Hostage to arrogance
There was, however, one aspect of the Course that made our relationship heartwarming and helpful for me. Up to this moment: affirmation.
- The conviction that permeates the Course and the character of its author, that no matter what our circumstances they can be put to positive, constructive use. Victor Frankl being but one author among many, a survivor of Auschwitz, to experience and write about it.
- The conviction that the point of our entrapment in hierarchical corruption is to take responsibility for rising above it. For learning from our circumstances how to build, use, and sustain character that can’t be compromised. To grow beyond groveling on a planet of ass-kissing tribal apes to a state of individual sovereignty. Competent to choose freely guided by Love-empathy and Logic-differentiation. Standing up for the inviolable character of integrity.
While I would have preferred that my arrival was everything that Karen could have hoped for it didn’t occur to me that either of us should be hostage to arrogance. The idea that we were the judge of what our time together was to mean, and if circumstances didn’t bend to our will that was their fault, not ours.
The only legitimate representative of the ego
Reverse “reasoning” that put the cart before the horse. Exemplified by Christof Koch, a prominent neuroscientist, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking. Each one postulating the outcome of their theorizing at the outset rather than incorporating it into the questions that inquiry was meant to address.
Producing, in Koch’s and Hawking’s cases, output that can’t be taken seriously. Human-ape’s brain, the proven seat of Consciousness. Hawking’s “boundaryless universe,” that materialized out of nowhere, always was and always will be, and so is its own “creator.” The physicist’s dream come true: matter creating matter with no need for Mind. The original myth behind all conspiracy theories: the big picture at the beginning presided over by a know-it-all.
And the dream of an anti-religion bigot. Like Sigmund Freud, a ferocious enemy of “God.” A champion of secular rationalism and scientific objectivism. An atheist who has no room for “faith” except that the voice behind all this grandstanding is that of the real “God.” Himself. When asked by Freudian psychologists for his opinion of Freud, Jesus of the Course answered that he was one of the “more religious” persons he’d come to know.
Recognition that Freudian psychoanalysis is religion based on “scientific” physiology rather than on any pretense of psychology. On body-brain idolatry and he the founder its “God.” Unquestioned and unquestioning. As obvious a manipulation by reverse-reflecting arrogance as the body-idolizing Church. The only legitimate representative on Earth of the ego. Jesus’ and Mind-Child’s reverse-opposite.
Littleness hitting the big time
Einstein’s output can be taken seriously. But only because it proves what his flawed Logic made evident at the beginning: that he was wrong. He had labored to overturn the evidence before him by weaponizing his formidable talents against the discoveries of physics his talents had made possible.
That the universe is not only illusory it’s split into two incompatible parts. Both incomprehensible riddled with contradictions and unsolved mysteries. Yet in between, in the sweet zone where we happen to “exist,” it’s The Donna Reed Show.
Based on the flawed assumption that because Energy had lent itself to an elegant mathematical expression so too would its “creation” – the universe of spacetime-matter. When it’s Energy, inseparable from Mind no matter what state it’s in, the Force of Spontaneity that connects cause with effect and idea with expression, that’s connected human-ape’s common metaphysical ancestor with its “creation.”
A madcap hallucination of hierarchical competition among animals for supremacy. In a temporary world of movie studio lot facades and Broadway stage settings, that Einstein devoted himself to proving meaningful and real. Not only worthy of respect but worthy of veneration, for being beautiful. Indisputable validation of the profession and universe he loved. And so of his contributions to it and himself, their source.
Another manipulation by reverse-reflection of its host’s self-unawareness. In the same vein as Freud’s lordly “atheism,” Hawking’s Olympian “quest for knowledge,” Koch’s intimacy with “consciousness,” and Anna Rosenbaum’s female-conquering “fountainhead.” Big apes chest-pounding their supremacy from the grand altitudes of Gotham. Where if you can make it there you can make it anywhere. Littleness hitting the big time.
The reverse of Real
So we’re left with a house on the campus of Caltech, stuffed with “Einstein’s papers.” The dumpster out back waiting to fulfill its mission and a jar containing his brain that maybe neuroscience will someday find a use for. None of these so-called “great minds” having paused from their grandiose causes to inquire into the nature of Mind. Into the source of spontaneous insights and their role in Sapiens’ progress. Even when Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) noted how, time and again, paradigm-shifting discoveries depended on them.
So if they’re so important why isn’t their story being told? What’s holding every field back from looking into the metaphysics behind the physics of Sapiens’ story?
We don’t know from what survived of Parmenides’ discoveries whether the father of metaphysics theorized beyond its threshold, so maybe he did. But barring that one possibility, there’s only one other that can be taken seriously. Jesus. The rest being professionals of all stripes, poets, philosophers, religious mythologizers, psychics, mystics, and physicists – all captive to sensory perception. To “realism.” Sapiens’ uncrossable boundary between the serious and career-ending speculation.
Karen King’s What Is Gnosticism? (2003) and Kenneth Wapnick’s Love Does not Condemn (1989) between them mined what there was of metaphysical thinking during and after Jesus’ personal ministry. King throwing her hands up, Wapnick complaining about excessive mythology. Both finding scant support for Jesus’ non-dualism, the prerequisite for explanation that would be both rational and credible.
My own search for evidence of Jesus’ breakthrough in philosophy and psychology has found some here and there, but nothing more than hints. Thinkers like Plato, Descartes, Bishop Berkeley, and others, who were intrigued by the boundary between real and unreal. Even, like Valentinus and Berkeley, confident that what is conventionally thought of as real and illusory is the reverse.
The Reality of Interconnectedness
And now Adam Becker, a historian of physics who, after sizing up the state of quantum mechanics in What Is Real? (2018), openly wonders if Parmenides was right. (“What Is Spacetime Really Made Of?” Scientific American (02/01/22)).
Valentinus was alone in narrating Sapiens’ ancestral exile from metaphysical Reality to an earthly existence. Limited in scope to one event in Reality-Creation – the “fall” — without letting the implications of Logic and the interrelationships of Love expand it. Back to its metaphysical antecedents and forward toward its evolutionary Ideals. Spontaneously, with intuitive insights from the perspective of Guidance, so that it could be put into context. To be understood with meaning and purpose that can’t be understood without it.
Through the story of Mind-Parents, as well as through the story of their Child and its illusory human-ape embodiments. So that the so-called “fall” is less likely to be overlaid by the misperceptions of hierarchical minds and thus turned into a weapon of corruption and deconstruction. Without context attempts like Valentinus’ to postulate anything happening in Reality, however insightful, do a disservice to metaphysics and physics both. The way that any half-telling of history does, by biasing it. Lending itself to misinterpretation and misuse.
Presuming to characterize acts and actors without bringing in other perspectives is illogical. Without weighing other interests in the balance, it’s unfair. As it is for everything, the Reality of fairness and accuracy is its interconnectedness.
Sapiens’ real common ancestor
Though it seems the reverse, human-apes are a single organism. Like aspens on the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, a single plant each accounting for a forest of outgrowths. Our species classified by zoology: animal-tribe-ape-human-ape, with only “tribe” to suggest the defining property of a living organism. Growth from a single cell. Like all matter in a universe of spacetime matter, originating with Mind-Energy, the common source of cells and particles. Biology and physics.
Which, if the Logic of physics is to stop there, leaves the questions hanging as to why and how our species evolved and what explains the phenomenon of Mind-Energy responsible for it. That require further inquiry across the boundary between physics and metaphysics if we can be persuaded that it matters and if it can be managed.
Fragmentation is one reason why it matters. Why Logic can’t stop with mythologizing a metaphysical Reality that it doesn’t understand instead of trying with its help to understand it. Because whether self-consciously whimsical or self-consciously inventive, offering different takes on a story left untold is inherently self-centered and unjust. One-sided. Like the poet John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) and the physicist Roger Penrose’s Cycles of Time (2010 UK), day-dreaming whose psychological purpose is mockery. Reverse-reflection’s campaign to obstruct a serious and essential project: to move Sapiens beyond species of tribal animal to discovery of its true identity. Of its real common ancestor and the metaphysical Home where it exists in the Now. Where it belongs.
A virtual herd of demons
That won’t happen unless and until Sapiens’ inquiry frees itself from the death grip of sensory perception. From the pretense of taking its task seriously to actually doing it. By letting Mindful Spontaneity be its Guide rather than willful manipulation. Arrogance besotted with itself. Everything around it being about itself, the uniquely toxic personality type of the narcissist. The reverse-reflection of spontaneity and innocence, Self-Awareness and creativity. Of character, compassion, and competence.
A virtual herd of animals that, when activated by hallucination, drops the ‘virtual’ to become human-ape’s vaunted ‘force of nature.’ Wildness defying the boundaries of civilization. Entitlement violating due process and regular order. Predatory and bullying, unrelatable and dangerous. Fragmenting-separating, dividing-divisive. Whether ‘real’ or ‘unreal,’ psychological or physical: de-humanizing. Dismembering, crucifying, and excruciating. Uniquely infuriating: unjust.
A virtual herd of animals that, when activated by hallucination, drops the ‘animals’ to become a herd of demons.
April 12, 2025