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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

Speak to the Other’s Saliency

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Powerful Mind Part 32

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, December 20, 2024.
Created October 13, 2023

Read Powerful Mind 31

Every conversation is a potential spike in learning, typically even richer  than most
other times, though “alone times” can reap the most surprising revelations.

The amount of learning available in each instant of life mostly goes untapped. Looking at life through a variety of observation lenses helps capture more of that nascent learning.

One way of looking at life is that it’s all a big reconnaissance. Looking at it that way defers the feeling of urgency to achieve closure on some solid pro or con position on every little thing.

Every conversation is a potential spike in learning, typically even richer than most other times, though “alone times” can reap the most surprising revelations.

Many of us live lives focused around day jobs in some sort of business or another, sometimes in the public or nonprofit sector or academia or science, but it is still “taking care of business” on a day-to-day basis. This affords us many conversations, sometimes specifically goal-directed, and sometimes off-duty.

In our interactions, while taking care of business or at other times, often each person brings some hoped-for outcome. Say for example you attend a small group meeting or a one-on-one. The other person probably has one or more things they are trying to achieve and wants your help. You may be in the same position. It may not be obvious from the outset what the other person wants. You may not always be aware of your own expectations or desires, they may be hidden from you, and you may not have done your homework.

The networks in the brain we have discussed before include the salience network, which is responsible for prioritizing what to do next, what is most important in the present moment, and which has the key role of switching from the default network to the executive control network, which is an overarching theme of our body of work within what I call psychotechnology, the pragmatic optimization of mental/affective functions.

Saliency as a concept refers to that which stands out in the foreground against the background of everything else.

When you are with someone it is polite and considerate to try to discern what the other person’s saliency network is prioritizing at the moment. For example, let’s say it is in a business environment. You may be there for a very special reason of your own of which you are well aware.

The normative way of proceeding in today’s world culture – at least in the West – is to go for the jugular. Take the initiative to make your pitch.

However, you will learn much more and increase your chances of success if you start by helping the other person further the implicit goals of whatever is currently the focal point of their salience network. It’s also kinder, nicer, and – if my theory of the conscious universe is correct – the “force will be with you” if you do it this way.

In order to do this you need to listen and observe carefully, without presuppositions.

You also need to avoid pigeonholing based on your first impressions. “Aha, they want X!” might occur to you but keep an open mind.

Within the conventional bounds of whatever context you are in, of course, you are allowed to ask direct questions to find out what the other person is most concerned about.

This next thought is very much about the present-day reality and may not be so important in other eras. Prepare to be shocked because nowadays it’s not uncommon to hear a person say something that is strongly emotionally charged and deeply wedded to some political or anti-group position. If you don’t already know this about the person it could flip a switch inside you that has the effect of feeling that this is not your sort of person. You may start to think about how to depart. Observe those reactions in yourself without ratifying them and let them drift into the past. Continue to be open-minded and compassionate.

Once it becomes more clear what the other person wants, work on that first, and hold back what you are there to accomplish.

If it’s a group meeting, before putting forth your own agenda, observe carefully to see if you can make out what is salient to each person in the room or Zoom.

Work creatively to help others accomplish their aims. Doing this before putting forth your own needs is a better pragmatic approach in terms of actual achievement of your aims.

Of course, if there is a natural linkage by which your desired ends can serve theirs, without contortions or fakery, then it’s a win/win.

Here are some helpful observational lenses lifted from my book Mind Magic which may facilitate learning during the reconnaissance.

    • If I look at this situation as a child might, what do I see?
    • Be aware of the emotions radiated by each entity including yourself.
    • How might I turn this to everyone’s advantage?
    • Unstitch yourself from the moment by looking down at the whole scene from the ceiling.
    • Question your own possible biases which may affect what you see.
    • Strip away your own interpretations to get back to the things themselves.
    • “Just the facts, Ma’am.” (Dragnet’s Joe Friday)
    • Remember that words have a physical impact on you, so that you must guard against being influenced by them.
    • Toy with alternate explanations for events. Allow your imagination free reign to propose the most unbelievable such explanations.
    • Look at everything as if seeing it for the first time.
    • Why did I notice that?
    • Why did that happen? What is it trying to tell me?

Love to all,
Bill

 

happy holidays!

 

Mind Dwell Hath Consequences

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Powerful Mind Part 45
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, October 11, 2024.
Created January 19, 2024
Read Powerful Mind 44

Whatever repeatedly appears on the screen of your mind will eventually appear in your external experience...

Quote from You Are the Universe: Imagine That, Chapter 17 – “Predreaming” by Bill Harvey

My wife Lalita is an avid reader, she reads a couple of books a week. The other day she came across a book she had to mention to me, because of the similarity of its title to my book Mind Magic. The book is called The Magic in Your Mind. It was written by U.S. (Uell Stanley) Andersen, an American football player and businessman. I was fascinated and looked it up and then bought it and am reading it.The book asserts that our imagination controls what happens to us in our lives. This is not a new idea, nor is it just an idea: since antiquity, rare human beings have discovered this way of using their mind, verified that it works, and written about it. The earliest trace of it is in the Vedas going back to memorized but not written texts possibly as early as ~1700 BC or even earlier, finally converted to written form ~500 BC.

In the Sermon On The Mount (~27 CE), Jesus quotes Proverbs 23 Verse 7 “As a man thinketh, so shall he be”.

The Law of Attraction was the book by William Walker Atkinson (1906) which might have inspired Jose Silva to create the Silva Mind Control Method (1977) – or Jose might have discovered it again by himself. In between these books (1961) was when Andersen published his book. The Secret was then published by Rhonda Byrne in 2006. Any of these writers might have been inspired by earlier books, and/or themselves discovered the phenomena and the ways of using them.

I’m finding the writing in Andersen’s book to be inspired and exalting to read. Even though I know these things, the way he explains them is beautiful and lofty. His poetic metaphors and allusions have the ring of truth. I wish I had found his book before he passed away in 1986, it would have been great fun to have conversations with him.

When I was writing Mind Magic in 1972 (published in 1976), I purposely avoided metaphysics and cosmology, because I wanted the book to have universal appeal, including atheists and people of all religions. The methods in Mind Magic are positioned as “useful fictions” and as “lenses” which had been invented by me and tested in my life. The reader is invited to try them and see for themselves that they are pragmatic, i.e. the methods work.

My book You Are The Universe – YATU (2014) I went the other way and rooted my mental methodologies in a picture of the Universe as One Self playing all roles, thus each of our minds is actually the universal mind enjoying the view from one avatar’s perspective. In that book (YATU) I report on my own (mundane and extraordinary) experiences and theorize about how reality works, in order to explain those experiences. And I theorize why The One Self is playing this game.

Chapter 17 of YATU is called “Predreaming” and is all about how to use the mind to cause the future you want, and how to avoid accidentally “ordering poison from the menu” by careless use of these same faculties. An excerpt:

Whatever repeatedly appears on the screen of your mind will
eventually appear in your external experience on the Universal
Computer Screen we call material reality.
You are tuning in these material experiences, ordering them,
Attracting them to you, by dwelling on them.
It makes no difference if your dwelling on them consists of
prayer to get them (your desires), or dread of getting them (your
fears).
The “dwelling-on” places the order, in either case.
Oblivious to our inherited “ordering power”, almost all of us are
using it against ourselves.

The difficulty of using this Predreaming method is not the intense visualization of your most precious dreams actually coming true in real life, that part is fun, it’s almost like daydreaming with purpose. The hard part is keeping your mind from repeatedly drifting into emotively imaging dreaded eventualities that are exactly what you most ardently desire to not happen.

In my novel Pandemonium: Live To All Devices, the character Templegard is the only soldier-spy tested by U.S. Army Intelligence who is able to not think of a green monkey. For most of us, even those of us with relatively high degrees of mental self-discipline, it’s almost impossible to not think of something. The trick is to not avoid thinking of X, but to focus on thinking of Y, and that will work, but requires practice at first.

Any negativity in the mind will tend to bring negativity into your actual life. This is why in previous chapters of Powerful Mind we have oft mentioned quickly turning off internal alarms and moving on to solutions for whatever is causing those alarms. Negativity is a very useful alarm system but when we are in Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP) we tend to wallow in the alarm that is going off, rather than turning it off, thanking it, and moving on to planning how to deal with the thing that is causing the alarm to go off.

The more intensely you detail the future you want to happen the better. This same attention to detail is valuable in preparing contingency plans for what you will do if the very things that you do not want to happen, happen anyway. Not only planning what you will say or do or what your face and body language will communicate, but experiencing it in your imagination, what it will look like and feel like from being inside yourself in that future moment.

Once you have pre-experienced the worst eventualities you will find that some of their sting has been burned out. This will make it easier to casually turn aside if they pop up again in your mind. You will feel prepared and less concerned that such a thing might happen to you. Stoic, courageous, and fatalistic. Resolved.

This can be done every night before going to sleep as regards what might happen in the day ahead. First disarm the undesired outcomes by preparing for them, then put them aside and focus on predreaming the outcomes you do want to happen. If you are comfortable praying, go right ahead. I think of praying as asking for cosmic fire support. I don’t feel comfortable asking the Universe for help in trivial self-serving matters, I feel comfortable asking for the Universe to help in instances where the outcomes I want are beneficial to all concerned, although in the short run some may be more benefitted than others.

Andersen argues that we should strive to change our identification with our ego to our identification with the Universe. This is unquestionably right in my opinion however it can run into friction with one’s atheism or specific religious beliefs (many Jews for example are uncomfortable equating themselves with God). This is why I rephrase his exhortation to identify with our Muse, the “voice” (some guidance might not involve words) inside that gives us the best advice. It comes down to the same thing as Andersen’s advice. And in Mind Magic, the final chapter is all about Identifying with the Universe. Here in Powerful Mind, I’m refining that only slightly into identifying with your Muse, as operationally easier to put into practice. You will by doing so tend to let lower thoughts float downstream without acknowledging them or identifying with them. You’ll instead tend to wait for the Muse and invite it space in which to be heard (or the advice felt and comprehended without words).

More on Key #12 in upcoming posts. In the meantime, ration negativity, and keep track of what percent of your time you detect it inside; and enjoy purposeful daydreaming about the future you want with all of your powers of imagination.

Listen to my latest interview about my book THE GREAT BEING
Moments with Marianne with Bill Harvey KMT radio interview about THE GREAT BEING book

In this 15-minute interview with Marianne Pestana on KMET ABC News Affiliate, I talk about THE GREAT BEING, my latest book in the Agents of Cosmic Intelligence series.
Listen here.

 

 

 

You may know that I’ve been publishing a sci-fi series called Agents of Cosmic Intelligence, an alternative history of the Universe, in which some of the main characters put into practice the mental methodologies I’ve compiled into my nonfiction books. All of this is aimed at enabling the human race to become more effective and to undo the messes made in the past. By contradistinction to AI, Artificial Intelligence, I think of this as HI, Human Intelligence. I feel that it’s obvious we should be putting at least as much time, money, and effort into HI as into AI – especially if we are fearful of what AI can do to subjugate us.

The books in the series so far take place long ago or in the near future, but what was missing until now is how the Universe began, and what happened on Earth before ~3000 BC. That is now in The Great Being, which is chronologically the first book in the series.

Two reviewers have already written reviews of The Great Being and they really “get” what the whole series is aiming at. I’ve waited for this feeling of someone really getting it for a long time and it is heartwarming to say the least. Here are excerpts and links to the reviews. — Bill

Reviews of The Great Being Warm the Cockles of My Heart

Indie reader approved

4.2 stars. A compelling and thought-provoking work of science fiction. Harvey’s sprawling, hugely ambitious exploration of consciousness, free will, and the eternal dance between light and darkness is intellectually stimulating and emotionally resonant. The novel’s central message—that all beings, no matter how lost or misguided, are ultimately part of a greater cosmic unity—is a hopeful and uplifting one…Read the full review. — Indie Reader

IR Independent Review

A singularly unique and eye-opening work of visionary fiction, Blending realms of historical, religious, spiritual, and mythological traditions, this is an ambitious and epically creative read … The full value will be more readily apparent to those readers who can see the threads of allegory, legend, and science woven into one unified whole. Enlightenment and radical self-awareness are powerful undercurrents within the narrative; the role of dogmatic thinking, hierarchical power structures, and the tyranny of knowledge are explored in various ways through the characters’ revelations, opinions, and personalities. The story within a story here is one of psychological development and the real-life pursuit of higher modes of thinking … A wide-reaching and insightful assessment of human civilization and behavior…Read the full review.—Self-Publishing Review / Independent Review of Books

bluelink review

Tonally amusing, aesthetically fearless, and packed with witty observation and divine incident … By turns accessible, erudite, and hallucinogenic, it is an intriguing philosophical romp that cleverly fuses psychedelic science-fiction and fantasy elements with organized religion’s creationist ideologies and the scientific theories of evolutionism … An ambitious, entertaining novel packed with spiritual curiosity, one that will greatly appeal to fans of intelligent science fiction and alternative history stories alike… Read the full review. —BlueInk Review

booklife by Publishers WeeklyBlending spiritual philosophy, alternate history, pre-historic adventure, and brisk life-after-life storytelling, The Great Being is above all a beginning. First comes creation itself, which gets started with the knockout opening line (“The Nothingness felt surprise upon realizing itself.”), … This is the fourth entry published but the first chronological chapter. It shares the swift pacing, spiritual seeking, twisty plotting, and sharply human dialogue of the earlier books, though its focus feels tighter… Read full review, —BookLife by Publisher’s Weekly.  

kirkus reviewsIn Harvey’s retelling of the creation myth, heavenly agents combat a growing rebellion unfolding on Earth … this story deftly explores human nature—the uplifting qualities and dour traits alike … enthralling tale of humanity’s origins and cosmic espionage… Read full review, — Kirkus Reviews

Midwest Book ReviewA real standout…The radically inviting nature of this story brings with it the opportunity to view life and God in an entirely different light…Designed to awaken and introduce new interpretations of spirituality and life meaning. As readers who may not have expected such nuances come to absorb the greater gift of The Great Being‘s message, they will find the radically inviting nature of this story brings with it the opportunity to view life and God in an entirely different light … The story evolves with a reinterpretation of myths, events, and concepts that doesn’t just invite, but demands discussion and insights on the parts of all kinds of spiritual thinkers as the story evolves a unique and compelling flavor of discovery … One of Bill Harvey’s great talents lies not just in his storytelling ability, but his focus on translating life events and history with new interpretations … Readers interested in transformative reading… will find The Great Being‘s message to be one of hope, discovery, and new ways of viewing the universe [and] will find The Great Being a standout. Read the full review. — Diane Donovan for Midwest Book Review

THE GREAT BEING is available in print and Kindle. Read an excerpt.

Love to all,
Bill

 

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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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