Category Archives: Powerful Mind

Ride the Psychic Foam

Powerful Mind Part 38
Created December 1, 2023

Key #10 is about how to ride the bucking bronco that is your mind. Your mind, which is constantly throwing up inner words, feelings and impulses that – if allowed – can enslave your mood.

When my late partner Len Matthews, a wonderful human being, read my book Mind Magic, he initially disagreed with the idea that he should “dis-identify with the thought senate” (paraphrasing the title of Chapter 9). He said, “I’m proud of my ideas, I want to call them my own.”

I pointed out the subtitle of that chapter “Not Throwing Your Authority Behind Untested Head Spewings”. This, I explained, allowed for cases in which a person can take pride and ownership of ideas after having tested those ideas thoroughly enough, with which he agreed.

Therefore Key #10 is about how to test one’s inner drafts before adopting them as one’s own official policy.

Not viewing the situation that way, the vast majority of the human race throughout history, and perhaps more so today due to the Distraction Culture produced by Acceleritis, tend to assume that the inner soundtrack is one’s very own self expressing positions that have been fully ratified by all sides of oneself.

In Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), the pandemic coping condition for information overload, most of the time the mind is operating in what neuroscientists call the Default Network. This is an idle stream of consciousness that keeps switching tracks based on associations, and includes daydreaming as well as commentary on what one is doing in the external world of consensual reality sometimes involving other people.

In the Observer state, neuroscientists say that the brain is operating from the Executive Control Network, and the mind is in a state of metacognition, able to observe with a degree of detachment what the inner wordstream is saying. It is that degree of detachment which Mind Magic Chapter 9 aimed to achieve in readers. By having that degree of detachment, one can inspect what one’s mind just said, to see if it is consistent with one’s general viewpoint, or if it appears to be an outlier, perhaps a remnant of who you used to be. Or just a first reflexive reaction of anger at someone in language you might have used as a child or as a teenager but would not normally use aloud today.

By helping children to learn these ways, they shall more quickly become able to be in control of their own impulses.

When I was a child, like all other children, I had a very hard time guessing which of my impulses to act upon and which ones to just let drift away. Perhaps I had more trouble with it than most children. Because on stage and in other rare moments I had experienced the Flow state, in which simply letting myself flow with all of my impulses seemed to work fantastically well. At the time this is what I muddily thought. It was only much later on that I realized that in Flow one does not always act on every impulse, in fact, in making that assumption I had caused myself to be taken out of Flow after very short periods of it. This took years to discover. In the meantime, I had absurd experiences of following impulses which turned out to be ridiculously wrong and impossible to defend afterward.

In that chapter of Mind Magic, one of the metaphors used is to consider the mind to be a vast senate of viewpoints, installed based on people you have met who may have impressed you in one way or another, which set up a robot simulating that person within one’s own mind, presumably mediated by a specific pattern of electrochemical flow among specific neurons. In a lifetime one may meet, or hear, speak, or read the words of, tens of thousands of people, including in media. Thousands of them may leave permanent impressions as biological “AI” outposts within one’s mind. This, then, is the senate.

The Executive Control Network may be viewed as the inner True Self, trying to sort through what may be conflicting impulses arising simultaneously like virtual particles in the quantum foam, within one’s own microcosm. The great physicist John Archibald Wheeler postulated that in nothingness before the Big Bang, there had always existed quantum foam, with virtual particles arising and disappearing. In my book A Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and “God” I posited that the quantum foam itself is consciousness, the original substrate of the universe. Whether or not this is true we might not as a species know for millennia, although as individuals some of us may decide to adopt it as a working hypothesis for life, as I do.

By installing Key #10 in one’s own mind, one gives oneself the psychic distance to edit one’s own headstream.

More than that, one can take the time to teach errant senators how to behave properly. For example, one day recently, I heard myself think something mean about a person I love. With Key #10, it’s not enough to just correct oneself and move on: you are advised to carry on an inner dialog with the senator who said that, and to find out how that part of you thinks and feels. Does the part of you who just said that mean thing not love this other person? Or was that just an old reflex from your childhood when you first started to use mean words like that? If the latter turns out to be the case, as it did, that senator (or neuron grouping) can learn that it’s no longer appropriate to use such language even to oneself, it’s no longer fitting within the person you have become. In this way the mind is eventually cleansed and impurities have been removed from it.

One of the inner signals that one learns to pay attention to is any trace of negativity. By now, using the other Keys 1-9, we have already changed our mental habits enough to realize that we prefer to be happy and to know how to quickly tune out of anything that makes us unhappy. Negativity is what makes us unhappy, therefore we have already started to learn how to tune away from negativity to positivity, to find one’s creativity interested and challenged by the “dare” of negativity to find creative solutions to remove all causes of negativity from one’s life as quickly as possible in each case.

More methods for riding one’s psychic froth in the next installment.

My best to all,

The Supreme Depression

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Powerful Mind Part 37

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, October 25, 2024
Created November 17, 2023
Read Powerful Mind 36

You don’t have to let everything in, you can let love and joy in without reservation, and filter everything else out, not allowed in, rise above it!

We call the economic depression of 1929-1939 “The Great Depression”. I call the psychological depression period we are now in “The Supreme Depression”.

From my readings, it appears to me that the current Supreme Depression is far more psychologically damaging to the human race than was The Great Depression. In The Emotional Life of The Great Depression, John Marsh (Oxford Press, 2019) describes the negative feelings evoked during The Great Depression as despair, fear, panic, righteousness, and anger, all of which had been chronicled by many historians. It was the righteousness and anger which Hitler and Mussolini manipulated to bring themselves to power.

However, Marsh also adds that there were positive feelings during that period, mostly after 1932, three years into the ten-year depression, as a result of the election of FDR, and they were hope, awe, and love. From our observations about our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, we know that the economic depression made us stronger in many ways.

Our current Supreme Depression is similar but different. The economic situation is cloudy and volatile, but there has been no market crash affecting the USA, our economy here is still standing, and many people’s incomes have kept steady with inflation, while many people keep getting richer, although it’s also edge city for many people in America. In the rest of the world, economic conditions are worse in many places and better in a few.

Moving from economics to psychology, however, the modern world has never seen such widespread doom and gloom thinking, hatred, cynicism, gullibility, and willingness to give up personal freedoms in exchange for perceived greater physical safety. The Great Depression was a walk in the park by comparison, and yet enabled so-called “strongmen” to almost take over the world. The Supreme Depression could enable the new crop of charismatic tyrants to enslave us. Many influential journalists and politicians worldwide assume that dystopia is here to stay and will soon be consolidating its grip everywhere, there are now new digital media that make it easy to have a screen and perhaps earpods washing one’s mind with negativity for nearly every waking minute.

Everyone knows that polls can be wrong. Nevertheless, poll results are a guarantee of attention, because everyone is so attached to the political party propaganda war and frightened of the outcomes. What people say in surveys has a low degree of predictivity of their actual behavior. The response rate to polling surveys is generally under 10% and sometimes hits a high of as much as 13%, meaning that the random sample that was predesignated is not random anymore, 13% of us willing to take part in polls are (mis-) representing the other 87% of us. Even people in the research business who know these things are drawn as if by an addictive substance to reading the poll results.

Negativity is such a powerful influence that it doesn’t need absolutely continuous access to your mind in order to poison your attitude. Negativity even for only 10% of your waking minutes can ruin your day and your life, let alone the constant diet of negativity which has become our lives.

Chaim Oren reports that a rabbi once told him “Optimists and Pessimists are both right.” Meaning that the pessimist is going to experience exactly what he or she expects, and so is the optimist. We draw to ourselves whatever our mind projects onto the world. As I’ve pointed out here perhaps too many times, even the greatest physicists agree that our consciousness affects the probability waves of matter and energy around us and how that magma manifests as definite and concrete events in our timeline. Our mind sharpens possibilities into actualities that we experience. Allowing our minds to be constantly poisoned by negativity is absolutely self-defeating, not to mention unpleasant.

What can we do about this, once we have become serious about opening our minds to the greater possibilities of our own life?

It might seem like a hard pill to swallow, but we can actually turn off the negative noise. We don’t have to read or watch the negative news. We don’t have to stay on a social media page that offers no solutions only problems and invective. We don’t have to be hooked on downers for the rest of our lives. Paraphrasing Tim Leary, now would be an ideal time to “Tune In (to our true selves), Turn On (our subtle inner guidance systems), and Drop Out (of the negative media inputs that only weaken us).”

There is of course the fear of missing out. How can we be good conversationalists if we don’t know the latest events? Isn’t that burying our heads in the sand? If you enjoy the news then continue to tune into it at your usual times, but if you find yourself getting into a negative mood, be aware of it and of your freedom to switch away.

GPT4 and the other new LLM (Large Language Model) AIs can come in handy here. Ask your favorite AI to summarize the latest news events that might point to positive outcomes ahead. Ask what new solution ideas to world problems were announced today. You can stay well-informed and decide which articles to read based on using what I call a Hate Filter, that is, asking an AI the right questions, designed to keep you in the know and inspired by new discoveries and solution ideas, not trapped in a bubble of hopeless cynical negativity. If you are pessimistic about the world, that will not translate into your being able to make the most of your opportunities in life.

You don’t have to let everything in, you can let love and joy in without reservation, and filter everything else out, not allowed in, rise above it!

The way to take charge of your new life which starts right now is to stop allowing yourself to be given these daily injections of hypnotic suggestions that bring down your effectiveness and immune response. Use that time to contemplate and plan your new life, to meditate and apply metacognition to rule your mind castle, and to use media to find the ideas and knowledge and fun that relate to your purpose and meaning in life, to your gifts and passion work, to the dreams and aspirations that you used to have, the subjects that have always fascinated you, and to ideas that once inspired you that you have put aside. Not all of them may still be relevant to you, but some will be and will give you new surprises and whole new canvases to paint your life on.

My best to all,

Live chat with my avatar now.

Bringing on the Observer State by Observation

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Powerful Mind Part 31
Created October 6, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
Read Powerful Mind 30

“How observant of you!” We have all heard people say this from time to time, to us or to someone else. There is wisdom in everything that is said, often much deeper wisdom than even the person who says it is aware of. Old sayings especially.

The Observer state is more than being an observant person, although that is one aspect of the state.

We are embarking here on explaining Key #7, which is about the perceptions, the five senses, and the internal sense, the mind with its thoughts and feelings. Feelings include more than emotions; emotions are the bodily manifestations of our feelings. Thoughts are more than us talking to ourselves in our minds; thoughts include images, memories, hunches, and ideas we understand without using words in our mind.

These sensory systems bring us information about the world outside and inside.

Key #7 is about how to use these tools to further your Mission, and take care of yourself and other people better, by getting into the Observer state. Key #7 focused on how to do that using more powerful methods of observation. Other Keys aim to get you there by other strategies.

To review, the default network in the brain, what we call EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure), is the most common state of most human beings. The mind wanders, impulses arise, and you choose which impulses to act upon based on the past. The brain part called the cerebellum, which is responsible for coordinating muscle control including movement and balance and much more, also acts like an AI to keep track of every event in your past and makes associations between event type, action taken, and result; and then sends you impulses to take specific action that would have been best, in that event type, in the past.

This is of course not a perfect way to make decisions. What if the event you are now embroiled in has never appeared in your life before, and the default events that are most similar and which the cerebellum therefore uses as proxies for your current situation, are really not close enough? What if none of the actions you took in the past were really all that effective? As explained in the chapters relating to Key #2, consistency is not really the best policy.

The cerebellum is part of the old brain, going back millions of years. 200,000 years ago our species evolved a frontal cortex specifically as an improvement on the earlier decision “optimization” system. This new part enables the executive control network in the brain, although all brain systems are distributed in many parts of the physical brain. This network is where you want to work from. The best way to shift gears to that network is though conscious metacognition, that is, by observing your own thinking and feeling. This will get you into the Observer state.

You can easily slip out of the Observer state into EOP (Emergency Oversimplification Procedure). The reason it is easy to slip out is distraction. The environment in what we call modern civilization is extremely distractive, unless you live alone in a cave. Another reason is long habit. Getting mad at yourself only makes things worse. Maintain your sense of humor, it’s another way of maintaining your sense of perspective. Perspective allows us to realize that minor slippages are usually unimportant in the greater scheme of things, and are valuable learning experiences if you use them that way. The old sayings that captured this include “don’t sweat the small stuff”, “no use crying over spilt milk”, and “practice makes perfect”. Key #4 also helps with this, reminding you not to keep score (because it trivializes you) but rather stay focused in the present.

Ego

Metacognition and the executive control network do not assure the onset of Observer state. Observer state is where you can identify impulses arising in you which come from ego. It’s not always obvious. And you’re in the Observer state when you can ignore such impulses, not act upon them.

Ego is a form of neediness, also known as attachment, where you experience negative feelings because something you have become needy of, is withheld.

If something you were born actually needing is withheld – like oxygen, food, water, certain temperature levels, health – it’s natural to have negative feelings, and would not fall into the category of ego.

Most of ego is related to esteem – the desire that other people esteem you. Such dependencies weaken you and get in the way of achieving a powerful mind.

One of the things you will be looking out for as you amp up the power of inner and outer observation is your own subtle neediness. Observer state is the powerful will that enables you to surmount those attachments. Renunciation of that neediness doesn’t mean stopping yourself from enjoying those things when they come your way, but you must have the will power to stop yourself from running after more of the same.

It will seem like the universe is testing your resolve (and that might be what is actually happening).

You make your will stronger by exercising it. Especially when you can discipline yourself. Be careful not to exercise your will by being domineering with other people.

As a first step toward internalizing Key #7, keep an eye out inside for signs of neediness and analyze what it exactly is. Imagine scenarios in which your ego gets the stroking you want and scenarios in which your ego is crushed and humiliated. You will sense progress when you realize you don’t care about that stuff so much anymore – the sting will have been taken out of such mortification incidents. You will have become a mensch.

Be vigilant from the start of each day to the end. It’s optional but very helpful to keep a journal noting when ego arose in you and what you felt and did about it.

After this useful preparation we shall begin to more directly address observation in the next post.

Love to all,

Stripping Away Imposed Limitations

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Powerful Mind Part 29
Created September 22, 2023

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
Read Powerful Mind Part 28.

We have all been brainwashed. It was not done because of any conspiracy. It arose naturally as a result of the original minorities that seized power, the education systems and other structures that bloomed in the environments of those governments, the media the species invented, the economics of media and marketing in the world as it became.

The world we came into, the best intentions of our parents, and our own tabula rasa impressionability, did the rest. Operant conditioning was applied “accidentally”. Our parents wanted to prepare us for life with all its warts and so their advice was designed to help us avoid mistakes they had learned from, painfully. We of course insisted on learning for ourselves. By the time our childhood peers became more influential upon us than our parents had been, most of our behaviors, gestures, facial expressions, comments, likes, dislikes, and tendencies had already been conditioned by family influences including the friends of the family to whom we were exposed.

We were more like little imitative monkeys than we realized. We were generally not cognizant of how what we thought of as our self was being formed by others. Later in life we all realize it to some degree sooner or later. Some of us more than others, upon realizing this insidious process and how it shaped what we thought of as our own thinking, rebelled. Without realizing it perhaps, we repressed anger at our parents for having controlled our belief systems and values to the degree they had. We suddenly valued independent thinking as a thing that had never mattered to us before. Often in the process of trying to differentiate ourselves from those who had influenced our development, we came around to realize years later that the fight against the early conditioning had led a circular path right back to performing along the early ingrained lines anyway.

How can we in reality make a clean permanent break from the brainwashing we endured, and continue to endure each day?

How can we take charge of ourselves, stripping away the external influences, and will we find anything left of ourselves once we have done that? How scary to feel that without all the mimicry programs there might not be a “self left to stand on”? Never fear. You do have a real self under all that. Your dreams and visions and hunches tap into the roots of your individuality even though they may be tainted by external influences too. Which is why it is a good idea to pay attention to your deepest thoughts, feelings, images, memories, and to analyze and understand what they mean, what your non-conscious mind is trying to communicate to your conscious mind.

This is all about you and your life, what you want to do with the blank canvas, which by now has scribbling all over it.

Don’t trash the scribbling because it too has messages that will help you understand yourself. Everything you have done – even things you now regret – is of positive value to you as learning experiences, and you have probably not yet extracted all of the learning you can get out of each experience. Looking back over your life as we did in the previous post – especially the memories that still evoke emotion in you – is for the purpose of extracting the remaining lessons. Once you have fully assimilated an experience that has always made you feel guilty and ashamed, those feelings will no longer have any sting.

Metacognition – studying yourself – can actually unwind emotional blocks and take the sting out of “bad” memories. That is not the only benefit of metacognition, but it’s an important one.

How much have you gotten out of this series of posts so far? One way to look at that is to remember the “wants” that came into your mind when you read the post “What Do You Really Want?” which was posted on September 8, 2023. Hopefully you took notes either on paper or in a device and kept those notes, and if so, you can review them now. In any case, what you can do right now is to repeat the short exercise of writing down the things you want, and even if you have no notes, you can think about how the wants you write down now might have changed since September 8. Your inner processes are not all at the conscious level, so you could be surprised at noticing that certain things you said you wanted a couple of weeks ago now don’t seem as important to the you of now. And maybe other wants have risen higher recently.

Think about this for a moment: which wants do you want to have, and which wants would you rather not have?

There could be things that used to drive you, and caused you painful experiences – these may be wants you don’t want to have any more.

Also, I have found that it helps to throw off desires I have by plumbing the depths of where did I get that want in the first place? Once I discover how a want was planted in me, it makes it all the easier to cast off that want or to dial it down.

One of the most pernicious wants – especially if it becomes a need – is the desire for approval by others. Self-approval is of course a bedrock requirement. If we don’t like ourselves for any reason, we are going to be undermining ourselves, like a scorpion continuously addicted to constantly stinging itself. Why be that way? It’s an insult to the opportunity of life itself. You have to be on your own side. If something is preventing that, it’s a top priority to contemplate that first, and conquer it, no matter what else you might have to give up or dial down.

Whereas self-approval is a good thing, the need for approval from others is very undermining. Catch yourself justifying yourself to others, it is evidence that your need for the approval of others is causing you to act in a pathetic manner. Not everyone around you is sharp enough to see that consciously, but everyone can sense that you are needy without clarifying that into words in their own minds. Do you really want to appear needy to others? Is that really going to help you accomplish what you wish to accomplish in your life? Best to edit out those words that your impulsive default network sends to your tongue to enunciate.

What are you going to accomplish with the remainder of your life? What is your mission, your purpose, your goals? How are you going to deliver the gifts you have been given to the rest of the world. How are you going to leave something behind that will make you feel fulfilled when you breathe your last breath?