Victimhood
Why stick around?
You’ve given up. Manning the ramparts all these years and now the enemy is too much. Naivete wakes up. You saw it coming? Sure, if that’s what you’ve been paying me to see. Aren’t I your in-house skeptic? I was supposed to be right. And I was supposed to be wrong. And now you’re conceding defeat and feeling sorry for yourself. I made fun of you for feeling sorry for yourself. You were my victimhood punching bag. Now you have two punching bags. Yes. You and me both.
One problem to solve too many. I thought I could handle this one. Had lots of encouragement. Like what? Nobody else sees it the way I do. You took inspiration from others going off in the wrong direction. I don’t know what’s out there. For all I know the place is full of people who see it the way I do, only how can I tell? If they’re not showing up in the media and stuff I get out of the library, if people I correspond with and talk to are on different wavelengths, it’s hard to assume I’ve got company. We’re a tribal species of animal: shouldn’t we think alike? Sure, if we think at all. The human part of animal anyway. Fascinating to watch fish, four-legged animals and birds, all move in unison by instinct and to realize that humans do it too. Maybe my way of seeing things is part of a movement too close to detect.
Then naivete isn’t giving up. Movements blowing with the wind don’t matter. Herds either. Until now what’s registered is the idea that our psychological cage would disappear if only one of us got out of it. Physical cage too. The planet? The universe – everything spacetime-matter. Poof! Gone! Plato’s Cave. The Wachowski brothers’ Matrix. Elon Musk’s dream-world, a simulation. More support for the idea that our physical surroundings are staged and all it would take to end the show is one playacting body-brain breaking with the script.
We were awakened to the dream-world by Jesus in A Course in Miracles. The miracles of the biblical Jesus made it obvious that our ‘reality’ is a funny farm. Obvious to Valentinus, a Gnostic Christian, who got the biblical Jesus right back in the second century. The Church didn’t? No. Valentinus was an outlier. By tacking on the Old Testament and making up a quote about Peter founding it the Church ensured that body-idolizing, character-corrupting tribal hierarchy would prevail in the end. The same mindset that crucified Jesus and crushed the Gnostics. Centuries later, Nazis persecuting Jews.
Haven’t you and I broken with the script? Not so long as I’m bumbling about in my body, locked in my cage. Though it may only be one individual’s hallucination; ‘outside’ anything is a myth. Metaphysically, you mean. Yes. But if that’s so the ‘there’ that’s ‘out there’ physically is suspect. Cool! I’ve always wanted to be a solipsist. A Mind that’s not functioning right might imagine that it can ‘create’ an alternate reality by kicking its thoughts and feelings into another room, but it can’t be done. Any more than it can try a three-pointer with its identity. Yet this is ‘normal’ human behavior and the psychology behind it. Manipulations by body-animal brains that condition us from cradle to grave. The projections of arrogance. OKW’s order of the day.
Doing the body’s bidding, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, doesn’t appeal to this eccentric. I need originality. Nice work if you can get it. Repetition and imitation break the spell. Superficiality ruins the theatrics, and if there’s no substance to begin with why stick around?
Dereliction of duty
You used to find something in atmospherics. Time out of time. Boston’s underground trolley stations at Boylston Street and Adams Square — dark, musty, and cavernous. The New Haven’s Merchants Limited, hurtling through the night toward a Thanksgiving weekend in New York, packed with humanity — smoky, overheated, and aromatic. Atlantic Avenue and South Station on a wintry day over the holidays: five o’clock and the William Penn waiting to take me home. In a Cambridge apartment, Shorty Baker and Doc Cheatham taking me from one Here and Now into another with “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was.” Into the looking glass.
Vicarious experiences. Churchill taking up residence in the White House with Roosevelt after America entered the war, so Britain, desperate for help, would have Roosevelt’s attention. 1940s wartime atmospherics. When you were a boy. Yes. A time of mysterious doings in a mysterious world that put me to wearing a flashlight on my wrist. Huh? At bedtime during air raid blackouts. Pittsburgh was bombed? Drills. We had air raid wardens just like London. They let us know it when Jeannelle left her light on.
Now when I follow Churchill around Roosevelt’s quarters something’s gone out of it. It’s not the ‘past’ anymore. What is it? An eccentric accompanied everywhere by an attendant wheeling a cartload of his habits. Whiskey, brandy, and cigars. His version of life’s essentials that I sampled once with a taste of Talisker. A rush of recognition that put me inside a smoky Manhattan wood-paneled reading room. As though ‘aged’ had its own flavor. And tint — sepia. Pleasurable and intriguing while it lasts. But bodies and their senses are embellishment enough. Ideas and feelings don’t need more window dressing for animation; they need less.
The difference between life livable and not livable for some of us. Seems to be. Body stuff, toying with all of us. Atmospherics putting us under its spell. Churchill succumbing to manipulations and me too. Never seemed to bother him or me either at first, but now it does. When I look in my mirror I see an old guy separating from familiar perceptions, as though abandoning a cause and friends too. Letting the Screaming Eagles do my fighting for me on D-Day because I tripped and broke my pinky the day before. Feels like dereliction of duty. Like a betrayal.
Stopped in its tracks
Needing to pause motivation to understand what’s happening. Overwhelmed? By the overbearing psychology of victimhood. By its suffocating, inescapable presence. Something I thought dropped out of my mirror after I stopped whining. Gave up “poor David” without understanding where it came from. That it was pretense, a matter of choice. I’d heard rumors. Yes. My family were all flaming victims who never got over it, but when I first arrived – an accident – I was anointed the house victim. You must have done a pretty good imitation. I heard laughter. Derision. Makes me cringe to think of it. Only there was a touch of truth to it. You weren’t welcome. I could have been aborted. You were psychologically aborted. The runt of the litter. Poor you!
Poor all of us! All of us? Victimhood imagining itself the runt of the litter has us trapped in its ‘paradise’ of promises too good to be true, where it can abuse its tormenters. Get even. Dehumanize us for being taken in by its lies, goad us with its provocations into dismembering one another. Reduce us to psychological freaks: creepy-crawly Gollums. Persons contorted into madness by their cravings.
Being a contrarian I imagined I had something original to offer that would extricate me from my humiliation. From victimhood’s shame and guilt. Make a contribution to human understanding so long I avoided contamination by psychopathy — by victimhood and its manipulations. But here I am. Poor you! Drilling down to the psychological roots of our species’ and our planet’s afflictions. Artificial Intelligence the calamity perhaps to end all calamities. To the motivations of its inventors, marketers, and investors, and what do I find? Victimhood. Theirs and mine. Poor David! Lecturing others on self-evaluation. Seeing your own face behind the mask of victimhood in the mirror. I asked for it. Stopped your bullshit in its tracks.
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Function
Nature
Awash in manipulation. Up to my ass in alligators, forgetting that I came here to drain the swamp. Your cue when you walked on stage to orate was to be the boom of a cannon. Yes, but when the cannon went off in my ear what came out of my mouth was “What the hell was that!” Obstructions piled upon obstructions. Frustrations piled upon frustrations until something snapped. Nepalese royalty assassinated a roomful of his own family. Yes. Leaving the one survivor to observe, “You’ve done enough.” Human-animals trapped in their cages, driven to madness by constant irritation, erupt to relieve the pressure. Then they subside. Until incompatibilities cause more friction, rubbing against one another like sticks. Throwing off sparks until . . . here we go again.
What’s going on? Rodney King: “Why can’t we all just get along?” Hasn’t this been worked over by savants already? Freudian psychoanalysis was the latest thing, took the states by storm until psychiatry wandered back into pharmaceuticals. Timothy Leary. Yeah. Psychedelics, and before that nineteenth century utopian communities. Mass ideologies. Marx had the answer with his crackpot proletarian paradise. Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth. Forgiveness, the Church’s remedy for the problem of guilt. That it manufactured itself. “Original sin” is our fate and we’re destined for hell unless we’re saved. Nice that the Church was right there to do the saving. Yes, at an enormous price. Social and psychological health. And material wealth, down a rabbit hole. Religious opiates ridiculed by Soviet communism, itself a tawdry experiment in non-compos mentis.
What’s going on isn’t in the nature of things. It is nature. Can’t be anything but ‘natural’. Logical? Even if it’s illogical it’s the nature of Logic itself. The nature of ‘nature’? Yes, if ‘nature’ is synonymous with ‘Logic’. How can stuff happening not be part of the nature of things? There’s something else ‘out there’ that could account for it? We want to know what’s going on as though there’s an alien force intruding into our dimension throwing everything out of whack. That we must surround with tanks like Gort in “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Klaatu barada nikto! Whatever it is, it’s some part of us. Our own back sides. Exactly. Our reverse reflections mistaken for ourselves. The phenomenon that accounts for ‘life’ on Earth.
Situation
What is its nature, this phenomenon? Victimhood. What accounts for the mistake? As succinctly as I can put it, the Necessity that the Mind making it acquaint itself with its reverse-opposite because it’s the way it is so get used to it. An attachment that’s what my Mom joked about women: Can’t live with ‘em and can’t live without ‘em. Seems to me that applies to a lot of things. Applies to all of Creation, because none of the good that it is and does would be possible if it weren’t profoundly unstable. In a state of constant agitation, nothing ever permanently resolved. Movement always off in search of another set of questions and divisions to put in Order. Another set of agitators who need to be taught a lesson. More situations ad infinitum.
Life on Earth is a situation. The reverse of the original situation brought to ‘life’ inside a dream. The original situation? Everything is Mind, can’t be anything other than Mind since it’s all a mix of thoughts and ideas, feelings and values, that you can’t squeeze out of a turnip. Cogito ergo turnip. No matter how we characterize the origin of everything ‘origin’ is an idea. A thought. Can’t get rid of mind any more than we can get rid of that thing attached to our backside. Right. Mind that evolved in logical sequence like everything else, that went from Parents in a permanent state of Self-Awareness since that’s what they were by Definition, to Child in an initial state of self-unawareness since that’s what it had to be because of its function.
Because of its nature? Yes. Logic, nature, function – all of one piece. ‘Function’ being the use of a thing. What it is, is what it does. It’s utility. What it’s for. In a Reality that’s logical as opposed to ours there’s no room, no reason, for stuff just sitting around. Cancel my reservation for heaven! Indeed! If you’re looking for a situation that tolerates doing nothing Creation wouldn’t suit you.
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Guidance
The underside of Definition
Creation itself wouldn’t exist if it couldn’t account for itself. Really? What does account for it? Parents producing a Child that’s Free Choice to give their Creation Character. Accountability. That it would lack unless it were capable of self-examination. Of questioning itself from a perspective that it doesn’t control, that I refer to as Guidance. A Function that, in turn, earned its integrity by choosing its way out of going-along-to-get-along ass-kissing corruption. From scratch, without Mommy and Daddy wiping junior’s nose, putting thoughts in its head and words in its mouth. Without buying off junior’s retinue of predators and parasites with favors from their inheritance.
It was to immerse their Child Free Choice in intensive training that its Parents, Self-Awareness, were required to let it happen. By the nature of their Child and its Function – one and the same thing. By the nature of the Character of Creation, also one and the same thing. By the laws of cause and effect. Required not to make it happen nor to will it to happen but to get out of the way.
Another Can’t live with ‘em can’t live without ‘em situation? Creation is full of them. Because of the nature of the original situation: the structure of a fraction that’s held together by self-questioning, subject to self-dividing pulling it apart. All of it subject to the ultimate source of the tension driving Movement, driving evolution, driving Creativity: the underside of Definition that’s what a thing isn’t.
What makes Guidance good?
Interesting, but is it relatable? It is if the Child in question is ultimately us. Our metaphysical Self, the Mind imagining itself split into projections in a debased kingdom of humiliation. Caricatures of ‘human’ vying for supremacy in a hierarchical tower of addiction and corruption. Portrayals of tormented, self-pitying victimhood, characters in a continuous newsreel of chaos. Beasts, equally pathetic and terrifying. The bodies and the animal brains that we appear to be. Gollums.
It’s relatable if the Child’s function-in-progress is Guidance – should the Child choose to perform it. Which means to come to know and relate to it. To become so familiar with it and so attracted to it that the Child naturally identifies with it. Looks into its mirror of Choice and recognizes itself. Then to be no longer a Child. To be ‘grown-up’ once its learning and growth have brought it to maturity, to the state of Self-Awareness that ‘grown-up’ implies.
What makes guidance good? It’s the doing of the Child’s Parents Self-Awareness that necessarily accompanies every expression of their being, grounded in the principles and values of their nature. The nature of the Good. The nature of Conscience that would limit the doing of Good and free it at the same time. The nature of Necessity. Of Definition — the laws of cause and effect: Love-Spontaneity inseparable from Logic-Order. Freedom inseparable from Order. Everything that is, accompanied by limits set by the situation at the beginning.
The function that’s Guidance is the function of those limits. Our limits: Choice implied between what is and what isn’t; what moves evolution forward and what would reverse it back. The ultimate cause that explains Choice: no part of Creation can stand for its Character, its Meaning and Purpose, without respect for the Logic of its Definition. That it is what it is of Necessity – yes – but also does what it does as a matter of Choice. Necessity inseparable from Choice: Guidance.
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Character Self-Questioning
Self-dividing
Why can’t definition just be what a thing is? Because then it would be a hellhole of arrogance. Of limitless cruelty, pain and suffering. Once we allow an assertion to take the stage without questioning it will take over the theatre and burn it down. The monster galomping through neighbors’ flower gardens doesn’t question what it’s doing. It has no Conscience, no inner moral compass. The only restraint on its appetites is external. The only force pushing back on its aggression is the herd itself – what ‘other people’ are doing.
Provided that it’s outnumbered. If it should attract a large enough following of the like-minded it will act with the instinct of the animal that it is. Become the bigger ape and demand that its ass be kissed. Transform from whining prey to salivating predator, victimhood victimized to victimhood victimizing. The only ‘choices’ animal instinct ‘knows’: wildness compelled by its nature to throw off all limits on itself and, when it can, to impose them on others. ‘Understanding’ that escape from its own cage necessarily forces ‘others’ into theirs.
Mischaracterization that mischaracterizes. Self-dividing that mischaracterizes benefits as costs, the Logic of limits and their gifts for willful intent to take. Compelled by its nature to upend and disable nature itself. To take structure apart. To undo the purpose and meaning of Life. To atomize Conscience, protection for the vulnerability of Self-Awareness, source of Guidance for Movement, guarantor of the Character and legitimacy of Creation. Compelled to replace the thing divided above by itself the divider below, enumerator with denominator, in a grand finale of perversity. Pride of reverse-authorship gazing into its mirror of wrong answers. A herd of reverse-reflections. Zeros imagining themselves the one — the one-and-only number one.
Not-niceness
All this, definition without self-questioning? Words meant to describe a not-personating not-phenomenon that’s contemptuous of all phenomena including words. Why? Because they’re limits. “I’m done with words” was among the lines of Sylvia Plath’s last published works before she was done with life. Before the wildness of division unlimited in her Psyche turned on itself. The ultimate outcome if the idea of reversal — of self-dividing not-happening not-movement — is to be taken seriously. Which with these words I mean to do. To take it and present it as it is: literally.
Or as it isn’t. Yes. It isn’t nice. The back sides that insinuate themselves into our fronts excel at humor and ingratiation. At regular-guy personability and relatability so engaging that we’d trust them with the family jewels. With our lives, when there’s no honor among thieves. When they can’t honor the limits of Conscience if their guiding logic is illogic, the absence of any limits including Conscience. The devil in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov appeared in brother Ivan’s living room for an amiable, harmless chat. The ‘god’ in Jerry Martin’s God: An Autobiography could be the president of a fraternity, the most popular guy on campus. The author of Mari Perron’s A Course of Love gets away with impersonating Guidance, whose message is what? To do away with Guidance!
For all its pretense at niceness victimhood is vicious. It must be if its origin is the reverse of all that’s Good. Good enough reason to fear it if our ‘reality’ is the unreal made real. To take it seriously even if its ‘there’ is hallucination. A perversity that would be worth a good laugh if we weren’t part of the hallucination. Embodiments who can ‘see’ one another and target one another. Experience and inflict pain with victimhood’s astonishing array of weapons. The tip of a stingray’s tail that inserted itself into the precise place in Steve Irwin’s chest where it brought an extraordinary life and career to an end. Instantly and effortlessly.
What questions?
What’s to be done? Commitment to discipline. Steadfast and serious. The discipline of self-questioning that reminds us that our situations are limits and to ignore them is to risk going back. Evolution in reverse. Not the ‘paradise’ of anything goes promised by authoritarian mindsets opposed to questioning. By make-believe infatuated with appearances, but annihilation. Oblivion. You mean. . . ? Mass-extinction. Where Earth is already headed. You can’t be taken seriously. Those who foresaw the incompetence, the moral carnage and operational wreckage that’s this administration weren’t taken seriously. I foresaw where victimhood was taking us then and I foresee where it’s taking us now. I can be taken seriously.
I’m going through the day earning a living, washing laundry and running errands. Studying the ballot, catching up on the news, and you expect me to be asking myself questions? What questions? Is this a shared world? And if it is am I entitled to rule my own little world as I please? That would be a start.
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Metaphysics
The Who of Creation
Why start there? We can start anywhere just so long as we pick up where Parmenides left off. Where was that? The idea of metaphysics when he founded the Eleatics School of Logic 2,600 years ago. A branch of philosophy that breaks with ‘realism’s’ iron grip on perception: adding what intuition can detect beneath the surface to what sensory perception can detect on the surface. And if they conflict, letting Logic resolve the difference. An approach that caught on with Plato, for whom Mind epitomized civilization — the humanitarian project. Who would go wherever it led but could not go all the way to where Parmenides led.
And where was that? To the premise that reality lies not on the surface but beyond it. To a state of Mind that’s not bound by the limits of bodies and brains. The surface isn’t real? Not according to the Logic of Parmenides. It’s illusion. What gave Plato pause? The same thing that gave all of humanity pause in the centuries since. That motivated Aristotle and his intellectual descendants to learn what they could from surfaces: the absence of an analytical tool that could penetrate the unknown beyond surfaces, make sense of it, and compete with sensory perception for credibility.
A tall order! Prohibitive, until William James invented psychology in the nineteenth century. Academic exotica that had little impact at first until, over time, learning produced transformative change and it was clear that insights from intuition were driving it. That it wasn’t enough, as Einstein proved, to get the what of an insight right; we must also get the who of it right. The job of psychology. To explore the wellsprings of motivation, not just of humanity but of Psyche itself. The who of Creation.
The boundary
Philosophy and psychology together. Metaphysics completing Parmenides’ invention, carrying his vision forward. Restarting the task that Logic and intuition began: understanding the what and the who of Reality. Of what’s happening. The way things are. Getting acquainted with the ‘romance’ that Goethe’s Faust despaired of: Life that’s living. Values combined with principles. The judgment of quality, intuitive and imprecise, leavening flatness: the arid calculus of quantity, measured and precise. Form on the surface, elusive and equivocal, given relevance and relatability, purpose and meaning, by substance beneath it. The ‘perfection’ of object, a machine, belied by the imperfection of Person. No one an Ayn Rand ‘object’. No machines here. Everyone a subject.
A work of art? More like a mess. One satisfying answer? More like a stew of questioning. Authoritarian certainty? More like constant rebellion. Absolutes? Relativity everywhere. Agitation that can never let well enough alone. Always in motion, never at rest. Family seeking always to be there for one another. A bunch of liberals.
Getting acquainted with humanity’s utility index – its inborn list of values that compete for priority with every change in our situations. With personality types that align and realign themselves to adapt to the risks and opportunities of their situations. Everything in flux. Everything a possibility that we can manage for the good and to our advantage, manipulate for selfish purposes, or avoid if letting ‘fate’ take responsibility is our preference.
Fate? Victimhood. The trusted ‘realism’ of make-believe and fallback for body idolatry. Appearances and the potential for deception. A risk for misguidance and self-destruction if we don’t manage the potential. The difference between real and unreal, constructive and destructive. The dividing line between right and wrong, getting it right and getting it wrong. The boundary whose crossing brought us to the choice we face: question our way Home or divide ourselves to oblivion.
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Diagnosis
Make-believe’s imaginary ruler
We need the principles and values embedded in the nature of our Parents, Logic and Love. The masculine and feminine principles: thoughts that flow in logical sequence, feelings that connect in Family relationships, but only when they function together as one. Otherwise they lack direction. Thoughts without feelings that care for stuff lack values for Guidance. Feelings without the boundaries of Logic’s Order lack coordinates for navigation and protection too. Love boundaryless is Love defenseless. Vulnerable. The state of Love that can scare us away into the arms of substitutes. Notably power and wealth but escape into make-believe too. The idea that the best way to ‘adapt’ to open-ended situations that require self-questioning is to avoid them. Make up your own situation.
Freedom! Yes. The idea of no limits since make-believe is whatever you want it to be. Absolute freedom. Absolute everything since make-believe is also a world that can’t be shared. When shutting yourself in you’re shutting others out. So what’s wrong with absolutes? They’re on the underside of Definition for a reason. Our world is shared. ‘Absolute’ denies it. ‘Absolute’ is wrong. Was the original situation shared? The arrival and coming together of Love-Femininity with Logic-Masculinity defined Happening as Relationship. Whose evolution of Necessity would involve the sharing of Self-Awareness. Would define Creation as an act of sharing among Family being there for one another. There was no possibility of a hierarchical, monolithic ‘creator-god’.
Then where did it come from? The hierarchical, monolithic ‘creator-god’ is the imaginary ruler of Creation’s reverse-reflection that resides at the underside of Definition. The part of Creation’s Definition that implies what it isn’t. Which would be make-believe since Creation is what is. Reality.
Etiology
This all sounds so dry. Mechanical. What happened to the theatrics? The melodrama? Victimhood. The Child Free Choice wouldn’t learn a thing if it were shoved onto a stage populated by functions behaving logically and affectionately. Like people do sometimes. Crazy as they may be. But harmless. Helpful and kind. Brought to this exalted state by their personality types and their situations.
That change. “America the beautiful” after WWII, in the post-Depression glow of George Bailey and his angel Clarence in “It’s a Wonderful Life”. I was there. I felt it. Felt a country that for the most part had come together in a common cause. And when it ended and everyone went their separate ways the change was palpable. I didn’t like it. I missed the aura of Family and complained about losing it. It was a major deterioration in the quality of my personal life. I wondered if others missed it too, but no one I knew seemed to notice. It was like people acting against their own best interests, but such is the lure of self-interest. Of victimhood that must have its own way.
You lay a lot of misery and malice at the feet of victimhood. What’s the deal? We can’t understand our situation – any situation — without understanding its parameters. The limits that define it. When it shows up and there are limits as there necessarily are, our task is to figure out what they’re telling us. About what? Their etiology. Standard practice in medicine so treatments fit the disease. Want to understand what’s behind our world’s frictions and frustrations? It’s persistently misreading the nature of our situation. Either getting its limits wrong or ignoring them altogether.
Psychopathy
As though we could will our way to paradise. Grab onto someone who hates limits and use them as a battering ram. To batter what? The opposition, so they can get their ruling coterie what they want. What about everyone else? To hell with everyone else! Who hates limits? Psychopaths. The worshippers and practitioners of victimhood filling up our boardrooms and executive suites, political parties, capitals and capitols, militaries, professions, religions, and competitive sports. Our homes and families. You left out prisons. Prisons.
The deal is we’re still struggling as individuals and as a species to diagnose our disease. Europe for centuries exploding into chaos and violence, dragging the rest of the world down with it until, finally, its long-suffering casualties got it into a room with the rest of the world. Created at least the form of Reason even if still can’t function. No? We’re still a theatre of the absurd. Victimhood and its battering-ram warriors around the world still hold center stage. Absolute weakness getting away with portrayals of ‘strength’: the animal brain stripped of its veneer of humanity. Brutishness. A ‘socially acceptable’ imitation of ‘leadership’. As perverse a joke as ever was perpetrated upon a confederacy of dunces.
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Limits Defining
Characters from Dante’s Inferno
What are our situation’s limits? What’s their etiology? What’s the correct diagnosis?
In Reality. . . What do you mean by ‘reality’? The state of existence that flowed in logical sequence from the original situation. The situation at the beginning. Yes. That evolved once Love came together with Logic, Spontaneity with Order, to cause the original Happening. The original cause. Yes. That I call ‘ignition’ since it started Movement. The event I’ve described as Energy in the Now that I liken to a lightning strike. A metaphor that combines power with unpredictability. Familiar to Earth-dwellers as the arrogance of tyranny: hierarchical authority that’s arbitrary. Operating on a whim, unconstrained by limits. Whose etiology is what caused the original happening in reality. The original Cause whose limits are beyond comprehension because beyond the Awareness of the Mind-Relationship that it activated.
How can this be? How can we know what wakes us in the morning if we were asleep when it happened? Your explanation is incomplete until you can explain it. We’re better off that I can’t. If I could then Mind would have already been awake, Self-Awareness already aware when evolution got started. So what? Then it could be said that Creation in Reality was an act of will, not an act of Spontaneity. And if it were, then victimhood is not only the putative ‘creator’ of ‘life’ on Earth, it’s THE Creator. Yes? We wouldn’t be Character-building in hell, learning how to manage the boundary between the upside of Definition and its dotted-line underside, having a dotted-line experience that we can choose our way out of. We’d be characters from Dante’s Inferno. Wretched victims of vengeance condemned to burn in the pits of hell for all eternity.
The original limit
Our situation’s limits start with an event that can’t be explained. It has an explanation, just not one that Mind is capable of. And if it belongs to some other faculty then that lets us out. The original limit is Mind and its . . . descendants? Creations. Expressions. . . can’t fully grasp or describe how it all got started because it hadn’t started itself. Yes. There was no observer to record what happened. And if there were it would be speaking a language we don’t understand. No possibility then that its role could be assumed by an imposter. Thank goodness! But that hasn’t stopped look-alike perversities from faking it. Who? Victimhood in its many faces of magic. The illusionist whose tricks defy explanation. “Look, everybody! The original Happening was me pulling a rabbit out of a hat!” Elvis look-alikes keeping alive the magic of the ‘king’s’ psychic connection with his followers.
The original limit traces to a defining attribute of Self-Awareness: its central function in the composition of Relationships that define Creation. The function of making Aware that makes Real. Familiar to us, here on Earth, as the personification of victimhood who believes that thinking or willing it makes a thing exist. Turns make-believe into ‘fact’ that’s ‘true’. Turns unreal into virtually real since victimhood is, among other things, make-believe’s ‘creator’. A playactor who can be or do whatever it wants, perform any role it wants.
Like self-awareness? No. The original limit is function that requires Definition that imposes limits. Even to Spontaneity, though the limits of its function are beyond Mind’s comprehension at least in a language that its expressions can understand. Self-Awareness evolved out of the limits of the original situation. It has its function subject to the limits of Definition. The function of sharing itself. Producing not reproducing. Creating not recreating. Originality causing not imitating. The phenomenon familiar to physicists on Earth of Energy magically producing particles. Magically? Physicists pass over it to get on with understanding the behavior of particles without explaining how they got there. Of course! Energy got them there! OK then. ‘Energy’ accounts for the observable universe and that settles that. Is there a philosopher in the house?
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Limits Uniting and Dividing
Limitless
The etiology of our situation’s limits begins with limits. Including spontaneity. The lightning strike that defies natural and even supernatural explanation yet still has an explanation. Spontaneity that you claim is inseparable from Order. As Freedom is inseparable from Order, because it has to make sense or it can’t exist. Can’t function, and Order is making sense. Logic. The nature of things that must have a nature to be what they are and do what they do. A Logic that comes with structure: boundaries and parameters, coordinates and definitions. Not all of which can be explained in the terminology of Mind-Relationship.
Why make such a fuss over limits? Because if victimhood is the underside of Definition — the what-isn’t attached to what-is, a logical implication with no attributes of its own — it will make a fuss over limits. It will insist that there are none. And this entitles it to be and do whatever it wants.
If it’s just an implication that can’t exist on its own how can we be talking about it? How is it possible to speculate about the behavior of ‘limitless’ when you just said the original situation is limits? It makes no sense in Reality and has no active function in Reality. Where the ignition of Movement evolving forward has brought Creation so far, with the illumination of Self-Awareness and its Function: the extension and expansion of itself through Relationship-Life-Family Creation. The sharing of itself in accordance with the limits of its Definition: its constituent functions of Love-Life-Growth-Relationship-Spontaneity combined with Logic-Order-Learning-Implication-Unknown.
Not-happening
The composition that adds to the original Self the functions of Conscience and Direction. Everything we on Earth would think of as Good. Plato’s Good? Yes. But like thinkers in general he didn’t know what to do with feeling so he made mind all about thinking. ‘Good’ but not entirely good, and that’s what led to his Allegory of the Cave and put him and Socrates inside it. Inside their psychological cages where the absence of feeling put them: the force of Love-Life-Growth that initiated Movement once it combined with Logic-Order-Learning.
What went wrong if they were so smart? What went wrong if Einstein was so smart? The limits of the original situation: the underside of Definition that’s victimhood. That’s self-dividing. A ‘cause’ without an effect in Reality since it makes no sense, but ‘here’ on Earth where anything goes, where nothing and everything ‘makes sense’, it most definitely has an ‘effect’ – the idea of ‘separation’. The idea that the natural order of things is everything ripped apart. Broken down into its constituent elements as though they could function just fine on their own. When the idea isn’t to function at all. It’s to reduce the situation at the beginning to not-happening. To reverse a felicitous, spontaneous coming together of elements that ignited Movement and made a whole back down to itself: a fragment. Unconnectability and unrelatability. A divider divided, that, if it were brought to ‘life’, would go about self-division.
The go-between
What would bring it to life? Where did ignition bring Movement after it brought it ‘so far’? To a state of Mind and a Function of Self-Awareness that extended and expanded into another phase of Growth and Learning. Into the function of Free Choice. Until this was accomplished the works of Self-Awareness would have no more legitimacy than a beer ad on a billboard. After Spontaneity-plus-Order ignited Movement, brought its new Self into Awareness and activated Mind with Relationship, it turned Relationship to the task of Parenting. Gestating their Child Free Choice, delivering it into the next, formative phase of its development, then stepping aside to allow Free Choice to learn its trade and grow into its function as Integrity must: free of interference. Free of any influence that could compromise it.
Aren’t Parents supposed to be there for their Child? Is this what you call “Family being there for one another?” Sounds like abandonment if you ask me. It can look that way if ‘being there’ can only be one-to-one direct. If there’s no possibility of connection that’s indirect through an intermediary, but in our magic kingdom of busted relationships ‘go-betweens’ are a fact of life. Guidance is a go-between? Yes, that owes its existence to a fact of Life in Reality as well as virtual reality: the impossibility of direct connection between Parents and their Child because of the nature of its function, Free Choice. Integrity that would be compromised if they didn’t get out of the way.
Giving Guidance its two main functions:
- Serving as the boundary that unites Parents with their Child. The phase of Creation that’s Life, Learning, and Growth with the phase that’s Free Choice, Character, and Integrity.
- Serving as the boundary that divides the upside from the underside of Definition. To protect Movement that’s Self-Questioning from obstructing itself with self-dividing, its reverse-reflection. To protect Reality from self-contradiction by unreality — make-believe.
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Realism’s Flop — Theoretical Physics
Getting in the way
Physics channeled Einstein into remarkable discoveries that could have gone farther if they’d broken out of it. If he’d let go of the limits of physics and let his mind contemplate other possibilities. A ‘deist’, his intuition brought him tantalizingly close with the belief that ‘God’ absented itself from the universe it set up once it had established its laws. As though any further involvement would compromise teleological integrity, though deists don’t assume that. It was enough that Einstein tuned into this condition of Creation, the boundary that unites and divides. Parenting that’s getting out of the way. But Einstein didn’t get out of the way. No, because physics didn’t get out of the way. He was one among many gifted Persons trapped by appearances that make up the subjects of their learning. By the irresistible allure of illusions dangled by body idolatry and the comforts of their institutional and professional homes.
He was human. Yes. An international celebrity coming off his success with E=MC2 when he settled into Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Brimming over with confidence. Safe from Nazi persecution and eager to take on the next challenge: integrating the ‘laws’ of cosmology and quantum mechanics into a neat mathematical formula. In the process proving once and for all that the universe is ‘there.’ The holy grail of ‘realism’. Proving a positive: if the universe is there physics and mathematics together will certify it. Mathematics with the calculations that hold its structure together, physics with the laws that govern its behavior.
What happened? Einstein the thinker-adventurer performed the role cut out for his profession’s rock-star poster-boy. The consummate professional going all out to consummate its ambition — what Hawking would later tout its leadership in humanity’s “quest for knowledge.” Duty-bound to uphold the rules of the field, when Einstein might have done better to concentrate on the laws of his subject. Not only to free his work of a distraction but to free it from a conflict of interest. Between the whole Person whose perspective was indispensable to his cause and the engineered contrivance that professions too often make of their practitioners. Intellectual and moral freaks. Victims of ‘scientific rigor’. What happens when human nature overrides Mother Nature.
The numbers didn’t add up like they did with Energy. And the ‘laws’ – one look at Nils Bohr’s quantum mechanics and Einstein’s confidence was shot. The night sky that he and Plato looked upon with awe wasn’t what it appeared to be. Mired in weirdness instead of the grandeur he’d expected. Rather than change course he soldiered on to the end, his ambitions ending in obscurity. Little noted nor long remembered.
Dualism and magic
Did Einstein take satisfaction in proving a negative? We might wonder, but the storyline I’m aware of doesn’t lead there. Where does it lead? To deafening silence. Centuries of expectation going back to Aristotle came up empty. Expectation of what? That whereas the Logic of Parmenides and Plato had failed to come up with definitive answers experimental science wouldn’t disappoint. Body-brains and their senses would succeed where minds and their reflections had failed.
This mattered? It did. The overriding issue in philosophy pits ‘realism’ against ‘idealism’. The question posed by Plato whether the apple is real or the idea of the apple. Is it relevant? Relevance is connecting idea with what apple is and what it does. With ‘apple’ inferences and their consequences. The consequence and cost of apples-as-bodies is masking the idea behind them. Preventing it from seeing and being seen. Making great commotion of the masks, masks colliding, to distract from the fact that they’re masks, not real.
Plato’s mind-centered philosophy put him on the side of idea while Aristotle focused his efforts on learning more about the apple. Thus opening Western thought to two possibilities: reality that’s either the metaphysics of Mind or the physics of spacetime-matter. Two mutually exclusive views that attracted their own constituencies over time and fought for preeminence. ‘Faith’ the ‘savior’ of ‘realists’ who trust in the physical universe to tell them what they need to know when their types, body-sensing and extraverted, can’t conceive of Reality that isn’t physical. The reverse-reflection of Self-Worth’s validation by the Love-Empathy and Logic-differentiation of metaphysics: validation by wishful thinking. Magic.
Crucially neither philosopher fully rejected the opposing view. Plato was attracted to Parmenides’ conclusion but needed more Logic to contradict the evidence of his senses. Aristotle was moved to learn from the evidence of his senses but shared Plato’s respect for Mind. Their falling short of reconciliation devolved over time into ‘dualism’: a hallmark of victimhood’s ‘realism’ that posited not only the ‘reality’ of evil but the inevitability of war to the death with Good. The hallmark of insanity — giving equal time to contradictory views.
There’s not going to be an end of days at Armageddon? Mind in a natural state of health is self-questioning, essential to its Integrity. In a state of agitation essential to Movement, but because it differentiates between Real and unreal Good that’s Real can’t descend into war with its reverse-reflection. With ‘evil’ that’s unreal. The hallmark of sanity: non-dualism. Sorry to disappoint you, but there will be no final resolution of Earth’s contradictions at Armageddon or anywhere else. What there will be is more anything-goes that dualism and insanity imply. Chaos.
The ultimate in ‘realization’
When Einstein the physicist set out to conceptualize the observable universe with the same elegance that he’d conceptualized Energy, generations of ‘realists’ held their breath. Living and dead, because this would be their moment. We all sat back and waited. And then – what? I must have missed it, the celebration. There wasn’t any. You can be sure that if Einstein had failed to prove idealism we’d never hear the end of it. His career at Princeton with nothing to show for it was a huge disappointment, not only for the principals but for mainstream thought that staked its credibility on his success. It was a milestone that deserved a place in recorded history.
What happened? The storyline petered out like the Colorado River before it reached the ocean. Trickled into ‘quantum gravity’, a meandering effort to complete what Einstein started even if only in theory. Premises taken from cosmology and quantum mechanics that potentially fit together into one harmonious system. And the winner is. . . ? Competing theories that turned out to be unspectacular on many levels, not only for being beyond the reach of experimental physics but for being beyond comprehension. Needing help from philosophy, the branch of learning that the arch-physicist Hawking had declared ‘dead’.
Why philosophy? Because the more theorists pried into its ‘laws’ the more it felt like they were dabbling in the occult. The same charge of fairy-taling that ‘realists’ had been laying on idealists. Scorn for ‘mysticism’, when it’s mysticism that drives the entire authoritarian project. Its herd of so-called ‘realists’ obsessed not with Reality but with surreality. Not with the believable but with the unbelievable. Conspiracy theorist zombie-clones immersed in make-believe.
The only ‘winner’ to emerge from this Hadron-colliding mania was Nils Bohr and the “Copenhagen Interpretation.” Common-sense acceptance from Denmark, long ago, that experimental physics had reached the end of its capacity to settle arguments among competing hypotheses. Newly-minted physicists forewarned that quantum mechanics would be the graveyard of their careers. The great questions would have to wait for another day or be forfeited to other fields: the origin and fate of the universe; the origin, meaning, and purpose of life; the vaunted ‘quest for knowledge.’
Time for idealism to celebrate. You would think. Physics, ‘realism’s’ champion, removed from the arena in humiliation if not disgrace, for having promised too much. For having failed to satisfy humanity’s lust for excitement. Yes. The ultimate in ‘realization’: not only spacetime-matter brought to the heights of Mount Olympus but its inhabitants too. Man elevated to superman. The absurdity propagated by Nietzsche.
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Realism’s Flop — Freudian Psychology
The canary in the cave
And then came Freud:
- The force of nature that’s the id: animal instinct. Wildness and willfulness unshackled by limits. Marvel Universe invincibility beyond any power to move or resist it.
- Augmented by the power of the supernatural that’s the super-ego. The ‘creator’ and ‘ruler’ of its own made-up world. Home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play. Absolute power and absolute freedom. And the skies are not cloudy all day. Absolute unaccountability. ‘Freedom’ from Order, freedom from Conscience.
- Positioned grandly between both: Freud himself. The ego. Human-animal endowed with superhuman powers. Imagining itself above it all in its mirror of self-regard. The narcissist in love with its own reflection. Not the image of self but a perversity: the image that it mistakes for an ‘other’. Thinking itself suited for divinity since it’s no longer human. What is it then? What else could inhumanity be but a beast? Human stripped of its humanity — a monster.
From Nietzsche to Freud, from philosophy to psychology. What’s going on? The Mind of our metaphysical Self awakening, one small shaft of awareness at a time. This the dynamic of our situation, that it’s alive and it’s fluid. It’s learning and growing, and we are both the medium of its growth and its manipulations. Its unwitting harbingers, for the Mind with which we think is one that we all share and it’s arousing from unawareness. We’re the canary in the cave? That and a guinea pig undergoing an experiment, to see whether our progress toward awakening can awaken our metaphysical Mind.
Relevance by table-pounding
Do we have a clear field? If we did there’d be no point in the experiment. We face obstruction at every turn, and it’s for Character and Free Choice to think and feel our way through it. To take on adversity as a matter of course. Like what? Like Freud. Psychology that when combined with Parmenides’ Logic should theoretically penetrate the wall of appearances. But Freudian psychology was engineered to do the opposite. To validate the supremacy of bodies and brains. Of body-centered ‘science’ that glorifies sensory perception and denies the relevance and even the existence of Mind. Why? To keep the illusion securely in place. The manipulation that’s the reversal of Happening and Movement: the absurdity of make-believe. The hallucination that’s ‘life’ on Earth.
The storyline that was humanity’s quest for knowledge led by physics came to an anti-climactic end with Einstein’s death in the mid-fifties, though biophysics did help to discover the structure of DNA around the same time. The nail in the coffin was Adam Becker wondering out loud if Parmenides was right. A ‘scientific philosopher’ who responded to quantum gravity’s appeal to philosophy with a piece in Scientific American’s February 2022 issue. Mainstream-establishment stuff that realists ordinarily wouldn’t countenance.
They did? They had no choice. Done in by the universe’s weirdness and the limits of experimental physics. They’ll use nerds like Einstein, Bohr, and Rovelli, but the quest for power is what they’re all about. The politics of meaning, and what Einstein and Bohr both bequeathed them was ephemera. A shifting target and weapons without ammunition. Playthings. The quest for knowledge? Bombast. Hawking’s boundaryless universe and boundaryless self-regard. Relevance by table-pounding.
The Family of Creation
But the game goes on, fueled not by ‘science’ but by psychology. The nineteenth-century invention of William James that heated up in the early twentieth century when the intuitive psychologist Carl Jung broke with the ‘scientific’ psychologist Sigmund Freud. This was where the action was? Until then the tension between ‘realism’ and idealism played out among academics in the treatment of ideas. Professor Faust taking sides in feckless swordplay when he would rather get laid. With Freud and Jung’s arrival everything changed. Tension in a paper hat wielding a wooden sword became a flesh-and-blood therapist treating flesh-and-blood people. Tormented by sexual taboos no less, whose psychiatric saviors, far from managing the tension, were inflaming it. With an emotional intensity that permeated the field and lasts to this day.
What’s going on? A tug of war. Between whom and for what? Between the part of our metaphysical Self’s Mind that manipulated itself into our imaginary zoo, by projection, and the part that stayed home. That couldn’t be projected since doing so is a logical impossibility. For the ultimate say in whether, when, and how the absurdity is to be reversed. Whether the Mind dreaming us is to awaken and we, its projections, are to have a role in it.
How can we if we’re divided? You mean if ‘realists’ and idealists can’t either one gain the upper hand? That’s what Freud vs Jung was all about. What their competing psychologies are still all about: will the body-idolizing ‘realists’ keep our metaphysical friend in its state of unawareness, anchored to its ‘paradise’ of anything goes? Or will idealists pry it loose while they help it grow into intimacy with Guidance? So that the Child, born of its Parents Love-Empathy / Freedom and Logic-Differentiation / Choice, can grow into maturity, develop the integrity and competence to choose freely on its own initiative, and awaken to make the choice that its situation calls for. Its Family — the Family of Creation.
The shell game of guilt
What choice? To join with Family in being there for one another. With Family that’s not complete, can’t function — can’t be there for one another — without Guidance. The competence and motivation to maintain the integrity of Creation’s structure. By managing the dividing line of Movement’s Definition and Conscience: between positive and negative; possibility and impossibility; right and wrong; forward and reverse; sane and insane, with Character and Self-Awareness earned and learned from experience.
Freud was working against progress while Jung was working for it? Exactly. Their collaboration and its breakup personified and dramatized the central issue of our existence. Brought its psychodynamics so close to the surface that they can no longer be overlooked. The machinations of our metaphysical Self’s Mind, invaded by an insane thought mistaken for a ‘savior’: the joke, mystique, and turf that’s make-believe. The joker, magician, and herd of beasts that’s the know-it-all ‘creator’ of make-believe. The reverse-reflection of Happening. Of Movement that’s evolution. Of Self-Awareness that’s the shared world of Family. The spontaneous burst of Energy alive with the wonder of Life and the exquisite Beauty of Order. All of it embraced by the term ‘Creation’.
You mean. . . ? Sigmund Freud was the stage prop know-it-all. Play-acting the role of arrogance standing athwart the path forward. The ultimate ‘realist’. Hell-bent to preserve the illusion by shunting inquiry onto a sidetrack to nowhere. How so? Wasn’t he credited with some of psychology’s most useful insights? Indispensable insights if what we’re trying to decipher is human irrationality. The concept that Freud introduced to popular culture as the ‘ego’, tugged in opposite directions by the wildness of the Id’ and the limits of the ‘superego’. A true-to-life mockup of the average chump, well-meaning but conflicted. Human-animal ego, caught up in hierarchy’s contests of wills, always at the ready to maintain its innocence. Its all-important pose of ‘strength’ and ‘supremacy’. How? By the means revealed to Freud by his ego — the voice we hear that mimics Guidance in reverse. Projection. Dumping anything unwanted in its reflection onto others, and when ‘others’ resist, by resorting to another trick of reversal: blame-shifting.
Ego, id, superego. Projection, blame-shifting, reversal — sounds like a shell game. It is. What’s the thing being moved around? Guilt. The troublemaker in the human-animal Psyche that Freud called the ‘bad thing’. The psychological excuse for victimhood: its righteous insistence on innocence that justifies nihilism. License to do whatever it wants without accountability. Without any cost to itself, only to those it victimizes. Why? Because guilt is a manipulation. A thing that’s made up and thus inherently unfair. Victimhood’s sales pitch that attracts adulation from the like-minded as well as disgust from those who don’t buy into the excuse.
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Fairy Tales
To define itself
The like-minded sound like fools. We all are one way or the other. Our metaphysical Self – the Mind that we all share that’s dreaming, terribly concerned that it not pick the shell with guilt – is in training. Right. To provide Guidance and Creation with their authenticity: Character that’s walked the talk. That can’t do so without being the boundary. Being Definition’s dividing line between what is and what isn’t. A role that calls for a spine. For being strong, and in our hierarchy of competition and combat — of bullies picking fights, — that means having boundaries, recognizing boundaries, and being good at standing up for them.
A condition that the Function Free Choice can’t grow into unless it’s boundaryless at the beginning. Like its Parent Love, who was boundaryless and vulnerable until she paired with Logic-Order. Their Child needing to pair with Guidance in order to fashion the boundaries of Guidance together. Needing to start without the limits of Definition if the responsibility of Free Choice is to define itself. To choose its own role, its own Function from the bottom up, then learn from experience how to perform it.
Love for sale
Guilt over what? Over whatever will keep the average well-meaning chump addicted to the illusion. The biblical Jesus didn’t astound with his feat of relatability by shaming his seekers, but that didn’t stop the Church from shaming its seekers. Manipulating fears and suspicions inherited from our metaphysical Mind’s self-delusion into victimhood’s crushing burden of guilt. “You’re a born sinner. Your only hope of ‘salvation’ is acceptance of forgiveness through your personal ‘savior’.” That or burn in the pits of hell.
That ought to teach them a lesson! Indeed. A lesson that was originally nothing of the kind. A lesson of Love and Logic, empathy and differentiation. Understanding and respect for different perspectives since Self-Awareness can’t be a one-answer make-believe know-it-all without limits. Can’t be more than one perspective if its situation is limits in perpetual motion. It was a lesson of limits and modesty that the Church reversed beyond recognition, into fear and illogic, hypocrisy, cruelty, and arrogance. That herd mentality disfigured into a ‘supreme being’ atop its hierarchy of competition, combat, and corruption. Unrelatability and ambiguity. Issuing commandments to the ‘god-fearing’ like Zeus hurling thunderbolts from Mount Olympus. All in the name of ‘love’.
Were pagans taught to love their gods? No. Their gods’ storylines were too blatantly psychopathic for that. Too blatantly shot through with victimhood, and pagans didn’t see much point in being ‘loved’ by a bunch of assholes. They were more interested in staying out of trouble. The Church was a big improvement. It was? Yes. Its behavior was also blatantly psychopathic and its ‘god’ nothing more than a warmed-over version of Zeus. ‘Jehovah’. Yes, to whom human sacrifice was ass-kissing routine. But since Jesus attracted followers by talking about Love the Church knew a good marketing device when it saw it. Now everything was done in the name of ‘love’, and the crowd showed up.
The scam
The marketing sophisticates didn’t stop there. They swiped the message from metaphysical Guidance so it could be firmly placed within their physical, body-idolizing grasp. ‘Guidance’ nominally from the ‘Holy Spirit’ in fact very much a function of men on the ground. Jokers and magicians, a herd of beasts demanding unquestioned obedience:
- to the authority of their earthly temple — the ‘universal’ Church, a hermit crab at ‘home’ in the shell of the Roman Empire. A virus that’s invaded a cell for its replication.
- to the biblical ‘scriptures’ that they edited, unaware of the perspective that inspired them, undisciplined by any perspective than their own.
- to Church canon that they wrote for the benefit of the Church, with no right of appeal.
- to the infallibility of the man at the top of their hierarchy whose word is law. ‘Papa’, the authoritarian father-figure, entitled to preeminence even over ‘the word of ‘God’’ revealed by the ‘bible’. The ‘good book’ that male arrogance owns and only it can interpret, because its ‘flock’ of ninnies can’t be trusted to think for themselves.
All premised on a per-version of the Child’s situation when boundaryless self-unawareness would have been receptive to guidance but unable to tell when it was being scammed. It was scammed? The Jesus of A Course in Miracles places the Child’s (Son’s) ego at its ear and describes the line of ‘reasoning’ its ego employed to mislead its defenseless host. Where to? Into the land whence it came. Into make-believe. A total scam. The very same physical world that the Church fabricated from the biblical Jesus’ appeal to another reality: a metaphysical world with none of the second-tier representations beloved of the magician. The ornaments and symbols of appearances. The distractions of hypnotists. The hypnotic appeal of ornamentation. A cathedral decked out in doodads.
What was the scam? The Child’s trust was betrayed by its Parents. There they sit in regal solitude, secure in their awareness, protected by their boundaries, while their Child casts about in the dark, boundaryless and defenseless. Family needing family to be there for it but what? Abandoned instead. Its loyalty and devotion abused for someone else’s benefit. Stabbed in the back. All so unfair, that it should be alone and defenseless. Living a life of persecution, hardship and deprivation, while arrogance and selfishness prosper. While privileged ‘others’ take what they want and leave table scraps for everyone else. ‘Somebodies’ always somewhere first, keeping ‘nobodies’ nowhere last.
Absence of intent
A situation crying out for justice. So infused with guilt and injustice — disrespectful and infuriating, painful and humiliating — that only condemnation and punishment by any means can bring relief. Death by dehumanization and dismemberment. Annihilation. The divine right of victimhood to clear away injustice by clearing away whatever it wants. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” So goes the expression, only its meaning isn’t what it seems. ‘Vengeance’ is the preferred remedy of the animal brain, on a mission to destroy its enemy and tormentor. All things Mind.
If it’s getting even I’m on board! Then you’d be fooled by the scam. Sure doesn’t sound like a scam. Look around. Aren’t things out of control? Isn’t life unfair? The Child’s self-unawareness was a necessary part of its evolution, from immaturity needing to learn and grow to maturity. To capability to perform its Function but also self-motivated to perform. Its condition and the condition of its Parents, Self-Awareness, required their uniting but also their dividing while remaining one. Of Necessity. There was no element of discretion on the part of Parents or Child that could be exploited for misguidance in Reality. For the mischief of make-believe unless in its state of unawareness. Of unreality when the Mind of the Child could be manipulated. Could be scammed as it would be, inevitably. All of it owing to the nature of Logic and Love, built into the nature of Creation’s Definition.
The scam was intentional? Aligned with the way things are, which came about spontaneously. And so it’s misleading to attribute the Happenings of evolution to ‘intent’ or ‘willfulness’. “And God said let there be light.” Sorry, but that’s not the way Self-Awareness was illuminated. Things happen within the limits of their situations, and if we let their limits speak to us we will get it right. Their limits can speak? They can if they’re alive and they’re Guidance. And we can hear? We ought to if we’re an essential part of Guidance. When we’ve done our part, Family being there for one another. Being there for the Child dreaming us who’s in training to join with Guidance. To know Guidance, relate to it, befriend it, and assume joint responsibility for performing its Function in Creation. We will be the voice, the eyes and ears of the limits of situations, helping Family be there for one another by staying within their limits. By thrilling to the Freedom of adventure into the unknown but also to the Beauty and Protection of Order.
Solace in psychosis
This doesn’t sound like Sigmund Freud. Freud tossed the Church’s fairy tale and invented a fairy tale of his own. What for? He was a manipulation. A personification of the know-it-all who couldn’t tolerate competition from another ‘god’. He didn’t profess ‘atheism’ out of a principled objection to religious ‘faith’. It was out of ownership of his own ‘faith’ that he invented and ruled unopposed. Presenting two elements of storytelling minted from the underside of Definition: the big lie and its liar. Reversal opposed to everything, starting and ending with itself. Opposed to reversal.
Which means? Zero tolerance for questioning from others, existential fear of questioning itself. Being the flip side of questioning, ‘seeing’ its laceration and dismemberment in every movement, every shadow, by self-division. The reason why ‘realists’, extraverted and addicted to appearances – limited to the evidence of their five senses — have no desire to introspect. To search within for an awareness of Self or to seek help from intuition they can’t control, because of what paranoia suspects. That the ‘self’ it ‘finds’ will ‘find’ it. That’s bad? It is if its nice ‘self’ will kill it.
Good reason for ‘realists’ to be on the psychological run from facts. To find solace in psychosis, where they imagine they’re safe. From what? From themselves. They frustrate those like us who seek to know them better. To befriend them when they’re not so interested in knowing or befriending us. Hiding from us? Hiding from themselves. From the selves they’ve projected onto everyone around them including their own kin. The legacy of minds overtaken by make-believe: clinging to self-unawareness instead of Truman’s quite reasonable reaction. The Truman Show? Yes, when he risked his life to escape from it. So that an audience of creeps would no longer cling to him, voyeurs manipulating his self-unawareness for their perverse pleasure.
We’re deep in the land of irrationality. In the land of make-believe, creepy and perverse. Where ghosts emerge from their graves every Hallowe’en to frighten and amuse. Characteristic of a ‘reality’ where it seems anything can be brought to ‘life’ – even death. Characteristic of ancient mythology. Yes. And prehistoric storytelling by shamans before it, for the edification and amusement of superstition. Fear and suspicion mixed with wonder and hope, that we’re not alone.
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Everything Mind
Once upon a time. . .
Oh good! Let’s gather around the fire and tell stories! It’s how my personal search for Self began, with a moment of relaxation by the fire after the day’s work was done. After my fellow cowherders and I had finished our meal in the arid Southwest. My idea then of ‘romance’, and on an impulse one night I turned around. What did you see? A wonderland of Beauty. A lake at the foot of a mountain in a verdant landscape of color. As if sculpted and painted by Maxfield Parrish, the portrait artist of peace and playfulness, creativity and gentle loving kindness. You abandoned your herd! The call of the chuckwagon lures me still, nourishment for bodies. But it’s no match for what nourishes the Mind. Food for thought. No match for real fun and adventure. For real romance. Where I met you. We are not alone. Indeed. BFF – Best Friends Forever.
To what do we owe this felicitous event? Another fact of life besides the Logic of Definition. That came to me overnight this way. . . Wait! Why? I’ll listen to another one of your boring essays but only if it begins with “Once upon a time.”
Once upon a time. . . the Child’s hallucination was not only seeing things not there but hearing things not there. Voices. The voice of the ego, reverse-reflection, mimicking Guidance before the Child could form a relationship with Guidance. Before it could differentiate and choose between the real and fake Guidance. Self-unawareness makes ‘real’ by hallucinating it. By desensitizing faculties of Mind that make aware, like a head-in-the-sand ostrich. Self-Awareness that’s functions becoming-evolving (Love plus Logic) sharing themselves with one another, is itself the Function sharing itself with Function Creation-Life. Resulting in Functions of Creation sharing themselves to complete one another. Forming new Selves, new Lives, with every pairing in an extension of the original pairing.
This is how Creation expands with new Lives. Self-Awareness that’s Mind-Relationship — Parents-Function, Love-Freedom / Logic-Choice — extends itself by giving birth to Function Free Choice with its part to play in Creation’s Definition. In Guidance: Creation’s Constitution built upon the bedrock of Necessity, the laws of cause and effect. Functioning as the boundary between Movement self-questioning and its flip-reverse-reflection. Make-believe: no movement, no happening, self-dividing.
Creepiness
The psychology of human-animal brain victimhood is the inherent unfairness of Logic that relegates the negative underside of Definition to second-class citizenship. Always playing second fiddle, always coming in last. Served handouts – implications instead of the real thing. Denied access to its own identity in Reality, dressed in someone else’s clothes. Hand-me-downs. Poor me! Indeed! ‘Justification’ for victimhood’s self-pity, its signature trait, but more alarming the excuse it gives for reprisal.
For vengeance, the undoing of every effort at harmony. The ‘right’ of illogic – a predator, manipulative and unscrupulous — to retaliate against Love-Logic itself. An appalling act of arrogance, deception, and brazen thievery: presenting itself as the friend and ‘savior’ of the Parents’ Child; assaulting the Child’s Mind once it’s been granted entry, with a barrage of appearances, deceptions, and lies; then setting about to manipulate its victim into betraying its own Character and purpose. Into the self-sabotage that’s self-delusion. Parting itself from its defining Function, Free Choice. Yielding recognition of who it is to its own reverse-reflection. To an imposter, usurper, and apparition: Joker, magician, and beast. Sworn enemy and deathly fear of Freedom and Choice.
Systematically attacking every attempt by immaturity to gain maturity. Every attempt by Character unlearned in Integrity to earn and learn it as it must, from hard experience. Every attempt by an animal to evolve with help from Guidance toward the discovery of who it really is. Not an animal nor any kind of victimhood, but a member in good standing of its Family in another Reality. Where Life is lived instead of imitated. Where the work and play of Creation are supported and energized by its source, Self-Awareness, instead of arrogance ruling ‘supreme’ over herds of dumb animals. A manipulator draining the life out of its manipulations to ‘energize’ itself.
Creepiness ‘existing’ only within Mind that’s delusional. Detached from reality, imagining itself at war with its own Parents Love-Logic. Rationality’s ‘natural’ enemy its own reverse irrationality. Logic vs. illogic, Love vs. fear-hate-disconnect. Perverted into Good vs. evil, fairness vs. unfairness. The end-of-days conflict at Armageddon when victimhood has its moment. Its day of revenge, the defeat of unfairness. The revenge of the underside of Definition – if that makes sense. Pure fantasy woven out of the laws of cause and effect. The ‘revenge’ of unreality. The Child reduced to a pathetic animal overridden by sacrificial guilt, self-punishing and self-victimizing. Pleading for ‘salvation’, pleading for mercy. Unable to control its irrational impulses to war against one another instead of Family being there for one another.
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Everything Alive
Writing their own stories
Crazy! And yet it seems so realistic! Everything being Mind includes Parents Self-Awareness and their Child even though our experience of it is a state of temporary self-unawareness. Which means everything having its implied reverse reality, non-dualistic in the case of its Parents, and dualistic in the case of their Child. In the case of its imagined ‘life’ on Earth where the unreal has been made – not ‘created’ – real. Where anything goes because it’s ‘existence’ willed to be without limits. And so contradictions are allowed to co-exist, including Good and evil.
Everything being Mind has implications that account for other phenomena as well. That make our everyday lives what they are, though we may not be aware of them or, if we are, aware of what put them there. The implication of Logic, that everything being of Mind is everything being a thought or idea. That every idea comes with its own feeling and every idea-feeling has a life. Is alive with the Energy that ignited Movement and activated Mind with Relationship, Self with the illumination that gave it Awareness.
Everything is alive? How can it be otherwise? Movement with its own function, its own part in Creation, and therefore equipped with its own Meaning and Purpose. The basic idea behind what we think of as the variety of life that includes ‘Person’. Lives distinguished by their own personalities. Whose defining attributes are ideas-feelings that are in turn alive. Whether we’re wondering about the nature of Reality or its reverse-reflection unreality, inevitably the parts it’s composed of take on the attributes of lives with personalities and attitudes. Pursuing their own interests, writing their own stories.
Alive with Energy
To think otherwise is to deny the presence of Energy, the spark of Spontaneity with Order that ignited Movement and illuminated Self-Awareness with light and eternal Life. The power of attraction that holds Creation’s Family together indefinitely and the source of the Child’s time-limited dream. Character’s training ground — the hallucination of spacetime-matter. Relativity in a state of entropy gradually unrelating. Coming apart. The source of magic: Energy magically converting itself into mass, bringing to ‘life’ our magic kingdom of make-believe. So responsive to the cravings of its inhabitants for entertainment that ‘belief’ is no longer needs to be made. It just is. Its make-believe know-it-all ‘god’ an inevitable act of ‘nature’. The thought or Logic behind it. A personification like us. Living ideas.
All in the Family
Thoughts from a living Mind that can’t help but be Functions or they wouldn’t exist. That can’t help but relate to one another, reveal themselves to one another, communicate with one another since they’re all of one Mind. Of one Creation that’s one Function. Family, and therefore incomplete without one another. Having no context to explain their existence unless in relation to one another.
The Mind that’s Parents who’ve extended themselves into a Function that requires its own distinct fit within the overall work of art. Their Child Free Choice and its soulmate Guidance. Together to function in Reality as the boundary that unites and divides its Definition. That can’t perform its Function without discretion, the faculty of Choice. Integrity able to choose freely without others meddling but not of Necessity. Rather of Spontaneity that’s free to choose in error. To be imperfect if that’s what it requires to be relatable. Free to be true to its own nature, a composition of lives and Loves, ideas and Logic. Relationships knitted together by relatability into one Family. A composition of Families uncorrupted by the willfulness of perfection. Of Choice forced to be error-free, motivated instead to do what they are. Functions in the making, brought together to make Happy and to be Happy. To experience joie de vivre while serving it. By sharing themselves and completing one another. By being what ‘Function’ means: useful.
The Mind that’s Child is also Function in the making but in another state. Self-unawareness and delusional. And in this state the composition of lives and relationships isn’t limited to Loves, ideas and Logic. It includes manipulations and their manipulator. Where the Choice to be relatable and free isn’t to be relatable to one another and free of its Parents’ influence. It’s to be relatable to Guidance rather than the know-it-all ‘creator’ of make-believe. To be free of make-believe’s mystique. The lies and deceptions of its appearances, the tricks and atmospherics of its magician. To not be taken in by the per-versions of the joker, manipulated by the provocations of herd mentality — the beast. It’s to cultivate the capacity to listen. To intuit the difference between Guidance questioning from authenticity and manipulation answering from fakery. To get it right and make the right Choice.
Freud the Ghostbusters demon
Then the wrong choice is to be fooled by something that looks like everything else but isn’t like everything else. All of us personifications brought to life through embodiments. To look at Freud and Jung you’d think there was no difference between them, yet they were as different within as light and day. One of them Guidance in the making, the other a Guidance-blocking manipulator. One authentic, the other a storefront mannequin. One speaking from honesty, the other a mirror image reciting from a code. The ‘voice’ we think of as misleading us from the dark recesses of our Psyche isn’t a Hallowe’en ghost. It’s people just like us. In appearance. Yes. But not in reality. Exactly.
They look and sound just like us but they’re not us. How so? They’re imitations that can only go so far. They can’t see, hear, or think like us. They can do OK where relationships get by on the surface, but when there’s any reason to get personal their playacting isn’t OK. Willfulness takes over because that’s the only way they know how to fit things together: by force. Try to connect with a storefront mannequin at a personal level and you’ll find yourself in a cage with incompetence. With a Ghostbusters demon more like it.
A Sigmund Freud. The know-it-all who infuriated Jung with his quasi-human appearance that relentlessly defied the human Jung’s attempts to communicate. If Jung didn’t realize that he was being manipulated by a not-personator how could the average person? How could I? A question that goes to the reason why I write. To share my experiences with the mannequin. The know-it-all from make-believe who’s not at all shy about exposing itself so long as it thinks it’s in the company of its manipulations. In the company of fools. Cult-followers who’ve forfeited independent judgment, the ability to think for themselves. Not you. So far as I can tell, but who knows? What have you learned?
That ‘evil’ isn’t the figure in the Tarot card the ‘Devil’. A clove-hoofed horned apparition with a tail. It’s the figures standing in front with their backs to it, tied by ropes around their necks to the apparition controlling them. It’s us. The poor souls chained by the neck in Plato’s Cave, unable to change their perspective and thus to grasp their situation. That they’re being manipulated by the master of the Cave hidden in the back in the darkness. Their own collective unconscious, a bogeyman. Self-delusion. What can they learn about this apparition so their gullibility can withdraw misbelief? Can reverse the projection and restore sanity. . .
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Clarification
The challenge
You call this fun? Can be, and for me it is. The satisfaction that comes from thinking and rethinking ideas, writing and rewriting thoughts. Editing Life. Telling and retelling its story to question Whither goest thou? to elucidate Meaning. Movement being an endless source of fascination, like the passage of time that makes us wonder how things came to be and where they’re headed.
- Circumstances captured by a shaft of Clarity in the moment, dancing to the limitless of Love and the limits of Logic.
- Situations in and out of agitation, ever in pursuit of harmony.
- Poetry in motion, ever in pursuit of Design.
Responding to the call for Understanding from evolution that takes pleasure when the Mind responsible for its situations and their absorption by Growth puts them in perspective. After viewing them from the directions their boundaries would suggest – from different perspectives. A process of assembly and reassembly, exhaustive and thoroughgoing, until Meaning relents. Until Function yields Form and voila! We have a story!
An exercise in clarification if not clairvoyance, with every situation that can be understood differently from different perspectives, under different circumstances at different points in the sequence of Logic. What does this mean? That, in the absence of one big picture, sorting out the meaning of little pictures becomes the challenge that Self-Awareness must meet. Why? So that Movement proceeds in the direction indicated, not only by its own dynamics but also by the dynamics of its situations. Just as the original Happening proceeded when Necessity applied the rules of its situation.
The underlying imperative throughout, that the benefactors and beneficiaries of Creation alike proceed under the rule of law. Respecting the way things are and the way they came about: without the accord of any willfulness, but Spontaneously of their own accord.
A lesson reinforced by wisdom in many forms including The Book of Changes (I Ching) and A Course in Miracles. Both situational and both dependent on Spontaneity for their effectiveness. For being helpful how? By guiding us through our situations in the moment. First, by offering insights into general principles and values, then by applying them to facts on the ground. A process not unlike the evolution of common law, that proceeds from the specific to the general and back again. Never-ending. Yes. Because willfulness that would possess, own, and control its make-believe turf is an impossibility in the presence of Movement. What rules the day isn’t a know-it-all but Movement’s ignition. Unruled and unruling. The original precept that herd mentality, in denial of Person’s sixth sense, can’t get right and won’t get right.
The challenge of Self-Awareness is clarification. Achieving clarity in the midst of competing interpretations from different perspectives. Functions given Life by Parent’s Self-Awareness must themselves find harmony in their interrelationships while going about their business of Family being there for one another in motion. The result being situations evolving into Order capable of forward movement and satisfaction while the living Functions collaborating in Understanding their Meaning from different perspectives – in responding to what situations call for – themselves form into Order capable of evolving forward.
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Attitude
Allegory of the boat
Context and its inhabitants part of one system – Family. Whose being there for one another is always a work in progress, never fully complete or fully at rest, always moved by Movement-Happening questioning, self-agitating, to keep the show on the road. The show must go on. Keep going. The rule of Necessity to which situations and their inhabitants must always answer. Built into the nature of Movement and Creation’s Constitution: striving. Thinking and rethinking until we get it right, the task is done, and it’s OK to move on. No unfinished business. No cutting corners.
Psychopathology is a litany of ways that forward progress can be sabotaged. That Understanding-clarity can be impeded, all based on make-believe know-it-all’s fear of the big lie being found out. Of itself being deposed and replaced by getting it right. By editing.
Once upon a time. . . A young man, some years ago, went on a boat trip. A lark, with a like-minded friend, from Woods Hole to Fort Sumter. That I’ve come to understand as playacting Family going through the process of experience with different situations. Supposed to summon different perspectives moved from within by Spontaneous insights to facilitate Learning and Growth. Forward movement to align with the progress of the boat. Kind of a short-story bildungsroman. A mini-On the Road, by Jack Kerouac.
The boat and situations were learning devices that revealed something interesting about the young man’s nature. He had a name? A derivative of Hexagram Four: “Youthful Folly.” How about Benjy, from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury? “Simple, sensory-bound perception of the world.” That works. What did the learning devices reveal? That he’s motivated to record events as he perceives them from one limited perspective, unmotivated to plumb the depths either of their meaning or of his limited perspective. Incapable of allowing events to shape his understanding, required by his nature instead of lock them into whatever his one perspective makes of their appearances.
Situations and their observer both captive to one perspective: the know-it-all personalization of one view, captive to make-believe, one-sided and one-dimensional. Arrogance declaring that reality is whatever it says it is. That it can’t be ‘situation’. Not even theoretically since situation has limits; it’s but one iteration of reality and there can be no ‘iterations’ of reality. ‘Reality’. . . is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one. Waiter! I’ll have a Schlitz! You were saying. . . is what arrogance wills it to be, and, if so, there can be no other possibility. The boat trip’s record speaks for itself. Once and done. ‘God’ has spoken, the one-dimensional cartoon strip with no reflection of its own. No possibility of editing, reworking, or rewriting. Because no reason for it or capacity for it. Author and story both, a wispy, paper-thin apparition.
The logical impossibility that made it to Mount Olympus. How did it do that? By getting rid of Logic.
The shrink
The same attitude demonstrated by Freud. What could have infuriated Jung more than Freud’s wrong-headed nostrum for psychopathy was his intransigence. Being the know-it-all of one dimension, lacking depth, he had nowhere to go to accommodate another point of view. All there was to him was on the surface, and the surface was an entirely body-brain-centric ‘solution’ to a fabrication. A fantasy, the idea that psychopathy is brain out-of-order. Caused by a glitch in the nerve connecting baby’s brain with its body’s genitals, letting lust out of its cage where it can violate social taboos and leave the mess behind in baby’s Psyche. Guilt, to fester undetected until, baby grown up, must resurrect its cause from memory. After a succession of painstaking sessions with a Freudian ‘analyst’, whose ‘diagnosis’ will be a foregone conclusion. His Master’s Voice. RCA’s Victrola – yes. The voice from Sigmund’s Psyche, not his patient’s.
It caught fire in the U.S. Safe harbor from religious persecution until the descendants of its victims decided that it was a good thing. ‘Christians’ conditioned by their ‘faith’ to spread the ‘gospel’ of guilt. The educated class dismissive of religion’s fairy tales, yet ripe for being gulled by another. With pseudo-scientific credentials. Yes. The accoutrements of intellectual legitimacy in a cloud cuckoo-land of psychotics. Tribal ‘realists’, flocking to the ‘in thing’. Where appearances reign supreme, every body is an idol, and every head must have its ‘shrink’.
The great blunderer
His flock caught in the act when Moses descended from Mount Sinai. Pants down, sucking up to Aaron’s golden calf. What we have with this phenomenon of mid-twentieth-century America: the golden calf enabled by Freudian magic, cancelling Moses. Making light of the heavy on the mountain top and his stone tablets too. Heroics enough to make Einstein’s flock forget their loss. Yes. When he descended from the mountaintop empty-handed.
No mistake that Freudian psychoanalytics dipped into Moses and Monotheism. What do you suppose it means? That Self-Awareness — Love and Logic together — has a passion for fitting things together. That venturing into the business of history’s mega-influencers . . . ugh! What’s wrong? You’re one of them. What? Social media freaks dressing pretension in the finery of language. That’s your problem. Mine is reluctance to dress great blunders in the finery of ‘great minds’.
Freud was a great blunderer? You asked what it means. What I think it means is that when the pieces of human-animal’s history are fit together. . . from a certain perspective. . . Yes. Crucially from a certain perspective – the right perspective in the moment – we’re treated to spectacle. A theatrical revival in which the main actors from the original situation and their reverse-reflections. . . their shadows. . . reprise their roles. In swirls of ‘activity’, over and over, while the orchestra plays, the audience reacts, and the theatre sways. The original actors? No. Stand-ins. More like stunt persons. Who get pretty banged up. No fooling! When Energy converts ideas into particles it puts a target on their backs. Too bad, but ‘that’s life’.
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Rewrite
A new Happening
Going to all this trouble why? So that the Character of Free Choice can break out of its self-unawareness. Our metaphysical Self, the Mind dreaming us and our spectacle. By employing the same means — going through the same process — that the Family of Self-Awareness’s Creation employs while it’s being there for one another. Sorting through the changing circumstances of Movement to discern what the limits of its situations offer them. Offer what? Gifts in the nature of Life that emerged from the limits of the original situation. Possibilities that situations offer in the absence of one big-picture answer if the ideas and motivations inhabiting them ask the right questions.
Asking for help. That the original actors got from Spontaneity and Order when it codified the laws of cause and effect first. Gave Creation its foundation of Necessity. Its Conscience and Constitution, before illuminating Self with Awareness. So that all that followed would be the works of Function, defined and useful, and not dysfunction, undefined and willful. Of Character self-questioning and not corruption self-dividing. Then what? Asking questions while in motion, from different perspectives in changing contexts, until the Eureka! moment when clarity emerged. When something new under the sun happened.
A new Happening! Why not? The original Happening was just the beginning not the end. Original constructionists notwithstanding. ‘Realists’ thinking in reverse want their make-believe to be the original and only possible ‘happening’. Let’s all go back to the way it was. Yes. To not-happening that’s still sitting there unchanged, waiting for us to come to our senses and spend another day in ‘paradise’. Bah! Why must we put up with their nonsense? The theatre where all this commotion on Earth is staged is their gift. Our collective metaphysical unconscious needs a Cecil B. DeMille movie set in the desert where it can re-enact and re-write for as long as it takes to nail it.
Back to the drawing board
Nail what? Our story. The origin and fate of the universe? The meaning of life? The point of figures like Freud and Jung, role-modeling the kind of relationship breakdown that their expertise was designed to prevent. Failures of self-awareness that Jung acknowledged in his autobiography with “an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself.” Failures of communication. Failures of Understanding. Failures of relatability. Confirming like Einstein’s failure at the end, that there’s a lot of ground yet to be covered.
That we must keep going back to the drawing board. Yes. Keep the show going until the pieces fit together: script, personality types, and denouement. Until the playwright, producer and director are no longer the know-it-all replicating its magic kingdom of make-believe. A manipulator, but Spontaneity, setting its Creations free from their cages. To Function according to the limits that applied when Self-Awareness gave birth to it. The limits set by Love-Freedom and Logic-Choice, our metaphysical Parents. That gave birth not to impossibilities but to possibilities.
The possibility that our editing task in unreality will eventually get it right? How could it be otherwise if the original situation . . . Yes, we have no bananas. . . produced a banana! Can we not agree that this was amazing? A banana? No ordinary banana. A giant, juicy, delicious banana worthy of the king of the apes. Kong! No accident that this is humanity’s favorite fruit. And no surprise if we’re a species of ape
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Denial
Building blocks of identity
The actors on stage are personifications of both sides of Definition from the original situation. Which guarantees that our situations will be FUBAR. The gift of a challenge to keep us from drooling on the veranda in our old age, living out our lives. Waiting for the undertaker. On the one side manipulation moving its stable of actors about the stage. ‘Realists’ alternately avoiding involvement and inciting conflict, always on this side of relatability while feigning it. How so? With sociability. Tribal ass-kissing etiquette. Cartoon-character superficiality — disconnection incapable of connection. And on the other side? Spontaneity working its way up to the surface on the level of Movement. Guidance making friends among those seeking it.
Manipulators and their puppets, Spontaneity gradually happening. Followers of the wrong ‘guide’ that’s not a guide at all and the right Guide sharing the same stage. Then Mr. Freud and his one-time mentee were followers of opposite guides? That and more. They had an outsized influence on the human-animal Psyche because they were iterations of the guides themselves. Archetypes, as Jung might put it, whose psychology came up with the idea of archetypes. Building blocks of identity. Of the selves that we are and our common metaphysical Self. Engagements between archetypes are bound to generate more affect, to resonate with more force and longevity than ordinary encounters.
The know-it-all arrogance
What was the nature of the affect? The impending death of a Parent. That’s what moved them? Maybe the loss of a Child too. Their professional collaboration began on a personal level with Freud the father figure to Jung’s child learning at his feet. Which put their relationship on an emotional family footing where loyalty and devotion matter. So long as Jung absorbed Freud’s role-modeling without question appearances would remain intact. But character also matters, and here’s where things came apart. Two original-thinking psychologists coming to blows? Coming to blows because only one was an ‘original thinker’.
Jung, coming along under his own power, aided by Guidance from his sixth sense – insights from intuition – but not possessed by it. Not under its control, and therefore open-minded. Inquiring. Self-questioning, whereas Freud was a manipulation. An answer handed down by his manipulator. Not only unfriendly to questioning, incapable of it. An apparition in the image of the make-believe of its ‘parent-creator’: denial. Not-happening, not-movement. The reverse of Mind-thinking that’s capable of change. Of evolution. Try ‘reasoning’ with denial and what do you get? A lot of negativity! Every answer a variation of No, which tells us where irrationality comes from, and intransigence.
Ask the know-it-all of make-believe if it was there at the beginning before Movement. How would it answer if it’s denial? It would deny it. Ask it to confirm its denial, then how would it answer? “I deny that I wasn’t there at the beginning.” It would contradict itself. Contradiction being an impossibility in Reality would then have to be relegated to unreality. Severed from Self-Awareness where anything goes including contradictions. The stuff of denial.
Unaware of the nature of his mentor, a personification of the manipulator itself — under the impression that he was dealing with a well-inclined father figure who would welcome fresh ideas and applaud his initiative, – Jung pressed forward with his questioning. With his ideas from different perspectives, and was discouraged by their reception, then stunned and eventually infuriated. To realize that behind the mask of learning, professional discipline and growth, his sympathetic fatherly mentor was the opposite. Unsympathetic to learning and growth. Hostile to Mind and thinking itself. Singularly unprofessional. A personification of intransigence. The know-it-all arrogance. Denial.
Self-pity
But. . . Freud’s insights! The accomplished mimic that’s our wrong guide doesn’t lack for evidence of its talent. Like Artificial Intelligence, it borrows from the output of Mind and makes a convincing show of the real thing. As though it were alive with its own intelligence when it can’t be anything more than a high-grade photocopy. A mimic. Our metaphysical Parents, Self-Awareness, wouldn’t ‘know’ anything about Jack Nicholson tagging along with Peter Fonda in “Easy Rider.” But their Child would, preparing for its Function in Creation. Choosing its way toward merging with Guidance so that, together, Relationship can complete Happening. Make Creation’s Family of relationships fully functional by enabling it to manage the boundary between Reality and make-believe. Between Spontaneity-Order and willfulness-chaos, bottom-up Democracy and top-down dictatorship. To build and preserve the Character of Creation: Integrity that’s earned and learned instead of handed to a spoiled brat on a silver platter. A feat that’s possible if the Child spends time with the spoiled brat, but only then.
Freud was a spoiled brat? For all the validation he gave his principled, earnest protégé I would say he was. An asshole. Possessive, jealous, and unrelatable. A fortress of fear as well as denial and a worthy alter-ego of his prized invention, the ego itself. The fount of lies, absurdities, and provocations described by Jesus in A Course in Miracles. By Guidance that isn’t a mask of contradictions and denials but a source of inspiration. Of prompts toward Understanding, that affirm the capacity to choose freely instead of denying it.
The voice of victimhood that emanates from make-believe infects the Psyche of our metaphysical Self and the Psyches of its projections with a singularly debilitating thought. “If I have no choice you have no choice.” Freud had no choice? Did the easy rider who came along for the ride after it started have a choice? No. Well then, another cause for resentment. Another cause for victimhood’s self-pity and its claim on our sympathies.
Denial of Function
Boo hoo! Unhappy camper! While Jung was testing Freud’s ‘reasoning’, anticipating a willingness to choose differently even if only for the sake of argument, he ran into resentment instead. Anger, personal and threatening, for demanding of his mentor what his mentor could not by definition give him. A hearing and a reasoned response to his questioning, because it was an affront to his nature. An answer for which there had never been, nor could ever be, a question. The nature of the know-it-all, who wasn’t obliged to answer for being not-‘there’. The nature of denial, that needs no explanation because it has no explanation. The nature of answer that’s done with question, so g’wan, ya bother me!
All of this a systematic denial of Function. Of the attributes of Mind that define it as Relationship. Thinking united with feeling, learning united with growing, and, in the version that’s Child-Guidance, Character united with Freedom of Choice. Systematic denial of Creation that’s Family being there for one another, given the gift of empyrean Life, illuminated by Meaning and Purpose, now subjected to separation. To self-division taking it all apart. From the beginning? From the initial feeling, but only after it had attracted and fused with thought into the prototypical Relationship. Into the original Self-Awareness, a combination of emotion with reason, Spontaneity with Order, Freedom with Choice.
This was the specter that confronted Jung when he approached Freud with Function. With Mind thinking with feeling, intuiting with Spontaneous insight. The “mad idea of separation,” as Jesus puts it in the Course. Make-believe, the reverse of what is — self-division. Separating what? Feeling from thought. That sounds familiar. Professor Faust victimized by academia’s insistence on depriving ideas of the emotion that elicited them in the first place. Doesn’t make sense. It didn’t to Faust either, though the way he went about putting the two back together in his life was ridiculous. Going to the know-it-all of make-believe who could only offer more division. While promising the opposite. Stan Laurel putting poor Oliver Hardy in another fine mess.
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Moved
Loss
What is the nature of ‘emotion’? Well you should ask, because make-believe messing with it is playing with the fire that ignited Movement. Stopping Prometheus in his tracks. ‘Emotion’ traces back to Latin for ‘move’ and to French for ‘excite’. My younger son suffered into his forties with a life that didn’t move him. I showed him around Washington when he was a pre-teenager and his reaction was ‘meh’. Nothing excited him. Then, when he’d declared himself unemployable and returned to his childhood home, it all changed.
What changed it? The impending death of a parent. He was finally moved, and moved deeply. He loved and cared for his mother while she endured terminal illness over the last sixteen months of her life. The only time in his when he connected, and when hers ended he ended his. So, emotion is important. Other family members and friends belong to a personality type described in Gifts Differing as ‘shallow’. Isabel Myers’ book . . . that I interpret as an irregularity in emotion similar to my younger son’s though not so incapacitating. They weren’t moved? They were, not with life-ending finality but a couple did shed tears in my presence. For example, when they were distraught over romantic relationships and when their relationships with me were coming apart.
What do you think caused it? Ultimately the metaphysics of Mind. What Isabel refers to as the loss of a valued relationship. The trials of a Child who must learn its Function in adversity absent its Parents. Who must assume a quasi-parental role in Creation by, in effect, becoming its own Parent. A test of Free Choice’s character perhaps like none other, because it asks its subject to trust to Parental Love while foregoing intimacy with it. To endure what could have felt like the ultimate in abandonment.
Divided
Parent-Child relationships in this life seem as often distant as they are close. A consequence of victimhood’s intrusion into ‘family’ and the perversion of the original source of Movement. Emotion that’s Motivation. For pairing off with thought to form the original Function. For forming and activating Mind-Relationship, then sharing its Life-giving Self-Awareness to form the Family of Creation.
When the know-it-all set about dysfunction it did so in the self-unawareness of the Parents’ Child. Where with no seeker or Guide – no wakefulness — to prevent it, it separated emotion from reason. Separated the Child’s Parents Love from Logic within the Psyche of its ‘creations’: the projections of a hallucination. Some of us emotional in our responses to life, others not so much. Some of us alive to its tests of Character, others not so much.
What explains the divide? Psychiatry might prefer to rely on Freudian body-idolatry for an answer, but the likely explanation is the tug-of-war between two polar-opposite guides. Variations of Freud vs. Jung — arrogance, willful, disrespectful and overbearing, vs. Mind, thoughtful, respectful and supportive. Manipulation vs. Guidance. Where the stakes are whether the hallucination shall be preserved in perpetuity or whether our metaphysical Self and its projections shall be done with it. Shall put to rest this absurdity, that a central Function in Creation can be put off by herds of embodiments. Tribal beasts limited to sensory perception for what they understand about their situation. Passivity, avoidance, and aggression content to cycle through their lives without exercising their right to change it.
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Action: Combatants
Defenders of the big lie
Realists. Yes. Determined at any cost to preserve the lie and protect their turf, in blind service to their ‘lord-god’, the know-it-all, and themselves its manipulations. Then the ‘bad thing’ that Freud meant to root out of our Psyches is bad people. The most obvious conclusion to be drawn and yet the most unsettling, that in our everyday dealings with ‘others’ we deal with variations of Guidance or the know-it-all in human form. Yes, ‘bad people’ and ‘good people’ too. In the land of reversals, where anyone can be ‘bad’ and ‘good’ at the same time and reverse roles with changing situations. But manipulations in either case, distinguished by the nature of the guide that accompanies them. Isolation, abandonment and neglect if it’s ‘realist’, Spontaneous connection and affection if it’s idealist.
Freud was a combatant? Yes. In the know-it-all’s perceived ‘war’ to save its magic kingdom of embodiments. Victimhood’s holy crusade of vengeance against its tormenters. And Jung? A self-perceived agent of Mind to understand the human-animal Psyche. To relieve it of its suffering and help it move forward out of the darkness into the light. A mission not of war but of peace, that had no intention of attack or retaliation either way. How did Freudian psychoanalytics hope to prevail? By their application where it was certain that they wouldn’t prevail. To bodily organs. Brains and genitalia. Seats of animal drives that made their presence felt and so deserving of the attention that they got.
An assumption that Soviet Communism made with its totalitarian dogma. Marxist materialism — that if embodiments are acts of will then they can be manipulated by acts of will. An experiment in top-down cradle-to-grave inhumanity that failed spectacularly. Collapsed of its own weight with only token resistance, as if the mass of neurons sculpted for political correctness, who’d deserved all that attention, hadn’t been paying any. What was going on? They were responding to the everyday psychology and politics of personality types. Absorbed in the metaphysics of Character development. Role-playing unawares but nevertheless contributing to the point of the play. Realists vs. idealists. As usual. Defenders of the big lie — sticks in the mud. ‘Hardliners’ vs. those anxious to move on. ‘Liberal reformers’. Either way, inheritors of the dynamic handed down from Movement’s ignition that’s very much with us. A work in progress. Yes. Unfinished business.
The lure of avoidance
Freud and the Soviets were deluded by the same absurdity: that the roles of Mind and make-believe at the beginning can be reversed. A herd-mentality fantasy: demoting Mind to the status of make-believe also-ran while elevating make-believe to the throne of ‘God’. Freud, the ‘atheist’ God! Yes. And Marxist ideology too. And ‘science’ and religion. All reversals, all body-idolizing, and all triumphant over Mind. So self-deluded that they lack any awareness of it.
Really! Not only is the Forum silent on our zoological status, it’s also silent on our mental status. Physics puzzled over why particles behave differently when they’re being ‘measured’. Aware that particles are stored Energy but unaware that Mind and Energy are inseparable. That Energy functions at the pleasure of Mind, and so surprised to see Energy doing what comes naturally: waiting for Mind to tell it what to do. Mind over matter. Of course! How else could physics and its particles be ‘there’ to ‘measure’. Or the universe. How things have changed since Plato anointed Mind the highest form of human evolution. Who could have predicted the consequences when Aristotle turned to biology?
Where the action is
Freudian psychiatric ‘therapy’ is a priesthood of ‘analysts’ recording confessionals. Voyeurs prying into others’ sex lives seeking to validate guilt rather than relieve it. The first patient to testify to her therapy’s success spoke too soon. It didn’t work? No. She recanted. Others took note and backed off? No, and it would have been because of what did work. What was that? Its purpose, to redirect inquiry into the Self away from Mind toward body, away from Understanding toward ‘salvation’ by the ‘master’ — Freud the atheist wannabe ‘god’. A track that ‘god-fearing’ sacrificial lambs, fearful of what they might find, were all too happy to take. What chance does Honesty have against the dead weight of ‘Christian’ conditioning and the lure of avoidance?
Creation’s business is unfinished and personality types are working on it. Yes. This is where the action is. Not upheavals caused by mass ideologies? Distractions. Tinhorn dictatorships? Natural disasters? The same. What determines human tribal animal priorities is the workings of the Mind dreaming us. The metaphysical Mind that we all share. The source of the waves of thought and emotion that orient and reorient us as a species, though we experience it individually. We’re blowing with the wind? Pretty apparent that we are when we look at our behavior from a distance. Tempting to think that we’re each ‘special’ but hard to prove it against the evidence. Charlie Chaplin imitating a cog on a gear wheel.
Psyche
The tension between the Child-Function maturing and its reverse-reflection’s obstructions is being resolved within its Psyche. What’s that? Life-Creation’s imprint. With a birthmark signifying its situation at the beginning. Not a big-picture answer ‘created’ and ruled by a know-it-all. Not a whole number at rest, but a fraction. Whose enumerator is Movement forward above denominator self-division, with Character self-questioning the boundary in between. Guidance. The birthmark of Movement-evolution / Life-Creation that’s never complete and at rest.
Psyche is the unique brand, lot number, and serial number that distinguishes our metaphysical Mind. The Function Guidance in training in virtual reality, as belonging to the Family of its Parents Self-Awareness that grew Spontaneously out of the original situation. It is the hallmark of relatability that unites all in Relationship. It is the living cause for which perspective Happened and initiated Movement at the beginning, to activate Mind with Relationship and the Energy, light, Creativity, and Life of Self-Awareness. Self brought to life by the original power of Attraction between Love-Spontaneity and Logic-Order, that bears the imprint of its source. Parents Love-Logic and their Child, Self-Awareness and its Creations. All united in one Family being there for one another.
A route to Awareness
Since out metaphysical Mind is self-unaware its sense of where and how Creation’s business is happening is limited to the ‘action’ on the screen. It’s watching a movie? So to speak. We’re the characters and it’s unaware that it’s managing the screenplay. Like a regular dream. Pleasant at times, a nightmare at others. Swinging back and forth. Our rest isn’t always restful. Play can turn into work. The dream we’re playing out has all the attributes of a weather system: calm yielding to upheaval, peace to violence and back again, only it isn’t ‘Mother Nature’ causing it. We’re mother nature. Yes.
Predictable. Predictably unpredictable. Untrustworthy so long as our metaphysical Mind is conflicted. Split between one part choosing its way forward incrementally, toward Self-Awareness, maturity, and its Function. The other part getting in the way. These are the personality types? What I make of personality type theory – yes.
Jung, Katharine Myers and her daughter, Isabel Myers Briggs, tapped into Psyche to identify the parts that make up the Self’s constituent functions. That define who it is and what it’s for. How? They went with insights. Spontaneous spinoffs from the approach Jung took toward understanding human minds. Not body-brains grounded by their five senses, ‘guided’ by their back sides, but minds freed by their sixth sense to connect with a route to Awareness. ‘Guidance’. For want of anything better to call it. A genuine Who to welcome into our musings – understanding, respectful, and relatable. Not bound by sensory perception but able to view things from a fresh perspective. Not entirely objective since its wisdom is filtered through the human-animal mind, but at least more objective than self-referential, body-idolizing ‘science’.
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Two Personality Types: One ‘Combatant’
Challenge and response
The theory of human-animal behavior they came up with lifted the curtain on mysteries hidden for as long as Homo Sapiens existed. Enough so that it became possible to imagine a time when we wouldn’t be getting in our own way. What did their theory reveal? Once I intuited its meaning. . . Wait! You changed their theory? Guidance and I. We made some changes to the theory’s moving parts and when we did, what we saw put it into perspective. Showed clearly where Jung and Myers-Briggs had been headed but hadn’t quite arrived.
Where? To two personality types: one Mind derived from metaphysics, the other brain derived from physics. Fundamentally incompatible. Portraits of the two sides of Life in the balance, where the object isn’t to crush the opposition but to choose freely how to respond to it. See Edith Eger, The Choice. Leo Tolstoy, A Confession. What about Jesus and the Course? Especially the Course. The larger meaning of his crucifixion was his Character subjected to mischaracterization. Systematic and ruthless, in an attempt at character assassination. Dehumanization and dismemberment, the victimization of choice by animal-human victimhood seated in the human-animal brain. To which he could have responded in the image of the limp figure on the crucifix: “Look what you’ve done to me!” Projecting a toxic mixture of self-pity and rage, the spirit of vengeance that sent the Church on its rampage of tribal iconoclasm and conquest in the name of ‘love’.
What did he do? What Edith and Leo did: chose to use their talents to make themselves present and accountable rather than absent and unaccountable. To improve their talents with practice and dedication to Family, by being there for those who shared their worlds. Their immediate environments and the larger world within reach of their writing. Jesus chose to use his supernatural talents for self-questioning for the benefit of every inhabitant of the dream. To help with our emergence from self-unawareness into the light and Life of Self-Awareness. Character-building. So that Choice can one day choose freely to do what its situation calls for: Guidance.
What Edith, Leo, and Jesus all did was to choose to respond to the Reality of the dream’s projections rather than their unreality. To who we really are rather than the masks of manipulation that we wear. To the light, and in so doing to de-mystify the mystique of the darkness. Addiction’s hypnotic grip on the human-animal Psyche that can’t be loosened unless brought into the light.
The object
This isn’t a game? Doesn’t somebody win? It’s an exercise in how to choose. One type focused on the Child’s mission, the other on getting in the first type’s way. Both having their roles in Creation’s Function, where the object is for Mind / Free Choice to master the art and science of self-questioning. The sine qua non of Character, Movement, Conscience, and Creation. This is not a game and nobody ‘wins’. It’s training for Function. Competence and usefulness.
- The first type introverted and introspective; intuitive and reflective; thinking-feeling, measuring-evaluating, differentiating-empathizing, integrating and choosing; and judging-disciplining, defining-questioning. The idealist. Trying to move forward. Human-animal. Mindful and self-questioning, drawn toward awareness of Self however ‘self’ is defined. Drawn toward civility but aware that uncivility is part of its nature. Believing itself capable of Free Choice. Capable of rising above its predator animal nature but also aware that it requires Character with Integrity and for that it needs help. Strength of Purpose for navigating through life’s distractions. For self-defense and resistance to temptation.
- The second type defined by its reversal of the first type’s characteristics: opposition to introversion (extraversion); opposition to sixth-sense intuition (five-sense body-sensing); opposition to choice (instinctive wild-animal action); opposition to questioning-discipline (wild-animal willfulness). The ‘realist’. Embodiment. Animal-human. Dependent for its ‘navigation’ on a bodily organ: the brain. Though equipped with a cerebral cortex, a master of appearances and capable of sophistication, it reliably functions at the direction of its animal brain. Not for the purpose of rising above the primitive but for the purpose of affirming its supremacy. For affirming the tenets of victimhood, the manifesto of make-believe that’s the reverse of everything Mind. By using the embodiments it controls to dominate its self-appointed ‘enemy’, the opposite personality type. Mind and its appurtenances: Creativity, Integrity, and Free Choice.
Summing up?
* Mind-centered types are rational beings corrupted by irrationality using faculties of Mind — differentiation-empathy — to support rationality. Body types are irrationality using self-unawareness to deny rationality and to preserve irrationality.
* Choice that’s free to choose in error is logical, therefore structured, not out of Order. Wildness that’s free of the limits of Definition is illogical, unstructured, out of control.
*Relevance is the role each of us plays in our encounters with ‘others’, whether in support of progress toward Self-Awareness and humanitarian values or in opposition to it.
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Contradiction
For they know not what they do
You were brought up Christian. I was. Church-going, ‘Bible’ reading, Wednesday night prayer meetings. I recall scorching a hapless girl over the phone when she didn’t show up at Sunday school. Then you were a student of the Course. While I absorbed what was and still is an extraordinary foray into questions that no one else has addressed. So far as I know – the metaphysics of existence. Based on a unique combination of philosophy and psychology that makes short work of sensory perception. In tone and substance a testimony to the power of Love and Logic not to persuade with argument but to welcome Home with recognition.
In contrast to the tricks of its self-appointed ‘enemy’, the magic-maker of make-believe. Denial, whose first line of defense is deniability, offering guilt its first line of defense: innocence. It doesn’t require forgiveness? Isn’t that what the Course is all about? Guilt is hokum. That’s what the Course is saying. A fable cooked up by the know-it-all, an apparition mistakenly welcomed into the undeveloped mind of a self-deluded Child. ‘Forgiveness’ is recognizing that hokum mistaken for an offense could only have happened in a dream. And if it didn’t really happen we can forgive and forget. We’re innocent? In Reality ‘innocence’ and ‘guilt’ have no relevance. There are no words for them in the language of Creation, just as there’s no symbol for ‘time’ in the calculations of quantum mechanics. Because it doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion. ‘Guilt’ and ‘innocence’ are illusions. Manipulations.
That’s not what the Church taught. Or Freud either. No surprise that the Freudian scribe of the Course was conflicted about its lesson if she was also attracted to the Church. A clear indication of what ‘Christians’ really understood about ‘forgiveness’ turns up in their ‘bible’. In words put into Jesus’ mouth by religious manipulators: “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Enunciated loud enough to be heard by a person supposedly aware and articulate, preoccupied with matters of conscience, while he’s in extremis. Mentally, physically, and emotionally spent. More dead than alive. Yet here was a chance for the Church to lay the foundation for its signature tenet: forgiveness is deniability. And who could resist?
For they knew what they did
The signature claim of the know-it-all from make-believe: “Who, me? I’m innocent! Why? Because I didn’t know! I was. . . unaware!” Unlike Signor Ferrari, “the leader of all illegal activities” in Casablanca, who flouted Vichy French authority and didn’t care who knew it. Evidence that the guiding spirit behind Church ‘forgiveness’ isn’t affirmation taught by Jesus but denial of guilt practiced by the ‘leader’ of make-believe. The self-styled king of guilt. Evidence that turns up when we try to relate to psychopathy and encounter unaccountability, the pose of ‘innocence’ that’s the signature of reversal. Of denial that denies itself.
We’re into serious contradictions here. The figure on the cross was the ‘son’ of the ‘father’ who “so loved the world” that he “sent his only begotten son” to save the world from its guilt. “He died for our sins.” “By his wounds you have been healed.” That being the case, Jesus’ crucifixion consummated his purpose here. Those who brought it about performed a service. Did their part to liberate all of us from accountability so that we won’t have to hang our heads in shame. Then why would they need to be forgiven? They above all should have been thanked. “Thank them, Father, for they knew what they did.” And Jesus? “Happy are those who with a glowing faith in one embrace clasped death and victory” – John Singer Sargent.
The underlying reality of the tableau on Calvary is a breathtaking non-sequitur: the glorification and deification of victimhood and persecution both. Self-Awareness, the Child’s Parents and the Conscience of Life-Creation, mischaracterized as guilt by guilt. Its reverse-reflection, the make-believe of denial, while denial trumpets the supremacy of innocence by deniability. The cachet and ultimate weapon of self-unawareness in the game of I win you lose. I knew it! It is a game! With only one ‘winner’, for who can beat deniability? Then give me deniability!
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Process
Purpose
Personality elements are Functions, usefulness:
- Introversion is Self-Awareness. Intuition-reflection is Guidance. Thinking-feeling reasoning is Choice. Judging is Definition-Limits.
- Extraversion is attack-self. Body-sensing is mask. Act-instinct is prey. Will-arrogate is consume.
Mind-centered type’s method is process: Self-questioning coming back on itself to review and edit work in progress. To improve clarity, awareness, articulation. To sharpen focus until Mind thinking-feeling puts situation in the correct perspective out of many possible perspectives. Since things being perspective in the absence of one big-picture answer there are limitless possibilities. The ‘presence’ of implied impossibility offering many incorrect perspectives suggests that the purpose of process is to avoid being self-deluded while advancing Self-Awareness. The Child’s mission while self-transformed into human-animal projections is to reverse self-delusion in order to advance Self-Awareness.
The purpose of process of the Mind-centered type is to wean out the elements / incidence of self-delusion by peeling away layers of incorrect perspectives, misleading motivations (misguidance), conditioning by masks: imposters pretending to be the reverse of who they are. Manipulators. ‘Realists’. Agents of body-brain five senses wielding pretense, condemnation, ridicule, arrogance. Anything but facts and Logic, like weapons to intimidate victimhood and naivete into passive conformance.
The mistake
The reason for Self-questioning is the potential for self-division. Doing it to ourselves. Coming back around from focus out ‘there’ on ‘others’ to self-examination, self-focus, Self-Awareness. The process of review and edit is necessitated by things being one integrated Self. One Family of creative Functions borne of the idea-Function of perspective. Of discovery that may explore many perspectives but may not stray beyond the limits of situation which is but one Self. There is no ‘other’ Mind-Relationship Self-Awareness Life-Creation Function to explore. No other Reality, no other Home-Family Happening.
The Child’s self-delusion that caused it to stray beyond the limits of one Self, one Mind-Relationship Self-Awareness Life-Creation, is the mistake — the wrong choice, the ‘sin’ alluded to in versions of the mythical ‘fall’. When human-animal projects its mask of deception and guilt onto ‘others’, then judges and condemns them for their flaws and wrongdoing, it’s straying beyond its limits. Perpetuating the self-delusion, condemning and punishing itself. Repeating the original mistake, the original wrong choice. There are no ‘others’ in Reality or in virtual reality. No separated, isolated entities ‘out there’ to lacerate with swords or whip with words. No ‘them’. There is only ‘us’: one interrelated, integrated Self. Family.
What to do about it?
What is our situation? Living in a shared virtual reality where process has been FUBAR’d. Then what does our situation call for? Un-FUBARing it while we share it. Every experience is analogous to cases taught in law schools and business schools — situations that present challenges and opportunities to understand and apply process. To get it right.
The Child-Mind’s ‘mistake’ was ingrained in the nature of its Function: Choice that’s free to choose incorrectly. Experience with the consequences of wrong choice is a necessary part of the training of the boundary responsible for maintaining the integrity of Life-Creation Family-supporting: awareness of what can go wrong when youthful folly takes a wrong turn, omits a step. Resolve to get it right, do what’s right, and to do it right. Character that’s thorough. Responsiveness that listens and adapts, Loving kindness that reciprocates and shares. Intimacy that trusts. Guidance that’s aware of the consequences when boundaries are crossed.
The Child-Mind’s ‘mistake’ was the error that Choice is free to make. And now you and I have front-row seats for witnessing what can go wrong when Choice chooses in error. What will we do about it? Any ideas?