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Published on Leave a comment on Evolution’s Choice

The process of growth

Individuals evolve over time into agents or actors with distinct parts or functions that reveal patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior with increasing clarity. Like a blurred image that becomes recognizable with better resolution. Who they are and what they’re about – their being and doing – emerges into the clear, as though from darkness into light.

A progression from unawareness to awareness that may parallel or indicate evolution on a larger scale. As though individuals are varieties of a self or being that’s a composite. Evolving, or trying to evolve, from a kind of sleep into wakefulness. The common threads are changing circumstances – evolution – made up of different stories with different contexts, and levels of awareness ranging from unaware to aware in a before-after sequence.

The threat of elimination

All suggestive of order or a pattern whose purpose itself comes into focus with evolution. As the composite self gradually gains Self-Awareness and its individual replications undergo the same experience, one self moving its replications forward in a reciprocal process, one interconnecting with the other sub-consciously as in a dream.

The pattern that emerges on both scales seems differentiated by one dominant factor: opposites or opposition. Evolution made up of parts going forward with it and opposed to going forward. Parts changing and parts determined not to change. As though definition is either shared between co-equal partners with different agendas, content with contradiction, or contested between mortal enemies not content with contradiction. Where the outcome can only be the supremacy of one and the elimination of the other.

The remedy: embrace of change

Which takes evolution out of the context of the benign, which can safely remain out of sight in the darkness of self-unawareness and puts it into the opposite: the necessity of avoiding elimination on the wrong side of mortal combat in the darkness of self-unawareness.

The remedy being the embrace of change that’s evolution toward Self-Awareness and away from the resistance to change. The embrace of individual idealism that’s sharing and progress and the abandonment of tribal realism that’s self-serving and regress.

Two distinct visions

Two distinct sets of personality types: mind-centered and body sensing-centered. Two distinct perspectives: inward-subjective and outward-objective. Two distinct sets of values: love-logic, order with freedom, sharing-service, individuality-creativity vs. competition-combat, ownership-self-service, order without freedom, tribal supremacy-conformity.

And two distinct visions:

  • authority shared between free-spirited Logic and Love that governs family-sharing, by serving and supporting individual growth and creativity with sensitivity and respect, from the bottom up, under the law, vs.
  • absolute, unquestioned authority that rules tribal ownership and competition arbitrarily, without opposition, to preserve itself by enforcing conformity and opposing growth, with cruelty and disrespect, from the top down, above the law.

One approach self-consciously deliberate and moral, concerned with the wellbeing of all – inclusive, the other instinctively expedient, concerned with itself – exclusive. One that supports sharing, the other that insists on ownership and dominance opposed to sharing. One subjective, concerned with friendship in intimacy and harmony, the other objective, concerned with possession, control, and supremacy in combat. One devoted to mutual respect among equals under the law, the other devoted to the prerogatives of arrogance among un-equals above the law.

The correct choice is Now

The pattern that’s differentiated by opposites seems not to offer choice between one or the other but to compel it. Not to offer the opportunity to grow through mindfulness if one chooses it but to provide guidance when one chooses it. As though the outcome can’t be dictated by the self-serving arbitrary self-unawareness of opposites but is required instead by the Necessity of Reality. By laws of cause and effect from which there can be no escape, with which there can be no compromise. The definition of definition: the one-and-only absolute. Where the buck stops. The way things are. Defined of Logic-Love, by Logic-Love, and for Logic-Love.

Where the pattern leads is toward Self-Awareness competent to choose correctly between one approach or the other and to do so now.

Published on Leave a comment on Necessity’s Choice: Between the Kindness of Character that Creates and Governs with Feeling and the Cruelty of Anti-Character that Forces Conformity and Rules without Feeling

A dialogue in the Platonic mode sharpened to a fine point by the incisive critique and lacerating wit of an imaginary thirteen-year-old (in italics)

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Getting to meaning with why and how

News reporting and analysis has to be about questioning before it’s about answering. Stories worth reading start with six questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how.  Answers to the first four questions are descriptive. They tell you what the author observes but don’t help with interpretation. With understanding what it means.

Answers to the last two questions – why and how -- do help. They’re what creative thinking, writing, and analysis are all about. Providing a perspective that helps readers make sense of things. With insights that look beyond appearances for context, understanding, and awareness. Especially self-awareness that we all have trouble with. 

You want everyone to think just like you. My sermons are about sharing and experimenting with other perspectives. Not thinking alike. Because this is where learning, growth, and creativity take off: being open to looking at things differently. If the congregation nodding off in the pews all thought like me I would fall asleep.

Socrates made a career out of questioning that brings minds to their full potential. By embracing individuality and originality. By thinking creatively. Forcing his views on others would do just the opposite. That’s not what he wanted and I don’t either. My letters and sermons are only to help with looking at things differently. That’s what the news room of a Los Angeles newspaper taught me. Yes -- that they would hire anyone.

The personality type that avoids meaning

I call today’s sermon “Why Brain Can Never Be Mind’s Friend.” It’s the title of an essay I just posted on my website. Frankenstein fans will be heartbroken. They were hoping the monster would trade its brain for Victor Frankenstein’s mind and become a mind surgeon.

Today’s sermon asks us to think about why some personality types are OK with all six questions and others aren’t. What’s their problem? The why and the how. Some types can’t or won’t open their minds to why and how. They register facts, but without reflection and analysis they can’t interpret meaning. Thinking that bypasses meaning bypasses context and understanding.

Why would they do that? They’re actually opposed to thinking. The “anti-intellectual” considers book-learning, professional growth, and the discipline of conscience, accountability, and self-improvement surrendering to weakness. A mindset comfortable with facts but uncomfortable with the why and how of insight doesn’t will itself to know. It wills itself not to know. Not to express individuality and originality. Not to be creative but to be sociable. To blend in with the group.

And more fundamentally to avoid meaning. Why? Because of the Truth it might reveal about them. A frightening prospect: that they're mistaken. Wrong.

What’s that thing in the jar?

Doesn’t everyone want to be their own person? To be creative? Not this personality type. They think there’s something better, and that’s what my sermon is about. Asking the why and how of this type so you can recognize its traits, see the downside, and avoid it. What if I’m attracted to it? Depending on the circumstances we’re all attracted to it. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here with bodies and brains.

But we also have free will, and if you’re aware of the choice between personality types it’s more likely you’ll choose wisely. So that’s why today’s sermon is about brains and formaldehyde? What? I see the jar behind your back and the flask from your laboratory. You’ll never get my brain, Dr. Frankenstein! 

The cure for insomnia

If that personality type attracts you it could be harmful in lots of ways. How? Mainly by blocking originality and creativity. By keeping you from using your talent for creative writing. For expressing what makes you unique -- your individuality -- instead of losing your self in the crowd. How awful! Yes. We don’t want that to happen.

Creative talent rewards us with usefulness. With service to community that brings satisfaction and happiness. You’ve got creative talent, so there’s good reason for challenging you to make full use of your mind. To help you develop your talent instead of blocking it. To help you be happy by making yourself useful. Or by putting me into a coma.

Wisdom from Frankenstein’s dog 

Mainstream philosophy and theology haven’t figured out the difference between brain and Mind. And science doesn’t want to know. Scientists are only interested in what they can detect with their bodies’ senses so they can experiment with it. Quantities they can measure are all they care about. They can’t do that with Mind. So, not even neuroscientists who study the brain think much about Mind. We’re on our own.

Except that there is a source I read years ago that’s a big help. Dogman! Yes. I read Dogman and now I understand everything. What is this source? A book so dense with wisdom that it can take a long time to read.* We can talk about it another time if you’re interested. I’m already dense, so maybe we can forget it.

Wishful thinking 

Aren’t brain and Mind the same thing? No. They’re exact opposites. In fact brain’s purpose, besides defining “self” as group or tribe, is to replace Mind. What for? Because Mind contradicts brain when it defines “self” as individual. And because of the way that bodies with brains appeared after Mind had already been there. In a dream that a sleeping Mind is dreaming.

The Mind that’s dreaming is our ancestral Mind, split into two parts. They’re both unconscious and neither is working right. But while body-brains make sure their part is all about bodies the other part is about Mind. Body-brains are attached to their dream world. They’ve even convinced themselves they made it. It’s not to be shared with Mind or anyone else because they own it. It’s their turf. They work hard to make it real. How? By discrediting and silencing the voices of those who might disagree. Who see differently.

Wisdom that isn’t self-centered

The part of the split Mind that’s dominated by body-brains is limited to the one perspective it trusts: the one defined by the body’s five senses – sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. Being body-centered makes it self-centered. Focused by animal instinct rather than Mind, on winning in competition and survival in combat. It’s not about wisdom.

The other part thinks with Mind that’s also not working right but with a big difference. It’s open to wisdom from other perspectives. Body-brains’ five senses don’t have an exclusive right to tell Mind everything it needs to know. Mind has a sixth sense. Intuition, the source of spontaneous insights and guidance from wisdom that isn’t self-centered. From a broader context that enables understanding and civilization with a purpose. Guided by conscience and loving kindness toward ideals that set us apart from herds of animals. Values from the heart that give meaning to theories, discoveries, technologies, engineering feats, and works of art. All the things that go into human progress.

The “bad thing”

It’s because the wisdom behind spontaneous insights comes from Love as well as Logic. Always together, never separate, as though they were married in Heaven. Which, as a matter of fact, they were. It’s the reason why the part of the split dreaming mind that’s centered on Mind can trust its sixth sense. Can choose to be guided by insights from intuition with a mind open to different perspectives. That’s capable of learning and growing. Because it’s chosen to be guided by the Relationship that accounts for all of Reality and Creation: Logic married to Love.

This matters? Very much. Mind’s loss of self-awareness, long ago, in the state that preceded the state we’re in, brought something into its thinking, feeling, and behavior – into its Psyche -- that didn’t belong there. The same thing that the psychologist Sigmund Freud studied in the human psyche. He called it the “bad thing,” and he devoted his career to understanding and correcting it. It’s the shadow-reflection of Self, a reverse mirror-image that’s its opposite in every way. Mindless and loveless, lifeless and soulless.

The herd inside the human brain

Instead of thinking with Logic and reason the Mind that’s gone over to its reverse-dark side acts by instinct. Instead of being motivated by Love to share its abundance, to value life and Creation with conscience, Innocence, trust, generosity, and gentle loving kindness, it’s driven by fear, hatred, selfishness, distrust, and guilt to claim everything for itself. To be sensitive only to its own needs and feelings and eliminate competition.

The un-self-aware Mind invaded by its shadow-opposite dreamed a world that would bring its reversal of thinking and feeling to “life.” By imagining it in physical form: the substitute for Mind we’re familiar with called “brain” and the part of the brain that imagines us as herds of animals driven by instinct and fear to compete for survival and dominance. It’s called the “amygdala” or “animal brain,” and we all have it.

What is “action”?

When Adam Skywalker was lured away from Obi-Wan’s Jedi training, he was choosing to exchange his loving self for its reverse mirror image. To exchange Mind’s thinking disciplined by Logic, reason, feeling and value for the lure of its opposite: the undisciplined “power” and “freedom” promised by the animal brain for conquering its “enemies.” He was choosing the dark side.

The telltale sign that something’s not right is will that’s detached Logic and Love-feeling from thinking and replaced it with the unthinking, unfeeling instinct of “action.” With the drive of a predatory beast to risk loss in its all-out competition to inflict loss. To “win.” If we sense that we or others, like Adam Skywalker, are motivated by insensitive dominance rather than sensitive Love-feeling, by “winning” or “conquering” instead of sharing, then something is not right.

Yes, it matters

Together, Logic and Love, thinking and feeling, define what we mean by “Mind.” Our reverse mirror-image – our shadow-reflection opposite – is an attempt to separate them. To disable Mind. The result is a Mind split between itself and its opposite, the animal brain. Mind that isn’t thinking, feeling, and behaving right. This is why it matters that Logic and Love are inseparable.

Individual vs. tribe

How do we keep what happened to Adam Skywalker from happening to us? By protecting the integrity of Mind to think and feel with Logic and Love instead of being lured away by their opposites. To use Free Will to make choices and the independent judgment of right thinking to choose wisely. What choices?  Between opposing personality types, interpretations of authority, and values.

Society defines us by our group-tribal markers – age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, professions, ideologies, and so forth. But before then we’re something more fundamental. We’re individual persons. Defined by the qualities that give strength to character. By markers that define the individual selves we choose to be and the causes we choose to serve.

The values that build character

Our choices between different personality types, interpretations of authority, and values determine what we do as well as who we are. The character we present to one another in relationships. Whether it’s character that identifies itself as a sovereign individual, before it lets society lump it into groups, or as a group. As a tribe that answers to values opposite to the values that guide the individual.

Whether we take responsibility for freely choosing the qualities that define our character as individuals, or hand responsibility over to groups to shape us to suit themselves, may be the most important choice we can make. Because the circumstances that split Mind into two incompatible parts also split us into incompatible sets of values. One that values character, the other that doesn’t. A split that means we won’t enjoy peace until we learn the difference and make the right choice: the values that build character.

Real strength

What is the difference? One set of values respects our fundamental identity as persons, the other doesn’t. Mind’s mistake that let the “bad thing” in let disrespect in. Nothing turns incompatibility into hatred and violence more readily than disrespect.

How will we know to choose wisely? 

  • By choosing a personality type that respects, uses, and shares the faculties of Mind we were given. That doesn’t take direction exclusively from the body’s five senses and the external-physical environment around it. Our bodies’ capabilities, appetites, and vulnerabilities can’t be allowed to set our priorities by replacing Mind with animal instinct. With “action”. And by letting possession and games among groups distract us with pleasures and entertainments rather than enriching our lives with sharing, cooperation, trust, and closeness among individuals.
  • By understanding that strength doesn’t come from ruling by fear from the top down but by serving with Love and Logic from the bottom up. If we value Force – the power of strength – we won’t be misled by the weakness of authority that has to seize it rather than earn it. That must crush individuality with intimidation and violence to preserve itself. That must prove its legitimacy by turning every space into a field of combat. Into turf where it must always be the bull that owns, possesses, and controls it. Where it must always emerge triumphant – the “winner.”

None of this is strength. It’s weakness so vulnerable, so insecure, that it will go to any lengths to appear to be strong. Authority that supports and serves individuality and creativity from the bottom up is secure in the strength of Logic and Love. It has no need of appearances. Of shows of brutality in combat to impress its enemies.

The difference between the two is the difference between the personality type that respects Mind and the type that doesn’t. The type that imagines that anything that can’t be detected by bodies’ five senses, especially Mind, is inferiority that deserves contempt.

The choosing and earning of Worth

What do you get when you smoosh all of our values together? A big mess. You get “Worth,” the idea that sums up everything that Reality-Creation is about. Energy directed by self-aware Mind that empowers causes with effects, thoughts with consequences, relationships with reciprocity, definitions and laws with Necessity, and creativity with Creations. Energy, the light that came on with Self-Awareness and powered its expansion. From the question of Possibility to the abundance and diversity of Life that is the answer. The values of Logic and Love shared with Freedom that express and affirm the Worth of Life.

Values are the raw material of Creation. Gifts from its source, Self-Awareness, to the Child of Logic-Love entrusted with Free Choice, to make of Creation an act of Free Will. An act that could not create without it, for what is true of Worth is that it must be chosen and it must be earned. And what is true of Free Choice – the Child of its Parents, Logic-Love – is that it does the choosing and the earning. Earning by sharing its gifts and by reciprocating and affirming the Worth of the giver with the compositions of Free Choice. And earning by risking Self-Awareness when choice that is truly free, guided by its own judgment, chooses wrongly.

The limits of definition

How can that happen? By lacking an awareness of certain attributes of values that can only come with experience. The attribute that values come with: the definitions given them by the giver, Logic-Love. And if the use that’s chosen strays outside the limits of their definitions it will be a mistake. It may risk the loss of Self-Awareness. For example, just as Logic and Love are inseparable Freedom and Order are inseparable. Yet many of us yearn for a world of disorder where we can have Freedom without limits. An impossibility.

The gift of values that are the raw material for Creation is to be used for its intended purpose: to express the Beauty, Worth, and Reality of Mind and its thought: the idea of Life. Of all of Creation. If Child Free Choice uses its gift to express and affirm a value’s reverse side – its opposite – it would be trying to affirm an impossibility: the reality of what is necessarily unreal. It would be violating Logic-Love and contradicting the value’s intended purpose.

The nature and purpose of values

A mistake that’s familiar to us because we all make it. Trapping ourselves inside a dream with the authoritarian mindset that relies on the body’s five senses to make it real. By blocking awareness of the Truth that can only come from Mind. When Mind puts its faith in something that can’t be real or true, it’s choosing to be un-self-aware. The state of Mind that humanity is in because so many of us put our faith in what our bodies – matter -- tell us instead of listening to the voice of Logic-Love that reaches us through our Mind.

Authoritarian “realists” are re-enacting and perpetuating Child Free Choice’s mistake and the result is a persistent, harmful lack of Self-Awareness. Mistaken identity that is the cause and effect of mistaking the nature and purpose of values. The cause and effect of their misuse which accounts for all that is not beautiful about our dream-world. Our imaginary “paradise”.

Values have opposites

Authority, like Freedom and everything else, is subject to the laws that define Order. The laws of cause and effect that reflect the values of Logic-Love. Necessity that ensures that Creation is free and authority is benevolent. Yet many of us crave absolutes that aren’t limited by laws except arbitrary laws of our own making. Like absolute Freedom and absolute Power, they’re impossibilities that enable malevolent rule to ignore Necessity and take away Freedom.

Values in the Mind of their giver that is Logic-Love have no shadow-opposites. But in the Mind of Free Choice, their Child, shadow-opposites – the “dark side” – must be a choice even if mistaken or choice would not be free. The same awareness of choices within and among values that disciplines Free Choice in Creation must also discipline ours.

Awareness of what? Awareness that values have opposites. That values convert into ideals and passions that drive behavior, and some of these are good and some are bad. Some are light and others are dark. Some constructive, others destructive. Which version of Freedom and Power do we value? The version with Order or the one without?

The values that fit

How can we be aware of the difference? By being aware of the choice between opposite personality types and opposite interpretations of authority. Because they imply opposite values. There is not one value structure, one standard of acceptable or functional behavior, but two.

  • One for the Mind-centered individual personality type drawn to Logic-Love that supports individuality and creativity, with governance from the bottom up, under the law, that’s rational, benevolent, sensitive, and kind.
  • The other for the body-centered tribal personality type drawn to action-dominance that demands conformity, with authoritarian rule from the top down, above the law, that’s self-centered, self-serving, insensitive, and cruel.

If we are aware of the difference:

  • Values that will best fit the Mind-centered individual type will include sharing-generosity, family-community sensitivity, responsibility-accountability, friendship-intimacy, Free Choice, cooperation, conscience, individuality-originality, and creativity..
  • Those that will best fit the body-centered tribal type are self-sensitivity, sociability-camaraderie, authority-rule, dominance-supremacy, moral expedience, obedience-loyalty, conformity-uniformity, taking-monopolizing, competition-winning, and avoidance of responsibility-accountability, unpleasantness-difficulty, work-difficulty, and uncontrolled-unpredictable change.

The emperor’s horse

A comprehensive list of value-opposites would fill a book, but here are some:

  • Individual Creation vs. group tribal conformity
  • The inner peace-harmony of Logic-Love and Free Choice (idealists) vs. external peace-harmony / appearances enforced by tribal dominance (realists)
  • Serving-supporting vs. possessing-controlling
  • Honesty-Truth (depth and substance) vs. appearances-dishonesty (superficiality-shallowness)
  • Considerate-respectful vs. inconsiderate-disrespectful. . . .

Granddad, I think the horse is dead. You get the point? Yes. These two value systems aren’t alike at all. One is fragrant, the other stinks. Well put!

Amen to the benediction!

And you have some idea now how to distinguish between them and how to avoid making the wrong choice? Yes. I will choose wisely because I’ve grown a beard. I’ve dressed myself in a robe and sandals and I have a lantern so it looks like I’m searching for wisdom. It's true. Success here definitely depends on appearances. On perceptions whether right or wrong, and “clothes make the man.” I’m not a man. And besides, emperors don’t wear clothes.

I now decree that this sermon is over. Time for the benediction when every 13-year-old can be truly thankful. To you, Plato, and Socrates, I bid a fond farewell.

Amen!

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*A Course in Miracles (Foundation for Inner Peace 1976)

 

 

Published on Leave a comment on An Idealist’s Answer to “Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?”

Wisdom isn’t judgment. Wisdom is the relinquishment of judgment. -- A Course in Miracles

Rodney King’s lament

Rodney King wondered, “Why can’t we all just get along?’ and so do I. Here are three ways that personalities come into conflict: opposite personality types, opposite approaches to authority, and opposite values. The differences summed up in the labels that attach to the opposites: idealist and realist.

The divide between idealists and realists

How do idealists and realists differ? Realists rely exclusively on their bodies’ senses to tell them what’s real. That is, what actually exists as opposed to speculation. Idealists rely on a faculty of mind to tell them what’s real: thinking that produces ideas and feelings that value them, sometimes idealizing them. They don’t rely on their bodies’ five senses to access this faculty. They use their intuition instead, a kind of sixth sense that connects with Mind that’s distinct from the brain.

The Greek philosopher Plato, the father of Western thought, explained the difference this way: it’s not the apple that’s real -- matter that’s detected by the body’s senses. It’s the idea of the apple in Mind that thinks it. Mind that can’t be detected by the body’s senses but is nevertheless real. Plato had a choice whether to attribute reality to matter -- the apple -- or to Mind. Since he was a philosopher troubled by our world of appearances and injustice, who sought reality and valued Mind as the only means of discerning it, it wasn’t a difficult choice. Nor is it a difficult choice for realists when they trust only their five senses to say what’s real.

The difference then is “idealists” associate with Mind, “realists” with body or matter. This is the foundation for all that follows in differentiating between idealists and realists in the three categories of opposites: personality types, approaches to authority, and values.

Personality Types

The only explanation that makes sense

The existence of a thing implies the existence of its opposite. This is its Logic. But since contradictory things can’t co-exist opposites must exist in a state that doesn’t negate their hosts. Philosophy is concerned with reality because that state is unreality. And since our world is flooded with opposites it’s also flooded with unreality that requires philosophy to discern it. Distinguishing between what’s Real and unreal has led metaphysics, a branch of philosophy that looks behind appearances, to conclude that our entire universe is unreal. Illusory, the stuff of dreams. On the basis of Logic. Experimental physics is also being led there by its discoveries that defy understanding.

To the idealist-metaphysicist it’s not debatable. It’s a given: the only explanation for spacetime-matter and the human condition that’s logical. That makes sense.

Personalities and the Logic of opposites

Personalities are random mixtures of components that rarely reveal at first glance whether they incline toward idealism or realism. But when the two tiers of components are aligned in opposition to one another it’s clear that the logic of opposites, Reality and unreality, is expressed through personality types. It doesn’t require the contrast between INTJ and ESFP to reveal that all of us fall on one side of the divide or the other, and the falling isn’t a matter of conscious choice. If I’m an idealist it happened like everything else in the evolution of life on this planet: by accident, mistake, or just happenstance. By the guiding hand of unreality, the opposite of Logic. That wills us not to experience the perfect harmony of Logic but chaos and conflict.

Two tiers of opposites 

The idealist-realist divide is plainly reflected in the way that personality types are differentiated in the Myers-Briggs system. It’s also reflected in the alternative five-factor system put forth by realists opposed to the role that Jungian intuition played in formulating Myers-Briggs.

The personality  components identified by Carl Jung and expanded and interpreted by Myers-Briggs are opposites that form two tiers. Four components line up across the top: Introvert, Intuition, Thinking, and Judging. As love (values) cannot be separated from Logic (making sense), feeling or evaluation cannot be separated from thinking or reasoning. So, my system modifies Myers-Briggs by relabeling Thinking to Thinking-Feeling.

Their opposites across the bottom are Extravert, Body sensing, Feeling, and Perceptive. Feeling here is distinguished from Feeling linked to Thinking by its association with a part of the brain that’s decidedly not motivated or directed by thinking.  It’s our animal brain, the amygdala, that links us to animals -- to our predatory animal ancestors who survived not on conscious, thoughtful deliberation but on instinct and emotion that drive action. Emotion that drove the will of tribes to behave like herds, to dominate in competition with other tribes. To eliminate threats and defeat opposition. To ensure winning -- the triumph of the will.

Whereas the brain’s prefrontal cortex employs thinking to socialize the predator in us its animal brain -- a force of nature -- driven by its passion to dominate and by its fear of being dominated, acts on instinct whether it’s socialized or not. Myers-Briggs makes no distinction between Feeling linked to Thinking and primal emotion that’s linked to acting on instinct without thinking. My putting Feeling in this context is a significant departure from Myers-Briggs.

The myth of unlimited power and freedom

The same distinction accounts for the opposition between Judging and Perceptive. Judging here is not what we mean by “judgmental.” Nor does “Perceptive” fit with its ordinary use. Whereas Judging employs all the capabilities of Mind to understand, to make sense of relativity and changing circumstances, placing them in context that reveals meaning and implies purpose, Perceptive adheres exclusively to the instinctive force and absolutes of will for its direction. Whereas Judging requires the discipline of discretion, Perceptive throws off all limits. Its preferred field of action is force or power without opposition and freedom without limits, two absolutes that defy the limits of choice implied by Judging.

They also happen to be the absurd promises that lured our unconscious ancestral Mind out of Reality and into self-delusion. Into its dream of an alternate “reality” -- the fantasy that is our incomprehensible world of spacetime and matter. That was supposed to deliver unlimited power and freedom and couldn’t since neither is possible, here or in Reality.

The body is the apple

Introvert     Intuition    Thinking-Feeling     Judging
[internal]    [Mind]        [reason-values]      [understanding]

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Extravert    Sensing      Action-Emotion       Perceptive
[external]    [body]        [will-force]               [dominating]

The tier of personality components across the top is thus Mind-centered, concerned with choices among competing considerations -- selves, interests, ideas, and values -- that produce satisfactory results because they make sense. They’re logical. There are no absolutes that preclude discretion in choosing.

The tier across the bottom is body-matter centered. It’s concerned with success in competition among unthinking, un-choosing absolutes. Forces of nature answering to the imperatives of the animal brain, a beast that can’t be housebroken. Isolated, separated bodies bound together as one in herds or tribes. Bands of brothers revered for semper fidelis and bravery, sharing in the glory of violence.

Where the idealist and the realist dwell

The idealist dwells in the Mind-centered INTJ tier across the top where thoughts and feelings, ideas and ideals predominate. The selves served are individuals and families dedicated to developing every individual’s full potential. The main values served are individuality, originality, diversity, free will, and creativity. Plus service and support for these values by families. The idealist and the idealist’s personality type home are thus not only Mind-centered but also individual-centered.

The realist dwells, in contrast, in the body-centered ESFP tier of opposites across the bottom, where instinctive action and competition among herds or tribes for dominance predominates. The selves served are tribes made up of bodies of the same species that share tribal identity markers. The values served are sociability, conformity, and uniformity. Plus the rule of the tribe from the top down that imposes conformity by force.

The flash point: freedom of choice

The ideal served by the Mind-individual centered INTJ personality type is the individual fully enabled and empowered to play a unique role in creation with freedom of choice. Because it’s the very reason why Logic-Love gave birth to their child, our ancestral Mind, one might think of freedom of choice as sacred.

The contrasting ideal served by the body-tribe centered ESFP personality type is the authority of the tribe to impose its will without opposition on its members. That is, to rule arbitrarily instead of under the law and thus to deprive its members of a role in creation with freedom of choice, The ideal is triumph of the tribal will -- rooted in the animal brain -- over all competition whether from tribal members or other tribes. The contrast between the two personality types is nowhere more evident and consequential than their attitudes toward free choice.

Mind and brain are not the same

Realists insist that nothing can be real -- can definitely exist -- unless it can be detected by the body’s five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound. To them, “mind” is interchangeable with “brain.” Bodies that can be detected all have brains that can be detected. Realists have no concept of Mind that exists without being detectable and so they insist that consciousness is seated in the brain along with spontaneous insights. Insights whose origin is unknowable, and so while realists can’t deny that insights happen they avoid inquiring into why and how they happen.

Far from being interchangeable Mind and brain are opposites. The brain equips isolated, separated bodies with the capacity to survive in a predatory, competitive environment by uniting as one in groups or tribes. It does so by subordinating individuals’ will to the will of the tribe to enforce conformity and to dominate adversaries from within and without.

All of this is a testament to the force of nature acting by instinct, socialized just enough to create a semblance of order but otherwise without deliberation or reflection. Humans are animals, bodies with brains that unmistakably belong to animals. The prefrontal cortex is there to tame the herd so that it can act in concert, but in any contest between thought and action the amygdala, a beast programmed to act, will dominate.

Mind that’s split

Idealists do conceive of Mind that’s real even though it’s not matter that can be physically detected. Where realists stop at five senses idealists experience Mind through their sixth sense that delivers insights from Intuition, the opposite of Body sensing. Where idealists associate sixth sense with a legitimate source of discovery, growth, and creativity, with authentic guidance driven by Logic and Love, realists associate it with unverifiable speculation not subject to any scientific or professional discipline and therefore prone to crackpot theories that obstruct serious inquiry. The Mind in Mind-centered INTJ personality type is one Mind that knows nothing of many body-brains or tribes. In serving the needs of individuals for learning and growth its main priority is competence in the exercise of free choice, a talent that conflicts with tribal dominance and is therefore suppressed.

The one Mind in Mind-centered INTJ personality type that’s accessed through Intuition’s sixth sense delivers guidance from Logic-Love, but the one Mind that seeks guidance through individual humans is split. Split between the Logic-Love of its inheritance and its opposite -- illogic, fear, hatred, and guilt -- that make us imperfect and also distinguish the human animal from other animals. Where bodies and their senses are idolized by realists the Mind idealized by idealists is only the one accessed through Intuition, not the split mind of the idealist.

Self that’s split

Whether a personality type is Mind-centered or body-centered it has one thing in common: it’s human and it’s imperfect. What it doesn’t have in common is the same self. The self of the INTJ Mind-centered type is the individual. The self of the body-centered type is the tribe -- a group. This essential difference accounts for the sharp contrast in the types’ conception of authority and their values.

Interpretations of Authority 

Insensitivity from the top down

The earth-bound brain understands authority as it’s employed within the only self that it recognizes: not the individual soul but many bodies uniform in appearance and behavior obedient to the will of the tribe. Authority resides exclusively in those who rule the tribe from the top down. Theirs is the only voice to be heard, the only legitimate source of intelligence and feeling. Theirs are the only interests to be served with one exception: the material needs of those beneath them must be met to ensure conformity without dissent.

The central concern of this self-centered version of authority is to maintain itself by eliminating or dominating all opposition. The one and only consideration is its preservation, not the wellbeing of those it controls. The same earth-bound brain can only conceive of a supreme being, or “God,” who rules with absolute authority from the top down. Who issues commandments and judges and punishes those guilty of disobedience.

Sensitivity from the bottom up

Logic-Love accessible through Intuition holds that the opposite is true. Not only is it conceivable it’s also likely. If Logic-Love is the source of Reality and Creation then authority that’s its own objective can’t create anything by ruling from the top down. All it can accomplish is self-preservation through intimidation and force until its inevitable defeat by a superior adversary.

Authority that fosters the creation of varieties of worth -- of life, beauty, order, freedom, abundance, intimacy, and other values -- must enable and empower its creations to employ their free will and other attributes in the act of creation. Must serve from the bottom up rather than rule from the top down. Where the point of authority isn’t disempowerment to ensure conformity but empowerment to enable creativity.

Two distinctly opposite objectives, opposite means of attainment, opposite versions of authority: rule from the top down that’s unsupportive, insensitive, and cruel; service from the bottom up that’s supportive, sensitive, and kind. Which one is more conducive to the fullest development, expression, and use of a child’s competence to engage with the world on his or her own terms? With entrepreneurial imagination, ingenuity, and self-assurance? Which one is centered on the child’s welfare instead of on itself?

Governance under the law

Authority that rules from the top down is backed up by its own will. Which puts it above the law because it is the law. Arbitrary and capricious, which isn’t law at all. It’s chaos. Authority that serves from the bottom up is backed up by the laws of cause and effect that embody the values of Logic-Love and apply impartially to everything and everyone. This includes authority which cannot govern unless it governs under the law.

The discipline of alignment with laws meant to support free choice in creation contrasts with its opposite: the discipline of conformity to an arbitrary will meant to suppress free choice and creativity. Why? Because free choice and creativity pose a threat to absolute, unopposed authority. The perfect harmony of creation is achieved through the governance of Logic-Love guided by the laws that define Reality and Creation. In the absence of Logic-Love and laws authority that rules arbitrarily on its own behalf can only maintain the appearance of order through force.

Values 

Realism’s flight from Logic

The case for realism rests on the fact that who we are and where we came from -- what “life” and the universe are all about -- must involve speculation. Theories abound but none can meet accepted standards of proof. We are left as individuals each to decide what it’s all about. To decide what’s real. And if everyone has five senses but not everyone is endowed with an active sixth sense then realism rather than idealism must be our guide.

The flaw in this argument is its reliance not on Mind to persuade but on matter. On the body’s ability to detect other physical objects. Objects that belong to the same material world as the bodies detecting them. And so what’s “real” isn’t established by the objectivity prized by science; it’s nothing more than bodies detecting themselves. It’s entirely subjective. Matter proclaiming that it truly exists from a mirror. An obvious departure from reasoning acknowledged by the philosophy of science but conveniently ignored by science itself.

The flaw is the absence of a perspective not of our material “reality” that’s objective. The absence of Logic-Love, the faculty of Mind-Intuition that recognizes and rejects flawed thinking that interferes with its function, which is to support understanding with logical explanation. To help us make sense of things. Realists who find refuge in their bodies’ five senses are not only running toward unthinking, self-referential matter. They’re running away from our only means of making sense: Logic-Love that explains.

It's all bias

But whether we’re realists or idealists is just our bias. Our personality types can’t lead us to the truth but they do entrench each of us in subjective bias. So it’s just my bias when I declare that of the two categories of values -- one based on the individual, the other based on groups or tribes -- only the individual aligns with the laws of cause and effect that define Reality and Creation. The bias of my version of a Mind-centered INTJ personality type. The Logic that supports it explains that the billions of us are actually replications of one Self, one Mind not many. The many version of this one Self is the version implied by its opposite. An opposite that must in every respect be the opposite of its host, the one Mind-Self that’s real. And so its opposite must be unreal -- an illusion.

I conclude that the values associated with the individual align with Reality and Creation because the individual -- the one Mind-Self -- is real and the values associated with its opposite -- the many selves, groups, tribes -- cannot be real. I do so not because my five senses tell me so but because Logic-Love accessible through Mind’s sixth sense, not body-brain, tells me so.

Our distinctly human tribal values

The values associated with tribes are entirely the product of body-brains programmed to express a distinctly human version of our predatory animal nature, our competitive herd instinct:

  • Where idealist-individual values support free choice in creativity realist-tribe values support the abdication of free choice in conformity.
  • Where the individual prizes intimacy and free self-expression in loving, non-competitive relationships, the tribe prizes sociability and scripted self-expression in competitive relationships.
  • Where individual values are directed toward equality and empowerment in horizontal relationships, tribal values are directed toward hierarchical relationships that empower top-down authority and disempower those beneath it.
  • Where individual values above all respect individual worth and free will, tribal values inherently disrespect both.

Which may make tribal values distinctly human: they seem to define the human character judging from its inept stewardship of its natural and human resources.

It also makes them wrong, suitable for opposites opposed to Reality and Creation but not for the one Mind born of Logic-Love to play an indispensable role in the creation and reciprocation of Worth. To raise children. This is who I believe we truly are, not automatons manipulated by tyrants to dominate and destroy one another in endless conflict..

Do we really have a choice?

The split mind of humanity oscillates between these competing codes of ethics that were clearly differentiated when Niccolo Machiavelli published The Prince in 1532. So what I propose with two incompatible takes on morality is not new. Yet its implications for the human character and its propensity toward self-destruction seem not to have penetrated our awareness. Not to the point where it would make a human course correction.

Survival without functioning within groups or tribes isn’t feasible when we are born into a species that is itself a tribe. We can imagine ourselves disciplined by individual morality but, as Machiavelli showed, the realities of survival in competition often subordinate it to tribal top-down authority. We allow ourselves to go off course because there seems to be no other choice, and this applies to idealists as well as to realists.

The ESFP body-brain centered personality type is opposed to this choice as well as to choice generally since it’s a function of Mind. Realists and their ESFP apotheosis continue to serve Machiavellian tribal values without recognizing that they’re incompatible with morality. Without understanding that the mirror they hold up to us is humanity’s unreal dark side. They’re wrong because they’re immoral, the source of wrongdoing.

Why conscience?

Why make the difference clear? So that we put the gift of free will to good use. So that in defining our character with values we will make the right choice: for respect for the laws of cause and effect and their source, Logic and Love inseparable. So that when we are divided into competing groups or tribes we stay true to our sovereignty and integrity as individuals and don’t let our values, our morality, be compromised no matter what self-serving top-down authority demands of us. So that we have a conscience that wills us to do what’s right and listen to it.

Does history offer any examples of realists stricken by conscience after they sacrificed their will to the will of the tribe? J. Robert Oppenheimer was overwhelmed by guilt for his part in producing the Bomb, Robert McNamara for prosecuting the tragedy that was the Vietnam War. Many others, then and now, wish that they had not betrayed their humanity to a false idol.

Conflicting values, conflicting stories

The Mind-centered personality type that values individuals and families, free will, creativity, and service tells one story. The body-brain centered personality type that values tribes, captivity, conformity, and top-down rule tells another. Stories with different objectives and steps for getting there. The individual storyline is culturally explicit because it puts human nature in a positive light. These are values we can be proud of. The tribal storyline is culturally implicit because it puts us in a negative light. Only a perverse pride could own the conquests of red army ants.

The two storylines are contradictory, which helps to explain the friction between their adherents.

  • If Mind-centered individual values tell the story of humanity parting with appearances to help its one Mind-Self regain self-awareness, acceptance of its innocence, and consciousness, the body-brain centered tribal values of realists accept things as they appear to be and take it from there, proceeding directly to instinct-driven action without any need for mind-changing reflection or deliberation.
  • If individual values affirm the worth of Creation and the competence of free-spirited individuals enabled and empowered by authority to take part in it, tribal values affirm the necessity of competition and the submission of individual wills to tribal authority to win it. “Winning” measured not by creativity and free expression but by dominance. By ownership, possession, and control.

The story told by an idealist’s values

An idealist’s values might look something like this:

Home-Relationship
Innocence-Beauty
Wholeness-Wellness
Enablement
Empowerment
Spontaneity-Creativity

The story it tells is of humanity that has a Home in Reality and a Relationship with its one Mind-Self’s parents, Logic-Love. A Home and Relationship that belong to Reality-Creation, not to our alternate “reality.” So, the central driving force behind this and the following values is the urgency of awakening to Reality and regaining awareness of Home and Relationship. A feat that humanity can pull off when the perfection and Beauty of Innocence replace guilt in its psyche -- its soul. An accomplishment that lies within the power of any individual guided by Logic-Love, not within any tribe.

The integrity of the individual is restored with the healing of the Mind corrupted and split by its mistaking its opposite -- its unreal shadow -- for an other self and by surrendering its free will to give it access. Being in a state of Wholeness and Wellness signifies that healing has taken place: the individual -- the one Mind-Self -- has regained its sovereignty and thus the capacity to choose freely. This state of Mind is prerequisite for the values that follow: Enablement of the individual to exercise free will with competence, through trial-and-error learning in our alternate reality and Empowerment of competence in Free Choice to be part of Creation when consciousness is restored.

The attributes that the one Mind-Self must have to perform in Reality are Spontaneity and Creativity. Attributes of Free Choice that cannot be compromised by external influence from any source including the Child’s parents, Logic-Love. This explains the necessity of training by experience in an unreal environment where the Child’s parents couldn’t interfere even if they wanted to and there can be no real consequences -- no harm done.

This is our mission from this idealist’s perspective. What about the realist?

The story told by a realist’s values

From the realist’s perspective its values might look like this:

Will
Instinct-Action
Emotion-Force
Dominance-Winning
Sociability-Likability

Our mission would be survival through unending competition and conflict -- pointlessness. But if we look behind the mystique of the “Triumph of the Will” to what it actually implies we might find the following.

Alienation-Disconnection
Guilt-Imperfection
Division-Sickness
Disablement
Disempowerment
Captivity-Enslavement

These are terms that apply across the board to the body-brain centered ESFP personality type, its exercise of top-down authority, and its tribal values. The story that it tells is of a copycat -- a parasite shadow-self. A derivation without a life of its own and therefore without originality. Entirely incapable of individuality and creativity, that borrows its attributes from its host and reverses them into their opposites. To understand its action agenda take the attributes of its host and reverse them, starting with its host’s core attribute, that it is one entity not many, an individual not a group or tribe.

Which makes the entire tribal value system unreal -- the fact that explains the copycat’s greatest fear: self-awareness. And its fanatical obsession with authoritarian control since without forced conformity its secret will be exposed: the emperor wears no clothes. The emperor is a thing made up, a forgery who has neither existence nor authority. The work of an illusionist. An apparition. A mere reflection, without substance, incapable of casting a reflection on its own.

Of the two systems only the individual system is valid. The tribalist-realist system is but a deception that distracts from the Truth by conflict and dominance. Not only unreal but dangerous and wrong. Destined to be undone and abandoned when our one Mind again chooses Logic and Love, its source and true Self. When it chooses Reality and Truth that know nothing of competition and conflict. That know only the intimacy of Love and the Logic and Reality of Creation.

Whither goest thou. . . ? 

From an idealist’s perspective, these are the values of the idealist and realist that define our character. Each with a split mind, each with a light and a dark side, neither perfect. In an alternate reality of ambiguous appearances, in the presence of competing biases, can we say what it means? 

In the 40s, before climate change and mass extinction were a concern, my back yard was full of fireflies. We called them lightning bugs. Little blinking lights floating silently, lazily in space. A reminder that August is for letting up, slowing down. That in the life of the cosmos one life on our little planet is one blink. Loaded with meaning and meaningless at the same time.

. . . Into the wastebasket of time

A mandala is a geometric design, symbolic of the universe, that can be intricately beautiful. One I admired was created painstakingly with colored grains of sand. After a prescribed period for display it was taken to the point where two rivers form a third river and dumped.  All that work. All that talent, creativity, and beauty tossed out as if it had no value. To symbolize what? Perhaps that when a life is lived and examined for all that it means, whether it served the cause of Mind or submitted to the dictates of body, the show is over. It can be thrown away.

Into the wastebasket we call time, that never needs to be emptied because it doesn’t contain anything. What’s here and gone in the blink of a firefly or a life has meaning, but without substance, without permanence that’s only possible with timelessness, its meaning is here and gone with it. Meaning in the context of the temporal that’s meaningless in the context of the eternal.

The eternal, where there is no competition and dominance, only truth, creativity, trust, innocence, and intimacy.  Where it’s Real and the Idealist is the realist.

Published on Leave a comment on The Defining Values of Our Character [1st draft]

“God is the Mind with which I think. My real thoughts are in my Mind. I would like to find them.” -- A Course in Miracles, Workbook Lesson 45

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The first draft of this essay completed May 12, 2023 is reproduced here August 7 to restart the process of writing and editing after a three-month pause. The pause was recommended by the I Ching Hexagram 34 but was necessitated in any case by mental and physical burnout. I am pleased to resume work however at a slower pace, with less intensity, and hopefully not too serious a drop in performance. Thank you for your interest and patience. -- DCH

Coming to terms with the way things are 

“Confused and confusing,” an acquaintance’s judgment on a letter I’d written. “Thoughtful but somewhat disorganized,” a professor’s verdict on one of my essays. So when you’ve had enough with this essay it’s not you. No matter what the topic my poetic right-brained thinking will find a way to make it difficult. No excuses.

But it’s not all my fault. The topic is a killer. It’s defeated almost all the best minds of Eastern and Western thought, who would rather retreat into babbling mythology and mumbo-jumbo sorcery than figure it out. Mind in two states, Conscious and unconscious. Dwelling in two realities, one that’s real and one that’s not. That I call an “alternate reality” just to soften the blow, that it’s just a dream, an illusion. Our everyday world that we call home. Where the unreal has been made -- not created -- real. “Mother nature” who’s nobody’s mother but a magic trick our sleeping ancestral Mind is playing on itself.

“Conscious” and “Mind” in initial caps. To denote that they’re not of our “reality” but of Reality that is real. And quotes I often use to flag deception. That can be no part of the House of Truth that we once occupied and will again when our ancestral Mind awakens. A use of style to alleviate at least some of the confusion: initial caps to say we’re in the House of Truth. Not made-up reality but the real thing. Quotes to let you know that appearances can be deceiving, especially “reality” that’s unreality.

Some personality types can’t conceive of a Reality they can’t see, hear, and touch. For them the only help I can offer is a reminder: that we all have a sixth sense -- our intuition -- and psychic ability whether used or neglected. They can open their minds to another perspective or not -- their choice. If this is you and you’re more comfortable with things the way they are, you must be a “realist.”  Which is fine with me because I’m an idealist. I’m not comfortable with the way things are and I’m talking to you. If you stick with me I might make you a little less comfortable. It could be unpleasant, yes. But for both of us it would be a good thing.

Why a good thing? 

Values overlap. The vision of Logic is shared with the vision of Hope, Purpose, and Meaning. They in turn are inseparable, worthy of equal prominence among our most basic values, and yet what value doesn’t incorporate both?  “Value” implies Purpose and Meaning.

Worth is a value in and of itself that’s built into every value. The affirmation and empowering of Worth could express the entire point of Reality-Creation, the cause it serves. Not just to stand for anything but to stand for what’s Good. What is “Good?” Worth with the values of morality built into it -- justice, loving kindness, reason, and more. Values that distinguish family-individuality from tribal-conformity, Mind from body-brain-matter, idealist from “realist.”

To reflect on values is to realize that logically there is no way that Reality could not stand for Plato’s “Good.” That what we experience as “life,” that seems so often detached from, or opposite to it, so often de-moralizing, could not overflow with it. That it had to be values that Child-Mind, our one Self, was given by its Parents at birth in Reality, to use in endowing the creation and affirmation of Life-Worth with their essential attribute of Free Choice.

How can values not be embedded in the core, the essence, of existence and how can they not be Good? How then can we let ourselves be gulled into dismissing the ideal of Good and embracing in its stead a conception of “reality” that’s utterly devoid of motivation? That at its core is lifeless, loveless, mindless, and soulless. A misshapen image of pointlessness that allows us no more self-worth than a dung beetle.

To reflect on values is to realize that with every choice we make we’re choosing not only among them; we’re choosing to accept or reject who and what they stand for. The gifts that they are and the Giver. We’re choosing who we are and who we want to be. An ideal that tests us every day to reach higher until we get it right. Until we’re served our purpose here, gained the competence we sorely lack, and are ready to move on. Eventually to serve a useful role in Reality. Always -- always -- with Guidance. Because otherwise we’re sure to get it wrong.

Who or what would get in the way? Who or what is holding us back now? The believer? The idealist? Passion for Psyche, Logic, and Love? For Free Choice and Creativity? For Reality and Truth? Or could it be the “realist?” Addition to the opposite. 

Good neighbors 

Many years ago, I was presented with a “utility index” by Dr. Ruth Mack of the Institute of Public Administration, a group of policy analysts in Manhattan who were helping my employer, the New England River Basins Commission, with flood management policy in the Connecticut River basin. The index contained nine values that stakeholders could use to choose among different ways of avoiding or mitigating flood damage: intimacy or love; aesthetics; health; freedom; safety; self-esteem; material comfort; belonging; and control. A tenth was added later: hope.

Fairness was built into the index in the idea of belonging to a community of interests that can’t last long without it. And ultimately it was fairness that set regional policy. It wasn’t fair for downstream communities to burden their upstream neighbors with the costs of their exposure to flooding, by robbing them of their free-flowing tributaries and numerous other assets. Numbers didn’t carry the day; it was human nature. Neighborliness and respect. Sociology. Psychology.

Personality, character, and values  

I showed the list to my two pre-adolescent sons and was struck by how readily they connected with it. One instinctively alighted on intimacy or love, the other circled around, wanting to think about it. I knew Ruth had handed me something significant. Had I thought about it I would have realized that it was a mirror, and this is why they took an interest. They were looking at themselves. They were looking at terms that defined the persons they were or wanted to be. The persons they wanted to be to others. Their self-image. And this might have been a one-of-a-kind opportunity to consider whether they liked what they saw or might want to change it.

Already I had a sense of my sons’ personality types. They grew up. Their personalities evolved into different types that reflected not only adulthood but also the value preferences that define the different types. The images reflected in the mirror were no longer the blur of childhood innocence. They were high-resolution portraits of individuals. Persons defined by their personalities; each character defined by its values. Three components of individuality rolled into one: personality, character, and values.

Values have opposites

When persons and whole societies go off track, they’ve put down the mirror and stopped reflecting on who they want to be. On the values they want their image to stand for. Did they think that character doesn’t matter? That if they leave it to chance it will take care of itself?

If this is why they’ve wandered off track it can’t mean that they’ve left character to chance. It means they’ve put it in someone else’s hands. In the hands of someone or something who has no problem making the decision for them. As opposed to someone who would prefer to wait until they’re asked for help. The choice is between a voice that’s inherently intrusive and disrespectful or supportive and respectful. Respectful or disrespectful of our sovereignty and free choice. Clear indication that the former has its own agenda. That it’s up to no good because values, like everything in our world, have opposites. Dark sides.

Why utility index needs to be updated. . . .  

it's all by intent

There’s nothing light about the disrespect of uninvited boundary-crossing. About taking advantage of someone who’s let their guard down.

It's the way of the predator who wishes no one well, not even itself since it’s an opposite. In a world of chance, accidents, and fortunate events it’s easy to assume that no mind could possibly be behind it. But this would be a mistake. Because Reality or unreality, either way, is a state of Mind. Nothing occurs without occurring within Mind. It’s where everything occurs or it’s nothing.

If voices make their presence known while we manage or neglect the profile in the mirror, pulling us one way or the other, toward the light or toward the darkness, make no mistake: they are a state of mind. If the pull is toward darkness then the state must be unconsciousness.* Unawareness that would account for neglecting the profile in the mirror and going off track. A mistake of this magnitude, that turns us from an image we want to one we wouldn’t recognize, doesn’t just happen. It's intentional. Just ask Friedrich Nietzsche and Sylvia Plath. Minds aren’t possessed by chance. They’re possessed by intent. And if possession is involved it’s ill intent.

From family spats to global mayhem

The mind that’s supposed to be doing the tracking is us, which means the intent is coming from us. it’s our mistake. The corrective can’t be to passively wait for someone or something else to take over when that was the mistake. The corrective is to pick up the mirror and take another look. To get serious about self-awareness. Is this who we want to be? Is the image in the mirror attractive or unattractive? Good or bad? The corrective is to get over the idea that self-image is a mask. A marketing brand with a thousand angles to manipulate the other. A smile painted on the snout of the big, bad wolf.

The corrective is to invite the voice we neglected when we put the mirror down to help us discard the dark side of values and choose the light side. Help that only the respectful voice can provide because of where respect comes from: from Logic that understands and explains and Love that cares and connects. Two functions of one Mind that are inseparable because they complete one another.

That can’t be taken for granted in a world of opposites. Of contradictions that systematically interfere with understanding and connecting. That systematically foment misunderstanding, misjudgment, and disconnecting. Our world of incessant friction on every level, from individual families all the way to global powers.

Avoidance of self-awareness

Let a critic or skeptic try to convince me that this isn’t so and I will be convinced: that I’m hearing the wrong voice. That my opponent may never have looked in the mirror and, if it did, it might see no reflection. Because the wrong voice speaks for no one and nothing but itself, an opposite. The defining attribute of an opposite is that it can’t exist. There can only be one Reality. A mirror held up to an opposite can only be a reminder that it's not there. Another attribute is avoiding mirrors. Avoiding self-awareness. It’s what we’re doing when we put the mirror down: listening to the wrong voice and avoiding self-awareness.

Honesty

The mirrors we hold up to ourselves regularly reveal what we are doing. Art and entertainment, work and play, built into our everyday lives. But how often do they reveal what we are thinking? How often do they question how we are thinking? Take us to the source of what we are doing and thinking and why?

Reflecting on our values confronts us with the one question for which habits of deception and avoidance have no answer: why? The question that stops us in our tracks and persuades us at least to think about changing our minds, changing course. Before fear, frustration, rage, and guilt are placed again in the care of deception and avoidance. The therapist who likes things just the way they are. “Seek but do not find.” Anything but “I would meet you upon this honestly,” the mirror thrust before us in the poetry of T. S. Eliot. The morality of Truth that puts the lie to the therapist: Honesty.

Dishonesty

What else but dishonesty would make of Jesus the champion of guilt instead of Innocence? The excuse for tormenting an entire people, the Jews, with an eternity of persecution when no life he lived, no story he told, could do that? What else but dishonesty would put words in his mouth to justify and validate what it is, the insane idea of sin, the lie of guilt. To idealize tribal supremacy in the guise of ecclesiastical virtue, appropriating his words, his values, to its own fraudulent ends?

In a “reality” born of deception and avoidance there can be no “truth,” no definitive answer. But nothing stops us from asking an honest question. From asking why and choosing of our own Free Will to answer honestly. To think differently and change our minds if we mean to be honest with ourselves.

The face and the faceless mask in the mirror

Let me hold up my mirror and ask what you see. How can I do this? By going back to the utility index I was handed years ago. By updating it to reflect a higher resolution of character and values than was apparent then. For Logic and Love don’t stand still. They’re growing along with everything else alive. With all of Reality and Creation, expanding awareness with circumstances that never stop evolving. That extend into infinity.

It’s no longer one static list of separate values. It’s evolved into two lists that are dynamic and interrelated. The first is original: the values that account for individual morality within personal relationships among family and friends. The second is derivative, that accounts for relationships within and among tribes that march to the expedience of Machiavelli’s drummer. The former sourced ultimately from Reality that’s light and the latter its opposite derived from it. A shadow-reflection of a self-deluded mind that’s dark.

It's the strange “reality” of our world, the interplay of light and dark in the dream of a split Mind. If we’ve gone off track the second image in the mirror might shock an individual into doing something about it. Into awakening, since one individual truly reversing the lie of guilt back to the Truth of Innocence is all it would take. For who wouldn’t be shocked to find in our reflection the grotesque mask of Dracula leering back at us? Character that flaunts expedience without morality is hideous even to mind possessed by it.

The challenge to choose again

That is, if mind is willing to look. If the occupants of Plato’s Cave had any interest in bringing their enchanted darkness to the light of day. The Child would never have deluded itself into identifying with a perversion of the Truth if it hadn’t lost Consciousness. If it had been capable of paying attention and thinking freely. And we, its projections, wouldn’t either. Wouldn’t identify with the wrong guide, the delusion, instead of choosing freedom from its possession. To be guided by the agent of Psyche-Soul who would never possess us, back to awareness of our real Self.

Not if we looked at the values that define its character. Not if we were aware that Child Free Choice was responsible for choosing them. That we, its projections, are who we choose to be. 

What then is the mirror? An opportunity, an invitation, and a challenge to choose again.

The challenge here is to heal

How go about using Free Choice to heal a split Mind? By understanding whose Mind it is and what it does. Its function and how it functions. By being aware of the choices. The mirror provided by the defining values of our character is a device for learning how to exercise Free Choice so that we can heal the separation. Our task here, in our alternate “reality,” because Creation is beyond the capacity of a split mind.

Mind itself is a value with a function. The value of Consciousness. The Mind of the Child -- our ancestral Mind. Not the Mind of its Parents, Logic-Love, who account for Reality-Creation with their own functions on their own plane of Creation, but an extension of their Mind.

The indispensable element

The function of their Child-Mind in Reality is to introduce an indispensable element into the Creation and affirmation of Life-Worth: the element of Free Choice. Consciousness of all the possibilities. It’s who the Child is and what it does  Performed on its own plane of Creation because its function and a function of its Parents, Consciousness that determines Reality, cannot intermix.

Creation is the attributes of Logic, Love, and Psyche-Soul, and the talents of Child Free Choice, playing together purposefully in harmony to create compositions of gifts-values from the raw material of Creation: the continually expanding implications of Logic, the connecting-expanding relationships of Love, the radiating light of Psyche-Soul, and the talents and values given to the Child by its Parents, Logic-Choice and Love-Freedom. That express and affirm the Worth of Creation and its source with the attributes of originality, Innocence, Beauty, and Perfection that define it. An achievement that would be meaningless if it were not performed with Free Choice. If it could not also express the value of Free Choice. The Child -- us.

Time and entropy destined to end

One Mind and one Consciousness with two distinct identities and two distinct functions. One the Parents of the other whose Consciousness determines and defines Reality. The other the Child whose Consciousness enables its function, Free Choice, by arraying the possibilities. Identities and functions that perform through their inseparable Relationship, yet without interfering with one another.

For if there were interference it would automatically trigger a response from the laws of cause and effect that structure Reality-Creation. It would redirect Energy away from Child-Mind’s function. It would cause Child-Mind to lose Consciousness and put it into another state. The state of unconsciousness that got entangled with an opposite and split itself in two. That dreamed an alternate “reality” in a state corrupted by its opposite: our material world of opposites, time, and entropy, destined to end.

Analysis at the beginning

The task of Child-Mind here is to put its situation to good use. Can it be to learn from experience how to exercise Free Choice? Does it seem that we, the descendants of our ancestral Mind, need to learn? To gain competence that will be needed in Reality-Creation when our ancestral Mind regains Consciousness. If so, how does it do this? How does the Child-Mind function? How does it choose freely?

It begins with analysis. Philosophy and psychology combined in the work of Carl Jung, Katharine Briggs, and her daughter Isabel Myers to deconstruct Mind into components that enable analysis of its function. The gift of their talents enables our talents to put it to use. Start with four components from the type INTJ: introversion, intuition, thinking, and judgment.

INTJ

Introversion is looking within, not being distracted by what’s on the outside because in Reality there is no “outside.” There are no “externals.” Reality is all one Mind. Introversion is where we get introspection, the act of looking into the mirror of our character and values.

Intuition is Mind-Energy not in the form of matter detecting its Source through the agent of Soul. Through the Force of Oneness that knows nothing of boundaries. We get understanding from Logic and Love accessible through reflection. The act of accessing spontaneous insights through the sixth sense we call Intuition, to establish context from evolving circumstances that produces meaning and purpose. That articulates what the situation calls for, the baseline condition for the next step: choosing how to respond to what the situation calls for. What we learn from Logic-Love before we get into answering is how to frame the question. Getting it right.

We apply understanding from Logic-Love to guide choices among considerations by reasoning with Mind-Logic and feeling-evaluating with Mind-Love. Inseparable elements of Thinking with Mind. Here is the nerve center of a split Mind’s attempt to choose rationally and objectively. This is where the rigor of benefit-cost analysis comes into play, measuring the quantitative and evaluating the qualitative in logical sequence, ideally without bias, honestly and transparently. Foregoing the limits of body-addicted science to bring everything that’s relevant into play with systems thinking, holistically.

We use Judgment to make choices and reach decisions that express the values and serve the causes that we stand for. That define the character that we strive to be -- the image in the mirror of our values. It does this through a process of integration that utilizes all the functions of Mind: finding consciously and intuitively among all the considerations the one that controls. The value that for each set of circumstances pulls all the other considerations into alignment.

This is how Mind functions to choose freely. An amalgam of principles and procedures from many fields, among them three with which I am professionally familiar: public policy, jurisprudence, and benefit-cost analysis. All neatly gathered under the headings of Jung / Myers-Briggs personality type theory: introversion, intuition, thinking, and judgment. INTJ -- the opposite of ESFP and ESFJ.

When Intuition is obstructed

Intuition can’t be Mind being taken captive by shadow-parasite. This was Jung’s thought about Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a misperception. Captivity by shadow-parasite is prefrontal cortex overwhelmed by animal emotion amygdala -- a brain phenomenon. Intuition that produces spontaneous insights is Mind’s portal to Soul’s agent who connects us with Logic-Love and cannot be corrupted. But Mind can be interfered with. And it is obstructed by body-brain that would have us believe that our sixth sense can’t be trusted.

It can be trusted if we are mindful of the difference between body-brain and Logic-Love, the function of Mind-Consciousness. If we are alert to what brain is up to and guard our thoughts. Most notably against victimhood, the perversion of Intuition by the. Child’s shadow opposite. The portal to the twin fantasies of absolute authority and absolute freedom that lured the Child’s impaired judgment into self-delusion. That release deluded minds not to the Reality of Logic-Love but into a never-never land of self-indulgence and cruelty.  

When “Feeling” isn’t feeling

The premise by Jung / Myers-Briggs that thinking and feeling can be separated works if feeling, like thinking, has only one source and represents only one set of values. But it doesn’t, and this causes confusion. The source of thinking is one Mind-living energy not in the form of matter whose opposite is brain-dying energy in the form of matter. The source of feeling that Jung / Myers-Briggs posits is Love-Abundance and its values of caring, sharing, affirmation, and empowerment -- all the elements of morality-Good. The morality-Good of families and friendships among individuals devoted to one another.

The other source of feeling that Jung / Myers-Briggs overlooks is emotion seated in the part of the brain that connects the human animal with its pre-human animal ancestry. The amygdala that motivates behavior with the will of the predator to dominate. With the “will to power” that rules the human psyche in the fevered view of Nietzsche and the “triumph of the will” in the crazed view of Hitler. Driven by the fear, rage, and hatred of herd or tribe provoked by competition from other herds or tribes. Entirely devoid of the values of Love among individuals, replaced by devotion to herd in opposition to other herds. Offering not caring, sharing, and empowerment from Abundance but demanding ownership, possession, and control from hollowness.

The “feeling” of tribal belonging

If Logic and Love are inseparable in Reality then so must be thought and feeling. In our alternate “reality” of opposites, of entropy that sees that everything eventually comes apart that was held together by energy that’s dying, they’ve been separated, disconnected. A state of madness that guarantees personalities whose parts flip in and out of sync. Pulled this way and that by sun toward light and coherence, moon toward darkness and incoherence.

Madness is how it is in our alternate “reality.” It’s not just an appearance. But whereas mind and body can be usefully distinguished as they are with Intuition and body-sensing, and as they are with thinking distinguished from the emotion of body-animal brain, thinking and feeling are two aspects of Mind that can’t be separated. Not even in appearance if in Reality it turns out that they’re one and the same.

There are no hairs to be split between “feeling” and “emotion.” But there is a clear distinction between one kind of feeling and another. It is the feeling of family Love that forges relationships among friends not in competition that belongs with thinking and Mind-centered INTJ. It is the feeling of tribal belonging that provokes fear, rage, and hatred against tribes in competition that belongs with feeling and body-centered ESFP.

Nietzsche’s gift

The perversion of this Truth that madness has contrived is the unevolved emotion of animal will seated in the amygdala overtaking the socializing deliberation of the prefrontal cortex. Mob psychology: the herd demolishing the pretext of individual, of independent judgment.

The madness of Nietzsche renowned for his extraordinary fusion of thought with feeling in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Penguin Books 1969): “In a man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts” (Introduction by R. J. Hollingdale, p. 12). A talent also noted by Jung in Psychological Types (p. 319). When, in Truth, Thus Spoke Zarathustra was the voice of the Child-Mind’s shadow -- its unreal opposite -- announcing its triumph in the clear over the will of its host. Whose end would come prematurely in total captivity: mental and physical paralysis.

The opposite of thinking can’t be part of itself. Can’t be feeling whose source is Love when the source of thinking is Logic and the two are inseparable. One Mind, one definition. The “feeling” of ESFP can’t be the only attribute that’s copied from Mind-centered INTJ when all the other attributes of body-centered ESFP have their own definition. Moreover, all functions of Mind manifested in INTJ are of one Mind and inseparable. If an opposite must be found to INTJ-Mind that’s inseparable from Love-feeling then it would have to be the entirety of the opposite personality type. Not one part of it but all of it: Extravert-Sensing-Feeling with Judgment (ESFJ) or with Perceptive (ESFP).

Hostage to guilt

The distinction posed by Jung / Myers-Briggs between thinking and feeling is thus both useful for analysis and misleading. Among all the considerations the one that must control is the inseparability of Logic and Love, Child-Mind’s Parents who gave it definition: the being and doing of Free Choice. The culture of separation and opposition that dominates the corrupted Mind insists that they are separate to hide its illegitimacy. By perpetuating the injustice done to the Child when its Parents supposedly engineered its loss of Consciousness.

When the real injustice was done to the Parents. Because Logic-Love could not have done it. It was a smear perpetrated to lock in place the guilt of the Parents to go along with the guilt of the Child for its part in the separation. Guilt without which captivity to the shadow, the parasite, could not psychologically be sustained.

Humanity’s corrupted mind is held hostage to Child-Mind’s opposite by the colossal lie of guilt. By the lie that because a defenseless Child was betrayed by its Parents its self-image can’t be innocence beloved of its Parents. It must be the helpless innocence of wounded victimhood. A petulant child, gorging on self-pity, entitled to specialness. Excused from all restraint on absolute authority and absolute freedom to settle scores and even the balance. To define fairness on its own terms and no one else’s. To set the rules and write the script however it wishes. In the image of its source: Child-Mind’s opposite. An unreal shadow. Darkness. A parasite.

Toward deconstructing the Big Lie

What example can history offer of the beast that’s wounded victimhood when it’s let loose? Germany, the instigator of one World War set free to instigate another one. When it was “stabbed in the back” and treated unfairly by the peace. By the vindictive Treaty of Versailles that excused it from all restraint and accountability. The myth of wounded victimhood that started with the Child’s self-delusion. The defining values of the Child’s character from that point onward. That will go on replicating itself and re-enacting its wounding until the Mind of Free Choice puts a stop to it. 

Free us of the conviction that separation from our Parents was their doing and ours, from the fear of punishment, and our begging for Innocence by any means and the mockery that is our phony alternate “reality” must end. The nightmare of helpless innocence and wounded victimhood. Freely choosing to understand: that Logic cannot be separated from Love, thought from feeling-values; that the Child’s and our Parents in Reality could never separate from us or harm us in any way, leads us toward our goal. Toward regaining our Innocence that was never lost and Child-Mind’s Consciousness along with it. Toward deconstructing the Big Lie and restoring Truth.

ESFP and ESFJ 

The opposite of Mind is body-matter. Mind-Energy not in the form of matter vs. brain-energy not in the form of matter. So where do extraversion, body-sensing, feeling, and perception fit in? The layer of personality markers from Jung / Myers-Briggs theory that lie opposite INTJ. Markers that upon close examination do more than account for personality type differences. They’re an act of war.

To say that they “fit in” is to miss their source and its intent: to block awareness of Mind, the opposite of matter and body-brains that validate it with their five senses. To block access to the agent of Soul, its opposite and arch enemy. Our connection with Mind’s Logic and Love from Reality who know nothing of alternate realities or their source. That we can access through their gift of intuition, our sixth sense.

Extraversion is orientation toward “objective reality” of energy in the form of spacetime-matter projected “out there.” That’s external to Mind in a compromised state doing the projecting. Both logical impossibilities: projection and its handiwork. A world of body-brains meant to distract Mind from the truth of Reality-Mind and Reality-Creation, neither of which is spacetime-matter or detectable by the body’s five senses. By the gold standard of scientific “knowledge” known as sensory perception. Hubristic nonsense.

Body-sensing is Mind-energy in the form of matter detecting itself. Substituting the body and its five senses for the guidance of Logic-Love accessible through intuition’s sixth sense. The first step toward body’s final ascent to the throne that it imagines has been vacated by Mind. The throne of top-down authority that owns its sensed material domain and is therefore entitled to possess, control, and dominate it. Subjecting it to its mindless, primitive will seated in the amygdala, brain’s common ancestry with animal beast.

Nietzsche’s ideal of “Superman,” the figure transmogrified by Ayn Rand’s “objectivism” into Howard Roark, the noble architect atop his own towering creation. Or the neuroscientist Christof Koch, scrambling up the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in the dark of night, to proclaim the supremacy of King Kong. The beast. The “reductionist” -- romance.

Supremacy over what? Over the Child Free Choice and the Child’s Parents Logic-Love. Over Innocence laid low by guilt. Over Truth replaced by the Big Lie. The supremacy of an unreal shadow over its host, Reality. Creation that needs no Creator. Humanity orphaned and lost that needs no Parents, no guide. Buried now between Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton. The eternal adolescent, Stephen Hawking, yearning for adventure in limitless space.

The arbitrary authority so conjured dominates with absolute authority without opposites and imagines itself as “almighty god.” A perversion of the authority of the laws of cause and effect. Of the values of Logic and Love and the innocence of Soul without opposites that the laws of Reality express. The “triumph” of rage and cruelty over gentle loving kindness. The nightmare of predatory authoritarian supremacy that regularly overtakes our body-obsessed, body-possessed world. More hubristic nonsense.

Feeling that’s associated with the self mis-identified as body-brain rather than Soul-Mind is the unevolved emotion of animal-herd seated in the amygdala. Though it displays tenderness and other signs of nurturing required by procreation its dominant function is fear required for self-protection in space contested by predators like itself. Fear accompanied by rage necessary for intimidation of competitors who can be bullied and hatred for the elimination of enemies who can’t.

This is the emotion stored in body-brains that occupy a material world ruled by a perversion of authority. It is not the feeling described by Jung / Myers-Briggs personality type theory that didn’t venture into where either INTs or ESFs come from and therefore didn’t reflect on why they differ. The appearance of gentle loving kindness of the body-centered world is limited to animals identifying with herd caring for its own. To herd-tribe sharing among its own who forfeit individuality to tribal uniformity so they can belong. It isn’t about the virtue of caring and sharing. About inclusivity that recognizes and values the worth of all herds-tribes and individuals whether they belong or not. The ESF’s body-sensing feeling isn’t about Love.

ESFJ that attaches to the category Judgment becomes the animal beast that seizes control with cruel intent. With Reality’s judgment of innocence perverted by body-brain’s animal will into judgment of guilt. Justified by the perversion of innocence that is wounded victimhood. The all-purpose excuse for projection of condemnation onto “others” and execution by punishment, the infliction of every manner of abuse, every manner of persecution and atrocity available to self-pity. Guaranteed to entrench belief in the reality of its horrors and thereby perpetuate unreality -- the self-delusion of absolute authority without opposites. Tyranny.

Perceptive is brain without Mind-Judgment. Without discernment guided by introspection, reflection, thinking-feeling, values-morals, or discipline. ESF that attaches to Perceptive becomes an action comics caricature. The passive fool who fantasizes that submission to un-boundaried chance that body-brain can’t detect with its five senses attains absolute freedom without limits. Freedom from the limits of definition, the function of Logic-Love that can’t be seen, heard, or touched, and therefore must not exist. Unaware that friend chance is a parasite attached to its host, Mind-unconscious. No one’s friend. That’s all too visible, audible, and palpable to bodies in their made-up “reality.” A cartoon of impossibilities that can’t exist.

The “thinking” of a personality type: ESFP self identified with body that’s deprived itself of the ability to think. A rejection of Mind that imagines itself in a state of spontaneity attained by the magic of specialness. The mindset of a playactor in a one-dimensional entertainment. “Let’s Pretend,” a radio program that was a staple for little fantasists on Saturday mornings, a 1940s version of Disney’s Magic Kingdom. Entertainment that delivers constant “action” through contrivances: games of competition and conflict with no real substance or consequence. A world of superficiality skittering along the surface of a pond like a water-bug, unaware and uninvolved in the life below.

“War” between separation and healing

Two kinds of ESF, both ruled by authoritarian fantasies. ESF with judgment the fantasy of absolute authority without opposites. ESF with perceptive-specialness the fantasy of absolute freedom without limits. One a mask of condemnation and guilt. The other a mask of childlike innocence. Both mis-identification with impossibility, the face in the mirror that is infantile self-absorption. The arrested development of opposition to life that is lifelessness. Of opposition to learning and growth that is mindlessness.

The face of a demon conjured from the pits of hell. Not the fatuous Transylvanian count endeared to us by Hollywood and Bela Lugosi but the monster with hair on the palms of its hands scribed by Bram Stoker. The face of the predator. The face of serious terror, harm, and death.

Free Choice with Mind, no choice with body

Neither of which has any possibility of maneuverability or even existence in the presence of Mind-centered INTJ. Which makes of ESFs a mortal enemy of INTJ. Not that INTJ can return the favor since Mind in Reality can have no awareness of what’s not real. Of impossibilities like absolute authority and absolute freedom. So while conflict between them may sustain ESFs’ playacting fantasy and disrupt relationships, while it may account for the Armageddons of crazed mythology from Zoroaster to evangelical “Christianity,” all it does for INTs is move them to share the Logic-Love of understanding from intuition to heal the separation.

Two opposites that may appear to be in conflict but can’t be if one seeks Truth guided by possibility and the other escape from Truth guided by impossibility. That define our experience of life: healing and separation. And find expression in opposing personality types. In types distinguished by the values that define character. That enable analysis that leads to explanation. To asking Why and coming up with answers that make sense. That, when we hold up the mirror, we can recognize and use to arrest our arrested development and move forward. Choosing freely with Mind instead of body. Without obstruction by externals, bodies, tribal dominance, and the self-willed unawareness that is self-delusion.

Toward self-awareness. Toward Child-Mind’s liberation from self-delusion and awakening to Consciousness. To the sanity of Home in Reality-Creation. Where we started and never really left.

Where Order and Freedom reside 

The values that define character flow from the definition of Self, whether in Reality it is one Child-Mind or in alternate “reality” it is many projections of an unconscious, dreaming Child-Mind. Whether it is the Relationship that is Family in Reality, the basic unit of Creation, or tribe-herd group in alternate “reality,” the only self that the dreaming Child-Mind, corrupted by its shadow-opposite, is capable of recognizing. A self composed of isolated-separated bodies whose individuality-creativity is suppressed by tribe in contrast to Family in Reality where the point is to enable it.

The Family Relationship in Reality is Parent-Child: the bonding of Life-Being / Mind Logic-Love with Free Choice. The birth of the Child thus brought into Being two actors, two Selves, essential to Creation: Free Choice and Family. Whose purpose is to extend, expand, and affirm the Life-Worth of Creation Freely Chosen. This is Creativity -- the engine that drives Creation: the bond between Parent-Child (Family) plus Free Choice (Child).

Its structure is Reality. The laws of cause and effect that apply autonomously. With the Force of Necessity that is Reality without interference by the governance of Mind / Logic-Love. In the same way, the Worth of Life-Creation is affirmed autonomously, through Free Choice, without interference by the Mind / Parents who govern. Were it otherwise there would be no kiss from a handsome prince to awaken the Sleeping Beauty. Our ancestral Mind would be just as well off here.

In both cases the Mind / Parents who govern must abstain from interference for the protection of Authority that resides in Life-Creation itself. For the rule of law. For the democracy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and not for the authoritarian beast that menaces our world. A Truth that Child-Mind corrupted by its shadow-opposite, obstructed by the body’s senses, struggles to grasp. That in Authority under the law reside both Order and Freedom. That in Authority above the law resides neither. It’s tyranny.

The Reality of Idealism and the call for healing

The values presented first are termed “idealistic” because they define the character of our ancestral Mind, the Child who is Free Choice of its Parents Logic and Love, before it lost Consciousness, lost awareness of its home in Reality-Creation, and dreamed the alternate “reality” that is humanity’s material world. Their origin is the Parents who intended the gift of values and talents for their Child’s use in applying Free Choice to Creativity. To the composition, expression, and reciprocation of the Life-Worth of Creation.

They’re idealistic because the expression of values as ideals is part of the function of Creation whereas it can’t be part of an alternate “reality,” dreamed by a corrupted Mind, that’s a perversion of Creation. That pretends to replace Authority that serves and supports the Creation of Life-Worth from the bottom up, under the laws of cause and effect, with a perversion of authority that rules arbitrarily-lawlessly from the top down, not for the Creation of Life-Worth but for its denial. To consummate the original injustice -- the turning of the Child’s Mind against its Parents by an illusion: its shadow-opposite. A virus. A parasite. By self-delusion. A world so defined can’t call for Creation. It can only call for healing.

Meant to be used

The values of Reality-Creation have no inherent ranking. They have their place in the sequence of Logic-Love that moves Creation forward and in the sequence that moves healing forward as well. From Guidance that beckons with Home and Relationship, Innocence and Beauty, Wholeness and Wellness, through Enablement and Empowerment to Spontaneity and Healing. And, hopefully, someday, back to Creativity.  Like all the elements of Creation supported by Logic-Love they have functions that fit together in harmony. One no better or more important than the other. In one interconnected whole -- the Oneness that is Soul.

They also vary in their application to compositions of circumstances, the purpose and meaning of context that’s continually changing and evolving. Values can stand alone in the abstract but they’re meant to be used. To be applied to circumstances that compose each individual’s granular world. To help us navigate the ever-shifting situations that we experience as “life.”

The unreality of “realism”

The ranking of values is left to hierarchy, the perversion of authority that is the dream of an unconscious, corrupted Mind. Our material world ruled by the illusion of absolute authority and absolute freedom. By the mad idea that the Child’s shadow-opposite has replaced Logic-Love, its Parents. Where there can be but one value: the authority of the mad idea ruling over the madness of disorder, disunity, separation. An impossibility. A perversion. A joke.

But because the body’s senses anchor us to this alternate “reality,” because we “know” no other reality, the values that belong to our material world are “realistic.” What must be termed “idealistic” from our perspective is therefore realistic, and what must be termed “realistic” is actually delusional. Such is the world of opposites where Logic and Love, the ultimate values, are gone -- eliminated. Such is our perspective.

From one to two sets of values 

Publication of The Prince in 1532, Machiavelli’s guidance for authoritarian rule, brought to an end the pretense that human behavior follows a single moral code. And with it the idealist’s dream of a “kingdom of heaven” on earth. The values practiced by Mind’s Family-Relationship in Reality have a place in Child’s split Mind. They’ve been adapted to its dream and are recognizably good because families of individuals reside here too. Along with Intuition and the agent of Soul that is our real Relationship.

But these values share uneasy space with a wholly different set of values. The values of tribes. Collections of individuals dedicated not to the development and expression of individuality but to its extinction in service to uniformity. To the direction not of Mind composed of Logic and Love, occupied with Peace, but to brain composed of a leash and the willful predatory instinct at the end of it, bent on war. The prefrontal cortex and the herd of animals that’s the amygdala. The beast that it’s supposed to socialize. It was for the ruler of the beast that Machiavelli shared his statecraft.

All positive values are ultimately subsets of the Energy-Force of Soul-Interconnectedness in Reality. Family Relationship-inclusiveness taking all into itself for Peace, Harmony, Freedom, and Order, and for the enablement, empowerment, and affirmation of the Worth of Relationship’s Creations. Its tribal opposite in unreality takes captive within itself for conformity, disconnection, exclusiveness, disablement, disempowerment, and conflict. This is the ultimate source of negative values -- the “dark side.”

When opposite values conflict

An impactful figure who stood for individual-family values was Jesus. He and the values he taught were not a frontal assault on tribal values but that’s how they came to be viewed by the reigning religious authorities. This is the context of his execution. He was misperceived to be a threat to their authority which, in the end, is what they care most about. Not right or wrong but their license to rule unopposed. Their rationale which holds tribes together in obedience and justifies competition with other tribes for dominance.

Jesus made it plain that he spoke for another rationale not of this world and meant no threat. But because it was attracting widespread interest it created the appearance of a movement. A movement that could replace established authority with another one, and so his innocence or guilt didn’t matter. He had to go. In Ri -- “King of the Jews” -- broadcast the point of his fate: a warning to all who would challenge established tribal authority. A warning and a lie. A projection by authoritarian rule centered on itself and only capable of recognizing itself. The judgment of guilt upon Innocence. Injustice.

Matter is the source of Consciousness? 

If the laws of Necessity that govern the Reality of Mind have a perversion it would be the laws of necessity that rule the alternate “reality” of body. There, energy is under the direction of Mind. Here energy stored in matter, our bodies, imposes its will on us. Bodies dictating to mind-brain how they are to be cared for. Matter telling mind what to do, mind following the direction of the laws of necessity: body survival, body pleasure, body conquest-dominance. There, Mind over energy. Here, matter-energy ruling brains.

Not just Stephen Hawking but all of body-centered science views individual-family values as a threat to its authority. Because it’s out to “prove” through experimental science that mind-consciousness equates with matter-brain. Otherwise, it would have to concede that the only rational explanation for spacetime-matter is that matter originates with Mind, which would overturn its entire rationale. Repeatedly in his book, The Idea of Brain (Basic Books 2020), Matthew Cobb insists that the only possible source of mind-consciousness is brain matter. I.e. matter produces mind instead of the other way around -- a logical absurdity. Proof that science isn’t centered on any “quest for knowledge” but on protecting its founding premise: the reality of bodies and their material environment.

The ultimate purpose served by science and the Church both isn’t discovery and morality but the justification for their tribal authority. Their dominance-supremacy. Expedience dictated by tribal survival-dominance; the only consideration that matters to tribes that otherwise have no logical premise for their rule. Because Truth-morality contradicts tribal expedience.

United in opposition

The two sets of values are thus related to one another not by symbiosis but by opposition. Because tribal values are opposition. Individual-family values don’t recognize the reality of any other system of values since the reality that is their source is Reality-Truth itself. Is Conscience, the faculty of Mind that’s absent in Machiavelli’s tribal expedience.

It’s the same non-relationship that existed between Jesus who spoke for another Reality that can’t recognize unreality and therefore has nothing to oppose. That’s opposed by unreality, its opposition by definition. Reality can’t oppose unreality without making it real, an impossibility. But unreality can “oppose” Reality if that’s what it “is:” opposition to Reality, an absurdity.

The voices in our ears  

If the choice is between two sets of values here on earth -- one set for families-individuals, the other for groups or tribes, one set moral, the other Machiavellian -- how are we made aware of it? Are we the cartoon character beset by two voices whispering in either ear, one in angelic blue under a halo, the other in satanic red sprouting horns? Actually, yes. They’re two versions of our own voice, the voice of our ancestral Mind, one Child.

The devil has it easier because it’s in this world and of it, as are we. And it was the influence of its voice on our ancestral Mind that conceived it. It’s at home here and it likes everything just the way it is: a land of contradictions where anything is possible. Absurdities like absolute authority without opposites and absolute freedom without limits. It can speak out of turn because it thinks it’s the boss, we’re wrongdoers, and we deserve no respect.

Where it can play the joker wearing a thousand masks. Likable or angry, personable and warm or impersonal and cold, reassuring or intimidating, erudite know-it-all or ignorant fool, agreeable ass-kisser or bull-necked warrior. Where it can play the entertainer with a thousand jokes, a thousand perversions of the Truth. Or a magician with a thousand tricks. Overlord, joker and magician -- masters of contradiction.

It's not so easy for the agent of the Soul. It’s in the dream, but Soul that connects with Possibility couldn’t have had a hand in designing a land of contradictions -- an impossibility. So it’s not at home here. And the forms it takes to connect with opposites can’t be contradictions. Not if it’s Soul that connects with Logic and Love who can’t pretend to be what they aren’t. It would never speak out of turn. Not if role modeling respect for the sovereignty, integrity, and Innocence of the individual and the indispensability of Free Will is what brought it here.

Transmissions in the clear

History has given us many profiles of the satanic voice, from philosophy, psychology, theology, and mythology. But why take their word for it when it does the honors itself? With works by minds either fooled or possessed by it that speak in its own words. Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Mari Perron’s A Course in Love, Jerry Martin’s God: An Autobiography. One creative talent not fooled or possessed by it, Fyodor Dostoevsky, brought the Joker into The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan’s disarming visitor to his living room. An engaging conversationalist who would be welcome anywhere.

The agent of Soul has weighed in with its own depiction in A Course in Miracles. With perfect Logic and Love: what the devil is -- the crackpot thought system of our own opposite, our ego; -- what it does -- endlessly splitting off into isolated, separated absurdities; -- how we came to be afflicted by it -- by Child-Mind misidentifying with its own shadow, its ego; -- and how we can be rid of it -- by doing our part to help the Child get its real Self and its right Mind back. By becoming friends with our light side -- the agent of Soul -- and listening to its voice instead of being fooled by our own dark side. By doing exactly what our ancestral Mind must do because that’s who we are: one Child, one Mind. Free Choice, Logic and Love, brought together as One by the Innocence and Force of one Soul.

Doubtless there are many more examples. The point being we aren’t cartoon characters and the voices whispering in our ears, with halos and horns, aren’t either. They’re part of our everyday lives. They’re making their presence felt. And the result is our everyday lives and our everyday world. Thwarted careers and relationships. Wrongdoing of every stripe on every scale. Personalities ruled by the ego striding across the world stage starting wars and taking down democracy.

Why bother?

So why bother with analysis? Why bother articulating the values these opposing influences are feeding into our ears? Because this is the line of scrimmage where the outcome will be determined. Because choice always comes down to values. We motivate ourselves to make the right choice when we look squarely at what we’re doing and what it will cost. When we acknowledge that ours is a world of competition between one way of being and another way. And the difference is expressed in what they stand for: values. The stuff of Worth which is what Reality-Creation is all about.

The mirror that a list of values holds up is the clearest expression of Self that we’re capable of. The choice of different selves that puts it to us: Who are we? Does our behavior and the state of our lives reflect the values we stand for? Is the state of our world the best that we can do? If not, who do we choose to be: our real selves or cartoon caricatures mocking us? Our own opposites. Our own shadows who speak with our own voices and aren’t real.

Why bother with analysis? Why bother holding up the mirror? This is why.

ESFs will rejoice

Ruth Mack’s utility index is one no more. I’ve divided it into two. In the spirit of Machiavelli’s honesty it now reflects the values that define the character of families-individuals and set the code of conduct for tribes. One recognizably idealistic, the other realistic. One on the side Creativity and Peace, the other on the side of obedience and conflict. One light, the other dark.

One reason for both that I find personally compelling is to part certain personality types from their habit of applying tribal values to individual family-type situations. The body-centered personality type extravert-body-sensing-feeling (ESF) programs itself to lock individuals into a tribal-social context where conformity rules. Where originality and creativity are devalued instead of affirmed. Ruinous for any personal-intimate friendship but particularly dangerous for adolescents who need support for the lives they want to live. They don’t need the crushing weight of tribal convention and disrespectful authoritarian parenting.

ESFs mean no harm. They just haven’t looked into the mirror. When they look closely at the two codes; when they see that theirs isn’t the only one; that there’s another; it’s motivated by Love instead of fear; and it doesn’t obstruct the lives of loved ones the way theirs does, they’ll choose the other. They’ll rejoice. They’ll shower me with appreciation. And I can go on being my type: fool that I am, a naïve, moralizing idealist.

*The term “unconscious” or “unconsciousness” is used herein to denote a metaphysical rather than a psychological state of Mind. The state of humanity’s ancestral Mind in the Reality not of spacetime-matter that dreamed an alternate “reality” of spacetime-matter -- our material universe. The Mind I refer to as Child-Mind in Reality who is our one real Self, not the many isolated, separated bodies that we appear to be in its dream. The “unconscious” of Jungian psychology is “an exclusively psychological concept. . . derived. . . in particular from psychopathological experience.” From experience, that is, with the psychologist’s human subjects within the dream and not from speculation about an ancestral entity from another reality. It is expressly “not a philosophical concept in the metaphysical sense.” (C. G. Jung, Psychological Types (Must Have Books 2019, pp. 613-614)

Jungian psychology does, nevertheless, leave open the door to psychic phenomena through the “collective unconscious.” While attributing these to “the inherited brain-structure” Jung includes in their definition “mythological associations. . . dreams and phantasies.” (Jung, op. cit. p. 616) Whose origins are just as readily traceable to metaphysical as to any other “reality.” In fact, the metaphysical rather than “the inherited brain-structure” is logically a truer-to-life source of insight by far into humanity’s story if its premise is correct. Which implies that “right-brained” may have little or nothing to do with it. The ultimate source of all our experience would rather be Mind in Reality, not of spacetime-matter, that’s unconscious and dreaming.

Elusive brain, elusive self

Neuroscience has tried to understand the brain by viewing it as a machine and taking it apart to see how it works since the Danish anatomist and future Catholic bishop Nicolaus Steno suggested it in 1665. It was “the moment that the modern approach to understanding the brain was set out.” [Cobb 1, 40-41]. Where things stand as of December 2019, when Cobb finished his book, is the brain doesn’t actually allow its parts to be so distinguished or localized. They overlap to the point where it can’t be said for certain, for example, that the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere don’t or can’t perform the same functions.

A useful discovery to keep in mind because despite the human tendency to separate itself out into clean divisions, say of motivation and morality, we aren’t all or none of anything. For all the limitations and transgressions I’m tempted to ascribe to personalities other than my own I’m forced to admit that more than a trace of every one lurks somewhere in my own performance. The brain responds to shifting circumstances as a collection of neural networks that shift. That refuse to be pinned down, and so it is with personality, character, and values. Much as I’m tempted to label my personality type the best and others less it won’t stick. What we’re engineered for isn’t status quo that’s static but context that’s flux. Like the brain we have to be anything and everything to be ready for anything and everything. If Darwin was right and species are geared for survival it can’t be otherwise.

From chaos to making sense

So while this essay suggests a neat division of values between idealism and realism, conscience and expedience, individual and tribe, where any individual personality fits in it, with its arrangement of faculties du jour, can’t be pinned down. Just as the law is whatever the court decides in any given case the individual’s fit is whatever choices the individual makes in any given situation. We can be pinned down but only for the circumstances du jour. If it seems I’ve got myself or you securely labeled don’t worry. Circumstances will change and we will too.

And anyway none of this is necessarily the truth. It’s just my bias. Harry Truman said if you want a friend in Washington get a dog. In our suspect reality of elusive everything -- chaos -- if you want the truth get another reality. Go home. That’s what I’m trying to do with these essays. To understand so that I can go home to a life of love, truth, and justice. Where all I ask is that it makes sense.

The Reality of unrest 

Making sense can’t mean perfect Peace if by that we mean inactivity. The end of doing -- everything coming to rest. Not if there is one Reality and it is circumstance that is Mind. The original circumstance for which there can be no previous circumstance that is not Mind and so it just is. Reality is changing circumstances always needing to be fit together, always needing order, always needing the Logic-Love of Mind to do it. A state of wonder and beauty where it’s done and confusion and frustration in our alternate “reality” where it’s not. A state that, for all its wonder and beauty, is still not at rest. Is anything but inactive.

The implication of impossibility that accompanied the first premise of possibility didn’t produce a voice to be shared with the Logic-Love of Consciousness. The Parents. That’s the “reality” of our ancestral dreaming Mind -- the Child. Born of the egg and the seed of Creation, the Oneness-Soul of Innocence without opposites. But it did give Mind its ideal to pursue while searching for rest through the always evolving, always changing contexts of Creation. For coming to rest in the resolution of opposites, the perfection of Peace. An unattainable ideal so long as Mind must abide by its own Logic, the unavoidable implication of opposites.

The unattainable ideal

What does it mean? We don’t owe the movement of changing circumstances here to the intruder that interferes with Logic-Love, though it is responsible for the difficulties they pose -- the churning pressure of events and the turmoil. We owe it to Mind, the ultimate source of all circumstances. To its logical implication of opposites and to the pursuit of its ideal that opposites imply. To the Force of Necessity behind it. “Rest in peace” is no less wishful thinking in Reality than it is in our alternate “reality.” What would be the point of Creation otherwise? There is only the Peace of harmony and order that is not just being but doing. That is not and never will be at rest.

The over-arching motivation for every aspect of doing, including Creation, is to bring all of it to rest without the implication of opposites. It isn’t Perfection. It is the unending search for Perfection, a work in progress that keeps Mind and all of Reality-Creation going. A logical impossibility. An unattainable ideal.

Nothing ventured nothing gained

What, then, is Mind, our ancestral Child-Mind’s Parents? Among other things, role models for creative idealists. The point of Creation isn’t just getting there. It’s also the effort it take whether we make it or not. Striving. Because the measure of the worth of a goal can’t be whether it’s easy or hard, doable or not. It’s the strength of character it adds to those it serves and to those who pursue it. What is the planet earth but a wailing wall of grief over broken hopes, aspirations, and attachments? A constant cry of despair from striving that falls short.

If Creation is all about the expansion and expression of Worth then character that engages with it will expand and express itself as well. With striving that earns it without focusing on payback but on the worth of the goal itself. Without insisting on the rewards of success but unconditionally on the service to be provided. On the truth that striving -- the effort to make a difference -- is its own reward and character is ultimately what we have to show for it. What we the participants in Creation are building in addition to Creation itself.

Are we serious about the life of Love, Truth, and Justice that lies ahead? Will waiting for saviors to do it for us make it happen? Is this the example our role models are setting for us? The idea that “heaven” is where all is peace, quiet, and rest is mistaken. Creation is striving with a purpose. The idealist’s credo: “Nothing ventured nothing gained.”

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Where you wind up on list of values is where you put yourself -- these are defining values. List 1 = Conscious Mind Reality-Creation idealist. List 2 = Realist split mind light unconscious alternate “reality. List 3 = Realist split mind dark alternate “reality.” 

[The following is a first-cut subject to extensive editing. DCH 08/07/23]

Family-individual morality (mind-centered) 

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Guide, Psyche, Agent of Soul, escort
    • Connection to Logic-Love, Reality
    • Guidance, mentoring, role modeling, leadership
    • Logic-Love, metaphysics, understanding, vision, recognition, awareness
    • Memory, awareness-Consciousness, awakening
  • Love
    • Service, support
    • Liberation, Free Spirit
    • Gifts, Talents
  • Logic
    • Decision-choice, Thought-Reason, rationality, sanity
    • Judgment, wisdom, discipline, making sense

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered)

  • Will
    • Tribal strength:
      • self-guide, detachment from Logic-Love
      • self-reliance, self-sufficiency, authorship of alternate reality
    • Willful preservation of tribal authority:
      • mind control, avoidance of individual questioning, understanding
      • heart control, avoidance of individual emotional detachment, disloyalty
      • memory control, avoidance of individual return to Consciousness, awakening
    • Belonging
      • Tribal strength: self-service, self-support
      • Tribal liberation, individual captivity
      • Tribal enablement, individual disablement
    • Animal instinct
      • Replacement of instinct for decision-choice, Thought-Reason, rationality, sanity
      • Replacement of instinct for Judgment, wisdom, discipline, making sense 

“Home” - “Relationship” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered) 

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Family interconnectedness
    • Timelessness, Here and Now
  • Love
    • Unconditional Love
    • Family intimacy-feeling, belonging
    • Inclusiveness, acceptance
    • Relationship -- Family-individual, egalitarian friendship, companionship
  • Logic
    • Understanding, fitting together, sequence
    • Lawfulness, order

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered) 

  • Will
    • Tribal unity
    • Time, temporal, there and then
  • Belonging
    • Conditional transaction
    • Fraternity
    • Exclusiveness
    • Relationship -- tribe-member, authoritarian alliance, comradeship
  • Animal instinct
    • Action
    • Arbitrary rule, dictation

“Innocence” - “Beauty” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered) 

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Spirit, essence, purity, perfection
    • Aesthetics, sensuous joy of nature, art or music
    • Sanctuary, shelter, safety
    • Peace, tranquility, compatibility
  • Love
    • Authenticity, Honesty, sincerity, truthfulness
    • Liberation from addiction, toxicity
    • Individuality-affirmation, validation, Worth
  • Logic
    • Definition, boundaries
    • Knowledge, Truth
    • Protection, security
    • Awareness-Self, recognition-introspection, Innocence-harmlessness
    • Awareness-Authorship, Parents-Creator
    • Authority of rule of law

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered)

  • Will
    • Fortress, bunker
    • Victimhood, guilt, Retribution, vengeance
    • Tribal predatory will to
      • conquer-replace purity, perfection
      • possess-accumulate aesthetic wealth-treasures of sensory perception
    • Belonging
      • Invalidation, punishment
      • Tribal dependence on expedience-inauthenticity, appearances-facades, deception-masks, dishonesty-insincerity, for preservation of tribal authority
      • Captivity to addiction, toxicity
  • Animal instinct
    • Tribal predatory instinct for appearance, deception, weakness of prey
    • Aggression, intrusion, invasion
    • Survival, self-defense, attack, predation
    • Awareness-other, extraversion, guilt-harmfulness
    • Denial-Authorship, self-creator
    • Self-authority, rule above the law

“Wholeness” - “Wellness” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered) 

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Wholeness, Interconnectedness
    • Health, healing
    • Self-integrity
  • Love
    • Abundance, benevolence, loving kindness, caring
    • Family belonging, equality, sharing
    • Affirmation, respect, Worth
  • Logic
    • Reality, structure, foundation, stability
    • Lawfulness, respectfulness, justice-fairness
    • Judgment, discipline

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered)

  • Will
    • Intra-tribal cohesion, inter-tribal competition, conflict
    • Individual provisioning for competition winning, survival
    • Individual Self-surrender, sacrifice
  • Belonging
    • Tribal bounty, largesse, charity
    • Tribal belonging
    • Individual subordination, surrender
    • Tribal affirmation, respect, Worth
    • Individual invalidation, disrespect, worthlessness
  • Animal instinct
    • Tribal glory-mythology, fantasy, facade, fabrication
    • Tribal arbitrary rule, above-the-law lawlessness, arrogance, injustice-unfairness
    • Tribal license, individual confinement

“Enablement” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered) 

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Belief, faith
    • Ideal
  • Love
    • Growth, expansion
    • Growth -- personal, character, spiritual
  • Logic
    • Development, competence, skill-ability, maturity
    • Progress, advancement, achievement, success
    • Learning, experience, discovery, exploration

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered)

  • Will
    • Tribal faith in its supremacy
    • Tribal pursuit of the ideal of absolutes: authority without opposition, freedom without limits
  • Belonging
    • Tribal hegemony, empire
    • Tribal unawareness of personal Growth
  • Animal instinct
    • Tribal nurturing of its young for group protection, supremacy
    • Tribal training in competitive skills
    • Tribal recognition for competitive superiority
    • Tribal support for scripted individual learning, preservation of status quo
    • Tribal hostility to unscripted individual experience, discovery, exploration, threat of change in status quo 

“Empowerment” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered)

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Inclusiveness, Oneness, Family unity
    • Interconnection
    • Empowerment, strength
    • Timelessness, Here and Now
  • Love
    • Feeling, intimacy
    • Creativity
    • Relationship-Connection
  • Logic
    • Implication, sequence, extension, evolution
    • Context expansion
    • Meaning, Purpose, Understanding
    • Judgment, discipline
    • Presence of Mind

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered) 

  • Will
    • Exclusiveness, multiplicity, tribal cohesion
    • Competition, separation, division
    • Force, power
    • Time inexorability
  • Belonging
    • Invulnerability, insensitivity
    • Conformity, sameness
    • Obedience
  • Animal instinct
    • Status quo, tradition
    • Context contraction
    • Fate, chance
    • Untamable wildness
    • Absence of Mind 

“Spontaneity” - “Creativity” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered)

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Soulmates, playmates, playfulness
    • Exaltation, joyfulness, happiness, laughter
  • Love
    • Relationship, intimacy-Trust
    • Creativity, individuality, originality, eccentricity
    • Free expression, diversity, variety
  • Logic
    • Awareness-Self, sovereignty, individual rights, Self-respect
    • Free Thought, Choice, Will
    • Judgment, independence

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered)

  • Will
    • Teammates, fans
    • Exultation
  • Belonging
    • Alliance, team loyalty, suspicion-distrust
    • Conformity, conventionality
    • Scripted expression, uniformity
  • Animal instinct
    • Awareness-tribe, tribal supremacy, individual Self-denial, Self-effacement
    • Scripted-ruled thought, choice, will
    • Vacated judgment, dependence

Published on Leave a comment on Governance by Compassion and the Example of Jesus

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Following is an imaginary conversation with a bright, talented, creative, and dutiful pre-adolescent. Her voice is in italics, mine in regular font. We’re talking about the meaning of Easter and the poem I wrote about it: “Resurrection: Live and Love Unyielding, Life Eternal.”

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The Why of Easter 

I like “Resurrection.” Good! It’s short. Anything else? Did they do Easter eggs when Jesus was around? It doesn’t say anything about eggs. Next year you can write a poem about eggs. “Our legs beg for kegs of eggs with pegs.” Something creative like that. I’m so glad I have your talent and wisdom to brag about (snicker snicker). We color eggs at Easter because. . . That’s enough! You’re just going to say something stupid. . . Because someone figured out that it’s a great way to keep kids off the streets. What about chickens? It’s a great way to keep chickens off the streets too. That’s it. I’m outta here! 

Since you like my poem you must want to learn more about it. Of course I don’t. Anything would be better than that -- unless the poem is about me. Is it about me? Easter is about you and me and everybody. I thought it was just about Jesus. Because he couldn’t be killed and that’s good for the rest of us. OK, then Easter isn’t just about Jesus. It is about everybody. Why? 

Our world can’t seem to settle down in peace. People do wrong because they don’t seem to know any better. Jesus brought information and a way of thinking that helps us know better so we can do better. So we can get it right before we try doing what’s right. So we understand. With insights from another perspective that sees beyond appearances. With vision that isn’t limited to what we can see with our bodies’ eyes. He could do all that?

Walking on water

He was a nobody at first. The Romans who ruled Israel then had nothing to do with him. The authorities from his own country who told people what to believe and how to behave paid no attention to him at first. He just went around on a donkey talking to individuals, families, small groups -- whoever would listen to him. And then the groups got larger. How come if he was a nobody? 

What he was saying was different but it made sense. It seemed to connect with people at the level of their soul, their Psyche, where it was deeply moving. So moving that it seemed true even if it was hard to believe. It had psychological force so compelling that it could change minds. That was unusual.

He was also doing amazing stuff. Healing people like healers before him had done but also things that no one had ever done. Miracles like making a dead guy come back to life. He fed his audience outdoors one day with food out of thin air. He was on a boat with some followers when a storm came up. Everyone thought it would sink the boat and they would all drown. They were terrified. Jesus brought the sun back out and calmed the water. Wait a minute! And just to make sure his followers got the point he got out of the boat and walked on the water! Whoa! How could he do that?

The gift of Intuition

He was thinking with Mind conscious instead of dreaming with Mind unconscious. Showing us what we can do when we do the same. He explains how in the book he authored not long ago called “A Course in Miracles.” You mean he’s still here? He is. Just not in a body. He’s accessible to everyone through Soul. Soul that’s Spirit and not body. Soul and Energy that interconnect everything plus a part of Mind we call Intuition or sixth sense. It was through his connection with the Soul or Spirit of an individual’s body that he authored the Course. She wrote down what he authored. Amazing! 

What does the Course say? It makes it clear that getting to where Jesus got requires a big change of mind. We have to ignore what our bodies and brains and our world have been telling us and turn to another guide. The one we’ve chosen hasn’t been telling us the Truth. We’ve been misled. Will it take long? it could take one or more lifetimes or generations to get to where Jesus got. Or it could happen overnight. How?

Mind conscious is timeless, always in the Now. Always Love, and Love is free, spontaneous. Anytime we’re controlling we’re dealing with fear, not Love. Love can’t have anything to do with forcing or being forced. Spontaneous changes of mind are among the psychic events that are abnormal here. Spontaneous is normal there. History tells us of individuals who’ve gone from one way of thinking to the reverse in an instant. In a burst of light that revealed something different. As if Intuition or sixth sense were showing off. Change of mind can be imperceptible over time or spectacular in the moment. One way or the other it can happen. And it happens not in our bodies or brains but in our Mind. Through Intuition.

Why we’re getting help

Where did Jesus get this ability? Just as there are spontaneous permutations of genetics over long periods that bring about radical change there can be spontaneous permutations of other kinds that change things. A human with the ability to be with us in the state I’ve described as a dream and to be in another state that’s not a dream at the same time is a permutation. Extremely rare but, after all, where else can anything abnormal happen but in dreams where abnormal is normal?

How could just one rare person have such a large impact? It’s not because the dream isn’t revealing its source to us every moment. In a Mind that was conscious before it became unconscious. In the presence of Energy that activates whatever Mind asks of it, conscious or unconscious, and the presence of Soul that interconnects everything whether it’s real or part of a dream. Energy and Soul don’t pay any attention to boundaries and that includes the boundary between reality and the dream. Then there are paranormal events -- near-death, psychic, and other experiences that are so frequent and familiar that we just shrug them off.

Right-brain stuff is weird but by itself it can’t convince us that we’re in a dream. The left brain maintains order with judgment. When it can’t -- when order becomes disorder -- animal will acts on instinct without judgment. A state of chaos that’s also frequent and familiar. Destructive and painful, and maybe a reason why we’re getting help to do something about it. To end a dream that only seems safe and stable until it becomes unsafe and unstable.

Why now?

The rare person had a large impact because he integrated energy, Soul, right and left brain -- all our circumstances, everything -- and put it into context that gave it meaning. Gave it purpose. To awaken us from the dream and return to the reality of consciousness. To the world that he knew that we don’t know. The world defined by Logic, Love, and Innocence, not our world that’s illogic, fear, and guilt. Where other signs of consciousness don’t seriously contradict the dream Jesus' lesson and his miracles did seriously contradict it. All of it. As if it were a lie and he was trying to help us replace it with the Truth.

Which is exactly what he was trying to do. It demanded a response not from parts of the dream but the entire dream, because when he succeeds with any individual it will end the dream. So that’s what he got: a response in space over time from the entire dream that was extraordinary. Who’s winning, Jesus or the dream? Jesus and conscious Mind are forever, dreams are temporary. This one will end regardless.

Then what’s the point? To make the dream end sooner rather than later. The Course makes it clear that the Mind that’s unconscious has real work do to once it wakes up. When it’s learned what the Course teaches it will be needed in Creation. Since Reality and Creation are Now you can say we’re needed there now.

We have nothing to fear. 

The main point of all of Jesus' miracles was that another world lies behind the appearances that our bodies’ five senses detect. Our bodies’ senses may be preventing us from detecting that world and misleading us about the nature of our world. If we insist that there can only be one world and the only way to detect it is with our bodies’ senses then we will miss the point of Jesus’ miracles. We will be denying that we have a sixth sense -- Intuition. That it is through its spontaneous insights from Logic and Love that we can follow his example and eventually access his world. What makes his world different?

  • When he brought Lazarus back from the dead, Jesus was showing us that in the other world behind appearances Life can’t die. In a world that’s Creation death makes no sense. Even here the energy that brings life to our bodies still exists after it departs. It can’t be destroyed.
  • When he fed his audience with loaves and fishes that seemed to come from nowhere, Jesus showed us that in the world behind appearances to Love is to share its abundance. By sharing his Love in that way he showed that he’s our friend from the other world that’s not limited by appearances. He is an agent of Love -- the real thing -- here to help us and he loves us.
  • When Jesus calmed the storm and walked on water, he showed that when his followers understood what he understood fear would go away just like the storm. They would see that there’s nothing to fear. Fear would be replaced by understanding. By the sunlight of Love.

Take all three miracles together and they tell us that in his world where we belong we are Love, we are Loved, and Life is eternal. The Love of one Soul that connects all of us can’t be contained by our physical world. We have nothing to fear because his world is real and ours only seems real. Unbelievable!

To a perspective that’s limited to our bodies’ senses Jesus must seem unbelievable. But to our sixth sense that’s open to Logic and Love, open to seeing things differently, not at all. He makes perfect sense.

Numbers don’t count. Individuals do count.

Though he demonstrated amazing power Jesus had no interest in being powerful the way we think of it. He wasn’t trying to start a movement like a new religion or a church. Didn’t he found a church? The Church said so but it was just putting words in his mouth. He wasn’t trying to organize anything, and that was the point. That each of us has the capacity as individuals, as souls that are part of one Soul that extends beyond our world, to fix what’s broken. It was OK if he attracted many people but he would have been satisfied with only one if that individual truly understood. That’s how uninterested he was in numbers. In churches and their religions, tribes and their members, countries and their citizens, that claim strength in body counts. You've lost me.

Our world is an expression of an idea that’s the opposite of the Truth. What’s that? The Truth that Jesus spoke to was that the Soul to which we all belong is One. It is Oneness, and the ancestral Mind that imagines us is one Mind. One Child of its Parents, Logic and Love, motivated to Love and Create in Peace. The opposite is that the Child isn’t one but many. That we only exist as groups or tribes. That individuals have no Worth. Only groups have Worth. We are many bodies whose brains only know us as animals. As tribes that behave like herds in perpetual conflict, driven by the will of animal brains to dominate, by the frenzy of mob psychology to hate and destroy in war.

And so to express the Truth that we are one Mind, one Child, by forming yet another group wouldn’t make sense. It could only reinforce the original deception, that the Child as one has no Worth. Only its shadow opposite -- bodies in numbers all organized into competing groups -- has Worth. The Truth that Jesus helped us to understand wouldn’t be served if he yielded to appearances and made little of the individual. If he showed respect for numbers as though only groups have the power to bring his vision to life and give it Worth. He stood for Child-the-one, not Child-the-many. This is why everything he said and did was centered on the power and Worth of the individual.

The Truth that lives on

Those who came after to repeat what he taught were teachers who followed his example. Individuals speaking to individuals who showed no interest in organizing a church. What became of them? They lasted into the second century until the world of groups took over and organized a church.

The Church turned what Jesus taught into what it was never meant to be: a theocracy based in Rome, modeled on the Roman Empire. Controlled by authority ruling unquestioned from the top down, imposing conformity instead of empowering individuality and creativity. All for one overriding purpose: to preserve its dominance. Any teacher not embedded in its hierarchy, sanctioned by the Church, was branded a heretic and silenced by force.

The original teachers disappeared. But the world of groups can never have the last word. That’s for the meaning of the Resurrection: that the Truth that Jesus taught, the Worth and power of the one Child, the individual, lives on. And so long as we need him, our teacher, the agent of Soul that’s oneness, will not disappear. He Loves us. He will always Love us. And he will never leave us.

The gift of Understanding with Mind

One Mind and many body-brains are of two different worlds, and if Jesus addressed individuals and had no interest in numbers this placed him unmistakably in the world of Mind. Of Authority that enables and empowers. A world beyond the “laws” of physics, the authority of matter that disables and disempowers.

What Jesus got across with simple stories about right and wrong and his amazing acts was that Love connects us to another Reality. It was a lesson in Logic as well as Love. Logic defines the world of Creation, peace, and harmony that Jesus reached through Soul. The world of Mind. But even if there can be no logical definition for an illogical world of bodies and brains, the Logic of Mind can at least explain it.

The gift to Jesus was a foot in both worlds. In and of his world, in our world but not of it. The gift that enabled him to share understanding with understanding from Logic and Love.

The threat that is another voice

How could it make someone mad if he was just trying to explain? If he wasn’t trying to take over? It didn’t at first. Jesus had no army to threaten anyone with so the Romans weren’t concerned. But the following he attracted did scare Israel’s religious authorities. They thought they should be the only voice and here was another voice, a nobody drawing attention away from them. Through powers they could neither understand nor control -- Innocence and gentle loving kindness, Soul and Truth that transcend the visible world, the Worth of the individual. The opposite of what they taught: unquestioning obedience to power in the visible world. Their power.

Authority serves.

It wasn’t a miracle that showed how Jesus’ version of authority broke with what the authorities taught. It was a simple act of service: washing the feet of a few of his followers. Why did he do that?

The definitions of Logic and the relationships of Love fit all of Creation’s beings and their functions together in harmony. This is how authority governs in Jesus’ world. If Order were forced it would block Free Will and end Creativity. Real Authority doesn’t dominate; it facilitates. Even more remarkable, it serves. You mean like being a servant? Yes, but not in the sense of servant-to-master. Only in the sense that Authority must provide a foundation of support for all the elements of Creation.

This means seeing that its Creations’ receive the help they need when they call for it. If Jesus had provided individuals with computers that were his invention then he would be on call for tech support -- a service. Jesus’ point in washing feet was to show that governing is also serving from the bottom up, the same point Lincoln made at Gettysburg. Rule that dominates from the top down would never do that. It would deprive people of the support service they need to work creatively and it would be wrong. 

The strategy that backfired

Jesus became so revered that he was taking on the aura of a prophet of God, putting him and his followers beyond the rule of the religious authorities. They couldn’t allow it. What did they do? They chose a way to get rid of Jesus so awful that nobody would ever think of doing what he did. That made sure that he and his teaching and special powers disappeared and never came back. I guess they didn’t succeed. 

They didn’t succeed. Instead of putting Jesus in the past and out of sight their cruelty undone by resurrection only brought him back up front and center. Stronger than ever. Though not in the way he thought of it because he wasn’t after numbers. Stronger in the way that our world thinks of it. The mistake of the authorities helped to turn the voice of a nobody into a force of unimaginable numbers. His words and example spread all over the world and keep on spreading today. They couldn’t kill Mind or body because even his body rose from the dead.

Your guess is as good as mine

What does it mean? It means whatever we choose to make of it using our own judgment. Not as members of any group but each of us as individuals. Then I have to figure it out for myself? You’re not going to tell me? I can share my perspective if you like, just as Jesus shared his. And you can reflect on it and make up your own mind. We don’t learn and grow by closing ourselves off to others’ perspectives. We do it by sharing them.

Life evolves where Jesus comes from. Where Creation moves forward naturally with changing contexts, perspectives, thoughts, and feelings. Circumstances change here too though with a lot of resistance, and since what’s broken isn’t getting fixed it doesn’t seem like movement is forward. Our perspectives are only what they are in the moment. Yours and mine, so what you’re hearing from me now can’t be the last word. Just take it for what it is.

The joy of Easter. The love and reverence for Jesus

Whatever you hear can never be substituting my mind or my voice for yours. Jesus would never do that and neither would I. You’d be sorry if you tried. My Siberian tiger has sharp claws! We wouldn’t deny anyone’s Free Will. Free Will is indispensable to Creation where Jesus comes from and here too, though if we’re not moving forward we’re not really creating. Maybe all we can do is fix what’s broken and hope to get back to Creation.

Anytime we allow Free Will to be taken from us we’re making ourselves useless or worse. We’re letting ourselves be instruments of someone else’s will, doing their bidding. Making common cause with Jesus is OK but we can’t make ourselves into copies of anything. That’s looking for trouble. Unless we become the persons we choose to be of our own Free Will, able to see with our own unique perspective and think with our own unique judgment, we can’t be individuals. We can’t be any use to Jesus. All he can do is comfort us when we hurt. Free Will must always be respected.

Ideologies that command vast numbers so far haven’t fixed what’s broken. They always use force that denies Free Will to change things and that just makes it worse. That would be why Jesus paid no attention to numbers. Why he didn’t care about founding movements and churches. Why he shows so much Love and respect for us as individuals. Because we’re the only way to fix what’s broken, with our Free Will. That makes me feel pretty important. Me too. Maybe now we can understand why so many individuals came to love and respect him. Why we’re glad that he resurrected and we celebrate Easter.

Who’s the “savior?”

Jesus could have used his supernatural powers and his following to team up with Caesar and rule the Roman empire. Just like Adam Skywalker with his Jedi Knight powers teamed up with Palpatine to rule the Galactic Empire. Jesus and his following could have taken over moral authority in Israel which is why the people who already had it were so anxious to get rid of him. He spoke for things that are true that can’t be any other way, but he didn’t hand people a book and tell people it was the Truth and they had to obey it. He was serious about being understood and heard but not to take over people’s minds and think for them.

Wasn’t he a “savior?” What he taught was we’re our own saviors but we need help. We can’t do it alone without a trusted guide. Guiding us is the only sense in which he can be our “savior.” He didn’t offer to do anything that we can do for ourselves. And what he taught was what’s important. Just as its lesson can be taught in different ways its teachers can have different identities. Whatever we’re comfortable with. So long as our minds and hearts are on the right track our guide doesn’t have to be “Jesus.” It can have any name. He and what he taught are inclusive, not exclusive.

Demanding obedience messes with Free Will. It doesn’t give people power; it takes it away. What made Jesus so unusual was that even though he spoke with authority and attracted a following he didn’t use it to mess with Free Will. He made a point of empowering other individuals, respecting their voice instead of making it all about his. He made their Worth the center of attention, not his. He didn’t even tell his own story. What we learned about him is what others wrote. Humility like his could never be the arrogance and disrespect of a bully like Palpatine.

Perspective that’s hard to understand

Visitors from another galaxy would have a different perspective from ours. But at least they would be from the same universe and it might be possible to understand one another. The other world that Jesus spoke for wasn’t another galaxy. We can think of it as another reality where authority worked the way Jesus showed us, focused not on itself but on its creations and their creativity. Loving and supporting from the bottom up, not demanding obedience with force from the top down.

It was a perspective so unusual that it couldn’t be understood. Not by authoritarians who rule from the top down and that’s the way it was then. Not in a world where “God” was “the almighty” who had to be feared because anyone who disobeyed him went to hell. There was a lot of misunderstanding about Jesus and what he taught then and there’s still a lot of misunderstanding now.

Powers that can’t be given or taken away

The Church that came along later said it spoke for Jesus and we would be in big trouble if we didn’t obey it. A view of authority that was the reverse of what Jesus taught, so I don’t believe it. The authority that resides in each individual soul has innate Worth. Innate power that comes from being Love and being loved. From being part of the Mind and loving heart, the Soul that we come from and share. We don’t depend on any authority on earth for these things.

They aren’t for those who govern on our behalf to give or take away. Lincoln’s Gettysburg address is revered because it spoke for the same kind of authority that Jesus taught, the system of governance we call democracy. “Authorities” who rule by force on their own behalf are the opposite. All of Palpatine’s “power” resided in him, not the people. And he had no respect for individuality or Free Choice.

Praise for the tyrant?

But didn’t his empire maintain order? Didn’t the Roman empire? Didn’t the Church do good? Yes. And Hitler built the Autobahn and made Volkswagens. Mussolini made the trains run on time.

Tyrants pride themselves on imposing order and stability when at its core it’s disorder and instability. The overthrow of true authority is destabilizing and the end result of authoritarian rule is always its own overthrow. Violence captured by Greek mythology in the overthrow of the Titan tyrant Uranus by his son Cronus followed by the overthrow of the Titans by Zeus and the Olympians. Zeus the paranoid predator, ever alert to challenges to his authority posed by any movement beyond his control, especially by his own offspring.

It's important to be careful with affirmation for the good that authoritarians do. Why? Their mindset turns every reflection on its performance into a judgment on its legitimacy because of the nature of its origin. Which is? Illegitimacy. It’s the opposite of true authority. And if it’s not true then it can’t be part of Reality. Part of Creation. Part of Life which shares, affirms, and empowers. Authoritarian rule, whether it’s over a single family, an ideology, or an entire nation, takes, invalidates, and disempowers. It systematically hollows out the individual, robs it of its creativity, its life, to fill itself. Like a giant virus taking cells captive so it can kill them and replicate itself. It’s not about life. It’s about death.

Its “truth” isn’t the overwhelming power and security that it seeks to project. At its core it’s weakness and insecurity. It obsesses over what’s said about it because the source of its justification can’t be self. It has no self. It’s a parasite that depends for its existence on its host. Which gives it an insatiable craving for approval. For self-justification. Every comment on its performance is either justification for the predator or opposition that must be crushed. Any word of praise for Il Duce making the trains run on time would be twisted into the legitimacy of fascism. It would be swallowed up by the authoritarian’s bottomless appetite for what it can’t give: approval.

We must be careful with affirmation for the good that authoritarians do because it will be swallowed up by self-justification that doesn’t reinforce the good. It can only perpetuate the bad. The authoritarian mindset is ugly. I don’t like it. Nobody should. But since it’s with us we can only do our duty: stand up to the bully, replace it, and stand by true authority that doesn’t bully.

Love and Innocence, vulnerability and betrayal

If Jesus could walk on water and change minds couldn’t he have protected himself? Did he have to submit to the authorities? Jesus spoke with authority because he spoke for Authority. The Will of the Truth of Logic and Love that’s not of our world but serves us when we let it. So he had not one but two wills to respect: ours and the Will that he served.

He could only trust both in innocence to let him engage with us in safety. Not to approach in trust and innocence would have compromised the Trust and Innocence that he spoke for. Nor could he interfere with our will if it compromised Free Will. To understand Jesus is to understand innocence. The Truth he shared of the Innocence of the Soul to which we belong. Oneness that has no reason to fear harm from opposites. An agent of Soul that’s Innocence couldn’t protect himself against what he couldn’t know.

Wherever the emptiness of authority for its own sake would replace the fullness of Love; wherever it would displace Free Will, the Trust and Innocence of Love can be betrayed. It’s vulnerable in our world, and Jesus was betrayed. By a follower that he trusted. By religious authorities that he trusted. By betrayal -- an act that Innocence would know nothing of and could not anticipate. This may help to explain why Jesus couldn’t protect himself.

Protection

But it made no difference. The Authority that Jesus served, the Life that’s the Truth of Logic and the fullness of Love, was all the protection he needed. It can’t be killed no matter how cruel and unjust its opposite.

Denying death meant to cow an entire people into submission to authority was the last act of his body while Jesus was among us. Its Resurrection proof that respect for individuality, creativity, and Free Will that comes from Logic, Love, and Truth is real Authority. Proof that authority that’s disrespectful and rules by force, that overrides every voice with its own voice because it’s afraid of individuality, creativity, and Free Will, has no real power over us. Proof that souls confined to bodies that come and go don’t come and go. Their Life force is forever. We have nothing to fear.

When there’s a beast to be slain

So then we can ignore disrespectful authority? Jesus was asked what to do about Caesar, the Roman emperor. What did he say? That disrespectful authority is an unavoidable fact of life in our world that requires accommodation. Otherwise leave it alone. Our purpose is to serve real Authority while it serves us and that should be our focus.

We’re not supposed to rebel? To stand up to Caesar? When Caesar demands that we surrender our minds and hearts to him, our individuality and integrity, an agent of Soul that’s Innocence can’t be our guide. The world of Jesus has no boundaries. Our world does. We do what’s necessary to protect our independence and democracy. Join together not as a tribe bent on cycles of destruction but as family with one specific, shared purpose: to keep the beast from crossing our boundaries.

When that’s done, we get back to our real work. This is why World War II was thought of as a “good” war. There was a beast to be slain, we came together as one to slay it, disbanded, and resumed peaceful lives when we were done.

When Eros took a stand for Love

The story of Jesus took one approach to authority that's unloving. There's another? The myth of Psyche and Eros. Psyche was a girl so innocent and beautiful that she was attracting people away from the temples of Aphrodite. Just like people were paying attention to Jesus instead of their religious rulers. Aphrodite was an Olympian goddess, jealous of her power and cruel toward anyone who questioned it. She didn’t crucify Psyche but she did make her perform tasks that would have killed her if she didn’t have help.

What happened? The last task -- an errand to the underworld -- almost did kill her. While she lay unconscious her lover Eros came and rescued her. Aphrodite’s son, who was also an Olympian. He brought his Love up to Mount Olympus to be with him. Like Jesus, she ascended to Heaven.

Wasn’t Aphrodite mad? Very! To save Psyche Eros had to escape from the room his mother had locked him in. Which means he had been forced to yield to cruel and unjust authority and he rebelled. Once her son made it clear that his mother couldn’t control him she had to give way. Because nothing can control Free Will and character when it stands up for itself. Like the wild Siberian tiger that is your spirit of Free Will and character. Eros stood up to his mother and when he did, he stood up for Love.

Trust in Jesus, Soul of Innocence

This was the form that Psyche’s “resurrection” took: rescue by rebellion. Jesus couldn’t role model rebellion against a force that Innocence couldn’t recognize. That would only make it real. Any form of attack always implies that its opponent exists. And if Jesus came to represent another world that exists attacking our world wouldn’t make a very good case for it. It would tell us that he’s an ordinary person we can’t trust. Exactly!

The reappearance of Love and Innocence after fear and guilt tried to make it disappear was his “rebellion.” An act of Truth that attacked no one, yet it helped with understanding that authority that rules by force can’t be Truth. It can only “be” an appearance. A specter of fear and guilt. A deception that’s meant to deceive. A boogeyman. Not like Jesus. No. Not like the Soul of Innocence and Honesty that we can trust.

Whither sixth sense?

Whether we can trust the way that ordinary persons and their institutions have represented Jesus over the years is open to question. The way that he represented himself is not. When we apply the Logic and Love that he shared to his story it resonates with Truth. That’s what my sixth sense tells me. What does yours tell you? When the eggs are all dyed and hidden I'll definitely think about it.

Happy Easter to you! Happy Easter Jesus! I love you! Me too!

Published on Leave a comment on Resurrection: Life and Love Unyielding, Life Eternal

When Soul walks among us, loves us, teaches us
and is taken away
When mind and heart cry out for Love
and all that can be heard is silence
Their voice expands into every corner of time and space

With the Force of Truth:
That Soul can never be taken away
That mind and heart crying out for Love will aways be heard.

We return today in observance of the Truth
The Life of Soul that was shared with us intact
Its example an inspiration yet

When the mistake cycles back on us like a shadow
from Groundhog Day
Lifting us from sleep to getting it right

From giving up to never giving up:
To theft of Soul, silencer of voice
To self-regard, its voice the only voice
Denial of Truth, hope and Soul, mind and heart

The imposition of mistake upon itself
Silenced by its own crucifixion, denied its own resurrection
The emptiness of authority for its own sake
That would replace the fullness of Love

It didn’t happen then and it can’t happen now.
When will it happen? Never.
What the Life and example of Jesus mean to me.
Resurrection. Life and Love unyielding. Life eternal.

Published on Leave a comment on The Force and Necessity of Affect

Reflections to share with adolescents

Reflections to share with adolescents who may be wondering about affect: its role in relationships, in adolescents’ future, in mythology, and in all of Creation. How does it figure in the choice between what is Real and unreal, True and false, Good and evil? Why does it matter?

The usual poetic content is heavy with subjective thought and feeling. Grief and romantic Love are common types of feeling but there are others. Many are related to the values listed in my piece on adolescence [Thirteen: Reflections on Character and Values at the Beginning of Adolescence. 08/28/21]  T.R. Hummer’s non-rhyming poem, “My Mother in Bardo” (New Yorker 01/24/22 p. 50), is an example of a poem infused with grief. But if I’m assigned to compose a rhyming poem and I have no particular talent for lyrics, I might produce something lifeless, without affect.

Literature and poetry in particular say a lot about who we are and what’s important to us. For adolescents coming into their own it can be an effective way to gain self-awareness. If they feel a sense of loss, say, for a deceased grandparent, they might express it in a non-rhyming poem. It might be strikingly different from a poem whose search for originality, beauty, or other effect is through rhyme.

Before the Big Bang

Absence of affect in subjective, creative expression is a red flag. For an adolescent it might or might not have implications for character development, but, if so, they can run deep. Star Wars mythology is based on it. What turned Adam Skywalker toward the dark side and service to Palpatine, the galactic emperor? What made the galactic empire evil? Absence of affect.

Explaining Why requires theorizing with Logic about the antecedents of our material universe -- what I call “Reality-Creation.” It preceded the Big Bang, exists in parallel with our material universe, and heavily influences our behavior and its consequences beyond our awareness. It holds sway over the origin and fate of the universe and the meaning of life. Its context is Mind-Love, not spacetime-matter. I use initial caps to set terminology that is of this other Reality apart from the lower case of our un-reality.

The “Child” is the One we were in Reality before the Child lost Consciousness and became the many. While unconscious, it mis-identified with its shadow-reflection, went into a dream state corrupted by its shadow-code, dreamed our un-reality, replicated itself in isolated-separated human bodies, projected the material world detected by their bodies’ senses, and continues to replicate itself within its dream world under the influence of its shadow-reflection. An explanation for all this is the subject of my book-in-progress with the working title, The Story of the Child.

Affect is feeling -- emotional sensitivity. Feeling is value or Worth – things cared for. Gifts with talents the Child was given at birth with which to exercise Free Choice in Creation. Affect is rooted in Mother-Love, the source of all feeling in the Child’s phase of Reality-Creation.

The dis-integration of Love from Mind

The Child has Free Will or Free Choice because the Child is Free Choice, its role in Reality-Creation. In the Child’s phase with Free Choice, the loss of Consciousness produced a dream-world of un-reality where all ideas-thoughts and their associated feelings have opposites. Opposites are the reverse mirror-image shadow-reflection of the Child and all of its values, all of its gifts including its talents.

The code that defines all opposites is derived from the Child’s Being. The code is non-being. Which means it’s insane. Nuts. The appearance of a “system” which is the opposite of system. A system ruled not by laws but by chaos -- arbitrary rule where “rules” apply to everybody but the ruler. The reverse mirror-image of sanity, what we know as the “dark side.” Everyone and everything in our un-reality has a shadow-opposite. A dark side. No exceptions.

What makes the dark side “possible” in the dream state is the separation of Love-feeling from Mind-thought. The marriage between Father Mind / Logic-Choice and Mother Love / Freedom-Creativity not only produced the Child. It’s what holds all the Implications and Interconnections of Reality-Creation together. In our un-reality that integration is gone. Science’s search for a perfectly ordered, perfectly integrated cosmos ended over a century ago and now it’s even giving up on a cosmos that just makes sense. Because it doesn’t. Meanwhile, the judgment we need to manage human affairs, to maintain order in harmony, is equally dis-integrated. It needs to be constantly re-integrated, constantly pieced together, in all our choices.

The Reality-Creation of Consciousness knows nothing of shadows, reflections, or opposites. So, shadow-opposites played no part in the Child’s Conscious exercise of Free Choice in Reality. In un-reality it’s different. “Dark side” shadow-reflections very much represent a choice for us, the unconscious Child’s replications. The choice between Right and wrong, Good and evil, where good values-gifts are the product of Mind integrated with Love-affect and their evil shadow opposites are the product of Mind absent Love-affect. We choose correctly when we discipline our thoughts and feelings, our ideas and values, always to keep Love combined with Mind.

The pussycat “Lord Vader”

One of the traits that distinguish personality types is variation in levels of affect-feeling. In importance attributed to values because feeling is value rooted in Love, the Mother of everything cared for, everything of Worth. What distinguishes character is its values.

Adam Skywalker belonged to a personality type described in Isabel Myers’ Gifts Differing. He “went over to the dark side” because his type’s level of affect-feeling and therefore his character was relatively shallow. Absence of affect-feeling translates to a relatively shallow-weak connection with the Good-positive and therefore a relatively strong susceptibility to, or attraction for, the shadow-negative.

The choice posed by Good-positive – who we are in Reality -- and evil-negative – our shadow in un-reality -- pulls different personality types in different directions. The son Luke Skywalker’s character was relatively deep with feeling-affect, strongly anchored to values, and therefore less susceptible to the attraction of shadow-opposites. The character of Darth Vader – “Dark Father” – was relatively weak with feeling-affect, loosely anchored to values, and therefore more susceptible. Adam Skywalker, who became the mythic “Lord Vader” feared by trembling subordinates, was a personality weakling -- a pussycat. Captives of shadow-reflections can impress with the appearance of strength but their reality is weakness.

Lack of values rooted in affect-feeling translates to a weak or missing internal moral compass. To a weak sense of right vs. wrong -- a lack of conscience. To insensitivity and therefore to predilection for cruelty. What defines the galactic empire and its emperor Palatine as “evil” is an absence of affect-feeling. It’s defined by Mind-thought without Love-value and therefore as character without conscience: insensitive and prone to cruelty. It becomes a universe where harm is done and pain inflicted because it is not felt, because character and values don’t matter.

Guidance from Isabel Myers’ Gifts Differing

Isabel Myers’ Gifts Differing intuits clues from personality types to differences that can account for and predict relative attraction for the dark side. The ESFP type with relatively weak feeling-judgment is a type that, if it’s not disciplined by its social culture, can be misled into shadow-opposites and wrongdoing. It happens to be the type exhibited by the current idol of the Republican party, a body-matter idolater, serial wrong-doer, and a menace to democracy, civilization, and world order. But any type weak on affect-feeling and character-values is a candidate.

My piece about adolescence listed both positive values and their shadow-opposites – the dark side. What an interest in the opposites might indicate about an adolescent’s developing personality type we don’t know. We do know that an ‘S’ (sensing) in preference to an ‘I’ (intuition) would fit an engineer or craftsman working with material objects. Sensing would account, say, for a poem engineered rather than intuited. Intuited, that is, from psyche or soul, from thoughts-feelings stored in humanity’s collective Memory.

We also know that Gifts Differing can help predict choices that different types tend to make and therefore where on balance they may be headed: To promoting humanitarian kindness and freedom (the Jedi Knights) or engaging in inhumane cruelty and oppression (the galactic empire). Definitive conclusions can’t be drawn by outside observers. They can only be drawn by subjects themselves who monitor their personality types – the building of character through their preferences.

While Isabel distinguishes between the light and dark sides the distinction is indirect. It’s implied, for example by reference to “wrongdoing,” inadequate consideration of costs, shallowness, insincerity, and other tendencies. But otherwise her “feeling” doesn’t account for dark side opposites. The difference between thinking (T) and feeling (F) isn’t necessarily what she’s intuited. Nevertheless, the difference is significant and deserves reflection. All of the differences – between introvert-extravert, sensing-intuition, thinking-feeling, and judging-perceptive – are relevant for types’ tendencies toward positive values and their opposites and therefore toward their subjects’ ultimate ending in fulfillment or disappointment.

The turning point: adolescence

Adolescence is a critical phase in establishing these tendencies. It’s the phase when Luke Skywalker committed to the cause of the Jedi Knights after the loss of his foster parents. It’s the phase when his father, Adam, started to part with Obi-Wan, his Jedi trainer, betray the Jedi cause, and go over to the empire. For many, our personal fortunes literally hang in the balance when we are adolescents.

May Affect be with you!

Published on Leave a comment on The Most Important Choice We Will Ever Make

Objectifying the “dark side”

A 13-year-old boy found my essay Thirteen: Reflections on Character and Values at the Beginning of Adolescence useful in part for its appendix. Entitled “Values Derived from Human Needs,” the appendix gave words to describe both the light and dark sides of values. He thought the description of the dark side was particularly helpful.

The human mind’s fascination with the “dark side” can have unfortunate consequences. Here is an observation about “evil” in Understanding, the second of my two Christmas letters:

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

Two mistakes in our thinking put the dark side into our thoughts, make it real, empower it, and bring it to life. The first is objectification. We objectify something that’s a part of ourselves when we mistake it for something that’s not a part of ourselves. When we imagine that it’s a separate object, like a stick or a ball, or a pet or another person that we can relate to. When it’s just the reverse side of ourselves – subject, not object, a shadow or reflection – and has no separate existence of its own.

Bringing the dark side to life with projection

Once we’ve imagined that our shadow-reflection is a separate object we can relate to, we commit a second mistake: projection. We project attributes of ourselves onto this object that give it the “existence” it had heretofore lacked. We project our self, that is, our identity, our sovereignty, and our free will that enable the objectified shadow-reflection to act with authority and autonomy as though it were real.

The thoughts and feelings we project onto the object are those that we are uncomfortable with, that we don’t want. It is these that give our dark side its menace, the aspect of danger, of the appearance of purpose and meaning – something happening -- that fascinates and misleads human awareness into wrongdoing and harm.

These uncomfortable thoughts and feelings were precipitated by an event that preceded our engagement with our shadow-reflection. The event was loss of consciousness, and it set in motion a succession of misperceptions and misjudgments beginning with the misperception that our shadow-reflection is a separate self – an object – and the misjudgment that we can safely entrust our wellbeing to its guidance.

The wrong guide is our own creation

For that is what has come of our mistakes. Objectifying our shadow-reflection and giving it autonomy and authority over us by projecting our selves onto it has turned it into a guide. A very serious misjudgment, because once it’s activated its genetic code has no interest in guidance. Its only interest is captivity: controlling its host so that it can replicate itself like a virus and remain in “existence.” All because we have given it the ability and power to do so that come from ourselves. This is what it means that “Evil isn’t what ‘others’ do to us. It’s what we do to ourselves.”

These reflections are part of the core of Christianity that teaches mindfulness, love, and free will – attributes that belong firmly on the light side of values and not on the dark side. To practice Christianity is to recognize, disable, and disempower the dark side in everything we do. And this means understanding that our shadow-reflection is nothing:

  • Nothing that can be objectified – made into a separate object.
  • Nothing that can be brought to life by projecting ourselves onto it.
  • Nothing that can entertain us with the appearance of danger, of “action,” conflict, violence, hurt, anger, and all the other manifestations of values turned against themselves. Of purpose and meaning taken out of context by minds that misperceive and misjudge.

The most important use of our mind

The choice presented by the light and dark side of our values is whether to lead with gifts given to us – our own ability and authority – for our own purposes or with something that’s been given away and “given” back to us for the wrong guide’s purposes. Whether to lead with our own power given to his Child by God or with derived power that isn’t ours and can’t be used for our own benefit.

The right guide is Jesus or the Holy Spirit, a gift to us from God to his Child, who wishes us well and wants us to succeed, to be free, and to be happy. The wrong guide is the Joker, our mistake, a nothing that can’t wish anything and if it could, would only wish us to be its mindless captive and be unhappy. The choice between these two guides is a function of mind possessed of free will. It is the most important choice we will ever make and the most important use of our mind.

Will that is truly free is an informed will. Will guided by mind that understands. That’s no longer under the spell of our shadow-reflection: nothingness – the “power” of the “dark side.”

Published on Leave a comment on Thirteen: Reflections on Character and Values at the Beginning of Adolescence

Goodbye childhood, hello adolescence!

If you just turned thirteen it may be the most important date in your life. When hormones kick in bodies change – you’ve heard all this. What you may not have heard is that minds can change, too. Minds and selves, so different that what they see out there and in here is hardly recognizable.

That’s how it was for me and my classmates when we were thirteen. Kids fresh out of grade school and Sunday school. Challenged by adolescence, one of the biggest transitions of our lives then and thereafter. While we were also adjusting to Phillips Academy at Andover, then an all-male preparatory school with a no-nonsense approach to education. With a world of opportunity for character development, too. We were destined for four incredible years of education and growth that would put us all in the best universities: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Oxford, Cambridge, the rest of the Ivies, and more.

But we didn’t know it yet. All we knew was this thing called childhood was over. We were adolescents. Instead of reading Justin Morgan Had a Horse (1945) now we were reading The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Anticipating a strange new world: the mysterious, sophisticated world of adults. Where safe passage through ambiguity -- the murkiness and deviousness of human motivation -- was by no means assured. We were intrigued, scared, ambivalent. That’s how it was. That was adolescence.

What’s life all about anyway?

We could feel ourselves changing. But changing into who or what was confusing. Because we couldn’t tell where all these forces of humanity and nature were taking us. Decisions coming at us faster than we knew how to decide. Not: Do we run with the crowd or go it alone? Keep up with our homework or blow it off? But: What really interests us? What really matters?

What did we want our one shot at life to be all about? Have something to show for it or just go with the flow? How could we apply ourselves in school to become the person we wanted to be? To develop character with solid values and abilities that helped us grow? To be of service. What was life all about anyway?

Creating something beautiful in the here and now

What can be more exacting, more exciting, than learning to think for ourselves? The beginning of adolescence is when everyone who has learning to share with us gets serious about it. What we learn or don’t learn counts. All the curricular and extra-curricular activities, competitions, assignments, social interactions, and entertainments give us an array of possibilities to choose from. Different beliefs and causes that will bless us with purpose, meaning, and satisfaction the rest of our lives. That will help us discover who we are and how we choose to apply our ideals and powers to create something beautiful -- an expression of what we stand for.

The world of the university may be some years away. But for the thirteen-year-old student who wants to make something beautiful of her life, it starts here. It starts now. it’s not too soon to reflect on her potential. Not If she means to qualify for the best universities. It’s not too soon to realize how satisfying, how much fun, it can be to be responsible for developing her own potential. To be in charge of it. To think for herself. Because no one else can do it for her.

What are the right values?

Kids from families that practice gentle loving kindness are already familiar with the best value of all. They’re halfway there to building character with strong values. For the rest adolescence is their chance to make up for lost time. In either case it’s a pleasure to talk with them about values. Because if they’ve just turned thirteen they want to grow. Their minds and hearts are open. They’re a work in progress, beauty put there to create beauty. Creativity that may not last, because with the onset of “maturity” minds and hearts often close to the possibilities, become set in their ways. Thirteen is beautiful. Keep minds and hearts open and you’ll make it.

Character and values are certainly role-modeled in school but they aren’t expressly taught. We could learn some of the best values in other venues, like church, and also some of the worst. Being parted from independent judgment to demonstrate “faith” in someone else’s judgment is not being mindful. Not when the value of mindfulness is right up there with gentle loving kindness. This is why it’s important to talk about values: there are no “saviors” to do our thinking for us. Building character with strong values is a do-it-yourself proposition. Do it yourself with lots of help, to be sure. Help from other people. Help from philosophy, psychology, theology, and any of the sciences that resonate with Mind and Love. With Logic. Help above all from our own intuition, the source of insights that guide and inspire the arts, sciences, and all of human progress. But always grounded in our own judgment, our own free will. Always.

Values are many things: ideals to inspire us, attributes to define us, instruments to be used. But the place to start is that they’re gifts. And what they require from us, if they’re going to do their job, is thankfulness and respect. Because they come from a Source that deserves thankfulness and respect – from Love. From the Source of our Being and our Worth.

What are the right values? Whatever values fit the situation we’re in. What’s the right fit? Whatever we figure out if we get it right. Choosing values to serve for different situations requires thought, feeling, and conscience. Mind and heart working together.

One thing it does not require is a formula. Minds unable or unwilling to do the work will make a show of values. Minds without conscience or character whose only value is what’s in it for them. If their “values” don’t feel like the real thing they probably aren’t. They’re just appearances for taking advantage, a clever formula someone learned to fool us and hide the truth. It’s not loving or kind. It’s cheating to avoid values. Cheating isn’t getting it right.

Character and values anchor us

We can’t think for ourselves without evaluating. Without being aware of our values and being true to them when we make up our minds. Using our minds to reason and evaluate fortifies us with understanding and good judgment. With conscience that knows right from wrong and displays good character. It assures others that we can be trusted. That we’re safe to be close to at work and play.

Children follow a path laid down for them. Adolescents learning to think for themselves begin choosing their own path. It’s how they transition to becoming young adults. Character isn’t defined for them anymore. They have to define it themselves, and it begins with choices. Choices among values that pull in different directions. The best defense against being pulled in the wrong direction is to choose the right values.

Character isn’t about blowing with the wind. It’s about the values that we choose and commit to. That define and anchor us. The best defense against choosing the wrong path is building the right character.

The ways we express our values

They’re things people need, want, or otherwise care about. One dimension belongs here with us on our planet of spacetime and matter. Another belongs in a part of our mind that’s not spacetime and matter. It’s called “intuition.” It produces spontaneous insights that guide thinking in science and every other field, but no one knows where they come from. A third dimension is their opposites – the “dark side.”

So if we think of “Wealth,” for instance, it could mean property we accumulate for our comfort beyond necessities, like yachts and jewelry. Or it could mean the thought and feeling of Abundance that motivate us to share our Love, Power, and Worth. Those are very different takes on “Wealth,” but they’re equally valid in their contexts. “Scarcity” is one word for their opposite.

Here are ways of labeling ten basic categories of human values or needs:

Love (family-intimacy)
Belonging (community)
Worthiness (affirmation)
Empowerment (energy, control)
Abundance (wealth, material comfort)
Protection (safety, security)
Freedom (free will)
Health (healing)
Beauty (purity, essence)
Hope (faith, purpose).

Like rivers they branch outward into tributaries that contain all kinds of things important to us. Values that we use to make up our minds. “Core values” that apply across humanity and values we choose and express as individuals. They’re part of our everyday experience, as concrete and immediate as the food we eat. If “belonging” doesn’t sound important “fairness” certainly will, and it’s part of belonging.

There are too many values to list all the ways we express them, but some that are implied by our needs are listed in the appendix. Terms that catalogue their opposites are given as well. This should give us a feel for how familiar and relevant values and their opposites are, like “kindness” and “scarcity.” How they influence our work and relationships and how important it is to be aware of them.

One perspective on our choices doesn’t tell us what to think. But by presenting the dark side as well as the light it does give us an idea how values pull in different directions. What choices can imply and where they might lead if we’re not mindful. If we don’t exercise solid independent judgment that comes from introspection, reflection, reasoning, evaluating, and discipline. So when we decide our eyes will be open. So the consequences – especially the costs – won’t be an unpleasant surprise.

Role modeling values

What grandparents learn from their grandchildren is the joyfulness of living in the moment. Of spontaneity that opens minds and hearts. That frees them to laugh and love, to play and think creatively in ways they’ve forgotten or may have never learned before. Time with their grandchildren is well spent. In fact, it can be enormously helpful. What grandparent isn’t grateful for being admitted into the world of a precious child?

We are all role models. Children no less than grownups. But the values a thirteener might learn from a grandparent can’t be following in anyone’s “footsteps.” Grownups’ lives and careers are also a work in progress. They’re not meant to be footsteps for anyone to follow. Let role models guide and motivate us, but don’t let them take over.

Are character and education worth the effort?

Three accomplished role models have written primers on adolescence, worthy causes, and qualifying for some of the best universities:

Being a Teen: Everything Teen Girls and Boys Should Know About Relationships, Sex, Love, Health, Identity, and More, by Jane Fonda (Random House 2014)

It’s Your World: Get Informed, Get Inspired & Get Going!, by Chelsea Clinton (Penguin 2017)

The Ultimate Teen Guide to Getting into the Ivy League: The 10-Step System, by Courtney Malinchak (Strauss Consultants 2017)

These are just a sample of what’s out there. Whatever our situations someone else has been there, thought about it, and come up with insights and information to stimulate our thinking and ease the way. If it seems like we’ve been abandoned the truth is very different. Whatever our situation it puts us into a community that wants to help. Just like our intuition, it only needs to be asked. So don’t let change come of its own accord: bone up on it and master it.

Even the best high schools and preparatory schools can’t make it easy to get into places like Harvard and Caltech. It takes extra effort. If what we’re looking for is “easy” why bother with school at all? Why bother with Life? What lies ahead for all of us is deciding whether we want to make the effort. Malinchak’s book could scare us away or fill us with determination. Which will it be?

Here’s one reason for making an extra effort. At Andover I was an average student with one distinction: I tried hard. I may have been the only athlete recommended for a varsity letter without scoring points for the team. My coach’s recommendation said my work ethic inspired my teammates to score points, and that’s why I deserved the award. The best universities look for applicants who want to excel. Who are passionate about pushing themselves beyond their limits. And one way they measure passion is by level of effort. I made it to Harvard. Andover might have gotten me there without extra effort, but maybe it wouldn’t.

Having an education from a world-class university is like being able to board a plane at a busy airport without going through security. Everyone wants you on board and they want to make it easy. Because the source of your education puts their minds at rest about your mind. About your character, talent, and values. You’re trusted. People can put their confidence in you. A degree from the top universities, like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Caltech, or Stanford, that’s put to good use, can gain acceptance into the highest circles of wealth, power, and society. I know this from experience. Without my Harvard degree the opportunities that put accomplishment, satisfaction, and joy into my career would not have been there. This is a solid reason for making an extra effort. It might be stressful but you’ll never regret it.

Just as the best universities open up worlds of possibilities, only the values of good character can get us into those worlds. Can give us the power and ability to realize our potential once we’re there. Good education and good character are gifts that never stop giving.

Career or no career? What does Mona Lisa say?

If an adolescent girl is unsure of her motivation Mona Lisa Smile, with Julia Roberts, might help. It’s a 2003 film that tells the story of an art professor at Wellesley College who encouraged her students to pursue careers. The professor’s students divided themselves into women who wanted careers and those who didn’t. I knew a graduate of Wellesley who earned a degree in economics. After that, she earned a law degree from Harvard and a license to practice law in Massachusetts. She had a very good mind. But even though she earned a profession she never actually wanted it. And as soon as she could, she abandoned it.

Do you want training for a professional career? Or are you one of the Wellesley students who don’t want a career? It can be a difficult choice for a conscientious girl that requires a lot of thought. This film may help, because it dramatizes the choice from both sides. Good thinking and great entertainment!

The values of a grandparent: Mindfulness, learning and growth

What this grandparent wants others to know about him is that he places a high value on mind – on learning and growth. That he believes that Mind and Love, thought and feeling, are inseparable. That he will be honest with others and places a high value on facts, Logic, and Truth. He believes that we make the world a better place by making ourselves better persons, and we make ourselves better persons by making the world a better place.

We choose Life when we choose not to be satisfied with the way things are. When we choose to explore the possibilities open to us by our minds. When we allow and encourage our minds to reflect. To see things from perspectives different from our own, To explore new approaches to our work, relationships, and wellbeing. Our values are to be used for creativity, to build character and self-worth.

The “niceness” of sharing, empowerment, and affirmation

In five different regions this grandparent practiced the value of service. Service through ideas (mindfulness), sharing, empowerment, and affirmation. He helped others come together to make good things happen. He shared his ideas, organized, and put them in charge. In one region he helped to secure community leadership training through twelve colleges and universities. Accumulating wealth and power for himself wasn’t a consideration. Attracting support for his career today, in thinking and writing, is a consideration. But he’s still committed to the same values.

The values that make a grandparent loving are gentle loving kindness, service, sharing, empowerment, and affirmation. These are the “niceness” that secures a grandparent’s place in his grandchildren’s hearts, that can cover him with hugs and kisses from grandchildren who need and appreciate it. That secures a place for them in his heart and makes them Best Friends Forever.

What is “empowerment?” It’s sharing our strength and energy with another person to make them stronger. To support their efforts. To help them compete. To cheer them on instead of trying to take them down so we can always be the “winner.” When we empower others we empower ourselves. It makes us all winners.

“Affirmation” is applause. It’s sharing all that we value in ourselves to affirm another’s worth. It’s making sure that if we think we’re important they’re important, too. In a world that can make us all feel overlooked affirming another’s worth can make the difference between hope and despair, between succeeding or giving up. Sharing our worth is sharing our Abundance. It’s Love. And anytime we love another it always comes back. It’s what it was meant to be: Love and affirmation for you and me.

Where did these values come from? From many sources over time. But none more important than the values that shaped this grandparent’s character in adolescence. None more important than what he learned at Phillips Academy, Class of ’55. From teachers, coaches, administrators, and classmates, all devoted to excellence. To making an effort. To being and doing your best. This was Andover. The best.

Sharing or ownership? One way of looking at it

This grandparent’s take on what values are all about is just one perspective out of many. If it stimulates an adolescent’s thinking then it’s done some good. But if she already has high ideals and it messes with them, then it hasn’t. These reflections aren’t “wisdom” if they don’t do any good. All they’re for is to help adolescents think about values so they can learn to think for themselves.

Values are gifts given to us to be shared by a source that is Sharing. It’s Love, and what Love does is share. If we want to know what to do with our gifts we can follow the example set by their Source: we can put them to good use for everyone by sharing. By using our values to empower all of Life and Creation and to affirm its Worth. When we feel truly loved then we feel Love’s power and its affirmation. We feel gentle loving kindness. This is what we share when we share our values. We connect.

Ownership pulls in a different direction. If Love is Freedom ownership is containment. Responsible ownership is sensitive to its impacts on others. But we live in a world where ownership is often abused, where instead of sharing and sensitivity to community it pulls toward possession and control for itself. Owning our gifts can pull us toward misusing them to attain dominance and supremacy by empowering ourselves and affirming our own worth. To compete to “win” by making others lose. To achieve “rightness” by making others wrong. This isn’t gentle loving kindness. If it looks like it don’t be fooled. It’s just appearances – formulas that avoid values. Formulas that avoid mindfulness. It doesn’t connect us with others. It disconnects.

The choice is: Are values to be shared following the example of Love, their Source? Are they to be “owned” responsibly? Or are they to be used only for possession and control? Are they to be used to empower ourselves and others, to express our individuality? Or used to control others to suppress it? Are they to be used to affirm everyone’s worth as equals deserving respect? Or to deny others’ worth?

Friendships and ownership don’t mix

The rules that govern competitive relationships done wrong are beating the other guy, owning, possessing, controlling, dominating, attaining supremacy, and always being right. The rules that prevail in personal friendships are the reverse: share, empower, affirm, respect the other guy’s free will, and keep everyone safe. The rules aren’t win-lose; they’re win-win. They’re both are right.

If it seems like we can’t avoid values owned instead of shared it’s because we spend a lot of time in groups. And group behavior either encourages or tolerates competition. What it offers is belonging, but that’s not the same as Love. Rather than individuals sharing their Abundance, their worth, it’s the group gathering up our worth and sharing it back. As if we were worthless without it. Loyalty to groups and their credos is inevitable, but it can be too much of a good thing. Ownership – the rules that govern group competitive relationships -- never works in individual family relationships and friendships. What does work is sharing. What works is Love.

Competition done right

Ownership focused on supremacy isn’t even the rule when competition is done right. Olympians do compete to win. But what they’re really doing is competing with themselves to excel. They’re feeding off competition to push themselves beyond their limits. The distinction of Olympic gold is excellence, not dominance. If the mindset of Olympians were otherwise they wouldn’t win. They wouldn’t even be in the Olympics.

What we learn at the best schools and universities is the pursuit of excellence. Competing with ourselves to push beyond our limits, not to dominate. Not to puff ourselves up with “winning” and “supremacy.” The pursuit of excellence is the value, the learning, that animates character with strength and energy at schools like Andover and Harvard. Not everyone can qualify for the Olympics. But anyone with talent and motivation, anyone who’s shown that they’re worthy of their values, their gifts and talents, can strive for an Olympic-grade education. For excellence. The best schools and universities are there for us if we qualify. If we’re committed to character and the right values.

What’s the use?

We build and express character according to how we use our gifts. Misusing our gifts is a mistake. Our gifts were given to us for a purpose: to create, support, and affirm the worth of Life. Using them for any other purpose is a mistake. Owning our gifts instead of sharing them so they can be used as weapons is the dark side. A very big mistake.

Strong character and education are developing our talents so they can be used. Weak character is putting talents to the wrong use or letting them go to waste. Sharing and ownership of values are the use and misuse of values.

The goal of values is to be worthy of them, to deserve them. To show their Source and others that they belong to us. They belong to us when they’re shared. The values we own for possession and control aren’t being used for their intended purpose, so they don’t belong to us. They shouldn't be entrusted to us.

The ideal of sharing isn’t always attainable in a world that’s not always “nice.” That conditions us from birth to think of our values as things to be owned and used for our own benefit, to gain wealth and power in competition with others. The wrong values are like toxins that keep us in a state of paralysis, an unchanging status quo without learning and growth, where development is arrested.

Depending on how we use them values are the sun that radiates light with the force of Love and sharing or they’re black holes that consume light with the gravity of ownership and containment. When we turn values into black holes the first object that they consume is our self because we’ve betrayed it.

The goal of learning and growth: sound judgment based on strong ideals

Taking it to the next level in our education and taking on adolescence at the same time can be fulfilling and frightening. Learning and character development are meant to take us out of our comfort zones. That’s natural. What all this shouldn’t be is painful. It can be painful if we’re not prepared. If we’re looking back instead of looking forward. We need to recognize that turning thirteen puts our lives in a different context, with new meaning and purpose. With minds opened to the possibilities from books and thoughts like these, it can make all the difference.

We can choose Love and share our gifts. We can resist the pull of its opposite, because character matters, and so does the truth.

The pull of our ideals is strong but so is the pull away from them. This is the thought to share on the eve of adolescence. A time of exploring and experimenting when an adolescent needs good judgment for protection, based on strong ideals.

As children entering adolescence begin thinking and evaluating for themselves one view is that the best use of our gifts and values is sharing. But that’s just one view. It’s their take that matters. When they’ve taken on the challenge of adolescence and education, when they’ve learned to think for themselves, what will they believe?

From the Class of ’55 to the Class of ’25, with Love

To all thirteen-year-olds may the next four years take you beyond the challenges, adjustments, and frustrations of adolescence. May they take you to a taste, a passion, for its incomparable gift: for learning and growth that never end. For Life as it’s meant to be lived, with meaning, purpose, and joyfulness. May you never be content with the way things are. May you never stop questioning.

Good luck and God bless!

Appendix: Values derived from human needs

Love: spiritual wealth and abundance, giving and receiving, openness, generosity, feeling, empathy, caring, kindness, affirmation-validation, tenderness, home, family and intimacy, interconnecting web of creativity, timelessness, immediacy (the here and now), awareness, unconditional acceptance

[The dark side] Fear: separation, abandonment, judgment and condemnation
(blame), abuse, cruelty, savagery, terror, hatred, rejection, anxiety, hollowness,
invalidation, retribution, neglect

Belonging: roots, extended family, community, fairness, equity, justice, emotional support

[The dark side] Alienation: isolation, loneliness, grievances, resentments,
bigotry, prejudice, inequality, unfairness, injustice

Worthiness: character, enlightenment, presence of mind, competence, gifts, talents, learning, discovery, work, worthy causes, growth (spiritual, personal, character), perseverance, achievement, recognition, largeness, self-respect, innocence

[The dark side] Worthlessness: quitting, surrender, failure, shame, guilt,
littleness, invisibility – not being seen or heard

Empowerment: order, control, strength and energy, forcefulness, assertiveness, will, resolve, conviction, truth, centered, grounded, competitive, prevailing, enduring

[The dark side] Disempowerment: emasculation, humiliation, embarrassment,
debilitation, disorder, disorientation, deception, confusion, doubt, loss, subjugation,
defeat, extinction

Material comfort: food, clothing, shelter, material wealth and abundance, having

[The dark side] Scarcity: impoverishment, homelessness, hunger, deprivation,
exposure, not having

Safety and security: protection and peace, trust, harmlessness, sanctuary (temenos), joyfulness and spontaneity, happiness, playfulness and laughter, immortality

[The dark side] Endangerment: vulnerability, exposure, harmfulness,
betrayal, treachery, pain, injury, mortality

Freedom: choice and expression, independence, individuality, liberation

[The dark side] Enslavement: confinement, restriction, addiction, the
tyranny of judgment and condemnation (blame), oppression, conformity, suffocation

Health (mental, physical, spiritual, emotional): wellness, wholeness, healing (the separation-wound), reason, integrity, miracles

[The dark side] Sickness: woundedness, insanity, delusion, depravity,
grievances, resentments, dismemberment, impairment

Beauty: perfection and purity in forms and functions, appearances and essences, thoughts and ideals, artistic, inspiriting, inspiring, sacred, uncorrupted, aesthetic, sensory attraction and pleasure – sights, sounds, taste, touch, smell

[The dark side] Repugnance: revulsion, aversion, deadening, flawed, marred,
desecrated, violated, corrupted, impure

Hope: faith and purpose

[The dark side] Despair: depression, surrender, collapse, purposelessness,
nihilism, ambivalence, confusion, disbelief

Published on Leave a comment on Remembering

Flitting in and out of others’ lives
Wondering what’s in it for me
Where what seems important
Comes and goes and isn’t worth much

Remember me mind and heart who stood
For something not in and out
Comes and goes, that speaks of Worth
Beyond time that can be shared

That doesn’t need for what’s here and gone
To be around to do Good
That’s not owned or controlled or used
To gain advantage
To be more than us or better than us

That’s only used to put minds at rest
And comfort knowing
That nothing can ever come between us

This is how I want to be remembered
When I think of you.

Published on Leave a comment on For the Love of a Grandparent

Our values are what really matters – love and family; friendship and community; health and healing; freedom and free will; self-worth; purpose, learning, striving, growth and achievement; abundance; protection and trust; beauty, purity and innocence; empowerment and control. Whenever we’re in doubt, these are our conscience. These are our best guide to avoiding mistakes.

Grandparents know all about mistakes because they’ve seen and made lots of them. They know a lot about values, too, because experience has taught them what’s important. Kids might do fine without a grandparent. But it’s possible they’d do even better with one. Grandparents want kids to have this resource: helping them with values so they avoid mistakes.

This is how grandparents want to be there for their kids. They applaud kids' performances and cheer them from the sidelines. But when kids are ready for more, grandparents are ready for more.

Grandparents don’t tell kids what to do. Setting a good example, standing up for their values – that’s their job. If they follow the wrong example they won’t be role modeling their values. They won’t be role modeling the values they want their grandchildren to have.

What kids need from their grandparents is good role models.

Here are some thoughts about grand-parenting, relationships, and role modeling based on one grandparent's experience:

Respect and affection between friends can never be taken for granted, because that would be telling our friends their needs and feelings don’t matter. That they don’t matter. It would tell them that they’re worthless when friendships should tell them the opposite.

Differences between people can cause serious problems. Our reading and entertainment tell us that every day. Our minds work differently. Our personalities aren’t the same. We value different things. Our priorities are different. We present ourselves differently. We try to connect and communicate differently – the list goes on and on.

Our circumstances are always changing. And our needs and feelings change with them. Because everyone’s circumstances are different, no one has the same point of view.

Our physical, biological, and social environment is a dynamic system driven by powerful forces. Understanding these forces is the purpose of every field of learning -- physics, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, social science, political science, ethics, theology, biology, and more. We are brought together in one great human enterprise: learning.

One of the great lessons of life is the need for continuous improvement -- for learning and personal growth. This is as true for groups as it is for individuals. It is our purpose. We can’t stand still. We must move forward.

Learning takes effort. It takes thought, and kids are capable of that. If grandparents didn’t believe in their kids they would say, “They’re just kids” and ignore them. Grandparents don’t ignore their kids. They think their kids are worth a whole lot more than just one birthday gift. They're worth a million birthday gifts! They're not “just kids.”

As Vince Lombardi would put it: What’s best for our kids isn’t everything: it’s the only thing. Being useful to their kids is why grandparents exist. A good grandparent will try to be useful even if it means doing without the affection, kindness, joy, and laughter that their kids bless them with. Their kids are worth a trillion birthday gifts!

Relationships usually survive misunderstandings and hurt feelings without too much damage. But when we don’t respect our differences it can have more serious consequences. It can cause wounds that take away trust and safety. It can even bring close friendships to an end.

In the end, there is only one way to save a friendship and that is to earn it. To have strong values, share them, and to stand up for them even if it takes work and may not succeed. What is friendship worth, anyway, if it doesn’t ask something of us? If we don’t risk something?

Living a truly good life and doing what’s right aren’t things to be casual about. They require thought and deliberation. They require care and concentration, because it can be very easy to lose sight of what really matters and make a mistake.

It’s up to each of us to determine for ourselves what’s right. It’s everyone’s duty to affirm the truth about who we are and what we believe in everything we do. It’s all about Character. It’s all about Purpose.

Modesty is being aware that a higher power knows what’s best and letting this awareness guide our conscience. Anyone can find fault with what’s wrong, but who really knows what’s right? This is modesty, a virtue that is everyone’s duty to share, and grandparents would share it with their kids.

Miracles happen when power that we’re not aware of works quietly through our minds and hearts to overcome barriers to change and lead us forward. The barriers to change necessary for friends to move forward may not come down without a miracle. This is as true for brothers and sisters as it is with fathers and sons.

“Happy endings” aren’t a given but neither is disappointment. What we think are “happy endings” may also lie beyond our understanding. We should be prepared for both, because whatever comes may be for the best – we don’t know.