Birthmarks

Wisdom from a Napkin at The Kettle 

Worth an extra rasher of bacon

The template for everything that is and isn’t is fraction self-questioning in Reality, self-questioning and self-dividing in unreality. 

Slow down! You’ve lost me already! If Moni could understand so can you. Who’s Moni? My waitress. She even paid for my real Vermont maple syrup. What? So they would see more of me at the Kettle. Why would they want to see more of you at the Kettle? Gluttons for punishment? I look good in my best shirt. I think it was attracting customers. What’s the Kettle anyway? A nice restaurant in Manhattan Beach where friends took me for my last birthday. Great pancakes! And you rewarded them by ruining one of their napkins. I wrote this on a notepad.

Moni got a 77 percent tip. For that she should have paid for your meal. I’d invited three other people to join me. When they didn’t show up she deserved it because I’d taken up a whole booth. I wouldn’t have shown up either. And shame on you for taking a whole booth away from more deserving customers. 

But enough! What’s all this bullshit about a template? There are two phases of existence that we need to be aware of. What’s supposedly happening here on Earth and what actually happened somewhere else. In a manner of speaking, since it’s all one Mind. Where Mind evolving got started before it produced a part of itself to do something that it couldn’t do itself without screwing it up. A function we can think of as its Child. That needed specialized training on Earth where it would grow up and then it could perform its function back home with its Parents. Putting the final touch on Creation as it were. “Creation” with a capital ‘C’? To help distinguish between the Parents’ state of Self-Awareness and their Child’s self-unawareness.

Understanding what the Child’s training on Earth is all about has occupied the bulk of our attention, and it has its template. But we’ve never gotten it right, and it’s because we’ve never tried to understand its Parents’ story. That has its own template. I’ve figured that out. Well la te da and good for you! Worth an extra rasher of bacon. Worth a whole jug of real Vermont maple syrup if you ask me. Nobody. . . . Never mind. 

Upside-down 

What are these templates? For the Parents’ situation at their beginning it was a fraction. Enumerator wanting to move forward, left to right, but immobilized. Like the lion with a thorn in its paw. A fraction with a thorn in its paw. Wait till my math teacher hears about this! Its denominator below the dividing line was questioning it, which was fine. But it was also trying to divide it, which was not fine. Because if it succeeded it might have turned fraction into a whole number. Great! Problem solved! You think so? Whole number without an enumerator in motion forward would have brought everything to a stop. Then we wouldn’t have been having this conversation? Nobody would. That’s bad? 

Mind came along and removed the thorn. Androcles? How did it do that? By a bunch of stuff I’ll explain later. Right now I’m thinking of naming Mind “Androcles.” You don’t already have a name? Everyone is stuck with “God.” It’s totally wrong, but I haven’t thought of a good alternative. Then the template is this fraction. . . . It’s the structure of Creation in Reality. That consists of enumerator above the dividing line and denominator below. That’s questioning. Or, if you like, a circle whose circumference is divided by its diameter. The dividing part has been removed by Mind’s process of differentiation. That’s what removed the thorn.

It got tossed out? Just put to use where the way things are isn’t real. Where contradiction can’t conflict with Reality but it’s perfect for training Mind’s Child in virtual reality — ‘there’ but not really there. Where we’re practicing getting our act together before our act goes into production in Creation. Our act? What happened to the Child? Dreaming us and our virtual reality. Getting trained to do great things in Creation through us. A different situation from its Parents’ at their beginning that involved a different template. Don’t tell me: the Child’s template is the enumerator on the bottom of the dividing line looking up at the denominator. Exactly. The fraction inverted because unreality is Reality in reverse. Upside-down.

Uh oh

Different situations, different templates. Hmmmmm. ‘Fraction’ is the pattern imposed on things the way they are by their situation in its formative stage. Like a definitive brand that sets the mold. The die is cast. Caesar taking his country into a new era with a new template. By crossing the Rubicon with his legion in violation of the Republic’s code and its template: generals and their armies covered with blood, mud, and authoritarian pretension stay outdoors! Fraction was the original Movement’s reverse-opposite taken on board as a logical necessity. Immobility. An impossibility required to complete its definition by what it isn’t.

The mirror of Self-Awareness needed to question it from another perspective. That since Parents themselves couldn’t provide it, it had to come from elsewhere. What ‘elsewhere’? Another Mind? From their Child Free Choice. Independent judgment attached to Definition free of their influence. Creation’s constitution and Conscience. Nothing above the law in Creation. Yes. That functions as Guidance. With faculties drawn from the ignition of Movement by Spontaneity inseparable from Order. Spontaneity-Love that empathizes, Order-Logic that differentiates. A guarantee of Creativity free of contamination by willfulness. And Sapiens’ hope for better things, because these are the faculties that broke it away from ape.

What’s got the Child’s attention, looking up at the denominator, is the divider part. A Hallowe’en mask. That or your best friend. How about your savior? If it’s contradiction that can’t be allowed into Creation in Reality then it’s make-believe. It can present itself any way it likes because there’s nothing defining it. Nothing? Well, the reverse of the enumerator. A derivative of someone else’s definition. If it’s not your own then you can take advantage of reversal to portray yourself any way you like. Then the template is fraction upside-down. Enumerator in the person of the child at the bottom, and it’s looking up into a mirror. Yes. Into make-believe, a reflection of its host in reverse. The divider. Misperceived as the Child’s ‘savior’. Uh oh. Yeah. Uh oh.

The test of Character

What happened to denominator-questioning? It’s there too. Only the Child, being a child and starting its training without the attributes of Character it has to build for itself, will have to learn to differentiate. Part of its training. And so it can’t tell correct from incorrect, true from false, and so forth. Questioning from dividing. Its Parents knew the difference? Being Reality themselves they made short work of make-believe. An all-encompassing big answer know-it-all. Pretending to be a whole number: a ‘paradise’ of no movement, nothing happening. Pretending to be a predecessor and antecedent of Happening that the Parents pulled off. ‘Number one’. An absurdity. A total fraud spouting a pack of lies. Misperceived as a savior. Sounds familiar. A hint, maybe, that my theorizing is relevant.

You wouldn’t happen to have a visual, would you? Just imagine fractions right side up and upside-down. With the denominator split between questioning (good) and dividing (bad). Put faces on them if you like. Except that dividing plays an essential part in the training of the Child. To do what? To provide the doing part of Creation’s Definition. What would that be? Guidance. Which is why dividing as well as questioning has a place in the constitution and Conscience of Creation. In its Definition. It’s ‘bad’ but not really bad. A Necessity. Part of the way things are.

So the next time I recoil at the antics of an asshole I should thank him. Yes. For helping you build Character by giving you a choice: either stand up to him and own yourself, or let him own you. Put you in a cage. Psychological, physical, or both. Helping you learn how to contradict wrongdoing. Because in virtual reality it’s not just a cartoonish caricature. It can kick your butt. And it will if it can get away with it. Like when the Nazi bully started violating human rights and taking land and got away with it. Nobody stood up to it. It got so big it took half the world to put the beast down.

Not a word about birthmarks

We can reflect on that while we ponder our options today. Aware that ‘peace on Earth’ starts with each of us but just as confused as we were a century ago about how do deal with contradiction. Within and without. Demanding forcefulness in our Mindfulness from the first sign of the bully. Contradiction in response to contradiction. “Filled with a terrible resolve” before the enemy bombs Pearl Harbor instead of after. Before our own demons take us away from our duty to be there for one another.

Honest acceptance that our world of make-believe isn’t here to pamper us. It’s here to divide us. Doing Character a favor and Creation too. With a ‘real-world’ lesson in ‘niceness’: if contradiction is whatever it takes to take us down, we’re whatever it takes to contradict it. By force if necessary, until we get it right. Until we learn what it takes for Mindfulness to bring order to chaos without willfulness or force of any kind.

Any questions? May I have another napkin? Of course. Anything else? Your title lured me into intrigue, a secret reserved for the in-crowd at the Algonquin Roundtable. All this stuff about templates and not a word about birthmarks. Not just a poetic allusion. It goes to the heart of an age-old ape-human misperception, the source of conflict still wracking our world today. Its explanation requires context that can’t be risked on a napkin. Farewell cruel world! Death by bullshit!    

The meat cleaver theory 

You’ll change your tune when I answer questions that science and philosophy can’t. Really? Including the origin of the Big Bang. Let’s hear it. The extension of Mind Self-Awareness needed for its self-questioning was Free Choice, the function of its Child critical to its independent judgment and integrity. That Creation in Reality couldn’t take on without making room for what was essentially a wild card. To be attached and quarantined, because it would have one foot planted on the enumerator side but another on the denominator side. Squish! Into a cow pie! Yes, if Guidance hadn’t finished its training.

Free Choice couldn’t be born into Creation in a state of Self-Awareness if the point of its self-questioning was to gain Self-Awareness. To earn and learn it in self-unawareness by building it from the ground up in Relationship with Guidance. This was its Logic, its nature. Being Free Choice, one part enumerator moving, one part denominator self-questioning, it automatically went straight from the womb into self-unawareness. But not straight into training by self-dividing. This required a separate step. Needing perspective from both sides of fraction’s dividing line, the Child needed its Mind to be split. To allow the denominator to do to it what it couldn’t do to its Parents’ Mind in Reality: to divide it.

Leon Trotsky’s fate. A meat cleaver fracturing his skull. Stalin’s revenge. The splitting of the Child’s Mind had no effect on its existence. But it did ensure that it would begin its job in unreality sweeping floors. With an ax buried in its skull. The blow was meant to separate everything that held Creation in Reality together, so that the Child would learn to put its pieces back together again. Like boot camp, where Sarge made me disassemble and reassemble my rifle. So you’d be familiar with a device that could save your life. What made the blow decisive was severing the connection between Love and Logic, Movement’s ignition. Without that nothing at the start of the Child’s training would make sense or hold together.

Thus the period of evolution, interconnections and reconnections, that had to take place before Sapiens made its debut. Getting a lot of help, I see. From Spontaneity, yes. But not from anything mistaken or willful that would compromise the Child’s integrity. Our task here is like Psyche’s when she was given impossible tasks by Aphrodite: succeeding because she had helpers. The Child, enumerator looking up at the denominator within its upside-down fraction – our template, – mistook the divider for a helper. Its savior, since it couldn’t be aware of its ties to Creation and its Parents, and it needed help with everything. Our Aphrodite.

She sweet-talked her gullible beholder from her mirror and then – bang! Down the middle with her meat cleaver. Her version of it. The Child’s version was it invited a nice lady into his thoughts who was going to take him to her paradise of anything goes. A mistake that will mess up its thinking until we get it straight: this isn’t ‘paradise’ and its ‘creator’ is no ‘savior’.

Prefrontal domestication 

Then what about the Big Bang? Just as “atomic bomb” refers to splitting or dividing an atom the Big Bang refers to denominator in unreality dividing fraction’s enumerator. The Child-in-training’s situation required a physical environment where corruption in an animal kingdom of ass-kissing hierarchy would test its Character. This is what provided it. An illusory act of violence that produced another illusory act of violence: the Big Bang. The origin of an illusory universe of violence. Or maybe lots of universes. The theorizing gets ridiculous. The splitting of Mind that produced lots of cell-splitting ‘life’ and atom-splitting energy, both constructive and destructive. Everything splitting. Everything separating. That’s life! Breaking Up Is Hard to Do. 

Did you notice how our brains are shaped? Yes. By a meat cleaver. Split down the middle between two hemispheres. One on the left the brain’s version of Logic, on the right its version of Love. One’s thinking that’s boundaried, the other boundaryless. The mark of the divider on the human Psyche is manifest in the shape of the brain. That’s all? Hardly. In the split down the middle between personality types, one Mindful-individual the other body-sensing willful-tribal. The making of our world of make-believe no-movement was unignition by an act of no-movement.

Painful! Was there no anesthetic? Before denominator does violence to the human Psyche by dividing it’s anesthetized by denominator questioning. To mask harmfulness with the appearance of helpfulness. Animal brain with prefrontal cortex – sociability. Window dressing meant to assure prey that their predators have been domesticated. I wish! 

What happened to the others?

In more primitive times predatory ape-human herd mentality imagined an almighty ape mad at them. For engaging in tribal atrocities against one another and their own members. Rampant abuse before ‘civilization’ introduced table manners. Craving relief from the psychopathology of self-worthlessness, lovelessness, and despair. Guilt. And when Jesus arrived, a super-salesman of Relatability with a super sales pitch, they bought it. Love, innocence, and hope. Their only consideration – salvation from damnation. Relief from authoritarian tribal judgment.

They weren’t looking for understanding? Just rescuing. A little affirmation of the individual. Sweeping ‘explanations’ wouldn’t have interested them. Bullshit like this. But that was then, this is now. Give me bullshit or give me death! After centuries of feckless speculation and mythologizing, ‘faith’ and ideologies, ‘science’ and all the rest that haven’t come up with answers; after centuries of violence and bloodshed with ever greater potential for mass-extinction, Sapiens’ thinking has may have shifted a little. Ready to try something different. Still addicted to short cuts but hardened to the Necessity of getting it right. Aware that there’s actually a cost to getting it wrong and it could fall on everyone’s shoulders. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Understanding the way things are requires metaphysics of the way things are. Philosophy plus psychology. Structured. Thinking grounded in system implied by structure. Complete. Integrated. Systematic and coherent. Aligned with the geometric-mathematical structure presented. “Birthright.” Geometric structure a circle, circumference divided by diameter. Mathematical structure enumerator divided by denominator: fraction that can’t resolve to whole number.

Creation in Reality plus Guidance in training in unreality. Where the object is to choose freely and therefore correctly. Between Guidance or manipulator, Movement or paralysis, self-questioning or self-defeating. Between Character with Integrity in humanitarian civility or ass-kissing corruption in animal-kingdom hierarchy.

To escape from an inverted ship by intuiting which part of its hull provides an exit. The bow or the stern. And which guide is qualified to lead its passengers there. Gene Hackman or the other guy. The existential question posed by The Poseidon Adventure. Whose answer was Gene Hackman and the stern. But then again, we never learned what happened to the others. 

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Elmer Fudd Wises Up 

Resistance training

In the language of spontaneity, this essay is what it is. Not to be tugged this way and that in a contest of wills. It has a voice and a mind of its own and a context of its own. That can change to fit whatever its situation calls for — changing circumstances in the poetry of Movement. To be listened to and heard on its own terms. To be made of whatever is to be made in the moment. A perspective out of time and not of this world. Its essence, not to be owned. Only to be heard and its gift accepted by sharing it. Respectfully and with its help, or there would be nothing to share.

In the language of ideas, this essay is about Character. Structure and resistance, characteristic of fraction, the birthmark of the title. The structure of Creation in Reality. Taken from mathematics: enumerator over denominator, united and divided by a dividing line. From geometry. Pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Character standing on its own against resistance. From the denominator within, questioning enumerator’s movement forward.

That would be Character compromised. A house divided and unable to stand, were its denominator given the power to divide. To bring enumerator, denominator, and structure down in a state of self-contradiction. Our state here in life on Earth: a training ground for Character. To learn and practice the difference between Character strengthened by resistance questioning and weakened by its reverse: resistance self-dividing. Between Integrity and corruption. The two sides of fraction — one Self-Aware and Real, the other self-unaware. Making it up as it goes along.

The structure of Creation in Reality that’s inverted in unreality. The task of Character, to put it right side up. To put enumerator moving forward back on top, denominator questioning it back on the bottom. And to resist denominator’s contradictions with contradiction — what it takes to stand on our own two feet. To build Character capable of performing its function in the Reality of Creation. Guidance. Being there with us and for us. Character in resistance training that’s eventually us, our metaphysical Self. Provided that’s who we choose to be. Provided we get it right.

Presto! We have a symbol. What? Twenty-two over seven (seven): 22 / 7 (7). The way things are in Reality and inverted, the way things are in unreality. 7 (7) / 22. Catchy, don’t you think? A symbol of Character that can’t be divided and symbol that can’t catch on. But your idea is correct nonetheless, and super computers trying to divide Character indefinitely are symbolic as well. Of the divider. ‘Action’ outside the limits of Definition. An impossibility. Make-believe.

Something better than a psychopath

‘Bedtime story’ from the perspective of a metaphysicist fascinates by explaining the why and how of things. That can be found within and behind the scenes of stuff ‘happening’, whereas to other perspectives fascination is to be found on the surface. The who, what, when, and where of things – the usual fare when we sit at the feet of storytellers. Whose orientation is outward rather than inward, and so unconcerned with what’s motivating the ‘action’. They just want a ringside seat to witness it. To see William Holden’s Bad Bunch slaughter an arena full of uniforms with a Gatling gun. Or Arnold Schwarzenegger do anything because it’s movement with a purpose. Avenging injustices to victimhood in the cruelest way possible. By conflict. Guarantee of reciprocity: more injustices, more excuses for vengeance, and conflict in perpetuity.

Bedtime story at the feet of a metaphysicist won’t lull anyone into a comfy dream state if it can’t stick to the storyline. Which it won’t if it’s told by two storytellers. One of which is a stickler for the logical order of things, the other an aviator who flies by the seat of its pants. Darting this way and that according to whatever distracts it in the moment, coming and going as it pleases. Uncle Remus’ bluebird of happiness. Spontaneity. The bluebird of Love. A poet in addition to a musician. With a sense of humor. Lots of luck making this character stick to anything. Willing it to ‘obey’. Willing it to tell a story from A to Z in a straight line. Can’t be done, and if metaphysics is to capture meaning in the moment it shouldn’t even try.

You’ve spoiled everything, as usual. Just trying to be honest. Can’t tell a simple bedtime story without writing an essay about bedtime stories. At least this time I’ve got a story to tell. Told in a language no one can understand about stuff ‘happening’ that no one cares about. It actually has an ‘A’ and a ‘Z’ and things in between that connect them. It can’t wake them up in Peoria but it will in Azusa – everything from A to Z in the USA. It’s what they call a “thought system.” Be still my beating heart. Thought systems wake people up. They even start movements. Zoroaster got one going a long time ago. Yeah. And then what? A bunch of other ‘thought systems’ and ‘movements’ that fizzled out. Hawking was right: “philosophy is dead.” 

Hawking is dead, but that’s another matter. OK. You’re starting a movement and I’m supposed to be intrigued. I’m not starting a movement. Elmer Fudd can keep his shotgun. The gift of insights has produced another way of looking at things. At the way things are. How they got that way and why, and if it’s a gift the only way I can receive it is to share it. To give it back. Reciprocity – an act of Love. To whom doesn’t matter because Love loves everyone. Elmer too? Elmer too. Blasting away at Easter bunnies? We can’t all be nice Easter bunnies. Some of us obviously have to be Elmer. Why? To help us all do what we’re here for: to learn and grow into something better than a psychopath wielding a shotgun. To be a learning device.

Breaking new ground?

Ah! They’ll love it in la la land. What? The box office appeal of ‘learning devices’. Dynamite! Erich von Stroheim starring in “The Grand Learning Device.” Elmer can’t be parted from his shotgun so long as he allows himself to be defined by a carrot patch in need of a guardian. By one function, when there are others, and they don’t all involve cruelty to animals. In fact, he might even aspire to a state where there’s no cruelty or animals either. A higher order of being that gets him and bunny rabbits both out of carrot patches. Into an environment where the object is sharing abundance among friends. Mindful and considerate, instead of acquisitiveness among competitors for possessions. Mindless and inconsiderate. 

Clever, but you’re not getting away with it. What? Separating ‘human’ from ‘animal’. My other way of looking at the way things are ventures beyond ‘human’ and ‘animal’ both. So, you’re right. Human can stay attached to animal. If it’s an idea that got its source out of my perspective there’s no point bringing it back into my perspective. Where my bedtime story could lead us and Elmer Fudd too is to another level of awareness. Of what? Of another ‘us’. An ‘us’ that took leave of its senses or was never there in the first place. So it could learn from blasting with, and getting blasted by, a shotgun. From being one form of animal-beast or another, until it wised up. Stopped letting itself be manipulated by an absurdity. Letting itself be defined by it and decided to define itself.

What could possibly persuade Elmer, the Easter bunnies, and their fans like me to give up our amusements? A good reason, that’s what. Better than millennia of ‘thought systems’ and mythologies? If it gets us beyond their scope it could. Wow! They didn’t cover everything? They’re all focused on us. On speculations about what went wrong since we’re obviously defective goods. On what it implies for what we should do differently. Especially for whether we should be looking out for a superior version of us. A ‘prime mover’ who’ll be nice to us or scare the shit out of us if we don’t kiss its ass. Sacrilege! You’re talking about ‘God’! An invention of a narrative that doesn’t go far enough. Make-believe. Herd mentality.

“Beyond their scope.” Breaking new ground? This could be interesting. I think so. Would you like to read on? Well, actually. . . . 

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On Beyond the Hang-up 

Boldly putting us to sleep 

Bedtime story! Once upon a time. . . . Long, long ago and far, far away? Long, long ago or right this instant. Here and now, depending. Depending on what? On whether we’re measuring distance by time and space or forgetting about both. Why would we do that? You mean How can we tell a story without time and space? I mean maybe we should forget about a bedtime story. We can if the story is about something that’s neither. Neither time nor space? When it’s fully functional. Both parts of it are performing as they’re meant to. Designed to. When wouldn’t they be? When one part is offline and in training. Going through exercises – situations — designed for its evolution into its role provided that it’s OK with performing it. Provided that it understands what its training is all about, accepts it, and chooses to do it when its training is done.

Ah! The story of Adlai E. Stevenson! ‘E’ for Ewing. So what? My maternal grandma’s dad was a Ewing. My mom said we were related. To the guy who couldn’t make up his mind. For good reason. Earthly power can be corrupting. If he won the presidency he thought he might lose something more important. His personal integrity. We could do worse than emulate the way he went about accepting the nomination. Aware of its risks to his character and to the people he was committed to serve. Not the role model running things today. Yes. No worries if there are no people to be served! Just himself. Simplifies things. No need to dither. Pounce and capture. All it takes. A ‘man of action’! Mussolini.

This isn’t a bedtime story about a ditherer or a pouncer, Stevenson or Mussolini’s emulator. It’s about Mind. ‘Mind’ with a capital ‘M’. Like the brain of Captain Kirk? No. And not Mr. Spock either. They could be beamed aboard because their brains were inside bodies. The Mind we’re talking about can do this. Project itself onto another planet and beam itself back on board as though it were body-brains like the crew of the Enterprise. Cool! But only the second function of Mind, and only when it’s in training. Offline in a state we can think of as dreaming. Making stuff up. Like a really interesting bedtime story? Sure! With treachery and betrayal? Not only that: fighting! Oh good! Savagery, debauchery, depravity! Institutionalized mob violence. I’m listening! 

Good, because we just touched on one of the benefits of learning about Mind. It why we live in “interesting times.” The source of all this mayhem isn’t the bad guys Mind’s second function is dreaming up. It’s the Mind doing the dreaming. Taking something made up – make-believe that can’t do anything let alone make itself real – and making it ‘real’. Then we’re hip-deep in bad guys unaware that they’re being manipulated.

Mind’s second function is a manipulator? No. But its training requires that it be offline and infected with a half-baked idea. Behaving like a virus that takes a living cell captive and replicates itself. Coding the organism for self-destruction if uninfected cells can’t prevent it. The half-baked idea is the manipulator. The virus. Elusive and impossible to ‘kill’ because it’s undefinable and undefining. Like a thing ‘seen’ in a hallucination. ‘There’ but not there. ‘Real’ but not real. Presenting itself to a mirror in its finest Transylvanian evening wear, horrified to find that it has no reflection.

Ah! Then there is a bad guy. It’s just lurking inside helpless innocence; the Mind that’s not in its right Mind. Correct. But only up to a point. More to the story? There is. Boldly going where no one has gone before. You think so? Who knows? All I know is I never heard anything like it before. OK by me so long as it puts me to sleep. 

Toward a higher state than ‘animal’

Then you’re satisfied with forgiveness. Huh? With letting the bad guy off the hook. I suppose so. Isn’t that the nice thing to do? Sure. The only thing to do if we want to get along and not be at each other’s throats. But there’s another way. Slit the bad guy’s throat! Herd mentality. Join up with a herd and you won’t ever again be bothered by conscience. Ever again feel remorse for doing a bad thing, because ‘good’ and ‘bad’ don’t mean anything to a herd. Only survival of the fittest. ‘Winning’ in competition. Being the last one standing. Supremacy atop hierarchy.

What kind of ‘morality’ is that? Machiavellian. Whatever it takes to ‘win’ the only index of ‘good’. Expedience. The morality, it happens, of any zoological classification of “tribal animal.” That’s us? Look it up. Machiavelli caused quite a stir in his time but he was just stating the obvious. In effect, that ‘human’ is a tribal animal – a sub-species of ape. Herd mentality whose ‘morality’ is capturing prey and doing with it whatever a predator does with its prey. Practicing good manners. Yes. Ape etiquette: smaller ape ass-kissing bigger ape. And if you’re not nice to the bigger ape you’ll lose your ass. No more worries about guilt or innocence, conscience or accountability. Just getting your ass kicked.

Dear me! Forgiveness lets everyone off the hook but the bad guy is still there. So is the memory of what the ‘bad guy’ did to us and all the cross-currents of anger and guilt that it caused. Everything erased except costs, which haven’t been accounted for and wounds which can take forever to heal. Minds and hearts, bodies and souls, scarred for an eternity. Herd mentality takes out the bad guy. In a game of get-even. The theatrics of ‘good’ vs ‘evil’, where ‘good’ just has to be ‘us’ and bad has to be ‘them’. Simplifies things, doesn’t it. More satisfying than forgiveness since human tribal-animal is a predator after all. What beast in our soul can be satisfied by ‘loving’ its ‘enemy’? Not me!

The choice between individual-nice and herd-not-nice is hung up on human vs animal. We can’t choose to be human individual-nice? We could if we could figure out what to do with ‘animal’. Not the better angel of our nature but something else. ‘Lesser’ or ‘worse’, but whatever it is it continues to exert an outsized influence on human behavior. Particularly on human interrelationships that need to be conjunctive rather than disjunctive. For survival if not for progress toward a higher state than ‘animal’.

‘We’ the storyteller

Your bedtime story will fix all this. It gets us past the hang-up keeping mindfulness captive to a mindless ape within. Predatory animal instinct still resident inside the brain. Unevolved and unevolving: our amygdala. At the base of the brain and on top of the spine. About which neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and theology have very little to say. Despite the fact that herd mentality would be nothing without it. And authoritarian arrogance, the trademark of a know-it-all mindset. The virus tracking our every move. Sauron making sure that ‘movement’ goes nowhere.

Brain surgery! What Freud attempted figuratively, by having patients talk their way into their animal brains to ferret out whatever this bad thing was. To get rid of guilt or at least manage it by being aware of it. But brains, like bodies, can’t be the solution whether they’re ‘understood’ or not. Why not? Because the self-deluded Mind in training is making it all up. You can’t ‘cure’ make-believe if its job here is to cure you. To be a learning device. All we can do is hope it advances our training toward its objective.

What’s that? To build Character and Integrity from within. What for? For Mind to perform its function when it’s completed its training. The function of Guidance that Definition needs to keep Creation in Reality on track. Movement within its boundaries, because everything has limits. Including Freedom. The function of Choice essential to Guidance mediating and adjudicating, experienced with the ways of arrogance. Experienced with standing up to the bully in our world of bigger apes. With resistance to ass-kissing corruption. Qualified to choose freely. To be trusted with Guidance.

Why “creation in reality?” Is there another ‘creation’ that’s not real? Human-animal’s world. Physical ‘reality’ that’s distinguished from metaphysical Reality. Initial cap ‘R’. Initial caps generally to make the distinction when we’re referring to metaphysical Reality. The focus of our bedtime story. The first-function Mind where stuff really happens as opposed to being hallucinated by the second-function Mind in training. Reality that’s ideas vs. unreality that’s their personifications and embodiments. Physical objects detectable by body-brain senses.

How does Mind detect anything without taste, touch, smell, hearing, and sight.? With the “Mind’s eye.” An expression from human intuition that contradicts what ‘realists’ would have us believe. What’s that? That nothing can be detected without body-brains’ five senses, and if it can’t be detected it doesn’t exist. A pillar of Western Thought that our story will expose for the make-believe absurdity that it is. A pillar of science and every other field of study. Yes, and a barrier to answers and solutions that human evolution needs. Going boldly where no one has gone before indeed!

Where did going boldly begin? No ‘beginning’ to Movement and no ‘ending’ that either term would mean to human-animal. Then everything doesn’t have limits. Everything has limits within its context because everything has context. “Situation.” Everything is situational. Rephrase your question to What was the situation at the beginning? and I can begin to answer. What was the situation at the beginning? Since the question is put to my Mind in my context you’ll need to know something about it first. You’re the storyteller. When I say ‘I’ can begin to answer it would be misleading. The storyteller is ‘we’.

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When Civility Fails 

Out of nowhere

The story began its journey in my Mind, from there to here, as a collaboration between what I thought I was doing, consciously, and what another version of ‘I’ was doing. A source of insights that broached the surface as though source and insights came from below. Not at my behest, nor in response to my search for an answer to a question that I’d defined. You weren’t in charge of your own thinking? My personality type has a poetic sensibility. It’s accustomed to allowing my psychological and physical environment to impress itself on me as opposed to knee-jerking judgments about it. In that sense my mind has characteristically been receptive to spontaneous impressions without its getting in the way.

But as a doer as well as a thinker-feeler I’ve also gotten in the way. With immediacy so distracting that circumstances and poet can’t always speak for themselves. Personal growth so arrested by clutter that when it paused for a moment, my collaborator saw an opportunity. To help you catch up? Apparently so. When I withdrew from a situation to reflect on why it wasn’t improving and to do something about it. Then to discover that I was sorely in need of depth. Philosophical, psychological, and moral. Connection with another perspective able to grasp my situation in a broader sense. OK. To put it in context. Yes. The context of a species of ape having no idea what the hell’s going on.

Timeout! May I have a word with your collaborator? Why? So our bedtime story doesn’t put me to sleep before I’ve heard it. You don’t want to find out what’s going on? I didn’t sign up for this! You don’t trust my collaborator. I understand. No you don’t! I have a human attention span. It took you and your collaborator how long to come up with this bullshit? Six-plus years. I rest my case. You’ve got six minutes to make your case. That’s all? OK. Sixteen. Sixty. Whatever. I have a stop watch. Logic will look for the broadest context given the opportunity. I’m retired. My time’s my own. Why not let it do its thing – go all the way? Spend all day thinking and writing at the computer? Just to indulge your collaborator? My collaborator has a collaborator. Love. This wasn’t just an academic exercise.

An act of love? I had a job to do and I needed to be qualified to do it. To have your bust displayed in the Capitol Rotunda. Humanity’s savior! Grandiosity brought one of my paternal ancestors out of his old country over to the new, then a descendant, my Granddad, out of his old job in the country into a new job in the big city. Founding a family business so he could rub shoulders with “Pittsburgh millionaires.” Icons of the industrial revolution like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, George Westinghouse, Andrew Mellon, Arthur Vining Davis, Henry Phipps, their peers and descendants. And he did. Granddad made it. With a construction business hauling big piles of dirt. I do see the connection. His son was my Dad, and he took grandiosity a step farther. Propelling the family business and himself into the rarified atmosphere of corporate influence and its know-it all politics. PhD. Piled higher and deeper. Not bad for lineage that came out of nowhere: a farm in Ashby, England.

Getting what right?

So you couldn’t help dealing with a little itty-bitty personal situation as if the fate of the world hung on it. Ridiculous! I like my collaborator. Guidance whose Source is Definition derived from rock-solid principles and values. Our metaphysical Self’s Parents: Love-Spontaneity inseparable from Logic-Order. Who better to role-model dealing with any circumstances? Their situation at the beginning was a situation like any other, requiring a response to the limits that define it.

What situation? Movement’s ignition that required process and structure and found it in the form of a metaphorical fraction. The prototype for all situations to follow: enumerator and denominator both separated and united by a dividing line. Mathematics accompanied by geometry: a circle whose circumference is divided by its diameter. Guaranteed being around for a while by a ratio that seems incapable of resolving to a whole number.

The response, too, from Mind-Relationship, our metaphysical Self’s Parents. A template their descendants can use for all responses to follow. A compelling basis for our bedtime story.

I see. When our bedtime story is done I’ll be Ilsa Lund boarding the last plane to Lisbon. All aglow with a higher purpose than shacking up with the owner of a gin joint. The ideal that an idealist would want to understand if it’s serious about getting it right. Getting what right? The way things are. The principles, values, and laws that define how things work. Being in step with that which cannot be contradicted without contradicting Reality. Idealist or not, I don’t imagine myself entitled to rewrite the rules of Necessity. Only to understand and apply the rules conscientiously if they’re descended from our Parents’ role-modeling.

Eliminate the negative?

Which you take to be benevolent. Good. From my perspective, yes. From yours or anyone else’s whatever you make of it. What I make of it is Vision defined by the attributes of Love and Logic. That accounts for all experience we can attest to personally and conceive of intellectually, and is accountable for it. That’s a mouthful! It is, because what it implies is that the role model an idealist would emulate takes responsibility for the negative as well as the positive. What isn’t as well as its source, what is. Origin plus all its derivatives. A challenge for story making if it would account for non sequiturs, but that’s what our bedtime story does. The Logic of it.

Definitely a challenge for me. Why? My collaborators are Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer. Their logic during WWII was to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. Right. To avoid “Mr. In-Between” so Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo got what was coming to them. In the face. A necessity in our world where positive and negative co-exist side-by-side. Where civilized questioning doesn’t always suffice to keep things on track.

‘Here’ in our world, cleansing our minds of negative thoughts and feelings is a will-o’-the-wisp. Negative is ‘there’. Not only in the sense of being detectable but in the sense of belonging. Having a role to play. Its affects are what are coming to us in the face from an artist of invention with a special talent for provocation. For stoking rage with injustice. For manipulating the minds, hearts, and souls of its victims along with facts so that it can take satisfaction in its handiwork. The stagecraft of a born entertainer, expert at turning stage, script, and performers into one reflection. Of the playwright. Itself.

Confrontation

The ‘God’ of make-believe. Arrogance. As a friend none worse. But as a test of Character, none better. What’s to be done with the theatrics of joker-magician-brute? Put on masks of tragedy and comedy and join in the act. The conventional view since that’s what so many do. Join in the antics of a herd and think that’s how things get done. Or let the playwright, its thespians, and their overwrought theatrics pass through unmolested. Is it OK if I laugh? At them but not with them, because where the humor lies is in the lies. How ‘artful’ their art is with sheer effrontery. Not to be humored but to be recognized for what it is: a manipulation. Pretense that can jerk its victims around but only if they allow it.

If they join in the manipulation. Exactly. Trying to “eliminate the negative” is getting suckered into a joke that’s on us. Let unwanted thoughts and feelings pass through unmolested acknowledges that they belong but only as tests of character.

To be passed. How? In the first instance standing up to effrontery by dismissing it for the absurdity that it is. Having a good laugh. And when confrontation is unavoidable? Confront it.

Character won’t pass its audition by being a no-show. The situation it’s here to build on is the simulation of questioning’s dark side dividing. Contradiction by confrontation that has no place in Reality but it’s ‘real’ enough here in training. The unreal-world ‘enemy’ that can’t be ‘known’ or taught a lesson by avoiding it, and so to be taken at face value. To be confronted and put in its place.

How? By whatever means its defenses allow. By re-reversing the reversal. Turning the instruments of manipulation against it as A Course in Miracles has shown. Or by accepting the costs of contradiction if not. As Winston Churchill did by fighting back. As Harry Truman did by delivering horror for horror. Both to be honored for standing up to the beast when the instruments of manipulation couldn’t be reversed. When efforts to preserve civility had failed and the only means available was war.

‘Winning’ isn’t always possible on positive’s terms. Not inside a hallucination, where manipulation has given negative a fighting chance to ‘win’. Unless we’re willing to dump our responsibilities on another generation or project ourselves into another ‘paradise’, our main responsibility is to keep moving. To remove obstructions as best we can and to learn in the process how to get better at it.

By reflecting on what went wrong the last time and resolve to do better the next time. Right! As we’re trying to do with these thoughts. By mining the story of our metaphysical Self to see what can be learned if we expand the context. To go back to the situation at the beginning if our collaborators can guide us there. So that the next time Character is tested . . . like right now. . . it can put the genie back inside its bottle. Where things aren’t, in make-believe. Where Character goes to die if it fails the test.

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Collaborators: Teacher 

Communication without words 

Fight fiercely, Harvard! Standing up to the bully is a storyline fashioned out of the situation at the beginning that’s all about Character. The character of what? The way things are. Not an abstraction of no more than academic interest but the greatest story ever told. With unresolved questions to be dealt with and outcomes with high stakes in the balance. The fate of Worth itself, the ideals of Life lived with purpose and Character tested by its questioning. All in the context of Movement ignited by Force itself, enough to power everything that is and isn’t for an eternity. Everything that isn’t? Creation’s functions defined by what they aren’t for as well as by what they are for. To complete their definition according to their Logic. Enabled and empowered by the Force of Movement’s ignition to help Character learn and choose on its own how not to act as well as how to act.

I can question the integrity of your vision but it’s held together by an internal logic. As far as I’ve taken it anyway. Tomorrow it could hold together better, differently, or not at all. Not in the nature of Movement to tip its hand until the moment has arrived. It has a wild card? Yes. Spontaneity. That shows up in the way our minds contemplate change, presuming that either choice with deliberation or predatory animal willfulness will master it. Intelligence or a force of nature, when the eventuality is neither. What else can it be? Guidance connected with the way things are. With Definition at the beginning.

Respectfully, since it can’t decide for us, but it can respond to thoughts from self-unawareness in need of Guidance. To calls for light that come from darkness. Maybe aware that help is needed to get through situations, but unaware of what ‘help’ really means or where it comes from. Of what ‘situation’ is trying to tell us since we seem pathetically immune to understanding ours. What would that be? What our metaphysical Self, a Child, is to learn from its Parental role models is how to deal with situation. From unreality on Earth: how to respond to mischaracterization. By the orderly sequence of Logic, one step at a time. Evolution from its ignition forward. With Character characterizing.

The function of Creation in Reality that’s relevant to our metaphysical Self is role model. What one would expect of the parents of any child: help with its grasp of meaning, purpose, and cause. Beginning with communication. Connection through Relatability in the language of explanation and Understanding. The language of ideas. Defined by their contributions to Creation in Reality since there’d be no reason for them to exist otherwise. The language of functions. Universals that everyone can understand no matter what their origin. That need representation by words here while we’re in our psychological cages but can dispense with words when we’re free.

Can we switch to communication without words now? Nothing doing, chump. Extra-sensory’s path of least resistance is still a ways off. Meanwhile, the psychopathology of Persons and personal relationships has been saddled by make-believe with the language of body-brains. Five-sensing unreality so that recognition will have to deal with not-happenings as well as happenings in two dimensions simultaneously in reverse. Then to figure out the difference. A test of Character. Not my fault that the language of ideas and functions can be hard to understand. Yours is our native tongue? A feeble start. The native tongue of our metaphysical Self’s birthplace. Our family Home, so you’d better learn to speak it because we could be going back someday. Could be? If we choose to, our choice is Free, and what we’ve chosen is to take on the role of Guidance in Reality.

Its subject in motion

The role of Guidance in the Reality of Creation that involves questioning. In life on Earth questioning and its flip side: contradiction. That could only manifest ‘here’ in unreality since contradiction and Reality don’t mix. When questioning the state of mind to be attained is Relatability. Personification open to questioning, loving and learning spontaneously within limits. Minds acting by thinking rationally, respectful of the terms of Movement. Aligned with the way things are, experienced through Guidance with the way things aren’t.

With mischaracterization. Understood for what it is and put to use for what it does: instill Character by teaching it lessons through evolving situations. Tests of Character. In the Reality of Creation tests of Creativity and Guidance. Wisdom, maturity, perspective, differentiation and empathy. Understanding. Recognizing and respecting limits. The terms of Movement’s ignition, beyond the power of Guidance to manipulate: Definition. Necessity. Its being the purpose of Guidance to help lives, Minds and ideas, implement, execute, and apply the principles, values, and laws of Definition to situations. To help with the interpretation and application of the laws of Necessity to its subject in motion. A moving target that requires Mind open to questioning for self-renewal. Experienced with ‘real world’ situations. Questions that can’t proceed, can’t grow and evolve, without answers. Without resolution. Without Guidance. 

Creepy! 

What real world situation would have prompted these thoughts? A collage of experiences with families over time. My family of origin – the family of my parents, followed by my own family. Then the family of a son. In between and concurrently with the families of two siblings, close friends who took me into theirs, and my adopted family. Apartment mates. A window into human-animal rationality and irrationality both. That greeted me initially with what seemed like regular order, then to degenerate into a free-for-all of psychopathy. Whose wildness and willfulness are on display today on a global stage. In full view of humanity, behaving exactly as one would expect from a sub-species of tribal ape.

What are we witnessing in all this psychopathy? Families wracked by division pulling them apart, turning them against one another. Pilots training in flight simulators. Practicing how to handle situations that cripple or destroy air worthiness. That make flight unsustainable, bringing them down in flames. Calling upon their ingenuity to prevent the inevitable or at least to survive the crash. Individually sauve qui peut or collectively as a herd or flock. Or as an intentional ploy to avoid combat – Catch 22. Psychopathy coping with itself.

Learning is not limited entirely to division. It can also occur in the presence of Movement forward that’s guided. Toward development instead of arrested development. Progress instead of retrogression. The Mindfulness and humanity of Self-Awareness instead of body-centric idolatry. Self-unawareness. Light instead of the abomination of domination by authoritarian herd mentality. Ass-kissing hierarchical corruption.

Ah! Politics! No. Not politics. Its reference only because my personal experience with psychopathy is an almost identical match with its theatrics on a larger stage. Not accidentally, for they share the same roots and incur the same costs. And deserve the same condemnation. No. For they share the same freedom from judgment that we all do, in the terms of Movement at the beginning. In the limits of the way things are that apply to Creation and its Creators alike. Mercifully and thankfully free of even the idea of judgment and condemnation, wrongdoing and punishment. Of ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’, ‘forgiveness’ and ‘sacrifice.’

Mind if I open the window? This is creepy, yukky stuff. Go right ahead. It needs to be acknowledged that manipulation in all its forms is creepy. And the means that various theories and practices have sought to counter it as well. When they rappel down into its innards and are greeted by special effects. The stench alone enough to make its explorers throw up. Predators lurking in confessional booths play-acting absolution while prying into the vulnerabilities of the fallen. Hypocrisy wounded by the same iconoclasm that it practiced on its own predecessors. Lurid obsession with the procreative act, snooping everywhere for the stigma of guilt and violations of taboos. Excuses for tormenting the damned. For head severings and burnings at the stake. Whatever form of depravity suits righteousness, always in service to the body. Its dehumanization on the cross when it isn’t deified in ecclesiastical finery.

Body demonizing

The body of a hairless ape shouldn’t lend itself to idolatry but it does. Like the idolatry that greeted Moses at the foot of the mountain? Yes. Psychological craving that goes back to Movement’s ignition at the beginning. When the Self-Awareness it illuminated united Love-Spontaneity with Logic-Order, femininity with masculinity, to warm the cause and Worth of Life with Parents. Creation in Reality with its foundation in Relationship. Friendship grounded in Love and Logic as incapable of abandoning their Child as they are one another. A presence felt within Creation in Reality but not so much where we are. In our magic kingdom of self-unawareness, where Parents’ Child has work to do and it can’t be done while they’re fussing over it. While they’re spoiling everything with Self-Awareness.

We need a substitute! Exactly. Assurance, concrete and immediate, that something we can believe in occupies the throne where mommy and daddy are supposed to be. The all-important role of Parents, and where do children find this incontrovertible fact? In their bodies. Undeniably ‘there’ and indispensable. Centers of our universe. Vending machines of pleasure, torture racks of pain. Whether put there by benevolence or malevolence we can’t tell, but they’re all we’ve got. So to be treated like objects of art, flattered, pampered, and inflated by symbols of Worth. Until reality takes over and the costs of primacy outweigh the benefits.

What reality? That everything meant to be a test of Character is a learning device. We’re to learn from our bodies? The most elemental of lessons: how to take care of what’s been entrusted to our care. That’s a big one. For human-ape it begins and ends with our bodies and their brains. Would the causes of mass extinction be ignored by body-idolizing body-centered ‘realists’ if they actually cared about the body? Reversal would, but of course in reverse.

What do you mean? The irrationality inherent in self-unawareness. The ultimate target of the body-centered type isn’t Mind-centered – the enumerator moving. It’s itself, the denominator dividing. Dividing itself, reversing itself. The authoritarian-‘conservative’ mindset that would not only take our guns away; it would take away our bodies and itself too. If fraction in self-unawareness is Movement self-resisting reversal is self-reversing. ‘Idolizing’ the body in reverse. Not only ignoring mass extinction and climate change but seeking it. Demonizing the body.

The man we love to hate

You withdrew from a situation to reflect. What situation? Documented and recorded in memories of psychopathy, like many others’. Cluttering thoughts with injustices that can’t be forgotten or forgiven. Waste that begs to be picked up by the local waste management service. Only there isn’t one. Not for this kind of waste. Only efforts to escape from negativity. Mind-fucking. Yes. Self-delusion. Another symptom of the problem – more make-believe. Pathetic!

Then you can’t go into detail? I’ve done my due diligence. Gone into detail and made sense of it as best I can. Conscientiously and thoroughly. Persons and personalities – all there in writing. But not for public consumption. Lives I hold dear even though they were my teachers. My opposites and tormentors who continue even in absentia to teach me lessons. With right crosses and left jabs. Don Dunphy doing the blow-by-blow, to the cadence of gongs sounding more rounds of brutality. In between Gillette safety razor commercials. Urging you to “look sharp, feel sharp, be sharp.” Yes. To look my best so I can step into the manly ring and have my face messed up by assholes. 

Assholes? Our partners in Character-building. Sparring partners who don’t pull their punches or else it might give us the impression that it’s just for appearances. When the stakes are real and we’d best learn to defend ourselves. To give as good as we get. The way Winston Churchill did while he was role modeling Character for the world, taking abuse from spineless ass-kissers who wanted to kiss Hitler’s ass to save their skins. Performing their roles in the training of Character, as necessary as Churchill’s and no less worthy.

Then you can go into detail about the character of asshole without giving offense. A composite of psychopathy. The nature of my teacher and the lesson it’s taught. Gimme a face! How about Erich von Stroheim, the man we love to hate? The post-WWI Teutonic menace associated with The Grand Illusion. An enduring presence, off-putting in an arresting way. Sure of his place in our Psyches. Not gloating but matter-of-fact. Honest with us in a way that we’re seldom honest with ourselves. To be put up with because he has to be. The check on reality that we can’t do without.

Anyone you know? 

The composite of psychopathy presents itself as our collaborator with different facades. Sociability and affability. Dependably ingratiating and pleasant, agreeable and accommodating. While holding itself above questioning. More than ‘a disturbance in the force.’ Arrogance. Emotional inaccessibility. An unwillingness and inability to share in personal intimacies since its commitments stop at a far remove from vulnerability. On the surface. Its priorities in all things focused on preservation of appearances as much as protection of self. Because they’re one and the same.

When provoked out of its façade of niceness it’s because the pride our teacher takes in appearances has been offended. As though it were their creator. Owner and possessor of a surface. Turf that it’s graciously shared with others for their benefit, for which they’re expected to be grateful. Or to be rebuked and banished for trespassing. Nothing more certain to provoke the ‘collaborator’ than contradiction of its prerogatives. The birthright of creator: owner, possessor, and absolute ruler of its ‘creation’. Its domain.

Contradiction in the form of acknowledgment of other creators, other claimants to authority – earthly or divine – that might question its authority. Its grip on its own place of authority so tight, so unrelenting, that it can’t allow questioning let alone the thing questioned. Its stance in relation to sources of personal questioning one of stolid, inarticulate resistance. Inaccessibility. A fortress not of miscommunication or misunderstanding but no-communication, no understanding. Not of invulnerability but no vulnerability. A stance it can apparently afford to take at no cost to itself since the space beneath the surface is empty. Where these capacities ordinarily dwell, tender with the sensitivities of life and feeling. Connectedness through the touch of communication, understanding, and vulnerability.

As though the collaborator were literally drawn from the tablet of a cartoonist, the desk of a draftsman. One-dimensional. All surface. With a genius for objectifying its made-up ‘creation’ and its inhabitants borne of its own objectification. Its vaunted invincibility owing to its indistinguishability from any other appearance. A perfect blend with its material environment that can’t be provoked or dislodged unless turf and owner are questioned. And then ‘collaborator’ sheds all pretense of collaboration and becomes what it ‘is’. An invention of a mind lost to make-believe. The mind of a cartoonist captive to its characters. Captive to appearances. An entertainer swallowed up by its roles. Joker. Magician. Brute. Anything else? Yes: ‘God’.

Psychopathy alright. Anyone you know? A version of human tribal ape that owes it familiarity in part to being one myself. You know the type? Sure, if it dwells within my own animal brain. Just a matter of recognizing its attributes in others and piecing it together.

You can’t slap that label on me! No? I do the questioning here and I’m above questioning. I see. Those are my terms. Take it or leave it. OK, Mr. big shot arrogance. Have it your way. But these are my terms. What? You do the questioning. I control the narrative.

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Personality Types

In the Logic of Lieutenant Columbo

My collaborator-Guide seems to be a kind of Lieutenant Columbo. A crime-solver who owed his success to a preternatural gift for Logic. An insistence on figuring out the natural order of things so he could identify with precision where the fault lay. The natural order of things? The part of the way things are that we can’t fool around with. The way it is, so put up or shut up. The sequence of events that’s one step at a time in logical order. Necessity, that the Tao makes sure to get across early on in its Chinese Book of Changes (I Ching). In Hexagram Four, “Youthful Folly.” Wisdom for situations like Columbo’s, that call for piecing things together in logical order. What situation wouldn’t?

My collaborator, six years ago, took my mind backing away from doing to reflecting as an opportunity to catch up on a lot of things. My personal growth that was lagging as well as my understanding of relationships. The way that minds work and what it takes for them to change. Logic isn’t content with half-measure anything. It’s programmed to put things in the proper context. To find the right perspective, and if it has to go all the way back to the beginning of everything it’ll do it. How did Logic find a home in your mind? How did it find a home in Lieutenant Columbo’s? In the mind of his creator, another storyteller? My best answer is personality type, and that leads to wondering why projections in a dream by Mind-Function that needs training must be divided into different personality types.

A test of invention

You and your collaborator have an answer? My collaborator seems to be a Jungian analyst as well as a Parmenides / Jesus metaphysicist. With theories about personality types that started with Myers-Briggs Jungian intuition and didn’t stop there. OK. You found something that Katharine and Isabel didn’t. Or Carl either. A pattern in personality types that goes a long way toward understanding the nature of the human-animal. The difference between Mind-centric types and body-centric, rich with implications for their interplay in life on Earth and for their origin in the situation at the beginning. Essential to understanding the way things are.

How so? Don’t be distracted by the story. Examine the Mind that’s telling the story. Personality type gives it away. Whether it’s Character in search of perspective or mischaracterization incapable of perspective. Person self-questioning, open-minded and relatable, or arrogance above questioning, inaccessible and unrelatable. One type offering Loving Friendship, the other a ticket of admission into its psychological cage. The ability to differentiate between friend and predator is crucial to understanding the way things are that’s situational.

As it was when our metaphysical Self got its ‘life’ on Earth off to a start in a state of self-unawareness. That inverted its surroundings, including the metaphorical fraction in which it found itself and the perspective needed to orient itself. Identified with the enumerator looking up at the denominator. The Mind with which we think: disoriented and challenged to right itself. The purpose of its training: to relieve itself of the wrong perspective blocking its understanding and avail itself of another. So that it can get its bearings. Correctly assess its situation, steer in the right direction, and get where it’s going safely.

With the response that its situation calls for: a practical, common-sense solution to a practical problem. Instead of a scheme made up in self-unawareness by a know-it-all crackpot. The start to our Self’s training that was purposely inverted. So that it would learn to stand on its own two feet instead of on its head. Exactly. A task it can’t accomplish in darkness and disorientation without a pilot. Familiar with the harbor. Yes. And then, too, another kind of Guidance for another kind of pilot. Flight simulator. Help with changing our Minds. Getting the right perspective so we can fly for Real. Learning how to fly by learning how not to crash.

Too late! Enumerator looking up at denominator already crashed. Everything inverted in our magic kingdom of anything goes is one big crash scene. A multiple vehicle pileup on an interstate. Yes. Brought to this sorry state by the fog of self-unawareness. I have a solution. Practical and common sense. What? Catch 22. Orr’s sane solution to fighting insane wars. Learning how to survive a crash at sea so that we can get the hell out of here. 

The best fit 

You found an opening to a better perspective in Myers-Briggs personality type theory. Crucial to Understanding because it’s pointless to argue ‘facts’ and ‘truth’ in a ‘paradise’ of make-believe anything goes. In the way things are that’s situational whether Mind trying to understand is Self-Aware or self-unaware. Whether our situations are humanitarian-individual or Machiavellian-tribal. There are only your ‘facts’ and my ‘facts’. And so the authoritarian know-it-all is free to proclaim whatever ‘reality’ it wants in the moment. The willful two-year-old. Yes. ‘Creator’ of its ‘universe’ of lies. Theatrics.

Make-believe is a derivative of its host what-is. A state of entrapment. Captive to its host’s definition for its own definition in reverse. Having to ‘be’ and ‘do’ whatever its beholder isn’t and doesn’t do. Therefore, not ‘being’ and ‘doing’ anything in Reality — just appearances. A perversion of Mind Self-Awareness’s self-sufficiency, where it ignited itself with its own internal source of Energy and all of Movement-Creation. Role-modeling liberation and independence in direct contrast to the reverse mirror-image attached to it. Make-believe in a state of captivity and dependence.

Self-Awareness can dance the Last Tango in Paris but hard to imagine make-believe out there on the dance floor with it. Two independent forms blending into one fluid, graceful motion. Memorable art that only genuine talent could perform, which leaves out make-believe. Good at imitation but not at the real thing. The job of making it up as you go along is a test of invention. Not a test of character. Although it’s mischaracterized as such.

What personality type makes the best fit with invention? It wouldn’t be Mind-centered: rational and conscientious; respectful of limits; thorough. More likely it would be its reverse: body-centered; wild and willful; disrespectful of limits; addicted to the path of least resistance.

Spellbound

Mind-centered, body-centered – this is your big invention? We didn’t come here to be told the truth. We came here to be lied to so that we can figure out the truth on our own. Beginning with the truth that we can’t get anywhere in our land of lies without Guidance that can help us differentiate. Between true and false, Real and make-believe, right and wrong, forward and backward, up and down.  That can provide a North Star so we can orient ourselves and navigate through a sea of obstructions, temptations, and distractions. So we can anchor ourselves to Relationship, the one assurance of ‘here and now’. Of belonging, for which make-believe tribal ‘belonging’ is an illusory substitute.

The lie is that we’re a mixture of traits planted in our psyches by a sperm that happens to get to the egg first. A random act of insemination that begins, characteristically, with competition for Olympic gold in the 100-meter dash. Our psyches imprinted with an act of supremacy sending us off into hierarchy programmed for competition to be number one. An act perpetrated by bodies procreating in an act of violence. Penetration of personal boundary, setting an example for success in competition: assertion of supremacy not by persuasion or mutual consent but by willfulness and force. By predatory animal instinct to capture, possess, and dominate. By bodily appetites: physical, relentless, and addictive.

The Jungians – Carl and his Myers-Briggs elaborators – broke from the Aristotelian-Freudian model. The one that produced Freud’s anatomy of make-believe grounded in body-brain idolatry. The idea that the only ‘reality’ worth exploring is whatever validates the primacy and supremacy of make-believe’s embodiment. Neatly compartmentalized by the brain divided between animal-brain appetites, a force of nature not to be denied; the prefrontal cortex, its socializing disciplinarian easily denied; and the left and right hemispheres, boundaried Logic and boundaryless Love, putting a brave face on seismic instability apt to erupt at any moment.

Id, superego, and ego. The Freudian triumph of religious atheism demolished at one blow by A Course in Miracles. Revealing the ‘ego’ to be a sewer outfall instead of Freudian divinity. Its vaunted world of scientific objectivity and precision to be what it is: a subjective hallucination. A mass of contradictions. Opposing thoughts held together within the same minds. A theater of the absurd peopled by fools.

And Jung wasn’t fooled. He was off where questioning showed some promise. Letting his thoughts be guided by intuition, a faculty of Mind, instead of caged by human flesh. Open to questioning where Freudian theory was decidedly not. That led him and Myers-Briggs to parts of a pattern they couldn’t discern. Why not? Though they took up with Mind and their intuition was open-ended, it didn’t take them beyond the threshold between physics and metaphysics. Which it might have if their time hadn’t ended when the Course’s began. It was the metaphysics of the Course that got my collaborators and me across the threshold. Demolishing Freudian atheistic body-idolatry so that we can part with Child psychology, spellbound by make-believe theatrics, and move on.

The opposition

To what? To a broader context. When the template was set for Creation in Reality by Movement’s situation at the beginning. When it became possible to intuit patterns in the way that Parents came into being. Then in the way that their Child began its training and its imaginary personifications took the stage. Human-animals seemingly swarming their planet with indiscriminate tribal mayhem when it’s anything but indiscriminate. There’s a clear pattern. It’s based on Jungian / Myers-Briggs intuitive psychology. On their personality type theory. And it puts to rest any idea that tweaks to our prefrontal cortex, soporifics to our animal brains, or psychedelics to our left and right hemispheres will get us out of our rut.

Mind-centered types are being there for one another. Character-building questioning themselves and one another. Uniters. Body-centered are not being there for one another. Hierarchical ape-humans competing with one another. Character-corrupting dividing themselves and one another. Dividers.

Mind-centered types are introspective. Reflective-intuitive. Logic-sorting and Love-relating; Logic-thinking-quantifying and Love-feeling-evaluating. Both together weighing and integrating, judging and defining. Questioning to ensure judgment’s respect for the limits set by the situation and for the boundaries of discipline. For the Worth of Character and Conscience in the balance.

Body-centered types aren’t just another variety of folks in the neighborhood. They’re the reverse of Mind-centered. Opposed to Mind-centered. Rivals? Yes. Competitors, and what they mean to ‘win’ is beyond a gold medal. They mean to be the only ones entitled to compete. Winners of gold, silver, and bronze all three. And never Mind-centered be allowed to mount the podium again. Fraction’s denominator determined to replace enumerator and proclaim itself whole number one. Game over!

Monkey see monkey do

Well, as Professor Dawson would say, “Surely this remedy is too harsh.” Take a close look at their traits. Some original with Myers-Briggs, others changed to bring out meaning that they missed.

• Extraversion opposed to introversion. To looking at itself in the mirror of self-reflection when it has no reflection. When make-believe is nothing there to ‘know’. Compelled to direct all attention away from Self-Awareness internal to what’s ‘out there’ external. To physical appearances, ‘scientifically’ verifiable in the darkness of self-unawareness. Away from philosophy and psychology that might shine a light upon it.
• Five body-sensing hysterically opposed to intuition sixth sense. To another perspective capable of differentiating between Real and make-believe, that would recognize it for what it is: unreal. A fraud.
• Wild – predatory animal ‘action’ — opposed to mindful deliberation, Conscience, and the limits of Definition. The ‘promise’ of anything goes that enticed a boundaryless, defenseless, and undifferentiating metaphysical Child into a psychological cage inside a zoo. While its keeper imagines itself the king of beasts inhabiting its domain. A wilderness where it may exercise its divine ‘right’ to absolute freedom.

• Willful – predatory animal instinct — viscerally opposed to the judgment of ‘Mind’ that would compete with the divine ‘right’ of arrogance to absolute power. Divinity obsessed with its unquestioned ascendance in hierarchy. Make-believe fixated on supremacy ‘winning’ in competition, possessed by an existential fear of ‘losing’.

Traits that, taken together, add up to the mindset of a self-appointed ‘creator’ and a domain cast in its image. To serve as the reflection that its creator, a reverse mirror-image, can only find in a ‘reality’ of its own invention. The mindset of arrogance, unlimited and unaccountable. The ‘God’ of make-believe.

The two types that, taken together, add up to a personification of fraction’s enumerator-Mind divided and reversed by denominator-body. Individual Mind-Self disciplined by internal moral compass contradicted by tribal-body fragmentary not-selves exempted from Conscience and accountability by Machiavellian tribal expedience. No moral compass other than “what everyone else does.” Monkey see monkey do. Ape etiquette.

‘Feeling’

Personality types don’t sort themselves out so clearly in everyday life. What makes the pattern clear to you? The perspective of a personality type situated at the far end of Mind-centered. The type Myers-Briggs categorizes as INTJ: introvert, intuitive, thinking, judging. From which I can take in the whole better than if I were viewing it from within any of its parts.

Which end? Introversion, where the emphasis is on Self-Awareness, the object of the Mind-centered type, Movement at the beginning, and fraction’s enumerator. When Movement and vantage point both converge on the goal of Self-Awareness patterns become discernible. I get clarity, and this is what I discern. The template of fraction revealed in the way that personality types sort themselves out. One type determined to evolve forward. To progress, while the other tries to divide it. To resist all movement. The difference between liberal-progressive and conservative-reactionary in the politics of Sapiens’ evolution. Striving to break out of our psychological cages to evolve forward vs. insistence on preventing it.

Where does your take deviate from Myers-Briggs? They separated thinking from feeling, a common misperception. Putting ‘feeling’ in their ESFP type: extravert, body-sensing, feeling, and perceptive. I put it back where it belongs, with thinking on the Mind-centered tier, and replaced it on the body-centered tier with ‘wild’. Animal instinct driven by the rudimentary emotions of a predator associated with bodily appetites — conquest and survival, food and procreation, assimilation and belonging. Mainly fear, greed, and lust, but also tenderness for its young and pleasure in the playful side of competition.

‘Perceptive’ 

What about Myers-Briggs’ ‘perceptive’? Predatory animal willfulness has disguises to insinuate itself into civil society undetected. One of these is an imitation of the boundarylessness of Love in the pretense of “living in the moment.” Devil-may-care. Carpe diem. A pair of fuzzy dice slung over the rearview mirror. While it can be genuine for INTPs and other Mind-centered types, it’s just another mask for the body-centered type. A necessity for make-believe’s ‘God’ if that’s the face lurking behind “perspective’s” childlike innocence. A performance it can pull off with ease since in truth it has no boundaries of its own.

Myers-Briggs picked up on the playful innocence part. But because they hadn’t discerned the difference between Mind- and body-centered types they couldn’t be aware of its more sinister aspect. Reflected in their ESFP type’s tendencies only as a tendency toward “wrongdoing” when, in fact, it’s of a piece with something far more serious. Mob violence, spontaneous or organized. Animal-herd mentality on a murderous rampage.

You’re sure? Your interpretation sounds extreme. The two personality type tiers range from one extreme on the left to another on the right with gradations in between. Myers-Briggs advises “service with a smile” as a career choice for ESFPs. Thinking them challenged by analysis, judgment, accountability, and sincerity, all traits associated with Mindfulness with a Conscience. Fit for trusting your car to the man who wears the Texaco star. Not realizing that the ‘F’ for ‘feeling’ in ESFP isn’t a friendly gas-station attendant. It’s a not-personator. An animal. Animal-human tribe. Body-centered herd mentality.

Ideas: engines of change

“The politics of Sapiens’ evolution” boils down to Movement and resistance to it. The legacy of fraction at the beginning, where the enumerator is Movement forward and down below it is the completion of its definition. By the what-isn’t of no-movement. Which, being an impossibility, can only be expressed within Mind in a state of self-unawareness. When it’s Guidance in training to build Character, hallucinating a virtual reality of impossibilities where anything goes. Make-believe, resistant to Movement and inherently bereft of Character. Peddling mythologies rife with absurdities to delude its inhabitants and keep them caged in ignorance. None more absurd than Revelation’s towering end-of-days battle between the forces of good and evil on the plains of “Armageddon.” A requirement of Logic, that the definition of ‘good’ be completed by its derivative. Its reverse-opposite, a mirror-image reflection. Positive-light by its negative-shadow. ‘Evil’.

All this fuss over nothing! Conceptually the equivalent of one gene’s mutation changing the nature of an entire species. The mutation by itself is no big deal. What makes it a big deal is its implications. Translated by Movement into the consequences that flow from it. ‘Consequences’ being an implication of Movement at the beginning required by its situation to absorb the implications of fraction. Its birthmark, identifying it as consequential in a particular way. What way? The components of Creation all charged with the Energy of Life growing. In the state of Movement we call evolution. What components? Ideas. Alive with Life growing toward a state of maturity that can never be fully realized while circumstances and situations continuously change. Each idea a continuum of change from one state to the other, one extreme to the other. Enjoying the freedom to express itself in all its manifestations but impossible to pin down.

Moderation first to go, then gracious living. What’s to become of us! The reverse of all this Growth and Movement is make-believe’s half-baked idea of no movement — paralysis. Friedrich Nietzsche was an extreme version of a personality type susceptible to possession by make-believe. ‘Gifted’ or cursed with an ability to speak for its ‘god’ in the language of reversal. The ancient Iranian ethical philosophy of Zoroaster turned on its head in the mind of Nietzsche into a precursor of National Socialism. A perversion of intuition speaking in the language of spontaneous insights that attracted the admiration of Carl Jung. Along with erudition attracted to philosophy as it was attracted to the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Another type susceptible to possession by the ‘god’ of make-believe. Nietzsche taken down by mental and physical paralysis after publishing Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Plath taken down by her demon in a re-enactment of gas-oven persecution after she published Aerial. Another name for Jerusalem.

“Ideas make history.” The motto of Harvard’s history department while I was majoring in history there. Because ideas charged with the Energy of Life growing are the substance of Movement. The raw material of Creation and the source of Character’s questioning. The inexorable force of evolution that make-believe no-movement would stop here on Earth if Character-building Guidance can’t prevent it.

Character sides with Movement and Movement lives and grows with ideas. Character builds with ideas. Yes. When our cluttered minds get out of the way and allow ideas to arrive of their own accord. Welcome insights from sixth sense instead of blocking them. Engines of change. Differentiate between these and knock-offs opposed to change. Delivered by five-sensed animal brains that can also be consequential but not for the wisdom they impart. Rather for their value as learning devices, like the psychoanalytics of Freud put to constructive use by the Course. Sources of wisdom in a way that his manipulator didn’t intend.

Into the inconceivable

You were in a situation, something went wrong, and you took timeout to figure out why. My approach was open-ended. Neither prejudiced by preconceived question at the beginning nor answer at the end. What intuition sought was explanation that would lead toward understanding. How and what I couldn’t have told you other than a changing of minds. But changing my own Mind had been a priority long before it became a priority to change others’. Since I’d read A Course in Miracles and realized how off-target my perceptions were. Needing to change, and since that had been easier said than done I couldn’t be casual about changing others’. Theirs or mine.

It was, in fact, my failure to share my perspective on an issue over a period of years that precipitated my withdrawal. Shocked and appalled that I’d made no progress. Aware that the same could apply to me. I was the dunce of Sue Burton’s sources, who’d told me before I’d read the Course that I was an “old soul” who had to keep coming back to learn my lesson. I was right! You’re a clueless old fool! Got me there, because that’s what they said. 

And so the whole enterprise was humbling. There was no alternative but to try. I had a cause, to rectify an injustice. Mischaracterization. An act of arrogance that thought itself entitled to replace me with itself. As though it needed me to be a reflection of itself before it could accept my presence. Apparently painless on its end, but on mine it felt like character assassination. Dehumanization by dismemberment. As if I’d been sliced and diced by the divider. The psychological flowering of a hideous weed: the “mad idea of separation.” Punched in the solar plexus by the ‘ego’, whose antics get the bulk of the Course’s attention.

Others were in the line of fire besides me. Defenseless against the reverse of everything that is. Provocation. Manipulation. The signature of arrogance, a predatory beast. To be there for others overrode my personal cause. To shield vulnerability from harm for which I might be its only source of protection. I might not otherwise have had a sense of urgency. But I did have. It was intense and insistent, and this was the reason.

Overloaded with preconceptions and judgments. How can you say your search was open-minded and open-ended? These were the limits of my situation as I understood it at the time. I didn’t claim to be a slate so blank that it lacked all definition. If that were so I would have had no motivation. As it was, I was moved to find the right perspective with a well-established habit of Mind: relating to another perspective. A call for help and its response. The dynamic of Movement that needed direction in these circumstances – in this moment — and got it.

Sorting things out within the broadest possible context so that I would get it right. All things considered. As astonishing to me as it must be to you that ‘context’ went where it went. Into the inconceivable.

Here we are!   

Logic doesn’t like dismemberment? No. Nor Love. Collaborators with Guidance and Movement’s two sources of ignition at the beginning. Our metaphysical Parents. Opposites in some ways, but they do have something in common. An affinity for interconnectedness.

I had had a psychic experience forty-one years before. “A felt perception of the interconnectedness of things” — the phrase that came to mind when I tried to describe it. As though it were another Self inhabiting my Mind from within my Psyche. To be welcomed for its friendship and also for its helpfulness. Anything in particular? A wealth of information without words. When it finished I wrote down “aware” and “storyline.” All I could come up with. Time for the clueless old fool to wake up to what’s happening! That or be prepared to deal with what’s to come. Or both. I’ve been on the alert ever since for something that would summon a higher level of awareness, and here we are!

The collaborators with Guidance have no patience with illogic whose only ‘purpose’ is an impossibility. To make of appearances a reflection of itself. They take exception to the manipulator’s efforts because so long as they influence the human Psyche they get in the way of orderly sequence. They’re a distraction at best, an obstruction to progress at worst. That, one way or the other, must be removed. How to accomplish their removal gets to the essence of who we are and the mission we’re being trained for. How to facilitate Movement and keep it on track. The function of Guidance. 

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Thought System 

The help they needed 

Logic is the answer. Part of the answer. The other part is Love. You were motivated by Love? From my childhood on the motivation from my subconscious that dominates my approach to relationships is to relate. In a condition that took a while to articulate, that ultimately settled on “loving friendship.” The condition that satisfies boundaryless Love once it’s attached itself to its partner, Logic. The inseparability of reciprocity between friends. Functions that belong together not because they validate assets already in place but because they add assets that weren’t there. To complete one another. In the way that Isabel Myers encourages opposite personality types to collaborate in strengthening one another where they’re weak.

A psychological task I’ve undertaken with psychopathy. Self-identified with the know-it-all ‘creator’ of make-believe that resists all attempts to put itself before a mirror. Then how can you succeed? By working with my collaborator. Logic and Love? Yes. With Relationship. Depth perception able to see beyond appearances to another dimension. Able to recognize and differentiate between character two-dimensional and mischaracterization one-dimensional. A cartoon character that could only have been ‘put there’ by make-believe. Whether as a magic trick or a joke, a Hallowe’en prank or World War III, doesn’t matter. It’s all made up. Therefore susceptible to replacement by Person. The substance behind the image. The face behind the mask.

You’re talking miracles. The Course says, “there is no order of difficulty in miracles,” and this is why. We’re talking “miracles” because we’re talking make-believe. In a land of anything goes anything is possible. If we take that literally it means miracles are possible. By self-consciously holding up a mirror to psychopathy so that it can change its mind. By separating itself from separation. Dividing itself from division. Then recognizing itself and being done with its know-it-all manipulator. The apparition in the mirror. By letting go of make-believe so it can assume its role in family where it belongs. That’s been neglected to the detriment of others who need Person instead of psychopathy.

The mirror that psychopathy has held up to me has done wonders. Helped me toward Self-Awareness and Understanding. Given me a sense of what it means to be there for one another far beyond what it was twelve years ago. Now, maybe I can return the favor.

Your quest for explanation isn’t an academic exercise. No. It has stakes. Of no importance outside its context but important enough within. An attempt to take what’s to be learned from metaphysics and apply it to real-world problems. That involve flesh-and-blood persons in need of its benefits. Practical solutions. Guidance and protection for lives that could go off track without it. That could collide with ‘reality’ in the land of make-believe that could be anything but humorous and entertaining. That could be fatal, as it was for my younger son and for one of my nephews. Persons who might today be sharing their gifts if they’d received the help they needed.

Driven to whip your ass

Where does help come from? Thinkers have given it some thought, the Course included. The I Ching and Jungian psychology. Sources I’m aware of, including Gnostic Christianity the Harvard Divinity School academic Karen King has written about and a variety of other philosophies and religions Kenneth Wapnick and other scholars have written about. “Thought systems” in the terminology of the Course. For which the ‘ego’s’ ‘thought system” is one example. A per-version rather than one among many versions. A mirror-full of wrong answers.

Yours another entry in the sweepstakes. Call it that if you want. I wasn’t conscious of trying to fashion anything of the sort or to start yet another ‘movement’. “Thought system” came out the other end of the pipe organically. The result of Love plus Logic, empathy plus differentiation. Spontaneously, on the wings of insights. Through the Mind’s eye rather than body-brains’ five senses. The result of being and doing what ‘Sapiens’ is supposedly all about: thinking, feeling, and acting better than ‘ape’.

And psychopathy lapped it up. Appreciated it? Hardly, when the ass-kissing the know-it-all’s arrogance expects gets bluntness instead. A reflection that the narcissist would rather not see in its mirror. The unattractive, unappealing consequences of alignment with make-believe. A black hole of pretense. An inferno of sturm und drang guilt. A herd of beasts driven by Machiavellian expedience to whip your ass.

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The Structure of Creation in Reality 

The Irrational Number

My ass is smarting with so much wisdom. Is there any chance I can be comforted? Yes. I can comfort your ass. But not with kissing. That’s a no-no. Where then have Logic and Love led you with their depth perception? To an imprint. Ah! A visual at last! Let me get my iPhone so I can record it. To the image of a fraction. Wait! Are you sure it isn’t artificial intelligence? It made a ‘fight’ between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise look so real it’s the talk of la-la land. It’s not artificial anything, though its ‘existence’ is entirely dependent upon Movement.

If it needed Movement to make something of it why start there? Why not start with Movement? Because there’s no understanding Movement, or evolution or Creation either, without it. Its pattern is evident everywhere. It’s the structure of Creation and the source of its process. Not Love and Logic? Love and Logic supplied motivation, principles, and values. The ingredients needed for everything Good. For Creation’s guidance by Definition imbued with Conscience. But they couldn’t do so in the absence of ignition’s situation at the beginning.

Fraction. Not whole-number one, the antithesis of Movement. That couldn’t make anything happen. But enumerator going forward. Representing what is, being questioned by denominator below the dividing line. What isn’t. The logical and necessary component of its definition. Impossibility to possibility.

And so we now know what possibility is from two perspectives. What it is and does do and what it isn’t and doesn’t do. Correct! If we didn’t have these two perspectives the enumerator would be what we see with one eye instead of two: one-dimensional lacking depth. Without background that gives person personality, personality relatability, and relatability direction. It would be a single dot on a blank sheet telling us nothing about what it’s up to or where it’s headed. Add a second dot beneath it, connect the two, point them anywhere and we have direction. All that’s missing is ignition for Movement. From the elements of the greatest story ever told. The story of how Mind as Relationship evolved from its situation at the beginning into Life-Creation. Into stuff happening.

Do we have numbers for the fraction? The ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Pi. The most common approximation is 22 / 7. It’s not precise? “Its decimal representation never ends or repeats,” according to AI. Which makes it an “irrational number.” Uh oh. Yeah. The reason why human-ape’s ribbon-cutting ceremony was conducted by nut cases. Irrational from the start. What other possibility was there if whole number one was a hitch-hiker without a thumb?

An exercise in waste management

It still seems so plausible. So appealing. Yes. So rational. Says human-ape tired of the friction, longing for relief. Imagining itself lounging on a white sandy beach beneath a palm tree. In a ‘paradise’ of nothing to do. Who do I see about making a reservation? The know-it-all. It will be more than happy to arrange permanent residence. What if I’m just looking for an all-expenses paid vacation? The know-it-all can arrange that too. Great! What’s its web address and I’ll apply now. Let’s see. . . hmmmmm. My firewall says it’s not a good address. Don’t go there. Why? Corrupted. Must be a scam. How about a phone number? OK. . . . Uh oh. What? I got “Your call cannot be completed as dialed.” Want to try email? Text? Instagram? Forget it. Give up? Never! There’s got to be a way. Another savior who will transport me to paradise. Yes. On the wings of make-believe.

The ribbon-cutting for Life-Creation couldn’t have been conducted by nut cases. And it wasn’t. What’s the difference? Love-Spontaneity combined with Logic-Order. The ignition for Movement, the doing part of Mind Self-Awareness, and the Conscience of Creation embedded in its Constitution. Values and principles capable of direction and discretion, judgment and discipline, put the pieces of its situation in logical order. Differentiating between rational and irrational and consigning irrational to another function of Mind. To another kind of Self-Awareness that needs first-hand experience with irrational for its training.

It didn’t just go to waste like stuff does here? Life on Earth is an exercise in waste management by self-unawareness. By make-believe, the reverse of definition that can’t tell the difference between useful and useless. The functions of Creation shared by Self-Awareness are useful by definition. One of countless reasons why the way Movement handled its situation at the beginning can help us handle our situations if we use it as a role model. 

If fraction’s denominator is so readily domesticated for use in Creation why does it need a dividing line? Why can’t friendly peace-loving questioning join with enumerator above the line and the two of them go off happily together down the Yellow Brick Road? Sure, if it’s nothing more than a cowardly lion. Or a scare crow or tin man. It can’t be friends with anything it’s questioning. The system can’t be prejudiced or there will be no justice. Integrity requires Character and Character requires independence. Sovereignty inviolable or it isn’t sovereignty. No intermixing of judgment with performance or performer. No contamination or adulteration.

Denominator questioning gives fraction its legitimacy. Its structural integrity, so that it can stand on its own even if it’s not a whole number. Even if it’s two-story vertical in an otherwise horizontal setting that depends on questioning to keep its balance.

Back to the VIP lounge 

The “dawn of everything” refers to the first stirrings of Happening. Ideas, evolution, and the sequence of Logic. Do we have a visual? Sure! Love, Life, and Growth gradually flooding the situation at the beginning with light. Not peeking up over the horizon? Later we will have sunrise when Love pairs with Logic. Whose boundaries will concentrate Love’s radiance into the light that illuminates Self-Awareness. The light of Creativity to be shared with all of Creation and serve as a beacon for its cause. Being there for one another in Loving Friendship, standing firm on the rock of Creation’s constitution. Holding high a torch like Columbia, the ethereal female personification of the United States. Its Definition and Conscience, shared with every part of Creation in need of honest self-appraisal. In need of questioning from Guidance, our North Star of Self-Awareness, while we navigate our way through the distractions, hazards, and obstructions of self-unawareness.

The original “action” in the sense of Newton’s law was Movement. It assumed the limits of its situation at the beginning, carrying on in a state of Self-Awareness. The function of Mind defined as Relationship, on condition that it do so also in a state of self-questioning. Which in turn required that it submit Definition’s function of Guidance to training while in a state of self-unawareness dividing.

This being the original action, there was no “equal and opposite reaction.” There could not be in Reality if there was nothing Real already in existence. Only the limits of its situation: unformulated ideas. Lacking Definition, self-contradictory, and unrelatable. That required Movement and Mind-Relationship to resolve their contradictions. To make fraction functional that had been internally illogical, non-relatable and non-functional. By defining it.

Significantly for human-ape’s getting its situation right, there was no movement backward. No pushback from a non-existent ‘paradise’ of no-movement nothing happening ‘perfect peace’. At the dawn of everything all there was for us to contemplate was the fundamentals of the way things were. The impossibility of a static state. . . .

Timeout! Why doesn’t Mind allow it? Not for Mind to ‘allow’ or ‘deny’ when the way things are happens spontaneously, beyond any will to dictate, possess, or control. If Mind can’t will stuff to happen what’s it good for? Function. Ideas-thoughts and values-feelings. Meaning with Purpose. Relationship with Relatability. ‘Person’ with personability. Differentiation with Empathy. Perspective with depth. Creativity and productivity with service and support.

All to counter the misperception that Mind exists outside Definition. That it has no definable function and is beyond ‘knowing’. Authority beyond questioning: inaccessible and unrelatable and therefore exempt from conditions that limit the way things are. Worse than useless. A loose cannon capable of enormous destruction on a whim.

The significance of a static state that can’t be is that Mind functions within the limits of its situation. Its situation being not whole number static state, therefore fraction self-questioning. An assumption that might enliven an ivory tower seminar were it not descriptive of events on the ground. Predictive too? The whereabouts and doings of the bluebird of happiness are about as predictable as the stock market. That said, we can predict with confidence that make-believe know-it-alls will continue to regress back to their ‘heaven’ of unquestioned authority, a VIP lounge for Arrogance Airlines passengers: do-nothing cigar-chomping slackers.
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 Test of Character in the Denominator 

The great manipulator

Where fraction becomes a problem is in what Logic requires: the Necessity of Definition that includes the reverse of what is. On the flip side of denominator-as-questioning: not only a tendency toward imbalance but more crucially toward division. Ah! The dividing line. When the wraps are taken off the denominator by self-unawareness the character underneath is no pussycat house pet. It’s denominator dividing.

The element of life on Earth that puts teeth into training. So Mind Free Choice Questioning will come out of training smarting from the pain of its mistakes. Taught a lesson to be sure that it’s learned its lesson. By the business end of the denominator coded to attack the enumerator anytime Mind isn’t in its right mind. Learning its function taught to the tune of a hickory stick. In our magic kingdom of make-believe hallucinating. An anything-goes free-for-all of division. Separation. Psychopathy in the uniquely offensive form of arrogance. The know-it-all bully challenging Sapiens to do something about it. The great manipulator. The king of beasts pulling our strings. Yes. So long as it can get away with it.

No footprint in the snow

My bedtime story could start with Movement’s ignition or with fraction. Why choose fraction? Doesn’t this validate make-believe’s half-baked idea that Movement is second in the sequence of Logic? That a version of itself came first? Isn’t fraction just another version of make-believe’s whole number? The two are interconnected, so in that sense that’s true. Then make-believe is number one. Movement couldn’t launch without it. That would be true but for a critical distinction. Between a precondition that was there and was replaced (make-believe whole number one) and a precondition that allowed happening. The nature of the original situation that, if it weren’t fraction, would prevent happening. But being fraction didn’t prevent.

It allowed it but at a price. The terms that allow Movement forward within limits. The limits of the situation that prevailed upon its happening. Fraction.

The foundation upon which the way things are is built and the structure of Movement. The structure of Creation, that can’t be a ‘paradise’ of anything goes make-believe, boundaryless and wild. Entitled to be and do whatever it wants. Beyond the limits of questioning. Beyond the limits of Definition. You’re spoiling the ending. How so? I was hoping to rule the Galactic Empire. Where’s the fun? Gone with the big wind – the know-it-all. Palpatine and his trusted lieutenant, Lord Vader. Personifications of questioning’s dark side on the underside of Definition. Below the dividing line where Character is formed out of the corruption and hypocrisy, arrogance and neglect, of make-believe.

How about a J. Arthur Rank visual? Visualize Movement’s ignition by Love-Spontaneity and Logic-Order coming together with Energy in the Now. Where we’ve supposed there was fraction. A potentiality that doesn’t count as “existence” since there’s no evidence of it. Detectability or impact. No footprint in the snow. Yes. For lack of Movement. Movement had to come first for anything to exist. To be there. To happen. 

Ideological descent

I’m glad we’ve got that settled. No joke! Because the halls of ‘authority’ here are filled with false claimants to ‘number one’. A source of friction, unnecessary and preventable, and this is the ‘rationale’ they rely on for their position. That there’s a ‘debate’ over which came first, the chicken or the egg; they’re right; those who disagree are wrong; and they’ll resort to any means to have their way.

I know the type. Attracted to labels that give them an air of intellectual legitimacy. As though their ideas emanated from ivory towers of contemplation when the face leering at us behind the mask is greed for power and wealth. Having their own way.

• “Objectivist,” Ayn Rand’s pushback against Bolshevik confiscation and the ideals of Russian-style Marxism.
• “Conservative,” from Edmund Burke’s distaste for Jacobin tyranny and ideals of the French Revolution.
• “Realist,” Aristotle’s rationale for refocusing thought from Logic and sixth sense to the five senses and things. That degenerated over time to know-nothing contempt for idealism that wasn’t done with Logic and sixth sense.
• “Traditionalist,” authoritarian recoil from the limits on Movement imposed by Necessity at the beginning: the impossibility of one big answer ruled by a know-it-all. An attempt by hierarchy and orthodoxy to reverse Movement in service to an impossibility. To will evolution into non-existence and replace it with farce.
• “Master racist,” from servility overtaken by denominator-dividing in the spirit of the authoritarian know-it-all. Hatred of anything not itself. Believing itself anointed with supremacy, entitled to eliminate inferiority by any means. ‘Them’.

The common denominator being ideological descent from make-believe’s know-it-all at the beginning. The authoritarian impulse to be the be-all and end-all of everything that is. The ultimate narcissist. The ‘artist’ who sought to rule global politics a century ago with his overblown theatrics. Hitler. The ‘holy father’ who enlisted papal infallibility in support of Hitler. Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII. The ‘psychologist’ and ‘atheist’ who sought to place Psyche under the religion of body-brain idolatry in the name of ‘science’. Freud.

Make-believe’s maneuvering to affect respectability and hide its nature leads us down an assortment of holes. How can we tell? Bullshit has a soft spot for hypocrisy, so look for ‘science’. Freud’s attempt to recast psychology as “mind science” is one example. “Five-Factor” personality type theory another. An attempt to de-legitimize Jungian intuitive theory with a “more scientific” approach based on – guess what! – body idolatry. “Five factor” corresponding with five senses. Smell, hearing, touch, taste, and sight. Premised on the ascendancy of social conformity. Herd mentality’s weapon against creativity’s questioning and unfrocking of its fraudulence. Pressure from ‘sociability’ to be a regular guy and not make waves. Not offend anyone with an honest interest in who we are and what we’re about. Don’t ask questions. Be ‘agreeable’!

A formula that would neuter a personality type inclined to be ‘agreeable’ when it’s warranted but disagreeable when it’s not. To be intuitive open to sixth sense rather than caged inside a cognitive zoo by an animal body’s five senses. My type. I don’t care. If it’s more scientific than Jung and Myers-Briggs I’m all for Five Factor. Sure. ‘Science’ is cool. Prestige for adolescence that wants to be ‘in’. Not a nerd, just one of the crowd. Where admittance requires that intelligence and character, originality and creativity, be checked at the door. I’m somebody! Yes. Rubbing shoulders with fellow ‘scientists’. All feasting on know-it-all fare: five-factor make-believe self-glorifying bullshit.    

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The Birthmark: Role Model for Character 

Integrity that can’t be compromised

Once Movement was ignited something changed. Visual? Yes. Happening detectable with impact. A footprint in the snow. And as it formed it did more than take on the shape of a foot. It revealed a pattern where the sole would have fallen. Take a look and tell me what you see. “Made in China.” 

Let’s start over. I see the pattern of a fraction. Yes? The value of Pi, an irrational number. Ah ha! That’s a big deal? If it’s forever imprinted on the foot of Movement it is. Without it Movement would have been blocked by make-believe’s big answer. We wouldn’t be here and there wouldn’t be any bedtime story. The pattern on Mike Gorbachev’s head. Huh? Our bedtime story is about how Movement got a birthmark. Wow! You’re not as dumb as you look. I even know what it means. OK. Go for it. That Movement can’t be divided. Blow me down – I’m thunderstruck! Twarn’t nuthin’. Let me adjust your carnation. Is your pillow comfortable enough? Need anything from room service?

If Movement originated with a birthmark that means it can’t be divided, then what? Birthmark becomes trademark. Like its descendants have a brand? Whatever form we take, down deep in our Psyches there’s an identifier. That identifies us as what? As character that can’t be divided. And if it can’t be divided then we’re integrity that can’t be compromised. All because of the value of pi? Your idea, wasn’t it? A fraction that can’t resolve into a whole number. What else could it be? 

Camera! Action!

Our world of make-believe tells us point-blank about the Reality behind its appearances. Newton’s law of physics, that for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Certifying that even in make-believe Logic reserves a place for reversal within Definition. The quest for coherence among the laws of cosmology and particle physics. Quantum gravity’s discovery that reality is “granular.” Meaning what? For one thing, that meaning is contained in our individual circumstances and relationships. Expressed through the behavior of ideas personified. Through us — persons. Mirroring the behavior of particles and vice versa, one no less “spooky” than the other.

We’re particles? There’s an equivalency – yes. “Spooky” and creepy too. Acting out the laws of quantum mechanics in self-unawareness, where anything goes:

• Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Particles’ whereabouts unknown while they move from one street light to the next. Denominator questioning: can matter really be ‘here’ if it’s not there? Are we really here if we’re here and gone the next minute? Is ‘here’ Now if particle physics has no place for time in its calculations? Time doesn’t exist? Something to think about. Because our little particle friends, who go missing in between street lights, don’t need it.

• Scroedinger’s entanglement. Interconnection. Particles acting like Siamese twins, one itching the other scratching, even though they’re on opposite sides of the room. Or on opposite ends of the galaxy. Why not? Families interrelating in Creation and our world both, but only in our world as tribes. And only in our world divided as well as questioning. I was wondering about that. Me too. In an unassigned essay I handed in at Andover, a search for friends in a family home of empty rooms. You got an A? Not from an English teacher searching for Shakespeare hotspurs. An entanglement to be avoided! So dense with poetic allusions that this hotspur disappeared.

• Feynman’s sum of histories. Particles being everywhere at the same time. Ideas in Creation don’t have to wait on hold to get customer service. No time lapse needed for the before-after sequence between thought and its expression where Movement is Real. Here, time stretches things out horizontally, giving the dream’s contradictions their moment on stage and hint of orderly sequence. When, if the gaps were removed by time-lapse photography, what we would witness is a mélange of anything goes all at once. Sapiens all over the lot with every conceivable thought and feeling to match. Impossible to pin down when its motivation can’t sit still. Fraction in perpetual motion questioning itself: the process and structure of Creation. Of Life. The smallest quanta — wave or particle who knows? One thing or the other, vibrating in a froth of agitation.
• Particles changing their behavior depending on whether they’re being observed (“measured”) or not. Like people. Who have something to hide. Whereas particles are Energy stored in matter doing what Mind’s doer does: taking direction from Mind. To do what? Most likely change a stage setting. What stage setting? For a situation that will be a test of Character for a Person in training with Guidance. A world fashioned by make-believe for self-delusion will be busy enough. But when its situations are being appropriated by Guidance for training, it becomes a beehive of activity. Calling upon every particle on set to pay attention to the director. Cecil B. DeMille. OK then. Let’s roll! 

The domesticator

Human-animals experience and express every facet of a reverse mirror-image. Our unreality caught in a perversion of motion: the rotation of bodies beneath a revolving dance-hall mirror, bathed in the fleeting moods and fantasies of romance. The atmospherics of motion yearning to connect. A dream world. Who could deny it? I could deny it if you say we’re doing everything at the same time. Agitated or not.

We keep having to deal with situations because they can’t make up their minds. Getting it right was Self-Awareness at the beginning. Parents taking decisive action to bring order to disorder, setting an example for their Child to do the same. To put to work the talents of Logic for differentiation and of Love for empathy, to build Movement-evolution and Life-Creation around the structure of its situation that allowed it. For us to understand that in finding meaning in individual lives and relationships we’re not starting with the pieces all fit together. They’re scattered on the floor. Everything at once, whether true or false, right or wrong.

The voice on the other end of the phone or seated beside us on the sofa is everything at once, and so are our thoughts and feelings about them. Not for us to let appearances dictate which facet of a mirror will define ‘Person’. Passive and uninvolved, as though it doesn’t matter whose coat of arms we march under. As ready to do battle with another as to be their friend. For us to sort through the maze of contradictions that we are, the masks and manipulations, and recognize the Person behind them. Not an anything-goes caricature from know-it-all’s make-believe. Invulnerable and invincible, but human. 

A diamond hard and real, concrete and immediate, yet at the same time, vulnerable. A makeshift façade of pieces slapped together, yearning for the key that will make sense of it. That will come out with who we really are behind the façade. The secret code locked up in an ark. If make-believe is the reverse of Movement and it’s out of sight in Reality, then Movement has nothing to hide. It’s in the nature of Self-Awareness to be open-Minded. To share its story in the act of role-modeling the Character of Creation. Shared and sharing. 

Forget about it. Why? The know-it-all controls the narrative and does the defining. You have a problem with that? The problem with anything goes is that if everything is true at once then it’s a state of undifferentiation. Bullshit. Exactly.

Lacking the ability to differentiate, the know-it-all. . . bullshitter. . .  proclaims its illogic by insisting, of all things, that it control the narrative. That it do the defining, when it belongs in the back of the room in a dunce cap. Wildness needing lessons in domestication: how to speak the language of Spontaneity. The language of ideas, and then maybe it can join the conversation. As it is, the best it can offer is the services of domesticated psychopathy. A version of the body-centered type, so proud of itself for being housebroken that it thinks it’s the domesticator. A house pet. Commissioned by its know-it-all master to go forth and domesticate, as though all who resist are wildness needing to be tamed.

Hadron’s revenge

Here, in our magic kingdom of dysfunction, pieces are tossed at us and we’re dared to put them together. Pieces of what had fit together in the Creation of Reality. At least into something useful that isn’t self-defeating. Not a problem for the Child’s Parents, and it needn’t be for their Child either if it accepts the limits of Definition:

• The principles and values of Movement’s ignition. Attraction between opposites, Love-Spontaneity and Logic-Order. Mutual completion between the boundaryless and the boundaried, feelings and thoughts, values and ideas. Direction.

• Mind as Relationship, Self-Awareness as Parents, Definition as Guidance, and Child as Guidance in training.

• Fraction as the structure of Creation in Motion against the resistance of self-questioning, a house united that will stand.

• Character and Integrity earned against the resistance of a house divided — self-contradiction that won’t stand. Enabling Guidance to help with the wisdom, compassion, and perspective of a grownup.

Even when loving a Person caught in defiance of definition — definition in reverse. A superb teacher for being an opposite. Help with learning who we are by who we aren’t. A ‘friend’ of sorts, even if, in this life, it can’t act like it. Can’t ‘act’ at all. A description that fits fraction at Movement’s beginning. A representation of the idea of Movement immobilized. Like the lion with a thorn in its paw that needed help with removing it. Androcles was Mind differentiating with empathy that understood the essence of Movement: moving ahead – doing things – in logical sequence, one step at a time. Allowing Love-Spontaneity to share in taking each step. The creative process — insightful, thoughtful, spontaneous. Moved and moving.

And geometry: the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Certifying that even in make-believe Logic won’t allow the dark side of questioning to overturn the way things are. Super computers here and in Japan still calculating the value of pi. Yes. The value of irrationality: body-centered division straining to the last to divide. The authoritarian mantra: Keep dividing! The Large Hadron Collider, the sword of Quantum Gravity, chopping every little bit of mass into pieces until there’s nothing left to chop. Then what? Turn it into a tourist attraction. A religious shrine to the Great Divider. Already sounds like a Roman emperor, so it might work. Or the ruler of Mordor. We could lure hordes of human particles into the collider. No one would know the difference.

The face of division

Movement’s first step sealed its identity as not-whole number. As fraction questioning itself with a flip side. Rationality but with an irrational streak attributable to the situation at the beginning. The divider-herd on the rampage beneath fraction’s dividing line. Charged with training the function of Creation’s Definition that requires the attributes of Guidance. Character with Integrity that can be trusted to be there. Capable of Choice that’s Free, its function earned, learned, and tested under fire. In the crucible of resistance, corruption, and lethal combat. Guarantor of Loving Friendship modeled on the power of Attraction between opposites complementing one another. Power for which know-it-all pretense and arrogance are no match.

Bravo! But how come all this power winds up cowering in confession booths weeping over its frailties? Unable to resist temptation. Little slices of flesh prey to self-degradation. Wrongdoers all. Because of where our bedtime story cut off in evolution’s logical sequence. The storyline that accounts for Hexagram Four in the I Ching, “Youthful Folly.” That would discipline judgment sent off on a conspiracy-theorizing toot by something that occurred once Movement took its first step. What was that? Its accompaniment not only by fraction’s birthmark signifying Character but by its flip side signifying corruption. The dark side of denominator questioning, where we find – guess who! – the know-it-all dividing. Make-believe’s bullshit factory. Churning out appearances and lies like there’s no tomorrow.

Help! Not to worry. Movement’s trademark has no reverse in Reality thanks to its Definition. Just the implication of what isn’t that can have no effect on what is. That is, so long as we’re safe within Mind-Parents. Relationship Self-Awareness sharing itself in Creation that’s self-questioning. Not dallying with their Child up to its hips in corruption and division while it’s in training. The prelude to our bedtime story brought events up to the point where the Child, Mind self-unaware, was greeted by the face of division in its mirror.

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The Religion of Make-Believe

Truman’s self-delusion

Why mirror? Fraction at the beginning is questioning. Its function in Creation. Division, its function in the self-unawareness of Mind’s Child in training. It performs both essential functions by an act that goes beyond being what it is. The distinction between being and doing – as though it were holding up a mirror to its beholder. A mirror that, when questioning, asks Who are you? and goes from there. A mirror that, when dividing, does the reverse. Answering its mystified beholder’s questioning by making stuff up. By mischaracterizing everything to align with what it is: mischaracterization. Make-believe craving to convert all who approach into reflections of itself. While the beholder, a raw recruit buck private trainee, looks for Guidance in the mirror toward Self-Awareness, the image in the mirror responds with convoluted directions back to itself.

What directions? To where the bedtime storytelling fun is. Versions and perversions of circumstances into boffo endings that bring down the house. Whipsawing the emotions of performers and audience, back and forth between reversals and re-reversals, until they can’t take any more. All for effect. What effect? “Excitotoxicity.” One internet maven’s label anyway, that gets to the heart of it. A high achieved by a form of intoxication. Minds saturated with the storytelling version of anything goes, taken in by the promise of an alternate ‘reality’. By make-believe, where its benighted occupants can make of it whatever their hearts desire. I’m sold! Take me there! Well then, be delirious with joy. Intoxicated with excitement, because you’ve arrived.

To this? To the best and also the worst that it has to offer. The best a Truman TV Show where dyspeptic performers out of dysfunctional families and neighborhood hanky-panky are paid to be nice to one another. To smile for the camera and their viewing audience. Psychological voyeurs delighting in the deception. A cruel prank played on a simpleton, the lead character who hasn’t been let in on it. A rich source of mirth bathed in the daily pleasantries of a sprightly neighborhood. His self-worth nourished by love and respect from family, friends, and neighbors. All fake. All made up for the degradation and humiliation of a species of ape.

What the know-it-all demands of flattery

This is funny? It is to perversity aware of the difference between appearances and reality and eager to exploit it for its purposes. To manipulate others into falling in with its selfishness without the hassle of work. Without the unpleasantness of difficulties. Problems that require thought and feeling to solve. A boon for those looking for the path of least resistance: affirmation by appearances. If it’s good enough for the manipulator-‘god’ who created this nonsense then it must be good enough for its captives. Our friend the know-it-all. Producer, director, and playwright of the Truman TV Show. One more example of how life on Earth reveals its roots in the metaphysics of Movement at the beginning.

Who wants to play a simpleton being laughed at? The know-it-all warms to the role of lead anything, even it’s to the lead character in a slapstick farce. Its nature is reversal and so is its make-believe. Everything in reverse. So while the know-it-all is selling the epitome of ‘cool’ it’s mugging outrageously for the camera. Dumb and dumber. The ultimate simpleton who thinks that life inside a make-believe of appearances is as good as paradise if not better. The only way-things-are that the self-deluded fool is aware of. A rich source of mirth indeed. To be laughed with as well as at since humor is a byproduct of make-believe. A legitimate gift to the quality of life on Earth if we can overlook its motivation. Perversions of truth meant for its amusement, that can nevertheless be genuinely funny.

All part of the know-it-all’s routine for manipulating everyone into herd mentality and captivity to appearances. Into regular-guy social pressures to conform. Turning the joke on Truman against his deceivers: pressure to go on with the deception. Why not if it makes things easy for him? Simpletons in on the joke who want the rest of us to go on pampering them with appearances. Authoritarian-tribal importance all too happy to be inflated by flattery from sycophants. What difference does it make whether it’s delusional or paid for so long as it does what the know-it-all demands of it: that it preserve and protect make-believe. That it worship appearances and the body-brain animal-herd senses that put them there.

The mask of amiability 

You’re talking religion. The crowning jewel of herd mentality invention. The theatrics and melodramatics of make-believe storytelling. Conspiracy theorizing by the know-it-all that casts Good itself into the role of evil and vice versa. How does it get away with it? By a particularly egregious form of manipulation. Sewing fear and distrust among the gullible. Character assassination by whispering shit behind their backs. As it did when it manipulated Mind-Questioning onto its training ground, a magic kingdom of hierarchical rapine veiled in ape ass-kissing etiquette. By mischaracterizing the Child’s Parents as originators and exploiters of vulnerability. As injustice seeking vengeance upon the just. A fair approximation of itself and its M.O.: reversal slapping guilt on others for its own wrongdoing. Perpetrator posing as redeemer.

And getting away with it. Why? Because everything about make-believe is contrived to permit it. The “agent of Rome” profiled in an episode of Asterix has a field of self-unaware animal brains to fit in with where the word of one is as good as the word of another. There being no boundaries within anything goes with which to judge and no one competent to judge. And so a whispering campaign of conspiracy theories can target whomever it wants with whatever made-up stories it wants. Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. Yes. Al Franken’s book about a bullshit factory posing as a news outlet. The monster created when Walter Winchell, a Vaudeville song-and-dance performer, conflated news with Broadway entertainment to attract readers to his column. Published appropriately in a tabloid named the New York Daily Mirror. 

How did we get from simple fraction with a simple message to a bullshit factory? The structure of Creation at the ignition of Movement and evolution can be visualized as a skeleton. Right, and Creation as a closet. That needed flesh on its bones. A test of Character in different situations depending on whether it’s characterization self-questioning in Self-Awareness Reality or personification-embodiment, self-dividing in self-unawareness unreality. Characterization and questioning putting flesh on the bones in Reality. Action that’s Real vs. what’s ‘happening’ in our theatre of the absurd. Denominator posing as enumerator in fraction inverted, now ‘dividing’ personification from topside-down. The ‘logic’ of authoritarian rule. Madness. Yes. Ridiculous. Structure that’s built and supported from its foundation stands up. Engineering 101. Divider posing as fraction’s ruler from the top down is a joke. Reversal contradicting and corrupting while wearing the mask of amiability — blatant cock and bull.

An incubator of division

What makes it so compelling? Character. That’s all? The cause of Creation. The Force behind Movement. Every step taken by evolution is a statement of Character. That doesn’t need the religion of make-believe – bunk – to make it compelling. Just to have achieved existence is enough given the qualities of Character that made it possible. That made it happen. Worth, that in our magic kingdom of hierarchy is treated as worthless if it didn’t leverage its way to the ‘top’ with ‘connections’. The “phonies” dismissed by Holden Caulfield, vulnerability on a quest for Honesty and Character on the streets of New York. Connection. Love, boundaryless and defenseless, exposing itself unbidden to the elements. On a journey into the unknown. Character-building.

With an audience of one. Elwood P. Dowd’s Harvey. George Bailey’s Clarence Odbody. Calvin’s Hobbes. Bob Fosse’s (Roy Scheider’s) Angelique (Jessica Lange). Luke Skywalker’s Obi Wan Kenobi. Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Jung’s intuition. Every person’s personification of Guidance in the trust and intimacy of Loving Friendship. Every Character’s characterization of questioning and inspiration in Conscience. In whole number one we have the symbol of tribal-hierarchical corruption. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Plath’s Aerial. Freud’s ego. Hamill’s Captain Marvel. Riefenstahl’s will. Lombardi’s ‘winning’. King Kong’s Empire State Building. Rand’s Fountainhead. Elmer Gantry’s ‘God’.

Fraction is the symbol of Character synonymous with incorruptibility, whose experience with ‘family’ in virtual reality is a test of Character. By tribal corruption employing intimidation, seduction, and character assassination: to join fraction’s divider below the line. There to make of family an incubator of division. A make-believe ‘paradise’ of unrelatability: conformity, uniformity, and arrested development.

Exercise! 

How can Character resist? By exercising. Me? Get up off the sofa? By conducting exercises:

• In Learning. To contradict contradiction in Child-Mind’s state of self-unawareness, self-division, self-contradiction, and self-corruption.
• In Growth-maturation out of human-animal self-unawareness toward another, Real Self that isn’t a species of animal fit for a planetary zoo. A magic kingdom of hierarchical corruption.
• In health and healing, by getting out of the way to led Mind, body, and Soul heal themselves without interference from willfulness.
• In perspective. Differentiation and empathy, wisdom and Understanding, self-questioning humility and self-evaluation Honesty. That’s not contaminated and obstructed by arrogance self-answering, empowering, and authorizing.
• In role-modeling. Teaching or Learning depending on the situation and its personifications. Personality types and embodiments arrayed to respond to its meaning.

The concept of Character central to the meaning of Creation in Reality Self-Awareness and Guidance training in unreality self-unawareness is liberation from captivity to authoritarian herd mentality. Characterization of Relationship as hierarchical weak-strong, inferior-superior (Tao / I Ching) and guilt-innocence son-father (Jesus / the Course). Everything in self-unawareness make-believe ‘life’ on Earth is mistake-prone and in need of training to get it right. For its role in Self-Awareness in Creation once training is done. Mind-Child through its projections – human-animal personifications and embodiments – and through their Guides personified to their individual situations, relationships, and personality types. Guides teachers and learners in relationship, both mistake-prone, in need of training in Earth’s magic kingdom of hierarchical corruption.

If the Tao / I Ching and Jesus / Course guide in error as well as correction it’s only natural since their authors are here to learn by trial and error as much as their students. And since any expression of their Guidance must be communicated through, as well as to, the corrupted minds and limited perspectives of their audience.

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Guidance in Training 

No shy violet

A Course in Miracles lends itself to questioning. How so?  For its attempt to finesse the problem of attraction between male and female by rigid sameness among the dream’s projections, that we experience as embodiments in different genders as well as personifications in different personality types. Why is it a problem? Sensual pleasure anchors sensory perception in unreality. It’s an effective firewall against the Logic of Reality that would win us over with Mind and sixth sense  The Tao attempts to finesse the same problem in the I Ching by its reliance on ‘Yin’ and ‘Yang’ without making explicit the obvious: that ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ underlie every human situation. Its sixty-four hexagrams (situations) are all arrangements of ‘Yin’ or ‘Yang’ lines, broken or unbroken, interpreted as ‘weak’ (lake) or ‘strong’ (mountain). We’re girls and boys in unreality as well as Reality.

Not a problem if Vive la difference! Makes more sense. If the reality made plain here is that there would be no ignition of Movement, no Creation in Reality, were it not for the power of Attraction between Feminine and Masculine, Love and Logic. Yin and Yang but without the Tao’s mischaracterization of weak and strong. A mistake that overlooks the obvious: that in the logical sequence of Movement Love came first.

Why? Because of all the attributes that might qualify for this singular honor, Spontaneity had to be it. An attribute of Love. Our friend, the Bluebird of Happiness. Of Happening. Mind Self-Awareness’s eternal mystery that puts it beyond any power within or outside itself to penetrate. A security firewall that we can think of as encryptment. WWII Navajo code-talk – indecipherable. Plus a Google-suggested password and two-factor authentication. Spontaneity given its impetus by other attributes of Love. Life and Growth that cannot be denied. Given this array of muscle-power the real mystery is how Guidance got the idea that femininity is a shy violet.

Father Sauron

In the logical sequence of Self-Awareness coming online as Mind-Relationship, the pairing of Love with Logic would have been Spontaneous and simultaneous. As it would have to be in the singular act of self-activation. Self-empowerment by Energy in the immediacy of Now. Fusion of functions of Mind equally essential to its cause and equally definitive. This is where the sameness valued by the Course is to be validated, not in the denial of differentiation and empathy along with things to be differentiated and empathized with.

The Course’s monolithic sameness, in personifications without personality types and embodiments without genders, has all the earmarks of Freudian religious psychology: objectifying and puritanical. Depriving its subjects of psychic and procreative vitality at one stroke. Of their power to question the ways of the master. The ‘Father’ – Freud. An obvious strike against the ‘Son’ Jung.  Whose crime against Freudian nature was to question the ‘Father’. To find openings to Understanding that Freud would deny, in personality types and archetypes, through the Spontaneity of intuition. Beyond the control of Father Sauron, the know-it-all. Lord and master of all he surveys. Dominant and dominating by will. Self-contradiction. 

The message 

You’re not convinced that “comparisons are of the ego?” They are in reference to hierarchy but not to personality types and their building blocks, archetypes. The Course would have us believe that meaning is to be extracted from ‘holy encounters’ between clones of one metaphysical self, lacking any trace of individuation. Every relationship a matchup between identical-tribal twins answering to the same treatment protocol. Not only devoid of meaning but devoid of life. Evidence that I take of infiltration by Freudian make-believe, as compromising as the infiltration of the story of Jesus by Church hierarchy.

The Course was dictation not collaboration. Made palatable to its scribe by the author-dictator’s relatability and her body-centered authoritarian-hierarchical personality type. A contradictor from unreality content with taking dictation from a contradictor of unreality, but not about to abandon her identity. What was that? Contradictor. How would she abandon it? By taking it all in — the lesson of the Course. By supporting it in her personal and professional life thereafter. She didn’t? She neither sought nor accepted any further involvement beyond publication of the book. Advocacy and teaching were handed off to a psychotherapist on fire to promote Freudian psychoanalysis. The cause of his master. Jesus? No. Freud. What was left of her work? Her husband tossed it all after she died.

You feel betrayed by Jesus and the Course? Not at all. Guidance is in training too. To be admired and thanked for its assistance to the purblind. Human-animals, who would be roadkill in our magic kingdom of beasts without it. The Tao’s I Ching and Jesus’ Course in Miracles are awesome contributions to human Understanding that are nevertheless imperfect. They contain mistakes. From which their authors, like the rest of us, are to learn. All of us evolving, teachers and students alike. When Jesus says he’s our brother and our ‘Father’ would like to be thought of as our friend, he means it literally. The message is relatability, not supremacy. Helpfulness not perfection. Garbled by herd mentality’s inventions and a work in progress. But it’s clear enough. You’re grateful? Yes. But, like Helen, not about to give up my identity. Questioner. To keep Guidance as well as the rest of us honest. Incorruptible.

Come off it!

So disrespectful! Guidance and its presumed connection with a ‘supreme being’ at the top of hierarchy attracts ‘worship’ from human-ape herd mentality. Ass-kissing. If you were my friend is this how you would want friendship to be expressed? No. But I wouldn’t mind a little ass-kissing now and then. 

Androcles wanting to be thought of as our friend is offering Relatability. Androcles? My alias for the Source of Movement that removed the thorn from fraction’s paw. Our Parents, Love-Femininity married to Logic-Masculinity. Helpfulness. Movement’s ignition. Who wish us well and empower Creation from the ground up. Self-Awareness sharing its Energy rather than a know-it-all arrogating power to itself from the top down. Guidance our brother the same – offering relatability. If herd mentality insists on putting ‘friend’ and ‘brother’ on a pedestal it’s putting them beyond reach. Denying itself their gift and them its reciprocation. Getting in the way of Relationship.

Creating a grand door-opening for the know-it-all to sashay on stage flaunting its regular-guy lovability. For once a teacher that human-ape could learn from: getting rid of exaggerated ‘respect’ that’s getting in the way.

Ah! So I’m running for high office, you’re my campaign manager, and you want me to come across like my opponents. If they’re coming off it I do. Coming off what? Their script. Relating to their audience spontaneously so they’ll be accessible in the moment. Vulnerable. Capable of mistakes. Capable of being questioned. Human instead of mannequins so coiffed and manicured, programmed and managed, no one would ever mistake them for the real thing. ‘Perfection’ that’s forgotten who it is and what it’s about: relating. Maybe not the main reason why the election of 2024 came out the way it did but for sure it was one reason.
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Love Your Enemy? 

An irrational act of will 

Where does this bring us in our bedtime story? To the point in the story of Movement after it was imprinted with its birthmark. That characterized Self-Awareness Creation as explicitly rational and self-questioning and implicitly irrational and self-dividing. To when the Child-Mind of Self-Awareness — Mind-Relationship Parents – was turned into scrambled eggs by the greeting it received. From the mirror rooted in self-unawareness dispensing religious mythology from make-believe. Haunting the Child’s head with animal-brain bogeymen pitting victimhood against evildoers, innocence against guilt. Obliging those who’d prefer to take a pass to ignore it or, if they have a conscience, to practice ‘forgiveness’. A means of rising above the mess that’s as convoluted as the mess below it.

You don’t hold with forgiveness? Sure! So long as it’s the best that Mindfulness can do for now to fend off the incursions of willfulness. Beats retaliation any day. Lowering ourselves to the level of the bully. But it doesn’t really work. The wrongdoing is still there in our self-unawareness and the guilt along with it. We’re just advised to look the other way. To follow the example of make-believe, bury our heads in the sand, and will away whatever disturbs our peace. Jesus acknowledged as much in A Course in Miracles when he said that it would take only one person truly forgiving to overturn the know-it-all’s (ego’s) house of cards (“thought system”). Hell will freeze over by the time any of us can be that person.

Why not you? Or you. If we all share the same mind, we’re gifted with access to Guidance, and Love-Spontaneity and Logic-Order are present even though we can’t be aware of it, why can’t lightning strike now? The answer is that the process of forgiveness prescribed by the Course is psychological theory that works for minds not troubled by animal brains. For Sapiens after it’s evolved from a species of tribal ape into the competence for Guidance that’s its objective. When it can’t get there unless it learns to forgive. Cart before the horse. Irrational.

You’re just impatient. Frustrated. What I am is aware that the know-it-all’s make-believe concocted this religious good vs. evil, innocence vs. guilt, bullshit. That it’s put us through bloodthirsty authoritarian theatrics of the right and the left. That it’s a manipulation. And the Course’s metaphysics and religion putting us through psychological contortions to disable it are part of the manipulation.

We can go on straining every muscle to ‘forgive’ to infinity. ‘Worshiping’ mutilated bodies on crosses. ‘Saviors’. Paying homage to authoritarian monstrosities decked out in the cosmetics of ‘love’. ‘God’. But manipulation is manipulation. Herd mentality is herd mentality. And so is self-delusion. Forgiveness is self-delusion, part of the manipulation? It is if it’s minds blocked by tribal animal brain sensory perception from fusing with Guidance. Forced to paper-over wrongdoing and guilt by an irrational act of will posing as rational choice.

Into make-believe oblivion 

You can’t love your enemy?  “Loving our enemy” can’t make good sense metaphysically in human-animal’s Psyche where there are no ‘enemies’. Physically, where there are ‘enemies’ and degrees of separation are ‘real’, it can make sense. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. In the nature of Love that distance is no impediment to attachment so long as it’s fed by communication. Abigail Adams didn’t dump John just because his letters from France took months to arrive. What about you? I would have dumped him before that. One of our Founding Fathers? Why? Off to gay Paree? French women swept off their feet by the dashing American revolutionary? The two-timing bum – I knew what he was up to! In that case distance is an impediment.

Otherwise, it was the incompleteness of Love and Logic without one another that set off sparks. What set them apart as much as what they had in common. Role models for ‘loving your enemy’? That’s a stretch. Not if we understand that the first step toward ‘enemy’ is ‘us’ vs. ‘them’.

Not a big deal until fear, suspicion, and distrust rear their ugly heads. Turning music, laughter, and dancing in steerage among immigrants into a threat to natives in first class. Diversity into a foreign invasion. A far cry from the scene of joyous innocence depicted in A Night at the Opera. From the same era as It’s a Wonderful Life. Depression and war. People who were then celebrated as ‘us’, now mischaracterized as ‘them’. All the excuse that self-dividing paranoia needs to take the next step. Yes. To demonize. So that ship, passengers, and crew may be remade into an exclusive club. A whole number. ‘Peace’ and ‘purity’ rid of demons. Sailing off into make-believe oblivion.

Everything that is, is owed to the original ‘us’ vs. ‘them’. To boundaryless Love that could never be mistaken for Logic, bristling with boundaries. With the limits of Definition that Love’s Spontaneity could never accept. Nor Life growing and evolving, attributes of Love that initiated Movement at the beginning. Allowing itself to be brought within the confines of Order, and yet it did. In alignment with Necessity, the way things are and must be: Relatability. If neither a static-state, all-encompassing ‘answer’ is possible where nothing goes, nor its reverse where anything goes. Unrelatability. Reverse-opposition to Interrelationship. To Interconnectedness.

‘Situation’ means limits. What is there in the absence of the fantasies of make-believe that aren’t there. Limitless for being made up. Setting the first principle of Movement’s situation at the beginning: that it proceed within limits. It is within the limits of Definition that Creation in Reality becomes possible. Love functioning becomes possible, boundaried and protected by Logic. Logic guided by the Conscience of Love. Together providing the motivation and direction for Creation. Guidance rooted in Definition.

The lure of freedom from limits

Freedom inseparable from Order. Inseparable from limits. A bedrock principle of civilization and governance under constant attack by the authoritarian obsession with ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’. Perversions of the truth it stands for. Hell-bent to ‘conserve’ the wildness and willfulness of a kingdom of predatory animals. A black hole of make-believe.

Authoritarians are the only ones taken in? No. The black hole has produced other victims. Persons of extraordinary talent overtaken by the gravitational allure of make-believe’s big lie.  So much so that they descended into madness. Anyone I know? A few household names plus others I’m aware of.

• Nietzsche, who propagated the big lie of the know-it-all’s invincibility, thereby helping to legitimize and popularize National Socialism’s ‘superman’ — the ‘master race’.

• Sylvia Plath, whose poem Ariel channeled by the know-it-all propagated its persecution. Victimhood’s big lie.

• Hawking, a special case who avoided the appearance of madness while perpetrating lies on a cosmic scale. The inventor of a physical universe without limits in A Brief History of Time. Who applied the talents of captivity to make-believe to the study of black holes, then climaxed his tenure with burial between Darwin and Newton. One last non sequitur to cap off a career of non sequiturs.

• Jerry Martin, whose God: An Autobiography propagates the big lie of the know-it-all’s extraordinary relatability. Herd mentality wracked with paranoia, portraying itself as voluble and ingratiating, personable and charming. Seductive. Supremely polished at appearances. Especially accessibility — a regular guy you’d want to have a beer with. Everything you’d want in a friend except friendship. A cartoon character. An emotional no-show.

You could win!

I can love my enemy if I’m guided by the perspective of our Parents. Choosing to welcome diversity instead of putting us all in us vs. them, a psychological cage. But it would be different if I were to choose to do so by ‘forgiveness’. How so? In our virtual reality of make-believe, the bad guy and his wrongdoing are ‘there’. You can’t have it both ways, and ‘forgiveness’ is trying to have it both ways. Assuming that bad body-stuff ‘happened’ and then willing it away by an act of Mind. Assuming that it didn’t happen. As irrational as holding conflicting thoughts at the same time: Reality plus unreality. Too much for the human body-brain to handle that’s trapped inside the manipulation. Inside make-believe ‘real’.

Traitor!  Betraying a founding principle of civil society! Not my intent. Nor should it be the result if I have no problem with the principle itself. Forgiveness is possible. Any individual who puts its psychology into practice as prescribed by the Course will make it happen. Fuse with the perspective and motivation of Innocence within – Guidance or “Christ” – and recognize the same in an ‘other’. See no difference between Self and ‘other’ when recognizing both as one Self wholly innocent. Do a complete makeover of identity: your own and the other’s and Voila! Forgiveness! Never mind that it will trigger a raft of defenses built into human-animal’s genome, a fortress of denial engineered just for this purpose. Yes, a pushover for a miracle. But if ‘possible’ means the same as anyone could win a galactic Powerball lottery — forget it.

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 A Call for Help 

‘Relatable’ by force

Forgiveness is part of manipulation premised on wrongdoing manipulation being make-believe. Not real. The philosophically legitimate part of forgiveness. Its truth and effectiveness, but persuading human-animal body-brain self-unawareness to honor the truth is virtually impossible, and so is forgiveness. The truth that ‘enemy’ to be Loved and forgiven is illusory, when the very nature of life on Earth – ‘nature’ itself — is predicated on its reality. Its definition. Even if illusion / self-delusion is accepted in principle, the wrongdoer must still be taught to stay within its boundaries. To accept the reality and Necessity of limits. The insanity and unacceptability of chaos. It can’t be done by metaphysics if the intrusion is physical and the intruder refuses to look in the mirror. Has thereby rendered itself mentally and emotionally inaccessible and therefore ‘relatable’ by force only. Unmoved, unmoving, and immovable. Like our animal brain: unevolved and unevolving. An insult to common sense and the way things are. Movement.

Acceptance of the illusory state of life on Earth finesses the psychology of forgiveness. The transference of self-as-innocent to others to reverse the projection of guilt, but as everyday interrelationship it runs afoul of sensory perception. Of body-centric virtual reality. Too convoluted. Too complicated for any but theoretical purposes. 

Dumb animal

For all practical purposes ‘forgiveness’ is a pipe dream. An unattainable, metaphysical ideal. And it’s being so means that pushing it anyway in our fortress of denial is asking its adherents to suspend all belief, all Logic, and go all in with make-believe. To pretend that something awful has been made to disappear when it’s still sitting there in plain sight. Not just wishful thinking, willful thinking. Contradiction as unthinkable here in unreality as contradiction is in Reality. Which is why it has to resort to willfulness to make its point. Toxic! I’d rather we didn’t put human-animal’s limited mental faculties to this kind of test. Better that it be asked to do what it can do with an explanation it can understand.

The Course’s explanation can’t be understood? Do you understand the explanation I just summarized? Uh. . . Jesus died for our sins so we’re all off the hook. Right! Make-believe Church-marketing nonsense. Then don’t even try to understand.

He didn’t die for our sins? He had a great pitch, predicted great stuff to come and went down in flames. Making him and his pitch look to herd mentality hierarchy like a chump. A loser. Until somebody in marketing came up with a better idea. Make it look like it was all on purpose. He meant to go down in flames. To be crucified? Yes. The grisly mutilation on the cross put himself there just so we wouldn’t have to go there. To be punished for our wickedness. Breathtaking in its audacity, expecting Church faithful to buy into blatant nonsense but they did. They were looking for a savior to get them off the hook and here he was! Yes. Going down in flames was the point. Ingenious! A lesson in how easily manipulated the human-animal can be. Dumb and irrational. 

Dumb because we’re animals but also because our metaphysical Self is a Child – boundaryless and defenseless against self-delusion. Who couldn’t have been given a chance to demonstrate its Self-Awareness. Why? Because, being Free Choice, it had to earn it. And if it had been allowed to demonstrate it prematurely it would have booted itself right back into self-unawareness. No operation brings its workforce online until it’s trained. Couldn’t its Parents have brought it along? Sure, and compromised its integrity. Dear me — we’re descended from an orphan! In its unawareness our antecedent was seemingly detached from everything Real except for its collaborator and fellow-trainee. Guidance anchored to the principles, values, and laws that define Reality and Creation.

Fellow trainee? Two functions with one purpose in life on Earth. Opposites as Love and Logic were at Movement’s ignition: Free Choice and wisdom. To join together as one. One a colt, spirited and adventuresome, born into a narrow perspective. The other judgment from a broader perspective, a mare and a stallion disciplined by a broader perspective. The limits of the way things are. So that, in Relationship, Relatability can make something happen. What? Guidance, the doing part of Definition. To plug in the last piece of Definition in one act, thereafter, to re-enact as part of Guidance’s continuous self-renewal. What for? To be prepared for whatever situations Movement and evolution have in store for Creation. The consequence of structure that’s agitation, restless and unpredictable. The here and now of Spontaneity, always at risk of spinning out of control if Definition’s Guidance isn’t there to rein it in. The gift of Logic-Order inseparable from Love-Spontaneity. 

Half measure

The Course takes us all the way to the point within an inch of where forgiveness happens. But it can’t get us there any more than physics can take us all the way to where the Big Bang happened. Close but no cigar. In both cases A for effort. Physics and metaphysics both to be applauded for taking us to the brink of Understanding. For bringing a ray of light to the darkness. But both tripped up by ‘reality’. The reality of unreality: that in a hallucination what’s ‘there’ must be taken at face value and dealt with. Whether it’s really there or not. It can’t be dealt with by denial. The darkness has to be brought into the light.

Jesus made headway bringing light to darkness, but the effort came up short and got him in trouble. Like Socrates questioning and contradicting before him, trapped inside the dark. Inside Plato’s Cave where minds hallucinate and necks are roped to its master. Self-imagery in control of Athens and Israel. Big-answer busybodies averse to questioning. With the Course Jesus still responds to calls for help with light, offering forgiveness. Maybe the best he could do for Freudians trained in the ways of their authoritarian ‘master’, steeped in animal-brain self-dividing and guilt. But not good enough. A half-measure that itself is a call for help.

You’d be straining every muscle to make a point. I would be if I were trapped inside the manipulation. You’re not? The point of our bedtime story. What’s that? That we don’t have to be.

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Into Clarity with Questioning 

How is that possible? 

I feel. . . refreshed! Really? The sky has cleared! Look! There were clouds. What happened? It was so dark. It’s like. . . a new day. Me too. I feel refreshed. It even smells better. Feel the breeze. We’re at land’s end. It’s coming off the water. Pure air passing over pure water. It feels like a caress. We must be in some kind of zone. Where are we? Where maybe a few explorers have come but apparently not many tourists. I’d say we’re in a dream but I can’t. Why not? It feels so real. Like a near-death experience without the death. Like out-of-body? I’m hardly aware of my body. I had no idea how heavy it was. This is fantastic! Can we stay here? 

Maybe someday. But it would be asking too much to enjoy our sensory makeover without letting our minds catch up. As it is, we’re bringing human-animals into where only humans dwell. An out-of-animal experience. If it’s out-of-body then I would say so. Out of make-believe where animals and their ways turn the script written for them into theatrics. No timpani drums. Do you hear any? Please don’t remind me. Silence is golden! I liked the noise. I thought it relieved the boredom but you’re right. The quiet here – no word for it. 

How about ‘peace’? Ha! Peace on Earth? Now I know you’re making it up. We’re not liberated. We’re still the same old fools making fools of ourselves. Almost had me there! 

OK then, you do the explaining. I can’t. Why not? The only ‘explaining’ I can do is manipulation. Make-believe is all I know. Our new setting can’t be worked into your plot? Blue skies, clean air, pure water. No noise pollution or unpleasant smells either. If it’s new I’d have to ask questions. What’s wrong with that? I do that and next thing you know the jig is up. Make-believe is supposed to be the creator of everything and this. . . paradise. Yes? Too chancy. If I start asking questions and it’s not make-believe’s reflection it’ll be upset. Best not to ask questions. You too. I can leave the explaining to you but you’ll just make a fool of yourself and you might get whacked. 

The point of our story is to get us beyond the reach of make-believe. Then explain to me how that’s possible.

A complete ninny

We pick up where ancient wisdom left off. Before body-centric ‘science’ and ‘realism’ took over. Before sensory perception became the order of the day and anything contradictory had to shut up. Anything Mindful. Like the metaphysics of Parmenides that almost brought Plato along until Aristotle and matter took over. Like the ethics of Socrates – Character questioning — that got run over by herd mentality: Machiavelli’s Prince wielding the power of might-makes-right. Like Jesus’ effort to overturn appearances from the bottom up. How so? By explaining their psychological mechanics so they can be dismantled. Psychological mechanics? Freudian psychoanalytics that conveniently revealed the anatomy of authoritarian arrogance from the inside out. The structure of make-believe reversal: top-down and upside-down, so that it can be re-reversed, turned right side up, and bottom-up Reality restored.

Where all this left off was with metaphysics looking behind physical appearances with Logic, Character asking Sapiens Who are you?, and the Course taking human psychopathology partway to its metaphysical roots. Partway? To the psychopathology of the split Mind dreaming it but not to the psychology of its Parents. Valiant efforts all. Cut short or limited in scope, but either way not the whole story. 

Then off we go to Bombay, Peru, and Acapulco Bay! Yes. “Come Fly with Me.” Frank Sinatra and Billy May, October 1957. My twentieth year. At the dawn of everything. Not hardly. The real dawn of everything might have been around your twentieth year. Moi? The original questioner.

The turgid conspiracy-theorizing mess we just exited was its flip side: the all-encompassing whole number one implicit in fraction’s denominator. The equal and opposite reaction caused by every action? In our physical world it would be. But at the dawn of everything the buck stopped with the original, prototypical Movement. The only ‘reaction’ it could generate was its birthmark. The fraction that couldn’t be or do anything on its own. Characteristic of Mind: everything that happens, happens within. Self-generated, including Movement. Mind wasn’t acted upon by Movement to awaken. Movement acted within Mind as a step in its evolution. Its growth. Self-generated, toward maturity and the competence to fulfill its role in Happening within the limits of its situation.

‘Mind’ that I’m used to thinking of as ‘God’, adapting to circumstances beyond its control. Submitting to limits. No more lord and master of everything than a house pet that needs to be house broken. Only able to do anything because some force it couldn’t control paired off a couple of its faculties. Right under its nose, without it’s being aware of it. As if it didn’t know its own mind! A complete ninny at the mercy of circumstances. You’re describing events in the evolution of Self-Awareness. In the sequence of Logic that involves stuff happening before and after stuff happening. How else could Mind evolve toward Self-Awareness if not from a state of self-unawareness? Toward an active state if not from inactive? How could anything happen if not from situation defined as the way things are?

A lesson in geometry

The dawn of everything was situation, and it was what it was. A good way to put it, because “it was what it was” frees human-animal from condemnation. From having to take conspiracy-theorizing centered on guilt seriously. It frees us from susceptibility to self-judgment and self-delusion under the influence of make-believe while we’re coping with self-unawareness. Offers us the role model of Mind-Relationship at the beginning instead: accepting its questioning built into the way things are. Putting its implicit flip side, dividing, to constructive use. Honing the character and competence of its Child to perform an essential function. Guidance.

We can learn our function, Guidance, by understanding that make-believe’s tales of guilt and innocence, good and evil, are clutter. Obfuscation. Yes. Bullshit. OK to respond with ‘forgiveness’ so long as we understand that it’s a holding action. Necessitated by the manipulation, until our understanding of the way things are takes another step forward. Goes beyond the Child’s emergence onto its training ground in self-unawareness. Goes farther back to the ignition of Movement by its Parents’. To their emergence into Self-Awareness and the structure of Creation.

Bearing the imprint of fraction, the situation at the beginning. Yes. The absence of a static state of no movement. The putative big answer that wasn’t and couldn’t. That had to give way to another state that could. Could what? Happen, with Movement’s ignition. The state of agitation. Restlessness, a defining attribute of Movement. Of evolution and Creation. Always a fraction, never resolving to a whole number. Never coming to rest. Whose structure matches the structure of Movement. Enumerator moving forward above dividing line with denominator questioning it below the line. Both explicit and active in Reality. While questioning’s flip side, the divider, is implicit and inactive. Non-existent. As befits anything make-believe that has no place in Reality.

The structure of  life on Earth? The same but with one major difference: questioning’s flip side is explicit and active. As though it does exist. The divider that the Course tags “the mad idea of separation.” Our misbegotten version of ‘guidance’ that delights in denial, reversal, and perversity. Denial that it’s a derivative of anything, dependent on anything, sharing anything. Mining a rich source for absurdity, trickery, and malfeasance from delusional thinking in its theatre of the absurd. It’s OK with being below the line? Actually, no. It would have its suckers born every day believe that it’s on top and there’s no bottom. That enumerator-moving and denominator-questioning not only don’t exist; they have no right to exist. An attitude one would expect from pure arrogance. Number one — the scoreboard cleared of any other numbers. The one-and-only.

You left out a step. I did? The structure of Creation is a circle whose circumference is divided by its diameter. The ratio is the fraction. Mr. Maynard wouldn’t be surprised. Who’s he? My geometry teacher at Andover. So frustrated by my resistance to learning that he once turned an entire class over to grilling me. He succeeded? Yes. In making Mike Ogden pity me. Walked me over to Commons afterward so I’d have someone to commiserate. Pitiful! Geometry wasn’t your only problem.

The arrival of everything

All of it the function of Mind I’ve labeled “Logic.” One step after the other in logical sequence. Yes. The oriental tea ceremony. Hexagram Four. “Youthful Folly” in training, practicing getting it right so that it will do what’s right and do it right. Grow up. To ‘strength’ that is strength. Maturity that’s not self-centered and arrogant, littleness and pettiness. Largeness of Spirit that’s not mean-spirited. Perspective broad instead of narrow. Evolving. Right. Progressing. Because in the absence of a static state what Mind-Parents and the children of Self-Awareness are gifted with is Movement. Life-Creation that’s perpetually in motion whether it seems that way or not.

The dawn of everything was the dawn of motion. And its imperative, the essence of Creation: keep moving. A visual? Andy Warhol’s insight, the distinction between motion that’s external and detectable to body-brain senses and internal and not detectable. Demonstrated by Empire. His ‘motion picture’ of a stationary object. The Empire State Building. Evolving-moving through a succession of still-lifes passing through it like a banner headline. An approximation of time converted to timelessness in the eternal Now: stuff happening in sequence. In a continuum with no past or future, no forward or backward.

An approximation, too, of human-Psyche’s dynamic when psychological growth is accelerated or arrested. Beneath the surface and out of sight, where events occur that can be of monumental significance. Only not everyone is aware of it. Yes. Leaving potentially catastrophic consequences unattended and unprepared for.

Some personality types do well with the flow of appearances above the surface. You’re in good hands with them so long as appearances and self-imagery are all that matter. Not in good hands when it’s internals and Self-Awareness that matter. The storyline taking shape with all the bumps and bruises that our Psyches endure in the darkness. The abuse from arrogance. Perspective from self-unawareness, one-dimensional and one-sided. Animal brain lacking differentiation and empathy, in need of depth-perception. In need of Relationship. Relatability.

The dawn of everything we’ve characterized as “Relationship” was the arrival of our metaphysical Parents and their gift of Relatability. Whose expression in Self-Awareness Creation brings all into the Reality and the pursuit of its Ideal in Loving Friendship. Being there for one another.

Tough like a father, loving like a friend

Got a visual? Whatever your intuition and imagination find most appealing. My metaphysical Parents are mythological gods, Persephone and Apollo. Loving Friendship is my working relationship with Guidance in the image of my younger son. Happenstance? Persephone and my son role-modeled experience with life in the darkness of self-unawareness. She conscripted to be wife to the dark lord of the underworld; he left literally hanging by the cruelties of a life unfulfilled. Both icons for whom I feel the greatest affinity, for their suffering and strength and for their wisdom and compassion. Who came to me. Spontaneously, unbidden. They were ‘chosen’ only in the sense that I’ve come to understand why they came and why they’re a good fit. One insight, one revelation, at a time.

You love them. If I Love anything, yes. With what feels like passion, because it’s accompanied by a sense of resolve. Attached to work that’s to be done. To purpose that’s to be fulfilled if I share in their passion. For being there in Loving Friendship. For re-reversing the reversal, which brings us back to the matter at hand. Finding a better perspective on the way things are than the reversal of a pile of make-believe crap.

The model for approaching any situation begins with Mind’s situation at the beginning. Fraction that’s agitation — forget about ‘perfect peace’. Restlessness calling for resolution, pieces to be fit together logically in Order one step at a time. With an understanding of the way things are. Fit together empathetically in recognition and acceptance rather than willed to be what they aren’t in denial and rejection. A call for Love within the boundaries of Protection and for Movement forward. For reconciliation between two sides of Necessity, one constructive in alignment with the way things are. Compatible and conjunctive. Relatable. The other out of alignment and obstructive. Incompatible and disjunctive. Unrelatable.

Echoes from the past. Yeah. Rebukes for being “contrary” and “hard to get along with.” From my school principal and my Mom, when I was just being me. I didn’t know what they were talking about and didn’t give it much thought until years later. When life taught you a lesson? I was contrary with the guy who’d just hired me and the look on his face finally got the message across. “The Look.” Never forget it. He got you down on bended knee. No. He was Character who appreciated Character. Never did that. Valued independence and originality, and when I showed some it was rewarded. Valued Love too, which astounded me when he mentioned it in a speech.

Your hell-raising benefited him? Sure did, and he did more than pat me on the back. He got me out of the White Mountains of New Hampshire down to Washington. Where you could kick ass. Yes. Where I got attention, and when it got pushback his was a voice of support. I helped to get him attention. Nothing beats Relationship when it’s held together by Character and mutual respect. And politics. Ours being from Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, though he’d seen combat in WWII and knew the hard side of it. Tough like a father and loving like a friend. A role model for fatherhood and friendship. Irreplaceable. I miss him.  

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Into Character with Contradiction 

Contradict the contradiction!

Agitation is questioning. “Who are you?” “What are you about?” “Why?” Stimulation for Creativity in the unobstructed flow of Movement. Contradiction when it is obstructed. Logic and possibility directing illogic and impossibility to get out of the way. Here on Earth, where unreality and disorder are the clown car spewing its contents into the center ring. When they aren’t Energy stored in matter threatening nuclear holocaust. Not funny! No. Needing to be directed by its source not to empower division. Not to obstruct. Responsibility built into the Character of Relationship: Parenthood responsible for the behavior of its offspring. Insemination for conception. Thoughts for their effects. Ownership with boundaries that do demand enforcing as opposed to make-believe that has no boundaries. Nothing to ‘enforce’ but the wildness and willfulness of arrogance.

If know-it-all authority deems itself above questioning then it can’t be questioned. The number one center of the universe — the one-and-only — will contradict questioning by silencing it. With intimidation if that’s all the bully needs to have its way, or with force if not. Either way, it must be contradicted. By withholding awareness. Agitation that’s stimulation. Attention for who and what it imagines itself to be: number one make believe. While ordering it out of the way for what it does: obstruct Movement. The way things are that can’t be obstructed. That’s the job of Guidance and Free Choice to advance once they’ve combined functions, joined in one Relationship, and taken up their place within Definition. Character that can’t be corrupted. Necessity that can’t be contradicted.

Set the terms!

The response of Character is to respond to big-answer neglect with neglect. But in so doing to affirm the Person behind its mask. With Understanding that can only come from Guidance, borne of Parents at Home in Definition. Perspective inclusive of all that is. Unconditional Love. Largeness of spirit, whose right to Guide is affirmed by its denial in make-believe.

Movement finds ways through and around obstruction by taking advantage of make-believe’s self-unawareness. Its misperceptions and misjudgments, half-baked ideas and ill-advised actions, and reversing them. Reversing reversals. One-upping one-upmanship’s attempt to take captive and assert supremacy. Using its source of propulsion to reverse its direction. By assertion of Mind’s understanding the way things are. The way things work that make-believe, in the arrogance and ignorance of willfulness, can never understand.

Encounters with make-believe’s know-it-all are a game of chess. Attack and counterattack. Where the object is to capture the opponent’s king. Absurdity’s ‘meaning of life’, and so everyone is at the same chessboard. Out to capture their opponent’s king and so to be defended against by superior strategy. By counterattacks that capture the other’s king. A perversion of being there for one another, the Relatability and self-Worth of Creation in Reality. Being ‘there’ for worthlessness and unrelatability. A self-appointed chess master that will swarm its chessboard with beasts fearful of losing their make-believe master. Obsessed with taking yours in a game of appearances. Of self-imagery, to protect its supremacy and, above all, its ‘creation’. Make-believe.

A holy game of chess. Yes. ‘God’ and its ‘creation.’ Eternally at war with trespassers determined to snatch its domain and depose it. As it imagines it did when it outwitted its delusional host, deposed its ‘God’, took over the controls, and projected itself and its unwitting passenger into make-believe. Into a promised land of ass-kissing animal hierarchy where it rules supreme. Its voice the only one to be heard and its ass the only one to be kissed. Its real estate empire complete: the loser’s domain absorbed into the winner’s domain.

A holy game of Monopoly. The terms of a static state of self-unawareness that define the Child’s training ground. Whole number one. Everything associated with it an impossibility and absurdity. A joke, magic trick, and monstrosity. A perversion of the limits set by fraction when ignition put everything into motion. The limits of Creation in Reality.

Embrace the negative

The logical Necessity of Definition pairs positive with negative in the form of a fraction. With positive as enumerator coming first, negative as denominator second — an implication and derivation of enumerator. Each with their own contributions to Movement, evolution, and Creation. Their own functions, with parallels to the Parent-Child Relationship. Attached but functionally divided by a common boundary. Togetherness made possible by division, possibility by impossibility, and vice versa. Dr. Strangelove. Sterling Hayden’s Jack Ripper ride-‘em-cowboy atop The Bomb. Irony in the presentation of the human-animal Psyche, a self-contradicting anomaly. Pi, the rogue fraction calculating itself out to infinity.

A perspective that embraces the negative in a way that allows it to question without descending into dividing. That follows Parents’ lead in managing the forces of Creativity. Pulling in different directions through the uniting influence of Mind-Movement’s ignition. The power of Attraction. The nature of Energy at the beginning. By shifting the story from Child-Guidance in training to its roots in Parents-Movement Creating it moves from its negative what-isn’t side of Definition to its positive what-is side. From fraction’s denominator to its enumerator, where Understanding the story of Creation puts Relationships and Relatability in a positive light. That requires acceptance of self-questioning. Of Guidance rather than re-reversal of self-dividing through forgiveness.

Forgiveness isn’t needed in this situation. Where there’s no wrongdoing or guilt to ‘forgive’. Only an understanding that in the absence of the mythical whole number one — in a static state opposed to Movement, opposed to Relationship, opposed to questioning — Creativity requires self-questioning. Acceptance of the Necessity of being asked from a mirror questioning Who are you? To renew motivation in the course of Movement-evolution. Grounded in Definition and guided by Character with Integrity freely chosen. Relatability earned and learned through experience with both the positive and negative aspects of Definition.

Whose personification and role model in Greek mythology was the goddess Persephone, queen of the underworld. Compassionate and empathetic Understanding from depth perception. From experience below the dividing line with the divider and his division as well as questioning. The incubator of Character-Integrity and Choice that’s Free. Guidance.

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An Honest Appraisal

Big difference!

These two are among the main ideals served by Creation in Reality. Both based on the idea of fraction:

• Being there for one another in loving friendship (enumerator)
• Paying attention to the example we set by questioning it (denominator)

The first ideal is satisfaction, a state of comfort and security. The second is a reminder that satisfaction is unsustainable in a state of Movement without self-renewal. Keeping pace with change by honest appraisals of who we are. Of where we stand in the circumstances of the moment, whether committed or uncommitted. Loyal to our ideals or gone over to their opposites. Willing to question and be questioned. A stance that reveals itself in the mirror held up by self-evaluation, when we accept its verdict, align with Movement, and thereby declare ourselves for Character. Or decline to look, abandon Movement, and separate from Character.

Guidance through Movement is help with questioning. Experience that recognizes change and is familiar with its boundaries. Depth perception that sees beneath the surface, beyond appearances. Two-dimensional. Perspective broad enough to take it all in. Differentiation and empathy capable of sorting through the pieces to get at those that matter most. To take inchoate and make choate — to integrate. Qualified to ask what the situation means and thus to guide us to the right questions. The ones that get the right answers.

Provided that we’re on the side of Character and that’s what we want. To get it right. Make-believe won’t guide us to the right questions? Make-believe is the big answer that’s no questions and no perspective. Nothing mindful. If it can’t differentiate it can’t understand what difference anything makes. The theory, philosophy, or meaning of it. ‘Action’ separated from Mind thinking it is its reverse: inaction. Paralysis. Captivity. Incapable of any attribute that would qualify make-believe to guide us in any sense. Unless it’s backward and down. The perversion of Guidance that’s manipulation. Big difference!

A virtual impossibility 

What’s the difference if we choose separation? If we’ve in Loving Friendship with Guidance and it’s backing us up we will not back down. If we identify with make-believe we cannot stand up. Standing up to make-believe, a black hole of neglect and a bully, is a test of Character. Whether we choose to question it if it presents an opening or to contradict it if it does not. How do we know if it’s presented an opening? If the manipulator allows its captive to treat us as a learning device. As it would if it proclaims itself committed to getting it right. Or to  always being there for us. To loving us, whether or not words and deeds belong to the same mindset. These are openings.

Then you speak from experience. What experience? With exploiting openings so that character can touch character. Relatability can connect with relatability. Separation can heal. Theoretically maybe. Churchill was Character and Character says never give up. But doing so in practice is a work in progress. Where all I can be sure of is that others have been learning devices to my benefit. Spectacularly so. But not you. You’re not a learning device. I see no benefit in anyone I’ve engaged with. No feedback, no reciprocity. It’s as though we’re all learning devices for one another but in our state of self-unawareness we don’t give it any thought. How we’re going about it or whether it’s for good or ill. Forgiveness may be no more difficult than changing another’s mind — a virtual impossibility.

The buck stops here 

There’s a lesson here? Personifications of the Child projecting itself into a hallucination are descendants of the same Parents. And so with no lack of motivation to give and receive, share and reciprocate, the bounty of their Love. While, being children of self-unawareness, they’re unaware of the basics of reciprocity: what’s of value to themselves let alone to others. Even of who they really are, unable to exchange value for value. Aware of what they’ve given up but unaware that anything has been given back.

Ships passing in the night. Yes. Occupying the same space but in the most critical way unaware of each other. Yearning to connect through every manifestation of Love while unable to communicate. For lack of functional Relationship. For lack of reciprocity, a source of misunderstanding that can lead to war.

I feel sorry for them. Feel sorry for all of us: families of mismatches and misfires. Being there for one another by not being there at all. Reciprocity in reverse — great entertainment. What’s to be ‘forgiven’ in the end: the sheer folly of good intentions gone awry. What fools these mortals be. Gone awry not for lack of trying but for lack of awareness. And for lack of Guidance. The measure of how dependent we are on Relationship to get anything done in our state of self-unawareness. Unawareness of the Relationships that power Movement. Creation in Reality. Stuff happening.

The lesson is a reaffirmation of Guidance. If we’re meant to be learning devices rather than pinball machines we need a collaborator with another perspective. Trust and intimacy that goes beyond the self-imagery of hierarchy and lip service to ritual. Beyond rescuing from situations of our own making through ‘salvation’, ‘worship’, and ‘prayer’. Herd mentality looking for favors from ‘higher authority’. When the buck stops here. Guidance is here to help, but we are the ‘authority’. Responsible for our own Character. For self-questioning, the heart of it. Getting up off our knees to ask, in all honesty: Who are we?