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Powerful Mind Part 21

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
Updated July 18, 2025. Created July 28, 2023

Read Powerful Mind part 20               |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

“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 Powerful Mind parts  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.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Love to all,
Bill

A Clearer, More Effective State of Consciousness

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Powerful Mind Part 6

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog,
Updated May 9, 2025; Created April 14, 2023

Read Powerful Mind Part 5               |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

The Observer State

A clearer, more effective state of consciousness —
only seconds away from your daily state of consciousness.
Just knowing it exists can benefit you

This blog post is about states of consciousness. We will focus on one particular state of consciousness we call the Observer state. The Observer state is more powerful than the state most of us are in most of the time, and leads to the Flow state, which is more powerful still in terms of your ability to make an impact on others around you and on the world. We speak about both states as being “The Upper Mind”. The purpose of this book is to show you the simple yet easily missed doorways into the Upper Mind.

Why is it important to think about consciousness at all?
Because life is all about consciousness.

We do not exist without consciousness. While modern science has made brilliant progress in almost every other sphere of reality, too little is known about consciousness.

Yet all the ills of the world are rooted in ignorance of how consciousness works. We have made the world we see around us. It all started in our minds. Every day, we do things we regret because we listen to and act on whatever our minds dish up to us. We need our minds to perform better, to become powerful, to gain insight into ourselves and others, to come to better decisions on a moment-to-moment basis.

The extreme anti-heroes who have become powerful on the world stage, who have driven much of our history so far, might not have chosen paths of destruction if their genius had been creatively channeled, if they had not lost touch with their compassion and love.

If we collectively knew our own minds better, we would not go to war, but rather we would find creative win/win solutions — the ones we get to in the end anyway, after all the bloodshed. The path to a better world lies through the terrain of consciousness.

One day, when we all really do know our minds better, the world will be a relative paradise compared to the way it has been throughout all recorded history.

As the great science fiction pioneer H.G. Wells said, “History is a race between education and destruction.”

If we can make our minds powerful now, we can gain the maturity as a race necessary to not destroy ourselves, given the extreme weaponry we have now at our disposal and our habitual disregard of our destructive effect on the environment (the air we breathe, the water we drink).

Because war is a pattern repeated throughout recorded history, we tend to assume this is the way it has to always be. And yet, “recorded history” literally means since the onset of written language. In short, written language and the thinking processes that go with it have led to acceleritis, information overload, and Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), which blocks the upper mind and leads not only to war but also to crime and personal cruelty born of our disconnection from innate compassion. Our minds need to become more powerful in order not to be confused by the information overload so much that we are easily led and manipulated into a life nearly devoid of positive feelings, squandering the opportunity of life.

Each of us knows intuitively that the only thing we can change is ourselves. This is the only way we can make a better world.

Powerful Mind seeks to reveal specific information and techniques for attaining specific states of consciousness. We will be talking about waking states of consciousness, not about sleeping states. Sleeping states are important too, but in the interest of focus, we’ll leave these to another book.

A Broader View of What Science Is

Around 400 BC, in the Golden Age of Greek philosophy, one branch of philosophy called “epistemology” focused on understanding “how can we know?” Over time, different schools of thought evolved about how we can know: rationalists believe that we can know things directly through our intellect; authoritarians believe we know by listening to authority figures who tell us what we know; empiricists believe that we know by direct experience, by testing things in the real world; intuitionists believe we can know directly through a mysterious faculty.
Science developed out of empiricism, basing what we consider to be “truth” on factual experience, testing, and validation. In the case of science as practiced in the West, especially in the last few hundred years, that “experience” is usually the taking of measurements using instruments with dials and displays from which one takes readings. The person taking the readings is the “observer” often mentioned in relativity and quantum mechanics, the latest forms of science. In the East, science is also based on experience, and there the experience can often be inner experience where dials and displays are not involved. This is still science and still based on empirical experience.

This Eastern willingness to accept internal evidence explains why science in the West has not validated the existence of the more effective states of consciousness. Starting toward the end of the 19th Century, inner experience or introspection fell out of favor in psychology, after William James, the last of the giants of psychology to accept inner evidence directly. The more externally-oriented culture of the West created a blind spot. In psychology, work shifted to behaviorism, the focus on externally quantifiable actions, along with the study and social application of conditioning to alter these actions.

Eastern epistemology actually fuses empiricism and intuitionism. No conflict is seen between these ways of knowing because they both involve experiencing reality for oneself.

Although based on empiricism, Western science became authoritarian and elitist in its epistemology: the common person was excluded from “knowing” by the reduction of all science to mathematics, a difficult language to master. Science at its cutting edge moved out of the sphere of something the common person could totally visualize and comprehend.

Science and States of Consciousness

Regarded academically as a “soft science”, traditional Western psychology recognizes only three states of consciousness: dreamless sleep, dream sleep, and waking consciousness. Eastern psychology, since the fifth century B.C., recognized ten states of waking consciousness: the normal everyday waking state, the access state which precedes meditation, and eight progressively deeper states of meditation. Oscar Ichazo, a modern student/teacher of consciousness techniques and founder of the Arica Institute in 1968, fuses ideas from consciousness explorers throughout history (plus his own) to propose fifteen waking states of consciousness ranging from psychosis, through six levels of neurosis, three levels corresponding to the Eastern access state, and five levels of higher consciousness.

It is revealing that Western psychology reduces waking consciousness to a single state. William James was the first prominent Western psychologist who warned against “prematurely closing the book” on the existence of other states of waking consciousness. More recently, Mihaly Czikszenthmihalyi (pronounced “cheek-sent-me-high-ee”), former head of the University of Chicago Psychology Department, coined the term “Flow state” (known in show business as “Being On”, and in sports as “The Zone”), and conducted valuable research into this state, which was published in his 2008 book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.

Details to follow in the subsequent posts.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Love to all,
Bill

 

 

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We Each Have a GPT4 Within Us

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Powerful Mind Part 39

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.
Created December 8, 2023. Updated April 4, 2025

Read Powerful Mind 38             |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

No computer system before the current Large Language Models (LLMs) has been able to fool humans into thinking that the computer is human or the intellectual equal – which is the Turing test, proposed by one of the pioneers of modern computers, Alan Turing, in March 1946. What is amazing about the LLMs is how human their texts sound.

What is even more amazing is that all they are doing is a version of autocompletes – when your computer or smartphone fills in the next word or words you are going to key in. GPT4 and the other LLMs are gigantic versions of the same algorithm. The vast amount of training data is what makes them sound like us and be right so much of the time.

Unbeknownst to us, we have always had a similar function in our own brains. The reason it remained unknown to us for so long is that it passed the Turing test. We took it as our own words to ourself.

This function predicts what we will say next, based on what we have said in the past (which are the training data), and on what we just said to ourselves a moment ago (which is the prompt to be autocompleted).

On occasion, the robot (as I call the inner biological AI) might escalate what you just said to yourself (the prompt), using terms you had used in the past (training data) in association with that word you just used. “Escalate” means taking your prompt and making a more extreme statement as a follow-up. In this way, the inner AI may contribute to our recognized collective leanings into extremism throughout recorded history and never more so than today.

The problem is we take all of our thoughts at equal value. The ones we ourselves say to ourselves, and to the ones that are predictions by our robot. We didn’t know about this robot thing, so we presumed that any thought in our mind was propelled solely by our own free will. However, we find this to not be the case. There is another word source which accesses memory systems and – like today’s LLM chatbots – predicts/suggests what to say next.

Why is there such a system? Apparently pro-survival, it reminds the self how to promptly respond to incoming signals of each specific type. However, it will tend to self-past-consistency and so it will potentially underestimate where the self has evolved to at the current moment.

In Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), otherwise known as the default network, these snuck-in inputs will be taken as the self’s own.

In Observer state, otherwise known as the executive control network, the self senses that it is now going off a bridge too far and pulls itself back.

However, even in Observer state, for the past few millennia we have not known that the human brain has these predictive abilities, and they are right now being discovered by science. Using introspection, I discovered the robot and wrote about it in my 1976 book Mind Magic.

From my own direct experience, I link the robot with Freud’s concept of the Ego. In Civilization and its Discontents he writes that the ego first arises when the baby feels needy and frustrated. It acts as the self, but it is actually a self-protective layer of mind on top of the id, the original self. In childhood I was able to understand my own actions through this lens of distinguishing the different voices in my mind.

Science is now confirming that the robot, as I wrote about it in Mind Magic, is a real thing, not just a metaphor. It’s as if a cosmic chunnel is being built from two ends, science and introspection, and they are actually connecting.

The verification for these psychotechnologies – the 12 Keys among others – by science is coming at just the right time. The upcoming generations feel handed a raw deal and fearful about their future, and they spend most of their time in EOP like the majority of us, ill-equipped for the likely challenges. Psychotechnology can achieve maturity of thought processes relatively quickly.

When Observer state is achieved it enables objective formal operational and systems thinking. One starts from understood and believed-in goals, then proceeds ethically and thoughtfully to achieve those goals. Each individual in this converted state is on a Mission with a known purpose. Having a Mission makes the individual less willing to give in to useless inner negativity and more self-disciplined about taking prompt but unhurried action aimed at carrying out the Mission.

The individual achieves meaning without the same constant dependency on media diversions. Moving toward of a future of one’s own shaping, life is exciting enough on its own. In Observer state, each challenge is a learning experience on the way to the goal.

Further psychotechnology balances this drive with resilient nonattachment to outcomes. Yerkes and Dodson proved that optimal arousal causes superior performance vs. maximal arousal. Czikszentmihalyi proved that there is a state above Observer state which he famously called Flow state. Yale’s Neuroscience Master Chun notes that the random chatter between lobes disappears in Flow state.

Spiritual psychotechnology opens up the individual to the possibility of cosmic connection, and how to recognize and work with it.

Worry and Fix

Two little words. And yet a philosophy can be built on them.

A 50,000-foot view of what goes on in our minds is a mix of these two things. We’re always either worrying or fixing.

A great many people worry almost constantly. This appears to leave them little time for fixing.

A few of us have learned to minimize time spent worrying and maximize time spent fixing.

The two strategies are poles apart in terms of success rates. And inversely poles apart in terms of popular adoption.

But why would people choose to waste time worrying when they could be fixing?

People generally do not believe they have the power to make a difference in their own lives, let alone to change the world. They feel swept along by forces much stronger than themselves, some coming from the outside and some coming from the inside.

The traitorous thoughts coming from the inside are the ego, the aspect of self which resists community mindmeld; it is always in a cold war against the others perceived to be separate beings, essentially competitors, rivals. Everyone else is the potential rival.

Everyone else is also the threat vector coming at the ego from the outside. Inside and outside sources appear to agree on the dangerous nature of the others. Everyone else.

In higher states of consciousness – specifically Observer state and Flow state – these paranoid delusional biases are identified instantly by a person. In Observer state one is conscious of one’s own judgment swings and even fine-tuning adjustments taking place from moment to moment.

In the higher states, there is no worry because every challenge is accepted with valor and all time is spent on fixing, building, creating. Worries streak in, and last only fleeting minutes, while the focused mind dissects them, and establishes new rules of engagement (fixing).

The present environment is geared toward producing hyper-over-stimulation/distraction. This is the result of Acceleritis over the past six millennia. We became stimulation junkies and invented technodrugs to feed that addiction.

At one time not so very long ago, in the West, we felt very confident and competent. In the East and South, where most of current growth has come from, there was great hope.

Now uncontrolled thoughts and feelings have stampeded the herd. This is all utterly unnecessary.

We have the skills and resources to fix everything, even at the advanced state of ruin we have already made of the planet and its species.

But not without working together.

If we continue to wallow in delusional hate fantasies while Rome burns, well. You know how that ends.

Can we all please wake up from the nonsense and get to cooperating to fix the mess we made?

Further methods of attaining inner clarity (Key #10) in Part 40.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

My best to all,
Bill

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