Category Archives: Powerful Mind

Updating Your Life Plan

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, June 28, 2024
Powerful Mind Part 30 – Created September 29, 2023

Mountain road. Landscape with green field, sunny sky

“Comedian George Carlin once quipped, ‘Oh, you hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.’” This is a quote from a Gallup report finding that 60% of workers are dissatisfied with the work they are doing.

The pandemic gave us the space we needed to realize that we were not getting enough satisfaction out of the life we were living, and a person’s work is central to a person’s life – “Lieber Und Arbeit” (Love And Work) as Freud put it – the two key tentpoles (which in my book You Are The Universe I show is actually the bottom of the Tree Of Life in Kabbalah).

But even before the pandemic many of us already knew that we had placed ourselves in the wrong spot, maybe even the wrong line of work. The education system has not prepared us to know what our true gifts to the world are, the passion work that would keep us in the Flow state more often. For some time I’ve been recommending individualized education, to bring out the best in each of us, and to know the occupational optimization answers for each of us. Ironic that the Latin word educare means “to draw out” and yet our education systems around the world pound information in rather than draw anything out.

I’ve also written about work study internships for a day starting at very early ages, maybe as early as seven years old, where kids can pick and choose which of the participating companies and departments they would like to try out for a day.

Since the pandemic, tens of millions of people around the world have been contemplating changes in their lives, focused especially around the kind of work they do, and where and how they do it. A big part of it is not the occupation itself but the culture of the company. Too many companies treat employees as expendable cogs and not as partners and allies. If AI were used to enable the whole personnel of a company to insert anonymous or otherwise ideas and suggestions with true protections against repercussions (today’s HR departments promise that but do not deliver it often enough), and if the C suite got continuous AI summaries a maximum of 25 words per hour 9-5, the C suite might realize that the wisdom bubbling up is unbelievably brilliant and right. Global consultant Chaim Oren and I discuss these points in this podcast: How to Thrive in the Age of Crisis.

How to thrive in the age of crisis - a guide for life
Be sure you know what work YOU want to do, and that it isn’t someone else who caused you to believe you wanted that. Then make a plan to get from where you are to that work. Consider the moves carefully so as not to waste the goodwill you have built up in the field in which you have been working. Don’t leave people in a bad place by abruptly pulling out, take care of the people and company you now serve, as you make your transition. If you do it that way, some of them may help you get to where you want to be. maybe there are ways to intersperse what you now do with elements of what you want to be doing. This is a great testbed for early learning.

This will take time so you mustn’t add to your existing stress by becoming discouraged at how it seems Sisyphean and that you’ll never get there. Here’s the key trick: life is an adventure. You may have lost that sense of adventure before, perhaps long ago and without realizing it. But now that you have taken control of your own life and are steering it toward making your true dreams come true, you must sit back and become grateful for this big second chance you have given yourself, and that however it comes out, you are at least going to enjoy the adventure, the true adventure of your life as it was always meant to be, now that you have the real target in your sights. You are going to enjoy getting there even if you never do get all the way there!

Remind yourself of this every time you feel dissatisfaction returning. Like all negative emotion, that is just an alarm reaction designed to wake you up to some threat vector. Turn off the emotional alarm, thanking it for ringing, and set to learning whatever lesson has to be learned so that the source of that dissatisfaction may be reasonably solved to no longer cause you negativity.

This means that while you are on the adventurous path to your new life, no matter what happens, failure, censure, whatever, it isn’t going to get you down. You are at least pursuing your passion work, that’s what matters, and enjoy each second of the journey by learning from what appear to be signs that you will never attain your dreams. The outcomes are not the point. The pursuit is the point, as long as what you pursue is the highest use of the real you to the species and to the universe, in your own lights.

Remember that what you feel projects out and makes impressions that change the “external” world, so that the more quickly you turn off your own negativity, and keep envisioning (“predreaming”) the life scenario you want, the more likely you are to achieve it all. But beware of the trap of caring too much about the outcomes. Do what you can to obtain the outcomes you want, and let the chips fall where they may, and use negative feedback to refine your methods but not bring you down.

Key #6

Be sure of what YOU want and enjoy the journey to your dreams,
without attachment to outcomes.

Here’s a little secret: Dissatisfaction is wrong predreaming, it brings you what you don’t want to happen.

Attachment to outcomes is a misunderstanding. It’s ego. It’s the need to prove yourself to other people, belonging, status/prestige, wealth/success, all those lower motivations that you were conditioned to be needy about. The established psychological principle of Yerkes-Dodson obtains: highest performance comes when there is just the right amount of desire to win, and performance falls off sharply when there is too much attachment to the outcome.

Enjoy the adventure!

Love,
Bill

 

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Inner Visibility: See Your BioAI, See Your Muse

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, June 21, 2024
Powerful Mind Part 44 Created January 12, 2024

Inner Visibility: See Your BioAI, See Your Muse

You may say “That’s easier said than done,” wherever in my writings you come across my exhortations to light up your inside, pay more attention to what’s going on inside you, and other phrases of that ilk. I agree. One cannot simply decide to have more inner visibility, one needs specific mental methods to bring that about.

We’ve already discussed some of these methods. Parking the body in a comfortable position where in time it can disappear from your radar. With your eyes closed, watching to see the very beginning of a feeling or thought arising. Being aware of procrastination and going in circles. Daily Alone Space. Mindquiet, thinking without words. Last thoughts before sleep. Conducting your own inner orchestra. And many methods so far in this book Powerful Mind being serialized here.

A visual image – kind of a mind map – is another type of method. Imagine that you are in bed, in an especially comfortable position, nothing about your body feels uncomfortable to you. Your eyes are closed and your breaths are slow and deep. Your mind appears to you in a visual image. In that visual image, you can see that you are composed of an outer bubble, containing two side-by-side inner bubbles, one in front of you on the left, and one in front of you on the right. The essence of who you are, The Experiencer, is what is seeing this, so it itself is not seen in the picture. You look out from your position as The Experiencer.

The bounds of the outer bubble are unknown. The outer bubble when your eyes are open extends as far as your eyes can see, your ears can hear, your nose can smell. The outer bubble is your entire consciousness, and for all you know, may be coexistent with the entire consciousness of the universe, as your present sensory abilities may not tell the whole story.
The bubble ahead of you within the outer bubble on your left is your BioAI, what we have called the robot. It is constantly making suggestions based on calculations, predictions based on all prior stored experiences.

The bubble ahead of you within the outer bubble on the right is your Muse or Master voice, the place from which comes your revelations, inspirations, moments of extreme clarity, mental Flow state, Eureka moments, Aha! moments, the ideas that suddenly pop in and startle you by their insight and their ring of truth.

This image can help remind you to be aware of the provenance of each thought, feeling, and impulse arising within you – is this more imitative babble from the BioAI or is this the Muse.

Alas, at the beginning of such a journey, if you are to be real with yourself – the journey is pointless if you are not going to be real with yourself – you will experience that most of what you allow your most precious asset, your mind, to spend its time on, is babble from the BioAI. The good news is that over time the methods will shift your time allocation substantially over to receiving from the Muse, with a great reduction of time spent and actions taken based on the forecasts of the BioAI.

You may ask, what is the Muse? Is it your own subconscious, or is it actually some helpful invisible being, or is it The One Being that is the entire conscious Universe? Science is not yet able to answer that with high confidence. Someday (my personal conviction) science shall be able to establish what the true answer is. Until then, one must accept not knowing the answer, while still obtaining the pragmatic benefits of receiving suggestions from the Muse and giving them the proper respect and cautious trial in external world interactions.

This image is a tool to be used but is not intended to depict reality itself. In reality, there will be many useful thoughts you think which are not readily classifiable into BioAI or Muse, and in fact, trying to reduce all experiences to two pigeonholes is itself robotic oversimplification – the dodge the BioAI uses to deal with excess complexity – reductionistic oversimplification and dichotomania. What we have called Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP).

Instead, this visualization tool is aimed at noticing evidence of the presence of one or the other of these extreme cases – robotic impulses or flashes of brilliance.

The BioAI, thousands of years ago when the world was far simpler for human beings to deal with, was undoubtedly a very valuable “extra sense” to have. In the complicated civilization rocketing ahead with new changes day to day, the BioAI adapted as best it could, but was outclassed by the challenge slope, as it has moved from climbing a one-degree slope, toward a practically vertical one.

Acceleration of complexity is not the only aspect of our civilization which has strained the BioAI. The type of civilization we have evolved is hierarchical, competitive, and disadvantageous to most Earth homo sapient natives, advantageous to a lucky few. Some of us resonate with the idea of leveling the playing field, and some of us resonate with the game as it has been played for millennia. These philosophical differences have always been manipulated to serve the self-interest of powerful individuals and groups. As a result of complexity acceleration (“Acceleritis”) and these other conditions, the new individual entering this world is likely to experience one or more traumas early in life. These traumas can alter the functioning of the BioAI, predisposing it into an assumed permanent defensive posture which is so ever-present as to become invisible to that person.

We define defensive ego behavior as a predispositional wound syndrome of the BioAI. In many people, the BioAI acts as if that individual is coming from behind, and in one way or another, seeks to catch up. This might involve calling attention to one’s accomplishments or best qualities, taking offense at not being properly credited, chronic envy causing dislike, racing always to get more things done faster, which can cause bodily tensions the individual is so used to they are almost invisible to the conscious mind.

In that latter category, check your body right now, and from time to time throughout each day, to find where you are holding yourself tight and to focus on relaxing those places. Let your shoulders relax down and out, stop causing your breath to be shallow. You are not in a race against the clock (most of the time) so let yourself slow down to enjoy whatever puzzle it is you are in the midst of solving. Put distracting ideas on notes and put them off to the side to thoroughly engage with one thing at a time and enjoy perfecting that one thing. Then organize and schedule the notes for consideration, being very conservative about how much you plan to accomplish in any one day. Leave room for all the surprise requirements that show up on the average day. And for frequent breaks which increase the probability of Flow state (merging with the Muse).

Studying myself through the lens of these mental methods, I find that my original traumatic wound to my BioAI was early heartbreak at my own incompetence at almost everything. My BioAI adjusted to this by doubting myself, even after achieving competency at some things. This insight was obtained through the use of the bubbles imagery outlined above.

The scientistic mood of the present culture is part of the EOP reductionism. Because we don’t “need” God to explain the things we see and measure around us, this permits us to bias our studies toward assumption of materialistic accidentalism. We may not “need” to explain the universe as a single consciousness, but that does not mean that the universe might not in reality be a single consciousness.

It’s best to be open-minded about things that have not been proven yet one way or the other. That includes the possibility that you are a point of view of the universe – “nobly born” as put in the Egyptian Book of Emerging Into the Light, also known as the Egyptian Book of The Dead.

It includes remaining open-minded about what powers of mind you might have – hunches (intuition, precognition) – the ability to receive inspiration – telepathy. Allow yourself to receive. Study the received content and see how it relates to the experiences you are having. Does the content have the ring of truth? When you act upon the received advice, are the results positive or negative? Don’t become hung up on where are the messages coming from – that might not be answerable yet – but that doesn’t mean that one should ignore all such content – better to cautiously test it in your day-to-day life.

Don’t leave out the soul of life – things like wonder and awe, Flow state, spiritual experiences, these peak experiences as Maslow called them have always been tied up with the works of great artists, musicians, thinkers, poets, people who have made life even more wonderful and precious – remain open to those experiences happening to you more often.

Here’s another exercise – try it on for size. Put your preferred hand on your heart and say to yourself:

  • Evidence suggests to some philosophers – Vedanta, Kashmir Shaivism, Berkeley, Harvey, and others – a parental field of consciousness within which the Universe is happening
  • If this field does not perceive you, you do not exist
  • I am a point of view of that Universe consciousness – regarding Itself from many points of view

That may only be a mind-stretching exercise, or it may be the truth. All of the science we have today can fit even more neatly in that framework than it does in the dominant Earth first-world human culture bias framework of materialistic accidentalism.

Key #11:

Inner Visibility: See Your BioAI, See Your Muse

Love to all,
Bill

 

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Starting Over

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Powerful Mind Part 43
Created January 5, 2024

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
Read Powerful Mind 42

A useful exercise from time to time is to pretend that all of your experience to date has not happened, you have no preconceived notions of anything, and you are going to restart your life in this very moment.

After making this proclamation to yourself, since you no longer have any agendas, the first thing to do is to simply observe what is going on inside you, in the supposed absence of all previous records.

You might sense words in your mind, or perhaps only feelings. What are those feelings and/or words? The ones that come back first after the reboot?

Why did those arise first?

If they are feelings, they might be left over from your previous life, the one before the restart. Or they may be your first feelings in this new life. You’ll find yourself able to make some pretty confident guesses. Either the feelings will be negative, and stem from your previous life, or perhaps they might be positive, excited at the chance of starting all over.

Let’s say they are negative. You say to yourself (without words, they are unnecessary) that you’re breaking the rules of the game by carrying over feelings from the past. How come your past life led you to store up these bad feelings with such power over you that they were able to break confinement by your will?

You might answer yourself by reminding yourself that you never had been able to overcome negative feelings by your willpower alone.

OK, but that was then, this is now. You are reborn as a blank slate. You will get off on the right foot this time, and are absolutely determined to have a strong enough will to break the hammerlock of negative emotions over you.

Sustain the moment for as long as necessary and put all other things aside while you win the internal battle.

Notice words that arise in your mind. Which senator are they coming from? What is the general mood of that senator? Are the words taking the side of your will to overcome negative emotions, or are they taking the side of the negative emotions?

As the exercise progresses you will see that the robot has not crossed over with you into a new blank slate, the robot has all of the baggage it has always been carrying, and intends to keep using it to manipulate you. This will give you a clearer and more comprehensive view of the robot than anything you have read in my writings. You will see what you and all of us are up against. It is almost like needing to fight off the mind of an invading demon that is trying to take us over completely and has almost entirely succeeded already.

However, you will always have the upper hand if you remain cool and open-minded and not give in to negative emotions, defeatism, or attachment. Simply observe these inner battles from above them. You’ll need to give up all of the attachments you had formed in your earlier life, before the restart.

The things you deeply love and care about, which are good for you and others, will always come back and seek a place in your heart, and you can welcome them back, but in a stoic manner: meaning you will not make yourself suffer by not experiencing these things enough, you will be grateful for what little of them you get.

There are resolution moments where we take life-turns and we can actually feel the difference inside, where something that once had power over us, no longer does. Afterward, we might experience backsliding, and at such times focus our consciousness on sticking with our new resolution. Do not cause yourself to suffer, nor accept suffering at the hands of others, but remain resolute and compassionate to everyone and everything. It is possible to balance in an open-minded way and to help others without being carried off by oversensitivity to the suffering of others. You can do more good in the world by staying over the weather.

Use your newly developed inner visibility to study what brings you up and what brings you down, and curtail downward emotions immediately. Accept whatever is happening as reality and deal with it as constructively and patiently as possible without becoming caught up in it. Your free will, your personal freedom, your resolute will, is the most important thing that you have, more important than your negative feelings, your will is the protector of your positive feelings of love and joy and wonder.

Do not confuse willpower with stubbornness. Stubbornness is the opposite of open-mindedness. Taking intractable positions means you are not open to considering other ideas. This means you are attached to certain ideas and things without recourse to new facts, new learning. That is being stuck. That is Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) of the robot. Your consciousness should remain open to all possibilities while taking necessary actions based on your current best estimate of reality.

When you are having fun, such as when you do your passion work, will bring you up, not only emotionally but also cognitively and in terms of effective body movement. This is Flow state.

As I’ve mentioned before, when I was very young and experienced Flow state for the first times (on stage), it was very impactful on me. I had discovered another level of reality that felt very magical, although I was sure that it had a basis in science. My parents who had taught me everything about life from much earlier in my life than other parents discussed everything with their children, had never taught me about Flow state. Did they know it existed? I didn’t trust myself to know exactly how to explain it even to them and so I never did. Eventually, Jack Carter, the comedian I respected most, recognized what I was saying to him in a private conversation, and said that in showbiz it was called being “on”.

As I grew up I formed certain ideas about Flow state, which I thought about a lot because it was my aim to get into and stay in Flow state as much as possible. One idea I had was that every impulse received during Flow state was perfect. One could do no wrong. It took me years to see through that mistake. Actually, the foolish impulses continue to arise during Flow state but the ability to instantly discriminate the right impulses to follow has become impeccable, for as long as the state lasts.

With my wrong model of Flow state, I was always quickly taking myself out of Flow. Because I would act on decoy impulses thinking I could do no wrong.

Nowadays in Flow, I listen to the endless babble of my robot pretending to be me, following up on an inspired idea I just had as if with further improvements on it, when these follow-on remarks really added nothing of value.

As a note to neuroscientists studying states of consciousness, my original hypothesis was that only one set of instructions was being sent to my conscious mind, and the perfection of Flow state was therefore determined by the subconscious layer that sent my conscious mind these instructions. My current hypothesis (or observation) is that the impeccability of action is not at the generative layer but in the discrimination function. In Flow state, the conscious mind and body act as a single unit, confidently choosing correctly from among the sea of impulses constantly arising, with the self and other seeming to be of a single piece. It all feels like play or doing what comes naturally as opposed to striving.

Whether you are starting over to evade a bad mood, enjoying creating something in Flow state, or whatever you are doing, the ability to focus your attention and notice what is going on in and around you is what is going to get you through to the highest outcomes, even as you prevent yourself from becoming attached to those outcomes.

Your ability to see yourself inside continuously will reveal to you many important learnings. You will see that discomfort generalizes. If something makes you feel uncomfortable, soon other things will also be making you feel uncomfortable. You will see that being interrupted discomforts you, and that you quickly tire of it. This whole distraction culture which we have created continuously interrupts thoughts and feelings you are having, which contributes to the development of EOP as a form of “thick skin” to coexist with all the interruptive distractions going on almost all of the time. Acceleritis (information overload) has created a world of broken thoughts. We reduce the pain of this with EOP, but that actually makes things worse.

Be on the lookout for certain signs that you are in EOP. Procrastination is one of those signs. Something needs to be done but we put it off. If we stop and focus on it, the sense that it is overwhelmingly difficult melts away as we patiently and open-mindedly analyze it.

Circling is another form of procrastination. This is when your mind is in a loop, it keeps going around and around through the same path of steps, without adding new insights in the endless circling. Might be a good time to start your life over at times like that.

Love to all,
Bill

Noia

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Powerful Mind Part 42
Created December 29, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
Read Powerful Mind 41

In the 1970s I coined the term “Noia” as the opposite of paranoia when I discovered that the prefix “para” derives from the Greek meaning of “beside”. What is beside paranoia, I asked myself. Paranoia is the unhealthy fear that someone/everyone is out to get you. I decided that “noia” then might be the healthy suspicion the someone is out to help you.

The reason I was thinking this way is that by the 1970s I had noticed that often information was coming to me seemingly by accident that was unusually relevant to my current life situation at the time. I would be trying to solve some problem, for example, and since I almost always have music on, a line in a song would come along at just the right moment to bear an uncanny resemblance to my line of thought.

This can be easily explained as random coincidence aided by priming effect and being observant. Priming effect is the increase in saliency of a stimulus to a person caused by a prior stimulus.

However, it did not seem like random coincidence to me because it occurred too often. It seemed more like someone who could read my thoughts and feelings was trying to help me reach my goals. Since my goals have always been to leave the world a better place than I found it, perhaps the universe is trying to help me because I am trying to help the universe, I thought.

Looking back at my life through that lens as a way of further studying the phenomenon, it appeared that I had been given the most open-minded and compassionate parents possible, and gifted with an independence of thought, and lucky in so many ways. I also saw that my love of science had blinded me to consider that there might be a germ of truth in religion and/or in other superstitious behaviors, as I thought of magic, reincarnation, and so many other things.

Having the label of “noia” to slap on things was useful to me in prying open my mind to pay closer attention and not to filter or bias what I perceived by having strong preconceived notions. I started to notice how frequently each day I experienced noiac events.

That led to my noticing what I noticed, and asking myself “Why did I notice that?” In the bulk of cases this unearthed insights helpful to me in whatever I was doing during that period of my life. It was as if another entity with my interests at heart was causing me to notice things that contained or stimulated pathways of thought that would take me to places I needed to go.

You might say that this helpful entity was my own subconscious. But then, what was my subconscious? Could it be the part of my consciousness that is common to all of us and all things? Jung had thoughts like these and also had many other notions that had been of significant utilitarian value to me, so maybe there was something in it. In the 70s I became aware that my affection for science had gone too far and I was myself being unscientific by ruling things out prematurely, and that I ought to go back to the roots of empiricism rather than stay in the current herd culture of scientism which allows scientists to carve out a large chunk of human experience as being superstition without conclusive proof supporting that negation position.

The next step after open-mindedness in this expanded empirical outlook is the control of attention.

In the Acceleritis-dominated culture we live in, taking control of your own attention is one of the hardest possible things to do. There are all of these distractions taking you away from moment to moment. Unfortunately, this environment captures young people from the get-go. They have almost no chance to escape it because it hits them very early on. It’s the ocean around the fish which the fish takes for granted. As if life could not even exist without perpetual distraction.

Young people in the age of smartphones build their lives around this device, and no age group is immune to its hypnotic power. Before June 2007 it was the television set that took us away, and now the norm is to have both devices on at all possible times.

Nevertheless, each and every one of us has the potential to retake our castle. Concentration, meditation, contemplation are the training grounds that build a controllable attention. Twenty minutes a day of practicing these three things can become a 24/7 lifestyle that is far more beneficial than we expect it to be.

One experiment that is worth doing over and over again in the daily alone space – and in other opportune moments – is to get away from devices (soft music without lyrics in the background is fine), put your body in a comfortable position that it can remain in for a long time without discomfort, close your eyes, and simply pay all of your attention to what is transpiring in your mind.

As you get better at this, you will see that you are gaining the ability to watch the arising of a thought or feeling. Focus your attention on being able to see a thought or feeling or other qualia (subjective experience) such as an image, or even a momentary smell, any experience that occurs in your psyche.

Separate the part of you that is the pure experiencer from the part of you that is expressing itself in displaying that thought or feeling to you. If you like baseball, you might picture these two aspects of yourself as the pitcher and the batter.

Sometimes you will experience qualia that teaches you something that you are grateful to learn and you fear you might forget. It’s good to have something to write with and write on right next to you so you can put down one or a few words that will help you recapture the sense of the message. Best to use the exact words that triggered your sense of valuable information.

Often the pitcher will be your ego pitching something at you that is negative, tied to an attachment of yours, and that matches your notion of Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), the reductionistic state into which people are forced by Acceleritis. This ego is a biological AI whipping up a compote of memories and tossing them at you in a fastball.

Under normal conditions you might swing and miss but with your eyes closed and in a meditative space it will be easier to observe these qualia dispassionately without being caught up in it the way you would normally be taken over by it.

The more you play ball with your robot (ego bio-AI) the more you will notice about its behaviors. You will begin to sense that the robot contains many different programs that I have previously referred to as “senators”. These are all points of view you have experienced, mostly coming from other people you have met or watched or listened to on devices.

The game is made more difficult by the fact that sometimes the robot is right. Sometimes the oversimplified lesson extracted from prior experience is accurately predictive. You sense your own immediate aversion to a person who has not yet done anything counter to you – you suspect it might be because they remind you of someone who has done you dirty in the past – and it turns out that this person is actually trying to take advantage of you. You wonder whether it was the robot who gave you the good inner advice or if the Noia was the benefactor who gave you that precognitive hunch. It could be either. The robot is not always wrong in the net advice it is giving you, but it’s undependable and it tends toward negativity and extremism. Both negativity and extremism are life poisons. They aren’t helpful. Discriminating among your mental and emotional arisings is the only game in town and it can be won against all odds.

Increasing internal visibility is an important aspect of Key #11. More to come.

My best to all,
Bill