Tag Archives: Self

Embrace the High Path

Powerful Mind Part 22
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog – September 20, 2024
Created August 4, 2023

Read Powerful Mind 21

This begins the introduction to Powerful Mind Key #4.

Don’t Ignore the Ultimate Questions

Why is there a universe at all? Who am I? Why am I here? What am I doing here? “What’s it all about, Alfie?” (from the song “Alfie” written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David for the 1966 film Alfie.)


Read “Alfie” lyrics

As little children first realizing these questions for ourselves, we are awed. We might experience an oxytocin rush, with the hair at the base of our neck standing up and chills up and down our spine.

The vast majority of us eventually give up on these questions as unanswerable. We don’t see how those ultimate questions relate to our day to day lives. However, they do relate to our everyday lives. In ways that we are not aware of, the hidden assumptions we make about these ultimate questions leave us with very little motivation to act nobly, and so our lives tend to devolve into a form of quiet desperation (Thoreau) I call Emergency Oversimplification Procedure (EOP).

Coming full circle, returning back to our childhood perspective of awe and wonder, is to be reborn. The benefits will be at least as strong as each of the Keys we have already shared and those to follow.

As a starting point let’s go back to the greatest, most advanced and sophisticated scientists we have ever produced, in all of the recorded history of the only civilization on Earth of which we have present knowledge: Einstein, Wheeler, and Hawking.

In my book A Theory of Everything Including Consciousness and “God” (I refer to it as “ATOE”) I present a more complete account of the final theories of Einstein and Wheeler, which I’ll therefore only very briefly summarize here.

Einstein felt certain that the universe is evidence of an intelligence far greater than our own. An intelligence that our own intelligence can learn to understand! This gave Einstein those oxytocin thrills all his life through childhood and adulthood.

Wheeler postulated that the universe originally existed as probability waves, and evolved consciousness which collapses the probability waves into the matter energy spacetime universe that we who have consciousness all experience. He coined the term “Anthropic Participatory Principle” to mean that we who have consciousness are participating in the creation of the universe of which we are a part.

Both scientists were comfortable in making the obvious assumption that the universe can be thought of and described as one thing, of which we the observers and co-creators are intrinsic parts. That acceptance by philosophers and scientists that the universe can be cognized as a single thing is a thread running through all history of thought, going back to long before the Rig Veda in the East and Thales in the West.

When considering the ultimate questions, it helps to begin there, letting one’s mind envision the universe as one thing.

“Visualize the whole universe as one thing
Every individual of every species
Every idea
Every event
Every moment of time
Every percept
Every lump of matter and energy
All parts of one thing.”
  —Mind Magic, Page ix

In his last book Brief Answers To The Big Questions, in which he shares his final thoughts, Stephen Hawking writes: “In 1980, I said I thought there was a 50-50 chance that we would discover a complete unified theory in the next twenty years. We have made some remarkable progress in the period since then, but the final theory seems about the same distance away.”

Perhaps this is because we have been averse to considering certain possibilities due to biases we don’t realize we have.

For one thing, except for Wheeler, and to some extent Einstein with his thought experiments involving “the observer” (consciousness in the act of taking measurements), consciousness has been left out of all the proposed unified field theories of the last 100 years.

What if consciousness is the missing piece without which no one will ever discover a complete unified theory of physics?

Wheeler is the one of these three giants who came closest to achieving the inclusion of consciousness in his overarching theory of reality. In his stated view, the universe came first, and consisted of quantum foam in which virtual particles flickered in and out of existence, and then, as if to be appreciated, this universe developed an audience: consciousness in sentient living things.

Hawking refers to the Anthropic Principle a number of times in his final book. He points out that there might be an infinite number of universes, and in our universe, all of the conditions are conducive to the development of intelligent life, but we shouldn’t make too much of that, because we are the intelligent life forms lucky to have been born into one of the universes whose conditions supported the development of intelligent life. So of course to us we would assume consciousness to be a necessary ingredient to achieve a universe of actual hard events rather than mere probabilities. But Hawking wants us to leave open the possibility that other universes might exist too, with intelligence and consciousness never developing in them, perhaps collapsing probability waves into concrete things and determined events by some other means besides consciousness.

What if consciousness came first? This is one direction that has not been sufficiently explored by the greats of physics.

If consciousness came first, to me, everything falls neatly into place. A number of science writers in this 21st Century have written articles asking if we might all be living in a giant computer simulation. This is a very similar idea to my Theory Of The Conscious Universe, which is summarized in ATOE and explained in the most speculative detail in my book You Are The Universe. As Wheeler noted, information appears to be more basic to the universe than matter energy spacetime; he called this his “Bits Before Its” principle. Information is the stuff that goes through computers, and through consciousness.

We may be on the edge of the next great leap in physics, a world in which the universe is accepted to be intelligent, and each of us is an intrinsic part of that universe. This worldview, which I believe will be verified scientifically down the road a bit, will totally change the way we relate to one another. Even having an open mind about this possibility will have positive effects on how people deal with each other, and how well the world works.

When you look inside yourself, you may see that you have already formed certain assumptions contradictory to this view of a unified conscious universe. Living in the times that we are living through right now, with so much divisiveness and violent competition and hatred, the idea that we might all be parts of a single consciousness may seem preposterous, and we have been quick to slap the labels “superstition” and “magical thinking” on all such ideas – except when people like Einstein and Wheeler talk that way.

Opening the mind to such a possibility leads to self-questioning about how does one act if we ourself might actually turn out to be part of one consciousness? We actually have several choices.

  1. “Reject”: reject these ideas entirely and go on with your life as before (you already know this is not my advice from past blogposts).
  2. “Hedge”: continue to follow your past patterns (you already know this is not my advice from past blogposts) but just in case it might turn out to be true that we are all one thing together, try a little harder to get along with others.
  3. “Embrace”: embrace the high path. Act the way you would if you are betting on the One Consciousness Universe. Take yourself seriously. Act with purpose. Leave the world a better place than you found it. Pay close attention to your own subtle hunches. Reconsider everything carefully and mindfully. Treat others as you would like to be treated. Take responsibility. Protect others. Set a good example. Rise above negativity.

Divinity

 What is the meaning of the word “divinity”? The dictionaries give circular definitions, and come close to being more specific by using words like “godlike” and “holiness”, but fall short of explaining what it means to be godlike or holy or divine.

Teleology (from the Greek for “targeting”) is a word which philosophers use to suppose that the universe might have a preferred direction as to where it is going. This presupposes the consciousness and intelligence of such a universe.

Although Wheeler specifically assumed that the universe began without consciousness, his discussion of the Participatory Anthropic Principle (see ATOE) implies that the universe purposely moved toward the development of consciousness. What it seems like Wheeler overlooked is that intelligence and consciousness must have been present from the beginning in the universe, if teleology was evidenced by the universe’s preference for developing consciousness somewhere within its parts later on.

I don’t think Wheeler overlooked that. I think he didn’t want to go up against the orthodoxy to that degree. Science for the last few hundred years has implicitly avoided anything besides a materialistic conception, and this is the main reason why it has avoided dealing with consciousness this long.

What is divinity if not the universe having purpose?

If the universe has purpose, then we as parts of the universe, we too have purpose. We too are divine.

Self Divinity

 Self Divinity is the predisposition to treat oneself with the utmost respect, and to also do the same for all others, including animals and even inanimate objects. This is one facet of taking the High Path.

It’s hard to imagine that having such a predisposition could get us into more trouble on a practical level than we are already in. On the other hand, most of us recognize that we are all already in deep trouble, and perhaps treating others and oneself as divine could help dig us out of the deep troubles we’ve created for ourselves by centuries of rapid weapon advancement and widespread labelling of everything but materialism as superstitious magical thinking.

No course in personal effectiveness could be complete while making a wide detour around these sensitive subjects. And so we will go deeper into this 4th Key.

Love to all,
Bill

 

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Shift in Perspective

Powerful Mind Part 24

Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog, September 13, 2024
Created August 18, 2023
Read Powerful Mind 23

Possibly the most pervasive hidden assumption we all make without thinking twice is that we are each a separate entity.

Science has neither proven nor disproven that we are each a separate being. Science has perhaps not given much attention to this at all. The numerous scientists I have met besides myself appear to have this hidden assumption too.

If, however, my Theory of the Conscious Universe happens to be right, this hidden assumption is wrong. My theory likens consciousness to a self-aware (sentient) computer made out of energy. A type of energy that science has not yet accounted for, which I call psionic energy, presuming a quantum of that energy called a psion. I speculate that psions are a species of tachyons, i.e. they move at faster than light speed.

Robert Anton Heinlein wrote a novel Time for the Stars in which telepathy between identical twins is used for instantaneous communication between Earth and its starships ranging out to other stars and even to other galaxies, where light and radio waves take years and even millennia to travel back to Earth. A neuroscientist friend of mine is doing basic work in this area right now, seeking to determine first if there really is telepathy.

Both consciousness and computers process information. John Archibald Wheeler, who trained many of today’s top physicists, in his “Bits Before Its” theory, postulated that information is the substrate of the universe.

This aligns with my Theory of the Conscious Universe, which came to me before I read Wheeler’s work, and coincides with Wheeler’s theories in all particulars except one: Wheeler has quantum foam, probability waves, and virtual particles pre-existing consciousness which freezes the probabilities into certainties called matter and energy existing within a field of spacetime.

Where I differ with Wheeler is that I postulate that his quantum foam, probability waves, and virtual particles are the information processing of the universe’s consciousness. The foam, probabilities and virtual particles are the thoughts, feelings, images and other qualia arising within the Master Mindfield. I have used initial caps to signify my respect for the Universal Mind.

If we are avatars in a “videogame” the One Self is playing, then our real identity is that of the whole universe. We are a phenomenon representing the universe itself, as each of our cells is a part of us.

This relationship of sameness and “partness” with the parent universe has a pragmatically beneficial implication: the universe has every reason in the world to be benevolent toward us, as we are part of it. If my theory is correct, death is not the end, and the direction of the play we are acting in is toward a happier future, as the universe itself is invested in our success.

Then how bizarre we must seem in our hisandherstory to observers out in space who know the truth. The One Self understands us from the inside and outside and so the explanation is there to eliminate the sense of the bizarre, yet even from the point of view of the universe we probably seem like deviate savages.

We can imagine Earth in another timeline where the human inhabitants could tell right away that they were all part of The One Consciousness. They would not have invented war and weapons, nor even business competition, they would have been very cooperative with one another, and kinder to animals and plants and even to minerals and bodies of water.

Perhaps The One Self considers that timeline somewhat boring compared to ours whose nastiness might be considered an acceptable cost for the greater sense of adventure we bring. More likely, the universe is helping us to learn to evolve out of our present state, where we have turned a heavenly planet into a somewhat hellish one at the moment.

As I have sought to logically prove here before, science has not yet verified (or even figured out how to verify) my theory. Nor has science proven Materialistic Accidentalism. Therefore if each of us is to behave so as to make our own actions appropriate, whether the universe is a free-for-all of separate beings or all one being, we need to make a shift in our perspective every moment of our lives from now on.

The pragmatic benefits of this open-mindedness include the reduction in causing unpleasant things to happen to us because we expected them and unconsciously brought them upon ourselves. Instead, we shall leave open the possibility that Wheeler and I are both right in saying that our minds affect reality, and so we shall use our minds to focus on what we want to have happen, and not to dwell obsessively on what we fear will happen.

How might we attain this shift in perspective, down at the operational level?

 Identifying With All You Perceive

Kabbalah, Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, and Kashmir Shaivism are among the many philosophies which predate, predict, and align with my Theory of the Conscious Universe. A practitioner who totally gets these philosophies no longer looks out his/her eyes identifying with their own body/mind as themselves, they look out and identify with everything they experience, inside and outside. “I Am That” is a sacred/holy trigger phrase that crops up in almost every such tradition. It is a reminder to not identify with the illusional separate self, but with everything in the experience bubble moment to moment.

Nobility

A noble person is one who is unselfish, fair-minded, unbiased, and morally good. These traits emerge as organically natural to one who identifies with all he or she experiences, rather than identifying with only the one body seemingly being occupied by the individual consciousness. That body is just the self-propelled tripod (actually bipod) for the current camera one is inhabiting at the moment in the play.

In ancient times there were occasional good and noble kings and queens who identified with the people whom they served, protected, and took care of. The noble kings and queens had typically been trained in spiritual philosophies.

In present times, in movies and television/streaming series, and occasionally in real life even today, we call such people “heroes” and “heroines.” Their every action proves convincingly that they care about others. Unfortunately, there is not enough of this going on. You can make a difference there.

In your experience bubble with other people, strive for all to win, not just your own bipod to win.

Positive and Negative Feedback Loops

“If your motives are truly for ‘the good of all,’
this will be sensed by others
and they will cooperate with you,
lending their energies to your actions.
If your motives are to simulate selflessness
in order to gain power for your self,
this will be sensed by others
and they will tend to not cooperate with you,
lending their energies to the muffling of your actions.”
Mind Magic, Page 222

 Accept What Is


View time: 37 seconds

Becoming upset is railing against the universe – one’s larger Self. If something is happening or has happened that means the universe let it happen. Your taking umbrage at such happenings is fighting city hall in the largest possible sense – making no sense at all.

A superior response is to accept what is and work on figuring out what to do about it that will bring the most happiness to the most people as soon as possible. Armed with a smile your plans will stand a much better chance of sooner success. Even if your plan will probably not see fast results there is still no better course of action for you to take until you think of a new plan that could see faster positive results.

You may be in a hellish situation but if you accept it is what it is with a smile and take it as a creative challenge, you will do yourself and everyone else more good, than by taking any other strategic course of action.

Love,
Bill

 

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Superfluous Superstructure of the Self

June 7, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog

We all pay some attention to our inner lives. But for some of us this means sustained micro-observation and for most of us it is occasional flashes in between slavish addiction to the endless rushes of information coming in through our five fascinating physical senses.

This tsunami of infobits roaring in has itself escalated over time, causing even more outward focus.

But even 2500 years ago, Aristotle made the same observation, commenting that the unobserved life is not worth living. He was trying to get more people to turn inward. His teacher’s teacher Socrates had started the whole thing by his exhortation “Know Thyself”. (Socrates had inspired Plato with whom Aristotle studied.)

The greatest philosophers and psychologists of all time were all practiced at inner micro-observation. This was especially true in ancient India, and for example, metacognition is at the core of Buddha’s teachings. In the modern era this includes William James, perhaps the best of them all at concentrated introspection, as well as Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Abraham Maslow. Freud however was more of a rationalist, deducing things logically, whereas Jung was more of an intuitionist, taking the original feelings arising in his cognition without embellishing them with rational overlays as much as Freud did.

A long time ago by introspection I realized that thoughts do not arise as thoughts but as feelings, and then the cognitive affective processes embellish those feelings with attributed meanings, interpretations, often involving images, metaphors, and words, at which point they are truly what we all call thoughts.

This has recently been discovered by science, decades and millennia after the same insight was available to each of us by micro-inner-observation.

It will help you attain metacognition to imagine that your inner space has a map. At the pure core of your being imagine that you have a center, something like an energy or a gas, that you can sense. In higher states of consciousness such as the spiritual level of Flow state you can see this self of yours as light, often bluish. Most of the time you can only feel it.

Imagine now in this map that there is another part of yourself that you yourself have built over time, a superstructure that is overlaid on top of the central sphere of your selfness. Suspend disbelief for the sake of argument, and for the moment consider my theory that this part of you is akin to an artificial intelligence (AI) that has a physical underpinning of neurons and their interconnections in your brain and nervous system, specific neurons and interconnections which were caused by your experiences, especially where there were degrees of emotion and assimilated “learning”. The word “learning” is in quotes because much of this was mis-learning.

The entire superstructure taken together corresponds to what Freud termed the Ego.

This superstructure uses a substantial part of your mental energy but the return on that energy investment tends to be negative. The expenditure of this incremental cognitive load tends to do you a lot more harm than good.

Freud said that this appurtenance was called into being when the baby first experiences frustration at not getting what it wants or needs. It functions as the security officer (Worf in Star Trek) and press agent, business manager, negotiation agent, sales rep for what Freud called the Id, and I refer to above as your core beingness.

The reason I say Freud was more of a rationalist is that when I introspect into my Id or core essence self I do not find the animal selfishness and limitation to hardwired instinct that Freud said I would find there. Instead I find a happy lightness of being that is not needy but is caring and fascinated.

Try this experiment and I feel that you will totally get what I’m saying and can add it to your personal strength arsenal.

  • Take your place in your core, the pure witness, the observer.
  • From that vantage point, simply observe the feelings that arise in your superstructure.
  • You will sense the apparent duality in you at that point, probably a realization of your own indifference and yet interest in these ego feelings.
  • This higher feeling is the most important key to metacognition.

You may have experienced this many times in your life, and it may have come about by temporarily hitting bottom. When you have been pushed around by life and have not seen the lesson the universe intended, you may in your frustration, resentment and rage just say to yourself that you give up, you just don’t care anymore.

When this happened to Bucky Fuller – heartbroken by unrequited love – he decided to commit suicide. Once he did that he was in his core self, looking at all of the superstructural self he had built, disillusioned in a good way by all that stuff, having just given it all up. He now discovered no reason to end his life, for a new better version of it was just beginning. He then became the Bucky Fuller genius we all remember.

You can practice this core self-perspective any time you want, for a few seconds or minutes or extended periods, even continuously for the rest of your life.

The essence of the feeling is that you are above all the nigglings in your superstructure. It’s only habit which has made you so vulnerable to those sudden feelings of worthlessness, fear, anxiety, defeatism, hatred, envy, resentment, and so on which have become automatic and super powerful.

Habits reinforced by hundreds of thousands of repetitions in your life do not pack up and go away right away. They will sometimes come back and even overpower you sometimes. But once you have learned to identify with your core and not your superstructure you are on the high road to true freedom. Keep practicing this Observer state and you cannot lose.

My best to all,
Bill

 

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Perspective

Created March 8, 2024
Welcome to this week’s Bill Harvey Blog.

Perspective is very helpful in dealing with the present historic moment…These are the times that test what we’ve got. Each of us…
It’s time to be that best version of yourself.
Let the highest part of you come out now. This is The Moment.

My friend arrived and put down his bag and took off his scarf and coat and sat on the banquette seat I’d saved for him. I asked him in a cheery voice how he was, expecting his usual enthusiastic answer, and he made ambiguous body language.

“How are you feeling?” I asked, still upbeat.

“Overwhelmed,” he admitted.

“By…”

“By the cold, all the news, and age!” he specified.

I contemplated his answer. “I’m with you on all of that.”

“I was just reading The New York Times, and every story is bad news. I used to be able to find one or two ‘good news’ stories in every issue.”

“I’ve been advising cutting down on the news and all other media that brings you down.” He nodded in violent agreement. We ordered lunch.

“How do you deal with those things?” he asked.

“You know, my take on the universe is that we are all one unkillable consciousness. That on Earth you and I are part of a free will experiment the conscious intelligent universe is doing. It is that Intelligence which looks out our eyes as us.” He nodded, chewing, having heard this from me before, in other language.

“I feel certain that the test we are undergoing will teach us wisdom of immense value. I write to help bring an end to suffering. I feel great sadness for those suffering, but I can’t let that affect my effectiveness on their behalf.”

He knew me from a long way back and knew that was what I say whenever there’s an opening. Never the exact same words, but always the same idea we are One Consciousness. He also knows that is my best guess as to what is really going on and that I live my life within this picture of reality.

If I’m wrong, then so is Einstein; neither of us believe that this complexity has all put itself together completely by accidental collisions, without the inescapable logical necessity of prior Intelligence.

We ourselves are a micro model of the Conscious Intelligent Universe – we are a consciousness so we know intimately what such a thing is.

And we know therefore that it is possible for there to be a consciousness.

Therefore it is totally illogical to state that a much larger version of the same thing “cannot possibly exist.”

My view of reality has an equal chance of being either true or false.

The same is true of any other view of reality now on the table.

Until your next death, when you gain important evidence, or simply cease to be able to experience knowing. Maybe then you’ll find out my “guess” or “prophecy” was right or not.

In any case, the real question is how to deal with the frightening omens and general sense of alarm. How to remain on a positive course, and learn from the challenges now appearing.

Stoic philosophers were the first to write down their ideas for dealing with horrific circumstances, and the Spartans largely demonstrated stoicism in action, except when they didn’t. At least they proved that it is humanly possible to zoom back far enough out of oneself to grok the universe is going to do stuff and we are supposed to rise to the occasion and to control our inner reaction to whatever befalls us externally.

Epictetus didn’t link his exhortations to any cosmological theory, he relied upon common sense. He implied that who knows what the universe really is, what we know is that we undergo severe trials here in reality and we need to understand the best way to deal with them. We can choose to take a different emotional reaction to our favorite cup being broken. It works with practice, will does develop.

Perspective is very helpful to me in dealing with the present historic moment.

This is as big as WWII. Even if we avert war but remain at battle stations for the rest of our lives.

Or, we come out of this into a reasonable facsimile of utopia.

These are the times that test what we’ve got. Each of us.

This is the cold water in the face wakeup call that God – the Conscious Intelligent Universe – is watching, and it’s time to be that best version of yourself. Let the highest part of you come out now. This is The Moment.

Love to all,
Bill