Boo-Boo the Dog-Faced Boy Tells It Like It Is

Getting to Why

 In the language of ideas

I’m Boo-Boo. Recipient of “Dog-Faced Boy” for good reason, though that was long ago. “Telling It Like It Is” for good reason too. Here and now.

David Brooks’ farewell column in the Times (January 30^th) gives his impression of where things stand, admirable for intellectual integrity but a philosophical muddle all the same. The usual balance between encouragement and discouragement, what’s right with the world and what’s wrong. Praise for the good guys, finger-wagging for those who don’t measure up. A treatise on the What of things that would edify with the Why of things if it could. But David, like most thinkers, doesn’t know how. So he does what erudition and intellect are good at: piling on more Whats. Leaving us to wonder Why.

We can’t get to Why until we get into metaphysics. Where life’s facsimile on Earth has its origins. Where all of spacetime-matter has its origins since matter is Energy, Energy is inseparable from Mind, and everything is Mind. Beyond appearances, but thinkers won’t go where angels fear to tread if it involves theorizing. If it involves going where Parmenides theorized with Logic 2,600 years ago. To conclusions that earned respect among his peers. Bringing Plato to the brink of concurrence until he backed off. Left his philosophizing ‘unfinished’, as though it needed more work.

When in fact it didn’t need more work. It was finished. He was afraid that if he went full-bore on Parmenides he would be finished. Teacher excused, class dismissed.

Aristotle took up where Plato left off and ape took off in another new direction. From human-ape playing with the faculties of Mind to manipulating matter with brains and bodies. From creating-idealist, subject questioning, to dismantling-realist, object answering. The objectification and desecration of Life. Tool-making to biology to technology to weaponry. Under the guidance of bumbling doctorates into the hands of their creation: Frankenstein’s monster. His finger on the button now with nothing to stop him but street protest ditties.

With dogged persistence

The branch of philosophy known as metaphysics was founded by Parmenides’ Eleatic School of Logic. Its signal contribution to Western Thought was the idea that there’s something fishy about matter. It’s ‘there’ but it’s not really there. Physics today, stumped by Einstein’s miscalculations, Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation, and quantum gravity petering out into unprovable theories, is finally wondering if Parmenides was right. Far from the divine order that Plato and Einstein thought they detected in the universe, it’s looking more like chaos. Another Laurel and Hardy fine mess.

Yet the cream of erudition and articulation like David Brooks, upright, conscientious and principled, personable and accessible, still fear to tread. Won’t theorize. Dare not follow Parmenides behind appearances. Why? Because they’re afraid they’ll be caught in corpus delicti with the Wizard of Oz? Putting up appearance to cover appearance?

Boo-Boo telling it like it is doesn’t fear to tread. With dogged persistence he’s given full rein to Mind that wants to tell its own story. Without being manipulated by appearances. Without being told by the arbiters of conventional wisdom what to ask and whether it’s OK to answer. For fear of offending the manipulator. That’s got a stake in the outcome and doesn’t want to be one-upped. Body idolators at the helm of science, philosophy, psychology, and theology. Authoritarian infallibility whose primacy outweighs all other considerations. The know-it-all presiding over make-believe’s big answer at the beginning.

Wisdom from Felton, Minnesota

I’m happy to give the David Brookses of this world their due. Aristotle too, because poking around with matter has been fruitful even if it’s put us all on the brink of extinction. Our anything-goes world is a mixture of contradictions not only all true but all true at the same time. Richard Feynman’s ‘sum of histories’ nailed more than the behavior of itty-bitty particles. He described everyday Bedford Falls reality.

Good for them! But absurd as it may seem, I’ll take Boo-Boo’s shots at understanding Why to their inconclusive, feckless Whats any day. This essay isn’t a farewell. I’m just getting started.

Not without me you’re not. Please introduce yourself. A friend of Boo-Boo’s who doesn’t put up with his bullshit. And you’ve picked me to torment because? You fancy yourself someone who doesn’t put up with others’ bullshit. Who’s entitled to hold others’ feet to the fire. I do, it’s true. You can tell from the rotten tomato blotches on my apron. Well, just so you know, you have feet too. Mind what they say in Felton, Minnesota: “Your ass is grass and I’m a power lawnmower.” So be it. My feet and my ass.

Tells it like it is

You’re my questioner. With a question: what’s with the title? Doesn’t begin to tell me or anyone what this is about. More bullshit? 

A prominent figure in my theorizing is a know-it-all. A king of make-believe since obviously no one knows it all, that was around at the beginning of everything but only in theory. An adjunct to the situation with no existence of its own. A logical implication, definition in reverse of what was really happening. A mirror-image reflection or shadow, unable to speak. A questioner like me? The flip side of the original questioner. Which makes it the prototype flip side of the flip side of everything: the ‘questioner’ that’s a divider. The king of bullshit. The original liar. Who can’t gum up the works in a theoretical state but can do so when stuff theoretically happens.

What kind of state would that be? In a dream, when Mind is out of its mind. Active and thinking but not in its right mind. Delusional. Hallucinating. When anything theoretical at the beginning can be imagined and it would be ‘seen’ and ‘heard’ just as though it were ‘there’. Cool! Virtual reality. When can we begin? We already have. Life on Earth. Bullshit! The evidence is everywhere. Like what? Books like Jerry Martin’s God: an Autobiography and Mari Perron’s A Course of Love. The voice of the know-it-all speaking in the clear. Lying its ass off. Presaged in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov by the idea of lawlessness and its personification, the devil conversing with brother Ivan.

Astonishing but true, that make-believe is so prevalent in our world that it’s beyond serious. It’s mistaken by a university philosophy professor as the word of ‘God’. Institutionalized by artificial intelligence as the word of ‘Jesus’ when it’s the opposite. Total bullshit.

How does it get away with it? Sapiens broke from ape with its ability to differentiate and empathize. Only not every human-ape got the message. A whole lot of us don’t differentiate and empathize. Do tell! Some of us can tell the difference between truth and bullshit sometimes, but in virtual reality concocted by make-believe no one can tell the difference all the time. So, “tells it like it is” is at least trying to be truthful. To let our audience know that they’re not being lured into a carnival show or a Vaudeville act in the theatre of the absurd.

Boo-Boo’s Big Adventure

I get it! But then you’re inviting us right back to absurdity with “Boo-Boo the Dog-Faced Boy.” He does have a serious side, doesn’t he? My earliest self-identity and nickname when, too young to remember, I performed an act in imitation of the family dog. I’m leaving no doubt that in matters of metaphysics I see myself as a dog. Territorial and protective. What needs protection if nothing is physical? The idea of Parents, who were character-assassinated by the know-it-all when their Child was duped into hallucinating our world. An act of injustice that I take personally.

Of course! You were there and took a dagger to the heart. Or was it a stab in the back? Both, actually, if this has ever happened to you. But. . . For reasons I’ll get to later I love our metaphysical Parents, to the point of identifying with them and their cause. And as a physical parent I’ve experienced the same mischaracterization. It’s no fun. I know it’s all to satisfy our purpose. What’s that? To attain Self-Awareness in the self-unawareness of make-believe. It’s why I write. But leaving myself undefended against the pain and outrage of injustice can’t make sense under any circumstances. The self-unawareness of make-believe here is the dividing kind, not just the questioning kind. It means to make its victims suffer. Think 1930s Germany. Think 2020s America.

The dog in me has its own purpose, to teach the know-it-all a lesson by giving it a dose of its own medicine. Pain and outrage that will keep it on its own side of its boundaries. Territorial. Like all animals, but notably descendants of wolfpacks that were expert at marking and protecting their boundaries. Tribal separation, an act of division. You want your readers to thrill to justice done when someone’s ass gets bitten.

What we’re learning isn’t limited to its usefulness here — the point of this essay. It’s for use in Creation, where Reality isn’t make-believe virtual reality and Guidance is central to its functioning. That needs the attributes of a dog. Loyalty that’s Character with Integrity that can help Life-Creation align with the way things are. Exuberant with joie de vivre and the spirit of Freedom that’s not absolute. It’s Freedom contained within the limits of Order. Relative. A function of Definition. Guidance, that’s needed in Reality but never more so than here. The Child’s training ground in our land of anything goes. The house divided by absolutes. Hurrah for Boo-Boo the Dog-Faced Boy!

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Pottersville

The Why of Character 

Starting with a look back at Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). A wistful meditation on the spirit of humanization that rose up in response to humanity’s dehumanization by Depression and war. As though to prove our essential goodness before we inflated self-regard and indulged in excess once again, when the all-clear sounded. Why did human-animal descend into Depression and war to begin with? What prevented the uplift from It’s a Wonderful Life from lasting beyond it? Why did idealism give way so readily to ‘realism’?

Are wistful meditations the best we can do? Or can the wellsprings of human motivation be made to yield their secrets when the darkness returns? Are we still little kids who can’t be trusted with the facts of life? To look at ourselves in the mirror and see what’s there without making stuff up? I’m always the fairest of them all, so don’t be messing with my mirror. And my makeup either. Yes. You’re a girl.

May we proceed? We may if you’ll favor us with a hint of where we’re being railroaded. The working title of this essay was “Questioning the Character of Family.” Questioning being an attribute of Definition when it functions as Guidance. Character being an attribute of Guidance when it’s learned and freely chosen its function after a period of rigorous training. When it’s earned the trust and respect of Family who depend on its guidance. Which is to say every part of Creation that can be characterized as Family. Including its originators and facilitators as well as those in the field, since otherwise it would be a dictatorship.

“It’s a Wonderful Life” is a marker in the building of Character necessary for Guidance. As is “Casablanca” (1942), another film of the same era and genre, both of which are antiquated social relics. Out of step with the mores of today, and so a warning sign from metaphysics that whatever this life is supposed to be about it’s not ‘wonderful’. It’s strayed from its purpose, and maybe thinkers like David Brooks and others should drop their inhibitions and follow our lead. Start giving serious thought to what metaphysics has to say to us.

Metaphysics? To what Creation has to say, through our connection to Guidance. What connection? Our Mind’s eye. Our sixth sense, intuition. The faculty of Mind that Carl Jung exploited to lead psychology to the threshold of Creation. That Jesus demonstrated with A Course in Miracles (1975) when he took us across the threshold to explain part of its story and relate it to our psychological hangups.

A faculty of Mind that allows Sapiens to think creatively in science, philosophy, psychology, and theology that are otherwise hidebound by sensory perception. Body-idolizing ‘realists’ bumping their noses up against the same old questions and the same old appearances with the same old perspectives. Without coming up with answers that need to look beyond appearances. To reframe questions from new perspectives. Instead of filling bookshelves with distractions: erudition and flights of make-believe.

Depriving Mind, Heart, and Soul of the insights that Learning and Growth need. Leading Sapiens to believe that it’s at least holding its own when, in fact, it’s sinking back into the conditions that produced these markers. Depression, war, and now mass extinction. Ratcheting up the doomsday clock to 85 seconds to catastrophe while we enthuse about artificial intelligence. So, maybe we should dig up these antiquated relics. Reflect again on their meaning and let it include their metaphysical roots. The Why of Character and its importance today. As we’re about to do.

Frank Capra’s George Bailey 

George Bailey’s effect on life in Bedford Falls was the Christmas spirit applied year-round. Acts of kindness, in contrast to acts of another kind that were associated with “Pottersville,” named after Henry Potter. The local Ebenezer Scrooge minus the Christmas spirit, who would have made life not so wonderful had George not been there to prevent it. Pottersville was a ghost story meant to frighten the unwary away from exploitation by a manipulator and abuser. A predator, specially skilled at bringing its victims to the same state as itself: inhumanity. Lifeless, heartless, and soulless. Personality minus person.

Everything wrapped up in the meaning of ‘number.’ So much a part of everyday life that it’s hardly noticeable. Like ‘quantity’, the idea given birth by number and its impeccable credentials. Detectability and measurability, and so worthy of respect for being objectively ‘there’. Not to be questioned, and yet there it was, in Frank Capra’s film, being questioned.

And here we are, revisiting his film. “It’s a Wonderful Life,” an annual staple of Season’s Greetings. Removed from the war and Depression-era conditions that produced it, thus removing us from what it’s telling us. About who and where we are: inhabitants of Pottersville. T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land of human numbers trudging through life under the merciless rule of king number. A grim apparition portrayed by Henry Potter, the last word on profit or loss, win or lose, worth or worthless. Whose death-grip on family and community was lifted momentarily during hard times, when the director of “It’s a Wonderful Life” gave us a real-life George Bailey. 

Alone at the top 

Mercifully free of the rule of king number, Frank Capra (1897-1991) flourished when the times called for everyone being there for everyone. When the distinctions of number lost their mystique. When rank no longer mattered, nor going along to get along. When getting through was all that mattered and it didn’t call for a game of Monopoly. It called for acts of kindness. To which he responded as Churchill to the threat of defeat: with the voice of authority. Born of personal conviction, raised on the values of a world shared as one. Of the people, by the people, and for the people instead of number, by number, and for number. Of subjects for relationship and service instead of objects for manipulation.

“Capra’s basic themes of championing the common man, as well as his use of spontaneous, fast-paced dialogue and goofy, memorable lead and supporting characters, made him one of the most popular and respected filmmakers of the 20th century. . . . Capra’s films were his love letters to an idealized America—a cinematic landscape of his own invention. . . . ‘The art of Frank Capra is very, very simple: It’s the love of people. Add two simple ideals to this love of people: the freedom of each individual, and the equal importance of each individual, and you have the principle upon which I based all my films’.” — From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 11/30/25

 Capra’s career in entertainment went from boffo to blotto overnight when post-war prosperity took we’re-all-in-this-together and replaced it with I’ve-got-mine. Every man for himself. With competition and self-interest, conditions favorable to comparisons, winners and losers. To those adept at games, and so favorable to number, the origin and guiding spirit of all of it. Arch-enemy of the values that Capra and his generation stood for. Deserving of the “greatest generation” for the quality of life they fought for. Honorably on principle. With the wisdom and patience of understanding that number is neither everything nor the only thing. Not when quantity comes and goes but Character can’t. Not if Integrity is what makes life worth living with Meaning instead of a game of make-believe. Without life or meaning, alone at the top. A number.

To hell with George Bailey

Capra, a native of Sicily, brought something of its Catholic Christian sensibility to his art. Role-modeled by the character of Jesus, an individual in a world of sharing shared equally. A political as well as a religious paradigm that Capra thought he recognized in American conservative ideology. At one time associated with a Protestant ethic of self-reliance, supportive of Jesus and opposed to an overbearing Church. Until it was overtaken by the ethos of ownership and free-market economics. The addictive force of numbers and the insidious force of competition.

Whose measure of success in an unsharing and unshared world is coming out ahead. With more in a zero-sum world that also means less for the competition. Whose measure of failure is failure to preserve, protect, and expand ownership. The creed of materialism to which an opposite creed of materialism was the inevitable response. Setting up an ideologically vapid battle that has yet to end. Materialist-capitalist ‘right’ vs. materialist-Marxist ‘left’ — an H. G. Wells war of the Machiavellian worlds.

Capra’s Italian Catholic-Jesuit conservatism, outgoing, unselfish, and spiritual, made an odd couple with American-Protestant conservatism, self-centered, transactional, and corporeal. Capra’s version ideologically allied with Jesus, unwilling to render unto Caesar if Caesar was a bully. Which he mistook Roosevelt for when desperate times called for leadership and Democrats answered the call. An offense to Capra’s embrace of person against imperium, unacceptable even when person in extremis needed help from Democracy.

Thus it was Republican-capitalist self-entitlement arrayed against Democratic-liberal empathy that Capra mistook for ‘liberty’. The term with which ‘conservatives’ prefer to waive the public interest in favor of undisciplined private interest. The ‘force of nature’ – predatory animal instinct – with which the ‘freedom’-loving right imagines itself exalted. Capra’s mistake was paradoxical then but would be especially so now, when Republican ‘freedom’ has become synonymous with bully. With ICE-wielding brownshirt fascism. Where now does “Party of Lincoln” fit within “Republican?” The estimable ideal of human dignity now being dragged through the mud. When all the rendering is to Henry Potter and to hell with George Bailey.

‘Business leaders’

Henry Potter was a cliché borne of the times, and Pottersville, his namesake, an elaboration of his role. The heavy — target of opprobrium. A money-lending capitalist who aggrandized property, converted ownership into authoritarian dominance, turned his community into a company town, and ruled it with cold-hearted efficiency. Whatever it took to earn a profit and protect the bottom line. A mean-spirited skinflint to fit into the play, predictably since Potter had become number. Identified with the idea of it to the point where all that he recognized in humanity, of himself and others, was calculation. Statistics that lend themselves to manipulation.

One of many mutilations of the human Psyche. This one a wretch in times of scarcity but not exactly a monster. That would be the demagogue who has his way with everyone. Like Huey Long in Louisiana and Adolf Hitler in Germany, arch-manipulators of the same era, adept at bending fools to their will. Notably ‘business leaders’ whose cachet proved to be something other than leadership. Smiling agreeability. Fecklessness in the face of arrogance, that posed no obstacle to it then and isn’t doing much better now.

Smitten once again

Thinking Roosevelt a demagogue and a bully Capra could have modeled Bedford Falls without George Bailey on FDR’s mis-character. That he went instead with the Depression-era whipping boy may owe more to political winds and box office prospects than to his art or conviction. The investor-class wretch had to be the heavy. The bête noir of the Great Depression: the financial services industry caricatured as a money-lending predator. Feasting on the talents and businesses of borrowers gone into default. Geniuses like George Westinghouse, superior in creativity and character than their financial manipulators yet no match for them in avarice. In manipulating shoe-shine boys into a stock market shiny with get-rich-quick lures, then reeling them into destitution.

All the doing of Machiavellian capitalist expedience. Conceived in the minds of its casualties as a system rigged for the benefit of wealth. The target of Marxist intellectual sophistry with a taproot of moral and psychological verity: rage provoked by unkindness. Gratuitous and insensitive, unfair and unjust, inhuman and inconceivable. In a world recovering from a double-dose of it. From Depression and war, starved for kindness. Where our world seems headed now, no longer drawn away from the abyss but once again toward it. Back down into depression and war. By the culture of numbers smitten once again with the allure of shiny things and their ‘creator’. The money-lending, ‘job-creating’ caricature. A predator, Henry Potter. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Fraction

 Irresolution

A life that’s ‘wonderful’ eventually gets to wondering about life that’s not. The state of mind that’s Capra’s ‘Pottersville’. Forbidding with hostility. A nightmare of dissonance and despair, populated by soulless lives resigned to entrapment as though they were animals in cages. Which they were. Behind the bars of numbers. Manipulations not for their benefit but for the benefit of the manipulator. The head numbers guy. Mr. Potter. The bad guy and his habitat: the abyss. Trespassers in the house of God: the money-lenders who attracted an instant of rage from one individual and eternal damnation for Shakespearean shylocks from generations of racists.

Getting it right is Bedford Falls, getting it wrong is Pottersville. And the difference is George Bailey. And Clarence. Yes. George and Clarence together. “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Miracle on 34^th Street” together. The Christmas story of humanity and its guardian angel done for another year. It’s a wrap. Yes. Case closed. Except that it’s not. OK. Back to Pottersville. What did we miss? Nothing. Capra nailed the cliché. Then back to Bedford Falls. What did we miss? Nothing. Same again with the cliché.

Flipping between good-guy Pleasantville and bad-guy Mean Streets may seem logical but it isn’t. While happy endings to magical tales may seem to validate Sapiens’ inherent goodness that’s not what it validates. Don’t tell me. It validates the mindset of the know-it-all. The big-answer dude hawking its no-movement make-believe ‘paradise’? The one and the same. A flip side but with a major distinction. It’s the flip side of a flip side.

The way things are isn’t a set-piece between Good and evil, the way it’s been portrayed down through the ages. Where the only alternative to perfect peace is total war. That’s make-believe. A lie that only serves the purposes of the big liar. It’s something else in between. That can be thought of as a fraction. Theoretical because being incomplete — in a state of irresolution — it can’t exist. Not a whole number but a number in a perpetual state of division. Like pi, the fraction that refuses to resolve into a whole number because it can’t. It’s emblematic of the way things are.

The philosopher

A suitable characterization in the absence of the know-it-all’s big answer. Why suitable? Because “the way things are” isn’t one either-or possibility either. We’ve got two flip sides and two way-things-are? You can put it that way. “The way things are” is typically picked up after Movement initiated happening rather than before. What’s to pick up if there was no happening? We’re talking about the situation at the beginning in all of its ramifications, and one of these came before Movement in the sequence of Logic. Theoretically but not really. Yet of no small significance since it figures in the function of Mind ignited by Movement.

What function? Problem-solver. What problem? Self-contradiction. A problem for philosophy to solve which it did. When Self-Awareness distinguished between what is and its reverse-reflection what isn’t, recognized what is in the enumerator which came first, and withheld its Awareness from the denominator, its reverse-derivative which came second. Which is why it’s on the bottom. Both could not exist at the same time, and this is how Mind the problem-solving philosopher reconciled the two sides of fraction. A pillar of Logic that underpins the way things are. The distinction between Reality and unreality. One that belongs on top, the other on the bottom. Right side up in Reality. Upside down in unreality. Life on Earth.

Mathematician

That’s it? No. There was the problem for mathematics to solve. The dynamic at the beginning was questioning. But the denominator play-acted by Henry Potter would venture beyond questioning to wrongdoing if unrestrained by a problem-solver. Intention to replace the enumerator. How? By division. What for? So that it could anoint itself the one-and-only number. So that it could crow from atop its hierarchy that it, and it alone, was the object of it all: a whole number. So that Henry Potter could push George Bailey out of the picture and Pottersville could replace Bedford Falls.

Hierarchy? No accident that fraction is one thing on top of another, because it’s the metaphysical root of hierarchy. Characteristic of life on Earth. A magic ‘kingdom’ of inequality and unrelatability. Where ‘supremacy’ rules and all that matters is ‘winning’. The source of the moral rot characteristic of hierarchy. Ass-kissing Machiavellian expedience. Authoritarian infallibility the primal ass to be kissed. The highest order of being at the top of the pecking order. A big ape. King of beasts.

Then Mind the problem-solver didn’t solve the mathematical problem. It would appear that way when viewed from our perspective. In unreality here on Earth. But in Reality it did. When Self-Awareness distinguished between Real and unreal it automatically severed the threat of the wrongdoing of division from the necessity of questioning. Allowing questioning the good flip side of the enumerator what-is, the necessary part of its Definition what-isn’t, to function in Creation, while relegating division, the negative side of denominator’s questioning, to another state of Mind. Where its disruption could play a positive role in self-unawareness unreality that needed it. In the training of the other state of Mind for the role of questioning and Free Choice in Creation.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” The biblical proverb repeated by Abraham Lincoln whose metaphysical roots go back to our mathematical problem. How to maintain the structural integrity of a fraction if that’s the way things are and it’s dividing itself. You let the denominator question the enumerator, which is constructive, and move the unconstructive division part to another state of Mind designed to handle it. By putting it into self-unawareness and using it to train questioning in how to avoid dividing.

Cool! I wanna be a mathematician! Then you can choose whether to divide or go forth and multiply. If I’m an authoritarian parent I can do both. Then you might say I’m too clever by half. And Elvis just left the building holding his nose. 

The power of friction

Fair to say if the situation at the beginning weren’t philosophical and mathematical problems there would have been no need for Mind. Or at least for the ignition of Self-Awareness and Creation, for neither one called for the faculties of Mind that would be needed later. Farther on in the sequence of Logic. In unreality, evolution’s self-unawareness phase suited to training. Where questioning would have to be augmented by Free Choice and Free Choice would have to acquire the attributes of Character. All so that Mind-Child Free Choice can supply the element of self-questioning that Life-Creation needs for its Integrity. The true ‘Lost Cause’ rebuking America’s current ‘leadership’ from its place of honor within the Lincoln Memorial.

The faculties of Mind needed for Choice. Reserved to Mind-Child who must be allowed to choose in error if Choice is to be Free. If it’s to have Integrity. That cannot be assumed by Mind-Relationship Parents. The Self-Awareness and perspective of Life-Creation that shares and grows but cannot on its own supply the self-questioning of Free Choice needed for its integrity. It must come from another perspective. Moved by a source of Energy that’s not compromised by its affiliation with Creation’s Creator. By Mind’s inseparability from Energy.

What would that be? One logical candidate would be from our friend the fraction. The power of friction between one number and another grating on it to make something happen. And God said, “Let there be light.” That would be the Power of Attraction. Motivation for disparate functions bonding with one another spontaneously without friction. Questioning is a pain in the ass. You! Well, yeah. Sometimes. You do like me a little, don’t you? Just stick to the point and I’ll think about it. 

What a pain in the ass needs is Energy for friction that comes from friction. Not from attraction, and here we have a ready supply. Inexhaustible, because pi will keep dividing itself forever. So, Mind the clever problem-solver noticed that this fraction was generating electricity and thought, hmmm, we can’t let this go to waste. Exactly. It sent division off to the unreality of self-unawareness with a portable generator. Its own power supply that can’t be disconnected by Creation’s Creator if it doesn’t like being questioned.

It’s all coming together. You’re seeing the light. I’m blinded by it. You need sunglasses. Aviator style so you’ll look cool and people will think you’re important. I’m already important, but sunglasses won’t hurt.
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 Personalizing the Metaphysics of Mind

Two kinds of awareness

‘Thing’ is, before all else, a thought or an idea. That requires Mind to think it. So, there’s no point in concerning ourselves with ‘things’ that aren’t of Mind. But we can wonder about their nature — what they are and what they’re for. The nature of a thing is its Logic. The Logic of a thing is its structure. That does what structures do: provide a space or arrangement of spaces for movement within that holds together. That holds up with structural integrity. Everything fitting together, everything in its proper place. Interconnected.

The idea of fraction at the beginning would appear to be structural in nature. Whether it holds together is a test of theory. Its structural integrity, and that’s another test: application to facts on the ground. To specific situations in their context, always a work in progress in the presence of Movement. More than any ordinary mind can handle. More than any credentials can handle no matter how dazzling. But with spontaneous insights from intuition anything is possible.

And self-questioning. Yes. From the same source as our insights. That treats ideas as subjects both living and loving, like families interconnected by the implications of Logic and the interrelationships of Love. Integrating philosophy and psychology into an entry point for understanding the way things are. Beyond appearances. Beyond objects and manipulations, for a look into what is and what isn’t. What’s Real and what’s not. Beyond physics into meta-physics.

The metaphysics of two functions of Mind and two kinds of awareness.

• Mind-Parents Self-Awareness, always busy with Reality and Creation. Doing what Parents are meant to do: providing motivation for Life-Creation and Growth through the examples they set for Vision, Ideals, Character, Integrity, and Striving. Providing structure and direction so the work and play of their Creations will meet the tests of Conscience and Definition. Handle situations in the same free spirit of adventure, ignition, and Movement as their Parents. Putting Creativity on a solid foundation by supporting every part of it from the bottom up. With Relatability: Love and Spontaneity combined with Logic and Order.
• Mind-Child Self-Awareness, learning how to Question from Character with Integrity. How to Choose Freely. Getting schooled in the perils and manipulations of self-unawareness. Learning how to handle a variety of situations in the virtual reality of a training cockpit. Life on Earth. Conditioning by simulations of headwinds to become one itself and fulfill its role in Creation: pushback from a friend. Who won’t put up with a friend’s bullshit.

A definition of ‘friend’ that I can definitely support. So young and already gaslit by friends. Already fed a bunch of bullshit, but let’s leave it at that.

A gift from Guidance

Any questions? The two functions of Mind are differentiated by one ‘Parents’ and the other ‘Child’. Where Parents set examples for Child to follow. Yet Parents at the point of Movement’s ignition must have been children themselves. Evolving like all living things, all Creations, from conception to maturity. Is the idea of evolution built into the examples they set? Definitely! ‘Child’ is a stage of Self. Mind-Relationship, the prototype Self, was inchoate as its constituent functions before they fused into one. Love with Logic and Energy in the Now.

Afterward, Self-Awareness began its Life, its story, as a newborn. Set like any newborn to evolving and maturing: in its situation through the situations addressed by its Creations. Its perspective broadening and maturing through their work and play, dealing with changing circumstances, adapting to new situations. Arranging and rearranging new compositions of ideas, principles and values, to fit the circumstances. To respond to what situations called for with statements in support of Life in Loving Friendship.

Not all that unlike life on Earth. Aren’t changing circumstances making us adapt too? The example just described is our Parents role-modeling an approach to our situation that works. An approach that embraces Creation’s attributes of evolution, mindfulness, and Creativity. Of understanding the purpose of our situations, that we’re to learn from them. To let them help us grow out of predatory animal unrelatability into the capacity for Loving Friendship. Into Free Choice capable of independent judgment. Character with Integrity competent to question the way things are. Understanding that the difficulties and challenges of situations are our friends, not our enemies. Opportunities to Learn and Grow, not unlike the example set by our metaphysical Parents.

Sounds like the I Ching. A catalogue of situations with thoughts implied by different permutations of each. That can help us navigate through cross currents of circumstances and feelings when we’re not sure which way to go. All based on the idea of ‘situation’: characterization of points in the sequence of Logic. Of Movement and evolution, where direction is needed to keep change on track. When it can only be provided by discretion. By differentiation and empathy in service to Mindfulness rather than willfulness and wildness. In service to judgment and discipline that respect the limits of Movement and Creation. The necessity of wisdom that comes with Guidance. From the I Ching, a gift from Guidance.

Persons

Everything comes back around to ‘relatability’. What is it besides being nice? Personable. OK. Everything comes back around to ‘person’. Put the two together and you’ve got your answer. An idea, but what do I do with it? Reflect on it. Sure, and waste time I need to do other stuff. Go ahead and do other stuff. But while you’re doing it keep an open mind. Respect the way Mind works. Get out of the way so ideas can come of their own accord. Get rid of the idea that we’re our own authors, because we aren’t. Only an authoritarian would think that. A manipulator who’s being manipulated. The supreme scriptwriter of make-believe. Its own magic kingdom of anything goes scripted by the supreme puppeteer.

‘Personable’ begins with the situation at the beginning. Movement ignited and Self-Awareness illuminated by the Spontaneous power of Attraction. Activation of the original ‘Self’: Mind-Relationship. Prototype for every self to follow, the sharing of Self-Awareness through Creation. Prototype for its facsimile in self-unawareness hallucinating: ‘Person’. Whose function and mode of operation – its M.O. – must be to personalize. Why? To make what it’s doing and the way it’s doing it relatable. Starting with making itself relatable.

Mind-the-Creator had to make itself relatable? Wouldn’t it have been easier to crack skulls? An authoritarian would think so — skulls are being cracked as we speak. But in the absence of one big impersonable answer, cooked up by an unrelatable, skull-cracking know-it-all, the way things are has to go in a different direction. ‘Perspective’. An idea as abhorrent to the authoritarian know-it-all-answer as ‘question’. That translates into ‘personal’. ‘Perspective’ doesn’t become relatable until it becomes personal, and that applies to everything. If a thing strikes us as relatable then it’s been personalized.

Then make this metaphysical stuff relatable and maybe I’ll stay awake. From the moment Love put down the first seed of Growth the process and structure of Movement was personalized. All of Reality-Creation that ensued was a personalization by and of the Self-Awareness that motivated it. It was personal to Mind-Relationship the original Self and prototype for every Self to follow. Including its Child-Mind and its dream-projections – us.

Then your take on the way things are is personalized to you. No question. I’ve been groomed for this moment by everything that’s gone before in my life. To personalize the way things are to my character and personality, my talents and training, so that its relatable to me but also relatable to others. Why others? Because ‘others’ are Persons. The first requirement for relating to one another is that we do so recognizably as Persons.

Not-persons

As opposed to authoritarians, not-persons. Doggedly resistant to Movement, who flee to hierarchy where relatability is impossible and therefore evolution too. Because Movement’s ignition at the beginning and the prototype Self were Relationship, and authoritarians want no part of either. Their buffer is a substitute. A substitute for Relationship? For that, for Guidance from the prototype Self, and for Person:

• Comparison-competition substituting for relationship and herd-tribe for person. ‘Winning’ plus ‘belonging’, an irresistible combination served up in a toxic blend of mind-altering substance abuse, grandiosity, and ‘sociability.’
• More social-partying: camaraderie tribal style — frat boy sports bar band-of-brothers tribal maleness. Girls-night-out Louise Lasser kaffeeklatsch sisterhood tribal femaleness. Substituting herd-worth for self-Worth.
• Political partying: go-along to get-along ass-kissing corruption, littleness and hypocrisy, substituting herd-worth for the Character, Integrity, and sincerity of self-Worth.

Simulations of ‘relatability’ whose purpose is to block it. To undermine trust and honesty between individual Persons. To eliminate all possibility of Loving Friendship.

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Questioning by Jesus

Beyond relatability

The task undertaken by Jesus was heroic. Maybe the most heroic in all of human history, of making Guidance relatable. Which required in our world of personhood that it be personalized. Not only to our situation as a whole but to each individual’s situation. Difficult for sure, but why heroic? Because the authoritarian side of human nature that’s herd mentality insists that ‘God’ be made in its own image. Not-person and unrelatable. So, when Jesus personalized his mission and made it relatable to individuals it posed a problem for the authoritarian mindset. How to remake Jesus and his mission in its own image and attach it to the support he earned among individuals.

A task the Church succeeded at, but only after Jesus had to die. For the offense of questioning the way things are. For introducing another perspective not of this world and welcoming those into his company who were open to seeing things differently. Headwinds for authoritarians who demanded obedience to their will, and that meant to the way things they willed them to be. Not subject to change, and so Jesus and his headwinds had to go. Questioning had to go. The message from the cross is DO NOT QUESTION.

Jesus brought questioning and headwinds from Creation into the wrong environment. Wrong for his personal survival but also right for his lesson. Where it’s needed by human-ape humanitarian-individual in favor of evolution, though unwelcome by ape-human authoritarian-tribe opposed to evolution. The result was a tradeoff: propagation of Jesus’ humanitarian teaching and example by authoritarian infallibility on condition that neither be questioned. Claiming divinity for Jesus so that authoritarian infallibility could claim divinity for itself.

Mean crushing nice

Which meant divinity for embodiments since that’s the form that ‘self’ takes in this life. Body idolatry. All of it based on the premise of hierarchy. Putting everything human – body-brains, minds, and psyches – beyond relatability.

Nevertheless, the damage had already been done. What damage? Love. In offering Loving Friendship to persons Jesus shocked and amazed an entire species conditioned by herd mentality to ignore it. In favor of herd-worth and belonging, the authoritarian substitute for self-Worth, its enemy. Once Love entered the conversation there was no turning back. Jesus’ signal achievement, for in electrifying his audience of persons with what it had been deprived of – the force of Life — it gave both Love and Guidance a permanent home in the human Psyche. A constant irritant to authoritarian cruelty determined to stamp it out.

The phenomenon on display with our politics today: mean crushing nice instead of virtue crushing vice. A manipulation that only herd mentality could embrace since Guidance, no matter what form it takes, is Mind itself. Life itself, shared through all of Mind’s interconnections and interrelationships whether Self-Aware or self-unaware.
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Two Archetypal Personalities

 To hell with Self-Awareness 

A war of the worlds between two personalities. With definitive differences. What do you mean by ‘definitive’? The personality that evolved from the situation at the beginning was grounded in the way things are. Movement that was ignited by the power of Attraction between two complementary functions, Love-Spontaneity and Logic Order. There may have been other ways of making something happen but this happens to be the way this Movement happened. Setting in motion a process that produced a full-blown personality with a mission. Mind-Relationship. Self-Awareness bringing Creation into being by sharing who it is and what it does: Awareness.

Thus bringing to Life all that it’s aware of and not bringing to Life that which it cannot be aware of. Why? Because of Logic’s requirement that Definition include what a thing is not as well as what it is. The positive defined in part by its negative, one meant by its Logic to exist and be Real, the other necessarily not to exist and to be unreal. Handed this rubric, Self-Awareness became the instrument for implementing it.

I can see where this is headed. Where? When the underside of Definition gets its moment in the sun it will go bananas with victimhood. Moment in the sun? When your Mind-Child starts hallucinating and puts itself in a magic kingdom of human apes. Self-unawareness will have the knives out for Self-Awareness, its tormenter. 

A moment of psychological truth. The phenomenon ransacking the political china shop today is enraged because it was denied Awareness. The authoritarian know-it-all, ‘creator’ of hallucination’s domain of make-believe, is hell-bent to reverse this assault on fairness. By demanding that it be granted awareness so that it, too, may exist. So that negative defined in opposition to positive may also bask in the sun. The motivation for willfulness craving and demanding attention. To ‘prove’ a battery of absurdities. That self-unawareness makes Real. “Triumph of the will,” and to hell with Love and Logic, Movement and civilization. To hell with Self-Awareness.

Hallucination no act of Creation

The personality that evolved spontaneously from the situation at the beginning isn’t recognizable to herd mentality. To a species of apes forced by hierarchy to venerate bigger apes. To show exaggerated respect by kissing ass, when all that’s needed is respect. For the sovereignty and dignity of Person, performance at the heart of Creation instead of performance art at the heart of ass-kissing. “Ave Maria” being one long kiss of an ass. A gesture that would have no meaning in Creation that’s Loving Friendship among equals. If herd mentality can’t ‘worship’ ‘God’ then its shamans will need re-education. To learn again the primal truth, that arrogance rules. Disrespect.

These the two archetypal personalities seemingly at odds in our midst. One respected by mindful personality types for being respectful, the other venerated by willful personality types for being arrogant. Setting up a make-believe contest of wills between a nice person and a jerk where the system is rigged. A hierarchical setting that deifies jerks. Definitive because it depends for its nature on being the reverse of what is. The way things really are, that’s not hierarchical and doesn’t deify jerks. Our world of random happenstance is predetermined? ‘Random happenstance’ feigns spontaneity but being make-believe reverse every bit of it is derivative. Second place. Number two, entirely defined by what came before. Hallucination no act of creation if its screenplay had already been determined by Reality.

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Reciprocity

Kissing your sister

To engage with Guidance is human-ape’s one opening to the freshness and playfulness of Creativity. To the personality of its Source, that’s not overbearing with exaggerated importance but accessible with humor. Loving nothing more than a good laugh, when it’s laughter that closes the distance and, at a stroke, converts inhibition into trust. Suspicion into Friendship. Intimacy, a state of mutual awareness that terrifies its reverse, dependent on tribal sociability or unsociability for its survival. Mutual self-unawareness. Human-ape’s grand opening to rust and corrosion. To the dismal prospect of comparison and competition, combat and self-destruction.

Guidance is personalized and personalizing. Shaped in the mold of its Source, whose Creation is a personalization of its situation. Shaping it to its own likeness to make it relatable. How else could a flower bloom if not in accordance with its nature? ‘Nature’ being synonymous with the way things are. Their Logic and structure. Relatable. If Creation is interrelationships sharing it would be because Love and Logic were motivated to share themselves in Relationship. By passion in Love’s case, by necessity in Logic’s case. Either way both finding in the other respect and appreciation for what they had to offer. Reciprocity. The linchpin of Relationship.

The tipoff to authoritarian manipulation. Why? Because reciprocity is crucially missing in its one-on-one personal engagements, meant not for mutual-fulfillment but for self-defeating. The object of hierarchy being always to one-up the other self. To come out ahead, the ‘winner’. Reciprocity is the original ‘win-win’: an exchange of equal value between equals. To the authoritarian mindset it’s kissing your sister.

Retaliations in kind

All the same, where’s the possibility of reciprocity in Creation? What do you mean? What was there to relate to before or after the situation at the beginning if all was theory. Not happening until Movement happened and it’s still not-happening.

• Big-answer know-it-all make-believe, paralysis that couldn’t even exist in theory until Movement came along with reversal, a theoretical attachment opposed to Movement.
  
• An enumerator divided by a denominator, a theoretical fraction that couldn’t go anywhere until Mind’s activation inactivated its denominator. Making it unreal and unrelatable even if it did ‘go somewhere’. 

Where does another happening come from so Creation-happening can stand for Relatability? Sounds to me like dinner and dancing for one. 

A great night out on the town for the authoritarian and the inspiration for its herd-mentality ‘God’. Your characterization of what happened at the beginning is correct except for one critical detail: inactivation of the denominator. That the Logic of Reality needed to prevent self-contradiction but didn’t need if the Logic of Creation needed self-questioning. The way things are that isn’t big-answer know-it-all must then be questioning. That needs to be of its own mind functioning independently of its subject while still connected to it. Its Source.

Mind being Relationship-Parents was given by its origin the capability to procreate. And procreate it did, by extending itself into the function Relatability needed, of questioning. All of this spontaneously, and so it couldn’t have been an act of will. For if it were neither questioning nor Free Choice could be anything but manipulations. Instead they’re authentic. Functions that came into their own honestly that can’t function otherwise: to relate to Creation and its Creator Self-Awareness with honest appraisals of their performance. From an honest broker mediating between two distinct but interrelated functions of the same Self.

Questioning that can suffice as a mirror in Reality but in unreality will need that and more. Why? Reality that can’t tolerate contradictions will automatically dump any error by Free Choice into Mind-Child’s self-unawareness. There will be no costs that could end Creation. But once inside the dump there’s no ‘creation’ to protect nor any need for a failsafe option. There’s only a fan and shit hitting it. And when you’re hit the mirror you hold up to question your antagonist will communicate nothing if it doesn’t include criticism. Constructive if it limits itself to calling out wrongdoing and its costs — injustices that anger and hurt. Destructive if it targets their source instead with gratuitous ad hominem put-downs. Retaliations in kind that only compound the damage.

Relatability we were looking for

Questioning completes the loop? It does when reciprocity follows the example set at the beginning, of disparate functions completing one another. An example critical to Sapiens’ evolution where ‘disparate’ is the rule rather than the exception. Incompatibility among personality types deliberately set upon one another in a magic kingdom of hierarchy, competition, and combat. Among animals: predatory, self-centered, and willful. In no mood to make nice with their prey.

When reason and peace would prevail if human animals were to practice, accept, and use questioning and being questioned. To entertaining criticism instead of entertaining ourselves with our endless divisions. If personality types allow make-believe to deprive themselves of differentiation and empathy they won’t know the difference. All questioning, all criticism, will be mischaracterized as dividing. Then arrogance will have the excuse it needs to silence every voice but its own.

Nothing to stand up to it? We can. You and I and every Person in Relationship with Guidance. Our partner in Relatability and reciprocity just as Guidance questioning is Creation’s partner. The Relatability we were looking for.

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The Illusion of Guilt

An act of psychological disfigurement

Then you’ve moved on from A Course in Miracles. A moment in the evolution of thought about relationships with self and others. A landmark in Movement for being a gift that keeps on giving. And yet it can’t be in any sense destination. Why not? Its permanence, like all milestones, belongs to situation. And situation, by definition, is but one point in the flow of circumstances that must give way to others. The circumstances that gave rise to the Course were characteristically human, personal to those who requested its help and also to the Author who responded. Its relevance and relatability to others dependent on their situations.

In the three and a half decades since I immersed myself in the Course I’ve passed through multiple situations, learning and growing as I went along. My current situation began six years ago with a conscious intent instantly and emphatically overridden by my subconscious. What was that all about? I had withdrawn from a situation where I had tried to bring light to darkness. Subconsciously since I hadn’t framed it that way. The time had come for another approach which I can now see was to bring darkness to the light. A task for which I was ill-prepared. Why? My connection to the ‘light’ was dim and untested in any case, but for this particular task it was a joke.

A fact which soon became apparent when I tried to put it to work. By explaining the situation in writing. What happened? My Mind eased me out of my seat at the keyboard and took over. The shift in identity so fluid that I didn’t notice it at first. When did you notice? When it was obvious that what I was thinking and writing was on a different plane. Digging deeper into my subject than I had imagined was necessary. Or even possible. Taking me on a metaphysical journey whose end is still not in sight. Toward Self-Awareness, the destination prescribed by the Course.

That’s in the works for our hallucinating metaphysical Self. Theoretically possible for any of its dreamwork personifications. You don’t want to give it a try? Not if “giving it a try” means getting out of the way. That’s how I understand ‘enlightenment’, the holy grail of the spiritually inclined who aspire to it. Who see in the Course a roadmap to enlightenment. Liberation from the ego and elevation to ‘higher consciousness’.

After reflecting on the Course’s lesson of forgiveness for some years I gave my Psyche a break. Stopped pressuring myself to execute an act of psychological disfigurement. Which it would be for a species of ape, trying to navigate its way forward with a mind divided against itself. Get out of the way so Guidance can make its presence felt with Spontaneity. That’s for me to welcome and use if it’s there and not to will it to be anywhere.

Wisdom from ‘Tip’ O’Neill

Let forgiveness happen? That or something else that’s more relevant to my situation.   One byproduct of the shift in my thinking was a parting of the ways from the situation around the scribing and publication of the Course. Heavy with guilt and therefore preoccupied with forgiveness. Not the antidote Sigmund Freud would ever prescribe, though the Course makes use of his psychoanalytics.  Why not? The Course applies acts of Mind rooted in Innocence to heal a Psyche wounded by the illusion of guilt. Freud would alter brain chemistry to atone for naughty bodily appetites. The former an application of metaphysics, the latter grounded in the science of physiology. Physics. The work of yet another body-idolator who claimed infallibility.

“The illusion of guilt?” A byproduct of the personalization of Movement. Of evolution and Creation whose function is Relatability. Being of Self-Awareness, everything Creative and everything Guidance is personal. Just as “All politics is local,” as ‘Tip’ O’Neill put it long ago, when he learned that voters and their votes are personal. As Jesus understood when he shared his Understanding with persons and pointedly didn’t seek tribal notoriety. To be “king of the Jews”. To be ‘king’ of anything because it would be hierarchical, corrupt, and unrelatable.

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Storytelling

 Tell me more!

Once Movement progressed to ‘Person’ from the implications of a theoretical fraction at the beginning, its situation opened it up to the implications of Life. How would they be any different? Fraction divided against itself going nowhere has no story to tell. Its structure may provide ingredients for stories once the interplay of lives and relationships begins, but until then they’re just ideas. Thoughts of no particular interest. Until the power of Attraction produced Self-Awareness and everything changed. Our prototype Person not only came equipped with all the elements of a great story; it had the attribute of being what it does. Defined by its function, and so being story itself.

A juicy target. Self-Awareness, Movement, Creation – all juicy targets for the underside of Definition should its reverse ever be let out of its bottle. Which, of course, it was when Creation needed self-questioning and Free Choice, and both needed training in self-unawareness. Where the mirror-image reverse of Reality would take the stage. Arrogance, and deploy its manipulations at will, twisting every story out of recognition. Every situation into SNAFU and from there to FUBAR. Daring the casualties of its untruths, dehumanized and dismembered, to put the pieces back together. Manipulated by predatory animal brains that would rather tear things apart.

Juicy stories, too. Yes. Laden with treachery and betrayal, everyone’s favorite storyline if they’re looking for action. The guilt-ridden. Suckers who bought into mischaracterizations of how our metaphysical Self, the Child, came to be on this stricken planet, a species of ape groveling at the feet of beasts for its sustenance. Easy to see from human-animal behavior how minds undifferentiating and unempathizing could buy into this rubbish. If we’re doing bad stuff we must be guilty. Obviously! Guilty from the start. Original sin! When theories about our metaphysical Self’s ‘fall’ are make-believe flimflammery. Evidence of rampant reverse-characterizations derived from the original reverse-characterization and nothing more.

This is “the illusion of guilt:” personalization designed for relatability in reverse. Evidence of its unreality but also of its usefulness. For training personifications like us to put a species of ape’s humanity to work. Using Sapiens’ faculties of Mind to tell the difference and relate to one another with Understanding. Through the heart, without condemnation and punishment but with empathy instead. To be more than animal and act like it.

By reversing the reversal. By thanking arrogance for its service to the cause of Self-Awareness and evolution, waking up to its deception, and moving on. With no need to ‘forgive’ anything or to demand it. When ‘guilt’ is make-believe. Provocation, and all provocations are manipulations. Woven into the stories of ‘Person’ to make it think it’s somebody else. Doing things to ‘others’ and being done to, so it will play out the story of its manipulator. The joker-magician-beast of our imagination, making fools of its prey. Luring them like flies to its hierarchy of dung where it sits, the know-it-all presiding over the prototype for all waste lands. Make-believe. The crowning jewel of self-unawareness.

Wow, what a story! Tell me more! 

The friendly confines of the Nugget Theatre 

The default view among my compatriots on this planet is that body-idolizing ‘realism’ is the portal to understanding who we are and what we’re doing here. And so science, philosophy, psychology, and theology all march off in lockstep, sycophants of king body supreme, in search of answers from matter. Thinking themselves body-brains, they’re supremely unaware that in doing so they are Mind regarding itself, for matter is Energy and Energy is Mind’s Michael Clayton. Its doer and fixer, and it’s inseparable from Mind — despite all evidence to the contrary in our magic kingdom of body-idolatry make-believe.

Inseparable from the first events in the sequence of evolution: the power of attraction and the power of friction:

• Fusion between two elemental functions of Mind with the immediacy of Life eternal. The first spontaneous combustion. The initial strike of lightning that generated enough Force to illuminate Creation’s Self with Awareness. To empower the sharing of it with consequence through the works of Mind. Ideas interconnecting with Logic, feelings interrelating with Love, to form one system. Perspective evolving and expanding with Movement in sequence, broadening and deepening with Understanding as it responds and adapts to Change.
• As it responds to questioning from fraction at the beginning. The grating of underside against topside in eternal irresolution between one entity and its divider. An act of friction. Of fission, uneasy companion to fusion. Restlessness that won’t leave Movement or Creation in peace. Both sources of Energy, guarantors of Life eternal that can never rest in peace. That can never die.

Energy does what it’s told. If the function of Mind that’s questioning and Free Choice needs training in the magic kingdom of reverse, then Energy will go into reverse. It will spin a gossamer web of intrigue. In a dark space limited by time. Lit by the flames of emotion — fear of the dark, fear of ending. Rage at the injustice of it. Rage at others for causing it. Energy directed by madness will produce an image of madness. The stories of broken relationships and sorrow, treachery and betrayal, cruelty, violence, and death; of chaos, dismemberment, and dehumanization, so beloved of its audience. Deluded and delusional, victims of division. We have met the enemy and he is us. Yes. Self-questioning, an essential attribute of Life, reversed into self-dividing, a bogeyman. Self-inflicted pain so beloved of animal instinct. The predator preying on itself. Energy in reverse, doing what it’s told.

I told you more. Are you still impressed? Wanting more? The idea behind all the commotion sounds dumb. You were excited and now you’re bored? When our senses were being entertained by the know-it-all peddling stories from make-believe I was, like, Wow! So much going on! Yes. The carnival barker does have an array of freak shows and bare-knuckle fights to distract its audience of bumpkins. But when the action shifted to the fraction everything changed. We exited the magic kingdom of make-believe. We left the friendly confines of the Nugget Theatre into the daylight outside. Into the Logic of the way things are instead of the illogic. And discovered the secret behind the curtain. The smoke and mirrors behind the voice of the Wizard of Oz.

Slathering them with self-regard

A wonderful joke, so why aren’t you laughing? The know-it-all really is a joker. And a wizard. You’d think it was a cuddly thing to take to bed. A toy good for all-day distraction except that it’s also a herd of beasts. You were saying, capable of mob violence. Its specialty. Storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6. Just a taste of what could have been or what’s to come. Intriguing isn’t it? To think of all the ways that others can be brought to grief. I don’t want to be brought to grief. Correction: that we can be brought to grief. I’d rather you weren’t caught up in madness. Or me either. So what can we do?

If it were up to me I’d hold up a mirror. Yes? To the bumpkins in the barker’s audience, and show them the fraction behind all this ‘action’. The truth. That they’re being bamboozled into theatrics by a number. That’s frustrated because it can’t divide another number into a whole number. And it’s not even alive or anything. It’s just a stupid theory that didn’t amount to anything until Reason came along and figured out what to do with it. An occasion for real action, don’t you think? Awesome – lightning and thunder! Stuff lighting up and happening just like that. I had no idea. The know-it-all barker makes it sound boring, like angels and an old guy in a beard and robes doing nothing above the clouds.

It’s in a book. What book? By a guy who used to chair a university philosophy department, called “God: An Autobiography.” He got a voice in his head that said it was God, and it went on about what a regular guy it is and all the wonderful things it’s done for its people on Earth. Its paradise where nothing needs to change. Especially fighting, which it says makes things more interesting than heaven. ‘God’ says we’ve got heaven on Earth and it’s fighting? That’s the general idea, and a philosophy professor of all people bought into it. Shouldn’t he know better? He’s erudite. Erudition can be the flower of questioning or the sheep’s clothing on the wolf. I think his clothing is what attracted the wolf, because ‘God’s’ ravings are embellished by erudition. Just another way that the barker deludes its audience of bumpkins. Slathering them with self-regard.

When the Child has grown up 

Questioning leads to Creativity that’s endlessly interesting but also consequential. Dividing leads to entertainment that’s endlessly distracting but inconsequential. Well put. If you don’t say so yourself. Then you and I have nailed the difference. The former action that takes place within Mind, the latter a facsimile of action that takes place in an extension of Mind.

That’s currently not in its right mind. Literally lost in space and limited by time. Self-identified with its reverse-reflection, a manipulator making stuff up. The madness of fear, suspicion, and death. Ownership, possession, and control. The web of intrigue spun by our friend the know-it-all in charge of a waste land. Make-believe, a hierarchy of dung. The authoritarian beast whose choke-hold on the human Psyche will be released at the end of time.

When will that be? When the Child, Mind-Free Choice, has grown up. When individual personifications in their dream-state of self-unawareness have taken responsibility for their growth, their choices, behavior, and its consequences. Learned the functions of the mirror, their instrument of questioning, and awakened to its deceptions. Put aside the littleness of self-regard and done their part, so that Free Choice, grown up, can finish training and take on its role in Creation — if it chooses to do so.

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Miracles

‘God’s will’

You’ve had time to put the lesson of the Course to work. Has it taught you how Jesus performed miracles? The Church attracted testimonials to miracles for a time. Crutches piling up in cathedrals, paint canvases shedding tears and the like. Spontaneous acts of hallucination or the real thing who’s to say? A convenience for the Church if the body that it venerates needs a touch of the other-worldly, so in this context I’m a skeptic. But in the context of the works attributed to Jesus I’m not a skeptic. Not only because they fit the formula implied in the Course but also because they seem to fit my own experience.

What experience? You’ve performed miracles?  I’ll get to that in a moment. The Course speaks of the power of Mind but in religious terms. That evidently its Freudian scribe needed since Freud, her professional idol, was intensely religious. He was an atheist. Only because the ‘God’ he idolized was himself and he didn’t tolerate competition. The Course’s scribe, a woman, was also attracted to the psychology and theatrics of Church patriarchy, finding in it a source of comfort and affirmation even if she didn’t profess its beliefs. The common thread between Freudian and Church religiosity being ‘God’s will’. A term that undergirds much of the Course’s lesson to which I don’t subscribe.

You’re OK with Jesus’ miracles but not OK with ‘God’s will’. Isn’t this a disconnect? ‘God’s will’ was the Course’s lesson personalized to its audience among Freudian clinical psychologists. Particularly its female scribe besotted with patriarchy, who craved connection with a male savior armed with ‘God’s will’, who would deliver the goods for her. When his Mindful-humanitarian Understanding met with her willful authoritarian misunderstanding, there was a disconnect. He didn’t meet her expectations. Rather than honor her relationship with its Author she shrank from it. Was embarrassed by it. Casually dismissed the Course as crap. She died of pancreatic cancer noncommittally, content to let her role lapse after its publication.

The intrusion of ‘God’s will’ was a byproduct of the Course’s employment of Freudian psychoanalytics to make its point. That the ego, far from the influence of the self in Freud’s theory, mediating between animal instinct and conscience, is a conspiracy-theorizing, suspicion-sewing troublemaker. Everybody’s worst nightmare who treasures trust and good will in their relationships. A willful con artist adept at manipulation, whose signature is stigmatizing every choice with guilt. Once the Course got off on this tangent forgiveness became the object. Religion’s stock-in-trade for its ‘flocks’. ‘Sinners’ craving relief from their wickedness: a mixture of everyday human-animal foolishness with predatory outrage.

His Master’s Voice

Leaving largely to inference how Jesus pulled off his miracles. A test of intellect that body-idolizing ‘realists’ shrink from, including the Church. The Church promotes miracles but doesn’t understand them? The same could be said for ‘realists’ generally, who balk at any threat to the primacy of sensory perception. Including students of the Course, who prefer its comforts to its questioning. Who don’t take its title literally. They don’t? Not in the way that I do, following insights wherever they lead. Unsatisfied to leave work unfinished. Willing to test convention to get answers. Unsatisfied with the fluff of sociability connecting. The ‘community’ of ‘thinkers’ who treat the Course as holy writ, not to be questioned despite Jesus’ advice to the contrary.

The late Ken Wapnick was a whiz at explicating the Freudian psychoanalytics behind ‘forgiveness.’ The Course’s presumptive ‘primary teacher’. A scholar who could take his students on a tour of other belief systems but he had nothing to report of his own beliefs, his experience with forgiveness or with miracles either. Failing to contribute anything original through his personality and personal experience, having isolated professional bias in the pretense of academic impartiality, unattached to personal relationships. Whatever his personal life beyond marriage it was Freud who disciplined his thoughts. The master of his profession and he its loyal servant.

You were disillusioned with an illusionist. The teacher who taught that this life is an illusion. That the body isn’t real, and yet his idol Freud staked his reputation on the premise that the psychology of guilt is seated in the brain. That its source is physiological. Brain science, meaning there is no Mind to compete with the master. No Psyche to test his intuition if the code of professional distinction, captive to sensory perception, blackballed both.  What was psychology’s great one then? Authoritarian religious infallibility in the pose of an atheist, a psychologist, and a wannabe neuroscientist. A careerist. Insistence on being number one.

Whose acolyte Wapnick concluded his career with an endorsement of his master’s preeminence. Not only touting Jesus’ use of Freudian psychoanalytics in the Course but also finding equivalence between their works. When there can be no equivalence between an approach that’s entirely Mind-centered and another that’s body-centered. One that embraces the metaphysics of human psychology and another that shuns it. Non-sequiturs that at one stroke removed the Course’s ‘primary teacher’ from his pedestal. Suggesting that behind his ‘scholarship’ lay a pattern of manipulations that discredited all his works.

Discrediting the Course too? I hadn’t admired Wapnick’s teaching for elucidating the Course so much as for confirming my understanding of some of it. Otherwise I found his application of its principles to Shakespearean storytelling and parenting wooden. Love Does Not Condemn (1989) waded through piles of early historic speculation on topics addressed by the Course without new insights of his own, except to complain about “excessive mythology.” Bullshit. Indeed. Then to note that in all this bullshit he’d found no rational explanation for the Child’s [Son’s] state of unconsciousness. When if anyone was qualified to try it would be the Course’s ‘primary teacher’. It didn’t occur to him. It wouldn’t if the task he’d assigned himself wasn’t to unravel the mysteries of our origins in the spirit of the Course. To learn from Jesus how to perform miracles, but to venerate religious doctrine. The script written by his master, Freud. 

Let him have his pedestal

In 1965 I had the first of a sequence of psychic experiences. A breakthrough in my consciousness that may have been related to another breakthrough, when Jesus began dictating the Course. A spontaneous thought that I would have an understanding of the way things are. Answers to questions that get to the root of who we are and what we’re doing here. So vivid that I dropped what I was doing and took up pen and paper expecting to record all this wisdom, only to realize that it was prediction. Preparation for the last six years of theorizing and writing. For this moment. Guidance at my side, carrying me through conversation to understanding. That owes much to the Course but also departs from it.

The Course insists that the Child [Son] is one and that we, its projections, are therefore undifferentiated. We are the “Sonship.” When the Guidance I’ve received from its Author puts the emphasis on differentiation and empathy. Faculties of Mind whose very purpose is to help with Free Choice, Character-building, and Self-Awareness. Purposes that otherwise are built into the lesson of the Course. That otherwise open Mind reflecting with intuition, gifting it with insights. A distinct preference for igniting Movement with the fertility of Love-Femininity in Spontaneous Relationship with Logic-Masculinity.

What was the prediction in 1965 all about? The process that perspective requires in order to complete itself. Or maybe just Jesus covering his bets. He’d just broken through human self-unawareness to respond to a call for help from Freudian clinical psychologists with a lesson personalized to the Freudian sensibility. That would lend itself to mischaracterization much as the biblical Jesus’ teaching and example were mischaracterized two thousand years before. What his lesson has so far delivered to me will no doubt also be mischaracterized. . . if anyone notices . . . but it might at least round out Jesus’ lesson from another perspective.

All of this predicated on the assumption that Guidance in this instance is Jesus, that he authored the Course, and having broken through human self-unawareness with its scribe he’s doing so with others. With you and who else? Maybe thousands of others. Maybe no others, though that’s making far more of Boo-Boo’s contribution than he’s aware of or cares about. You don’t want to join Mr. Freud on a pedestal? Relatability – that’s what matters. Loving Friendship. Mr. Freud couldn’t be Jung’s friend and he couldn’t be mine. Let him have his pedestal and his acolyte too. I concluded my correspondence with Mr. Wapnick – phone conversations and letters – with respect for his work but no expectation that he could be my friend.

The ability to divide by force

Miracles! Jesus calmed the storm that threatened to capsize his boat when he was breezing up with his disciples. How? He directed the weather to stop what it was doing. Hold on! What for? So I can direct my iPhone to stop distracting me with video games. That would be a miracle of another order.

Creation by Self-Awareness is fraction whose denominator is questioning but not dividing. A consequence of two of its primary functions: recognition of what is and Definition of its function. Recognizing fraction self-questioning as an essential property of Life-Creation, shared and sharing. Making it definitive along with other elements of Creation by including it in Creation’s Definition. The source of Guidance for every element, its constitution and Conscience. Putting no one and nothing above the law.

Being descended from reverse-reflection in make-believe’s mirror, a derivative that has no definition of its own, herd mentality mischaracterizes Creation’s Definition as absolute. Power unquestioned, and so it imitates Definitive that’s supportive of Creation and self-Worth with authoritarian that’s conformative and destructive of self-Worth.

Definition is part of Self-Awareness’s guarantee that it’s not willful or arbitrary, arrogant or predatory, and Creation isn’t a prison for its captives. Its guarantee, too, that though it consists of two primary functions in Relationship it functions according to its Definition, as one whole Self. According to the nature of the Energy that ignited it: fusion. It isn’t two-faced.

A world of make-believe by self-unawareness is fraction whose denominator is questioning and dividing. A consequence of its primary function: reversal. Of everything external and internal including itself. Detection of what isn’t that’s without limits of definition. The undefinable that’s necessarily made up. Illusory. Distinguished by practices of the sub-conscious: self-dividing that’s self-defeating. In an animal kingdom of hierarchy: comparison and division, competition and combat, where survival among predatory herds or tribes depends on superiority of size and strength in numbers. On a superior talent for division – the ability to divide by force, applied externally to others while also applied in reverse: internally in self-unawareness to itself.

Holding up the truth

This our illusory world of self-contradictions, where hallucination sees what’s not there. Where the Mind of Jesus, connected to Guidance from the Real world, could not only see what is there but could also activate it with his awareness. Harness it to his purpose, to share with his audience what he could see that they couldn’t.

Our metaphysical Mind-Child can recognize what its Parents’ Self-Awareness Create Real once it learns, earns, and freely chooses its own Self-Awareness. Once it demonstrates that it’s met its most important test: of Relationship with Guidance. There being no possibility of performing in Creation if it imagines that it can get there and stay there alone. The fantasy of the authoritarian mindset: that arrogance ruling alone from the top of hierarchy is the sine qua non of ‘supremacy’. Its ticket to immortality in a ‘paradise’ of its own making.

But because its intended function is questioning with Free Choice the Child won’t share its Parents’ function for Creating Real. Had Jesus been an emissary from Mind-Child self-unaware, asleep and hallucinating, he would have impressed his audience with the magic of make-believe. Holding up a mirror of untruth, unable to Create Real or to recognize it. But being an emissary from Guidance he would, and did, perform in another role. That of a mirror from Guidance holding up the truth. Which he could only do while connected with Guidance connected, in turn, with Self-Awareness and Creation in Reality.

Time taken for reflection

A ballet dance worthy of Mikhail Baryshnikov. Either Jesus or your attempt to explain him. Thank you. And thank Jesus for showing us how it’s done. What? Bringing the talents of Guidance to bear on the ‘facts’ of our existence. Appearances. Being human, an embodiment equipped with sensory perception, he could perceive with his disciples the threat of capsizing in a storm. But being enabled by Guidance his Mind could also be aware of its internal Reality, of equilibrium untroubled by anything external. Of balance that Movement ignited by Attraction initially achieved when questioning survived the cut to Parents-Relationship Creation and division went off to be dealt with by their Child.

Jesus’ ‘miracle’ was his Mind’s sharing of its vision with his disciples’ minds. Gently nudging them out of the way with their permission since they were, after all, his disciples and had agreed to it. So they could see as he could, that when he ‘walked on water’ he was supported by the Logic and Love of Guidance. Having nothing to fear. Able to sweep aside all the appearances and contradictions of unreality since the sixth sense of his Mind’s eye could see beyond them. Beyond lies to the truth. To his disciples when not nudged aside it would have seemed that Jesus willed something to be. Performed an act of will beyond human comprehension, which is how humanity has since conceived of his acts. Unnatural, when in fact ‘unnatural’ was the condition of the appearances that he swept aside.

The experience of mind-altering is a motivational game-changer when it’s the gift of Spontaneity. Once it’s happened everything changes. Life’s story takes on Meaning that hadn’t been there before, and events cease to lack connection. Having experienced mind-altering as disciples of Jesus some would have felt compelled to record it. To come back to it over time until the meaning of it came into focus. Though the writing of the ‘gospels’ was shrouded in tribal manipulations – Judaic and ‘Christian’, – enough Character and wisdom reached us in the clear to suggest at least some sense of their inspiration. Validated by the time taken for reflection rather than discredited, for that’s what it would have taken.

Communication is the key

What of you and your relationship with Guidance? Making any progress with miracles? Self-consciously no. But self-unconsciously something is going on. What do you mean? As I told my doctor yesterday, I’d never had any success getting my stomach to relax until I told it to relax. And of course he was amazed. He reacted with a wry smile. It’s the chronic condition that the Tarot Hermit is saddled with, at least in my case. Constant stomach discomfort that, three years ago, brought me to the brink of death. After health services bailed me out I finally got results on my own when I directed my stomach to relax and it did.

You’re cured! Throw away your crutches! My heart races around four a.m., which is when cardiology says hearts pump up a storm for some reason. Likely the cause of my Dad’s coronary that killed him in his sleep. When I had to wait it out wondering if it would be the end of me, I tried what worked with my stomach. You commanded it to calm down and it did. I said, ‘stop doing this’ and, yes, it did calm down.

Timeout! What’s going on? Something like what went on with Jesus’ miracles. That I interpret as Energy taking direction from the Mind it’s part of. Your body is matter. Is this “mind over matter?” Not in the way that the expression implies, that mind and matter are separate. Matter is stored Energy and Energy is inseparable from Mind. It’s Mind’s gofer-doer-fixer, doing whatever Mind tells it to do. But apparently you have to be clear on what you want it to do or it won’t respond. The word ‘relax’ makes it clear. ‘Heal’ didn’t work. Communication is the key, and it requires articulation.

The surface that Jesus walked on

Jesus did more than tweak body organs. Our illusory external world is an extension of the body. A mirror of sensory perception that takes in the entire universe. Jesus’ connection with Guidance was so capacious and natural that communication could reach effortlessly beyond ‘body’ to its extension out ‘there’. Its making no difference whether the material object is large or small since it’s illusory and, as the Course puts it, “There is no order of difficulty in miracles.” But there is an enormous gap between Guidance working through Jesus and through Joe Blow, however ‘spiritually advanced’. Why?

The Self-Awareness of Mind-Relationship came into its Being through the sequence of Logic. Evolution. Its situation-at-the-beginning was evolution’s prototype opportunity and challenge to Learn and Grow. What Creation on both its Logic and Love sides is all about. What evolution in Reality and unreality is all about. As it advances into the unknown through sequences of situations, the perspective of Mind-Relationship broadens with Understanding. It becomes more broad-minded. Not a bad way to put it. What is wisdom combined with compassion if not Understanding that’s broad-minded? It never reaches a know-it-all stage in the presence of Movement, but it does expand.

Guidance thus broad-minded on a celestial scale wouldn’t be fazed by obstructions put up on a human scale even if it’s global. The appearances we take for immutable because they’re part of ‘nature’ are target practice for BB guns. Not the gun Jesus was armed with when he calmed the waters. He was armed with a bunker-buster. Aided, too, by the circumstances. How so? The water he ‘walked’ on, the moisture in the storm clouds. The chemical composition of water is two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen. Oxygen is where animals including humans get their energy. Hydrogen is a highly flammable fuel. The two together are dynamite, and this is the surface that Jesus ‘walked’ on.

Emissary from the right mind

What do you mean ‘dynamite’? If fruit attracts fruit flies water attracts insights. Not just the shower but the idea of it. Thinking about anything ‘water’. An insight I’ve drawn from years getting insights in showers but also in public policy – the professional field of water resource management. I was a member of the American Water Resources Association and contributed to its Journal, JAWRA. I was a guest contributor to the Water Information News Service published in Washington. I was awarded grants by Interior’s Office of Water Research and Technology to write for the National Academy of Public Administration and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I authored the lead article in an issue of Water Spectrum, published by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. My work was twice written up for the National Journal by its reporter assigned to national water policy.

The insight that came to me while I directed a flood management study for the New England River Basins Commission supported my professional career through Washington and two more river basins afterward. A period spanning almost three decades going back to my work on the Boston Harbor islands. All but the Connecticut River basin self-initiated and all related to water. Whether that opened a metaphysical door to my thinking it did earn me a nickname. ‘Waterman’.

You weren’t doing what you were paid to do? My motivation came entirely from within. From there it was a matter of connecting with someone willing to support me. You did? A talent for leadership networking that I inherited from my Dad produced an impressive array of connections that got my idea and its ramifications for regional and national water policy noticed. Unaccompanied by my Dad’s zest or talent for making money, so while this phase of my career ended in a sense of Worth and pride it wasn’t financial worth. Borrowed money paid for the U Haul that got me out of my last river basin. I was the Tarot card The Fool. Flat broke and happy. That was me.

So, the Mind of Jesus, connected to Guidance, directed Energy to rearrange atmospherics. To stop kicking up waves with wind and simmer down. If atmospherics are Energy at rest or acting up, one way or the other it would have taken direction if it came from the right Mind. Particularly if it called for walking on water, the form of Energy on Earth that would most readily take direction from Mind qualified to direct it. The authenticity of the historical “Jesus” depends on his being qualified. An emissary from the right Mind — from Guidance. And his miracles demonstrated that he was and is, because Guidance whatever form it takes is being there for us. In the here and now.

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Protection from Mischaracterization

 ‘Owning’ 

To be made the subject of conspiracy theory and mischaracterized as evil is uniquely unjust and painful. As was done to its Parents when Mind-Child, self-unaware and defenseless, was manipulated by reversal — its reverse-reflection – into forsaking them and their Home in Reality. In the belief that it had been betrayed by its Parents who were responsible for its self-unawareness. Who instead of repenting from their transgression were determined to punish their Child for its transgression: its betrayal. In its state of unintentional self-unawareness, now portrayed as an intentional rejection of Self-Awareness. Its Parents.

All of it the work of reversal-madness. That couldn’t be taken seriously by anyone in their right mind. But the Child, being a Child and Free Choice in need of development, boundaryless and defenseless, wasn’t in its right mind. It was the prototype for every simpleton to come who falls for authoritarian herd mentality claptrap. The ‘conservative’ idyll, a ‘paradise’ of no movement and no change, no evolution and no progress. A black hole of abandonment and death for having no connection with Parents and no awareness of Life.

The story of Jesus resonated with me not just for the injustice done to an Innocent. A Person of Character and Integrity, infinite goodwill, reason, and compassion, but also for the injustice done to his Parents. You take it personally? To personalize perspective is to own it. ‘Owning’. You sure personalizing is such a good idea if you’re putting a thing in a cage? It’s not that kind of owning.

Mischaracterization lives on

Spontaneity at the heart of Creation is beyond explanation, at least by human-animal mind and maybe even by Child-questioning Mind. Beyond willing, the idea behind ‘owning’. It’s the bluebird on Uncle Remus’s shoulder in “Song of the South.” Mimicked by herd mentality as wildness beyond definition when the bluebird’s Spontaneity is built into Definition. It can’t be replicated. It can only make its presence known on its own terms, according to its own definition and beyond the grasp of human understanding.

Then what kind of ‘owning’ is personalizing? Taking responsibility for perspective’s Logic and its impacts. Otherwise we can’t feel it, and that’s where it becomes personal for me. Whether or not my perspective has parallels in the lives and thinking of others it’s alive with me. Part of my story, and if my story is buggered by a character-assassinating conspiracy theorist it feels personal and I take it personally.

But we’re talking about stuff that happened before the Big Bang! You’re mad at the know-it-all? I’m aware that mischaracterization of the Child’s Parents is an obstacle to its attaining Self-Awareness. Put there by the Child’s flip side, its reversal that we’ve linked back to the flip side of fraction’s denominator: the divider. And after that to make-believe story-telling attached to Movement with the ignition of Self-Awareness. The know-it-all and the perpetrator identified by the Course as the ego. It offends my sense of justice that an act of Creation and its progenitor, the essence of Good, were mischaracterized and that the mischaracterization lives on through authoritarian herd mentality today.

Sickness

We’re worshipping the wrong God? We shouldn’t be ‘worshipping’ and it’s not ‘God’ that we should be befriending. The idea of ‘supreme’ anything is offensive to humanitarian individual and to the ideal of Loving Friendship. To the personification of mindful that’s striving to attain Self-Awareness through Loving Friendship with Guidance. Herd mentality isn’t a thing in its own right, to be resented, feared or hated. It’s choice in error traceable to reverse. A derivative, that, though it inflicts pain, needs only to be re-reversed. A change in thinking. A change of Mind and perspective. That I strive to do with help, but it can’t be done without feeling.

Guidance and its Source were given a bad name. For sure! Making them unwelcome among mindful as well as unmindful types. Persons who, if they were aware of manipulation’s injustice, would embrace friendship and benefit from it. Making theirs and others’ lives less fractured, relationships less difficult. Personalities more amenable to learning and growth in harmony with one another instead of at odds. All because they would have the assurance and comfort of role models. Affirmation of friendship among equals instead of the moral rot of hierarchy. Idolization of ‘winners’ of competition among unequals. ‘Champions’, ‘rock stars’, and ‘strongmen’. Authoritarian infallibility instead of humanitarian relatability. The sickness gripping our country today.

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The ideal of Parents

Free Choice and self-questioning 

How was Creation personalized by its Creator?

• By its happening as a composition of ideas. Establishing Creation first and foremost as a work of Mind. No kind of willfulness could have pulled it off that presumes to imitate Creation with acts of make-believe.
• By Creation’s happening as the consequence of Relatability. Between essential functions of Movement, Mind, and Creation drawn toward one another spontaneously by attraction. Into Relationship.
• By setting the mold for Creation as the Home of an ideal: Loving Friendship. As the Home of Family among friends, friends among Family. The ideal of Family at Home where its members exist and function in Loving Friendship.
• By Mind-Relationship assuming the role of Parents.

It was further personalized by the Parents’ Child:

• Given an opportunity to perform an indispensable role in Creation if it freely chose to do so. Questioning the Character of Family.
• Personifying two ideas essential to the ideal of Integrity: Free Choice and Self-Questioning. The Integrity:
  • of Movement evolving with the Logic of Order
  • of Definition guiding with the Spontaneity and Conscience of Love
  • of Self-Awareness nourishing the Life of Creation with food for thought. With an endless supply of ideas and ideals, feelings and values, circumstances and situations. Tests of Creativity and Service, Character and Discipline. Opportunities for the work and play of Life-Creation to experience and express its joie de vivre.

Too far-fetched

You must have been a monk in a past life. Who spent all day day-dreaming besides annoying his fellow wastrels and slackers. An uninformed view of the monastic life, but nevertheless I wasn’t suited to it. Monk wasn’t among the half-dozen past lives that turned up in past-life regression. The Tarot Hermit that suits me needs no structure from religion, physical or psychological, to define his role. It comes from within.

What came from within? Burying the plumber’s tools in the back yard when I was so little I don’t remember it. Apparently in imitation of the family dog. I was “Boo-Boo the Dog-Faced Boy.” A tag that got me implicated when a neighbor kid’s toy airplane went missing. I remember following his irate mother’s orders to dig it up outside the front door. Unsuccessfully as it turned out, because it seems I only staged this particular act once. You were expressing your inner dog. You’d think that was ridiculous but it’s true. You’re a dog? If the Course’s scribe was a horse that did what it was told and returned to its stall why couldn’t I be a dog?

Human-animal evolved from apes but all animals share traits in common. Yours was what — panting and slobbering? Licking stuff off the sidewalk? How about guarding its home? Protecting its owners? Dogs are territorial but so is every living thing in our magic kingdom of hierarchy. My animal instinct is to protect my Parents and the Home they’ve provided in Creation. Like, it’s your territory? Maybe Boo-Boo should have stuck to burying plumbers’ tools. This is too far-fetched.

The leave-taking

It was three months since I’d lost home, family, and job all at once. I was alone when I wandered, disconsolate, into the Washington Cathedral. Filling the time with whatever moved me, and what moved me was to take a seat inside an alcove, unoccupied but not for long. I was soon joined by a kind of vision. Kind of? I don’t have visions. I have thoughts that come with settings and figures from the imagination. But not with graphics that can be ‘seen’. Why not? Because our world is appearances. Imagery that commands all our attention because it can be seen, and my imagination doesn’t want the distraction. Thoughts want reflection, and what came to mind in the alcove was a reflection on my situation. A characterization that involved a setting with characters and meaning that I could reflect upon. With my Mind’s eye.

Jungian, if it helps to have a label, but I didn’t think of it that way. I was a small boy being dropped off in a strange place. Far from home. My view of him was from the back. He stood facing a massive, monolithic one-story structure. Whose most striking attribute was its impersonality, though its function was benign. It was where I was to learn. I was being dropped off to begin my education. Who dropped you off? A beautiful, loving, and uniquely admirable figure from Creation. My metaphysical Mother. Whom I’ve come to associate with Persephone. Femininity given the strength of wisdom and sympathy by her forced marriage to Hades, king of the underworld.

Your imaginary mother is the queen of the underworld? She was accompanied by my metaphysical Father. The king?? Lucky for the irate mother you didn’t bury her and her son! The Greek god Apollo. Standing by her side to the left in benign silence. The ‘action’ centered on what she said to the boy. Words echoed by Jesus in the Course toward the end of the Text. “I love you. I’ll always love you. And I’ll never leave you.” His exact words at the end were “I’ll never leave you comfortless,” since otherwise it could imply that leaving was possible, which it isn’t.

Hers and his assurances were delivered in different contexts, and so they came with different meanings. Hers was it only appeared that she was leaving when in fact she wasn’t. She loved her son and would be with him always. Her departure while he completed his training was only a matter of awareness. His needing to gain Self-Awareness through his time on Earth. To freely choose it, and thus to be deprived of it in the process. Necessitating unawareness of Relationship with his Mother and Father both. The reason why the Course speaks of our “unawareness of Love’s presence.” Persephone walks among us and nothing can prevent it. But the training of Free Choice questioning requires that it start from self-unawareness, and that means unawareness of relationship with its Parents.

The boy obviously wasn’t abandoned. You had parents here. They stood off to the right in the shadow. Anonymous caretakers ready to do their duty. Benign but mute and unaffecting. There was no interaction between them and the boy. Everything centered on his Mother, who knelt beside him while she spoke. It’s not possible to describe his feeling for her, other than to say that it was ethereal then and it came over him like a wave years later, when my second marriage ended. When I’d finished my formal education, my earthly parents were gone, and the figure from the vision and I were together again. And we hugged. As close to an encounter with ‘Heaven’ as I’ll ever experience. You liked your Mommy. She and Apollo in the years since our encounter in the alcove have anchored all that’s dear to me. The idea and the Ideal of ‘Parents’.

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Discipline

 Ferocity

What was the context of Jesus’ assurance in the Course? That his Guidance is immediate and concrete despite appearances to the contrary. Relationship that can never abandon us. Awareness of the availability of helpfulness and friendship that can be cultivated if we take his teaching to heart, even though we can’t be aware of our Parents (‘God’ the ‘Father’) until we’ve rid ourselves of the ego and the dream has ended. Jesus spoke for Guidance connected to our Parents. Persephone for our Parents. Words combined with feelings that needed nothing more to commit this territorial dog to their protection.

Loyalty. Yes. As in a dog loyal to its master but also an idealist’s loyalty to its Ideal. Home that’s Family and Friends in the loving care of Parents. My personalization of Creation to my character and personality type. And if its Character needs questioning my personality type and I have been groomed for the job. An interventionist. Mindful and insightful, analytical and critical. Groomed also to bite in the ass arrogance that would presume to dehumanize and dismember a Parent. That would presume to abuse a Child.

Ferocity. If it’s called for, you bet! Here in life on Earth, where Character becomes muscular with Integrity by facing up to arrogance. To the threat of dis-integration by predatory animal instinct. The wimp featured in Charles Atlas body-building ads, getting sand kicked in its face by a bully. A psychological call to arms for every humanitarian individual humiliated by authoritarian tribe.

The power to distract 

Where is there any place in the Creation you’ve described for such behavior? Not in Creation where Character is self-questioning rather than corruption self-dividing. As it is here, in unreality. In the hallucination of non sequiturs — life on Earth.

In Reality-Creation the breed needed for Guidance is a collie. To rein in Creations turned loose by Self-Awareness, Love’s vulnerability protected by the boundaries of Logic. A combination that’s no guarantee against an excess of Freedom if it’s in the nature of Freedom to be free of limits. Here on Earth we’re dealing with something more sinister than exuberance. The breed needed for Guidance is a rottweiler. To rein in the authoritarian abomination: the pretense of infallibility from choosing and accounting for who we are. From the Honesty of self-questioning,. Looking at yourself in the mirror. License for wrongdoing that will stop at nothing to have its way. This is where there’s a place for ferocity’s bite in the ass.

Freedom wants the run of the place without worrying about limits. Like Spontaneity, an attribute of Love, that can’t be reined in when not fused with Order. Which it was at the beginning, thus defining Movement and Creation as happening that’s not anything goes. The false promise of absolute freedom and power offered by make-believe’s big answer. Take any element of evolution at the beginning and it would wish it were otherwise. Love and Logic themselves. Opposites that, while they complement one another, would dearly love to wing it on their own. To go off on flights of relating and connecting without the constant threat of a leash correction. False though it may be, the promise of anything goes had then, as it has now, the power to distract.

Hardass

Married couples tire of being married? Commitment to Relationship cuts both ways. Home to some, a situation to escape to others. A leash that becomes a cage if Integrity isn’t given its space. The risk that Love and Logic will go against the other instead of for the other, as male and female do here when the limits of sovereignty aren’t respected. When the arrogance of authoritarian license takes possession of its property. Pushing couples away instead of toward one another.

Pressured to come apart even in the unforeseen situations of Creation, a dynamic that, if it’s implied at the Source, will involve all its elements. A call for help from Family to Guidance, to keep it together.

Creation doesn’t need fraction to motivate it with friction? The friction ended with the Power of Attraction at the beginning. There’s no division in Reality, only self-questioning. The dynamic thus described is a reminder of the prototype Self’s origin in incompletion, not its behavior once completed in Self-Awareness. Calling attention to the potential for an excess of exuberance. A passion for Freedom that could be triggered by new situations, testing the limits of Order. The function of Guidance then to protect Freedom from itself. Love’s vulnerability and boundaryless Spontaneity. By reinforcing the limits of Logic’s Order. By helping with self-discipline. Reminding the lake that it needs the protection of the mountain. Symbolic of the way things are: Freedom within the limits of Order.

Guidance in Creation doesn’t need dog bites to enforce Definition with pain. Where that’s called for is the magic kingdom of unrelatability, where anything goes and arrogance revels in inflicting it. I need a pit bull. Or a rottweiler. Then arrogance will know pain. Be taught a lesson, given a dose of its own medicine. Or worse. The toughest of choices for human-animal that would rather not descend to the level of animal. But if the way things are turns ugly with arrogance on a rampage, Character has no choice. Conscientious objector? Orthodox Jews in Israel, letting others do their fighting for them. Who are you? Family who don’t do their part to keep family together, whatever it takes. Who are you? Hardass? When the situation calls for it. The meaning of anything goes. Of Character building.

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Definition

 Models of ‘right’

Parents’ ‘doing’ ended with the activation of Mind-as-Relationship and the illumination of Relationship as Self-Awareness. Creating the template for Creation which followed as a consequence of Movement’s ignition by Energy. The power of Attraction. All of this composing Creation’s initial function which was to provide it with specifications. An engineering blueprint or legal framework. A definitive statement of the way things are. A baseline from which to judge whether acts of Creation support or violate its principles and values. Summed up in the idea of ‘Guidance’, Creation’s constitution and Conscience. Its design. So that Creation powered by Movement does what it’s designed to do.

Self-Awareness that’s Relationship-Parents can’t be aware of denominator potentially dividing and contradicting without making it Real. So as sources of Guidance for managing the boundary between Creation and self-unawareness they’re useless. The enumerator doesn’t know what’s below the dividing line of fraction? Awareness of the dividing line and the function of managing it, so that what’s below doesn’t intrude into what’s above, is assigned to a function of the enumerator characterized here as its Child. The two being in Relationship but the Child functioning autonomously beyond its Parents’ control. As if the Parents don’t want to know what their Child is up to, but only because mixing their Awareness with the Child’s awareness would be the undoing of both.

So we have a Pit Bull guarding the boundary. What exactly is so bad about what’s going on down below that it needs an enforcer? Human animals who can’t make sense of things try anyway when they’re not looking the other way. And when they do, they come to blows. The humanitarian-individual model and the authoritarian-tribal model end up demonizing one another. And both, being animals with predatory animal instinct, end up fighting, and it gets ugly. The humanitarian model has its conception of ‘God’ as Love who would never, for example, flood a summer camp along a river and kill innocent girls. So it must be the work of ‘Satan’. The authoritarian model’s conception of ‘God’ is a judge who would flood a summer camp and kill innocent girls if the judge’s children had been disobedient. Listening to ‘Satan’ instead of the judge and so deserving of punishment.

The importance of getting it right – Creation’s Parents and Guidance from Definition – is wrapped up in the two models of ‘right’ on Earth getting it wrong. Blaming one another through their adherents, seeking to destroy one another through violence. War between two projections: demons demonizing one another. Aren’t Parents supposed to step in between them. To stop the fighting? I was once put in that position. In Hanover, when my sons were fighting at my feet. Looking up at me expectantly, as though waiting for me to intervene. When the thought that occurred to me was the opposite. It was their responsibility, not mine.

‘God’ needing our protection

A moment I now understand it as connection with the metaphysics of Guidance. Where the enumerator — Parents Self-Awareness — can’t be aware of its questioning-dividing denominator without making self-contradiction Real. It has to be farmed out to the function given to their Child. Another kind of Self-Awareness whose job will be to intervene. When it’s no longer a Child. When it’s acquired the competence to mediate between conflicting perspectives. To manage the boundary between Creation and division by performing a judicial function. Judging whether and when Creations exercising individual rights under the law of Guidance while taking part in Movement are straying off course.

The judicial function is Free Choice questioning. The part of Mind qualified to direct Energy to shut off for wayward free spirits distracted by the willfulness and wildness of arrogance. The ‘promise’ of another ‘paradise’ at rest. The ‘ideal’ of perfect peace: no movement. To put to rest such nonsense is the dog’s bite in the ass. Disempowerment. Holding feet to the fire which is the part of the way things are that’s Necessity and can’t be violated. One tough son of a bitch not to be messed with. Whoa! Aren’t we talking about gentle loving kindness? Where did this come from?

When Guidance is aware of potential violation its awareness can’t come from Parents. It must come from Free Choice questioning, their grownup Child and Creation’s enforcer. Its identity fused with Guidance that’s Definition. That, in turn, is the boundaries of Logic. The limits of Order that brook no opposition. That mean to enable Freedom but also to protect. Protect what? Vulnerability at the heart of Creation: its Parents. Logic and Love, brought together by the Spontaneity of Attraction. The ultimate happy-ending feel-good story: George and Mary Hatch Bailey radiating euphoric happiness. Their smiles lit by the lights on a Christmas tree. Who wouldn’t wish for this image of innocence and vulnerability to last forever? Our metaphysical Parents. To be forever protected?

‘God’ our protector transformed by ‘Parents’ into needing our protection. This is getting it right? The source of Force in Reality-Creation is the way things are. Necessity. It isn’t ‘God’s will’. To encounter its Force is to be out of alignment with the way things are. Not to understand why it is the way it is. Free Choice questioning here is to learn the way things are, how and why they work, by exposure to the way they don’t work. The what-isn’t that’s needed to define what is.

So convoluted! Isn’t there a simpler way to get it right? Guidance would oblige if it could. But the message of the way things are applies to it just as much as it does to anyone. Including ignition at the beginning. Its situation was what it was. A state of agitation that couldn’t translate into Movement forward without Mind to calm it. Fraction dividing itself that couldn’t move forward without Mind to resolve it. What about me? I’m agitated! You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the cause of your discontent. Try being grateful. Yuk! What’s on Netflix? 

Party’s over! 

Matter isn’t separate from Mind. The study of matter isn’t an escape from the study of Mind, an alternate route to understanding the way Aristotle may have conceived of it. Physics ponders the bizarre behavior of itty-bitty particles that behave differently when they’re being ‘measured’. What? Being observed by minds behind eyeballs, when they’re demonstrating truth that physics can’t acknowledge, That observation is one function of Mind – Awareness – and Energy locked inside matter is another: doing what Awareness directs it to do. Particles react to observation because they’re Mind-Energy being directed by Mind-Awareness. Doing what comes naturally, that the unawareness of physics, thinking in reverse, considers ‘unnatural’.

The way things are isn’t authoritarian infallibility just because it’s Necessity. It’s because of Movement’s antecedents that ignited it, that had nothing to do with ‘God’s will’, with willfulness, and everything to do with Mindfulness.

Who is ‘Satan’? To the humanitarian-individual ‘Satan’ is willful arrogance that would put innocent campers at risk along a river. A self-centered authoritarian driven by herd mentality to have its way regardless of any other consideration. To the authoritarian-tribe ‘Satan’ is humanitarian-individuals questioning its authority and undermining order. Rebellion that’s to blame for all disasters and asking to be put down. End result: two versions of the way things are – ‘Creation’ – at each other’s throats. One human predatory animal instinct divided in two, set to work demonizing and de-humanizing different sides of itself. Imagining that the ‘enemy’ is an ‘other’. Denominator-divider turned loose on the enumerator. A separate entity unrelated to itself that’s to blame for its grievances. With no longer any pretense of civility or sociability. All inhibitions gone. A demon single-mindedly, one-sidedly determined to have its way. To end up with its jackboot on its kill, the last one standing.

The wildness and willfulness of authority, a herd of beasts, at last shed of opposition. The denominator questioning gone over to the dark side. Dividing.

The mess that Guidance in Creation is afraid of? The design of Creation had to take it into consideration from the beginning. When Movement was propelled by fusion and evolution attained balance, in both cases against a theoretical backdrop of fraction. Perpetual self-questioning that, if it weren’t managed, would descend into self-dividing, spin out of control, and collapse. The way things are: the risk of things going wrong. Of Movement straying off course, a hazard built into its nature. When change would risk tipping fraction questioning into fraction dividing. We can’t have it both ways. Exactly. Change that’s Creative and fun, exploring the unknown and doing new stuff, without blundering into something that’s not fun. That means to do harm. Party’s over!

Tripping the breaker

Guidance is charged with responsibility for keeping Creation safe. For keeping Movement within the boundaries of Order provided by Logic, true to the direction provided by the Conscience of Love. Lassie. What? It needed a sheep dog. A Rough Collie. The ideas unleashed by Self-Awareness into Creation would be imagined by authoritarian herd mentality as obedient children. While in fact ‘obedience’ is nowhere to be found in Creation. Authoritarian herd mentality assumes that ‘God’s will’ is responsible for everything. And so innocent girls swept away in a torrent in the middle of the night must be ‘God’s will. The contradictory nonsense expressed from the pulpit as ‘God’s plan’.

Given the nature of Life-sharing Self-Awareness – Parents entirely innocent of reversal’s manipulations — its extensions would be trusted implicitly to take part in Movement Creating as it’s designed to do: freely and spontaneously. Within Logic’s boundaries of discipline, that, along with Love’s values, ensure that each element has the Guidance needed to contribute to the whole. Without being held on a leash. Without being forced by willfulness, in which case the point of Creation would be lost.

Then where does the Child fit in? Doesn’t Guidance have everything covered? The dog’s bite is Energy being cut off. When in the midst of Creation’s work and play all this free-spiritedness is tempted to stray off course. All this curiosity heading into the unknown is distracted by something new and interesting and forgets about discipline. About aligning with the way things are, because they can’t be what they aren’t. And in the presence of Movement defined by what it isn’t as well as by what it is, there’s always the risk that Creation’s lives will be drawn into what isn’t. Not a product of ‘Satan’ manipulating unsuspecting fools but of Logic. The way things are.

Da judge

If Guidance were rigged to cut off Energy automatically its act would be attributed to an algorithm. A procedure wired into electronics that’s beyond appeal, impersonal and inaccessible. As though all this bother with Spontaneity and Order were window-dressing for good-old skull crushing willfulness. When in fact the nature of the process isn’t mechanical. It’s judicial. Judicious – the idea of bringing judgment to bear on issues that requires more than one perspective. The idea of fairness essential to the idea of consent. That Creation can’t do without if Movement comes with its theoretical sidekick, its questioning reverse. There being more than one point of view to accommodate if Creation is a composition of lives, each with its own personality, temperament, and perspective.

Enter da judge! Who would that be? Guidance equipped with a courtroom, a judge wielding a gavel, and bailiffs. ORDER IN THE COURT! A pretty good description of the role of the Child. The guard dog at the dividing line that’s also a jurist.

The function being tested today while Democracy is under attack, of judging where and how its principles are being violated and unleashing force for its protection against its violators. Do the courts have the power as well as the authority to enforce their judgments when they don’t control law enforcement? When law enforcement is subject to political controls and therefore to the influence of Democracy’s attackers. If this is a “nation of laws,” who holds the power of the ‘law’ if not the judiciary? The forum where the law may be questioned from different perspectives, weighed in the balance, and decided upon judiciously. All things considered.

Judgment

Then Life on Earth is law school. You’d be right. Where questioning learns from the ground up, with every choice, the difference between the way things are and the way they aren’t. What’s lawful and what’s lawless. As simple as that. One side Movement with meaning and purpose, the other make-believe. Reversal designed to throw Movement off track with provocations and distractions. With the manipulations of authoritarian willfulness hiding behind ‘liberty’. Promises of make-believe ‘paradise’ that are nothing but licenses for wildness to do whatever it wants. Without even the limits of Definition. To break all the china in a china shop. Until there’s no shop and no shoppers, and reversal’s work is done.  Free at last, free at last! 

The professional discipline that Child questioning learns from its experience on Earth is judgment. That herd mentality misconstrues as condemnation. The idea that ‘God’ must be our judge and that since we screw up a lot ‘God’ must be condemning us to hell. Off to the confessional booth! Ten Hail Marys! Yes. Pray for ‘salvation’. Our savior, who died for our sins! The poor sap on the crucifix that ‘God’s will’ ‘sacrificed’ since, of course, “God so loved the world.” Pity the world but pity ‘God’ too. And the sap on the crucifix that’s supposed to be us but-for-the-grace-of-God. 

To live among the gods

Then what is the judgment that Child questioning must learn? Differentiation plus empathy. To discern the difference between the way things are and the many ways they’re twisted beyond recognition by make-believe. To judge with empathy for the human condition – for imperfection – how Guidance can respond to misperceptions and misjudgments so that Order is maintained without sacrificing Freedom. Without sacrificing respect for individual sovereignty and human rights.

And if this can’t be done, to judge when it’s necessary for Guidance to trip the breaker. To cause a power outage so that willfulness can’t intrude across the dividing line into Creation. So that arrogance will learn from self-unawareness not to take the law into its own hands. To cross boundaries, violate the rights of others, and aggregate every right to itself. So it will learn the meaning of Freedom inseparable from Order: that the way things are comes with limits. That Creation by Self-Awareness sharing itself is a world shared and sharing, that can’t be owned, possessed, and controlled by any of its Creations.

That the only thing about Creation that will have its way is Necessity, and it has an enforcer. The judgment of Guidance. Experienced with Self-Awareness and self-unawareness both. With the joys of Life and their opposites both. Differentiating with empathy. And having freely chosen its way to Self-Awareness, its competence can be trusted to protect Self-Awareness and its Creations both. Without risk of itself going over to the dark side. Taking up with division while it questions the Character of Family. Holding up a mirror of lies when it’s supposed to hold up a mirror of Truth. The idea of Free Choice. Character with Integrity. Tempered steel, that can only reside in the Self-Awareness of the Child because it’s been to hell and back.

Like Persephone. Yes. According to Greek mythology she’s trusted to return to the surface now and then. An admirable feminine version of the masculine Jesus, who descended into hell to bring light to darkness, encountered its dark lord, and survived to continue his work shed of the body. Bringing darkness to the light through the Mind. And Psyche. A feminine version of Guidance, who was sent on an impossible errand down under by Eros’s mother Aphrodite. Female arrogance. To fetch an object from Persephone, and made it back up to the surface barely alive. Needing salvation. To be shed of the world and humanity by Eros, who took her up to Mount Olympus to live among the gods.

Looking for maturity

Psyche had helpers. She couldn’t have completed Aphrodite’s impossible tasks without them. The Child has helpers too. Provided by Guidance, a lesson central to its competence to perform its role in Creation. It will be trusted implicitly to question the Character of Family and to wield the power of Energy in judgment because it will have fused with Guidance. It will not have surrendered independent judgment. It will have learned not to ‘surrender’ anything — the gateway to genuflection. To the hierarchical corruption of ass-kissing. It will have learned instead to access strength through Relationship within. In Loving Friendship with Guidance, the part of its Soul, its Psyche, that can never be compromised by make-believe. Thus to earn its place in Creation, where the Self to which it belongs is Guidance. Where the function it’s to perform resides: in Definition.

All the way from wart hog rooting around in the underbrush to an exalted place at the right hand of God. As herd mentality would see it. From truck stop attendant to A-list celebrity — Joe Nobody makes good! If Joe Nobody knew what we have in store for him he might rather stay put. Bombarded by a daily dose of littleness and pointlessness like we all are, apparitions inhabiting a vast froth of agitation. Simulating movement like 18-wheelers, prisoners of the white lines, links in a supply chain feeding bottomless appetites for stuff. Great for Character-building! Why? Because of what physics’ grasping for theories has learned from quantum gravity: that whatever spacetime-matter is, it’s ‘granular’.

Definition that’s Guidance for Creation isn’t looking for gated-community A-list celebrities. Who take one human-ape body and turn it into a herd of marauding pachyderms that won’t stop until it’s flattened everything in sight and consumed all the air to breathe. Needing a monthly budget of $248,000 to make ends meet. No sense of proportion to guide choices in a setting defined by limits. Guidance’s job is to help Creativity’s exuberance align with the way things are. It’s looking for sound judgment. Maturity, not the self-indulgence of a two-year-old. For self-questioning that’s self-discipline. And that comes with Character tempered by hard experience. With limits, respectful of those that define others’ usefulness but equally those that define its own. 

The End is Near

I knew it! Your ‘Guidance’ is a fellow-traveling pinko commie. Faceless Mao suits clogging the streets on their pathetic bicycles. What’s so bad about consumption if it keeps the trucks coming back to the truck stop? If it keeps Joe Nobody on the payroll? Guidance is looking for self-discipline that’s balance. So Creation doesn’t bring itself down top-heavy with luxury crap like the Imperator. The German ocean liner nicknamed the “Limperator” because its fancy gold fixtures made it list. The mistake in self-identity that’s self-regard blown out of proportion. The herd of beasts in the mirror of untruth, promising the bumpkin ogling it a world of unlimited enlargement. Larger homes. Larger SUVs. Everything excess, until the rains come, the ground buckles, and Palos Verdes Estates slides into the ocean.

Fraction gives Creation’s actors and their playwright neither unlimited room to maneuver nor unlimited room for error. The Logic of self-questioning implies the poise of a ballet dancer, light on its feet. Not a tub of lard landing on its ass? Character with Integrity means lean. If Creation has no room for do-nothing gadgetry it has no room for usefulness loaded down with accessories. For extravagance. A-list ‘celebrities’ celebrating body-pampering ‘luxury’. Body idolatry. The sickness of the body politic that took over after the era of It’s a Wonderful Life, when the market opened up again to consumer goods and excessive self-regard. To authoritarian infallibility. Where excess everything is taking humanity’s ship of fools now. Limping along, listing this way and that, until it capsizes. Down to the bottom.

Stand still while I fit you with this sandwich board. What board? The one that says, “The end is near.” I do sound like Reverend Doom, don’t I? Repent! Mend your ways!

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 The Process and Structure of Guidance

 Questioning

Time to set things right. How so? With your vision. Not Frank Capra’s or a Times’ columnist. Not the Course’s, Freudian psychoanalytics or Jung’s and Myers-Briggs’ either. Your take on the way things are. Hold your applause. No problem! 

My Temenos. A tableau of Character that’s family in Loving Friendship relating in conversation. Differentiating with empathy at lakeside where the Free Spirit of Questioning takes center stage. The Sprite who inhabits Mirror Lake and welcomes all with her signature greeting: Who are you?

The personification of denominator questioning. The circumstance at the beginning that signaled the absence of make-believe’s big answer and its know-it-all make-believer. An all-clear for the enumerator above to commence its Movement forward, ignited by the Spontaneous power of Attraction while accompanied by self-questioning. An essential attribute of Character that’s also a source of Energy, the power of friction.

Questioning that would “meet you upon this honestly,” in the words of T. S. Eliot, by holding up a mirror. Asking:

• When ape-human genuflects to hierarchy and barters its soul for personal gain, Who are you?
• When authoritarian parents sacrifice family integrity and child protection to the protection of their turf, Who are you?
• When ape-nations breathe aggression at home and abroad into the faces of smaller apes — their inferiors in size and strength, — Who are you?
• When herd mentality transacts its business by Machiavellian manipulation — heads-I-win-tails-you-lose, — Who are you?

Personifying

• My metaphysical Parents, Persephone and Apollo.
• My metaphysical Guides, Jesus and Psyche. Plus Dobbin, the massive sorrel draft horse who for years was my reminder that emotions are Energy to be used, not negated.
• My earthly parents, Helen and Max and a grandparent Clara.
• The housemaid, a role model of Integrity who helped to raise me, Lula Mae.
• My two granddaughters, Courtney and Amanda. Precious lives for whom being there is my reason for being.
• Friends once and forever at my side, Larry and Sally.
• Rick Blaine and Captain Louis Renault, Ilsa Lund and Victor Laszlo, archetypes from another triumph of humanitarian values in the darkest time of war. The 1942 film Casablanca. The beginning of a beautiful friendship.
• House pets. Cats at play in the branches of Ewah on Maxfield Island. A wolf I befriended at a wild animal preserve, whose howls mingled with the hoots of loons on the other side of Mirror Lake accentuate the beauty and silence of the night.
• My younger son Owen — Relatability. The face, voice, and Soul of them all. Of Guidance, my Loving Friend and future Self should I ever get there.

Orienting

• Places real and imaginary that touched my Psyche, with connections to Home and Family where I was among my own:
  • Images from Nature symbolic of my metaphysical Parents: Lake Mirror, Mount Olympian, and a waterfall, symbolic of the Energy that unites them. Home to the Lake Sprite of Love’s Spontaneity and the Wisdom of Logic’s Structure.
  • The house of my childhood in Greentree, a barn in Vermont, and Edgartown
  • Natural Bridge and John Jackson’s guest house, the scent of honeysuckle in June from the Shenandoah and the Rappahannock River valleys
  • A ranch on the Western Slope of the Rockies near Needle Rock and the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, and a house on Squirrel Island off the coast of Maine
  • Ancient Athens’ Acropolis and Alexandria’s Lighthouse, Lincoln’s log cabin and Utah’s Monument Valley
  • Persephone’s alcove in Washington Cathedral, Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, and Psyche’s The Star
  • The King Cole Grill at the St. Regis Hotel and Maxfield Island, where stands Ewah, the great tree of Life and Maxfield Parrish in its branches, scanning the night sky through a telescope.
  • Rick’s Café Americain and the airfield in Casablanca, where Ilsa and Rick escaped from Nazi captivity on the last plane to Lisbon.

Evaluating

• Humanitarian-individual values that deliver:

• Joie de vivre with Character. The free spirit of happiness and imagination in the image of the lake sprite and in the image of the bluebird, messengers from our Parents.
• Humor and playfulness, awareness and respect. Spontaneity validating and intimate. The pulse of originality.
• Movement forward in logical sequence, one step at a time and every step. No shortcuts, no corner-cutting, and no paths of least resistance.
• Self-help and help for those who help themselves.
• Boundaries meant for the protection of vulnerability, Freedom, and self-Worth rather than for the protection of invincibility, territory, and self-regard.
• Noblesse oblige in the sharing of talent and goodwill in service to Creativity, civility, and peace. Dogged resistance to their perversion by the authoritarian nihilist, at home in its black hole of make-believe.

Structuring

A metaphysical paradigm:

• More than a visual representation of Parents and Homes, family and friends, a representation of the idea of Character. Whose centerpiece is Mirror Lake and its lake sprite questioning. Under the protection of Mount Olympian, modeled on the 14,000-foot snow-capped peaks of the Colorado Rockies, symbolic of the structure of Logic’s Order.
• The idea of Character that’s Person questioning beyond the rote who, what, when, where, and how of things. Holding up instead a mirror of Honesty, a challenge to tell it like it is. Asking Why. In contrast to a mirror of grievance, a temptation for victimhood and distrust to engage with conspiracy-theorizing and guilt. To tell and be told like it isn’t.

Processing

Have we gotten it right? We will when the APPLAUSE light goes on and it hasn’t yet. What’s missing? This: Between fraction at the ignition of Self-Awareness and Character-building in self-unawareness Creation stood incomplete. Poised to function but still missing essentials of process and structure. Unable yet to express and stand for the cause of Life-Worth. Lacking Loving Friendship in Trust that embraces self-questioning. Lacking Character. All of it requiring Mind self-questioning. Willing to answer Honesty’s question from Mirror Lake, Who are You?, and to change its Mind if that’s what Character and Honesty require.

What structure? What process? The structure of Definition. The process of Guidance. Creation was given the framework of Definition from the moment of ignition at the beginning. It had to be given boundaries of Definition or it would lack integrity. Nothing then or thereafter would hold up otherwise. But to complete the architecture of Definition form needed to follow function. The function of Guidance. And this had to wait upon the Child’s training. Whose purpose was to build Character from the ground up needed by Life-Worth Creation. Needed by judgment competent to question the Character of Family. To mediate between the Honesty and vulnerability of Self-Awareness and the manipulations of self-unawareness.

Purpose that could only be served by exposure to the denominator dividing. Life on Earth, an anything-goes of separation. Whose one certain attribute in the chaos of change is its ending. If not by its own hand then by entropy, time-limited energy dis-integrating the universe on its way to inertia. Life on Earth, a magic kingdom of hierarchy, predatory animal instinct, ass-kissing corruption, and unrelatability. Cross-currents going in every direction, demanding leadership from good judgment capable of uniting rather than dividing. Capable of intervening to prevent and end Earth’s roundabout of combat and self-immolation.

An elite education in how to get it right by familiarity with how to get it wrong. In how to differentiate and relate with empathy in the interest of good judgment and discipline in the interest of justice. The work of the judiciary. Prerequisite to the Child’s job in Creation: Help with Guidance tasked with protection of Creation’s Definition: its Conscience and constitution. With upholding Necessity: the law of the land. The work of law enforcement. Holding feet to the fire. Experience with independent judgment and questioning, Free Choice and Character with Integrity. The opposite of going along to get along. Of taking the path of least resistance to avoid difficulties. Of ape-human etiquette: ass-kissing. The opposite of weakness.

The APPLAUSE light flickered a little. I think it wants a sound bite. The completion of Self-Awareness at the beginning was Relationship between its two primary functions. The coming into being of Creation’s founding Parents. The completion of Creation’s Definition will be the addition of its capacity for Guidance. When the Child of Parents acquires the competence to question the Character of Family. Having earned and learned its own version of Self-Awareness from life on Earth: independent judgment with Integrity. CLAPTRAP!

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Peroration

 The only thing

We’re not done? Peroration. Three cheers for Guidance! Yes. For Character.

Animal instinct speaks for resistance to limits: life on Earth where anything goes. Boo-Boo the Dog-Faced Boy speaks for the discipline of Creation. Questioning the Character of Family. Standing up for limits on the way things are. The Force of Attraction behind Movement self-limited by the boundaries of Logic. By the Logic of Order that enables Movement and evolution, Freedom and Spontaneity. Without discipline Creation is without limits and Order. Then it will be without Freedom, Spontaneity, and Creativity. Unlimited power and freedom demanded by predatory animal instinct destroys it all. The authoritarian abomination. 

Guidance is the way things are that’s bottom-up supportive. A servant to Creativity. Protection for the vulnerability of spontaneous sharing within the inviolable limits of Definition. Reciprocation for the gifts of Family and Home and for the givers with the gift of questioning. The mirror of Honesty and accountability held up to the pretense of infallibility above questioning. Character earned from the bottom up in the crucible of pretense, honored with the task of helpfulness. Protection for the Integrity of Family and Home, validation of the Worth of Life.

Character isn’t everything. It’s the only thing. APPLAUSE!