Tag Archives: Robot

Being Real

Powerful Mind Part 19

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – August 16, 2024
Created July 14, 2023

In Powerful Mind 18 we talked about the consistency program, one of the elements of your robot (mechanized oversimplified coping patterns) that constrains your freedom of expansive choice in every situation. There are other constraints on your free will and creativity in every moment, and one of them is social pressures.

We are social animals, we have built huge hives called cities and we huddle in them together, or if we choose to live closer to nature we still highly value the ability to go out and mingle. This is a natural form in which love expresses itself as belonging, we belong to each other and with each other, and we enjoy it. This is part of our reality and can have positive and negative outcomes on our ability to express what is in us. It is of more long-lasting positive value to learn how to channel situations so as to be free in every moment to be who you are, even if it does not seem to fit in at an obvious level.

It’s natural to seek rapport by acknowledging the beliefs you have in common with the people around you. It may feel risky and unnecessary to expose your differences. But it need not be risky, if done right. Instead of expressing disagreement, try the Socratic method: ask questions, and consider the answers objectively, temporarily suspending whatever you may believe based upon your accumulated past experiences.

A contrarian is one who has established a fixed script to argue against practically everything said in earshot. This is the robot with its oversimplified and fixated habit patterns.

Being yourself and not glossing over inner secret disagreements you may have while appearing to go along with the crowd, is an act of courage. But it need not be risky if carried off with savoir faire, kindness and respect. Open-mindedness is an attractive quality and encourages people to be themselves too. Locked-in ideological dogmas are among the more dangerous side effects of allowing enslavement to one’s robot. Enslavement creeps. You start by enslaving yourself to robot reactions in order to avoid the psychic dissonance and feeling of helplessness at the complexity of life. That then becomes enslavement to other people because you are trying simplistically and superficially to become accepted by them.

The trick with being real is that it is not a stand-alone principle, it must be executed simultaneously with a complementary principle, screening out negativity. If you open up yourself without screening out negativity, the results will be undesirable. You will be expressing not only the real you, you will also be letting out the ventings of your robot. The real you does not want negativity, does not want to add more negativity to the world, would far prefer to never experience negativity, ever. So why do we so often express negativity, sometimes without realizing what a negative expression sits there on our face? It is a robotical phenomenon, not coming from our True Will. Call it a chemical reaction or Pavlovian conditioning or anything else you want; it is part of the problem not part of any solution.

When called upon to comment on a subject you know to be important to the people you are with, and you know going in that you differ from them on certain aspects of this subject, reveal your open-mindedness up front, and mention some of the things that have occurred to you about the subject about which you are still sorting things out. Handled this way you are inviting your friends to discuss the subject open-mindedly, which is more fun for everybody. Everyone might learn something. This method of respectful discourse is the foundation on which great civilizations have been built. When this format of openhearted discussion is lost these civilizations have crumbled. That’s how important it is to be real, and yet positive at the same time. When you disagree you can still express positivity by the way you do it, with respect and open-mindedness.

One of the best ways to move toward resolution of ideas which are being debated is by setting up experiments and objectively recording and interpreting the outcomes. This is the method of science and deserves to be applied to daily life, including politics and governance. Fact-based decision-making based on empirical observation of test results, safely testing concepts in action. This can be done at the level of small local organizations or on a global scale.

By avoiding giving your usual response, you open up the chances of creativity and learning, you rethink things. By avoiding social pressures to simply pretend to agree, yet maintaining friendliness and respect as you speak your mind, you make the world a better place, you add to the net value of the universe.

Every rule in this book (these posts will become the book Powerful Mind) has its exception cases. All 12 Keys work best when balanced together customized to the current situation you face. This integration is best done intuitively without attachment to outcomes and without fear or anger. Living in this open way rests upon a foundation of courage. Winston Churchill identified courage as the most important virtue, because all the other virtues rest upon it.

Love to all,

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Bring a Sense of the Epic into Your Life

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Volume 3, Issue 11

Science can no longer rule out the possibility that a Single Universal Intelligence is the only thing that exists, per our Theory of the Conscious Universe. Our theory explains how this Intelligence is able to simultaneously play an infinite number of chess games called lives. The You who looks out your eyes and experiences life may not be the gnomish “you” that parts of yourself — neuron clusters programmed by Accidentalism and Materialism — think you are.

Accidentalism is the religion that claims the universe came about by accident out of nothingness.

Materialism is the religion that claims everything is matter, so the human need to worship something can be directed only at material things.

My theory is not a religion. It is a system of hypotheses aimed at explaining all of documented human experience including the “paranormal”. We classify certain experiences as “paranormal” based on our limited experience in the universe as the standard for what is “normal”. And based on our mental emotional ego filters that protect us from dissonance by steadfastly refusing to make anything out of the cumulatively uncanny success rate of our own hunches, thereby trivializing our own experiences of the “paranormal”.

The explanation making the most sense to my gut is that there is only One of us. Each of us is another instance of the Universal Intelligence. All instances are really one Intelligence playing many roles.

The main thing about my theory is that I don’t want you to believe it but rather to test it for yourself. This means using it as a lens of what may in fact be true, certainly is possible, and why not see if using the lens to explain experience might not lead to more control and pleasure than the present way of looking at things?

Some might liken this to a pleasant drug-induced state of useless fantasy. It is equally plausible that the way we as a world look at things today is an unpleasant drug-induced state of useless fantasy.

At any rate, one needs merely to entertain the possibility that the entire selfness of the Universe is what looks out your eyes, which you call yourself “me”. This is logically and empirically possible based on the most predictively successful theory in history, quantum mechanics. So entertain it for a second.

Realize it is possible that you are the one self that exists, enjoying yet another life. Realize if this just happens to be the one true explanation that science and everyone will affirm some day in the future, here you are going to the movies to enjoy identifying with a fictional character who is having an epic adventure, when in fact that is just a fairy tale produced in Hollywood while your own life is a genuine, authentic, rich real life saga of a hero beset by challenges and overcoming them — just like in the movies — but real — and therefore infinitely more meaningful and dramatic.

It is possible that the One Being is you… and everyone else. Possible. Actually possible. You have been betting on a reality so far different from this, your automatic reaction is to thrust it aside with a derisive snort. That reflex is itself an interesting phenomenon deserving careful attention — put a pin in it, we will come back and dissect it often on this page in the future. Call it your daily persona, “the robot”. The name is a handle to put on that aspect of your self — the reasons will become apparent in this blog and in my books (including Mind Magic) and DVDs.

Don’t let the thrusting aside of new concepts or experiences be internally accepted. Override it by an act of will from your true self. Keep an open mind. Empirical evidence is the only thing to give weight to. Things you yourself have experienced, seen with your own eyes, not things you were told. All the philosophies and cosmologies and religions and scientific theories and my theories are just abstractions of the real thing — symbol systems, metaphors, isomorphisms (same information carried in different code). Reality is what it is. As a race we cannot say yet that we really know what it is. Therefore an open mind is the only sane position — yet another clue that the present world system is not actually sane. Acceleritis has caused EOP. Information overload has actually existed for 6000 years and just keeps getting worse, exponentially. We are dealing with it very poorly. Our society is not yet a sophisticated one. Civilization on planet Earth will be sane and sophisticated when its mind is open and each person is making careful and unfiltered observations of his/her own experience. The Observer state leading to the Flow state.

Takeaway: don’t thrust aside the undisprovable possibility that you are the hero in the most epic movie of all time… and so is everyone else.

Best to all,

Bill

PS — You Are The Universe is now on track for Summer 2013 publication. Watch this space for more.

What Is The Highest Good?

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Volume 2, Issue 13

As a philosophy major I learned to say “The Highest Good” in Latin: Summum Bonum. I had begun philosophizing as a toddler about the same subject, vaguely noting that my inarticulate intuition could not accept anything I was told as an absolute, even from those two beloved gods Ned and Sandy (my parents). Without innate acceptance of authority as absolute I was required to develop my own ideas, which uncorked a lifelong case of idearrhea. (Just kidding.)

What is the “singular and most ultimate end human beings ought to pursue”? The word “ought” is a marker that indicates one is being slipped an assumption of necessary morality, rendering the question a loaded one. Kant believed that the universe “ought” to contain God to reward the Good. Christian thought is that one “ought” to live in communion with God and according to God’s precepts. In such schools of thought, one assumes the intuition of the elders to be the last word when it comes to interpreting God’s precepts. Other schools “believe” that one is required to be one’s own interpreter of the Will of God.

Before receiving my degree I had developed my own “philosophy”. The ideas had jumbled natively in my mind before formal study enabled scholastic order if not rigor. I decided to choose aesthetics as my touchstone to the Summum Bonum, to allow my own aesthetic preferences to determine what for me would be The Highest Good. With or without God, what did I decide/intuit/feel to be the most beautiful way to handle each moment? And of God, which would be a more beautiful universe — the one with or without God? In that way I decided which hypotheses I would base my life upon. This was my rational mind, ever forgetting that the intuition is the boss of the rational mind, which dutifully articulates whatever the intuition has already decided. In EOP the robot masquerades as the intuition so convincingly that our mind is hijacked, to use Dan Goleman’s term.

My own definition of intuition is the ability to sense what is going on, to make connections and put things together, leaping across the intervening logical steps that remain to be identified by the rational mind in its quest to rationalize what the intuition already told us. Sometimes someone asks me why I did something and it takes a while to provide an adequate answer. This makes me an intuitionist in the Jungian scheme of four functions of consciousness, identified as the rational mind (thinking), intuition (cognitive feeling), feelings (bodily emotion), and perception.

Being many “-ists”, including a pragmatist, The Highest Good to me is the best conscious approach to any situation, which I see as love — omnidirectional, unconditional, and nonattached love. Such love creates the greatest long-term happiness for the greatest number, which I find aesthetically pleasing.

“Why nonattached?” one might ask. Nonattached would seem to neuter love and to make it bland and vapid. Not our intended meaning. I was using (as I usually do) the word “attached” in the Buddhist sense, which is the same as the Greek Stoic sense as in the Enchiridion of Epictetus. Where it means the losability of the things one is fond of, and thus freedom from addictive dependence upon the objects of our affection. There is utility in losability because the things that shove us down into EOP are our attachments — the ones our gut does not consider losable.

The intuition is not immune to learning from the rational mind — the intuition evolves and is not simply a static animal instinct (we have those too). But the intuition is not the part that becomes addictively attached; it’s the robot, aka ego. The ego is not our true self because our true self is the totality of everything we are and the ego is just a part of that.

What is The Highest Good to you?