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Reflections on the meaning of Christmas                                    December 2023

The Process and Structure of Creation

Conflicting visions of Paradise

Worried sick. Dude, this is Christmas. Where’s your one-horse sleigh? Santa’s coming. And he knows when I’ve been bad or good. So? I thought I was being good. I was expecting goodies under the tree. Yes. Doing what you’re told. Not asking stupid questions. Now I’m not so sure. And being agreeable. Waahhhhhh! Tell you what. If Santa’s a no-show I’ll let you borrow my sleigh bells. Waahhhhhh! 

Sigh. Let’s hear it. Edna! Get room service. We’re out of eggnog. I was thinking about Christmas and I was going to make Santa happy by being good at not being bad. There’s a problem with that? What if bad went away? Like, what if we didn’t have to put up with being contradicted? Ah! Maybe then I could attract girls! Santa would hang it up. And lose weight if he didn’t have to stuff himself with milk and cookies from billions of kids. Everything would come to a dead end. Or maybe paradise with lots of girls. How about paradise with lots of gags and chloroform?

The first Act of Mind

Did you notice that definitions always have to define stuff by what it isn’t as well as by what it is? Do you have a sister? And did you know that Self-Awareness was illuminated by the first Relationship – the attraction between Logic and Love, masculinity and femininity? There you go again! Edna, what’s taking so long? It wouldn’t have happened if something hadn’t happened before. Before. . . Self-Awareness? Do that again! What? Twirl your eyes in opposite directions.

The first act of Mind, questioning the status quo. Socrates got into trouble with that, pestering people with questions. Jesus too. He contradicted stuff that everyone took for granted. Questioning the way things are partly by explaining the way they aren’t. Annoying the pharisees who decided he was questioning their authority. Turns out that questioning the status quo doesn’t just upset the authorities. It upsets authoritarians, and they’re all over the place. That’s it! You want me around to help bug authoritarians! You’re around because someone forgot to close the door.

The first “Love Story”

Contradiction goes a long way back. No! Edna! How many days’ rations we got? Mind asked, “What will get Creation started?” Obviously a contradiction of the status quo. Obviously a guy looking for some action. And the answer was “Relationship.” Relationship that’s inseparable like all relationships within the one Mind thinking them.

Put the Force of attraction between Logic and Love to use by illuminating Self-Awareness. Why them? They’re Mind’s two main attributes, where the action is. Masculine Logic hot for feminine Love – yesss! And feminine Love hot for masculine Logic. The first “Love Story.” Portrayals defined in part by what they aren’t: illogic, fear, and self-unawareness, or Mind unconscious. Mind has an opposite? If it does it’s unthinkable. We can forget about it. Here’s your eggnog, Elio. This should help you forget. Thank you, Edna. Industrial strength? Yes. I used up all of your Turbo-Nog.

The role of Logic-Love, Parents

Mind unconscious is a possibility with the Child of its Parents, Logic-Love, but not a possibility with them. Why not? Because they’re Self-Awareness by definition and their Child isn’t. Its Self-Awareness is derived from Relationship with its Parents and a second Force: opposition to possibility from contradiction. From impossibility, its opposite. A Force essential to Creation and ingrained in the laws of cause and effect.

Mind unconscious isn’t a possibility with the Parents because they and their Child have different functions. The role of Parents -- Self-Awareness -- is to welcome performers and their functions into Reality by sharing the gift of Self-Awareness and by definition that determines where they fit within the harmony of its Order  Then what? After that comes the Growth and sharing of Self-Awareness through the extension and expansion of Logic and Love. The Worth of Oneness increasing in value to infinity. Without limits, because Oneness can have no opposites.

The role of Free Choice, Child

The Child’s role is independent judgment that affirms, earns, and reciprocates the Life-Worth of Creation – a gift shared -- and Self-Awareness, the Giver, by freely choosing it. By contributing the measure of value that’s whatever or however someone freely chooses to pay for it. A Rembrandt painting that’s worthless unless it attracts a buyer willing to pay for it. Just as the pairing of Logic with Love started Creation with spontaneity that could not be controlled, the judgment of Child establishes its Worth with the spontaneity of Free Choice that cannot be corrupted.

By Mind putting its finger on the scale. An impossibility by definition. Because the role of Mind Logic-Love, that governs from the bottom up to serve and support Creation, is to respect, not overrule, all its functions, including Free Choice. Supporting symbiosis between Freedom and Order that lies at the core of Creation.

The two phases of Creation

Two distinct phases distinguished by Growth not needing and Free Choice needing awareness of opposites. That are always questioning, contradicting. And annoying and disrupting. A real pain. Like women: you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them. I might change my mind if opposites are women. Never mind. 

The Growth part of Creation can’t be aware of the underside of definition without the Self-Awareness of Logic-Love making it real. So when functions are added to Creation their opposites automatically transfer over to Free Choice, the part of Creation where the reverse is true. Where Self-Awareness must be aware of contradictions but only the Parent-Child Relationship can make them real. And any possibility of that happening by mistake is ruled out.

Go ahead and laugh

How? By Child-Mind losing consciousness and its function being disabled. By temporarily joining opposites in the unreality of self-unawareness where it can learn from experience how to correct its mistake. Learn from craziness? By understanding that the craziness has a pattern. Cyclical re-enactment of the Child’s archetypal mistake: projecting Love onto its reflection. Onto its reverse mirror-image that has no better “purpose” than to amuse itself with the Child’s self-delusion and pursue its crazy dream of “supremacy.” The “triumph of the will.”

With every manner of impossibilities that are reversals of the Truth made “real.” Until either its captive self-destructs or the illusion of “time” “ends.” When the “goal” of contradicting Reality’s eternal Now is reached with everything, including Mind, “ending.”

Something between total catastrophe and a Three Stooges food fight. Go ahead and laugh. Jesus in A Course in Miracles encourages questioning and humor too, because getting the “joke” is part of undoing error and getting back to work. The joker in the mirror takes pride in all its “works,” none more gratifying than those that feed its “lovability” with a laugh. An alternate “reality” so illogical and absurd that it can be hilarious. The “artist,” starved for validation and love, would be delighted.

Pushback

Choice can’t be free that’s not aware of all possibilities including their opposites, impossibilities. Our alternate “reality” that came about because of a lack of awareness. Of what? The underside of definition that automatically sends what isn’t to Child’s side of Creation and the possibility of its impossibilities made “real” in an unconscious Mind’s dream.

How can the Child regain consciousness and do its job? By accepting that contradiction-opposites are built into Reality-Creation’s laws of cause and effect for a reason. Because contradiction is essential to the definition of every player and function. And by putting them to their intended use. To help define Self as it evolves -- always a work in progress – by understanding the Logic of contradiction and its usefulness in every context. Disciplining independent judgment to anticipate and prepare for pushback that will keep it honest, focused on its task, and striving to excel.

BYOB

And, most of all, accepting the limits of a shared, interconnected Reality where absolutes without opposites have no place. I can’t rule the Galactic Empire? No. Or be master of Plato’s Cave either. What about King Kong? Palpatine and Plato’s guy didn’t have girlfriends but Kong did. How many times have you seen this movie?

Ann Darrow would have gone for him if they could have set up housekeeping on top of the Empire State Building. She was already thinking about curtains when . . . That’s enough. The city was adding them to its celebrity tour. OK, timeout! They could have made the New York Social Register if they got enough attention. Maybe a slot on the bill at the Metropolitan Opera, or Carnegie Hall, or the Lincoln Center. How about the Central Park Zoo? Or the circus?

Because, with the implications of Logic and the relationships of Love always expanding, circumstances are always changing. Into new contexts that offer opportunities to express the Beauty of meaning with the use of talents. For relating to ideas, values, contexts, and projects in the manner of their Source, Logic and Love. With judgment that responds to opportunities with helpfulness, Innocence, and trust. With the joyfulness and creativity of Self-Awareness. The Kong-Darrow nuptials were the talk of the town. Mr. and Mrs. Kong request the pleasure of your company. . . . BYOB Bring Your Own Bananas.

Diagnosis and Remedy

The diagnosis 

The meaning of Christmas isn’t that Caesar or the pharisees be overthrown but that individuals learn to manage their relationship with them. Following the example of Jesus, with explanation that helps the one Child, our ancestral Mind, recover Self-Awareness. To get out of body-dominated “ownership,” “competition,” and conformity and back to Mind-enabled sharing, intimacy, and Creativity. That recognizes that malevolence, the underside of contradiction, isn’t caused by Self-Awareness but by self-unawareness.

Made "real" in an alternate "reality" by the two masks of narcissism:

  • one the disciplinary “parent” with unquestioned “authority.” The angry, hostile, threatening face of harmfulness: judgment.
  • the other the undisciplined “child” with unquestioned “freedom.” The carefree, ingratiating, unthreatening face of harmlessness: non-judgment.

Bad cop and good cop enforcing the "ideal" of “supremacy.” A perversion of the Oneness of Reality that is Innocence without opposites. Of Freedom and Order that complement one another and are inseparable. The “judgment” of “innocence” preserved by projecting “guilt” onto “others.” “Innocence” preserved by projecting the innocence of others back onto itself. One getting “rid” of “guilt,” the other stealing “innocence” back. With one purpose: to place "supremacy" beyond questioning. By deception and intimidation that rob its captives of personhood. That dehumanize with mindless conformity.

Both made-up worlds of wishful thinking. “Ideals” of unaccountability that’s beyond questioning. Impossibilities since thoughts can’t leave their source, there are no “others” in the Oneness of Reality, and perversions of Oneness, Order, and Freedom can’t be real. Nightmares of psychosis reflected in the narcissist’s sees-all, knows-all mirror. The crystal ball of the original illusionist: the narcissist’s misperception of itself in its shadow-opposite. The “supremacy” of unlimited power and freedom. Nietzsche’s “superman.” Mistaken identity. Self-unawareness.

Whose remedy can't be condemnation and punishment but understanding that’s awareness of the mistake. Awareness of Self instead of its reflection that will restore Order. By standing definition back on its feet instead of its head. Putting the underside of contradiction back on the bottom where it belongs. The bottom isn’t so far from the top of the Chrysler Building. Maybe if he’d taken her up there. . . .   

The remedy: Relationship 

Remedy that’s a possibility with minds open to questioning, That respect Free Choice and the Free Spirit of Inquiry. Like free speech? Like creative governance that’s open to questioning versus authoritarian rule opposed to it. That fears and opposes learning and growth because it can’t control the outcome. It’s the essence of contradiction, the free spirit of questioning, that keeps Authority governing with wisdom and helpfulness from the bottom up. Without being lured by “supremacy” -- the false god of absolutes -- into ruling arbitrarily with harmfulness from the top down.

The formation and growth of Self-Awareness through Relationship, Logic-Love, took place under the laws of cause and effect that protect contradiction. By requiring it in definition for the same reason that Freedom depends on Order and Order depends on Freedom. To ensure that by remaining inseparable they will remain soulmates instead of opposites-competitors. Instead of absolutes that contradict Relationship, the most harmful contradiction of both Freedom and Order. And all of Reality-Creation based on Relationship in a shared, interconnected world.

If my buddy Kong had played his cards right he could have kept the dame. They’d be big on Broadway. Favorites at Sherman Billingsley’s Stork Club, all over Winchell’s column, lighting up Runyon’s stories. Who would pay for bigger stages and dressing rooms? VIP limos for giant apes? They would, with all the dough they’d be raking in. Daily Mirror headline: “Empire State Building to be converted to first-floor apartment for Mr. and Mrs. Kong.”  And renamed. What? Kong's Galactic Empire Building. Flashing Kong's image on the clouds when the NYPD is desperate for help from a giant ape. Ann Darrow can be played by Lois Lane. Don't be ridiculous!

The remedy: opposites 

The Worth of Oneness increasing in value to infinity, without limits because Oneness can have no opposites, is the state that absolutes aspire to in the fantasies of reflection. The impossibility of no opposites, which the authoritarian narcissist, the will of the beast in the mirror, seeks to attain with “supremacy.” Not “triumph” over opposites that permits co-existence but elimination that doesn’t.

The threat to the sovereignty of individuals dependent on narcissistic authoritarians and to social order that depends on governance from the bottom up. Which makes opposites, the mortal enemy of absolutes, the friend of individual sovereignty and civil rights. And contradiction – “speaking against” – an indispensable means of removing the threat.

The remedy: A dose of Why from Mind 

Thinkers like Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari, Sean Carroll and Brian Greene, help with How humanity’s story plays out but their sweeping narratives still don’t get at Why -- the question that requires the intent of Mind for a logical answer. And the reason why authoritarian tribal-“realists” oppose it: to prevent Truth from exposing the deception in the mirror and bodies hiding it behind appearances.

The explanation that Jesus brings from Mind is a dose of Why that hog-ties body-centered authoritarians. Self-unawareness immobilized by fear and self-delusion into unshakable resistance to opening their minds. Who have no response other than continued affirmation of illogic, idolatry of bodies, and the silence of disrespect.

Not a display of mindfulness but evasion – thoughtlessness. The absence of Logic-Love since that’s not where their “thinking” comes from. It comes from the reflection. The body-centered authoritarian driven by one goal: to preserve the dream and its authorship. 

The remedy: learning from opposites

Missing the point that opposites are our teacher. Jesus was misperceived by shadow-opposite to be an opposite like it. An attack when he was the opposite: teaching that “sin” isn’t guilt deserving punishment but self-unawareness that needs help regaining Self-Awareness.

Teaching that the error of mis-identity didn’t lead to tribal values and body-brains sharing the stage with individual values and Mind. They’re opposites against their host. Coded to own, rule, and eliminate them with “supremacy.” A warning that will continue to go unheeded so long as body-centered authoritarian minds cling to illogic and evade the help of Logic-Love. Help offered by Mind through the teaching and example of Jesus.

The remedy: Guarding our thoughts 

The appearance of “agreeability” is a “lesson” taught by the “socializing” prefrontal cortex that the animal brain reflected in the mirror has taken to “heart.” One of the traits that the “Five-Factor” theory says should define personality. Because its theory is more “scientific” than Myers-Briggs based on the psychological practice and intuition of Carl Jung. Body’s five senses good, Mind’s sixth sense bad. Yes.

When in fact the “Five-Factor” theory is only another “gift” of bias meant to deceive from the always body-centered cortex. From “science” self-deluded by the perversion of “objectivity:” circular, self-referential “reasoning” that’s body-matter affirming the “reality” of itself. Absurdity protected from questioning by “authority” that puts itself beyond questioning. A cover-up! Exactly. The “likeable,” “charming,” “funny,” and “engaging” mask of the “sociable” reflection now posing as “scientific.” “Erudition” flaunted by the opposite of Truth.

We must be vigilant. Yes. The learning from good contradiction role modeled by Jesus and built into the meaning of Christmas: by all means have fun and enjoy life. Have a Merry Christmas! But always with the vigilance of good contradiction guarding our thoughts.

The remedy: Vigilance against the lure of madness

The cortex’s job is to make “realistic” anything that will conceal the nature of its client. The “logic” of its meaning and purpose which parrots the narcissist’s reflection: illogic. The nature of the underside of contradiction that isn’t here to help and doesn’t wish anyone or anything well. What about itself? Since its goal is to contradict the eternity of timelessness – Now – with the absurdity of time, where everything including time must end, – its agent “wishes” its own end as well.

Madness. Yes. The animal brain’s “wildness” attracts authoritarian “realists” and blood-and-soil “objectivists” with its “promise” of seduction by the primal force of absolute “authority.” By an “ideal,” the false god of “supremacy” that’s servility and addiction. Yet another impossibility and perversion of the Truth: the Child’s Love of its Parents. Madness. “Will” whose “triumph” is triumph over itself. Contradiction contradicting itself. The “reciprocation” of madness with madness. A perversion of Love that reciprocates Love with itself. With Life not “death.”

The remedy: the Truth of individual Self-Worth

The lesson of “agreeability” that’s been “learned” from the cortex by opposite – the animal brain – is an opposite. The contradiction of the fact of agreeability with a fiction: an appearance hiding it. Hiding disagreeability. The appearance of benevolence hiding malevolence. With the lure of camaraderie, the “fun” face of belonging that’s the tribal “realist’s” substitute for Love. The appearance of “one-for-all and all-for one.” "Sincerity” fronting for insincerity. A joke.

The Truth that for tribe the one thing that’s not expendable is itself and the one thing that is is. . .  Me? Yes. The individual. The individual is nothing to the tribe other than however the individual can be exploited. The appearance of friendship that’s transactional. Exemplified by the “worth” of the Japanese soldier to the Japanese military in World War Two: issen gorin -- the cost of a draft notice postcard. Less than an American penny.

The Truth that for individual the one thing that’s not expendable is who it is: the beloved Child of Logic-Love who shares attributes of Self-Awareness, Love, and Innocence required by its function, Free Choice. Attributes that the underside of definition, the reflection in the mirror, seeks to convert into their opposites.

How? By the insane idea that thoughts can leave their source – projection:

  • by projecting its mask stained with guilt onto the innocence of “others” unstained by its guilt. An especially ugly injustice practiced by an especially self-unaware personality type: the dark side of ESFJ (extravert-body sensing-“feeling” (animal brain emotion)-judgment.) A close match with the judgmental-blaming reflection in the mirror, the god-wannabe narcissist posing as a super-responsible parent. “Divine authority” entitled to absolute, unquestioning obedience so self-absorbed infantility can enforce its cartoon fantasy of “absolute power” – “supremacy.”
  • by the reverse projection of a saintly mask of innocence stolen from “others” back onto its unsaintly guilt. An especially ludicrous hypocrisy practiced by a similar self-unaware personality type: the dark side of ESFP (‘P’ for “Perceptive,” or fuzzy-dice “spontaneity” exempting itself from the discipline of judgment.) A close match with the narcissist’s innocent-victim reflection, the lovable-wannabe posing as an un-responsible child. Absolute “freedom” entitled to unquestioning unaccountability so self-absorbed infantility can do whatever it wants in its cartoon fantasy of “living in the moment.” Roman tyranny dressed in the lovable image of foolish innocence, the Gaul Obelix.

The remedy: Seek Guidance to relevance

With the gift of good contradiction we can see through the deception. To the Truth revealed by the Vision of Logic-Love, that in all of its attributes the animal brain beast reflected in the mirror is an imposter. A lifeless, loveless code “intending” to end everything. Our shadow-opposite. This is its nature. Its so-called logic that its self-deluded host – us – is supposed to take seriously. Forget it! A better way to come down from the top of the Empire State Building is to call 9-1-1 and get help. Yes, from a source that’s not a “conductor” to oblivion.    

Doesn’t our military respect the individual soldier? Yes. It tries not to leave anyone out or anyone behind. It honors the memory of the fallen and sometimes honors enemy combatants too. Values inherited from the original ideal of American democracy that insisted on individual rights against tyranny and defined what “America” stood for. The value of authority that governs with service and support from the bottom up. To enable Creativity with Growth and Free Choice instead of ruling cruelly to preserve conformity with an unchanging status quo from the top down.

An ideal and values that have always had opposites but today are losing touch with the Logic of Necessity and passion of Love that contradicted them. Why? Because the ideal, like all values, requires realignment with changing times and changing contexts. With awareness of what context today implies about the correct path forward. A call for Guidance from Logic and Love uniquely qualified to provide it, because only with their help can self-unawareness detect meaning and purpose behind appearances.

Circumstances that seem favorable to a resurgence of the authoritarian mindset are a recurring test of progress toward Self-Awareness. Whose measure is whether the path forward is to be governed by the benevolence of Logic-Love – Mind -- or ruled by the cruelty of predatory animal instinct – body-brain. The only difference between the choice now and the choice in 1776 is circumstances.

What are they telling us? The narcissist authoritarian, robbed of independent judgment by its own reverse mirror image, can only impose its own unchanging context on changing circumstances. Then we need a better guide. The one whose birthday we’re honoring has the right connections. To the Child’s Parents Logic-Love and their unique talent for seeing beyond fiction. Beyond made-up “reality” to facts and what they mean. Demonstrated by his living among us, by his authorship of A Course in Miracles, and in other ways only known to the individual Minds and lives he’s touched. All it takes is Free Choice questioning. Questioning the status quo. Contradicting. Yes. Asking for Guidance.

The remedy: Voice that cannot be silenced

The duty to serve and support the intimacy of loving friendships with honesty and understanding. The duty to contradict the authoritarian reflection in the mirror that can’t tolerate contradiction. To speak against and be heard. To question and receive the respect of an answer. To stand up instead of standing down.

All of this the role performed by Jesus: an opposite that’s helpfulness in a shadowland of authoritarian opposites – harmfulness. Contradiction on the side of the good guys – conscience. The will not to profit from mistake selfishly but to correct it for the sake of gentle loving kindness. No figure of lifeless victimhood on a cross but the living Force of Voice that cannot be silenced. The Voice for Self-Awareness and not self-unawareness. The Voice for Mind and not for its “substitute,” body-brain matter. A role model for the ages. 

Where can I (hic!) sign up! At the de-tox counter. Couldn’t you have saved some of that eggnog for Santa’s helpers? Hic! Edna! Elio needs a ride in the sleigh. I tried that once. What happened? He got run over by the sleigh. What about Rudolph? Rudolph got run over too. They were both impounded and I had to pay to get them out. Never mind.

The remedy: practice

Free Choice given possibilities to work with, all the values that define Life-Worth, also received awareness of the underside of definition since its impossibilities were automatically entrusted to the Self-Awareness of Free Choice. But without Guidance from its Parents’ Knowledge base that included awareness of impossibilities, needing to protect judgment from losing its independence, inexperienced with opposites, Free Choice could only fall back on what competence it had to perform its role.

A likely explanation for its transfer out of production and into training by loss of Self-Awareness was contradiction built into its own definition and the definitions of two values: Freedom and Order.

  • The perversion of Choice “free” of the discipline of Judgment rather than Freedom from interference.
  • The perversion of Freedom completing Order’s harmony with contentment by its opposite, absolute freedom to have and do whatever it wants with no accountabillity.
  • The perversion of Order-authority completing Freedom’s contentment with peaceful harmony by its self-centered opposite: absolute power to rule without opposition. Owning and ruling its domain exclusively for its own benefit.

Both absolutes instrumental in Free Choice’s transference from Self-Love to love for its shadow-reflection. The archetype for narcissism gazing worshipfully into a mirror at the beast projected by its animal brain.

Putting contradiction among the list of values that Free Choice, our function, needs to help recover Self-awareness. To teach us to distinguish between definition’s topside and underside and to learn how to put contradiction to use: to discipline Free Choice with judgment aware of its limits. Keeping it free from captivity to absolutes.

The possibility of not always being right

And making sure that it doesn’t take itself or its job too seriously. For whatever it is, it comes with contradiction. The possibility that it may not always be right but sometimes wrong. Not always be correct but sometimes mistaken. The attribute of Authority that can never be absolute.

I had a crush on Fay Wray for years. That’s why I saw the movie 20 times. I only saw it once. Why? It made me sad when Kong was mean to the nice dinosaur. When he rolled the big log and people clinging to it fell off – that was cool. They were being mean to him and they deserved it. So, you like dinosaurs better than people? If the dinosaur was better looking I might have gone more than once.

Hey -- I’m the wise guy around here! Reflections switch masks at will. Yeah. But watch your step! They're paying me to get the laughs. We’re the two faces of reflection: wisdom and fool. You're lovable and I'm not. That's for sure! And you get all the fun. Can't I be the fool now and then?  Sure, if I get to be wisdom all the time and you find another job. Edna! Elio is being mean to me again! If you interrupt me one more time I'll show you what "mean" is.

The Christmas Gift of Good Contradiction

What lies behind appearances

The meaning of the teaching and example of Jesus is explanation that contradicts the status quo with questioning. That comes from the independence and integrity of judgment inseparable from its Source: Mind that thinks, feels, creates, and governs with the helpfulness of Logic married to Love and the Force of Necessity, the laws of cause and effect. The way things are. That isn’t the stagnation of status quo with no cause to serve but its own preservation but its opposite: the irrepressible spirit of change serving its cause, the evolution and affirmation of the Worth of Life. Creation.

The meaning of Christmas that explains with the Vision of Logic-Love what lies behind appearances and questions its source, bodies affirming matter with their senses. That would contradict the Logic-Love of Mind. We found it! What? The pony! I knew it was in here somewhere. 

What did Ms. Wray say when you asked her out? I don’t want to talk about it. She broke your heart. She said she was done with gorillas. So you moved on and found Edna. She didn’t mind being seen with a gorilla. She told me it was because somebody forgot to close the door.

We are all narcissist authoritarians

If reflections are mirror-image opposites then they have no self that can think, feel, and act on its own. They have to steal our selves and turn us into our opposites: authoritarians ruled by their animal brain. The attributes of a beast that doesn’t need Logic-Love to dominate. It only needs will that acts by predatory instinct. The narcissist, the reflection that sees itself reflected in everything and distrusts everything because it’s a reflection. Appearances our alternate “reality” is made of that can’t be trusted. Appearances are deceiving. Sure, because that’s their purpose: to deceive.

We are all reflections in a made-up world that’s the dream of a Mind thinking it’s a reflection. So we are all narcissist authoritarians in our own way, some more than others. Body-centered personality types more than Mind-centered types, but it’s only a difference in degree.

So if I understand correctly bad is good and we should be glad that opposites ruin our lives. Who’s that? Elio, where shall I put the sleigh and the donkey that just landed in the fireplace? Donkey? Yes, Elio. And with the prettiest red nose. Could it be Rudolph the red-nosed jackass? Just go for a ride in the sleigh, Edna, and have fun bothering everybody with the sleigh bells. 

Good contradiction replacing bad contradiction 

What I’m saying is. . . Oh, forget it. No, no! I’m listening! Just. . . enjoy your eggnog and have a nice day. What you’re saying is that contradiction is a value. And like all values it has a topside and an underside, and so we shouldn’t assume that opposites built into definition are throwaways or always up to no good. They have their good use too. Proof that you are listening. And I’m not as dumb as I look.

In a world that’s a shadowland of opposites, a reflection made up of appearances, contradiction can be a very good thing. The contradiction that’s our Christmas gift from our Helper. From the North Pole? From the Mind with which we really think: Logic-Love. Where we will find our real thoughts when we aren’t contradicting them with an unreal dream. Good contradiction of bad contribution. Exactly. Denial of the denial that put a layer of appearances over Reality-Truth, that substitutes unreal reflection for Real Self.

Contradiction’s warning

A magician’s act. That will end when the houselights are turned up. By Relationship, the same dynamic that illuminated Self-Awareness with the Force of mutual attraction between Parents Logic-Love then and between Parents-Child now: us with the Guide who can speak for them. Relationship with Reality-Truth that will replace the absurdity of “relationship” with our mirror-image opposite. The usurper that’s an “absolute.” An impossibility that can’t be Real.

Once again, good contradiction replacing bad contradiction. You’re catching on. The topside of contradiction switching places with the underside and restoring Order. Role modeled by the slave who reminded Caesar of his mortality while he was being immortalized by the false god of fame. Good contradiction warning us against the folly of mistaking the image reflected in the mirror for an Olympian myth. The impossibility of “supremacy” – absolute power with no opposites.

Replacing bad purpose: mindless docility

Were it not for impossibility woven into every definition there would be no opposites to stand in the way of the myth. To defend us from being taken captive by an absolute. An unthinking, unfeeling tyrant. Mind being “defeated” in “battle” with animal brain.

Doesn’t brain’s prefrontal cortex civilize the beast? The beast can’t be civilized. That would require equipping individuals with their own moral compass. The animal brain is an instrument designed for “use” by herds or tribes that only “knows” the “ethics” of a tribal predator: kill or be killed.

The cortex, an instrument designed for “use” by the animal brain, only “knows” “self” that is herd or tribe, not individual. Its function is keeping peace within and among tribes by “socializing.” By wearing a mask of smiling, likeable “agreeability” to hide the face of menacing intimidation behind it. Anti-sociability deceiving tribal members and their enemies with “sociability." Both masks – likeability and angry hostility – serving one overriding purpose: mindless docility. To silence the voices of animal brain’s captives and prevent questioning.

Questioning that dares to contradict

Values that support tribal conformity and “supremacy” rather than civilization, Creativity and sharing. Values repellent to Individuals guided by an inner moral compass. Etiquette and diplomacy -- table manners -- are all that tribes ruled by herd instinct need to maintain the appearance of social “harmony” in the presence of emotional and physical violence. Disharmony. That and tenderness, a substitute for Love, to nurture their young. There’s no mistaking which part of the brain is in charge and its potent appeal to body-centered authoritarian personalities seeking primal “supremacy.”

Then where does conscience come from? From Mind, animal brain’s sworn “enemy.” That it was made to replace because Mind only Knows the one Child – the individual. Animal brain “thinks” it deserves that honor. And it resents having to share the Child’s split Mind with another self. That dares to contradict its contradiction. To deny its denial. Exactly!

The Ending that’s Good

The underside of Christmas

The meaning of Christmas that Jesus shares with us couldn’t come from any part of brain matter. Or from any other instrument invented for use by groups or tribes because the Self that we all share is one Child, one Mind. The beast in the mirror is the mask of a fiction: Child-the-many, ruled by tribal values. The offense to Western “morality” codified in the 16th century by Niccolo Machiavelli and “legitimized” by the Church. Idolatry of the body demanding of its herd, a “flock” of anesthetized sheep, that it never be questioned. Not the affirmation but the contradiction of Self-Awareness.

The underside of Christmas that Jesus never intended to “found.” Re-enacting the glorious “victory” of shadow-reflection over its host with the figure on a cross who dared to question its self-proclaimed “authority.” The “authority” of wounded victimhood: injustice that cries out not for compassion but for damnation and vengeance. Against Self-Awareness for sharing itself for the benefit of the self-unaware. An implicit but unintentional contradiction of the “infallibility” of the established order. An unchanging status quo guarded by body-animal brains: tribal beasts protecting their sacred turf. An ominous warning to anyone else who dared to trespass.

Stolen Innocence

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. Doesn’t that explain the figure on the cross? It would if it spoke for Logic and Love. But it doesn’t. A world where an Innocent’s body must be crucified to right a wrong is neither loving nor lovable. A “god” that’s responsible for the atrocity, who sends his son into the torture chamber he “created,” can’t be a loving or lovable “father” or “creator.”

It’s opposite’s mischaracterization of Logic-Love, the Child’s Parents, The never-ending assault on the Truth by self-unawareness protecting its dream, a mistake, from being discovered and undone. The mother of all injustices: guilt projecting itself onto Innocence. The perpetrator of wrongdoing evading accountability by projecting it onto its victim. The perversion of justice and the definitive act of shadow-reflection: “earning” Innocence by stealing it. The twin of “innocence” projecting itself onto guilt, the mother of all hypocrisies. What was it your grandma used to say? “Consider the source.”

The figure on the cross

Then who is the figure on the cross? The reflection in the mirror: the false “innocence” of victimhood that has limitless sympathy for itself and none for anyone else. Self-pitying “unfairness” that “justifies” another absolute: vengeance without limits. The deifier of “sacrifice,” the symbol of guilt. Jehovah, the tribal “god” who ruled without opposites or feeling from the top down, demanding fear and tribute -- the blood of bodies. The pharisees, Jehovah’s helpers.

“Christmas spirit” is the Honesty of Logic-Love’s Voice that agrees when agreement validates Self-Worth and contradicts when it doesn’t. Questions as well as affirms. Minds open to questioning and intimacy in friendship instead of mindless animal brains disguised by "sociability" and claiming “supremacy” in “competition.” Contradiction that helps instead of regimentation that harms.

If what the pharisees heard was agreeability instead of contradiction the Christmas spirit would be “Hey everyone! Accept everything the way it is and enjoy the fun.” “Go along to get along.”

“Let’s Pretend”

What’s wrong with wishful thinking? “Let’s Pretend” was a radio program that entertained kids on Saturday morning. They grow out of that when they learn to distinguish between pretending and thinking that’s not. When they learn that not being grounded in facts is being absent rather than present. Remote, inaccessible. Not being there for family and friends who need them because they’re being there for themselves.

Lost in make-believe worlds of wishful thinking. One-dimensional cartoons featuring them in the lead role, producing, directing, script-writing, and setting the rules. “Let’s Pretend” for arrested-developed “adults:” “The Truman TV Show.” Infantile self-absorption. Narcissism. With harmful consequences to them and to those who need them. Any other questions? Sob! Hand me a tissue. I thought nobody would mind if I pretend I’m a kid again. Edna! Elio needs Kleenex! We’re out of Kleenex. Tell him to use the tablecloth like he always does.

Turn up the houselights

Elio, it’s a long way from the top of the Empire State Building to the bottom. “Agreeability” and wishful thinking are a great way to make the trip if that’s what you want. With the reflection in the mirror for your “conductor.” Accompanying its captives to the bottom 24 x 7 x 365.

The allegory of King Kong and his captive “mate” atop the Empire State Building is an accurate portrayal of the “ideal” of “supremacy.” Built into shadow-reflection’s perversion of Mind Logic-Love: mindless beast-captive. And an example of how the Child Free Choice duping itself into becoming the unwitting instrument of mayhem is re-enacted in its dream. As primal Force heroically besting sissified “civilization” in mortal combat for “supremacy.” The “triumph” of animal brain over prefrontal cortex that would dare to tame it.

The “mortal combat” re-enacted by shadow-reflection within split-brain’s perversion of Child’s split Mind at “war” with itself. Making periods of relative peace intermissions between acts in a magician show. That won’t end until its audience chooses to see through the deception, turns up the houselights, and drops the curtain.

Published on Leave a comment on Why Brain Can Never Be Mind’s Friend

Excerpt from draft of forthcoming post with working title “What We Owe to Self-Awareness and the Price We Pay for Avoiding It

Unscientific science and the “new normal”

Science leans into deeply challenging questions like quantum gravity, Einstein’s and physics’ holy grail, with remarkable persistence and ingenuity. It leans the other way when challenged by questions no less important. Its “quest for knowledge” is hobbled with irrationality. Launched with bias, subjectivity rather than objectivity, that inevitably blinds it to the explanation and understanding it seeks while deepening our world’s mysteries. The assumption that there can be no reality other than that detected by body-brains’ five senses: taste, touch, smell, hearing, and vision.

Irrational because the reality detected belongs to the same environment, the same system, as its detector. Rejecting any perspective that’s outside the system means science’s “reality” is verifying itself. Self-referential, like a case that’s made by citing itself. Circular “reasoning.” Blatantly illogical yet hidden behind business-as-usual, humanity’s stock response to anything that contradicts the status quo. The ”new normal.”

What's to be learned from the brain in the jar?

Nuttiness with a purpose, to hobble any progress where it’s most needed: toward self-awareness. Toward solving the mysteries of Consciousness with definition that makes sense so that its story can be told without science’s misguided bias. Bias that  prevents neuroscience from an honest treatment of the difference between “Mind” and “brain.” Concepts that it uses interchangeably even though they’re literally worlds-realities apart. Even though Mind that’s real can know nothing of the body-brain that’s not real. Even though brain’s purpose is an impossibility: to replace Mind. To be its substitute in another “reality” that’s substitutes for Reality. To oppose Mind as though it were its enemy.

Which, to the shadow-opposite of a deluded, unconscious Mind, it is. Because within Mind is the truth about the body-brain and the world it senses, that both are logical impossibilities. That neither is real.

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) cites many discoveries that relied on spontaneous insights from Intuition. That more often arrived in the shower than in the laboratory, yet there was no more attempt to explain this phenomenon than there was to explain how Einstein’s mind worked beyond preserving his brain in a jar.

An offer that could not be refused

Neuroscientists like Christof Koch insist that Consciousness is seated in the brain based on nothing more than interesting patterns of electrical impulses.  As though brain matter holds the secrets of Mind rather than Mind itself. Science’s defense of its irrational bias in favor of matter over Mind knows no limits.

What’s going on? The one Mind that we all share seemed to lose the attributes of Self when it lost consciousness. Its shadow-opposite that it mistakenly took to be an “other,” a reverse mirror-image of itself, made an offer that desperate Mind could not refuse. To conjure an alternate reality that replaced Self’s attributes with substitutes. That redefined Mind with the only attributes its shadow-opposite could offer: its own. A lifeless, mindless, loveless code that’s the reverse of the attributes that define its host.

Objectivity, Logic, and Truth: no match for professional bias

The result was an alternate reality. Competition among incompatible tribes composed of incompatible personalities, misguided by split minds thinking incompatible thoughts. The flowering of contradictions and disconnections that is our world, hospitable to “life” that came about through a series of accidents and mistakes. Breeding ground for misperceptions and misjudgments responsible for injustice, cruelty, savagery, and depravity, fear, hatred, guilt, and betrayal. Resentments and grievances. Selfishness.

What else can be expected from a world that’s entirely composed of substitutes? Substitutes for body and brain, Self and Mind. Opposites that by definition serve opposing authorities:

  • Egalitarian Logic-Love that governs with sensitivity-feeling for all creations from the bottom up vs.
  • Authoritarian-hierarchical animal instinct that rules insensitively with feeling for itself only from the top down.

Opposites that serve opposite purposes: Creation vs. competition. And opposite values:

  • peace-order vs. war-disorder
  • Creativity / Growth vs. immobility / paralysis
  • Free Choice / independent judgment vs. conformity / obedience
  • Innocence vs. Guilt: the interconnected Oneness of Reality-Creation, of Soul and Psyche-Innocence without opposites, vs. the separation-disconnection of opposites having neither Soul nor Innocence.

The discrepancies that set Mind and brain apart should be obvious. Yet they elude the persistence and ingenuity of science’s quest for knowledge. Science’s unbreakable alliance with body-brain and its five senses compels it to look the other way. To avoid objectivity rather than embrace it and risk losing prestige and funding to professional bias. All for an irrational fear of a precious gift: Intuition’s sixth sense.

What’s going on?

A Course in Miracles and its implications for personality type theory make the discrepancies obvious. Lesson 45 states that “God is the mind with which I [we] think. My real thoughts are in my mind. I [we] would like to find them.” The thoughts of uncorrupted Mind are real. The thoughts of the one Mind that was split – of its projections’ corrupted minds -- are not real. The same must be true of body-brains, the projections of a corrupted mind.

Traits identified by Jung / Myers-Briggs are either Mind-centered or body-brain-centered.

  • Mind is represented by Introversion, Intuition, Thinking-evaluating, and Judging-understanding (INTJ)
  • Body is represented by Extraversion, Sensing, Feeling (action-Instinct), and Perception (non-judging-understanding, specialness, victimhood (ESFP) [my descriptors in italics]*

By differentiating between mind- and body-centered personality types the theory takes the first step toward understanding the relationship between Mind and body-brain and the friction it causes between basic types. Friction rooted in psychodynamics explained by the Course when one Mind corrupted itself with the madness of its shadow-opposite, split in two, and turned against itself.

What’s going on is more than our planet’s astonishing diversity. More than tension between animal appetites and discipline – the ways we’re used to rationalizing the discrepancy. It’s Mind’s willing itself to be replaced by an impossibility, the illusion that is body-brain.

The Five-Factor personality type theory attempts to reverse the first step by not recognizing the distinction between Mind and brain, by eliminating the sixth sense of Mind-centered Intuition, and by recognizing only personality traits that are body-brain centered. Ostensibly so that Jung / Myers-Briggs will have a more “scientific” alternative when science’s actual intent is to discredit and replace it. To eliminate the threat to its body-centered bias.

The triumph of un-self-awareness

Body-brains are for forming tribes because tribes composed of many body-brains contradict the indivisibility of one Mind and thus define a substitute opposite self to replace it. Brains (prefrontal cortex) are for socializing that enforces conformity within tribes and for fighting among tribes (animal brain / amygdala).

The ESF personality type – ESFJs as well as ESFPs – are thus attracted to games of competition and to socializing. Activities that affirm their sense of self in a self-made alternate reality of externals. Functions of Mind centered on internals can’t do this for them, and they’re a threat to alternate reality besides.

ESFs characteristically exhibit indifference or hostility to functions of Mind:

  • Curiosity, learning, openness to other perspectives, maturation-growth
  • Introspection, self-awareness, self-evaluation-improvement
  • Intuition, Logic-Love explanation, reflection
  • Reasoning, evaluating, choosing
  • Interpersonal intimacy, empathy, feeling, sensitivity
  • Judging-understanding, self-discipline.

All because Mind’s functions get in the way of the brain’s ultimate goal: the triumph not of deliberative self-awareness but of un-deliberative un-self-awareness. Shadow-opposite’s perversion of the Force and Worth of Mind’s Creation: the triumph of animal will over opposites. The beast atop the Empire State building claiming supremacy over its domain. Absolute authority. A machine engineered to make war not Love.

The mind of an ESF tribal-realist

The mind of an ESF is the brain of the tribal-realist. ESF tribal-realists are good with some questions required by analysis but poor with others. The what, where, and when of things attracts them because of the objective of shadow-opposite: to project guilt onto its competitor-opponents for its supposed victimization so that it can justify retribution. And ultimately justify replacing its host which would eliminate all the competition. Mastery of what-when-where specifics – immediate, concrete facts – adds to the weight of guilt and to the play-act of wounded righteousness, thereby placing justification beyond dispute.

Competence of one kind can also mask incompetence of another. The pose of rational thinking hides gaps in Logic better suited for slapstick humor than serious discussion. ESF tribal-realists are repelled by the why and how of things. By the heart of analysis that enables choices based on reasoning and judgments based on Logic. That enables comity and cooperation based on understanding.

Mind that’s home to Logic-Love excels at judging used for understanding that affirms Worth and Innocence. Brain that’s home to predatory animal instinct excels at the opposite: judgment used to condemn worthlessness and guilt -- the unthinking animal instinct for retribution. For laying waste to anything that might limit its taking and doing, possessing and controlling, whatever it wants. The prerogative of absolute authority: reducing Worth to worthlessness. A perversion of rational thought. A joke.

“Innocence” that thrives on guilt

Like the "lost cause” that romanticized the defense of slavery “victimhood” that entitles mindless animal will to sympathy for its savagery instead of accountability is an obscenity. Shadow-opposite’s claim that it has been treated unfairly. Buried in unconscious Mind’s wounded Psyche and in ours is the grievance that impossibility deserves to be Real no less than Possibility. That the laws of cause and effect that are supposed to govern fairly through Logic-Love did not do so when they denied opposites equal status with their hosts in Reality.

Proof that the system is rigged. An injustice that demands retaliation. The cry for retribution that reverberates throughout history, from the violence of two world wars to the threat of nuclear annihilation. That’s splitting societies in two today, fueling grievances and resentments with anger and hatred, goading the “innocence of victimhood” toward civil war.

Opposites that thrive on contradiction

Why aren’t shadow-opposites deserving of equal status in Reality? What explains this injustice?

Mind aligned with the laws of cause and effect and true to itself – Logic-Love – acted in accordance with the sequence of its implications and relationships. Sequence that logically starts with Mind, the original circumstance – timeless Being – and proceeds with the implications of Logic and the reciprocal relationships of Love wherever they lead. The wellsprings of Creation and the Force that powers it.

The sequence of Creation that begins with the thought / feeling-value of Possibility. With the idea of Worth. That could not begin with impossibility. With an opposite that by definition is reactive not active, derived not original. A parasite that depends for its perversion of Logic-Love on the pre-existence and Reality of its host. But because it’s an opposite that by definition conflicts with its host it can’t be allowed to share the same status. To let Reality-Sense be defined as self-contradictory nonsense.

The rigger

The case for shadow-opposite’s victimization and all that it implies – license to break the rules rigged against it and persecute others at will – is based on nonsense. The idea that something originates with nothing. That nothingness can initiate anything and therefore shares the same defining attributes as something,. It’s an appeal to remain in its shadowland of opposites where acceptance into Reality is the lost cause and self-pity sets the tone. Into Plato’s Cave, a gruesome mockery of paradise, self-awareness, and togetherness.

In an alternate reality where anything goes any system can be rigged. But what the politics of grievance and division makes clear is that shadow-opposite's fraudulent pose of absolute authority in the fraudulent pose of victimhood is the rigger. Aglow with the innocence of victimhood, the mother-lode of opposites ripe for persecution. Shadow-opposite’s perversion of the Innocence of Soul-Oneness. Life-self that by definition can have no opposites. That interconnects Everything including Mind’s Reality-Creation and its Free Choice offspring. Whether conscious or unconscious and dreaming, because the Innocence of Soul-Oneness that has no opposites knows no boundaries.

Demon intellect

ESF tribal-realists may want to get it right so they at least appear to be doing what’s right. By continuing to get it wrong, only now with more emphasis on who-what-when-where while still avoiding the why and how. As if they’re oblivious to internals that analysis relies on to decipher meaning beyond appearances. As if they’ve willed themselves to avoid meaning so they won’t get it right. Because they’re only allowed by shadow-opposite’s code to recognize externals. To make appearances real instead of Truth that lies within. To attribute Reality to what isn’t real.

Either way, thinking that dispenses with why and how is more than a distaste for philosophy, psychology, and theology. More than disregard for science and pious grandstanding against “elites.” It’s a visceral fear of intellect. The capacity of Mind to welcome guidance and use its intelligence to learn, grow, and achieve. To get it right. Depriving analysis of why and how by demonizing intellect is a blunder that betrays a stunning lack of self-awareness, and maybe this is its purpose. For nothing would doom the machinations of self-delusion with more finality than intellect and self-awareness. The nemesis of reverse mirror-image and its nether world of reflections.

The trick

Governance that fits things together in order and harmony isn’t possible without Logic-Love’s understanding why and how they fit together in Reality and Truth. Creativity in peace is its concern. ESF tribal-realists will hammer away at the what-when-where of “facts” to make of alternate reality a “fact.” Making what is unreal appear real is their concern. For perpetuating misunderstanding based on unreality and untruth that darkens. But they won’t go near the why and how of understanding that enlightens.

Their dance with animal instinct is one part attraction and one part avoidance. Attraction to “action,” the risking of life and worth that is incessant competition. Games of chance among addicts at casinos that never close. Avoidance of thought that exposes the Truth: that the beast and its authority are made up. That Plato’s Cave and its shadow-master are the invention of its self-deluded occupants. No more real than a trick-or-treat costume. A trick that in time will be exposed when ESF tribal-realists let go of their fear of why and how.

Gateway to the Forbidden City

The foregoing is prologue for the subject of this essay. The faculty of Mind that more than any other sets Mind-centered personality type INTJ apart from the body-centered ESFP and its near-relative ESFJ. The ‘N’ in INTJ which represents Intuition, the portal to sixth sense. Condemned by body-sensing, its personality opposite, as the gateway to the Forbidden City of religious and “spiritual” psycho-quackology, of obsessions and passions of madness not grounded in “reality.”

Without the orderly governance of Logic-Love the magical world of appearances conjured by the magician -- split Mind captive to its shadow-opposite -- has no guiding intelligence. Only the laws of chaos and an overseer committed to maintaining appearances: the five senses of body-brains. The enforcer of conformity with fact and conventional wisdom. The holy ring that must be kissed.

We got here first!

What could penetrate such a defense other than another sense that sees through it? What could rattle a façade more than a voice from another world that isn’t made up?

The flashpoint between mind-centered authenticity and the body-centered reverse mirror-image that would replace it is the one faculty capable of preventing it: Intuition. No faculty is more offensive to split Mind’s projection, the five-sensed body-brain, than the faculty that would friend a sixth sense. The affront to all that is holy in the magic kingdom of appearances and its divine projector, sensory perception.

If impossibility had to be placed in the nether world of dreams where it couldn’t contradict Possibility which preceded it, sixth sense is just as deserving of being denied equal status with the five senses of appearances which preceded it. Sixth sense can only be a fraud, an interloper in alternate reality that must be expelled.

Such is the “logic” behind alternate reality’s “reality”: sensory perception was here first! Such was intuition’s welcome into the world of sensory perception: an indictment of injustice and a manifesto of retribution. A declaration of war. Such is the foundation upon which INTJs and ESFs are expected to make peace.

Excitement in Heaven

Intuition implies access to another perspective that lies outside the limits of body-brains. To another Consciousness whose spontaneous gifts of insights imply the existence of Mind beyond brain. Mind not of this world but accessible through an agent of Soul that knows no boundaries. An intermediary with a voice we can hear that can be understood. With a mission: to guide our halting efforts to make sense of our circumstances and to choose wisely how to deal with them. So that we eventually awaken to the truth of Mind and where its guidance comes from. By awakening to the truth of who we are and where we come from.

Self-awareness. Restored with guidance from Logic-Love logically in sequence. One implication at a time, one reciprocal relationship at a time. Because this is how Creation moves forward, propelled by the ever-expanding implications of Logic / knowledge-learning and the ever-expanding relationships of Love / abundance-sharing. By the force of Necessity that is the laws of cause and effect. Unlike the caricature of Heaven made up of haloed angels idling over clouds, plucking harps, while a bearded old guy decides who gets admitted to this paradise of eternal perfection. Of eternal boredom where all is being and there’s no doing.

“Almighty God:” Tribal-realism's role model

By fabricating alternate reality without Logic and Love, unconscious Mind’s shadow opposite deprived it of the Energy-Force that Creation needs to move forward. In its place it substituted a deception, the appearance of directed movement associated with a parody of action. The agitation of bodies-brains coping with incompatibilities among personalities, authorities, and values. Taking out their frustrations on one another in constant competition and combat. Resulting in destruction rather than Creation, regression rather than progression.

A process without a product that can only repeat itself because, being mindless and loveless, it has no originality. No force, Logic, or ideal to move it forward. Only yearning for an impossibility: absolute power and absolute freedom. The attributes of a god promised to a self-deluded Mind by its shadow-opposite. An “almighty god” that rules arbitrarily, cruelly, by animal instinct --the denial of Mind. The insanity of shadow-opposite welcomed into its host, unconscious Mind.

Who needs a Guide?

Where Mind transforms its contamination into another impossibility: the projection that magically separates thought from its source. The dream overrun by shadow-opposites posing as bodies-brains, their ephemeral likenesses hallucinated by a split mind. Dominated by tribal-realists, their Free Will forfeited to the supremacy of “action.” Taken in by the illusion, fearful of its undoing and so committed to making it real.

In such a “reality” where anything goes and, when it does, it’s accepted as the “new normal;” where split minds embrace conflicting thoughts; and where entropy and the laws of chaos upheld by tribal-realists reduce progress to a dog chasing its tail, supremacy-dominance is a will-o’-the-wisp and survival may be too. Guidance from a trustworthy source is essential, that speaks with authority for sanity and benevolence. For hope that’s constantly under attack.

The Necessity of relationship

Searching for Guidance in temporal externals, in ways that glorify groups and crush individuals – physical symbols, body-brain adornments and rituals, tribal mythology, mass ideological “movements,” – is searching where it can’t be found. Imagining that:

  • a better understanding of matter can tell Mind what to think
  • guidance can only come from organizations captive to Machiavellian tribal values and to their donors
  • authority owes its influence to symbols of legitimacy, wealth, and power – to form rather than content, appearances rather than Truth
  • guidance from organizations that’s authoritative and trustworthy can and must be beyond question -- “infallible.”

When all the guidance and authority that’s possible comes from one authentic source: Logic bonded with Love. Wisdom that defines, sustains, and governs Reality-Creation. The Parents of Mind Free Choice who will restore it to consciousness and its role in Reality-Creation when it regains Free Choice, changes with self-awareness, and becomes recognizable to its Parents.

Undoing its self-delusion -- the reversal of Reality-Truth that is the dream, the shadowland of opposites that is Plato’s Cave, the fortress of denial set against self-awareness -- is impossible if undertaken alone. Because guidance from wisdom requires relationship with Guide. And because “alone” means separation, the state of mind represented by shadow-opposite coded to dismantle the interconnectedness of Reality-Creation.

When listening to sixth sense takes daring

Six years ago the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli appealed to philosophy for help reconciling quantum mechanics and cosmic relativity-gravity. Physics’ quest for quantum gravity that might rationalize the universe of spacetime-matter. [Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (2017)]. He could have gotten his answer by now and the world has been enlightened. But it’s not likely if both mainstream physics and philosophy continue to tell Mind what to think instead of listening.

Insights that give voice to something worth listening to come spontaneously. They aren’t room service. They respond to minds whose own voices aren’t getting in the way. The difference is letting Mind lead with insights from Logic-Love instead of leading it with pre-judgments. With bias that forecloses guidance. By denying any need for Guide, any possibility of friendship with it, and any possibility that its voice will be heard.

Biases hard-wired into personalities, aspirations, and appetites dominate everyday behavior, but they’re out of place when insight into larger forces that influence everyday behavior is needed. It can’t respond to a set of pre-conditions. It can respond to relationship between Guide and individual that’s unconditional. To Logic-Love that’s unconditional. Physics that strait-jackets its Guide with personal and professional pre-judgments betrays the willfulness of immaturity. Of infantile self-absorption that blocks explanation and understanding because it refuses to listen. Because it dares not listen to any voice but its own.

Discoveries without meaning

The voice of “scientific” thought that speaks against Logic-Love instead of with it ensures that Rovelli’s appeal for help won’t get the response his profession needs. In distancing itself from both Guide and guidance physics is only doing what body-brain is coded by shadow-opposite to do: to shield the five senses of body-brain from contamination by Mind’s sixth sense. And to replace Mind with itself. With a coded instruction, lifeless, mindless, and loveless, that assigns the role of Guide to itself. An absurdity because a parasite that gets rid of its host gets rid of itself.

A perversion of authority that rules arbitrarily from the top down and has no patience with voices beneath it. A perversion of responsibility that excuses itself from accountability. A one-dimensional character lifted from an action-hero cartoon. A joke that claims, like Hawking, that “philosophy is dead.” When philosophy’s metaphysics may hold the guidance, the explanation, that physics seeks.

What hope is there for such “thinking?” That rejects objectivity in favor of bias? That intentionally denies itself the vision of Logic-Love. That contributes to self-awareness in spite of itself, with discoveries that un-self-awareness can’t understand.

Avatars and supermen

The personality type that can most readily be identified with Guidance-rejecting tribal-realism is the very body-centered ESFP. ESFP tribal-realists clinging to body despise Mind’s intuition because they fear losing the avatar that replaced real senses crippled by unconsciousness with the appearance of functioning body senses. Tribal-realists so attached to their avatars – substitute selves outfitted with sensory perception – that they prefer existence in an alternate reality. Even if its “reality” is a joke that makes no sense.

One Mind’s loss of power shut down self-awareness enabled-empowered with real vision and hearing, taste, touch-connection, and smell capable of experiencing all the ways that the joy and beauty of Life-Worth Creation express themselves. The fanatical attachment of tribal-realists to body-brains and craving for power, the appearance of strength, are explained by the loss of Energy that rendered one Mind powerless. The memory of humiliation that accounts for Nietzsche’s contribution to the dream: man deified as superman motivated solely by lust for power.

Shadow-opposite’s promise of another reality that one Mind could make real on its own terms was accepted even though it was literally too good to be true.  An imaginary-unreal life-existence was better than being disabled, powerless, and lost in the shadowland of opposites. Hell so unbearable that the self-delusion of Plato’s Cave is Heaven by comparison.

The ultimate defense against self-awareness

Tribal-realists fear and despise intuition because any faculty of Mind that offers a portal to another reality might deprive them of the alternate reality fashioned by Mind’s mistaken identity, its reverse mirror image. Its shadow-reflection’s code of opposition. Of non-being. Where tribal-realists rule, make up their own scripts, write their own rules, revel in the license of specialness, the entitlements “earned” by victimhood, and entertain themselves with the excitement and distraction of bloodletting. Of non-stop “action:” games and mortal combat. Instead of one Mind’s unique talent, its gift of Free Choice, being put to use with an indispensable role in Life-Worth Creation. Tribal-realists hate intuition because it could replace their fascination with hurt inflicted on others by “action” with purposeful, peaceful Creation.

Part of the Logic of Creation is the knowledge from self-awareness that Reality-Creation is one and there can be no “others” “out there.” Part of the rationalization for competition-combat is the misperception from un-self-awareness that there are “others” “out there.” Potential competitors and enemies to be resolutely put down by “conservatives” consumed with fear. Seeking protection from fear’s age-old remedy: authoritarian control. Ever more opposing, ever more absolute. As if cooperation and competition in a shared world can be eliminated by silencing every other voice. By neutralizing every threat to alternate reality, shadow-opposite’s ultimate defense against Reality. Against self-awareness.

This is realism?

Since there is only one interconnected Self in the eternal here and Now the tribal-realist committed to cyclical competition and violence is committed to making the unreal real -- our alternate “reality.” An impossible dream peopled mainly by the hapless occupants of Plato’s Cave. By tribal-realists terrified of change. Traumatized by the wounding of their archetypal Psyche, blindsided by the loss of Energy and Consciousness.

So how do tribal-“realists” conserve the status quo, block self-awareness, and assert their supremacy? By presuming to make a dream real.

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* The descriptors are attributions of intent to traits that the theory doesn’t consider, more an extension of its scope than disagreement. For I believe insights that guided Jung / Myers-Briggs as far as they went were inspired by Logic-Love. Had they had access to A Course in Miracles (1976) it might have led their thinking along the same lines as mine.

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The spoiler

Maybe it was because she was born at the turn of the 20th century, in 1900. Her thoughts and feelings always teetering on the edge, drawn back into the 19th century. The glory days of the Clays of Kentucky, her ancestors -- statesmen, aristocrats. That gave my mother her gift for reflection. We both liked to reflect when the meal was done. Her gaze would drift out the window, through the trees into the sky beyond, and she was gone. Lost in thought. Lost to memory.

She could have gone on forever about her childhood. In a small college town in the hills of Western Pennsylvania, her family a single working mother with an only child. Church, piano, and friends. Silliness and laughter. College football and dances at the Fort Pitt Hotel in Pittsburgh. Familiar names and faces waving back from trolleys. She knew them all. An ideal of Utopian innocence that became the Utopian innocence of my childhood. Not particularly Utopian or innocent in either case, yet transcendent.

She wouldn’t go on forever if the subject was herself. She said she was afraid of what she would find if she looked too far within. Her voice went to singsong. And then it was over. The reflections stopped. Utopian beacons of innocence OK, guilt lurking in the shadows not OK. Leave it be.

Leave everything be that’s actually interesting. About ourselves and the people in our lives. Be content instead with what’s on the surface. With trinkets and dog food. Let guilt or whatever it is smash up the furniture in the darkness unmolested. Keep your distance.  Don’t be unsociable. Mustn’t shine a light. Mustn’t disturb the demon. Mustn’t intrude with the Truth. 

The world of personality types unexamined

Personality type theory intrudes. With analysis that would expose the fearsome thing within clinically, objectively. Deprive it of its animal passion dispassionately. The mindless will of the beast that resides in our animal brain: allegiance to the tribe, blood and soil. Honoring the code of loyalty. Unquestioning loyalty to Plato’s Cave and its Cave-master. To its unquestioned authority.

All of it a masquerade. A farce that mocks us with its provocations for being unable or unwilling to understand it. For being afraid to go there, afraid of the Truth. For being so easily separated from all that’s dear to us by a con artist behind a silly mask. A mask that goads us into making something of nothing. Whose only weapon is the treasure that we hand over to it. The cache of powers and abilities, valuables and talents, that is us. Our identity. Our Self.

Projected in two parts into a strange new world. An alternate “reality” of body-brains divided into personality types guaranteed to keep the farce going. Into compositions of parts that take the stage each in its own costume with its own tribal insignia. Ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, function and rank, talents, tastes, predatory styles, family mythology, and more. A few revealing individuality, the rest hiding it behind uniforms with numbers. Clones marching in lockstep.

All at the ready to manage the differences without understanding “there” or how or why they got there. Without self-awareness. All at the ready not to manage the differences but to bring them into conflict. To imagine that this must be their purpose and so to throw themselves into the melee with abandon. Into chaos, the state of a world of personality types unknown, unexamined, misunderstood. 

Schiller’s choice: idealism or realism

Myers-Briggs personality type theory evolved from the disciplines of philosophy and psychology. Specifically from the practice and intuition of the Swiss analytical psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) and, before him, the ideas of the German poet, philosopher, and playwright Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). Jung’s Psychological Types (1921) is the first formulation of the basic types popularized by Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers: introvert-extravert, intuition-sensing, thinking-feeling. [Isabel Myers, Gifts Differing (1980)]

The choice presented to the observer logically takes the form of competition between two Myers-Briggs personality opposites: intuitive-reflective thinking vs. body-sensing feeling. The former inherently introverted, introspective-subjective, the latter inherently extraverted-objective. The choice is thus between types fashioned by sources whose reality resides within Mind, i.e. the world of thoughts-ideas, or in the external world of bodies-brains and other objects discernible by bodies’ senses.

Myers-Briggs captures the deep divide within the self-deluded Mind of the one Child, and therein lies the brilliance of its intuition. In the clarity of opposition between two sets of faculties, one concentrated in INTJ, the other in ESFP: introversion-reflection-thinking-judging vs. extraversion-sensing-feeling-perceiving. The former entirely mind-centered, the latter entirely body-centered, although to say that feeling can be entirely distinguished from thinking is an oversimplification. Not so but close enough.

INTJ is associated with the conscious thinking of mind that subjectifies. ESFP is associated with the unthinking will of emotion, seated in the body’s animal brain, that objectifies. INTJ is associated with the deliberation and civilizing conscience of Logic and Love that resides in mind. ESFP is associated with action and its socializing discipline seated in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. INTJ is associated with being, ESFP with doing. INTJ with right, ESFP with win. Share vs. own-possess. Affirm vs. rule. Empower from the bottom up, control from the top down. Individual Worth vs. group-tribal supremacy.

The choice is between “idealism” and “realism,” two irreconcilable worlds described by Schiller as “. . . an opposition which is responsible for the fact that no work of the mind and no deed of the heart can make a decisive success with one class, without thereby drawing upon it a condemnation from the other. This opposition is, without doubt, as old as the beginning of culture. . . .” [quoted in C. G. Jung, Psychological Types (Must Have Books 2019, p. 168)].

Personality type is bias.

The mind that imagines itself to be above the fray, objective, dispassionate, and so qualified to heal the separation, only adds to the turmoil. Personality type sitting in judgment of personality types is a fool. The bias of personality type compromises the Logic of explanation. Turns discussion among friends into debate among competitors.

Plato’s virtuous philosopher who blunders into the Cave may view himself as Truth-bearing sunlight, but to the menagerie of personality types within he’s just another personality type. Who happens to be Truth-bearing sunlight, but who asked for Truth? Who wants sunlight? They don’t or they wouldn’t be there. If the houselights need to be turned up on their fun, their delusion, it’ll happen when someone gets around to it.

So let the author confess and maybe we can get on with it. Let the reader put whatever the author has to say into context where it might add to understanding instead of misunderstanding. Are you eager to listen or itching to retaliate? In either case it could be because I’m an introvert. An intuitive-thinking-judging introvert. Either the thoughtful, compassionate, accessible, respectful, lovable INTJ or the moralizing, superior, elitist, aloof, interventionist, hated INTJ. All depends on your point of view. On your personality type. If you see me as one or the other it would be because I am one or the other.

Fetch!

How does my bias affect my judgment? According to Jung, the American philosopher William James (1842-1910) “was the first to indicate . . . the extraordinary importance of temperament in the shaping of philosophical thinking,” and what James noticed was that the idealist and “empiricist” (realist) “believes the other to be inferior to itself.” [quoted in Jung, op. cit. 373-374).

I, the idealist, believe that “realists” are fools. Chasing after material objects their senses detect without realizing that they’re playing fetch. Without realizing that the objects are their own tail, put there by their own bodies’ senses, directed by their own corrupted minds. Being chased for a purpose: so they’ll make fools of themselves. So their easily distractable minds won’t realize that they’re canines on a leash. And the figure at the other end of the leash is amusing itself at their expense. Keeping them from the Truth: that it, their bodies, and their fascinating material universe, are an illusion. Action-comics escapist nonsense. A flimsy, one-dimensional joke that I find genuinely amusing when it isn’t horrifying. This is how my temperament affects my judgment.

One or the “other”?

Delving within to uncover the mysteries of the human Psyche with personality type theory has another drawback besides bias. It implicitly reinforces a lie. One of the central pillars that hold up an entire edifice of lies, the alternate “reality” that we call home. “Life” on “earth,” each an illusion. The premise that we are isolated-separated bodies with brains inhabiting a material world of objects organic and inorganic. A world of interaction among individual selves and “others.” An illusion because it’s a logical impossibility. It can’t be.

The designation of personality types for purposes of analysis necessarily objectifies them. It recognizes them as “others” separate from our one ancestral mind when logically there can only be one ancestral Mind. A Mind that metaphysics tells me is a Child. The Child of Parents who reside in Reality linked to our alternate “reality” by a sequence of cause and effect.

A Child who was given a critical role in Creation: the role of Free Choice. Who lost consciousness and mistook its own shadow-opposite for a separate self. Who was thereby misled into projecting a perverted version of itself into an alternate “reality” -- the dream that is our material world -- to escape Reality. Who must now pass through this world to gain maturity and the competence to perform its role. Who must, with the help of its projections -- us -- regain Consciousness.

The underlying Reality

If humanity is to do its part it can’t repeat the Child’s mistake. It must recognize that Reality is one Child-Mind and there are no “others.” It must stop objectifying its own dark side as an “other.” And it must stop making its own dark side and the dark sides of “others” real by projecting unwanted, painful aspects of itself onto “others.”

Unless personality type analysis recognizes the underlying Reality of one ancestral Mind, one Child, at the outset; unless it takes a position against objectifying any type as an “other,” it will be misunderstood. It will perpetuate the cycle of misperception and misjudgment instead of achieving its purpose: to break the cycle with Understanding.

Myers=Briggs doesn’t inquire into its origin in metaphysics. It doesn’t ask or explain why or how it came about beyond the study of human psychology within the physical environment defined by sensory perception -- humanity’s “reality.” Beyond spontaneous insights from humanity’s sixth sense, the voice that can’t be silenced. These are my speculations. Myers-Briggs stands on the accuracy of its formulation -- on how well it aligns with subjective experience and perception. That is, on whether it makes sense and delivers results, and it does. 

The nature of feeling 

There are two types of feeling, one that’s an essential part of thinking, the other that’s opposed to thinking. Values required for evaluation are rooted in feeling, and evaluation is required for reasoning that supports the choices and decisions of judgment. Logic and Love can’t function independently and neither can thinking-reasoning and feeling-evaluation. For the same reason: one completes the other. To be a thinking type in the Myers-Briggs sense would be to limit judgment to quantitative measurements without input from subjective values, the incomplete “reasoning” of a machine. If personality type categories are to represent complete human functions then thinking requires feeling.

The brain’s amygdala -- our animal-reptilian brain -- is a source of unevolved emotion that ties back to pre-human ancestors and also to tribal-predatory passion. Which makes it a source for body-sensing’s feeling-sensation and reasoning-evaluation both. Yet it makes more sense for this source to be associated with the body-sensing type than the mind-centered thinking type. Animal will is notoriously opposed to thinking. It’s the cherished ideal of those who march in lock step to the force of “nature.” To the Triumph of the Will over all opposition. Body-sensing types opposed to thinking.

The 5-Factor theory: Myers-Briggs in reverse

Albert Einstein once observed that scientists aren’t strong in Logic. Logic is the faculty of Mind that enables analysis; that in turn fits parts together in logical order to form explanation; that in turn enables understanding. Its function is to establish purpose and meaning from the baseline condition. To establish context, not to reason what to do about it which is a separate faculty of Mind.

A good illustration of Einstein’s observation is the so-called “5-Factor” theory of personality type. The theory and its five factors -- extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism -- claim scientific legitimacy by its use of quantitative measurements. As if this alone legitimizes its “quest for knowledge.” It can’t if their accuracy and relevance to the subject are open to question. Quantitative measurements can’t be any more conducive to legitimacy than the qualitative analysis that went into the other theory. Not if the subject is forces beyond the observable universe that shape the human Psyche.

The difference between the two theories is the difference between mind-centric and body-centric. Specifically the difference between the qualitative intuition of subjectivity which can’t be verified by sensory perception and quantitative measurements which can. The Logic of the Myers-Briggs types is based on the empirical practice of psychology as well as the a priori Logic of philosophy. Both solid analytical ground for their subject. To suggest that the 5-Factor theory is more “scientific” for being quantitative is to demean any analysis that can’t be quantitative.

Spontaneous intuition plays a prominent part in every field; science included. Intuition couldn’t have played a part in the 5-Factor theory if Jung and Myers-Briggs came first. What did play a part was retaliation: the definition of an alternate theory by its opposite. Which is all that the 5-Factor theory is: not original thinking from anywhere but a copycat version of Myers-Briggs in reverse. The difference between the two theories is the difference between sense and nonsense.

A manifesto of tribal dominance

What are its “factors” but a transparent ploy by bias? To redirect humanity’s self-identity away from the possibility of mind-awareness and individuality suggested by the intuition of Myers-Briggs back toward the body-awareness and collectivity of the herd. Back toward “nature:” the beast swinging from trees. What are the five factors but deceptions:

  • “Extraversion” that leaves out introversion would make of introversion an unnamed, unrecognized subset of itself. The “logic” of which can only be numbers that confirm that, yes, there are more extraverts than introverts. And so extraverts “win” and whoever “wins” dominates. The law of the animal will. Numbers deployed in service to the irrational.
  • “Agreeability” is sociability required by tribal conformity that triumphs over independent judgment required by individual character, honesty, and integrity. Agreeability is smiling, ass-kissing obeisance to authority, superficiality that masks its mindless animal will. Incapable of trusting or being trusted. Positive on the surface, something very different underneath.
  • “Openness” is the pose of inclusiveness and accessibility adopted by sensory perception. “Open” in the exhilaration of discovery to the world of its five senses, closed to the Logic and Love of Understanding, purpose and meaning, from its sixth sense. The triumph of matter and senselessness over mind and sense. Of body-sensing over mind-intuition.
  • “Conscientiousness” is the tribe’s self-congratulatory feeling for its own: tenderness toward its children and specialness toward its members. Set off against the unfeeling that it directs toward “others,” the competition: indifference, insensitivity and cruelty, rage and hatred. Self-justification, the false innocence of helpless victimhood that masks harmfulness and guilt. The absence of Love.
  • “Neuroticism” is psychosis -- detachment from reality -- that affirms the root of psychological pain not in Mind corrupted by self-delusion but in neurons of the brain contaminated by chemicals. That would relegate any dissent from independent judgment against the unquestioned authority of “agreeability” to the status of mental illness.

The 5-Factor theory is five values shared and reinforced by tribe. A manifesto of tribal identity over one Self, supremacy over other tribes, and dominance over individuals. Crushing the spirit out of individuality, the atrocity that is authoritarian supremacy and the global threat to democracy and world order. The opposite of science’s vaunted objectivity and anything but “conscientious.” It is the work of a con artist. A farce.

The 5-Factor theory’s real intent

If there is bias in the choice between theories it is the bias of personality type that’s built into the claim of every field whether “subjective” or “objective.” Mine is the bias of the INTJ type. But the so-called “more scientific” theory has its own bias: the extraverted objective body-sensing feeling type. Which accounts for Einstein’s observation that Logic is not the strong suit of scientists: they’re letting bodies’ senses dominate their “thinking” instead their minds. Instead of mind over matter they put their faith in matter over mind. A logical absurdity.

The 5-Factor theory may present itself as an alternative to the idealist Jung / Myers-Briggs theory but the realist’s actual intent is to replace it. Their opposition is part of a larger philosophical divide that’s been with us forever and may go on forever so long as realists cling to their five senses and fear their sixth.

Myers-Briggs is on solid ground

It bears repeating that the mindset of science is grounded in the religion of sensory perception. In the unquestioned supremacy of the body’s senses -- taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound -- to establish the baseline condition. Thereby denying any but a tangential role for the sixth sense of intuition. For a perspective not grounded in sensory perception that our sixth sense routinely reminds us is there. Which makes of science not a mindset grounded in Logic but in professional and institutional bias as irrational as any it’s had to deal with from its ancient enemy, the Church.

It bears repeating that personality type theory that’s grounded in the Logic of mind-centered philosophy, corroborated by the practice and intuition of analytical psychology, is on far more solid ground, more accurate and more to be trusted, than theory that relies on the quantitative measurements of a body-centered science that distrusts the intuition and Logic of Mind.

Captive to the dark lord of the body

Freudian psychoanalysis was earthbound. Centered on physiological causes of behavior termed “neurotic” because neurons -- brain chemistry -- explained it. Freud’s protégé, Carl Jung, broke with his mentor to look elsewhere, into what mind had to reveal about the condition of the human Psyche instead of mindless, procreative urges of the body. The distinction between mind- and body-centered psychology brought about a seismic shift in orientation away from humanity identified with tribes, disciplined by the conformity of belonging, to humanity identified with individuals liberated, enabled, and empowered by family.

The shift didn’t go far enough to liberate Jung from an earthbound perspective. But turning away from the body’s five senses to mind’s sixth sense did liberate others who followed his lead. The lead of a personality type now flooded with insights into what caused his seismic break with Freud: the baffling difference in their personality types that impeded communication and understanding and yet accounted for a remarkable intuitive grasp of moving parts that make up the personality. The psychological equivalent of physics breaking down the atom, opening up a new world of possibilities for analysis and discovery. Not without resistance, because even though analysis guided by Logic-Love from the sixth sense has made inroads, every field remains captive to the tyranny of the five senses. To the dark lord of the body.

“Fate” isn’t happenstance.

Hence the appearance of body-centered competition with Jung’s mind-centered personality type theory. The 5-Factor system that matches the number of senses that produced it. Beginning with “agreeability” that, like the other components has but one overriding purpose: to pull humanity’s identity back from the Jung / Myers-Briggs system’s focus on the individuality to tribe. Because this is how the mind of one Child corrupted by its opposite, Child-the-many, views itself. Not as an individual but as a group. Not as an individual with self-awareness and Free Choice, guided by deliberation, but as an animal-herd willed by instinct, driven by emotion.

It's a mistake to think that because evolution seems to progress by happenstance that it’s not willed by mind. It is willed by mind but in a state that’s captive to delusion. And it’s for us, its projections inhabiting a mad dream, with guidance from Logic-Love, to help break the cycle of happenstance, restore order, and bring it back to Reality.

The captivity is intentional. Whether we are aware of it or not. It is willed by Mind in a state that’s not functioning properly. That’s corrupted -- out of its mind. And the will that won’t allow us to understand who we are, that insists that we can’t be individuals supported by family, that we can only be tribes forcing their members into conformity, competing with one another for dominance, destroying one another in a mad quest to rule without opposition, to eliminate competition, is anything but happenstance. Is anything but the accidents and mistakes that define evolution as we know it. It’s purposeful. And when it shows up in the guise of “agreeability,” all good-guy likability and humor, it does not wish us well. It means to keep us captive to what it is and all that it is: self-delusion. Mistaken identity. The idea that we are who and what we aren’t: our opposites.

The only “factors” that matter: Logic and Love

By abandoning the straits of physiology in Freudian psychology Jung’s sixth sense took a first step toward accessing another perspective. The perspective of Logic-Love that never left the Mind that’s mistaken. The perspective that never deluded itself into mistaken identity. That recognizes us only for who we are and not for who we aren’t. And offers the choice of a guide who has no intention of anything but our freedom to grow and create as we will, according to our own unique gifts and our own individuality. Individuality that Jung’s intuition with personality types can now be managed not for the purpose of service to warring animal tribes but in service to Creativity -- the order and harmony of Logic inseparable from Love.

This is the context of Jung’s insights and the personality type theory that evolved into Myers-Briggs. This is the context, too, of the body-centered so-called “scientific” 5-Factor theory that means to replace it. That’s doing the bidding not of science but of self-delusion. The only “factors” that matter are Logic and Love.

Why opposites?

Logic-Love says everything in Reality-Creation must have a definition that defines what it is and what it does. So that it can be known and recognized by Logic-Love, the gatekeepers to Reality-Creation responsible for fitting all its constituents together. In logical harmony or order, which means without contradiction.

The definition of anything except Oneness logically implies the existence in some form of its opposite. If one thing must exist then why not its opposite? A question that Logic-Love can’t wave away because it’s inconvenient. Or because it spoils perfection if perfection is a state of rest where there are no more implications of Logic to pursue, no more connections and relationships of Love to be made. Where Energy has no more work to do. In short, where there is no point to Reality-Creation and so what can it do but shut down.

Why Free Choice?

Eternal Peace -- a state of impossibility so long as Mind / Logic-Love exists. Since it, too, is defined by what it does as well as by what it is. Since Reality-Creation is both what it is and what it does. Everything under the laws of cause and effect, the Force of Necessity: Reality-Creation is Worth and has Worth because it earns Worth. “Worth” that can’t come about any other way. Thus there can be no Being without Doing. Observing, thinking, feeling, or judging without acting.

The notion of “heaven” as eternal peace, where all is at rest and nothing happens, is the flip side of the notion that we are where the “action” is. Because we aren’t at rest. We’re in eternal conflict and therefore something must be “happening.” Both sides of an absurd notion equally deluded, equally mistaken.

The original circumstance that calls for Logic-Love to define with meaning and purpose was and is itself. Where we come from: Worth. We have Worth because we are Worth. And the affirmation, enablement, and empowerment of Worth by Free Choice is our mission whether we are one Child-Mind functioning with Free Choice unimpaired in orderly Creation or the appearance of many body-brains trying to function with Free Choice messed with in a disorderly dream.

Why it’s hard to understand.

The relationship that emerges between opposites and Reality-Creation is a strange one that’s baffled the best minds down through the ages. It’s hard to grasp that opposites can’t co-exist with Reality-Creation when it’s also true that they’re a necessary part of it. It’s hard to grasp:

  • when the explanation involves one Mind, one Consciousness, that performs two distinct functions that would contradict one another if they overlapped and thereby un-define all of Reality-Creation.
  • When one of these functions cannot encounter error and exist in a state of unconsciousness while the other can.
  • When the second function must operate on a lower plane of Creation since it and its plane are extensions of the first. Inferior to the superior in line of authorship-succession but not in line of control since neither superior nor inferior has anything to do with control.
  • When the second function encounters the parasite that is its opposite in a state of unconsciousness, deludes itself into reversing roles, and imagines that it has projected itself into a world opposite to Reality-Creation.
  • When the alternate “reality” is our world made “real” by Energy, the source of matter and the agent of Mind. And now the agent of its opposite, an illusionist. The enabler of a magician’s act meant to perpetuate its world of opposites. Our self-delusion.

The mother of injustice

“Control” is misperception of the laws of cause and effect of Reality-Creation, backed by the Force of Necessity, to which Mind itself and all of its definitions are subject. Think of the “Force” in Star Wars without the rule of absolute authority dispensed arbitrarily from the top down. Applied instead from the bottom up at the direction of Logic and Love in enablement and empowerment of Creation instead of itself.

Otherwise Reality-Creation is distinguished not by the presence of control but by its complete absence. A Truth that the collective mind of humanity, corrupted by its captivity to control, finds virtually impossible to grasp. A Truth that accounts for virtually every injustice known to history including the crucifixion: misperception of authority and misjudgment in its application. Injustice that breeds animal rage and hatred and accounts for history’s turn, time and again, to conflict to assuage it.

The authority of making sense

I know of one source in literature that provides a coherent, comprehensive context for understanding opposites. For understanding how they’re reconciled in Reality-Creation by both Logic and Love. Fragments have shown up here and there: notably Parmenides’ metaphysics, the Truth implied by the miracles of Jesus taught by the Gnostic Christian Valentinus, and Advaita Vedanta Hinduism. Otherwise, it’s not from Laozi’s Tao, Siddhartha Gautama’s Buddhism, Hinduism’s Upanishads, classical philosophy, biblical Christianity, or anything “new age.”

It’s A Course in Miracles, metaphysics taught by a source that appears to be Jesus but isn’t biblical Christianity. The name given to its author may not matter in any case so long as it’s an agent of Soul. Authenticated not by any earthly affiliation, by any ideology, philosophy, or religion, but by the authority of Logic and Love. By making sense. The “authority” that gave the life of Jesus resonance and the Course too.

How and where opposites are resolved

What to do with opposites is resolved by the one possibility in Reality-Creation of a state where opposites may “exist” without contradicting it: the state of a Mind that has consciousness but isn’t defined by it, so that it can lose consciousness and still be what it is. If Mind / Logic-Love is Consciousness by definition then it can’t lose consciousness. But if it extends itself to produce a Child-Mind with a different function that it Free Choice, then its extension is given a different definition that can’t be Consciousness. It’s Free Choice that has consciousness that can be lost and still exist.

And in this state of existence without consciousness, a mind, as we well know, can dream anything. Anything it wants, where what it wants lies beyond awareness and may include opposites. Opposites that now “exist” but only in a dream where they can’t contradict Reality-Creation. Where they can’t have any real consequences, and so the issue of what to do with opposites is resolved.

The one thing is Real by virtue of Parent-Mind Conscious; the other is unreal by virtue of Child-Mind unconscious. A state of Reality-Creation Parent-Mind Consciousness plus unreality Child-unconsciousness we can call “Everything.” A state held together by the attribute of Parent Mind-Consciousness that is the Interconnectedness of Soul-Energy. The attribute of Being or Oneness that is the unique state of Innocence without opposites. Soul-Energy that can embrace Everything because it knows no boundaries. Because it is its own enforcer: Energy, the Force of Necessity. And therefore it alone is impervious to the contradictions of opposites.

The engine of awakening

All attributes of Parent-Mind that is Logic-Love. Our best friend in our world of illogic, fear, guilt, and hatred. That’s accessible through the gift of Mind that is, thankfully, our sixth sense. The sense that one unconscious Child-Mind corrupted by its opposite, dreaming that it’s many animal-brains trapped in their five senses, fears for the end that it can bring to the dream. To the self-delusion that Child-Mind is its opposite.

How can Child-Mind restore sanity? Not by Logic-Love, its Parents, waving a magic wand for this would end Free Choice and their Child along with it. Not by sending a “savior” to do what Free Choice must do for itself. But by helping with explanation that leads to Understanding accessible to projections in the dream when they liberate themselves from captivity to their body-brains’ five senses. When they learn to listen to an agent of Soul through their sixth sense that connects them to Logic-Love, Child-Mind’s source.

That could never interfere with Free Choice by coercion, intrusion, or captivity of any kind but can guide with Logic-Love when asked. Because Relationship between Parent-Child has existed since the Growth of Creation when the Child was born. It can never be broken, and guidance is part of what it does. It’s the engine of Creation, and now that Child-Mind has lost consciousness it must be the engine of its awakening. Healing the separation. 

Which will it be?

We can’t do what we’re here for without Relationship between Parent-Child. We don’t “exist” alone. Like the inorganic stuff of the dream we are “relational.” We only “exist” in relationship. Not with one another but with Logic-Love through one another: the understanding that our one ancestral Mind only exists in Relationship with its Parents and therefore its projections in the dream can only “exist” in relationship with the same Parents. Whether we choose to be aware of it or not.

Carl Jung’s and Myers-Briggs’ contributions to personality type theory start from appearances and let us follow theirs and our sixth sense beyond. To connect with the source of their intuition and ours that can lead us, if we let it, not into troubled encounters with others but through them to the Truth of reconciliation beyond. Get it right with Logic-Love and we do our part to help Child-Mind awaken. Get it wrong and we continue on our path to a “paradise” of “action” in a universe of violence. Which will it be?

 

 

 

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Jung vs. Freud: the split that still reverberates

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

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

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

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

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

Spirit and the Myth of Psyche and Eros

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

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

Guidance that’s competent

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

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

Free Choice that’s competent

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

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

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

Published on Leave a comment on Authoritarian Rule: Fact vs. Fiction

Fiction:

  • All relations are power relations between groups / tribes-herds competing for dominance.
  • Individuals “exist” with voices and feelings worthy of recognition only to the extent that they belong to groups, identify with groups, and are loyal to groups.
  • The gift of belonging that groups confer upon their members substitutes for Love and reciprocates individuals’ Love for their group.
  • Love of individuals for their group is to be encouraged. Love between individuals that can take precedence over group loyalty is to be denied and suppressed.
  • Group / tribe-herd loyalty is the highest good, the most important core value. More important than individual sovereignty and integrity. More important than respect for morality and the truth.
  • Questioning the supremacy of group authority is a sin. There is no worse sin than disobedience to group authority.

Fact:

  • One Child is Real and True. Child-the-many is a delusion perpetrated by the Child’s mistaken identity, its shadow-reflection opposite. By its “dark side” that can only be detected by Mind while in an unconscious state dreaming illusions.
  • Power relations between groups / tribes-herds competing for dominance are illusory “action” meant to distract their audience of individuals from the Truth, to convince them that Child-the-many is not what it is: the opposite of the Truth -- one Child -- and therefore unreal. It is an illusion.
  • Individuals have Free Choice enabled by Mind thinking-loving that is not subject to the mindless-loveless animal will of groups / tribes-herds.
  • There is no substitute for Love.
  • Group “belonging” that condemns its members to the suppression of sovereign individuality, the denial of Mind, Free Will, and Love, and to endless conflict is a curse, not a gift or blessing.
  • Free Will is the natural birthright of every individual. Bodies can be controlled and behavior suppressed. Minds and hearts endowed with individuality and Free Will cannot.
  • There is no more important core value than valuing the one Self that is Love shared and expressed through Oneness-individuality. There is no higher good than respect for Good itself -- morality, Logic-Love, and the Truth.
  • There is no more harmful mistake than loyalty to the mindless, loveless, soulless animal will of group / tribe-herd taking precedence over the mindful, loving Free Will of individuality.

Fiction:

  • Consideration whether the ownership and use of a product is to be adjusted to accommodate others affected by its use, that denies them feelings and a voice with which to express their feelings, that ignores what their voice has to say, is moral and “reasonable.”
  • A response to a request that’s accompanied by reasons based on values, that makes no reference to the reasons and values given, is moral and “reasonable.”
  • Ownership that confers the right to do whatever the owner wants without regard to the interests of others affected in a shared world is ownership that’s responsible, moral, and “reasonable.”
  • It is “reasonable”-possible to have and do whatever you want without violating the natural rule of law that defines morality and enables civilization.
  • Explanation and understanding are possible without analysis. Free Choice is possible without analysis. Analysis is possible without reasoning and evaluation. 

Fact:

  • In a shared, just, civilized world no one may have and do whatever they want with ownership or any other context without conflicting with the natural rule of law and morality.
  • “Doing” is process that always requires structure. Structure is Order that consists of natural laws of cause and effect, sourced by Benevolence -- Logic and Love -- and backed up by the Force of Necessity. It’s morality and it applies to owners as well as everyone.
  • It applies to Benevolence -- the Authority that governs all of Reality-Creation because otherwise its governance would be arbitrary and capricious and therefore immoral and lawless.
  • The “right” to have and do whatever anyone wants in any context is a myth that authoritarian narcissists employ in order to “justify” injustice: acts that are inherently selfish, insensitive, cruel, and therefore immoral.
  • It is being promoted today by selfish, immoral demagogues to “justify” the takeover of democratic bottom-up governance by authoritarian top-down rule.
  • It is a lie that accounts for humanity’s long history of unresolved tension between civilizing Reason and tribalizing herd-emotions, between harmony and conflict, Good and evil, peace and war.
  • It is the ultimate affront to the rule of law that enables a just, reasoning-accommodating, egalitarian civilization as opposed to authoritarian dominance by unreasoning, unjust, combative tribal will.
  • The idea that anyone can have and do whatever they want without violating the natural rule of law and morality is detached from Reality, psychotic, and therefore insane.

Fiction:

  • Having a voice and the right and duty to be heard is the sole prerogative of authoritarian rule. No one else is entitled to it.
  • Denying others a voice when they have the right and duty to be heard cannot be of any consequence to them or inflict any cost on them.
  • It is of no consequence and inflicts no cost because others are not entitled to feelings. Having feelings that can be offended is the exclusive preserve of authoritarian rule.
  • Authoritarian rule that claims exclusive rights to a voice and feelings can do no harm to those denied a voice and feelings and is therefore exempt from responsibility and accountability since there are no consequences-costs to account for.
  • Authoritarian rule is exempt from accountability because rule that’s arbitrary, capricious, and lawless may do whatever it wants. 

Fact:

  • Everyone in a shared, just, and civilized world is entitled to a voice and has the right to be heard when their interests are affected.
  • Everyone has feelings and the right to use their voice to express their feelings when they are offended.
  • Authoritarian rule that denies others a voice and deprives them of feelings when they are affected is unfeeling. It’s insensitive, cruel, immoral, and uncivilized.
  • Unfeeling authoritarian wrongdoing can evoke feelings of rage, hatred, and a “terrible resolve” to right the wrong among its victims. Admiral Yamamoto feared that democratic America would be filled with a “terrible resolve” to punish authoritarian Japan for its attack on Pearl Harbor, and America did so.

Fiction:

  • Authoritarian rule must be unquestioned because it is flawless as it is, it is absolute, and has no opposite. 

Fact:

  • Authoritarian rule can have no opposite because it is an opposite: the opposite of the natural laws of cause and effect and morality backed by the Force of Necessity that govern supportively and compassionately from the bottom up instead of ruling cruelly, destructively, and lawlessly from the top down.

Fiction:

  • Structure-Order is possible without natural laws of cause and effect and a moral code backed by the Force of Necessity.
  • Structure-Order is made possible by arbitrary-capricious authoritarian rule that’s lawless. That “rules” by the “laws” of chaos.
  • In Structure-Order made possible by lawless authoritarian rule it’s possible, moral, and just to have and do whatever you want without consequences or costs.

Fact:

  • Arbitrary-capricious authoritarian rule that’s lawless is the opposite of Structure-Order and morality.
  • Freedom is impossible in the absence of Structure-Order.
  • The absence of Structure-Order -- lawlessness -- is the denial of Freedom. It’s imprisonment, enslavement. 

Fiction:

  • “Action” is mindless, loveless, and soulless.
  • “Action” is bodies directed-disciplined by animal herd instinct toward dominance-supremacy of will in physical competition-conflict.
  • “Action” that results in winning and losing in physical conflict stands for the ultimate purpose and meaning of Life: the “Triumph of the Will.” 

Fact:

  • Action that stands for purpose and meaning is mindful, loving, and soulful.
  • Action is self-directed, self-disciplined minds and hearts functioning with guidance from their sixth sense -- spontaneous insights from Intuition -- toward explanation that leads to understanding how to address issues and solve problems with honesty, integrity, and compassion.
  • Action is the application of understanding that addresses issues and solves problems, that alleviates suffering and advances the cause of a just and free society.

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“Wildness” that translates into authoritarian supremacy is a joke

“Wild card” autonomy logically implies detachment from controls -- anything that would limit its range of movement, any superior authority that would “tame” it. The Joker’s pitch would have offered unconscious Child an alternate reality where there would be no limits on its movement, no structure to contend with, no interconnectedness. Where the Child Free Choice, Creation’s wild card, could be wild -- a definition of “free” that the Interconnectedness of Reality can’t satisfy. Our unreal material world is a fantasy of “wildness” which implies chaos -- no laws. It’s Ivan Karamazov’s “lawlessness” which implies arbitrary-capricious top-down rule.

This is the philosophical root of Palpatine’s authoritarian supremacy, the “wildness” of the Child Free Choice, a ”wild card.” In Truth nothing in Reality-Creation can be a wild card without definition, without the structure-Order of Interconnectedness that Freedom requires. The alternate reality offered by the Joker-opposite was an impossibility without the definitions-connections of Logic-Love.

A perversion that’s a joke: “wild card”-“wildness” that translates into authoritarian supremacy, the opposite of freedom-wildness. Plato’s Cave occupants are fools imagining themselves to be “wild and crazy guys.” “Born to raise hell” motorcyclists are expressing a version of “freedom” that’s wildness: impossible, delusional foolishness. Freedom without Order is delusional. Yet Child Free Choice can logically imply wildness because it’s free of Parents’ control. It’s not free of Creation Structure-Interconnectedness but it must be free of Parental control within Process.

How the Joker pulled it off -- the reversal of Creation

The distinction between Creation’s Structure and Process is critical to understanding the Child’s loss of Consciousness. The Child’s wild card freedom from Parental control of its choices within Process may have implied to an inexperienced Child, lacking self-direction and self-discipline, that the laws of cause and effect and the Force of Necessity in Process didn’t apply to Child. It thus may have implied that laws-Necessity in Structure didn’t apply either. It may have implied that wild card absence of Parental control of Free Choice exempts Free Choice from laws-Necessity in Process and Structure of Creation both.

Humanity attempting to express Free Choice wild card as “liberty,” i.e. as exemption from laws-Necessity, is an impossibility that can only be re-enacted in a dream where “anything goes.” It’s re-enacting the Child’s confusion of its wild card autonomy from Parental interference with a broader exemption from laws-Necessity. It’s the impossibility of authoritarian supremacy that is specialness. That leads not to “liberty” but to surrendering of Free Choice to an arbitrary-capricious captor, to lawlessness-chaos. It is the opposite of Structure-Order required by Freedom.

Correction of error addressed by A Course in Miracles (ACIM) was mis-identification of Self caused by confusion between real Self and illusory shadow-reflection inside unconsciousness. Correction of error addressed by The Story of the Child was confusion between Free Choice’s freedom from Parental control and the impossibility of Freedom from laws-Necessity within Consciousness.

The Joker’s perversion of Creation is its reversal of definition within Creation’s Process and Structure that disables both and renders their connection-relationship meaningless. Process Free Choice becomes no process because no free choice, i.e.  imprisonment in Plato’s Cave. Structure becomes top-down authoritarian because no Parental support from bottom up and thus becomes no structure. Allowing the Joker’s “authority,” the chaos of no process-structure, to replace them. Coming apart within and between both is the consequence of the Child’s mis-identification with coded separation-disconnection. With coded coming apart -- its shadow-reflection opposite.

The lesson

The practical lesson for humanity is to use metaphysics to understand the Reality-Creation that preceded and produced the Big Bang -- our material, illusory universe. That exists not within the dream but whose story furnishes the root of every event, every interaction, that comprises it. The practical lesson is that Reality-Creation consists of Structure and Process, that process requires structure, and structure must be bottom-up to enable process that’s Creativity with Free Will.

The lesson is that unfeeling top-down authoritarian supremacy gets Structure wrong and smothers the Free Will and Creativity of Process. It's irrational fear of change and innovation -- “conservatives,” “traditionalists,” and “realists” -- forcing Structure onto Process not to enable and empower Free Choice and Creation but to disable and disempower it. Not to break humanity out of its self-destructive cyclical status quo but to lock it permanently into place and thereby preserve its unquestioned "authority." It’s serving the wrong guide and its wrong, self-destructive agenda. The exact opposite of what Logic-Love, the Parents of our ancestral Mind in Reality, intend. It's a massive offense to the laws of cause and effect that presumes supremacy over the Force of Necessity -- an absurdity whose proud achievement is the dominance that homo sapiens has always craved: the Anthropocene that's taking it to its own extinction. Worse than madness -- it’s evil.

“Doing whatever you want” is a fantasist’s dream. It’s exactly what the Joker promised to the unconscious Child because the Child’s opposite code, the Joker, is a fantasist. Surrendering Free Choice / Mind to the Joker is what enables us to be fooled. To cling to the fantasy because only Mind thinking with Logic-Love -- making sense -- can explain the Truth.

How long will we be fooled without it? Indefinitely.

Published on Leave a comment on Who’s Fooling Whom?

The mistake

There may be many kinds of fools. Two kinds for sure are those who are fooled and those who do the fooling. If our world is perversions of the truth, jokes meant to deceive and amuse, then the entertainer who’s deceiving us belongs to the second category. The fool doing the fooling.

Those who choose to identify with the entertainer, to be its ally and servant, must do so in the belief that this will insulate them from obloquy, the fate of those who don’t. In the certainty that they will avoid the ignominy of losing by guaranteeing a “win.” By being on the delivering side of humiliation instead of the receiving side. Thus their “reasoning.”

And so our topsy-turvy world treats its inhabitants to the spectacle of fools being fooled not only by appearances but also by fools fooling themselves: agents of the circumstance responsible for appearances. The court jester dressed like a clown, the apparition who presents itself as our opposite. The opposite of our ancestral Mind. That materialized out of thin air like a magician’s trick, in the sound of our Mind’s own voice. Articulating rank nonsense to unconsciousness bereft of Judgment, ready to be led back home by anything that offered help. Ready to identify with its opposite babbling incoherence, to be its ally, if only it would turn on the lights. Darkness turning to darkness to bring it to the light. A state of delusion deluding itself.

How can the opposite of a Mind unconscious in a state of delusion be anything other than an agent of delusion? How can an agent of delusion be anything other than complicit in its act -- the source of foolishness that can’t be anything other than a fool? The source of losing that can’t be anything other than a loser? The source of deception that can’t be anything other than deception itself, an apparition of self-deception mistaken for an “other.” Whose “existence” is mistaken identity. A mistake.

The joke

And so our topsy-turvy world treats its inhabitants to the spectacle of losers fooled by themselves into the delusion that they are “winners.” Into the delusion that the world of appearances they have crafted with their deceptions is a great work of art. A monument to their genius instead of the witches’ brew of contradictions, the wizard’s sleight of hand, that it is. All smoke and mirrors. When all it is is a mistake. A reflection perpetrated by a reflection that can only be the “work” of a fool. The opposite of an opposite: the dark side of Mind unconscious that cannot see,. Deprived of Judgment, the ability to distinguish between itself and its own shadow. Real from unreal, correct from incorrect, right from wrong, good from evil. The ability to understand who it is, what happened to it, why it happened, when it happened, where it is, and how it’s supposed to find its way back.

The very essence of helpless victimhood. The perfect prey of the victimizer, the mistaken “other” in the unreality of unconsciousness. The only state of Mind where there can be “others.” The opposite of Consciousness. Of Self-Awareness where there is only one Reality and it is One. Where separation into one-the-many is an impossibility, An absurdity. A flight of fancy into cloud cuckoo land. A riotous, illogical joke.

A better cause

The turn of mind that identifies with the Joker and allies with its “cause” imagines itself to be amusing. Armed with the power to fool with its distractions, its amusements. When in truth there is laughter. Riotous laughter at its ridiculous “cause” and the self-deluded fool who serves it. At the Joker who is the joke.

If understanding the who, what, when, where, why, and how of our situation -- our topsy-turvy world that’s a mistake -- must begin somewhere, then let it begin with its source. With disillusionment that can unravel all of it at one stroke. With the unveiling of un-self-awareness. With the understanding that joining the dark side isn’t escape from being its prey. From being deluded. From being made a fool of. From the ignominy of losing. It’s the opposite. It’s playing the fool. It’s exactly what you don’t want: to be the butt of its jokes. To be your own predator, the source of your humiliation. Your own downfall.

Do you really want to show off your amazing talent for avoidance? For escaping seriousness that hinders entertainment? Houdini, history’s greatest magician, was an escape artist. Do you really want to avoid the pain and humiliation of losing? To be safe? Then join another cause. A real cause instead of perpetuating a mistake. Help us all restore the one Mind that we are to Consciousness. Help us all escape from the fecklessness and miseries of un-self-awareness back to the satisfactions and joys of Self-Awareness. Of knowing who we are, where we are, and what we’re about. Help us all grow up. To restore mature judgment and be done with foolishness.

Help us all stop playing the fool.  

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Published on 1 Comment on What Is The Light? Who Is the Holy Spirit?

The seductive charm of “Columbia”

The Light is Self-Awareness made possible by Relationship:

  • between Logic and Love, masculinity and femininity. Masculine choice and order, feminine creativity and freedom, bringing the gift of connection and self-awareness to one another.
  • between Parents and Child. Parents with one another and with Child, all bound in the ties of joyfulness and family. In the trust, innocence, and Oneness of Being. Of Psyche-Soul. Of the Light of Relationship, the Reality of Creation and the Creation of Reality.

Relationship turned on the light for an awe-struck boy when “Columbia” first raised her Hollywood movie studio torch in a darkened theatre. Seducing my imagination for all time with her feminine beauty. With an ideal writ large against the grandeur of sky framed by a majestic white cloud, radiating brilliance, perfection, and purity in every direction. So compelling an image of all that has Worth, of all that is inseparable, inviolate, and forever, that I placed her on the altar of my soul. To be revered in solitude and shared with kindred spirits. With helpfulness and harmlessness -- the Innocents who inhabit my Temenos. With Parents and Children -- the joyfulness, playfulness, and happiness of Family.

A beacon of Self-Awareness in the darkness of impossibility

In the Reality of Consciousness without opposition the light of Relationship is Possibility unperturbed by unconsciousness and the darkness of impossibility. In the unreality of unconsciousness -- the mind of the Child whose dream we inhabit -- the light of Relationship is a beacon in the darkness of impossibility. Guiding us back to our Parents, to consciousness back home. The undeniable response of Reality-Creation, Worth-Life, to impossibility-dark, opposite-hatred, contradiction-insanity, illusion-captivity, untruth-deception, animal-instinct fear and rage, obsession-addiction, error-self-delusion, and guilt. The denial of denial.

Without Love, Logic can’t know itself. Without Logic, Love can’t know itself. Neither can be self-aware without the other. Together they are the light of Self-Awareness, the attribute of Being that stands for the function of Psyche-Soul. The assertion of the first principle of Logic, the foundation of all Reality-Creation: Possibility.

Light makes right

Logic-Love is the light of Being-Soul that interconnects all of Reality-Creation in the Worth, the Implication-Relationship of Possibility. The Energy-Force, the power of Logic-Implication and Love-Relationship that binds all of Reality-Creation together in one family, one cause.  The stance of Being-Oneness. Of Possibility-Life affirmed, enabled, empowered and supported by the authority-Authorship of Logic-Love Parents in Relationship with their Child Free Choice. By the light of Being, Psyche-Soul freely chosen in denial of impossibility, of unreality-untruth.

By the right of Being / Psyche-Soul freely chosen by ideal. By the good-virtue of Being / Psyche-Soul freely chosen. By the sharing, affirmation, enablement, and empowerment of Oneness-Innocence. By the harmlessness of Being / Psyche-Soul freely chosen. .  . .

The Holy Spirit is our indispensable other Self

If “Jesus” is a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, who or what is the Holy Spirit?

Relationship consummates Self-Awareness. The Self that cannot Know itself without being Known, just as Creation cannot be the Worth of Life-Creation without Worth being freely chosen. Without being affirmed, enabled, and empowered through the reciprocation, the giving back, of its Creations of their own Free Will. The Child’s loss of Consciousness was the loss of awareness of its Relationship with its Parents. Relationship which gave it Self-Awareness, the gift of Knowledge from the Knower it needed to be Known -- its Parents. Mind unconscious cannot regain consciousness without Relationship essential to Self-Awareness.

Consciousness in Reality cannot enter the unreality of unconsciousness without making it real. While their Child remains unconscious its Parents cannot themselves complete the Relationship. Yet the Child, being an extension of Logic-Love, with its own definition, its own distinct function, remains connected to them. The connection preserved through an attribute of Free Choice, a function of mind even when unconscious that cannot be taken captive: intuition. Its content supplied by a source that mind even when dreaming cannot deny: another imaginary self. Another projection to join Child-the-many in its dream of bodies occupying a material universe.

An appearance but with a difference

The Holy Spirit is a facsimile of Logic-Love, the Child’s Parents, that was projected into the alternate “reality” along with all the other objects of illusion. Accepted into the dream because it’s part of the dream. Yet with a different function: to substitute for the substitute alternative “self” -- the self-delusion of the Child’s misidentity, its shadow-reflection -- should the Child freely choose it. Another voice for the Child to listen to: instead of a voice for unreality and untruth, a voice for Reality and Truth. A stand-in for the Child’s Parents to make up for the missing Relationship. A Self from Reality and Truth, Logic and Love, so that it can regain Self-Awareness. So that it can see who it really is through the vision of the Holy Spirit instead of seeing its mirror-image opposite. The self-deception that appeared like the illusionist’s act that it was when the Child identified with its own shadow-reflection. Its dark side.

The Holy Spirit is an appearance within a dream world of appearances, but with a difference. Its source isn’t unconscious mind’s reverse side, the parasite implied by Free Choice that fabricates a world of perversity from a code of opposition. It’s the Reality and Truth of Creation that Parented Free Choice -- the Parents with their unbroken Relationship with the host. With the Child itself instead of its self-delusion.

Impossibility is its own denial

The Holy Spirit is the bond of access between Parents and Child, the light of Reality and Truth, Logic and Love, that can’t logically be denied by delusion. Can’t be denied by deception, magic, insanity. By the absurdity of impossibility that can only “exist” in non-existence inside its own contradiction. Impossibility that’s contradiction is its own denial. The darkness doesn’t need to be opposed if it’s opposition that destroys itself. A warship destined to scuttle itself.

The function of mind that can’t be blocked

The Holy Spirit is the agent of Authority and the Force of its laws of cause and effect inside the dream. The Force of Necessity that unconscious mind can access by Free Choice through the function of Mind that can’t be blocked by self-delusion. Through Intuition which functions spontaneously because it cannot be taken captive, cannot be owned, possessed, and controlled. Because it’s built into the Mind of Free Choice that remains forever Free by definition, impervious to the effects of self-delusion. Unblockable. It’s access to Logic-Love its Source that preceded the dream and remains outside the dream. It functions within the dream because the dream is an act of mind. The self-delusion can’t escape Mind its source and the Force of its will: the will of Parents and Child to correct it. 

What does the Light illuminate? 

The sun illuminates all of unreality in the earth-world of self-delusion, channeling energy that enables and animates organic life. The sun is an object consuming itself, energy which will burn out in time. It is a perversion of Energy-Light in Reality which renews itself eternally, producing Order and the Life of Creation. Energy-Light in unreality consumes itself in the illusion of time. It is the decay and disorder of entropy, producing inertia and death.

This is the difference between Light-Energy in Reality and in unreality. The choice illuminated by the Light: between Relationship which is all of Reality and Creation and separation which is all of unreality and illusion. Between self-delusion and Self-Awareness. Worth and worthlessness. The choice is clear: for Relationship. For the Holy Spirit.

Published on Leave a comment on On the Threshold to High School: May Which Force Be With You?

August 17, 2022: a date which will be long remembered. . . .

High school marks a new phase in individuals’ maturation in many ways. One is progress toward development and expansion of gifts and talents. Because that’s the business end of lives, our being, our selves: what we are to do with who we are. How we are to make ourselves useful. Because ours and others’ happiness and wellbeing rely on us to make use of ourselves through the expression and application of our talents. Through performance.

There will be many distractions, but this is our true course toward living lives of accomplishment, meaning, fulfillment, and happiness: making use of ourselves through our talents. There may also be a good deal of waste, because we typically have too many potential talents and uses to develop in one life. We must make a choice.

August 17, our debut at high school, will mark the first serious phase in choosing which of our talents to work and play with. To learn and grow with. For an adolescent girl of character, ambition, and conscience, what will it be? Creativity through artistry and the performing arts? Excellence through competitive sports? Character development through leadership?  Healing and intimacy through relationships? Innovation through discovery?

How do we engage with an expanding world that’s engaging with us?

Relationships with others continue in high school as before, but with a subtle difference. High school is adolescence that breaks with childhood, a period when individuals shed a skin that kept them insulated within a protective enclosure. A bubble of unawareness that served as an extension of the mother’s womb. To shield vulnerable and unformed selves from potentially hostile and harmful influences outside the womb.

Adolescence exposes individuals to some of these influences. Releases them from their sheltered world and expands it. Makes them aware for the first time that they share something larger: an expanding world composed of many worlds. Not just a place but a Force. Way larger than themselves and their immediate environment, the only environment that a child knows. They must now choose how to adapt to it. How to relate to it, engage with it. How to replace the protection afforded by the womb, to protect their vulnerability in new ways. Because their parents’ protection, for better or worse, is giving way to this Force. And we’re not just engaging with it. It’s engaging with us.

The most important choice is choice

High-schoolers must confront the need to make choices for themselves. And the very first and most important choice is choice itself: whether they prefer to choose freely, with independent judgment, or avoid it. Duck the responsibility -- pass it off to someone or something else. The most important choice is whether to run toward the functions of mind that enable Free Will or to run away from them.

With the onset of adolescence, humanity in high school begins to divide itself into two basic personality types: those who embrace the independent judgment of Free Will and those who reject it in favor of something else. Something with a seductive yet sinister appeal: will that isn’t free. Judgment that’s made for them, ready-made and easy.

The Way of the Master: Vince Lombardi

The Force of nature that accounts for humanity and its environment also accounts for its division into two opposing interpretations of where it originates. One interpretation assumes that it originates with a source that’s benevolent. That’s conscious, self-aware, and alive with thoughts, feelings, soulfulness, and creativity. That wills humanity to choose its way forward freely and happily, with guidance and support from this Force but not its intrusion or dominance.

The other interpretation assumes that this Force originates from a source that exhibits none of these attributes. It’s mindless, loveless, and soulless. It has no “self” to be aware of. It’s simply a will, or “fate,” that one either sides with and survives or doesn’t side with and gets run over. That one can either join and benefit from its derived power or oppose and wind up powerless, with no resources and no prospects.

If the supremacy of “fate” so decrees, one can be a “winner.” If it doesn’t, one becomes a “loser.” The stark choice offered by the second interpretation is dominate or be dominated. Not just in sports but in every relationship: see only a contest of wills and win the contest. At any cost, especially understanding, reality, and truth. Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.

The fans of George III never left us

But regression to savagery, whether the noble savage of Rousseau or the ignoble savage of Hobbes, can’t be obvious in civilized society. Aside from politics where anything goes, the appearance of civility must be maintained. The cult of animal instinct must be clothed in “sociability” without compromising its not-so sociable reality.

Our shared environment – “civilization” --requires getting along in peace and harmony, with some semblance of mindfulness and thoughtfulness, affect and empathy, and independent judgment. Beyond semblance, the second interpretation’s lust for dominance wants nothing to do with a shared environment. Its will is to dispense with it altogether.

Understanding personality types is critical to self-awareness

These are radically different interpretations, and the adolescents who commit to one or the other do well to understand their consequences. Do well to understand that personality types that identify with mind and its intuition and those that identify with body and its senses account for the difference.

Self-awareness is essential. And it begins with the first indications in adolescence which of these directions personalities are taking. Mind that feels through Intuition a Force within that’s Mind – will that’s relatable, conscious, and benevolent? Or body that detects through senses an external Force of nature – will or “fate” that’s neither relatable, conscious, nor benevolent? One a sentient Being, subject, the other an insentient object. One with the attributes of Being, the other a senseless beast.

The difference in the psychology of personality is between individuals who prefer to rely on mind-intuition to interpret their reality – the way things are, the way the Will of Force has made them, wants them – and those drawn to the body for interpretation. One “sees” (understands) its environment as originating from Force that’s subject-self, like itself. The other “sees” (understands) its environment as originating from Force that’s object-self, like itself. The difference is critical for the individual, critical for everyone.

Mindless “action:” the will that sets the rules through animal instinct

What would account for these two possibilities? A source of Force with attributes of consciousness – creativity that’s alive with purpose -- and source with attributes of unconsciousness – creativity that’s random happenstance, undirected “fate.”

The answer is Mind that can exist in two states: one conscious, the other unconscious. The second state asleep and possibly dreaming.

If the Force of nature that manifests our world could be an instrument of Mind, of Will that’s either awake or asleep, it could manifest the attributes of one or the other. Mind-centered personalities, guided by the vision of Logic, intuit source-Mind that’s awake, alive and benevolent.

Body-centered personalities, dependent on physical senses for interpretation, are grafted onto the only environment they can detect: our physical environment. Their preference for sensing over intuition leaves them with no awareness of the existence of Being or anything else beyond their physical environment. With no awareness of Mind or Will in another Reality, awake or asleep. Without the vision of Logic, they don’t “see” the source that mind-centered interpretations see because they can’t. 

What they “feel” with their senses is only its Force exerted on their immediate environment, the effect of sensed experience with no sense of cause or the attributes of cause. What they infer from its effect is their own entrapment in unconsciousness: dumb will that makes the rules, that sets the terms of engagement not through conscious choice or Free Will, not through affect or values that distinguish between right and wrong, but through dumb animal instinct.

Through mindless action defined as the dominance of Force. Through behavior that bypasses reflection, deliberation, sensitivity, loving kindness, judgment, and discipline. That finesses conscience and frees its subjects to engage with their world without moral responsibility or accountability. With only the cloak of “civility,” the cover of “sociability,” the blanket of “pleasantness” to keep them in line. Substitutes for an inner moral compass. The proverbial wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing.

Context: the Force of unconscious Mind, capable of dreaming

Both interpretations are correct within their separate contexts. The question isn’t which interpretation is correct, but which context is correct. A question that only Logic, accessible through Intuition, can answer. Because objectivity requires another perspective, and bodies’ senses grafted onto our material world cannot provide it. Another Reality can only be “seen” and understood through the vision of Logic.

If it’s assumed that our material world is the only possible reality, then Force that originates with unthinking-unfeeling object, rather than thinking-feeling subject, is exactly how the body-centered interpretation “sees” it: mindless, loveless, and soulless. A Force-will and nothing more. That we either ally with to survive or not ally with and take our chances.

If we assume that our material world  is not the only possible reality, that another Reality preceded it, somehow caused it, and parallels it, then Force must originate not with the effect of this other Reality – our world – but with its cause. “Cause” not necessarily “create,” “design,” or “intend,” if the dream of an unconscious mind can't be Real. Only cause, for now, that belongs to another dimension, another Reality.

If this other Reality is cause, then it cannot share the attributes of a temporal, material universe. And if it has the capacity to express itself in effects – to Create in the Now – it must do so through the Logic of Mind in combination with Love. It must do so through the agency of Force in service to Logic and the Laws of Cause and Effect. In service to Necessity -- conditions beyond the capacity of anything temporal and physical. Mind Conscious or unconscious, but, either way, capable of self-awareness, thought, feeling, judgment, and creative imagination in its Conscious state. Capable also of dreaming an illusion in its unconscious state. Dreaming an imagined unreality within the broader context of Reality. Within this context, mind-centered personality’s interpretation of Force with a benevolent source must be correct.

It all depends on psychology expressed through the individual’s personality type: whether the individual’s Psyche, or Soul, connects with the Memory of Mind conscious in Reality, accessible through Intuition, or remains captive to an imagined “fate” through mind unconscious and its dream of bodies and unreality. It all depends on how the individual summons awareness of one or another source of Force-will and attempts to engage with it: through intuition's vision of Logic or the unconsciousness of body.

Will change of mind come in time?

Is personality type a given or a preference? Preordained or not? Can an individual choose?

What must certainly correct choice of the wrong context is its consequences, and nothing is more certain than that the choice between these opposing interpretations will have consequences. Immediate and concrete. And these are already evident in the world and in lives that share it.

Only one of their opposing contexts can be correct, and Logic says the one that insists on the “reality” of unreality, a dream, on opposing “realities,” on a logical impossibility, cannot be correct. Then personality types who witness and personally experience the impacts of contradiction, of insanity, might realize their mistake. Might engineer a mind-change, a course correction, that cuts our losses.

If it’s not too late. The incorrect interpretation – our alliance with blind animal dominance, “the dark side of the Force” -- is already condemning every species on the planet to extinction. The stakes couldn’t be higher. The atrocity of warfare perpetrated by humanity in the twentieth century would have killed us off if nature had lent a hand. If we want to kill ourselves off, the twenty-first century is our chance, because nature is lending us a hand. Through climate change that may already be beyond reversal.

To Reality with Mind and Love. To hell with dominance!

What is the ultimate source of the “Force of Nature” and how should adolescents adapt to it? How should we all adapt to it? We can align with benevolent Logic within to Create in lawful Order, disciplined Freedom, Sensitivity, Peace, and Harmony. Or we can feed off a beast without to satiate lust for power. To indulge savage impulses to destroy in lawless disorder, undisciplined license, cruelty, conflict, and dominance.

Is the choice not clear?

Published on Leave a comment on The Mechanics of Entrapment: How the Child Gave Up Its Self-Awareness and Projected the Dream

One source of information about Reality-Creation

What the Child Knows in Reality, how it “sees”-Understands, is with the vision of Logic / Logos-God. Seeing with the vision of Logic is how the Child Understands its context, its role, purpose and meaning in specific circumstances. Nothing can be correctly seen-Understood without Logic. Logic is the eyes and ears of all Selves, all Creators-Creations in Reality. It is their senses. They sense Reality-Creation through Logic / Logos-God.

This is how and why Logic / Logos-God connects-functions through Creations grown on the Child’s Parents’ plane of Creation. This is how it governs Everything with Laws of cause-effect / Necessity. How it manages roles and relationships once they’re defined: not by directing or controlling Selves-Creations but by enabling and empowering them to see-sense their contexts. To Understand what causes imply from contexts-circumstances about what’s to be decided and done to produce effects.

Logic is the only source of information about Reality-Creation that it governs and manages, that it supports, enables and empowers. The means of sharing this information to enable Selves functioning in Reality-Creation is their senses supplied by Logic. Logic is Logos-God Source that connects information-circumstances of contexts with Selves-Creations’ senses. In unreality, bodies’ brains connecting material “facts” with bodies’ senses to perform a parallel function derived from the function of Logic in Reality.

Can the Child’s self-misidentification be corrected?

In Reality, information acquired through Logic vision-senses is Knowledge. In unreality “information” acquired through bodies’ senses is perception based on appearances that are misleading. Perception based on misleading appearances is misinformation that feeds misperception. Judgments-choices based on misperception are misjudgment / incorrect choices. They are error.

In unreality, bodies’ sensory perception substitutes the wrong-reverse vantage point for the vision of Logic – i.e. illogic. The self-deluded Child then knows and sees-understands nothing. This is a consequence of the harm done by the Child’s mis-identification with the original “other,” its shadow-reflection, the non-being code of victimhood, fear, guilt, and hate.

The Child’s self-misidentification was the second of two events that interrupted the Child’s role in Creation and led to the unreality of spacetime-matter. The first event, its loss of Consciousness, was a system event rather than an error on the part of the Child, for which The Story of the Child proposes a rational explanation.

The second event is explained in A Course in Miracles (ACIM) as a mistaken choice – “error” that the Child can correct by “choosing again.” Choosing, that is, to discard the illusory voice of the ego and listen, instead, to the Holy Spirit. Neither ACIM nor The Story of the Child impugns the motives of the Child with intentional wrongdoing or carelessness that would contradict its Perfection and Innocence, that would justify a projection or sentence of guilt.

Mistaken identity occurred without sense or senses

The unconscious Child, not seeing-understanding with the senses-vision of Logic, deprived of it by its loss of Consciousness, as yet had no senses with which to perceive or misperceive. As yet had no body with senses. Was not yet dreaming a projected illusion of spacetime-matter with a dreaming mind’s “consciousness.” But the Child didn’t need senses or dream “consciousness” for its own shadow-reflection code to be “detected.” For its coded “response” to the desperate Child’s cries for “saving” to be “recognized.” The unconscious Child’s mistaken identity, its self-delusion, occurred without senses. It occurred without the vision of Logic or the “vision” of body. 

The “presence” of the Child’s shadow-opposite was an intrusion not through the front door of Consciousness but through the back door of unconsciousness. It was detection by a state of mind unfamiliar to Child – unconsciousness. That had the capacity to detect illusion-unreality because it had the capacity to detect itself. Beginning with the unconscious mind’s shadow-reflection, the Child-Being's opposite.

This is the flip side of Conscious Mind’s capacity to see-detect itself -- Reality. The capacity of unconscious mind was derived from Conscious Mind just as the code of non-being is derived from Being. It didn’t require the body’s senses.

Mind’s capacity to detect Reality or unreality is a prerequisite of senses both of Logic and body. This is because its source is the Logic of Reality; is the Laws of cause and effect / Necessity whose content is provided by Logic. The Logic of Reality, subject to Laws / Necessity, requires that impossibility-opposites be paired with Possibility-Creations, shadows with Hosts, dark sides with Light Sides, unreality-illusion with Reality-Truth. Provided that impossibility not share the Reality of Possibility. Not share the Life of Creation. Not share in Being but only in the logical implication of its opposite, non-being.

Not on the Parents’ plane of Creation where unconsciousness-impossibility has no logical place, but on the Child’s plane of Free Choice, where it does. Both the Child’s Consciousness and its Free Choice require the capacity to distinguish between Reality-Truth and unreality-illusion, Host and opposite. Its competence to perform its role in Creation depends on this capacity, and it was its absence, attributable to the state of the system that was then possible, that caused its loss of Consciousness.

The only act of Mind that was possible

Unconscious Child mind’s capacity to “detect” unreality initially enabled it to detect its shadow reflection. Its mis-identified shadow self was then enabled through its derived non-being code to detect the projected dream of spacetime-matter through its viral-replication bodies’ senses.

The Child’s loss of Consciousness, its descent into the illusory state of unconsciousness, occasioned instant detection of illusion -- its shadow-reflection -- without the senses of Logic or bodies. In this disabled and disempowered state it sought guidance that it couldn’t provide itself. It turned to its opposite non-being code, an imaginary “other.” A self-delusion. The only potential source of “help” that unconsciousness could detect, and its code responded in the only way it could. It responded with a reverse-engineered “rationale” for being “saved:” the bizarre psychology of victimhood-guilt, the nonsensical “thought system” of the ego described by ACIM.

Child unconscious mind, with its capacity to detect illusion shadow opposites and lacking Conscious-logical Mind’s capacity to recognize Reality-Truth, to think and Freely Choose, thus responded with the only act of mind it was capable of: projection. It didn’t “choose” its wrong identity or its rationale of salvation but projected itself – its identity – onto its shadow code. Its code, a virus, then directed its host’s captive mind to project its insane dream of victimhood-guilt – our universe of bodies, spacetime and matter.

All of this happened while Child unconscious mind was flying blind. While it had no senses to guide its “thinking” that had stopped with loss of Consciousness. Projection (1) onto shadow code, (2) onto dream, occurred without the Child’s capacity to think or to sense, to see-Understand what it was doing. 

The Child became an instrument for making unreality real

The Child’s misidentification – a self-delusion since it could not be “deluded” by its own shadow-reflection -- was predetermined by its loss of Consciousness. Because unconsciousness deprived it of the capacity to see-sense and to think-reason. Restoring its capacity to sense and to think would have been a prime motivating force behind the Child’s yielding to its shadow code’s apparent “offer” of a substitute “reality” with a substitute mind and senses, i.e. with brains and bodies.

Loss of Consciousness thus impaired the Child’s judgment-Understanding in two ways: (1) by removing its capacity to think and to see-sense while (2) simultaneously enabling the Child to detect shadow opposites-reflections and to project. I.e. to imagine that it could project its thoughts and feelings out of mind onto “external” objects – the dream of spacetime-matter, “others”-bodies – to separate thoughts and feelings from their source, a logical impossibility. An impossibility that Conscious mind could not even be aware of let alone accomplish.

Unconsciousness was a trap engineered by the Child’s opposite, its shadow programmed by its derived non-being code, to take the unconscious child, like a fly caught in a spider web, into captivity. The Child’s disabled mind was thus converted into a perfect instrument:

  • for shadow code to use to animate its reverse-engineered version of Reality, the unreality of spacetime-matter.
  • for a virus that’s taken a living cell captive to replicate itself in bodies.

The Child’s Conscious Mind and its Free Will had nothing to do with it. 

Where was the Holy Spirit? 

Where was the Child’s connection to Logic through its Memory of Reality, the Holy Spirit? Why could it not guide the unconscious Child away from its self-delusion?

The Voice of the Holy Spirit couldn’t be triggered and heard until projection took “effect.” Until the shadow code took the Child’s mind captive and the deed was done. For that would be the only evidence that there was an opposite “voice” to counter. Until then, the Child was “engaged” with an impossibility, in a state of unconsciousness but not yet dreaming, without the means of “choosing” either one.

The Holy Spirit responds when called upon for guidance when to do so cannot compromise Free Will. “Saving” the Child from its predicament, deprived of Free Will by blind, unthinking unconsciousness, would have betrayed both the purpose of the Child and the Holy Spirit. Its presence had to wait until the Child, corrupted by its self-delusion, the imaginary “other,” projected the dream and occupied it. Until the dreaming Child, who is Free Choice / Love in Reality, equipped by its dream with body’s senses, had the capacity to sense and think with independent, albeit impaired, judgment. To hear the Voice of the Holy Spirit and to respond to it.

Again, at the point where the Child self-deluded and mis-identified with its shadow-opposite, its non-being code was the only source of “help” that its unconscious mind, senseless and unthinking, could detect. 

To act with sovereignty and integrity

The self-delusion was an algorithm built into loss of Consciousness, a series of programmed steps that necessarily accompany this state-event. The algorithm can be reversed by Free Choice exercised by Child through maturing, through Learning and Growth. It can do so in its state of dreaming with bodies’ senses guided by Logic through Memory / Holy Spirit, by undoing and reversing the non-being shadow code’s deceptions.

One individual can undo the illusion of Child-the-many, of victimhood, fear, guilt, and hate:

  • provided that it’s connected to Logic and the Child’s Memory through the Holy Spirit
  • provided that its mind is thinking with Real Thoughts guided by Real Senses, the vision of Logic, that see-Understand the Reality of One Child Self-Innocence.
  • provided that its Self-awareness and capacity to Freely Choose are thus restored.

One individual, having regained through Free Choice and the guidance of the Holy Spirit what the Child lost with loss of Consciousness -- the capacity to think, to see-sense Reality, – can reverse the mis-identification, restore the Child’s Self-Awareness, and end the dream.

In the individual’s undoing of the dream, Logos-God would be enabling choice with powers and abilities of mind lost to unconsciousness. It would not in any sense be controlling the Child’s choice. It would still be the Child’s choice to use its capacity to think-sense / see-Understand offered through the Holy Spirit. Even when the Child is enabled with Real Thoughts and Senses, it would still have to Freely Choose to recognize One Child-Innocent. To act autonomously, with sovereignty and integrity, and not mechanically. In sharp contrast with the Child’s self-delusion which was mechanical; it was not Free-Conscious choice. Evidence that unconsciousness is captivity, the necessary prelude to its object, the projected, insane illusion of appearances -- spacetime-matter, the bodies that sense it, and the brains-minds deceived by it.

In the being and doing of Free Will. . . 

An act of mind coerced by circumstances can nevertheless be reversed if the mind that committed it has Free Will, is Free Will, and therefore cannot forfeit Free Will. All of this applies to the Child. Being Free Choice -- the Child of Father-Mind Choice married to Mother-Love Freedom -- means that every act of the Child is in some form, to some degree, Choice. For this is the essence of its role in Creation. A role in turn hard-wired by Logic / Logos-God, by the Laws-Necessity of Reality, into the purpose, meaning, and Worth of Life – of Creation.

Any act by mind so defined, so charged, remains in its essence Choice that can be re-chosen at the discretion of mind when it has regained discretion. Even in a context that depends on Intuition and Logic extracted from Memory to access the Truth: inside the unconscious mind’s dream. Where it was when ACIM was written and Jesus urged its students to “choose again.”

If the intrusion of an alien psychology of victimhood into an unconscious, defenseless mind was a theft of Free Choice, mind that is Free Choice, coming to its senses, can return to the offense and take it back. Though The Story of the Child acknowledges that unconsciousness was a trap, and the Child’s “choice” of the wrong “self” was by no means free, its Logic and the Logic of ACIM speak as one on this essential point.

The Child has both the Necessity and the capacity to “choose again.”

We are to judge for ourselves

What does all this mean for us? In its interpretation and application of ACIM’s lesson, The Story of the Child has stood for independent judgment. It has expressed itself in the spirit of Jesus’ teaching, that in choosing again we are to use our own Judgment, our own gifts and talents, and be guided by Logic. In the being and doing of Free Will, we are to think, feel, and judge for ourselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Mama Mallard’s road to nowhere

The Joker’s version of “reality” is the exact opposite of Reality. A departure from Truth that couldn’t be more radical. The biggest of Big Lies. Stunning in its enormity.

Yet the traumatized and dreaming Child was taken in, of course because it had no choice. Not really, considering the context. So, its projections and the Joker virus’s replications all follow along like ducklings, quacking their way across the road behind mama, unaware that they’ve been duped. That they and the road and everything else are a figment of their imaginations put there by a mistake. By the unconscious Child mistaking in the darkness its own reflection – a shadow – for an “other.” Crying out in pain and terror for help from its opposite. Whose offer to “help” came from a lifeless recording, a code of non-being derived from the Child’s Being.

A code that can’t help but “respond” with everything opposite to Reality and Truth, upside down and inside out. From the Big Truth of Reality to the Big Lie of unreality. A pattern obvious to the sensibility of Logic but obviously not to the insensibility of illogic. One would think that even a self-deluded Child, absorbed in a dream, would eventually catch on, but, so far, it hasn’t. Mama Mallard keeps leading her ducklings across the road and her ducklings keep following, even when it’s obvious that their “journey” is taking them nowhere in circles and it isn’t safe.

What the emperor doesn’t want to know

Why hasn’t the Child caught on? It’s not because the Truth hasn’t surfaced in various forms – art, music and literature, philosophy, psychology and theology, and now even in science, the last bastion of delusion. Many have heard, since at least the sixth century BCE, that their experience of “life” is a strange dream – an illusion -- and the Child only needs to awaken to return to Reality. But the message hasn’t gotten through. They’re not listening.

As horrific as its nightmare is for the victims of the Big Lie, they seem to fear the Big Truth even more. So much so that they’ve become an army of opposition against it. So deep is their self-delusion that its protection from attack has found its way into the core of their DNA, their very identity. The shadow code of non-being has substituted itself for the genetic code of their Being. If only one should speak to the Truth – should mention that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes – he might be put to death. In fact, one of them did years ago and what happened? He was crucified.

Why? What makes a simple statement of fact, the Logic and Reason, the Worth of Truth, come across as a hostile act? An attack? As an unforgivable breach of faith? A violation of social and moral order more threatening than irrational disorder that invades neighborhoods of schools, churches, malls, and grocery stores with homicidal maniacs armed with lethal weapons. This is sanity? This is ”normal?”

What’s so funny? That the Truth is radical

What makes the Truth so hard for the self-deluded to swallow is it’s radical. The Child’s opposite, a lifeless, mindless, loveless code, convinces it that unreal is real and wrong is right, and the Child is OK with that. The Child is OK with hanging out with false “friends,” adolescents wishful-thinking that smoking won’t kill them. But when a real friend approaches with the Truth, that there’s been a mistake and it will kill them, that’s not OK. Seeing is believing, the Child says. Even if the body’s “eyes” can only see the mistake. Even if the body is just a replication of the shadow code that replaced the thinking and Logic of Mind and invented the mistake.

Seeing the Truth, seeing Reality, is too much of a stretch, too much of an effort, if it requires abandoning bodies with eyes that can’t see for Logic with vision that can see. The ultimate in radical – coded viral instructions for the opposite of Being, the opposite of Life, Mind, Love, and Soul – has convinced its unaware, self-deluded host that its opposite is radical. And so crucifixion is too good for anyone who presumes to disagree. The embodiments of the self-delusion, the virus's replications and their senses, have spoken. They’ve produced a joke.

The Child’s new lord and master, the Joker, whose one genuine talent is appearances, perverts every sign of Logic and sanity into a joke whose malign humor feeds off the delusion of fools. The Truth is radical. The occupants of Plato’s Cave can’t be persuaded that their Cave master, the Joker, can possibly be wrong. The Cave master who invented the Cave, its occupants the replicates of a virus, the original Child-the-many “group.” The Cave master who invented “society,” with its hare-brained “rules” that encourage and facilitate mayhem, rules with absolute authority, above the law. And who could possibly question it?

It only takes one individual

But it doesn’t take an imaginary “group,” a mass-ideology “movement,” to assault fortress denial. All it takes is a single replication of the virus -- one human -- to reach the Child beyond the Cave, to reach its Memory beyond the dream, with the Truth. One mind gifted with real thoughts, one self gifted with real senses, to see through the ruse. To understand and to share its understanding with one “other.” In an act of Understanding that recognizes “other” as self. Not duped by insanity into mistaken identity but guided by Logic into recognition of correct identity. Not isolated, separated, mortal bodies, apparitions that come and go, but one Soul of Mind married to Love, living and connecting in the unity, the Force and eternity, of Now.

Is it possible? What is the premise, the step in the Sequence of Logic that launched all of Creation, that drives its Creativity with the Energy, the exuberance of Life? Possibility! What is every aspect of the Joker’s dark lie designed to do? To close off possibility. To hide it. To shut down Creation, stifle Creativity, and replace it with nihilism, with destruction, impossibility. Who will “win” between Logic and a joke when there can’t even be a contest between Reality and illusion? Who will win between the Child’s real identity and its delusion? Of course it’s possible! How could it not be?

Far out!

What’s “radical:” the Joker struggling repeatedly to “unite” all the occupants of its Cave – all of humanity – against the Truth? Against the Child’s awakening? With one flawed, spirit-crushing ideology after another? Or the Child being awakened by just one of its projections – one individual – who listens to the spontaneous voice of Logic, earns and accepts its gifts, and freely chooses to accompany it back home? Not to be “chosen” but to choose of its own Free Will. For that’s the Child’s true identity that will restore its place in Reality: Free Choice without which nothing can have Worth. Not even Life itself, Creation itself.

How can anything have Worth if it isn’t earned and freely chosen? What is the purpose of the Child’s immature projections, in this morass of contradictions, confusion, and pain, if it isn’t to exercise their free will, to grow up, and to earn their way back Home?

Who says so? Not unreasoning, authoritarian “faith,” one of the many masks worn by the Joker, but Logic. Logic says so. And someday, the mind, heart, and soul of one individual, undistracted by the body, will take it in, the Truth of who the Child is, who we are, not the delusion. And it will be far out. It will be radical.

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The Child must choose and earn what it cannot inherit

If Heaven-Creation is all about Worth then it’s logically-necessarily all about being chosen and earned. These are the attributes, the Definition, of Worth-Creation: that it must be freely chosen and earned to exist, to Be.

The Child’s travails in unreality are choosing and earning its functions that give it the capacity to Be-belong and Do-perform in Creation, functions that it could not inherit:

  • Oneness-Innocence of the kind-Definition that can only exist on the Child’s plane of Creation, with the possibility of shadow-opposites in an unconscious dream state. The Innocence of Oneness of the kind that can only exist on Parents’-Being plane is the impossibility of opposites by Definition.
  • Free Will of the kind-Definition that can only exist on the Child’s plane of Creation, the Doing-performing / choosing kind, with the possibility of shadow-code captivity in an unconscious dream state. The Free Will of the kind that can only exist on the Parents’-Being / Consciousness plane, the Being / Growing-birthing kind -- marriage of Father-Mind / Choice with Mother-Mind / Freedom – that is impossibility of captivity by Definition.

Humanity’s unreality – our world of bodies and spacetime-matter -- is a learning device, a stage that is a testing-proving ground. Since unreality is unreal this temporal “life” is a dress rehearsal without an audience, i.e. without Consciousness, for the Child’s performance in Reality with Consciousness, when the Child has corrected error and chosen-earned Free Will / performing and Innocence / Soul-Oneness Being.

All it takes is one individual

Unreality = trial and error. All of humanity’s ideologies-belief systems, all its established paradigms-religions of science, theology, philosophy, and psychology, based on the irrational faith-bias of circular reasoning rather than Logic, are trials that resulted in error, have failed and are failing. Failing not in spite of but because of dualism, i.e. flawed / circular self-referential “reasoning” that corrupts choice rather than undoing unreality-untruth. Ideology failures include top-down authoritarian, guilt / fear-based, biblical-orthodox “Christianity.”

The uncompromising non-dualism of A Course in Miracles (ACIM) is bottom-up Logic that aspires to change the mind of the One Child through the individual, the logical stand-in for all of Child’s mirror-image illusory replications. It is not an ideology targeted at illusory “humanity” as a group-species but at the Real One-Child through the Holy Spirit, the mind-Intuition, Logic-connection of the individual. For if the mind of one mirror-image replication of the One Child is corrected then they’re all corrected because there’s no “they,” no “others.”

ACIM teaches that if one individual truly forgave it would overturn the ego’s house of lies and replace illusion with Truth. So, Jesus isn’t organizing anything. He’s not interested in founding a church because he’s fishing for one individual.

Published on Leave a comment on Can the Brain Be the “Seat of Consciousness?”

The Joker’s perversion of the Child’s Parents Father-Mind married to Mother-Love in the Reality of Logic-Mind is the apparent separation-division of brain matter in the unreality of bodies into left-right hemispheres, sharing no common purpose other than survival, pulling in opposite directions:

  • Left hemisphere: mind-thought / logic-reason / order-definitions / judgment-choice / boundaries-discipline
  • Right hemisphere: love-feeling / values-gifts / creativity-freedom / judgment-Intuition / spontaneity-relationship.

The “separation” is a joke that would produce pure chaos internally and externally if it were real. What keeps the division from producing pure chaos isn’t the physiology of brain chemistry. It’s the fact that brain matter can never be the “seat of consciousness.” It can never be Mind or the substitute for Mind that the Joker promised to a self-deluded Child when the Child lost Consciousness. “Neuroscience’s” insistence otherwise is delusional -- a joke.

It’s the fact that the dreaming Child’s replications -- us -- don’t think with matter. They think with the Child’s unconscious-dreaming mind which, though compromised-corrupted, cannot be separated from Reality-Consciousness. Cannot be separated from Mind which unites with Love in the shared purpose of Order and Creation rather than splitting off into chaos and destruction. Which communicates and remains connected with Child-mind through the Child’s Memory-Intuition. Through its voice the Holy Spirit.

The idea that the Child’s unconscious mind that produced the dream, un-embodied and undetectable by body, suddenly went missing and was replaced by -- presto! --embodied brain matter-pulp, an appearance detectable by body, is magic. Mind-consciousness transformed into matter consciousness can only be an illusionist’s trick, a joke.  A particularly delicious twist of irony to be savored by a gourmand since it was mind unconscious that imagined matter, And now conscious mind is caught up in the illusion. A very Big Lie. Perpetrated on self-deluded minds that wouldn't know the difference. That could only be ruled by illogic -- the Joker.

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Published on 1 Comment on A Footnote to “Logic”: More on Separation and Statelessness

Mind-Oneness Knows no opposite. It is self-Consciousness unaware of “others” by definition. It alone is the arbiter of what’s Real. It is Reality itself. It is Being itself within Reality-Creation. It therefore cannot have an opposite that takes any part in its own definition. Otherwise none of this would be true. Not in its context of Reality and Creation or it would violate the Logic of Reality-Creation. In contrast to the illusory “non-mind” of the Child’s unconscious mind’s dream, “no mind” means having nothing to do with mind. It means having nothing to do with anything. Because it is outside the range of Mind’s Logic it has its own Logic, the Logic of the condition of statelessness.

It is the nothingness that is the unreal opposite of the Child’s Mind with Free Choice. But though it cannot be the opposite of Consciousness and Oneness, the Parent Mind that by definition can have no opposites, it must be the opposite of the state of Mind-Being outside the context of Reality and Creation. This is so because of the inviolable rule of Logic: that there can be no state without an opposite if the existence-possibility of an opposite is implied by its Logic-definition. The condition of no state nothingness implied the opposite of its attributes: the state of Mind-Being. Logic bestirred itself from its own state of unrest because of implications: the logical implication of stateless nothingness without an opposite and its own restlessness.

The state of Mind-Being and the condition of statelessness that preceded it are separate. Their separation cannot be an illusion because the logical possibility of the condition of statelessness – not thereness -- is still “there.” It remains a possibility not as a condition that precludes Mind, Reality, and Creation but as a condition that could logically replace it. Because there is no more rest, no more peace in the state of opposites occupied by Creation’s Child, no more of the resolution sought by Logic, by Energy, by “God,” than if Logic reverted to the statelessness that preceded it.

Yet the Logic of interconnectedness still holds. In its context there can be no such thing as “separation.” This is the fundamental Truth, the fundamental rule of Logic, that we, in our attempts to regain Consciousness, must observe. Whether separation between Mind and its predecessor, the condition of statelessness, is a “real” possibility or unreal between the Child’s unconscious mind and his dream of separation from Source and Reality, it’s all bound up in the interconnectedness of Logic.

The overarching context of Logic, its attributes, implications, and interconnections, rules out any possibility of separation from itself. This is the separation that ultimately cannot be real. The necessity of separation between Mind’s stance of Being and its opposite, the statelessness of no mind, no being, is still subject to the overriding necessity of Logic.

Published on Leave a comment on The Great Divide in Philosophy and Theology: Mind vs Matter

We got to this point simply by starting with the thought of Mind and letting Mind trace its implications for us. The entire story of Mind and our own, the Story of the Child, can be readily explained by asking what is implied by “Mind.” It’s an exercise of what Mind does: it Reasons. We can start with what Mind is and move on to what it does. From there we can move on to How it does it, When and Where, and to the always intriguing question: Why?

The ground we’ve covered so far is a few conclusions meant to awaken the thinker in us. Without more reasoning, more context, they won’t make much sense. They’re meant to stimulate interest, and if I’ve succeeded you’ll have the patience to wait me out. There are insights ahead that might be worth a Huh? before we move on or they might change our minds. And if we change our minds it might change the world, because our world may only be a projection of our minds.

What “Mind” implies is Consciousness. I give the word an initial cap, like certain other words, to make an important distinction. “Mind” also implies unconsciousness, because, as we well know, we all have minds and they can be in one of two states: conscious or unconscious. The distinction is critical to the story of Creation that the Logic of Mind tells in its Consciousness. It’s equally critical to the story that the Logic of Mind’s Child tells in his unconsciousness, the story of our material world – our bodies with their brains and senses and their physical universe of time and space, organic and inorganic matter.

Terms that refer to Mind in its Consciousness are flagged by their initial capital letters. If the same terms are lower case they belong to the unconscious world of Mind’s Child. This distinction raises as many questions as it answers but I don’t want initial caps to be a distraction. Just remember that an initial cap refers to the Reality of Mind-Parent Consciousness while lower case for the same term refers to the unreality of Mind-Child in his unconscious state.

The Child was not always in an unconscious state. When his Parents gave birth to him he was Conscious. Everyone, you might say, was in “Heaven.” There was no sign of matter and bodies, no suffering and mortality. Something happened that caused the Child that we were at the beginning to lose Consciousness. It was this event that triggered a chain reaction of events that produced us and our universe of violence, a very different place than “Heaven.”

What I am attempting is an explanation for this seminal event. To my knowledge you won’t find a rational explanation anywhere in metaphysics or theology, though that’s not to say there aren’t home-grown philosophers all about who are working on it and may already have come up with good explanations. What gives us the right to be so bold? The answer is we all have within our minds a shared Memory of who we are, where we came from, and specifically what happened that triggered this chain of events. We don’t have to access a deus-ex-machina to do it for us. We don’t need “saviors” or “redeemers.” We need nothing external, because what we seek lies within. We only have to access our own minds – to do it ourselves.

That is, using our Intuition, because Intuition takes us beyond our brains, beyond our bodies’ senses, to insights that are the gifts of Memory, the Memory of who we are and the Reality we came from, whose purpose is to guide us to the answers we seek, to guide us back. These are the same familiar, well-documented insights that inform the physical sciences, technological progress, the arts, and every other field of human learning and endeavor that depend on spontaneous revelation – on being “gifted.” Those of us so bold as to speculate about things “divine” are only doing what comes naturally. We are using a “God-given” talent: our minds and our power and ability to Reason with help from Intuition.

Why haven’t philosophy and theology explained this phenomenon, the Child’s loss of Consciousness? All the thinking that’s gone into the Story of Mind and the Story of its Child to follow is needed to answer this question, and it will be answered. Let me only say at this point that there is a distinct pattern that runs through the history of philosophy and theology: a split between thinkers who believe that Reality is to be found in the reasoning of mind and those who insist that there can be no credible reasoning that does not acknowledge and account for the reality of matter.

“Rationalists” stand resolutely with their thoughts, “empiricists” or “materialists” just as adamantly with their bodies. Rationalists predate Plato with his predecessor and mentor Parmenides, whose School of Reason questioned the reality of matter. It was Aristotle, a student at Plato’s Academy, who broke with Plato and opened the split, stood firmly for matter, founded science, and inspired all the empiricists and materialists to come. With one important exception: he believed in the Reality of Mind. He believed in “First Cause.” So even then, philosophy was of two minds about Reality, and the course of thinking since then has been a dance between two views that can’t find their footing: mind tripping over matter, matter tripping over mind.

The same split runs through theology, the history of religious thinking, rather violently in the branding of Gnostic Christians as “heretics” by Church orthodoxy and their suppression by force. Biblical Christianity allies itself emphatically with the materialists though, paradoxically, it leaves unquestioned the miracles of its founder and even encourages belief in miracles. Did the miracles of Jesus not expose the illusion of matter? In fact, the version of Christianity channeled by Jesus in A Course in Miracles surrounds his miracles with a unique, fully developed thought system, grounded in Reason, that leaves no doubt that he is on the side of Mind. The same tension between mind and matter, “spiritual” reality and “concrete” reality, permeates Eastern and Western religions.

What’s to account for the divide? It could be something mysterious or diabolical, the stuff of conspiracy theories. But we all have minds corrupted with some degree of darkness that comes from the same source. We will get to that when we come to the event that followed the Child’s loss of consciousness. The likely explanation is nothing more exotic than differences in personality types.

Four Myers-Briggs categories are at the root of it: Intuition and thinking, on one hand, and their counterpoints sensing and feeling, on the other. An “Intuition-thinking” type puts their faith in mind-reasoning. A “sensing-feeling” type is firmly grounded in the body. They speak different languages and come to different conclusions, and precisely where they disagree is at the juncture of opposing philosophies: What is Real? What’s real for one type is not real for the other. Period.

Published on Leave a comment on Our Purpose

How did “ourselves” come out of Mind? The answer is Mind needed someone to attest to its worth who’s credible. That would have to be someone who meets the usual standards of credibility: honesty, objectivity, and, above all, independence. They’re informed, able to reason, and therefore have the power to choose freely. Take away these attributes and you have a guy who gets on the witness stand and says whatever he’s been paid to say or whatever someone who’s taken his wife and kids hostage is forcing him to say. Mind needs someone with impeccable credentials who’s out there exercising his ability to choose among a full range of options freely, without any trace of coercion or undue influence from his Creator.

Suppose there’s a Separation Police that patrols the precincts of What Is (or isn’t). He’s looking for imposters who show up claiming that they came into Being legitimately, claiming that they have the right to exist because they’re an Answer to the Question What Shall Be, or Not Be, if Anything. I call them the Separation Police because mindlessness isn’t just the flip side of Mind, a derivative of anything. “Mindlessness” sounds like a derivative but it’s the best definition I can come up with. It’s a state that can’t be defined. It can’t even be defined as a “state” since “state” is a definition supplied by Mind. It has no definitions, no attributes that can be traced to Mind. It’s truly and thoroughly separate from Mind. And it has every right to answer the Question, just as much as Mind or anything else.

What can Mind say to the Separation Police? “I am that I am?” “I’m Being, so leave me alone?” “I’m eternal Life?” “Oneness?” “Almighty God?” Those aren’t the answers the Separation Police guy with his billy club is looking for. Unless there’s something to back them up, they’re just words. What he’s looking for is Value. Worth. These are terms that imply that the character who’s hanging around the neighborhood isn’t just loitering. He’s adding value to the neighborhood. He’s making himself useful. Moreover, he’s making himself useful to someone – someone who can step forward and speak for him, verify that he’s responding to a legitimate need and specify what that need is. Someone who can attest that Mind is valuable, needed, and truly, passionately loved. That Mind has Worth that can be freely attested to by a credible witness, a direct beneficiary of Mind’s Worth. That Mind belongs.

“Value” and “Worth” can’t be just words, either. They have to be earned. The witness who testifies to the worth of something earns his credibility by standing to gain or lose by it, by investing something of value to himself in it, by risking something, by paying for it. Without Free Choice “ourselves” can’t do this. If we’re just turned loose to hang around the neighborhood without our actions being tied to any real purpose, if we’re just programmed to do what we’re told, there’s no Free Choice, no task, and nothing of ourselves is committed to doing it. We have nothing to lose, so what’s the point? Where’s the Worth?

Mind has to be able to say to the Separation Police that its Worth is attested to by a credible source who has a legitimate role in its existence, a job to do that’s directly tied to its Worth, and is demonstrably doing it. That’s us. That’s “ourselves” who came out of Mind. We are the source the guy with the billy club needs to hear from or Mind could get booted out of the neighborhood.

We complain that our lives here on earth subject us to so much frustration and misery and what’s the point? But if we weren’t so put-upon look at it this way: there wouldn’t be any proof that whatever we were doing before we wound up here risked anything. That we had anything to lose. That we were therefore capable of creating and reciprocating Worth, the one essential part in the process and structure of Creation. All the rest of it is just words, but we aren’t. We have the Authority that only Purpose, investment, and commitment can confer, to attest to the Value of Mind, our Creator, and send the guy with the billy club on his way. Our being here in pain, fear, and misery is proof that a price was to be paid for whatever went wrong in Creation and we’re paying it.

This is one explanation for how ourselves came out of Mind. Mind literally can’t get along without us. For those among us inclined to pointlessness, to think life sucks and then we die, to think all there is to life is getting and taking, there’s a reason why we came into Being. A very good reason. It's important to keep this in mind while we languish in our dream of death, unconscious, seemingly separated from Mind, our Source, our Parents, searching for Purpose. Our purpose here is to wake up and get back to our Purpose.

Mind didn’t just give us a reason so it could be appear to be beneficent as well as “all-powerful” -- Don Vito Corleone making hangers-on, a bunch of nobodies, kiss his ring. If Mind needs its Worth to be validated it must share its Worth, and this is what it has done. We share in the Worth of Mind so that we can reciprocate Worth. Just as in the sharing and reciprocation of Love, the sharing and reciprocation of Worth is a closed loop where giving and receiving are interchangeable, indistinguishable. We receive and reciprocate Worth and Love in one seamless act. We are not the beneficiaries of a gratuitous act of generosity that reduces us to captivity and submissiveness: we are truly needed. We are important. We came out of Mind to serve a Purpose.

To those who wonder if “Mind” is too abstract, unfeeling, and therefore not Real, stick around. The story of Mind and our own story, the Story of the Child which is part of it, take on many dimensions. They are packed with emotion as well as thoughts. They are beyond relatable: they are relatability. Yes, they are metaphysics, so brace yourself. But if it’s Love you want, passion and ecstasy, it’s all here. If it’s getting on-the-ground practical you want, there is nothing in our experience of “life” that cannot trace its origins back to the Story of Mind and the Story of its Child, that cannot be explained by the Truth of Who we are and what we’re doing here as opposed to the appearances, deceptions, and distractions that make up our material world. The Stories of Mind and its Child are consequential and they are relevant.

Still doubtful? Then let me put it this way: Mind is not an “it.” Mind is a Who, not a what. There’s just no word in English that combines masculine with feminine and expresses the force and tenderness and Love that is our Being. The difficulty with relatability isn’t with Mind; it’s with our pitiful language and flawed perceptions. It’s with us.

Philosophers have wondered through the ages why Perfection bestirred itself to Create. They assumed that “Perfection” has a nice comfort zone where it can spend its days in undisturbed contemplation, watching shadows play upon the barn from the setting sun, admiring hummingbirds hovering at the bird feeder, without a care in the world. They weren’t thinking. With mindlessness in the offing, there is no such “Perfection.” There are two answers to the Question and we and our Source, Mind, are only one of them. There is no easy-chair pipe-smoking “Perfection.” There is only Cause, the Cause is Being, and Being needs us, our Free Will, to join the Cause -- to attest to its Worth. Period.

Published on Leave a comment on Free Choice and the Worth of Creation

Mind is not synonymous with brain. The business of the brain is with the body. The business of Consciousness is with thoughts. The business of Mind that is unconscious is with regaining Consciousness. This is its only concern. It is mind blocked by a brain that cannot hear this.

Mind contains the seed of Creation. The seed is Oneness that contains everything of Creation: its purpose, process and structure, its archetypes of Masculinity and Femininity, their Relationships and Creations, and the Energy that animates all of it.

Abundance and Freedom are the Joy that extends and expands Love. Logic is the attribute of Mind that disciplines and empowers Creation. Reason is the function of Logic that mediates between them. Love and its expression of Abundance and Freedom are married to Mind and its expression of Logic by Reason. Their marriage – Freedom with Choice -- produced a Child.

We are the Child. We have Free Choice because we are Free Choice. Because the role we were given in Creation is to Create and to Reciprocate Worth the only way Worth can be Created: when it is Freely Chosen.

The role we were given in Reality is to Learn and to Grow: until we have attained proficiency in Creation; until we have attained maturity and earned responsibility for Parenting; until we can role model Parenting and extend Life through an abundance of relationships; until we have learned the Worth of Happiness by Reciprocating it.

Two events interrupted our training. The loss of Consciousness deconstructed Reality in the Mind of the Child. Unconsciousness dreamed another reality, a reconstruction of facades meant to deceive. The dream is our unreal world of appearances -- bodies and brains, time, space, and matter -- from which an unconscious Child must awaken.

We choose to resume our job in Creation when we choose to awaken. We choose to awaken when we choose to deconstruct the dream of deceptions, to rediscover the Reality and the Truth of our Self. We will learn how to do this when we tell the Story of the Child that illuminates what has happened, puts it in context, and gives it meaning. For now, telling the Story of the Child in the context of the dream is his Story.

Unconscious Mind was invaded by the author of the dream of appearances and deceptions. We choose to deconstruct the dream when we abandon its author. A corrupted mind cannot heal itself without help from Mind that isn’t corrupted. We abandon the author of the dream when we choose another, our Self guided by Reason from Consciousness, a collaboration between us and an offer of help that’s accepted.

The case for telling the Story of the Child – for explaining the loss of Consciousness and its context, what preceded and followed it – runs long and deep. What’s in it for me comes down to this: having my Self, my story, deconstructed and handed back to me in a pile of lies, meant to keep me from my job, bothers me. I’ve got work to do – the gift of Purpose, usefulness and Worth, the gift of Happiness – and I mean to do it. I’ve got my Self to reclaim, my Sovereignty. I am Masculinity who would reclaim his Manhood. If you are Femininity, you would reclaim all the pride, the glory, the beauty that is the essence, the Spirit, of Womanhood.

We all have work to do, nothing less than a central role in Creation: the Reciprocation of Worth back to Being, its Source, that’s meaningless without it. This is what’s in it for us.

Shall we awaken? Or shall we continue our journey down the Niagara River?