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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.

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.