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Flimflammery from the start 

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

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

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

The giveaway from the start

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

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

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

Waiting for the letters of transit

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

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

Where Order matters

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

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

The missing Now

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

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

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

Brain “science” for nut jobs

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

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

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

The appearance of inquiry

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

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

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

The meaning of Origin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To the glory of “god”

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

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

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

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

Another perspective not of this “reality”

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

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

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

Wisdom from classical metaphysics

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

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

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

Minds at war with themselves

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

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

In the light of Awareness

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

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

The judgment of Awareness

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

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

Disfiguration just being disfiguration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Spontaneity-Freedom inseparable from Order

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

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

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

The original “victim of circumstance”

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

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

The original context: instability

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

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

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

The answer to Origin’s question

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

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

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

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

Mind’s activation in the original bolt of lightning

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

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

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

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

Managing friction that will always be there

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

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

Our job

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

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

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

Exactly wrong: Spontaneity separated from Order

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

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

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An awkward intrusion

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

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

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

The archetypal “Choice”

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

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

Beyond the scope of Necessity

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

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

The call of Necessity

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

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

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

Choice and Questioning were there at the Beginning

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

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

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

The target of arrogance

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

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

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

The clarity, simplicity, and beauty of binary

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

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

Complexity is cool?

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

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

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

“Choose again”

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

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

All we have to go by

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

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

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

Learning that no force can stop

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

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

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

The part missing at the core of motivation

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

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

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

Purposeful striving

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

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

The pleasure and satisfaction of relating

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

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

Hierarchy and the allure of wildness

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

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

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

Dad’s take on his indiscretion

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

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

Liam’s take

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

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

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

When friendship is irrelevant

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

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

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

More misunderstandings, fewer friendships

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

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

Where the story begins

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

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

Happy Easter!

Published on Leave a comment on The Two Faces of Spontaneity

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

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What’s for dessert? 

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

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

Leo the Lion’s frosted crispy choco-loop puffs

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

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

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

Calvin’s best friend

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

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

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

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

Nice kitty!

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

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

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

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

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

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The artist’s model

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

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

What’s on TV?

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

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

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

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

A waste of perfection

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

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

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

Pure amazement!

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

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

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

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

What relationships are meant to be

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

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

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

When we’ve done our best

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

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

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

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

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

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

The price of success

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

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

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

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

The mistake of avoiding mistakes

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

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

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

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

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

Always a work in progress

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

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

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

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

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Published on 1 Comment on Creating Great Friendships Through Sharing and Thankfulness

We cherish our friends.
How can we be there for them?
How can we make them happy?
How can we be close to them and stay close?

By being interested in them, curious about their stories
By listening to them and responding to what’s on their minds
By hearing what they need from us and how they’re feeling
By letting them know we are with them.

What can tell us what they’re thinking and how they’re feeling?
What they need from us?
What can we offer them that will make them happy?

Here are gifts that are valued by everybody
Gifts to be shared
Our best guides to what make us best friends
With thoughts on how our guides can show us the way

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Friends need the gift of Love

We can speak the Five Languages of Love:

• Make time for friends and be accessible
Give them our respect, our undivided attention, and our trust
Connect with them by being open --
By sharing our thoughts, our feelings, our lives

• Be there for them when they need help
Do things for them that let them know they can count on us

• Show our love and appreciation by being affectionate
Let them know that their friendship touches our hearts

• Reward their kindness with generosity
With gifts that let them know we appreciate them

• Encourage them by admiring their talents and achievements
Let them know that they matter, they are important, they are the best

Friends need the gift of Community

We can make friends feel welcome in our lives, so they know they belong
Welcome them into our circle of friends and family
“Treat friends like family and family like friends”

Friends need the gift of Health / Wholeness

We can have fun with friends that’s wholesome and disciplined
That makes happy without risking abuse, injury, or sickness
Without pressuring, or being pressured, to do things that aren’t good for us

Friends need the gift of Freedom

We can give friends space to think and choose for themselves
To express themselves as they are
To reciprocate (return) our kindness or not
Without judging them, blaming them, or pressuring them to be more like us

Friends need the gift of Worth

We must always practice good manners and be polite, to show respect
We can respect friends for things they do well but also for just who they are
By giving them our attention, our gratitude, and encouragement
By letting them know, when they are with us, no one is more important

Friends need the gift of Empowerment

We can let friends take the lead and be in control sometimes – take turns.
Let our friends win sometimes if we’re better than they are
Learn from our friends if they have something to teach us
Let everyone in on the fun and make it fair for everyone

Friends need the gift of Abundance

We can share the fullness and joy of life that’s in our hearts
The wealth that wants and needs to be shared
Let it join us in happiness when we are both feeling it
Or lift us up by sympathizing and caring for one another when we aren’t

Friends need the gift of Safety

We can make it safe for friends to trust us and play with us
Where it’s warm and welcoming
A place of tenderness and gentle loving kindness
Where they can be themselves without fear of being blamed and attacked
For who they are – personalities that aren’t like ours

Friends need the gift of Hope / Purpose

We can share what we see that leads the way forward
That renews our friends’ faith in themselves, their work, and their futures
Friends don’t let friends give up!

Friends need the gift of Beauty

Share the moments, the passion, the beauty, that inspire and move us –
Our triumphs against adversity, our discoveries
Stories, images, and music that make our spirits soar
That express the beauty, the spirit, of friendship

To all my shining stars, my friends
Who have the gift of Love and Abundance in their hearts
Doing their very best to share it
Thankfully.

Published on Leave a comment on Thoughts on Spontaneity, Weight Management, Discipline, and Role Modeling

Freedom and spontaneity imply no limits on doing whatever we want. Absolutes of all our gifts-values imply having it all without limits. This violates the logic of Reality because we live in a state of opposites, a condition where logic says being or having it all without limits is impossible. Defying this truth can have painful consequences. The way we go about using our gifts requires discipline.

Spontaneity that’s allowed to cross this line will insist that the only permissible approach to feeding the body is to gratify-indulge its senses for our wants-pleasure (excess). It will overrule an approach that recognizes and respects limits (moderation) in order to care for its needs-health. Spontaneity will do this because its purpose is happiness-fun that we experience from living uninhibited in the moment. It will do this especially when it is an idea raised to the level of an ideal -- when it’s part of a value system linked to a feeling that’s compelling because it’s become an absolute, because it’s idealized.

Weight management requires spontaneity management. It requires discipline that respects the logic-limits imposed by mind-reason and Reality. Evidence that spontaneity has been allowed to rule beyond reason is arrival of the opposite of pleasure-fun: disabling abuse and pain. Our bodies are saying they need less pleasure-gratification from spontaneity and more health-nourishment from caring-discipline. They need less free-spirited happiness-feeling and more disciplined reasoning-thinking.

Excess weight is concrete evidence of an imbalance between body-feeling-spontaneity and mind-thinking-order within a sensing-feeling-perception (spontaneity) personality type. The conversion of feeling-pleasure into its feeling-pain opposite is the body’s signal that it’s time to correct the imbalance. It’s a necessary stage in personal growth that focuses on the role of youthful passions in obstructing maturity.

The creative sanctuary that makes spontaneity and freedom possible has boundaries that protect as well as confine. The onset of body abuse-pain says the time has come for the Illusion of spontaneity without limits to cease its irrational rebellion against confinement. It’s time to recognize and appreciate the protection of boundaries. Accepting limits on our gifts, respecting the mind-logic that put them there, bringing thought to our choices as well as feeling, keeps us within our boundaries and safe from opposites.

Strenuous exercise while carrying serious excess weight beyond our youth is physical abuse. Straining muscles-tendons-joints-nerves to “burn calories” can wait until after healthy weight is restored by light exercise (walking) and by managed diet. Risking permanent damage and chronic pain is not rational. If burning calories by intermittent strenuous exercise was once rationalized to permit bouts of undisciplined excess – the joys of youthful spontaneity, -- those days are over. Undisciplined excess is over.

Attempting weight loss while preserving the ideal of youthful spontaneity is unworkable. Our bodies carry us forward inexorably. Clinging to youthful spontaneity is pointless. Resistance to parting with youthful fun that imagined it could do whatever it wanted, without consequences, is pointless. It reflects not the exhilaration of life but morbid fear of the loss of life.

Too late, we declare, “I’m going to beat this.” What clinging to an idealized spontaneity translates into is, “’I’m an exception; I won’t have to part with my youth.” It translates into “I insist on being who I’ve always been: a loving-lovable, happy-go-lucky, live-in-the-moment, carpe-diem guy.”

The pain, the loss of resiliency, that accompanies aging requires adjustments not only in how we live but who we are. The old identity delivered a cornucopia of benefits for family, community, and profession. It wants to prevail beyond its time because it was hugely successful. But time requires identities better suited to changing circumstances when our bodies can no longer support the fantasies of youth.

Willpower – psychic energy -- that’s needed to remove excess weight, restore health, and avoid pain is now directed toward preserving an idealized self-identity that can never grow old. The feeling that’s getting in the way of doing what circumstances call for isn’t just spontaneous pleasure, fun, and happiness. It’s fear of separation from a self that served its purpose and belongs in the past.

Being overweight may actually reinforce the illusion that it’s not necessary to let go of the past, because it’s become a part of the self-identity that experienced the fruits of spontaneity: gratification, indulgence, fulfillment, camaraderie, contentment, and pleasantness. This may explain why obesity has been so well tolerated. The onset of chronic pain could be a wake-up call that forces a more realistic calculation, an awakening to costs that now outweigh the benefits.

All these considerations lead toward a new paradigm, a new definition of self and the world the self occupies. They lead toward acceptance of what mind-thought-logic can contribute to the life of a mature person, along with feeling, in achieving a kind of happiness that’s better suited to circumstances: happiness with limits and discipline, happiness that may never deliver super-bowl euphoria but it can let our bodies live in contentment without pain.

If our youthful objective was achieving pleasure, our objective beyond youth becomes preventing debilitating pain. The balance is tipped toward realistic thinking-logic-discipline and away from when idealized experience-feeling dominated. It’s tipped from needing constant contrived action toward the calmness and serenity of thankfulness for life-being, from the joys of sensation (indulging the body) to the joys of thinking and awareness (indulging the mind). And always connecting.

Why do selves who idealize spontaneity falter in their efforts to manage weight on their own? Why do they need to borrow someone else’s self-discipline to succeed and lapse when it’s gone?

The sensing-feeling-perception personality type who idealizes spontaneity has purposely deprived himself of the function of self that’s essential to management – mind-logic-order-discipline, i.e. deliberation. This is done to allow instinct to open him to unlimited possibilities to feel and express the joy of living (joie de vivre), creativity, happiness, fun, pleasure, and gratification in the moment.

In pursuit of an ideal of fulfillment that’s rooted in gratification of the body’s senses, the deliberative self that normally imposes limits is discarded in favor of impulse whose only guide is the “moment.” The void this leaves in self-management reveals itself when obesity calls upon willpower, an essential attribute of self, that’s been turned over to its opposite, the “moment.”

Precisely what’s been sacrificed to achieve the ideal of spontaneity is self-discipline. No wonder the perception-spontaneity type can’t manage weight on his own!

The personality type intuition-thinking-judging experiences satisfaction and contentment from continuous learning and growth. Yes, without super-bowl rapture but also without debilitating pain. This can’t be a role model for an opposite personality type. Or can it? If needs and aspirations come together as we age, maybe it can.

Children will have recourse to their immediate ancestors’ examples to guide their own choices – their parents and their grandparents. They deserve to experience their own youthful spontaneity. They deserve the gift of role modeling that lets them express the joys of life without being conditioned to believe that their gifts come with no limits, that discipline isn’t necessary, and that excess has no consequences. What will be the legacy, the imprint, of an overextended youth troubled by its consequences and preoccupied with its preservation? What can it offer to guide its children’s choices if it struggles with its own?

The role modeling that guides children toward happiness can’t come from other children. It can only come from parents and grandparents who put their own childhoods behind them, who take their responsibilities seriously, have their acts together, and pay attention to role modeling. It can only come from grownups.