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Published on Leave a comment on The Power of Spontaneity and the Original Call to Mind

Spontaneity-Freedom inseparable from Order

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

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

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

The original “victim of circumstance”

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

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

The original context: instability

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

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

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

The answer to Origin’s question

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

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

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

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

Mind’s activation in the original bolt of lightning

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

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

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

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

Managing friction that will always be there

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

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

Our job

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

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

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

Exactly wrong: Spontaneity separated from Order

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

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

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

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

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The artist’s model

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

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

What’s on TV?

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

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

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

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

A waste of perfection

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

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

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

Pure amazement!

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

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

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

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

What relationships are meant to be

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

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

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

When we’ve done our best

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

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

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

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

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

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

The price of success

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

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

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

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

The mistake of avoiding mistakes

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

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

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

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

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

Always a work in progress

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

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

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

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

Published on Leave a comment on Can One Personality Type Help Its Opposite Grow?

Isabel’s theory

Isabel Myers’ theory of personality types* says the answer to the question posed by this essay is yes. In theory one individual can coach a personality opposite in the use of faculties that his or her type typically underutilizes. In the example addressed here those would be introspection, reflection-intuition, thinking-reasoning, feeling-evaluation, and judging (INTJ), faculties typically under-utilized by the opposite type extravert, sensing, feeling, and perceptive (ESFP).

According to Isabel’s theory the faculties that make up our types are preferences, and since they’re largely responsible for performance it’s only a matter of preference whether we improve our performance by making better use of them, specifically by expanding into faculties associated with our opposites. This must happen routinely, for example when circumstances compel perceptives who prefer to experience life in the moment to use their judging faculty to plan ahead. What seems less likely is that any type would seek help from an opposite to gain competence with the opposite’s faculties.

Isabel’s theory is intriguing nonetheless, not just because it makes sense but because, if it could be put into general practice it would help with personal growth and better relations. How often do relationships and projects come apart because personalities lack the will or ability to share what they’re experiencing? Because, lacking a feel for other types, they blunder unintentionally into misjudgments that end goodwill and cooperation.

One faculty too many

The ideal setting assumed by Isabel’s theory would be two individuals with opposite personality types in cheerful collaboration. Two opposite types could be the best of friends, and if they are one might even welcome the other’s kindness. But what if the type being coached senses that the other is turning him into a copy of himself? Is manipulating preferences to assume control over the relationship?

It would be remarkable if even an individual crippled by ineptness with under-utilized faculties were aware of it. Or, if he were, comfortable exposing his ineptness to an opposite type for strengthening unless the other were already a trusted personal friend or a paid professional. Our personality types and how we go about relating to them are our psychological underwear. By a certain age we’re partial to our preferences. We don’t take change lightly if it can just as easily create distance as close it. Perhaps help with one or two faculties won’t feel like a humbling makeover, but what if help is needed with three or four?

Guides locking horns

Isabel’s theory would still be feasible in the right moment for the right relationships. That is, if they’re the only voices in the room. But what if one or both is self-consciously submitting its judgment -- the product of its Judging faculty -- to guidance from another voice? What if “opposites” are not only opposite faculties but opposite guides? The individual might be the soul of agreeability but not if his guide recoils at being sidelined by an opposite guide. By the competition. By the enemy if the guides represent opposite takes on the values of moral character or competitive prowess.

We may have begun not with John Locke’s tabula rasa but with Carl Jung’s psychological types locked and loaded for combat. Which means there could be four voices in the room to manage instead of two. There could even be a situation where two plus two doesn’t equal four. Where the guides of one or both have become so involved in shaping their personalities that the boundary between self and guide is obliterated. Two plus two could now equal three or only two. Two individuals with opposite personality types who consciously or subconsciously identify with their guides. Guides who themselves are personality types with their own faculties and preferences. Committed to blocking their host from even detecting another voice let alone listening to it. 

Two models of authority

The mind’s faculty of sixth sense or Intuition that led to the theory of psychological-personality types presupposes a quasi-professional setting where self-analysis can be conducted objectively and safely. Where both parties are open to faculties of mind -- introspection, reflection, reasoning, evaluation, and judging. But if one or both has identified with will instead of mind to direct behavior, for the very reason that its perceived strength compensates for weakness, then self-analysis isn’t an option. It will be strenuously opposed. The type who identifies with will won’t want anything to do with it because of its purpose: to overturn the iron rule of mindless will with the civilizing governance of mind.

The theory of personality type opposites has then strayed into the great divide in human thought and behavior: between the “realist” model of authority that deifies rule without opposition from the top down -- the authoritarian “triumph of the will” that crushes individuality and free choice -- and the democratic ideal of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: governance from the bottom up that cultivates and respects individuality and free choice. Absolute authority, a mythical beast, vs. the indomitable spirit of freedom. Not absolute freedom without limits that’s another mythical beast but freedom of thought, expression, and choice that recognizes the necessity of Order in a shared world.

Respect for Free Choice

Personality types in the grip of either of these impossibilities -- absolute authority or absolute freedom -- will treat self-analysis as an existential threat because it threatens self-delusion, the state of mind of anyone lost to nonsense. All that can be done to rescue mind from captivity, with Isabel's theory, is to coach an empty room, record the attempt, and leave it to the spontaneity of intuition to bring it to its host’s attention. That is, when the beast has let down its guard. When its host decides with his own intuition, on his own, to exercise his indomitable Free Choice.

It's all an act

Alternate “reality” is an intentional act of self-delusion by Child-Mind, disabled and disempowered by unconsciousness, corrupted by misidentity with its own shadow, the code that defines its opposite, the Joker-magician. Which makes alternate “reality” an act. A performance by a magician. A magic act meant to hypnotize and captivate with its “entertainments:” hilarious perversions of Truth and horrifying perversions of Justice. All of it an impossibility that can’t be taken seriously. Adding the lure of magic and retribution -- the consummation of victimhood -- to the lures of the absolutes: authority and freedom. The lure of “fun.”

Plato’s Cave would then be a stage and its occupants play-acting puppets. Like the actors in the Truman TV Show, some so deluded, so closely identified with the Cave master, that they think they’re the producer. The occupants would then resist Truth because it would turn up the house lights. It would ruin the atmospherics of darkness, disembodied voices, laughter and screams, flames and flickering shadows -- the smoke and mirrors required to sustain illusion and fend off disbelief. It would expose the trick and stop the show. It would take away everyone’s “fun,” and, make no mistake, they think this is fun. So long as it’s “others” who are at the wrong end of violence and retribution they’re living the dream.

The boredom of “fun”

The Cave and its magic act are the production of a split Mind that’s Free Choice as well as corrupted. Its occupants may be deluded and confused, but given direction and incentive, they’re capable of folding the show on their own. The Mind that was lured into the Cave still retains the faculty of Intuition. The portal to spontaneous insights and understanding that is the sixth sense, that can neither be blocked entirely nor indefinitely. From awareness of an incentive to stop pretense more powerful by far than the magician’s lures: the will to Freedom. The indispensable function of Free Choice. Somewhere in the back of their minds is the memory of Free Choice and the ability to reclaim it. Whenever they choose.

When “fun” isn’t fun anymore. When Pete Hamill looked down at his drink and realized he was done with it. Done with the drinking life and its one-dimensional comic book “reality.” Done with “Brooklyn.” Done with adolescence, taverns, street fights, and mock comradeship. Ready to live a life with intimacy, maturity and responsibility, talent and creativity. Ready to have fun.**

The delusion then isn’t fully a delusion. It’s a self-willed adventure-fantasy conjured by adolescence to get into mischief with impossibilities. With dangerous toys in a shallow make-believe world. A universe of scary objects like black holes that fascinates with its vastness, complexity, violence, and pointlessness. All to avoid Reality mischaracterized by the Joker as boring.***

Bubbles within a bubble

Preoccupied with its production, the Cave’s fantasy troupe is inaccessible to anyone but its own members. It can’t be concerned with consequences beyond the show that must go on. And if any of its members carry the fantasy into their own lives; if they choose to live an adventure-fantasy, they, too, will be inaccessible.

For what will their lives be but re-enactments? Mimicking the Joker-corrupted Mind’s projection of an alternate reality. Monkey-see, monkey-do. Dragooning family and friends into playing scripted parts to keep the act alive. The wishful thought that action-comic impossibilities are possible: fantastic characters, hair-raising encounters, nonstop “action.” To keep themselves persuaded that it’s “real.” To keep the “fun” going at all costs. At the cost of wholesale disrespect for character, honesty and integrity, individuality and creativity. Their own and the captives to their adolescent, senseless will.

What will their lives be but alternate realities within an alternate “reality.” Bubbles within a bubble. Detached from reality. Wholly out of touch. 

Persuasion from a leash correction

An adolescent Child’s corrupted mind intentionally “choosing” self-delusion was an act of wrongdoing and so is its re-enactment. While the Cave’s troupe gets around to stopping the show it might motivate them if individual re-enactments in our midst receive a leash correction. The correction administered to untrained dogs by leashes when they race off in pursuit of prey. They learn that the costs of misadventure can’t all be displaced onto others with impunity. That there’s a price to pay -- a dose of Reality.

What then is Isabel’s contribution? An intelligent analytical approach to the problem posed by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave that complements leash correction. That will work beautifully someday when its light reaches the occupants of the Cave not from without but from within. When they tire of delusion and choose of their own free will to work toward self-awareness instead. With help from Intuition’s gift: respect for Free Choice and the Logic and Love of explanation that leads to Understanding.

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*Gifts Differing (Consulting Psychologists Press 1980) based on Carl Jung’s Psychological Types (Must Have Books 2019)
**A Drinking Life (Little, Brown 1994)
***Jerry L. Martin, God: An Autobiography (as Told to a Philosopher) (Caladium Publishing Company 2020)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most important choice is choice

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

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

The Way of the Master: Vince Lombardi

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

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

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

The fans of George III never left us

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

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

Understanding personality types is critical to self-awareness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Context: the Force of unconscious Mind, capable of dreaming

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

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

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

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

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

Will change of mind come in time?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is the choice not clear?