Tag Archives: Acceleritis

The Consistency Program

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Powerful Mind Part 18

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, February 28, 2025
Created July 7, 2023
Read Powerful Mind 17

“Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his Essay on Self-Reliance: ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.’ His point was that only small-minded men refused to rethink their prior beliefs. Or, put another way, he thought that today’s intuition could trump yesterday’s conclusions.” — Paul Rosenzweig, LAWFARE

Wise people have been aware of this excess invocation of consistency for some time, but their admonitions have been little grasped as cultural necessities. Why is that?

Decision-making is the basis for all action by conscious agents of any species.

Almost all decision-making is implicit, meaning the same as subconscious in this context. And because that literally means it takes place below the level of conscious awareness, it becomes understandable that many mental bad practices can persist for millennia.

Wise folks can and do tell us the right ways to live, and yet, even if it sounds good to us, we can’t seem to put their wisdom into practice.

That’s because it is harder to change mental habits than the wise have realized in the past. Those wise in today’s age are probably quite aware of the importance of this difficulty in taking control of one’s actions such that one is able to optimize real-world decision-making and its real-world outcomes, without being helplessly dragged along by past inner scripts which have become lodged in our minds.

There is a subtle sense of time pressure in our culture – often not that subtle. Under these conditions (I call Acceleritis), it’s natural that one would want to be able to make fast decisions, especially about things which do not immediately seem to be all that important.

When one’s mindset is set that way (I call it Emergency Oversimplification Procedure), one way to speed up decision-making is simply to be consistent with one’s past behavior.

We become imitations of ourselves, especially imitators of our remembered experiences. It would be more effective if you’re going to imitate, to remember back to your best moments, and to emulate whatever you did at those moments. Although, that would still be sub-optimizing.

The best practice is to be real in the moment, filtering out only negativity.

What does that mean – being real in the moment? It means exposing your true current feelings in a positive way. Not remembering back. Not imitating yourself or anyone else. Just acting naturally, without the inner sense of being at risk. Not self-protective. Not defensive. Just yourself, but editing out any negativity. Translating what may feel negative on the inside so it’s just an objective statement of facts on the outside.

This is easy to say but not easy to do. Bringing autonomous auto-reactions under one’s own conscious control is a major life achievement.

There are tricks you can use, such as applying your sense of humor.

Such as not imitating yourself or anyone else.

Such as by not choosing to be consistent with what you said yesterday or ten seconds ago, choose instead to re-inspect what you were espousing, and learn about your current self-administration by doing that inspection. You’ll recognize this to be Key #2. The Keys all work together and there are many overlaps among them. Here we are beginning our journey into Key #3 and we can see how Key #2 helps achieve Key #3. See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Consistency is a program in your mind. Supported by networks of neurons that interact in consistent ways. The universe has not given us a keyboard so that we could manipulate and change these neuronal patterns directly and so we shall have to build it someday, but in the meantime these Keys are the closest proxy we have for that keyboard. Which is not to dis-include the equivalent of Keys contributed by other thinkers on the subject, many of whom today are scientists, and many of whom today are spiritualists (which to them/us is an inner science).

Feed your mind voraciously while keeping it steadily open.

Details to follow in the subsequent posts.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Love to all,
Bill

 

Start Your Life Anew with a Clear Slate Every Moment

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Powerful Mind Part 21

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – January 3, 2025
Created July 28, 2023
Read Powerful Mind 20 

“The entity should ideally retain all power
over current behavior;
none should be yielded to the past or to others.”
– Mind Magic – page 73

 In the prior three posts Powerful Mind 18, 19, and 20, we have been offering techniques of metacognition which have worked for me, in stripping off layers of conditioning that obscured my individuality. This post will put it all together and add a few more relevant tips that will help you make each moment an originality moment, when you can come to entirely fresh perspectives, including everything you have learned up to the last second.

Some of the major challenging or helpful aspects of this Key #3 to overthrow conditioning are mimicry, consistency, expressing true feelings constructively, resolutions, self-descriptions, predictability, the momentum of others, and the naked eye.

Review: Mimicry and Consistency

“Avoid mimicry.
You don’t have to be like your friend
in order to be his/her friend.”
– Mind Magic – page 78

Let your own latest words come kindly and constructively out of your mouth, filtering out negativity. Observe momentary impulses to stick in the words of others, sometimes choosing to use them if that feels right, most of the time ignoring the impulse. If the situation is a professional discussion, for example, quoting experts or peers has its place. In a normal one-on-one conversation, external support for one’s statements is not typically an immediate necessity.

If you particularly like a way you have said something in the past, sure, go ahead and use such phrases occasionally, but rhetoric becomes old pretty quickly, and in Flow state the words will usually have morphed and moved ahead in your inner counsels and what you hear yourself say may be happily surprising to you.

Review: Expressing true feelings constructively

 Nothing is gained by quarreling or hurting people’s feelings. Adding more of that stuff only adds to the challenge heap of your own life. Doing good each moment makes life easier for yourself and others. Expressing yourself negatively sets you back, gives you a longer to-do list for the immediate and long-range future, replacing those divots you yourself caused. It’s totally counterproductive.

It also stores up negativity within you that biases clear right judgment. You will make more mistakes in completely different areas from the one in which you allowed negativity in. The ripple effect occurs both with positivity and with negativity. Marketing research studies have consistently shown that the ripple effect of negativity is stronger than the ripple effect of positivity: The average person having a positive experience with a brand tells six other people about it. The average person having a negative experience with a brand tells thirteen other people about it.

If you are going to express yourself, do it right, think carefully about it, anticipate scheduled meetings you will be having tomorrow, and think deeply about what you want to say. Catch yourself during mental rehearsal stepping on a landmine which will derail the conversation and waste time plus create or enlarge future obstacles.

New: Resolutions

 Breaking years and decades of conditioning and of repetition of habitual behaviors is not easy. It is a form of making resolutions with yourself to change a given behavior pattern.

One thing that stands in the way of the effectiveness of any resolution is the memory the average person has of having made resolutions before which had never taken hold and were quickly broken. This memory undermines belief in any new resolution.

The only way around this barrier reef is to manifest your new resolutions in very small ways starting immediately, so all parts of you actually see the proof that this time it is different, something new in you is there, giving you the strength to stick to your promise to yourself. Then keep it up, refresh the resolution each new day, get up in the mornings, and take advantage of the first opportunities to manifest your new resolutions.

Most importantly, be kind to yourself in the instances where habit sneaks in, and before you knew it was happening in some way you have broken a resolution before you could catch yourself. That doesn’t mean you’re pushed all the way back into the habitual robot you used to be. It’s normal to not have 100% efficacy when setting out on a new course in life. Keep an eye out for similar situations in the future, detect when you are in a situation that could cause you to backslide, and speak more slowly, think ahead more meticulously when speaking in those situations.

New: Self-Descriptions

 Avoid describing yourself in unqualified terms. If someone asks you to describe yourself, go ahead, but make sure that you qualify your attributes as to whether they apply to the way you have sometimes been in the past, or whether they are up to the moment descriptive of your aspirational self, the way you want to be. Talking about the way you have been in the past is telling your robot to keep doing it that way. That’s the opposite of what you really want: freedom to be yourself stripped of external conditioning and negativity. Your own free will, your own creativity, your own growth potential, your passion work, your unique gifts to the world. Don’t lock in the past. Don’t reinforce ways of being that you don’t want.

New: Predictability

“Predict and eschew
the predictable culture-conditioned response.
Do not always get angry in situations
in which anger is expected of you;
do not always contradict in situations
in which contradiction is expected of you.”
– Mind Magic – page 76-77

 When people expect you to be resistant to something, surprise them by being more open-minded than they expected. When they expect you to join a bandwagon of complaining about some other people, surprise them by being compassionate to them and to the people they are mentally beating up. Be solution-oriented and think win/win. If you can’t come up with any creative realistic suggestions in the moment, be open to hunches that come up in the fringes of your mind for the next few days, you might have a delayed reaction idea that could be beneficial to the person you had been speaking with, and their relationship with the people that had been criticized.

Creativity by definition is always somewhat unpredictable.

True freedom always exalts creativity.

New: the Momentum of others

 Don’t allow yourself to be stampeded by the momentum of others. Others anxious to have something a certain way, carry psychic momentum which can be imparted to you without you even realizing it. What others think they want from you may not get them what they really want or need. Listen compassionately and objectively seek to help where you can. Remain calm and cool-headed in the midst of all emotional weathers. Be the voice of reason and kindness in coming up with win/win solution possibilities for others to consider and refine. Encourage people at their positive undertakings. This does more good than constructive criticism, which in the Acceleritis / EOP(Emergency Oversimplification Procedure) culture is taken the wrong way too much of the time.

New: the Naked Eye

 Our expectations create a perceptual screen. As we emerge from our conditioning to realize and actualize the uniqueness of our being, the conditioning sneakily remains lodged in our senses. When you look at something, see only what is there. Look at things as if for the first time you are seeing them. Drop all expectations and comparisons and see what is really happening with an open mind. Look for the thread of something good nascently in the situation, and gently call attention to that thread of opportunity.

Key #3

Constructively and kindly express what you are really feeling.
This is radical new mental strategy #3,
the third simple key to the doorway
of the upper mind.

Further Keys: see The 12 Powerful Mind Keys.

Happy 2025 to all!

Love to all,
Bill

Conduct Your Inner Orchestra

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Powerful Mind Part 40
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog December 13, 2024.
Created December 15, 2023
Read Powerful Mind 39

Simplify the task of conducting your inner orchestra, without oversimplifying it.

The reason homo sapiens have settled into this pandemic coping pattern I call Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) is that the mind – with its jumble of thoughts, feelings, images, memories, imaginings all coming too fast one atop the other – is initially very difficult to orchestrate. That might not have been the case before written language when the number of question-producing experiences we had each day was likely to have been a mere handful. Since written language, there has been an explosion of inventions (including tools, weapons, and media) bringing us more and more information per day. As you know I call this Acceleritis, the probable cause of EOP, which, fifty years later, neuroscience is now discovering as the default network.

The purpose of Key #10 is to simplify the task of conducting this inner orchestra, without oversimplifying it as in the case of EOP.

Let’s review the ground we’ve covered so far regarding Key #10:

    • Interpret your feelings constructively – seek to learn from bad feelings – transform all inner experiences into future operating guidelines
    • Be grateful for existing – use willpower to maintain a permanent attitude of positivity – filter out negative hypnotic suggestions
    • Edit your headstream – test your inner drafts – update your senators (your inner AI ego robot) (Keys #1 & #2)
    • Balance your own arousal so that it is optimal for performance – detached from addiction to specific outcomes
    • Go with the Flow as long as it remains 100% positive – gently and Socratically share any concerns with others only if that feels more helpful than a wait-and-see attitude
    • Note your own mental chatter without taking it as how you really feel (Key #7)
    • Do not have a closed mind with regard to the possibility that you and the universe are one connected consciousness
    • Minimize time spent worrying by detecting worry and immediately turning it into fixing

This may seem like too many things to consider at once, all the time. You are absolutely right. That’s why we went with EOP in the first place. So don’t try to explicitly juggle all these balls, just let them sink into the core of your being. How then to simplify one’s inner life so as to stay in Observer and Flow states as much as possible?

Optimizing Rituals

We all have our rituals, things we do each day. Our life is organized around these daily patterns. These little certainties impart a sense of order and keep our life from flying apart in troubling times.

In order to remove the feeling that twelve Keys, each of them filled with complexity, is too much to internalize workably, here are some suggested additions to your daily ritual which can pragmatically overcome this sense of being daunted by the size of the task of self-mastery.

Check for Joy

The first thing in the morning, before getting out of bed, or even opening your eyes, remember your life’s mission and check for your own joy. You ideally will be eager to jump out of bed and seize the day, but if you’re not, contemplate what is bothering you.

I’ve noticed that sometimes I’m out of sorts for a day or more right before my subconscious mind delivers an idea that changes everything. It’s almost like birthing pains. The idea itself that finally emerges fills me with joy again. Often it’s something that’s been right in front of my face sometimes for months or years and seems utterly obvious in retrospect.

If joy is absent at the start of your day, see if you can get an angle on the possible cause even before you get out of bed. Maybe your dreams will offer clues. Obligations may cause you to need to keep moving but you can continue to dissect why your passion mission is not enough to motivate your joy today, while bathing and/or showering and otherwise getting ready for the day. This is usually a very productive time for diagnosing your own mood.

Be on the lookout for the root of your lack of joy being some attachment you have allowed to persist. You might be attached to doing things in an orderly way and the pressure of incoming assignments and requests may have destroyed any hope of order. All you can do is to focus on prioritizing and being decisive until order is re-established. Scheduling when you are going to get something done, and being extremely conservative about how long each task will take, can get you back into feeling that you can be patient, systematic, and thorough.

Some or many of these tasks might be questions in your own mind and feelings about what to do about specific situations, or about abstract principles. It relieves stress to keep a list of these unanswered questions so you can come back to them without being attached about getting them all resolved asap. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. It helps to have the sense that you have added one new thought or idea about each such question every time you contemplate it.

Passion Projects

Be aware of your own passion projects and how each one figures into your overall mission. Keep a list of those and see how you change their ranking over time.

Each person you love is one of those passion projects. Each goal in your life is on that list.
In the day-to-day tumble of obligatory and voluntary events, having the mission and passion projects to remind you of the meaning of your life is restorative.

Glance at the list once a day. This is effectively a form of Key #8, rotating your attention to cover every passion project. This will have the effect of springing out good new ideas or reminders that should have higher priority for sooner action on one or more of your passion projects.

Daily Alone Space

While keeping up with the tsunami of responsibilities, duties, chores, assignments, and unexpected events, days tend to pass without allowing any space for strategic thinking. This is why it’s mission-critical that you give yourself an uninterruptable 20 minutes or more each day to meditate and contemplate how your life is going. You can do this while doing yoga or exercise or while sitting up straight cross-legged or in a chair. Slow deep breathing helps. Often the best time each day for this is around 5 pm, but it can be any time you can carve out that particular day.

Simply watch the material your mind brings up and decide what is important enough to think about. You may find that you are displeased with something that you yourself did. If so, forgive yourself by understanding why the event happened as it did, and make a plan as to handle it if a similar situation presents itself in the future – as it undoubtedly will.

Remind yourself to be grateful that you screwed up in this relatively minor way this time, because that provoked your learning from it and deciding upon how to handle such things in the future, when they might be far more important to your life and mission. Just in case the universe is conscious and actually let this small goof happen so you could be armed to not make the same mistake in a situation of much greater importance, thank the universe or God whichever way you prefer to address the Totality Of Existence.

Last Thoughts Before Sleep

Before you let yourself fall asleep, prevision the next day the way you’d like to see it come out. Obviously, a glance at your schedule before getting into bed will make this much easier and more effective.

As you do this you may find yourself rehearsing what you will say and will catch things that you realize would be stepping on a land mine. Rephrase those of course. You will then find yourself feeling more confident about the morrow and this will take you into a fine sleep.

You may also see how certain meetings or events could take a bad turn. Rehearse your optimal gentle, Socratic, constructive, win/win response to such pushbacks. But do not dwell upon those downside possibilities once you have prepared yourself for them. Before you go to sleep once again prevision the day the way you would prefer it to go, strengthen your intentions and your resoluteness with courage, and enjoy a beautiful night’s sleep.

Those are the daily rituals we suggest upon rising, after work, and before going to sleep.

Learn & Teach

As you progress through life, look at the whole process as one of learning, and share your learnings when people ask for that. You may also sometimes cautiously try sharing what seems to you to be a piece of learning that the other person needs even though they have not asked for help. But be prepared to immediately abandon the idea if the other person doesn’t want to hear it.

Mindquiet

There may be times when despite how much you have learned and how much time you spend in Observer state, everything is just coming at you too fast, from the outside as well as the inside. It’s best at those times, if you can, to excuse yourself and go into a bathroom stall where you can be alone, and exercise your will to blank out the flow of inner thoughts and feelings. Just breathe slowly and deeply and wait and watch the blankness of your inner world. Big Picture integrations, summarizations of where you are at may soon present themselves to your psyche. Often it will resolve into a single main challenge you face. This clarity and focus will equip you to flow with the situation courageously and effectively.

Key # 10:

Patiently determine the most constructive use of each salient inner experience

What this Key says is that whatever is going on inside of us, some of it is obviously more important, let’s call that the salient part. Don’t bother with minor imperfections but go for the Big Picture items that cry out to be dealt with first. Look patiently at those salient items without allowing the feeling of urgency to take you over. Treat that feeling of urgency as part of the auto-completing bio-AI in your brain, not as you yourself.

Contemplate each salient item as something to learn from, and the impetus for you to give yourself new guidelines. Don’t be attached to reaching closure on the new solution, let its picture resolve in its own time. Maintain a list of items that are still cooking and use strikethroughs when they have resolved themselves so that you can look back at your trail up the mountain.

My best to all,
Bill

Become All You Really Are

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Powerful Mind Part 41
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog. October 4, 2024
Created December 22, 2023
Read Powerful Mind 40

Who are you, really? You probably play many roles in life, and try to live up to what others expect of you in each role. Your body language now moves by itself without you even noticing it, but each move was pressed into you like a piece of movable type impressing into clay, by your subconscious emulation of your role models.

My unofficially adopted older brother Bill Heyer opined that my book Mind Magic might be re-titled Really See Yourself. He was talking about your real self underneath those acquired roles and conditioned habits.

The movement in psychotherapy today to consider the inclusion of psychedelics in treatment – which goes back to antiquity and is related more to rites of passage than to treatment of mental diseases – reflects the common experience of those who have seriously experimented with LSD, psilocybin and other mind-altering chemicals of suddenly being able to see themselves, their imitative robotic selves and the true experiencer self under the layers of conditioning. This is generally a life-altering experience, and it is for the better, for minds that have been strengthened enough to withstand the extreme disorientation and to be able to integrate it into a constructive total picture of reality.

This degree of self-realization does not however require drugs, putting the 12 Keys into practice will take you to the same place in a more gradual way.

In your day-to-day life, you have seen yourself on some occasions as having a lot to offer the world, and at other times you may have seen yourself as worthless, but these mood swings are part of the package, not evidence of what your true value is. Your true value in my estimation of reality far exceeds your most grandiose views of yourself. Because my best guess is that deep down inside each of us is an avatar of the universe itself, what the human race has always called God.

In my theory summarized in A Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and “God” all that exists is a single consciousness at play, a single Experiencer that multiplies itself in order to behold and interact with itself from many viewpoints.

Those philosophers who accept the idea of the universe possibly being conscious but reject the idea that this consciousness is benevolent, base their position on the existence of suffering. They conclude that the existence of suffering proves that there cannot be a loving God. My fiction series Agents of Cosmic Intelligence is designed to demonstrate one of many scenarios in which there can be a benevolent conscious universe and suffering can exist in that universe as a learning experience resulting from enabling eternal avatars to have free will. It is we the avatars who cause the suffering by errors we make from which we learn more and more, lifetime after lifetime.

You may be an avatar of the universe. My theory may be wrong. Nothing of this is scientifically provable yet. However, if you open your mind to all possibilities you can gather evidence through your own experience. If you do not foreclose the possibility, you may hear in your mind “advice” that appears to be coming from wisdom you yourself didn’t know you possessed, and which works spectacularly well in the real world. This may come in the form of words or of a wordless hunch that comes true. When you are not blocking these possibilities by arbitrary or conditioned fixed-position skepticism, you might be surprised to notice how often you get these accurate intuitions. Jung included intuition as one of the four functions of consciousness, along with perceptions/memories, thinking, and feeling.

Intuitions can be explained without necessarily invoking extrasensory perception. For example, the totality of experiences stored in memory might be the source of these hunches we cannot explain, which we name as subconscious processing.

Many of us succeed in opening our minds to all possibilities to a degree that enables us to experience unusual and often useful events, such as knowing before picking up the phone whom the call is coming from, what someone is about to say, why one friend always flinches when you lift your right arm expressively, where a particular industry will be in a few years, exactly what to say to relieve a person who is torturing himself or herself, and to see through fakery. And much more.

All you truly are is probably so much greater than what you think.

Ego wants to believe that but for the wrong reasons. Ego is essentially a defensive system, what Hobbes was talking about when he described how we will pick fights with people out of fear. Ego is the operating system of the biological AI inside our brains and nerve networks. In higher states of consciousness when one perceives Oneness directly, feeling at one with the universe and loving everything and everybody while retaining realistic understanding of weaknesses in others which render them not to be trusted in the present moment, the ego has been bypassed and the conscious mind is focused in itself.

Empiricism has devolved in current practice into measuring the things we can measure with instruments. Its original meaning was to observe what actually happens in reality and that includes within one’s own psyche. William James was among the last of the great psychologists to employ introspection as a methodology, and more recently Maslow and Csikszentmihalyi brilliantly drew upon introspection as a supplement to the observation of behaviors. Introspection helps explain behavior. You can use that yourself. If you do something that you yourself cannot explain why you did it, introspection can ultimately reveal why some part of you, perhaps ego attachments, perhaps Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), caused you to do it.

The civilization culture we take for granted has dwarfed our concept of ourselves. Acceleritis is the word I coined to describe how information overload has forced us into EOP and to call attention to the fact that it is all still accelerating, that unless we learn the trick of really seeing ourselves and everything else without conditioned filtration, we are going to be more gnomish in the future than we are today. We can see evidence all around us of civilization on the brink of falling apart, people becoming more distrustful of one another and more pessimistic, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom that we will live out if we don’t take charge of our own consciousness now.

We used to have a mythos that awed and inspired us, and many of us still retain a fragment of that in religion or inclusive idealism. We recommend keeping an open mind about anything being possible unless and until it is proven otherwise by multiple replications of the scientific method. That open-mindedness allows awe and wonder to coexist with logic and reason. Until we know for sure what the universe is and what consciousness is, based on science as proven as quantum physics and relativity, we make our decisions day to day based on not knowing if we are an avatar of the universe whose consciousness shall live forever, or an animal that will die permanently, we have to make those moment to moment decisions to be optimal in the context of both possibilities.

In that existential situation it is not unreasonable to talk to God in your own mind if you feel like it. The conscious universe of which you are a part is a real possibility, no law of existing science precludes it. Many respected scientists take a premature stand against anything even remotely close to God, and in our respect for them, many of us downgrade the possibility of God, although this is what a follower does by blindly and loyally following everything an authoritarian says. Take back your right to think for yourself without being swayed by what others, even brilliant scientists, think. Take back your autonomy. You can do this without invoking faith, wishful thinking, superstition, or belief, just by remembering with extreme clarity that nothing has been proven yet either way.

As Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” He also pointed out that what we don’t know is vast compared to what little we do know so far. Under these conditions, it is a mistake to adhere rigidly to one or the other indefensible position. At some point in your life (you might be one of the rare people lucky to have already reached this stage) your own experiences might compel you to take the position that you know that God exists, and you will make all your decisions in the context of that certainty. But there’s no need to rush it. Best to stick to empiricism, your own experience, and to not foreclose any possibilities without sufficient evidence that such foreclosure will benefit you permanently.

We are embarked on Key #11. Stay open to the possibilities that you may have extrasensory perception, precognition, even the possibility that the universe is trying to help you and is sending you messages. Remove the blocks.

More to come on this.

My best to all,
Bill

 

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