Category Archives: PANDEMONIUM

Happy Independence Day! Maintaining Our Independence

Created July 1, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

246 years ago, we became a country. 530 years ago, we began to colonize this beautiful terrain we call the United States of America. The colonists who came here were fleeing tyrannies and religious persecution, and seeking opportunities for living free lives, willing to face dangers and cognizant of the need to stick together for mutual protection. Among them were freethinkers whose hunger for knowledge had driven them to read widely most of the ideas written down by sages throughout the thousands of years human beings have been writing things down. The Founders respected the philosophy of Jesus Christ and the philosophy of Freemasonry, and some described themselves as deists, acknowledging the logic of a supreme creator. They tended to be openminded pragmatists, realists, and were excited at the prospects of science.

One of the principles of the American Revolution and its concomitant design of a new working model for governments, was to prevent any one person from gaining too much power. Another principle was the separation of church and state. The system was set up to be self-optimizing by innovative use of checks and balances. Our forefathers knew that any system could be gamed and that success would depend upon the good will and good intentions of honest people voted into office.

Because they were practical people, they knew they could not go hog-wild with new and unfamiliar ideas and still bring together the majority of American colonists. They would not have stood a chance of pulling it off if they proposed freeing slaves and giving every human being a vote. In 1776, colonist nuclear families were strong and could be self-sufficient survival units when they needed to be. Just as marketers today consider households a significant unit. Back then the unit had more unity than it does today. Giving the vote to the man or men in the household was a way of giving the vote to the household. The land to be settled was virtually infinite from the viewpoint of the 2,500,000 colonists in 1776 (there were also 600,000 Native Americans at that time) so it was assumed that everyone who wanted to vote could easily become a land owner. With the specific proposals the Founders made to the American people, as it was, they just barely made it. It was touch and go, many colonists weren’t sure whether they were loyal English folks or ready to risk their lives for a set of enticing ideas.

But here we are today. We made it through that gauntlet and have toughed it out through gauntlet after gauntlet since then.

We now face possibly the most terrible gauntlet we have ever faced: the system has been gamed from within.

A small number of people interested in power have conspired for a long time to set this up. It looks like one organized conspiracy but in all likelihood it’s a chain of ideologically linked separate cabals going back almost to the beginning. George Washington had urged us to never form parties but 20 years into it, we were in the two-party system, and over the years the things Washington warned us against – the party becoming more important to some people than the country – became ugly reality. Gerrymandering and filibustering became practices, despite their inherent conflict with the Constitutional principles not to mention common sense. Jefferson had the right idea that education was the key lever by which human beings could become the sane, ethical people presumed by the design of the freedom-based government. However, the content of that education was never developed to the point of sufficient efficacy to ensure sane, ethical graduates.

So, we are blessed to have been left, still today, being the ones who have that problem to solve. We are the ones to whom the prize of overcoming our own worst tendencies belongs. If not us, then to our children or grandchildren, but it must start with us, for we must teach our progeny what they need to know and do to finally put an end to the old corrupt ways that have always been so easy to fall back into.

To the average person, this challenge is so daunting that the almost universal reaction is to give up. I’m reminded of those Simon & Garfunkel lines in the song “Mrs. Robinson”:

Going to the candidates’ debate
Laugh about it, shout about it
When you’ve got to choose
Every way you look at this, you lose

This is why so many people don’t vote. They feel it’s not going to do any good. The powerphiliac perpetrators of minority rule are pleased that so many people don’t vote, it makes their plans easier to achieve.

As Americans, it’s our duty to fulfil the mission set for us in 1776. Whether we win or lose, it would be cowardly to not even try. We must all vote.

That’s not all.

Bias and Binarism

Life was always complicated, but never to this degree. The easy way out human beings always take when overwhelmed by complexity is to fall back on binarism: reducing everything to good guys and bad guys. Simplistic but satisfying as a way of achieving fake closure, this popular form of reductionism makes the world black and white. Objects in the world are sorted into one or the other. Stuff in the bad bucket is irredeemable. Oneself of course is always in the good bucket. This is another comforting factor of binarism.

Washington put down parties because they could cause counterproductive divisiveness within the nascent nation. He realized the tendency of people to operate based on attraction-repulsion and to form two poles, although being a practical person he did not go off on a philosophical rampage about it.

The illogic of the party system is that it’s based on the goodness of having a bias. A bias for change or against it. This is illogical because any bias is a fixed presumption which is likely to not perfectly fit every single situation. A better strategy is to be openminded and take everything on a case-by-case basis, looking at facts without bias. Yet political parties enshrine bias, like a superstition.

The situation in America today is caused by these things:

Persistent underlying binarism between people driven by lust for power and people driven by lust for life.
Pandemic binarism as part of a general self-dumbing-down strategy to cope with excess complexity (“Acceleritis”).
Anger and hatred for a suspected enormous group of bad guys who are presumed responsible for all the bad things on this list.
The subconscious gravitation of people into “belonging” groups.
The almost universal assumption that we are all in this bar brawl on our own and there is nothing actually connecting us together making us all one.
Massive frustration at the innumerable obstacles one faces each day and at the difference between one’s dreams and reality.
A sense of not being able to make a difference, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The party system, putting bias in the good bucket.

“You better free your mind instead.”
–John Lennon

America is working it out. Go with the flow with an open mind, not foreclosing the future based on ancient schisms. Hit the reset button. Make your mind a clean slate. Consider each piece of evidence that hits your senses as if being born again right now. Now, that’s Independence Day!

Science Fiction

As you may know, I’m writing a science fiction series to try every angle into empowering the minds of fellow beings with freeing thoughts and ways of being. Chuck Young, founder of Ameritest which is now part of Dynata, holder of patents for innovations in measuring the effects of communications, and wide-ranging genius, read my new novel Pandemonium: Live To All Devices, and wrote an interesting review of it containing sophisticated allusions to literature, philosophy and science, I thought you might enjoy.

Happy July Fourth Holiday!

Love,

Bill

The Ego Level is the Source of Today’s Threats

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Created June 24, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

In my view of the world, each of us moves up and down through levels of consciousness, from one moment to the next through our day. These levels were entirely theory for thousands of years, something I did not know when I discovered them in myself around age 5.

I never wanted to be on stage, but my showbiz parents were firm. “You were born in a trunk,” my father told me, a showbiz metaphor for being born into a showbiz lineage. Later I found out that his father, whom I never met, had been a “song and dance” man in London vaudeville. My maternal great grandfather Wulf, for whom I was named, had been a Ukrainian trapeze artist who was still performing, which included hanging by his teeth to his trapeze, at age 80. Something I’m still metaphorically doing today.

On stage I robotically performed by lines and moves as trained, until I started to have strange experiences which greatly improved my performances. Much later I realized this was the Flow state, a term coined by a former advisor to “my” nonprofit The Human Effectiveness Institute, the famed Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, head of the psychology department at the University of Chicago at the time.

That’s when I realized we all continuously shift from level to level. Introspection was the only tool I had since I could find no books in any bookstore in Bensonhurst that mentioned levels of consciousness. As time went on, I was able to discern specific clues as to which level I was in.

For example, fear and defensiveness were inner signs that I was in a lower state. Rushing and nervousness were outer indicators that my inner feelings were of anxiety and sense of impending failure.

Intuitively I saw ways in which I could diagnose what was causing me to be in these lower states. This involved staying awake in bed at night so I could uninterruptedly focus on these things. Without knowing the real meanings of the words meditation, contemplation, concentration at that time, I see now that was what I was doing most of those nights.

This led me to create my own system for myself to overcome these lower states. I came to realize that the really important thing was to get back up into the Flow state and maintain it for longer and longer periods. All of the petty fears and desires I had were trivial by comparison to that goal.

Much later, as I studied psychology books, I began to form theories about all of this stuff going on inside me and how it related to what I was reading about the theories and experiments in the field of psychology, and more recently, neuroscience.

When I read Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents I realized that Ego as he defined it – an intermediary point of view emerging when the baby first feels thwarted about its needs going unattended, and begins to center its life on an inner persona acting as the “press agent” for the self – everything suddenly snapped into place. Those lower states inside me were in fact being generated by this apparently ruling part of my being, the Ego. For me to get into Flow I needed to get out of Ego and into my true self, The Me That Was Born.

As we look around us today at the havoc that the world has descended into, it appears obvious to me that the true threat vector behind all the madness is the Ego. The Ego of a Trump. The Ego of a Putin. The Ego of many other Hitlers in waiting. The Egos of the insurrectionists, blinded by the voice of their Fuhrer (leader). Hitler was a powerful speaker and mass hypnotist and Trump was a TV star and President of the United States, not a powerful speaker, but those media and title qualifications were enough to cause the mass hypnotism of millions of people living stuck in the lowest Ego states.

Without those lowest Ego states in the followers and leaders, none of this would be happening.

Not that reading my manual Mind Magic would miraculously dispel all the ills of the world, by freeing each reader from her or his Ego forever, it usually does make a nice dent. That’s what keeps me going, the evidence that I can make a positive difference if I can write and communicate more clearly about all of this to more people.

I am aware that a minority of the population reads non-fiction books, and a larger minority read fiction books, so in order to cover more territory, I’m putting these same ideas into both fiction and non-fiction.

In my latest novel released this week, PANDEMONIUM: Live To All Devices, the focus is on the action and only in service to the plot do my mind methods appear. The fact that the protagonists are psychics gives me leeway to get deeply into what is going on inside the characters, because it has a direct bearing on the plot.

The main protagonist, Ed Templegard, is normally a very high being, often in the Flow state, and motivated by the idea of protecting people. But he gets brought down to the Ego level without his fully realizing it. He wants to stop Perse but Perse is too strong for him. He wants Nastassia but she is far away. These things degrade his level of consciousness and throughout the story he is gradually discovering that, fighting it, and eventually – oops no spoiler here.

The education system which starts at home will over time incorporate more and more of the things we all really need to know about living life. Not just what is taught today, but also what people today are left to come to understand for themselves – something which happens all too rarely. The current state of play 2022 is compelling evidence that teaching about levels of consciousness has to become part of the foundations of our learning objectives from birth onward.

Love to all,

Bill

How I Came to Write my Latest Novel, PANDEMONIUM: Live To All Devices

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Created June 17, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

In the 1982-83 time period the U.S. Army invited me to speak at West Point and to Delta Force and other elite units at Carlisle War College including some Generals. One night in a big outdoor jacuzzi with Army guys we attempted remote sensing. They admitted that this was part of top-secret work going on that these men were involved in indirectly.

The darkly satirical movie “The Men Who Stare at Goats” starring George Clooney was based on a treatment by the late U.S. Army Colonel Jim Channon, Commander of the Army’s First Earth Battalion, whose name I changed to Tim Shannon in Pandemonium. Jim brought me into all this when he looked me up after reading my book Mind Magic. He had led the search for psychics for the Army. The First Earth Battalion had been Jim’s idea. It was part of his cover as he penetrated the New Age Movement on the lookout for psychic talent. That was how he came to read MM.

Two years earlier, my first meeting with Delta Force had been in a Manhattan apartment owned by people involved with Arica Institute, and its leader Oscar Ichazo was in the meeting. In a conversation I was having with one of the Delta officers he said “since the failed rescue mission in Iran we’ve been investigating every crazy idea that could possibly help win the cold war, including making a pact with the devil.” These experiences contributed to my screenplay Triple Agent which is now book one of Pandemonium.

I began to have unusual experiences in early childhood. My showbiz parents had insisted I perform onstage where I first experienced the Flow state, which of course I didn’t know as such at the time.

Offstage in an informal gathering when I was about five, I got into a rapid improv comedic exchange with the late great comedian Jack E. Leonard in which my repartee cracked up those gathered; but I could not hear what I was saying—it came out of me automatically.

When I was twelve, I had two out of body experiences, and heard a voice in my mind saying “I am God and so is everyone else.”

Each day, I have hunches that turn out to be right. When my company Next Century Media was working in Hollywood with the studios in the 90s, Oliver Stone dubbed me the “media visionary”. The predictions I made about today’s media in my newsletter in the 80s-90s have all come true.

In Pandemonium as in all my other books my reason for writing is to share my “mind moves” with as large an audience as possible so that everyone can drop the block against “psychic” (intuitive) powers and use them, and beyond intuitive powers, can be as effective as possible in all aspects of their lives by discriminating between the impulses of the ego versus the impulses of the true connected self, achieving and maintaining access to Flow state more often.

Pandemonium: Live to All Devices is one in a series called AGENTS OF COSMIC INTELLIGENCE, an alternate view of history in which the same characters appear in different eras. The First Son was published in 2018 and The Message will be published later this year. One thread that runs through all of my books is that there is a scientific explanation for the spiritual contention that there is a God—that everything in the Universe is part of a single Consciousness. AGENTS is a fictional representation of what could be reality. You Are The Universe: Imagine That is a non-fiction book which details my Theory of the Conscious Universe, which is also summed up in a ten-minute video called CONNECTEDNESS.

I feel that as a writer my job in the world of today is to reopen people’s minds to the awesome possibilities of who we really are and what life really is. In the present epoch our world culture is split into people who have totally lost their sense of wonderment and magic versus those who believe in a specific religion which they feel is the only true religion. Too many of the latter group tend to feel in conflict with people outside their religion, thus without realizing it, being hypocritical to their own religion’s essential tenets.

The absence of the sense of the numinous in our everyday lives has left us quick to anger and hate and superficial in our insights into ourselves. My writing may not have any effect on all this although thousands of letters and emails on file attest to some people having been positively affected. Even though I might not have as much effect as I might like, this is still what I feel called to do with my life.

In AGENTS I’ve strived to filter out my own desire to teach so that what comes through is an adventure without obvious pedagogy. I know from my own experience reading the books of Robert A. Heinlein starting when I was five, I learned a lot about life and how to live and be a competent person, but while I was reading his stories, I was just raptly having wonderful fun. Only very rarely did RAH stick his head through the page to openly teach. I hope I avoid that even better than Heinlein did, although I’ll never be the writer he was.

The subtitle of Pandemonium, “Live to All Devices”, reflects the media technologies introduced in the story—virtual reality television where people widely separated around the globe can appear as if they are in the same place, “Gibsons”, electronic tiaras people wear which make augmented reality into virtual reality, floating see-through chatbots that look human—all media to come in the next decade. I say this with some certainty given how accurately I’ve been able to predict new media technologies over past decades. My day job is in the media industry, where I’ve just won an Emmy® Award for the “pioneering development” of privacy-protected big data for television, something I did through my company Next Century Media in the 1990s.

I had hoped that my day job and my passion work as a writer would dovetail someday, and that’s happening now. “My” latest technology startup, Research Measurement Technologies (RMT), has a way of understanding a person’s motivations based on the content they consume, so you can send a person content that you can be pretty certain will delight them. I’m working with partners to create some of the future media tech in Pandemonium. Advising large corporations who are my clients, I have long pushed them in the direction of replacing intrusive advertising with inspiring and useful content sponsored by advertisers in the ad pods on television and the ad spaces on digital, and after many years it seems to be the time for this revolution to actually gain traction.

The big ideas which make life rich and full can represent a much larger share of media time, and when this shift takes place, the negative effects of media can be supplanted by effects more positive and transformative than any of us realize is possible.

Love to all,

Bill

Keep an Open Mind about your Powers of Mind

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Created June 10, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

If you’ve been skeptical about psychic powers all your life, that is a very hard thing to change on a dime. You may have read my writings for years and come to have trusted me for advice on media and measurement matters, and possibly been willing in reading some of my recent blogposts to open your mind to the possibility that Flow state, intuition, inspiration, tapping into your subconscious, telepathy, and precognition are real. Even still, that open mindedness may not yet have led you to internally discover and start to more fully use these powers of mind. Years of excluding those things from your second-to-second life creates a powerful momentum to continue to function the only way you know how.

Here in this post are a couple of ways you can take a more active role in opening the doors of perception.

You must have noticed that sometimes you are contemplating saying something and someone else says it for you. Your life partner probably reads your mind and vice versa. Some of this is simply knowing what you would normally say in such a situation, but sometimes it involves things that you haven’t talked about with each other at all.

Turn it around. Sometimes you think you know what someone else is thinking but there’s nothing to be gained by saying anything like that, so you wait, and oftentimes the person speaks aloud what you thought they were thinking.

We’ve all had these experiences, daily probably, and don’t count it up or make anything of it. But a lot of this could be your own dormant and internally discredited telepathic capability. Is empathy, which we all acknowledge exists, really that different from telepathy? In both cases we have senses that detect predispositions in others, which remarkably often turn out to be accurate, and yet we write it off as simple good guessing about someone we know pretty well.

Use it or lose it. If we continuously through life act as if these powers are unscientific and do not exist, that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy for us. Isn’t that what’s happened to us as a species? Denial of all possibilities that are not simple extensions of our current everyday lives in what is generally regarded as a material world, period, ignoring the implications of consciousness which is not material. Some scientists would like to boil down consciousness to specific physical brain functions, reducing the notion of what a human being is into no more than biology-based robots. But science has never proven that notion is true.

One of the most eminent physicists in history and a colleague of Einstein and Bohr, John Wheeler, culminated his long career predicting wormholes before they were observed and many other accomplishments including helping to harness atomic energy, published his Participatory Anthropic Principle which states that consciousness plays a significant role in shaping all events, which implies a form of telekinesis that goes much further out than telepathy and intuition (accurate hunches).

It’s my hunch that telepathy will be scientifically proven in this century. Charles Tart has already meta-analyzed thousands of individual experimental case studies to establish that proof statistically, but the ultimate proof we are still waiting for would be more compelling, using experimental design, neuroscience, and a more complete explanation of the phenomenon.

So how can you take a more active role in testing out your own unused powers?

For one thing, you can use the words “Are you thinking…” to check out your suspicion about what you feel another person is thinking. You can do this as often as you like because it’s a verbal construction that is common and doesn’t make the other person even think about telepathy. It seems that you are simply playing back what you think you heard them say or imply or that you sense a direction to which the other person’s words are leading. Harmless. And yet it will possibly begin to show you that you actually have some power to make extremely good guesses about what another person is thinking.

You’ll have to filter this by a tendency for wishful thinking – in other words, you might want them to be thinking X and that bias would interfere with the clarity of actual telepathy.

For another thing, you can keep a log of your hunches and then go back and score them by what percentage of them came true.

My books Mind Magic and You Are The Universe are packed with advice at this granular operational level for increasing your powers of mind – not just extrasensory perception but also reasoning, decision making, emotion management, self-discipline, concentration, imagination, and so on. Thousands of people have written me to say how much Mind Magic has helped them.

Needless to say, for me this is my lifelong passion, to help spread powers of mind to more and more people, so that we as a species start to make better collective and individual decisions, before it gets to be too late.

Years ago, I became convinced that writing nonfiction books and blogs and videos can only do so much. Our mental/emotional conditioning is extremely strong. People can read and agree with my nonfiction and it enables them to use some strategies that help them that they weren’t using before.

But nonfiction creates a certain atmosphere which is limited largely to the rational parts of the mind. I came to my present hypothesis that fiction will be able to have much larger positive effects faster, because in reading fiction the reader changes selves, temporarily becomes the protagonist, and is living vicariously through the protagonist, in a form of simulated life. This engages emotions, motivations, the subconscious, all of the self and mind and consciousness of the reader.

I decided to create a series of novels/scripts called Agents Of Cosmic Intelligence. In this series I would depict the lives of five people with psychic abilities, and would track these people across incarnations. This large canvas would enable me to show what it’s like on a day-to-day basis to make use of the mind’s powers, that can convey the experiential feel of living that way, embedded in a romantic adventure epic story across all of history and into the future.

Will it work? You can judge for yourself. If you like Kindle, here’s a link where you can get for free the first ~50 pages of the Agents novel PANDEMONIUM: Live To All Devices. If you prefer a real book, next week I’ll include a link where you can get that.

“PAN” as we call it is set about thirty years in the future where artificial reality and robotics are far ahead of where they are today. If you remember back to last century and read my media newsletter back then, you know that my prognostications were pretty accurate in predicting today’s media. PAN will show you some of my unique and non-obvious predictions of future new media.

I call the genre Transformative Sci-Fi.

Here’s what some early reviewers say about PAN:

“Fueled by brilliantly insightful scientific speculation…the meticulously described science fiction backdrop is an undeniable strength. This thick narrative full of big ideas is recommended for deep readers who enjoy their literary fare on the mind-bending and thought-provoking side.” —BlueInk Review

“[Pandemonium] works on so many levels… The writing is so fluid, reading it was really more like seeing it. And so suspenseful…I can’t wait for the next one!” —Jim Spaeth, Sequent Partners (gave it five stars in Amazon)

“A fun, fast paced, literary burrito…something for everyone. With sci-fi and espionage, wrapped in a little theology, with a sprinkle of romance… It will have you thinking of otherworldly possibilities while taking you through a moment to moment, fast-paced espionage episode. Happy reading. I highly recommend.”

—Lenai B. Begue (gave it five stars in Amazon)

Hope you enjoy!

Love to all,

Bill