Category Archives: Self

Setting Up a New Command Center in Your Mind

Created July 8, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

If you are horrified by what is going on in the world today and wish you had the power to make it better, here’s how to get that power and to start using it for the good.

Nothing can be achieved until you are master of your “self”.

A battlefield shortcut methodology to achieve self-mastery is summarized in this post.

Imagine that you are installing a new spot in your mind to which you can return at will. A place you can go to whenever you really need effectiveness, and to get away from all bugaboos you use to torture yourself.

Furnishing the New Command Post

First, understand what this place is. It’s a new/old perspective point where you rise above all that has come before and start anew every time you arrive there. You’ve visited that terrain before, perhaps, at times when you just threw up your hands and gave up on everything. You may have felt it oddly freeing rather than a continuation of despair in a new guise. It is definitely identifiable by the freedom you feel to modify, override, replace, erase even the things for which you’ve been desperately striving for a long time. You can think of it as the Reset Button. The wellsprings of unbounded creativity live in this place.

Another attribute of the Command Post is that you feel a fondness for your own most noble impulses. And an impatience with your own whining tendencies. Keep that feeling alive to you every moment.

You may also feel that everything you thought you knew is really half-knowledge, that you’ve been going along with everyone else because resistance would have been futile, but from here in the Command Post you are able to dispassionately observe things as if experiencing them for the first time.

Now that you’ve acclimated to the subconscious/feeling aspects of the new Control Center, here are the recommended conscious furnishings:

Apply your new perspective to see the humor in the things that have been your personal albatrosses. And through that same lens to continuously see the humor in all things, even if at some times expressing that to others may be insensitive, and make a point of remembering that last point, i.e., it’s sometimes better to keep that perception of humor to yourself. At other times the other people around you will benefit from that perspective. You’ll need to see which way your noblest self feels at that moment and act accordingly.
Remove all barriers to feeling the love that you feel for the things and entities that you love. Start with yourself. Get in touch with the love you feel for yourself. See what you feel is loveable about yourself. Now migrate carefully from there to plumbing the depths of your spirit to what it is you are here on Earth to accomplish. Once you have a feeling for your life’s purpose, write it down in the form of a vow, an intention, what you intend to do, despite the challenges in the way. However, recognize that the actual outcomes will not be 100% under your control so that you cannot equate the intention with any guarantee of success. All you guarantee is that you are going to give it your very best shot every moment. However, it comes out will be up to the total system, the Universe. Here in the Command Post you shall never give in to feeling attached to how it will all come out.
What logically flows from the prior furniture you’ve just installed, is the supportive, empowering intention to not waste your own computing power on nonsense. Respect the power and value of your own being, your own mind for example, and don’t simply tolerate the situations in which you find your mind in the default network of simply hopping from thought to thought, feeling to feeling, aimlessly and without hookup to your reason for being, your self-assigned mission.
Install a mirror. Make sure to look in that inner mirror while hanging out in the Command Module.
Install a periscope. Use it to take a long view of what is going on in the rest of the world which appears to exist outside you. Understand the difference between the frame of mind you are now in (in the Command Center) and the frame of mind of all the hysterical people racing around out there. Make a vow, a strong intention, to catch yourself when you slip back into that default network conditioned by the culture into which you were born, and to remind yourself that you’re better than that, and move back into your Command Center.
Form a talisman and put it on. It will be your philosopher’s stone, the tool you use know whether to flow with your natural first inclination, or to wait and check things out before allowing your motor control to obey your first natural impulse from within. This talisman of discrimination will enable you to easily move into the Flow state much more often, and also prevent you from making disastrous mistakes. The way it works is you carefully and continuously use the mirror to detect negativity in what you are about to say or do. Negativity is a sign of non-Flow-state impulses. Letting through impulses directed by love is the sign of oncoming Flow state.Now that you’ve set up your Command Center, spend as much time there as possible, while doing what you have to do based on prior agreements, and/or while carrying out your mission.

How This Relates to Dealing with the Horrors of the Present

From your new Command Post you will be in the best possible condition to help others deal with the fears and angers endemic to the current world situation in which all of the malingering ancient errors have been magnified by the latest technology, and compounded together into an enormous traffic snarl affecting all the minds on the planet. Around you people will begin to feel better and will become more able to make effective decisions to exercise damage control over their own lives and the lives of the people they love. This will ripple outwards.

The people who are most carried away by their self-inflicted wounds will find themselves losing the support of those who have cleared away most of the debris in their minds. This may initially make them even more dangerous but ultimately they will have to take stock of what is happening and make some new decisions. We are social animals. We are all codependent. We have tremendous influence over each other. This has been part of the problem but if we play our cards right, from our personal Command Centers, we can make it part of the solution.

Love,

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

The Art of Neutralizing Negative Emotion

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Created June 3, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love to all,

Bill

Don’t Overthink Stuff, Nor Act on Every Impulse

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Created April 21, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Flow state is what the human race needs more of. It is super competency, the opposite of what we witness all around us every second nowadays.

Flow state is that condition in which an individual is doing everything perfectly. Which is why I referred to it as super competency.

Some of the other characteristics of Flow state are:

The individual has the sense that things are doing themselves
It feels like play
There is no fear of failure

The public is only vaguely aware of Flow state. Even those who know the state exists do not realize its significance in the context of the current collapse of civilizational institutions. Very few people recognize that widespread Flow state can be achieved and that this can restore robust forward progress toward a cooperative peaceful world.

If this were part of the public narrative, given that almost everyone now agrees that the human race is not in a good place, a lot more action would be taken quickly, like at the speed with which the Covid vaccines were developed.

But can we really get masses of people to change dramatically in time? Yes.

It’s not as daunting as it seems. Individuals can learn simple principles of action and apply those principles to filter their own impulses before action – and to accurately sense when to not filter them at all.

The existence of this higher state of consciousness is scientifically well established. Neuroscientists have been studying its brain signature for decades. There are many studies with some degree of agreement and the work is progressing.

But we don’t need to wait until science knows Flow state inside and out. That is beside the point. The point is we know how to train people to increase time spent in Flow state and the world needs us all to receive that training right now. Much of the needed training is contained in my book Mind Magic. I wrote it in hopes of training everyone to get into it more often (maintaining it continuously is very rare). I’ll share a few key takeaways here today.

Flow state happens with authentic non-edited natural response. However, if one takes a black and white oversimplistic approach to getting into the Flow state by going with their every natural inclination, what will happen is generally not Flow state but rapid alternation between egotistical behavior and flashes of Flow state, in which more moments go to ego.

What rule of action can we follow that will allow us to release into Flow, yet prevent us from wishful thinking that we are in Flow when we are not?

You get into Flow state when you are adept at the mechanical behaviors involved and are faced with a challenge situation that is matched closely with your skills but allows for no letting down of your guard.

In a conversation where you are not threatened or nervous you are likely to get into Flow state if you are discussing something you have studied deeply or you are trying to help another person with no thought of personal gain.

The simplest rule for managing your own behavior second to second is to be authentic without thinking about making yourself look good or achieving business aims or any goal other than giving the best of yourself at every moment regardless of the outcomes.

Before you can release yourself to just be you, you must feel unattached to outcomes. Then you get let go and be your self and you will feel the Flow gear engage. It will feel wonderful and you will be doing good in the world. You will be making a positive difference not just in your own interest but in everyone’s. You will be building trust that will develop strong relationships and enable you to do more good each day.

When you are not in Flow you do need to edit your impulses. They often come from ego and will not have long term success. They will not be inspired and will not inspire others. As a general rule you should assume the need to edit your own impulses except at times when you feel positive and letting yourself Flow with your natural impulses is the right thing to do.

However, we can instantly fall out of Flow because we become overconfident and ego quickly slips back in. Knowing this you can monitor impulses even during Flow to prevent yourself from falling out by simply not acting on certain impulses of which you are uncertain. That slight uncertainty is enough of a clue in Flow to keep your mouth shut and your mind open.

Love to all,

Bill

The Human Effectiveness Institute

New tools to focus the mind, enabling higher performance

Category Archives: Self

Setting Up a New Command Center in Your Mind

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

The Art of Neutralizing Negative Emotion

Don’t Overthink Stuff, Nor Act on Every Impulse