The Way Things Are at the Beginning
The idea behind our world
Well, look who’s here! As I live and breathe. . . . With more tales from the crypt. Entertaining, I hope. Yes. If life-stranger-than-fiction haunts your house you’ll be amused. Creepy stuff. Definitely! Hallowe’en characters with dire warnings always get my attention when I stroll by. You take them seriously? Where do you think I get my ideas? People think they’re ridiculous but they’re wrong. Why? Deep oriental wisdom. These clever characters are alive with it. My career as a savant is taking off and I owe it all to them. Hallowe’en yard art.
Intriguing! Can you share one of their ideas? What do you need? There’s only so much wisdom I can wring out of my drawing. My philosophy teacher expects words. I see your dilemma. You and your Hallowe’en zombies are going to get me out of it. OK. Let’s start with a gem I heard just yesterday. From a witch with wrinkled green skin, a wart on her ugly beak, missing teeth, and a child’s head cradled in her lap. The answer to why there’s Mind and how it evolved. I always wondered . . . what? Be patient. It will all be clear in the end. Yes. And pigs will fly.
What was there at the beginning? My philosophy teacher tapping her watch. It doesn’t matter. Whatever was ‘there’ was an idea. Anything or nothing – that could be expressed and shared through conversation. That flows forward in sequence, one thought or idea to the next implied by the first. Connected and connecting through the idea of association. Communication among interrelated lives and functions sharing ideas. Ad infinitum. Amazing! I’ve never heard of it. What is this strange phenomenon called? ‘Thinking’.
If the beginning wasn’t a void where did all these front yard freaks come from? Where do they go back to? It’s a secret. A deep philosophical question for you and your teacher to ponder after trick-or-treating is over. But my friend the witch did offer a clue. When she’s not creeping people out in the neighbor’s front yard she’s lurking around in the human Psyche. Oh no! In my holy of holies — my diary! Oh yes. Contaminating it with everything negative and contrary. Everything irrational and outrageous. Ugly and ridiculous. Perfectly awful! It’s a grab bag of carnival flimflammery. Hilarious when it isn’t horrifying. Treats for Hallowe’en diorama fans like me but not for everyone. A cavalcade of contradictions that’s constantly breaking stuff and pitting us against one another. Crazy-making! Yes. The idea behind our world.
Getting psychology right
That seems to haunt certain mindsets we come across now and then. Personality types who identify with its carnival-barker ‘creator’, claim its ‘creation’ for themselves, and go to great lengths to make it official. Official? Yes. The official version of life on Earth. The big picture they made up, and so they know everything there is to know about it. They own it. It’s their domain. And whoever strays onto its grounds or happens to be there already is for them to manipulate. Just like they manipulated the truth to come up with it. Their proud possession. ‘Created’ by a know-it-all. Unreal and therefore one-dimensional. Having only one perspective and therefore one-sided. Being monolithic arrogance and therefore unrelatable. The haunted idea of ‘God’.
These personality types don’t know they’re haunted? No. How come? Unawareness. Their state of mind in general, that covers especially anything their manipulator doesn’t want them to know. Their manipulator? Willfulness.
Every field of study is a response to the challenge presented by life on Earth: to figure out what it’s all about. To pose questions. To piece things together the way we would with a puzzle. Come up with answers that at least make sense. Because we lack awareness. The human condition. Terminal ignorance that we can only pick away at. Trace the growth of character, personality, and mind and its measure is an advance in awareness. That some personality types seek and others resist. Why resist? Is there something wrong with them? The rest of us would certainly like to know. How? By getting psychology right.
Substitutes for the real thing
To understand “other people” is to understand what’s motivating them from deep within the human Psyche. The repository of forces that shaped the way things are from the beginning, including our Hallowe’en friends’ crypt. The big picture, a haunted house from a Charles Addams cartoon. The know-it-all who made it up. A ludicrous caricature as phony as the grimacing mannequins babbling at us from front lawns. Yet an idea. That belongs not to ‘place’ or ‘space’ but to a state of Mind that must be there to think it. Aware or unaware, conscious or unconscious. In this case unaware and unconscious. The state of Mind responsible for life on Earth.
What was the way things are at its beginning? An assumption required by the idea of Meaning. Anything and everything associated with Love and Logic, the founding ideas and functions of Mind. The assumption that Mind is everything and all that there can be. Why? No matter how we approach the question the answer leads to the founding principle of idea. To the founding function of Mind that thinks it. Then Mind was there at the beginning? It was. But not in the way that self-unawareness thinks of it. The human mind. Magical thinking imagining ‘God’, the ‘supreme being’, always-is and always-was. Full-blown and fully functional astride ‘His’ land of perfection. That he ‘created’ by an act of will. As if by magic.
The way things are at its beginning was more logically a core attribute of ‘idea’: Growth or Movement. Which couldn’t have been what it is and be fully anything. Then Mind had a beginning? Yes. In the sequence of Logic which must start somewhere if not in time. Otherwise ‘idea’ and its attributes would have no meaning. And neither would ‘Mind’ or ‘Life’. Evolved and evolving because Mind Lives. Like life on Earth? Yes and no. Sharing some attributes with life on Earth but with a big difference. Arriving not from absence but from a phase in the evolution of presence. There was no state of not-mind for Mind to replace if everything is Mind and ideas. A reminder that things are not always what they seem here on Earth, where the appearance of separation rules. Where states of not-this and not-that seem to abound and their ‘replacements’ as well. Substitutes for the real thing. More magical thinking.
Grow up!
The seeds from which Mind grew were ideas. Ideas with attributes. Their definers that make Growth and Function, Life and Movement, definitive of ideas. Definitive of Meaning, itself an idea.
Once our thinking takes in the Meaning of ‘idea’ it becomes obvious. What becomes obvious? That there was no way that there could be a ‘beginning’ of “the way things are” without all of these attributes coming together in one event. Spontaneously and sequential. Interrelated and orderly. Of necessity, because that’s the way things are. Ideas. Living, moving, growing, and functioning with meaning. Growing like a flowering plant. With a bloom? A beautiful bloom. Mind that’s Relationship. Growing, evolving, accessible, and thus relatable.
Two aspects of the way things are that have their admirers on Earth. The power of ideas and the beauty of Mind. But not admired by everyone. A lesson I learned from pursuing Loving Friendship, an ideal taken from Reality here on Earth in unreality. A lesson in hard knocks, from trying to relate. That I wouldn’t have learned from Plato’s Academy and his descendants. Academics, though they do have much to offer. From being taught, but from my teachers here on Earth. Personality types who aren’t relatable.
If Love from our own personality type’s Psyche motivates us then we will seek to relate to others in Loving Friendship. To grow in our understanding of what it is and what it does. Through experience that’s rewarding, pleasurable, and positive. That can be painful and negative when we try our luck with unrelatable types. But never mind. If the ultimate reward is Learning and Growth it’s all the same. Our metaphysical Self is a child, and we, emissaries of self-unawareness, are children. We’re here to mature. Can there be any question that, for all its technological wizardry, Sapiens needs to grow up?
Reverse the reversal!
We can be grateful to simpatico types for the joy and fulfillment they bring into our lives. As you have done for me and I hope I’ve done for you. Though it’s counter-intuitive we can also be grateful to our opposites for their contributions. Pain and outrage? Were it not for being thwarted in my attempts at Loving Friendship and the pain and outrage it’s caused – yes. I would have lacked a critical element for my insights. What? Resolve. Perseverance. Motivation. Creation is evolution and evolution is Growth. In this life, where striving is confronted by No as often as by Yes, Movement forward can falter for any number of reasons. Any number of excuses, and this puts a premium on motivation.
For me, overcoming adversity put there by willfulness is a great motivator. The challenge of resistance to manipulation that would provoke me into being remade in its own image. Repugnance, for that’s what it is. The Creature from the Black Lagoon. That nevertheless drives me toward ever greater efforts to evolve. To grow and create. Were it not for striving thwarted by opposition – an unrelatable personality type with whom I once thought myself in Loving Friendship – I might have coasted in neutral over the past six years. I might have experienced life as not much happening. Instead of what it’s been: eventful and meaningful. Happy in its own way, and for all I know the best way.
How can this be? Because of what it’s produced. A rich harvest of ideas that don’t know when to quit. Like I’m on steroids! Where so many of my peers are drooling on the veranda my problem is calming down. An example of what can happen when the force behind adversity is harnessed for personal growth. What else could it be harnessed for? Retaliation in kind. Letting repugnance remake us in its own image and returning the favor. It takes motivation to resist. Taking pain and outrage, weapons of self-destruction, and beating them into plowshares. Into something useful. Productive. Self-improvement.
I view my function as the reversal of reversal: a voice coming back from questioning to question its flip side. The voice of self-defeat. Whether or not I can be silenced my function cannot. As for the voice of self-defeat it makes no secret of where it’s headed. The only question is whether it can take everyone down with it.
The overriding Ideal of Worth
Self-Awareness comes with the realization that experiences like this, of harm inflicted upon us by ‘others’, is misunderstanding. That requires getting it right. Understanding who they are by understanding who we are. How? By making use of our gifts. Above all Mind. That can think with the discipline, judgment, and order of differentiation. That can reflect with the gift of intuition. Evaluate with the feeling of Empathy. Motivate with the limitless power of ideas. The raw material of Creation that present us with circumstances to comprehend. With situations, each in their uniqueness, alive with questioning meant to bring each of us to life.
Personally, that cannot be accomplished so long as we allow ourselves to be manipulated into tribes. Into herd mentality, the enemy of Movement and Creation, Learning and Growth. Whose cause and effect are denial of Person. Denial of individuality, originality, and creativity. Paralysis, the enemy of personification, personality, and personal growth. The enemy of Freedom and Free Choice.
Living expressions of an idea: Life in motion and in relationship with itself. Person, whole for being in Loving Friendship with Guidance. The only way that the individual can relate. The only way it can grow to maturity, through two lives growing together in mutual support of Self-Worth. Can form Loving Friendships and learn from them the destination of Self-Awareness. That can’t be entrapment in embodiments and arrested development on a planet of apes. In an animal kingdom of hierarchy constantly at war, bent on self-destruction, but the function of Free Choice in the Reality of Creation. In another dimension, where there is Life with Purpose and Purpose with Character and Integrity. The way things are with Meaning. The overriding ideal of Worth.
When the leaves are turning
Self-Worth. The target of manipulation. Its provocateurs and their provocations. Pushing back on Learning and Growth that would obliterate ‘justification’ for injustice. The arrogance of the manipulator who would steal the self-worth of its captives. Why? So that it can presume to be their betters. Entitled to rule without opposition. Supreme in its inaccessibility and unrelatability. At the pinnacle of hierarchy on its exalted throne. What throne? The throne of worthlessness. Everything make-believe. Everything an act. Entirely dependent on its audience of fools to maintain the deception, who would know better if only they hadn’t surrendered their minds. To their ‘leader’: herd mentality.
All roads from herd mentality lead back to the same place. Over and over. To ‘place’ that isn’t place. The imaginary big picture. The big answer overseen by the know-it-all. That offers up a ‘paradise’ of ‘place’ outside of Mind. Outside of Movement, where nothing can exist. Nothing is possible.
What put what’s not ‘there’ ‘there’? Think of a forest in the Colorado Rockies. Aspens connected by the same root system. A single organism. When the first shoot breaks ground it may appear to be solitary. But because of its nature it’s not. It’s a system. Mind is a system. Thoughts with functions that are part of a larger function. All interrelated, so that when one appears it can’t be alone. Every other part of the system tags along. Like it does with an aspen shoot.
Shoots that grow organically, each in sequence, until they produce a forest. A way of visualizing how Mind evolved, one function at a time. Not from the top down or outside-in but from the inside-out and bottom-up. From presence rather than absence. Not an act of will, controlled and controlling, but of Spontaneity, that no will could touch. A notion at odds with religion’s insistence on a ‘God’ of eternal almightiness. All-powerful and all-controlling. Where the emphasis isn’t on compassion or creativity but on invincibility and supremacy. A role model for herd mentality. Insensibility sated with cruelty. Brought to Hallowe’enish absurdity in a forest of separated bodies, all interconnected within the one Mind thinking them. Imagining themselves one in unity with herds caught up in wars of dismemberment.
But so be it. This isn’t an encomium to invulnerability; it’s but one person’s take on one event in evolution. Mind-Relationship destined from the start to become a fully operational, fully active system because of what it is and what it does. Because of the function its constituent functions determine that it perform: Creation. An expression of all that’s meant by the Ideal of Movement. Like a forest of aspens in the Rockies on a crisp fall morning. When the leaves are turning and you’ve never seen anything so beautiful.
Mind is of good character
An expression of the Ideal of Definition. Defined and definitive. Powerful and beautiful because of what it is: the nature of a thing. Its Logic. The ideal of Character. Like the character of Henry David Thoreau. Mind with a perspective, self-defined and self-contained, that could never be mistaken for another or manipulated by another. By willfulness into being other than what it is: Integrity. Freely chosen and freely expressed, and so competent to Guide. To serve as a role-model of Self-Worth.
Like another: Jesus, who exemplified the power and beauty of Conscience. Socrates, Joan of Arc, and Thomas More. Abraham Lincoln, Marie Curie, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks, John Lewis and Martin Luther King. Among the living Robert Reich, Rachel Maddow, and Chris Hayes. More than leaders – inspirations. Never more needed than now. Role models for me; likely others for you. Whatever their names they’re all models of Character. Defined and definitive.
Descendants of the Prototype. The Character of Mind? Yes. Before we commit our fortunes in relationships with others we size up their character. We “take the measure” of the person if only intuitively, and it’s no different when we commit to our sense of who or what brought us here. Consciously or sub-consciously, with or without reservation, we groove with it on the way to making a statement. Declaring ourselves. Telling our stories.
It’s to Mind’s Definition that we look for Guidance, from Definition that we receive it. Its Character. And if we’re getting it right – differentiating with empathy – we’re understanding that Mind is of good character. If nothing else from the way that it evolved. Its founding statement and declaration, that it could never have happened if it were willed or willing. If it were the curse upon humanity of herd mentality. Predatory animal instinct. Willfulness.
The great comings-together
The two most elemental functions of Mind that account for the most elemental functions of Life, evolution, and Creation – Movement – are Love and Logic. Being the source of Mind’s creative Self – Relationship, the source of Self-Awareness and its illumination, – their coming together to form Mind-Self Relationship is also the power of attraction that activates, interconnects, and interrelates all the elements of Mind-Relationship / Creation, all the movements of evolution, and all the steps in the before-after sequence of Mind-Love-Logic feeling-thinking. The power of ignition.
The definitive act of evolution-Creation at the beginning was accomplished by the two attributes of Love and Logic: Spontaneity combined with Order. Definitive because these attributes define the nature or Logic of Reality-Creation: the way things are. Its Definition, constitution, and Conscience. Its founding principles and values.
Two attributes of Spontaneity and Order account for the definitive act of being and doing in timeless Now: Energy combined with direction. The two elemental functions of Definition that together form its central function of Guidance. The doing of Definition, the usefulness and gift of Guidance from Mind-Relationship illumination Self-Awareness for all of Life.
The coming together of Self-Awareness / Life with Guidance accounts for Creation’s attribute-cause of Good, for the Character or nature of Reality-Creation as positive, for the direction of evolution forward.
The coming together of Freedom with Order, attributes of Love and Logic, accounts for the Creativity of forward movement disciplined by Conscience.
- The integrity of all of Creation is its Worth, the product of the Relationship / coming together of Guidance with Mind’s autonomous function of Choice, its being of one inseparable piece with Mind-Relationship but its doing carried out independently. There being an element of Movement-evolution Life-Creation that is and forever remains indeterminate. Mind’s freedom to act in accordance with Guidance, its own nature or Logic, the way things are, as it chooses. The nature, the Worth, Character, and integrity of Life-Creation: that it cannot be contained, captured, limited, owned, possessed, tamed, controlled, or willed into being or doing anything that it doesn’t freely choose, independently and Spontaneously. The Life Force of Mind-Relationship Self-Awareness Creation cannot be caged.
The function of Guidance inseparable from Free Choice Character with Integrity is not to dictate, to answer, but to question. That Mind Free Choice may itself fit together considerations in logical order to form answers for its guidance in addressing change. The changing circumstances, the evolving situations, of Movement. Thus to proceed-progress toward ever higher levels of Self-Awareness through Learning-Logic and Life-Love / Growth combined with Choice. The controlling / definitive element of direction.
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The Willfulness of Manipulation
Still standing like a stone wall
“There stands Jackson, like a stone wall!” The Confederate? ‘God’s will’. Still standing after you’ve assaulted the idea of ‘God’. Why? Isn’t it the bulwark of Conscience? The line no one wants to cross if they know what’s good for them? The enforcer. The idea wielded by the Church to instill fear in its flock. By any tyrant to ensure compliance with its dictates: fear of authority. You’re not ‘God-fearing’? No. This doesn’t put me at odds with the Course; but Jesus does invoke ‘God’s will.’ And this does put me to questioning a critical source of Guidance.
Why? Because it leaves no space between Benevolence and willfulness, Loving Kindness and cruelty. A linguistic defect perhaps, but I see it differently. As one with the need to convey the idea I translate as ‘Definition’ that Jesus conveys as the ‘Father’. Meaning ‘authority’, a reference to Mind-Relationship but with a no-nonsense chip on its shoulder. Don’t mess with me. Yes. Appealing, perhaps, to the authoritarian Freudian psychologists who asked for Guidance and published the book. But not to me, a Jungian. Understanding that Movement and Definition are the way things are in Reality. Understanding, also, that the way things are in Creation is questioning. ‘God’s will’ implies exemption from questioning. Exemption from the Character and Integrity of Worth earned and freely chosen. Maybe my thinking should grant it, but that’s not where it is now.
Mind-Relationship doesn’t need an enforcer or any kind of will to do the enforcing. What I believe it needs and offers is Guidance that’s Spontaneous. Reliably helpful, harmless, and definitive. Relatable. Enough for me because psychologically it works. Maybe not enough for you. The human Psyche, susceptible to herd mentality, seems unable to conceive of its Creator unless it carries a club. ‘God’s will’. I’m afraid so. If that’s how it is with the Course. If Jackson is still standing like a stone wall.
The importance of Spontaneity
“Defined and definitive.” “Evolved and evolving.” Meaning wrapped in wordplay? The meaning of ideas, yes. Past tense / present tense, subject / object – the grammar of wordplay when it captures an idea. What idea? The connection between what a thing is with what it does. Where in Reality, a thing is and therefore has a function. It does. “Created and creating.” While, in unreality, there is neither. No ‘is’ and no ‘does’, only the appearance of it in a reversal of Reality. That we can characterize as Realityplay. “Manipulated and manipulating.” “Unreal and unrealizing.” “Misunderstood and misunderstanding.” “Possessed and possessing.”
A shorthand, grammatical way of highlighting the disconnections of unreality generally; here the disconnect between cause and effect, thought and expression, object and function, purpose and meaning. The internal ‘logic’ of a distortion. A lie: that it has no logic and can only be meant for confusion, deception, and distraction. The perpetrator does to others because of what has been done to it. “Judged and judging.” A perversion of the function of Self-Awareness that’s Relationship shared (between Love and Logic) and sharing (with Creation). Victimhood-hollowness taking as opposed to Abundance-fulfillment giving.
Isn’t ‘defined’ what’s been done to Mind? It could be if there were anything outside of Mind to do it. But what distinguishes Mind’s interconnectedness from the disconnectedness of our world is its self-sufficiency. What needs to be done for it if there were anything outside of it is done by itself. How is this possible? Through the agency that accompanied, and was built into, the first act of Movement. Spontaneity. The phenomenon for which there is no word to describe it, roughly translatable as ‘Now’. That the Course calls the “Holy Instant.” Spontaneity plus Order plus Energy. Movement’s most elemental functions. Beyond which metaphysics would need a Large Hadron Collider if it needs to be any more elemental, but it might not.
You’ve cracked the code? Only so far as the power of attraction is understandable through the idea of ‘ignition’. The crossing of two wires that start an engine. Love with Logic. It’s as far as I’ve gotten. The explanation for how Mind could define itself and yet be objectively subject to its own Definition. Could function under the law instead of above it, genuinely unable to change its own constitution, to redirect evolution. The importance of Spontaneity can’t be overestimated when its absence would be catastrophic.
Worthless gestures of kindness
Then life on Earth must be in trouble. ‘Spontaneity’ as our world defines it is supposedly captured by the idea of ‘random’. The appearance of stuff happening for no rhyme or reason whenever. By accident or mistake, either way unintended. Unpredictable and chaotic. When reversal is entirely derived from the way things are that’s entirely not chaotic. The ‘method’ in Hamlet’s ‘madness’. Chaos is method despite appearances, and lacking the Logic of Spontaneity it’s predictably self-destructive. It does mean trouble.
Manipulators who trust to ‘fate’ for their guidance and protection imagine themselves roguish Double-O-Sevens at the Baccarat tables. Testing their luck while flaunting manly fearlessness. Taunting “God’s will” with a pair of fuzzy dice. Throwing off the weight of Guidance to be the master of their own fate. They aren’t? For as long as make-believe holds up it may seem that way. But there’s no ‘strength’ in intentional self-unawareness no matter how bedazzling its theatrics. What’s for show needs a climax to bring the curtain down. What would that be? Self-destruction. The more violent the better. That’s if reversal of the way things are means anything. Meaningless entertainment that ends with a bang, and then the show is over.
In the world of make-believe entertainment the guiding principle is style: whatever is fashionable at the moment. Where ‘fashionable’ is determined by herd mentality. Today it’s action on animal instinct without consideration for relative benefits and costs. For reasoning, choosing rationally, acting with aforethought. Shooting from the hip. Preference being given to blunt force wherever possible since the object of animal instinct is show of strength. One-sided ruthlessness in competition-combat, dominance of the enemy. The theatrics of blood and soil — tribalist and racist. With no credit given for listening, explaining, understanding, or empathizing. For all gestures of kindness, dismissed as worthless for being signs of weakness.
To Brazzaville!
What are manipulators missing? Everything so long as their heads are buried in the sand. Like physicists stupefied by particle behavior. Nils Bohr and Albert Einstein trained in philosophy, who could have understood it but never did. Put their faith in matter and forgot about Mind. Can Mind exist or function with elements of it racketing around separate from it? Functioning on their own as if under the influence of another Mind? If everything is Mind it’s got to be interconnected and functioning under its own direction. One system whose parts all interrelate, where only one break would bring the whole operation to a halt.
The consequence all of us could expect, including physicists, if particles were not ‘entangled’. What experimental science discovered with the supposedly occult field of quantum mechanics was the obvious: that separation isn’t obvious. Our universe makes a great show of it. Human self-destruction, its endless glorification by the arts and entertainment, thrives on every form of replicating it. But it makes no sense. And if it doesn’t then it’s just more evidence of make-believe. Of herd mentality conspiracy-theorizing that will carry on until Sapiens, or what’s left of it, tires of it. Tires of the inanity of ideas that make no sense. Of evolution — Creation’s source of Movement forward — moving backward. Abandons its theatre of the absurd.
Watching itself make a fool of itself, and takes off on a journey to somewhere. In company with Guidance. Maybe to Brazzaville. At the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Yes. A destination that makes sense.
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The Evolution of Mind-Relationship
A lesson in grammar
How did Mind evolve from ‘presence’ rather than ‘absence’? If the know-it-all’s big static picture is nonsense then all that’s possible is perspective. One way of looking at things out of many, that can’t be THE way of looking.
What would be THE way of looking? The big picture-answer that’s only ‘possible’ as an act of will. “It is because I say it is.” “I willed it into being, so shut up.” Make-believe. The slops of magic served up to the religious who will believe anything. ‘Religion’ synonymous with delusion. The ‘will’ of its ‘God’ synonymous with arrogance. The appearance of ‘opposite’ that’s atheism. Uncompromising faith in its own divinity that by any other name is religion. Sigmund Freud, Francis Crick, Stephen Hawking — all competing for burial rights next to Pope Urban VIII.
This is the mindset conjured up by the mirror of anything goes when it was triggered by the first Movements of Mind. An undefined implication of reversal coming along when Movement began its progression from possibility to Reality. From the first shoot of Love that metaphorically broke ground side by side with Logic. Because even though it took Love to initiate Movement it took Self that’s Love’s Relationship with Logic to do so.
Metaphorically? There was no ‘ground’ already there at the beginning. Otherwise we would have to concede that the big picture wasn’t make-believe. “Broke ground” goes with “the first shoot of Love.” Even so, doesn’t ‘Movement’ imply change from an existing condition? Language borrowed from the way things aren’t. Like trying to describe artificial intelligence with terminology from a Burma Shave roadside ad. There couldn’t have been an “existing condition” if the first Movement was an awakened Mind’s first idea. Movement forward.
As it might be when you’ve slept in on a Sunday morning, the room is flooded with sunlight when the blinds are pulled, and your first thought is ‘awake’. In the echo chamber that’s anything goes the first Movement within Mind, undeveloped and inactive, would produce its contradiction: any variant of movement backward. The first implied reverse-idea in the sequence of evolution. Inactive in Reality, the appearance of active in virtual reality. Where life on Earth is at odds with itself. Asleep thinking ‘awake.’ Yes. And vice versa.
Though its devotees insist otherwise, the reflective idea of movement backward could not have been thought first in the sequence of evolution. The static big picture was the first make-believe spinoff from the evolution of Reality. The original mischaracterization that could not have happened if characterization had not preceded it. A lesson in grammar. Will herd mentality will ever learn it? Not so long as it continues to look outside of itself obsessed with numbers. Not so long as it fails to follow where insight from intuition leads by looking within. To the granularity of the way things are. To seventh-grade grammar. Yes. Basics.
Homo Sapiens. Homo Erectus
The initial Self. Reality’s equivalent of Person that breaks ground here on Earth. Where ‘life’ appears to deny system, deny interrelationship, by first denying Person. Fragmenting it into incompatible personality types who then sort themselves into tribes. That then ‘connect’ by decimating one another until one rules supreme. While its kingdom on Earth is vanishing into mass extinction.
Time for another visual! Space ship launch. From what, a pad? This is Movement. Change. Whose launching pad is in dispute. Here on Earth, though not in Reality. One view being that the point of origin is the aspen grove just coming to life. Mind, the thought system whose evolution begins with the first sign of Movement that we visualize as a space ship. The existence of Mind implied by the first sign of Movement. The other view being that Movement pushed off from the fantasy we’ve described as the big picture. That was there in place before Movement. Disturbed by this outrage because it had everything covered and didn’t need anything else. The voice of arrogance ready to deny facts and assert arrant nonsense in order to preserve itself. Make-believe.
The idea of place outside of Mind that’s static and unchangeable. Religion’s treasured mischaracterization of ‘heaven’, that it’s perfect. An unchangeable status quo that’s not to be questioned lest we invoke the rage of its ‘creator’. ‘God’. When Creation takes all its living elements that share in Creation through successions of what might be thought of as ‘places’. The coming together of circumstances when they offer opportunities to make something of them. Something new that fits when Character with Integrity listens to what the situation calls for. When it responds with differentiation and empathy by relating instead of willing, adding to Self-Worth instead of detracting.
Functions that can only be performed by Persons. Not by herds. During “interesting times’, when things are in motion. Presenting opportunities to listen for meaning, to respond with sensitivity, purpose, and creativity. To put our mark on Movement. Instead of consulting the oracles, circling the wagons, and getting out the Winchesters. When ‘tribe’ is in its element and willfulness in its glory. Poised to ‘triumph’ over ‘others’, reflections in a mirror. The moment when ‘Sapiens’ has its chance to climb the mountain. Take a stand. Demonstrate that it isn’t captive to the ‘animal’ in ‘human-animal’. Captive to herd on all fours but standing erect. Upright, on its own two feet. Homo Sapiens, Homo Erectus. Yes. Person. The sojourner gifted with two legs to stand on, a destination, and a spaceship.
Backward and down
The Movement we visualize as spaceship is an idea. Setting forth from its Source, Mind accompanied by a rider. Put there by the absence of the big picture: a mirror that reflects the idea of anything goes. Questioning everything implicit in the idea of Movement. Why? Because if there’s no big answer then one perspective is as good or legitimate as another. There is no central codifier of laws to say which of any way things are is THE way. No supreme court of knowledge. No supreme court of conscience. Any perspective that would assert itself must be its own proof of authenticity. And it can’t succeed in this purpose without constant questioning. Of the way things are and of itself.
What is willfulness? What is arrogance but the idea that this can be done on the cheap? Effortlessly. Without questioning. Without Learning and Growth. Everything an act of will. Instead of striving. The idea that to be possessed worth need only to be invented or stolen. It need not be earned. The rider on the space ship is getting a free ride. It contributes nothing to propulsion. But in life on Earth, where it’s got its hands on the controls, it contributes to repulsion. To movement backward and down.
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The Psychology of the Flip Side
The grand validator of our unreal world
Back to where? To the big answer where there’s no movement. To the psychology of self-destruction that lies at the root of human evolution. The ‘bad thing’ in the human Psyche that Freud sought to extirpate while looking in the wrong place for it. In brains and bodies. In guilt inferred from extracting physical pleasure while causing and attracting psychological pain. The pain of breaking social taboos. Inciting disapproval from herd mentality, our lord and master. From the discipline of religious faith in the name of scientific objectivity. Its lord and master, Freud.
William James inaugurated psychology in 19th century America with a fundamental insight. That it’s divided into two dominant mindsets, and they don’t get along: ‘realists’ and idealists. Sigmund Freud came along with additional insights, though they focused on the psychoanalytics of realists rather than on mindsets per se. Rather than on personality types which became a preoccupation of Carl Jung. Whose intuition freed him from bondage to body-brain senses to explore wherever Mind and its spontaneous insights led.
Did he come upon the “bad thing?” No. Though he and his Myers-Briggs collaborators made amazing progress. At home in the world of ideas and talented with both differentiation and empathy. Superb analysts, adaptable as one would expect from the intuitive. In contrast to Freudian pseudo-scientific dogma. Religion by any other name, substituting the preconceptions of arrogance and Freud the preconceiver for the free spirit of inquiry. Presuming ‘objectivity’ while putting an end to questioning. To intellectual integrity, and in the process ending his partnership with Jung, Freud’s questioner.
Intuitive psychology then took us up to the threshold of discovering what I believe it was looking for. That lay beyond professional and academic boundaries that would allow it. What boundaries? Sensory perception. Body-brains’ five senses: taste, touch, smell, hearing, and vision. The same barriers to discovery today, because the psychology of anti-movement continues to hold ‘realists’ in its spell. To manipulate the animal side of human-animal into defending ‘body’ with herd mentality. “Conventional wisdom,” while opposing Mind that’s personal integrity. Individuality that thinks, reflects, and intuits with its sixth sense. Freely and independently. With initiative, originality, and creativity, instead of locking it all down inside a mental and psychological cage. The body and its brain. The gold standard of appearances and self-deception: sensory perception. The Grand Validator of our unreal physical world.
The language of ideas, the language of communication
You discovered something that Jesus didn’t lay out in the Course? Guidance from spontaneous insights supports our choices to learn and grow. It can’t make them or it would negate our purpose here. To build character with integrity and in the process learn how to choose freely. The Course sticks to the scope of the request for it. It didn’t need to go all the way back to the beginning and it doesn’t. To the beginning of time? No. Time is of our world not metaphysics. To the first traces of Movement in the before-after sequence of Logic. The beginning of Growth. The phenomenon we think of as evolution.
You found what they were looking for? A perspective that may be interesting. Why? Because even though none of its elements can be original the way in which they’re assembled could be. Or at least unusual. Interesting if from this perspective we can tap the potential of questions and insights to produce fruitful answers. Answers that help Persons navigate away from mischaracterizations and their source instead of toward them. That help with Learning and Growth grounded in the way things are instead of the way they aren’t.
I crossed the threshold into metaphysics not as an act of will but spontaneously. As an act of Mind guided by its sixth sense You mean. . . Guided by spontaneous insights into the way things are when perception isn’t limited to physical appearances. By the five senses that tell us they’re there. Why didn’t Jung and Myers-Briggs cross the threshold? Weren’t they guided by their sixth senses? They were. But they were inhibited by professional and academic standards that frown on ‘speculative’. Sixth sense is ‘speculative’. The same standards that kept Karen King, a Harvard Divinity School scholar, from referencing the Course in her study, What Is Gnosticism? Even though the label ‘Gnosticism” does fit the Course.
The Course arrived too late for us to know whether Jung and Myers-Briggs would have crossed over if they’d read it. But not too late for me. The Course is invaluable for its methodology as well as for its insights. Love and Logic brought together instead of separated. Affect with principle, empathy with differentiation, psychology with philosophy. Systems thinking. Releasing the full potential of ideas to help with Understanding. The language of communication and the language of ideas – one and the same.
Sorting things out, thinking things through
Jesus says so in the Course. Your language – idea-speak. Getting there. Once I was provoked by manipulation into changing my Mind change came on a scale I’d never experienced before. Through the flow of spontaneous insights. The language of ideas. That led you to the ‘bad thing’. To my perspective on it. The event I’ve tried to describe that was the first stirring of Movement precipitated by the first stirring of ideas. The coming together of Love with Logic, functions that ignited the first stirrings of Mind, Self-Awareness, and Creation. On and on.
All of it accompanied in principle by its flip side. The unhappy camper I’ve characterized as a reverse mirror-image. Opposed to Movement and all that it implies. This was the bad thing? The bad thing that includes camp with camper. The idyllic ‘paradise’ of no movement to which the code of the flip side would have all Movement return.
The flip side has a flip side? The principle essential to Creation of self-questioning. All of Creation held up to a mirror of self-examination while it goes about its business. Trying to do its homework and get it right. Obliged to do so in the absence of a supreme court of answers. In the ‘presence’ of its replacement: “Anything Goes.” A slapstick Vaudeville act performed in the theatre of the absurd. ‘Sponsored’ by the flip side. Featuring starring performances by the demons of “Ghost Busters.” Soundtrack by Spike Jones and his Orchestra. Produced and directed by The Three Stooges. Who’s Spike Jones? OK, Benito Mussolini and the NBC Orchestra. Much better!
By knowing what it’s doing? By doing something with the gifts of Mind-Relationship that can defy the ablest minds among us: sorting things out. Thinking things through. Identifying the parts, the elements, of the way things are; getting a feel for their meaning; listening to them; and only then proceeding to put them together. In a way that responds to the challenge of the moment. When times are interesting. Alive with Movement and loaded with consequence as they are now. Asking that we understand their meaning and we can’t get it wrong.
Creation is Relatable
If Freudian psychoanalytics helped with understanding the ego it was because it was the ego that ruled his personality type and its mindset. Its mentality, which displayed unmistakable characteristics of herd mentality: one-dimensional atheism, which denied the existence of ‘God’ to make room for the ego. One-sided perspective, to forestall its transgression by any other. Differentiation reduced to dogma. The object of questioning. recast as victim entitled to pity. Instead of beneficiary, who deserved and received empathy from Jung, his questioner.
Freud was silent on understanding our Real Self, naturally enough since in its grandiose mythology the ego replaced it. Jungian personality type theory helps with understanding the ego and our Real Self both, by distinguishing between the Mind type centered on Person and its opposite, the body type centered herd. Between Mind-Self’s personification and herd-self’s embodiments.
Conflicting ideas about who we are, linked to our origin in metaphysics, and who we aren’t, imposed on us by physics. By our universe of spacetime-matter and our planet of the apes – cages for existence denied the freedom of Movement. Of Learning and Growth that, someday, will grow up and be done with self-unawareness, make-believe, and paralysis.
Because Jung was led by intuition into the realm of ideas, Jungian psychology gifted us with the notion of archetypes. Without which Logic couldn’t sort things out. Personality traits couldn’t sort into the patterns that explain who we are and what we’re about. Metaphysics couldn’t tell its story without mixing with ‘mysticism’, ‘spirituality’, Tarot, and astrology. As it is, analysis does well enough on its own. Where ideas and their archetypes dwell, in metaphysics. Where the story of Mind and Reality, evolution and Creation, can begin to be told. The story of its questioning and the implications of what was learned. The source of the “bad thing” in the human Psyche, that can’t be limited to this ‘reality’. To life on Earth, where the wounds to Psyche couldn’t have originated.
Creation is compositions of ideas-relationships that evolve and form in response to the changing circumstances of Movement. To situations that call upon Choice earned and learned from experience to choose among their possibilities freely. To express through its Character the Worth inherent in the Integrity of their Source. The Ideal of Loving Friendship. Vulnerable and imperfect because, in the presence of Movement, in the absence of a big picture, it’s not invincible. A know-it-all. Because it’s Relatable.
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The Psychology of ‘God’
Conspiracy: the only possible wrong
What invests the flip side with the attributes of darkness? What demonizes it? Why does Movement then move against itself in an ear-shattering grinding of gears? How does it take harmlessness and innocence, defenselessness and goodwill, and turn it into a wrecking ball of malice? A predator behind a mask of benevolence? An executioner?
If, in Reality, it is but a logical implication, undefined, relying on its host for the attributes that do put it ‘there’ at all. The idea of impossibility. Reversals of every working part of possibility. A no-we-can’t reflection of the little red engine that can, headed down the mountain instead of up. A mission stenciled ‘Impossible’ assigned to commit wrongdoing instead of foiling it. What brings it to life and personalizes it when it’s not-life and not-person? So that its imaginary provocations can sting and turn its targets against themselves. Against their own interests in a paroxysm of retaliation and self-destruction.
The Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. A conclusion that might have been mistaken since even artificial intelligence couldn’t dig up every last shred of evidence. But for the mentality of its critics more evidence wasn’t needed. Questioning personality types given over to the flip side of one Mind-Self, interconnected and interrelated by its constituent functions, Logic and Love: a herd of mindless animals, driven by predatory instinct to disconnect and un-relate its competitors. To rule supreme.
One-dimensional for being but an appearance. One-sided for excluding Mind’s sixth sense from sensory perception, thus limiting itself to the perspective of a reflection. Incapable of reflecting, as a shadow is incapable of casting a shadow. That must be reflected in the presence, identity, and acts of ‘others’ or cease to ‘exist’. Unable to comprehend, trust, accept, or recognize any portrayal of events unless the figure portrayed was a herd like itself. Unless the events portrayed were caused by its members and validated their agency. Not the agency of one self – an impossibility – but of many conspiring. The only possible explanation for wrongdoing if herd-self is the only possible perpetrator.If conspiracy is the only possible wrong.
The shadows of their own existence
What, then, would account for the dismembering of a pathetic, self-pitying individual yearning for Love and affirmation? For recognition and acceptance? The will of wildness manifest in herd mentality: to demonize, dehumanize, and dismember the ‘enemy’. Whether it’s a chimp that strolled into the wrong part of the jungle, or a body attired in the wrong color that wandered into the wrong neighborhood. Or an existential threat to the legitimacy of an idea: ‘herd’ brought to the brink by ‘Person’. Any form of ‘self’ that’s not-herd. That if it’s not destroyed, might expose ‘herd-self’ for what it is: a caricature.
A story idea meant for the theatre of the absurd. Where the object is to distract with the magic of make-believe. To engage and entertain with a gift for humor and making things up. To frighten into obedience with a gift for intimidation and self-willed invincibility. To deceive with a gift for appearances. Taken from the surface, the only possible source of the superficial. The ‘birthplace’ of the actors its audience loves, fears, and loves to hate. Brought to ‘life’ by the mentality of ‘animal’, wild and willful. By an imagination at home with anything goes. The king of beasts – a cartoonist. Hard at work on his masterwork. A joke.
Despite the unquestioned character of the Warren Commission and the integrity of its process, its conclusions were stampeded into the dust. Twisted into validation of a Machiavellian beast that stops at nothing to have its own way. When not to have its way confirms its impending doom at the hands of those conspiring against it. Abolitionists conspiring to take away its slaves. Public safety advocates conspiring to take away its military-style weapons. Democracy advocates conspiring to outlaw its brownshirts. Everywhere agents provocateur lurking in the shadows conspiring against it. Reflections of themselves that they must destroy. At any cost, including the shadows of their own ‘existence’. Dogs chasing their tails. Herd mentality.
The bad
This is the bad thing? A reverse-reflection inseparable from its host. And so impossible to get rid of. That can only be managed. Reverse-reflection of what? Of the element of Creation that’s indispensable to its Worth. To the point of it all or there would have been no motivation for Movement itself. Fundamental. The idea characterized as Free Choice. That’s either performed with Character, Integrity, and Grace or it’s a bag of wind. Differentiating with empathy or it’s a dumb animal. Risking mistakes and failure without a safety net or it’s chicken. Relatable for real or only pretending to care. Like everyone else. A phony using its talent for make-believe to manipulate its way through life. At everyone else’s expense. At the expense of its self-unawareness: a reverse-reflection.
We pay a price? When the flip side of Free Choice is let out of its cage the price we pay is calamity. Herd mentality loosed in civilization. Where it doesn’t belong. Where persons relate one-on-one in accordance with the way things are, in civil society. Guided by principles and values taken from Mind-thinking and feeling. Motivated by Love and Logic to get it right, to do what’s right, and do it right. Motivated by Conscience. By the Good, now upended by a creature from the jungle, motivated by expedience. The rule of anything goes. The law of dog-eat-dog and devil take the hindmost. The bad.
Without interference
The bad? Wildness. An idea derived from Beauty, Free Choice at its essence. Idealized by Movement from its beginning: Loving Friendship in a shared environment that has no need of Order. Love that has no need of Logic, the other side of its Self. That can revel in the boundaryless. Where it originated, the first stirrings of Relationship and Growth. That had no need of Learning to be what it is: wild. The Beauty of Love in the wild. The Beauty of Choice so Free that it needn’t serve any cause, be judged by any values, disciplined by any principles. That it can fly on its own without needing Guidance from Conscience. The prerogatives of life in an unshared Creation.
In our unshared world of herd mentality. The bad thing. The idea lodged in the human Psyche. The reverse-reflection of the idea ingrained in the Psyche of Love before it attained the status of Self with Logic. Before, together, they put their indelible stamp on Creation. The limits of Definition. The limits on anything absolute including Freedom. When ‘absolute’ is defiance in the face of sharing. The ultimate pretense of herd mentality: that it’s absolute. It can do whatever it wants, be whatever it wants. To exercise absolute freedom in the presence of anything goes. Where only it exists and nothing else. Where nothing is shared.
Sounds good! Our metaphysical Self trains here in the presence of anything goes and its embodiment, the herd, to learn the hard way: that ‘anything goes’ cannot include an unshared world. And so we learn to get along together. How? By managing our personalities and mindsets so we can work together. Or at least stay out of one another’s way, as our metaphysical Self and its Parents must do in Reality. Once their Child has reached maturity and competence to perform its function autonomously, without their interference.
The savagery of mindlessness
Management of our differences can’t be attained without respect for wildness. As an unattainable ideal ingrained in boundaryless Love and the Free Choice of Self-Awareness. An indispensable part of Motivation. Without understanding that it’s also an unattainable object ingrained in the boundary-crossing madness of herd mentality. Opposed to choice and opposed to reasoning that would make it possible. Relying instead on predatory animal instinct, the ‘gift’ of mindlessness not having to think. Not having to differentiate with empathy. Not having to be human.
Not good. Not if it would silence the note from Puccini’s Turandot that touches the human soul with the indescribable. From Nessun Dorma, when the artist’s practice led it into the realm of Spontaneity and something beautiful happened. An affirmation of Love’s presence. Not if it would silence the lyric from Rodgers and Hart’s Where or When, that lifts feeling from gravity into the weightlessness of levitation. The feeling that anything is possible if it can be so touching.
Moments of sensory perception that belie its purpose, when feeling joins with reason and hope. To silence the will of wildness and give expression to wildness of another kind. Complete without the protection and Guidance of boundaries. Without the Beauty of Order. The Spontaneity of Love: unbounded and wild. To be cherished and admired in our world of predatory instinct instead of hunted down to extinction. The image of a magnificent buck that brought The Deer Hunter to a close. Saved from extinction by a rare moment of release. From bloodletting. The herd doing its thing. The savagery of mindlessness at war. Self-unawareness.
The ’God’ of the analyst
We live to be moved. And when we are, to Create. To re-enact Creation at its origin with an act of Spontaneity with Order. That’s definitive. That redefines Creation with new-fresh perspectives from / on the changing circumstances of Movement. ‘Movement’ = Life. We live to experience Life. The reward that comes from the Character-Worth-Integrity of Creation earned and freely chosen. Not movement brought to an end with the impossibility of whole-number resolution. Mind and energy brought to inertia, but with a pause for inner peace and reflection after all involved have gotten it right. Have functioned as one family of individuals of one Mind. United not by the force of herd mentality but by the sharing of reciprocity in Loving Friendship. Giving and receiving that’s giving back.
It’s in the nature of the way things are that it’s the Movement forward of Learning and Growth that can’t be one static know-it-all big picture. That it’s perspective that requires questioning in order to define itself and find direction. In order to produce and achieve, imagine and free-associate, with creativity. That questioning requires that it question itself and, for this reason, everything that makes up the way things are, every element of Creation, is self-questioning. Including the Reality of Creation and Mind-Relationship itself. Including its Definition. That though it can’t be a static big picture know-it-all in the presence of Movement Self-questioning in Reality whose ‘Self’ is everything, and therefore not self-centered as it would be – and is – in unreality, where it implies unawareness of, and indifference to, a world that’s shared with others of equal worth.
The self-questioning of Reality carries only the implication of a flip side. A source from which questioning originates that contradicts its subject. That turns subject attached and guided into object unattached and misguided. Where Mind unconscious and self-unaware might hallucinate virtual reality its self-questioning activates flip side and makes it explicit. Produced within mind the condition of being two minds at once. Holding thoughts that conflict. Thoughts combined with feelings and energy that account for human reasoning, judgment, and behavior. Conscience. The discipline of the Good, rendered impotent by its flip side. Machiavellian expedience. Herd mentality, nihilistic and cruel. The character and nature of evil. The dark side of self-questioning: self-defeating.
Are we putting it into words? Into ideas for which there are no words. That can’t be expressed in the language of self-defeating. That can only be questioned, and this for now is one result. Inarticulate and imperfect. Definitive only for what it excludes: the body-sensing willfulness of herd mentality. That looked for wildness of the wrong kind in the taboo-breaking behavior of Freudian psychology. In ‘guilt’ tied to nothing: the peccadillos of sensory perception. A foolish distraction, when the ‘bad thing’ it was looking for lurked in the mind of the analyst. The wildness of the absolute. Inaccessible and unrelatable. The bad thing. ‘God’.