Avoid Hasty Closure

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The mechanism of “making up one’s mind too fast due to overload panic” and how to avoid this

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
September 4, 2026

MIND MAGIC / MIND EXPERIMENTS Book Excerpt Series: Part 7

Hasty closure is the mechanism of "making up one's mind too fast due to overload panic"

Built into each human being before birth is an information- processing program whose apparent purpose is to make us need to understand our external and internal experiences. It works as follows: certain experiences (or “perceptions” or “percepts” – these words are all used interchangeably) trigger a feeling of dissonance in the mind; you pay closer attention to and think about these until you have a feeling of having absorbed their information, at which point the feeling of dissonance goes away, and we say that you have achieved closure.

Hasty closure can be defined as those instances in which it would have been useful for us to think further before closure.

Not all percepts trigger dissonance, but there are too many percepts available relative to our current capacity. Thus, most external and internal percepts are automatically screened out by a process of instant closure which avoids dissonance entirely.  For such percepts, we are not even given the opportunity to decide how much thought they merit; they do not reach our conscious attention and, therefore, receive no conscious thought.

Obviously, whenever we achieve instant closure by not even noticing a percept that contains valuable information for us, this is also an instance of hasty closure.

Thus, there are two types of hasty closure:

Type A: Instances in which we notice an object or a thought, think about it, reach our conclusions, and put it out of our minds too hastily.

Type B: Instances in which we do not even notice an object or a thought which contains useful information for us.

The types of percepts that will tend to be screened out most frequently by this second type of hasty closure will be percepts on which we have achieved closure in the past.

Thus, as we experience more and more different types of percepts, fewer and fewer percepts will trigger dissonance; we will stop looking at things we have seen before, and we will stop thinking about things we have reached conclusions about before. In this respect, the mind acts as if there is never any need to reopen old issues, although relevant new information may now be present in memory with which to look at old issues from new angles.

Eventually, we end up looking only at a narrow range of percepts that are relevant to our interests; this tends to block potential change or expansion of our interests.

Know that percepts that do not trigger dissonance and which therefore yield instant closure, do so as follows: Images of things we have seen before are stored in memory. When we are about to see something, our minds automatically search our memory for a comparable object (note the distinction between seeing something and our minds having already seen it). If our mind finds something similar enough, it projects the stored image onto the new object so that we do not ever see the new object but are merely dimly aware that a familiar type of object is there.  Dissonance is not triggered, and this allows our attention freedom to concentrate on remaining percepts for which our minds have not found a suitable match.

As a result, we mostly do not perceive our environment. Instead, we perceive mostly what we expect to perceive, i.e., we usually see our mind’s prediction. Since most objects have more relevant detail than we have ever noticed, this process robs us of the opportunity to add detail to our image of most objects.

In some cases, the mental projection that we see is significantly different from the reality we do not see.

Example:

You are in a hurry. You glance at a book title. You glance away quickly. A moment later, you think, “ ‘Fellow’s Folly’ is the name of that book, the same as a song I know; the author must also know that song.” You glance back at the book title and read it carefully: “Free Four.”

What has happened is that your visual system was scanning for relevant clues since time did not permit a larger sampling of visual observations from each scanning sector. It picked out the two words starting with an F. After you looked away, your mind experimented with alternate predictions, based upon what you had in your “F___  F___” file drawer, i.e., what memories you had of word pairs with initial F’s on each word. It then verbalized to you what seemed to it to be an interesting prediction.

You looked back to test the prediction and found that it had been wrong.

Another entity in your place might not have looked back to test the prediction because, as a result of even less attention to head action, that other entity would think that it saw “Fellow’s Folly” and would have accepted the supposition that the book’s author named the book after the song as fact.

In this way, most entities “see the prediction” and not the bulk of the reality around them, in a continuous stream of such incidents as described above.

Society increases the tendency towards hasty closure by creating time pressures, communicating expectations, causing negative emotion, encouraging black-and-white positions, and valuing sophistication.

Creating time pressures
To some extent, we have been programmed by the expectations of others.  Most of our actions have been expected of us, and we have engaged in some of them for this reason alone.

At birth, we encountered an organized group of others who taught us that we had been created to fill a slot in their organization (our current society). During our most receptive early period, we probably met no one outside this organization. Thus, we may now spend most of our time working for this organization.

Under such conditions, our capacity for attention to matters not strictly organizational is severely reduced. Our closure goal is intensified; we cannot tolerate dissonance that distracts us from the organization’s tasks. If we are also trying to spend time on non-organizational goals, we may also regard dissonance as distracting us from these latter goals.

Thus, we will strive too hard for closure and achieve it too hastily on many occasions. This is the result of the organization’s infringement on our time.

Mind Experiments

  1. Notice the things you notice and don’t notice.
    Whenever it turns out that you didn’t notice something you might have noticed, tell your senses, “What to always check for,” such that you would have noticed the thing you just missed. For example, let’s say you realize you don’t know whether a particular man you just met has a mustache. So, you tell your senses, “Always check whether they have a mustache.” Notice patterns in the things you hadn’t been noticing and now do. Which dimensions are and aren’t you observant in?
  2. Notice the things that your eyes jerk to
    As if your body were under someone else’s control, and you were trying to figure out that person.  The phenomena described in Chapter 1 can be demonstrated to oneself by moving the objects in one’s room: such objects and any other things out of place are what the eyes automatically go to. This shows that the senses have a model of the typical situation and are checking for deviations. This is an important “energy-saving biocomputer system” built into us. However energy-saving it can be under natural circumstances, this system tends to screen out the value element from our sensory experience due to information overload. As a result, we hardly see anything around us—just enough from a strictly practical standpoint, but not sufficient to satisfy aesthetic criteria as well.
  3. Distinguishing between your prediction and the actual appearance
    1. The phenomena described in this chapter can also be demonstrated to oneself as follows: When seeing a face (especially if you’ve never looked closely at it before), casually glance away and look at the image of that face in your mind. Then, if appropriate, casually look at the actual face again (for a few moments so the image clears; inappropriate if tension-producing).
    2. Compare the first impression with the full impression. The distortions you put into the first impression have meaning. Were you putting the person in a category?

Love to all,
Bill

 

Meditation

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
August 28, 2026

MIND MAGIC / MIND EXPERIMENTS Book Excerpt Series: Part 6

Read Part 5 

Remaining focused through complexity can be learned

Meditation as automatic clear-out process

The number of “not-perfectly-familiar-so-as-to-be-invisible” sensory impressions falling on the individual per second determines how much unresolved experience will be created by a culture. Subtract out that culture’s propensity for meditation (“putting the biocomputer on ‘automatic clearout’”), which is the fastest process for resolving unresolved experiences, and what is left is the weight of residual unresolved experiences.

In our culture, the high sensory glut and low incidence of meditation create such a backlog of unresolved activity in the brain that these electronic “tensions held” become a distracting screen, and we go into a kind of hypnotic trance. We handle the trivial moment-to-moment stuff and lose sight of the highest long-range possibilities of our lives.

Meditation is the assimilation of information.

It does to sensory food what the liver does to physical food. Unassimilated food turns gangrenous. So do unassimilated experiences.

In meditation, the mind unclutches; super-efficiently, experience is assimilated; patterns are recognized; action implications become clear. The resulting clarity eliminates the tension of unassimilated experiences that caused the mind to clutch up in the first place.

Humans exist by processing information.

That information is our inner and outer sensory experience, including words we are told. All this tends to program us, if we don’t process the information in a certain way nature intended. If we do process it the natural way, we program ourselves.

The natural way of processing assumes a reasonable ratio of input volume : meditation time. In today’s reality, this ratio has become highly unreasonable.

Input volume - Meditation - yesteryear and now

Assimilation = higher pattern recognition

Picture a pyramid of many stories, each one containing books . . . a pyramid library. The basic structure of any field of information may be regarded cybernetically as a pyramid. (With thanks to Fred Klein, 1973.)

This is how it is organized:

Pyramid of Unresolved Experiences

    • On the lowest floor (also the largest), are the specific detail books, covering diverse facts from all fields of knowledge.
    • The books on the second floor cover the same fields of knowledge, but from a “theoretical overview” perspective. We can imagine a whole rack of books on the first floor telescoping upward to a point in one book on the second floor.
    • The third floor brings whole fields together.
    • The fourth floor brings everything together into philosophic viewpoints.
    • The fifth floor contains books written about the fundamentals of philosophy itself.
    • The sixth floor contains a single book.
    • In the capstone of the pyramid is a single word

Each floor contains the same material as the floor below, but in integrated, reduced form, i.e., from a higher, more universal perspective, ignoring more and more of the “incidental details.”

This pyramid model is to be applied to any field of information. One’s perspective can be on any floor or in the capstone. However, this is not simply a matter of putting one’s perspective in the capstone. It has to “float up,” so to speak, as a result of the assimilation process.

The many unresolved experiences in one’s Life need to be meditated on. As a result of this process, one gradually “floats upward” out of “a lot of chaotic thoughts/feelings” into a sense of “everything falls into place.”

We have involuntarily shut down our inner and outer senses against the information overload.

Most of our minds are on “hold.” The brain is holding many messages for you, taking up much mindspace, mind-energy, and mind-time, giving you these same messages repeatedly. While with your conscious control over that same brain, you repress and dodge these messages.

You haven’t answered your messages in how many years? There’s a message for each person you haven’t forgiven. And for each pain in your body. And for every other symbol of something unresolved in your Life. And for every question you’ve asked that you’re still unsure about the answer to, that is relevant to your “maze.”

In effect, the brain knows it has the information you need, and it is trying to give it to you. Meanwhile, a set of functions often called the “subconscious” or “unconscious’ gives you away in various social situations, i.e., embarrasses you in various ways to get you to confront some of these messages. But we are not observant because we have involuntarily shut down our inner and outer senses against the sensory overload.

Skepticism is the anus of our mind clenching to keep out the information overload.

The severest human shortfall caused by information overload is the limitation of possibility.

One of the most overwhelming surprises one gets in deep meditation is how complicated it really is to figure out the right action in a typical everyday situation. This is certainly the key subconscious deterrent to really being: it is too complex now.

Too many variables
⇓
The limitation of possibility
⇓
“Magic of Life” extinguished. ⇓

We all move too fast.

We pretend that we are capable of functioning in this haze of complexity. This is a hysterical reaction. What happens to most of us is that under the pressure of time, we take automatic positions on things based on our programming. Without realizing it, most people are trying a desperate, short-cutting approach to existence.

We label this a hysterical “panic” reaction because it continues to persist for a lifetime in most cases, although it proves itself unworkable every day.

The realistic reaction belongs to the yogi under the tree. The yogi doesn’t act on an idea until he has meditated out all its possible connections to other ideas in his ken. Thus, the actions never snag.

Each other’s windup toys

All information has some intrinsic command effect on the brain. Even rhythms may be soothing or create a wide range of other moods. Our brains are being washed in information with some command effect over us, from waking to sleep each day (and during sleep). Ours is the Age of Background Brainwashing.

We don’t even notice that it is there or why we buy those products or snub those strangers. How little of our behavior is under our own control; how much was programmed from outside!

We become shorthand human beings.

There is always a subtle time pressure. “Don’t you dare waste my time!” is the unspoken rule. Thus, when someone asks a question, we tend to flip back something that “sounds like something we would say in such a situation”. We usually give no fresh thought to the matter.

It is the automatic pilot. Free will is switched off. Creativity is a forgotten ideal. The robot is playing its tapes.

This is the eventual result of a narrowing process that takes place via communication exchanges when we are very young. We encounter such a large number of understandings (with many “iterations” to “unwind” each one) that eventually, we stop trying to express what is inside of us and content ourselves with flashing cliché signals which everyone understands.

The capacity to remain focused through
complexity is a key survival characteristic
for humans today.

The point of staying focused is that it enables you to:

  1. Catch more of the incoming stimuli;
  2. Catch more of your total reaction to these stimuli;
  3. Identify the real priority items;
  4. Simultaneously continue or change motor activity gracefully as needed;
  5. Make decisions when needed—without “distraction-resulting-in-only-partial-attention” to any of these.

The true yogis know how to do this. Remaining focused through complexity is a thing that can be learned and trained.

Mind Experiment

1. Adaptive or programmed?

For one day, keep track of yourself from moment to moment, watching to see whether you are behaving in a more programmed or adaptive fashion.

Note the kinds of situations through which you flow adaptively, creatively, and spontaneously, and those through which you move in fixed mechanical ruts.

2. Massage to remove tension

Removing tension from the body yields more energy for use by the mind. Thus, massage can help induce meditative states.

Love to all,
Bill

 

Too Many Variables and Sensory Overload Lead to Unresolved Experiences

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
August 21, 2026

MIND MAGIC / MIND EXPERIMENTS Book Excerpt Series: Part 5

Read Part 4 

rigid shock reaction to today’s information overload

“Too many variables” is another way of defining the root cause of today’s mass hysteria. These variables are programmed into our lives, by words and pictures and gestures, etc., via people and media and nature. Six hundred years ago, it was mostly just people and nature. And fewer people contacts per day.

Why is the increased load of sensory messages so devastating?

Because:

  • We get attached to having our lives come out a certain way (sometimes we get programmed into these attachments). This sets up a “maze” for us to get through, e., what we must do to get what we want.
  • We have strong emotional charges connected to these attachments.
  • The more messages we hear, the more complicated we make our maze—the more conditions we try to bring about at once.
  • Everybody’s mazes get tangled.
  • Everything “uncopeable with” we ultimately hypnotize away.

Unresolved experiences

These tug at the mind. It is an automatic secretary function of the brain which does this. These are items the brain recognizes as relevant to goals and about which it knows more clarity will be possible. It holds these messages for us and gives us these messages in odd moments.

When these items first came in through the senses, they were “question-producing” and achieved cortical recognition, although not necessarily conscious cortical recognition. This resulted in dissonance, and the items were put on “hold.”

Now, with the brain giving us six weeks worth of messages each day, needing clear meditation and learning so that we can improve our progress through our maze, we repress all of these messages. We refuse to learn. “We haven’t got the time.” Instead, we persist in our fixed, programmed pattern: this is not a normal condition but a pandemic pathological rigid shock reaction to today’s information overload.

We plan empirical studies to confirm or disconfirm that:

  1. A sensory overload relative to meditation time (to assimilate those inputs) causes a shift in how information is processed: different (simplified) biocomputer logics.
  2. By perpetuating robot repetition of conditioned programming, these simplified logics reduce free will, powers of observation, and sensory sensitivity, and in other ways, unnecessarily hamper one in achieving lasting satisfaction from Life.
  3. The simplified logics are intended by Nature to be used in short bursts for coping with actual emergency threats to survival, i.e., they are an alarm.
  4. The pandemic problem today is the inability to turn off the ever-constant alarm reaction.
  5. The difficulty in functioning through this alarm reaction is that learning is suspended.Experiences that need to be assimilated are repressed.
  6. Meditation is the most efficient method of assimilating human experience.

The source of tension

Unresolved experiences cause tension. This is the body’s way of “alarming” us so we figure out what’s bothering us. In a “natural” situation, we stop and meditate. On today’s sensory battlefield, there’s a general feeling that to stop is doom. Part of this is the subconscious awareness of how many messages are waiting inside, and how tangled together it all is.

So, we keep up the act as usual and wait for some outside force to maybe come along and save us someday. This leaves us with a lot of tension. Taking it out of the body directly (by massage, etc.) only treats the symptoms (though we highly recommend massage). The tension will, therefore, always return. “He can’t relax—he’s got so much on his mind.”

Clarity removes tension.

Tension is an alarm system prodding us to do something we are not noticing needs doing; like pain, a warning device. Tension is clutching—a keeping-tight. The mind does it first, then the body follows. Tension in the body mostly comes from tension in the mind; therefore, for example, fear makes us take up less space physically.

We find that when we achieve clarity on whatever has been bothering us, the tension eases. Then, the choices are clear, and one chooses at the proper time. It is clarity that turns off the alarm system “tension.”

Mind Experiment

Let yourself enjoy a long, slow, new, creative approach to all situations. There’s no hurry. There’s just the Eternal Now. How you relate to it at this moment is all.

Start your life NOW.

What are my attachments?

List the things, events, and conditions that must be maintained or brought about in your life in order for you to be happy—a particular job, a particular lover, a certain amount of money, physical security, having people think of you a certain way, and so on.

Then, list the things you fear that must not happen in your life, or you will be very unhappy—losing your current job, lover, status, etc.

Eventually, the items on these lists will be immaterial to you. You’ll want to keep the lists and keep looking at them from time to time until that point.

What bits of my past are holding me back?

 List the moments in your life that still trouble you when you remember them.

(You might not get all of these listed at once since some particularly troubling memories might be being actively repressed by your subconscious. But you can keep adding to the list as you remember more of these experiences.)

Achieving clarity on just one situation

 Take any one of the unresolved experiences on the list developed above, set aside uninterruptible and open-ended time, and relive the experience in complete detail from beginning to end, one or more times, like a detective looking for clues.

What you are looking for is the truth of what bothers you about this situation. The truth of why it bothers you may not be why you think it bothers you.

Some part of you will tend to want to avoid these memories, fearing that they can only cause more hurt. In fact, each of these memories is an energy watershed you can turn to great advantage in your life simply by understanding your emotional charge with each situation.

This is why the mind tags these memories with alarm charges: so that eventually, you’ll pick up the phone.

After you get the knack of it, you’ll naturally clear out all the items on the list you made, mostly spontaneously, at moments when you don’t expect it.

If you’d like to speed up the process, just set aside time and relive the experiences in priority order.

Love to all,
Bill

 

The Independent Mind: Breaking Free from the Partisan Spell

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Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
August 14, 2026

This is a moment for cosmic re-evaluation, starting from an open mindCosmic Crossroads Beyond Division

The trouble started long ago when Democrats started demonizing Republicans and vice versa. When I was a kid, it wasn’t this way. It was like rooting for the Yankees instead of the Dodgers, although living in Brooklyn. It was surprising but not something to rouse animus.

Sportsmanship has always been an attractive characteristic of individuals, athletes, and famous people. People could be rivals, kid one another, but never come close to demonization.

My first realization came about the turn of the Century. Someone sent me a Halloween card whose cover said, “Want to wear a really scary costume this Halloween?” Inside it said, “Dress up as a Republican.” I had to shake my head.

After that, it came on in slathers, and the buildup was tsunami-like. My beloved business partner, the late Bill McKenna, called liberals “Libbies,” and it was obvious from his tone of voice that the female surname “Libby” was a giveaway that all Liberals were effeminate and not masculine enough.

The algorithmic intensity of modern media has brought this to a level absolutely on a plane with Brave New World and 1984. In fact, the proportion of movies, video series, and books about dystopia has shot up. It is as if the whole population is helping to order up dystopia to engulf us in consensus reality, by the amount of our thinking and dreaming about it, which is helping to bring it about. We are “Living the Nightmare” in our expectations, and now we have accepted it as the necessary reality.

It has become literally mass hypnosis.

We now accept it as normal that our leaders will be corrupt, lie to us, bully us, shoot us, and steal our money in every way possible. Yet, we go about our daily routines less happy than usual and more prone to escapism. We don’t rearrange our fundamental thinking about our loyalties because that would be too much to bear; the fear of the unknown floods in when we even come close to thinking about that.

We would not be that way if we were not surrounded by all of our tribe and reinforced in our tribal thinking by very select use of media channels that echo chamber us and keep out the bad memes that would undermine our sense of self and drag us down into doubt.

“This is who I am,” we think, without words, down at a level below our own conscious awareness. “I have chosen this course in life, and it’s far too late to turn back and become somebody else. The other Party is far too radical and ugly; none of my best friends and family like them.” In these subconscious self-conversations, we do not have enough intellectual prowess to point out to ourselves that there is a third option of not being hung up on either Party. If we take the time away from escapism to have these self-conversations at a conscious level, we will have more controllable intelligence to make sense of things. The third option is to become a political Independent, which about half the US population has already chosen. That would allow us to vote based on individual merits rather than robotic puppeting the party line.

It’s hard to admit to oneself that one has been a puppet and played like a violin for decades of one’s life. It’s better to let awareness of the truth come in rather than to protect oneself against the truth and to live in a shell of self-deception. The truth will sometimes show you that you say one thing and do another, and that the high and noble precepts you mouth are not reflected in your actions. Yes, this is a painful experience, but so is childbirth, and both types of temporary pain lead to an infinite amount of emotional payoff in the end.

This is a moment for cosmic re-evaluation starting from an open mind.

Love to all,
Bill