Category Archives: Mindfulness

Respect Everything

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – November 29, 2024
Created February 23, 2024

We have not found any other way to effectively turn off the hate so why not try respect?

Open-mindedness is one of the most important principles of metacognition (continuously studying one’s own mind as if from the point of view of an outsider) according to Dr. Gerald Zaltman, who has taught neuroscience at Harvard, and metacognition at Harvard Business School. Without open-mindedness one tends to be locked into positions one has taken in the past, even though there might be new relevant evidence that could be considered.

If one is truly open-minded, then that person can also see the possible truth in positions 180 degrees away from their own. An atheist can see that it is possible that an intelligence created the universe. A progressive can see that there might be useful truth in some things that a conservative says.

How little we know, as Hoagy Carmichael’s and Johnny Mercer’s song tells us (from the 1944 Hemingway-based movie To Have and Have Not). Arthur C. Clarke put it another way, he said that of all the things that we can someday know, what we know now is an infinitesimally small percentage.

We have changed our scientific perspectives many times along the way, and we continue to change them. The wisest among us have this perspective and their epistemology naturally embraces open-mindedness. Although in most of his work a physicalist, the great Stephen Hawking in his final book quoted John Wheeler’s Participatory Principle which states that our consciousness helps create reality. This opens the door to overthrowing physicalism and establishing consciousness as the principal underlying reality.

These are great thoughts from great people. Open-minded to the very end, despite their decades of study and theorizing.

Compare that to the average person. The average person takes very strong stands based on, really, very little. They fall into a very deep rut as to what they believe and the beliefs they hate. Most of their assumptions are not something they themselves learned from their own life experiences, but heard about from others influential in their lives. This reflects an unconscious epistemology of Authority rather than Empiricism. The very selfsame unconscious epistemology that leads to Authoritarianism. Blind followership, in other words.

Without open-mindedness, a person drifts as if by animal instinct to be attracted to types of people, e.g. tough guys, or pretenders of that ilk. This is a survival instinct in many species (e.g. pecking order) and when human beings behave animalistically they are not rising to the occasion of having exclusive cognitive capabilities proprietary to our species.

The lack of open-mindedness impels us to be negatively motivated. We know what we are fighting against. We are less sure of what we are fighting for. This is most apparent in the current political climate. It would be most noble and most fun for governments to spend 100% of their time focusing on creative solutions. Instead, they appear to spend most of their time knocking down the ideas of others. Yet we must respect all of them if we are to be open-minded. Respect does not imply agreement or support. It simply reflects the recognition that we all deserve respect. Even those who do not respect us. Noblesse oblige.

Open-mindedness and respect go together. If one is open-minded, one tends to listen respectfully to the thoughts and feelings of others. If one is respectful, one tends to listen to others with an open mind, and to use metacognitive strength to hold at bay the screaming voices in one’s own mind reflexively denouncing what the other person is saying.

If all of reality is a single consciousness, the larger parent of that part of the consciousness we take to be our own, then respecting everything makes complete sense. We have been conditioned by centuries of majorities of thinkers we respected who could not see how ancient conceptions of God could be squared with the findings of science.

What came out of nowhere in the last half Century were new conceptions of God that fit neatly in with quantum physics and relativity. Just replace the word “God” with “the original consciousness field” and everything makes sense, the Participatory Principle, relativity, quantum entanglement, the Heisenberg effect, Bits Before Its, the jigsaw puzzle falls into place.

What Wheeler called the quantum foam could simply be the original consciousness field. The way Wheeler described the quantum foam, which pre-existed The Big Bang in his theory, was that virtual particles spontaneously arose from it and fell back into it. Sounds a lot like consciousness, with ideas and feelings arising from it and often disappearing back into it before we could grasp them.

Since we cannot prove that point right now, it comes down to being open-minded about it. For some of us who have noticed that our hunches, at least the dispassionate ones, often have great validity, we can decide to run our lives betting on cosmopsychism, as scientists are now calling it. When that struck me as more of a revelation than a hunch circa 1969 I called it The Theory of the Conscious Universe. I had a feeling that everything was conscious, it was an experience, more like a perception than an idea. I also dimly recalled that I had always had that perception as a child but it went away a long time before, slipping away quietly.

If we retain the realization that the world might be a very different sort of place than it appears, and take that possibility seriously, we naturally become more open-minded and respectful toward others, who may actually be ourselves at a different place in the game.

Whatever the truth might be, we can perhaps know it with certainty the next time we die.

In the meantime, if we can all agree that the world needs a bit of a makeover right now, which I think is a pretty pervasive take on things, we can exercise our will to take a stronger hand in the game by rising to a state of open-mindedness and respect for all things, as all things may be a part of our One Self.

This includes respect for our own current self. The popular term “self-esteem” is not quite as healthy as self-respect, because “esteem” implies a vain ego, and “respect” does not.

If we respect others, we shall find that it has increased our level of self-respect. It is a magnanimous position to take. We have taken unconditional responsibility to behave properly.

If we can apply respect in our daily lives, it will automatically tune down the hate. We have not found any other way to effectively turn off the hate so why not try respect?

Love to all,
Bill

If You Are Normal Today, It Might Be Holding You Back

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Created May 17, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

With metacognition a child can become a mensch at an early age… And it’s never too late to begin practicing metacognition.

The norm today is Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP: the condition that sets in when there is too much information resulting in desperate shortcutting such as rationalized guesswork), a way of using the mind that as little children we fall into as a result of being surrounded by people in that state.

It never occurs to us to question it because it’s totally automatic from the first moment of awareness.

A new paper reports that children who are taught to watch their minds starting at age 2.5 years, show advantages in memory over the control group by the time they are 4.5 years old.

There shall be many other such experiments; and I will be doing some of them with Dr. Jerry Zaltman, in our work of teaching metacognition (also known as self-awareness, mindfulness, Observer state, etc.) to students from Kindergarten through college.

Eventually this will lead to children’s books, animated content, and games (physical, mental, emotional; interactive video, Artificial Reality, etc.) which teach the youngest children to pay attention to their minds as well as everything else. Jerry and I are also planning to insert courseware for public schools and colleges, and, with Chaim Oren, workshops for C suites.

Metacognition does not just improve memory, it improves quality of life. As Aristotle said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.”

The more adept the individual is at metacognition, and the more constant is his or her use of metacognition, the more situational awareness they will have, the more they will comprehend the causes and effects they experience, the more they will be able to discriminate quickly between healthy and unhealthy impulses they have. The more rapidly they can understand the principles of ethical behavior. The more easily they can avoid ego-driven behavior.

With metacognition, a child can become a mensch at an early age.

A child can learn to pay attention to hunches and see if they come true. And can realize when they are having inspired thoughts. And can even precociously discover their purpose in life. But they can only do this if they are watching their own minds as much as they watch the events being reported by their senses.

The same applies to us at all ages.

And it’s never too late to begin practicing metacognition.

The norm is by definition =100 IQ. Today’s amazing AIs are crowdsourcing and parroting everyone, hence their advice is also coming from a 100 IQ. Aspire to something higher and better. Aim for supernormal.

It is said that Buddha taught his son metacognition using a mirror.

“There are actions which bring good to the people and actions which bring harm,” Buddha said, holding up a mirror so Rahula could look at himself. “Before you say anything or do anything, reflect on what good it can do and what harm it can do. If there is any harm, do not say it, do not do it. Do this reflecting continuously. Only take actions that are purely for the good.”
—The First Son, Episode Two of Agents of Cosmic Intelligence, by Bill Harvey

My Best to All,
Bill

 

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Mind Discipline

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Created March 1, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Intellectual knowing is not the same as embodying
that knowledge in one’s actions.

Today there is fortunately an outpouring of articles and books on the subjects which a half century ago were rarely discussed outside of the kinds of books which were carried only by so-called metaphysical bookstores back then.

People with vast curiosity tend to study a wide spectrum of subjects. That describes me starting around age 4 when I fell in love with reading and writing. That also describes many people I know who have read many of the same esoteric books that I have, and some who have learned many things from the same writers. And many people whose reading has been far more inclusive than mine.

In conversations, I have noted that some of my great friends can quote wisdom but often are unaware that their actions do not conform to the bits of wisdom which they quote.

In some cases, this can be analyzed as intellectual versus emotional learning. The rational mind can be aware of important principles of how to live the good life, and yet on an emotional level, they are leaning away from those principles even as they espouse them.

Take a simple example: “There is no use crying over spilt milk.” Like all aphorisms, we tend to underestimate the amount of wisdom this aphorism contains. This is because familiarity breeds contempt. I know at least one person who can teach this to others but always lets disappointing news disturb her.

I know a man who has studied vast amounts of wisdom literature and understands all of it fully, yet his attitudes override the levels of tolerance which all wisdom literature teaches.

I know another man who is a walking encyclopedia of the history of applied psychology who does not pick up on his audience’s reactions.

Clearly there is a gap in the mind between knowing something and believing it to be true and valuable, yet not being able to “carry it off” in reality.

This gap is where discipline needs to be applied.

The reason that self-discipline is needed is that our day-to-day, moment-to-moment life is practiced with a mix of automatic and “manually overridden” (conscious, on-purpose, granularly formed) responses to external events.

Because we are used to that mix and never think much about it, we tend to overlook automatic responses which slip through despite the fact that they disagree with principles we espouse. Besides, “who has the time?” The Acceleritis culture is driving us all at top speed by giving us too many stimuli at practically all times. In moments when all media are turned off, we are not really escaping because that’s when the backed-up cognitive load dumps into our consciousness with unanswered questions and unassimilated half-learning, stuff we noticed but didn’t have time to think about why we noticed it, what it was saying to us that stuck so much in our minds.

My old friend Daniel Goleman has written many books about emotional intelligence, a phrase he coined long ago to describe the quality of a consciousness to integrate intellectual learning with emotional signals from inside and outside, and to perfect one’s actions taken, illuminated by this higher order of inner integrity.

Today I wish to emphasize another aspect of gaining emotional intelligence: self-discipline. Mental and emotional, intuitive and perceptual self-discipline.

The logical way to approach this topic is to start with the desired end state. First one ought to discern the ultimate goal of one’s own life, what you are here to do. The way the game is set up—this is not easy—and many people give up and let their game piece be pushed around by external forces. This is the first important place to apply mental and emotional, intuitive and perceptual self-discipline. You have to make the time to select the dream vision you wish to make come true over the course of your life. What your gift to the world shall be, your body of work you will leave behind to benefit posterity.

A guess is better than not having a targeted end state.

Discipline then has to be applied that respects yourself, you have set a goal, now you have to make it come true, you have to believe in it, you can’t be wishy-washy about it, that is a denial of self-respect.

You can’t allow yourself to waste time. To waste time is to waste your life. Time is a precious limited quantity. You must make best use of each second. Otherwise, you are admitting to yourself that you are not really laser-focused on your mission, you are programming yourself for failure to achieve your mission, you obviously do not take yourself seriously.

That’s why you can’t allow yourself to cry over split milk. Because not only is it a waste of time, it negatively programs you and the others around you. You are causing negative effects, and harming yourself and your mission, by giving in to the automatic reaction of the amygdala. This takes enormous self-discipline which can be gained by practice, and by never taking your eye off your mission.

At the same time, you can’t rush past noticing the cascade effects inside yourself, you must pay the time and attention to see your own automatic reactions that slipped through and screwed something up, so you can figure out what clues to look for next time, so you stop that particular automatic reaction from slipping through again.

One exercise is clearing the mind of all emotions. Any psychologist will tell you that emotions are the physical body manifestations that are connected with the inner feelings you have – so as you discipline away all the emotional clutter you have just been experiencing, it will happen in your body as well as in your mind – it will change your breathing, your heart rate, skin moisture, pupil aperture, and many other things. But you start with an inner act of will to cancel all inner events and return to a state of complete neutrality and emptiness. Starting over. Rebooting. I find that for me this is most effective when I walk into our meditation room, get down on the floor, breathe deeply, empty whatever is in me, and start my life over with a blank slate.

I hope you will refocus on your own mission and try this rebooting exercise whenever needed, and let me know how it goes.

Love to all,
Bill

The Art of Neutralizing Negative Emotion

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Created June 3, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Negative emotion serves one pro-survival purpose only: it galvanizes us into action as an alarm system.

Once having detected her/his own negative emotion, the sophisticated Flow state experiencer moves quickly to neutralize the negative emotion and to work rationally and dispassionately on solving the problem which caused it. Like turning off the alarm clock in the morning.

What is a sophisticated Flow state experiencer? A person who has had the benefit of learning how to perform some skill so well that they repeatedly experience the sense of autotelic behavior: behavior that appears to do itself, perfectly, and without the need to put forth any effort for that to occur.

Such a person then invariably begins to contemplate this strange experience that comes and goes and is very welcome to stay longer than it ever does.

In a way, a sophisticated Flow state experiencer is like a lucid dreamer, one who is able to know the she/he is dreaming, and therefore able to control the dreams to a greater degree than the average person. “Life is but a dream” is a line out of the children’s song Row, Row, Row Your Boat. In that metaphor, the lucid dreamer is the sophisticated Flow state experiencer in the dream level we call “real life”.

I know that negative emotion can be neutralized because I do it all the time now. I’m not sure that I can put into words the perfect instructions for how you can do this, but I’ll try.

First, why? Why would you want to learn the trick of neutralizing your own negative emotions?

One obvious answer is that you feel bad when you have negative emotions and it’s obvious that nobody would choose to feel bad when they could otherwise feel good.

Another valid answer is that negative emotions reduce our effectiveness and keep us out of higher states of consciousness, such as the Observer state and the Flow state. 

In the Observer state you can see why you have an impulse that arises in you out of your subconscious. In normal waking consciousness you would either simply act out the impulse or hesitate without knowing what to do.

In Flow state you are beyond all that, your body and mind are doing everything perfectly without any inner heckling or gloating.

Negative emotion blocks both of these higher levels of performance. It also biases choices and decisions we make rather than enable objectivity and rationality in making better decisions.

When I neutralize negative emotion one thing that happens is that I observe what is going on inside me very attentively and put aside emotion entirely. I observe emotion and therefore am not inside it anymore. There is a falling away of my historic passions and motivations into a deferred file to be resumed later. I am highly cognizant of the lack of proof for any position over any other position in terms of human values. I experience sort of an ennui, or boredom, or tiredness with everything I stand for and believe in and am trying to bring about. I have a feeling, unspoken, of something like ho hum so what. I am as if reborn tabula rasa (blank slate). I can see things in new ways I could not before. Consider possibilities I never would have considered before. I have total free will with no mortgages from the past. All of this happens in a moment.

You might try this and see if it works for you the next time that something gives you negative emotion of any kind. Anger, hate, resentment, loathing, fear, guilt, melancholy, depression, sadness, regret, physical pain, loss.

Negativity keeps us from more quickly solving the problem that caused the negativity.

Love to all,

Bill

 

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