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Published on 2 Comments on Mind Plus Circumstance: Where the Action Is

The original premise

The original-archetypal circumstance was the Necessity of circumstance: a premise. A premise that any state or no state is circumstance that cannot ever be at rest. Not at the “beginning” because there can be no “beginning” without time, nor at the “end” because there’s no “end” to the eternal Now. And because circumstance will still be a Necessity that moves forward with Logic-Love.

The question what was the original circumstance that preceded Reality-Creation is meaningless in the context of eternal Now without beginning-ending. Its meaning is limited to another context: the context of the instrument whose function is implied by the premise of circumstance: to give circumstance existence in a state of Reality-Creation that has Order and Worth. The instrument that is Mind composed of Logic inseparable with Love. And its function was the “original” implication of Logic and the value / relationship-connection of Love.

Unrest at the “beginning”

Within the context of Mind and its function the meaning of the “original” circumstance was unrest.  Circumstance poised-unconsummated until the Connection-Relationship between circumstance and Mind was established that processed it into existence. That thereby set Reality-Creation in motion with the necessary attributes of Logic / Order and Love / Purpose-Worth.

“Circumstance” defines the state of anything or nothing, state or statelessness. There is no “state” that is not in some way “circumstance.” It necessarily implies the function of Mind to process it. If a definition is needed of the “tao” that exists beyond any discernible purpose or meaning, right or wrong, it would be “circumstance,” because circumstance and Mind are one and the same. One cannot exist without the other.

“Unrest” defines the “original” state of circumstance because it necessitated the function of Mind, they’re inseparable, and the connection necessarily implies a reciprocal-infinite process: circumstances feeding into Mind reciprocating its implications and relationships to produce more-changing circumstances.

The pitch for self-delusion

The idea that Reality-Creation began with a state of rest that could remain unchanged in perpetuity, to which our souls may return at some point to linger forever in “heaven,” is an impossibility in any context. It’s a deliberate deception whose purpose isn’t to entice us into paradise after death. It’s to set off the excitement of stuff happening in our alternate “reality” against the boredom of “heaven” and so to keep us firmly locked into our alternate “reality.”

To keep us captive to our self-delusion because the alternative is worse. To pitch reincarnation that keeps the “action” going here -- endless cycles of cruelty and injustice, fear, guilt, and existential threats -- instead of waking up to the scam and finding our way Home. When we realize that what’s going on with Mind-circumstance in Reality-Creation and our role in it is where the action is. And the only “action” here is ending our delusion.

Published on Leave a comment on Whither Goest Thou? Reflections on the Missions of Institutions Devoted to A Course in Miracles and the Work of its Teacher Kenneth Wapnick

Tao reveals itself differently to each individual, according to his own nature. The man of deeds, for whom kindness and the love of his fellow man are supreme, discovers the tao of cosmic events and calls it supreme kindness -- ‘God is love.’ The contemplative man, for whom calm wisdom is supreme, discovers the tao of the universe and calls it supreme wisdom. The common people live from day to day, continually borne and nourished by tao, but they know nothing of it; they see only what meets the eye. For the way of the superior man, who sees not only things but the tao of things, is rare. The tao of the universe is indeed kindness and wisdom; but essentially tao is also beyond kindness and wisdom. . . . [T]his life-giving activity [growth], to which all things owe their existence, is something purely spontaneous. . . . [T]ao is omnipresent; everything that exists, exists in and through it. [The I Ching or Book of Changes, Bollingen Series XIX (Princeton University Press 1950, pp. 298-299]

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Trust and Relationship begin with Fact

Jesus informs us in A Course in Miracles that we have the choice when to learn its lesson but not whether, as though it could not possibly change or be changed. As though it were cast in concrete, and yet he also informs us that it is not a “bible.” He cautions us not to treat it as the holy Word of God, absolute Truth with which to condemn and reject all who fail to accept it. Why not if he means what he says: we’re screwed if we don’t comply? All that is in the Course, that focuses on the darkness within the human Psyche, the pain and anguish of guilt, is explanation meant for us to understand just how badly screwed we already are.

Though they concentrate on why the Course cannot be a bible the reflections that follow cannot imply that its lesson can be ignored. Why? Because the laws of cause and effect emanate from circumstances. That in their constellations change but in their individual parts may not change. For these are the stuff with which the purpose and meaning of their compositions, their contexts, is revealed. This is where the Force of Necessity comes from, not their explanation or interpretation but from fact.

The works of Logic and Love in Relationship with their Child, Free Choice, that make up Creation, are part of evolution but not the facts of Reality they’re based on. The Force of Logic and Love depends upon it, for this is the immutable Rule of Law that applies to Logic and Love as to everything else. That gives them their legitimacy. That enables and empowers Trust essential to all Relationships in Reality. Fact.

Uncompromising Fact that can’t be ignored

It is fact that cannot be ignored in the lesson of the Course that takes away choice. The fact that Kenneth Wapnick, its teacher, refers to as its “uncompromising non-dualism.” Uncompromising because the human condition is defined by its unreality. Because it derives its state from the condition of our ancestral Mind, the Child: its unconsciousness. If the state of Child-Mind is defined by its unconsciousness, that cannot be part of Reality defined by Consciousness, that cannot evolve, then we, projections in its dream, are also in a state of unconsciousness. In a state of unreality.

There cannot be dual realities. Only one can be Real. Though Jesus has promised never to leave us “comfortless” he can’t do it by denying fact. The denial of fact is the stock-in-trade of the Child’s self-delusion, the magician that is the error we, projections of Free Choice, must freely choose to correct. Detectable by no more obvious attribute than its dexterity with untruth, the sleight of hand of illusion, the lies of deception. “Making it up as it goes along.”

Form that must change, content that cannot change

How we approach our task, how we apply the lesson, will vary from individual to individual. And so it compounds error to treat the Course that was addressed to two individuals, two personalities, in their time and place, as holy writ for us in our personalities, our time and place. It won’t fit. And if the task of governance is to fit in harmony it will be a violation of Logic and Love who govern in harmony.

The form of the lesson must change even if its content can’t. Our alternate “reality” is unreal. Fact.

The Course is an act of Logic and Love

The business end of Mind in Reality is its two main components Logic and Love, whose function is to source everything necessary for the Worth of Creation. Everything under the law: the laws of cause and effect that stand for the values of Logic and Love, wisdom and compassion. Maintained in place by the Authority of the Interconnectedness of Soul that is Innocence without opposites and by the Authority of Truth that is Necessity empowered by Energy -- Force under the direction of benevolence, the Logic and Love of governance. Of Mind.

A Course in Miracles is an act of Mind, one part Logic, the other part Love. Each part a set of functions designed to help the unconscious Child to regain Consciousness through its projections. Through the minds and hearts of the occupants of an alternate “reality” when doing so doesn’t interfere with Free Choice.

Minds and hearts corrupted by the code that defines the Child’s opposite, its shadow. Impossibility that is unreality. The unreal code that is the opposite of Logic and Love, wisdom and compassion. The opposite of Mind, a reversion to unthinking will and emotion, instinct and action that distinguish uncivil animal from civil animal. From human. That conjure within Mind unconscious the uniquely human animal. A horror of insanity composed of impossibilities: absolute authority, absolute freedom, and absolute truth. The same impossibilities that lured unconscious Child into its dream of an alternate “reality” and now lure it toward self-destruction. The “triumph of the will” that is the Child’s shadow-code, a magician. Self-delusion.

The force of the tribe

The act of Mind that is A Course in Miracles gains traction toward the Child’s awakening from self-delusion through equal emphasis on its two main parts: Logic and Love. Emphasis that necessarily contends in unreality with resistance and opposition to both. With an authoritarian mindset deluded by absolutes into specialness: thought and feeling concentrated on itself. The shadow authoritarian ideal: self without opposites, a perversion of the Innocence of Psyche-Soul without opposites.

The pull of specialness in unreality interferes with the Course’s application by shifting its emphasis in two ways: from Logic to Love and from Love that is feeling that shares to its opposite, feeling that monopolizes. From feeling-inclusive to feeling-exclusive. Feeling that is Worth to feeling that is worthlessness.

The force behind specialness that works its will is the force of the tribe, the human version of animal-herd. The invention of the human authoritarian mindset that degenerates into mob psychology: a herd of enraged humans feeling and acting by mindless instinct as one. The force that interferes is sociability. The pretense of “oneness” enforced by the rules of going along to get along. Present in every human tribal activity, for it is the main function of brain distinct from Mind.

For the Love of Truth and Honesty

Brain whose self-identity is tribe. Whose task is tribal dominance by act of predatory animal will domesticated by sociability. Pretense that is likability, niceness, and pleasantness, that is until the inevitable conflict and civility gives way to uncivility. To the discipline not of sociability but to the law of the jungle. Kill or be killed.

Emphasis that tilts toward Love and away from Logic in the work of the Course does so in service to neither but to pretense. To the agenda of resistance and opposition to keep humanity in line through the iron will of tribe. The Love of the Course is not and never was likability and pleasantness to disarm and distract. It is and always has been caring for the values, the Truth and Honesty of Logic and Love. To enable and empower the sovereignty and Worth of individuality that is Free Choice, not will that is captive to predatory tribal instinct.

Logic and Love, equal and inseparable

Sociability is at cross-purposes with the Course. Its discipline of tribal integrity gets in our way anytime that niceness, agreeability, and pleasantness -- mockeries of Love -- are allowed to devalue or displace the Truth and Honesty of Logic. We serve Truth and Honesty by serving the cause of Logic equally with Love. The cause of wisdom equally with compassion. The state role-modeled by Jesus through the Course: the authority of gentle loving kindness. Authority that is the Logic of Love and the Love of Logic.

If to make the Course an absolute of anything is to kill it, to make it sociability of any kind will also kill it. If it is not “tribe” it cannot be “social.” It is an act of Mind, not brain. Mind that is in equal measure Logic and Love, equal and inseparable.

Mind and possibility at the beginning

The laws of cause and effect speak for the state of Mind that adheres at any point in evolution. In the sequence of the implications of Logic and the connections of Love in their response to circumstances that change in turn in response to the implications of Logic and the connections of Love. An interactive process mirrored in the evolution of English common law, the basis for American jurisprudence. A reciprocal process of questioning established precedent as well as its application to new issues in new contexts defined by changing circumstances. If there is no stopping change then there can be no stopping reconsideration both of the application of established precedent and the law that it’s based on.

The laws of cause and effect spoken for in the Course were not there at the beginning. What was there at the beginning was circumstance implied by Logic: Mind and possibility charged with its definition, the functions of Logic and Love, to respond to possibility with an act of Creation. With thought and feeling, ideas, reasoning, and values. An act that could not have been preceded by an opposite. By an impossibility, for opposite by implication of Logic -- by definition -- cannot precede the source of its contradiction.

The work in progress that is Reality and Creation

The laws of cause and effect spoken for by the Course are Necessity to that point in the evolution of Creation. Of the open-ended forward movement of Logic and Love that is implied by eternity, the eternal Now. The laws of cause and effect that are the Necessity of Truth, the Truth that supports the lesson of the Course, cannot be a “bible” because it cannot be absolute. In the movement of Logic and Love in their eternal dance of interaction with circumstance nothing can be absolute. Nothing can stand unquestioned when nothing can stop the process. When nothing can stop Creation driven by change that is question. If anything is “absolute” it is eternal question that implies the impossibility of absolute, the eternal answer that is and shall always remain a work in progress. The Course is no exception -- a work in progress integral to the process Creation and the structure of Reality that are a work in progress.

Marketing its lies to an unconscious and disempowered Child as the absolute truth is the mode of its shadow code of impossibilities. Not its Parents, Logic and Love, but a predator. The illusionist that lured it into captivity and keeps it there with its illusions: absolute authority. absolute freedom, and absolute truth. With arbitrary rule backed by the authority of law that’s status quo beyond change because it’s beyond questioning: a “Holy Bible.” A self-deluded fool’s perversion of governance that enables and empowers Creation with support from the bottom up that’s under the law. Law that necessarily expands with experience and Knowledge. With the ever-broadening context that is evolution -- Reality and Creation.

The dynamics of function 

To focus on what A Course in Miracles does is to focus on its function. Function is an attribute of Logic-Love’s definition of Reality-Creation and every part of it. An attribute whose essence is Energy, the dynamic of Force. The Force of Soul that Interconnects and of  the Authority of Necessity, the laws of cause and effect that cannot change. That define Reality and guide Logic-Love’s benevolent governance of Creation from the bottom up. Every part either has a use or it can’t exist. This applies to Mind-Consciousness and to Psyche-Soul both, the Interconnecting Force of Everything. Every part has agency under the law.

This applies to every cause including institutions dedicated to disseminating the Course and the work of its teacher. The work of doing is the work of Energy, the agent of doing for all of Reality-Creation. The dynamic of Force that gives cause its effect, the sequence of Logic-Love its forward movement. Always dynamic, always in motion because circumstances are always in motion, always changing. The Course is part of a dynamic process of growth and evolution within an alternate “reality” whose function is to guide it. To help Free Choice manage it, use it, and adapt to it dynamically.

The provocation that is honesty

The lesson of the Course is delivered authoritatively but always with gentle loving kindness. We’re given soft pillows when we board the plane, an assurance of service with wisdom and compassion. But the flight isn’t meant to lull us to sleep. Far from it. In an alternate “reality” that is dishonesty and untruth a perspective that speaks honestly for Truth is provocation. There’s bound to be turbulence. Turbulence with a purpose: not sleep but awakening. To get us off our butts and moving.

Jesus’ honesty when he walked among us showed how provocative Truth can be. The Course is sheer provocation capable of stirring the occupants of Plato’s Cave into a hornet’s nest of opposition. Into crucifying the messenger, because that’s what the crucifixion was meant to accomplish: the permanent end of messenger and message. The permanent end of fear that the Truth will ever again be told.

The comfort of gentle loving kindness, wisdom and compassion abates fear so that it won’t block accessibility. But it’s not a substitute for the lesson, nor is it meant to distract from the lesson. It only affirms its Source, the Logic-Love of Reality and its Peace. Because Logic-Love could not make its presence known otherwise.

Yet it’s provocation and a call to respond to it. A call from Logic-Love not to swoon in the ecstasy of “spirituality” but to act. Its meaning isn’t the pillow. It’s the journey out of untruth into Truth. Out of the nonsense of two realities into the sense of one Reality. The journey of provocation and turbulence that is Honesty.

The face behind the mask of pleasantness

The opposite is described in the Course as the “ego’s thought system.” It does offer substitutions and distractions. It has a thousand faces, none more sinister or familiar than likability. The devil that visited Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s novel was affable, conversational. The “god” of Jerry Martin’s God: An Autobiography is casual, erudite and entertaining, a regular guy you’d want to have a beer with. The “god” of Mari Perron’s apocryphal A Course of Love is a cheerleader for anything goes. Every one your best friend and every one a phony. Pleasantness whose purpose isn’t receptivity to Truth. It’s to hide the Truth.

Two perspectives, two functions

In applying the metaphysics of the Course to explain our alternate “reality” Kenneth Wapnick and I take off in different directions. No difference in our loyalty to the metaphysics of the Course but significant difference in what we do with it. A difference in function:

  • He taught what the Course says in its context: the specifics of two clinical psychologists at a medical-academic institution in mid-twentieth century Manhattan -- their personalities, psychologies, and relationships. I intuit what the Course may imply for specifics beyond its original context. Not on my own but in relationship with an agent of Soul, guided by Logic and Love.
  • Ken helped to interpret and communicate the Logic-Love of the Course within its scope: error committed after the Child (Father’s Son) lost consciousness. I am applying it to explore its implications for issues beyond its scope. To explain the Child’s loss of consciousness and what this implies for regaining it.
  • Ken brought his unique perspective, individuality and creativity to his task. I bring a different perspective, individuality and creativity to mine.
  • We respond to two different needs: his to clarify the lesson of the Course, mine to extend it. His to explain its metaphysics, mine to expand its metaphysics. His to focus on what the Course is, mine on what it can do.

“Absence of felicity,” absence of partiality

My differences with Ken show in our takes on two topics: Helen Schucman’s apparent ambivalence about the Course and the significance of Carl Jung’s intuition about personality type. Helen was the main scribe of A Course in Miracles which was channeled by Jesus. She was assisted by Bill Thetford, a professional colleague, in a support role. In essence, they took dictation and from it produced a manuscript suitable for publication. Neither sought nor was given editorial license to modify the lesson. Neither sought a role in teaching it.

In his biography of Helen, Absence of Felicity, Ken struggled with her reluctance to involve herself in the Course’s cause beyond recording it. Being her friend and admirer and a teacher of the Course, Ken might have been moved by personal bias that even though she held back it was not for lack of conviction. For lack of love and respect for its Author, for whom she had just completed an intensely intimate labor of love.

Had Helen not maintained neutrality skeptics could have cited this as evidence of her authorship just as any court observer would cry foul if the stenographer took sides in litigation. There were enough skeptics as it was, hard-core “realists” blocked by their bodies’ five senses from having anything to do with a sixth. A common occurrence that accounts for history’s split between two schools of thought: idealism and realism.

Helen’s gift back to the Course

The viability of the Course depends upon its source from another perspective, one that’s not tainted by human ambiguity. Its author needs to be an agent of spiritual Psyche or Soul, the agent of Logic and Love that interconnects everything including our alternate “reality.” Otherwise it won’t know what it’s talking about. How can any source talk to the occupants of one “reality” about events in another without convincing evidence of connection to both? If it can’t speak legitimately for Reality and Truth how can it make sense?

The Course owes its legitimacy and acceptance as much to its Author as to its lesson. Limiting Helen’s role to that of impartial stenographer ensured that the voice of spiritual Psyche would come through in the clear, unmolested by the human psyche. Protecting the integrity of its Author may have been Helen’s last and most sensitive act of service to the Course:

Misled by body-sensing “realism”

Ken’s unfinished work about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung may have reflected something of the person behind the professional: a subconscious preference for Freud’s “realism” and indifference bordering on aversion to Jung’s intuition about personality types. Though he observed that Jung hadn’t gone far enough Ken showed no interest to that point in Jung’s signal achievement. In particular in the critical difference between body-sensing and intuition that telegraphed the difference between Jung and Freud.

That telegraphed, as well, the aspect of Helen’s personality that suited her to her role of detachment in the story of the Course. An aspect that Ken’s brand of psychotherapy seems to have overlooked. Though Helen had experienced psychic episodes they hadn’t revealed a gift for insight or the soul of an intuitive behind the exterior of a realist. If they had it seems likely that she would have been all in for the Course. What gave her pause was the same patriarchal body-sensing that prevented teacher Freud from understanding pupil Jung. For who would balk at non-dualism, the point of “miracles” in A Course in Miracles, that our “reality” sensed by the body is unreal? That it’s so illogical it can’t be taken seriously. Who else but a body-sensing “realist?”

A taste of Heaven

Jung’s intuition tells us that personalities that define our individuality necessarily define us by what we do as much as by who we are. By our function in the evolution of context through changing circumstances. As true here as it is in Reality; nothing can exist without its part in some form of activity, whether purposeful or pointless. The role given to Helen was the business end of her personality that defined who she was to be by what she was to do in its context. The integrity of her role as scribe depended not on her going beyond its limits but on her staying within.

Helen’s willingness to devote a significant portion of her life to scribing the Course expressed core human values: satisfying work suited to the worker; meaningful work for a respected authority; support for individuality, talent, and creativity; personality and task performing as one; striving attuned to Free Will instead of smothering it. None of these brought to life to the same extent, if at all, by the regular job that frustrated her. Her talents weren’t flowering into soulful poetry on the job but they were when she was moonlighting with Jesus. The boss who never insisted that she take the job. She could tell him to shove it any time she wanted.

The act of Creation in Reality is Interconnection that’s joyful as well as effortless. Striving toward the affirmation and reciprocation of Worth. An act of benevolence defined by the governance of Logic-Love, given Life by the Force of Soul. That celebrates the Creativity of every one of its parts and every contribution shaped by its unique context. Who wouldn’t give up a part of their day to experience this? Jesus didn’t offer Helen a job; he gave her a taste of Heaven and she loved it. When Jesus taught that we are perfect just as God created us, Helen felt the Truth in it. It must have felt like an affirmation of Worth like no other.

“Success”

How did Helen’s personality fare in her work environment at Columbia Presbyterian? Exactly as a court stenographer might, who had no voice in the proceeding, if asked to speak with the voice of a litigant. Out of her element. Lost. Unsure what to say but sure she doesn’t want to be humiliated for saying it. In self-defense Helen might have taken on the hardness of certainty without to hide the softness of uncertainty within. The personality of an authoritarian realist could have been so unyielding, so demanding, that she was virtually impossible to work with. A misfit. Toxic.

If Heaven is the functions of self-awareness fitting together in harmony then our opposite “reality” must be the functions of un-self-awareness that collide in friction. Because to be un-self-aware is to be unaware of self’s individuality and function. “Success” in this life is more often than not a series of fortunate events that connect personality and function we’re unaware of with situations we’re unaware of. Everything spontaneous, beyond awareness.

Our personalities should help guide us to where our individuality and its talents belong, but if we lack self-awareness, if we undervalue Jung’s personality types, it won’t happen. In the event, it’s the agent of Soul from Logic-Love -- the tao -- that guides us when we allow it, unseen.

The “success” of one life is but a mirror image of the series of unplanned accidents and mistakes that accounts for all of life on our planet. Not to know what we’re doing is quite in step with the nature of our alternate “reality,” and Helen was in step. Demanding that the personality of a scribe take positions, whose job description is the opposite, would have made her at least hard to work with if not toxic. Her work space would have been toxic if she wasn’t alone. As it was it was so toxic that it put out the Call for Love -- for the “better way” -- that gave us A Course in Miracles.

The authenticity of the Course and its Author

Contrast the friction of misfits at work with Helen’s remarkable fit with Jesus. Their compatibility further evidence that the Jesus of the Course is authentic. That he’s an agent of Soul connected to Logic and Love, the same functions of Mind in Reality that fit all functions together in harmony. Further evidence that Jesus knew what he was doing when it was through Helen’s mind, through her personality and its function -- scribe, -- that he channeled the Course. Probable choice because of her function, improbable on the face of it because of her personality.

The Course’s authenticity is undermined anytime skeptics can mischaracterize its scribe as one of them. She wasn’t one of them. The impartiality of a scribe is just that: impartiality. Skepticism is taking sides, and Helen could not do that. Though she was obliged to signal impartiality it’s clear that she never meant it to detract from the Course or its Author. It wasn’t a stance, thumbs up or thumbs down. A state that concerned her biographer, who sought to correct it with an interpretation of thumbs up. But Ken needn’t have been concerned. The ornery scribe took care of the skeptics on her own.

Intuition’s gift of personality type

I cite Ken’s esteem for Helen and for Freud not as an indication of questionable scholarship. He was as respectful of scholarship as he was of their achievements. His grasp of the Logic of the Course was as uncompromising as its non-dualism -- reliably disciplined and on the mark. Articulate and professional. His passion for his cause and contributions almost as impressive as the Course itself. The same unerring judgment that offered Helen her job was clearly at work when it offered Ken his.

I cite it instead as an instance of a more general tendency of human illogic to overlook personality type and function in its understanding of our alternate “reality.” Of the human condition, and so to guide Free Choice in choosing how to address it. How to discern purpose and meaning correctly so that we progress beyond it instead of being stuck inside Plato’s Cave.

I cite it, too, as an instance of how original thinking with intuition can work productively with the Course when the Course itself doesn’t cover all the bases. Though he dives into the human Psyche to an unprecedented depth Jesus leaves it to us to explore its breadth. Breadth that could have included personality type to explain projection and the obstacles we face in reversing it, but it didn’t. The point being we can figure it out for ourselves. If Jesus had laid it all out for us would we still have Free Choice?

Jung and Myers-Briggs shared the gift of Mind -- the sixth sense that is intuition -- with their theory of personality type. With illumination that can make the occupants of the Cave aware that its darkness isn’t their only choice. They aren’t prisoners and neither are we. None of us is a victim except by our own hand. We aren’t truly stuck anywhere except by our own choice, delusion that we’ve inflicted on ourselves. 

Body-sensing’s corruption of personality type

“Science” has done the opposite with its “five factor” theory of personality type. With the five senses of the body insanely fearful of what Mind’s sixth sense will reveal about them: that they don’t serve the light. That they and their captive science are instruments of the dark. Keeping us inside the Cave. Aided and abetted by Freud, adamant that Psyche is confined to body just as science is adamant that Consciousness is confined to brain.

Where does such nonsense come from? Not from the Logic of Jung’s and Myers-Briggs’ intuition that makes sense. It can only come from illogic that doesn’t make sense. From the master of the Cave. From delusion, and what’s called for is voice to speak for something better. Full-throated support for understanding personality type and function with intuition, not for overlooking it.

Klaatu barada nikto!

Jung and his successors, Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers, were guided by the same source and produced results that were equally insightful. Not flawless but equally useful if only analysts and theorists like Ken were aware of it.

A foundation dedicated to Ken’s work won’t critique it. Yet I share my critique to make a point, that acknowledging the Course’s part in a living, ongoing reflection on the questions of life’s purpose and meaning would add to its relevance, not detract from it. Would expand the reach of Ken’s extraordinary contribution, not impede it.

No one can absorb every detail, every nuance, of what Jesus and Ken had to say through the Course. But anyone with Mind and its sixth sense, along with the uniqueness of their personalities, is qualified to reflect on its implications. Is qualified to apply its lesson from one set of circumstances -- the personalities, lives, and work of two clinical psychologists in twentieth century Manhattan -- to another.

Policies and principles given voice in one moment are meant not to be enshrined as though time had stopped, but to be applied. Applied to other moments because time hasn’t stopped. The world of the Course and Ken’s teaching is not The Day the Earth Stood Still. We are not Patricia Neal needing Michael Rennie’s robot Gort to protect us inside his flying saucer. It’s the Cambrian era: change and diversity so powerful that nothing can stop it.

Infinity in motion

The Course is more than the comfort of sanctuary. It’s the engine of Mind and intuition that enable and empower adaptation to change. Function that asks to be recognized and put to use. To overlook it is to miss not only the Truth of what it is but the Truth of what it’s for.

We can’t do as Jesus has asked without staying in step with change. Without aligning ourselves with the Logic and Love of Creation. With work that can never be done because the implications of Logic and the connections of Love -- Relationships that hold the Interconnectedness of Soul together as One -- aren’t temporal. They’re infinite. Eternal. Eternally in motion. If this is the Truth of Reality and Creation, then it must be the Truth of the Course and the use we make of it. To bring us to the light of self-awareness and the end of the darkness of our Cave.

The example set by Jesus

What did Jesus mean when he admonished teachers and students not to treat the Course as a “bible?” That to do so would thwart its use, just as the intended use of Jesus’ parables and miracles long ago, in a different context, was thwarted by captivity to authoritarian hierarchy and canon. By “Bible” that distracted minds detached from Reality with the false promise of absolute Truth. Just as the Child unconscious had been misled by the two-headed lie of absolute Authority and absolute Freedom. All of it a con.

Jesus didn’t respond to Helen’s and Bill’s Call for Love with the absolute Truth. With an external deus ex machina that, once imposed on their situations, would solve all problems in perpetuity. He responded with example. He role-modeled how to address their problems without telling anyone what to do. How to explain context -- individual and humanity -- with Logic combined with Love that leads to understanding. So that reasoning can address purpose and meaning grounded in facts instead of magical thinking. So that it will be guided by perception and judgment instead of misperception and misjudgment. All of it grounded in Reality and Necessity -- the laws of cause and effect  that take the mystery out of miracles.

The call for original thinking that provokes

Above all, he set an example for the use of Logic, Love, and Free Will to expose the lie that is our alternate “reality.” Courageously and honestly, for this is anything but a convenient truth. Unless we follow his example with explanation that leads to Understanding, based on Logic and Love, that's shared with wisdom and compassion, it will be taken by others as provocation. As attack that warrants response in kind: unthinking, unreasoning retaliation.

If we allow the Course to be treated as absolute unquestioned anything we kill it. It’s not a “bible” because its very purpose is to question and be questioned. To empower the implications  of Logic that is forever asking Why. To enshrine the Course in absolute Truth is to deprive it of its power. To do the work of insanity, the Child's shadow-code. Parsing its metaphysics and sharing lives is useful but so too is application that puts it to work. So too is original thinking that’s provocative or it’s not doing its job. A view that’s legitimate and even critical but under-represented. Why? Because it's provocative. 

Choose again

Application of its metaphysics is what makes the Course unique. Text, Workbook, and Manual. A point made eloquently through the work of its teacher, Kenneth Wapnick. Then can the Course and its teacher be honored as inspiration and guidance for their use? For their application by their students to changing contexts that require fresh understanding? Through the same independent judgment, the same sixth sense guided by Logic and Love, that Jesus affirmed when he closed with Choose again?

Institutions dedicated to the Course and its teacher’s work in their time might also help to reflect on what’s to be said through the same Logic and Love, the same sixth sense, in our time. To reflect and apply the Course as a living document in the spirit of Jesus, whose work is not done. Is this feasible? It’s worth asking.

The pheasant in its nest

The pheasant needs flight to adapt to the world around it. It can’t stay in its nest. Every institution needs to reflect on its mission to stay viable. When the Miracle Distribution Center, the Foundation for A Course in Miracles, and the Foundation for Inner Peace reflect again, what considerations arise from the example of Jesus? What suggestions might be offered by the provocation of Honesty and Truth and the dynamic of Love? By the eternal Why of Logic?

Thank you. Keep up the good work, and God bless!

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Published on 2 Comments on The Agent of Soul

Jung vs. Freud: the split that still reverberates

Why shouldn’t an agent of Soul, our Psyche, be accessible to us through Intuition when it was the Force of Soul that animated the dream? Where in our minds is the agent to be found?

In the obvious place. In our Psyche where psychology looks for it. Where Carl Jung intuited the “collective unconscious.” Where his once and former mentor, Sigmund Freud, mistook it for something else. For an agent of the body, certain to the end that physiology writhed like a serpent in cosmic mud under his analytic microscope. His insights found acceptance improbably in America where its superficiality offended him. They also took him improbably not to their cause, to Logic-Love from Intuition, but circuitously back to effect. Back to the body and the chemistry of brain matter.

Jung’s psychology took what Freud started and did connect with the agent of Soul. Because he found offensive the idea that the Psyche he was looking for could possibly reside in matter. The reason why he and his mentor went their separate ways and why the break in their relationship still reverberates in Western thought.

Jung didn’t make the same mistake. While Freud went with the body’s five senses and conventionality Jung went with his sixth sense and originality. To look beyond appearances, beyond the body, and found a wealth of insights that would have progressed even farther had he lived to read A Course in Miracles. The metaphysics of Jesus that explained with unprecedented Logic, depth, and clarity the psychodynamics of another Reality. Events beyond our awareness that produced humanity’s split mind in an alternate “reality,” the source of its irrationality, contradictions, and conflicts. The haunting, pain, and torment of guilt. An alternate material “reality” of isolated-separated bodies, spacetime relativity, dark energy, colliding galaxies, and particles that defy the laws of physics. “Life” that depends on accidents of nature -- random events, mutations of genes -- for its evolution.

All of it a testament to the rule of lawlessness. To chaos. A systematic assault on the laws of cause and effect, the Force of Necessity that orders and Interconnects Reality and enables the harmony and peace of Creation -- its Freedom, the spontaneity of joyfulness.

Spirit and the Myth of Psyche and Eros

Jung helped to change human thought from recalcitrance to receptivity with his insights into personality types, purely a gift of intuition that couldn’t be attributed to brain chemistry if it posited faculties of Mind unrelated to brain. Faculties that could only be attributed to something else. To the agent of Soul that also goes by the name of Spirit. Spirit that is the essence, Innocence, and Beauty of Soul. Spirit that in our ancestral Mind in Reality and its projections in unreality is Psyche. The same innocent, ethereally beautiful girl of Greek mythology who inspires us with the eternal love story of Psyche and Eros. Our guide and role model for performing the task assigned to us in unreality and returning, with help, back home to Reality.

If we think our lot is hard hers was literally impossible. The series of tasks she was assigned by Aphrodite, her lover’s jealous, vengeful mother, were intended to remove her from his life permanently. Yet Psyche performed them with help until she was sent down to Persephone in hell for her final errand. The one that was supposed to be her end. She lost consciousness and may never have awakened if Eros had not broken his mother’s grip and come to her side. Instead of death on earth her love was requited with eternal life on Mount Olympus. With Eros in the home of the gods. A parallel with Jesus, another tale of death yielding to the Truth of Life. 

Guidance that’s competent

If the agent of the Soul is the agent of Psyche then it knows our situation and it’s well qualified to lead us through it. Our guide is Spirit. Not bodies. Not science that, like all fields of inquiry has a role to play but puts its faith in bodies’ senses. Not Freudian psychology that looks for answers in brain chemistry. In bodies’ cravings, brains’ neuroses, and nutty behavior. But the Spirit that Jung’s Intuition connected with. To “spiritual psychology,” another name for sixth sense that every field has always depended on but can’t acknowledge for what it is: another perspective than our own. Connection to another Reality.

The Reality described in the Course with helpful, harmless, loving familiarity. Demeaned and ridiculed by split minds for its strangeness. For its affront to the familiar and the conventional, to our unchanging status quo while it goes about quietly, unobtrusively with evolution. With the Interconnections of Logic and Love that, when the right constellation of circumstances forms -- when the time is right, -- will help us, Free Will hand in hand with Psyche, with Spirit, reach our goal.

Free Choice that’s competent

To get our dreaming ancestral Mind out of bed and back to work. No longer an inexperienced, immature Child but now grown up. Experienced with opposites. With illusion, temptation, adversity, and pain. Equipped with the Wisdom and Compassion, the Patience of its Parents but informed by its own experience that only Free Will could Live. Its own unique, individual Self with its own unique work to perform.

Made possible by what? By what we’re learning here. In this chaos of frustration, injustice, missed connections, and pain we call “life.” In this mess of contradictions we call our world. A world of split minds and their material environment that makes no sense, who would discredit perspective from another world that does make sense for being weird.

What’s to do? Embrace our sixth sense. Embrace Psyche. Embrace Free Choice and keep at it. What have we got to lose?

Published on Leave a comment on A Concise Definition of Metaphysics

What Metaphysics Is

Metaphysics is looking behind physical appearances (spacetime-matter), with the vision of Logic and Love through spontaneous Intuition, to understand:

  • Reality-Truth (the laws of cause and effect / Necessity)
  • Consciousness-Being (Self-Awareness, Conscience-Worth)
  • Relationship-Connection (Parents, Parents-Child, Implications)
  • Creation and Reciprocation (of Life-Being / Worth)
  • unreality-untruth (the laws of chaos)
  • unconsciousness / non-being (illusion, opposites)
  • conflict-disconnection (bodies-separation, illogic)
  • projection (of appearances-deceptions)

Metaphysics is Explanation. Explanation that’s required for Understanding. Explanation that makes sense because it’s based on Logic and Love integrated as one function of Mind, inseparable and inviolate. Explanation that’s its own Authority because Logic and Love combined stand on their own. Because Explanation that aligns with Reality’s laws of cause and effect aligns with the Authority of Necessity.

What  it does: correct misunderstanding

Explanation from metaphysics based on Logic-Love corrects misunderstanding. Corrects the dominant paradigms of science, philosophy, psychology, and theology that are based on loveless illogic. On the circular “reasoning” of “reality” based on sensory perception that includes the knower in the known. That defies objectivity accessible only through another perspective not of this “reality” and accessible only through Intuition.

This is not revolutionary heresy. This is grade-school Logic. 

The dominant paradigms are based on misperception that accounts for history’s unending cycle of misjudgments that allow humanity’s animal nature to separate Free from Will. To separate Mind that serves Free Choice, civilization, and individual sovereignty from the instincts and unevolved emotions of the herd. Rather than leading humanity toward the promised land of harmony, peace, and progress, the revered paradigms of misperception are responsible for contradiction, conflict, and violence.

This is humanity’s fate so far, a state of precarity on the edge of cliff. And the forces that put us here aren’t only our animal nature. They’re the very forces that we turn to to civilize our animal nature. To keep us from going over the cliff, and what are they doing? Pushing. 

Understanding is essential to correcting error

What metaphysics does is help correct error. A central error of thought -- the misperception -- that is one major cause of misunderstanding. The misunderstanding that explanation cannot venture beyond the boundaries of the misunderstanding. Beyond the boundaries of spacetime-matter when the source of the Big Bang that produced it cannot be physical. Matter cannot be the source of matter. Matter doesn’t “create” anything. The source of the Big Bang is mental.

This is not revolutionary heresy. This is grade-school Logic.

What metaphysics does is venture beyond the unreality of appearances to tell the story of Mind that exists in Reality. The story that preceded humanity’s alternate “reality” and serves as the root cause of everything that takes place within it. Not to understand the root causes of our misjudgments, our frustrations and miseries, is to be condemned to repeat them. The repetition of mistakes that can be understood with help from Logic and Love, accessible through Intuition rather than bodies’ senses, would be excusable if understanding were not possible. But with metaphysics it is possible. And the determination of the dominant paradigms to block it, to preserve their authoritarian dominance against the mounting evidence of their own discoveries, is inexcusable.

It might only take one

Explanation that leads to Understanding is the gift of metaphysics, at once the most important and least appreciated branch of philosophy. A branch that by definition applies systems thinking to every problem. That brings the whole of the human genome and experience to every task so that it gets done. Without having to fuss over professional boundaries and competing protocols. Because metaphysics alone among the dominant fields of Inquiry is Free Inquiry. The servant of Free Will. Us -- Free Choice.

It is the gift of the Parents Logic-Love to their Child -- to us -- to reclaim Self-Awareness and be done with appearances. The deceptions, magic tricks, distractions, and superficialities that make up our “reality.” The gift of Free Will -- the wild card of thought and feeling that might break the cycle of misjudgment. That might actually lead us forward if we let it.

If we listen with our Intuition. And maybe if only one of us gets it right. That might be all it takes.

Published on Leave a comment on Who Was Helen Schucman?

Helen Schucman in Kenneth Wapnick’s telling

There’s strong evidence, besides ACIM, that Jesus isn’t a savior spoon-feeding us all the answers. An authoritarian determined to bend imperfection to Perfection by a dominating will.

The superlative mind and scholarship of Kenneth Wapnick, a PhD psychotherapist, were unerring in their interpretation of the Course, an astounding match for the unerring Logic of Jesus. But in his love of his subject and its scribe I believe that Kenneth’s biography of Helen Schucman may have erred. Absence from Felicity (Foundation for A Course in Miracles 1991) gave an account of Helen’s life that, toward the end, recorded not commitment but reluctance. Not passion but doubt. After years in everyday correspondence with Jesus, doing faithfully as she was asked, Helen ended their relationship not with intimacy but with distance. Her biographer was one of the small group of intimates who brought the Course to light. Much to his credit he could have finessed Helen’s distance but he didn’t. He stayed true to his conscience and his human subject, allowing readers to reach their own judgment. In spite of evidence to the contrary his judgment concluded that, at the very end, Helen resolved her conflict. Found sanctuary in the embrace of her Guide and the Course. Chose the high priestess of her imagination, the Voice of the Holy Spirit. Peace in Jesus and the Course. She became, at last, a true believer.

Another Helen Schucman

The end that a sympathetic biographer may have wanted but not necessarily what happened. Helen was an authoritarian “realist” drawn to the patriarchal Roman Catholic Church. This was, I believe, her personality type that determined whose truth she put on her throne and whose voice she heard. The “authority” that Helen thought she recognized in the teacher of the Course was a patriarch. Who belonged to her body-centered world and could deliver body-centered miracles if he chose to. Not supportively from the bottom up but arbitrarily from the top down. An Absolute answerable to nothing and no one. This was a misperception. This was not Logic and Love who cannot be above the Necessity of their own Laws of Cause and Effect, or else Order would become chaos, lawfulness lawlessness, governance dictatorship.

Despite all that Jesus taught, of Logic and Love who cannot be implicated in this body-centered world, Helen remained firmly anchored to her personality type. Clung to her misperception, her expectation for a savior who could bring light to darkness instead of letting darkness choose to come to the light. Who could choose for her. Helen didn’t abandon Jesus. She wandered away, an authoritarian waiting to be told how to think, how to behave. Not wanting to choose. Unable to choose. A victim of pancreatic cancer whose all-powerful Patriarch had failed her by denying her healing, the Miracle she imagined she had earned. Despite all that Jesus taught, she still got it wrong.

Helen anchored the family of intimates who produced the book. She showed little if any inclination or aptitude for marketing it. An object of respect, it was also a “pile of crap” when she didn’t want to seem taken in by it. The authoritarian “realist” views differences of any kind -- perspective or opinion -- as a contest of wills for supremacy. Can’t conceive of a “higher power” unless it’s “almighty god,” a cardboard cutout armored action hero championing the Israelites and smiting their enemies.

The mind of an authoritarian “realist” can’t be accessed to share different perspectives and ideas beyond the superficiality of groups. They have their own throne and it’s occupied by their own authorship: the grotesque mask of the Joker, a self-delusion. Their own lifeless, mindless, loveless, soulless dark side that’s nothing more than the code that defines their opposite. Not what they are but what they aren’t. An authoritarian arbitrary ruler above the law, a parasite that answers to a code derived from its host. The essence of weakness posing as strength. That has no rules of its own but is literally hell-bent to reject the Laws-Necessity of its host. To preserve an illusion: the unquestioned  dominance of its authorship. A thought so insane, so perverse, that it can never be taken seriously. A joke.

Kenneth’s choice: Freudian analytics vs Jungian intuition 

Just as Helen showed little inclination or aptitude for marketing the Course Kenneth showed little inclination or aptitude for running with intuition to explore its implications beyond its scope. To reflect on the Child’s loss of consciousness, its conditions and consequences. On its implications for the self-delusion of unreality that followed it. For the experience its projections call “life” in this strange world of spacetime-matter, of contradiction and conflict, impossibility and perversity, jubilance and defeat, hilarity and misery.

The analytics of Freud, his insistence that the “bad thing” that deforms the human psyche is ultimately the doing of bodies rather than minds, blocked his awareness of root causes. Awareness that can only come through intuition whose function has no explanation from the body’s senses and, therefore, no legitimacy in the body-idolizing minds of authoritarian “realists.” In the minds of those responsible for the dominant paradigms of science, philosophy, psychology, and theology, all of which rest on flawed, self-referential reasoning. On illogic. 

Kenneth’s own personality and its turn of mind joined enthusiastically with the hardened analytics of Freud. He mastered the analytics of the Course’s Logic to become the teacher whose voice is almost indistinguishable from that of its author. But in so doing he cut himself off from the potential of Jung’s intuition to explore the implications of the Course beyond its scope. He contented himself with understanding what is without being motivated to examine what else might be. He missed the significance of Jung’s insights into the personality of Psyche and so missed the impact of Helen’s personality on her relationship with, and ultimate response to, the author of the Course. To Jesus and the nature of his Authority.

Which Helen served Jesus’ purpose better?

Jesus’ choice of an authoritarian “realist” to scribe the Course worked to perfection if its only object was dictation taken accurately, without protest, over a period of years, and the publication of a book. If it was meant to demonstrate the power of “almighty god” to restore muddled unconsciousness to an enlightened state of consciousness, to convert authoritarian “realist” skepticism to intuitive idealistic conviction, it failed. Clearly, this was not the object. If anything, I believe the object was the opposite: to demonstrate the inability of any “power” to deny the Child and its projections their birthright: their capacity to choose freely for themselves without interference. To be of their own mind and not the mind of anyone or anything else, not even the Mind of their Parents in Reality.

Why otherwise are the agents of the Child’s Parents, manifestations of the Holy Spirit, so deferential to our own judgment? So careful not to interfere, or appear to interfere, with Free Choice?

All the inhabitants of Creation are defined by their roles. By their contributions to shared purpose whose definitions fit them together in logical harmony at the same time that they confer individuality. That mark them as Creations empowered to function independently of their Creators, to affirm the Worth of Creation freely without compromising their individuality. In the Reality of Order with Freedom, Freedom with Order, that defines Creation. In the harmony of the definitions and relationships of Logic and Love that govern Creativity and all its Creations. Not with dominance from the top down but with benevolence and support from the bottom up.

The right of Free Will that Helen stood up for: to get it wrong

The role that Helen performed to perfection wasn’t to be the convert. It was to be the insistence of the Child on choosing for itself, even if it erred. To be clear: the Course and Necessity don’t give our ancestral Mind or any of its imaginary projections a pass. Its lesson must be learned. Whether sooner or later in the illusion of time is up to us. Learning and growth in unreality may have been ordained by the laws of cause and effect that govern Reality-Creation. Unconsciousness that put the Child and its projections in this dream world, a trainer where learning by trial and error has no real consequences, may have been a Necessity. But neither Logic-Love nor the Necessity of their laws of cause and effect could have ordained that their Child’s training to maturity and competence would take forever. Still, that said, we have the right to be wrong. To refuse to acquire the competence the Child needs to perform its role in Creation as long as we like. To remain self-deluded in Plato’s Cave indefinitely. In the illusion of time long or short is meaningless. Unlike the eternity of timelessness, the illusion of time, like all illusions, has a beginning and it will surely have an end. The Child’s sojourn in the unreality of time had a beginning and it will have an end.

ACIM's author and his scribe proved it: the right to get it wrong. The prerogative of Choice without which it could not be Free. And even with Jesus in Helen’s mind dictating clarity from Logic and Love, she took her place on the podium and stuck her fist in the air. Proclaimed her sovereignty in an all-too human act of defiance and folly. The human spirit defending its “rights” against correction at the same time that it makes a fool of itself. Confederates defending their “rights” even if they’re defending the indefensible -- slavery. The right to choose wrong or even not to choose at all if “realists” must have their authoritarian “savior” to choose for them. Had Helen done otherwise, after being under Jesus’ influence for years, she might well have proclaimed untruth instead of Truth: the willful dominance of an imposter. The illusion of an alternate “reality” ruled by a replacement authorship. She proved her right to Free Choice. And in doing so left no doubt that Jesus is the author, and authority, he appears to be.

Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Helen!

Kenneth wanted Helen to join the fold. Ever faithful to the Logic of ACIM that’s where he believed she belonged. The case he made that she did join the fold bore his signature gifts for reason and compassion. But to this observer it was wishful thinking. I’m glad that she kept her distance. Kenneth and I both love and admire her. We both have reasons for identifying with her, but they’re not the same. One reason I can celebrate for Helen’s obstinance is the legitimacy it confers on what otherwise might seem my own presumption. My adherence to the Logic-Love of the Course while expanding on it. While taking the lessons it taught beyond their scope to explore the realm of intuition that physicists, theologists, and other authoritarian “realists” have declared beyond exploring. Creating the appearance, to some, of apostasy. The appearance that I’m going up against the Course when, in fact, I’m going forward with it. I am no less an acolyte of Jesus for risking the appearance of disagreement if that is where Intuition guided by Jesus takes me,

Maybe we’re supposed to figure out the Child’s loss of consciousness ourselves. Maybe we’re supposed to explore realms of intuition “beyond exploring.” Do you think? If authoritarian “realists” oppose it then idealists like me should probably pursue it. Venturing into the unknowable with the help of emissaries from Logic and Love, our Parents. Through Intuition that functions whether we use its insights or not.

“Blasphemy” was the curse of the Church’s Inquisition that thought nothing of burning innocents at the stake. There’s nothing of this in the Course. Nothing of “heresy,” though it’s clear about Necessity. The Author of the Course doesn’t accompany its students on their trek at one altitude only to abandon them at others. There are no barriers in unreality to Logic-Love from Intuition that connects with Reality. How can the perversities of a dream limit what’s real? What’s true? There are no barriers to purpose that fits our context: if we choose freely to regain the Self-Awareness that we are and the function that we do.

I’m going wherever I’m led. By the marvel that is the human mind, corrupted and compromised by delusion yet connected by Intuition and Free Choice to its Source. Together, we go where one individual mind chooses to go. One step at a time. Inspired by the example of Jesus and A Course in Miracles. Inspired by its scribe. Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Helen!

Published on Leave a comment on The Drill Sergeant

Seeing things

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

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

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

Let’s be honest

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

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

The path taken to understanding

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

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

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

The incompatibility of idealist-mind and realist-will

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

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

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

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

There can be no “meeting of the minds”

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

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

The real “authority” in sergeant’s stripes

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

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

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

We’re just getting started

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

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

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

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

We’re just getting started.

Published on Leave a comment on Understanding

Getting it right

Expanding context beyond immediacy. Defusing limbic emotions and the rush to judgment, the urge to project guilt. Distinguishing between ourselves and the opposites that shadow everything – our mirror-image reflections. Understanding. The change of mind that tests us this time of year. Have we more? Are we more? How can it be possible when Consciousness is gone? The rule of law, protection from the shadow when the many were one, when we were awake and real. While the disembodied voice of our reflection is heard in waves of misinformation and authoritarian grievance, forgeries of stolen sovereignty. Its rule arbitrary, its necessity misunderstanding.

Evil isn’t what “others” do to us. It’s what we do to ourselves. Imagining that our flip side – our reflection, a shadow – is an “other” that has a life, a voice of its own with something to offer. When all it has to “give” is a reverse image, what we aren’t. It’s nothing more than an implication of Logic that all things have opposites. That if two realities can’t be real then our reflections can’t be real. They’re the Joker whose joke is “I’m you." Whatever its offense making it real by engaging with it is what causes it.

The Joker’s every perversion of Reality is a joke. Making itself right by making others wrong. Scripting truth and rules to suit itself. Heads I win, tails you lose. A lifeless viral parasite coded for self-replication, the “winning” of self-delusion. An imaginary magician that couldn’t perform unless we, the rabbit, asked it to pull us out of a hat. Misidentification of ourselves for an “other” that isn’t real makes it real. Correction is Understanding that we are not our reflection. That it can’t substitute for the Self we seek whose home is in Reality. Not here but where Mind will lead us if we allow it.

If evil itself can be understood without blame then there must be hope for Understanding. For elevating context from the false “realism” of bodies in captivity, to the truth of Mind liberated to think. To the Truth of another Reality that isn’t a joke. That parallels ours, was there before ours, is responsible for ours, and explains ours. To getting it right: Forgiveness is Understanding. So minds undeluded can do what’s right and do it right.

Where can undeluded minds take their pleas? To illumination from Intuition instead of deception from bodies. To awareness that alights on markers navigating back to consciousness. With Insights to recognize one at a time. Implications of Logic to follow wherever they lead. Guidance from Necessity, the authority of Logic, that enables and protects freedom of thought, expression, and choice -- the Integrity of Creation. That responds to pleas with Love -- sharing, empowerment, and affirmation of Worth -- instead of fear -- ownership, possession, and control. With the Innocence of Now, Psyche intact, instead of victimhood addicted to woundedness, self-pity, and guilt.

The Gift of Logic

Abundance and its comforts taken for granted replace hope with expectation, respect with entitlement, knowing our place with arrogance, adaptation with reverence for the status quo. An unsustainability brought on by not getting around to it. By somnolence. The set of a mind that could be equal to the task of awakening but for lack of Logic. Not for lack of the Free Spirit of Mind and Love that’s been there for us since the room went dark. But for the will and the ability to listen to it. To pay attention. To avail ourselves of its Gift: the judgment of Innocence, the understanding, of Logic. The noesis of Logos – God.

Misinformation is being orchestrated by a source that identifies itself as “god,” with books, podcasts and the like. Showcasing accessibility and erudition so confounding that otherwise discerning minds fall for it. A Course of Love and God: An Autobiography are a W.C. Fields flimflam act that deserves the price of admission, not for its wisdom but for the laughs. Minds are duping themselves in the clear, not in slow motion but in alarming acceleration. Waking up can’t wait. Not till we’ve extracted every last bit of pleasure and resource from body and planet. Not till we get around to it.

The next generation building character, in harmony with its environment and in spite of it, offers hope. For youth and for the rest of us, that though we are animals anchored by brain to matter we still have minds and free will. We will yet prove to be better than limbic systems that keep us rooted in unconsciousness. In threatening shadows and autonomic passions that overwhelm deliberation and judgment. We can overcome.

The place in our hearts

Paul Desmond riffing on his alto saxophone. For All We Know. Reflections on a stream that come and go with the intricacies of improvisation. That can’t help but be what they are. Us in reverse. That we never get to see as we are. Never get to know as we are. Haunted by beauty. Drawn by scent and touch imagined. By the taste of Memory heard and gone. A here and now, place and time, that can never be. Yet the Now that you will always be to me.

Shorty Baker riffing on his trumpet. I Didn’t Know What Time It Was. A call for love from time out of time. And I didn’t know. Notes gently trailing a caress across the whorl of preoccupation, lifting me out of cold blankness into the warmth of acceptance. By the vulnerability of subject in a room full of objects. Cause beyond effect that needs no intoxicant, no commotion, to excuse the brashness of its intrusion. I’m not done with it. Can never be done with it, your call for Love.

Alyosha bidding Dostoevsky’s farewell. The Brothers Karamazov. “There is nothing more wholesome and good than sacred memory preserved from childhood. Let us be kind, then honest and then let us never forget each other. You are all dear to me. From this day forth I have a place in my heart for you all, and I beg you to keep a place in your hearts for me.”

Published on Leave a comment on Origin and Meaning: The Logic of Everything

The first Implication of Logic

The original act that began the sequence of Logic that began everything was an Implication of Logic:
• from a condition of statelessness, the opposite of Creation -- worthlessness vs. Worth, pointlessness vs Purpose, meaninglessness vs Meaning, lifelessness vs Life, non-being vs Being:-- that state must Be and it must be the state of Creation.
• from statelessness, the opposite of Reality-Knowledge: that state must be Real and that it must be the state of Reality.
* from statelessness, the absence of everything: that state must be the presence of everything.

Statelessness – the absence of Everything -- prodded the sequence of Logic into motion with the Implication of Reality-Creation because “absence of Everything” implied “absence of Logic,” a Logical impossibility and therefore a condition of unreality. Logic’s response was an act of Necessity and self-assertion: the presence and inviolability of Logic.

The original act that began the sequence of Logic that began everything was thus an Implication of Logic from statelessness, the opposite of Reality-Creation, the opposite of Being-Life. The Implication contained DNA genetics with coded instructions for the design, development, and activation of the state of Reality-Creation, the state of Being-Life, attributes with the Force of Logic that holds all Implications and their Interconnections together.

The first Implication caused the first Interconnection in the sequence of Logic that required:
• Connection-match between before-after in the sequence to move it forward
• Reciprocity to complete the Connection and its effect.

Existentialism: Meaning that flows from the bottom up

Precedent was set with universal Implication for Meaning-Worth: that it always begins with Implications drawn from circumstances on the ground, from the situation in the Now involving whatever Selves and stakes-considerations, whatever Values-Worth compose the situation. This is what is meant by "Existentialism." The Logic of Meaning-Worth requires context for establishing Meaning, and context must be provided by circumstances at the current “before” point in the sequence of Logic.

The original activation by Energy, the Force of Logic

Energy is the electromagnetic Force that interconnects the Implications of Logic, the gravitational Force that holds the Interconnections of Logic together, and the nuclear Force that keeps opposites apart.

The original activation by the Force of Logic -- by Energy, -- that activated Reality-Creation, was its activation of the seed of Creation: Oneness that contained genetic code-instructions for everything at that point in the sequence of Logic in those circumstances. It did not contain everything that was to come because it had not happened yet. That is, it had not been recognized by Mind-Consciousness, validated by Love-Values, and authorized by Logic, so it belonged to the “after” part of the sequence of Logic and was yet to become Known. It was yet to be part of the exploration, the advance-extension into the unknown that is Creation.

The original activation of Energy, the Force of Logic, was caused by an Implication of Logic from statelessness. The sequence of Logic at the beginning thus began with an Implication of Logic that awakened Energy from a state of rest to engage with Creation and perform its first application: activating Logic’s seed of Creation, that is. activating its coded instructions for the design and development of Reality and the seeding of new Life that is Creation.

The first act by Oneness, the seed of Creation

The first act by Oneness-Innocence, the seed of Creation-Life, was an act of organic growth in alignment with Logic, that is, in the sequence of Logic deploying its Energy. The first act was organic evolution from Oneness into the marriage between two attributes of Logic: Mind-Masculinity Reason-Thought with Love-Femininity Value-Passion. It was an act of Reciprocity that holds all of Logic's Implications and their Interconnections together. It was in essence an affirmation of Worth, an act of Love which is an attribute of Logic.

The Implications and Reciprocity of Logic give Mind its ability to think and reason, to analyze and judge. The Force of Logic’s reciprocal Interconnections gives Mind its power to think and reason, to analyze and judge with consequences, i.e. to act, to decide, choose, and connect, to make Mind-Thoughts causes with effects. The Interconnections and Reciprocity of Logic give Love its ability to feel, to care and value. The Force of Logic’s reciprocal Interconnections gives Love its power to feel and care, to value and judge with consequences, i.e. to act, to share, affirm, evaluate, and connect, to make Love-Feelings causes with effects. It is the Implications and Interconnections of Logic that bind Mind and Love together into one Creative Force.

The first act of Oneness was thus to form the first intimate-loving Relationship capable of Parenting a Child, thereby capable of forming the first intimate family Relationship. The Couple was the first Parents of Creation-Life: Father-Mind and Mother-Love. The first act by Oneness, the seed of Creation-Life, was thus to form the first Relationship between Selves that are attributes of Logic which is the Source of Oneness, the Source of Reality-Creation which is everything that Is and everything that is to Be.

All steps in the sequence of Logic, then and Now, are part of a logically Interconnected succession of Implications.

The original engagement of Energy that led to the activation of Oneness was caused by an Implication from Reality-Creation, the opposite of statelessness. All causes in the Laws of cause and effect are Implications of Logic.

The Logical impossibility of separation

“Absence of Everything” and “presence of Everything” kept apart by Energy nuclear Force are still Interconnected / held together by Implications of Logic / Energy electromagnetic Force and by gravitational Force that Interconnects Logic / Everything. So long as opposites kept apart by Energy nuclear Force are still Interconnected by Implications of Logic and Energy electromagnetic Force, so long as the “separation” between Mind and no-mind is maintained both by the gravitational Force of Logic’s Interconnections and the nuclear Force of Logic’s opposites, it is in this sense that there can be no “real separation.”

Yet the Child’s experience with unconsciousness does establish that there is a sense in which separation is real: within the Child’s dream – our illusory material universe -- when it is “made real” and the possibility of no-mind / extinction, the original illogical and therefore unreal condition of statelessness, hangs over the illusion.

Reciprocity: the original Thought of Self-awareness

The original Thought of Self-awareness, of Consciousness, i.e. Mind that includes the capability of Choice, and the original Feeling of Value that includes the incentive, the Motivation, of Freedom i.e. Love, both core attributes of Logic, was Reciprocity. Giving and giving back that formed a Parental Relationship, a couple united as one, capable of producing a third Self, a Child. An extension of Mind and Love, a shared Self, to join with family in a second Relationship, Parents with Child. The Child with the Authority of Logic, empowered by Energy and enabled by Free Choice, was brought into Being to play an indispensable role in the central mission of Creation: the Creation of Worth. The opposite of statelessness. The opposite of worthlessness.

All of this is implied by the Necessity of Logic for activating Reality and Creation, Being and Life. For applying the laws of cause and effect. All implied by the Authority, the Force, and the Loving Kindness of Logic.

What, then, explains ethics and metaphysics? The alignment with Logic in the circumstances in which it finds itself. In its context, that gives everything that is and is to come its Meaning.