Created October 31, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

The Sadducees were the materialistic and authoritarian traditional ruling class of wealthy aristocrats, high priests and merchants, and a self-identifying sect within Judaism that denied things that other Jews believed in, including the existence of the spirit; the Sadducees denied resurrection, denied redemption in a future life, and “believed in unrestrained free will —meaning God had no role in the personal lives of humans. Everyone was master of his or her own destiny”. They were known for their main belief which was in wealth. A significant recurring income stream they sought to protect was payment for the rituals performed in the great temple, including animal sacrifice. Jesus reinterpreted and reinvigorated the Jewish beliefs of the other sects, Pharisees and Essenes, focusing on the heart, mind, and spirit rather than on material wealth, and drew heavily upon the thoughts of Hillel, making kindness to others the number one priority of Jewishness.

If voting had existed there, Jesus would have not encouraged his followers to vote for the Sadducees no matter how seductive their arguments might have sounded. The brilliant Republican Evangelical American writer Michael Gerson has written an inspired article about this subject. Although I have quoted the article once before, it seems to me timely to share his words with you here, as we are heading into a season both of voting and of remembering the spiritual ideas that have uplifted us:

Jesus rejected the role of a political messiah. In the present age, He insisted, the Kingdom of God would not be the product of Jewish nationalism. It would not arrive through militancy and violence, tactics that would contribute only to a cycle of suffering. Instead, God’s kingdom would grow silently, soul by soul, “among you” and “within you,” across every barrier of nation or race — in acts of justice, peacemaking, love, inclusion, meekness, humility and gentleness.

Instead of ignoring the cries of the ill, poor and abused, they would honor the unerasable image of God we see in one another. Believers don’t accept a society divided by rank or dominated by the illusion of merit — they seek to subvert such stratification in constructive ways, to prioritize justice and common provision for people in need.

Do the dark pleasures of resentment and anger simply have a stronger emotional appeal than the virtues of compassion and self-sacrifice?

Or maybe it just feels impossible to judge your own upbringing and cultural background. It is hard to question the aggressive, predominant views of your community or congregation. It is far easier to seek belonging, even if it means accepting a lie or ignoring a wrong. Thus, moral courage is often a solitary stand.

Today Do Not Make the Dream Go That Way

India’s sages taught and still teach that our expectations program our material experiences. Our minds create our reality. This is not a solipsistic process (except in schizophrenia), we all do it together to create the consensus reality. This is not far from what physicist John Wheeler said in his theory of the Participatory Anthropic Principle.

This can be empirically verified, and is intuitive common sense, but its implied advice is not taken and acted upon by the population at large. The advice would be to consider every moment how one’s thoughts and feelings were programming reality, and whether one really wanted to do that. Perhaps we can learn how to cooperate better in mentally and emotionally pre-creating the reality we all want. There are some common elements virtually all of us agree on, such as peace, love, happiness, family, community, honor, hard work, education, creativity, art, individuality, public safety and its correlate, violence reduction… the list goes on.

To simplify, the imaginings billions of us are having at this exact second, of the bloody mess seemingly growing by the day all around the world, increases the probability of those even more disastrous escalation situations actually coming about. We have to steer away from that dream, not throw more fuel on its fire. All the negative hand-wringing conversations not only don’t move us toward solutions, they actually move us more into the feared outcome.

Then the news media have difficult choices to make but, so far, quickly decide to tell it like they see it. This is twisting the dial to a larger fire on the stove.

It is sane – once knowing these facts – to decide resolutely to stop going along with an assumption that this is hole we are doomed to swirl down in – and to switch channels in our minds and hearts to imagining how it could all end peacefully, with respectful dialog. And then to make the imaginings tangibly real together by hard work and respect for our seemingly antithetical viewpoints – which may not be as polarized as we have collectively settled into thinking they are. By avoiding unpleasant conversations about the details of what are the desired outcomes and paths, we are locking in the brain-dead animosity amplification approach as the standard operating system of the human race. How passé.

Imagination is more important than has been publicly stated, except in song. Zaltman said that 95% of decision making is subconscious. A powerful driver in that realm is the imagination. That is the seat of creative power in the subconscious. There are other powerful drivers there, including the intuition, which boils up insights from the subconscious and God knows where else.

Know Thyself was Socrates’ summary advice to human beings.

The meaning is scientific in its specificity. Know Thyself means Know what are your powers of mind, and how do they drive you (as we find things today), and then, now that you know who you are and are therefore in control, how to use those assembled powers, and why? The epithet is known in today’s science as metacognition and as self-metaprogramming.

This is the central purpose of every life. The percentage of us who find ourselves is an unknown number. The whole subject is abstruse because the world culture is polarized away from the spiritual and immaterial.

Jesus was talking about the same subject. Working upon oneself to be able to have sufficient control of one’s own mind and heart to be able to not even think about wrong actions or desires.

Working upon oneself was classically Jewish, with their concept of menschdom.

Hinduism calls it nivritti.

Islam means surrendering the little soul to the One Actual Soul of the Universe. This is actually the Flow state outcome of working on oneself. The working is done in an intermediary state we (The Human Effectiveness Institute) call Observer state. Werner Ehrhardt called it the “clear” state. Oscar Ichazo called it 96. Buddhism calls it the access state (the entrance doorway through which Flow is accessible). Jews call it being a mensch. I call it Observer state. It’s a state of being that pops up across time and space and cultures and is a commonsense reality. Nevertheless, its science status is zero. That tells you a lot about a culture. What it wants to find out and what it doesn’t consider worth trying to find out about. Scotoma means blindspot and they occur on all levels.

Esoteric literature throughout hisandherstory has been tabu, and yet all it was in essence is a package of spiritual intuition and powers of mind. The reason it was tabu was because that was the market that authoritarian high priests in all religions were going after. It all comes down to who really knows the most about: What happens after death. Whether ESP is achievable or not. Whether there is a benevolent God. What is our relationship to God. Whether God has given us license to do anything we want, or a path to stay upon.

These considerations appear to be academic and irrelevant to our lives. That’s the mindset we inherited. The same mindset is re-conditioned every day in every way.

Einstein had a strong intuition. One of his hunches that he was certain about, was that the universe was created by an incredible intelligence. Science to him was a way of gaining insight into the beautiful thinking of that supreme intelligence.

Yet Einstein balked at the notion of a personal God, a God who cared one whit about Einstein.

My only disagreement with Einstein is on that point. A supreme intelligence would have all of the faculties we have and infinitely more, which means that Being would be conscious and self-aware, in fact, supremely self-aware.

If the Being had infinite computing power, it could live through an infinite number of avatars simultaneously, paying attention to and caring about each one of us. As one cares about the protagonist in a movie perhaps, or more likely as one cares about one’s child.

There is nothing supernatural about that idea. It is eventually verifiable. It is in resonance with quantum theory and relativity. It changes everything though because it makes consciousness the most important thing in the universe.

If in fact we are in a massively multiplayer role-playing game (MMRPG) called existence, and the basic stuff of which the universe is made is consciousness, with matter being a supremely advanced haptic feedback system, then causality stemming from our expectations and perceptions having an actual shaping effect upon events, is not a long throw from there.

This again is also quite close to what the pre-eminent physicist John Wheeler said, that consciousness triggers probabilities to crystalize into facts.

Which means that at least in some cases you yourself are causing the very things that cause you the greatest suffering, partially by just expecting it, and partially by subconscious failure rehearsal.

The more we can all communicate with each other in a hopeful, realistic way, the sooner these new dark ages shall be forced back into inky shadows.

Love to all,

Bill

 

Created January 21, 2022

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog post.

Although we in the USA are unquestionably more polarized than we have been since the Civil War.

Yet the phenomenon is at a very superficial surface level. Arguments begin to flare up as soon as tripwire words are used and then people change the subject or get into fights.

It’s that surface tension which prevents us from going deeper where we would find more common ground than we would expect.

The singularity of present times were concocted by a devil’s brew of causes coming together all at once: two political parties drifting farther apart toward extremism, some social media engines fueling whatever gets virality, Acceleritis (information overload increasing daily), the pandemic, fear of the future replacing our signature hope and faith that the future is in our hands and we will lead the world into a form of practical utopia.

This last item is especially concerning because the very spirit of America is now doubting its own core essence. We can’t let that happen, we must turn back the clock on that one.

The mind is a very complex thing. If we let ourselves cave to lack of confidence in ourselves, it will become much harder to fix things, and the effects are cumulative. We’ve already let it go too far. Let’s stop it here and start to walk it back.

First of all, let’s consider my assertion that there are more good people than bad people in the world.

What is a good person? What is a bad person?

These are both temporary conditions not permanent ones, except in the most extreme cases. We know that Hitlers and serial killers have specific causes for their behavior that are probably not totally under their own control, yet it makes sense to hold them responsible anyway, and even if they are insane we need to put them someplace they can’t hurt others. The same applies to all of us.

A good person is someone whose actions consider other people. That is most of us. It includes the times we really don’t care that much about the specific other person involved but we realize that things will be better for us if we treat them as if we care. Under this definition I think most of us would agree that most people fit into that “good” category.

Good and bad are in the mind reductionist abstractions of a far more nuanced and complex distribution of characteristics in the population. Each of us is a complex and ever-evolving skein of at least 265 personal characteristics relevant to this discussion. Each Democrat and each Republican is totally unique in terms of this mix of elements of which Left-Right is only one. The two buckets are nearly meaningless when all of these characteristics are considered. Categorizing ourselves as Left or Right is an immense oversimplification and trivialization of our personal individuality.

Left and Right in themselves certainly are a reality, one of the dimensions of bias we have been conditioned to have. Any form of mental/emotional bias is inherently a very bad idea. We ought as individuals to approach life scientifically therefore without bias, studying the facts and making the best decisions based on the evidence, and always, thinking creatively.

Even before present times it was concerning that our political leaders do not appear to have a great deal of creativity, offering us the same solutions and the same candidates over and over, when they ought to have learned by now from the evidence of their own senses how senseless this is. In every other walk of life our species demonstrates amazingly vast amounts of creativity, why is it so absent from the political realm where it is arguably the most needed?

It does come back to Acceleritis. In accelerating overload stress conditions, the mind seeks closure hastily embracing binary bias as an unconscious tactic which fails miserably yet is tolerated. Black and white no in-between. The world thus distorted can thus never be seen with clarity.

With distorted judgment (bias) being institutionalized in our egos and in our political parties, is it any wonder that one day we would arrive in this state?

Deeper inside than our egos we are in our Deep Selves unbiased observers and experiencers. You have had moments of supreme clarity when you have seen all that I say here for yourselves. You can train yourself to get back into that headspace at will. In that place in yourself you realize you are detached from all this hullaballoo, it doesn’t really touch you, who cares, let me just get on with what I want to do with my life, to express my own creativity and individuality.

Biases rule the world. We don’t have a scientific party. We don’t have a spiritual party. We have a progressive party that wants change and a conservative party that likes things as they are. Both are biases. The mind should be left open to consider each proposed change without having to stop all change.

When on the other hand we sense we are tense and attached to something it is a sign that we are not in our Deep Self at that moment. Attachment is distorted judgment. It is therefore a sign of being in the Ego state.

You can experience these different states of consciousness for yourself. Get away from reading and other people for a little while and practice and you will get the skill of moving yourself back into your own Deep Self.

We can repair our country by conversations that go beneath kneejerks down to find where we do agree, and work out the details of the future from there.

Although the power fight is going on for control of the country, we cannot press a button to make that stop. We have to let it go its way for now while we by means of conversations interpersonally and in the media have people who are in different parties demonstrate how working things out can occur. Survey companies can go deeper and referendums can be mounted.

We will find that the will of the people is to stop the bickering and fix things, and that the parties are writing their own death certificates by the way they are acting. More and more people are becoming independents. Fewer and fewer people are saying to themselves “My Party Right Or Wrong”. They are freeing themselves from biases and acting more maturely. Some are moving into their passion work, regardless of their age. As Stan Satlin writes, “Ageing is God’s way of saying stop wasting time”.

All the best,

Bill

Created November 23, 2021

This time every year I write a column about gratitude.

Gratitude has a lot going for it as an emotion and as an attitude. The mood of gratitude encompasses both an attitude mix (gladness and recognition of a benefactor) which can be expressed in words, as well as emotions which can only be spoken of metaphorically or described physiologically. The whole package not only makes us feel good, it emanates outward to those around us and makes them feel good too. According to the Mayo Clinic , a daily gratitude practice boosts the immune system and improves sleep.

We are spoiled by life. It is so taken for granted that we cease to realize we might never have existed, and so we see no need to feel gratitude just having had life for as long as we have had it.

Spoiled brats that we are, we never put two and two together: how can we be so intensely attached to continuing to live, without seeing how that implies how much we worship living.

Perhaps for many of us who have taken on the multi-century pandemic doubts about a Supreme Creator, since we doubt that there is anyone to be grateful to, we assume that a generalized gratitude feeling might be irrelevant. But that is short sighted: rationally we can direct gratitude to the people that raised us, shaped us, helped us get to where we are today.

Science of any stripe would not go so far as to prohibit feelings of gratitude toward Nature, most scientists would say that it’s none of their business, has nothing to do with science, and humanist scientists would say that to deny loving Nature and being part of it is anti-life.

When I was very young and thinking about these things – childishly siding with science and the Yankees, rather skeptical about God at the time – I could not rule out the possibility of God. A moment came during these contemplations when I had admitted to myself that God could exist and might be listening in to my thoughts right now. Strangely I felt a huge sadness descend upon me and I felt that God must feel very sad and rejected to see how lost His creation is, as if I were to turn and slap my mother, how would she feel, that must be how God feels, if He exists, I thought. In my mind I comforted Him before laughing at myself and moving on.

I’m grateful for all my memories including my worst moments, they have taught me so much. If I hadn’t made those mistakes then, I’m afraid to think about who I would be now, still driven about by mechanically conditioned behaviors. Learning from our own mistakes is salvation from being a robot.

I’m grateful for all the people I’ve meet and am to meet.

Most of us reading this ought to be more grateful that they are living in a democracy. We proud Americans savor the fact that the USA was one of the significant leaders in bringing democracy to what is now one in five human beings alive on Earth today. Pretty lucky you made it into the one in five this time around.

To you readers who are not living in a free country, what are you to be grateful for? You are living. You are in some degree of equilibrium with your environment. If you are a warrior, you remain free inside. If you are truly to win over the situation you must not let your own principles be corrupted by it. Be grateful you have the strength and adaptability to survive. Be grateful for all of these things, and for the things to come. Be grateful for these amazing younger generations we all share, the young are a global community, they see the truth, they see what must be done, and they will free us all.

Be grateful for all that.

A song which comes to mind:

Happy Thanksgiving!

Love, Bill