How did “ourselves” come out of Mind? The answer is Mind needed someone to attest to its worth who’s credible. That would have to be someone who meets the usual standards of credibility: honesty, objectivity, and, above all, independence. They’re informed, able to reason, and therefore have the power to choose freely. Take away these attributes and you have a guy who gets on the witness stand and says whatever he’s been paid to say or whatever someone who’s taken his wife and kids hostage is forcing him to say. Mind needs someone with impeccable credentials who’s out there exercising his ability to choose among a full range of options freely, without any trace of coercion or undue influence from his Creator.
Suppose there’s a Separation Police that patrols the precincts of What Is (or isn’t). He’s looking for imposters who show up claiming that they came into Being legitimately, claiming that they have the right to exist because they’re an Answer to the Question What Shall Be, or Not Be, if Anything. I call them the Separation Police because mindlessness isn’t just the flip side of Mind, a derivative of anything. “Mindlessness” sounds like a derivative but it’s the best definition I can come up with. It’s a state that can’t be defined. It can’t even be defined as a “state” since “state” is a definition supplied by Mind. It has no definitions, no attributes that can be traced to Mind. It’s truly and thoroughly separate from Mind. And it has every right to answer the Question, just as much as Mind or anything else.
What can Mind say to the Separation Police? “I am that I am?” “I’m Being, so leave me alone?” “I’m eternal Life?” “Oneness?” “Almighty God?” Those aren’t the answers the Separation Police guy with his billy club is looking for. Unless there’s something to back them up, they’re just words. What he’s looking for is Value. Worth. These are terms that imply that the character who’s hanging around the neighborhood isn’t just loitering. He’s adding value to the neighborhood. He’s making himself useful. Moreover, he’s making himself useful to someone – someone who can step forward and speak for him, verify that he’s responding to a legitimate need and specify what that need is. Someone who can attest that Mind is valuable, needed, and truly, passionately loved. That Mind has Worth that can be freely attested to by a credible witness, a direct beneficiary of Mind’s Worth. That Mind belongs.
“Value” and “Worth” can’t be just words, either. They have to be earned. The witness who testifies to the worth of something earns his credibility by standing to gain or lose by it, by investing something of value to himself in it, by risking something, by paying for it. Without Free Choice “ourselves” can’t do this. If we’re just turned loose to hang around the neighborhood without our actions being tied to any real purpose, if we’re just programmed to do what we’re told, there’s no Free Choice, no task, and nothing of ourselves is committed to doing it. We have nothing to lose, so what’s the point? Where’s the Worth?
Mind has to be able to say to the Separation Police that its Worth is attested to by a credible source who has a legitimate role in its existence, a job to do that’s directly tied to its Worth, and is demonstrably doing it. That’s us. That’s “ourselves” who came out of Mind. We are the source the guy with the billy club needs to hear from or Mind could get booted out of the neighborhood.
We complain that our lives here on earth subject us to so much frustration and misery and what’s the point? But if we weren’t so put-upon look at it this way: there wouldn’t be any proof that whatever we were doing before we wound up here risked anything. That we had anything to lose. That we were therefore capable of creating and reciprocating Worth, the one essential part in the process and structure of Creation. All the rest of it is just words, but we aren’t. We have the Authority that only Purpose, investment, and commitment can confer, to attest to the Value of Mind, our Creator, and send the guy with the billy club on his way. Our being here in pain, fear, and misery is proof that a price was to be paid for whatever went wrong in Creation and we’re paying it.
This is one explanation for how ourselves came out of Mind. Mind literally can’t get along without us. For those among us inclined to pointlessness, to think life sucks and then we die, to think all there is to life is getting and taking, there’s a reason why we came into Being. A very good reason. It's important to keep this in mind while we languish in our dream of death, unconscious, seemingly separated from Mind, our Source, our Parents, searching for Purpose. Our purpose here is to wake up and get back to our Purpose.
Mind didn’t just give us a reason so it could be appear to be beneficent as well as “all-powerful” -- Don Vito Corleone making hangers-on, a bunch of nobodies, kiss his ring. If Mind needs its Worth to be validated it must share its Worth, and this is what it has done. We share in the Worth of Mind so that we can reciprocate Worth. Just as in the sharing and reciprocation of Love, the sharing and reciprocation of Worth is a closed loop where giving and receiving are interchangeable, indistinguishable. We receive and reciprocate Worth and Love in one seamless act. We are not the beneficiaries of a gratuitous act of generosity that reduces us to captivity and submissiveness: we are truly needed. We are important. We came out of Mind to serve a Purpose.
To those who wonder if “Mind” is too abstract, unfeeling, and therefore not Real, stick around. The story of Mind and our own story, the Story of the Child which is part of it, take on many dimensions. They are packed with emotion as well as thoughts. They are beyond relatable: they are relatability. Yes, they are metaphysics, so brace yourself. But if it’s Love you want, passion and ecstasy, it’s all here. If it’s getting on-the-ground practical you want, there is nothing in our experience of “life” that cannot trace its origins back to the Story of Mind and the Story of its Child, that cannot be explained by the Truth of Who we are and what we’re doing here as opposed to the appearances, deceptions, and distractions that make up our material world. The Stories of Mind and its Child are consequential and they are relevant.
Still doubtful? Then let me put it this way: Mind is not an “it.” Mind is a Who, not a what. There’s just no word in English that combines masculine with feminine and expresses the force and tenderness and Love that is our Being. The difficulty with relatability isn’t with Mind; it’s with our pitiful language and flawed perceptions. It’s with us.
Philosophers have wondered through the ages why Perfection bestirred itself to Create. They assumed that “Perfection” has a nice comfort zone where it can spend its days in undisturbed contemplation, watching shadows play upon the barn from the setting sun, admiring hummingbirds hovering at the bird feeder, without a care in the world. They weren’t thinking. With mindlessness in the offing, there is no such “Perfection.” There are two answers to the Question and we and our Source, Mind, are only one of them. There is no easy-chair pipe-smoking “Perfection.” There is only Cause, the Cause is Being, and Being needs us, our Free Will, to join the Cause -- to attest to its Worth. Period.