Time to think again
Intuition with insights from the Life of Mind explain human experience with clarity and practical resonance. Potentially more so than any other source, because the twists and turns of human thought don’t terminate at the portal we came through to get here. They extend way beyond the “beginning of time” to the portal through which anything and everything must pass. To the Presence that was there in the Now, at the beginning: the rules and definitions that govern what Is and what Isn’t. The ancients called it Logos. I’m OK with “Logic.” Tap into the implications of Logic and they take us a long way.
What follows in “The Lure of Liberty” is a small harvest of fruit that this particular tree bears. Nourishment for minds wanting better answers to questions than the dominant paradigms provide us, from philosophy, psychology, science, and religion. Questions that thwart human progress, because the dominant paradigms are not connecting with our origins, getting our story right. As a species we’re far from connecting with context that supplies purpose and meaning. Far from grasping what our circumstances may be telling us. Because the very source we must turn to for answers, the human mind, has been turned against itself. The very central fact that the dominant paradigms fail to acknowledge. We must come to terms with its implications. We must learn to remove the barriers to Logic and change our mind.
A few modest insights won’t make much difference. But they illustrate a point I hope to make in my book, The Story of the Child: that returning to the roots of philosophy, through the insights of Intuition guided by Logic, can inch us forward. Insights guided by sources from Logic like Jesus and A Course in Miracles, Plato and The Allegory of the Cave, can break through the wall of ambiguity our split minds and bodies’ senses have built. Remove its deceptions and contradictions. Replace its deeply flawed perceptions with perceptions better aligned with Truth and make progress.
By thinking. Not a novel idea. But after science and technology have held the stage, after Hawking declared philosophy “dead” and not only humanity but all of life is imperiled, maybe its time has come. Maybe, with our country facing another civil war, it’s time to get back to business and think again.
Respect for the role of Free Will in Creation
There’s work to be done in Reality and we can’t do it. A job with real purpose and meaning. What’s worse is we’re prevented from doing it by a lie. A deception that our world of appearances has locked in place by our bodies’ senses, by circular self-referential reasoning since bodies themselves are appearances. A manipulation by a virus whose only purpose is to preserve its place in our thoughts. In mind which is a precious gift from our Parents, who Know only Reality and Truth.
Whose concern isn’t our subservience to any cause. To any agenda, any deception or manipulation. It’s to the protection and exercise of the reason, reciprocity, and Free Will that we are. To the part their Child has been blessed with in Reality and Creation: to enable the creation of Life to affirm its own worth, to extend and empower it.
What would the miracle of Creation, of Life, be without Free Will? A thought without an expression. Form without content. Cause without effect. An empty stance of self-proclaimed value. A billboard advertising an idea without a product. A “product” no one has chosen to buy. What is a product worth that has no market? What is it worth if no one in their individual circumstances, their context, has found any application or use for it? If its “market” is forced or deceived into consuming it?
What does it matter that the Child’s Parents are Mind-Reason-Choice married to Love-Creativity-Freedom and their purpose was to birth a Child whose very identity is Free Will? The inborn power and ability to choose freely so that the creation of Life won’t be hollowness without consequence? Empty rhetoric? Sound and fury signifying nothing?
What does it matter that the Child’s Parents are careful not to let their Authority and Knowledge compromise her Free Will? That their reticence is part of the gift, not a withholding? That they are to be thanked for enabling us to learn what we must, as we will, at our own pace, because they must. We are not stamped by their Authority and Knowledge. We are not denied by their reticence, their respect. We are liberated by it.
Is the Child “our guy” or “our girl”?
Who is the “Child”?
She would be the first step in understanding that everything must have a definition. The first incontrovertible law of metaphysics: that we can’t get at Reality without Logic. Because it is Logic that supplies definitions. That determine who or what a thing is and what it’s for. Who or what can break the surface in all of Reality or unreality, Creation or uncreation – in the all-inclusive scope of Everything and nothing – without having a definition slapped on it? When do the purpose and meaning of anything appear without definition? When can the question what Is or Isn’t, or how it came to be or not to be, be answered without Logic? Without definition?
The definition of the Child may or may not be indifferent to gender but language is not. This language insists on masculine or feminine. Jesus, in A Course in Miracles, determined to get us back to Reality, addresses his readers as the “Sonship:” one son with no differences of any kind because our bodies, illusory thinking, and their differences are an illusion. “God” is the “Father.” I don’t have that luxury.
Where the implications of Logic and insights from Intuition have taken me is beyond the scope of the Course. I choose to break with its precedent on gender because the Logic of the Child’s story, before s/he fell under the influence of the ego, seems to require it. Masculinity and femininity may have played a defining role in the Child’s origin and attribute of Free Will. While the Child could be herself or himself, her Parents of my imagination are Father-Mind and Mother-Love. The Logic and definitions of metaphysics are all about attributes, and if the distinction can’t be made in this context – specific attributes assigned to Parents, Child, and their Child’s role in Creation – the story that Logic and Intuition have woven together in my telling can’t be told.
The precedent I hope never to break is with Logic itself, the authenticity of the Course and my reason for keeping faith with it. So let me add that the Course is modern Gnostic Christianity, and the Child imagined by the Valentinian Gnostics, in the second century, was Sophia. Whose role in the “fall” is not unlike that of the Son in the Course. We chase down the same explanation, and it matters not whether the central figure is our guy or our girl.
We are not our Parents
The Child is who we are in the before-after sequence of Logic: before she lost consciousness, when she lived as Mind in Reality where it is always Now, and after she lost consciousness, when she dreamed an unreality as brains encased in bodies, in an environment of spacetime and matter where it is never Now. The after-Child is us. Though we in our bodies are but a projection of a dreaming mind. Sharing Life-Being with our Parents in Reality but unaware of it, because their Child is unconscious and we are but figures in the dream, living unreal lives, thinking unreal thoughts.
Unaware that the Child shares Life-Being with her Parents in Reality for another reason: because an event is buried in the Child’s Memory, in our collective Memory, and is unknown to us. The event that shut down consciousness, knocked out its power. That preceded the event that lured the Child into an alternate reality of carnival funhouse mirrors. A substitute “home” whose attributes are the exact opposite of her real Home.
The Child is an extension of her Parents, Mind married to Love. Yes, in Reality we are Mind. We are Love. But the Child is not her Parents. Cannot be. And hers is not their role in Creation.
She’s Innocent! And so are we.
What she is also emphatically not is guilt deserving of punishment for having lost consciousness. Nowhere in the Logic of why and how this happened in Reality can a case be made that either Parents or Child engineered the event outside the limits of Logic. Assumptions to the contrary are projections by ego-corrupted minds, themselves steeped in guilt, as we all are. Not by the loss of consciousness but by the activation of the ego shadow code that came after, when the Child was not in her right mind.
Pursuing the Truth through Logic to establish the Child’s Innocence can have important consequences: for our ability to follow our guides who teach forgiveness, like Jesus in A Course in Miracles, and for our awakening. It’s a story worth telling and I hope to make a contribution, logically, in my book, The Story of the Child.
Reclaiming the purpose and meaning of Life
We aren’t performing any role in Creation now because the Child who imagines us is unconscious. Asleep and dreaming a dream of unreality. An illusion of appearances meant to deceive. Meant to locate a falsehood and its source within Child-mind and keep it there. An agent of unreality and untruth whose only purpose is the preservation of the dream, to keep the Child unconscious and us in its thrall.
The master of Plato’s Cave. The ego whose origin in the Child’s psyche is explained by Jesus in the Course. A viral shadow code – non-being – that tricked the Child, unconscious and defenseless, into listening to it. Into choosing to follow it because it had a message the Child, in her defenselessness and disorientation, her nightmare of sin, guilt, and fear, was desperate to hear. Into following it where only a lie could lead, into the insanity of separation. Into chaos ungoverned and ungovernable. Into Energy encased in matter, split minds encased in bodies, all of it entrapped in entropy destined for inertia.
Lies can be undone. Minds tricked into dreaming nonsense can awaken. Can heal the illusory separation. The Child with Free Will can choose again. What then is the lie? Where is Reality? Where is Truth? Where is our Home and how can we get back to it? What happened to our purpose, the meaning of Life? How can we reclaim it? How can we awaken?
Logic is empowerment as well as protection.
Logic – Logos -- is definition and governs by definition. By defining the meaning, nature, character, and scope of things. “Definition” is DE- + finis, the Latin word meaning “boundary, limit.” To “define” implies confinement: boundaries that put limits on freedom, mobility, autonomy. Built into the meaning, nature, character, and scope of everything that Is. Nothing in Reality-Creation can Be without the boundaries, the limits, of their definitions.
Definition is the essential instrument of Logic. Without definition Logic would be cause without effect. Definition is the bar code on every product of Reality-Creation and every self that went into and came out of its Creation. The label that identifies it and certifies its legitimacy, its belonging to Reality-Creation. That signifies that it’s Real.
Nothing in Reality-Creation can Be without designation by Logic of who or what it is, what it is for, and what it does. The “nature” of a thing is its Logic. Logic is identification: it defines who and what self is. Identification is self’s authority. The Logic of a Life that defines who or what it is is its authority to do what it does, to perform its function in Creation. Logic is authority that limits who or what self is, what-when-where self can do, and how self can do it, by defining and identifying it. Logic authorizes acceptance into Reality of the works of Creation, its new lives, the extension of Being, and the functions they were given by definition to perform.
The authority of Logic empowers new Lives, new selves. Logic is empowerment as well as protection. It is self’s login ID that gains entry into Reality. Logic’s definitions not only cover who or what self is that authorizes belonging to the community of Being; it also animates who or what self is. To act in service to the function implied by who or what self is.
Logic governs by managing roles and relationships in service to the shared purpose defined by Logic: Creation and reciprocation of the worth of Being-Life. Logically, without conflict or contradiction among identities or functions. Without opposites colliding that’s impossible in Reality but defines unreality, the state of mind that’s corrupted by the viral shadow of ego non-being. The Logic of Logic, its own definition-purpose, is the absence of contradiction: Peace, Truth, and Sanity. The gift of reason, the gift of rationality. The Logic of governance is the same: harmony within the diversity of Creativity, the gift of rationality.
The dual function of Logic’s authority
The context in Reality governed by Logic is the exact opposite of the Child’s context in unreality, where the ego’s promise of “freedom” from the confinement of definitions, from Logic’s authority, led her not to harmony but to chaos. It was a subterfuge: that there is another reality where definitions don’t have boundaries – an absurdity. Where the necessity, the authority of Logic, doesn’t rule and definitions aren’t needed – more absurdity. Where the Child overcome by fear, desperate to get rid of guilt, can attain unlimited possession and control of her gifts -- freedom, empowerment, and abundance. Perverted into license to do whatever she wants, control rather than adapt to her environment, and hoard rather than share wealth. Another reality where the Child can get rid of guilt and escape.
The trick’s power to deceive derives from the dual-function of Logic’s authority: definition-limit with boundary and protection-empowerment with boundary. With a sleight of hand the ego directed the Child’s attention toward define-limit in its open left hand and away from protect-empower in its closed right hand. It was a direct and deeply sinister assault on Logic. On Logos. On God. And it succeeded, which is why we are here. In the Child’s unconscious mind, her abilities disempowered, Logic was rendered meaningless, making it susceptible to its perversion by ego non-being.
Repeating the Child’s signature mistake
What was accomplished by the sleight of hand, the deception in its essence, was a misconception of Truth combined with mis-direction from Truth. A lie combined with avoidance of the Truth. The dynamic of delusion that corrupts the human mind, split between good and evil, and compromises every field of human inquiry including ethical philosophy. Distraction by the body and the lie, avoidance of Mind and the Truth. At one stroke the Child not in her right mind was drawn toward an illusion, a lie, and chose a guide to lead her there.
The Child’s desperation for escape to an alternate reality implied belief in it. It was thus the original act of her unconscious mind, the archetypal belief in contradictory realities, one real, the other unreal:
• that accepted the illusory ego shadow code’s offer to be the Child’s guide to a magical alternate reality.
• that invested belief in the magical alternate reality and thus activated it, our world where, in the words of the Course, “the unreal is made real.”
• that characterizes human thought within the dream, a continuous replication of the Child’s signature mistake: making unreality real, keeping the ego shadow code and its insane dream “alive,” legitimizing its guidance, listening to it, following it.
Melvin Furd in his glory
The shadow code’s response to the Child’s plea was, Sure, there’s someplace else. I can take you there. Follow me. “Someplace else” is a fantasy, the opposite of Reality-Creation. An illusion of facades and pretense. Chaos characterized by absurdities, contradictions and their collisions. A veritable Large Hadron Collider in slow motion. Where every attribute of Creation is turned inside-out and upside-down, reversed and perverted, turned against shared purpose, against itself: “life” imagined as death.
The distinction between Logic-Heaven and ego-hell is the distinction between Order and chaos. The fatal misperception of Freedom is that it’s possible without Order, without the discipline of Logic that governs the roles and relationships of Reality-Creation in a state of harmony. Part of the grand illusion of separation that turned dream into nightmare, Heaven into hell. Once again, it was Logic’s own authority that gave the trick its power to deceive, the dual function of boundary: definition-limit and protection-empowerment. That gave an ego-corrupted mind an opening to project its lies onto Logic-authority. Cloaked in the defense of “liberty,” when in Reality it’s a direct assault on Liberty. A taking of Freedom, not its giving.
What had been the sharing and reciprocation of abundance, empowerment, and affirmation, a celebration of worth and thankfulness, the purity of Reality, was now a toxic brew of possession by taking, control by dominance, confinement by manipulation of appearances, worthlessness by invalidation and ingratitude. What had been radiant and fragrant was now putrefaction, the waste of inverted self-interest. The stench of selfishness warped by wealth and power into Gollum, a pathetic, misshapen frenzy of human greed, conquest, and depravity. Into specialness, a wild fantasy of violation of shared purpose, of Innocence, of Being-Life, all with the seed of guilt. The ultimate perversion: Oneness, expanding Creation, contracted into littleness. The Logic of Everything displaced by nothing. The grand poseur, Melvin Furd, in his glory atop the throne of God.
Specialness withheld: the original conspiracy theory
All of it literally mis-guided. By nothing more than a viral shadow code. A foolish delusion that has no life of its own. That distracted an unconscious, defenseless mind with false promises and will, one day, finally, be ignored. Mis-guided by mis-characterization of the shared purpose of Reality-Creation, a gift to the Child of happiness as well as affirmation of worth. A sanctuary of shared peace and protection, Love and belonging, trust and Intimacy. Of Innocence and empowerment, spontaneity, joyfulness, playfulness, song, and laughter.
It is not and cannot be the gift of shared Oneness. The Innocence and Knowing of Oneness, of Consciousness, the Child’s Parents, and the function of their Child, Free Choice -- the exploration of possibilities into the unknown, that include the possibility of unconsciousness and dreams of unreality -- do not mix. The relationship between Parents and Child is essential to Creation and remains unbroken in Reality. Yet these two attributes are incompatible by definition. So illogical together that combining both on the same plane of Creation, inadvertently, may account for the Child’s loss of Consciousness. Inquiring into how and why this could have happened is the purpose of my book, The Story of the Child.
The mischaracterization that corrupts the shared purpose of Reality-Creation is the sanctuary’s denial of specialness. The gift of shared Oneness that could not be given. And so ego-corrupted minds, craving specialness, looking for trouble, fantasize that it was a gift deliberately withheld. The original conspiracy theory.
We are the heroes
Another excuse for hating – what else? Logic. For hating – what else? Reality and Truth. For hating God. The seed bed in the human psyche for the plague of irrationality and insurrection that grips our politics today. The nurseries from The Thing (1951) and Alien that incubate monsters out to destroy us.
And who came to the rescue? Us. Captain Pat Hendry and Ellen Ridley saw to the monsters’ end. It took some thinking. It took courage and a lot of effort. But they figured it out. No “saviors” were on hand to bail them out. And therein lies the message. We are the heroes. The answers we seek lie within our own minds, and this is where we must go.
Specialness is a logical impossibility
The supposed denial of specialness resonates so deeply with the wounded Psyche of the Child that it may continue bleeding grievances, resentments, and conspiracy theories until the Child awakens. Until the end of time. Yet it is entirely false. The Child’s role in Reality-Creation requires that she be aware that she cannot be or act as Oneness. This is logically neither who she is nor what she does. She must be aware of possibilities, the possibility of unconsciousness and its illusory opposites that the Innocence of Oneness cannot and must not bring to Consciousness.
That she was not aware in Reality could explain her loss of consciousness. But why was she not aware? This is the question that insights from Intuition, guidance from Memory – Logic, – need to answer. If character and Innocence matter, and they do. This is the question addressed in my book, The Story of the Child.
The Innocence of Oneness cannot and must not bring the possibility of unconsciousness and its illusory opposites to Consciousness because it is Consciousness that welcomes the thoughts of Mind, the gifts of Creation, into Reality. It is Knowledge that by Knowing realizes. Consciousness that by definition does not and cannot Know anything of illusory-unreal opposites. Purity and Innocence that by definition can Know nothing of impurity and guilt. The inward-looking Self-awareness of Oneness, the seed of Creation that contains Everything, that by definition can Know nothing of anything outside itself. Because, by definition, there is nothing outside of itself.
Does the Child really want Consciousness -- her Parents -- to admit her nightmare of appearances, misery, death, and hell into Heaven? Could specialness, if it were an attribute of the Child as conspiracy theorists want, really be compatible with the shared purpose of Reality-Creation? With the miracle of eternal Life?
The idol of the right: “almighty god” who does whatever he wants
The Child’s acceptance of the ego’s sinister offer of guidance is rationalized by the lie that Oneness-specialness was her birthright. That wrathful Parents bent on her punishment for separating from them deprived her of it. That it was their taking it from her that caused her unconsciousness. Unconsciousness that she may have experienced as expulsion from her home in Reality, from her sanctuary of happiness in Creation.
To an ego-corrupted mind the real calamity of unconsciousness, the result of an inadvertence, would then be misconstrued as an imagined offense: unfair exclusion from Heaven. A deliberate wound to the heart, to their worth. A myth straight out of the story of the Child, corrupted by the ego, that thrives in our Ghost Busters political culture populated by internetted social media demons. That motivates the right, from January 6th insurrectionists to latter-day Ayn Rand “objectivists.” Grieving over the birthright of Oneness-specialness that was stolen from them along with their property. Over their unfair exclusion from the society of “winners,” the special-elite privileged with their exclusive entitlements.
The ego’s misshapen myths are the consequence not of Logic’s deliberate mismanagement of Reality-Creation but of its laws of cause and effect. Of the necessity of Authority’s definitions of what a self must be and what it can do. Of what’s logically possible and what’s not. Projections of ego-corrupted irrational minds pervert what’s possible by Logic-definition and shared Purpose into what’s allowed by an arbitrary authority that’s taking-possessing and controlling-dominating. By a self-absorbed self-interest just like them. By what they misperceive as an “almighty god,” unbound by Logic, who does whatever he wants. This is what the ego shadow code aspires to be. This is who its followers imagine they are.
More ego-insanity: the Child’s stolen right to dictate
Non-being shadow code, the angel of death, is the arch-enemy of Free Will, enabler of Life. If there is one one talent that the ego does not possess it would be Free Choice. Manipulating the unconscious Child into parting with her gift would be its first priority. Free Choice among the Child or any of her progeny poses a terminal threat to the outlandish fabrications of unreality. The thrust of any inquiry, any argument, toward asking Why would automatically separate mind from servility, the condition of mindless obedience to authority that rules Plato’s Cave.
So, when the Child was lured into the dream away from Reality-Truth, it was with the lie that her right to dictate without the necessity of Free Choice was taken from her. That she should be able to Create Life as Oneness-Consciousness – as God -- by simply Knowing. And thus was born, in the Child’s Psyche, the authoritarian streak that recoils from governance by free choice managed by Logic. That’s drawn toward concentrations of authority in autocrats who can dictate “order” without sharing it democratically. With the support of subjects who don’t object to their powerlessness because they share power vicariously through their Cave-master guides. Because their worth receives its affirmation from superficial entertainments even though they’ve surrendered their sovereignty, their souls.
Where does all this madness come from?
The essential attribute of evil is mindlessness. Which, since Logic and Feeling, Mind and Love, are inseparable, also means lifelessness, lovelessness, and thoughtlessness -- all that the absence of these elements of Reality-Creation imply.
The essential motivation behind the assault on Logic-Order, on behalf of the ego’s malign defense of “liberty,” is not the protection of Free Will but its surrender. To an entirely unreal, illogical, mythical “higher power” that’s nothing of the sort. To an imposter, shadow code’s non-being posing as the master of Plato’s Cave. Whose hapless occupants are held not in a paradise of “liberty” but in an authoritarian hell of captivity. Duped by numbers, by the appearance of belonging to a group, into fantasizing that they’re serving a larger cause. When all they serve is an illusion: their master’s authority. The tyranny of a delusion wielded by a bizarre figment of corrupted imaginations: a very self-centered, very unreal, specialness.
The fallacy of right-wing authoritarian politics
Republicans, fearing that they were a permanent minority, sought the advice of consultants around a century ago. Their advice: give up trying to attract the majority with reason. Forget about truth. Appeal instead to irrationality and tell voters whatever they want to hear.
The result? Unimagined success! Republicans discovered to their delight that many voters, captives to ego-myths of specialness denied and victimhood, would rather vote their grievances and resentments than any calculus of benefits and costs. They would rather retaliate against their tormenters, “elites” who deny their birthright to specialness. Would rather enact a grand reckoning of justice than govern. Tie their fortunes to the madness of a victim just like them, even if it takes down Democracy, their country, even peace.
So compelling is this irrational nonsense that it filled Plato’s Cave to overflowing, with millions of occupants pledged to the defense of its master at any cost. Convinced that loyalty to a “higher power” puts them on the side of good. That the power of the Cave master is shared with them when, in truth, it was stolen from them. What Republicans learned to their delight was that minds already duped by lies will fight fiercely to defend them. That making unreality real isn’t on the margins of society; it’s the force that drives human irrationality.
Irrationality carried now to dangerous extremes, unhinged from Reality and sanity. Denying climate change. Threatening yet another Civil War. A state not of passive alienation from shared purpose but of active, deliberate insurrection. Against our only means of community – shared purpose. And in service to what? To a lie: a perverse defense of “liberty” that’s hard at work taking it away.
Changing minds without drinking the hemlock
What’s the answer? Jesus says, in A Course in Miracles, that all our Father asks of us is that we show a little willingness to change our minds. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave an enlightened one, modeled after Socrates, offered help. He tried to part the occupants from their delusions. His reward was hemlock. Minds can change. Desperately need to be changed. The dominant paradigms are ripe for change. But we must know what we’re doing. Choose the right Guide and ask for help. Access Intuition. Align thinking with Logic. Stop the madness and give it some thought.
Follow Logic into the Story of Mind by understanding three basic facts:
• Logic moves forward by implication. That is, by what points imply. Grasping implications requires reflection, a function of Intuition which expands into different ways of looking at things which, in turn, yield different possibilities. A source of Creativity which never ends because the implications of Logic never end.
• What is not Reality-Good must be its exact opposite. To define unreality which is non-being / not-good, simply reverse the attributes of Reality-good. These are the lies that need to be undone.
• We change individual minds with universal truths. There is no “universal mind” in our fractious unreal world of separation to change with any truth. The occupants of Plato’s Cave are individuals their master would possess and control as a group. They are not a group and cannot be approached as a group.
Choose by exercising Free Will:
• Make logical connections by using reason, a function of Thinking, which provides one of three main foundations for choice: measurement of benefits and costs.
• Use evaluation, a function of Feeling, to weigh and compare the value of benefits and costs..
• Use judgment, a function of Order and Authority, to establish purpose and meaning from context, the third, critical foundation. Which allows analysis to integrate every consideration under one. The one that’s most important. The controlling consideration that makes a statement who we are and what we’re about: our thinking, our values, our character. The one that decides.
God bless and have at it!