Category Archives: Important Ideas

Imagination is a Powerful Tool: Five Exercises

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Created July 29, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

For every function of mind, it’s there because it can be used a certain way conducive to Flow state and happiness. It’s ours to discover what that way is, and isn’t.

Take the Ego for example. The best way to use it is sparingly, when the time requires it (e.g., if you don’t use it, you will be used by a low-minded other). That’s its survival relevancy and why it’s in us. The best motto of the Ego is Stand Up For Yourself.

However, in this our hisandherstory, we have devolved here into this channel, this instance of the metaverse in which all of the inappropriate uses of the Ego have gone rampant, and caused us to build a culture around misuses of the Ego. A culture built upon bad behavior.

The religionists got that one right. They speak truth on that score. Science with a conscience says the same thing. That is all the alarm clock doing its job. Now science with a conscience and the truly spiritual in each of us can look each other in the eye, shake hands, and tackle the challenge of restoring enlightened self-interest pragmatically.

The need to compete did not come in the DNA. The DNA gave us the power to compete when it was necessary. It did not hardwire us to want to continually provoke and aggravate competition. The trait of a tendency toward aggressive self-defense has been conditioned into us by the present culture of the past 6000 years. It’s been an age of power games and it’s not over.

We have to be able to look at such things. To see why we are the way we “instinctively” are. Why we have what appears to be a natural inclination to be repelled by certain things, and attracted to others. It’s not so much hardwired instinct, it’s also our life experiences, which tend to cause a defensive stance that the person is not aware of taking.

We have to be able to adjust our decisions based on knowing these things about ourselves. Adjust for our own biases. We have no survival interest in having any biases, our thriving depends on making decisions that cause things to work out the way we wanted, or better. Ethical Effectiveness must be the only thing we optimize our decisions and our lives around.

The rational mind is not in itself capable of changing behavior. Unless all parts of oneself are united in making a decision, you will be losing effectiveness.

The culture has tended to push us in the direction of the rational mind, with less attention being paid to perception, feelings, intuitions, and especially the imagination.

Using the imagination during daily alone spaces can be a way of progressing faster in self-mastery. This can be much more important to your future life than physical exercise, and the two can sometimes be combined, given patience and concentration.

There are two ways of using the imagination, and they both work. One is to choose what to focus on, and the other is to let the imagination do what it likes.

The misuse of the imagination is to picture or fear upcoming negative events for more than a moment in which the alarm function is thanked, and the mind focuses on solutions for the feared eventuality. Dwelling on the alarm ringing without turning it off does not make you effective in the real world. Switching from learning that the body has picked up a blip on the radar that looks unfriendly, to thanking that part of yourself and immediately fearlessly focusing on how to unwind the situation.

If fears do not distract you that day, one imagination exercise I call LOVE. In the exercise, you vividly imagine all the people and things you love, and revel in how much you love them, one at a time, taking your time with each one.

When all parts of oneself get into LOVE the rewards are salient. Afterwards you may be in bliss and act lovingly towards the people you love. Maybe even perfect strangers.

Another exercise, which works best if engaged in right after LOVE, I call FORGIVENESS. In your imagination you forgive each person you continue to bear malice towards. Starting with yourself. You want to imagine yourself at very young ages to recall things you hated yourself for, and to finally forgive yourself for them, one at a time, as they come up in memory. Then each other person or thing you specifically don’t love. Forgive them all. Don’t carry the past it’s too heavy. Don’t make the same mistakes again but don’t blame. Blame wastes internal decision making energy and time and doesn’t lead to greater effectiveness.

A third imagination exercise I call SANKALPA, which is Sanskrit for INTENTION or VOW. This is where you dream the movie of your life with a happy Hollywood ending, the way you want it to come out. This is the most important imagination exercise.

A fourth imagination exercise I call PREDREAM. This is best performed after one is comfortable in bed. One imagines the next day the way one wishes it to come out. This leads to some interesting screw-ups being imagined, and contingency plans or prevention plans are laid to take care of such exigencies. This is both preparation and rehearsal, and evokes creativity in deciding against saying one thing and instead saying another, in upcoming conversations being imagined. A further benefit is enjoyed if one falls asleep or nearly does, because this hypnagogic state creates opportunity for the subconscious mind to help write the script of your imaginings. This is a doorway for revelations so always have a pen, pad, and tiny flashlight close by.

The fifth imagination exercise I call WAKEUP. As you wake up you focus on not forgetting your dreams. Then you see if there is any relationship between your dreams and what happened yesterday or recently. Not so much in the events, but are they connected in some way by the way they feel? Take notes before getting out of bed. Anything you can now see a better way of doing, something you did yesterday perhaps, write down notes before getting out of bed.

Obviously, these are not one-and-done exercises. All of them can be used over and over again, picking the one to fit your mood or need.

These exercises are all fun, because the imagination is fun to use, if you don’t misuse it to falling into a black hole which is 100% masochism. Dark moments are valuable clues to the unmade internal decisions that are still waiting to be confronted and decisively made. Write those down. Work on them patiently in terms of strategic development, and let the subconscious help you. Don’t ignore any signal in your mind, be especially open to any hunches or ideas that might come out of nowhere, and be cautious not to become infatuated with any which have negative overtones toward someone or toward anything.

If you’d like to think more about the imagination, here is some recommended reading out of Wikipedia from some of my teachers.

Love,

Bill

As developed by Carl Jung between 1913 and 1916, active imagination is a meditation technique wherein the contents of one’s unconscious are translated into images, narratives, or personified as separate entities. It can serve as a bridge between the conscious “ego” and the unconscious.

Active imagination – Wikipedia

For James, imagination is intentional in the sense that it points towards an object that it poses as real. It has therefore a cognitive content, however minimum.

The Role of Imagination in James’s and Dewey’s …

“The realm of imagination was seen to be a “reservation” made during the painful transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle in order to provide a substitute for instinctual satisfactions which had to be given up in real life.

Freud on The realm of imagination – freud quotes

 

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Losing Mental Obesity and Having Future Fun

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Created July 22, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

In my previous post, we wrote about that function of mind which unintentionally acts as a traitor, inflicting wounds on its owner. We speak of the bloated ego within us as that traitor.

We postulated that a less obese ego would be a good thing to have, and that the elephantiasis of the ego pandemic is fallout from the accelerating creativity unlocked within us by written language. As daily world events indicate, our creativity and inventiveness has had effects ranging from the spectacular to the disastrous. One of the most negative impacts of the runaway complexity is the ballooning of the ego function through agencies to be unpacked below.

Even the way we all tend to look at the present state of the world is distorted by the ego. We are all obsessed, because of the ego, with the downside possibilities of the near future, much more than we are excited by the upside possibilities straight ahead. Why does the self-protective, selfish function of consciousness, Mister Looking Out For Number One, exaggerate and dwell upon the worst outcomes?

One might explain it away by drawing a nexus between selfishness and survival: surely our urge to survive, central to all life forms, was thinking of the need for a suspicious security officer like Worf when it extruded the code necessary for the existence of the ego function?

Perhaps, but a bit of self-reflection reveals another cause, related to Acceleritis and its resulting information overload: I call this principle “Compensation”. The ego in our present culture is compensating for a general feeling of inadequacy, caused by a never-ending string of missing the mark in almost everything we do, because the complexity of daily life has overwhelmed our capacity to always operate in the natural Flow state. After the first few years of life this wound of mortifying incompetency cries out for succor, and the ego where this notation lives, is the agency by which redress and proving oneself shall be achieved – or so the ego thinks. The methods employed by the ego in trying to salve this feeling of being unworthy, include (a) to brag in some concealed or exposed form, (b) to subtly or obviously try to bring others down to a level in which the ego can feel superior, and many other methods which in Putin’s case, includes trying to take over an even bigger chunk of the world. That would vindicate the ego and win the game, in Putin’s subconscious mind, all would be set to right, or so his subconscious thinks.

Acceleritis might not have done the damage it has done so far if not for another enabling factor in the world of the past few centuries. And that is, the loss of direction in the search for meaning in life.

It’s easy to explain what the ego-ridden average person is doing with their life as a form of a game. The game is essentially to maximize the pleasure for one’s sphere of loved ones, and to minimize their pain. Totally reasonable and pragmatic, but it ignores the human need (possibly shared by other life forms) to feel that one’s life means something more than just continuous defense of one’s pleasure bubble. Humans have an innate desire to know what is really going on here, who am I, why am I here, and to creatively express their unique gifts. We as a race have always had an intuition of Someone Else With Us, a vast consciousness to which we have given the codename “God”.

Until the last few centuries, during which observance of rituals has masked over an inner unspoken atheism which prints out in behaviors that belie the claimed belief in a specific religion. The average person has let science go off using its advanced mathematical cryptography, and stayed in touch only at the broadest level in which it is widely assumed that science has proven that there is no God, and intellectuals go one step further and believe that Logical Positivism has proven that even the concept of God is meaningless.

In a race that needs meaning, the past few centuries have dissuaded us from the search for that stuff. So all we are left with is a choice of which game to play to while away the time as pleasantly as possible. This factor plus Acceleritis have caused the self-promoter function to expand to fill the conscious self, as a continuous band-aid over the cumulating wounds of disappointment in oneself and life. Hence the ubiquitous need to compensate. Thus has the valid ego function become toxic.

It’s not just widespread mental “laziness” (actually mental triage in the face of inforush) that has caused the popular perception of a schism between science and spirituality. Many scientists (excepting the most senior ones) have publicly expressed a bias (unproven assumption) in favor of Accidental Materialism, the explanation that the universe came about accidentally, and all that matters is matter, with energy simply a released form of matter. Some of this breed of scientists have dismissed consciousness as an epiphenomenon, meaning we can hear the noise in our heads but it really doesn’t have any impact on the way we behave, we just think it does.

We humans and other animals are very affected by a show of confidence, if it appears unshakeable and is connected with intelligence. Even before a word is said. Then, when words pour out of such a being articulately, suavely, and with great surety, our tendency as humans is to give those words some credence. Even if it disagrees with one or more of our own long-held assumptions. The actual truth or falsity of the content has nothing to do with how much it persuades us based on the foregoing presentation variables.

The good news, however, is that scientists of the highest order throughout history and even today, are not biased toward Accidental Materialism, have open minds about God and about all subjects where empirical evidence has not been conclusive yet.

In his Amazon review of my latest scifi novel Pandemonium: Live To All Devices, Chuck Young, founder of Ameritest recently acquired by Dynata, lists some of the greatest scientific minds of the past hundred years who have had reason to consider consciousness to be at least equally important to matter:

Consciousness is the central theme of this book. In one of Harvey’s insightful observations, a character notes “The most important human quality is the ability to control one’s own mind.”
Consciousness is the deepest of all philosophical problems, which the ancient Greeks described as the Mind-Body problem, and which the greatest of our modern scientific minds have not shied away from also thinking about. In the words of Max Planck, winner of the 1918 Nobel Prize in physics, “In the last analysis, we ourselves are part of the mystery we are trying to solve.” Or Erwin Schrodinger, winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize, “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is fundamental.” Or Werner Heisenberg, winner of the 1932 Nobel Prize, “Contemporary science, today more than at any previous time, has been forced by Nature herself to pose again the question of the possibility of comprehending reality by mental processes.” 0r Eugene Wigner, winner of the 1963 Nobel Prize, “The very study of the external world leads to the conclusion that the content of consciousness is an ultimate reality.”
The only person to ever win two Nobel Prizes in physics, John Wheeler, pointed out that in the debate of Mind versus Matter it is an axiom of the current secular worldview that matter arises first, in the Big Bang, and that somehow the conscious mind has emerged through some combination of improbable physical processes. But that is only an axiom for creating our belief system about the nature of the Universe. It cannot be proven. But what if, according to Wheeler, we invert that axiom and assume consciousness comes first? Like the shift from Euclidean to Non-Euclidean geometry in mathematics, changing that one starting axiom leads to a radically different worldview.

To me, I find it easier to imagine consciousness coming before matter, because consciousness is unitary and matter is diverse. Also, taking empiricism to its ultimate extreme, the only thing any of us can say with total certainty based on empirical observation is that our consciousness exists. Everything we call matter and energy is something we experience through our consciousness.

Once the mind accepts that being closed to possibilities based on the vagaries of cultural conditioning is counter-productive, the awe, wonder, and numinosity of life come rushing back in like a friendly tsunami. Possibilities are again seen to be endless, and the ability to imagine upsides, free of mental fat, is welcomed in.

In a recent WDST radio interview about Pandemonium: Live To All Devices with my host Doug Grunther, founder of Right Brain Network, Doug asked me if there was anything in the story that would give us all any reason to feel more optimistic about the future. I responded that there are three unspoken takeaways from this scifi spy novel set in the near future:

  • Keep an open mind about your own powers of mind
  • Keep an open mind about the whole multiverse being one consciousness, each of us an avatar
  • The future has a sporting chance of being fun

Love,

Bill

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The Prevalence of Self-Inflicted Wounds

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Created July 15, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

We’re not happy about Putin for very good reason. Yet he is one of us and we can learn from his mistakes. Might be a tad easier than learning from our own mistakes, until we get the hang of the latter, which is a good thing to do.

Here he was trying to contain NATO and instead his actions taken in that regard had a boomerang effect. Making him more unstable and dangerous no doubt.

Let us consider my argument that there is a common cause, or mechanism, within all of us that is responsible for his having done that.

And that same phenomenon in you connects to the things you have done in your life which were akin to shooting yourself in the foot or other necessary appendage.

What is that thing that is dragging us all down, then?

It is a miscalibration of one function of the mind.

This function has been miscalibrated by the history (we ought to say hisandherstory) through which we have passed as if through a gauntlet.

The long and short of it: thugs took over and still rule in most places. Here in the few democracies the thugs are actually a mixture of all kinds of people, which is an improvement. We average citizens like that someone else is watching the unbelievably complex store. When we are born, we are immersed in a degree of complexity that is baffling to our capacity, and then it gets ever more intense. It was not always that way. My theory is that the Acceleritis started with written language. Nowadays Acceleritis has reached fever pitch, with the average person multitasking during virtually every second of the day.

That was how this particular mental function came to become miscalibrated.

Well, what is that darn function, then?

Freud gave it a name which I’ll cite in a moment. But first let’s talk about why the function was validly necessary.

In a world in which many agents have free will and one is only a single member of this cloud, it is inevitable that there will be conflicts of interest.

This function is specifically designed to be useful in preventing and overcoming these conflicts of interest.

Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents, one of his greatest books, said that this function starts up when the baby has its first experience of needing something and not having that something delivered instantly.

At that point, he wrote, a new function of mind arises, to deal with such situations.

He called it the ego.

He characterized it as a managerial function, to get the self what it wants or needs through the use of specific tactics that were not inherent in the original self.

What existed of the self/mind before that point he called the id. I call the id the Me That Was Born. Same thing whatever you call it.

I also call the ego by another name. I call it the robot. Because I see it as a set of coded instructions that creates further coded instructions, mediated by electrochemical reactions in the nervous system, which arise subsequent to birth and therefore are not the original self.

I see the original self as an extremely valuable thing, of cosmic significance, and worth distinguishing from the programs that the original self subconsciously creates.

So the ego is sort of the patient’s caregiver, the client’s press agent, the client’s advocate, the function that tries to make sure that the self gets credit where it is due.

Miscalibration of the Ego

In a supposed “normal” world, in which the input stream does not overwhelm the central processor immediately, causing inforush paralysis and then Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), the ego would be as pragmatically useful as the thumb.

However, when the ego is confronted by excessive information, it becomes a danger. One moves quickly into a hasty acceptance of supplied defaults. This is how mental self-enslavement occurs. The ego over-reacts and exaggerates threats, causing hormonal changes we sense as our own fear or anger whenever something – even trivial – appears potentially capable of challenging our security. It’s the survival-driven fight or flight reaction in situations which do not rationally justify such a reaction, when reacting that way is childish and vain.

In an ideal and yet pragmatically possible future, individuals will pull themselves up by their bootstraps to deal with information overload, without giving in to the impulses sent from the ego.

What can you do?

Be on guard. Getting stressed out is a sign that you slipped gears and are internally dominated for the moment by the ego in you. Take that sense of dilemma as a signal to stop, breathe, press the reset button hard, reject recent emotional reactions, go to neutral. Look at the situation objectively and scientifically.

Let’s take an example. Say that you’re having a conversation with your significant other. Assume that they say something that bugs you. While noting your hormonal release effects and keeping them separate from your true self, notice the fact that “feeling like making sharp retorts to unworthy statements” shrinks you back into the contracted ego you.

Understanding Your Ego

In its inflamed state due to the inforush, your ego makes bad decisions trying to serve your interests. It’s only a biological AI, so it’s imperfect, not built for the volume of complexity rushing at you each second. In order to be master of your own castle you have to be aware of these things and to take control of them.

You can’t allow yourself to be pulled under by the force of your amygdala and the rest of your limbic alarm system. You must maintain control of the ship despite these powerful waves washing you in hormonal takeover.

The secret is that your vulnerability lies in your attachment to certain outcomes. You have become obsessively hypnotized and enslaved by terror of certain outcomes (e.g., death, mortification, loss of loved ones, terrible illness, etc.) and desire of others (money, fame, etc.). Only by confronting these feelings on the stage of your consciousness can you gradually readjust the control to favor your true self.

My book Mind Magic was written to provide more detailed instructions. With or without my further advice, it was always you that it comes down to, you must do this for yourself in any case, no matter what tools you select to help you, this is the challenge that the Universe presents to you at this moment of truth in a world at climax.

Love,

Bill

 

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Setting Up a New Command Center in Your Mind

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Created July 8, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

If you are horrified by what is going on in the world today and wish you had the power to make it better, here’s how to get that power and to start using it for the good.

Nothing can be achieved until you are master of your “self”.

A battlefield shortcut methodology to achieve self-mastery is summarized in this post.

Imagine that you are installing a new spot in your mind to which you can return at will. A place you can go to whenever you really need effectiveness, and to get away from all bugaboos you use to torture yourself.

Furnishing the New Command Post

First, understand what this place is. It’s a new/old perspective point where you rise above all that has come before and start anew every time you arrive there. You’ve visited that terrain before, perhaps, at times when you just threw up your hands and gave up on everything. You may have felt it oddly freeing rather than a continuation of despair in a new guise. It is definitely identifiable by the freedom you feel to modify, override, replace, erase even the things for which you’ve been desperately striving for a long time. You can think of it as the Reset Button. The wellsprings of unbounded creativity live in this place.

Another attribute of the Command Post is that you feel a fondness for your own most noble impulses. And an impatience with your own whining tendencies. Keep that feeling alive to you every moment.

You may also feel that everything you thought you knew is really half-knowledge, that you’ve been going along with everyone else because resistance would have been futile, but from here in the Command Post you are able to dispassionately observe things as if experiencing them for the first time.

Now that you’ve acclimated to the subconscious/feeling aspects of the new Control Center, here are the recommended conscious furnishings:

  • Apply your new perspective to see the humor in the things that have been your personal albatrosses. And through that same lens to continuously see the humor in all things, even if at some times expressing that to others may be insensitive, and make a point of remembering that last point, i.e., it’s sometimes better to keep that perception of humor to yourself. At other times the other people around you will benefit from that perspective. You’ll need to see which way your noblest self feels at that moment and act accordingly.
  • Remove all barriers to feeling the love that you feel for the things and entities that you love. Start with yourself. Get in touch with the love you feel for yourself. See what you feel is loveable about yourself. Now migrate carefully from there to plumbing the depths of your spirit to what it is you are here on Earth to accomplish. Once you have a feeling for your life’s purpose, write it down in the form of a vow, an intention, what you intend to do, despite the challenges in the way. However, recognize that the actual outcomes will not be 100% under your control so that you cannot equate the intention with any guarantee of success. All you guarantee is that you are going to give it your very best shot every moment. However, it comes out will be up to the total system, the Universe. Here in the Command Post you shall never give in to feeling attached to how it will all come out.
  • What logically flows from the prior furniture you’ve just installed, is the supportive, empowering intention to not waste your own computing power on nonsense. Respect the power and value of your own being, your own mind for example, and don’t simply tolerate the situations in which you find your mind in the default network of simply hopping from thought to thought, feeling to feeling, aimlessly and without hookup to your reason for being, your self-assigned mission.
  • Install a mirror. Make sure to look in that inner mirror while hanging out in the Command Module.
  • Install a periscope. Use it to take a long view of what is going on in the rest of the world which appears to exist outside you. Understand the difference between the frame of mind you are now in (in the Command Center) and the frame of mind of all the hysterical people racing around out there. Make a vow, a strong intention, to catch yourself when you slip back into that default network conditioned by the culture into which you were born, and to remind yourself that you’re better than that, and move back into your Command Center.
  • Form a talisman and put it on. It will be your philosopher’s stone, the tool you use know whether to flow with your natural first inclination, or to wait and check things out before allowing your motor control to obey your first natural impulse from within. This talisman of discrimination will enable you to easily move into the Flow state much more often, and also prevent you from making disastrous mistakes. The way it works is you carefully and continuously use the mirror to detect negativity in what you are about to say or do. Negativity is a sign of non-Flow-state impulses. Letting through impulses directed by love is the sign of oncoming Flow state.Now that you’ve set up your Command Center, spend as much time there as possible, while doing what you have to do based on prior agreements, and/or while carrying out your mission.

How This Relates to Dealing with the Horrors of the Present

From your new Command Post you will be in the best possible condition to help others deal with the fears and angers endemic to the current world situation in which all of the malingering ancient errors have been magnified by the latest technology, and compounded together into an enormous traffic snarl affecting all the minds on the planet. Around you people will begin to feel better and will become more able to make effective decisions to exercise damage control over their own lives and the lives of the people they love. This will ripple outwards.

The people who are most carried away by their self-inflicted wounds will find themselves losing the support of those who have cleared away most of the debris in their minds. This may initially make them even more dangerous but ultimately they will have to take stock of what is happening and make some new decisions. We are social animals. We are all codependent. We have tremendous influence over each other. This has been part of the problem but if we play our cards right, from our personal Command Centers, we can make it part of the solution.

Love,

Bill

 

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