Category Archives: Observer State

Powerful Mind Pt. 4

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Created March 31, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

To read Powerful Mind Pt. 3, click here.

Chapter 2

The Observer State

A clearer, more effective state of consciousness —
only seconds away from your daily state of consciousness.
Just knowing it exists can benefit you

This entire book is about states of consciousness. In this chapter we will focus on one particular state of consciousness we call the Observer state. The Observer state is more powerful than the state most of us are in most of the time, and leads to the Flow state, which is more powerful still in terms of your ability to make an impact on others around you and on the world. We speak about both states as being “The Upper Mind”. The purpose of this book is to show you the simple yet easily missed doorways into the Upper Mind.

Why is it important to think about consciousness at all? Because life is all about consciousness. We do not exist without consciousness. While modern science has made brilliant progress in almost every other sphere of reality, too little is known about consciousness.

Yet all the ills of the world are rooted in ignorance of how consciousness works. We have made the world we see around us. It all started in our minds. Every day we do things we regret because we listen to and act on whatever our minds dish up to us. We need our minds to perform better, to become powerful, to gain insight into ourselves and others, to come to better decisions on a moment to moment basis.

The extreme anti-heroes who have become powerful on the world stage, who have driven much of our history so far, might not have chosen paths of destruction if their genius had been creatively channeled, if they had not lost touch with their compassion and love.

If we collectively knew our own minds better we would not go to war but rather we would find creative win/win solutions — the ones we get to in the end anyway after all the bloodshed. The path to a better world lies through the terrain of consciousness. One day when we all really do know our minds better the world will be a relative paradise compared to the way it has been throughout all recorded history. As the great science fiction pioneer H.G. Wells said, “History is a race between education and destruction.” If we can make our minds powerful now, we can gain the maturity as a race necessary to not destroy ourselves, given the extreme weaponry we have now at our disposal and our habitual disregard of our destructive effect on the environment (the air we breathe, the water we drink).

Because war is a pattern repeated throughout recorded history, we tend to assume this is the way it has to always be. And yet, “recorded history” literally means since the onset of written language. In short, written language and the thinking processes that go with it have led to acceleritis, information overload and Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), which blocks upper mind and leads not only to war but also to crime and personal cruelty born of our disconnection from innate compassion. Our minds need to become more powerful in order not to be confused by the information overload so much that we are easily led and manipulated into a life nearly devoid of positive feelings, squandering the opportunity of life.

Each of us knows intuitively that the only thing we can change is ourselves. This is the only way we can make a better world.

Powerful Mind seeks to reveal specific information and techniques for attaining specific states of consciousness. We will be talking about waking states of consciousness, not about sleeping states. Sleeping states are important too, but in the interest of focus we’ll leave these to another book.

A Broader View of What Science Is

Around 400 BC, in the Golden Age of Greek philosophy, one branch of philosophy called “epistemology” focused on understanding “how can we know”? Over time, different schools of thought evolved about how we can know: rationalists believe that we can know things directly through our intellect; authoritarians believe we know by listening to authority figures who tell us what we know; empiricists believe that we know by direct experience, by testing things in the real world; intuitionists believe we can know directly through a mysterious faculty.
Science developed out of empiricism, basing what we consider to be “truth” on factual experience, testing and validation. In the case of science as practiced in the West, especially in the last few hundred years, that “experience” is usually the taking of measurements using instruments with dials and displays from which one takes readings. The person taking the readings is the “observer” often mentioned in relativity and quantum mechanics, the latest forms of science. In the East, science is also based on experience, and there the experience can often be inner experience where dials and displays are not involved. This is still science and still based on empirical experience.

This Eastern willingness to accept internal evidence explains why science in the West has not validated the existence of the more effective states of consciousness. Starting toward the end of the 19th Century, inner experience or introspection fell out of favor in psychology, after William James, the last of the giants of psychology to accept inner evidence directly. The more externally-oriented culture of the West created a blind spot. In psychology, work shifted to behaviorism, the focus on externally quantifiable actions, along with the study and social application of conditioning to alter these actions.

Eastern epistemology actually fuses empiricism and intuitionism. No conflict is seen between these ways of knowing because they both involve experiencing reality for oneself.

Although based on empiricism, Western science became authoritarian and elitist in its epistemology: the common person was excluded from “knowing” by the reduction of all science to mathematics, a difficult language to master. Science at its cutting edge moved out of the sphere of something the common person could totally visualize and comprehend.

Science and States of Consciousness

Regarded academically as a “soft science”, traditional Western psychology recognizes only three states of consciousness: dreamless sleep, dream sleep, and waking consciousness. Eastern psychology since the fifth century B.C. recognized ten states of waking consciousness: the normal everyday waking state, the access state which precedes meditation, and eight progressively deeper states of meditation. Oscar Ichazo, a modern student/teacher of consciousness techniques and founder of the Arica Institute in 1968, fuses ideas from consciousness explorers throughout history (plus his own) to propose fifteen waking states of consciousness ranging from psychosis, through six levels of neurosis, three levels corresponding to the Eastern access state, and five levels of higher consciousness.

It is revealing that Western psychology reduces waking consciousness to a single state. William James was the first prominent Western psychologist who warned against “prematurely closing the book” on the existence of other states of waking consciousness. More recently, Mihaly Czikszenthmihalyi (pronounced “cheek-sent-me-high-ee”), former head of the University of Chicago Psychology Department, coined the term “Flow state” (known in show business as “Being On”, and in sports as “The Zone”), and conducted valuable research into this state, which was published in his 2008 book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

Details to follow in the subsequent posts.

Love to all,

Bill

 

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We All Need Optimal Competition to Supplant the Unhealthy Kind

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Created February 17, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The optimal use of competition is to set it up to be good-natured. As if in a debating game. The way the Founders of the Constitution thought about it. Without fierce fear of failure, megalomaniacal attachment to power and political money, without hatred, gaming the system, or violence. The Founders knew there would inevitably always be political arguments along the way, but felt confident that with the checks and balances and good will, we would be able to work things out.

The Constitution itself never mentioned political parties. Jefferson and Washington both warned against the rise of political parties in America. They had seen what happened with the Tories and Whigs in Merrie Olde England. Wigs on the green. At the time, in the American Colonies, being the government was just a particularly hard and risky job without a lot of perks. Like being anything in the Colonies at that time.

In any situation where the lust for winning and the fear of losing has become obsessive, human effectiveness drops sharply. Different brain processes take over. Yerkes-Dodson experiments and later work by others proved that when we care too much about an outcome, we reduce our own power to get that outcome.

Too many of the human beings involved in the process of governing us are now showing their worst sides most of the time because they are so ignobly and obsessively motivated. I say ignobly because a public servant worth his or her or their title serves the public regardless of personal outcomes for themselves. They do the necessary for the good of the people. They keep their solemn Oath. Such were the Founders. If we had them today none of this would be happening. Which is not to say that all of our public servants today are ignoble. But the ignoble ones are showing off blatantly because they have used unfair tactics and are still getting away with it, so they appear at the moment to have the upper hand over the noble ones. 

What if anything can we do about the present disappointment many of us feel when we think about our beloved nation with its high ideals? Firstly, we ought not vote for ignobles. Secondly, smaller degrees of change are easier to achieve, so let’s see what can be done to moderate the behavior of those in government. They should be held to a higher standard. Lying, hate talk, attacking the other party, extolling one’s own party, damning the proposed solutions put forth by others without offering any solutions of one’s own, openly gaming the system (gerrymandering, filibustering, appointing of politically motivated judges) so as to gain and keep power, accepting inappropriate monetary rewards, there are specific guidelines which could be put forth as a new Code Of Conduct Standard for the country’s government decision makers at Federal, State, and even local levels.

That is only a surface change but it will have inner feedback loops that will help people break their conditioning. We’ve been all been conditioned and it’s hard but not impossible to break conditioning. Our conditioning began early and we had nothing to compare it to so we took it all for granted. Later we felt in our comfort zone to stay within the herd of people who received similar conditioning to ourselves, and we might not have even been conscious of doing it. This conditioning resides within brain neurons created by our experiences and affects us strongly. The repetition of reinforcement over decades enforces a self-image which is too much made up of what other people think and too little created by our own fully reconsidered clear-eyed contemplation.

In order for the governments of the world to perform optimally, and nations to be led to peaceful coexistence and compassionate cooperation, authoritarian (will take longer) and democracy/republic leaders need to evolve themselves by knowing themselves better, and by reinvigorating their true individuality. Becoming liberated from conditioned intense attachment to money and power and replacing those drives with loftier inspiration to make a better happier world. We all need this but we all need it to happen for world leaders as much as we need it for ourselves. Without inner changes in all of us, especially those who are supposed to lead us, the species might not make it in time to avert the many ticking timebombs our overwhelmed minds have created.  

Witness the recent slide of a perfectly humane and smart American party into what it is now. But the Republicans I know are nothing like that. Those in highest offices may be acting crazy, but the ground truth is quite different, very few Republicans I know who are not in the government are anything like crazy. It’s not the people; it’s a relative handful, a few thousand mis-motivated people that have arrogated unto themselves a great excess of power already, and they have made clear that they are not at all interested in keeping their oaths to protect the American Constitution. This is a domestic threat to our way of life. It’s un-American. It’s a return to what we sought to replace with Americanism. Because the atavistic governing style staging a comeback runs on bribes, maybe we should call it Bribalism.

The Business of the United States Is Business 

Republican legislators when acting sanely (before the extreme attachment to personal outcome hypnotized them) were pro-business before. Now their core is more the lesser educated, their concern for businesses could be manifesting as good advice and programs for small businesses in this era in which small businesses are arising more rapidly due to the internet. Meanwhile, businesses have transcended the pure profit motive for enlightened self-interest (buzzword: Purpose), which empowers them to take up good causes and aim to make people’s lives better. 

Although this is authentic to US business today, the party which used to cleave to business is not exactly doing that kind of thing as much. Now the GOP is saying only what will hold together the tens of millions of people who keep it in power. This is analogous to milking a brand that is on the decline: it will not avert the decline, but in the short term before that decline is finished, “get as much out of it as you can.” It would be far better to avert the decline by returning to its original brand identity as the Party of Lincoln, the party of business especially small businesses, the party demanding proofs and safeguards from those bringing progressive proposals, the party which completes a healthy optimal competition with the more change-oriented party.    

Republicans rise up to take responsibility for your party. You are true Americans; there are a few thousand people terrorizing the country and they unfortunately turn out to be all too many of the people we together elected, and unluckily for you most of them right now are of your party – but not of your mind, nor of your character. You have to rise up collectively to peacefully take back control of your party and bring it back to the center. No one else can do it but you. Step up, step forward, take responsibility. It’s the right thing to do.

Love to all, 

Bill

PS – How to take advantage of the “Yerkes-Dodson Law” (and more) to improve your own performance: https://www.humaneffectivenessinstitute.org/observerness/ 

PPS – I’m not saying bribes are limited to one party. Remember, I’m an Independent. As I’ve written here many times, I see fixed going-in conditions such as progressivism or conservatism to be biases, things which distort objective judgment and obscure and confuse objectivity. Biases block Observer state and Flow state.

Bringing Out Our True Selves

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Created August 12, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

This came through at 3am, I got out of bed and am writing it down.

Materialistic Accidentalism is a story we made up to explain reality to ourselves. In their heart of hearts, most of the people in the world today assume that the universe is an accident and that it is principally made up of matter. Most of the rest believe their religious explanation, and navigate through a wicked materialistic world as best they can, keeping to their articles of faith and training regarding the guard rails on their own behavior as best they can.

Let’s play a game. I’ll make up a story that is at least equally plausible as the latter two stories, Materialistic Accidentalism and religious creation explanations. Frankly, it will be more consistent with the latter, but that is not because of prejudgment or bias on my part, it just comes out that way as a result of logic. Here is my story:

Consciousness is a real thing in itself. Consciousness is the substrate, the primal content of the universe. Consciousness projects matter which pushes back when we push on it, which is really the processing of signals at the subatomic level of matter. Consciousness invented the brain to use the way we use our personal computers, to do the boring work for us.

The brain was our first personal computer.

War Reflects a Wrong Idea About Reality

The story that we each are separate is easy to believe because it sure feels that way. The sense of self is what consciousness is. It’s composed of coherent energy.

It’s conceivable that all of us together are cells in a single consciousness which has a richer, more multifaceted sense of self. Like the multifaceted eye of a fly on a higher level.

Not having, in our everyday state of consciousness, any awareness of such a connected reality of consciousness, we are alienated, we act selfishly, self-protectively, competitively, and sit in judgment of everyone else. In the end this leads to war and could lead to the entire destruction of the planet and everything on it. Looking at it from the perspective of our species, we are on our way to committing mass suicide, justified by lots of blather and by motivations which are dark humor if my story about who we are happens to turn out to be the real explanation. Like a man punching himself in the face. If we are in fact all one Being.

We are not here to accumulate land and absorb whole other countries, nor to rack up toys/material objects, praise and worship, fame, sex partners, power or money.

We are here to evolve as a consciousness. The road ahead, in my story, is that we will live again and again, and the long trend is upward to greater sanity and perceptual scope. Ultimately to being self-aware in the totality consciousness, the Original Self.

In the internal logic of my story/explanation of reality, competing against Accidental Materialism and the religious creation stories, the One Original Consciousness is what is creating each of our individual consciousnesses by populating us from within, looking out our eyes, as what we sense as OUR self. We are all avatars in the original video game.

What We Call the Subconscious Is Actually the Superconscious

In our present state of normal everyday consciousness, we are confused by such statements, since “sub” means “below” and “super” means “above”, it seems like a meaningless statement, an oxymoron. This linear black and white thinking is part of the limitation inherent in what we call normal consciousness.

What I’m saying is that what we call our subconscious is our real self, submerged in ego. The ego – a function of the brain, our personal inbuilt computer, the neural net built into our brains by our assimilated and unassimilated experiences – has taken over the castle of our mind. We now identify with the ego sub-sentience that is street-smart to, and resonant with, our ego dominated materialistic selfish Acceleritis-riddled culture, taking ego as our true self, when actually it is not. We have repressed our true self (what Freud called the id) and over-ridden it with the “out for number one” persona that takes over in early childhood.

Every now and then our real self tries to say something and that registers as a hunch. Or a dream, if we happen to be sleeping. Or, as flashes of true insight we get as we are lucky enough to slip into the Observer state or the Flow state. I’m positing that those higher state experiences are our true self, the self was born, breaking through the clouds.

Extra Motorific Competency

Another name for the Flow state might be Extra Motorific Competency, in terms of our ability to perform flawlessly in action. This is a takeoff of Extra Sensory Perception – ESP and EMC. Making the point that they are both aspects of the same thing: the arising of a more intelligent, competent, balanced and ethical part of ourselves, with unsuspected powers operating.

Both types of experiences – ESP and EMC – when we have them feel otherworldly, like nothing else we have ever experienced. They are Maslovian “peak experiences”. Numinous. What Freud called the “oceanic” feeling.

Observer state is a more subtle experience, that does not seem in any way “supernatural”. It is simply metacognition: being able to objectively consider one’s thoughts and feelings. The importance of the Observer state is that it is the doorway to Flow state. I’m reporting solely from my own experiences in saying that.

At 3am, half-asleep, when I started taking this down in scribbled notes I was experiencing it as taking dictation. This has been going on since I was a child. I hear whole sentences which excite me and I have to write them down so I don’t have to worry about not remembering it in the morning. I associate taking dictation in this way with inspiration in the classical sense used by Plato and metaphorized as the Muses. In modern slang it’s “channeling”. But channeling whom? Our true selves, what we now call our subconscious. Except that it is more powerful than what we call our conscious mind which – until we are in Observer state – is actually the ego, our internalized personal biocomputer.

These “magical” (that’s the way they feel) experiences of Flow state, ESP, taking dictation, are as real to me as everything else I experience, like inventing a new type of optimizer, or meeting my wife for the first time, or taking a vacation, or boiling eggs.

That is not scientific proof. But since it is real to me, and works to make me more effective in my life, I take my story as being the one I’m betting on. It’s pragmatic for me to do that because it works. When I ignore my hunches, or am cowed by being painted as “weird” by the imposing size of the ego culture, I do not perform at Flow state level.

I do expect that science will come around to validating my story. It might not happen in our current lifetimes. Science is on its way there as a result of relativity, quantum physics, and information theory. Consciousness is the “observer” in relativity. Consciousness “freezes probability waves” in quantum physics. Consciousness itself is information processing. Physicists and psychologists are divided between stories but tenure and security are tied to sticking with Materialistic Accidentalism until there is unassailable scientific proof of a different story. The ego culture is totalitarian in that way.

Coming back to religion. Above I wrote that my story competes with the religious creation stories. That was an oversimplification. My story could actually be the scientific explanation for their stories. For example, there can be little doubt that Jesus and Buddha experienced Flow state. My scifi novel The First Son is a fictionalized demonstration of how Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and other religions could have come from Flow state inspiration and taking dictation. My story and the religious stories are unified in that book and in Pandemonium: Live To All Devices, my newest scifi novel, set about thirty years in the future from today.

“God does not play dice with the universe.” –Einstein, denying Accidentalism

I set this nighttime dictation as a note in a bottle here to float out across the history of time… until it is found and considered by those whose minds are open to all possibilities not yet verified or disconfirmed by science.

Love to all,

Bill

 

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Editing Impulsive Neediness

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Created August 5, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

As always in this column I’m writing about self-mastery. The objective is for most if not all of us to achieve and maintain the Observer and Flow states, the higher states of consciousness in which we are more effective. We need herd immunity to the lower states of consciousness dominating our culture up until now.

We need it now more than ever, as the acceleration of negative events is obvious to us all: the human race is running amok. Just to cite the most recent example, the leaders of China are tossing missiles around. Would that they had assimilated the ideas of Lao Tzu, Confucius, and the I Ching.

This macro behavior starts at the personal individual level. Each of us can only improve our own personal behavior. It could take a long time for this shift to roll over enough of the population to make a difference. But it is the only way to get to the desired end state. And for each of us, it will make whatever may happen to us more bearable if we are in these higher states during what may be trying times ahead.

Not that trying times are inevitable. We mustn’t underestimate the power of the media to effect shifts positive or negative. So far no one has organized the media to promote positive shifts. Such a scenario (as fictionalized in Pandemonium: Live To All Devices) could have significant positive impact on the outcome of the latest threat vectors.

I’ve written recently about the way the ego – the part of the mind that is driven to get us what we feel we need – as a result of various cultural pressures (information overload, complexity of life, expectations placed on us, restrictions on our creativity, too many unassimilated traumatic errors in our trial and error growing up phase) has become defensive. Without realizing it about ourselves, most of us tend to be continually attempting to compensate for having already been somewhat defeated.

Good and sensible things can have bad effects if taken to extremes. The ego function is not inherently a bad idea, but under present world conditions it becomes toxic. We overreact, and do so prematurely. We have been wrong too often, we see ourselves as having been victimized too often, we have been frustrated too often. In a less complex and more egalitarian society, with less continuous stress, less sense of continuous time pressure, more opportunity to be creative, the ego would function normally and not become toxified.

In our brains the amygdala is involved in this phenomenon. It goes into fight or flight reaction. A good thing to have when one is actually being physically threatened, but not such a good thing when it goes off all the time in what are, realistically, not situations that are all that threatening.

The wisest philosophers in history have painted a picture of what it is to be an ideal human being. It involves a degree of moderation and balance, not getting carried away to one extreme nor to the opposite extreme. In the Kabbalah, one’s work and love, mercy and severity, wisdom (knowing right action) and understanding (forgiving and curing wrong action) must be brought into balance in order to achieve inspiration (Flow state).  A nobility of spirit in taking responsibility and care for other people, a friend to the world, with a true and profound commitment to that degree of empathy. This is what it is to be a mensch.

In the origins of show business, the Greeks invented tragedy and comedy plays. Tragedy portrayed a noble spirit who fell off the wagon into hubris – the ego. Comedy portrayed people in lower states of consciousness and how funny their behaviors are when looked at from a higher perspective.

Hisandherstory looked at through this lens reveals that we as a race knew it all along. We knew about Observer and Flow states. We knew about ego. We just used other words to describe the same things.

A noble individual exudes calm and remains calm no matter what happens. This makes that individual more effective. Such an individual does not seem at all needy to others. He or she is not addicted to anything, so threats of having something taken away may be regarded objectively.

We today who have been so ravaged by life in an ego dominated culture and yet aspire to get out of that stuckness, can benefit from remembering and using these methods:

  • Don’t act on impulse. First study the impulse and why you are having it. Is it coming from some sort of neediness, for attention, or affection, or recognition, or from fear of loss? Remain calm, breathe deeply, edit the impulse rather than acting on it.
  • When you feel suddenly brought down by something, not as happy as you were a second ago, push that reaction away and study it without wearing it. Decide calmly what to do – because the higher function of those negative feelings is like an alarm to get you to focus on solving something. Take it as a creative challenge. There is probably no rush, it’s likely a problem that has been around for a long time.

We all know these secret tricks perhaps, but we don’t always use them. The future of the planet depends upon rising to the occasion and being our worthiest selves 24/7. Fortunately, it can be catching. When we see someone else acting rightly it brings us up. We just need that to go viral.

Love,

Bill

 

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