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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.

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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 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.

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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)

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 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?