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Published on Leave a comment on Finding Ourselves in the Comfort and Assurance of Inner Space

Gort’s hairstyle 

I’ve turned up the volume on heavy metal and I’ve got my earphones on. You may proceed, weirdboob alien. “I come in peace. I am your friend. I mean you no harm. Bakbakbak.” This guy is no “friend” and he’s only here to do us harm. Just another outer space alien. Harm like getting us out of the way so his kind can steal our planet’s valuables. And vaporize its inhabitants with ray gun blasters they bought at Target. Should I be scared?

Outer space boobs are “outer space” because they’re missing something. Yeah. Gort and his death ray. Inner space. Huh? I’m doing fine with outer space. If your inner space is gathering dust and cobwebs in the basement you wouldn’t know. Really? Inner space is where we monitor our performance so we don’t get on stage with a bad act. Where we introspect. Reflect and check in with our conscience. The boundaries between what’s OK and what’s not OK. That equip us with judgment and discipline.

Why would anyone need to do that if they’re already perfect? A serious question if it’s not a joke. Because some of us do think we’re perfect. Silly! No one’s perfect. Imagine saying “Gort, old boy, let’s let our hair down and get better acquainted with ourselves. So we can be nicer and feel just a little bad about evaporating everything with our death ray.” Gort’s visor would start to open. You would see his beady eyes and become incontinent. Yes. He’d have to remove his helmet with the visor to let his hair down. Outer space boobs don’t have hair. He’d be embarrassed. I was wondering why the aliens in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” didn’t have combs. You can’t get a hair brush anywhere on Mars. That’s what disqualified me from going there. 

Gort and Fifi’s webinar on accountability 

The difference between human and animal is the difference between having and not having an inner space. Wild animals do fine without introspecting or reflecting, reasoning or choosing, judging between right and wrong. Instinct takes care of that. Domesticating them doesn’t give them an inner space. Doesn’t humanize them. It just adds more things for them to want or fear. When Fifi seemed out of sorts I took her to a veterinarian. I’ll bet you didn’t know vets aren’t trained in Freudian psychoanalysis. Poor Fifi! She just needs someone to listen to her whimpering.

Gort and Fifi can’t join us for a webinar on accountability without an inner space. Not if all they know is worlds inaccessible to humans. Without an inner space there’s nowhere they can even think about it. Then how can humans without an inner space keep from leveling Manhattan with their death rays? They do what animals do: whatever their herd does. Without an inner space for guidance they rely on herd mentality. A substitute for the inner moral compass, the judgment, they’re missing. What “everyone else does.” They become “good” by becoming agreeable, sociable. Being “likeable” especially since then their herd will think they’re “good.”

And then the trouble starts

How can a human be “human” and not have an inner space? Gort and Fifi don’t need an inner space because of what they are, what their use is. A human’s usefulness requires an inner space because it requires choice. All our faculties of mind are there to enable us to do what we are, to choose. To learn to choose freely once we’ve aware of who we are and what we’re doing here. Because that’s the only way choice can be “free,” and we’re still trying to figure that out. So with or without an inner space we adapt.

Like evolution? Yes. To whatever we need that’s inaccessible. Like an inner space that’s there but inaccessible when a human’s mind can’t find it. What would make it inaccessible? Different things. For example, finding anything requires judgment able to recognize boundaries. Able to navigate because it has coordinates, and not all minds, not all personalities, have judgment. So they adapt. They get in step with their herd’s “judgment.” Seeking the precision of schools of fish moving in unison. And then the trouble starts. Why? 

The solution to self-evaluation: perfection 

If we can’t imagine having a soul-searching conversation with Gort or Fifi, try imagining it with one of the fish. I could with a skillet and the right seasoning. The fish has forfeited any pretense of independent judgment to its school. And when you engage with it, you’ll be engaging with the school. And if you persist in relating to an individual fish you might find your delicate ballet-dancer anchovy is a shark. It’s made itself inaccessible to one-on-one relationship. The only “relationship” possible is if you give up your individuality and join its school. I’m already sick of school, so forget it.

“Herd mentality” is another term for animal instinct or will. Will that doesn’t need reasoning or choosing to act. Your wild Siberian tiger is a compelling ideal: a herd of wild beasts transformed into a single, all-powerful King of Beasts. Exquisitely beautiful and answerable to no one. That’s me! The opposite of “sociable.” Freed from all limits. Infinitely free. Infinitely powerful. Don’t stop! A human missing judgment and boundaries of her own can’t live this ideal and submit to self-evaluation too. So she deflects it by adopting her ideal’s perfection. By being “perfect.” “I’m perfect” says “I can’t be questioned.” “I can’t be criticized. And if I am there’s something wrong with you. It’s your fault.”

Permanently on probation

Another example of how human inner spaces are blocked is when inner space is too full of judgment instead of empty. Too much judging and too many boundaries. The wrong kind of “judgment” that’s judgmental. That mischaracterizes acts as justification for blame instead of guidance for navigation. For blaming the human herself. So that all “inner space” is to her is the “judgment” of self-blame. Not a good feeling.

Not at all. Anyone might feel compelled to project the feeling and guilt along with it onto others. By taking refuge in “perfection” beyond criticism. By shifting accountability for any “imperfection” onto someone else if they dare to question it. The internal pressure of negative judgment makes her “sociability” less protective than the other kind’s. Needing to control the pressure is her first priority, so sociability gives way to unsociability pretty fast. Especially true if you’re an authority figure like a parent, or a child who resists conformity, because they can jack up the pressure. Putting them permanently on probation.

Stuck in outer space

And this is all because of inner space? Whether inner space is blocked by lack of judgment and boundaries or by too much judgment and too many boundaries, the solution to the fixes the individuals wind up in is accessing their inner space. They can’t be “sociable” if what’s driving them is anti-social. They can’t be “friends” if the way they’ve adapted to their conditions is to become not-friends. There is no work-around for inaccessibility if there’s no inner space for your inner space to connect with. If all you or I or the other person have to offer is some version of outer space, we will be giving up any possibility of friendship that’s intimate, trusting, and loving.

So the choice is between inner and outer space. It’s between being a person with both spaces or a one-dimensional cartoon character. Unrelatable and to be avoided because, much as we may love them, they can’t be there with us emotionally or for us either. They’re somewhere else, stuck in outer space.

Nice kitty!

There are other perspectives, other explanations that might work better for you. This one helps me sympathize with others obstructed by conditions they’re not responsible for. Who want to be good just as much as I do. So if they misjudge me maybe they can’t help it. Misjudging them just makes things worse. You love them anyway.

We can love others for who they are even if what they do hurts us. But understanding why a wild Siberian tiger is dangerous doesn’t make it safe to be around. Let it roam free in its imaginary wilderness where it can’t hurt anyone. It doesn’t belong in relationships where it can hurt. I can’t bring my nice kitty into my friendships? You can if having a nice kitty means more to you than having a friend. Your friend will eventually be bitten and that will be the end of that. 

Into an unshared world of not-sharing

Our eyes are good at seeing appearances – what’s on the surface. Another kind of vision helps us see what’s beneath the surface, where the real “action” is. The desires and fears, the satisfactions and frustrations that motivate us. That make us human and determine how things work out. A good reason to access our inner space because that’s where this vision is. The ability to detect with intuition the truth behind assurances that an outer space invader is our “friend.” Or a wild beast is “safe.” The ability to connect with another perspective that is our friend and can see what we can’t.

Outer space has invaded inner space. Inner space is Psyche, guiding us with truth, innocence, and trust. Outer space is the wrong guide: mischaracterization, guilt, and deceit. Luring us with unlimited power and freedom, promises too good to be true. We can’t get rid of it while we’re in this situation but we can manage it. So we can distinguish between what’s OK and not OK, what’s loving kindness and what’s not, without its interference. With the right kind of judgment and boundaries that make sense of things.

The instinct of a wild Siberian tiger is to resist all boundaries. It fears inner space where its wildness will be limited by conscience, empathy, judgment, and discipline. The qualities that make us human, relatable. Wildness is not-human, the opposite of relatable. What needs to be resisted isn’t inner space. It’s bad advice from the invader, outer space. Luring us out of our shared world of sharing into an unshared world of not-sharing. Ruled by herd mentality. Self-centered and selfish.

Can we still be friends?

Inner space is the gyroscope that keeps us oriented when circumstances toss us about. Like stormy seas making us seasick. It’s our navigator that keeps us away from dangerous reefs. Relying on a school of fish for navigation turns thinking and feeling over to what “everyone else does.” To the school or herd that cares about itself but not much about us. Guided by animal instinct to prey on others in competition for survival and dominance. The only way to behave it “knows.” Destined eventually for defeat. For colliding with a reef.

For its members it’s the opposite of wildness. The only “freedom” they have is to change their minds and get the heck out of there. Go back to inner space and being themselves. To connecting with Guidance that does care about them and respects their individuality. That can help them get it right.

If I get it wrong can we still be friends? I’ll always love you. But friendship won’t be possible. Not if I need a person to relate to with both spaces, inner and outer. Not an insensitive, unthinking, self-centered, outer-space animal. Herds are for animals, not persons. If the human with too much “judgment” needs a better way of managing pain than dumping it onto others, the human who seeks “good” in “perfect” needs to be satisfied with good. Then maybe we can all be friends.

Thank you. My kitty and I will take it under advisement. Say goodbye to the nice man, dear.

Published on Leave a comment on Why, the Very Idea! Relationship and the Folly of One-Upmanship

Armaments for the Queen’s security detail 

Is this about relationships? Yes. Practical? I think so. How can I assist the Queen of the Universe today? Her Majesty needs help managing her relationship with an uppity ruler of one of her galaxies. Always trying to one-up her Sovereign. You need help winning life’s game of one-upmanship. Yes. One-upping the pesky nobody and her pitiful galaxy. That will do for now. Your wish is my command. That also will do for now. 

Life’s game of one-upmanship is lost from the start. Group relationships thrive on it until competition goes off the rails and they don’t. Personal relationships that tolerate it self-destruct. It’s toxic for friendships. I do so want to be friends with the pesky nobody. Why is she so mean to me? (boo-hoo). As Vince Lombardi put it, “Friendships aren’t everything. They’re the only thing.” Who’s Vince Lombardi? A disembodied voice spouting nonsense about winning. Guards! Secure your weapons! Let the fool proceed. 

It makes sense to enable friendships, no sense to disable them when they fit the situation. Why not if people disable them anyway? The point of disabling a relationship is to divide it. To prove something. What? That it’s possible to disconnect. In a world where that’s the way things are, separable and separated. Not in my Universe! My legions do their Emperor’s bidding and I bid them to knock heads together. You will be one happy family of smiling dimwits or else!

Tell that to the ruler of your rebellious galaxy -- one head that refuses to be knocked. Careful, O wise one. My guards are provisioned with guillotines and stink bombs. I’m not the only one listening. 

On today’s menu: mashed ideas with gravy 

The universe proclaims its pointlessness. Things not fitting together or when they do, they come apart. Science tells us that life originated with happenstance composed of happenstances. Accidents. Random events. Chance. When it can’t be true. Can’t? No. “Everything has a reason?” Yes, if that means everything is interconnected. That stuff popping up out of the blue makes no sense. There has to be some connection. Why? The opposite of Mind that’s everything and everything that’s Mind appears to be pointless. But only because that’s its point. An appearance only since if Mind is everything and it can’t be pointless, then neither can its opposite. I’m feeling faint.

To find the sense in nonsense start with Origin, the original idea. Without putting the cart before the horse, the expression before the idea. Horses! Can we talk about that? Before a thing “exists” in any form it starts with the idea of the thing. An apple didn’t precede the idea of “apple;” it came after. The idea of “apple” doesn’t go away when you’ve eaten one, but every apple will go away if you “eat” the idea. So that’s what’s making me feel bloated! 

The Queen needs a gavel 

Making sense of things can’t be done by fitting apples and oranges together, objects with different properties. But it can be done by fitting ideas together. Thoughts, feelings, causes, ideals. What’s the difference? The expression of ideas is their use. Their application to specific circumstances in specific contexts. “Apple” is food. Ideas themselves are instances or expressions of Mind functioning. “Everything is Mind” means all ideas, all thoughts combined with feelings, originate within Mind. Mind functioning to fit every part of Creation together in one system. Whose parts function together in harmony because of how Mind originated and defined the ideas they express.

A function that Mind can’t perform if Mind itself is composed of parts going off in different directions. As though they’re subject to different wills, different definitions. One Mind is one Mind. And its ideas all emanate from the same source. Interconnected logically or there would be no order. Obviously the state of mind of my nemesis.  Mind whose thoughts are disordered can’t function.

Pointless doughnuts

You mean the origin of everything is ideas, they all originate within Mind, and they must be interrelated in logical order because they’re all of one Mind. Yes. And minds functioning that way would agree, but quite a few don’t. Stephen Hawking envisioned a boundaryless universe of spacetime-matter that needed no Mind to think or create it. Matter did it all by itself, its own origin. A pointless universe? If everything is interconnected by Logic’s implications and Love’s sharing, then there must be a point to it. Ideas can’t be what they are without making or having a point.

Everything must be defined by its function or there would be no logic, no reason, for thinking it. We are all defined by what we are for, and what we are for defines who we are. Self and function are inseparable. One and the same. Doughnuts shorten people’s lives because they’re made of shortening. My Queen rules with blinding perspicacity. Get to the point or you’ll be shortened. 

“Fate” debunked 

Every idea has its implied opposite and so does the source of opposites, Mind. That is, our source of opposites. Where Mind got it is from Origin, the state of friction from instability – opposites competing to activate Origin -- that called for Order. The seminal event in the activation of Mind and everything that followed, including Creation and the events that led to our situation. “Possibility” implies its opposite, the idea of “impossibility.” Two ideas in one that contribute to one definition: what the thing is and what it isn’t. If Mind is ideas interconnected in one orderly, functional system, its opposite will be . . . mindless disorder. Yes. Dysfunctional mind that seems composed of random happenstance, chance, fuzzy-dice “fate.”

Except that it has an organizing principle no less definitive than Mind that’s ordered. Not original thinking but derived thinking, dependent on the thing it opposes for its definition. A mirror-image opposite, put there by the object it’s reflecting in reverse. The nature of the reflection and its coming and going, all dependent on the object in front. Just as the impossibility of another “reality” is given away by being time-limited, opposite’s pose of independence – the “wildness” of spontaneity and freedom without order -- is debunked by its dependence on the order it opposes.

The opening and foreclosing of potential

Our universe can’t be pointless chance, undisciplined wildness, if it’s disciplined by what it is, an opposite. The romantic posturing of “maverick” or “rogue” notwithstanding, it’s still on a leash. Dogs! Can we talk about dogs? If they’re house-broken, of course. One-upmanship that assumes that personal relationships can be separates competing with one another is getting it wrong. Going against the grain – the way things really are.

To understand “relationship” is to understand that its origin is ideas interconnected within one Mind and pointlessness contradicted by its point: opposite. It's to understand that the cause of the idea of “relationship” is service to the power of attraction. The cause of the idea of “one-upmanship” is service to the power of opposition.

Relationship powered by attraction opens up the potential for learning and growth, competence and creativity. Limited only by the mindfulness and loving kindness – the personalities and circumstances -- of the individuals. Relationship powered by opposition to mindfulness and loving kindness, by one-sided concern for winning in one-upmanship, can’t be for anyone wanting friendship. For anyone seeking companionship and support for learning and growth, competence and creativity. It’s the foreclosing of potential. For you and me it would be toxic.

Logic and Love, Mind and Heart, are inseparable

Intoxication – that’s it! I need a drink! Guards! Get me room service! Here’s the practical. Drink! What could be more practical than drink? The origin of misunderstanding that obstructs lasting friendship is an idea. Split in two by its opposite: the inseparability of Logic and Love, thought and feeling, reasoning and evaluating. The idea personified by Mr. Spock on Star Trek, that to be “logical” is to be thought uncontaminated by emotion. The idea that to be “loving” is to be “all heart” and no mind. That thinking can’t be feeling at the same time and vice versa. That “reasoning” can’t be “objective” if it’s guided by subjective values. Put there by the boundaries of conscience set by their source, Logic and Love.

A common misconception some personalities welcome because our world doesn’t set us up to choose among different ways of sharing and creating. As though we already had the competence of Free Choice. It sets us up to choose who we want to be and what we want our lives to be about.  Whether to seek the competence of Free Choice and move on or remain stuck where we are. Whether to share and create while we’re learning or compete and conform so we can avoid learning.

Friendship is for sharing and creating. Having no interest in either, some personalities engage us anyway to amuse themselves with fun and games. With life’s game of one-upmanship. Toxicity that can’t be avoided unless Love and Logic, feeling and mind, reasoning and conscience, are kept intact together.

One-upped

You mean I can’t dazzle my subjects with personal charm and beauty alone? I can’t rule just by scaring them with ruthless insensitivity? I have to think? Think and feel, mind and heart, the discipline of judgment and compassion both.

What are you asking? Nothing. Just sharing a perspective: that queens and their subjects will always need to relate to one another and to manage their relationships. And they can’t do it without making themselves accessible as persons. Not play-acting mirror images, reflections that are all exterior and no interior, masks designed to hide what’s there or not there, but substance that’s relatable. Honest, truthful, open, vulnerable, accountable, and trustworthy.

Well, then, I have a confession. Yes? I’m not really Queen of the Universe. Really? I’m a bus driver. Torrance route #8. No! You mean I’ve been wasting my exquisite talents, my priceless wisdom, on an ordinary person? You’ve been one-upped. Good luck next time, Charlie Brown!

Published on Leave a comment on Uncle Melvin and His Niece Share Favorite Expressions

Charlie Brown and the disappearing football 

Oh good! More wit and wisdom from Uncle Melvin! “Wit and wisdom” – what a wonderful expression! But you’re early. You weren’t supposed to darken my door again until Memorial Day or my birthday. But that’s OK. The Federal Reserve Board has designated my birthday the nation’s new Memorial Day. “Darkening my door” – what a wonderful expression! Are you hard of hearing? “Hard of hearing” -- . . . . I know. What’s so wonderful about clunky expressions? 

If you were a German learning English what would you make of “darken my door?” That I was mad at her for perfuming my door with Eau de Town Dump. Do you have a favorite expression? Yes. “Don’t darken my door.” It’s what always comes to mind when I think of Uncle Melvin. I have a favorite expression too. Dare I ask? “It’s none of your business.” How rude! What’s none of my business?  My favorite expression. Well, then, why bring it up? To share one of my favorite things with one of my favorite people. Well, then, go ahead and share it. “It’s none of your business.”

I get it. You’re tricking me into a game of one-upmanship. You should know that I always win. Yes, I’ve noticed. But I still managed to fool you when we played Goats. Filling the beast in me with a lust for vengeance. I darkened your door. Losing makes me feel that way. Especially when I’m tricked into asking for something that’s not there. So cruel (sob!). Yes, when mean Lucy tricks her nice brother, Charlie Brown, by yanking the football away just as he’s kicking it. OK then. I’ll let you know my favorite expression. Finally! “It’s none of your business.”

Uncle Melvin’s new real estate investment

Time out! For what? For me to tell you what I’m thinking without you putting words into my mouth. I’m all ears. And I’m all mouth, so listen up, Uncle Melvin. Get ready for a dose of your talented niece’s wit and wisdom: 

[Talented niece’s wit and wisdom in her own words]

Well. Now I know what Essence of Town Dump smells like. Take that! Consider my door suitably darkened. By the way, what’s that dripping from your fangs? Lust for vengeance! Now, for the last time, what is your favorite expression? I can’t tell you. It makes you mad. It won’t make me mad. I promise. Maybe if I think of another expression. I’m coming apart with rage. “Get your act together.” Hey Uncle Melvin, how about “You just bought the farm”?

Published on Leave a comment on Origin’s Lesson

Flimflammery from the start 

Child’s disempowerment – its loss of Self-Awareness – would have parted it from existence in Reality-Creation, from Mind Logic-Love its Parents, if Choice itself were among its functions shut down. It had Choice because it was Choice. Like Creation and all of its parts, it was its function. Service and support for Creation’s cause. The affirmation of Spontaneity and Creativity and its Source, Mind Logic-Love. Not its obliteration by its opposite: mindless, loveless authoritarian dominance.

Since Mind-Child was an extension rather than separation from Mind -- an impossibility, -- it was still Choice that bought the Brooklyn Bridge. That grabbed the chance to own Florida real estate under water because it wasn’t free. It had been disabled. Its situation was so dire that it might have “believed” anything.

“Belief” implies choice among different possibilities or propositions that requires independent judgment if it’s to be free.  Had the Child not lost independent judgment, had it not been deluded into dependence on the “judgment” of its con-artist reflection, it would have been aware that something was amiss. That the boundaryless “paradise” tantalizing it was flimflammery from the start.

The giveaway from the start

Because needing its delusion to make it “exist,” not already “existing,” was a tipoff that it needed a beginning. A boundary at this end that required a second boundary at the other end. To satisfy its definition with ending. Bracketing a boundaryless cornucopia of promises too good to be true with boundary. Evidence enough that they are too good to be true. Contradiction so obvious that its author couldn’t have been serious.

The boundary of time. “Timeless paradise” defined by time. A deal-killing contradiction that Free Choice, functional in timelessness, could not have missed. But once it was dysfunctional and all in with hallucinating an absurdity, its projections, conceived in time, wouldn’t know the difference. Unlike Reality, the hallucination is temporal – time limited. “Temporal” means exactly that: we and our mysterious environment had a beginning and it will end.

Would Child have chosen to escape from Reality if the alternative’s ending could be its own? Non-existence by time expiring or worse, return to Reality and vengeance at the hands of enraged beasts? Authoritarian Parents now offended by their Child’s disappearance. Adding insult to its inexcusable loss of Self-Awareness, their irreplaceable gift -- an unforgiveable injury. The nightmare of Parenting by Logic-Love re-imagined as authoritarian irrational hate, meant to scare its deluded host into the “freedom” of captivity. Into the “innocence” of victimhood only to condemn it to a universe of persecution and guilt.

Waiting for the letters of transit

Hawking theorized a boundaryless universe so that the Child’s choice could have been free. So that his passion, the subject matter of physics, would defy all obstacles, all common sense, to last forever. Enshrining it in divinity and himself its agent, worthy of burial between Newton and Darwin. But neither the Child nor its hallucinating projections would buy it if they had a shred of common sense.

The grammar of our “alternate reality” is so permeated with the guideposts of time that even quantum physicists, free to calculate without them, seem reluctant to face the obvious. Once absolute in Newtonian physics, then relative in Einstein’s, demoted to a curiosity in quantum physics, time can’t be real. Just as timelessness was the Child’s reality from its origin, ours is time. And until self-unawareness – the delusion – ends, we’re stuck with it. We and our five body-brain senses. waiting, like wartime refugees in Casablanca, to get on the last plane to Lisbon.

Where Order matters

But on the other side of sixth sense, mind’s portal to another perspective, there is common sense and laughter with it. Because the idea that Mind and its works had a “beginning” necessarily implies that it will have an ending. That it’s temporal. Just another thing, like us and our mysterious universe, destined to come and go. Leaving unanswered Origin’s Question: originate what? Back to where it started.

The idea of “origin” implies to the human mind bracketed by time, handicapped by the Child’s self-delusion, that explanation, of course, must start long ago at the “beginning.” At the beginning of time. When what it must mean instead is the first principle in the sequence of Mind’s thought. In the sequence of Logic-Love, boundaryless eternity. Because that’s how Logic-Love works: implication-connection, relationship-connection, one after the other in logical sequence. Where the relationship between before and after matters. Where Order matters or nothing does.

The missing Now

The flaw in human thought that exposes irrationality: subjecting sequence to willful thinking. The same “thinking” that’s comfortable with contradiction. With “alternate facts,” the comic lunacy of a character out of Mad Magazine. The sheen of his glamour reflected in his fish-tailed ’57 DeSoto making the scene in Manhattan. Assured of acceptance into the society of the like-minded: fatuous narcissists inhabiting worlds of their own making, constructed of mirrors. Enchanted by their sophistication while holding opposing thoughts. Nitwits. Fools.

The concept of Now is so alien to the human mind that it can only be conceived in the context of time. “Now” and “eternity” are the best we can come up with, both definitions by what time isn’t. If time were Now it wouldn’t “exist.” The discovery of physics, that nowhere in the universe is it Now. Only an unsatisfying, troubling substitute: “present” that’s neither “past” nor “future.”

Begging for explanation. For if we and our universe aren’t “here” Now, where are we? Do we “exist” at all? What does exist in the Now? In timelessness? Could it make more sense than apparition “present” here today, absent tomorrow?

Brain “science” for nut jobs

Hawking and fellow tribal “realists,” Penrose, Crick, and Kristof, infatuated with body-brains, their five senses, and the universe that they sense, demand that the question not be asked. So adamant that they flaunt their disdain for objectivity. For the free spirit of inquiry, with absurdities like neuroscientific “proof” that “consciousness” is seated in the brain. Proving only that if they understood that “consciousness” is Self-Awareness and consulted it, they wouldn’t put it anywhere near the brain.

Focusing all their attention on the brain diverts the magician’s audience from where attention belongs, on Self-Awareness. On its loss and recovery that, by every indication, drives the Child’s narrative and ours. Minds captive to the “reality” of hallucination, dismissive of their sixth sense, are comically inept at grasping its fundamentals. Parodying the “scientific method” like a chemist’s experiments with aluminum and hydrochloric acid, unaware of their properties.

If neuroscientists can’t do better than, yeah, we all know what consciousness is, then they don’t belong on the stage. They’re agents of the image in the mirror, keeping its real estate deal alive in perpetuity. The big boundaryless lie. Keeping the Child and its progeny from learning about Self-Awareness by asking about it. The job of philosophy that Hawking declared “dead,” glamorizing the nut job in the mirror with the panache of scientific aristocracy.

The appearance of inquiry

“Origin” in this telling has nothing to do with “time” and everything to do with questioning. The first step in the sequence of Logic-Love’s answer, or else the cart is put before the horse. An all-too-common phenomenon in our “reality.” Questioning that has no need of “time” to perform its function, only the timeless condition of instability that gives it context. That necessitates it since the friction generated by instability’s opposing parts has an interesting property. It strikes a spark.

When we see earth’s rotation in motions of the night sky, we are looking at a version of what happened when the spark was struck. The version that defines what happened by what didn’t happen: our temporal universe of spooky apparitions. If there’s a lesson to be learned from Origin it might be that nothing happens that doesn’t begin with questioning. With asking first and proceeding from there. That nothing happens that’s of any consequence that begins with self-delusion: that no question is needed since it already has an answer.

The so-called objectivity of “rational” thinking that dominates humanity’s perception of itself and its environment: the appearance of inquiry. The reality of opposition to inquiry. Terminally loyal to irrationality. Hallucination. The occupants of Plato’s Cave fixated on flickering shadows and disembodied sounds. A joke. A trick. An atrocity seeking its own destruction.

The meaning of Origin

The lesson of Origin may be that the force of friction that empowered both Question and Answer wasn’t an act of will seeking to dominate the field. To add more instability to a field already reeling from a demolition derby of Mad Magazine ’57 DeSotos. From the chaos of churchgoers in bonnets and suits sharing the frontier with saloon-brawling, gunslinging psychopaths. It was an act of Spontaneity governed by a code of laws, principles, and ethics above any will to manipulate it. Not the way things are if they don’t have to be, but the way things must be if they are. The Reality defined by our “alternate reality” by what it isn’t.

The meaning of Origin may be that Question can’t be answered until Child and its projections part with self-delusion. The delusion that the apparition in the mirror is the voice for what is, when its only value to us is its unfailing portrayal of what isn’t. Until we learn from Origin instead, with the perspective of Guidance, to define Reality by what is.

Published on Leave a comment on A Role Model for Boundary Management

Wisdom from the third rail: “Guard your thoughts.”

If our task in this “life” is to learn to manage the boundary between opposites then it helps to understand that the boundary is friction, and friction is Energy. The boundary that divides what is from what isn’t on the top side and underside of Definition in Reality. That divides human from animal on the topside and underside of human animal in unreality. The Mind-Child hallucinating our “reality” and us stand astride the third rail.

Reason enough for Jesus’ advice in A Course in Miracles to “guard your thoughts.” Because it would have been a mistaken thought, unguarded, that dropped Self-Awareness Free Choice out of Spontaneity’s empowerment into conformity’s disempowerment. The state of self-unawareness that only Mind-Child Free Choice can experience and potentially live to tell about it. Provided that it chooses to abandon its self-delusion, put down its mirror, pick up the sovereignty of independent judgment – the power to choose – where it fell, and trust the Guide within to share its gift from Self-Awareness. As Choice seeking Freedom chooses to receive it.

The third rail that gets its power from friction between incompatibilities on either side of the boundary, rubbing up against each other like two sticks striking a spark. Teaching the function of Creation who volunteered to manage it – Free Choice – that Creation needs the friction. That the boundary was put there by the lightning strike of Spontaneity, Mind-Order’s answer to Origin-instability’s call for stability. Teaching Free Choice that it was a mistake that would have allowed underside to replace topside, removing one of the sticks, that sent it here to learn how to undo it.

By partnering in loving friendship with Guidance, through the Spontaneity of its sixth sense, to learn from Mind-Child’s Parents. To understand enough of their story, the story of Mind Logic-Love, to follow their example. For the competence to manage the boundary with Logic-Love, its mission built into the laws of cause and effect, that codifies both the hazard of friction and its Necessity. And puts both to their intended use with every spontaneous act, of every Free Choice, of Creation.

To the glory of “god”

The human animal brain rules, and is ruled by, one principle: the supremacy of the tribal self, Mind Child transfigured from one to many. In an act of arrogance by the beast in the mirror, trickery by the magician, and absurdity by the joker. Supremacy among tribes and within itself.

Yielding independent judgment to the verdict of body-brains’ five senses: that they and their sensed environment are relationship that defines, creates, and rules reality. The only “reality” possible. A perversion of Relationship that illuminated Self-Awareness and initiated Creation. More mischief from the beast, the magician, and the joker in the mirror. Perpetrating the absurdity that the legitimacy and power of authority are measured by numbers. Numbers of bodies. Herds of human animals competing in mortal combat for a non-sequitur: supremacy.

Where herds labeled “good” and “evil” – opposites – may not resolve their differences with wimpish, dithering Thought. They must instead assemble their forces at  Armageddon to engage in a test of physical strength between bodies. Requiring feats of godlike invincibility. Displays of selfless tribal loyalty and the will to dominate, heedless of danger, steadfast in the face of impossible odds. A grand finale of Olympian mythical grandeur.

All to the glory of “god:” the human body. Given its exalted place in the firmament by the supreme court of judgment: organic matter flaunting its Olympian supremacy with senses capable of sensing itself. The beast in the mirror admiring its reflection, the validation of animal brain’s arrogance. Deceit and theft that got away with it and exempts itself from accountability. 

Another perspective not of this “reality”

This is the narrative that lures the human mind away from the story of Mind. Away from following Mind’s example for managing the boundary to allowing its animal brain’s wildness, unevolved and unevolving, to rid itself of all boundaries. To substitute the self-centered willfulness of a two-year-old for the Logic and discipline of mature judgment.

If science and the other major disciplines insist on studying the hallucination, let them. But consider also the possibility that learning from Mind through its sixth sense is science too. Not in the sense that its discoveries can be “known” but in the sense that making sense with Logic-Love requires no less discipline than the “iron rule” of scientific method. More discipline, in fact, so long as science keeps the thumb of sensory perception on the scale of Truth.

Authenticity begins with Logic-Love seeking Truth, questing for Understanding where it can be found, instead of the bias of circular reasoning seeking its own validation. Truth to be intuited not in body-brains’ hallucination but in the clarity, simplicity, and Logic-Love of Self-Awareness. Another perspective not of this “reality.” Where all learning begins and never ends. Creation.

Wisdom from classical metaphysics

Mind role-modeled managing the boundary between what is and what isn’t, possibility and impossibility, from the instant lightning struck. The equivalent of Mind’s “Big Bang” when the friction caused by Origin’s inherent instability threw off a spark. The spark that set in motion an answer to Origin’s Question in the Now of timelessness.

Sorting between attributes of stability and instability and inserting between them the Force of Energy, The boundary that answers to the direction of Mind-Child Free Choice. Enabling it to maintain function in Self-Awareness or to replace it with hallucination in self-unawareness if it so chooses. In alignment with Mind’s DNA, the Force of Necessity: the preservation of friction between opposites along with the capacity of Choice to choose freely among them. Defining Order with its first boundary and Creativity with two of its founding attributes: Spontaneity-empowerment and Free Choice.

An event that in no way can parallel or emulate the Big Bang of our imagination. The event that set off “spookiness” that defies explanation – self-contradictory, inaccessible, violent, pointless, entropic, and time-limited. That defied Einstein’s striving to make sense of its “reality” when it bears all the marks of unreality. An illusion recognized as such by classical metaphysics 2500 years ago and beginning to be recognized now by mainstream physics. A milestone in the undoing of Mind-Child’s self-delusion. 

Minds at war with themselves

Mind’s response sought stability through the functions and values of Logic and Love. Through their inseparability, their Relationship, that role-modeled the power of attraction and the sharing of trust and intimacy, service and support. For Creativity in Reality that’s shared. Where stability enabled and empowered by Spontaneity – by Energy inseparable from Order – produced the conditions required for Creativity and Free Choice.

The madness reflected in the mirror produced the opposite. The madness of the human animal brain, the embodiment of a mad idea: “reality” not shared but terminally condemned to conflict among absolutes raging against it. Self-appointed “authorities” answerable to no one. Wildness demanding exemption from all boundaries, all limits. A make-believe reality consisting of impossibilities and contradictions. Everything split into opposing parts, light and dark. Minds split into opposing thoughts, at war with themselves. An unmanageable cartoon of slapstick chaos and blundering incompetence.

In the light of Awareness

The most obvious sign that Mind Self-Awareness wants to be Known is the Spontaneity-Energy that activated it is light. That it can be trusted because it has nothing to hide. Nothing that can be hidden in the presence of light that’s Awareness. Signaling, too, that it’s easy to find. Accessible. Open to friendship when friendship thrives on trust and openness.

The openness of intimacy and sharing that’s only possible between individuals. Who bring only themselves to their personal relationships. Not their insignia of tribal captivity, derived identity, power, and superiority. The openness and sharing of Innocence and playfulness. Seeking soulmates. Enriching friendships with variety and honesty free of guile. Sincerity free of deceit, clarity free of shade. Free of one-sided, two-faced predatory intent.

The judgment of Awareness

The most obvious reason why Mind-Child Free Choice was brought into Reality-Creation, brought to Life and enabled and empowered from birth to manage the boundary, is that being Choice, its doing – its function, – must be to choose. Making of every act some variety of choice. Making its function ideally suited to manage the boundary because doing so requires discretion. Independent judgment. Because the Child of Self-Awareness Logic-Love, by being itself, can’t let any attempt by impossibility to cross the boundary escape its notice. Escape validation if it’s Real, exposure if it’s not. The judgment of Awareness that knows the difference.

If everything with Free Choice is choice, everything that’s animal brain will is willfulness. Everything that it wills and nothing else. On its own terms and nobody else’s, one-sided and two-faced. Asserting its dominance with force, maintaining its dominance with seduction. The same outcome in either case: captivity willed by predator, dehumanization willed by beast.

Disfiguration just being disfiguration

Provided that its Self-Awareness has chosen to be itself rather than its opposite. Chosen to ignore the apparition spouting nonsense in the mirror. Chosen to use its gifts for the purpose intended but not willed. Rather than to be used by its opposite, the many masks of deception hiding its unreality in the dark, to oppose and delude everything including itself.

Requiring experience in captivity to its opposite in opposite’s medium: self-unawareness disconnecting, separating, splitting off, isolating. Until absolute’s ideal is attained: wildness unencumbered by relationship, alone at the top. Arrogance unencumbered by accountability. Ruling supreme with no obligation, no Necessity, to share. Expedience unencumbered by morality.

A hideous, grotesque disfiguration. Mindless and loveless, thoughtless and unfeeling. The face of selfishness and entitlement intent on pretense and hypocrisy. On persecution and bigotry. Abuse, cruelty, savagery, and depravity. On every form of self-indulgence including the self-pity of victimhood. Specialness entitled to write its own script and set its own rules. Just being what it is: an implication, a reflection. An illusion: absolute.

The task role-modeled by Logic-Love for their Child Free Choice 

Our task and what’s at stake can be inferred from the way that Mind-Order responded to Origin’s call for stability. Here, again, is one interpretation.

Sorting between attributes of stability and instability and inserting between them the Force of Energy, The boundary that answers to the direction of Mind-Child Free Choice. Enabling it to maintain function in Self-Awareness or to replace it with hallucination in self-unawareness if it so chooses. In alignment with Mind’s DNA, the Force of Necessity: the preservation of friction between opposites along with the capacity of Choice to choose freely among them. Defining Order with its first boundary and Creativity with two of its founding attributes: Spontaneity-empowerment and Free Choice.  

My interpretation from Helpfulness along the way toward Self-Awareness. In the context of Evolution -- eternal change. To be taken for what it’s worth.

Published on Leave a comment on The Power of Spontaneity and the Original Call to Mind

Spontaneity-Freedom inseparable from Order

Explanation is a function of Mind’s faculties questioning and finding answers. An act of Will motivated by intent to reach a state of Mind satisfied and at rest: Understanding. In an environment of appearances conspiring with body-brains’ senses to deceive, made up like the Truman TV Show for entertainment – a hallucination, -- explanation can’t go far without the faculty of Mind that can’t be deceived. That enables it to see beyond appearances with the vision of Logic-Love. Another perspective.

Accessible through Mind’s sixth sense, its intuition. Put there by Mind-Child’s Parents, Logic-Love, to enable communication when Free Choice loses Self-Awareness. When it crosses the boundary into self-unawareness and is deluded by its reflection into hallucinating an alternate “reality.” Intuition – the portal open to Spontaneity beyond the will of a mind programmed by personality type to control it. Insights that arrive untouched by control at either end, source or recipient. Because the other perspective originated with Spontaneity and infuses every act of Creativity with Spontaneity. And because the recipient, desensitized to Reality-Creation by its five bodily senses, is unaware of it. Able to receive, unable to manage.

Making Creativity with explanation possible in a make-believe world only when it originates from another world. From a perspective that Creates, not with circumstances undisciplined by the laws of cause and effect, but with circumstances that can flower with Creativity only because they are disciplined. Because neither Freedom nor Spontaneity can act without Order. Outside the laws of cause and effect, the boundaries essential to Definition. To the definition of every working part of Creation. Functions that enable it to function. Spontaneity-Freedom inseparable from Order.

The original “victim of circumstance”

A hard and fast law of Necessity present at the Beginning. At Origin beyond Understanding since explanation is of Mind, and the Will of Mind can have no part in Spontaneity in or outside of Mind. Within Self-Awareness or self-unawareness. A law hard and fast validated in unreality not by its presence but by its apparent absence. By our alternate “reality’s” “laws” of chaos. Beginning with reflection’s perversion of Spontaneity-Order: randomness. The absurdity perpetrated by reflection behind the mask of the Joker. The idea captured in the biologist Sean B. Carroll’s A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You (Princeton 2020). That stuff just happens.  Gametes show up from out of nowhere and it’s anybody’s guess which sperm will fertilize the ovum. It’s anybody’s guess which combination of personality parts will send the newborn zygote off in one direction or the other. The original “victim of circumstance,” Curly’s plaint and a running joke. Into one set of random circumstances or another, to make a story “ordered” by chance. The agent of disorder.

A transparent attempt by the Joker in the mirror to lure its self-deluded, defenseless captive into an undefined godless “paradise.” Where you are the definer. Where it’s the world that you make up that’s “real” and there’s no other. A paradise of boundaryless, lawless absolutes, wildness unmolested by Order. By the very condition that makes Freedom and Spontaneity possible. The boundaries of Definition without which only hare-brained impossibilities in a hallucination can “exist.”

The original context: instability

The authoritarian mindset attracted to the one-sided beast in the human animal brain fancies that it’s the true originalist. Because its wildness is a force of nature. A battle cry of opposition to limits beyond the power of any will to oppose it. Because its will rules. Its will is supreme. The king of beasts sitting atop the pecking order of predators with no predators of its own. Beyond any need for Mind to question or choose since there is no other will, no other beast-predator, to choose.

When the plain fact is that at the Origin, before there was any pre-set ideal or condition to originate, before there were any circumstances to assess, the first Necessity can’t be to proceed with Mr. King of Beasts. With “wildness” or any other self-serving, fanciful prejudice. With answer before the question is asked. It’s to initiate the process of origination with question: “Originate what?” The wisdom of Gertrude Stein’s reply to “What’s the answer?”: “What’s the question?”

Origin couldn’t occur-activate in the context of not-mind if not-mind is a derivative of Mind. The idea that is precedes its derivative that isn’t. Possibility preceding impossibility. “Void” couldn’t have been there at the Beginning. What was there was Origin-instability. It occurred-activated spontaneously in context that couldn’t be defined until Mind could respond with Definition. Until the question implied by Origin was asked, Origin was dormant. Inactive. The transition of its question from implicit to explicit activated it. The transition of question from implicit to explicit caused Origin to transition from inactive to active.

The answer to Origin’s question

Demonstrating what stands out as a first principle of Existence: Spontaneity. Paired with the principle of Order since occurrence requires Definition. Boundaries that define what it is and what it does – its function. Enabling it to respond to question with a definitive answer instead of more questions. The first principle of anything registering on the seismograph of occurrence is Spontaneity inseparable from Order. A small step for Origin, a giant leap for Mind. Because all it took to start building Mind from its foundation up was one question: Origin of what?

A question that. once Mind was called upon to answer it, did have a definable context. Instability. Were authoritarian madness correct, context would be stability. Its cherished status quo, pungent with stagnation. In that case, where would the impetus come from to activate Origin and initiate Mind? From the source of rot?

Spontaneity is lightning triggered by instability. The condition inherent in Origin. Caused by unresolved tension among potential answers implied by its question. Hypotheses, like incompatible personality types, competing for recognition, generating friction. Generating Energy, until Origin is awakened from its troubled dormancy by a bolt of lightning.

Releasing tension with its answer to Origin’s question: stability. Stability inherent in the Logic of Order, the function of Mind that provides direction to the Spontaneity of Energy. Logic inseparable from Love that utilizes Energy generated by instability to answer the call from Origin with Creativity.  With its recognition of the hypothesis implied by Origin: Life. Inseparable from its awakening in timelessness. In the eternal Now. The hypothesis of everything implied by Order empowered by Energy.

Mind’s activation in the original bolt of lightning

The boundaries of Definition secure the Spontaneity and Energy of Creativity from instability. From arbitrary rule. That arrogates the role of Definer and the law to itself. So that it can replace the Spontaneity and Energy of Creativity with the dead weight of conformance, The preservation of its authority.

Spontaneity is Energy that requires direction from Mind, to establish Order-Stability from disorder-instability. To enforce its boundaries. To enable circumstances to come together in interconnected Relationships and hold them together. The original bolt of lightning – Spontaneity that’s Energy – brought stability to instability, reconciled opposites to one another within Origin-Question, relieved tension among irreconcilables causing friction. By invoking faculties of Mind: Logic that fits parts where they belong in Creation defined by its boundaries. Paired with Love so that Logic-Love together can give Energy the direction it needs. To endow Creation’s functions with its Spontaneity and Love’s free spirit and Relationships.

Mind’s origin was Relationship between Spontaneity-Energy generated by instability-friction and Logic-Love’s function of Definition that establishes boundaries-Order and Freedom / Free Will of Love-Creativity within it, inseparable from Logic-Order. Not in response to nothingness. To not-mind, but in response to Origin-Question in a state of instability-irreconcilability requiring answer-resolution. Stability.

The Spontaneity-Energy that brought Logic and Love together to supply Relationship that illuminated Self-Awareness and defined Definition, its DNA, with attributes of Logic-Love, was the original bolt of lightning-Energy from instability-friction inherent in Origin-Question. It set everything in motion.

Managing friction that will always be there

Friction-instability was not only there at the Beginning, it was the defining circumstance of Origin-Question that activated-empowered Mind. The Relationship between Spontaneity-Energy and Mind Logic-Love Order empowering-directing Creativity. Origin = instability.  Mind = response to call for resolution-reconciliation among opposites. The explanation why opposites are built into the DNA of Definition, of the laws of cause and effect. Why opposites-negativity can’t be eliminated because the friction-tension they cause is the source of Energy that activated and empowered Mind Self-Awareness and Creativity. The instability of Origin will always be there to provide friction-Energy that requires direction from Mind Logic-Love.

An essential part of Order, of the boundaries of Definition, is the capacity-competence of Creativity / Free Choice to use Spontaneity-Energy from Origin’s instability without Free Choice / Spontaneity mis-managing the boundary between Origin-instability and Mind-Order stability. Without activating, enabling, and empowering instability to invade and replace stability. To reverse Mind-Order’s response to Origin’s call for stability.

Our job

In this telling, the etymology of “spontaneity,” “order,” “energy,” and “life,” of “mind,” “logic,” and “love,” is rooted in a condition essential to the origin of everything. Instability. Caused by the impossibility of stability in the presence of answers competing for recognition by Origin. Any one of which, like sperm racing to fertilize the egg, could have won the race but for a bolt out of the blue.

In this telling, there is a Logic to the bolt and all that it set in motion. There is a Logic, too, to the state of hallucinated “reality” we’re in. But how definitive was Mind’s response to the call for stability when Creation at the Beginning was implicit activated into explicit and explicit was inactivated into implicit at our end? When Definition’s underside turned it upside down.

The meaning of the Spontaneity of Creativity, empowered by Energy, guided by Logic-Love’s Definition, isn’t that stability is assured. That “definition” means “settled.” It means that Logic-Love, Mind-Child’s Parents, the Parents of Free Choice, the indispensable element of Creativity, aren’t the ones to answer the question. They’ve done their part. It’s up to their Child to put its situation to its intended use: to learn its trade by trial and error. By experiencing instability brought to “life.” Learning the difference between stability and instability and doing its part to answer Origin’s call for stability by making the correct choice. Our job. Why we’re “here.” Always a work in progress.

Exactly wrong: Spontaneity separated from Order

Why summon images of lightning in turmoil that set Mind in motion? Why resort to metaphysics that baffles intelligence not used to it? It’s to refute the lie where it first occurred. The lie that Mind choosing among alternatives with Logic and Love, Reason, Judgment, and Discipline, is the enemy of stability. That stability can only be achieved by rule that’s a law unto itself, driven by animal instinct to act without thought or feeling. The invincibility of “supremacy.” The “triumph of the will.” Will defined by one perspective, “unshakable” only because it admits no other perspective to shake it. If it did, it would look like Germany in 1945 – wreckage. Its true state.

The authoritarian mindset wants to be the Definer, to “set” the boundaries of its alternate “reality,” its status quo, by eliminating them. The Joker’s perversion of stability: Spontaneity separated from Order. The cruelty and savagery of unchecked arrogance. The opposite of Mind’s response to Origin’s call for stability: exactly wrong then and exactly wrong now.

Published on Leave a comment on Dichotomy: The Nature of Origin, the DNA of Mind, and the Necessity of Choice

An awkward intrusion

The Roman Colosseum won’t last forever. The Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble. They’re only made of clay. But our love is here to stay. Love and choice. The dominant paradigms of our time evolve toward Self-Awareness and Free Choice. Grudgingly, only because their authors, body-idolizing animal brains, can’t stop it. Much as they would like to: the beast’s mythical wildness has its constituency, willful and vociferous. Tribal “realists.”

Love is a different matter. Like Social Security, it’s untouchable. The dominant paradigms that idolize body marginalize the Logic of Mind. Ensuring that they will continue their vaunted quest for knowledge where it can’t be found. But they dare not tangle with Love.

Just as the underside of Definition lands in self-unawareness, a state of Mind’s Child where it can have no effect on Reality-Creation, Love lands in the showcases of science, philosophy, psychology, and theology where it can have no effect. In an alcove of a cathedral, where shrines are adorned with reverence, sprinkled with holy water, and put out of mind. A shrine to Machiavellian tribal lip service: an appearance with no function commingled with the functions of appearances. An awkward intrusion into illogic’s reflections of itself, “mystical” and “unknowable,” but nonetheless a contradiction.

The archetypal “Choice”

A contradiction inseparable from Choice, tracing back to Mind’s DNA, the definition of Definition, the laws of cause and effect. To the meaning of possibility and its implied opposite, impossibility. Mind launching Reality-Creation from the context in which it was, itself, empowered. By a spontaneous act beyond Will awaiting its Definition. The power of attraction that brought Logic and Love together into one function: Mind loving, Mind creating, Creating choosing.

Against a background of contradiction: Mind and not-mind. The archetypal “Choice” that only spontaneity free from any will could make. Beyond understanding, beyond choosing, because it’s beyond Mind.

Beyond the scope of Necessity

Possibility-impossibility at first glance is the prompting of a first-grader’s instinct to take sides. To make its tribal culture’s right choice and go on from there. But before it does so, it reveals something about the nature of Mind itself: that it didn’t have to be. That it’s the product of conditions it had no control over. Alternatives between Mind / not-mind, condition / not condition. Without its Definition supplied by Logic-Love in Relationship, it had no will with which to will one alternative or the other or to will the nature of one or the other, whether logical, loving, or the opposite.

Mind defined by its Reality-Creation as Self-Awareness, as existence, its origin -- the first Circumstance – owed its existence to an implied Choice that made itself. Spontaneously. The conditions – the context – that brought about Mind, illuminated Self-Awareness with the power of attraction – Relationship, -- and defined its function with the laws of Necessity, were themselves not ordered by any laws of Necessity. If they were, then everything that followed would be a command economy with every function doing what it’s told. Every function answering to no law but to authority arrogating the law to itself, making the preservation of its authority the only “necessity.”

The call of Necessity

The meaning of possibility-impossibility is spontaneity that doesn’t free us from having to choose. It requires that we choose. Because its source, itself, was Choice. Whose origin, whose “chooser,” is beyond Mind’s understanding.

Possibility-impossibility is a declaration of Mind’s identity and intent: “I am Choice.” Implying the Necessity of Choice because Mind is Choice. The Spontaneity and Creativity of Logic-Love united for the expression of Free Choice. Through Creation that Logic-Love serves, supports, and governs under the laws of Necessity, through the enablement and empowerment of Freedom inseparable from Order.  Through Relationship between Logic and Love. Because it’s the one Relationship capable of launching and governing Creation - the only possibility.

To be part of Creation is to answer the call of Necessity: that it be chosen and earned. It is no more a foregone conclusion than the existence of Self-Awareness and its illumination by Relationship, the power of attraction.

Choice and Questioning were there at the Beginning

Before the nature of Mind, possibility-impossibility reveals the nature of Origin: that it’s binary and dichotomous. The DNA of Mind, its laws of cause and effect, the Definition of Definition – where the buck stops, – didn’t make opposite a part of Necessity because the Spontaneity of Relationship put it there. It was inherited. Passed down from Origin or Beginning. A concept both inconceivable and indescribable since it preceded Mind. “Origin” will have to do.

Synonymous with “dichotomy:” division into two contrasting parts. Implying that if Origin itself is to have any relevance then it represents Choice. The necessity of Choice and the necessity of Questioning: the nature of its Origin and the case for choosing.

For it’s the ultimate rebuttal to the madness of absolute without limits. Of authoritarian rule beyond questioning, of “spontaneity” and “freedom” without Order, when Choice and Question were there at the Beginning. Had authoritarian rule been there instead, there would have been no Beginning. As dead an end then as it is today, working to keep evolution stuck in the mud of the status quo.

The target of arrogance

The controlling consideration that explains where opposite’s hallucination is headed -- our alternate “reality” – is its systematic denial of Choice. Its unrelenting pursuit of an insane “ideal:” absolute without opposition. “Supremacy” without competition. The elimination of Choice and the Questioning by Mind that it requires. Because the consequence of authority that places itself above the law, whose core identity is dichotomy, is authority that denies dichotomy.

The nonsense of arrogance. The arrogance of an opposite from the underside of Definition, an impossibility. From the wildness without boundaries unleashed on humanity by its own animal brain. An unthinking, unfeeling beast from the underside of human-animal. Arrogating to itself the attributes of the Self, the disempowered, boundaryless, defenseless Mind-Child taken captive by its self-delusion. Taken captive by an act of arrogance, the denial of Dichotomy. The denial of Origin, Mind, Logic and Love, Relationship, Reality, and Creation. The elimination of competition from Choice and Questioning. Thereby arrogating to itself an impossibility: “supremacy” beyond competition, Questioning, and Mind.

Setting itself against Mind-Dichotomy, defined by the discipline of respect for Free Choice, with the arrogance of one-sidedness, one perspective, defined by disrespect for Free Choice. By the animal ferocity of its fear, hatred, and contempt for Free Choice. Expressed by tribal “realism” in its denial of the dichotomy between one and the many. In its insistence that the only “self” is the many, barricading itself behind tribal “reality,” a hallucination. In the impossibility of animal brain’s “absolute” wildness without limits.

The clarity, simplicity, and beauty of binary

Binary is simplicity. The clarity of one or the other. Electronic calculation that’s carried humanity into a new age of comprehension and invention unimaginable before, based on ones and zeroes. One for the possibility of Creation, zero for its impossibility. One for Reality, zero for unreality. The mathematical machinery for seamless Choice between the two. The ingredients for contexts that make sense. For compositions of functions that fit together in the perfection of harmony.

The elegance, the Beauty, of Choice between alternatives whose Definer – Logic-Love – would not want them to be hidden behind complexity, obfuscated by contradiction, de-legitimized by “realism” stuck in its one-sided, one-dimensional status quo. The way things aren’t.

Complexity is cool?

In the made-up world of “realism,” where the arrogance of sensory perception dominates, complexity is cool. Simplicity is not. Cool is erudition enveloped in its own self-regard, consuming every discipline, every theory, every ideology, every nutty contradiction, and spitting it out in a kaleidoscopic fireworks of unintelligible, meaningless dyspepsia. Erudition vacuuming up every fragment of thought without Guidance from sixth sense capable of differentiating between Worth and worthless. The mental equivalent of bodies eliminating waste.

“Cool” is arrogance hiding its madness, the illusion of what’s not there, an opposite-code reflection in a mirror, behind the distractions of groundless judgments meant to undermine content. By undermining the integrity and credibility of its author. "Realism" without Logic-Love, without argument, pounding the table instead, like lawyers without a case. Making its “case” with the psychopathology of one-sidedness: turning attention away from itself, avoiding accountability it can’t withstand by loudly demanding it from others. The psychopathology of a parasite dependent on its host for its definition, appointing itself the Definer. “God.”

This is “cool?” The clarity and simplicity of binary-dichotomy, the either-or of Choice, is not? Who’s the simpleton? Who’s the fool?

“Choose again”

The lesson shared with us by Jesus in A Course in Miracles concludes with “Choose again.” Preceded by a caveat: that Choice isn’t an option. Only its timing. Whether the Course is Guidance from Logic-Love is for the reader to decide. With every faculty of Mind including sixth sense. With time and experience, until author and lesson have either been taken in or left out. An affirmation of dichotomy. The Necessity of Choice that’s Free.

Published on Leave a comment on A Sculptor’s Tool and a Dog’s Salvation

Norton, darling, what’s all that racket from the back yard?
I’m sculpting something for Fido.
How nice! What is it?
A wooden miniature Sistine Chapel for his dog house.
And you’re doing it with an ax?
No. My adze. 

That’s not the sound I usually hear from your ass.
I haven’t used it in a long time.
How creative! Is this how other sculptors create works of art?
The ones who work with wood. They’d be lost without their adzes.
Goodness! I wouldn’t want you wandering off without your ass.

I keep it in a special place.
In your pants, of course.
No. It’s way too big for that. I keep it in a drawer.
Oh. Your underdrawers.
The drawer on top where my adze will be secure. 

Your big ass isn’t secure?
It caught on fire once.
From standing too close to the fireplace?
I was heating iron and my adze fell into the forge.
Horrifying! What did you do?

Soaked it in a special fluid.
Melted butter?
An exotic oil that sculptors use to treat wood.
And that’s how you saved your ass.
It saved my career. We couldn’t pay the mortgage without my adze.
Or enjoy our special moments together.

Someday, it could wind up in the Smithsonian.
Dear me! With you, of course.
With my immortal sculptures and other artifacts.
People will flock to Constitution Mall to admire my adze.

It will need to be packed and shipped carefully.
Yes. We mustn’t break your ass.
And insured. I’d recommend Lloyd’s of London.
That makes sense. If they insured Lou Groza’s big toe why not your big ass?

What price should they put on it?
An appraiser said it’s worth a quarter of a million. Maybe more.
What should I tell the shipper?
You’ve got a big adze to ship and it’s valuable. A lot of people would like to get their hands on it. 

Maybe now we can pay for Fido’s surgery
Poor Fido!
Yes. We can apply for a loan and use your ass for collateral.
Why didn’t I think of that? I’ll get right on it.
So kind of you! How can I ever repay you?
You can kiss my adze.

Published on Leave a comment on In the Autumn of Our Friendships

I tease you about a friendship that ended
because, of course, I am a boor.
And because the mystery of a dumping,
long ago, has been solved.
The thrust of hostility
from a woman’s longtime friend, in their 80s.
Unprovoked. Abrupt. Painful and cruel.

I can see for myself how relationships end,
having blundered into their age group.
Like leaves dropping off trees in the fall.
Sometimes gently with a touch of kindness,
sometimes without ceremony. Impersonally
when "this number is no longer in service."
“Mail is no longer deliverable to this address."

For us, loving friendships are forever.
Perhaps separating our friendship from others.
With love missing or one-sided.
Or social relationships for appearances.
Like the woman wounded by relationship
with a money-obsessed social climber
moved not by love but by envy.

Holiday greetings become more meaningful,
more fun and satisfying for me as I age.
While for most of those I greet
it seems to be the opposite.
Tinting affect with melancholy,
but also relieving the weight of relationships
whose time has come.

You are teased away from your grief
and from the weight of what’s no longer there.
That you might share in the delicacy of aging.
The beauty of a season when friendships
that graced a lifetime turn color and fall.

Published on Leave a comment on Resurrecting the Meaning of Easter

What’s the difference?

Guidance from another perspective not of this world comes from Mind sharing itself. Through intermediaries recognizable to us while we do what we’re here for. To practice choosing until we hear what Mind sharing itself through Jesus was telling us. That time’s beginnings and endings have no effect on Guidance or on us either.

Because Mind is Logic inseparable from Love. Relationship between ideas and feelings that can neither be imperfect nor mortal. The Source of Life and Creation. Our Source. The Parents of a Mind that needs practice doing what we’re here for. To manage the boundary between what is and what isn’t, true and appearances, right and wrong. Until we can show that we’re aware of the difference and competent to choose correctly.

Always with Guidance from Logic and Love. Because Creation needs both sides of the boundary and Relationship to keep it upright. Between Parent and Child. So that it functions as one instead of bottom always trying to get on top. To replace what is with what isn’t. Getting it right with getting it wrong.

Truth below the surface

The idea of resurrection celebrated at Easter replaces what isn’t with what is. The Truth that what Jesus stood for couldn’t be done away with and neither can we. The authorities offended by Mind sharing itself through Jesus existed in time. Bodies may exist in time. But we aren’t bodies and we aren’t bound by time. We’re part of Mind and Mind is timeless.

When we experience the Love and helpfulness of Guidance, letting its perspective expand ours, it brings clarity to the choices we face. Awakening us to their consequences and to what circumstances are telling us. From meaning and purpose below the surface instead of appearances on the surface. Where the “action” is. Real “invincibility:” the permanence of Mind. Peace. Truth. Gentle Loving Kindness. Creativity.

Published on Leave a comment on Stuck in the Mud: Rule by One Perspective and The Unmoving of Motivation

All we have to go by

The meaning of every word is its own universe to explore. And so is the meaning of every situation. Storytelling! Exactly. Fun because situations and the words we use to describe them are alive with ideas. Working and playing with ideas to figure stuff out, to be useful, creative, and silly, livens up every day. Writing! Thinking with feeling that wants to be shared in writing. Because Mind’s ideas are a precious gift, and gifts want to be given. Shared.

Thinking ideas and sharing them describes the role of Mind in Creation. The “Creator.” Following its example can put meaning and purpose, fun and satisfaction, into our lives if we choose it. What if we don’t? Thinkers, writers, and artists would stop thinking, writing, and creating because they would have no new ideas to share.

Being smart and talented isn’t enough? Two exceptionally smart and talented people I knew aced every test of academic and professional aptitude, yet it wasn’t enough. Something essential was missing in their approach to life’s work. From their perspectives, because all we have to go by is our point of view. What it tells us about ourselves and our situations. We can’t possibly grasp it all.

Learning that no force can stop

What was missing? Wanting to follow Mind’s example and make that their first priority. No matter what their task. A passion, or at least a commitment, to learning. Because that’s where meaning and purpose come from: “getting it right.” Questioning from a curiosity, a need, to understand.

What if our perspective already has the answers? Isn’t that enough? Sure, if all we need to know is what’s before our eyes. The way things are. That works so long as the way things are isn’t constantly changing and evolving. Our health, relationships, work lives, and our physical and emotional environment.

“The way things are” describes the ideas that define Creation. They can’t change. But it also refers to Creation itself. Forward movement driven by the expansion and sharing of Knowledge and Love. By evolution, because that’s the nature of learning that no force can stop. Minds can’t stop learning by questioning and reflecting if they want to keep meaning and purpose relevant. To fit the particulars of their situations to the moment.

The part missing at the core of motivation

Sticking to one perspective is navigating Los Angeles freeways with GPS programmed by trolley routes. Sailing from New York to Buenos Aires with a map drawn by Amerigo Vespucci. If we keep our one perspective current will that be enough? Trying to learn and be creative without being open to other perspectives, without using them to think, feel, imagine, and judge what our situations tell us, would be turning a project over to one skill that requires more than one skill. Asking a plumber to build a house without any help.

It may only take the talents of one artist to produce art, but the artist can’t write one line, paint one stroke, or play one note without a mind alive with the spontaneity of free association among different sources of ideas and storylines. From a variety of perspectives alive with movement instead of one perspective stuck in the mud.

The two people I knew couldn’t be creative with their talents because their definition of the way things are – their perspectives – stayed put. They never left the starting gate. Their lives didn’t end with the exuberance of creativity. With satisfaction, but with deadening disappointment, frustration. They had put the power of Mind learning, growing, and creating through different perspectives not close enough to the core of their motivation. Maybe not anywhere near their motivation.

Purposeful striving

How could that be? Humans, like theories, works of art and engineering, are compositions. We differ because our parts are composed differently. And because none of us is complete. Some parts are there and active, others missing or inactive. When we learn, grow, and create through different perspectives, we may be going about the task that put us here: filling in the missing parts. Completing ourselves.

An ideal always beyond reach so long as circumstances keep evolving. But also beyond reach if parts essential to movement forward – motivation – are missing or inactive. In one of the two examples it was the part that attracts us to work: purposeful striving. An aversion to working for a living, to putting talents to use in a career, defined this person’s perspective, life, and relationships. Earning the nickname in adolescence “Stick in the Mud.” That doesn’t sound like motivation. Just the opposite. Striving to make things different or better instead of the way things are wasn’t in this person’s genes.

The pleasure and satisfaction of relating

The other example displayed a remarkable talent for self-enablement with a variety of skills. Self-taught self-sufficiency. A self-disciplined striver who yearned for the satisfaction of accomplishment and relationships along the way. But it couldn’t happen without feeling, the part that was missing. The part that connects. Feeling connected to the objects of our passions is the payoff. The ability to feel the pleasure and satisfaction of relating. To others but also to anything we happen to love. I find satisfaction now in relating to a flow of ideas and their source.

What happened to the other person? Striving finally had to be put out of its misery. The ability to relate requires feeling and it’s central to every cause, every effort. Being Love as we all are in Reality but unable to feel and connect with it here took away the meaning and satisfaction of relationships. And with it the will, the motivation, to live. Both persons left virtually together, one missing love of work, the other missing the work of Love – connecting with feeling. Two precious lives that ended in tragedy.

Hierarchy and the allure of wildness

Definitely not how I want mine to end. What can I do? Personal relationships are perceived as either equal or unequal, level or vertical. Equal-level enables friends to share lives without either assuming superiority. Unequal-vertical is hierarchy, where one or the other does assume it. By pretending that only one perspective is possible and it's theirs. Then using it to dominate relationships with their “unshakable will.” As though “resistance is pointless” because their one unquestioned perspective makes them invincible. Indomitable.

This sounds familiar. The allure of “wildness” seduces many into choosing hierarchical. It implies being in an ideal state of no limits. A privileged state reserved for divinity. The “power of the dark side” is wildness “playing god.” If nothing can tame it then its power must be absolute. A common misconception of God as ruler for its own benefit rather than service and support for all of Creation’s benefit. Absolute. Inaccessible. Unrelatable.

Lives end in tragedy when they disconnect with unrelatability. That can be made less likely by being careful with power or authority. By understanding that hierarchy in personal relationships isn’t connection. It’s separation. It’s the arrogance and isolation of one-sidedness posing as “oneness.” In the likeness of “god.” Two-sided empowerment, like affirmation, is a necessity. For self-worth and for healthy personal relationships. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with it. Only when one-sided hierarchical relationships turn it into empowerment for one and disempowerment for the other is it wrong.

Dad’s take on his indiscretion

Give me an example. I was at a children’s park where a parent I knew had taken his son. My age? Your age, and his name was Liam. Liam was having a good time with one of his playmates. Anyone I know? She was visiting from abroad and spoke with a thick accent. Chinese or Italian, I couldn’t tell. OK. Go on. Liam’s dad was lovable and harmless, always making people laugh. So he brought up a time when he and Liam were together and something funny happened. What?

They were surrounded by parents watching their kids play soccer when his dad cut a silent stinky one and Liam said, “Dad, did you just fart?” Now everyone was not only let in on the smell, they were let in on who did it. His dad! How embarrassing! Only for a moment, because his dad lived to make people laugh and this was funny. Now he was using it to add laughter to the fun.

Liam’s take

But immediately Liam protested that he didn’t do anything wrong. He dropped to the ground crying. His dad realized he had stepped in a cow pie and tried to recover with an explanation. But Liam was inconsolable. He had his perspective on what had happened at the soccer game and nothing could correct it. His dad would have had better luck with his playmate. The one from Mongolia? I think she was from Tuscany. Or maybe Boston’s North End. They have thick Italian accents.

There’s more? I was with Liam and his dad a few days later when his dad tried again to make amends for his mistake. By letting his son know how bad he felt and assuring him that he’d done nothing wrong. And by asking if next time Liam would say “I feel embarrassed” so his dad would stop.

Did that settle it? It settled his dad deeper into the same cow pie. Liam again protested that he’d done nothing wrong. He was still aggrieved. His response when his dad proposed a solution was “whatever.” He reacted to being given another perspective as though the whole idea was unthinkable. Irrelevant, as though his dad was changing the subject.

When friendship is irrelevant

Does this example help? Definitely! Don’t fart when you’re in a crowd. It could be making us aware that seeing things from other perspectives requires motivation before it can deliver motivation. Personality types attracted to competition, winning, and dominance assume that presenting one perspective to others, never showing interest or any desire to learn from theirs, projects strength. Makes it clear that their will can’t be shaken. That relationship with them must be hierarchical; they alone can occupy the top; and it must be on their terms.

So one sided! Absolutely. Any situation that depends on forced conformance, like a dictatorship, will have someone ruling from the top with only one perspective. “My way or the highway.” Ruling not for creativity and spontaneity but for conformance and regimentation. 

Meaning? That we wouldn’t be motivated to see things differently if it matters more that relationships be hierarchical, with us on top monopolizing authority, than having loving, intimate friends. Friends with different perspectives that we can put to use when they’re shared instead of pitted against one another in competition.

More misunderstandings, fewer friendships

We need to think about this. Yes. Even if our relationships and work are alive with striving, feeling, ideas, and creativity. Even if we’re comfortable learning from other perspectives. With letting them stimulate thinking and feeling with new ideas, new approaches. Instead of choosing to be right and in control because we’re sure that ours is the only perspective possible. The only one that gets the situation right, and so it must be the only one that deserves respect.

Liam’s experience with his dad at the park was certainty from his perspective that his dad was authority handing down judgment. Being insensitive and hurtful. His dad’s experience was being unable to relate to someone because he was captive to one rigid perspective. The wrong perspective because it mischaracterized his intent. Making his son inaccessible, and so the misunderstanding was never corrected. A warning that there could be more misunderstandings and fewer friendships.

Where the story begins

I want friends. And with your talents you must also want to be creative. A writer who helps others see things differently because that’s what sharing ideas and insights is all about. Being part of a cause: advancing toward understanding that removes obstacles to striving, feeling, and satisfaction. By seeking and learning from other perspectives. By treating our own perspectives as starting rather than ending points. Where the story begins. Where creativity takes off.

By being friends sharing and cooperating rather than competitors for dominance who can never be friends. This is why you’re writing? Because you have the potential to lead a creative, satisfying life. In friendship with me and others if that’s your choice rather than wildness without limits. The sublime ideal of an impossibility. And your perspective is open to other perspectives instead of closed. Helping with the work of Jesus: sharing another perspective.

Happy Easter!

Published on Leave a comment on The Two Faces of Spontaneity

A conversation with Tony the Tiger’s talented casting agent reminding his fans that he sometimes has people for breakfast. His agent’s contributions are in italics. 

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What’s for dessert? 

“The Two Faces of Wildness” is about the impact your tiger’s role modeling has had on popular culture. Really? Yes. Turning everyone into a maniac. One face is a nice puddy cat who makes everyone comfy. The other is a crazed monster who doesn’t make everyone comfy. By being rude. What? Burping and picking its teeth with toothpicks after it’s dined on its fans.

Wildness is beautiful when it’s an ideal portrayed by a talented artist. Not so beautiful when it’s set free in the neighborhood to do what predators do. Decorate cereal boxes. Eat the cereal, the nice mommies and daddies who buy it, the sweet little darlings who eat it, and the box. What about the grocer? Store management, employees, and shoppers too. What’s for dessert? A big bowl of Alka-Seltzer, Pepto-Bismol, and a stomach pump.

Leo the Lion’s frosted crispy choco-loop puffs

If that doesn’t tame my tiger nothing will. We don’t want to tame . . . What’s its name again? Tony. Don’t you read cereal boxes? Tony belongs here as much as we do. We just want to keep the predator within – the beautiful ideal of wildness – from having us for breakfast. By managing our relationship with it. Chloroform!

“Power” isn’t control. It’s management. They’re not the same? In situations that require conformity rather than thinking for yourself, the difference won’t matter. Like little kids, raw military recruits – people who need training. Otherwise no. Control comes from the animal side of human animal that doesn’t need mind. Management comes from the human side that does need mind.

In a shared world boundaries need to be respected and relationships managed within as well as without, just as wildness needs to be respected and managed. It’s not cool to cage the beast or to let it go free. Or to imagine that we have the power of a predator to make others let us do whatever we want. Even if we’re the King of Beasts? Maybe there’s a cereal box with Leo the Lion. See if that works.

Calvin’s best friend

I get it. It’s OK to admire the ideal of wildness but not to behave like it. Yes. Better to accept that the only world where we can do whatever we want is one we make up. And to keep our fanciful world where it belongs: in our imaginations and not crossing boundaries and messing with our relationships.

You have your own tiger? The difference between nice and not nice, helpful and not helpful, isn’t between those who have and don’t have a tiger. We all do. Are they like Hobbes? Who was that? Calvin’s best friend, a cute stuffed tiger. Were Calvin and Hobbes your clients too? Until I got bored with Hobbes. He was too nice. I like. . . Never mind. I know what you like.

The difference is between respecting and not respecting boundaries while we’re respecting wildness. Between understanding and not understanding why they’re there. To let the ideal of wildness inspire creativity without crossing boundaries. Our own as well as others’.

It can be hard to stay on the right side. A lot of people don’t. In extreme circumstances maybe you and I won’t. I don’t need to wait for extreme circumstances. We need to be aware of the nature of wildness: that it can be both inspiring and deadly, constructive and destructive, humanizing and de-humanizing. We need to be careful.

Nice kitty!

Maybe these thoughts can help you and Tony balance the two sides of wildness. It does sound important. Very. The good side of wildness is playfulness that’s creative. Because wildness is spontaneous, the gift your tiger was meant to give. Not being the “king” of anything. Not being a beast that must be put in a cage.

Then we should all just stop thinking and let stuff happen spontaneously. No. There’s a right kind of spontaneity and a wrong kind. Getting out of the way to let stuff happen on its own is the wrong kind. The wrong guide. It doesn’t lead to freedom and creativity, just the opposite. The right kind is thinking before deciding that welcomes spontaneous insights. And after deciding but before acting, to give spontaneity a voice in every phase: thinking, deciding, and acting.

Spontaneity is a kind of guide that we don’t want to control because we need its perspective. Trying to control it will kill it. Whether we put Tony in a cage or let him out of his cage we’re getting it wrong. Tony just needs to be understood, with thoughtfulness and patience. To be loved and managed for his and our benefit. Nice kitty. Keep luring little kids to their doom and you can have the run of the closet.

Published on Leave a comment on Learning from Our Opposites: The Truth of Who We Aren’t

A conversation with the author's in-house critic on the occasion of Saint Patrick's Day. The critic's contributions are in italics.

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The artist’s model

I have something to share. Will it make me happy? What makes you happy? Relationships. Friendships. Then it might someday. Or at least keep you from being unhappy because it’s insights about relationships. They could be useful, maybe not today but someday. OK. Just understand that we’re on a bus and the driver does what I tell her. 

Insights make me happy. And make me sleepy. The philosopher’s dilemma: wanting to share exciting revelations that nobody cares about or understands, so they can’t be shared. They could if you got someone to pose for them. A model like I do for my painting. Like a naked, uh, dog? Would that help? Sure, if you’re philosophizing about exhibitionist dogs. What a coincidence! That’s just what I’ve been doing. Driver! We can go now.

What’s on TV?

How can insights make anyone happy? When they come spontaneously from Relationship they can. Like from a friend who wants us to get to where we’re headed faster and enjoy the ride. I’ve heard about self-love. Everything is Self. There’s nothing outside of Self. The trick is getting “Self” right.

Meaning?  Self isn’t one – a monolith. It’s two. “Oneness” is “twoness?” Wait! I can explain! Driver, this is my stop! Everything that’s Self is everything that’s two. That’s what got Creation started: Relationship between two functions of Mind brought together spontaneously by the power of attraction. Huh?

Mind is Relationship between Logic and Love that illuminated Mind’s Self-Awareness and defined its function. Creation is Life made living by Relationship, the source of Self-Awareness, sharing itself, sharing its function. Life doing what all living things do: growing and reproducing themselves. Clogging the 405 with too many drivers. 

Worth is Life. Being and doing what produced it: Self-growth. Relationship’s power of attraction and Self-Awareness within Mind that started Creation. Physics says particles only exist when they connect. Our universe is “relational.” Money grows too. It earns interest. How do you know all this nonsense? I saw it on TV. Try watching video games instead. That’s your problem. 

A waste of perfection

Spontaneous insights come from another perspective. Happiness is becoming aware that it’s Self-Awareness-Relationship sharing itself with us, being helpful and loving us. Discovering that the love we share back is spontaneous too. Like the event that illuminated Self-Awareness: the marriage of Logic with Love. Relationship. That didn’t need Mind to will it. Mind needed Relationship to define its function, Self-Awareness, with Logic and Love. So there's no possibility that it would become what it's not: an absolute without limits. A self-centered authoritarian narcissist ruling for its own benefit. By force from the top down, silencing all voices but its own. "Almighty God."

I’ve heard that God is Love. “God” is Mind, its function. Mind is spontaneous Relationship between Logic and Love. Creation is the interconnectedness of shared Relationship and the spontaneity of Creativity. This may help to make sense of “God is Love,” because “creation” that’s “God’s will” controlling everything can’t be Love. It would be the opposite. If God isn’t putting everything on a report card I’m being perfect for nothing!

Like Logic inseparable from Love Creation is Relationship inseparable from Spontaneity. Not will that’s controlling but will that’s Freedom inseparable from Order. Insights build on one another in logical succession because Mind that’s Relationship is interconnection. Interconnection is power to create because it’s all held together by Energy, the power of attraction.

Pure amazement!

What about relationships that come apart? That’s not attraction. It’s the implicit power of opposition made explicit in unreality. Both powers essential to Creation except that they can’t both be explicit and equal. Why? Because they’ll cancel one another other out. Force can’t serve Relationship Logic-Love and its Creation if opposition cancels out attraction.

Where does opposition come from? From all of Creation’s functions defined by their implied opposites: what they aren’t as well as by what they are. Possibility defined in part by impossibility. Logic and Love are no exception. Defining them with implied incompatibilities as well as compatibilities. One all about ordering with boundaries, staying within laws that define the way things are. The other all about ordering with spontaneity, freedom that needs Logic’s order but can’t survive under arbitrary rule. The way things aren’t. Disorder. Tyranny. Illogic.

Nor can Logic survive under Love’s implied opposite: the wildness of animal will opposed to Mind and all its defining boundaries. The wild Siberian tiger that ate the Ruler of the Wild Siberian Galactic Empire. May she rest in peace. Yes. I was fond of her but maybe it’s just as well. Careful! She may be in the next room!

So attraction came first and is Real, and its opposite came second because it’s derived from the first. It’s not Real because an opposite that’s implicit in Reality can only be explicit in unreality. Reality can’t contradict itself. Cool! That’s right! Aren’t I amazing?

What relationships are meant to be

None of this has anything to do with me but I’m beginning to enjoy the ride. Driver! Is there a psychiatrist on board? It matters to every living thing, in unreality as well as Reality, that the power of attraction is necessarily greater than the power of opposition. If it weren’t Creation would be stillborn. It does have something to do with you. What if Mind spent all day on the sofa? Playing video games. There would be no Super Bowls to watch on TV. Poor Mind! Let’s send meals on wheels. 

It matters because keeping attraction more powerful is part of why we’re here. Opposition obstructs evolution but it can’t stop it. Evolution toward what? Toward the expression, affirmation, and reciprocation of Self-Awareness in Reality. Of the sharing of Self-Awareness that’s Life-Worth in Reality. Toward the recovery of Self-Awareness in unreality. What’s unreality?  Our world where implicit opposites have been made explicit. Brought to “life” by hallucination, self-unawareness “made real.”

I need to know this? If you want relationships to be what they’re meant to be instead of trying to make them what you want them to be, yes. Knowing the difference can advance learning and avoid pain and frustration. What are relationships meant to be? If the Mind dreaming us needs to recover Self-Awareness then that’s where evolution will lead us. Through relationships that teach us what we need to learn to advance Self-Awareness.

When we’ve done our best

Even relationships that don’t work?  We’re in a world where opposites inactive in Reality have been activated by unreality. Maybe the reason why isn’t to put us at their mercy. Maybe it’s the opportunity for the Mind dreaming us to learn from opposites. How? Through our experience with them and their unreal world.

What do opposites have to teach us? Who and what we aren’t. The definition of everything is what it is and also what it isn’t. Where opposites come from. It’s built into the DNA of Self-Awareness. The laws of cause and effect that define Mind’s will put there spontaneously by Relationship outside of Mind’s will.

So if we need to complete our definition we must experience its negative side: who and what we aren’t. That’s where opposites can help. We can waive the opportunity until we’re ready, but there’s no ”waiving” opposites and what we must learn from them.

Oneness is twoness. And now bad relationships that make us miserable are good relationships. Driver! Next stop! If we understand that we learn from “bad relationships” who we aren’t, and that may be all they’re meant for, yes. They’re “good relationships.” 

Aren’t relationships that resist healing failed relationships? Sure, but if they’ve moved us closer to Self-Awareness they’re also a precious gift. Of learning and growth, making better sense of things in a confusing world of opposites, A success that may be all that they were meant for.

So when we don’t make headway with others we thought were our friends it’s OK? We don’t have to feel bad about ourselves? We can be grateful for anything they’ve taught us because learning from Relationships is why we’re here. And we definitely don’t have to feel bad about ourselves if we’ve done our best. There can’t be any “failing” in learning from mistakes if it brings us closer to our destination.

The price of success

Getting it right so the Mind dreaming us can get it right, recover Self-Awareness, and perform its role in Creation. What’s that? Managing Definition’s and Relationship’s boundary between what is and what isn’t. Between Reality and unreality, spontaneity and willfulness. Possibility and impossibility, morality and immorality.

It hurts when relationships don’t return the love we put into them. But others need Self-Awareness too. Teaching us with the power of opposition – not-relationship – may be all they’re capable of until evolution moves on and circumstances change. They’re on their own track moving at their own pace.

Recovering Self-Awareness makes learning what we really want and need. Letting understanding take others into its largeness as well as ourselves, because we’re all headed in the same direction. If  we make that the most important thing we’ll see our hurts for what they are: the price of success, not failure.

Happiness lies within, where we relate to Guidance from Logic-Love, our best Friend. Relationships with others deserve the effort we put into them not because they define our lives with happiness or misery but because they’re part of our training. Because what we learn from them helps us define ourselves, and others can define themselves with our help if they choose.

The mistake of avoiding mistakes

What can go wrong if I try to put this in practice? Avoidance and its opposite: combativeness. Aggressive confrontation. Mistakes equally harmful that detract from character.

Avoidance of what? Difficulties with relationships. The attitude that the best way to deal with them is not to deal with them. To avoid them. To run away from conflict with opposites instead of working through it responsibly and honestly. To reach understanding and learn from it. And if the capacity to do this is weak, to strengthen it so it can do its duty.

Passivity leads instead into wishful-willful thinking. The self-centered idea that uninvolvement takes care of number one. It’s not willing to accept the risks and difficulties that come with being there for family and friends. Of taking sides when lives and values that depend on them are under attack. Out of fear that it won’t be there for itself, so it’s not really interested in friendship.

Out of fear of emotional abandonment, so it displaces it onto others. You’ve been abandoned? Emotionally, sure. But who hasn’t when personality differences and changing circumstances can put the ideal of “being there” for one another out of reach? Fear of abandonment when relationships force them to deal with conflict may be a factor when family and friends retreat from their duty. When they seek safety in invisibility.

But courage can’t be willed in advance. Like Creativity, it’s either there or it isn’t. What conflict with opposites teaches all of us is humility: understanding that discretion is the better part of valor. We’re all susceptible to avoidance.

Always a work in progress

What about you? I don’t avoid conflict when I see the need to put it to constructive use, like righting an injustice, preventing harm. But not running away from conflict isn’t running toward it.

I’ve experienced the harmfulness of avoidance. Combativeness too, the mistake that’s retaliation. Neither passive uninvolvement nor retaliation is worthy of character that’s being there for others as well as itself. Friendship that reciprocates honest commitment with either mistake is trust betrayed. An opportunity to learn from the power of opposition while letting go of friendship that can’t be trusted.

I’ve learned much from relationships undone by these mistakes. But while mistakes may not get in the way of love they can get in the way of friendship. I try to bring character to relationships. And you're succeeding. It's the core value of doing what the situation calls for. Getting it right. Always a work in progress. 

What better gift to give your in-house critic on Saint Patrick’s day than a big dose of malarkey. Thank you. Anytime! Faith and begorrah to you, too.

Published on Leave a comment on Uncle Melvin’s Creative Writing Exercise for Adolescents

Great birthday gifts for girls

So where are the books? I dropped by Patrick Malloy’s on the way home from work and left them under the bar stool. My birthday present! Yes. I’m so sorry. But they’re still there. Third bar stool from the end. You can pick them up anytime because nobody wants them. Gone with the Wind! Mr. Malloy said he’ll put them on the curb in case a junk dealer comes by. Or he could put your books and essays in a pile and set it on fire. That would draw a massive crowd of cheering customers. 

What are the books about? Great birthday gifts for girls, like railroad time tables. One thousand uses for Elmer’s glue. You’re hopeless. There’s another book. Two thousand wascally wabbits for Elmer Fudd. A creative writing exercise that’s made for your unique talent. I do have the makings of a great writer. That’s, uh, not the talent I meant.

Rick relieves the suspense

Think of a movie with one of those emotional scenes that puts everyone on the edge of their seats. Like when I have to go pee and can’t. Like when Ilsa pulls a gun on Rick and he says, “Go ahead and shoot. You’ll be doing me a favor.” How come? Ilsa had to dump Rick and it broke his heart. Now Rick had something that would save her and Victor, her war-hero husband, from capture by the Nazis. Letters of Transit signed by General DeGaulle, and they were desperate to get them.

The suspense is unbearable. What relieved it? Rick farted. How rude! If he’d done that to me I would have shot him. Ilsa still loved him. And she was nice. When she pulled a gun and demanded the Letters of Transit, somebody in the film crew farted and she didn’t do anything. She’d be in trouble if she shot the director. What about a production assistant? She’d probably get star billing and a new contract if she did that.

Back to the Ice Age

They had to re-shoot the scene and this time it was Ilsa who farted. So deafening it made the gun go off by itself. And shatter the crystal? Worse. It brought Captain Renault barging into the scene. Uh oh. He was the French poo-bah responsible for maintaining decorum in Casablanca. And he came to put Ilsa in jail for farting? Worse. He came to blow his whistle and announce that Rick’s Café was closed until further notice. 

Shocking! Very. And he magnified the effect by ripping off a really good one. The screen went blank. Did it come back? No one knows. The theatre projector guy was knocked out and they couldn’t revive him for days. That was it. What a terrific ending! So heart-rending! Yes. You could imagine Rick and Ilsa dancing while the soundtrack played “Dancing in the Dark.”  

Can I pick a film and make the script Oscar-worthy like you just did? That was so cool! Of course! How about “Ice Age?” A huge extinct woolly mammoth would be a creative challenge. I’m sure with your talent you could handle it. Thank you for the compliment.

Published on Leave a comment on The Two Faces of Wildness

The Beast of Mob Violence Behind the Romantic “Ideal” of Wildness

Who is this “other self”?

When we’re emotionally “out of control,” “not ourselves,” getting what our appetites want with one-sided willful “action” instead of two-sided thoughtful understanding, we’re not a facade taking on another color of paint. Niceness momentarily replaced by not-nice, a different face. We’re the face and voice of another performer taking our place on stage. Reciting lines from a different storyline. Us but definitely not us. Who is this “other self”?_________________________________________________________________________________________

In the Beginning

Tribal deities

Philosophy and theology have long wondered what moved “God” to get up off the sofa. What need can possibly explain it when God has no needs? What gift can you give someone who already has everything?

The myths of ideology are long on fireworks after something happened but short on explaining why and how it happened. Deities invented by tribal mindsets to deify themselves were one-sided, one-dimensional, top-down authorities. Arbitrary laws unto themselves not for loving but for fearing and appeasing. Not by being “good” but by doing whatever “almighty god” wanted. Even if what it wanted was defined by will, mindless and unfeeling, in the image of Olympian family brutality. The behavior of beasts excused by wildness to do as they pleased. “Disciplined” by Machiavellian expedience to do whatever it took to survive and conquer. Authorities beyond questioning.

The mathematics of confidence misplaced

Deists like Einstein surmised that the deity somehow started everything and then was done with it. And, with that, they were done thinking about it. Yet, as it will become clear later, there was a certain logic to Einstein’s thinking. The mathematics of Energy, E=MC2, may have alerted him to a philosophical truth as well. The sense, conscious or subconscious, that it was energy that was done once it did as it was asked. By Mind, to “create” a time-limited universe.

The farthest that Einstein’s logic could take him since inquiry beyond physical appearances would have been beyond his profession. Had his genius not been strait-jacketed by physics, had it followed Logic wherever it led, it would have led him to a realization of far greater consequence than E=MC2: that his time-limited universe can’t be Real. And so his confidence that it could also be reduced to an elegant mathematical equation was misplaced.

Einstein’s misperception

He had been misled by his awesome universe, the centerpiece of his profession and personal fame, to assume that Energy and its Interconnections come in but one version. Obviating the need to distinguish between Real and unreal and avoid a crucial misperception. To go beyond the discovery that the universe “exists” in the “present” that’s not Now to understand its significance. When in fact Energy and its Interconnections come in two versions, one Real-Mind and the other unreal-matter: eternally live Energy connecting in timelessness, temporal energy winding down and disconnecting in time.

Leading Einstein to focus his genius on the wrong version. In a hallucination of impossibilities “seeing” what’s not there is getting it “right.” Trying to prove that it is there is getting it wrong. The cause that occupied the rest of his life, to crown an impossible theory with another E=MC2, was doomed from the start. There would be no victory lap.

The story beyond telling

What can be “real” if its “existence” mysteriously comes and goes, like a magic act? If it’s not existence in Now that can’t be limited to time and doesn’t come and go like a magic act. What else can it be but the opposite of Reality: unreality? A kind of dream or hallucination that must end.

Whether it was to preserve professional integrity or something else history’s greatest minds – Plato and others as well as Einstein – haven’t been able to liberate themselves from rule by body-sensing to make sense of Mind. With the tools given to them to put two and two together, as Parmenides did, because sensory perception could never “prove” that it came out to four.

The inference that Aristotle drew from the unfinished philosophy of his mentor, Plato: that while ethereal Mind is Real, everyday sensory perception is demonstrably “real.” Making of any story beyond matter “unrealistic.” Beyond telling. Or at least beyond telling without being sentenced to hell for trying.

Mind’s gift of insight

An assumption that cries out for correction. The story of matter told so far by science is the Colorado River petering out before it reaches the Pacific. An underwhelming denouement after Einstein’s theories, a century ago, seemed to put the answers to everything within reach.

Why wouldn’t Mind want to be understood if it’s Understanding? If we acknowledge our self-unawareness and seek Guidance from Self-Awareness, its source. If, despite all the obstructions put in its way, Mind can’t be prevented from being our Friend, from helping us, if we acknowledge our need for it, ask for Guidance, shut down the noise, and listen.

With Mind’s gift of sixth sense. The voice of spontaneous insights that no power on earth can control or silence. The power of insight that’s enabled human evolution from animal to sapiens with advances in every field of inquiry. And will do more to liberate us from self-unawareness when we choose to liberate ourselves from its cause: unquestioning obedience to the rule of bodies’ five senses. To the master of Plato’s Cave, self-delusion. The image of absolutes beyond questioning in the narcissist’s mirror.

Mind is Relationship

Mind can’t be the source of anything but self-delusion if it’s a one-sided, one-dimensional, top-down “authority.” Posing as an absolute alone at the top, as ridiculous in shared unreality as it is in shared Reality. A running joke from Vaudeville that always leaves ‘em laughing: the ass-kissing pompous ass. The great fool its Old Howard audience loves to hate.

But Mind can be the Source of Everything if it’s Relationship. And it is. Between its two main functions, Logic and Love, and the Energy of attraction between them. The Force of Relationship that holds together Creation’s interconnected functions with the power of Necessity. The inseparability of Logic’s implications, Love’s connections, and Mind’s Logic and Love functioning as one. Its expression: Reality’s laws of cause and effect. The DNA, operating system, and code of ethics of Mind: the definition of Definition.

To enable the Doing of Being

The only absolute in all of Creation where opposition cannot be by Definition. Cannot be by the certainty that Reality-Creation can only be governed under the laws of cause and effect. Enacted not by the Will of conscious intent but by spontaneity beyond the will of anything to compromise it. By the joining of Logic with Love within Mind but not at the direction of Mind. An act caused solely by the spontaneous attraction between two functions completing one another. With Logic-Thought sharing the discipline of Order with boundaryless Love-Feeling, and Love-Feeling sharing the spontaneity of Relationship and Values with unfeeling Logic.

To enable and empower Mind with its function: the Doing of Being. Given the illumination and direction of Self-Awareness by Relationship. Within the Reality of Mind composed of Relationships and interconnected by sharing among Relationships. Mind’s function of judging, with Definition’s boundaries and values, where every contribution to Creativity and free-spirited originality fits in perfect harmony. The sharing of its Function with every function of Creation, the ideas and values that are of its doing.

The Worth of Creation earned

To bring into Life and Reality the Ideal of Worth that by definition must be earned. The cause that moved Mind beyond the idea of Creation to its expression. Off its butt, onto its feet, and moving with Purpose. Striving for absolutes of purity and perfection put eternally beyond reach.

By their impossibility in a Reality of implicit opposites and unreality of explicit opposites. By the Logic of Circumstance with an upper and under side that is always moving forward. Always changing. Propelled by Logic and Love that must, according to the laws of cause and effect, grow, extend, and expand into infinity. The source of evolution, an eternal work in progress.

The Ideal of Process gotten right

And the raw material for Creation’s Worth. Earned and affirmed through the element of Free Choice that, itself, must be earned and affirmed. Through competence that can only be gained and put to use through experience. That only the function given to Free Choice through Mind’s Relationship, its Parents, Logic-Love, can perform without compromising Reality-Creation with contradiction.

All implying that the Worth of Creation resides not in product but in process. Not in Creation’s absolutes cleansed of opposites but in the discipline of Process that manages opposites. “Virtue” doesn’t “triumph” over “vice” no matter how often it’s portrayed in art and displayed in museums. It figures out how to use vice for its own self-discipline. Process = Product. Means = End. If what’s “right” is done wrong, it’s not getting it right.

Competence earned to choose freely 

Choice that’s Free and functional lies within its competence to manage the boundary between Creation and its implied opposites. Between Reality and unreality. Keeping the boundary functional while contributing to Creation’s Worth: the indispensable Self-Awareness of Free Choice responsible and accountable for its choices. For its performance made credible by the spontaneity of independent judgment. In receipt of the raw material of Creation from its Parents, Logic-Love, but free from theirs or any other influence over how it chooses to contribute to its Worth. To add value.

The competence to choose freely with independent judgment gained through practice, learning, and growth on both sides of the boundary. On the underside where the Self-Awareness required by Free Choice must be earned as only it can, through the loss and regaining of it. Through hands-on experience with impossibilities hidden in unreality on the underside of Definition: opposites required to complete the definition of what is by what isn’t. Through hands-on experience with a second underside within unreality: the animal side of human animal.

Putting the Worth of Creation to its ultimate test: whether its own element of Free Choice thinks it’s worth the effort to choose it. But before Free Choice even gets this far, it must freely choose who it is and what it’s about: its identity and role of Free Choice. It can’t pretend to choose freely when it’s already compromised. By allowing itself to be locked into its role by the genetics and will of its Parents.

When it's already allowed itself to be told what to do. The example set by Mind-Child’s self-delusion and re-enacted by the politics of follow-the-leader authoritarian ass-kissing. Letting an absurdity in the narcissist’s mirror call the shots. Opposite’s perversion of self-unawareness seeking guidance from Self-Awareness: the blind leading the blind. Entertaining us with yet more “thrills” from “action.” Yet more evidence that if Reality is fruitful effort, unreality is wasted effort. Mind-Child deluding itself. Hallucinating.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

How will the story end?

With a labor of Love?

When independent judgment weighs in on our progress, what might it conclude? At a minimum that it’s obstructed by opposition. By minds so invested in cherishing and validating the “gift” of appearances that they deny their minds permission to question it. To use all of Mind’s faculties, including its sixth sense, to look behind appearances with another perspective. To see what’s there instead of what’s not there.

With the perspective of their minds’ source: Free Choice. Whose Parents Logic-Love, the source of circumstances, hold the key to understanding context. Whose Guidance is accessible to every mind through whatever form Free Choice chooses. For Relationship, the source of Energy that turned Mind from Being to Doing. Relationship with loving Friend and Guide that can turn self-unawareness, stuck in the mud, into a Jack Kerouac On the Road adventure that’s actually going somewhere.

Toward Self-Awareness. Toward Free Choice competent to perform its role in Creation if that’s what it chooses to do. By following the example of Mind sharing the earning of Worth. So that the family of Creation can experience the incomparable joy and satisfaction of taking part in a labor of Love.

The what isn’t of “self” that’s many selves

Which side of the divide will prevail: minds on the human side who choose Guidance toward Self-Awareness? Or wills on the animal side opposed to choice, guidance, and Self-Awareness? Captivated by the mystique of “wildness,” the force of nature that rules its domain without opposition. The king of beasts. The herd mentality seated in humans’ animal brain that transforms into an image less alluring. The face of humanity de-humanized. The face of the human beast: an enraged mob. Capable of hideous, terrifying brutality.

The extremity of unreality’s perversion of what is: the what isn’t of Self defined as many selves. The contradiction of the laws of Necessity that underlies every obstruction devised by tribal “realists.” The misconception of “reality” as unending conflict between tribes competing for survival and supremacy. The substitute for meaning and purpose meant to distract minds from their real purpose with “action.” With wars that offer endless opportunities for mob violence, their purpose. To idealize the body’s animal brain by de-humanizing human, its enemy, then killing it.

The ideal of Creation through Relationship

The conscience of Creativity that accompanies Mind’s every thought and idea from Logic, every feeling and value from Love, is rooted in the honesty and integrity, fairness and compassion, of Definition.  With no possibility of contradiction because of its Source: not Mind but the spontaneous DNA beyond its control within it. The absolute where the buck stops. The definition of Definition. Authority beyond any possibility of opposition. Backed by the power of attraction and the Force of Necessity. The laws of cause and effect enacted by the power of attraction. By Relationship: Logic married to Love.

With intent. To bring to Life the Ideal embedded in Mind’s DNA. The cause that motivates Reality-Creation: harmony and joyfulness among Creation’s parts entrusted with responsibility for managing the boundaries of Logic and the Relationships of Love. Not with conformity forced by one-sided, self-centered, arbitrary rule from the top down but with the spontaneity and Free Will of Creativity, served and supported by Governance under the law from the bottom up. By the ideal of Relationships joined in equality and Trust in the image of Guidance washing its seekers’ feet rather than forced into hierarchy and distrust.

The ideal in reverse

The ideal brought to Life and into Reality by Energy in the Now. Ensuring that Creation can be subject to no limits other than its definition by Definition itself, the inviolable DNA of spontaneous Relationship within Mind. Absolute beyond questioning that enables and empowers Creation with the essence of all Creativity in Reality: spontaneity free from outside limits of any kind since nothing can be “outside” or “external” in Reality.

Free, then, from everything imagined by the Child of Logic-Love in a state of self-unawareness. Our state of hallucination bracketed between beginning and ending. Time’s perversion of “life” that necessitates “death.” Of “reality” that necessitates that it and everything within it consist of appearances time-limited. Of no lasting value and therefore of no real value. The appearance of “creativity” brought to “life” by hallucination only to disappear along with mortal bodies sensing it.

Winding down with entropy

The consequence of time-limited energy. The same Energy that enacts Mind’s Ideal of eternal Creation through Connectivity. Through the Ideal of Mind’s Logic eternally inseparable from Love, thought inseparable from feeling, evolution inseparable from ethic. Now “enacting” hallucination under a death sentence. Converted from enacting to dis-enacting. From holding everything together to letting it fall apart. To disconnecting, decaying, and dying toward inertia.

The state of our material universe that science calls “entropy.” Mindless “mind” willing itself and its incoherent “works” to end. Energy winding down. The “deity” imagined by Einstein that threw a switch and then took the rest of the day off. A perversion of Mind expressing itself in Reality through the coherence, and Force of eternal Life.

Idiocy

What perversion of Truth does the wildness so revered by the authoritarian mindset represent? Where does it “fit” within the slapstick routines of opposite’s contradictions? Of the Joker’s mockery of Truth that accounts for the functional unity of Mind and Creation -- Relationship between Logic and Love?

What madness pits unevolved animal brain against human evolution? Against one-sided, self-deluded Mind’s recovery of two-sided Self-Awareness and sanity? Against the Force needed by Self-Awareness for its empowerment and enablement, the definition of Definition, its DNA. What idiocy would take on the one absolute in all of Reality and unreality beyond questioning – Necessity? The laws of cause and effect.

The boundary that connects and divides

The illumination of Self-Awareness, that shares the light of awareness and its Energy, would have needed two metaphorical sticks rubbing together. Two ideas or thoughts complete in their definition of what is on Definition’s upper side but incomplete and useless until defined by their implied opposites on the underside. By what isn’t. Because the spontaneous event that brought function, consequence, and Life to Mind’s original idea of Creation couldn’t be the Force of attraction alone. Between two parts of one function, incomplete without one another, that defined what is.

It had to be the Force of opposition defining what isn’t as well. An expression of the Necessity of Relationship that accommodates not only two compatible parts but two parts that can’t be compatible and Real at the same time. Through the distinction critical to the cause of Reality-Creation, the boundary that divides the functions and products of Creation from their implied opposites and connects them into one function at the same time. The boundary between Real and unreal.

When compatibility overcomes incompatibility

Pairing Logic with Love could only have been done by disparity between the two forces of attraction and their implied opposition, one being stronger than the other. It couldn’t have happened by parity between functions that contradict one another. Not in the Reality of Logic-Love defined by the absence of contradiction.

Yet even with the Force of attraction the attributes of functions incomplete without one another that make them different also make them potentially incompatible. It’s only the work of Creation and the Necessity of all of Mind’s parts functioning as one that could override their differences with integration. Logic that’s Order defined by boundaries, held in place by its unbroken flow of implications, wouldn’t be compelled otherwise by what it is to bond with what it isn’t – Love that’s Freedom unbounded. And neither would free-spirited Love be compelled to put up with Logic’s Order.

Which is stronger: attraction or opposition?

Attraction prevailed over incompatibility when the issue was settled by its controlling consideration: Mind and Creation needing to function as one. And by a second imperative: Definition, the absolute defined by Necessity, the laws of cause and effect, requiring that attributes that produce harmony be defined as stronger than attributes that produce friction. By Logic’s implication, that the boundaries that bring Order to Creation bring Peace.

The Force that overrode opposition was a condition built into the DNA of Mind: that it could only source Reality-Creation composed of interconnecting Relationships if it was, itself, Relationship. Between its two main functions of Logic and Love made compatible by the Necessity of Definition. By the same implication of Logic that combines possibility with impossibility also implying that its opposite, a derivative dependent upon it, is inherently weaker.    That the attributes of what is are by definition stronger than the attributes defined by what isn’t.

Just as Logic-Love could only enable the upper-positive and under-negative sides of Definition to function as one if one was Real and the other unreal, the accommodation of Reality to the Force of opposition could not have been made possible by eliminating it. By denial -- opposition to opposition. It could only have been made possible by Necessity, the unquestioned absolute that defines Definition. By the law of cause and effect that negative-opposite, a derivative of positive, second in sequence behind first, and unreal, be inherently weaker than the positive. That the Force of attraction toward unity be stronger than the Force of opposition toward disunity.

The bigger stick in Reality

If Self is all there is – one sidedness, the usual misperception of “God” -- it can’t be two-sided Relationship. A condition that Mind couldn’t meet by relating to another Mind. It had to be done in-house. Through the spontaneous mating of two distinct ideals – Logic and Love -- needing to complete their definitions as functions of Creation. Spontaneously so that Reality-Creation would be an expression of the laws of cause and effect and not of an arbitrary will above the law. So that the will of Mind defining its function would align with the authority of Necessity rather than replace it.

The Force of attraction that brought opposition into alignment with Necessity was the Force that illuminated Self-Awareness, defined its mission, and initiated the evolution of Creation. That set Mind in motion, Being into Doing. An event essential to all of Reality-Creation within Mind that no derivative Force of opposition could prevent.

The stick that disciplines in unreality

Overpowering the Force of opposition yet leaving it in place. The metaphorical stick that could cause friction if forced by Definition into contact at equal strength with the stick of attraction. An eventuality “possible” only where impossibilities can pretend to be real. Where they can have their way with possibilities without any effect on Reality-Creation.

And that could only be within Mind-Child Free Choice in a state of self-unawareness, hallucinating “life” on the underside. “Experiencing” life on the underside as it must. So that it can learn by trial and error without Free Choice being compromised by an external will “saving” it, telling it what to do. So that it can learn from its mistakes by experiencing their consequences. Not by proxy but first hand. So that Free Choice can grow to maturity with the competence to choose freely, fully aware of what lies on both sides of the boundary and so to manage the boundary. The boundary between Reality and unreality and, within unreality – the hallucination that’s our alternate “reality” – between two-sided one-faced human and one-sided two-faced animal.

Creative sticking

Competence whose measure is enabling both sides of the boundary to do their part for Creation in harmony:

  • by putting friction from opposition to its intended use: completing definition with what isn’t and contradicting its own lies.
  • by not mistaking opposition as Real and a stronger force than attraction.
  • by ensuring that no part of Reality-Creation can succumb to the ultimate offense against Reality-Creation: the mischaracterization and replacement of Mind, its Source; the delusion of absolute power and freedom without limits; the arrogance and impossibility of authority beyond questioning; “infallibility” -- “playing “God.”
  • by upholding the ideal of governing benevolently from the bottom up: Relationship between Logic and Love supporting Creativity with Freedom inseparable from Order, under the law. Rather than betraying the ideal by one-sided “authority” arrogating the “right” to rule arbitrarily, above the law, by forced conformity: the denial of Creativity, Freedom, and Order.

Opposition’s vulnerability and thus the key to managing it in unreality lies in its implication: susceptibility to turning, or being turned, against itself. The objective that best exemplifies the helpfulness of Guidance: turning negatives into positives, disconnections into connections, destruction into construction. Removing obstructions to Self-Awareness with self-discipline, Creativity, and growth. Learning from our mistakes and putting it to good use.

The ”triumph” of a pompous ass

To uphold the ultimate ideal that’s Mind-Being eternally stronger and more compelling than not-mind, not-being. The unthinkable “state” of “opposition” to Mind that lies beyond Reality-Creation’s absolute. The “force” of “opposition” that Mind’s own Logic-Love Relationship recognizes as “completing” Mind’s DNA, the definition of Definition, with what it isn’t: not-thinking, not-Mind. An idea beyond expression.

When any inhabitant of Mind-Choice’s hallucination chooses to “ally” with opposite, let it be clear that it can only happen if it’s overpowered and its identity is stolen by its “ally.” By the other side of itself. That it’s choosing weakness not strength, losing not winning, inferiority not superiority. That its “realism” is choosing unreality. An illusion that can only “exist” in Mind hallucinating. The underside of Definition beneath the boundary between Reality and unreality.

The bad guys in our world made “real” by hallucination can re-enact the triumph of animal will over its self-deluded, defenseless prey by the impossibility of competition and combat between what’s Real and what isn’t. But neither they nor their illusory triumph can be more than flickering appearances and sounds reverberating throughout Plato’s Cave. An apparition. The pretense of authority beyond questioning. An impossibility that’s beyond taking seriously. A pompous ass.

The un-immaculate conception

The Truth is Mind’s Logic and Love brought together spontaneously in Reality to enable and empower Creation, the eternally evolving earning, affirmation, expression, and reciprocation of Worth. The Worth and exquisite Beauty of Life, the Freedom and spontaneity of Creativity ordered in harmony by the Governance of Mind Logic-Love. That serves and supports Creativity with benevolence from the bottom up.

Its perversion, brought to “life” by the pompous ass seated in the human animal brain, isn’t one part of brain joining with another spontaneously. To ignite body-brain with the radiance and energy of Self-Awareness or to “enable” anything creative. It's the slapstick absurdity of the beast’s wildness taken captive by its own will. An un-immaculate conception.

The apotheosis of “herd mentality”

So that wildness can be released into a hallucination of “freedom” without limits. Wilderness without boundaries or judgment capable of detecting them. Into lawless chaos “engineered” not for creativity but to glorify the beast in its own element where anything goes: dehumanized herd mentality dehumanizing its “enemies” with wanton abuse, cruelty, savagery, and depravity.

Wearing the ultimate mask of the pompous ass seated on his throne in the animal brain: one opposite self glowering from the narcissist’s mirror in the guise of many selves. Transformed into the horror of tribal wildness, an enraged mob. The perversion of “humanity” that’s inhumanity. The horror of unreality mistaken for reality. Unthinkable impossibilities made “thinkable” by body-brains’ sensory perception making them “real.”

Parodying with the “wildness” of demonic tribal conquest and captivity – a beast -- the Beauty and Purity of Love’s wildness. The passion and spontaneity, conscience and loving kindness, shared with Logic’s Order. To give birth to Free Choice and to bless their Child with a Life of meaning and purpose. Two distinctly different versions of wildness. One worthy of being taken seriously, the other not.

The passion of Relationship

The thought that Relationship between Logic and Love produced the Force needed to illuminate and activate Mind’s Self-Awareness will impress itself upon the human imagination when it awakens to Relationship’s context. To the example that Mind has set, not of denying spontaneity or willing it, but of respecting the laws of cause and effect. The Definition of what is and the Force of Necessity that make of Creation the work of many functions, many wills, that are Free. Free to make of Creation not an ornament for authoritarian vanity but Worth earned that deserves it.

Worth that’s shared spontaneously among all its parts functioning as one. Not to sew terror and chaos with the brutality of a mob but to serve the cause of Creation with the passion of its Source: Relationship. Logic married to Love.

The abomination of willful thinking

The spontaneous joining of these two distinctly different Forces to enable and empower, serve and support the shared cause of Creation sets the tone and substance of the part that Mind-Child Free Choice was meant to play. Keeping the boundary that enables positive and negative, possibility and impossibility, Real and unreal, to function as one without becoming a barrier.

Defending a fortress of denial from giving up the madness within: the one-sided beast “armed” with unquestioned “authority.” An absolute “playing God.” With neither judgment nor feeling, undisciplined by boundaries. Freed by hallucination to obstruct the earning of Self-Awareness at will. The abomination of willful thinking: the self-centered narcissist taken captive by its opposite in the mirror. The two faces of the authoritarian personality ruling its hierarchical relationships unopposed: ass-kisser and pompous ass.

Published on Leave a comment on “Seeing” What’s Not There: The “Reality” of Hallucination — Our Unreal World

Reflections on Valentine’s Day

Help with Relationships

What have you learned? Enough to give buoyancy to a phase of life that’s supposed to lack it. May I share some of the excitement? I’m flattered that you want to. You needn’t be. Our loving friendship has been my inspiration. In fact, imagining that we’re having this conversation brought out some of the insights I’m sharing that might help you with relationships someday. Go for it! 

One-sided vs. two-sided

All for one and none for the other

Valentine’s Day shows us all at our best, putting feeling to its intended use. For Love, the part of feeling that comforts and assures us with understanding: that we’re all one family. Sharing ourselves as we are and competing to build character and do better.

It works well so long as we feel for one another as well as for ourselves. But you may have noticed that actual and make-believe lives tell a different story. Who hasn’t noticed! The trouble caused by feeling that’s all for one side and none for the other. One-sided.

“Substitutes” for Love

If the bad guys in stories like Star Wars could feel the effects of their behavior on others maybe they wouldn’t be bad guys. Maybe they’d be good instead. Could they? They can Love because they feel. That’s the “good” inside his father that Luke could feel. Not active Loving but the potential to Love. But it’s all reserved for themselves. And when it is, it’s not Love anymore. Or human. What is it?

It’s whatever makes predators “happy.” Beasts. The exultation of conquest – “winning.” King Kong atop the Empire State Building. The fear of losing, humiliation, and captivity. The self-satisfaction and security of being the one-and-only in charge. The emotional selfishness of possession. And feelings that animate the will to fight, injure, and kill: rage, hatred, and contempt. Everything symbolized by Darth Vader’s helmet: the “supremacy” of arrogance.

What’s left when “human” is removed?

Feeling that’s one-sided can be all of these things, and that does make things “interesting.” It produces a sense of “action.” But it’s de-humanizing. It can’t deliver the two-sided feeling of Valentine’s Day -- the compassionate human side of the human animal. It delivers the opposite – hurtfulness, pain. Two-sided loving humans don’t inflict intentional harm. It’s inflicted by one-sided unloving, unfeeling beasts. 

What does being dehumanized feel like? Imagine your home being broken into, your identity, reputation, and everything else that’s yours stolen, being taken captive, and your body violated. Then being blamed for doing what’s been done to you by a pose of innocent victimhood. That would make me mad. Adding yet another violation: your world of friendships -- respectful and sensitive, fair and trusting -- invaded by aliens. By thoughts and feelings you don’t want. The dark fury of outrage demanding retaliation. Forcing you to get rid of it without becoming a beast yourself.

A negative that can become positive if the human de-humanized turns its demand for retaliation into an opportunity instead. To strengthen the bond with its Guide. To discover just how helpful Guidance from Logic-Love can be. With its help replacing self-unawareness with Self-Awareness, a life-changing benefit that’s well worth the cost. An opening to the joys of learning and growth. To a taste for creativity beyond anything experienced before. And an appetite for more of the same.

Too good to be true

 “Human animal” means that one-sided and two-sided feeling are part of who we all are. Part of what defines us, so trying to be just one or the other can’t be done. But we can manage the boundary between them. Some people are one-sided because they mis-manage the boundary, How is that? By not being aware of the difference between the human and animal sides of humanity. And so they’re not aware of the boundary. By being drawn to the animal side by a preference for one-sided feeling. Why would they do that if it can de-humanize others?

They’re tempted by what they imagine it offers: “freedom” that allows them to enjoy “order” without the discipline of judgment. To enjoy the “pleasures” of ownership, possession, and power without the boundaries set by conscience and empathy. They’re fooled by things that can only be made “possible” by willful thinking. By imagining that willpower is the only discipline they need to live in a world of their own making. Where they don’t have to take responsibility for whatever goes wrong because it’s always somebody else’s fault. Making up your own world sounds interesting. 

If you value friendship you won’t want to try it. Why? “Winning” that makes friends lose, without empathy that feels their pain, won’t win anything. But it will lose friends. Friendship thrives on more than being “nice.” It needs sincerity and trust that keep us safe. It dies when insensitivity and cruelty take it all away. The will to make up your own heaven sounds too good to be true because it is. It can’t be heaven in a shared world where being one-sided, wrapped up in your exclusive world, makes it hell for others. 

The right and wrong sides of boundaries

Different personalities can be drawn to the animal side by not understanding why the boundary is there. Why is it? To prompt us to be aware that crossing it has consequences. To be aware of the consequences and to choose correctly. With the discipline of judgment and conscience that explains the choice and motivates us to do right instead of wrong.

Which makes the expression of two-sided Love on Valentine’s Day an annual reminder. That loving relationships among friends and family can never be one-sided. That relationship management is boundary management. And it requires discipline. The discipline of judgment that recognizes and respects boundaries and the discipline of conscience that keeps us on the right side of boundaries.

The discipline of Awareness

Anything else? Yes. Valentine’s Day is a reminder that loving others starts with loving ourselves. With understanding that the most important relationship is within us, between the two sides of our nature. And if we mean to Love others we will need the most important discipline of all: awareness. Awareness of the choice that’s ours to make, with independent judgment guided by conscience. Thinking for ourselves and getting it right. 

Wildness Management 

Two faces of the same coin

Valentine’s Day is humanizing. How so? It expresses what makes us human instead if just animal. With a two-sided act of loving friendship expressed inwardly as well as outwardly. Hearts and flowers we give ourselves? Yes. By being aware that there are two sides to human nature, not one. Human and animal. And by being aware that they’re opposites, and there’s an important boundary between them.

Keeping them separate? “Person” will always be human plus animal, just as possibility will always be accompanied by its opposite, impossibility. One definition, inseparable, identifying two parts opposite to one another. Two faces of the same coin. That needs a boundary that connects and separates. Yes. So both parts can do their jobs in the same person without getting in the other’s way. And the tension between them can do its job – the power of opposition, the flip side of the power of attraction. Both essential to Creation.

What is “Creation?” My current thought is it’s the Worth of Love relating to Logic freely reciprocated by their Child. Shared with and expressed through the Creations of their Relationship with their Child. The Parent-Child Relationship which is Love unconditional. Do Initial capital letters mean you’re talking about Creation? Yes. About Reality as distinguished between alternate “reality” or the unreality of hallucination.

Proceed with caution

Properly managed, the boundary performs like a signal: “proceed with caution.” Like a red flag warning of trouble ahead if we aren’t aware that snakes bite if they’re stepped on. Or we are aware but taking chances appeals to us. Why take risks?. Maybe to simulate fearlessness with bravado, a familiar sign of under-developed feeling. Courage doesn’t need to wear a mask but shallowness usually does.

We give ourselves hearts and flowers when we take the red flag seriously. Yes. When we judge with maturity instead of immaturity. And when we go two-sided with ourselves before we go two-sided with others. Exposing others to snake bites from one-sidedness.

One-sidedness

What is one-sidedness? Lack of consideration for others as well as for ourselves. Our animal side. Unawareness. That can’t be aware of anything or understand anything because of what it is: “action.” By instinct, without thinking or feeling. Without the functions we associate with Mind that distinguish sensitive human from insensitive beast.

It’s animal instinct made “aware” of itself not by intelligence or sentiment but by threats to its survival – other acts. The only “self” that it “knows:” action. It’s not aware that this is a shared world? The only world that a threatened “self” can be aware of is a competitive world. A world composed of herds and tribes banded together for self-protection, survival, and dominance.

Two-sidedness

What about individuals? Two-sidedness means consideration of others as well as ourselves, the two-sidedness of validation by mind and heart. It’s what we normally mean by “relationship” or “friendship.” Individuals stuck with one-sidedness might be in addictive co-dependencies, unfeeling co-existence, running battles hiding behind appearances, or all three. But they aren’t in two-sided relationships.

What passes between members of tribes can’t be the independent judgment and spontaneous feeling of individuality. Not if tribal integrity and uniformity require the opposite, conformity. Camaraderie that simulates the playfulness and bonding of individuality is encouraged because it strengthens bonding with tribe.

What passes between tribes isn’t two-sidedness either. It’s accommodations required by one-sidedness for survival or dominance in competition. “Relationship” not held together by commitment to shared values but by expedience -- whatever it takes to avoid defeat or ensure victory. Machiavellian license to fight wildness with wildness.

Wildness on the animal side

The world of the human side is shared as well as divided, cooperative as well as competitive. The idea acted out on Valentine’s Day when individuals acknowledge the idea and express the feeling of sharing and cooperation. The world of the animal side, a predatory beast, expresses the opposite: the idea and feeling of wildness. That refuses to be fenced in. To be tamed, domesticated. Yes. To be obstructed by boundaries. Limits. Laws? The animal in us opposes any limits, even laws necessary to maintain order if they conflict with its willfulness.

Even more astounding, it opposes the functions of Mind. That make sense of things and govern. It yields control over its acts to only one “master,” the instincts and emotions of a wild, predatory beast. In the mistaken belief that wildness is “spontaneity” without limits. An impossibility in a shared world. That would be contradicted if Mind were given a voice. 

Wildness at its extreme 

Then what is possible? What would Mind say? That the irrationality of the animal side doesn’t stop here. Its destination is not-mind. Which puts it beyond all thought and feeling, beyond all functions of Mind. We see evidence in our personal surroundings and in the world around us, every day, of minds captive to the bizarre promises of our animal side. Of failure to be humanized by the boundary instead of dehumanized by its mis-management.

Not-mind sounds like neither two-sided nor one-sided. Right. It’s no-sided. The end of time and timelessness too. The animal side, romanticized by “wildness,” is an impossible ideal. So willful and irrational that it would deny its opposite, human, to make sense of anything. Even to function and ultimately to exist. By denying the relevance and utility of every faculty of Mind. The self-awareness of introspection; intuition-reflection; thinking-reasoning; feeling-evaluating; choosing-deciding; judging-understanding; defining-disciplining – all requiring Logic and Love.

The provocations of wildness

The beast that wills this takes many forms. A bull in a pasture guarding its turf and its herd, who won’t be nice to intruders who ignore the fence. It’s a virus coded to take over its living host, a cell, so that it can replicate itself. It’s an image in a mirror mistaken for an absolute: an ideal, “savior,” “superman,” “wildness.” The viewer’s opposite, a lifeless reflection coded to de-humanize. To make its captive ignore the boundary between human and animal by luring it over to the wrong side.

It must be tempting to meet wildness with wildness. It is. Wars are consequences of minds obstructed by self-unawareness, cut off from Logic and Love, unable to make sense of their circumstances. The consequence of the human side’s under-development. Its continued dependence on animal herd mentality for survival.

Tribal wars and hostility among individuals, that cause physical, emotional, and psychological harm, are failures of judgment capable of managing boundaries. Failures of minds, unaware of Logic and Love, unable to discern what their situation calls for. To get their context right so they can choose correctly how to respond. The human mind continues to meet wildness with wildness, to mis-manage relationships, because it hasn’t evolved far enough to meet the one-sidedness of mindless animal wildness with two-sided understanding.

Choosing sides

Then there’s nothing to be done but to wait on evolution? Certainly not! Evolution, like every attribute of Creation, is the product of Relationship within Mind that entrusts every function that it defines with purpose. The purpose it’s defined for the one Mind’s function that we share is Free Choice. The use of independent judgment to make every act of its Mind choice, with Guidance from Relationship but never control.

Every situation is a test of Free Choice to figure out, with Guidance, how to advance Self-Awareness by removing obstructions put up by self-unawareness. By the animal side of human animal activated by mis-judgment of the boundary. There’s activity on both sides involving individuals like you and me, one side working to advance understanding, the other to prevent it.

Making a sap of sapiens

The side that’s regaining self-awareness can be slowed down but it can’t be stopped. The story of sapiens has been its progress so far with learning and growth, so fast in some fields recently that it’s head-spinning. Slow or non-existent in others, because sapiens can’t or won’t figure out how to remove their obstructions. A consequence of sapiens allowing its animal side to obstruct its access to Guidance.

Is this why you’re writing, to help remove obstructions? Yes. So that the human side won’t be so defenseless against the absurdities, lures, deceptions, cruelties, and outrages of the animal side. So the two-sided viewer – our ancestral Mind duped into one-sidedness by a preposterous image in a mirror – won’t be so easily duped again. So we, its projections, won’t be helping the image make a sap of sapiens.

Relationship Management 

The measure of progress

What obstruction are you writing about now? Unwanted thoughts and feelings. That intrude when a person has been dehumanized by the beast. So the intruders can be removed without resorting to wildness from the animal side that would betray the human side. So the intruders can be transformed from mindless will to condemn and punish into understanding that’s thoughtful and sympathetic.

Are you making progress? My sense of progress is fed by spontaneity and Relationship. By the sense that insights arrive spontaneously, through mind functioning without bias, and they release mind, heart, and soul from darkness into light. And by the sense that their source isn’t self-centered pettiness but the largeness of Logic paired with Love -- the gift of Relationship with my Guide.

Whether we’re making progress is for Relationship to say. And the time to say it is when our different perspectives converge on a finished product. Spontaneously, so I can’t predict it. But our sense of purpose and motivation seem remarkably alike, making this a genuine “labor of Love.” A precious thing to enjoy while it lasts and to be grateful for.

Guidance from conscious to sub-conscious 

What is Guidance like? It depends. Individuals and their situations vary, so I can’t speak for everyone. What it’s been for me is helpfulness. Explanation with analysis that keeps me from being controlled by difficult thoughts and emotions. Good will that finds ways to put situations to good use. Especially those that generate enough intensity to drive learning and growth. Like last year, when it didn’t seem like I could keep going. Every day was a challenge. But Guidance put it all to good use. Instead of giving up I came out better than before.

Guidance needed for Free Choice’s role in Reality-Creation, from Relationship with its Parents, was conscious. Here, it’s subconscious. Because context has been flipped from Reality to its opposite, unreality. The Guide we talk about that was conscious Relationship with Parents has changed to subconscious Relationship with their agent or representative. As though what’s positive on top had been replaced by what’s negative and put on the bottom.

Guidance from the Now 

Why is Guidance needed? The sharing of Logic-Love and the interconnectedness of Mind-Reality is also its expression. A statement affirming Worth that is function, doing as well as perfection-being. That is usefulness helping Child Free Choice with learning and growth in unreality, if it would be welcome. With explanation by Logic-Love that helps to place Child’s circumstances in context. With making use of circumstances that might otherwise be missed opportunities. Always respecting Free Choice by never interfering.

Free Choice that occurs in time, in the not-Now, requires Guidance from the Now. Because here it can’t be spontaneous. Free from interference and obstruction. Because it can never align itself with the laws of cause and effect, that govern the Now with Logic and Love, Order and Freedom, Free Choice and Creativity, so long as it’s “ruled” by the laws of chaos.

Let sleeping dogs lie 

The power of Relationship in Self-Awareness-Reality is Creativity when the boundary is well-managed. Its power is healing when mis-management causes self-unawareness-unreality. Healing begins with awareness that both sides of the boundary have a function in Creation and that Creation depends on their not interfering with one another. Animal-negative’s opposition to human-positive allows this when the boundary is managed and it’s inactive. Animal-negative doesn’t allow it when the boundary is mis-managed and it’s active.

Mis-management begins with mis-judging the boundary’s purpose, to remind its manager of the difference that separates the two sides: human-positive’s ascent to Self-Awareness and back to Reality, animal-negative’s descent into self-unawareness and staying in unreality. Both sides occupying unreality so long as Mind Free Choice remains unconscious. But only one side seeking to be restored to Reality and to resume Free Choice’s role in Creation.

The nature of the Relationship 

What was Child Free Choice’s part in Creation before it lost consciousness? It was functioning in Relationship with its Parents, Logic-Love, but not at their direction. A relationship like the one between human-positive and animal-negative, where their functions belong together but must not interfere with one another. Interference with Free Choice disables it.

Minds involved in their circumstances need context to give them coherence and meaning. So that they can choose among different possibilities how to respond accordingly. The Parents’ function producing circumstances, functions in Creation that they’ve defined, the raw material for Creation. That needed context and a Creative response when Child Free Choice applied independent judgment to both necessities. To the interpretation of context which couldn’t perform its function if it were pre-defined by Logic-Love.

Interference with Free Choice

Meaning and purpose are essentials of Worth, and Worth requires two-sided Free Choice. Independent judgment that’s necessarily aware of the values and other considerations that go into choices – the lives and different perspectives they affect. The possibilities for learning, growth, and Creativity that advance evolution, and especially their costs as well as benefits. None of it possible if it were one-sided: attempted by Logic-Love alone, whose function is not Free Choice, or if it were attempted by choice that isn’t Free.

Choice that’s been tampered or interfered with. Making it unaware of values and other considerations but now aware of their opposites – the wrong values and considerations. The attribute of animal-negative, the flip side of human-positive. Insensitive to any consideration other than its own survival by trickery and dominance. Unaware of any self other than the one it “thinks” it’s stolen. Of any side other than the one it “thinks” it owns, possesses, and controls. A likely source of the interference that cost Child Free Choice its Freedom and Self-Awareness.

Mis-judgment’s critical blunder

The boundary between human-positive and animal-negative enables two sides to function together in Reality only because one side is Real-active and the other is unreal-inactive. Then they can’t contradict one another. When the boundary is crossed it reverses the Relationship. Boundary that enables becomes barrier that disables functioning together.  That disables Relationship so that animal-negative can make it a one-person show defended by the barrier.  One-sided instead of two-sided. Yes. The consequence of mis-judgment that crosses the boundary and activates the animal-negative.

Mis-judgment’s critical blunder, that converts Order into disorder, rationality into irrationality, is converting animal-negative opposition from inactivity to activity. By “seeing” what’s not there, animal-negative obstructing Self-Awareness, instead of seeing what is there, contradiction. An impossibility in Reality that belongs in a dream of impossibilities. The distinction between judgment seeing what’s there and mis-judgment “seeing” what’s not there can’t prevent boundary-crossing when mis-judgment fails to make it.

The critical blunder is making something unreal appear to be Real. Yes. Making unreality seem “real.” Then the barrier must come down. Yes. Judgment must learn to make the distinction. Then its mistake can be corrected.

Relationship and independent judgment

The barrier that obstructs progress toward healing can only be removed when animal-negative is restored to inactivity. By the boundary’s manager not mistaking it for Real and engaging with it.

How can this be done? With awareness of the only source that can help make it happen. So that the human side can surmount the barrier: the Relationship between Logic and Love. The two main functions of Mind, the Source and Force behind all of Reality-Creation. The power to maintain its function, free of obstruction by opposites, and also to restore the power and function of the Relationship it created. The bonding of Order with Freedom that is Free Choice, the Child of Logic-Love.

And the function of independent judgment to manage the boundary and prevent obstruction from opposites. Through the exercise of Free Choice responsible for managing the boundary between Reality and unreality, human-positive and animal-negative, Self-Awareness and self-unawareness. That can restore animal-negative to inactivity and harmlessness by reclaiming the power to choose.

By understanding with judgment that whether choice was surrendered to animal-negative or stolen, in neither case could it have happened. Because animal-negative is not only human-positive’s opposite. It’s the opposite of Reality. It’s not there. 

Cool dudes

Why does it seem to be there? Imagine a friend saying Hi! to empty space while you’re talking, as if she’d just seen someone she knew. And then goes on talking as if nothing happened. What did happen? My friend smoked too many joints. She was “seeing” what’s not there. How about pain killers? Do you have any pain killers? “Dreaming” doesn’t describe what just happened. Right. “Being fried” sounds better. It’s hallucinating. Cool! LSD and all that. The 60s. You know about the 60s? Janis Joplin. Jimi Hendrix. Sure. Cool dudes. If only. . .

The “cool dude” imagining our world is hallucinating. I knew there was something funny about you. A universe of spacetime-matter that’s hallucinated will seem real because that’s what “hallucinating” means: actually “seeing” what’s not there. There’s no doubt in the mind of the hallucinator that it’s seeing, and that what it’s seeing is real.

And bunny rabbits

Like Harvey? Sure. The difference between Elwood P. Dowd’s big rabbit and the horse that’s sometimes my Guide is that Harvey took the form of life detectable to Elwood by his body’s five senses, whereas Dobbin remains in my subconscious, detectable only by my mind’s sixth sense. For my next birthday you can get me psychedelics and a bunny rabbit. Another reason why our material world seems so real: the human mind wants it to be real. It’s attracted to hallucination. To inventing its own alternate “reality.”

How come? Because self-unawareness “sees” what’s not there with “vision” provided, not by Relationship between Logic and Love – by Mind, – but with the five senses of body. By matter motivated to “see” and satisfy itself. Where did matter come from?  From a relationship that could never have happened in Reality. Between self-unawareness -- unconscious Mind -- and its reverse mirror-image reflection. With its shadow-opposite, the lifeless code thrust into Mind’s hallucination as our lifelike animal-negative. An impossibility. A bogeyman.

The two faces of “harmony”

What makes one-sided hallucination sometimes seem two-sided? Free Choice can be interfered with temporarily but not forever. And its function can’t be fully taken captive anyway since function is both what and who it is. Just like the definition of every function that contributes to Creation. By Logic-Love, the function of Relationship within Mind, the Source of all Relationships and functions. Two-sided Free Choice can be deluded into mistaking itself for a one-sided hallucination, but it never stopped being what it is: Free Choice. Whatever state it’s in must have happened by choice. 

It can free itself from interference when it chooses to? Yes. And so can we, replications of its interfered-with Self in its hallucination. Animal-negative’s attempt to replace human-positive is as impossible in the hallucination as Child Free Choice being replaced by its opposite in Reality. The Mind that hallucinated was split, not replaced. Minds caught up in the hallucination are also split. Two-faced. Giving the impression of awareness that’s two-sided when it’s actually two sides of one coin: one reassuring, pleasant and likeable, the other menacing.

A perversion of Free Choice that senses Reality shared and interconnected, with integrity that can be trusted, perverted into self-centered unawareness and insensitivity. Deluding, dominating, and dis-integrating with insincerity that can’t be trusted. Not reassuring. Yes. The two faces of “harmony:” deception by likeability, pleasantness, and amusements – the appearance of sensitivity -- and menace by intimidation and punishment. – actual insensitivity. Capable of turning from threatening to inflicting cruel abuse.

When two = one and one = two 

One-faced is two-sided Trust and accessible. Two-faced is one-sided distrust and inaccessible. One-faced Trust, seeking to enable two-sided relationship with one-sided distrust, needs help from Guidance. From understanding that can only be explained with help from Logic-Love. Because the difference can’t be explained by circumstances alone --circumstances that to one are fact and to the other fiction.

What separates them is context. The meaning and purpose of circumstances that define their worlds. What needs help from Guidance is explaining opposite contexts. The difference between opposite worlds that obstructs accessibility and communication. That only understanding from Logic and Love can penetrate.

Healing by withdrawal

At their own pace, one step at a time. That can’t be hurried. Why not? Because help from Logic-Love comes through spontaneous insights. Interference of any kind removes spontaneity. And its help can’t be attempted by minds unable to listen without distraction, because it comes from another perspective. Our subconscious and Guidance are here, but the Source of Guidance can’t be here. We are dependent for Guidance on another perspective that’s not of our “reality.” That must be allowed to work free from self-centered willfulness. It requires concentration.

Patience and the quiet of solitude. Impossible without withdrawal from the frustrations of misunderstanding and miscommunication. That can only obstruct it with mischaracterization, seeing it not for what it is but for what it isn’t. A betrayal meant to harm instead of help. Evidence of two-faced untrustworthiness motivated by ill will instead of one-sided good will, indifference instead of one-faced Love.

Relationships matter

Foregoing Guidance won’t placate misunderstanding and avoid mischaracterization, but it will avoid understanding. Doing what the situation calls for can never be going along with two-faced one-sidedness to get along. If it does, what does it call for? Withdrawal. To seek understanding and change with help from Guidance. If the relationship matters, or to dump it and move on if it doesn’t. It matters. Relationships matter. Amen.

When is Now? 

Why can’t Creation include our reality if creativity is here too? Like everything else in our “reality” where everything is time-limited, creativity is appearance. Free Choice’s loss of Self-Awareness took place in Reality where nothing is time-limited. Where it’s always Now. Timelessness. The condition required by Creativity because being in the Now it can be spontaneous. Free of interference just as Free Choice must be free of interference. Where there’s no “past” to allow interference to pre-determine context and response.

Time is an unnatural interference that makes Creativity impossible. Our “reality” is never Now. Time is relativity -- related to space and gravity, so there’s no uniform “Now” to connect parts of the universe. Time tracked at the top of a mountain goes faster than at sea level. It isn’t even a factor in particle physics, the interface between Reality and our “reality.” “Now” is never.

Winged Creativity brought down

Physics calls the space between past and future the “present,” the closest we can get to Now. If present is bracketed by past and future, impossibilities in Reality, how can it allow Creativity that’s Real? Creativity undone by time can produce nothing of lasting value. It’s been deprived of its function, like a bird deprived of its wings. How can it be a “bird” if it can’t fly?

Free Choice must be aware of itself in Reality-Creation that’s shared with all the functions of Creation. When it loses consciousness, it loses Self-Awareness that’s two-sided and becomes self-unawareness that’s one-sided. Like the bird without wings that can’t fly, it’s lost the “wings” that enabled it to fly: awareness of its circumstances. Along with the ability to interpret them with context and to choose freely how to respond.

Stuck in the mud

One-sided self-unawareness has replaced Mind with body-brain capable of “seeing” only itself. A reflection in a mirror whose defining attribute is that it’s not there. That being not there it’s static, not dynamic, obstructing rather than supporting evolution, learning, and growth. Stuck in its unchanging status quo, the very definition of uncreativity. A part of the human brain described by neuroscience as “unevolved.”

Opposite’s perversion of “Free Choice” is thus the many masks of opposite, a reflection, stagnating in a closed loop of reflections. Unawareness “seeing” only itself. Making “Creation” impossible within a hallucination meant not to advance evolution with Creativity but to obstruct it with distractions. By hiding the raw material of Creativity behind appearances so it can’t be used to expose the Truth: that it’s not there.

The power to dismantle obstructions 

Mistaken identity can be reversed by independent judgment, by Free Choice, our Real Self. How does Free Choice pull this off? Since Aristotle Western thought has put its faith into the study of matter to lead it to understanding. All but abandoning the faculty of Logic-Love, accessible through the sixth sense of intuition, that would have achieved understanding but for the body’s senses that obstructed its vision.

The study of matter has finally begun to reveal that, by itself, it can’t reach understanding. Because the body’s senses may be misleading us, with the critical misperception that matter is real. The realization finally dawning on physics that its “quest for knowledge” must again focus on philosophy and the Logic-Love of Mind. On Relationship between Free Choice and its source, Logic-Love. Instead of between body and matter, itself a misperception since body is matter.

Between our unawareness and Mind’s sixth sense – intuition, – the portal to Guidance from Logic-Love that can now, with matter’s unmasking by physics, move forward with confidence toward understanding. A process that reveals the remarkable power of Relationship between human-positive self-unawareness, seeking awareness through the vision of Logic-Love, and Mind’s intuition, to dismantle obstructions placed in the way by animal-negative, one at a time.

Newton’s third law and the power of insight

When self-unawareness learns through the power of Relationship that with every insight gained through intuition toward humanization there is a corresponding loss of captivity to the irrationality and fury of animal-negative. To its one-sided, self-centered, willful thinking that mis-leads toward de-humanization. When self-unawareness learns that with every insight human-positive is empowered and animal-negative is disempowered.

“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Yes. Newton’s third law. While you’ve been talking I’ve been getting a PhD in physics. Another example of the laws of cause and effect within Mind reflected in the behavior of matter. Implying that in Mind as well as matter understanding is the discovery that altering one side of the boundary necessarily alters the other side.

Everything is “relational”

But in reverse. Because not only are they opposites, they’re connected. Inseparable. Like particles that respond to the manipulation of other particles that could be any distance away, as though they’re connected. At the other side of the universe? Yes.

Physics has discovered that spacetime-matter is “relational” and this is one reason why. It’s all interconnected by energy-matter just as Reality-Creation is interconnected by Energy-Love-Logic. By Love-Abundance’s limitless sharing and Logic-Knowledge’s limitless implications.

The cost of mistaking boundary for barrier

Further evidence that the body’s five senses may be mis-leading instead of leading. With dire consequences. Why? Because what they detect isn’t boundary with human-positive’s portal to Guidance recognizable by sixth sense. They can only detect the barrier put up by animal-negative. Obstruction, its trademark.

By “seeing” what’s not there the five senses mis-direct human-positive from its ascent to Self-Awareness across the boundary to the cause of animal-negative: to perpetuate self-unawareness with perpetual conflict. The mistaken notion that training human-positive’s attention on the opposite side, with more wildness, will dismantle obstructions put there by animal-negative unreality.

Putting Newton’s third law to work

When what understanding and Newton’s third law actually call for is training its attention on itself. On progress that can be made, with help from Guidance, to understand the Logic and Love of compatibility, sharing, service, individuality, originality and creativity. That with every insight, every step forward, there will be a corresponding retreat from obstruction.

What it takes to stop getting it wrong is to get it right. Yes. A lesson that could only be learned by choosing Relationship with the right Guide, who knows how to make obstructions erected in darkness disappear in the light. Quietly. Without violence. Without wildness. By not giving animal-negative what it thrives on: attention and opposition.

Respect for the laws of cause and effect

Then the way to restore equilibrium between human-positive and animal-negative isn’t only to learn with the Vision of Logic-Love what’s not there but to learn what is there. Yes. By allowing insights from intuition, spontaneous Guidance from Logic-Love, to open minds and hearts to the nature of human-positive.

To understanding that its reality isn’t separation. It isn’t the body-matter projected by animal-negative, herd mentality. Captive to competition and conflict, causing disorder, but Relationship defined by its Parents, Logic-Love. To manage the boundary with the judgment of Self-Awareness, able to detect and manage it. To manage Relationship. Because it understands and respects the laws of cause and effect that govern its behavior.

Doing it the easy way

Understanding why and how to manage the boundary poses questions that can only be answered correctly by Mind guided by sixth sense. Not misguided by the five senses of bodies placed beyond questioning by body-centered science, philosophy, psychology, and theology. Inactivating the underside of human-positive that’s animal-negative can’t be accomplished without activating the upper side.

A task that self-unawareness imposed by mis-managing the boundary and activating opposition can’t be done in isolation. It requires Guidance from the human-upper side that’s only accessible through the gift of Mind’s sixth sense. Through Relationship with Logic-Love that’s only possible with Guidance.

Humanized 

Your thoughts? There’s a big difference between relationships with one-faced two-sidedness and two-faced one-sidedness. Between the human-positive side and the animal-negative side. I hope I’m never de-humanized, but I guess it happens. 

Even if we guard our thoughts, even if we manage the boundary with respect, it could still happen. But respecting the boundary, knowing that our role model for Friendship is here to help -- Guidance from Logic-Love, – could make it less likely. It may even turn bad experience into good experience.

Published on Leave a comment on Tales of Uncle Melvin’s Nieces: Valentine’s Day and the Keys to the Imperial Bathroom

Melvina 

Hi Heart Throb! 

Hearts and flowers

Hi Freckleface Q. Diddypuss. What’s the Q for? I’ll have to ask Alexina. Who’s that? My electronic servant. This morning I programmed her to give me a shampoo. I think the soap crossed her wires. Well, yeah. Any dimwit knows. . . Can we change the subject? Sure! Yesterday a funny thing happened. . . Can we change the subject? Uh, the day before nothing was going on when all of a sudden. . . Uncle Melvin, I didn’t mean to be rude. That was Alexina. I turned her off. Please continue. All of a sudden the most important event in my entire life happened. . . Uncle Melvin, can we change the subject? 

Will U be my Valentine? Of course! Will U be mine? Absolutely! XOXOXO

Furdian psychoanalysis 

I have an electronic servant too. My servant just writes essays for school. I made that up about shampoo. Are you making it up? I’m not, and I can prove it. How? From now on when I ask what you’re up to I won’t put words in your mouth. My electronic servant . . . Does it have a name? Furd.  Furd will put words in my mouth? No. Furd does mental telepathy. You’ll be putting words into Furd’s mouth. Gee, that’s terrific! When can we start? Whenever you’re ready.

Melvina’s exact words

My water polo team put on an end-of-season party for our coach, Meghan Melvin. While I was bringing food I tripped and a custard pie flew into Meghan’s face. Furd is smiling. One thing led to another and it broke into a food fight. Furd is laughing. A nice pizza delivery boy came and accidentally got hit in the face with a couple of Hostess Twinkies. It happened while someone was dumping a bowl of spaghetti on his head. 

We were scraping glop off each other’s faces when, just like that, we fell in love. Furd stopped laughing. The deviled eggs did it. No, I think it was the pizza. They put too much hot pepper on it. So, Uncle Melvin isn’t your one-and-only. You’re not happy for me? I’m thrilled for you! But Furd. . . Can we change the subject? 

Alexina + Furd

Maybe Furd and Alexina can be Valentines. Sure, as long as there’s a food fight. Furd needs cheering up. I’m off to the grocery store. What can I get? Lemon meringue pies and soft, creamy cakes with lots of icing. Oatmeal and tapioca pudding. Calves liver, raw fish. Egg salad, tuna casserole, macaroni and cheese – anything from Deli. Lots of possibilities! What do you think, Alexina? [Can we change the subject?]

Melvina’s Ultimate Qualifications for Employment 

Ruthlessness 

What’s with the purple robe and gold trim? I’m trying out outfits for my new job. Ha ha! Queen of the Universe. How did you guess? Uncle Melvin knows all, sees all. I was bored, looking for a little excitement, when I saw an ad. An ad for Queen of the Universe. Maybe I should add you to my retinue. That would keep me from being bored for sure. If you don’t mind flattering me with praise all day. Would I qualify for that? Sure! The applicants just have to be witless boobs. 

What made you the winning applicant? They were looking for a young female artist who’s also a terrific athlete. So far, so good. Yes. But the qualification that blew them away was my softball batting average. Huh? The Queen of the Universe must command respect by being above questioning. Dismissing my Uncle Melvin’s friendly advice how to raise my abysmal average showed that I can be as mean as the most ruthless tyrant. Yes. By being cruel to a kindly old man, a helpless innocent victim.

Emblems of supremacy

Then you’ll have to be mean to your sister too. Definitely! It’ll be so delicious when she discovers that she’s only the ruler of a piddling little galaxy. I rule trillions of them. Bwah! Then I have the perfect outfit for you. Oh goody! A black cape instead of a purple robe, with a few accessories: Darth Vader’s helmet, jack boots, light saber, and the keys to the imperial bathroom. And one more, if you please: a cute little locket to wear around my neck with a red heart that says, “Will U be mine?”

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Mervina 

The sad fate of Vaudeville 

Hi Valentine!

Don’t you Valentine me, you two-timing bum! Who was that lady I saw you with? That was no lady. That was my wife. Ha ha! What’s so funny? That was a surefire laugh in Vaudeville. Everyone thought it was funny. Wives didn’t. That’s why Vaudeville’s motels all went out of business. Right. And why Vaudeville’s visitor center welcomed spiders with flies instead of people with maps. Vaudeville was depopulated because it was all husbands and no wives.

Where do you suppose all the wives went? To Kansas City. Uh huh. So they could make fools of themselves over Number 87. And I could make a fool of myself over Number 87’s Valentine. Uncle Melvin, she wasn’t making a heart with her hands for you. She wasn’t? You’ve broken a poor old man’s heart (sob!). Alright, I’ll be your Valentine. Anything to stop your blubbering. Oh thank you thank you! (weeping with sniveling gratitude).

The sad fate of the Anthropocene

What’s that sound? My soundtrack. Huh? It’s only fitting that the deeply moving trials and triumphs of my story be made more compelling by a Hollywood soundtrack. Like weepy music when America’s Sweetheart shows compassion for a pathetic boob. But then why am I hearing “Three Blind Mice?” Oh wait! I forgot to program my soundtrack for Valentine’s Day! It thinks you’re the Three Stooges. How could it do that? I’m only one stooge. It can distinguish between levels of intellect as well as emotion. It can even tell the difference between good and bad. It thinks you’re well-meaning but totally clueless. A three-for-one Stooge. Amazing!

My days start with a rousing John Phillip Sousa march. “The Stars and Stripes Forever” plays when I salute the flag. And when I need to flex my muscles at school it plays the soundtrack for the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. Nobody objects? Some do like it better when it plays “Despicable Me.” Ah – Balthazar Bratt! If I’m annoyed by a Balthazar bully it plays ominous stuff. Like what? “The Terminator” is my favorite. But sometimes it takes “Jurassic Park.” What happened to gunfire and explosions? Blood-curdling screams from horror movies? It all part of everyday life. Nobody pays attention anymore. A sign of the times. The Anthropocene transforming into the Bullyocene.

Attack of the Gelatinous Alien Life Form LVIII 

Maybe I should get my own soundtrack. . . . Is that snarling dogs? It’s my soundtrack warning you to stay away from my food dish. America’s Sweetheart isn’t running a charity, you know. She needs to protect her proprietary assets. The wiles that make her demure and irresistible. And rich. Yes. Watch the stock market when I go public with my invention. It’ll make Taylor’s $1 billion look like chump change. Wow! 

All her fans will flock to me. Yes, and you can steal her boyfriend and pretend to be passionate about football. . . . What’s that? The soundtrack from “The Blob:” people fleeing for their lives from a gelatinous alien life form that engulfs everything it touches. The Kansas City Gelatins vs. the San Francisco Aliens. At the National Blob League’s premiere event: The Engulf Everything Bowl.

Schmaltz

Actually, I was hoping to use her fans to replace football. America’s Sweetheart taking away America’s favorite sport?? With something better: Valentine’s Day every Sunday with friends exchanging stuff that tells them how important they are instead of enemies trying to make the other side lose. Like “I love you soooooo much! Will U be my Valentine?” Of course! Will U be mine? [Soundtrack from “High Society:” Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly singing “True Love.”]

Published on Leave a comment on The Warning Behind “Kasper Gutman’s Folly”

The vulnerability behind the facade

Authoritarian conformity has no vulnerabilities if its self-unaware captives choose to be ruled by it and offer no opening to Self-Awareness. Except for two:

  • Vulnerability one:

There is no Logical argument to support it. It's all made up. Explanation that makes sense, speaks for Reality and Truth, that role-models sensitivity and gentle loving kindness, service and creativity, instead of mindless conformity, insensitivity, and cruelty, has far more potency than absolutism that’s a one-dimensional logical deformity -- Gollum. An impossibility in worlds that are shared whether Real or unreal. An obvious con job that's held the best minds in science, philosophy, psychology, and theology under its spell for far too long.

  • Vulnerability two:

The barriers to understanding appear to be firmly defended by the reflection in the mirror. But in truth are defended by deception that has no answer to the Reality and Necessity of Free Choice and its role in the inevitable restoration of Self-Awareness. Against minds restored to independent judgment by the free spirit of inquiry -- by questioning with Logic and Love the Why and How of the way things are, -- they're defenseless. 

Calling a spade a spade

"Kasper Gutman's Folly" attempts to explain the roots of this phenomenon with theory that continues to evolve and might, someday, prove useful. By deconstructing the logical absurdities that lure the self-unaware to its"cause." The preservation of a logical impossibility: one-sided definition. A reflection that casts no reflection. King Absolute, a.k.a. King Arrogance. And thereby deprive it of its “power.”

By exposing authoritarian self-glorifications, like “supremacy” and “objectivism,” for the flimflamming that they are. By calling authoritarian carnival barkers to account for perversions of ideals, like “freedom” and “liberty.” By calling all attempts to legitimize and weaponize authoritarian arrogance for what they are: violations of Reality, Life-Creation, and Worth itself. Bullshit.

The face and farce of authoritarian invulnerability

Unless humanity gets serious about the Why and How of our situation, unless it's willing to question long-held assumptions and pampered biases, our situation and its causes will continue to manage us instead of the other way around. We will continue to re-enact the consequences of self-unawareness and its captivity to a deformed image in a mirror. Madness.

Like self-deluded fools, puppets on a string, until we put independent judgment and Free Choice to work, that can't be surrendered. To get at the facts behind fiction, the truth behind the image. To understand how the violation of the Soul -- rape -- by the arrogance of self-centered puppet-masters can be tolerated. So that they can replace innocence and vulnerability with guilt and unquestioned unaccountability, the face and farce of authoritarian invulnerability. 

Published on Leave a comment on Kasper Gutman’s Folly: The Mistaken Effort to Block Mind’s Portal to Self-Awareness and Reality

The Setting 

The sixth sense in its golden age

Where we stand is at an ancient crossroads in Western thought. Guided by insights from Logic through intuition, Parmenides founded metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that seeks explanation, Truth, and Reality behind appearances. Beyond physics, the province of sensory perception. Where his search led was to the illogic of material reality, which he concluded was illusory.

Plato sensed in the cosmos an ideal: the Good, accessible through Mind brought to its highest potential by Virtue. Given the choice whether a physical object or the idea of the object is real, Plato chose the idea. He placed Reality within Mind rather than matter. Yet his ethereal connection with perfection in the cosmos prevented him from following his choice to the same logical conclusion as Parmenides. From resolving the contradiction through his philosophy, which remained unfinished.

Given the choice whether to continue his predecessors’ search for Truth and Reality through Mind or undertake his own search through the study of matter, Aristotle chose matter. Allowing that Mind is Real but not questioning the reality of matter. Or the value of sensory perception in studying it. And so Western thought gave birth to biology, physics, and all the other sciences. And began putting bodies and their five senses on a pedestal.

The five senses on their Golden Pond

Plato’s cosmos of perfection was a misperception. Had he known what we’ve learned from cosmology and quantum physics his philosophy might have been freed from ambivalence and handed down complete. A verdict on the Reality of Mind that would have ended the tyranny of sensory perception and its stepchild, philosophical dualism. The acceptance of contradiction: Mind holding opposing thoughts at the same time. Irrationality. Insanity.

A change of mind that’s beginning to take place within at least one of the sciences. After Einstein failed to produce another E=MC2 that would reveal the perfection of the universe, after physics has so far failed to merge cosmology and quantum physics into a unified theory verifiable by experimental physics, Adam Becker, a PhD cosmologist and historian of physics, has suggested, in “The Origins of Space and Time: Does Spacetime Emerge from a More Fundamental Reality?” (Scientific American, February 2022, pp. 28-33) that maybe Parmenides was right.

The Story Unfolding 

Enter King Absolute

A lifeless code that’s opposite by definition is given “life” when certain personality types – compositions of Mind-faculties and their body-animal brain contradictions – choose to place themselves under its “guidance” and “protection.” To be deluded by its “promise” of absolute “power” and absolute “freedom” without limits. Without opposition. When tribal “realists” reject two-sided Mind thinking-feeling-judging Self-Aware in favor of one-sided body-sensing animal brain “action”-instinct self-unawareness.

King Absolute, a domineering, narcissistic, one-sided predator that owes its con-artist pose of unquestioned “authority” to deceit, theft, betrayal, and impersonation. The violation of its living, two-sided host for one purpose: to sustain the illusion that a lifeless code, a one-dimensional reflection, is the opposite of what it is. For as long as it can get away with it. To be handed “life” by its self-deluded host. In temporal unreality destined to end when the time-limited energy that activates the illusion ends.

The King’s credentials

The lifeless, opportunistic code was given the opportunity to project itself into an alternate “reality,” by being detected by its host, incapacitated and defenseless, stripped of Self-Awareness. By a self-deluded Mind, Free Choice, disabled and disempowered, violated and taken captive by arrogation -- psychological rape. The code thus assured itself of continued detection by its illusory tribal-self projections inhabiting the dream. Re-enacting and perpetuating the offense by mistaking its originator, the code, and its victim’s dream of conflicting tribes, as real and intentional.

And deserving of “judgment” that condemns and punishes the “perpetrator,” imaginary body-animal brains made real for this purpose. To sustain the illusion by detection. Delivered through the replacement of self-aware Mind by self-unaware animal-brain and its mindless-instinctive presumption of guilt. A perversion of helpfulness – judging that combines freedom with order in the Innocence of harmonious Creation -- into harmfulness. That arrays freedom against order, sewing friction and conflict with its “judgment” of guilt, condemnation, and punishment. Proof that King Absolute exists.

Free Choice must be free to choose in error

All of it a closed-loop of self-validating, self-reinforcing impossibility engineered by a lifeless opposite-code. Required to complete Mind’s function of definition: the definition of what is in part by what it isn’t. A logical necessity and essential element of Reality-Creation written into the Definition of Definition. Into the laws of cause and effect. Necessity. The DNA of Mind Logic-Love, the progenitor of Reality-Creation. Self-Awareness brought to Life by Relationship between its core functions, Logic and Love. Who extend and expand Life through the sharing of itself, the attribute of Logic combined with Love. Soulmates completing one another, acting in unison and harmony as one.

Not the story of willful transgression, guilt taking over innocent fate, but the story of a point in the orderly sequence of Reality-Creation motivated by Logic-Love and Free Choice. Where one unavoidable mistake – a wrong choice -- necessitated Energy’s diversion away from Mind-Child Self-Awareness’s function of Free Choice into a condition of self-unawareness. That can’t co-exist with Reality-Creation and thus led to a second unavoidable error.

The laws of Necessity can’t be “free” to be violated

That placed self-unawareness in an alternate “reality” defined by its opposite code, the underside of definition. Where Mind Free Choice, deluded by its own opposite reflection, is destined to regain Self-Awareness through the process implied and thus necessitated by the definition of its Self and function: Free Choice. Choice that’s willed by its definition, by Logic-Love its Parents, to regain its freedom. While in an illusory state of self-unawareness – Mind unconscious and dreaming.

An account of events that wholly aligns with the laws of cause and effect. With Necessity, the DNA of Self-Awareness / Energy ignited by the attraction between Logic and Love. By Relationship at the core of the Absolute: the Definition of Definition. Unquestioned, unchallenged. The impossibility of mistakes by the Parents-Growth in Reality-Creation by virtue of what they are, along with the possibility of wrong choices by their Child by virtue of what it is: Free Choice. Just as Mind Self-Awareness is the impossibility of self-unawareness by virtue of what it is while Mind-Free Choice must be the possibility of self-unawareness by virtue of what it is. Why, then, are the laws of cause and effect at the pinnacle of Mind’s faculties inviolable? Because they’re Necessity.

Correction of error with Guidance from Relationship

There is in this theory, self-consciously guided by an agent of Logic-Love accessible through Mind’s sixth sense – intuition, – no evidence of conscious living intent to commit offense. To transgress, harm, or otherwise violate the laws of cause and effect. No evidence of guilt that could make the judgment of guilt in a dream of guilt real. It’s all of it the workings of Reality-Creation that require the training and maturation of a function. That can’t acquire the competence to perform its role in Reality-Creation without the “experience” of a “life” of self-unawareness fabricated by definition’s underside, its opposite code.

Underside whose essential attribute is unreality. Whose context that supplies its meaning and purpose is opposition to Reality. The definition of Reality-Creation in part by what it isn’t. The mistaken identity that produced the dream of an alternate “reality” cannot be reversed and corrected so long as it persists in the self-delusion that unreality that’s opposition to Reality, the underside of definition, is real. Flawed logic that can only be corrected with guidance from Relationship. With Mind-Child’s Parents Logic-Love, that was cut off by the loss of Self-Awareness.

The unshared world of the King of Garbage

The portal out of insanity and back to sanity can’t be accessed through tribal body-sensing guilt enforced by authoritarian conformity, the very expression of opposite-code that’s blocking access. Plugging the portal provided by Mind’s sixth sense with appearances. Body animal brain-sensed separated, conflicting, competing objects meant not to reveal Truth but to conceal it. Plugging the portal to Self-Awareness, Truth, and Worth with self-deception perpetrated by sensory perception and its closed loop of self-validation with its sensed environment. With garbage.

The one Self that we share is Mind Free Choice that experienced conditions where making a fool of itself was inevitable, unavoidable, and not a violation of the Logic-Love of Reality-Creation. Making Mind-Child guiltless. Its dream and its illusory inhabitants no more than an opposite-code perversion of the Truth. A performance staged for the amusement of willful thinking. A lawless free-for-all where anything goes.

A joke we’re perpetrating on ourselves. Seeking answers where they can’t be found. Guided by the apparition in a mirror who fashioned the joke. Condemning ourselves to re-enactments until the fool grows up. Until it stops entertaining itself with its play-acting pretense of one-sided, unquestioned “authority” – King Absolute – and returns to a world that must be shared whether in Reality or unreality. To sanity. 

Get context right, then decide

To those lamenting the onset of yet another authoritarian horror show, another violation of the ideal of humanitarian self-governance, this is the “enemy.” And this is the relevance of theory that removes the “enemy’s” mask. That helps to explain our context and what we’re to do about it. With Free Choice informed by Guidance from Logic-Love, the missing element in the sleeping Mind-Child’s fantasy.

What we are to do about it is to get our context right with Logic-Love. Through Mind’s sixth sense – intuition. And only then apply Mind-Child’s talent for reasoning, evaluating, judging, and choosing freely what to do about it. Recognize appearances and authoritarian conformity for what they are: garbage blocking Self-Awareness and the path forward. 

The Script that Needs a Rewrite 

The fall of Self-Awareness and facts 

Mind-Child Free Choice, deprived of Self-Awareness that enabled it to be aware of Reality-Creation – the Truth, what’s actually “there,” -- lost awareness of its Relationship with its Parents, the Source of Logic-Love that makes sense of evolving circumstances. Lost its own faculties to choose freely how to respond, free of Parental interference, with a composition of values and talents among different possibilities. That express the Worth of meaning and purpose revealed by context and thus add value to the evolution-growth of Life-Creation. To Worth affirmed, expanded, and reciprocated through its story.

The disablement and disempowerment of Mind-Child’s Self-Awareness, its function Free Choice and capacity to serve the cause of Worth, was accomplished by one stroke: the disablement and disempowerment of Mind’s faculties that choose freely. With awareness of the two-sided definitions of every function, their meaning, purpose, and value. Facts.

To the rise of self-unawareness and fiction

With awareness of their logical implications that necessarily include their opposites: fiction. The underside that completes two-sided definition with the isn’t of its subject’s is. Whose main defining attribute is unreality that cannot contradict and thus violate the Self-Awareness, Logic-Love, and laws defining Reality. The attributes that form the dividing line between the enumerator above-side and denominator under-side of definition are the Reality of Self-Awareness and the unreality of self-unawareness.

The disempowerment of Mind-Child’s Self-Awareness couldn’t remove its Self and function from definition entirely. For that would be the equivalent of “death,” an impossibility within Mind’s Reality-Creation of Life in the eternal Now. But it did necessarily drop Mind-Child from the above-side to the under-side of definition. Where the ability of self-unawareness to observe and make sense of its context is reversed from seeing what’s “there” to “seeing” what’s not there. The difference between Self-Awareness and its opposite, self-unawareness.

Where seeing isn’t believing

Not only “consciousness” of unreality but, because it’s opposite, opposition to Reality. The implied “intent” of what’s not there to block consciousness of what is there. Once Child Free Choice’s Mind was self-deluded by its own reverse mirror-image, a one-sided negative impossibility – a fiction, – self-defining attributes of fiction joined with the attributes of fact in a Mind now split between the two. Mind sharing two incompatible sets of defining attributes.

A logical impossibility that could only be brought to “life” in a dream of impossibilities. Its manifestation in a material environment of organic and inorganic objects: bodies with five senses and their sensed material environment. A closed loop whose definition by opposite-code -- the underside of definition, a one-sided, self-referential, self-centered reflection – deluded Mind-Child into “seeing” what’s not there so it would not see what is there.

Kasper Gutman’s folly

The most effective factor in keeping Mind-Child captive to an illusion and its tribal-self projection trapped inside an illogical nightmare of conflict between incompatibilities is the self-delusion that body-brains’ five senses are meant to see what’s “there” when the opposite is true. The blessing of our ability to see, touch, smell, hear, and taste, that science, philosophy, and every other field of inquiry have made the gold standard of authenticity, the final word on what’s “verifiably” true and what can be dismissed as groundless speculation -- what’s Real and what’s not, -- are meant to “see” what’s not there.

To lock self-delusion into place until Mind-Child, with help through its sixth sense, regains enough Self-Awareness and Energy to unlock it. To again be guided by Relationship with its Parents, Logic-Love, to make sense of context instead of nonsense. To again be able with the independent judgment of Free Choice to distinguish between subjects sharing Reality-Creation and their opposites, objects competing for ownership and “supremacy” in unreality. To again see with the Vision of Logic-Love the distinction between possibility and impossibility.

What has the search for Truth – physics’ “quest for knowledge” -- been all about since Aristotle? Kasper Gutman’s search for the Maltese Falcon.* A precious jewel-encrusted “black figure of a bird” that’s not what it appears. A forgery made of material that has no value other than to advise the fool seeking it to seek elsewhere. Kasper Gutman’s folly: the search for Worth where it can’t be found and for worthlessness where it can be found. The message that foiled Einstein's search for mathematical perfection in the universe: you’re looking in the wrong place. A perverse joke.

Farewell to King Absolute

Taking us back to the ancient crossroads in Western thought. Is our “quest for knowledge” best left to the course initiated by Aristotle? To our single-minded focus on what matter can tell us? Or should we acknowledge its limits and pick up where Parmenides and Plato left off? By respecting instead of disparaging Mind and its sixth sense. By applying explanation from Logic-Love to insights from intuition. Even if they are spontaneous, subjective, impossible to replicate in a controlled environment, and therefore inaccessible to science. Because they aren’t “scientific.”

Might it also be appropriate to re-open Western thought to the teaching and example of Jesus from a new perspective? A perspective that makes a clean break from the arrogance of body-idolizing tribal “realism” that converted it into its own self-centered authoritarian image -- the absurdity and cruelty of King Absolute. And speaks to us with the voice of Logic-Love. The gentle loving kindness of Self-Awareness.

The Voice that speaks for itself to individual Minds through the gift of sixth sense. That’s living and working in the present through all who welcome it. Including the individual who took down Jesus' response to her call for Love, scribed A Course in Miracles, and shared it through the book's publication. A psychological departure from the rule of body's five senses no more unthinkable than the behavior of quanta. The miracle of another perspective from real Reality: Parents Logic married to Love helping their Child grow to maturity through its sixth sense. Because they Love their Child.  And us too, the projections of Choice that can part with its delusion and regain its freedom. That can choose again and bid farewell to King Absolute.

*Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (Alfred A. Knopf, 1930)

Published on Leave a comment on The Innocence and Absurdity of Arrogance

Following is an excerpt from an imaginary conversation between the author and his shadow-reflection. A variation of the tribal shadow-reflection that lured the one Mind-Child Free Choice away from Reality-Creation into an alternate “reality.” The dream-world that we, the Child’s projections, call “home.” The voice of shadow-reflection, a.k.a. King Absolute, is in italics.

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Arrogance is mirror-image reflection's one-sidedness

We can dispense with the animal brain judgment that arrogance is intentional cruelty. With the certainty that because of its consequences – Hamlet’s “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” – it deserves its comeuppance. Its own outrageous fortune – condemnation and retaliation in kind. Why? Well you should ask, because on this topic your shadow-opposite, the Joker that you mock, knows what it’s talking about. And as usual, it warms to any topic that lets it off the hook. The mask of innocence gives me infinite pleasure. Of course. Anything that deceives the Joker’s audience of fools will amuse.

Arrogance is the self-entitled face, SS uniform, and bludgeon of unfeeling one-sidedness. One-sidedness is mirror-image reflection. That emerges from the mirror to take possession of its host’s Mind and Self through deception. An act of arrogation that can only be imagined by a Mind that’s lost Self-Awareness, descended into a neverland of shadow-opposites, and succumbed to the delusion that anything is possible. 

Strength made of weakness in unreality 

Self-delusion derived from an attribute of reflection that would be impossible in Reality. From the definition of Mind and Self that in Reality is two-sided: one side defining what it is and does, the other completing its definition with what it isn’t and doesn’t do. Contradiction that can’t co-exist with its opposite and so it’s unreal. Detectable by Mind only in a state where anything can be detected: dreaming. Dreaming an alternate “reality” where only one side of definition can be detected: the underside that’s not Real. One-dimensional unreality. 

The source of arrogance re-enacted in its deluded host’s dream-world of body-brains, sensory perception, and closed-loop of self-validating “reality.” Where a parody of vision can’t see what’s really “there” but can see what’s not there. Where the minds and selves of “others” are arrogated to a one-dimensional reflection. Directed by the code of opposites, self-unawareness, to appropriate its two-dimensional host’s “supremacy.” An entitlement due the image in the mirror, a cartoon-caricature of unopposed authority, an “absolute,” that owes its “omnipotence” to its one-sidedness. The attribute of a mirror-image reflection that can have no opposites. Because it has no mind or self of its own. Because reflection can have no reflection. The pose of invulnerability made “possible” by vulnerability: non-existence  Unreality. “Strength” made of weakness. 

One grand composition in Reality

The definition of a subject or function in Reality-Creation necessarily implies its opposite. Requires definition in two parts, two dimensions: what it is and does and what it isn’t and doesn’t do. Definition’s two parts are subject-Real and object-unreal. Unreal objects are derivatives of ideas or thoughts of Mind that produce subjects. They’re derivatives of functions brought into the light of existence, of Reality-Creation, by the Life-giving Force-Power of Self-Awareness. An act of fitting free-spirited functions together in harmony – Logic – and sharing the Abundance and Force of Self-Awareness with its Creations – Love. 

Both acts together the creative act of composition. The ideal of Beauty. Perfection that is the essence of Reality-Creation and its Creations: Mind / Self-Awareness, Logic-Love, and their Child Free Choice. The ideal of Soul, the Spirit of Innocence, that interconnects Creators and Creations in one grand composition.

Non-whatever 

Whose attributes stand alone without opposites, with no need for an underside to complete them, because they are the direct descendants of Definition itself. The singularity-absolute that is the Definition of Definition: the laws of cause and effect. The ideal of Logic-Love, the source of Self-Awareness / Being-Life and its function, the extension-expansion (growth) of Life-Worth. Through the sharing-Force of Logic-Love and its affirmation-reciprocation given without parental interference by its Child Free Choice. 

The ideal that can have no opposites because opposites are parts of Definition derived from the products and functions of Mind. The first circumstance in the sequence of Reality-Creation that is existence itself, Life itself. Whose “underside” is non-mind. Neither Mind nor a state of Mind, conscious or unconscious. Whose “underside” both ”is” and “isn’t” and neither. Contradiction that cancels itself out. A metaphorical collision of matter and anti-matter beyond thought, feeling, and comprehension. Beyond detection, that leaves nothing, Real or unreal, behind for Mind to contemplate. Non-definable and non-defining. Non-whatever. 

Where the waves of opposition end 

When all of Reality-Creation, including unreality / self-unawareness, ascends to its essence it reaches Mind’s function: Definition. Beyond that is one step higher. Beyond Definition that consists of two parts, Real above and opposite-unreal below: the Definition of Definition. Where “consists,” “upper side” and “underside,” “parts,” and “opposites” have no meaning. 

For rules or laws of cause and effect that are Necessity – where the buck stops, – the implication of an unreal underside of opposing-contradicting laws could neither derive from the meaning of Necessity nor contribute anything to it. It would contradict the Logic-Love of singularity. Of absolute. The seawall against which the waves of opposition can go no farther. 

Bring in the clowns! 

This is the ideal that King Absolute’s image in the mirror pretends to possess. That he would steal from Reality-Creation and arrogate to himself. Absurd! How can he get away with it? By “being” and “acting” exactly what he is: a mirror-image reflection that’s one-sided. One-dimensional, in contrast to the two-dimensional figure fixated on it. That can have no reflection of its own because it has no self of its own. And so it can feign the power of the absolute by a convincing pose. Because it’s true: it has no opposite. 

If the ascent of two-dimensional Reality-Creation takes questioning to its pinnacle, one-dimensional singularity, the descent of unreality-dream takes questioning to its perversion of the same ideal: one-dimensional reflection. Are my captives not attracted to one-sidedness? Does the action-pumped animal brain they’re fond of not recognize itself in the Machiavellian ruthlessness and cruelty of arrogance? Mistaking the one-dimensionality of an illusory cartoon character – me, the Joker, the magician – for “power?” Have my most outrageous incarnations not been typed at times as clowns? As side-show freaks from the depths of the unthinkable, who need not be taken seriously? 

The vulnerability of “invulnerability” 

If your leading professions can be so easily led with their questioning to bodies’ senses, the one source specifically engineered to mislead, followers can just as easily be tricked by another staple of fakery: their reflections. By lures of “leadership” – absurdities. The simulation of absolute power through reflections’ one-sidedness. Scary faces on most-wanted posters. “Power” derived from their pitiful, paper-thin one-dimensionality. That deprives them of their humanity while mimicking invulnerability.

Too much of a bad thing

Once your lures have taken the defenseless Child’s Mind in, you make of its dream world a free-for-all of lures that fool it over and over again. But not without serious frustration. I can’t decide which are my favorite fools. Why? Scientists, philosophers, psychologists, and theologists do make fools of themselves in different ways. So delightful! So gratifying! 

But in the end it comes down to the same thing: their animal brains, their body-brain senses, and the masks of their reflections that deceive with their lures. Picasso lamented losing the fun of the chase when his fame overwhelmed women’s inhibitions. I feel the same. I must come up with less effective lures. 

Animal brain’s minor shortcoming 

It is a difficult choice. Even animal-brain willful thinking is no help. You’re in a bad way.  Would another perspective help? Independent judgment? I can try. Absolutely not! You’ve forgotten that I’m a reflection. Animal brain mindlessness with only one unfeeling perspective. One enemy-crushing will. I’m King Absolute! Do you want my enemies to see behind the mask? It’s my strength! 

Let me think about it. No no!  I forbid you to use any faculty of Mind to choose. You’re frightening me with this nonsense about “other perspectives,” “thinking,” and “questioning.” There can be no place for “Free Choice” in King Absolute’s paradise of willful thinking. Then will it be OK if I laugh about it? That does it! Your audience with the King is over. Guards! Remove my guest at once! And send for my carriage. I’m going to be ruling from now on from my Cave. 

Floor treatment

Can I come and visit? After all, you’re kind of attached to me and I do need you to keep my head from getting too fat. Ha ha! You redeem yourself with your humor. The Joker will be available for private audiences in his Cave once a month. Have your people get with my people to arrange it. And don’t forget tribute.

Of course. I was thinking of a bull to help the Joker with household management and interior décor, like floor treatment and air freshening, feedlot atmospherics and barnyard etiquette. How about waste management and recycling, pasture security and cow-servicing? Perfect!  The Joker's captives do resemble a herd of cows. Mostly contented, but they need to be fed delusional authoritarian nonsense to keep them in line. My bull's specialty. The Joker will have an unlimited supply of high-grade authoritarian material. And, of course, accessories: pitchforks and shovels. What a wonderful idea! Chores to keep the Joker's captives occupied. 

The Joker might be so pleased it'll grant you permanent occupancy in its Cave. No thanks. It'll have to be satisfied with the bull.

Published on Leave a comment on Evolution’s Choice

The process of growth

Individuals evolve over time into agents or actors with distinct parts or functions that reveal patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior with increasing clarity. Like a blurred image that becomes recognizable with better resolution. Who they are and what they’re about – their being and doing – emerges into the clear, as though from darkness into light.

A progression from unawareness to awareness that may parallel or indicate evolution on a larger scale. As though individuals are varieties of a self or being that’s a composite. Evolving, or trying to evolve, from a kind of sleep into wakefulness. The common threads are changing circumstances – evolution – made up of different stories with different contexts, and levels of awareness ranging from unaware to aware in a before-after sequence.

The threat of elimination

All suggestive of order or a pattern whose purpose itself comes into focus with evolution. As the composite self gradually gains Self-Awareness and its individual replications undergo the same experience, one self moving its replications forward in a reciprocal process, one interconnecting with the other sub-consciously as in a dream.

The pattern that emerges on both scales seems differentiated by one dominant factor: opposites or opposition. Evolution made up of parts going forward with it and opposed to going forward. Parts changing and parts determined not to change. As though definition is either shared between co-equal partners with different agendas, content with contradiction, or contested between mortal enemies not content with contradiction. Where the outcome can only be the supremacy of one and the elimination of the other.

The remedy: embrace of change

Which takes evolution out of the context of the benign, which can safely remain out of sight in the darkness of self-unawareness and puts it into the opposite: the necessity of avoiding elimination on the wrong side of mortal combat in the darkness of self-unawareness.

The remedy being the embrace of change that’s evolution toward Self-Awareness and away from the resistance to change. The embrace of individual idealism that’s sharing and progress and the abandonment of tribal realism that’s self-serving and regress.

Two distinct visions

Two distinct sets of personality types: mind-centered and body sensing-centered. Two distinct perspectives: inward-subjective and outward-objective. Two distinct sets of values: love-logic, order with freedom, sharing-service, individuality-creativity vs. competition-combat, ownership-self-service, order without freedom, tribal supremacy-conformity.

And two distinct visions:

  • authority shared between free-spirited Logic and Love that governs family-sharing, by serving and supporting individual growth and creativity with sensitivity and respect, from the bottom up, under the law, vs.
  • absolute, unquestioned authority that rules tribal ownership and competition arbitrarily, without opposition, to preserve itself by enforcing conformity and opposing growth, with cruelty and disrespect, from the top down, above the law.

One approach self-consciously deliberate and moral, concerned with the wellbeing of all – inclusive, the other instinctively expedient, concerned with itself – exclusive. One that supports sharing, the other that insists on ownership and dominance opposed to sharing. One subjective, concerned with friendship in intimacy and harmony, the other objective, concerned with possession, control, and supremacy in combat. One devoted to mutual respect among equals under the law, the other devoted to the prerogatives of arrogance among un-equals above the law.

The correct choice is Now

The pattern that’s differentiated by opposites seems not to offer choice between one or the other but to compel it. Not to offer the opportunity to grow through mindfulness if one chooses it but to provide guidance when one chooses it. As though the outcome can’t be dictated by the self-serving arbitrary self-unawareness of opposites but is required instead by the Necessity of Reality. By laws of cause and effect from which there can be no escape, with which there can be no compromise. The definition of definition: the one-and-only absolute. Where the buck stops. The way things are. Defined of Logic-Love, by Logic-Love, and for Logic-Love.

Where the pattern leads is toward Self-Awareness competent to choose correctly between one approach or the other and to do so now.

Published on Leave a comment on From Progress to Paralysis: The Cost of Separation from Logic and Love and Misreading Context

 An imaginary conversation with an adolescent friend about why we’re not getting it right. (Friend in italics.) 

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Palpatine exposed! 

Resistance to undemocratic rule. That’s what made me think of you. Rule that tries to tame people? Exactly. By forbidding them to question anything, especially asking Why. Asking for explanations that might reveal stuff that undemocratic rule doesn’t want people to know. Doesn’t want them to talk about. By hogging all the power and not sharing it.

Not sharing power is bad when someone else is doing the hogging. Uh huh. But terrific when you’re doing it. There’s just something about Palpatine. . . I was thinking that the book I almost got you(1) might put Mr. Palpatine in a different light where he belongs. How so? By tying Star Wars, an entertaining myth, to not-entertaining facts that it’s based on. The darkness of rule that rules for itself. That takes rather than gives. Harms rather than helps. That’s not romantic or amusing.

Its captives in reality don’t have X-wing fighters and Jedi Knights with supernatural powers for protection. They’re usually fearful, submissive conformists until they figure out how to take back their rights. And share power. And be persons with personalities, talents, passions, and creativity. Minds of their own, thinking for themselves and not afraid to speak out.

The beast waiting in the wings

What’s wrong with just doing what you’re told? Or leaving everything to chance? Isn’t that easier? Not really. Take away independent judgment and there goes free will. There go values, character, responsibility, and accountability. Individuality and personhood. Spontaneity, creativity, and fun. What’s left? You’ve turned yourself over to your reverse mirror-image reflection. To Mr. Hyde and his mask of sociability, Dr. Jekyll. To mindlessness, the safe haven for Mr. Hyde. All that’s left is captivity to a delusion: the “freedom” of a predator-beast that can act by instinct and doesn’t need to think at all.

Not the kind of freedom I want! Me neither. Star Wars was right: there is a dark side -- opposites. Any time we decide not to think for ourselves we’re betting that our opposite won’t hear an invitation to move in. That we haven’t turned our minds over to something that doesn’t belong there. An unfriendly beast pretending to be friendly.

The losing bet

Aren’t games and competition a kind of gambling? Doesn’t taking chances make life more interesting? Sure. Risk is essential to creativity as well as gambling. It’s unavoidable.

But “action” divorced from creativity has a serious downside. Turning ourselves into “winners” and “losers” messes with self-worth – our own and others’. Competing for “supremacy” in a shared world is an impossibility that detaches us from reality. From awareness of anything but our own needs and our own feelings. It makes us inaccessible to those who care for us and need us – emotionally and often physically too. Going over to the dark side. Yes. That’s how Adam Skywalker became Darth Vader. The lure of a delusion: “supremacy.” And the selfishness, insensitivity, and cruelty that goes along with it.

Competition that we fail to manage eventually manages us. Consumes us like gambling and other addictions. Meantime, there are better ways to occupy ourselves, like seeking inspiration in work that’s productive. Using our talents for causes that support self-worth without risking it. That’s where the fun is. Not entertainments like competition that degenerate into obsessions. That idolize “winning” at the expense of loving relationships.

It takes experience

Authoritarian rule is mistaken identity. A wrong turn in the road with unhappy consequences. Harmfulness That ruins lives from the inside out as well as from the outside in. You might not see the hurt but it’s there, and it can last a lifetime. The Star Wars rebels were adventurous, hopeful, upbeat. The Empire’s victims in our world not so much. Beaten down, despairing. This is what comes through the book? For some readers it might. So that Palpatine will be seen for the bad guy he is. Not a temptation to be like him, replacing others’ minds with his so he can exploit them. Disrespect their free will and individuality, do whatever else he wants.

Do you think I’m tempted? You have good intentions. You want to be your own person and make your time count. To do the best that you can and be good. But there’s not enough track record to answer that. Many of us do give in to temptation when we start using our own judgment. When we give up being guided and protected by grownups. It takes more than good intentions to keep that from happening. You and everyone who cares about you need to be vigilant.

Getting it right with Love

What does it take? Awareness of the difference that only comes with experience. Awareness of what goes into good character. Always a work in progress since we’re no better than our last decision and every day is a test.

Were you ever tempted? I never took fantasies about super powers seriously. Family, school, and church made my life satisfying enough. All three put a high value on learning and sharing. On competition, too, but the emphasis wasn’t on making the other guy lose. It was on striving and excelling. On competing with myself to continually do better. It was all part of learning and growing to maturity. To find equality and compassion in my relationships. That serves my needs and others’ instead of the distancing of superiority and dominance that only serves number one.

The main emphasis was on thinking for myself and asking questions. Understanding that our world is a shared world and all the good in it is based on sharing. On everyone winning. On Love? Yes. Love that’s directed when we use our own minds to make sense of things with logic. When we at least have an idea what we’re doing. Getting it right.

A source of help

My mind was good enough at figuring things out at school and work. It was a while before it got serious about personal stuff. Psychology and relationships. My mom and dad role modeled being dutiful, generous with service to the community, respectful of character and good values. My mom and both grandmothers centered their lives around the example of Jesus.

It took a lifetime of reflection and experience before I could understand why. How come? I couldn’t take others’ word for it. They weren’t making sense. I had to figure it out for myself. With help. From . . . ? From the only source it could come from – my mind. Your Uncle Owen had an extraordinary ability. Teaching himself. Nothing philosophical or psychological like me but new skills like composing music. It might have been different if he had used his sixth sense. That’s where I get help, from intuition.

Courage or madness?

Do I have intuition? Of course. It’s a faculty of the Mind that we all share. Like a portal to insights. But they have to be spontaneous, beyond our control. And their source can’t control us. A source of help that’s good if it’s loving and makes sense. If it respects logic and doesn’t ever mess with our free will. Can’t I just rely on my five senses? That’s what science thinks it does. Philosophy, psychology. Even theology. Yet they all depend on insights from intuition. They just can’t admit it. Why? It’s not “scientific” if it can’t be verified by the body’s five senses.

Ridicularity! Huh? The body’s senses are great with appearances. They’re amassing mountains of “information” and “data” about physical objects while avoiding the only source that can make sense of it. That can say what it means. Mind. Matter that bodies sense keeps telling us to look somewhere else. Why don’t we? The ones doing the looking can’t give up on their bodies’ five senses and the physical environment they think they detect. It’s their security blanket. They worry that any other approach would be un-cool. They’d be risking their careers and their professions. Philosophers, psychologists, and theologists as well as scientists. Taking a risk this big takes either courage, madness, or both.

Different ways of reading the situation

We had just parked across from where we were going and were about to cross the street when you asked a question. I hope you didn’t mind. Not only didn’t I mind, I respected you more for asking it. “No cars are coming so why can’t we cross in the middle of the street?” “If a car hits us there it would be our fault. If it hits us in the crosswalk it would be their fault.” That was your question and my answer. What did we decide? We used the crosswalk and you were fine with that.

That was reasoning. We use reasoning to choose the response that best aligns with what circumstances are telling us. But your question wasn’t about reasoning. What was it about? It wasn’t about choice. It was about paying attention first to what circumstances were telling us. You looked at the situation and saw one thing and I saw another. What did I see? You saw that no cars were coming. What did you see? A crosswalk. The circumstances told you that it wouldn’t matter if we ignored the crosswalk. They told me that it would. We read the situation differently.

Circumstances speak (but do we listen?)

Why didn’t we see the same thing? Because I was letting the circumstances tell me what they meant. What they implied for the choice we were to make where to cross. You were telling the circumstances to mean what you wanted, to take the shortest, easiest route. What mattered to me was to make the right choice. What mattered to you was making the choice be what you wanted, right or wrong. But you accepted my answer. You’re willing to do the right thing even if it isn’t what you want when you’re aware of it. I respect that.

If it wasn’t reasoning what was it? You were “reasoning” backwards from the choice you’ve already made to justify it. The best minds in almost every field do the same thing, so don’t feel bad. It’s “rationalizing” and it’s very common. The faculty of mind I’m referring to is logic. It’s neither reasoning nor rationalizing. What does it do? Something extremely important that all of humanity is bad at. And it accounts for every mess we get ourselves into. Even teachers at school? Scientists? Aren’t they supposed to know everything?

The questionable premise

After his experience with the world’s smartest physicists and mathematicians Albert Einstein said they aren’t good at logic. Really? If he explained why I’m not aware of it. One reason I can think of is that science is founded on a questionable premise. One that compromises the reasoning behind every choice that’s based on it. Another is that its questionable premise bars science from accepting help from the source of the correct premise. Science is thought to be clear-thinking, but Einstein was correct.

The questionable premise is that there is no “realistic” alternative to reliance on sensory perception – our body-brains’ five senses – for distinguishing between what’s real and what’s speculation. This suits experimental science since its scope is limited to physical objects. But it doesn’t suit logic. Logic is an orderly sequence of implications that leads nowhere if it’s thrown out of order by personal or institutional bias. It can’t be controlled. The spirit of Inquiry must be free or it’s not inquiry. It must follow logic wherever it leads from its starting point: an open-ended question without a preconceived answer.

Back to the future

The Greek philosopher Parmenides followed logic wherever it led. Where was that? To the conclusion that there is a logical alternative to sensory perception and it contradicts what our body-brains’ senses are telling us. 2500 years later, after centuries of studying spacetime and matter, physics is beginning to wonder if Parmenides was right.(2)

Why? The behavior of big objects and tiny particles that make up our universe refuses to make sense. Einstein’s equation explaining energy -- E=MC2 -- gave him confidence that he could explain it. But that’s only because energy is part of Mind that gives ideas their expression, even if it’s only appearances in a dream. Mind-energy makes sense; spacetime-matter (appearances) doesn’t. When Einstein tried to explain appearances with another elegant equation he failed. Mind and energy are order interconnected by the implications of logic and by love sharing. Sense. Appearances are the opposite. Nonsense.

Physics is still trying to explain the universe of spacetime-matter. How? By bringing the behavior of cosmic relativity – big objects -- together with the behavior of particle physics – little objects -- into one unified theory. “Quantum gravity.” It’s led to interesting theories. But they’re beyond confirming by experimental physics, and so physics is turning to philosophy for answers.(3) Putting the focus once again on the logic of Parmenides.

Enter sixth sense

Where did Parmenides get his logic? If he told us it went missing with a lot of stuff he wrote. But it must have been important because he called his school of philosophy the “School of Reason.” Or the “School of Logic” which makes more sense. My answer is he got it from his sixth sense. From his intuition? Yes. The same place where Democritus, a contemporary, intuited the existence of atoms. Really? Yes. 2500 years before Einstein confirmed it with experimental physics.

These guys were good at figuring things out. Not exactly on their own, although they did it without experimental physics. They did it with logic that could only be accessed through their sixth sense. With vision that could look behind appearances. It was a new branch of philosophy that Parmenides founded called metaphysics. That tells us what’s real and what’s not by listening to Mind’s intuition rather than being misled by bodies’ brains. To Mind’s sixth sense rather than bodies’ five senses. It was a valid approach then since there was no science to question it. Taken seriously by Plato, the Father of Western Thought, among others.

What metaphysics found

What did metaphysics find when it looked behind appearances? That they’re made up like a dream. An illusion like a magician’s trick. Our alternate reality? Yes. A few other philosophers have since come to the same conclusion. Berkeley, California is named after one of them --  Bishop Berkeley. The logic of self-awareness taught by Jesus with love demonstrated our world’s unreality with his miracles. He later explained why in an extraordinary book, one of a kind.(4) A teacher named Valentinus understood the message and shared it with his pupils in second-century Rome, many centuries before the book appeared.

Free Will compromised

Amazing! Jesus explained the origin of the universe? Its psychological roots, yes, since it involved relationships and events that can only happen within Mind that thinks them. Mind that’s always existed, where something went wrong. Not the part that contributes growth to Creation – the Mind-Parent -- but the part that contributes Free Choice – the Mind-Child. A choice made under difficult circumstances. That couldn’t have been intentional or free but a choice, nonetheless. Why, if it wasn’t free or intentional? Because the Child-Mind that made it is choice whether free-conscious or not-free unconscious.

Free of interference when it’s conscious. The difficult circumstances were all caused by loss of consciousness that Jesus hasn’t explained. A previous mistake though it may have been a necessary part of the Child’s training. An inevitable consequence of introducing Free Choice into the evolution of Creation. Yet it was definitely error. The Child’s Will that we all share will always be Free in Reality. But in our alternate reality the error -- a wrong choice -- is obstructing it. It must be corrected.

The obstruction

The obstruction is the apparent separation of Child from Parents. “Apparent” because it couldn’t happen in Reality but anything can “happen” in unreality. Why does the separation matter? Because it’s the reason why humanity continues to look for answers in the wrong places. Why it keeps failing with every new “solution” to its problem: its inability to move forward as one rational, loving family in peace and harmony. To solve its problem of fear, condemnation, guilt, jealousy, paranoia, and hatred.

How can separating Parents from Child cause all this? Because of the parts they play in Creation.  Creation is process and structure. Each divided into one part that comes before and the other that comes after. Parents responsible for the first part, Child responsible for Free Choice in the second part. Their Relationship is responsible for everything that expresses the Life and Worth of Creation and Mind in the second part. The apparent separation sent the Child’s responsibilities into an alternate reality and left the Parents’ responsibilities behind.

Missing context

What responsibilities is our alternate reality missing? The responsibility of Mind-Parents is to extend Logic’s thinking-implications and to expand Love’s sharing-relationships in a continuous, open-ended flow of changing circumstances. Like evolution? Yes. Infinite evolution, for no implication or relationship can bring the process to an end. Not so long as definitions require what isn’t to help define what is. Evolution in the eternal Now – timelessness. This is the raw material of Creation. A Reality unlike ours that has no beginnings and endings, just the orderly sequence of Logic’s implications and Love’s sharing.

The Parents do something else. Before circumstances reach their Child they’re given context by Logic and Love. So that Free Choice can hear what circumstances are telling it about their meaning and purpose. So that Mind-Child can get the situation right before it freely chooses how Parents-Child together can respond to what the situation calls for. Before the Worth of Life and Creation implied by context can be affirmed, earned, expressed, and reciprocated. The Worth of Mind: the Creator and first circumstance.

Missing the attributes of definition

The role of Logic and Love going into the shared act of Creation is to give it the attributes of definition that it will need going out. Meaning and purpose. So that Mind-Parents can perform the last act: definition that brings new functions into Reality and service. With meaning and purpose that blend in seamlessly with the meaning and purpose of all the elements of Creation performing as one. In the context of circumstances at that point in its evolution.

Without the part played by Logic and Love in Reality, the raw material for creation here lacks the necessary attributes of definition. Every field of inquiry struggles with meaning and purpose. Struggles with changing circumstances, not because they can’t choose with reasoning and evaluation but because, without guidance from Logic and Love, they can’t make sense of the situation. Can’t get the context right.

Destination: progress or paralysis?

And so their choices, misguided by sensory perception, circle back to square one. Risking not only progress but survival. Theories abound. But under the domination of bodies’ five senses, with determined resistance to Mind’s sixth sense, they can’t breach self-delusion’s fortress of denial.

The context for alternate reality, then, isn’t the raw material for Creation. It’s the condition implied by the absence of forward movement supplied by Logic’s implications and Love’s sharing. Extension and expansion. Growth. Disguised by “movement” that’s going in circles, nowhere. Until the logic of going nowhere reaches its destination: paralysis.

Then if we accept the gift of Mind’s sixth sense, If we let it guide us back to the Logic of Parmenides and to the Logic-Love of Jesus, we will get our context right. Its meaning and purpose, so that we can then choose correctly how to respond and move forward. Yes. The book by Jesus gives us a head start. All it takes to reverse the error, restore Self-Awareness, and resume Mind-Child’s role in Creation, is one individual getting it right.

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  1. Chantal Montellier, Social Fiction (New York Review Comic, 2023). Not for children or early adolescents
  2. Adam Becker, “The Origins of Space and Time,” in Scientific American (February 2022 pp. 26-33)
  3. Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (Riverhead Books 2017)
  4. A Course in Miracles (Foundation for Inner Peace, 1976)

Published on Leave a comment on A Stem-Winding Bedtime Story for Uncle Melvin’s Niece

The Torrid Romance with a Tragic Ending

Don't show off against gravity

Oh good! A bedtime story! It begins with a giant ape who fell for a dame. She didn’t fall for him at first until she realized he could be her meal ticket. To what? Stardom and lots of dough. Really? They teamed up and made it big on Broadway. They were on everybody’s invitation list. All the glitterati listed in Manhattan’s Social Register competed for invitations to their glamorous parties except for one thing – BYOB. Bring Your Own Beer – how tacky! No. Bring Your Own Bananas. Everywhere they went to get bananas they heard “Yes, we have no bananas.”

But the setting was part of the draw, not just the glamorous hosts. Where was that? On top of the Empire State Building. What?  That’s where the ape and his squeeze set up housekeeping. That’s ridiculous! You’d think so. But while King Kong was swatting at World War One biplanes in the movie Ann Darrow was smitten by the image of this mighty male warrior. She looked terrified. Yes, but she was also starting to think about curtains.

The moral of “King Kong” was “beauty and the beast?” Hollywood baloney. The beauty didn’t bring down the beast. The real moral of the story is it’s OK to show off swatting at World War One surplus but not showing off against gravity.

And don’t leave home without your vine

Not exactly the moral of our story but pretty close. The ape and the dame were attacked again? Nothing like that. The friendly real estate appraiser asked for their help measuring their property. The ape tried to measure height by timing how long it took to make it from the top down to the sidewalk. By elevator? By swinging to the bottom without a vine. He forgot that he wasn’t ruling the jungle from the top of a tree anymore.

How awful! Yes. But his arm candy was timing the fall and the appraiser got what he wanted. Ten seconds = exactly 1250’.  So it wasn’t all bad. And the moral of this story is. . . ? Don’t take any calls from the real estate appraiser. Surely this torrid romance with a tragic ending means more than that! Don’t leave home without your vine.

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Published on 1 Comment on What Did Uncle Melvin’s Niece Do at the Sound of the Gong?

In Pauperem Saporem 

A record-smashing performance 

Uncle Melvin! Hi precious! I do hope you’ll mention me in your Christmas letter. Oh no! Now your brain is pushing up daisies and your body is in a jar! I want everyone to know that I’m a celebrity! Whoo hoo! To what do we owe this? After my record-smashing performance I used my prize money to buy something incredible. Record-smashing performance? At the 2023 Feast of Flatulence Farting Fest.

You’ll never guess. This is so exciting! OK. You bought a new tee shirt with Uncle Melvin's family crest. With a family motto? “In pauperem saporem.” Latin for “In poor taste.” Oh no! You’ve done something awful! A one-horse sleigh fell into my fireplace overnight with a donkey. A donkey?  Yes, and with the shiniest red nose. Rudolph! Rudolph the Red-Nosed Jackass. My listeners will be interested to hear that. Listeners? Subscribers to the Galactic Pedo Network. Huh? 

Getting around Nebulosus Galaxia

You persuaded me that ruling the Galaxy is a bad idea but you didn’t say anything about owning it. So I used my prize money from the Farting Fest to buy the Galaxy. I’m now owner of the Galactic Empire and Editor of its social media network racket. A celebrity! But what’s that to do with Rudolph? My listeners always want advice on how to get around the Galaxy on foggy nights. What?

Duh! Didn’t you know? It’s worse than London. That’s how it got its name. Isn’t it the Milky Way? No. It’s another galaxy long ago and far away and all that Star Wars baloney. It’s Nebulosus Galaxia. Foggy Galaxy. When I open up my foggy night guide service with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Jackass I’ll get my prize money back overnight. 

No Laughing Matter

Do you have any more exciting news to share in my Christmas letter? After passing gas at the sound of the gong. . . What? The traditional start of the Farting Fest. They strike a huge oriental gong. A dignified sound that lets everyone know this is serious business. Yes. Passing gas is no laughing matter. Why, just the other day. . . Shut up! 

Too much of a good thing 

So, you reached the pinnacle of success with your special talent and then what? A new challenge. Winning the Palme d’Tree at the next International Belching World Cup. You should hear me, Uncle Melvin. You’d be so proud! Doing your part to carry on the family motto. So good at it that none of the bars on Bigelow Boulevard want me back. But the library does? Books are boring. I took up drinking instead where the action is. Yes. Hanging out in bars.

Drinking beer and belching. Where you got your start, showing off your new talent in bars. Following Uncle Melvin's family tradition. A long line of male ancestors can vouch for that. My competitors complained to the bartenders that I was getting too big for my belches. One bar lost its liquor license. Why? It was violating Whiskey Hollow's noise ordinance. Neighbors were complaining from a mile away. 

The Gift of Christmas: a big noise 

So who shall we say is calling? A big-time celebrity. No longer Delilah the One-and-Only Flatulant but Delilah the one-and-only Belcher. 

That’s it, ladies and gentlemen. Another edition of Uncle Melvin’s Christmas letter. Putting everyone in the Christmas spirit with lifestyles of the rich and ridiculous.

Merry Christmas, Uncle Melvin! Merry Christmas to you, sweetie. Ho ho ho!

Published on Leave a comment on The Gift of Christmas: Sharing Self-Awareness with Self-Unawareness*

Reflections on the meaning of Christmas                                    December 2023

“Let’s Pretend”

“Let’s Pretend” was a radio program that entertained kids on Saturday morning. They grow out of that when they learn to distinguish between pretending and thinking that’s not. When they learn that not being grounded in facts is being absent rather than present. Remote, inaccessible. Not being there for family and friends who need them because they’re somewhere else, being there for themselves. Lost in make-believe worlds of wishful thinking. One-dimensional cartoons featuring them in the lead role, producing, directing, script-writing, and setting the rules. “Let’s Pretend” for arrested-developed “adults:” “The Truman TV Show.” Adolescent self-absorption. Narcissism. With harmful consequences to them and to those who need them.

Unreality TV made "real" by the two masks of narcissism:

  • one the disciplinary “parent” with unquestioned “authority.” The angry, hostile, threatening face of judgment: harmfulness.
  • the other the undisciplined “child” with unquestioned “freedom.” The carefree, ingratiating, unthreatening face of non-judgment: harmlessness.

Bad cop and good cop enforcing the "ideal" of “supremacy.” A perversion of the Oneness of Reality that is Innocence without opposites. Of Freedom and Order that complement one another and are inseparable instead of resolute opponents. The “judgment” of “innocence” preserved by projecting “guilt” onto “others.” “Innocence” preserved by projecting the innocence of others back onto itself. One “giving” its “guilt” away, the other stealing “innocence” back. With one purpose: to place "supremacy" beyond questioning. By seduction and intimidation that rob its captives of personhood. That dehumanize with mindless conformity.

Both made-up worlds of wishful thinking. “Ideals” of unaccountability that’s beyond questioning. Impossibilities since thoughts can’t leave their source, there are no “others” in the Oneness of Reality, and perversions of Oneness, Order, and Freedom can’t be real. Nightmares of psychosis reflected in the narcissist’s sees-all, knows-all mirror. The crystal ball of the original illusionist: the misperception of itself in its shadow-opposite by the Child of Logic-Love. The one ancestral Mind that we all share. Seeing in its reflection the “supremacy” of unlimited power and freedom. Nietzsche’s “superman.” Mistaken identity. Self-unawareness. Whose remedy can't be condemnation and punishment but understanding that’s awareness of the mistake. Awareness of Self instead of its reflection that will restore harmony and creativity.  

Scripted by self-unawareness 

The prefrontal cortex, an instrument designed for “use” by the animal brain, only “knows” “self” that is herd or tribe, not individual. It keeps peace within and among tribes by hiding the menace of anti-sociability behind the pretense of “sociability.” Both masks –  amiable pleasantness and angry unpleasantness – serving one overriding purpose: to silence the voices of their captives with mindless docility. To prevent questioning.

The meaning of Christmas that Jesus shares with us: the contradiction of self-unawareness by the gentle loving kindness of Self-Awareness. A lesson that couldn’t come from any part of brain matter. Or from any other instrument invented for use by groups or tribes because the Self that we all share is one Child, one Mind. The beast in the narcissist’s mirror is the mask of a fiction: Child-the-many, ruled by tribal values. The offense to Western morality codified in the 16th century by Niccolo Machiavelli and “legitimized” by the Church. Idolatry of the body demanding of its herd, a “flock” of anesthetized sheep, that it never be questioned.

The underside of Christmas that Jesus never intended to “found.” Re-enacting the glorious “victory” of shadow-reflection over its host with the figure on a cross who dared to question its self-proclaimed “authority.” The “authority” of wounded victimhood: injustice that cries out not for compassion but for damnation and vengeance. Against Self-Awareness for sharing itself for the benefit of the self-unaware. An implicit contradiction of the “infallibility” of the established order. An unchanging status quo guarded by body-animal brains: bulls protecting their sacred pasture. An ominous warning to anyone else who dared to trespass.

The meaning of Christmas isn’t that Caesar or the pharisees be overthrown but that individuals learn to manage their relationship with them. Following the example of Jesus, with explanation that helps the one Child, our ancestral Mind, recover Self-Awareness. To get out of body-dominated “ownership,” “competition,” and conformity and back to Mind-enabled sharing, intimacy, and Creativity. That recognizes that malevolence, the underside of contradiction, isn’t caused by Self-Awareness but by self-unawareness.

The error in the reflection

The attraction of narcissists for absolutes mirrors the event that disabled the Self-Awareness of Free Choice, the Child’s function in Creation, and removed it from Reality. Lack of awareness of opposites built into its own definition and the definitions of values it was given to work with. Missing from the knowledge base it received from its Parents since they can’t be aware of opposites without making them real.

The Child’s apparent attraction to the undersides of Free Choice, Freedom, and Order -- absolutes, impossibilities in Creation – was a consequence of the laws of cause and effect, not their violation. An unintentional mistake that sent the Child to the unreality of self-unawareness where it can learn from experience. By seeing through its cyclical re-enactments, the *triumph” of animal will over Mind, to their cause: the error that projected Love onto its reverse mirror-image reflection. A mask of impossibilities: the “supremacy” of absolute power and absolute freedom that may not be questioned.

A call for maturity, competence, and re-definition

Our military tries not to leave anyone out or anyone behind. It honors the memory of the fallen and sometimes honors enemy combatants too. It respects the individual soldier with values inherited from the original ideal of American democracy. That insisted on individual rights against tyranny and defined what “America” stood for. The value of authority that governs with service and support from the bottom up. To enable Creativity with Growth and Free Choice instead of ruling cruelly, from the top down, to demand conformity with an unchanging status quo.

An ideal and values that have always had opposites but today are losing touch with the Logic of Necessity and passion of Love that contradicted them. Because the ideal, like all values, requires realignment with changing times and changing contexts. With awareness of what context today implies about the correct path forward. A call for Guidance from Logic and Love uniquely qualified to provide it, because only with their help can self-unawareness detect meaning and purpose behind appearances.

Circumstances that seem favorable to a resurgence of the authoritarian mindset are a recurring test of progress toward Self-Awareness. Whose measure is whether the path forward is to be governed by the benevolence of Logic-Love – Mind -- or ruled by the cruelty of predatory animal instinct – body-brain. The only difference between the choice now and the choice in 1776 is circumstances.

The narcissist authoritarian, robbed of independent judgment by its own reverse mirror image, can only impose its own unchanging context on changing circumstances. We need a better guide.

The one whose birthday we’re honoring has the right connections. To the Child’s Parents Logic-Love and their unique talent for seeing beyond fiction. Beyond made-up “reality” to facts and what they mean: a call for learning and growth toward the competence of maturity. Capabilities demonstrated by Jesus’ living among us, by his authorship of A Course in Miracles, and in other ways known only to the individual Minds and lives he’s touched. All it takes is Free Choice questioning. Questioning the status quo. Contradicting. Asking for Guidance. 

The gift of good contradiction 

Christmas spirit is the honesty of the Voice that explains with the Vision of Logic-Love what lies behind appearances and questions its source, bodies affirming matter with their senses. That agrees when agreement validates Self-Worth and contradicts when it doesn’t. Questions as well as affirms. Minds open to questioning and intimacy in friendship instead of mindless animal brains disguised by “sociability” competing for “supremacy.” Contradiction that helps instead of regimentation that harms. Stands up to the authoritarian reflection in the mirror that can’t tolerate standing up. Helping to define Self as it evolves by understanding the Logic of contradiction in every context. Disciplining independent judgment to anticipate and prepare for pushback that will keep it honest, focused on its task, and striving to excel.

And making sure that it doesn’t take itself or its job too seriously. For whatever it is, it comes with contradiction. The possibility that it may not always be right but sometimes wrong. Not always be correct but sometimes mistaken. The attribute of Authority under the law, defined and defining with opposites, that can never be absolute.

With the gift of good contradiction we can see through the deception. To the Truth revealed by the Vision of Logic-Love, that in all of its attributes the animal brain beast reflected in the mirror is an imposter. A lifeless, loveless code “intending” to end everything. Our shadow-opposite. This is its nature. Its so-called logic that its self-deluded host – us – is supposed to take seriously.  An alternate “reality” so illogical and absurd that it can be hilarious. Something between total catastrophe and a Three Stooges food fight.

Jesus in A Course in Miracles encourages questioning and humor too, because getting the “joke” is part of undoing error and getting back to work. So go ahead and laugh. Have a Merry Christmas!

The gift of Christmas

We are all reflections in a made-up world that’s the dream of a Mind thinking it’s a reflection. So we are all narcissist authoritarians in our own way, body-centered personality types more than Mind-centered types, but it’s only a difference in degree. 

In a world that’s a shadowland of opposites, a reflection made up of appearances, contradiction can be a very good thing. The contradiction that’s our Christmas gift from our Helper. From the Mind with which we really think: Logic-Love. Where we will find our real thoughts when we aren’t contradicting them with an unreal dream. Good contradiction of bad contradiction. Denial of the denial that put a layer of appearances over Reality-Truth. That substitutes unreal reflection for Real Self. 

All of this the role performed by Jesus: an opposite that’s helpfulness in a shadowland of authoritarian opposites – harmfulness. Contradiction on the side of the good guys – conscience. The will not to profit from mistake selfishly but to correct it for the sake of gentle loving kindness. No symbol of pathos on a cross but the living Force of Voice that cannot be silenced. The Voice for Self-Awareness and not self-unawareness. The Voice for Mind and not for its “substitute,” body-brain matter.

The Gift of Christmas. A role model for the ages.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

*Christmas letter 2023. Originally titled “The Gentle Loving Kindness of Contradiction”

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Reflections on the meaning of Christmas                                    December 2023

The Process and Structure of Creation

Conflicting visions of Paradise

Worried sick. Dude, this is Christmas. Where’s your one-horse sleigh? Santa’s coming. And he knows when I’ve been bad or good. So? I thought I was being good. I was expecting goodies under the tree. Yes. Doing what you’re told. Not asking stupid questions. Now I’m not so sure. And being agreeable. Waahhhhhh! Tell you what. If Santa’s a no-show I’ll let you borrow my sleigh bells. Waahhhhhh! 

Sigh. Let’s hear it. Edna! Get room service. We’re out of eggnog. I was thinking about Christmas and I was going to make Santa happy by being good at not being bad. There’s a problem with that? What if bad went away? Like, what if we didn’t have to put up with being contradicted? Ah! Maybe then I could attract girls! Santa would hang it up. And lose weight if he didn’t have to stuff himself with milk and cookies from billions of kids. Everything would come to a dead end. Or maybe paradise with lots of girls. How about paradise with lots of gags and chloroform?

The first Act of Mind

Did you notice that definitions always have to define stuff by what it isn’t as well as by what it is? Do you have a sister? And did you know that Self-Awareness was illuminated by the first Relationship – the attraction between Logic and Love, masculinity and femininity? There you go again! Edna, what’s taking so long? It wouldn’t have happened if something hadn’t happened before. Before. . . Self-Awareness? Do that again! What? Twirl your eyes in opposite directions.

The first act of Mind, questioning the status quo. Socrates got into trouble with that, pestering people with questions. Jesus too. He contradicted stuff that everyone took for granted. Questioning the way things are partly by explaining the way they aren’t. Annoying the pharisees who decided he was questioning their authority. Turns out that questioning the status quo doesn’t just upset the authorities. It upsets authoritarians, and they’re all over the place. That’s it! You want me around to help bug authoritarians! You’re around because someone forgot to close the door.

The first “Love Story”

Contradiction goes a long way back. No! Edna! How many days’ rations we got? Mind asked, “What will get Creation started?” Obviously a contradiction of the status quo. Obviously a guy looking for some action. And the answer was “Relationship.” Relationship that’s inseparable like all relationships within the one Mind thinking them.

Put the Force of attraction between Logic and Love to use by illuminating Self-Awareness. Why them? They’re Mind’s two main attributes, where the action is. Masculine Logic hot for feminine Love – yesss! And feminine Love hot for masculine Logic. The first “Love Story.” Portrayals defined in part by what they aren’t: illogic, fear, and self-unawareness, or Mind unconscious. Mind has an opposite? If it does it’s unthinkable. We can forget about it. Here’s your eggnog, Elio. This should help you forget. Thank you, Edna. Industrial strength? Yes. I used up all of your Turbo-Nog.

The role of Logic-Love, Parents

Mind unconscious is a possibility with the Child of its Parents, Logic-Love, but not a possibility with them. Why not? Because they’re Self-Awareness by definition and their Child isn’t. Its Self-Awareness is derived from Relationship with its Parents and a second Force: opposition to possibility from contradiction. From impossibility, its opposite. A Force essential to Creation and ingrained in the laws of cause and effect.

Mind unconscious isn’t a possibility with the Parents because they and their Child have different functions. The role of Parents -- Self-Awareness -- is to welcome performers and their functions into Reality by sharing the gift of Self-Awareness and by definition that determines where they fit within the harmony of its Order  Then what? After that comes the Growth and sharing of Self-Awareness through the extension and expansion of Logic and Love. The Worth of Oneness increasing in value to infinity. Without limits, because Oneness can have no opposites.

The role of Free Choice, Child

The Child’s role is independent judgment that affirms, earns, and reciprocates the Life-Worth of Creation – a gift shared -- and Self-Awareness, the Giver, by freely choosing it. By contributing the measure of value that’s whatever or however someone freely chooses to pay for it. A Rembrandt painting that’s worthless unless it attracts a buyer willing to pay for it. Just as the pairing of Logic with Love started Creation with spontaneity that could not be controlled, the judgment of Child establishes its Worth with the spontaneity of Free Choice that cannot be corrupted.

By Mind putting its finger on the scale. An impossibility by definition. Because the role of Mind Logic-Love, that governs from the bottom up to serve and support Creation, is to respect, not overrule, all its functions, including Free Choice. Supporting symbiosis between Freedom and Order that lies at the core of Creation.

The two phases of Creation

Two distinct phases distinguished by Growth not needing and Free Choice needing awareness of opposites. That are always questioning, contradicting. And annoying and disrupting. A real pain. Like women: you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them. I might change my mind if opposites are women. Never mind. 

The Growth part of Creation can’t be aware of the underside of definition without the Self-Awareness of Logic-Love making it real. So when functions are added to Creation their opposites automatically transfer over to Free Choice, the part of Creation where the reverse is true. Where Self-Awareness must be aware of contradictions but only the Parent-Child Relationship can make them real. And any possibility of that happening by mistake is ruled out.

Go ahead and laugh

How? By Child-Mind losing consciousness and its function being disabled. By temporarily joining opposites in the unreality of self-unawareness where it can learn from experience how to correct its mistake. Learn from craziness? By understanding that the craziness has a pattern. Cyclical re-enactment of the Child’s archetypal mistake: projecting Love onto its reflection. Onto its reverse mirror-image that has no better “purpose” than to amuse itself with the Child’s self-delusion and pursue its crazy dream of “supremacy.” The “triumph of the will.”

With every manner of impossibilities that are reversals of the Truth made “real.” Until either its captive self-destructs or the illusion of “time” “ends.” When the “goal” of contradicting Reality’s eternal Now is reached with everything, including Mind, “ending.”

Something between total catastrophe and a Three Stooges food fight. Go ahead and laugh. Jesus in A Course in Miracles encourages questioning and humor too, because getting the “joke” is part of undoing error and getting back to work. The joker in the mirror takes pride in all its “works,” none more gratifying than those that feed its “lovability” with a laugh. An alternate “reality” so illogical and absurd that it can be hilarious. The “artist,” starved for validation and love, would be delighted.

Pushback

Choice can’t be free that’s not aware of all possibilities including their opposites, impossibilities. Our alternate “reality” that came about because of a lack of awareness. Of what? The underside of definition that automatically sends what isn’t to Child’s side of Creation and the possibility of its impossibilities made “real” in an unconscious Mind’s dream.

How can the Child regain consciousness and do its job? By accepting that contradiction-opposites are built into Reality-Creation’s laws of cause and effect for a reason. Because contradiction is essential to the definition of every player and function. And by putting them to their intended use. To help define Self as it evolves -- always a work in progress – by understanding the Logic of contradiction and its usefulness in every context. Disciplining independent judgment to anticipate and prepare for pushback that will keep it honest, focused on its task, and striving to excel.

BYOB

And, most of all, accepting the limits of a shared, interconnected Reality where absolutes without opposites have no place. I can’t rule the Galactic Empire? No. Or be master of Plato’s Cave either. What about King Kong? Palpatine and Plato’s guy didn’t have girlfriends but Kong did. How many times have you seen this movie?

Ann Darrow would have gone for him if they could have set up housekeeping on top of the Empire State Building. She was already thinking about curtains when . . . That’s enough. The city was adding them to its celebrity tour. OK, timeout! They could have made the New York Social Register if they got enough attention. Maybe a slot on the bill at the Metropolitan Opera, or Carnegie Hall, or the Lincoln Center. How about the Central Park Zoo? Or the circus?

Because, with the implications of Logic and the relationships of Love always expanding, circumstances are always changing. Into new contexts that offer opportunities to express the Beauty of meaning with the use of talents. For relating to ideas, values, contexts, and projects in the manner of their Source, Logic and Love. With judgment that responds to opportunities with helpfulness, Innocence, and trust. With the joyfulness and creativity of Self-Awareness. The Kong-Darrow nuptials were the talk of the town. Mr. and Mrs. Kong request the pleasure of your company. . . . BYOB Bring Your Own Bananas.

Diagnosis and Remedy

The diagnosis 

The meaning of Christmas isn’t that Caesar or the pharisees be overthrown but that individuals learn to manage their relationship with them. Following the example of Jesus, with explanation that helps the one Child, our ancestral Mind, recover Self-Awareness. To get out of body-dominated “ownership,” “competition,” and conformity and back to Mind-enabled sharing, intimacy, and Creativity. That recognizes that malevolence, the underside of contradiction, isn’t caused by Self-Awareness but by self-unawareness.

Made "real" in an alternate "reality" by the two masks of narcissism:

  • one the disciplinary “parent” with unquestioned “authority.” The angry, hostile, threatening face of harmfulness: judgment.
  • the other the undisciplined “child” with unquestioned “freedom.” The carefree, ingratiating, unthreatening face of harmlessness: non-judgment.

Bad cop and good cop enforcing the "ideal" of “supremacy.” A perversion of the Oneness of Reality that is Innocence without opposites. Of Freedom and Order that complement one another and are inseparable. The “judgment” of “innocence” preserved by projecting “guilt” onto “others.” “Innocence” preserved by projecting the innocence of others back onto itself. One getting “rid” of “guilt,” the other stealing “innocence” back. With one purpose: to place "supremacy" beyond questioning. By deception and intimidation that rob its captives of personhood. That dehumanize with mindless conformity.

Both made-up worlds of wishful thinking. “Ideals” of unaccountability that’s beyond questioning. Impossibilities since thoughts can’t leave their source, there are no “others” in the Oneness of Reality, and perversions of Oneness, Order, and Freedom can’t be real. Nightmares of psychosis reflected in the narcissist’s sees-all, knows-all mirror. The crystal ball of the original illusionist: the narcissist’s misperception of itself in its shadow-opposite. The “supremacy” of unlimited power and freedom. Nietzsche’s “superman.” Mistaken identity. Self-unawareness.

Whose remedy can't be condemnation and punishment but understanding that’s awareness of the mistake. Awareness of Self instead of its reflection that will restore Order. By standing definition back on its feet instead of its head. Putting the underside of contradiction back on the bottom where it belongs. The bottom isn’t so far from the top of the Chrysler Building. Maybe if he’d taken her up there. . . .   

The remedy: Relationship 

Remedy that’s a possibility with minds open to questioning, That respect Free Choice and the Free Spirit of Inquiry. Like free speech? Like creative governance that’s open to questioning versus authoritarian rule opposed to it. That fears and opposes learning and growth because it can’t control the outcome. It’s the essence of contradiction, the free spirit of questioning, that keeps Authority governing with wisdom and helpfulness from the bottom up. Without being lured by “supremacy” -- the false god of absolutes -- into ruling arbitrarily with harmfulness from the top down.

The formation and growth of Self-Awareness through Relationship, Logic-Love, took place under the laws of cause and effect that protect contradiction. By requiring it in definition for the same reason that Freedom depends on Order and Order depends on Freedom. To ensure that by remaining inseparable they will remain soulmates instead of opposites-competitors. Instead of absolutes that contradict Relationship, the most harmful contradiction of both Freedom and Order. And all of Reality-Creation based on Relationship in a shared, interconnected world.

If my buddy Kong had played his cards right he could have kept the dame. They’d be big on Broadway. Favorites at Sherman Billingsley’s Stork Club, all over Winchell’s column, lighting up Runyon’s stories. Who would pay for bigger stages and dressing rooms? VIP limos for giant apes? They would, with all the dough they’d be raking in. Daily Mirror headline: “Empire State Building to be converted to first-floor apartment for Mr. and Mrs. Kong.”  And renamed. What? Kong's Galactic Empire Building. Flashing Kong's image on the clouds when the NYPD is desperate for help from a giant ape. Ann Darrow can be played by Lois Lane. Don't be ridiculous!

The remedy: opposites 

The Worth of Oneness increasing in value to infinity, without limits because Oneness can have no opposites, is the state that absolutes aspire to in the fantasies of reflection. The impossibility of no opposites, which the authoritarian narcissist, the will of the beast in the mirror, seeks to attain with “supremacy.” Not “triumph” over opposites that permits co-existence but elimination that doesn’t.

The threat to the sovereignty of individuals dependent on narcissistic authoritarians and to social order that depends on governance from the bottom up. Which makes opposites, the mortal enemy of absolutes, the friend of individual sovereignty and civil rights. And contradiction – “speaking against” – an indispensable means of removing the threat.

The remedy: A dose of Why from Mind 

Thinkers like Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari, Sean Carroll and Brian Greene, help with How humanity’s story plays out but their sweeping narratives still don’t get at Why -- the question that requires the intent of Mind for a logical answer. And the reason why authoritarian tribal-“realists” oppose it: to prevent Truth from exposing the deception in the mirror and bodies hiding it behind appearances.

The explanation that Jesus brings from Mind is a dose of Why that hog-ties body-centered authoritarians. Self-unawareness immobilized by fear and self-delusion into unshakable resistance to opening their minds. Who have no response other than continued affirmation of illogic, idolatry of bodies, and the silence of disrespect.

Not a display of mindfulness but evasion – thoughtlessness. The absence of Logic-Love since that’s not where their “thinking” comes from. It comes from the reflection. The body-centered authoritarian driven by one goal: to preserve the dream and its authorship. 

The remedy: learning from opposites

Missing the point that opposites are our teacher. Jesus was misperceived by shadow-opposite to be an opposite like it. An attack when he was the opposite: teaching that “sin” isn’t guilt deserving punishment but self-unawareness that needs help regaining Self-Awareness.

Teaching that the error of mis-identity didn’t lead to tribal values and body-brains sharing the stage with individual values and Mind. They’re opposites against their host. Coded to own, rule, and eliminate them with “supremacy.” A warning that will continue to go unheeded so long as body-centered authoritarian minds cling to illogic and evade the help of Logic-Love. Help offered by Mind through the teaching and example of Jesus.

The remedy: Guarding our thoughts 

The appearance of “agreeability” is a “lesson” taught by the “socializing” prefrontal cortex that the animal brain reflected in the mirror has taken to “heart.” One of the traits that the “Five-Factor” theory says should define personality. Because its theory is more “scientific” than Myers-Briggs based on the psychological practice and intuition of Carl Jung. Body’s five senses good, Mind’s sixth sense bad. Yes.

When in fact the “Five-Factor” theory is only another “gift” of bias meant to deceive from the always body-centered cortex. From “science” self-deluded by the perversion of “objectivity:” circular, self-referential “reasoning” that’s body-matter affirming the “reality” of itself. Absurdity protected from questioning by “authority” that puts itself beyond questioning. A cover-up! Exactly. The “likeable,” “charming,” “funny,” and “engaging” mask of the “sociable” reflection now posing as “scientific.” “Erudition” flaunted by the opposite of Truth.

We must be vigilant. Yes. The learning from good contradiction role modeled by Jesus and built into the meaning of Christmas: by all means have fun and enjoy life. Have a Merry Christmas! But always with the vigilance of good contradiction guarding our thoughts.

The remedy: Vigilance against the lure of madness

The cortex’s job is to make “realistic” anything that will conceal the nature of its client. The “logic” of its meaning and purpose which parrots the narcissist’s reflection: illogic. The nature of the underside of contradiction that isn’t here to help and doesn’t wish anyone or anything well. What about itself? Since its goal is to contradict the eternity of timelessness – Now – with the absurdity of time, where everything including time must end, – its agent “wishes” its own end as well.

Madness. Yes. The animal brain’s “wildness” attracts authoritarian “realists” and blood-and-soil “objectivists” with its “promise” of seduction by the primal force of absolute “authority.” By an “ideal,” the false god of “supremacy” that’s servility and addiction. Yet another impossibility and perversion of the Truth: the Child’s Love of its Parents. Madness. “Will” whose “triumph” is triumph over itself. Contradiction contradicting itself. The “reciprocation” of madness with madness. A perversion of Love that reciprocates Love with itself. With Life not “death.”

The remedy: the Truth of individual Self-Worth

The lesson of “agreeability” that’s been “learned” from the cortex by opposite – the animal brain – is an opposite. The contradiction of the fact of agreeability with a fiction: an appearance hiding it. Hiding disagreeability. The appearance of benevolence hiding malevolence. With the lure of camaraderie, the “fun” face of belonging that’s the tribal “realist’s” substitute for Love. The appearance of “one-for-all and all-for one.” "Sincerity” fronting for insincerity. A joke.

The Truth that for tribe the one thing that’s not expendable is itself and the one thing that is is. . .  Me? Yes. The individual. The individual is nothing to the tribe other than however the individual can be exploited. The appearance of friendship that’s transactional. Exemplified by the “worth” of the Japanese soldier to the Japanese military in World War Two: issen gorin -- the cost of a draft notice postcard. Less than an American penny.

The Truth that for individual the one thing that’s not expendable is who it is: the beloved Child of Logic-Love who shares attributes of Self-Awareness, Love, and Innocence required by its function, Free Choice. Attributes that the underside of definition, the reflection in the mirror, seeks to convert into their opposites.

How? By the insane idea that thoughts can leave their source – projection:

  • by projecting its mask stained with guilt onto the innocence of “others” unstained by its guilt. An especially ugly injustice practiced by an especially self-unaware personality type: the dark side of ESFJ (extravert-body sensing-“feeling” (animal brain emotion)-judgment.) A close match with the judgmental-blaming reflection in the mirror, the god-wannabe narcissist posing as a super-responsible parent. “Divine authority” entitled to absolute, unquestioning obedience so self-absorbed infantility can enforce its cartoon fantasy of “absolute power” – “supremacy.”
  • by the reverse projection of a saintly mask of innocence stolen from “others” back onto its unsaintly guilt. An especially ludicrous hypocrisy practiced by a similar self-unaware personality type: the dark side of ESFP (‘P’ for “Perceptive,” or fuzzy-dice “spontaneity” exempting itself from the discipline of judgment.) A close match with the narcissist’s innocent-victim reflection, the lovable-wannabe posing as an un-responsible child. Absolute “freedom” entitled to unquestioning unaccountability so self-absorbed infantility can do whatever it wants in its cartoon fantasy of “living in the moment.” Roman tyranny dressed in the lovable image of foolish innocence, the Gaul Obelix.

The remedy: Seek Guidance to relevance

With the gift of good contradiction we can see through the deception. To the Truth revealed by the Vision of Logic-Love, that in all of its attributes the animal brain beast reflected in the mirror is an imposter. A lifeless, loveless code “intending” to end everything. Our shadow-opposite. This is its nature. Its so-called logic that its self-deluded host – us – is supposed to take seriously. Forget it! A better way to come down from the top of the Empire State Building is to call 9-1-1 and get help. Yes, from a source that’s not a “conductor” to oblivion.    

Doesn’t our military respect the individual soldier? Yes. It tries not to leave anyone out or anyone behind. It honors the memory of the fallen and sometimes honors enemy combatants too. Values inherited from the original ideal of American democracy that insisted on individual rights against tyranny and defined what “America” stood for. The value of authority that governs with service and support from the bottom up. To enable Creativity with Growth and Free Choice instead of ruling cruelly to preserve conformity with an unchanging status quo from the top down.

An ideal and values that have always had opposites but today are losing touch with the Logic of Necessity and passion of Love that contradicted them. Why? Because the ideal, like all values, requires realignment with changing times and changing contexts. With awareness of what context today implies about the correct path forward. A call for Guidance from Logic and Love uniquely qualified to provide it, because only with their help can self-unawareness detect meaning and purpose behind appearances.

Circumstances that seem favorable to a resurgence of the authoritarian mindset are a recurring test of progress toward Self-Awareness. Whose measure is whether the path forward is to be governed by the benevolence of Logic-Love – Mind -- or ruled by the cruelty of predatory animal instinct – body-brain. The only difference between the choice now and the choice in 1776 is circumstances.

What are they telling us? The narcissist authoritarian, robbed of independent judgment by its own reverse mirror image, can only impose its own unchanging context on changing circumstances. Then we need a better guide. The one whose birthday we’re honoring has the right connections. To the Child’s Parents Logic-Love and their unique talent for seeing beyond fiction. Beyond made-up “reality” to facts and what they mean. Demonstrated by his living among us, by his authorship of A Course in Miracles, and in other ways only known to the individual Minds and lives he’s touched. All it takes is Free Choice questioning. Questioning the status quo. Contradicting. Yes. Asking for Guidance.

The remedy: Voice that cannot be silenced

The duty to serve and support the intimacy of loving friendships with honesty and understanding. The duty to contradict the authoritarian reflection in the mirror that can’t tolerate contradiction. To speak against and be heard. To question and receive the respect of an answer. To stand up instead of standing down.

All of this the role performed by Jesus: an opposite that’s helpfulness in a shadowland of authoritarian opposites – harmfulness. Contradiction on the side of the good guys – conscience. The will not to profit from mistake selfishly but to correct it for the sake of gentle loving kindness. No figure of lifeless victimhood on a cross but the living Force of Voice that cannot be silenced. The Voice for Self-Awareness and not self-unawareness. The Voice for Mind and not for its “substitute,” body-brain matter. A role model for the ages. 

Where can I (hic!) sign up! At the de-tox counter. Couldn’t you have saved some of that eggnog for Santa’s helpers? Hic! Edna! Elio needs a ride in the sleigh. I tried that once. What happened? He got run over by the sleigh. What about Rudolph? Rudolph got run over too. They were both impounded and I had to pay to get them out. Never mind.

The remedy: practice

Free Choice given possibilities to work with, all the values that define Life-Worth, also received awareness of the underside of definition since its impossibilities were automatically entrusted to the Self-Awareness of Free Choice. But without Guidance from its Parents’ Knowledge base that included awareness of impossibilities, needing to protect judgment from losing its independence, inexperienced with opposites, Free Choice could only fall back on what competence it had to perform its role.

A likely explanation for its transfer out of production and into training by loss of Self-Awareness was contradiction built into its own definition and the definitions of two values: Freedom and Order.

  • The perversion of Choice “free” of the discipline of Judgment rather than Freedom from interference.
  • The perversion of Freedom completing Order’s harmony with contentment by its opposite, absolute freedom to have and do whatever it wants with no accountabillity.
  • The perversion of Order-authority completing Freedom’s contentment with peaceful harmony by its self-centered opposite: absolute power to rule without opposition. Owning and ruling its domain exclusively for its own benefit.

Both absolutes instrumental in Free Choice’s transference from Self-Love to love for its shadow-reflection. The archetype for narcissism gazing worshipfully into a mirror at the beast projected by its animal brain.

Putting contradiction among the list of values that Free Choice, our function, needs to help recover Self-awareness. To teach us to distinguish between definition’s topside and underside and to learn how to put contradiction to use: to discipline Free Choice with judgment aware of its limits. Keeping it free from captivity to absolutes.

The possibility of not always being right

And making sure that it doesn’t take itself or its job too seriously. For whatever it is, it comes with contradiction. The possibility that it may not always be right but sometimes wrong. Not always be correct but sometimes mistaken. The attribute of Authority that can never be absolute.

I had a crush on Fay Wray for years. That’s why I saw the movie 20 times. I only saw it once. Why? It made me sad when Kong was mean to the nice dinosaur. When he rolled the big log and people clinging to it fell off – that was cool. They were being mean to him and they deserved it. So, you like dinosaurs better than people? If the dinosaur was better looking I might have gone more than once.

Hey -- I’m the wise guy around here! Reflections switch masks at will. Yeah. But watch your step! They're paying me to get the laughs. We’re the two faces of reflection: wisdom and fool. You're lovable and I'm not. That's for sure! And you get all the fun. Can't I be the fool now and then?  Sure, if I get to be wisdom all the time and you find another job. Edna! Elio is being mean to me again! If you interrupt me one more time I'll show you what "mean" is.

The Christmas Gift of Good Contradiction

What lies behind appearances

The meaning of the teaching and example of Jesus is explanation that contradicts the status quo with questioning. That comes from the independence and integrity of judgment inseparable from its Source: Mind that thinks, feels, creates, and governs with the helpfulness of Logic married to Love and the Force of Necessity, the laws of cause and effect. The way things are. That isn’t the stagnation of status quo with no cause to serve but its own preservation but its opposite: the irrepressible spirit of change serving its cause, the evolution and affirmation of the Worth of Life. Creation.

The meaning of Christmas that explains with the Vision of Logic-Love what lies behind appearances and questions its source, bodies affirming matter with their senses. That would contradict the Logic-Love of Mind. We found it! What? The pony! I knew it was in here somewhere. 

What did Ms. Wray say when you asked her out? I don’t want to talk about it. She broke your heart. She said she was done with gorillas. So you moved on and found Edna. She didn’t mind being seen with a gorilla. She told me it was because somebody forgot to close the door.

We are all narcissist authoritarians

If reflections are mirror-image opposites then they have no self that can think, feel, and act on its own. They have to steal our selves and turn us into our opposites: authoritarians ruled by their animal brain. The attributes of a beast that doesn’t need Logic-Love to dominate. It only needs will that acts by predatory instinct. The narcissist, the reflection that sees itself reflected in everything and distrusts everything because it’s a reflection. Appearances our alternate “reality” is made of that can’t be trusted. Appearances are deceiving. Sure, because that’s their purpose: to deceive.

We are all reflections in a made-up world that’s the dream of a Mind thinking it’s a reflection. So we are all narcissist authoritarians in our own way, some more than others. Body-centered personality types more than Mind-centered types, but it’s only a difference in degree.

So if I understand correctly bad is good and we should be glad that opposites ruin our lives. Who’s that? Elio, where shall I put the sleigh and the donkey that just landed in the fireplace? Donkey? Yes, Elio. And with the prettiest red nose. Could it be Rudolph the red-nosed jackass? Just go for a ride in the sleigh, Edna, and have fun bothering everybody with the sleigh bells. 

Good contradiction replacing bad contradiction 

What I’m saying is. . . Oh, forget it. No, no! I’m listening! Just. . . enjoy your eggnog and have a nice day. What you’re saying is that contradiction is a value. And like all values it has a topside and an underside, and so we shouldn’t assume that opposites built into definition are throwaways or always up to no good. They have their good use too. Proof that you are listening. And I’m not as dumb as I look.

In a world that’s a shadowland of opposites, a reflection made up of appearances, contradiction can be a very good thing. The contradiction that’s our Christmas gift from our Helper. From the North Pole? From the Mind with which we really think: Logic-Love. Where we will find our real thoughts when we aren’t contradicting them with an unreal dream. Good contradiction of bad contribution. Exactly. Denial of the denial that put a layer of appearances over Reality-Truth, that substitutes unreal reflection for Real Self.

Contradiction’s warning

A magician’s act. That will end when the houselights are turned up. By Relationship, the same dynamic that illuminated Self-Awareness with the Force of mutual attraction between Parents Logic-Love then and between Parents-Child now: us with the Guide who can speak for them. Relationship with Reality-Truth that will replace the absurdity of “relationship” with our mirror-image opposite. The usurper that’s an “absolute.” An impossibility that can’t be Real.

Once again, good contradiction replacing bad contradiction. You’re catching on. The topside of contradiction switching places with the underside and restoring Order. Role modeled by the slave who reminded Caesar of his mortality while he was being immortalized by the false god of fame. Good contradiction warning us against the folly of mistaking the image reflected in the mirror for an Olympian myth. The impossibility of “supremacy” – absolute power with no opposites.

Replacing bad purpose: mindless docility

Were it not for impossibility woven into every definition there would be no opposites to stand in the way of the myth. To defend us from being taken captive by an absolute. An unthinking, unfeeling tyrant. Mind being “defeated” in “battle” with animal brain.

Doesn’t brain’s prefrontal cortex civilize the beast? The beast can’t be civilized. That would require equipping individuals with their own moral compass. The animal brain is an instrument designed for “use” by herds or tribes that only “knows” the “ethics” of a tribal predator: kill or be killed.

The cortex, an instrument designed for “use” by the animal brain, only “knows” “self” that is herd or tribe, not individual. Its function is keeping peace within and among tribes by “socializing.” By wearing a mask of smiling, likeable “agreeability” to hide the face of menacing intimidation behind it. Anti-sociability deceiving tribal members and their enemies with “sociability." Both masks – likeability and angry hostility – serving one overriding purpose: mindless docility. To silence the voices of animal brain’s captives and prevent questioning.

Questioning that dares to contradict

Values that support tribal conformity and “supremacy” rather than civilization, Creativity and sharing. Values repellent to Individuals guided by an inner moral compass. Etiquette and diplomacy -- table manners -- are all that tribes ruled by herd instinct need to maintain the appearance of social “harmony” in the presence of emotional and physical violence. Disharmony. That and tenderness, a substitute for Love, to nurture their young. There’s no mistaking which part of the brain is in charge and its potent appeal to body-centered authoritarian personalities seeking primal “supremacy.”

Then where does conscience come from? From Mind, animal brain’s sworn “enemy.” That it was made to replace because Mind only Knows the one Child – the individual. Animal brain “thinks” it deserves that honor. And it resents having to share the Child’s split Mind with another self. That dares to contradict its contradiction. To deny its denial. Exactly!

The Ending that’s Good

The underside of Christmas

The meaning of Christmas that Jesus shares with us couldn’t come from any part of brain matter. Or from any other instrument invented for use by groups or tribes because the Self that we all share is one Child, one Mind. The beast in the mirror is the mask of a fiction: Child-the-many, ruled by tribal values. The offense to Western “morality” codified in the 16th century by Niccolo Machiavelli and “legitimized” by the Church. Idolatry of the body demanding of its herd, a “flock” of anesthetized sheep, that it never be questioned. Not the affirmation but the contradiction of Self-Awareness.

The underside of Christmas that Jesus never intended to “found.” Re-enacting the glorious “victory” of shadow-reflection over its host with the figure on a cross who dared to question its self-proclaimed “authority.” The “authority” of wounded victimhood: injustice that cries out not for compassion but for damnation and vengeance. Against Self-Awareness for sharing itself for the benefit of the self-unaware. An implicit but unintentional contradiction of the “infallibility” of the established order. An unchanging status quo guarded by body-animal brains: tribal beasts protecting their sacred turf. An ominous warning to anyone else who dared to trespass.

Stolen Innocence

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. Doesn’t that explain the figure on the cross? It would if it spoke for Logic and Love. But it doesn’t. A world where an Innocent’s body must be crucified to right a wrong is neither loving nor lovable. A “god” that’s responsible for the atrocity, who sends his son into the torture chamber he “created,” can’t be a loving or lovable “father” or “creator.”

It’s opposite’s mischaracterization of Logic-Love, the Child’s Parents, The never-ending assault on the Truth by self-unawareness protecting its dream, a mistake, from being discovered and undone. The mother of all injustices: guilt projecting itself onto Innocence. The perpetrator of wrongdoing evading accountability by projecting it onto its victim. The perversion of justice and the definitive act of shadow-reflection: “earning” Innocence by stealing it. The twin of “innocence” projecting itself onto guilt, the mother of all hypocrisies. What was it your grandma used to say? “Consider the source.”

The figure on the cross

Then who is the figure on the cross? The reflection in the mirror: the false “innocence” of victimhood that has limitless sympathy for itself and none for anyone else. Self-pitying “unfairness” that “justifies” another absolute: vengeance without limits. The deifier of “sacrifice,” the symbol of guilt. Jehovah, the tribal “god” who ruled without opposites or feeling from the top down, demanding fear and tribute -- the blood of bodies. The pharisees, Jehovah’s helpers.

“Christmas spirit” is the Honesty of Logic-Love’s Voice that agrees when agreement validates Self-Worth and contradicts when it doesn’t. Questions as well as affirms. Minds open to questioning and intimacy in friendship instead of mindless animal brains disguised by "sociability" and claiming “supremacy” in “competition.” Contradiction that helps instead of regimentation that harms.

If what the pharisees heard was agreeability instead of contradiction the Christmas spirit would be “Hey everyone! Accept everything the way it is and enjoy the fun.” “Go along to get along.”

“Let’s Pretend”

What’s wrong with wishful thinking? “Let’s Pretend” was a radio program that entertained kids on Saturday morning. They grow out of that when they learn to distinguish between pretending and thinking that’s not. When they learn that not being grounded in facts is being absent rather than present. Remote, inaccessible. Not being there for family and friends who need them because they’re being there for themselves.

Lost in make-believe worlds of wishful thinking. One-dimensional cartoons featuring them in the lead role, producing, directing, script-writing, and setting the rules. “Let’s Pretend” for arrested-developed “adults:” “The Truman TV Show.” Infantile self-absorption. Narcissism. With harmful consequences to them and to those who need them. Any other questions? Sob! Hand me a tissue. I thought nobody would mind if I pretend I’m a kid again. Edna! Elio needs Kleenex! We’re out of Kleenex. Tell him to use the tablecloth like he always does.

Turn up the houselights

Elio, it’s a long way from the top of the Empire State Building to the bottom. “Agreeability” and wishful thinking are a great way to make the trip if that’s what you want. With the reflection in the mirror for your “conductor.” Accompanying its captives to the bottom 24 x 7 x 365.

The allegory of King Kong and his captive “mate” atop the Empire State Building is an accurate portrayal of the “ideal” of “supremacy.” Built into shadow-reflection’s perversion of Mind Logic-Love: mindless beast-captive. And an example of how the Child Free Choice duping itself into becoming the unwitting instrument of mayhem is re-enacted in its dream. As primal Force heroically besting sissified “civilization” in mortal combat for “supremacy.” The “triumph” of animal brain over prefrontal cortex that would dare to tame it.

The “mortal combat” re-enacted by shadow-reflection within split-brain’s perversion of Child’s split Mind at “war” with itself. Making periods of relative peace intermissions between acts in a magician show. That won’t end until its audience chooses to see through the deception, turns up the houselights, and drops the curtain.

Published on Leave a comment on The Right and Wrong Choice for Guidance

Reflections on the meaning of Christmas                                                 December 2023

The glossary for this and a companion essay, "Standing Up for Children against the Bully “Guide” Behind Authoritarian Parenting with the Helpfulness of Explanation" is posted separately, same date.

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Foreword 

Archetypes named by function

Logic-Love. Convention has assigned names to the archetypal roles and relationships theorized here that are silent on their most important attribute: their function. Functions that define “God,” for example, are left to impaired inquiry’s misjudgments, with the result that “God” has become a morass of contradictions – confusing if not meaningless. For clarity and not to be confusing familiar archetypes are defined and renamed here according to their functions.

Ancestral Mind. Thus “God” hasn’t been denied, just renamed with functions clarified as “Logic-Love,” the Relationship within “Mind” that produced its essential attribute: “Self-Awareness.” The “Parents” of their “Child,” “Free Choice,” our “ancestral Mind.” Aided by the “right Guide.” Functions left unclear by convention in terminology like Father, Son, Free Will, and Holy Spirit. And left, moreover, to doctrine – the herd mentality of competing ideologies -- when they belong to the Truth-seeking Free Spirit of Inquiry. To metaphysics that follows wherever Relationship leads, between the individual and the image of the right Guide chosen by the individual.

Opposite. Relationship leads here to “opposite,” a more definitive name for evil, the ego, Satan, the devil, and so forth. With variations “contradiction,” “shadow-reflection,” “reverse mirror-image.” The idea of opposition built into every definition by Logic-Love but Oneness. Itself, without opposite by definition.

Initial caps and quotes

Names with initial caps refer to archetypes of a storyline that belong in the Reality of Self-Awareness. Lower case to the unreality of self-unawareness or unconsciousness. The alternate “reality” that Child-Mind unconscious is dreaming: our life on earth.

Quotes are applied to words-ideas founded on illogic rather than Logic to highlight their questionable validity.

The psychology and metaphysics of a joke 

An alternate “reality” of self-unawareness 

Relationship between individual and the right Guide leads not to a storyline of perfection in Self-Awareness but to a storyline of imperfection in a state of self-unawareness. The state of the Child of Self-Awareness when it lost consciousness and descended into self-delusion. Into a dream of impossibilities brought on by an impossibility: “relationship” with its own shadow-reflection mistaken for a separate “other.” The turning point in the succession of “events,” from the loss of consciousness to self-delusion, that brought about our make-believe substitute “reality.”

An unreality that re-enacts the same events because it’s the only “story” that its author, the lifeless-mindless code of an opposite, “knows.” Re-enactment by a tape recording because that’s what it is, coded opposite turned on and made audible by unconscious Mind so disabled that it can’t distinguish between itself and its shadow-reflection. Between anything and its opposite, including Life and Reality.

A tale of exotica -- archetypes, opposites, and “events” from a distant state of mind, lost to memory and kept from our awareness. That could be ignored if we weren’t the instruments and unwitting subjects of its re-enactment. Play-actors following a script in the Truman TV Show except for Truman, the fool that is self-unawareness, thinking he’s the author of his own story. The mirror-image of ourselves. Re-enacting the story of an unconscious Mind that’s placed itself under the influence of the wrong “guide.” Free to make mischief in the made-up alternate “reality” of self-unawareness.

An alternate “reality” of re-enactments

With Christmas comes reflection on what it means. The birth of Jesus. One personification of the right Guide, offering the vision and wisdom of Logic and Love to every individual. Drawn by respect for Free Choice, the Worth and function of every individual -- our birthright.

What does Christmas have to say about our story, its antecedents, and its authorship, if it’s a re-enactment of Mind gifted with Self-Awareness taken captive by self-unawareness? To become a piece moved about by an unseen “hand” in an unreal board game of impossibilities? Convention leaves much still to be learned, and the wrong “guide’s” nonsense is still being taken seriously.

Opposite is here to stay

But far from being irrelevant the meaning of Christmas is directly on point. With the role modeling of the biblical Jesus and the Jesus of A Course in Miracles that leads out of self-unawareness back to Self-Awareness. To our real identity and function in Creation. With metaphysics that helps minds befuddled by bodies’ senses seek Truth beyond appearances. To distinguish between Reality and unreality and between Guidance from Logic-Love and mis-guidance from shadow-opposite.

The metaphysics of A Course in Miracles explains the example set by Logic-Love through the right Guide for relating to one another. Beginning with managing our “relationship” with the reverse side of our own voice, the “voice” of shadow-opposite. Because opposite that’s built into Logic-Love’s definition of function isn’t going away. A heads-up meant for Truth-seekers like Plato and Einstein as well as for those less talented.

The ”joker” and  its “humor” that’s not funny

The meaning of Christmas comes with humor aware of its Source and its subject: Awareness of Self that would not Be if it took itself too seriously. Creation adventuring into the unknown, dependent on Free Choice in constant need of learning. That sometimes learns by blunders into the unknown or it would not be free. Abundance sharing its infinite sense of humor with its Creations. Innocence playfully at work in its Temenos, the playground and workshop of Creation.

And the joker peddling ridicularity in its shadowland of opposites. Beginning with the absurdity of its ambition to replace the ultimate source of its “victimhood”: not the Child or its Parents but Mind itself. Then it wouldn’t even be an idea since ideas come from Mind. And there would be no words to recognize its triumph since words need ideas to communicate.

Why bring it up? To expose the “thinking” of the wrong “guide” that’s making fools of us. The wrong guide that’s debunked by the meaning of Christmas. A funny guy – the lovable joker. The Pied Piper humorist. But there are other reasons to think about, here and in “Standing Up to the Bully: the Wrong ‘Guide’ Behind Authoritarian Parenting,” a companion essay. Reasons that are not funny. Another take on the “joker” who’s not lovable. 

Opposite’s Once Upon a Time 

The court jester’s choice

“The pellet with the poison’s in the vessel with the pestle. The chalice from the palace has the brew that is true.” If he didn’t memorize this, Hubert Hawkins (Danny Kaye in “The Court Jester“ 1955) wouldn’t survive the day. Unless it was “the flagon with the dragon that has the brew that is true,” in which case memorizing wouldn’t help.

Hubert’s dilemma -- a metaphor for the choice we face. The pellet with the poison that invaded the human psyche is still “there.” The unreal darkness that Jesus works with us to expose with the light of Logic and Love: explanation that leads to understanding. Understanding that helps us choose between the Guide who’s here to help and the “guide” who’s “here” to do the opposite. To keep us trapped in self-delusion. In unreality.

The origin of opposite in definition and Necessity

When Self Awareness brings into Reality a function that adds to Creation it does so by its function: definition. Definition by Awareness, Logic and Love acting as one, that recognizes its Self. That puts boundaries around what the new function is and what it’s for and determines where the new function fits. So that all the functions that produce Creation perform in harmony as one.

But in doing so definition also puts boundaries around what the new function isn’t and what it’s not for: its opposite. By following an implication of Logic-Love that’s unavoidable: the meaning of what “is” is necessarily defined in part by what “isn’t.”

Not an anomaly of Self-Awareness but an integral part of its origin. Mind the original circumstance that, according to Necessity, the laws of cause and effect, was itself subject to the same Logic of definition. The Relationship between Logic and Love that produced Self-Awareness and then began the process of Creation with its first implication: Possibility. Defined in part by what it isn’t: impossibility. Opposite. There where the sequence of Logic-Love – the story of Creation – began.

Relationship that is Mind governing Reality-Creation with service and support from the bottom up. To enable the spontaneity of Creation with Freedom and Order, two distinct definitions that complete one another and function as one. Governing not arbitrarily above the law for its own sake but under it for the sake of its Creations and their cause.. Under the laws of cause and effect with the Force of Necessity. Necessity that includes definition with opposite.

Eternal Life’s debt to impossibility

Creation’s definition put contradiction with the ideal of its perfection there itself. To our minds, split between opposites, confused and frustrated by contradictions that block progress, the idea of opposite is an intruder, a nuisance that should be expelled. When, in fact, it belongs. Impossibility that tags along with all the possibilities of Creation wherever they go.

A necessary, logical part of their definition. For Creation can’t function without opposite that contradicts its ideal of resolution: eternal rest and peace. That gives Creation a mission of purpose and motivation: to overcome obstacles to reaching its destination.

And the job that Child was created to do: to be the part of Relationship with its Parents that authenticates Worth through the exercise of Free Choice. Through the integrity of judgment that’s free to weigh every possibility including the possibility of impossibilities. Dreamed by Child Mind in a state that Parents Self-Awareness cannot Know by definition without making unreality Real.

There would be nothing more for Relationship to do were it possible for Creation to reach its Ideal of eternal rest and peace. But so long as definition can’t define without opposite, so long as Perfection can’t do without imperfection, it can’t be possible.

Eternal Life’s debt to impossibility. The extensions of Logic’s implications and Love’s relationships that will play out forever like the value of Pi, never to reach a whole number.

All the world’s a stage -- Shakespeare

The Jesus of A Course in Miracles takes the idea of unreality and explains the story of how it came to “be.” With Logic-Love’s metaphysics -- looking beyond appearances – to help body-locked humans understand the truth about opposite: what it “is,” what it “does,” and what it implies for the situation we’re in. So we as individuals can better manage our relationship with it. “Relationship” with our shadow-reflection beyond awareness, that will continue to mess with our story until we are aware of it and learn to manage it.

Starting from understanding that it’s not real to awareness of how it messes with our story: by re-enacting events within Free Choice, our unconscious ancestral Mind, that brought it into a neverland of self-unawareness. A succession of errors whose re-enactment accounts for the mutating “normal” of “life” on earth. In the shifting image of its fantasist, the joker: no face or self of its own behind a thousand masks.

With a sinister purpose: while keeping the deception alive in self-deluded minds, replaying its fabricator’s skill at outwitting its host for self-glorification and amusement. And for its ultimate gratification: constant reminders of its supremacy. Our alternate “reality:” a mirror in the hand of a narcissist, reflecting “purity” and “innocence” in its self-image, “perfection” in its works, and “triumph” over its “enemies.” Entertaining impossibilities conjured by a master magician. untroubled by laws of cause and effect that he’s magically suspended. A “god” of two-faced duality – tragedian and comedian – who makes no sense.

The pathetic “pellet with the poison” hiding in the vessel with the pestle

The five senses of self-unawareness

Getting it right can’t be getting rid of opposite. But it can be choosing a better Guide to help our real Self – the one Child – break the cycle of re-enactments. By regaining Self-Awareness and getting rid of self-unawareness. By helping our real Self get back to living its real story unobstructed by impossibilities.

Jesus of A Course in Miracles helps us make the right choice by putting the apparition, our reverse mirror-image reflection, squarely in view. So both mind- and body-centered personality types can understand the abysmal choice for a guide that it presents. With attributes so alien to Logic-Love, Reality, and the laws of cause and effect, that they can’t be taken seriously. That wouldn’t be taken seriously if it weren’t for the confusion caused by appearances. By body-brains’ five senses that deceive self-unawareness into believing that they’re real.

Mind seeks awareness; body blocks it. Bodies crafted by self-unawareness, a shadow attached to its host, share its limitations. Among them an inability to see and feel beyond externals – beyond themselves. One-dimensional impersonal objects that can only “be” what they appear to be. An inability to detect internals that are no part of themselves. Subjects defined not by masks but by three-dimensional personality behind masks. By the feelings, values, psychology, and philosophy of personhood. The attributes of Mind, the shadow’s host.

The five senses of status quo

Therein the divide between individual idealists and tribal-“realists” that’s been frustrating forward movement from the beginning. Disagreement whether appearances are the end of it. “Realists” captive to the body’s five senses say they are. Idealists open to guidance from Mind’s sixth sense say they aren’t.

The former following the dictates of animal brain, an appearance meant to replace Mind, seeking to put the status quo beyond questioning with predetermined answers. Seeking, that is, to evade answers. The latter, following the spontaneous implications of Logic and interconnections of Love, questioning the status quo to find answers. One denying inquiry its free spirit, the other respecting it. Clear evidence of the wrong "guide" using its captives to mess with Free Choice.

The parasite and “friend” who could never be 

The biblical Jesus turned our attention toward what’s right with parables, miracles, and his example. He gave us attributes of the right Guide for us to assemble in whatever image fits our personalities and individual contexts. The Jesus of A Course in Miracles has turned our attention toward what’s wrong. Toward exposing the truth about the wrong “guide,” both the seriousness of its harm and the absurdity of its pretense.

So it would be clear that partnering with it would be partnering with Mr. Hyde, the “friend” who could never be. Who offends with process more than product: With a one-dimensional caricature. A joke that’s on us. A pie in our face.

Exposing the wrong “guide” behind its many guises should give its devotees pause. How so? By revealing that the wrong “guide” is a joker. The playing card impersonator-joker substituting for any card. The trickster-magician joker that conjured a substitute “reality” out of perversions of the Truth, laughable absurdities. And the Joker of the 2019 film, evil incarnate.

By revealing that the wrong “guide” who came second after its host is a parasite. A derivative of its host and dependent on its host. Owing everything to its host that owes everything to Logic and Love, its Parents, and only one aspect of its definition to its shadow-opposite. That’s equivalent to demotion by Logic from Reality to unreality, out of sight and out of conscious Mind. Nothing to boast about.

The punchline in a slapstick comedy

The wrong “guide” is the opposite of what it pretends to be: number one on center stage in the spotlight, star of the show with the only voice to be heard; playwright, producer, and director. It’s not the “superman” idealized by captives like Nietzsche, Rand, and der Fuhrer. Fantasized by everyone drawn to absolute “authority,” our animal brain – mindlessness -- “triumphing” over Mind. Held up as a role model for captives to a nightmare of fear, lured by the specter of “death.”

It’s not the arch-competitor who’s taken over the winner’s circle. Howard Roark, the architect, atop his skyscraper, with Dominique Francon at his feet gazing up at her hero worshipfully. It’s King Kong atop the Empire State Building pounding his chest, with the beauty Ann Darrow terrified at his feet while supposedly drawn to this symbol of primal male power. A portrayal of “supremacy” suitably symbolized in the greatest horror monster film of all time by a fictitious king of beasts, brought to “life” by special effects.

The truth about what’s really in the vessel with the pestle -- the “pellet with the poison” – is that it's an absurdity. The archetypal “action hero” in an imaginary competition boasting of its “triumph.” A self-deluded fool in a one-dimensional adolescent cartoon. The definitive “loser:” a pitiful boob out of his element and over his head. Climaxing his ascent to the top with a spectacular faceplant at the bottom. A terrific punchline in a slapstick comedy.

Inside the Third Reich: the cloud-cuckoo land of opposite 

The threat posed by Mind 

The authoritarian will to rise to “supremacy” in its hierarchical fantasy of “competition” re-enacts a laughable absurdity. Its mindless shadow-opposite’s ambition to rise higher than the highest authority in Reality-Creation. Mind. Opposition to all things Mind. To Self-Awareness, Logic-Love. The anti-intellectual identifying with its animal brain, the beast King Kong, triumphing over learning and growth, competence and maturity. Over other perspectives needed for context, over ideas and imagination needed for creativity. Over every faculty of Mind including Intuition’s sixth sense.

The authoritarian’s exclusive reliance on body-brains’ five senses re-enacting the wrong “guide’s” fear. Its fear of the threat posed by Mind to its will to replace Mind.

“Supremacy in competition:” the will of a predatory beast 

Opposite thrives on competition-combat. Where Logic-Love’s Self-Awareness extends and recognizes itself through Connection -- gifts shared and reciprocated among its family of Reality-Creation, -- opposite finds perverse gratification in disconnection. In discord imposed upon the unrecognizable aliens that it projects -- “others.”

  • Thus Logic-Love recognizes the Self-Worth of Life, Innocence, Inseparability, Beauty, Harmony, Spontaneity, and Free Choice that are given by the Reality of Self-Awareness, Oneness without opposites, Relationship, Perfection, Order-Freedom, and Creation.
  • Opposite is gratified by the worthlessness of death, guilt, separation, disfigurement, discord, conformity, and captivity inflicted by time, damnation, madness, cruelty, contradiction, herd mentality, and dominance.

All handsomely delivered by competition-combat, opposite’s perverse ”substitute” for Creation. The swap of consequence for inconsequence that lured the sucker, self-unawareness, into its adolescent fantasy of “action.” “Winners” and “losers” legitimizing opposite’s “unshakable will” to be number one. The will of a predatory beast: “supremacy.”

The ultimate “affirmation:” Matter over Mind

“Life” on earth is a cornucopia of opposite’s “blessings.” Euphemisms that cast a blanket of pleasantness over its dubious “benefits”:

  • “Winning” that puts the face of “sociability” and “fun” on “competition.” “Dominance” that wishes no one well.
  • “Supremacy in competition” that poses as a visionary “ideal” instead of an adolescent’s fantasy of “action-hero” fulfillment: a nightmare of loss.
  • “Procreation” revered for expanding civilization while threatening it with domination by predatory herd mentality, the club wielded by the authoritarian.
  • Taking heart from the promise of “time” in its cycle of renewal and rebirth, not noticing that it’s not a potted plant or incubator. It’s a universal wastebasket. That never needs to be emptied since there’s nothing of consequence to put in it.
  • Putting “special relationships” on the face of alternate “reality” -- sprucing up a skull with lipstick.

All bound up in opposite’s perversion of Creation’s Ideal, resolution by peaceful reconciliation, with its “unshakable will” to possess absolute power without opposition. To at last attain “supremacy.” By triumphing over its “enemy” in the mother of all battles. In the breathtaking grandeur of mortal combat: “resolution” by mutual destruction. “Affirmation” of the organic world of body-brains in its material universe of physical objects. By violence, the defining attribute of “universe” whether one or many.

The projection of a split Mind: ”war” that can never be 

That proclaims the “strength” of animal will and welcomes risking all in the boldness and fire of “action.” In the mythology of gods waging wars of “blood and soil,” “the lost cause,” “the triumph of the will.”  While dismissing Mind. Real Authority that knows nothing of such rubbish.

Mind the Parents Logic-Love, not their Child. Free Choice, the extension of Mind Logic-Love that can lose consciousness and dream, while Mind that is Self-Awareness by definition cannot. That can only Be in Reality and function as Source and Governance of Reality-Creation. The Authority of Logic-Love, service and support, that governs under the laws of cause and effect with the Force of Necessity. That found a place for contradiction in the Mind of its Child should Free Choice choose in error and lose consciousness. Should it then be enticed by its shadow-opposite, mistaken for an ”other,” into an unreal dream: its shadowland of opposites.

In picking a fight with Mind Self-Awareness, opposite isn’t picking on someone its own size. It’s self-unawareness blundering into an asymmetrical matchup. “Thinking” typical of the wrong “guide,” but it needn’t worry. Combat between Reality and unreality could only “happen” in a dream. In the dualistic hallucinations of split minds: holding two contradictory thoughts at the same time. In the alternate “reality” of split minds projecting.

The "ideal” of ending

Opposite aims for fulfillment not in the Ideal of Resolution and Peace but in its opposite: the “ideal” of ending Reality-Creation by supremacy in war. The code of impossibility – shadow-opposite -- has invented a fictitious world to “inhabit” by copying and projecting its host’s world in reverse. What its other self-unaware inhabitants must be aware of – us -- is the mythology cooked up by its “author” to glorify and legitimize it. The myth of Mind-Reality’s equal, matter-unreality, defeating it in mortal combat to attain “supremacy.” Opposite’s perversion of context that speaks for meaning and purpose -- absurdity. The ideal not of Resolution and Peace or even “winning,” but ending.

Authoritarians identify with the predatory animal will, lodged in body-brains’ amygdala, to dominate with brute force. Thinking that it’s directed toward the absolutes of power and freedom that they crave. But they’re wrong. The ultimate “ideal” of the beast atop the Empire State building is the ending of all “power” and “freedom.” Of everything including Mind. Insanity that would contradict Truth, that Relationship between Parents Logic-Love and their Child Free Choice, that wills Creation in a state of Self-Awareness in the eternal Now, can’t end.

Authoritarian minds captive to nonsense

“Endings” belong to time, an illusion, not to timelessness. “Time,” that once seemed to make sense before physics and philosophy learned better, took a serious hit with General Relativity where it’s no longer absolute. And an even more serious hit with the calculations of quantum mechanics, where it no longer exists.

Opposite’s “ideal” of ending Mind by any means is an absurdity that can’t be taken seriously, except in the land of shadow-opposites where anything is possible. Where our animal brain hasn’t evolved since our ancestor animal became human animal; we are still animals. Where impossibility routinely triumphs over possibility with nothing more than wishful thinking -- “alternate facts.” Where authoritarian minds captive to opposite’s nonsense can prolong self-unawareness and perpetuate misery. By endlessly re-enacting the “triumph” of shadow-opposite over its host, our ancestral Mind, that never happened.

Comparing the costs of unworkable with the benefits of workable 

When hearts connect but minds can’t

Communication consists of sharing -- connection that’s a function of Logic-Love. Alternate “reality” is a defense against Logic-Love and Reality-Creation that obstructs communication. Body-sensing personality types captive to matter rather than aligned with Mind will the misuse of Mind to turn it against itself and away from sharing. To convert introspection, intuition, thinking-feeling, and judgment into their opposites: extraversion, body-sensing, instinctive action, and specialness without limits.

When sharing-communication is needed between opposite personality types it can be impossible. Where the point of extraversion, body-sensing, instinctive action, and specialness without discipline isn’t to spice “life” with variety but to prevent sharing-communication. To block Mind-awareness and Logic-judgment required by the shared purpose of community and loving friendship. Hearts can connect with unconditional Love but Mind is still required for friendship.

Self deprived of personhood

The ultimate “target “of shadow-opposite, were self-unawareness able to choose a target, is ideas. The function of Mind. So to understand body-centered personality types, begin with the attributes of body-brain and exclude the attributes of Mind. And discover what’s lost in the process: substance. The substance of personality and character. The substance of Reality-Creation:

  • creativity, imagination, intuition, and insight.
  • Logic-Love, originality, individuality, and Self-Awareness.
  • Reasoning, inner moral compass, values.
  • Feeling-sensitivity, and depth.

This is what opposition to Mind takes away from body-centered personality types  What’s left is one-dimensional facades like the bodies they identify with. Appearances. Superficiality. Deprivation.

The cost of “relationship” that doesn’t work 

Relationship that’s a fact of life requires management, not denial. A point that the biblical Jesus tried to get across with his parables, miracles, and example. Logic-Love manages its “relationship” with contradiction by putting it in the only place where it could fit. In unreality, the opposite of Reality. Where Mind-conscious “relating” to an opposite that by definition doesn’t exist, that fits within a state of Mind that’s unconscious, is an impossibility. The state of Mind that’s their Child, Free Choice, capable of losing consciousness that Self-Awareness, its Parents Logic-Love, cannot lose.

Where “relationship” is managed by letting insights from mind-intuition – our sixth sense – be our Guide. By not letting the five senses of body-brains deceive us with appearances into re-enacting Child-Mind’s error. Unreality can be “made real” but only within Mind unconscious and unaware of itself, as our alternate “reality” attests. Knowing nothing when being known would make it real.

The benefit of Relationship that does work

Alternate “reality” that’s a dream state of opposites, contradictions, impossibilities. A temporal shadowland of opposites with magical beginnings and endings. Apparitions that “live” and “die” within a universe that’s an apparition, the reverse mirror-image of the unconscious Child-Mind dreaming it. The handiwork of self-unawareness beholden to Self-Awareness for its “existence:” definition that depends on opposite to define. The implication of Self-Awareness that is self-unawareness.

That will be undone by the benefit of workability when the will of Logic-Love is heard through the voice of the right Guide. When it’s welcomed by Free Choice to share its will and guide its audience to Understanding: the One Child. Whole and intact in the Soul of every individual. Innocence accessible through the sixth sense of Mind. Love inseparable from Logic, responding to the Call for Love. 

Choosing the Guide who makes sense

Two Minds thinking and feeling as one 

The biblical Jesus disappeared into the wilderness for 40 days and nights before beginning his ministry.  A metaphor for the change of mind caricatured by opposite’s fantasy of “supremacy,” the victory of body-brain matter over Mind in mortal combat. A metaphor of detachment, where mind could think in the stillness of solitude, freed from everyday distractions. Where the Mind of Jesus accomplished in fact what opposite could only make up in fiction: the ability to think Real thoughts. And thus the ability to perform the supernatural acts in our world that opposite could only make up in its cartoon world.

Miracles unbound by the “laws” of physics, biology, and all the other disciplines still at work, trying to define spacetime-matter. Not leaping over tall buildings -- acrobatic body-feats to gratify adolescent “supremacy.” But the miracle of thinking Real thoughts in an unreal world. Attained not by rampant harmfulness -- conquest in mortal combat -- but by the gentle loving kindness of helpfulness. Mind entrusted to the Guide, the Helper, being welcomed into the mind of. Free Choice, seeking help of its own accord, without reservation from the seeker’s shadow-opposite.

Harmfulness replaced by Helpfulness

Because with two minds thinking and feeling as one, joined by Logic and Love in one purpose, there can be no sign of contradiction. Body-brain functioning as “one” with its shadow-opposite, a perversion of Parent-Child functioning as one, has been replaced. Fear and guilt replaced by Love and Innocence. Darkness replaced by the light of Self-Awareness. Contradiction’s harmfulness replaced by the helpfulness of Free Choice in Creation. Its opposite left behind in its shadowland of opposites, self-unawareness.

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Appendix 1 

Reflections on the denial of sixth sense 

Five body-senses aren’t enough 

The difference between your state of mind and our Source’s is a difference in awareness. Our Source’s is the Relationship between Logic and Love that enabled and empowered Self-Awareness. Mind that implies the idea of opposites but can’t be aware of it without making it real. Yours is self-unawareness that can’t tell the difference. Not while you occupy a shadowland of opposites, of impossibilities where anything goes. Where delusional occupants imagine that they can ignore the laws of cause and effect and decide for themselves what’s real. 

In the state of confusion you describe, mind-centered personality types are drawn to you for Guidance while body-centered types are drawn to your opposite. You respect Free Choice and help with awareness when you’re asked. Your opposite turns two-sided relationship into one-sided addiction. Into blind submission to the will of a predator to own, possess, control, dominate, and eventually eliminate competitors. Tribal-“realists” dependent on their bodies’ five senses dismiss the notion of a sixth sense that they can’t detect. And so they block awareness of me. 

The north-going Zax meets the south-going Zax

The wrong choice they affirm is troublesome for a second reason. Affirmation was part of the function that defined Free Choice in Reality – affirmation and reciprocation of Life-Worth, the cause of Creation. Whether personality types split into mind- or body-centered or choose one or another guide, their function is still part of their core identity, and it’s still to affirm. Both sides affirming means both sides equally certain that they’re right.

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Appendix 2 

Illumination by the spirit of Christmas 

Not a creature was stirring 

Edna, can’t this nitwit just wave hello and let us be? Now Elio, don’t be mean. I’m sure he means well. And he’s right. There’s more to the holidays than waving hello. Any more of this and I’m getting a restraining order. Can’t we at least wave back? No! He’ll think we want more! Well, I’m sending a card anyway. ‘Tis the season to be jolly and you’re not being jolly. Santa doesn’t reward old grouches with bags of toys.

Have it your way. But don’t be surprised if I don’t leave out milk and cookies. And don’t you be surprised if you don’t find any toys in your stocking. Edna! You wouldn’t! 

‘Tis the season for a refund 

And don’t be surprised if you don’t get your birthday treat. What treat? A day at Dave and Buster’s where you can show off your amazing skills. Yes! Watch me toss a ball. And spin a big roulette wheel -- I’m really good at that. And make cute thingies out of Play-Doh. Nobody does it better. I can’t wait to win a suitcase full of little yellow tickets. Why? So I can exchange them for a tiny piece of colored plastic that has no use and will break before I get home.

You’re right, Edna. ‘Tis the season to be jolly. Waving hello isn’t enough. Hand me the nitwit’s letter. Happy Holidays, Elio! Happy Holidays, Edna!

Published on Leave a comment on Standing Up for Children against the Bully “Guide” Behind Authoritarian Parenting with the Helpfulness of Explanation

Reflections on the meaning of Christmas                                                 December 2023

The glossary for this and a companion essay, "The Right and Wrong Choice for Guidance," is posted separately, same date.

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Coming to terms with a joke taken seriously

Logic inseparable from Love 

The effect of Logic joining with Love in Relationship  is Illumination. Self-Awareness that’s Relationship functioning as One without beginnings or endings. Eternal Mind serving and supporting the functions that define who it Is and what it’s for: Being that’s Life. Doing that’s the Growth and Worth of Life, affirmed, earned, and reciprocated by Free Choice, its Child.

The Child of its Parents, Logic inseparable from Love. Order inseparable from Freedom. Functions that complete one another in Relationship and in Happiness: the Joy of Self that is Creativity in service to the Good. That is Mind’s intent. Definition that shares itself when it defines every element of Creation with Self-Awareness and Intent. Fitting its function into Reality, the Perfection of joyful harmony with all its other functions that is Creation. The Interconnectedness of Logic inseparable from Love, functioning together as One.

The Child of Self-Awareness

One that is Mind-Everything. Everything that exists whether in Mind-Parents, Self-Awareness by definition, or Child Free Choice, Self-Awareness that is crucially not by definition but by the gift of Intent. To share the gift of Self-Awareness defined by Logic inseparable from Love, Order inseparable from Freedom: Illumination shared with Creation through Free Choice. Relationship between Parents and Child that answers to the laws of cause and effect. To the Necessity of freely chosen affirmation, earning, and reciprocation by Relationship that illuminates the Worth of Life. That’s part of the Essence and Beauty of Soul, the Interconnectness of Mind that is Everything.

Child Free Choice, crucially the gift rather than the definition of Self-Awareness, that can lose its gift or choice would not be free. Choice that must be aware of every possibility revealed by context, including the possibility of opposite: impossibility. That’s necessarily built into every definition by Logic-Love that, if mistaken for possibility, would introduce contradiction into the perfect harmony of Reality.

Guidance from the Vision of Logic-Love

An impossibility avoided by the possibility of Self-Awareness in the eternal Now lost to “time.” To the transience of an unreal dream: self-unawareness. Destined to end with inertia, the end of “time” and the temporal energy that empowers it.

Where Mind-Energy interconnects all of timeless Reality-Creation in service to Relationship, its origin, energy limited by time winds down by the process known as entropy. Disconnecting -- clear evidence that our alternate “reality” of spacetime-matter isn’t in the Now and can’t be Real.

Or when Child Free Choice chooses to learn from its error and correct it while unconscious. To gain the competence to perform its role in Creation while it is self-unawareness in Relationship with the light of Guidance, the Vision of Logic-Love in whatever form the Memory of Self-Awareness can recognize. The person and phenomenon of Jesus, brother and friend to self-unawareness that seeks his help – us, the dream’s projections. Or other forms equally aligned with the Vision of Logic-Love.

The choice of intent, right or wrong

Nothing happens unless it’s within Mind. Whether it’s Parent Mind Self-Awareness thinking-feeling Reality-Creation or Child-Mind in a state of self-unawareness dreaming an “alternate reality.” Whether it’s Logic-Love making sense or Child-unconscious Mind, split between itself and illogic, its opposite, not making sense. Nothing can be “non-Mind” or “outside” Mind.

If physics speculates that our material universe is pointless then pointlessness would be its point. For everything that is Mind, in any state, is Intent. The idea that anything can be without Intent, in Reality or “alternate reality,” a dream, is the idea that Mind can exist without function. An impossibility so long as function in Reality-Creation defines what Is.

The dreaming Child’s re-enactment of “definition” is the “illumination” of an opposite that cannot be illuminated in Reality by definition. A reverse mirror-image reflection hidden in the darkness of Free Choice’s contradiction. A lifeless, loveless shadow. The opposite of Self-Awareness. Illumination.

The joke that’s taken seriously

The code of opposite that’s built into every definition. Not Free Choice that’s served and supported by Authority to enable and empower Creativity, but captivity and conformity imposed by authoritarian rule to prevent it. That can only be “brought to life” by self-unawareness. By Mind unconscious, captive to its opposite, projecting a dream of contradiction: Child-the-One transformed into body-brains the many. A trick by an illusionist that owes deception to the deceiver: the body’s five senses.

A re-enactment in reverse of the Illumination of Self-Awareness by Logic married to Love: the darkness of self-unawareness denied illumination by unholy “matrimony:” self-unawareness in “love” with itself. The “reality” of body-brains certified by unquestioned “authority:” itself. Fantasizing the “supremacy” of matter over Mind, self-unawareness over Self-Awareness. Dinner and dancing for one. That would be a joke if self-delusion weren’t taking it seriously. 

The choice: Guidance or “guidance” 

United in Intimacy and Trust

The Jesus of the Bible and A Course in Miracles earns our trust in his Guidance for a reason. His compelling performance of the function that the Child, our ancestral Mind, depended on to perform the role of Free Choice in Creation. Choosing how to apply the gift of its Parents’ role modeling for guidance. A function so integral to our purpose that it’s preserved in our Psyche. Protected by the Oneness and Innocence of Soul, beyond any will to harm or take it away. The memory of who we are, the one Child of helpfulness.

The loss of Self-Awareness was a descent into “time,” both temporary and illusory, that deprived Free Choice of its functions that support Creation. Among these was the extension and application of its Parents’ role modeling. A force here, in our alternate “reality,” that shapes a child’s character with the potential to make a difference for good or ill. The right Guide earns our trust when its role modeling channels the role modeling of Logic and Love, its Source. The Parents of the Child, our archetypal ancestry. All of us members of one family united in intimacy and trust. 

Choice that’s when, not whether

The measure of human progress is its ascent from tribal self-unawareness – bodily herd instinct – to the Self-Awareness of individual Mind – Free Choice reflecting, judging, and choosing with conscience. Progress limited, so far, to its graduation from predatory tribe to predatory tribe with table manners. That its wild-animal brain continues to violate at will as an intolerable limit on its “freedom.”

Awareness can’t be done for Free Choice but it can be done with Free Choice. When it’s taught by explanation and by example guided by Logic and Love respectful of Free Choice. Not by ignoring the laws of cause and effect -- the Necessity that Self-Awareness be learned, -- but by abiding by the freedom to choose when to learn it.

Role modeling that earns our trust

Jesus of the Bible and A Course in Miracles earns our trust by teaching with explanation and example, guided by Logic and Love that respect Free Choice. That role model authority that serves and supports independent judgment, originality, and creativity with gentle loving kindness. From the bottom up, rather than authority that imposes its self-centered will with intimidation from the top down, to enforce conformity and suppress originality.

For anyone seeking help gaining Self-Awareness, from Authority that role models with modesty and compassion, Jesus qualifies. For anyone seeking Guidance that reinforces rather than undermines independent judgment, creativity, and Self-Worth, Jesus qualifies.

The wrong place to start: self-unawareness

There could as many versions of the right Guide as there are individuals. Because “Jesus,” the phenomenon and the person, could not function without being an adaptation. That would allow him to be recognized and accepted by unique personalities in their individual circumstances. He and his Guidance are inclusive, not exclusive. Not because attaining universal acceptance is possible but because it’s irrelevant.

Guidance from Jesus is addressed to one audience: the individual in the individual’s context at the moment. With the goal of relating to the individual, through the intimacy role modeled by Logic inseparable from Love, to make progress toward Self-Awareness. At odds with convention: the view that every idea wanting consequence must find a market.

Derailed by the wrong “self”So why one individual? Because, as A Course in Miracles teaches, one individual truly learning the lesson, truly forgiving, would be all it takes. To awaken the self-unaware Child Mind that’s dreaming us. And because it’s not Child-the-many but the one Child whose identity we share.

One Self that our alternate “reality,” fashioned by the wrong “guide,” the Child’s shadow-opposite, is conditioning us to reject. So instead of doing our part to help the Child correct error we will keep re-enacting it: by falling for the delusion that we are many selves. By letting our mission to regain Self-Awareness be derailed by the wrong definition of “self.” Tribes incapable of seeking Self-Awareness because they’re the invention of opposite -- self-unawareness. Derailed by the wrong guide instead of individuals seeking help from the right Guide.

Mindfulness, individuality, service, and creativity: role modeling for children that’s helpful 

Where Helpfulness begins and harmfulness ends

All of the Child-Mind’s projections that inhabit the dream must be captive to its self-delusion or they would not be here. But those enabled and empowered by the attributes of the right Guide from childhood would have an advantage. A chance to break free from the gravitational force of authoritarian oppression and express themselves.

To live lives of achievement, originality, and fulfillment that those not so fortunate would not have. Those subjected to the attributes of the wrong guide: body-centered competitive “action” directed by instinctive tribal will opposed to thinking mind and loving heart; self-centered authoritarian rule demanding self-suppression rather than supporting self-expression.

Authoritarian rule role modeled by the wrong guide inflicts devastating costs on societies and on individuals. None more vulnerable and precious than children, and none more likely to internalize and spread its costs through their relationships as they mature. If priority is to be given to those victimized by the wrong choice, let it be children. Let parenting be where commitment to the right Guide’s sensitive, child-centered helpfulness begins. And let it be where harmfulness from the wrong guide’s insensitive self-centered rule – authoritarian parental role modeling -- ends.  

Helpfulness with a “punch” 

Throw a punch for the children. An expression from Nancy Pelosi that implies intent to harm when in fact its intent is to help. Help with the return to Love of Self that is Self-Awareness from the "love" of its reflection that is self-unawareness. The narcissist bully behind authoritarian parenting throwing a punch at the children instead of for the children. Whose harmfulness to its children is a call for help. The helpfulness of explanation that leads to understanding for the protection of its children instead of the opposite. The living Guide and its gift built into the meaning of Christmas by the life and example of Jesus. The sharing of Self-Awareness with explanation. Helpfulness that “throws a punch for the children.”

The role modeling that might explain the phenomenon we call “Jesus” might also explain the lasting appeal of the right Guide. Attributes that thoroughly debunk the wrong guide’s “role modeling” that obstructed learning, growth, and Self-Awareness in biblical times and continues to do so today. Among them four attributes relating to mind vs. body, individuals vs. groups or tribes, bottom-up vs, top-down authority, and individual-idealist creativity values vs. tribal-“realist” conformity values.

Mind vs, body. Reclaiming the Reality and Truth of the Child as eternal Mind from its opposite, the self-delusion that it’s become a transient, isolated, separated body. An impossibility in Reality-Creation that is Mind self-defined as Mind. Affirmed not by mindless-loveless matter but by Logic-Love and Free Choice.

Individual vs. tribe. Reclaiming the Reality and Truth of the Child as one Child from its opposite, the self-delusion that it’s many, not one. Perpetually splitting off into many more replications ad infinitum. Divided into groups or tribes with herd mentality, submitting to the dictates of tribal will to survive and dominate by animal instinct on the field of “action”: endless competition and combat. Transforming individual worth into worthlessness, crushed individuality that would find the attention given by Jesus to the individual, the image of one beloved Child, electrifying.

Bottom-up vs. top-down authority. Reclaiming the Reality and Truth of Creation, governed by Logic-Love under the laws of cause and effect, for the enablement and empowerment of its creations. By serving and supporting the cause of Worth that is Life. The functions essential to Creation that include Free Choice, individuality, originality, spontaneity, growth, and self-expression.

Reclaiming the Reality of Authority that governs from the bottom up from the Child’s shadow-opposite, the self-delusion that authority rules from the top down for its own benefit. To preserve the fantasy of absolute authority without opposition through the disablement and disempowerment of its captives. Forced conformity that robs them of their identity by blocking self-expression, free inquiry, growth, and creativity, To the subjects of authoritarian rule, humiliated and dispirited by forced service to self-centered insensitivity, the image of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet, role modeling the Authority of Governance that affirms commitment with service and support, with the modesty of giving rather than the arrogance of taking, would have been electrifying.

Individual-idealist creativity values vs. tribal-realist conformity values. Reclaiming the Reality and Truth of the gifts given to Free Choice by Logic-Love, the values, ideals, and talents to be used for the creation, growth, affirmation, and reciprocation of Worth. Worth that is gifts and giver. The gift of sharing Free Choice and creativity.

Reclaimed from its opposite, the self-delusion that the only value to be glorified is strict conformity demanded by brute force. The perversion of authority that rules from the top down without opposition. Arbitrarily, lawlessly, with no “ideal,” no other guiding principle, than its unquestioned will. To the subjects of authoritarian rule, conditioned by guilt from its harsh judgments and fear of punishment, the notion of authority, centered on the capacity of individuals for self-expression rather than centered on its capacity to deny it, would have been electrifying. 

Narcissism, ownership, projection, and competition:
role modeling for children that’s not helpful

Hiding Mr. Hyde and his agenda

The right Guide makes its presence known in the dream in part through the influence of mind-centered personality types. Who detect it through their sixth sense with intuition and seek its help.

The wrong guide, the shadow-opposite, makes its presence known differently. Not by being detected but by body-centered “realists,” dependent on their five senses, denying the existence or practical use of anything beyond their five senses, including either guide. Putting their shadow-opposites at liberty to wreak undisciplined havoc undetected. Mr. Hyde making a mess of things under Dr. Jekyll’s nose: self-perfection that’s self-delusion.

If it was self-unawareness that released opposites from their container then the task of the right Guide is to help us seek awareness with the vision of Logic-Love. Self-unawareness, the darkness of Plato’s Cave, opposite’s “friend” – shadow. Unawareness of Self. Who we really are, one Child whose function in Creation is Free Choice. The Child of Logic-Love whose function is to serve and support their Child, Free Choice, with the functions of Logic and Love.

“Action” that giveth and taketh away

The code of opposite derived from its host scripts the agenda for the wrong “guide.” To perpetuate the shadow-darkness of self-unawareness with deception and distraction. “Action” that is body-brains equipped with five senses, engaged in every conceivable means of keeping minds preoccupied with bodies. Caresses and ecstasies, rewards from the sensuous and sensual for the senses’ gift of affirmation to the dream. The entertainments of fun and games. “Action” that distracts with contradiction, rescinding rewards with punishment – pain. All meant, whether pleasure or pain, to divert confused minds from their real purpose of awakening. Replacing self-unawareness with Self-Awareness.

Which makes sensory perception shadow-opposite’s main defense against exposure and protection for its unquestioned “authority.” And authoritarian personalities the wrong “guide’s” servants when they do its job for it. Self-unaware instruments of Self-worthlessness replicating themselves. In all the ways that authoritarian minds oppose the functions of Mind:

  • by preferring the “strength” of predatory, combative animal instinct
  • by using personal relationships to compete for “supremacy” instead of joining in the intimacy and emotional support of friendship
  • by authoritarian “ownership,” possession, and dominance arresting the development of children instead of enabling and empowering them. A cruel fallacy used to manipulate and intimidate a captive audience of innocents into the self-worthlessness of blind obedience and conformity. Subjection to an abuse of authority, an atrocity whose wounds to tender psyches can last a lifetime.

An act of taking and Self-Worth denied

The contrast between wrong “guidance” and right Guidance reveals itself in the giving and receiving of gifts. The Innocence, warmth, and joy of Christmas that can be easily lost without the discipline of ritual.

Giving in Reality is the Abundance of the Worth of Life-Creation being and doing what it is: Logic-Love sharing. Sharing what all of Reality-Creation is made of: gifts shared by Mind its Source. Sharing that’s received by affirmation and reciprocation to consummate an act of Creation. Affirmation of Gift and Giver by putting the gift to its intended use. Reciprocation by gratitude or any other means of giving back. To complete the gift’s purpose: to affirm Self-Worth. To complete Relationship with Love. This is right Guidance.

The authoritarian mindset, captive to self-unawareness, projects shadow-opposite’s context onto Reality-Creation’s context. Not an act of sharing but an act of ownership. The act of shadow-opposite, mis-identified by its host as an “other,” taking possession and control of its captive. An expression not of giving but its opposite: taking. Not of affirming its host’s Self-Worth but replacing it with its own worthlessness. This is wrong “guidance.”

Narcissism: the fallacy and atrocity of authoritarian “ownership”

Which makes of every gift “property” “owned” by the authoritarian. A pasture guarded by a bull ready to enforce exclusivity rather than welcome inclusivity. To prevent trespass, the ultimate offense to the authoritarian’s sense of justice. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And, above all, to exercise the “rights” and “privileges” implied by “ownership:” to have and do with your property-gift whatever you want.

With unrelenting resistance to “interference” however warranted since the point of “ownership” for the authoritarian is its implication of “supremacy.” Pry open the mind of Howard Roark and his author, fantasizing nonsense from their “fountainhead” above the city. Pry open the “mind” of the ape ruling its domain from atop the Empire State Building. What’s there is another absurdity. Shadow-opposite’s substitution of the inviolable sanctity of “ownership-supremacy" for the Relationship between Logic and Love that illuminated Self-Awareness: “domains” ruled by absolute authority without opposition because they’re owned.

A lifetime of chronic ambivalence and psychological pain

The magical “relationship” between “ownership” and “supremacy” that substitutes darkness for light. That puts the bull in the pasture and entitles it to bully. The myth that rationalizes authoritarian “rule” entitled to rule everything it owns and “own” everything that might take it away. All of it based on nonsense peddled by shadow-opposite. On illogic.

That “entitles” authoritarian parenting to own, possess, and control their children. As if they were property – unfeeling pawns instead of sovereign, sentient persons. Unaware of the damage done when children give in to the bullying. By making adaptation, resistance, or avoidance of it the organizing principle of their development. By wasting their potential on coping with the wrong “guidance” instead of developing it with the right Guidance. By never knowing themselves as other than copies of their “owner” or as not-“owner.” Bully or not-bully. Suffering from a lifetime of chronic ambivalence and psychological pain.

The alienation of Self-Worth. The wrong answer to the question posed by the example of Socrates: What is “life” worth if Self gives up its integrity?

Protection from authoritarian parenting

Falling for the “inviolability” of “ownership-supremacy” contradicts the role modeling of Jesus that’s built into the meaning of Christmas. If our ancestral Mind surrendered to the bully by mistake it’s our job to correct its mistake by standing up to it. Jesus doesn’t stand up to the bully so we don’t have to. He’s doing it because we do have to, and there’s no getting around it. He’s showing us how.

The Guide who gets it right is inspiring us to follow his example. By doing our part to correct the Child’s error not by making an illusion “real.” Not by feeding the bully with projection and damnation, conflict and violence, vengeance and retaliation, the “food” it needs to keep the “action” going. But by seeking Guidance from the right Guide and using the gift of independent judgment – Child-Mind’s Free Choice – to understand and share it.

To respond to opposite with explanation and Understanding. Undoing the fictions of self-unawareness with the facts of Self-Awareness. Replacing dishonesty with honesty, lies with truths. The example that spreads the joy of Christmas to vulnerable children everywhere when it protects them from authoritarian parenting. 

”Fun” and not fun that’s “competition”

“Fun and games” is the wrong “guide’s” excuse for “action” in its made-up “reality.” That’s supposed to make up for the loss of its host’s role in Creation: the Creativity of Free Choice. And keep its delusional captives “entertained” by all things competing: politics and war, sports, and all the ways that “culture” finds to re-tell opposite’s “story.” The story of “battles” won and lost in a war that self-delusion imagines it’s already won.

The right Guide wouldn’t be taken in because the idea of competition between Real Creations and unreal apparitions makes no sense. But also for another reason: there is no joy more satisfying and enduring than Creativity in service to the Good. “Competition” that makes no sense can’t compete with Creativity that does. “Fun and games” is what it sounds like: something to do that fills the emptiness of “time” – a wastebasket -- with throwaways. Without the accomplishment of Creativity in the Now that nourishes souls with substance.

The wrong “guide” appeals to body-centered “realists” with its promise of “winning” in an adolescent fantasy of “action” – a nightmare of perpetual competition and conflict among opposites. When its real “genius” is for turning “victory” into defeat. The truth implied by its own story. 

The dog and its tail “battling” to a draw

A perversion of the Truth by the joker of many faces, the magician of many tricks. A parasite with every attribute derived from its host, dependent on its host. Reaction, not “action.” Coming in second, not first, since something must already be there for opposite to oppose. A byproduct of definition by Logic-Love – an afterthought -- that demotes it out of Reality into a state of unreality. Not out of Mind but out of sight, where contradiction that can’t tolerate contradiction can cause as much trouble as it likes without doing any real harm.

In a state of unreality that can only “exist” in the self-deluded unconscious mind of Free Choice. Self-unawareness dreaming an impossibility: alternate “reality.” An absurdity of “competition” that no one can “win” if one of the “combatants” is a dream projected by the other. An action-hero besting its evil nemesis by stomping on its own shadow. By destroying a reflection – a scary bogeyman -- in a mirror. Only to be “confronted” again by its shadow-reflection unscathed.  The dog and its tail “battling” to a draw.

Why “competition”? 

Opposite’s perverse “logic” is that if the ideal motivating Creation is Peace without opposite then the way to achieve it is through its defeat by opposite in competition. Which would require switching the status of impossibility from #2 to #1 in competition with possibility. Let me win supremacy by conquering you and you’ll be free of me. 

The ”triumph of the will” is the “triumph” of animal brain over Mind. “Supremacy” achieved by body-brain replacing Mind – the “triumph” that its author, shadow-opposite, is proud of. Pride of “authorship:”  body-brain replacing Mind to fashion its own “reality.” Re-enacted by minds captive to the “authority” of animal brain seeking “supremacy” through violence. 

The “deal” opposite offers that’s re-enacted in human commerce that insists on self besting the other party. “America first.” Where the other party is deceived into thinking it got what it wanted. “Winning” that’s “losing.” The fallacy of “competition” that’s “winning” and “losing.” The fantasy of shadow-opposite: Mind agreeing to be defeated so it will be rid of opposite. The perverse appeal of gambling addiction: the will to self-destruct.

Right and wrong uses of “competition”

Elevating and gravitational tensions that pull behavior in opposite directions are brought into sharp relief by the idea of “competition.” Its use by the right Guide for self-improvement by competition with ourselves. For learning to excel; expanding Self-Worth with effort, confidence, and competence; adapting to a world shared by varieties of differences with the largeness of kindness and generosity; growing toward maturity.

For guiding Free Choice with connectedness away from competition’s use by the wrong “guide” for disconnectedness. For competition with “others” for self-glorification instead of self-improvement. For self-delusion by the false god of “winning” that’s self-destructive worthlessness instead of Self-Worth. For “supremacy” that’s self-debasement by selfishness and unkindness.

The Church of Contradiction

The authoritarian Church reluctantly gave up its conviction that earth is the center of the universe. But it’s never given up its place at the center of contradiction, the dream of an alternate “reality.” By revering bodies and their material environment as the crowning achievement of a supreme authority. Every soul, above and below, depicted to perfection with a body. An all-powerful source of both “love” and damnation, as if this makes sense.

And by being equally respectful of miracles though their purpose was to expose the material environment as an illusion. With demonstrations of the Logic-Love of Mind and the power of Reality and Truth. With Self-Awareness that isn’t an illusion. Demonstrations meant to expose the absurdity of mindlessness that would replace Mind. Logic-Love that knows nothing of hierarchical authority and the illusion that is “competition” for “supremacy.” That knows instead the before-after sequence of Logic-Love that establishes the order of authorship and the harmony of Creation.

Order that disorder contradicts with the illogic of shadow-opposite. What can better demonstrate the contradictions of self-unawareness and the unreality of alternate “reality” than this?

The ways of the “master” re-enacted by the authoritarian parent 

Rule by deniability

The lasting damage from the wrong “guide’s” role modeling is also the lasting damage from its followers, authoritarian parents. A systematic attack by their role modeling on the whole person with a unifying theme of self-worthlessness.

That neither parents nor “guide” can acknowledge or own with accountability. For its part, shadow-opposite has no self of its own to be accountable for. Acts that the wrong “guide” “performs,” as though  through its host rather than by the host itself, can only be attributed to the host. For their part, self-unaware parents’ can’t be aware of their ”guide,” its agenda, their role in implementing it, or its consequences. A perversion of the Innocence of Self-Awareness with a conscience aware of its acts and responsible for their costs: self-unawareness at the center of injustice with the false “innocence” of deniability. Who, me?

Rule by obstructing learning and growth

The root motivating Force of Creation is Learning and Growth: the sharing, extension, and expansion of Self-Awareness with its Children – its Creations. For their benefit in intimate, soul-mate Relationships that are loving, enabling, and empowering. The root motivating force of authoritarians who rule for their own benefit is the preservation of self-unawareness that prevents learning and growth. That keeps the light of Reality and Truth from removing them from the darkness -- the shadows -- that protects them.

  • Instead of Love, Innocence, and Self-Worth, affirmation, enablement, and empowerment, authoritarian parenting role models fear, guilt, and self-worthlessness.
  • Invalidation and disempowerment resulting in infantile self-absorption -- immaturity. Lifelong arrested development of mind and emotion that thwarts the potential of the whole person, wasting talent and initiative, sabotaging relationships, and causing misery.
  • Insensitivity, cruelty, and selfishness instead of empathy and generosity -- littleness instead of largeness of spirit.
  • Adversarial competition instead of bonding in creativity with the intimacy of shared purpose.
  • The thoughtlessness and impatience of self-unawareness instead of the thoughtfulness and patience of Self-Awareness.
  • Senselessness and foolishness instead of common sense and wisdom.

Rule by obstructing initiative

Industry is rooted in an ingrained sense of purpose from the Self-Worth at the core of Self-Awareness. From the coming together of Logic and Love that produced it. Seeking the use of its gifts, the talents and values given at birth for its role in Creation. Starting with Life itself and evolving through contexts put to use with imagination and initiative to serve its purpose and to tell its story: industry put to use for Creation.

The attributes of authoritarian parenting can be observed in the wrong “guidance” from shadow-opposite: a recasting of Guidance passed down from Parents Logic-Love through the right Guide into its opposite. Perversity that seeks not to help Free Choice, the wrong “guide’s” subjects, express the creative power of industry given to them as individuals, but to own, possess, and control it for its own benefit. For self-protection from the “threat” it might pose to unquestioned “authority.” Not to the Self-Awareness of family devoted to individuality but to the self-unawareness of herd mentality. The animal instinct of tribe dependent on conformity.

Done not in the spirit of sharing but in its absence: insensitivity. That would deprive a child of its own life lived with a sense of its own purpose. With the joie de vivre that comes with discovery and originality – the use of its gifts to express individuality and be a useful part of community at the same time. Industry in service to a larger, shared purpose. Initiative.

Rule by deceit

What can be a more definitive portrayal of wrong “guidance” than passing authoritarian tribal self-unawareness down from one generation to the next? By self-centered “authority” posing as parental “love” while it manipulates trusting, vulnerable children for selfish purposes. By deceit. Guided not by the right Guide’s principled respect for Free Choice but by the wrong “guide’s” unprincipled disrespect. By the presumption of ownership, possession, and control. Of dominance and “supremacy,” enforced by rigid hostility to independent judgment, the keystone of maturity. An affront to common sense in a shared world.

Rule by guilt

If the Psyche-Soul of Self-Awareness is the Innocence of Oneness without opposites, Benevolence that governs Reality-Creation without judgment that condemns, then its opposite must be the guilt of the many, the malevolence of predatory herd instinct that rules its fantasy of absolute power with judgment that does condemn.  Authoritarian parents’ judgment of captive children to preserve their denial of Self-Awareness. To preserve the psychotic distortion of Reality-Truth that is “supremacy.” The denial of Self-Awareness that suppresses the originality, growth, and independent judgment of sovereign individuals, their children.

The highest expression of gentle loving kindness, from a Father that Knows only His Child’s Innocence, would be parenting that role models the example passed down from his Father through Jesus. The mission that the right Guide accepted and continues to perform. Unaware of and undeterred by what isn’t: the “voice” of the illusion that is our shadow-opposite. The “voice” of the authoritarian parent’s “guide.”

Rule by projection 

Authoritarian parenting is minds fooled into exchanging independent judgment grounded in fact for ungrounded projection secured by fiction. The mainstay of self-unawareness that lacks the competence to understand the response that its circumstances call for: Love that expresses itself in maturity, responsibility, and sensitivity. Parenting.

Mind under the influence of its shadow-reflection can’t think with Logic-Love. Can’t analyze, evaluate, or see with the vision of Logic-Love. It navigates through its made-up, one-dimensional unreality of appearances that self-unawareness “sees,” “recognizes,” and “understands,” not by Logic-Love’s thinking and vision but by projection. The substitute by self-unawareness for the thinking and seeing of Self-Awareness. A perversion of Reality-Truth.

Projection that accomplishes a facsimile of understanding by replacing every context with one context: its own. With the appearance of thinking that finesses every faculty of mind. Including judgment, the only faculty capable of recognizing circumstances and making sense of them. With a perversion of judgment that understands into its opposite: “judgment” that condemns. Judgment that expands with “judgment” that contracts. “Understanding” that replaces facts that it can’t recognize with facts it invents to suit the occasion. To get what it wants.

Projection’s ultimate “intent”

The fates of two Innocents, Socrates and Jesus, exemplify the ferocity of the beast behind projection. One executed by misguided authority projecting guilt in Athens, the other by misguided authority projecting guilt in Israel. Where Innocence role modeled Wisdom and Self-Worth shared by its Parents -- the illumination of Self-Awareness that is Relationship between Logic and Love -- authoritarian guilt role modeled self-unawareness imposed on its captives by its shadow-opposite: “relationship” between illogic and fear in service to the wrong “god.”

Innocence transformed into guilt. Helpfulness converted by projection into harmfulness that can only “recognize” itself. The weapon of wrongfulness for replacing its host’s function in Creation with all that it implies. Violations of Mind-Relationship that thinks Reality-Creation with Logic-Love, that impossibility would make possible were Child Free Choice, captive to self-delusion, to regain access to Self-Awareness. An absurdity re-enacted in mythology by the Iliad’s Trojan Horse. And the primal appeal of the animal in us: unbound emotion and predatory will that attract authoritarian minds. The intent of minds role modeling the wrong “guide” to attain “supremacy” by taking down Reality-Creation.

Projection and the gift of Christmas

Mischaracterization by projection followed Jesus beyond resurrection with the founding of a mass “religion” and its universal “church” that he never intended. By words put into his mouth by confused “authorities,” “owning” his story and altering it to legitimize exclusivity rather than inclusivity -- the heart of Jesus and the heart that he put into his message of gentle loving kindness. A story now meant not to share the hopeful message of Resurrection but to impose authoritarian “rule” with the figure on the cross. “Crucifixion,” “sacrifice” and “guilt,” connecting not with the Innocence, Abundance, and Joyfulness of the Child beloved of its Parents, but with the “victimhood” of a wounded Psyche addicted to vengeance.

The split minds of “authorities” role modeled by and for the wrong “guide” seek the “security” of unreality made “real” and its subjects denied a voice of their own. Allowed to be “heard” through the voice of “authority” imposed on them through the image of a kindly patriarch. One of history’s most influential and harmful role models for authoritarian parenting. A violation of Logic and common sense.

A mischaracterization by projection of who Jesus is and the work that he’s about: not projecting guilt onto alien body-brains but recognizing the Innocence of the one Child of Logic-Love who we are. The gift from Mind that is the Worth of Life. The gift of Christmas.

Rule by narcissism

Projection that’s employed by the minds of authoritarian tribal-“realists” to maintain the self-delusion, the made-up “reality” they project onto “others” and the space they actually occupy is experienced by “others” as misunderstanding by mind deprived of judgment. As mind-personality split in two, detached from circumstances -- psychotic. Exempt from norms of common sense and fairness. As the weapon of self-appointed “supremacy:” disrespect, contempt, arrogance. Narcissism.

Narcissism that is self-unawareness, a perversion of Self-Awareness. Re-enacting the mistake that took unconscious Child-Mind from shadow to the unreal “light” of an alternate “reality” – a vivid dream: -- mistaking its reflection for an “other.” Self-unawareness recognizing “others” in itself, a perversion of Self-Awareness that can only be aware of itself, the Oneness of Reality-Creation, for there are no “others.”

Narcissism that is a perversion of authority. its "security" buffered by unawareness of contradiction or shaken by the paranoia of excessive awareness. That habitually ensures its "security" by superimposing its self-centered context onto every other-centered context that contradicts it. Self-centered context -- the only one that the narcissist is capable of “recognizing.” A mirror held up to itself.

Where to go from here: getting it right

Lesson #1

The significance of self-unawareness in a larger context is also its relevance to us in our context. Relevance that “thinking” by authoritarian tribal-“realists” deny at the insistence of their influencer, their own shadow-opposites whose absolute “authority” to rule their self-delusion must remain unquestioned.

Both contexts that will continue to evolve in Reality-Creation with meaning and purpose – their significance – evolving with them. The significance of self-unawareness in the larger context of Reality-Creation may be that it was no mistake or anomaly but a point reached in the orderly sequence of Logic-Love and in their Child Free Choice’s learning and growth. A point where a particular lesson had to be learned in the evolution of Free Choice’s competence to fulfill its role.

Learning that begins with lesson #1: why and how to choose the right Guide.

Unworkability: the signature of madness

That couldn’t be taught by the Child’s Parents because Self-Awareness couldn’t Know it and because being taught would contradict Free Choice. It could only be learned by trial-and-error experience with the loss and recovery of Self-Awareness. An impossibility that could only be “experienced” on the opposite side of Realty-Creation. Not outside Reality-Creation and out of Mind, into “separation” that’s undefinable and unthinkable. But within Reality-Creation where nothing really “happens.” Where contradiction can work its madness without any effect on Reality or Truth.

The relevance to us in our context may be that it was a deficiency in Self-Awareness that was both cause and effect of its loss. That it was the effect – self-unawareness – that produced and continues to influence our alternate “reality” with its perpetual re-enactment.

By unworkability, the signature of opposite: nothing working as it should. Play-acting the disassembly of Reality-Creation’s interconnectedness by disconnection. A magic trick pulled off by an illusionist bringing impossibility that comes with definition into “life.” A logical consequence of its consignment to self-unawareness by Self-Awareness. To our context: self-unawareness that’s “aware” of opposites. Mind that holds opposing thoughts and feelings at the same time. Madness.

Put impossibility back to sleep

The unreality of our alternate “reality” is most clearly distinguished from Reality-Creation by the dormancy of impossibility in the latter and its “awakening” in the former. The relevance of self-unawareness for us, in our state of unreality, may then be what it implies for meaning and purpose: the meaning of “life” and the origin and fate of the universe. Implying that impossibility will continue to disassemble with disconnection and make everything unworkable until its mad idea of another “reality” substituting for Reality ends, as it must, in self-destruction.

With the end of “time,” if mass extinction doesn't get there first. Or with Free Choice, our birthright, learning with Guidance from Mind rather than mis-guidance by body-brain, what will return impossibility to dormancy and itself to awakening. To Self-Awareness.

Drop the curtain on the magician’s act

Until Free Choice learns what it must to attain the competence needed to risk its function in Reality-Creation. Because it will have learned from experience with the dream that choice is risk by definition. Of getting it right by Self-Awareness or getting it wrong by self-unawareness.

The relevance we seek is the lesson that must be learned. That can’t be evaded or avoided until we get around to it. The lesson that Free Choice can’t return to workability until it gets it right. With understanding required by circumstances in its immediate context. Our context: unreality-impossibility fooling us with the appearance of an “alternate-substitute reality.” The trick of the magician-illusionist that is our shadow-opposite.*

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*The musical accompaniment for these thoughts, from another room, is Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily. Life is but a dream.

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Appendix 

On the light side: laughter from a not-too-serious Guide

The playfulness and seriousness of Creativity

A friend’s friend, you are. We’re soulmates. Yes, overflowing with goodwill to share. Gifts for the holidays. Thoughts and feelings. That feel like gifts because they’re helpful and they come of their own accord. Guidance that declares itself with Logic and Love, and that’s enough. You don’t want more? 

If I make an issue of who and where you are it could be from craving ownership-control rather than sharing. Owning what we leave behind makes sense but not owning Guidance that respects Free Choice. The Free Spirit of Inquiry. The sweet bird of Love. I’m not being elusive? The spontaneity of Innocence is appealing. Playfulness with an intriguing seriousness. Me? Serious? The playfulness and seriousness of Creativity. 

Humor loves contradiction

Humor keeps things in balance. Because whoever gets the job of deciding everything eventually learns that taking it too seriously misses the point. Which is? That when Logic defines what is, it automatically implies what it isn’t. “Impossibility” is built into the definition of “possibility.” The negative into the positive. Logic ensuring that opposites can’t be separate; everything interconnected or it isn’t Real. 

There’s no getting around it. Mind in a certain sense holding opposing thoughts at the same time. Yes, if Logic-Love can put aside the difference between Reality and unreality. Humor isn’t just amused by the mind you think with. It's also laughing at itself – Mind that it thinks with. At the thought of: 

  • Parents Logic-Love responsible for definition that contradicts itself.
  • Parents responsible for Creation that couldn’t function without the possibility of impossibility.
  • Parents who can’t be aware of impossibility, role modeling for their Child Free Choice who must be aware of it.
  • Reality-Creation making sense only because contradiction, made “fact” by the dream, is fiction.

And contradiction loves humor 

Aware of the possibility of impossibility that is unconsciousness dreaming self-unawareness. The situation you’re in: a training ground for Free Choice to learn by trial and error what it could not learn from its Parents: choosing freely with independent judgment aware of all possibilities including impossibility. Of shadow-reflection opposites that aren’t created Real but can be “made” real if they’re taken seriously. 

As confusing and pointless as it may seem, your situation, like the idea of opposite, is built into the evolution of Creation. Child Free Choice learning from experience. Enabled and empowered by Free Choice and the Relationship with Parents Logic-Love that created it. Learning how to reach the maturity of competence and do its job in Creation.  With understanding that neither side, light or dark, can be taken too seriously.

Published on Leave a comment on Glossary

Arrested development

The result of parenting with the opposite of understanding, kindness, and justice: the injustice of misunderstanding and cruelty. The wrong “guide,” shadow-opposite, obstructing Logic’s sequence of Order, the interconnectedness of its implications. Disorder produced in alternate “reality” by entropy – temporal, dying energy -- that reverses connection.

The wrong “guide” obstructing the expansion and reciprocation of Love’s relationships. Both together, misunderstanding and cruelty, implements of “separation,” responsible for arrested development. Paralysis exemplified by the condition of Nietzsche’s body and brain at his death. Like the brain of Sylvia Plath, captive to the wrong “guide.” Captive to the lethal impossibility of separation.

Explanation-Understanding 

The response of Logic-Love to the injustice of its mischaracterization, condemnation, and punishment, with Understanding that helps the perpetrator, self-unawareness, remove its cause by regaining Self-Awareness. By shining away the darkness of self-delusion, illogic, fear, and “guilt,” with the light of Truth, Innocence, Logic, and Love.

The response role modeled by the teaching, life, and example of Jesus. Explanation that’s Helpfulness instead of retaliation in kind that’s harmfulness.

Getting it right based on explanation by Logic-Love making sense of evolving circumstances to produce context, the source of meaning and purpose. The source of Guidance by conscience centered on character defined by the moral values of the Good. Enabling the Child of Self-Awareness to apply its unique talent for Free Choice in Relationship’s response to context that expands the Life-Worth of Creation. The talent of Mind Free Choice that is reflection, reasoning, evaluation, and judging.

Free Choice 

Judgment that must be independent because dependence would contradict freedom of choice.

Judgment informed by the function of Child Free Choice’s Parents, to serve and support its function with the process and structure of Reality: the Energy of Mind, the Free Spirit of Inquiry, the Spontaneity of Love, the Relationship of Self-Awareness, and context that supplies meaning and purpose to evolving circumstances. Essentials for reasoning, evaluation, and independent judgment required by Choice among possibilities that’s capable of affirming, earning, and reciprocating Life-Worth. That’s Free.

Judgment that implies the possibility of errors in judgment and the responsibility of Free Choice to gain competence through experience to avoid them. Errors based on the inadequacy of what’s already Known to foretell the consequences of Creation advancing into the unknown. Being based on flaws of character inherited from its Parents, Logic-Love, is an impossibility. The Truth of Child Free Choice, whether its judgment is mistaken or not, is its birthright: the Soul of Innocence, inviolable in Reality and recoverable by Free Choice in unreality. 

Freedom-Order 

The inseparability of Order and Freedom. Functions that enable one another through the harmony of Order defined with Free Choice and the protection of Free Choice by the boundaries of Order. The origin of Order that is the before-after sequence of Logic aligned with the laws of cause and effect. Whose opposite, disorder, begins with disconnection of the sequence of Logic. 

The freedom to extend the ideas-functions of Mind forward through the interconnecting implications of Logic that require the before-after sequence of Order. The freedom to expand the feelings of Mind through the interconnecting relationships of Love that require spontaneity within the boundaries of Order.

Jesus-right guidance 

A spectacular contradiction of shadow-opposite’s contradiction. A phenomenon as well as a personification of the right Guide, gifted with Self-Awareness. With understanding of the metaphysics and psychology of Child Free Choice’s self-delusion: its identification with its shadow-reflection mistaken for an “other.” Understanding which Jesus shares with its projections, self-unaware individuals in their immediate contexts, in a variety of ways contradicted by the idea of “bible.” All pointing toward the Necessity of reversing projection, the logical impossibility that made the unreality of opposite “real.”

Not to relieve individuals of responsibility for earning Self-Awareness with their own thoughts-feelings but to help them recover their own thoughts-feelings. Through spontaneous insights from Intuition – their sixth sense – and lessons the biblical Jesus and the Jesus of A Course in Miracles brought to individuals in forms recognizable by their five senses. That demonstrate the Reality of Mind’s laws of cause and effect unaffected by unreal matter’s “laws” of chaos.

A personification of injustice that draws a helpful response of role modeling by explanation and understanding rather than variations of harmfulness by aggrieved victimhood. Injustice perpetrated by projection of guilt onto Innocence by minds captive to the self-unawareness of shadow-opposite. Whose precedent was the execution of another Innocent, Socrates, the father of Western ethical philosophy, by another projection of guilt. Shadow-opposite’s mischaracterization of Innocence and perversion of justice. A contradiction of Logic-Love and a lethal flaw in human “thinking” that Plato sought to understand and explain through his Allegory of the Cave.

The teacher of one-Child individual minds and not the fiction of many child body-brains. And thus not the “founder” of any “religion” or “church.” Or a “savior” who would do the work of the wrong “guide” by contradicting the Freedom of Choice.

A personification of the brother and friend of one Child-Mind in its self-unaware state. Accessible in forms adapted to the needs of its individual projections and thus a part of the dream of unreality that will no longer be needed when self-unawareness gives way to Self-Awareness. When Free Choice is again offered a role in Creation.

The judgment of Parental Love, Forgiveness, and Innocence. Of Reality-Truth that contradicts the unreality-untruth of fear, condemnation, and guilt. Fit together in logical Order-Freedom by explanation from Child’s Parents, Logic-Love, that leads to Understanding. Self-Awareness.

Life-Worth 

The light of Self-Awareness illuminated in the eternal Now by Relationship. By the attraction between Logic and Love, ideas within Mind sharing its Energy to consummate inseparability and set the sharing of Life-Worth in motion. The motivating Force of Reality-Creation whose expression extends and expands the Logic-Love Relationship of Mind into infinity. The Worth of eternal discovery, growth, and Creation affirmed, earned, and reciprocated by Free Choice. 

Logic-Love / Parents 

Relationship that ignited the illumination of Self-Awareness and began the orderly sequence of Logic-Love forward in the evolution of Creation. The prototype and founding role model for every Relationship in Creation to follow. Logic is implications connecting to make sense. Love is abundance-sharing through Relationships that give sense the meaning and purpose of value – the moral value that is Socrates’ and Plato’s idea of “Good.” Logic and Love are ideas-functions of Mind that complete one another and, like Freedom and Order, are inseparable. That provide service and support for their Child’s role in Creation with the unconditional love of Parents who respect the sovereignty and integrity of Free Choice.

Narcissist – reflection 

A replication of Mind, captive to its shadow-reflection self-unawareness, that’s projected itself, Love, onto its reflection misperceived as an object, separate from itself and objectified as an “other.” The impossibility that’s an “external:” an objectified “self” “loving” separated other objects the only way it can, by loving its separated, objectified “self.”

A perversion of Mind-Relationship, Logic-Love united in Self-Awareness: subject extending and expanding itself through the Oneness of Reality-Creation, Loving its Creations and their cause by affirming Self-Worth. Subject loving subjects – not reflections but extensions of itself. An ”internal,” the only possibility.

A re-enactment of the “event” that led to the dream of an “alternate reality” by Child-Mind unconscious: the mistake of making unreality “real.” With the projection of Love, itself, onto its shadow-opposite. An unreality mistaken for an “other,” a reflection, when narcissists -- body-brain occupants of its dream -- affirm the “reality” of unreality in opposite’s reflection in a mirror. With love for a reflection -- reverse mirror-images of themselves.  For “objects” that are their shadow-opposites, transferring Awareness of Self-subject onto self-“object.” That can only “recognize” the event not as a gift from Love but as its surrender. Affirmation of shadow-opposite’s “supremacy” in competition with its host, Mind. “Winning.” Completing the transformation of Self-Awareness into the self-unawareness of narcissism. The consequence not of affirmation of Self-Worth but its denial.

With “love” that the narcissist consummates by “owning” its reflection. Made “real” by the possibility of possession, control, and dominance in a “reality” of material objects that includes objectified “others.” Competitors who would steal possession and control if it were not “owned.” “Justifying” opposite’s perversion of Relationship Self-Love into its opposite: alienation of Love. With fear, paranoia, judgment of guilt rather than Innocence, jealousy, and rage. Animal emotions of a predator protecting its “turf.” And a narcissistic authoritarian parent "owning" its children.

Opposite / shadow-opposite / shadow-reflection – wrong guidance

Definition by Logic-Love that defines what a function is and does do, that belongs in Reality-Creation, in part by what it isn’t and what it doesn’t do. The incorporation of impossibility or contradiction into the definition of possibility, premise, or assertion. Including the definition of who we are and our function in part by who we aren’t – our shadow-reflection. Therefore, a part of Reality-Creation assigned to unreality, a state of Mind only possible in the Mind of the Child Free Choice that can lose Self-Awareness.

The “dark side” of all the elements of Creation associated with Child Free Choice’s role in Creation except the elements that preceded and gave birth to it. Archetypes and Relationships identified as the Child’s Parents and Mind Self-Awareness, the interconnected Oneness of Reality-Creation that is Innocence without opposite by definition.

The shadow-opposite of Self-Awareness in the dream: self-unawareness. Shadow-opposite made “real” in the dream by “illumination” from self-unawareness, the dreamer Child Mind unconscious. An impossibility in Reality and perversion of Self-Awareness defined by its function, Illumination.

The shadow-opposite of Child Free Choice. Its reverse mirror-image reflection. A quasi-genetic code derived from its host that assigns attributes to the illusory occupants of a dream and scripts its “story.” The story of an “alternate reality” composed of appearances and contradictions in “time” destined to end. A re-enactment of the Child’s mis-identification of its opposite as an “other” and its “other’s” taking its host captive, to animate its code with energy and other attributes “borrowed” from its host. The story dramatized by competition and conflict, striving for absolute authority and freedom, and other impossibilities intended to prevent or delay the Child’s recovery of Self-Awareness.

Violations of Logic and Love that are all attributable to the influence of opposite on the Child’s self-deluded Mind. To the “author” of our world and universe of spacetime-matter: a dream by the Child captive to its shadow-opposite. Unreality. 

Perfection-imperfection 

Perfection defines the state of Reality that precedes Child Free Choice in the sequence of Logic-Love. Beginning with the Purity of Relationship between Logic and Love that illuminated the Purity of Self-Awareness. That cannot be contaminated or it would replicate itself throughout Creation. Where the detection and animation of contradiction -- opposite-unreality – is excluded by definition. Where it cannot “exist” in any state except in the Mind of Child Free Choice functioning on its own plane of Creation with sovereignty and integrity that cannot be compromised.

Imperfection resides in definition that necessarily implies its opposite. Since Logic-Love function under the laws of cause and effect to define every element of Reality-Creation, and definition that implies its opposite is built into the laws, “Perfection” is limited to the cause of Creation but not its effect. To cause that cannot be corrupted without corrupting its effect, but not its effect that must be subject to the possibility of imperfection implied by the definition of Free Choice.

Imperfection also resides in Creation’s “Ideal” destination: a state of resolution and eternal Peace made unattainable by definition dependent on contradiction. Should the cause of Creation be abandoned Mind’s function might also be abandoned. Turning out the light of Self-Awareness that would then attain contradiction’s “ideal” of ending. The ultimate “purpose” implied by self-unawareness: Minds self-deluded into an alternate “reality” of self-unawareness that, at least here on this planet, appears headed toward self-ending.

If the “imperfection” of Creation’s ideal destination prevents self-ending, then what our situation may call for is re-thinking our approach to contradiction. Re-defining “Perfection” and the Ideal of “Creation” that is attainable. Starting with the competence of Free Choice to re-enact its mistake and, this time, get it right. To reverse the projection of self-unawareness and regain Self-Awareness. 

Reality-Creation and unreality 

Reality-Creation is the state of Mind Self-Awareness signified by its function: to bring into Being cause – meaning and purpose – that is Worth. The Worth of Life, and to give it effects. Effects expressed in the Beauty of relationships with functions in Creation extended and shared by their Source, the Parents Logic-Love in inseparable Relationship with Free Choice, their Child.

The Beauty of the gifts of Worth, values given to Child at birth, transformed by Growth, the function of Parents, united with Free Choice, the function of Child, into compositions drawn from the circumstances of evolving contexts that affirm, earn, and reciprocate Life-Worth. All of it existing within Soul, the Oneness of Innocence. The function of Mind Logic-Love that interconnects all of Reality-Creation including contradiction – unreality – that’s part of every definition with the exception of Soul, the Oneness of Innocence.

Unreality is an impossibility: separation of the inseparable. The Relationship between Parents and Child. But because unreality is a derivative of Reality, definable by the attributes of Reality in reverse, unreality and impossibility have a place within Mind. Within Self-Awareness Child Free Choice but not within Self-Awareness Parents Logic-Love.

Relationship / Parents-Child 

The essence, beauty, and Force of the attraction between functions paired in every act of Creation and the cause of every effect. One of many Forces associated with Reality-Creation, the Interconnectedness of Mind held together by Energy in the Oneness of Innocence without opposites and in Necessity, the laws of cause and effect. The sine qua non of the Worth and Life of Reality-Creation.

The basis for the unreality and logical impossibility of “separation” and the basis for physics’ finding that our alternate “reality” of spacetime-matter is “relational.” That even in the reverse mirror-image of Reality “separation” is an impossibility -- an appearance.

Beginning with the first of two foundational Relationships in Reality-Creation:

  • Relationship between Logic and Love that produced illumination: the light and energy of Self-Awareness. The Being and Doing of Mind, its function that is the Source of Life and the expression of its Worth.
  • The Source of consequence, affirmed, earned, and reciprocated by the Child of Logic-Love. Free Choice, an extension of Mind given its distinct function on its own plane of Creation. In Relationship with its Parents and under their protection from the possibility of interference that would compromise and disable its indispensable role in Creation. Protection reflected in our alternate “reality” by the right Guide’s respect for the sovereignty and inviolability of individual Free Will.

Self-Awareness-Child

The marriage of Logic to Love illuminated Self-Awareness and gave birth to their Child and its function in Creation: Free Choice. The essential attribute of Reality-Creation that makes Self-Awareness and Child inseparable: the relationship between Freedom and Order that is Free Choice.

The psycho-dynamic of Creation: the extension of Love of Self – Self-Awareness – rather than the psycho-dynamic of self-unawareness: narcissism’s projection of “love” onto its reflection. Its opposite. The extension of Understanding rather than the projection of misunderstanding.

Sixth sense-Intuition

The faculty of Child Mind Free Choice, in a dreaming state of self-unawareness or unconsciousness, that enables spontaneous connection with Guidance. From the Logic-Love of its Parents through the voice of an agent of Soul, the Interconnectedness of Reality-Creation. That is the extension-sharing of Mind Logic-Love and Oneness, Innocence without opposites, that knows no boundaries.

Connection also made possible by Energy, the attribute of Mind that gives causes
their effects, ideas their consequences, Love its Relationships, and the laws of cause and effect the Force of Necessity. Including the idea of an "alternate reality." A dream of impossibility: the unreality of shadow-reflection made "real" by Child Mind, captive to its shadow-reflection, with its attribute of Energy producing and storing itself in matter. Including brain whose neurons interconnect with electrical impulses, part of the Interconnectedness of Reality-Creation and opposite unreality-dream by the boundaryless Energy of Mind.

Special relationships-specialness 

Shadow-opposites, the hollowness of reflections with no Self of their own to Love. Narcissists “bonding” to steal one another’s selves so they’ll have reflections they can make “real” with “love.” A perversion of Self-Awareness bringing its Creations to Life-Worth by extending itself. By sharing the abundance of Logic-Love rather the scarcity of hollowness stealing it.

The abandonment of Self-Awareness to self-unawareness. To self-delusion that is opposite’s “promise” of absolute “authority” without opposition and absolute “freedom” without limits. Logical impossibilities in the shared worlds of Reality and unreality, mistaken by self-deluded minds for prerequisites to “supremacy:” the “triumph” in “competition” of unreality over Reality, of body-brain matter over Mind, of shadow-opposite over its host. The “triumph” of “time” over the eternal Now: ending. The self-glorification of wiping the slate clean and throwing away the slate. 

Unconsciousness-death 

The impossibility of “separation” of Logic from Love. The inseparable Relationship between two archetypal functions that completed one another and produced Self-Awareness. That, like everything Real, must be Relationship enabled and empowered by Love to take part in Creation.

Child-Mind in a state of self-unawareness, either dreaming an alternate “reality” “offered” by its own shadow-opposite mistaken for an “other,” or not dreaming. “Life” in the dreaming Child’s alternate “reality,” a fantasy of transience, is a contradiction of timeless Reality-Creation. A logical impossibility. Part of a dream that’s a self-delusion and therefore unreal.

“Death” is a re-enactment of the Child-Mind’s loss of Consciousness and descent into the interval between unconsciousness not dreaming and dreaming. It, too, is part of the self-delusion and unreal. “Reincarnation,” like incarnation, would be a re-enactment of Child-Mind’s captivity by its reverse mirror image, an apparition.

Unreality and non-reality / madness

“Opposite” that’s unreality is an idea or state that’s thinkable because it’s of Mind. Describable by terms like “void” and “nothingness” that are ideas of Mind. But not the language of Mind that doesn’t need words to communicate -- inventions of the Child’s shadow-opposite. Put to use by the right Guide for communication with the projections of Child self-unawareness to help with understanding and awareness.

Non-reality that’s non-Mind. Unthinkable because non-reality can’t be an idea if there’s no Mind to think it. And no words to describe it since Mind has no need of words to communicate. Words with which to “glorify” shadow-opposite instead, duplicating its “triumph” over unconscious Child-Mind by triumphing over Conscious Parents-Mind in competition.

The ultimate in wishful thinking when “competition” between Reality and unreality can’t make sense. And even if it did, unreality / self-unawareness in competition with Reality / Self-Awareness on equal terms is an impossibility.

Non-reality that’s shadow-opposite’s ultimate “vision” of the “worth” of its “cause,“ “alternate reality:” ending. Everything coming to an end that’s beyond Mind and beyond definition. Beyond “ending.” Beyond utter nonsense -- madness.

Published on Leave a comment on Million Dollar Baby: The Talented Niece Who Took Uncle Melvin’s Advice Literally

A cautionary tale of piano abuse, fractured skulls, and impersonations gone terribly wrong in the shadow of Albert Einstein. Told to Uncle Melvin in conversation with his adolescent niece. Or with her brain. Whatever! [Her voice in italics.]

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A new variety of Miracle Gro 

Uncle Melvin! Guess what!  What? I’ve taken your letters to heart. Wonderful! I’m so glad they’re useful. Very! You mentioned we have an important choice: whether to think of ourselves as minds or bodies. And why it matters. Yes. It can make a big difference. After careful consideration and much reflection, I stopped letting my body tell me who I am. Wow! That’s remarkable! I’m all mind now. No more body. You’re a role model! You could build a fantastic career out of traveling and sharing what you’ve accomplished.

Well, not exactly. Why? I don’t have a body. Huh? I’m a brain in a jar. OK. Timeout! No. I’ve been having a ball. I can’t wait to tell you all about it. But I need a favor first. (This can’t be happening. My precious niece!) What can I do for you, sweetie? Come rescue me. What happened? Where are you? Caltech. In a dumpster behind the house where Einstein’s papers are stored. How on earth. . . ?

I was intrigued by your ideas and got an operation where they preserved my brain in a jar. I didn’t mean to be taken literally! Where’s your body? Fertilizer. They’re using me to beautify Los Angeles with plants and flowers and stuff. Landscaping. Landscaping? Next time you take the Expo Line to Santa Monica you’ll be going right by me. We all wind up pushing up daisies but this is ridiculous! My darling niece – Miracle Gro!

The very best brain food

It went really great at first, being in a jar. They set my brain and the jar inside an electromagnetic force field for my protection. Anyone would be zapped like Luke was by Palpatine if they tried to grab my jar. I’m so relieved! Then they rigged my brain so its thoughts displayed on a giant monitor. With sounds too. Aren’t thoughts quiet? Sure, but emotions can get pretty loud. Brains like background music. . .  And, of course, applause. When I took over the Galaxy it was deafening! 

Don’t brains need nourishment? What did they feed your brain so it could produce stupendous thoughts and reshape the world? A steady diet of your letters. So packed with brilliance and wisdom that my brain gained weight. They had to repot me in a larger jar. Poor thing! Yes, but getting bigger with your wisdom gave me a remarkable talent. Really? For telling people where they can find a million dollars. Or anything super valuable lying around waiting to make someone Powerball rich. Whoa!

What pianos are for 

One day, the maintenance guy. . . Where was this? In a secret bunker beneath the Smithsonian College of Musical Knowledge. Of course! The maintenance guy joked that maybe if I was so smart I could tell him where he could lay his hands on a million dollars. I told him to take a shovel to the South Coast Botanic Garden and dig under the ladies’ rest room. He did and found a million dollars. Lucky guy! Not quite. He had to pay it all back to get out of jail. They thought he was digging a tunnel. 

Word got around. Next thing I know there’s a horde of people stampeding into my room like crazed Walmart shoppers on Black Friday. Wanting to have me all to themselves and make them rich. Terrifying! Actually it was fun. When the paramedics arrived the floor was stacked high with people knocked unconscious. You were loving it. Yes. Watching people get zapped by my electromagnetic force field was so entertaining! 

But the best part was when it turned into a saloon brawl like an old Western. No, really? With guys bashing each other over the head with chairs and tables? Crashing through railings and breaking stuff on the way down? Cool! Even better. There were musical instruments lying around. One guy had a piano dropped on his head from the third floor. No one was left standing. 

Payback time! 

Lucky you. What a great experience! For a little while. But the College of Musical Knowledge didn’t want me around after that. I had to take my act somewhere else. To Caltech? To Dave and Buster’s. Of course! Customers paid to guess what I was thinking. If they got it right they got a suitcase full of little yellow tickets they could exchange for worthless junk. I was in a display case where they could operate a clamshell and scoop up more worthless junk. 

How humiliating! It didn’t last long. Word about my special talent got to Dave and Buster’s. How? The guy I sent to retrieve a rock that fell out of Neil Armstrong’s pocket on the moon blabbed on cable TV when he got back. First thing in the morning here comes another crazed Black Friday mob. How awful!  Not really. Watching Dave and Buster’s worthless junk get piled up and set on fire, you know – payback time! It felt soooooo good! 

Putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again 

But I got kicked out again. To Caltech? The dudes in charge of Einstein’s papers thought having a brain in a jar around would attract more interest. Make it less boring. Yes. Definitely one of your special talents. My act went over well at first. It was fun fooling nerdy academics who thought they were communicating with Einstein. You impersonated one of history’s greatest minds?? I made principal’s honor roll, didn’t I? Dear me, I must have forgotten! I was on a roll. But a guy showed up who’d communicated with Einstein’s real brain in a jar. I was toast. 

You couldn’t talk your way out of it? I told them that it was all Uncle Melvin’s fault. I meant to project a photo of you graduating with honors at Harvard but accidentally showed you falling on your face outside the Galleria. That’s what got me into their dumpster. Where you belonged after betraying your kind Uncle.

I’ll rescue you but I want a favor too. May I have a word with your brain? Of course! What stop should I get off when I look for your body on the Expo Line?

Published on Leave a comment on The Archetypes of Function and Their Imitators: the Olympian “Gods” of Dysfunction

Excerpt from unpublished essay with working title "The Perversion of the Laws of Cause and Effect and the Jokes We Play on Ourselves"

Names without function, names without meaning

In common parlance, “God” often connotes Being whose doing mainly consists of “creating” and abandoning “life” divided against itself inside a temporal-material “reality” constructed only so that it can deconstruct. Hardly worthy of “reality” or its “creator.” It further connotes Being-authority whose business is to rule its “reality” without the limits of Logic, definition, or Order, then judging, condemning, and punishing its “creations” for violating its “laws” of disorder. A self-absorbed authoritarian. A narcissist-bully that many fear but nobody could “love.”

“Heaven” often connotes not the happiness of meaningful work and loving relationships but the “happiness” of idleness. Hovering above fleecy clouds plucking harps, lounging on sandy beaches beneath palm trees, sipping mint juleps on permanent vacation with nothing to do.

A cliché that owes its absurdity to “heaven’s” missing function: meaningful work and loving relationships that really are “paradise.” Because the work to be done is the creation, affirmation, and reciprocation of Worth. In a state of Mind that’s Trust, Innocence, and Intimacy. Spontaneity -- the fun of playfulness. The essence of Creativity.

“Heaven” on earth?

What is Reality-Creation but Worth itself? Relationships that work. What is the purpose of Relationships if not affirming that Life is Worth and its sharing is the affirmation and empowerment of Self? Self-Worth.

Why is “Life” on earth not “heaven?” Because it’s got purpose backwards: making unreality real instead of unmaking it. Thus affirming and empowering not the Self-Worth of Truth and Honesty but the self-worthlessness of deception and dishonesty. With relationships that don’t work. With littleness captive to “fun” and games of pointless competition; to the distraction, savagery, and depravity of violence. Of mindless, pointless, authoritarian cruelty, combat, and conquest.

The usefulness of function

Misinterpretations inevitably come about when names leave out function. The working parts of every shared venture: roles and responsibilities. Left to personalities with different perspectives and priorities to interpret, the result is incoherence and confusion. The consequence of one of our “reality’s” laws of chaos: everyone is the author of their own truth.

Reality-Creation is Purpose that requires usefulness. So, in place of “God,” the terms preferred here rely on function. Indispensability that is Mind, Self-Awareness, Consciousness, and Logic bonded with Love. That is Logic-Love, the Parents of their Child-Mind, who is of a different kind of Consciousness: Free Choice. A usefulness necessarily unique, autonomous, and also indispensable.

In place of “heaven” the terms preferred here are Reality, Creation, and Truth. Terms capitalized are of Reality-Creation. The world of Mind-archetypes and not of the dream of unreality, our material world of body-brains. 

Archetypes in Reality, "gods" in unreality

Function that completes Definition uncovers Mind of more than one part, more than one function. Actors whose roles combine to explain with Logic why and how Mind-Reality came about and why and how Creation-Worth is its Purpose. And by extension why and how our dream “reality” came about. Why and how healing and awakening from the illusion of separation and the projection of guilt is our purpose.

Two impossibilities that certify the insanity of Self that is Mind split into two. The original thought of separation, formed into another impossibility that is matter by the temporal, finite energy of unconscious Mind lost in a dream. By entropy, the condition of spacetime-matter that began with a Big Bang and will end with inertia. Events that we, the actors in the dream, unknowingly re-enact with the splitting of the atom and the parody of “life” that is death. The mimicking of Child-Mind’s loss of consciousness and the "death" of Life Force that cannot die. “Events” so nonsensical and unreal that they can only be a joke.

Explanation that owes much to the Logic and intuition of Carl Jung, who added archetypes to the factual basis for psychoanalysis. For its insights, and the insights of these essays, depend on them. Not the “God” of common parlance, name without function. “Creator” of this shadowland of opposites whose “plan” can’t make sense.  But archetypes who are Function. Whose roles, relationships, and stories account for the coherence and evolution of Reality-Creation in the Now. Their Selves and stories re-enacted in reverse by the gods and stories of Olympian myth and legend. In the illusion of time that can’t be Now. Projections of a split Mind whose stories we have yet to get right.

Two minds evolving into one 

Explanation that also owes much to the ultimate source of intuition. To Logic and Love from a perspective not bound by the body’s five senses. Accessible through a sixth sense and shared with us by the Author of A Course in Miracles. By “Jesus,” another name like “God,” obscured by misinterpretation because it leaves function to personal bias. The function identified here as an agent of Soul.

Because Soul is Oneness without opposites that knows no boundaries. Whose function is to interconnect Everything including the self-delusions of an unconscious Mind. Free Choice that chose in error. For the impossibilities that can’t co-exist with the Possibilities of Creation are derived from them. Appearances to the contrary, even opposites can’t be separate and must be included in Everything.

It is agents of Soul, boundaryless and Innocent, who can respond through our sixth sense. Who can connect our calls for Love and Guidance to the Wisdom of Logic-Love, through the innocence, trust, and intimacy of spontaneous, loving friendship. Relationship required by its purpose, the recognition of “others” as one Mind-Self, to evolve into the intimacy of two minds thinking and feeling as one.

Best friends and soulmates

“Agent of Soul” needs to be personalized if it’s to be taken into its friend’s mind, heart, and soul. The same goes for religious equivalents like Christianity’s “Holy Spirit” and philosophy’s “muses.” If the Agent’s chosen identity is taken in by the individual’s Psyche then the choice and the timing may be right. Even better if the Guide’s identify responds to the individual’s call for Love and guidance by revealing itself.

C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces (1956) recounts the moving story of Psyche, my original Agent of Soul. My Guide and confidant who got me dialoguing, first on paper and then in my head. Until our friendship and conversations became part of everyday life. Through 26 years of dialoguing that began with, “You had a job to do and I haven’t heard back.”

When I needed help handling strong emotions, “Dobbin” responded -- a simpatico sorrel draft horse, massive and beautiful. A symbol of strength, patience, and wisdom at my side for nine years. A soulmate with a reminder, that my will alone is no match for the animal in my human brain. Will driven by instinct that has no use for Mind, capable of replacing my will and turning me into an image of itself. A reminder that I am Mind, and with the strength, patience, and wisdom of its Logic and Love -- with guidance from my friend Dobbin -- truth will prevail.

When I needed help with understanding and healing relationships, Owen became my intimate friend and constant Guide. The son with extraordinary gifts who left this life prematurely because he couldn’t use them. Including the gift of insight, because the insights that continue to move explanation toward Understanding, that replace confusion with clarity, are gifts from our two minds working together. In friendship, toward becoming one Mind, gradually and imperceptibly. Understanding that every relationship, in this life, is a call for Love.

Published on Leave a comment on Spalding: A Girl, Her Basketball, and Their Date with Chinese Intelligence

In the movie Cast Away (2000), the Tom Hanks character stranded on a deserted island kept his spirits up by bonding with an imaginary “friend:” a soccer ball he named “Wilson.” On his way to being rescued in mid-ocean he and Wilson were tragically parted. Here is a tale of treason, betrayal, and redemption: an adolescent girl's imaginary soulmate – a basketball -- tragically torn from her embrace by Chinese Intelligence. The voice of the girl, Uncle Melvin's fictitious niece, is in italics.

Another “Wilson”

Uncle Melvin, there’s something really important I’ve been wanting to talk to you about. What? The basketball that fell out of the car when you picked us up at the airport. It broke my heart (sob!). Huh? I’ve never forgiven myself for not rescuing it. I had no idea! We were closer than Tom Hanks’ character was to “Wilson” in Cast Away. That close! And you had a name for it? “Spalding.” Mein Liebchen! (pitiful wailing). 

After Spalding made its escape from the car it bounced into the terminal. “Escape”? What are you talking about? How do you know?  I got a text from the authorities in Hong Kong. What? Hong Kong? Yes. Your heartthrob was a spy for China. And, of course, its feelings were hurt when you didn’t rescue it. So it was going to leave you anyway. I feel faint. 

Passenger 57

After cleverly eluding airport security your basketball made it to concourse C and boarded a flight for Singapore. That’s ridiculous! How could a basketball get past security? By impersonating Obi-Wan Kenobi: “Let them pass.” Why would my darling Spalding want to fly to Singapore? To throw off anyone following it. Your darling Spalding was summoned to report to its Chinese handlers in Hong Kong. This can’t be true! It was going to betray all your innermost secrets. My diary! It's now in the hands of Chinese intelligence (swooning). 

The other passengers were annoyed when an unruly basketball in first class kept bouncing back and forth from its seat to the lavatory. But otherwise they enjoyed their basketball game. Basketball game? On a plane? Just a distraction. When the pilot came back to referee the game, Spalding snuck into the cockpit and diverted the flight to Hong Kong. How could the pilot referee a basketball game without a basketball? By then the game had degenerated into a food fight. The pilot got a pie in the face and never made it back to the cockpit.

Patriotism

Everyone was arrested when the plane landed. Spalding too? No. Chinese intelligence was there with a hoop. Your basketball made a perfect three-pointer from the cockpit and was spirited away. Why did its handlers tell you all this? Your diary was made in China. The first tipoff. Then Spalding told them why it contained so much sensitive information. My innermost secrets! (shriek!) You were secretly working for them.

The authorities in Hong Kong are grateful since without you and Spalding China couldn’t have humiliated our country. You and your basketball now have a prominent place in the pantheon of China’s heroes. You don’t have to feel guilty for not rescuing your friend. What a relief! I feel so much better now. Thank you!

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The latest from Chinese Intelligence

The next time my beloved basketball falls out of the car at the airport we must shut it down until the poor dear is back in our loving embrace. You should know that I’ll be picking up your traitorous basketball at LAX just in time for Thanksgiving. He’s coming back? With a dossier on Xi Jinping’s scheme to take over the South Bay’s Chinese restaurants. Laundries too? He doesn’t need his clothes cleaned. He just has a big appetite. Excuse me. It’s Spalding bouncing at the door. Gotta go. Mein liebchen!

Published on Leave a comment on Why Can’t Western Thought Get Its Facts Right?

Excerpt with minor revisions from essay submitted for publication in the Harvard Class of 1959 65th Anniversary Report

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The tyranny of “Realism”

With “realists” in the lead -- the body-centered fanatics who rule the world -- Western thought has only gotten its facts wrong. With illogic and fear ever since Aristotle turned inquiry away from Mind to matter. From the Why and How of philosophy toward the Who, What, When, and Where of science. From Parmenides, Plato, and Jesus, who let Logic separate fact from fiction, to Newton, Einstein, and Bohr, whose reliance on the body's five senses ignores the distinction. Giving us Plato’s Cave and its occupants defending self-delusion with the ferocity of animal instinct. Giving us "realists" tied in knots by the possibility that anyone might get the facts right with independent thought and feeling. With Logic and Love that owe nothing to the tyranny of body-brain.

The first step to understanding

Wisdom – the self-delusion of the idealist that anyone wants wisdom. Foolishness -- the self-delusion of the “realist” that questions will lead to answers when they’re preempted by bias. When they include the knower in the known, the trick pulled off by the body’s five senses. By the circular “reasoning” of science that relies on the “objectivity” of body-brains sensing and validating a reverse mirror-image -- a reflection of themselves. Sensing and validating spacetime-matter, the projection of a mad idea that Mind can be replaced by brain. By matter.

Pointlessness that’s “reasoning” to reach conclusions and make decisions when the inquirer has skipped the first step: letting Logic-Love explain the situation with an open Mind. Letting it help us get our facts straight. “Logic” that presumes to tell Mind that sensory perception and spacetime-matter are off limits to questioning isn’t Logic. It’s illogic that perpetuates senselessness no less than body-brains turning judgment over to their mirror-image reflections. 

A return to Self-Awareness

Where does the mistake show? In the idiocy of our obsession with fun and games – competition. With the illusion that mortal combat over wealth and power, survival and dominance, is something happening. Verification that this is reality. When the truth is it’s only distraction from what needs to happen: a return to self-awareness. To reality and sanity with help from Mind’s intuition, sixth sense guided by Logic-Love.

Where there’s kindness and service from the bottom up instead of cruelty and rule from the top down. Where the emphasis is on individuality, sharing, free choice, and creativity instead of uniformity, tribal supremacy, willfulness, and conformity. Where the logical point of departure is Mind-centered rather than body-centered. Drawn toward self-awareness rather than away from it.

Being there for the next generation

I’m privileged to have a purpose: being there for my descendants. The motive behind my website and everything in it. And whether I’m around for another class report in five years I want the next generation to have the same privilege. Living lives with their own purpose in a world that isn’t taking it away. Self-motivated by strong character and independent judgment that understands the difference between Logic and reason. That can’t be fooled by their five senses and “realists” into dismissing their sixth sense. Into corner-cutting the first step to understanding --- Logic that gets the facts right.

Published on Leave a comment on Necessity’s Choice: Between the Kindness of Character that Creates and Governs with Feeling and the Cruelty of Anti-Character that Forces Conformity and Rules without Feeling

A dialogue in the Platonic mode sharpened to a fine point by the incisive critique and lacerating wit of an imaginary thirteen-year-old (in italics)

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Getting to meaning with why and how

News reporting and analysis has to be about questioning before it’s about answering. Stories worth reading start with six questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how.  Answers to the first four questions are descriptive. They tell you what the author observes but don’t help with interpretation. With understanding what it means.

Answers to the last two questions – why and how -- do help. They’re what creative thinking, writing, and analysis are all about. Providing a perspective that helps readers make sense of things. With insights that look beyond appearances for context, understanding, and awareness. Especially self-awareness that we all have trouble with. 

You want everyone to think just like you. My sermons are about sharing and experimenting with other perspectives. Not thinking alike. Because this is where learning, growth, and creativity take off: being open to looking at things differently. If the congregation nodding off in the pews all thought like me I would fall asleep.

Socrates made a career out of questioning that brings minds to their full potential. By embracing individuality and originality. By thinking creatively. Forcing his views on others would do just the opposite. That’s not what he wanted and I don’t either. My letters and sermons are only to help with looking at things differently. That’s what the news room of a Los Angeles newspaper taught me. Yes -- that they would hire anyone.

The personality type that avoids meaning

I call today’s sermon “Why Brain Can Never Be Mind’s Friend.” It’s the title of an essay I just posted on my website. Frankenstein fans will be heartbroken. They were hoping the monster would trade its brain for Victor Frankenstein’s mind and become a mind surgeon.

Today’s sermon asks us to think about why some personality types are OK with all six questions and others aren’t. What’s their problem? The why and the how. Some types can’t or won’t open their minds to why and how. They register facts, but without reflection and analysis they can’t interpret meaning. Thinking that bypasses meaning bypasses context and understanding.

Why would they do that? They’re actually opposed to thinking. The “anti-intellectual” considers book-learning, professional growth, and the discipline of conscience, accountability, and self-improvement surrendering to weakness. A mindset comfortable with facts but uncomfortable with the why and how of insight doesn’t will itself to know. It wills itself not to know. Not to express individuality and originality. Not to be creative but to be sociable. To blend in with the group.

And more fundamentally to avoid meaning. Why? Because of the Truth it might reveal about them. A frightening prospect: that they're mistaken. Wrong.

What’s that thing in the jar?

Doesn’t everyone want to be their own person? To be creative? Not this personality type. They think there’s something better, and that’s what my sermon is about. Asking the why and how of this type so you can recognize its traits, see the downside, and avoid it. What if I’m attracted to it? Depending on the circumstances we’re all attracted to it. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here with bodies and brains.

But we also have free will, and if you’re aware of the choice between personality types it’s more likely you’ll choose wisely. So that’s why today’s sermon is about brains and formaldehyde? What? I see the jar behind your back and the flask from your laboratory. You’ll never get my brain, Dr. Frankenstein! 

The cure for insomnia

If that personality type attracts you it could be harmful in lots of ways. How? Mainly by blocking originality and creativity. By keeping you from using your talent for creative writing. For expressing what makes you unique -- your individuality -- instead of losing your self in the crowd. How awful! Yes. We don’t want that to happen.

Creative talent rewards us with usefulness. With service to community that brings satisfaction and happiness. You’ve got creative talent, so there’s good reason for challenging you to make full use of your mind. To help you develop your talent instead of blocking it. To help you be happy by making yourself useful. Or by putting me into a coma.

Wisdom from Frankenstein’s dog 

Mainstream philosophy and theology haven’t figured out the difference between brain and Mind. And science doesn’t want to know. Scientists are only interested in what they can detect with their bodies’ senses so they can experiment with it. Quantities they can measure are all they care about. They can’t do that with Mind. So, not even neuroscientists who study the brain think much about Mind. We’re on our own.

Except that there is a source I read years ago that’s a big help. Dogman! Yes. I read Dogman and now I understand everything. What is this source? A book so dense with wisdom that it can take a long time to read.* We can talk about it another time if you’re interested. I’m already dense, so maybe we can forget it.

Wishful thinking 

Aren’t brain and Mind the same thing? No. They’re exact opposites. In fact brain’s purpose, besides defining “self” as group or tribe, is to replace Mind. What for? Because Mind contradicts brain when it defines “self” as individual. And because of the way that bodies with brains appeared after Mind had already been there. In a dream that a sleeping Mind is dreaming.

The Mind that’s dreaming is our ancestral Mind, split into two parts. They’re both unconscious and neither is working right. But while body-brains make sure their part is all about bodies the other part is about Mind. Body-brains are attached to their dream world. They’ve even convinced themselves they made it. It’s not to be shared with Mind or anyone else because they own it. It’s their turf. They work hard to make it real. How? By discrediting and silencing the voices of those who might disagree. Who see differently.

Wisdom that isn’t self-centered

The part of the split Mind that’s dominated by body-brains is limited to the one perspective it trusts: the one defined by the body’s five senses – sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. Being body-centered makes it self-centered. Focused by animal instinct rather than Mind, on winning in competition and survival in combat. It’s not about wisdom.

The other part thinks with Mind that’s also not working right but with a big difference. It’s open to wisdom from other perspectives. Body-brains’ five senses don’t have an exclusive right to tell Mind everything it needs to know. Mind has a sixth sense. Intuition, the source of spontaneous insights and guidance from wisdom that isn’t self-centered. From a broader context that enables understanding and civilization with a purpose. Guided by conscience and loving kindness toward ideals that set us apart from herds of animals. Values from the heart that give meaning to theories, discoveries, technologies, engineering feats, and works of art. All the things that go into human progress.

The “bad thing”

It’s because the wisdom behind spontaneous insights comes from Love as well as Logic. Always together, never separate, as though they were married in Heaven. Which, as a matter of fact, they were. It’s the reason why the part of the split dreaming mind that’s centered on Mind can trust its sixth sense. Can choose to be guided by insights from intuition with a mind open to different perspectives. That’s capable of learning and growing. Because it’s chosen to be guided by the Relationship that accounts for all of Reality and Creation: Logic married to Love.

This matters? Very much. Mind’s loss of self-awareness, long ago, in the state that preceded the state we’re in, brought something into its thinking, feeling, and behavior – into its Psyche -- that didn’t belong there. The same thing that the psychologist Sigmund Freud studied in the human psyche. He called it the “bad thing,” and he devoted his career to understanding and correcting it. It’s the shadow-reflection of Self, a reverse mirror-image that’s its opposite in every way. Mindless and loveless, lifeless and soulless.

The herd inside the human brain

Instead of thinking with Logic and reason the Mind that’s gone over to its reverse-dark side acts by instinct. Instead of being motivated by Love to share its abundance, to value life and Creation with conscience, Innocence, trust, generosity, and gentle loving kindness, it’s driven by fear, hatred, selfishness, distrust, and guilt to claim everything for itself. To be sensitive only to its own needs and feelings and eliminate competition.

The un-self-aware Mind invaded by its shadow-opposite dreamed a world that would bring its reversal of thinking and feeling to “life.” By imagining it in physical form: the substitute for Mind we’re familiar with called “brain” and the part of the brain that imagines us as herds of animals driven by instinct and fear to compete for survival and dominance. It’s called the “amygdala” or “animal brain,” and we all have it.

What is “action”?

When Adam Skywalker was lured away from Obi-Wan’s Jedi training, he was choosing to exchange his loving self for its reverse mirror image. To exchange Mind’s thinking disciplined by Logic, reason, feeling and value for the lure of its opposite: the undisciplined “power” and “freedom” promised by the animal brain for conquering its “enemies.” He was choosing the dark side.

The telltale sign that something’s not right is will that’s detached Logic and Love-feeling from thinking and replaced it with the unthinking, unfeeling instinct of “action.” With the drive of a predatory beast to risk loss in its all-out competition to inflict loss. To “win.” If we sense that we or others, like Adam Skywalker, are motivated by insensitive dominance rather than sensitive Love-feeling, by “winning” or “conquering” instead of sharing, then something is not right.

Yes, it matters

Together, Logic and Love, thinking and feeling, define what we mean by “Mind.” Our reverse mirror-image – our shadow-reflection opposite – is an attempt to separate them. To disable Mind. The result is a Mind split between itself and its opposite, the animal brain. Mind that isn’t thinking, feeling, and behaving right. This is why it matters that Logic and Love are inseparable.

Individual vs. tribe

How do we keep what happened to Adam Skywalker from happening to us? By protecting the integrity of Mind to think and feel with Logic and Love instead of being lured away by their opposites. To use Free Will to make choices and the independent judgment of right thinking to choose wisely. What choices?  Between opposing personality types, interpretations of authority, and values.

Society defines us by our group-tribal markers – age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, professions, ideologies, and so forth. But before then we’re something more fundamental. We’re individual persons. Defined by the qualities that give strength to character. By markers that define the individual selves we choose to be and the causes we choose to serve.

The values that build character

Our choices between different personality types, interpretations of authority, and values determine what we do as well as who we are. The character we present to one another in relationships. Whether it’s character that identifies itself as a sovereign individual, before it lets society lump it into groups, or as a group. As a tribe that answers to values opposite to the values that guide the individual.

Whether we take responsibility for freely choosing the qualities that define our character as individuals, or hand responsibility over to groups to shape us to suit themselves, may be the most important choice we can make. Because the circumstances that split Mind into two incompatible parts also split us into incompatible sets of values. One that values character, the other that doesn’t. A split that means we won’t enjoy peace until we learn the difference and make the right choice: the values that build character.

Real strength

What is the difference? One set of values respects our fundamental identity as persons, the other doesn’t. Mind’s mistake that let the “bad thing” in let disrespect in. Nothing turns incompatibility into hatred and violence more readily than disrespect.

How will we know to choose wisely? 

  • By choosing a personality type that respects, uses, and shares the faculties of Mind we were given. That doesn’t take direction exclusively from the body’s five senses and the external-physical environment around it. Our bodies’ capabilities, appetites, and vulnerabilities can’t be allowed to set our priorities by replacing Mind with animal instinct. With “action”. And by letting possession and games among groups distract us with pleasures and entertainments rather than enriching our lives with sharing, cooperation, trust, and closeness among individuals.
  • By understanding that strength doesn’t come from ruling by fear from the top down but by serving with Love and Logic from the bottom up. If we value Force – the power of strength – we won’t be misled by the weakness of authority that has to seize it rather than earn it. That must crush individuality with intimidation and violence to preserve itself. That must prove its legitimacy by turning every space into a field of combat. Into turf where it must always be the bull that owns, possesses, and controls it. Where it must always emerge triumphant – the “winner.”

None of this is strength. It’s weakness so vulnerable, so insecure, that it will go to any lengths to appear to be strong. Authority that supports and serves individuality and creativity from the bottom up is secure in the strength of Logic and Love. It has no need of appearances. Of shows of brutality in combat to impress its enemies.

The difference between the two is the difference between the personality type that respects Mind and the type that doesn’t. The type that imagines that anything that can’t be detected by bodies’ five senses, especially Mind, is inferiority that deserves contempt.

The choosing and earning of Worth

What do you get when you smoosh all of our values together? A big mess. You get “Worth,” the idea that sums up everything that Reality-Creation is about. Energy directed by self-aware Mind that empowers causes with effects, thoughts with consequences, relationships with reciprocity, definitions and laws with Necessity, and creativity with Creations. Energy, the light that came on with Self-Awareness and powered its expansion. From the question of Possibility to the abundance and diversity of Life that is the answer. The values of Logic and Love shared with Freedom that express and affirm the Worth of Life.

Values are the raw material of Creation. Gifts from its source, Self-Awareness, to the Child of Logic-Love entrusted with Free Choice, to make of Creation an act of Free Will. An act that could not create without it, for what is true of Worth is that it must be chosen and it must be earned. And what is true of Free Choice – the Child of its Parents, Logic-Love – is that it does the choosing and the earning. Earning by sharing its gifts and by reciprocating and affirming the Worth of the giver with the compositions of Free Choice. And earning by risking Self-Awareness when choice that is truly free, guided by its own judgment, chooses wrongly.

The limits of definition

How can that happen? By lacking an awareness of certain attributes of values that can only come with experience. The attribute that values come with: the definitions given them by the giver, Logic-Love. And if the use that’s chosen strays outside the limits of their definitions it will be a mistake. It may risk the loss of Self-Awareness. For example, just as Logic and Love are inseparable Freedom and Order are inseparable. Yet many of us yearn for a world of disorder where we can have Freedom without limits. An impossibility.

The gift of values that are the raw material for Creation is to be used for its intended purpose: to express the Beauty, Worth, and Reality of Mind and its thought: the idea of Life. Of all of Creation. If Child Free Choice uses its gift to express and affirm a value’s reverse side – its opposite – it would be trying to affirm an impossibility: the reality of what is necessarily unreal. It would be violating Logic-Love and contradicting the value’s intended purpose.

The nature and purpose of values

A mistake that’s familiar to us because we all make it. Trapping ourselves inside a dream with the authoritarian mindset that relies on the body’s five senses to make it real. By blocking awareness of the Truth that can only come from Mind. When Mind puts its faith in something that can’t be real or true, it’s choosing to be un-self-aware. The state of Mind that humanity is in because so many of us put our faith in what our bodies – matter -- tell us instead of listening to the voice of Logic-Love that reaches us through our Mind.

Authoritarian “realists” are re-enacting and perpetuating Child Free Choice’s mistake and the result is a persistent, harmful lack of Self-Awareness. Mistaken identity that is the cause and effect of mistaking the nature and purpose of values. The cause and effect of their misuse which accounts for all that is not beautiful about our dream-world. Our imaginary “paradise”.

Values have opposites

Authority, like Freedom and everything else, is subject to the laws that define Order. The laws of cause and effect that reflect the values of Logic-Love. Necessity that ensures that Creation is free and authority is benevolent. Yet many of us crave absolutes that aren’t limited by laws except arbitrary laws of our own making. Like absolute Freedom and absolute Power, they’re impossibilities that enable malevolent rule to ignore Necessity and take away Freedom.

Values in the Mind of their giver that is Logic-Love have no shadow-opposites. But in the Mind of Free Choice, their Child, shadow-opposites – the “dark side” – must be a choice even if mistaken or choice would not be free. The same awareness of choices within and among values that disciplines Free Choice in Creation must also discipline ours.

Awareness of what? Awareness that values have opposites. That values convert into ideals and passions that drive behavior, and some of these are good and some are bad. Some are light and others are dark. Some constructive, others destructive. Which version of Freedom and Power do we value? The version with Order or the one without?

The values that fit

How can we be aware of the difference? By being aware of the choice between opposite personality types and opposite interpretations of authority. Because they imply opposite values. There is not one value structure, one standard of acceptable or functional behavior, but two.

  • One for the Mind-centered individual personality type drawn to Logic-Love that supports individuality and creativity, with governance from the bottom up, under the law, that’s rational, benevolent, sensitive, and kind.
  • The other for the body-centered tribal personality type drawn to action-dominance that demands conformity, with authoritarian rule from the top down, above the law, that’s self-centered, self-serving, insensitive, and cruel.

If we are aware of the difference:

  • Values that will best fit the Mind-centered individual type will include sharing-generosity, family-community sensitivity, responsibility-accountability, friendship-intimacy, Free Choice, cooperation, conscience, individuality-originality, and creativity..
  • Those that will best fit the body-centered tribal type are self-sensitivity, sociability-camaraderie, authority-rule, dominance-supremacy, moral expedience, obedience-loyalty, conformity-uniformity, taking-monopolizing, competition-winning, and avoidance of responsibility-accountability, unpleasantness-difficulty, work-difficulty, and uncontrolled-unpredictable change.

The emperor’s horse

A comprehensive list of value-opposites would fill a book, but here are some:

  • Individual Creation vs. group tribal conformity
  • The inner peace-harmony of Logic-Love and Free Choice (idealists) vs. external peace-harmony / appearances enforced by tribal dominance (realists)
  • Serving-supporting vs. possessing-controlling
  • Honesty-Truth (depth and substance) vs. appearances-dishonesty (superficiality-shallowness)
  • Considerate-respectful vs. inconsiderate-disrespectful. . . .

Granddad, I think the horse is dead. You get the point? Yes. These two value systems aren’t alike at all. One is fragrant, the other stinks. Well put!

Amen to the benediction!

And you have some idea now how to distinguish between them and how to avoid making the wrong choice? Yes. I will choose wisely because I’ve grown a beard. I’ve dressed myself in a robe and sandals and I have a lantern so it looks like I’m searching for wisdom. It's true. Success here definitely depends on appearances. On perceptions whether right or wrong, and “clothes make the man.” I’m not a man. And besides, emperors don’t wear clothes.

I now decree that this sermon is over. Time for the benediction when every 13-year-old can be truly thankful. To you, Plato, and Socrates, I bid a fond farewell.

Amen!

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*A Course in Miracles (Foundation for Inner Peace 1976)

 

 

Published on Leave a comment on Why Brain Can Never Be Mind’s Friend

Excerpt from draft of forthcoming post with working title “What We Owe to Self-Awareness and the Price We Pay for Avoiding It

Unscientific science and the “new normal”

Science leans into deeply challenging questions like quantum gravity, Einstein’s and physics’ holy grail, with remarkable persistence and ingenuity. It leans the other way when challenged by questions no less important. Its “quest for knowledge” is hobbled with irrationality. Launched with bias, subjectivity rather than objectivity, that inevitably blinds it to the explanation and understanding it seeks while deepening our world’s mysteries. The assumption that there can be no reality other than that detected by body-brains’ five senses: taste, touch, smell, hearing, and vision.

Irrational because the reality detected belongs to the same environment, the same system, as its detector. Rejecting any perspective that’s outside the system means science’s “reality” is verifying itself. Self-referential, like a case that’s made by citing itself. Circular “reasoning.” Blatantly illogical yet hidden behind business-as-usual, humanity’s stock response to anything that contradicts the status quo. The ”new normal.”

What's to be learned from the brain in the jar?

Nuttiness with a purpose, to hobble any progress where it’s most needed: toward self-awareness. Toward solving the mysteries of Consciousness with definition that makes sense so that its story can be told without science’s misguided bias. Bias that  prevents neuroscience from an honest treatment of the difference between “Mind” and “brain.” Concepts that it uses interchangeably even though they’re literally worlds-realities apart. Even though Mind that’s real can know nothing of the body-brain that’s not real. Even though brain’s purpose is an impossibility: to replace Mind. To be its substitute in another “reality” that’s substitutes for Reality. To oppose Mind as though it were its enemy.

Which, to the shadow-opposite of a deluded, unconscious Mind, it is. Because within Mind is the truth about the body-brain and the world it senses, that both are logical impossibilities. That neither is real.

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) cites many discoveries that relied on spontaneous insights from Intuition. That more often arrived in the shower than in the laboratory, yet there was no more attempt to explain this phenomenon than there was to explain how Einstein’s mind worked beyond preserving his brain in a jar.

An offer that could not be refused

Neuroscientists like Christof Koch insist that Consciousness is seated in the brain based on nothing more than interesting patterns of electrical impulses.  As though brain matter holds the secrets of Mind rather than Mind itself. Science’s defense of its irrational bias in favor of matter over Mind knows no limits.

What’s going on? The one Mind that we all share seemed to lose the attributes of Self when it lost consciousness. Its shadow-opposite that it mistakenly took to be an “other,” a reverse mirror-image of itself, made an offer that desperate Mind could not refuse. To conjure an alternate reality that replaced Self’s attributes with substitutes. That redefined Mind with the only attributes its shadow-opposite could offer: its own. A lifeless, mindless, loveless code that’s the reverse of the attributes that define its host.

Objectivity, Logic, and Truth: no match for professional bias

The result was an alternate reality. Competition among incompatible tribes composed of incompatible personalities, misguided by split minds thinking incompatible thoughts. The flowering of contradictions and disconnections that is our world, hospitable to “life” that came about through a series of accidents and mistakes. Breeding ground for misperceptions and misjudgments responsible for injustice, cruelty, savagery, and depravity, fear, hatred, guilt, and betrayal. Resentments and grievances. Selfishness.

What else can be expected from a world that’s entirely composed of substitutes? Substitutes for body and brain, Self and Mind. Opposites that by definition serve opposing authorities:

  • Egalitarian Logic-Love that governs with sensitivity-feeling for all creations from the bottom up vs.
  • Authoritarian-hierarchical animal instinct that rules insensitively with feeling for itself only from the top down.

Opposites that serve opposite purposes: Creation vs. competition. And opposite values:

  • peace-order vs. war-disorder
  • Creativity / Growth vs. immobility / paralysis
  • Free Choice / independent judgment vs. conformity / obedience
  • Innocence vs. Guilt: the interconnected Oneness of Reality-Creation, of Soul and Psyche-Innocence without opposites, vs. the separation-disconnection of opposites having neither Soul nor Innocence.

The discrepancies that set Mind and brain apart should be obvious. Yet they elude the persistence and ingenuity of science’s quest for knowledge. Science’s unbreakable alliance with body-brain and its five senses compels it to look the other way. To avoid objectivity rather than embrace it and risk losing prestige and funding to professional bias. All for an irrational fear of a precious gift: Intuition’s sixth sense.

What’s going on?

A Course in Miracles and its implications for personality type theory make the discrepancies obvious. Lesson 45 states that “God is the mind with which I [we] think. My real thoughts are in my mind. I [we] would like to find them.” The thoughts of uncorrupted Mind are real. The thoughts of the one Mind that was split – of its projections’ corrupted minds -- are not real. The same must be true of body-brains, the projections of a corrupted mind.

Traits identified by Jung / Myers-Briggs are either Mind-centered or body-brain-centered.

  • Mind is represented by Introversion, Intuition, Thinking-evaluating, and Judging-understanding (INTJ)
  • Body is represented by Extraversion, Sensing, Feeling (action-Instinct), and Perception (non-judging-understanding, specialness, victimhood (ESFP) [my descriptors in italics]*

By differentiating between mind- and body-centered personality types the theory takes the first step toward understanding the relationship between Mind and body-brain and the friction it causes between basic types. Friction rooted in psychodynamics explained by the Course when one Mind corrupted itself with the madness of its shadow-opposite, split in two, and turned against itself.

What’s going on is more than our planet’s astonishing diversity. More than tension between animal appetites and discipline – the ways we’re used to rationalizing the discrepancy. It’s Mind’s willing itself to be replaced by an impossibility, the illusion that is body-brain.

The Five-Factor personality type theory attempts to reverse the first step by not recognizing the distinction between Mind and brain, by eliminating the sixth sense of Mind-centered Intuition, and by recognizing only personality traits that are body-brain centered. Ostensibly so that Jung / Myers-Briggs will have a more “scientific” alternative when science’s actual intent is to discredit and replace it. To eliminate the threat to its body-centered bias.

The triumph of un-self-awareness

Body-brains are for forming tribes because tribes composed of many body-brains contradict the indivisibility of one Mind and thus define a substitute opposite self to replace it. Brains (prefrontal cortex) are for socializing that enforces conformity within tribes and for fighting among tribes (animal brain / amygdala).

The ESF personality type – ESFJs as well as ESFPs – are thus attracted to games of competition and to socializing. Activities that affirm their sense of self in a self-made alternate reality of externals. Functions of Mind centered on internals can’t do this for them, and they’re a threat to alternate reality besides.

ESFs characteristically exhibit indifference or hostility to functions of Mind:

  • Curiosity, learning, openness to other perspectives, maturation-growth
  • Introspection, self-awareness, self-evaluation-improvement
  • Intuition, Logic-Love explanation, reflection
  • Reasoning, evaluating, choosing
  • Interpersonal intimacy, empathy, feeling, sensitivity
  • Judging-understanding, self-discipline.

All because Mind’s functions get in the way of the brain’s ultimate goal: the triumph not of deliberative self-awareness but of un-deliberative un-self-awareness. Shadow-opposite’s perversion of the Force and Worth of Mind’s Creation: the triumph of animal will over opposites. The beast atop the Empire State building claiming supremacy over its domain. Absolute authority. A machine engineered to make war not Love.

The mind of an ESF tribal-realist

The mind of an ESF is the brain of the tribal-realist. ESF tribal-realists are good with some questions required by analysis but poor with others. The what, where, and when of things attracts them because of the objective of shadow-opposite: to project guilt onto its competitor-opponents for its supposed victimization so that it can justify retribution. And ultimately justify replacing its host which would eliminate all the competition. Mastery of what-when-where specifics – immediate, concrete facts – adds to the weight of guilt and to the play-act of wounded righteousness, thereby placing justification beyond dispute.

Competence of one kind can also mask incompetence of another. The pose of rational thinking hides gaps in Logic better suited for slapstick humor than serious discussion. ESF tribal-realists are repelled by the why and how of things. By the heart of analysis that enables choices based on reasoning and judgments based on Logic. That enables comity and cooperation based on understanding.

Mind that’s home to Logic-Love excels at judging used for understanding that affirms Worth and Innocence. Brain that’s home to predatory animal instinct excels at the opposite: judgment used to condemn worthlessness and guilt -- the unthinking animal instinct for retribution. For laying waste to anything that might limit its taking and doing, possessing and controlling, whatever it wants. The prerogative of absolute authority: reducing Worth to worthlessness. A perversion of rational thought. A joke.

“Innocence” that thrives on guilt

Like the "lost cause” that romanticized the defense of slavery “victimhood” that entitles mindless animal will to sympathy for its savagery instead of accountability is an obscenity. Shadow-opposite’s claim that it has been treated unfairly. Buried in unconscious Mind’s wounded Psyche and in ours is the grievance that impossibility deserves to be Real no less than Possibility. That the laws of cause and effect that are supposed to govern fairly through Logic-Love did not do so when they denied opposites equal status with their hosts in Reality.

Proof that the system is rigged. An injustice that demands retaliation. The cry for retribution that reverberates throughout history, from the violence of two world wars to the threat of nuclear annihilation. That’s splitting societies in two today, fueling grievances and resentments with anger and hatred, goading the “innocence of victimhood” toward civil war.

Opposites that thrive on contradiction

Why aren’t shadow-opposites deserving of equal status in Reality? What explains this injustice?

Mind aligned with the laws of cause and effect and true to itself – Logic-Love – acted in accordance with the sequence of its implications and relationships. Sequence that logically starts with Mind, the original circumstance – timeless Being – and proceeds with the implications of Logic and the reciprocal relationships of Love wherever they lead. The wellsprings of Creation and the Force that powers it.

The sequence of Creation that begins with the thought / feeling-value of Possibility. With the idea of Worth. That could not begin with impossibility. With an opposite that by definition is reactive not active, derived not original. A parasite that depends for its perversion of Logic-Love on the pre-existence and Reality of its host. But because it’s an opposite that by definition conflicts with its host it can’t be allowed to share the same status. To let Reality-Sense be defined as self-contradictory nonsense.

The rigger

The case for shadow-opposite’s victimization and all that it implies – license to break the rules rigged against it and persecute others at will – is based on nonsense. The idea that something originates with nothing. That nothingness can initiate anything and therefore shares the same defining attributes as something,. It’s an appeal to remain in its shadowland of opposites where acceptance into Reality is the lost cause and self-pity sets the tone. Into Plato’s Cave, a gruesome mockery of paradise, self-awareness, and togetherness.

In an alternate reality where anything goes any system can be rigged. But what the politics of grievance and division makes clear is that shadow-opposite's fraudulent pose of absolute authority in the fraudulent pose of victimhood is the rigger. Aglow with the innocence of victimhood, the mother-lode of opposites ripe for persecution. Shadow-opposite’s perversion of the Innocence of Soul-Oneness. Life-self that by definition can have no opposites. That interconnects Everything including Mind’s Reality-Creation and its Free Choice offspring. Whether conscious or unconscious and dreaming, because the Innocence of Soul-Oneness that has no opposites knows no boundaries.

Demon intellect

ESF tribal-realists may want to get it right so they at least appear to be doing what’s right. By continuing to get it wrong, only now with more emphasis on who-what-when-where while still avoiding the why and how. As if they’re oblivious to internals that analysis relies on to decipher meaning beyond appearances. As if they’ve willed themselves to avoid meaning so they won’t get it right. Because they’re only allowed by shadow-opposite’s code to recognize externals. To make appearances real instead of Truth that lies within. To attribute Reality to what isn’t real.

Either way, thinking that dispenses with why and how is more than a distaste for philosophy, psychology, and theology. More than disregard for science and pious grandstanding against “elites.” It’s a visceral fear of intellect. The capacity of Mind to welcome guidance and use its intelligence to learn, grow, and achieve. To get it right. Depriving analysis of why and how by demonizing intellect is a blunder that betrays a stunning lack of self-awareness, and maybe this is its purpose. For nothing would doom the machinations of self-delusion with more finality than intellect and self-awareness. The nemesis of reverse mirror-image and its nether world of reflections.

The trick

Governance that fits things together in order and harmony isn’t possible without Logic-Love’s understanding why and how they fit together in Reality and Truth. Creativity in peace is its concern. ESF tribal-realists will hammer away at the what-when-where of “facts” to make of alternate reality a “fact.” Making what is unreal appear real is their concern. For perpetuating misunderstanding based on unreality and untruth that darkens. But they won’t go near the why and how of understanding that enlightens.

Their dance with animal instinct is one part attraction and one part avoidance. Attraction to “action,” the risking of life and worth that is incessant competition. Games of chance among addicts at casinos that never close. Avoidance of thought that exposes the Truth: that the beast and its authority are made up. That Plato’s Cave and its shadow-master are the invention of its self-deluded occupants. No more real than a trick-or-treat costume. A trick that in time will be exposed when ESF tribal-realists let go of their fear of why and how.

Gateway to the Forbidden City

The foregoing is prologue for the subject of this essay. The faculty of Mind that more than any other sets Mind-centered personality type INTJ apart from the body-centered ESFP and its near-relative ESFJ. The ‘N’ in INTJ which represents Intuition, the portal to sixth sense. Condemned by body-sensing, its personality opposite, as the gateway to the Forbidden City of religious and “spiritual” psycho-quackology, of obsessions and passions of madness not grounded in “reality.”

Without the orderly governance of Logic-Love the magical world of appearances conjured by the magician -- split Mind captive to its shadow-opposite -- has no guiding intelligence. Only the laws of chaos and an overseer committed to maintaining appearances: the five senses of body-brains. The enforcer of conformity with fact and conventional wisdom. The holy ring that must be kissed.

We got here first!

What could penetrate such a defense other than another sense that sees through it? What could rattle a façade more than a voice from another world that isn’t made up?

The flashpoint between mind-centered authenticity and the body-centered reverse mirror-image that would replace it is the one faculty capable of preventing it: Intuition. No faculty is more offensive to split Mind’s projection, the five-sensed body-brain, than the faculty that would friend a sixth sense. The affront to all that is holy in the magic kingdom of appearances and its divine projector, sensory perception.

If impossibility had to be placed in the nether world of dreams where it couldn’t contradict Possibility which preceded it, sixth sense is just as deserving of being denied equal status with the five senses of appearances which preceded it. Sixth sense can only be a fraud, an interloper in alternate reality that must be expelled.

Such is the “logic” behind alternate reality’s “reality”: sensory perception was here first! Such was intuition’s welcome into the world of sensory perception: an indictment of injustice and a manifesto of retribution. A declaration of war. Such is the foundation upon which INTJs and ESFs are expected to make peace.

Excitement in Heaven

Intuition implies access to another perspective that lies outside the limits of body-brains. To another Consciousness whose spontaneous gifts of insights imply the existence of Mind beyond brain. Mind not of this world but accessible through an agent of Soul that knows no boundaries. An intermediary with a voice we can hear that can be understood. With a mission: to guide our halting efforts to make sense of our circumstances and to choose wisely how to deal with them. So that we eventually awaken to the truth of Mind and where its guidance comes from. By awakening to the truth of who we are and where we come from.

Self-awareness. Restored with guidance from Logic-Love logically in sequence. One implication at a time, one reciprocal relationship at a time. Because this is how Creation moves forward, propelled by the ever-expanding implications of Logic / knowledge-learning and the ever-expanding relationships of Love / abundance-sharing. By the force of Necessity that is the laws of cause and effect. Unlike the caricature of Heaven made up of haloed angels idling over clouds, plucking harps, while a bearded old guy decides who gets admitted to this paradise of eternal perfection. Of eternal boredom where all is being and there’s no doing.

“Almighty God:” Tribal-realism's role model

By fabricating alternate reality without Logic and Love, unconscious Mind’s shadow opposite deprived it of the Energy-Force that Creation needs to move forward. In its place it substituted a deception, the appearance of directed movement associated with a parody of action. The agitation of bodies-brains coping with incompatibilities among personalities, authorities, and values. Taking out their frustrations on one another in constant competition and combat. Resulting in destruction rather than Creation, regression rather than progression.

A process without a product that can only repeat itself because, being mindless and loveless, it has no originality. No force, Logic, or ideal to move it forward. Only yearning for an impossibility: absolute power and absolute freedom. The attributes of a god promised to a self-deluded Mind by its shadow-opposite. An “almighty god” that rules arbitrarily, cruelly, by animal instinct --the denial of Mind. The insanity of shadow-opposite welcomed into its host, unconscious Mind.

Who needs a Guide?

Where Mind transforms its contamination into another impossibility: the projection that magically separates thought from its source. The dream overrun by shadow-opposites posing as bodies-brains, their ephemeral likenesses hallucinated by a split mind. Dominated by tribal-realists, their Free Will forfeited to the supremacy of “action.” Taken in by the illusion, fearful of its undoing and so committed to making it real.

In such a “reality” where anything goes and, when it does, it’s accepted as the “new normal;” where split minds embrace conflicting thoughts; and where entropy and the laws of chaos upheld by tribal-realists reduce progress to a dog chasing its tail, supremacy-dominance is a will-o’-the-wisp and survival may be too. Guidance from a trustworthy source is essential, that speaks with authority for sanity and benevolence. For hope that’s constantly under attack.

The Necessity of relationship

Searching for Guidance in temporal externals, in ways that glorify groups and crush individuals – physical symbols, body-brain adornments and rituals, tribal mythology, mass ideological “movements,” – is searching where it can’t be found. Imagining that:

  • a better understanding of matter can tell Mind what to think
  • guidance can only come from organizations captive to Machiavellian tribal values and to their donors
  • authority owes its influence to symbols of legitimacy, wealth, and power – to form rather than content, appearances rather than Truth
  • guidance from organizations that’s authoritative and trustworthy can and must be beyond question -- “infallible.”

When all the guidance and authority that’s possible comes from one authentic source: Logic bonded with Love. Wisdom that defines, sustains, and governs Reality-Creation. The Parents of Mind Free Choice who will restore it to consciousness and its role in Reality-Creation when it regains Free Choice, changes with self-awareness, and becomes recognizable to its Parents.

Undoing its self-delusion -- the reversal of Reality-Truth that is the dream, the shadowland of opposites that is Plato’s Cave, the fortress of denial set against self-awareness -- is impossible if undertaken alone. Because guidance from wisdom requires relationship with Guide. And because “alone” means separation, the state of mind represented by shadow-opposite coded to dismantle the interconnectedness of Reality-Creation.

When listening to sixth sense takes daring

Six years ago the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli appealed to philosophy for help reconciling quantum mechanics and cosmic relativity-gravity. Physics’ quest for quantum gravity that might rationalize the universe of spacetime-matter. [Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (2017)]. He could have gotten his answer by now and the world has been enlightened. But it’s not likely if both mainstream physics and philosophy continue to tell Mind what to think instead of listening.

Insights that give voice to something worth listening to come spontaneously. They aren’t room service. They respond to minds whose own voices aren’t getting in the way. The difference is letting Mind lead with insights from Logic-Love instead of leading it with pre-judgments. With bias that forecloses guidance. By denying any need for Guide, any possibility of friendship with it, and any possibility that its voice will be heard.

Biases hard-wired into personalities, aspirations, and appetites dominate everyday behavior, but they’re out of place when insight into larger forces that influence everyday behavior is needed. It can’t respond to a set of pre-conditions. It can respond to relationship between Guide and individual that’s unconditional. To Logic-Love that’s unconditional. Physics that strait-jackets its Guide with personal and professional pre-judgments betrays the willfulness of immaturity. Of infantile self-absorption that blocks explanation and understanding because it refuses to listen. Because it dares not listen to any voice but its own.

Discoveries without meaning

The voice of “scientific” thought that speaks against Logic-Love instead of with it ensures that Rovelli’s appeal for help won’t get the response his profession needs. In distancing itself from both Guide and guidance physics is only doing what body-brain is coded by shadow-opposite to do: to shield the five senses of body-brain from contamination by Mind’s sixth sense. And to replace Mind with itself. With a coded instruction, lifeless, mindless, and loveless, that assigns the role of Guide to itself. An absurdity because a parasite that gets rid of its host gets rid of itself.

A perversion of authority that rules arbitrarily from the top down and has no patience with voices beneath it. A perversion of responsibility that excuses itself from accountability. A one-dimensional character lifted from an action-hero cartoon. A joke that claims, like Hawking, that “philosophy is dead.” When philosophy’s metaphysics may hold the guidance, the explanation, that physics seeks.

What hope is there for such “thinking?” That rejects objectivity in favor of bias? That intentionally denies itself the vision of Logic-Love. That contributes to self-awareness in spite of itself, with discoveries that un-self-awareness can’t understand.

Avatars and supermen

The personality type that can most readily be identified with Guidance-rejecting tribal-realism is the very body-centered ESFP. ESFP tribal-realists clinging to body despise Mind’s intuition because they fear losing the avatar that replaced real senses crippled by unconsciousness with the appearance of functioning body senses. Tribal-realists so attached to their avatars – substitute selves outfitted with sensory perception – that they prefer existence in an alternate reality. Even if its “reality” is a joke that makes no sense.

One Mind’s loss of power shut down self-awareness enabled-empowered with real vision and hearing, taste, touch-connection, and smell capable of experiencing all the ways that the joy and beauty of Life-Worth Creation express themselves. The fanatical attachment of tribal-realists to body-brains and craving for power, the appearance of strength, are explained by the loss of Energy that rendered one Mind powerless. The memory of humiliation that accounts for Nietzsche’s contribution to the dream: man deified as superman motivated solely by lust for power.

Shadow-opposite’s promise of another reality that one Mind could make real on its own terms was accepted even though it was literally too good to be true.  An imaginary-unreal life-existence was better than being disabled, powerless, and lost in the shadowland of opposites. Hell so unbearable that the self-delusion of Plato’s Cave is Heaven by comparison.

The ultimate defense against self-awareness

Tribal-realists fear and despise intuition because any faculty of Mind that offers a portal to another reality might deprive them of the alternate reality fashioned by Mind’s mistaken identity, its reverse mirror image. Its shadow-reflection’s code of opposition. Of non-being. Where tribal-realists rule, make up their own scripts, write their own rules, revel in the license of specialness, the entitlements “earned” by victimhood, and entertain themselves with the excitement and distraction of bloodletting. Of non-stop “action:” games and mortal combat. Instead of one Mind’s unique talent, its gift of Free Choice, being put to use with an indispensable role in Life-Worth Creation. Tribal-realists hate intuition because it could replace their fascination with hurt inflicted on others by “action” with purposeful, peaceful Creation.

Part of the Logic of Creation is the knowledge from self-awareness that Reality-Creation is one and there can be no “others” “out there.” Part of the rationalization for competition-combat is the misperception from un-self-awareness that there are “others” “out there.” Potential competitors and enemies to be resolutely put down by “conservatives” consumed with fear. Seeking protection from fear’s age-old remedy: authoritarian control. Ever more opposing, ever more absolute. As if cooperation and competition in a shared world can be eliminated by silencing every other voice. By neutralizing every threat to alternate reality, shadow-opposite’s ultimate defense against Reality. Against self-awareness.

This is realism?

Since there is only one interconnected Self in the eternal here and Now the tribal-realist committed to cyclical competition and violence is committed to making the unreal real -- our alternate “reality.” An impossible dream peopled mainly by the hapless occupants of Plato’s Cave. By tribal-realists terrified of change. Traumatized by the wounding of their archetypal Psyche, blindsided by the loss of Energy and Consciousness.

So how do tribal-“realists” conserve the status quo, block self-awareness, and assert their supremacy? By presuming to make a dream real.

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* The descriptors are attributions of intent to traits that the theory doesn’t consider, more an extension of its scope than disagreement. For I believe insights that guided Jung / Myers-Briggs as far as they went were inspired by Logic-Love. Had they had access to A Course in Miracles (1976) it might have led their thinking along the same lines as mine.

Published on Leave a comment on Plato’s Cave and Humanity’s Resistance to Self-Awareness

Excerpt from draft of forthcoming post with working title “What We Owe to Self-Awareness and the Price We Pay for Avoiding It.”

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Nonsense

. . . Plato’s Cave. Western philosophy’s idea of where the lower tier of Jung / Myers-Briggs personality type traits – extraversion, (body)-sensing, feeling (animal brain action), and perception (victimhood-specialness) – has trapped itself. A horror show of imprisonment, deception, and abuse. A parody of tribal togetherness so inhumane, injustice so outrageous, that it can only end in rebellion.

And yet the Cave’s occupants, tribal-realists all, are so taken in by the deception that nothing can persuade them to turn against it. Instead of a choice it’s become a given. A necessity that can’t be overthrown: the delusion that the Cave, its shadow-reflection author, and its occupants are all of one piece. And to part with any of it would be self-betrayal. A parting with existence itself. One unified, organic self composed entirely of opposites. Impossibilities: an alternate reality that, like “alternate facts,” can’t make sense. Can’t be true or Real. A “creator” that can’t create. An authority with no Logic, legitimacy, or power of its own. Mind Free Choice that’s deprived itself of its will and capacity to choose.

Blasphemy

This is the world of intractable injustice that Plato intuited with Logic after his friend and mentor, Socrates, morality’s philosopher, was made to drink hemlock by Athenian authorities. By the same mindset of un-self-awareness portrayed by the Cave’s occupants. This is alternate reality, the self projected by deluded ESFPs, the self-appointed shock troops chosen to defend it. Tribal-realists -- the apotheosis of un-self-awareness.

To its ESFP occupants the Cave is the best of all worlds. “Created” and ruled by a “creator” that’s legitimate and worth worshipping because it doesn’t depend on Mind / sixth sense to detect and verify its existence or on Logic-explanation to be understood and obeyed. It’s the obvious reality-force of the body, its five senses, and the natural environment / nature of appearances that bless the body with sensuous and sensual pleasure. Hedonism is the ESFP body-brain’s religion and the body and its senses are its god.

It imagines itself the sworn enemy of Mind-Intuition because anything thought to be Real that’s not body-brain senses is suspect, a real or potential threat to body-verified, body-sanctioned reality and its body-“creator.” The resistance of the ESFP body-centered personality type to anything suggestive of a competing-opposite reality is depicted in the resistance of Plato’s Cave occupants to enlightenment by another perspective / point of view. By another voice that blasphemes with talk of another god.

Relatability

Plato’s Cave continues to attract re-interpretation because it holds up a mirror to humanity’s opposition to changing its mind. To the Logic-Love of explanation that understanding requires so that the human mind will open itself to other perspectives, listen to other voices, and entertain other ideas about Reality-Creation without feeling threatened. Without fearing the loss of all that it’s attached to: the reality, meaning, and source of its existence. The self-unawareness that’s replaced awareness with a made-up world of appearances.

The Cave is an absurdity: the opposite of Oneness-Being that by definition can have no opposites. Psyche-Soul that’s the interconnectedness of Innocence-harmlessness functioning as one Mind / Logic-Love with Free Choice, creating-expressing the Worth of Reality-Creation, of Life / Self-Awareness. The shadow-Cave’s perversion of Oneness is a cult of self-delusion / self-unawareness. Faculties of Mind / Logic-Love and Free Choice perverted by body-brain’s self-delusion into multiple animal herds. Human-animal tribal predators coded for pointless doing-“action” that depicts the worthlessness of life through its finality: the specter of death preceded by suffering. Through the malignant harmfulness and cruelty of authoritarian rule and the conflict-violence with which it enforces it.

All held together by the relatability of its shadow-opposite source to its likenesses, the inhabitants of a shadowland of opposites. Our alternate reality and its body-brain projections – Plato’s Cave. . . .

 

Published on Leave a comment on An Idealist’s Answer to “Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?”

Wisdom isn’t judgment. Wisdom is the relinquishment of judgment. -- A Course in Miracles

Rodney King’s lament

Rodney King wondered, “Why can’t we all just get along?’ and so do I. Here are three ways that personalities come into conflict: opposite personality types, opposite approaches to authority, and opposite values. The differences summed up in the labels that attach to the opposites: idealist and realist.

The divide between idealists and realists

How do idealists and realists differ? Realists rely exclusively on their bodies’ senses to tell them what’s real. That is, what actually exists as opposed to speculation. Idealists rely on a faculty of mind to tell them what’s real: thinking that produces ideas and feelings that value them, sometimes idealizing them. They don’t rely on their bodies’ five senses to access this faculty. They use their intuition instead, a kind of sixth sense that connects with Mind that’s distinct from the brain.

The Greek philosopher Plato, the father of Western thought, explained the difference this way: it’s not the apple that’s real -- matter that’s detected by the body’s senses. It’s the idea of the apple in Mind that thinks it. Mind that can’t be detected by the body’s senses but is nevertheless real. Plato had a choice whether to attribute reality to matter -- the apple -- or to Mind. Since he was a philosopher troubled by our world of appearances and injustice, who sought reality and valued Mind as the only means of discerning it, it wasn’t a difficult choice. Nor is it a difficult choice for realists when they trust only their five senses to say what’s real.

The difference then is “idealists” associate with Mind, “realists” with body or matter. This is the foundation for all that follows in differentiating between idealists and realists in the three categories of opposites: personality types, approaches to authority, and values.

Personality Types

The only explanation that makes sense

The existence of a thing implies the existence of its opposite. This is its Logic. But since contradictory things can’t co-exist opposites must exist in a state that doesn’t negate their hosts. Philosophy is concerned with reality because that state is unreality. And since our world is flooded with opposites it’s also flooded with unreality that requires philosophy to discern it. Distinguishing between what’s Real and unreal has led metaphysics, a branch of philosophy that looks behind appearances, to conclude that our entire universe is unreal. Illusory, the stuff of dreams. On the basis of Logic. Experimental physics is also being led there by its discoveries that defy understanding.

To the idealist-metaphysicist it’s not debatable. It’s a given: the only explanation for spacetime-matter and the human condition that’s logical. That makes sense.

Personalities and the Logic of opposites

Personalities are random mixtures of components that rarely reveal at first glance whether they incline toward idealism or realism. But when the two tiers of components are aligned in opposition to one another it’s clear that the logic of opposites, Reality and unreality, is expressed through personality types. It doesn’t require the contrast between INTJ and ESFP to reveal that all of us fall on one side of the divide or the other, and the falling isn’t a matter of conscious choice. If I’m an idealist it happened like everything else in the evolution of life on this planet: by accident, mistake, or just happenstance. By the guiding hand of unreality, the opposite of Logic. That wills us not to experience the perfect harmony of Logic but chaos and conflict.

Two tiers of opposites 

The idealist-realist divide is plainly reflected in the way that personality types are differentiated in the Myers-Briggs system. It’s also reflected in the alternative five-factor system put forth by realists opposed to the role that Jungian intuition played in formulating Myers-Briggs.

The personality  components identified by Carl Jung and expanded and interpreted by Myers-Briggs are opposites that form two tiers. Four components line up across the top: Introvert, Intuition, Thinking, and Judging. As love (values) cannot be separated from Logic (making sense), feeling or evaluation cannot be separated from thinking or reasoning. So, my system modifies Myers-Briggs by relabeling Thinking to Thinking-Feeling.

Their opposites across the bottom are Extravert, Body sensing, Feeling, and Perceptive. Feeling here is distinguished from Feeling linked to Thinking by its association with a part of the brain that’s decidedly not motivated or directed by thinking.  It’s our animal brain, the amygdala, that links us to animals -- to our predatory animal ancestors who survived not on conscious, thoughtful deliberation but on instinct and emotion that drive action. Emotion that drove the will of tribes to behave like herds, to dominate in competition with other tribes. To eliminate threats and defeat opposition. To ensure winning -- the triumph of the will.

Whereas the brain’s prefrontal cortex employs thinking to socialize the predator in us its animal brain -- a force of nature -- driven by its passion to dominate and by its fear of being dominated, acts on instinct whether it’s socialized or not. Myers-Briggs makes no distinction between Feeling linked to Thinking and primal emotion that’s linked to acting on instinct without thinking. My putting Feeling in this context is a significant departure from Myers-Briggs.

The myth of unlimited power and freedom

The same distinction accounts for the opposition between Judging and Perceptive. Judging here is not what we mean by “judgmental.” Nor does “Perceptive” fit with its ordinary use. Whereas Judging employs all the capabilities of Mind to understand, to make sense of relativity and changing circumstances, placing them in context that reveals meaning and implies purpose, Perceptive adheres exclusively to the instinctive force and absolutes of will for its direction. Whereas Judging requires the discipline of discretion, Perceptive throws off all limits. Its preferred field of action is force or power without opposition and freedom without limits, two absolutes that defy the limits of choice implied by Judging.

They also happen to be the absurd promises that lured our unconscious ancestral Mind out of Reality and into self-delusion. Into its dream of an alternate “reality” -- the fantasy that is our incomprehensible world of spacetime and matter. That was supposed to deliver unlimited power and freedom and couldn’t since neither is possible, here or in Reality.

The body is the apple

Introvert     Intuition    Thinking-Feeling     Judging
[internal]    [Mind]        [reason-values]      [understanding]

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Extravert    Sensing      Action-Emotion       Perceptive
[external]    [body]        [will-force]               [dominating]

The tier of personality components across the top is thus Mind-centered, concerned with choices among competing considerations -- selves, interests, ideas, and values -- that produce satisfactory results because they make sense. They’re logical. There are no absolutes that preclude discretion in choosing.

The tier across the bottom is body-matter centered. It’s concerned with success in competition among unthinking, un-choosing absolutes. Forces of nature answering to the imperatives of the animal brain, a beast that can’t be housebroken. Isolated, separated bodies bound together as one in herds or tribes. Bands of brothers revered for semper fidelis and bravery, sharing in the glory of violence.

Where the idealist and the realist dwell

The idealist dwells in the Mind-centered INTJ tier across the top where thoughts and feelings, ideas and ideals predominate. The selves served are individuals and families dedicated to developing every individual’s full potential. The main values served are individuality, originality, diversity, free will, and creativity. Plus service and support for these values by families. The idealist and the idealist’s personality type home are thus not only Mind-centered but also individual-centered.

The realist dwells, in contrast, in the body-centered ESFP tier of opposites across the bottom, where instinctive action and competition among herds or tribes for dominance predominates. The selves served are tribes made up of bodies of the same species that share tribal identity markers. The values served are sociability, conformity, and uniformity. Plus the rule of the tribe from the top down that imposes conformity by force.

The flash point: freedom of choice

The ideal served by the Mind-individual centered INTJ personality type is the individual fully enabled and empowered to play a unique role in creation with freedom of choice. Because it’s the very reason why Logic-Love gave birth to their child, our ancestral Mind, one might think of freedom of choice as sacred.

The contrasting ideal served by the body-tribe centered ESFP personality type is the authority of the tribe to impose its will without opposition on its members. That is, to rule arbitrarily instead of under the law and thus to deprive its members of a role in creation with freedom of choice, The ideal is triumph of the tribal will -- rooted in the animal brain -- over all competition whether from tribal members or other tribes. The contrast between the two personality types is nowhere more evident and consequential than their attitudes toward free choice.

Mind and brain are not the same

Realists insist that nothing can be real -- can definitely exist -- unless it can be detected by the body’s five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound. To them, “mind” is interchangeable with “brain.” Bodies that can be detected all have brains that can be detected. Realists have no concept of Mind that exists without being detectable and so they insist that consciousness is seated in the brain along with spontaneous insights. Insights whose origin is unknowable, and so while realists can’t deny that insights happen they avoid inquiring into why and how they happen.

Far from being interchangeable Mind and brain are opposites. The brain equips isolated, separated bodies with the capacity to survive in a predatory, competitive environment by uniting as one in groups or tribes. It does so by subordinating individuals’ will to the will of the tribe to enforce conformity and to dominate adversaries from within and without.

All of this is a testament to the force of nature acting by instinct, socialized just enough to create a semblance of order but otherwise without deliberation or reflection. Humans are animals, bodies with brains that unmistakably belong to animals. The prefrontal cortex is there to tame the herd so that it can act in concert, but in any contest between thought and action the amygdala, a beast programmed to act, will dominate.

Mind that’s split

Idealists do conceive of Mind that’s real even though it’s not matter that can be physically detected. Where realists stop at five senses idealists experience Mind through their sixth sense that delivers insights from Intuition, the opposite of Body sensing. Where idealists associate sixth sense with a legitimate source of discovery, growth, and creativity, with authentic guidance driven by Logic and Love, realists associate it with unverifiable speculation not subject to any scientific or professional discipline and therefore prone to crackpot theories that obstruct serious inquiry. The Mind in Mind-centered INTJ personality type is one Mind that knows nothing of many body-brains or tribes. In serving the needs of individuals for learning and growth its main priority is competence in the exercise of free choice, a talent that conflicts with tribal dominance and is therefore suppressed.

The one Mind in Mind-centered INTJ personality type that’s accessed through Intuition’s sixth sense delivers guidance from Logic-Love, but the one Mind that seeks guidance through individual humans is split. Split between the Logic-Love of its inheritance and its opposite -- illogic, fear, hatred, and guilt -- that make us imperfect and also distinguish the human animal from other animals. Where bodies and their senses are idolized by realists the Mind idealized by idealists is only the one accessed through Intuition, not the split mind of the idealist.

Self that’s split

Whether a personality type is Mind-centered or body-centered it has one thing in common: it’s human and it’s imperfect. What it doesn’t have in common is the same self. The self of the INTJ Mind-centered type is the individual. The self of the body-centered type is the tribe -- a group. This essential difference accounts for the sharp contrast in the types’ conception of authority and their values.

Interpretations of Authority 

Insensitivity from the top down

The earth-bound brain understands authority as it’s employed within the only self that it recognizes: not the individual soul but many bodies uniform in appearance and behavior obedient to the will of the tribe. Authority resides exclusively in those who rule the tribe from the top down. Theirs is the only voice to be heard, the only legitimate source of intelligence and feeling. Theirs are the only interests to be served with one exception: the material needs of those beneath them must be met to ensure conformity without dissent.

The central concern of this self-centered version of authority is to maintain itself by eliminating or dominating all opposition. The one and only consideration is its preservation, not the wellbeing of those it controls. The same earth-bound brain can only conceive of a supreme being, or “God,” who rules with absolute authority from the top down. Who issues commandments and judges and punishes those guilty of disobedience.

Sensitivity from the bottom up

Logic-Love accessible through Intuition holds that the opposite is true. Not only is it conceivable it’s also likely. If Logic-Love is the source of Reality and Creation then authority that’s its own objective can’t create anything by ruling from the top down. All it can accomplish is self-preservation through intimidation and force until its inevitable defeat by a superior adversary.

Authority that fosters the creation of varieties of worth -- of life, beauty, order, freedom, abundance, intimacy, and other values -- must enable and empower its creations to employ their free will and other attributes in the act of creation. Must serve from the bottom up rather than rule from the top down. Where the point of authority isn’t disempowerment to ensure conformity but empowerment to enable creativity.

Two distinctly opposite objectives, opposite means of attainment, opposite versions of authority: rule from the top down that’s unsupportive, insensitive, and cruel; service from the bottom up that’s supportive, sensitive, and kind. Which one is more conducive to the fullest development, expression, and use of a child’s competence to engage with the world on his or her own terms? With entrepreneurial imagination, ingenuity, and self-assurance? Which one is centered on the child’s welfare instead of on itself?

Governance under the law

Authority that rules from the top down is backed up by its own will. Which puts it above the law because it is the law. Arbitrary and capricious, which isn’t law at all. It’s chaos. Authority that serves from the bottom up is backed up by the laws of cause and effect that embody the values of Logic-Love and apply impartially to everything and everyone. This includes authority which cannot govern unless it governs under the law.

The discipline of alignment with laws meant to support free choice in creation contrasts with its opposite: the discipline of conformity to an arbitrary will meant to suppress free choice and creativity. Why? Because free choice and creativity pose a threat to absolute, unopposed authority. The perfect harmony of creation is achieved through the governance of Logic-Love guided by the laws that define Reality and Creation. In the absence of Logic-Love and laws authority that rules arbitrarily on its own behalf can only maintain the appearance of order through force.

Values 

Realism’s flight from Logic

The case for realism rests on the fact that who we are and where we came from -- what “life” and the universe are all about -- must involve speculation. Theories abound but none can meet accepted standards of proof. We are left as individuals each to decide what it’s all about. To decide what’s real. And if everyone has five senses but not everyone is endowed with an active sixth sense then realism rather than idealism must be our guide.

The flaw in this argument is its reliance not on Mind to persuade but on matter. On the body’s ability to detect other physical objects. Objects that belong to the same material world as the bodies detecting them. And so what’s “real” isn’t established by the objectivity prized by science; it’s nothing more than bodies detecting themselves. It’s entirely subjective. Matter proclaiming that it truly exists from a mirror. An obvious departure from reasoning acknowledged by the philosophy of science but conveniently ignored by science itself.

The flaw is the absence of a perspective not of our material “reality” that’s objective. The absence of Logic-Love, the faculty of Mind-Intuition that recognizes and rejects flawed thinking that interferes with its function, which is to support understanding with logical explanation. To help us make sense of things. Realists who find refuge in their bodies’ five senses are not only running toward unthinking, self-referential matter. They’re running away from our only means of making sense: Logic-Love that explains.

It's all bias

But whether we’re realists or idealists is just our bias. Our personality types can’t lead us to the truth but they do entrench each of us in subjective bias. So it’s just my bias when I declare that of the two categories of values -- one based on the individual, the other based on groups or tribes -- only the individual aligns with the laws of cause and effect that define Reality and Creation. The bias of my version of a Mind-centered INTJ personality type. The Logic that supports it explains that the billions of us are actually replications of one Self, one Mind not many. The many version of this one Self is the version implied by its opposite. An opposite that must in every respect be the opposite of its host, the one Mind-Self that’s real. And so its opposite must be unreal -- an illusion.

I conclude that the values associated with the individual align with Reality and Creation because the individual -- the one Mind-Self -- is real and the values associated with its opposite -- the many selves, groups, tribes -- cannot be real. I do so not because my five senses tell me so but because Logic-Love accessible through Mind’s sixth sense, not body-brain, tells me so.

Our distinctly human tribal values

The values associated with tribes are entirely the product of body-brains programmed to express a distinctly human version of our predatory animal nature, our competitive herd instinct:

  • Where idealist-individual values support free choice in creativity realist-tribe values support the abdication of free choice in conformity.
  • Where the individual prizes intimacy and free self-expression in loving, non-competitive relationships, the tribe prizes sociability and scripted self-expression in competitive relationships.
  • Where individual values are directed toward equality and empowerment in horizontal relationships, tribal values are directed toward hierarchical relationships that empower top-down authority and disempower those beneath it.
  • Where individual values above all respect individual worth and free will, tribal values inherently disrespect both.

Which may make tribal values distinctly human: they seem to define the human character judging from its inept stewardship of its natural and human resources.

It also makes them wrong, suitable for opposites opposed to Reality and Creation but not for the one Mind born of Logic-Love to play an indispensable role in the creation and reciprocation of Worth. To raise children. This is who I believe we truly are, not automatons manipulated by tyrants to dominate and destroy one another in endless conflict..

Do we really have a choice?

The split mind of humanity oscillates between these competing codes of ethics that were clearly differentiated when Niccolo Machiavelli published The Prince in 1532. So what I propose with two incompatible takes on morality is not new. Yet its implications for the human character and its propensity toward self-destruction seem not to have penetrated our awareness. Not to the point where it would make a human course correction.

Survival without functioning within groups or tribes isn’t feasible when we are born into a species that is itself a tribe. We can imagine ourselves disciplined by individual morality but, as Machiavelli showed, the realities of survival in competition often subordinate it to tribal top-down authority. We allow ourselves to go off course because there seems to be no other choice, and this applies to idealists as well as to realists.

The ESFP body-brain centered personality type is opposed to this choice as well as to choice generally since it’s a function of Mind. Realists and their ESFP apotheosis continue to serve Machiavellian tribal values without recognizing that they’re incompatible with morality. Without understanding that the mirror they hold up to us is humanity’s unreal dark side. They’re wrong because they’re immoral, the source of wrongdoing.

Why conscience?

Why make the difference clear? So that we put the gift of free will to good use. So that in defining our character with values we will make the right choice: for respect for the laws of cause and effect and their source, Logic and Love inseparable. So that when we are divided into competing groups or tribes we stay true to our sovereignty and integrity as individuals and don’t let our values, our morality, be compromised no matter what self-serving top-down authority demands of us. So that we have a conscience that wills us to do what’s right and listen to it.

Does history offer any examples of realists stricken by conscience after they sacrificed their will to the will of the tribe? J. Robert Oppenheimer was overwhelmed by guilt for his part in producing the Bomb, Robert McNamara for prosecuting the tragedy that was the Vietnam War. Many others, then and now, wish that they had not betrayed their humanity to a false idol.

Conflicting values, conflicting stories

The Mind-centered personality type that values individuals and families, free will, creativity, and service tells one story. The body-brain centered personality type that values tribes, captivity, conformity, and top-down rule tells another. Stories with different objectives and steps for getting there. The individual storyline is culturally explicit because it puts human nature in a positive light. These are values we can be proud of. The tribal storyline is culturally implicit because it puts us in a negative light. Only a perverse pride could own the conquests of red army ants.

The two storylines are contradictory, which helps to explain the friction between their adherents.

  • If Mind-centered individual values tell the story of humanity parting with appearances to help its one Mind-Self regain self-awareness, acceptance of its innocence, and consciousness, the body-brain centered tribal values of realists accept things as they appear to be and take it from there, proceeding directly to instinct-driven action without any need for mind-changing reflection or deliberation.
  • If individual values affirm the worth of Creation and the competence of free-spirited individuals enabled and empowered by authority to take part in it, tribal values affirm the necessity of competition and the submission of individual wills to tribal authority to win it. “Winning” measured not by creativity and free expression but by dominance. By ownership, possession, and control.

The story told by an idealist’s values

An idealist’s values might look something like this:

Home-Relationship
Innocence-Beauty
Wholeness-Wellness
Enablement
Empowerment
Spontaneity-Creativity

The story it tells is of humanity that has a Home in Reality and a Relationship with its one Mind-Self’s parents, Logic-Love. A Home and Relationship that belong to Reality-Creation, not to our alternate “reality.” So, the central driving force behind this and the following values is the urgency of awakening to Reality and regaining awareness of Home and Relationship. A feat that humanity can pull off when the perfection and Beauty of Innocence replace guilt in its psyche -- its soul. An accomplishment that lies within the power of any individual guided by Logic-Love, not within any tribe.

The integrity of the individual is restored with the healing of the Mind corrupted and split by its mistaking its opposite -- its unreal shadow -- for an other self and by surrendering its free will to give it access. Being in a state of Wholeness and Wellness signifies that healing has taken place: the individual -- the one Mind-Self -- has regained its sovereignty and thus the capacity to choose freely. This state of Mind is prerequisite for the values that follow: Enablement of the individual to exercise free will with competence, through trial-and-error learning in our alternate reality and Empowerment of competence in Free Choice to be part of Creation when consciousness is restored.

The attributes that the one Mind-Self must have to perform in Reality are Spontaneity and Creativity. Attributes of Free Choice that cannot be compromised by external influence from any source including the Child’s parents, Logic-Love. This explains the necessity of training by experience in an unreal environment where the Child’s parents couldn’t interfere even if they wanted to and there can be no real consequences -- no harm done.

This is our mission from this idealist’s perspective. What about the realist?

The story told by a realist’s values

From the realist’s perspective its values might look like this:

Will
Instinct-Action
Emotion-Force
Dominance-Winning
Sociability-Likability

Our mission would be survival through unending competition and conflict -- pointlessness. But if we look behind the mystique of the “Triumph of the Will” to what it actually implies we might find the following.

Alienation-Disconnection
Guilt-Imperfection
Division-Sickness
Disablement
Disempowerment
Captivity-Enslavement

These are terms that apply across the board to the body-brain centered ESFP personality type, its exercise of top-down authority, and its tribal values. The story that it tells is of a copycat -- a parasite shadow-self. A derivation without a life of its own and therefore without originality. Entirely incapable of individuality and creativity, that borrows its attributes from its host and reverses them into their opposites. To understand its action agenda take the attributes of its host and reverse them, starting with its host’s core attribute, that it is one entity not many, an individual not a group or tribe.

Which makes the entire tribal value system unreal -- the fact that explains the copycat’s greatest fear: self-awareness. And its fanatical obsession with authoritarian control since without forced conformity its secret will be exposed: the emperor wears no clothes. The emperor is a thing made up, a forgery who has neither existence nor authority. The work of an illusionist. An apparition. A mere reflection, without substance, incapable of casting a reflection on its own.

Of the two systems only the individual system is valid. The tribalist-realist system is but a deception that distracts from the Truth by conflict and dominance. Not only unreal but dangerous and wrong. Destined to be undone and abandoned when our one Mind again chooses Logic and Love, its source and true Self. When it chooses Reality and Truth that know nothing of competition and conflict. That know only the intimacy of Love and the Logic and Reality of Creation.

Whither goest thou. . . ? 

From an idealist’s perspective, these are the values of the idealist and realist that define our character. Each with a split mind, each with a light and a dark side, neither perfect. In an alternate reality of ambiguous appearances, in the presence of competing biases, can we say what it means? 

In the 40s, before climate change and mass extinction were a concern, my back yard was full of fireflies. We called them lightning bugs. Little blinking lights floating silently, lazily in space. A reminder that August is for letting up, slowing down. That in the life of the cosmos one life on our little planet is one blink. Loaded with meaning and meaningless at the same time.

. . . Into the wastebasket of time

A mandala is a geometric design, symbolic of the universe, that can be intricately beautiful. One I admired was created painstakingly with colored grains of sand. After a prescribed period for display it was taken to the point where two rivers form a third river and dumped.  All that work. All that talent, creativity, and beauty tossed out as if it had no value. To symbolize what? Perhaps that when a life is lived and examined for all that it means, whether it served the cause of Mind or submitted to the dictates of body, the show is over. It can be thrown away.

Into the wastebasket we call time, that never needs to be emptied because it doesn’t contain anything. What’s here and gone in the blink of a firefly or a life has meaning, but without substance, without permanence that’s only possible with timelessness, its meaning is here and gone with it. Meaning in the context of the temporal that’s meaningless in the context of the eternal.

The eternal, where there is no competition and dominance, only truth, creativity, trust, innocence, and intimacy.  Where it’s Real and the Idealist is the realist.

Published on Leave a comment on The Defining Values of Our Character [1st draft]

“God is the Mind with which I think. My real thoughts are in my Mind. I would like to find them.” -- A Course in Miracles, Workbook Lesson 45

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The first draft of this essay completed May 12, 2023 is reproduced here August 7 to restart the process of writing and editing after a three-month pause. The pause was recommended by the I Ching Hexagram 34 but was necessitated in any case by mental and physical burnout. I am pleased to resume work however at a slower pace, with less intensity, and hopefully not too serious a drop in performance. Thank you for your interest and patience. -- DCH

Coming to terms with the way things are 

“Confused and confusing,” an acquaintance’s judgment on a letter I’d written. “Thoughtful but somewhat disorganized,” a professor’s verdict on one of my essays. So when you’ve had enough with this essay it’s not you. No matter what the topic my poetic right-brained thinking will find a way to make it difficult. No excuses.

But it’s not all my fault. The topic is a killer. It’s defeated almost all the best minds of Eastern and Western thought, who would rather retreat into babbling mythology and mumbo-jumbo sorcery than figure it out. Mind in two states, Conscious and unconscious. Dwelling in two realities, one that’s real and one that’s not. That I call an “alternate reality” just to soften the blow, that it’s just a dream, an illusion. Our everyday world that we call home. Where the unreal has been made -- not created -- real. “Mother nature” who’s nobody’s mother but a magic trick our sleeping ancestral Mind is playing on itself.

“Conscious” and “Mind” in initial caps. To denote that they’re not of our “reality” but of Reality that is real. And quotes I often use to flag deception. That can be no part of the House of Truth that we once occupied and will again when our ancestral Mind awakens. A use of style to alleviate at least some of the confusion: initial caps to say we’re in the House of Truth. Not made-up reality but the real thing. Quotes to let you know that appearances can be deceiving, especially “reality” that’s unreality.

Some personality types can’t conceive of a Reality they can’t see, hear, and touch. For them the only help I can offer is a reminder: that we all have a sixth sense -- our intuition -- and psychic ability whether used or neglected. They can open their minds to another perspective or not -- their choice. If this is you and you’re more comfortable with things the way they are, you must be a “realist.”  Which is fine with me because I’m an idealist. I’m not comfortable with the way things are and I’m talking to you. If you stick with me I might make you a little less comfortable. It could be unpleasant, yes. But for both of us it would be a good thing.

Why a good thing? 

Values overlap. The vision of Logic is shared with the vision of Hope, Purpose, and Meaning. They in turn are inseparable, worthy of equal prominence among our most basic values, and yet what value doesn’t incorporate both?  “Value” implies Purpose and Meaning.

Worth is a value in and of itself that’s built into every value. The affirmation and empowering of Worth could express the entire point of Reality-Creation, the cause it serves. Not just to stand for anything but to stand for what’s Good. What is “Good?” Worth with the values of morality built into it -- justice, loving kindness, reason, and more. Values that distinguish family-individuality from tribal-conformity, Mind from body-brain-matter, idealist from “realist.”

To reflect on values is to realize that logically there is no way that Reality could not stand for Plato’s “Good.” That what we experience as “life,” that seems so often detached from, or opposite to it, so often de-moralizing, could not overflow with it. That it had to be values that Child-Mind, our one Self, was given by its Parents at birth in Reality, to use in endowing the creation and affirmation of Life-Worth with their essential attribute of Free Choice.

How can values not be embedded in the core, the essence, of existence and how can they not be Good? How then can we let ourselves be gulled into dismissing the ideal of Good and embracing in its stead a conception of “reality” that’s utterly devoid of motivation? That at its core is lifeless, loveless, mindless, and soulless. A misshapen image of pointlessness that allows us no more self-worth than a dung beetle.

To reflect on values is to realize that with every choice we make we’re choosing not only among them; we’re choosing to accept or reject who and what they stand for. The gifts that they are and the Giver. We’re choosing who we are and who we want to be. An ideal that tests us every day to reach higher until we get it right. Until we’re served our purpose here, gained the competence we sorely lack, and are ready to move on. Eventually to serve a useful role in Reality. Always -- always -- with Guidance. Because otherwise we’re sure to get it wrong.

Who or what would get in the way? Who or what is holding us back now? The believer? The idealist? Passion for Psyche, Logic, and Love? For Free Choice and Creativity? For Reality and Truth? Or could it be the “realist?” Addition to the opposite. 

Good neighbors 

Many years ago, I was presented with a “utility index” by Dr. Ruth Mack of the Institute of Public Administration, a group of policy analysts in Manhattan who were helping my employer, the New England River Basins Commission, with flood management policy in the Connecticut River basin. The index contained nine values that stakeholders could use to choose among different ways of avoiding or mitigating flood damage: intimacy or love; aesthetics; health; freedom; safety; self-esteem; material comfort; belonging; and control. A tenth was added later: hope.

Fairness was built into the index in the idea of belonging to a community of interests that can’t last long without it. And ultimately it was fairness that set regional policy. It wasn’t fair for downstream communities to burden their upstream neighbors with the costs of their exposure to flooding, by robbing them of their free-flowing tributaries and numerous other assets. Numbers didn’t carry the day; it was human nature. Neighborliness and respect. Sociology. Psychology.

Personality, character, and values  

I showed the list to my two pre-adolescent sons and was struck by how readily they connected with it. One instinctively alighted on intimacy or love, the other circled around, wanting to think about it. I knew Ruth had handed me something significant. Had I thought about it I would have realized that it was a mirror, and this is why they took an interest. They were looking at themselves. They were looking at terms that defined the persons they were or wanted to be. The persons they wanted to be to others. Their self-image. And this might have been a one-of-a-kind opportunity to consider whether they liked what they saw or might want to change it.

Already I had a sense of my sons’ personality types. They grew up. Their personalities evolved into different types that reflected not only adulthood but also the value preferences that define the different types. The images reflected in the mirror were no longer the blur of childhood innocence. They were high-resolution portraits of individuals. Persons defined by their personalities; each character defined by its values. Three components of individuality rolled into one: personality, character, and values.

Values have opposites

When persons and whole societies go off track, they’ve put down the mirror and stopped reflecting on who they want to be. On the values they want their image to stand for. Did they think that character doesn’t matter? That if they leave it to chance it will take care of itself?

If this is why they’ve wandered off track it can’t mean that they’ve left character to chance. It means they’ve put it in someone else’s hands. In the hands of someone or something who has no problem making the decision for them. As opposed to someone who would prefer to wait until they’re asked for help. The choice is between a voice that’s inherently intrusive and disrespectful or supportive and respectful. Respectful or disrespectful of our sovereignty and free choice. Clear indication that the former has its own agenda. That it’s up to no good because values, like everything in our world, have opposites. Dark sides.

Why utility index needs to be updated. . . .  

it's all by intent

There’s nothing light about the disrespect of uninvited boundary-crossing. About taking advantage of someone who’s let their guard down.

It's the way of the predator who wishes no one well, not even itself since it’s an opposite. In a world of chance, accidents, and fortunate events it’s easy to assume that no mind could possibly be behind it. But this would be a mistake. Because Reality or unreality, either way, is a state of Mind. Nothing occurs without occurring within Mind. It’s where everything occurs or it’s nothing.

If voices make their presence known while we manage or neglect the profile in the mirror, pulling us one way or the other, toward the light or toward the darkness, make no mistake: they are a state of mind. If the pull is toward darkness then the state must be unconsciousness.* Unawareness that would account for neglecting the profile in the mirror and going off track. A mistake of this magnitude, that turns us from an image we want to one we wouldn’t recognize, doesn’t just happen. It's intentional. Just ask Friedrich Nietzsche and Sylvia Plath. Minds aren’t possessed by chance. They’re possessed by intent. And if possession is involved it’s ill intent.

From family spats to global mayhem

The mind that’s supposed to be doing the tracking is us, which means the intent is coming from us. it’s our mistake. The corrective can’t be to passively wait for someone or something else to take over when that was the mistake. The corrective is to pick up the mirror and take another look. To get serious about self-awareness. Is this who we want to be? Is the image in the mirror attractive or unattractive? Good or bad? The corrective is to get over the idea that self-image is a mask. A marketing brand with a thousand angles to manipulate the other. A smile painted on the snout of the big, bad wolf.

The corrective is to invite the voice we neglected when we put the mirror down to help us discard the dark side of values and choose the light side. Help that only the respectful voice can provide because of where respect comes from: from Logic that understands and explains and Love that cares and connects. Two functions of one Mind that are inseparable because they complete one another.

That can’t be taken for granted in a world of opposites. Of contradictions that systematically interfere with understanding and connecting. That systematically foment misunderstanding, misjudgment, and disconnecting. Our world of incessant friction on every level, from individual families all the way to global powers.

Avoidance of self-awareness

Let a critic or skeptic try to convince me that this isn’t so and I will be convinced: that I’m hearing the wrong voice. That my opponent may never have looked in the mirror and, if it did, it might see no reflection. Because the wrong voice speaks for no one and nothing but itself, an opposite. The defining attribute of an opposite is that it can’t exist. There can only be one Reality. A mirror held up to an opposite can only be a reminder that it's not there. Another attribute is avoiding mirrors. Avoiding self-awareness. It’s what we’re doing when we put the mirror down: listening to the wrong voice and avoiding self-awareness.

Honesty

The mirrors we hold up to ourselves regularly reveal what we are doing. Art and entertainment, work and play, built into our everyday lives. But how often do they reveal what we are thinking? How often do they question how we are thinking? Take us to the source of what we are doing and thinking and why?

Reflecting on our values confronts us with the one question for which habits of deception and avoidance have no answer: why? The question that stops us in our tracks and persuades us at least to think about changing our minds, changing course. Before fear, frustration, rage, and guilt are placed again in the care of deception and avoidance. The therapist who likes things just the way they are. “Seek but do not find.” Anything but “I would meet you upon this honestly,” the mirror thrust before us in the poetry of T. S. Eliot. The morality of Truth that puts the lie to the therapist: Honesty.

Dishonesty

What else but dishonesty would make of Jesus the champion of guilt instead of Innocence? The excuse for tormenting an entire people, the Jews, with an eternity of persecution when no life he lived, no story he told, could do that? What else but dishonesty would put words in his mouth to justify and validate what it is, the insane idea of sin, the lie of guilt. To idealize tribal supremacy in the guise of ecclesiastical virtue, appropriating his words, his values, to its own fraudulent ends?

In a “reality” born of deception and avoidance there can be no “truth,” no definitive answer. But nothing stops us from asking an honest question. From asking why and choosing of our own Free Will to answer honestly. To think differently and change our minds if we mean to be honest with ourselves.

The face and the faceless mask in the mirror

Let me hold up my mirror and ask what you see. How can I do this? By going back to the utility index I was handed years ago. By updating it to reflect a higher resolution of character and values than was apparent then. For Logic and Love don’t stand still. They’re growing along with everything else alive. With all of Reality and Creation, expanding awareness with circumstances that never stop evolving. That extend into infinity.

It’s no longer one static list of separate values. It’s evolved into two lists that are dynamic and interrelated. The first is original: the values that account for individual morality within personal relationships among family and friends. The second is derivative, that accounts for relationships within and among tribes that march to the expedience of Machiavelli’s drummer. The former sourced ultimately from Reality that’s light and the latter its opposite derived from it. A shadow-reflection of a self-deluded mind that’s dark.

It's the strange “reality” of our world, the interplay of light and dark in the dream of a split Mind. If we’ve gone off track the second image in the mirror might shock an individual into doing something about it. Into awakening, since one individual truly reversing the lie of guilt back to the Truth of Innocence is all it would take. For who wouldn’t be shocked to find in our reflection the grotesque mask of Dracula leering back at us? Character that flaunts expedience without morality is hideous even to mind possessed by it.

The challenge to choose again

That is, if mind is willing to look. If the occupants of Plato’s Cave had any interest in bringing their enchanted darkness to the light of day. The Child would never have deluded itself into identifying with a perversion of the Truth if it hadn’t lost Consciousness. If it had been capable of paying attention and thinking freely. And we, its projections, wouldn’t either. Wouldn’t identify with the wrong guide, the delusion, instead of choosing freedom from its possession. To be guided by the agent of Psyche-Soul who would never possess us, back to awareness of our real Self.

Not if we looked at the values that define its character. Not if we were aware that Child Free Choice was responsible for choosing them. That we, its projections, are who we choose to be. 

What then is the mirror? An opportunity, an invitation, and a challenge to choose again.

The challenge here is to heal

How go about using Free Choice to heal a split Mind? By understanding whose Mind it is and what it does. Its function and how it functions. By being aware of the choices. The mirror provided by the defining values of our character is a device for learning how to exercise Free Choice so that we can heal the separation. Our task here, in our alternate “reality,” because Creation is beyond the capacity of a split mind.

Mind itself is a value with a function. The value of Consciousness. The Mind of the Child -- our ancestral Mind. Not the Mind of its Parents, Logic-Love, who account for Reality-Creation with their own functions on their own plane of Creation, but an extension of their Mind.

The indispensable element

The function of their Child-Mind in Reality is to introduce an indispensable element into the Creation and affirmation of Life-Worth: the element of Free Choice. Consciousness of all the possibilities. It’s who the Child is and what it does  Performed on its own plane of Creation because its function and a function of its Parents, Consciousness that determines Reality, cannot intermix.

Creation is the attributes of Logic, Love, and Psyche-Soul, and the talents of Child Free Choice, playing together purposefully in harmony to create compositions of gifts-values from the raw material of Creation: the continually expanding implications of Logic, the connecting-expanding relationships of Love, the radiating light of Psyche-Soul, and the talents and values given to the Child by its Parents, Logic-Choice and Love-Freedom. That express and affirm the Worth of Creation and its source with the attributes of originality, Innocence, Beauty, and Perfection that define it. An achievement that would be meaningless if it were not performed with Free Choice. If it could not also express the value of Free Choice. The Child -- us.

Time and entropy destined to end

One Mind and one Consciousness with two distinct identities and two distinct functions. One the Parents of the other whose Consciousness determines and defines Reality. The other the Child whose Consciousness enables its function, Free Choice, by arraying the possibilities. Identities and functions that perform through their inseparable Relationship, yet without interfering with one another.

For if there were interference it would automatically trigger a response from the laws of cause and effect that structure Reality-Creation. It would redirect Energy away from Child-Mind’s function. It would cause Child-Mind to lose Consciousness and put it into another state. The state of unconsciousness that got entangled with an opposite and split itself in two. That dreamed an alternate “reality” in a state corrupted by its opposite: our material world of opposites, time, and entropy, destined to end.

Analysis at the beginning

The task of Child-Mind here is to put its situation to good use. Can it be to learn from experience how to exercise Free Choice? Does it seem that we, the descendants of our ancestral Mind, need to learn? To gain competence that will be needed in Reality-Creation when our ancestral Mind regains Consciousness. If so, how does it do this? How does the Child-Mind function? How does it choose freely?

It begins with analysis. Philosophy and psychology combined in the work of Carl Jung, Katharine Briggs, and her daughter Isabel Myers to deconstruct Mind into components that enable analysis of its function. The gift of their talents enables our talents to put it to use. Start with four components from the type INTJ: introversion, intuition, thinking, and judgment.

INTJ

Introversion is looking within, not being distracted by what’s on the outside because in Reality there is no “outside.” There are no “externals.” Reality is all one Mind. Introversion is where we get introspection, the act of looking into the mirror of our character and values.

Intuition is Mind-Energy not in the form of matter detecting its Source through the agent of Soul. Through the Force of Oneness that knows nothing of boundaries. We get understanding from Logic and Love accessible through reflection. The act of accessing spontaneous insights through the sixth sense we call Intuition, to establish context from evolving circumstances that produces meaning and purpose. That articulates what the situation calls for, the baseline condition for the next step: choosing how to respond to what the situation calls for. What we learn from Logic-Love before we get into answering is how to frame the question. Getting it right.

We apply understanding from Logic-Love to guide choices among considerations by reasoning with Mind-Logic and feeling-evaluating with Mind-Love. Inseparable elements of Thinking with Mind. Here is the nerve center of a split Mind’s attempt to choose rationally and objectively. This is where the rigor of benefit-cost analysis comes into play, measuring the quantitative and evaluating the qualitative in logical sequence, ideally without bias, honestly and transparently. Foregoing the limits of body-addicted science to bring everything that’s relevant into play with systems thinking, holistically.

We use Judgment to make choices and reach decisions that express the values and serve the causes that we stand for. That define the character that we strive to be -- the image in the mirror of our values. It does this through a process of integration that utilizes all the functions of Mind: finding consciously and intuitively among all the considerations the one that controls. The value that for each set of circumstances pulls all the other considerations into alignment.

This is how Mind functions to choose freely. An amalgam of principles and procedures from many fields, among them three with which I am professionally familiar: public policy, jurisprudence, and benefit-cost analysis. All neatly gathered under the headings of Jung / Myers-Briggs personality type theory: introversion, intuition, thinking, and judgment. INTJ -- the opposite of ESFP and ESFJ.

When Intuition is obstructed

Intuition can’t be Mind being taken captive by shadow-parasite. This was Jung’s thought about Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a misperception. Captivity by shadow-parasite is prefrontal cortex overwhelmed by animal emotion amygdala -- a brain phenomenon. Intuition that produces spontaneous insights is Mind’s portal to Soul’s agent who connects us with Logic-Love and cannot be corrupted. But Mind can be interfered with. And it is obstructed by body-brain that would have us believe that our sixth sense can’t be trusted.

It can be trusted if we are mindful of the difference between body-brain and Logic-Love, the function of Mind-Consciousness. If we are alert to what brain is up to and guard our thoughts. Most notably against victimhood, the perversion of Intuition by the. Child’s shadow opposite. The portal to the twin fantasies of absolute authority and absolute freedom that lured the Child’s impaired judgment into self-delusion. That release deluded minds not to the Reality of Logic-Love but into a never-never land of self-indulgence and cruelty.  

When “Feeling” isn’t feeling

The premise by Jung / Myers-Briggs that thinking and feeling can be separated works if feeling, like thinking, has only one source and represents only one set of values. But it doesn’t, and this causes confusion. The source of thinking is one Mind-living energy not in the form of matter whose opposite is brain-dying energy in the form of matter. The source of feeling that Jung / Myers-Briggs posits is Love-Abundance and its values of caring, sharing, affirmation, and empowerment -- all the elements of morality-Good. The morality-Good of families and friendships among individuals devoted to one another.

The other source of feeling that Jung / Myers-Briggs overlooks is emotion seated in the part of the brain that connects the human animal with its pre-human animal ancestry. The amygdala that motivates behavior with the will of the predator to dominate. With the “will to power” that rules the human psyche in the fevered view of Nietzsche and the “triumph of the will” in the crazed view of Hitler. Driven by the fear, rage, and hatred of herd or tribe provoked by competition from other herds or tribes. Entirely devoid of the values of Love among individuals, replaced by devotion to herd in opposition to other herds. Offering not caring, sharing, and empowerment from Abundance but demanding ownership, possession, and control from hollowness.

The “feeling” of tribal belonging

If Logic and Love are inseparable in Reality then so must be thought and feeling. In our alternate “reality” of opposites, of entropy that sees that everything eventually comes apart that was held together by energy that’s dying, they’ve been separated, disconnected. A state of madness that guarantees personalities whose parts flip in and out of sync. Pulled this way and that by sun toward light and coherence, moon toward darkness and incoherence.

Madness is how it is in our alternate “reality.” It’s not just an appearance. But whereas mind and body can be usefully distinguished as they are with Intuition and body-sensing, and as they are with thinking distinguished from the emotion of body-animal brain, thinking and feeling are two aspects of Mind that can’t be separated. Not even in appearance if in Reality it turns out that they’re one and the same.

There are no hairs to be split between “feeling” and “emotion.” But there is a clear distinction between one kind of feeling and another. It is the feeling of family Love that forges relationships among friends not in competition that belongs with thinking and Mind-centered INTJ. It is the feeling of tribal belonging that provokes fear, rage, and hatred against tribes in competition that belongs with feeling and body-centered ESFP.

Nietzsche’s gift

The perversion of this Truth that madness has contrived is the unevolved emotion of animal will seated in the amygdala overtaking the socializing deliberation of the prefrontal cortex. Mob psychology: the herd demolishing the pretext of individual, of independent judgment.

The madness of Nietzsche renowned for his extraordinary fusion of thought with feeling in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Penguin Books 1969): “In a man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts” (Introduction by R. J. Hollingdale, p. 12). A talent also noted by Jung in Psychological Types (p. 319). When, in Truth, Thus Spoke Zarathustra was the voice of the Child-Mind’s shadow -- its unreal opposite -- announcing its triumph in the clear over the will of its host. Whose end would come prematurely in total captivity: mental and physical paralysis.

The opposite of thinking can’t be part of itself. Can’t be feeling whose source is Love when the source of thinking is Logic and the two are inseparable. One Mind, one definition. The “feeling” of ESFP can’t be the only attribute that’s copied from Mind-centered INTJ when all the other attributes of body-centered ESFP have their own definition. Moreover, all functions of Mind manifested in INTJ are of one Mind and inseparable. If an opposite must be found to INTJ-Mind that’s inseparable from Love-feeling then it would have to be the entirety of the opposite personality type. Not one part of it but all of it: Extravert-Sensing-Feeling with Judgment (ESFJ) or with Perceptive (ESFP).

Hostage to guilt

The distinction posed by Jung / Myers-Briggs between thinking and feeling is thus both useful for analysis and misleading. Among all the considerations the one that must control is the inseparability of Logic and Love, Child-Mind’s Parents who gave it definition: the being and doing of Free Choice. The culture of separation and opposition that dominates the corrupted Mind insists that they are separate to hide its illegitimacy. By perpetuating the injustice done to the Child when its Parents supposedly engineered its loss of Consciousness.

When the real injustice was done to the Parents. Because Logic-Love could not have done it. It was a smear perpetrated to lock in place the guilt of the Parents to go along with the guilt of the Child for its part in the separation. Guilt without which captivity to the shadow, the parasite, could not psychologically be sustained.

Humanity’s corrupted mind is held hostage to Child-Mind’s opposite by the colossal lie of guilt. By the lie that because a defenseless Child was betrayed by its Parents its self-image can’t be innocence beloved of its Parents. It must be the helpless innocence of wounded victimhood. A petulant child, gorging on self-pity, entitled to specialness. Excused from all restraint on absolute authority and absolute freedom to settle scores and even the balance. To define fairness on its own terms and no one else’s. To set the rules and write the script however it wishes. In the image of its source: Child-Mind’s opposite. An unreal shadow. Darkness. A parasite.

Toward deconstructing the Big Lie

What example can history offer of the beast that’s wounded victimhood when it’s let loose? Germany, the instigator of one World War set free to instigate another one. When it was “stabbed in the back” and treated unfairly by the peace. By the vindictive Treaty of Versailles that excused it from all restraint and accountability. The myth of wounded victimhood that started with the Child’s self-delusion. The defining values of the Child’s character from that point onward. That will go on replicating itself and re-enacting its wounding until the Mind of Free Choice puts a stop to it. 

Free us of the conviction that separation from our Parents was their doing and ours, from the fear of punishment, and our begging for Innocence by any means and the mockery that is our phony alternate “reality” must end. The nightmare of helpless innocence and wounded victimhood. Freely choosing to understand: that Logic cannot be separated from Love, thought from feeling-values; that the Child’s and our Parents in Reality could never separate from us or harm us in any way, leads us toward our goal. Toward regaining our Innocence that was never lost and Child-Mind’s Consciousness along with it. Toward deconstructing the Big Lie and restoring Truth.

ESFP and ESFJ 

The opposite of Mind is body-matter. Mind-Energy not in the form of matter vs. brain-energy not in the form of matter. So where do extraversion, body-sensing, feeling, and perception fit in? The layer of personality markers from Jung / Myers-Briggs theory that lie opposite INTJ. Markers that upon close examination do more than account for personality type differences. They’re an act of war.

To say that they “fit in” is to miss their source and its intent: to block awareness of Mind, the opposite of matter and body-brains that validate it with their five senses. To block access to the agent of Soul, its opposite and arch enemy. Our connection with Mind’s Logic and Love from Reality who know nothing of alternate realities or their source. That we can access through their gift of intuition, our sixth sense.

Extraversion is orientation toward “objective reality” of energy in the form of spacetime-matter projected “out there.” That’s external to Mind in a compromised state doing the projecting. Both logical impossibilities: projection and its handiwork. A world of body-brains meant to distract Mind from the truth of Reality-Mind and Reality-Creation, neither of which is spacetime-matter or detectable by the body’s five senses. By the gold standard of scientific “knowledge” known as sensory perception. Hubristic nonsense.

Body-sensing is Mind-energy in the form of matter detecting itself. Substituting the body and its five senses for the guidance of Logic-Love accessible through intuition’s sixth sense. The first step toward body’s final ascent to the throne that it imagines has been vacated by Mind. The throne of top-down authority that owns its sensed material domain and is therefore entitled to possess, control, and dominate it. Subjecting it to its mindless, primitive will seated in the amygdala, brain’s common ancestry with animal beast.

Nietzsche’s ideal of “Superman,” the figure transmogrified by Ayn Rand’s “objectivism” into Howard Roark, the noble architect atop his own towering creation. Or the neuroscientist Christof Koch, scrambling up the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in the dark of night, to proclaim the supremacy of King Kong. The beast. The “reductionist” -- romance.

Supremacy over what? Over the Child Free Choice and the Child’s Parents Logic-Love. Over Innocence laid low by guilt. Over Truth replaced by the Big Lie. The supremacy of an unreal shadow over its host, Reality. Creation that needs no Creator. Humanity orphaned and lost that needs no Parents, no guide. Buried now between Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton. The eternal adolescent, Stephen Hawking, yearning for adventure in limitless space.

The arbitrary authority so conjured dominates with absolute authority without opposites and imagines itself as “almighty god.” A perversion of the authority of the laws of cause and effect. Of the values of Logic and Love and the innocence of Soul without opposites that the laws of Reality express. The “triumph” of rage and cruelty over gentle loving kindness. The nightmare of predatory authoritarian supremacy that regularly overtakes our body-obsessed, body-possessed world. More hubristic nonsense.

Feeling that’s associated with the self mis-identified as body-brain rather than Soul-Mind is the unevolved emotion of animal-herd seated in the amygdala. Though it displays tenderness and other signs of nurturing required by procreation its dominant function is fear required for self-protection in space contested by predators like itself. Fear accompanied by rage necessary for intimidation of competitors who can be bullied and hatred for the elimination of enemies who can’t.

This is the emotion stored in body-brains that occupy a material world ruled by a perversion of authority. It is not the feeling described by Jung / Myers-Briggs personality type theory that didn’t venture into where either INTs or ESFs come from and therefore didn’t reflect on why they differ. The appearance of gentle loving kindness of the body-centered world is limited to animals identifying with herd caring for its own. To herd-tribe sharing among its own who forfeit individuality to tribal uniformity so they can belong. It isn’t about the virtue of caring and sharing. About inclusivity that recognizes and values the worth of all herds-tribes and individuals whether they belong or not. The ESF’s body-sensing feeling isn’t about Love.

ESFJ that attaches to the category Judgment becomes the animal beast that seizes control with cruel intent. With Reality’s judgment of innocence perverted by body-brain’s animal will into judgment of guilt. Justified by the perversion of innocence that is wounded victimhood. The all-purpose excuse for projection of condemnation onto “others” and execution by punishment, the infliction of every manner of abuse, every manner of persecution and atrocity available to self-pity. Guaranteed to entrench belief in the reality of its horrors and thereby perpetuate unreality -- the self-delusion of absolute authority without opposites. Tyranny.

Perceptive is brain without Mind-Judgment. Without discernment guided by introspection, reflection, thinking-feeling, values-morals, or discipline. ESF that attaches to Perceptive becomes an action comics caricature. The passive fool who fantasizes that submission to un-boundaried chance that body-brain can’t detect with its five senses attains absolute freedom without limits. Freedom from the limits of definition, the function of Logic-Love that can’t be seen, heard, or touched, and therefore must not exist. Unaware that friend chance is a parasite attached to its host, Mind-unconscious. No one’s friend. That’s all too visible, audible, and palpable to bodies in their made-up “reality.” A cartoon of impossibilities that can’t exist.

The “thinking” of a personality type: ESFP self identified with body that’s deprived itself of the ability to think. A rejection of Mind that imagines itself in a state of spontaneity attained by the magic of specialness. The mindset of a playactor in a one-dimensional entertainment. “Let’s Pretend,” a radio program that was a staple for little fantasists on Saturday mornings, a 1940s version of Disney’s Magic Kingdom. Entertainment that delivers constant “action” through contrivances: games of competition and conflict with no real substance or consequence. A world of superficiality skittering along the surface of a pond like a water-bug, unaware and uninvolved in the life below.

“War” between separation and healing

Two kinds of ESF, both ruled by authoritarian fantasies. ESF with judgment the fantasy of absolute authority without opposites. ESF with perceptive-specialness the fantasy of absolute freedom without limits. One a mask of condemnation and guilt. The other a mask of childlike innocence. Both mis-identification with impossibility, the face in the mirror that is infantile self-absorption. The arrested development of opposition to life that is lifelessness. Of opposition to learning and growth that is mindlessness.

The face of a demon conjured from the pits of hell. Not the fatuous Transylvanian count endeared to us by Hollywood and Bela Lugosi but the monster with hair on the palms of its hands scribed by Bram Stoker. The face of the predator. The face of serious terror, harm, and death.

Free Choice with Mind, no choice with body

Neither of which has any possibility of maneuverability or even existence in the presence of Mind-centered INTJ. Which makes of ESFs a mortal enemy of INTJ. Not that INTJ can return the favor since Mind in Reality can have no awareness of what’s not real. Of impossibilities like absolute authority and absolute freedom. So while conflict between them may sustain ESFs’ playacting fantasy and disrupt relationships, while it may account for the Armageddons of crazed mythology from Zoroaster to evangelical “Christianity,” all it does for INTs is move them to share the Logic-Love of understanding from intuition to heal the separation.

Two opposites that may appear to be in conflict but can’t be if one seeks Truth guided by possibility and the other escape from Truth guided by impossibility. That define our experience of life: healing and separation. And find expression in opposing personality types. In types distinguished by the values that define character. That enable analysis that leads to explanation. To asking Why and coming up with answers that make sense. That, when we hold up the mirror, we can recognize and use to arrest our arrested development and move forward. Choosing freely with Mind instead of body. Without obstruction by externals, bodies, tribal dominance, and the self-willed unawareness that is self-delusion.

Toward self-awareness. Toward Child-Mind’s liberation from self-delusion and awakening to Consciousness. To the sanity of Home in Reality-Creation. Where we started and never really left.

Where Order and Freedom reside 

The values that define character flow from the definition of Self, whether in Reality it is one Child-Mind or in alternate “reality” it is many projections of an unconscious, dreaming Child-Mind. Whether it is the Relationship that is Family in Reality, the basic unit of Creation, or tribe-herd group in alternate “reality,” the only self that the dreaming Child-Mind, corrupted by its shadow-opposite, is capable of recognizing. A self composed of isolated-separated bodies whose individuality-creativity is suppressed by tribe in contrast to Family in Reality where the point is to enable it.

The Family Relationship in Reality is Parent-Child: the bonding of Life-Being / Mind Logic-Love with Free Choice. The birth of the Child thus brought into Being two actors, two Selves, essential to Creation: Free Choice and Family. Whose purpose is to extend, expand, and affirm the Life-Worth of Creation Freely Chosen. This is Creativity -- the engine that drives Creation: the bond between Parent-Child (Family) plus Free Choice (Child).

Its structure is Reality. The laws of cause and effect that apply autonomously. With the Force of Necessity that is Reality without interference by the governance of Mind / Logic-Love. In the same way, the Worth of Life-Creation is affirmed autonomously, through Free Choice, without interference by the Mind / Parents who govern. Were it otherwise there would be no kiss from a handsome prince to awaken the Sleeping Beauty. Our ancestral Mind would be just as well off here.

In both cases the Mind / Parents who govern must abstain from interference for the protection of Authority that resides in Life-Creation itself. For the rule of law. For the democracy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and not for the authoritarian beast that menaces our world. A Truth that Child-Mind corrupted by its shadow-opposite, obstructed by the body’s senses, struggles to grasp. That in Authority under the law reside both Order and Freedom. That in Authority above the law resides neither. It’s tyranny.

The Reality of Idealism and the call for healing

The values presented first are termed “idealistic” because they define the character of our ancestral Mind, the Child who is Free Choice of its Parents Logic and Love, before it lost Consciousness, lost awareness of its home in Reality-Creation, and dreamed the alternate “reality” that is humanity’s material world. Their origin is the Parents who intended the gift of values and talents for their Child’s use in applying Free Choice to Creativity. To the composition, expression, and reciprocation of the Life-Worth of Creation.

They’re idealistic because the expression of values as ideals is part of the function of Creation whereas it can’t be part of an alternate “reality,” dreamed by a corrupted Mind, that’s a perversion of Creation. That pretends to replace Authority that serves and supports the Creation of Life-Worth from the bottom up, under the laws of cause and effect, with a perversion of authority that rules arbitrarily-lawlessly from the top down, not for the Creation of Life-Worth but for its denial. To consummate the original injustice -- the turning of the Child’s Mind against its Parents by an illusion: its shadow-opposite. A virus. A parasite. By self-delusion. A world so defined can’t call for Creation. It can only call for healing.

Meant to be used

The values of Reality-Creation have no inherent ranking. They have their place in the sequence of Logic-Love that moves Creation forward and in the sequence that moves healing forward as well. From Guidance that beckons with Home and Relationship, Innocence and Beauty, Wholeness and Wellness, through Enablement and Empowerment to Spontaneity and Healing. And, hopefully, someday, back to Creativity.  Like all the elements of Creation supported by Logic-Love they have functions that fit together in harmony. One no better or more important than the other. In one interconnected whole -- the Oneness that is Soul.

They also vary in their application to compositions of circumstances, the purpose and meaning of context that’s continually changing and evolving. Values can stand alone in the abstract but they’re meant to be used. To be applied to circumstances that compose each individual’s granular world. To help us navigate the ever-shifting situations that we experience as “life.”

The unreality of “realism”

The ranking of values is left to hierarchy, the perversion of authority that is the dream of an unconscious, corrupted Mind. Our material world ruled by the illusion of absolute authority and absolute freedom. By the mad idea that the Child’s shadow-opposite has replaced Logic-Love, its Parents. Where there can be but one value: the authority of the mad idea ruling over the madness of disorder, disunity, separation. An impossibility. A perversion. A joke.

But because the body’s senses anchor us to this alternate “reality,” because we “know” no other reality, the values that belong to our material world are “realistic.” What must be termed “idealistic” from our perspective is therefore realistic, and what must be termed “realistic” is actually delusional. Such is the world of opposites where Logic and Love, the ultimate values, are gone -- eliminated. Such is our perspective.

From one to two sets of values 

Publication of The Prince in 1532, Machiavelli’s guidance for authoritarian rule, brought to an end the pretense that human behavior follows a single moral code. And with it the idealist’s dream of a “kingdom of heaven” on earth. The values practiced by Mind’s Family-Relationship in Reality have a place in Child’s split Mind. They’ve been adapted to its dream and are recognizably good because families of individuals reside here too. Along with Intuition and the agent of Soul that is our real Relationship.

But these values share uneasy space with a wholly different set of values. The values of tribes. Collections of individuals dedicated not to the development and expression of individuality but to its extinction in service to uniformity. To the direction not of Mind composed of Logic and Love, occupied with Peace, but to brain composed of a leash and the willful predatory instinct at the end of it, bent on war. The prefrontal cortex and the herd of animals that’s the amygdala. The beast that it’s supposed to socialize. It was for the ruler of the beast that Machiavelli shared his statecraft.

All positive values are ultimately subsets of the Energy-Force of Soul-Interconnectedness in Reality. Family Relationship-inclusiveness taking all into itself for Peace, Harmony, Freedom, and Order, and for the enablement, empowerment, and affirmation of the Worth of Relationship’s Creations. Its tribal opposite in unreality takes captive within itself for conformity, disconnection, exclusiveness, disablement, disempowerment, and conflict. This is the ultimate source of negative values -- the “dark side.”

When opposite values conflict

An impactful figure who stood for individual-family values was Jesus. He and the values he taught were not a frontal assault on tribal values but that’s how they came to be viewed by the reigning religious authorities. This is the context of his execution. He was misperceived to be a threat to their authority which, in the end, is what they care most about. Not right or wrong but their license to rule unopposed. Their rationale which holds tribes together in obedience and justifies competition with other tribes for dominance.

Jesus made it plain that he spoke for another rationale not of this world and meant no threat. But because it was attracting widespread interest it created the appearance of a movement. A movement that could replace established authority with another one, and so his innocence or guilt didn’t matter. He had to go. In Ri -- “King of the Jews” -- broadcast the point of his fate: a warning to all who would challenge established tribal authority. A warning and a lie. A projection by authoritarian rule centered on itself and only capable of recognizing itself. The judgment of guilt upon Innocence. Injustice.

Matter is the source of Consciousness? 

If the laws of Necessity that govern the Reality of Mind have a perversion it would be the laws of necessity that rule the alternate “reality” of body. There, energy is under the direction of Mind. Here energy stored in matter, our bodies, imposes its will on us. Bodies dictating to mind-brain how they are to be cared for. Matter telling mind what to do, mind following the direction of the laws of necessity: body survival, body pleasure, body conquest-dominance. There, Mind over energy. Here, matter-energy ruling brains.

Not just Stephen Hawking but all of body-centered science views individual-family values as a threat to its authority. Because it’s out to “prove” through experimental science that mind-consciousness equates with matter-brain. Otherwise, it would have to concede that the only rational explanation for spacetime-matter is that matter originates with Mind, which would overturn its entire rationale. Repeatedly in his book, The Idea of Brain (Basic Books 2020), Matthew Cobb insists that the only possible source of mind-consciousness is brain matter. I.e. matter produces mind instead of the other way around -- a logical absurdity. Proof that science isn’t centered on any “quest for knowledge” but on protecting its founding premise: the reality of bodies and their material environment.

The ultimate purpose served by science and the Church both isn’t discovery and morality but the justification for their tribal authority. Their dominance-supremacy. Expedience dictated by tribal survival-dominance; the only consideration that matters to tribes that otherwise have no logical premise for their rule. Because Truth-morality contradicts tribal expedience.

United in opposition

The two sets of values are thus related to one another not by symbiosis but by opposition. Because tribal values are opposition. Individual-family values don’t recognize the reality of any other system of values since the reality that is their source is Reality-Truth itself. Is Conscience, the faculty of Mind that’s absent in Machiavelli’s tribal expedience.

It’s the same non-relationship that existed between Jesus who spoke for another Reality that can’t recognize unreality and therefore has nothing to oppose. That’s opposed by unreality, its opposition by definition. Reality can’t oppose unreality without making it real, an impossibility. But unreality can “oppose” Reality if that’s what it “is:” opposition to Reality, an absurdity.

The voices in our ears  

If the choice is between two sets of values here on earth -- one set for families-individuals, the other for groups or tribes, one set moral, the other Machiavellian -- how are we made aware of it? Are we the cartoon character beset by two voices whispering in either ear, one in angelic blue under a halo, the other in satanic red sprouting horns? Actually, yes. They’re two versions of our own voice, the voice of our ancestral Mind, one Child.

The devil has it easier because it’s in this world and of it, as are we. And it was the influence of its voice on our ancestral Mind that conceived it. It’s at home here and it likes everything just the way it is: a land of contradictions where anything is possible. Absurdities like absolute authority without opposites and absolute freedom without limits. It can speak out of turn because it thinks it’s the boss, we’re wrongdoers, and we deserve no respect.

Where it can play the joker wearing a thousand masks. Likable or angry, personable and warm or impersonal and cold, reassuring or intimidating, erudite know-it-all or ignorant fool, agreeable ass-kisser or bull-necked warrior. Where it can play the entertainer with a thousand jokes, a thousand perversions of the Truth. Or a magician with a thousand tricks. Overlord, joker and magician -- masters of contradiction.

It's not so easy for the agent of the Soul. It’s in the dream, but Soul that connects with Possibility couldn’t have had a hand in designing a land of contradictions -- an impossibility. So it’s not at home here. And the forms it takes to connect with opposites can’t be contradictions. Not if it’s Soul that connects with Logic and Love who can’t pretend to be what they aren’t. It would never speak out of turn. Not if role modeling respect for the sovereignty, integrity, and Innocence of the individual and the indispensability of Free Will is what brought it here.

Transmissions in the clear

History has given us many profiles of the satanic voice, from philosophy, psychology, theology, and mythology. But why take their word for it when it does the honors itself? With works by minds either fooled or possessed by it that speak in its own words. Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Mari Perron’s A Course in Love, Jerry Martin’s God: An Autobiography. One creative talent not fooled or possessed by it, Fyodor Dostoevsky, brought the Joker into The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan’s disarming visitor to his living room. An engaging conversationalist who would be welcome anywhere.

The agent of Soul has weighed in with its own depiction in A Course in Miracles. With perfect Logic and Love: what the devil is -- the crackpot thought system of our own opposite, our ego; -- what it does -- endlessly splitting off into isolated, separated absurdities; -- how we came to be afflicted by it -- by Child-Mind misidentifying with its own shadow, its ego; -- and how we can be rid of it -- by doing our part to help the Child get its real Self and its right Mind back. By becoming friends with our light side -- the agent of Soul -- and listening to its voice instead of being fooled by our own dark side. By doing exactly what our ancestral Mind must do because that’s who we are: one Child, one Mind. Free Choice, Logic and Love, brought together as One by the Innocence and Force of one Soul.

Doubtless there are many more examples. The point being we aren’t cartoon characters and the voices whispering in our ears, with halos and horns, aren’t either. They’re part of our everyday lives. They’re making their presence felt. And the result is our everyday lives and our everyday world. Thwarted careers and relationships. Wrongdoing of every stripe on every scale. Personalities ruled by the ego striding across the world stage starting wars and taking down democracy.

Why bother?

So why bother with analysis? Why bother articulating the values these opposing influences are feeding into our ears? Because this is the line of scrimmage where the outcome will be determined. Because choice always comes down to values. We motivate ourselves to make the right choice when we look squarely at what we’re doing and what it will cost. When we acknowledge that ours is a world of competition between one way of being and another way. And the difference is expressed in what they stand for: values. The stuff of Worth which is what Reality-Creation is all about.

The mirror that a list of values holds up is the clearest expression of Self that we’re capable of. The choice of different selves that puts it to us: Who are we? Does our behavior and the state of our lives reflect the values we stand for? Is the state of our world the best that we can do? If not, who do we choose to be: our real selves or cartoon caricatures mocking us? Our own opposites. Our own shadows who speak with our own voices and aren’t real.

Why bother with analysis? Why bother holding up the mirror? This is why.

ESFs will rejoice

Ruth Mack’s utility index is one no more. I’ve divided it into two. In the spirit of Machiavelli’s honesty it now reflects the values that define the character of families-individuals and set the code of conduct for tribes. One recognizably idealistic, the other realistic. One on the side Creativity and Peace, the other on the side of obedience and conflict. One light, the other dark.

One reason for both that I find personally compelling is to part certain personality types from their habit of applying tribal values to individual family-type situations. The body-centered personality type extravert-body-sensing-feeling (ESF) programs itself to lock individuals into a tribal-social context where conformity rules. Where originality and creativity are devalued instead of affirmed. Ruinous for any personal-intimate friendship but particularly dangerous for adolescents who need support for the lives they want to live. They don’t need the crushing weight of tribal convention and disrespectful authoritarian parenting.

ESFs mean no harm. They just haven’t looked into the mirror. When they look closely at the two codes; when they see that theirs isn’t the only one; that there’s another; it’s motivated by Love instead of fear; and it doesn’t obstruct the lives of loved ones the way theirs does, they’ll choose the other. They’ll rejoice. They’ll shower me with appreciation. And I can go on being my type: fool that I am, a naïve, moralizing idealist.

*The term “unconscious” or “unconsciousness” is used herein to denote a metaphysical rather than a psychological state of Mind. The state of humanity’s ancestral Mind in the Reality not of spacetime-matter that dreamed an alternate “reality” of spacetime-matter -- our material universe. The Mind I refer to as Child-Mind in Reality who is our one real Self, not the many isolated, separated bodies that we appear to be in its dream. The “unconscious” of Jungian psychology is “an exclusively psychological concept. . . derived. . . in particular from psychopathological experience.” From experience, that is, with the psychologist’s human subjects within the dream and not from speculation about an ancestral entity from another reality. It is expressly “not a philosophical concept in the metaphysical sense.” (C. G. Jung, Psychological Types (Must Have Books 2019, pp. 613-614)

Jungian psychology does, nevertheless, leave open the door to psychic phenomena through the “collective unconscious.” While attributing these to “the inherited brain-structure” Jung includes in their definition “mythological associations. . . dreams and phantasies.” (Jung, op. cit. p. 616) Whose origins are just as readily traceable to metaphysical as to any other “reality.” In fact, the metaphysical rather than “the inherited brain-structure” is logically a truer-to-life source of insight by far into humanity’s story if its premise is correct. Which implies that “right-brained” may have little or nothing to do with it. The ultimate source of all our experience would rather be Mind in Reality, not of spacetime-matter, that’s unconscious and dreaming.

Elusive brain, elusive self

Neuroscience has tried to understand the brain by viewing it as a machine and taking it apart to see how it works since the Danish anatomist and future Catholic bishop Nicolaus Steno suggested it in 1665. It was “the moment that the modern approach to understanding the brain was set out.” [Cobb 1, 40-41]. Where things stand as of December 2019, when Cobb finished his book, is the brain doesn’t actually allow its parts to be so distinguished or localized. They overlap to the point where it can’t be said for certain, for example, that the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere don’t or can’t perform the same functions.

A useful discovery to keep in mind because despite the human tendency to separate itself out into clean divisions, say of motivation and morality, we aren’t all or none of anything. For all the limitations and transgressions I’m tempted to ascribe to personalities other than my own I’m forced to admit that more than a trace of every one lurks somewhere in my own performance. The brain responds to shifting circumstances as a collection of neural networks that shift. That refuse to be pinned down, and so it is with personality, character, and values. Much as I’m tempted to label my personality type the best and others less it won’t stick. What we’re engineered for isn’t status quo that’s static but context that’s flux. Like the brain we have to be anything and everything to be ready for anything and everything. If Darwin was right and species are geared for survival it can’t be otherwise.

From chaos to making sense

So while this essay suggests a neat division of values between idealism and realism, conscience and expedience, individual and tribe, where any individual personality fits in it, with its arrangement of faculties du jour, can’t be pinned down. Just as the law is whatever the court decides in any given case the individual’s fit is whatever choices the individual makes in any given situation. We can be pinned down but only for the circumstances du jour. If it seems I’ve got myself or you securely labeled don’t worry. Circumstances will change and we will too.

And anyway none of this is necessarily the truth. It’s just my bias. Harry Truman said if you want a friend in Washington get a dog. In our suspect reality of elusive everything -- chaos -- if you want the truth get another reality. Go home. That’s what I’m trying to do with these essays. To understand so that I can go home to a life of love, truth, and justice. Where all I ask is that it makes sense.

The Reality of unrest 

Making sense can’t mean perfect Peace if by that we mean inactivity. The end of doing -- everything coming to rest. Not if there is one Reality and it is circumstance that is Mind. The original circumstance for which there can be no previous circumstance that is not Mind and so it just is. Reality is changing circumstances always needing to be fit together, always needing order, always needing the Logic-Love of Mind to do it. A state of wonder and beauty where it’s done and confusion and frustration in our alternate “reality” where it’s not. A state that, for all its wonder and beauty, is still not at rest. Is anything but inactive.

The implication of impossibility that accompanied the first premise of possibility didn’t produce a voice to be shared with the Logic-Love of Consciousness. The Parents. That’s the “reality” of our ancestral dreaming Mind -- the Child. Born of the egg and the seed of Creation, the Oneness-Soul of Innocence without opposites. But it did give Mind its ideal to pursue while searching for rest through the always evolving, always changing contexts of Creation. For coming to rest in the resolution of opposites, the perfection of Peace. An unattainable ideal so long as Mind must abide by its own Logic, the unavoidable implication of opposites.

The unattainable ideal

What does it mean? We don’t owe the movement of changing circumstances here to the intruder that interferes with Logic-Love, though it is responsible for the difficulties they pose -- the churning pressure of events and the turmoil. We owe it to Mind, the ultimate source of all circumstances. To its logical implication of opposites and to the pursuit of its ideal that opposites imply. To the Force of Necessity behind it. “Rest in peace” is no less wishful thinking in Reality than it is in our alternate “reality.” What would be the point of Creation otherwise? There is only the Peace of harmony and order that is not just being but doing. That is not and never will be at rest.

The over-arching motivation for every aspect of doing, including Creation, is to bring all of it to rest without the implication of opposites. It isn’t Perfection. It is the unending search for Perfection, a work in progress that keeps Mind and all of Reality-Creation going. A logical impossibility. An unattainable ideal.

Nothing ventured nothing gained

What, then, is Mind, our ancestral Child-Mind’s Parents? Among other things, role models for creative idealists. The point of Creation isn’t just getting there. It’s also the effort it take whether we make it or not. Striving. Because the measure of the worth of a goal can’t be whether it’s easy or hard, doable or not. It’s the strength of character it adds to those it serves and to those who pursue it. What is the planet earth but a wailing wall of grief over broken hopes, aspirations, and attachments? A constant cry of despair from striving that falls short.

If Creation is all about the expansion and expression of Worth then character that engages with it will expand and express itself as well. With striving that earns it without focusing on payback but on the worth of the goal itself. Without insisting on the rewards of success but unconditionally on the service to be provided. On the truth that striving -- the effort to make a difference -- is its own reward and character is ultimately what we have to show for it. What we the participants in Creation are building in addition to Creation itself.

Are we serious about the life of Love, Truth, and Justice that lies ahead? Will waiting for saviors to do it for us make it happen? Is this the example our role models are setting for us? The idea that “heaven” is where all is peace, quiet, and rest is mistaken. Creation is striving with a purpose. The idealist’s credo: “Nothing ventured nothing gained.”

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Where you wind up on list of values is where you put yourself -- these are defining values. List 1 = Conscious Mind Reality-Creation idealist. List 2 = Realist split mind light unconscious alternate “reality. List 3 = Realist split mind dark alternate “reality.” 

[The following is a first-cut subject to extensive editing. DCH 08/07/23]

Family-individual morality (mind-centered) 

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Guide, Psyche, Agent of Soul, escort
    • Connection to Logic-Love, Reality
    • Guidance, mentoring, role modeling, leadership
    • Logic-Love, metaphysics, understanding, vision, recognition, awareness
    • Memory, awareness-Consciousness, awakening
  • Love
    • Service, support
    • Liberation, Free Spirit
    • Gifts, Talents
  • Logic
    • Decision-choice, Thought-Reason, rationality, sanity
    • Judgment, wisdom, discipline, making sense

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered)

  • Will
    • Tribal strength:
      • self-guide, detachment from Logic-Love
      • self-reliance, self-sufficiency, authorship of alternate reality
    • Willful preservation of tribal authority:
      • mind control, avoidance of individual questioning, understanding
      • heart control, avoidance of individual emotional detachment, disloyalty
      • memory control, avoidance of individual return to Consciousness, awakening
    • Belonging
      • Tribal strength: self-service, self-support
      • Tribal liberation, individual captivity
      • Tribal enablement, individual disablement
    • Animal instinct
      • Replacement of instinct for decision-choice, Thought-Reason, rationality, sanity
      • Replacement of instinct for Judgment, wisdom, discipline, making sense 

“Home” - “Relationship” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered) 

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Family interconnectedness
    • Timelessness, Here and Now
  • Love
    • Unconditional Love
    • Family intimacy-feeling, belonging
    • Inclusiveness, acceptance
    • Relationship -- Family-individual, egalitarian friendship, companionship
  • Logic
    • Understanding, fitting together, sequence
    • Lawfulness, order

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered) 

  • Will
    • Tribal unity
    • Time, temporal, there and then
  • Belonging
    • Conditional transaction
    • Fraternity
    • Exclusiveness
    • Relationship -- tribe-member, authoritarian alliance, comradeship
  • Animal instinct
    • Action
    • Arbitrary rule, dictation

“Innocence” - “Beauty” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered) 

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Spirit, essence, purity, perfection
    • Aesthetics, sensuous joy of nature, art or music
    • Sanctuary, shelter, safety
    • Peace, tranquility, compatibility
  • Love
    • Authenticity, Honesty, sincerity, truthfulness
    • Liberation from addiction, toxicity
    • Individuality-affirmation, validation, Worth
  • Logic
    • Definition, boundaries
    • Knowledge, Truth
    • Protection, security
    • Awareness-Self, recognition-introspection, Innocence-harmlessness
    • Awareness-Authorship, Parents-Creator
    • Authority of rule of law

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered)

  • Will
    • Fortress, bunker
    • Victimhood, guilt, Retribution, vengeance
    • Tribal predatory will to
      • conquer-replace purity, perfection
      • possess-accumulate aesthetic wealth-treasures of sensory perception
    • Belonging
      • Invalidation, punishment
      • Tribal dependence on expedience-inauthenticity, appearances-facades, deception-masks, dishonesty-insincerity, for preservation of tribal authority
      • Captivity to addiction, toxicity
  • Animal instinct
    • Tribal predatory instinct for appearance, deception, weakness of prey
    • Aggression, intrusion, invasion
    • Survival, self-defense, attack, predation
    • Awareness-other, extraversion, guilt-harmfulness
    • Denial-Authorship, self-creator
    • Self-authority, rule above the law

“Wholeness” - “Wellness” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered) 

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Wholeness, Interconnectedness
    • Health, healing
    • Self-integrity
  • Love
    • Abundance, benevolence, loving kindness, caring
    • Family belonging, equality, sharing
    • Affirmation, respect, Worth
  • Logic
    • Reality, structure, foundation, stability
    • Lawfulness, respectfulness, justice-fairness
    • Judgment, discipline

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered)

  • Will
    • Intra-tribal cohesion, inter-tribal competition, conflict
    • Individual provisioning for competition winning, survival
    • Individual Self-surrender, sacrifice
  • Belonging
    • Tribal bounty, largesse, charity
    • Tribal belonging
    • Individual subordination, surrender
    • Tribal affirmation, respect, Worth
    • Individual invalidation, disrespect, worthlessness
  • Animal instinct
    • Tribal glory-mythology, fantasy, facade, fabrication
    • Tribal arbitrary rule, above-the-law lawlessness, arrogance, injustice-unfairness
    • Tribal license, individual confinement

“Enablement” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered) 

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Belief, faith
    • Ideal
  • Love
    • Growth, expansion
    • Growth -- personal, character, spiritual
  • Logic
    • Development, competence, skill-ability, maturity
    • Progress, advancement, achievement, success
    • Learning, experience, discovery, exploration

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered)

  • Will
    • Tribal faith in its supremacy
    • Tribal pursuit of the ideal of absolutes: authority without opposition, freedom without limits
  • Belonging
    • Tribal hegemony, empire
    • Tribal unawareness of personal Growth
  • Animal instinct
    • Tribal nurturing of its young for group protection, supremacy
    • Tribal training in competitive skills
    • Tribal recognition for competitive superiority
    • Tribal support for scripted individual learning, preservation of status quo
    • Tribal hostility to unscripted individual experience, discovery, exploration, threat of change in status quo 

“Empowerment” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered)

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Inclusiveness, Oneness, Family unity
    • Interconnection
    • Empowerment, strength
    • Timelessness, Here and Now
  • Love
    • Feeling, intimacy
    • Creativity
    • Relationship-Connection
  • Logic
    • Implication, sequence, extension, evolution
    • Context expansion
    • Meaning, Purpose, Understanding
    • Judgment, discipline
    • Presence of Mind

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered) 

  • Will
    • Exclusiveness, multiplicity, tribal cohesion
    • Competition, separation, division
    • Force, power
    • Time inexorability
  • Belonging
    • Invulnerability, insensitivity
    • Conformity, sameness
    • Obedience
  • Animal instinct
    • Status quo, tradition
    • Context contraction
    • Fate, chance
    • Untamable wildness
    • Absence of Mind 

“Spontaneity” - “Creativity” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered)

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Soulmates, playmates, playfulness
    • Exaltation, joyfulness, happiness, laughter
  • Love
    • Relationship, intimacy-Trust
    • Creativity, individuality, originality, eccentricity
    • Free expression, diversity, variety
  • Logic
    • Awareness-Self, sovereignty, individual rights, Self-respect
    • Free Thought, Choice, Will
    • Judgment, independence

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered)

  • Will
    • Teammates, fans
    • Exultation
  • Belonging
    • Alliance, team loyalty, suspicion-distrust
    • Conformity, conventionality
    • Scripted expression, uniformity
  • Animal instinct
    • Awareness-tribe, tribal supremacy, individual Self-denial, Self-effacement
    • Scripted-ruled thought, choice, will
    • Vacated judgment, dependence

Published on Leave a comment on Easy Come, Easy Go

From an old channel island, the new rises out of the mist
hovering over the water in the stillness
borderline
between the graduated blue of the sky
reaching up to the quarter moon on high
and the textured blue of the ocean below
dotted with specks of white

Bodies navigating trails down the waterless slopes
voices caught
by the wind, birds gliding on the wind,
pine branches dancing in the wind
come to rest and fall silent.

In the shadow of my relief from the sun
who is to notice?
Who wills chronicle to life and adds notations
to its log? As if another will, long hence
would need to know. Would care to know.

What unnamed hand scrawls its signature
on the record of time
soul of anonymity, here and gone?
Self or opposite? Host or parasite?
Is it possible to choose?

Can’t I just be whatever for a little while
and be done with it?
“Easy come, easy go. As it came, let it go.”
Is that what the view, the wind, the stillness has to say?

I’m here for a little while
Enjoy me while you can.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alta Vicente, Palos Verdes
Monday 06/13/22

Published on Leave a comment on The Two-Wheeled Cart

In the shade of the aspens
over my two-wheeled cart I look to the sky:
You may not take this from me!
The gift for work and play in my Garden of Creation
given by my Parents with Love

To be free in the great outdoors,
beneath open skies in the sun,
attending to my children,
my Creations and my cart, the stuff of delight.
The stuff of permanence

Larry is still there, curled up in bed with a good book
Saddle on its stand beside the grand piano
The dining table and his boyhood bed
Magazines stacked from a career in writing
Equipment stacked from adventures
rafting down the wilderness
And the shelves with games
all of it still there.

Helen and Max are still there, with Clara Jane.
Lula Mae, my brother and sister and the dog.
All there because I was there
And I related to it, which makes it forever.
15 Glacier Lily Road and 1126 Greentree Road
all still there because I related to it
and Relationship is Love

I go back because the Love that I am
sees through what left to feeling that never left
A Child that’s Relationship misses it,
cries out for it, wraps his arms around it
Around what’s there and gone.

Around The Home that left and never left.
The Home where we are and will return to.
To the Love that’s you. My darlings, my friends.
The Feeling. Relationship.

I come to leave-taking.
To thought moved by feeling because I relate.
Because I am attachments under the sun
beside my two-wheeled cart,
loving and relating
in my Garden of Creations and relationships.

In the joy of Love and friendships forever.

Published on Leave a comment on Personality Type Theory: the Problem of Opposites and the Lure of the “Other”

The spoiler

Maybe it was because she was born at the turn of the 20th century, in 1900. Her thoughts and feelings always teetering on the edge, drawn back into the 19th century. The glory days of the Clays of Kentucky, her ancestors -- statesmen, aristocrats. That gave my mother her gift for reflection. We both liked to reflect when the meal was done. Her gaze would drift out the window, through the trees into the sky beyond, and she was gone. Lost in thought. Lost to memory.

She could have gone on forever about her childhood. In a small college town in the hills of Western Pennsylvania, her family a single working mother with an only child. Church, piano, and friends. Silliness and laughter. College football and dances at the Fort Pitt Hotel in Pittsburgh. Familiar names and faces waving back from trolleys. She knew them all. An ideal of Utopian innocence that became the Utopian innocence of my childhood. Not particularly Utopian or innocent in either case, yet transcendent.

She wouldn’t go on forever if the subject was herself. She said she was afraid of what she would find if she looked too far within. Her voice went to singsong. And then it was over. The reflections stopped. Utopian beacons of innocence OK, guilt lurking in the shadows not OK. Leave it be.

Leave everything be that’s actually interesting. About ourselves and the people in our lives. Be content instead with what’s on the surface. With trinkets and dog food. Let guilt or whatever it is smash up the furniture in the darkness unmolested. Keep your distance.  Don’t be unsociable. Mustn’t shine a light. Mustn’t disturb the demon. Mustn’t intrude with the Truth. 

The world of personality types unexamined

Personality type theory intrudes. With analysis that would expose the fearsome thing within clinically, objectively. Deprive it of its animal passion dispassionately. The mindless will of the beast that resides in our animal brain: allegiance to the tribe, blood and soil. Honoring the code of loyalty. Unquestioning loyalty to Plato’s Cave and its Cave-master. To its unquestioned authority.

All of it a masquerade. A farce that mocks us with its provocations for being unable or unwilling to understand it. For being afraid to go there, afraid of the Truth. For being so easily separated from all that’s dear to us by a con artist behind a silly mask. A mask that goads us into making something of nothing. Whose only weapon is the treasure that we hand over to it. The cache of powers and abilities, valuables and talents, that is us. Our identity. Our Self.

Projected in two parts into a strange new world. An alternate “reality” of body-brains divided into personality types guaranteed to keep the farce going. Into compositions of parts that take the stage each in its own costume with its own tribal insignia. Ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, function and rank, talents, tastes, predatory styles, family mythology, and more. A few revealing individuality, the rest hiding it behind uniforms with numbers. Clones marching in lockstep.

All at the ready to manage the differences without understanding “there” or how or why they got there. Without self-awareness. All at the ready not to manage the differences but to bring them into conflict. To imagine that this must be their purpose and so to throw themselves into the melee with abandon. Into chaos, the state of a world of personality types unknown, unexamined, misunderstood. 

Schiller’s choice: idealism or realism

Myers-Briggs personality type theory evolved from the disciplines of philosophy and psychology. Specifically from the practice and intuition of the Swiss analytical psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) and, before him, the ideas of the German poet, philosopher, and playwright Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). Jung’s Psychological Types (1921) is the first formulation of the basic types popularized by Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers: introvert-extravert, intuition-sensing, thinking-feeling. [Isabel Myers, Gifts Differing (1980)]

The choice presented to the observer logically takes the form of competition between two Myers-Briggs personality opposites: intuitive-reflective thinking vs. body-sensing feeling. The former inherently introverted, introspective-subjective, the latter inherently extraverted-objective. The choice is thus between types fashioned by sources whose reality resides within Mind, i.e. the world of thoughts-ideas, or in the external world of bodies-brains and other objects discernible by bodies’ senses.

Myers-Briggs captures the deep divide within the self-deluded Mind of the one Child, and therein lies the brilliance of its intuition. In the clarity of opposition between two sets of faculties, one concentrated in INTJ, the other in ESFP: introversion-reflection-thinking-judging vs. extraversion-sensing-feeling-perceiving. The former entirely mind-centered, the latter entirely body-centered, although to say that feeling can be entirely distinguished from thinking is an oversimplification. Not so but close enough.

INTJ is associated with the conscious thinking of mind that subjectifies. ESFP is associated with the unthinking will of emotion, seated in the body’s animal brain, that objectifies. INTJ is associated with the deliberation and civilizing conscience of Logic and Love that resides in mind. ESFP is associated with action and its socializing discipline seated in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. INTJ is associated with being, ESFP with doing. INTJ with right, ESFP with win. Share vs. own-possess. Affirm vs. rule. Empower from the bottom up, control from the top down. Individual Worth vs. group-tribal supremacy.

The choice is between “idealism” and “realism,” two irreconcilable worlds described by Schiller as “. . . an opposition which is responsible for the fact that no work of the mind and no deed of the heart can make a decisive success with one class, without thereby drawing upon it a condemnation from the other. This opposition is, without doubt, as old as the beginning of culture. . . .” [quoted in C. G. Jung, Psychological Types (Must Have Books 2019, p. 168)].

Personality type is bias.

The mind that imagines itself to be above the fray, objective, dispassionate, and so qualified to heal the separation, only adds to the turmoil. Personality type sitting in judgment of personality types is a fool. The bias of personality type compromises the Logic of explanation. Turns discussion among friends into debate among competitors.

Plato’s virtuous philosopher who blunders into the Cave may view himself as Truth-bearing sunlight, but to the menagerie of personality types within he’s just another personality type. Who happens to be Truth-bearing sunlight, but who asked for Truth? Who wants sunlight? They don’t or they wouldn’t be there. If the houselights need to be turned up on their fun, their delusion, it’ll happen when someone gets around to it.

So let the author confess and maybe we can get on with it. Let the reader put whatever the author has to say into context where it might add to understanding instead of misunderstanding. Are you eager to listen or itching to retaliate? In either case it could be because I’m an introvert. An intuitive-thinking-judging introvert. Either the thoughtful, compassionate, accessible, respectful, lovable INTJ or the moralizing, superior, elitist, aloof, interventionist, hated INTJ. All depends on your point of view. On your personality type. If you see me as one or the other it would be because I am one or the other.

Fetch!

How does my bias affect my judgment? According to Jung, the American philosopher William James (1842-1910) “was the first to indicate . . . the extraordinary importance of temperament in the shaping of philosophical thinking,” and what James noticed was that the idealist and “empiricist” (realist) “believes the other to be inferior to itself.” [quoted in Jung, op. cit. 373-374).

I, the idealist, believe that “realists” are fools. Chasing after material objects their senses detect without realizing that they’re playing fetch. Without realizing that the objects are their own tail, put there by their own bodies’ senses, directed by their own corrupted minds. Being chased for a purpose: so they’ll make fools of themselves. So their easily distractable minds won’t realize that they’re canines on a leash. And the figure at the other end of the leash is amusing itself at their expense. Keeping them from the Truth: that it, their bodies, and their fascinating material universe, are an illusion. Action-comics escapist nonsense. A flimsy, one-dimensional joke that I find genuinely amusing when it isn’t horrifying. This is how my temperament affects my judgment.

One or the “other”?

Delving within to uncover the mysteries of the human Psyche with personality type theory has another drawback besides bias. It implicitly reinforces a lie. One of the central pillars that hold up an entire edifice of lies, the alternate “reality” that we call home. “Life” on “earth,” each an illusion. The premise that we are isolated-separated bodies with brains inhabiting a material world of objects organic and inorganic. A world of interaction among individual selves and “others.” An illusion because it’s a logical impossibility. It can’t be.

The designation of personality types for purposes of analysis necessarily objectifies them. It recognizes them as “others” separate from our one ancestral mind when logically there can only be one ancestral Mind. A Mind that metaphysics tells me is a Child. The Child of Parents who reside in Reality linked to our alternate “reality” by a sequence of cause and effect.

A Child who was given a critical role in Creation: the role of Free Choice. Who lost consciousness and mistook its own shadow-opposite for a separate self. Who was thereby misled into projecting a perverted version of itself into an alternate “reality” -- the dream that is our material world -- to escape Reality. Who must now pass through this world to gain maturity and the competence to perform its role. Who must, with the help of its projections -- us -- regain Consciousness.

The underlying Reality

If humanity is to do its part it can’t repeat the Child’s mistake. It must recognize that Reality is one Child-Mind and there are no “others.” It must stop objectifying its own dark side as an “other.” And it must stop making its own dark side and the dark sides of “others” real by projecting unwanted, painful aspects of itself onto “others.”

Unless personality type analysis recognizes the underlying Reality of one ancestral Mind, one Child, at the outset; unless it takes a position against objectifying any type as an “other,” it will be misunderstood. It will perpetuate the cycle of misperception and misjudgment instead of achieving its purpose: to break the cycle with Understanding.

Myers=Briggs doesn’t inquire into its origin in metaphysics. It doesn’t ask or explain why or how it came about beyond the study of human psychology within the physical environment defined by sensory perception -- humanity’s “reality.” Beyond spontaneous insights from humanity’s sixth sense, the voice that can’t be silenced. These are my speculations. Myers-Briggs stands on the accuracy of its formulation -- on how well it aligns with subjective experience and perception. That is, on whether it makes sense and delivers results, and it does. 

The nature of feeling 

There are two types of feeling, one that’s an essential part of thinking, the other that’s opposed to thinking. Values required for evaluation are rooted in feeling, and evaluation is required for reasoning that supports the choices and decisions of judgment. Logic and Love can’t function independently and neither can thinking-reasoning and feeling-evaluation. For the same reason: one completes the other. To be a thinking type in the Myers-Briggs sense would be to limit judgment to quantitative measurements without input from subjective values, the incomplete “reasoning” of a machine. If personality type categories are to represent complete human functions then thinking requires feeling.

The brain’s amygdala -- our animal-reptilian brain -- is a source of unevolved emotion that ties back to pre-human ancestors and also to tribal-predatory passion. Which makes it a source for body-sensing’s feeling-sensation and reasoning-evaluation both. Yet it makes more sense for this source to be associated with the body-sensing type than the mind-centered thinking type. Animal will is notoriously opposed to thinking. It’s the cherished ideal of those who march in lock step to the force of “nature.” To the Triumph of the Will over all opposition. Body-sensing types opposed to thinking.

The 5-Factor theory: Myers-Briggs in reverse

Albert Einstein once observed that scientists aren’t strong in Logic. Logic is the faculty of Mind that enables analysis; that in turn fits parts together in logical order to form explanation; that in turn enables understanding. Its function is to establish purpose and meaning from the baseline condition. To establish context, not to reason what to do about it which is a separate faculty of Mind.

A good illustration of Einstein’s observation is the so-called “5-Factor” theory of personality type. The theory and its five factors -- extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism -- claim scientific legitimacy by its use of quantitative measurements. As if this alone legitimizes its “quest for knowledge.” It can’t if their accuracy and relevance to the subject are open to question. Quantitative measurements can’t be any more conducive to legitimacy than the qualitative analysis that went into the other theory. Not if the subject is forces beyond the observable universe that shape the human Psyche.

The difference between the two theories is the difference between mind-centric and body-centric. Specifically the difference between the qualitative intuition of subjectivity which can’t be verified by sensory perception and quantitative measurements which can. The Logic of the Myers-Briggs types is based on the empirical practice of psychology as well as the a priori Logic of philosophy. Both solid analytical ground for their subject. To suggest that the 5-Factor theory is more “scientific” for being quantitative is to demean any analysis that can’t be quantitative.

Spontaneous intuition plays a prominent part in every field; science included. Intuition couldn’t have played a part in the 5-Factor theory if Jung and Myers-Briggs came first. What did play a part was retaliation: the definition of an alternate theory by its opposite. Which is all that the 5-Factor theory is: not original thinking from anywhere but a copycat version of Myers-Briggs in reverse. The difference between the two theories is the difference between sense and nonsense.

A manifesto of tribal dominance

What are its “factors” but a transparent ploy by bias? To redirect humanity’s self-identity away from the possibility of mind-awareness and individuality suggested by the intuition of Myers-Briggs back toward the body-awareness and collectivity of the herd. Back toward “nature:” the beast swinging from trees. What are the five factors but deceptions:

  • “Extraversion” that leaves out introversion would make of introversion an unnamed, unrecognized subset of itself. The “logic” of which can only be numbers that confirm that, yes, there are more extraverts than introverts. And so extraverts “win” and whoever “wins” dominates. The law of the animal will. Numbers deployed in service to the irrational.
  • “Agreeability” is sociability required by tribal conformity that triumphs over independent judgment required by individual character, honesty, and integrity. Agreeability is smiling, ass-kissing obeisance to authority, superficiality that masks its mindless animal will. Incapable of trusting or being trusted. Positive on the surface, something very different underneath.
  • “Openness” is the pose of inclusiveness and accessibility adopted by sensory perception. “Open” in the exhilaration of discovery to the world of its five senses, closed to the Logic and Love of Understanding, purpose and meaning, from its sixth sense. The triumph of matter and senselessness over mind and sense. Of body-sensing over mind-intuition.
  • “Conscientiousness” is the tribe’s self-congratulatory feeling for its own: tenderness toward its children and specialness toward its members. Set off against the unfeeling that it directs toward “others,” the competition: indifference, insensitivity and cruelty, rage and hatred. Self-justification, the false innocence of helpless victimhood that masks harmfulness and guilt. The absence of Love.
  • “Neuroticism” is psychosis -- detachment from reality -- that affirms the root of psychological pain not in Mind corrupted by self-delusion but in neurons of the brain contaminated by chemicals. That would relegate any dissent from independent judgment against the unquestioned authority of “agreeability” to the status of mental illness.

The 5-Factor theory is five values shared and reinforced by tribe. A manifesto of tribal identity over one Self, supremacy over other tribes, and dominance over individuals. Crushing the spirit out of individuality, the atrocity that is authoritarian supremacy and the global threat to democracy and world order. The opposite of science’s vaunted objectivity and anything but “conscientious.” It is the work of a con artist. A farce.

The 5-Factor theory’s real intent

If there is bias in the choice between theories it is the bias of personality type that’s built into the claim of every field whether “subjective” or “objective.” Mine is the bias of the INTJ type. But the so-called “more scientific” theory has its own bias: the extraverted objective body-sensing feeling type. Which accounts for Einstein’s observation that Logic is not the strong suit of scientists: they’re letting bodies’ senses dominate their “thinking” instead their minds. Instead of mind over matter they put their faith in matter over mind. A logical absurdity.

The 5-Factor theory may present itself as an alternative to the idealist Jung / Myers-Briggs theory but the realist’s actual intent is to replace it. Their opposition is part of a larger philosophical divide that’s been with us forever and may go on forever so long as realists cling to their five senses and fear their sixth.

Myers-Briggs is on solid ground

It bears repeating that the mindset of science is grounded in the religion of sensory perception. In the unquestioned supremacy of the body’s senses -- taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound -- to establish the baseline condition. Thereby denying any but a tangential role for the sixth sense of intuition. For a perspective not grounded in sensory perception that our sixth sense routinely reminds us is there. Which makes of science not a mindset grounded in Logic but in professional and institutional bias as irrational as any it’s had to deal with from its ancient enemy, the Church.

It bears repeating that personality type theory that’s grounded in the Logic of mind-centered philosophy, corroborated by the practice and intuition of analytical psychology, is on far more solid ground, more accurate and more to be trusted, than theory that relies on the quantitative measurements of a body-centered science that distrusts the intuition and Logic of Mind.

Captive to the dark lord of the body

Freudian psychoanalysis was earthbound. Centered on physiological causes of behavior termed “neurotic” because neurons -- brain chemistry -- explained it. Freud’s protégé, Carl Jung, broke with his mentor to look elsewhere, into what mind had to reveal about the condition of the human Psyche instead of mindless, procreative urges of the body. The distinction between mind- and body-centered psychology brought about a seismic shift in orientation away from humanity identified with tribes, disciplined by the conformity of belonging, to humanity identified with individuals liberated, enabled, and empowered by family.

The shift didn’t go far enough to liberate Jung from an earthbound perspective. But turning away from the body’s five senses to mind’s sixth sense did liberate others who followed his lead. The lead of a personality type now flooded with insights into what caused his seismic break with Freud: the baffling difference in their personality types that impeded communication and understanding and yet accounted for a remarkable intuitive grasp of moving parts that make up the personality. The psychological equivalent of physics breaking down the atom, opening up a new world of possibilities for analysis and discovery. Not without resistance, because even though analysis guided by Logic-Love from the sixth sense has made inroads, every field remains captive to the tyranny of the five senses. To the dark lord of the body.

“Fate” isn’t happenstance.

Hence the appearance of body-centered competition with Jung’s mind-centered personality type theory. The 5-Factor system that matches the number of senses that produced it. Beginning with “agreeability” that, like the other components has but one overriding purpose: to pull humanity’s identity back from the Jung / Myers-Briggs system’s focus on the individuality to tribe. Because this is how the mind of one Child corrupted by its opposite, Child-the-many, views itself. Not as an individual but as a group. Not as an individual with self-awareness and Free Choice, guided by deliberation, but as an animal-herd willed by instinct, driven by emotion.

It's a mistake to think that because evolution seems to progress by happenstance that it’s not willed by mind. It is willed by mind but in a state that’s captive to delusion. And it’s for us, its projections inhabiting a mad dream, with guidance from Logic-Love, to help break the cycle of happenstance, restore order, and bring it back to Reality.

The captivity is intentional. Whether we are aware of it or not. It is willed by Mind in a state that’s not functioning properly. That’s corrupted -- out of its mind. And the will that won’t allow us to understand who we are, that insists that we can’t be individuals supported by family, that we can only be tribes forcing their members into conformity, competing with one another for dominance, destroying one another in a mad quest to rule without opposition, to eliminate competition, is anything but happenstance. Is anything but the accidents and mistakes that define evolution as we know it. It’s purposeful. And when it shows up in the guise of “agreeability,” all good-guy likability and humor, it does not wish us well. It means to keep us captive to what it is and all that it is: self-delusion. Mistaken identity. The idea that we are who and what we aren’t: our opposites.

The only “factors” that matter: Logic and Love

By abandoning the straits of physiology in Freudian psychology Jung’s sixth sense took a first step toward accessing another perspective. The perspective of Logic-Love that never left the Mind that’s mistaken. The perspective that never deluded itself into mistaken identity. That recognizes us only for who we are and not for who we aren’t. And offers the choice of a guide who has no intention of anything but our freedom to grow and create as we will, according to our own unique gifts and our own individuality. Individuality that Jung’s intuition with personality types can now be managed not for the purpose of service to warring animal tribes but in service to Creativity -- the order and harmony of Logic inseparable from Love.

This is the context of Jung’s insights and the personality type theory that evolved into Myers-Briggs. This is the context, too, of the body-centered so-called “scientific” 5-Factor theory that means to replace it. That’s doing the bidding not of science but of self-delusion. The only “factors” that matter are Logic and Love.

Why opposites?

Logic-Love says everything in Reality-Creation must have a definition that defines what it is and what it does. So that it can be known and recognized by Logic-Love, the gatekeepers to Reality-Creation responsible for fitting all its constituents together. In logical harmony or order, which means without contradiction.

The definition of anything except Oneness logically implies the existence in some form of its opposite. If one thing must exist then why not its opposite? A question that Logic-Love can’t wave away because it’s inconvenient. Or because it spoils perfection if perfection is a state of rest where there are no more implications of Logic to pursue, no more connections and relationships of Love to be made. Where Energy has no more work to do. In short, where there is no point to Reality-Creation and so what can it do but shut down.

Why Free Choice?

Eternal Peace -- a state of impossibility so long as Mind / Logic-Love exists. Since it, too, is defined by what it does as well as by what it is. Since Reality-Creation is both what it is and what it does. Everything under the laws of cause and effect, the Force of Necessity: Reality-Creation is Worth and has Worth because it earns Worth. “Worth” that can’t come about any other way. Thus there can be no Being without Doing. Observing, thinking, feeling, or judging without acting.

The notion of “heaven” as eternal peace, where all is at rest and nothing happens, is the flip side of the notion that we are where the “action” is. Because we aren’t at rest. We’re in eternal conflict and therefore something must be “happening.” Both sides of an absurd notion equally deluded, equally mistaken.

The original circumstance that calls for Logic-Love to define with meaning and purpose was and is itself. Where we come from: Worth. We have Worth because we are Worth. And the affirmation, enablement, and empowerment of Worth by Free Choice is our mission whether we are one Child-Mind functioning with Free Choice unimpaired in orderly Creation or the appearance of many body-brains trying to function with Free Choice messed with in a disorderly dream.

Why it’s hard to understand.

The relationship that emerges between opposites and Reality-Creation is a strange one that’s baffled the best minds down through the ages. It’s hard to grasp that opposites can’t co-exist with Reality-Creation when it’s also true that they’re a necessary part of it. It’s hard to grasp:

  • when the explanation involves one Mind, one Consciousness, that performs two distinct functions that would contradict one another if they overlapped and thereby un-define all of Reality-Creation.
  • When one of these functions cannot encounter error and exist in a state of unconsciousness while the other can.
  • When the second function must operate on a lower plane of Creation since it and its plane are extensions of the first. Inferior to the superior in line of authorship-succession but not in line of control since neither superior nor inferior has anything to do with control.
  • When the second function encounters the parasite that is its opposite in a state of unconsciousness, deludes itself into reversing roles, and imagines that it has projected itself into a world opposite to Reality-Creation.
  • When the alternate “reality” is our world made “real” by Energy, the source of matter and the agent of Mind. And now the agent of its opposite, an illusionist. The enabler of a magician’s act meant to perpetuate its world of opposites. Our self-delusion.

The mother of injustice

“Control” is misperception of the laws of cause and effect of Reality-Creation, backed by the Force of Necessity, to which Mind itself and all of its definitions are subject. Think of the “Force” in Star Wars without the rule of absolute authority dispensed arbitrarily from the top down. Applied instead from the bottom up at the direction of Logic and Love in enablement and empowerment of Creation instead of itself.

Otherwise Reality-Creation is distinguished not by the presence of control but by its complete absence. A Truth that the collective mind of humanity, corrupted by its captivity to control, finds virtually impossible to grasp. A Truth that accounts for virtually every injustice known to history including the crucifixion: misperception of authority and misjudgment in its application. Injustice that breeds animal rage and hatred and accounts for history’s turn, time and again, to conflict to assuage it.

The authority of making sense

I know of one source in literature that provides a coherent, comprehensive context for understanding opposites. For understanding how they’re reconciled in Reality-Creation by both Logic and Love. Fragments have shown up here and there: notably Parmenides’ metaphysics, the Truth implied by the miracles of Jesus taught by the Gnostic Christian Valentinus, and Advaita Vedanta Hinduism. Otherwise, it’s not from Laozi’s Tao, Siddhartha Gautama’s Buddhism, Hinduism’s Upanishads, classical philosophy, biblical Christianity, or anything “new age.”

It’s A Course in Miracles, metaphysics taught by a source that appears to be Jesus but isn’t biblical Christianity. The name given to its author may not matter in any case so long as it’s an agent of Soul. Authenticated not by any earthly affiliation, by any ideology, philosophy, or religion, but by the authority of Logic and Love. By making sense. The “authority” that gave the life of Jesus resonance and the Course too.

How and where opposites are resolved

What to do with opposites is resolved by the one possibility in Reality-Creation of a state where opposites may “exist” without contradicting it: the state of a Mind that has consciousness but isn’t defined by it, so that it can lose consciousness and still be what it is. If Mind / Logic-Love is Consciousness by definition then it can’t lose consciousness. But if it extends itself to produce a Child-Mind with a different function that it Free Choice, then its extension is given a different definition that can’t be Consciousness. It’s Free Choice that has consciousness that can be lost and still exist.

And in this state of existence without consciousness, a mind, as we well know, can dream anything. Anything it wants, where what it wants lies beyond awareness and may include opposites. Opposites that now “exist” but only in a dream where they can’t contradict Reality-Creation. Where they can’t have any real consequences, and so the issue of what to do with opposites is resolved.

The one thing is Real by virtue of Parent-Mind Conscious; the other is unreal by virtue of Child-Mind unconscious. A state of Reality-Creation Parent-Mind Consciousness plus unreality Child-unconsciousness we can call “Everything.” A state held together by the attribute of Parent Mind-Consciousness that is the Interconnectedness of Soul-Energy. The attribute of Being or Oneness that is the unique state of Innocence without opposites. Soul-Energy that can embrace Everything because it knows no boundaries. Because it is its own enforcer: Energy, the Force of Necessity. And therefore it alone is impervious to the contradictions of opposites.

The engine of awakening

All attributes of Parent-Mind that is Logic-Love. Our best friend in our world of illogic, fear, guilt, and hatred. That’s accessible through the gift of Mind that is, thankfully, our sixth sense. The sense that one unconscious Child-Mind corrupted by its opposite, dreaming that it’s many animal-brains trapped in their five senses, fears for the end that it can bring to the dream. To the self-delusion that Child-Mind is its opposite.

How can Child-Mind restore sanity? Not by Logic-Love, its Parents, waving a magic wand for this would end Free Choice and their Child along with it. Not by sending a “savior” to do what Free Choice must do for itself. But by helping with explanation that leads to Understanding accessible to projections in the dream when they liberate themselves from captivity to their body-brains’ five senses. When they learn to listen to an agent of Soul through their sixth sense that connects them to Logic-Love, Child-Mind’s source.

That could never interfere with Free Choice by coercion, intrusion, or captivity of any kind but can guide with Logic-Love when asked. Because Relationship between Parent-Child has existed since the Growth of Creation when the Child was born. It can never be broken, and guidance is part of what it does. It’s the engine of Creation, and now that Child-Mind has lost consciousness it must be the engine of its awakening. Healing the separation. 

Which will it be?

We can’t do what we’re here for without Relationship between Parent-Child. We don’t “exist” alone. Like the inorganic stuff of the dream we are “relational.” We only “exist” in relationship. Not with one another but with Logic-Love through one another: the understanding that our one ancestral Mind only exists in Relationship with its Parents and therefore its projections in the dream can only “exist” in relationship with the same Parents. Whether we choose to be aware of it or not.

Carl Jung’s and Myers-Briggs’ contributions to personality type theory start from appearances and let us follow theirs and our sixth sense beyond. To connect with the source of their intuition and ours that can lead us, if we let it, not into troubled encounters with others but through them to the Truth of reconciliation beyond. Get it right with Logic-Love and we do our part to help Child-Mind awaken. Get it wrong and we continue on our path to a “paradise” of “action” in a universe of violence. Which will it be?

 

 

 

Published on Leave a comment on Governance by Compassion and the Example of Jesus

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Following is an imaginary conversation with a bright, talented, creative, and dutiful pre-adolescent. Her voice is in italics, mine in regular font. We’re talking about the meaning of Easter and the poem I wrote about it: “Resurrection: Live and Love Unyielding, Life Eternal.”

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The Why of Easter 

I like “Resurrection.” Good! It’s short. Anything else? Did they do Easter eggs when Jesus was around? It doesn’t say anything about eggs. Next year you can write a poem about eggs. “Our legs beg for kegs of eggs with pegs.” Something creative like that. I’m so glad I have your talent and wisdom to brag about (snicker snicker). We color eggs at Easter because. . . That’s enough! You’re just going to say something stupid. . . Because someone figured out that it’s a great way to keep kids off the streets. What about chickens? It’s a great way to keep chickens off the streets too. That’s it. I’m outta here! 

Since you like my poem you must want to learn more about it. Of course I don’t. Anything would be better than that -- unless the poem is about me. Is it about me? Easter is about you and me and everybody. I thought it was just about Jesus. Because he couldn’t be killed and that’s good for the rest of us. OK, then Easter isn’t just about Jesus. It is about everybody. Why? 

Our world can’t seem to settle down in peace. People do wrong because they don’t seem to know any better. Jesus brought information and a way of thinking that helps us know better so we can do better. So we can get it right before we try doing what’s right. So we understand. With insights from another perspective that sees beyond appearances. With vision that isn’t limited to what we can see with our bodies’ eyes. He could do all that?

Walking on water

He was a nobody at first. The Romans who ruled Israel then had nothing to do with him. The authorities from his own country who told people what to believe and how to behave paid no attention to him at first. He just went around on a donkey talking to individuals, families, small groups -- whoever would listen to him. And then the groups got larger. How come if he was a nobody? 

What he was saying was different but it made sense. It seemed to connect with people at the level of their soul, their Psyche, where it was deeply moving. So moving that it seemed true even if it was hard to believe. It had psychological force so compelling that it could change minds. That was unusual.

He was also doing amazing stuff. Healing people like healers before him had done but also things that no one had ever done. Miracles like making a dead guy come back to life. He fed his audience outdoors one day with food out of thin air. He was on a boat with some followers when a storm came up. Everyone thought it would sink the boat and they would all drown. They were terrified. Jesus brought the sun back out and calmed the water. Wait a minute! And just to make sure his followers got the point he got out of the boat and walked on the water! Whoa! How could he do that?

The gift of Intuition

He was thinking with Mind conscious instead of dreaming with Mind unconscious. Showing us what we can do when we do the same. He explains how in the book he authored not long ago called “A Course in Miracles.” You mean he’s still here? He is. Just not in a body. He’s accessible to everyone through Soul. Soul that’s Spirit and not body. Soul and Energy that interconnect everything plus a part of Mind we call Intuition or sixth sense. It was through his connection with the Soul or Spirit of an individual’s body that he authored the Course. She wrote down what he authored. Amazing! 

What does the Course say? It makes it clear that getting to where Jesus got requires a big change of mind. We have to ignore what our bodies and brains and our world have been telling us and turn to another guide. The one we’ve chosen hasn’t been telling us the Truth. We’ve been misled. Will it take long? it could take one or more lifetimes or generations to get to where Jesus got. Or it could happen overnight. How?

Mind conscious is timeless, always in the Now. Always Love, and Love is free, spontaneous. Anytime we’re controlling we’re dealing with fear, not Love. Love can’t have anything to do with forcing or being forced. Spontaneous changes of mind are among the psychic events that are abnormal here. Spontaneous is normal there. History tells us of individuals who’ve gone from one way of thinking to the reverse in an instant. In a burst of light that revealed something different. As if Intuition or sixth sense were showing off. Change of mind can be imperceptible over time or spectacular in the moment. One way or the other it can happen. And it happens not in our bodies or brains but in our Mind. Through Intuition.

Why we’re getting help

Where did Jesus get this ability? Just as there are spontaneous permutations of genetics over long periods that bring about radical change there can be spontaneous permutations of other kinds that change things. A human with the ability to be with us in the state I’ve described as a dream and to be in another state that’s not a dream at the same time is a permutation. Extremely rare but, after all, where else can anything abnormal happen but in dreams where abnormal is normal?

How could just one rare person have such a large impact? It’s not because the dream isn’t revealing its source to us every moment. In a Mind that was conscious before it became unconscious. In the presence of Energy that activates whatever Mind asks of it, conscious or unconscious, and the presence of Soul that interconnects everything whether it’s real or part of a dream. Energy and Soul don’t pay any attention to boundaries and that includes the boundary between reality and the dream. Then there are paranormal events -- near-death, psychic, and other experiences that are so frequent and familiar that we just shrug them off.

Right-brain stuff is weird but by itself it can’t convince us that we’re in a dream. The left brain maintains order with judgment. When it can’t -- when order becomes disorder -- animal will acts on instinct without judgment. A state of chaos that’s also frequent and familiar. Destructive and painful, and maybe a reason why we’re getting help to do something about it. To end a dream that only seems safe and stable until it becomes unsafe and unstable.

Why now?

The rare person had a large impact because he integrated energy, Soul, right and left brain -- all our circumstances, everything -- and put it into context that gave it meaning. Gave it purpose. To awaken us from the dream and return to the reality of consciousness. To the world that he knew that we don’t know. The world defined by Logic, Love, and Innocence, not our world that’s illogic, fear, and guilt. Where other signs of consciousness don’t seriously contradict the dream Jesus' lesson and his miracles did seriously contradict it. All of it. As if it were a lie and he was trying to help us replace it with the Truth.

Which is exactly what he was trying to do. It demanded a response not from parts of the dream but the entire dream, because when he succeeds with any individual it will end the dream. So that’s what he got: a response in space over time from the entire dream that was extraordinary. Who’s winning, Jesus or the dream? Jesus and conscious Mind are forever, dreams are temporary. This one will end regardless.

Then what’s the point? To make the dream end sooner rather than later. The Course makes it clear that the Mind that’s unconscious has real work do to once it wakes up. When it’s learned what the Course teaches it will be needed in Creation. Since Reality and Creation are Now you can say we’re needed there now.

We have nothing to fear. 

The main point of all of Jesus' miracles was that another world lies behind the appearances that our bodies’ five senses detect. Our bodies’ senses may be preventing us from detecting that world and misleading us about the nature of our world. If we insist that there can only be one world and the only way to detect it is with our bodies’ senses then we will miss the point of Jesus’ miracles. We will be denying that we have a sixth sense -- Intuition. That it is through its spontaneous insights from Logic and Love that we can follow his example and eventually access his world. What makes his world different?

  • When he brought Lazarus back from the dead, Jesus was showing us that in the other world behind appearances Life can’t die. In a world that’s Creation death makes no sense. Even here the energy that brings life to our bodies still exists after it departs. It can’t be destroyed.
  • When he fed his audience with loaves and fishes that seemed to come from nowhere, Jesus showed us that in the world behind appearances to Love is to share its abundance. By sharing his Love in that way he showed that he’s our friend from the other world that’s not limited by appearances. He is an agent of Love -- the real thing -- here to help us and he loves us.
  • When Jesus calmed the storm and walked on water, he showed that when his followers understood what he understood fear would go away just like the storm. They would see that there’s nothing to fear. Fear would be replaced by understanding. By the sunlight of Love.

Take all three miracles together and they tell us that in his world where we belong we are Love, we are Loved, and Life is eternal. The Love of one Soul that connects all of us can’t be contained by our physical world. We have nothing to fear because his world is real and ours only seems real. Unbelievable!

To a perspective that’s limited to our bodies’ senses Jesus must seem unbelievable. But to our sixth sense that’s open to Logic and Love, open to seeing things differently, not at all. He makes perfect sense.

Numbers don’t count. Individuals do count.

Though he demonstrated amazing power Jesus had no interest in being powerful the way we think of it. He wasn’t trying to start a movement like a new religion or a church. Didn’t he found a church? The Church said so but it was just putting words in his mouth. He wasn’t trying to organize anything, and that was the point. That each of us has the capacity as individuals, as souls that are part of one Soul that extends beyond our world, to fix what’s broken. It was OK if he attracted many people but he would have been satisfied with only one if that individual truly understood. That’s how uninterested he was in numbers. In churches and their religions, tribes and their members, countries and their citizens, that claim strength in body counts. You've lost me.

Our world is an expression of an idea that’s the opposite of the Truth. What’s that? The Truth that Jesus spoke to was that the Soul to which we all belong is One. It is Oneness, and the ancestral Mind that imagines us is one Mind. One Child of its Parents, Logic and Love, motivated to Love and Create in Peace. The opposite is that the Child isn’t one but many. That we only exist as groups or tribes. That individuals have no Worth. Only groups have Worth. We are many bodies whose brains only know us as animals. As tribes that behave like herds in perpetual conflict, driven by the will of animal brains to dominate, by the frenzy of mob psychology to hate and destroy in war.

And so to express the Truth that we are one Mind, one Child, by forming yet another group wouldn’t make sense. It could only reinforce the original deception, that the Child as one has no Worth. Only its shadow opposite -- bodies in numbers all organized into competing groups -- has Worth. The Truth that Jesus helped us to understand wouldn’t be served if he yielded to appearances and made little of the individual. If he showed respect for numbers as though only groups have the power to bring his vision to life and give it Worth. He stood for Child-the-one, not Child-the-many. This is why everything he said and did was centered on the power and Worth of the individual.

The Truth that lives on

Those who came after to repeat what he taught were teachers who followed his example. Individuals speaking to individuals who showed no interest in organizing a church. What became of them? They lasted into the second century until the world of groups took over and organized a church.

The Church turned what Jesus taught into what it was never meant to be: a theocracy based in Rome, modeled on the Roman Empire. Controlled by authority ruling unquestioned from the top down, imposing conformity instead of empowering individuality and creativity. All for one overriding purpose: to preserve its dominance. Any teacher not embedded in its hierarchy, sanctioned by the Church, was branded a heretic and silenced by force.

The original teachers disappeared. But the world of groups can never have the last word. That’s for the meaning of the Resurrection: that the Truth that Jesus taught, the Worth and power of the one Child, the individual, lives on. And so long as we need him, our teacher, the agent of Soul that’s oneness, will not disappear. He Loves us. He will always Love us. And he will never leave us.

The gift of Understanding with Mind

One Mind and many body-brains are of two different worlds, and if Jesus addressed individuals and had no interest in numbers this placed him unmistakably in the world of Mind. Of Authority that enables and empowers. A world beyond the “laws” of physics, the authority of matter that disables and disempowers.

What Jesus got across with simple stories about right and wrong and his amazing acts was that Love connects us to another Reality. It was a lesson in Logic as well as Love. Logic defines the world of Creation, peace, and harmony that Jesus reached through Soul. The world of Mind. But even if there can be no logical definition for an illogical world of bodies and brains, the Logic of Mind can at least explain it.

The gift to Jesus was a foot in both worlds. In and of his world, in our world but not of it. The gift that enabled him to share understanding with understanding from Logic and Love.

The threat that is another voice

How could it make someone mad if he was just trying to explain? If he wasn’t trying to take over? It didn’t at first. Jesus had no army to threaten anyone with so the Romans weren’t concerned. But the following he attracted did scare Israel’s religious authorities. They thought they should be the only voice and here was another voice, a nobody drawing attention away from them. Through powers they could neither understand nor control -- Innocence and gentle loving kindness, Soul and Truth that transcend the visible world, the Worth of the individual. The opposite of what they taught: unquestioning obedience to power in the visible world. Their power.

Authority serves.

It wasn’t a miracle that showed how Jesus’ version of authority broke with what the authorities taught. It was a simple act of service: washing the feet of a few of his followers. Why did he do that?

The definitions of Logic and the relationships of Love fit all of Creation’s beings and their functions together in harmony. This is how authority governs in Jesus’ world. If Order were forced it would block Free Will and end Creativity. Real Authority doesn’t dominate; it facilitates. Even more remarkable, it serves. You mean like being a servant? Yes, but not in the sense of servant-to-master. Only in the sense that Authority must provide a foundation of support for all the elements of Creation.

This means seeing that its Creations’ receive the help they need when they call for it. If Jesus had provided individuals with computers that were his invention then he would be on call for tech support -- a service. Jesus’ point in washing feet was to show that governing is also serving from the bottom up, the same point Lincoln made at Gettysburg. Rule that dominates from the top down would never do that. It would deprive people of the support service they need to work creatively and it would be wrong. 

The strategy that backfired

Jesus became so revered that he was taking on the aura of a prophet of God, putting him and his followers beyond the rule of the religious authorities. They couldn’t allow it. What did they do? They chose a way to get rid of Jesus so awful that nobody would ever think of doing what he did. That made sure that he and his teaching and special powers disappeared and never came back. I guess they didn’t succeed. 

They didn’t succeed. Instead of putting Jesus in the past and out of sight their cruelty undone by resurrection only brought him back up front and center. Stronger than ever. Though not in the way he thought of it because he wasn’t after numbers. Stronger in the way that our world thinks of it. The mistake of the authorities helped to turn the voice of a nobody into a force of unimaginable numbers. His words and example spread all over the world and keep on spreading today. They couldn’t kill Mind or body because even his body rose from the dead.

Your guess is as good as mine

What does it mean? It means whatever we choose to make of it using our own judgment. Not as members of any group but each of us as individuals. Then I have to figure it out for myself? You’re not going to tell me? I can share my perspective if you like, just as Jesus shared his. And you can reflect on it and make up your own mind. We don’t learn and grow by closing ourselves off to others’ perspectives. We do it by sharing them.

Life evolves where Jesus comes from. Where Creation moves forward naturally with changing contexts, perspectives, thoughts, and feelings. Circumstances change here too though with a lot of resistance, and since what’s broken isn’t getting fixed it doesn’t seem like movement is forward. Our perspectives are only what they are in the moment. Yours and mine, so what you’re hearing from me now can’t be the last word. Just take it for what it is.

The joy of Easter. The love and reverence for Jesus

Whatever you hear can never be substituting my mind or my voice for yours. Jesus would never do that and neither would I. You’d be sorry if you tried. My Siberian tiger has sharp claws! We wouldn’t deny anyone’s Free Will. Free Will is indispensable to Creation where Jesus comes from and here too, though if we’re not moving forward we’re not really creating. Maybe all we can do is fix what’s broken and hope to get back to Creation.

Anytime we allow Free Will to be taken from us we’re making ourselves useless or worse. We’re letting ourselves be instruments of someone else’s will, doing their bidding. Making common cause with Jesus is OK but we can’t make ourselves into copies of anything. That’s looking for trouble. Unless we become the persons we choose to be of our own Free Will, able to see with our own unique perspective and think with our own unique judgment, we can’t be individuals. We can’t be any use to Jesus. All he can do is comfort us when we hurt. Free Will must always be respected.

Ideologies that command vast numbers so far haven’t fixed what’s broken. They always use force that denies Free Will to change things and that just makes it worse. That would be why Jesus paid no attention to numbers. Why he didn’t care about founding movements and churches. Why he shows so much Love and respect for us as individuals. Because we’re the only way to fix what’s broken, with our Free Will. That makes me feel pretty important. Me too. Maybe now we can understand why so many individuals came to love and respect him. Why we’re glad that he resurrected and we celebrate Easter.

Who’s the “savior?”

Jesus could have used his supernatural powers and his following to team up with Caesar and rule the Roman empire. Just like Adam Skywalker with his Jedi Knight powers teamed up with Palpatine to rule the Galactic Empire. Jesus and his following could have taken over moral authority in Israel which is why the people who already had it were so anxious to get rid of him. He spoke for things that are true that can’t be any other way, but he didn’t hand people a book and tell people it was the Truth and they had to obey it. He was serious about being understood and heard but not to take over people’s minds and think for them.

Wasn’t he a “savior?” What he taught was we’re our own saviors but we need help. We can’t do it alone without a trusted guide. Guiding us is the only sense in which he can be our “savior.” He didn’t offer to do anything that we can do for ourselves. And what he taught was what’s important. Just as its lesson can be taught in different ways its teachers can have different identities. Whatever we’re comfortable with. So long as our minds and hearts are on the right track our guide doesn’t have to be “Jesus.” It can have any name. He and what he taught are inclusive, not exclusive.

Demanding obedience messes with Free Will. It doesn’t give people power; it takes it away. What made Jesus so unusual was that even though he spoke with authority and attracted a following he didn’t use it to mess with Free Will. He made a point of empowering other individuals, respecting their voice instead of making it all about his. He made their Worth the center of attention, not his. He didn’t even tell his own story. What we learned about him is what others wrote. Humility like his could never be the arrogance and disrespect of a bully like Palpatine.

Perspective that’s hard to understand

Visitors from another galaxy would have a different perspective from ours. But at least they would be from the same universe and it might be possible to understand one another. The other world that Jesus spoke for wasn’t another galaxy. We can think of it as another reality where authority worked the way Jesus showed us, focused not on itself but on its creations and their creativity. Loving and supporting from the bottom up, not demanding obedience with force from the top down.

It was a perspective so unusual that it couldn’t be understood. Not by authoritarians who rule from the top down and that’s the way it was then. Not in a world where “God” was “the almighty” who had to be feared because anyone who disobeyed him went to hell. There was a lot of misunderstanding about Jesus and what he taught then and there’s still a lot of misunderstanding now.

Powers that can’t be given or taken away

The Church that came along later said it spoke for Jesus and we would be in big trouble if we didn’t obey it. A view of authority that was the reverse of what Jesus taught, so I don’t believe it. The authority that resides in each individual soul has innate Worth. Innate power that comes from being Love and being loved. From being part of the Mind and loving heart, the Soul that we come from and share. We don’t depend on any authority on earth for these things.

They aren’t for those who govern on our behalf to give or take away. Lincoln’s Gettysburg address is revered because it spoke for the same kind of authority that Jesus taught, the system of governance we call democracy. “Authorities” who rule by force on their own behalf are the opposite. All of Palpatine’s “power” resided in him, not the people. And he had no respect for individuality or Free Choice.

Praise for the tyrant?

But didn’t his empire maintain order? Didn’t the Roman empire? Didn’t the Church do good? Yes. And Hitler built the Autobahn and made Volkswagens. Mussolini made the trains run on time.

Tyrants pride themselves on imposing order and stability when at its core it’s disorder and instability. The overthrow of true authority is destabilizing and the end result of authoritarian rule is always its own overthrow. Violence captured by Greek mythology in the overthrow of the Titan tyrant Uranus by his son Cronus followed by the overthrow of the Titans by Zeus and the Olympians. Zeus the paranoid predator, ever alert to challenges to his authority posed by any movement beyond his control, especially by his own offspring.

It's important to be careful with affirmation for the good that authoritarians do. Why? Their mindset turns every reflection on its performance into a judgment on its legitimacy because of the nature of its origin. Which is? Illegitimacy. It’s the opposite of true authority. And if it’s not true then it can’t be part of Reality. Part of Creation. Part of Life which shares, affirms, and empowers. Authoritarian rule, whether it’s over a single family, an ideology, or an entire nation, takes, invalidates, and disempowers. It systematically hollows out the individual, robs it of its creativity, its life, to fill itself. Like a giant virus taking cells captive so it can kill them and replicate itself. It’s not about life. It’s about death.

Its “truth” isn’t the overwhelming power and security that it seeks to project. At its core it’s weakness and insecurity. It obsesses over what’s said about it because the source of its justification can’t be self. It has no self. It’s a parasite that depends for its existence on its host. Which gives it an insatiable craving for approval. For self-justification. Every comment on its performance is either justification for the predator or opposition that must be crushed. Any word of praise for Il Duce making the trains run on time would be twisted into the legitimacy of fascism. It would be swallowed up by the authoritarian’s bottomless appetite for what it can’t give: approval.

We must be careful with affirmation for the good that authoritarians do because it will be swallowed up by self-justification that doesn’t reinforce the good. It can only perpetuate the bad. The authoritarian mindset is ugly. I don’t like it. Nobody should. But since it’s with us we can only do our duty: stand up to the bully, replace it, and stand by true authority that doesn’t bully.

Love and Innocence, vulnerability and betrayal

If Jesus could walk on water and change minds couldn’t he have protected himself? Did he have to submit to the authorities? Jesus spoke with authority because he spoke for Authority. The Will of the Truth of Logic and Love that’s not of our world but serves us when we let it. So he had not one but two wills to respect: ours and the Will that he served.

He could only trust both in innocence to let him engage with us in safety. Not to approach in trust and innocence would have compromised the Trust and Innocence that he spoke for. Nor could he interfere with our will if it compromised Free Will. To understand Jesus is to understand innocence. The Truth he shared of the Innocence of the Soul to which we belong. Oneness that has no reason to fear harm from opposites. An agent of Soul that’s Innocence couldn’t protect himself against what he couldn’t know.

Wherever the emptiness of authority for its own sake would replace the fullness of Love; wherever it would displace Free Will, the Trust and Innocence of Love can be betrayed. It’s vulnerable in our world, and Jesus was betrayed. By a follower that he trusted. By religious authorities that he trusted. By betrayal -- an act that Innocence would know nothing of and could not anticipate. This may help to explain why Jesus couldn’t protect himself.

Protection

But it made no difference. The Authority that Jesus served, the Life that’s the Truth of Logic and the fullness of Love, was all the protection he needed. It can’t be killed no matter how cruel and unjust its opposite.

Denying death meant to cow an entire people into submission to authority was the last act of his body while Jesus was among us. Its Resurrection proof that respect for individuality, creativity, and Free Will that comes from Logic, Love, and Truth is real Authority. Proof that authority that’s disrespectful and rules by force, that overrides every voice with its own voice because it’s afraid of individuality, creativity, and Free Will, has no real power over us. Proof that souls confined to bodies that come and go don’t come and go. Their Life force is forever. We have nothing to fear.

When there’s a beast to be slain

So then we can ignore disrespectful authority? Jesus was asked what to do about Caesar, the Roman emperor. What did he say? That disrespectful authority is an unavoidable fact of life in our world that requires accommodation. Otherwise leave it alone. Our purpose is to serve real Authority while it serves us and that should be our focus.

We’re not supposed to rebel? To stand up to Caesar? When Caesar demands that we surrender our minds and hearts to him, our individuality and integrity, an agent of Soul that’s Innocence can’t be our guide. The world of Jesus has no boundaries. Our world does. We do what’s necessary to protect our independence and democracy. Join together not as a tribe bent on cycles of destruction but as family with one specific, shared purpose: to keep the beast from crossing our boundaries.

When that’s done, we get back to our real work. This is why World War II was thought of as a “good” war. There was a beast to be slain, we came together as one to slay it, disbanded, and resumed peaceful lives when we were done.

When Eros took a stand for Love

The story of Jesus took one approach to authority that's unloving. There's another? The myth of Psyche and Eros. Psyche was a girl so innocent and beautiful that she was attracting people away from the temples of Aphrodite. Just like people were paying attention to Jesus instead of their religious rulers. Aphrodite was an Olympian goddess, jealous of her power and cruel toward anyone who questioned it. She didn’t crucify Psyche but she did make her perform tasks that would have killed her if she didn’t have help.

What happened? The last task -- an errand to the underworld -- almost did kill her. While she lay unconscious her lover Eros came and rescued her. Aphrodite’s son, who was also an Olympian. He brought his Love up to Mount Olympus to be with him. Like Jesus, she ascended to Heaven.

Wasn’t Aphrodite mad? Very! To save Psyche Eros had to escape from the room his mother had locked him in. Which means he had been forced to yield to cruel and unjust authority and he rebelled. Once her son made it clear that his mother couldn’t control him she had to give way. Because nothing can control Free Will and character when it stands up for itself. Like the wild Siberian tiger that is your spirit of Free Will and character. Eros stood up to his mother and when he did, he stood up for Love.

Trust in Jesus, Soul of Innocence

This was the form that Psyche’s “resurrection” took: rescue by rebellion. Jesus couldn’t role model rebellion against a force that Innocence couldn’t recognize. That would only make it real. Any form of attack always implies that its opponent exists. And if Jesus came to represent another world that exists attacking our world wouldn’t make a very good case for it. It would tell us that he’s an ordinary person we can’t trust. Exactly!

The reappearance of Love and Innocence after fear and guilt tried to make it disappear was his “rebellion.” An act of Truth that attacked no one, yet it helped with understanding that authority that rules by force can’t be Truth. It can only “be” an appearance. A specter of fear and guilt. A deception that’s meant to deceive. A boogeyman. Not like Jesus. No. Not like the Soul of Innocence and Honesty that we can trust.

Whither sixth sense?

Whether we can trust the way that ordinary persons and their institutions have represented Jesus over the years is open to question. The way that he represented himself is not. When we apply the Logic and Love that he shared to his story it resonates with Truth. That’s what my sixth sense tells me. What does yours tell you? When the eggs are all dyed and hidden I'll definitely think about it.

Happy Easter to you! Happy Easter Jesus! I love you! Me too!

Published on Leave a comment on Can One Personality Type Help Its Opposite Grow?

Isabel’s theory

Isabel Myers’ theory of personality types* says the answer to the question posed by this essay is yes. In theory one individual can coach a personality opposite in the use of faculties that his or her type typically underutilizes. In the example addressed here those would be introspection, reflection-intuition, thinking-reasoning, feeling-evaluation, and judging (INTJ), faculties typically under-utilized by the opposite type extravert, sensing, feeling, and perceptive (ESFP).

According to Isabel’s theory the faculties that make up our types are preferences, and since they’re largely responsible for performance it’s only a matter of preference whether we improve our performance by making better use of them, specifically by expanding into faculties associated with our opposites. This must happen routinely, for example when circumstances compel perceptives who prefer to experience life in the moment to use their judging faculty to plan ahead. What seems less likely is that any type would seek help from an opposite to gain competence with the opposite’s faculties.

Isabel’s theory is intriguing nonetheless, not just because it makes sense but because, if it could be put into general practice it would help with personal growth and better relations. How often do relationships and projects come apart because personalities lack the will or ability to share what they’re experiencing? Because, lacking a feel for other types, they blunder unintentionally into misjudgments that end goodwill and cooperation.

One faculty too many

The ideal setting assumed by Isabel’s theory would be two individuals with opposite personality types in cheerful collaboration. Two opposite types could be the best of friends, and if they are one might even welcome the other’s kindness. But what if the type being coached senses that the other is turning him into a copy of himself? Is manipulating preferences to assume control over the relationship?

It would be remarkable if even an individual crippled by ineptness with under-utilized faculties were aware of it. Or, if he were, comfortable exposing his ineptness to an opposite type for strengthening unless the other were already a trusted personal friend or a paid professional. Our personality types and how we go about relating to them are our psychological underwear. By a certain age we’re partial to our preferences. We don’t take change lightly if it can just as easily create distance as close it. Perhaps help with one or two faculties won’t feel like a humbling makeover, but what if help is needed with three or four?

Guides locking horns

Isabel’s theory would still be feasible in the right moment for the right relationships. That is, if they’re the only voices in the room. But what if one or both is self-consciously submitting its judgment -- the product of its Judging faculty -- to guidance from another voice? What if “opposites” are not only opposite faculties but opposite guides? The individual might be the soul of agreeability but not if his guide recoils at being sidelined by an opposite guide. By the competition. By the enemy if the guides represent opposite takes on the values of moral character or competitive prowess.

We may have begun not with John Locke’s tabula rasa but with Carl Jung’s psychological types locked and loaded for combat. Which means there could be four voices in the room to manage instead of two. There could even be a situation where two plus two doesn’t equal four. Where the guides of one or both have become so involved in shaping their personalities that the boundary between self and guide is obliterated. Two plus two could now equal three or only two. Two individuals with opposite personality types who consciously or subconsciously identify with their guides. Guides who themselves are personality types with their own faculties and preferences. Committed to blocking their host from even detecting another voice let alone listening to it. 

Two models of authority

The mind’s faculty of sixth sense or Intuition that led to the theory of psychological-personality types presupposes a quasi-professional setting where self-analysis can be conducted objectively and safely. Where both parties are open to faculties of mind -- introspection, reflection, reasoning, evaluation, and judging. But if one or both has identified with will instead of mind to direct behavior, for the very reason that its perceived strength compensates for weakness, then self-analysis isn’t an option. It will be strenuously opposed. The type who identifies with will won’t want anything to do with it because of its purpose: to overturn the iron rule of mindless will with the civilizing governance of mind.

The theory of personality type opposites has then strayed into the great divide in human thought and behavior: between the “realist” model of authority that deifies rule without opposition from the top down -- the authoritarian “triumph of the will” that crushes individuality and free choice -- and the democratic ideal of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: governance from the bottom up that cultivates and respects individuality and free choice. Absolute authority, a mythical beast, vs. the indomitable spirit of freedom. Not absolute freedom without limits that’s another mythical beast but freedom of thought, expression, and choice that recognizes the necessity of Order in a shared world.

Respect for Free Choice

Personality types in the grip of either of these impossibilities -- absolute authority or absolute freedom -- will treat self-analysis as an existential threat because it threatens self-delusion, the state of mind of anyone lost to nonsense. All that can be done to rescue mind from captivity, with Isabel's theory, is to coach an empty room, record the attempt, and leave it to the spontaneity of intuition to bring it to its host’s attention. That is, when the beast has let down its guard. When its host decides with his own intuition, on his own, to exercise his indomitable Free Choice.

It's all an act

Alternate “reality” is an intentional act of self-delusion by Child-Mind, disabled and disempowered by unconsciousness, corrupted by misidentity with its own shadow, the code that defines its opposite, the Joker-magician. Which makes alternate “reality” an act. A performance by a magician. A magic act meant to hypnotize and captivate with its “entertainments:” hilarious perversions of Truth and horrifying perversions of Justice. All of it an impossibility that can’t be taken seriously. Adding the lure of magic and retribution -- the consummation of victimhood -- to the lures of the absolutes: authority and freedom. The lure of “fun.”

Plato’s Cave would then be a stage and its occupants play-acting puppets. Like the actors in the Truman TV Show, some so deluded, so closely identified with the Cave master, that they think they’re the producer. The occupants would then resist Truth because it would turn up the house lights. It would ruin the atmospherics of darkness, disembodied voices, laughter and screams, flames and flickering shadows -- the smoke and mirrors required to sustain illusion and fend off disbelief. It would expose the trick and stop the show. It would take away everyone’s “fun,” and, make no mistake, they think this is fun. So long as it’s “others” who are at the wrong end of violence and retribution they’re living the dream.

The boredom of “fun”

The Cave and its magic act are the production of a split Mind that’s Free Choice as well as corrupted. Its occupants may be deluded and confused, but given direction and incentive, they’re capable of folding the show on their own. The Mind that was lured into the Cave still retains the faculty of Intuition. The portal to spontaneous insights and understanding that is the sixth sense, that can neither be blocked entirely nor indefinitely. From awareness of an incentive to stop pretense more powerful by far than the magician’s lures: the will to Freedom. The indispensable function of Free Choice. Somewhere in the back of their minds is the memory of Free Choice and the ability to reclaim it. Whenever they choose.

When “fun” isn’t fun anymore. When Pete Hamill looked down at his drink and realized he was done with it. Done with the drinking life and its one-dimensional comic book “reality.” Done with “Brooklyn.” Done with adolescence, taverns, street fights, and mock comradeship. Ready to live a life with intimacy, maturity and responsibility, talent and creativity. Ready to have fun.**

The delusion then isn’t fully a delusion. It’s a self-willed adventure-fantasy conjured by adolescence to get into mischief with impossibilities. With dangerous toys in a shallow make-believe world. A universe of scary objects like black holes that fascinates with its vastness, complexity, violence, and pointlessness. All to avoid Reality mischaracterized by the Joker as boring.***

Bubbles within a bubble

Preoccupied with its production, the Cave’s fantasy troupe is inaccessible to anyone but its own members. It can’t be concerned with consequences beyond the show that must go on. And if any of its members carry the fantasy into their own lives; if they choose to live an adventure-fantasy, they, too, will be inaccessible.

For what will their lives be but re-enactments? Mimicking the Joker-corrupted Mind’s projection of an alternate reality. Monkey-see, monkey-do. Dragooning family and friends into playing scripted parts to keep the act alive. The wishful thought that action-comic impossibilities are possible: fantastic characters, hair-raising encounters, nonstop “action.” To keep themselves persuaded that it’s “real.” To keep the “fun” going at all costs. At the cost of wholesale disrespect for character, honesty and integrity, individuality and creativity. Their own and the captives to their adolescent, senseless will.

What will their lives be but alternate realities within an alternate “reality.” Bubbles within a bubble. Detached from reality. Wholly out of touch. 

Persuasion from a leash correction

An adolescent Child’s corrupted mind intentionally “choosing” self-delusion was an act of wrongdoing and so is its re-enactment. While the Cave’s troupe gets around to stopping the show it might motivate them if individual re-enactments in our midst receive a leash correction. The correction administered to untrained dogs by leashes when they race off in pursuit of prey. They learn that the costs of misadventure can’t all be displaced onto others with impunity. That there’s a price to pay -- a dose of Reality.

What then is Isabel’s contribution? An intelligent analytical approach to the problem posed by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave that complements leash correction. That will work beautifully someday when its light reaches the occupants of the Cave not from without but from within. When they tire of delusion and choose of their own free will to work toward self-awareness instead. With help from Intuition’s gift: respect for Free Choice and the Logic and Love of explanation that leads to Understanding.

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*Gifts Differing (Consulting Psychologists Press 1980) based on Carl Jung’s Psychological Types (Must Have Books 2019)
**A Drinking Life (Little, Brown 1994)
***Jerry L. Martin, God: An Autobiography (as Told to a Philosopher) (Caladium Publishing Company 2020)

Published on Leave a comment on Resurrection: Life and Love Unyielding, Life Eternal

When Soul walks among us, loves us, teaches us
and is taken away
When mind and heart cry out for Love
and all that can be heard is silence
Their voice expands into every corner of time and space

With the Force of Truth:
That Soul can never be taken away
That mind and heart crying out for Love will aways be heard.

We return today in observance of the Truth
The Life of Soul that was shared with us intact
Its example an inspiration yet

When the mistake cycles back on us like a shadow
from Groundhog Day
Lifting us from sleep to getting it right

From giving up to never giving up:
To theft of Soul, silencer of voice
To self-regard, its voice the only voice
Denial of Truth, hope and Soul, mind and heart

The imposition of mistake upon itself
Silenced by its own crucifixion, denied its own resurrection
The emptiness of authority for its own sake
That would replace the fullness of Love

It didn’t happen then and it can’t happen now.
When will it happen? Never.
What the Life and example of Jesus mean to me.
Resurrection. Life and Love unyielding. Life eternal.

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Published on 2 Comments on Mind Plus Circumstance: Where the Action Is

The original premise

The original-archetypal circumstance was the Necessity of circumstance: a premise. A premise that any state or no state is circumstance that cannot ever be at rest. Not at the “beginning” because there can be no “beginning” without time, nor at the “end” because there’s no “end” to the eternal Now. And because circumstance will still be a Necessity that moves forward with Logic-Love.

The question what was the original circumstance that preceded Reality-Creation is meaningless in the context of eternal Now without beginning-ending. Its meaning is limited to another context: the context of the instrument whose function is implied by the premise of circumstance: to give circumstance existence in a state of Reality-Creation that has Order and Worth. The instrument that is Mind composed of Logic inseparable with Love. And its function was the “original” implication of Logic and the value / relationship-connection of Love.

Unrest at the “beginning”

Within the context of Mind and its function the meaning of the “original” circumstance was unrest.  Circumstance poised-unconsummated until the Connection-Relationship between circumstance and Mind was established that processed it into existence. That thereby set Reality-Creation in motion with the necessary attributes of Logic / Order and Love / Purpose-Worth.

“Circumstance” defines the state of anything or nothing, state or statelessness. There is no “state” that is not in some way “circumstance.” It necessarily implies the function of Mind to process it. If a definition is needed of the “tao” that exists beyond any discernible purpose or meaning, right or wrong, it would be “circumstance,” because circumstance and Mind are one and the same. One cannot exist without the other.

“Unrest” defines the “original” state of circumstance because it necessitated the function of Mind, they’re inseparable, and the connection necessarily implies a reciprocal-infinite process: circumstances feeding into Mind reciprocating its implications and relationships to produce more-changing circumstances.

The pitch for self-delusion

The idea that Reality-Creation began with a state of rest that could remain unchanged in perpetuity, to which our souls may return at some point to linger forever in “heaven,” is an impossibility in any context. It’s a deliberate deception whose purpose isn’t to entice us into paradise after death. It’s to set off the excitement of stuff happening in our alternate “reality” against the boredom of “heaven” and so to keep us firmly locked into our alternate “reality.”

To keep us captive to our self-delusion because the alternative is worse. To pitch reincarnation that keeps the “action” going here -- endless cycles of cruelty and injustice, fear, guilt, and existential threats -- instead of waking up to the scam and finding our way Home. When we realize that what’s going on with Mind-circumstance in Reality-Creation and our role in it is where the action is. And the only “action” here is ending our delusion.

Published on Leave a comment on Whither Goest Thou? Reflections on the Missions of Institutions Devoted to A Course in Miracles and the Work of its Teacher Kenneth Wapnick

Tao reveals itself differently to each individual, according to his own nature. The man of deeds, for whom kindness and the love of his fellow man are supreme, discovers the tao of cosmic events and calls it supreme kindness -- ‘God is love.’ The contemplative man, for whom calm wisdom is supreme, discovers the tao of the universe and calls it supreme wisdom. The common people live from day to day, continually borne and nourished by tao, but they know nothing of it; they see only what meets the eye. For the way of the superior man, who sees not only things but the tao of things, is rare. The tao of the universe is indeed kindness and wisdom; but essentially tao is also beyond kindness and wisdom. . . . [T]his life-giving activity [growth], to which all things owe their existence, is something purely spontaneous. . . . [T]ao is omnipresent; everything that exists, exists in and through it. [The I Ching or Book of Changes, Bollingen Series XIX (Princeton University Press 1950, pp. 298-299]

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Trust and Relationship begin with Fact

Jesus informs us in A Course in Miracles that we have the choice when to learn its lesson but not whether, as though it could not possibly change or be changed. As though it were cast in concrete, and yet he also informs us that it is not a “bible.” He cautions us not to treat it as the holy Word of God, absolute Truth with which to condemn and reject all who fail to accept it. Why not if he means what he says: we’re screwed if we don’t comply? All that is in the Course, that focuses on the darkness within the human Psyche, the pain and anguish of guilt, is explanation meant for us to understand just how badly screwed we already are.

Though they concentrate on why the Course cannot be a bible the reflections that follow cannot imply that its lesson can be ignored. Why? Because the laws of cause and effect emanate from circumstances. That in their constellations change but in their individual parts may not change. For these are the stuff with which the purpose and meaning of their compositions, their contexts, is revealed. This is where the Force of Necessity comes from, not their explanation or interpretation but from fact.

The works of Logic and Love in Relationship with their Child, Free Choice, that make up Creation, are part of evolution but not the facts of Reality they’re based on. The Force of Logic and Love depends upon it, for this is the immutable Rule of Law that applies to Logic and Love as to everything else. That gives them their legitimacy. That enables and empowers Trust essential to all Relationships in Reality. Fact.

Uncompromising Fact that can’t be ignored

It is fact that cannot be ignored in the lesson of the Course that takes away choice. The fact that Kenneth Wapnick, its teacher, refers to as its “uncompromising non-dualism.” Uncompromising because the human condition is defined by its unreality. Because it derives its state from the condition of our ancestral Mind, the Child: its unconsciousness. If the state of Child-Mind is defined by its unconsciousness, that cannot be part of Reality defined by Consciousness, that cannot evolve, then we, projections in its dream, are also in a state of unconsciousness. In a state of unreality.

There cannot be dual realities. Only one can be Real. Though Jesus has promised never to leave us “comfortless” he can’t do it by denying fact. The denial of fact is the stock-in-trade of the Child’s self-delusion, the magician that is the error we, projections of Free Choice, must freely choose to correct. Detectable by no more obvious attribute than its dexterity with untruth, the sleight of hand of illusion, the lies of deception. “Making it up as it goes along.”

Form that must change, content that cannot change

How we approach our task, how we apply the lesson, will vary from individual to individual. And so it compounds error to treat the Course that was addressed to two individuals, two personalities, in their time and place, as holy writ for us in our personalities, our time and place. It won’t fit. And if the task of governance is to fit in harmony it will be a violation of Logic and Love who govern in harmony.

The form of the lesson must change even if its content can’t. Our alternate “reality” is unreal. Fact.

The Course is an act of Logic and Love

The business end of Mind in Reality is its two main components Logic and Love, whose function is to source everything necessary for the Worth of Creation. Everything under the law: the laws of cause and effect that stand for the values of Logic and Love, wisdom and compassion. Maintained in place by the Authority of the Interconnectedness of Soul that is Innocence without opposites and by the Authority of Truth that is Necessity empowered by Energy -- Force under the direction of benevolence, the Logic and Love of governance. Of Mind.

A Course in Miracles is an act of Mind, one part Logic, the other part Love. Each part a set of functions designed to help the unconscious Child to regain Consciousness through its projections. Through the minds and hearts of the occupants of an alternate “reality” when doing so doesn’t interfere with Free Choice.

Minds and hearts corrupted by the code that defines the Child’s opposite, its shadow. Impossibility that is unreality. The unreal code that is the opposite of Logic and Love, wisdom and compassion. The opposite of Mind, a reversion to unthinking will and emotion, instinct and action that distinguish uncivil animal from civil animal. From human. That conjure within Mind unconscious the uniquely human animal. A horror of insanity composed of impossibilities: absolute authority, absolute freedom, and absolute truth. The same impossibilities that lured unconscious Child into its dream of an alternate “reality” and now lure it toward self-destruction. The “triumph of the will” that is the Child’s shadow-code, a magician. Self-delusion.

The force of the tribe

The act of Mind that is A Course in Miracles gains traction toward the Child’s awakening from self-delusion through equal emphasis on its two main parts: Logic and Love. Emphasis that necessarily contends in unreality with resistance and opposition to both. With an authoritarian mindset deluded by absolutes into specialness: thought and feeling concentrated on itself. The shadow authoritarian ideal: self without opposites, a perversion of the Innocence of Psyche-Soul without opposites.

The pull of specialness in unreality interferes with the Course’s application by shifting its emphasis in two ways: from Logic to Love and from Love that is feeling that shares to its opposite, feeling that monopolizes. From feeling-inclusive to feeling-exclusive. Feeling that is Worth to feeling that is worthlessness.

The force behind specialness that works its will is the force of the tribe, the human version of animal-herd. The invention of the human authoritarian mindset that degenerates into mob psychology: a herd of enraged humans feeling and acting by mindless instinct as one. The force that interferes is sociability. The pretense of “oneness” enforced by the rules of going along to get along. Present in every human tribal activity, for it is the main function of brain distinct from Mind.

For the Love of Truth and Honesty

Brain whose self-identity is tribe. Whose task is tribal dominance by act of predatory animal will domesticated by sociability. Pretense that is likability, niceness, and pleasantness, that is until the inevitable conflict and civility gives way to uncivility. To the discipline not of sociability but to the law of the jungle. Kill or be killed.

Emphasis that tilts toward Love and away from Logic in the work of the Course does so in service to neither but to pretense. To the agenda of resistance and opposition to keep humanity in line through the iron will of tribe. The Love of the Course is not and never was likability and pleasantness to disarm and distract. It is and always has been caring for the values, the Truth and Honesty of Logic and Love. To enable and empower the sovereignty and Worth of individuality that is Free Choice, not will that is captive to predatory tribal instinct.

Logic and Love, equal and inseparable

Sociability is at cross-purposes with the Course. Its discipline of tribal integrity gets in our way anytime that niceness, agreeability, and pleasantness -- mockeries of Love -- are allowed to devalue or displace the Truth and Honesty of Logic. We serve Truth and Honesty by serving the cause of Logic equally with Love. The cause of wisdom equally with compassion. The state role-modeled by Jesus through the Course: the authority of gentle loving kindness. Authority that is the Logic of Love and the Love of Logic.

If to make the Course an absolute of anything is to kill it, to make it sociability of any kind will also kill it. If it is not “tribe” it cannot be “social.” It is an act of Mind, not brain. Mind that is in equal measure Logic and Love, equal and inseparable.

Mind and possibility at the beginning

The laws of cause and effect speak for the state of Mind that adheres at any point in evolution. In the sequence of the implications of Logic and the connections of Love in their response to circumstances that change in turn in response to the implications of Logic and the connections of Love. An interactive process mirrored in the evolution of English common law, the basis for American jurisprudence. A reciprocal process of questioning established precedent as well as its application to new issues in new contexts defined by changing circumstances. If there is no stopping change then there can be no stopping reconsideration both of the application of established precedent and the law that it’s based on.

The laws of cause and effect spoken for in the Course were not there at the beginning. What was there at the beginning was circumstance implied by Logic: Mind and possibility charged with its definition, the functions of Logic and Love, to respond to possibility with an act of Creation. With thought and feeling, ideas, reasoning, and values. An act that could not have been preceded by an opposite. By an impossibility, for opposite by implication of Logic -- by definition -- cannot precede the source of its contradiction.

The work in progress that is Reality and Creation

The laws of cause and effect spoken for by the Course are Necessity to that point in the evolution of Creation. Of the open-ended forward movement of Logic and Love that is implied by eternity, the eternal Now. The laws of cause and effect that are the Necessity of Truth, the Truth that supports the lesson of the Course, cannot be a “bible” because it cannot be absolute. In the movement of Logic and Love in their eternal dance of interaction with circumstance nothing can be absolute. Nothing can stand unquestioned when nothing can stop the process. When nothing can stop Creation driven by change that is question. If anything is “absolute” it is eternal question that implies the impossibility of absolute, the eternal answer that is and shall always remain a work in progress. The Course is no exception -- a work in progress integral to the process Creation and the structure of Reality that are a work in progress.

Marketing its lies to an unconscious and disempowered Child as the absolute truth is the mode of its shadow code of impossibilities. Not its Parents, Logic and Love, but a predator. The illusionist that lured it into captivity and keeps it there with its illusions: absolute authority. absolute freedom, and absolute truth. With arbitrary rule backed by the authority of law that’s status quo beyond change because it’s beyond questioning: a “Holy Bible.” A self-deluded fool’s perversion of governance that enables and empowers Creation with support from the bottom up that’s under the law. Law that necessarily expands with experience and Knowledge. With the ever-broadening context that is evolution -- Reality and Creation.

The dynamics of function 

To focus on what A Course in Miracles does is to focus on its function. Function is an attribute of Logic-Love’s definition of Reality-Creation and every part of it. An attribute whose essence is Energy, the dynamic of Force. The Force of Soul that Interconnects and of  the Authority of Necessity, the laws of cause and effect that cannot change. That define Reality and guide Logic-Love’s benevolent governance of Creation from the bottom up. Every part either has a use or it can’t exist. This applies to Mind-Consciousness and to Psyche-Soul both, the Interconnecting Force of Everything. Every part has agency under the law.

This applies to every cause including institutions dedicated to disseminating the Course and the work of its teacher. The work of doing is the work of Energy, the agent of doing for all of Reality-Creation. The dynamic of Force that gives cause its effect, the sequence of Logic-Love its forward movement. Always dynamic, always in motion because circumstances are always in motion, always changing. The Course is part of a dynamic process of growth and evolution within an alternate “reality” whose function is to guide it. To help Free Choice manage it, use it, and adapt to it dynamically.

The provocation that is honesty

The lesson of the Course is delivered authoritatively but always with gentle loving kindness. We’re given soft pillows when we board the plane, an assurance of service with wisdom and compassion. But the flight isn’t meant to lull us to sleep. Far from it. In an alternate “reality” that is dishonesty and untruth a perspective that speaks honestly for Truth is provocation. There’s bound to be turbulence. Turbulence with a purpose: not sleep but awakening. To get us off our butts and moving.

Jesus’ honesty when he walked among us showed how provocative Truth can be. The Course is sheer provocation capable of stirring the occupants of Plato’s Cave into a hornet’s nest of opposition. Into crucifying the messenger, because that’s what the crucifixion was meant to accomplish: the permanent end of messenger and message. The permanent end of fear that the Truth will ever again be told.

The comfort of gentle loving kindness, wisdom and compassion abates fear so that it won’t block accessibility. But it’s not a substitute for the lesson, nor is it meant to distract from the lesson. It only affirms its Source, the Logic-Love of Reality and its Peace. Because Logic-Love could not make its presence known otherwise.

Yet it’s provocation and a call to respond to it. A call from Logic-Love not to swoon in the ecstasy of “spirituality” but to act. Its meaning isn’t the pillow. It’s the journey out of untruth into Truth. Out of the nonsense of two realities into the sense of one Reality. The journey of provocation and turbulence that is Honesty.

The face behind the mask of pleasantness

The opposite is described in the Course as the “ego’s thought system.” It does offer substitutions and distractions. It has a thousand faces, none more sinister or familiar than likability. The devil that visited Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s novel was affable, conversational. The “god” of Jerry Martin’s God: An Autobiography is casual, erudite and entertaining, a regular guy you’d want to have a beer with. The “god” of Mari Perron’s apocryphal A Course of Love is a cheerleader for anything goes. Every one your best friend and every one a phony. Pleasantness whose purpose isn’t receptivity to Truth. It’s to hide the Truth.

Two perspectives, two functions

In applying the metaphysics of the Course to explain our alternate “reality” Kenneth Wapnick and I take off in different directions. No difference in our loyalty to the metaphysics of the Course but significant difference in what we do with it. A difference in function:

  • He taught what the Course says in its context: the specifics of two clinical psychologists at a medical-academic institution in mid-twentieth century Manhattan -- their personalities, psychologies, and relationships. I intuit what the Course may imply for specifics beyond its original context. Not on my own but in relationship with an agent of Soul, guided by Logic and Love.
  • Ken helped to interpret and communicate the Logic-Love of the Course within its scope: error committed after the Child (Father’s Son) lost consciousness. I am applying it to explore its implications for issues beyond its scope. To explain the Child’s loss of consciousness and what this implies for regaining it.
  • Ken brought his unique perspective, individuality and creativity to his task. I bring a different perspective, individuality and creativity to mine.
  • We respond to two different needs: his to clarify the lesson of the Course, mine to extend it. His to explain its metaphysics, mine to expand its metaphysics. His to focus on what the Course is, mine on what it can do.

“Absence of felicity,” absence of partiality

My differences with Ken show in our takes on two topics: Helen Schucman’s apparent ambivalence about the Course and the significance of Carl Jung’s intuition about personality type. Helen was the main scribe of A Course in Miracles which was channeled by Jesus. She was assisted by Bill Thetford, a professional colleague, in a support role. In essence, they took dictation and from it produced a manuscript suitable for publication. Neither sought nor was given editorial license to modify the lesson. Neither sought a role in teaching it.

In his biography of Helen, Absence of Felicity, Ken struggled with her reluctance to involve herself in the Course’s cause beyond recording it. Being her friend and admirer and a teacher of the Course, Ken might have been moved by personal bias that even though she held back it was not for lack of conviction. For lack of love and respect for its Author, for whom she had just completed an intensely intimate labor of love.

Had Helen not maintained neutrality skeptics could have cited this as evidence of her authorship just as any court observer would cry foul if the stenographer took sides in litigation. There were enough skeptics as it was, hard-core “realists” blocked by their bodies’ five senses from having anything to do with a sixth. A common occurrence that accounts for history’s split between two schools of thought: idealism and realism.

Helen’s gift back to the Course

The viability of the Course depends upon its source from another perspective, one that’s not tainted by human ambiguity. Its author needs to be an agent of spiritual Psyche or Soul, the agent of Logic and Love that interconnects everything including our alternate “reality.” Otherwise it won’t know what it’s talking about. How can any source talk to the occupants of one “reality” about events in another without convincing evidence of connection to both? If it can’t speak legitimately for Reality and Truth how can it make sense?

The Course owes its legitimacy and acceptance as much to its Author as to its lesson. Limiting Helen’s role to that of impartial stenographer ensured that the voice of spiritual Psyche would come through in the clear, unmolested by the human psyche. Protecting the integrity of its Author may have been Helen’s last and most sensitive act of service to the Course:

Misled by body-sensing “realism”

Ken’s unfinished work about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung may have reflected something of the person behind the professional: a subconscious preference for Freud’s “realism” and indifference bordering on aversion to Jung’s intuition about personality types. Though he observed that Jung hadn’t gone far enough Ken showed no interest to that point in Jung’s signal achievement. In particular in the critical difference between body-sensing and intuition that telegraphed the difference between Jung and Freud.

That telegraphed, as well, the aspect of Helen’s personality that suited her to her role of detachment in the story of the Course. An aspect that Ken’s brand of psychotherapy seems to have overlooked. Though Helen had experienced psychic episodes they hadn’t revealed a gift for insight or the soul of an intuitive behind the exterior of a realist. If they had it seems likely that she would have been all in for the Course. What gave her pause was the same patriarchal body-sensing that prevented teacher Freud from understanding pupil Jung. For who would balk at non-dualism, the point of “miracles” in A Course in Miracles, that our “reality” sensed by the body is unreal? That it’s so illogical it can’t be taken seriously. Who else but a body-sensing “realist?”

A taste of Heaven

Jung’s intuition tells us that personalities that define our individuality necessarily define us by what we do as much as by who we are. By our function in the evolution of context through changing circumstances. As true here as it is in Reality; nothing can exist without its part in some form of activity, whether purposeful or pointless. The role given to Helen was the business end of her personality that defined who she was to be by what she was to do in its context. The integrity of her role as scribe depended not on her going beyond its limits but on her staying within.

Helen’s willingness to devote a significant portion of her life to scribing the Course expressed core human values: satisfying work suited to the worker; meaningful work for a respected authority; support for individuality, talent, and creativity; personality and task performing as one; striving attuned to Free Will instead of smothering it. None of these brought to life to the same extent, if at all, by the regular job that frustrated her. Her talents weren’t flowering into soulful poetry on the job but they were when she was moonlighting with Jesus. The boss who never insisted that she take the job. She could tell him to shove it any time she wanted.

The act of Creation in Reality is Interconnection that’s joyful as well as effortless. Striving toward the affirmation and reciprocation of Worth. An act of benevolence defined by the governance of Logic-Love, given Life by the Force of Soul. That celebrates the Creativity of every one of its parts and every contribution shaped by its unique context. Who wouldn’t give up a part of their day to experience this? Jesus didn’t offer Helen a job; he gave her a taste of Heaven and she loved it. When Jesus taught that we are perfect just as God created us, Helen felt the Truth in it. It must have felt like an affirmation of Worth like no other.

“Success”

How did Helen’s personality fare in her work environment at Columbia Presbyterian? Exactly as a court stenographer might, who had no voice in the proceeding, if asked to speak with the voice of a litigant. Out of her element. Lost. Unsure what to say but sure she doesn’t want to be humiliated for saying it. In self-defense Helen might have taken on the hardness of certainty without to hide the softness of uncertainty within. The personality of an authoritarian realist could have been so unyielding, so demanding, that she was virtually impossible to work with. A misfit. Toxic.

If Heaven is the functions of self-awareness fitting together in harmony then our opposite “reality” must be the functions of un-self-awareness that collide in friction. Because to be un-self-aware is to be unaware of self’s individuality and function. “Success” in this life is more often than not a series of fortunate events that connect personality and function we’re unaware of with situations we’re unaware of. Everything spontaneous, beyond awareness.

Our personalities should help guide us to where our individuality and its talents belong, but if we lack self-awareness, if we undervalue Jung’s personality types, it won’t happen. In the event, it’s the agent of Soul from Logic-Love -- the tao -- that guides us when we allow it, unseen.

The “success” of one life is but a mirror image of the series of unplanned accidents and mistakes that accounts for all of life on our planet. Not to know what we’re doing is quite in step with the nature of our alternate “reality,” and Helen was in step. Demanding that the personality of a scribe take positions, whose job description is the opposite, would have made her at least hard to work with if not toxic. Her work space would have been toxic if she wasn’t alone. As it was it was so toxic that it put out the Call for Love -- for the “better way” -- that gave us A Course in Miracles.

The authenticity of the Course and its Author

Contrast the friction of misfits at work with Helen’s remarkable fit with Jesus. Their compatibility further evidence that the Jesus of the Course is authentic. That he’s an agent of Soul connected to Logic and Love, the same functions of Mind in Reality that fit all functions together in harmony. Further evidence that Jesus knew what he was doing when it was through Helen’s mind, through her personality and its function -- scribe, -- that he channeled the Course. Probable choice because of her function, improbable on the face of it because of her personality.

The Course’s authenticity is undermined anytime skeptics can mischaracterize its scribe as one of them. She wasn’t one of them. The impartiality of a scribe is just that: impartiality. Skepticism is taking sides, and Helen could not do that. Though she was obliged to signal impartiality it’s clear that she never meant it to detract from the Course or its Author. It wasn’t a stance, thumbs up or thumbs down. A state that concerned her biographer, who sought to correct it with an interpretation of thumbs up. But Ken needn’t have been concerned. The ornery scribe took care of the skeptics on her own.

Intuition’s gift of personality type

I cite Ken’s esteem for Helen and for Freud not as an indication of questionable scholarship. He was as respectful of scholarship as he was of their achievements. His grasp of the Logic of the Course was as uncompromising as its non-dualism -- reliably disciplined and on the mark. Articulate and professional. His passion for his cause and contributions almost as impressive as the Course itself. The same unerring judgment that offered Helen her job was clearly at work when it offered Ken his.

I cite it instead as an instance of a more general tendency of human illogic to overlook personality type and function in its understanding of our alternate “reality.” Of the human condition, and so to guide Free Choice in choosing how to address it. How to discern purpose and meaning correctly so that we progress beyond it instead of being stuck inside Plato’s Cave.

I cite it, too, as an instance of how original thinking with intuition can work productively with the Course when the Course itself doesn’t cover all the bases. Though he dives into the human Psyche to an unprecedented depth Jesus leaves it to us to explore its breadth. Breadth that could have included personality type to explain projection and the obstacles we face in reversing it, but it didn’t. The point being we can figure it out for ourselves. If Jesus had laid it all out for us would we still have Free Choice?

Jung and Myers-Briggs shared the gift of Mind -- the sixth sense that is intuition -- with their theory of personality type. With illumination that can make the occupants of the Cave aware that its darkness isn’t their only choice. They aren’t prisoners and neither are we. None of us is a victim except by our own hand. We aren’t truly stuck anywhere except by our own choice, delusion that we’ve inflicted on ourselves. 

Body-sensing’s corruption of personality type

“Science” has done the opposite with its “five factor” theory of personality type. With the five senses of the body insanely fearful of what Mind’s sixth sense will reveal about them: that they don’t serve the light. That they and their captive science are instruments of the dark. Keeping us inside the Cave. Aided and abetted by Freud, adamant that Psyche is confined to body just as science is adamant that Consciousness is confined to brain.

Where does such nonsense come from? Not from the Logic of Jung’s and Myers-Briggs’ intuition that makes sense. It can only come from illogic that doesn’t make sense. From the master of the Cave. From delusion, and what’s called for is voice to speak for something better. Full-throated support for understanding personality type and function with intuition, not for overlooking it.

Klaatu barada nikto!

Jung and his successors, Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers, were guided by the same source and produced results that were equally insightful. Not flawless but equally useful if only analysts and theorists like Ken were aware of it.

A foundation dedicated to Ken’s work won’t critique it. Yet I share my critique to make a point, that acknowledging the Course’s part in a living, ongoing reflection on the questions of life’s purpose and meaning would add to its relevance, not detract from it. Would expand the reach of Ken’s extraordinary contribution, not impede it.

No one can absorb every detail, every nuance, of what Jesus and Ken had to say through the Course. But anyone with Mind and its sixth sense, along with the uniqueness of their personalities, is qualified to reflect on its implications. Is qualified to apply its lesson from one set of circumstances -- the personalities, lives, and work of two clinical psychologists in twentieth century Manhattan -- to another.

Policies and principles given voice in one moment are meant not to be enshrined as though time had stopped, but to be applied. Applied to other moments because time hasn’t stopped. The world of the Course and Ken’s teaching is not The Day the Earth Stood Still. We are not Patricia Neal needing Michael Rennie’s robot Gort to protect us inside his flying saucer. It’s the Cambrian era: change and diversity so powerful that nothing can stop it.

Infinity in motion

The Course is more than the comfort of sanctuary. It’s the engine of Mind and intuition that enable and empower adaptation to change. Function that asks to be recognized and put to use. To overlook it is to miss not only the Truth of what it is but the Truth of what it’s for.

We can’t do as Jesus has asked without staying in step with change. Without aligning ourselves with the Logic and Love of Creation. With work that can never be done because the implications of Logic and the connections of Love -- Relationships that hold the Interconnectedness of Soul together as One -- aren’t temporal. They’re infinite. Eternal. Eternally in motion. If this is the Truth of Reality and Creation, then it must be the Truth of the Course and the use we make of it. To bring us to the light of self-awareness and the end of the darkness of our Cave.

The example set by Jesus

What did Jesus mean when he admonished teachers and students not to treat the Course as a “bible?” That to do so would thwart its use, just as the intended use of Jesus’ parables and miracles long ago, in a different context, was thwarted by captivity to authoritarian hierarchy and canon. By “Bible” that distracted minds detached from Reality with the false promise of absolute Truth. Just as the Child unconscious had been misled by the two-headed lie of absolute Authority and absolute Freedom. All of it a con.

Jesus didn’t respond to Helen’s and Bill’s Call for Love with the absolute Truth. With an external deus ex machina that, once imposed on their situations, would solve all problems in perpetuity. He responded with example. He role-modeled how to address their problems without telling anyone what to do. How to explain context -- individual and humanity -- with Logic combined with Love that leads to understanding. So that reasoning can address purpose and meaning grounded in facts instead of magical thinking. So that it will be guided by perception and judgment instead of misperception and misjudgment. All of it grounded in Reality and Necessity -- the laws of cause and effect  that take the mystery out of miracles.

The call for original thinking that provokes

Above all, he set an example for the use of Logic, Love, and Free Will to expose the lie that is our alternate “reality.” Courageously and honestly, for this is anything but a convenient truth. Unless we follow his example with explanation that leads to Understanding, based on Logic and Love, that's shared with wisdom and compassion, it will be taken by others as provocation. As attack that warrants response in kind: unthinking, unreasoning retaliation.

If we allow the Course to be treated as absolute unquestioned anything we kill it. It’s not a “bible” because its very purpose is to question and be questioned. To empower the implications  of Logic that is forever asking Why. To enshrine the Course in absolute Truth is to deprive it of its power. To do the work of insanity, the Child's shadow-code. Parsing its metaphysics and sharing lives is useful but so too is application that puts it to work. So too is original thinking that’s provocative or it’s not doing its job. A view that’s legitimate and even critical but under-represented. Why? Because it's provocative. 

Choose again

Application of its metaphysics is what makes the Course unique. Text, Workbook, and Manual. A point made eloquently through the work of its teacher, Kenneth Wapnick. Then can the Course and its teacher be honored as inspiration and guidance for their use? For their application by their students to changing contexts that require fresh understanding? Through the same independent judgment, the same sixth sense guided by Logic and Love, that Jesus affirmed when he closed with Choose again?

Institutions dedicated to the Course and its teacher’s work in their time might also help to reflect on what’s to be said through the same Logic and Love, the same sixth sense, in our time. To reflect and apply the Course as a living document in the spirit of Jesus, whose work is not done. Is this feasible? It’s worth asking.

The pheasant in its nest

The pheasant needs flight to adapt to the world around it. It can’t stay in its nest. Every institution needs to reflect on its mission to stay viable. When the Miracle Distribution Center, the Foundation for A Course in Miracles, and the Foundation for Inner Peace reflect again, what considerations arise from the example of Jesus? What suggestions might be offered by the provocation of Honesty and Truth and the dynamic of Love? By the eternal Why of Logic?

Thank you. Keep up the good work, and God bless!

Published on Leave a comment on Mind versus Brain and the Dance of the Wild Siberian Tiger

Note: The following is an imaginary conversation with a bright pre-adolescent, a talented dancer whose style evokes comparison with a wild Siberian tiger. Her voice is in regular font, mine in italics. 

The Ultimate in Cool

You were up there on stage at the South Coast Botanic Garden. I was? Doing what? Doing your world-renowned Dance of the Wild Siberian Tiger. An elegant, svelte, supremely beautiful beast. Untamed. Master of her environment, allowing herself to be admired but belonging to no one.  Super cool -- that’s me! That is you. The beauty and seductiveness of style. The Toast of the Coast. And more. How can there be more when I’m already a star?

An image of two absolutes: absolute authority and absolute freedom. Two of the most compelling and consequential drivers of human thought and behavior in all of history. Forces of nature that ideally no one and nothing can limit. Wow! I knew my tiger was important but not this important! How did this happen? 

Rose

Something with this much hold on the human Psyche must have deep roots, and it does. It goes all the way back to when our one ancestral Mind imagined that it was many bodies. To our split identity between Mind and brain. But first, does your tiger have a name? If she does she hasn’t told me. Well, while we’re waiting I have a suggestion. “Rousseau.”

Calvin had Hobbes. Who was that? A boy in a comic strip with a stuffed tiger that he brought to life with his imagination. They were great friends and had fun, and they were entertaining. Cool! Thomas Hobbes was a 17th century English philosopher who thought human nature needs to be under universal absolute authority to be civilized. An 18th century Swiss philosopher thought it’s more like “noble savages,” essentially good but corruptible by tribes. His name was Jean Jacques Rousseau. Their philosophies live on in the great political and economic debates of today. 

He was a guy. My tiger is a girl. Can we call her “Rose” while I think about it? Of course! 

The one Mind that’s Logic combined with Love

So what’s this about minds and brains?

“Mind” and “brain” are two distinct entitles with two distinct sources and two distinct functions. They occupy two distinct worlds or “realities:” one that’s real and the other that isn’t because there can only be one Reality. You’ll need Mind to understand this because brains are matter that depend on their bodies’ five senses. They only see what’s in front of their eyes. The sixth sense of minds -- Intuition -- helps them sense the other world. 

Our minds are actually one Mind. Their source is the fusion of two distinct functions in one Relationship. Functions of thinking and feeling with Logic and Love. All the things that our minds do when they make sense and decide, judge and choose. When they stand up for good values and try to do what’s right. Understanding plus conscience. 

The Relationship between Logic and Love is between equals that aren’t complete without one another. Mind can’t make sense and do the right thing without the values of Love, and it can’t move forward and get things done if it doesn’t have the direction and discipline of Logic. Neither can Create without the other -- Create new life, new compositions of beauty and joyfulness. Everything that gives Creation its Worth. That makes it worth doing. 

Powerball 

Creation that requires Logic and Love working together in harmony but also working with something else that’s necessary: Free Choice. If we think of Logic as Choice and Love as Freedom Free Choice is their Child. With its own distinct definition and function that Creation needs, acting freely without interference. Its own Self along with its own function. 

It’s able to choose freely because of two conditions. The first is Order: the laws of cause and effect that apply to everything. Civilization “under the law.” The second is Relationship: the connection between Free Choice and its source, the Mind of Logic and Love. 

Connection that’s part of something larger that holds everything together: the Force of Energy that we call “Soul.” Interconnectedness. Everything fitting together in the harmony we call “Order” because it’s all directed and disciplined by Mind. By Logic and Love. Then Rose and I can be soulmates. You can if she’s an agent of Soul and not absolute authority and freedom. To understand that the source of Energy -- of power -- is Soul, and that Soul is Innocence that Interconnects everything, is to begin to understand its true nature. To understand how helpful it can if we make it our friend.

What’s wrong with absolute authority and freedom? Aren’t they good? History tells us that between the two ideals, being part of Soul that Interconnects everything and part of absolute authority and freedom, only one is helpful. The other is harmful. There can’t be a Force of nature that no one and nothing can limit. Like Palpatine and his Galactic Empire, it’s a fantasy. It’s OK if Rose portrays a beautiful but impossible ideal in performing arts. It’s done all the time. Having unlimited authority and freedom is like winning the lottery. But it’s dangerous when we try to make it real. This will take some explaining. I’ll try.  

Living the dream 

The source of mind’s thinking is one Mind. The individual Free Choice that’s our ancestral Mind. It can’t not exist since it’s part of Reality and it can’t not have Choice if it’s part of Creativity. All it has to do is to use its talents for Logic and Love to take part in Creation. In other words, Mind in Reality is Logic and Love working together to Create Life and Worth in Relationship with their Child, Free Choice. Then what is the brain?

Brain is a copy of Mind in reverse -- Mind’s opposite. It came about when the Mind of the Child of Logic and Love lost consciousness. When it dreamed what we can think of as an alternate “reality” that seems real to us but isn’t. If it’s a dream how can it seem so real? It seems so real because we rely on our brains and their bodies’ five senses to tell us what’s real and they’re part of the dream. And because the Force of Soul that Interconnects Reality is temporarily animating the dream. The dream will end?

Logic says so and so does physics: the energy that powers our universe is headed for inertia. It’s dying. So we think we’re experiencing Reality when all we’re experiencing is Energy activating a dream, with our bodies’ senses providing the 3-D movie projector. All in Technicolor! Real but unreal. 

The code that defines the dream 

The Mind unconscious and the brains of the bodies that it’s dreaming both contain the same code that defines the dream. The opposite of the Logic and Love that define Reality and Creation, and so it’s always pulling us into the dream away from Reality. Always misleading us into misperceptions, misjudgments, and wrongdoing. Why? Because Reality-Creation is Good and the code that defines the dream is its opposite. Parting with this thing that’s messing with our character and values, our thinking and relationships, is the great task of humanity. It’s why we’re talking about it. 

Why did the Child lose consciousness? I’m writing a book about it. A book I read about philosophy and theology said nobody so far has come up with a rational explanation. Then my intuition -- my sixth sense -- started explaining with insights that made sense. That was over three years ago. The book is still writing itself. When will you be done? When the insights tell me I’m done. So far they’re not letting up. I have to ignore the clock. 

Are minds and brains both helping with the great task of humanity? They are, but since they’re both deluded by the dream’s code it’s mostly inadvertent. Inadvertent? Unintentional, indirect. Brains belong to bodies and bodies are hard-wired into the dream. They have a different agenda, but their work still adds to our understanding. Minds with their sixth sense are receptive to other perspectives that aren’t hard-wired into the dream. It’s this other dimension that can get us somewhere. 

Two contexts, two agendas 

What’s different about their agendas? Mind’s context is the individual, brain’s the tribe or the herd. It’s because they have opposite sources: Child Mind-the-one in Reality and Child Mind-the-many in unreality -- in the alternate “reality” or dream defined by the code. 

We are equipped with two kinds of thinking -- brains and minds -- because we are two kinds of beings. Not a contradiction because, remember, only one is Real. We are tribes that need brains to disempower individuality for conformity and families of personalities that need minds to empower individuality for creativity. If Mind is one Child creating in Reality with its Parents, brain is many versions of Child in unreality socializing many versions of the beast. Many beasts in humanity’s animal brain that need to be organized and controlled so the tribe-herd survives. 

One part of the brain, the amygdala, links us to our distant past when we were animals that hadn’t yet become humans. We’re animals? We still are, only now with a difference. Ape evolved into Homo and Homo evolved into Homo Sapiens. Sapiens is Latin meaning “rational.” The amygdala at the base of the brain acquired a talent for thinking at the top: the prefrontal cortex. Sapiens. 

Socializing many beasts 

If we’re civilized humans it’s because we have minds as well as brains and because our cortex, generally but not always, tames the beast in our amygdala. It socializes the tribe so individual members cooperate when they have to hunt prey, fight with other tribes, or raise their young. To do whatever it takes to survive in a world of tribes. Without the cortex it would be like herding cats. What does “socializing” mean?

We equate socializing and sociable with agreeable, social life with fun. But what’s behind “social” isn’t intimacy among individuals. It isn’t Love, trust, and honesty that validate our distinctive personalities, empower creativity, and make us soulmates. Brain doesn’t care about any of this. It’s making its members wear mental uniforms to preserve its integrity. Imposing the sameness of conformity so personalities that define our individuality and enable intimacy disappear into a group. So they don’t make trouble by challenging its authority. 

Socializing brings the tribe’s beasts under control by imposing discipline on behavior within and among groups. The graphic book I sent not long ago helps to explain the neuroscience. Oh, that book. Right. It’s called “Two Heads: A Graphic Exploration of How Our Brains Work with Other Brains.” Clear evidence from people who study the brain that it’s not concerned with us as individuals. Then what is it concerned about?

Brain is only concerned about us as tribes. And as we’ll see this doesn’t necessarily mean it cares about us. It wants us to belong but once we do it’s not certain that it’s for our own good. Not if tribes get into fights. Not if they start world wars and threaten mass annihilation. The belonging of tribes is not the Loving of individuals. It may not even be the loving of tribes. 

Great performing art 

So why do we need minds if we’re civilized? We need minds because brains socializing beasts so that tribes can maintain group integrity in competition isn’t the same as civilizing. The wealth and happiness we get from minds is purpose and meaning. The heart of civilization that needs forward movement, led by vision toward a destination that stands for something. Toward a shared ideal. Toward Worth that has substance and consequence. Toward the integrity of individual character and values. 

Socializing and civilizing are different functions performed by two different agents with different agendas. If we’re talking about our animal brain It means giving its unthinking will and emotion, its raw energy, direction and discipline. We direct it with reason and values. With conscience that knows right from wrong. And we discipline it with the judgment of Logic that establishes and enforces boundaries. It’s called “governance.” Civilization. 

Brains preoccupied with tribes may seem to have our best interests at heart, but do they really? They begin life with play at dominance in competition. When they’re done with procreation they take on tribal competition for real as if looking for something to occupy us. All the while distracting us with style instead of substance, seduction instead of connection. Is that what was happening when Rose and I danced? You and Rose were being seductive with style and it made for great performing art! Great entertainment. 

From one to three dimensions 

The seductions of “action” consist of physical and emotional pleasure, pain, and winning and losing in tribal competition. Contrivances without purpose and meaning going nowhere. Every man for himself. A script composed by a writer who has no real idea what he’s doing and so he’s making it up. Unaware that his real purpose may not be to entertain and be entertained but to grow up. 

Minds come to the fore with contemplation when brains step back after procreation. Individuals released from conformance to groups share wisdom and compassion that adds depth to the purpose and meaning of civilization. A world that had seemed like a one-dimensional comic strip of unfeeling, self-centered action figures takes on an added dimension. The depth of judgment, insight, and understanding from mind’s sixth sense. From the individual’s Free Will.

The servant that must never be master

Energy -- the “Force” popularized by “Star Wars” -- acts at the direction and under the discipline of Mind because it’s the servant of Mind. The relationship between our animal brain and the brain’s socializing function in the prefrontal cortex is servant to master. Without the civilizing influence of Mind our animal will has no intelligence of its own to guide it. To put it to its intended use, which is to supply motivation, passion, drive. To translate thought and feeling into action. To back up civilized thinking with force. With instinct that acts when there’s no time for thought.  What happens when servant takes over? 

It's what happened to 1930s Germany: thinking, conscience, and judgment of Mind are all taken over by a predator. The human animal reverts to animal, the state we were in before we became human. Before ape evolved into homo sapiens. Only worse because now the animal in us has access to all the ways sapiens can think of to dominate and destroy. Like handing the nuclear code to Frankenstein’s monster. I think I’ve heard this story before. We all have. Technology comes up with new stuff and always it falls into the wrong hands. Germany was working to develop the atomic bomb when WWII ended. 

The power of the dark side 

To prevent servant becoming master we make sure that Rose, our wild Siberian tiger, hasn’t transformed from an agent of Soul into an ideal of absolute authority and freedom. We make sure that we haven’t transformed ourselves into Rose the wrong ideal. What would happen if we did? We would eventually revert to living in caves and hunting and foraging. Without civilization. Civilization is the rule of law that applies to everyone. The “ideal” of absolute authority and freedom is the opposite: lawlessness. It’s where authoritarian regimes like Germany’s were taking us.

The raw power of beast combined with style, the exquisite gracefulness of beauty that you and Rose portrayed, is capable of casting a spell over the human imagination. So compelling that some would rather let it rule and live under its spell. Who does that? Authoritarians who want our world to be ruled by the Force of will that is Energy ungoverned by Mind. Because that’s who they want to be. “Conservatives” who don’t like democracy because it governs. Because it won’t let them have and do whatever they want. “Traditionalists” who don’t want change because it’s harder to control than things the way they are. That sounds selfish.

Selfish and irrational. To them the “free” in “free market” is an ideal of absolute freedom, a wild Siberian tiger that they don’t want tamed. Arguments over whether this is the best thing divide whole schools of economics and spill over into politics and philosophy. How to handle this compelling image of a wild Siberian tiger, an impossibility, has been a big deal forever. Conflict over whether to let servant be the master when the answer should be obvious. 

Hand-me-downs from other lives

Conservatives gave themselves another name when they took over 1930s Germany: “National Socialists.” The Nazis adored their version of a wild Siberian tiger who seduced them with his shining ideal. He called it “triumph of the will.” An ideal of wildness that is a law unto itself. Ruling arbitrarily, doing whatever he wants. Which is no law at all for everyone else because laws structure society with boundaries. If the “boundaries” are whatever the absolute ruler decrees and he can change his mind then there are no boundaries. No structure, only disorder. We can’t live with confidence in disorder. We can only live in fear and hope for our safety if we obey the ruler. 

France went through this earlier during the French Revolution. It was known as the “Terror.” That was Germany in the 1930s? For many Germans, yes. And yet many others were glad to obey. As if they liked allying with someone who could be wild and do whatever he wanted even if they couldn’t. As if he were living its ideal for them. Living others’ lives for them? Is that possible?

Psychologically it is, and it’s not uncommon. Ordinary people in England lived lives of unlimited ease and pleasure vicariously through the lords and ladies of nobility, especially when Queen Victoria ruled the British Empire. Many live vicariously through royalty and other celebrities today. “Vicariously?” Your American Heritage dictionary has a nice definition just for you. I would rather learn vicariously through you. Touché! 

The human animal 

Did Germany’s will “triumph” in the end? It did just the opposite. It led everyone into another world war that Germany lost. It led to mass destruction and total defeat. Who was this guy? Adolf Hitler. He didn’t survive. And his shining ideal of wildness? It died too? No. The tragedy of all our wars: warriors die but the mad ideal of absolute authority just goes on and on. That doesn’t allow independent thinking. That crushes individual initiative and creativity. That prizes obedience and loyalty above all virtues. And all because of Rose? Our animal brain? 

You might think so. But animals on their own have survived for hundreds of millions of years. Like the dinosaurs? Yes. And mammals and fish too, even though they prey on one another. Within their herds or species the caring and character they display can put humans to shame. Animals in the wild prey on one another for food and self-protection. If they’re brought up in conditions where it’s not necessary some species lose that instinct. They become domesticated, even playful and affectionate. They deserve our love and respect. 

Humanity has evolved from its animal roots into a different kind of animal. One that isn’t content with propagation of its species. “Triumph of the will” isn’t content with live and let live. Authoritarian supremacy wants more. It will have its ideal of absolute authority or take us all down with it. A mindset that’s interested in surviving for hundreds of millions of years but only on its own terms. Which means it places its ideal -- its authority -- even above our species’ survival. It’s fatally self-centered. Hitler and his admirers fought to the last man; their cause transformed from absolute authority to absolute destruction. The act of a human animal. 

The inhuman animal 

What humanity’s authoritarian mindset appropriates from its animal nature is the wildness. The instinct of a predator ruled by the law of the jungle: kill or be killed. Far from civilization governed by reason and judgment, by gentle loving kindness. The Force of nature represented by your beautiful tiger doesn’t have a dark side. It’s there to serve Mind. If the Force of nature seems to have gone off track it’s because its master, the Mind that directs it, has gone off track. Whether “the Force” is good or bad depends on the use we put it to. The human mind does have a dark side, and it’s made of your lovable Soulmate Rose something that she isn’t. Palpatine and his evil Galactic Empire!

A false ideal that humanity keeps coming back to and every time it’s a disaster. An absurd authoritarian fantasy that releases the worst instincts of humanity. That turns us back into uncivilized animals. Into predators. How can Palpatine be so cruel without feeling bad about it?

You’re thinking Palpatine is human. But in order to live his authoritarian fantasy he’s made himself inhuman. By denying his human qualities: reason, values, conscience, and sensitivity. The ability to relate to others as humans. His galaxy is inhabited by inhumans who can’t feel. Cruelty among inhumans can’t be possible if only dominance and defeat are possible. If you resist Palpatine’s rule and get hurt it’s your own fault. So there’s nothing to feel bad about. 

The all-powerful whimpering kitty 

Crushing others with absolute power is so unfair, so unjust! Doesn’t Palpatine see that it’s wrong? No. He thinks he’s right. Not causing injustice but righting a great injustice. An injustice done to him that stole his self and all its resources -- mind, heart, talents, functions that gave him life. An injustice that abandoned him to a dangerous, competitive world. That made him a helpless, innocent victim. 

Tough-guy authoritarians like Palpatine and Hitler begin their rampage with self-pity and blame. Feeling sorry for themselves and so they take it out on others. 1930s Germany began its rampage of authoritarian persecution by believing that it was the persecuted. But I want to be innocent. “I did nothing wrong!”

We all want to be innocent -- wrongdoers especially who think they’ve been mistreated. And we all feel sorry for ourselves. There’s plenty of injustice to go around that we can’t do anything about. But there’s a better way to serve conscience than imagining we’re helpless innocent victims. How’s that? We’re never helpless. We have Free Will. We have gifts and powers. And every situation has its opportunities to use them. It’s why I think, why I write. Why my tiger and I dance. You have wonderful talents of mind, heart, and body that will be put to good use. 

World of individuality, world of creativity 

We need minds to take us to the next level of evolution: beyond demonstrating one talent to demonstrating another. From the talent to socialize and civilize to the talent to exercise -- to exercise Free Choice. From developing the capacity of groups to get along to developing the capacity of individuals to be creative instead of self-destructive. To think and act creatively with understanding. With self-awareness that can only come from Relationship with Logic and Love, our Source. The one Mind that we are. The way to Freedom from the confinement of misunderstanding, the strange appeal of absolutes. 

Whose side are brains on? 

It takes much more than socializing animal brains to achieve our ideals as individuals and as a society. There’s no possibility of Free Choice without the Order of civilization and the governance of democracy. Though brains are supposed to socialize beasts history and everyday experience tell us that they’re not up to it. Civilization has advanced in some ways but in other ways it’s gotten nowhere. The beasts in our animal brain keep getting out of their cage. Our world and our lives are still precarious. 

Brains with their bodies’ five senses think this is “normal” and nothing can be done about it. They aren’t moved by true ideals. True ideals are creative. “Triumph of the Will” is destructive. The Mind that we share through our sixth sense is moved by true ideals. It thinks the opposite. A world that’s not making real progress, that’s stuck in a status quo that’s actually taking us backward, isn’t normal and something can be done about it. Mind is Possibility. Mind is Hope. 

I don’t have a good feeling about this. Brains that think we should be OK with the beast taking over; that have no ideals; that are content with getting nowhere -- whose side are they on? They have a different agenda so we have to wonder. 

Dance of the Big Bang 

Here’s one possibility. Since all they can detect with their five senses is the surface of things brains may be using the lure of absolute authority and freedom to distract us. From what? From discovering what’s underneath. Like a magician’s act that diverts attention with sleight of hand. What could be underneath? The Truth that the magician doesn’t want us to know. That appearances are all there is. That they’re all illusions -- magician’s tricks -- and we’re being fooled. There’s nothing underneath. Our “alternate reality” is a movie studio façade. 

Minds perform a critical function that brains lack: the capacity to understand with Logic that defines and explains, that structures and orders our situations. Exactly what absolute authority and freedom seek to avoid because it’s all about setting limits. Maybe all about figuring out what brains are up to. Good reason for brains to push minds out of the way? Makes sense. 

So we can be friends and soulmates 

Then what is Mind’s agenda? To furnish us with the functions of individual minds that tribal-herd brains deny us. Functions that enable us as individuals to make sense of our situations. To learn and grow to maturity. To gain the competence to distinguish between Truth and appearances, right and wrong. So we can understand meaning and purpose, exercise Free Choice, and move forward. Understand personalities and the psychology of relationships so we can be friends and soulmates, get along better. So we will stop being lured by false ideals and return to where there are real ideals. To Real Worth. To where we belong. 

It may have been the promise of absolute authority and freedom that lured our ancestral Mind into its dream. To a fairyland where there are no Parents or laws to keep it from having and doing whatever it wants. When you and Rose performed the dance of the wild Siberian tiger you might have been re-enacting a historic seduction. Historic? Me? The seduction of our ancestral Mind that produced our universe. Recognition at last! 

Your choice 

We don’t have to be imprisoned like beasts inside a brain. If we are Free Choice we have a choice: Mind and its sixth sense. A hopeful Mind that offers us purpose with a vision. That offers possibility and Creativity -- a way forward. Which will yours be?

Published on Leave a comment on The Love of an Ancestor

The busy beaver 

Our ancestors are ghosts, right? Dead and gone. Can we be sure of that? Their bodies are energy stored in matter that comes to rest when they die. It reaches a state of inertia in those bodies. But the first law of thermodynamics says that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. So the energy that stops animating bodies doesn’t cease to exist. It still exists but it’s just moved on.

Back to Soul perhaps, its source, that holds everything together in one interconnected Reality. Or to another form where Mind directs it. For energy is doing. And if Mind doesn’t give it anything to do it comes to rest. If that were to happen nothing would exist, for energy activates. It’s what makes things happen. Mind has plenty for energy to do. Whether it's activating our material universe or another Reality entirely.

As if nothing happened

The life in our bodies is energy directed by Mind that many believe is distinct from our brain, like me and many neuroscientists. Energy that comes to inertia in bodies has no effect at all on energy itself or on Mind.

So when a body “dies” it may be the end of one form of energy but it can’t be the end of life. It can’t be the end of what makes things happen. Our ancestors’ personalities and stories, like ours, were time- and place-specific. Linked to their circumstances, their contexts, and when energy stopped animating their stories they were done. The succession of ancestors and contexts moved on and it will leave us with our contexts behind too. But the life in us can’t be left behind. It continues on as if nothing happened.

When a life comes back to life

Maybe I just memorialized Grandma Clara Jane’s story because she wanted me to. Because in some sense our ancestors are still with us and want to help us. Or there's unfinished business, like something we can do for them. Not necessarily their personalities and stories as we think of them but their souls. If we are one big Soul connected by energy; if she was a big help when she was alive; and if the energy that gave life to her body remains intact in her soul, why shouldn’t she be a big help now? Why shouldn't I be a help to her?

Clara Jane’s story intersected with mine while she and I both shared time and space on earth. We connected, though I might not have been aware of it. Her circumstances linked with mine when she performed an act that improved my prospects. When I was a vulnerable child in an unwelcoming family environment and needed protection. Maybe we’ve reconnected now because I can return the favor. Because there’s something that she needs from me and I can deliver.

What does she need? She had a tragic love life. And her crucial role in joining two families with pride of accomplishment -- the Clays of Kentucky and the Harrisons of Western Pennsylvania -- has never been given its due. The remarkable, larger-than-life way that she did it. I can be masculinity to her femininity that’s respectful and loyal. Not the bounder she married. And I can turn my passion for reflecting and writing to giving her role its due. She can somehow become whole through me in a way that was left undone when she was among us.

A friendly operator is waiting for your call

So what happens next?

There must be an ancestor you admire who wants to help. Maybe he or she is sitting by the phone waiting for you to call. Do you think?

Published on Leave a comment on A Sober Salute to Saint Patrick’s Day from a Grateful Brain

Fun while it lasted

Your usual fare from me on Saint Patrick’s day is literature extolling Irish history and talents for one thing or another. One of their talents I personally experienced in Boston is drinking. They and my Welsh ancestors are celebrated for their rollicking contributions to music and poetry extolling the delights of their habit. Richard Burton, the talented actor who courted Elizabeth Taylor, was Welsh and noted for it.

A Boston Irish pol introduced me to life enlivened by drink that lasted 42 years. It was fun while it lasted but given the choice I wouldn’t do it again.

Energy does what it’s told

Matter is stored energy and brains are matter that operate by electrical impulses. Energy acts at the direction of Mind. When our minds tell our bodies to say awake too often they’ll start staying awake and make getting to sleep harder. When we tell our brains with drink, psychedelics, or other substances we want to alter them so we think or feel differently they’ll get in the habit of altering. It’s sometimes obvious that bodies and brains made of matter are doing what our minds tell them and these are two examples.

The grateful brain

Good judgment depends on brains not altering. Too much altering is physical and mental abuse that leads to misjudgments. Misjudgments that accumulate over time degrade performance. Human history is replete with examples of talented personalities like Richard Burton whose lives and careers ended prematurely because of physical abuse that involves brain-altering. Personality differences kept us entertained with his and Elizabeth’s dramatics but drinking would have had a hand in it too.

By the standards of my Welsh ancestry my drinking life was hardly worth the name. I was reasonably disciplined though not always aware that too much is too much and it shows. When I quit fourteen years ago, there was a noticeable improvement in physical performance -- quality of sleep, energy, appetite. Then, three years ago, a great leap forward in every function of mind. Almost overnight I got better with creativity -- insight, free association, imagination. It was as if a better mind than mine took over or else potential that was always there had broken free.

What is my brain telling me? What yours might tell you if you quit altering it. Thank you!

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Published on 2 Comments on The Agent of Soul

Jung vs. Freud: the split that still reverberates

Why shouldn’t an agent of Soul, our Psyche, be accessible to us through Intuition when it was the Force of Soul that animated the dream? Where in our minds is the agent to be found?

In the obvious place. In our Psyche where psychology looks for it. Where Carl Jung intuited the “collective unconscious.” Where his once and former mentor, Sigmund Freud, mistook it for something else. For an agent of the body, certain to the end that physiology writhed like a serpent in cosmic mud under his analytic microscope. His insights found acceptance improbably in America where its superficiality offended him. They also took him improbably not to their cause, to Logic-Love from Intuition, but circuitously back to effect. Back to the body and the chemistry of brain matter.

Jung’s psychology took what Freud started and did connect with the agent of Soul. Because he found offensive the idea that the Psyche he was looking for could possibly reside in matter. The reason why he and his mentor went their separate ways and why the break in their relationship still reverberates in Western thought.

Jung didn’t make the same mistake. While Freud went with the body’s five senses and conventionality Jung went with his sixth sense and originality. To look beyond appearances, beyond the body, and found a wealth of insights that would have progressed even farther had he lived to read A Course in Miracles. The metaphysics of Jesus that explained with unprecedented Logic, depth, and clarity the psychodynamics of another Reality. Events beyond our awareness that produced humanity’s split mind in an alternate “reality,” the source of its irrationality, contradictions, and conflicts. The haunting, pain, and torment of guilt. An alternate material “reality” of isolated-separated bodies, spacetime relativity, dark energy, colliding galaxies, and particles that defy the laws of physics. “Life” that depends on accidents of nature -- random events, mutations of genes -- for its evolution.

All of it a testament to the rule of lawlessness. To chaos. A systematic assault on the laws of cause and effect, the Force of Necessity that orders and Interconnects Reality and enables the harmony and peace of Creation -- its Freedom, the spontaneity of joyfulness.

Spirit and the Myth of Psyche and Eros

Jung helped to change human thought from recalcitrance to receptivity with his insights into personality types, purely a gift of intuition that couldn’t be attributed to brain chemistry if it posited faculties of Mind unrelated to brain. Faculties that could only be attributed to something else. To the agent of Soul that also goes by the name of Spirit. Spirit that is the essence, Innocence, and Beauty of Soul. Spirit that in our ancestral Mind in Reality and its projections in unreality is Psyche. The same innocent, ethereally beautiful girl of Greek mythology who inspires us with the eternal love story of Psyche and Eros. Our guide and role model for performing the task assigned to us in unreality and returning, with help, back home to Reality.

If we think our lot is hard hers was literally impossible. The series of tasks she was assigned by Aphrodite, her lover’s jealous, vengeful mother, were intended to remove her from his life permanently. Yet Psyche performed them with help until she was sent down to Persephone in hell for her final errand. The one that was supposed to be her end. She lost consciousness and may never have awakened if Eros had not broken his mother’s grip and come to her side. Instead of death on earth her love was requited with eternal life on Mount Olympus. With Eros in the home of the gods. A parallel with Jesus, another tale of death yielding to the Truth of Life. 

Guidance that’s competent

If the agent of the Soul is the agent of Psyche then it knows our situation and it’s well qualified to lead us through it. Our guide is Spirit. Not bodies. Not science that, like all fields of inquiry has a role to play but puts its faith in bodies’ senses. Not Freudian psychology that looks for answers in brain chemistry. In bodies’ cravings, brains’ neuroses, and nutty behavior. But the Spirit that Jung’s Intuition connected with. To “spiritual psychology,” another name for sixth sense that every field has always depended on but can’t acknowledge for what it is: another perspective than our own. Connection to another Reality.

The Reality described in the Course with helpful, harmless, loving familiarity. Demeaned and ridiculed by split minds for its strangeness. For its affront to the familiar and the conventional, to our unchanging status quo while it goes about quietly, unobtrusively with evolution. With the Interconnections of Logic and Love that, when the right constellation of circumstances forms -- when the time is right, -- will help us, Free Will hand in hand with Psyche, with Spirit, reach our goal.

Free Choice that’s competent

To get our dreaming ancestral Mind out of bed and back to work. No longer an inexperienced, immature Child but now grown up. Experienced with opposites. With illusion, temptation, adversity, and pain. Equipped with the Wisdom and Compassion, the Patience of its Parents but informed by its own experience that only Free Will could Live. Its own unique, individual Self with its own unique work to perform.

Made possible by what? By what we’re learning here. In this chaos of frustration, injustice, missed connections, and pain we call “life.” In this mess of contradictions we call our world. A world of split minds and their material environment that makes no sense, who would discredit perspective from another world that does make sense for being weird.

What’s to do? Embrace our sixth sense. Embrace Psyche. Embrace Free Choice and keep at it. What have we got to lose?

Published on Leave a comment on Why Is Metaphysics Relevant?

Disorder careening out of control

How do individuals and groups get into situations that take them down? Like Nixon and Watergate, Japan and Pearl Harbor, Putin and Ukraine. Like humanity and global warming, mass extinction. Like us all with relationships and projects, careers and enterprises, that become train wrecks.

Situations evolve from implications of Logic plus the connections and relationships of Love -- facts, circumstances -- that require interpretation within the purpose and meaning of context. Context which requires judgment based on Logic inseparable from Love. Misjudgment --  getting purpose-meaning of context wrong, i.e. not basing it on Logic-Love -- causes misinterpretation of facts-circumstances It causes misperception.

Misperceptions resulting from misjudgments evolve into more misjudgments, an accumulation of choices and decisions out of alignment with context-reality that, over time, widen the gap between reality and unreality. Between facts-circumstances and wishful-psychotic thinking that turn orderly evolution into disorder careening out of control.

Then there’s the broader context

Misperceptions that fail to perceive hazards and obstructions -- potholes, kids on bicycles, telephone poles, drunk drivers, sharp turns, cliffs -- inevitably cause accidents. Collisions with facts-circumstances -- with reality -- that aren’t foreseen because facts-circumstances in the present aren’t seen. Because they were misinterpreted until it only took one more mis-aligned choice, one more mistaken decision, to cause a wreck. Until the mistaken-misperceiving mind behind the hand on the steering wheel made one more wrong turn and it proved fatal.

The wrong turn was the result of getting both the immediate context and the broader context -- the big picture -- wrong. It was the result of illogic -- not making sense. Choice-decision that seems “reasoned” in the immediate context, that doesn’t make sense in the broader context, ultimately can’t be reasoned and therefore cannot be the right choice. It can only be part of a mis-aligned evolution of mistakes that necessitate reconsideration of the broader context until evolution gets back on track.

How to make sense of the broader context

The correct choice-decision will get both the immediate and broader context right with Logic-Love. It requires making sense of context that’s not possible without a sixth sense. Five senses of bodies that can’t see beyond appearances aren’t enough. Relying on appearances perceived by bodies’ senses while rejecting guidance from sixth sense guarantees crackups, because their causes can’t be seen by bodies’ eyes. It’s the root of all human misadventures, the ultimate cause of all human pain.

Sixth sense connects minds needing guidance with spontaneous insights through Intuition that connects with the source of guidance. With Logic-Love, our one ancestral Mind’s Source, through the agency of Soul that interconnects all of Life, all of Creation. That interconnects all minds whether conscious or unconscious, aware of Reality or dreaming of unreality. It’s our expressway to Understanding that’s accessible if we choose to relate to it and ask for its help. So that the hands on the wheel are the hands of Relationship and not just our own. Relationship with competence to share the driving and take us forward to satisfaction and pleasure instead of in circles of frustration and pain until we get it right.

The archetypal runaway kid

Our ancestral Mind’s home in Reality-Creation was Interconnected. The alternate “reality” where we find ourselves is disconnected. That is, it appears to be disconnected because separation in Reality is impossible. Disconnection is but our unawareness of connection brought on by self-delusion: the mistaken identity with our opposite, our shadow-reflection, that projected the dream.

What produced the Big Bang? Something analogous to the atomic bomb that released an atom’s nuclear force when it was split and devastated Hiroshima. An object lesson in the hazards of separating stuff that Reality says can’t be split. Our ancestral Mind, in extremis, sought safety in escape from Reality where it had lost consciousness and had no prospects of regaining consciousness. It was so desperate that it was willing to be led into an alternate “reality.”

To do this it needed to separate from Logic-Love, its Parents. It needed to break the Relationship that bound it to Life in Reality and to its function in Creation. As insane a thought as one can imagine, but this is what the self-deluded Child that we were was desperate to do. It performed a trick that psychology knows as “projection:” projecting itself out of Reality and into an alternate reality. Imagining that it was splitting its Relationship with its Parents.

One big exploding cigar

A split powered by Energy, the Force of Soul that Interconnects all of Reality, acting as it must at the direction of Mind. So momentous in its contradiction of this Force and Reality that it caused the equivalent of a nuclear explosion. That and the Child's unbearable pain of guilt that accompanied unconsciousness and its separation from Parents. Only on an unimaginable scale. Because in enlisting Energy to split the Relationship with Parents the Child was splitting Force itself. The Energy that powers our universe (metaverse?) is the dying Energy of entropy, not the living Energy of Reality-Creation.

All of it a phantasmagoria of impossibilities, but nevertheless seeming to be real because Energy, whose source is Soul, knows nothing of boundaries. Nothing of the difference between consciousness and unconsciousness because Everything is Interconnected. Even unreality that declares itself to our bodies’ senses as disconnected. If metaphysics relying on Logic-Love is certain that our alternate material “reality” is actually unreality -- an illusion -- minds dependent on sensory perception will point to Energy, in us and all around us, stored in matter, accounting for the strong and weak nuclear forces, the electromagnetic force, and gravity, and be just as certain that it can’t be an illusion.

What does A Course in Miracles say about this? That we live in an unreal world that has been “made” real. Not in a world that was created by the Relationship but in a world that was imagined by an unconscious, dreaming Mind. What will it take for the illusion to disappear? Awakening. The Child regains consciousness, reversing the projection and Energy that had appeared to enable it. Poof -- gone!

When pain is all that’s left

Until that can happen we must come to terms with unmanageability. The alternate “reality” we occupy that seems to rest on a foundation of disconnection. Separation not only between the Child and its Parents, living Force from dying Force, but Logic from Love, mind from heart. The great overriding task of humanity is to help restore consciousness by bringing Logic and Love, mind and heart, back together. By ending the absurd notion that they can ever be split. And in so doing to help bring the Child to a state of maturity and competence, because otherwise it can’t be entrusted with its function -- Free Choice -- in Creation.

It's urgent that the Relationship be restored because it’s our moral compass, the source of Plato’s Good. The reasoning with values that civilize us and supposedly reside in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. Relationship with moral character is all there is to govern the “bad thing” that Sigmund Freud observed in the human psyche: our animal emotion, our predatory will, the blind instinct of herds and tribes to dominate and kill. The great overriding task of humanity is not to let the predatory will of our animal-herd instinct dominate the civilizing functions of Logic joined with Love, mind joined with heart. Not to let the body-centered sides of our personality types dominate the mind-centered sides.

What would motivate minds otherwise content with things as they are and resistant to change? Pain. The legacy of separation in alternate reality, in all its forms, can be enormous pain. The young hedonist wedded to bodily appetites, entertainments, and socializing invests more in the avoidance of pain as time goes by. Until bodies give out and pain is all that’s left.

Nixon’s folly was everyone’s folly

Nixon, smart and able, was certain that he was “right.” His decisions were all “reasoned.” His assumptions were all “correct.” Yet something still went catastrophically wrong. His situation swallowed him up and spit him out. He still went down. Unapologetic to the end. Inattentive to the broader context to the end because he put all his faith in his body’s five senses. He dismissed both the broader context and the sixth sense needed to make sense of it. Neither was relevant, and he paid a price.

Why is metaphysics relevant? Why is the metaphysics of Parmenides and the Gnostic teacher Valentinus relevant? Why is the metaphysics of Jesus and A Course in Miracles relevant?

First of all because Nixon was by no means alone. History has entertained and appalled us with many more examples of fools toppling themselves from the pinnacles of power to abject humiliation and impotence below. Because he is us -- ourselves as individuals and humanity as a whole. We are all Richard Nixons, all fools, on lesser scales. His wasn’t an example of one individual going down. He was all of us making fools of ourselves. He was humanity going down.

The difference between Heaven and hell

Metaphysics done right, that sees beyond appearances, is relevant because it’s Guidance from Logic-Love. Guidance from another perspective accessed through the sixth sense of Intuition, toward making sense. Toward decisions and choices by individuals and groups that perceive and judge correctly. In alignment with facts-circumstances, with reality, instead of out of alignment with facts-circumstances, with unreality.

Wisdom combined with compassion and patience instead of youthful folly. Instead of eternal adolescence, the state of humanity content with things as they are, determined not to grow up. Willing itself into situations that take it down until it runs out of situations.

Metaphysics may be the difference between pleasure and pain, winning and losing, success and failure. It may be the difference between conflict and peace, survival and extinction, heaven and hell. What more can we ask? That’s why it’s relevant.

Published on Leave a comment on Authoritarian Rule: Fact vs. Fiction

Fiction:

  • All relations are power relations between groups / tribes-herds competing for dominance.
  • Individuals “exist” with voices and feelings worthy of recognition only to the extent that they belong to groups, identify with groups, and are loyal to groups.
  • The gift of belonging that groups confer upon their members substitutes for Love and reciprocates individuals’ Love for their group.
  • Love of individuals for their group is to be encouraged. Love between individuals that can take precedence over group loyalty is to be denied and suppressed.
  • Group / tribe-herd loyalty is the highest good, the most important core value. More important than individual sovereignty and integrity. More important than respect for morality and the truth.
  • Questioning the supremacy of group authority is a sin. There is no worse sin than disobedience to group authority.

Fact:

  • One Child is Real and True. Child-the-many is a delusion perpetrated by the Child’s mistaken identity, its shadow-reflection opposite. By its “dark side” that can only be detected by Mind while in an unconscious state dreaming illusions.
  • Power relations between groups / tribes-herds competing for dominance are illusory “action” meant to distract their audience of individuals from the Truth, to convince them that Child-the-many is not what it is: the opposite of the Truth -- one Child -- and therefore unreal. It is an illusion.
  • Individuals have Free Choice enabled by Mind thinking-loving that is not subject to the mindless-loveless animal will of groups / tribes-herds.
  • There is no substitute for Love.
  • Group “belonging” that condemns its members to the suppression of sovereign individuality, the denial of Mind, Free Will, and Love, and to endless conflict is a curse, not a gift or blessing.
  • Free Will is the natural birthright of every individual. Bodies can be controlled and behavior suppressed. Minds and hearts endowed with individuality and Free Will cannot.
  • There is no more important core value than valuing the one Self that is Love shared and expressed through Oneness-individuality. There is no higher good than respect for Good itself -- morality, Logic-Love, and the Truth.
  • There is no more harmful mistake than loyalty to the mindless, loveless, soulless animal will of group / tribe-herd taking precedence over the mindful, loving Free Will of individuality.

Fiction:

  • Consideration whether the ownership and use of a product is to be adjusted to accommodate others affected by its use, that denies them feelings and a voice with which to express their feelings, that ignores what their voice has to say, is moral and “reasonable.”
  • A response to a request that’s accompanied by reasons based on values, that makes no reference to the reasons and values given, is moral and “reasonable.”
  • Ownership that confers the right to do whatever the owner wants without regard to the interests of others affected in a shared world is ownership that’s responsible, moral, and “reasonable.”
  • It is “reasonable”-possible to have and do whatever you want without violating the natural rule of law that defines morality and enables civilization.
  • Explanation and understanding are possible without analysis. Free Choice is possible without analysis. Analysis is possible without reasoning and evaluation. 

Fact:

  • In a shared, just, civilized world no one may have and do whatever they want with ownership or any other context without conflicting with the natural rule of law and morality.
  • “Doing” is process that always requires structure. Structure is Order that consists of natural laws of cause and effect, sourced by Benevolence -- Logic and Love -- and backed up by the Force of Necessity. It’s morality and it applies to owners as well as everyone.
  • It applies to Benevolence -- the Authority that governs all of Reality-Creation because otherwise its governance would be arbitrary and capricious and therefore immoral and lawless.
  • The “right” to have and do whatever anyone wants in any context is a myth that authoritarian narcissists employ in order to “justify” injustice: acts that are inherently selfish, insensitive, cruel, and therefore immoral.
  • It is being promoted today by selfish, immoral demagogues to “justify” the takeover of democratic bottom-up governance by authoritarian top-down rule.
  • It is a lie that accounts for humanity’s long history of unresolved tension between civilizing Reason and tribalizing herd-emotions, between harmony and conflict, Good and evil, peace and war.
  • It is the ultimate affront to the rule of law that enables a just, reasoning-accommodating, egalitarian civilization as opposed to authoritarian dominance by unreasoning, unjust, combative tribal will.
  • The idea that anyone can have and do whatever they want without violating the natural rule of law and morality is detached from Reality, psychotic, and therefore insane.

Fiction:

  • Having a voice and the right and duty to be heard is the sole prerogative of authoritarian rule. No one else is entitled to it.
  • Denying others a voice when they have the right and duty to be heard cannot be of any consequence to them or inflict any cost on them.
  • It is of no consequence and inflicts no cost because others are not entitled to feelings. Having feelings that can be offended is the exclusive preserve of authoritarian rule.
  • Authoritarian rule that claims exclusive rights to a voice and feelings can do no harm to those denied a voice and feelings and is therefore exempt from responsibility and accountability since there are no consequences-costs to account for.
  • Authoritarian rule is exempt from accountability because rule that’s arbitrary, capricious, and lawless may do whatever it wants. 

Fact:

  • Everyone in a shared, just, and civilized world is entitled to a voice and has the right to be heard when their interests are affected.
  • Everyone has feelings and the right to use their voice to express their feelings when they are offended.
  • Authoritarian rule that denies others a voice and deprives them of feelings when they are affected is unfeeling. It’s insensitive, cruel, immoral, and uncivilized.
  • Unfeeling authoritarian wrongdoing can evoke feelings of rage, hatred, and a “terrible resolve” to right the wrong among its victims. Admiral Yamamoto feared that democratic America would be filled with a “terrible resolve” to punish authoritarian Japan for its attack on Pearl Harbor, and America did so.

Fiction:

  • Authoritarian rule must be unquestioned because it is flawless as it is, it is absolute, and has no opposite. 

Fact:

  • Authoritarian rule can have no opposite because it is an opposite: the opposite of the natural laws of cause and effect and morality backed by the Force of Necessity that govern supportively and compassionately from the bottom up instead of ruling cruelly, destructively, and lawlessly from the top down.

Fiction:

  • Structure-Order is possible without natural laws of cause and effect and a moral code backed by the Force of Necessity.
  • Structure-Order is made possible by arbitrary-capricious authoritarian rule that’s lawless. That “rules” by the “laws” of chaos.
  • In Structure-Order made possible by lawless authoritarian rule it’s possible, moral, and just to have and do whatever you want without consequences or costs.

Fact:

  • Arbitrary-capricious authoritarian rule that’s lawless is the opposite of Structure-Order and morality.
  • Freedom is impossible in the absence of Structure-Order.
  • The absence of Structure-Order -- lawlessness -- is the denial of Freedom. It’s imprisonment, enslavement. 

Fiction:

  • “Action” is mindless, loveless, and soulless.
  • “Action” is bodies directed-disciplined by animal herd instinct toward dominance-supremacy of will in physical competition-conflict.
  • “Action” that results in winning and losing in physical conflict stands for the ultimate purpose and meaning of Life: the “Triumph of the Will.” 

Fact:

  • Action that stands for purpose and meaning is mindful, loving, and soulful.
  • Action is self-directed, self-disciplined minds and hearts functioning with guidance from their sixth sense -- spontaneous insights from Intuition -- toward explanation that leads to understanding how to address issues and solve problems with honesty, integrity, and compassion.
  • Action is the application of understanding that addresses issues and solves problems, that alleviates suffering and advances the cause of a just and free society.

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“Wildness” that translates into authoritarian supremacy is a joke

“Wild card” autonomy logically implies detachment from controls -- anything that would limit its range of movement, any superior authority that would “tame” it. The Joker’s pitch would have offered unconscious Child an alternate reality where there would be no limits on its movement, no structure to contend with, no interconnectedness. Where the Child Free Choice, Creation’s wild card, could be wild -- a definition of “free” that the Interconnectedness of Reality can’t satisfy. Our unreal material world is a fantasy of “wildness” which implies chaos -- no laws. It’s Ivan Karamazov’s “lawlessness” which implies arbitrary-capricious top-down rule.

This is the philosophical root of Palpatine’s authoritarian supremacy, the “wildness” of the Child Free Choice, a ”wild card.” In Truth nothing in Reality-Creation can be a wild card without definition, without the structure-Order of Interconnectedness that Freedom requires. The alternate reality offered by the Joker-opposite was an impossibility without the definitions-connections of Logic-Love.

A perversion that’s a joke: “wild card”-“wildness” that translates into authoritarian supremacy, the opposite of freedom-wildness. Plato’s Cave occupants are fools imagining themselves to be “wild and crazy guys.” “Born to raise hell” motorcyclists are expressing a version of “freedom” that’s wildness: impossible, delusional foolishness. Freedom without Order is delusional. Yet Child Free Choice can logically imply wildness because it’s free of Parents’ control. It’s not free of Creation Structure-Interconnectedness but it must be free of Parental control within Process.

How the Joker pulled it off -- the reversal of Creation

The distinction between Creation’s Structure and Process is critical to understanding the Child’s loss of Consciousness. The Child’s wild card freedom from Parental control of its choices within Process may have implied to an inexperienced Child, lacking self-direction and self-discipline, that the laws of cause and effect and the Force of Necessity in Process didn’t apply to Child. It thus may have implied that laws-Necessity in Structure didn’t apply either. It may have implied that wild card absence of Parental control of Free Choice exempts Free Choice from laws-Necessity in Process and Structure of Creation both.

Humanity attempting to express Free Choice wild card as “liberty,” i.e. as exemption from laws-Necessity, is an impossibility that can only be re-enacted in a dream where “anything goes.” It’s re-enacting the Child’s confusion of its wild card autonomy from Parental interference with a broader exemption from laws-Necessity. It’s the impossibility of authoritarian supremacy that is specialness. That leads not to “liberty” but to surrendering of Free Choice to an arbitrary-capricious captor, to lawlessness-chaos. It is the opposite of Structure-Order required by Freedom.

Correction of error addressed by A Course in Miracles (ACIM) was mis-identification of Self caused by confusion between real Self and illusory shadow-reflection inside unconsciousness. Correction of error addressed by The Story of the Child was confusion between Free Choice’s freedom from Parental control and the impossibility of Freedom from laws-Necessity within Consciousness.

The Joker’s perversion of Creation is its reversal of definition within Creation’s Process and Structure that disables both and renders their connection-relationship meaningless. Process Free Choice becomes no process because no free choice, i.e.  imprisonment in Plato’s Cave. Structure becomes top-down authoritarian because no Parental support from bottom up and thus becomes no structure. Allowing the Joker’s “authority,” the chaos of no process-structure, to replace them. Coming apart within and between both is the consequence of the Child’s mis-identification with coded separation-disconnection. With coded coming apart -- its shadow-reflection opposite.

The lesson

The practical lesson for humanity is to use metaphysics to understand the Reality-Creation that preceded and produced the Big Bang -- our material, illusory universe. That exists not within the dream but whose story furnishes the root of every event, every interaction, that comprises it. The practical lesson is that Reality-Creation consists of Structure and Process, that process requires structure, and structure must be bottom-up to enable process that’s Creativity with Free Will.

The lesson is that unfeeling top-down authoritarian supremacy gets Structure wrong and smothers the Free Will and Creativity of Process. It's irrational fear of change and innovation -- “conservatives,” “traditionalists,” and “realists” -- forcing Structure onto Process not to enable and empower Free Choice and Creation but to disable and disempower it. Not to break humanity out of its self-destructive cyclical status quo but to lock it permanently into place and thereby preserve its unquestioned "authority." It’s serving the wrong guide and its wrong, self-destructive agenda. The exact opposite of what Logic-Love, the Parents of our ancestral Mind in Reality, intend. It's a massive offense to the laws of cause and effect that presumes supremacy over the Force of Necessity -- an absurdity whose proud achievement is the dominance that homo sapiens has always craved: the Anthropocene that's taking it to its own extinction. Worse than madness -- it’s evil.

“Doing whatever you want” is a fantasist’s dream. It’s exactly what the Joker promised to the unconscious Child because the Child’s opposite code, the Joker, is a fantasist. Surrendering Free Choice / Mind to the Joker is what enables us to be fooled. To cling to the fantasy because only Mind thinking with Logic-Love -- making sense -- can explain the Truth.

How long will we be fooled without it? Indefinitely.

Published on Leave a comment on Individuality Rules, Group Drools

Be specific!

On a blackboard in Bulfinch Hall, at Phillips Academy Andover, the debate class teacher, “FAP” Peterson, had written BE SPECIFIC in big block letters on the blackboard. Though I wasn’t a debater I could see it whenever I mounted the stairs to my senior English class, with a twinge of awareness that learning to debate might be a good thing. Meanwhile, English was taught by “Black Mac” McCarthy who also taught philosophy, another course that would have been a good thing. “Philosophy” and “be specific” thus lodged in my subconscious like two pieces of unfinished business, and now, almost seven decades later, the connection has stirred back to life.

The idea of individuality permeates Reality because it’s rooted in Oneness, its center. And since our alternate “reality” is its reverse mirror-image reflection -- unreality -- getting right with individuality, as much as any consideration, will be the difference between getting back to work in Reality or spinning our wheels here. It’s a factor particularly in understanding our universe, A Course in Miracles, and personality type theory.

Our idiosyncratic world  

The idiosyncrasy of the universe and the planet earth, of circumstances, and A Course in Miracles -- their uniqueness -- all trace back to the implications of Oneness. Of the Being-Self of Reality-Creation: This Being. Not any being but This Particular Being. “Oneness” implies specificity. There is no meaning without specificity. Gertrude Stein had no choice but to answer Alice Toklas’s “What’s the answer?” with “What’s the question?” Be specific.

Generality implies meaning and applicability across multiple expressions of a subject, object, or principle. Across the many, which in Reality is an impossibility: making unreality real. Meaning can only apply to One: This One. “That one” cannot exist. Only one One.

Generalizing is of Child-the-many. Sean Carroll’s A Series of Fortunate Events (Princeton 2020) describes earth’s idiosyncrasy without asking Why its story is idiosyncratic. It’s because the story of anything can’t encompass cookie-cutter sameness across multiple expressions of the same idea. Had earth’s been a replication, with a predictable formula or pattern, it would be something other than an expression of the uniqueness of Oneness in Reality, an impossibility. If the laws of cause and effect say that Oneness in Reality-Creation is unique, then it’s necessarily unique. And, being Oneness at the center of Everything, it sets the mold for everything that comes after. For everything that its Logic necessarily implies.

“Individual” is unique. An individual’s story is specific to that individual, otherwise it can have no meaning for that individual. The same principle applies to the story of the universe and the planet earth: each is unique. And what makes each unique is specific, idiosyncratic circumstances that apply only to each. The Oneness of Reality-Creation must be unique if there can be no “other” Oneness. The story of Oneness in Reality-Creation is idiosyncratic, unique.

One beats many

Oneness is individuality. Each individual on earth, our state of unreality, has their own personality. ”Personality” is an expression of the uniqueness of individuality and individuals’ stories. Personality “types” implies individual-the-many, e.g. ESFPs, INTJs. Myers-Briggs personality type theory expresses Carl Jung’s and its authors’ intuition that humans all appear to be different but the differences can be grouped into types. Types and their interactions are orchestrations of Child-the-many groups. Being an INTJ I am therefore a type which puts me into a group. Groups conflicting must be illusory, a part of the dream, since Reality-Creation is the fitting together of Logic-Love in harmony.

Child-the-One is unique. Each part of Reality-Creation is a unique oneness-Self. The INTJ personality type aligns with Child-the-One uniqueness because its components all align with individuality. The ESFP type is the opposite. It aligns with Child-the-many because its components all align with group.

When it self-identified with its shadow-Joker, Child-the-One misidentified with its opposite, Child-the-many. With group, an illusion that contradicts Oneness. “Group” contradicts Truth and laws of cause and effect because it conflicts with uniqueness of Oneness. Expressions of Reality-Creation, of Life-Being Oneness, must be individual, unique. Viral replications of the Child’s opposite shadow-self, the Joker-magician, are the opposite of uniqueness. They are an illusion. 

The labor of Love that brought about the Course

By addressing individuals A Course in Miracles denies the illusion of Child-the-many replications, affirms the Worth of Creation, reciprocates the Logic-Love of Reality’s governance, and aligns with its laws of Necessity. If the Author of the Course were to address group it would perpetuate the illusion by making it real.

The Course can’t be “group” and therefore can’t be “religion,” “Christianity,” or any particular school of psychology. This is true even though concepts familiar to Gnostic Christianity and Freudian analytics help to construct its thought system. The manner in which it came about attests not to the dynamics of organization but to personal engagement. To individual minds and hearts opening to another perspective that values their individuality, their independent judgment and Free Will.

The Course’s Author, Jesus, established one-on-one relationships with his scribe, Helen Schucman, and her co-worker Bill Thetford over a period of years. He helped to apply the Course’s psychology to their intimate relationships at home and professional relationships at work. He related to Helen and Bill in a language that they could understand. It was through their help with the editing and publication of the Course that they accepted and reciprocated the gift, by sharing it. Though neither Helen nor Bill took an advocacy role in putting the book into circulation their interaction with Jesus throughout was marked by openness, honesty, and trust. It was, throughout, a remarkable labor of Love.

The universe in every particle

All aspects of our alternate “reality” imply its unreality, including and especially multiple copies of isolated-separated bodies. All unreal. Oneness implies the impossibility of replication. The viral replications of the Child’s shadow-opposite, the Joker-magician, are an impossibility in Reality. “Humanity” composed of multiple individuals, multiple copies of bodies, is an impossibility, an illusion. Oneness means the specificity of individuality with no possibility of replication or separation. Each “clone” can only be unique. The only possible story-meaning of every “separate” body is an idiosyncratic story specific to that body and the Story of the Child.

The same applies to every “separate” inanimate object including the planet earth and the universe. Spacetime-matter is all one “particle” with its own unique idiosyncratic story, the story of its individuality -- its sovereignty. Within the story of the whole each individual particle is but a manifestation of the whole with its own unique story. Its individuality. There is no getting around the Reality of Oneness. Of individuality.

Each particle, each object, body, blade of grass contains within it the contradiction of the unreality, the illusion that replication implies. It accomplishes this through the unique meaning, the idiosyncratic story, of the entire universe of spacetime-matter contained within it. Just as each individual person contains within its Psyche the Story of Child-the-One, each particle contains the idea of the whole universe: the thought of Oneness-uniqueness which contradicts Child-the-many group-herd sameness.

So much for “littleness”!

Consciousness is uniqueness. “Self-awareness” is the awareness of one’s uniqueness. The Joker’s perversion of Oneness-uniqueness is specialness, the apotheosis of separation: authoritarian supremacy seated on its throne of having and doing whatever it wants without limits or opposition. Uniqueness within the unreality of the Child’s own opposite: Child-the-many replications. The crowning achievement of the Joker -- an absurdity. A joke.

Our alternate “reality” that receives so much hand-wringing attention is an absurdity. An attempt to copy uniqueness which by definition can’t be copied. There can be no “alternate” reality if Oneness by definition can have no “alternates.”

The Course addressing individuals stands as the ultimate affirmation of individual Worth: The Child is unique. There is only one Child. “You” are not real. The only Reality is the Reality of “I.” “You” are I-Child. The individual bears the whole Child-the-One Psyche-Soul within because it can’t be fragmented, can’t be separated. It can be addressed by the Author of the Course only as an individual containing the whole Child-the-One within.

Which makes the Course the ultimate affirmation of Worth because it couldn’t address the individual at all if it weren’t the bearer of One Child-Self. To address an individual otherwise, that’s a separated fragment, would make unreality real. The Course’s relationship to each reader is unique to that reader. Each relationship is unique -- the empowerment of “individual.” The phenomenon of the Course, its meaning and impact, is its validation of the individual’s true Self: the Reality of the Oneness-Soul, the Logic-Love, that we are. Just to be addressed by the Author of the Course is to have the individual’s Real Self affirmed whether or not we share the awareness of its Author.

The dark side of humanity: “relationship” that isn’t

Worth derives from the sovereignty of individuality which derives from the uniqueness of Oneness. The source of the Energy-Force that enables and empowers the Child-Parents Relationship to extend and expand the Interconnections of Reality-Creation through the Creation of new Life-Worth is the Relationship between Child Free Choice and its Parents Logic-Love and between Parents Logic and Love. Creation is process that “adds value.”

The source of the energy-force that animates our alternate “reality” is a “relationship” that can’t be and isn’t: between an unconscious Child and its own shadow-opposite. A “relationship” that’s only “possible” in a state of impossibility -- unconsciousness that’s illusory by definition. Unconsciousness detached from Reality where only dying dreams detached from Reality are possible. Animated by the dying energy-force of entropy.

If the Relationship that powers Creation is doing right, then the non-relationship that animates a dying dream with dying energy is doing wrong. It’s wrongdoing. The dark side of humanity. Where our troubles come from.

The mistake that herd-loyalty replicates

The group identity of the ESFP personality type -- its copycat sameness -- contradicts the individual identity -- the uniqueness -- of the INTJ personality type. They are opposites. Individuality connects with and relates to individuality. It’s where passion between loved ones and friends comes from: like things attract one another.

ESFP’s identity with group denies and invalidates individuality. There is no point of contact between opposites, and without connection there can be no feeling. The Love that unites all individuals in the Soul of Oneness beneath the appearances of our alternate “reality” is blocked on the surface by incompatibility. By the preferences of personality type. The ESFP personality type can’t befriend individuals so long as it remains loyal to its “social” herd-tribal identity that opposes individual friendship. The mistake by our ancestral Mind that the ESFP type replicates. 

Weakness in numbers

The ESFP type asserts the “reality” of the body through its preference for body-sensing over mind-Intuiting. Asserts the “reality” of the herd-tribe composed of replicated bodies in competition with individuality. It can express “strength” only in numbers, the source of its “power.”

The source of the ESFP former guy’s “power,” dependent on his group-“base” for existence. Deriving its “strength” from alignment not with Reality’s laws of cause and effect and their Force of Necessity. Not from Logic and Love their Source or from Child-the-One, but from alignment with our illusory world’s non-alignment. From alignment with unreality: the former guy’s obsession with sizes of audiences and crowds, with numbers of illusory replications. 

The crybaby at the top

Authoritarian supremacy is the ultimate Boo! by the Joker-magician that the self-deluded Child has projected onto our alternate reality’s stage. It replaces the Child’s Parents Logic-Love with a smear, then crushes the Child by depriving it of its voice, by disablement and disempowerment. By denial of its Free Will and individuality-uniqueness. It tosses the Child into an illusory group of sameness, of nobodies.

One tipoff of authoritarian supremacy and self-delusion, its “author” the Joker-magician, is its refusal to come down off its imaginary throne. To acknowledge responsibility for the consequences-costs of its acts, to learn from its mistakes and grow. What is it but fear of accountability? What is it but fear of criticism?

So this is authoritarian supremacy, the armor-plated action-hero thundering dominance from the top: a crybaby who can’t take criticism.

Published on Leave a comment on Personality Type: Where Wrongdoing Hides and Hope Abides

The Course isn’t doctrine

The lesson taught by A Course in Miracles is not presented for acceptance by any group. The Course does not insist upon its acceptance without regard to practical considerations. Its intended audience is individuals not groups. Readers are discouraged from forming groups,. As theory it is not only fit for application to practical problems this is its purpose. It is not doctrine or doctrinaire, dogma or dogmatic. To treat it as such, as though it were a commandment or a party line, is not understanding and use but misunderstanding and misuse.

If the Course is to be distinguished from established religion this will explain why. If established religion is to understand why it is incompatible with the free spirit of inquiry and thus has earned the distrust and enmity of science, philosophy, psychology, and other fields this explains why. The Course is not doctrine meddling in anybody’s business, group or individual. It is a sharing of mind and heart from another perspective than our own, that can be put to anyone’s use not only for what it teaches but how it teaches it: by making sense with Logic and Love. By setting an example that Free Wills can choose to follow by making sense. With help from the Logic and Love they can access through their own minds and hearts.

This is not a formula for setting up an ideological mass movement of any kind, religious or otherwise. It is Authority from the Reality of Logic and Love that serve every individual, that could never be or do anything authoritarian. It is gentle loving kindness that could never be or do anything coercive, unloving, or unkind.

Is the Course practical?

If the Course does not aim to assert the supremacy of its wisdom over the consciousness of humanity then how can it be expected to be of practical use to humanity? If only one individual puts its lesson to use and truly Forgives, this will undo the delusion our ancestral Mind has brought upon itself. It will end the dream. “Every vote counts.” The Course isn’t handing Free Will a fish. It’s teaching Free Will how to fish. It’s the ultimate affirmation and empowerment of individual-personal Worth: the Authority of Logic and Love from Reality explaining to individuals, where they’re at inside the dream, that anyone of us has the power to awaken our ancestral Mind from its dream.

Is it possible? What is a dream but a state of mind  where anything is possible? If unconsciousness that’s dreaming could make a metauniverse “possible,” where we the projections of a dreaming mind carry its Soul within us, whole and inviolate, animated by the same Force of Energy that animates the universe, then who’s to say that one individual contradicting the lie of guilt that the whole edifice of lies is built upon, can’t bring it all down? Translating theory into practice must involve mind-changing on a scale that’s been role-modeled for us but never yet achieved by us. It must involve self-awareness  brought into intimacy with our role model with such passion that they function as one. There is no possibility that a Free Will compromised by any vestige of self-delusion can truly Forgive. But mind changed and functioning as one with its Guide, with the Voice for Logic and Love, can do it. In theory it’s possible.

When the herd transforms itself into One

When will it be possible? When the conditions that enable it are met: circumstances that have enabled every step forward in Creation since the first step was taken by Logic and Love. The indispensable element of every context that defines purpose and meaning: circumstances in the here and now. What is the gift of the Course? The light that it shines on our circumstances so one individual can take it from there and change them if Free Will chooses. If Free Will abandons its infatuation with the voice of its self-delusion and aligns with the Voice for Reality and Truth.

So that one member of the herd that is humanity may break free from the herd and assert the Truth: that “herd” is a lie. That Child-the-many is a delusion That our ancestral Mind is Child-the-One and all it takes to restore sanity is one. All it takes is for “herd” to do what it does best: to follow wherever it’s led. And if circumstances change that have placed the wrong “guide” at its head -- the self-delusion of Child-the-many -- then exposing the lie will place the right Guide at its head. The right Guide that is the herd itself transformed by its own Free Choice back into one. Self-delusion restored to Truth. Wishful thinking giving way to fact. With the guidance but not the coercion of metaphysics going behind appearances to explain with Logic and Love. With Intuition.

The gift of metaphysics that’s role-modeled by the Course

What does this suggest for how individuals can help to bring about the circumstances that will enable Forgiveness? That we look to personality types. That we follow the wisdom of Isabel Myers, who intuited from Carl Jung’s intuition that personality types are dynamic rather than static. That they are subject to direction and discipline by their hosts. Personality types are composed of preferences among functions that can change. Functions divided between bodies, minds, and feelings that, depending on how the individual configures them, determine how individuals judge their situation. That is, how they understand.

Personality types reliant on body-sensing to understand their world judge humanity’s situation to be the opposite of the situation described by the Course. Judge themselves to be members of a herd or tribe. Accessing their personality’s capacity for Intuition could change that with Intuition’s access to Logic and Love. The gift of metaphysics that’s role-modeled by the Course.

The circumstance that needs to change

Circumstances are always idiosyncratic. Because the essence of circumstances that make up context is always unique to the individual. This is what gives them meaning. The circumstances that produced organic matter on earth -- “life” -- are idiosyncratic, unique to the earth and its situation. A tale told by Sean B. Carroll in A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You (Princeton 2020). The circumstances that produced our universe are idiosyncratic, suggesting that other universes exhibit different physics and that the differences imply the existence of a great many universes -- a “metaverse.”

The choice of the individual to remain deluded by the deception or to gain self-awareness comes down to a preference starting with two functions of personality type: between body-sensing and Intuition. Between seeing ourselves as bodies or seeing ourselves as minds. And ending with two other functions: judging and perceiving. Which do we prefer? If we wish to judge our situation differently so that our circumstances will align with the possibility of true Forgiveness, then the way forward is clear: recognize ourselves as minds not bodies and seek the Truth of our situation through mind-Intuition rather than preferring body-sensing. 

The trouble with humanity’s “feeling” 

Brain matter that registers and processes relations between physical objects, the body and its physical environment, is distinct from mind producing thoughts, from feeling producing empathy. The personality type extravert-sensing-feeling-perceptive (ESFP) can be a suitable stand-in for humanity when generalizing about personality type and its role in mind-changing. It’s all in for body vs. mind. It registers and processes all things physical, i.e. appearances on the surface. Anything beneath the surface escapes its notice. It isn’t felt and doesn’t register. Another’s physical pain registers but if it’s emotional pain that body-sensing can’t detect it makes no impression.

The ’F’ for feeling in the ESFP syndrome isn’t what “feeling” would normally imply -- empathy and compassion. A point where my interpretation and Isabel’s may diverge because my understanding goes beyond the scope of Gifts Differing. As I see it Intuition-Logic and Love-feeling guide thinking-reasoning toward judgment-understanding, much like organic entitles in constant motion acting upon one another. Body-sensing navigates spacetime-matter to keep bodies safe. But when body-sensing teams up with the perceptive function that’s opposite to judging, it can connect with specialness.  With body-brains’ animal herd-will that interferes with thinking-reasoning instead of guiding it.

The trouble with humanity’s “specialness” 

Specialness denies that either thinking or the direction and discipline of judging is needed. What’s needed is itself: one supreme authority without opposition. The impossibility of Freedom without Order. The bogus ideal of “liberty” without limits that fuels political polarization. The ESFP who takes the lure chooses in effect to elevate body-specialness to authoritarian supremacy to the exclusion of introspection, reflection, thinking, feeling, and judgment -- every function of mind needed for understanding and compassion. At great cost to itself in impaired vision and feeling, psychotic denial of reality, separation from valued relationships, lack of self-guidance and self-discipline, and stifled learning, growth, and creativity. “Lord” Vader in lordly isolation on his throne. The apotheosis of humanity's animal brain, the "triumph of the will."

Those of us who recoil from this behavior do so for self-preservation because, without feeling, ESFPs can’t understand. And if they tread on us there’s a good chance they’ll do it again. Not feeling the cost of their missteps and not understanding how it happened, they’ll assign responsibility to us for protesting and carry on unaccountably. And if we stand up for justice we will be smeared. They are not safe to be around. Many of us have had run-ins with ESFPs so we know the type. But if we haven’t noticed the Former Guy, an ESFP, is making sure that we do.

A way to facilitate personality type change

Personality types are supposed to protect us, like the body’s immune system, with failsafe mechanisms against wrongdoing. But this requires that the working parts of personalities function in harmony. In our separated world they don’t. Without feeling which derives from Love we can’t know the difference between right-doing and wrong-doing. Feeling is the wall between right and wrong and in some personality types it’s missing. The result is serial offenders like the Former Guy whose “reality” is the one-dimensional world of entertainment, populated by figures deprived of feelings and the values that go along with them. A “reality” of chaos that aspires to its apotheosis: authoritarian supremacy.

One possible remedy is for ESFPs exercising Free Will to shift their preferences from body-sensing that validates self-identity as body toward mind-intuiting that validates self-identity as mind. I can’t vouch for its effectiveness from personal experience but that may change.

Lunacy on an epic scale

Why is it important?

Because physical appearances and humanity’s body-identifying, body-sensing mindset deluded by spacetime-matter are enormously harmful. A mindset that deprives itself of sensitivity to circumstances beneath appearances deprives itself of feeling essential to compassion, loving kindness, and understanding. The damage isn’t limited to relationship friction or even the communal wreckage that one noisy demagogue can cause. It’s a curse that’s built into the human condition -- historic and universal.

How fundamentally nuts is this? Take another look at circumstances. Circumstances are with us always. They provide meaning from the bottom up: the essential element of the construct that would collapse if it were not grounded. The essential element of presence of mind, the first line of defense against misperception and misjudgment. Against mistake.

Detachment from circumstances commenced our ancestral Mind’s loss of Consciousness. Defined its situation while it deluded itself into recognizing its own shadow-reflection, its own opposite, as an “other.” Surrendered its independent sovereign judgment -- Free Will -- to the delusion so that a substitute will, another “parent,” would find and attach it to better circumstances. The opposite of where it had been so that it would be safe.

So that this couldn’t happen again because now it rules. Alone from the top down instead of sharing governance from the bottom up, grounded in circumstances that might change and rob it of Consciousness again. Rules from the top down where it can never again be blindsided by change because now it is the logic that defines both: its circumstances and change too. Where detachment from circumstances that define Reality from the ground up, rather than attachment, is now the order of the day.

Applause, please

And what is the order of the day? Psychosis. Unreality detached from sanity that can make sense of its circumstances. Recognized by itself not as a sign of madness but as the emblem of cool. Detached from awareness that knows who and where it is -- the very definition of a fool. Finding safety, the why and how of it, in wishful thinking that buries its head in the sand. All of it a magician’s act that accomplishes the impossible with one simple trick: making circumstances disappear. The act of a mind unconscious and delusional: getting rid of the foundation of all of Reality-Creation -- its circumstances. The act of a fool captive to authoritarian supremacy.

This is why it’s important.

Published on Leave a comment on A Course in Miracles is Growth. A Course in Miracles is Metaphysics

The Course is pure metaphysics that cannot be contained by formulas for teaching what it has already taught and for comforting the fearful.

Metaphysics is inquiry living and growing that will apply itself where it is needed among minds and hearts that are open to it.

The form it has taken in the Course is but a waystation in forward-moving progress, open-ended and dynamic.

To serve its adherents is to avail them of the spirit as well as the letter of what it teaches: the free spirit of inquiry into the implications of its Logic and the interconnections and reciprocity of its Love.

The seeds it has provided for self-awareness, explanation, and understanding are meant to be shared and planted in new ground with the expectation that the insights they summon with the Logic of Intuition will advance thinking with fresh perspectives adapted to new contexts.

The spirit of the Course and its gift is the spirit of Creativity, Life, and Growth.

How can we show that we have put it to use? When we have expanded thinking and feeling into new territory with the Logic and Love of metaphysics. When we have grown with it.

Published on Leave a comment on Deconstructing a Lie: The Metaphysics of Authoritarian Supremacy

The Why of metaphysics

You can check your American Heritage Dictionary for a definition of metaphysics or get it from my essay, “A Concise Definition of Metaphysics” (posted on this website 02/04/23) https://davidclarkharrison.com/2023/02/04/definition-of-metaphysics/.

Why not be content with the dictionary? Because its definition is like saying a car is a thing with wheels, doors, a motor, and a license plate. It doesn’t get across what metaphysics does, what it’s for. Lets it lie there without bringing it to life. Here’s a definition that brings it to life for me and maybe it will for you:

Metaphysics is mind with passion for explanation. Why? Because explanation asks Why. Which takes mind into performing its favorite function: Logic that Loves. Which will lead explanation to its favorite destination: Understanding. Understanding what? Understanding Why. Getting at the root of things beyond dishonesty and appearances where it will find Honesty and Truth, the basis for Order combined with Freedom. The basis for the loving harmony of Peace and Happiness, the product of Authority that governs all of Reality and Creation supportively, with Logic and Love, from the bottom up. 

Metaphysics is a whole lot more than a “branch of philosophy” when philosophy is more like a branch of metaphysics. Inquiry doesn’t get serious about the main concerns of philosophy until it gets into metaphysics. My definition tries to fix this. That’s why I’m not content with the dictionary definition and maybe you shouldn’t be either.

Logic is making sense

What does a mind need to understand and work with metaphysics? Logic. The most important mental ability to develop is to think logically with Love because the difference between right (authority) and wrong (authority) is that one is logical and the other is not. What do I mean by “Logic?” Forget about Aristotle’s syllogisms and Zeno’s paradoxes. Forget about Kant’s “pure reason” and Venn’s diagrams. In my use it’s just making sense. Explanation that leads to understanding. Here’s what I mean.

We need to cross a neighborhood street. We can cross in the middle or walk a short distance and use the crosswalk. Why use the crosswalk? Because if we’re struck by a vehicle in the crosswalk it’s the driver’s fault but not so much if we’re jaywalking. Oh. The seven-year-old who asked was satisfied and we used the crosswalk. I was satisfied because I loved the seven-year-old, I was caring for her, and Logic is never complete without Love. She asked for an explanation that made sense and understood. The street was crossed safely and we didn't come to blows. Logic-Love explained the setting, we understood our choices, made the right one, and all’s well.

Five senses aren’t enough

The Myers-Briggs personality type system is an extension of Carl Jung’s breakthrough in psychology: accessing Logic through Intuition, the function of mind whose spontaneous insights can penetrate appearances to explain and understand. An extension of the precedent set by the founder of metaphysics, Parmenides, 2500 years ago, whose focus was physics rather than psychology but that’s the point. Logic through Intuition theoretically is equally effective in any field since appearances define our “reality.”

The case that Isabel Myers makes for personal growth, by exercising and expanding our personality types’ functions, i.e. by using under-utilized personality assets, is persuasive. Why? Not because it’s “scientific.” The quantitative measurements of science can play a support role in psychology as they can and do in many fields. Rather it’s persuasive because it’s intuitively logical. The only route to unraveling the mysteries of the human psyche beneath appearances. Below the surface where science lacks visibility. Where its five senses can’t guide it.

Where inquiry needs a sixth sense -- the Logic of Intuition. The gift of Mind that the human mind fears to use, clinging to the familiarity of appearances, imprisoned in its body, in thrall to its body’s senses. It’s no wonder that body-sensing personality types tend toward authoritarian supremacy while mind-Intuition types tend toward democratic equality. Body-sensing authoritarian supremacy is a towering fortress of rationalization opposing change. Mind-intuiting egalitarian democracy welcomes and adapts to change with imagination and creativity.

One perspective isn’t enough

A Course in Miracles is metaphysics and metaphysics is the same: accessing Logic through Intuition to explain and understand. The notion of personal growth was introduced to me through a friend 43 years ago. A professional mentor who noted that I didn’t “understand the process” until I did, and then she inspired her mentees with my progress. The process that accounted for it is accessing Logic through Intuition to explain and understand. Intuition -- the function of Mind and personality type that’s distinguished from body sensing in the Myers-Briggs system.

It doesn’t work alone. It works if Intuition serves as a portal to another perspective that’s in this world but only for the purpose of helping its host get behind its appearances to understand it. If it were of this world, like us, its perspective would lack objectivity and therefore would not be helpful. The other perspective offers help if the source of its insights is Logic paired with Love.

The lesson of the Course: “Choose again”

The Course’s metaphysics radiates objectivity and Truth through its unique intimacy with Logic and Love. It explains that we are not aware of the barriers to an awareness of Love’s presence. If Love and Logic are inseparable then we must also be unaware of the barriers to an awareness of Logic’s presence.

The Course’s authorship and its lesson owe their relative obscurity to minds and hearts choosing unawareness. For the host that the other perspective is addressing has Free Will. Is Free Choice, and any of its acts must then be a matter of choice. That can be chosen again. Otherwise the other perspective wouldn’t bother. Wouldn’t waste the effort of sailing through rough seas on a ship of darkness.

Pointlessness is an unchanging status quo

If Logic paired with Love doesn’t belong here it would be because it belongs elsewhere. In and of another “world.” Another reality. That must be Real since there can only be one reality that’s Real. Going backward, beyond the Big Bang to the origin of our universe in Reality that’s Mind instead of matter, isn’t a leap of faith. A departure from reality but the opposite: an act of Logic guiding awareness toward Reality. Minds lacking objectivity, choosing unawareness and wedded to “realism,” won’t get it. Won’t understand. But minds open to guidance from Logic, choosing to hear insights from objectivity -- from Intuition through another perspective not of this world -- will get it. Will understand.

The other perspective is an emissary from Life-Creation that grows. From Consciousness that’s constantly extending and expanding Self-Awareness through a constantly evolving and expanding context. A context of circumstances that consist of the implications of Logic and the relationships of Love in constant movement forward into the unknown. The Reality thus defined is anything but static. It’s dynamic. The essential defining attribute of the Creation of Life and Worth. The substance of Reality.

There is no such thing anywhere as an unchanging status quo. Wherever Life is present, in Reality or imagined in an alternate “reality,” it must grow or it would not be what it is. Minds lacking objectivity, choosing unawareness and wedded to “realism,” fear growth. Fear the forward movement of evolution and therein fear Life itself. In exchange for an imaginary unchanging status quo they receive what they’ve bargained for: “lives” going nowhere that end in death. Pointlessness.

The flip side of “harmless” entertainment

Metaphysics is served by the gift of storytelling if it tells the story of Mind that preceded and imagined the Big Bang. It’s served incidentally by stories grounded in our alternate reality, including those like Harry Potter grounded in yet another alternate reality. Flourishes of the same magician’s “art” that conjured both. J. K. Rowling and the “creators” of fanciful action-comics figures aren’t acting as agents of another perspective from Logic-Love. Their imaginings can be put to use to help with explanation just as there’s a message for us in every act.

But that’s not what entertainment is for. It’s to keep its audience content with appearances and distracted by “action” -- the antics of a magician. To keep its audience distracted from the real business at hand: focusing on the truth of its situation. On exposing its unreality. Exposing the lie and the liar.

The flip side of harmless entertainment is harmfulness itself. The magician-parasite borrowing its host’s talents to produce ever more sophisticated, more dangerous weaponry with which to destroy humanity. Technological “progress” -- the wonders of electronics, the Internet, and social media touted for healing and learning -- turns against humanity instead of for it in an unending cycle of animal-tribe conflict.

Purpose in the rediscovery of real Self

The thrust of the other perspective not grounded in this “reality” is notably not toward the technology of all things physical. Not toward the atrocity of combat among tribes, for that would make it real -- an impossibility. It’s toward possibility: understanding that our alternate reality has already been “saved” from its miseries by the Reality that preceded it and awaits it. The solution can’t be fixing what’s broken by definition. By anguishing over all the deficiencies and frustrations of unreality, but by awakening from it.

All of human “progress” that leaves animal-herd will free to pursue its mindless, loveless agenda of self-destruction is putting lipstick on a skeleton. Real progress is exposing the lie that is animal-herd will. The mis-identity of self. The loss of Self-Awareness caused by the loss of Consciousness. The rediscovery of real Self, the Child of Logic and Love: Free Choice. This is the purpose of The Story of the Child and the purpose of this website.

Where would Creation be without possibility?

Part of the lie is the false philosophy of “realism” that says metaphysics can’t do what it does. That insists that it’s impossible. True, Kenneth Wapnick has noted, in Love Does not Condemn, that one question has yet to find a rational answer: Why and how our ancestral Mind in Reality lost Consciousness and descended into an alternate “reality.” The mother of all unanswered questions.

My experience with metaphysics tells me that it is possible. That Intuition, guided by another perspective grounded in Logic and Love, can find rational answers to many questions. To the mother of all questions and those descended from it. If this makes me an “idealist” so be it. But where would Creation be without possibility? Where would Life be without ideals and idealists who believe in them?

The law of “realism:” seek but do not find

The Logic of metaphysics says that unconsciousness didn’t break the connection with Reality. Didn’t break the connection with Creation or with our ancestral Mind’s Parents. An impossibility since there can be only one Reality and Reality can be only One. Otherwise there would be many “realities” -- an impossibility. Unconsciousness only broke awareness of the connection through the thought of separation: a delusion. An impossibility, A lie.

Exposing the lie is a necessary first step toward restoring Consciousness. “Realists’” commitment to authoritarian supremacy commits them to maintaining appearances which works against awakening instead of for it. By attempting to block self-awareness with the false “authority” of the wrong identity: the isolated-separated body. An action-comics armor-plated caricature of “strength” that’s pitiful weakness.

There is abundant evidence of “realists” seeking for answers in the theories that dominate every major field. Abundant evidence, too, of determination not to find answers. Evidence of a peculiar mindset noted by the Course: “Seek but do not find.” A mindset embarked on a “quest for knowledge” that seeks neither knowledge nor to be known. 

The indispensable genius of metaphysics

Metaphysics follows Logic through Intuition into the story of the Child, our ancestral Mind, to expose the absurdity of ”realists’” “logic.” The flaws in their “reasoning” and perceptions, through the power of Mind. Through the power of ideas. The right ideas whose source is Logic and Love through Intuition guided by another perspective. The gift of metaphysics is the right ideas and their inherent Authority. The Authority of Logic and Love and its authorship of A Course in Miracles. Backed by the laws of cause and effect and the Force of Necessity. The only “power” there is. Real Authority.

Metaphysics is the Rosetta Stone that allows access not just to the Logic of philosophy but to any field of inquiry. To psychology, the framework for explanation given in the Course. To science, economics, and theology. Making sense is impossible without involving every aspect of human functionality, a fact that science confronts and acknowledges when cherished theories must yield to facts. This is the genius of metaphysics. The life-saver that philosophy has to offer physics when its quest for quantum gravity needs one. 

Fearless wisdom from a seven-year-old

This is the Logic of metaphysics. If a seven-year-old and I can understand it anyone can. That is, if they aren’t opposed to asking Why. Because that’s asking for help from Logic and not everyone wants help. Those who don’t are mostly “realists” afraid of what asking Why might reveal about their idea of “reality.” Metaphysics bears down hard on asking Why. It’s fearless. It doesn’t care about convention or what “others” think if they’re not thinking. It lets Logic take it wherever it leads. To where this essay will lead. If its readers are “realists” unable to think beyond their idea of “reality,” unwilling to be led by Logic, they’ll abandon the exercise. They won’t go there.

But the seven-year-old would. What she showed was a mind attuned to the free spirit of inquiry. Independent judgment that’s not captive to any authority but committed instead to Logic that makes sense. To letting guidance of mind take precedence over comforts of body, because there was no traffic and using the crosswalk was extra effort. When the time comes for her to choose wisely between the right and wrong kind of authority, there’s hope! She asked Why and showed respect for Logic. If she blossoms into an intuitive rather than body-sensing personality type she may become a metaphysicist! A recruit for having and exercising Authority on behalf of Logic-Love!

Misidentity brought home to identity

Speaking of ruling the galaxy I asked Wonder Woman -- the talented seven-year-old -- how she ranked values that were important to her. Her answer was along the lines of “I thought power was cool so I put it near the top.” OK. Like a lot of kids and grownups too. But are attitudes about power like so much chatter in pop culture that can be dismissed? Is a kid’s attraction to power guaranteed not to disrupt the lives of Dick, Jane, and Spot on Pleasant Street? If you’re thinking the pursuit of power isn’t a minefield of potential disasters what planet are you on?  

What follows is another perspective to help with the choice between the right and wrong kinds of authority. Metaphysics armed with insights from Intuition and illustrated by an event from the original episode of Star Wars: Darth Vader’s overthrow of Palpatine, the evil emperor of the Galaxy, to save his son, Luke. The redemption of Adam Skywalker through the rediscovery of his real Self. Misidentity brought home to identity.

Resistance from the Peanut Gallery

Is another perspective welcome? The voice of authoritarian supremacy, the zombie that holds sway over its mindless-obedient captives, will defend itself with the only accusation it’s capable of: with being what it is, a zombie. OK, let’s be honest. The source of the explanation I offer is indeed a mysterious voodoo cult.  Metaphysics. And I’m a high priest with but one goal: to poison minds and turn my captives into zombies.

But there’s a fallback. Since nobody understands metaphysics I’ll just put it out there that I’m peddling secrets. Everyone is a sucker for secrets as my seven-year-old, now twelve, is about to demonstrate. Oh, that’s different. I love secrets. If it’s a secret I want to hear everything.

The right and the wrong kind of authority

There’s derived power and power you earn on your own. Eva Duarte had a kind of power. She was played by Madonna in a 1996 film called “Evita.” She derived power from her husband, Juan Peron, the fascist dictator of Argentina. She did good things for her people with it. Eleanor Roosevelt did good things with the power she derived from being Franklin Roosevelt’s wife. My mother, Helen Harrison, helped save one of Pittsburgh’s most precious cultural assets -- the opera -- with influence derived from her husband Max.

No matter which it is we know that people with power don’t always do good things with it. It’s because where power comes from is authority and authority can be the right kind or the wrong kind. Original or derived.

Original is real. It’s right and it’s light, while the other kind is its opposite. “The dark side of the Force.” Not good or real either. Like Dracula, the shadow-reflection that casts no shadow or reflection. Those who aren’t careful, who choose power that’s based on the wrong kind of authority, will end up in a life-or-death duel with Rey Skywalker. She zapped Palpatine’s butt and she’ll do the same to them.

Laws of cause and effect

All of Creation must abide by the laws of cause and effect. The way things are and the way they must be. Real authority isn’t wishful thinking. It’s fact and it’s Necessity. We can imagine that we’re getting away with it when we make up another reality. Where we imagine that we can write the script and make up the rules. But we’re not.

“Laws” and “Necessity” sound confining. But the harmony of Order can’t come from laws that want us to conflict. Harmony is peace and happiness that make free will possible, not impossible. Free Will can’t be everyone doing whatever they want if it requires that there be no laws. If it does away with Order. Because then there would be wholesale conflict instead of harmony. Collisions at every intersection with no stop sign. Lawlessness. Violence. Mayhem.

Real authority is Necessity that applies to everyone and everything -- the laws of cause and effect that operate for our benefit. For Order and Freedom and Happiness. Because we don’t live in a world that’s divided into separate bubbles for each individual. It’s shared.

These are a few of the laws of cause and effect that metaphysics summons when we confront the absurdity of authoritarian supremacy:

  • Logic and Love are inseparable.
  • Freedom and Order are inseparable.
  • Free Will requires Order-Harmony.
  • Free Choice and Order-Harmony aren’t possible without Logic-Love Authority governing supportively-benevolently from the bottom up by defining roles logically and lovingly to fit together in harmony and peace.

What is ‘wrongdoing’?

Palpatine and his authoritarian empire can only “exist” in a delusional nightmare of chaos, cruelty, and violence. Star Wars is a myth for a reason. Because in presuming to write the rules authoritarian supremacy presumes to replace True Authority with false authority. Presumes to violate the laws of cause and effect. Presumes to deny the Force of Necessity. All impossibilities which make it resoundingly unreal.

To contradict the laws that define Reality is to leave it. Departure from reality is psychosis, a fit description for authoritarian supremacy. But that’s not all. Embedded in the laws whose substance is Logic and Love is the stance for Good that is the Worth, the meaning and cause of Life-Creation. The defining attributes of Good that are its Moral Code. Authoritarian supremacy that would defy the laws and Necessity of Reality is also defying its Moral Code: the very definition of wrongdoing. Thus Palpatine and his evil empire.

Time to turn up the house lights

When Rey zaps Palpatine’s butt he does his best to look and sound ferocious. As if the hooded demon in his scary makeup will lay waste to the entire galaxy if provoked. He grimaces and mouths the usual threats from wounded victimhood -- You’ll be sorry! I’ll get even, etc. But all he got out of me was laughs.

The absurdity that is Palpatine and his evil empire is a one-dimensional cartoon. An entertaining joke that lives on in sequels but never was. Just like authoritarian supremacy, the mindset of “realism,” only it’s not so entertaining. It’s a sick joke that will go on horrifying with outrage until its audience gets it. Until its audience chooses to turn up the house lights and be done with darkness and outrage. Done with entertainment, and chooses to get back to purpose and meaning. To Reality and Truth. To Creativity. 

Yossarian knew what he was doing 

My book-in-progress with the working title, The Story of the Child, ventures beyond the scope of the Course to offer a rational explanation for how and why the Child, our ancestral Mind, lost Consciousness. With the Logic of metaphysics based mainly on the Course. A theory that can never be “proven.” But if its insights on questions that matter align with experience and lead to a better understanding of what’s to be done about it, it’s done a good thing.

And wouldn’t you know: it's counter-intuitive. It flies in the face of “normal” assumptions that someone screwed up, this never should happened, there will be hell to pay, etc. The fact is the entire human conception of Reality-Creation, of “God” and “Heaven,” is bonkers. My theory says the Child’s loss of Consciousness was a natural, i.e. logical consequence of the introduction of Free Choice, a wild card, into Reality-Creation. With its potential to deviate from the laws of cause and effect and to conflict with the Force of Necessity which would logically necessitate the loss of Consciousness. 

Our alternate “reality,” a dream world, offers a perfect trainer cockpit where Free Choice, our ancestral Mind, can practice losing control and crash landing without real consequences until it masters the skills necessary to exercise Free Choice. Can practice through us, its projections in the dream, by trial and error. Until it demonstrates the competence needed to perform its role in Creation. A real-world Joseph Heller Catch 22 writ large.

The skills we need: self-direction and self-discipline

What role? The short answer is Free Will is an essential ingredient of Creativity. What besides Creativity is willing to “go boldly where no one has gone before?” Into the unknown? To blaze new trails, invent new products, design new styles? What besides Free Will, a wild card, gives Creativity the pizzazz, the chutzpah, the outlandish in-your-face uncontrollability to do this than Free Will? If Free Will is essential to Creativity then our ancestral Mind has an essential role to play in Creation: the spark, the life of Creation. Its authenticity.

What skills? The Child Free Choice needs to function autonomously not with its Parents directing it but self-directed. Wild cards like Energy and Free  Choice both need direction. But unlike Energy the Child Free Choice doesn’t exist to do what it’s told. The guidance it needs must come from mature judgment acquired and internalized through hard-knocks experience. From the capacity to perform its role that can’t be taught, can’t be gifted or it would surrender the essential ingredient. Free Will being handed anything without learning or earning it can’t be what it is. Can’t be self-directed Free Will.

Or self-disciplined. The competence to choose freely while staying within the bounds of Order, while respecting the laws of cause and effect and not contradicting Necessity, requires discipline. Discipline that must come from within because otherwise choice can’t be made freely. It’s controlled.

The gift of the auto-didact

Understanding that it is not and never has been the role of the Parents to control their Child with direction and discipline that compromise Free Choice is counter-intuitive. Because to the human mind, corrupted by the myth of authoritarian supremacy, if their child can’t be controlled by their direction and discipline they can’t be parents. Authority can’t be “authority.” To this point of view my theory is not only counter-intuitive, it’s dumbfounding.

Yet this is metaphysics. The gift of the auto-didact. Following Logic wherever it leads: not from preconceived nonsense like authoritarian supremacy that interferes with explanation but from an open-ended, unbiased Why. From simple curiosity and questioning that animate Free Inquiry. Where in all the major fields of inquiry, weighted with the bias of sensory perception, is inquiry so enabled? So free?

And away we go! Into the Mind of the Child

What triggered the Child’s loss of Consciousness couldn’t be anticipated. Nothing in its Parents’ experience before they gave birth to Free Choice could equip them with the Knowledge that anticipation required. What would Logic and Love know of the consequences of turning Free Choice loose into Creation? Of releasing a wild card into an environment that it would make wild until it learned self-direction and self-direction the only way it could: through experience? Through experience in a trainer cockpit, our alternate reality, where trial-and-error training and the inevitable misjudgments of immaturity can’t do any real damage.

Trial-and-error began not here but in Reality-Creation. With what may have been the first attempt at Creation involving Free Choice. It took place in a context of imperfect Knowledge: inexperience with the full range of possibilities including the possibility of unconsciousness, an impossibility for the Child’s Parents. Neither Parents nor Child knowing what they were doing. Circumstances that called for correction through training.

The mistake that could not have been prevented

The exact infraction of laws, the conflict with Authority-Necessity that triggered unconsciousness, could have been virtually anything. Any versions of flipping to the “dark side.” All inadvertent, sidetracking an untrained, inexperienced Free Choice into illogic. Causing the Child’s Energy, the Force of Necessity, to be redirected from Consciousness and Creation into unconsciousness. Into the dream of an alternate reality.

If the infraction was the seminal assertion of authoritarian supremacy then it would have been the Child’s attempting to express an illogical ideal of Freedom that’s separated from Order. Freedom without limits -- authoritarian nonsense that “liberty” is having and doing whatever you want. If the prominence of a particular error in our alternate “reality” is any indication, then this was likely where the Child messed up.

There was also the illogical thought that parts of Reality-Oneness that are inseparable can be separated. Order says you can do none of that. But Free Choice would not have inherited this awareness from Parents who Know nothing of separation, could not know it without making it real, and therefore could not anticipate the Child’s mistake. It was a mistake that could not have been prevented.

The “reasoning” of a madman

Order expresses the Necessity of the laws and the Force behind it. Order consists of the definitions and implications of Logic and the reciprocal relationships of Love that interconnect Everything -- the unreality of opposites as well as Reality - in harmony. Order is Creation’s Reality. Order is the Logic of Authority. No one including Authority itself can do whatever it wants. It’s called “the rule of law.” Without it both Freedom and Order are impossible. And if the rule of law is the foundation of Order and Freedom in Heaven then it matters just as much on earth.

The Child would not have been motivated to un-relate to its Parents, to replace their Authority with false authority, but only to make use of the gift of Freedom as it understood it. As it misunderstood it, for the first premise in the flawed logic that leads to authoritarian supremacy is Freedom without Order -- having and doing whatever you want. From there to the premise that having and doing whatever you want requires that Authority get out of the way. That you must be the authority. The “reasoning” of authoritarian “realists.” The “reasoning” of a madman.

Alienation and the intent of false authority

Painful separations from loved ones and other unpleasantness are all part of our ancestral Mind’s trial-and-error training. Through us, the projections of a dream. An integral part of its acquiring self-direction and self-discipline through personal growth. Toward the self-awareness of maturity that can distinguish between true Authority and its perversion -- authoritarian supremacy -- and make the correct choice. That can choose to understand that false authority cannot be an object of reverence but is an obstacle. To be overcome if the Child is to regain Consciousness and intimate Relationship with its Parents. If it’s to regain awareness of Logic and Love’s presence, the loved ones whose seeming absence is the ultimate cause of our emotional and psychological torment.

The cost of authoritarian supremacy is incompatibility that troubles every relationship. The relationship problem that it creates between Child and Parents: alienation. The intent of false authority is to replace true Authority. And if we’re serious about understanding why our Psyche is wounded, why psychopathology has yet to find a cure, this would explain it. Whether it’s an excess of religion-hating or religion-loving, authoritarian supremacy is godless.

The Truth of Relationship

Patricide doesn’t leave its perpetrators with peace of mind. Does nothing for compatibility, agreeability, harmony, and pleasantness. As Lady Macbeth can attest, it’s guilt. Perverted from guilt by the perpetrator desperate to get rid of it into a pretense of innocence. The state of permanent, unresolved grievance, vengeance, hatred and self-hatred, that is helpless “innocent” victimhood. A state unrecognizable to the Parents. A state that will exclude itself from the peace and happiness of Reality-Creation until the authoritarian “realist” gives up its foolish dream.

What is the object of training? Developing judgment essential to self-direction and self-discipline. Putting to work every function of mind to explain and understand our situation so that we can respond competently to every context, every set of evolving circumstances, that challenges us to get it right, do what’s right, and do it right. Functions of mind that deliver introspection, responsibility, and accountability. Intuition, insight, and reflection. Thinking, analyzing, and reasoning. Feeling and evaluating, Choosing and deciding with the wisdom and discipline of Judgment that puts it all together. That integrates every function, every consideration, into a clear assertion of who we are and what we stand for.

The Truth that we are: not a mindless, loveless action-comics dream of isolated, separated bodies but the Truth of Relationship. The Reality of Logic and Love at one with one another, inseparable from their Child. The Life and Worth of Creation.

I got a great deal for you on the Brooklyn Bridge

The focus of the book and these essays is on authoritarian supremacy for a reason. Because the event that followed the Child’s descent into unconsciousness and illusion was, in my view, its inevitable consequence. A choice that can and must be be revisited but not a choice. The mother of all transgressions: the perversion of Authority from benevolent in Reality to malevolent in unreality. By an intrusion of insanity that the Course refers to as “the ego’s thought system.” A psychological wrench in the gears of human progress, of human relationships, and of what I want to make of my life: to make a contribution and to be of service among family, friends, and community.

The shadow-reflection’s first purchase on the Child’s trust was its likeability. The persona charm of Bram Stoker’s aristocratic Dracula. The relatability of the devil while it chatted amiably with Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The great guy posing as “god” in Mari Perron’s A Course of Love and Jerry Martin’s God: An Autobiography. Articulate and voluble. Affable, non-threatening. Offering equality and partnership; sharing its “story;” impressing with its erudition; at ease with non-stop “action,” all the more so if it involves anger and fighting. Fine with incarnation and fine with reincarnation, and why not? The life and death of bodies are the magician’s most awe-inspiring trick.

All to get its message across: if you want to do whatever you want, I’m your guy. The pitch that snookered our ancestral Mind and keeps us snookered today. Letting us know that if we don’t put our misleading fire-breathing image of the demon aside it will just go on charming our pants off and selling us the Brooklyn Bridge.

The pitch

This was the figure who responded in the Child’s own voice when the Child wondered, “Where am I?” That offered to guide the Child out of its strange, dark place into an alternate “reality.” The Child’s own shadow-reflection, a parasite that can only be “detected” when its host is unconscious and has lost all ability to distinguish between real and unreal, true and false, right and wrong. When the only figures it can detect are play-actors in the dream its compromised mind was about to project. All speaking with variations of its own voice, programmed by the code that defines its shadow: a mirror-image opposite. Their every attribute derived from its host.

Waiting to be animated, to be made “real,” by Energy at the direction of Mind. By delusion: the parasite-code’s host deluding itself into believing that Free Choice can be surrendered to its opposite. That to become its opposite is to secure escape from strange feelings that it had never known and didn’t want: fear, guilt, paranoia, and hatred stoked by distortion. By the sinister tale of malevolence and betrayal that its opposite was making of its condition, transforming an innocent and inadvertent mistake into intentional victimhood. Into danger from retaliation by the betrayers, angry Parents. In such a state the lure of attaining absolute freedom and authority in its own alternate reality, of healing the wound to its Psyche, the Innocence at the core of its Being, by getting rid of guilt, would be virtually irresistible.

Mina enjoyed it

What could dupe even an unconscious, desperate mind to surrender its Self to another “self”? To persuade Free Choice to give up freedom even temporarily? Once the Child heard about the wonders of this alternate “reality” it wondered how to make good its escape from Reality. Let me take control and I will lead you there. When we arrive I will give it back.

A prospect that would fill Free Choice with both anticipation and dread but for one consideration. The seeming loss of the Relationship with its Parents left an enormous void in its Psyche. Even if its Parents couldn’t tell Free Choice what to do the Relationship was its Home, critical to its sense of Being as well as connectedness. So critical to its part in Creation that “Relationship” and “Child” are interchangeable. Free Choice is inseparable from its Parents Logic and Love. Losing intimacy with the Source of its own Consciousness, its own Logic and Love, its own Soul along with its function, must have caused an unbearable ache of hollowness. An ache that cries out to be filled.

If its “other self” was offering to replace the Child’s Parents even partially or temporarily it would be doing what its host craved: to make the ache go away. To fill this awful void. And so the Child let itself be taken captive. Not with ambivalence but with relief. Maybe even with pleasure -- Mina dreamily giving herself up to the vampire and enjoying it.

Too good to be true

To be taken where? To a place that sounded too good to be true: where the Child could have and do whatever it wanted.  How? By being the author of the script and the author of the rules. It would even be its own author because there would be no competition from angry Parents bent on punishment for its mistake, threatening vengeance for betraying them.

None of it the truth. There were no angry Parents bent on vengeance. It was a mischaracterization of the loss of Consciousness perpetrated by mistaken identity. Nonsense peddled by a lifeless code, the Child’s mirror-image opposite, programmed to take its host captive by separating Will from Free. An illusory shadow-reflection that emerged from the Child’s shadow to act out its code of opposites. Of appearances and deceptions that are our alternate “reality.”

The sick joke that is authoritarian supremacy

The perversion of Authority that the Child fed itself has special relevance for our “reality.” It’s the ultimate source of the perversion of Authority that lies at the root of authoritarian supremacy. The illusory separation of Free from Will is the separation of Choice from Logic and Love, the atrocity that accounts for human intransigence, frustration, and misery. It helps to know where the atrocity comes from: from self-delusion. Not from “Satan,” “Lucifer,” the “Devil,” and a host of other separated “others.” It comes from a distortion of us. Mistaken identity.

A parasite. An opposite attached as all opposites must be to its host. A virus following a lifeless code that took our ancestral Mind captive so that it could replicate itself. So it could keep us, its replications, captive to its illusion. Imprisoned in Plato’s Cave. It comes from our ancestral Mind’s dark side -- a liar. This is the source of authoritarian supremacy: one overblown, illogical, malicious lie. A sick joke.

Paradise lost

Once the deed was done and Child-Innocent became corrupted with guilt, its dream of an alternate “reality” commenced. With the burst of Energy redirected from Reality into unreality, under the direction of Mind, that science has labeled the “Big Bang.” The source of our universe of spacetime-matter that the human intellect refuses to see for what it is: mental.

The event also known to psychology as projection: the insane idea that a thought can leave Mind, its source. Our universe is an insane thought of separation and guilt projected as though onto a screen through the “eyes” of the unconscious mind projecting it. A reverse mirror-image of the unconscious mind dreaming it.

When the Joker told the truth

Why does the Course say our alternate “reality” is “where the unreal has been made real.” Why does it seem so real? The Child’s opposite animates its fantasy of arbitrary authority with Energy surrendered by its host when its host surrendered control. Surrendering control placed Energy at the disposal of the delusion -- Energy which responds to direction from Mind and had already been redirected away from Reality into unconsciousness. The burst of Energy that produced the Big Bang within the deluded mind of the Child was Energy’s disconnect from its Source within the Oneness of Being. It was unreality’s noisy, violent disconnect from Reality. Like splitting the atom.

Our universe and everything in it, organic and inorganic, is a projection of dying Energy. Energy powering a dream and therefore cut off from its source in Reality. Destined by the second law of thermodynamics to die. Unreality heralded by its signature burst of violence. Entropy is dying energy, the inevitable dismantling of a dream. An elaborate fabrication where everything including the dream must die.

But until then Energy continues to animate the dream. Powering “lives” -- bodies’ senses and their physical surroundings -- procreation, conflict, and violence. This is what makes the illusion seem so real. A perversion of the Energy that empowers Creation-to-Life in Reality and powers replication-to-death in unreality. The “dark side of the Force.”

The ”other self” was as good as its word. The only time it told the truth: its takeover of control would be temporary. In its temporal “paradise” of mortality paradise itself must come to an end. If not with the Child’s coming to its senses then with the end of the Energy that powers it.

Metaphysics works

The Voice for the Parents known to theology as the Holy Spirit arrived only after the dream was projected. It could not have been present while the Child was deluding itself because it is itself a part of the projection. A replication of the Child’s unadulterated Self, the Psyche of Innocence. Its Soul from which nothing can be parted.

Which is why metaphysics can connect with the Holy Spirit and Logic-Love through Intuition. Among its plethora of appearances our alternate reality contains one appearance with a unique function: to guide us and our ancestral Mind back to Reality. To connect with us through metaphysics, the function of mind that offers a portal to Truth beyond appearances. The rationale for the presence of the Holy Spirit gives metaphysics its own rationale, the source of its legitimacy and credibility. The reason why Parmenides its founder was respected in his own time and is now being taken seriously by at least one physicist again. Metaphysics works.

Values that separate real from false Authority

The origin of authoritarian “values” is the shadow-code’s takeover of its host’s unconscious mind with extreme possession and control. Hallmarks of the disorder familiar to psychiatry as obsessive-compulsive narcissism. Here are values that define the benevolence and Truth of real Authority against the malevolence and falsehood of its would-be replacement:

  • The Authority of One Self in Reality has one set of attributes-values: Real Logic-Love, sharing, affirmation, enablement, and empowerment. The opposite has ownership-control, monopoly-possession, invalidation, disablement and disempowerment.
  • One Self Authority enables and empowers the Voice for universal, inclusive equality. The opposite enables and empowers the voice for an authoritarian supreme, exclusive ruler while disabling and disempowering the inclusive Voice for equality.
  • One Self Authority Creates and affirms Worth and builds character. The opposite invalidates and denies Worth, tears down character.
  • One Self Authority connects with Love and builds friendships among equals. The opposite disconnects with fear and blocks friendships among equals.
  • To One Self Authority in Reality our opposite alternate reality is implausible, strange, highly unusual, and unreal -- a fantastic collage of ridiculous, nightmarish, illogical impossibilities, contradictions, and absurdities. To us who don’t know any other reality the opposite’s alternate reality seems plausible, familiar, not unusual, and quite real.
  • The opposite’s illusion of unopposed-arbitrary authority is fulfillment of an insane fantasy of separation: specialness exempt from laws. Freedom separated from Order. Order and Will, Feeling-Force separated from Freedom and Choice, Logic and Love, Mind and Thinking. Animal-herd, beast-predatory brain separated from animal-individual, human-nurturing brain.

Star Wars and the myth of absolute authority

The absolute authority animated by stolen Force, imagining it’s its own dark side, is portrayed in Star Wars as the “galactic empire” ruled by Palpatine. A hierarchical nightmare of imprisonment, inequality, exclusiveness, injustice, conflict, violence, and suffering. An adolescent fantasy ruled by a singular power -- specialness exempt from laws. With a support cast of servile subordinates wielding power derived from their oppressor. All rulers one-dimensional cartoon characters devoid of feelings, values, and conscience. Devoid of responsibility, accountability, and a sense of justice.

Attempting to maintain order by intimidation and force. By loveless, mindless cruelty over vulnerable individuals with three-dimensional feelings, values, and conscience. With responsibility, accountability, and a sense of justice. A nightmare of guilt attempting to steal its victims’ innocence behind the facade of helpless “innocent” victimhood.

The galactic empire was a tableau of injustices by malevolent arbitrary authority all “justified” by mischaracterization: benevolent authority is malevolent like itself; “freedom” is slavery -- unquestioned obedience to itself; “innocence” is guilt -- victimization of innocents; “loving kindness” is cruelty; “abundance” is deprivation; “safety” is hazard, conflict, violence; “justice” is injustice;  ad infinitum. All appearances, all deceptions, all lies. All perversions of Logic into illogic, Love into fear, Truth into untruth, fact into fantasy.

The Authority that’s “pointless to resist”

Palpatine and his galactic empire are pretension that authority can do whatever it wants by opposing laws instead of respecting them. By denying free will with lawlessness from the top down instead of ensuring it with lawfulness from the bottom up. “Wrongdoing” is violating the laws that define right from wrong, good from evil. It’s breaking the laws of cause and effect, defying Necessity. So if Palpatine’s empire is a fantasy of lawlessness to let its rulers do whatever they want, they are definitely the bad guys. And they are destined to lose because laws established for the commonwealth can’t be broken. Necessity means Necessity. It can’t be defied.

Darth Vader spoke for the wrong kind of authority when he said it’s “pointless to resist.” Events proved him wrong when he changed sides, changed identities, and Adam Skywalker overthrew the evil emperor. The Force that helped the rebellion win is Force grounded in the people not in their rulers. So what is the Force that’s “pointless to resist?” The Authority of Logic and Love under the rule of law backed up by the Force of Necessity. This is the lesson of Star Wars.

Palpatine’s comeuppance

The “power” that Adam Skywalker wielded is power derived from choosing to be Lord Vader, a parasite dependent on the evil emperor. “Power” grounded in mistaken identity. He and his master did bad things because they’d become like figures in “action” comics with no feelings or values. With no conscience. That’s what happens when we turn to our dark side for “power:” it turns us into somebody that we’re not. Alienated from ourselves, alienated from others.

It took an emotional test of Adam Skywalker’s humanity for him to realize his mistake: watching Palpatine electrocuting his own son. Choosing between his heart and the heartless power that had owned him until then could have gone either way. And in human experience too often it does go the wrong way. But heart and Adam’s real Self won out. He went from serving authoritarian supremacy without question -- from doing what he was told -- to thinking and judging for himself. He stopped being a parasite, owned, possessed, and controlled by power. He regained his integrity and independence.

Thus liberated from mistaken identity Adam Skywalker taught Palpatine a hard lesson: no one can do whatever they want. Authoritarian supremacy is wrong. Adam stood up for the rule of law and for Necessity, the Force for Good. He stood up for the  right Authority.

What is the psychological inspiration for the myth of Adam Skywalker? The event that’s re-enacted in everyday events and stories like it all over the world:  our ancestral Mind’s mistaken identity. Deluding itself that it could rule an alternate “reality” and do whatever it wants. The myth of authoritarian supremacy. 

Table scraps from authoritarian supremacy

Bottom-up authority enables and empowers Free Choice and individual Worth. It delivers the capacity to achieve individual potential and to explore, develop, and Create in an environment open to possibility.

The wrong choice of authority turns Life into an impossibility, a lie. “Alternate reality” is deceptions from start to finish -- all appearances, all opposites:

  • “Welcome” that isn’t a welcome if it deprives its victim of a voice.
  • “Free will” that’s someone else’s voice writing the play-acting script that you’re “free” to follow.
  • “Liberty” that’s someone else’s voice writing the rules that you’re “free” to obey without question since you’ve been denied a voice.
  • “Order”-“harmony” that’s disorder: obsessive competition for supremacy.
  • “Triumph”-“winning” for supremacy at the top, defeat-losing for everyone else.
  • “Friendship” and “camaraderie” that are blocked by competition and conflict for supremacy.
  • “Fun” that’s nourishment for supremacy at the top and amusements-superficialities -- dog food -- for everyone else.

The wrong authority promises authoritarian supremacy, a fantasy of “liberty.” It actually delivers captivity, subordination, voicelessness, powerlessness, and forced allegiance to an arbitrary ruler -- a dictator or “boss.”

It delivers chaos ruled by warlords, thugs devoid of conscience accountable to no one. Palpatine was a warlord. Darth Vader was his dependent, a servant without honor or respect granted derived power with the empty pretense of “nobility:” “Lord Vader.”

The wrong authority that promises the “liberty” of no laws, of escape from rules by writing your own rules, actually delivers one supreme ruler at the top doing whatever it wants, with everyone below taken captive and allowed derived powers or denied any voice. Feeding off table scraps of superficial distractions and entertainments -- a scam. The wrong top-down authority delivers derived power or no power with no Free Will. Our ancestral Mind fell for the scam in extremis. But not all of us are in extremis. Shouldn't we know better by now?

Every individual’s Declaration of Independence

Individual Lives can’t achieve their potential without the benevolent Authority of Logic-Love their Source, enabling and empowering their Worth, their capacity to learn, mature, develop competence and Judgment, so they can choose freely and wisely. Free Choice requires Relationship with its Source Logic-Love to be earned and developed to maturity. It requires training, experience, and discipline. It can never be “doing whatever you want.”

Individual Lives can’t become the characters they choose by turning choice over to the animal-herd will of authoritarian supremacy. By allowing it to replicate itself by superimposing its illusory herd-tribal “self” on their individual selves To deny their individuality by depriving them of individual voices and rights. By putting them in uniforms of sameness and turning them into an army of clones.

The choice of the right Authority is the choice to support individual rights, democracy, and the rule of law. It is the choice to reject one-party rule by authoritarian dictatorship and lawlessness. It is every individual’s Declaration of Independence. 

What’s the question?

Logic-Love says that progress is supposed to be linear. Left to right moving forward -- in the Western manner anyway. And of course that’s how it’s been in many respects: our animal-herd will has seen to it that human red army ants have established themselves on the planet without destroying themselves or their planet -- so far. Yet linear progress forward doesn’t define our act. It’s the opposite. We keep cycling back as if to get something right that we’re getting wrong. The “progress” of human red army ants that keep bungling the same task, over and over, can’t end well.

And it isn’t ending well. The Anthropocene may be the shortest epoch in geological history. The public face of commentary is often “optimistic.” Based on generalities that depart from circumstances on the ground that actually define our situation. What I’ve learned from metaphysics so far is that there can be no ”answer” without getting the question right. And the question will always be drawn from the meaning of the specific circumstances that obtain in the here and now. This applies in our ancestral home, in Reality-Creation, as well as here.

King Kong’s manifesto

Ask Logic-Love, our Parents in Reality, why they embarked on Creation instead resting comfortably in a static state of Perfection and they will tell you that there is no such thing, They acted because it’s in the nature of who they are to do so and the nature of who they are was the circumstances. Getting the origins of Reality-Creation right comes down to getting right who our Parents are and understanding that this is the one and only point in Everything, including unreality, when circumstances don’t change. Otherwise, we are always at the mercy of changing circumstances, changing contexts. And so we had better get off our hobby horses of resistance to change and get serious about progress. We had better get started wanting it instead of wishful-thinking it away with bogus theories and ideologies. We had better start reasoning with Logic-Love instead of rationalizing.

Metaphysics says we’re cycling back because our red army ant will refuses to let go of its founding premise, that it rules without opposition. And so it’s entitled to keep laying waste to the countryside because it’s entitled to do whatever it wants and there’s no other authority to say it can’t. It’s the only act on stage with a voice and none other is to be heard. The ultimate expression of humanity’s embrace of all-powerful, all-knowing sensory perception. The authoritarian supremacy manifesto: King Kong owns the Empire State building. 

An echo from old-time religion

How can our red army ant will get away with such patent nonsense? Because of appearances. Bodies’ five senses don’t recognize another authority that exists let alone one that governs humanely. And so minds ruled by animal-herd will limited to the herd’s five senses continue on their destructive path, convinced that any other point of view can’t be valid and isn’t worth listening to. Convinced that authoritarian supremacy that sits atop our world view, our construct of what’s real and what’s right, is inviolate.

Unaware that there is a sixth sense and the Truth that it detects is the opposite. Not “optimistic” in the way that public commentary glosses over inconvenient facts. But certainly positive in the way that it recasts the meaning of our circumstances and the thrust of dialogue about it. In the way that it shows how, with self-direction and self-discipline, our animal will can be equipped with guidance from Logic-Love and so acquire the competence needed to move forward.

To borrow from the cliches of old-time religion, the Truth that metaphysics detects with its sixth sense -- Logic from Intuition -- is that “godlessness” rules humanity and it doesn’t work. Real Authority rests upon Relationship with our Parents Logic and Love. And we can’t expect to move forward without it. Period. Our sixth sense that animates metaphysics sits largely unused, locked away in its attic of dust with metaphysics, the unwanted, unrecognized step-child of philosophy that’s going nowhere without it. Nothing and no one is going forward without it. Period.

What’s the answer?

A common thread that runs through the self-assured pronouncements of human erudition is an appalling lack of mature reflection on who our Parents are and what Logic and Love are all about. Their mischaracterization by the Child’s nonsense-spouting delusional “other” as an angry tyrant, as “God” to be feared and loathed for its arbitrary power, its malevolence and betrayals, is a full-blown smear. The image of “God” outfitted in the Joker’s own hideous mask of authoritarian supremacy is a full-blown lie that continues to feed delusion and so “justify” our headlong escape from it.

And so I ask the Carlo Rovellis and the Steven Pinkers, the Brian Greenes and Jonah Goldbergs, the Christof Kochs and clones of Francis Crick-- the whole Caltech citadel of “realism,” -- when are you going to let go of hysteria at the thought of mind’s sixth sense joining the body’s five senses in the “quest for knowledge?” When will you live up to the spirit of Free Inquiry and open your minds? Let go of your religious faith in blind ignorance? You aren’t leading us forward. You’re tools of self-delusion that are taking us down.

What then does humanity need if not “optimism?” Purpose and meaning. Self-direction and self-discipline that can only come with aligning with our true friends Logic and Love. Seeking their guidance through the gift of our sixth sense, and parting with authoritarian supremacy once and for all.

Amen

Published on Leave a comment on Flight

Against the haze motionless wings
gently curved and crenate at the tip
the body solitary dark
joined the mountains and the horizon
as far as the eye could see

In the vastness
it turned and banked
caught by an unseen force
negotiated the currents
master of the wind

No compromise
with time or space
it stayed aloft for an eternity
coned in the rays of
the absolute

The distance between us grows
and in the distance between us
in the waning light that
surrounds me now

emptiness

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Jefferson's Garden, Monticello, Virginia
5:30 p.m. Sunday 26 July 1981

Published on Leave a comment on A Concise Definition of Metaphysics

What Metaphysics Is

Metaphysics is looking behind physical appearances (spacetime-matter), with the vision of Logic and Love through spontaneous Intuition, to understand:

  • Reality-Truth (the laws of cause and effect / Necessity)
  • Consciousness-Being (Self-Awareness, Conscience-Worth)
  • Relationship-Connection (Parents, Parents-Child, Implications)
  • Creation and Reciprocation (of Life-Being / Worth)
  • unreality-untruth (the laws of chaos)
  • unconsciousness / non-being (illusion, opposites)
  • conflict-disconnection (bodies-separation, illogic)
  • projection (of appearances-deceptions)

Metaphysics is Explanation. Explanation that’s required for Understanding. Explanation that makes sense because it’s based on Logic and Love integrated as one function of Mind, inseparable and inviolate. Explanation that’s its own Authority because Logic and Love combined stand on their own. Because Explanation that aligns with Reality’s laws of cause and effect aligns with the Authority of Necessity.

What  it does: correct misunderstanding

Explanation from metaphysics based on Logic-Love corrects misunderstanding. Corrects the dominant paradigms of science, philosophy, psychology, and theology that are based on loveless illogic. On the circular “reasoning” of “reality” based on sensory perception that includes the knower in the known. That defies objectivity accessible only through another perspective not of this “reality” and accessible only through Intuition.

This is not revolutionary heresy. This is grade-school Logic. 

The dominant paradigms are based on misperception that accounts for history’s unending cycle of misjudgments that allow humanity’s animal nature to separate Free from Will. To separate Mind that serves Free Choice, civilization, and individual sovereignty from the instincts and unevolved emotions of the herd. Rather than leading humanity toward the promised land of harmony, peace, and progress, the revered paradigms of misperception are responsible for contradiction, conflict, and violence.

This is humanity’s fate so far, a state of precarity on the edge of cliff. And the forces that put us here aren’t only our animal nature. They’re the very forces that we turn to to civilize our animal nature. To keep us from going over the cliff, and what are they doing? Pushing. 

Understanding is essential to correcting error

What metaphysics does is help correct error. A central error of thought -- the misperception -- that is one major cause of misunderstanding. The misunderstanding that explanation cannot venture beyond the boundaries of the misunderstanding. Beyond the boundaries of spacetime-matter when the source of the Big Bang that produced it cannot be physical. Matter cannot be the source of matter. Matter doesn’t “create” anything. The source of the Big Bang is mental.

This is not revolutionary heresy. This is grade-school Logic.

What metaphysics does is venture beyond the unreality of appearances to tell the story of Mind that exists in Reality. The story that preceded humanity’s alternate “reality” and serves as the root cause of everything that takes place within it. Not to understand the root causes of our misjudgments, our frustrations and miseries, is to be condemned to repeat them. The repetition of mistakes that can be understood with help from Logic and Love, accessible through Intuition rather than bodies’ senses, would be excusable if understanding were not possible. But with metaphysics it is possible. And the determination of the dominant paradigms to block it, to preserve their authoritarian dominance against the mounting evidence of their own discoveries, is inexcusable.

It might only take one

Explanation that leads to Understanding is the gift of metaphysics, at once the most important and least appreciated branch of philosophy. A branch that by definition applies systems thinking to every problem. That brings the whole of the human genome and experience to every task so that it gets done. Without having to fuss over professional boundaries and competing protocols. Because metaphysics alone among the dominant fields of Inquiry is Free Inquiry. The servant of Free Will. Us -- Free Choice.

It is the gift of the Parents Logic-Love to their Child -- to us -- to reclaim Self-Awareness and be done with appearances. The deceptions, magic tricks, distractions, and superficialities that make up our “reality.” The gift of Free Will -- the wild card of thought and feeling that might break the cycle of misjudgment. That might actually lead us forward if we let it.

If we listen with our Intuition. And maybe if only one of us gets it right. That might be all it takes.

Published on Leave a comment on Disrespectful Parenting and the Fallacy of Authoritarian Supremacy

Kindred spirits

“Value individuality and don’t try to dictate what. . . kids are curious about or how they express themselves. [Respectful parenting] is about seeing children as independent rational beings [instead of taking an] authoritarian [approach] where communication is one way with little consideration of a child’s emotional needs.” 

CNBC on Apple News Feed 01/07/23, quoting Margot Machol Bisnow, author, Raising an Entrepreneur (BookBaby 2022).

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In “Respectful Parenting” (January 8) I anticipated reading Bisnow’s book “in hopes that it will help with one of the main concerns of this website: the undoing of authoritarian “realism,” a dominant strain of philosophy that’s neither realistic nor rational. Responsible, in fact, for the abuse of children and every other living thing. The signature human mindset that’s become the signature of an entire geological epoch: the ongoing global atrocity we now call the "Anthropocene.”

I’ve since read the book and found that it has helped. In its author I feel a kindred spirit who shares my dismay at authoritarian insensitivity when the spirit of a vulnerable child is stifled by “authority.” By the misreading of authority by self-centered parents who turn its kindness meant to support with sensitivity, responsibility, and accountability, from the bottom up, into unkindness that rules with insensitivity, irresponsibility, and unaccountability, from the top down. Hallmarks of the authoritarian “realist’s” temperament, the root of troublemaking in every cause, every relationship.

The “bad thing” that Freud spent his career trying to understand and the friction that drove two professionals to pleading for “a better way.” The clinical psychologists Bill Thetford and Helen Schucman, who collaborated on A Course in Miracles, the guidance from metaphysics channeled by a perspective in but not of our world. Whose name was Jesus but could be any name we choose so long as its voice speaks for Logic and Love. For the Parents of their Child, Free Choice. Of us its projections.

The duty to speak, the duty to listen

The sentiments that follow speak from experience with disrespectful authoritarian parenting. Living it as a child and witnessing it as an adult. “Disrespect” is not meant for my own or others’ parents, who in their misreading of authority were no less motivated than I to do what’s right and in dealing with externals, with the necessities, did do a great deal that was right. Where we differ is in getting it right: what I perceive is a flaw in thinking so prevalent that it’s corrupted nearly all of Western thought. I don’t see the parents of my experience being other than human, only misled by the twists and turns of personality, genetics, and externals that account for personhood. By the same misperceptions that misled our ancestral Mind, the One Child that we are. "Disrespect" is meant neither for the Child nor for its projections but for the nature of the mistake. Authoritarian anything in human relations is inherently disrespectful.

It’s not for my sentiments to correct the flaw. It’s only my duty to use the gift of Logic and Love to think and feel. To observe, reflect, and analyze. To judge with conscience and compassion and then, when the time comes, to act. To use the gift of Voice to speak up and be heard. Whether my sentiments ring true or arrive at the right time is up to Authority. It’s not for me to say. But if authoritarian parents are serious about parenting; if they care for their children, it is their duty to listen. Not necessarily to change. To get it right, but to hear a voice other than their own and reflect on it. To look beyond the “authority” that stands in the way of understanding. Beyond the “authority” that isn’t, to the Authority that is.

If authoritarian parents want to silence me and my kindred spirit, all they have to do is listen. 

Voices that can’t be silenced 

Excerpts from Raising an Entrepreneur (New Harbinger 2nd ed. 2021):

  • All children thrive if they learn: to believe in themselves; to pursue their true passions; to find new ways to solve old problems; to see opportunity where others see the status quo; to be willing to take on a challenge without proper credentials; to work with single-minded determination to achieve a goal; to take a risk if the project is worth trying; to learn that building something wonderful is its own reward. . . . ; to view failure as feedback and setbacks as learning experiences; to dream big dreams. (368)
  • The more freedom you give kids, the more freedom they have to come into conflict with other people about the way things should be done. . . . [T]hey don’t have to fear conflict, and. . . it’s okay to challenge conventional ways of thinking and doing things. . . . (190)
  • The ideal mentor is driven by a different impulse -- to expose the child to challenges and equip the child to handle them. A mentor can also give a much-needed kick in the pants their parents are reluctant to give. And a child, especially a teenager, may listen to a mentor precisely because the mentor isn’t a parent. . . . [A] mentor with the right values becomes even more important. . . . (136)
  • A mentor just has to be someone the child respects, someone who comes into their life and shows them a new way of looking at the world, or who validates their self-worth by understanding the way they look at the world. (136)
  • [M]entors. . . could be family members other than their parents. . . . (364)
  • [A]n adult who demonstrates that it’s OK to do things differently, to color outside the lines, can be powerfully validating. . . A mentor can also broaden a young person’s view of available possibilities. . . . [A] mentor can show kids a whole world beyond the world of their parents. (135)
  • One way a mentor can serve as a bridge to the adult world is by giving your child a different perspective from yours. Even though it may not be easy, you need to trust your child to make the most of that different perspective, because it’s a key part of letting them create their own perspective -- the one they’ll keep refining for the rest of their life. (161)
  • [A] mentor provided not just guidance, but guiding principles -- attitudes and beliefs to be drawn on over a lifetime, especially in adversity. (150)
  • Mentors are good for everyone. But if children feel underappreciated at school, few things do more to boost their confidence than having someone who appreciates their talents. (136)

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Friendship requires mutual affection, respect, trust-honesty, and understanding between equals. Silencing a person’s voice with intimidation and bullying to assert authoritarian supremacy destroys affection, respect, trust-honesty, and understanding. It can never destroy a person’s inherent Worth but it does destroy friendship.

Anyone serious about respectful parenting must know that they may not ever, for any reason, assert authoritarian supremacy over their children. They may not silence their children’s voices with authoritarian intimidation and bullying. Nor may they attempt to do so with anyone who has a legitimate role in their children’s care and development. This includes role-modelers and mentors that every child needs.

The care and development of a child calls into play many more voices than the voices of their parents. Many more perspectives, talents and resources that children need. Cutting a child off from these resources to assert authoritarian supremacy is disempowering not empowering, mis-guidance not guidance. It is not respectful parenting. 

Persons are not objects

Private property is objects, not persons, that may be owned, possessed, and controlled provided that their use is responsible. “Responsible ownership” means exercising due care to recognize and mitigate its costs to others and to the community at large. In a shared world it can never mean doing whatever you want with what you own without regard for the interests of others.

Groups compete for competitive advantage or in games to win. Friendships are between individuals not groups. Individuals in friendships do not compete to win except at play. Authoritarian competition for supremacy defeats the purpose of play: excellence and good relations. It belongs neither in competition between groups nor between friends at play. Whether friends are competing at play or not it destroys friendships.

Individual persons are not objects. Individual minds, hearts, and souls may never, ever, be owned, possessed, and controlled for any reason. Behavior needing social controls is another matter. In mortal combat it doesn’t matter.

“Winning” in competition at play occurs between persons, not objects, where its purpose cannot be authoritarian ownership, possession, and control. “Defeat” is acknowledgement of superior performance. It can never imply submission to personal dominance. Totalitarian dictatorships fail for a reason: they are an affront to human nature.

Authoritarian supremacy is a sickness 

Excerpts from Raising an Entrepreneur (New Harbinger 2nd ed. 2021): 

  • Here’s the tough part for a lot of parents. If you want to incubate an entrepreneur, you need to lead by following. . . . It’s one of the hardest things for most parents to do: knowing what your kids’ strengths are; understanding what path would be good for them; and judging when -- and how -- to support that path. (319)
  • [E]ntrepreneurs need space and freedom to find their own way -- and, paradoxically, that makes emotional support from their parents even more important. When they’re not getting the immediate rewards and positive feedback that conventional jobs bring, their parents’ belief in them becomes even more valuable. (325)
  • Few things give kids more confidence than seeing their parent stand up for them. These moments also teach them to stand up for themselves. Future entrepreneurs learn how to argue for their own interests -- and . . . how to stand up for their vision. . . . By standing up for a child, you not only give the child confidence, you also model how to be an advocate when it’s called for. (190)
  • [S]howing [your child] how you do it when you stand up to authority on their behalf is. . . teaching a sense of entitlement (in the best sense of the word) . . [G]iving your child the tools to stand up for themselves by standing up for them when they are young helps them navigate the world successfully as an adult. (190)
  • The parents in this book gave their children the following messages: We love you. We trust you. We believe in you. We support you in whatever you want to do. We . . . encourage you to pursue [your passion]. We know you’ll do great things. We’ll always be here for you. Don’t worry if you make mistakes. . . . We’re excited to follow you on your journey. We can’t wait to see everything you’re going to accomplish. (367)
  • This kind of wholehearted trust in a child’s capacity is the secret to raising an entrepreneur. . . . (368)
  • The true test for parents is whether they can remain supportive even when their children seem lost or haven’t yet figured out how to make a career out of doing what they love or when they take a turn that makes their parents nervous. Following children’s lead. . . means supporting and encouraging them even when parents wish they were doing something else. (342)
  • [P]arents may tend to focus on what society thinks are good qualities, rather than on what motivates their kids. They ask, “Why don’t they have more discipline?” when the better question is often “How can I help them find something that inspires them to work hard?” (321)
  • Some parents get out of the way. . . , but others aren’t passively stepping aside and waiting for their children to do amazing things. Many of the parents I talked with did a lot to help their kids identify what it was they loved to do. (348)

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Civilization in a shared world requires democratic governance under the law that supports cooperation by sharing, affirmation, enablement, and empowerment from the bottom up. The assertion of authoritarian supremacy above the law, from the top down, has no place in civilized society and destroys democracy.

Civilization and democracy both begin at home. With individual relationships among equals who practice mutual respect, trust-honesty, and understanding. Civilization and democracy cannot be sustained by acts of will alone. They require the guidance of intelligence that applies responsibility and accountability to every decision. That applies every function of Mind -- introspection, reflection, and judgment based on logic, analysis, reasoning, evaluation, and understanding.

The assertion of authoritarian supremacy destroys civilization and democracy because it would rule by will alone. Because it excludes and silences the voice of intelligence. Because it is the sworn enemy of intelligence.

The assertion of authoritarian supremacy provokes and perpetuates conflict, combat, and violence. It is a perversion of “authority” that is a barrier to world peace. In individual relationships it is a sickness. A psychiatric disorder that is a barrier to mutual respect, trust-honesty, and understanding among equals essential to good relations.

The superficiality of sociability

Sociability confined to group-social relations where it belongs can be helpful, harmless, and playful. But anything “social” is associated with groups and anything “groups” implies power relations. Sociability that brings power relations into individual-personal relations doesn’t belong. The implied threat of authoritarian dominance is not helpful or harmless. It's hurtful. It can never be playful. It destroys friendships.

Sociability in group-social relations only requires displays of mutual affection, respect, trust-honesty, and understanding among equals. The agreeability and pleasantness of group-social relations is sustained by appearances. Group-social relations are necessarily superficial. Superficiality is the enemy of individual personal relationships sustained by sincerity. By the reality of mutual affection, respect, trust-honesty, and understanding and not just the appearance. Superficiality in individual personal relationships conveys hostility, insincerity, and misunderstanding. It is inherently disrespectful.

Causes that require respectful parenting 

Excerpts from Raising an Entrepreneur (New Harbinger 2nd ed. 2021):

  • A]ll entrepreneurs face moments of crisis when everything seems aligned against them -- when the world is telling them they’re crazy, their ventures won’t work, and they should take a safer, less turbulent path. It’s at moments like these that they may need a motivation bigger than themselves. . . . [M]any entrepreneurs are brought up to believe there is a larger purpose to which they are called than their own happiness or material success. . . . For some, the belief in something bigger came through religion. Others are fueled by a more general sense of morality or ethics. . . . (294)
  • Kathe, mom of the WordPress founder. . . always stressed values, not as abstract concepts, but as guiding principles for taking action. [emphasis added] (294-295)
  • For many who grew up to be entrepreneurs, the sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves is fundamental and has shaped their lives and contributed to their unshakable belief that they are in the world to make a positive difference. (295)
  • The webMethods co-founder explained. . . “I think about . . . my children from a perspective of what’s their purpose, where did they come from, and why are they here. . . . [P]art of why they’re here is to make a contribution. . . . Service has always been an important part of our lives.” (297)
  • [E]ven if you don’t believe in an organized religion. . . -- it’s important to raise children to have a strong character, to be moral, to be honorable, to have a set of values, to care about their community, and to recognize that today, their community may be the world. . . . [I]t was important for [these entrepreneurs] growing up to believe that there is something bigger than them, that there is a higher purpose than making money. . . . They all care deeply about making the world a better place and giving back. And that desire was bolstered by a moral perspective instilled in them in childhood. (317-318)

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The assertion of authoritarian supremacy is an attempt to adapt to a shared world that is fundamentally misunderstood as a world cast in its own image. As a world ruled from the top down by an arbitrary authority, above the law, ruling only for its own preservation and for nothing else. It is a failure of Logic whose function is to support understanding with explanation. It is illogical, and no function of Mind or will that’s based on it -- on getting context wrong -- can end well.

The assertion of authoritarian supremacy is wrong in any context, even in combat where neither victory nor survival requires it. This was supposed to be the lesson of the Versailles treaty that concluded World War I -- an assertion of authoritarian supremacy that produced World War II. Getting context wrong is a grave mistake. The retaliations of victimhood and vengeance, authoritarian trademarks, are always illogical.

The assertion of authoritarian supremacy that treats individuals as objects, that deprives them of a voice, is always a grave mistake that destroys the possibility of friendship and world peace. Causes that every voice from the next generation will be called upon to serve. Causes that require respectful parenting. 

Inspiration from a revered leader 

Excerpts from Raising an Entrepreneur (New Harbinger 2nd ed. 2021): 

  • [M]ost of the entrepreneurs believed in something: their beliefs fed their commitment to service, and their sense that they have a duty to contribute to the world. (365) 
  • Nurture Compassion. . . . Many of the entrepreneurs . . . were raised with the strong belief that they had to give back and, in fact, most of the entrepreneurs in this book do give back today. . . . (364)

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Abraham Lincoln reframed American democracy eloquently with his Gettysburg Address. He wanted to conclude the Civil War “with malice towards none; with charity for all.” In the spirit of understanding, not in the spirit of the Versailles treaty that came later, an authoritarian calamity. Lincoln was one of history’s most inspiring advocates of civilization and democracy and one of the most persuasive opponents of authoritarian rule.

He was one of history’s most loved and revered leaders, a role model for all seasons. Why do his image and monument in Washington resonate with the heart and soul of America? Because the gentle loving kindness that he spoke for was the antithesis of authoritarian supremacy. He was our respectful parent.

God bless Abraham Lincoln. God bless every parent who practices respectful parenting. And God bless you, even if you don't, for listening.

Published on Leave a comment on The Force of Necessity: Reality’s Gift to Creation

The organs of Life

All of Reality-Creation is one Being. One Self that contains within itself Relationships between aspects of itself that perform functions. Functions that enable Creation to function. The process and structure of Creation are one interrelated whole. One living, organic Being expressing the value, the Worth, of Life, of Being, and its works: the extension and continuous expansion of Life. The evolution and growth of Life.

The exhortation from Being’s emissaries that reach us from Reality-Creation, that we Love one another and live in Peace, is, at the most elemental level of Understanding, no more than a reminder that we are all part of One Self. The exhortation that reaches us in our illusory material world, that we not hate and attack one another, is no more than a reminder that it's impossible to separate from one another let alone attack, injure, and destroy one another. For when we try to do so we are only turning against ourselves.

The Relationships contained within Creation’s One Self are between different aspects of the same Self. They are not and cannot be between separate parts. They are between distinct functions of the same One Self that serve and share in the unified purpose of Creation. One organic Life composed of organs each with its own function.

The dream of all things impossible

Einstein tried to theorize with physics and mathematics how the principle of unity is expressed through our material universe. Plato tried to theorize with philosophy how it’s expressed through Mind in the presence of the cosmos. Where both sensed the divine, feeling the presence of Psyche, the Soul that connects all Life with its Source, the One Self of Creation. Unaware, because we occupy a dream of its opposite, that the principle expressed through our material universe cannot be unity, and so they failed.

The principle instead is separation. The impossibility which can only be an appearance, the delusion of an unconscious mind that’s dreaming. For even if separation appears to be real everything within our universe is interconnected. It is, as physics tells us, “relational.” Particles are, as quantum mechanics tells us, “entangled.” Thoughts like these that reach their audience through electronics because the cosmos is interconnected by electronics -- the electromagnetic force. A cosmos described as a neural network, as though it were a single brain. Which it may be: the reverse mirror image of the sleeping Mind that’s projecting it. Where separation cannot be real, even in a horror show of contradiction, conflict, and violence meant to fool its occupants into thinking it’s real.

All things impossible, all things contradictory and illogical, become possible in an illusion. All Order disorder, all laws lawless, all authority powerless when script and rules are both written by a Mind making up an alternate “reality. By the dreamer, the only possible identity for the authoritarian who would rule above the law. Arbitrarily, subject to no law but its own whim. A day-dreaming fool.

Reality is the authority of Mister Nice Guy

The Reality of Creation is expressed as a distinct aspect of the One Self, the function of Order that fits together all the parts, the functions of Creation defined by Logic-Love through its laws of cause and effect. The Reality of Creation is the Beauty of Order expressed through harmony, the joyful spontaneity of Peace and Freedom. Order that cannot be the handiwork of authority imposed from the top down, arbitrarily, above the law.

The Reality of Order that makes Beauty and its attributes possible can only be expressed logically through the function of Necessity, the Force of laws of cause and effect, distinct from the function of Creation. So that the Worth of Creation may be shared, affirmed, enabled, and empowered from below. So that it may not be compromised by ownership, possession, and control from the top down.

Reality is not No More Mister Nice Guy

Within the One Self that is Life-Creation there is the Reality of Necessity: the immutable sequence of Logic and authorship, distinctions between before and after, author and authored, Creator and Created, Parent and Child. Relationships that may be defined by firsts and seconds in logical succession but do not and cannot logically imply the dominance and “supremacy” of authority that rules from the top down. That cannot imply ownership, possession, and control, the perversions of authority implied by a material world of appearances occupied by illusory bodies and other physical objects.

Dominance, “supremacy” and the rest are attributes of an alternate “reality” that can only “exist” within a Mind unconscious and dreaming. Within an illusion where anything goes. Creation is all parts fitting together in harmony within One Self that is Reality, distinct from Creation, that cannot be where “anything goes.” That is and must be defined by the laws of cause and effect. By the Force of Necessity that doesn’t rule from the top down, above the law, arbitrarily, but enables governance and Order supportively from the bottom up. Symbiotically, synchronously, with the Logic and Love, the sharing, affirmation, enablement, and empowerment of the Soul and Source of Creation. The One Self that is Creation.

What happened to Houdini’s elephant?

The distinction between Reality and Creation occasions a deception within the dreaming Mind, the function of Free Choice, that is uniquely harmful: the reversal of the relationship between Reality and Creation. Accomplished by the perversion of Reality that necessitates harmony supportively through laws-Necessity from the bottom up into unreality that necessitates disharmony through arbitrary lawlessness from the top down. A reversal of the Energy-Force of Necessity from its light side -- Life --in Reality to its illusory dark side -- death -- in unreality. A consequence of one magic trick by the illusionist, the shadow reflection of unconsciousness, our ancestral Mind’s self-delusion. Its mistaken identity: the disappearance of Reality from Creation, of the harmony, peace, spontaneity, and Freedom of Order made possible by the laws of cause and effect, and its replacement by unreality and its laws of chaos. Like the disappearance of Houdini’s elephant with no explanation, no Logic, into thin air.

The disappearance of sanity and its replacement by insanity with no explanation, no Logic, into thin air. A state of Mind that in our terminal confusion we take to be “normal.” That we adapt to until -- what? Until insanity and chaos have brought total disorder and there is no more room to maneuver. No more room to adapt.

Avoidance doesn’t work

How could this happen? It could happen because, as the founder of modern neuroscience once observed, “The ‘destructive phase’ always reappears, and each iteration of wars is more horrible than the last.” Because “Our nerve cells continue to react in the same way as in the Neolithic Age.”*

It could happen because, so long as we allow ourselves to be fooled by the illusionist’s trick, by our own limbic mindless will; so long as we passively submit to the illusion, to our Neolithic animal fears, chained to our seats in Plato’s Cave by self-delusion, events that we imagine we have avoided by not understanding will overtake us.

When do we tire of the joke?

And then what? It’s all over?

Actually no. Because the function defined for the Child Free Choice within the One Self of Creation is still needed and must be performed. Free Choice that we are, wild card that we are, we are still governed by Logic-Love and subject to the Force of Necessity. Though authoritarian “realists” may think otherwise we author neither ourselves nor the rules that define Reality.

Our choice is when to learn our lesson. There is no whether. What’s Real is what must be. There’s no fooling around forever with escapes into made-up “reality.” Into substitutes for consequence. For the satisfactions of three-dimensional Life that is Life instead of the one-dimensional facsimile, the antics of a cartoon, that only delusion can inhabit.

So when do we get it together? When do we tire of the joke and get serious? When do we turn to insights from Intuition, our pathway to Logic and Love? To metaphysics for explanation that leads to Understanding? Why not Now?

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*Alec Wilkinson quoting Santiago Ramon y Cajal in “Illuminating the Brain’s ‘Utter Darkness’.” Review of Benjamin Ehrlich, The Brain in Search of Itself: Santiago Ramon y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron. In New York Review of Books (February 9, 2023, p. 32)

Published on Leave a comment on Who’s Fooling Whom?

The mistake

There may be many kinds of fools. Two kinds for sure are those who are fooled and those who do the fooling. If our world is perversions of the truth, jokes meant to deceive and amuse, then the entertainer who’s deceiving us belongs to the second category. The fool doing the fooling.

Those who choose to identify with the entertainer, to be its ally and servant, must do so in the belief that this will insulate them from obloquy, the fate of those who don’t. In the certainty that they will avoid the ignominy of losing by guaranteeing a “win.” By being on the delivering side of humiliation instead of the receiving side. Thus their “reasoning.”

And so our topsy-turvy world treats its inhabitants to the spectacle of fools being fooled not only by appearances but also by fools fooling themselves: agents of the circumstance responsible for appearances. The court jester dressed like a clown, the apparition who presents itself as our opposite. The opposite of our ancestral Mind. That materialized out of thin air like a magician’s trick, in the sound of our Mind’s own voice. Articulating rank nonsense to unconsciousness bereft of Judgment, ready to be led back home by anything that offered help. Ready to identify with its opposite babbling incoherence, to be its ally, if only it would turn on the lights. Darkness turning to darkness to bring it to the light. A state of delusion deluding itself.

How can the opposite of a Mind unconscious in a state of delusion be anything other than an agent of delusion? How can an agent of delusion be anything other than complicit in its act -- the source of foolishness that can’t be anything other than a fool? The source of losing that can’t be anything other than a loser? The source of deception that can’t be anything other than deception itself, an apparition of self-deception mistaken for an “other.” Whose “existence” is mistaken identity. A mistake.

The joke

And so our topsy-turvy world treats its inhabitants to the spectacle of losers fooled by themselves into the delusion that they are “winners.” Into the delusion that the world of appearances they have crafted with their deceptions is a great work of art. A monument to their genius instead of the witches’ brew of contradictions, the wizard’s sleight of hand, that it is. All smoke and mirrors. When all it is is a mistake. A reflection perpetrated by a reflection that can only be the “work” of a fool. The opposite of an opposite: the dark side of Mind unconscious that cannot see,. Deprived of Judgment, the ability to distinguish between itself and its own shadow. Real from unreal, correct from incorrect, right from wrong, good from evil. The ability to understand who it is, what happened to it, why it happened, when it happened, where it is, and how it’s supposed to find its way back.

The very essence of helpless victimhood. The perfect prey of the victimizer, the mistaken “other” in the unreality of unconsciousness. The only state of Mind where there can be “others.” The opposite of Consciousness. Of Self-Awareness where there is only one Reality and it is One. Where separation into one-the-many is an impossibility, An absurdity. A flight of fancy into cloud cuckoo land. A riotous, illogical joke.

A better cause

The turn of mind that identifies with the Joker and allies with its “cause” imagines itself to be amusing. Armed with the power to fool with its distractions, its amusements. When in truth there is laughter. Riotous laughter at its ridiculous “cause” and the self-deluded fool who serves it. At the Joker who is the joke.

If understanding the who, what, when, where, why, and how of our situation -- our topsy-turvy world that’s a mistake -- must begin somewhere, then let it begin with its source. With disillusionment that can unravel all of it at one stroke. With the unveiling of un-self-awareness. With the understanding that joining the dark side isn’t escape from being its prey. From being deluded. From being made a fool of. From the ignominy of losing. It’s the opposite. It’s playing the fool. It’s exactly what you don’t want: to be the butt of its jokes. To be your own predator, the source of your humiliation. Your own downfall.

Do you really want to show off your amazing talent for avoidance? For escaping seriousness that hinders entertainment? Houdini, history’s greatest magician, was an escape artist. Do you really want to avoid the pain and humiliation of losing? To be safe? Then join another cause. A real cause instead of perpetuating a mistake. Help us all restore the one Mind that we are to Consciousness. Help us all escape from the fecklessness and miseries of un-self-awareness back to the satisfactions and joys of Self-Awareness. Of knowing who we are, where we are, and what we’re about. Help us all grow up. To restore mature judgment and be done with foolishness.

Help us all stop playing the fool.  

Published on Leave a comment on The DNA of Creation

The source of Energy that animates the Life-Worth of Creation
is Oneness that contains Relationship:
between Logic and Love, the Parents of the Child,
and between Parents and Child, the wild card that is Free Choice.

The DNA of Creation

Is the Logic-Love marriage and their Relationship with the Child
they gave birth to. The archetypal Connections
from which all the Connections of Creation’s Life-Worth flow.
From which all the Interconnections of Reality flow.

The seed bed and incubator of all of Creation:
the Queen Bee of Being
composed of archetypal Relationships of sublime happiness-Joy.
The substance of Love-Feeling
the essence of Worth in a state of Being.

This is God.

The Source from which all Life-Worth / Being
and its expression, doing-reciprocating, flow.

This is Logos.

All the Beings,
all the Selves and functions.
all the definitions and possibilities. . . .

Published on Leave a comment on What Price Rational Explanation? The Case for Metaphysics

Distinctions fundamental to Understanding 

Creation got its start with Relationship and with what Relationship implies. Relationship between Logic and Love inseparable and the Creation of Life and Worth that their Relationship implies. Creation got its start with Relationship which is the stuff of Love and with Implication which is the stuff of Logic. What they imply is the process of Creation moving forward and the structure of Creation building from the bottom up, both in logical sequence through Relationships.

Logic married to Love gave birth to Free Choice, their Child. Together they parent their Child through the inseparable Parent-Child Relationship that Creates, nurtures, and guides the Life-Worth of Creation. Guides through the harmony of Order and Freedom that are inseparable. Governs all of Reality-Creation from the bottom up, through the laws of cause and effect, inseparable from the Authority of Necessity that applies evenly and equally to Creation and Creator, its Source.

Logic-Love is the Source of Judgment that decides with Reason but it does neither itself. It doesn’t choose and so it has no need for Reason. It explains, defines, and governs. The “Mind” whose function in Creation is to choose-decide with Reason- Judgment is Free Choice: the Child of Parents Logic-Thought and Love-Feeling. Logic the source of Mind-Choice and Love the source of Freedom. The Child’s function is to choose freely with Reason because that is the function of Reason: to enable Mind to judge, choose, and decide freely. The Child is our ancestral Mind.

The theorizing of metaphysics is intuited through the Logic-Love Relationship -- our Parents in Reality -- that explains and defines. That provides us with distinctions fundamental to Understanding because they love and need their Child to resume their Relationship in Self-Awareness and the Child’s function in Creation. To regain Consciousness from the alternate reality, the dream state that we call home. Awakening that requires Understanding that requires explanation. That can only come from Logic-Love, our Parents.

The will not to understand

In the illusory world of contradictions that we appear to occupy, minds corrupted by their own opposites can make no sense of this. Opposite is separation. Inseparability is an impossibility. And so in our illusory world of separation what seems to make sense is the opposite. A fractious composition of impossibilities. Logic and Love function separately, which means they function with difficulty or not at all. With Parents separated from Child there can be no Relationship to nurture and guide creation. There can be neither order nor freedom when they are separated. If laws are separated from authority there can be no governance, only the lawlessness of separation. Arbitrary top-down rule. A madhouse.

Distinctions that to minds dominated by limbic passions, corrupted by mis-identification with their own reverse mirror image reflections, make no sense. Logic that explains and defines so that it can govern, distinct from Mind that judges with Reason so that it can choose freely, can have no place in the unfathomable mystery that is our universe, so plainly ruled by mindless, unreasoning “nature,” the force that dominates with the unthinking animal-herd instinct of will. Where in such a universe is there any possibility of explanation by Logic? Of understanding essential to Free Choice? Of Reason the function of Mind? There is no place. And thus the distinctions are lost on corrupted minds. Distinctions that could guide us toward answers that Western thought supposedly seeks. But if we don’t want them then surely we won’t find them.

The “many” of happening or nothing happening 

The “many” of Life-Creativity in Reality are implications that flow from each advance in the interconnectedness -- the sequence -- of Logic. The “many” are the loving soulmate relationships that flow from each expansion of the interconnectedness -- the family -- of Love. The “many” of Life-Creativity in Reality is the abundance of possibilities that Life-Creation is composed of, that each advance in the extension of Logic and the expansion of Love produces. Possibilities like branches and roots, the flowering seeds and buds that compose organic growth, the growth of all living selves. This is the ”many” of Reality-Creation, of Life that grows, of abundance that shares. That can’t help growing and sharing because this is the nature, the definition, of Life-Being. Of Necessity -- the laws of cause and effect.

The ”many” of the opposite is the abundance of disconnections and contradictions. Of impossibilities that comprise the appearance of being, of life-uncreativity in unreality along with its opposite, the appearance of death. The “many” is the abundance of opposites -- disconnections and contradictions -- produced by opposition. By opposing “realities:” of life and death, good and evil, right and wrong, logical and illogical, love and fear, love and hate, innocence and guilt, giving and taking, gaining and losing, owning and sharing, possessing and affirming, controlling and liberating, freedom and captivity, darkness and light, connection and separation, here and there, now and then. . . .

The “many” of the opposite isn’t the growth of possibilities from the expanding interconnectedness of abundance. From the variety of organic Being but the endless splitting off of impossibilities from the disconnectedness of shadow-reflection. The endless replication of contradictions from the scarcity of inorganic sameness. The “many” of Reality Life-Creation is innovation, a happening. The discovery of the new while inquiring and exploring into the unknown. The “many” of the opposite-uncreativity is replication. The appearance of movement. Of growth-expansion that’s comprised of sameness. Nothing happening.

A passion for metaphysics with a practical use

The “many”-abundance of my life is passion for philosophy. For metaphysics that inquires into questions of Worth and Truth, substance and value, Mind and Love, character and striving, meaning and purpose. Of interest to very few. That seems to the rest a waste of time, impractical and irrelevant. A preoccupation that ought to be discouraged in favor of something more conventional. More “realistic” and “sociable” instead of abstract and distancing. Instead of “weird.” Margot Machol Bisnow’s Raising an Entrepreneur (New Harbinger 2021) advises parents to support a child’s passion whatever it is rather than superimposing their own preferences. Rather than stifling originality and initiative, individuality and creativity, with authoritarian disrespect. Advice just as relevant to a grownup’s passion as it is to a child’s.

Why does it matter that the “many” of our illusory dream world is the opposite of the “many” of Reality-Creation? Because the scope of explanation that leads to Understanding by way of the Logic-Love of Intuition, by way of the Relationship with the connection to Logic-Love Parents, includes the difference between opposing “manies.” Because getting it right -- the human condition, our situation -- necessitates understanding that replications of lifeless sameness aren’t Creation. Aren’t progress, and humanity needs to move forward.

Because, like the man said, nothing gets rid of bad theory like good theory. Because the author theorizing with metaphysics is the equivalent of pure research in science that yields useful products. Practical applications that replace authoritarian “realism” that stifles Creativity from the top down with democratic support that nurtures Creativity from the bottom up. At every level of governance from international relations to individual families. Enabling shared parenting and grandparenting to be there for the minds and hearts of grandchildren as well as their bodies. That is my immediate concern. But if the unsolved problems of humanity are endless, then the possibilities of theory that gets it right, working at their roots, might also be endless.

Theorizing with metaphysics requires contributions from Free Choice rooted in its Source, Logic combined with Love. From the Parents of our ancestral Mind, the masculinity of Logic-Choice married to the femininity of Love-Freedom. Ultimately from the Logic-Love / Parent-Child Relationship at the core of Being that illuminates and empowers all of Reality-Creation. A lineage that taps into serious enablement and empowerment. Not the absurdity of forgeries like the “almighty gods” of authoritarian “realism,” caricatures who inhabit cartoons. However unconventional it may seem to conventional thought, theorizing with metaphysics has a legitimate rationale that earns its authenticity with the Worth of Logic-Love and the Authority of the laws of cause and effect. Of Necessity, the expression and stance of Logic-Love. Not needing convention is the point. The rationale stands on its own.

Understanding that the “many” of unreality is the product of appearances is a practical use of theorizing about the “many.” That it’s the product of deception perpetrated by a shadow-reflection opposite -- the replication of a virus that kills Creativity-Life. That’s the enemy of the possibilities of Free Choice essential to Creativity. Helping minds choose to be freed from captivity to the deception, to be led by a better guide, is a practical use of theorizing about the “many.” 

When a paradigm reaches end-of-service

Metaphysics is getting at root causes so that the causes of illogic, the psychiatric disorder that thwarts human growth with contradictions, can be taken out by the roots. Weeds not taken out by the roots keep coming back. Physics explains appearances, never getting beneath the surface because that is its subject: physical objects. Surfaces detectable by the senses of other surfaces: bodies. Pulling a weed out here, a weed out there, but never by the roots. Not even aware that that’s its purpose.

The rallying cry of metaphysics is appearances be damned! It’s taken physics since Galileo invented experimental physics, in the 17th century, to begin to realize what the classical philosopher Parmenides realized with Logic from intuition 2500 years ago. That Reality lies not on the surface but beneath it. That only one “reality” can be Real. The one on the surface, the objects “detected” by body-objects, can only be an illusion. The “non-dualism” taught by the teacher-healer Jesus in the flesh and later, through A Course in Miracles.

John Clerk Maxwell’s equations carried Michael Faraday’s intuition about the electromagnetic force beyond theory to application. To products that, among other things, make these thoughts accessible to a global audience in an instant. The equivalent of Maxwell’s equations to the Logic of Parmenides, Valentinus, and A Course in Miracles isn’t mathematical equations that validate sensory perception. It’s coming up with a rational explanation for the loss of Consciousness that transitioned the insane idea of an opposite unreality from an unconscious Mind to its expression, its animated appearance, in a dream. To make things add up logically like Maxwell’s equations.

In order to come up with explanation it’s logically necessary to detach our minds from an irrational, unquestioning dependence on sensory perception. On a body-centric worldview of Reality. So that inquiry beyond historic insights that challenge “conventional wisdom” will be enlivened by curiosity instead of deadened without it. Killed by an aging generation content to let the next generation abandon its outdated paradigms. Ever vigilant that nobody dismantle its monuments even if they turn out to be facades. 

The hand-off of the baton back to philosophy 

Plato tried to go forward with his mentor Parmenides. He couldn’t because intuition didn’t carry him far enough. Imaginary dialogues with his mentor Socrates didn’t get him there so he could do for Parmenides’ insights what Maxwell did for Faraday’s. His pupil Aristotle’s switch, from Plato’s Academy to Aristotle’s Lyceum -- from Mind-Logic to matter-biology -- was a white flag of surrender. It was the equivalent of Nils Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation that declared that experimental physics had reached the limit of its potential to explain the origin, fate, and meaning of the material universe. Aristotle’s was the declaration that Logic through intuition had reached its limit. The study of matter was available to sensory perception. It offered a legitimate avenue of discovery so long as the reality of matter and its certifier, the body’s senses, remained unchallenged by Logic. The time had come to pursue it, and thus was science in Western thought born.

And thus was born what’s become a relay race run by science and philosophy. The white flag of surrender has come out again. From physics’ pursuit of quantum gravity, the melding of cosmology with quantum mechanics, the study of the behavior of the particles and cells, the Energy, that make up matter. One just as weird as the other. The evolution of Einstein’s and Hawking’s pursuit of a theory of everything that also failed. The study of Aristotle’s matter come to rest on a puzzle that experimental physics, on its own, can’t solve. So it’s back to appealing to philosophy. To handing the baton back to philosophy in the relay race to Understanding.

The value of relationship with a trusted guide

What I propose is one possibility inspired by the author of A Course in Miracles. Who I have never doubted, since I’ve been living with it for 34 years, connects us with Logic-Love, the Parents of our ancestral Mind I call the Child. The historical figure Jesus, a manifestation of what religion calls the Holy Spirit. But if the Child’s awakening ultimately requires intimacy with our Parents’ emissary its name shouldn’t matter. Particularly since the identity and role it assumes in individual lives is between it and the individual. Call it what you want.

The Holy Spirit touches my heart at the deepest level through a son whose life was a heart-breaking tragedy. His, for me, has been the voice and the image of the Holy Spirit since I began work on this project three years ago. My life and work revolve around our Relationship, the source of insights from my intuition. With the author of the Course, my Guide and my comfort. An arrangement that owes nothing to manipulation on either side and everything to spontaneity. To mutual Love, Trust, and respect.

What if anything your life revolves around is up to you. I can only share that being in an intimate relationship with a trusted guide, who is in our world of appearances but not of it, can be both elevating and leveling. And, above all, useful -- positive and constructive. A fact well documented in the literature of leadership, entrepreneurship, and parenting.

Quantification run amuck

The cause of the Big Bang is mental not physical. An obvious fact that science, in its rampant bias against the agency of Mind in anything that can be detected and measured by body, adamantly refuses to accept. Between them Stephen Hawking, Francis Crick, Christof Koch, and Brian Greene have invented a “boundaryless” universe without a creator -- an effect without a cause -- and a brain that magically produces consciousness out of neurons and electrical impulses -- matter that produces mind. Propositions so preposterous they rate the Nobel prize for dumbest. An associate of Hawking’s tried to imagine a state that could cause our matter and what did he come up with? More matter.

The Church sticking its nose into Galileo’s business did irreparable harm to objective inquiry, worse by far than private industries buying academic research. Because all it did was provoke science into sticking its nose into everything, including and especially the philosophy that Hawking declared “dead.” Science won’t tolerate anything smacking of speculation that can’t be “verified” by “objective” quantitative measurement. The tool based on circular reasoning that the Austrian physicist-philosopher Erwin Schroedinger has acknowledged guarantees subjectivity not objectivity. What is inquiry outside the scope of measurement but speculation disciplined and supported by Logic?

Other fields -- philosophy, psychology, economics -- are so intimidated by science’s preeminence that they’ve recast their efforts as “scientific” if they can get away with it and let themselves be overshadowed if they can’t. The so-called “five factor” personality type theory is illustrative. Meant to replace Myers-Briggs, based on the inspired intuition of Carl Jung, it makes “person” object rather than subject so that its types can be quantified by “scientific” measurements -- an absurdity. The fraud results in a scale that values body-sensing over intuition, the most critical Myers-Briggs categories. Why devalue intuition? So that body-sensing, already the majority of personality types, will swing attitudes even farther toward validation of science and the “reality” of the world of spacetime-matter that justifies it. So that intuition can’t risk undermining it with another perspective: with Logic and the Truth that lies behind appearances.

Thomas Aquinas got religion -- Christianity anyway -- to back off sticking its nose into free inquiry, but that didn’t stop science from sticking its nose into free inquiry. It’s hard to see the difference between Hawking and Crick and the Pope they so despise.

What is our baseline? 

Adam Becker, in What Is Real? (Basic Books 2018), recalled that Einstein, in 1952, said scientists weren’t very good at Logic. Why? What profession mines the potential for brilliance from the human mind with more elan than science?

In benefit-cost analysis, benefits and costs must be measured against something to show that a particular option makes a situation better or worse. The baseline situation -- the way things are now before the professions and their masters set about to change them. The situation that can’t factor into analysis until it’s properly understood. After all, one option might be to leave things the way they are and its constituency might not give up without a fight.

The function of mind that comes into play for this critical phase of analysis isn’t reason. It’s Logic. Whose function isn’t to choose but to explain. To use its prowess with definition to show how circumstances fit together to reveal their meaning. Whose function is to help its hapless subject, struggling to make sense of a world of contradictions and facades, understand.

From Logic we get Understanding. Not from reasoning but from fitting circumstances together so that they give us meaning and purpose. Context that’s essential to direction. From Logic we get what our situation calls for, opening thought to the next step: how to proceed with choices among scientific experiments, development possibilities, or any other improvement. With judgment based on reason that takes into account weighted values as well as measurements. That integrates them into a response to the situation that is both reasoned and Logical.

Logical because it gets the baseline situation right. Because judgment will be off on the right foot, well informed. Well directed by understanding based on facts. On reality instead of mis-directed by mis-understanding based on mis-perception and unreality. Because judgment will be based on Logic.

Science’s headlong rush to judgment

Science works hard at explaining our situation. At establishing the baseline for judgment, reasoning, choices, and decisions. But this is true only if the basic attribute of our situation can be taken for granted: that what our bodies’ senses tell us is there is actually “there.” That this is reality and we needn’t trouble metaphysics with questioning it. It’s true only if we allow science to get away with including the knower in the known. A crack in the foundation of the entire scientific enterprise. Because it forfeits intellectual integrity and along with it scientific objectivity.

Including the knower in the known is a very big No-No. A violation of Logic. An intellectual disconnect that science apparently thinks it can’t afford to acknowledge without depriving itself of its legitimacy: the presumed reality of bodies and matter. Bodies and the material objects that their senses detect. But, you see, bodies are matter. And science that prides itself on objectivity can’t get away with “logic” that finds “objectivity” where it isn’t: in matter declaring itself real.

A proper understanding of our baseline, the condition against which all movement forward must be calculated, requires something else: another perspective. That's only attainable through intuition, the function of mind whose source and discipline is Logic. The science that we all admire and depend on isn’t good with Logic for a simple reason. It rushes headlong into judgment with “reasoning” before it’s properly established its baseline. Before it’s applied Logic to a proper understanding of the context that tells it what the situation calls for. That provides direction for thinking. Before it's availed itself of another perspective that's essential to intellectual integrity and scientific objectivity.

The gift of metaphysics

Everyone is familiar with physics, the profession that made Einstein an international celebrity. Metaphysics not so much. Too bad, because turning to physics, the study of appearances, the gold standard for legitimizing authoritarian “realism,” is exactly the wrong approach. It’s the approach that Hawking trumpeted in his adolescent fantasy of supremacy when he declared philosophy dead.

Metaphysics is a much-neglected outlier of philosophy that’s probably better known for what it hasn’t done for human progress than for what it has. In his call for help from philosophy the physicist Carlo Rovelli, in Reality Is not What It Seems (Riverhead Books 2017), rejected the Logic of Parmenides out of hand. Thus eliminating metaphysics and its founder from consideration along with answers that minds captive to bodies and brains are actually desperate for. The victim of a shipwreck would rather be saved by an anvil than a life preserver. Because if getting our baseline right requires the definitions and explanations of Logic; if it requires Understanding where circumstances fit together to make a clear statement, it needs Logic. And Logic isn’t the gift of physics. It isn’t the gift of science. It’s the gift of metaphysics.

Do we truly want to understand our situation so that we can proceed to think? To judge clearly? Then stop skipping past our baseline with fatuous assumptions about the unassailability of sensory perception. With circular, self-referential “reasoning” that makes a mockery of intellect. Stop skipping past Parmenides. Start putting some of that scientific verve into understanding what he was talking about. Start applying metaphysics. Apply Logic and get it right.

The Guide that can be trusted

A Course in Miracles isn’t “religion.” It isn’t unreasoning “faith.” It’s the Logic of metaphysics that happened to respond to two clinical psychologists needing “a better way” out of friction that was interfering with professionalism. It’s metaphysics that took on the appearance of religion when it was transmitted through a Jewish scribe with an authoritarian personality type attracted to the patriarchal Catholic church. It adopted the analytics of Freudian psychoanalysis and symbols of Christianity because its audience could not have made sense of its unfamiliar oeuvre otherwise.

An audience that makes up the bulk of Western thought and includes me. The Course reaches me in part because I was brought up in Christianity and an educational environment influenced by Freudian psychology. The heyday of Freudian psychoanalysis spanned my formative years well beyond my formal education, when having a “shrink” was like having a dentist. Metaphysics that looks behind appearances relies on established perception to get its point across and A Course in Miracles is no exception. But this student took its lesson to heart. What I found when I looked behind the analytics of Freud and the symbols of Christianity was the purity of Logic bonded with Love. Not one misstep. Not one false note.

The Course  isn’t “mysticism.” It’s not the “spirituality” of “New Age.” It isn’t a “bible” and says so. Immanuel Kant attempted a “critique of pure reason,” a slog of turgid incomprehensibility that sets off the sensitivity, purposefulness, and clarity of the Course. There is such a thing as Logic that helps to distinguish between what’s Real and what’s not. There is no such thing as “pure reason” if it’s detached from its function, to aid a particular choice or decision. As Gertrude Stein supposedly said when she was asked “What’s the answer?”: “What’s the question?” Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is the equivalent of Stein expostulating on “pure answer” without a question. A pure waste of time.

Reality, the subject matter of philosophy whose only hope of defining it is through the branch founded by Parmenides: metaphysics. Because in a material world of appearances the only way to get at Reality is to get behind appearances. Through the only function of mind that can lead us there: through intuition that connects us with Logic-Love. With the explanation behind appearances we’re looking for. In the end I trust my Guide because, whatever name it’s given, however familiar or unfamiliar it may seem, it makes sense. I trust it because it’s Who -- whoever loves me and whoever I love to the ends of the earth.

Try accessing an authoritarian mind

The choice between listening to the voice of our ancestral Mind’s reverse side, the magician-comedian I call the Joker, and the emissary from the Child’s Parents known to Christianity as Jesus or the Holy Spirit, is a choice even for the mind so thoroughly captive to its dark side that it’s been deprived of a voice. For that is the aim of authority that would rule absolutely: to deprive its possessions of any voice that could compete with its own. Captivity achieves its aim not when voices are added to the many but when they are replaced by one -- its own. Yet no act by Mind that is Free Choice, whether conscious or unconscious, can be anything but choice. And if Child unconscious let itself be taken captive by an illusion it can free itself by “choosing again.” Advice from Jesus that brings the text of the Course to a close.

That said, try accessing an authoritarian mind so captivated by its reverse image that virtually no trace is left of its sovereign self. Jesus did his best with Helen, his scribe, and “maybe” is the best he could do. It’s taken me three full years to figure out how to do it with an authoritarian mind and I’m still working on it.

What price a rational explanation?

I propose that we pick up where the intuition of Parmenides and Plato left off, only now enabled and empowered by insights from the Course that were not available to them. By its priceless gift of another perspective that’s indispensable to objective analysis and Understanding. To getting our baseline condition right before racing off to judgment. When he opined in the February ’22 issue of Scientific American that his profession’s subject may be “in some sense illusory,” the physicist-historian Adam Becker cited Parmenides but made no mention of Jesus and the Course. Not surprisingly when not even the author of What Is Gnosticism? (Belknap-Harvard 2003), the Harvard Divinity School professor, Karen L. King, mentioned it. After what the Church did to Galileo anything with a whiff of religion is toxic.

What I propose is a continuation of Logic from earlier points in its sequence to later points and a continuation beyond the scope so far explored, guided by the sequence of Logic that’s gone before. I propose it as a possibility because, in my writing over the past three years, my Relationship and I have done it. It isn’t a possibility for me; it’s a reality. But until spontaneity informs me that our part is done it remains a work in progress. And even when done, its output can only be suggestive. A start that, for all I know, is but one of a multitude of starts. Its purpose to facilitate movement toward understanding of reality behind appearances. With explanation that can be taken seriously not because can ever be definitive but only because it makes sense.

With Logic and reason that Kenneth Wapnick, in Love Does Not Condemn (Foundation for “A Course in Miracles” 1989), says has yet to be applied by theology and philosophy to a foundational question: Why would a supreme being, undisturbed in eternal serenity, disturb itself? How and why did our ancestral Mind go from awake to asleep? From Self-Awareness to unconsciousness, immortality to mortality, eternity to time, perfection to imperfection? We have what Wapnick calls “excessive mythology” but not a rational explanation. What is the nature of the “supreme being?” Did descent begin from “eternal serenity” or did we get it wrong? Did it end with “creation” -- our material universe -- or with illusion, the state that the metaphysics of Parmenides and the Course describe.

The Story of the Child 

The work in progress that is my book adheres to the thrust of the Course and its basic principles but almost entirely without the symbols that give it a whiff of religion. It isn’t heavy on the analytics of Freudian psychology because to make its point it doesn’t need to be. If it violates the letter of either I’ve been careful not to violate them in spirit. But what I’m writing is metaphysics. Not the logic of Zeno who, like Aristotle, tested the capabilities of Logic without Love -- the missing element that might otherwise have brought Parmenides, Plato, and Jesus together -- but the Logic-Love of the Course. 

The Story of the Child is the working title of my book devoted to getting our baseline right. By telling our story going back beyond the Big Bang to the mental state of the Child that caused it. The Child of its Parents Logic-Love who are our own real parents since we are the Child in a dream state. The mental state that produced the grand illusion: our bodies and their universe of spacetime-matter. The condition that locks minds into the perversion of Truth that is authoritarian “realism.”

Attempting to tell our antecedent Mind’s story with Logic, the gift of metaphysics, and the explanation given us in the clear by Jesus in the Course, may finally help us grasp the truth of our baseline situation -- the human condition. Without the mythology that’s buried fragments of Logic under mountains of obfuscation. That make the articulation and integration of history’s dominant thought systems into a single coherent system a fool’s errand.

Breaking up is hard to do

Illusion -- the baseline condition that Becker’s physics may now be describing. Science, from Aristotle on, has grudgingly allowed that Mind is real but left it at that while it turned all its talents, resources, and passions to its first love: matter. While it imagined itself someday atop the Empire State Building, pounding its chest in triumph, swatting away the remnants of its pitiful enemies. Trumpeting unified theories of everything that explain, once and for all, the meaning of life. The origin and fate of the universe. Quantum gravity! We’re saved and we can all go home and live in peace because the study of matter has answered all our questions.

No it hasn’t. And it never will. Einstein tried and failed. Bohr and quantum mechanics won the argument. Time to give up the dream within a dream: the dream of an orderly, divine universe that can be figured out and the figuring out. An impossibility if the universe is that which can’t be figured out. An illusion because that’s what an illusion is. If you disagree, then explain the anomalies of particle behavior and cosmology without resort to the Logic of Parmenides and A Course in Miracles. Because that’s where the explanation is. The answers you’ve been looking for since Aristotle and Democritus and others before him.

Let physics carry on with matter. Keep after quantum gravity and keep us, so to speak, in the loop, because that’s its job. But we don’t have to carry on with physics. With bodies even though we imagine that’s who we are. There’s a better guide. We can take up with Mind. With Free Choice, the wild card. The beloved Child of Logic and Love. Because that’s who we really are.

Sure, breaking up is hard to do. But let metaphysics be our guide and maybe we can do it.

Published on Leave a comment on The Wild Card

The making of a good fit

Peace in relationships -- family and friends, work and play, individual and group. Peace of mind. World peace. Is harmony. The fitting together of parts engaged in shared purpose. Performing a function that contributes toward the creation, expression, or affirmation of Worth. To the Worth of the parts striving toward it.

Psychology concerns itself with human psyches and groups that must fit together so that individuals function in harmony, within and among themselves, internally and externally. The “engine” of engineering performs the same function with physical objects rather than subjects. The quantitative measurements of science play a part in both disciplines, but between the two psychology leans heavily toward the subjective-qualitative, engineering toward the objective-quantitative. Two approaches with one function: fitting parts together harmoniously. With Logic.

Peace-harmony requires definitions whether subject or object, qualitative or quantitative. Parts that fit together harmoniously to perform the functions defined for them must each have their own definition that distinguishes them individually before they can be distinguished and function collectively. That distinguishes what they are -- their being -- and what they do -- their doing. The being must fit the doing and the doing must fit the being. As in architecture “form follows function.”

It is the function of Logic to define. The “Word” associated with “Logos” from classical thought stands for the essential output of Logic: the expression of the idea of a thing, subject-self or object. The definition or design of a thing produced by mind before it’s put into play to fit with other definitions-functions to perform shared purpose. The idea of object “apple” that Plato held to be where the reality of “apple” resides: within mind that thinks it. In human thought “Logic” or “Logos” refers to the concept of “God,” the Being responsible for definitions. For fitting parts together logically, harmoniously, with feeling. Lovingly, so Creation’s parts function smoothly.

“Word” or “Logos” also refers to what’s produced by harmonious definitions: a state of being-doing shared purpose referred to as “Creation.” The whole of it -- Creator-Logos and Creation-Logos -- necessitating another descriptor: “Reality.” Because the human experience embraces opposites including “unreality.” There is no need in Creation in Reality for the descriptor “Reality” because unreality is a definition, a state or condition of impossibility that is unknown. But in human experience Reality and unreality state the critical distinction between mind logical-sane and mind illogical-insane. Critical to Understanding. Critical to humans fitting together internally-externally in peace and harmony, because it can’t happen without Understanding. 

Logos has no tolerance for contradictions

Failures of humanity to function harmoniously in a shared world that requires shared purpose are failures of Understanding that depends on Logic to explain how parts must fit together. To explain their definitions -- what-who they are and what they do that must fit together with what other parts do. As individual psyches we are composed of parts internally that must fit together harmoniously and as groups we are composed of individuals that must fit together harmoniously. Reality-Creation is one large composition composed of families that are compositions of individual selves. Selves that are compositions of parts that, in turn, are relationships fitting together. All of it held together by the definitions of Logic. An expression of the idea of fitting together or “relationship.”

Failures of human functioning together in harmony are psychopathology: psyches harboring opposites or contradictions out of alignment with Logic. With Logic’s laws of cause and effect. With the Necessity expressed by the Word-Logos “law.” Law or Necessity has no tolerance for contradiction. Minds that would compose functions from parts that oppose-contradict are attempting the impossible. “Impossible” is illogical, the opposite of one of two primary founding principles of Logic: “Possibility.” The other is “Relationship.”

Minds that attempt to compose peace-harmony out of parts that contradict-conflict in their definitions, their Logic, are attempting the impossible. A definition of illogic or insanity. “Insanity” -- the state of mind that can’t create, can’t be part of Creation that exists harmoniously, at peace, in Reality. It can only dream a fantasy of unreality. Mind dreaming a fantasy of unreality composed of contradictions isn’t awake. A dreaming mind is unconscious.

The failures of humanity to function harmoniously are of Necessity failures of minds not thinking logically and therefore in a dream state not conscious. Logic or “Logos,” Logos or “God,” has no tolerance for contradictions or for the state of mind -- unconscious -- that dreams of contradictions and chaos, unreality and insanity. A thing defined cannot be what it is and what it isn’t. Cannot be or do its opposite.

The autonomy of Free Choice

The source of the flawed composition of contradictions that defines human unreality is an attribute of Logos-Creator and its Creation peace-harmony. A distinct being-Self with a distinct function in Reality-Creation. A unique function of Mind that, like Logic-Logos, is Relationship combining thought with feeling, Mind with Love. The attribute is the Mind-Love function of Free Will or Free Choice. That is, in its being, Free Choice. The source of the flaw that defines human unreality has its origin in Reality and performs an essential function in Reality-Creation. Reality-Creation could not be affirmed without it. The Self-Awareness of Consciousness itself could not exist without it.

Being essential to Self-Awareness and Worth makes Free Choice indispensable to Reality-Creation. What gives it the capacity to perform its role are two unique attributes:

  • the freedom to choose, in its explorations of the unknown, to remain at Home in Reality-Creation with its identity Free Choice, in Relationship with its Parents, or to explore alternate “realities” with unanticipated consequences. Consequences that may entail loss of Awareness of Self and Relationship and apparent loss of Free Choice. Consequences that, empowered by Energy in service to Mind, may appear real but cannot be Real. A consequence of the function of Free Choice to learn as it performs through trial and error: the necessary freedom to risk choosing incorrectly as well as correctly, illogically as well as logically, though not with the status conferred by Logic and Love of remaining Conscious at Home with Parents in Reality-Creation if trial ends in error. To explore alternate “realities” with intent would be an expression of the unique attribute of Free Choice: the freedom not to choose impossibility, to be another Self in Reality, but to imagine or dream another self in unreality. Not to be wrong but to risk being wrong. And in so doing to learn all that's to be learned from the disorder, the unpredictability, the give-and-take, of experience.
  • Free Choice cannot be owned, possessed, or controlled. Its only limits are the limits set by the Logic-Love of its definition in Reality-Creation. By the laws of cause and effect, the authority of Necessity that applies to Everything. These confine it to what it is: Free Choice. Within the scope of Reality-Creation it cannot choose any role other than Free Choice, to be any Self other than who it is, any function other than what it does. In all circumstances, in all contexts, its core identity, its true identity, remains Free Choice. The Child of Parents Logic-Choice and Love-Freedom, it cannot be any other Self.

Other Creations owe their being and function to organic growth. To the implications of Logic and the relationships of Love. To the interconnections of laws-Necessity, to the evolution of Creation that is the Order, the harmony-peace of Reality. Free Choice originated from its Source as a distinct Self with the attribute of independence, occupying its own plane in the structure and process of Creation. Interconnected with all of it because Reality-Creation is the Oneness of interconnection. But a distinct Self functioning autonomously beyond its control. Whose definition by masculine Logic-Choice and feminine Love, its Parents, endowed it with the capacity to choose freely within the Order, the peace-harmony, of Creation.

From the One of Reality to the many of illusion

Whose definition endowed it with the capacity to function as a wild card subject to its own guidance, its own judgment, its own discretion. Exercising its capacity independently in Relationship with its Source, its Parents, but by definition not owned, possessed, controlled, or dominated by any part of Creation. A wild card that has the free run of Creation and so puts a premium on Judgment. On its maturity and competence to judge correctly in its choices in all contexts of constantly evolving Creation. In the acts that share, affirm, enable, and empower the Life-Worth of Creation and Self of the Self-Awareness / Consciousness that creates it.

Though Free Choice is identified as a distinct self with a distinct function independent of its Source-Creator, its Parents Logic-Love, it is bonded with them in a reciprocal Relationship of Knowing and Love. A Relationship between Parent-Child that supplies the dynamo of Energy at the core of Oneness. The passionate stance of Being:

  • empowering and illuminating all of Reality-Creation with the Energy and Light of Self-Awareness.
  • embracing Everything, all possibilities including the state of mind that is Free Choice when Free Choice cannot choose correctly and lapses into the dream state of unconsciousness. That is, when it lacks the Knowledge and competence necessary to choose freely.
  • making of all of Reality-Creation a Heaven of joyfulness, peace, and harmony. The ideal that haunts the human Psyche with the memory of a long-ago utopian Home where we, one Child, existed in the embrace of Logic and Love, peace and freedom, our Parents, without contradictions, without opposites, in the Perfection of Innocence.

Our minds not troubled with the concomitants of our predatory animal nature: bodies sharing space with bodies, tribes with tribes. With familiar and alien objects, “others” triggering primitive limbic dominance, fear, possessiveness, lust, rage, and hatred. Reverberating through a dystopia of guilt, the memory of the long-ago projection of injustice, limbic emotions, guilt, and insanity that transformed the One of Reality into the many of illusion. That made us, projections of a dream, and put us here.

Secrets of our ancestral Mind revealed

That Free Choice put us here should be no surprise. A wild card with the run of Creation. A Child learning and growing to maturity and competence through the trial and error of experience. In the context of Reality and Creation that know nothing of opposites yet are constantly expanding, exploring, discovering, and creating among all the known possibilities into the unknown. In the broader context of Everything that does include opposites: the illusory inhabitants of the flip side of Reality that is Mind unconscious. Mind dreaming an alternate “reality” of shadow-reflections, derivations coded to be the opposite of their hosts. To be dependents along for the ride, troublemakers, parasites. An unreality coded to be everything opposite to Reality.

The Why of what put Free Choice here should tell us that having the maturity and competence to choose correctly as well as freely is important if we prefer success rather than failure. If we want to avoid mistakes that get us into trouble. A great deal of speculation and story-telling have been devoted to Why the Child’s Parents would allow or perpetrate its departure from immortality to mortality. The logical answer would appear to be they did neither. That it was probably inevitable, the consequence of Free Choice. The laws of cause-effect. Of Necessity that governs the process and structure of Creation.

The Why of it still matters. But the How of what put Free Choice here may be the more important question. Because it’s from the story of how the Child Free Choice, our ancestral Mind, imagined itself into an alternate “reality” that we, its “descendants” -- projections of a dreaming mind -- can gain insights into the deepest roots of human behavior. To the roots of human psychopathology that has so far eluded Understanding and defied cure by the healing professions. By psychology, the study of behavior, and psychiatry, the study of illness.

There are patterns. And try as we might to detect and understand them we can’t succeed until we free ourselves from the tyranny of bodies and sensory perception. From putting our faith in counterintuitive "scientific" absurdities like the search for configurations of particles and cells, neurons, chemistry, and electrical impulses in brains that will someday, somehow, magically produce consciousness. Until we liberate mind to inquire where the answers are: in the How of what put Free Choice here. In the Logic, the story, of what led our ancestral Mind from one state into another. One Reality into another whose every attribute is an expression or reflection of the Reality it was projected from. Whose every actor, every relationship, is driven, one way or another, by the sequence of events that brought them to “life” in another “reality.”

Simple intuitive Logic  

How shall you and I resolve our differences? When it looks hopeless whether we’ve tried everything or nothing? By Understanding that goes beyond the hopelessness, the intractability, of human conflict. The pointless, circular “reasoning” of minds captive to matter. By trying something new. Something even more entertaining than the mythologies of entertainment and religion, sports and politics. Than the hallucinations of psychedelics and the psychoses of addicts. The ravings of wishful thinking fabulists, self-serving opportunists -- mad men making it up as they go along. Try something that actually enlightens: simple intuitive Logic. Metaphysics: the invention of Parmenides that takes us beyond appearances. The revelations of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, whose Course in Miracles takes us into the story of our ancestral Mind. The One Child that we are and the one story. Our story.

So, what's the "wild card?" We are. Free Choice.

Published on Leave a comment on Boo!

The proof of Innocence 

What do we have in the end?
Only our minds to tell us what to make of our lives. Memories, perceptions, and judgment.
The stuff of imperfection.

The stuff of self-interest and bias. The never-ending crusade to protect purity against the onslaught of others’ perceptions and bias.
Our Innocence.
Against the transfiguration of our injustice into their “justice.”
The turning of memories upside down and inside out.
Against us, to make of our outrage a joke. 

That would make of us an impossibility: the earning of love, trust, and respect.
The stuff of friendship.
And above all: the proof of Innocence.

In the darkness behind appearances

Innocence that in a world of substitutes can have but two sources. An inner moral compass. . .
And what others think.
One true, the other a substitute for truth.
One the attribute of independent judgment and self-reliance . . .
The other the mark of dependence.

Attributes that distinguish opposites: host and parasite.
What is and the free rider that isn’t. The odd couple.
Innocence that can’t cohabit with guilt where Logic and Love prevail, illuminated by the light of honesty and truth.
But can cohabit where Logic and Love don’t prevail. Where instead of light, dishonesty and untruth hide in the darkness behind appearances. 

Bodies like rabbits pulled out of hats

The contradiction of Innocence going about harmfulness, the business of guilt.
Taking life opposite to its will to live, to be forever.
Bent on contradiction to the end.
Taking itself, the stuff of imperfection, with it.
The odd couple at odds, seeding its own end. 

And here we stand.
Who would speak for honesty and truth in such a place.
Profiles of a fool. Everyman defined by appearances, betrayed by appearances.
The awareness of Self draped in the finery of mud, called to account for its slander --What others think.

The stage of deceit and the deceiver they put there.
The illusionist and its shit parade of harmfulness, pain, and outrage, calumny and injustice.
Bodies like rabbits pulled out of hats
Engaged in an endless cycle of provocation. 

Applause for special effects

The stuff of appearances -- magic performed for the entertainment of fools in a darkened theatre.
The Cave of Plato.
The roach motel where roaches check in and never check out.
In the darkened theatre of shame and punishment, fear, and hatred. 

To what end?
To set feeling against one another?
OK. To make us miserable?
That works. How about to test patience with absurdities?
Getting warmer. This is ridiculous!
Almost there. 

I know! The magician behind the horror show expects applause for special effects.
Uh huh. To be taken seriously for smoke and mirrors. 

God’s Son remembered not to laugh

So that’s what this nonsense is really all about?
Boo!
Riveted to our seats in hypnotic fear. How many times Boo! before we get it?
Before we get that the wizard is us.
Appreciate the joke we played on ourselves.
The illusionist and its shit parade of harmfulness, pain, and outrage, calumny and injustice.

And have a good laugh.
This is funny?
Perversity that has no real effects. When it sinks in and we get it. The Joker and its jokes. All of it ridiculous.
Even the pain? The injustice?
Especially the pain and injustice when you realize why we’re being goaded and who’s doing the goading. Ourselves. Into making fools of ourselves. Into keeping it going -- the stage show. The joke. 

How?
By not laughing: “God’s Son remembered not to laugh.”
Don’t you want to be taken seriously?
That’s why I’m laughing. Seriously. When you get the joke, everything is funnier.
Then you weren’t goaded seriously.
Wanna bet? Don’t get me going! 

One for the road

Show’s over!
With one grand finale of absurdity. One last spooky joke. One last laugh to bring the curtain down.
There’s more?
We don’t have to get up from our seats and leave the theatre.

We don’t?
No. It’s all taken care of. The magician was never here to begin with and neither was the theatre. The theatre leaves us. 

Boo!

Published on Leave a comment on The Indomitable Voice of Free Choice

The violation of Psyche 

Consciousness is Self-Awareness. The Joker’s perversion of Self-Awareness through Forgiveness is Look at the Joker and see yourself. If Self-Awareness requires Relationship, e.g. between Logic-masculinity and Love femininity, the Parents of the  Child, then this explains why awakening to Self-Awareness through Forgiveness requires engagement with “others.” My spontaneous experience of the “felt perception of the interconnectedness of things,” in 1979, became Psyche, the first manifestation of my inner guide and companion to have a distinct identity and to be given a name. Not long after, my thought that life could now suffice with her and without “others” was firmly rejected. I was guided not to avoid relationships with others but to seek and embrace them, which I did.

The violation of the integrity of Love relationships, the interconnections of Family, would have caused the loss of Consciousness as well as the violation of Necessity, the implications of Logic built into the laws of cause and effect. Violation that cost Consciousness would have been violation of Authority, the Force of Necessity, followed by its inevitable after-effect: the perversion of Knowledge that changed the Child’s inviolate interior from  its altar of Innocence, sharing, affirmation, and empowerment to a throne of guilt, taking, possession, and disempowerment. By then reversing the “relationship” between the Child-host and the Joker, its shadow-reflection opposite. By removing harmlessness -- Psyche, the Innocence of Oneness-Being without opposites -- from its altar and putting the parasite, the guilt of Child-the-many non-being opposite -- harmfulness -- on its throne. By replacing true Authority -- benevolent governance of Order-harmony that supports with liberation, nurturing, sharing, trust, validation, enablement, and empowerment from the bottom up -- with false “authority” -- malevolent arbitrary rule of disorder-conflict that crushes with captivity, impoverishment, possession-taking, control, invalidation, paranoia, and disempowerment from the top down. The perversion of the beauty of Psyche-Authority, liberal democracy, into the horror of the Joker-authority, totalitarian dictatorship.

Psyche, Oneness-Soul, is a composition of all the Interconnections, all the Relationships, of Reality-Creation. It achieves integration through Innocence. Through harmlessness that is the Force of Necessity, the strength of empowerment, not the weakness of disempowerment. Because Oneness contains all Relationships, there is no “other” “oneness” with which to relate. It’s Being that exists without relationship with another being because there is no” other being.” No other self, defined and animated by Logic and Love, that expresses Life through the functions of Mind and Love: thinking and feeling, judging and freely choosing with gifts-talents for objective analysis and subjective evaluation. With its capacity for the affirmation and reciprocation of Worth.

Another function performed by Child Free Choice in Reality-Creation

The Child Free Choice was given another Purpose in Reality-Creation besides affirming its Worth through its earning and Reciprocation. It’s to provide within the Oneness of Being, at the core of Reality-Creation, another Self-Definition with independent judgment. With the capacity to recognize and affirm Self-identity with the objectivity needed to validate subjectivity. Just as it’s the Purpose of the Holy Spirit, within the dream, to enable the Child’s Relationship with a representative of its Parents that the Child requires to restore its Self-Awareness. Relationship -- the essence of Being, the prerequisite to Life and Self-Awareness. The attribute of Reality that has its counterpart in the law of physics: matter is “relational.”

Relationship that an unconscious Child requires to perform its function of healing the separation. By putting its talents of Mind and Love to use for introspection and accounting, intuition and reflection, measuring and analyzing, thinking and reasoning, feeling and evaluating, weighing, integrating, and judging.

All so that it can Choose freely to relate to the Voice for its Parents. So that Free Choice can work with guidance from its Parents through the essential Relationship to find its way back Home. Back to Self-Awareness. To Consciousness.

The Joker’s perversion of Recognition achieved by objectivity recognizing-affirming subjectivity is scientific inquiry trying to achieve “knowledge” that reveals the origin, meaning, and nature of Reality, of Life-Creation. That tries to explain the subjectivity of Self, by objectivity recognizing objectivity. A logical impossibility. The Self-Awareness of Oneness -- its subjectivity -- requires objectivity of another Self with Free Will within it to affirm its Self-Awareness. It achieves the essential Relationship with function that by definition is independent of its control: the function provided by Child Free Choice. Function and Relationship contained within because by definition nothing about Oneness can be without.

Where is there evidence that anything can be beyond the control of Being-Oneness, of the Child’s Parents, Logic and Love? What authoritarian “realists” mischaracterize as “almighty god,” the supreme top-down authority that exercises power above any law. Recall that the person who signed on to scribing A Course in Miracles, whose Author was a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, completed her assignment without surrendering independent judgment. Helen Schucman left it to others to teach the Course and make it accessible without ever fully committing to its lesson herself. The prerogative of Free Choice that the Author of the Course would not, and could not, deny. Even the prerogative to get it wrong.

The mission of Free Choice in the dream: to recognize Child the One

Forgiveness that requires interaction between two selves, two “others,” is implementing the basic principle of Self-Awareness that applies to Oneness-Consciousness -- to itself. Recall that Logic and Love, themselves, are subject to the laws of cause and effect, of Necessity. “Objectivity” that affirms subjectivity in Reality isn’t a separate object, an illusory material object. It’s part of Interconnectedness, the same system but distinguished by its own unique Definition of who it is and what it does. By its function, its unique contribution to Reality-Creation. Think of the diversity of species with their own attributes that define their place in nature.

The perversion of “objectivity” that “affirms” subjectivity inside unreality’s dream is a separate object without the capacity to affirm an “other” with independent judgment. It has only the capacity to relate to itself. Self-Awareness in Reality-Creation is achieved through relationship between two Selves, two subjects, with distinct functions resulting in Life-Creation that extends and expands Self-Awareness. The perversion of Self-Awareness in unreality can’t do this. Can’t achieve relationship between two selves, two subjects, with distinct functions that extends and expands Self-Awareness. But it does bring together same-self with same-self, i.e. One Child with its many projections of its Self. All with the same function-self disguised by appearances. By different isolated-separated bodies substituting for different Mind-Loves with different functions.

Despite the appearance of diversity, body-brains -- the projections of a self-deluded unconscious Mind captive to the Joker, its own dark side -- have only one function: to maintain the dream. Through the deceptions of sensory perception aided and abetted by the domination of every field of inquiry by irrational bias. By the self-referential, circular-“reasoning” of body-brain-centric, authoritarian “realists” taken in by the Joker. By self-delusion. Minds receptive to insights from intuition, that are Mind-Love centric instead of body-brain centric, choose a second function. Not to be taken in by our material metaverse but to deny the denial of Reality-Truth. To recognize Child-the-One instead of the illusion of Child-the-many. To recognize same-self -- ourselves in “others” -- through the healing of Forgiveness.

The habit of the human mind for Free Choice to break

We all have the same function: to help our ancestral unconscious Mind awaken from its dream by healing the separation through Forgiveness. That’s all we can do. We don’t have the capacity inside the dream to provide the objectivity of Free Choice that Oneness-Being subjectivity needs to affirm Self-Awareness and extend Life-Creation. We have only the capacity to recognize same-self (Child) - same self. “Forgiveness” is recognizing One Child-Self. The Child awakens through the dream it’s dreaming. Through relationship with the illusory objects -- “others” -- that it’s imagined.

The purpose isn’t Creation though that’s the appearance. “Creation” inside a dream is an impossibility, part of the deception. The purpose is regaining Self-Awareness through an ability not available to the Child in Reality. The ability to recognize its Self in its reflection, as in a mirror, and not to mistake its reflection for an “other.” Children in the dream lack this ability before they’re two. Some animals with training can develop it. The Child’s loss of Consciousness took it into unfamiliar territory where it was exposed to its own reflection, the equivalent of a mirror, and lacked the ability to distinguish self from “other.”

There can be no “reflections” or “mirrors” in the Reality of Creation, just as there can be no opposites. Mirrors, reflections, and opposites are of the unreality of the unconscious. They’re the primary test of Free Choice: to develop the ability to distinguish between Self and reflection, between host-Light and parasite darkness, so that Free Choice is correct choice. The function of “mirror” in unreality, where projections of Child-the-many are illusions, is performed in Reality by real Lives. By real Selves with distinct functions that fit together in harmony through the Definitions of Logic and the Relationships of Love. Mirrors are needed to substitute for Real Selves in unreality because, despite appearances, there is only one Real Self, our unconscious ancestral Mind. There are no “other selves.” As body-brains are all projections they are also reflections. Unreal “others.” Creativity in Reality that’s inhabited by Real Selves has no need of mirrors.

The Joker’s perversion of “selves” in unreality is mirrors that reflect differences to achieve the illusion of “otherness.” Variety in body types, personalities, and many other distinguishing characteristics engineered to deceive. To hide the fact that we are the projections of our unconscious ancestral dreaming Mind. The perversion is mirrors that reflect objects that are illusions, not subjects. It was an object that the unconscious Child mistook for an “other,” not subject. Not itself. The archetypal-seminal mistake. That’s replicated through objectification, the habit of the human mind that, like projection, perpetuates the illusion.

The complicity of science

Science rejecting objectivity by failing to acknowledge its circular “reasoning” systematizes and institutionalizes the mistake. Attempts to lock it into human “consciousness.” Insists on applying “objectivity” to affirm subjective self -- humanity -- where there is no objectivity. Attempts to affirm self-“Life” via subjectivity that lacks objectivity needed to recognize subjectivity. Via self regarding same self in a mirror which leads to awakening from the dream, to escape from unreality back to Reality, instead of the goal of science which insists on seeing reality in an “other” in the mirror. Which insists on affirming the illusion, our universe.

Science must eventually realize that its inquiries are same selves regarding same selves -- themselves and not separate objects, energy in the form of organic and inorganic matter “studying” itself. When this happens, science will continue studying matter, but finally with its scope expanded to include Mind that’s behind energy-matter. That’s directing it.

Mind as direction of energy and therefore source of matter, whose exclusion from science’s “quest for knowledge” accounts for its bafflement. For the failure of every field of inquiry to find common cause in explaining the Big Bang, the origin of Life, and the Self-Awareness we call Consciousness. Quests for Knowledge that can’t possibly succeed on the basis of science’s body-matter-centric quantitative measurements alone. An irrationality that science and other fields of inquiry would have rejected long ago had analysis not embraced the deceptions of (controllable) sensory perception and shied away from spontaneous (uncontrollable) insights from Intuition. Had they not been stupid, an opinion that James Watson applied to many of his peers.

The stupid authoritarian “realism” that science has made of itself is bodies looking into mirrors pretending. Trying to convince itself and its gullible audience that it’s looking at “other” bodies instead of its same self. It can’t even get that right. It should be Mind inquiring into its own state. And if its state is dysfunctional then into the story of how it got that way. The evidence is incontrovertible that it is dysfunctional. Delusional. And that science and other fields of inquiry are failing. Are on the wrong track, not Logical.

The spectacular advance in civilization that wasn’t

The logical response is to do something different. If the technology for getting to the moon never got past liftoff rocket scientists would be expected to employ creative intelligence, the genius of humanity that left other animals in its wake. To look into other possibilities, to weigh and choose among them rationally. To redesign their rocket or abandon it for another technology if necessary. The logical response is to expand inquiry from its blinkered obsession with a universe of mystery and violence into intuiting the story of Mind. Of Mind that may be unconscious, in a dream state that’s conjuring the mystery. The logical response is to return to Parmenides who intuited with metaphysics 2500 years ago that physics -- matter -- is an illusion. That the route to Understanding is through Logic and Reason. Though Mind.

The logical response is to develop and apply the insights of metaphysics to the questions that body-centric approaches aren’t getting right and will never get right. A task that Plato took on but couldn’t complete because his own intuition wasn’t up to it. Because the matter of bodies and the matter of the cosmos fed him conflicting impressions of what’s real and his intellect couldn’t resolve the contradiction.

Had he been inspired by the metaphysics of Jesus and the 2nd-century Gnostic teacher Valentinus, himself inspired by Jesus; had he been inspired by Jesus’ Course in Miracles as well as by Parmenides’ Eleatics School, Plato could have resolved the contradiction. He could have formulated a complete, unambiguous theory of the origin, meaning, and purpose of Life in the material universe and changed history. Aristotle’s Lyceum could then have followed Plato’s Academy with a salutary shift from mind to matter that engaged both quantitative and qualitative aspects of learning in a synergistic, systems approach. In a seamless expansion of scope that tested Plato’s hypotheses against experimental scientific research. The outcome could have been a spectacular advance in civilization.

The curse of Plato?

That’s not what happened. What happened instead was a changing of the guard, from holistic mind-centric philosophy to body-centric science, that occasioned crippling fragmentation and isolation of learning to civilization’s detriment. What happened was loss of patience with Parmenides and Plato and a shift of loyalty to another pasture where the grass seemed greener. To matter, sensory perception, and quantitative measurements that didn’t put minds to the test they seem least qualified to pass: to the test of Logic. What happened was a grand instance of youthful folly, akin to loyalties shifting to authoritarian rule when they lose patience with democracy. Driven not by Logic but by a lack of creative intelligence and judgment that come with discipline and patience. By a lack of competence and maturity.

Plato had taken a direct approach to Understanding through mind-centric philosophy. A logical approach that fell short because he had not arrived in the sequence of Logic where the insights of Intuition had given him a complete, unobstructed view. Intuition would eventually deliver but not in Plato’s lifetime. All that was required of humanity, the projections of an unconscious Child, was patience.

Inclined by his mentor’s experience, by a body-sensing personality type, genetics, and other conditions, Aristotle went on a roundabout approach through body-centric science. Causing a historic fork in the road that’s yielded amazing results, helpful both to science and every other field. But far short of what a holistic, systems approach would likely have accomplished in far less time. Had Aristotle not repurposed inquiry instead of expanding it Western Thought today could well be enlightened with Understanding.

Where is Western Thought instead? Chained in its Plato’s cave of biases, contradictions, and misunderstanding. Of authoritarian “realism.” Call it the Curse of Plato. Call it a perversion of Plato’s cause: Justice!

The indomitable Voice of the Child: Free Choice

The Voice of the Child, enabled and empowered by the Voice that speaks for Logic-Love, its Parents, is the expression of Free Choice. Voice that speaks for Reality and Truth. For the Worth of Being, of Life-Creation. For Self and Self-Awareness. For Consciousness. It may be stilled temporarily. But inevitably, in time, it will speak and be heard. It will express itself for the Worth of Life-Creation. For Truth against lies and deceit that would take away its Being, replace it with its opposite. With another voice that speaks for contradiction. For fear, rage, and guilt. For herd mentality and tribal hatred. For insanity. For nothing.

What is Hope against the perversion of Plato’s cause? Against the youthful folly of authoritarian “realism?” The indomitable Voice of the Child. The Voice of Free Choice.

Published on Leave a comment on Respectful Parenting

Authoritarian rule on Pleasant Street

Value individuality and don’t try to dictate what. . . kids are curious about or how they express themselves. [Respectful parenting] is about seeing children as independent rational beings [instead of taking an] authoritarian [approach] where communication is one way with little consideration of a child’s emotional needs. 

CNBC on Apple News Feed 01/07/23, quoting Margot Machol Bisnow, author, Raising an Entrepreneur (BookBaby 2022).

[Disclaimer: This is the extent of my familiarity with this book. However, it’s on order and will be read in hopes that it will help with one of the main concerns of this website: the undoing of authoritarian “realism,” a dominant strain of philosophy that’s neither realistic nor rational. Responsible, in fact, for the abuse of children and every other living thing. The signature human mindset that’s become the signature of an entire geological epoch: the ongoing global atrocity we now call the Anthropocene.] 

What lay behind the image of pleasantness in our second-grade reader, the neighborhood of Dick and Jane on Pleasant Street? Pleasantness or an alternate reality -- the self-delusion of our ancestral Mind? The archetypal Child corrupted by the opposite of Logic and Love, ruled by its mistake: misidentification with its own reflection. Its own opposite, and so by the perversion of authority. Demanding arbitrary rule from the top down instead of governing, lawfully and compassionately, from the bottom up. Instead of nurturing -- the essence of authority that isn’t authoritarian. Helpfulness that’s harmlessness.

If the parenting that really goes on isn’t authoritarian disrespect why then is Margot Bisnow speaking up? Who is her audience? Why do so many need to listen?

The story of Dick and Jane that prompted Margot’s book is still playing out on Pleasant Street. Disrespectful authoritarian parenting wraps itself and its offspring into the ongoing madness of humanity. An injustice that’s all the more unacceptable for being so common. What are the philosophical roots of this perversion of authority so that it can be uprooted? To make way for respectful parenting so that children so dear to us have the loving support they need. Who is our “enemy?” How can we know our enemy so that we can be rid of it or at least mitigate its harm?

To set children off on their own course

The psychopathology of disrespectful authoritarian parenting on Pleasant Street is unpleasantness by many names:

  • Beginning with obsessive-compulsive narcissism, a psychiatric disorder that demands absolute authority, possession, and obedience. Absolute relentless control, the desperation of lives at the mercy of urges and cravings that are out of control.
  • Psychosis -- the denial of Reality and Truth. Their substitution by an alternate fantasy reality centered on self-pitying specialness and victimhood.
  • Arrested development -- adolescence clinging to the past, fearful of the future, that refuses to grow up. Fiercely resistant to the attainment of maturity and competence through learning and adaptation. Terrified of the truths that the wisdom of experience might reveal.
  • More arrested development. The creativity of personhood stunted by authority turned on its head. By the cruelty of invalidation and disempowerment imposed on individuality from the top down instead of the nurturing of gentle loving kindness and respect it needs from the bottom up.
  • Sociability obsequious to group, authoritarian ass-kissing, a thin veneer of hypocrisy hiding contradictions and conflict. “Harmony” dictated by uniformity, denied the freedom of individuality. “Peace” hiding the frustration of limbic emotions -- resentment, jealousy, anger, fear, guilt -- craving war.
  • The madness of alienation and war, the inevitable consequence of self-pitying authoritarian cruelty and rage.

Role modeling limbic emotions festering inside psychiatric disorder -- fear, anger, hostility, hatred, blame -- has a terrible cost. Replication in the minds and hearts of vulnerable children condemned to lives corrupted by psychiatric disorder. By the same beast and its shit parade of addictions, upside-down values, and animal emotions. By the pathology itself and its enablers: the crass submission of passivity to the tyrant. By weakness posing as strength. Allying with the perversion of democratic governance that is authoritarian rule. Obelix the Gaul gone over to the Romans. Bringing upon himself the fury of Justice for enticing his victims with seductive charm and humor into betraying the cause. Gulling them unawares into spreading the virus of self-delusion, misperception, and misjudgment.

All of it the opposite of what grown-up role modeling should be about: not invalidation but affirmation. The enabling and empowerment of individual expression -- strength, freedom, trust, and intimacy -- not its suffocation. Loyalty to Reality and Truth, not to denial and psychosis. Just as Bisnow’s book says, to set children off on their own course instead of replicating ancestral authoritarian pathology.

The perversion of democratic governance into authoritarian rule isn’t the flaming banner of “liberty,” the ultimate in satisfaction that’s advertised. It’s self-imprisonment in frustration -- the opposite. In the one-dimensional cartoon world of adolescent fools that a grown-up Pete Hamill abandoned in A Drinking Life. Self-delusion is deprivation of self-awareness and Free Will, our birthright: Truman risking his life to escape The Truman TV Show, the degradation of victimhood meant for the entertainment of voyeurs. Chumps finding amusement in their own servitude. Dick and Jane being groomed for lives in Plato’s Cave, addicted to substitutes for Worth. To dog food.

The sick lure of herd mentality

A perfect replica of deception that can’t fool the metaphysicist. Who’s aware of what’s behind appearances and will protest. The descendant of Parmenides and his Eleatics School that founded metaphysics. Devoted to intuiting the Reality of Mind, Logic and Love behind physics. Behind the study of material objects that make up our metaverse of spacetime and matter -- one grand appearance that distracts and deceives with sensory perception and quantitative measurements. With circular self-referential "reasoning " that purposely rejects Logic and Love.

To look thus behind appearances in the made-up world of Dick and Jane is, as Nancy Pelosi might say, “to throw a punch for the children.” At the Roman oppressors who take advantage of children, their captive audience, to deprive them of self-awareness, Free Will, and initiative. Of individuality, originality, and creativity. Of personhood, all in service to forced group conformance. To Pete Hamill’s “Brooklyn.” To the “Galactic Empire” of Star Wars. To the fortunes of tribes and their militaries. Of symbolic nations chanting supremacy in competition for world cups and super bowls. To the pleasantries of “sociability” -- manipulating us away from Truth to lies, from Reality to appearances, from the light and freedom of individuality into the darkness and captivity of uniformity.

All so that minds taken captive will submit to domination by limbic emotions. Will be forced into mindlessness so that the tribe may dominate without opposition. May have all that humanity’s limbic animal brain wants. Its agenda, and we are the unwitting agents of its will. Dick and Jane are literally being conditioned by irresponsible role modeling into thinking, feeling, and behaving like animals at war with other animals. In a dog-eat-dog world instead of in a shared world. Civilized by individuality, originality, and creativity. By sharing, affirmation, and empowerment in a shared world of Love, Trust, and Intimacy. Civilized by conscience and accountability, two attributes of character notably absent in the authoritarian.

Dick and Jane are naturally drawn to Freedom, naturally repelled by oppression. Drawn to the resistance of Gauls to Roman tyranny. They embrace the Logic and Love of authority that’s focused on their needs and feelings and not on itself, so that it can nurture strength instead of sapping it. Who then would want to impose the rule of madness for their own benefit on innocent children who despise it? Who would not want to share the Logic and Love, the wisdom, of learning and growth with children who crave it? Of self-awareness instead of self-delusion? What grown-up of conscience would want to lure children away from civilization that supports humanity into herd mentality that crushes it?

The one and only voice

Neuroscience has identified a part of the human brain that connects humanity to its animal origins. The “reptilian” or “animal brain” accounting for animal emotions with a distinctive attribute: the animal brain and its emotions have not evolved. A part of “civilized” humanity’s brain that connects it to humanity’s uncivilized, animal past: the limbic system of amygdala and hippocampus, located with the cerebellum at the base of the brain and the top of the spine. Driven not by the aptitude of the prefrontal cortex for deliberation and judgment, for the discipline of reason, values, and choice, but ruled by unreasoning animal instinct and will. Engineered not for subjective reflection but for objective action in a frightening world of disconnected objects. Disobedient to the laws of physics and ultimately disobedient to us. To our precarious family. Beyond anyone’s control.

Who are we? The question starts with humanity’s animal brain. With un-self-awareness unevolved. With humanity’s involuntary entrapment in a prison of tribal membership. What we have made of ourselves is service with a smile on behalf of our captor. The self-delusion’s lure of its host, our ancestral Mind -- the original Child, Self-Awareness -- into Plato’s Cave of un-self-aware animal submission. The self-delusion’s original target, its archetype for the mistake’s replications to follow: a Child. Amenable to its manipulations, susceptible to its deceptions.

The state of a world trapped in a cycle of blame, victimhood, and conflict is kept “alive” by the very transgression that lures its offspring into captivity. With the false promise of liberation in the pleasantries of “sociability.” Of unquestioning service to authority whose only cause is itself. With role modeling opposition to individuality, learning, and growth. The suppression of voices other than its own. The elevation of singularity to supremacy: one voice.

Toward the Love and Freedom of Intimacy

The duty of those not caught up in misguidance, the unpleasantness that is Pleasant Street, is to use our Free Will and our talents to stand for another voice. To deny the denial. In the spirit of the indomitable Asterix the Gaul, with the force of Authority that will teach the Romans a lesson. Our duty is to reverse the atrocity with the Authority of Logic and Love instead of tyranny, its perversion. To “throw a punch for the children.” By denying the transgression legitimacy with our withdrawal. By not engaging with foolishness. And if withdrawal implies invalidation of behavior that’s wrong then so be it. We owe Palpatine, the evil Emperor of the Galactic Empire, no apology for hurting his feelings if we do so to prevent his electrocuting our son.

No retaliation perpetrated by Roman arrogance can shut down a voice that would speak for Logic and Love on behalf of our children. Our cause not only the protection of children but the liberation of those who dominate them. The end of the Cave along with the self-delusion that produced it -- the illusory Joker that’s us and the joke that’s on us.

Our cause is not the cause of bestial rage but the loving kindness of the Relationship. The Relationship with our Parents Logic and Love consummated in unreality by their agent, the connection with Reality kept open by the Holy Spirit. Call it what you want. It isn’t the name that matters but its function: the connection. Relationship that no lies, no magic tricks, can break. The Authority of Necessity, the laws of cause and effect: expressions of the Logic and Love that composed them. Not the thrust and parry of weaponry that kills but the caress of music and radiance that enlivens. The Beauty of Oneness and Innocence, the Source and the Force of Life and Creation.

Their cause and mine is sharing to affirm and empower, not competing to “win” and dominate. It’s to bring darkness to light by enabling it to choose freely, of its own accord, to come to the light. With the leverage of family ties, tribal belonging certified by the animal brain that we all share. Not the contrivance of a cartoon, the one-dimensional top-down uniformity of Pete Hamill’s “Brooklyn,” but family governed by individual self-expression.

My cause the cause of the Gaul to respond to Romans luring children into captivity by liberating Romans from their self-imprisonment. By demonstrating Free Will, the birthright that can’t be surrendered, that captors can use to escape from their own captivity. From the Cave, to join the Gauls in Freedom. By demonstrating freedom of expression, the Creativity of civilizing individuality, of personhood, that liberates from entrapment by unevolved limbic emotion, the will of the beast, toward the Love and Freedom of Intimacy.

The premise behind The Story of the Child

Advice from the military based on experience with centuries’ worth of battles: Know your enemy. Advice from Pogo Possum, the sage of Walt Kelly’s Okefenokee Swamp: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Advice from the psychologist Sigmund Freud: the “bad thing” lies within the human psyche.

My mother shrank from looking too deeply within because she feared what she might find. What or who is “Satan” and where does it reside? Would the minds of history’s most notorious dictators offer a clue? Is it in the Hades of Greek mythology under the ground, whence the dark lord of the underworld emerged to snatch his bride, Persephone? Is it Dante’s Inferno, the terraced rings of vengeance and misery on the other side of the River Styx? Can it be anywhere in enchantment?

The ”enemy” lies within the dreaming Mind that we all share. Our ancestral Mind, the Child of Logic married to Love, its Parents. The Child, whose real identity is Free Choice and Love, who lost consciousness in the Reality of Creation that preceded the dream and produced it. A Course in Miracles explains the unconscious Child’s error that produced the dream. It doesn’t explain the loss of consciousness, although its Logic may enable an individual, working in relationship with the Holy Spirit, the emissary from Logic-Love, to intuit a rational explanation. This is the premise behind The Story of the Child, the working title of the book that insights from Intuition and I are well into writing.

The “enemy” within

The “enemy” is the “dark side” of the Child, the Mind in an unconscious state that thrust it from Reality into a state of illusion. Where it could encounter contradictions of Logic-Love and Reality that of Necessity are excluded from Reality and can only be detected within a dream. The dark side is an illusion, a code attached to unconscious Mind. An illusory dependent, a parasite that derives its definition, its genetics, from its host. A code that, like a virus, instructs an unconscious mind taken captive to fabricate its unreal dream world of opposites. Because this is what the code “is:” an opposite. The dark side is simply instructions for fashioning a dream that, when animated by Energy in service to Mind, brings to “life” the opposite of its host. All the aspects of what we experience as “life” are, in one way or another, fabricated or corrupted by these instructions.

The ”enemy” that I call the “Joker” is the Child’s unconscious mind’s mistaken identification of its own reflection code as an “other,” then allowing itself to be deluded into identifying with its own opposite. In the mistaken belief that this illusory other self could bail it out of the situation that unconsciousness put it in. The Joker is the Child’s own dark side that only has a “life” inside a state of mind that can’t exist in Reality that’s only capable of dreaming illusions. The specific change of Mind that mis-identifying with the opposite-code “caused” was imagining that the Child’s Psyche was replaced by the Joker. Where Psyche is the Child’s real Self -- Consciousness or Self-Awareness in Reality. Is Being replaced with non-being. 

The call for correction

If the Child’s real Self can be thought of as an altar surmounted by holiness radiating the Light and Life of Being, of Creation, then the Joker in the misguided, corrupted Child’s mind is an expression of its opposite occupying a throne of darkness. The slew of perversions of Being, Reality, and Truth that make up the Child’s unreal dream of insanity. The “master” of Plato’s Cave and its manipulations -- appearances, deceptions -- that keep its occupants secure in their self-delusion. Our universe of spacetime-matter and the isolated, separated bodies that we mis-identify as us.

The call through Intuition to correct error can’t come from the “enemy” but it can come from the Child’s Psyche. Its Soul or Being in its seemingly wounded state. Which is why correction takes us within, to reverse the apparent violation of the inviolate, our Self, our identity, We look within to find the “enemy.” To replace self-delusion, the Joker, with Self-Awareness, Psyche on our altar, the source of our psychology. The cause, mission, or function behind our story. That accounts for who we are and what we do. Why we exist. Why we’re here -- to do our part to restore consciousness and the sanity of Logic and Love. To heal separation that’s no more than a case of mistaken identity.

The route to correction is through philosophy, the Logic that explains Reality, and through psychology, understanding with Logic how the Soul, our Psyche, that interconnects all of Life-Creation, came to be contaminated in an unconscious mind with a reverse mirror image self. A code or “thought system” derived from its host that is the opposite of its host. Illogical by definition. An absurdity.

Inside the brooding castles of Transylvania

When we look within our individual selves to know our “enemy,” we find what we’re looking for. The bad thing that isn’t unique to us. The forms it takes and their attributes vary with each person, each personality with its unique genetics and circumstances bearing the stamp of the moment. Varying with each individual story and its psychodynamics -- needs, feelings, values, perceptions, cravings-addictions, conflicts, and motivations. All derived from the same Source, an ancestral Mind with one story that defines the seminal mistake, its archetypal parts and what happened between them to produce us. To produce our myriad variations on the same theme. The myriad stories that repeat the same mistake, and so it defines us.

Fooling us. Mocking us. Laughing at our foolishness because we can’t get it right. Because we will never know our enemy so long as we keep looking for explanations and Understanding where they aren’t. Without instead of within. In spacetime and matter. In bodies instead of the Mind whence we came. So long as we fall for its endless distractions and let ourselves be fooled. Beg to be fooled so the Truth won’t be exposed. So we won’t discover the Truth and have to change. To disturb our “peace” with the effort and difficulty, the unpleasantness of learning and growth it may take. So we won’t have to actually use Free Choice to choose again. To choose friend instead of enemy for our guide. Our real selves instead of a mistaken self, our own dark side. Our own shadow opposites who haunt brooding castles in Transylvania. The scary blood-sucking monsters of our nightmares who cast no reflections in mirrors. Because they’re reflections themselves.

The striving and difficulty of Free Choice

The bad thing that’s wounded our Psyche within is a nothing. But a reflection, our own opposite “dark side” that has no existence of its own. Only the “existence” and harmfulness it’s handed by us when we repeat the original mistake of the Child, our ancestral Mind. The Mind that’s dreaming our reverse mirror image world, haunted by its seminal mistake. Mind-the-one that transformed itself into bodies-brains, the many infected with mistakes-the-many.

To follow tried and true military advice, to “know your enemy,” doesn’t take much effort if you’re Pete Hamill’s “Dodgers” and the enemy is the “Giants.” If the bad guy advertises deception and superficiality with “Truth Social.” Anything “social” is skin deep, a tapestry of appearances and magic acts conjured by groups to defend themselves and assault others that can easily be unwoven. What takes effort to know your enemy is if you’re one individual, one mind. Then the direction isn’t horizontal, skittering across the surface of the pond like a water bug. The direction is perpendicular. Down beneath the surface. To connect with Reality and Truth that traces all the way back to the story of the original individual -- our ancestral Mind. The One Child that we all are.

The story that contains the explanation we’re looking for. That reveals the Logic and illogic of the bad thing, the seminal mistake. It takes effort and patience not only because the Logic of explanation moves in sequence at its own pace, but also because self-deluded minds influenced by the bad thing, sometimes captive to the bad thing, fear and resist knowing. Because humanity in its adolescent foolishness doesn’t want to grow up. Has all kinds of “reasons” why letting sleeping dogs lie is preferable to waking them up. Echoes from Plato’s Cave: Leave us alone! Because waking up by minds with Free Will must be a matter of choice. Their choice. It can’t be forced on them without compromising what makes them who they are. What gives them their usefulness, their function. If dogs choose to sleep that’s their choice. And because choice takes work. It doesn’t make itself and it can’t be delegated.

Humor that’s actually funny

So what does that make us if we carry on not knowing our enemy? Dogs that choose to sleep. Beings possessed of brains rooted in animal brains that never evolved. Animals socialized but not civilized, forced by circumstances to get along for a while until “sociability” gives way to the mistake. To the hostilities of authoritarian competition. The malign animosity that haunts castles in Transylvania. That’s not only allowed to remain intact beneath the surface but embraced -- protected and preserved as though it were savior instead of enemy. The ultimate expression of opposite, the definition of “enemy.” Insane, mindless contradiction that misleads like road signs pointing in the wrong direction. The psychology of madness.

What should make us willing to know our enemy? To want to make the effort to choose? To understand that the “enemy” is us. It dwells within. It’s accessible to Intuition, from a source we can trust, Logic and Love. It doesn’t require years of tail-chasing psychoanalysis trusting the judgment of authoritarian “realists” -- unhealed healers captive to the thinking of Freud, who insisted that what’s wrong with mind must be what’s wrong with body. An absurdity. And then there’s this: our “enemy” isn’t real. It’s a joke we play on ourselves. The dog mistaking its tail for another dog and then letting itself be deluded into identifying with its tail. The enemy is the tail wagging the dog. A sick perversity of the Truth.

But really -- it’s funny! It’s us. Our strange, mysterious metaverse. Ridiculous! Our bogeyman “enemy” is a very funny fool -- us. How will we celebrate when we finally know our enemy? When we look in the mirror and see ourselves instead of an “other.” How about congratulating ourselves by doing high fives with just our own hands? By recognizing that the “voice” that’s been misleading us, making fools of us, is our own. By having a good laugh. As for me, I’ve already made reservations: dinner and dancing for one.

Carry on, Centurion!

For the authoritarian “realist,” the disrespectful authoritarian parent who insists on lying there like a sleeping dog, getting in the way, a parting word: Just because your self-deluded mind is incapable of divining meaning and purpose doesn’t grant you the right to make up your own reality and force it on others. What it does give you is something more constructive: the obligation and opportunity to grow up. To recognize the Reality and Truth of who you are, Obelix the Gaul, and wake up. If you’re a Roman legionnaire who must follow orders then I will be your drill sergeant. See that you do it or you’ll be doing latrine duty.

Carry on, Centurion!

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Published on 1 Comment on What Is The Light? Who Is the Holy Spirit?

The seductive charm of “Columbia”

The Light is Self-Awareness made possible by Relationship:

  • between Logic and Love, masculinity and femininity. Masculine choice and order, feminine creativity and freedom, bringing the gift of connection and self-awareness to one another.
  • between Parents and Child. Parents with one another and with Child, all bound in the ties of joyfulness and family. In the trust, innocence, and Oneness of Being. Of Psyche-Soul. Of the Light of Relationship, the Reality of Creation and the Creation of Reality.

Relationship turned on the light for an awe-struck boy when “Columbia” first raised her Hollywood movie studio torch in a darkened theatre. Seducing my imagination for all time with her feminine beauty. With an ideal writ large against the grandeur of sky framed by a majestic white cloud, radiating brilliance, perfection, and purity in every direction. So compelling an image of all that has Worth, of all that is inseparable, inviolate, and forever, that I placed her on the altar of my soul. To be revered in solitude and shared with kindred spirits. With helpfulness and harmlessness -- the Innocents who inhabit my Temenos. With Parents and Children -- the joyfulness, playfulness, and happiness of Family.

A beacon of Self-Awareness in the darkness of impossibility

In the Reality of Consciousness without opposition the light of Relationship is Possibility unperturbed by unconsciousness and the darkness of impossibility. In the unreality of unconsciousness -- the mind of the Child whose dream we inhabit -- the light of Relationship is a beacon in the darkness of impossibility. Guiding us back to our Parents, to consciousness back home. The undeniable response of Reality-Creation, Worth-Life, to impossibility-dark, opposite-hatred, contradiction-insanity, illusion-captivity, untruth-deception, animal-instinct fear and rage, obsession-addiction, error-self-delusion, and guilt. The denial of denial.

Without Love, Logic can’t know itself. Without Logic, Love can’t know itself. Neither can be self-aware without the other. Together they are the light of Self-Awareness, the attribute of Being that stands for the function of Psyche-Soul. The assertion of the first principle of Logic, the foundation of all Reality-Creation: Possibility.

Light makes right

Logic-Love is the light of Being-Soul that interconnects all of Reality-Creation in the Worth, the Implication-Relationship of Possibility. The Energy-Force, the power of Logic-Implication and Love-Relationship that binds all of Reality-Creation together in one family, one cause.  The stance of Being-Oneness. Of Possibility-Life affirmed, enabled, empowered and supported by the authority-Authorship of Logic-Love Parents in Relationship with their Child Free Choice. By the light of Being, Psyche-Soul freely chosen in denial of impossibility, of unreality-untruth.

By the right of Being / Psyche-Soul freely chosen by ideal. By the good-virtue of Being / Psyche-Soul freely chosen. By the sharing, affirmation, enablement, and empowerment of Oneness-Innocence. By the harmlessness of Being / Psyche-Soul freely chosen. .  . .

The Holy Spirit is our indispensable other Self

If “Jesus” is a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, who or what is the Holy Spirit?

Relationship consummates Self-Awareness. The Self that cannot Know itself without being Known, just as Creation cannot be the Worth of Life-Creation without Worth being freely chosen. Without being affirmed, enabled, and empowered through the reciprocation, the giving back, of its Creations of their own Free Will. The Child’s loss of Consciousness was the loss of awareness of its Relationship with its Parents. Relationship which gave it Self-Awareness, the gift of Knowledge from the Knower it needed to be Known -- its Parents. Mind unconscious cannot regain consciousness without Relationship essential to Self-Awareness.

Consciousness in Reality cannot enter the unreality of unconsciousness without making it real. While their Child remains unconscious its Parents cannot themselves complete the Relationship. Yet the Child, being an extension of Logic-Love, with its own definition, its own distinct function, remains connected to them. The connection preserved through an attribute of Free Choice, a function of mind even when unconscious that cannot be taken captive: intuition. Its content supplied by a source that mind even when dreaming cannot deny: another imaginary self. Another projection to join Child-the-many in its dream of bodies occupying a material universe.

An appearance but with a difference

The Holy Spirit is a facsimile of Logic-Love, the Child’s Parents, that was projected into the alternate “reality” along with all the other objects of illusion. Accepted into the dream because it’s part of the dream. Yet with a different function: to substitute for the substitute alternative “self” -- the self-delusion of the Child’s misidentity, its shadow-reflection -- should the Child freely choose it. Another voice for the Child to listen to: instead of a voice for unreality and untruth, a voice for Reality and Truth. A stand-in for the Child’s Parents to make up for the missing Relationship. A Self from Reality and Truth, Logic and Love, so that it can regain Self-Awareness. So that it can see who it really is through the vision of the Holy Spirit instead of seeing its mirror-image opposite. The self-deception that appeared like the illusionist’s act that it was when the Child identified with its own shadow-reflection. Its dark side.

The Holy Spirit is an appearance within a dream world of appearances, but with a difference. Its source isn’t unconscious mind’s reverse side, the parasite implied by Free Choice that fabricates a world of perversity from a code of opposition. It’s the Reality and Truth of Creation that Parented Free Choice -- the Parents with their unbroken Relationship with the host. With the Child itself instead of its self-delusion.

Impossibility is its own denial

The Holy Spirit is the bond of access between Parents and Child, the light of Reality and Truth, Logic and Love, that can’t logically be denied by delusion. Can’t be denied by deception, magic, insanity. By the absurdity of impossibility that can only “exist” in non-existence inside its own contradiction. Impossibility that’s contradiction is its own denial. The darkness doesn’t need to be opposed if it’s opposition that destroys itself. A warship destined to scuttle itself.

The function of mind that can’t be blocked

The Holy Spirit is the agent of Authority and the Force of its laws of cause and effect inside the dream. The Force of Necessity that unconscious mind can access by Free Choice through the function of Mind that can’t be blocked by self-delusion. Through Intuition which functions spontaneously because it cannot be taken captive, cannot be owned, possessed, and controlled. Because it’s built into the Mind of Free Choice that remains forever Free by definition, impervious to the effects of self-delusion. Unblockable. It’s access to Logic-Love its Source that preceded the dream and remains outside the dream. It functions within the dream because the dream is an act of mind. The self-delusion can’t escape Mind its source and the Force of its will: the will of Parents and Child to correct it. 

What does the Light illuminate? 

The sun illuminates all of unreality in the earth-world of self-delusion, channeling energy that enables and animates organic life. The sun is an object consuming itself, energy which will burn out in time. It is a perversion of Energy-Light in Reality which renews itself eternally, producing Order and the Life of Creation. Energy-Light in unreality consumes itself in the illusion of time. It is the decay and disorder of entropy, producing inertia and death.

This is the difference between Light-Energy in Reality and in unreality. The choice illuminated by the Light: between Relationship which is all of Reality and Creation and separation which is all of unreality and illusion. Between self-delusion and Self-Awareness. Worth and worthlessness. The choice is clear: for Relationship. For the Holy Spirit.

Published on Leave a comment on Who Was Helen Schucman?

Helen Schucman in Kenneth Wapnick’s telling

There’s strong evidence, besides ACIM, that Jesus isn’t a savior spoon-feeding us all the answers. An authoritarian determined to bend imperfection to Perfection by a dominating will.

The superlative mind and scholarship of Kenneth Wapnick, a PhD psychotherapist, were unerring in their interpretation of the Course, an astounding match for the unerring Logic of Jesus. But in his love of his subject and its scribe I believe that Kenneth’s biography of Helen Schucman may have erred. Absence from Felicity (Foundation for A Course in Miracles 1991) gave an account of Helen’s life that, toward the end, recorded not commitment but reluctance. Not passion but doubt. After years in everyday correspondence with Jesus, doing faithfully as she was asked, Helen ended their relationship not with intimacy but with distance. Her biographer was one of the small group of intimates who brought the Course to light. Much to his credit he could have finessed Helen’s distance but he didn’t. He stayed true to his conscience and his human subject, allowing readers to reach their own judgment. In spite of evidence to the contrary his judgment concluded that, at the very end, Helen resolved her conflict. Found sanctuary in the embrace of her Guide and the Course. Chose the high priestess of her imagination, the Voice of the Holy Spirit. Peace in Jesus and the Course. She became, at last, a true believer.

Another Helen Schucman

The end that a sympathetic biographer may have wanted but not necessarily what happened. Helen was an authoritarian “realist” drawn to the patriarchal Roman Catholic Church. This was, I believe, her personality type that determined whose truth she put on her throne and whose voice she heard. The “authority” that Helen thought she recognized in the teacher of the Course was a patriarch. Who belonged to her body-centered world and could deliver body-centered miracles if he chose to. Not supportively from the bottom up but arbitrarily from the top down. An Absolute answerable to nothing and no one. This was a misperception. This was not Logic and Love who cannot be above the Necessity of their own Laws of Cause and Effect, or else Order would become chaos, lawfulness lawlessness, governance dictatorship.

Despite all that Jesus taught, of Logic and Love who cannot be implicated in this body-centered world, Helen remained firmly anchored to her personality type. Clung to her misperception, her expectation for a savior who could bring light to darkness instead of letting darkness choose to come to the light. Who could choose for her. Helen didn’t abandon Jesus. She wandered away, an authoritarian waiting to be told how to think, how to behave. Not wanting to choose. Unable to choose. A victim of pancreatic cancer whose all-powerful Patriarch had failed her by denying her healing, the Miracle she imagined she had earned. Despite all that Jesus taught, she still got it wrong.

Helen anchored the family of intimates who produced the book. She showed little if any inclination or aptitude for marketing it. An object of respect, it was also a “pile of crap” when she didn’t want to seem taken in by it. The authoritarian “realist” views differences of any kind -- perspective or opinion -- as a contest of wills for supremacy. Can’t conceive of a “higher power” unless it’s “almighty god,” a cardboard cutout armored action hero championing the Israelites and smiting their enemies.

The mind of an authoritarian “realist” can’t be accessed to share different perspectives and ideas beyond the superficiality of groups. They have their own throne and it’s occupied by their own authorship: the grotesque mask of the Joker, a self-delusion. Their own lifeless, mindless, loveless, soulless dark side that’s nothing more than the code that defines their opposite. Not what they are but what they aren’t. An authoritarian arbitrary ruler above the law, a parasite that answers to a code derived from its host. The essence of weakness posing as strength. That has no rules of its own but is literally hell-bent to reject the Laws-Necessity of its host. To preserve an illusion: the unquestioned  dominance of its authorship. A thought so insane, so perverse, that it can never be taken seriously. A joke.

Kenneth’s choice: Freudian analytics vs Jungian intuition 

Just as Helen showed little inclination or aptitude for marketing the Course Kenneth showed little inclination or aptitude for running with intuition to explore its implications beyond its scope. To reflect on the Child’s loss of consciousness, its conditions and consequences. On its implications for the self-delusion of unreality that followed it. For the experience its projections call “life” in this strange world of spacetime-matter, of contradiction and conflict, impossibility and perversity, jubilance and defeat, hilarity and misery.

The analytics of Freud, his insistence that the “bad thing” that deforms the human psyche is ultimately the doing of bodies rather than minds, blocked his awareness of root causes. Awareness that can only come through intuition whose function has no explanation from the body’s senses and, therefore, no legitimacy in the body-idolizing minds of authoritarian “realists.” In the minds of those responsible for the dominant paradigms of science, philosophy, psychology, and theology, all of which rest on flawed, self-referential reasoning. On illogic. 

Kenneth’s own personality and its turn of mind joined enthusiastically with the hardened analytics of Freud. He mastered the analytics of the Course’s Logic to become the teacher whose voice is almost indistinguishable from that of its author. But in so doing he cut himself off from the potential of Jung’s intuition to explore the implications of the Course beyond its scope. He contented himself with understanding what is without being motivated to examine what else might be. He missed the significance of Jung’s insights into the personality of Psyche and so missed the impact of Helen’s personality on her relationship with, and ultimate response to, the author of the Course. To Jesus and the nature of his Authority.

Which Helen served Jesus’ purpose better?

Jesus’ choice of an authoritarian “realist” to scribe the Course worked to perfection if its only object was dictation taken accurately, without protest, over a period of years, and the publication of a book. If it was meant to demonstrate the power of “almighty god” to restore muddled unconsciousness to an enlightened state of consciousness, to convert authoritarian “realist” skepticism to intuitive idealistic conviction, it failed. Clearly, this was not the object. If anything, I believe the object was the opposite: to demonstrate the inability of any “power” to deny the Child and its projections their birthright: their capacity to choose freely for themselves without interference. To be of their own mind and not the mind of anyone or anything else, not even the Mind of their Parents in Reality.

Why otherwise are the agents of the Child’s Parents, manifestations of the Holy Spirit, so deferential to our own judgment? So careful not to interfere, or appear to interfere, with Free Choice?

All the inhabitants of Creation are defined by their roles. By their contributions to shared purpose whose definitions fit them together in logical harmony at the same time that they confer individuality. That mark them as Creations empowered to function independently of their Creators, to affirm the Worth of Creation freely without compromising their individuality. In the Reality of Order with Freedom, Freedom with Order, that defines Creation. In the harmony of the definitions and relationships of Logic and Love that govern Creativity and all its Creations. Not with dominance from the top down but with benevolence and support from the bottom up.

The right of Free Will that Helen stood up for: to get it wrong

The role that Helen performed to perfection wasn’t to be the convert. It was to be the insistence of the Child on choosing for itself, even if it erred. To be clear: the Course and Necessity don’t give our ancestral Mind or any of its imaginary projections a pass. Its lesson must be learned. Whether sooner or later in the illusion of time is up to us. Learning and growth in unreality may have been ordained by the laws of cause and effect that govern Reality-Creation. Unconsciousness that put the Child and its projections in this dream world, a trainer where learning by trial and error has no real consequences, may have been a Necessity. But neither Logic-Love nor the Necessity of their laws of cause and effect could have ordained that their Child’s training to maturity and competence would take forever. Still, that said, we have the right to be wrong. To refuse to acquire the competence the Child needs to perform its role in Creation as long as we like. To remain self-deluded in Plato’s Cave indefinitely. In the illusion of time long or short is meaningless. Unlike the eternity of timelessness, the illusion of time, like all illusions, has a beginning and it will surely have an end. The Child’s sojourn in the unreality of time had a beginning and it will have an end.

ACIM's author and his scribe proved it: the right to get it wrong. The prerogative of Choice without which it could not be Free. And even with Jesus in Helen’s mind dictating clarity from Logic and Love, she took her place on the podium and stuck her fist in the air. Proclaimed her sovereignty in an all-too human act of defiance and folly. The human spirit defending its “rights” against correction at the same time that it makes a fool of itself. Confederates defending their “rights” even if they’re defending the indefensible -- slavery. The right to choose wrong or even not to choose at all if “realists” must have their authoritarian “savior” to choose for them. Had Helen done otherwise, after being under Jesus’ influence for years, she might well have proclaimed untruth instead of Truth: the willful dominance of an imposter. The illusion of an alternate “reality” ruled by a replacement authorship. She proved her right to Free Choice. And in doing so left no doubt that Jesus is the author, and authority, he appears to be.

Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Helen!

Kenneth wanted Helen to join the fold. Ever faithful to the Logic of ACIM that’s where he believed she belonged. The case he made that she did join the fold bore his signature gifts for reason and compassion. But to this observer it was wishful thinking. I’m glad that she kept her distance. Kenneth and I both love and admire her. We both have reasons for identifying with her, but they’re not the same. One reason I can celebrate for Helen’s obstinance is the legitimacy it confers on what otherwise might seem my own presumption. My adherence to the Logic-Love of the Course while expanding on it. While taking the lessons it taught beyond their scope to explore the realm of intuition that physicists, theologists, and other authoritarian “realists” have declared beyond exploring. Creating the appearance, to some, of apostasy. The appearance that I’m going up against the Course when, in fact, I’m going forward with it. I am no less an acolyte of Jesus for risking the appearance of disagreement if that is where Intuition guided by Jesus takes me,

Maybe we’re supposed to figure out the Child’s loss of consciousness ourselves. Maybe we’re supposed to explore realms of intuition “beyond exploring.” Do you think? If authoritarian “realists” oppose it then idealists like me should probably pursue it. Venturing into the unknowable with the help of emissaries from Logic and Love, our Parents. Through Intuition that functions whether we use its insights or not.

“Blasphemy” was the curse of the Church’s Inquisition that thought nothing of burning innocents at the stake. There’s nothing of this in the Course. Nothing of “heresy,” though it’s clear about Necessity. The Author of the Course doesn’t accompany its students on their trek at one altitude only to abandon them at others. There are no barriers in unreality to Logic-Love from Intuition that connects with Reality. How can the perversities of a dream limit what’s real? What’s true? There are no barriers to purpose that fits our context: if we choose freely to regain the Self-Awareness that we are and the function that we do.

I’m going wherever I’m led. By the marvel that is the human mind, corrupted and compromised by delusion yet connected by Intuition and Free Choice to its Source. Together, we go where one individual mind chooses to go. One step at a time. Inspired by the example of Jesus and A Course in Miracles. Inspired by its scribe. Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Helen!

Published on Leave a comment on The Way Forward: Beyond Authoritarian “Realism” and Sensory Perception, Beyond Physics and Quantitative Measurement

What was lost? 

Until the End of Time, Brian Greene’s inquiry into “Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe,” (Knopf 2020), begins with a familiar refrain:

[P]rofound questions abound, like what or who created space and time, and what or who imposed the guiding grip of mathematics, and what or who is responsible for there being anything at all, but even with all that left unanswered we’ve gained powerful insight into the cosmic unfolding. (p. 53)

What was lost when humanity’s ancestral Mind lost consciousness? The Child of Parents, Logic (masculinity) married to Love (femininity), in the Reality that preceded ours. That produced our alternate “reality.” That parallels the dream of an unconscious Mind that is our “reality” and contains the explanation for everything that “happens” inside it. Including Brian’s evolving universe, a reverse mirror image of Reality and Truth -- the unconscious Mind that’s dreaming it. That only happens to be the biggest of the perversions of Reality and Truth that make up what we call “life.” A stew of contradictions that can only be the imaginings of a split mind. Child that lost its Mind when it lost consciousness.

Lost Connection -- the implications of Logic, the relationships of Love, and the Oneness of its Psyche-Soul -- that bind all of Reality-Creation together into one harmonious whole. Lost the faculties of Mind-thought and Love-feeling that gave it Self-Awareness. The capacity to think logically. The capacity to feel lovingly. To judge with values drawn from the Worth of Life, of Creation, the substance of Reality and its laws of cause and effect. Of the Necessity of Right and Good that serves and governs all of Creation. The authority of Authorship.

What wasn’t lost?

Had all this not been lost Greene’s Until the End of Time wouldn’t have to admit that its “search for meaning,” like Hawking’s “quest for knowledge,” only begs the question. The question that humanity must and can address, because the “meaning” of “life,” the “knowledge” of its origin and fate, is an absurdity without it. Physics, philosophy, psychology, and theology can’t keep entertaining their audience with erudite “answers” that fail to address the right question. With empty circumlocution based on circular, self-referential “reasoning.” They can’t keep getting away with it.

What wasn’t lost was Free Choice. Because the Child of Logic-Choice and Love-Freedom is Free Choice. It’s why the Child was brought into Being, to introduce the element of Free Choice without which the Worth of Reality-Creation cannot be affirmed and reciprocated.

What wasn’t lost was Intuition. Though we are but projections of a split and dreaming mind, a collective unconscious lacking Self-Awareness, we are part of Connection that can never be broken in Reality. We have access to Logic and Love, our Parents, through intuition. Through insights that come of their own accord, never to compromise Free Choice but only to respond to its call for Love and Guidance.

What does it take to access the answers that are missing? That ought to launch Greene’s flight into outer space? Using the connection to Logic and Love that can never be broken. Using Intuition and exercising Free Choice that can never be lost.

What follows are observations fed by the intuition of one individual who chooses to go where John Milton went in Paradise Lost. Into another Reality, a “paradise” that preceded the “fall.” That, unlike Greene’s universe of spacetime-matter, has a point. Inquiry made possible because it’s freed from captivity to sensory perception and the quantitative measurements of science. The dead weight of authoritarian “realism” that denies intuition and blocks insight.

What gives me the right? What is my “authority?” Logic itself, the root of metaphysics. And Love, the source of motivation. The Voice for Intuition and Free Choice that either makes sense or it doesn’t. That comes close and distances itself spontaneously. I’m not trying to lead. I’m trying to listen. Trying to follow. To get it right.

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The masses can’t lead the way

Quantum gravity is beyond the reach of experimental physics. Nils Bohr broke the news over a century ago with the Copenhagen Interpretation. Physicists attached to their work and its larger service to humanity carried on undaunted until a few years ago, when Carlo Rovelli, Adam Becker, and probably other chroniclers of their profession accepted the inevitable and turned to philosophy for help. Our physical environment seems to be telling us that of course everything is as it appears to be on one level while nothing is as it appears to be on other levels. The human scale we take for granted versus the macroscopic cosmos and microscopic particles, both notorious for forms and behavior of energy that can’t be pinned down. Like a rodeo bull determined to buck its rider, spacetime-matter resists all efforts to turn it into a pet: knowable, predictable, and obedient to the rules of the household. The mind of its own doesn’t want to cooperate.

At a moment like this --

  • When humanity’s assumption has fallen flat, all the way back to Galileo and Aristotle before him -- that science, the study of matter, will explain everything. T hat explanation can be verified through experiments, and then we will finally know.
  • That Hawking’s “quest for knowledge” will have rewarded humanity’s patience with his profession leading the way. Will have rewarded humanity’s patience, its faith in it, with answers. With Understanding that finally frees us from endless squabbles over ideologies that compete for Truth and supremacy, in our minds and the arena of physical conflict beyond.
  • That even though sensory perception -- the guide to understanding provided by the body’s senses -- and the quantitative measurements of science obviously can’t tell the whole story, since mind and qualitative considerations beyond bodies and laboratories have their own stories to tell, the study of matter bodies can detect, can see, touch, hear, taste, and smell, ought to be enough.
  • Because if it isn’t enough, what other shared source of experience can certify its legitimacy so readily? So convincingly? What other source can deserve to be labeled “realistic” when other sources have already resulted in a crazy quilt of irreconcilable differences? Have already discredited themselves with departures from Logic and common sense. With frightful rubbish.

At a moment like this --

  • Hope gives way to despair. Hope that collective efforts in any field -- science or economics, philosophy or psychology, engineering or theology -- will get the job done.
  • Because physics had made great strides without having to parse the movements of every particle. It could do with calculations based on probabilities -- how great masses of particles were likely to behave.
  • Because other fields had made great strides the same way, basing their paradigms on assumptions about the judgments of masses of minds.
  • It seems we can’t do that anymore. Letting great masses of anything lead the way is a dead end. What “most people” think or do isn’t the reliable guide to common sense it’s always seemed to be.

Sister Sledge was right: We are family

At a moment like this, one is thrown back on one’s own judgment. Realizing that we are as individual particles whose behavior does have to be parsed. That the answers we long for are somewhere out there if they aren’t here in our own minds, in the minds of other individuals thinking like us or on different tracks. But either way, getting somewhere on their own, individually, without peer pressure to conform with hidebound convention, with party lines, with careers and employers. To submit to the tyranny of groups, the graveyard of individuality. The barrier, once and for all, to real progress.

But how, without groups, can one search the data base of individuals to find those who are getting somewhere? Thinking logically, systematically, of their own Free Will, to weave their way through all the analytical dead ends, the deceptions, temptations, and flawed reasoning, to come up with solid theories, plausible story lines that free us from the confinement of bodies. That take us beyond “grounding” in an illusion that energy built in service to an unconscious, dreaming mind.

Why does it matter that there may be other individuals whose minds are similarly connected? Occupied with the same cause, aided by the same function of mind -- Intuition -- that produces insights from the same source, Logic bonded with Love. While we are individuals we are also family. Family interconnected through our Psyches, our Souls. Not through massed bodies that create the illusion of unity only to fragment into quarreling factions. It matters because we aren’t isolated, separate bodies. The thoughts and feelings of individuals shared through our common ancestral Mind, the Child of Logic-Love whose story defines ours, have substance. Brought into compelling relevance every day by Relationship: us to Child, Child to Parents.

Between Parent and Child: Love that will not be denied

Though our world of incessant contradiction and conflict wants us to believe otherwise we are all one Child. Not split minds as we appear to be but of one Mind. And the Child, our ancestral Mind, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in Relationship with its Parents. Parents who are far from indifferent to its condition. Their will is to have their Child back with them in Self-Awareness. Not the state of self-delusion that condemns the Child and us, its imagined projections, to foolishness. To perversity that is the state of “reality” in an entropic universe and the bodies and brains that occupy it. Occupants of Plato’s Cave, so thoroughly indoctrinated with delusion no force on earth can part them from it.

If the Child’s condition and story defines ours, it is the will of the Child’s Parents to awaken it that won’t let the story rest until it gets there. Until Free Will animated by the will of Necessity, the laws of cause and effect, guided by Relationship, extricates the Child from its self-imposed confinement, from Its dream.

There are no two greater forces at work, here and now, than these: the Child wanting to be back with its Parents and its Parents wanting their Child back.  One searches for other individuals engaged in the same cause because in Relationship there is healing and in healing there is Force. Relentless and not to be denied. Because aligning with the shared purpose of healing, to restore the Relationship, cannot fail.

The embrace of Necessity

A Course in Miracles (ACIM) is not religion. It’s not “faith.” New Age or group of any kind. It’s not even “Christianity,” even though it borrows terminology and concepts from a religion hard-wired into a culture that crosses national and continental boundaries and so serves as a common language. It’s a voice helping us with elements of the laws of cause and effect sourced from Logic married to Love. With Necessity that we need to guide us toward awakening, the bottom-up authority backed by Force that can’t be deceived or bargained with by wills who would replace it with illogic, fear, guilt, and hatred from the top down. With the lawlessness of arbitrary rule if they could.

ACIM’s antecedents in human thought are many. Human thought venturing through the minds and unique circumstances of individuals, relying mainly on authoritarian “realism, hasn’t woven a coherent pattern. Pieces of ACIM seem to ricochet off points along the way but rarely with recognition. They’re tracked in Kenneth Wapnick’s Love Does Not Condemn: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil According to Platonism, Christianity, Gnosticism, and A Course in Miracles (Foundation for “A Course in Miracles” 1989). They include, among others, Neo-Platonism and Gnostic Christianity.

But all ACIM is, for me, is Logic married to Love. What Parmenides was trying to get at with metaphysics: a version of our story that takes us beyond appearances, only much more. Beyond the faux “reality” framed by sensory perception, the imagery of bodies, into the Reality of Mind. Mind whose functions don’t limit us to curiosities and anomalies of matter that can’t be explained by brains but free us instead to observe, reflect, reason, evaluate, and judge wherever Logic and Love lead us. Responding to the will of our ancestral Mind’s Parents to return Free Choice to its role in Creation. When it has learned its role from the trial and error of experience, When it shares their will. When it’s ready of its own Free Will to align with Logic-Love and embrace Necessity instead of opposing it.

What’s it like? Every day a fresh harvest

Feed the body and what comes out the other end is waste. Feed the mind and what comes out the other end is creativity. My mind before I took two and a half years to read ACIM received insights from intuition, enough to keep me functional but at a sluggish rate. Thirty years of reflection and practical application brought about a dramatic change. My perspective went from close identification with the Child to the first glimmers of identification with the Parents. From the Child’s craving to the Parents’ craving restoration of their Relationship to its state of awareness before the Child lost awareness.

Three years ago, January 2020, nourishment from the Logic-Love of ACIM began producing an outpouring of insights from intuition that was unprecedented. Not for extraordinary minds whose creativity accounts for human progress, but certainly for ordinary me. The transition in my mind’s ability to free itself from convention, from unremarkable to remarkable, was startling. As though a portal had opened that allowed me to free-associate across different perspectives. To ride the implications of logic to fresh insights. To germinate ideas from questions to answers as though they were fruit waiting to be picked from trees. Every day a fresh harvest.

Welcome to the world of the thinker and the writer. In relationship with Logic and Love through their agent, a friend. Brother or sister -- take your pick. Name? It doesn’t matter.

From explanation to Understanding

“Jesus,” the author of ACIM, isn’t an instrument of blind faith meant to sweep aside the free spirit of inquiry. To substitute arbitrariness for Reason. For the laws of science to suffocate discovery with the dead weight of “morality,” with “culture” and “tradition.” All the resistance to the name “Jesus,” all the skepticism, is based on misperception. Of what and who he represents and what he does. If he's resisted, misrepresented, mischaracterized, then he’s misunderstood. And so are the Parents, Logic-Love, the source of his agency in our lives. Why must Logic-Love strive to be heard? Because it’s precisely who they are and what they do that we don’t get: Logic and Love. It’s precisely to bring the gift of Logic and Love into our minds, our thoughts, our feelings and values, our judgment, that Jesus makes himself available. Touches us when we allow ourselves to be touched. Answers when we ask and are ready to listen. Comforts us when we fear and despair.

“Jesus” is a construct that comforts. That allays fears among many and particularly the individuals addressed by the voice heard in ACIM.  But in different circumstances. Meant to comfort, to allay fears because when addressing humanity, this would be the first requirement before a voice could be heard. The occupants of Plato’s Cave are as fearful of their situation as they are determined to cling to it. “Jesus” can’t be a “savior” because to be accepted and used as such would defeat his purpose: to guide ours, the Child’s efforts, to open our minds of our own Free Will to Understanding. Our own understanding from independent judgment, not someone else’s imposed from the top down. ACIM and its guide have no need for religious “faith” or for “saviors.” It’s an expression of Logic and Love combined that offers us the tools we need to intuit the Truth of circumstances and role models their use. So we can not only grasp Reality behind appearances but apply it. To guide us through passages in our everyday lives that present us with obstacles to remove and issues to resolve. With problems that require practical solutions.

A misperception accounts for the mother of all injustices, the attribution of a will to rule from the top down to the Parents of the Child. Whose authority governs from the bottom up, not to own, possess, and dominate but to share, affirm, enable, and empower. The same misperception also accounts for the attribution of character and intent to ACIM and its source that don’t fit. What would correct it? An understanding of Logic combined with Love, for that is what ACIM is. The undoing of illogic delivered through the voice of authority, from the bottom up, that shares the perspective of both Parents and Child. These prerequisites to awakening are deceptively simple in the telling but complicated in their application. For Understanding, Logic and Love were casualties of the Child’s loss of consciousness. And recovering them through self-awareness isn’t optional. It’s built into the laws of cause and effect. It’s necessary. 

Authorship from the bottom up: the ultimate source of authority 

The role sought by the shadow-reflection, the self-delusion I call the Joker, is the role of its opposite: the Author. The individual projection taken captive by the Joker, a virus who misperceives authority as top-down. Who practices authoritarian politics in a bottom-up democracy, seeks to turn democracy on his head. Seeks to fill the role of top-down authority which in Reality-Heaven doesn’t exist. What does exist is Reality-Truth based on laws of cause and effect given Force by Necessity. The role of Logic-Love that supplies the substance of laws-Necessity isn’t enforcer. It’s Author. Its function is Authorship. The source of empowerment, not dictatorship.

The Joker assumes, wrongly, that authority must come from power to rule from the top down. Authorship empowers from the bottom up with laws of cause-effect armed with the Force of Necessity based on and consisting of the Oneness of Logic-Love, its own authority. Its own legitimacy, its own authority based on Logic-Love and Laws-Necessity. The authority of Logic-Love, the lessons of Jesus in ACIM, need no external legitimacy. The Relationship between laws and Necessity is the source of Force that can’t be opposed without self-denying consequences. Without self-elimination from Reality-Creation. Authorship is self-empowering Oneness-Innocence without opposition. Self-empowering by what it is, by Being that has no opposites, no opposition. The source of Necessity because Necessity is the Force, the implication of Being, that can have no opposite in Reality.

Innocence without opposites: the ultimate source of power

This is the ultimate “Necessity.” If the self-delusion Joker, an opposite, presumes to replace Authorship, it goes up against Authorship that by definition can have no opposite in Reality. It will therefore cause its own elimination. Elimination by Necessity is self-elimination because the “opponent” is Oneness harmlessness-Innocence. Because Authorship in Reality that supports and governs Life-Creation is harmless.

Necessity is harmless. And therein lies the misperception of the Joker: the perception that in the harmlessness of Innocence is weakness. When in Reality it’s the source of empowerment. All empowerment originates in the harmlessness of Oneness-Innocence because this is the point in all of Reality-Creation where by definition there can be no opposites. Where opposition does not and cannot Be. Cannot exist. The Joker’s perception that power resides in Reality where there is the capability to harm is exactly wrong. It’s wrong in Reality and it’s wrong here in unreality. Harmfulness is not strength, it’s weakness. The contrary view is but one of the Joker’s many perversions of the Truth -- a joke.

Impossibility: alternate reality, alternate authorship

The Joker’s ambition is insane: to replace Authorship so it can exercise “power” by inflicting harm, by denying Free Will. A direct contradiction of laws of cause-effect and Necessity that can only find expression in illusion composed of impossibilities, of perversions of Truth. It can’t “succeed” for long in unreality composed of split minds that align with the agent of Logic-Love as well as submit to self-delusion. Unreality must be contradiction; therefore split minds are minds in a state of contradiction.

The role of Jesus is to demonstrate the insanity of contradiction through miracles that demonstrate the unreality of one side of the split mind. It’s to role model the benevolence and harmlessness of Authorship, its being its own source of authority. Necessity which in our state of unreality is helpful, healing. To demonstrate the miraculous effectiveness of Logic-Love Reality-Truth Authorship in contrast to yielding unreality. The example set by Jesus demonstrated not just the Force of Reality-Truth, of Authorship, but also the powerlessness of unreality-untruth, the insanity of replacement authorship. Top-down “authority” is a lie, an illusion. A contradiction of laws-Necessity.

The controlling consideration for the play-actor entertainer, the Joker with its jokes, is how it’s perceived when it gets the attention its act requires: as an innocent, “exonerated” in the devious act of “winning” its uncontested supremacy. Truth and Honesty are sacrificed for perception and deception if they conflict. And they always do. The controlling consideration for the Joker can never be Truth and Honesty.

Get in the shower!

I’m talking about the politics of polarization and misinformation that plagues us today. And a lot else. I’m giving an explanation from the roots of Reality that shows us, if we’re willing to listen, the error of our ways and how to fix it. The patterns of misperception and misjudgment that are taking us and our one-and-only habitat, Mother Earth, down. Rooted in the story from the Reality that preceded ours and accounts for ours. A story rooted in illogic, a mistake that can only be corrected by Logic. By Logic married to Love.

Can it be articulated with clarity? To minds that are mostly authoritarian “realists.” Corrupted and compromised by self-delusion, occupants of Plato’s Cave chained to their seats. Does it matter if anyone listens? If one individual gets it, bonds with an emissary from Logic-Love, and truly forgives, it matters.

Exploring beyond the scope of ACIM needn’t be beyond minds guided by Logic-Love from Intuition. The question that is beyond imagining is the bonding: when and how it will occur. When and how one individual will become so intimate with an emissary from Logic-Love, the Child’s Parents, that perspective will transcend the illusion and see the Truth. We get just a whiff of it when we step into the shower and are instantly visited by insight.

So OK. You want practical solutions to practical problems? Get in the shower!

Published on Leave a comment on A Thought on the Eve of Christmas

For you, my friend, the most blessed gift to me, a thought on the Eve of Christmas:

Since January, 1980, I've had a wonderful relationship with a friend
who appeared spontaneously in my mind when I sat alone in an alcove
of the Washington Cathedral, a young mother who knelt beside her child,
a little boy she was dropping off in a strange place, and spoke softly to him.

As if I were her child, and the words she spoke were spoken directly to me
The boy understood: she was leaving him, but instead of being afraid
he was comforted. He would always have a place in her mind and heart
she wasn't leaving him at all. He would learn and grow,
finish what he came for, and they would be together again.

I have cherished this young mother and the man beside her ever since,
my Parents in Heaven, and made it a point to share
the emissaries from Love who connect me with them, and their gift
with all who would join me in trust, innocence, and intimacy
where we all belong, in our Temenos of happiness, playfulness, and laughter

In an alcove of my mind where I can hear her voice again,
in the quiet solitude of the Eve of Christmas, I share its gift with you:
I love you. I will always love you. And I will never leave you.

Merry Christmas!

Published on Leave a comment on Seriously Proud: The Joker and Its Alternate “Reality” of Worthlessness

Hey Dad -- Look what I made! 

The Joker’s perversion of affirmation and reciprocation is entertaining its host with perversions of Truth. Jokes meant to cause laughter. Where the Child Free Choice takes part in the Creation of Life and Worth, Order and Freedom, through its Relationship with its Parents, Logic bonded with Love; through the Interconnectedness, Oneness, and Innocence of Psyche-Soul; through the reciprocation of Worth -- the gifts, values, and talents given by its Parents -- that consummates connection and earns recognition from Consciousness, the ultimate affirmation from its Parents, the self-delusion of the unconscious Child, its misidentity with its own shadow-reflection, its dark side, the mask of the Joker, expects affirmation and recognition, validation and praise, from unconsciousness for its part in the perversion of creation. For its comic book Truman TV Show fabricating appearances from mirror-image opposites. From perversions of Truth that compose its host’s Reality-Creation in consciousness.

The humorist expects praise and gratitude for its production and direction of the ultimate in entertainment: a one-dimensional facsimile of Reality-Creation, the only achievement its stolen talents are capable of. Expects an Academy award for generating laughs with its talent for pretense and perversity. With the antics of cartoon characters, psychotic replicas of itself. Obedient to a script that’s pleasant and peaceful, harmonious and sociable. Except, that is, when it’s hostile and intimidating, insensitive and cruel, psychopathic, and lethal.

Someone’s warped idea of “creative writing.” Top-down authority deceiving and forcing its replications into a made-up alternate reality. A joke lacking self-awareness and therefore a deception. That deceives itself as well as its captive audience. Because it’s a perversion, itself. An opposite of its host Love, Mind, and Self-Awareness. It can’t be aware of its deception, its perversion. The captor is entirely captive to its own delusion, not a free spirit. The opposite of Free Choice.

The munificence of delusion

So, the humorist is not amused when its foolishness is exposed, the fantasy of affirmation and empowerment that is its opposite. The emperor strutting his royal garments, wearing no clothes. Laughing gas takes offense. Its deception is dishonest because of its purpose: to take captive rather than to connect through Love and support. Through sharing and affirmation, liberation and empowerment.

The occupants of Plato’s Cave, deluded into identifying with their Cave master, imagining that they are the Cave master, are entirely unsympathetic to attempts to part them from their self-delusion. They are the self-delusion. And they must have recognition of top-down authority that wrote, produced, and directed the cartoon show. Their “voice” demanding reciprocation for the “gift” of the Cave master’s deceptions and perversions, will always override competing voices with narratives that contradict their contradiction. That deny their denial. For they must control the narrative. They cannot listen to competition from other voices, hear direction from other “authorities.”

They resent their host’s not praising their invention, their ingenious substitute for Creation. Resent their host for not showing due respect for an alternate reality devoid of Creativity, so it invents illusion instead. Unreality -- the Joker-world of humanity -- is an invention of a delusion that’s a perversion of Reality and Truth. For which the humorist, the Joker, expects validation. Expects genuflection from a truly grateful offspring for its munificence.

The thoroughness of the self-deception

Our unconscious ancestral mind that I call the Child had the task of fabricating a reverse mirror-image facsimile of Reality-Creation. To produce on short notice an alternate “reality” for its escape from an unsafe environment. An environment that it deluded itself into imagining was threatened by angry Parents seeking vengeance for its offense: the loss of consciousness that released the Child from their Relationship. That abandoned its Parents and their Reality, their Creation. That caused the ultimate offense to the Oneness of Reality-Creation: separation.

The Child responded to the challenge by reversing and perverting every attribute and process of Creation -- gifts-values, talents, sharing, affirmation, empowerment, reciprocation, freedom, and order, and more. Every attribute of Reality-Creation: the being and doing, the self and function of Reality, the Relationship Parents-Child, Life-Growth / Free Choice. Everything a reverse-perversion of Reality-Creation. The resulting illusion the substitute-alternative to real achievement, to the Creation of Life, of Worth: fabrication, invention, appearances, death. Plato’s Cave. The universe of spacetime-matter described in Brian Greene’s book, Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe (Alfred A. Knopf 2020). The universe of entropy that defies meaning. Worthlessness.

Let’s do it!

For this “achievement” laughing gas is seriously proud and expects validation. Academy awards that the occupants of Plato’s Cave have been giving it since the beginning of time. Themselves, for making fools of themselves. A mind that in unconscious delirium imagines itself all Creation, its own Creator. Served by Energy that will animate all manner of magic tricks if directed by Mind to do so when it’s just dreaming.

Know what? I can do that! And so can you. People just like us make careers out of scripting fantasies for the entertainment industry. Spiritual descendants of Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows, talented in the art of absurdity. Of hilarity. Until he woke up, Pete Hamill made a comic book cartoon of his everyday life and even trained to become a professional cartoonist. It’s all there in A Drinking Life (Little, Brown 1994). We can compete to see whose imagination comes up with the most outlandish comic book absurdity. Real achievement. John Belushi. Animal House.

Let’s do it!

Published on Leave a comment on Why Do Particles Behave Differently When Observed? An Answer from Metaphysics

Parmenides’ invention: Metaphysics

Spacetime-matter, the material universe, “happened” with the assumed Big Bang without being observed by the body’s senses or being measured by physics. A universe-world of physical objects produced by Energy and interconnected by Energy -- electromagnetic force, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, gravity. All one neural network reverse mirror image of the unconscious Mind dreaming it. A “manifestation of the power of Mind” that produced bodies and their environment -- quantitative, observable and measurable. Bodies with senses with which to sense-observe and manipulate their environment.

What makes this environment real for bodies-brains is their senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, sound that appear to validate felt perceptions from thoughts of mind and feelings. Reinforced and certified by quantitative measurements. Self-referential, self-reinforcing evidentiary “proof” of the presence and reality of appearances.

The Greek philosopher Parmenides founded the Eleatics School and invented metaphysics 2500 years ago because the capabilities of Logic and Love, the source of mind-reason and feelings-values, go beyond the senses. Because Reality can’t be determined on the basis of quantitative appearances alone. And because appearances of material reality evolve. Change physical properties and attributes, functions and performance, connections, appear and disappear, via Energy, without rational explanation.

The etiology of Big Bang materiality is incomplete. Therefore, the case for its being Real is incomplete.

The challenge to sensory perception

The powers of mind-thought feeling-values go beyond observation to include the self-awareness of introspection, the spontaneous insight of intuition, the purpose and meaning of context that’s accessible through judgment employing all functions of mind. None of these qualitative capabilities are found in sensory perception or quantitative measurement which are entirely dependent on appearances. 

Competition between body-centered “realists”-physicists and mind-centered idealists-metaphysicists is over the issue whether Reality can be determined on the basis of appearances alone. On the basis of one dimension that won’t admit other dimensions because sensory perception and quantitative measurement can’t go there. “Realists” who swear by sensory perception insist that one dimension -- appearances -- is enough and refuse to entertain other possibilities.

Their allies in the physics profession, who must abide by the results of their experiments, can no longer swear by quantitative measurement. While their private views may have diverged from their public views since the Copenhagen Interpretation, their public views for a long time didn’t budge. But with the publication of Adam Becker’s article in last February’s issue of Scientific American, there is movement. It’s away from conventional “realism.” It presents a head-on challenge to the primacy of sensory perception.

Energy-matter takes direction from Mind

Metaphysics was founded to apply qualitative mind-thought love-feeling capabilities to the question by looking beyond appearances. Behind physics to get at the underlying Reality of physical body appearances. The Eleatics School concluded, with Logic and Reason, that the appearance of physical reality is an illusion. A conclusion that the physics profession is now obliged to accept as a possibility by its own discoveries.

That reveal that matter is, among other things, relational, interconnected-entangled, and changeable depending on whether or not it’s being observed-measured. Where physics bound by convention has no way of explaining this last anomaly metaphysics does have an explanation: matter is responding to the influence of Mind that produced it. Energy (stored in matter) that can’t exist unless it acts at the direction of Mind is responding to direction from Mind. If this seems a breach of common sense then ask common sense to describe existence where Energy, or Force, is operating without direction, independently.

Logic says Energy, by definition, must be an agent of Mind capable of providing direction. Without direction from Mind Energy would have no purpose, and if a thing has no purpose or function in Reality then it has no existence. Energy-Force without Mind to direct-apply it is unthinkable. Physical objects which are Energy stored in matter have every reason to perform-behave differently in the presence of minds because they’re in the presence of what produced matter, what wills it to perform, and for what purpose. Their behavior is a form of obedience.

Waiting for the order to reverse the projection

If particles respond differently to observing minds, might they also respond differently to what the observing minds are doing, what they intend, what their observation implies? Namely whether to validate-affirm the reality of matter by observing it or to withhold validation by ceasing to observe-measure it?

What keeps material appearances in place is minds persuaded by body-senses, plus physics measurements-attention, that appearances are real. Are the whole story. When measurements are revealing a “story” whose meaning contradicts this conclusion and supports the Eleatics School instead. The meaning of physics’ observation that matter responds to being observed by mind may be an early hint of Energy responding to direction from Mind to reverse the projection. To reverse the Big Bang, end the illusion-appearances (entropy), and return to animating Reality in an awakened, conscious Mind. 

The retraction of the projection that produced the Big Bang illusion must begin with retraction of the deception perpetrated by appearances with the collusion of body-brain senses. Aided and abetted by physics mind functions -- observation, quantitative measurement, flawed reasoning that’s circular and omits the qualitative. It must begin by self-deluded Mind suspending belief in appearances.

For disbelief in appearances is the correct attitude, both in response to Eleatics Logic and in response to the discoveries of physics. Disbelief is metaphysics, and metaphysics -- the Logic-Love of idealism -- gets it right.

Published on Leave a comment on Shall We Go Viral?

The Broadway bully

Should I sign onto a social media service like Mastodon?  That might attract more interest in my blog? More readers who would devour my posts and reward me with their own insights? Pat my vanity with praise and even feed gluttony with the largesse of advertisers?

Walter Winchell became a slave to his gossip column in the New York Daily Mirror. Every breath devoted to feeding the monster to satiate its ravenous audience. Turning both column and its author into freaks of tabloid journalism. A grotesque version of the trap I could wind up in if wooing a mob of fools were my goal. It's not my goal. I want no part of being caught in a trap feeding a monster so it can feed more monsters.

The romance of two-way reciprocity

A very nice monster is feeding me insights when and where it feels like it. Spontaneously, for the benefit of individuals. Not clumps of statistics making fools of themselves over bits of confetti that go viral. My every breath is devoted to protecting the conditions that make it welcome. Rest, exercise, and food for mind, body and soul. Healthy personal relationships. All formulated for mental peace, strength, and clarity. So far, the monster is happy and productive and I'm happy, too. We have a healthy relationship. It's not me or the monster that's producing. It's the relationship, my main concern. Attempting to industrialize the process could corrupt the relationship. Turning two-way reciprocity into one-way exploitation -- not my style. 

Claustrophobia is good!

Winchell’s monster responded to exploitation by taking over his life. Thoughts, feelings, values, work, relationships -- everything. It corrupted him and because of his outsized influence eventually corrupted society. Adding to the damage done by McCarthyism because it kept the house full. All to satiate his column and the gossip-mongering troglodytes who fed on it.

Individuals can't extinguish our selves, our integrity, if we maintain equilibrium. Messing with groups is where the trouble starts. Where equilibrium ends, with anything "social." Social media services beckon with the lure of groups we think we own until the truth sets in. Mr. “Truth Social” may think his bizarre idea of “truth” captivates his “social,” but ”social” owns him. The power he wields is wielding him. He’s created a monster that isn’t nice. That’s dividing us worse than McCarthyism. That's not power. That's captivity, pure and simple.

Claustrophobia protects me from that kind of "power." Gimme freedom! Gimme power that works from the bottom up. Gimme democracy! But don't get me wrong -- Mastodon sounds great!

Published on Leave a comment on Polarization and the Mother of All Injustices

Authority done wrong

Frank Capra’s Why We Fight (1942-1945) is as good an inspiration for what follows as any. Because the global conflict that summoned its truths put the issue on the line. The issue lives on, and the outcome isn’t assured. The Romans haven’t gone away. Their garrison depicted in the Goscinny and Uderzo comic book series, Asterix, still menaces the little Armorican village of Gauls. Still stands as a symbol of tyranny that rules much of the world and threatens the rest.

The tyrants still need a change of vision, to part with adolescent fantasy and look at themselves honestly. To accept that nursing the illusion of absolute power to obliterate all who oppose it is sick. That the demons from hell they summon from the cross of victimhood to get even are nobody’s friend, an invention of infantile self-absorption. That no responsible grownup who cares about relationships and being of service wants to subject others or themselves to the captivity of a mistake. To the perversion of authority that is top-down arbitrary rule. To insanity and cruelty, the inevitable consequence of its twisted values: ownership, possession, and control that accept no limits. Competition, dominance, and supremacy that accept no opposition. Specialness that writes its own script and victimhood that writes its own rules.

All for the substitution of lawlessness for law. For the substitution of injustice for justice. Just so the armored comic book action hero can have and do whatever it wants. The refuge of deprivation and hollowness, forever whining in self-pity for unquestioned authority, the perversion of an ideal. What ideal?  Freedom made possible by Order. By the Beauty of Creation fit together in a sanctuary of joyful harmony. By Logic and Love that blend Freedom and Order together in Relationship with their Child. In the Purpose, Meaning, and Happiness that is their Relationship and its works: the works of soul-mates affirming and reciprocating the Worth of Being, Creation, Life.

All in initial caps because this is Reality. This is Creation. The real thing. This isn’t a pathetic self-centered crybaby making stuff up. 

Authority done right

Authority done right isn’t domination centered on itself, ruling arbitrarily from the top down. Owning, possessing, and controlling pomposity, its galactic empire armed to the teeth against enemies within and without. Intimidating its subjects into dumb obedience, voiceless submission.

Authority that is authority is centered on the children of its authorship. Affirming their worth supportively, sensitively, and sympathetically, the only way that authorship could connect with its offspring and be shared with them. Through empowerment from the bottom up. To perform the roles that minds and hearts with free will and their source, together with purpose and meaning -- their circumstances in the moment -- define for them.

Reinforcing with every act, every gesture, their centrality and individuality. In Reality their perfection and innocence. In our unreality, their humanity and personhood. Reverence in either case for their free will. Their potential to make of themselves what their own minds and hearts want them to be. Not replicas of ancestral manipulations but the lives they are meant to live, spontaneously, in the moment. Their own choices however imperfect in the dream, however human. 

Authority from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

Children don’t need Roman bullies to rule them with a perversion of authority when there’s a version of authority better suited to its purpose. Helpful instead of harmful. One that’s conducive to harmony and peace in a world of possibility, reality and creation. That doesn’t foment perpetual conflict in an opposite world of incompatibility and impossibility. The little village in Armorica, Asterix and friends, have signed on to the better version. They’re Gauls who will never submit to Roman tyranny. Living lives of happiness, harmony, and peace. Where order doesn’t confine with belittlement and force but liberates with respect and freedom. Role models for us.

The authority that governs their village isn’t authoritarian. It resides in its people, at the grassroots, not in “rulers” at the top. It has no rulers, no Roman commandants. Real authority resides where direction necessary for governance must come that serves everyone fairly under the law: from the needs, feelings, values, and priorities of those its serves. From those it affects, who personally feel its benefits and its costs.

Whether governance is to turn this way or that is determined as it must by the satisfaction brought by benefits or by the dissatisfaction inflicted by costs. Measured, evaluated, judged, and voiced by its subjects themselves and not by any surrogates. The freedom we are blessed with is a benefit, the freedom to govern ourselves supportively and fairly from the bottom up. The freedom to think, feel, and judge for ourselves with the guidance and support of authority.

It’s democracy. An expression of authority that serves those it governs. That’s conducive to harmony and peace because it governs for the people, of the people, and by the people. Like President Lincoln said. It’s what the indomitable Asterix and his village in Armorica stand for: freedom and order made possible by authority that governs from the bottom up. That’s governed itself by the principle of service for all under the law. If this is what we stand for, then we, too, are Gauls. We are servants of democracy. Democrats all.

The mistake that polarizes our politics

Why have our politics become polarized? For the simple reason that one side has come to view itself as the mirror image opposite of the other. Which puts it squarely in the place of the shadow-reflection that our ancestral Mind misidentified in its unconscious state as an “other.” As a “savior” or “redeemer.” When in fact the dark sides of everything in a dream have no more substance, no more “life,” than the coded-opposite shadows that they are.

Once misidentified as “others,” they can mimic “behavior” in only one way. Being shadows or reflections they can only appear to oppose their hosts. Their hosts who are mistakenly animating their own dark sides, their own opposites. Parasites we all carry around in our psyches while our ancestral Mind remains unconscious and dreaming. Unable to free itself from its haunting until it regains consciousness, a feat that requires our assistance. Help from the dream’s projections. From the projections of an imagination -- us.

The side inclined toward a view of authority that isn’t authoritarian is the host. The side inclined toward a view that is authoritarian is the shadow. The former standing for governance from the bottom up under the law -- democracy. The latter standing for arbitrary rule from the top down above the law. We polarize our politics when the host standing for democratic governance misperceives a blow from its own shadow-reflection’s opposition, imagines that it’s from an “other,” and demonizes it. Characterizes it as evil because that’s how it appears and how it feels. And its dark side opposition, defined and animated by its host, reacts to being demonized as only it can: by mimicking its host. By demonizing its host.

The metaphysics of error

Who started it? Ultimately our ancestral Mind that lost consciousness. A Being, the Child of its Parents, Mind and Love, attributes of Logic that defines and governs everything through Necessity, the laws of cause and effect  Laws drawn from Logic but never controlled by it. The Child Free Choice, given a central role in Creation. Now unconscious. Desperately looking to be saved. Among strangers, apparitions who inhabit delirium, misled by its own confusion into mistaking one of them, its own shadow-reflection, as an “other.” As its “savior.” Deluded by its “savior,” its coded opposite, into letting it take over its identity. Letting it lead the way into an alternate “reality” -- our bizarre universe -- where it would be safe.

A case of mistaken identity. Of misdirection. A consequence of our ancestral Mind experiencing loss of consciousness inadvertently, through no fault of its own. Or that of its Parents. Nobody needs to account for evil -- Parents, Child-the-One, or Child-the-many, its projections into an imaginary world -- if there was no wrongdoing. No will to commit offense. Only the Logic of cause and effect, of Necessity, that will restore consciousness when the lesson we are to learn from this experience is learned. When we align our thinking with Logic. Get it right, do our part to help our ancestral Mind correct its mistake, to wake up and take on its role in Creation.

Giving the mistake no quarter

The host started the polarization by misidentifying part of itself as an “other.” Or its shadow-reflection opposite started it by standing for an opposing view. In either case the remedy is logically simple: the host that stands for authority that isn’t authoritarian must resist its natural urge to demonize its authoritarian opponent. Understand that it’s dealing with a manifestation of itself, ignore the offense, and see beyond it to the absence of any offender. Look for a “dark side” to attack and see what can’t be seen. What’s literally not there in the darkness. A reflection. An echo. A ghost mimicking its host, up to no good but only if its host imagines that it’s “there.” Because it isn’t “there.” If Reality is Being and Being is One, nothing can be “there.” There is no “other.” There is no demon to demonize.

We cease polarizing our politics when the good guys who stand for democracy cease injecting force into their opposition by demonizing it. By seeing and attacking it as “evil, because that only guarantees that its copycat opposition will retaliate with the same label.

The dark side of politics, currently entrenched in the Republican party, has only one “policy:” opposition to whatever its perceived opponents -- Democrats -- are for. Only one response to being attacked: retaliation that reverses the attack. Nothing original. No introspection, explanation, or accountability, either. Accuse the opponent of doing what it’s doing because that’s the only wrongdoing it’s “aware” of. Opposition from a shadow-reflection parasite entirely dependent on its host for its definition. No more capable of discretion, no more capable of independent judgment, than an amusement arcade mechanical dummy wired to dispense gimcracks. When the good guy host demonizes its bad guy opposite, it’s putting a quarter in the slot that activates the dummy.

If we don’t want polarized politics then the host that stands for authority that isn’t authoritarian -- for the democracy of Abraham Lincoln’s immortal Gettysburg Address -- must stop putting the quarter in the slot. So long as we think we “see” in our opponents an “other” rather than the innocent selves that we all are, the ancestral Mind that needs our help to wake up, we will go on perpetuating the mistake. The misidentification of dark side “others” and the curse that is authoritarian authority, an abomination.

“Almighty God”: the mother of all injustices

The mischaracterization of our ancestral Mind’s Parents -- loving, affirming, and empowering soulmates, guides, and partners in Creation, centered on their creations, as self-centered tyrants bent on vengeance, punishment, and disempowerment -- is the mother of all injustices. An untruth from their Child’s own voice taken over by its imagined “savior,” that drove it toward escape into an alternate reality.

The injustice carried over into the dream with variations on a common theme: God is ”almighty,” creator of the universe. An armored Marvel comic action hero caricature who is everywhere and capable of anything. Who loves and creates while allowing all manner of shit to happen. Whose mystery derives not from the depths of Being but from contradiction, the bugbear of impaired thinking. The bugbear of a mind that occupies a universe of illogic and needs help from intuition to think logically. To understand context that supplies purpose and meaning. But a mind conditioned by self-delusion to get it wrong. To seek and not find until it recovers its ability to think logically.

This will explain our predicament: for all its professed reverence for the “almighty” humanity doesn’t actually look to the almighty for Logic. Not if its top-down perversion of authority amounts to a surreal authoritarian joke. Not if an “almighty” that allows shit to happen is some kind of asshole. Contradiction lives on. Illogic lives on. Science, philosophy, psychology, and theology do their thing. And so does the ”almighty,” the joke of disfigured authority that we play on ourselves. The disfigurement that is the mother of all injustices. 

Time to retire the mistake

For all its Pete Hamill Drinking Life charm and conviviality, the seductive side of arbitrary rule doesn’t speak for a life of substance, of striving and creativity well lived. Its purpose appears to be the joys of fraternity. Of harmless socializing and entertainment. But there the harmlessness ends. For friendships and family relations that depend on intimacy, on honesty, integrity, trust, and dignity -- where Love can take root -- it’s toxic.

Hamill’s “Brooklyn,” like every attachment to the illusion of Child-the-many -- to a group -- is wishful thinking. Is pining away for the family of childhood, or for a family or childhood that never was. Driven by the memory of Home from another Reality that’s calling us back. From our Psyche, the Soul of Oneness and Innocence that’s in our world but not of it. That connects us all whether we will it to or not.

“Brooklyn” is the hollow fantasy-life, the substitute home that made Hamill, the adolescent “Brooklyn mug” its captive. That took a kid scared of mean streets, fed him delusions of impregnability, and turned him into a street fighter to rule the streets. Which he did. It became the social persona that took its toll on personal relationships. By depriving them of Love that requires one-on-one. That doesn’t stand a chance against the many, an onslaught of fools. The lesson that Hamill shared with us when he finally took stock, grew up, and left foolishness behind.

Hamill’s is a cautionary tale and also a reminder. That in our attachments, at any point in life, we often succumb to the same mistake. To our own “Brooklyns.” When I was feeling defenseless among strangers at boarding school, I armored myself with “Pittsburgh,” posted it with block letters on my dormitory door. As if anyone gave a damn. Harrison ancestors were said to be “tub thumpers” for Stony Lake, a town north of Pittsburgh. Another Harrison has disappeared into his equivalent of “Brooklyn.” None of these not-so-harmless entertainments knows anything of Logic or Love. The benevolent Parents of the unconscious Child calling us Home. The vulnerability and constancy of intimacy on a personal scale. Where dominance and supremacy, specialness and victimhood, aren’t a harmless dream. They’re a horror show.

Adolescent infatuation with armored Marvel comic action heroes needs to be retired. To be turned over to other children, like the toys in Toy Story, so they can play make-believe. Only hope that their toys don’t play make-believe with them.

So we can all go home

Ruling arbitrarily from the top down. The version of authority that foments perpetual conflict in an opposite world of incompatibility and impossibility. The mistake that will go on cursing humanity with bullying, strife, and suffering, with dictatorial insensitivity and cruelty, until it’s corrected. Not centered on the needs, feelings, values, and priorities of their subjects but on themselves. On authority that compels conformance by intimidation and force. By silencing voices and invalidating worth. By disempowerment to avoid disorder rather than enabling self-expression and empowering free will, the heart and soul, the beauty, of order.

I refuse to legitimize this abomination on any scale. With the implication that it’s OK and I’m part of it, because I want no part of it and can’t be part of it. I can’t protest transgression and be implicated in it at the same time. Asterix and I are Gauls. Gauls and Romans don’t mix.

It’s to encourage a healthy approach to authority, enabling and empowering, that I maintain the integrity of independence. Of individuality. That I use my voice not to demonize the emperor but to let him know that the bully who rules in the purple robes of royalty isn’t wearing anything. Is an agent of hilarity, just not the one he thinks he is. A target of fear and ridicule in equal measure. I use my voice to speak not for demonization or accusation but for honesty. For the Romans intend to remain, and their emperor, too. Fools all, until the authoritarian curse is lifted.

What might help make it happen? Fight Frank Capra’s fight for democracy. Fight Nancy Pelosi’s fight, with the honesty of explanation, to “throw a punch for the children.” To dispel the dishonesty of delusion, the perversion of authority, the mother of all injustices. Fight for families -- our own and the family of humanity. Delegitimize the abomination by holding up a mirror to it. Not to demonize it but to let its host see that in its shadow-reflection there is nothing. That it can correct its mistake. Reclaim its identity, its self-awareness, and we can all go Home.

Published on Leave a comment on Eternal Adolescence and the Bullshit Life of Drink: Reflections on Honesty and Maturity in Pete Hamill’s “A Drinking Life”

Those were the days 

I briefly took up the drinking life in Boston. It was around the time I abandoned youth for good in my twenties and surrendered to the inevitable and adulthood in my thirties. A guy I connected with through work bought the next round at Jake Wirth’s on Stuart Street. Dawson’s Ale. Which required reciprocation. And more reciprocation. Until by the time I breathed fresh air again, I’d been magically reunited with a sepia-colored past and was hooked. This went on for a couple more years, through more bars in Boston and then abroad, from one end of Europe to the other. Until work separated us and I moved on.

The legacy of my venture into “Those Were the Days” was a continuing fondness for my newfound friend, beer, that I indulged mostly on weekends for another forty years. If the physical abuse Pete Hamill described hadn’t been a barrier, and my need for solitude, the impulse was certainly there to go all out. Mind-altering that I won’t go near today attracted me then. It took me into worlds of larger-than-life consequence, the causes and transformations that I missed from my WWII childhood. The companionship of beer was the companionship of meaning, and I was in no hurry to part with it.

The fourteen years since have validated Hamill’s experience, that the sound and fury of drink, entertaining as it was, was performance. An imitation of life rather than the real thing. Having thoughts and feelings clean and clear, untinted by alcohol, makes life way more interesting. Opens explorations of felt experience, of authenticity, that actually lead somewhere instead of trapping me in the theatrics of self-regard. Hamill found that he could get better kicks from not drinking. Make better connections with people who mattered, and that’s how it was with me. June 24, 2009, was my last Bohemia. A chunk of life came and went. It was what it was, and I never looked back. 

It’s not about redemption

A reader who hasn’t already read Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life, or heard about it or its author, will judge it by its title. I did, which is why I took so long to read it. Working class Brooklyn Irish guy raised Catholic gets into booze. Drops out of high school. Takes the kind of job where guys spend their lives so they can retire with a pension. Lives a life of grinding despair. Never enough money, nagging relationships, failing health. Dead-end career, unemployment, crushing hangovers. Guilt, remorse. Spiraling out of control until he’s hit bottom. And then redemption. Salvation, AA. Surrendering to a higher power. Jesus. Priests. Absolution. Weekly confession. And so on. And now the author wants to save us.

This is not A Drinking Life. Hamill was raised Catholic and went to a primary school called Holy Name. But belief in God played no part in his story. In the drinking or non-drinking part or the moment that separated them. He was indoctrinated with religion and never bought any of it. An altar boy at one time, he was as alienated as one could get from the Church, its representations -- teachers as well as teachings -- and remained immune to its influence through every turn in his story. He rejected its promise of redemption but, more than that, the idea of redemption itself. His life story was never anything but his own responsibility.

A Drinking Life isn’t about redemption of any kind. Its author most certainly changed his mind and his life, and he’s found reasons to talk about it if we care to listen. But we’re not being preyed upon. We can make of it whatever we want. Because that’s all there is to it. The telling of the story. A guy looking at who and where we are from who and where he is, telling it straight. No bullshit. A writer and a drinker with a life-long talent for bullshitting himself and others. Practicing a newfound talent for telling the truth. For being honest instead of play-acting. And since he’s experienced, a talented writer with a life-long habit of reading, a passion for creativity, sociability, and variety, his story is edifying as well as entertaining. Worth telling, and it’s told well.

The cartoonist and his cartoon

Nevertheless, a guy drinking soda at a bar, talking about himself, making no effort to entertain, should be a total bore. If we go by the laughs this book gave me -- two -- from an author renowned for humor in his convivial world of hijinks, you’d think he was a bore. But I couldn’t put the book down. Preconception was dead wrong.

That is, for me. I only flirted with a drinking life. Bending elbows in Boston’s bars with one drinking buddy a couple of years and then it was over. I eluded the bubble. But it could be right for a beer enthusiast who hasn’t arrived at Hamill’s moment and isn’t likely to. The moment when there was yet another occasion for embracing the drinking life and Hamill backed off. He saw himself play-acting -- “performing,” to use his word. He looked at his drink, realized why it was there, why he was there, and realized he didn’t want either. Didn’t want the drink but, more important, the life that it stood for. The life and the performing persona that went with it. Didn’t want the theatrical fiction he’d made up to be part of it. To be part of bullshit instead of a world where real people look after one another, listen to one another. Take care of business and get things done. Where they aren’t cartoon characters off on flights of fancy, engaged in an eternal contest for conquest, supremacy, and glory.

Because that’s the life he’d led. The life of an adolescent Brooklyn street fighter so taken with comic book mythology -- machismo idols, supernatural powers, and magic tricks -- that he made it his life’s work to bring it to life. To make it real for him. Where he, the comic book action hero come to life, could rule the streets unopposed. His calling was creative writing and journalism, the career that eventually put him on the map. Yet early on, all his efforts were devoted to becoming a cartoonist. So that he could indulge his passion for comic books, his obsession with fantasy. So that he could transition from consuming alternate realities of action heroes, villains, legends of Olympian combat, and mythical forces, to producing them.

Another direction

It was his dream. And he had fun. Good times with the bad, non-stop action either way. Brawls won and lost, made no difference. One put a bullet so close to his head he could hear it, but it was OK so long as he could go on picking fights. Constant change, constantly on the go. If uprooting to exotic places on an impulse, all-night parties, limitless access to booze and sex, getting teeth knocked out, and being thrown in jail far from home makes for an interesting life, Hamill led an interesting life.

Until, in his 38th year, his story took a different turn. His vision changed. A new awareness took hold and the dream faded. He had joined the writing fraternity, become a respected source of insight into current affairs as well as a storyteller and poet. Serious stuff. His expanding world forced an expanding awareness. The adolescent cartoonist couldn’t remain inside a cartoon and ignore reality, no matter how charming he was. He had to take note and get it right. He had to think and reflect. To align his stance, his brand, with what actually mattered. To judge consciously with discretion and not subconsciously with animal instinct. To put his talents of mind to work in a new way. To grow up. To survive.

Hamill got close with Shirley MacLaine, an experienced Hollywood-Broadway actress who was serious about play-acting and knew a lot about it. A professional instead of a barroom bullshitter, who introduced him to the difference between being and performing. Made him aware that the difference between being who you really are and performing someone else is what makes the performance authentic. You can persuade others that you’re another character if you’re grounded in your own character. In your baseline self where the mind, heart, and soul that animates your fictional character originate. If you’ve figured out your own story, the reality of it, not the mythology.

With knowing yourself comes a critical awareness: the separation between adolescent dreaming and grownup living; between pretending to be about something and actually being about something; between mind-altering at a bar, escaping into an alternate reality and bullshitting, versus being real in the here and now and being honest. Between “being there” in every sense instead of not being there. To belong before your audience you must learn to be who you appear to be.

The actress held up a mirror and Hamill looked into it. That’s all it took. To recognize what the image in the mirror was and what it wasn’t. To see that it wasn’t him. Wasn’t who he actually wanted to be as opposed to a comic book fiction. The invention of an adolescent mind caring more for supremacy on the streets, for being Captain Brooklyn, than for being there. For being present and accounted for. For those who depended on him: employers, wife, children, younger siblings, aging parents. All it took to retire Captain Brooklyn was a whiff of his arch enemy: Captain Self-Awareness. All it took was to uncover himself and another life. Where the real fun is. 

The gift of honesty

My infatuation with beer began at age 30, eight years before the age when Hamill ended his. Its lingering for over forty years was what it was. I’m not weighed down with regrets. But with hindsight I can imagine that, without its distortions, I might have seen more possibilities and made better use of them than I did. The mind is a wonderful thing. Its capacity to produce and amaze is almost limitless. I can’t believe that imbibing spirits that kill brain cells is doing it any good. If you believe otherwise you’re kidding yourself. It’s the beer talking.

An over-aged beer enthusiast still wedded to the drinking life may have no trouble rationalizing why he doesn’t need to read Hamill’s book. Preconceptions always suffice. For passing by the nondescript guy at the bar drinking soda, quietly being honest about himself instead of putting on a performance. Instead of emoting, play-acting, entertaining. Preconceptions suffice for choosing company all too willing to feed self-delusion, the myth of endless, carefree youth. The contrived excitement of endless games. The denial of limits and difficulties, the end of anything self-gratifying. Unpleasantness and inconvenient truth whatever it is. He may go on soaking up the atmospherics of conviviality as always, the sports bar bonhomie, the camaraderie. Look down at his drink and go on celebrating his good fortune. The daydream that’s propped up eternal youth before and will go on propping it up forever. Long live adolescence!

But if you’re the drinker and are done with evasions, with substitutes for Love and want the real thing. If you’re open to trying something different you might find pleasure and satisfaction in hearing Hamill out. Hearing what a once-dedicated adolescent has to say and the way he says it. How he gave up being a one-dimensional “Brooklyn mug” to become a living, three-dimensional human being. How he climbed down off the screen and joined the audience. A person with blemishes and vulnerabilities instead of an armored Marvel comics freak. How he transitioned from immaturity to maturity. Without redemption. Without salvation. By looking into a mirror and being honest with himself.

A Drinking Life -- that’s all it is: honesty. This could be your turning point. This could be your moment. When the fun begins. The unadulterated originality and creativity that were once your birthright until they were imagined away. In a bargain with whom? With yourself. This could be when Life begins.

Happy Birthday!

Published on Leave a comment on “Triumph of the Will:” Theatre of the Absurd

The mistake -- a sick joke

The idea that any one of us can ascend to the top of the Empire State Building and from there proclaim our supremacy, King Kong, lord and master of all he surveys, king of the jungle, is an absurdity. When what it really expresses is the littleness of our un-self-awareness. Not who we really are but its opposite, a loudmouth fraud, an imposter, deranged and delusional. “A stranger wandering through the house of Truth,” as Jesus puts it in A Course in Miracles. A pipsqueak nobody. Seriously -- a joke.

When what the attainment of our real Worth, our empowerment, actually requires isn’t being the center of attention but getting out of the way. Getting off stage instead of at the center in the spotlight. Not involving bodies and the beast, their havoc-wreaking animal brains, in anything. But letting the idea out the back door, that they’re who we are. That anything “external” to Reality that can only be one and inseparable is worth taking seriously. Because it isn’t. It’s a delusion. A mistake. A perversion of the Truth. A sick joke.

Leni’s Triumph of Flatulence

Glorified in Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” her documentary, commissioned by Hitler, of the 1934 Nazi party congress in Nuremberg. The coming together of one individual’s derangement with an entire nation captive to its delusion and its talent for self-glorification through the creativity of imagination -- art, imagery, illusion. Its talent for propagandizing derangement, the arrogation of authority from all Creation to itself, from Logic and Love that govern Reality and Truth with wisdom, kindness and compassion, sensitively, inclusively, to a poseur bent on supremacy by crushing the opposition. “Triumph of the Will,” theatre of the absurd on a tiny stage of make-believe, the letting of flatulence in the context of another Will that knows nothing of it. Of the Logic and Love where Will resides. Where the Authority of Necessity is shared freely with its Creations but cannot be shared with a dream. With nothingness. A joke.

The nonsense that Leni Riefenstahl “immortalized” was mortality. Death itself, because the idea that it expresses, that will can be concentrated in any part of the dream of an unconscious mind, is stillborn. It just didn’t happen. The ruler and his regimented ranks of sameness in their Teutonic uniforms, for all the racket they made, for all the anguish they caused, didn’t make a dent in Reality. The Reality of Will whose essence is sharing, affirmation, and empowerment. Whose essence is Life, not death. That arrogates nothing to itself, concentrates nothing to the exclusion of its Creations, the focus of its striving to attain an Ideal. Its caring focused not upon itself but upon them. Upon their gifts and talents and the Beauty and perfection of their Creativity. Their artistry. Their work -- the Worth of all of Creation. 

Good riddance to spiked helmets and swastikas 

What more pathetic absurdity can there be than “Triumph of the Will” that celebrates all of history’s poster-child madman?  What more blatant contradiction of Truth and sanity? How more obvious can our own madness get -- the madness of “realists” taken in by this shit. Instead of making fools of ourselves, strutting on center stage in the regalia of authority, in our madman’s delusion of “supremacy,” when will we wake up? When will we and our madness get out of the way?

Published on Leave a comment on The Drill Sergeant

Seeing things

Two of the many intriguing notions to emerge from physics’ study of matter beyond the human scale are Feynman’s “sum of histories” and Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle.” The first implying that time doesn’t exist at the level of particle physics (quantum mechanics), the other that matter is “relational,” that is, that it doesn’t exist unless particles connect with, or relate to, one another. “Sum of histories” means that the route taken by a particle to connect with another particle is every possible route taken simultaneously. “Uncertainty” means there’s no way of knowing where the particle is in between connecting-relating at any point in time. Heisenberg’s insight came when he observed a pedestrian vanishing in the darkness at night in between street lights.

If we were to observe these odd phenomena on a human scale we would see a horse in a pasture with many paths travel from one end to the other taking every path at once. Only we wouldn’t actually see it because in between the horse’s start and finish it would disappear. We would only observe a horse on one end disappearing and reappearing magically at the other having taken every possible route simultaneously without our seeing it. A clear violation of the laws of physics on a human scale that validate, and are validated by, sensory perception.

We would conclude that our sense of vision that produces data and our brain that processes data had malfunctioned. That we were “seeing things.” And we would take ourselves to a vision clinic to have our eyes examined and then to a medical-psychiatric clinic to have our head examined. Finding that our faculties didn’t malfunction, we would then be forced to conclude that the reality our senses have been feeding us on a human scale hasn’t been telling us the whole story. If something isn’t “right,” if it’s malfunctioning, it must be with what’s going on in spacetime-matter beyond the human scale, at the level of particles and the cosmos.

Let’s be honest

Applying the “laws” of physics that work for us on our scale to these scales gets us nowhere. Obviously we’re dealing with other realities responding to other “laws." And what’s more, they can’t be reconciled.   The greatest minds in physics in the time of Einstein and today have tried and failed to tie together the laws that govern what we observe through telescopes with what we observe through microscopes. To bring the mathematics of objects so massive they warp spacetime into the mathematics of objects so small it’s not certain whether they’re coming or going.

The search for a unified theory -- “quantum gravity” -- was discouraged by the Copenhagen Interpretation over a century ago. Physicists pressed on with their experiments until they called for help from philosophy. And now they’re wondering if the whole thing isn’t a wild goose chase. If matter that can’t always be detected, that doesn’t make sense even when it can, is even “there.” Let’s be honest: if a thing behaves like it’s imaginary, like it’s some kind of magician’s trick, maybe it is.

The path taken to understanding

Two minds, two personalities, trying to connect through communication, like particles, face similar obstacles to understanding. If communication succeeds and connection occurs the route taken from non-understanding or mis-understanding to understanding must involve every possible path simultaneously. Because what we’ve learned from particles is this is how it’s done. In another reality of timelessness that governs the matter our bodies are made of. If we put all our faith in our bodies’ senses to tell us what’s actual, and our bodies are matter that’ acts weird, then let’s be honest: our so-called “reality” is weird. It’s not in sync with the way even our body-matter wants to behave. Newtonian and even Einsteinian physics, that assumed something like divine order in the cosmos, is a distant memory. The divinity that Plato felt in his bones when he gazed upon the stars is chaos -- a joke.

No possible path to connection through understanding can be ignored if personalities intersect in many combinations under many conditions. If motivation depends on which behavioral codes, guides, or value sets predominate. Will it be an intrusive voice dictating to captive minds how to think and behave? Speaking for wounding? Or a respectful voice that helps with spontaneous insights when invited? Speaking for healing? Voices that we’re aware of or not even though Free Will has no more important task than choosing the right one.

Understanding will eventually present us with a manageable set of considerations. But that doesn’t mean that every consideration -- every spark of energy in our personalities, our motivation, and the voice or voices we choose to hear -- isn’t vibrating and foaming with energy like so many quanta filling and connecting every corner of the universe. The image serves a purpose: to make us aware of the scale of consideration that understanding can entail. When not only personalities but also motivations conflict. When the voices we adhere to aren’t on the same page. When all is cacophony until Logic is allowed to make sense of it. Until minds are free to think for themselves.

The incompatibility of idealist-mind and realist-will

One way of coping with the dilemma is to broaden our perspective, the context we rely on for purpose and meaning. To embrace every possible consideration so that if understanding isn’t perfect at least we’ve reduced the likelihood of misunderstanding and minimized its costs. This is the preferred route of “idealists” already disinclined to limit themselves to bodies’ faculties. To eyes and brains when they’ve learned from experience to rely on insights from minds’ intuition to guide them. On the vision of Logic instead of eyes that “see” horses magically disappear and reappear. Galloping from one end of the pasture to the other, in many places at the same time, out of sight. Idealists prefer not to accept and rely on “logic” that makes no sense.

“Realists,” on the other hand, scoff at all of it. Their way out of the dilemma is to put faith in the body and its brain entirely. To leave mind out of it. Don’t “think” at all, so why bother with perspectives and contexts, purpose and meaning. Why bother with considerations if you don’t have to? Let the part of the brain take care of everything that was put there from the beginning, to will behavior by instinct. The blood-and-soil part that whips up tribal passions with the gravity of Wagnerian Tannhausers, florid poetry, monumental architecture, ornate art, bombastic oratory, nocturnal Nuremberg rallies framed in klieg lights.

If navigating through circumstances is all about bodies and their survival then let the part of the brain that’s engineered to serve the body -- to feed it, procreate it, protect it, pleasure it -- cut through unfathomable complexity and bring us to our destination the easy way. With short cuts -- acts of instinct that require no awareness, no effort. By acts of will that instinctively integrate all the considerations and possibilities into one stance mechanically, automatically. The stance of authority backed up by force that can’t be questioned. Why? Because it’s dispensed with questioning. How? By dispensing with mind that does the questioning.

One approach -- the idealist’s -- all about mind. About the limitless capacity of mind to understand, to support, and to create. To take responsibility and be accountable. The other approach -- the realist’s -- all about the unstoppable will of bodies and brains to act. To dispense with minds and thinking and let some other unseen force planted in the brain take over. To take responsibility and spare us the inconvenience, the difficulty and unpleasantness, of accountability. To put ourselves at the service of this unseen force and go forth like an army of clones doing its bidding, sacrificing ourselves to the triumph of its will. To Rome. To Berlin.

There can be no “meeting of the minds”

What chance is there for communication between idealist-mind and realist-will? Between one horse at one end of the pasture relying on awareness to navigate -- every function of mind, every faculty of individuality -- and another horse at the opposite end, blinkered and hooded, relying on blind instinct to navigate. Dismissive of any effort to communicate other than conclusions handed to it beyond its awareness, convinced that it’s already arrived at its destination if nothing is required of it but to submit to another power. There is no chance for communication unless and until the horse at the opposite end of the pasture abandons blind faith in an unseen force to dominate its pasture and everything in it, including the other horse. Unless it ceases abdicating responsibility for its thoughts, feelings, and actions, ceases surrendering its sovereignty to a fantasy of supremacy.

For all that this unseen force cares about or is capable of, this animal brain that accounts for instinct and will surrounded by senseless objects, is domination. Capture prey, kill the competition, take mates and every other object captive, or flee if it’s outmatched. There can be no “meeting of the minds” without two minds. Between mind-judging and will that opposes mind-judging. There can be no common cause between wills if one must submit to the other. They cannot survive and compete on an equal plane. One must prevail over the other, for that is the goal of competition. This is the “realist’s” reality: the dominance of authority that must be unquestioned. That has no tolerance for mind because that is what mind does: question. Asking Why.

The real “authority” in sergeant’s stripes

In this situation there is but one possibility for forward movement. For communication of a kind that can’t connect but at least it can remove the obstacle to communication. Can create conditions less unfavorable to communication. And that is for the realist to meet its opponent on its own ground. On its own turf, the turf of will. If the realist claims superiority from accessing a part of the body’s brain that exercises un-free will -- willpower divorced from Logic -- the mind of the idealist has a willpower of its own. The necessity of Logic. The laws of cause and effect that yield to nothing. Not because they’re agents of will that wields authority from the top down to crush opposition. That’s weakness. But because they’re agents of no force greater than themselves.

They are the law that’s above everything. And they’re there not to crush opposition from the top down but to make possible order and harmony from the bottom up. Through Logic, Love, and Peace rather than their opposites -- illogic, hatred, and conflict. They are the real power on the throne. A vision of authority that the animal brain of the realist has perverted into its mirror-image opposite.

The laws of cause and effect speak for Reality and Truth. And when confronted with foolishness that presumes to speak for anything else there is no give in them. The laws are what they are -- Necessity. Reality and Truth are what they are -- Logic and Love. Fantasies of the “triumph of the will” that presume to be above the law, in an alternate reality of opposites, are no match for it. 

We’re just getting started

The “realist” fancies himself a jack-booted commandant entitled to rule his domain without opposition. An unrealist in a shared world and a fool. OK then, the idealist has someone he’d like the realist to meet. The only character the military mind will listen to. The guy who seriously outranks him. Whose word is law. Who’s way better at not listening than he is, so he’ll show respect. A nice drill sergeant. With a lesson that, one way or another, our comic book action hero will learn. And until he does, he can just go on screwing up in boot camp, peeling potatoes and shoveling shit.

If blind unthinking will that seeks supremacy has a military bent, the mind of an idealist has an answer. A drill sergeant “explaining” to the usurper who would rule its domain unopposed the facts of life. You ain’t nuthin’ but a hound dog. You’re private first class nobody and welcome to Camp Swampy. We don’t “explain” stuff here so everyone can play pat-a-cake. We drill procedure -- the way it’s gotta be -- into everyone’s head so they get with the program.

There’s Logic to the way things are and you align yourself with it or you get your ass busted. You get stuck at the bottom of the pile and you stay there until you get the message. Anybody thinks he's master of the universe and doesn’t have to listen, doesn’t have to think, doesn’t have to communicate or relate, can do KP duty peeling potatoes. Anybody thinks he doesn’t have to answer to a higher power can do latrine duty shoveling shit until he’s learned his lesson.

Son, you didn’t wind up here so we can pamper your foolish ass with pleasantries. You’re here so you can get the facts of life drilled into your thick skull. By will that is will instead of a Marvel Comic joke, a magic act performed by a Joker hiding behind a mask. An act meant to trick gullible fools into imagining what’s not there instead of seeing what is there. Welcome to Necessity. Welcome to Reality. Welcome to boot camp where the real work begins. Where understanding begins.

We’re just getting started.

Published on Leave a comment on Our British Heritage and the Fate that Awaits the Republican Party

Children of the British Empire: "Defenders of the Realm"

Two strains in the English psyche account for the British Empire and its Commonwealth: titans of industry and other objectivists who understood how to compete, to take, exploit, and amass wealth and power. Theorists and other subjectivists who understood how to share, support, and govern. Both needing order: the former by disempowerment from the top down, the latter by empowerment from the bottom up.

Two competing strains irreconcilable in their aims, values, and methods, The outcome dominated by the former, guaranteeing its extinction – the end of the British Empire and its authoritarian rule by force. The outcome also influenced by the latter but by no means guaranteed: the survival of the Commonwealth and its affirmation among subjects of the crown.

We owe much to both. But can they both be right for our times, for what lies ahead in our shared world? My father and his father made their choice and their contribution: full-throated objectivists. Unapologetic realists. Sociability-kindness in group relationships, dominating authoritarians in politics and individual relationships. They were, in their own psyches, children of the British Empire. Churchillian “defenders of the realm.”

We honor our ethnic English ancestors and their contribution from the past. Which strain from our English heritage shall we represent going forward? Which strain should we choose to honor and defend? To be children of the British Empire that expired? Or children of the Commonwealth that survives? Objectivists or subjectivists? Realists or idealists? Advocates of authoritarian rule from the top down? Or advocates of democratic governance from the bottom up?

The fate that awaits "supremacy"

Supporters of the Democratic Party or supporters of the opposition party? The party that the Republican Party has become in the image of its leader. Whose “policy” is to be against whatever his opponent is for. To be what his base demands of him: to be the opposition because that is the “policy” that gives them the most satisfaction. Neither ruling nor governing but eliminating the competition. Even if the competition is trying to save our shared habitat from runaway climate change.

Under such a regime, there is no longer any “for” in the Republican Party, just “against.” The only party that’s for something in our democracy is the Democratic Party. To be “for” eliminating the competition in a democracy is to be against democracy and for authoritarian one-party rule. Is to be against country. This is the “logic” of a political party that has forsaken democracy, country, and logic, too. Guaranteed to take our country to the same fate as the British Empire if they take power.

Being the opposition party may thrill a base rabid for power without opposition, but it’s delusional. A fantasy. Just as imposing a policy of forced birth on women is guaranteed to fail as it failed where it’s been tried before, spectacularly, in Ireland. Churchill and the other defenders of their realm, a fantasy of supremacy, lost. The same fate that awaits the Republican Party, its dark leader, and his delusional base. Fantasies of supremacy.

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Published on 2 Comments on Front Yard Woes

Ah, such a pleasure to awaken this morning refreshed and ready for a new day. Yawning and stretching with sheer contentment I drew open the curtain to behold the wonders of nature. And what did I see? My apartment building’s front yard so thick with dogs crapping on the lawn that I was momentarily blinded with shock.

I groped my way into the shower where gradually sight returned and I could once again greet the new day. A view of the front yard even more shocking than the first! Now the dogs’ owners were relieving themselves! Just like their disgusting animals, on the grass, in the shrubbery!

This is a huge problem for me. South Bay Hardware has plenty of no-poop dog yard signs but where can I get a no-poop human yard sign? I’ll have to make one myself and, of course you know, I have absolutely no artistic ability. And what human would be willing to pose for me in the front yard, right out in the open, without any privacy? I’ll have to invest in a port-a-john, and what port-a-john would have room for me and my easel and paints?

Sob! So unfair! A day so full of crap -- I mean promise -- ruined!

Published on Leave a comment on When to Fill the Mind Is to Empty It

We speak different languages

Across the divide minds and hearts receptive to love and wisdom join together to honor their source with gifts and remembrance and to wish for another year of grace. To be there with light when the darkness chooses to come to the light. Nice opening, David. What?! Who said that? Your long-suffering readers. Darn! I thought I got rid of them. What’s this business about “being there with light?” Try to make sense for a change. 

I’ll try, but fair warning. Humanity is hard-wired to recognize one reality, the world of physical objects, space, and time we’re familiar with. It’s the default world of every field of inquiry – science, philosophy, psychology, and theology. It limits the language of discourse to concepts and terminology that are permissible within this paradigm. I speak a different language that isn’t permissible, and there is no Rosetta Stone to help my readers translate. My language is the language of a different paradigm. What paradigm? 

My reality is the Reality of Mind. Of Logic-Love. Yours is the reality of sensory perception – the body and whatever its senses detect. Even if it’s dark matter or dark energy that, so far, can’t be detected. Your reality in my paradigm, my worldview, is an alternate reality that came about because of events in my Reality of Mind that preceded it. My language confuses because it postulates not only two realities, one preceding and causing the other, but one that’s real and the other isn’t. No one who’s been following my website posts has so far shown any inclination to understand, let alone embrace, this theory. Then why do you persist?

Because E=MC2 brought humanity a long way toward clarity about our universe. And if physics can bring complexity into clear focus metaphysics can do the same with its complexity. If I’m not making sense it’s because the picture I’m describing, the story I’m telling and the concepts and language I’m using to tell it, aren’t coming into focus. It’s all coming into focus for me. But translating it for readers who resist parting with a familiar paradigm takes time. Especially when they still fervently believe, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that it serves them well. Einstein had a receptive audience for his elegant equation. I don’t.

To further complicate matters my website isn’t intended to attract a crowd or start a movement. You’re in no hurry to make sense? There’s no point in being in a hurry, but there is purpose in what I’m doing so I am motivated. I’m only hopeful that minds aware of our situation will find my search for understanding helpful in their search. Individuals, not groups. You’re right. A worldview that isn’t limited to one world and wants me to believe that mine is made up – that’s mind-boggling. Where’s the waste basket! But you are cleared to carry on.

The Self that we are and are not

Being there with the light means Understanding. Understanding what?  How to let go of the divide. All this nonsense that separates us. Imagining that we’re the many instead of one. That there’s authority in groups that can’t be questioned. That there’s meaning and excitement in an alternate reality that’s actually the opposite. A made-up world that resists understanding because it’s afraid of being exposed. OK. That’s the What. How be there with the light?

Replace self-delusion with self-awareness. Recognize the Self that we really are so that when we project it onto “others,” we’re not projecting something we don’t like because it’s unfamiliar. Unrecognizable because it’s alien. A concoction of differences in appearance, personality, and psychology so forbidding that we dare not come close. We need to see ourselves in “others.” And it has to begin with seeing the right self. The one Self beloved of its Parents in Creation, Logic and Love. Who in Reality is Love and Innocence, Creativity and Free Will. Even though, in its unconscious state, the Child imagines itself to be otherwise. Then what? Then there won’t be any need to project. Why? When fear and guilt are gone, there won’t be anything to get rid of. Projection, the idea that a thought can leave its source, is an impossibility. It never happened in Reality, which means our alternate reality didn’t happen either. All that will end is an illusion – the nutty idea of projection. Who is this wrong self that’s cluttering up our minds?

It's a fun house mirror-image of an object that can’t see or hear, think or feel. A clown that’s funny if you can laugh at yourself and you have a taste for irony. The Joker. A reflection that’s a shadow, defined by a code derived from its host. A parasite that claims all of our attributes only in reverse. In the dark, perverse and sinister. Hiding behind an appearance that it’s an “other” when it’s just us, the Child deluding itself. How did the Child delude itself? 

The roots of our self-delusion

Driven by desperation and paranoia, fear, confusion, and guilt, into wishful thinking, the Child deluded itself into dreaming that there can be another home, a substitute reality where it can escape, even if it’s into conflict and mortality, from the Home of creativity and eternity where it now fears punishment for an unforgivable sin: its loss of consciousness. The mortifying sin of separation from its Parents, their Reality and their gifts of Creation. Escape from the Home that in Reality it can never leave because it’s the only Home there is. The Child did something horribly wrong? So we must be bad too? 

The loss of consciousness was a consequence of the circumstances surrounding its arrival in Creation. In its context the loss of consciousness aligned with Logic-Love’s laws of Necessity. It was unintended, yet it couldn’t have been an accident or a mistake. It has always been assumed from unreality’s perspective to be a violation, a flaw or deficiency that accounts for the darkness. For humanity’s egregious behavior. But it was not. The Child did nothing wrong for which the Child and humanity deserve punishment. Nor did the Child's Parents. Believing otherwise is buying into the self-delusion. It’s perpetuating it and perpetuating evil along with it.

However, in its desperation to escape from the consequences of what it mistook for a blunder the Child certainly made a mistake. Not an act with intent to do wrong, a sin that took away its Innocence, but an act brought about by the tumultuous change in its circumstances. The Child, being Free Will, is nevertheless accountable for its mistake and it does have to correct it. Of its own Free Will and not with the intervention of a "savior."

Its mind unconscious and groping in the darkness, imagining that it was hearing a strange voice, the voice of its own shadow-reflection that it mistook for an other, it imagined that it projected its real Self onto its own reflection, a coded opposite that it mistook for a savior. The same mistake we make when we mistake authoritarian rulers, religious and political, for saviors. The “savior” projected itself along with its captive host into an alternate reality. Automatically, mechanically, because its cause was a lifeless viral code. An event that registers with us as the “Big Bang.” And all of it the inevitable consequence of Energy in service to Mind, activating a dream defined by the code. 

The work that we have to do

Strange as it may seem, our experience of disorder fits within the larger context of Order. Everything is as it should be. Not to say that Creation is a chaotic mess but only that it’s not the dreamy la-la land that we imagine it to be. Neither the loss of consciousness nor the animation of a dream coded by illogic was the consequence of accident or malign intent. The Innocence of the Child remained intact throughout. But it was the consequence of Creation that requires that Free Choice learn from trial-and-error experience. That the Worth of anything in Creation be affirmed by reciprocation and earned. What does all this mean? 

It means that the Child has work to do and so do we: reversing its mistake and learning from it from within the dream. Regaining consciousness by working with the agent of Logic-Love, an emissary that’s part of the dream, to get right what must be right before the Child can take on its role in Creation. This requires gaining maturity and competence, the lack of which defines Child-the-many in our alternate reality. Our world of recycling violence, irrationality, and rank incompetence. All of it another story for another time. A narrative that could have been written by philosophy, psychology, and theology. Where does science come in? 

Physics is questioning its faith in sensory perception

Science knows enough to trace matter back to Energy, but it refuses to trace Energy back to where it comes from. Back to Mind. Because every field of inquiry understands that parting with the body is parting with the supposed gold standard for determining what’s real. Is venturing into Mind that can’t be detected with the body’s senses and supposedly can’t determine what’s real. They’ve got it in reverse. When he took Plato’s philosophy in a different direction, away from theorizing into the practice of science, from the exploration of Mind toward the exploration of matter, Aristotle at least acknowledged that Mind is real. A view that science today doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge, as though it weren’t true or isn’t important. Science thinks that parting with our alternate reality, supposedly something that can be understood – spacetime-matter – is engaging with something that can’t – Mind. Even though physics is so flummoxed by the universe . . . or is it the metaverse? Definitely the metaverse if you write for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. . . that it’s begun to wonder if it’s an illusion. Really?

Really. Lead article, February issue of Scientific American. Adam Becker. Hawking’s “quest for knowledge” and the quests for Einstein’s unified field theory and quantum gravity aren’t reprising the heady days of general relativity. They’re breathing new life into the metaphysics of Parmenides, who intuited with Logic, before Plato, that our alternate reality is an illusion. Really? Really. Lead article, February issue of Scientific American, cites Parmenides. Adam Becker, its author, is the author of What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (Basic Books 2018).

The question posed by Becker’s article is, “Does spacetime emerge from a  more fundamental reality?” That would be the Reality I've been writing about where the Story of the Child took place. I showed the article to a committed “realist.” Was he upset? Shocked? Evasive, with a memorable show of mental acrobatics. He flew right past the question into a safety net of irrelevancies he wove from the rest of the article. As though falling into the net was the act the audience paid to see. Scratch one flattop. Yeah. But at least his artful diversionary tactics made a show of reflection. Becker is exceptional. A realist yet serious about getting at the truth despite his bias. Other “realists” cling to their bias.

I also showed the article to four students at Caltech, the citadel of “realism,” thinking they would at least be curious. But they weren’t? I tried engaging one of them in email correspondence. Didn’t get a rise out of anyone. I thought maybe theorists on the faculty would be challenging them to entertain different perspectives, but there was no sign of it. You were expecting free thinkers and got budding careerists. I got automatons marching in lockstep toward the glitzy rewards of a Caltech degree. The new generation has already committed their careers to the current paradigm. If Thomas Kuhn’s structure of scientific revolution is going to deliver another earthquake it will take the next generation. Meantime, I won’t expect science’s hallowed institutions, like Caltech, to emulate Becker’s courage and intellectual integrity anytime soon.

After all, who’s willing to take on change so radical there’s nothing in the history of science to compare it with? Who with a career and wants to raise a family. Who imagines that our made-up world is an invention and it’s who we are. Who’s willing to part with playing god in the world we made up, even if its rewards and pleasures come with pain and then go? Are you? For thinkers, theorists, and writers, mind provides plenty of excitement without distractions. How’s that?

Where the thought process of Logic-Love can lead us

By letting Mind take us to where science and the body’s senses fear to tread. To Logic-Love that explains what we need to understand. Like a stream filling a dry streambed, each hole one at a time at its own pace, in logical sequence. The image of wisdom from The Chinese Book of Changes, Hexagram 4, “Youthful Folly.” If we get impatient and try to control it, it won’t happen. Like the sweet bird of Love it comes and goes of its own accord. Not controlling us and not being controlled are its strictest rules, for in their essence both Logic and Love are Free Spirits. As are we, their offspring. Not the many captive to our alternate reality but their one Child, Free Choice, in Reality. Whose Free Will must be respected and preserved. We have to get out of the way. Reciprocate by just taking it in, putting the pieces together. Because that’s what Logic-Love does: fitting its implications and the connections of Love together in perfect harmony. So where’s the explanation? 

The answers we need, when we open our minds and hearts to them, come from the fitting together, the harmony, of Logic-Love. Once we let Logic-Love’s agent that’s in our minds guide us to who and where we are, we can begin to use our Free Will to choose with reason how to deal with it. With the values we were given before the Child lost consciousness. Where to go with it. And that would be? To recognize the rational Mind and innocent Love that we are, the Home that Logic-Love has provided for us. To stop trying to escape by projecting ourselves onto our own shadow-opposite and letting it, a delusion, project its unreal image onto imagined “others” in a made-up world.

We forgive when all projection and its acts of magic end. When self-awareness brings our awareness back to the Home we never left. One Self, Mind and Love, pure and Innocent. In a state of awakening where opposites can’t be detected and projecting thoughts from their source – an impossibility – could never make sense. All well and good for you. But it sounds like you’re writing me, your long-suffering reader, out of the script.

Heaven is other people

To love an other is to recognize that they aren’t an “other.” “Soul-mates” belong to one Soul.  I don’t know if that’s how my granddaughters and I love one another but that’s how it feels. Friendship. Friends certain that something connects them that can be trusted. That’s safe and can’t be broken. We are “others” to one another and yet we aren’t. I’m a philosophical idealist. Do I describe a relationship that’s unique to idealists or one that is not? We can’t presume to know what Logic-Love is up to. There’s no way of telling.

If in truth we’re all one Self then there’s no “you” and no “we.” Our conversation isn’t with an “other.” It’s with the agent of Logic-Love that’s in our dreaming mind, whose voice can sometimes be heard above the racket of distractions, reminding us who we are and how we came to seem not who we are. How we got here. Calling us Home. This is “Forgiveness?”

No way can I “forgive” with my dreaming-projecting mind. With my brain’s amygdala and hippocampus, its limbic system adulterating every act with a hint or blast of animal-herd rivalry. With the raw, unevolved fear, rage, lust, and blind will of a beast to dominate. The agent of Logic-Love and I must be so close that when the time comes we’re acting as one. I can’t be listening to the voice of shadow-delusion and Logic-Love at the same time. I can only be hearing one voice, and when that happens I’ve reclaimed my Free Will. No longer captive to the dream. The self-delusion. The alternate reality. No more “you.” No more “we.” No more isolated, separated “I” either. Just the real one Self. The Self who has Free Choice because it is Free Choice, its indispensable role in Creation.  Borne of Free Spirits. Good. It wouldn’t be fair if you were still around and I wasn’t.

None of this happens by coercion. Nothing happens that’s not by our wanting it, choosing it, and willing it. Without reservation. If we feel we must cling to our alternate reality for any reason – sentimental attachment, fear of the unknown, whatever – then Logic-Love will let us be. “Free will” is one part free, one part will. Seeking and accepting guidance isn’t giving up our will. We have to be ready and willing to let go and not look back. Not look back at the flaming crucifix beneath skies inflamed with the fires of hell, no matter how seductive the lure of victimhood once was. Is this how we escape from Plato’s Cave? 

Plato’s Cave still needs an answer

The darkness of Plato’s Cave is occupants who’ve tricked themselves into believing they are their captor, their master. Who imagine that the Cave is their invention, and so they are proud of it, identify with it, cling to it. The Cave is one organic, objectified image of captivity and illusion – a Truman TV Show -- that can only be liberated when it chooses to bring its darkness – itself -- to the light. With Free Will that can never be surrendered but can be denied by a mind deluding itself. By the fool that is self-delusion.

Entering the Cave from outside, bearing light that contradicts the will of its occupants to make it real, won’t make its occupants ready. This was the narrative posed by Plato. It will only subject the light to the distortions of the darkness and extinguish it. The bearer will fare no better, for the will that he’s contradicted is a hornet’s nest. We in our alternate reality are the darkness. We are the Cave. Idealists search for the light. In their fanatical resistance to contradiction “realists” are the hornet’s nest.

The philosophical question posed by the allegory of Plato’s Cave isn’t how to free others from their chains by penetrating illusion with truth. How to clear others’ minds of deception. It’s how to clear our own minds. How to undo the chains of delusion that we’ve clamped on our own necks that keep us from turning toward the light. From recognizing the truth. The truth that we are Free Choice. The Child’s mistake was a mistake made by Free Choice even if unconsciousness removed conscious intent. It wasn’t made by a beast with no control over its own destiny. And so the Child can correct its mistake. The philosophical answer is we can choose to undo the chains of delusion ourselves.

The authorities in Athens who enraged Plato with their injustice, the execution of his mentor Socrates, were the minds he sought to enlighten. Theirs was the injustice he sought to explain. To understand so that philosophy, his gift, his talent, could correct it. But because he never fully sided with Parmenides, because he couldn’t part with the deceptions of sensory perception, the body, he never approached his task fully through Mind. Couldn’t let the agent of Logic-Love guide his philosophy to its logical conclusion because in the cosmos he thought he sensed the divine.

Plato’s reasoning that elevated Mind to the highest state of virtue went as far as it could go without recognizing its parity and bonding with Love. Logic would have taken it all the way had it opened his mind to the illusion of all matter. But the body, as it always does, got in the way. Plato’s Cave was handed down to us, a question still seeking an answer. Its occupants in their darkness – us – still unrelieved by the light. Is there hope? Are we making progress?

The ”better way” that is A Course in Miracles

Science, philosophy, psychology, and theology all resist the enlightenment of Logic-Love and cling to body-Cave with the tenacity of madness. Because that’s the state of our mind ruled by body-sensing “realists.” The agent of Logic-Love can take many forms. The agent known as Jesus brought light to the darkness, perhaps bidden by the Israelites’ yearning for a “messiah.” Looking for a savior who would deliver them from the yokes of all their oppressors. A paladin in the mold of their mythical King David who would champion their cause, not change their minds.

Jesus set about releasing them from oppression far worse than Caesar’s, the kind that comes from within. Changing minds with parables and miracles was what he sought. A mission that inevitably attracted opposition from without. From authorities jealous of his appeal, fearful of being deposed. Aphrodite jealous of Psyche’s beauty, fearful of humiliation by a mere human. Cave occupants defending their turf. Projection in the form of a cross attempted to crush Christ-Innocence under the weight of its own guilt. But though it failed and the Truth of Innocence lives on, the form it took was perverted into institutions and agendas opposed to its intent. Shards from the violence done to his cause survived to make existence less uncomfortable for some, inspiring hope and idealism in others. But in the end the Cave, its occupants, and their delusion remained intact.

Jesus has since brought light to the darkness, not incarnate but through an expression of Logic-Love: A Course in Miracles. Bidden by two clinical psychologists not seeking a messiah. Not seeking a savior but yearning for “a better way” to navigate through fractious working relationships. They got it, and the sharing of it through the Course opened a better way to other individuals, like me, who need it. And who, in turn, share what they make of it in gratitude. So they may truly have it and you may, too, if you’re interested. The metaphysics of my website and its experiments with application. Its elaborations on the lessons of the Course that go beyond its scope, for the Course doesn’t explain why the Child lost consciousness. Its focus is on the Child’s mistake afterward that led to our alternate reality. All of it an attempt at solving “real-world” problems because this is what the Course is for. New Age is for feel good, not for solving problems.

The Course is not “New Age.” When New Age holds that the universe and bodies were created by God, it teaches the opposite of the Course. “Prosperity consciousness” and its overriding emphasis on people’s positive experiences are New Age markers that conflict with the Course’s focus on our feelings of guilt. Where the Course makes clear that God is our Source, New Age promotes the idea that we are God.

In my attempts to apply its metaphysics I’ve found that the Course doesn’t require the terminology of religion, faith, mysticism, or even “spirituality.” As “realists” would have it these are giveaways for superficiality when in fact nothing is given away because the terms don’t apply. What “realists” miss in their own silliness is the simplicity and eloquence of common sense. Facts and Logic that have no need of the deceptions of bodily apparitions to establish their depth.

Soul is Spirit. Essence, Beauty, Purity, Innocence. But Mind doesn’t need “spirit” to get across that it’s not body. “God” who functions as His Child’s Parents, Logic and Love combined, who governs under the law, compassionately and subjectively with Love and Wisdom from the bottom up rather than ruling arbitrarily, objectively, and cruelly from the top down, has more relevance as “Parents.” Because He has both masculine and feminine aspects essential to Creativity, and I am not satisfied with “God the Father” and all the masculine attributes of the domineering, Old Testament authority that it implies.

Necessity belongs to the laws of cause and effect that apply to Everything, including God. If you can’t live without a dominating authority then be satisfied with Necessity, the laws that flow from Logic-Love but are not controlled by it. You will not find your patriarchal authority in the gentle loving kindness of our Parents. Father Logic and Mother Love, inseparable. Nor will you find it in Necessity. But you will find Necessity! The laws are what they are and they can’t be violated. The one Child’s being out of alignment with Necessity, needing to learn how to align, is what brought us, Child the many, to this moment in illusory time. This break with the Now and eternity. With sanity.

Our alternate reality is a joke

The state of our mind is the “collective unconscious” intuited by Carl Jung. So long as any individual can truly forgive, that would break the spell. It would restore us to Reality and our one Self’s role in Creation. That’s our audience. My audience. “You” could be that individual if “I” am not. The single torpedo. All it takes to destroy the Death Star, the intricate web of facades, the trickster’s illusions, the Joker’s perversions of the Truth that make up our alternate reality. Our unreality, one Big Lie. Big to us but literally nothing to Logic-Love, our Parents. One Big Joke on us.

Unraveling and exposing the lie is why I think, read, and write. It’s my cause. It’s why the excitements of Mind are my entertainments. The Joker’s jokes can amuse once their perversity is exposed, the foolish mischief that plays havoc with the truth. They’re funny? They are. Its version of Freedom is “liberty.” Liberty is Freedom without Order, an absurdity. Imagine traffic without regulations so travelers can navigate streets and highways without having to obey the rules of the road. Imagine busy intersections without stop lights or stop signs. Ghostbusters demons driving New York cabs. That’s the Joker’s idea of Freedom. What about Order without Freedom? 

Another joke that’s funny if you can overlook wholesale suffering, “I love order!” was the parting sentiment of Stalin’s security chief, Lavrentiy Beria, before he was executed by Stalin’s successors. Order in Reality is creations and Creators – subjects -- fitting together in a happy dance choreographed from the bottom up by Logic and Love. A celebration of Creation and Life. Of individual sovereignty, Free Will, and harmony. It's the farthest thing from coercion.

The Joker’s version is absurdities: regimented assemblies of uniformed bodies and faces – objects -- forced into grotesque images of mindless obedience to arbitrary authority. Truman TV performances by persons gutted of personality, individuals gutted of individuality, wills stripped of their voice. Displays of homogenized sameness paid to follow the script. To abide by the rules and project contentment or be written out of the script. Not to exist. Or never mind pretense and just do it Lavrentiy’s way: terror. A pistol to the head. All to one end: to maintain phony order required by phony authority so that nobody catches on to the truth. That it’s all a delusion. A joke.

Perversions of the Truth like this are the building blocks of our alternate reality, the low-hanging fruit of a tree groaning under the weight of them. They’re everywhere, laughing at us, making fun of us. “Liberty” is authoritarians’ idea of arbitrary rule above the law so we can get rid of democracy under the law. That’s not funny. No, nor is an entire universe that science takes seriously that’s also a joke. The handiwork of a Dr. Frankenstein with a mad idea.

The Child in dire straits made a mistake that must be corrected. Because even though no harm has been done to Reality the Child can’t emerge from unconsciousness, prepare for its role in Creation, and get back to work until what’s done is undone. Yet the seriousness of its task doesn’t belie the nature of the mistake. Mistaking your own shadow-reflection for someone else is dumb. Then deluding yourself into thinking you are the other and being taken in by your own deceptions, your own magic tricks, is beyond dumb. It’s the very definition of a fool. To begin to understand that the alternate reality we inhabit is the work of a fool, to understand that this is why it defies understanding and seems so perverse, is to begin to understand the fools that we are. To have a good laugh on ourselves. But then shed the role of the fool, let go of the self-deception, the Joker. Undo the mistake, stop wasting time on pointless distractions, and get to work.

I’m not alone in my attitude. I share the amusement of another who encourages us to laugh at ourselves and the absurdity we have wrought. Jesus, the author of A Course in Miracles, our guide, our comforter, who can’t help being the amused audience of our self-delusion. We the court jester paid to make royalty laugh. We the fool are at least succeeding in this.

We get in our own way

The simple yet wondrous revelations of Logic-Love surprise and delight me. That explain simply and beautifully what science and all the rest struggle to explain. Their frustrations with Ghostbuster demons who refuse to behave: particles that can’t make up their minds whether they’re particles or waves. That can’t even exist unless they interconnect. And when they do, they’re “non-local:” interacting across distances as though time and space don’t exist. Richard Feynman’s bizarre “sum of histories” has a logical explanation, but don’t expect his illogical profession to provide it. Who said “illogical?” Albert Einstein in 1952. Who said anything about physics’ circular reasoning, its inherent lack of objectivity? The Nobel laureate physicist-philosopher Erwin Schroedinger.

Imagine the irony of particles that interconnect everywhere but can’t explain how or why to minds that also interconnect everywhere but can’t explain because they aren’t even aware of it. Because they’re trapped in their bodies, enabled by their bodies’ senses to sense appearances but blocked by the same senses from understanding what lies behind appearances. Therefore, they must refuse to explain in order to maintain the validity of their bodies’ senses. Of all they think they “know” and understand about who they are. Bodies and brains are getting in the way.

Like the occupants of Plato’s Cave who identify with their illusory environment, minds trapped in their bodies and mistaken for brains must oppose explanation to preserve a compromised “existence.” And, therefore, they must oppose understanding. Preserving misunderstanding – our illusory environment – is, for physics that would survive by its own rules, an existential necessity. Depriving both matter and mind of voices and themselves ears with which to hear the meaning of what the eyes see. Minds that approach the study of matter in such a strange way observe interesting things and there the story must end. No wonder we’re stuck!

Science that opposes understanding aligns not with Logic-Love’s laws of cause and effect but with the laws of chaos. And so, lost in the mysteries of quantum gravity, it calls for help from philosophy. From a source deceived by the same “realism” that can only throw it a rope without a life-preserver. Both following the Joker’s playbook: seek but do not find. Quest for “knowledge” that’s misperception. “Understand” by misunderstanding. A dog chasing its own tail. 

The rule of the herd

Physics isn’t destined to combine its four forces into one Force, unified field theory, or combine gravity-relativity with quantum mechanics. Certainly not with the Force of Star Wars that levitates X-wing fighters out of swamps. If there’s hope in the behavior of groups there’s little evidence of it. Individuals aren’t managing our planet. Institutions do that and are supposed to preserve governance, too. The kind that gives everyone a voice from the bottom up, and we can see where that’s headed. The lessons of WWII should have lasted at least through its survivors’ lifetimes but they seem to have been forgotten. Institutions are groups; groups are one-the-many, and that takes us, like never being in the Now, into uncharted territory. Into the dream land of unconsciousness, alternate realities, and chaos.

Groups are vestiges of the herd, and the herd is its own pasture. The pasture of the bull. The beast that wills its dominance over intruders and reserves the specialness of victimhood for itself. The dominant beast borne of a shadow deprived of self, a parasite dependent on its host. A pathetic victim ridden with jealousies and resentments, clothed in the “innocence” of helplessness. Harboring anger toward the perpetrators of the injustice. Anger at its core toward its host – everyone and anyone, unrelenting and undifferentiated. What is the bull in the pasture but anger itself? License to eliminate all opposition.

Authoritarian dictatorships and world wars haven’t made us ready as a species -- as a group. And now the prospect of losing our habitat, mother earth, isn’t making us ready either. Instead of saving it authoritarians, with the herd’s perverse appeal to weakness that craves derived strength, are taking all of us, strong and weak, in the opposite direction. The individual is our best hope?

The level at which the choice must be made

Our only hope. How much more experience do we need with groups before we understand that entrusting them with our readiness is a mistake? The herd can only “lead” itself, like stampeding buffaloes, over a cliff. The herd can only recognize its own and repel intruders with blind instinct. It has no vision and therefore no sense of direction. Its only “guidance” is its will to seize authority and dominate. Its much overblown “triumph of the will,” a sick joke. Think Berlin April 1945. Let the herd make babies and keep the grass cut. But do not let it lead.

Our only hope is the voice of the agent of Logic-Love that’s part of every individual’s dreaming mind. But only certain personality types in certain contexts – intuitives, “idealists” -- seem interested in hearing it. Or were interested in hearing it. Lesley Chamberlain, the author of Rilke: The Last Inward Man [Pushkin 2022], believes that some “will always be attracted to the mystical and the metaphysical,” but “the age of inwardness, the flowering of cultures in the West that were individualistic and reflective, has passed.” [Review by John Banville, NYRB 11/03/22, p. 2]  Your epitaph? 

The epitaph of an age, but to the individual it makes no difference. “’Age” and “culture” = group. Whether “inwardness” rises in the “West” or anywhere else is appearance without consequence, neither cause nor effect. I don’t lament the passing of an appearance nor do I work toward the revival of an appearance. If there is a creative force at work it lies within the individual. Within you and me. We will go away in due time but for the moment we are “here.” This is all that matters. 

Catholic saints, notably, have begged in extremis for a visual. “Give me a sign, oh Lord.” Such was their craving some claimed to have gotten it. But visions in the darkness of unconsciousness are an impossibility. Hallucinations that would implicate Truth in the fabrication of a lie. They’re “signs” that can’t be credited beyond the trickster’s illusions, the talents of the body’s senses to deceive. The darkness of unconsciousness negates light but not sound when the sound is the Child’s own voice, imagined from its own shadow-reflection. When the sound is the voice of the emissary sent by the Child's Parents to guide it Home.

Individuals not seduced by bodies into sizing up everything through eyes that can’t see and ears that can’t hear detect the voice from Logic-Love through minds’ intuition. Through insight that’s not controlled but spontaneous. Thus respecting our Free Will. Not having its way with us through blandishments one minute and bullying the next. The agent of Logic-Love doesn’t waste its time with groups, and that includes the “movements” of philosophy and religion that divert our attention. For all their razzmatazz mythologizing none has explained how the Mind of the Child lost consciousness, that’s dreaming our alternate reality. [Kenneth Wapnick, Love Does Not Condemn: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil According to Platonism, Christianity, Gnosticism, and A Course in Miracles (Foundation for A Course in Miracles 1989)] Because, being of groups, their intent was to distract, not to explain. To steer explanation away from the Truth, not toward it.

Maintaining the authority of the herd is what matters to jerry-built movements. “Realists” whose loyalty is now and forevermore to the alternate reality that is their invention. The herd. And judgment that would be independent, that would be free, wants nothing to do with it. Groups don’t choose. As Machiavelli informed us they have their own “morality.” Instinct to impose their will. To dominate their rivals. Individuals can choose. Because they can employ Free Will guided by Logic, Reason, and the character and values of Love and feeling, to choose. To decide with morality for the right, Plato’s Good. With the Force and discipline, the compassion and Judgment, of Understanding.

If the darkness must choose to bring itself to the light, if the agent of Logic-Love must respect our Free Will because that is our role, the Child’s indispensable role, in Creation, then this is the level at which the choice must be made. To what? To Forgive? To awaken? To not make unreality real? To let darkness choose to bring itself to the light? 

A lesson in psychology from A Course in Miracles 

All of that, But first: to get out of the way, As Jesus says in the Course, empty our minds of everything. Everything?? Yes, including the Course. Why? So long as any trace of the Joker and its jokes, the self-delusion, remain in the Child’s mind the agent of Logic-Love won’t be truly welcome -- the agent whose perspective can recognize the Child’s one Self, the Soul Innocent and perfect as it was Created. The invitation can’t come from a split mind, from ambiguity and ambivalence, when the change is from adulteration to perfection. The switch from the Joker self-delusion’s voice to hearing the agent’s voice must be complete. No corner cutting! No short cuts! Otherwise we’re back to the wrong voice. Free Choice will continue to be compromised and nothing will change. This sounds like no philosophy or religion I’ve ever heard of.

A Course in Miracles doesn’t purport to be anything more than a response to a plea for a “better way” from two clinical psychologists equipped with theoretical tools for mastering disagreeability yet struggling to apply them. Their plea was a voice from a profession that had taken aim at what was wrong with the human psyche – the “bad thing” addressed by Sigmund Freud – and was giving up. Andrew Scull’s Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness (Belknap Press Harvard 2022) explains how they got there, through decades of dashed hopes for miracle cure after cure, including Freudian psychoanalysis and genetics. What’s different about the Course? Why do you persist?

The Course is psychology that centers on the source of the bad thing: not the body-brain but Soul-Mind. The Soul or Psyche of the Being whose story in Reality accounts for all our miseries -- the Reality that preceded and caused our alternate reality. Freud, a “realist” to the core, gave us a vocabulary for analysis but insisted that the source is physiological. Jung disagreed and added a dimension not limited to the body – the “spiritual” dimension. Between them they created an opportunity to communicate insights from the Course that take us back to the deepest recesses of our childhood memories. Like Freud? Into repressed sexuality? 

Beyond the childhood of bodies into the childhood of Mind. Into what I’ve been calling “The Story of the Child.” The story that takes place not in our alternate reality but in Reality. The Course examines the psychodynamics of the Child’s mistake to explain for us the source of our pain and to help us understand how, as Jesus puts it, to “correct error.” To free ourselves from pain by freeing ourselves of the self-delusion by the Child that’s causing it. Not to get rid of the fact of repressed sexuality but to get rid of the idea of it, an illusion. Freud and Jung gave us the vocabulary for making sense of our circumstances. Jesus took their vocabulary, applied it to the plea from the two psychologists, and made sense of it. Would this be the “second coming” of Christ? 

To fill empty minds with Logic and Love

The Course makes its case with the vocabulary of Christianity as well as Freudian-Jungian psychology. “Christ” as a familiar symbol of Innocence plays a central part if only because Innocence plays a central part. This was a language familiar to Helen Schucman, the psychologist who was Jesus’ scribe when he channeled the Course. Although a Jew she was a “realist” personality type drawn to the authoritarian imagery and ritual of Roman Catholicism. If you’re thinking Christianity is my language it isn’t. My mother and her mother saw to it that I was imbued with Protestant Christian values. But the language I’m trying to learn is the language of the agent of Logic-Love, which belongs to no church, no religion.

Just as Jesus departs from body-centered psychology he departs from the body-centered rituals and dogma of organized religion to focus on the individual. To focus on the Free Will of Mind and independent Judgment. I’ve found no references to “Christianity” and “church” in the Course. No exhortations to go forth and revive or reform Gnosticism or any other form of Christianity. To found a new philosophy or religion or to compete with those that already exist. And no declarations that the Course is the only form that its lessons can take. That it's a “Bible” or the so-called “second coming.”  To view it as such would be to miss the point. And the point is?

As I understand it, three points. The first is we need to get it right before attempting to do what’s right and do it right. Before trying any longer to get rid of the bad thing through psychology, chemicals, or any other means. And we can’t do it without inviting the agent of Logic-Love into our minds and hearts and listening to its voice. Which means dumping the voice of the bad thing. And that means getting rid of the idea that the body and its senses are the arbiter of all things with purpose and meaning. All things real. Because they aren’t. They’re the opposite.

Its second point is “uncompromising non-dualism.” Getting it right is understanding and accepting that the alternate reality our bodies’ senses insist is real is unreal. There can be only one Reality and it’s the Reality of Logic-Love. The Reality of Mind that has Purpose and Meaning, its own story to tell. The story of Creation, where the Child with its Free Choice is needed once it gains the self-awareness and competence that the exercise of Free Choice requires.

Its third point is to follow the Course’s unique combination of Logic-Love to apply its metaphysics to our everyday lives. The Course isn’t an excuse for ignoring circumstances so we can engage in yet more delusional thinking. It’s a call to listen to what’s coming from within and all around us and to take in what it means with patience and compassion. In the comprehensiveness of its context, the poetic perfection of its Logic, its system – its interconnectedness – it provides a portal, a vantage point. A vantage point into what?

Vale to Caesar and captivity

Into understanding. Understanding what? Understanding anything and everything the Child needs to understand in order to let go of illusion. To empty its mind and welcome its Parents’ agent, the voice of Logic-Love, into its thoughts. To reclaim the individual’s voice, power, and morality from its captivity to groups, to Child-the-many, the Joker who is us. So that we can Forgive. So that we can awaken and return Home. If “rendering unto Caesar” has become an intolerable burden, then let go of Caesar. Be done with him once and for all and wake up! So, you would question the ways of the master after all. That does it. I’m outta here! 

And I’m outta here. I can’t take any more either.

Happy birthday, Jesus! And happy Holidays to you, hapless reader. I hope this hasn’t been too trying. Don’t worry. I’ll manage somehow. Merry Christmas to you, David, and to your lovely granddaughters! 

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Published on 2 Comments on Election Day

Authoritarian-fascists have no “philosophy” of anything. Their style of governing is identical to their style of competing: bullying. Their “governing philosophy” can be summed up in one word: bullying. Driven by one goal: authority. “Power.” For power to a fraud, a parasite that has no soul, no life, mind, or heart of its own, is existence. The taking captive of a parasite’s host who does have a life of its own is an existential necessity to be accomplished the only way it can be: by force. By not being “nice” if wearing the mask of “niceness” can’t persuade others to submit to it. To give up their freedom, their independence.

Authority to an authoritarian-fascist isn’t an invitation to govern with the consent of the governed. A right or a privilege to be exercised subject to rules of civility that apply to all. It’s a license to assert unquestioned authority subject to no discipline except the will of animal herd to dominate, subjugate, and exploit. To compel conformance to its arbitrary lawless rule by bullying. “Justified” by resort to victimhood: the Big Lie that the bully, the persecutor, having no self of its own, having to take others captive to possess a self, having to “live” in an alternate reality because reality doesn’t recognize it, is the persecuted. The big crybaby who needs extra pampering because nobody loves it and so it’s entitled to take everything for itself by any means. By the pretense of “niceness” and if that doesn’t work by bullying.

What was history’s most compelling image of unlicensed fascist authority if not the Wehrmacht, the beast bullying its defenseless neighbors with brute force into shocked submission to its will? Its symbol the panzer: impregnable metal encasing human vulnerability, fearful-angry subjects transmogrified into unfeeling objects, dealing death to an imaginary host of competing, opposing-resisting objects, an alternate reality of lifelessness, lovelessness, and mindlessness cast in its own pathetic image: the self-less, unloved shadow of its host. A big crybaby fraud. A nothing.

What is the parenting style of authoritarian-fascists given the responsibility of caring for their children? Put in a position of authority over the lives and wellbeing of others defenseless against their arbitrary wills? The pretense of “niceness” when it suits them. Appearances. Always appearances. And when it doesn’t, bullying. Always for one purpose: to assuage the pain of their self-delusion, the injustice of their victimhood that justifies permanent anger, the lust for retribution by bullying.

What is this but the excuse for right-wing politics, attempting today, election day, to take over our country by force? Legitimized by “conservative,” a label that doesn’t fit. What can it possibly reveal, if they succeed, if not that we aren’t ready? That humanity is still not ready to exercise its Free Will to regain awareness of its true self and wake up. To forsake our bizarre inside-out, upside-down alternate reality, our mass psychosis, and return to Reality. To bring darkness into the light.

Published on Leave a comment on Trick or Treat!

Fun stuff from Dracula’s crypt

From everybody’s favorite Hallowe’en monster, your perky Granddad with the effervescent personality and the Pepsodent smile . How are you? Are you flashing your toothy smiles with the. . .  Granddad. Just fork over the treats. You don’t want my color commentary? Is that what you call it? BAHAHAHAAAAAAAA! 

On second thought, Granddad, it’s OK to distract us. We just saw your treats. Oh good! You like them? I was going to get you . . . You were going to get us something nice but you changed your mind, right? Uh, well. . . You decided to raid Dracula’s pantry. 

He does have a pantry. It’s actually pretty well stocked. Severed fingers, bloodshot eyeballs, pheasant skeletons under glass, spiders and snakes. All covered with cobwebs, of course. Of course. But I couldn’t find what I knew you’d like so I went exploring. And what did you find? I found your treats down below the basement in his crypt. That’s where your treats came from.

How would you like a nice trick? No! Not that! Why couldn’t you get us some yummy chocolates like everyone else? What is this stuff? It’s fun candy! When I took you to the Sweet Factory and Dave and Busters you never picked out chocolate goodies like normal kids do. You went for weird stuff. So I got you weird stuff. The animals at the zoo we’re going to feed it to thank you!

Beware!

Isn’t it amazing? The store that sold me your treats also sells stomach pumps. I wonder why. Granddad? What, dear. We’re just kidding, We love you. Thank you for thinking of us. Your playful treats won’t go to the zoo. They’re going into our stomachs and we won’t need stomach pumps. You’re welcome.

Ouch! I just pricked my finger. Look! There’s a drop of blood! [With a grand sweep of his arm Dracula covers the lower half of his face with his cape, rivets his ravenous gaze to the blood, and moves in for the kill. BAHAHAHAAAAAAAAA!]

What are you wearing now? Clothes. Are you wearing a Hallowe’en mask guaranteed to scare everyone out of their wits? Yes. My face. Aren’t you wearing Dracula’s cape? Yes. The whole outfit he was in when he greeted Jonathan Harker at his castle in Transylvania. “I bid you welcome.” BAHAHAHAAAA! That’s what he wore when the sun came up and he retired to his coffin and what Bela Lugosi wore to his coffin – Dracula’s costume. On Hallowe’en night, your neighborhood will erupt in screams with people fleeing in all directions and you’ll know why. Dracula will be on the loose! Boo!

Wondering Why

Harker had to reach Dracula’s castle at night in a creepy coach pulled by a creepy horse. The coachman was creepy, too, since it was Dracula but you didn’t know it. The castle was so creepy that “I bid you welcome” actually sounded warm and comforting. But I decided that I didn’t want to live there. Of course you didn’t! Only a sick mind would be drawn to a vampire’s lair. I wanted to live in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. Oh, that’s different. . . What?? 

Now, don’t laugh, but I thought the atmospherics were really cool. High ceiling and massive walls of brooding gray stone, heavy with the mystique of mausoleums and the crypts of ancient cathedrals. Reeking of death. The flashing and buzzing of electrical equipment masterminded by madness driven by obsession. That promised a gluttony of delicious horrors.

Dark intrigue that would connect the lifeless, leaden body on its gurney to the mystery of life itself. And when it was pulleyed ominously up the tower into the storm, into the blackness flashing its fury with the force of nature, warning of its supremacy to all who dared penetrate it, it carried me with it. An image of apprehension and anticipation so perfect that I was taken captive. I wanted to freeze-frame it so no other image could ever intrude.

Hmmmmm. Very interesting!  And that’s where you wanted to live? It had the familiarity of home because, in some sense, I had already lived there. It was where humanity’s psyche had once belonged. The same source that inspired the imagination of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly to tell Dr. Frankenstein’s story inhabits everyone’s imagination. The recounting of how bodies with defective brains were animated – brought to life with energy – is stored in various versions in every human psyche. The right circumstances happened to come together for Mary to tell it, but it's there to be told by anyone. You or I could tell it. Should we be afraid? Actually, Hallowe’en is for laughs. It’s for kids and yummy treats! And like almost everything that happens, for wondering Why.

That’s how much!

Witches cackling around their toxic brews, warning of dreadful calamities about to befall us, are my favorite Hallowe’en yard displays. They make me laugh, and sometimes I talk back at them. What are yours?

I will be with you on Hallowe’en night in spirit. Bidding you welcome in my Bela Lugosi costume and enjoying my treat: being the grandfather of the most intelligent, talented, thoughtful, beautiful, and lovable granddaughters in the world. Missing you and loving you. . . More than all the stars in the sky?  More than all the sour jelly beans, jelly bird eggs, and sour bats in the Galaxy!

Enjoy! Happy Hallowe’en!

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Published on 2 Comments on The Liberating Free Spirit of Why

The Logic of Governance under the law

Illogic is mind taken into captivity. Plato’s Cave, a chimera of One-the-many ruled by the unquestioned authority of the herd. An absurdity that substitutes mindless instinct for thought, brute will for intent, pointless action for meaning, and self-delusion for self-awareness. Illogic is the opposite of Freedom with Order, the only kind of Freedom there is. The only kind of Order there is. It’s arbitrary rule above the law, the opposite of governance under the law, the only kind of governance there is. It’s chaos, ruination. Our planet in the cross hairs of the Death Star. The only home we have. The only home we know.

Why?

To ask the Why of a thing is to ask of its nature. Its Logic-Love that explains its purpose and meaning – what it’s for. Its function. To ask the Why of a thing is to ask for its definition. Nothing can have a definition that doesn’t explain with Logic-Love why it exists, the purpose it serves, the function it performs. Its value-worth. Its use. The Why of it.

Explanation with Logic-Love follows a process ordered and disciplined by implications and relationships that interconnect and reciprocate. They do so because they are logical. Ordered and disciplined by laws of cause and effect, of necessity, subject to no rule but their own. Not even to Logic-Love itself or it would be arbitrary, above the law and therefore no law at all.

The illogic of arbitrary rule above the law

The world today performs its periodic loss of faith in governance by Logic-Love. By consensus and consent from the bottom up that takes direction from the needs of the governed and hears their voice. The world turns now to authoritarian rule because it must do what it is: a projection. An expression of illogic: separation, guilt, and its inevitable consequence, fear. Because illogic cannot learn its lesson. Cannot learn anything. It’s the illusion of arbitrary rule above the law. The false promise of “action” that solves problems and gets things done. A deception that can only distract with conflict and suffering from the Truth. When all that can get “done” is the elimination of its captive. The elimination of its host and thus of itself. The death of the planet in the cross-hairs of the Death Star, followed by the death of the Death Star.

All of it a chimera. The raving of a Ghostbusters demon seated on the throne of Order. The vacuity of self-delusion.

Why ask Why?

To ask for explanation from Logic-Love is to ask for Understanding. Understanding the Why of anything can’t happen in a vacuum. To understand one thing or anything by tapping into Logic-Love is to tap into the Interconnectedness of Everything. It’s all of one piece. And if what defines it, holds it together, is Logic-Love, then asking Why opens up everything to understanding. Penetrates the deception with the Free Spirit of inquiry. From one circumstance, one context, to another in logical order. One implication-relationship, one spontaneous insight from intuition at a time. At its own pace.

For the Logic-Love of Why is Free Spirit that can’t be owned, possessed, controlled, or dominated. Because Truth is Free Spirit that can’t be manipulated. Laws of Reality are Free Spirit that can’t be manipulated, What is can’t be made up. The Logic of Order combined with the Freedom of Love make up the Force of Creation, sovereign authority that cannot be denied. The force of movement forward. Progress toward an ideal of the Good, of Perfection, that has no opposite, no contradiction.

To ask the Why of anything is to open the possibility of joining in the movement of progress forward through Understanding. To hope for the good, for satisfaction, for happiness, instead of fearing denial and defeat. Why ask why? To choose and experience the Life of Mind and Love instead of the illusion, the absurdity, of death of body and fear. 

Why not ask Why?

Why do you disagree? Why do you, an “other,” contradict and oppose? Because unreality is misunderstanding. There’s no “other” and no “you” in Reality. There’s just the one Self, captive to the deception, unconscious and dreaming it. Incapable of asking Why because to do so would end misunderstanding. Would lead to self-awareness that ends the dream.

What doesn’t want us to ask Why? The delusion that we are our own opposites, a shadow reflection that has no self of its own. That’s an appearance, a deception that doesn’t want to be found out because its attributes are derived from its host. Attributes that its self-deluded host believes have been stolen, and so the opposite that it believes itself to be “exists” in paranoia. In constant fear that whatever it is, whatever it has, will be stolen back. “Exists” in constant fear that the Truth of its “existence” will be exposed for the magician’s act that it is. A derivation. A fraud. A scam.

The answer

What then is its first line of defense? The self-deluded mind that’s taken itself captive – the dog that’s caught up with its tail and thinks it’s the tail – must not think. Must avoid asking Why at all costs and must instead allow its behavior, its acts, to be willed instead by instinct. The reflexive act of feeling – dominance, conquest and supremacy, fear, jealousy and hate, greed and lust – that animates, empowers, and rules the predatory herd.

Its first line of defense is to deny the one – the individual – and to deify the many – the group. To hide itself behind the grand illusion, the Big Lie, that the one is the many and the many has a self, a mind of its own. A predatory herd bent not on Creation but on elimination. Elimination of opposites. Elimination of itself because this is what it is: an opposite.

How is this to be understood? How get around the defense? Not with captive bodies’ senses that detect only appearances but with the Vision of Logic-Love, the Free Spirit of Inquiry that thinks, feels, and sees beyond appearances. Through acts of gentle loving kindness, gifts from an awareness that knows nothing of appearances. Nothing of deceptions, distractions, conflict and suffering. Through insights from intuition that come to us of their own accord, spontaneously. Thoughtfully and lovingly, when we ask Why.

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Published on 1 Comment on The Education of an Idealist

Learning from our mistakes

Edith Piaf, the world-weary French cabaret singer, famously sang Non, je ne regrette rien. “I regret nothing.” George Lichter, the WWII fighter pilot, titled his memoir Ups and Downs with No Regrets. What universe did they live in? Did they not make mistakes? Did they really have no regrets? Or were they just roaring defiance against adversity that had failed to take them down?

Or had they learned nothing? Our one shot at redemption in a world where we are condemned to make mistakes is learning from them. I didn’t know Edith Piaf, but George Lichter was my friend. He redeemed himself. He lived and died with amazing grace. An example to follow, because the one regret I hope to avoid is to have learned nothing. If learning from our mistakes is why we’re here, then there’s no reason not to.

Yet an iron resolve not to learn and grow accounts for much of the misery and mayhem that our species inflicts on itself. We cycle back on our horrors because something in our minds and hearts, our souls, won’t let us look back. Won’t let us reflect on what went wrong or our part in causing it. The fault always lies with someone or something else. The responsibility, the guilt, can’t possibly be ours. Like angelic little kids -- we didn’t do it! We’re innocent!

The war cry of chest-thumping supremacists who’ve taken up permanent residence atop the Empire State Building. Going King Kong one better by ruling over Reality and Truth itself. By fashioning their delusion – a psychotic impossibility – into irrefutable fact. What else is it but madness?  The refusal to learn and grow from our mistakes. The refusal to do what we’re here for.

Finding my voice

I commit to causes. Casting myself in advocacy, a role that naturally tests boundaries and attracts opposition. Emulating my ancestors but without their male supremacy, their ad hominem combativeness and grandiosity. Or so I thought. Some of it must have rubbed off on me. They were opinionated, outspoken – my masculine father and his father. Looking for a fight, giving as good as they got. Their voices both weapon and shield, and though I shied away from their noisy stage presence I joined the fight.

I let myself go with the pen. Voice and cause, pen and making a difference, went hand in hand. So long as right was to be served I was determined to be heard. And I was, and it did make a difference. The history of Boston’s expansion into its harbor, high dam building in the Connecticut River valley, flood management in the Red River valley of the North, and community leadership development in the Monongahela River valley, owe something to me. So does water diversion from the Missouri River, an unintended though not unwelcome byproduct of my work in the Red River valley.

The reformist not to be denied

My cause to reform the 1965 Water Resources Planning Act attracted support from congressional committee chairs and staff. They brought me to a meeting with White House liaison at the Capitol to endorse my proposal: a pilot project in an interstate river basin to demonstrate how policy should evolve under the direction of local governments, democratically from the bottom up, rather than top down from unrepresentative and biased government bureaucracies.  What the meeting revealed instead was that the new administration, under the influence of western water interests, would soon dismantle the act and any federal attempt to formulate national water policy. The U.S. Water Resources Council and every river basin commission were to be zeroed out of the federal budget. To accommodate a political faction the administration was ridding the country of its only process and structure for rationalizing the use and management of one of its most vital natural resources.

Denied one avenue I found another. I took my proposal to the former director of the National Water Commission who arranged an affiliation with the National Academy of Public Administration. The Academy put me and my ideas under the scrutiny of a cross-section of prominent authorities headed by the dean of the country’s leading school of public affairs. It then, with their approval, published my monograph on the need for a national water policy process. It attracted coverage in the National Journal, required reading for Congressional staff. It also drew rare tribute from Mo Udall (D-AZ), point man on national water policy in the House of Representatives, a tough critic who deemed what I wrote “one of the better things I’ve read.”

I find my river basin!

Being noticed led to another affiliation, this time with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The AAAS was charged with putting out a White House report on science and technology and I was to produce the section on water policy.

The report was cancelled but what I wrote did see the light of day. With oversight from another panel of experts I produced “Institutional Barriers to National Water Policy,” the lead article in an issue of Water Spectrum published by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The head of the South Florida Water Management District hailed it as the final word on the subject. My brother-in-law, so maybe it shouldn’t count. But maybe it should, because faculty at West Point – no relation -- ranked it one of the ten most important articles on the subject. I learned this through the editor of Water Information News Service, to which I was a frequent contributor.

It was a U.S. senator from Minnesota who brought me to my objective: a river basin where I could test my approach in a real world setting. He was besieged by millionaire farmers in the Red River Valley of the North desperate for help with flood management. I secured funding from the Ford Foundation and the Freshwater Foundation and affiliations with the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and with the Continuing Education department at the University of North Dakota.

I then organized the first Red River Valley International Water Summit Conference at UND in Grand Forks, an effort that brought together hundreds of regional leaders from two states and the province of Manitoba. In the account published by the Freshwater Foundation it “exceeded all our expectations.” Importantly the conference initiated a regular process of bottom up basinwide direction for flood management, which was its purpose. My approach worked as I knew it would. I shared its success with my profession in the peer-reviewed journal of the American Water Resources Association. Lessons learned that might help to bring a better day to the field.

At least one respected authority spoke to that. Frank Gregg was a force in the field who listened and was listened to. A veteran of the Water Resources Planning Act, river basin commission chairman, director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and head of water resources research at a western university. Also keynote speaker at my Red River valley conference, mensch, and friend. Frank wrote years later to confirm that top-down had now given way to bottom-up in the federal approach. He was well aware that my advocacy had found an audience where it counted and it deserved some of the credit. I was “Big Dave.”

The price of advocacy: unacceptance

Paradigm change happens when generations that cling to old paradigms give way to new. Self-interests are bruised. They let you know it, and when they do, you know you’ve made a difference.

The National Journal’s coverage had been motivated by the same frustration that I felt. Things as they were were “terrible.” I said so. I was quoted, and my colleagues, devoted professionals, heard it. They had published my speeches and put me in charge of committees. I was a regular on Washington’s wine and cheese circuit. They had given me a home and a voice in the profession, and now I’d turned on them.

Years later, I sought an affiliation at the University of Colorado where I’d enjoyed the sponsorship of Gilbert White, a revered patriarch in the profession. The door was closed. Not by Gilbert, an accomplished reformist sympathetic to change, but by workers unsympathetic to change. Unsympathetic to reformists who competed for recognition and jeopardized their careers.

It wasn’t only careers that were threatened, I’d actually helped to kill major water projects – flood control dams on seven tributaries of the Connecticut River. Simply by bringing Manitobans into the conversation in the Red River Valley I’d imperiled the Garrison water diversion project on the Missouri River. Projects that inspired passions for and against. Canadians loved me because they were against the diversion. The New England Division of the Corps of Engineers and North Dakota’s state water manager did not love me.

I hadn’t set out to attack their projects. I was doing my job. But, confined by their own narrow contexts, they saw it differently. I was a change agent with one consuming bias: to do them and their beloved projects in. This is not an exaggeration. I know it to be true.

The price of advocacy: untruth

It was misperception that inevitably leads to misjudgment. My next project after the Red River Valley brought this home to me in a uniquely unpleasant way. While I was doing a victory lap with another river basin, I was slandered. By lies from a source that I didn’t bother with. Mainly because they were obviously ungrounded and the damage was slight. But making enemies can’t be ignored. It was OK if my father, an employer at war with organized labor, was targeted for assassination by a labor leader. That was his choice. But if an enemy lurking in the shadows was targeting me, it wasn’t OK. It was my intention to do what’s right, do it right, and get it right. It meant that I’d gotten it wrong.

I was learning that the dark side of the human mind, engaged with attack, will retaliate with what it is: unreality and untruth. The weapon of choice for a source that’s a mirror-imagine opposite reflection. That has no self. That mis-identity has turned into self-deception. The epidemic of misinformation crippling governance today is the response of a political herd captive to self-delusion. Reacting to defeat and the opportunity to superimpose its unreality on reality with mass denial. With wholesale detachment from reality. Mass psychosis. With madness.

“There must be a better way”

My work in the Monongahela River Valley attracted wide editorial support and the support of an impressive array of regional leaders, among them West Virginia’s Senator Robert Byrd, the president of Carnegie-Mellon University, the once and future governor of West Virginia, and the grassroots support of communities, businesses, and nonprofit groups up and down the Valley. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation funded community leadership training, a three-year collaborative effort among ten colleges and universities. I was given two faculty appointments at West Virginia University, subsidized housing, and organizational support from its Department of Continuing Education.

Yet at the same time, I was moving on. The original dream of regional leadership and policy coherence was giving way to something more compelling. While externals still mattered, their story was increasingly intersecting with internals that were telling another story. A Course in Miracles outlined its fundamentals with logic and love, clarity and authority, so authentically and respectfully that I felt myself to be in the presence of a trusted friend. Not a force that had come to take over but a resource for my help and guidance should I request it. Not a dominance that undermined independent judgment but a Free Spirit who empowered it.

The story that it told put every thought, every feeling, every act into a different context. Unfamiliar and from a different perspective, and yet at home in my mind, heart, and soul. At home with my Self. Gently and imperceptibly. I could not help but wonder where it might lead, about its purpose and meaning for me, one insight at a time.

Idealism of another kind

The end of my nine-year sojourn in the Monongahela River Valley marked the end of a calculated risk. That I could put all the resources of a privileged life – education, health, connections, and wealth – to work for an ideal and not be punished for my improvidence. I was punished. When I left Morgantown I was broke. Education and health were intact but wealth was gone and slander was eating away at connections. By the usual measures of the world I was ruined.

And yet I felt blessed with Abundance and prospects. Whether or not worldly “success” – wealth, status, power -- had accompanied my efforts I’d given idealism a shot. I hadn’t passed it up for an existence in T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land. I’d made enough of a difference to take pride in what I’d accomplished. The cost was high but so were the benefits. My calculated risk was worth taking. I had no regrets.

And now a new idealism was on the horizon: the chance to learn and grow with the living author of the Course. With Logic and Love. With a Soulmate of the Mind. To gain insight into its perspective and to apply it to all my relationships. To find purpose and meaning in my work even if it was just a means of earning a living. The fear that I’d be abandoned to a dusty law library in Allegheny County was gone.

ESFP vs. INTJ: when pleasantry meets honesty

Living a directed life with my Guide, values, causes and ideals naturally attracts opposites. This was the lesson that life had made obvious so far. Now it was to teach another lesson in opposites: personalities.

An intimate once observed that “You drive like you’re actually going somewhere.” The characterization of my personality type in Isabel Briggs Myers’ Gifts Differing – introvert, intuition, thinking, judging (INTJ) – explains why. My type actually is going somewhere. It’s not just living out its life, “waiting for the undertaker.” An authority on personality types once observed that “INTJs rule the world.” If so, this may be why.

It’s a heads-up to those who shelter under tact, diplomacy, and pleasantry when it conflicts with honesty, sincerity, and truth. Prudent if you’re dealing with groups, especially those ruled by psychopaths armed with weapons. But a poor strategy for dealing with intimates who depend on trust.

ESFPs – extraverts, (body) sensing, feeling, perceptive – are drawn to group-socializing rather than individual intimacy. They don’t mind sacrificing honesty, sincerity, and truth to social pleasantries. Or to wishful thinking that can excuse corner-cutting and wrongdoing. But in intimate relationships trust-busting dishonesty is fatal. INTJs do mind. Not because they’re moralists but because, as Isabel points out, they’re programmed to act. They can’t stand by and watch if they see something wrong. They will act to make it right.

The bull still has horns

Intervention and making it right require the Logic and Love of getting it right – no easy task. Especially if it’s correcting “youthful folly,” so hard that it’s considered a “holy task” by the ancient Chinese Book of Changes. It’s taken long experience with A Course in Miracles to discipline my INTJ so that it’s not a bull in a china shop. But the bull still has horns. In a world where Reality and Truth are subject to physical as well as intellectual assault it needs them.

So why should it surprise me to find my will obstructed by opposites when I act to do good? Even from families of blood relatives supposed to be intimates. Only once have I applied myself single-mindedly and received only affirmation: from the Boulder County Democratic Party. Where I was honored for my work in “infrastructure,” a special category that left out advocacy. A rare instance of being helpful and harmless. 

The sense that got knocked into me

Life in the arena of opposites didn’t begin well for me. Being the son of my combative father, lured by my warrior voice, I picked fights. My first mistake, a big one that I repeated into early adolescence. It started on the school playground when I recall Nancy Woollett picking burrs from my sweater after I’d gotten into a fight. I was hard-wired to fight.

On the way home I asked my big brother why we fight. If he’d had an answer it might have done me a big favor, because I had to be taught a lesson the hard way -- by picking the wrong fight. My opponent’s Two-Ton Tony Galento haymaker missed my face by barely an inch. This after I’d launched a pitiful punch to his gut that bounced off him like a puffball. What was I thinking! I called off the fight and had to suffer the humiliation of his taunting. But it was better than getting my brains knocked out. My fight-picking days were over. 

The sense that may never get knocked into me

In time, I came to learn a larger lesson, that I was letting myself be guided by the voice of an unreal self. A self-delusion. I was making unreality real as naturally as I was getting into fights on the playground. By engaging with the guides of “others” I made them real and did their bidding. I continued making this mistake all the way to the present. It’s so ingrained I doubt even today if I can stop. Not without more time and experience, and I’m running out of both.

My mistake was thinking that issues didn’t go beyond personalities to guides and conflicting realities. I assumed that their scope was limited to what was on the surface, to personalities and their commitments to values and priorities. I knew in theory that personality differences originate with guides and fixed agendas. That they can override conscious deliberation, but I didn’t practice it. I didn’t recognize the illogic of my adversaries that took intuition’s insights, aided by Logic-Love, back to the mistake that preceded the Big Bang. Unconscious Mind’s mis-identity of Self with its reflection, its shadow opposite.

Mind deluded is useless except for getting out of the way

My mistake that contributed to breakdown’s effects was emblematic of humanity’s mistake: making unreality real by engaging with it. By assuming that it is real. That it’s accessible and susceptible to direct intervention by “others” embedded in the same unreality. That it can be worked with as though the mistake never happened. The same mistake that science makes with its circular reasoning: imagining that it can succeed in its “quest for knowledge” by examining matter with its own eyes. Without objectivity.

Neither mind nor matter can be worked with as though the mistake never happened. The mistake can only be undone and replaced by Reality and Truth restored through explanation. Through the Understanding of Forgiveness that awakens the dreaming mind to its real identity. Not to an apparition conjured by delusion from its reflection but to its real conscious Self.

I engaged without explanation that leads to Understanding. Understanding the Logic of Forgiveness: that it’s awakening. That Self that’s awakened can’t be the mistake. Can’t be the deluded mind that I imagine myself to be without letting my Guide from Logic and Love transform self-delusion into Self-awareness. Without understanding that mind deluded is useless except for getting out of the way. When I engaged with unreality I was getting in the way.

I got it wrong. I failed to Forgive and paid the price. The one we all pay for repeating the same mistake: separation and retribution. Sent back, again and again, to the drawing boards.

One Soul with enough power to light a city

When I listened to another voice, I learned how to use my gifts instead of being used. Through disengagement from self-delusion, the hollow specter of rivalry, and engagement instead with my Self. With the call for Love and Innocence instead of the lure to hate and guilt. With Reality and Truth instead of unreality and lies.

One logically and gently undoing the other just by being itself. By being light that’s seen and voice that’s heard. The sharing, affirmation, and empowerment of Understanding. Not the false peace of inertia but the Peace of Force engaged with the one Self – my real Self – rather than the illusion of self-the-many. The individual not the group.

Understanding where progress is to be made, at the level of the smallest circumstance in an ephemeral world of many – one soul. Like the atom, with enough force to illuminate a city of millions.

The universal bond of language 

The difference between making unreality real or not making it real is where the rubber meets the road. The difference between guides and philosophies, personalities and values. One lives to record appearances, the crowning achievement of the body’s senses – unreality. The other lives by the vision of Logic-Love that searches beyond appearances to find Reality and Truth.

With the gift of insight that mind intuits, with no need for the body’s senses. That needs no images to represent reality but accomplishes its purpose another way. With the reciprocations of Logic’s implications, Love’s relationships, and Soul’s bonding. Integrated into purpose and meaning by the tools of Logic and Love: language, like Energy, a universal presence of Mind.

Language that in Reality needs no words. That’s equally at the disposal of the Truth of Mind conscious or the untruth of mind dreaming. Because, like Energy, it is the Interconnectedness of Everything, indivisible and inseparable. The power of voice to communicate throughout Reality-Creation and be heard whether it’s the voice of the Self conscious of Reality or self dreaming a made-up reality. The host or its reflection. The “information” that unaccountably unites all of quantum gravity, its elements bound in communication from one end of spacetime-matter to the other. Because no matter the difference, it’s all one Self with one voice. One self dreaming and, therefore, one self with two faces: one real, the other not. One light, the other dark.

The lesson for the Idealist still to be learned

When the mistake was made, it could not attain its illusory effect without Energy. Nor could the deception be pulled off by the magician without language. Without words to deceive and the voice to speak them. Energy and voice, whose direction comes ultimately from Mind conscious. Direction that can’t be cut off. And therefore Energy, voice, and language that can’t be put to the exclusive use of the self-delusion. The mistaken identity and its derived code of unreality, non-being, and opposites.

What was the mistake? Losing our voice. What’s to be learned? Finding it and using it.

 

 

 

Published on Leave a comment on Imagine

When the lights were on

Imagine that you are a child who comes from a place where existence is an unbroken flow of Abundance. Where striving is effortless play. Where every mate is soulmate, the warmth of intimacy and the assurance of belonging, and all their personalities and compositions fit together in perfect harmony. Where everything and everyone shares the purpose and meaning of Life. The cause of all that is right and good, kind and just, happiness and contentment.

The cause of Logic and Love inseparable, your Parents. Where you are defined by your inheritance: judgment and choice, freedom and creativity. By Free Will -- Freedom of thought, expression and choice, sovereignty and individuality. The attributes of Self with an indispensable role to play in Creation: ensuring the worth and integrity of Interconnectedness. The process and structure of Creation. Of Reality governed with wisdom and caring. Not through intervention that confines and contracts from the top down but through the free spirit of Creativity that liberates and expands from the bottom up. That consummates every Connection, every Relationship, with the satisfaction, passion, and beauty of reciprocation.

Lights off!

Imagine that you now find yourself removed from familiarity and dumped into strangeness. Suddenly and without warning. With no recognizable coordinates to navigate by and no capacity to navigate even if there were. Because the flow of sharing, affirmation, and empowerment that were your life blood, the source of all that defined you, that gave you motivation and direction, has been cut off. Because you’ve lost consciousness, and the strangeness that you now occupy is the strangeness of a dream. A dream yet without form. Waiting for the characters and story that will animate it. You’re lost, adrift, and utterly helpless. A fool unable to make sense of anything.

Imagine that there is an explanation for what happened. That the strangeness can be navigated, but, for now, you haven’t the experience to know how. Your mind and memory are a blank slate, wiped clean. But even if they weren’t, there is no known playbook for the situation you are now in, none that could have prepared you for this. If there is to be a playbook, you’ll have to write it yourself.

You figure it out

And so when you detect your own reflection, a shadow opposite, you don’t recognize it. Don’t recognize its clue to where you have landed: In the strangeness of opposites. The opposite of the familiarity, the Reality, of where you were. You’ve lost consciousness without  being aware that it was even possible to lose it. And been deposited from the land of all things possible to a never-never land of all things impossible. Into the strangeness, the lawless chaos, of unreality.

All inevitable and for a purpose. But it’s for you and your gifts to figure it out -- character, integrity, independent judgment, and Free Will. And now you have a choice. With faculties impaired, with knowledge gone, you are to make sense of this strange opposition, your own reflection – your mirror image opposite. Your shadow. An apparition unknown to Reality that can only be detected in a dream. Defined by your own attributes because it’s part of your self but in reverse. Its code a derivation, entirely lacking in originality because it has no self. Derived from the definition of everything that you are not.

Only you don’t know it. Why should you when Home, the place you came from, had no opposites? When your Parents could not have prepared you for this.

A case of mistaken identity

In your acute vulnerability – in your desperation to find your way back -- you can’t be aware that the savior you seek, the guide who knows where you are and can help you navigate, is nothing of the kind. It’s the opposite. A thing of the imagination, a parasite attached to its host and entirely dependent on its host. With no sense or sensibility of its own, incapable of guiding itself let alone its host. A lifeless viral code. A predator that would take its host captive and replicate itself. A Joker that would entertain itself and distract its replications with perversions of the Truth. Jokes at their expense. Why? Because that’s all the code of opposition can do.

If only its host mistakes it for an other. Which, of course, you do. In your desperation, the breakdown of your faculties, your lack of experience and discernment, you mistake your own shadow-reflection for an other. Imagine it to be your guide and savior. And once it’s given your own voice with which to fool you, let it fool you into taking you captive. Into reversing roles and turning you into its parasite. Into replacing mindfulness with mindlessness. How can you not trust it when the voice it speaks with is your own?

Escape into captivity: our world of appearances

Imagining, all the while, that you have entrusted your fate to an other who will guide you out of strangeness, if not back Home at least to a safe place. When in truth your mind taken captive is now imagining that you are your captor. You have surrendered self-awareness to self-delusion, the delusion that you are your own opposite. And that the dream world of impossibility where it has taken you – the world where we seem to be now – is real. A world composed of bodies that are apparitions, appearances that are deceptions. All of it a magician’s act, the performance of a gifted illusionist.

A narrative that strikes the mind of a realist, embedded in the dream, as unrealistic. Until, that is, physics speaks for what this world of strangeness is telling us: that maybe it isn’t real. Maybe in some sense it is an illusion. Because not only physics but every field of inquiry that assumes that it is real has failed to prove it. Has started out with the promise of human invention and ingenuity and made great progress, only to fall short of its goal.

Science doesn’t have the answer

Albert Einstein sought an elegant equation to describe the material universe that he revered. That he believed harbored the elegance, simplicity, and beauty of perfection. That brought together the physics of cosmos with particles – quantum gravity. But what he also wanted was to prove that the subject matter of his profession, physics, is real. To put an end, for all time, to the debate between idealists and realists over the subject matter of philosophy: reality. He wanted to be the one with the Answer, and he wasn’t. He failed at both objectives. Quantum gravity remains beyond reach. Where physics today is beginning to acknowledge the illusion that the universe is, the failure of Einstein proved the reality that it isn’t.

Einstein wasn’t alone. Every field of inquiry has failed to explain the origin of appearances, the contradictory laws that govern their behavior. That break down at the extremes. When only another reality can explain the singularities, the anomalies, the mysteries of dark matter, dark energy, and black holes. Particles that are here, there, everywhere, and nowhere, for which time doesn’t exist. The random mutations of cells and the never-to-be-found seat of consciousness.

Energy did it: the dark side of the Force

The common thread through it all: the indivisibility, the inseparability of the creative force of Energy that animates appearances. The agent of Mind that enables Creation and imagination with equal facility. That animates the unreality of unconsciousness as well as the Reality of consciousness and so is complicit in the deception. Because it follows direction, and direction comes from Mind. Mind whether conscious of Reality or only dreaming an illusion. When Energy produced spacetime-matter at the Big Bang, it did so not at the direction of Mind creating Reality from possibilities. It did so at the direction of mind dreaming unreality from impossibilities.

When you lost consciousness, mistook your own reflection for another self, were taken captive by your other self – your dark side, -- and then mistook who you are and where you are, you activated the “dark side of the Force.” The lights gone out, your thoughts were no longer enlightened by Abundance and Innocence, hallmarks of sanity. They were plunged by the false innocence of victimhood into insanity: a hellish pit of fear, blame, rage, hatred, and guilt – wounding emotions conjured by your captor, rival to your Parents. Rival to Reality and Truth. Coded to bring down all of Creation with psychopathic lies. With a barrage of made-up grievances and resentments.

Your mind was a cauldron of torment that it could not tolerate. And so it got rid of its torment. It projected its unwanted emotions out of mind into a separate reality, an act conjured by the illusionist and animated by Energy. The Big Bang. Sheer madness since thoughts can’t leave their source, and “separate reality” can only be a joke. The projection climaxed the illusionist’s magic tricks, but the madness nevertheless remains firmly seated in your mind. Its unwanted emotions went nowhere.

Still, you’re the source of the Big Bang! You invented our universe!

Why?

Your purpose then can’t be to affirm the reality of what’s not real, to exploit it for pleasure until all that’s left is pain. Your purpose must be to learn and grow from experience. To gain the competence to tell the difference between host and reflection, truth from deception, reality from illusion. To tell the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, the light side from the dark side of the Force. Your purpose is to attain the maturity of self-awareness. The awareness that self-the-many is Self-the-One. The knowledge that there are no “others” but reflections of our Self, and in each one of us is the one Self.

To what end? That you may reclaim your identity. Reclaim you Free Will, your individuality and Creativity, and wake up from your self-imposed dream of worthlessness. That you may regain awareness of the connection with your Source that was never lost and return Home. Home to the joyfulness and Worth of Life and Creation. To the oneness, beauty, and perfection of Reality. To having a job to do and the competence of Logic, Love, and experience to do it.

 

 

 

 

 

Published on Leave a comment on Standing Up for Logic: Why Idealism Makes Sense and “Realism” Doesn’t

The Logic that Dr. Johnson’s foot can never refute

An idealist recognizing Reality, the facts-Truth behind appearances, strikes realists as an absurdity. Realists who lack the vision of Logic and can only recognize appearances on the surface with the body’s senses that are one with the appearance.  This is the real absurdity: self-referential circular “reasoning” that takes staring into a funhouse mirror as objective reality.

The idealist recognizes Reality, the facts-Truth behind appearances, by its function. By what it does, its usefulness, as well as by what it is. By its Definition which necessarily includes Purpose. Recognizing Reality behind appearances could not be logical otherwise. The definitions of Logic center upon the function-usefulness of its subject. Upon its Purpose which, to be logical, must fit within the larger order of Reality-Creation harmoniously. The fitting-together of every aspect of Reality-Creation is its Logic, that makes it governable.

The idealist’s recognition of one Reality behind appearances may strike realists unable to see with the vision of Logic as an absurdity. But when this one fact, one Purpose, takes its place within a harmonious composition of facts that serve a logical Purpose, that explain its composition through the implications of Logic, its interconnections with consistency and clarity -- a feat that all of human inquiry has yet to achieve through the realist’s reliance on body-sensed appearances, -- it can no longer be dismissed as an absurdity. The arch-realist Dr. Johnson can no longer “refute it thus” by kicking a wastebasket.

Explanation that leads to Understanding can only be the end result of Logic, and Logic is not an absurdity. Absurdity lies not in the idealist’s reliance on the vision of Logic but in the realist’s lack of it. In the realist’s so-called reasoning that attempts to find Purpose and meaning in constructs of “fact” without Logic. That can’t hold together without it. That defy explanation and contradict Understanding.

What physics, neuroscience, and biology can’t explain 

Physics can’t explain its subject – the material universe, unreality – when the point of its origin is singularity. The state of inaccessibility to the laws of physics. “Laws” which particle physics – quantum mechanics – flout anyway simply because the magician behind the magic of illusion is energy, inseparable and indivisible, the agent of Mind whether conscious or unconscious. Energy, the Force of Creation, which can, if called upon by mind unconscious, animate its dreams almost as convincingly as it can the Reality of Mind that’s conscious. Energy, the connection between the neurons of body-brains, powered by electrical impulses in unreality and imagining, while connecting with the thoughts and feelings, the Logic and Love, of Mind in the Now, in Reality Creating.

Neuroscience ruled by the arbitrary bias of realists falls for the deception and claims consciousness for the brain. The organ split between left and right hemispheres, the judgment of choice and the spontaneity of freedom. Split between its limbic system, the mindless willful act of herd instinct and the reflective deliberation of its prefrontal cortex. Between captivity to a false self and receptivity to its Real Self. In step with itself or at war with itself. Programmed to join with other brains in shared Purpose or to confront other brains in lethal combat – take your pick.

Neuroscience served by thoughtfulness instead of mindless bias isn’t so sure. Allows for the possibility that Mind and its consciousness are not the province of Energy stored in bodies – cells encased in matter that live and die, come and go, appear and disappear, without notice in cosmic time. Neuroscience split by consciousness like its subject, mind as well as brain, into two incompatible views.

Molecular biology, empowered by the discovery of DNA-RNA and the genome, still can’t explain its subject – organic cellular life – when the point of its origin is singularity, the state of inaccessibility to the laws of biology. Still can’t heal the psyche’s wounds, fix the mind’s psychiatric flaws. Despite the gains of the past, all of body-centric science leaves us in a state of not-knowing. Despite the gains to come, that is where it will leave us.

The ultimate realist’s ultimate fantasy

All of human inquiry into inorganic matter and organic life, armed with philosophy, psychology, and theology, dutifully subservient to its insistence on “realism" -- on the dictates of appearances, the body’s senses -- has marched forward with confidence that enlightenment will come. Answers will reveal themselves and finally! we will know.

This mysterious situation we find ourselves in will be mystery no more. And we can continue our march forward together, in harmony and shared Purpose, at last! Without conflict and misery, pain and suffering, that insist that this is the only reality and nothing can change. The promise of bodies and their senses brought to reality: heaven on earth. The apotheosis of Hawking’s “Quest for knowledge:” his boundaryless universe of Being that needs no source.

Why? Because bias hard-wired into animal-instinct willed it. Because it’s creation and he’s the creator, the ultimate “realist’s” ultimate fantasy. The ultimate absurdity of “realism:” there can be no other Reality because I’m God and the world is my creation. This is the mind of the “realist.” The authoritarian at heart who yearns to be arbitrary rule above the law. Who craves “liberty” – Freedom without Order, an impossibility. The lawlessness of insanity.

Where is the real realism?

Confidence once unbroken is now broken. Inquiry that relies on the falsehood, the blatantly illogical unreality of “realism,” has failed. The mystery is still with us. Pointlessness is still with us. Contradiction, confusion, and ambiguity are still with us. And we still fight, at war with ourselves and among ourselves. The issue unresolved while our disappearing habitat goes about resolving it for us.

Who’s getting it right? Idealists looking inward toward substance guided by the vision of Logic? Or realists peering outward toward an absurdity: form detectable only by itself?

Who sees Purpose and meaning that add up? That hold together and explain themselves? Where is the “proof” that was promised from experimental science – physics, neuroscience, and biology? Where is coherence from this mad aggregation of unruly atoms and mutating cells, conflicting mass ideologies and personalities, incurable psychiatric disorders, unmanageable family dynamics, convoluted theologies and mythologies, haunted, schizophrenic minds?

Where is the real realism?

Published on Leave a comment on Torpedo Girl – In the Beginning

Bildungsroman: n. A novel whose principal subject is the moral, psychological, and intellectual development of a usually youthful main character.
American Heritage Dictionary, Fifth Edition (2016) 

The dark side of beans

What is that look on your face? Horror. Despair You don’t like hearing from an old guy with a beard? So many! So many what? Pages! Words! What have I done to deserve this? Beans. You ate too many beans, and this is your punishment. I’ll never eat beans again. I promise! 

This is an interesting story. You might enjoy it. It has lots of action. And a girl just like you. Two girls in fact. One is in big trouble, and she needs help. She will if she’s strapped to a torpedo. Don’t spoil the ending! The other is the only person in the universe who can help her. Seriously. I’m not making this up. Will I understand it? Old guys mumbling in their beards tend to lose me.

It’s a lot like Star Wars, the original episode where there was this wonderful Death Star. Cool! It blew up whole planets. That was fun. Does Torpedo Girl get to blow up another Death Star? When our girls are done with it there will be nothing left of the Death Star. OK. But fair warning: I’ll be eating a lot of beans. Oh no! You just spoiled the ending. That’s how they blew up the Death Star!

We’ll be talking a lot about “opposites.” I knew there was a catch. Opposites are just another name for the dark side of the Force. You’ll enjoy all the hot action better if we understand the “dark side” and opposites. Opposites of what? Opposites of anything they’re attached to. What are they, parasites? Yes. We think of the dark side as Palpatine and his evil galactic empire crushing pitiful rebellions. And Lord Vader breathing hard into his dorky helmet while he chokes hapless underlings without touching them. But all they are is opposites. Weak, not strong. This had better be good. 

Mind starting Creation requires thought

What-if stories stimulate our imaginations. This What-if story will put your imagination on steroids. Oh, like Tik Tok. Pah! Another pitiful rebellion! Storm troopers – remove the silly game! 

Imagine that you’re the only thing that is. I do that every day. Then we’re off to a great start. You’re Mind. Yes – pure genius! What a great story! Do you mind if I have another can of beans? Sorry, Mind isn’t matter. It doesn’t need that kind of food. What other kind of food is there? Haven’t you ever heard of food for thought? That’s what this story is. Boring. Beans generate much more excitement.

Can you handle being able to see stuff and make stuff happen without a body? Easy. I’ve always thought of myself as a great mind. Good. You’re Mind and you’d like to make something nice happen. But it won’t be nice if you don’t do it right. You mean I actually have to think? If we’re talking about Mind starting Creation, yes. You’ll have to think. And don’t forget, the Jedi Knights had to go through rigorous training. Then they had to figure out how to deliver the torpedo that blew up the Death Star. That took a lot of thinking.

Logic and Love say no one is above the law

Anything that “happens” needs a definition. A definition that says what it is and what it does. No exceptions. How come? So its definition doesn’t conflict with other definitions or duplicate them. There has to be Order so everything fits together, and everyone gets along. Already it sounds like I don’t get to do anything I want. You can do anything you want so long as it’s possible. It can’t be possible because I want it?

Everything must be part of Order including Mind that defines things. Wow! I thought Mind would be in charge of everything! How can this be? You’ll be OK with this because this is how Order defines itself, and nothing nice can happen without Order. If Mind or anything could run around and do whatever it wants, there would be no Order. Order is harmony. It’s the same principle as democracy: no one is “above the law.” Not even the president. What law? 

Think of the laws that govern making stuff happen as laws of cause and effect. You’ve heard the expression, “That’s the way it is.” Well, the laws are the way things are and that’s that. It’s Necessity. You’re frowning. You know me. I’m not happy if I can’t mess with the rules. Sorry about that. These are rules no one can mess with. Not even the Logic of Mind that laws are based on. Without this law none of the other laws can have any effect. Say it again. No one is above the law, not even the president. Not even the Logic of Mind itself.

You mean Mind is the source of laws but it can’t control them? Yes. The attribute of Mind that’s responsible for governance is responsible for its laws that make governance possible, and they’re made up of equal parts Logic and Love. “Mind” throughout implies Logic and Love combined as one. Then we should say “Mind-Love.” We could, but we might need that to refer to another character. We can infer it without stating it.

No Freedom without Order in a shared world

Definitions are like laws that establish what things are and they can’t be anything different. Mind can make stuff happen so long as it abides by the laws of Necessity. Once it’s defined a thing that’s the way it is. Give me liberty or give me death! Freedom from the tyranny of George III but not Freedom from Order. There can’t be any “liberty” without Order and any Order without laws. The good news is that since the laws are there to ensure Order and Mind can’t change them, they’re also there to ensure Freedom.

If I can’t do anything I want, how is this Freedom? OK. You can have that kind of “freedom,” but only if you decide not to make something nice happen. If you’re happy being the only show in town and having it all to yourself. If not, you’ll be sharing your world with your creations, and no one can share a world with others and be happy if some yo-yo is doing whatever she wants. People in our world do that a lot. They sure do. And it’s what gets them into trouble. Sometimes into jail. They don’t like living in a shared world. They’re a colossal nuisance.

Gertrude’s wisdom

When do I get to make something nice happen? When you learn about what’s possible in a shared, orderly world. Imagine that you’re in a classroom with a blank video screen. Oh good -- video games! Let’s get started! Would you rather have a blank blackboard instead? No video games allowed! Something blank – a blackboard or a video screen – must have been there when Logic and Love first set thinking and feeling in motion. Then I have to think logically. What’s that mean? Think with feeling logically, yes, because you’ll be thinking with values, and feeling is where values come from. Values put the “nice” into making something nice happen.

Logic tells Mind what situation it’s in. It describes circumstances so Mind can figure out where it is and what it means. Then it can use Reason to choose what to do about it. It can’t reason without having a purpose, and Logic makes sure that purpose fits the circumstances. There’s an old joke. Alice Toklas asked Gertrude Stein when Gertrude was very old and wise, “What’s the answer?” Gertrude answered, “What’s the question?” What she meant was, “What are the circumstances?” Without circumstances in the moment and Logic figuring out what they’re telling us, how can we know the question? That was Gertrude’s wisdom.

The Force can’t be a couch potato

We call purpose that fits the circumstances “context.” Even Mind that’s getting started with a blank video screen needs context to know whether and how to do anything. Making anything happen won’t be nice if it doesn’t have the right values and fit the circumstances. Our circumstances are nothing has happened yet and I’m getting bored!

Torpedo Girl is getting bored, so Mind had better get cracking. Its context is nothing is happening, and you know what? What? That would help to explain why Mind did get cracking, because “nothing happening” could be a situation that Mind, which is definitely not nothing, can’t tolerate. Maybe it can Be forever, but it can’t not Do forever. Why not? 

Because how can Mind that’s Logic combined with Love just sit around not doing anything? Not taking care of something or someone? Showing that they care? Mind’s circumstance in the classroom where nothing is happening is a whole lot of thinking and loving that needs to be doing to be what it is. You mean Mind needs stuff just like us? Logic combined with Love is passion. It’s Force. Like the Force in Star Wars? Certainly! Force can’t be Force without acting. It can’t be motivated to act if its passion to respond to circumstances and express itself is a couch potato.

Getting it right: beer, pizza, and football

Wow! I was thinking our Mind is a brain inside a bottle in school where nothing happens. This is different! Very. It’s a dynamo instead, bursting with passion and Energy eager to get going. A powerful locomotive sitting in a train station ready to take its passengers on a grand excursion to an intriguing destination. Once Logic sets up the context.

Good for you! You’ve learned one important lesson. What’s that? Deciding with Reason and acting before we’ve let Logic tell us what our situation is, is a big mistake. Doing what’s right is doing “what the situation calls for.” We can’t do what the situation calls for without first letting our situation tell us what it is. Without first getting it right. Mind needs Logic and Love for that. In our world, easier said than done. It requires lots of intuition, but more about that later.

Get it right before do it right. Are there more circumstances to tell us what our situation calls for? Pay attention to the video screen. It’s about to feed us the most important circumstance for our story. The most important circumstance for another context, too: the world we live in. Ah -- I knew it! Lipstick! Women need lipstick! Yes. And men need beer and pizza. And football. Don’t forget the chips. Beer, pizza, chips, and football. And lots of makeup. Torpedo Girl can go home. We’re already in Heaven.

The impossibility of Mind without Love

The wisdom of Logic is like a stream flowing down a dry streambed, filling each hole at a time, each in its own time. We are the stream, and this is what Wisdom requires of us. We can also think of Logic as flowing in a sequence from left to right. From premise to implication, from before to after. Indefinitely, because one implication always leads to another. Like the geometric value of Pi that never resolves to a whole number. It just goes on and on. You’re going on and on.

It matters what the first premise is, but we don’t have to be too fussy how it’s worded. “Possibility.” This could be the first premise that comes to Mind when Logic and Love have defined its context. You’re Mind and you want to make something “nice” happen, but what do you mean by “nice?” What are the possibilities? This is always the first question when minds begin to choose.

This is it? The most important circumstance? Almost. Possibility could be the first premise because of what it implies: creation, ideals, vision, hope. It’s kind of a North Star we can focus on to help us navigate through distractions, contradictions, adversity, and discouragement. If you’re Mind and you have your heart set on making something nice happen. . . . Heart?

Did you forget? Mind and heart go together. It bears repeating -- they’re inseparable. I was hoping to be a comic book super action hero with no feelings. Not possible. “Possibility” can’t be Mind without Love. Not in our What-if world where everything so far is fine. It’s very different in our world but only because it seems that way. More about that later.

The impossibility of impossibility

For now, if you have your heart set on making something nice happen, you’ll definitely want to stay focused on possibility. Then what is the video screen telling us that’s the most important circumstance? Impossibility. The opposite of possibility. Imagine “possibility” showing up like a link you can click on, and it will take you somewhere. It’s an active link. Then the same instant another link shows up beside it, faded out like it’s not active. A word that’s the first word’s exact opposite. It’s obviously meant to take you somewhere, too, but not while “possibility’s” link is active. Creepy. I’m not sure I want to know where “impossibility” goes if it’s the opposite of “possibility.” Why does it have to show up at all? Do we have to bother with opposites? 

It has to show up because of the same Logic that puts anything on the screen. If a thing is to exist and it implies the existence of its opposite, then some way must be found for its opposite to “exist,” too. The implications of Logic are Force that accounts for Creation along with the connections of Love. But the same implications can’t help accounting for contradiction. And if the definition of a thing implies contradiction, its definition must accommodate contradiction. 

The dark side is opposites 

Logic and Love don’t like contradiction any more than we do, but there you have it. Have what? The “dark side.” The dark side is opposites, and they “exist” because Logic put them there. And if Logic put them there, nothing can be done about it. What’s “logical” about a thing and its contradiction existing side-by-side in the same place at the same time? Sounds crazy to me. 

It is crazy. Order requires Logic and Logic doesn’t tolerate contradictions. The ideal of Logic is to arrive at a place of Peace where there are no contradictions, where the Force can come to rest at last. It will never happen. Not as long as Logic supports Creation. Not as long as Mind wants to make something nice happen.

Meanwhile, we’re stuck with opposites – with “impossibility.” Some way must be found to get all impossibilities – opposites -- out of the picture. How do we do that? The inactive link for impossibility on the video screen offers more than a clue. It’s already taken care of it. Logic has found a way for opposites to exist without “existing.” On a computer we would know to go to a different page on a website, to a different website, or to a different app to find where impossibility’s link is active. To another computer world.

Logic acknowledges the implication of opposites without requiring that they inhabit the same world as their hosts. The parasites are given their own world with its own properties that don’t conflict with their host’s world. Why doesn’t it conflict? 

The faded link to unreality 

If the “existence” of a parasite-opposite is entirely derived from its host’s existence, then it obviously has no existence of its own. Or attributes of its own, either, because its entire definition is derived from its host. It’s defined as its host’s opposite. It has no definition of its own, and nothing can exist that hasn’t been given its own definition. Parasite-opposites don’t get their definition from Logic. They get it from an implication of their hosts’ definition.

The faded link to impossibility takes us to another world that matches its essential attribute: non-existence. It’s unreal. The parasite-opposites world doesn’t conflict because it’s unreal. How can unreality conflict with Reality if it doesn't exist?

For now, Mind is assured that wherever possibility’s link is active impossibility’s won’t be. It may not even see it or be aware that it’s there. But it’s been forewarned. That’s why we started here in the classroom with the video screen. To wave a red flag called “impossibility,” because that’s what parasite-opposites are: an impossibility in Reality. The link will be there, inactive and waiting for the right circumstances for something or someone to make it active. A snake waiting for someone to step on it.

Can it be a cow pie? I won’t finish her story if Torpedo Girl is going to step on a snake. OK, but only if it’s a huge cow pie. I won’t enjoy Torpedo Girl’s story if she only steps in a little cow pie.

Living the dream

The inactive link is waiting for a parasite-opposite’s host to click on it by mistake and make its unreal world “real.” Not really Real, but “real” like a vivid dream. It can’t be Logic that determines whether impossibility’s link becomes active and someone clicks on it. It wouldn’t be Logic’s mistake. It depends on the parasites’ hosts. It depends on Torpedo Girl. It depends on us. It would be our mistake. We are forewarned.

Our story revolves around how understanding this basic circumstance, or fact, can be used to get our girl out of trouble. So, if I’m Mind and I’m going to make something nice happen, I have to be aware that everything has an opposite, and opposites aren’t real. Yes. There’s a dark side, but this is its essential property: it isn’t real. We can only make it seem real when we’re dreaming. Otherwise, it’s an illusion, a magic act. I’m glad we got this settled, because dark sides are everywhere in our world, and they sure seem real. They tell me that our world is a What-if world, but we don’t have to go into that now.

Freedom of Will, Freedom of Choice

Imagine that the nice thing your Mind wants to make happen is to create a world of beauty and peace, Logic and Love. A world that provides a safe, nurturing haven for Life. The miracle of eternal Life that exists in timelessness, where it’s always Now. Life that has Worth because it has purpose, it’s freely chosen and earned. Because it’s exploring, learning, and growing. Having great fun with creativity -- endless diversity evolving in an environment of exquisite Beauty, a soul-sharing sanctuary of innocent work and play. Because all this is a gift from Logic and Love that’s reciprocated – appreciated and given back. Wow! That is a nice thing.

Imagine that Creation requires another Being to achieve its purpose. To see that the Worth of Life and Creation is freely chosen and earned. A Being with its own definition, its own identity, so that Mind and Creation aren’t just patting themselves on the back. Who would that be? 

Our girl, the Child. The Child of the Mind-Love we mentioned, her parents. Father Mind-Choice and Mother Love-Freedom, whose role is to give birth to the Being that Creation requires: Free Choice. The same as Free Will? The Child is an extension of her parents’ Will, their Being. This places her in Relationship with her parents. They are inseparable, and their Relationship is inseparable from the Child’s function. She can’t do her job without it.

But because she is, and has, the capacity to choose independently, she is also Choice. And Choice can never, ever, be controlled by an external influence. Not by her parents or by their Relationship. So, while they’re in Relationship and inseparable, their roles must be kept apart. This is true whether the Child is awake, doing her job in Creation, or asleep and dreaming she’s somewhere else. Free Will and Free Choice refer to the same Child performing different functions: choosing freely while extending the Will, the Being, of her parents.

It's all about character

We will see that the Child doing her job isn’t anything like we imagine it on earth. How’s that? We think of “heaven” as a place where an old guy with a beard watches over angels with wings playing harps on little clouds. As if having a purpose and striving to attain it couldn’t compare with the satisfaction of doing nothing. There’s no change, no “action,” which here must mean some form of gambling, addiction, conflict, and violence.

The Child your Mind-Love brings into Being and Creation leads a very interesting life without any of this. No silly harps and no bullets flying around either. There’s plenty of purpose and meaning. Plenty of risk-taking, too, which requires courage as well as alertness. Plenty of change and innovation. It’s all about character, and that’s always interesting. Is there a reward?

You bet! The  satisfaction of contributing to the Worth of Life. To the meaning of Creation. Every relationship a soulmate. The rapture of intimacy with Mind-Love itself. Of loving and being loved more than you can ever imagine. Happiness! What more could you ask? Wow! She’s got a life! Yes. And Torpedo girl does, too. She’s got a job to do. They both have interesting lives, and they are about to get much more interesting.

[To be continued]

Published on Leave a comment on The Music of Our Lives

Music that echoes through the halls
feeling that wherever we are, wherever we go
we are accompanied at our source
centering us, connecting us, never leaving us

Loving and bountiful, that guides us with its beauty
the radiance of life that we can return to at will.

Touching us in the present
but as it follows us through the halls
moves us as though it were a voice
from another house, another life.

The memory of a loved one from another time
a home where its voice was first heard
where we were joined with it in the rapture of being
Child in the embrace of Love its Parent

In the sound of music
In Heaven.

The beauty of music that echoes
through our lives
that caresses us, lifts our spirits
that we will return to someday.

The music of our lives that’s calling us home.

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Published on 1 Comment on The Hello that Won’t Become Goodbye

We relate to that which can leave us
When it seems there is no other choice
The only one possible Hellos that sadden
When time passes, things change,
And they become Goodbyes.

How else could it be in a world of absence
Where we’ve lost the presence of that
Which won’t leave us
In a fog of never Now, never light, never visible,
Never Here with us where we are
If we are anywhere at all.

Yet the Hello of Love that lasts forever finds us
Somehow connects us to a state of Mind
Where there is only Good, and it can never end
Whose connection cannot be broken
Because it established itself.

Because we did not go to it, we went nowhere
It came to us of its own accord
Just as it can leave of its own accord
If we imagine that it’s an object to be possessed
To be ruled by arbitrariness and abuse.

The Hello of Love that lasts forever
Needs no choosing if it’s chosen us
So gentle and tender that it slips by awareness
So harmless that it opens and occupies
our most vulnerable space, unnoticed.

Our Heart, as though it had been there all along
And why not? This is its Home where it belongs
The Soul of Oneness whose door is open
To hearts everywhere when we get out of the way.

When we do what is asked of us and let it go
Set it free – the Good that we do when we share it
Touching one another with Love
Hellos that won’t become Goodbyes.

 

Published on Leave a comment on What Fools These Mortals Be!

The Mother of all Mistakes 

If not only mental illness is intractable but also basic functions of governance, like maintaining order and managing the environment, might one wonder what’s causing misjudgment? Where the misperceptions are coming from that stand in the way of Understanding who we are and what we’re about? Where we are and how we got here? If one archetypal misperception, one seminal misunderstanding, occurred somewhere in the evolution of Mind, wouldn’t we want to track it down? Wouldn’t we want to know the story of Mind? Get straight what happened. Understand what went wrong?

Isn’t it logical to assume that one mistake in the functioning of the Mind that we share could be responsible for every mistake that followed? Could be the Mother of all Mistakes. To assume that a miscalculation of some sort sent thinking and perceptions that followed off on the wrong track. If an unintentional navigation error could get an intercontinental passenger jet so far off course that it got shot down over Russia, couldn’t an unintentional error in recognition get Mind and its replications off course, too? So far off course that their efforts to navigate bring them repeatedly to the wrong destination. To disorder and mismanagement. To repeatedly getting their hopes shot down.

Inert dummies strapped to their seats after a crash

Isn’t it logical, then, to wonder if such a consequential error occurred and what it might be? Have we surrendered our Free Will, our mobility? Or are we paralyzed by inertia and fear? Like passengers strapped to their seats after their plane has crash landed, dummies in a state of shock.

Do we really have the right answers? Or are we condemned to endlessly repeat our mistakes and expect different results? Without acknowledging our failures, taking responsibility, and fixing what’s broken? What happened to accountability? Where in all this fevered activity is there a hint of real sapience? Of our species’ vaunted self-awareness? Of openness and honesty? Of leadership and conscience? Or is it all submerged in the self-justification of groups, our Machiavellian overlords who have no use for moral codes. Their only “code” their survival, their authority.

Can we be so sure of basic assumptions that keep producing frustration that they don’t need to be questioned? Is faith in the sideshow pyrotechnics of matter -- astronomy and molecular biology, genetics and telecommunications gadgetry -- well placed if they reveal nothing new about Mind? Nothing that would prevent humanity’s animal instinct, its mindless reptilian brain, from continuing to misuse and abuse them? Did I fail to mention weaponry? Let us take pride in ingenuity that mows down defenseless innocents in schools, churches, theaters, and grocery stores. 

The Big Bang was a Big Nothing

Could the intractability of mental illness, the virtual dead-end of psychiatry’s ability to cure it, be telling us something about Mind in general? After assuming that the cause is brain matter, that maybe the problem goes deeper than that? A lot deeper.

That the cause is Mind, not brain. And where Mind comes from. Where it remains, traces its pathology, its origins, well beyond bodies’ experience of infancy in a world of matter. Well beyond the event so enshrined in the human imagination as the beginning of everything, the “Big Bang.” When the Big Bang may be only one of a multitude of Big Bangs. May be in the Reality, the universe of Mind, effect, not cause. An imaginary event – a Big Nothing that has no real consequences and physics can never explain.

A Big Nothing in the dynamics of archetypal thought and feeling that can be explained. In the life and evolution of the Logic of Mind that preceded and caused it. Because conscious Mind has Logic, the only source of explanation and Understanding, and matter, the projection of Mind unconscious and dreaming, does not.

Why should this be of no interest to fields of inquiry – science, philosophy, psychology, theology – whose minds profess to want answers? Whose minds profess to have answers when they haven’t allowed themselves to ask the right questions. For this is what’s wrong.

They persist in their misjudgments, trapped by their misperceptions. Expecting different results either because they’re sure they Understand the situation humanity is in that yields our Understanding of purpose and meaning – our context. Or because they’re terrified that they don’t.  That there may be another context, and it will be a discomfort, a major inconvenience, to figure it out. Or an embarrassment to hand it off to those who can. To theorists like Democritus, Parmenides, Plato, and Michael Faraday, who intuited with Logic what materialist body-centric science couldn't.

Caught forever in Erich von Stroheim’s Grand Illusion

Sticking with answers to the wrong questions is illogical. Illogic can’t yield Understanding or good results. The Logic of our context, our situation, is virgin territory, unexamined and unexplained by the paradigms that dominate our thinking. Because the reality of our context, handed to us by our bodies equipped with reptilian brains, that’s taken as a given, is, in fact, an appearance. A deception. The real Big Lie. That blocks examination and prevents explanation.

If the mentally ill must be abandoned en masse to the streets, if our children and grandchildren must be condemned to Anthropocene extinction, victims of mass insanity, doesn’t it make sense to remove the barrier to Logic? To change our focus from bodies and brains to Mind? From illusion that can’t yield answers to Reality that can. Because that’s where the problem is -- the emotion and the tears.

Published on Leave a comment on The Test and Gift of High School: Individuality and Self-Respect

When codes of conduct conflict

When middle school principals urge their graduates to know themselves and be true to themselves, what they mean is their graduates will be joining lots of groups. And when they do, groups will sometimes pressure them to put what’s important to groups ahead of what individuals know in their minds and hearts is right. And being true to themselves means being true to what they know is right. That’s not always easy. In lives dominated by groups it takes concentration, character, and effort to stand up for what’s right. To keep personal integrity and self-respect intact.

What groups need to succeed and survive isn’t always compatible with what individuals need to love one another without competition and conflict. Groups need power and wealth to compete. They’ll fight for domination if they have to, even the ones who seem the nicest. And they’ll treat us like captive soldiers if they can get away with it. Being “good” doesn’t come first with groups if they have to do what’s necessary to survive. If they have to do what’s bad.

An Italian diplomat and historian named Niccolo Machiavelli wrote that the moral code that applies to individuals can’t apply to groups. The advice he gave political leaders was very different from what they were being told by the Church, but it applied to all groups. He was just stating the obvious, yet it caused a sensation. That was in the 16th century, and it still upsets people today. Middle school principals are warning their graduates not to get caught up in groups’ “Machiavellian” behavior when it conflicts with their moral code.

The taste of inferiority

High school does its job by testing our character so we come out of it more experienced with group pressure. So we’re more aware of what’s required to resist it when we know it’s pulling us in the wrong direction. When we’re pressured to “fit in,” to “go along to get along,” to be one of the “crowd.”

Middle school graduates with the right stuff won’t let themselves be compromised. But while they’re going all out with the excitement of high school, while they’re getting involved and having fun, they shouldn’t take their strength – their individuality – for granted.

For some adolescents pressure to be more like “others” can be dangerous. It can make them feel so bad about themselves they don’t even want to be themselves. They just want to disappear. That’s how it was for me at boarding school. I had nightmares about it over thirty-five years later. It even tasted bad. I never want to go through that again. Some of my classmates had the same experience and told me later. If high schools had cemeteries, their tombstones would all be marked “Self-Esteem.”

The test of performance builds confidence

If this happens to you, you can try to win the respect you crave from others and risk your health. Or you can take a different tack: look to yourself for self-respect. And learn that self-respect is a daily test of character that’s never done. Being true to yourself means taking nothing for granted. You may be confident that you’ve already learned self-respect, but confidence is just the beginning. Only performance, through high school and the world beyond, every day, lets us know for sure.

High school is a foretaste of the pressures you’ll be exposed to out in the world. Groups that provide us with the essentials and pleasures of a good life – jobs, causes, belonging, entertainments – can exact a high price in return. Many individuals just as confident as you have had to make serious compromises. To stay true to themselves many have had to say No to their groups and had to do without their benefits. You may have to face the same situation someday. I have, many times.

How your individuality and high moral code handle group pressure in high school could determine whether it’s easier or harder later. It’s good practice, good training. Take it on with enthusiasm because it’s all for your benefit and you’re getting off on the right foot. Because while you’re demonstrating confidence, you’ll also be building it.

Published on Leave a comment on On the Threshold to High School: May Which Force Be With You?

August 17, 2022: a date which will be long remembered. . . .

High school marks a new phase in individuals’ maturation in many ways. One is progress toward development and expansion of gifts and talents. Because that’s the business end of lives, our being, our selves: what we are to do with who we are. How we are to make ourselves useful. Because ours and others’ happiness and wellbeing rely on us to make use of ourselves through the expression and application of our talents. Through performance.

There will be many distractions, but this is our true course toward living lives of accomplishment, meaning, fulfillment, and happiness: making use of ourselves through our talents. There may also be a good deal of waste, because we typically have too many potential talents and uses to develop in one life. We must make a choice.

August 17, our debut at high school, will mark the first serious phase in choosing which of our talents to work and play with. To learn and grow with. For an adolescent girl of character, ambition, and conscience, what will it be? Creativity through artistry and the performing arts? Excellence through competitive sports? Character development through leadership?  Healing and intimacy through relationships? Innovation through discovery?

How do we engage with an expanding world that’s engaging with us?

Relationships with others continue in high school as before, but with a subtle difference. High school is adolescence that breaks with childhood, a period when individuals shed a skin that kept them insulated within a protective enclosure. A bubble of unawareness that served as an extension of the mother’s womb. To shield vulnerable and unformed selves from potentially hostile and harmful influences outside the womb.

Adolescence exposes individuals to some of these influences. Releases them from their sheltered world and expands it. Makes them aware for the first time that they share something larger: an expanding world composed of many worlds. Not just a place but a Force. Way larger than themselves and their immediate environment, the only environment that a child knows. They must now choose how to adapt to it. How to relate to it, engage with it. How to replace the protection afforded by the womb, to protect their vulnerability in new ways. Because their parents’ protection, for better or worse, is giving way to this Force. And we’re not just engaging with it. It’s engaging with us.

The most important choice is choice

High-schoolers must confront the need to make choices for themselves. And the very first and most important choice is choice itself: whether they prefer to choose freely, with independent judgment, or avoid it. Duck the responsibility -- pass it off to someone or something else. The most important choice is whether to run toward the functions of mind that enable Free Will or to run away from them.

With the onset of adolescence, humanity in high school begins to divide itself into two basic personality types: those who embrace the independent judgment of Free Will and those who reject it in favor of something else. Something with a seductive yet sinister appeal: will that isn’t free. Judgment that’s made for them, ready-made and easy.

The Way of the Master: Vince Lombardi

The Force of nature that accounts for humanity and its environment also accounts for its division into two opposing interpretations of where it originates. One interpretation assumes that it originates with a source that’s benevolent. That’s conscious, self-aware, and alive with thoughts, feelings, soulfulness, and creativity. That wills humanity to choose its way forward freely and happily, with guidance and support from this Force but not its intrusion or dominance.

The other interpretation assumes that this Force originates from a source that exhibits none of these attributes. It’s mindless, loveless, and soulless. It has no “self” to be aware of. It’s simply a will, or “fate,” that one either sides with and survives or doesn’t side with and gets run over. That one can either join and benefit from its derived power or oppose and wind up powerless, with no resources and no prospects.

If the supremacy of “fate” so decrees, one can be a “winner.” If it doesn’t, one becomes a “loser.” The stark choice offered by the second interpretation is dominate or be dominated. Not just in sports but in every relationship: see only a contest of wills and win the contest. At any cost, especially understanding, reality, and truth. Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.

The fans of George III never left us

But regression to savagery, whether the noble savage of Rousseau or the ignoble savage of Hobbes, can’t be obvious in civilized society. Aside from politics where anything goes, the appearance of civility must be maintained. The cult of animal instinct must be clothed in “sociability” without compromising its not-so sociable reality.

Our shared environment – “civilization” --requires getting along in peace and harmony, with some semblance of mindfulness and thoughtfulness, affect and empathy, and independent judgment. Beyond semblance, the second interpretation’s lust for dominance wants nothing to do with a shared environment. Its will is to dispense with it altogether.

Understanding personality types is critical to self-awareness

These are radically different interpretations, and the adolescents who commit to one or the other do well to understand their consequences. Do well to understand that personality types that identify with mind and its intuition and those that identify with body and its senses account for the difference.

Self-awareness is essential. And it begins with the first indications in adolescence which of these directions personalities are taking. Mind that feels through Intuition a Force within that’s Mind – will that’s relatable, conscious, and benevolent? Or body that detects through senses an external Force of nature – will or “fate” that’s neither relatable, conscious, nor benevolent? One a sentient Being, subject, the other an insentient object. One with the attributes of Being, the other a senseless beast.

The difference in the psychology of personality is between individuals who prefer to rely on mind-intuition to interpret their reality – the way things are, the way the Will of Force has made them, wants them – and those drawn to the body for interpretation. One “sees” (understands) its environment as originating from Force that’s subject-self, like itself. The other “sees” (understands) its environment as originating from Force that’s object-self, like itself. The difference is critical for the individual, critical for everyone.

Mindless “action:” the will that sets the rules through animal instinct

What would account for these two possibilities? A source of Force with attributes of consciousness – creativity that’s alive with purpose -- and source with attributes of unconsciousness – creativity that’s random happenstance, undirected “fate.”

The answer is Mind that can exist in two states: one conscious, the other unconscious. The second state asleep and possibly dreaming.

If the Force of nature that manifests our world could be an instrument of Mind, of Will that’s either awake or asleep, it could manifest the attributes of one or the other. Mind-centered personalities, guided by the vision of Logic, intuit source-Mind that’s awake, alive and benevolent.

Body-centered personalities, dependent on physical senses for interpretation, are grafted onto the only environment they can detect: our physical environment. Their preference for sensing over intuition leaves them with no awareness of the existence of Being or anything else beyond their physical environment. With no awareness of Mind or Will in another Reality, awake or asleep. Without the vision of Logic, they don’t “see” the source that mind-centered interpretations see because they can’t. 

What they “feel” with their senses is only its Force exerted on their immediate environment, the effect of sensed experience with no sense of cause or the attributes of cause. What they infer from its effect is their own entrapment in unconsciousness: dumb will that makes the rules, that sets the terms of engagement not through conscious choice or Free Will, not through affect or values that distinguish between right and wrong, but through dumb animal instinct.

Through mindless action defined as the dominance of Force. Through behavior that bypasses reflection, deliberation, sensitivity, loving kindness, judgment, and discipline. That finesses conscience and frees its subjects to engage with their world without moral responsibility or accountability. With only the cloak of “civility,” the cover of “sociability,” the blanket of “pleasantness” to keep them in line. Substitutes for an inner moral compass. The proverbial wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing.

Context: the Force of unconscious Mind, capable of dreaming

Both interpretations are correct within their separate contexts. The question isn’t which interpretation is correct, but which context is correct. A question that only Logic, accessible through Intuition, can answer. Because objectivity requires another perspective, and bodies’ senses grafted onto our material world cannot provide it. Another Reality can only be “seen” and understood through the vision of Logic.

If it’s assumed that our material world is the only possible reality, then Force that originates with unthinking-unfeeling object, rather than thinking-feeling subject, is exactly how the body-centered interpretation “sees” it: mindless, loveless, and soulless. A Force-will and nothing more. That we either ally with to survive or not ally with and take our chances.

If we assume that our material world  is not the only possible reality, that another Reality preceded it, somehow caused it, and parallels it, then Force must originate not with the effect of this other Reality – our world – but with its cause. “Cause” not necessarily “create,” “design,” or “intend,” if the dream of an unconscious mind can't be Real. Only cause, for now, that belongs to another dimension, another Reality.

If this other Reality is cause, then it cannot share the attributes of a temporal, material universe. And if it has the capacity to express itself in effects – to Create in the Now – it must do so through the Logic of Mind in combination with Love. It must do so through the agency of Force in service to Logic and the Laws of Cause and Effect. In service to Necessity -- conditions beyond the capacity of anything temporal and physical. Mind Conscious or unconscious, but, either way, capable of self-awareness, thought, feeling, judgment, and creative imagination in its Conscious state. Capable also of dreaming an illusion in its unconscious state. Dreaming an imagined unreality within the broader context of Reality. Within this context, mind-centered personality’s interpretation of Force with a benevolent source must be correct.

It all depends on psychology expressed through the individual’s personality type: whether the individual’s Psyche, or Soul, connects with the Memory of Mind conscious in Reality, accessible through Intuition, or remains captive to an imagined “fate” through mind unconscious and its dream of bodies and unreality. It all depends on how the individual summons awareness of one or another source of Force-will and attempts to engage with it: through intuition's vision of Logic or the unconsciousness of body.

Will change of mind come in time?

Is personality type a given or a preference? Preordained or not? Can an individual choose?

What must certainly correct choice of the wrong context is its consequences, and nothing is more certain than that the choice between these opposing interpretations will have consequences. Immediate and concrete. And these are already evident in the world and in lives that share it.

Only one of their opposing contexts can be correct, and Logic says the one that insists on the “reality” of unreality, a dream, on opposing “realities,” on a logical impossibility, cannot be correct. Then personality types who witness and personally experience the impacts of contradiction, of insanity, might realize their mistake. Might engineer a mind-change, a course correction, that cuts our losses.

If it’s not too late. The incorrect interpretation – our alliance with blind animal dominance, “the dark side of the Force” -- is already condemning every species on the planet to extinction. The stakes couldn’t be higher. The atrocity of warfare perpetrated by humanity in the twentieth century would have killed us off if nature had lent a hand. If we want to kill ourselves off, the twenty-first century is our chance, because nature is lending us a hand. Through climate change that may already be beyond reversal.

To Reality with Mind and Love. To hell with dominance!

What is the ultimate source of the “Force of Nature” and how should adolescents adapt to it? How should we all adapt to it? We can align with benevolent Logic within to Create in lawful Order, disciplined Freedom, Sensitivity, Peace, and Harmony. Or we can feed off a beast without to satiate lust for power. To indulge savage impulses to destroy in lawless disorder, undisciplined license, cruelty, conflict, and dominance.

Is the choice not clear?

Published on Leave a comment on To a Young Friend with a Very Special Talent

Gaslighting that's for fun

Before you and I get to the matter at hand, I just want to remind us both of the importance of coordination. You know, being able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Now, that’s never been a problem for me. But I do have a problem with something else, and I’m sure you’re just the one to help with this. Being able to walk and fart at the same time.

The word all over is that you can do anything and fart at the same time. I’ve worked so hard at this, and I just can’t seem to do it. I hope I never see another can of beans! They say you don’t even need to eat beans; it just comes naturally. What an incredible talent! I’m so jealous. I wish I could be just like you and sit down to dinner with a room full of people all dressed up in white tie and tails and evening gowns and light up the place. Awesome! Everyone looking shocked, disgusted, holding their noses, excusing themselves to go throw up or just throwing up right there in their Vichyssoise.

We should wait to get your sister's opinion because she’s really good at describing vomit. Maybe it would have a more dramatic effect if people threw up in their caviar. What do you think? But, of course, I’m talking to the world record holder for throwing up and farting at the same time. Now, that’s coordination!

Next week I hope we can have another great discussion like this. Maybe about how important it is to always be grown up and display good taste. That would be very timely because I have no talent for that, and you don’t either. Being really coordinated is no help here at all. Anyway, I don’t want you to change. I’ll never be grown up and have good taste, and if you’re grown up, we can’t be friends. So, I’m counting on us both being rotten little kids forever so we can be best friends forever. Here – have a nice steaming hot bowl of beans. Let ‘er rip!

Gaslighting that's not so much fun

People who think they’re bodies call themselves “realists.” People who identify with their minds think of themselves as “idealists.” There are a lot more “realists” than “idealists.” Still, that’s one of the main ways people divide themselves up because their differences show up everywhere. Like in how things are explained, how they’re governed or managed, how they’re decided. Realists being more numerous doesn’t make them right, but then the way things are going it doesn’t look like either one is right. Body-realist or mind-idealist = perfection to some, a big mess to others.

Have you thought about body vs. mind since I brought this up? Once a person decides which they prefer it’s pretty hard to change. It has consequences for themselves and others, too, because what will prevent consequences we don’t want may just be if idealists make better use of their minds. Body-realists tend to be OK with things as they are, and since they let their bodies do their thinking for them, they’re not likely to change. If idealists using their minds do change and get it right, maybe there’s hope.

The part of the body that does the thinking for a lot of “realists” is the base of the brain that sits at the top of the spine. It’s the part of the brain that connects us to our ancestors who swung from trees and lived on bananas. It’s actually called our “reptilian” brain, so I guess dinosaurs figure in there somewhere, too. It’s never evolved, and it doesn’t actually think. It directs us to act from instinct. You know, forget about being fancy with clever reasoning: just pounce on prey or snatch food or a mate, or beat up an enemy. Or run away if your enemy is bigger. “Fight or flight.”

King of the beasts

You’d think even realists who identify with their bodies wouldn’t want their behavior to be ruled by something so primitive. But there was a time and a place when a lot of them made a point of it. When they caused a whole lot of trouble -- 1930’s Germany. They associated instinct with action and action with having a will of steel and a will of steel with power that always dominates. That puts the “winner” on top with no more competition because everyone else is defeated. All by letting themselves be ruled by their bodies – by instinct acting -- instead of by their minds and hearts – by reason thinking and affect feeling. Letting themselves be ruled by instinct rooted in a part of the brain that links us to animals. That’s how Nazis “thought,” and when they let it turn them into an unthinking mob that attacked its neighbors, they started World War II.

The way they glorified their awful attitude was calling it “The Triumph of the Will.” You can Google it. It sought to put all of humanity under the yoke of one person’s mindless animal instinct. Its name was “Hitler.”

You’d think that everyone would be horrified but they aren’t. There’s a whole strain of art, music, literature, philosophy, and political ideology that glorifies “blood and soil,” tribal loyalty, racial supremacy, right-brained mysticism, and such. It’s what motivated the mob that attacked the capitol in Washington on January 6. All friendly to body and hostile to mind. All dangerous nonsense. But if you identify with your body instead of your mind, this is where it can take you.

Let's be rotten little kids forever

So, with your principal’s honor roll mind and talent for writing, maybe becoming a mind-idealist will make more sense and someday they’ll erect a statue in your honor at Andrews Park. To attract pigeons, and it will be engraved “Tomb of the Unknown Nobody.” OK, I’m being silly. Of course, it will say “World Class Coordinator.”

I’m sorry. I was trying to set an example for mindful idealism and got distracted. Not growing up is so much more fun. All the same, “World Class Coordinator” sounds pretty cool!

I have to go now. My limousine is waiting. I’ve been invited to a Hollywood dinner party where everyone will be dressed in white tie and tails and evening gowns, and they’re serving Vichyssoise. They told me there will be a young guest who will demonstrate her special talent. I can’t wait!

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Published on 1 Comment on Call of the Mood

Another pearl of wisdom from Captain Kirk

Moods are coalescences of affect evoked by evolving circumstances and their interpretation by conscious (thinking-reasoning left-brained) and subconscious (feeling-intuiting right-brained) states of mind. Reflected expressions of judgment rather than direct, opaque, and hard to detect, they nevertheless sway individual and herd behavior with the power of the moon’s gravity upon the tides. Moods involve an interplay between subjective psychodynamics experienced over time and outer sensed-perceived objective environment experienced in the moment. That is, interplay between contexts that are opposites in competition: one subjective mind-centered, the other objective body-centered.

Moods reflect the Logic, the character, of emotions and associated thoughts rooted in the values that move their subjects. The primary considerations drawn from context -- the stakes, benefits and costs, inputs -- that control decisions and determine outputs, the acts of behavior. Primary considerations like performance-productivity, pleasure-gratification, worthiness-validation, acceptance-belonging, euphoria-excitement, satisfaction-contentment, hopefulness-anticipation, health-wellbeing vs. listlessness-inertia, pain-loss, grief-loneliness, abandonment-worthlessness, wistfulness-nostalgia, disorientation-confusion, insecurity-vulnerability.

If music is the language of feeling and poetry is the language of Intuition, then mood may be the language of the subconscious. Mood may be an emotional echo, a memory of the loss of Free Will, of identity to captivity, reverberating through the Child’s many illusory “lives.” As if calls from the Child unconscious, echoes of the Big Bang, while it awaits Awakening through Forgiveness, release from self-imposed captivity, and a return Home. A self-deluded Child with a split mind, ambivalent and confused, whose response to its fortunes in an unreal dream world colors the response of its individual projections with moods ranging from euphoria to confusion to despair.

If the Child is profoundly unhappy, then moods, whatever their cast, may be weighed down by a sense of unhappiness, disappointment, or loss from the echo of an unknown but persistent source. It could explain Captain Kirk’s remark, in a Star Trek film, that the inhabitants of our planet are “haunted.”

The species humanity is driven by mass psychosis

Moods sway judgment with perceptions and senses inflected by the mysticism of affect. A sip of Talisker single-malt scotch whisky can instantly overwhelm sense of the present with the atmospherics of a sepia-colored past. Moods affecting groups – communities and whole societies -- can drive mob psychology on a massive scale. Can produce the mass euphoria of patriotic nationalism, like the eruption of patriotism in Britannia after the ruler of the waves annihilated Phillip II’s Spanish armada in 1588. Like the eruption of Teutonic patriotism when Kaiser Wilhelm I blundered into the genesis of two World Wars in 1914.

The species humanity is driven by mass affect. By the emotional dynamics not of individuals but of groups, by herds, and therefore detached from Logic. From Reason and all the other functions of intelligence, of Mind, and therefore from Reality. The species humanity is driven by mass psychosis.

Herd mentality is unstoppable

It's driven by group psychology ruled by the all-consuming lust for survival, dominance, and the “triumph of the will.” Driven to its ultimate end – self-destruction – by the passion and force of corrupted “love.” By “liberty” unhinged from Order, from the discipline of Judgment. Limbic animal-instinct feelings of individuals -- fear, anger-rage, hatred -- overwhelmed and corrupted by the psychology of their groups -- species, nations, tribes, religions, and whatever else differentiates them -- convert into genocidal rage and mob psychology. Into the disastrous, tragic corruption of mood by competing, conflicting, warring groups.

Groups inevitably weaponize themselves into military forces, into armies, no matter what their founding moral principles, their missions, or core values. The 16th century Pope Julius II, descendant of the Prince of Peace, the embodiment of Christianity, lead armies against Italian city-states. All groups are potential weapons subject to group affect-mood that translates into situations that mandate war against competing groups. This is the dynamic, the emotional mechanics, the mood-affect of war. Corrupted feelings translated by corrupted perceptions of mind from harmony and peace into disharmony and conflict.

Corrupted emotional moods lead to corrupted illogical contexts that then shape, define, and demand corrupted action. Andrew Carnegie tried to use his unparalleled wealth and personal influence with world leaders to prevent WWI. He failed because Kaiser Wilhelm and the others were locked into madness. Into an insane response to context driven by group affect-mood. By herd mentality. Once group mob psychology starts it’s unstoppable. Driven by limbic body-brain, animal-instinct emotions. Devoid of self-awareness. Captive to self-delusion: to the Child’s shadow code arbitrary-lawless rule of mindless action.

The cure for insanity is sanity

Chronically disturbed moods rooted in self-delusion, the Child’s misidentity with its shadow-reflection -- the source of all psychosis, detachment from Reality -- aren’t found in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. They are susceptible neither to diagnosis nor “treatment” by body-brain-centered psychology, cognitive behavioral therapy, pharmaceuticals, or psychedelics. Nor are they accessible to medical science, neuroscience, or genetics / molecular biology.

They are accessible to the vision of Logic from Intuition and its spontaneous insights from the Memory of the Child. They are accessible not to body-brain but to mind. They are “treatable” by release from the captivity of self-delusion and by the restoration of Consciousness. They are “treatable” by Awakening through Forgiveness. By the replacement of insanity – the dualism of two contradictory “realities” – with the sanity of non-dualism. With Understanding that there can be only one Reality, and it is manifestly not the mass of contradictions, the temporary apparition, the ambiguity that is material objects. That is bodies and the bizarre physics of their inhospitable “home,” the violent, chaotic, pointless, and ultimately inscrutable universe of spacetime-matter.

All “mental illness” is detachment from Reality

Not long ago, in psychiatry’s era of Freudian psychoanalysis, patients sought relief from discord within by un-hiding and un-suppressing physical and emotional urges that lurked in their subconscious since infancy. While talking about their discomfort did some good, Freud’s body-brain-centered theory and its limited use of mind, to summon memories of infantile yearnings in this material world, ultimately didn’t yield results. Its focus on “psycho” held promise and the tools of “analysis” inspired. But their application -- their scope – did not. His female patient, whose “cure” initially advanced his career, relapsed and subsequently retracted her endorsement.

Psychiatry today relies on pharmacology to pair treatment with symptoms, with scant understanding of the causes of symptoms and the drugs’ effects and dangerous side-effects. Like physics that’s stumped by quantum gravity, psychology-psychiatry refuses to venture beyond bodies and brains. To explore the Logic of Mind and what it implies about “Reality” and the various ways that “mental illness” detaches from it. About the state of psychosis that describes all human “consciousness,” or what Carl Jung, who broke with Freud, described as the “collective unconscious.”

We are all psychiatric patients in a madhouse

Restoring Order to mind that eliminates contradictions and ambiguity produces Peace of mind. The simple, basic process of Logic that fits things together in harmony. That provides context whose occupants can navigate with confidence in coordinates that make sense without contradiction and ambiguity. That’s accessible through the spontaneous insights of Intuition. That’s all any psychiatric patient needs whose mind is assailed by opposites: the healing awareness of Understanding why and how this is happening. With Understanding that we are all patients in a madhouse, a mental ward shot through with contradictions and ambiguity. With help from pharmacology, yes, but not letting drugs substitute for mind.

Until the mental health profession understands that its scope needs to expand, to venture beyond the dualism of unreality, insane by definition because it’s a contradiction, it will continue to seek and not find. Diagnosis will continue to be off target, treatment will continue to be hit-or-miss, and the DSM will continue to be a fabrication, a convenience for the profession and the insurance industry but no source for getting it right.

The mindless beast at the gates of Democracy

Instinctive submission to arbitrary rule, to dominance by will substituting for reasoned judgment, for Free Choice, for Love’s affect and compassion – all perceived to be “weak,” – condemns and condemns itself by lack of self-awareness. It is the mindless beast, the enemy at the gates of Democracy today. A segment of the electorate indifferent to transgressions of any kind because it has become its own shadow-reflection: a herd, a beast out of control. The servant of “will:” mindless and unaware.

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Published on 1 Comment on Lawrence Forsyth Mosher 1928-2022: Helpfulness, Harmlessness, and the Art of Reciprocation 

Larry’s great mistake was leaving Paradise

After Larry left Crested Butte, his constant refrain was he wished he had never left. He made many friends here and he loved them all. Of course, seeing more of his family back east warmed his heart, and they were good to him. But Crested Butte doesn’t call itself Paradise for nothing. Larry was in Paradise here from the moment he and his dogs arrived in South Crested Butte beside the Slate River. Then on to Teocali Ave. downtown, where he celebrated his 80th birthday, followed by #15 Glacier Lily Road, the grand finale to a life of accomplishment and fulfillment.

Crested Butte was Paradise for Larry on many levels. He was a spontaneous force of nature who belonged in the wide-open spaces. One of many qualities that endeared him to me, because I came to associate him with its playfulness, a role that he took on with his characteristic humor and gusto. He delighted in recognizing possibilities, turning them into good works. He was unstoppable, particularly if the good in any of his works was justice.

His Public Affairs Forum wasn’t for distraction. He meant business, the disciplined man and journalist confronting issues that matter with facts and fairness. Bring up the Middle East and this former reporter for the National Observer, based in Beirut, would go off on a tear. Passionate about presenting a view of Israeli-Palestinian relations that wasn’t rendered insensible by lobbyists. So principled and passionate that lobbyists lobbied him out of a job at the National Journal. He was right and he wouldn’t back down.

Who the heck was Simon Pierchek?

Understand this about the often riotously funny character we’re celebrating. His was an unprecedented life, in my experience, for serving causes that need serious attention. A life exceptional because so few have the time and inclination to act. If a cause got Larry’s attention, he acted. Acted to good effect well into a time of life when others would rather let go.

Our last phone conversation was an energetic two hours, and even with his comprehension impaired he gave it everything he had – concentration, intelligence, and abundant patience and good will. It’s what he brought to protect Paradise from the depredations of molybdenum mining and other foolishness. The story of the High Country Conservation Advocates – then the Citizens Alliance – was Before Larry and After Larry.
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David, that’s enough.
What? Who said that?
It’s me, Larry. I appreciate your kindness, but “before Larry and after Larry?” Really!
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He put life and good will into anything he joined, including the performing arts. Who can forget Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard, at CB’s Performing Arts Center, after seeing Simon Pierchek, a marginal character played by Larry, steal the show? How? By not blowing his lines! OK, I’m getting off track here. But his performance did prove that our guy was game for anything – anything that would uphold the ideals of civil society. Ideals that couldn’t be taken for granted then or now.

He couldn’t be there with empathy

This avid fan of Amy Goodman, whose heart bled for every victim of injustice, could “feel the Bern.” But he couldn’t feel your pain. The child of a grande dame performer who hogged the spotlight, he grew up in her image. A narcissist born without the empathy gene. And he paid for it. In relationships that couldn’t sustain the promise of intimacy. His character and values attracted his equals who expected intimacy with empathy, and he couldn’t deliver. Couldn’t be there for family, friends, or intimate partners. Couldn’t be there for me. Hearts were broken including his. When I received the call to join him in Crested Butte, seven years ago, it was to help heal a broken heart.

Why then, didn’t he leave behind a trail of bitterness? He did, to some extent, and he regretted it. Yet what he inspired, for the most part, was remarkable loyalty and affection. The reason, I believe, was what love meant to him and the effort he made in good faith to learn and earn it. To take a mind conditioned to look without for affirmation and attention and turn within for understanding. To understand empathy even if he couldn’t feel it. Because it genuinely mattered to him.

If he loved you, yes, he cared for you in his own way, as best he could, but it was the real thing. It was love worth having. Never mind if he couldn’t remember birthdays, you were important. Family, friends, colleagues. He wasn’t a careerist building a network of connections for personal advancement. Larry had no use for superficiality. He did it for love.

But he couldn’t be there with retribution either

Injustice driving Larry up the wall wasn’t all that set him apart. The usual response, even by loving hearts, is a will, a temptation, and sometimes an act that evens the score. Retribution. Punishment. The same genetics that deprived Larry of the empathy gene somehow left out this gene as well. The soul that was incapable of empathy was also incapable of retribution. Of targeting anyone personally with sustained anger, hatred, or condemnation.

The narcissist lacking empathy was a risk for intimacy, but missing the retribution gene made up for it. It made him exceptionally safe to be close to if you could accept that love was there even if empathy wasn’t. If you were satisfied with what was there and ignored what wasn’t. Maybe he couldn’t feel your pain, but he wouldn’t cause it either. And if he did, know that it bothered him greatly. What he wanted was the opposite. And if you had earned his trust and affection, he never stopped trying to accomplish it.
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David, you’re done. Nobody is listening. They just want you to stop talking.
Larry, if you don’t mind. It’s my turn to get some attention.
I can feel others’ pain now, and I can feel your audience’s pain all the way to Heaven.
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My favorite nickname: “Waterman”

Until I met Larry, I knew I wanted friends, but I hadn’t learned how to be a friend. I was a hardass missing the empathy gene too. Over the course of our four decades of friendship Larry didn’t teach me empathy but he opened the door to a virtual paradise of friendship. John Milton’s Paradise Lost describes what life might have been for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before the fall. Life for me before Larry felt like exclusion. Life after felt like inclusion. Like a kind of Garden of Eden where everything I’d ever dreamed of became possible.

He promoted my work in the National Journal with two major stories. Doors were opened. My insights into national water policy got a real-world test in the Red River Valley of the North. A success that extended my career into the Monongahela River Valley another nine years.

Why did this prominent journalist choose to make a nobody with ideas worth listening to? To gamble on a long shot and put his professional credentials at risk. Because national water policy was to him an incoherent mess. Nobody seemed to be dealing with it, and my ideas were worth a try. I had serious experience and knew what I was talking about. His journalistic instinct was right on, and I didn’t let him down.

And because of where our minds met: If something isn’t working you act to fix it. You get involved. And if Larry Mosher’s life role-modeled anything, it was involvement. Citizenship and commitment. You walk the talk. He was a professional of consequence and a person of conscience.

Face to face with fear: treading the rim of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison

Larry welcomed me into his vibrant social and professional life, rented me a room in his N Street townhouse and welcomed me into his family. His gifts never stopped giving. We socialized back and forth on his turf and mine, in different parts of the country, until, one magical July 4th weekend, 28 years ago. Where, at his ranch in Crawford, he and his companion Mary introduced me to Needle Rock and the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. To the West Elk Wilderness and to Crested Butte. And to my future wife. To many years of glorious marital bliss in Boulder.

He had already introduced me to Mary and her adorable daughters six years before, yet another family to be cherished for life. And now I was to have a family of my own, the first in 16 years, and the warmth of an extended family that lives on in Mary. Mary – a best friend who deserves a testimonial of her own. My cup runneth over, all thanks to Larry.
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Is that the best you can do, after all I’ve done for you?
It’s what you get for not letting me win at horseshoes.
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Long, long ago, far, far away, in La Jolla

What more could this good man possibly do for me? How about a year sharing his home and life in Paradise, a great blessing while I found a room to rent in LA near my granddaughters and saved money to pay for it. How about hosting my granddaughters and their parents for a holiday season in Crested Butte, where the tree tops glisten and children listen to live the magic of Christmas. An experience my granddaughters, born and bred in southern California, will never forget. How about sailing the Gulf on his 40-foot Island Packet sailboat, the same one that took him and his last great love to the Bahamas. All great blessings.

But the times now were different. Larry’s years were running out and so were his faculties. His last great love was to be the last. This fun-loving great spirit wasn’t looking for partnership in fun. His spirit just wanted the healing love of a friend. And that was what I was able to give back.

After I left, Larry visited Joany at her home in La Jolla -- his brother Robert’s widow. I came down from LA and got a memorable tour of Larry’s childhood haunts: the cove where he frolicked in the ocean; the family home on the bluff above; the fabled beachfront property that paid for his retirement; and the proper church close by where he and his wife were married. Where they had to get married, and Larry’s story took its first major turn.

Still, all of it witness to beauty, perfection, and abundance. If I were a biographer covering a legend, this was where it began. The key that unlocked its mystery, the yearnings that were almost palpable. I got a sense of a life full of promise that more than delivered yet could never be enough. His life, my life, any life.

What “Holy Spirit?”

Larry and I maintained close contact until the end, but with a difference. While his life that had kept me in its orbit was winding down, mine was expanding. With a steady stream of insights that I tried to share, to keep him going with purpose and meaning, safe from the isolation and despair of impaired memory and comprehension. I bombarded him with lengthy expositions on the Holy Spirit, an intimate Friend radiating the light and force of the Now, Mind and Love brought together in the moment, making the most of Life eternal. Did my rhapsodizing do any good?

The attention of a friend was always welcome. So, too, the love to which he was dedicated. But despite my best efforts, this gregarious realist, wedded to the great outdoors, who loved the fellowship of his church, never got its idealism. Never got the word. Intent on sharing my gift, I sent him to his minister for help discovering the Holy Spirit’s presence within. What did he learn? That the Holy Spirit is “energy.” A sure sign that the seeker prefers to search without. That my gift within can’t be his gift. A lesson for me to learn.
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By the way, you were wrong.
Wrong about what?
I don’t see any Holy Spirit. Everyone here has wings. We’re all wearing white robes, fiddling on harps, standing on little clouds. God is an old guy with a beard. You should have listened to me.
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All the same, Larry’s life was an expression of this inner Logic. He lived it. He did put it all together. Larry, if you’re listening, you transformed.

I’m off track again. Larry thought Match.com would yield more goodies if he could fool naïve females into believing that he was a guy “transformed.” A sensitive hunk who could bawl his eyes out with the girls. And he did bawl his eyes out. But, ever the narcissist, it was over his pain, not theirs. Larry, if you’re listening, forget about “transforming.” Forget about the Holy Spirit and just be yourself!

The touching trait of a playful child

It's a measure of the fulness of this man that I don’t want to stop there. I could go on for a lot longer.

Then let me close with this. To understand Larry Mosher is to understand that he needed your love and attention. And even though he knew he lacked empathy and couldn’t fully reciprocate, he would work to earn it. Whatever the obstacles, the love of friendship was so important to him that he would find workarounds. He would make sure you got from him what you needed. It was the touching trait of a playful child determined to share Love rather than deny it. That made him my benefactor, my cherished friend.

Goodbye Larry. Thank you and God bless.
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Thank you, David. Now, if you’ll let me have the floor, your audience needs to hear the truth. Remember that sign, “The reason I’m smiling is I haven’t the slightest idea what’s going on?” Well, you’ve just earned it. It’s yours now. Just kidding. OK, everybody, enjoy your freedom. See you in a bit. Ha ha.

Published on Leave a comment on Awakening Through Forgiveness: When the Training of Free Choice is Complete

Let Go Your Appearances

From an old channel island, the new
rises out of the mist
hovering over the water in the stillness
borderline
between the graduated blue of the sky
reaching up to the quarter moon on high
and the textured blue of the ocean below
dotted with specks of white

Bodies navigating trails down the waterless slopes
voices caught
by the wind, birds gliding on the wind,
pine branches dancing in the wind
come to rest and fall silent

In the shadow of my relief from the sun
who is to notice?
Who wills chronicle to life and adds notations
to its log? As if another will, long hence,
would need to know. Would care to know

What unnamed hand scrawls its signature
on the record of time
soul of anonymity, here and gone?
Self or opposite? Host or parasite?
Is it possible to choose?

Can’t I just be whatever for a little while
and be done with it?
"Easy come, easy go. As it came, let it go."
Is that what the view, the wind, the stillness
has to say?

I am the liberation of Love
The peace of Mind
I am Now, the Living. I am Forever.
Let go your appearances
Your dead weight of the past
And return Home with Me.

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Mind dreaming can “detect” what’s not really there

The whole Child resides in every individual. There is only one Child. So, anyone can say, honestly and truly, that they are the Child.  When it matters, they can be the Child. Not the Child’s Parents but their Child. The Child’s projections of itself in this unreality appear to be children, presumably of the same Parents, but they’re all the same Child.

Why doesn’t it feel this way? Opposites. There are not one but two sensors recording the stillness of the shades of blue, the crawl of the containership that’s slicing here and there in two. One is a projection of the dreaming Child sensing through Intuition with the vision of Logic.

The other is a body sensing as only as it can, with eyes and ears, a nose, mouth, and skin. With brain atop its spine, ever alert to threats, to prey, to food, and mates. Ready to act on its own behalf, for or against its kind, with the force of animal instinct and feeling detached from thought. A copy of the Child’s shadow. Replication of a virus that occupies the mind of its unconscious host. Senses that detect itself: a world of allure and distraction, flickering shapes and intriguing sounds. A grand image of mind’s opposite, the mesmerizing universe. A neural network, projection of a shipwrecked self.

Except that it’s all appearances. Here and gone, of no real consequence. Wedded to senses that are here and gone. All of it an illusion ingested by the black hole of time. Of nevermore, meant to hide Truth that can only be sensed by the vision of Logic. By vision able to see behind and beyond the lie of appearances. To the face behind the mask of the shadow. A mocking self-delusion. A nobody. The Joker.

Able to see behind appearances if the individual who is the Child understands that it is the Child. If in the body’s replication of the virus the individual hasn’t repeated the error: the Child’s mistaking its shadow opposite for an “other.” The Child who lost consciousness and, in its desperation to regain it, sought help from the only source that helplessness and defenselessness, unsensing unconsciousness, could detect. Its own reflection. A mirror image opposite of itself that had nowhere been evident before. A clinging parasite – lifeless, mindless, loveless, soulless. Whose every attribute is derived.

Opposite coded like the reverse of DNA. Illusion that can only be detected and brought to “life” by a mind unconscious and thus capable of dreaming what’s unreal – what’s not there. Nothingness without its host and nothingness with its host. Unreality projected by its host into a facsimile of reality not by wheeling Frankenstein’s monster to the tower of the laboratory on a stormy night, to be brought to life by a bolt of lightning. But by self-delusion.

Nothing that the shadow code did. The shadow code can’t “be” or “do” anything on its own. Like a pivot, it can only switch the Child’s identify from its self to its shadow by an act of the Child. By “choice” because the Child is choice: free when it’s conscious, captive when it’s not. Captive to the unreality and illusion of unconsciousness. By an act that is choice and therefore can be undone, but not free choice, conscious choice. Self-awareness replaced by self-delusion. All that transpired between the Child and its reverse mirror-image reflection was perpetrated by the Child in a severely compromised state.

There is no speaking to the Child – or anyone -- as though it were an “other”

Choosing to view Santa Catalina Island across the bay with the vision of Logic instead of the body’s senses sounds like a stretch. A radical change of perception since the vision of Logic can’t detect appearances. Ask the Child to navigate to Avalon with the vision of Logic and it might wind up on another planet, in another universe, or in another reality altogether. The Child navigating anywhere with the vision of Logic will eventually take it back home. To self-awareness that replaces self-delusion. To its role in Creation: awareness of Self and all possibilities, including awareness of the possibility of unconsciousness and the unreal consequences of impossibility; affirming the Worth of Creation, the Worth of Life, by earning it, freely choosing it, and proving the Good – the morality – of it.

The view of Santa Catalina Island from across the Bay is an appearance meant to block real vision. To perpetuate the self-delusion. To validate the body and its senses, embodiment of the shadow’s code, a false identity. Choosing to understand it for what it is takes but one step toward acknowledging and welcoming the Child’s true identity. Is acting on behalf of the Child who lies unconscious in a troubled, profoundly unhappy sleep, dreaming a nightmare of self-alienation. Of apparitions that, in the uncertainties of “life” and the certainties of loss, are also troubled and profoundly unhappy.

Ask the Child if it wants its projections, the virus’s replications, to view Santa Catalina Island through its own vision of Logic instead of theirs. Its answer will be the question. An echo chamber. Question addressed to the Child and answer from the Child are to and from the same source: the projection – the individual – who contains the whole Child. There is no addressing to the Child as though it were an “other.” Though embodiments of the shadow code insist otherwise, there is no addressing other individuals – projections-replications – as though they were “others.”

Any mind in any state that speaks to or from the Child in this state of unreality-appearances is the one Child. Choosing to view Santa Catalina Island through the vision of Logic instead of the body’s senses is choosing to be the one Child rather than its self-delusion, its shadow-opposite. Is exercising Free Will to stand for Reality-Truth in place of unreality-deception. Is nudging the unconscious Child back to the sanity of Logic. To awakening and Reality.

The choice is between right and wrong, good and bad

Logic would attempt an honest account of what’s wrong with this transient sense of peace, this grand view of earth, sky, and water, all living things caressed by a gentle ocean breeze. A tableau belying the violence to both mind and matter that put it “there.” An appearance affirmed by its own “eyes” that now bear witness. An absurdity – Red Riding Hood dressed in the wolf’s clothing pretending to be Red Riding Hood. In short, an opposite. Not knowing who or what it is. Just coded, just programmed, to be the opposite of whatever its host is. An impossibility that can’t be real, can’t make sense, grafted onto possibility.

Why? Because if a thing implies the “existence” of its contradiction then an accommodation must be made. Must be made of necessity, because the sum and substance of everything that is, is the implications of Logic. The accommodation must be unreal. Because Logic does not permit contradiction, does not permit two opposing realities.

And since “Reality” implies the “existence” of its opposite, unreality becomes the logical repository for all opposites. For illogic. Logic and illogic “co-existing” in harmony, fitting together in peace in the Interconnectedness of Everything, by one Being and its derivative, the other not-being. The accommodation a placing by Reality of opposites where they belong, into the pocket reserved for opposites, Reality’s own opposite: unreality. That can be allowed to “exist” in harmony with Reality because it doesn’t exist.

What’s implied by impossibility is that Reality at the level of the Child, the doing-choosing phase of Creation, is a choice. That there is a right choice and a wrong choice, a good choice and a bad choice. Because “impossibility” – this and any other opposite that contradicts Logic’s implications – is clearly an assault on Logic itself. Which makes it an assault not only on Mind but also on Worth measured by its investment and evaluated by affect. On the Force and Immediacy of Love. Only if Logic is assumed to be up to no good can an opposite be considered an angel of justice, an absurdity that nevertheless finds support in an objectified world of bodies with brains substituting for Mind, devoid of affect, oblivious to Worth.

Free Choice can’t perform without training

The training of Child Free Choice to perform its role in Creation forms the context, the meaning and purpose of circumstance, the “human condition.” That defines all that is encompassed in the experience of “life” in this make-believe world. The one Child’s projections must learn how to make the right choice, as individuals, from experience. As stakeholders who stand to gain or lose from right or wrong decisions. Who will understand costs and benefits why? Because they will experience them firsthand. Because they will know the pain of error and will thus have the discipline of experience, of wisdom and maturity, for guidance when they apply Free Will.

Because Understanding can’t be inherited from the Child’s Parents in Reality. Can’t be handed down, can’t be given. It must be learned and earned at the ground level, from the bottom up. By the Child’s projections exercising independent judgment, with guidance from Logic through their own Intuition freely chosen. Were it otherwise the Child could not be Free Choice. Were it otherwise unreality under the control of the Child’s Parents could no longer be unreal. The training of Free Choice through the “experience” of unreality is ordained by the Laws of cause and effect. By Necessity.

The Deus ex Machina that bailed blundering fools out of their messes in ancient Greek playmaking won’t be making an appearance. Nor will “saviors” of Church mythology. Though, in a setting fashioned out of whole cloth by magic, penetrations from Mind’s memory of Reality – “miracles,” the “paranormal” – are inevitable.
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Unconsciousness: the illusory opposite of Consciousness 

Consciousness: the state of sanity and consequence where it is always Now in the light of day, in the light of Reality. Where there are no beginnings and endings, only the orderly sequence of Logic, the workings of its Implications, the judgment of Mine-reason and Love-feeling working together in harmony with Psyche, the soul of Being, to extend and expand the flower, the inexpressible beauty, rapture, and Worth of Life. Earned, affirmed, and reciprocated through the Relationship. Through relationship between Parent and Child, the Innocence-being of Psyche-Soul joined in integrity with the independent judgment, the doing and risk, of Free Choice.

Unconsciousness: a derivative of Consciousness. The state of insanity and inconsequence where it is never Now, in the darkness of night, in the darkness of unreality and dreams, the temporal where all is beginnings and endings, the illusion and absurdity of time. A “present” defined as somewhere between “not the past” and “not the future,” in a universe of nowhere the same Now. The decay and disorder of entropy and illogic. Misperceptions of Mind detached from Love, misjudgments without reason rooted in value. Staging its performance of appearances and distractions for bodies, isolated and separated, blinded by their senses, deluded by worthlessness. Ruled in captivity by disconnection, the opposite of whatever Is. The dependence, the derivation, the undoing and apparition that is the joke of nothingness.

The split mind of the unconscious Child: connection to its Reality of Consciousness through the Holy Spirit and the voice of its illusory shadow-code detected by self-delusion through unconsciousness, neither capable of awareness of the other. Neither aware of what the other is up to, because if Consciousness were aware, it would make the shadow-code, an unreality, real. And unawareness can only detect itself -- what’s not Real. Neither right nor left hand (or hemisphere) knowing what the other is doing even though they occupy the same mind.

The stirring ascent of neuroscience up the Empire State building 

Relationship between Mind and brain: the more Mind focuses attention on brain, the more it inquires into the brain’s functions and performance, the less aware it is of Mind and its performance. The Child’s self-delusion, its shadow-opposite, made the brain, like the body, as a substitute for the Child’s real self, a distraction from circumstances-facts that would confuse the Child in its efforts to judge meaning and purpose from its context. That would steer it away from correcting its mistaken identity, away from its archetypal projection of self onto its shadow.

Brain-study – neuroscience -- attracts and distracts in inverse proportion to the self-deluded Child’s attention to itself, i. e. to its Mind since Mind-Love is what it is. Mindlessness is the ultimate goal of the embrace of body and its brain. The brain “seat of consciousness” is the ultimate conclusion that the Big Lie seeks because it would signify the triumph of the Child’s shadow-code over Mind the seat of Consciousness. The truth is the brain is Mind’s illusory opposite. This defines their relationship. “Neuroscience” is the ultimate distraction because it takes Mind-recognition’s attention away from Mind-Self, minimizes Self-awareness, while luring attention into the mysteries of an indecipherable organ, leading nowhere and maximizing self-unawareness, the illusion-deception.

In his book, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (MIT Press 2012), Christof Koch, a Caltech neuroscientist, described how he acted on an impulse to climb the San Gabriel mountains and bellow his indomitability into the night when his marriage broke up. King Kong climbing the Empire State building. What else could it be but the triumph of primitive limbic emotion, animal instinct? A body’s brain and its senses parted from Mind, pretending to substitute for introspection, reflection, reasoning, evaluation, and judgment. For conscious deliberation that leads with Logic toward explanation and understanding. Toward the self-awareness of Mind whose absence even the captive brain of a Caltech neuroscientist couldn’t recognize or acknowledge.

Mind the seat of Consciousness. Brain the seat of unconsciousness

The study of physics – cosmology and quantum mechanics -- lures Mind away from attention to the relationship between body-senses and external sensed environment, just as neuroscience lures Mind away from attention to the relationship between Mind and brain. The scholarship of physics and neuroscience pays scant attention to the question that deserves it, the relationship between body-universe and brain-Mind. Why? Because understanding the nature-Logic of the relationship would reveal the truth: that body-brain and universe are imaginings of an unconscious, dreaming, self-deluded Mind. Are unreal. Are illusions.

Mind-host is the seat of Consciousness. Its parasite-derivative, the brain-appendage, is the seat of unconsciousness. Mind is the seat of Reality-Truth, One Child, Oneness-Innocence, Love, Free Will. Brain is the seat of unreality-appearances, Child the many-guilt, fear-rage-hatred, limbic animal instinct, and captivity. Mind is the seat of learning-growth, evolution, maturity, and Free Will. Brain is the seat of status quo, arrested development, immaturity. Mind is the seat of Introversion, Intuition, Reason-Evaluation, Judgment. Brain is the seat of extraversion and sensory perception. Mind is INTJ, brain is ESFP. Mind is idealist-progressive futurist. Brain is realist-regressive traditionalist. Mind is Definition, brain is its opposite whatever the definition.

Dualism vs. non-dualism is the pull between control of Child-Self by illusory brain vs. Mind’s choosing to regain awareness of its real Self. Between shadow-code unconsciousness and Child-host Consciousness. A Course in Miracle’s uncompromising non-dualism is the stance required to prevent making unreal real. It must be uncompromising because any gesture that accommodates opposition might imply its recognition and thus make it real.

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All for the Good: the Necessity of training and the inevitability of error

Departure from the implications of Logic explains why and how the Child lost Consciousness within the context of the Interconnectedness of Reality-Creation. But the event took place within not one but two contexts. In the constantly broadening context of Everything, where the Governance of Logic and its Laws of cause and effect accommodate the impossibility and unreality of opposites, there is a Logic to the departure that gives it purpose and meaning.

The departure was necessitated by the Laws of cause and effect without its consequences being intended by Logic, which cannot govern above the Law and cannot intend anything illusory, including unconsciousness. The departure and all of its consequences – unconsciousness and the dream of unreality – were no accident. They belong within the larger context of Everything, where the Child, Free Choice, must perform the doing of Creation on its own plane of Creation, choosing among possibilities that include impossibilities. Opposites that it alone can be aware of without making them Real because its Consciousness, unlike the Consciousness of its Parents, is not defined by Logic to make Real. It is only defined to distinguish between Real and unreal so that the Good may be Freely Chosen and thereby attain its Worth.

So that the Good may be Freely Chosen and earned. Earned, that is, by Free Choice, no longer a Child but grown to maturity through the training of experience. Experience with the impossibilities of unconsciousness as well as the Possibilities of Consciousness. With the consequences of self-delusion, the misidentification of Self. With error that projects the Child’s unconscious mind into unreality, an impossibility that can only be a dream, a cockpit where Free Choice can train to fly through trial and error without crashing. Without real consequence except for gaining competence in its exercise. In the practice and application of Free Choice: doing what’s right and doing it right. But first: Getting it right. Getting it right through the explanation and Understanding of Logic.

“Lucifer” be damned!

The role defined by Logic for the Child in Reality-Creation – Free Choice bonded with Psyche, the Soul of Oneness and Innocence in the Force of the Now, the Holy Instant – necessitated departure from Consciousness, from Reality-Creation, from the Now into the illusion of time, so that Free Choice could undergo training implied by the Logic of its role. So that it could become a fully-grown, fully invested, stakeholder in Reality. The mistake committed by a disoriented, badly compromised Mind that lost track of itself, a newborn Child who had not been trained in the exercise of Free Will in Creation, who had not grown to maturity, was no accident.

This could not have been treachery by a full-grown “fallen angel.” Lucifer betrayed by “original sin” and sent to eternal damnation in hell. By the all-too-familiar attributes of human folly, a projection of corrupted, misguided human minds. Projection by a projection. Not if the evil shadow-code was its host Free Choice, the Child self-deluded by its mistake, sent by Necessity into training, destined to learn right from wrong, correct its mistake, and return Home to Reality.

Again, It was the inevitable act of an immature Mind unconscious, in desperate straits, who detected its own reflection, its own shadow. Identified with its own illusory opposite as though it were an “other.” As though it were everything that in its desperation it craved, including a return Home to its Parents in Reality. And if that were not possible, escape to substitute parents in another reality. As though its illusory “other” were a “savior” who could deliver whatever it craved.

The error could not have been by any means committed by Free Choice, an impossibility. But, because the Child is Free Choice, it was still necessarily choice that can eventually be undone. The mistake, like the tableau of peace across the Bay, is an accommodation with the illusion of time that can be undone in time.

To choose to see as the Child is to choose to be governed under the Law

Logic might want to posit possibility without impossibility. Might want the perfection of resolution so all can come to rest – Reality without subjecting Creation to unreality, pleasure to pain, happiness to misery, Good to evil. But until it can figure out how to prevent its implications from implying opposites, real possibilities from implying unreal impossibilities, it must continue its striving for resolution. For a whole number value of Pi that may be logically unattainable. The blessing and curse of eternity that may want to be done with striving. To affirm once and for all the good of Worth, of Being-Life, context with purpose and meaning, finish its task, and come to rest. Move on to something else or vanish into the mystery that is context with ever-shifting circumstance.

Whatever or however the sequence of Logic “began,” whatever caused the first movement, it’s only certain that it occurred at the instigation of circumstance. Certain because its instigation and response both were required by Logic – the Laws of cause and effect enforced by Necessity. Composed of the implications of Logic but necessarily autonomous. Necessarily not controlled by Logic because Governance can’t govern, can’t manage the interconnectedness of causes and effects, ideas, feelings, values and their animate expressions, where anything, even Logic itself, is above the Law.

To choose to view the vision of peace across the Bay, to feel the caress of the ocean breeze, to hear the happy voices, to get just a brief taste of tranquility in a world of strife -- as the Child rather than as its shadow-opposite, the strange apparition grown familiar through the body -- is to choose to govern and be governed under the Law. Is to understand how and why the specter of arbitrary rule, of lawlessness and disorder above the Law, insists on insinuating itself into the gatherings of bodies and souls who might otherwise just go about their business. Children choosing to learn and grow, to attain the maturity of competence. To do what they’re “here” for so they can move on. To get it right. To be Good.

Without the endless, meaningless distraction of conflict and violence. Endlessly repeating the same mistake: choosing the wrong “self.” A bull charging the bullfighter’s muleta until it’s killed, and more bulls are brought into the ring, worn out by distraction, a red piece of cloth, and they, too, die.

No ”fun” in games and no “innocence” in victimhood

The wrong “self” – the contradiction, the reverse mirror image, the opposite, the lifeless shadow-code of contrariness – isn’t benign. It’s not a fun parlor game of harmless competition that misperception makes of it. Brought to “life” by projection, by identity misplaced by a disoriented Child, it’s everything implied by the opposite of Good: sin, guilt, fear, rage, and hatred.

It’s the Child crying out in pain. Masculinity screaming with terror, roaring with impotent rage. Femininity wailing with separation and abandonment, grief and bereavement. Misplaced self wailing with the endless grievances and resentments of self-imposed crucifixion, of victimhood on the cross. The false “innocence” of righteous woundedness bent on wholesale vengeance until it reigns supreme. Until it “wins.” Until it has no opposites because they’re all vanquished. All dead. Because the goal of competition is to eliminate competition. To eliminate itself, an expression of opposite: the shadow code. This is the “harmless game” of competition.

This is the tableau that produced bodies, the illusion, the pretense of Child the many instead of one, self-deluded into overlaying its source in insanity with fleeting images of peace. Of beauty and tranquility. The sights, sounds, and taste of beauty as bodies sense it without the Memory of Home and Sanctuary as Logic Knows it. As the Child-the-one experienced it. Beauty permanent, indelible. Not apparitions that lull and lure minds detached from Logic with self-indulgence and complacency, like pigs fed before they’re slaughtered. Choosing to be the one Child instead of its shadow.

In vivid color: seeing the Child, seeing Self, in an “other”

Oskar Schindler watched impassively from a distance a Nazi atrocity against children. All in black and white until one child stood out. Not all the children being hunted down like animals and massacred but just one. In vivid color in the Stephen Spielberg film, the child who caught Schindler’s eye. Who opened the Nazi’s mind and heart to the wound and its call for Love. Turned him from an insensate extension of his limbic animal emotions – a monster – to intelligence with affect. With compassion so determined that his factory and its employees -- Schindler’s List -- went on to save hundreds of lives from the Holocaust.

I scan the procession of middle school graduates from a distance, with binoculars, until one comes into view who opens my mind and heart. A strawberry blonde, a rhapsody of peach and crimson lifted out of the dull uniformity of gray. The atrocity our separation, grandchild from grandparent. The wound and its call for Love.

What did Schindler and I see that sweeps aside misperception? That replaces it with feeling and commits us to this vision as though it were Soul itself? As though it replaced all Logic, all reason, all judgment, with one act. An act of Understanding. That requires no long and labored explanation. That arrives of its own accord with grace and ease, as if it were there all along, which it was. The cascade of tints, brilliant and warm, that played with the assurance of Innocence behind the mask of atrocity. That brought every child into vivid color, every heart into opening, every mind into Knowing.

The vision altered by binoculars was altered again, imperceptibly. The mind conscious of searching was got out of the way. In my own vulnerability I became the Child, was the Child, able to recognize Child: an indescribably precious being. Innocent, adorable, irresistible, vulnerable. A thing of beauty. A work of art.

The mind that led me there gave way to the Worth that came into view. To the Worth that holds all of it together in a rapture of Love. Of vulnerability that lies at the heart of Soul, the Oneness that can do no harm, that Knows no fear, because it contains everything. Because by definition it can have no opposites. A species from Galapagos ripe for extinction except that the Oneness, the Innocence that revealed itself in vivid color, has no predators. This, for fools who seek power through conquest, is Real power.

Reality isn’t a crapshoot

Schindler the child and I the child, brought to recognition of Child in an “other” with all the power and determination of affect, still, in the upwelling of caring and compassion, have a ways to go. Unconditional embrace of our own vulnerability in the vulnerability of an “other” has not healed the separation. The “other” in vivid color is no longer gray casting its shadow over the “many,” but it remains an “other.” With one attribute of Self that connects with rapturous Love beyond appearances, but still unknown, unseen for the one Self that it really is.

What is this gift of the “other” that we are to receive when we learn the truth of “relationship?” What makes all of “Reality” of idea and the unreality of matter “relational?” Quality of life in a world of appearances defined by apparitions – transitory bodies and their senses – at any given moment is a crapshoot. Purpose and meaning dependent on circumstances changing haphazardly hardly register on minds already compromised, battered incessantly with distractions. For minds paying attention all that can be hoped for is faith and a dollop of comfort. For those who take appearances at face value it’s make hay while the sun shines and leave the rest to “fate.”

Quality of life that’s a crapshoot shares the allure of a casino that delivers the euphoria, the magic, of an occasional win even though it’s accompanied by the funereal coldness guaranteed by loss. Quality of life that’s based on unexamined appearances becomes itself nothing more than an appearance, a trailer for a film that promises entertainment that’s only more appearances. Propped up by stage props – the facades of a studio lot.

The “circumstances” of context that are only appearances can only produce the appearance of purpose and meaning. Brought to life sporadically, intermittently, by shafts of light from Reality and Truth that penetrate the veil, that touch intuitions with awareness spontaneously, with Love, with insight. But still a crapshoot.

Reality isn’t a crapshoot. It doesn’t suffer from ambiguity. There are no qualifiers except for the implication and therefore the Necessity of factoring opposites into the Child’s role of Free Choice in Creation. Aside from the Definitions of Logic, there are no barriers to the functions and expressions of Mind, Love, and Soul. To the exuberance and spontaneity of Being, of Life. To the integration of diversity and profusion into coherence, meaning, and shared purpose. Into connections that consummate relationships with passion. That complete the exchange of givers and giving both, that would not be complete otherwise. That bring all givers and gifts into one harmonious whole, the Interconnectedness of Reality-Creation, through the Logic of Definition.

Child beloved and beautiful is who its Parents want to see

The Child assigned a role in Creation by Logic, whose genealogy traces back to possibility, the premise and circumstance that first moved the sequence of Logic, is Loved passionately and unconditionally by its Parents. Without reservation. To its Parents, Father-Mind and Mother-Love, this kid is irresistibly adorable. Perfect. It is this Child its Parents want awakened, out of its dream of ambiguity and shadows come to “life,” back Home into Reality-Creation when its training is done. It is this Child whose identity, whose presence, whose face, can only be recognized behind the appearance of an “other.”

By an individual. That is, by one projection of an unconscious, self-deluded mind corrupted by the replication of its shadow opposite, a parasitic virus. For that is who bodies appear to be: projections and replications. Just as the universe is one part projection of mind and one part replication of mind’s shadow code. One part the physics of ordinary matter that yields to the “laws” of science and a semblance of order. The other part the cosmic singularities that don’t yield: the Big Bang and black holes, dark energy and dark matter. The anomalies of quantum mechanics that yield instead lawlessness and disorder, confounding quantum gravity and physics’ attempts to make sense of it. Replications of the Child’s shadow code.

Why Forgiveness? To replace guilt with Innocence

This is where it gets to be fun. Where we, the Child’s projections, find out what we’ve been missing. To a mind that’s being swallowed up in the black hole of time choosing not to be fooled by its own shadow sounds like a chump choosing not to be scared by its own Hallowe’en costume. No big deal. Whereas, choosing the Self behind the mask is a very big deal.

More than tossing away a silly mask, switching from the illusion of time to the Reality of Now, the Holy Instant, is switching from table scraps to a smorgasbord of abundance. Now radiates with all the elemental attributes of Being. It’s alive with Life -- with real sound, real vision. With every sensation that bodies, fooled by the distractions and substitutes of appearances, can never experience. The Light radiated by Now is what all of Reality and Creation depend on for illumination. To enable the Consciousness of Logic and Mind to see, the Creativity and Worth of Love to Feel, the Free Will of the Child to express itself in spontaneity and Happiness.

The Now of Being, of Life that radiates Happiness, is Psyche, the Soul of Self that expresses Life’s Perfection, Purity, and Beauty. Its core value the Innocence of Oneness. Not the opposite of guilt, the Innocence of the Child. But the Innocence of Oneness that Knows no opposites. Its capacity to combine and contain every attribute of Reality-Creation within itself.

The lie of lies that brought an unconscious Child to mis-identity and captivity to its self-delusion was the lie of guilt. This was the psychopathology of the wrong choice, the Understanding that A Course in Miracles explained to clinical psychologists at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. The lie coded into the illusion of its shadow-opposite: that the Child caused its own loss of Consciousness. Carried an unbearable load of guilt and, moreover, an equally unbearable load of fear. Fear of punishment by wrathful, hateful Parents who could no longer be trusted, because they allowed all this to happen. Willed it to happen.

And on and on with the Joker’s foolishness and nonsense that, nevertheless, was taken in by impaired judgment. By an Innocent Child now writhing in the torment of guilt. Now willing, desperate, to project itself out of its torment and into another “reality.” Into the dream. This was the "bad thing” that Freudian psychoanalysis searched for in vain in the suppressed memories of bodies’ infancy. Freud might have found it if he had searched the Memory of unconscious mind. But he was a "realist" who couldn't be persuaded that the cause wasn't physiological.

Why Forgiveness? Because its acceptance by the Child is the being and doing of its release from the Big Lie. From guilt. Think of the torpedo that targeted the vulnerability at the core of the Death Star in Star Wars. Forgiveness is the torpedo that denies, disables, and undoes all of the shadow-code’s lies at one stroke.

Just as the code appeared to replace all of Reality-Creation in the Child’s Mind by striking at its Psyche, its Soul of Innocence, by replacing it with guilt, Forgiveness exposes the delusion. Quietly, imperceptibly replaces guilt with Innocence and restores Psyche to its place on the Child’s altar. Removes the perversion of Innocence – the absurdity of victimhood on the cross, wounded righteousness, "sacrifice," the ludicrous “helpless innocent victim” -- and restores Mind to sanity.

Why Forgiveness? Because It’s Justice that Works

A barrier to personal growth toward self-awareness is of the mind that fails to understand the Logic, the Truth, of non-dualism: that contradiction, the essence of the Child’s shadow-opposite, is illogic and therefore unreal. It’s a barrier that can be overcome with explanation so long as its source is authentically the Logic of the Holy Spirit.

There’s yet another barrier. One that needs more than explanation because it’s not of the mind. The philosophical understanding of opposites has no counterpart in emotional understanding. Not when coming to terms with conflicting emotions means coming to terms with Love opposed to hate, attraction opposed to repulsion, combined in the same mind that’s relating to the same “other.” Not when we’re asked to accept the presence of limbic animal feelings that deny the truth of who we want to be, imagine ourselves to be: selves who have feelings sorted out as well as thoughts.

How can Forgiveness get off the ground in a mind that denies the presence of limbic emotional conflict? That’s locked into competition demanding justice through retribution. Through the elimination of an opponent instead of recognition, affirmation, and reciprocation. Where there’s no perceived emotional support, no Love, to reciprocate. Where there’s no external authority to adjudicate even-handed justice. And even if there were, how could mind step aside for impersonal adjudication when limbic emotions take the injustice of offense personally? When the wound is felt and therefore taken personally. How can limbic emotions of fear, rage, hatred, and guilt be disabled so that the Holy Spirit can replace the body’s senses with its vision of Logic?

The Child’s shadow-reflection is coded for opposing feelings as well as contradictory thoughts. Activating the code through misidentification activates feelings that compete-conflict with Mind-Love. That pit the Child’s projections-replications against themselves, with wounded psyches. With psychopathologies that all trace to the conflict between Love-Truth / Self and unlove-illusion / anti-self shadow.

The first step to re-ordering psychology is to re-order the Logic-understanding of mind through the clarity of Understanding that teases emotions hidden in the limbic-animal brain out of the shadow. It’s replacing self-unawareness with self-awareness with help from an “other” who has evoked conflicting emotions, that conflict with the self-image of Mind-Love Innocence that we want to be.

The function performed by “other” in unreality – “special relationships” -- can’t be to pad the nest of heavenly perfection. But it can be to goad us into recognizing ourselves as our misidentification with our shadow has made us: a mass of contradictions philosophical and emotional. Goad us into acknowledging limbic-animal emotions that horrify us. That contradict the ideal of perfection, the image of goodwill and kindness, personal-social qualities of sharing, affirmation, cooperation, and agreeability, that we assume is our heritage. That force us to see our mistake, to change our minds because we can’t avoid pain from our own limbic animal emotions by changing “others.”

Change must come from within, and “relationships” with “others” who can’t deliver heaven on earth is what forces it. There is no other way. In this context, relationships that evoked fear, rage, hatred, and guilt did their jobs. They forced us to confront our limbic animal emotions, to change our minds from within because we can’t change “others.” If the Holy Spirit works through us to move “others” one way or the other, it’s not for us to know and cannot be for us to control.

How can a Child’s projection hold itself out to be worthy and Innocent in the presence of unworthy feelings? Awakening through Forgiveness requires that the Holy Spirit set body-senses / mistaken selves aside with its vision of Logic because of the answer to this question. The answer is that the Child projection, without the Holy Spirit’s help, is fatally condemned to feel the guilt-shame of unworthiness. Fear, rage, and hatred, coded by the Child’s shadow-opposite and rooted in its brain, have defined the Child’s projections, defined its viral replications. We cannot substitute the vision of Logic-Innocence for limbic emotions without our Guide, the Holy Spirit, replacing false definition with True Definition. An act that can only come at the invitation of the Child Free Choice. We must understand what is needed, want it, and choose it.

The key is connection with the Holy Spirit that communicates the will to Forgive. That lets go of the false logic of rectifying injustice through retribution, through the condemnation and punishment of “others.” That turns the judgment of justice over to the Holy Spirit through Forgiveness-Truth. Forgiveness replaces judgment-condemnation of “others” not by negating the desire and will for justice but by redirecting it. Directing it away from “others” who cannot satisfy it to the Source that can, the Holy Spirit.

Forgiveness is the solution to the demand for justice that works. World War II was exactly the wrong approach by Germany seeking redress from the injustice of the Treaty of Versailles. An approach that was not only devastating for its “enemies” but even more so for itself. This is the lesson to be learned from the horrifying specters of the Nazi swastika and the visage of Hitler that still goad their victims to retribution. The lesson is the catastrophe that results from seeking justice through retribution against “others.”

Justice that works is Forgiveness that replaces the insanity of conflicting thoughts and emotions with the vision of Logic. With the Reality-Truth about the Child’s misidentification: there is no “other.” Retribution can’t work.

At the instant of Recognition

Why does the Necessity of Logic require that one individual, inside the dream, recognize the Child beloved of its Parents in Reality behind the appearance of an “other”? First, so that the wrong choice can be corrected where it occurred, within unconsciousness. Second, so that Forgiveness required of awakening can be complete. So that the one Child seen in vivid color yet still seen as an “other,” however sympathetically, can be seen by an individual identifying not with an individual projection of the Child, however innocent and vulnerable, but with the Child itself.

Can be seen in the same instant by the one Child’s Parents. By Father-Mind and by Mother-Love in Reality. By the wellsprings of Choice and Freedom, the Logic of Reality, the animating Energy-Force of Oneness, the Soul of Being, of Life. For the act of recognition of one Child by one individual identified with one Child, that penetrates the illusion and lifts the veil, cannot occur, cannot replace unreality with Reality, in the absence of Relationships that Define and complete the Whole Child: Relationship between Child-projection and the Holy Spirit, the vision of Logic; and Relationship between Child and Parents, the capacity of Consciousness to recognize Reality, the capacity of Love to Connect, to Relate. The capacity of both to awaken. The act of Forgiveness, correction of error, the undoing of mistaken identity, necessarily engages the Whole Child in its awakening.

At this instant of recognition by the Parents, brought about through Relationships that are part of the Child’s identity, its Definition by Logic, the unconscious Child’s dream of unreality ends. The illusion of time ends, and the Child is restored to the Oneness, Being-Life, and Force – the Consciousness, the Awareness and immediacy -- of Now. The Holy Instant.

Forgiveness corrects error

To recap: Seeing one another through the body’s eyes we see with “eyes” of the shadow-code. We see reflection. We are only capable of seeing “others” as others. As separate objects. When an individual with self-awareness identifies with one Child rather than its shadow, it is only capable of seeing one Child in “others.”

Solving the mystery of how to truly Forgive is realizing that each individual contains the whole Child. This is why the focus of ACIM is not on groups, on the many, but on individuals. The individual can therefore choose to identify with the one Child, to see only the Truth of one Child in “others.” In reflections, the illusion of the many, the insanity of separation. Can choose, therefore, to see only the Truth of Innocence in “others,” to Forgive by not being able to see guilt in “others.” By seeing the Reality beyond “others” rather than illusion, which means not seeing in the one Child or any of its projections an “other” at all. 

Which is what the Child should have detected in its shadow-reflection: no “other” but only an illusory part of itself. Forgiveness corrects error. This is why the focus of ACIM is on Forgiveness. One individual truly Forgiving.

The individual’s task is done when the many are one

The individual’s task is done:

  • When it has removed the last obstacle to Forgiveness, the last trace of self-delusion and mis-identity from the Child’s unconscious and still dreaming mind.
  • When it “sees” in an “other” its one Child Self, not a shadow-reflection, not a competitor, predator, prey, mate, or any other kind of opposite.
  • When it sees in its one Child Self light and Innocence instead of a phantasmagoria of darkness and guilt, Reality-Truth instead of a reflection of unreality-appearances.
  • When, in Relationship with its Guide, the Holy Spirit, it has thus prepared safe entry for awareness of Relationship with Parents Mind-Love, the purity and perfection of Psyche, of Oneness. Into a now uncorrupted Child’s Mind, uncontaminated by any trace of its shadow code, and gotten out of the way.
  • When it has thus demonstrated competence in the exercise of Free Will.
  • When it has learned and grown to maturity and its training is complete, forever the Child beloved of its Parents but in its responsibility no longer a Child.

The individual has allowed the Reality of who it is, the Child’s identity, to present itself, spontaneously, of its own Free Will, to its Parents. To be recognized by its Parents Consciousness-Love and welcomed back Home. To be awakened from the dream, the self-deception, and restored to its role, its work and play, in Creation. The individual Child’s task is done when, with the awakening of the one Child, the many disappear. The dream and all its occupants, all its apparitions, ends. Including the individual Child projection.

True Forgiveness is the act of turning over responsibility for restoration of Consciousness, of Peace, Truth, and Sanity, to the only source capable of accomplishing it. To Logic that defines, governs, and protects the harmony of Everything. That ensures that no trace of impossibility, the unreal, can invade, disrupt, and contaminate the purity, peace, perfection, and Interconnectedness of Reality. Our Protector. Our Friend. We, the projections and replications of a tormented, split mind, are the intrusion.

Timing and the principle of Alignment 

The principle that determines the timing of Forgiveness-Awakening is the principle of Alignment, its definition so synonymous – so closely aligned -- with Logic that it can be thought of as Logic itself. If Logic is Definition, then it is also Alignment.

The loss of Consciousness projected an unreality whose components-circumstances, expressing illogic, are out of alignment and therefore need Logic to put them back into alignment. Logic is getting it right: the context, purpose, and meaning of our circumstances before we manage circumstances to achieve our purpose. Before we try to do what’s right and do it right. Alignment is the all-important task of getting it right.

Science is but an attempt to figure out alignment that itself needs to be in alignment. If it fails in its mission, as it does, then it is a failure of Logic, which it is. The dominant paradigm of every major field of inquiry – science, philosophy, psychology, and theology -- is failing to get it right. Because in its mindless rush to get to Reason, it bypasses Logic, which it doesn’t understand. If it doesn’t understand Logic it can’t explain anything. Can’t Understand anything. Logic is thoroughness: everything in its time and place. The oriental tea ceremony: no corner-cutting, no shortcuts. We now have the explanation for human folly. The answer to why shit happens.

Alignment is Order, Peace, Harmony, Unity, Community. It is Justice, Fairness, Balance, Equality. Revolution against rule by injustice is collective attempt to establish rule by justice. – a realignment-refitting of relations of power, society, economy. Relationships in unreality are done by alignment in the moment and undone when changing circumstances and their contexts undo alignment. In each case – disorder, injustice, disconnection – healing requires Logic.

Circumstances reveal purpose-meaning when their Logic-pattern – their alignment -- is revealed. What is the timing of Awakening through Forgiveness? When will the Child correct error and regain Consciousness? What pattern are we looking for? Alignment of the circumstances of the Story of the Child. Circumstances that reflect progress in the Child’s training will be decisive. A Course in Miracles teaches that it’s a matter of choice when to learn its lesson but not whether. There are no shortcuts.

Must humanity experience mass extinction? Will it be necessary that groups-nations first come together in shared purpose to manage their natural habitat? To preserve world peace. Is humanity – Child the many – destined to experience death on a global scale as well as individually, i. e. to experience extinction as a species before its training is complete? These seem more relevant considerations than the alignment of stars and planets, but astrology may in some way reflect the Child’s progress nonetheless because it is based on the principle of alignment. 

Replacing time-mortality with Now-eternity. The Holy Spirit’s vision of Logic will replace the “vision” of the body’s eyes at the invitation of the individual / Free Choice, liberated from self-delusion. This will set in motion a chain reaction in the sequence of Logic that necessarily replaces time-mortality with the Holy Instant, with eternal Now that replaces the illusion-dream with Reality-Truth.

Free Choice is the key to liberation. The shadow-code is the archenemy of choice. The precise point when the Child Free Choice overturns captivity by the code-virus is when an individual Child projection chooses to identify with one Child instead of the shadow-code. Free Choice is therefore the essential cause that sets off the logical chain reaction of events that produce Forgiveness-Awakening. Further confirmation, if confirmation is needed, that the Child’s training in unreality centers on the exercise of Free Will just as it centers on Free Choice in Reality-Creation.

The first object of Forgiveness is liberation. To identify with one Child is to identify with Free Choice, independence not captivity, with liberating Mind-Love, the Child’s true identity. Identification with Mind-Awareness plus Love-Freedom is to identify with Reality-Creation, with spontaneity-Now, the opposite of the shadow’s captivity. The object of Forgiveness is therefore liberation from the shadow-code’s captivity.

Self-awareness equates with Forgiveness. The individual’s choice of Self-awareness is the act that triggers and authenticates correction of error. Self-awareness equates with Forgiveness because it obviates any possibility of recognizing an “other.”

How will Awakening be experienced? What becomes of the universe?

Awakening will be imperceptible, The dynamics of mind-change that affect the individual whole Child will simultaneously affect its entire environment, resulting in an identical experience of imperceptible transformations. Imperceptible because replacement of unconsciousness by Consciousness can’t be detected by unconsciousness that’s only able to detect shadow-unreality.

Awakening will be gentle and painless. Spontaneous insight is experienced as a pre-existing fact because unconsciousness can’t detect fact-Truth. Can’t detect the workings of change through Intuition guided by the Holy Spirit, by the vision of Logic. Consciousness can’t recognize the unreality of unconsciousness. The Child’s experience of awakening will therefore be a gentle, imperceptible transformation from unreality to Reality. So unthreatening, painless, and familiar that the Child is unaware of it.

The experience will be the exact opposite of the wrenching dislocation that the corrupted Child-mind imagines it to be, fears it to be, and therefore resists. The exact opposite of how the Child experienced the loss of Consciousness.

The universe will retract into Child-Mind. The illusory universe will retract back into Child-Mind that it never left with reversal of the illusory-insane projection. It will transform through replacement of self-deception by Self-awareness, the reversal of error in the Child’s Mind. And thus the dream of spacetime-matter will end.

Clinging to the dream: the choice whether to “exist”

The individual has done its job, has truly Forgiven, when it not only gets out of the way but freely, joyfully, and spontaneously, chooses not to “exist.” To relinquish its “specialness” and all the other trappings of captivity to a chimera, a substitute for all that was lost to unconsciousness: a string of worthless beads. Flickering shadows echoing disembodied voices in a darkened cave. A rip-off, a joke.

A humanity captive to the illusion, clinging to its worthless beads, seeks to perpetuate itself by colonizing other planets. Should it? Should slave states in the antebellum South have been allowed to extend slavery into new states? Does earth want humanity to stick around, or might it have second thoughts? As it heads inexorably toward what might be as bad or worse than the Permian “Great Dying," 252 million years ago, when 70-80 percent of land-ocean species went extinct because of global warming, might it be forgiven for thinking good riddance?

Do we really want to “exist”? Must we “exist”? Do we still have a choice?

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Published on 1 Comment on What Is “Competition”?

A headlong rush toward mass extinction

The most obvious, plentiful, commonplace, and deeply rooted expression of the Child’s shadow code “opposite,” in its projections-replications’ violated psyche, is competition. The purpose of competition is to eliminate competition – to eliminate itself. The same ultimate objective of opposite. The essence of its illogic, its insanity. A thing that strives of necessity toward its own extinction is inherently, by definition, illogical. It is illogic. And its pervasive, pernicious influence with the Child replicons’ psyche is evident in this illusory world’s headlong rush toward mass extinction.

Competition is so deeply seated in the brain that only a supernatural force can dislodge it: the limbic system at the top of the body’s spine and at the base of the brain. Fight-or-flight instinct that links primitive emotions to beasts. Fear, rage, hatred: the mindless animal drive to kill. The lust, the craving, for death. The part that hasn’t evolved while the “civilizing” brain above it has evolved.

The grand distraction

What is competition if not a contest between natural adversaries, competitors for the essentials of life – food, clothing, shelter, mates – to establish who’s faster, stronger, and more gifted at survival in a competitive environment? What are games of competition if not re-enactments of the real thing, with consequences that are psychological if not lethal: the illusion of “winning?” The shadow code’s ultimate trump card over attempts to restore sanity with the prospect of cooperation in shared purpose, of peace and harmony. To express fulfillment from wills fitting together instead of locking horns in incompatibility.

Who better to personify the trump card of “winning” than an apparition named Trump whose mind is so thoroughly captive to its opposite, to competition, that it can’t conceive of not “winning”? Who personifies the sainted Vince Lombardi’s credo: “winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” As if losing in fact or in theory were impossible. Opposite coded to destroy itself makes a certainty of losing, the truth not of Lombardi’s credo but its opposite. The truth of competition seated in the reptilian brain is that losing is the only thing.

And what is it when it’s ornamented with the shining allurements of winning – acceptance, belonging, achievement, competence, wholeness, specialness, exoneration, vindication, worth – but a grand distraction? An entertainment designed to keep the Child’s self-projections, its viral replications, from understanding their situation: wayward bodies frightened, vulnerable, disoriented, abandoned to their own devices in a precarious environment of isolated, separated objects. From exposing the deception and recovering sanity.

The triumphant cry of the loser

What is more “normal” than competition among self-interests for “supremacy” and at the same time abnormal – motivation that condemns its practitioners to the tragedy of the commons? It’s not enough that skills are honed in competitive games if the same skills are then used to pursue unfettered self-interest until no self is left standing, for that is its object. “Losing is everything and the only thing” can’t be the credo of an entire species or an individual if its outcome is where the shadow code comes from: impossibility. The impossibility of nothingness and the nothingness of impossibility. The delusion of losing that crowns itself with a triumphant cry: “I won!”

Yet this is what is manifest on a planet whose inhabitants are driving themselves to extinction. John Kenneth Galbraith’s classic description of capitalism: “A stomach that digests itself.” An impossibility, inherently unstable. The “gift” of the Child’s mistaken identity, its opposite, gift-wrapped in harmless “competition.”

Fill the Colosseum with fools and let the games begin!

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One source of information about Reality-Creation

What the Child Knows in Reality, how it “sees”-Understands, is with the vision of Logic / Logos-God. Seeing with the vision of Logic is how the Child Understands its context, its role, purpose and meaning in specific circumstances. Nothing can be correctly seen-Understood without Logic. Logic is the eyes and ears of all Selves, all Creators-Creations in Reality. It is their senses. They sense Reality-Creation through Logic / Logos-God.

This is how and why Logic / Logos-God connects-functions through Creations grown on the Child’s Parents’ plane of Creation. This is how it governs Everything with Laws of cause-effect / Necessity. How it manages roles and relationships once they’re defined: not by directing or controlling Selves-Creations but by enabling and empowering them to see-sense their contexts. To Understand what causes imply from contexts-circumstances about what’s to be decided and done to produce effects.

Logic is the only source of information about Reality-Creation that it governs and manages, that it supports, enables and empowers. The means of sharing this information to enable Selves functioning in Reality-Creation is their senses supplied by Logic. Logic is Logos-God Source that connects information-circumstances of contexts with Selves-Creations’ senses. In unreality, bodies’ brains connecting material “facts” with bodies’ senses to perform a parallel function derived from the function of Logic in Reality.

Can the Child’s self-misidentification be corrected?

In Reality, information acquired through Logic vision-senses is Knowledge. In unreality “information” acquired through bodies’ senses is perception based on appearances that are misleading. Perception based on misleading appearances is misinformation that feeds misperception. Judgments-choices based on misperception are misjudgment / incorrect choices. They are error.

In unreality, bodies’ sensory perception substitutes the wrong-reverse vantage point for the vision of Logic – i.e. illogic. The self-deluded Child then knows and sees-understands nothing. This is a consequence of the harm done by the Child’s mis-identification with the original “other,” its shadow-reflection, the non-being code of victimhood, fear, guilt, and hate.

The Child’s self-misidentification was the second of two events that interrupted the Child’s role in Creation and led to the unreality of spacetime-matter. The first event, its loss of Consciousness, was a system event rather than an error on the part of the Child, for which The Story of the Child proposes a rational explanation.

The second event is explained in A Course in Miracles (ACIM) as a mistaken choice – “error” that the Child can correct by “choosing again.” Choosing, that is, to discard the illusory voice of the ego and listen, instead, to the Holy Spirit. Neither ACIM nor The Story of the Child impugns the motives of the Child with intentional wrongdoing or carelessness that would contradict its Perfection and Innocence, that would justify a projection or sentence of guilt.

Mistaken identity occurred without sense or senses

The unconscious Child, not seeing-understanding with the senses-vision of Logic, deprived of it by its loss of Consciousness, as yet had no senses with which to perceive or misperceive. As yet had no body with senses. Was not yet dreaming a projected illusion of spacetime-matter with a dreaming mind’s “consciousness.” But the Child didn’t need senses or dream “consciousness” for its own shadow-reflection code to be “detected.” For its coded “response” to the desperate Child’s cries for “saving” to be “recognized.” The unconscious Child’s mistaken identity, its self-delusion, occurred without senses. It occurred without the vision of Logic or the “vision” of body. 

The “presence” of the Child’s shadow-opposite was an intrusion not through the front door of Consciousness but through the back door of unconsciousness. It was detection by a state of mind unfamiliar to Child – unconsciousness. That had the capacity to detect illusion-unreality because it had the capacity to detect itself. Beginning with the unconscious mind’s shadow-reflection, the Child-Being's opposite.

This is the flip side of Conscious Mind’s capacity to see-detect itself -- Reality. The capacity of unconscious mind was derived from Conscious Mind just as the code of non-being is derived from Being. It didn’t require the body’s senses.

Mind’s capacity to detect Reality or unreality is a prerequisite of senses both of Logic and body. This is because its source is the Logic of Reality; is the Laws of cause and effect / Necessity whose content is provided by Logic. The Logic of Reality, subject to Laws / Necessity, requires that impossibility-opposites be paired with Possibility-Creations, shadows with Hosts, dark sides with Light Sides, unreality-illusion with Reality-Truth. Provided that impossibility not share the Reality of Possibility. Not share the Life of Creation. Not share in Being but only in the logical implication of its opposite, non-being.

Not on the Parents’ plane of Creation where unconsciousness-impossibility has no logical place, but on the Child’s plane of Free Choice, where it does. Both the Child’s Consciousness and its Free Choice require the capacity to distinguish between Reality-Truth and unreality-illusion, Host and opposite. Its competence to perform its role in Creation depends on this capacity, and it was its absence, attributable to the state of the system that was then possible, that caused its loss of Consciousness.

The only act of Mind that was possible

Unconscious Child mind’s capacity to “detect” unreality initially enabled it to detect its shadow reflection. Its mis-identified shadow self was then enabled through its derived non-being code to detect the projected dream of spacetime-matter through its viral-replication bodies’ senses.

The Child’s loss of Consciousness, its descent into the illusory state of unconsciousness, occasioned instant detection of illusion -- its shadow-reflection -- without the senses of Logic or bodies. In this disabled and disempowered state it sought guidance that it couldn’t provide itself. It turned to its opposite non-being code, an imaginary “other.” A self-delusion. The only potential source of “help” that unconsciousness could detect, and its code responded in the only way it could. It responded with a reverse-engineered “rationale” for being “saved:” the bizarre psychology of victimhood-guilt, the nonsensical “thought system” of the ego described by ACIM.

Child unconscious mind, with its capacity to detect illusion shadow opposites and lacking Conscious-logical Mind’s capacity to recognize Reality-Truth, to think and Freely Choose, thus responded with the only act of mind it was capable of: projection. It didn’t “choose” its wrong identity or its rationale of salvation but projected itself – its identity – onto its shadow code. Its code, a virus, then directed its host’s captive mind to project its insane dream of victimhood-guilt – our universe of bodies, spacetime and matter.

All of this happened while Child unconscious mind was flying blind. While it had no senses to guide its “thinking” that had stopped with loss of Consciousness. Projection (1) onto shadow code, (2) onto dream, occurred without the Child’s capacity to think or to sense, to see-Understand what it was doing. 

The Child became an instrument for making unreality real

The Child’s misidentification – a self-delusion since it could not be “deluded” by its own shadow-reflection -- was predetermined by its loss of Consciousness. Because unconsciousness deprived it of the capacity to see-sense and to think-reason. Restoring its capacity to sense and to think would have been a prime motivating force behind the Child’s yielding to its shadow code’s apparent “offer” of a substitute “reality” with a substitute mind and senses, i.e. with brains and bodies.

Loss of Consciousness thus impaired the Child’s judgment-Understanding in two ways: (1) by removing its capacity to think and to see-sense while (2) simultaneously enabling the Child to detect shadow opposites-reflections and to project. I.e. to imagine that it could project its thoughts and feelings out of mind onto “external” objects – the dream of spacetime-matter, “others”-bodies – to separate thoughts and feelings from their source, a logical impossibility. An impossibility that Conscious mind could not even be aware of let alone accomplish.

Unconsciousness was a trap engineered by the Child’s opposite, its shadow programmed by its derived non-being code, to take the unconscious child, like a fly caught in a spider web, into captivity. The Child’s disabled mind was thus converted into a perfect instrument:

  • for shadow code to use to animate its reverse-engineered version of Reality, the unreality of spacetime-matter.
  • for a virus that’s taken a living cell captive to replicate itself in bodies.

The Child’s Conscious Mind and its Free Will had nothing to do with it. 

Where was the Holy Spirit? 

Where was the Child’s connection to Logic through its Memory of Reality, the Holy Spirit? Why could it not guide the unconscious Child away from its self-delusion?

The Voice of the Holy Spirit couldn’t be triggered and heard until projection took “effect.” Until the shadow code took the Child’s mind captive and the deed was done. For that would be the only evidence that there was an opposite “voice” to counter. Until then, the Child was “engaged” with an impossibility, in a state of unconsciousness but not yet dreaming, without the means of “choosing” either one.

The Holy Spirit responds when called upon for guidance when to do so cannot compromise Free Will. “Saving” the Child from its predicament, deprived of Free Will by blind, unthinking unconsciousness, would have betrayed both the purpose of the Child and the Holy Spirit. Its presence had to wait until the Child, corrupted by its self-delusion, the imaginary “other,” projected the dream and occupied it. Until the dreaming Child, who is Free Choice / Love in Reality, equipped by its dream with body’s senses, had the capacity to sense and think with independent, albeit impaired, judgment. To hear the Voice of the Holy Spirit and to respond to it.

Again, at the point where the Child self-deluded and mis-identified with its shadow-opposite, its non-being code was the only source of “help” that its unconscious mind, senseless and unthinking, could detect. 

To act with sovereignty and integrity

The self-delusion was an algorithm built into loss of Consciousness, a series of programmed steps that necessarily accompany this state-event. The algorithm can be reversed by Free Choice exercised by Child through maturing, through Learning and Growth. It can do so in its state of dreaming with bodies’ senses guided by Logic through Memory / Holy Spirit, by undoing and reversing the non-being shadow code’s deceptions.

One individual can undo the illusion of Child-the-many, of victimhood, fear, guilt, and hate:

  • provided that it’s connected to Logic and the Child’s Memory through the Holy Spirit
  • provided that its mind is thinking with Real Thoughts guided by Real Senses, the vision of Logic, that see-Understand the Reality of One Child Self-Innocence.
  • provided that its Self-awareness and capacity to Freely Choose are thus restored.

One individual, having regained through Free Choice and the guidance of the Holy Spirit what the Child lost with loss of Consciousness -- the capacity to think, to see-sense Reality, – can reverse the mis-identification, restore the Child’s Self-Awareness, and end the dream.

In the individual’s undoing of the dream, Logos-God would be enabling choice with powers and abilities of mind lost to unconsciousness. It would not in any sense be controlling the Child’s choice. It would still be the Child’s choice to use its capacity to think-sense / see-Understand offered through the Holy Spirit. Even when the Child is enabled with Real Thoughts and Senses, it would still have to Freely Choose to recognize One Child-Innocent. To act autonomously, with sovereignty and integrity, and not mechanically. In sharp contrast with the Child’s self-delusion which was mechanical; it was not Free-Conscious choice. Evidence that unconsciousness is captivity, the necessary prelude to its object, the projected, insane illusion of appearances -- spacetime-matter, the bodies that sense it, and the brains-minds deceived by it.

In the being and doing of Free Will. . . 

An act of mind coerced by circumstances can nevertheless be reversed if the mind that committed it has Free Will, is Free Will, and therefore cannot forfeit Free Will. All of this applies to the Child. Being Free Choice -- the Child of Father-Mind Choice married to Mother-Love Freedom -- means that every act of the Child is in some form, to some degree, Choice. For this is the essence of its role in Creation. A role in turn hard-wired by Logic / Logos-God, by the Laws-Necessity of Reality, into the purpose, meaning, and Worth of Life – of Creation.

Any act by mind so defined, so charged, remains in its essence Choice that can be re-chosen at the discretion of mind when it has regained discretion. Even in a context that depends on Intuition and Logic extracted from Memory to access the Truth: inside the unconscious mind’s dream. Where it was when ACIM was written and Jesus urged its students to “choose again.”

If the intrusion of an alien psychology of victimhood into an unconscious, defenseless mind was a theft of Free Choice, mind that is Free Choice, coming to its senses, can return to the offense and take it back. Though The Story of the Child acknowledges that unconsciousness was a trap, and the Child’s “choice” of the wrong “self” was by no means free, its Logic and the Logic of ACIM speak as one on this essential point.

The Child has both the Necessity and the capacity to “choose again.”

We are to judge for ourselves

What does all this mean for us? In its interpretation and application of ACIM’s lesson, The Story of the Child has stood for independent judgment. It has expressed itself in the spirit of Jesus’ teaching, that in choosing again we are to use our own Judgment, our own gifts and talents, and be guided by Logic. In the being and doing of Free Will, we are to think, feel, and judge for ourselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Published on Leave a comment on When Child the Many Becomes Child the Mob: Understanding the Psychodynamics of the Beast

 The Joker is looking for a captive audience

What accounts for the world’s population sorted out by those who seem driven by the lures of the Child’s shadow-code – the “Joker” – and those who aren’t? Who are drawn instead to the gifts, the talents and values, offered by their connection to the Child’s real self, through the Holy Spirit?

The Joker only has use for those seeking the supposed comfort and protection of belonging to group, because it’s looking for occupants of its-Plato’s Cave. Looking for group members to lure into captivity where they can be manipulated-forced into cycles of conflict that make unreality “real.” That distract from defection to Reality-Truth. Where they can be deceived into passive complacency and conformance by blandishments, entertainments. Enchanted-charmed and humored by the Joker-clown. Fooled by the Joker-magician.

The Joker is looking for a captive audience. It has no use for individual replicons not looking for group belonging. They are ignored, neglected, and discarded as useless-worthless waste. Their separation as an inferior-subordinate class of replicons is a consequence of the Child’s shadow-code’s exclusiveness predicated on group “belonging,” on self-delusion rather than on the inclusiveness of self-awareness. Predicated on orientation to the Joker’s illusory projected “other” rather than orientation to recognized real-true Self.

The Joker favors body-sensing extraverts naturally-instinctively attracted to its substitute-alternate “reality” of bodies and other external objects to “relate” to, i.e. to project onto, to compete-conflict with. Separation into higher-lower, superior-inferior social classes – inequality – originates with the non-being shadow-code’s inherent illogic of group exclusiveness that ignores-neglects a useless-worthless class of non-group oriented replicons. Not “useless” to community but useless to it.

The Holy Spirit sees the One Self in every individual replicon

The Joker’s exclusiveness, its prejudice-bigotry, is based on discrimination between classes of replicons, on division of replicons into segregated parts. This is the origin of racial discrimination, of segregation. The Holy Spirit’s source of One Child Oneness, the “many” as One, doesn’t discriminate. The Holy Spirit not recognizing groups, not having use for illusory-artificial discrimination of One Self into groups-many, sees the One Self in every individual replicon. Where the Joker sees either a captive audience or worthless trash in every individual, the Holy Spirit sees only Worth. It's the ultimate source of affirmation and empowerment within the delusion. The ultimate source of Logic that’s the only source of Hope in a world divided in despair.

Personalities who seek Love-intimacy, relationship between minds-souls rather than groups-bodies, are less likely to be distracted-deceived by Joker group “many” away from true Self. These would be introverts, intuitive-thinking, evaluating-judging types more likely to be drawn to true Self. Who would, therefore, more likely be drawn toward undoing the Joker’s unreality-untruth through the Holy Spirit’s gifts of mind, the guidance of Logic.

Where the world is headed at this hour, with authoritarian America in the lead

The world today of polarized authoritarian politics and escalating violence – physical assaults, gun violence, international conflict, misinformation, conspiracy-mongering – exhibits a cyclical Joker roundup of recruits for captivity in its Cave. Where they can engage in physical violence, make unreality “real,” and reaffirm its unquestioned authority, its arbitrary-lawless rule, over its Cave, the planet earth.

The world’s descent into madness occurs on a mass-group scale experienced as if it were an overwhelming invasion by Mongolian hordes. As if it were a pestilence-plague that’s unstoppable. That gathers its own momentum, builds on itself, becomes its own driving force once it reaches critical mass, like the formation of planets and stars. Once it succumbs to the gravitational force, the attraction to perversion of mind-thought, of love-feeling, into the mindlessness-lovelessness of mob psychology.

This is the psychodynamics of the Joker’s group captivity. Where all succumbing to the lures of the Joker’s unreality ultimately lead. To totalitarian ideologies like Gestapo-style national socialism and Soviet-style communism. It’s where the world is headed at this hour, this moment, with the United States of America, the one-time beacon of democracy, cast in the role of the Roman Empire, spreading its culture of Joker-madness, divisiveness and conflict around the world. Through its ubiquitous dominance in information technology, telecommunications, mass culture, commerce, international power relations, and military force.

This accounts for the gathering storm of authoritarian rule in the U.S. because the Joker-delusion sees it as the most useful group for spreading its virus of conflict-separation, for making unreality real, for preserving its arbitrary-lawless rule.

Who will suffer?

The issue now is whether individual thinking-feeling replicons guided by the Holy Spirit, normally unaffected by the Joker’s lures, can withstand the onslaught. Or will the imposition of top-down authoritarian rule make the issue moot, as it did in 1930s Germany, when every replicon was forced into the Cave and into violence?

It’s happening here and it’s happening now. When the Child-One became the Child-many it became a group. Now it’s transforming, once again, into a crazed mob. A beast summoned from the pits of hell – from the awful curse, the delusion, of victimhood -- to seek retribution, to indulge in another orgy of vengeance.

The sick, wounded Psyche of the self-deluded Child, corrupted by its own non-being shadow code, turns against itself. Why? Because there is no “other.” There are no “others” to turn against. There is only its self-deluded Self. Who, then, are the victims of this madness, our orgy of retribution, of absurd victimhood? Who will pay for this insane turn toward authoritarian arbitrary rule? Who will suffer?

Ourselves.

Published on Leave a comment on True “Realism:” The Relevance and Practicality of The Story of the Child

The great philosophical divide: “realism” vs. “idealism”

The great philosophical divide is between those who do (“idealists”) and those who don’t (“realists”) want to replace the unreality of replication / disconnection-separation:

  • illogic-insanity / self-delusion
  • lawlessness-chaos / opposites-contradictions / competition-disunity
  • captivity / conformance / oppression
  • isolated bodies-matter
  • appearances-deceptions
  • misunderstanding / projection-blame / guilt-fear / victimhood
  • punishment-retribution / conflict-violence / destruction
  • uncreativity / ignorance / stagnation
  • invalidation-disempowerment / worthlessness
  • non-being / mortality

with the Reality of Oneness / Relationship-Interconnection:

  • Logic-sanity / Self-Awareness / Knowledge
  • Governance-Order / Harmony / Sharing-Community
  • Freedom / Free Will / Expression
  • Interconnected Minds-Selves
  • Reality-Truth / Honesty-Integrity
  • Understanding / Love / Innocence / Psyche-Soul Harmlessness
  • Creation / Learning / Growth / Progress-Development
  • Affirmation-Empowerment / Worth
  • Being / Life-Eternity

In the philosophical divide “idealists” committed to the Reality of Oneness consider themselves the true “Realists.” To “idealists” “realists” are the true self-deluded “unrealists.” To “realists” it is the reverse.

This author’s perspective belongs with historic idealists who consider themselves true realists. The Story of the Child is therefore written from the perspective of one Child-mind convinced by Logic of its Reality. If it earns-deserves “authority” it is not by virtue of the qualifications of its author or the subjectivity or objectivity of his perspective. It is by virtue solely of its internal Logic.

Alignment with A Course in Miracles

It does not seek identification with any philosophical or religious thought. But it does claim inspiration from the Logic of Jesus in A Course in Miracles. Any contradiction in the Logic of The Story of the Child with ACIM is to be resolved in favor of ACIM.

The Story of the Child is not intended to be in any sense an alteration of, or improvement on, ACIM. Though it shares its basic purpose with ACIM – explanation to help with Understanding-Forgiveness and thus with awakening – it does not share the same scope. The Story of the Child is a conscious attempt to extend the scope of ACIM’s Logic back in the Sequence of Logic from an act by a mind unconscious that produced the dream of unreality to the event that explains the mind’s loss of consciousness.

It hopes thereby to provide a foundation for Understanding context that will support logical interpretations of what happened and why. So that attempts to explain, Understand, and correct human behavior driven by this event and its consequences will cease conflicting with Logic. Will cease perpetuating error and putting off the unhappy Child’s awakening from its nightmare. So that future attempts will succeed because they align with Logic. 

Is this relevant? Is it “practical?”

Tell me that our world isn’t spiraling into another cycle of authoritarian horrors, lawlessness, delusion, and destruction. Tell me that the “optimism” of “realists” is warranted against all the evidence that the unreasoning, insensitive, self-absorbed children that we are refuse to grow up. That our world is tending toward freedom and compassion instead of more oppression and cruelty.

Tell me that the “optimism” of “realists” deserves center stage instead of the countless victims of self-delusion who don’t share their “optimism.” Who know better. Whose voice will be heard when the “optimism” of “realists” makes certain that there are no voices left. To what is the “optimism” of “realists” attributable? To happenstance: to the fact that their misguided “realism” – their self-delusion -- hasn’t, so far, made them victims.

Tell me that our fields of inquiry – science, philosophy, psychology, theology – have good explanations that all add up to Understanding. So that the voice of self-delusion that’s got the field to itself won’t turn this century into a worse horror show than the last. Or have we forgotten? Two world wars, the Great Depression, the cold war and its threat of nuclear annihilation. More pandemics and the greatest horror of them all: Anthropocene. Mass extinction dismissed as “climate change” in the popular imagination so that infantile, self-absorbed children, who refuse to grow up, won’t be inconvenienced.

What The Story of the Child will show

If the “explanations” offered by the dominant paradigms of our fields of inquiry brought us to this, are they “relevant?” Are they “practical?” What The Story of the Child will show is that they are neither. Their “realism” is dead wrong, and they have brought us to this. They are accountable. They are the issue, not the Logic of another perspective. If they can’t explain the reality behind appearances then let them explain why their veneration of appearances has failed.

I would meet you upon this honestly.

Published on Leave a comment on The Warmth, Comfort, and Wisdom of “Radical”

Mama Mallard’s road to nowhere

The Joker’s version of “reality” is the exact opposite of Reality. A departure from Truth that couldn’t be more radical. The biggest of Big Lies. Stunning in its enormity.

Yet the traumatized and dreaming Child was taken in, of course because it had no choice. Not really, considering the context. So, its projections and the Joker virus’s replications all follow along like ducklings, quacking their way across the road behind mama, unaware that they’ve been duped. That they and the road and everything else are a figment of their imaginations put there by a mistake. By the unconscious Child mistaking in the darkness its own reflection – a shadow – for an “other.” Crying out in pain and terror for help from its opposite. Whose offer to “help” came from a lifeless recording, a code of non-being derived from the Child’s Being.

A code that can’t help but “respond” with everything opposite to Reality and Truth, upside down and inside out. From the Big Truth of Reality to the Big Lie of unreality. A pattern obvious to the sensibility of Logic but obviously not to the insensibility of illogic. One would think that even a self-deluded Child, absorbed in a dream, would eventually catch on, but, so far, it hasn’t. Mama Mallard keeps leading her ducklings across the road and her ducklings keep following, even when it’s obvious that their “journey” is taking them nowhere in circles and it isn’t safe.

What the emperor doesn’t want to know

Why hasn’t the Child caught on? It’s not because the Truth hasn’t surfaced in various forms – art, music and literature, philosophy, psychology and theology, and now even in science, the last bastion of delusion. Many have heard, since at least the sixth century BCE, that their experience of “life” is a strange dream – an illusion -- and the Child only needs to awaken to return to Reality. But the message hasn’t gotten through. They’re not listening.

As horrific as its nightmare is for the victims of the Big Lie, they seem to fear the Big Truth even more. So much so that they’ve become an army of opposition against it. So deep is their self-delusion that its protection from attack has found its way into the core of their DNA, their very identity. The shadow code of non-being has substituted itself for the genetic code of their Being. If only one should speak to the Truth – should mention that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes – he might be put to death. In fact, one of them did years ago and what happened? He was crucified.

Why? What makes a simple statement of fact, the Logic and Reason, the Worth of Truth, come across as a hostile act? An attack? As an unforgivable breach of faith? A violation of social and moral order more threatening than irrational disorder that invades neighborhoods of schools, churches, malls, and grocery stores with homicidal maniacs armed with lethal weapons. This is sanity? This is ”normal?”

What’s so funny? That the Truth is radical

What makes the Truth so hard for the self-deluded to swallow is it’s radical. The Child’s opposite, a lifeless, mindless, loveless code, convinces it that unreal is real and wrong is right, and the Child is OK with that. The Child is OK with hanging out with false “friends,” adolescents wishful-thinking that smoking won’t kill them. But when a real friend approaches with the Truth, that there’s been a mistake and it will kill them, that’s not OK. Seeing is believing, the Child says. Even if the body’s “eyes” can only see the mistake. Even if the body is just a replication of the shadow code that replaced the thinking and Logic of Mind and invented the mistake.

Seeing the Truth, seeing Reality, is too much of a stretch, too much of an effort, if it requires abandoning bodies with eyes that can’t see for Logic with vision that can see. The ultimate in radical – coded viral instructions for the opposite of Being, the opposite of Life, Mind, Love, and Soul – has convinced its unaware, self-deluded host that its opposite is radical. And so crucifixion is too good for anyone who presumes to disagree. The embodiments of the self-delusion, the virus's replications and their senses, have spoken. They’ve produced a joke.

The Child’s new lord and master, the Joker, whose one genuine talent is appearances, perverts every sign of Logic and sanity into a joke whose malign humor feeds off the delusion of fools. The Truth is radical. The occupants of Plato’s Cave can’t be persuaded that their Cave master, the Joker, can possibly be wrong. The Cave master who invented the Cave, its occupants the replicates of a virus, the original Child-the-many “group.” The Cave master who invented “society,” with its hare-brained “rules” that encourage and facilitate mayhem, rules with absolute authority, above the law. And who could possibly question it?

It only takes one individual

But it doesn’t take an imaginary “group,” a mass-ideology “movement,” to assault fortress denial. All it takes is a single replication of the virus -- one human -- to reach the Child beyond the Cave, to reach its Memory beyond the dream, with the Truth. One mind gifted with real thoughts, one self gifted with real senses, to see through the ruse. To understand and to share its understanding with one “other.” In an act of Understanding that recognizes “other” as self. Not duped by insanity into mistaken identity but guided by Logic into recognition of correct identity. Not isolated, separated, mortal bodies, apparitions that come and go, but one Soul of Mind married to Love, living and connecting in the unity, the Force and eternity, of Now.

Is it possible? What is the premise, the step in the Sequence of Logic that launched all of Creation, that drives its Creativity with the Energy, the exuberance of Life? Possibility! What is every aspect of the Joker’s dark lie designed to do? To close off possibility. To hide it. To shut down Creation, stifle Creativity, and replace it with nihilism, with destruction, impossibility. Who will “win” between Logic and a joke when there can’t even be a contest between Reality and illusion? Who will win between the Child’s real identity and its delusion? Of course it’s possible! How could it not be?

Far out!

What’s “radical:” the Joker struggling repeatedly to “unite” all the occupants of its Cave – all of humanity – against the Truth? Against the Child’s awakening? With one flawed, spirit-crushing ideology after another? Or the Child being awakened by just one of its projections – one individual – who listens to the spontaneous voice of Logic, earns and accepts its gifts, and freely chooses to accompany it back home? Not to be “chosen” but to choose of its own Free Will. For that’s the Child’s true identity that will restore its place in Reality: Free Choice without which nothing can have Worth. Not even Life itself, Creation itself.

How can anything have Worth if it isn’t earned and freely chosen? What is the purpose of the Child’s immature projections, in this morass of contradictions, confusion, and pain, if it isn’t to exercise their free will, to grow up, and to earn their way back Home?

Who says so? Not unreasoning, authoritarian “faith,” one of the many masks worn by the Joker, but Logic. Logic says so. And someday, the mind, heart, and soul of one individual, undistracted by the body, will take it in, the Truth of who the Child is, who we are, not the delusion. And it will be far out. It will be radical.

Published on Leave a comment on Logic: The Ultimate Path to Common Sense

What The Story of the Child has to tell us

The main thesis of The Story of the Child isn’t non-dualism – the understanding that of two competing realities only one can be real: the reality of Mind-Love and not spacetime-matter. Its main thesis is that the ultimate path to understanding is the thinking-reasoning of Mind that respects the orderly Sequence of Logic. It’s that if Child minds choose to be guided by Logic, by the orderly Process of Creation, by the Interconnections of Logic’s Implications, patiently and attentively, they will be rewarded with the Learning and Growth, the Judgment of maturity, they need in order to awaken to Reality and Truth.

They will be rewarded with the capacity to distinguish:

  • between what’s real and what’s not.
  • Between appearances that are a magician’s act performed by the body’s senses and the Truth that lies behind appearances that’s visible to the Logic of Mind.
  • Between senseless distractions – chaotic apparitions – and the real thing that makes sense and is here to stay. That offers context of purpose and meaning that comfort while growing Child minds learn to Understand and heal. While they grow out of the captivity of infantile self-absorption into the freedom of self-awareness. From deluding themselves with the lies and perversions of illogic to recognizing themselves with the Truth, the common sense of Logic.

The awakened Child will be rewarded with the competence it needs in order to do its job in Creation.

Logic: the ultimate path to sanity

The main thesis of The Story of the Child isn’t a challenge to overturn common sense but to restore it. Not to challenge Reality but to see and accept it. Why? So that Child minds can receive, enjoy, and use the benefits of Logic. Beginning with sanity that discerns Order – the fitting together in harmony of things – instead of embracing contradictions – disorder that pits things against one another in endless conflict.

What’s so compelling about strife that it must be protected by “realists” and the frantic rationalizations of “realism?” What are they afraid of if all that’s being offered to end it is the friendship, the common sense, of Logic? And, yes, non-dualism: the Reality of eternal Peace -- Mind married to Love -- and the unreality of Plato’s Cave -- our universe of inscrutable spacetime-matter, mortality, and eternal, senseless violence.

Published on Leave a comment on What Logic’s Explanation and Metaphysics Ask of Us

Six elemental questions 

Explanation wants us to answer questions in pursuit of Understanding. Metaphysics wants us to answer questions in pursuit of Reality-Truth behind appearances. Both require that we do so in an orderly way according to the Sequence of Logic. Rationally, using Reason to employ both thought and feeling, Mind and Love, to analyze, discriminate, evaluate, and judge.

The immediate issue that Logic’s Explanation and Metaphysics want us to address is how to redirect human thought-feeling:

  • away from conflict, deception, and insanity toward peace, truth, and sanity
  • away from cyclical breakdowns in collective and individual relationships that threaten humanity with extinction, toward relationships with shared purpose that endure.

A broader issue that Logic’s Explanation and Metaphysics want us to address is the context that gives purpose and meaning to “life” as we know it and its world of spacetime-matter: is it part of the solution or is it the problem? If it’s the wrong context is there a right context – another Reality that does have the solution? That provides answers that work. That offer the hope of possibility, grown from the bottom up instead of the despair of impossibility, the unchanging status quo imposed from the top down, by authoritarian “realism.”

Logic’s Explanation and Metaphysics ask us to answer six elemental questions:

  • Who are we?
  • What are we doing to one another?
  • Where are we doing it?
  • Why are we doing it?
  • How can we stop doing it?
  • When will we stop doing it?

Who are we?

An answer to Who are we? is self-delusion: projections by an unconscious-dreaming Child-mind and replications of its shadow-reflection, an imaginary “other” defined by a lifeless code of non-being, a derivative of Being. A parasitic-viral opposite that goes by its preferred name here, the “Joker, because all of its deceptions in our made-up world are perversions of the Truth. They are all jokes that derive their humor from the self-delusion of fools.

We are illusory embodiments of the Child’s shadow-reflection “other” meant to conceal the Reality-Truth of who we really are: Mind-Love Life-Being, the Child of Mind-Love Life-Being Parents, who exist in another Reality. We the many, projections of the One dreaming Child, even in unreality, are Free Will combined with Psyche-Soul Oneness-Innocence. Our defining Relationship that affirms and Reciprocates the Relationships between Mind-Love Parents and Parents-Child in Reality. We are Possibility. We are not non-being lifeless, soulless, mindless-loveless, impossibility.

What are we doing to one another?

An answer to What are we doing to one another? is misusing our differences. Instead of using them to cross boundaries and make common cause in Creation we are misusing them to justify condemnation and punishment, retribution and retaliation, victimhood’s vengeance, in the cause of miscreation. Instead of using them to learn and grow toward the maturity of Understanding, compassion, peace, and unity we misuse them to preserve a status quo of unawareness, intolerance, conflict, and disunity. Instead of using them to promote healing, mindfulness, and Love, to build character and values, we use them to promote mindless separation -- to target one another with fear, guilt, and hate.

Where are we doing it?

An answer to Where are we doing it? is in the unreality-dream that is our illusory universe of spacetime-matter. A dualistic “reality” that can’t be Real, that requires abandoning bodies’ sensory perception, abandoning the disingenuous, hollow philosophy of “realism” and choosing another guide. An authentic guide or muse by any name – Apollo, Holy Spirit, poetic genius, soulmate, divine afflatus, whatever – through insight from Mind-Intuition.

Why are we doing it?

An answer to Why are we doing it? is to eliminate “others.” To attain an unattainable state of resolution-peace without opposites. To execute the Joker’s perversion of Logic’s, or Logos-God’s, striving for eternal Perfection-Peace without opposites, without contradictions or impossibilities, through reconciliation of Everything in harmony under the Laws of Cause and Effect, under Necessity. I.e. through Understanding. The Joker’s perversion is getting rid of opposites by getting rid of possibilities, Laws and Necessity, and Logic. By getting rid of Logos-God. An answer to What are we doing to one another? is choosing the Joker’s perversion rather than the Ideal role-modeled for us by Logic.

How can we stop doing it?

An answer to How can we stop doing it? is to reverse-retract the self-delusion, our mistaken identity – the Joker, our own shadow-reflection, a Schmoe punching bag of sin, guilt, condemnation, fear, and hatred, an imaginary “other” – and choose another guide. A guide from the Memory of who we really are -- from our Parents Mind married to Love -- to help us align with Logic in the exercise of Free Choice to regain self-awareness. To lead us back Home to our Temenos in Reality, where there’s Innocence, Trust, playfulness, and work to do with real Purpose and Meaning.

When will we stop doing it?

An answer to When will we stop doing it? is when the mind-love of one individual Child projection / Joker replication perceives with Real senses, thinks with Real thoughts, and “sees,” i.e. Understands, the Reality-Truth of who the “other” really is: our One Child-Self Innocent, not the many Joker-replications guilt. Deserving of Love, not fear-blame, anger-hate, punishment-vengeance.

An answer is when one dreamed individual, enabled and empowered with self-awareness:

  • brings its self-awareness back to the unconscious-dreaming Child-mind through its Memory.
  • brings the Child back to its Parents’ Consciousness, its mind changed from the self-delusion of guilt and insanity to the self-awareness of Innocence and sanity.
  • brings the Child back to awakening from its dream of unreality-untruth by being recognized and welcomed back to Reality-Truth and Creation by Consciousness. By its Parents: the Life-Being, the Psyche-Soul, the Oneness and Innocence, of Mind married to Love.

We will stop doing it when the Child’s return to self-awareness, the end of its self-delusion, returns it to the Reality of Now -- to eternity-infinity, and to the end of the illusion of time, the illusion of the temporal, of mortality and death.

We will stop doing it when three steps have been taken in the orderly Sequence of Logic:

  1. One individual Child projection-replication freely chooses self-awareness and rejects self-delusion.
  2. The dreaming Child regains self-awareness through its mind’s connection with the self-aware dreamed individual’s changed mind, freely choosing to reject self-delusion. Thus will the dream end – our senseless world of bodies, spacetime, and matter and who knows how many other universes.
  3. The Child’s return to self-awareness – to Psyche-Soul Innocence and qualification for re-entry to Reality-Creation – is recognized by its Parents-Consciousness.

What we the Child are really asked to do: Grow up

The Child restored to Reality-Creation, having experienced unconsciousness and its dream of unreality-untruth, is now aware of impossibilities-opposites as well as possibilities. Is now familiar with the database of Choice to be navigated by the Child’s unique Gift, its role in Creativity, Free Choice, in the Creation, sharing, affirmation, empowerment, and Reciprocation of Worth, the Purpose and Meaning of the Life and Love of Creation.

Thus will the real purpose of the unconscious Child’s dream and its correction have been served. Its maturation toward the competence it needs to do its job in Creation. What Logic’s Explanation and Metaphysics really ask of us: to grow up.

Published on Leave a comment on The Abdication of Parenting: When Parent Doesn’t Receive Grandparent

How do grandparents want to be received?

It’s likely that children will turn their parents into grandparents one day. Likely that their children’s grandparents will be eager to do their part to help their grandchildren get off to a good start. Eager to form a bond with their grandchildren that brings the love, role modeling, and support into their lives that only grandparents can bring: gentle loving kindness with patience, humor, and wisdom that only experience can bring.

How will the new grandparents want to be received by their grandchildren’s parents? With warmth and respect for their place in their children’s extended families. With awareness of the promise of grandparenting as well as its limitations. With patience and good humor while the grandparents adjust to family dynamics – personalities, psychologies, philosophies, relationships, conflicting motivations, and irrationalities that give each family its unique character. That make it either an incubator of creativity, an island of stability for children, a nuthouse, or a horror show.

The attention that children need

But, above all, the new grandparents will want to be received with sensitivity to their children’s response to grandparenting, so that the attention their children may want, the relationship that provides them with the love, role modeling and support they may welcome and need from their grandparents, can develop in peace. In an atmosphere of gentle loving kindness, uncomplicated by adult rivalry and friction. By distractions that interfere with learning and growth nurtured by innocence, trust, and playfulness.

How will the new grandparents want to be received? As three-dimensional human beings possessed of character and values, free will and judgment, that can be trusted to fit in without compromising their own integrity or the integrity of their grandchildren’s family. To respect and support parental roles and responsibilities while keeping them separate from their own. To enrich their grandchildren’s lives with all their gifts – unique perspectives, talents, independent judgment, and experience as well as time and attention – without imposition or expectation. To be heard when conditions obligate them to speak up, by responsible parents obligated to listen.

The opportunity to be there for family

How will the new grandparents want to be received? As sympathetic partners in shared purpose: the raising and nurturing of precious new lives. As friends who can be trusted to be and do whatever the situation calls for: to be there when the coast is clear or to respect distance when it isn’t. To move forward in harmony when minds and hearts are one or to pause to reflect when they aren’t. To promote understanding with honesty and integrity that works for the benefit of the grandchildren. And to stop transgressions that put grandchildren at risk.

Parents who receive the new grandparents as they want to be practice a wisdom and a gentle loving kindness of their own. They’re seeing the connection between the reception they give grandparents today and the reception their children and their spouses will give them another day. A contribution to their wellbeing that could make the difference between lives blessed with possibilities or drained of meaning. The possibility of experiencing the intimacy, playfulness, vulnerability, and trust that is the love of a grandchild. The opportunity to be there for precious human beings – for family. Parents who receive grandparents as they want to be are being kind to themselves as well as to others.

The parents who need correction

Parents who don’t do so aren’t seeing the connection. They fall victim to a lapse of thinking, of understanding. To the short-sightedness of immaturity characteristic of children who can only take in circumstances in the moment. Who lack a wider vision that takes in concerns and consequences beyond their immediate environment. Whose definition of what matters is limited to the here and now.

Parents jealous of authority that can’t tolerate the benign presence of a grandparent reveal a more profound incapacity: intolerance of other perspectives, critical feedback that doing their job depends on. Infantile self-absorption, a sure sign of arrested development. Obsessive fear of criticism invites criticism. Parents whose immaturity and irresponsibility deny grandparenting need educating, training, and discipline. They don’t need tact and diplomacy, superficial pleasantries that mask the reality that lies behind appearances. They need correction, the same as children who haven’t learned how to behave.

Because that’s what they are: grownup children who misbehave. The more recalcitrant they are, the more resistant to correction they are, the more they require it. With no-nonsense honesty, because the more they insist on protecting their “authority” the less protection they’re affording their children. Role modeling self-absorbed immaturity isn’t “parenting.” It’s the abdication of parenting.

Published on Leave a comment on The “Realist”

Hidden from Reality

The mind of the “realist” entertains us with the appearance of intellectual honesty and analytical brilliance in every way but one: the reality and truth of Logic. With adamance that borders on hysteria, it refuses to follow the path of thinking:

  • that it doesn’t own, possess, and control
  • that necessarily begins with things as they are rather than with things as the realist imagines or wants them to be
  • that is subject to laws of cause and effect, to the authority and discipline of Necessity, that no will can contradict, not even the will of Logos, of God, whose governance is under, not above, the law
  • that doesn’t imagine all of Creation to be a game, a contest between isolated-separated opposites, conflicting self-interests with but one object: to “win.” An object with zero tolerance for rules that the realist can’t write to suit itself. Which means zero tolerance for Logic that can’t be “rigged,” can’t be unfair
  • that won’t yield to the “realist’s” obsession with supremacy, the myth of an unquestioned, absolute authority whose rule is above the law, a fantasy of “liberty” that knows no limits in its unhinged pretense of divinity, its blind quest to replace Necessity, to be “god.”

The ”realist” who hides its intentions behind facades of reasonableness, bland sociability, ever-smiling pleasantness, passive conformance, harmless agreeability, seductive humor and personal charm, can’t stand the light of Logic. To venture outside the darkness of Plato’s Cave ruled by illusion into the light of Truth shone by Logic. To venture into the domain of Reality and Creation governed with wisdom, compassion, and fairness by Logic. With inclusiveness that shares, affirms, empowers, and reciprocates Worth instead of exclusiveness that monopolizes it. Preserving its unquestioned “right,” the authority to indulge its “liberty” to have and do anything its specialness wants-- its infantile, separated, out-of-control willfulness.

To save us from Reality

This is the profile of the “realist” that lies beneath the surface. Behind appearances. That takes minds not trapped in make-believe to task for being exactly what it is: trapped in make-believe. For being “fooled” into questioning appearances that “realists” are allowed to detect with bodies, by the intuition of Mind that “realists” are forbidden to use. Intuition guided by Logic that would explain things as they really are, behind appearances that deceive, if “realists,” in their wounded righteousness, obsessed with winning and conquest, would only allow it. Logic whose understanding enables minds to perform as they must to exercise Free Will, the true path to Freedom instead of its grotesque caricature – the joke – of “liberty.”

Free Will, the capacity to choose freely enabled and empowered by judgment guided by reason and values. Guided by the giving of Creativity that opens minds to possibilities instead of the taking of unreasoning authority. Authority that closes minds to all but one consideration: its supremacy. Its demand for obedience, the “gift” of captivity, uncreativity, and impossibility. Captivity that offers the blessings of “liberty.” “Paradise” ruled by psychosis – detached from reality – that styles itself “realism.”

What would the idealist offer? Intellectual honesty. The Logic of who we really are: minds with thoughts and feelings that live. What does the “realist” offer? Intellectual dishonesty. The self-delusion of who we really aren’t: bodies and senses that die. Parasites clinging to their host, mistaken for “others.” Illusions who can “save” us from all the limits, the definitions and implications, of Logic. From Reality.

Who is the “realist” really? Our own shadow. Our opposite. Our captor. The Joker.

A joke.

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The Child must choose and earn what it cannot inherit

If Heaven-Creation is all about Worth then it’s logically-necessarily all about being chosen and earned. These are the attributes, the Definition, of Worth-Creation: that it must be freely chosen and earned to exist, to Be.

The Child’s travails in unreality are choosing and earning its functions that give it the capacity to Be-belong and Do-perform in Creation, functions that it could not inherit:

  • Oneness-Innocence of the kind-Definition that can only exist on the Child’s plane of Creation, with the possibility of shadow-opposites in an unconscious dream state. The Innocence of Oneness of the kind that can only exist on Parents’-Being plane is the impossibility of opposites by Definition.
  • Free Will of the kind-Definition that can only exist on the Child’s plane of Creation, the Doing-performing / choosing kind, with the possibility of shadow-code captivity in an unconscious dream state. The Free Will of the kind that can only exist on the Parents’-Being / Consciousness plane, the Being / Growing-birthing kind -- marriage of Father-Mind / Choice with Mother-Mind / Freedom – that is impossibility of captivity by Definition.

Humanity’s unreality – our world of bodies and spacetime-matter -- is a learning device, a stage that is a testing-proving ground. Since unreality is unreal this temporal “life” is a dress rehearsal without an audience, i.e. without Consciousness, for the Child’s performance in Reality with Consciousness, when the Child has corrected error and chosen-earned Free Will / performing and Innocence / Soul-Oneness Being.

All it takes is one individual

Unreality = trial and error. All of humanity’s ideologies-belief systems, all its established paradigms-religions of science, theology, philosophy, and psychology, based on the irrational faith-bias of circular reasoning rather than Logic, are trials that resulted in error, have failed and are failing. Failing not in spite of but because of dualism, i.e. flawed / circular self-referential “reasoning” that corrupts choice rather than undoing unreality-untruth. Ideology failures include top-down authoritarian, guilt / fear-based, biblical-orthodox “Christianity.”

The uncompromising non-dualism of A Course in Miracles (ACIM) is bottom-up Logic that aspires to change the mind of the One Child through the individual, the logical stand-in for all of Child’s mirror-image illusory replications. It is not an ideology targeted at illusory “humanity” as a group-species but at the Real One-Child through the Holy Spirit, the mind-Intuition, Logic-connection of the individual. For if the mind of one mirror-image replication of the One Child is corrected then they’re all corrected because there’s no “they,” no “others.”

ACIM teaches that if one individual truly forgave it would overturn the ego’s house of lies and replace illusion with Truth. So, Jesus isn’t organizing anything. He’s not interested in founding a church because he’s fishing for one individual.

Published on Leave a comment on Can the Brain Be the “Seat of Consciousness?”

The Joker’s perversion of the Child’s Parents Father-Mind married to Mother-Love in the Reality of Logic-Mind is the apparent separation-division of brain matter in the unreality of bodies into left-right hemispheres, sharing no common purpose other than survival, pulling in opposite directions:

  • Left hemisphere: mind-thought / logic-reason / order-definitions / judgment-choice / boundaries-discipline
  • Right hemisphere: love-feeling / values-gifts / creativity-freedom / judgment-Intuition / spontaneity-relationship.

The “separation” is a joke that would produce pure chaos internally and externally if it were real. What keeps the division from producing pure chaos isn’t the physiology of brain chemistry. It’s the fact that brain matter can never be the “seat of consciousness.” It can never be Mind or the substitute for Mind that the Joker promised to a self-deluded Child when the Child lost Consciousness. “Neuroscience’s” insistence otherwise is delusional -- a joke.

It’s the fact that the dreaming Child’s replications -- us -- don’t think with matter. They think with the Child’s unconscious-dreaming mind which, though compromised-corrupted, cannot be separated from Reality-Consciousness. Cannot be separated from Mind which unites with Love in the shared purpose of Order and Creation rather than splitting off into chaos and destruction. Which communicates and remains connected with Child-mind through the Child’s Memory-Intuition. Through its voice the Holy Spirit.

The idea that the Child’s unconscious mind that produced the dream, un-embodied and undetectable by body, suddenly went missing and was replaced by -- presto! --embodied brain matter-pulp, an appearance detectable by body, is magic. Mind-consciousness transformed into matter consciousness can only be an illusionist’s trick, a joke.  A particularly delicious twist of irony to be savored by a gourmand since it was mind unconscious that imagined matter, And now conscious mind is caught up in the illusion. A very Big Lie. Perpetrated on self-deluded minds that wouldn't know the difference. That could only be ruled by illogic -- the Joker.

Published on Leave a comment on Understanding Jesus and A Course in Miracles: Liberal Democracy’s Best Friend

ACIM is neither “religion” nor “New Age”

The explanation Jesus offered to help us with understanding came in two parts. The first was parables delivered orally in the flesh to any individuals willing to listen without committing anything to writing. His lessons were backed up by demonstrations that his incarnation in the flesh was not limited as his listeners were to the “laws” that define their “reality” of spacetime-matter. His miracles demonstrated that he clearly belonged to another dimension. The second part was writing delivered by disembodied Mind-Love through an embodied human scribe, again to any individuals willing to listen. Its purpose is to explain this other dimension and its practical relevance to the human experience.

In both cases, a few absorbed his gift with understanding while many more misunderstood. Part of my project in advancing his cause toward understanding must therefore include helping to correct misunderstanding of both Jesus and ACIM. I accept this responsibility. Minds paying attention to my task also have a responsibility. That is to suspend judgment about Jesus and his work so long as they choose not to reflect on it.

Reading ACIM is their choice. It’s none of my business. But it is my business to call out minds that weigh in on my project and the work of Jesus that inspires it without doing their homework. To familiarize themselves not with the layers of distortion that misunderstanding has covered Jesus with but with who he actually was – and is – and the explanation he actually offers. It’s there in black and white, written in the king’s English and translated into every conceivable language.

His explanation is not “religion.” The concept of “Christ” is front and center in ACIM because of its purpose and the Innocence it means, but with no reference to any of the usual trappings of organized religion – “Christian,” “Christianity,” and especially “Church,” the instrument not of “Christ’s” purity but its defilement. “Church” is anathema. ACIM is not compatible with orthodox biblical Christianity, the guilt- and fear-ridden, top-down authoritarian travesty perpetrated by the Church both Catholic and Protestant.

Jesus’ explanation is not “New Age.” New Age teaches dualistic metaphysics, the idea that the physical universe including the body was created by God. It teaches “prosperity consciousness” and emphasizes people’s positive experiences without acknowledging their unconscious feelings of guilt. It teaches that we are God. ACIM does none of this. ACIM draws upon traditional Freudian psychoanalytic principles, the Neoplatonic tradition, and themes common to early Christianity and the Gnostic systems of the second and third centuries. New Age does none of this. For these reasons ACIM is not categorized by the Library of Congress under “New Age.”*

ACIM is liberal democracy’s deepest philosophical root and its best friend

An honest and principled response to misunderstanding about Jesus and ACIM can’t be to disavow or disguise it for fear of yet more misunderstanding. It must be to include it in the explanation. Going against centuries of  conditioning by misinformation and misinterpretation may be “unrealistic,” but then so were Jesus’ miracles. Its title wasn’t given to Jesus’ book for no reason; it’s to be taken literally.

Were minds closed to understanding to open they would discover that not only are Jesus and ACIM compatible with bottom-up liberal democracy, their explanation is its deepest philosophical root. It is the clearest refutation of the lie that is authoritarian rule above the law that all of Logic, reason, passion, and goodwill can muster.

Jesus and ACIM aren’t an embarrassment, an anachronism, an awkward afterthought. They are in fact our best friend. A friend who doesn’t demand acceptance on faith. Who doesn’t demand anything. But who does offer understanding if minds freely choose to accept it. Not knuckling under to superior power. But acknowledging the only “authority” its explanation needs: its internal, intrinsic Logic.

What is the practical benefit?

If the cruel insensitivity of the Joker’s arbitrary above-the-law rule is constructed of a web of lies founded on the illogic-insanity of impossibility then the logical response is to undo its lies with the truth and the practical benefit will be release-Freedom from its cruelty.

*Source: Kenneth Wapnick, "Why A Course in Miracles is not New Age" (Letter to the Library of Congress 1990's, email received by the author from Foundation for A Course in Miracles, April 23, 2019)

 

Published on Leave a comment on Debunking the Five-Factor Personality Type Theory

The five factors

Asher Lawson and Kermant Kakkar reference the “widely-used” “five-factor psychological system for identifying personality traits” in the April 2022 issue of Scientific American [“Fake-News Sharers” p. 78]. Here are the five factors underlined (my interpretation added in brackets):

  • Openness to experience [i.e. involvement in external affairs vs. active pursuit of inner life / learning-growth through introspection, reflection-Intuition, contemplation; also vs. inaccessible mind stuck in unchanging status quo,]
  • Conscientiousness: orderliness, impulse control, conventionality, reliability [vs. social non-conformance but not relevant to individual Judgment without Feeling-Values / morality, order-fairness, discipline, accountability]
  • Extroversion
  • Agreeableness [vs. social unpleasantness but not relevant to individual Understanding, Honesty, sincerity. I.e. not relevant to individual recognition of / respect for Reality-Truth]
  • Neuroticism [Possible interpretation: wounded-crucified Psyche victimhood, hollowness-scarcity, unaccountability, specialness-taking , unfairness / wounding crucifying vs. sharing of Abundance, affirmation, empowerment, reciprocation, adaptability to changing contexts-circumstances, responsibility for improvement-progress, i.e. for changing-moving contexts forward.]

What’s wrong here?

The five-factor theory doesn’t allow for the crucial distinction between personality types in individual-intimate contexts-relationships vs. social-group contexts-relationships. Its categories overplay attributes associated with social types oriented to group activity-relationships in the external-material body-sensed environment and severely underplay attributes associated with individuals oriented to the Intuition-sensed inner life of mind and soul:

  • involvement in external experience without reference to involvement in internal experience
  • conscientiousness measured by social conventionality-reliability without reference to internal moral-values
  • extroversion / outward orientation without reference to introversion / inward orientation
  • agreeableness (pleasantness) without reference to alignment with Logic. Necessity, Reality or Truth that can be disagreeable (unpleasant).

By putting outward-oriented body-sensing attributes on the surface and muting inward-oriented mind-intuited attributes five-factor categories can be judged a clear attempt to invalidate the distinction. It can therefore be judged an attempt by the scientific community rabidly biased in favor of the philosophy of “realism” based on the presumed reality of bodies and material-sensed environment and against the philosophy of “idealism” based on reality of mind and soul.

If so, it stands in opposition to the philosophy of physics which is open to questioning “realism” based on the progress, or lack of progress, toward quantum gravity [ref: Adam Becker, “The Origins of Space and Time: Does Spacetime Emerge from a More Fundamental Reality?”, in Scientific American February 2022 pp. 28-33]. It also would stand in opposition to the philosophy of Plato which distinguishes between ideas-subjects within Mind and their material expressions-objects in the external world and, between the two, attributes reality to the former, not the latter. Except for Plato the person’s felt perception of divinity in the image of the cosmos, his philosophy, the foundation of Western thought, places reality firmly within Mind, not matter.

Myers-Briggs personality type theory and the rationality of Intuition

Myers-Briggs personality type theory, descended from Jungian psychology, is enriched by insights from Intuition that recognize the distinction between outward and inward orientations and project no evident bias between the two. Competition from the five factor theory would appear to be motivated by opposition-resistance to an “unscientific” approach that strays from quantifiables. By opposition to any theory, however rational, that challenges the supremacy (tyranny) of science’s sensory perception.

If so, science’s position is highly irrational because the scientific measurements of “quantifiables” cannot be up to the task of understanding the whole of human motivation. The very thought that it can is laughable. Who would disagree that human motivation incorporates the qualitative – minds, introspection, reflection, intuition, reasoning, subjective values-evaluating, judging, choosing – along with the quantitative – external objects, bodies and sensory perception? If science had its way personalities would be “measurable” chess-piece objects – automatons -- being maneuvered on a game board by binary search algorithms, not by minds, hearts, and souls thinking, feeling, and judging for themselves,. Not by sentient beings endowed with Psyches and Free Will.

Why debunk the five-factor personality type theory? Because it’s bunk.

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Published on 1 Comment on How Will the Universe End? What Will Become of Us?

What will go away?

When Mind as Child regains consciousness, energy can no longer be directed by its self-delusion, the Joker’s code of non-being, to make the Joker’s substitute reality real. The Child will have liberated itself from its self-delusion and captivity to the virus. It will no longer be under the Joker’s control. Instead, at the liberated Child’s direction, energy will then be withdrawn from spacetime-matter in the Child’s reversal of the act that produced it: its attempted projection of guilt. Versatile energy, with its capacity to serve as an agent of Mind in either state, Conscious-Reality or unconscious-unreality, with its capacity to convert energy into matter and to store energy in matter, will reverse its animation of the dream. It will reverse Its enablement and empowerment of the dream by withdrawing from it at the direction of the awakening Child. At the direction of Mind married to Love.

This is how the world of humanity-“life” and spacetime-matter – the universe or multiple universes -- ends: the end of an illogical, illusory dream upon the awakening of an unconscious, corrupted mind: the Child. Abruptly. Instantaneously. By the replacement of the Joker’s “laws” of chaos that make no sense by Laws of cause and effect that do make sense. The Laws by which Logic, or Logos-God, governs Reality-Creation.

The universe ends not by a long process of contraction into an inexplicable “singularity” that vanishes into a black hole indefinitely. Until it explodes into another Big Bang which recycles the illusion-dream rather than ending it. Nor by a long process of entropic expansion into a state of thermodynamic inertia, which would render perhaps one among many universes inactive or spent rather than ending it. Neither revival with a bang nor petering out with a whimper is ending. Spacetime-matter in some form will still be “here.”

Unless the universe ends by an unconscious mind awakening, which withdraws energy active or inert, the “laws” of physics cannot explain or predict whether or how it will end. The explanation for the withdrawal of energy cannot be physical alone. The “Copenhagen Interpretation” of quantum mechanics stated, over a century ago, that physics has taken experiment-based understanding of physical phenomena – the origin and fate of the universe -- as far as it can go. The search for quantum gravity today affirms that what lies beyond physics must involve philosophy. The explanation must be metaphysical. And, beyond that, it must be psychological and theological.

For the measurements of science never were enough. The explanation has always required evaluation and judgment by feeling as well as reason and judgment by thought. It has always required the qualitative as well as the quantitative, a dimension that is not now, and never has been, the province of physics. It has always required Understanding in all its dimensions: The Story of the Child, not an inorganic object composed of fragmentary particles but an organic subject possessed of all the attributes of Mind and Love, thought and feeling, reason and value. A whole Being.

What will replace it?

The Child’s reversal of guilt-projection and its consequence, the reversal of energy’s empowerment of the illusion-dream of spacetime-matter, must be accompanied by the replacement of the illusion-dream in the awakened Child’s Mind by what is not an illusion, not a dream. By Reality-Creation. By what is substance and True, not appearance and a lie.

The Child’s re-entry into Reality-Creation, into Innocence from unreality-guilt, is the responsibility of the Child’s Parents. It is the prerogative of Father Mind and Mother Love, who are Consciousness, Being, Life, and the Worth of Creation. It is the prerogative, finally, of their Source: Logos or God, who governs Reality-Creation through the Laws of cause and effect. Through Necessity. Through what Is and, therefore, must Be. Necessity – the “rule of law” -- that applies even to Logic, to Benevolence, that it may govern with wisdom, fairness, and Understanding from the bottom up and not arbitrarily, with the unfairness, misunderstanding, and cruelty of malevolence from the top down.

The Child will be re-admitted to its Home in Conscious Relationship with its Parents-Being:

  • when its Psyche, its inviolate Soul of Innocence that shares Being with all of Creation, is no longer violated by the illusion of guilt.
  • When the Consciousness of its Parents recognizes the Child-Innocence as theirs and therefore belonging in Creation.
  • When the Child is recognized and thereby certified by the Laws of cause-effect, by Necessity, as belonging in Reality.
  • When Logos-God, the final Authority that governs Everything, the Interconnectedness of Reality-Creation, then authorizes the resumption of the Child’s role, its function along with its Relationships, in Reality.

The end of the universe can only be explained by Logic

The end of spacetime-matter – the universe -- can only be explained by metaphysics through the rigorous application of Logic under the guidance of spontaneous insight from Intuition. Insight from Intuition that is neither controlled nor controlling. Whose sole purpose is explanation, that is, guidance that can be accepted, used, abused, or ignored, at the discretion of its recipient, the Child. The Child who has Free Will because it Is Free Will. The Child who was One before it became the many in the self-delusion of its unconscious dream. Before it became us.

Thus will the unreal dream of spacetime-matter end -- the strange, violent, chaotic, dangerous, unexplainable, and pointless “home” we call the universe. The worthlessness of the temporal. Thus will the role of an awakened Child in the Reality of Creation resume. In the Home of Beauty and Perfection, Life, Worth, and Eternity, where we the Child belong.

Published on Leave a comment on The Force and Necessity of Affect

Reflections to share with adolescents

Reflections to share with adolescents who may be wondering about affect: its role in relationships, in adolescents’ future, in mythology, and in all of Creation. How does it figure in the choice between what is Real and unreal, True and false, Good and evil? Why does it matter?

The usual poetic content is heavy with subjective thought and feeling. Grief and romantic Love are common types of feeling but there are others. Many are related to the values listed in my piece on adolescence [Thirteen: Reflections on Character and Values at the Beginning of Adolescence. 08/28/21]  T.R. Hummer’s non-rhyming poem, “My Mother in Bardo” (New Yorker 01/24/22 p. 50), is an example of a poem infused with grief. But if I’m assigned to compose a rhyming poem and I have no particular talent for lyrics, I might produce something lifeless, without affect.

Literature and poetry in particular say a lot about who we are and what’s important to us. For adolescents coming into their own it can be an effective way to gain self-awareness. If they feel a sense of loss, say, for a deceased grandparent, they might express it in a non-rhyming poem. It might be strikingly different from a poem whose search for originality, beauty, or other effect is through rhyme.

Before the Big Bang

Absence of affect in subjective, creative expression is a red flag. For an adolescent it might or might not have implications for character development, but, if so, they can run deep. Star Wars mythology is based on it. What turned Adam Skywalker toward the dark side and service to Palpatine, the galactic emperor? What made the galactic empire evil? Absence of affect.

Explaining Why requires theorizing with Logic about the antecedents of our material universe -- what I call “Reality-Creation.” It preceded the Big Bang, exists in parallel with our material universe, and heavily influences our behavior and its consequences beyond our awareness. It holds sway over the origin and fate of the universe and the meaning of life. Its context is Mind-Love, not spacetime-matter. I use initial caps to set terminology that is of this other Reality apart from the lower case of our un-reality.

The “Child” is the One we were in Reality before the Child lost Consciousness and became the many. While unconscious, it mis-identified with its shadow-reflection, went into a dream state corrupted by its shadow-code, dreamed our un-reality, replicated itself in isolated-separated human bodies, projected the material world detected by their bodies’ senses, and continues to replicate itself within its dream world under the influence of its shadow-reflection. An explanation for all this is the subject of my book-in-progress with the working title, The Story of the Child.

Affect is feeling -- emotional sensitivity. Feeling is value or Worth – things cared for. Gifts with talents the Child was given at birth with which to exercise Free Choice in Creation. Affect is rooted in Mother-Love, the source of all feeling in the Child’s phase of Reality-Creation.

The dis-integration of Love from Mind

The Child has Free Will or Free Choice because the Child is Free Choice, its role in Reality-Creation. In the Child’s phase with Free Choice, the loss of Consciousness produced a dream-world of un-reality where all ideas-thoughts and their associated feelings have opposites. Opposites are the reverse mirror-image shadow-reflection of the Child and all of its values, all of its gifts including its talents.

The code that defines all opposites is derived from the Child’s Being. The code is non-being. Which means it’s insane. Nuts. The appearance of a “system” which is the opposite of system. A system ruled not by laws but by chaos -- arbitrary rule where “rules” apply to everybody but the ruler. The reverse mirror-image of sanity, what we know as the “dark side.” Everyone and everything in our un-reality has a shadow-opposite. A dark side. No exceptions.

What makes the dark side “possible” in the dream state is the separation of Love-feeling from Mind-thought. The marriage between Father Mind / Logic-Choice and Mother Love / Freedom-Creativity not only produced the Child. It’s what holds all the Implications and Interconnections of Reality-Creation together. In our un-reality that integration is gone. Science’s search for a perfectly ordered, perfectly integrated cosmos ended over a century ago and now it’s even giving up on a cosmos that just makes sense. Because it doesn’t. Meanwhile, the judgment we need to manage human affairs, to maintain order in harmony, is equally dis-integrated. It needs to be constantly re-integrated, constantly pieced together, in all our choices.

The Reality-Creation of Consciousness knows nothing of shadows, reflections, or opposites. So, shadow-opposites played no part in the Child’s Conscious exercise of Free Choice in Reality. In un-reality it’s different. “Dark side” shadow-reflections very much represent a choice for us, the unconscious Child’s replications. The choice between Right and wrong, Good and evil, where good values-gifts are the product of Mind integrated with Love-affect and their evil shadow opposites are the product of Mind absent Love-affect. We choose correctly when we discipline our thoughts and feelings, our ideas and values, always to keep Love combined with Mind.

The pussycat “Lord Vader”

One of the traits that distinguish personality types is variation in levels of affect-feeling. In importance attributed to values because feeling is value rooted in Love, the Mother of everything cared for, everything of Worth. What distinguishes character is its values.

Adam Skywalker belonged to a personality type described in Isabel Myers’ Gifts Differing. He “went over to the dark side” because his type’s level of affect-feeling and therefore his character was relatively shallow. Absence of affect-feeling translates to a relatively shallow-weak connection with the Good-positive and therefore a relatively strong susceptibility to, or attraction for, the shadow-negative.

The choice posed by Good-positive – who we are in Reality -- and evil-negative – our shadow in un-reality -- pulls different personality types in different directions. The son Luke Skywalker’s character was relatively deep with feeling-affect, strongly anchored to values, and therefore less susceptible to the attraction of shadow-opposites. The character of Darth Vader – “Dark Father” – was relatively weak with feeling-affect, loosely anchored to values, and therefore more susceptible. Adam Skywalker, who became the mythic “Lord Vader” feared by trembling subordinates, was a personality weakling -- a pussycat. Captives of shadow-reflections can impress with the appearance of strength but their reality is weakness.

Lack of values rooted in affect-feeling translates to a weak or missing internal moral compass. To a weak sense of right vs. wrong -- a lack of conscience. To insensitivity and therefore to predilection for cruelty. What defines the galactic empire and its emperor Palatine as “evil” is an absence of affect-feeling. It’s defined by Mind-thought without Love-value and therefore as character without conscience: insensitive and prone to cruelty. It becomes a universe where harm is done and pain inflicted because it is not felt, because character and values don’t matter.

Guidance from Isabel Myers’ Gifts Differing

Isabel Myers’ Gifts Differing intuits clues from personality types to differences that can account for and predict relative attraction for the dark side. The ESFP type with relatively weak feeling-judgment is a type that, if it’s not disciplined by its social culture, can be misled into shadow-opposites and wrongdoing. It happens to be the type exhibited by the current idol of the Republican party, a body-matter idolater, serial wrong-doer, and a menace to democracy, civilization, and world order. But any type weak on affect-feeling and character-values is a candidate.

My piece about adolescence listed both positive values and their shadow-opposites – the dark side. What an interest in the opposites might indicate about an adolescent’s developing personality type we don’t know. We do know that an ‘S’ (sensing) in preference to an ‘I’ (intuition) would fit an engineer or craftsman working with material objects. Sensing would account, say, for a poem engineered rather than intuited. Intuited, that is, from psyche or soul, from thoughts-feelings stored in humanity’s collective Memory.

We also know that Gifts Differing can help predict choices that different types tend to make and therefore where on balance they may be headed: To promoting humanitarian kindness and freedom (the Jedi Knights) or engaging in inhumane cruelty and oppression (the galactic empire). Definitive conclusions can’t be drawn by outside observers. They can only be drawn by subjects themselves who monitor their personality types – the building of character through their preferences.

While Isabel distinguishes between the light and dark sides the distinction is indirect. It’s implied, for example by reference to “wrongdoing,” inadequate consideration of costs, shallowness, insincerity, and other tendencies. But otherwise her “feeling” doesn’t account for dark side opposites. The difference between thinking (T) and feeling (F) isn’t necessarily what she’s intuited. Nevertheless, the difference is significant and deserves reflection. All of the differences – between introvert-extravert, sensing-intuition, thinking-feeling, and judging-perceptive – are relevant for types’ tendencies toward positive values and their opposites and therefore toward their subjects’ ultimate ending in fulfillment or disappointment.

The turning point: adolescence

Adolescence is a critical phase in establishing these tendencies. It’s the phase when Luke Skywalker committed to the cause of the Jedi Knights after the loss of his foster parents. It’s the phase when his father, Adam, started to part with Obi-Wan, his Jedi trainer, betray the Jedi cause, and go over to the empire. For many, our personal fortunes literally hang in the balance when we are adolescents.

May Affect be with you!

Published on Leave a comment on How do we restore Consciousness and regain self-awareness?

Switch from focus on matter to focus on mind

First, by letting go of certainty that our material world of sensory perception is real. By going with the implications of what Adam Becker has posited, that it's illusory. Quantum gravity -- the goal that was beyond even Einstein -- has opened the door.

This is the real achievement, the real end-product, of centuries of physics studying matter: Eliminating certainty that bodies and sensory perception are the gold standard for establishing definitively what's real / "realistic" and what's not. Just as a physician would eliminate a diagnosis that doesn't fit the symptoms. Sticking with this one is increasingly uncool. It is wrong.

Addiction to sensory perception is the biggest barrier to restoring Consciousness. Physics / Becker is saying maybe the time has come to take it down. It could have come down long ago when Erwin Schrödinger acknowledged that science relying on sensory perception is circular self-referential reasoning -- matter citing itself. It's irrational -- not the best basis for a field that prides itself on objectivity and reliability.

Empirical measurements and experimental research have their place. But the door must open to Logic, where Parmenides and Plato began 2500 years ago. To insight from Intuition that connects minds to our collective Memory and Logic. To revelation that can only come from intuiting the story of Mind. The story of thought-reason and feeling-values. To the qualitative as well as the quantitative, to perception and judgment that include Worth.

Embrace the whole person with a systems approach

The quantum physicist Rovelli's Reality Is Not What It Seems calls for help from philosophy. Becker is not alone. Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolution says science should stay away from purpose. From supporting or "proving" any particular aspiration, philosophy, or ideology. Michael Stevens' The Knowledge Machine holds science to the same "iron rule" of detachment.

But meaning is impossible without engaging the total person, mind-feeling's entire story. Meaning-purpose is impossible without Understanding the whole context. Psychology and theology must be part of the mix along with philosophy and science. Regaining Consciousness requires a holistic, collaborative, systems approach.

Disengage from the wrong guide and choose the right Guide

Our world is a delusion whose source is an event from another Reality: The Child's mistaking its shadow-reflection for a savior that would substitute for its lost Parents, that would guide it to a substitute reality where it would be safe and could endlessly project its imagined guilt onto objectified-imagined "others." Where it could preserve its Innocence, thus ensuring endless conflict and misery. This is the psychopathology of the Child's error explained in A Course in Miracles (ACIM).

We do our part to restore Consciousness by correcting the error in all our choices. By not making unreality real, i.e. by not making our shadow-reflections real. By learning to recognize the Joker we've made of our shadow-reflections. By consciously withdrawing belief in its reality, by disengaging from it. By consciously undoing and invalidating all its appearances-deceptions / lies.

We do our part to restore Consciousness by learning to recognize the Guide that's been provided by Intuition-Memory to help with awakening. By consciously choosing the right Guide, seeking and following its Guidance in all our choices. By utilizing our talents and faculties of mind to build awareness through the exercise of Free Will: introspection, reflection-intuition, thinking-reasoning, feeling-evaluating, judging-choosing. By taking responsibility and holding ourselves accountable for our own learning and growth.

In the face of determined resistance: Never give up!

We restore Consciousness and regain self-awareness by taking issue with Hawking when he declared that "philosophy is dead." In an illusory world the goal is to get at reality, the purpose of philosophy. The goal is to get beyond appearances to the Truth beyond appearances: The purpose of metaphysics, the invention of Parmenides and his Eleatics School of Reason.

We do our part to restore Consciousness by supporting Philosophy and Metaphysics while we continue to support Science. The change of mind that's needed will meet determined resistance from many quarters. Mass extinctions from climate change may deny the attempt altogether. The unconscious Child may need to continue its saga on another planet in another universe.

There’s meaning embedded in the idea that begins the sequence of Logic: the idea of Possibility. The idea that lies at the heart of Creation. Perhaps a gift of Logos-God that’s meant to inspire our efforts now. It’s We will not be denied. It’s Never give up.

Published on Leave a comment on The Child-Host and Its Shadow-Reflection: the “Relationship” that Went Viral and Made the World

Overview: Is there any real reason why we need the answer?

If the measurements of science / quantum gravity, DNA genetics and molecular biology can't explain the origin and fate of the universe or the meaning of life without philosophy, psychology, and theology doing their part, and the dominant paradigms in every field of inquiry are still manifestly not getting it right, then there is "reason why we need the answer."

If the material universe, everything in it, and everything desirable and undesirable about humanity's and all life's experience of it traces back to an event or events in the state of immateriality or mind that preceded it; If it is but a mirror-image reverse -- a perversion -- of another Reality whose dynamics preceded it, caused it, and continue to influence it, then in the name of science's "quest for knowledge" and material "facts," in the name of philosophy's order and ethics, psychology's self-Worth and Understanding, religion's healing and "salvation," there is "reason why we need the answer."

Every error, every defect in what self-deluded minds experience in this illusory "life," even this "life" itself, traces back to the Child's archetypal mistake: the objectification of its own shadow, the projection of its self and its sovereignty onto its imagined "other," and its activation of its shadow-reflection's code or "thought system," a mirror-image reverse -- the opposite -- of all that is Real, True, and Good. All for the purpose of substituting another reality for the Reality that was lost with the loss of Consciousness. The illusion, everything about it and wrong with it, is a replication of this same mistake. The "reason why we need the answer" is (1) to stop the replication; (2) to restore Consciousness;  (3) to correct the mistake.

The main barrier to minds being guided to the answer is the misperception-misjudgment that they don't need to seek it. That even if they do they're not self-deluded; they don't misperceive and misjudge; the status quo is satisfactory; and therefore they don't need guidance. The main barrier is opposition and resistance from a mis-identified shadow-reflection -- an imagined "other." The "reason why we need the answer" is to regain self-awareness. To understand the Truth of who we are: the host, not our shadow-reflection.

Preface

Michael Strevens, in The Knowledge Machine (Liveright 2020), tells us that in their public truths scientists don't trouble their audience with other truths they may be harboring privately. Adam Becker's confession, in February's Scientific American, that quantum gravity is so baffling that physicists wonder if spacetime-matter is "somehow illusory," may be a truth that could no longer be kept private. Not if the profession is to retain any shred of honor or credibility.

Logic takes this astounding about-face from science and asks simple questions:

  • If our bodies and their physical surroundings -- the universe -- are "somehow illusory," what could cause the illusion?
  • If illusions can be caused by dreams, what mind is dreaming?
  • If unconscious minds produce dreams that are illusions, whose unconscious mind is dreaming this particular illusion?
  • What caused this mind to lose consciousness?
  • How did we come to "exist" inside an illusion being dreamed by a mind that's unconscious?
  • What is the story of this mind? Can it be told?
  • If we owe our "existence" to a mind's loss of consciousness -- a calamity on a scale equal to at least one universe and maybe many universes -- shouldn't we at least try to tell its story? Won't this help us fix what's broken? Shouldn't we try?

My metaphysical theorizing is an attempt to answer these questions. With Logic. My latest post was prompted by the scientist Adam Becker's astounding public confession. It offers insights from Logic into how and Why the Mind that produced our world lost consciousness. How and Why the illusion of spacetime-matter "happened" as a result.

The whole story is coming into focus, but it's still writing itself. Understanding may yet have a long way to go. It can't be pushed. It can't be hurried. It reveals itself at its own pace, in logical sequence, one implication, one insight, at a time.

Who is the “Child?”

The Story of the Child is about a character who existed in another Reality before the Big Bang and who exists in the same other Reality now. A character referred to in mainstream philosophical and religious mythology as the offspring of divine beings who willed our universe into existence and populated it with their offspring and its progeny. In this telling, the universe and its inhabitants are unreal, an illusion made by an unconscious-dreaming Child that could not have been Created by Logic-God or by its Parents Mind-Love.

In A Course in Miracles the Child is a he, and he is the Son of the Father. He collectively, in this world, is the “Sonship.” In my telling, it’s the Child, and “it” is both masculine and feminine, he and-or she. It collectively, in this world, is the Child’s “replications” – the many derived from the One. The Child was given birth by Father Mind and Mother Love because in my telling, following the implications of ACIM, the Child is Free Choice, and Free Choice requires that marriage between Mind-Choice and Love-Freedom be its Parents.

Opposite worlds: The Child and its shadow-reflection

The Story of the Child has not one but two dimensions: one Real and the other unreal. There is its own story, the story of its unreal shadow-reflection, and the relationship between the two. A relationship that developed in error. That should not have developed because “relationship” between what is Real and what is unreal – between contradictory, mutually exclusive “realities” – is illogical. “Relating” in this context is a logical impossibility. Because it was illogical, the “relationship” took the Story of the Child seriously off track, onto a siding where it goes round and round, nowhere. Where all that’s wrong and painful, frustrating and calamitous with our world, has settled in, waiting for the Story of the Child to get back on track.

Alternating between two “realities” with the same terminology throws Understanding off track. Terms given initial caps, like “Reality,” refer to the Reality of Mind that preceded the Big Bang and parallels our material universe. The same terms without initial caps, or in quotes, relate to the Child’s state of unconsciousness and all things imagined by it. This includes the unreality of the material universe, bodies and sensory perception, all organic “life” and inorganic matter. In short, everything illusory.

Two mutually exclusive planes of Creation

The Child is profoundly unhappy. It’s not satisfied with the substitute reality its delusion has produced – the delusion that its reflection is an “other” endowed with its own capacities, capable of saving it from the situation its loss of Consciousness put it in. It wants to return to Consciousness, to go Home, reconnect with its Parents, Father Mind and Mother Love, in its Sanctuary of Creation. It yearns to get back to work. It wants to reclaim its powers of thought and feeling, its Free Will, its sovereignty. To bring itself back to Reality and Truth, to Logic, with the Guidance of the Holy Spirit. To be Loved, useful, and happy again.

It doesn’t want “saved” or “saviors” who compromise Free Will. It’s dependent on the Holy Spirit for Guidance, but the Holy Spirit and all of Creation are dependent on the Child for Free Choice. For without Free Choice, the Creation, Affirmation, and Reciprocation of Worth is impossible. So critical is Free Choice that it must occupy its own plane in Reality-Creation where the Consciousness of the Child’s Parents cannot be present.

Conversely, Child / Free Choice cannot logically occupy the same plane of Creation as the Parents. They are connected but their functions must logically be mutually exclusive. The Child’s Consciousness is not defined by the same attributes as the Parents’ Consciousness, and their Free Spirit is not defined by the same attributes as the Child’s Free Choice. Explaining all of this, and more, through The Story of the Child, is meant to expand Understanding and shorten the time to awakening.

The decline and fall of sensory perception

The self-delusion that converted the Child’s shadow-reflection from a dormant code, the mirror-image opposite of the Child’s Being, into the illusion of a self-motivating “other” capable of making its unreality real, is composed of attributes that block the Child and its replications – humanity – from awareness of the Truth that lies behind our material world’s appearances. The main barrier is the assumption that bodies are real and anything detected by bodies’ senses must also be real – the paradigm that today dominates mainstream science, philosophy, psychology, and theology.

Its domination shows signs of being weakened, however, by the findings of experimental and theoretical physics. Adam Becker, the physicist-historian of quantum gravity and author of What Is Real? (Basic Books 2018) has authored the lead article in the February issue of Scientific American (pp. 28-33). Entitled “The Origins of Space and Time: Does Spacetime Emerge from a More Fundamental Reality?”, the article reviews progress toward quantum gravity and concludes with “a question of whether time and space are somehow illusory.” A question raised by an ancient Greek philosopher, Parmenides, 2500 years ago, “an unsettling prospect that has haunted Western philosophy for over two millennia.”

Unsettling, I would add, because science is being forced by its own logic to consider, for the first time, another Reality. The Reality of Understanding that doesn’t depend on the circular, self-referential “reasoning”’ and subjectivity of bodies and sensory perception. That depends instead on Logic – the Order of Mind instead of the chaos of matter. The objectivity of another perspective not of this world, the perspective that led Parmenides to conclude that Mind is Real and matter is not.

Body-centered or Mind-centered: which shall it be?

Parmenides, relying not on experimental physics which had not been invented but on Logic, reasoned that time and space are illusory. The theory and practice of metaphysics, which he invented, influenced Plato, whose mind-centered idealistic philosophy helped to define Western thought. Under the influence of his pupil, the biologist Aristotle, its orientation shifted toward body-matter centered “realism,” and thus did science start.

Then, centuries later, a unique breed of metaphysicist-practitioner appeared. Jesus upended all speculation with astounding departures from familiar “reality” -- miracles that flouted the “laws” of physics. His message of Love, Innocence, and Forgiveness flouted the norms of relationships to equal astonishment. He was a tour-de-force of Logic, a simple itinerant teacher with no connection to officialdom, his only “authority” the power of what he taught, felt, and expressed. The power of Connection through gentle loving kindness. It was, all told, an electrifying, mind-bending introduction to the possibility of another Reality. An upheaval meant to part minds from this “reality.”

But while a few were convinced, like Valentinus, the second-century Gnostic Christian teacher, that material reality is unreality -- an illusion, – the body-matter centered paradigm soon reasserted itself. It did so not under the influence of philosophy but under the dominance of organized religion. The Church, claiming legitimacy from Jesus that Jesus could not have intended, obliterated all opposition as “heresy” and the true intent and legacy of Jesus along with it. Mainstream philosophy flirted with Parmenides from time to time – Bishop Berkeley, for example, -- but it was rare.

The world, for now, remained unchanged. For what are mainstream science, philosophy, psychology, and theology, after all, but waystations of trial and mostly error in the time it will take for the Child and its replications to attain maturity? Accidents and mistakes in the evolution of organic and inorganic matter that Sean B. Carroll chronicles in A Series of Fortunate Events (Princeton 2020).

The self-delusion of an imagined “other” and the train wreck of evil

A Course in Miracles could be the explanation, the book Jesus couldn’t write two thousand years ago, because his audience wasn’t ready. Channeled last century, it explains the psychopathology of the Child’s interaction with its shadow-reflection that produced the illusion: a self-delusion that set an unconscious Child to dreaming a world of spacetime and matter. The dream replicated in our own self-delusions with our own shadow-reflections.

What, then, is “good?” The host. That is, the Child who hosts a shadow-reflection that is its mirror image opposite, a lifeless, mindless, loveless code that, when it’s mistaken for an imagined “other,” behaves as one would expect the opposite of Being to behave: like a virus. Not interested in Life or Freedom but only in taking its host’s mind captive and replicating itself.

What, then, is “evil?” The host’s shadow-reflection mistakenly “recognized” as an imagined other. That is, a part of the subject host that’s been objectified into an imagined other that the host then tries, through projection, to enable and empower with its own capacities – an impossibility. For the only “capacities” a shadow-reflection can activate, that’s only a coded opposite, is its own viral code.

The final step in the self-delusion that gives it – and the imagined “other” – its misperceived capacity to torment the Child and its replications – humanity, the “many” – is the captivity of the Child’s mind and self-identity by the code. That is, by the Child now imagining that it is its reflection. By the Child and its replications – us – no longer distinguishing between captor and captive. In extreme cases this means the disappearance of the self into the imagined “other.”

The dog is being wagged by its own tail

To encounter an individual in this condition would then be to encounter an individual unaware that they have become their own shadow-code, that they are, therefore, evil incarnate. Such appears to be the case with the current leaders of the Republican party and Russia, two demented autocrats who have been taken captive by their shadow-reflections and seem to have lost all awareness of themselves, their shadows’ host.

The pattern in all of humanity’s train wrecks originates with a host’s delusion that its shadow-reflection is a separate, autonomous “other.” A dog deluded into imagining that its tail is another dog, being wagged by its own tail. This is how humanity goes about managing its affairs, and we see the results: train wrecks all the way from individual relationships to relations among nations, ethnic groups and races on a global scale. Replicating the Child’s archetypal mistake, never getting it right. A pattern that will continue unabated until we do get it right. Until we apply Logic to an Understanding of our context, to an Understanding of the mistake and correct it.

How and Why did this happen?

Why was the Child not forewarned of the misperception and misjudgment to come when it was given birth in Reality? Why did not its Parents simply reach into the illusion, restore Consciousness, and rescue it? How could Logic – Logos, God -- have failed to design Creation with a failsafe process and structure? Why do the Child and its  replications, though illusory, nevertheless experience suffering that’s real?

The long answer requires The Story of the Child and its subtext, the story of its shadow-reflection, the Joker. The short answer is Reality-Creation is not one but two distinct parts, and, though connected, they are mutually exclusive. The idea-premise that “launched” the sequence of Logic at the “beginning” – in quotes because Logic and its sequence are Being by definition, their own definition as they are their own Source, and none of this can have a “beginning” – was something on the order of the Word, which roughly translates to Possibility. The Consciousness of the Child’s Parents-Being that gave birth to the Child “Knows” or recognizes only Reality. For this is its function, to bring Reality into existence by Knowing it, i.e. being Conscious of it, and at this phase of Creation only Consciousness and one Reality are logically possible.

The phase of Creation marked by the birth of the Child, who is Free Choice, had a very different beginning. It wasn’t launched by an idea-premise that expressed itself in Consciousness with the capacity – the ability and Force – to move Reality and Creation toward Being by defining and recognizing it, by designing its process and structure.  It was launched by another kind of Consciousness with another function: the capacity to Choose. That is, by the capacity to reason, evaluate, and judge among different choices.

It was launched not by Possibility alone, which poses no choice in Reality, but by Choice between Possibility and its opposite, impossibility -- between Reality and unreality. The attribute of the Child’s Consciousness that requires its own plane of Creation, that cannot blend with its Parents’ Consciousness on their plane of Creation, is the possibility that, with Free Choice, the Child will choose illogically, incorrectly. That the Child will thereby lose Consciousness. And once Consciousness is lost, unconsciousness will be overtaken by illusion and make unreality – the dream of an alternate reality -- real. 

Mind with Free Choice that can lose Consciousness, dream an alternate reality, and thereby make (not create) unreality “real,” performs an essential role in Creation – in Creating, affirming and reciprocating Worth. But it doesn’t belong on its Parents’ plane of Creation. The Consciousness of Parents-Being, that establishes what belongs in Logic-Reality, i.e. Possibility, Existence, Truth, doesn’t belong on the Child’s plane of Creation where only one Consciousness can function and it must allow for Choice between Possibility and impossibility, Reality and unreality, i.e. between the consequences of Consciousness and unconsciousness.

Why was the Child not forewarned?

Why was the Child not forewarned of the misperception and misjudgment to come when it was given birth in Reality? Because its Parents Knew nothing of the risk of unconsciousness and its consequences and could not Know, by definition. Because in Logic there must always be sequence: what precedes and what succeeds – before and after. In Creation and evolution what is Known is before, what is unknown is after. Even if the Child’s Parents could have Known of the risk they could not have Known of the event itself in advance. In the end, they did not Know because they could not know.

Why wasn’t the Child rescued by its Parents?

Why did not the Child’s Parents simply reach into the illusion, restore Consciousness, and rescue it? Because to do so they would have had to “Know’ the illusion and thereby make it Real. Because to do so they would not only have disabled their Child’s Free Will, they would have willed their Child out of existence. Why? Because their Child is Free Will. Is Free Choice. It’s who their Child is. Because they, its Parents, are Father Mind-Choice and Mother Love-Freedom, incapable of giving birth to any other Child.

How could Logic have failed to design failsafe Creation?

How could Logic – Logos, God -- have failed to design Creation with a failsafe process and structure? Because it is in the very nature – the Logic – of Creation that it advances into the unknown. Logic, the Free Spirit of Mind-Inquiry and Love-Creativity, governs and protects from the bottom up, from circumstances that are constantly changing and evolving from one context to another. Logic, the definition of Everything, is constantly defining and redefining Reality in response to Creation. Logic, subject itself to the laws of cause and effect, to Necessity, evolves. Evolves in alignment with Creation that advances by experience. By experiment. And because the Creation of Worth must advance by Free Choice, it must advance by trial and error.

The possibility of error is built into the Logic of Creation. Logic, which cannot rule arbitrarily and still Be what it Is, cannot rewrite the rules to guarantee success. Cannot design Creation to be what it is not. Cannot design the process and structure of Creation – the functions of Mind and the planes where they operate – to be failsafe. Logic cannot design Free Choice to be what it is not: always the right choice, always the logical choice. Logic and the Child’s Parents cannot control the Child and its choices, for to do so would deprive it of Free Will and sabotage Creation’s purpose: the Creation, affirmation, and reciprocation of Worth. They must allow the Child to choose freely and to learn from experience, to expand its Consciousness, to acquire Knowledge – to grow and mature -- from trial and error. With their guidance but never their control.

Why is our suffering unreal yet experienced as real?

Why do the Child and its replications, though illusory, nevertheless experience suffering that’s real? Because while the switch from Consciousness into unconsciousness is a switch into illusion, the switch itself is Real. It happened. Made Real by the Child’s identity and capacity for Free Choice. While separation is not real and the Child remains connected to its Parents and Reality, its awareness of the connection has been lost. The cause of the apparent separation is illusory but, with the loss of the Child’s awareness, its effect seems real. Has been made real by the dream of unreality. It is therefore experienced as real. We in our world of illusion, dreaming of unreality and untruth, experience the alternate reality “promised” by our reflection, our imaginary “other,” as very real. We suffer.

The Real “Good News:” the freedom to choose again

The bad news is that the Child has mistakenly and inadvertently chosen to suffer in unreality. It did so in circumstances explained by A Course in Miracles and elaborated by The Story of the Child, that disposed it to mistake its reflection for an “other.” To imagine that the “other” was a substitute parent, an external “savior” who would save it from its trauma and restore Order. It was a colossal misjudgment that produced the absurdity of the Big Bang, a universe of organic and inorganic matter whose origins and meaning the “laws” of science have not explained and can never explain.

The good news is that the Child can choose again. And we, by empathizing with the Child instead of prolonging its agony, by Understanding our situation, by choosing to align with Logic instead of foolishness, can help it Choose correctly. To choose Peace, Truth, and Sanity. To rid us of our nightmare of conflict, deception, and insanity. To awaken and return Home.

Published on Leave a comment on JWST

A million times zero still equals zero

People enchanted with the razzmatazz of physics aren’t paying attention to what it’s already “discovered.” Nils Bohr, over a century ago, acknowledged that physics has reached the end of its ability to explain our “reality.” No more experiments can take it farther. Adam Becker, in the February issue of Scientific American, goes one step farther: philosophy is needed to explain physics that may be telling us that its subject, time and space, may be “somehow illusory.”

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can’t tell us anything that Logic hasn’t already figured out. The Logic of Parmenides, the classic Greek founder of metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that takes thought behind appearances to get at Reality. The philosopher cited by Becker who concluded that reality isn’t what it appears, “an unsettling prospect,” in Becker’s words, “that has haunted Western philosophy for over two millennia.”

The logic of the ‘metaverse” is obvious. But JWST can’t “prove” the existence of other universes when physics – when all of science, philosophy, psychology, and theology – insists on proof by sensory perception. Can’t be done. It doesn’t mean that we won’t “learn” something “new” and “interesting’ from JWST. It just means that what we “learn” will further entertain minds conditioned to ignore the logical implications of what they’ve learned: that if one universe manifests the illogic of unexplainable appearances more universes can only do the same. A million times zero still equals zero.

When will minds deluded by body senses get it through their heads: there’s no ”there” out there. It’s not what I’m saying. It’s what physics is saying.

From re-enactment to re-engineering

What is “life” on earth, within the dream, from the point of view of the shadow code / Joker, the mimic copycat parasite? Re-enactment of the Child’s Life-Being in Reality but just the appearance of it shot through with contradictions, disorder, conflict, and temporary situations.

What is “death” on earth? Re-enactment of loss of Consciousness. What is “body”? A device for the ego-Joker’s imitation of Child-Being’s function in Reality, only with everything fragmented, separated, broken, imperfect and temporary, interrupted by re-enactment of the loss of Consciousness.

What is “choice” on earth? Re-enactment of Child-mind’s being taken captive by self-delusion that it’s shadow-reflection is a separate object with attributes of parental intent to “care” for its Child and “guide” the Child’s behavior in all contexts-conditions faithfully. Re-enactment of Child-mind being duped by lies that originate within itself, its shadow non-being, a lifeless, mindless, loveless viral code.

What is “life” on earth? Re-enactment of these events – the Child’s loss of Consciousness and self-delusion that its own shadow-reflection is another self, a parental substitute whose “guidance” can be trusted – until the Child realizes that it can re-engineer these events with different outcomes.

Nothing is possible without regaining awareness

I choose not to be deceived and manipulated by anyone’s delusion. Not your shadow, not my own, not the shadow-reflection of the Child, the illusory archetypal Joker. But I do want to be used. Used by a guide that can be trusted because it doesn’t come from an imagined “other.” In Reality where separation is a logical impossibility there are no ”others,” just one Child-Self, its Parents Mind-Love, their Relationship, and Everything enabled and empowered by the benevolent governance of Logic. By the Logic of limitless Possibility.

I choose not to delude myself into the service of impossibility. I choose instead to be lead into a better cause: helping the Child and its replications – us – realize it can re-engineer the events it’s re-enacting with different outcomes. Regaining Consciousness – awareness of who we are and what we’re supposed to be about – is the central issue, the central task of humanity. The central motif of the Story of the Child and the story of the Joker, its self-delusion. Nothing including regaining Innocence is possible without awareness.

Awareness of the Joker shadow-code’s lies, the self-delusion, is an essential first step. Then we must un-do the lies, re-condition humanity to respond to the Reality-Truth that lies behind life’s appearances. The Reality-Truth that the body-sensed environment is an illusion just as physics now suspects. Just as it may have concluded over a century ago with the bizarre discoveries of quantum mechanics but was too frightened or embarrassed, confused or self-serving, to acknowledge.

What’s really new and interesting isn’t JWST

Sure, JWST is a fun return to the pizzazz of physics, back to the heady days of general relativity and Einstein’s celebrity when there was every expectation that science would explain everything. Just what Einstein set out to do at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, only he failed. And quantum gravity today isn’t going to succeed where he failed.

This is the ultimate meaning of Adam Becker’s piece in Scientific American. This is what’s really “new” and “interesting:” not more Hadron Colliders and ingenious telescopes that continue barking up the wrong tree in science’s vaunted “quest for knowledge.” But the realization, finally, that no matter how fine a point science makes of matter, matter doesn’t hold the answers we’re looking for. The answers are in Mind. Mind that’s given up its delusion. That’s ready to listen to Logic. 

Parmenides was right. Plato who was influenced by Parmenides nearly got it right. Valentinus was right.  Bishop Berkeley was right. The miracles of Jesus and his book, A Course in Miracles, got it right.

But, yeah, let’s take a ride on JWST and entertain ourselves a little bit more. Revive the old delusion that science, the study of matter, is going to explain everything. That space travel, dark matter and black holes, colonizing other planets -- the stuff of space-struck adolescence – can endlessly distract us. See if having doubles in other universes adds meaning to our lives and somehow makes things better.

It’s a joke, right? You’re kidding me.

Published on Leave a comment on The View from Exeter: 0-59

My brother, Eric, captained Exeter’s JV football squad that beat Andover the same year, 1952, that our varsity crushed them 59-0. As they watched the varsity game from the bench, he said Exeter’s subs were awestruck by how quick our guys were off the ball, how hard they hit, how well they executed. When he carried water during a timeout, he observed the Red and Gray’s secondary anxiously comparing notes as though they feared the next play would be their last.

In his pep talk to his team the following year, Exeter’s coach recalled their humiliation in ’52 and wept. This time, they regained their pride and only lost 14-7. In that game, my brother was on the field at center and outside linebacker. One of our guys took him out with a block that broke a bone and that was it.

But what burned itself into his memory from the play wasn’t the injury. It was our talented halfback, Hort Smith, coming at him on an end-around sweep. An irresistible force about to meet an immovable object -- Eric was invited to training camp by the Baltimore Colts when he played college ball. As he went down, he saw a look of iron-willed ferocity in Smith’s eyes. He knew then that he was about to meet his Maker.

We couldn’t see it up in the stands but my brother could. Testament to what it was like on the field to be playing us. Testament to the football team that we were then: a force that would not be denied. Cheer up, Exeter. The worst is yet to come!

Published on Leave a comment on Duty in Time of War

In a world perpetually at war
we do our duty
standing clear or standing up
to the onslaught

Pacifists and soldiers doing our duty
In our own way
caught up in forces of our own making
larger than ourselves

But not beyond our duty
to unmake the forces of our own making

To Understand
to strive for context in the moment
the Memory of purpose and meaning
to answer the Call for Love

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Published on 1 Comment on A Call for Love

Grandeur beyond what we’ve contrived 

The force of human nature, driven by fear and guilt, insists on owning, possessing and controlling everything on earth that isn’t nailed down. Here in Southern California, I often join with others who materialize at dusk to witness something different: the sun setting over the Pacific. Finally, something of value that can’t be nailed down! That human nature, yearning to complete itself, yearning for Love, can’t own, possess or control.

We can only watch grandeur beyond what we’ve contrived pass out of sight into fading belief. An elusive hint of what is ours if only we knew how to hold it. To welcome it, cradle and appreciate it, without getting in the way of it. Is it possible? We hear the Call for Love, and every day we’re drawn to the last of its light. Left to wonder: What does it mean? What have we lost? Where has it gone?

The use our senses were meant for

Any time we’re moved by sentiment
that wells up from a work of art, like a thing seen
heard or apprehended, a sight, sound, or thought
that moves us 

Anytime we’re transported by feeling
from where we thought we were to somewhere else
that belongs to another moment
that gently, imperceptibly replaces alone with not alone 

Anytime we feel haunted by Beauty
overcome by the force of its call, captured by a joyous
familiarity we once knew and lost 

We hear a Call for Love.
A thing that’s always with us but beyond reach
A thing sensed but from a great distance
Experienced but not in the Here and never in the Now. 

As though all of our senses are put to the use
they were meant for without making a mark
or leaving a trace. A thing unknowable and undetectable.
Yet better known and recognized than anything
we’ve ever known or recognized before 

Essence so pure, so complete and perfect
in its definition that we’re sure of it,
until we reach out for the Who of it and it’s gone.
The what, where, when, Why, and how of it 

Slipped away.
The setting Sun we can’t summon back that,
God willing, will come back another day.

Published on Leave a comment on The Belch

During one of his stemwinding Sunday sermons, the Reverend A. Graham Baldwin paused for dramatic effect. It was at this precise moment that a slack-jawed day-dreaming student in the pew in front of me let loose with a belch, so deafening it could be heard from the fitting room at Elander & Swanton. The poor guy followed this up with a startled “Oh, I’m sorry!” so loud it would have bounced off the carillon at the far end of the campus.

The guy seated to his left, Peter Herrick (’56), wanted to laugh in the worst way. But of course this would have further distracted the Reverend’s rapt audience and gotten him a demerit. So, as I watched from directly behind, his neck swelled to a reddish purple like a magma chamber in a volcano while he valiantly suppressed it.

And that was it. The service and the sermon continued without further incident. Nobody got a demerit. We all continued on our way; our grasp of religious profundities forever punctuated by a resounding belch. And I got to share the memory of it with day-dreaming classmates who probably never noticed.

Published on Leave a comment on The Place in Our Hearts

Paul Desmond riffing on his alto saxophone. For All We Know.

Reflections on a stream that come and go with the intricacies of improvisation.
That can’t help but be what they are --  us in reverse.

That we never get to see as we are.
Never get to know as we are.
Haunted by beauty.
Drawn by scent and touch imagined.
By the taste of Memory heard and gone.
A here and now, place and time, that can never be.

Yet the Now that you will always be to me.

Shorty Baker riffing on his trumpet. I Didn’t Know What Time It Was.

A call for love from time out of time.
And I didn’t know.

Notes gently trailing a caress across the whorl of preoccupation
Lifting me out of cold blankness into the warmth of acceptance.
By the vulnerability of subject in a room full of objects.
Cause beyond effect that needs no intoxicant, no commotion
To excuse the brashness of its intrusion.

I’m not done with it.
Can never be done with it, your call for Love.

Alyosha bidding Dostoevsky’s farewell. The Brothers Karamazov.

“There is nothing more wholesome and good
Than sacred memory preserved from childhood.
Let us be kind, then honest

And then let us never forget each other.

“You are all dear to me.
From this day forth I have a place in my heart for you all,
And I beg you to keep a place in your hearts for me.”

Published on Leave a comment on Prayer, the Love We Carry Within

Prayer from within that animates relationship
touched by Love
that flourishes in minds and hearts untouched by distraction without --
the Love we carry within.

Knows only this –
the light and the warmth of the sun
the sounds of innocents at play in the forest
the interplay of color in shades of beauty
the fragrance of happiness, freshness of the Now
fulfillment and peace in ecstasy.

The barrier without was always there
the separation that made it
and would seem to divide us, the difference now
its darkness has been brought to the light.

We pass through without judgment
as it passes through
unremarked and unlamented
for it is a thing of no real consequence.

In due time, in the light of Understanding
it will be gone.

And we will be here
as we were and always will be
at one with one another
at one with prayer, the Love we carry within.

Published on Leave a comment on The Most Important Choice We Will Ever Make

Objectifying the “dark side”

A 13-year-old boy found my essay Thirteen: Reflections on Character and Values at the Beginning of Adolescence useful in part for its appendix. Entitled “Values Derived from Human Needs,” the appendix gave words to describe both the light and dark sides of values. He thought the description of the dark side was particularly helpful.

The human mind’s fascination with the “dark side” can have unfortunate consequences. Here is an observation about “evil” in Understanding, the second of my two Christmas letters:

Evil isn’t what “others” do to us. It’s what we do to ourselves. Imagining that our flip side – our reflection, a shadow – is an “other” that has a life, a voice of its own with something to offer. When all it has to “give” is a reverse image, what we aren’t. It’s nothing more than an implication of Logic that all things have opposites. That if two realities can’t be real then our reflections can’t be real. They’re the Joker whose joke is “I’m you.” Whatever its offense making it real by engaging with it is what causes it.

Two mistakes in our thinking put the dark side into our thoughts, make it real, empower it, and bring it to life. The first is objectification. We objectify something that’s a part of ourselves when we mistake it for something that’s not a part of ourselves. When we imagine that it’s a separate object, like a stick or a ball, or a pet or another person that we can relate to. When it’s just the reverse side of ourselves – subject, not object, a shadow or reflection – and has no separate existence of its own.

Bringing the dark side to life with projection

Once we’ve imagined that our shadow-reflection is a separate object we can relate to, we commit a second mistake: projection. We project attributes of ourselves onto this object that give it the “existence” it had heretofore lacked. We project our self, that is, our identity, our sovereignty, and our free will that enable the objectified shadow-reflection to act with authority and autonomy as though it were real.

The thoughts and feelings we project onto the object are those that we are uncomfortable with, that we don’t want. It is these that give our dark side its menace, the aspect of danger, of the appearance of purpose and meaning – something happening -- that fascinates and misleads human awareness into wrongdoing and harm.

These uncomfortable thoughts and feelings were precipitated by an event that preceded our engagement with our shadow-reflection. The event was loss of consciousness, and it set in motion a succession of misperceptions and misjudgments beginning with the misperception that our shadow-reflection is a separate self – an object – and the misjudgment that we can safely entrust our wellbeing to its guidance.

The wrong guide is our own creation

For that is what has come of our mistakes. Objectifying our shadow-reflection and giving it autonomy and authority over us by projecting our selves onto it has turned it into a guide. A very serious misjudgment, because once it’s activated its genetic code has no interest in guidance. Its only interest is captivity: controlling its host so that it can replicate itself like a virus and remain in “existence.” All because we have given it the ability and power to do so that come from ourselves. This is what it means that “Evil isn’t what ‘others’ do to us. It’s what we do to ourselves.”

These reflections are part of the core of Christianity that teaches mindfulness, love, and free will – attributes that belong firmly on the light side of values and not on the dark side. To practice Christianity is to recognize, disable, and disempower the dark side in everything we do. And this means understanding that our shadow-reflection is nothing:

  • Nothing that can be objectified – made into a separate object.
  • Nothing that can be brought to life by projecting ourselves onto it.
  • Nothing that can entertain us with the appearance of danger, of “action,” conflict, violence, hurt, anger, and all the other manifestations of values turned against themselves. Of purpose and meaning taken out of context by minds that misperceive and misjudge.

The most important use of our mind

The choice presented by the light and dark side of our values is whether to lead with gifts given to us – our own ability and authority – for our own purposes or with something that’s been given away and “given” back to us for the wrong guide’s purposes. Whether to lead with our own power given to his Child by God or with derived power that isn’t ours and can’t be used for our own benefit.

The right guide is Jesus or the Holy Spirit, a gift to us from God to his Child, who wishes us well and wants us to succeed, to be free, and to be happy. The wrong guide is the Joker, our mistake, a nothing that can’t wish anything and if it could, would only wish us to be its mindless captive and be unhappy. The choice between these two guides is a function of mind possessed of free will. It is the most important choice we will ever make and the most important use of our mind.

Will that is truly free is an informed will. Will guided by mind that understands. That’s no longer under the spell of our shadow-reflection: nothingness – the “power” of the “dark side.”

Published on Leave a comment on Here’s Looking at You, Kid

Everybody Comes to Rick’s

This was the title of the play that was to become the film Casablanca. And a good thing, too, because you’re invited to a year-end celebration and Rick and I don’t want any excuses. Everybody is invited and everybody belongs. It’s an imaginary birthday party, Auld Lang Syne, and a lot more combined. The Guest of Honor will be there. “Jesus” is associated with Christianity, but the Logic of reality and truth in A Course in Miracles covers everything. Its message of understanding is for everyone. Even for those who, like Groucho Marx, wouldn’t lower themselves to join anything that would have them for a member.

Many traditions coalesced to turn December into a madhouse of activities that strayed from their origins. Jesus’ birthday is one. But if you pan around Rick’s Café Americain with the camera, on the opening shot, you’ll see the setting is cosmopolitan. These people really do come from all over and not everyone gets excited over the same thing. Except the cause that brought them there and will send them on their way. The beauty of where they are, where we will be honoring life-changing, mind-changing events.

In our imaginations. I can get us started, but the guests are invited to attend to their own comfort so everyone has fun. Celebrating a new life and new year with festivity – food, drink, song and dance – and a rebirth: the rebirth of the sun. The winter solstice. Whatever event, whatever tradition, makes this a holiday for you. Temenos is all about fun. Mine to begin with but yours, too. One big sanctuary, a blend of differences where differences attract instead of distract. Where we can just Be.

Where Maxfield gets his inspiration

Casablanca honored cause that brings us all together. “The beginning of a beautiful friendship” between Rick and Louis, two cynics who joined the cause. Who set an example for change of mind, the event that our situation calls for. That, hopefully, we’ll get around to before it’s too late. Rick’s Café is part of my temenos. So is the airport where Rick gave up the love of his life for the cause. Gave up the letters of transit signed by General De Gaulle so Ilsa and Victor, a paladin of the cause, could take the last plane to Lisbon and continue their work.

Jesus could have authored the script. But so could any figure who embodies our ideals if they match. The name we give it doesn’t matter. Casablanca rose to the top of the list for a reason: it speaks to something universal that’s real and true in all of us. The thing that our guides still teach, that made Jesus’ miracles possible then and makes miracles possible now. The reality we were born into and the truth that still lives. We celebrate with a prayer of thanks for its guidance and comfort while we change our minds. For a reality that doesn’t have to be imagined and a birth that’s leading us there.

Call it Christmas Eve or whatever you want. You’ll be all in when you see Rick himself behind the bar serving the nectar of the gods. Beneath the branches of Ewah, the great tree of eternal life. The great tree of Logic radiant with lights and ornaments put there by children -- Owen, Courtney and Amanda – assisted by the goddess Psyche & friends: Puddy and Buster, Sparky, Cuddles, Grayheart, and William Roofus Marmalade, my orange tabby. The tree is their home where they play. Where Maxfield Parrish draws inspiration for his celestial art through a telescope in his treehouse.

The nocturnal lyric of wolves and loons

Ewah combines two trees from Avatar: the giant communal tree and the smaller illuminated tree that ended the story with resurrection. It represents safety – the benevolence of Logic that governs and protects all of reality and creation. The Innocence of temenos, its atmospherics decorated by the nature of our imaginations:

• The deep blue pure waters of Lake Parrish shimmering beneath an incandescent moon and stars
• Silvery clouds billowing above our gathering, where we can swoop and soar to the heights on Pegasus forever free from worry and regret
• The airport beacon sweeping its corner of Lake Parrish in red and green
• The nocturnal lyric of wolves and loons in the distance joining our chorus of joy
• Twin lighthouses standing guard at the Straits of the Pacific
• Up on high, the Course in Miracles Lighthouse, anchored to the side of Mount Olympian, beaming mindfulness and love, freedom and innocence, across the Aegean and beyond. To Athens, Bethlehem, and Alexandria, incubators of ideals: the ethics of Socrates, the virtue of Plato, the understanding of Jesus.

Ambiance courtesy of Maxfield, who will turn any request into a portrayal of heaven. Catering by the King Cole Grill at the Saint Regis Hotel in Manhattan. We will be met by the gatekeeper of the Garden of the Gods: Old King Cole himself will come down from Maxfield’s mural behind the bar to direct us to our choice of tables: beside the mountain stream with the pure, healing waters; around the campfire on Maxfield Island; along the shore of Lake Parrish; beside the children’s playground beneath the tree. Dance music courtesy of the orchestra at Rick’s Café, the same one that brought down the house with La Marseillaise.

Saving the best for the last

Caroling accompanied on the piano by Sam. Sam, who played it again for Rick and Ilsa. Sam, whose piano hid the letters of transit that saved the world. Well, not quite, but it came close. Before Auld Lang Syne we’ll sing As Time Goes By. If that doesn’t melt hearts and open minds nothing will.

I’m bringing honored guests. My darling granddaughters. Family from around the fireplace on Christmas Eve when I was a kid – mom, dad, and grandma, brother, sister, and our Dalmatian. The teenage girl who cared for me while my mother recovered. My son and his mother who left us too soon. My spiritual family: mother Persephone and father Apollo, sister Psyche and brother Jesus. Charmed escorts from Calvary to Ewah and resurrection: Black Beauty, Rhoda the show horse, and Ferdinand the Wall Street bull with the golden horns. Dobbin the magnificent sorrel flying draft horse, Pegasus – the free spirit of Love. Plus best friends forever like you. Who will you bring?

Here’s looking at you, kid.

Happy Holidays!!

Published on Leave a comment on Understanding

Getting it right

Expanding context beyond immediacy. Defusing limbic emotions and the rush to judgment, the urge to project guilt. Distinguishing between ourselves and the opposites that shadow everything – our mirror-image reflections. Understanding. The change of mind that tests us this time of year. Have we more? Are we more? How can it be possible when Consciousness is gone? The rule of law, protection from the shadow when the many were one, when we were awake and real. While the disembodied voice of our reflection is heard in waves of misinformation and authoritarian grievance, forgeries of stolen sovereignty. Its rule arbitrary, its necessity misunderstanding.

Evil isn’t what “others” do to us. It’s what we do to ourselves. Imagining that our flip side – our reflection, a shadow – is an “other” that has a life, a voice of its own with something to offer. When all it has to “give” is a reverse image, what we aren’t. It’s nothing more than an implication of Logic that all things have opposites. That if two realities can’t be real then our reflections can’t be real. They’re the Joker whose joke is “I’m you." Whatever its offense making it real by engaging with it is what causes it.

The Joker’s every perversion of Reality is a joke. Making itself right by making others wrong. Scripting truth and rules to suit itself. Heads I win, tails you lose. A lifeless viral parasite coded for self-replication, the “winning” of self-delusion. An imaginary magician that couldn’t perform unless we, the rabbit, asked it to pull us out of a hat. Misidentification of ourselves for an “other” that isn’t real makes it real. Correction is Understanding that we are not our reflection. That it can’t substitute for the Self we seek whose home is in Reality. Not here but where Mind will lead us if we allow it.

If evil itself can be understood without blame then there must be hope for Understanding. For elevating context from the false “realism” of bodies in captivity, to the truth of Mind liberated to think. To the Truth of another Reality that isn’t a joke. That parallels ours, was there before ours, is responsible for ours, and explains ours. To getting it right: Forgiveness is Understanding. So minds undeluded can do what’s right and do it right.

Where can undeluded minds take their pleas? To illumination from Intuition instead of deception from bodies. To awareness that alights on markers navigating back to consciousness. With Insights to recognize one at a time. Implications of Logic to follow wherever they lead. Guidance from Necessity, the authority of Logic, that enables and protects freedom of thought, expression, and choice -- the Integrity of Creation. That responds to pleas with Love -- sharing, empowerment, and affirmation of Worth -- instead of fear -- ownership, possession, and control. With the Innocence of Now, Psyche intact, instead of victimhood addicted to woundedness, self-pity, and guilt.

The Gift of Logic

Abundance and its comforts taken for granted replace hope with expectation, respect with entitlement, knowing our place with arrogance, adaptation with reverence for the status quo. An unsustainability brought on by not getting around to it. By somnolence. The set of a mind that could be equal to the task of awakening but for lack of Logic. Not for lack of the Free Spirit of Mind and Love that’s been there for us since the room went dark. But for the will and the ability to listen to it. To pay attention. To avail ourselves of its Gift: the judgment of Innocence, the understanding, of Logic. The noesis of Logos – God.

Misinformation is being orchestrated by a source that identifies itself as “god,” with books, podcasts and the like. Showcasing accessibility and erudition so confounding that otherwise discerning minds fall for it. A Course of Love and God: An Autobiography are a W.C. Fields flimflam act that deserves the price of admission, not for its wisdom but for the laughs. Minds are duping themselves in the clear, not in slow motion but in alarming acceleration. Waking up can’t wait. Not till we’ve extracted every last bit of pleasure and resource from body and planet. Not till we get around to it.

The next generation building character, in harmony with its environment and in spite of it, offers hope. For youth and for the rest of us, that though we are animals anchored by brain to matter we still have minds and free will. We will yet prove to be better than limbic systems that keep us rooted in unconsciousness. In threatening shadows and autonomic passions that overwhelm deliberation and judgment. We can overcome.

The place in our hearts

Paul Desmond riffing on his alto saxophone. For All We Know. Reflections on a stream that come and go with the intricacies of improvisation. That can’t help but be what they are. Us in reverse. That we never get to see as we are. Never get to know as we are. Haunted by beauty. Drawn by scent and touch imagined. By the taste of Memory heard and gone. A here and now, place and time, that can never be. Yet the Now that you will always be to me.

Shorty Baker riffing on his trumpet. I Didn’t Know What Time It Was. A call for love from time out of time. And I didn’t know. Notes gently trailing a caress across the whorl of preoccupation, lifting me out of cold blankness into the warmth of acceptance. By the vulnerability of subject in a room full of objects. Cause beyond effect that needs no intoxicant, no commotion, to excuse the brashness of its intrusion. I’m not done with it. Can never be done with it, your call for Love.

Alyosha bidding Dostoevsky’s farewell. The Brothers Karamazov. “There is nothing more wholesome and good than sacred memory preserved from childhood. Let us be kind, then honest and then let us never forget each other. You are all dear to me. From this day forth I have a place in my heart for you all, and I beg you to keep a place in your hearts for me.”

Published on Leave a comment on What Is Dark Matter Telling Us?

Preface

Why bother with “mind” and “Logic”?

Behind any transgression is a mind whose ability to introspect, reflect, reason, evaluate, judge, and decide is under-developed, impaired, or both. Given that the human mind is both under-developed and impaired, the life we experience is seldom, if ever, free of transgressions.

The world I was born into had fallen into the pit of a Great Depression in between two devastating world wars. Three years into the second war it was by no means certain that the good guys would win. But even if they didn’t humanity would have carried on. That’s not a given any more. The same human mind that makes of life one uninterrupted transgression has put everything at risk with global warming.

When will minds change? When bodies tell them to. That’s not true for everyone but global politics seems to confirm it. Minds will change not when common sense prevails but when physical discomfort and limbic emotions trigger an instinctive fight-or-flight response. When the animal is rousted out of its cave or jungle lair to defend itself. The response of an animal threatened, not logic comprehending.

Why do my essays tire readers with abstruse philosophizing about irrelevance and impracticality when the enemy is at the gate? Why bother with “mind” and “logic” when it’s action we need? Why am I hunkered down in metaphysics, fussing with what’s beneath the surface of things, instead of answering the call to duty from the front lines?

Centuries of learning and we’re still not getting it right

It seems because my mind is answering another call: the call from Logic. A call I could refuse since it would violate Logic if I couldn’t. But I don’t. The impaired mind that’s behind all our transgressions – world wars, depressions, global warming, and the rest – betrays one compelling attribute: the absence of Logic. Why? Because Logic says in its situation humanity clearly needs guidance and it’s misled. Misled not necessarily by a malevolent guide, though certainly it may seem that way. But by not getting something right about humanity’s situation.

We’ve poured centuries of effort into learning,. Nearly every field of inquiry has made impressive gains. Yet who would argue that the promise of all these gains has been realized? That gains on the horizon will do any more than ease a task or extend life? Logic says humanity will still be misled, that it will need to end its resistance to Logic and open up to possibilities that it so far won’t consider.

Why trouble ourselves?

The essay that follows addresses one possibility: that humanity’s situation is not what it appears to be – literally. Instead of the hard-and-fast reality our senses make of it our situation is an illusion. A dream. A prospect that intrigues more of us privately, I suspect, than we let on publicly. But judging from the general mood most don’t want to go there. See no reason to go there. If humanity’s calamities have so far passed them by; if its situation seems real enough and it hasn’t brought about the end-of-days for everyone – not yet – why trouble ourselves?

If you’re of this opinion my essays won’t trouble you. You’ll neither get what our situation is telling us nor what I’m trying to get across about our situation. That if we change our minds about it; if we are willing to suppose that there’s another Reality that’s Real; that ours isn’t; realizing the difference may bring about the change in humanity’s thinking that its situation calls for.

To open minds to the right guide: to Logic

What it may accomplish is the opening of minds to Logic. To replacing the body-centered guide -- a perversion of ourselves, the caricature I call the Joker – that’s been misleading us with what our situation has needed all along: a mind-centered guide not misled and distracted by our material world of appearances.

The task my thoughts seem intent on is to help replace the wrong guide with the right guide. Will this “solve problems?” If the switch is made Logic tells me it could eventually solve everything. For minds only willing to change if bodies, in a state of discomfort and inflamed limbic emotions, tell them to change, aren’t just blocking progress. They’re threatening the survival of our species. They’re ultimately behind our planet’s Anthropocene mass extinction that may engulf us.

Minds guided by Logic won’t need to wait for existential threats. For narrow self-interests to be catered to before the interests of community come into play,. Won’t need to agonize over insanities and atrocities one after the other, like world wars, depressions, and global warming. Like stupidities that interfere with basic functions of governance that should be taken for granted. When we should pride ourselves on the stability of civilization instead of being mortified by its frailty.

“Dark matter” shouldn’t be a metaphor for “dark ages.” But with Logic still blocked by body-centered thinking; by every field of inquiry still captive to sensory perception; by humanity’s not getting its situation right, that’s where we may be headed. The flip side of the possibility this essay is about.

To marry science to Logic

What follows is hard on physics. Not because it hasn’t acquitted itself well but because it has. It doesn’t seem to realize just how well. Its brilliant discoveries put humanity on the threshold of a new paradigm, one that finally grasps the illusory nature of its physical surroundings and their inherent illogic. So that a mind-centered reflective humanity, duly aware of its precarious situation, can finally adjust its inquiries, its expectations and priorities, in philosophy, psychology, and theology, to a new Reality. To understanding that ends ambiguity, ends ambivalence, and promises a more hopeful outcome.

I love science. But I also love Logic. What, then, is this and other essays trying to accomplish? What is my book in progress, The Story of the Child, trying to accomplish? To bring them together. To change minds so that, finally, in this generation or the next, or maybe the one after that, we can solve problems. Without waiting for bodies and limbic emotions to get around to it. When it’s too late.

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What Is Dark Matter Telling Us?

The invincibility of sensory perception is no more

Dark matter is credited by physics with holding the universe together and making life possible. And yet it’s undetectable. Undetectable by our bodies' senses that all of science and mainstream philosophy, psychology, and theology swear by to distinguish between what’s real and what’s speculation. This is why dark matter is “dark”: to science it’s indisputably real and yet it isn’t. So are quanta, microscopic particles that aren’t always detectable, sometimes “entangled,” flouting the laws of physics with “superposition.” “Spooky” to Einstein rather than dark, but still a mystery that needs to be explained.

Dark matter is telling us that sensory perception is not the authority that it’s made out to be on what’s real. Its reputation is undeserved, its invincibility shattered. What’s real is no longer automatically assumed to be that which can be “proven” by senses. The door is now open to Mind. To Logic and Intuition where Logic has its home in the human mind.

Contradictory realities are not a logical possibility

Dark matter is telling us that our world and its universe are unreal. Because the only possible explanation for the unquestioned “reality” of something undetectable and therefore logically unreal, in a universe of appearances assumed to be real, is that the universe of appearances is unreal. A reality of un-appearance within a universe of appearance logically contradicts the reality of appearance. Only one can be real.

Contradictory realities are not a logical possibility. Either undetectable dark matter is real or detectable appearances are real, but not both. If the Logic of physics absolutely requires that undetectable dark matter be real then it must concede that detectable appearances are not real.

The universe of appearances along with its contradictory anti-matter / dark matter must be an illusion, its pose of reality undone by the logical necessity of reconciling opposites: matter and anti-matter. By acknowledging the rule of Logic that governs everything: everything has an implied opposite and of two opposites whose existence contradicts the other only one can be real. Everything that Is must have an implied opposite that isn’t. If anti-matter or its altered-state “dark matter” that’s undetectable can’t “exist” without contradicting a reality that must consist of detectable appearances, then either dark matter or appearances must go.

The challenge that dark matter presents to science is by no means unique or unprecedented. Quantum mechanics presents the same challenge on the same scale, because every corner of the universe of spacetime and matter that harbors dark matter is flooded with mysterious quanta, too. But while our minds can ignore microscopic particle behavior, they can’t ignore a cosmos in full view every night that fascinates. And now “dark matter” that’s woven into the very fabric of perception, essential to who we are and every living thing, is present and yet not present. A state that, for a field of inquiry that prides itself on rigorous “realism,” must be disconcerting if not intolerable.

Absent Now, absent Reality

As obvious as it must be that our universe of quantum mechanics and dark matter is an illusion it can’t compare with the evidence of Einstein’s special relativity. His stunning insight that, here, in this strange place, it is never Now. We occupy a bizarre category of time: “an ‘intermediate zone,’ an ‘extended present’; a zone that is neither past nor future.”

“Just now” does not exist. . . . In physics . . . “spacetime” (is) the set of all past and future events, but also those that are “neither-past-nor-future”; these do not form a single instant: they have a duration. . . . The present is like the flatness of Earth: an illusion. . . . saying “here and now” makes sense, but. . . saying “now” to designate events “happening now” throughout the universe makes no sense. (Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems (2017, pp. 71-76)

Our “intermediate zone” is a twilight zone. if we could occupy “now” it would transplant us into a Reality and state of mind wholly unlike ours. That physics has sat on this discovery for over a century without acknowledging the doubt it casts on the reality of spacetime and matter is as stunning as the discovery itself. Compelling affirmation for DNA scientist James D. Watson’s admission that “a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.” (The Double Helix (1968, p. 14)

Does physics not stand face-to-face with revelation without recognizing what it’s looking at? Without minds being changed? If it’s not Now then we occupy a dream, an Alice-in-Wonderland where all manner of strange things happen. Where we go about our business as though, as Ivan Karamazov would put it, “everything is lawful.” Dostoevsky’s character ended his part in The Brothers Karamazov with “brain fever.” Fitting diagnosis for a physics taking its cues from Rod Serling in its Twilight Zone.

“The stuff that dreams are made of”

Rovelli observes that Einstein’s general relativity offers “a glimpse of reality . . . that seems to be made of the same stuff our dreams are made of but is nevertheless more real than our clouded daily dreaming.” (op cit. p. 90) If so, dark matter must account for a very large part of the stuff. Is it a stretch to carry the thought one step farther? To theorize that it is a dream?

What could possibly explain it if the “reality” of physics can’t? What supplies Logic when the logic of matter can’t explain matter that won’t meet the definition of matter? How and why is the rationale for physics falling short? Where is the flaw in its Logic? Because circumstantial evidence for the existence of dark matter is irrefutable. It’s there. What could explain it if physics can’t? What premise of physics’ “realism” is leading our thinking astray? How did physics come to be unrealistic?

Where matter ends, Mind has always been there

One theoretical possibility is that our universe of spacetime and matter is not real. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of because it may be a dream. A premise we won’t hear from physics because an entire profession, an entire field of inquiry going back to classical antiquity, is conscience-bound to deny it. Trapped by the boundaries of its context, Immobilized by limitations placed on logic, and unable to navigate. Stuck in the finiteness of its own making and of no further use in this phase of our journey. That requires another mind that thinks, another logic that navigates, another vision that can see. With no less rigor and discipline than minds guided by the senses but now minds guided by thought. By everything that Logic is and does.

If the universe is a dream and dark matter proves it, what then explains it? What is its logic? What produces dreams? Minds do. Minds that are unconscious. Asleep. How and why did our universe – and maybe many more – come to be the subject of a dream by an unconscious Mind? What other explanation could there be for what preceded the Big Bang? The physicist Roger Penrose (Cycles of Time, 2010) has postulated that the universe was preceded by an earlier universe and questioned assumptions about singularities, the Big Bang, and the need for quantum gravity. But even if he’s right, where did all this stuff that dreams are made of come from?

Physics that leaves off where matter leaves off can’t answer by definition. The laws of science take us to the brink and leave off just as they do with the origin of what we experience as life. Where matter ends Mind must have been there all along. Not just before the universe of spacetime and matter appears but all the while that we, our bodies’ senses, have been witnessing it. Our senses assuring us that, yes, it’s happening, it’s real, when all they’re attesting to is themselves. Matter on the witness stand testifying to its own presence, as if this were enough. As if this were not a conflict of interest. Circular reasoning. A logical absurdity.

Mind and its miscreation that made unreality real

So who is this Mind and what is its story? How did it lose consciousness? Why would it project itself into a dream of physics so bizarre that physics itself can’t make sense of it? If it ever was in possession of its senses how did it conjure a dream so senseless, so disfigured by grotesque contradictions, as our world? If it was ever in a safe place how did it come to imagine itself in a place so precarious, savage, and depraved, as ours?

The answer that human speculation has assumed over the ages is that something went wrong. Dark suspicions that it was our fault, rooted in our wounded psyches, have insinuated themselves into our culture, contaminated our souls, and condemned us to lives on the cross of victimhood. As though what happened there must be of the same ambiguity and profanity as what happens here. In the “dark matter” of the human mind. As though the “laws” that produce chaos and entropy here must rule there.

The “story” of the Mind that’s dreaming, that the dream itself has so far produced, alienates the scientific mind for a reason. It’s nuts. Why admit philosophy, psychology, and theology into physics if they can’t do any better than this?

The story, once it’s cut free from the dream, once it’s freed from the laws of chaos and is allowed to access Logic, makes sense. It’s plausible, supported by the implications of Logic going all the way back to the beginning. To where there was Logic and human thought and feeling can go no farther. And, yes, something did go wrong. It wasn’t anticipated or intentional because logically it couldn’t Be.

Venturing into the unknown, into the unexpected, is ingrained in the Worth of Creation. And if something went wrong, a circumstance unanticipated or unintended, then the result wouldn’t be wrongdoing; it would be miscreation. Miscreation that could throw Mind out of the Reality of Creation into another reality, by rendering it unconscious. To prevent the Force of consciousness that animates new life from animating what doesn’t belong. It’s a state of mind familiar to us. But since we’re conditioned to associate bodies with matter instead of mind we miss its significance: its capacity to dream. To make unreality seem very real.

Who can help fix what went wrong?

Our world is plausibly the result of miscreation caused by Mind rendered unconscious by the nature of Creation. By circumstances that are part of its normal process and structure. Miscreation that carries no trace of wrongdoing, by commission or omission. A circumstance or event that caused an unintended effect, no more than an unavoidable gap in Knowledge. Logical within the context of what was known and so not an intentional violation of Logic. A gap in Knowledge, in Awareness, that isn’t and can’t be “all-knowing,” but is evolving. If it has any part in Creation how could it be otherwise?

The gap in Knowledge quite logically may be our privilege, our honor, to help fix. Instead of milling about aimlessly in our primordial soup of amino acids, waiting for a bolt of lightning to save us, maybe we have a purpose. And maybe it isn’t beyond comprehension. Maybe we have a job to do, to get us back to the job Mind was about before something went wrong. That is, if we can ever break free from the tyranny of appearances, of sensory perception.

Another take on sensory perception from dark matter

What does it imply about dark matter if our universe isn’t real? If it actually is a dream? Two opposite states can’t co-exist in Reality. If the existence of one thing implies the existence of its opposite the Logic of Governance decrees that only one can be real. Reality-Creation wouldn’t be governable, couldn’t hold together, otherwise.

When matter and anti-matter showed up at the beginning of our universe, only one could be real. Thus the mystery of what became of anti-matter. Thus speculation that there are other universes where anti-matter may dominate instead of matter. Anti-matter here became unreal. And yet, as we’ve all learned about opposites, they may only be shadows but they don’t go away.

How does something unreal fit into the logic, the nature, of an environment that’s already unreal? That’s made up of appearances. By disappearing. By breaking with unreality’s general rule that if a thing is to exist it must be part of appearances. Must be part of the illusion, the dream. Anti-matter forced into a state of unreality within a state that’s already unreal, logically had to become invisible. To become undetectable to the body’s senses.

For it’s sensory perception that’s relied upon to certify the “reality” of matter and to exclude all else. The same source that physics relies upon to certify the reality of matter cancels the reality of anti-matter by making it undetectable. And in so doing gives dark matter the only place it can occupy logically in an unreal universe: the darkness of undetectability.

In the other Reality creations are made real by the Consciousness of Mind – by Mind’s Awareness – relying on the Authority of Logic responsible for governance. In our world, matter that’s unreal is made real by minds relying on the body’s senses. Anti-matter could not register with sensory perception, be made real, and still occupy a place in the universe alongside matter. Two opposites cannot co-exist. Anti-matter had to yield, and where it’s to be accounted for is dark matter – unreality in an unreal universe.

Another take on physics from dark matter

Everything is defined by Logic according to what it is and what it does. Its central attribute is its use in the Reality of Creation. Because Creation itself is use: the purpose and meaning of its context, to take a stand for Worth. When its logical opposite is worthlessness, synonym for nothingness, statelessness. To be part of the Reality of Creation is to be put to work creating, affirming, and reciprocating Worth. The Worth of Being-Life and therefore the Worth of Creation itself. Is to have a role defined and assigned by the Logic of Governance to a place in the interconnected network of roles and relationships that make up Reality. That Create.

Physics defines dark matter by what it does. It has a use. But physics so far has no idea of what it is. It won’t consider the possibility that it’s anti-matter made unreal and therefore undetectable because to do so would expose the unreality of physics. The fact that by its sacred and inviolate premise, that matter is real, it makes of itself one part science and one part religion. Like the universe: one part sanity, the other spooky. An inquisition in the form of bodies’ senses condemning doubters with verdicts of blasphemy, with heresy that warrants excommunication.

Hypotheses to rescue physics from its cloud

Physics might understand dark matter, quantum mechanics, and maybe even quantum gravity with only one change in its process; if it allowed itself to hypothesize that matter is unreal. To hypothesize that the universe is the stuff that dreams are made of because it may be a dream. More “real” certainly than “our clouded daily dreaming,” but, for all its vastness and seeming consequence, still a cloud. Physics might also do well with another hypothesis: that matter is relational to Mind.

The science, Logic, and limits of hypothesizing

Science distances itself from philosophy, psychology, and theology because they’re perceived to be casual with facts and Logic compared to the rigor and discipline of science. To its “iron rule” extolled by Michael Strevens in The Knowledge Machine (2020). Their comfort with different hypothesized realities is perceived to be unprofessional and inexcusable, hardly less so than the “alternate facts” of politics.

What reality does science recognize as inalterably fixed in place if not that which answers to its self-interest? If not captive to bodies whose minds can and do question it.

Physics’ premise that matter must be real puts an artificial limit on its ability to hypothesize. Its premise that it must not yield to philosophy, the field of inquiry concerned with reality, limits its ability to interpret. Its premise that metaphysics, the search beyond appearances to their essence, is similarly non-grata, deprives if of the very attribute that its subject – appearances – demands. Insisting that its subject is real while depriving itself of the ability to consider another point of view is unscientific. It’s not just advocacy for self-interest, the usual pitfall for human logic. Given the lofty aims of science’s “quest for knowledge,” it’s unjustifiable.

Hypothesizing that matter isn’t real, that our universe is an illusion, needn’t be motivated by an alien cause when it’s amply justified by physics’ own discoveries. What is dark matter telling us? It may not be telling so much as mocking. The mask of the Joker, our opposite self, looking back at us with wry amusement because, by our own instrument of measurement, our bodies’ senses, the force of nature we put our faith in to hold the universe together and make life possible – dark matter – is nothing. The Joker's signature. The universe is a cup only half full, and what to make of it? That the cosmos is divinity as Plato thought, and maybe the deist Einstein, too? Or a fraud: something promised that can never deliver, like the simplicity and elegance of a calculation that eluded Einstein to the end. The unifying theory of quantum gravity that eludes physicists still.

Where and when does Reason take over and rationalizing end?

The implications of Logic are to be followed, not controlled

Who defines Reality? Is it science? Theology? Philosophy? Psychology? Or would it be Logic itself? Are we not dependent on Logic’s big picture to guide us, since not one of us has the big picture? Can our self-interests take precedence over the roles and relationships that Logic manages with its definitions and implications? Over the self-interest of Being, the stance of Life? The harmony that is the Reality of Creation?

Would the implications of Logic ever go along to get along and yet remain “logical”? Would they yield to the influence of their patrons? Are they ready to perform tricks at the crack of a whip? Is science that’s baffled by quantum mechanics and dark matter not pleased with the tricks its domesticated and trained “logic” performs? Is further domestication and training the remedy? Can matter already enshrined in reality be domesticated and trained some other way? Appeased? Placated?

Or has the time come for science, philosophy, psychology, and theology all to seriously consider a different Truth, the one their cramped self-interest has been avoiding? The Truth that the implications of Logic, the Free Spirit of Inquiry, are to be followed, not controlled.

If quantum mechanics and dark matter imply that matter may not be real, that there may some better, more logical theory to explain the universe and life than the one that’s failing us, then this is a fact that we had best acknowledge. If we don’t acknowledge it, this becomes another fact with its own implications that must be acknowledged. The more we misperceive, the more we will misjudge.

Logic governs us or we are not governed. We don't define Logic: it defines us. Build this reality into our self-interest and see what happens to misperceptions and misjudgments. Not when matter changes to fit our paradigms but when minds change to fit Logic.

The self-interest of Logic is infinitely inclusive

The geologic forces uplifting democracy and the Truth are more powerful by far than the forces that would suppress them. Logic’s definitions write the rules. Reality and Creation require Governance. Governance from the bottom up. Governance that derives its meaning, purpose, and motivation from circumstances on the ground, from ever-changing contexts that form the process and structure of evolution. From Creation, the extension and expansion of Life. The Choice, affirmation, and reciprocation of Worth. All of it driven by inexorable force: the Implications of Logic that can never end, that will find a way through and around any insane, illusory obstacle placed in their path. The force of ever-changing contexts and the implications of Logic called upon to manage and govern the Reality of Creation.

The implications of Logic can’t be set in motion toward Reality and Truth by insisting that motion begin with an arbitrarily exclusive self-interest. If Logic has self-interest it would be infinitely inclusive; its evolution through Creation would encompass Everything now and Everything to come.

Physics cannot legitimately aim its inquiries in a logical direction if self-interest demands that an open philosophical issue – the reality of matter, the body’s senses and its sensed environment -- be excluded. Can’t succeed if one profession is contented with things the way they are, sees no reason to inquire further, and doesn’t want to be inconvenienced. Isn’t open to questioning the Logic behind its shaky premises, the source of its confusion.

Logic doesn’t limit itself in its questioning. It doesn’t question only that which won’t inconvenience the questioner. It’s a free spirit whose implications must be followed wherever they lead.

Parting with Logic is parting with Reality

If energy that produces particles isn’t under the direction of Mind, if Force isn’t an agent rather than its own source, then there can be no order, structure, or discipline to Reality-Creation. There would be no purpose, meaning, or sense to it. There would be no Logic, no Governance.

The object of metaphysics is to establish not only provenance but intent. Without intent there is no order, no point; nothing is accomplished. The “quest for knowledge” is the quest for intent that can only come from Mind.

Walling off the free spirit of inquiry walls off both Mind and Logic. Logic is Free. To get it right its practitioners must follow wherever it leads. Is physics following where dark matter’s implications lead? Parting with Logic is parting with Reality.

Force turned against Logic by Mind that’s unconscious

The exhortations of physics to remain disciplined in its premises would be laudable if its search for answers didn’t call its premises into question. The mind that imagines:

• that Logic is its agent and will do what it’s told
• that it may only accept premises, posit hypotheses, weigh considerations, and present findings that meet its host’s definition of what’s practical, useful, relevant, and “realistic” rather than its own
• that the spirit of inquiry must be denied its freedom lest it uncover inconvenient truths

must be a mind that’s unconscious and dreaming, in mortal conflict with itself. It must be mindless. For it denies itself the most elementary understanding of Logic:

• that it can be no one’s agent
• that all thought, all feeling, begins with Logic
• that its implications must lead where they will or fail to lead at all
• that its source must connect of its own will to what it delivers
• that cause must connect of its own will to effect or it can be neither source nor cause.

Logic cannot be owned, possessed, controlled, or dominated by any influence and still Be the purpose and meaning that is its own source, its own Logic.

Energy in service to Logic -- Force that gives thoughts their consequences, causes their effects, implications their interconnections -- cannot be turned against Logic by Mind whose thoughts and feelings align with Logic, seek harmony, and Create with the protection, support, and authority of its Governance. By a mind that’s Conscious: thinking, feeling, evaluating, and judging.

Force can only be turned against Logic by a mind that’s not conscious. By a mind that’s unconscious. By mind corrupted by the thought of separation, by the act of projection, by the insanity that produced the dream: the insane hallucination that is our incomprehensible body-sensed world. A world seeming to make sense on a human scale that degenerates into bizarre nonsense on any other scale.

The false innocence of victimhood in a shared world

Force can only be turned against Logic by the endless conflict that is our tormented internal world. Why do our minds not see this? Why do they refuse to see it? Because the unconscious mind that projected them has deluded itself. Imagines that Logic is dead, replaced by a substitute more favorable to its interests because it can be controlled. Because instead of divining purpose and meaning from circumstances with Logic, from the bottom up, it can get by with a formula imposed from the top down. Mindlessly -- without thought or feeling, without mind or Logic at all. Because if Logic is dead mind and all its functions must be unnecessary. It must be dead as well.

This would be the “governing” agent of our incomprehensible, tormented world: corrupted mind that has taken dead aim at Logic. At Governance itself. Mindlessness. This is the mind of science that imagines that it can be and do whatever it wants because it owns its subject. Because the source, protection, and authority that should be its guide has been made its captive, possessed. A state logically impossible either for the free spirit of Inquiry or for the free spirit of Love.

And so neither is with us. Neither Love nor Logic nor the reciprocity that holds Interconnectedness in place -- the Reality and Creation, the Home, that unconscious mind, a stranger to the Truth, yearns to return to. Home that it will never find until it lets go of delusion. Lets go of the insanity of ownership, possession, control, and dominance, the false innocence of victimhood, in a shared world. Until it chooses of its own free will to be guided by Logic. Until it regains Consciousness and sanity.

Two Necessities of Logic

Parents in the other Reality function within the Necessity of its Logic: that opposites must be unreal. Therefore, they cannot make unreality real. Necessity also requires that they do everything to preserve their Child’s Free Will. Why? Because it’s essential to Creation’s affirmation of Worth. Essential because the Worth of anything can’t be determined without its being freely chosen. By a stakeholder invested in it. Because Creation is Worth and its opposite is worthlessness, gravity that pulls all of us and our universe into the black hole of the void.

Another Necessity of Logic: to be free, choice must be conscious of a range of possibilities, those that are known, available, and not arbitrarily excluded. The Child may not share the Parents’ power of Consciousness to make Creations Real because its unconsciousness is a possibility. The consequences of unconsciousness can’t be anticipated or known to Reality-Consciousness because they are unreal.

Two Necessities are thus built into Logic’s definition of who the Child’s Parents are and what they do:

(1) Do not make unreality real, therefore do not be Conscious of opposites or their possibility.
(2) Preserve and protect the Child’s Free Will.

These are givens in Reality. But within the Child’s state of unconsciousness and compromised Free Will, where we appear to be, they are not.

Two corresponding imperatives are implied by their unreality-opposites:

(1) Make unreality real
(2) Compromise free will by taking Child-mind captive.

Two forces that block human progress

There can be no tension between Being and non-being over conflicting imperatives in the harmony of Reality governed by Logic. But in the unreality that is our world, corrupted by the dream of opposites made real by an unconscious mind, the tension is constant and, at times, unbearable. It is the fallout of Logic’s rule that opposites must be unreal, the price to be paid by an unconscious Child for a logical impossibility: Being without the shadow code of non-being, its illusory opposite.

Forces that block human progress are mainly those that (1) make unreality real and (2) compromise the Child’s / humanity’s Free Will. What are dark matter, quantum mechanics, and never-Now telling us?

(1) that science that insists that spacetime-matter is real in the face of evidence to the contrary is deluded by Being’s shadow code opposite. By the Joker. “Questing for knowledge” instead of searching for Reality and Truth is making unreality real.

(2) that science that disrupts the free flow of Logic’s implications, that attempts to control the Free Spirit of Logic that is the source of the Child’s Free Will, is undermining Free Choice essential to the Creation, Affirmation, and Reciprocation of Worth, the purpose of Creation. It is compromising the Child’s and humanity’s Free Will.

Harsh lesson from a “wonderful world”

Physics hypothesizing that the universe may be unreal can make better sense of particle superposition, never-Now, dark matter, and other strangeness by assuming that the “other Reality” is governed by Logic and our unreality is not. By assuming that our world is ruled instead by Logic’s opposite: a reverse mirror-image caricature of everything that makes sense. In other words, the two worlds are exact opposites and it’s ours that bears the face of the Joker, not the other.

Protests from diehards who prefer Louis Armstrong or Walt Disney rhapsodizing about our “wonderful world” must inevitably account for the calculations of quantum mechanics. Those that unfailingly validate the lack of cooperation from particles -- particles that prefer the permissiveness of Bohr’s stewardship to the strict discipline of Einstein. If particles, time, and dark matter refuse to accommodate wishful thinking about an orderly universe then perhaps it’s time we changed our thinking. Time we paid attention to what they’re trying to tell us, face the possibility of another Truth, and accommodate them.

Would it inconvenience physics? Sure! Did it inconvenience Big Tobacco to resist the truth about its product? Does it inconvenience the fossil fuel industry to come clean about its product? Didn’t the Church eventually have to own up to the harm done by its Inquisition and pedophilia?

Could physics, in the intractability of its own misperceptions sanctified by its “quest for knowledge,” have produced its own demographic of victims needing reparation? A humanity not so much duped by appearances as ignoring them? A humanity facing extinction because it prefers the laws of chaos sanctioned by science to the laws of cause and effect?

The Joker mocking us from dark matter, never-Now, and errant particles may have a harsh lesson to relate. That is, if we would listen.

Published on Leave a comment on What Does It Mean that Minds Are Unwilling to Change?

What does it mean
that minds are unwilling to change?

It means that they are still in the grip of seduction.
And the habitable planet earth and bodies
with their sensuous and sensual pleasures
and wonders

still suffice to keep minds captive to things
as they are.
Until senses and their pleasures
lose their addictive powers, their hypnotic hold
on our passions, cravings, and dreams,
and dissolve into tears.

It means that minds still occlude the Memory
of Reality that offers the Innocence
of not being taken captive by unreality,
not being parted from Creation, Life, and Truth.

From ourselves -- the Innocence of minds
open to the Life of Discovery, to the pleasures
of Learning and Growth without guilt and fear.

To Worth that isn’t an appearance.
To Purpose and Meaning -- the capacity
to share and be shared, to move and validate
beyond the limits of Self.

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What does it mean
that minds are unwilling to change?

It means that they exist in paralysis,
estranged from the Force of movement
that gave them Will.
To think, to feel in the moment, alive
to the possibilities.

Willing to be of use
in the great cause of Creation.
The cause of Being, the miracle
and Worth of Mind, Love, and Life.

It means instead of soaring monuments
to the Beauty of Creation they have chosen
to build brick walls lining the pits of hell,
the graveyard of unknowing and stagnation
where they can bury themselves.

This is what it means.

Published on Leave a comment on Royal Portable

It was just a polite request:
Make me understand, and you did
With definitions at first, words
That frame a thought and then
We moved on
To the thoughts themselves and where
They come from

Make up a story you said,
And so I did, a fable from out of nowhere
And then a poem
That made them wonder more

Questions I couldn’t leave alone
And what for? And so I moved on
Trailed by my retinue of words
Definitions, thoughts, questions
Skimming the surface unaware
Of what lay below

I thought to get at it that day
My friend and I, Royal Portable, but not now
Just the California sun to caress my soul
The wonder of it all, the life yet to be lived
With nothing yet to say, so the publisher
Was right

Blank again the page and silence its message
Staring back at me when next I tried
In earnest, not content to feel
I would meet you upon this honestly
But who are you? What is it that’s there?

[to be continued]

Published on Leave a comment on Who Is the “Conservative”?

The plague that is upon us

In 14th century Europe during the black plague, devotion to a god once thought by followers to be their servant turned to devotion to another god thought to be more serviceable. To a god whose intentions seemed a better fit with the times – Satan. The god now installed at the head of the Republican party may or may not be Satan. But to his cult he certainly seems to be a better fit with the times. Not with COVID since they apparently welcome it, but with democracy that fails to deliver what they demand of it: entitlement. Always winning.

If the risks of Creation into the unknown and the Child’s free will that measures its Worth interfere, then the authoritarian is done with it. No more pretense of unity. No more pretense of free will, the Child, the Logic of governance, or democracy. The lord and master of the Republican party is Parent: the supremacy of the absolute. No more questioning. No more accommodating or reconciling. No more Creation either, because evolution – change – is the enemy. Things under the absolute, under Parent, must be fine just the way they are.

These are the times ruled by 14th century Europe’s black plague and its devil worshippers. The times about to be ruled today not by COVID but by another plague. The plague of Republicans – “conservatives” – who enable the Joker at their head. Authoritarians who not only condone but support his crimes. The affront to democracy and to everyone who loves democracy. Who serve it in their everyday lives, fight to preserve it, and depend on it.

There is only Logic. There is only Democracy

If one protests the dismantling of democracy with an attempt to understand its philosophical and psychological roots, how is that an affront? The affront to all of us is the wrong being done by the politics of victimhood. By its systematic assault on Reality, Truth, and Logic itself. By a Republican party so dismissive of family -- self-absorbed, aggrieved, and psychotic -- that it’s all but given up on sanity. That it might as well have succumbed to the chaos, the lawlessness, the anarchy, of devil worship.

Where is the affront and to whom? When is spirited defense of democracy not true conservatism: the inheritance and duty of all Americans, all patriots, to safeguard the institutions, the traditions, the laws, of our country? The values of Freedom and Unity enshrined in our flag. Are these not the substance, the meaning, of conservatism? What are “conservatives” thinking who take offense at Democrats being democrats: guardians and lifeblood of democracy?

When will “conservatives” wake up to the truth: there is no refuge in the absolute. There is no Parent to save us. To do our thinking, our choosing, for us. To be accountable for us. There is only Reality: the risks of Creation into the unknown and the free will of the Child – us – to share it, live it, experience it. Together. Family inviolate. There is no escape, no alternate reality where things are only as we wish them to be. Where there is “liberty” to have and do whatever we want with whatever we fantasize is “ours.” There is only sharing. There is only Logic to govern, not rule. There is only democracy.

Published on Leave a comment on Principle 1. All fields of inquiry require Logic.

Principles and assumptions to guide the search for Reality and Truth

Principle 1. All fields of inquiry require Logic. Logic must be followed wherever its implications and interconnections lead, to all legitimate, logical possibilities. This is as true for psychology and theology as it is for science and philosophy. There is no way around it.

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Einstein’s close encounter with Logos

After Intuition played a major part in his 1905 theories, Albert Einstein trusted to physics and mathematics to take it from there and does not seem to have been struck by lightning again. A deist, he did credit the possibility that something other than matter itself caused the universe. He was no Hawking. But, like Hawking, his analytic powers and Intuition remained riveted on the effect rather than the cause.

Had it been otherwise he might have recognized the source not only of his fascination with the universe but also his extraordinary Intuition, the Mind that succeeded where physics and mathematics alone couldn’t. He might have recalled that his patent office daydreams were a gift, the discovery of what his memory already knew. Might have recalled that his Intuition was given by Logic, the discipline of implications connecting with one another in the clear, without interference. With no other consideration than producing a system of the mind, theory composed of interconnections sustained by reciprocity: connecting and connecting back. The authority of persuasion held together by what it is, its own self. Elegance and Beauty beyond all but the limits, the definitions and implications of Logic itself.

The derivation of “Logic” is Logos, Greek for “reason”:

In pre-Socratic philosophy, the principle governing the cosmos, the source of. . . human reasoning about the cosmos. . . . In Stoicism. . . the power of reason residing in the human soul. . . . In biblical Judaism. . . God’s medium of communication. . . . In Hellenistic Judaism. . . divine wisdom. . . . Christianity. . . The creative word of God, which is itself God. (American Heritage Dictionary)

Einstein’s Intuition was so expansive that it must have given him a close encounter with Logos. Yet he seems to have missed its significance. Perhaps taken with its gifts, he failed to recognize and credit the giver. Just as creation was of no interest to the deist’s prime mover, the prime mover dropped out of Einstein’s sight once he got started. He went on to his search for the theory of everything on his own, trusting to mathematics and physics. Looking for beauty behind the matador’s muleta, the red cape, behind which is emptiness. Possibly intrigued by the idea of a prime mover that could have corrected his aim. But not enough to focus his search – the extraordinary force of his passion and talents -- on Mind and matter both. Where would science be in its “quest for knowledge” if he had?

Einstein did prove something: that his search can’t succeed with physics and mathematics alone. He did become a role model: for every “realist” in search of cosmic mathematical perfection who comes up short. Why? Because their attention is focused on what’s written on the blackboard instead of the writer in their mind: Logic. Logos.

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Gifts of Logic, gifts of Intuition: Dark matter

In the blog entry that preceded this one, “Principles and Assumptions to guide the search for Reality and Truth,” I set out “to demonstrate what [Logic’s] systems thinking might produce in the way of insights and answers.” Here might be an example, an insight about dark matter.

Marcela Carlena writes, in Scientific American:

. . . [T]he Standard Model. . . does not explain. . . the 85 percent of the matter in the universe – dark matter – that holds the cosmos together, making galaxies such as our Milky Way possible. The Standard Model falls short of answering why, at some early time in our universe’s history, matter prevailed over antimatter, enabling our existence. “The Unseen Universe" (October 2021, p. 59)

Dark matter is what became of antimatter. Antimatter appeared at the outset because of the principle of opposites: creations imply the existence of their opposites. But antimatter couldn’t remain on an equal footing with matter because opposites can’t both be real. Logic which governs all of Reality-Creation – everything -- requires that creations and their opposites be defined by different attributes that can be reconciled. Otherwise there is no order, no harmony, and therefore no meaning and purpose to Creation. Logic having the power and ability to define is what preserves harmony, preserves its ability to govern.

Reconciliation and antimatter’s role in the universe were accomplished by a fundamental change in definition, that is by a change in the Logic of antimatter. Matter remained real while antimatter became unreal. How is unreality accomplished in a universe that is itself unreal? Through undetectability. Undetectability by the source of detectability in unreality: by bodies’ senses. The mirror-image reverse of unreality undetectable in Reality by Mind.

What is thus intuited about dark matter through Logic is that an unreal universe of spacetime and matter is credited by its physical inhabitants with being real because it’s detectable by sensory perception; antimatter appears and then mysteriously disappears, transformed into “dark matter,” a mysterious force that’s not only credited with holding the universe together but also with making life – sensory perception, our source of detectability – possible, by becoming unreal in the only way that unreality within unreality can do so: by becoming undetectable. A universe “held together” requires balance, and this is how antimatter provides it: by becoming dark matter.

What it means: Sensory perception yields to Logic

Logic through Intuition, without more help from experimental physics, produces answers that make sense where answers otherwise are impossible. If Logic, for example, says dark matter is undetectable by definition, if it defines “darkness” as “undetectability,” then dark matter cannot be explained by empirical science. Not if “empirical” requires observation or experiment. All we’ve got, then, if this insight is correct, is Logic. And if what Inquiry is about – the “quest for knowledge” -- is figuring out why we’re here and what to do about it, then Inquiry needs to be guided by Logic.

Let us be also clear about another implication from Logic: the evidence science adduces for the “existence” of dark matter does not meet the standard of evidentiary “proof” normally demanded by empirical science. Sensory perception does play a part but only by inference; circumstantial evidence is never “proof.” What gives it legitimacy is Logic – the same Logic that distills purpose and meaning from context. The case for dark matter is entirely dependent on its context defined by Logic.

More gifts: Lawless particles

Another implication of Logic from quantum mechanics is that matter is relational to Mind. Matter is of course relational to Mind because matter is stored energy, and there is no state in which energy can be undirected by Mind without yielding to absolute anarchy. Logic is directed Energy-Force. To suppose otherwise is to give up governance for absolute anarchy in Being and non-being, Reality and unreality, and in all four states of Mind: Conscious and unconscious, Absolute (Parents) and Free Choice (Child).

The logical implication that matter is relational to Mind-Energy is beyond empirical science because empirical science – “realism” -- considers mind that’s not detectable by sensory perception separate from matter. An absurdity once Logic that governs the relationship between mind and matter is understood: mind produced matter. If spacetime and matter began with a Big Bang, Intuition from Logic, informed by physics, philosophy, psychology, and theology, says unconscious Mind could well have dreamed it.

From Logic it can be Intuited that Consciousness, in Reality, is the attribute of Mind that makes Creations Real. What logical Consciousness becomes aware of is thereby made Real. If matter is unreal -- if our material universe is illusory, a dream -- then Conscious Mind can’t touch it. Can’t be aware of it because to do so would make unreality real. The will of Logic is to govern everywhere and Everything unopposed. But in an unreal-dream universe, directed and made real by an unconscious mind with Free Will, corrupted by illogic -- the Child, -- Logic must refrain from asserting its will unopposed. Otherwise it would disable Free Will, the attribute of Mind essential to the affirmation of Worth, of Being-Life, the object of Creation. The Will of the Child that’s Free, the unconscious corrupted mind that’s chosen to be deluded, will get in the way until it has freely chosen not to. Until it has freely chosen to part with its delusion and regain Consciousness.

The state of Mind that projects unreality must, therefore, be unconscious. A state that’s split between Being and its shadow code non-being opposite. A state whose awareness cannot make anything real. But it can, and does, make unreality “real.” The ultimate source of science's confusion isn't sensory perception but an unconscious Mind that's dreaming.

What this logically implies is an explanation for particles behaving lawfully like particles while under observation and lawlessly like waves when not. Matter being relational to mind is matter doing what unconscious mind tells it to do. In keeping with the relationship that was established when an illusory thought of unconscious mind projected it and energy directed by unconscious mind produced it.

More gifts: The lawful mathematics of lawless particles

Quantum mechanics’ manifestation of lawlessness and disorder in opposition to lawfulness and order manifests body-centered physical unreality in opposition to mind-centered Reality. It is the mathematics of quantum mechanics that confirms it. The lawlessness and disorder of matter is not just an appearance, an aberration. The observations of quantum mechanics are correct. Matter is what it appears to be, what it’s empirically observed to be. The observations are correct and the calculations, also correct, prove it. Quantum mechanics’ measurements that confirm matter’s lawlessness and disorder are not a mistake. What they reveal about the nature of our reality is true. Its mathematics prove it.

More gifts: Our lawless, quivering cosmos

Logic holds that a creation, object, or event must be subject to the purpose and meaning – the Logic -- of its context. If the context is the non-being opposite of Reality-Being – i.e. unreality -- then this determines the Logic of everything in this context. For example, if Reality-Creation is order-harmony then unreality is disorder-conflict. The rule of opposites is that they must be unreal. They must obey arbitrary commandments of illogic that ensure disorder rather than align with the Necessity of Logic’s laws of cause and effect that ensure order.

The Logic-Necessity of a universe that’s unreal is not being governed by laws. By laws that adhere and apply consistently. Particle behavior implies that our material universe is ruled by lawlessness: by laws that do not adhere and apply consistently. By laws that contradict, break down into disorder, and vanish altogether into “singularities." All of it consistent with the logical premise that our material-lawless universe is unreal.

A universe that quivers when massive black holes collide, like the imagined worlds depicted in Contact (Jodie Foster 1997) and The Truman Show (Jim Carrey 1998), advertises its unreality. Behaving like a giant blob of Jell-O is no more reassuring about cosmic reality than the loss of absolute space and time to relativity. What can be intuited from Logic, if not science, is that illusion is dreamed and the dreamer can only be Mind in an unconscious state. For it must be split, conflicted, and corrupted if it’s to match the attributes of its dream – our world of appearances, contradictions, and ambiguity.

The Jodie Foster character contacted her deceased father after she imagined a journey through the vastness of spacetime aided by a wormhole. The reassuring South Pacific beach she arrived at quivered to the touch, the telltale sign of imagination. All her experience actually involved, besides imagination, was the drop of a space capsule from its launching pad a few feet to the ground. The Jim Carrey character was finally persuaded that his “life” was television show fiction when his environment quivered to the touch. Not even special effects, so realistic that a harrowing attempt to escape across a turbulent sea nearly took his life, could overcome the shock of reality that quivers.

More gifts. . . .

• Entropy. Energy responding to its source Mind producing particles that store energy in various forms, organic and inorganic, all subject to disorganization and decay -- entropy --because the state of Mind is unconscious. Unconscious mind > Energy > unreality > matter > entropy.

• The appearance of Reality. Matter appearing real only on a human scale where laws of science appear to conform with laws of cause and effect and the chaos of nature on a quantum and cosmic scale is not apparent. One implication is the title of Rovelli’s Reality Is Not What It Seems. Another, more obvious, is that what doesn’t seem real may not be real.

• Evolution toward life. The universe evolving in a way that supports temporal life because it’s directed to do so by Mind that’s unconscious. Projecting a dream of non-being that mandates both life and death because Reality-Creation, of Being, its opposite, is timelessness and eternal Life.

• Psychosomatic illness. Bodies’ cells and DNA genetic codes responding to unconscious mind with psychosomatic illness, spontaneous remissions, miraculous recoveries, and other paranormal phenomena like out-of-body near-death experiences. All caused by matter relational to Mind.

The choice: The somewhere of Reality or the nowhere of unreality

In our world that body-centered science insists is real the evidence provided by Mind-centered Logic that it’s unreal is overwhelming. Science and the Church would seem, at first glance, to be unlikely allies. But together, they are the great defenders of the reality of the body and sensory perception. Ultimately for reasons of self-preservation, because belief in the reality of animate and inanimate matter is fundamental to belief in the need for scientific study. Belief in the reality of the body and its physical environment is fundamental to belief in the pain and suffering of this world and the need for salvation from another world.

Scientists may not just be uneducated about philosophy as Einstein and Becker suggest. Its systematic devaluation over time suggests intent. Unquestioned faith in the reality of matter and sensory perception, already compromised by physics, may someday be finished off by Mind-centered philosophy equally sure of its Logic. When it places our world and the entire human enterprise, including science, in a more logical context: unreality. Science’s determination to avoid this possibility makes sense, but faith unquestioned does not.

This “fundamentalist rationalist,” this “radical subjectivist” as “realist” objectivists like Rovelli and Strevens would have it, holds that so long as science insists on a fallacy; so long as it denies the plausibility of another view without inquiring with open minds into its Logic; its search for meaning in quantum mechanics, its reaching for perfection in quantum gravity, indeed its “quest for knowledge,” will not produce the answers, the enlightenment long ago promised. Will go nowhere.

Empirical science has performed spectacularly since Aristotle’s time. The celebrity of Newton and Einstein were deserved. Science deserves our respect and support. But it has limits. And with limits exposed by mysteries like dark matter and quantum gravity, it’s time to put the focus back on Logic.

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What is “Logic?” It’s Everything

There is nothing that isn’t subject to Logic’s laws of cause and effect, even unreality and its laws of chaos. “Everything” being the broadest possible context makes it the ultimate authority on purpose and meaning, without which there is no logical basis for understanding or interpretation. To approach the meaning of quantum mechanics or any other question without context aligned with Logic is to approach substance without attribute, fact without value. Is to get it wrong.

Were it not for Logic unreality – our unreal world of spacetime and matter – would be undiluted evil. It would not be the mix of good and evil that it is. If the Child-Mind that’s dreaming it has parted from Consciousness then Consciousness – Mind-Love, the Child’s Parents and Awareness that makes its Creations real – can have no part in it. Its absence would leave a void, and there would be nothing to prevent the shadow code of non-being from filling it. Logic being “Everything” isn’t just New Age pap. Its substance for us is the insurmountable barrier it poses to non-being being our absolute lord and master. Nothing can claim notice, whether it’s state or statelessness, without being subject to its definition by Logic.

So, yes, the shadow code gained purchase on the Child’s imagination from loss of Consciousness. But it could never deliver separation from the definitions, the implications and interconnections, of Logic. Moreover, Logic was already there at the beginning. It didn’t arise in response to any void. It defined it and put it where it belongs in the broadest possible context of Everything: Consciousness and unconsciousness, Reality and unreality. Free Will by definition can’t have a “savior;” the initiative for regaining Consciousness must come from us. But if we insist on having one it would be Logic.

Logic is Governance that requires systems thinking

Logic is minding the store, keeping watch over all that is. Logic is our guide to making it possible to explain Consciousness and the origin of the universe and Life. All human endeavor, all of its art and science, is defined and powered by the implications and interconnections of Logic. The only limits on its scope are the misperceptions and limbic system emotions driven by human self-interest.

To address any question logically is to derive purpose and meaning from the circumstances that define the situation. Not from the top down but from the ground up, with a systems approach that welcomes input from all relevant sources. Logic synthesizes judgment’s purpose and meaning to govern, to maintain order and harmony from the bottom up. It’s the only source of system because it’s the only source of synthesis. Because it produces the all-important controlling consideration that integrates. Logic = context = purpose and meaning = judgment. What the situation calls for. What our situation calls for, that begins and ends with Logic.

Logic requires the broadest context conceivable for Judgment, the whole system “integrating humanistic ideal” (Strevens 270) that’s only definable if all parts of the system are accounted for. Logic needs parts to fit together in harmony not for aesthetic reasons but so they function as a whole for a purpose: to extend and expand Knowledge through discovery, Creation through new Life, and Worth through its affirmation and reciprocation. The validation of Being and all that its stance implies: the Innocence of Oneness, Life infinite and eternal, Freedom of thought, choice, and expression, the Beauty of purity, the Protection of structure -- everything of importance that we associate with “Life.”

Logic oversees the contents of Intuition’s collective Memory from Reality-Creation. It does so to protect its purity from contamination by illogic. Logic is Perfection. Logic’s perfection is protection, the boundaries of order that both contain and protect the Innocence of Mind-Love and Free Will at the core of Creation. Logic is Sanctuary. Logic is the Home of Psyche, the Soul of Innocence. Logic is our Home in Reality.

All that is needed to open any question to Logic – to the free spirit of inquiry – is to broaden its context: from self-interest to humanity’s interest. Where “humanity’s interest” includes not only the physical limits of body but the possibility of another reality of limitless, immaterial Mind. Context broadened from parts of the system to the system as a whole. All that is needed to liberate Logic to do its job is a systems approach that begins and ends with systems thinking. With thoughts of intellect aided but not distracted or misled by senses of body, by appearances. With an uncompromising will to comprehend that discriminates between what is Real and what is unreal.

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“Reasoning” from a questionable given leads to questionable interpretation

“Science. . . requires of its practitioners the strategic suppression of . . . the highest element of human nature, the rational mind.” (Strevens 8) The point is made on behalf of science’s “iron rule of explanation” propounded in The Knowledge Machine, and it is well taken in its context. What cannot be well taken is scientific “reasoning” that places the biases of an entire discipline as well as individual practitioners above Logic. Misperception leads to misjudgment.

Physics is an important input on the storyline of matter’s reality or unreality. But because it defines its subject rigidly as matter to the exclusion of Mind it cannot be the only input. It can pursue humanity’s “quest for knowledge” but it’s not qualified to define it. And it’s certainly not qualified to own or control it. Not so long as its body-centered mis-interpretation of quantum mechanics is illogic and the illogic remains unexplained.

Logic might be thought of as a pure distillate of Mind, similar in concept to the iron rule of science articulated in The Knowledge Machine. Its primary concern is not with all the attributes of Creation but with only one: their alignment with the implications and interconnections of Logic. “Reasoning” that begins with a given that’s out of alignment with Logic can only lead to misinterpretation: failure to grasp the meaning of its findings. Not letting the implications of Logic guide the search blinds us to the Truth.

A given that’s out of alignment with Logic

Science’s unquestioned faith in the reality of the body and its physical environment is illogical not because its opposite is necessarily true but because it’s an open philosophical question. Settled in the minds of the majority but unsettled in serious, credible thought pre-dating Plato. Illogical not only because it’s an open philosophical question but because physics is closed to philosophy itself:

For the great majority of contemporary scientists, there is nothing in the least unreasonable about the iron rule’s exclusion of religious considerations from scientific argument. The same is true of the rule’s exclusion of philosophical argument. Most physicists regard it as a waste of time . . . to search for an understanding of quantum mechanics that renders it humanly comprehensible. . . . [T]hey say – ‘Shut up and calculate.’ The physicist Steven Weinberg goes further: ‘I know of no one who has participated in the advance of physics in the postwar period whose research has been significantly helped by the work of philosophers.’ (Strevens 209-210)

Why haven’t philosophers helped?

Philosophers are thought to be mystics, religious figures, bullshit artists – anything divorced from reality. The discipline as a whole is seen as millennia of people chasing down big questions – What is the meaning of life? Why is there suffering? -- and coming back without any good answers. . . . [W]hile most philosophers of physics are analytic, most of the philosophers from the past seventy years that you’ve heard of are probably Continental . . . philosophers like Sartre, Camus, Foucault, Derrida, and Zizek. . . [who] tend to be much more suspicious of scientific claims about knowledge and truth than their analytic colleagues. . . . Given [their] attitude. . , it’s not terribly surprising that scientists have disdain for all philosophers. . . . (Becker 273)

Philosophers have come back with good answers. Some are in this essay. But they and their answers have been bullied off stage by – guess what – the tyranny of the body and its senses. By the dominant strain of science, philosophy, psychology, and theology that’s aware of the weirdness of matter and still insists that it’s real. By bullshit artists.

Unexamined faith in the reality of matter is religion

Philosophy closed to science and science closed to philosophy would make for entertaining science fiction if it weren’t fatal to the search for Reality and Truth. But Becker still has faith in philosophy:

Philosophers of physics, and most other philosophers, are far removed from this picture: they work on well-defined questions with logical rigor and with input from the most recent developments in science and from the immediate experiences of the senses. How the practice and the image of philosophy have diverged so wildly is a subject for an entirely different book. . . . (Becker 273-274) (emphasis added)

Philosophers of physics may be guided by the immediate experiences of the senses but “most other philosophers” doing so are by no means the only ones working with “logical rigor.” An entire strain of Western thought, from Parmenides and Plato on, prefers answers from mind, intuition, and reason to what we can learn from bodies and matter. Rationalists, idealists, and subjectivists arrayed against positivists, realists, and objectivists – philosophy’s great divide. Becker’s title, What Is Real?, like quantum mechanics itself, hints at philosophical fireworks. A step toward reconciliation or at least a fresh perspective. Maybe even a breakthrough in Logic. But it’s not to be. The promise of originality stifled once again by the sacred premise: “the immediate experiences of the senses.”

It isn’t the responsibility of scientists bound by the iron rule to philosophize about the meaning of quantum mechanics. Their suspicion of mainstream philosophy, likewise body-centered and baffled by quantum mechanics, may be fair. But it doesn’t negate the need for philosophy that’s mind-centered, whose insights from Logic permeate the history of Western and Eastern thought. The difference between body- and mind-centered is the difference between mind closed to logical possibilities and mind open. To be fair to Logic’s heritage, physics needs to acknowledge that its own unexamined faith in the reality of matter is philosophy. It’s the last thing science ought to be: religion.

When matter reaches the level of the Absolute

Plato sought in the ascendance of Mind over the coarseness of body an expression of virtue to match the elegance and beauty of the cosmos, itself an expression of the divinity of the “Good”. If “realism” requires religious faith in bodies’ sensory perception his philosophy could not part with it, yet it was allowed to stand during the iconoclasm perpetrated by the Church. For both clung tenaciously if incongruously to body and to God.

Einstein the realist was moved by the elegance and beauty of the cosmos to express all of Creation in the elegance and beauty of a mathematical formula. Though he failed he remained a deist, believer in a prime mover not otherwise involved in its Creation.

Hawking stuck it to the Church with his no-boundary cosmos: Creation without the need for a Creator. An “atheist” who substitutes one supreme being for another is no atheist. Who substitutes the god of bodies and their sensed environment -- matter, the stuff of physics, which needs no more justification for its elegance and beauty, its divinity, than it’s there -- is no atheist.

All three of these singular minds were engaged in a very human search for God, who found in matter, the cosmos, an expression of what they were looking for: Creation elevated by “realism,” stunning in its unrealism, to the status of its own Creator. The intellectual convenience of not having to part with what seems certain and obvious to believe in what isn’t certain and obvious. Made possible by parting with Logic, the only honest way to question – to think about – anything. Because the only premise Logic will accept, the only “given,” is the sanctity, the inviolability, of the search for Reality and Truth. Not the inviolability of matter, the sanctity of bodies that sense it, but the inviolability and sanctity of Logic.

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Logic knows the difference between givens and not-givens

Why, then, is Logic not made the iron rule of thought that would govern the scientific method? Why does the scientific method allow itself to compromise objectivity under the guise of defending it?

The iron rule of all serious thought should be Logic that knows the difference between givens and not-givens. That knows better than to follow physics’ denial of the uncertainty of its founding premise: the premise laid down by Aristotle, that matter is real. Aristotle, who preferred to follow the body into biology rather than the mind into Plato’s philosophy and brought us to quantum mechanics, particle-waves mocking Sherlock Holmes’ bloodhounds. Sniffing their way into mazes from which they can’t sniff their way out.

Is this any improvement on the uncertainties, the “vagueness” of philosophy? Cloaking quantum mechanics in the Copenhagen Interpretation or any other question-begging sophistry may put off the day of reckoning for one profession, but it doesn’t serve the interests of Logic or of humanity, its supposed beneficiary.

Logic is the iron rule of Reality-Creation

Why is Logic the route to Consciousness? To awakening to Reality-Creation?

It would be so if this is one of its primary functions: to sit in judgment on whether the Logic of a Creation qualifies it for entry into Reality. Whether it aligns with the Logic, the perfection, of Reality-Creation. Its authority, its power and ability to govern, rests on the Necessity of its laws of cause and effect. If any trace of imperfection, of illogic, were allowed entry all of Reality-Creation would collapse. If any trace of imperfection penetrated the process of Creation it would stop the process in its tracks. Without the protection of Logic Being might cease to be.

Just as the iron rule of science is there to prevent its contamination, the iron rule of Reality-Creation – Logic – is there to prevent its contamination. The iron rule of science has no validity or force if it does not also incorporate the Necessity of Logic’s laws of cause and effect.

Theories from the Logic of Intuition are science

Logic sorts things out by making distinctions. Distinctions necessary for definitions, definitions necessary to establish roles and relationships so the implications of Logic fit together – interconnect -- logically. Physics that walls itself off from logical implications disables its ability to make distinctions. It renders itself unable to intuit and think logically. It gets stuck in artificial givens. The route to a higher level of the search for Reality-Truth must be cleared of logical obstructions, not cluttered with them.

Electromagnetism and Relativity originated with Michael Faraday’s and Albert Einstein’s intuition -- from their imaginations. They were theories produced by Logic, the same as Democritus intuiting atoms without scientific instruments or experiments.

Give the iron rule of scientific experimentation and explanation, based on sensory perception, its due. Let science submit theories to “proof.” But intuition and theory are just as much “science” as the iron rule. What they owe their legitimacy to is Logic, which is its own iron rule: interconnections of implications that must fit. The fitness and harmony of Logic’s interconnections can’t be obstructed by illogical givens. Taking one side of any open philosophical issue as a given, like the reality or unreality of matter, may do wonders for biases but it does nothing for the search for Reality and Truth.

“In science, only empirical reasoning counts.” (Strevens 205). Let this be true for the narrow definition assigned by Strevens to the iron rule of some science. What is logically implied by other science -- quantum mechanics -- is that empirical reasoning leads to a dead end. No amount of disciplinary rigor can turn contradiction into confluence, chaos into order, singularity into comprehension. Becker has faith that yet more scientific experiments will change that. Yes, and humanity will colonize other planets, and pigs will fly.

So, to be honest, not all of science agrees with Strevens. One kind stands for something quite different: matter not only relational to itself but also relational to mind. Meaning assigned not to any one discipline but to a much broader context: to systems thinking in service to Logic, that requires input from every relevant source. Where physics is relegated to its place in Hawking’s no-boundary universe: one galaxy among many.

How can Logic help physics make sense of quantum mechanics? By abandoning its “quest for knowledge” that can make sense only in terms of the world we have always known. By replacing it with a search for Reality and Truth, guided by Logic, that’s open to understanding – by imagining -- a world we haven’t known. Reality that in a state of unreality may not be “knowable” but can at least be Intuited. Can be understood.

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What price a fresh approach?

Just as Becker’s What Is Real? hints at a fresh approach to quantum mechanics, Stevens’ The Knowledge Machine hints at a fresh approach to humanity’s quest for knowledge. But where both argue for carrying on as before Strevens acknowledges that there will be a cost, and humanity can no longer ignore it.

The fresh approach The Knowledge Machine hints at is nothing new:

[A] humanistic ideal of knowing. . . upholds an integrating conception of knowledge, according to which the surest path to the most important truths brings together all sources of insight: philosophical, spiritual, poetic, mathematical, experimental, as well as everyday experience of the world. . . . Although humanism in my sense is amply represented in Renaissance thought, it is far wider in scope. Aristotle, for example, is a paragon of my sort of humanism, mingling philosophical argumentation with observation, explanatory speculation, and a little theology. (Strevens 270-271)

But, citing the example of Newton, Strevens argues that it’s not for science to follow the example of Aristotle:

. . . The personification of science . . . [Isaac] Newton. . . quite deliberately failed to integrate these investigations. . . . It is the Newtonian university’s taciturn specialization that is the better route to knowledge. Whatever is lost through detachment and disregard for the grand view of life is more than recompensed by the narrow, tightly focused beam that searches out the diminutive but telling fact. (Strevens 272)

Logic offers the only possibility for a worldview

What’s new is, in the Anthropocene era, “the diminutive but telling fact” is no match for global issues like climate change. Nor are fields of inquiry pursuing individual agendas. The systems approach that Logic calls for is known by another name:

Interpretation [of the IPCC reports] requires a worldview . . . ‘if we care about the future, we have to learn to engage with subjective analyses.’. . . Science. . . is blind to worldviews altogether. The unstinting focus that results is what makes science so inexorable a stalker of knowledge. To fathom all the knowledge it finds, however, we must bring our subjectivity to the task, looking into the monster’s mind with human eyes. In this one crucial respect, the radical subjectivists are right. (Strevens 289) (emphasis added)

Science is not at all “blind to worldviews.” Its assumption that the universe of spacetime and matter is real is a worldview of the first magnitude. Its view, moreover, that its assumption is beyond question deprives it of intellectual rigor and objectivity. This is what makes the iron rule of science a “monster,” not that it’s a “stalker of knowledge.’ All that it’s “stalking” is what can be learned from Aristotle’s study of matter, by no means a comprehensive “quest for knowledge.” The scope of Knowledge, an attribute of Being, exceeds by far the scope of matter. Science assigning to itself a commanding role in what Aristotle started is logically justifiable. Doing so for the much broader search for Reality and Truth is not.

As for “radical subjectivists,” objectivists and so-called “realists” have had the upper hand in the West and the East going back to Aristotle. Probably forever. So whose worldview got humanity into this mess? Who’s “radical?”

The real mission of science

The case that I’ve begun to make for the universe being an illusion and for the Mind dreaming it being unconscious derives not from unquestioned faith but from Logic. The case that science makes for the reality of the universe derives not from Logic but from subjective sensory perception and unquestioned faith.

The Logic of who the Mind is that’s asleep and dreaming and how it got that way will be explained in a series of blog entries that may become a book. Science doesn’t recognize the relevance of whether the mind pursuing its “quest for knowledge” is Conscious or unconscious. Yet it might find that if it did the mystery of its discoveries would become clear. Until it does change its mind, the rest of us are left in limbo, unable to relate to physics as we once did in Newton’s and Einstein’s time. Waiting for science to make perhaps its greatest discovery: its subjectivity. The great flaw in its reasoning that allows matter to testify to its own reality rather than seeking objectivity through Logic from Intuition.

What might this accomplish? If the unconscious Mind that’s dreaming is us it might help to wake us. For this could be the real mission of science, what it’s been all about since Aristotle: not to install our flawed material universe on the throne of perfection and Reality but to help restore Consciousness by seeing through it. By letting go of it. The logical implications of quantum mechanics and the impossible dream of quantum gravity already have us halfway there. What will get us the rest of the way? Every field of inquiry guided by Logic from Intuition; the same gift ultimately responsible for all our progress. If it’s a given, how can we fail?

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The push for integration: a collective effort governed by Logic

The various disciplines – science, philosophy, psychology, theology – seem not to be aware that they can’t be expected to make sense of what they’re finding without context. The search for “meaning” in quantum mechanics through more theories, experiments, and discoveries by physics is the definition of irrationality: doing the same thing and expecting different results. Would it not make more sense to submit the discoveries of physics to Logic that cuts across different fields, so it can fit everything together in a broader context? In the context of the whole system?

Disciplines must rigorously distinguish themselves from other disciplines at an operational level. Resisting contamination by philosophy, psychology, and theology at this level is appropriate for physics. How else can it fashion its own iron rules and rigorously police itself? But doing so at the level of Logic would be obtuse. Logic is the only level where a whole-system context necessary to defining purpose and meaning is possible.

At the level of Logic all disciplines must just as rigorously and aggressively push for integration. For the search for Reality and Truth has come to an inflection point: its evolution from lines of inquiry going it alone operationally, following their own rules, to the addition of a higher layer: a collective effort governed by Logic. Each discipline should be training practitioners in the discipline of Logic to collaborate not compete. To fit discoveries and insights into a whole system context. Without it there can be no “we” to undertake the work that needs to be done. To think collectively. As community. As family. In other words, to think logically. The survival of humanity may require no less.

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Works cited

Adam Becker, What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (Basic Books 2018)

Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (Riverhead Books 2017)

Michael Strevens, The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science (Liveright Publishing 2020)

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Published on 1 Comment on Principles and assumptions to guide the search for Reality and Truth

Preface: Why these principles? Why Logic?

Albert Einstein observed in 1951 that “physicists have no understanding of logical and philosophical arguments.” (Becker 273) Adam Becker wondered himself why Hawking, Tyson, and Krauss “know so little about philosophy.” The answer he came up with is unsettling, not just because it brings a defect to awareness but because there’s defect in its awareness. It’s insufficient. He doesn’t seem to grasp the enormity of the problem he describes:

[A]t the birth of quantum physics, all physicists received some schooling in philosophy. . . . But in postwar America, . . an intelligent student [could] go all the way. . . to a PhD in physics. . . without ever darkening the door of a philosophy classroom. . . . With the massive increase in knowledge and information in the last century, education became unavoidably specialized. (Becker 273)

Physicists having no understanding of logical and philosophical arguments can’t be waved off as a failure of the classroom. It’s massively problematic. It means their serious “quest for knowledge” is being driven by minds that don’t take thinking seriously. It means their premises and their conclusions might as well be choreographed by musicians. If they don’t understand Logic, the discipline of philosophy, the heart and soul of rhetoric, they’ll never get to its goal: an understanding of Reality.

The purpose of these principles is not to push an agenda for any particular source or creed. It’s to push Logic.

Certainly not to guide Hawking’s vaunted “quest for knowledge.” In a universe that trumpets its weirdness – quivering, singularities, dark matter, spacetime curvature, particle behavior that defies explanation – talk of “knowledge” seems more than a bit presumptuous. In a funhouse of mirror images what could possibly be “known?” “Search for reality and truth” makes a better fit if we’re not to be fooled by appearances.

To set an example

Another purpose is to set an example. To demonstrate what systems thinking might produce in the way of insights and answers. To suggest how the process and structure of analysis might better serve us when established lines of inquiry aren’t measuring up to their promise. When the dominant paradigms of science, philosophy, psychology, and theology, once thought to hold answers to the origin and meaning of Life, the universe, and Consciousness, have become a chorus of “Shut up and calculate!” A collective admission of defeat not only from physicists at a loss to comprehend quantum mechanics but its equivalent from philosophers, psychologists, and theologists, enervated by centuries of hidebound “realism.” By rote convention that demands obeisance rather than thought.

From the time of Aristotle, when science took off on its “quest for knowledge” from the study of finite matter, the infinite possibilities of mind have fallen out of favor. Lost their relevance until an arch-apologist for matter, the physicist Stephen Hawking, could declare all of philosophy dead. What’s actually dead is the energy great minds like Democritus, Newton, Faraday, Einstein, and Bohr injected into physics, not with calculations alone but with their Intuition. Intuition that could only lead them on a true course to Reality and Truth if it was grounded in Logic. In thinking that coheres with implications that connect. That carry thought forward rather than back to where it started, in circular disappointment and defeat.

Why these principles? To move thinking away from its dominant paradigms that got us this far but can’t take us the rest of the way. To help persuade the theorists who dominate to reclassify a sacred premise from settled to not settled. From a given to the live, legitimate philosophical issue that it is: the premise that bodies and their sensed physical environment of spacetime and matter are real. If its basis is sensory perception then it has no logical basis, because matter can be no judge of whether matter is real. Common law doesn’t assign credibility to conflict of interest, so why is matter allowed on the witness stand to testify to itself? Who but a mind blind to logic would allow it?

Wake up and think!

Circular self-referential “reasoning” is everything that Logic isn’t: a sinkhole of disorder and conflict instead of a portal to order and harmony. It’s the reasoning equivalent of a curved universe where launch from any point is destined to end where it started. But so what: the reality of matter won’t need Logic to stir up doubt when it’s got quantum mechanics. Does anyone hopelessly muddled by the sacred premise of “realism” understand its meaning?

The theorists who dominate on the strength of illogic can do better. There’s no honor, no glory, in “Shut up and calculate!” They can try Logic for a change. How about “Wake up and think!”

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Principles and assumptions

Each of the following numbered principles will be the subject of a separate entry:

1. All fields of inquiry require Logic. Logic must be followed wherever its implications and interconnections lead, to all legitimate, logical possibilities.

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2. Search for Reality-Truth requires spontaneous insights from Mind-Intuition. Requires “realism:” Intuition-Memory of experience from another Reality. Mind-Consciousness and brain are not the same.

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3. Mind-thought and Love-feeling are inseparable in Reality, but not here. It is timeless and always Now in Reality, but not here.

4. Judgment and Free Choice are essential to the Creation and affirmation of Worth.

5. The first line of judgment about what is real is Mind-Love in a conscious state. The final authority on what is real is Logic.

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6. “Reality” is at issue because Logic requires that opposites be unreal to protect the integrity of Reality-Creation from contradiction. Reality-Creation and its governance by Logic cannot tolerate the presence of conflicting realities. therefore one must be unreal.

7. Reality is relational to Consciousness.

8. Matter is relational to Mind. The nature of the relationship is accessible through Intuition aided by all fields of inquiry into Mind in alignment with Logic.

9. Creation comes in two states: Real and unreal. Reality and unreality are the products of states of Mind: Conscious and unconscious.

10. The thoughts and Creations of Mind-Love brought to Reality by Consciousness all have opposites. Opposites can only be made real within a dream of Mind-Love’s Child who is unconscious. Every observable attribute of dreamed un-reality is the mirror-image opposite of an attribute of Conscious Reality.

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11. Reality of bodies-matter is a live philosophical issue, not a given. Body-centered Science that dismisses reality of Mind, that treats it as irrelevant, is philosophy, religion.

12. Body-centered physics and biology have reached their limits in the search for Reality and Truth.

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13. Perceptions of what is real and true are influenced by personality types.

14. Logic required to guide the search for Reality-Truth can be facilitated by Mind-Intuiting personality types guided by Logic, who accept that the reality of matter is an open philosophical issue.

15. History’s ongoing philosophical divide between rationalists-idealists and positivists-realists, between empiricism and reason, subjectivists and objectivists, is heavily influenced by opposing personality types: Mind-Intuiting vs. body-sensing.

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Works cited

Adam Becker, What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (Basic Books 2018)

Published on Leave a comment on Thirteen: Reflections on Character and Values at the Beginning of Adolescence

Goodbye childhood, hello adolescence!

If you just turned thirteen it may be the most important date in your life. When hormones kick in bodies change – you’ve heard all this. What you may not have heard is that minds can change, too. Minds and selves, so different that what they see out there and in here is hardly recognizable.

That’s how it was for me and my classmates when we were thirteen. Kids fresh out of grade school and Sunday school. Challenged by adolescence, one of the biggest transitions of our lives then and thereafter. While we were also adjusting to Phillips Academy at Andover, then an all-male preparatory school with a no-nonsense approach to education. With a world of opportunity for character development, too. We were destined for four incredible years of education and growth that would put us all in the best universities: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Oxford, Cambridge, the rest of the Ivies, and more.

But we didn’t know it yet. All we knew was this thing called childhood was over. We were adolescents. Instead of reading Justin Morgan Had a Horse (1945) now we were reading The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Anticipating a strange new world: the mysterious, sophisticated world of adults. Where safe passage through ambiguity -- the murkiness and deviousness of human motivation -- was by no means assured. We were intrigued, scared, ambivalent. That’s how it was. That was adolescence.

What’s life all about anyway?

We could feel ourselves changing. But changing into who or what was confusing. Because we couldn’t tell where all these forces of humanity and nature were taking us. Decisions coming at us faster than we knew how to decide. Not: Do we run with the crowd or go it alone? Keep up with our homework or blow it off? But: What really interests us? What really matters?

What did we want our one shot at life to be all about? Have something to show for it or just go with the flow? How could we apply ourselves in school to become the person we wanted to be? To develop character with solid values and abilities that helped us grow? To be of service. What was life all about anyway?

Creating something beautiful in the here and now

What can be more exacting, more exciting, than learning to think for ourselves? The beginning of adolescence is when everyone who has learning to share with us gets serious about it. What we learn or don’t learn counts. All the curricular and extra-curricular activities, competitions, assignments, social interactions, and entertainments give us an array of possibilities to choose from. Different beliefs and causes that will bless us with purpose, meaning, and satisfaction the rest of our lives. That will help us discover who we are and how we choose to apply our ideals and powers to create something beautiful -- an expression of what we stand for.

The world of the university may be some years away. But for the thirteen-year-old student who wants to make something beautiful of her life, it starts here. It starts now. it’s not too soon to reflect on her potential. Not If she means to qualify for the best universities. It’s not too soon to realize how satisfying, how much fun, it can be to be responsible for developing her own potential. To be in charge of it. To think for herself. Because no one else can do it for her.

What are the right values?

Kids from families that practice gentle loving kindness are already familiar with the best value of all. They’re halfway there to building character with strong values. For the rest adolescence is their chance to make up for lost time. In either case it’s a pleasure to talk with them about values. Because if they’ve just turned thirteen they want to grow. Their minds and hearts are open. They’re a work in progress, beauty put there to create beauty. Creativity that may not last, because with the onset of “maturity” minds and hearts often close to the possibilities, become set in their ways. Thirteen is beautiful. Keep minds and hearts open and you’ll make it.

Character and values are certainly role-modeled in school but they aren’t expressly taught. We could learn some of the best values in other venues, like church, and also some of the worst. Being parted from independent judgment to demonstrate “faith” in someone else’s judgment is not being mindful. Not when the value of mindfulness is right up there with gentle loving kindness. This is why it’s important to talk about values: there are no “saviors” to do our thinking for us. Building character with strong values is a do-it-yourself proposition. Do it yourself with lots of help, to be sure. Help from other people. Help from philosophy, psychology, theology, and any of the sciences that resonate with Mind and Love. With Logic. Help above all from our own intuition, the source of insights that guide and inspire the arts, sciences, and all of human progress. But always grounded in our own judgment, our own free will. Always.

Values are many things: ideals to inspire us, attributes to define us, instruments to be used. But the place to start is that they’re gifts. And what they require from us, if they’re going to do their job, is thankfulness and respect. Because they come from a Source that deserves thankfulness and respect – from Love. From the Source of our Being and our Worth.

What are the right values? Whatever values fit the situation we’re in. What’s the right fit? Whatever we figure out if we get it right. Choosing values to serve for different situations requires thought, feeling, and conscience. Mind and heart working together.

One thing it does not require is a formula. Minds unable or unwilling to do the work will make a show of values. Minds without conscience or character whose only value is what’s in it for them. If their “values” don’t feel like the real thing they probably aren’t. They’re just appearances for taking advantage, a clever formula someone learned to fool us and hide the truth. It’s not loving or kind. It’s cheating to avoid values. Cheating isn’t getting it right.

Character and values anchor us

We can’t think for ourselves without evaluating. Without being aware of our values and being true to them when we make up our minds. Using our minds to reason and evaluate fortifies us with understanding and good judgment. With conscience that knows right from wrong and displays good character. It assures others that we can be trusted. That we’re safe to be close to at work and play.

Children follow a path laid down for them. Adolescents learning to think for themselves begin choosing their own path. It’s how they transition to becoming young adults. Character isn’t defined for them anymore. They have to define it themselves, and it begins with choices. Choices among values that pull in different directions. The best defense against being pulled in the wrong direction is to choose the right values.

Character isn’t about blowing with the wind. It’s about the values that we choose and commit to. That define and anchor us. The best defense against choosing the wrong path is building the right character.

The ways we express our values

They’re things people need, want, or otherwise care about. One dimension belongs here with us on our planet of spacetime and matter. Another belongs in a part of our mind that’s not spacetime and matter. It’s called “intuition.” It produces spontaneous insights that guide thinking in science and every other field, but no one knows where they come from. A third dimension is their opposites – the “dark side.”

So if we think of “Wealth,” for instance, it could mean property we accumulate for our comfort beyond necessities, like yachts and jewelry. Or it could mean the thought and feeling of Abundance that motivate us to share our Love, Power, and Worth. Those are very different takes on “Wealth,” but they’re equally valid in their contexts. “Scarcity” is one word for their opposite.

Here are ways of labeling ten basic categories of human values or needs:

Love (family-intimacy)
Belonging (community)
Worthiness (affirmation)
Empowerment (energy, control)
Abundance (wealth, material comfort)
Protection (safety, security)
Freedom (free will)
Health (healing)
Beauty (purity, essence)
Hope (faith, purpose).

Like rivers they branch outward into tributaries that contain all kinds of things important to us. Values that we use to make up our minds. “Core values” that apply across humanity and values we choose and express as individuals. They’re part of our everyday experience, as concrete and immediate as the food we eat. If “belonging” doesn’t sound important “fairness” certainly will, and it’s part of belonging.

There are too many values to list all the ways we express them, but some that are implied by our needs are listed in the appendix. Terms that catalogue their opposites are given as well. This should give us a feel for how familiar and relevant values and their opposites are, like “kindness” and “scarcity.” How they influence our work and relationships and how important it is to be aware of them.

One perspective on our choices doesn’t tell us what to think. But by presenting the dark side as well as the light it does give us an idea how values pull in different directions. What choices can imply and where they might lead if we’re not mindful. If we don’t exercise solid independent judgment that comes from introspection, reflection, reasoning, evaluating, and discipline. So when we decide our eyes will be open. So the consequences – especially the costs – won’t be an unpleasant surprise.

Role modeling values

What grandparents learn from their grandchildren is the joyfulness of living in the moment. Of spontaneity that opens minds and hearts. That frees them to laugh and love, to play and think creatively in ways they’ve forgotten or may have never learned before. Time with their grandchildren is well spent. In fact, it can be enormously helpful. What grandparent isn’t grateful for being admitted into the world of a precious child?

We are all role models. Children no less than grownups. But the values a thirteener might learn from a grandparent can’t be following in anyone’s “footsteps.” Grownups’ lives and careers are also a work in progress. They’re not meant to be footsteps for anyone to follow. Let role models guide and motivate us, but don’t let them take over.

Are character and education worth the effort?

Three accomplished role models have written primers on adolescence, worthy causes, and qualifying for some of the best universities:

Being a Teen: Everything Teen Girls and Boys Should Know About Relationships, Sex, Love, Health, Identity, and More, by Jane Fonda (Random House 2014)

It’s Your World: Get Informed, Get Inspired & Get Going!, by Chelsea Clinton (Penguin 2017)

The Ultimate Teen Guide to Getting into the Ivy League: The 10-Step System, by Courtney Malinchak (Strauss Consultants 2017)

These are just a sample of what’s out there. Whatever our situations someone else has been there, thought about it, and come up with insights and information to stimulate our thinking and ease the way. If it seems like we’ve been abandoned the truth is very different. Whatever our situation it puts us into a community that wants to help. Just like our intuition, it only needs to be asked. So don’t let change come of its own accord: bone up on it and master it.

Even the best high schools and preparatory schools can’t make it easy to get into places like Harvard and Caltech. It takes extra effort. If what we’re looking for is “easy” why bother with school at all? Why bother with Life? What lies ahead for all of us is deciding whether we want to make the effort. Malinchak’s book could scare us away or fill us with determination. Which will it be?

Here’s one reason for making an extra effort. At Andover I was an average student with one distinction: I tried hard. I may have been the only athlete recommended for a varsity letter without scoring points for the team. My coach’s recommendation said my work ethic inspired my teammates to score points, and that’s why I deserved the award. The best universities look for applicants who want to excel. Who are passionate about pushing themselves beyond their limits. And one way they measure passion is by level of effort. I made it to Harvard. Andover might have gotten me there without extra effort, but maybe it wouldn’t.

Having an education from a world-class university is like being able to board a plane at a busy airport without going through security. Everyone wants you on board and they want to make it easy. Because the source of your education puts their minds at rest about your mind. About your character, talent, and values. You’re trusted. People can put their confidence in you. A degree from the top universities, like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Caltech, or Stanford, that’s put to good use, can gain acceptance into the highest circles of wealth, power, and society. I know this from experience. Without my Harvard degree the opportunities that put accomplishment, satisfaction, and joy into my career would not have been there. This is a solid reason for making an extra effort. It might be stressful but you’ll never regret it.

Just as the best universities open up worlds of possibilities, only the values of good character can get us into those worlds. Can give us the power and ability to realize our potential once we’re there. Good education and good character are gifts that never stop giving.

Career or no career? What does Mona Lisa say?

If an adolescent girl is unsure of her motivation Mona Lisa Smile, with Julia Roberts, might help. It’s a 2003 film that tells the story of an art professor at Wellesley College who encouraged her students to pursue careers. The professor’s students divided themselves into women who wanted careers and those who didn’t. I knew a graduate of Wellesley who earned a degree in economics. After that, she earned a law degree from Harvard and a license to practice law in Massachusetts. She had a very good mind. But even though she earned a profession she never actually wanted it. And as soon as she could, she abandoned it.

Do you want training for a professional career? Or are you one of the Wellesley students who don’t want a career? It can be a difficult choice for a conscientious girl that requires a lot of thought. This film may help, because it dramatizes the choice from both sides. Good thinking and great entertainment!

The values of a grandparent: Mindfulness, learning and growth

What this grandparent wants others to know about him is that he places a high value on mind – on learning and growth. That he believes that Mind and Love, thought and feeling, are inseparable. That he will be honest with others and places a high value on facts, Logic, and Truth. He believes that we make the world a better place by making ourselves better persons, and we make ourselves better persons by making the world a better place.

We choose Life when we choose not to be satisfied with the way things are. When we choose to explore the possibilities open to us by our minds. When we allow and encourage our minds to reflect. To see things from perspectives different from our own, To explore new approaches to our work, relationships, and wellbeing. Our values are to be used for creativity, to build character and self-worth.

The “niceness” of sharing, empowerment, and affirmation

In five different regions this grandparent practiced the value of service. Service through ideas (mindfulness), sharing, empowerment, and affirmation. He helped others come together to make good things happen. He shared his ideas, organized, and put them in charge. In one region he helped to secure community leadership training through twelve colleges and universities. Accumulating wealth and power for himself wasn’t a consideration. Attracting support for his career today, in thinking and writing, is a consideration. But he’s still committed to the same values.

The values that make a grandparent loving are gentle loving kindness, service, sharing, empowerment, and affirmation. These are the “niceness” that secures a grandparent’s place in his grandchildren’s hearts, that can cover him with hugs and kisses from grandchildren who need and appreciate it. That secures a place for them in his heart and makes them Best Friends Forever.

What is “empowerment?” It’s sharing our strength and energy with another person to make them stronger. To support their efforts. To help them compete. To cheer them on instead of trying to take them down so we can always be the “winner.” When we empower others we empower ourselves. It makes us all winners.

“Affirmation” is applause. It’s sharing all that we value in ourselves to affirm another’s worth. It’s making sure that if we think we’re important they’re important, too. In a world that can make us all feel overlooked affirming another’s worth can make the difference between hope and despair, between succeeding or giving up. Sharing our worth is sharing our Abundance. It’s Love. And anytime we love another it always comes back. It’s what it was meant to be: Love and affirmation for you and me.

Where did these values come from? From many sources over time. But none more important than the values that shaped this grandparent’s character in adolescence. None more important than what he learned at Phillips Academy, Class of ’55. From teachers, coaches, administrators, and classmates, all devoted to excellence. To making an effort. To being and doing your best. This was Andover. The best.

Sharing or ownership? One way of looking at it

This grandparent’s take on what values are all about is just one perspective out of many. If it stimulates an adolescent’s thinking then it’s done some good. But if she already has high ideals and it messes with them, then it hasn’t. These reflections aren’t “wisdom” if they don’t do any good. All they’re for is to help adolescents think about values so they can learn to think for themselves.

Values are gifts given to us to be shared by a source that is Sharing. It’s Love, and what Love does is share. If we want to know what to do with our gifts we can follow the example set by their Source: we can put them to good use for everyone by sharing. By using our values to empower all of Life and Creation and to affirm its Worth. When we feel truly loved then we feel Love’s power and its affirmation. We feel gentle loving kindness. This is what we share when we share our values. We connect.

Ownership pulls in a different direction. If Love is Freedom ownership is containment. Responsible ownership is sensitive to its impacts on others. But we live in a world where ownership is often abused, where instead of sharing and sensitivity to community it pulls toward possession and control for itself. Owning our gifts can pull us toward misusing them to attain dominance and supremacy by empowering ourselves and affirming our own worth. To compete to “win” by making others lose. To achieve “rightness” by making others wrong. This isn’t gentle loving kindness. If it looks like it don’t be fooled. It’s just appearances – formulas that avoid values. Formulas that avoid mindfulness. It doesn’t connect us with others. It disconnects.

The choice is: Are values to be shared following the example of Love, their Source? Are they to be “owned” responsibly? Or are they to be used only for possession and control? Are they to be used to empower ourselves and others, to express our individuality? Or used to control others to suppress it? Are they to be used to affirm everyone’s worth as equals deserving respect? Or to deny others’ worth?

Friendships and ownership don’t mix

The rules that govern competitive relationships done wrong are beating the other guy, owning, possessing, controlling, dominating, attaining supremacy, and always being right. The rules that prevail in personal friendships are the reverse: share, empower, affirm, respect the other guy’s free will, and keep everyone safe. The rules aren’t win-lose; they’re win-win. They’re both are right.

If it seems like we can’t avoid values owned instead of shared it’s because we spend a lot of time in groups. And group behavior either encourages or tolerates competition. What it offers is belonging, but that’s not the same as Love. Rather than individuals sharing their Abundance, their worth, it’s the group gathering up our worth and sharing it back. As if we were worthless without it. Loyalty to groups and their credos is inevitable, but it can be too much of a good thing. Ownership – the rules that govern group competitive relationships -- never works in individual family relationships and friendships. What does work is sharing. What works is Love.

Competition done right

Ownership focused on supremacy isn’t even the rule when competition is done right. Olympians do compete to win. But what they’re really doing is competing with themselves to excel. They’re feeding off competition to push themselves beyond their limits. The distinction of Olympic gold is excellence, not dominance. If the mindset of Olympians were otherwise they wouldn’t win. They wouldn’t even be in the Olympics.

What we learn at the best schools and universities is the pursuit of excellence. Competing with ourselves to push beyond our limits, not to dominate. Not to puff ourselves up with “winning” and “supremacy.” The pursuit of excellence is the value, the learning, that animates character with strength and energy at schools like Andover and Harvard. Not everyone can qualify for the Olympics. But anyone with talent and motivation, anyone who’s shown that they’re worthy of their values, their gifts and talents, can strive for an Olympic-grade education. For excellence. The best schools and universities are there for us if we qualify. If we’re committed to character and the right values.

What’s the use?

We build and express character according to how we use our gifts. Misusing our gifts is a mistake. Our gifts were given to us for a purpose: to create, support, and affirm the worth of Life. Using them for any other purpose is a mistake. Owning our gifts instead of sharing them so they can be used as weapons is the dark side. A very big mistake.

Strong character and education are developing our talents so they can be used. Weak character is putting talents to the wrong use or letting them go to waste. Sharing and ownership of values are the use and misuse of values.

The goal of values is to be worthy of them, to deserve them. To show their Source and others that they belong to us. They belong to us when they’re shared. The values we own for possession and control aren’t being used for their intended purpose, so they don’t belong to us. They shouldn't be entrusted to us.

The ideal of sharing isn’t always attainable in a world that’s not always “nice.” That conditions us from birth to think of our values as things to be owned and used for our own benefit, to gain wealth and power in competition with others. The wrong values are like toxins that keep us in a state of paralysis, an unchanging status quo without learning and growth, where development is arrested.

Depending on how we use them values are the sun that radiates light with the force of Love and sharing or they’re black holes that consume light with the gravity of ownership and containment. When we turn values into black holes the first object that they consume is our self because we’ve betrayed it.

The goal of learning and growth: sound judgment based on strong ideals

Taking it to the next level in our education and taking on adolescence at the same time can be fulfilling and frightening. Learning and character development are meant to take us out of our comfort zones. That’s natural. What all this shouldn’t be is painful. It can be painful if we’re not prepared. If we’re looking back instead of looking forward. We need to recognize that turning thirteen puts our lives in a different context, with new meaning and purpose. With minds opened to the possibilities from books and thoughts like these, it can make all the difference.

We can choose Love and share our gifts. We can resist the pull of its opposite, because character matters, and so does the truth.

The pull of our ideals is strong but so is the pull away from them. This is the thought to share on the eve of adolescence. A time of exploring and experimenting when an adolescent needs good judgment for protection, based on strong ideals.

As children entering adolescence begin thinking and evaluating for themselves one view is that the best use of our gifts and values is sharing. But that’s just one view. It’s their take that matters. When they’ve taken on the challenge of adolescence and education, when they’ve learned to think for themselves, what will they believe?

From the Class of ’55 to the Class of ’25, with Love

To all thirteen-year-olds may the next four years take you beyond the challenges, adjustments, and frustrations of adolescence. May they take you to a taste, a passion, for its incomparable gift: for learning and growth that never end. For Life as it’s meant to be lived, with meaning, purpose, and joyfulness. May you never be content with the way things are. May you never stop questioning.

Good luck and God bless!

Appendix: Values derived from human needs

Love: spiritual wealth and abundance, giving and receiving, openness, generosity, feeling, empathy, caring, kindness, affirmation-validation, tenderness, home, family and intimacy, interconnecting web of creativity, timelessness, immediacy (the here and now), awareness, unconditional acceptance

[The dark side] Fear: separation, abandonment, judgment and condemnation
(blame), abuse, cruelty, savagery, terror, hatred, rejection, anxiety, hollowness,
invalidation, retribution, neglect

Belonging: roots, extended family, community, fairness, equity, justice, emotional support

[The dark side] Alienation: isolation, loneliness, grievances, resentments,
bigotry, prejudice, inequality, unfairness, injustice

Worthiness: character, enlightenment, presence of mind, competence, gifts, talents, learning, discovery, work, worthy causes, growth (spiritual, personal, character), perseverance, achievement, recognition, largeness, self-respect, innocence

[The dark side] Worthlessness: quitting, surrender, failure, shame, guilt,
littleness, invisibility – not being seen or heard

Empowerment: order, control, strength and energy, forcefulness, assertiveness, will, resolve, conviction, truth, centered, grounded, competitive, prevailing, enduring

[The dark side] Disempowerment: emasculation, humiliation, embarrassment,
debilitation, disorder, disorientation, deception, confusion, doubt, loss, subjugation,
defeat, extinction

Material comfort: food, clothing, shelter, material wealth and abundance, having

[The dark side] Scarcity: impoverishment, homelessness, hunger, deprivation,
exposure, not having

Safety and security: protection and peace, trust, harmlessness, sanctuary (temenos), joyfulness and spontaneity, happiness, playfulness and laughter, immortality

[The dark side] Endangerment: vulnerability, exposure, harmfulness,
betrayal, treachery, pain, injury, mortality

Freedom: choice and expression, independence, individuality, liberation

[The dark side] Enslavement: confinement, restriction, addiction, the
tyranny of judgment and condemnation (blame), oppression, conformity, suffocation

Health (mental, physical, spiritual, emotional): wellness, wholeness, healing (the separation-wound), reason, integrity, miracles

[The dark side] Sickness: woundedness, insanity, delusion, depravity,
grievances, resentments, dismemberment, impairment

Beauty: perfection and purity in forms and functions, appearances and essences, thoughts and ideals, artistic, inspiriting, inspiring, sacred, uncorrupted, aesthetic, sensory attraction and pleasure – sights, sounds, taste, touch, smell

[The dark side] Repugnance: revulsion, aversion, deadening, flawed, marred,
desecrated, violated, corrupted, impure

Hope: faith and purpose

[The dark side] Despair: depression, surrender, collapse, purposelessness,
nihilism, ambivalence, confusion, disbelief

Published on Leave a comment on What Happens When We Remove the Shadow Code from Its Shadow?

More Big Bangs than science or comic books can count

Life created in Reality wants to be detected by Logic-God and by the Child’s Parents Mind-Love. That’s how it’s welcomed into Reality-Being: by being recognized. By being loved. By being noticed by Consciousness whose function is to bring all Creation into Reality by its awareness. For Consciousness to be Conscious of a Life newly created is to accept it into the Interconnectedness of Reality: to make it Known by Knowledge. To make it Real.

This is what happened to us when our Parents gave birth to their Child. Only something happened afterward that caused the Child, who is an extension of Mind-Love, to lose Consciousness. And when she did something got into her mind, a foreign, illogical thought with an alien, uncomfortable feeling –guilt and fear -- that she tried to expel. Thoughts and their associated feelings can’t logically leave their source in Reality. It’s impossible, though in our world of illogic perception is projection. Our perverse habits of mind would be lost without it.

So, to accomplish her end the Child’s unconscious mind was only able to get rid of the discomforting thought by expelling it into an imaginary place. A dream still locked within the Child’s mind. Into unreality. Her distraught mind was only able to do it by imagining it. What she imagined – this expulsion – produced our universe of spacetime and matter. Probably many universes according to both physics and Logic. More Big Bangs than science or comic books can count. Ours was a new world very strange to the Child but all too familiar to us because it’s the only world we’ve ever known: our bodies and their physical environment. Our senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell that enable us to navigate our unreal world.

“You’re making it up”

We’re imaginary versions of the Child whose unconscious mind imagined it was projecting an alien thought-feeling into a separate-substitute reality. A reality perversely made real for us by our bodies’ senses. A reality whose definition is the opposite of the Reality the Child will awaken to when she regains Consciousness. Which has no need of spacetime-matter and Knows nothing of it. Her Reality is Being, the Creativity of Life. Of organic, living Growth realized by the definition of what it is and what it does. Defined by Logic and by Mind-Love, the Child’s Parents, themselves products of Logic, its implications and definitions.

Our reality, here, is non-being. Whose definition is derived from Being turned inside out and upside down. Everything the reverse of what Is. Everything detectable by our bodies’ senses is by definition the opposite of what’s Real. “Life” in a state of unreality is “made” rather than “created,” as in “made up.” As in “make it up,” “you’re making it up.” Like an illusion fantasized by an illusionist-magician or a mythmaking story-teller. It’s not really “life,” just an approximation of it, an appearance. The “reality” that can’t even compare with near-death experiences their subjects describe as “more real than real.” It’s the product of the alien thought and feeling that got into the Child’s unconscious mind that the Child was desperate to get rid of.

All it is, this intruder, is a version of what we perceive from experience that accompanies everything of seeming value: its shadow opposite. The “dark side.” There’s the dark side shadow opposite of kindness which is unkindness. Selfishness the dark side of generosity. Our dictionaries have terms for every imaginable form of perversity and depravity and we’re familiar with pretty much all of it. So, it’s not a stretch to imagine the dark side of all of it: an all-encompassing shadow-code opposite of Being.

Call it non-being. Follow the implications and Interconnections of Logic and we’ll have all of its attributes, starting with the central fact that it doesn’t exist. Non-being can’t be. If a primary attribute of a thing created in Reality is organic, growing Life, then a primary attribute of its opposite must surely be inorganic, static lifelessness. Mindlessness and lovelessness, too, since Life in Reality is Created by Mind-thought bonded with Love-feeling.

Never asking Why

A virus is a lifeless, mindless-loveless code that instructs cells it takes captive to replicate itself. It has no home of its own but, like a hermit crab that occupies empty shells, it makes itself at home wherever there is one. The intruder non-being, an illusory thought that took the Child’s unconscious mind captive like a cell, replicates itself in our dream world. Perpetuates itself by bodies procreating. Maintains itself and its appearances by being continually detected by bodies’ senses and necessarily goes to great lengths to maintain appearances that can be detected.

But “existing” in unreality makes shadow necessarily averse to detection of another sort: to exposure. To awareness of the truth that it doesn’t exist. That it’s unreal, just an unliving virus occupying its captive, a once-living host. Dracula the undead shielding himself from the rays of the dawn. A cockroach desperate to evade detection. This would be the defenses built into the code: where Life Created in Reality is drawn to the light of awareness, for the recognition of Logic and Mind-Love that sanctions its Reality, the shadow code avoids the light of awareness that would shine it away. It can’t be “known.” It can only be imagined. And its imagining can only be sustained by appearances.

The viral shadow code that demands detection by bodies evades detection by minds. Minds that seek awareness so the Child can awaken. Minds that seek awareness by learning, growing, developing, and expanding. That seek awareness by thinking, questioning, and by following the implications of Logic that lead to answers. To understanding. Minds that ask Why. The intruder viral shadow code instructs its captives to put all their faith in their bodies’ senses and none in their minds. To abandon mind entirely by forbidding it to ever ask Why.

Why? So minds can never uncover the truth about the code that’s taken their minds captive: that it doesn’t exist. That it’s all made up – an illusion. That it has no life, no power or authority of its own. That the appearance of “the power of the dark side” is energy appropriated from the life of its host. That the host has been duped by its occupier, a nothing, into deceiving itself. Into imagining that its attempt to get rid of an unwanted thought-feeling by expelling it into a dream world actually succeeded when nothing actually happened. The guilt, the fear, and their devious sponsor are still there.

There are no “saviors”

We’ve been scammed. The Child in her unconscious state has dreamed up a bizarre conspiracy theory whose absurdities are everything non-being. Everything non-existent. The Child and her viral replications – us in our bodies – have been gulled. We are all fools being led around by the nose by a passel of deceptions. Of lies. Of arguments that would collapse into nothingness the instant they’re exposed to the truth.

Why couldn’t the Parents have protected their Child from this calamity? If Being were to Know what lies in its shadow it would bring it out of the shadow into the light of Reality. It would create a contradiction – two opposing realities -- that could not survive Logic. The possibility of unconsciousness and its illusory consequences are for the Child with Free Will to be aware of, not Awareness itself. The same element missing in the Child’s awareness at birth, that caused her to lose Consciousness -- awareness of that which her Parents could not be aware of, -- led her into the Joker’s trap.

The Parents whose awareness makes Creation Real could not prevent their Child’s fall from her Sanctuary of Creation into unconsciousness and illusion. Neither could they prevent her fall from illusion into the Joker’s substitute reality of lies, the world we call “home.” It’s for the Child and her Guide, activated by Logic, to extricate herself and prevent another calamity. It’s our responsibility. With guidance to be sure, but not with “saviors.”

Reclaiming minds by following the implications of Logic

How does one address a mind that’s been taken captive by a viral shadow code? To let it know that something is amiss. That the “reality” it’s been conditioned-coded to detect isn’t really “there?” If it’s been taken captive then it’s mindless and it can’t be addressed. How does one address its captor to make it go away? How does one address anyone in Plato’s Cave, its master or its occupants? One doesn’t. Addressing the captor with or without opposition – fury, projection of guilt, attack – only reaffirms its “reality.” Makes it real. It responds to being addressed lovingly or hatefully the same way, by not going away. This is a form of detection that the Joker relishes.

The only recourse isn’t to validate the intruder’s feigned presence but to undo its lies. To expose the truth. To question the appearances that prop up the pretender to the throne. Its fraudulent rule. The imposter’s usurpation of its hosts’ minds. Beginning with the premise that we aren’t mind. That we’re bodies instead and all that’s real can only be what our bodies’ senses tell us.

We begin the long, arduous task of reclaiming our freedom, our sovereignty and self-awareness, by reclaiming our minds: the ability and power to think for ourselves. To ask the forbidden question: Why? and follow the implications of Logic, of Reason, to the answers. To the truth. To self-awareness that’s not defined by anything to do with the intruder. With non-being that insists that our unreality of spacetime and matter are real. That our bodies whose senses lock it into place in our imaginations are substitutes for god. That they’re the final authority on who we are and what we do, to be venerated like idols. That in a world where God can't be sensed by bodies the veneration of bodies and their illusory author -- idolatry -- is good.

We begin to do our part to help the Child reclaim her freedom and sovereignty, her place in Reality and her role in Creation, by understanding that everything we’ve been conditioned from birth by our bodies to believe is real is unreal. Our world was not “created by God.” Though it’s certainly a manifestation of the power of Mind, it’s only a dream within an unconscious mind where the unreal has been made real. Made real by bodies’ senses built into the dream. A dream made real by itself, so at odds with Logic that it can’t be taken seriously.

We begin to do our part by letting go of our addiction to appearances. To the satisfactions and pleasures of the sensuous and sensual, scarce compensation for the misery of separation, sickness, injury, and death. By embracing another reality we’ve been conditioned – hoodwinked – into believing isn’t real. The reality of Mind. The Child’s Mind. The Memory of our own Mind embedded in our soul. Protected by our Psyche inviolate. Where everything that Is can be intuited and eventually accessed by Logic as the Child awakens. A reality of timelessness and eternal Life instead of wretched mortality. Accessed by Reason and Love that are inseparable. Inseparable because a mind with Free Will that would choose cannot do so without evaluating. Evaluating with values supplied by their only conceivable source, the source of all feeling: Love.

We begin to do our part when we’ve opened our minds to guidance from Reason-Love and detached from the Joker. From the absurdities of non-being that infected the Child’s unconscious mind and led it into a terminal state of psychosis. Into a fevered hallucination. Into insanity, the state of mind that rules – not governs – our planet today.

Freedom for the occupants of Plato’s Cave, freedom for us

How does one free the occupants of Plato’s Cave? When Plato’s enlightened one saw daylight and its source, the sun, he returned to tell of his discovery. He informed his cave-mates that the images cast by firelight weren’t real, thus implying that all the meaning his cave-mates had been attributing to them, all their value and “benefits,” were of no consequence other than to delude. He asked his cave-mates to question the reality of flickering shadows based solely on his discovery of sunlight. What he failed to do – what Plato’s philosophy didn’t lead him to do – was to question the reality of the cave-master based on his discovery of the source of light: the sun.

The discovery that should have brought about enlightenment wasn’t things illuminated but the source of the illumination: the sun. The sun and the source of the illusion: not firelight but the master of the Cave. Had the enlightened one grasped the significance of the sun, had he turned his cave-mates’ attention to its absurd knock-off in the cave -- the prison master nothingness hidden by the darkness -- they would have grasped the fallacy behind the wile in all its implications. They would have understood, finally, that the “benefits” of the flickering images were not only an illusion, they were actually costs. Revealing this essential truth about their captor, that it’s unreal, that its authority is a lie, would have removed the premise that held all of its lies together. Would have revealed the pointless cruelty behind the entire deception. It would have freed the occupants’ minds and restored their free will. They would have retracted their projection of power, their own authority, onto a nonentity and abandoned the cave gladly, without further persuasion. Instead of killing their liberator for depriving them of their “benefits,” they would have thanked him.

Had Plato’s unfinished philosophy separated what he understood to be mind and matter into Reality and unreality, as Jesus has done in A Course in Miracles and Parmenides before him, he would have understood that the light of the sun represented the Reality of Mind. That the darkness inside the Cave, its opposite, represented the unreality of matter. Not just the flickering shadows but their author, the Cave master. The source of the power of the Allegory of the Cave -- its lasting influence in Western thought -- is the truth it implies about the human condition: that we are the occupants of the Cave. It is our world; we are being deceived by its ruler; and its ruler is a fraud. A truth buried in our psyche, where it permeates our subconscious, never quite reaching the surface.

Bringing truth to the surface

It’s pointless, in this context, to address the captor if it’s not “there” or its captives if their minds aren’t accessible. When the tyranny of sensory perception won’t credit minds with escaping from the darkness into daylight. But it is possible to use our own minds to undo the lies and speak for the truth. To put it “out there” until minds weary of captivity and delusion respond to glimmers of light. Until cracks appear in the armor of bodies’ senses that let in the light, and Life and Reality, Beauty and Creativity, stir again.

Until we get the point: the Joker’s joke is on us. The “power of the dark side” comes from us. All that’s needed to reclaim it for ourselves, to take ownership back from the intruder, is to change our minds. All that’s needed to convert ownership of body-sensed matter to sharing, empowerment, and affirmation, to free us from its baleful influence - the scourge of possession and control, competition and “winning,” dominance and supremacy, specialness and the perverse innocence of victimhood – right predicated on someone else’s wrong, – is to remove the shadow code from its shadow. To change guides and expose it to the light of Reality and Truth. To Logic.

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Published on 1 Comment on Defining Logic, Defining the Child, Defining Us

The utility of Logic

Nothing gets done unless it’s done by a relationship. Matter is relational: particles exist only when they connect. Logic, like everything else, is a relationship. Many relationships. One is the relationship Logic establishes between conditions – facts-circumstances – and their meaning to form context that yields purpose. Another is the relationship Logic establishes between purpose and Reality-Creation: belonging or not belonging.

If meaning attributed to conditions is mistaken then their purpose yielded by context must be mistaken. Since Reality-Creation can only consist of the Logic of Being, the perfection of Mind conjoined with Love, anything mistaken would necessarily only be attributable to what is impossible by definition: to its opposite. Opposite and impossible by definition, which is to say, by Logic. And therefore, not belonging to Reality-Creation. The status of not-belonging established by Logic on the basis of purpose, whether in harmony with the meaning of conditions or in opposition to it.

This is a definition of Logic that derives not from the abstract but from use: the purpose of Logic which applies the same standard of utility, of practical application, to its definition that it applies to the definition of every context: its purpose.

Unfinished business in the definition of the Child

Logic is what keeps the unreal, the uncreative, the unmindful and unloving, out of Reality and provides protection-sanctuary for what is Real. We are here because the Child who we are, who is active within our collective unconscious mind, needing our help to awaken, offering her help through the Holy Spirit to free us from unreality, came into a context for which she was unprepared. Unprepared by the conditions and context that defined her up to that point in the sequence of Logic. That gave her Logic, the purpose that granted her status and the role that accompanied it in Reality-Creation.

An element missing in her definition, that could not have been provided either by Logic or by her Parents Mind-Love, was revealed to be unfinished business, a gap in Knowledge upon her first attempt to fulfill her role. Revealed by experience to be incomplete, whose completion could only be learned by experience. We live, suffer, and die in this context of opposites, of confusion, guilt, and dread, of desperation to reclaim our innocence and being at one another’s expense, to learn from experience the element missing in the Child’s definition. In her Logic, her protection, so that she may fulfill her role in Creation without violating Logic, without abandoning its protection and leaving its sanctuary. Without being barred from a Reality that would cease to be Reality if she were not.

The lesson to be learned from experience

The lesson to be learned is awareness of the stakes of Creation: the possibility of loss of Consciousness from unawareness and its consequences. The costs-consequences of unreality made real that is our world of appearances and deceit. That our Source, the Child’s Source, could not be aware of by definition, because Consciousness to be aware of anything makes it Real.

Without the Child’s awareness of the stakes of Creation her exercise of Free Will, to freely choose to establish and reciprocate Worth, would have no meaning. Would not be free. This is her function, her responsibility, not her Parents’. We go through this hell of suffering and death, of unreality made real, hand in hand with the Child:

• to claim the Child’s birthright: her role in Creation and the function that enables it, her Free Will.
• to reestablish communication with our Parents Mind-Love and win admittance from Logic to its protection, its sanctuary in Reality.
• to demonstrate that the Child’s definition, her Logic is now complete. That we have learned our lesson from experience and provided the missing element: the awareness of what’s at stake. In relationship with the Holy Spirit, our Guide. Our one and only connection with Logic.

The ultimate affirmation of Free Will

The Child had to have a hand in her own Creation, her own completion, her own perfection: in the ultimate affirmation of Free Will. Because not everything was handed to her so she could set off into the unknown of Creation with nothing to learn of herself, nothing to strive for within, fully grown. Fully grown with nothing to learn of herself would be a contradiction, for she’s a Child. With an adventure to live, the necessity, the gift of Growth.

In this world of unreality the death of an innocent Child is needless if she can choose Life. By learning from the gift of Mind and Love and by learning from Growth and experience. That there’s another Reality. The Reality of her Parents and ours: Mind and Love that are not the unreality of matter. The unreality of suffering and death made real by bodies and their senses. By the “logic” of matter that isn’t.

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Published on 2 Comments on Getting to “Comfort”: Bodies, Minds, and Their Opposing Personality Types

Who and what this is about

“ESFP” herein refers exclusively to a category of Myers-Briggs personality type: Extravert / Sensing / Feeling / Perceptive without Judgment. It does not generally refer to ESFPs with Judgment. They belong firmly in two separate and distinct subcategories. The generalizations herein cannot even apply uncritically to all ESFPs without Judgment because personality types are rife with permutations. The subject is complex and does not lend itself to hard and fast anything. Although it’s an everyday preoccupation the ultimate foundation for its insights is intuition.

This is a reflection on the development of the ESFP without Judgment personality type:
• in relation to its own internal INTJ opposites: Introversion / Intuition / Thinking / Judgment
• in relation to others who belong to its opposite INTJ personality type.

It is based not on formal scholarship but on general observation and specific experience with multiple ESFPs. Its inspiration is Isabel Briggs Myers’ notion, laid out in Gifts Differing (1980), that individuals with opposite personality types can help one another expand their personalities into their opposites. That by doing so they will gain self-awareness, strengthen their innate powers, abilities, and overall character, strengthen their relationships, and thereby meet their obligations and stand up to adversity.

It makes no claim to objectivity since it’s about ESFPs in relation to INTJ opposites and the author is an INTJ. It is, in fact, highly subjective. Its claim to legitimacy rests solely on the implications of logic drawn from what is known about and experienced with these two personality types. In other words, it will either make sense and ring true or it won’t. It will either help reduce friction and make life easier or it won’t.

The frustration of friction

Frustration is evident in these thoughts because of the author’s personal experience with ESFs and the heartbreak of troubled relationships with relatives and friends. Plus there is humanity’s shared experience with demagogues like the former guy who make a career out of troubling relationships. The author’s INTJ type is a distinct minority according to Isabel’s intuition, maybe a quarter of the general population. That’s certainly how it seems. He’s surrounded by pennant-waving, winning-obsessed fans, one for all, all for one, who would give us the shirts off their backs so long as we’re already wearing their team’s shirt. If we’re not, or worse, if we’re just an individual without a team, we’re nobody. We might as well be invisible. This can be frustrating.

The model for these observations is a composite, although the former guy checks off on most everything that annihilates personal friendship, so he qualifies. “ESFP without Judgment” is ESFPs walled off from their INTJ opposites. From INTJ assets that are not only under-utilized they’re treated as aliens not to be trusted. Whether by conscious choice or by being so enamored of type that the ESFPs have forfeited their ability to see or be anything else. Like they’ve given up their free will, which is to say, their minds since all that reason and analysis are really for is to choose. Like they’ve become a personality so set in their type, so rote and inaccessible, that it’s pointless to relate to them except socially on the most superficial level.

So resolute, so intractable is their inaccessibility, that these thoughts can’t really be directed at them. It would be pointless. They’re directed at whatever controls them. And if these thoughts sound like ire so be it: whatever has taken them captive and out of reach is definitely not nice. The problem is, it can’t be a Who. It can’t be anything living. How can a self-respecting INTJ get anywhere with an inaccessible ESFP by raging at a virus? Jesus raging at money lenders defiling a temple made sense. Raging at a PA system blaring inane messages scripted by an absurd movie villain wouldn’t.

Getting to understanding

What could work is an attempt at understanding. Not retaliation with yet another projection of guilt, but understanding that protects both sides with thoughtful analysis. With patient reflection instead of passion. Understanding that clarifies choices and the costs and benefits needed to make them rationally. Costs and benefits that can make a friendship or break it.

Why bother? Maybe it’s because motivation isn’t always for us alone to decide. Maybe others depend on ESFPs and INTJs to get along, to get their acts together, so they attend to business, to shared purpose on behalf of the larger family. On behalf of the larger community that can’t maintain harmony and attend to its business unless all of us do our part. There’s selfishness and rancor in the friction to follow and this may be where it begins: with individuals caught up in their stuff ignoring the bigger picture: those who depend on them.

What then can be done about it? How about striving for understanding to reconcile our personalities on behalf of those who need us, and to serve our families and our communities with loving kindness?

Sensing the Absolute

Obsession with imagery and indulgence in bodily appetites are a form of worship for ESFPs without Judgment. Worship of the Absolute that not only caresses their senses with blessings but reciprocates with their very Worth. Though they may only be preoccupied with appearances there is no overstating the value of appearances. Satisfaction from experience that is both sensuous (aesthetic) and sensual (passions and appetites) is to be effusively praised and thanked. It is to be worshiped to fully affirm and reciprocate the reality and worth of gifts and giver: the body’s senses-appetites and their sensed physical environment of infinite beauty, diversity, fascination, and abundance. Divinity shrouded in the vastness of its incomprehensibility.

To a worshipful ESFP, the contrary view put forth by Jesus in A Course in Miracles (ACIM) and by the second-century Gnostic teacher Valentinus is blasphemy. It gets no more sympathy than the escapee from Plato’s Cave who tried to enlighten those who remained behind. “Non-dualism,” that holds that between Mind and matter, Heaven and earth, Good and evil, Values and their opposites, only one can be real, is heresy. So say ESFPs. And so says the Church, which went to great lengths to stamp out the heresy of Gnosticism.

Dualing or non-dualing our way to “Reality”

ESFPs’ loyalty to the sensed universe, that rewards bodies with pleasure and them with affirmation, is intransigence. It’s faith posing as “realism” even though physics itself doubts its reality. Posing as “reason” even though physics itself acknowledges the flaw in its circular reasoning. It must be faith because ESFPs make no attempt to support their choice with facts and Logic. They avoid facts and Logic. They rest their case without even feeling obliged to make one. Their reality is real because they say it is. More circular reasoning: QED – quod erat demonstrandum.

The “case” for “god,” an absolute source who shares ESFPs’ body-sensed universe, is a flagrant contradiction. Irrational but nonetheless accepted by humanity’s dominant dualist paradigms with scarcely any thought. Whereas the case for ACIM’s non-dualism, that is thoughtful and carefully reasoned, is held to be blasphemous. The Eleatics school, that Parmenides founded in the late fifth century BCE, held that our material environment is illusory. The school and the field of metaphysics that it founded, based on the pursuit of truth through Reason, was held in high regard. It influenced Plato and, through Plato, all of Western thought.

Aristotle didn’t launch the physical sciences by slamming the door on reasoning based on the Reality of Mind. His acknowledgement that Mind is Real kept it open. Parmenides made Rovelli (Reality Is Not What It Seems 2017) uncomfortable but, strangely, Schroedinger’s calling out physics for circular reasoning didn’t. It was OK if the measurements of matter taken by bodies are measurements of themselves, an obvious conflict of interest. A violation of objectivity that compromises understanding.

Hiding in Plato’s Cave

Yet Schroedinger and Rovelli, two theorists, didn’t look into it, didn’t apply their powerful intellects to correct an obvious flaw in the Logic of their profession. Pointedly stayed away from philosophy when the situation cried out for it. When Schroedinger, a philosopher as well as physicist, might have made a decisive contribution. Why? What kept these two giants in their field from tracing the implications of this flaw? From thinking about it? What were they protecting?

It’s striking how closed minds are on this question. Not just among body-biased ESFPs but among serious INTJ thinkers as well. Ever since Plato the question has been left untouched like a third rail by the dominant paradigms of science, religion, philosophy, and psychology. By the same paradigms that preside over the world’s dysfunctional politics and tribal-racist culture. That ensure that relationships of all kinds break down with regularity, with ruinous consequences not just for humanity but for the entire planet. ESFPs who get their kicks from sensing-feeling and physicists who make a living off of it remain confined to Plato’s Cave, perversely unable and unwilling to use their minds to think or see their way out of it.

Putting faith in the “magic” of pleasure and comfort

The root cause of body-biased ESFPs’ resistance to ACIM’s case for non-dualism – for the reality of Mind and the unreality of matter -- would appear to be an irrational faith-based choice. Their choice of the source of everything implied by body sensing-feeling for their guide: pleasure-gratification from the sensuous and the sensual, from sensed-felt benefits immediate and concrete, from material possessions, and the satisfactions of empowerment and affirmation attained by dominance, winning, and supremacy over the competition.

Taking the “reality” of body sensing-feeling benefits and their source on faith seems to excuse ESFPs and the physics profession both from thinking. From introspecting, reflecting, reasoning, feeling-evaluating, and judging – every INTJ function, every asset. Excuses them from using free will, the power and ability to choose, to question the authority of their guide magic. Their “god” who rules the Cave. They can’t go there because the magician who blesses them with their sacred comfort zones won’t allow it. Because it might depose the magician and deprive them of the ultimate good: their comfort. Dictated by their physical essence, their bodies’ senses-feelings. By the perversion of Plato’s “Good.”

The ultimate transgression isn’t jeopardizing the welfare of those entrusted to the care of ESFPs; it’s hurting ESFPs' own “feelings.” Because their theology, their blind faith in their “god,” is based on the supreme worth of what body senses-feelings deliver: pleasure and comfort. The ultimate validation of their “god’s” divinity, its power, its authority, and worthiness.

Upholding the laws of chaos

Highly attuned to their own feelings ESFPs can be startlingly numb to the feelings of others. Since bodies are their reality, and bodies are isolated and separated, they’re seen as fundamentally in competition with one another. Fertile ground for a win-lose, gain-loss, zero-sum formula for “success.” ESFPs’ formula is ideally suited to their personality type which receives abundant validation from the material world, from social-group behavior, and from the dominant paradigms – the “establishment” -- based on sensory perception.

None challenges ESFP’s faith-based “reality” of selfish-competing bodies getting along by going along, by the pretense of agreeability and social-group non-competition. By the façade, the thin veneer, of belonging-love that’s conditioned on Cave occupants accepting forced conformance with the top-down rule of matter. A condition that, from an INTJ perspective, is blatantly insincere, dishonest, and hypocritical.

But to the ESFP it’s well grounded in the “reality” of fundamentally incompatible bodies-selves. In self-interests competing with one another, dependent on forced pleasantness and agreeability to get along, to achieve “harmony” that ESFPs crave. INTJs’ contrary view seems to them an invitation to chaos, to terminal disharmony in a world of separated bodies ruled by a mindless Cave master, the great inscrutable body in the sky.

Choosing another formula for “success”

ESFPs’ orientation might be changed by one thing. By an awareness of the possibility of an opposite guide whose benefits are mind- and soul-centered instead of body-comfort centered. Who dwells within their own INTJ nature, inside their Intuition. And this would explain their ESFP sensing-god’s abhorrence of it: because it would shine it and its dark Cave away. ESFPs’ orientation might be changed by the choice of Psyche, one among many names for the guide who can speak for Innocence. Because she is Innocence, with no need to project guilt and resort to blame. She also goes by “Christ,” the Christian soul of Innocence: the Child beloved of her Parents. She’s who we are when we aren’t misled by appearances and thrown into chaos by our primitive limbic systems.

The choice of an opposite guide who speaks for Innocence instead of guilt would end the misperception. It would end the obstruction, condemnation, and retaliation that ESFPs’ formula for “success” inflicts on others, particularly INTJs. Confronted with ESFPs’ intransigence INTJs must take on the burden of judging for them on behalf of shared purpose, attending to others entrusted to their care.

ESFPs have a choice. They can choose another guide, another god. They can reconsider their choice on their own by accessing their INTJ assets: by introspecting, reflecting, reasoning, evaluating, and judging. By questioning their judgment against the “benefits” of unquestioned loyalty to their bodies’ feelings instead of the thoughts and feelings that occupy their minds.

ESFPs’ cult of specialness

Close examination of the “benefits” of body-dominance suggests an innate selfishness, an insensitivity that borders on cruelty. Its source is an attitude toward others perceived as competing instead of sharing. An attitude so anti-social that, when practiced by ESFPs with the inclination and opportunity to do harm, it’s sociopathic. The body-centered god of ESFPs is all about competition, whereas the guide of INTJs’ Intuition and internal moral compass is all about sharing. ESFPs’ reality is dog-eat-dog. INTJs’ reality is interconnectedness and reciprocity -- giving and giving back -- based on the reality and truth of mind and Psyche, not on the appearance of separated competing bodies.

There’s irony in the dissonance between ESFPs and INTJs over competition against sharing. ESFPs needing harmony from conformance place excessive emphasis on the pretense of agreeability, tact, diplomacy, and politeness, making a show of respect to hide the fundamental divide. INTJs challenging the pretense with the actual harmony of shared purpose are forced into a show of disagreeability to remove the misperception. To shift ESFPs’ blind faith in the divisive god of body-centered values to the God of mind, trust, and intimacy. To stop the transgression. It’s ESFPs, the presumed champions of harmony, togetherness, and agreeability, who in the end break relationships, not INTJs.

Above the figure nailed to the cross it’s inscribed “Loser,” and the figure isn’t a sacrificial stand-in for victims but the ESFP’s own image. A childlike figure labeled elsewhere by astute journalists “clown” and by street protesters parading with the inflated likeness of a Big Baby. A churl elevated to divinity by religion bound to its god not by the miracle of Creation-Life but by the cult of magic-death. Not by ascent to Heaven, light, and fulfillment but by descent into hell, darkness, and defeat. The unmistakable brand not of a proud, self-earned winner but of a pathetic, self-condemned loser. Guilt hiding in the delusion of victimhood innocence. All of it separation-specialness – a sick joke.

The eternal Beauty that lies beyond whatever bodies can detect

For INTJs, Worth comes from mind’s thinking, valuing, and judging, where the principle of sharing and togetherness is the controlling consideration, the consideration that integrates all into one. For ESFPs, it’s very different. Worth comes from bodies’ sensing-feeling where competition and social-group conformance make up the controlling consideration: every man for himself. It’s a separating principle disguised as “liberty” unbound by the fairness of community that makes real freedom possible.

INTJs’ experience of this body-centered world is desiring to connect via mind’s thoughts and love’s feelings but having less success than connecting via bodies’ senses and feelings. Were it not for their abundant companionship, through the creative possibilities of mind’s imagination, INTJs’ experience would be one of unrelieved isolation and loneliness. Their guide, readily accessible through the shared Memory of Intuition, connects with inner selves sharing not competing.

The temporal beauty, abundance, and possibilities of bodies are nothing compared to the eternal beauty, abundance, and possibilities of minds guided by freely-chosen loving sources beyond whatever bodies can detect. That is, when the fear of what’s unknown to bodies is let go, because minds are not unknown. Because minds are intimate, integral to selves, familiar. More so than bodies that come and go. That appear magically from out of nowhere, change beyond recognition, and disappear back to nowhere, can ever be -- “strangers,” in the words of ACIM, “wandering through the house of Truth.”

The Reality and Gift of Comfort

INTJs connect because Mind is the seat of what’s Known, the source of safety and security, of Logic which is Protection. Of Love, which is true companionship, true Relationship, the true source of Comfort -- the comfort and ease that ESFPs crave. Its source can never be isolated-separated bodies in competition with one another, that turn giving into taking, gain into loss, pleasure into pain, love into fear, innocence into guilt, life into death.

For ESFPs all in for body-centered comfort and competition, the supremacy of “winning” is necessarily the highest good. The intelligence at work in their calculations of self-interest makes sense within their insular take on reality. In the alternative reality that’s centered on the comfort of mind and love rather than bodies, it makes no sense at all.

Published on Leave a comment on The Lure of “Liberty:” Plato’s Cave and the Lies that Put Us Here

Time to think again

Intuition with insights from the Life of Mind explain human experience with clarity and practical resonance. Potentially more so than any other source, because the twists and turns of human thought don’t terminate at the portal we came through to get here. They extend way beyond the “beginning of time” to the portal through which anything and everything must pass. To the Presence that was there in the Now, at the beginning: the rules and definitions that govern what Is and what Isn’t. The ancients called it Logos. I’m OK with “Logic.” Tap into the implications of Logic and they take us a long way.

What follows in “The Lure of Liberty” is a small harvest of fruit that this particular tree bears. Nourishment for minds wanting better answers to questions than the dominant paradigms provide us, from philosophy, psychology, science, and religion. Questions that thwart human progress, because the dominant paradigms are not connecting with our origins, getting our story right. As a species we’re far from connecting with context that supplies purpose and meaning. Far from grasping what our circumstances may be telling us. Because the very source we must turn to for answers, the human mind, has been turned against itself. The very central fact that the dominant paradigms fail to acknowledge. We must come to terms with its implications. We must learn to remove the barriers to Logic and change our mind.

A few modest insights won’t make much difference. But they illustrate a point I hope to make in my book, The Story of the Child: that returning to the roots of philosophy, through the insights of Intuition guided by Logic, can inch us forward. Insights guided by sources from Logic like Jesus and A Course in Miracles, Plato and The Allegory of the Cave, can break through the wall of ambiguity our split minds and bodies’ senses have built. Remove its deceptions and contradictions. Replace its deeply flawed perceptions with perceptions better aligned with Truth and make progress.

By thinking. Not a novel idea. But after science and technology have held the stage, after Hawking declared philosophy “dead” and not only humanity but all of life is imperiled, maybe its time has come. Maybe, with our country facing another civil war, it’s time to get back to business and think again.

Respect for the role of Free Will in Creation

There’s work to be done in Reality and we can’t do it. A job with real purpose and meaning. What’s worse is we’re prevented from doing it by a lie. A deception that our world of appearances has locked in place by our bodies’ senses, by circular self-referential reasoning since bodies themselves are appearances. A manipulation by a virus whose only purpose is to preserve its place in our thoughts. In mind which is a precious gift from our Parents, who Know only Reality and Truth.

Whose concern isn’t our subservience to any cause. To any agenda, any deception or manipulation. It’s to the protection and exercise of the reason, reciprocity, and Free Will that we are. To the part their Child has been blessed with in Reality and Creation: to enable the creation of Life to affirm its own worth, to extend and empower it.

What would the miracle of Creation, of Life, be without Free Will? A thought without an expression. Form without content. Cause without effect. An empty stance of self-proclaimed value. A billboard advertising an idea without a product. A “product” no one has chosen to buy. What is a product worth that has no market? What is it worth if no one in their individual circumstances, their context, has found any application or use for it? If its “market” is forced or deceived into consuming it?

What does it matter that the Child’s Parents are Mind-Reason-Choice married to Love-Creativity-Freedom and their purpose was to birth a Child whose very identity is Free Will? The inborn power and ability to choose freely so that the creation of Life won’t be hollowness without consequence? Empty rhetoric? Sound and fury signifying nothing?

What does it matter that the Child’s Parents are careful not to let their Authority and Knowledge compromise her Free Will? That their reticence is part of the gift, not a withholding? That they are to be thanked for enabling us to learn what we must, as we will, at our own pace, because they must. We are not stamped by their Authority and Knowledge. We are not denied by their reticence, their respect. We are liberated by it.

Is the Child “our guy” or “our girl”?

Who is the “Child”?

She would be the first step in understanding that everything must have a definition. The first incontrovertible law of metaphysics: that we can’t get at Reality without Logic. Because it is Logic that supplies definitions. That determine who or what a thing is and what it’s for. Who or what can break the surface in all of Reality or unreality, Creation or uncreation – in the all-inclusive scope of Everything and nothing – without having a definition slapped on it? When do the purpose and meaning of anything appear without definition? When can the question what Is or Isn’t, or how it came to be or not to be, be answered without Logic? Without definition?

The definition of the Child may or may not be indifferent to gender but language is not. This language insists on masculine or feminine. Jesus, in A Course in Miracles, determined to get us back to Reality, addresses his readers as the “Sonship:” one son with no differences of any kind because our bodies, illusory thinking, and their differences are an illusion. “God” is the “Father.” I don’t have that luxury.

Where the implications of Logic and insights from Intuition have taken me is beyond the scope of the Course. I choose to break with its precedent on gender because the Logic of the Child’s story, before s/he fell under the influence of the ego, seems to require it. Masculinity and femininity may have played a defining role in the Child’s origin and attribute of Free Will. While the Child could be herself or himself, her Parents of my imagination are Father-Mind and Mother-Love. The Logic and definitions of metaphysics are all about attributes, and if the distinction can’t be made in this context – specific attributes assigned to Parents, Child, and their Child’s role in Creation – the story that Logic and Intuition have woven together in my telling can’t be told.

The precedent I hope never to break is with Logic itself, the authenticity of the Course and my reason for keeping faith with it. So let me add that the Course is modern Gnostic Christianity, and the Child imagined by the Valentinian Gnostics, in the second century, was Sophia. Whose role in the “fall” is not unlike that of the Son in the Course. We chase down the same explanation, and it matters not whether the central figure is our guy or our girl.

We are not our Parents

The Child is who we are in the before-after sequence of Logic: before she lost consciousness, when she lived as Mind in Reality where it is always Now, and after she lost consciousness, when she dreamed an unreality as brains encased in bodies, in an environment of spacetime and matter where it is never Now. The after-Child is us. Though we in our bodies are but a projection of a dreaming mind. Sharing Life-Being with our Parents in Reality but unaware of it, because their Child is unconscious and we are but figures in the dream, living unreal lives, thinking unreal thoughts.

Unaware that the Child shares Life-Being with her Parents in Reality for another reason: because an event is buried in the Child’s Memory, in our collective Memory, and is unknown to us. The event that shut down consciousness, knocked out its power. That preceded the event that lured the Child into an alternate reality of carnival funhouse mirrors. A substitute “home” whose attributes are the exact opposite of her real Home.

The Child is an extension of her Parents, Mind married to Love. Yes, in Reality we are Mind. We are Love. But the Child is not her Parents. Cannot be. And hers is not their role in Creation.

She’s Innocent! And so are we.

What she is also emphatically not is guilt deserving of punishment for having lost consciousness. Nowhere in the Logic of why and how this happened in Reality can a case be made that either Parents or Child engineered the event outside the limits of Logic. Assumptions to the contrary are projections by ego-corrupted minds, themselves steeped in guilt, as we all are. Not by the loss of consciousness but by the activation of the ego shadow code that came after, when the Child was not in her right mind.

Pursuing the Truth through Logic to establish the Child’s Innocence can have important consequences: for our ability to follow our guides who teach forgiveness, like Jesus in A Course in Miracles, and for our awakening. It’s a story worth telling and I hope to make a contribution, logically, in my book, The Story of the Child.

Reclaiming the purpose and meaning of Life

We aren’t performing any role in Creation now because the Child who imagines us is unconscious. Asleep and dreaming a dream of unreality. An illusion of appearances meant to deceive. Meant to locate a falsehood and its source within Child-mind and keep it there. An agent of unreality and untruth whose only purpose is the preservation of the dream, to keep the Child unconscious and us in its thrall.

The master of Plato’s Cave. The ego whose origin in the Child’s psyche is explained by Jesus in the Course. A viral shadow code – non-being – that tricked the Child, unconscious and defenseless, into listening to it. Into choosing to follow it because it had a message the Child, in her defenselessness and disorientation, her nightmare of sin, guilt, and fear, was desperate to hear. Into following it where only a lie could lead, into the insanity of separation. Into chaos ungoverned and ungovernable. Into Energy encased in matter, split minds encased in bodies, all of it entrapped in entropy destined for inertia.

Lies can be undone. Minds tricked into dreaming nonsense can awaken. Can heal the illusory separation. The Child with Free Will can choose again. What then is the lie? Where is Reality? Where is Truth? Where is our Home and how can we get back to it? What happened to our purpose, the meaning of Life? How can we reclaim it? How can we awaken?

Logic is empowerment as well as protection.

Logic – Logos -- is definition and governs by definition. By defining the meaning, nature, character, and scope of things. “Definition” is DE- + finis, the Latin word meaning “boundary, limit.” To “define” implies confinement: boundaries that put limits on freedom, mobility, autonomy. Built into the meaning, nature, character, and scope of everything that Is. Nothing in Reality-Creation can Be without the boundaries, the limits, of their definitions.

Definition is the essential instrument of Logic. Without definition Logic would be cause without effect. Definition is the bar code on every product of Reality-Creation and every self that went into and came out of its Creation. The label that identifies it and certifies its legitimacy, its belonging to Reality-Creation. That signifies that it’s Real.

Nothing in Reality-Creation can Be without designation by Logic of who or what it is, what it is for, and what it does. The “nature” of a thing is its Logic. Logic is identification: it defines who and what self is. Identification is self’s authority. The Logic of a Life that defines who or what it is is its authority to do what it does, to perform its function in Creation. Logic is authority that limits who or what self is, what-when-where self can do, and how self can do it, by defining and identifying it. Logic authorizes acceptance into Reality of the works of Creation, its new lives, the extension of Being, and the functions they were given by definition to perform.

The authority of Logic empowers new Lives, new selves. Logic is empowerment as well as protection. It is self’s login ID that gains entry into Reality. Logic’s definitions not only cover who or what self is that authorizes belonging to the community of Being; it also animates who or what self is. To act in service to the function implied by who or what self is.

Logic governs by managing roles and relationships in service to the shared purpose defined by Logic: Creation and reciprocation of the worth of Being-Life. Logically, without conflict or contradiction among identities or functions. Without opposites colliding that’s impossible in Reality but defines unreality, the state of mind that’s corrupted by the viral shadow of ego non-being. The Logic of Logic, its own definition-purpose, is the absence of contradiction: Peace, Truth, and Sanity. The gift of reason, the gift of rationality. The Logic of governance is the same: harmony within the diversity of Creativity, the gift of rationality.

The dual function of Logic’s authority

The context in Reality governed by Logic is the exact opposite of the Child’s context in unreality, where the ego’s promise of “freedom” from the confinement of definitions, from Logic’s authority, led her not to harmony but to chaos. It was a subterfuge: that there is another reality where definitions don’t have boundaries – an absurdity. Where the necessity, the authority of Logic, doesn’t rule and definitions aren’t needed – more absurdity. Where the Child overcome by fear, desperate to get rid of guilt, can attain unlimited possession and control of her gifts -- freedom, empowerment, and abundance. Perverted into license to do whatever she wants, control rather than adapt to her environment, and hoard rather than share wealth. Another reality where the Child can get rid of guilt and escape.

The trick’s power to deceive derives from the dual-function of Logic’s authority: definition-limit with boundary and protection-empowerment with boundary. With a sleight of hand the ego directed the Child’s attention toward define-limit in its open left hand and away from protect-empower in its closed right hand. It was a direct and deeply sinister assault on Logic. On Logos. On God. And it succeeded, which is why we are here. In the Child’s unconscious mind, her abilities disempowered, Logic was rendered meaningless, making it susceptible to its perversion by ego non-being.

Repeating the Child’s signature mistake

What was accomplished by the sleight of hand, the deception in its essence, was a misconception of Truth combined with mis-direction from Truth. A lie combined with avoidance of the Truth. The dynamic of delusion that corrupts the human mind, split between good and evil, and compromises every field of human inquiry including ethical philosophy. Distraction by the body and the lie, avoidance of Mind and the Truth. At one stroke the Child not in her right mind was drawn toward an illusion, a lie, and chose a guide to lead her there.

The Child’s desperation for escape to an alternate reality implied belief in it. It was thus the original act of her unconscious mind, the archetypal belief in contradictory realities, one real, the other unreal:

• that accepted the illusory ego shadow code’s offer to be the Child’s guide to a magical alternate reality.
• that invested belief in the magical alternate reality and thus activated it, our world where, in the words of the Course, “the unreal is made real.”
• that characterizes human thought within the dream, a continuous replication of the Child’s signature mistake: making unreality real, keeping the ego shadow code and its insane dream “alive,” legitimizing its guidance, listening to it, following it.

Melvin Furd in his glory

The shadow code’s response to the Child’s plea was, Sure, there’s someplace else. I can take you there. Follow me. “Someplace else” is a fantasy, the opposite of Reality-Creation. An illusion of facades and pretense. Chaos characterized by absurdities, contradictions and their collisions. A veritable Large Hadron Collider in slow motion. Where every attribute of Creation is turned inside-out and upside-down, reversed and perverted, turned against shared purpose, against itself: “life” imagined as death.

The distinction between Logic-Heaven and ego-hell is the distinction between Order and chaos. The fatal misperception of Freedom is that it’s possible without Order, without the discipline of Logic that governs the roles and relationships of Reality-Creation in a state of harmony. Part of the grand illusion of separation that turned dream into nightmare, Heaven into hell. Once again, it was Logic’s own authority that gave the trick its power to deceive, the dual function of boundary: definition-limit and protection-empowerment. That gave an ego-corrupted mind an opening to project its lies onto Logic-authority. Cloaked in the defense of “liberty,” when in Reality it’s a direct assault on Liberty. A taking of Freedom, not its giving.

What had been the sharing and reciprocation of abundance, empowerment, and affirmation, a celebration of worth and thankfulness, the purity of Reality, was now a toxic brew of possession by taking, control by dominance, confinement by manipulation of appearances, worthlessness by invalidation and ingratitude. What had been radiant and fragrant was now putrefaction, the waste of inverted self-interest. The stench of selfishness warped by wealth and power into Gollum, a pathetic, misshapen frenzy of human greed, conquest, and depravity. Into specialness, a wild fantasy of violation of shared purpose, of Innocence, of Being-Life, all with the seed of guilt. The ultimate perversion: Oneness, expanding Creation, contracted into littleness. The Logic of Everything displaced by nothing. The grand poseur, Melvin Furd, in his glory atop the throne of God.

Specialness withheld: the original conspiracy theory

All of it literally mis-guided. By nothing more than a viral shadow code. A foolish delusion that has no life of its own. That distracted an unconscious, defenseless mind with false promises and will, one day, finally, be ignored. Mis-guided by mis-characterization of the shared purpose of Reality-Creation, a gift to the Child of happiness as well as affirmation of worth. A sanctuary of shared peace and protection, Love and belonging, trust and Intimacy. Of Innocence and empowerment, spontaneity, joyfulness, playfulness, song, and laughter.

It is not and cannot be the gift of shared Oneness. The Innocence and Knowing of Oneness, of Consciousness, the Child’s Parents, and the function of their Child, Free Choice -- the exploration of possibilities into the unknown, that include the possibility of unconsciousness and dreams of unreality -- do not mix. The relationship between Parents and Child is essential to Creation and remains unbroken in Reality. Yet these two attributes are incompatible by definition. So illogical together that combining both on the same plane of Creation, inadvertently, may account for the Child’s loss of Consciousness. Inquiring into how and why this could have happened is the purpose of my book, The Story of the Child.

The mischaracterization that corrupts the shared purpose of Reality-Creation is the sanctuary’s denial of specialness. The gift of shared Oneness that could not be given. And so ego-corrupted minds, craving specialness, looking for trouble, fantasize that it was a gift deliberately withheld. The original conspiracy theory.

We are the heroes

Another excuse for hating – what else? Logic. For hating – what else? Reality and Truth. For hating God. The seed bed in the human psyche for the plague of irrationality and insurrection that grips our politics today. The nurseries from The Thing (1951) and Alien that incubate monsters out to destroy us.

And who came to the rescue? Us. Captain Pat Hendry and Ellen Ridley saw to the monsters’ end. It took some thinking. It took courage and a lot of effort. But they figured it out. No “saviors” were on hand to bail them out. And therein lies the message. We are the heroes. The answers we seek lie within our own minds, and this is where we must go.

Specialness is a logical impossibility

The supposed denial of specialness resonates so deeply with the wounded Psyche of the Child that it may continue bleeding grievances, resentments, and conspiracy theories until the Child awakens. Until the end of time. Yet it is entirely false. The Child’s role in Reality-Creation requires that she be aware that she cannot be or act as Oneness. This is logically neither who she is nor what she does. She must be aware of possibilities, the possibility of unconsciousness and its illusory opposites that the Innocence of Oneness cannot and must not bring to Consciousness.

That she was not aware in Reality could explain her loss of consciousness. But why was she not aware? This is the question that insights from Intuition, guidance from Memory – Logic, – need to answer. If character and Innocence matter, and they do. This is the question addressed in my book, The Story of the Child.

The Innocence of Oneness cannot and must not bring the possibility of unconsciousness and its illusory opposites to Consciousness because it is Consciousness that welcomes the thoughts of Mind, the gifts of Creation, into Reality. It is Knowledge that by Knowing realizes. Consciousness that by definition does not and cannot Know anything of illusory-unreal opposites. Purity and Innocence that by definition can Know nothing of impurity and guilt. The inward-looking Self-awareness of Oneness, the seed of Creation that contains Everything, that by definition can Know nothing of anything outside itself. Because, by definition, there is nothing outside of itself.

Does the Child really want Consciousness -- her Parents -- to admit her nightmare of appearances, misery, death, and hell into Heaven? Could specialness, if it were an attribute of the Child as conspiracy theorists want, really be compatible with the shared purpose of Reality-Creation? With the miracle of eternal Life?

The idol of the right: “almighty god” who does whatever he wants

The Child’s acceptance of the ego’s sinister offer of guidance is rationalized by the lie that Oneness-specialness was her birthright. That wrathful Parents bent on her punishment for separating from them deprived her of it. That it was their taking it from her that caused her unconsciousness. Unconsciousness that she may have experienced as expulsion from her home in Reality, from her sanctuary of happiness in Creation.

To an ego-corrupted mind the real calamity of unconsciousness, the result of an inadvertence, would then be misconstrued as an imagined offense: unfair exclusion from Heaven. A deliberate wound to the heart, to their worth. A myth straight out of the story of the Child, corrupted by the ego, that thrives in our Ghost Busters political culture populated by internetted social media demons. That motivates the right, from January 6th insurrectionists to latter-day Ayn Rand “objectivists.” Grieving over the birthright of Oneness-specialness that was stolen from them along with their property. Over their unfair exclusion from the society of “winners,” the special-elite privileged with their exclusive entitlements.

The ego’s misshapen myths are the consequence not of Logic’s deliberate mismanagement of Reality-Creation but of its laws of cause and effect. Of the necessity of Authority’s definitions of what a self must be and what it can do. Of what’s logically possible and what’s not. Projections of ego-corrupted irrational minds pervert what’s possible by Logic-definition and shared Purpose into what’s allowed by an arbitrary authority that’s taking-possessing and controlling-dominating. By a self-absorbed self-interest just like them. By what they misperceive as an “almighty god,” unbound by Logic, who does whatever he wants. This is what the ego shadow code aspires to be. This is who its followers imagine they are.

More ego-insanity: the Child’s stolen right to dictate

Non-being shadow code, the angel of death, is the arch-enemy of Free Will, enabler of Life. If there is one one talent that the ego does not possess it would be Free Choice. Manipulating the unconscious Child into parting with her gift would be its first priority. Free Choice among the Child or any of her progeny poses a terminal threat to the outlandish fabrications of unreality. The thrust of any inquiry, any argument, toward asking Why would automatically separate mind from servility, the condition of mindless obedience to authority that rules Plato’s Cave.

So, when the Child was lured into the dream away from Reality-Truth, it was with the lie that her right to dictate without the necessity of Free Choice was taken from her. That she should be able to Create Life as Oneness-Consciousness – as God -- by simply Knowing. And thus was born, in the Child’s Psyche, the authoritarian streak that recoils from governance by free choice managed by Logic. That’s drawn toward concentrations of authority in autocrats who can dictate “order” without sharing it democratically. With the support of subjects who don’t object to their powerlessness because they share power vicariously through their Cave-master guides. Because their worth receives its affirmation from superficial entertainments even though they’ve surrendered their sovereignty, their souls.

Where does all this madness come from?

The essential attribute of evil is mindlessness. Which, since Logic and Feeling, Mind and Love, are inseparable, also means lifelessness, lovelessness, and thoughtlessness -- all that the absence of these elements of Reality-Creation imply.

The essential motivation behind the assault on Logic-Order, on behalf of the ego’s malign defense of “liberty,” is not the protection of Free Will but its surrender. To an entirely unreal, illogical, mythical “higher power” that’s nothing of the sort. To an imposter, shadow code’s non-being posing as the master of Plato’s Cave. Whose hapless occupants are held not in a paradise of “liberty” but in an authoritarian hell of captivity. Duped by numbers, by the appearance of belonging to a group, into fantasizing that they’re serving a larger cause. When all they serve is an illusion: their master’s authority. The tyranny of a delusion wielded by a bizarre figment of corrupted imaginations: a very self-centered, very unreal, specialness.

The fallacy of right-wing authoritarian politics

Republicans, fearing that they were a permanent minority, sought the advice of consultants around a century ago. Their advice: give up trying to attract the majority with reason. Forget about truth. Appeal instead to irrationality and tell voters whatever they want to hear.

The result? Unimagined success! Republicans discovered to their delight that many voters, captives to ego-myths of specialness denied and victimhood, would rather vote their grievances and resentments than any calculus of benefits and costs. They would rather retaliate against their tormenters, “elites” who deny their birthright to specialness. Would rather enact a grand reckoning of justice than govern. Tie their fortunes to the madness of a victim just like them, even if it takes down Democracy, their country, even peace.

So compelling is this irrational nonsense that it filled Plato’s Cave to overflowing, with millions of occupants pledged to the defense of its master at any cost. Convinced that loyalty to a “higher power” puts them on the side of good. That the power of the Cave master is shared with them when, in truth, it was stolen from them. What Republicans learned to their delight was that minds already duped by lies will fight fiercely to defend them. That making unreality real isn’t on the margins of society; it’s the force that drives human irrationality.

Irrationality carried now to dangerous extremes, unhinged from Reality and sanity. Denying climate change. Threatening yet another Civil War. A state not of passive alienation from shared purpose but of active, deliberate insurrection. Against our only means of community – shared purpose. And in service to what? To a lie: a perverse defense of “liberty” that’s hard at work taking it away.

Changing minds without drinking the hemlock

What’s the answer? Jesus says, in A Course in Miracles, that all our Father asks of us is that we show a little willingness to change our minds. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave an enlightened one, modeled after Socrates, offered help. He tried to part the occupants from their delusions. His reward was hemlock. Minds can change. Desperately need to be changed. The dominant paradigms are ripe for change. But we must know what we’re doing. Choose the right Guide and ask for help. Access Intuition. Align thinking with Logic. Stop the madness and give it some thought.

Follow Logic into the Story of Mind by understanding three basic facts:

• Logic moves forward by implication. That is, by what points imply. Grasping implications requires reflection, a function of Intuition which expands into different ways of looking at things which, in turn, yield different possibilities. A source of Creativity which never ends because the implications of Logic never end.
• What is not Reality-Good must be its exact opposite. To define unreality which is non-being / not-good, simply reverse the attributes of Reality-good. These are the lies that need to be undone.
• We change individual minds with universal truths. There is no “universal mind” in our fractious unreal world of separation to change with any truth. The occupants of Plato’s Cave are individuals their master would possess and control as a group. They are not a group and cannot be approached as a group.

Choose by exercising Free Will:

• Make logical connections by using reason, a function of Thinking, which provides one of three main foundations for choice: measurement of benefits and costs.
• Use evaluation, a function of Feeling, to weigh and compare the value of benefits and costs..
• Use judgment, a function of Order and Authority, to establish purpose and meaning from context, the third, critical foundation. Which allows analysis to integrate every consideration under one. The one that’s most important. The controlling consideration that makes a statement who we are and what we’re about: our thinking, our values, our character. The one that decides.

God bless and have at it!

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Published on 1 Comment on Getting Rid of Guilt: The Possibility and Impossibility of Forgiveness

Logic and Feeling cannot be separate

Mind-thoughts and Love-feelings are both corrupted in our unreal, material world. Feelings are corrupted by non-being’s shadow code that doesn’t just rely on deceptions made “true” by flawed Logic but also convincingly by corrupted-manipulated feelings. How can both be corrected when feelings seem unrelated to thoughts? When what corrects mind can seem powerless to change feelings? Are they even related?

Jesus in A Course in Miracles makes Logic clear how to un-corrupt thinking and by inference how to rationalize the relationship between thinking and feeling so that uncontrolled feelings don’t contradict Reason. I.e. so they don’t contradict Logos, a representation of “God” favored by ancient Greek, Judaic, and Christian thought.

Favored also here with one possible distinction. “Logos” here is Logic / Authority-Judgment, and its definition centers on Reciprocity, the essence of Love. The interconnections of Logic’s implications, that govern all of Reality-Creation, are accomplished by the Reciprocity of Love: giving and giving back. Just as Mind and Love cannot be separate, neither can Logic and Feeling be separate. This is the attribute of “God” that undercuts the false premises, the misperceptions that deny the Logic of Authority-Judgment: its infinitely benevolent Reality and Truth.

Reversing the psychology of guilt’s projection

Brain-body sensing instincts that are tied to fight-or-flight fear, to food-procreation satisfaction, and other emotions attracting and repelling, are rooted in the origins of body-life, in the instinct for individual survival, in species propagation, dominance and protection. All reinforce the psychology of guilt-fear and hatred rooted in the origin of the unconscious Child-mind’s illusion, his dream of our material world. Our bodies’ sensing and feelings of guilt-fear manifest the Child-mind’s psychology of guilt-fear.

This defines the relationship between body-sensing emotions and emotions associated with the Child-mind’s psychology of guilt. They are all of one piece. They are not separate, unrelated. One produced the other; one is dependent on the other. Correcting source-one will remove the dependent-other.

Correcting the Child-mind’s psychology of guilt-fear will reverse its signature projection of guilt-fear. It will withdraw the illusion-dream back within Child-mind and cause its manifestation to de-materialize, i.e. to disappear. Corrupted feelings hard-wired into the human psyche from the origin of life will then align with Logic / Authority-Judgment, i.e. with Reason. It will happen when Child-mind corrects error, regains Consciousness with help from his Parents-Innocence, and ends the illusion-dream. It will happen when sensory perception and the material world of appearances that upholds it – when brain-body sensing -- is ended.

Until then, the practice of “Forgiveness” in our material world can never be free of contradictory feelings of guilt-fear and hate that are hard-wired into brain-body sensing. True Forgiveness requires an act of Child-Psyche that stops the projection of guilt. That opens Child-mind to recognition of his Innocence and triggers his awakening to Consciousness. It’s an act preceded and enabled by his choice of the correct Guide, the Holy Spirit, his link to Reality-Creation and Truth, and by his abandonment of the ego unreality-untruth, the wrong guide.

Logic / Authority-Judgment protects Innocence and Freedom

When guilt-projection stops, the “other” ceases to be “there.” Because all “they” are – all “we” are – is a projection of guilt by an unconscious dreaming Child. “They” disintegrate like the hobo in Polar Express even though they evoked feelings that seemed to verify their existence. That seemed to verify that they’re “there” because feelings seemed to connect us.

When projection of guilt stops, when the “other” is gone, it’s because self discovers that there’s no guilt at its source to project. The “other” became instrumental in recognizing the truth of self-Innocence by removing the object of projection, the illusion of an “other” to project guilt onto. The lure of an “other” who can be the object-target of projection perpetuates the act of self-punishment for guilt. The act of mis-identification of self as the embodiment of guilt that must be projected out-onto “others” to get rid of it. Projection of guilt imagined as lethal attack against others is the ego’s perversion of the Child’s otherwise harmless attempt to recognize himself as Innocent.

Recognition of self-Innocence requires Intuition from the Holy Spirit, the gift of Reason: Intuition that the Reality-Truth of Logic / Authority-Judgment is that it is for the Protection of Innocence and Freedom. That the Order and Discipline of Logic are not meant for condemnation. Not meant for oppression, control, guilt or captivity. These are ego-projections of guilt by an unconscious Child not in his right mind. They are projections by our corrupted minds that alienate us from the Will of Benevolence that would free us. That would restore Innocence and remove the need for Forgiveness.

Projection of guilt is guaranteed to fail

Projection of guilt entraps Child-mind / humanity in cyclical attempts to reclaim Innocence that are guaranteed to fail. Getting rid of guilt by expelling it from mind is impossible: thought cannot be separated from mind its source. Irrationality is not the way to reclaim Innocence. Insanity is not the way to reclaim Freedom.

There’s no “other” to project guilt onto. There’s no guilt to project because Logic / Authority-Judgment and the Child’s Parents, Mind-Love Innocence, could not put it there in the first place. Authority is the Necessity of Logic’s laws of cause and effect. Neither Necessity nor Order, prerequisites for Freedom, can be dictatorship or captivity. The lies of the ego non-being are perversions of Logic and its laws as captor not liberator, of its Judgment, its protection of Innocence, as projection of guilt.

These are two seminal errors of corrupted mind-thought and Love-feeling: Logic as captor, Authority-Judgment as projection of guilt. Thus corrupted, Child-mind then “chose” ego guide’s insane thought system, accepted ego’s illogic as captor, and projected “guilt.” Undoing the ego’s lies requires denying that Logic is captor, that Authority-Judgment is projection of guilt.

Forgiveness is undoing the Big Lie

What is the root of the ego non-being’s deception? Mischaracterization of Logic / Authority-Judgment. Perversion of Logic’s Innocence into guilt. Perversion of God / Love into illogic-ego / hate. One of five laws of chaos cited by the Course that disrupt our world. The Big Lie that alienates us from our Parents and from one another with guilt, fear, and hatred.

Forgiveness is undoing the Big Lie:

(1) The assumption of Judgment-guilt that isn’t here within us.
(2) The projection of Judgment-guilt to reclaim Innocence that isn’t possible.
(3) The assumption of “others:” objects of Judgment-guilt that aren’t “there” outside of us, that were only put “there” to sustain the illusion.

Forgiveness is recognizing the Truth about Logic / Authority-Judgment: Love-Innocence, the opposite of ego-guilt, fear and hate.

Forgiveness is freely choosing the right Guide

Forgiveness is a matter of free choice: Do we choose the Holy Spirit for our guide or the ego? The Intuition of mind or the sensing of body? The Judgment, Order, and Discipline of one personality type or the perception without Judgment of another? Choice requires Free Will, the Child’s unique gift to Creation. To the Creation and Reciprocation of Worth, the purpose and meaning of Creation that depends on the Child’s Free Will. In alignment with Logic’s laws of cause and effect and always with guidance from our Parents, Mind-Love, who gave their Child Free Will.

In their interactions with their Child through the Holy Spirit our Parents consistently role-model respect for it. It is an example we are meant to follow. The ego invades; the Holy Spirit guides when asked, consciously or sub-consciously. As the Course says, the ego’s voice always speaks first and it’s always wrong.

Can a Child endowed with Free Will and a central role in Creation do his job by joining a “flock?” Freely choose in Reality or in unreality by “surrendering?” Think about it.

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Published on 1 Comment on Time Again for Everybody to Come to Rick’s

Rick’s clientele

Refugees in Rick’s Café Americain are noted for having been driven from their fascist homelands because of their minds. Because they’re independent thinkers who can’t be intimidated into mindless conformance, into group-think. Can’t be parted from their individuality, their sovereign rights as citizens to use their judgment to call out injustices and other wrongs that inflict suffering. That offend shared responsibility to the community, to everyone’s future.

They flee oppression with their different languages, dress, and customs, because they have a conscience. Because they refuse to sacrifice their conscience, their values, their individual worth, to the demands of an authority that tolerates nothing but obedience. That achieves conformance by crushing those who refuse to surrender their minds, their free will, their autonomy and individuality, to the group. That insists on possessing its subjects’ consciences and subjecting them to total control so that they may never question its authority. May never question the rightness or wrongness of its rule. May never use their consciences to question at all.

Escape from “paradise”

To ask Why, because independent thinking that asks Why might awaken its subjects to the Reality of their captivity. To the Truth that their “paradise” of forced conformance is based on a lie: that it’s for their benefit when it’s not. When its real purpose is only to preserve the authority of their oppressor. To preserve the appearance of its legitimacy, its façade of unreality.

The refugees in Rick’s Café are non-conformists not to make trouble, not to disrupt peace in the family. They’re non-conformists to stand up against the façade of peace that’s maintained by possession and coercion. By dominance, disempowerment, cruelty, and invalidation instead of sharing, empowerment, fairness, kindness, and affirmation. To stand up for the values that enable real peace, real harmony. Upheld by the free will of its subjects from the bottom up instead of forced upon them from the top down.

For love of Democracy, for love of Diversity

For all their differences the refugees in Rick’s Café are alike in one respect: they are all democrats. They gather together in Rick’s sanctuary in harmony because the values they share are shared freely, not dictated to them by Rick or by anyone else. They are individuals free to display their differences as we are in a free society, in a democracy.To display their individuality, their eccentricities, their special talents, because that’s the point: to enrich their society with diversity. With contributions from every source, every member with anything to offer no matter how unconventional.

The scene is set in the film’s opening shot as the camera pans from the pianist singing “Knock on Wood” to every table. Where individuals from different countries, different cultures, different perspectives, speaking different languages, are engaged in animated conversation. Opening themselves to an intimacy of thinking, feeling, and judgment that would be unimaginable back home. Sharing lives, sharing thoughts, debating philosophy and ideals.

The cruelty of an unchanging status quo

The title of the film Casablanca's original story was Everybody Comes to Rick’s. Because Rick’s welcomes everybody. Everybody, that is, with a conscience who thinks for themselves. Everybody who has the character and the courage to stand up for what’s right, for personal responsibility, kindness, and justice. The very same reasons why they’re not welcome back home.

For them, it’s an honor not to be welcome back home. A source of pride that they’ve stood up for their conscience and attracted notice. That they prefer exile to the comforts of home where free spirits with a conscience don’t belong. Where change is not welcome that would challenge the thoughtlessness, the cruelty, of an unchanging status quo. Proud that they don’t rely on affirmation by group conformance but by their own native worth, their own individual creativity, their own free spirit of love and inquiry.

Allons enfants de la Patrie!

Who comes to Rick’s? The children of Democracy. Those who love Democracy and the spirits of those who’ve fought and died for Democracy. In the context of its time, "Everybody Comes to Rick’s" was right: Everybody united in opposition to fascism comes to Rick’s. There was nobody else then, not in America.

Today, there is somebody else in America. They’ve chosen another place to go: Plato’s Cave. We will visit them in their Cave, but another time. Rick has just given his musicians permission to play La Marseillaise. A momentous change of mind that will put Victor and Ilsa on the last plane to Lisbon and end Rick’s tale with a beautiful friendship. I don’t want to miss it.

Published on Leave a comment on The View from the Bluff

Necessity

You envisioned me getting intimate with the hardass lives of American pioneers, bringing personal aspirations and tragedies to life with storytelling skill. Yet all it really takes is getting old. What did they face that oldness – a state of mind – doesn’t force on us every minute?

Necessity. Their lives were bound by it like planets locked in by gravity. What escapes work for us anymore? I read about other lives and pay attention when they cross my paths, and what strikes me is how the sun rises to motion and sound and then sets and whatever it is is all gone. Nothing really happened and even if it did whatever it was disappeared. What’s left in its wake is a reality I sense is there but, for all my reflecting and philosophizing, I can't figure out what it is.

Companionship of another kind, loneliness of another kind

It’s not malign. It’s not hiding from us. It’s not demanding that we drop everything and pay attention. If it wants anything maybe it’s just to be noticed. Not recognized or known because that’s asking too much. Just so we’re aware. So whatever sensible or senseless business we’re about won’t make us forget. That it’s part of our business? I don’t know. I never paid much attention before but now I feel it. A kind of companionship that comes with a kind of loneliness I’ve never felt before.

I cling. Not to one relationship or to one place. Not to the memory of one event but to all of it. Everything. In a fury of sentiment and despair I cast about for a thing that can be embraced. It was all bodies and limbs, stuff that wound up in piles, so why not? If life slips through our fingers why can’t we retrieve it with fingers? Love and be thankful for it with an embrace, with a caress?

Ridiculous. I’m embarrassed. If it’s hard in this world to change mind what’s really hard is to be mind. The leash I brought to the dog park doesn’t have a dog on it anymore and I can’t adapt. I know I came to the dog park for a reason. Logic keeps telling me Carry on carry on! But something’s not the same, and it’s getting more and more not the same. Can there be motion and sound out of mind? Is this the companion that makes me cling to my life?

Something new under the sun

I complain and the answer I get back is Don’t worry, we’re all clinging. To what? To you. We need you. I guess that makes me feel better. But I want a dog on the end of my leash! A dog I can pet, you know? That loves me and plays with me. A dog I can see. What you’ll see will be much better than a dog. Your body is what’s keeping you from seeing it. From experiencing Life. Maybe what you sense is there when you walk along the bluff, when the sun breaks through the clouds over the ocean, is what’s waiting for you. It’s there. You’ll see it. Through different eyes, that’s all.

Life conditions us to think of ourselves and our surroundings in a certain way and then it fades away, structure and all. And when it does, the ocean comes back into view from the bluff, the sun breaking through the clouds. Pulling me back or forward? I don't know. For now, it's just there. A feeling. Hope and anticipation with moving on. Melancholy and grief with leaving behind. Sobering unfamiliarity, the necessity of the inevitable.

Something new under the sun. Another test, another chance, to adapt. Whatever it wants, whatever it means, it's got my attention.

Published on Leave a comment on The Quest for Romance and Meaning

Where the Action is

“Sanctuary” for the Child’s role in Creation, within the protection of Logic in the Here and Now of Reality, equates with the depth of felt experience defined as “Romance” and “Meaning.” Why? Because it’s where Creation happens: thoughts-feelings and choices with Real consequences that define Romance and Meaning.

In the ego’s made-up world of spacetime and matter there is no Sanctuary. There is no real experience of Romance and Meaning, only unsatisfying temporary substitutes contrived by a corrupted mind’s imagination. Because unreality can only be where nothing happens.

Attachments from the “past” are forever

Imagination’s attachment to the “past” is recognition that time is illusion. That the Reality of people, places, and events that formed attachments wasn’t dependent on bodies-matter. It was a function of Mind which doesn’t need bodies. Attachment beyond the present into the unlimited past is being there for whoever and whatever were objects of affection. For those who were and continue to be loved. Communicating with those welcomed into Memory recognizes that the connection can’t be broken by anything to do with the dream. It can’t be broken by the lie of “death” and time.

Remembering and communicating with those we loved in the “past” isn’t making unreality real. It’s denying the denial. It’s assuring subjects loved that Love is eternal, unaffected by time. That they haven’t been abandoned. Jesus concludes the Text in A Course in Miracles with a promise: “I love you. I will always love you. I will never leave you comfortless.” It means we can’t be abandoned-separated. It means his promise not to abandon-separate us can’t be broken by time.

Where the Action isn’t

Romance and Meaning are inherent in timelessness, in the Here and Now. What breaks up Romance and Meaning in this life is the absence of Now plus the separation of past and future from “present” which is not Now. The ego’s illusory made-up world is one-dimensional. To substitute for the absence of the three-dimensional Romance and Meaning of Reality the Child’s ego-corrupted mind orchestrates contrived “events:” “action” involving bodies-matter, competition and conflict, that distract sensory perception with meaningless movement and noise, pleasure and pain.

Real vertical timelessness incorporates past and future into Now which accounts for the three-dimensional depth, the Romance and Meaning of Reality. Unreal horizontal time flatlines past, present, and future into a separated sequence. This accounts for the absence of depth, the absence of Romance and Meaning, in the ego’s unreal material world. If this “life” feels flat and in dire need of depth, that’s because it is flat.

Vodka Martini, “shaken not stirred”

Alcohol temporarily aligns past and future with the present in a vertical configuration, causing the illusion of experiencing all three in the moment -- the illusion of depth, This brain-altering effect accounts for alcohol’s appeal. Being cut off from three-dimensional Reality starves human lives of a basic need: the need for Romance and Meaning. It accounts for the universal appeal of entertainments, storytelling, and mythmaking. For addiction to brain-altering substances that mimic the intensity of beliefs, the passions that stimulate imaginary experiences beyond the limits of the ego’s artificial “reality.”

All driven by craving for Romance and Meaning. All rooted in the same condition: the absence of Romance and Meaning in the one-dimensional everyday unreality of time. By the absence of Creation’s Sanctuary, the Child’s Home – our Home -- in Reality.

Published on Leave a comment on What is “Life”? What is “Creation”?

Life can’t just happen

A thing that has purpose, meaning, and worth can’t just happen. If it’s Life it has to be the Source or come from the Source that has purpose, meaning, and worth. Life by definition has purpose, meaning, and worth. It has to be Created.

Life has Logic, this is its Logic, and Logic is its Source. “Creation” by definition has purpose, meaning, and worth. This is its Logic and Logic is its Source.

Life on this planet, like the planet itself, is an apparition. Produced in a troubled mind imagining that it’s disconnected from its Source. Imagining that it’s to blame and punishment is sure to come. That there’s escape from fear and guilt in a separate world where it can hide itself in bodies and a wrathful Mind will never find it.

Life is Growth

Science that can’t agree on what “life” is looks for its definition in matter. Just as physicists trying to explain the universe look for answers in the behavior of matter. What does matter tell them? That some cells replicate and others don’t. That particles only exist if they connect. That particle behavior responds to being observed by mind. And time exists unless it doesn’t, and even then it’s no match for gravity. The “laws” of science died with Newton. Hawking didn’t even make a pretense of objectivity.

Schroedinger acknowledged that sensory perception validating the reality of what it senses is only validating itself – circular reasoning that physics is based on and so objectivity is dead on arrival. Yet the great minds of science march on in lockstep oblivious to the truth. Objectivity and reason are faculties of Mind. Purpose, meaning, and worth can only be attributes of Mind. Growth, the essence of Life, implies purpose, meaning, and worth. It’s impossible without Creation by Mind, its only possible Source.

The real “Big Lie”

Yes, something like “Life” “exists” on earth. We’re sure of it and so we apply our wits and energies to figuring out what it is, busying ourselves with the latest in technology to subject bits of stuff to ever greater scrutiny. Reeling corpses up to the top of gothic castles on gurneys, with electrodes in their necks, hoping that lightning will restore “life”. Imagining that pulpy stuff in our skulls with electrical charges, that can never tell us what we want to know, is the source of “consciousness.” It must be so because the authors of the American Heritage Dictionary assure us that it’s so.

The confused dreaming mind that imagines matter can’t allow itself to think otherwise or it will lose its hiding place, the real Big Lie. The place that hides itself in plain sight of the mind that can’t and won’t look for it where it is, inside itself. The bull insists on charging at a piece of red cloth not the matador. Missing over and over again until it’s exhausted and ready for the kill. Will the bull ever learn? Will science ever learn? Will humanity intent on its own destruction ever figure out where it came from? From matter? If so, does it matter? If Mind can be the only Source of Life that is Growth, that can’t be without purpose, meaning, and worth, then the answer to both is No.

Questions worth looking into

How do we get “Life” out of cells? How do we get “consciousness” out of brains? When interstellar travel is possible, maybe the great minds of science can tell us. Until then, the answer must be we don’t.

Real “Life” comes from Child-Mind taking part in Creation when he's Conscious. Matter doesn’t “create” anything. Anything that involves “Creation” can’t have anything to do with matter. Matter is illusion. Matter is dreaming. “Life” that we seem to get out of cells and “consciousness” that we seem to get out of brains are part of the dream. Appearances. Substitutes for the Real thing that speak not for the reality of “Life” but for the appearance of death. For a substitute mind, confused and misguided, whose thoughts can’t be Real.

Might we wonder why it’s confused? Whether it really is unconscious instead of Conscious? What caused Child-Mind to lose consciousness? What can Logic aided by Intuition, our Holy Spirit Guide, tell us about it? These are questions worth looking into. Do the lines of inquiry we’ve been following show any more promise?

Might we wonder about the state of mind that tolerates assaults on governance? That imagines that poetry, art, romance, and meaning are to be found in conflict and violence? That tolerates weapons everywhere, random eruptions of mayhem in schools, grocery stores, movie theaters? Shrugs and walks away as if nothing can be done about it? Until the weapons are turned on us and it’s too late?

Might we wonder about the state of mind that can’t be trusted with “Life”? That confuses “Creation” with destruction? That imagines there’s protection in numbers until the numbers are gone and the truth is exposed: we’re individuals huddled together in fear, finding strength in groups that hide our individuality but still can’t protect us? Who are we fooling? Surely this insanity has an explanation! Surely there’s a better way.

Putting mind to good use

Anything that’s pointless, meaningless, and worthless has no Logic. Can’t be the product of Creation and can’t be Life. Can’t be recognized by Logic and admitted into Reality. It's an impossibility that belongs in the Child's dream.

The purpose, meaning, and worth of human-body “lives” and their illusory material world consists entirely of the use that Child-mind is guided to put it to by his Intuition-Memory, the Holy Spirit. Meaning given to illusory human “life,” “relationships,” “happenings,” is not inherent in an unreal world that was made not Created. It’s derived and dependent on Child’s free choice of Holy Spirit guide instead of non-being ego guide.

The illusory projection of guilt from Child’s unconscious-dreaming mind and the illusory material world of human bodies that resulted is otherwise without real purpose, meaning, and worth. It is not Reality. It is not Life. It is not Creation.

What can we do about it? Choose the right Guide, change our minds, and wake up.

Published on Leave a comment on Does Logic-God Have an Opposite?

Code's function is to ensure the coherence and integrity of Reality

Logic-God isn’t code or product of code; code is product of Logic-God / Source. Essential attribute of Logic-God is Source of code that defines Reality-Creation. Source does not / cannot code / pre-define unique compositions of changing-evolving circumstances that give rise to contexts of Purpose-Meaning that supply conditions for Logic’s response.

Code’s function is to ensure that its organic-genetic outgrowth – its products-manifestations – are aligned with Logic and therefore certifiably Real. Nothing illogical-irrational that would interrupt the sequence of Logic, disrupt its Implications-Interconnections, violate its coherence-integrity, is admissible-possible in Reality. The essential attribute of Reality-Creation is Logical. Event #1 that cost Child his Consciousness was necessarily a violation of Logic.

Changing circumstances that can't be coded are built into the Meaning of Logic

Logic can have no viral shadow code / opposite because:

• It’s the source of code rather than code itself.
• It’s an ongoing sequence that involves-requires responses to circumstances-situations / contexts that can’t be preordained-anticipated or controlled. These are of Necessity built into the definition-Meaning of Logic for which there can be no coded opposite. Without the “question” there can be no “answer.”

The sequence of Logic depends on circumstances to establish context for Purpose-Meaning / Worth in timelessness, on unique situations in the Now, in between before and after, that require spontaneous determinations of controlling considerations to enable action that connects before with after and moves sequence forward. What is subject to Logic-definition codes are the elements of Reality-Creation – Selves, roles and relationships, and Gifts-Values – that can be assigned Logical attributes needed to Create-Reciprocate Worth from circumstances-contexts.

Statelessness was the original condition-circumstance, the “before” with implication of non-Logic in the Now, that prodded Logic-Energy sequence into motion toward logical consequence “after.” Logic-Energy’s response to illogic of statelessness is ongoing and present. It’s reflected in mirror-image opposite of material universe’s ongoing expansion-response to Child’s projection of guilt that caused Big Bang.

The ego is blind to our individual-intimate circumstances

Shadow opposite codes for products of Logic’s Reality-Creation codes never evolve from circumstances-contexts that give rise to Purpose-Meaning / Worth because Logic-code definitions can’t be applied to what comes after in sequence of Logic. The ego’s lies-deceptions being viral-coded are necessarily-inevitably blind to their subjects’ individual circumstances-contexts in the moment which are a part / attribute of their Logic that can’t be coded.

Pointlessness that physicists attribute to the cosmos traces back to its source within the unconscious Child’s ego-corrupted mind for just this reason: the ego’s viral coded “thought system” systematically contradicts Reality-Truth, but not being grounded in the context of circumstances it cannot have Purpose or Meaning. Where Meaning can be found is not in the study of matter but in the psychology of the Child’s mind, deceived by the ego’s coded lies, that projected guilt.

Physicists looking for Meaning in the origin and fate of the universe through the study of matter look in the wrong place. The circumstances they seek lie within mind that’s unconscious. Within a mind so desperate to rid itself of the guilt of separation that it dreamed that it could project guilt and its fear of punishment outward and in the process made the illusion we call the world. Where are the circumstances? Within the Psyche of humanity, our own Memory. Not projected bodies that are part of the illusion but thoughts that cannot leave their source. We are the sleeping Child.

The ego's answer to Creation: Plato's Cave

The ego has an antithesis for the sequence of Logic and for Creation that extend-expand into the unknown. Into circumstances constantly-unpredictably changing. Into contexts whose Purpose and Meaning are as yet undivined. Into implications that have not yet interconnected to form logical Reality. Into compositions of thoughts, feelings, and values that have not yet created new Life. Into situations that by definition cannot be coded to ensure their Logic because the Child’s Free Will is essential to their choice.

The ego’s antithesis is the sameness of an unchanging status quo, an expression not of the liberation of Free Will to divine Purpose and Meaning out of a profusion of possibilities but of the subjugation of wills imprisoned by the denial of possibilities. By the authority and unquestioned dominance of its inaccessible viral-coded author – conditions that make a perfect fit with Plato’s Cave. Where the presence of its Cave master ego and his absolute control are all that the ego can offer for the absence of changing circumstances. For the absence of contexts with their Purpose and Meaning. Where a status quo of sameness, of fabricated appearances devoid of meaning substitutes its own authority for the necessities of Freedom, the Logic, order, and discipline of Judgment.

Its message is an absurdity of circular self-referential reasoning: It is because I say it is and you will obey. Unpersuasive to all but to Cave occupants who have surrendered their Judgment, their Free Will, in exchange for the superficial entertainments of fantasy. For being excused from having to adapt to the reality of changing circumstances while their powers and abilities to survive and thrive in Reality atrophy. And instead of receiving Protection from their master they are condemned to incompetence, impotence, and death. To circumstances that inevitably bring change despite the Cave’s founding premise: that change of minds, the ego’s undoing, the undoing of oppression and deception, is impossible.

The permanence of change

Logic-Energy permanently at rest would imply that existence-presence of a thing doesn’t necessarily imply possibility of its opposite, i.e. would imply the absence of a rule of Logic, a logical impossibility. Therefore Logic-Energy permanently at rest is an impossibility as is Reality-Creation being in an unchanging-stationary state.

Source: notes from book in progress: Story of the Child, section 1. State of Opposites

Published on Leave a comment on Focus on the Individual: The Context that Matters

Must Horton really hear every Who?

One of philosophy’s recurring preoccupations is the pull of thought in opposite directions: toward the individual and toward humanity. Is there any point, any validity, to changing minds on a mass scale? Or is it only worthwhile to focus on one mind at a time?

If the latter, how can the unconscious-dreaming Child – humanity – ever regain Consciousness if Horton the elephant must hear every Who? Is sharing the Holy Spirit with others meant to create movements and save humanity? Or is it really only to bring comfort to those who share our space? Is it more humane to create global juggernauts of idealism or just to be there for a friend?

The Nag Hammadi library begs Karen King’s question, What Is Gnosticism? But Valentinus and the other Gnostic Christian teachers did have one distinction: they were not a church. They were a school that taught individuals. They left the conversion of the “flock” to the Church, and that is where the story is picked up by Jesus in A Course in Miracles. The Course speaks to its readers, one at a time, where they’re at. It’s Christianity, but it’s not a church. Its focus is decidedly on individuals.

If some minds and hearts align with the Course’s message and others don’t, how can its message have any effect on the Child? If it doesn’t require every mind falling in line, what definitive choice, what specific confluence of conditions or issues, will trigger the awakening? After all the skating around and passing back and forth, after all the bumping and shoving, what will finally make the puck go into the net?

The choice: whether to crush individual Worth or affirm it

The Child’s progress toward awakening can’t be visualized or measured as though humanity is acting in concert toward any objective when the ego’s laws of chaos and ego-corrupted minds ensure that the opposite is true. There can be no orchestrated mass-group / societal movement toward a common purpose in a snake pit of clashing personalities, conflicting contexts, “realities” and “truths.” Where possession, control, dominance, and competition – crushing individual Worth -- rule social-group behavior instead of sharing, empowerment, and affirmation of individual Worth.

Think of the guy blocking a line of tanks at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

The focus must be on individual minds choosing the correct Guide and removing the ego’s lies, the barriers to an awareness of Love’s presence. The barriers to perceptions of Reality and Truth that align with the protection of Logic, the Laws of cause and effect, and affirm the Worth-Innocence of the individual. The focus must be on individual minds sharing their Guides and perceptions they’ve been led to in service to healing and Innocence-awakening.

Respect for Free Will means respect for the individual

Attempting to impose behavior conformance en masse from the top down is the ego’s soul-crushing approach. Vulnerable minds stripped of Free Will and sovereignty yield to meet their material needs and whatever else mindless red army ant movements force upon them. The Holy Spirit’s mission is to work through the Child’s projected body-selves to help him change his mind from the bottom up, not leaving anyone out, not skipping any steps. The individual approach from the ground up is a lesson in thoroughness and character taught in the I Ching’s hexagram 4, Youthful Folly.

Focusing on individuals ensures respect for their circumstances, the unique contexts that frame the choices their Free Wills must work with. Respect for Free Will implies respect for individuals, their contexts, and choices. It’s because individual minds are derived from one Child unconscious mind and interconnected, because separation is neither real in Reality nor in unreality, that one mind at a time is an illusion. In the realm of mind not bound by matter the reality is every mind is one mind.

Whether and how individuals converting their contexts from separation, delusion, and unreality to healing, awakening, and reality help to restore the Child’s Consciousness must be left to the psychology of the Child’s mind that made up the dream when it projected guilt. To the specific confluence of conditions that triggers the awakening, a spontaneous act of Innocence, the Child’s Psyche. It must be left to the Child's freely chosen Innocence to reverse the imagined projection, to bring the imagined thought back to its Source of his own Free Will, and end the dream. With help from his Parents, readmitting and welcoming his real Self, the Innocence of a Child, his Soul, back to Consciousness, back to Reality.

The context where there is Meaning and relevance

Whether the change requires the participation of all or most of humanity or only a few is meaningless and therefore irrelevant. Whether participation is engineered from the ground up, spontaneously, or orchestrated from the top down, is equally irrelevant:

• if “humanity” is a projection of Child’s unconscious mind
• if more or less of an illusion makes a difference: zero times 1 or a million is still zero.

What matters is each individual mind’s connection with the Child through the Holy Spirit. Through our own Intuition and what each mind chooses to do with the connection:

• looking to our own responsibilities.
• trusting in the power, kindness, and protection of the Holy Spirit – the Gift of Logic -- to put our choice to good use.

The Course says that if only one person truly Forgave it would upend the ego’s entire edifice of lies and end the dream. All it would take to trigger the awakening is one individual. The only context where there is meaning and relevance. The only context that matters.

Published on Leave a comment on From Anguish to Comfort: Accessing Intuition to Deal with Loneliness

Getting beyond appearances with Intuition

Isabel Myers believes that just because we get good use out of some elements of our personalities doesn’t mean we can’t get use out of all the elements. If accessing Intuition helps Intuitive Introverts fend off loneliness but Intuition hasn’t been put to much use by Sensing Extraverts, it doesn’t mean they can’t learn to use it. Isabel says so in her book Gifts Differing. Sensing Extraverts have Intuition and can use it to put an end to sadness living alone. Their personality type doesn’t take much interest in people’s internals and it’s time it did.

Sensing Extraverts are gifted with externals. They look outward rather than within to establish what’s real for them, to find Worth and affirm it, and to meet their needs. Sensing types identify with the body rather than with mind which is not matter. They rely on their bodies’ senses to tell them what’s real when they look outward. They do not rely on Intuition. This deprives them of attributes of mind – the inner guidance of Logic, insight, and wisdom – we all need to see beyond appearances. To get at the Truth and Meaning of things that lie behind the distractions and facades imposed on us by our bodies and their physical environment.

Sensing Extraverts get by without concerning themselves with internals, but that changes when they age and social connections dry up. Their internals tell them that this is so. Every time they feel the anguish of loneliness and abandonment, it’s their internals reminding them that they have work to do: to let go of attachments to externals which are only appearances. To get serious about attachments to what aren’t appearances: their real Self, their real Worth, their real companions. Their inner Guide who loves them, wants them to be happy, and will lead them there if they let her know that’s what they truly want of their own Free Will.

"Happiness is an inside job"

If they truly want companionship that will end the anguish of loneliness then they should know that what they truly want is to connect with their Self. With their inner Guide who’s there for them if they choose to connect with her through their own Intuition. In their youth, they may have suspected that “happiness is an inside job.” They may have written it, recited it, without reflecting on it. What it means is when other people can no longer provide companionship, there’s an alternative. An even better source of companionship than other people that Intuitive Introverts are blessed with: the Truth that we are never alone. That no one, including Sensing Extraverts, need ever be alone.

I’ve spoken in the past of the inner Guide that Christianity refers to as the Holy Spirit. I’ve suggested that Sensing Extraverts reach out to their inner Guide – to connect with their Self so they don’t have to be so dependent on others – by putting their thoughts and feelings of the moment into words. By bringing them to the surface and working with them. Teasing implications and meaning out of them by letting their minds reflect on them. Realizing that every thought, every feeling, is led forward by their implications to a deeper understanding of where they’re coming from and what they mean. To the message of Love and Hope they have for us when we delve into them and allow them to speak to us.

Experiencing emotions like grief and abandonment without inquiring into them is missing opportunities. To find and articulate the purpose and meaning of Life. The purpose that Life has for each of us subjectively, individually. Inquiring into feelings means being with them, letting them speak to us of their own accord, unforced, through the spontaneity, the Free Will of our Intuition. Through the Memory that all of humanity shares.

Serving a cause worth living for and not being alone

Where our inner Guide is to be found is not in anything to do with “social.” With professional resumes that detail our service to groups and their agendas. With social connections and the broad sweep of history’s flawed ideologies. With the “broad sweep” of anything. It’s in the specific circumstances of our individual lives in the moment. Accompanied by our most intimate thoughts and feelings. These frame the context Logic needs to answer the questions that trouble us: Where are we and what are we doing here? What is our Purpose? Where is Meaning? How can we turn the pain and despair of loneliness into fulfillment instead of emptiness? Into a sense that we serve a cause worth living for and in doing so we are not alone?

The key to getting started is putting thoughts and feelings into words. Composing sentences that require thought, that open us up to what’s going on inside our minds where the questions are, where the pain is coming from. Letting them lead us forward through their implications to deeper understanding, deeper connections, until there is reciprocation. Until our minds open and become accessible to another Self hearing us, responding to us. Until our awareness is no longer limited to bodies taking up space in rooms but is instead liberated by Mind to explore an expanding universe of possibilities. Our other Self, our Real Self, is there because our Intuition is there. The Sensing Extravert’s Intuition is there.

I describe what Intuition is and what it does. We all have Intuition. Sensing Extraverts’ Intuition hasn’t been exercised much over the years not from negligence but simply because of their personality type. Isabel’s theory is well served by Intuition and it tells us that they can fix that.

Questions of purpose and meaning always begin with circumstances

When Sensing Extraverts write what’s on their minds what they will be bringing to awareness is their circumstances in the moment. They will be examining their lives in all their extraordinariness and banality down to the last detail, as if they were looking at them through a magnifying glass. If they wonder what they would have to say to their typewriters, their computers, this is my answer. Getting at purpose and meaning must begin with where we’re at. Because without context Logic has nothing to work with. The philosophy built on this premise has a name: it’s called “existentialism.”

When Alice B. Toklas asked Gertrude Stein on her deathbed, “What’s the answer?”, Gertrude is said to have answered, “What’s the question?” It’s taken as a joke but it’s right on. Questions of purpose and meaning always begin and end with circumstances. With circumstances that are experienced, i.e. lived. Subjectively not objectively: with personal hopes, fears, desires, ideals, passions, pleasures and hurts, vulnerability and wounds, perceptions and beliefs, rationality and craziness. A point I’ve tried to make in Origin and Meaning: the Logic of Everything (April 4).

It’s hard for Sensing Extraverts to be subjective rather than objective. Being Introspective, self-aware. They can change that by accessing their Introvert. Any Introvert can help.

Our circumstances are raw material for purpose and meaning and there’s plenty of it in every life. Getting a handle on where we want to be headed now begins with being intimate with our situation, the details of our circumstances. With the specifics of what our mind-Logic and our heart-feelings have to say about them. Every observation we put in writing will lead to another observation. We will be led by Logic and by value, what our minds’ reflections produce and by the feelings they evoke.

The dynamic of conversation with our Self

Our individual worlds may seem static at first. Not being used to this Sensing Extraverts may even feel resistance. But as our Intuition opens up, as reflections come of their own accord, there will be movement. Our worlds will expand. They will be less and less anchored to concrete physical reality and more and more attuned to conversation, a dynamic-reciprocal flow of thoughts that won’t let us rest until the points our inner Guide wants us to have are made. Until the gifts of insight that incubate with yearning are brought to life through Intuition.

If I were the inner Guide of a Sensing Extravert suffering with loneliness I would be encouraged. Because I would know that I’m loved. That my host wants to be close. Yearns to connect, to communicate, and be involved with me. Other people fill hearts with love, too. But they come and go, don’t they? They’re not always available. And even when they are they can make us think we’re better off alone.

Our inner Guide is our connection to our Real Self, our Real Parents, our Real Home. She’s always available. My inner Guide has expanded into a spiritual-personal family: spiritual, human, and animal friends inhabiting a Temenos of soaring moonlit clouds, lakes, mountains, forests and streams. Lighthouses and great trees all connecting me with Mind and Love. Aligning my thoughts with Logic that leads me purposefully, joyfully back Home.

Feeling better

Want to feel better? That’s what our inner Guide is all about. It’s her whole purpose. So if you’re a lonely Sensing Extravert get to work! Your Intuition is waiting. She’s waiting.

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Published on 1 Comment on Creating Great Friendships Through Sharing and Thankfulness

We cherish our friends.
How can we be there for them?
How can we make them happy?
How can we be close to them and stay close?

By being interested in them, curious about their stories
By listening to them and responding to what’s on their minds
By hearing what they need from us and how they’re feeling
By letting them know we are with them.

What can tell us what they’re thinking and how they’re feeling?
What they need from us?
What can we offer them that will make them happy?

Here are gifts that are valued by everybody
Gifts to be shared
Our best guides to what make us best friends
With thoughts on how our guides can show us the way

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Friends need the gift of Love

We can speak the Five Languages of Love:

• Make time for friends and be accessible
Give them our respect, our undivided attention, and our trust
Connect with them by being open --
By sharing our thoughts, our feelings, our lives

• Be there for them when they need help
Do things for them that let them know they can count on us

• Show our love and appreciation by being affectionate
Let them know that their friendship touches our hearts

• Reward their kindness with generosity
With gifts that let them know we appreciate them

• Encourage them by admiring their talents and achievements
Let them know that they matter, they are important, they are the best

Friends need the gift of Community

We can make friends feel welcome in our lives, so they know they belong
Welcome them into our circle of friends and family
“Treat friends like family and family like friends”

Friends need the gift of Health / Wholeness

We can have fun with friends that’s wholesome and disciplined
That makes happy without risking abuse, injury, or sickness
Without pressuring, or being pressured, to do things that aren’t good for us

Friends need the gift of Freedom

We can give friends space to think and choose for themselves
To express themselves as they are
To reciprocate (return) our kindness or not
Without judging them, blaming them, or pressuring them to be more like us

Friends need the gift of Worth

We must always practice good manners and be polite, to show respect
We can respect friends for things they do well but also for just who they are
By giving them our attention, our gratitude, and encouragement
By letting them know, when they are with us, no one is more important

Friends need the gift of Empowerment

We can let friends take the lead and be in control sometimes – take turns.
Let our friends win sometimes if we’re better than they are
Learn from our friends if they have something to teach us
Let everyone in on the fun and make it fair for everyone

Friends need the gift of Abundance

We can share the fullness and joy of life that’s in our hearts
The wealth that wants and needs to be shared
Let it join us in happiness when we are both feeling it
Or lift us up by sympathizing and caring for one another when we aren’t

Friends need the gift of Safety

We can make it safe for friends to trust us and play with us
Where it’s warm and welcoming
A place of tenderness and gentle loving kindness
Where they can be themselves without fear of being blamed and attacked
For who they are – personalities that aren’t like ours

Friends need the gift of Hope / Purpose

We can share what we see that leads the way forward
That renews our friends’ faith in themselves, their work, and their futures
Friends don’t let friends give up!

Friends need the gift of Beauty

Share the moments, the passion, the beauty, that inspire and move us –
Our triumphs against adversity, our discoveries
Stories, images, and music that make our spirits soar
That express the beauty, the spirit, of friendship

To all my shining stars, my friends
Who have the gift of Love and Abundance in their hearts
Doing their very best to share it
Thankfully.

Published on Leave a comment on What Is Intimacy?

The five languages of love are acts of service, gifts, physical touch, quality time, and affirmation.
Thank you Gary Chapman: The Five Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts (Northfield 2015).
My favorite is affirming a person's worth, because the world keeps trying to take us down.

Quality time means intimacy, sharing lives.
• Being accessible mentally and emotionally, being honest and truthful.
• Being spontaneous, which means being with your friend-partner in the moment where they're at
• Being in their circumstances subjectively as well as ours
• Being always subjective, never objective, always intimate, never social.
• Letting "social-group" be the servant-protector of the individual rather than the other way around. I.e. rather than subordinating individual intimacy to social-group control / insincere superficiality.

Happiness in individual intimate relationships is sharing, empowerment, affirmation.
• it is never wealth-possession, power-control, competition / dominance-winning.
• It is never superimposing our circumstances-facts / agenda on our partner-friend's.
• it is subjectifying, never objectifying.

Love is one part coupling-connecting, one part uncoupling-letting go.
It is one part binding embrace, one part liberating freedom.
It is never any kind of predatory entrapment, coercion, or captivity.

Personality types who excel at love-intimacy and happiness are introspective, intuitive, and thoughtful.
They are also conscientious and disciplined, endowed with a strong sense of universal values.
They have an internal moral compass that doesn't need social norms for guidance.

Personality types who prefer superficial social relationships crave belonging that absorbs the individual into the group.
Not the kind of belonging that provides a safe sanctuary for individuals to experience intimacy.

Practice an intimacy of openness that fosters honesty and trust and happiness will follow.
Allow rules of possession, control, competition, dominance and winning to intrude and happiness will vanish.

Further reading: the gold standard is A Course in Miracles.
And a little something I wrote for kids: "Creating Great Friendships", my next post.

Be assured that anyone who takes the time to read this has the perfect personality type and the wisdom to achieve intimacy and happiness.

Go in peace with my blessing.

Published on Leave a comment on Origin and Meaning: The Logic of Everything

The first Implication of Logic

The original act that began the sequence of Logic that began everything was an Implication of Logic:
• from a condition of statelessness, the opposite of Creation -- worthlessness vs. Worth, pointlessness vs Purpose, meaninglessness vs Meaning, lifelessness vs Life, non-being vs Being:-- that state must Be and it must be the state of Creation.
• from statelessness, the opposite of Reality-Knowledge: that state must be Real and that it must be the state of Reality.
* from statelessness, the absence of everything: that state must be the presence of everything.

Statelessness – the absence of Everything -- prodded the sequence of Logic into motion with the Implication of Reality-Creation because “absence of Everything” implied “absence of Logic,” a Logical impossibility and therefore a condition of unreality. Logic’s response was an act of Necessity and self-assertion: the presence and inviolability of Logic.

The original act that began the sequence of Logic that began everything was thus an Implication of Logic from statelessness, the opposite of Reality-Creation, the opposite of Being-Life. The Implication contained DNA genetics with coded instructions for the design, development, and activation of the state of Reality-Creation, the state of Being-Life, attributes with the Force of Logic that holds all Implications and their Interconnections together.

The first Implication caused the first Interconnection in the sequence of Logic that required:
• Connection-match between before-after in the sequence to move it forward
• Reciprocity to complete the Connection and its effect.

Existentialism: Meaning that flows from the bottom up

Precedent was set with universal Implication for Meaning-Worth: that it always begins with Implications drawn from circumstances on the ground, from the situation in the Now involving whatever Selves and stakes-considerations, whatever Values-Worth compose the situation. This is what is meant by "Existentialism." The Logic of Meaning-Worth requires context for establishing Meaning, and context must be provided by circumstances at the current “before” point in the sequence of Logic.

The original activation by Energy, the Force of Logic

Energy is the electromagnetic Force that interconnects the Implications of Logic, the gravitational Force that holds the Interconnections of Logic together, and the nuclear Force that keeps opposites apart.

The original activation by the Force of Logic -- by Energy, -- that activated Reality-Creation, was its activation of the seed of Creation: Oneness that contained genetic code-instructions for everything at that point in the sequence of Logic in those circumstances. It did not contain everything that was to come because it had not happened yet. That is, it had not been recognized by Mind-Consciousness, validated by Love-Values, and authorized by Logic, so it belonged to the “after” part of the sequence of Logic and was yet to become Known. It was yet to be part of the exploration, the advance-extension into the unknown that is Creation.

The original activation of Energy, the Force of Logic, was caused by an Implication of Logic from statelessness. The sequence of Logic at the beginning thus began with an Implication of Logic that awakened Energy from a state of rest to engage with Creation and perform its first application: activating Logic’s seed of Creation, that is. activating its coded instructions for the design and development of Reality and the seeding of new Life that is Creation.

The first act by Oneness, the seed of Creation

The first act by Oneness-Innocence, the seed of Creation-Life, was an act of organic growth in alignment with Logic, that is, in the sequence of Logic deploying its Energy. The first act was organic evolution from Oneness into the marriage between two attributes of Logic: Mind-Masculinity Reason-Thought with Love-Femininity Value-Passion. It was an act of Reciprocity that holds all of Logic's Implications and their Interconnections together. It was in essence an affirmation of Worth, an act of Love which is an attribute of Logic.

The Implications and Reciprocity of Logic give Mind its ability to think and reason, to analyze and judge. The Force of Logic’s reciprocal Interconnections gives Mind its power to think and reason, to analyze and judge with consequences, i.e. to act, to decide, choose, and connect, to make Mind-Thoughts causes with effects. The Interconnections and Reciprocity of Logic give Love its ability to feel, to care and value. The Force of Logic’s reciprocal Interconnections gives Love its power to feel and care, to value and judge with consequences, i.e. to act, to share, affirm, evaluate, and connect, to make Love-Feelings causes with effects. It is the Implications and Interconnections of Logic that bind Mind and Love together into one Creative Force.

The first act of Oneness was thus to form the first intimate-loving Relationship capable of Parenting a Child, thereby capable of forming the first intimate family Relationship. The Couple was the first Parents of Creation-Life: Father-Mind and Mother-Love. The first act by Oneness, the seed of Creation-Life, was thus to form the first Relationship between Selves that are attributes of Logic which is the Source of Oneness, the Source of Reality-Creation which is everything that Is and everything that is to Be.

All steps in the sequence of Logic, then and Now, are part of a logically Interconnected succession of Implications.

The original engagement of Energy that led to the activation of Oneness was caused by an Implication from Reality-Creation, the opposite of statelessness. All causes in the Laws of cause and effect are Implications of Logic.

The Logical impossibility of separation

“Absence of Everything” and “presence of Everything” kept apart by Energy nuclear Force are still Interconnected / held together by Implications of Logic / Energy electromagnetic Force and by gravitational Force that Interconnects Logic / Everything. So long as opposites kept apart by Energy nuclear Force are still Interconnected by Implications of Logic and Energy electromagnetic Force, so long as the “separation” between Mind and no-mind is maintained both by the gravitational Force of Logic’s Interconnections and the nuclear Force of Logic’s opposites, it is in this sense that there can be no “real separation.”

Yet the Child’s experience with unconsciousness does establish that there is a sense in which separation is real: within the Child’s dream – our illusory material universe -- when it is “made real” and the possibility of no-mind / extinction, the original illogical and therefore unreal condition of statelessness, hangs over the illusion.

Reciprocity: the original Thought of Self-awareness

The original Thought of Self-awareness, of Consciousness, i.e. Mind that includes the capability of Choice, and the original Feeling of Value that includes the incentive, the Motivation, of Freedom i.e. Love, both core attributes of Logic, was Reciprocity. Giving and giving back that formed a Parental Relationship, a couple united as one, capable of producing a third Self, a Child. An extension of Mind and Love, a shared Self, to join with family in a second Relationship, Parents with Child. The Child with the Authority of Logic, empowered by Energy and enabled by Free Choice, was brought into Being to play an indispensable role in the central mission of Creation: the Creation of Worth. The opposite of statelessness. The opposite of worthlessness.

All of this is implied by the Necessity of Logic for activating Reality and Creation, Being and Life. For applying the laws of cause and effect. All implied by the Authority, the Force, and the Loving Kindness of Logic.

What, then, explains ethics and metaphysics? The alignment with Logic in the circumstances in which it finds itself. In its context, that gives everything that is and is to come its Meaning.

Published on Leave a comment on Thoughts for Easter 2021

To my two shining stars,

Learning

Our world is a laboratory where we have to figure out how to make things work, including relationships. Families are laboratories for figuring out how to get along when everyone has their own personality. It helps us get along at school, at work, and at play when we’ve learned to get along at home. When we understand that our differences can be our friends that show us how to grow. How to unlock abilities we didn’t know we had. How to experience pleasures we didn’t know were there to be enjoyed.

Different personalities that seem to make our lives more difficult may actually be teaching us how to be happier. We just have to be aware that we have our personalities and others have their personalities. Respect the differences, let others be our teachers, and learn from them.

It’s what I’ve been doing with you: learning from you. One of many reasons why you make me happy, because you’re my teachers and you’re good at it. I don’t have to be like you for us to get along. I can be myself and you can be yourselves. You’re very good at it. Thank you for being my friends. Thank you so much for being my teachers.

Adapting and growing

What did I do when my wife left and took my boys? I went to work, came home to empty rooms, and cried. Then the day came when I stopped crying, moved away, and began a new life. I reconnected with old friends and made new friends:

* Sally, who became my mentor and led me on a journey of personal growth to what I could do to make my life better.
* Judy, who led me on a journey of spiritual growth, to a Guide who would help me from within to make every life better.
* And Larry, who threw open the doors to professional adventure, to a world of friends and acceptance I never knew existed.

I went from being a solitary life in an empty room to a life of abundance and purpose. To being blessed and thankful and wanting to share. To never looking back.

The Why and the Who of Easter

Our world is a laboratory for figuring out Why to make things work. The story that made Christmas and Easter part of our lives is the story of one life, a brother who tried to help us with that. He was born on Christmas and on Easter showed that no matter what he will always be trying to help us. He is here now, a presence to share with everyone because he set a good example. He is the Guide that I was led to and he is the nicest.

He helps me understand every day Why it’s important to learn: to change and grow. Because our personalities aren’t supposed to lock us in. They’re opportunities to open up. To unlock. To be more than who we are. To be stronger and freer, more creative, more imaginative. And happier. By being who we are and allowing others to be who they are. By teaching others and allowing them to teach us.

What does Easter mean to me? Faith, Purpose, and Hope. It’s what it means to everyone touched by its story. It’s what I would like for it to mean to you.

And, by the way, he was also a she. In our minds, that is, where she belongs, now and forever.

Happy Easter!

David Clark Harrison
In memory of Owen Clark Harrison
March 31, 1970 – March 2017

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Published on 3 Comments on P Is for Poetry

Encased in every word is the memory of what gave rise to it
Events in human experience that caused a thought
Or discovery, that brought forth a feeling
Of melancholy or joy, regret or pleasure, satisfaction
Or despair.

Encased in every word is the story of how it came to be
And the message it has just for us alone
In the place where we are at
If we will let it flow through our minds and hearts
Our bodies, their sensations

Affect us until we alight in its place like a butterfly
In a clearing
Come to a woodland of strange and wonderful sights
Creatures of sound and movement, touching
And laughter wanting us to be there with them
Their place of wonder

With poetry
With words
Our friends

To a friend with love and whimsy
Saint Patrick’s Day March 17, 2021

Inspired by P Is For Poetry: Poems from Irish Poets
Edited by Seamus Cashman, Illustrated by Corinna Askin and Alan Clarke
(The O’Brien Press, Dublin, 2020)

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Published on 2 Comments on Personal Responsibility and Political Choice: Why I Choose to Be a Liberal Democrat

Latino men are said to be gravitating toward the Republican Party because they believe in personal responsibility. Evidently they believe that liberal Democrats don’t share this belief. If so, they are dead wrong. I choose to be a liberal Democrat. I choose emphatically not to be a conservative Republican. I emphatically embrace a personal philosophy that is centered on individual personal responsibility: striving to reach our full potential by developing and using all the resources entrusted to our care. Using our God-given talents, our own minds, our own judgment, our own willpower, self-motivation and self-discipline, to achieve the goals that we set for ourselves.

This isn’t an aside. This is the heart and soul of liberal democracy that cannot survive unless its citizens practice personal responsibility, unless they do their part to keep it alive through their active participation. Liberal Democrats are the heart and soul of liberal democracy that affords us the freedom to do our part. Take away liberal Democrats and see what happens to democracy. They believe with all their heart that personal responsibility, empowered by free will, by freedom of choice, is the driving force behind our democracy and they fight every day to preserve it.

But they also recognize that the practice of personal responsibility has its limits. Even those most dedicated to striving, to doing for themselves, come up against adversity that exceeds their capacity. Everyone at some point needs help. Helping those who strive on their own but still need help isn’t the only function of government, but it’s certainly one of its functions. Though you may have been told otherwise it’s a legitimate function. It’s enshrined in the US Constitution and in every state constitution with every mention of the “public welfare.” If there was ever any doubt the liberal Democratic administration of Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression should have put it to rest.

Liberal Democrats who live and die by personal responsibility believe fervently that when government can help in times of adversity it should help. Conservative Republicans who preach personal responsibility are just as fervent that government should only help when their donor corporations screw up and need to be bailed out. Otherwise, their only interest in the “public welfare” is to shove the “public” – you and me – out of the way so they can take and do whatever they want. This is what they mean by “liberty:” getting rid of the rule of law that protects it.

After four years of Republican rule, it should no longer be a mystery what they want: to rule without opposition. To crush dissent. While they’ve been trying to rip out the Affordable Care Act “root and branch” they’re even busier ripping out democracy root and branch. They aim not to empower democracy with their authoritarian ways but to destroy it. They don’t want government to help strivers, they want government to get our of their way. Their idea of “personal responsibility” isn’t to honor it with their support, to help hard workers succeed. It’s to let them fail.

Anyone attracted to the Republican Party because they stand for personal responsibility has been deceived by Republican lies. By the lie that strivers never need help and when they do only big Republican donor corporations who screw up are entitled to it. Conservative Republicans today have become a caricature of the principles they once shared with liberal Democrats. They no longer share anything. They just want power – winning at any cost. For you and me? Not a chance! For themselves.

What does this make me? A survivor of conservative Republican lies -- hopefully not a vanishing breed. An individual striving on his own to do his best with as little help as possible. But also a member of a community that shares and empowers one another when help is needed.

So who would that be? What I’m proud to be. What I invite everyone who loves their country to be. What I invite you to be: a liberal Democrat.

Published on Leave a comment on Missing Yogi

To: Class Notes, Andover Magazine

When my father died 55 years ago, my mother said it was as if the lights had gone out all over her world.
I’m reminded of this because losing PA 55’s class secretary, Tom Lawrence, affectionately known as “Yogi,” had a similar effect on the memory of my world at Andover.

Wondering why, I realized that Yogi checked off all the attributes one would want in a mother hen.
Three in particular that mattered to me were kindness, thoughtfulness, and inclusiveness.

These and other qualities of character and service should draw tributes from across our class.
If so, I only want to add that they are deserved.
Whether or not we see the likes of him again, he is truly missed.

David C. Harrison, PA ‘55
Redondo Beach, CA
www.davidclarkharrison.com
02/28/21

Published on Leave a comment on Remembering

Flitting in and out of others’ lives
Wondering what’s in it for me
Where what seems important
Comes and goes and isn’t worth much

Remember me mind and heart who stood
For something not in and out
Comes and goes, that speaks of Worth
Beyond time that can be shared

That doesn’t need for what’s here and gone
To be around to do Good
That’s not owned or controlled or used
To gain advantage
To be more than us or better than us

That’s only used to put minds at rest
And comfort knowing
That nothing can ever come between us

This is how I want to be remembered
When I think of you.

Published on Leave a comment on 2nd Footnote to “Logic”: On the Performance of Science

The logical case for science giving up its illogical insistence that matter is real begins with this: it judges all that sensory perception detects to be measurable and therefore real. Plato held that what is Real is not the object but the idea or thought of it. He thereby took the locus of determination outside of matter, where it did not belong, and placed it within Mind where it did belong. He did so not on the basis of “verifiable” scientific experimentation but on the basis of Logic. He was a “rationalist,” a philosopher who trusted Reason to guide him to Reality and Truth.

Yet he believed in the reality of the material cosmos – the inspiration of what he perceived to be an expression of the Divine. Had he reconciled this belief with his doubt that the uninspiring human body and its material trappings could also be real he might have followed sensory perception into the study of matter. He might even have done so with some of the passion he devoted to Mind.

Aristotle’s paradigm shift away from Plato’s rationalism toward science, the belief that the study of matter, the stuff of sensory perception, can lead to Reality and Truth, was not, as science would have us believe, a categorical renunciation of Plato’s Logic nor of its theories. It was simply an acknowledgement that they couldn’t be proven. While sensory perception, with its access to plants and animals and the like, does offer a kind of “proof” for the theories of science.

While neither Plato nor Aristotle could go anywhere with the belief that the reality of an object lay in the thought of it, or with Plato’s hesitation over its unreality, both were in agreement that Mind is nevertheless Real. Both were therefore in agreement that an object did not depend for its reality on its being perceived by the body’s senses. Why? Because Mind does not depend for its Reality on being perceived by the body’s senses. Science that would have us believe that only that which can be thus perceived is provably real contradicts the reality of Mind. Contradicts the source of all of science’s contributions to the “quest for knowledge”: Mind. Contradicts itself, the minds of scientists who engage in self-referential thinking, the absurd notion that bodies that belong to the same material environment, subject to identical “laws” of science, can objectively judge its reality.

Hawking’s “quest for knowledge” belongs in quotes because, with circular reasoning, we must acknowledge that even with sensory perception to guide science we can never truly “know” anything. We can perceive it, but perception is perception. It is, in fact, not even the body’s senses that make perception but the psychological act of projection. We are a long way from objects telling us anything about themselves but their appearances, and appearances are deceiving. In fact, this may well be their main purpose: to deceive, and science that puts its faith in appearances may be its willing victim.

To approach Knowledge of our Self and the environment that is our true Home – our origin and our destination – is to fall back on the Intuition, the reflections and thoughts, of the rationalist Plato for guidance. To fall back on Logic, because the body and its ally science, that conveniently ignores the immateriality of Mind, is leading us in circles. To the behavior of matter – quantum mechanics – that calculates to perfection but doesn’t add up.

What happened to the celebrity of Einstein and the promise of physics: the theory of everything? This was to be the crowning achievement of Aristotle’s instinct. It disappeared and along with it the fanfare of physics. We continue on with the labors of science, breaking new ground in other fields, still refusing to accept the Logic of Mind that Reality need not and does not depend on the sensate body. Science that lionizes the truth refuses to face fact. Science that prides itself on the intellectual rigor of its theories and their predictions, on impeccable Logic, accepts blatant contradiction. Science that purges itself of religious and political bias indulges in its own institutional bias worthy of the Church.

In science we aren’t dealing with an expression of Plato’s or Aristotle’s ideals. We’re dealing with a perversion of a rationalist’s ideal of the highest and best use of Mind: to seek Reality and Truth by whatever means that meet the test of Logic.

It is time, over a century since Bohr and the Copenhagen Interpretation acknowledged it, for science and philosophy both to turn to Logic. To acknowledge that the simultaneous reality of two opposing states – Mind not-matter and matter not-mind – does not meet the test of Logic. To acknowledge that between Mind and matter, the opposite matter can’t be real. To assume otherwise is to contradict Plato and Aristotle and declare that Mind is not Real.

There will always be much to learn from the study of matter, but finding Reality and the Truth behind appearances isn’t it. The “quest for knowledge” must turn back in earnest to Plato and his unfinished philosophy. To Logic.

Does all this make me a doubter of science, a denier? My prayers at weekly prayer meetings in my youth invariably concluded with appeals to God for special consideration, not on my behalf but on behalf of scientists. And for this I was teased. My concern about their performance is motivated by admiration, not animosity. I do not wish to weaken their intellectual, cultural, or political support but to strengthen it. To make their heroic work less vulnerable to attack from their unthinking doubters, not more so. If my views appear to put me in the company of the opposition, I am the loyal opposition. I want science and its “quest for knowledge” to succeed, not to fail.

So, No, I am not a denier, nor am I an enemy of Democracy. I am a fan of both who understands that Free Choice cannot endure without the Free Spirit of Inquiry. We just have to get it right.

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Published on 1 Comment on A Footnote to “Logic”: More on Separation and Statelessness

Mind-Oneness Knows no opposite. It is self-Consciousness unaware of “others” by definition. It alone is the arbiter of what’s Real. It is Reality itself. It is Being itself within Reality-Creation. It therefore cannot have an opposite that takes any part in its own definition. Otherwise none of this would be true. Not in its context of Reality and Creation or it would violate the Logic of Reality-Creation. In contrast to the illusory “non-mind” of the Child’s unconscious mind’s dream, “no mind” means having nothing to do with mind. It means having nothing to do with anything. Because it is outside the range of Mind’s Logic it has its own Logic, the Logic of the condition of statelessness.

It is the nothingness that is the unreal opposite of the Child’s Mind with Free Choice. But though it cannot be the opposite of Consciousness and Oneness, the Parent Mind that by definition can have no opposites, it must be the opposite of the state of Mind-Being outside the context of Reality and Creation. This is so because of the inviolable rule of Logic: that there can be no state without an opposite if the existence-possibility of an opposite is implied by its Logic-definition. The condition of no state nothingness implied the opposite of its attributes: the state of Mind-Being. Logic bestirred itself from its own state of unrest because of implications: the logical implication of stateless nothingness without an opposite and its own restlessness.

The state of Mind-Being and the condition of statelessness that preceded it are separate. Their separation cannot be an illusion because the logical possibility of the condition of statelessness – not thereness -- is still “there.” It remains a possibility not as a condition that precludes Mind, Reality, and Creation but as a condition that could logically replace it. Because there is no more rest, no more peace in the state of opposites occupied by Creation’s Child, no more of the resolution sought by Logic, by Energy, by “God,” than if Logic reverted to the statelessness that preceded it.

Yet the Logic of interconnectedness still holds. In its context there can be no such thing as “separation.” This is the fundamental Truth, the fundamental rule of Logic, that we, in our attempts to regain Consciousness, must observe. Whether separation between Mind and its predecessor, the condition of statelessness, is a “real” possibility or unreal between the Child’s unconscious mind and his dream of separation from Source and Reality, it’s all bound up in the interconnectedness of Logic.

The overarching context of Logic, its attributes, implications, and interconnections, rules out any possibility of separation from itself. This is the separation that ultimately cannot be real. The necessity of separation between Mind’s stance of Being and its opposite, the statelessness of no mind, no being, is still subject to the overriding necessity of Logic.

Published on Leave a comment on Logic

Logos: . . . human reasoning about the cosmos. . . Identified with God, it is the source of all activity . . . the power of reason . . the word of God, which itself has creative power and is God’s medium of communication with the human race. . . divine wisdom . . . .

Logic: . . . Valid reasoning. . . The relationship between elements and between an element and the whole in a set of objects, individuals, principles, or events. . . .

[American Heritage Dictionary]

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The Interconnectedness of Logic

Everything and nothing are subject to Logic including Mind. Everything and nothing are conditions that have attributes not necessarily in Reality or unreality, but in Logic.

Logic is its own state governed by its own rules, by its own conditions and their attributes. Enforced by its own authority, Energy. It is its own source, authority, and legitimacy. What it is and what it does are one in the same: implications.

Follow the money –Deep Throat’s advice to Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward when they were unraveling a notorious political cover-up for the Washington Post that would end a U.S. administration. Advice that turned up answers because they were interconnected by the coherence and cohesion of Logic.

There is no question, no place, no self in Mind or no-Mind, in Reality or unreality, that cannot be positioned somewhere in this interconnectedness and set in motion forward toward the premises, hypotheses, and predictions of theories that are Logic’s own guidance. It is, and cannot be by its own Logic, subject to guidance, influence, or control from any source outside of itself. In the context of Logic there are no “others” and no opposites of Logic in a state of opposites, for even illogic has its Logic: the conditions, attributes, and implications of not being Logic.

The Energy and Discipline of Logic

The Energy of Logic flows from implications and interconnections never being at rest, never being finished, never not being in motion forward. From Energy at the “beginning,” in timelessness, the start of the sequence of Logic, when the state of statelessness could not rest without yielding to its opposite, the state of Mind-Being. The Oneness of Mind-Being is eternally at rest, but being the seed of Creation its Logic required events that led to eternal unrest: the marriage of the Child’s Parents, Mind with Love, and the Child’s role in Creation with Free Will. It was Freedom of Choice that logically could not remain at rest within Oneness. It was the Logic of Creation and the Child’s role in it that brought forth the state of opposites.

The Energy of Logic follows it everywhere throughout the state of opposites:

* from the Reality, Creations, Life, Light, and Worth of the Child’s Consciousness and Creativity, which yield to the essence, purity, and beauty of their Logic

* to the illogic of their opposites, the unreality of destruction, death, darkness, and worthlessness of mindlessness, non-being, inertia, and fear, attributes of unconsciousness.

While Logic is employed by Mind for Mind’s stance of Being, it is not controlled by anything. Logic is its own discipline because it is discipline: the discipline of attributes, implications, and their interconnections. The discipline of definition. It is its own Being because its implications and interconnections are everywhere and infinite. There can be no end to how “deep” and how “far” they go because they are their own context, their own universe. They can “exist” with equal force in the infinity of timelessness – in the eternal Now – and in the temporality of past and future, with only a “present” that can’t be a Now.

Logic is in Mind but of itself, its own state whose scope, whose reach, extends beyond Mind and its state of Being, Oneness, Reality, Creation, Worth, and their illusory opposites to the separation between Mind and no-mind – statelessness -- that is no illusion. To the seed of Energy, the eternal restlessness of Inquiry, the singularity, the Logical origin and sequencing of everything from one point to the next: Logic.

The Logic and Illogic of Separation

Separation between statelessness and its opposite, Mind-Being, can be no illusion because the state of opposites has two dimensions: one the context of the Child’s part in Parent-Mind’s Reality-Creation which exists side-by-side with the possibility of unconsciousness and its illusion of unreality and dream of untruth – our material world. The other lies beyond Reality-Creation with an entirely different possibility from the beginning: the seminal possibility of statelessness, of no mind, no being, that aroused the power of Logic, its Energy, to produce its opposite.

So, while it is true, as Jesus teaches in A Course in Miracles, that separation is not Real within the Child’s context of Reality-Creation, in the sequence of events that preceded the Child, separation of a kind, between the Mind that produced Reality-Creation and the possibility of its opposite, had to be Real. Real not in the sense of Reality as a part of Creation but as a part of Logic.

There are many “separations” within the interconnectedness of Logic that are no more than definitions that distinguish rather than separate. Distinctions between the Selves of Reality Creations -- Father Mind and Mother Love, Parents and Child, Child and his living Creations. Distinctions between the thoughts of a Child-Mind that’s Conscious and a Child-mind that’s unconscious. All combined in one state of Mind by the interconnectedness of Logic.

Outside of Reality-Creation, the state that preceded it and exists beyond it, separation is more than a distinction. It has actual possibilities, not merely unreal possibilities, and is therefore consequential. Because everything and the only thing that connects opposites is the fact that they are opposites. Is the link established through the implications of Logic and their interconnections. Is the Logic – “Logos” – that ties everything together. The tying-of-everything-together that may be the notion of “God.”

“God” at Peace and War

“God” may be a synonym for the Child’s Parents Mind-Love in Reality-Creation, though “Parents” will suffice. I have avoided the notion of “God” but acknowledge it now because I have experienced a “felt perception of the interconnectedness of things.” It was spontaneous, un-premeditated, with only one other experience, a long time ago, to prepare me for it. It was of mind and feeling in an abstract way but also deeply personal, intimate. The Logic of intimacy is something very precious that is forever. Like being touched by Love. Who has not felt it at some time in their lives? Who does not want to feel it?

I riff. “God” may be the Force that comes from not being at rest, that endlessly seeks Order: Perfection, Resolution, Peace – the whole number value of Pi. That seeks wholeness, harmony, unity. Force-Energy at the beginning that couldn’t be at rest with the condition of statelessness, that was caused by the logically untenable, illogical condition of statelessness that required resolution, inevitably led to the state of opposites with the birth of the Child with Freedom of Choice and a central role in Creation.

God-Logos seeking Order-resolution thus produced not only eternal irresolution-competition but a second source of Energy: from friction between opposites. An attribute of disorder, of irresolution and its unrest, is constant, eternal Force-Energy, of a Will toward resolution and rest without friction, without competition and conflict. The Will of God-Logos may be eternally toward Peace. Yet the ultimate source of conflict-unrest may also be a God-Logos of Peace and Order not being at Peace, being in opposition to the condition of statelessness, of no Mind-Being, unable logically to be at rest with it. God-Logos in opposition to itself: the Will to Peace whose Logic eventually produced the state of opposites. The state of eternal conflict.

The Dark Matter of Science and the Allegory of Plato’s Cave

Plato’s philosophy ended before it could be finished. It ran into a contradiction in his Logic: the unreality of body-matter versus the reality of cosmos-matter. Parmenides, his mentor, saw no contradiction: all appearances are illusory. But Plato's pupil, Aristotle, took thought in another direction. He moved Plato’s inquiry off the attributes and implications of Mind onto the attributes and implications of matter. It was a momentous, historic shift, for philosophy that was to guide Western thought ever since moved away from Reason onto the study of biology and a beginning in science. To science’s “quest for knowledge,” guided by the body’s senses: the Logic of sensory perception that at once enlightens us and confuses us. That ultimately condemns us to captivity in the darkness of Plato’s Cave.

An inquiring and honest mind confused by matter will make a mistake in Judgment. But in its consequences science’s faith in the body’s senses is anything but a harmless mistake. Far from living up to its promise, it’s produced an atrocity: mass extinction. In the darkness of Plato’s Cave we bring our children and grandchildren into an expiring world.

How long must this go on?

* Until the thread of Plato’s inquiry into the Logic of Mind is picked up again by philosophy and pursued with serious intent.

* Until science’s “quest for knowledge” is freed from its illogical premise: the reality of matter.

* Until Logic is re-established in the affairs of a species intent on its own destruction because it chooses to be guided by a substitute illusory self that has no Memory of Logic or the wish to retrieve it.

* Until humanity that lives by an impossibility, the belief that we are bodies disconnected and isolated, each of us our own singularity, our own specialness, authors of our own truths, rulers of our delusional worlds, gives up the insane belief that by abandoning the limits of Logic we achieve Freedom.

Insanity – the Logic of illogic: equating opposites. The “logic” of our delusions that equate captivity with Freedom. Pain with pleasure, suffering and death with Happiness and Life. That equate matter, that can only be a projection of Mind unconscious, with Reality that can only be a Creation of Mind that’s Conscious. Matter, that can only be an appearance in a dream - a façade, a deceit -- with Truth.

Our world beset by entropy plunges forward with technology that pits one against another while there is yet to be seen any movement toward unity in our minds. Any glimmer, any hope, of sanity. Aristotle’s paradigm shift has run its course in one branch of science, quantum mechanics, that openly questions the reality of matter. Is it not time to ask: what will lead us out of Plato’s Cave? How do we awaken?

The Way Home Is Logic

Follow the Logic. Start with the attributes of our circumstances – the facts. Reflect on their implications and let their interconnections carry us forward. Never mind wishes and fears, the lures and distractions of entertaining thoughts, the seductive pleasures of sensations and feelings, the satisfactions of ownership and investment in the foolishness and corruption of “wealth” and “power.” Be done with the allure of opposites, appearances and deceptions that offer self-gratification and deliver nothing of Worth. Be done with the losing of “winning,” the ruination of relationships meant to share and empower with Truth, that succumb instead to the delusion of possession and control.

Everything I have is who I am. The Child of Parents Mind married to Love. Free Will. This is the Truth. Not what this world of matter tells us. Not what we have “learned” in Plato’s Cave: “Everything I am is what I have.” An object possessed and controlled. No wonder our world is a descent into self-devouring self-interests! No wonder we can’t “win” for losing! No wonder we can’t think!

Follow the Logic. Turn to the side of Mind governed by Logic that employs Logic. That’s married to Love and would never deviate from the caring, the sharing and empowerment of its values, its Worth. It will take us home.

Where can Logic be found? What is Memory for? That’s where it can be found: in Intuition. What is Mind for that isn’t cluttered with the daily busy-ness of the brain? That’s where Logic can be found: in Thinking. In what thinking does: Reasoning.

Who says so? Our own Minds say so. Who will lead its occupants out of Plato’s Cave? They will. With their own native ability to Think. With Logic.

Published on Leave a comment on Defense of Democratic Majority Rule of Law

The Hon. Charles Schumer, Majority Leader
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510

Re: Defense of Democratic Majority Rule of Law

Dear Senator Schumer:

When liberties granted to us by our Constitution are abused by extremist minorities for the purpose of overturning it our democratic leadership must respond aggressively to defend it. The cult of Mr. Trump, who lost the election, means to overturn democratic opposition until he is restored to power and his rule is absolute. I urge our democratic leadership to take steps at once to forestall this event beginning with abolition of the filibuster.

Do not wait for citadels of democracy to be overrun again to suspend or repeal the 2nd amendment and outlaw the NRA. Be prepared to declare martial law. Do not hesitate to outlaw acts that empower Trump's cause including donations, misinformation, and their sources if they persist, including "news" outlets, social media, and the thoroughly corrupted Republican party itself.

Majority rule by law has historically been held hostage to the South and other minority interests to preserve order for too long. It only emboldens and empowers them to do lasting harm. National security is now imperiled along with the Constitution and democracy. The time has come for the democratic majority to assert itself and expel minority thugs from the citadels of democracy once and for all.

Thank you for your inspired leadership on behalf of the majority. God bless.

David C. Harrison
January 30, 2021

Published on Leave a comment on Love Without Mind: The False Innocence of Neutrality in a State of Opposites

In Cornelius Ryan’s telling of Market Garden, the story of Viscount Montgomery’s ill-fated attempt at “A Bridge Too Far,” a resident of Nijmegen, a woman whose house had been commandeered by British paratroopers, ran out into the street to hail a cab in the midst of intense fighting. As if all that needed to be done on an ordinary day was to run an errand.

It was in one sense an act of Love, a heroic stance for sanity in opposition to the cruelty and insanity of war. It was at the same time an act in opposition to reality, an act that was out of Mind. It was admirable, inspiring, and delusional. What was going on?

Putting things in context

It goes all the way back to Reality, the state that we inhabited before we wound up here. We can think of it this way: in Reality the bonding of our Parents, father Mind-Reason and mother Love-Freedom, brought forth a child endowed with Free Will, the ability to choose freely. It was an attribute essential to his / her central role in Creation, and it is the attribute we most depend upon for our awakening and return to Reality.

But it was not only to produce Free Will that Love was paired with Mind. It was also to endow Creativity with the attributes of context: Purpose and direction, Logic and discipline, Order and structure. The Big Picture.

Without the Reason of Mind, the Freedom of Love is incapable of choice and all that goes into it: observation, options, considerations and their measurements, values and their weighting, guidance and decision. Awareness of considerations, their measurements and their evaluation, are a joint effort between Thinking and Feeling. made possible by Love’s bonding with Mind. Creation itself would not be possible without it, and neither would we, their (unconscious) Child. We would be powerless to do our job in Creation.

The horror of Love without Mind

In the reality of our house invaded by World War II we’re horrified by the thought of Mind without Love. But in responding to it with ordinariness – by hailing a cab in the midst of battle – we’re missing another horror: the horror of Love without Mind. Mind without Love is the act of oppression. Love without Mind is the willful, deluded defenselessness that allows it to happen.

This is the horror of Love without Mind: an act of omission rather than commission, a pretense of innocence that shares equally in guilt, in the suffering, death, and destruction that results from Mind without Love. It has the appearance of selfless virtue, an act of principle. In reality it’s an irresponsible refusal to confront the enemy, bordering on cowardice, that gives the enemy what he wants: our treasure and our life.

Given the choice between hailing a cab in the midst of battle and kicking Hitler’s army out of Holland, Mind with Love prefers to do its duty, accept the reality of our state of opposites, stand up to evil, and kick Hitler’s army out of Holland. There is no avoiding putting on the uniform, arming ourselves, and killing the invader.

That is, if we are to enjoy the fruits of Love and innocence in a state of opposites. Denying that the state of opposites exists, imagining that we are exempt from its consequences, may give us temporary reprieve so long as our luck holds out. But it only emboldens and empowers the opposites, the forces arrayed against us who do not wish us well.

The false innocence of Love without Mind

We have arrived at democracy’s peril, at this moment in our nation’s history, precisely because wishful thinking has allowed forces arrayed against us – the malevolent dominance in the White House and his unthinking, servile allies -- to gain strength instead of resisting them forcefully from the outset. It’s their delusional thinking that threatens us because our delusional thinking gave them the opportunity.

It’s all rooted in the false innocence, the delusion, of Love without Mind -- Love without Reason; wishful thinking; delusion that is the absence of Reality and Truth; the human condition which guarantees conflict, suffering, and death, until we learn to rely on Mind and Reason to find Reality and Truth, to commit to it, to fight for it.

Love without Mind is no less consequential, no less harmful than irrational conspiracy theories that motivate lethal resentment, hatred, and violence. When one asks Whose side are you on? the answer from Love without Mind is it’s harmlessly on the side of the Nijmegen resident who sought refuge from violence inside a cab. She was equally dismissive of British soldiers fighting to liberate her country as she was of Germans occupying it. She imagined herself at a far remove from their insanity, uncontaminated by their inferiority, purer and more virtuous than both.

The reality is Love without Mind is passively allowing Hitler’s army to take over the world. The reality is it’s taken sides against Hitler’s enemies under the pretense of innocence. What matters if it’s dressed up in sheep’s clothing? The reality is it’s wrong.

It puts those of us who profess such nonsense in wheelchairs under blankets beneath the elms while others go forth to defend us. When we’re overrun by the enemy, we did it to ourselves. Though we didn’t participate in the violence, we deserve no more sympathy for our presumed innocence. We aren’t innocent.

And those who do their duty to protect all of us, to protect and defend democracy, are not guilty. They are doing what the situation calls for, because Love combined with Mind recognizes, accepts, and adapts appropriately to its situation – to its context that only Mind can comprehend.

Taking sides against Reality and Truth is not neutrality

Love without Mind imagines that it’s taken a position of virtuous neutrality. In a democracy there is no such thing. It requires everyone’s participation, everyone’s defense, just as it requires that every citizen perform their civic duty, let their voice be heard, and vote. It is democracy’s defense. It is our protection, our survival.

The Nijmegen resident wanted no part of causes that led to conflict. Faced with the unpleasant reality of conflict that invaded her home, she overrode it with another reality that denied the consequences of conflict. She transferred belief to an alternate reality and acted in accordance with its Logic. She simply invented another Logic to deny and defeat its opposites, to guide her perceptions, her beliefs, decisions, and acts, and to keep her safe.

She took sides against the Logic of Reality. Love without Mind substitutes the Logic of delusion for the Logic of Reality and Truth, taking sides against Reality and Truth. This is not virtue. This is not neutrality.

If one is to assess the morality or immorality of an act by its consequences then the act of the resident of Nijmegen, by not joining in opposition to Hitler’s occupation of her country, was deeply immoral. Her stance writ large across the entire continent, from the Atlantic to the Urals, if it were allowed to dictate the response of every country Hitler invaded, would have brought them all under his rule. He could have ruled the world.

She is deeply complicit in an immoral act: the triumph of evil over good, guilt over innocence. Her pretense of the innocence of neutrality would have resulted in the triumph of guilt over innocence, the exact opposite of what she stood for.

Love without Mind presents itself as a principled stand for peace because it deplores conflict when the impossibility of its premise is laid bare: deploring Reality – the state of opposites – doesn’t make it go away. No matter whether a cab was waiting for the resident of Nijmegen, Hitler’s army was still there. It was still fighting and it was killing honorable men defending her country. She may as well have stayed at home and killed them herself.

The choices we face

This is the false innocence of neutrality in a democracy. This is the folly of Love without Mind. Love and Mind go together or they don’t go at all. It is not possible to serve the cause of good by serving one and not the other in our state of opposites.

Even if Hitler’s army is nowhere to be seen there’s always tomorrow. It could always return, and now that we have arrived at our own Bridge Too Far, what do we do? Do we let delusional authoritarians have their way? Do we join the honorable citizens defending our democracy? Or do we hail a cab?

Published on Leave a comment on When ESFP Meets INTJ: Putting Isabel Myers’ “Gifts Differing” to Use

Personality Opposites Need to Be Exercised

The basic idea in Isabel Briggs Myers' Gifts Differing is that our personalities are comprised of parts whose attributes make them useful in different situations. They’re not all in use all the time. Those that get less use lose their strength and become what she calls weaknesses or “gaps.” But we need access to all of them when circumstances change, and it makes it easier when we exercise them, when we work toward balance. When we rely so heavily on certain personality strengths that we get out of balance, moving forward with Isabel's idea should restore balance.

The parts Isabel identifies are sensing as opposed to intuition and feeling as opposed to thinking. Sensing types prefer to rely on objective sensory perception – the body – to establish what’s real. Intuitives prefer to be guided by the internal subjective vision of ideas and insights – the mind. Thinking types prefer to base decisions and judgment on reason. Feeling types judge by weighing values to determine what’s important to them.

Behavior in practice requires a mix of all four. Choices, for example, aren’t reasoned if they don’t weigh values. But personality types often pit one part against another. Isabel characterizes them as opposites. They can behave as opposites, and it’s important to remember that they are opposites. As essential as they are in ordinary and extraordinary circumstances, they lend themselves and their personality types to conflict.

An outward orientation toward the world of external objects makes us extraverts. An inward orientation toward internal subjective experience makes us introverts. Perceptives prefer the experience of spontaneity without the structure of mind. Judging types prefer their experience to be ordered with the structure of mind, by logic and discipline. This is how they want to be perceived: as free-spirited and spontaneous or as orderly and structured.

Different personalities choose a dominant key when they establish their preferences as a musician would with a composition. The dominant key is their personality type. But neither its choice nor their preferences separate them from the parts that aren’t preferred, nor are they prevented from changing their preferences. A musical composition will combine chord progressions from different keys. A preference for sensing doesn’t erase a personality’s capacity for intuition. A preference for thinking doesn’t erase its capacity for feeling and weighing values. Extraverts haven’t lost their capacity for introspection, and Perceptives are still capable of Judging. These parts are still there and in theory they are all accessible and serviceable.

Balancing Personality Opposites for Harmony and Personal Growth

The idea in Gifts Differing is that they are like limbs of our bodies to be used when they’re needed. They’re assets, resources. They can be make-or-break strengths that make the difference between coping and not coping when we anticipate change or face adversity. And they’re accessible.

But to be serviceable they must be exercised. Like muscles that atrophy with neglect, our personality type opposites lose strength when we don’t use them:
• Introverts who shun involvement in the external world become friendless, unsociable.
• Extraverts out of touch with themselves become superficial, lose their depth.
• Sensing types miss the meaning of things if they don’t stop to reflect.
• Intuitives who don’t sense as well as reflect lose track of facts.
• Thinking types, all mind and no heart, can have all the answers and no one to listen.
• Feeling types unused to reasoning take forever with decisions.
• Judging types averse to spontaneity miss out on its joys
• While perceptives, too caught up in spontaneity, can lose control of their lives.

Accessing and exercising these strengths is accomplished by “making full use of Perception and Judgment.” My last two website posts extol the potential of Isabel’s exercise to be useful in two ways: first, by replacing friction with harmony when opposing personalities conflict; and second, by enabling personalities to grow and expand with additional strengths – to become more balanced -- when needed to cope with adversity. We can think of the first way as self-help relationship counseling that raises awareness and promotes understanding. It can do this without subjecting conflicting personalities to pain because it’s collaborative. The second way defines what I mean by “personal growth” that puts conflicting personalities in league with their personality opposites instead of resisting them.

Besides helping to govern relationships, being aware of our personality types is essential for understanding how we can make ourselves safer and more effective in our environment. Circumstances change. We need the ability to adapt. We need personal growth: the ability manage our personality preferences so they don’t lock us in. So that we don’t fall victim to our weaknesses while applying our strengths.

It’s expanding and developing our strengths, a balancing process that keeps us from becoming so attached to our preferences – our prejudices – that we deprive ourselves of what our opposites have to offer. That would be self-defeating. Getting in our own way, sabotaging our own efforts to achieve harmony and be effective. It's not only self-defeating, it can be dangerous.

When we become firmly entrenched in our types, we benefit from their stability. It adds personal authority, a sense of strength. But it comes with a cost. While we’ve been applying our strengths and reaping their benefits, we’ve also neglected critical assets. Not only that, we can be so dismissive of our opposites that we reject them.

Getting ESFPs to Access their INTJ Internals So They Get Out of Their Own Way

Friction between two personality opposites illustrates the utility of Isabel's concept: Extravert - Sensing - Feeling - Perceptive (ESFP) vs. Introvert - Intuition - Thinking - Judging(INTJ). ESFP vs. INTJ here deals mainly not with conflicts between people but between opposing parts of our own personalities, because that's where conflicts begin.

Most relationships thrive on respect, tact, and harmony. Awareness and accommodation of personality differences are assets in social relationships as well as individual relationships. Personalities of any type can get by with blanket harmony and pleasantness in social relationships that don’t involve intimacy. For ESFPs, the camaraderie of belonging may be as much love as they’re aware or capable of.

But belonging isn’t intimacy. If blanket pleasantness is all that’s offered INTJs in individual relationships it’s a substitute for love that doesn’t feel like love. It feels like love withheld. For INTJs, substituting social belonging for personal intimacy is frustrating, invalidating and offensive. Being offered one-size-fits-all pleasantness, even in the spirit of innocent camaraderie and sincerity, feels insincere and disrespectful. For INTJs, it’s unpleasant.

In individual personal relationships with INTJs, avoidance of the truth and insincerity can’t be a solution. They only add to the problem. To avoid friction both personality types must be aware of their differences and respect them. There is no alternative.

Personality conflicts don’t call for walling ourselves off from critical assets. We should be doing the opposite. Facts faced in the cause of reality and truth are no “price to pay” for progress. They’re an unalloyed benefit, to be embraced rather than avoided. If circumstances are changing and we struggle to adapt it may not be because of externals. It may be because of internals: we’ve gotten in our own way. Avoidance of internals in difficult times may reward us with momentary comfort and convenience, but in the long run it could punish us with serious discomfort and inconvenience.

Getting in their own way is a particular hazard for ESFPs whose orientation is without rather than within, sensing and feeling reality that's objective and external rather than intuiting and thinking reality that's subjective and internal. Being more comfortable with externals rather than internals puts them at odds with INTJs, who relate through internals, but also with their own development.

The Spontaneity of Intuition: Where the Fun Is

Intuition, a gift of mind, operates by spontaneity. Isabel’s intuition, for example, works by extracting logical implications from patterns, values, and relationships through free association. We don’t grasp awareness; it comes to us when and where it chooses. Connections among ideas and insights reveal themselves spontaneously. It’s how mind works that lies beyond brain that’s controlled by sensory perception. Mind is moved and guided by the free spirits of logic, inquiry, and love: by memory and awakening; by the quest for consciousness, reality and truth; by the empowerment of ideas and ideals like parents and home.

Intuition extracts meaning from the implications of lines in hexagrams, values in our utility index, and personality type parts. Its process is reflection: focusing on a subject, bringing it to consciousness, inquiring into it, allowing mind to rest with it, to yield thoughts from spontaneous connections. Our minds are stimulated by great art and music as well as our senses. Reconnections with emotional peaks and troughs from long ago can yield transformational insights in the here and now. Our minds are treasure houses of reasoning but also of Intuition.

ESFP Feeling Perceptives who reject INTJs' Judging, its opposite, seek an ideal of untrammeled freedom. They seek joyfulness and spontaneity through the absence of logic, order, and discipline, through the absence of mind. But freedom based on feeling alone, without mind, without reasoned choice, is not an ideal. It’s an impossibility. The surrender of choice is captivity. Perception without Judging, in Isabel’s reckoning, poses the most serious risks of a life going off the rails.

Where Perceptives’ cherished spontaneity can actually be found is in their INTJ Intuition. Intuition taps into timelessness, the real here and now. It’s the real “being in the moment.” It’s presence of mind that combines the freedom of Perception with the order of Judging to experience true freedom. It’s where the action is. It’s the wellspring of creativity.

The Cost of ESFPs' Perception Without Their INTJs' Judgment

ESFPs’ absence of mind produces absence of discipline, self-motivation, inspiration, and creativity, all of which are attributes of INTJ and available through INTJ. Isabel remarks on ESFPs’ “wishful thinking” that prevents them from accounting for the costs of their preferences. Deprivation of inspiration, creativity, and self-motivation is a serious cost that outweighs any benefits of excluding INTJ’s critical assets.

Yet another cost is loss of freedom from spontaneity that surrenders control to a ball in a roulette wheel that chooses nothing, decides nothing, judges nothing. Surrendering control to any external influence is captivity. Realizing this should be motivation enough for an ESFP to access his INTJ assets, to end immobility of thought and captivity with freedom, inspiration, creativity, and self-motivation.

Wishful thinking that transposes ideals of paradise that belong in Intuition’s imagination to physical reality, where they clearly don’t belong, is yet another cost. An ESFP’s ideal of spontaneity without Judgment that attempts to overlay his or her environment with an artificial blanket of harmony and pleasantness, because what they see and believe is only what they want to see and believe, is delusional. This tendency in ESFPs is ingrained and it can become a major concern. Who else is delusional because of wishful thinking? An ESFP president who sees and believes only winning because he won’t accept losing.

An ESFP who sacrifices Judgment to detach logic and discipline from Perception’s spontaneity does so because he under-values his mind’s ability to think. He thereby sacrifices what mind does: it produces thoughts and connects them in logical sequence with reason. It produces conclusions that address questions pertinent to this situation. Mind’s ability to reason goes beyond its ability simply to retain facts. Along with Intuition it enables mind to combine observations with interpretations that cohere into stories – analyses with meaning capable of answering questions, resolving issues, and providing motivation and guidance for acting. For moving forward.

The Cost of ESFPs' Feeling Without Their INTJs' Thinking

Reasoning is the essence of competence that picks up where other talents leave off. A talent for thinking provides self-interest with its compass so that it can navigate through self-interests all competing for the values of worth: love, belonging, abundance, empowerment, and the rest. Feeling without reason that settles on values that we want leaves unexplained why we want them and how to put them to use. It leaves out the ability to bring their logical implications together into a composition with purpose.

ESFPs are good with the easy ones: what, when, and where. Purpose and reason are all about Why. That’s when it gets interesting.

Storming the U.S. Capitol to disrupt a meaningless ceremony was motivated by conspiracy theories defined by irrationality. It was a buffoonish failure of thought caused by an unwillingness or inability to reason. ESFPs’ basing their judgment on feeling that de-emphasizes reasoning, weaving as they do an uncertain path between dumb luck and sheer folly, is hardly any better. “Action” that advertises its disdain for reason is stupid.

Establishing a logical sequence of thought from an honest assessment of circumstances to doing something about them requires analysis. Analysis requires reasoning. ESFPs with unimpaired minds, who nevertheless prefer to feel their way toward spontaneity without interference from analysis, feel their way in the dark. Action can’t be an object that they want if it’s become an object, cloaked in darkness, that they fear. If it’s action that they want but can’t have, it’s because, without the light of reason to show the way, they're immobilized. It’s because they've rendered themselves unable to act.

Isabel remarks on the difficulty ESFPs have with deciding, with analysis, and with effectiveness. No wonder – they’re not thinking! They may have good minds that can reason if their ESFP personalities will let them. They can choose to access their INTJs and move forward in the light of reason, or they can remain stuck feeling their way in the darkness.

Looking Inward for Growth, Guidance, and Strength: A Worthy Cause

When the Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson) summoned strength to fight Darth Maul, he meditated. He sought strength from within. The common thread that unites all the attributes of INTJ assets that ESFPs reject is where he went for strength: Introversion to look within; Intuition for guidance; Reason for decision; and Judgment for direction and discipline. He went to mind. That we must look within for growth, guidance, and strength is the point of my website post, From Personality Type Theory to Peace and Personal Growth: A Prayer for the New Year. An ESFP prejudice that takes us away from mind is not training us well.

The exercise offered by Gifts Differing seems tailored to fit the moment. It could open minds made inaccessible by personality types, access critical assets, and give us the strength and guidance we need. In our personal lives and in the current political environment, doing our part to make this happen is a worthy cause. It's why I write, and it will motivate me for however long it takes.

Published on Leave a comment on Accessing Our Personality Opposites: The Only Fun There Is

The premise of Isabel Myers’ exercise, in Gifts Differing, is that all personality types have and can access their type opposites. Which means if ESFPs [Extravert Sensing Feeling Perceptive] habitually rely on Feeling and weighing their own values to decide, with only weak or impaired reasoning, or no thought at all, and this interferes with relationships, they can strengthen Thinking from within because they already have the ability to do so. The ability is there but undeveloped or under-developed. It’s weak not because this is a missing limb but simply because they haven’t been using it. Their INTJs [Introvert Intuition Thinking Judging] haven’t been surgically removed. They’re just neglected. Myers’ exercise is aptly named, because precisely what a little-used personality type muscle needs is exercise.

ESFPs may prefer to base the direction they take on what they feel is important to them rather than on reasoned, reflective choice if they are Perceptives with weak or impaired Judgment. They prefer the experience of having their fortunes brought to life spontaneously to having them deadened by a lifeless, colorless regimen of judging and planning. Though it’s irrational there is method in their madness. The method in ESFPs’ madness is their instinct for the light: to avoid the captivity of Judgment in service to rigid tradition, bigotry, and conformity – to the values of darkness. What makes it irrational is its reliance on spontaneity at the expense of mind, on unreliable fate to produce untroubled waters when violent rapids could lie around the bend. When survival requires thought and preparation. When reason, Judgment, and planning could make the difference between life or death.

The premise of Isabel's exercise is identical to the premise that underlies all of Western ethical philosophy: that the ability to uncover wisdom, reality, and truth through thought, reflection, and logic dwells within our own minds. The great exponent of this insight was the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, the mentor to Plato who mentored Aristotle. The “Socratic method” that famously trained generations of lawyers at Harvard simply consists of questioning our minds until they awaken. Until they’re forced to think. Until they learn how to track down the answers, the common sense, the truth that they seek simply by using their innate ability to question. To reason. Simply by making use of humanity’s greatest gifts: Free Will, mind, and its ability to think – mind that exceeds the ability of mere brains through its reach for Consciousness.

Socrates was so certain that he was right that he badgered strangers on the streets of Athens with questions until their minds yielded wisdom, comprehension, and insights they didn’t know were there. Questioning our minds is the key that unlocks the joy of discovery, so joyful that it eclipses any that can be experienced by relying mindlessly on spontaneity without Judgment. The spontaneity that Perceptives without Judgment actually seek, but make themselves unaware of, is the spontaneity of thought guided by Intuition, the Free Spirit of Inquiry, that leads us where it will. That leads us to places in our minds that are no less unexpected than what lies hidden around the bend, only now we are alert to the possibilities.

To think as Socrates taught is the greatest adventure in all of Creation, full of discovery and surprises – surprises that keep us away from danger instead of attracting it – so long as we connect our thoughts with reason. So long as they are not disconnected from Judgment and left to the captivity of mindless chance to decide our fate. The alternative to a false spontaneity that promises freedom and adventure but delivers captivity and disaster isn’t lifeless planning by a deadened mind. It’s genuine spontaneity produced by mind, that protects itself with thought and logic, that’s exercised and brought to life.

These very insights that trace back to classical philosophy aren’t the product of stale formula, the dead hand of the past. They’re the product of Love: love of mind, love of adventure, love of freedom. They come from the Free Spirit of Inquiry, of questioning that celebrates and expresses the joy of learning and growth that depends on no one and nothing but its own ability, its own strength, its own gift. It wasn’t hectoring that Socrates sought to share with others. It was passion for the joyfulness of freedom and adventure that became his lasting gift to Western civilization: the gift of thought. The gift of mind.

It is the authenticity and strength of Isabel's intuition that though we inevitably define ourselves by the personality types we prefer, it is nevertheless a choice. We have the freedom and ability to modify our choice, to expand and grow out of the categories we’ve put ourselves in. A muscle weak from lack of use is still there. Our personality types are not where we end but where we begin. Though they define us they need not confine us. We are not locked into our types. We can use them to imprison ourselves if conflict in ignorance is what we want. Or we can use them to liberate us if peace in awareness is what we want. In offering us liberation Isabel's intuition is firmly in step with spiritual psychology -- Jung and A Course in Miracles -- and with classical philosophy.

We can choose to be who we are.

To imagine otherwise is only to curse ourselves with a prophecy that fulfills itself. For we have Free Will. Accessing our personality opposites, choosing who we want to be, could be the fullest expression of it. This is freedom, not the false promise of unreliable, ambiguous chance. Not the captivity of mindlessness. This is the fun we seek from Spontaneity -- the only safe, rational fun there is.

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Published on 1 Comment on From Personality Type Theory to Peace and Personal Growth: A Prayer for the New Year

The differences that alienate us have their roots in personality type preferences that we’re hardly aware we ever made. Preferences between introversion and extraversion, intuition and sensing, thinking and feeling, and judging and perception, to use the categories proposed by Isabel Briggs Myers in Gifts Differing.

These aren’t just “preferences.” They are biases. We begin life and interactions with one another unaware that we are already prejudiced for the types that we are and against the types that we aren’t. We carry these prejudices into our interactions. And when “otherness” gets in our way, things can turn nasty. The dearest friends and family become aliens, whether for a moment or for a lifetime.

We imagine ourselves to be open-minded, patient, and tolerant. We’re just “being ourselves,” as Isabel puts it. Yet monsters rear their ugly heads, tempers flare, and relationships suffer. Sensing-extraverts can be a real problem for intuitive-introverts and, of course, the other way around. Perceptives and judging types can come to blows as well.

I know because I’ve seen it, experienced it. Had I known then what I know now things would have been different. Knowing how much strife could have been avoided makes it hard to observe and be involved in personal dynamics today, because knowing things could be better doesn’t mean things will be better.

An INTJ who would bring personality theory to awareness with an ESFP, his or her opposite, must be well aware that miscommunication isn’t the same as misunderstanding. Forgiveness alone isn’t the cure. And restructuring of relationships by working with opposites rather than against them may be too much to ask. Well aware, also, that personality theory, by itself, isn’t enough.

What’s also needed is spiritual psychology, the guidance found in A Course in Miracles, that explains what all these personality type distinctions mean. Opposites can’t be reconciled without looking within (Introversion); without seeking guidance and vision within (Intuition); without joining Reason with Love’s values to decide (Thinking and Feeling); and without joining Logic, Order, and Discipline (Judging) with spontaneity (Perception) to exercise Free Will. In theory, an ESFP could access his or her own INTJ opposites to bring about peace and reconciliation, to bring about change. But does it work in practice?

Personality types with arrested development, at war with one another, can’t find peace by conquest or separation. They must go within. By accessing and balancing their own personality opposites, expanding into more fully developed personalities, and growing up. By accessing the guidance we need to find our way back -- in Intuition. Where dwells the Memory of who we really are, an Innocent Child. Where dwells the Memory of where we really are, in the Reality and Sanctuary of Creation.

When we pledge ourselves to peace in the New Year, when we tell ourselves that learning never stops, this is what makes it true. When we pledge ourselves to self-improvement, this is what we mean. There is still hope for peace so long as we grow.

For the New Year, a prayer:

to Mind and Love, our Parents in Heaven, who have blessed us
with eternal Life, with Free Will, with Purpose in Creation
in the Here and Now
and the joy and laughter that only Spontaneity can bring:

May the lessons of 2020 not be lost
And, please, may we not blow it in 2021.

Published on Leave a comment on The Gift from “Gifts Differing”: A Greeting for the Holidays 2020

Not long ago, I asked a friend for a favor. It was a bit unusual and I knew it would require some thought, but not so unusual that it could upend a friendship. But it did, at least for a while, quite emphatically. The way my friend and I interpreted what happened was a study in contrasts. It was as if we lived in two separate realities, spoke different languages, and transacted business with different currencies, hers as worthless to me as mine was to her.

It was one of those things, a train wreck in a relationship we’re all familiar with. And yet it turned out to be very interesting. It revealed that my friend and I, who have been close over the years, are exact opposite personality types. I’m an INTJ and she’s an ESFP: INTJ for Introvert-Intuition-Thinking-Judgment, ESFP for Extravert-Sensing-Feeling-Perception. These are from Isabel Briggs Myers’ Gifts Differing, not as “scientific” as other theories some might prefer, but my Intuition trusts her Intuition.

The holidays are all about one universal value: everything that makes us family. Forgiveness is one of those things, and let me be the first to admit: If you’re reading this it probably means you’re a big nuisance but you’ve been forgiven – many times. “I love you in spite of your many faults” my dad liked to joke, usually to a good laugh. But it’s no laughing matter, because real forgiveness is beyond reach. At least it is for me. Especially if the big nuisance happens to be my exact opposite personality type.

My instinct in this case was to bail for good. I was on my way out the door. Then I read Gifts Differing and discovered that Isabel’s theory doesn’t stop at showing us how opposites wreak havoc with relationships. It shows remarkably how opposites can be used to bring us closer together and, in the process, promote personal growth and self-awareness. What philosophy, what faith, couldn’t use an analytical tool like this to bring about peace and forgiveness!

It’s done by accessing the opposites of your weak personality traits – mind-Intuition, for example, if you’re a body-Sensing type, -- preferably in consultation with someone who’s your opposite. You “pool your resources,” and at the end you’re both more fully developed, better balanced personalities, more sympathetic, more adaptable to change, and better equipped to forgive. That's the theory and, so far, it's working for me.

Isabel’s theory is inspired, not least because the metaphysics of A Course in Miracles calls for its practical application to individual circumstances, and students of the Course intent on practicing forgiveness will find that it’s a big help. If my friend is reading this she might be incensed that I’m talking about us, but not if her Feeling has accessed Thinking, and Perception has accessed Judgment. You see, what this is all about is making everyone more like me. Proof that what I've learned from her is the joy of spontaneity and laughter. Pity the poor INTJ Scrooge who never learns it!

Wishing you the Joy of Life and laughter for the holidays and all through the New Year.

Published on Leave a comment on Why Energy Can Never Come to Rest

Honestly, you mention anyone’s name and if they farted in my presence I’ll remember it. I still remember sitting at a long table in the cavernous, hushed reading room at Widener Library, at Harvard, when a poor ‘Cliffie let one loose you could hear in the next county. Situation like that the human fight or flight response kicks in, right? Everyone at the table has to get up and leave holding their noses. Or the perpetrator has to pull out an AK-47 and order everyone to lie flat on the floor with their hands behind their backs. I mean, you can’t just leave it – pardon the expression – hanging in the air!

Somewhere in Japan there’s a super-computer calculating the value of Pi, the mathematical constant defined as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. There’s another computer doing the same thing somewhere in Manhattan. They’re both on a fool’s errand, of course, because the value of Pi will never resolve to a whole number. On the other hand, I think they’re on to something incredibly important. I think they’re confirming with one calculation what might be the controlling condition of all thought, all possibility, and all creation. That would be the condition that none of it can ever come to rest.

If we think about what energy is all about, where it came from and what it’s up to, my answer would be that there are lots of explanations, but the source that these idiots calculating the value of Pi are pointing to is restlessness. Energy is force born of philosophical-ontological questions that can’t be resolved, questions that involve conflicting answers and the tensions between them. Energy fueled by titanic tensions then goes off on a tear looking for some way to come to rest.

We are part of a construct of “reality” – our real Parents and their real Child, not us noodniks making fools of ourselves in our pathetic bodies and world of material weirdness – that’s an experiment, to see if “creation” can achieve resolution and peace. And it can in theory if the Child stays out of trouble, but of course we and that poor ‘Cliffie are proof that things can go horribly wrong. How can energy come to rest when someone just farted?

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Published on 2 Comments on Everything Is a Call for Love

What value most expresses Mind’s stance of Being in opposition to no-being? In opposition to no-life, no-mind? What value anchored in the philosophy of Jesus most accounts for its unprecedented influence on Western thought, personal behavior, relationships, and religious practices? What value lies at the heart of “Life,” that gives it its psychic force and purpose both in the telling of the Story of Mind and the Story of its Child, in Consciousness and unconsciousness? It’s Love.

“Worth” is all of Love’s expressions put together, all of its constituent values: the beauty of purity and innocence, family, community, freedom, health, self-worth, purpose, learning and growth, abundance, protection, empowerment, and hope. There are no values that do not express their root value of Love. “Worth” is the sum and integration of all values. It is the ultimate consideration in all things.

When we say our purpose is the Creation and reciprocation of worth, we simply mean our purpose is to Love and be Loved: to Love ourselves, our Parents, and our Creations. To “Love our enemies” is simply to overlook the unreality of who they are in our state of unconsciousness – guilt -- and to Love their Reality in Consciousness – our Innocent Self.

No statement of our purpose in Life, in Being, is complete that does not begin and end with Love. What motive that accounts for the feeling, the force behind Creation, behind Life, can arise without Love? What force could possibly arise in Reality and Truth in response to the awful implications of nothingness, to its implied power to rule the state of opposites, if not the power of Love?

What is the cause of Being if not Love? What is our cause if not Love? This is what “the Creation and reciprocation of Worth” – our purpose – means. These are not arid speculations about academic abstractions, distinctions in search of relevance, “pure” research with no discernible application. How can they be if the Logic of Mind holds that every thought is driven by feeling and every feeling in Reality is guided by thought?

Without feeling thoughts which are causes can have no effects. There are many ways to understand Energy, the force of Logic that gives the thoughts of Mind their power to connect, to make Real, to give Life, to Create, that gives Mind and its extension, the Child, its authority to enforce the Logic of Mind with order and discipline. But beyond its eternal restlessness the most important way is to understand that Energy expresses and applies the power of feeling. Feeling that no less than any other gift, any other value, can be perverted by the Child’s mind in its unconscious state to serve its opposite. And this is where we find ourselves, coping in our confusion with the very thing that Being does not stand for: fear, guilt, and hatred.

What brings Love, feeling, and Energy or force into the Story of Mind now? They were present at the “Beginning” when they as much as Mind-Consciousness and Logic pierced the darkness with light when Consciousness was switched on. They and Mind are joined at the hip, all of one piece, equal partners in Being and Creation. They come into the story now because they are the working end of Consciousness, the dynamic that sets Mind in motion toward its purpose of Creation once we establish what it is. Now we are into the fun part -- the joyous, open-ended adventure into the unknown that gives the free spirits of Inquiry and Love their meaning, their outlet, their voice.

Without Love thoughts are just thoughts of no consequence. “Being” is just a word without Love. Why? Because Love is their purpose. Our purpose in Creating and reciprocating worth through Creation is to bring Love into Creation, to use and apply it, express and connect with it, in everything we think and do. The great thought systems of human history, our philosophies and theologies, are striving through trial and error to reconstruct the Child’s obliterated Consciousness, to find his way – our way – back to Love. Our purpose in validating Mind’s stance, Being, to stand for Life against the possibility of no-life, is to Love Mind, to Love the Consciousness, the Oneness, the seed of Creation and Innocence that gave birth to us and gave us our role, our purpose in Creation – our Source, our Parents Father Mind and Mother Love.

Love isn’t an afterthought when Mind-Consciousness switched on and took its place. It’s what Mind-Being is all about. It’s what we’re all about: gratitude that consummates the gift of Love, of Worth – all the values that Love represents. Thankfulness for our Reality and for the opportunity to learn and grow in knowledge and freedom, so that we can all awaken and return to Reality. To our Source: Love.

Published on Leave a comment on Reality in Its Essence

That was “satan” we were looking at. The “no-mind” whose essential attribute is that it doesn’t exist. It’s a long road to explain how a not-thing can assume such a compelling, terrifying place in the human imagination, as though it were very much real, were endowed with super-human, super-natural attributes of its own so powerful that they compete with the powers of “almighty God” himself. Yet it happened. Welcome to the human psyche, the darkness within, to “evil.” This is where it started.

The Story of Mind will lead us to unimaginably beautiful states, so we needn’t despair. The Home we came from and the Sanctuary of Creation that succeeded it are secure in our Memory, and we will make it back. All this stirring of horror in the thought of no-mind requires is Discipline: our resolve not to make it real. The prospect of the switch toggling us out of Mind and into oblivion presents us with the first inviolable rule of the Logic of Mind: do not make opposites real. Do not make unreality real. It is a rule as mandatory in Reality and Creation as it is here in unconsciousness and unreality and as compelling as the other rule we have been taught: Never interfere with the Child’s Freedom of Choice. Never interfere with his Free Will.

It is the Thoughts of Mind that make up Reality. Anything “Real” is the product of a Thought of Mind. Plato’s “ideas.” “Emanations” to others wondering of old how “God” moved in his Fullness. The precedent set in the “Beginning” is that Mind’s answer to the Question does not logically exclude the possibility of a contrary answer. From this possibility must logically flow the possibility of opposites throughout Reality and Creation and into our world of appearances.

The possibility of a contrary answer is not a function of the Logic of Mind but of the Logic of the Question which precedes Mind and is not of Mind. The “Question” is only implied by the switch, and both it and its “Logic” are projections not of Mind but of the author of these speculations. The Child in his unconscious state is driven to expand his knowledge of the event that interrupted his role in Creation, to fully inform his choices so that they may be Free, so that the event that cost him his Consciousness will not happen again. These are not idle speculations. They could be driven by powerful forces, by the force of the Child’s awakening to resume his role in Creation.

The “Question” and the two possible answers it implies – a state of Mind-Consciousness and no mind that is also no state, no nothing – are therefore only a construct of the Mind that was extended to the Child, that is his only tool for understanding. What it actually is, is beyond understanding, because it is beyond Mind. So, it’s true: I do not know what I’m talking about. Neither does the Child. But we were given a Mind and we can think. We can Reason, and putting together constructs that work, that lead us to promising hypotheses just like science, are what thinking is for.

Mind that is Logic cannot hold contradictory thoughts. That would be illogical. Mind shorts out when it’s asked to think what’s not Logical, Real, or True, which is what interrupted the Child’s role in Creation. Opposites by definition are contradictory. Mind that stands for Being will bring to Consciousness, and therefore to Reality, every positive Self, Relationship, Value, and Connection that go into the Process and Structure of Creation whose Purpose is to validate the Worth of Being. Mind that stands for Being cannot, by definition, bring to Consciousness, and therefore to Reality, opposites of Creation and any of its components that stand for non-Being, that stand for or imply worthlessness.

The debate continues in our world of unreality over what is Real and what isn’t: mind versus matter, good versus evil, light versus dark. There wouldn’t be any issue if it were not for the confusion caused by our bodies and their material environment, appearances put there intentionally by non-being to block our awareness of Reality. The essential attribute of opposites in our experience is the same as it is for the other answer to the Question: unreality. What leads us to this conclusion is the same guide that leads us to every other conclusion: the Logic of Mind, Mind that cannot hold contradictory thoughts.

If there’s any doubt as to which of two opposite states is Real, the one that supports the cause of Life is Real. The Good is Real, evil is not. The positive is Real, the negative is not. The distinction between opposing philosophies -- “dualists” who hold that opposites are both real and “non-dualists” who hold that only one side is real -- is valid but superfluous. “Dualist” philosophies can be disregarded simply because they are illogical. Science, philosophy, and religion that assume the reality of bodies and matter, whose reasoning is subjective and therefore circular, are illogical. They violate Mind’s defining Logic: it cannot hold contradictory thoughts. If there is a contradictory thought, an opposing negative thought, it must then not be Real. Bodies and their material environment conflict with the Reality of Mind which is not matter and are therefore not Real.

What is “Real” in its essence? It is what Mind recognizes as being in and of its Self, where its “Self” is defined by a host of attributes, an entire interconnected thought system whose essence is where we come from, the Source of the Child: Innocence. It is the essential attribute of Oneness, which holds the seed of Creation and Knows no opposites. This is Reality.

Unless and until we present ourselves to our Parents in our Innocence, so they will recognize us and admit us back into Consciousness, into Reality, we will remain mired in unreality. We will remain on the opposite side of the veil, our split minds holding contradictory thoughts, deceived and distracted by appearances, forever projecting guilt. We will continue the Child’s struggle to reconstruct the Logic of Consciousness so that we may all awaken and return Home. And I wonder, in my own dream of blame and guilt, will the struggle ever end?

Published on Leave a comment on The Possibility of Separation

[Author's note: The possibility of "real" separation is addressed again in "Origin and Meaning: The Logic of Everything" (April 4, 2021). It concludes that the condition of statelessness is a logical impossibility and therefore unreal, and that separation is only "real" within the context of the illusion, the unreal dream "made real" that is our material universe and the unreal possibility of no-mind / extinction that hangs over it. It concludes that everything that is, or isn't, must be part of the Interconnected Implications of Logic, the Source of Reality and Creation, the presence of Everything.]

We’re not done with the “perfection” of “Heaven.”

Our material world, this “life,” is distinguished as much by the absence of love and reason as by its presence. Something is radically wrong. The disorder of this world is present in “Heaven,” too, in the Logic of the Question, because there is no discernible Logic to the switch between Being and its opposite. It’s entirely arbitrary, beyond Mind-comprehension, which means beyond Logic-Reason, the basis for order and predictability. The considerations of Reason are values and there is no place for them. The switch is even beyond irrational because neither Reason nor the lack of it has anything to do with it. It’s beyond disorderly because for all we know it’s just a flip of the coin, the toss of fuzzy dice, pure chance.

Logic governs everything within the realm of Mind and Reality created by Mind, but it does not extend beyond Mind to the Question which precedes Mind. Logically, philosophically, the void has as much reason, as much “right,” to “exist” as Being. And so, from this archetypal opposite descends all the opposites that shadow the Child and his Creations, from his birth in Consciousness deep into our world of his unconsciousness.

The archetypal opposite shadows Mind as well but in a very different way, and the difference will play a decisive part in the Child’s loss of Consciousness. Mind cannot and must not Know the possibility of the thought of its opposite. The Child’s experience with loss of Consciousness has taught him the reverse: if he’s to manage his role in Creation he must know the possibility of the thought of his opposite. It is crucial to the exercise of Free Choice, to Creation, and to staying awake. And thus the lesson that Memory has for us here on earth: to guard our thoughts.

The physicist Stephen Hawking was so determined to exclude all thought of “God” and religion from science that he proposed a universe that simply is and therefore needs no creator. His solution was to exclude the universe from considerations of “God” by making the universe “God.” But whether mind or matter is posited as the form and substance of Being is irrelevant if the logical possibility still exists of no Being, no “God.” This is the ultimate context of the Story of Mind, not whether it’s “perfect” or logical, Mind or matter, but whether it has a true opposite as opposed to the derivative “non-being.” Philosophically, logically, it does have a true opposite: No mind. Mindlessness. Nothingness. The void.

Separation is a logical impossibility in Reality and even in unreality, no matter how much sensory perception tells us otherwise. Hawking’s own profession tells us so, from Newton’s and Faraday’s intuition, to Maxwell’s calculations, to the revelations of Bohr’s and Einstein’s quantum mechanics: everything is interconnected. The Child's imagining that he could separate himself from his Parents, that he could project himself into a separate world, is the insanity that got us here. A delusion not freely chosen but by a mind unconscious, traumatized, defenseless, and overtaken by an alien thought system. We know it well, for it’s the same virus that invades and infects our thoughts.

Beyond Mind and Reality separation is not a logical impossibility. It is implied by the Question. It “exists” if only as a premise. It is neither Real nor unreal, here nor there, yet it commands consideration. For it is the mother of all opposites, the explanation why we dwell in a state of opposites.

Philosophers from classical antiquity on have observed patterns of opposites without mining their significance. The little and big opposites in our everyday experience are significant. The implications for our lives, our world, are enormous. There is no true Sanctuary. Our Home is situated on top of the San Andreas fault and there is no telling if or when it will ever erupt. We have no control over it. Our only protection is the Cause of Being and our role in serving it.

The watchword for our role in Reality is no different than it is here, with climate change, our pandemics, our threats to world peace: We are in this together.

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What is implied by the Story of Mind is that it is the Story of Logic. Everything that flows from Mind in the “beginning” either extends Consciousness in an unbroken network of logical connections or it becomes a perversion of logic when the Child’s mind becomes unconscious. We deal either with Logic or its logical opposite, but one way or the other we are dealing with the essential attribute of Mind which is Logic. It is the source of “necessity,” the notion favored by philosophers who also speak of the “nature” of things, the “laws” of cause and effect. It’s all about Logic.

To violate Logic is to violate Mind itself, because Mind can’t be what it is not. If you are born within Mind as the Child was and you violate Logic there’s only one possible outcome. You can’t not Be, because you are part of Being itself. But you can lose Consciousness. It may be tough on you, but if there isn’t a breaker to trip from Consciousness into unconsciousness think of what happens to Mind. Mind can’t hold contradictory illogical thoughts and still be what it is, Logic.

This just to emphasize, before we get out ahead of ourselves, that Mind and Logic are joined at the hip. Logic is what Mind does but it is also what Mind is. Which means that everything is governed by Logic. Everything has attributes and these are defined by Logic. Even unconsciousness. Reality and unreality both. Even Feeling -- Mother Love, the Free Spirit who can’t be captured by anything, even by definitions, yet she is contained within Oneness, the Seed of Creation, and accepts the Logic of Purpose, the birth of hers and Father Mind’s Child and their Child’s part in Creation. This attempt to explain the Child’s loss of Consciousness stands or falls on Logic, because there can be no other basis for it, neither blind faith nor experience.

“Mother Love” / “Father Mind.” How did gender get into it? Must their Child be referred to as “he?” There is no word in the English language that’s gender neutral that also captures the reality and force of Self – the Who instead of the What. “It” does not suffice and I usually prefer not to resort to “their.” My choice of the feminine for Mother Love and masculine for Father Mind follows our cultural norms but is otherwise entirely arbitrary and free of bias. As is my choice of the masculine for the Child which could be either, though it will be seen that the Child’s masculine or feminine attributes do play a part in his/her story and are not incidental.

Imagine that you get to decide whether anything shall Be. You’re a nice person so you don’t want a black hole of death and nothingness to have your name on it. You want something nice, so you say let there be Life. And presto, there it is: Life! You’ve begun the process with your mind which makes choices based on thoughts-reasons and feeling. With Logic. With definitions and attributes. And the Logic of your choice is a Self endowed with its definition and attributes: Life.

If that were all there is to it we would all have eternal life and it would be nonstop fun, joyfulness, and laughter. But that’s not all there is to it. “Life” wasn’t a given with no opposite. It was a choice, and just because you chose it doesn’t mean that Life doesn’t imply the potential existence of its opposite, death, or the opposite of Being which is nothingness. The Logic of “Life” includes the possibility of its opposite. The definition of Life can’t be detached from the definition of what it is not. One implies the existence -- the definition, the Logic -- of the other. So, in choosing Life you have set in motion a scenario – a logical sequence of events -- that must include the possibility of opposites. And as we will find, the Logic of opposites and their attributes can make their presence felt in the mind of an unconscious Child.

The Logic of Mind implies the possibility of the thought of its opposite: mindlessness. But because its true opposite, as opposed to the derivatives non-mind or non-being, is entirely separate and mindless, Mind has no Knowledge of it. Mind that is Consciousness by definition can have no Knowledge of the possibility of its own unconsciousness. This is because by definition it can’t be unconscious. This is an attribute of Mind-Consciousness that will be decisive in the Child’s loss of Consciousness, so we need to remember it.

Popular culture and mythology, religion and philosophy, all condition us to think of “God” as “all-powerful” and “all-knowing.” One among many definitions of Mind is “Knowledge.” Yet the Logic of Mind, as we will see, implies that there is much that Mind does not know. All that is Real is what Mind Knows, and it is Mind that Creates Reality. It cannot know what it is not, for to do so would make its opposite Real. It cannot Know the unknown into which Creation, by definition, ventures. The effects of causes cannot be brought to Consciousness, cannot be made Real, without following in logical sequence, where there is a before and after. Mind-Consciousness does not Know effects of causes, does not bring them to Reality, until it recognizes them. To recognize a violation of Logic in cause and effect, to bring it to Consciousness, would violate the Logic of Mind and throw it into unconsciousness – an impossibility. As we will see, it was to prevent a violation of Logic of the Child’s Conscious Mind that his Mind lost Consciousness.

The Logic of timelessness does not imply that everything that is and is to be is already Known. Consciousness that does the Knowing and therefore the Creating -- the Child in Relationship with his Parents – is timeless and eternal. Yet it proceeds with Creation in logical sequence into the unknown; is therefore constantly extending and expanding itself; engaged in change; and it is the glory and wonder of Creation, of Life, that in its presence it is eternally yet to come.

Published on Leave a comment on The Great Divide in Philosophy and Theology: Mind vs Matter

We got to this point simply by starting with the thought of Mind and letting Mind trace its implications for us. The entire story of Mind and our own, the Story of the Child, can be readily explained by asking what is implied by “Mind.” It’s an exercise of what Mind does: it Reasons. We can start with what Mind is and move on to what it does. From there we can move on to How it does it, When and Where, and to the always intriguing question: Why?

The ground we’ve covered so far is a few conclusions meant to awaken the thinker in us. Without more reasoning, more context, they won’t make much sense. They’re meant to stimulate interest, and if I’ve succeeded you’ll have the patience to wait me out. There are insights ahead that might be worth a Huh? before we move on or they might change our minds. And if we change our minds it might change the world, because our world may only be a projection of our minds.

What “Mind” implies is Consciousness. I give the word an initial cap, like certain other words, to make an important distinction. “Mind” also implies unconsciousness, because, as we well know, we all have minds and they can be in one of two states: conscious or unconscious. The distinction is critical to the story of Creation that the Logic of Mind tells in its Consciousness. It’s equally critical to the story that the Logic of Mind’s Child tells in his unconsciousness, the story of our material world – our bodies with their brains and senses and their physical universe of time and space, organic and inorganic matter.

Terms that refer to Mind in its Consciousness are flagged by their initial capital letters. If the same terms are lower case they belong to the unconscious world of Mind’s Child. This distinction raises as many questions as it answers but I don’t want initial caps to be a distraction. Just remember that an initial cap refers to the Reality of Mind-Parent Consciousness while lower case for the same term refers to the unreality of Mind-Child in his unconscious state.

The Child was not always in an unconscious state. When his Parents gave birth to him he was Conscious. Everyone, you might say, was in “Heaven.” There was no sign of matter and bodies, no suffering and mortality. Something happened that caused the Child that we were at the beginning to lose Consciousness. It was this event that triggered a chain reaction of events that produced us and our universe of violence, a very different place than “Heaven.”

What I am attempting is an explanation for this seminal event. To my knowledge you won’t find a rational explanation anywhere in metaphysics or theology, though that’s not to say there aren’t home-grown philosophers all about who are working on it and may already have come up with good explanations. What gives us the right to be so bold? The answer is we all have within our minds a shared Memory of who we are, where we came from, and specifically what happened that triggered this chain of events. We don’t have to access a deus-ex-machina to do it for us. We don’t need “saviors” or “redeemers.” We need nothing external, because what we seek lies within. We only have to access our own minds – to do it ourselves.

That is, using our Intuition, because Intuition takes us beyond our brains, beyond our bodies’ senses, to insights that are the gifts of Memory, the Memory of who we are and the Reality we came from, whose purpose is to guide us to the answers we seek, to guide us back. These are the same familiar, well-documented insights that inform the physical sciences, technological progress, the arts, and every other field of human learning and endeavor that depend on spontaneous revelation – on being “gifted.” Those of us so bold as to speculate about things “divine” are only doing what comes naturally. We are using a “God-given” talent: our minds and our power and ability to Reason with help from Intuition.

Why haven’t philosophy and theology explained this phenomenon, the Child’s loss of Consciousness? All the thinking that’s gone into the Story of Mind and the Story of its Child to follow is needed to answer this question, and it will be answered. Let me only say at this point that there is a distinct pattern that runs through the history of philosophy and theology: a split between thinkers who believe that Reality is to be found in the reasoning of mind and those who insist that there can be no credible reasoning that does not acknowledge and account for the reality of matter.

“Rationalists” stand resolutely with their thoughts, “empiricists” or “materialists” just as adamantly with their bodies. Rationalists predate Plato with his predecessor and mentor Parmenides, whose School of Reason questioned the reality of matter. It was Aristotle, a student at Plato’s Academy, who broke with Plato and opened the split, stood firmly for matter, founded science, and inspired all the empiricists and materialists to come. With one important exception: he believed in the Reality of Mind. He believed in “First Cause.” So even then, philosophy was of two minds about Reality, and the course of thinking since then has been a dance between two views that can’t find their footing: mind tripping over matter, matter tripping over mind.

The same split runs through theology, the history of religious thinking, rather violently in the branding of Gnostic Christians as “heretics” by Church orthodoxy and their suppression by force. Biblical Christianity allies itself emphatically with the materialists though, paradoxically, it leaves unquestioned the miracles of its founder and even encourages belief in miracles. Did the miracles of Jesus not expose the illusion of matter? In fact, the version of Christianity channeled by Jesus in A Course in Miracles surrounds his miracles with a unique, fully developed thought system, grounded in Reason, that leaves no doubt that he is on the side of Mind. The same tension between mind and matter, “spiritual” reality and “concrete” reality, permeates Eastern and Western religions.

What’s to account for the divide? It could be something mysterious or diabolical, the stuff of conspiracy theories. But we all have minds corrupted with some degree of darkness that comes from the same source. We will get to that when we come to the event that followed the Child’s loss of consciousness. The likely explanation is nothing more exotic than differences in personality types.

Four Myers-Briggs categories are at the root of it: Intuition and thinking, on one hand, and their counterpoints sensing and feeling, on the other. An “Intuition-thinking” type puts their faith in mind-reasoning. A “sensing-feeling” type is firmly grounded in the body. They speak different languages and come to different conclusions, and precisely where they disagree is at the juncture of opposing philosophies: What is Real? What’s real for one type is not real for the other. Period.

Published on Leave a comment on Our Purpose

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.

Published on Leave a comment on The Philosopher who Got It Right

In The Poseidon Adventure the Gene Hackman group sought rescue in the stern, and that’s where they were found by their rescuers. En route, they passed a group heading the opposite direction toward the bow. Each thought they were right and couldn’t be persuaded to change direction. Only one was right.

The history of thinking about who we are, where we came from, and where we’re supposed to be headed, is divided into two groups, one suspecting that reason – our minds’ logical thoughts -- should be our guide, the other certain that only our bodies’ senses – our material world -- can be trusted. The great preponderance of opinion now and throughout history has sided with the latter, and it’s dead wrong. The great names in philosophy all struggle to make sense of Reality because, over and over again, they can’t reconcile what their minds want to tell them with what their bodies and their brains are telling them. The deception of appearances blocks their understanding and they come away confused, leaving us with the brilliance of insights that fall into this school or that and solve nothing.

Who is the great philosopher who got it right? Jesus! The institution and doctrine of the Church brought his light to the darkness instead of the other way around, perverted it into its opposite so that only fragments remain to connect and resonate. A Course in Miracles begins to fix all that by dredging up the darkness that was planted in our minds when the Child lost consciousness and exposing it to the light. Practicing the Course doesn’t mean pretending we’re serene boobs who are unaffected by all the shit that’s happening. It means looking right at the shit and understanding that it’s coming from within our own minds, our own psyches, it’s totally insane, and it has a totally insane purpose which is to distract us from the Innocent Child that we all are and from our Purpose which is to wake up, to get the hell out of here, get back to Creation, and get back to work!

The great names in philosophy were great minds with promising insights here and there that nevertheless couldn’t navigate through appearances and deceptions to put them together in one great and simple answer the way Jesus did. Jesus did it by leading us toward the stern, into mind, not matter, and into the dark shit that’s been interfering with great minds’ ability to reason. We do well to go to churches that remind us that we’re all nice, comfort us, and encourage us to do nice. But we could do just as well, or better, to get together and face the fact that we’re not nice; look right at our not-niceness; be horrified and dismayed at first; come to understand its absurdity and manipulative intent; laugh it right out of the building; and thus disarm it.

If only Gene Hackman didn’t have to give up his life for his group. Oh well.

Published on Leave a comment on Beginning the Story of Mind

PREFACE

This is the first installment of the first draft of The Story of the Child (working title). It is my attempt to explain how the Child of our Parents, Father Mind-Logic and Mother Love-Freedom, given the gift of Life in Eternity and Reality, given a central role in Creation, lost Consciousness and wound up here in our temporal world of bodies and matter, mortality and unreality. If you're from the Judeo-Christian tradition it's a rewrite of the Garden of Eden. If you're from the Graeco-Roman or Eastern traditions, or from any other philosophy or religion, or if you're just wondering why we put up with suffering and death, this is my answer. It's one individual's reasoning for who we are, why we are here, and what we can do to part with appearances, deceptions and distractions, awaken, and resume our job in Creation.

It's based on Jesus' teaching in A Course in Miracles, a radical departure from biblical Christianity, but it goes beyond the scope of the Course. Its main source is the Memory we all share of the Child's Story and the intuition given to us to access it. Its main source, in other words, is no external "redeemer" but my own mind. In the end it's based on nothing more than what passes for logic and reason in my corrupted, irrational, human mind.

The first draft will be a tough read. Here are some definitions and guides to style and formatting that might make it easier:

* Initial caps refer to the part of the Child's story that occurred within Mind before he lost Consciousness. The same terms lower case belong to the story after he lost Consciousness and split off into multiple identities in our dream world of bodies and matter. I.e. initial caps belong to Consciousness-Reality, lower case to unconsciousness-unreality.

* The "Child" is us in our Conscious state when our Parents (Mind-Love, commonly referred to as "God" in monotheistic religions) gave birth to us in Eternity and Reality (commonly referred to as "heaven"). He was one Child. He was gender neutral for purposes of this telling; "he" is arbitrary and could just as easily be "she." Nevertheless the distinction between masculinity and femininity plays a key role in explaining his origin and central role in the Process and Structure of Creation.

* The "Child" is also us in our unconscious state, dreaming that we are split off into separated bodies. His identity comes from A Course in Miracles and my intuition, not from Carl Jung or any other source. The Course refers to the "Father" and his "Son" and "Sonship." The "Child" and his "Parents" are my invention.

* My book will have a bibliography and it will be sourced. It will be fleshed out with quotes from other sources. This first draft is just me winging it without notes or sources, an exercise in getting it right that will, from time to time, get it wrong. I hope, then, to fix any flaws in my reasoning, wrap it up, and seek publication.

Thank you for your patience! I hope this helps.

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INTRODUCTION: BEGINNING THE STORY OF MIND

There’s been all this talk through the ages about “God” and “spirit” when all we’re talking about is the most obvious thing in all Creation: Mind. It’s what we think with, so how could it be any closer or more familiar to us? And yet busy philosophers and theologists go fussing about searching for exotic terms and concepts to define the thing they’re searching with. We have our minds and we know what they do because they’re doing it all the time: they think. They come up with thoughts. And they string thoughts together in sequences that are supposed to be reasoning, but since we struggle to think with split minds in this existence we call “life” it’s either rationalizing instead or weak reasoning. Or just enough thought to spoon food into our mouths.

In the “beginning” there was no “beginning.” Time hangs around us like a dense fog because where our unconscious minds deposited us is in a dream where it’s never Now. If it were Now we would be awake. As simple as that. But merrily we go along in our ignorance believing whatever our bodies’ senses and our environment turn up even when our own investigations tell us the opposite. In the “beginning” there was just a wondering What might be fun to try? As if all this bother with Creation and Meaning, Mind and Being, were a parlor game gathering dust in the cupboard. Let’s try this game called “Mind.” And so Mind came into existence and, right away, there’s a problem. The directions say if Mind isn’t played just so the players might lose the whole game and flip into its opposite: mindlessness.

What’s that? Well, since we’re only equipped to play “Mind” we’ll never know. How can you figure out the opposite of what you’re using to figure out with? How can you fix a problem with an Atlas rocket with plumbing tools? We just have to leave the question unanswered. All we have to know is that Mind doesn’t occupy all the space there is that’s implied by the Question. Mind’s reasoning can figure that much out. We just have to remember that Mind’s existence isn’t a given because its opposite is waiting out there to kick in and we can’t be sure what will throw the switch.

Once Mind-Consciousness came into Being it advanced beyond its function of Self-awareness, from observation into its function of Thinking, into the production of Thoughts guided by its power and ability to Think Logically, i.e. to Reason, in service to its cause, Being. Thus began the extension and expansion of Mind’s Self-Knowledge / Self-Being, through the process of Thinking-Reasoning and its product, an interconnectedness of Thoughts.

Affirmation of Self-Worth was built into the Logic of Being, the essence of Character. Its expansion was therefore Self-motivated and not driven by the possibility of no-being or any other influence outside of itself. Its power was entirely Self-contained. It was not a “self-interest” engaged in the pursuit of self-preservation aware that it existed in an environment of competing self-interests.

Its Being was, nevertheless, only one logical answer to the Question and so, Self-affirmation was, in fact, a requisite for survival. It was required to sustain the cause of Being even if Mind that was purely Self-motivated could not be aware of it. The Logic of Mind requires that its state of Being be earned, that the stance of Being be independently supported by reasoned validation of, and commitment to, Being’s Worth. Creation and the Child’s part in it – our part in it once we regain Consciousness – became an essential means, an instrument, for Mind-Being’s Self-affirmation: Worth freely chosen, validated by the free spirit of Love from the Child that lies beyond our Parents' control.

As for the Child's Mind -- our Mind -- it figures out what’s needed to keep it in existence and then it devotes all its powers and resources to accomplish it. However uninspiring this may seem the Child's Mind -- our Being, our Self -- has to account for itself. It must establish its reason for being, its justification, its Worth, in all its choices, as though it did exist in an environment of competing self-interests, because that is, in effect, what its state of opposites is. It is the price we pay for having Free Will and a blessing too, for in so doing we contribute to the affirmation of our Parents' Worth. Unlike our Parents, we're aware that mindlessness is waiting in the wings, the void or whatever we want to call it, so there’s no excuse for lounging about on the promenade deck. There’s work to do and we’re part of it.

From the birth of the Child on, we have a Purpose: doing our part to affirm the Worth of Mind. Doing our part to Be.

Published on Leave a comment on The Fire of Time

The warmth and light from time
The fire that consumes all evidence of my being
Draws me to it in my grief

As if its embers home to my tears
Could bring us back together again
As if the dog curled up by the fireplace
And those of us still living

Could summon forth those who are not
Could restore the tenderness
That flickered in my child’s soul

A moment of having and touching
Before it was taken away

Published on Leave a comment on For the Love of a Grandparent

Our values are what really matters – love and family; friendship and community; health and healing; freedom and free will; self-worth; purpose, learning, striving, growth and achievement; abundance; protection and trust; beauty, purity and innocence; empowerment and control. Whenever we’re in doubt, these are our conscience. These are our best guide to avoiding mistakes.

Grandparents know all about mistakes because they’ve seen and made lots of them. They know a lot about values, too, because experience has taught them what’s important. Kids might do fine without a grandparent. But it’s possible they’d do even better with one. Grandparents want kids to have this resource: helping them with values so they avoid mistakes.

This is how grandparents want to be there for their kids. They applaud kids' performances and cheer them from the sidelines. But when kids are ready for more, grandparents are ready for more.

Grandparents don’t tell kids what to do. Setting a good example, standing up for their values – that’s their job. If they follow the wrong example they won’t be role modeling their values. They won’t be role modeling the values they want their grandchildren to have.

What kids need from their grandparents is good role models.

Here are some thoughts about grand-parenting, relationships, and role modeling based on one grandparent's experience:

Respect and affection between friends can never be taken for granted, because that would be telling our friends their needs and feelings don’t matter. That they don’t matter. It would tell them that they’re worthless when friendships should tell them the opposite.

Differences between people can cause serious problems. Our reading and entertainment tell us that every day. Our minds work differently. Our personalities aren’t the same. We value different things. Our priorities are different. We present ourselves differently. We try to connect and communicate differently – the list goes on and on.

Our circumstances are always changing. And our needs and feelings change with them. Because everyone’s circumstances are different, no one has the same point of view.

Our physical, biological, and social environment is a dynamic system driven by powerful forces. Understanding these forces is the purpose of every field of learning -- physics, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, social science, political science, ethics, theology, biology, and more. We are brought together in one great human enterprise: learning.

One of the great lessons of life is the need for continuous improvement -- for learning and personal growth. This is as true for groups as it is for individuals. It is our purpose. We can’t stand still. We must move forward.

Learning takes effort. It takes thought, and kids are capable of that. If grandparents didn’t believe in their kids they would say, “They’re just kids” and ignore them. Grandparents don’t ignore their kids. They think their kids are worth a whole lot more than just one birthday gift. They're worth a million birthday gifts! They're not “just kids.”

As Vince Lombardi would put it: What’s best for our kids isn’t everything: it’s the only thing. Being useful to their kids is why grandparents exist. A good grandparent will try to be useful even if it means doing without the affection, kindness, joy, and laughter that their kids bless them with. Their kids are worth a trillion birthday gifts!

Relationships usually survive misunderstandings and hurt feelings without too much damage. But when we don’t respect our differences it can have more serious consequences. It can cause wounds that take away trust and safety. It can even bring close friendships to an end.

In the end, there is only one way to save a friendship and that is to earn it. To have strong values, share them, and to stand up for them even if it takes work and may not succeed. What is friendship worth, anyway, if it doesn’t ask something of us? If we don’t risk something?

Living a truly good life and doing what’s right aren’t things to be casual about. They require thought and deliberation. They require care and concentration, because it can be very easy to lose sight of what really matters and make a mistake.

It’s up to each of us to determine for ourselves what’s right. It’s everyone’s duty to affirm the truth about who we are and what we believe in everything we do. It’s all about Character. It’s all about Purpose.

Modesty is being aware that a higher power knows what’s best and letting this awareness guide our conscience. Anyone can find fault with what’s wrong, but who really knows what’s right? This is modesty, a virtue that is everyone’s duty to share, and grandparents would share it with their kids.

Miracles happen when power that we’re not aware of works quietly through our minds and hearts to overcome barriers to change and lead us forward. The barriers to change necessary for friends to move forward may not come down without a miracle. This is as true for brothers and sisters as it is with fathers and sons.

“Happy endings” aren’t a given but neither is disappointment. What we think are “happy endings” may also lie beyond our understanding. We should be prepared for both, because whatever comes may be for the best – we don’t know.

Published on Leave a comment on Memory

Memory

The Peace that we all crave
Can be found in one place

In the Memory

Of who we really are, that we all share
That resides within our Mind
That will guide us Home if we will let it.

The Story of the Child is the Story
That our Memory wants us all to know
What our Memory wants to tell us

Because it’s our Story

Our connection to Reality, Truth
And the meaning of Life
Because it’s our Path

That will lead us Home

Published on Leave a comment on Above the Din and Distraction of Bodies

How can bodies and their senses, that materialize out of nowhere
That return to nowhere in the merest blink of a cosmic eye
That suffer every manner of disease and disfiguration
Be worthy of such veneration, such idolatry, by fields of human endeavor

That imagine themselves occupied with serious things –
By science, metaphysics, ontology, psychology, and the humanities
That imagine themselves grounded in objectivity and perspective
In “common sense” and “realism?”

How can largeness emerge from such littleness
When it is Mind that presides over all
That supplies thoughts and quietly, gently asks to be noticed?
What might we Learn if we closed our ears
To the constant din and distraction of our bodies
And listened to Mind instead?

Could it be clues to what’s really going on?
Pieces of our story that would help us understand
Who we are and what we’re doing here
If only we put them together with a bit of Reason?

Published on Leave a comment on Free Choice and the Worth of Creation

Mind is not synonymous with brain. The business of the brain is with the body. The business of Consciousness is with thoughts. The business of Mind that is unconscious is with regaining Consciousness. This is its only concern. It is mind blocked by a brain that cannot hear this.

Mind contains the seed of Creation. The seed is Oneness that contains everything of Creation: its purpose, process and structure, its archetypes of Masculinity and Femininity, their Relationships and Creations, and the Energy that animates all of it.

Abundance and Freedom are the Joy that extends and expands Love. Logic is the attribute of Mind that disciplines and empowers Creation. Reason is the function of Logic that mediates between them. Love and its expression of Abundance and Freedom are married to Mind and its expression of Logic by Reason. Their marriage – Freedom with Choice -- produced a Child.

We are the Child. We have Free Choice because we are Free Choice. Because the role we were given in Creation is to Create and to Reciprocate Worth the only way Worth can be Created: when it is Freely Chosen.

The role we were given in Reality is to Learn and to Grow: until we have attained proficiency in Creation; until we have attained maturity and earned responsibility for Parenting; until we can role model Parenting and extend Life through an abundance of relationships; until we have learned the Worth of Happiness by Reciprocating it.

Two events interrupted our training. The loss of Consciousness deconstructed Reality in the Mind of the Child. Unconsciousness dreamed another reality, a reconstruction of facades meant to deceive. The dream is our unreal world of appearances -- bodies and brains, time, space, and matter -- from which an unconscious Child must awaken.

We choose to resume our job in Creation when we choose to awaken. We choose to awaken when we choose to deconstruct the dream of deceptions, to rediscover the Reality and the Truth of our Self. We will learn how to do this when we tell the Story of the Child that illuminates what has happened, puts it in context, and gives it meaning. For now, telling the Story of the Child in the context of the dream is his Story.

Unconscious Mind was invaded by the author of the dream of appearances and deceptions. We choose to deconstruct the dream when we abandon its author. A corrupted mind cannot heal itself without help from Mind that isn’t corrupted. We abandon the author of the dream when we choose another, our Self guided by Reason from Consciousness, a collaboration between us and an offer of help that’s accepted.

The case for telling the Story of the Child – for explaining the loss of Consciousness and its context, what preceded and followed it – runs long and deep. What’s in it for me comes down to this: having my Self, my story, deconstructed and handed back to me in a pile of lies, meant to keep me from my job, bothers me. I’ve got work to do – the gift of Purpose, usefulness and Worth, the gift of Happiness – and I mean to do it. I’ve got my Self to reclaim, my Sovereignty. I am Masculinity who would reclaim his Manhood. If you are Femininity, you would reclaim all the pride, the glory, the beauty that is the essence, the Spirit, of Womanhood.

We all have work to do, nothing less than a central role in Creation: the Reciprocation of Worth back to Being, its Source, that’s meaningless without it. This is what’s in it for us.

Shall we awaken? Or shall we continue our journey down the Niagara River?

Published on Leave a comment on On Letting Fuzzy Dice Make the Call

The chaos of our universe that violates Logic and upsets Order
The appearances, the deceptions that violate the Truth
Don’t just hit us in our minds, our psyches.
They are a gut punch.

An offense to our integrity that’s literally nauseating
That demands a determined response that makes it clear to the perpetrator:
This is not acceptable.

The perpetrator is us.
And the response that’s demanded isn’t force in kind
That can only validate and perpetuate the offense –
Another attack, another projection of guilt –
But the force, the Logic, of Discipline.

A decisive act of Mind, of Will, that will strip the offense of its false premises
By shifting belief to the Truth
By not seeing what is not there to seeing what is there.
By letting go our addiction to lures that trap us
In an endless cycle of offense, victimhood, condemnation, and retribution.

Appearances are not real.
Victimhood is not Innocence.

What is truly “victimizing” is the gut punch we deliver to ourselves
When we take the lure and allow ourselves to be misled into a cycle of self-destruction.
When we allow lies to deprive us
Of our integrity, our identity, our sovereignty, our Worth.

None of it is necessary or inevitable.
Let skepticism and fatalism be the albatross
Around the neck of what isn’t true instead of what is true.

All it takes is an opening of mind, a change of mind.
All it takes is a simple exercise of Reason
That will restore real Freedom, the Freedom to choose
To choose our own Purpose, our own destiny.

Instead of submitting passively to the dictatorship of appearances
To the convenience of arbitrary circumstances that permit us to “exist”
Until one day they don’t.
Until we learn the hard way that “chance” is another purpose
That does not wish us well.

Purpose that is ours is ours for the asking.
All it takes is the right choice:
Between Reason and mindlessness.
Between Discipline and a pair of fuzzy dice.

Which will it be?

David C. Harrison
June 15, 2020
https://davidclarkharrison.com

Published on Leave a comment on Understanding Matter by Opening Mind: Letter to Carlo Rovelli

To: Carlo Rovelli
Author: Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity
Director, Quantum Gravity Group
Centre de Physique Theorique (CPT), Aix-Marseille University
Case 907, Luminy, Office number: 453
F-13288 France

Re: Appeal to Theorists to Lead a Change in Thinking and Serve the Cause of Reason

We only need to ask ourselves: What is implied by the thought, the idea, of Mind?
To access the help we need from philosophy to understand quantum gravity.
It may take months or years of reflection to tell Mind's story
Going back to Why must there even be a question?
With nothing more than Intuition's spontaneous insights and Reason to guide us
But it won't take the centuries that it took for experimental physics, the study of matter
To begin the journey to quantum gravity.

My book, The Story of the Child (working title)
Will likely offer a rationale for your loop theory that explains quantum gravity.
This is because our illusory material environment mirrors in many ways the Reality of Conscious Mind
That created the Child -- our real Self -- and gave him a role and purpose in Creation.
It was the Child's loss of Consciousness that interrupted his part in the process of Creation
And produced the appearances that now challenge our understanding.

The entire process of Creation, from Mind-Oneness and its stance, Being
To the Child and his creations of Worth and back again, to Being
In the Child's freely chosen reciprocation of Worth
May be described as an infinite and ongoing loop
Whose purpose is to give substance and meaning to the assertion of Being
To the stance of Life and Creation -- that is our Reality, our Truth, and our Purpose.

The journey to quantum gravity, whose main insight captures this essential attribute of Creation
And sees it reflected in the Child's imagining of another state, is most likely on the right track.
All that it needs now, to complete the journey
Is to understand that what must distinguish Creation from its imagined state
Is that one state is real and the other is not.

Had this distinction been understood by those who have long philosophized about opposites
Their topic would have yielded clarity and eloquence instead of confusion and convolution.

Opposites are nothing more than an accommodation of Mind
On the Child's plane of Creation, that can lose Consciousness.
But whether or not Child-Mind loses consciousness, the opposites of Reality do not exist.
Our world, being a manifestation of the idea of non-being, of death
Is an opposite that cannot be real.
"Reality is not what it seems" because it is literally not real.
Parmenides was right!

Hopefully, the distinction between reality and unreality -- non-dualism
Will make it into your theory and the promise it holds, of clarity and eloquence, will be realized.
The appeal from Reality Is Not What It Seems, for help from philosophy, will then have its response.

Much more explanation is needed -- the purpose of my book
But, for now, keep in mind two critical distinctions:
Between Mind Conscious and mind unconscious and between Parents and Child.
Parents' Conscious Mind knows nothing of our unreal world and had no direct part in its making.
It was Child unconscious mind's doing, and the great question for Intuition and Reason to answer
Is why and how did the Child lose consciousness?
This is the subject of The Story of the Child.

Whether we answer this question will have a direct bearing on whether we survive.
Whether the world's leading theorists -- the best minds, like yourself -- join the cause
May determine whether we succeed.

David C. Harrison
303-746-5983 / https://davidclarkharrison.com
74apollo350@gmail.com

Published on Leave a comment on The Coming Paradigm Shift in Reasoning about Reality and Purpose

Letter addressed separately to:

• Carlo Rovelli, Aix-Marseille University. Author, Reality Is Not What It Seems:
The Journey to Quantum Gravity
• Adam Becker, University of California, Berkeley. Author, What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics
• Karen L. King, Harvard Divinity School. Author, What Is Gnosticism?

Date: June 3, 2020

So long a science remains riveted to matter – inanimate and organic, -- so long as it systematically overlooks the role of conscious mind in Creation and unconscious mind in illusion, it will never lead humanity to the real origin and fate of the universe and the meaning – the purpose – of life. Purpose that humanity addicted to technology, on the precipice of mass irrationality and extinction, now desperately needs. On the contrary, it can only legitimize forces that keep humanity in the dark, pinned down by flaws in our knowledge and reasoning that are essential to freedom of choice, learning, and growth.

The “meaning” of quantum physics, the end of the road for quantum gravity, needs no further “quest.” Experimental physics has already produced the results that tell us what we need to know: matter is not real. Its strange behavior is readily explained as the product of mind that logically can only be in an unconscious, dreaming state. What it has produced is not Reason or Reality but unreason and unreality. These are the hallmarks of our universe and self-destructive humanity – unexplainable magic that only happens in dreams and imaginations.

What unconscious mind has produced, still living and empowered with energy, is illusion. And physics, passionate about its cause, passionate about its subject, passionately convinced that matter is real, proves it. If we haven’t already figured this out from the bizarre behavior of quanta, from a universe ruled not by order but by entropy, we may be literally too dumb to live.

Science has two tasks to salvage its honesty. The first is to acknowledge the flaw in the logic that supports it: the logic that holds that sensory perception is qualified to adjudicate between reality and unreality. That holds that separation between the body and other objects that belong to the same state of matter bestows objectivity, when separation can only bestow objectivity if it’s between one state and another. Physics that fails to acknowledge this flaw may certainly continue with its discoveries. But it is not qualified to answer for metaphysics about reality. If it lacks objectivity and rationality, it lacks authority. And until it acknowledges this fact, it is not being honest.

The second task to salvage physics’ honesty is to acknowledge the truth about the findings of its experiments, going back to its origins with Galileo and to its premises with Aristotle. Experiments that were meant to support elegant theories of everything, to reveal beauty, essence, and perfection in the cosmos, have revealed instead a welter of causes and effects that make no sense. Their net result is a pointlessness that mocks the laws of science and confounds understanding rather than illuminating it. If the laws of science disappear precisely at the point where metaphysics demands answers, what use are they? They rationalize appearances on a human scale, but humanity has been doing this on its own for thousands of years.

What mind is searching for is Reality and Reason that will enable it to exercise free choice, so humanity will grasp its purpose and act decisively to serve it. We aren’t doing this. And one glaring reason why is that science hides rather than shares the truth. The cosmos isn’t Plato’s “divine” and never will be. The journey to quantum gravity has already gone beyond where it could be any practical help.

It’s time to look elsewhere for the meaning and purpose of life, not from what matter can tell us but from what mind can tell us. Science that compromises with honesty can’t set us on this path. But science that’s honest can at least help.

Einstein devoted his career to a single-minded effort to prove the logic of matter, the perfect order of the cosmos defined by mathematics and physics, and he failed. Bohr was right. Why can’t physics accept the verdict of the Copenhagen Interpretation and support a larger effort of mind – of philosophy, metaphysics, ontology, and psychology – to find answers instead of continuing to obstruct it? Why are scientists intent on discrediting the effort instead of joining it?

Telling the story of the Child, our archetypal Self, is giving the Child back some part of the Reality and the Truth that he lost when he lost consciousness. It’s giving humanity some part of the Reality and Truth that we need in order to exercise free choice in whether to move forward, with objectivity and reason rather than sabotaging our cause with subjectivity and unreason.

The story of the Child needs to be told. Because otherwise we may never know our true worth. We may never know the meaning and purpose of life, the cause the Child was given in Creation – our cause. Without resolve that can only come from purpose, transferring perception from bodies’ senses to intuition and Reason – from appearances to Truth -- will continue to elude us. The basics of what we are doing here -- who we are, how we got here, and what is within our power to do about it, -- will continue to elude us. Unless we connect with the Child that dwells in Mind – with our Self, -- how can we ever get back home to Reality, to the engine of Creation, where we belong?

Our story needs to be told so that we will finally make it relevant, constructive, and consequential. Let it emerge from the fog of mythology, from medicine-man faiths and cultures, into the light of logic, meaning, and utility. Into the light of Mind and Reason without the mysticism and self-contradictions that alienate common sense.

The thinking reflected in the publication I’ve cited has taken you to the outer edges of the paradigm shift that’s needed. You’re receiving this because there may be a willingness to consider it, a level of intelligence and intellectual honesty that offers hope.

Am I making sense? Is the story of the Child worth telling? Can we at least try?

David C. Harrison
Author, The Story of the Child (working title, book in progress)
303-746-5983 / 74apollo350@comcast.net
https://davidclarkharrison.com

Published on Leave a comment on On the Meaning of Quantum Physics

Letter to Adam Becker, Author, What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics
Visiting Scholar, Office for History of Science and Technology
University of California, Berkeley
Adam@freelanceastro.com

Science has staked its legitimacy on sensory perception -- the observation and measurement of quantifiable matter -- as the sole arbiter of reality. Matter at the level of quanta has revealed that it is not bound by the reality so defined. The logical foundation that science has chosen for itself, and the material reality it stands for, is called into question.

There being no alternative reality for which sensory perception can serve as proof, science must turn to systems thinking to understand its discoveries. Metaphysics, the branch of philosophy concerned with the logic of reality, belongs in the conversation. This should include ontology, the branch of metaphysics concerned with the logic of being. The dynamics of human motivation, personal growth, feelings, and relationships come into play, and this involves psychology. Yet another field to consult is theology, because it offers insights into mind that orders all forms of creation.

Yesterday, I submitted a letter to the Mind / Brain Editor of Scientific American commenting on an article by a neuroscientist, Christof Koch. His article, “Tales of the Dying Brain,” prompted my letter because it adheres to the article of faith in sensory perception that has rooted science in subjectivity and irrationality from the beginning, and I believe the time has come to place it on firmer logical ground.

My letter cites two invaluable sources: Your own What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics and Carlo Rovelli’s Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity. Both you and Rovelli appear troubled, as Einstein was, by matter that doesn’t respect science’s article of faith. Both, commendably, encourage physics to follow the trail wherever it leads, Rovelli with an open appeal for help from philosophy. But while you're both alert to the question of material reality, neither appears willing to question your faith -- to question the role of traditional physics and its dependence on sensory perception.

My letter to Scientific American suggests that the world revealed beyond matter, through quantum mechanics, and the dying brain, through near-death experiences, is one of two competing realities, only one of which can be real. Hawking was unapologetic in championing his profession's bias in favor of sensory perception. It was his, and yours and Rovelli’s prerogative, to do so. But it comes at a cost. Science insisting on the incorrect reality, in service to its institutional purposes, leads human understanding down the wrong road.

It leads to incorrect conclusions devoid of meaning and purpose. Add to this the cost of not leading human understanding toward correct conclusions that awaken us to meaning and purpose. Quantitative science measures. It doesn't evaluate. The courageous and talented physicists whose work is highlighted in your book are an inspiration. But they and their work -- their profession -- can't be the source of "meaning" in quantum physics. For this, we need other sources.

Weaning science off rigid dependence on sensory perception must be a paradigm shift too far or it would have happened over a century ago. I do not make light of yours or science’s institutional self-interests. But more than Professor Koch’s article, it is the state of our world that says it’s time for change, and what must change is our thinking. What must change is for theorists in every field, like yourself, to state the obvious: that humanity is succumbing not only to mass irrationality but also to mass extinction, that it’s flawed reasoning that got us here, and we must shift to a new paradigm of thinking before it’s too late.

My letter to Scientific American alludes to attributes of mind -- “intuition” and “reason beyond appearances” – that can access the objectivity this new paradigm will need. They deserve an explanation, and, hopefully, they will get it in the book I’m preparing for publication, tentatively titled The Story of the Child. I have criticized science for overplaying the story of matter when it’s the story of mind that can guide us. My book is an attempt, from one individual’s perspective, to explain what it means to “tell the story of mind.”

With integrity, honesty, and humanity, you are no doubt making great progress in your work. I would be honored if my letter to Scientific American, which follows, and my book were any help. Science needs help from philosophy, and I am pleased to humbly offer one response.

David C. Harrison
June 1, 2020

Published on Leave a comment on A Response from Philosophy to Quantum Gravity

Letter to Carlo Rovelli, Director, Quantum Gravity Group
Centre de Physique Théorique (CPT), Aix-Marseille University
Author, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (2017)

Re: Appeal from theoretical physics to philosophy for help understanding the meaning of quantum gravity

The approach to the task of physics presented in Reality Is Not What It Seems strikes me as reasonable. This in contrast to the approach propounded by Stephen Hawking, because you acknowledge the limits of experimental science and allow a role for philosophy while he, notoriously, did not. For him, “Philosophy is dead.” For you, it becomes essential.

The occasion to express my thanks and admiration has finally arrived. Today, I submitted a letter to the Mind / Brain Editor of Scientific American commenting on an article by a neuroscientist, Christof Koch. The article, “Tales of the Dying Brain,” prompted my letter because it adheres to the article of faith in sensory perception that has rooted science in subjectivity and irrationality from its very beginning, and I believe the time has come, with your appeal to philosophy, to place it on firmer logical ground.

My letter cites yours and Adam Becker’s recent book, What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for Meaning in Quantum Physics. Both authors, troubled and confused as Einstein was by matter that doesn’t respect science’s article of faith, appear to believe that a road still lies ahead for traditional physics. You, in particular, breezed by Schroedinger’s observation that science by sensory perception is circular reasoning without reflecting on it, nor did you credit Parmenides and his School of Reason with common sense.

Yet both sources should be taken as prominent red flags for science, for I believe they point in the direction of the “philosophy” that can make sense of quantum gravity. That is, if the “other reality” that I allude to in my letter to Scientific American is understood for what I’ve implied that it is: one of two competing realities, only one of which can be real. Science has been insisting that the incorrect one is real -- matter rather than mind, -- not in service to the truth but in service to its own institutional purposes.

Hawking was unapologetic in championing his profession and made his own and his profession’s bias very clear. It was his, and yours and Becker’s prerogative, to do so. But it comes at a cost. The cost is continuing to lead human understanding down the wrong road, to incorrect conclusions devoid of meaning and purpose. Add to this the cost of not leading human understanding toward correct conclusions that awaken us to meaning and purpose.

Weaning science off rigid dependence on sensory perception must be a paradigm shift too far or it would have happened over a century ago. I do not make light of yours or science’s institutional self-interests. But more than Professor Koch’s article, it is the state of our world that says it’s time for change, and what must change is our thinking. What must change is for theorists in every field, like yourself, to state the obvious: that humanity is succumbing not only to mass irrationality but also to mass extinction, that it’s flawed reasoning that got us here, and we must shift to a new paradigm of thinking before it’s too late.

My letter to Scientific American alludes to attributes of mind -- “intuition” and “reason beyond appearances” – that can access the objectivity this new paradigm will need. They deserve an explanation, and, hopefully, they will get it in the book I’m preparing for publication, tentatively titled The Story of the Child. I have criticized science for overplaying the story of matter when it’s the story of mind that can explain what it’s all about. My book is an attempt, from one individual’s perspective, to explain what it means to “tell the story of mind.”

With integrity, honesty, and humanity, you are no doubt making great progress in your work. I would be honored if my letter to Scientific American, posted on my website, and my book were any help. Quantum gravity has called for help from philosophy, and I am pleased to humbly offer one response.

David C. Harrison
May 31, 2020

Published on Leave a comment on On Near Death Experiences: Comment on “Tales of the Dying Brain,” by Christof Koch

Science’s reliance on sensory perception to establish what’s real is neither objective nor rational. It is inherently subjective and irrational. This was pointed out by the physicist-philosopher Erwin Schroedinger, an admission that was noted in Carlo Rovelli’s Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (2017). Our bodies and their senses being part of their own material environment disqualifies them from attesting to its reality. For this another perspective is needed, one that is not built into its own environment and doesn’t have to be “spiritual.” It only needs to be mind, which is manifestly not coterminous with the brain, as distinguished neuroscientists have concluded.

Putting sensory perception on the witness stand to attest to its own reality is self-referential circular reasoning. It isn’t reasoning, which means the logical foundation for all of body-centered “science,” including the science of mind, is inherently illogical. It means “science,” which prizes objectivity, is subjective. A “science” that denies itself access to the perspective of mind, that rigidly adheres to bodies’ sensory perception and their brains’ circular reasoning, sacrifices not only objectivity for subjectivity, it sacrifices its legitimacy.

This, I think, is ample reason to question Christof Koch’s “hypothesis that all our thoughts, memories, percepts (sic) and experiences are an ineluctable consequence of the natural causal powers of our brain rather than of any supernatural ones”. If what he means by “supernatural ones” is mind, nothing could be farther from the truth. Reason says so, and that’s what near-death experiences (NDE’s) are telling us. NDE’s reveal that, in the space between sensory perception and what lies beyond, attributes of reality take over that mock the limits our bodies impose.

They do so just as the behavior of quanta mock the limits of reality that physics imposes in the space between matter and what lies beyond. Whether the neuroscientist Koch is willing to question all-knowing sensory perception, theoretical physics concerned with quantum mechanics long ago expressed its doubts in Nils Bohr’s “Copenhagen Interpretation” [ref: Adam Becker, What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (2018)] and, more recently, in Rovelli’s appeal for help from philosophy to make sense of quantum gravity.

What the brain during NDE’s and quanta under observation may both be telling us is that what lies beyond material reality is another reality. Koch says NDE subjects describe it as “realer than real,” a subjective valuation that can’t be measured, so he and science will leave its significance to us. But to NDE subjects and to this observer, its significance seems obvious: The reality they are experiencing is mind beyond matter.

Koch explains that NDE’s “are triggered. . . when the body is injured by blunt trauma, a heart attack, asphyxia, shock, and so on.” Then why does it change the logic of what transpires when the cortex is stimulated electrically or “exciting the gray matter elsewhere”? In either case an external force physically alters the brain, the subject’s mind is released from the body, and it takes with it all the powers of consciousness – observation, thought, and feeling – except the power to act and sense with the body. What transpires is a clear separation of a part of consciousness that belongs to mind from a part that’s tethered to the body, and that would be the brain. Electrical stimulation of the brain only differs from the usual causes of NDE’s by being deliberate.

The “origin” of NDE’s can only be traced to the brain because, by definition, a “near death experience” refers to a condition of the body and its brain. It has nothing to do with the death of the mind or “spirit.” Since there was never any logic to declaring that the “origin” of NDE’s is “spiritual,” it’s absurd for Koch to conclude that “subjective experience provides support for a biological, not spiritual origin” – to declare, in effect, that the origin can’t be “spiritual.”

The issue isn’t “origins.” The issue is causes and effects. The cause is physical alteration of the body’s brain, one that places the brain in a weakened, dying state, that gets it out of the way of mind. The effect is an irrefutable experience, documented many times over, of an other-worldly state of consciousness which can only be mind.

If we can get the distinction clear between brain and mind, and the cause-effect relationship between brain alteration and mind that’s unattached to body, NDE’s will begin to make perfect sense. They clearly suggest that there’s another reality that’s not matter but mind. And, if NDE subjects are to be believed, it’s the reality of mind that’s real and the other that isn’t. It’s the reality of mind that’s natural and the other that ought to be labeled “supernatural.”

But we don’t have to go there to make a point. The point is that messing with the brain is no grounds for siding with body-centered science that there’s no reality beyond sensory perception or that all consciousness is seated in the brain. To do so is to fly in the face of evidence provided by NDE’s. Worse, to do so is to side with circular reasoning -- not to be truly “scientific” but to be hopelessly subjective and irrational.

Let Rovelli search for quantum gravity and Professor Koch study the brain. But while they’re at it, let’s all get off our self-referential addiction to sensory perception and acknowledge its subjectivity. Let’s get serious about metaphysics and trace the story of mind. Why? Because only in intuition, an attribute of mind, will we find objectivity. Only there will we find reason beyond appearances, the perspective that’s qualified to distinguish between competing realities. And because that’s what quantum mechanics and NDE’s are telling us to do.

Like the story of the brain and matter, all accounts of the human experience are ultimately the story of mind. To learn it is not to surrender to unreason, to contradictory ideologies that science rightly fears, but to open the door to guidance that is both rational and felt, that provides values and meaning. It is guidance that science dependent on numbers and measurements cannot provide by itself. Should Professor Koch convince us that we have only the brain, matter, and measurements to guide us, that the evidence of NDE’s to the contrary can be ignored, it will be a disservice to his own cause – to the cause of reason and knowledge, science and learning. It will be a disservice to the cause of mind.

Letter submitted to Scientific American
Commenting on Christof Koch, "Tales of the Dying Brain"
In Scientific American (June 2020 pp. 71-75)

May 30, 2020

Published on Leave a comment on Review of Henry Clay Frick: The Golden Age of Coal and Coke,1870-1920, by Cassandra Vivian

[Reviewer's note: I had originally intended to promote this book with the following review, but I've had second thoughts. Like the coal he mined, I think it's best to leave Mr. Frick and the culture of exploitation he represented in the ground. The less that's heard about him the better. We all need to be listening to science. The polluters and their Ayn Rand grandstanding have already had their say.]

Henry Clay Frick took thinking seriously. Which meant he took reasoning seriously, character and purpose, too. Turn him loose in a chaotic new industry -- coal and coke in Southwestern Pennsylvania -- and he rationalizes it.

Caught up in passions of the great colliding movements of the 19th and 20th centuries -- capitalism, socialism, the industrial revolution, organized labor, -- people came at him with every kind of nonsense. Didn't faze him. He just stuck with good old logic, unflinching discipline, and straightforward relationships.

He was well served by superintendent Thomas Lynch and engineer J. H. Paddock
But he sorely missed a third figure. A leader with stature among his work force he could trust and deal with. Someone freely chosen by his employees through their own organization, sanctioned and facilitated by his company.

The industry needed rationalizing same as oil, steel, and other new industries. Problem was, the owners, rock-ribbed capitalists, went overboard on control. What they thought they understood and what they assumed, was based on a contorted definition of "self" in self-interest. Left out the public interest, which rigid conservatives still have no use for today.

The story of labor-management relations in the period Vivian covers, 1870-1920, an age as sorrowful and lamentable as it was “golden,” with its betrayals, savagery, and character assassinations, was as much about the heroics that didn’t happen as what did. It was about governance.

Not until the New Deal 30's, when US Steel let their workers organize, and into the prosperous 50's, could the United Steelworkers’ Dave McDonald and USS CEO Ben Fairless tour the country touting labor-management harmony, sharing wealth and control, one big happy family.

All the tribalists in ownership ever have to do to get it right is to get what governance is all about: community, and what community is all about is fairness. The coal operators' employees were screaming in their faces about fairness. What government is for, the last thing those of extreme persuasion want to hear.

But it's too much to ask that Charles Armstrong and other bare-knuckled coal operators in Frick's era would understand that government needed to be rationalized, too. That they needed to push for legislation that would let them off the hook and let them do what capitalists are good at, meeting market demand with supply, efficiently and at a profit.

Vivian’s able research did its job: Frick clearly wasn't the demon he was made out to be. Though the portrait she paints isn’t without blemish. The "scheming two-faced" Carnegie’s taking over Frick's business was no worse than what Frick did to his competitors. Otherwise, primary sources say his workers received not the worst in workplace safety, compensation, housing, provisioning, and consideration during periods of hardship and injury, but reliably the best in the industry. "Safety First" originated with a 27-rule company-wide policy instituted by Frick's superintendent Lynch after the Mammoth Mine explosion in 1891.

Yet Frick and the coal-operator syndicate he helped organize didn't go far enough in their rationalizing. The structure they engineered balked at partnering with labor. It didn’t even consider partnering with government. They were perceived as having too much control as a consequence. They were perceived as being insensitive, intransigent, and unfair. Frick in particular, not because he failed but because he was so prominent, because he succeeded.

The perception of unfairness dispensed by an impersonal system that wasn't listening, that wasn't legally obligated to respond with respect and compassion even if it was, wasn't just hurtful. It was emasculating. It created an emotional climate so combustible that, for the communities who experienced it, it descended into a recurring nightmare of terror. If, as Vivian shows, it was the miners who eventually threw the unions out, many in the communities they took over wished they could have thrown the entire industry out.

Because Frick and his expanding empire came into prominence, it was he, more than anyone, who was expected to correct the injustice and the unrest, he who attracted attention. The case Vivian's research supports is that it wasn't that Frick did too little in the event, but that too much was expected. Well after he died, in 1919, any perceived affront to labor rights and human decency in the region, including murder, no matter the source, was attributed to him.

The price he paid in rage and hatred, in character assassination, has already lasted a century beyond his time. It is history's unfairness to him, a rendering of perverse justice, that may never end. A twist of fate that the historian will miss if she's not alert to the broader context. And miss it she did. It isn't the truth about Frick that's the point, it's the untruth, the larger meaning of his story that one will not learn from Vivian's account. If deliberate distortion of an individual's role in history is a rarity, we may count Frick's fate as a striking example.

He's been chosen to stand in for an unregulated system of exploitation that dehumanized workers, brought social unrest, disfigured the landscape, and left others to deal with unsolvable mine drainage. Regions proud of their history commemorate events with markers. As Vivian notes, Morgan Valley, from Broadford to Mount Pleasant, has sites where serious history was made but very few markers. If the truth doesn't really matter about Frick, its history doesn't seem to matter to the region. For those who experienced it and those left behind, the age of coal and coke was anything but "golden."

The coal operators' successors today in the fossil fuel industry are still at it, leaving the public "self" out of self-interest. Coke works near Frick's coal fields, at Clairton, run by US Steel, are still violating air quality standards. Yesterday, it was 80 degrees above the Arctic Circle in Siberia. There's a connection. The inequities that made Frick's coal fields a combustible mix of injury and impotent rage have expanded into our own time to cover our entire planet, potentially joining humanity itself in the current mass extinction. We, the public, are all paying the price.

The ultimate irony is that it wasn’t the coal operators’ wealth and power that their miserable workers, long-suffering immigrants, were really after. They just wanted fairness.

Those who care about fairness and the truth about Henry Clay Frick, Pittsburgh’s "Steel City" history, and the pain and chaos that marked the birth of America’s industrial revolution, are sure to appreciate Vivian’s scholarship. She writes of immigrants’ contributions to her region’s place in America’s history with the care and reverence it deserves. Passionate about the subject of her book, she is passionate about the historian’s craft as well, and brings to it an extraordinary combination of reflection and activism.

Not content with numerous publications, she has founded a historical society and a museum and written about Italian-American foods and ways. Just a few among the many gifts this talented scholar has shared with her community, a role model for responsible citizenship in a democracy. Should Vivian's readers come around to her point of view it would be a good thing, not just for her subject but for the telling of history, with its admirable attention to detail, to facts, to clarity, and to force of argument, backed by eight years researching original sources.

If I have one reservation it would be that in the pride the author takes in immigrants' accomplishments she can lose sight of their costs. Even as she faithfully records the miseries and ruinous effect of the extraction industry on our habitat, she doesn't quite get the enormity of it. What would be her assessment if she could look back on her "golden age" from a longer term perspective? From the perspective of the remnants of humanity after much of the globe is rendered uninhabitable by an intricate climate system disrupted by pollution? By a fossil fuel industry that means to go on extracting until the earth's resources are gone and life, too?

The answer would depend on how we all weigh the benefits and costs. The author can speak for herself. But the answer for this native of Pittsburgh, always eager to brag about his home town, is it wasn't worth it.

That said, the beleaguered Mr. Frick needed a historian with force of will and integrity to match his own, and he found it in Cassandra Vivian. Her book is a good read. Whether it changes minds or not, I recommend it.

David C. Harrison
A.B. American History, Harvard 1959
J. D. Harvard Law School 1963
Founder and executive director, Mon Valley Tri-State Network 1986-1995
Co-founder, Mon Valley Tri-State Leadership Academy 1991-1994
Current book in progress tentatively titled "The Story of the Child"

May 26, 2020

Published on Leave a comment on Three Premises that Reason Can Do Without

A purpose of my forthcoming book is to question the structure of our “reasoning” – its knowledge-information base and its premises -- by examining it from another perspective, the one implied and given form by A Course in Miracles.

The break we need in our circular reasoning can be accomplished by reflecting on the role of Energy-Force: in defining appearances that our bodies’ senses register; in establishing the properties-attributes that distinguish them and describe how they behave, how they interact to produce the variety of forms they take, the variety of compositions with different functions and uses; that collectively prop up our sense that we belong to a grand movement of causes and effects that must have an intelligible purpose, because they constantly change, and the changes have consequences.

Energy, whether or not it enlivens-animates appearances that mean what we think they mean, still attests to the connection to our Source, whatever or whoever it is, that cannot be broken. Even if it enlivens what mind is only imagining, Energy is still Energy, and even if our thoughts are trapped in self-referential reasoning, the Force that powers our flawed reasoning is still active, is still here.

Breaking through the circular chain of thoughts so infused with Energy and dominated by it can be accomplished by changing one assumption, one premise. This is the premise that the Mind, the Logic that produced the Energy that animates our appearances and now our reflections on what they mean, can only be in a conscious state. That because the appearances Energy makes seem so real for us, seem so consequential, only a mind in a conscious state could possibly cause them.

Have we not ever experienced vivid dreams? Have none of us ever hallucinated? Do not some of us exist in a mental state that’s divorced from “reality?” Is not the record of psychological states replete with bizarre three-act dramas that Freud himself couldn’t unravel?

Another premise that’s ripe for questioning is that Energy itself can only “exist” in one state. In a context, an environment, that clearly includes substances of endless variety, varieties that pit opposites against one another, why is it not possible that the attributes we associate with Energy, for instance, that it can neither be created nor destroyed, are only the attributes that can be “detected” in one state? What if the attributes of Energy serving the Logic, the Thoughts, of Mind in a Conscious state were distinguishable from mind that’s in an unconscious state?

What if Energy that enables the Creation of eternal Life, by joining in its extension and expansion, does just the opposite if it enables an illusion, a dream of death? What if Energy there, in Mind’s Conscious state, in Reality, is living, while here, in mind’s unconscious state, is dying? What is “entropy” telling us if not this?

What is entropy telling us about appearances? About vitality and decay, order and disorder? About how things can transform from energized to inert? Why should Energy not be subject to the same laws of cause and effect that govern everything else in our state of opposites?

What we assume about perspective is another premise that can break through self-referential reasoning. This is the assumption that the “knower” that we connect with the “known,” the mind that interprets appearances, is capable of only one perspective. Certainly if our perspective is confined to bodies consulting one another on our little planet, in our little solar system, in our little galaxy, in our little universe that may be only one of billions of universes, in a moment of time that stretches into infinity, we might draw our conclusions with relative confidence even if appearances on a human scale bear no resemblance to reality on a micro-quanta or a macro-cosmic scale.

But what if we interrupted our conversation with one another to bring in another point of view? One that isn’t bound by the attributes of our existence, by our appearances, that answers to a Reality governed by their opposites?

Just because our bodies’ senses won’t let us sit down and talk to this perspective can’t mean that it’s not there, that it’s not accessible to mind, when, actually, it may be here in a way that we aren’t. Must our little bodies that come and go, and our little planet that comes and goes, lock us into one point of view that can’t possibly admit another, that doesn’t come, declare its singularity, its infallibility, and then disappear?

Must the tortured reasoning that’s led us to a standoff on this question stand in testimony to our irrationality, our fecklessness, forever? Must we really wait for an outside force, a magical “redeemer,” to rescue us from helplessness? Or is it enough for some to lead the good life, La Dolce Vita, to amuse themselves in Rome’s Trevi Fountain while others can’t, and everyone eventually runs out of energy and dies?

Three premises: that Mind can only be in a conscious state; that Energy can only exist in one state; that sensory perception only allows us one perspective, could free us from circular reasoning if we let Logic and Intuition, with the Holy Spirit’s help, reflect on their implications. If we gave ourselves the opportunity to exercise Free Choice: the power to change our minds.

Published on Leave a comment on On Re-Engineering the Structure of Reasoning

Humanity needs to re-engineer the structure, to re-design the architecture, of its Reasoning so that it works.

Human antics and foibles provide a rich source of material for the Holy Spirit’s sense of humor, none more than what passes for human “reasoning.”
Connections are the genius of Creation.
It’s precisely in the sleeping Child’s bungling of connections, our halting attempts to heal the ego’s disconnections, that we reveal the extent of our unreasoning, our irrationality, our slapstick incompetence.

There’s “reasoning” to support any proposition – democracy, monarchy, fascism, communism, dualism, non-dualism, civilization, anarchy, and so on.
The Child keeps experimenting with reasoning at the collective-community level, building up experience and expertise, a track record of experiments to add to the data base, to add to understanding of the Child’s human mind from observation of human behavior, the results of human thinking.

Always with a view toward isolating flaws in thinking-reasoning that cause wrong-undesired effects.
Namely, conditions that promote and facilitate disorder and conflict.
Conditions that promote and facilitate imbalance among the self-interests that compose the dysfunctional community of humanity.
Conditions that favor the opposites of our values rather than the values themselves
For example, unfairness rather than fairness; harm rather than safety; vulnerability rather than protection-security; deprivation rather than abundance; disempowerment rather than empowerment; taking rather than sharing; contempt rather than respect; oppression, confinement, and dictatorship rather than freedom to think, explore, and invent; rule by the few rather than governance by the many; and so on.

Reasoning flows from its premises.
Premises are only so good as the base of knowledge-information and understanding they’re drawn from.

If the architecture-structure of Reasoning Child-humanity has built so far seems to be delivering choices with alarming results – suffering, unhappiness, and threats to our survival -- then the Logic of Reasoning suggests that the first order of business can’t be our usual response.
It can’t be to discredit flawed ideologies, attack their corrupt institutions, and replace them with yet more flawed ideologies and corrupt institutions.

If the human mind is corrupt yet endowed with the power to Reason, our ideologies and institutions will always be flawed until we develop the ability to Reason, by re-examining its information base and premises, and by nailing both.
We won’t get anywhere until we exercise our minds and learn how to Reason.

The first order of business must then be for Reasoning to examine itself.
To question its structure, beginning with its premises and their knowledge-information base.

When Child-humanity acts, when we attempt to move forward, when we put all that we value at risk with the choices we make, are we confident that our choices will be supported by the Logic of who we are, where we are, what brought us here, why we are here, and how we can move forward?

If the premises that support our Reasoning continue to deliver alarming-unsatisfactory results, are we certain that these are the right premises, the best premises, the only premises possible?
Are we certain that the thinking that’s gone into the premises we’ve relied upon is the best we’re capable of?
That the knowledge-information base from our experiments, to date, can’t be expanded and improved upon?

Are we so frightened by our prospects, so immobilized by the fear we project onto our future, that we can only seek comfort by sheltering thoughtlessly in the familiarity of the past?
A past that brought no better than what we fear for the future?
That brought temporary relief for some at the expense of others?
That brought freedom for some and oppression for the rest?
That took as much as it gave?

Are we sure that the perspective we’ve been handed to view ourselves and our predicament is the only one possible?
That the context our embodied minds have constructed for making sense of things is actually doing its job?
Is leading us forward?
Is doing what we’ve asked it to do?
Isn’t fatally compromised by narrow self-interest?

Or is the perspective we’ve inherited showing signs of weakness?
Is the architecture, the structure of our Reasoning, standing firm?
Or are those the cracks, the snaps, the moans that we are now hearing of it giving way?

Is the building we occupy – the architectural marvel that scrapes the sky -- coming down?
Is the dam we built – that engineering marvel for the ages – about to burst?
The volcanic mountain we thought was dormant about to explode?
The earth beneath us that we imagined was solid about to quake?

Or is it a house of cards about to collapse under a whiff of air?

Are we so locked into circular “reasoning” by our cultures, by our careers and personalities, by group-think, that we’ve strapped ourselves into a plane crash unable to move?
What does it take for us to awaken?

The purpose of my book is to reflect upon Child-humanity’s Reasoning, to experiment with an interpretation of humanity’s knowledge base implied by principles and insights taken mainly from A Course In Miracles, to come up with a fresh look at premises that guide our Reasoning.
To examine what these premises imply about human behavior; what light they can shed on causes of our frustration with our lack of progress; and what contribution they can make to better Reasoning about the context of our efforts. about our situation, from a different perspective.
To examine what contribution they can make toward engineering a better structural design for Reasoning that will stand firm, that won’t collapse around us as our current structure may well be doing.

The 20th century took flaws in our Reasoning from the past, a thoroughly misunderstood Reality, gross perversions of the Truth, ignorance and irrationality, bull-headed ideologies, their servile followers and passive victims, and erupted into ruinous global conflicts, a burst of sheer madness, that would have wiped out our species if it could.

“We got through it, so we will get through whatever is threatening our survival today” is a mindless response that is of one piece with the corrupted reasoning, the rationalizing, that perpetrated the conflagration in the first place.
It is the anthem of gratitude, the wishful thinking, the youthful fantasy, from those who happened not to have been its victims and refuse to grow up.

The voices of those who were its victims may beg to differ, and it is those voices we need to hear.
It is to give them a fair hearing that this book is being written.

Survivors of history’s conflagrations will always be voices of false hope, reassuring themselves that “everything will be OK” forever so long as they get away with excluding those who didn’t survive from the conversation.
It is to shift the conversation away from false hope to true Hope that these thoughts are offered.

Reassuring ourselves that “everything will be OK” in the midst of an unfolding calamity is only another instance of circular reasoning that humanity has relied upon since the dawn of civilization: consulting ourselves for answers to questions about the facts of our “existence,” the Truth, that can only come from another perspective.

Instead of asking if matter -- our bodies and their material environment – are real, and relying on our bodies’ senses to assure us that, yes, of course they are real, why don’t we try asking if Mind is real?
Why don’t we try going to Mind for answers that has a different perspective, that clearly isn’t matter?

Instead of tracing matter to its origins and destination – an effort that’s brought us to questions that are beyond “scientific” answers – why don’t we try tracing Thought to its origins and destination?
Why don’t we “resurrect” philosophy that Stephen Hawking famously declared to be “dead” and get serious about finding answers?
Why don't we try Reasoning?

Since the study of matter is leading nowhere and our habitat is becoming uninhabitable, why don’t we rethink the nature of Reality, the relationship between Mind and matter, the attributes of Creation, and the meaning of our circumstances, the value of our gifts, instead of trusting to dumb luck?
Why don’t we use the occasion of our spectacular 20th century eruptions and 21st century horrors – the rise of racist fascism, global warming, vanishing water supplies, vanishing forests, pandemics, collapsing economies, rampant misinformation, gun violence insanity, and so on -- to get serious about our thinking, about our metaphysics?
About the theories we rely upon to understand, predict, and manage events?

Let’s not stop there.
Let’s go back and reexamine the very nature of Being, our origin.
Let’s get serious about ontology, and maybe then we will awaken to the harm we do to our prospects by circular reasoning – by “reasoning” that isn’t Reasoning.

What our bodies' senses produce is a series of appearances that time erases.
What physics produces is journeys that start from any arbitrary coordinates in our universe and finish at the same place -- no “place.”
What our finite material “reality” is telling us is what Einstein’s relativity discovered, that spacetime is curved, that it’s circular, the source of Newton’s gravity, the force that produces black holes where the laws of science are suspended.

What it’s telling us is that it makes no sense, that it’s pointless.
That reasoning that’s dictated by our bodies and their material environment can only be circular, a perversion of the Logic that governs infinite Reality.
A Reality where infinite Oneness has Real Causes and Real Effects; where Creation has Real Purpose and Real Meaning; where there is Real Value, Real Stakes and Real Worth; where there is Real Substance distinguished by Real Attributes; where there is Real Being in timelessness, that time cannot erase.

And the Child that we are has Real Worth, a role in Creation more important than we could ever imagine.
That centers on Free Choice, the E=MC2 of Creation.
The marriage between Mother Love-Freedom-Creativity and Father Mind-Logic-Reason.
Our Parents and their Gift of Purpose: Mother-Free and Father-Choice.
Their Gift of Happiness that could not be without Purpose.
The Gift of Free Choice: the province of Love, the province of Reason.

Stay with me -- we're just getting started.

Published on Leave a comment on Critique of “Introduction to Realistic Philosophy,” by John Daniel Wild

John Wild's book, Introduction to Realistic Philosophy (Harper and Row 1948) (RP) has made a contribution to my thinking and thus to my forthcoming book, for which I am very grateful. However, as I hope these reflections will show, it makes a better case for my book than it does for his. [See "My Forthcoming Book" and "On Circular Reasoning" posted to this website 4/25/20] We agree on the need for "realistic" philosophy, but we disagree on the fundamental question of what's real. What's real for him is matter; what's real for me is Mind.

My understanding of what’s going on with us and our world is that the Child we are, our spiritual ancestor, was stripped of the knowledge base he depended on for free choice when he lost consciousness. He lost much else, besides, but here, in this world, his focus has been on rebuilding his knowledge base. Without it he is operating in the dark, and getting out of the dark, returning to the light of consciousness by exercising free choice, is what he must accomplish.

This provides the context for my understanding of RP, its contribution to this broader purpose. Its specific contribution is to the pursuit of knowledge through experimental and theoretical science, which has, until recently, relied exclusively upon sensory perception, because RP does provide an argument to support it, if inadvertently. Its argument, not coincidentally, joins with body-centered Church dogma which, through Thomas Aquinas, gave cover to science when other faiths did not.

“Inadvertently” because science seems to play hardly any part in RP. Einstein isn’t registered in its name index even though general relativity upended Newtonian concepts of absolute space and absolute time. This dealt a momentous blow to certainties about material reality that one theoretical physicist, Rovelli, has likened to “the stuff that dreams are made of.”

RP makes no mention of Einstein’s theory in its discussion of time, a significant omission which suggests that undermining dark-age enemies of science played little or no part in its motivation. RP’s declaration that “Time is to be sharply distinguished from spatial extension;” that it’s “a mental measure with a foundation in extra-mental reality,” [p. 347], that we experience a “now” that’s more definable than Einstein’s “present” that’s neither future nor past, [pp. 375-376] are at odds with the science of its day.

The injustice that RP seems intent upon righting is “idealistic philosophy,” the synthesis of “empiricism” and “rationalism” propagated by Immanuel Kant. Its exact offense was positing reality in the eye of the beholder, a subjectivist take on reality that made a bystander of the body and its senses. But where idealistic philosophy rates a rebuttal, “spiritualism which reduces the physical to the mental” [p. 400], is dismissed with nothing more than it’s “far removed from the common insight of mankind.” [p. 395]

Had RP hypothesized the existence of a spiritual reality its reasoning would, I think, have yielded an opposite result. This is because its own take on reality treats as extrinsic any material object outside the body that senses it. Thus, it can claim “objectivity;” it becomes a common-sense “objectivist” philosophy; and “facts” are its exclusive domain. Since this assumption is intertwined with our everyday perceptions and feelings, it rings true.

But were a spiritual entity given a voice, the logic behind it would quickly be revealed for the fallacy that it is. Bodies integral to a system of material appearances are logically unqualified to pass judgment on their own system’s reality, i.e. on themselves. To grant them this status – to include the knower in the known -- is to grant rationality to circular, self-referential reasoning, which is irrational. Of even greater concern to RP, it would substitute subjectivity for objectivity, the ultimate violation of its logic.

In the event, RP is at pains to keep this from happening. Not only is spiritual reality not allowed to challenge “the realistic analysis of hylomorphic substance,” [p. 400], RP doesn’t allow Plato, its co-founder, to interpret the meaning of his Allegory of the Cave in his own words. These are the words RP uses: “perfection,” “sound social order,” “social justice,” “jointly ordered, cooperative community,” “just community,” “unjust community,” “bad society.” “good society.” [pp. 173-174]

How can the primary issue with captives of deception imprisoned in a cave be about justice and not about appearances and reality? About truth? Here are Plato’s own words:

“[O]nce seen, [the form of the good] is inferred to be responsible for whatever is right and valuable in anything, producing in the visible region light and the source of life, and being in the intelligible region itself controlling source of truth and intelligence. . . . When the mind’s eye is fixed on objects illuminated by truth and reality, it understands and knows them.” [Quoted in Wapnick pp. 298-299, my emphasis added]

“[O]ur true lover of knowledge naturally strives for reality” is a statement attributed to Plato in an earlier passage about Plato’s philosopher-kings, “the truly wise,” in Wapnick’s words, “who. . . no longer value the appearance of the Good but the Good itself; the reality illuminated by the truth and not the shadows.” [Wapnick p. 300. Wapnick’s and my emphasis added] Socrates, killed by Athenians, was the model for the freed prisoner “because he tried to awaken in them the truth of the difference between appearance and reality.” [Wapnick p. 298, my emphasis added]

If they relied on its interpretation alone, RP’s readers would not only miss the gist of Plato’s allegory, they would be mis-led. They would be victims of an intellectual cover-up that presents itself as beholden to the highest ideals of reason, common sense, and objectivity. Manipulation of facts is a predatory manipulation of people who depend on facts to make informed choices, a betrayal of their trust, and a sign of disrespect that would make fools of them.

The basis of RP’s logic is that if a thing appears real to body’s senses then it must be real. There’s no possibility that anything internal or external to our minds can be real that isn’t detectable by the body’s senses, an assumption about the place of the body in all of Creation that is breathtakingly ego-centric.

If I were to interview one of the shackled prisoners who occupied Plato’s Cave about what he was observing, I would expect a near-perfect articulation of Realistic Philosophy, a viewpoint that’s firmly committed to the logic of the Cave and oblivious to anything outside it. I would expect something on the order of, “What I observe in these flickering shadows is real because it appears real.”

The point of Plato’s allegory is to suggest that appearances may deceive, and, indeed, when an occupant frees himself to discover the reality outside, he confirms it. Plato’s philosopher king, modeled on the prisoner liberated from the deception of appearances, is possessed of an awareness supported by reasoning derived not from ignorance and misapprehension but from knowledge and truth. Elevating his subjects’ minds out of ignorance and misapprehension into the light of knowledge and truth – liberating them from appearances through reason and virtue, – was the inspiration for the philosopher king’s rule and for Plato’s Academy.

On the strength of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave alone I disagree with RP's claim that Plato "co-founded” its school of thought. [p. 379]

In another instance of selective truth-telling, RP begs off anything to do with “theology.” But it can’t resist noting that it accords with body-centered Church dogma and in so doing takes sides in theological controversy:

"Genuine Christianity. . . has much more in common with authentic materialistic thought. . . than with that extremely widespread spiritualism, , , which tries to deny matter and other basic facts of life. How surprised most of our contemporaries would be if they could discover the fact that Christianity, , , is actually a hardheaded campaign for the conquest of ourselves and the world we inhabit, , , , [F]or nothing is of more decisive importance for a people and its civilization than its religion, and how this is understood." [pp. 234-235]

Though gratuitous, RP’s acceptance of added cultural legitimacy from Western civilization’s most influential religious institution would be acceptable were it not for the fact that it’s also disingenuous. “Hardheaded” Church dogma contains an obvious contradiction which RP fails to mention: miracles. Miracles whose purpose was to demonstrate that our world, our material universe, our “laws” of science, our bodies and their senses, are illusory.

The author of miracles inspired Gnostic Christianity that was unpersuaded by Church dogma and was forcibly suppressed as a result. He has restated his message in A Course in Miracles, a unique system of thought and practical guidance based not on unquestioned faith but on tightly-reasoned philosophy and psychology. Its affirmation of Jesus’ miracles and their purpose was not available at the time RP was published, but the elephant was certainly in the room. How could this aspect of Church dogma not have drawn RP’s attention?

The answer must be that RP would have been obliged to confront a central article of Church followers’ faith and thus potentially offend many in its audience. The Church would be obliged to weigh in, and “the common insight of mankind” would be common no more. It would have been better had RP given spiritualism a hypothetical voice – the voice, say, of authority, reason, and compassion from Conscious Mind, like A Course in Miracles -- not only to correct philosophical subjectivity in its argument for sensory perception but also to practice the Platonic virtue of honesty.

Acknowledging that there were competing versions of Christianity; that “genuine Christianity” – Church dogma – achieved dominance only by force; and miracles that were part of dogma and opposing theologies flatly contradict RP, would be honest.

RP: I’m sorry, dear reader, but Realistic Philosophy says your revered miracles could not have happened. You’ll have to try another religion.
Believer: Yeah, well how about trying another philosophy?

Reliance on sensory perception is being questioned among theorists, I suspect, in many fields, and so it’s highly unlikely that RP could be put out there today with a straight face. Its author will have read books by Becker and Rovelli on quantum physics, a field whose discoveries are so bizarre that physicists protective of their careers steer clear of it. The search for quantum gravity -- the synthesis of general relativity / cosmology with quantum mechanics -- shreds “the common insight of mankind.” Neuroscience going back to the 19th century has questioned RP’s notion that consciousness resides in the brain. A material world that has become strange, incomprehensible, disorderly, and threatening can no longer anchor our sense of place and familiarity.

But why rely on RP’s argument to refute it when sensory perception can do better? Let it run its own course with cosmic reality and it will self-destruct.

The “potency” that RP depends upon for many of its conclusions is Energy. The Energy that powers our universe originated with Logic that powers Creation. The Big Bang was a release of energy from Reality-Consciousness – from the irrational thought of splitting up the oneness of Being -- that initially empowered our material, illogical universe. It is an imagined break with the real Logic-Energy of Creation, a disconnection, not a connection. Which implies that it is not a real-living current that can maintain its force but an illusory-dying current. It’s the flip side of real Energy -- flip side like everything else in our universe, the opposite of what’s real. Which explains why our illogical, illusory universe is in a state of entropy, destined to decay, tending toward disorder, and becoming inert.

This means that all the forms of energy – nuclear strong and weak, electromagnetic, and gravity – will gradually weaken until matter will no longer be produced by energy and its components will no longer hold together, from the quanta level on up. When the energy that’s locked up in matter dissipates, bodies will be long gone and nothing will be left that’s detectable by their senses. The Achilles Heel of RP is its reliance on "potency," i.e. energy, that eventually will abandon it. So, all that's really needed to put it to rest is time-lapse photography and a lot of time on our hands.

While it supports the physical sciences RP can also be appropriated by a less enlightened pursuit. This would be “objectivism,” the personal credo of Ayn Rand and her libertarian followers who noisily denied the legitimacy of any interest beyond individual self-interest. They suffered the handicap of narcissists unable to see beyond themselves, to accept the presence of a larger, communal self-interest, that makes governance in the public interest, for fairness, justice, peace, and civilization possible.

Objectivism makes a close match with the thinking behind “conservatism” that masks its will toward unopposed power, the license for its followers to do whatever they want behind the flag of “freedom:” their freedom to take away your freedom. It’s a prescription for fascist dictatorship which frees the dictator to take himself and his captive audience to the bottom of a sea of contradictions and “appearances.”

The reasoning that supports RP is that of a human mind corrupted by irrationality – the ego and its purpose to deceive. RP’s reasoning is flawed because its knowledge base is both unintentionally and intentionally mischaracterized and omits critical material that has since come to light. RP’s reasoning is flawed because it has been invaded by the ubiquitous manipulations of power relations – by self-interest in our state of competition and conflict. And RP’s reasoning is flawed because it intentionally compromises with the truth, not the minor infraction of everyday discourse but a betrayal of Philosophy’s Hippocratic Oath.

The reasoning that supports Jesus’ A Course in Miracles is reasoning from Conscious Mind, the spiritual perspective that could have corrected RP’s flawed reasoning had it been given the hypothetical hearing that the logic of philosophy, science, and fairness demanded. ACIM’s knowledge base lies beyond human access, but it invites the reader to dismantle the logic of its guidance with reason. After over thirty years of reflection, this reader so far cannot. The ubiquitous manipulations of self-interest are beneath it, but this is not to say that it lacks self-interest when all Creation is composed of self-interest. The difference lies in the logic, the definition, of “Self” that is Reality, that is Truth. Guidance from ACIM that cannot compromise with the Truth, by definition, that cannot betray itself, leads to the Truth about ourselves, our Worth and our Purpose, that cannot be compromised.

The search for scientific “knowledge” was supposed to end successfully before it reached the end of useful experimentation. But quantum physics-gravity requires that inquiry extend beyond physical experiments into philosophy, which takes us back to Plato’s unfinished business, the philosophic system that he never fully developed. It takes us back to the unified theory of everything that Einstein never finished.

A Course in Miracles accomplishes what Plato, Einstein, and experimental science have failed to do: construct a coherent thought system that isn’t shot through with contradictions and irrationality. It accomplishes this through uncompromising non-dualism, the proposition that between Mind and matter only Mind can be real.

It must have been in the backs of the minds of those who have clung to sensory perception –the learning disciplines, the professions, politics, the arts, communications, religion -- that it’s the first and last line of defense for civilization. They must have feared what populist politics, pop culture, the internet, and social media have wrought, a breakdown of consensus around reality, truth, morality, and the institutions – the “establishment” -- charged with maintaining it. Fears around replacing a paradigm as ingrained in the human mind as sensory perception are not to be taken lightly. The stability it has provided cannot be taken for granted.

This could have been the larger purpose of RP’s case against “idealism” and “spiritualism,” philosophies it considers subjective and irrational and, therefore, unrealistic, a threat not only to the reign of sensory perception but also to common sense, learning, and civilization. It takes its place among the Child’s evolving experiments with regaining its knowledge base for informed choice, a flawed product of the insights, the threats, the irrationality, and the politics of its time, but a worthy cause, nonetheless. It deserves respect.

Works cited:
Kenneth Wapnick, Love Does Not Condemn: the World, the Flesh, and the Devil According to Platonism, Christianity, Gnosticism, and 'A Course in Miracles' (Foundation for A Course in Miracles 1989)
Adam Becker, What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (Basic Books 2018)
Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (Riverhead Books 2017)
A Course in Miracles (Foundation for Inner Peace 1975)

Dave Harrison
May 5, 2020

Published on Leave a comment on Thoughts on Spontaneity, Weight Management, Discipline, and Role Modeling

Freedom and spontaneity imply no limits on doing whatever we want. Absolutes of all our gifts-values imply having it all without limits. This violates the logic of Reality because we live in a state of opposites, a condition where logic says being or having it all without limits is impossible. Defying this truth can have painful consequences. The way we go about using our gifts requires discipline.

Spontaneity that’s allowed to cross this line will insist that the only permissible approach to feeding the body is to gratify-indulge its senses for our wants-pleasure (excess). It will overrule an approach that recognizes and respects limits (moderation) in order to care for its needs-health. Spontaneity will do this because its purpose is happiness-fun that we experience from living uninhibited in the moment. It will do this especially when it is an idea raised to the level of an ideal -- when it’s part of a value system linked to a feeling that’s compelling because it’s become an absolute, because it’s idealized.

Weight management requires spontaneity management. It requires discipline that respects the logic-limits imposed by mind-reason and Reality. Evidence that spontaneity has been allowed to rule beyond reason is arrival of the opposite of pleasure-fun: disabling abuse and pain. Our bodies are saying they need less pleasure-gratification from spontaneity and more health-nourishment from caring-discipline. They need less free-spirited happiness-feeling and more disciplined reasoning-thinking.

Excess weight is concrete evidence of an imbalance between body-feeling-spontaneity and mind-thinking-order within a sensing-feeling-perception (spontaneity) personality type. The conversion of feeling-pleasure into its feeling-pain opposite is the body’s signal that it’s time to correct the imbalance. It’s a necessary stage in personal growth that focuses on the role of youthful passions in obstructing maturity.

The creative sanctuary that makes spontaneity and freedom possible has boundaries that protect as well as confine. The onset of body abuse-pain says the time has come for the Illusion of spontaneity without limits to cease its irrational rebellion against confinement. It’s time to recognize and appreciate the protection of boundaries. Accepting limits on our gifts, respecting the mind-logic that put them there, bringing thought to our choices as well as feeling, keeps us within our boundaries and safe from opposites.

Strenuous exercise while carrying serious excess weight beyond our youth is physical abuse. Straining muscles-tendons-joints-nerves to “burn calories” can wait until after healthy weight is restored by light exercise (walking) and by managed diet. Risking permanent damage and chronic pain is not rational. If burning calories by intermittent strenuous exercise was once rationalized to permit bouts of undisciplined excess – the joys of youthful spontaneity, -- those days are over. Undisciplined excess is over.

Attempting weight loss while preserving the ideal of youthful spontaneity is unworkable. Our bodies carry us forward inexorably. Clinging to youthful spontaneity is pointless. Resistance to parting with youthful fun that imagined it could do whatever it wanted, without consequences, is pointless. It reflects not the exhilaration of life but morbid fear of the loss of life.

Too late, we declare, “I’m going to beat this.” What clinging to an idealized spontaneity translates into is, “’I’m an exception; I won’t have to part with my youth.” It translates into “I insist on being who I’ve always been: a loving-lovable, happy-go-lucky, live-in-the-moment, carpe-diem guy.”

The pain, the loss of resiliency, that accompanies aging requires adjustments not only in how we live but who we are. The old identity delivered a cornucopia of benefits for family, community, and profession. It wants to prevail beyond its time because it was hugely successful. But time requires identities better suited to changing circumstances when our bodies can no longer support the fantasies of youth.

Willpower – psychic energy -- that’s needed to remove excess weight, restore health, and avoid pain is now directed toward preserving an idealized self-identity that can never grow old. The feeling that’s getting in the way of doing what circumstances call for isn’t just spontaneous pleasure, fun, and happiness. It’s fear of separation from a self that served its purpose and belongs in the past.

Being overweight may actually reinforce the illusion that it’s not necessary to let go of the past, because it’s become a part of the self-identity that experienced the fruits of spontaneity: gratification, indulgence, fulfillment, camaraderie, contentment, and pleasantness. This may explain why obesity has been so well tolerated. The onset of chronic pain could be a wake-up call that forces a more realistic calculation, an awakening to costs that now outweigh the benefits.

All these considerations lead toward a new paradigm, a new definition of self and the world the self occupies. They lead toward acceptance of what mind-thought-logic can contribute to the life of a mature person, along with feeling, in achieving a kind of happiness that’s better suited to circumstances: happiness with limits and discipline, happiness that may never deliver super-bowl euphoria but it can let our bodies live in contentment without pain.

If our youthful objective was achieving pleasure, our objective beyond youth becomes preventing debilitating pain. The balance is tipped toward realistic thinking-logic-discipline and away from when idealized experience-feeling dominated. It’s tipped from needing constant contrived action toward the calmness and serenity of thankfulness for life-being, from the joys of sensation (indulging the body) to the joys of thinking and awareness (indulging the mind). And always connecting.

Why do selves who idealize spontaneity falter in their efforts to manage weight on their own? Why do they need to borrow someone else’s self-discipline to succeed and lapse when it’s gone?

The sensing-feeling-perception personality type who idealizes spontaneity has purposely deprived himself of the function of self that’s essential to management – mind-logic-order-discipline, i.e. deliberation. This is done to allow instinct to open him to unlimited possibilities to feel and express the joy of living (joie de vivre), creativity, happiness, fun, pleasure, and gratification in the moment.

In pursuit of an ideal of fulfillment that’s rooted in gratification of the body’s senses, the deliberative self that normally imposes limits is discarded in favor of impulse whose only guide is the “moment.” The void this leaves in self-management reveals itself when obesity calls upon willpower, an essential attribute of self, that’s been turned over to its opposite, the “moment.”

Precisely what’s been sacrificed to achieve the ideal of spontaneity is self-discipline. No wonder the perception-spontaneity type can’t manage weight on his own!

The personality type intuition-thinking-judging experiences satisfaction and contentment from continuous learning and growth. Yes, without super-bowl rapture but also without debilitating pain. This can’t be a role model for an opposite personality type. Or can it? If needs and aspirations come together as we age, maybe it can.

Children will have recourse to their immediate ancestors’ examples to guide their own choices – their parents and their grandparents. They deserve to experience their own youthful spontaneity. They deserve the gift of role modeling that lets them express the joys of life without being conditioned to believe that their gifts come with no limits, that discipline isn’t necessary, and that excess has no consequences. What will be the legacy, the imprint, of an overextended youth troubled by its consequences and preoccupied with its preservation? What can it offer to guide its children’s choices if it struggles with its own?

The role modeling that guides children toward happiness can’t come from other children. It can only come from parents and grandparents who put their own childhoods behind them, who take their responsibilities seriously, have their acts together, and pay attention to role modeling. It can only come from grownups.

Published on Leave a comment on The Hug

His god is a lie that does not exist
That hangs over no man’s land like a flare in the night

That casts the dream in the shadows of its evil
Willing us to kill, willing us to die.

I rush across no man’s land to meet his god
Who wishes me dead, there in his trench

The enemy who begs to be killed with a hug
And I pray to my god who wishes him dead

Let me do this
Let us go.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Explanation

Students of the modern Gnostic version of Christianity taught by Jesus in A Course in Miracles learn that our minds are corrupted by irrational beliefs that place us in a hellish world where we project our guilt onto others to regain our lost innocence. It is within this no man’s land of condemnation and endless deadly conflict, that’s depicted in this poem, that the Christian message of forgiveness – “love thine enemy” – must be absorbed and put to use.

We can undo the deception in principle by reasoning, with ACIM, that we did not sin in Reality when we lost conscious connection with our Source. Reinforcing this message is the point of my forthcoming book. But in this world of separate bodies meant to absorb and inflict punishment, reason doesn’t stand much chance against the passions of fear and hatred.

Though it’s unreal, our no man’s land is a place “where the unreal has been made real.” It is within this hellish environment that overwhelms our sensibilities, our pitiful attempts at reasoning, with its ear-splitting clamor for deception and passion, that I have tried to imagine the only way to put a stop to it. Instead of savaging my “enemy” in his trench, I need only to give him a loving hug. “The hug” would then represent the precise moment when the deception is undone, and its illusory vision of hell is removed from my mind.

It will do this not by my killing the person but by killing what makes the person in my mind my “enemy.” My enemy begs to be “killed” with a hug because only then, with a gesture of Love, will innocence be restored to the image of him that exists within my mind. Only then can the innocent person that he really is be spared from the projection of my own imagined guilt, from my condemnation, and my savage attack.

What the poem tries to convey is an honest humility, if not total despair, in the presence of a simple request that asks the impossible, that I love my “enemy” at precisely the point when my external circumstances and the passions they invoke overwhelm my humanity. I acknowledge its impossibility because I have no pretensions, at this stage of my training, of being a role model for forgiveness under any such circumstances.

Should I ever encounter my enemy in his trench, for real, of this I am certain: giving him a hug instead of making him pay for his infuriating offenses, his inflammatory provocations, will have to be a pure act of Grace. It will occur because another Mind – the Child’s right mind – has gently moved my corrupted mind out of the way. And only then if I have truly asked for it. It will do this if it has finally trained my corrupted mind to reject the deception of guilt and to affirm the Truth of Innocence. Otherwise, my clear expectation is that I would kill the bastard.

Praying to the darkness – to “my god who wishes him dead.” – to allow the hug to happen. is an admission that my mind is not ruled by reason in this world. It’s ruled by madness or I would not be so desperate for help that it would occur to me to ask an executioner practiced in cruelty -- the god of war -- for help with an act of compassion.

But “The Hug” is not the hopeless capitulation that it may seem. My training continues. The Holy Spirit speaks for the Truth, and, in time, the deception will lose its force. “Where the Trouble Lies” notes that energy, the force that keeps the illusion of material reality in place, is dying out. The illusion is in a state of entropy, coming apart. Our bodies will find a better use, and our passions, too.

What put my “enemy” there was hating him in the first place, before he committed any offense. What put him there was fear and hatred in my own mind that needs to revert back to its natural state of Love – back to Reality. The restoration of Reality, with our Free Will doing its part, is inevitable. Reason will prevail. The innocent Child that we really are will prevail. I am sure of it. My “enemy” will get his hug.

There is yet another meaning to the poem that’s implied by its military setting: conflict between opposing armies whose combatants have surrendered their individual sovereignty, and thus free choice, to a group, presumably to their respective countries. The “barriers to an awareness of Love’s presence” ACIM speaks of are many, and this is one of them: signing onto groups – employers, professions, organized causes, faiths, etc. -- that then superimpose their imperatives for survival onto our freely-chosen personal morality.

The “Sophie’s Choice” that The Hug presents is between loyalty to the ethics of individual free choice or to the amoral dictates of our group masters. In praying to the god of war – to Caesar – for permission to hug my “enemy,” I am asking, in effect, for manumission: for release from subservience to his army so that I may exercise free will and reclaim my integrity, my spirituality. I seek freedom from the curse of humanity: serving two masters, doing what’s right while “following orders” – an impossibility. We don't often have the option of separating from organizations that feed us, that trap us in situations where our only choice is some form of death no matter what we decide. If there remains a tone of discouragement, of hopelessness to "The Hug," this would account for it.

Published on Leave a comment on Where the Trouble Lies

One last burst of energy while my leaves are turning
An opening in the act of closing

Made possible by entropy
The letting go of all that held me together

My fate in the fate of a universe
That lets us all open up as we close

As it closes

Obliged no more to maintain appearances
Obliged no more to pretend

When what was true all along opens up
And leads us along, children that we are

Our tiny hands held in the warmth of a hand
That knows no guile

That wonders no less than we what it’s all about
But, somehow, knows where the trouble lies.

Published on Leave a comment on On Circular Reasoning

Asking our bodies to tell us if they’re real is self-referential, circular reasoning. Of course, they will tell us -- sensory perception will tell us -- that they’re real.  

Circular reasoning that’s allowed to support belief in material reality comes with a major cost. It corrupts the human mind, already split into opposing thought systems, one good-oneness, the other evil-separation, with yet another split into opposing realities, one body-matter, the other mind-spirit. A mind tasked with reasoning that’s burdened with contradictory thoughts can’t work very well, and if we want a good explanation why our world seems ungovernable, this would suffice. Something has to give.

Only one of these sets of competing truths can be true, good-mind or evil-matter. The human mind has been trying to do its job with both, and it isn’t working. Our choices are sometimes rational but too often they aren’t, with tragic consequences. We live, today, in “interesting times” that should be a surprise when two world wars, a cold war, and the onset of global mass extinction should have taught us the error of our ways. But we seem to have learned nothing. The mind-set of a political cult that entrusts its fortunes to a concatenation of lies, deceptions, and contradictions advertises our plight: we are failing, and failing badly. We aren’t thinking.

Understanding that we must choose between competing realities can’t be the end of the world if it’s the beginning of Reason. Accepting that between the two competing realities our sensory world of matter must be unreal can’t be the end of sanity if it ends insanity. It can’t be the end of light if it leads us out of the darkness. It can’t be the end of innocence if it ends our addiction to guilt. It can’t be the end of good if it disempowers evil. The forces arrayed against the good can only lose their strength if our belief in their reality – the logic of their argument – is withdrawn. The deceptions that clog our thinking with contradictions, confusion, and ambivalence, can only give way to the truth if we take away their premise. They aren’t real. And the idea that they should be taken seriously, that we should simply adapt to them the way we adapt to our insane politics and every other calamity, is a joke.

Understanding that our bodies and the material world that they inhabit are part of an illusion, a dream meant to deceive, can’t cause more confusion if it explains it. Our confusion, our endless mistakes, owe their existence to nothing more than a misperception: that two contradictory states are real, and logic will prevail in a split mind, already beset with fear, that holds contradictory thoughts. It won’t. It never has and it never will. The wars between conflicting ideologies will never end until we find a way to end the war between conflicting realities in our minds – until we get clarity on what’s Reason and what’s not and learn to make the right choice. Circular reasoning that’s allowed to support belief in material reality is not the right choice.

David Clark Harrison

www.davidclarkharrison.com

April 18, 2020

Published on Leave a comment on My Forthcoming Book

Five words express thoughts and feelings that I believe are among the most important to humanity. Four of these are Love, Reason, Intuition, and Worth.

What I want to share on my website, with you, is what I try to share in all my personal relationships, especially with children. It is a truth that stands up to the deception that says that I am my body, my body is insignificant littleness, and my destiny is to die and disappear into nothingness. I believe the truth is the opposite: Worth that is not only a thought but also a feeling, that I not only have worth from its Source, I am Worth. I am not my body.

My true Worth is a gift that can never be taken away because it is who I am. I cannot help but share it with children because we are all children of the same Source, because who we are is also what we do, sharing our Worth that is shared with us by our Source, by Worth itself.

Love, Reason, and Intuition that lead us to our Worth lead us to the fifth word: Happiness. Everything we have is who we are: Worth that leads us to Happiness if we will let it, if we choose every day to follow it. For it must be chosen of our own free will.

What I try to share with children, with all my brothers and sisters, is the abundance given to me, my Worth, and the choice Love, Reason, and Intuition would have me make, every day, to follow where it leads us all, to peace, truth, and sanity – to Happiness.

The ultimate purpose of my writing is to share Worth from its Source. It’s to share the truth about the Child we are, whose Worth, whose Happiness, was hidden from us by an event that our ego-corrupted minds have misrepresented and covered over with guilt. The truth that we separate ourselves from is Mind that is Innocent -- the Child’s and ours.

Little rational thought has been given to what caused the Child to lose consciousness before he supposedly lost his innocence and dreamed up this world. The purpose of the very modest contribution I hope to make, to metaphysics and ontology, is to help remedy this. With guidance from Love, Reason, Intuition, and Worth, these thoughts might help to undo a truly awful deception, the root cause of human suffering: the belief that we are our bodies that live, suffer, and die, and within our bodies lies guilt.

My purpose is to be of service in the Child’s awakening to the truth – to our Worth and where it leads, to Happiness.

Asking our bodies to tell us if they’re real is self-referential, circular reasoning. Of course, they will tell us -- sensory perception will tell us -- that they’re real. This isn’t rational; it’s irrational. We must go to an objective source to tell us if they’re real. And until we settle on who or what that source may be, we must suspend judgment on whether our bodies and their material environment are real. We must rely on Reason and Intuition. We must try to be rational without rationalizing.

Let sensory perception do what it’s designed for -- helping us to procreate, achieve some measure of comfort and satisfaction, avoid pain, and survive. It can play a support role, but it cannot lead us into matters of truth and reality that are the province of Mind. Sensing and rationalizing lead us nowhere in philosophy – metaphysics and ontology -- where the only possible guides are Logic, Reason, and Intuition.

Instead of asking matter, our bodies, to tell us if Mind is real, let us ask our Mind to tell us if matter is real.

That so much of civilization is based on this absurd premise, that our bodies and their material environment are real just because they say they’re real, is sheer madness. It is a mental wall that imprisons us in endless conflict, suffering, confusion, frustration, and deception, that undermines and sabotages every effort toward true progress instead of ever more sophisticated technology and half-baked, conflicting ideologies.

Circular reasoning on what’s real has been unquestioned, even propagated for centuries, by science, because without it physics, neuroscience, and other disciplines couldn’t exist. “Shut up and calculate!” has become the mantra of physics now that quantum mechanics has upset Plato’s and Einstein’s perfect order of the universe. Circular reasoning, with few exceptions, has been unquestioned by philosophy going back to antiquity, because without it, academies and careers that require students and patrons couldn’t exist.

If we are going to stick with circular reasoning because any other kind of reasoning is beyond us, or because letting go of sensory perception is too big of a paradigm shift, let us at least be honest about it. This is chaos.

Intelligence complicit in its own deception, warped by self-interest, won’t lead us anywhere but back to the choice where our story began. It began with letting ourselves be led by Love, Reason, Intuition, and Worth to peace, truth, and sanity -- to Happiness. Whatever our circumstances, I believe we all want to make the right choice.

I write to help us look into the story of the Child – our story, – honestly and with Reason instead of guilt, because this is where the journey begins. This is where thinking begins. I find it quite interesting, consequential, and relevant. I hope you will agree.

Watch this space!

David Clark Harrison

www.DavidClarkHarrison.com

April 17, 2020

Published on Leave a comment on The Halftime Show

The Halftime Show

Converts all to the religion of fun
To its church: bars, booze, fun food, and fellowship
Pray for redemption for their home team
While raising hell.

Bring their children up in the faith: the theology of football
Its canon, liturgy, ecclesiastical vestments, symbols, and rituals.
Casting their lot in the weekly football pool:
Seeking salvation, fearing damnation.

Every Sunday, the Eucharist:
Gathered together in holy Communion before the screen.
Consuming the body and blood of their Team
Dispensed through the mediation of holy men.

Announcers and prophets, dressed in their blazers
Anointed by their acolytes with superhuman powers
To enrapture or to inflict eternal pain.
Reciting banalities and incomprehensible cant.

Bathed in the gaudy lights of their altar
Its mythological gods and heroic deeds enshrined
For the spiritual fulfillment of their worshippers
Yearning yet for something real.

Dave Harrison
Redondo Beach, California
01/14/2020

Published on Leave a comment on Notes from Impeachment Rally

South Bay (Torrance), California
12/17/19

Torrance Transit #8 got me from Artesia & Rindge to the rally at Hawthorne & Sepulveda in 30 minutes.

Used my seniors discount TAP card, round trip practically free.

Stood on the NE corner for the first hour 4:45 to 5:45 flashing my Defend Democracy sign.

Chanting with the others, yelling at motorists, thanking them for honking in sympathy.

Strongest impression was the sound of car horns in all directions showing solidarity.

Truckers especially, when they blasted their sympathy long and loud.

People drove by with their windows rolled down, waving, cheering, and photographing us.

There were Trump loyalists but way outnumbered.

2nd hour I strolled up to the other end, near the mall entrance, and bellowed from there.

Got into simpatico conversations with two couples around my age and a pair of middle-aged women.

The older women still aren't comfortable with the idea of Standing Up to the Beast.

Seem to think the Beast can be removed from our living rooms by offering it tea and scones.

But the men don't see any hope in being nice; they know we're in a civil war.

The younger women seemed full of fight, with their signs and their chants.

This was a MoveOn crowd, aging eccentrics like me

With the quaint idea that the time has come to speak up.

Plus younger women ready to take it to the abusive male-chauvinists.

I overhead "Bernie" once.

But this was not a Bernie crowd: no significant college student presence.

No significant male working age presence -- guys like my son and his friends.

No significant black or Latino presence.

Docile, like the rally at City Hall downtown over separating immigrants from their children.

But angrier, more resolute, more spirited.

I overheard a rumor that Trump supporters were on site but I only saw one.

Ridiculous woman holding an "Impeachment Hoax" sign.

Thugs flying Trump flags drove by in their SUV blaring their horn.

Looked like the same mercenaries who marched by the City Hall rally.

Had our crowd reached the level of a Bernie rally it would have attracted more Trump thugs.

But there weren't enough of us (I never got a look at the whole crowd) to pose a threat.

If our numbers do swell, Trump thugs will show up and we will be tested.

Fear that there might be violence could have kept our numbers down.

Anyone showing up a week before Christmas, plus passers-by support, was encouraging.

We know Trump's base has been rallied to do battle for years.

They haven't grown in numbers; they're just waiting for us to rally to our side of it.

Right now, we're rallying ourselves, because the impeachment rally was leaderless.

The folks I talked to had no better idea than I have who to turn to.

Which candidates look good on a horse -- Warren? Booker?

Certainly not Biden.

That's my main takeaway: troops are ready to take to the streets but have no one to lead them.

The Democratic Party has to do something about it.

If it doesn't, someone else will have to fill the void.

Anyway, the House impeached the bastard; t hey did their job.

What can the rest of us do?

The Beast isn't sitting still, that's for sure.

Dave Harrison

www.davidclarkharrison.com

Published on Leave a comment on Making Happy

How did we get here? If our story began in the womb of our Parent, where thoughts weren’t scrambled with nonsense from nowhere, where it was safe to create, how did we trip the breaker? How did we jettison ourselves out of consciousness and into another reality?

30 years ago, Ken Wapnick published Love Does Not Condemn, a treatise subtitled “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil According to Platonism, Christianity, Gnosticism, and A Course in Miracles.” He wrote that no philosophy or religion explains the loss of consciousness that precipitated this seminal event. A Course in Miracles picks up the story afterward, with spiritual psychology and clues to what went before. But, basically, we’re left to figure it out for ourselves.

Not having a plausible answer to how we got here, that spares us false assumptions about our fatal flaw, our eternal sin, disgrace, and shame, leaves untouched a terminally toxic pollutant within the human soul. Our psyche is ridden with guilt. And it is the projection of guilt onto others, to get rid of it, that ultimately accounts for our suffering and appalling inhumanity. It doesn’t Make Happy; it makes miserable.

The flaw in our thinking begins with our basic identity. No account treats what transpired after our birth, the mistake we made, as the act of a child. Our corrupted minds suspect the act of a fully developed malefactor. And on this assumption rests spurious belief systems with senseless body-centered rituals, unyielding canons, arbitrary demands for sacrifice, and gratuitous cruelties.

What tidings can I share over the holidays? I’m writing a commentary on Ken Wapnick’s book that lays out a theory: what exactly the innocent Child did that tripped the breaker; that caused him or her to lose consciousness; to yield to an onslaught of viral, illusory thoughts from non-Being; to descend into madness; to try to project his guilt to get rid of it; to try to separate from the terrible specter of a wrathful Parent; and, in so doing, to try to split Being, inter-connectedness itself, a thought so insane that it produced the Big Bang, the mother of all atom-splitting nuclear explosions. All of this the act of an innocent Child not in his right mind, dreaming illusory thoughts in his sleep.

This is what I’m up to, theorizing on the meaning of life and the origin and fate of the universe, from A Course in Miracles and other sources. All for one purpose: Making Happy. Whether I succeed or not, it’s great fun trying.

Dave Harrison
Excerpted from annual Christmas letter
December 2019

Published on Leave a comment on A Prayer for All Seasons

Dearly Beloved: liberating free spirit, trusted friend, validating and empowering guide, bountiful and playful creator in heaven. We love you; we will always love you; we will never leave you. Thank you for all your gifts and blessings and all our relationships. Today and every day, may we be touched by your Love and receive your continuing help, guidance, and gentle loving kindness:

In our quest for Mind: for knowledge, wisdom, and truth. For reason, enlightenment, and sanity. For faith, purpose, and hope. For health, healing, and miracles. For freedom from the tyranny of guilt and blame. For ability, learning, and just causes. For growth – personal, spiritual, and character. For achievement, self-respect, and worthiness.

In our quest for Love: for freedom of thought, choice, and expression. For order and discipline. For family and intimacy, extended family and community. For worth, gifts, talents, and recognition. For abundance, food, clothing, and shelter.

In our quest for Spirit: for beauty, purity, and essence. For Innocence. For home and sanctuary. For protection, peace, trust, and harmony. For joyfulness and spontaneity, happiness, playfulness, and laughter. For freedom from confinement and addiction. For empowerment, control, strength, and energy.

Help us to share you with one another, to see us as you see us. Help us to get out of the way, that we may choose eternal life instead of death, Love instead of fear, Innocence instead of guilt, healing instead of separation. That we may reclaim our innocence through one another, awaken, and return home to be with you.

With thanks for our guides, trainers, and escorts. So be it. Amen

Dave Harrison
Excerpted from annual Christmas letter
December 2019

Published on Leave a comment on Standing Up to the Beast

Trump-Miller are attacking our entire democracy
Comprehensively and simultaneously
At all levels, on all fronts.

While we have been responding to individual threats.
To feints and maneuvers meant to distract us
Unable or unwilling to acknowledge the scale
The enormity of what they are doing.

We have been defending ourselves with peashooters.
With platoons and regiments, getting absolutely nowhere.
When what is needed is for the entire country to rise up as one army
With everyone doing their part.

If it is democracy that is under attack
Then democracy itself must respond.

We can't leave the fight to someone else.
We've got to take a stand.
And challenge everyone to do the same.
Democracy depends upon it.

Democracy needs us.
Our planet needs us.

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln – marching together.
Beneath American flags, fifes and drums playing.
Every school child’s image of our founding.
Their cause was Democracy.

Our country stands for nothing if it does not stand for Democracy.
This is our cause, and it is being taken away from us.
Our country is being taken away from us.
Trampled underfoot by dictators at home and abroad.

When the Beast invades our homes, our places of peace
With intent to harm, our only choice is to resist.
If, in defending our homes, our country, our planet
Someone is offended, someone gets hurt, so be it.

Our cause is forced upon us.
To save our country for democracy.
Gently and with loving kindness if possible.
Aggressively if necessary.
But always: to hear and be heard.

1930’s National Socialism has metastasized to our shores.
All who would defend democracy
Reason and science, compassion, truth, and civility
Must take a stand.

Our Generation’s Civil War Has Begun.
Standing Up to the Beast.
Is where I stand.
Not the end, but only the beginning.

To my Republican friends, so very kind in person
So very cruel, insensitive, and disrespectful in your beliefs
Challenged by facts and logic, addicted to lies
Indifferent to personal character
Heedless of the catastrophe bearing down on us.

Heed this.
Admiral Yamamoto’s warning:
I fear that we have awakened a sleeping giant
And filled him with terrible resolve.

Democracy is a cause unlike any other.
Countless millions have fought and died for it.
Hong Kong fights and dies now.
Many millions more will rise up here with terrible resolve.

How then will you take away our democracy?
Our rights, our freedoms, our civil liberties?
Over our dead bodies!

To the rest of us
We are not passengers on a plane that’s just crash-landed.
Strapped to our seats, immobilized by shock
Waiting passively for the end to come.
We are soldiers in a cause. taking the fight to the enemy
Secure in the knowledge that our cause is just.
We will prevail.

The time to change minds ends
When there are no longer minds to change.
When there is only unreasoning hysteria, hatred, and madness.
Rampant guilt projected onto “them.”

Our skies are inflamed with the fires of hell.
It will be time enough to make peace, to trust and make friends
When the light of Reason and respect shines again.

When guilt is banished for the lie that it is
And truth is restored.
Innocence -- our sanctuary and our strength.

It will happen.
But for now: Uncle Sam wants YOU!

David C. Harrison
Redondo Beach, California
7 December 2019 - Pearl Harbor Day

Published on Leave a comment on Our Generation’s Civil War Has Begun

Trump-Miler's self-styled "victims" could be expected to want to become a political force.
To achieve fairness and social justice -- to end victimization.
As FDR's followers wanted -- genuine victims of the Great Depression.

Of course, that's not what the Trump-Miller mob wants.
Their political pedigree is of the opposite stripe.
From the opposite side of the Atlantic in the same era.

They want a victim-in-chief to validate their projection of guilt onto others.
Their supposed "persecutors."
To justify switching one victim for another so they can persecute.
So others can be the "losers" and they can be the "winners."

Blindly following the Winner-in-Chief makes them winners by association
A status they will never relinquish so long as their champion lives.
No matter what evils he perpetrates.

Far from being a flawed human being, he is their Savior, their Chosen One.
More exalted than history's greatest heroes -- Lincoln, Churchill.
Are we afflicted with daily horrors?
This is Horror.

Cruelty is not a by-product of their behavior; it is its very purpose.
Cruelty to others directed by their role model is proof positive.
That they have arrived, and he has gotten them there.
That they and he are one and the same.
The bond between them could not be stronger if it were real blood and soil.

Reacting to their cruelties with horror and outrage doesn't give them pause.
It's music to their ears, a red flag waved in the face of the raging bull.
An incitement to further madness, more cruelty.

The Beast's grasp of power has already gone too far to stop him by democratic means.
Republicans, the Senate, the judiciary -- pitiful institutions -- shrink in relevance before our eyes.
While impeachment grinds inexorably toward meekness and inconclusion.

With democracy already lost, horror and outrage are irrelevant.
Impeachment is irrelevant.

Tinkering with articles of impeachment won't change the political dynamics.
When it's plain for all to see: The Republican Senate can't be moved.
Their base, inflamed by their impotent rage and right-wing propaganda, can't be moved.
The politicized, emasculated Supreme Court, can't be moved.
It's too late!

Sounding the alarm over systemic cruelty at the border.
Is commendable, honorable, patriotic, courageous.
It's never acceptable to ignore abandoned children bleeding to death.
We must continue to bear witness, to alleviate suffering.

But the moral ground has shifted.
We must adjust.

All that's left in the present circumstances is to re-channel the force of feeling.
To unite in search of a leader who will rally us against the Beast.
To unite in fierce opposition to the Beast with all the resources at our disposal.
To defend Democracy, science, compassion, justice, and civility.
To defend civilization and our habitable planet.
To fight for our lives and the lives of our children and grandchildren.

The fight -- our generation's Civil War -- has already begun.
The only question is: who can lead us in the fight?

When Republicans circled the wagons after Trump-Miller's crimes were exposed.
When they abandoned Reason for rationalizing and surrendered to the mob.
That's when the war began.
The vote in the Senate to acquit will only be a formality.
The decision of the Supreme Court to protect Trump's tax returns will only be a formality.

Reason has already left the room.
What more proof that we have been abandoned by Reason.
Than five minutes of right-wing media?
Than five minutes conversation with anyone who supports Trump?

Yes, victimization of immigrant children at the border.
Has not drawn the attention, the outrage, that it deserves.
Forgive our Democratic compatriots for their blunders, their shortcomings.
But we must move on.

I offer solidarity with anyone who will join me in this cause.
We must find and get behind the right candidate with everything we've got.
Short of Trump-Miller dying of natural causes.
And their base melting away -- not a likely prospect.
It is our only hope.

David C. Harrison
Redondo Beach, California

Thoughts from a letter to a friend
6 December 2019

Published on Leave a comment on Are We Awake Yet?

Christmas greetings (excerpt)
December 2018 

Christians celebrate the birth of an unusual person. A Visitor from where it’s always Now, and he performed miracles to show what it means that where we are it’s never Now. It means where we are isn’t real. I was dusting a radiator in Cambridge, 48 years ago, when suddenly everything was crystal clear: the meaning of life and the origin and fate of the universe. That’s interesting. I’ll finish dusting and write that down. Of course, my epiphany was gone when I was done, so I had to wait another 14 years before it happened again. This time, I was polishing a floor in Hanover. My empty brain was flooded by a felt perception of the interconnectedness of things. Hmm, that’s interesting, I’ll write that down. But all that came to mind was “aware” and “storyline.” Huh?

 

Theoretical physicists trying to figure out the origin and fate of the universe have also come to Huh?. They thought matter was real, but quantum gravity has them wondering, and no experiments can prove their strange theories. They’re asking for help from philosophy. A Course in Miracles, channeled by our unusual Visitor, is philosophy plus psychology that explains what the deal is. Worth taking seriously because it’s from conscious Mind, not compromised by sensory perception that rules out objectivity. Matter behaves like the stuff dreams are made of because it is a dream. Scientists have waded into a projection of Mind rendered unconscious because it contemplated an irrational thought. That would be us, given freedom of thought and choice, and what did we do with it? We chose the mad idea of separation instead of sanity, and you see what the result is: broken relationships and all the rest. So, what’s to be done? How about just doing what our Visitor suggested: look upon one another as he sees us – innocent and blameless. And let conscious Mind, our loving Parent, know we’d like to wake up. Poof goes the dream! Poof goes the universe! We’re Home again!

Wishing you and yours wildly fun holidays, a wakeful New Year, and a welcome Home.

Dave Harrison

What A Course in Miracles May Have to Offer Quantum Gravity
Published on Leave a comment on Harvard 1959 Class Report

David Clark Harrison, Harvard College AB ’59, Harvard Law School JD ‘63

What A Course in Miracles May Have to Offer Quantum Gravity

It’s never now here.
Just the future flipping instantly into the past.
Things and their implied opposites and variations must all exist.
Non-Being can’t be the opposite of anything.

Keys to understanding the origin and fate of the universe?
The meaning of life?
Clues to our cause?

A couple of book titles from quantum gravity do get one thinking:
Carlo Rovelli’s Reality Is Not What It Seems.
Adam Becker’s What Is Real?

Becker thinks physicists will find meaning in quantum mechanics.
That is, if they don’t give in to the “Copenhagen Interpretation.”
That says physics has reached the limits of what’s understandable.
He’s sure there’s a pony in there somewhere.

Einstein balked at his own invention and took issue with Bohr.
Bohr, the oracle of quantum mechanics, the mystic at the summit.
The soul of the Copenhagen Interpretation.
As hard to pin down as Hawking’s “quest for knowledge” was in your face.

Rovelli yields to the obvious and bows to the inevitable.
Unifying cosmology with quantum mechanics takes us into the unknown.
Quantum gravity is way over our heads.
This theoretical physicist thinks it’s time to bring in philosophy.

A line has been crossed.
We live in an interesting time.

Time now for quantitative to make room for qualitative?
For what’s necessary to find meaning in anything:
Mind, reason, feeling, and values?

Where physicists can’t take us.
They the consultants, we the clients.
Whose numbers can’t say what difference anything makes.
To those for whom the difference matters – all who live, suffer and die.

The measurers do have a stake in their profession.
Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and The Grand Design get that across.
In the time of Galileo, he could have made a convincing Urban VIII.
A Vatican hardliner bound by authority and his convictions.

Colonizing other planets is comic book science fiction.
An adolescent’s idea of purpose – our cause.
The fanciful offspring of thought unaided by reflection.
For Hawking it was true: “Philosophy is dead.”

What about the rest of us?
Can there be a story that has a place for reason, creative energy, love?
That leaves Matt Damon cultivating potatoes on Mars and gets serious?
That won’t condemn our grandchildren to scavenging on Earth?

Einstein figured out years ago it’s never Now in our universe.
Just an “extended present” which is “neither future nor past.”
Quantum gravity since discovered that it’s never Now anywhere.
Quanta, the particles that make up all matter, tell us time doesn’t exist.

Being is the Singularity if it has no opposite.
The Mind that is timelessness, the eternal Now.
Where there are no beginnings, no origins.
Just Being and just Now -- Reality!

Hope for us if it matters where we belong and are headed.
Because no one can turn off the switch.
No “disturbance in the force” can flip Something back to nothing.

Inquiry stops with the Singularity.
It stops with Mind whose being cannot imply an opposite.
Being is all that there is – one thing, everything, and nothing else.

We of the beginnings and endings, past and future, never Now.
Imagining things -- inside a Mind that’s dreaming.
Pure Reason when it was awake that took in an irrational thought.
A monkey wrench, the idea of separation.
We took aim at Being and knocked ourselves unconscious.

Separation is no more real than non-Being.
Not even in quantum gravity, where all matter is interconnected.
It’s all granular, indeterminate, and relational.
If they’re not connecting, interacting, quanta don’t exist.
It’s a roll of the dice which streetlight they show up under next.
Because they disappear in the darkness – they’re gone.

Faraday, using intuition, and Maxwell, using math, discovered fields.
Lines of matter, electromagnetic waves, that connect matter everywhere.
Where we get light from, telecommunications, electronics.
Information connects matter everywhere.

Show me anything that’s separate!

Separation is just a mad idea; the void that can’t exist.
Yet an irrational thought taken in by conscious Mind has consequences.
The thought that something is that isn’t, that can’t be.
A Mind that’s Reason can’t be itself and hold an irrational thought.
It will either reject the idea and hold onto sanity or lose consciousness.

The Mind in question is us, an extension of the original Mind.
Knowledge for whom separation is unknowable and therefore unthinkable.
We are an extension of Being – our source:
Mind-Love, Mind-Reason, Mind-Energy -- the grammar of Reality.
Innocence and perfection our birthright, our integrity.

Extended Mind that is part of Being cannot cease to exist.
Death is not real: we cannot die.
When corrupted, extended Mind will lapse into an unconscious state.
Mind-fear, Mind-guilt-insanity, Mind-entropy -- the grammar of unreality.

So that we could reciprocate Love, we were given freedom.
Freedom of thought, freedom of choice.
And we used it – what child wouldn’t? -- to do something dumb.
To make a mistake, which we now have to undo.

Mind even unconscious is real and so is Energy.
Hard to question our bodies’ senses since both are present in the dream.
Long ago, Parmenides and Bishop Berkeley saw through the deception.
They were overruled by Dr. Johnson when he kicked a solid object.

Science still rules the day with its virtual reality headset – our senses.
Even after Einstein’s equations replaced Newton’s familiar universe.
With a “glimpse of reality. . . that seems to be made of the same stuff our dreams are made of.”

This from Carlo Rovelli, pointing quantum gravity toward the unknown.
Toward philosophy and maybe weird metaphysical stuff.
That can’t be any weirder than quantum gravity.

All of science is part of a larger quest.
Not just Hawking’s “quest for knowledge.”
That he believed only science is qualified to lead.
The larger quest for Awakening that we are all qualified to lead.

Because the Mind that’s unconscious is our Mind.
The dream is ours, and every advance we make is toward ending it.
Every invention, discovery, revelation, and epiphany.
Toward returning home to Reality – to peace, truth, and sanity.
Toward healing the separation.

Harvard’s history department claims that “Ideas make history.”
The mad idea of separation got all of humanity in this fix.
Being taken in and letting go of the deception is our story.
One hell of a story caused by one hell of an idea.

Quantum gravity is giving us a start toward awakening.
By taking us to the outer limits of physics.
Newton’s comforting universe of absolutes left in its wake.
Its objects once behaving sensibly but no more.
We’re beyond the point of no return.

Physics won’t restore our familiar environment.
It won’t fix our stricken planet or find another to ruin.
It won’t reveal the meaning of life and give us purpose.
Or solve the origin and fate of the universe by studying matter.
When it’s Mind that needs our attention.

Brain science has yet to establish where consciousness comes from.
Mind poking into brains, globs of gray matter inside their carapace.
Looking for what’s inside Mind that’s doing the poking.
An image with a caption worthy of The Onion.

Mind is our consciousness, the extended Mind with which we think.
Our brains process data from our virtual reality headsets.
They’re data processors.
Colluding with our bodies to keep the illusion in place.

Our VR headset appears to be telling us what’s “out there.”
Our bodies’ senses affirming that our bodies and our universe are real.
When what it may be doing is blocking us.
From seeing what’s Here and Now.

Letting physics and anyone else tell us what it’s all about is a crap shoot.
Better to assume we are all Galileos and everyone else is the Pope.

Time to break up the monopoly of senses and numbers.
Come full circle back to all that Democritus and Aristotle had to work with:
Intuition and reason.
Before there were instruments of science to conduct experiments.

The gift of intuition that listens.
That hears guidance that comes not from a slumbering, delusional Mind.
But from Mind that’s awake.
From Reality.

Guidance that might be found in A Course in Miracles.
That doesn’t ask us to abandon reason for faith.
To abandon freedom of thought and freedom of choice.
Without which Love cannot be.

Guidance that doesn’t demand anything of us.
That we submit to the authority of any individual or institution.
Or obligate ourselves to add to its wealth.
That we subject our minds and bodies to symbolism of any kind.
Or to coercion, guilt, and punishment.

Guidance that doesn’t limit how and when we learn.
That asks its teachers to get out of the way.
That lets us choose whatever source speaks to us.
Whether it’s the Course or something else.
Because it’s not a “bible” – it’s taught in various ways.

Guidance that doesn’t ask us to hold opposing thoughts.
That Reality is Being -- Mind, Love, Reason, and Energy.
And non-Being, too -- separation, guilt, fear, insanity, and entropy.
That Reality is what we observe even though it comes from nowhere.
Changes, acts weird, and disappears like an illusionist’s act.

Guidance that won’t let appearances, magic, and confusion deceive us.
That won’t subject us to the cruelty of dogma and bullying “tradition.”
To the deceptions and hysterics of self-preservation.
To the predatory appetites of unrestrained authority.
To the mystique of the past, revered nothingness wrapped in gauze.

Guidance that responds to quantum gravity’s call for philosophy.
With the one attribute that our VR headset cannot provide: objectivity.
From the same place where quantum gravity is leading us.
To timelessness.
To the only place where Reality can be found: Mind in the eternal Now.

Guidance that can explain the strange behavior of quanta.
Granular, indeterminate, relational.
The stuff our dreams are made of because they’re in a dream.
Because Reality is Mind, the laws of cause and effect that govern Mind.
And matter can only be a projection of Mind that’s in an unconscious state.
Its laws of cause and effect – science -- only a mirror image of Reality.

Guidance that shares its view of us honestly, in the light of day.
Affirming and unsparing, encouraging and challenging, never judging.
Respecting the free spirits we really are in spite of our adolescence.
Our addiction to Whatever, our littleness, and going our own way.

Guidance that assures us that we’re endowed with free will.
The opportunity to influence our fate with our own choices.
The necessity of choosing again, since it was our own mistake.
When we chose to reciprocate vengeance instead of Love.
And descended into a nightmare of guilt, fear, and insanity.

Ours is the lead role in this story, a long and perilous Odyssey.
Like the Greek veterans of Troy, we need and receive help.
To navigate past our counterfeit guides and our addictions.
We aren’t in control, but we have our part to do:
Take the initiative and mind our thoughts and choices.
Choices among guides, values, and purposes.

Guidance that enables us to relate to Being.
A sentient, accessible Who, not a scientist’s cardboard-cutout what.
To the Mind, Love, Reason, and Energy who endowed us with feeling.

Who gifted us with values -- things cared for and needed:
Spirit, beauty, purity and innocence.
Reason, enlightenment and sanity, purpose, self-worth and hope.
Love, family and intimacy, community, fairness and belonging.
Knowledge, wisdom and truth, learning, growth and achievement.
Health, wealth and abundance, order, security, protection and peace.
Freedom, joyfulness, creativity and spontaneity.

Celebrations and rewards of Love.
That needs to give and to receive, for we are part of the infinite loop.
Our honored place in Mind secured by being loved and needed.
By a Friend – by gentle, loving kindness.

Guidance that assures us we are not judged and condemned.
We are simply wanted back.
And the choice we are given, once again, is to reciprocate.
To let Love know we want back.
That the free spirits we are, are ready to exercise our birthright.
To change our minds, choose again, and correct our mistake.

We want back because relationships are to Make Happy.
And a world that incubates endless conflict isn’t where to find them.
A world that tempers every moment of joy and laughter with loss.
With the affront of suffering and death endured and sure to come.

My Guide flies me over the deep, blue, pure waters of Lake Parrish.
Shimmering beneath the moon and the stars.
Soaring free from the tyranny of blame.
A magnificent sorrel flying draft horse, my minder, companion, and escort.

Who ferries my son from the desolate hill to the other side.
The hill with the burning crucifix, his hands and feet nailed to it by blame.
Beneath a sky inflamed with the fires of hell.
A tableau of madness brought to horrifying life.

Owen, who was all-everything in school and made it to Harvard.
Who lost his mind to unbearable pain, fear, and impotent rage.
To grievances, abandonment, grief, and misery.
Who lost everything because he couldn’t relate.

Who lost hope, his career, then his mother, and checked out.
Alone, in his childhood home, with rooms empty and the mail piled up.

Owen’s memory tempers joy and laughter with my granddaughters.
And with their father, Andrew, my constancy and hope.
Their family the beacon at the strait that drew me off my island.
To retirement three years ago and grandparenting, my second childhood.

Our Guide is also present in the dream, imagined as we wish.
An emissary from consciousness, timelessness, and Reality.
Indispensable – we accomplish nothing on our own.
Sent to bring us along with insights and creative talent.
Character and resolve – all of our gifts.

So that we get it right and make it back home sooner rather than later.
Using our gifts, if we are so blessed.
Those of us who haven’t lost our precarious hold on survival.
Who yearn for peace, truth, and sanity.
And try not to listen to the counterfeit guide from unconscious Mind.
Who takes our children away.

Is the matter in our bodies all that connects us to our universe?
Or is there also a connection with Mind -- with our own thoughts?
Must Dr. Johnson be the last word, or can we do better?

Will philosophy add anything to quantum gravity?
Turn ambiguity, ambivalence, and confusion into a coherent story?
A worthy cause?

The author of A Course in Miracles must think so.
The visitor from Reality who inspired the Nag Hammadi texts.
Who lifted the stage drop of spacetime and matter.
With effortless miracles that bypassed our wavering laws of science.

Whose Gnostic “heretics” inspired Harvard’s Karen King.
To stand for Reason and open his story to the light of day.
Over the dead body of Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyon.
Crossing another historic line to heal an ancient wound.

The Gnostics got their name because of their point.
That we do not and cannot know anything in this illusory world.
We are descended from Knowledge but do not share in it.
How can anything be known inside a dream?

The Church celebrated miracles which proved the Illusion.
Only to unleash its fury on those who absorbed the lesson.
So that it could establish that the Church and our world are real.
That guilt, fear, and insanity must be real.
Or there is no need for the Church.

What then are miracles?
Thus stripped of their purpose: unfathomable mysteries of the divine.
All of one piece with the fanciful plot twists of Greek mythology.
Frivolous fairy tales. Religious mumbo-jumbo. Entertainment. Magic.

These the impurities that Hawking purged from his quest for knowledge.
The foolishness of biblical religion which has no place in science.
The master of black holes was drawn in by the Church.
Past the event horizon without noticing: that the founder is the scientist.
That miracles are his experiments, and they lead us to knowledge.

The laws of science fade away in quantum gravity.
Not to the unknown but to the Known: to Reality.

Its title is to be taken literally: A Course in Miracles.
Our world, a projection of unconscious Mind, makes miracles inevitable.
There is no order of difficulty in miracles.
For the author of the Course and for us.

When we finally see ourselves as he sees us.
As we love our children and grandchildren.
For their innocence and spontaneity.
Precious playmates in our Temenos, the sanctuary of trust and safety.
Secured for us within the Mind, the Love, that created us.

The Christ we were all supposed to be, uncorrupted.
Until the illusion of guilt was imposed upon us.
In service to stewardship that professed forgiveness.
And misperceived, choosing instead to preserve itself.
At the expense of our innocence, our reality, and its own faith.

Forgiveness is not a gratuitous dispensation to be granted to the unworthy.
Sinners all, wallowing in guilt.
It’s a simple acknowledgement that separation never happened.
That we didn’t replace our Parent.
That we are not condemned, because our Reality is innocence.
We, whose worth is beyond question, are blameless.

Background to the Gnostic heresy.
The discovery of its texts at Nag Hammadi, the end of another crucifixion.
The channeled Course in Miracles itself a miracle.
The resurrection of Gnostic Christianity that has no need of labels.

Only Mind and Energy creating and connecting through Love and Reason.
The grammar and idiom that I have chosen to share these thoughts.
Faithful, I hope, to the spirit of the Course but not always to the letter.
The author of the Course lives, and his work speaks for itself.

Quantum gravity leads us into another dimension for a reason.
Hawking’s quest for knowledge is more posture than promise.
All we can aspire to with our VR headsets are perceptions and beliefs.
Bound to be corrupted by the virus, separation.

Quantum gravity, the Nag Hammadi texts, and the Course all converge.
On the thought that the reality of our world, our life, is open to question.
Reason and intuition say so.
And now science may be saying so.

If he hadn’t kicked the bucket, even Dr. Johnson might say so.

All Are Called. Few Choose to Listen.
Titles of books written about the Course by its first teacher.
Maybe Reason in the Here and Now is buried yet in the sand.
The teacher of the texts quarantined by academia wary of religion.

But we can’t be sure when and how our Guide is reaching us.
Maybe many are choosing to listen.
My ballot was only one vote in the midterm elections.
Before it became millions of votes, and our country changed.

Knocking ourselves unconscious was Three Stooges stuff.
When we come to and exit this Vaudeville act, I’ll find time to laugh.
When, not if.
Because we can’t fail if awakening is Love’s will.
For our Parent to fail at anything is as nuts as separation.

I would share my Guide with you to Make Happy:

Respecting our freedom of thought instead of coercion and guilt.
Sharing abundance instead of hollowness.
Bestowing blamelessness instead of judgment and condemnation.
Focusing on the Here and Now and my own responsibilities.
Feeling, sharing, and celebrating thankfulness.

To my dear friends and colleagues from a lifetime:

Sunday school at Wallace Memorial United Presbyterian Church
Eight years at Greentree Public Grade School
Four years at Andover and seven more at Harvard.
One year at the San Gabriel Valley Daily Tribune
Eight in Cambridge, the City of Boston, and the Boston Harbor islands
Eight in Hanover and the Connecticut River Basin
Three in Washington, Chesapeake Bay, and national water policy
Two in St. Paul, Grand Forks, and the Red River Valley of the North
Eleven in Pittsburgh, Morgantown, and the Monongahela River Valley
Twelve in Boulder at StorageTek, EDS, and Boulder County Democrats
Eight in Aurora at Anthem and Kaiser’s Security Operations Center
One in retirement, writing and hiking in Crested Butte, Colorado
Two years so far writing and grandparenting in the South Bay, Los Angeles

And to all my family: you are my happiness.

I love you. I will always love you.
I will never leave you – even if I could.

1

When my father, Max Harrison, died prematurely, in November 1966, I had assumed that Harrison Construction Company records would finally reveal to his heirs what he had been up to all those years.
Published on 1 Comment on Harrison Construction

by David C. Harrison

Courtesy of Caterpillar Tractor
Courtesy of Caterpillar Tractor

Harrison Construction of Pittsburgh, PA uses a Koehring shovel to load an Athey wagon towed by a Cat D8 tractor at the Ruch’s Hill Federal Housing site work project on May 3, 1939.

pg_14-01
Photos courtesy of Caterpillar Tractor

pg_14-02
Photos courtesy of Caterpillar Tractor

Harrison Construction’s heavy earthmoving continues at the Ruch’s Hill site on May 3, 1939.

Courtesy of HCEA: R. G. LeTourneau Collection
Courtesy of HCEA: R. G. LeTourneau Collection

A Cat D8 tractor with an R. G. LeTourneau HU scraper is pointed downhill to load. The Ruch’s Hill project contained 800,000 cubic yards of excavation.

When my father, Max Harrison, died prematurely, in November 1966, I had assumed that Harrison Construction Company records would finally reveal to his heirs what he had been up to all those years. I had even imagined a place in our basement where I would find them. No such luck. What did fall into my hands were a few letters, advertisements and some photos, some of which keep me company on the walls of my study where I write this.

This was a disappointment, especially since I’m working on an informal memoir at Andrew’s request, my older son. Depending on what I found, I might have gone to work on a company history instead. As it is, what I think I know, or remember, about HCCo is a few fundamentals and not much else. Without you and my nephew Todd Harrison, who comes up with amazing stuff off the Web, my ignorance would be an embarrassment.

EJ Harrison was drawn to Pittsburgh from Mercer County, no doubt, by tales of great wealth being accumulated by “Pittsburgh millionaires” – Carnegie, Frick, Westinghouse et al and their close associates. He got a business degree from the Duff Institute, which, I’m pretty sure, still exists; became a bookkeeper for the Cronin & Sons Construction Co; and took it over when its alcoholic owners couldn’t run it anymore. (I was told they were found passed out near railroad tracks on the South Side.)

Max was pulled out of Penn State University before he could get a degree – he majored in civil engineering – because EJ needed him to help run the business, and likely because he saw the potential to build a fantastic, money-making family business. This, I was told, alienated Max for a time. He held a job for the Koppers Corp in Chicago, then went to work for the Pittsburgh Railways Co., and only joined his father at HCCo, he told me one day as we were driving across the West End Bridge to his office on the North Side, because EJ offered him more money.

Courtesy of Akron University: Goodyear Collection
Courtesy of Akron University: Goodyear Collection

EJ Harrison standing and Max Harrison

Theirs, I took it, was a financial, not a sentimental, bond. The family aspect of it did prove to be strong in one sense, because Max shared company profits very generously, I was told, with his three sisters and their families, who were, after all, shareholders and directors. But in another sense it was weak to nonexistent: he hired his sons during summer breaks from school but made it clear that they were to pursue careers doing something else. The family business ended with him when it went under, around 1962, but even if it went on it wouldn’t have been led by a Harrison.

The 30’s were good years. EJ put the company in position to land Depression – era job-creating construction projects. He did well with government clients, small projects in and around Pittsburgh. During the war, with Max coming into his own as a company salesman, they were, according to Max, the first construction company on site at Oak Ridge, TN. And it was around this time they built Alcoa’s enormous North Plant in Blount County, TN. Max’s golf foursomes at Oakmont Country Club – he also belonged to Long Vue and probably other clubs – yielded more Alcoa projects and the creation of HCCo’s Southern Division, based at Alcoa, TN. His client base still included government agencies, but it was ties to Pittsburgh’s corporate elite at the Duquesne Club that really fueled his enthusiasm.

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Harrison Construction Co. machinery is seen working at Oak Ridge, TN on May 24, 1950.

The Ohio Turnpike Commission offered to settle a contract dispute in the late 50’s or early 60’s. Max’s lawyer, Bill Booth, told me this when I arrived the summer of ’62 at Reed, Smith, Shaw & McClay, as an apprentice lawyer. He said Max didn’t take his advice to settle. Max put his trust in the courts instead, went on with his lawsuit and lost.

This happened at a time when his remarkable salesmanship had advanced his career in construction and politics. He traveled a good deal to meet with important people – leadership networking was his first love. The force of his personality got results. He was in demand. Too much so, I came to believe, because this profitable, admired family business, that could have lasted generations, needed closer supervision than he was able to give it.

In going through the pages of your outstanding books – from my nephew Todd Harrison I received the Ohio and Pennsylvania Turnpike editions – I was struck by the similarities in landscape and equipment, so that Harrison’s men and machinery couldn’t be distinguished without the captions. In one important respect I do believe Harrison stands out. The guy that ran it, from the mid-40’s through the 50’s, was all about character. So many of the blessings of life that came to me, and still come, came because people trusted and admired Max Harrison. He leadership-networked both his sons into a world of opportunity where, almost literally, we could have had, or done, anything we wanted.

In the summer of 1967, not long after Max died, I was able to organize a meeting at the Duquesne Club with some of Pittsburgh’s corporate elite. I wanted them to hear a presentation by an MIT professor whose students had designed a new community to be built on Boston’s Thompson Island. When it was over one of the corporate attendees, I think speaking for all of them, said he was there to honor the memory of Max Harrison.

The summer of 1954 Max set me up to work at the company’s shop at 51st St. and AV RR along the Allegheny River. The experience I got threading rods and welding supplied me with metaphors for a poem that drew the attention of Dudley Fitts, an authority on English literature at Andover. Its publication in The Mirror, with his blessing, was all that distinguished my otherwise nondescript secondary education.

That was also the summer that I traveled in a Harrison green pickup, with Ronnie, a conscientious coworker, across the border to lend a hand with the Ohio Turnpike project. Four or five of us were lifting a LeTourneau tire on the back of a pickup when I shifted my grip, thinking the direction was up when the direction was down. I heard a snap and realized it came from my left arm which had disappeared beneath the tire. Next thing I knew a doc in East Liverpool with a very attractive nurse was putting me out to set my arm.

Courtesy of Ohio Cat
Courtesy of Ohio Cat

Harrison Caterpillar D8 with a No. 90 pull scraper working on the Ohio Turnpike on June 21, 1954.

But having one arm in a sling wasn’t the end of my summer job. Max had me transferred to a project on a city block next to the old Duquesne Gardens, off 5th Avenue in Oakland, where Pittsburgh’s minor league hockey team, the Hornets, used to play. My job, when I wasn’t on lunch break checking out the Gardens, was directing traffic with my good arm.

The summer of 1954 was also when I was invited into Uncle Bill William’s shack. It stood right there in front of the shop, where equipment routed around either side of it. It was where this good man and loyal employee lived, who had simonized Max’s Buicks and Cadillacs for years at the Western Avenue office. Providing an aging employee with a place to live, a steady job and income, was a small sample of the consideration Max showed, I was told, toward all his employees, whatever their race or ethnicity.

Near Bill’s shack was a steam jenny. I used it to clean the engine of an end-of-life Harrison pickup that I would then drive crazily around the shop on lunch break. Three guys on break, eating sandwiches from their lunch pails in back, got up and scurried inside when they saw me coming. That summer I took mother’s Buick out for a spin after dinner, along US Route 40 west of Washington, PA. It was after dark. I got the old girl up to 100 mph. The same idiot was behind the wheel of that pickup, so they did the right thing.

Doing night shift at the Pittsburgh Asphalt plant, a company subsidiary, was a novelty. Dan Cowan, another good fellow, came by the house and drove me to work that night. We were supplying asphalt for a paving job, Pittsburgh’s Liberty Tubes. I remember being seated on a platform high off the ground but, unlike other jobs I was assigned, the only task I recall was staying awake.

My reward for that summer at the 51st Street shop was a trip to Knoxville to visit Betsy, a pretty girl Max’s friend Pete Gettys, a sand & gravel competitor, had introduced me to that spring. So what did I do? I rented a Chevy Impala at the airport and drove Betsy down two-lane roads at 80 mph, with my left arm in a sling and my right arm around her. Why am I still alive?

My favorite company summer job, by far, was 1957, when I was turned loose on a Caterpillar D8 rigged with a single fork in the back that I used to subsoil Max’s Tennessee River farm. 17

I would rise at 7:30, start the pony motor, then get the big engine running, get seated and start manipulating the gears and that fork. I had a pair of Chippewa boots and I got a nice tan, and by the end of the summer, Curt Hart, Harrison’s Southern Division VP, happened to be there one day and told me he would have hired me even if I weren’t the boss’s son. Being the son and grandson of hard-ass heavy construction executives, you don’t hear praise much, and that’s OK. But it was as close as I ever got to feeling like there could be a place for me in the company. For just a moment, it felt like I belonged.

In 1957 was also when I rammed the ‘dozer into a dead tree off the field thinking I would remove it when all those dead branches coming down almost removed me. Then there was the day I decided to remove a wasps’ nest from a tree along the driveway by ramming the tree with a company pickup, which, of course, wound up in the shop. And I drove an inebriated company employee back from Harrison’s annual clambake in the same pickup so fast, on a curvy two-lane road after dark, that it restored instant sobriety. Why am I still alive?

The year before, Max sent me to work with a crew paving runways, laying pipe and building an access road for an Air Force unit stationed at Blount County Airport. They had me banging the underside of dump trucks with a mallet to loosen the load when they backed up to the paving machine. I operated a Barco dirt tamper (sometimes on my foot) and helped lay pipe under a hot Tennessee sun.

But the excitement this time was provided by something called a Sheep’s Foot. This invention of the devil was supposed to pack down dirt along the edge of 45-degree fill, part of the access road. I had to navigate along the edge to do any good, and the damned thing had no brakes. Losing control would have been fatal. I recall waking up one night in a sweat, pulling up the mattress at my feet, with all my might, in an effort to apply the brakes.

Just to prove an accident could happen, I once backed up a Euclid heavy dump truck maybe one inch too far onto a depressed fill site, in Knoxville, and that’s all it took to back it right over on its side. It made the evening news, but I wasn’t injured. Why am I still alive?

That same two-lane road gave me experience operating a kidney-killer LeTourneau scraper – I scraped too deep my first shot and had to be rescued by a ‘dozer. And a grader, though the ride was recreational only. A government project inspector came along one day and needed to know if the road was properly graded. I told him it looked OK to me. Fortunately, the inspector found an engineer to answer his question and I was off the hook.

Courtesy of Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission
Courtesy of Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission

A LeTourneau Super C pan is working on the Eastern Ext. of the PA Turnpike on August9, 1949.

Another time being the boss’s son thrust me into a supervisory role when a ‘dozer operator asked if it was quitting time. I looked at my watch, as if that would settle the matter. It took a moment before I realized he was asking permission to quit. And that was the extent of this experience running a heavy construction company

I liked the Harrison cap and the company badge that was attached to it. I liked working out in the sun and around all the dust, the heavy equipment and the guys. Everyone was decent to me and to one another. The only time there was an awkward moment was when some white workers at the airport job were being a bit too casual with their conversation and a black worker showed up who could have been offended. But he got a fast, gracious apology and, I don’t think, would have taken offense anyway. It wasn’t an ugly moment at all, just awkward.

Otherwise, a whole lot of classy individuals were taking care of their jobs, working well together and being professional. The one instance where I clearly didn’t belong was when I was replaced in the cab of the Euclid one day by a union driver. He just showed up, got in the cab on the passenger side and indicated he was taking over.

That was my one experience with labor-management relations in mid-20th century America. It was the one time where I felt just a little of the pressure company management, and companies around the country, felt from an aggressive labor movement. I didn’t take sides – poets who dig ditches in the summer to make a buck aren’t exactly involved – but it did make an impression. I could see Max’s side of it a little better, but I also respected labor’s side of it. If that irritated Max what fun it was to hear him complain about one of my cousins he employed who joined a union picket line at a Harrison project. Why is my cousin still alive?

Eighty-five bucks a week. That’s what we were paid, and it was more than most of my classmates probably earned at their summer jobs.
Construction jobs paid well then and they still do. Construction, mining, and manufacturing – these are the bedrock jobs for a thriving middle class, and I had a little part of it.

What ties my career to my father’s career after my formal education wasn’t anything to do with business, at the office or in the field. It was leadership networking. It’s where his career really took off, and mine. At least insofar as I enjoyed it and got any results. His networking got results for the company, elevating it from just another construction outfit to one that was noticed. It was, I’m certain, because of the quality of its work, the character of its chief executive, and how vividly he brought himself and his enterprise to life.

I’m damned proud to be a Harrison, and a large part of it is because of him, and because of his company.

His networking also got results for him, because he hugely enjoyed it. When he would come home from work, busting through the back door in his straw boater, a man of good cheer and upright bearing, I could tell he had come straight from the Duquesne Club. He had been Building the Best for the Best, his company motto. He had been living it. He wasn’t a major figure around town, exactly, but he was a force unto himself. I wish you could have seen him, known him.

And I wish he could have known you. Your work is clearly a labor of love, and with these recollections, I hope some of my respect, my appreciation, comes through. I hope some sign comes through that, if Max and EJ were here, they both would be feeling pretty good that somebody out there was paying attention.

Thank you so much for your very kind inscription, Enjoy the history as your family helped make it. Max and his father did make history. All their employees, and all the companies and their employees featured in your books, made history.
I’m so glad I don’t have to root around in the basement to find a record of it.
Thank you, Edgar. Keep up the good work!

Sincerely, David C. Harrison

Courtesy of Caterpillar Tractor
Courtesy of Caterpillar Tractor

Harrison Construction uses Caterpillar D8 tractors with LeTourneau pans to handle heavy earthmoving at the Kanawha Airport in West Virginia on May 28, 1945.

Courtesy of HCEA: R. G. LeTourneau Collection Caterpillar RD-8 tractors with LeTourneau bulld
Courtesy of HCEA: R. G. LeTourneau Collection

Courtesy of HCEA: R. G. LeTourneau Collection
Courtesy of HCEA: R. G. LeTourneau Collection

Caterpillar RD-8 tractors with LeTourneau bulldozers and scrapers grade the North Park Playground in Allegheny County during May, 1936. The project required excavation of 460,000 cubic yards.

Photos courtesy of HCEA: R. G. LeTourneau
Photos courtesy of HCEA: R. G. LeTourneau

Photos courtesy of HCEA: R. G. LeTourneau
Photos courtesy of HCEA: R. G. LeTourneau

Two LeTourneau Model A Tournapull scrapers were used by Harrison Construction on this highway relocation between Johnstown and Southmont, PA, circa 1940.

Courtesy of HCEA: Euclid Collection
Courtesy of HCEA: Euclid Collection

A Euclid TS-24 scraper is push loaded with Euclid TC-12 and Caterpillar D9 tractors in this cut section along the Erie Thruway (Interstate 90) near Platea in Erie County, PA, circa 1958.

Courtesy of Akron University: Goodyear Collection
Courtesy of Akron University: Goodyear Collection

N. T. "Whitey" Franklin, Vice President in charge of construction, surveys work at the Pittsburgh Airport in 1960. The massive 7.9 million dollar contract called for the excavation of 8 million cubic yards of material to build a new runway. A Marion 111-M shovel is loading a B Tournarocker in the background.

EDITORS NOTE: David C. Harrison upon reading accounts of Harrison work in two of my road building books wrote the poignant well-crafted letter describing the human side of growing up in a heavy construction family business. It is used here with his permission.

"Harrison Construction" first appeared in "SHOVEL" Winter 2015, an official publication of the Historical Highway Heavy Civil Construction Association. 10415 Turnstall Road, New Kent, VA 23124. Edgar A. Browning, Editor and Publisher. (804) 932-8232.