An Interview with Bill Harvey: Author of Powerful Mind

Born into a showbiz family, Bill Harvey went from performing on stage as a young child, where he experienced Flow state – that space where innovative and successful ideas and actions flow effortlessly – to becoming a media industry legend, receiving an Emmy and several other awards.

Bill liked the feeling of being “on” while performing, and wanted to learn how to be “on” more often – and so began his lifelong quest to understand how to bring on higher states of consciousness and to help others do the same.

Earning his degree in philosophy, Bill founded the Human Effectiveness Institute to share the consciousness techniques he had learned and developed. His ideas were further inspired by Alan Watts, Buddhism, and Zen, as well as by his parents and his adopted older brother, Bill Heyer.

Bill’s first book, Mind Magic: Doorways into Higher Consciousness, published in 1976, is now in its sixth edition, with a seventh edition in production.

He is the author of three more nonfiction books:

You Are the Universe: Imagine That
A Theory of Everything including Consciousness and “God”
Powerful Mind: 12 Simple Keys

Turning to fiction, Bill conceived the epic sci-fi series, Agents of Cosmic Intelligence. The first four published books in the series (of fifteen planned titles) are:

The Great Being
The First Son
The Message
Pandemonium: Live to All Devices

All of Bill’s books focus on helping individuals become more effective. In his nonfiction books, he includes experiments readers can try, which could lead them to discover that their hunches are meaningful and that the universe might be giving each of us clues. In his fiction books, he demonstrates his characters’ strengths in action and zooms in on their inner processes.

Bill’s worldview is open-minded, scientific, and inclusive of the possibility that the universe is conscious, that each of us experiences the universe’s consciousness as our own, and that reality, at its core, is consciousness.
Bill lives with his wife Lalita in New York’s beautiful Hudson Valley.

Tell us about your book.

Powerful Mind is primarily a set of twelve keys, short phrases to remind us how to be ourselves and not imitative robots that have been conditioned to act certain ways. I wrote the book intending for it to be an enjoyable, stimulating, and easy read, connecting the twelve keys to concepts and historical events that all of us know something about. It starts by explaining how we came to be molded a certain way by other people and other influences without realizing it, until one day we find ourselves wondering who we really are. The book aims to guide readers to discover the answer to that question. And to then restart their lives with a plan to do their passion work and share their unique gifts with society. It’s a book about giving ourselves a second chance at doing life.

Why did you want to write a book?

I wanted to share the techniques I discovered worked for me to find my passion work and to plan and execute my career to do the most good and have the most fun doing it. I feel it is incumbent on me to write this book and get it to as many people as possible because I believe it can make a difference at a time when something is definitely needed to jolt us out of hopelessness, cynicism, and pessimism.

My earlier book, Mind Magic, covered the same ground but did so without establishing any context or framework to help the reader understand the big picture of how these mental and emotional techniques relate to problems in the world today. Powerful Mind adds that perspective to the techniques themselves, explained this time with great care to answer questions readers might have had while reading Mind Magic.

Tell us about the genre you wrote in, and why you chose to write this sort of book.

While Powerful Mind is a book about personal growth, it’s also about philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. I feel that our fullest growth will come by including the big questions of what this universe is and what our place in it is. The book addresses those questions from a commonsense viewpoint, and also discusses quantum physics, spirituality in its many forms, how the mind works, and how the brain works.

From this vantage point, the book establishes a grounding map of three levels of consciousness: the robotic state, the metacognitive state, and the Flow state, and how and why we shift among them based on our thoughts, feelings, and actions—and most importantly, how to take over mastery of that process rather than being a pawn of it. Again, I chose to write this book because I sensed that such a book is needed, and with others writing books aimed at freeing us from closed, conditioned minds, it’s as if the universe is saying it’s time for this newest level of insight to become available to everyone.

Who are your biggest writing inspirations and why?

I was deeply influenced by Robert A. Heinlein as a child and throughout my life. Still, there have been so many others, William Shakespeare, Epictetus, Stendhal, Dostoevsky, Camus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and modern writers such as Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Thomas Pynchon… the list is enormous, and I find writers every week who inspire me and whose work I had not read before. One reason they all inspire me is the beauty of their writing and the way they create immersive new worlds of vicarious experience.

Another reason is that I can almost feel like I am them when they hit a streak of obvious Flow state. For some of them, including especially Shakespeare and Heinlein, it is also the message they convey about the meaning of life. Heinlein wrote what the trade calls “juveniles” because he wanted to help young people grow up. I feel that troubled youth today could benefit hugely from reading the Heinlein books I read as a child, and that inspires me to do the same as he did, subtly slipping in what I see as messages of great importance without upsetting the delicate balance of the fiction flow.

What are your plans now that your book is published?

I plan to make personal appearances, both live and in the media, to spread the message of Powerful Mind even to people who might never read the book.

Why did you write about this particular subject?

It’s my dharma, my mission. I have felt called to it since I was a young child. Writing about the mind, purpose, life, and the universe has been my constant avocation throughout my life. It’s what I’m here to do.

What inspired you to write this book?

Over three thousand people have written to me over the years about how my book Mind Magic changed their lives for the better, and yet I can see how that book simply laid out the techniques without explaining why they were important in the context of society at large. I needed to write Powerful Mind not only to help people cast off the invisible enslavement to their own conditioning, but also to think about how to make themselves more effective in helping civilization preempt another dark age, which has been creeping toward us and has already darkened minds and shrunken spirits.

What’s the main reason someone really should read this book?

It will help them spend more time in the Observer state, allowing them to detach from negative emotions, creatively respond to challenges with courage and enthusiasm, and eventually enter the Flow state. They will be more effective and able to steer their lives and careers in line with their gifts to the world. And they will find greater happiness in their lives.

Is there something in particular that motivates you (fame? fortune?)

I want to help, and this is the best way I can contribute. Others can do it in their own ways. Deep down inside, I feel that each of us would like to help all of us win.