The purpose of the Mind that was given to Sapiens when it went on its own evolutionary track is Self-Awareness. To understand that it’s not a sub-species of tribal apes in an animal kingdom of body-beings competing for supremacy alone at the top of hierarchy. Undisciplined willfulness. Unrelatability. It’s another Self that belongs elsewhere. Love. In a home suited to its nature: loving friendship between the Spontaneity of Creativity and the Order of Definition. Relatability. Free Choice.
This riff on a premise taken from A Course in Miracles coming in the context of an evolutionary about-face of America’s governing philosophy: from egalitarian-humanitarian Democracy to inhumanitarian-hierarchical Autocracy. From Aristarchy to Kakistocracy. Testing whether Sapiens can respond by actively choosing Mind’s mission to restore Self-Awareness or will remain captive to the status quo. To the unchanging self-unawareness of a beast.
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What better time to question?
Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Made the World’s Most Dangerous Man (2020). Mary L. Trump knows. She’s told us. Yet here we are, discussing whether or not so-and-so is qualified to run this-or-that agency. Business as usual. As though the beast appointing them were just another mouthy politician manipulating the storyline.
Putting on an act. Which it is, but in the sense that National Socialist Germany’s “triumph of the will” was an act. Turning human lives and their environs into a fiery backdrop of devastation staged for the gods.
Neither Mary nor a host of repentant Trump enablers and the entire Democratic Party could take down the world’s most dangerous man. What better time to ask Why than now? For progressives to question how to succeed where they and others have failed. To introspect and reflect and not be demoralized by a worse strain of contagion.
To understand why the beast and his entangled followers have so far gotten their way. Following Logic wherever it leads instead of shackling it with preconceptions. The same ones that keep Sapiens rooted in its unchanging, uncivilized past.
Appearances that deceive
Body and soul need energy. Fury and despair overload vulnerable psyches with the wrong kind. The idea behind the perfect storm we’re about to go through. Willfulness. The energy to overwhelm the boundaries of freedom and order instead of supporting them.
A worst-case scenario of ape-brain that’s never evolved combined with Sapiens-brain that has evolved. Putting Frankenstein’s monster at the controls of cutting-edge communications and weaponry. Who got hold of the same energy that brought him to life and used it to bring to “life” a world tailored to his likes. Inhabited by copies of himself. Our animal kingdom of hierarchy. Of unrelatability. Herds.
The monster and his human-ape followers are all will and no mind. Begging to be out minded except that the mind opposing it is too busy out-minding itself. By continuing to identify with the body-being on the underside of personality type and not with the mind-being on its upper side. No less deluded by its perspective than the beast it opposes. The world of externals defined by its five body-brain senses, one-sided and one-dimensional. A reverse mirror-image reflection. Appearances that deceive.
Mine is bigger than yours
Victimhood is all about pretense and manipulation, starting with facts and logic, on to appalling insensitivity and cruelty, and climaxing with organized mob violence. The nature of the beast: tribal wildness that can’t be contained by engaging in a contest of wills. That it can mischaracterize as an Armageddon slugfest between equals. To be remembered as “a day which will be long remembered in the history of the empire” if it wins. Or romanticized as a “lost cause” if it doesn’t. Heads I win, tails you lose.
No matter what new theories and myths the 2024 election’s outcome inspires their subject is a mockery of inspiration. Hearing in a chorus of bellowing from Old McDonald’s cows stentorian grandeur. Instead of littleness from an unevolved animal brain. Herd mentality obsessed with numbers: you and I are herd, so we exist. Mine is bigger than yours, so I win. The stentorian grandeur of truculance. A two-year-old.
The animal within
The individual wins. With independent judgment intact. With feeling linked to thought, conscience tied to accountability. With moral character based not on Machiavellian tribal expedience or on unthinking “faith” but on relationship. Us with our better selves and not with Mephisto. Which puts all the emphasis on mindfulness rather than willfulness. Why? Because willfulness is the animal in us.
I’m all in with the Resistance. Except that its strength can’t be in numbers alone. It has to be in ideas. In pressing forward with an articulate, compelling grasp of the situation we’re in and a response that removes the opposition’s testicles with surgical precision. Because situation and response logically match. And they won’t so long as our bones can be broken by the bully’s sticks and stones. So long as we ourselves remain captive to willfulness, the animal within.