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Ride the Psychic Foam

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Powerful Mind Part 38

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, updated November 21, 2025
Created December 1, 2023. 

Read Powerful Mind 37             |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Key #10 is about how to ride the bucking bronco that is your mind. Your mind, which is constantly throwing up inner words, feelings, and impulses that – if allowed – can enslave your mood.

When my late partner Len Matthews, a wonderful human being, read my book Mind Magic, he initially disagreed with the idea that he should “dis-identify with the thought senate” (paraphrasing the title of Chapter 9). He said, “I’m proud of my ideas, I want to call them my own.”

I pointed out the subtitle of that chapter, “Not Throwing Your Authority Behind Untested Head Spewings”. This, I explained, allowed for cases in which a person can take pride and ownership of ideas after having tested those ideas thoroughly enough, with which he agreed.

Therefore, Key #10 is about how to test one’s inner drafts before adopting them as one’s own official policy.

Not viewing the situation that way, the vast majority of the human race throughout history, and perhaps more so today due to the Distraction Culture produced by Acceleritis, tend to assume that the inner soundtrack is one’s very own self expressing positions that have been fully ratified by all sides of oneself.

In Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), the pandemic coping condition for information overload, most of the time the mind is operating in what neuroscientists call the Default Network. This is an idle stream of consciousness that keeps switching tracks based on associations, and includes daydreaming as well as commentary on what one is doing in the external world of consensual reality, sometimes involving other people.

In the Observer state, neuroscientists say that the brain is operating from the Executive Control Network, and the mind is in a state of metacognition, able to observe with a degree of detachment what the inner wordstream is saying. It is that degree of detachment which Mind Magic Chapter 9 (read an excerpt) aimed to achieve in readers. By having that degree of detachment, one can inspect what one’s mind just said, to see if it is consistent with one’s general viewpoint, or if it appears to be an outlier, perhaps a remnant of who you used to be. Or just a first reflexive reaction of anger at someone in language you might have used as a child or as a teenager, but would not normally use aloud today.

By helping children to learn these ways, they shall more quickly become able to be in control of their own impulses.

When I was a child, like all other children, I had a very hard time guessing which of my impulses to act upon and which ones to just let drift away. Perhaps I had more trouble with it than most children. Because on stage and in other rare moments, I had experienced the Flow state, in which simply letting myself flow with all of my impulses seemed to work fantastically well. At the time, this is what I muddily thought. It was only much later on that I realized that in Flow, one does not always act on every impulse; in fact, in making that assumption, I had caused myself to be taken out of Flow after very short periods of it. This took years to discover. In the meantime, I had absurd experiences of following impulses which turned out to be ridiculously wrong and impossible to defend afterward.

In that chapter of Mind Magic, one of the metaphors used is to consider the mind to be a vast senate of viewpoints, installed based on people you have met who may have impressed you in one way or another, which set up a robot simulating that person within one’s own mind, presumably mediated by a specific pattern of electrochemical flow among specific neurons. In a lifetime, one may meet, or hear, speak, or read the words of tens of thousands of people, including in media. Thousands of them may leave permanent impressions as biological “AI” outposts within one’s mind. This, then, is the senate.

The Executive Control Network may be viewed as the inner True Self, trying to sort through what may be conflicting impulses arising simultaneously like virtual particles in the quantum foam, within one’s own microcosm. The great physicist John Archibald Wheeler postulated that in nothingness before the Big Bang, there had always existed quantum foam, with virtual particles arising and disappearing. In my book A Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and “God”, I posited that the quantum foam itself is consciousness, the original substrate of the universe. Whether or not this is true, we might not as a species know for millennia, although as individuals some of us may decide to adopt it as a working hypothesis for life, as I do.

By installing Key #10 in one’s own mind, one gives oneself the psychic distance to edit one’s own headstream.

More than that, one can take the time to teach errant senators how to behave properly. For example, one day recently, I heard myself think something mean about a person I love. With Key #10, it’s not enough to just correct oneself and move on: you are advised to carry on an inner dialog with the senator who said that, and to find out how that part of you thinks and feels. Does the part of you who just said that mean thing not love this other person? Or was that just an old reflex from your childhood when you first started to use mean words like that? If the latter turns out to be the case, as it did, that senator (or neuron grouping) can learn that it’s no longer appropriate to use such language even to oneself, it’s no longer fitting within the person you have become. In this way, the mind is eventually cleansed, and impurities have been removed from it.

One of the inner signals that one learns to pay attention to is any trace of negativity. By now, using the other Keys 1-9, we have already changed our mental habits enough to realize that we prefer to be happy and to know how to quickly tune out of anything that makes us unhappy.

Negativity is what makes us unhappy; therefore, we have already started to learn how to tune away from negativity to positivity, to find one’s creativity interested and challenged by the “dare” of negativity to find creative solutions to remove all causes of negativity from one’s life as quickly as possible in each case.

More methods for riding one’s psychic froth in the next installment.

See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Happy Thanksgiving

My best to all,
Bill

 

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Staying Focused Through Complexity

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Powerful Mind Part 34

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, October 24, 2025
Created October 27, 2023

Read Powerful Mind 33             |              See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

By this point in our journey, your priorities are to be your highest self and spend as much time as possible doing your passion work, while avoiding distractions, especially from your own doubts and fears.

But there are so many other distractions to deal with, including people you love popping into your life at odd moments. By now, your Savoir faire may include noting that these are assignments from the Universe that deserve your attention even when the timing is frustrating.

Because we have collectively dreamed up this ultra-distracting culture we now live in, in which we are being exposed to multiple media simultaneously for most of our waking moments, and in which emails, texts, phone calls, and innumerable other messages are incoming at all times, these challenges may often overcome our resolve, and make us feel as if we are never going to be able to stay in Flow or even in Observer state. Plus, we may be balancing the work we use to make money with the work that is our passion to which we are ever so gradually transitioning.

The reality is that multitasking is something we all overestimate our own talent for. We are all at our best when we immerse completely in one single-pointed attention stream at a time. The implication: we need to schedule our time in advance, leaving at least twice as much time as needed to complete a given task, but making advance arrangements (like turning phones and email audio notifications off, and closing doors with Do Not Disturb signs) so that we can really focus on one task at a time, enjoying it to the hilt, and treating it as the most important thing in the world for the allotted time.

But the reality is that we will not always have the luxury of controlling our own space. Sometimes we will be out in the world of action mixing with dozens of other people we know. Sometimes we will be doing that while operating heavy machinery (e.g., a car). Let’s take a hypothetical situation in which you are driving a car, involving looking forward, occasionally in the rear view mirror, occasionally in the side view mirrors, and keeping in mind where you are going, which might involve listening to cues from a GPS. You will also be monitoring your own mind and feelings, but your salience network is prioritizing safety above all else.

This means that if you are daydreaming idly in default network, you will switch consciously back into Observer state, where you may detect flash-forwards to the upcoming meeting to which you are driving, and noting useful ideas that you might bring up in that meeting. You may also hear yourself rehearsing a specific dialogue that suddenly gets you in trouble in your mental picture of the meeting. You also make a mental note to avoid that line of dialogue, and perhaps you come up with a good phrase to use if someone else brings up that sensitive topic.

But you do not allow your useful inner predreaming to distract you from primary attention to the movements of cars and the changing of traffic lights, and to intuitions you may have of what another driver is going to do.

Let’s make the situation even more complex. Let’s say you’re driving a fairly large car with one passenger to the side and three more in back. One of these people is your business partner, whose apparent main goal in life is to diminish you in the eyes of others, which he does with amazing manipulative powers, projecting boundless self-confidence. The others in the car are important clients. Your partner is leading a discussion about an idea you have had, which he is criticizing, and the others are taking his views seriously and asking questions.

You note your ego’s reaction to this and set it aside, merely listening while maintaining safety on the road.

A method which can help in circumstances such as these is the rotation of attention. You might not be able to safely see each person while driving, but you can pay special attention to listening to what each person says, and you might ask for the views of someone who is staying silent. By rotating your surplus attention rather than trying to focus on everything at once, you may find that you can remain in the Observer or Flow state, get everyone safely to your destination, and perhaps, with right timing, make some short statement which restores the awareness of why you brought up that new idea in the first place, and why it still is worthy of testing further.

Better to let the idea rise or fall without intervention and return to it at some apropos later point, than to get emotionally hooked into the game your rival is playing. Safety and staying above your own ego are the natural priorities in the situation.

Key #8


When there is too much going on,
rotate attention to make sure
every workstream is covered.

 

Your own inner world is one workstream. The road ahead and the three mirrors are four other workstreams while driving. Each person in the car with you – or the radio – each of these is another workstream. Your equipment (mind, intuition, perceptions, feelings) is not at its best when dealing with multiple workstreams, and the tactic that optimizes you when multiple workstreams are unavoidable is rotation of attention focus. At least for brief instants, you are taking a full grab of each workstream. But the one or more workstreams which contain existential danger (like when driving) must never be without some degree of attention, even as you grab information from split-second peeks elsewhere.

Best to all,
Bill

Updating Your Life Plan

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Powerful Mind Part 30

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, September 26, 2025
Created September 29, 2023

Read Powerful Mind Part 29     |    See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Mountain road. Landscape with green field, sunny sky

“Comedian George Carlin once quipped, ‘Oh, you hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.’” This is a quote from a Gallup report, which found that 60% of workers are dissatisfied with the work they are doing.

The pandemic gave us the space we needed to realize that we were not getting enough satisfaction out of the life we were living, and a person’s work is central to a person’s life – “Lieber Und Arbeit” (Love And Work) as Freud put it – the two key tentpoles (which in my book You Are The Universe I show is actually the bottom of the Tree Of Life in Kabbalah).

But even before the pandemic, many of us already knew that we had placed ourselves in the wrong spot, maybe even the wrong line of work. The education system has not prepared us to know what our true gifts to the world are, the passion work that would keep us in the Flow State more often. For some time, I’ve been recommending individualized education to bring out the best in each of us, and to know the occupational optimization answers for each of us. Ironic that the Latin word educare means “to draw out” and yet our education systems around the world pound information in rather than draw anything out.

I’ve also written about work study internships for a day, starting at very early ages, maybe as early as seven years old, where kids can pick and choose which of the participating companies and departments they would like to try out for a day.

Since the pandemic, tens of millions of people around the world have been contemplating changes in their lives, focused especially around the kind of work they do, and where and how they do it. A big part of it is not the occupation itself but the culture of the company. Too many companies treat employees as expendable cogs and not as partners and allies. If AI were used to enable the whole personnel of a company to insert anonymous or otherwise ideas and suggestions with true protections against repercussions (today’s HR departments promise that but do not deliver it often enough), and if the C suite got continuous AI summaries, a maximum of 25 words per hour 9-5, the C suite might realize that the wisdom bubbling up is unbelievably brilliant and right. Global consultant Chaim Oren and I discuss these points in this podcast: How to Thrive in the Age of Crisis.

How to thrive in the age of crisis - a guide for life
Be sure you know what work YOU want to do, and that it isn’t someone else who caused you to believe you wanted that. Then make a plan to get from where you are to that work. Consider the moves carefully so as not to waste the goodwill you have built up in the field in which you have been working. Don’t leave people in a bad place by abruptly pulling out; take care of the people and company you now serve, as you make your transition. If you do it that way, some of them may help you get to where you want to be. Maybe there are ways to intersperse what you now do with elements of what you want to be doing. This is a great testbed for early learning.

This will take time, so you mustn’t add to your existing stress by becoming discouraged at how it seems Sisyphean and that you’ll never get there. Here’s the key trick: life is an adventure. You may have lost that sense of adventure before, perhaps long ago and without realizing it. But now that you have taken control of your own life and are steering it toward making your true dreams come true, you must sit back and become grateful for this big second chance you have given yourself, and that however it comes out, you are at least going to enjoy the adventure, the true adventure of your life as it was always meant to be, now that you have the real target in your sights. You are going to enjoy getting there, even if you never do get all the way there!

Remind yourself of this every time you feel dissatisfaction returning. Like all negative emotion, that is just an alarm reaction designed to wake you up to some threat vector. Turn off the emotional alarm, thanking it for ringing, and set to learning whatever lesson has to be learned so that the source of that dissatisfaction may be reasonably solved to no longer cause you negativity.

This means that while you are on the adventurous path to your new life, no matter what happens, failure, censure, whatever, it isn’t going to get you down. You are at least pursuing your passion work, that’s what matters, and enjoy each second of the journey by learning from what appear to be signs that you will never attain your dreams. The outcomes are not the point. The pursuit is the point, as long as what you pursue is the highest use of the real you to the species and to the universe, in your own lights.

Remember that what you feel projects out and makes impressions that change the “external” world, so that the more quickly you turn off your own negativity, and keep envisioning (“predreaming”) the life scenario you want, the more likely you are to achieve it all. But beware of the trap of caring too much about the outcomes. Do what you can to obtain the outcomes you want, and let the chips fall where they may, and use negative feedback to refine your methods, but not bring you down.

Key #6

Be sure of what YOU want and enjoy the journey to your dreams,
without attachment to outcomes.

Here’s a little secret: Dissatisfaction is wrong predreaming, it brings you what you don’t want to happen.

Attachment to outcomes is a misunderstanding. It’s ego. It’s the need to prove yourself to other people, belonging, status/prestige, wealth/success, all those lower motivations that you were conditioned to be needy about. The established psychological principle of Yerkes-Dodson obtains: highest performance comes when there is just the right amount of desire to win, and performance falls off sharply when there is too much attachment to the outcome.

Enjoy the adventure!

Love,
Bill

 

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The Patterns of Your Life

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Powerful Mind Part 28
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – September 12, 2025
Created September 15, 2023

Read Powerful Mind Part 27         |        See all 12 Powerful Mind Keys

Look back over your life and see what you can about what you apparently wanted most at different turning points in your adventure.

Now that we are embarked on Powerful Mind Key #6, which focuses you on a deep dive study of what you really want out of life, it will be helpful and fun for you to look back over your life and see what you can about what you apparently wanted most at different turning points in your adventure.

This is a task best approached in an alone space where you have made yourself temporarily invulnerable to interruption and distraction. Now that you have made the commitment to using your mind in the most powerful ways possible, you’ll find that having a daily alone space is almost essential. If others ask why you need to be alone for 20 or more minutes each day, “meditation” is the simplest explanation, although our forms of meditation in the 12 Keys encompass what in ancient India and around the world forever have been known as meditation, contemplation, and concentration – three forms of applying the mind in very special and important ways.

Neuroscience has identified one of the networks of the brain as the Default Network, which is the type of brain pattern most people use most of the time. It is essentially random chatter, and having observed it in myself most of my life, I have called it Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP), because it avoids deep thinking in favor of following attraction and repulsion impulses. In popular science, it is identified with Kahneman’s construct of System 1, which Daniel himself admitted might not be an actual system in the brain.

A second real system in the brain (which corresponds somewhat with Kahneman’s System 2) is called the Executive Control Network, and it is associated with metacognition and what I call the Observer state. A third is called the Saliency Network, and it is associated with whatever is the most relevant pressing matter to you at the moment, and which will bring on transition to the Executive Control Network in situations in which that will tend to be most useful to dealing with whatever is most salient to you at the moment.

Meditation, contemplation, and concentration are modes of cognition that depend mostly on the Executive Control Network. Piaget’s Formal Operational Level is his theoretical stage at which children are able to pick apart problems and systematically pursue and test solutions, and this would appear to be a stage in which the child has begun to regularly employ the Executive Control Network.

Depending upon your physical exercise regimen, it may be possible to combine your alone space with your exercise. This is not always the case because often our mental exercises will work best if you can write down flashes you have, and in some cases, doodle something, such as the schematic of your life we are about to describe.

Take a fresh sheet of paper and allow yourself to doodle on it any way you feel like. In this case, we are going to be looking back over your life to see what we can infer about what once motivated you most during certain phases, so you might want to use the pad you are writing on in landscape aspect, so that you have the whole length of the pad for the vector of your life. You might want to add a scale at the bottom showing the ages from birth, and one year old, at the left, running up to your present age at the right.

In that framework, you will find bubbling up in your mind stuff that would fall somewhere along that trajectory, and you can make an oval with words in it to mark what was going on at a certain age. Before you begin, let’s review the 15 motivations that my own empirical research at RMT (Research Measurement Technologies) has detected in human beings.

The 15 RMT Motivational Types

    1. Security – Feeling safe, rather than insecure; to no longer feel fear
    2. Belonging – Being part of a group; knowing that one is not alone in the world; having support
    3. Achievement – A sense of accomplishment; to do something significant in one’s life
    4. Aspiration/Learning – Wanting to know more; to reach a higher level of understanding
    5. Competency – Wanting to be really good at something
    6. Fitness – Wanting to have a healthy, strong, and attractive body
    7. Status/Prestige – Recognition from others; consensus validation of one’s own importance
    8. Wealth/Success – Affluence; freedom to spend on whatever one wants; ignore others’ criticism
    9. Heroism/Leadership – Acting heroically anytime; to speak up and take responsibility for situations
    10. Experience/Sex/Good Life/Hedonism/Epicureanism – Wanting interesting and fun experiences; to have a good time, enjoy the best of life, and see the world
    11. Power – Being able to control other people and situations to one’s liking
    12. Love – Wanting to love someone and be loved by the same person
    13. Creativity – Being creative in arts, business, crafts, nonprofits, sciences, technologies, or any field
    14. Self-Knowledge – Knowing oneself — who you are deep inside; mastery of one’s mind and emotions
    15. Self-Transcendence/Service to Humanity/Enlightenment/Spiritual Awakening/Nobility – Making a positive difference in the world; to take care of other people.

Taking my own life as an example, during my pre-school years, I can recall incidents suggesting these motivations: Security, Belonging, Achievement, Aspiration/Learning, Competency – the first five on the list – plus Love, Creativity, and Self-Knowledge. My parents put me on stage and, after many robotical performances (motivated by a desire for Competency), I experienced the Flow state, which was a turning point in my life. Aspiration/Learning what Flow state was, became a burning desire.

During kindergarten and elementary school, I can see in my own memories that Status/Prestige became more important to me than it had been earlier. Power became important because these were the streets of pre-gentrification Brooklyn at a time of bullies, knives, and zip guns.

I spent a lot of time alone, thinking, and observing my own thinking and feeling. I had early thoughts about how I might help fix the world, which in those years had just used atomic bombs for the first time, and I knew this was the biggest future threat. I had the idea to gain power to effect positive change by going to West Point, becoming a General, surviving and winning WWIII, and then being elected President, where I felt I could right the many wrongs I saw, heard about, and read about, implying that I had begun to manifest the motivation of Self-Transcendence (Altruism).

At age 12, with a knife to my throat, I told the kid with the knife, “I don’t believe you’re crazy, so I don’t believe you’d cut me, so I’m not scared.” That turned out to work. I feel that Heroism/Leadership was motivating me then, and perhaps earlier.

At the same age, I had two out-of-body experiences and the onset of puberty. As if these were not enough, I also heard a voice in my mind say, “I am God and so is everyone else.” This made no sense since I was in my own mind an atheist dedicated to pure science. Experience/Sex/The Good Life bloomed motivationally. I wanted to have a wide range of experiences and see the world.

By 16, I had graduated from high school, and my father had obtained for me two Congressional recommendations to West Point, but I was a year too young to be admitted. I went to Brooklyn College for a year and joined the Air Force ROTC. Leadership spiked as one of my top motivations for a while. However, the ROTC turned me off as regards West Point, and so I changed course and studied philosophy and psychology, the two subjects I had thought about every day of my life from my earliest memories. I also began to care about Fitness and got into the best shape of my life.

Graduating and taking the first job offer (Grey Advertising), Wealth/Success leapt up as a priority motivation. Aspiration/Learning and Competency once again became predominant motivations as I sopped up all the lore of marketing, advertising, and media as fast as I could.

That’s probably enough about me to give you an idea of how you can look at your own life through the lens of what motivated you at each stage. This will give you more grist for the mill to figure yourself out today, and where you go from here, what you want out of life now, and how you are going to get it.

Enjoy the journey inside!

Love to all,
Bill