Who let you in?
The flaw in human nature we’re dealing with has been around forever. It’s not safe to assume that everything is OK because it looks OK on the surface. There’s always an underneath and woe to those who don’t think about it and manage it. The agreeable person is like the reverse side of the angry person. Agreeable is way better. True for me too, but it’s nobody’s fault that they can’t always be agreeable. Why not? It’s just a theory, but it’s as though our world is somehow descended from another world where something happened that fixed things in place here. Ours being the reverse of the first, like a mirror-image reflection.
What happened? An inhabitant of the other world needed training to do its job where it could learn and make mistakes and earn its progress without having everything done for it and handed to it. To do this it needed to be here in our world. And to be here it had to enter a dream state, because it couldn’t be in two opposite worlds at once where they’re both awake worlds. It had to lose consciousness, Self-Awareness. And in that state it couldn’t be aware of anything except wanting to go home or at least be safe in some other world. It was vulnerable, defenseless. Unable to differentiate. To tell friend from enemy, real and unreal.
And in that state it saw things that weren’t really there. It was hallucinating. It hallucinated its own reverse-reflection as if in a mirror or the surface of a lake. A part of itself that’s part of everything we think of as the “dark side,” yet it’s essential to Creation and not to be thought of as all bad. It just needs to be understood and managed.
The inhabitant of this other world was defined by its attributes, like a personality. With a function it was to perform in its world once it finished training in our world. Free Choice. When it hallucinated its reverse-reflection it thought it was looking at another inhabitant. Lost and separated from its function, having lost the ability to choose freely, it had no choice but to listen to this “other” inhabitant. A ghost speaking total nonsense about another reality where its host would be in “paradise.” Lacking independent judgment, unable to differentiate between true and false, real and unreal, our hero bought the deception. Fooling itself and making a fool of itself, but in its condition what else could it do?
It did what it had to do. Let a wack job into its thoughts. Into its Mind since that’s who it was. Not body like us but Mind meant to choose freely once it learned how. Now shared with a thought contradicting its Self.
Reality Is Not What It Seems
Crazy! It sounds just like my mind! Both of us. So it could be led into this too-good-to-be-true other world, a hierarchical kingdom of animals ruled by a king of beasts. A herd of animals, the reverse of its Self and the crazy idea behind the image in the mirror: a herd of animals. Tribes of apes. An insult to the beholder of the image who would not have chosen to be led here if it knew what it was doing.
But the deed was done and there was only one thing to do: learn how to choose freely and get back to being its real Self. Which, of course, was the idea that put it here: to learn from experience. To make mistakes, learn from them, and move forward.
Starting out with the mother of all mistakes that eventually it would have to reverse. Making its unreal reverse-reflection real by listening to it, then by doing what it says. That is, if it chose to listen to Guidance that’s not a wack job, stop hallucinating, return Home to Reality, and do its thing in Creation. A test of character in a kingdom of beasts that Sapiens can live up to or not as it chooses. For my part it’s a test I’d rather pass than take my chances among marauding tribes of human-apes. Me too, although I do like a banana with my cup of Joe to start the day.
Zoology says our common ancestor is ape. Where in fact we have two: this one inhabiting our world of physics, the real one inhabiting the world of metaphysics. One Self instead of a herd; Mind instead of body-animal, hallucinating us and our world while split in two by its mistaken “savior.” Waiting to heal itself when we, embodiments of its crazy ideas, figure out with our Sapiens minds how to choose freely with character, honor, and integrity.
No small order when the story the “other” had to tell is the reverse of its beholder’s story. The cause of the logical non-sequiturs, personality conflicts, and all the other gremlins that plague our world. Everything inside-out and upside-down while seeming “normal.” Only in our section of the universe, in between the largeness of cosmic objects and small particles. Otherwise Reality Is Not What It Seems (2016 English translation) according to physics.
The lede that bleeds
That ought to know because that’s all it’s been doing the last five centuries: conducting experiments to solve the mystery. Coming up with cosmic wonders like Newton’s gravity, Einstein’s relativity, and especially E=MC2, Einstein’s definitive conception of Energy. All reassuring signs of progress that would one day culminate in success, only to get entangled in Schrodinger’s entanglement, Feynman’s “sum of histories,” and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Definitive signs of failure.
Whoa! You mean. . . The universe that seemed in perfect order to Plato and Einstein is a house of mirrors and Ghostbusters demons. Where nothing makes sense even though our part of it looks like it does. That can be thought of as one vast joke, a perversion of the way things really are meant to trick its inhabitants into believing anything.
Because that’s all that it is: a physical representation of “anything goes.” The premise that our metaphysical Mind’s Parents took care of by creating their version of what does go: Loving Friendship motivated by Conscience. An act of Creation that their Child has the opportunity to emulate when it re-reverses the nihilistic absurdity of “anything goes” corrupting its Mind. With the character and integrity of Free Choice.
So what’s the holdup? “Anything goes” is beloved of “realists” who like it here and don’t want change. Content to let Sapiens re-enact reverse-reflection’s take on what happened with its host: a clash between titans that ended with the “triumph of the will.” The opposite of what happened. Whose only purpose is to trick Sapiens with operatic grandiosity into thinking something’s “happening.” Gut-wrenching and meaningful, punctuated by cries of tragedy and shouts of conquest to the soaring strains of Tannhauser. When it’s all make-believe. A Marx Brothers Night at the Opera (1935) scripted by the ultimate distractor. Violence. The lede that bleeds.
Fort Pitt or Iron City? That Is the Question
Meanwhile, it only takes one individual to get it right and end the hallucination. To learn and earn the character and integrity of Free Choice. Creation doesn’t wait on all of humanity to change its mind. Either approach is mind-boggling, that one person could have this enormous impact or that the entire population of human-apes on the planet would convert to a radically different take on the way things are. Mass ideologies are an illusion, the idea that whole tribes can think alike. Like schools of anchovies swimming in unison.
But what truly boggles the Mind is this: that Reality, Character with Integrity, and Free Choice are inseparable. Interrelated just as time is relative to space and matter. What do you mean? I’m saying that when I’ve been speaking of “Reality” it wasn’t until now with the realization that nothing is “real” unless it has character with integrity and it’s freely chosen. The metaphysics of who we are and what our training here is about isn’t our metaphysical Self taking its competence to choose freely into Creation that’s already Real. It’s to make it Real. You mean a thing can’t be “real” unless it has character with integrity freely chosen? Exactly. I’ve discovered meaning in “real” that was there all along. Obvious now what was missing but a few hours ago it wasn’t.
Then what’s the way things are in Creation while our metaphysical Self heals its split Mind? That has to do with the idea of Now. The “Holy Instant” of the Course, where the sequence of Logic moves forward with the Energy of Spontaneity, no past no present. So whether Creation awaits our learning and earning Free Choice or is already barreling ahead with or without it – who knows? My Mind is bothered enough trying to visualize beings without bodies without having to conceive of evolution and Creation without time.
All I feel confident of now is that unless the bottle of Fort Pitt beer on the billboard heading down old Greentree Road into the West End has been learned and earned by character with integrity freely chosen it’s no better or worse than Iron City beer. Which means it’s worthless. And probably tastes like it. Intriguing. It puts things in whole new light. We must explore this further, but not now.