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Published on Leave a comment on The Two Faces of Wildness

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

Who is this “other self”?

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

In the Beginning

Tribal deities

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

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

The mathematics of confidence misplaced

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

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

Einstein’s misperception

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

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

The story beyond telling

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

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

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

Mind’s gift of insight

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

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

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

Mind is Relationship

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

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

To enable the Doing of Being

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

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

The Worth of Creation earned

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

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

The Ideal of Process gotten right

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

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

Competence earned to choose freely 

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

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

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

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

_________________________________________________________________________________________

How will the story end?

With a labor of Love?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ideal of Creation through Relationship

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

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

The ideal in reverse

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

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

Winding down with entropy

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

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

Idiocy

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

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

The boundary that connects and divides

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

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

When compatibility overcomes incompatibility

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

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

Which is stronger: attraction or opposition?

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

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

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

The bigger stick in Reality

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

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

The stick that disciplines in unreality

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

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

Creative sticking

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

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

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

The ”triumph” of a pompous ass

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

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

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

The un-immaculate conception

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

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

The apotheosis of “herd mentality”

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

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

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

The passion of Relationship

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

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

The abomination of willful thinking

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

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

Published on Leave a comment on The Force of Necessity: Reality’s Gift to Creation

The organs of Life

All of Reality-Creation is one Being. One Self that contains within itself Relationships between aspects of itself that perform functions. Functions that enable Creation to function. The process and structure of Creation are one interrelated whole. One living, organic Being expressing the value, the Worth, of Life, of Being, and its works: the extension and continuous expansion of Life. The evolution and growth of Life.

The exhortation from Being’s emissaries that reach us from Reality-Creation, that we Love one another and live in Peace, is, at the most elemental level of Understanding, no more than a reminder that we are all part of One Self. The exhortation that reaches us in our illusory material world, that we not hate and attack one another, is no more than a reminder that it's impossible to separate from one another let alone attack, injure, and destroy one another. For when we try to do so we are only turning against ourselves.

The Relationships contained within Creation’s One Self are between different aspects of the same Self. They are not and cannot be between separate parts. They are between distinct functions of the same One Self that serve and share in the unified purpose of Creation. One organic Life composed of organs each with its own function.

The dream of all things impossible

Einstein tried to theorize with physics and mathematics how the principle of unity is expressed through our material universe. Plato tried to theorize with philosophy how it’s expressed through Mind in the presence of the cosmos. Where both sensed the divine, feeling the presence of Psyche, the Soul that connects all Life with its Source, the One Self of Creation. Unaware, because we occupy a dream of its opposite, that the principle expressed through our material universe cannot be unity, and so they failed.

The principle instead is separation. The impossibility which can only be an appearance, the delusion of an unconscious mind that’s dreaming. For even if separation appears to be real everything within our universe is interconnected. It is, as physics tells us, “relational.” Particles are, as quantum mechanics tells us, “entangled.” Thoughts like these that reach their audience through electronics because the cosmos is interconnected by electronics -- the electromagnetic force. A cosmos described as a neural network, as though it were a single brain. Which it may be: the reverse mirror image of the sleeping Mind that’s projecting it. Where separation cannot be real, even in a horror show of contradiction, conflict, and violence meant to fool its occupants into thinking it’s real.

All things impossible, all things contradictory and illogical, become possible in an illusion. All Order disorder, all laws lawless, all authority powerless when script and rules are both written by a Mind making up an alternate “reality. By the dreamer, the only possible identity for the authoritarian who would rule above the law. Arbitrarily, subject to no law but its own whim. A day-dreaming fool.

Reality is the authority of Mister Nice Guy

The Reality of Creation is expressed as a distinct aspect of the One Self, the function of Order that fits together all the parts, the functions of Creation defined by Logic-Love through its laws of cause and effect. The Reality of Creation is the Beauty of Order expressed through harmony, the joyful spontaneity of Peace and Freedom. Order that cannot be the handiwork of authority imposed from the top down, arbitrarily, above the law.

The Reality of Order that makes Beauty and its attributes possible can only be expressed logically through the function of Necessity, the Force of laws of cause and effect, distinct from the function of Creation. So that the Worth of Creation may be shared, affirmed, enabled, and empowered from below. So that it may not be compromised by ownership, possession, and control from the top down.

Reality is not No More Mister Nice Guy

Within the One Self that is Life-Creation there is the Reality of Necessity: the immutable sequence of Logic and authorship, distinctions between before and after, author and authored, Creator and Created, Parent and Child. Relationships that may be defined by firsts and seconds in logical succession but do not and cannot logically imply the dominance and “supremacy” of authority that rules from the top down. That cannot imply ownership, possession, and control, the perversions of authority implied by a material world of appearances occupied by illusory bodies and other physical objects.

Dominance, “supremacy” and the rest are attributes of an alternate “reality” that can only “exist” within a Mind unconscious and dreaming. Within an illusion where anything goes. Creation is all parts fitting together in harmony within One Self that is Reality, distinct from Creation, that cannot be where “anything goes.” That is and must be defined by the laws of cause and effect. By the Force of Necessity that doesn’t rule from the top down, above the law, arbitrarily, but enables governance and Order supportively from the bottom up. Symbiotically, synchronously, with the Logic and Love, the sharing, affirmation, enablement, and empowerment of the Soul and Source of Creation. The One Self that is Creation.

What happened to Houdini’s elephant?

The distinction between Reality and Creation occasions a deception within the dreaming Mind, the function of Free Choice, that is uniquely harmful: the reversal of the relationship between Reality and Creation. Accomplished by the perversion of Reality that necessitates harmony supportively through laws-Necessity from the bottom up into unreality that necessitates disharmony through arbitrary lawlessness from the top down. A reversal of the Energy-Force of Necessity from its light side -- Life --in Reality to its illusory dark side -- death -- in unreality. A consequence of one magic trick by the illusionist, the shadow reflection of unconsciousness, our ancestral Mind’s self-delusion. Its mistaken identity: the disappearance of Reality from Creation, of the harmony, peace, spontaneity, and Freedom of Order made possible by the laws of cause and effect, and its replacement by unreality and its laws of chaos. Like the disappearance of Houdini’s elephant with no explanation, no Logic, into thin air.

The disappearance of sanity and its replacement by insanity with no explanation, no Logic, into thin air. A state of Mind that in our terminal confusion we take to be “normal.” That we adapt to until -- what? Until insanity and chaos have brought total disorder and there is no more room to maneuver. No more room to adapt.

Avoidance doesn’t work

How could this happen? It could happen because, as the founder of modern neuroscience once observed, “The ‘destructive phase’ always reappears, and each iteration of wars is more horrible than the last.” Because “Our nerve cells continue to react in the same way as in the Neolithic Age.”*

It could happen because, so long as we allow ourselves to be fooled by the illusionist’s trick, by our own limbic mindless will; so long as we passively submit to the illusion, to our Neolithic animal fears, chained to our seats in Plato’s Cave by self-delusion, events that we imagine we have avoided by not understanding will overtake us.

When do we tire of the joke?

And then what? It’s all over?

Actually no. Because the function defined for the Child Free Choice within the One Self of Creation is still needed and must be performed. Free Choice that we are, wild card that we are, we are still governed by Logic-Love and subject to the Force of Necessity. Though authoritarian “realists” may think otherwise we author neither ourselves nor the rules that define Reality.

Our choice is when to learn our lesson. There is no whether. What’s Real is what must be. There’s no fooling around forever with escapes into made-up “reality.” Into substitutes for consequence. For the satisfactions of three-dimensional Life that is Life instead of the one-dimensional facsimile, the antics of a cartoon, that only delusion can inhabit.

So when do we get it together? When do we tire of the joke and get serious? When do we turn to insights from Intuition, our pathway to Logic and Love? To metaphysics for explanation that leads to Understanding? Why not Now?

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*Alec Wilkinson quoting Santiago Ramon y Cajal in “Illuminating the Brain’s ‘Utter Darkness’.” Review of Benjamin Ehrlich, The Brain in Search of Itself: Santiago Ramon y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron. In New York Review of Books (February 9, 2023, p. 32)

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Distinctions fundamental to Understanding 

Creation got its start with Relationship and with what Relationship implies. Relationship between Logic and Love inseparable and the Creation of Life and Worth that their Relationship implies. Creation got its start with Relationship which is the stuff of Love and with Implication which is the stuff of Logic. What they imply is the process of Creation moving forward and the structure of Creation building from the bottom up, both in logical sequence through Relationships.

Logic married to Love gave birth to Free Choice, their Child. Together they parent their Child through the inseparable Parent-Child Relationship that Creates, nurtures, and guides the Life-Worth of Creation. Guides through the harmony of Order and Freedom that are inseparable. Governs all of Reality-Creation from the bottom up, through the laws of cause and effect, inseparable from the Authority of Necessity that applies evenly and equally to Creation and Creator, its Source.

Logic-Love is the Source of Judgment that decides with Reason but it does neither itself. It doesn’t choose and so it has no need for Reason. It explains, defines, and governs. The “Mind” whose function in Creation is to choose-decide with Reason- Judgment is Free Choice: the Child of Parents Logic-Thought and Love-Feeling. Logic the source of Mind-Choice and Love the source of Freedom. The Child’s function is to choose freely with Reason because that is the function of Reason: to enable Mind to judge, choose, and decide freely. The Child is our ancestral Mind.

The theorizing of metaphysics is intuited through the Logic-Love Relationship -- our Parents in Reality -- that explains and defines. That provides us with distinctions fundamental to Understanding because they love and need their Child to resume their Relationship in Self-Awareness and the Child’s function in Creation. To regain Consciousness from the alternate reality, the dream state that we call home. Awakening that requires Understanding that requires explanation. That can only come from Logic-Love, our Parents.

The will not to understand

In the illusory world of contradictions that we appear to occupy, minds corrupted by their own opposites can make no sense of this. Opposite is separation. Inseparability is an impossibility. And so in our illusory world of separation what seems to make sense is the opposite. A fractious composition of impossibilities. Logic and Love function separately, which means they function with difficulty or not at all. With Parents separated from Child there can be no Relationship to nurture and guide creation. There can be neither order nor freedom when they are separated. If laws are separated from authority there can be no governance, only the lawlessness of separation. Arbitrary top-down rule. A madhouse.

Distinctions that to minds dominated by limbic passions, corrupted by mis-identification with their own reverse mirror image reflections, make no sense. Logic that explains and defines so that it can govern, distinct from Mind that judges with Reason so that it can choose freely, can have no place in the unfathomable mystery that is our universe, so plainly ruled by mindless, unreasoning “nature,” the force that dominates with the unthinking animal-herd instinct of will. Where in such a universe is there any possibility of explanation by Logic? Of understanding essential to Free Choice? Of Reason the function of Mind? There is no place. And thus the distinctions are lost on corrupted minds. Distinctions that could guide us toward answers that Western thought supposedly seeks. But if we don’t want them then surely we won’t find them.

The “many” of happening or nothing happening 

The “many” of Life-Creativity in Reality are implications that flow from each advance in the interconnectedness -- the sequence -- of Logic. The “many” are the loving soulmate relationships that flow from each expansion of the interconnectedness -- the family -- of Love. The “many” of Life-Creativity in Reality is the abundance of possibilities that Life-Creation is composed of, that each advance in the extension of Logic and the expansion of Love produces. Possibilities like branches and roots, the flowering seeds and buds that compose organic growth, the growth of all living selves. This is the ”many” of Reality-Creation, of Life that grows, of abundance that shares. That can’t help growing and sharing because this is the nature, the definition, of Life-Being. Of Necessity -- the laws of cause and effect.

The ”many” of the opposite is the abundance of disconnections and contradictions. Of impossibilities that comprise the appearance of being, of life-uncreativity in unreality along with its opposite, the appearance of death. The “many” is the abundance of opposites -- disconnections and contradictions -- produced by opposition. By opposing “realities:” of life and death, good and evil, right and wrong, logical and illogical, love and fear, love and hate, innocence and guilt, giving and taking, gaining and losing, owning and sharing, possessing and affirming, controlling and liberating, freedom and captivity, darkness and light, connection and separation, here and there, now and then. . . .

The “many” of the opposite isn’t the growth of possibilities from the expanding interconnectedness of abundance. From the variety of organic Being but the endless splitting off of impossibilities from the disconnectedness of shadow-reflection. The endless replication of contradictions from the scarcity of inorganic sameness. The “many” of Reality Life-Creation is innovation, a happening. The discovery of the new while inquiring and exploring into the unknown. The “many” of the opposite-uncreativity is replication. The appearance of movement. Of growth-expansion that’s comprised of sameness. Nothing happening.

A passion for metaphysics with a practical use

The “many”-abundance of my life is passion for philosophy. For metaphysics that inquires into questions of Worth and Truth, substance and value, Mind and Love, character and striving, meaning and purpose. Of interest to very few. That seems to the rest a waste of time, impractical and irrelevant. A preoccupation that ought to be discouraged in favor of something more conventional. More “realistic” and “sociable” instead of abstract and distancing. Instead of “weird.” Margot Machol Bisnow’s Raising an Entrepreneur (New Harbinger 2021) advises parents to support a child’s passion whatever it is rather than superimposing their own preferences. Rather than stifling originality and initiative, individuality and creativity, with authoritarian disrespect. Advice just as relevant to a grownup’s passion as it is to a child’s.

Why does it matter that the “many” of our illusory dream world is the opposite of the “many” of Reality-Creation? Because the scope of explanation that leads to Understanding by way of the Logic-Love of Intuition, by way of the Relationship with the connection to Logic-Love Parents, includes the difference between opposing “manies.” Because getting it right -- the human condition, our situation -- necessitates understanding that replications of lifeless sameness aren’t Creation. Aren’t progress, and humanity needs to move forward.

Because, like the man said, nothing gets rid of bad theory like good theory. Because the author theorizing with metaphysics is the equivalent of pure research in science that yields useful products. Practical applications that replace authoritarian “realism” that stifles Creativity from the top down with democratic support that nurtures Creativity from the bottom up. At every level of governance from international relations to individual families. Enabling shared parenting and grandparenting to be there for the minds and hearts of grandchildren as well as their bodies. That is my immediate concern. But if the unsolved problems of humanity are endless, then the possibilities of theory that gets it right, working at their roots, might also be endless.

Theorizing with metaphysics requires contributions from Free Choice rooted in its Source, Logic combined with Love. From the Parents of our ancestral Mind, the masculinity of Logic-Choice married to the femininity of Love-Freedom. Ultimately from the Logic-Love / Parent-Child Relationship at the core of Being that illuminates and empowers all of Reality-Creation. A lineage that taps into serious enablement and empowerment. Not the absurdity of forgeries like the “almighty gods” of authoritarian “realism,” caricatures who inhabit cartoons. However unconventional it may seem to conventional thought, theorizing with metaphysics has a legitimate rationale that earns its authenticity with the Worth of Logic-Love and the Authority of the laws of cause and effect. Of Necessity, the expression and stance of Logic-Love. Not needing convention is the point. The rationale stands on its own.

Understanding that the “many” of unreality is the product of appearances is a practical use of theorizing about the “many.” That it’s the product of deception perpetrated by a shadow-reflection opposite -- the replication of a virus that kills Creativity-Life. That’s the enemy of the possibilities of Free Choice essential to Creativity. Helping minds choose to be freed from captivity to the deception, to be led by a better guide, is a practical use of theorizing about the “many.” 

When a paradigm reaches end-of-service

Metaphysics is getting at root causes so that the causes of illogic, the psychiatric disorder that thwarts human growth with contradictions, can be taken out by the roots. Weeds not taken out by the roots keep coming back. Physics explains appearances, never getting beneath the surface because that is its subject: physical objects. Surfaces detectable by the senses of other surfaces: bodies. Pulling a weed out here, a weed out there, but never by the roots. Not even aware that that’s its purpose.

The rallying cry of metaphysics is appearances be damned! It’s taken physics since Galileo invented experimental physics, in the 17th century, to begin to realize what the classical philosopher Parmenides realized with Logic from intuition 2500 years ago. That Reality lies not on the surface but beneath it. That only one “reality” can be Real. The one on the surface, the objects “detected” by body-objects, can only be an illusion. The “non-dualism” taught by the teacher-healer Jesus in the flesh and later, through A Course in Miracles.

John Clerk Maxwell’s equations carried Michael Faraday’s intuition about the electromagnetic force beyond theory to application. To products that, among other things, make these thoughts accessible to a global audience in an instant. The equivalent of Maxwell’s equations to the Logic of Parmenides, Valentinus, and A Course in Miracles isn’t mathematical equations that validate sensory perception. It’s coming up with a rational explanation for the loss of Consciousness that transitioned the insane idea of an opposite unreality from an unconscious Mind to its expression, its animated appearance, in a dream. To make things add up logically like Maxwell’s equations.

In order to come up with explanation it’s logically necessary to detach our minds from an irrational, unquestioning dependence on sensory perception. On a body-centric worldview of Reality. So that inquiry beyond historic insights that challenge “conventional wisdom” will be enlivened by curiosity instead of deadened without it. Killed by an aging generation content to let the next generation abandon its outdated paradigms. Ever vigilant that nobody dismantle its monuments even if they turn out to be facades. 

The hand-off of the baton back to philosophy 

Plato tried to go forward with his mentor Parmenides. He couldn’t because intuition didn’t carry him far enough. Imaginary dialogues with his mentor Socrates didn’t get him there so he could do for Parmenides’ insights what Maxwell did for Faraday’s. His pupil Aristotle’s switch, from Plato’s Academy to Aristotle’s Lyceum -- from Mind-Logic to matter-biology -- was a white flag of surrender. It was the equivalent of Nils Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation that declared that experimental physics had reached the limit of its potential to explain the origin, fate, and meaning of the material universe. Aristotle’s was the declaration that Logic through intuition had reached its limit. The study of matter was available to sensory perception. It offered a legitimate avenue of discovery so long as the reality of matter and its certifier, the body’s senses, remained unchallenged by Logic. The time had come to pursue it, and thus was science in Western thought born.

And thus was born what’s become a relay race run by science and philosophy. The white flag of surrender has come out again. From physics’ pursuit of quantum gravity, the melding of cosmology with quantum mechanics, the study of the behavior of the particles and cells, the Energy, that make up matter. One just as weird as the other. The evolution of Einstein’s and Hawking’s pursuit of a theory of everything that also failed. The study of Aristotle’s matter come to rest on a puzzle that experimental physics, on its own, can’t solve. So it’s back to appealing to philosophy. To handing the baton back to philosophy in the relay race to Understanding.

The value of relationship with a trusted guide

What I propose is one possibility inspired by the author of A Course in Miracles. Who I have never doubted, since I’ve been living with it for 34 years, connects us with Logic-Love, the Parents of our ancestral Mind I call the Child. The historical figure Jesus, a manifestation of what religion calls the Holy Spirit. But if the Child’s awakening ultimately requires intimacy with our Parents’ emissary its name shouldn’t matter. Particularly since the identity and role it assumes in individual lives is between it and the individual. Call it what you want.

The Holy Spirit touches my heart at the deepest level through a son whose life was a heart-breaking tragedy. His, for me, has been the voice and the image of the Holy Spirit since I began work on this project three years ago. My life and work revolve around our Relationship, the source of insights from my intuition. With the author of the Course, my Guide and my comfort. An arrangement that owes nothing to manipulation on either side and everything to spontaneity. To mutual Love, Trust, and respect.

What if anything your life revolves around is up to you. I can only share that being in an intimate relationship with a trusted guide, who is in our world of appearances but not of it, can be both elevating and leveling. And, above all, useful -- positive and constructive. A fact well documented in the literature of leadership, entrepreneurship, and parenting.

Quantification run amuck

The cause of the Big Bang is mental not physical. An obvious fact that science, in its rampant bias against the agency of Mind in anything that can be detected and measured by body, adamantly refuses to accept. Between them Stephen Hawking, Francis Crick, Christof Koch, and Brian Greene have invented a “boundaryless” universe without a creator -- an effect without a cause -- and a brain that magically produces consciousness out of neurons and electrical impulses -- matter that produces mind. Propositions so preposterous they rate the Nobel prize for dumbest. An associate of Hawking’s tried to imagine a state that could cause our matter and what did he come up with? More matter.

The Church sticking its nose into Galileo’s business did irreparable harm to objective inquiry, worse by far than private industries buying academic research. Because all it did was provoke science into sticking its nose into everything, including and especially the philosophy that Hawking declared “dead.” Science won’t tolerate anything smacking of speculation that can’t be “verified” by “objective” quantitative measurement. The tool based on circular reasoning that the Austrian physicist-philosopher Erwin Schroedinger has acknowledged guarantees subjectivity not objectivity. What is inquiry outside the scope of measurement but speculation disciplined and supported by Logic?

Other fields -- philosophy, psychology, economics -- are so intimidated by science’s preeminence that they’ve recast their efforts as “scientific” if they can get away with it and let themselves be overshadowed if they can’t. The so-called “five factor” personality type theory is illustrative. Meant to replace Myers-Briggs, based on the inspired intuition of Carl Jung, it makes “person” object rather than subject so that its types can be quantified by “scientific” measurements -- an absurdity. The fraud results in a scale that values body-sensing over intuition, the most critical Myers-Briggs categories. Why devalue intuition? So that body-sensing, already the majority of personality types, will swing attitudes even farther toward validation of science and the “reality” of the world of spacetime-matter that justifies it. So that intuition can’t risk undermining it with another perspective: with Logic and the Truth that lies behind appearances.

Thomas Aquinas got religion -- Christianity anyway -- to back off sticking its nose into free inquiry, but that didn’t stop science from sticking its nose into free inquiry. It’s hard to see the difference between Hawking and Crick and the Pope they so despise.

What is our baseline? 

Adam Becker, in What Is Real? (Basic Books 2018), recalled that Einstein, in 1952, said scientists weren’t very good at Logic. Why? What profession mines the potential for brilliance from the human mind with more elan than science?

In benefit-cost analysis, benefits and costs must be measured against something to show that a particular option makes a situation better or worse. The baseline situation -- the way things are now before the professions and their masters set about to change them. The situation that can’t factor into analysis until it’s properly understood. After all, one option might be to leave things the way they are and its constituency might not give up without a fight.

The function of mind that comes into play for this critical phase of analysis isn’t reason. It’s Logic. Whose function isn’t to choose but to explain. To use its prowess with definition to show how circumstances fit together to reveal their meaning. Whose function is to help its hapless subject, struggling to make sense of a world of contradictions and facades, understand.

From Logic we get Understanding. Not from reasoning but from fitting circumstances together so that they give us meaning and purpose. Context that’s essential to direction. From Logic we get what our situation calls for, opening thought to the next step: how to proceed with choices among scientific experiments, development possibilities, or any other improvement. With judgment based on reason that takes into account weighted values as well as measurements. That integrates them into a response to the situation that is both reasoned and Logical.

Logical because it gets the baseline situation right. Because judgment will be off on the right foot, well informed. Well directed by understanding based on facts. On reality instead of mis-directed by mis-understanding based on mis-perception and unreality. Because judgment will be based on Logic.

Science’s headlong rush to judgment

Science works hard at explaining our situation. At establishing the baseline for judgment, reasoning, choices, and decisions. But this is true only if the basic attribute of our situation can be taken for granted: that what our bodies’ senses tell us is there is actually “there.” That this is reality and we needn’t trouble metaphysics with questioning it. It’s true only if we allow science to get away with including the knower in the known. A crack in the foundation of the entire scientific enterprise. Because it forfeits intellectual integrity and along with it scientific objectivity.

Including the knower in the known is a very big No-No. A violation of Logic. An intellectual disconnect that science apparently thinks it can’t afford to acknowledge without depriving itself of its legitimacy: the presumed reality of bodies and matter. Bodies and the material objects that their senses detect. But, you see, bodies are matter. And science that prides itself on objectivity can’t get away with “logic” that finds “objectivity” where it isn’t: in matter declaring itself real.

A proper understanding of our baseline, the condition against which all movement forward must be calculated, requires something else: another perspective. That's only attainable through intuition, the function of mind whose source and discipline is Logic. The science that we all admire and depend on isn’t good with Logic for a simple reason. It rushes headlong into judgment with “reasoning” before it’s properly established its baseline. Before it’s applied Logic to a proper understanding of the context that tells it what the situation calls for. That provides direction for thinking. Before it's availed itself of another perspective that's essential to intellectual integrity and scientific objectivity.

The gift of metaphysics

Everyone is familiar with physics, the profession that made Einstein an international celebrity. Metaphysics not so much. Too bad, because turning to physics, the study of appearances, the gold standard for legitimizing authoritarian “realism,” is exactly the wrong approach. It’s the approach that Hawking trumpeted in his adolescent fantasy of supremacy when he declared philosophy dead.

Metaphysics is a much-neglected outlier of philosophy that’s probably better known for what it hasn’t done for human progress than for what it has. In his call for help from philosophy the physicist Carlo Rovelli, in Reality Is not What It Seems (Riverhead Books 2017), rejected the Logic of Parmenides out of hand. Thus eliminating metaphysics and its founder from consideration along with answers that minds captive to bodies and brains are actually desperate for. The victim of a shipwreck would rather be saved by an anvil than a life preserver. Because if getting our baseline right requires the definitions and explanations of Logic; if it requires Understanding where circumstances fit together to make a clear statement, it needs Logic. And Logic isn’t the gift of physics. It isn’t the gift of science. It’s the gift of metaphysics.

Do we truly want to understand our situation so that we can proceed to think? To judge clearly? Then stop skipping past our baseline with fatuous assumptions about the unassailability of sensory perception. With circular, self-referential “reasoning” that makes a mockery of intellect. Stop skipping past Parmenides. Start putting some of that scientific verve into understanding what he was talking about. Start applying metaphysics. Apply Logic and get it right.

The Guide that can be trusted

A Course in Miracles isn’t “religion.” It isn’t unreasoning “faith.” It’s the Logic of metaphysics that happened to respond to two clinical psychologists needing “a better way” out of friction that was interfering with professionalism. It’s metaphysics that took on the appearance of religion when it was transmitted through a Jewish scribe with an authoritarian personality type attracted to the patriarchal Catholic church. It adopted the analytics of Freudian psychoanalysis and symbols of Christianity because its audience could not have made sense of its unfamiliar oeuvre otherwise.

An audience that makes up the bulk of Western thought and includes me. The Course reaches me in part because I was brought up in Christianity and an educational environment influenced by Freudian psychology. The heyday of Freudian psychoanalysis spanned my formative years well beyond my formal education, when having a “shrink” was like having a dentist. Metaphysics that looks behind appearances relies on established perception to get its point across and A Course in Miracles is no exception. But this student took its lesson to heart. What I found when I looked behind the analytics of Freud and the symbols of Christianity was the purity of Logic bonded with Love. Not one misstep. Not one false note.

The Course  isn’t “mysticism.” It’s not the “spirituality” of “New Age.” It isn’t a “bible” and says so. Immanuel Kant attempted a “critique of pure reason,” a slog of turgid incomprehensibility that sets off the sensitivity, purposefulness, and clarity of the Course. There is such a thing as Logic that helps to distinguish between what’s Real and what’s not. There is no such thing as “pure reason” if it’s detached from its function, to aid a particular choice or decision. As Gertrude Stein supposedly said when she was asked “What’s the answer?”: “What’s the question?” Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is the equivalent of Stein expostulating on “pure answer” without a question. A pure waste of time.

Reality, the subject matter of philosophy whose only hope of defining it is through the branch founded by Parmenides: metaphysics. Because in a material world of appearances the only way to get at Reality is to get behind appearances. Through the only function of mind that can lead us there: through intuition that connects us with Logic-Love. With the explanation behind appearances we’re looking for. In the end I trust my Guide because, whatever name it’s given, however familiar or unfamiliar it may seem, it makes sense. I trust it because it’s Who -- whoever loves me and whoever I love to the ends of the earth.

Try accessing an authoritarian mind

The choice between listening to the voice of our ancestral Mind’s reverse side, the magician-comedian I call the Joker, and the emissary from the Child’s Parents known to Christianity as Jesus or the Holy Spirit, is a choice even for the mind so thoroughly captive to its dark side that it’s been deprived of a voice. For that is the aim of authority that would rule absolutely: to deprive its possessions of any voice that could compete with its own. Captivity achieves its aim not when voices are added to the many but when they are replaced by one -- its own. Yet no act by Mind that is Free Choice, whether conscious or unconscious, can be anything but choice. And if Child unconscious let itself be taken captive by an illusion it can free itself by “choosing again.” Advice from Jesus that brings the text of the Course to a close.

That said, try accessing an authoritarian mind so captivated by its reverse image that virtually no trace is left of its sovereign self. Jesus did his best with Helen, his scribe, and “maybe” is the best he could do. It’s taken me three full years to figure out how to do it with an authoritarian mind and I’m still working on it.

What price a rational explanation?

I propose that we pick up where the intuition of Parmenides and Plato left off, only now enabled and empowered by insights from the Course that were not available to them. By its priceless gift of another perspective that’s indispensable to objective analysis and Understanding. To getting our baseline condition right before racing off to judgment. When he opined in the February ’22 issue of Scientific American that his profession’s subject may be “in some sense illusory,” the physicist-historian Adam Becker cited Parmenides but made no mention of Jesus and the Course. Not surprisingly when not even the author of What Is Gnosticism? (Belknap-Harvard 2003), the Harvard Divinity School professor, Karen L. King, mentioned it. After what the Church did to Galileo anything with a whiff of religion is toxic.

What I propose is a continuation of Logic from earlier points in its sequence to later points and a continuation beyond the scope so far explored, guided by the sequence of Logic that’s gone before. I propose it as a possibility because, in my writing over the past three years, my Relationship and I have done it. It isn’t a possibility for me; it’s a reality. But until spontaneity informs me that our part is done it remains a work in progress. And even when done, its output can only be suggestive. A start that, for all I know, is but one of a multitude of starts. Its purpose to facilitate movement toward understanding of reality behind appearances. With explanation that can be taken seriously not because can ever be definitive but only because it makes sense.

With Logic and reason that Kenneth Wapnick, in Love Does Not Condemn (Foundation for “A Course in Miracles” 1989), says has yet to be applied by theology and philosophy to a foundational question: Why would a supreme being, undisturbed in eternal serenity, disturb itself? How and why did our ancestral Mind go from awake to asleep? From Self-Awareness to unconsciousness, immortality to mortality, eternity to time, perfection to imperfection? We have what Wapnick calls “excessive mythology” but not a rational explanation. What is the nature of the “supreme being?” Did descent begin from “eternal serenity” or did we get it wrong? Did it end with “creation” -- our material universe -- or with illusion, the state that the metaphysics of Parmenides and the Course describe.

The Story of the Child 

The work in progress that is my book adheres to the thrust of the Course and its basic principles but almost entirely without the symbols that give it a whiff of religion. It isn’t heavy on the analytics of Freudian psychology because to make its point it doesn’t need to be. If it violates the letter of either I’ve been careful not to violate them in spirit. But what I’m writing is metaphysics. Not the logic of Zeno who, like Aristotle, tested the capabilities of Logic without Love -- the missing element that might otherwise have brought Parmenides, Plato, and Jesus together -- but the Logic-Love of the Course. 

The Story of the Child is the working title of my book devoted to getting our baseline right. By telling our story going back beyond the Big Bang to the mental state of the Child that caused it. The Child of its Parents Logic-Love who are our own real parents since we are the Child in a dream state. The mental state that produced the grand illusion: our bodies and their universe of spacetime-matter. The condition that locks minds into the perversion of Truth that is authoritarian “realism.”

Attempting to tell our antecedent Mind’s story with Logic, the gift of metaphysics, and the explanation given us in the clear by Jesus in the Course, may finally help us grasp the truth of our baseline situation -- the human condition. Without the mythology that’s buried fragments of Logic under mountains of obfuscation. That make the articulation and integration of history’s dominant thought systems into a single coherent system a fool’s errand.

Breaking up is hard to do

Illusion -- the baseline condition that Becker’s physics may now be describing. Science, from Aristotle on, has grudgingly allowed that Mind is real but left it at that while it turned all its talents, resources, and passions to its first love: matter. While it imagined itself someday atop the Empire State Building, pounding its chest in triumph, swatting away the remnants of its pitiful enemies. Trumpeting unified theories of everything that explain, once and for all, the meaning of life. The origin and fate of the universe. Quantum gravity! We’re saved and we can all go home and live in peace because the study of matter has answered all our questions.

No it hasn’t. And it never will. Einstein tried and failed. Bohr and quantum mechanics won the argument. Time to give up the dream within a dream: the dream of an orderly, divine universe that can be figured out and the figuring out. An impossibility if the universe is that which can’t be figured out. An illusion because that’s what an illusion is. If you disagree, then explain the anomalies of particle behavior and cosmology without resort to the Logic of Parmenides and A Course in Miracles. Because that’s where the explanation is. The answers you’ve been looking for since Aristotle and Democritus and others before him.

Let physics carry on with matter. Keep after quantum gravity and keep us, so to speak, in the loop, because that’s its job. But we don’t have to carry on with physics. With bodies even though we imagine that’s who we are. There’s a better guide. We can take up with Mind. With Free Choice, the wild card. The beloved Child of Logic and Love. Because that’s who we really are.

Sure, breaking up is hard to do. But let metaphysics be our guide and maybe we can do it.

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Seeing things

Two of the many intriguing notions to emerge from physics’ study of matter beyond the human scale are Feynman’s “sum of histories” and Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle.” The first implying that time doesn’t exist at the level of particle physics (quantum mechanics), the other that matter is “relational,” that is, that it doesn’t exist unless particles connect with, or relate to, one another. “Sum of histories” means that the route taken by a particle to connect with another particle is every possible route taken simultaneously. “Uncertainty” means there’s no way of knowing where the particle is in between connecting-relating at any point in time. Heisenberg’s insight came when he observed a pedestrian vanishing in the darkness at night in between street lights.

If we were to observe these odd phenomena on a human scale we would see a horse in a pasture with many paths travel from one end to the other taking every path at once. Only we wouldn’t actually see it because in between the horse’s start and finish it would disappear. We would only observe a horse on one end disappearing and reappearing magically at the other having taken every possible route simultaneously without our seeing it. A clear violation of the laws of physics on a human scale that validate, and are validated by, sensory perception.

We would conclude that our sense of vision that produces data and our brain that processes data had malfunctioned. That we were “seeing things.” And we would take ourselves to a vision clinic to have our eyes examined and then to a medical-psychiatric clinic to have our head examined. Finding that our faculties didn’t malfunction, we would then be forced to conclude that the reality our senses have been feeding us on a human scale hasn’t been telling us the whole story. If something isn’t “right,” if it’s malfunctioning, it must be with what’s going on in spacetime-matter beyond the human scale, at the level of particles and the cosmos.

Let’s be honest

Applying the “laws” of physics that work for us on our scale to these scales gets us nowhere. Obviously we’re dealing with other realities responding to other “laws." And what’s more, they can’t be reconciled.   The greatest minds in physics in the time of Einstein and today have tried and failed to tie together the laws that govern what we observe through telescopes with what we observe through microscopes. To bring the mathematics of objects so massive they warp spacetime into the mathematics of objects so small it’s not certain whether they’re coming or going.

The search for a unified theory -- “quantum gravity” -- was discouraged by the Copenhagen Interpretation over a century ago. Physicists pressed on with their experiments until they called for help from philosophy. And now they’re wondering if the whole thing isn’t a wild goose chase. If matter that can’t always be detected, that doesn’t make sense even when it can, is even “there.” Let’s be honest: if a thing behaves like it’s imaginary, like it’s some kind of magician’s trick, maybe it is.

The path taken to understanding

Two minds, two personalities, trying to connect through communication, like particles, face similar obstacles to understanding. If communication succeeds and connection occurs the route taken from non-understanding or mis-understanding to understanding must involve every possible path simultaneously. Because what we’ve learned from particles is this is how it’s done. In another reality of timelessness that governs the matter our bodies are made of. If we put all our faith in our bodies’ senses to tell us what’s actual, and our bodies are matter that’ acts weird, then let’s be honest: our so-called “reality” is weird. It’s not in sync with the way even our body-matter wants to behave. Newtonian and even Einsteinian physics, that assumed something like divine order in the cosmos, is a distant memory. The divinity that Plato felt in his bones when he gazed upon the stars is chaos -- a joke.

No possible path to connection through understanding can be ignored if personalities intersect in many combinations under many conditions. If motivation depends on which behavioral codes, guides, or value sets predominate. Will it be an intrusive voice dictating to captive minds how to think and behave? Speaking for wounding? Or a respectful voice that helps with spontaneous insights when invited? Speaking for healing? Voices that we’re aware of or not even though Free Will has no more important task than choosing the right one.

Understanding will eventually present us with a manageable set of considerations. But that doesn’t mean that every consideration -- every spark of energy in our personalities, our motivation, and the voice or voices we choose to hear -- isn’t vibrating and foaming with energy like so many quanta filling and connecting every corner of the universe. The image serves a purpose: to make us aware of the scale of consideration that understanding can entail. When not only personalities but also motivations conflict. When the voices we adhere to aren’t on the same page. When all is cacophony until Logic is allowed to make sense of it. Until minds are free to think for themselves.

The incompatibility of idealist-mind and realist-will

One way of coping with the dilemma is to broaden our perspective, the context we rely on for purpose and meaning. To embrace every possible consideration so that if understanding isn’t perfect at least we’ve reduced the likelihood of misunderstanding and minimized its costs. This is the preferred route of “idealists” already disinclined to limit themselves to bodies’ faculties. To eyes and brains when they’ve learned from experience to rely on insights from minds’ intuition to guide them. On the vision of Logic instead of eyes that “see” horses magically disappear and reappear. Galloping from one end of the pasture to the other, in many places at the same time, out of sight. Idealists prefer not to accept and rely on “logic” that makes no sense.

“Realists,” on the other hand, scoff at all of it. Their way out of the dilemma is to put faith in the body and its brain entirely. To leave mind out of it. Don’t “think” at all, so why bother with perspectives and contexts, purpose and meaning. Why bother with considerations if you don’t have to? Let the part of the brain take care of everything that was put there from the beginning, to will behavior by instinct. The blood-and-soil part that whips up tribal passions with the gravity of Wagnerian Tannhausers, florid poetry, monumental architecture, ornate art, bombastic oratory, nocturnal Nuremberg rallies framed in klieg lights.

If navigating through circumstances is all about bodies and their survival then let the part of the brain that’s engineered to serve the body -- to feed it, procreate it, protect it, pleasure it -- cut through unfathomable complexity and bring us to our destination the easy way. With short cuts -- acts of instinct that require no awareness, no effort. By acts of will that instinctively integrate all the considerations and possibilities into one stance mechanically, automatically. The stance of authority backed up by force that can’t be questioned. Why? Because it’s dispensed with questioning. How? By dispensing with mind that does the questioning.

One approach -- the idealist’s -- all about mind. About the limitless capacity of mind to understand, to support, and to create. To take responsibility and be accountable. The other approach -- the realist’s -- all about the unstoppable will of bodies and brains to act. To dispense with minds and thinking and let some other unseen force planted in the brain take over. To take responsibility and spare us the inconvenience, the difficulty and unpleasantness, of accountability. To put ourselves at the service of this unseen force and go forth like an army of clones doing its bidding, sacrificing ourselves to the triumph of its will. To Rome. To Berlin.

There can be no “meeting of the minds”

What chance is there for communication between idealist-mind and realist-will? Between one horse at one end of the pasture relying on awareness to navigate -- every function of mind, every faculty of individuality -- and another horse at the opposite end, blinkered and hooded, relying on blind instinct to navigate. Dismissive of any effort to communicate other than conclusions handed to it beyond its awareness, convinced that it’s already arrived at its destination if nothing is required of it but to submit to another power. There is no chance for communication unless and until the horse at the opposite end of the pasture abandons blind faith in an unseen force to dominate its pasture and everything in it, including the other horse. Unless it ceases abdicating responsibility for its thoughts, feelings, and actions, ceases surrendering its sovereignty to a fantasy of supremacy.

For all that this unseen force cares about or is capable of, this animal brain that accounts for instinct and will surrounded by senseless objects, is domination. Capture prey, kill the competition, take mates and every other object captive, or flee if it’s outmatched. There can be no “meeting of the minds” without two minds. Between mind-judging and will that opposes mind-judging. There can be no common cause between wills if one must submit to the other. They cannot survive and compete on an equal plane. One must prevail over the other, for that is the goal of competition. This is the “realist’s” reality: the dominance of authority that must be unquestioned. That has no tolerance for mind because that is what mind does: question. Asking Why.

The real “authority” in sergeant’s stripes

In this situation there is but one possibility for forward movement. For communication of a kind that can’t connect but at least it can remove the obstacle to communication. Can create conditions less unfavorable to communication. And that is for the realist to meet its opponent on its own ground. On its own turf, the turf of will. If the realist claims superiority from accessing a part of the body’s brain that exercises un-free will -- willpower divorced from Logic -- the mind of the idealist has a willpower of its own. The necessity of Logic. The laws of cause and effect that yield to nothing. Not because they’re agents of will that wields authority from the top down to crush opposition. That’s weakness. But because they’re agents of no force greater than themselves.

They are the law that’s above everything. And they’re there not to crush opposition from the top down but to make possible order and harmony from the bottom up. Through Logic, Love, and Peace rather than their opposites -- illogic, hatred, and conflict. They are the real power on the throne. A vision of authority that the animal brain of the realist has perverted into its mirror-image opposite.

The laws of cause and effect speak for Reality and Truth. And when confronted with foolishness that presumes to speak for anything else there is no give in them. The laws are what they are -- Necessity. Reality and Truth are what they are -- Logic and Love. Fantasies of the “triumph of the will” that presume to be above the law, in an alternate reality of opposites, are no match for it. 

We’re just getting started

The “realist” fancies himself a jack-booted commandant entitled to rule his domain without opposition. An unrealist in a shared world and a fool. OK then, the idealist has someone he’d like the realist to meet. The only character the military mind will listen to. The guy who seriously outranks him. Whose word is law. Who’s way better at not listening than he is, so he’ll show respect. A nice drill sergeant. With a lesson that, one way or another, our comic book action hero will learn. And until he does, he can just go on screwing up in boot camp, peeling potatoes and shoveling shit.

If blind unthinking will that seeks supremacy has a military bent, the mind of an idealist has an answer. A drill sergeant “explaining” to the usurper who would rule its domain unopposed the facts of life. You ain’t nuthin’ but a hound dog. You’re private first class nobody and welcome to Camp Swampy. We don’t “explain” stuff here so everyone can play pat-a-cake. We drill procedure -- the way it’s gotta be -- into everyone’s head so they get with the program.

There’s Logic to the way things are and you align yourself with it or you get your ass busted. You get stuck at the bottom of the pile and you stay there until you get the message. Anybody thinks he's master of the universe and doesn’t have to listen, doesn’t have to think, doesn’t have to communicate or relate, can do KP duty peeling potatoes. Anybody thinks he doesn’t have to answer to a higher power can do latrine duty shoveling shit until he’s learned his lesson.

Son, you didn’t wind up here so we can pamper your foolish ass with pleasantries. You’re here so you can get the facts of life drilled into your thick skull. By will that is will instead of a Marvel Comic joke, a magic act performed by a Joker hiding behind a mask. An act meant to trick gullible fools into imagining what’s not there instead of seeing what is there. Welcome to Necessity. Welcome to Reality. Welcome to boot camp where the real work begins. Where understanding begins.

We’re just getting started.

Published on Leave a comment on Imagine

When the lights were on

Imagine that you are a child who comes from a place where existence is an unbroken flow of Abundance. Where striving is effortless play. Where every mate is soulmate, the warmth of intimacy and the assurance of belonging, and all their personalities and compositions fit together in perfect harmony. Where everything and everyone shares the purpose and meaning of Life. The cause of all that is right and good, kind and just, happiness and contentment.

The cause of Logic and Love inseparable, your Parents. Where you are defined by your inheritance: judgment and choice, freedom and creativity. By Free Will -- Freedom of thought, expression and choice, sovereignty and individuality. The attributes of Self with an indispensable role to play in Creation: ensuring the worth and integrity of Interconnectedness. The process and structure of Creation. Of Reality governed with wisdom and caring. Not through intervention that confines and contracts from the top down but through the free spirit of Creativity that liberates and expands from the bottom up. That consummates every Connection, every Relationship, with the satisfaction, passion, and beauty of reciprocation.

Lights off!

Imagine that you now find yourself removed from familiarity and dumped into strangeness. Suddenly and without warning. With no recognizable coordinates to navigate by and no capacity to navigate even if there were. Because the flow of sharing, affirmation, and empowerment that were your life blood, the source of all that defined you, that gave you motivation and direction, has been cut off. Because you’ve lost consciousness, and the strangeness that you now occupy is the strangeness of a dream. A dream yet without form. Waiting for the characters and story that will animate it. You’re lost, adrift, and utterly helpless. A fool unable to make sense of anything.

Imagine that there is an explanation for what happened. That the strangeness can be navigated, but, for now, you haven’t the experience to know how. Your mind and memory are a blank slate, wiped clean. But even if they weren’t, there is no known playbook for the situation you are now in, none that could have prepared you for this. If there is to be a playbook, you’ll have to write it yourself.

You figure it out

And so when you detect your own reflection, a shadow opposite, you don’t recognize it. Don’t recognize its clue to where you have landed: In the strangeness of opposites. The opposite of the familiarity, the Reality, of where you were. You’ve lost consciousness without  being aware that it was even possible to lose it. And been deposited from the land of all things possible to a never-never land of all things impossible. Into the strangeness, the lawless chaos, of unreality.

All inevitable and for a purpose. But it’s for you and your gifts to figure it out -- character, integrity, independent judgment, and Free Will. And now you have a choice. With faculties impaired, with knowledge gone, you are to make sense of this strange opposition, your own reflection – your mirror image opposite. Your shadow. An apparition unknown to Reality that can only be detected in a dream. Defined by your own attributes because it’s part of your self but in reverse. Its code a derivation, entirely lacking in originality because it has no self. Derived from the definition of everything that you are not.

Only you don’t know it. Why should you when Home, the place you came from, had no opposites? When your Parents could not have prepared you for this.

A case of mistaken identity

In your acute vulnerability – in your desperation to find your way back -- you can’t be aware that the savior you seek, the guide who knows where you are and can help you navigate, is nothing of the kind. It’s the opposite. A thing of the imagination, a parasite attached to its host and entirely dependent on its host. With no sense or sensibility of its own, incapable of guiding itself let alone its host. A lifeless viral code. A predator that would take its host captive and replicate itself. A Joker that would entertain itself and distract its replications with perversions of the Truth. Jokes at their expense. Why? Because that’s all the code of opposition can do.

If only its host mistakes it for an other. Which, of course, you do. In your desperation, the breakdown of your faculties, your lack of experience and discernment, you mistake your own shadow-reflection for an other. Imagine it to be your guide and savior. And once it’s given your own voice with which to fool you, let it fool you into taking you captive. Into reversing roles and turning you into its parasite. Into replacing mindfulness with mindlessness. How can you not trust it when the voice it speaks with is your own?

Escape into captivity: our world of appearances

Imagining, all the while, that you have entrusted your fate to an other who will guide you out of strangeness, if not back Home at least to a safe place. When in truth your mind taken captive is now imagining that you are your captor. You have surrendered self-awareness to self-delusion, the delusion that you are your own opposite. And that the dream world of impossibility where it has taken you – the world where we seem to be now – is real. A world composed of bodies that are apparitions, appearances that are deceptions. All of it a magician’s act, the performance of a gifted illusionist.

A narrative that strikes the mind of a realist, embedded in the dream, as unrealistic. Until, that is, physics speaks for what this world of strangeness is telling us: that maybe it isn’t real. Maybe in some sense it is an illusion. Because not only physics but every field of inquiry that assumes that it is real has failed to prove it. Has started out with the promise of human invention and ingenuity and made great progress, only to fall short of its goal.

Science doesn’t have the answer

Albert Einstein sought an elegant equation to describe the material universe that he revered. That he believed harbored the elegance, simplicity, and beauty of perfection. That brought together the physics of cosmos with particles – quantum gravity. But what he also wanted was to prove that the subject matter of his profession, physics, is real. To put an end, for all time, to the debate between idealists and realists over the subject matter of philosophy: reality. He wanted to be the one with the Answer, and he wasn’t. He failed at both objectives. Quantum gravity remains beyond reach. Where physics today is beginning to acknowledge the illusion that the universe is, the failure of Einstein proved the reality that it isn’t.

Einstein wasn’t alone. Every field of inquiry has failed to explain the origin of appearances, the contradictory laws that govern their behavior. That break down at the extremes. When only another reality can explain the singularities, the anomalies, the mysteries of dark matter, dark energy, and black holes. Particles that are here, there, everywhere, and nowhere, for which time doesn’t exist. The random mutations of cells and the never-to-be-found seat of consciousness.

Energy did it: the dark side of the Force

The common thread through it all: the indivisibility, the inseparability of the creative force of Energy that animates appearances. The agent of Mind that enables Creation and imagination with equal facility. That animates the unreality of unconsciousness as well as the Reality of consciousness and so is complicit in the deception. Because it follows direction, and direction comes from Mind. Mind whether conscious of Reality or only dreaming an illusion. When Energy produced spacetime-matter at the Big Bang, it did so not at the direction of Mind creating Reality from possibilities. It did so at the direction of mind dreaming unreality from impossibilities.

When you lost consciousness, mistook your own reflection for another self, were taken captive by your other self – your dark side, -- and then mistook who you are and where you are, you activated the “dark side of the Force.” The lights gone out, your thoughts were no longer enlightened by Abundance and Innocence, hallmarks of sanity. They were plunged by the false innocence of victimhood into insanity: a hellish pit of fear, blame, rage, hatred, and guilt – wounding emotions conjured by your captor, rival to your Parents. Rival to Reality and Truth. Coded to bring down all of Creation with psychopathic lies. With a barrage of made-up grievances and resentments.

Your mind was a cauldron of torment that it could not tolerate. And so it got rid of its torment. It projected its unwanted emotions out of mind into a separate reality, an act conjured by the illusionist and animated by Energy. The Big Bang. Sheer madness since thoughts can’t leave their source, and “separate reality” can only be a joke. The projection climaxed the illusionist’s magic tricks, but the madness nevertheless remains firmly seated in your mind. Its unwanted emotions went nowhere.

Still, you’re the source of the Big Bang! You invented our universe!

Why?

Your purpose then can’t be to affirm the reality of what’s not real, to exploit it for pleasure until all that’s left is pain. Your purpose must be to learn and grow from experience. To gain the competence to tell the difference between host and reflection, truth from deception, reality from illusion. To tell the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, the light side from the dark side of the Force. Your purpose is to attain the maturity of self-awareness. The awareness that self-the-many is Self-the-One. The knowledge that there are no “others” but reflections of our Self, and in each one of us is the one Self.

To what end? That you may reclaim your identity. Reclaim you Free Will, your individuality and Creativity, and wake up from your self-imposed dream of worthlessness. That you may regain awareness of the connection with your Source that was never lost and return Home. Home to the joyfulness and Worth of Life and Creation. To the oneness, beauty, and perfection of Reality. To having a job to do and the competence of Logic, Love, and experience to do it.

 

 

 

 

 

Published on Leave a comment on How do we restore Consciousness and regain self-awareness?

Switch from focus on matter to focus on mind

First, by letting go of certainty that our material world of sensory perception is real. By going with the implications of what Adam Becker has posited, that it's illusory. Quantum gravity -- the goal that was beyond even Einstein -- has opened the door.

This is the real achievement, the real end-product, of centuries of physics studying matter: Eliminating certainty that bodies and sensory perception are the gold standard for establishing definitively what's real / "realistic" and what's not. Just as a physician would eliminate a diagnosis that doesn't fit the symptoms. Sticking with this one is increasingly uncool. It is wrong.

Addiction to sensory perception is the biggest barrier to restoring Consciousness. Physics / Becker is saying maybe the time has come to take it down. It could have come down long ago when Erwin Schrödinger acknowledged that science relying on sensory perception is circular self-referential reasoning -- matter citing itself. It's irrational -- not the best basis for a field that prides itself on objectivity and reliability.

Empirical measurements and experimental research have their place. But the door must open to Logic, where Parmenides and Plato began 2500 years ago. To insight from Intuition that connects minds to our collective Memory and Logic. To revelation that can only come from intuiting the story of Mind. The story of thought-reason and feeling-values. To the qualitative as well as the quantitative, to perception and judgment that include Worth.

Embrace the whole person with a systems approach

The quantum physicist Rovelli's Reality Is Not What It Seems calls for help from philosophy. Becker is not alone. Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolution says science should stay away from purpose. From supporting or "proving" any particular aspiration, philosophy, or ideology. Michael Stevens' The Knowledge Machine holds science to the same "iron rule" of detachment.

But meaning is impossible without engaging the total person, mind-feeling's entire story. Meaning-purpose is impossible without Understanding the whole context. Psychology and theology must be part of the mix along with philosophy and science. Regaining Consciousness requires a holistic, collaborative, systems approach.

Disengage from the wrong guide and choose the right Guide

Our world is a delusion whose source is an event from another Reality: The Child's mistaking its shadow-reflection for a savior that would substitute for its lost Parents, that would guide it to a substitute reality where it would be safe and could endlessly project its imagined guilt onto objectified-imagined "others." Where it could preserve its Innocence, thus ensuring endless conflict and misery. This is the psychopathology of the Child's error explained in A Course in Miracles (ACIM).

We do our part to restore Consciousness by correcting the error in all our choices. By not making unreality real, i.e. by not making our shadow-reflections real. By learning to recognize the Joker we've made of our shadow-reflections. By consciously withdrawing belief in its reality, by disengaging from it. By consciously undoing and invalidating all its appearances-deceptions / lies.

We do our part to restore Consciousness by learning to recognize the Guide that's been provided by Intuition-Memory to help with awakening. By consciously choosing the right Guide, seeking and following its Guidance in all our choices. By utilizing our talents and faculties of mind to build awareness through the exercise of Free Will: introspection, reflection-intuition, thinking-reasoning, feeling-evaluating, judging-choosing. By taking responsibility and holding ourselves accountable for our own learning and growth.

In the face of determined resistance: Never give up!

We restore Consciousness and regain self-awareness by taking issue with Hawking when he declared that "philosophy is dead." In an illusory world the goal is to get at reality, the purpose of philosophy. The goal is to get beyond appearances to the Truth beyond appearances: The purpose of metaphysics, the invention of Parmenides and his Eleatics School of Reason.

We do our part to restore Consciousness by supporting Philosophy and Metaphysics while we continue to support Science. The change of mind that's needed will meet determined resistance from many quarters. Mass extinctions from climate change may deny the attempt altogether. The unconscious Child may need to continue its saga on another planet in another universe.

There’s meaning embedded in the idea that begins the sequence of Logic: the idea of Possibility. The idea that lies at the heart of Creation. Perhaps a gift of Logos-God that’s meant to inspire our efforts now. It’s We will not be denied. It’s Never give up.

Published on Leave a comment on What Is Dark Matter Telling Us?

Preface

Why bother with “mind” and “Logic”?

Behind any transgression is a mind whose ability to introspect, reflect, reason, evaluate, judge, and decide is under-developed, impaired, or both. Given that the human mind is both under-developed and impaired, the life we experience is seldom, if ever, free of transgressions.

The world I was born into had fallen into the pit of a Great Depression in between two devastating world wars. Three years into the second war it was by no means certain that the good guys would win. But even if they didn’t humanity would have carried on. That’s not a given any more. The same human mind that makes of life one uninterrupted transgression has put everything at risk with global warming.

When will minds change? When bodies tell them to. That’s not true for everyone but global politics seems to confirm it. Minds will change not when common sense prevails but when physical discomfort and limbic emotions trigger an instinctive fight-or-flight response. When the animal is rousted out of its cave or jungle lair to defend itself. The response of an animal threatened, not logic comprehending.

Why do my essays tire readers with abstruse philosophizing about irrelevance and impracticality when the enemy is at the gate? Why bother with “mind” and “logic” when it’s action we need? Why am I hunkered down in metaphysics, fussing with what’s beneath the surface of things, instead of answering the call to duty from the front lines?

Centuries of learning and we’re still not getting it right

It seems because my mind is answering another call: the call from Logic. A call I could refuse since it would violate Logic if I couldn’t. But I don’t. The impaired mind that’s behind all our transgressions – world wars, depressions, global warming, and the rest – betrays one compelling attribute: the absence of Logic. Why? Because Logic says in its situation humanity clearly needs guidance and it’s misled. Misled not necessarily by a malevolent guide, though certainly it may seem that way. But by not getting something right about humanity’s situation.

We’ve poured centuries of effort into learning,. Nearly every field of inquiry has made impressive gains. Yet who would argue that the promise of all these gains has been realized? That gains on the horizon will do any more than ease a task or extend life? Logic says humanity will still be misled, that it will need to end its resistance to Logic and open up to possibilities that it so far won’t consider.

Why trouble ourselves?

The essay that follows addresses one possibility: that humanity’s situation is not what it appears to be – literally. Instead of the hard-and-fast reality our senses make of it our situation is an illusion. A dream. A prospect that intrigues more of us privately, I suspect, than we let on publicly. But judging from the general mood most don’t want to go there. See no reason to go there. If humanity’s calamities have so far passed them by; if its situation seems real enough and it hasn’t brought about the end-of-days for everyone – not yet – why trouble ourselves?

If you’re of this opinion my essays won’t trouble you. You’ll neither get what our situation is telling us nor what I’m trying to get across about our situation. That if we change our minds about it; if we are willing to suppose that there’s another Reality that’s Real; that ours isn’t; realizing the difference may bring about the change in humanity’s thinking that its situation calls for.

To open minds to the right guide: to Logic

What it may accomplish is the opening of minds to Logic. To replacing the body-centered guide -- a perversion of ourselves, the caricature I call the Joker – that’s been misleading us with what our situation has needed all along: a mind-centered guide not misled and distracted by our material world of appearances.

The task my thoughts seem intent on is to help replace the wrong guide with the right guide. Will this “solve problems?” If the switch is made Logic tells me it could eventually solve everything. For minds only willing to change if bodies, in a state of discomfort and inflamed limbic emotions, tell them to change, aren’t just blocking progress. They’re threatening the survival of our species. They’re ultimately behind our planet’s Anthropocene mass extinction that may engulf us.

Minds guided by Logic won’t need to wait for existential threats. For narrow self-interests to be catered to before the interests of community come into play,. Won’t need to agonize over insanities and atrocities one after the other, like world wars, depressions, and global warming. Like stupidities that interfere with basic functions of governance that should be taken for granted. When we should pride ourselves on the stability of civilization instead of being mortified by its frailty.

“Dark matter” shouldn’t be a metaphor for “dark ages.” But with Logic still blocked by body-centered thinking; by every field of inquiry still captive to sensory perception; by humanity’s not getting its situation right, that’s where we may be headed. The flip side of the possibility this essay is about.

To marry science to Logic

What follows is hard on physics. Not because it hasn’t acquitted itself well but because it has. It doesn’t seem to realize just how well. Its brilliant discoveries put humanity on the threshold of a new paradigm, one that finally grasps the illusory nature of its physical surroundings and their inherent illogic. So that a mind-centered reflective humanity, duly aware of its precarious situation, can finally adjust its inquiries, its expectations and priorities, in philosophy, psychology, and theology, to a new Reality. To understanding that ends ambiguity, ends ambivalence, and promises a more hopeful outcome.

I love science. But I also love Logic. What, then, is this and other essays trying to accomplish? What is my book in progress, The Story of the Child, trying to accomplish? To bring them together. To change minds so that, finally, in this generation or the next, or maybe the one after that, we can solve problems. Without waiting for bodies and limbic emotions to get around to it. When it’s too late.

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What Is Dark Matter Telling Us?

The invincibility of sensory perception is no more

Dark matter is credited by physics with holding the universe together and making life possible. And yet it’s undetectable. Undetectable by our bodies' senses that all of science and mainstream philosophy, psychology, and theology swear by to distinguish between what’s real and what’s speculation. This is why dark matter is “dark”: to science it’s indisputably real and yet it isn’t. So are quanta, microscopic particles that aren’t always detectable, sometimes “entangled,” flouting the laws of physics with “superposition.” “Spooky” to Einstein rather than dark, but still a mystery that needs to be explained.

Dark matter is telling us that sensory perception is not the authority that it’s made out to be on what’s real. Its reputation is undeserved, its invincibility shattered. What’s real is no longer automatically assumed to be that which can be “proven” by senses. The door is now open to Mind. To Logic and Intuition where Logic has its home in the human mind.

Contradictory realities are not a logical possibility

Dark matter is telling us that our world and its universe are unreal. Because the only possible explanation for the unquestioned “reality” of something undetectable and therefore logically unreal, in a universe of appearances assumed to be real, is that the universe of appearances is unreal. A reality of un-appearance within a universe of appearance logically contradicts the reality of appearance. Only one can be real.

Contradictory realities are not a logical possibility. Either undetectable dark matter is real or detectable appearances are real, but not both. If the Logic of physics absolutely requires that undetectable dark matter be real then it must concede that detectable appearances are not real.

The universe of appearances along with its contradictory anti-matter / dark matter must be an illusion, its pose of reality undone by the logical necessity of reconciling opposites: matter and anti-matter. By acknowledging the rule of Logic that governs everything: everything has an implied opposite and of two opposites whose existence contradicts the other only one can be real. Everything that Is must have an implied opposite that isn’t. If anti-matter or its altered-state “dark matter” that’s undetectable can’t “exist” without contradicting a reality that must consist of detectable appearances, then either dark matter or appearances must go.

The challenge that dark matter presents to science is by no means unique or unprecedented. Quantum mechanics presents the same challenge on the same scale, because every corner of the universe of spacetime and matter that harbors dark matter is flooded with mysterious quanta, too. But while our minds can ignore microscopic particle behavior, they can’t ignore a cosmos in full view every night that fascinates. And now “dark matter” that’s woven into the very fabric of perception, essential to who we are and every living thing, is present and yet not present. A state that, for a field of inquiry that prides itself on rigorous “realism,” must be disconcerting if not intolerable.

Absent Now, absent Reality

As obvious as it must be that our universe of quantum mechanics and dark matter is an illusion it can’t compare with the evidence of Einstein’s special relativity. His stunning insight that, here, in this strange place, it is never Now. We occupy a bizarre category of time: “an ‘intermediate zone,’ an ‘extended present’; a zone that is neither past nor future.”

“Just now” does not exist. . . . In physics . . . “spacetime” (is) the set of all past and future events, but also those that are “neither-past-nor-future”; these do not form a single instant: they have a duration. . . . The present is like the flatness of Earth: an illusion. . . . saying “here and now” makes sense, but. . . saying “now” to designate events “happening now” throughout the universe makes no sense. (Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems (2017, pp. 71-76)

Our “intermediate zone” is a twilight zone. if we could occupy “now” it would transplant us into a Reality and state of mind wholly unlike ours. That physics has sat on this discovery for over a century without acknowledging the doubt it casts on the reality of spacetime and matter is as stunning as the discovery itself. Compelling affirmation for DNA scientist James D. Watson’s admission that “a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.” (The Double Helix (1968, p. 14)

Does physics not stand face-to-face with revelation without recognizing what it’s looking at? Without minds being changed? If it’s not Now then we occupy a dream, an Alice-in-Wonderland where all manner of strange things happen. Where we go about our business as though, as Ivan Karamazov would put it, “everything is lawful.” Dostoevsky’s character ended his part in The Brothers Karamazov with “brain fever.” Fitting diagnosis for a physics taking its cues from Rod Serling in its Twilight Zone.

“The stuff that dreams are made of”

Rovelli observes that Einstein’s general relativity offers “a glimpse of reality . . . that seems to be made of the same stuff our dreams are made of but is nevertheless more real than our clouded daily dreaming.” (op cit. p. 90) If so, dark matter must account for a very large part of the stuff. Is it a stretch to carry the thought one step farther? To theorize that it is a dream?

What could possibly explain it if the “reality” of physics can’t? What supplies Logic when the logic of matter can’t explain matter that won’t meet the definition of matter? How and why is the rationale for physics falling short? Where is the flaw in its Logic? Because circumstantial evidence for the existence of dark matter is irrefutable. It’s there. What could explain it if physics can’t? What premise of physics’ “realism” is leading our thinking astray? How did physics come to be unrealistic?

Where matter ends, Mind has always been there

One theoretical possibility is that our universe of spacetime and matter is not real. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of because it may be a dream. A premise we won’t hear from physics because an entire profession, an entire field of inquiry going back to classical antiquity, is conscience-bound to deny it. Trapped by the boundaries of its context, Immobilized by limitations placed on logic, and unable to navigate. Stuck in the finiteness of its own making and of no further use in this phase of our journey. That requires another mind that thinks, another logic that navigates, another vision that can see. With no less rigor and discipline than minds guided by the senses but now minds guided by thought. By everything that Logic is and does.

If the universe is a dream and dark matter proves it, what then explains it? What is its logic? What produces dreams? Minds do. Minds that are unconscious. Asleep. How and why did our universe – and maybe many more – come to be the subject of a dream by an unconscious Mind? What other explanation could there be for what preceded the Big Bang? The physicist Roger Penrose (Cycles of Time, 2010) has postulated that the universe was preceded by an earlier universe and questioned assumptions about singularities, the Big Bang, and the need for quantum gravity. But even if he’s right, where did all this stuff that dreams are made of come from?

Physics that leaves off where matter leaves off can’t answer by definition. The laws of science take us to the brink and leave off just as they do with the origin of what we experience as life. Where matter ends Mind must have been there all along. Not just before the universe of spacetime and matter appears but all the while that we, our bodies’ senses, have been witnessing it. Our senses assuring us that, yes, it’s happening, it’s real, when all they’re attesting to is themselves. Matter on the witness stand testifying to its own presence, as if this were enough. As if this were not a conflict of interest. Circular reasoning. A logical absurdity.

Mind and its miscreation that made unreality real

So who is this Mind and what is its story? How did it lose consciousness? Why would it project itself into a dream of physics so bizarre that physics itself can’t make sense of it? If it ever was in possession of its senses how did it conjure a dream so senseless, so disfigured by grotesque contradictions, as our world? If it was ever in a safe place how did it come to imagine itself in a place so precarious, savage, and depraved, as ours?

The answer that human speculation has assumed over the ages is that something went wrong. Dark suspicions that it was our fault, rooted in our wounded psyches, have insinuated themselves into our culture, contaminated our souls, and condemned us to lives on the cross of victimhood. As though what happened there must be of the same ambiguity and profanity as what happens here. In the “dark matter” of the human mind. As though the “laws” that produce chaos and entropy here must rule there.

The “story” of the Mind that’s dreaming, that the dream itself has so far produced, alienates the scientific mind for a reason. It’s nuts. Why admit philosophy, psychology, and theology into physics if they can’t do any better than this?

The story, once it’s cut free from the dream, once it’s freed from the laws of chaos and is allowed to access Logic, makes sense. It’s plausible, supported by the implications of Logic going all the way back to the beginning. To where there was Logic and human thought and feeling can go no farther. And, yes, something did go wrong. It wasn’t anticipated or intentional because logically it couldn’t Be.

Venturing into the unknown, into the unexpected, is ingrained in the Worth of Creation. And if something went wrong, a circumstance unanticipated or unintended, then the result wouldn’t be wrongdoing; it would be miscreation. Miscreation that could throw Mind out of the Reality of Creation into another reality, by rendering it unconscious. To prevent the Force of consciousness that animates new life from animating what doesn’t belong. It’s a state of mind familiar to us. But since we’re conditioned to associate bodies with matter instead of mind we miss its significance: its capacity to dream. To make unreality seem very real.

Who can help fix what went wrong?

Our world is plausibly the result of miscreation caused by Mind rendered unconscious by the nature of Creation. By circumstances that are part of its normal process and structure. Miscreation that carries no trace of wrongdoing, by commission or omission. A circumstance or event that caused an unintended effect, no more than an unavoidable gap in Knowledge. Logical within the context of what was known and so not an intentional violation of Logic. A gap in Knowledge, in Awareness, that isn’t and can’t be “all-knowing,” but is evolving. If it has any part in Creation how could it be otherwise?

The gap in Knowledge quite logically may be our privilege, our honor, to help fix. Instead of milling about aimlessly in our primordial soup of amino acids, waiting for a bolt of lightning to save us, maybe we have a purpose. And maybe it isn’t beyond comprehension. Maybe we have a job to do, to get us back to the job Mind was about before something went wrong. That is, if we can ever break free from the tyranny of appearances, of sensory perception.

Another take on sensory perception from dark matter

What does it imply about dark matter if our universe isn’t real? If it actually is a dream? Two opposite states can’t co-exist in Reality. If the existence of one thing implies the existence of its opposite the Logic of Governance decrees that only one can be real. Reality-Creation wouldn’t be governable, couldn’t hold together, otherwise.

When matter and anti-matter showed up at the beginning of our universe, only one could be real. Thus the mystery of what became of anti-matter. Thus speculation that there are other universes where anti-matter may dominate instead of matter. Anti-matter here became unreal. And yet, as we’ve all learned about opposites, they may only be shadows but they don’t go away.

How does something unreal fit into the logic, the nature, of an environment that’s already unreal? That’s made up of appearances. By disappearing. By breaking with unreality’s general rule that if a thing is to exist it must be part of appearances. Must be part of the illusion, the dream. Anti-matter forced into a state of unreality within a state that’s already unreal, logically had to become invisible. To become undetectable to the body’s senses.

For it’s sensory perception that’s relied upon to certify the “reality” of matter and to exclude all else. The same source that physics relies upon to certify the reality of matter cancels the reality of anti-matter by making it undetectable. And in so doing gives dark matter the only place it can occupy logically in an unreal universe: the darkness of undetectability.

In the other Reality creations are made real by the Consciousness of Mind – by Mind’s Awareness – relying on the Authority of Logic responsible for governance. In our world, matter that’s unreal is made real by minds relying on the body’s senses. Anti-matter could not register with sensory perception, be made real, and still occupy a place in the universe alongside matter. Two opposites cannot co-exist. Anti-matter had to yield, and where it’s to be accounted for is dark matter – unreality in an unreal universe.

Another take on physics from dark matter

Everything is defined by Logic according to what it is and what it does. Its central attribute is its use in the Reality of Creation. Because Creation itself is use: the purpose and meaning of its context, to take a stand for Worth. When its logical opposite is worthlessness, synonym for nothingness, statelessness. To be part of the Reality of Creation is to be put to work creating, affirming, and reciprocating Worth. The Worth of Being-Life and therefore the Worth of Creation itself. Is to have a role defined and assigned by the Logic of Governance to a place in the interconnected network of roles and relationships that make up Reality. That Create.

Physics defines dark matter by what it does. It has a use. But physics so far has no idea of what it is. It won’t consider the possibility that it’s anti-matter made unreal and therefore undetectable because to do so would expose the unreality of physics. The fact that by its sacred and inviolate premise, that matter is real, it makes of itself one part science and one part religion. Like the universe: one part sanity, the other spooky. An inquisition in the form of bodies’ senses condemning doubters with verdicts of blasphemy, with heresy that warrants excommunication.

Hypotheses to rescue physics from its cloud

Physics might understand dark matter, quantum mechanics, and maybe even quantum gravity with only one change in its process; if it allowed itself to hypothesize that matter is unreal. To hypothesize that the universe is the stuff that dreams are made of because it may be a dream. More “real” certainly than “our clouded daily dreaming,” but, for all its vastness and seeming consequence, still a cloud. Physics might also do well with another hypothesis: that matter is relational to Mind.

The science, Logic, and limits of hypothesizing

Science distances itself from philosophy, psychology, and theology because they’re perceived to be casual with facts and Logic compared to the rigor and discipline of science. To its “iron rule” extolled by Michael Strevens in The Knowledge Machine (2020). Their comfort with different hypothesized realities is perceived to be unprofessional and inexcusable, hardly less so than the “alternate facts” of politics.

What reality does science recognize as inalterably fixed in place if not that which answers to its self-interest? If not captive to bodies whose minds can and do question it.

Physics’ premise that matter must be real puts an artificial limit on its ability to hypothesize. Its premise that it must not yield to philosophy, the field of inquiry concerned with reality, limits its ability to interpret. Its premise that metaphysics, the search beyond appearances to their essence, is similarly non-grata, deprives if of the very attribute that its subject – appearances – demands. Insisting that its subject is real while depriving itself of the ability to consider another point of view is unscientific. It’s not just advocacy for self-interest, the usual pitfall for human logic. Given the lofty aims of science’s “quest for knowledge,” it’s unjustifiable.

Hypothesizing that matter isn’t real, that our universe is an illusion, needn’t be motivated by an alien cause when it’s amply justified by physics’ own discoveries. What is dark matter telling us? It may not be telling so much as mocking. The mask of the Joker, our opposite self, looking back at us with wry amusement because, by our own instrument of measurement, our bodies’ senses, the force of nature we put our faith in to hold the universe together and make life possible – dark matter – is nothing. The Joker's signature. The universe is a cup only half full, and what to make of it? That the cosmos is divinity as Plato thought, and maybe the deist Einstein, too? Or a fraud: something promised that can never deliver, like the simplicity and elegance of a calculation that eluded Einstein to the end. The unifying theory of quantum gravity that eludes physicists still.

Where and when does Reason take over and rationalizing end?

The implications of Logic are to be followed, not controlled

Who defines Reality? Is it science? Theology? Philosophy? Psychology? Or would it be Logic itself? Are we not dependent on Logic’s big picture to guide us, since not one of us has the big picture? Can our self-interests take precedence over the roles and relationships that Logic manages with its definitions and implications? Over the self-interest of Being, the stance of Life? The harmony that is the Reality of Creation?

Would the implications of Logic ever go along to get along and yet remain “logical”? Would they yield to the influence of their patrons? Are they ready to perform tricks at the crack of a whip? Is science that’s baffled by quantum mechanics and dark matter not pleased with the tricks its domesticated and trained “logic” performs? Is further domestication and training the remedy? Can matter already enshrined in reality be domesticated and trained some other way? Appeased? Placated?

Or has the time come for science, philosophy, psychology, and theology all to seriously consider a different Truth, the one their cramped self-interest has been avoiding? The Truth that the implications of Logic, the Free Spirit of Inquiry, are to be followed, not controlled.

If quantum mechanics and dark matter imply that matter may not be real, that there may some better, more logical theory to explain the universe and life than the one that’s failing us, then this is a fact that we had best acknowledge. If we don’t acknowledge it, this becomes another fact with its own implications that must be acknowledged. The more we misperceive, the more we will misjudge.

Logic governs us or we are not governed. We don't define Logic: it defines us. Build this reality into our self-interest and see what happens to misperceptions and misjudgments. Not when matter changes to fit our paradigms but when minds change to fit Logic.

The self-interest of Logic is infinitely inclusive

The geologic forces uplifting democracy and the Truth are more powerful by far than the forces that would suppress them. Logic’s definitions write the rules. Reality and Creation require Governance. Governance from the bottom up. Governance that derives its meaning, purpose, and motivation from circumstances on the ground, from ever-changing contexts that form the process and structure of evolution. From Creation, the extension and expansion of Life. The Choice, affirmation, and reciprocation of Worth. All of it driven by inexorable force: the Implications of Logic that can never end, that will find a way through and around any insane, illusory obstacle placed in their path. The force of ever-changing contexts and the implications of Logic called upon to manage and govern the Reality of Creation.

The implications of Logic can’t be set in motion toward Reality and Truth by insisting that motion begin with an arbitrarily exclusive self-interest. If Logic has self-interest it would be infinitely inclusive; its evolution through Creation would encompass Everything now and Everything to come.

Physics cannot legitimately aim its inquiries in a logical direction if self-interest demands that an open philosophical issue – the reality of matter, the body’s senses and its sensed environment -- be excluded. Can’t succeed if one profession is contented with things the way they are, sees no reason to inquire further, and doesn’t want to be inconvenienced. Isn’t open to questioning the Logic behind its shaky premises, the source of its confusion.

Logic doesn’t limit itself in its questioning. It doesn’t question only that which won’t inconvenience the questioner. It’s a free spirit whose implications must be followed wherever they lead.

Parting with Logic is parting with Reality

If energy that produces particles isn’t under the direction of Mind, if Force isn’t an agent rather than its own source, then there can be no order, structure, or discipline to Reality-Creation. There would be no purpose, meaning, or sense to it. There would be no Logic, no Governance.

The object of metaphysics is to establish not only provenance but intent. Without intent there is no order, no point; nothing is accomplished. The “quest for knowledge” is the quest for intent that can only come from Mind.

Walling off the free spirit of inquiry walls off both Mind and Logic. Logic is Free. To get it right its practitioners must follow wherever it leads. Is physics following where dark matter’s implications lead? Parting with Logic is parting with Reality.

Force turned against Logic by Mind that’s unconscious

The exhortations of physics to remain disciplined in its premises would be laudable if its search for answers didn’t call its premises into question. The mind that imagines:

• that Logic is its agent and will do what it’s told
• that it may only accept premises, posit hypotheses, weigh considerations, and present findings that meet its host’s definition of what’s practical, useful, relevant, and “realistic” rather than its own
• that the spirit of inquiry must be denied its freedom lest it uncover inconvenient truths

must be a mind that’s unconscious and dreaming, in mortal conflict with itself. It must be mindless. For it denies itself the most elementary understanding of Logic:

• that it can be no one’s agent
• that all thought, all feeling, begins with Logic
• that its implications must lead where they will or fail to lead at all
• that its source must connect of its own will to what it delivers
• that cause must connect of its own will to effect or it can be neither source nor cause.

Logic cannot be owned, possessed, controlled, or dominated by any influence and still Be the purpose and meaning that is its own source, its own Logic.

Energy in service to Logic -- Force that gives thoughts their consequences, causes their effects, implications their interconnections -- cannot be turned against Logic by Mind whose thoughts and feelings align with Logic, seek harmony, and Create with the protection, support, and authority of its Governance. By a mind that’s Conscious: thinking, feeling, evaluating, and judging.

Force can only be turned against Logic by a mind that’s not conscious. By a mind that’s unconscious. By mind corrupted by the thought of separation, by the act of projection, by the insanity that produced the dream: the insane hallucination that is our incomprehensible body-sensed world. A world seeming to make sense on a human scale that degenerates into bizarre nonsense on any other scale.

The false innocence of victimhood in a shared world

Force can only be turned against Logic by the endless conflict that is our tormented internal world. Why do our minds not see this? Why do they refuse to see it? Because the unconscious mind that projected them has deluded itself. Imagines that Logic is dead, replaced by a substitute more favorable to its interests because it can be controlled. Because instead of divining purpose and meaning from circumstances with Logic, from the bottom up, it can get by with a formula imposed from the top down. Mindlessly -- without thought or feeling, without mind or Logic at all. Because if Logic is dead mind and all its functions must be unnecessary. It must be dead as well.

This would be the “governing” agent of our incomprehensible, tormented world: corrupted mind that has taken dead aim at Logic. At Governance itself. Mindlessness. This is the mind of science that imagines that it can be and do whatever it wants because it owns its subject. Because the source, protection, and authority that should be its guide has been made its captive, possessed. A state logically impossible either for the free spirit of Inquiry or for the free spirit of Love.

And so neither is with us. Neither Love nor Logic nor the reciprocity that holds Interconnectedness in place -- the Reality and Creation, the Home, that unconscious mind, a stranger to the Truth, yearns to return to. Home that it will never find until it lets go of delusion. Lets go of the insanity of ownership, possession, control, and dominance, the false innocence of victimhood, in a shared world. Until it chooses of its own free will to be guided by Logic. Until it regains Consciousness and sanity.

Two Necessities of Logic

Parents in the other Reality function within the Necessity of its Logic: that opposites must be unreal. Therefore, they cannot make unreality real. Necessity also requires that they do everything to preserve their Child’s Free Will. Why? Because it’s essential to Creation’s affirmation of Worth. Essential because the Worth of anything can’t be determined without its being freely chosen. By a stakeholder invested in it. Because Creation is Worth and its opposite is worthlessness, gravity that pulls all of us and our universe into the black hole of the void.

Another Necessity of Logic: to be free, choice must be conscious of a range of possibilities, those that are known, available, and not arbitrarily excluded. The Child may not share the Parents’ power of Consciousness to make Creations Real because its unconsciousness is a possibility. The consequences of unconsciousness can’t be anticipated or known to Reality-Consciousness because they are unreal.

Two Necessities are thus built into Logic’s definition of who the Child’s Parents are and what they do:

(1) Do not make unreality real, therefore do not be Conscious of opposites or their possibility.
(2) Preserve and protect the Child’s Free Will.

These are givens in Reality. But within the Child’s state of unconsciousness and compromised Free Will, where we appear to be, they are not.

Two corresponding imperatives are implied by their unreality-opposites:

(1) Make unreality real
(2) Compromise free will by taking Child-mind captive.

Two forces that block human progress

There can be no tension between Being and non-being over conflicting imperatives in the harmony of Reality governed by Logic. But in the unreality that is our world, corrupted by the dream of opposites made real by an unconscious mind, the tension is constant and, at times, unbearable. It is the fallout of Logic’s rule that opposites must be unreal, the price to be paid by an unconscious Child for a logical impossibility: Being without the shadow code of non-being, its illusory opposite.

Forces that block human progress are mainly those that (1) make unreality real and (2) compromise the Child’s / humanity’s Free Will. What are dark matter, quantum mechanics, and never-Now telling us?

(1) that science that insists that spacetime-matter is real in the face of evidence to the contrary is deluded by Being’s shadow code opposite. By the Joker. “Questing for knowledge” instead of searching for Reality and Truth is making unreality real.

(2) that science that disrupts the free flow of Logic’s implications, that attempts to control the Free Spirit of Logic that is the source of the Child’s Free Will, is undermining Free Choice essential to the Creation, Affirmation, and Reciprocation of Worth, the purpose of Creation. It is compromising the Child’s and humanity’s Free Will.

Harsh lesson from a “wonderful world”

Physics hypothesizing that the universe may be unreal can make better sense of particle superposition, never-Now, dark matter, and other strangeness by assuming that the “other Reality” is governed by Logic and our unreality is not. By assuming that our world is ruled instead by Logic’s opposite: a reverse mirror-image caricature of everything that makes sense. In other words, the two worlds are exact opposites and it’s ours that bears the face of the Joker, not the other.

Protests from diehards who prefer Louis Armstrong or Walt Disney rhapsodizing about our “wonderful world” must inevitably account for the calculations of quantum mechanics. Those that unfailingly validate the lack of cooperation from particles -- particles that prefer the permissiveness of Bohr’s stewardship to the strict discipline of Einstein. If particles, time, and dark matter refuse to accommodate wishful thinking about an orderly universe then perhaps it’s time we changed our thinking. Time we paid attention to what they’re trying to tell us, face the possibility of another Truth, and accommodate them.

Would it inconvenience physics? Sure! Did it inconvenience Big Tobacco to resist the truth about its product? Does it inconvenience the fossil fuel industry to come clean about its product? Didn’t the Church eventually have to own up to the harm done by its Inquisition and pedophilia?

Could physics, in the intractability of its own misperceptions sanctified by its “quest for knowledge,” have produced its own demographic of victims needing reparation? A humanity not so much duped by appearances as ignoring them? A humanity facing extinction because it prefers the laws of chaos sanctioned by science to the laws of cause and effect?

The Joker mocking us from dark matter, never-Now, and errant particles may have a harsh lesson to relate. That is, if we would listen.

Published on Leave a comment on 2nd Footnote to “Logic”: On the Performance of Science

The logical case for science giving up its illogical insistence that matter is real begins with this: it judges all that sensory perception detects to be measurable and therefore real. Plato held that what is Real is not the object but the idea or thought of it. He thereby took the locus of determination outside of matter, where it did not belong, and placed it within Mind where it did belong. He did so not on the basis of “verifiable” scientific experimentation but on the basis of Logic. He was a “rationalist,” a philosopher who trusted Reason to guide him to Reality and Truth.

Yet he believed in the reality of the material cosmos – the inspiration of what he perceived to be an expression of the Divine. Had he reconciled this belief with his doubt that the uninspiring human body and its material trappings could also be real he might have followed sensory perception into the study of matter. He might even have done so with some of the passion he devoted to Mind.

Aristotle’s paradigm shift away from Plato’s rationalism toward science, the belief that the study of matter, the stuff of sensory perception, can lead to Reality and Truth, was not, as science would have us believe, a categorical renunciation of Plato’s Logic nor of its theories. It was simply an acknowledgement that they couldn’t be proven. While sensory perception, with its access to plants and animals and the like, does offer a kind of “proof” for the theories of science.

While neither Plato nor Aristotle could go anywhere with the belief that the reality of an object lay in the thought of it, or with Plato’s hesitation over its unreality, both were in agreement that Mind is nevertheless Real. Both were therefore in agreement that an object did not depend for its reality on its being perceived by the body’s senses. Why? Because Mind does not depend for its Reality on being perceived by the body’s senses. Science that would have us believe that only that which can be thus perceived is provably real contradicts the reality of Mind. Contradicts the source of all of science’s contributions to the “quest for knowledge”: Mind. Contradicts itself, the minds of scientists who engage in self-referential thinking, the absurd notion that bodies that belong to the same material environment, subject to identical “laws” of science, can objectively judge its reality.

Hawking’s “quest for knowledge” belongs in quotes because, with circular reasoning, we must acknowledge that even with sensory perception to guide science we can never truly “know” anything. We can perceive it, but perception is perception. It is, in fact, not even the body’s senses that make perception but the psychological act of projection. We are a long way from objects telling us anything about themselves but their appearances, and appearances are deceiving. In fact, this may well be their main purpose: to deceive, and science that puts its faith in appearances may be its willing victim.

To approach Knowledge of our Self and the environment that is our true Home – our origin and our destination – is to fall back on the Intuition, the reflections and thoughts, of the rationalist Plato for guidance. To fall back on Logic, because the body and its ally science, that conveniently ignores the immateriality of Mind, is leading us in circles. To the behavior of matter – quantum mechanics – that calculates to perfection but doesn’t add up.

What happened to the celebrity of Einstein and the promise of physics: the theory of everything? This was to be the crowning achievement of Aristotle’s instinct. It disappeared and along with it the fanfare of physics. We continue on with the labors of science, breaking new ground in other fields, still refusing to accept the Logic of Mind that Reality need not and does not depend on the sensate body. Science that lionizes the truth refuses to face fact. Science that prides itself on the intellectual rigor of its theories and their predictions, on impeccable Logic, accepts blatant contradiction. Science that purges itself of religious and political bias indulges in its own institutional bias worthy of the Church.

In science we aren’t dealing with an expression of Plato’s or Aristotle’s ideals. We’re dealing with a perversion of a rationalist’s ideal of the highest and best use of Mind: to seek Reality and Truth by whatever means that meet the test of Logic.

It is time, over a century since Bohr and the Copenhagen Interpretation acknowledged it, for science and philosophy both to turn to Logic. To acknowledge that the simultaneous reality of two opposing states – Mind not-matter and matter not-mind – does not meet the test of Logic. To acknowledge that between Mind and matter, the opposite matter can’t be real. To assume otherwise is to contradict Plato and Aristotle and declare that Mind is not Real.

There will always be much to learn from the study of matter, but finding Reality and the Truth behind appearances isn’t it. The “quest for knowledge” must turn back in earnest to Plato and his unfinished philosophy. To Logic.

Does all this make me a doubter of science, a denier? My prayers at weekly prayer meetings in my youth invariably concluded with appeals to God for special consideration, not on my behalf but on behalf of scientists. And for this I was teased. My concern about their performance is motivated by admiration, not animosity. I do not wish to weaken their intellectual, cultural, or political support but to strengthen it. To make their heroic work less vulnerable to attack from their unthinking doubters, not more so. If my views appear to put me in the company of the opposition, I am the loyal opposition. I want science and its “quest for knowledge” to succeed, not to fail.

So, No, I am not a denier, nor am I an enemy of Democracy. I am a fan of both who understands that Free Choice cannot endure without the Free Spirit of Inquiry. We just have to get it right.