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

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

 

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