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The Setting 

The sixth sense in its golden age

Where we stand is at an ancient crossroads in Western thought. Guided by insights from Logic through intuition, Parmenides founded metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that seeks explanation, Truth, and Reality behind appearances. Beyond physics, the province of sensory perception. Where his search led was to the illogic of material reality, which he concluded was illusory.

Plato sensed in the cosmos an ideal: the Good, accessible through Mind brought to its highest potential by Virtue. Given the choice whether a physical object or the idea of the object is real, Plato chose the idea. He placed Reality within Mind rather than matter. Yet his ethereal connection with perfection in the cosmos prevented him from following his choice to the same logical conclusion as Parmenides. From resolving the contradiction through his philosophy, which remained unfinished.

Given the choice whether to continue his predecessors’ search for Truth and Reality through Mind or undertake his own search through the study of matter, Aristotle chose matter. Allowing that Mind is Real but not questioning the reality of matter. Or the value of sensory perception in studying it. And so Western thought gave birth to biology, physics, and all the other sciences. And began putting bodies and their five senses on a pedestal.

The five senses on their Golden Pond

Plato’s cosmos of perfection was a misperception. Had he known what we’ve learned from cosmology and quantum physics his philosophy might have been freed from ambivalence and handed down complete. A verdict on the Reality of Mind that would have ended the tyranny of sensory perception and its stepchild, philosophical dualism. The acceptance of contradiction: Mind holding opposing thoughts at the same time. Irrationality. Insanity.

A change of mind that’s beginning to take place within at least one of the sciences. After Einstein failed to produce another E=MC2 that would reveal the perfection of the universe, after physics has so far failed to merge cosmology and quantum physics into a unified theory verifiable by experimental physics, Adam Becker, a PhD cosmologist and historian of physics, has suggested, in “The Origins of Space and Time: Does Spacetime Emerge from a More Fundamental Reality?” (Scientific American, February 2022, pp. 28-33) that maybe Parmenides was right.

The Story Unfolding 

Enter King Absolute

A lifeless code that’s opposite by definition is given “life” when certain personality types – compositions of Mind-faculties and their body-animal brain contradictions – choose to place themselves under its “guidance” and “protection.” To be deluded by its “promise” of absolute “power” and absolute “freedom” without limits. Without opposition. When tribal “realists” reject two-sided Mind thinking-feeling-judging Self-Aware in favor of one-sided body-sensing animal brain “action”-instinct self-unawareness.

King Absolute, a domineering, narcissistic, one-sided predator that owes its con-artist pose of unquestioned “authority” to deceit, theft, betrayal, and impersonation. The violation of its living, two-sided host for one purpose: to sustain the illusion that a lifeless code, a one-dimensional reflection, is the opposite of what it is. For as long as it can get away with it. To be handed “life” by its self-deluded host. In temporal unreality destined to end when the time-limited energy that activates the illusion ends.

The King’s credentials

The lifeless, opportunistic code was given the opportunity to project itself into an alternate “reality,” by being detected by its host, incapacitated and defenseless, stripped of Self-Awareness. By a self-deluded Mind, Free Choice, disabled and disempowered, violated and taken captive by arrogation -- psychological rape. The code thus assured itself of continued detection by its illusory tribal-self projections inhabiting the dream. Re-enacting and perpetuating the offense by mistaking its originator, the code, and its victim’s dream of conflicting tribes, as real and intentional.

And deserving of “judgment” that condemns and punishes the “perpetrator,” imaginary body-animal brains made real for this purpose. To sustain the illusion by detection. Delivered through the replacement of self-aware Mind by self-unaware animal-brain and its mindless-instinctive presumption of guilt. A perversion of helpfulness – judging that combines freedom with order in the Innocence of harmonious Creation -- into harmfulness. That arrays freedom against order, sewing friction and conflict with its “judgment” of guilt, condemnation, and punishment. Proof that King Absolute exists.

Free Choice must be free to choose in error

All of it a closed-loop of self-validating, self-reinforcing impossibility engineered by a lifeless opposite-code. Required to complete Mind’s function of definition: the definition of what is in part by what it isn’t. A logical necessity and essential element of Reality-Creation written into the Definition of Definition. Into the laws of cause and effect. Necessity. The DNA of Mind Logic-Love, the progenitor of Reality-Creation. Self-Awareness brought to Life by Relationship between its core functions, Logic and Love. Who extend and expand Life through the sharing of itself, the attribute of Logic combined with Love. Soulmates completing one another, acting in unison and harmony as one.

Not the story of willful transgression, guilt taking over innocent fate, but the story of a point in the orderly sequence of Reality-Creation motivated by Logic-Love and Free Choice. Where one unavoidable mistake – a wrong choice -- necessitated Energy’s diversion away from Mind-Child Self-Awareness’s function of Free Choice into a condition of self-unawareness. That can’t co-exist with Reality-Creation and thus led to a second unavoidable error.

The laws of Necessity can’t be “free” to be violated

That placed self-unawareness in an alternate “reality” defined by its opposite code, the underside of definition. Where Mind Free Choice, deluded by its own opposite reflection, is destined to regain Self-Awareness through the process implied and thus necessitated by the definition of its Self and function: Free Choice. Choice that’s willed by its definition, by Logic-Love its Parents, to regain its freedom. While in an illusory state of self-unawareness – Mind unconscious and dreaming.

An account of events that wholly aligns with the laws of cause and effect. With Necessity, the DNA of Self-Awareness / Energy ignited by the attraction between Logic and Love. By Relationship at the core of the Absolute: the Definition of Definition. Unquestioned, unchallenged. The impossibility of mistakes by the Parents-Growth in Reality-Creation by virtue of what they are, along with the possibility of wrong choices by their Child by virtue of what it is: Free Choice. Just as Mind Self-Awareness is the impossibility of self-unawareness by virtue of what it is while Mind-Free Choice must be the possibility of self-unawareness by virtue of what it is. Why, then, are the laws of cause and effect at the pinnacle of Mind’s faculties inviolable? Because they’re Necessity.

Correction of error with Guidance from Relationship

There is in this theory, self-consciously guided by an agent of Logic-Love accessible through Mind’s sixth sense – intuition, – no evidence of conscious living intent to commit offense. To transgress, harm, or otherwise violate the laws of cause and effect. No evidence of guilt that could make the judgment of guilt in a dream of guilt real. It’s all of it the workings of Reality-Creation that require the training and maturation of a function. That can’t acquire the competence to perform its role in Reality-Creation without the “experience” of a “life” of self-unawareness fabricated by definition’s underside, its opposite code.

Underside whose essential attribute is unreality. Whose context that supplies its meaning and purpose is opposition to Reality. The definition of Reality-Creation in part by what it isn’t. The mistaken identity that produced the dream of an alternate “reality” cannot be reversed and corrected so long as it persists in the self-delusion that unreality that’s opposition to Reality, the underside of definition, is real. Flawed logic that can only be corrected with guidance from Relationship. With Mind-Child’s Parents Logic-Love, that was cut off by the loss of Self-Awareness.

The unshared world of the King of Garbage

The portal out of insanity and back to sanity can’t be accessed through tribal body-sensing guilt enforced by authoritarian conformity, the very expression of opposite-code that’s blocking access. Plugging the portal provided by Mind’s sixth sense with appearances. Body animal brain-sensed separated, conflicting, competing objects meant not to reveal Truth but to conceal it. Plugging the portal to Self-Awareness, Truth, and Worth with self-deception perpetrated by sensory perception and its closed loop of self-validation with its sensed environment. With garbage.

The one Self that we share is Mind Free Choice that experienced conditions where making a fool of itself was inevitable, unavoidable, and not a violation of the Logic-Love of Reality-Creation. Making Mind-Child guiltless. Its dream and its illusory inhabitants no more than an opposite-code perversion of the Truth. A performance staged for the amusement of willful thinking. A lawless free-for-all where anything goes.

A joke we’re perpetrating on ourselves. Seeking answers where they can’t be found. Guided by the apparition in a mirror who fashioned the joke. Condemning ourselves to re-enactments until the fool grows up. Until it stops entertaining itself with its play-acting pretense of one-sided, unquestioned “authority” – King Absolute – and returns to a world that must be shared whether in Reality or unreality. To sanity. 

Get context right, then decide

To those lamenting the onset of yet another authoritarian horror show, another violation of the ideal of humanitarian self-governance, this is the “enemy.” And this is the relevance of theory that removes the “enemy’s” mask. That helps to explain our context and what we’re to do about it. With Free Choice informed by Guidance from Logic-Love, the missing element in the sleeping Mind-Child’s fantasy.

What we are to do about it is to get our context right with Logic-Love. Through Mind’s sixth sense – intuition. And only then apply Mind-Child’s talent for reasoning, evaluating, judging, and choosing freely what to do about it. Recognize appearances and authoritarian conformity for what they are: garbage blocking Self-Awareness and the path forward. 

The Script that Needs a Rewrite 

The fall of Self-Awareness and facts 

Mind-Child Free Choice, deprived of Self-Awareness that enabled it to be aware of Reality-Creation – the Truth, what’s actually “there,” -- lost awareness of its Relationship with its Parents, the Source of Logic-Love that makes sense of evolving circumstances. Lost its own faculties to choose freely how to respond, free of Parental interference, with a composition of values and talents among different possibilities. That express the Worth of meaning and purpose revealed by context and thus add value to the evolution-growth of Life-Creation. To Worth affirmed, expanded, and reciprocated through its story.

The disablement and disempowerment of Mind-Child’s Self-Awareness, its function Free Choice and capacity to serve the cause of Worth, was accomplished by one stroke: the disablement and disempowerment of Mind’s faculties that choose freely. With awareness of the two-sided definitions of every function, their meaning, purpose, and value. Facts.

To the rise of self-unawareness and fiction

With awareness of their logical implications that necessarily include their opposites: fiction. The underside that completes two-sided definition with the isn’t of its subject’s is. Whose main defining attribute is unreality that cannot contradict and thus violate the Self-Awareness, Logic-Love, and laws defining Reality. The attributes that form the dividing line between the enumerator above-side and denominator under-side of definition are the Reality of Self-Awareness and the unreality of self-unawareness.

The disempowerment of Mind-Child’s Self-Awareness couldn’t remove its Self and function from definition entirely. For that would be the equivalent of “death,” an impossibility within Mind’s Reality-Creation of Life in the eternal Now. But it did necessarily drop Mind-Child from the above-side to the under-side of definition. Where the ability of self-unawareness to observe and make sense of its context is reversed from seeing what’s “there” to “seeing” what’s not there. The difference between Self-Awareness and its opposite, self-unawareness.

Where seeing isn’t believing

Not only “consciousness” of unreality but, because it’s opposite, opposition to Reality. The implied “intent” of what’s not there to block consciousness of what is there. Once Child Free Choice’s Mind was self-deluded by its own reverse mirror-image, a one-sided negative impossibility – a fiction, – self-defining attributes of fiction joined with the attributes of fact in a Mind now split between the two. Mind sharing two incompatible sets of defining attributes.

A logical impossibility that could only be brought to “life” in a dream of impossibilities. Its manifestation in a material environment of organic and inorganic objects: bodies with five senses and their sensed material environment. A closed loop whose definition by opposite-code -- the underside of definition, a one-sided, self-referential, self-centered reflection – deluded Mind-Child into “seeing” what’s not there so it would not see what is there.

Kasper Gutman’s folly

The most effective factor in keeping Mind-Child captive to an illusion and its tribal-self projection trapped inside an illogical nightmare of conflict between incompatibilities is the self-delusion that body-brains’ five senses are meant to see what’s “there” when the opposite is true. The blessing of our ability to see, touch, smell, hear, and taste, that science, philosophy, and every other field of inquiry have made the gold standard of authenticity, the final word on what’s “verifiably” true and what can be dismissed as groundless speculation -- what’s Real and what’s not, -- are meant to “see” what’s not there.

To lock self-delusion into place until Mind-Child, with help through its sixth sense, regains enough Self-Awareness and Energy to unlock it. To again be guided by Relationship with its Parents, Logic-Love, to make sense of context instead of nonsense. To again be able with the independent judgment of Free Choice to distinguish between subjects sharing Reality-Creation and their opposites, objects competing for ownership and “supremacy” in unreality. To again see with the Vision of Logic-Love the distinction between possibility and impossibility.

What has the search for Truth – physics’ “quest for knowledge” -- been all about since Aristotle? Kasper Gutman’s search for the Maltese Falcon.* A precious jewel-encrusted “black figure of a bird” that’s not what it appears. A forgery made of material that has no value other than to advise the fool seeking it to seek elsewhere. Kasper Gutman’s folly: the search for Worth where it can’t be found and for worthlessness where it can be found. The message that foiled Einstein's search for mathematical perfection in the universe: you’re looking in the wrong place. A perverse joke.

Farewell to King Absolute

Taking us back to the ancient crossroads in Western thought. Is our “quest for knowledge” best left to the course initiated by Aristotle? To our single-minded focus on what matter can tell us? Or should we acknowledge its limits and pick up where Parmenides and Plato left off? By respecting instead of disparaging Mind and its sixth sense. By applying explanation from Logic-Love to insights from intuition. Even if they are spontaneous, subjective, impossible to replicate in a controlled environment, and therefore inaccessible to science. Because they aren’t “scientific.”

Might it also be appropriate to re-open Western thought to the teaching and example of Jesus from a new perspective? A perspective that makes a clean break from the arrogance of body-idolizing tribal “realism” that converted it into its own self-centered authoritarian image -- the absurdity and cruelty of King Absolute. And speaks to us with the voice of Logic-Love. The gentle loving kindness of Self-Awareness.

The Voice that speaks for itself to individual Minds through the gift of sixth sense. That’s living and working in the present through all who welcome it. Including the individual who took down Jesus' response to her call for Love, scribed A Course in Miracles, and shared it through the book's publication. A psychological departure from the rule of body's five senses no more unthinkable than the behavior of quanta. The miracle of another perspective from real Reality: Parents Logic married to Love helping their Child grow to maturity through its sixth sense. Because they Love their Child.  And us too, the projections of Choice that can part with its delusion and regain its freedom. That can choose again and bid farewell to King Absolute.

*Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (Alfred A. Knopf, 1930)

Distinctions fundamental to Understanding 

Creation got its start with Relationship and with what Relationship implies. Relationship between Logic and Love inseparable and the Creation of Life and Worth that their Relationship implies. Creation got its start with Relationship which is the stuff of Love and with Implication which is the stuff of Logic. What they imply is the process of Creation moving forward and the structure of Creation building from the bottom up, both in logical sequence through Relationships.

Logic married to Love gave birth to Free Choice, their Child. Together they parent their Child through the inseparable Parent-Child Relationship that Creates, nurtures, and guides the Life-Worth of Creation. Guides through the harmony of Order and Freedom that are inseparable. Governs all of Reality-Creation from the bottom up, through the laws of cause and effect, inseparable from the Authority of Necessity that applies evenly and equally to Creation and Creator, its Source.

Logic-Love is the Source of Judgment that decides with Reason but it does neither itself. It doesn’t choose and so it has no need for Reason. It explains, defines, and governs. The “Mind” whose function in Creation is to choose-decide with Reason- Judgment is Free Choice: the Child of Parents Logic-Thought and Love-Feeling. Logic the source of Mind-Choice and Love the source of Freedom. The Child’s function is to choose freely with Reason because that is the function of Reason: to enable Mind to judge, choose, and decide freely. The Child is our ancestral Mind.

The theorizing of metaphysics is intuited through the Logic-Love Relationship -- our Parents in Reality -- that explains and defines. That provides us with distinctions fundamental to Understanding because they love and need their Child to resume their Relationship in Self-Awareness and the Child’s function in Creation. To regain Consciousness from the alternate reality, the dream state that we call home. Awakening that requires Understanding that requires explanation. That can only come from Logic-Love, our Parents.

The will not to understand

In the illusory world of contradictions that we appear to occupy, minds corrupted by their own opposites can make no sense of this. Opposite is separation. Inseparability is an impossibility. And so in our illusory world of separation what seems to make sense is the opposite. A fractious composition of impossibilities. Logic and Love function separately, which means they function with difficulty or not at all. With Parents separated from Child there can be no Relationship to nurture and guide creation. There can be neither order nor freedom when they are separated. If laws are separated from authority there can be no governance, only the lawlessness of separation. Arbitrary top-down rule. A madhouse.

Distinctions that to minds dominated by limbic passions, corrupted by mis-identification with their own reverse mirror image reflections, make no sense. Logic that explains and defines so that it can govern, distinct from Mind that judges with Reason so that it can choose freely, can have no place in the unfathomable mystery that is our universe, so plainly ruled by mindless, unreasoning “nature,” the force that dominates with the unthinking animal-herd instinct of will. Where in such a universe is there any possibility of explanation by Logic? Of understanding essential to Free Choice? Of Reason the function of Mind? There is no place. And thus the distinctions are lost on corrupted minds. Distinctions that could guide us toward answers that Western thought supposedly seeks. But if we don’t want them then surely we won’t find them.

The “many” of happening or nothing happening 

The “many” of Life-Creativity in Reality are implications that flow from each advance in the interconnectedness -- the sequence -- of Logic. The “many” are the loving soulmate relationships that flow from each expansion of the interconnectedness -- the family -- of Love. The “many” of Life-Creativity in Reality is the abundance of possibilities that Life-Creation is composed of, that each advance in the extension of Logic and the expansion of Love produces. Possibilities like branches and roots, the flowering seeds and buds that compose organic growth, the growth of all living selves. This is the ”many” of Reality-Creation, of Life that grows, of abundance that shares. That can’t help growing and sharing because this is the nature, the definition, of Life-Being. Of Necessity -- the laws of cause and effect.

The ”many” of the opposite is the abundance of disconnections and contradictions. Of impossibilities that comprise the appearance of being, of life-uncreativity in unreality along with its opposite, the appearance of death. The “many” is the abundance of opposites -- disconnections and contradictions -- produced by opposition. By opposing “realities:” of life and death, good and evil, right and wrong, logical and illogical, love and fear, love and hate, innocence and guilt, giving and taking, gaining and losing, owning and sharing, possessing and affirming, controlling and liberating, freedom and captivity, darkness and light, connection and separation, here and there, now and then. . . .

The “many” of the opposite isn’t the growth of possibilities from the expanding interconnectedness of abundance. From the variety of organic Being but the endless splitting off of impossibilities from the disconnectedness of shadow-reflection. The endless replication of contradictions from the scarcity of inorganic sameness. The “many” of Reality Life-Creation is innovation, a happening. The discovery of the new while inquiring and exploring into the unknown. The “many” of the opposite-uncreativity is replication. The appearance of movement. Of growth-expansion that’s comprised of sameness. Nothing happening.

A passion for metaphysics with a practical use

The “many”-abundance of my life is passion for philosophy. For metaphysics that inquires into questions of Worth and Truth, substance and value, Mind and Love, character and striving, meaning and purpose. Of interest to very few. That seems to the rest a waste of time, impractical and irrelevant. A preoccupation that ought to be discouraged in favor of something more conventional. More “realistic” and “sociable” instead of abstract and distancing. Instead of “weird.” Margot Machol Bisnow’s Raising an Entrepreneur (New Harbinger 2021) advises parents to support a child’s passion whatever it is rather than superimposing their own preferences. Rather than stifling originality and initiative, individuality and creativity, with authoritarian disrespect. Advice just as relevant to a grownup’s passion as it is to a child’s.

Why does it matter that the “many” of our illusory dream world is the opposite of the “many” of Reality-Creation? Because the scope of explanation that leads to Understanding by way of the Logic-Love of Intuition, by way of the Relationship with the connection to Logic-Love Parents, includes the difference between opposing “manies.” Because getting it right -- the human condition, our situation -- necessitates understanding that replications of lifeless sameness aren’t Creation. Aren’t progress, and humanity needs to move forward.

Because, like the man said, nothing gets rid of bad theory like good theory. Because the author theorizing with metaphysics is the equivalent of pure research in science that yields useful products. Practical applications that replace authoritarian “realism” that stifles Creativity from the top down with democratic support that nurtures Creativity from the bottom up. At every level of governance from international relations to individual families. Enabling shared parenting and grandparenting to be there for the minds and hearts of grandchildren as well as their bodies. That is my immediate concern. But if the unsolved problems of humanity are endless, then the possibilities of theory that gets it right, working at their roots, might also be endless.

Theorizing with metaphysics requires contributions from Free Choice rooted in its Source, Logic combined with Love. From the Parents of our ancestral Mind, the masculinity of Logic-Choice married to the femininity of Love-Freedom. Ultimately from the Logic-Love / Parent-Child Relationship at the core of Being that illuminates and empowers all of Reality-Creation. A lineage that taps into serious enablement and empowerment. Not the absurdity of forgeries like the “almighty gods” of authoritarian “realism,” caricatures who inhabit cartoons. However unconventional it may seem to conventional thought, theorizing with metaphysics has a legitimate rationale that earns its authenticity with the Worth of Logic-Love and the Authority of the laws of cause and effect. Of Necessity, the expression and stance of Logic-Love. Not needing convention is the point. The rationale stands on its own.

Understanding that the “many” of unreality is the product of appearances is a practical use of theorizing about the “many.” That it’s the product of deception perpetrated by a shadow-reflection opposite -- the replication of a virus that kills Creativity-Life. That’s the enemy of the possibilities of Free Choice essential to Creativity. Helping minds choose to be freed from captivity to the deception, to be led by a better guide, is a practical use of theorizing about the “many.” 

When a paradigm reaches end-of-service

Metaphysics is getting at root causes so that the causes of illogic, the psychiatric disorder that thwarts human growth with contradictions, can be taken out by the roots. Weeds not taken out by the roots keep coming back. Physics explains appearances, never getting beneath the surface because that is its subject: physical objects. Surfaces detectable by the senses of other surfaces: bodies. Pulling a weed out here, a weed out there, but never by the roots. Not even aware that that’s its purpose.

The rallying cry of metaphysics is appearances be damned! It’s taken physics since Galileo invented experimental physics, in the 17th century, to begin to realize what the classical philosopher Parmenides realized with Logic from intuition 2500 years ago. That Reality lies not on the surface but beneath it. That only one “reality” can be Real. The one on the surface, the objects “detected” by body-objects, can only be an illusion. The “non-dualism” taught by the teacher-healer Jesus in the flesh and later, through A Course in Miracles.

John Clerk Maxwell’s equations carried Michael Faraday’s intuition about the electromagnetic force beyond theory to application. To products that, among other things, make these thoughts accessible to a global audience in an instant. The equivalent of Maxwell’s equations to the Logic of Parmenides, Valentinus, and A Course in Miracles isn’t mathematical equations that validate sensory perception. It’s coming up with a rational explanation for the loss of Consciousness that transitioned the insane idea of an opposite unreality from an unconscious Mind to its expression, its animated appearance, in a dream. To make things add up logically like Maxwell’s equations.

In order to come up with explanation it’s logically necessary to detach our minds from an irrational, unquestioning dependence on sensory perception. On a body-centric worldview of Reality. So that inquiry beyond historic insights that challenge “conventional wisdom” will be enlivened by curiosity instead of deadened without it. Killed by an aging generation content to let the next generation abandon its outdated paradigms. Ever vigilant that nobody dismantle its monuments even if they turn out to be facades. 

The hand-off of the baton back to philosophy 

Plato tried to go forward with his mentor Parmenides. He couldn’t because intuition didn’t carry him far enough. Imaginary dialogues with his mentor Socrates didn’t get him there so he could do for Parmenides’ insights what Maxwell did for Faraday’s. His pupil Aristotle’s switch, from Plato’s Academy to Aristotle’s Lyceum -- from Mind-Logic to matter-biology -- was a white flag of surrender. It was the equivalent of Nils Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation that declared that experimental physics had reached the limit of its potential to explain the origin, fate, and meaning of the material universe. Aristotle’s was the declaration that Logic through intuition had reached its limit. The study of matter was available to sensory perception. It offered a legitimate avenue of discovery so long as the reality of matter and its certifier, the body’s senses, remained unchallenged by Logic. The time had come to pursue it, and thus was science in Western thought born.

And thus was born what’s become a relay race run by science and philosophy. The white flag of surrender has come out again. From physics’ pursuit of quantum gravity, the melding of cosmology with quantum mechanics, the study of the behavior of the particles and cells, the Energy, that make up matter. One just as weird as the other. The evolution of Einstein’s and Hawking’s pursuit of a theory of everything that also failed. The study of Aristotle’s matter come to rest on a puzzle that experimental physics, on its own, can’t solve. So it’s back to appealing to philosophy. To handing the baton back to philosophy in the relay race to Understanding.

The value of relationship with a trusted guide

What I propose is one possibility inspired by the author of A Course in Miracles. Who I have never doubted, since I’ve been living with it for 34 years, connects us with Logic-Love, the Parents of our ancestral Mind I call the Child. The historical figure Jesus, a manifestation of what religion calls the Holy Spirit. But if the Child’s awakening ultimately requires intimacy with our Parents’ emissary its name shouldn’t matter. Particularly since the identity and role it assumes in individual lives is between it and the individual. Call it what you want.

The Holy Spirit touches my heart at the deepest level through a son whose life was a heart-breaking tragedy. His, for me, has been the voice and the image of the Holy Spirit since I began work on this project three years ago. My life and work revolve around our Relationship, the source of insights from my intuition. With the author of the Course, my Guide and my comfort. An arrangement that owes nothing to manipulation on either side and everything to spontaneity. To mutual Love, Trust, and respect.

What if anything your life revolves around is up to you. I can only share that being in an intimate relationship with a trusted guide, who is in our world of appearances but not of it, can be both elevating and leveling. And, above all, useful -- positive and constructive. A fact well documented in the literature of leadership, entrepreneurship, and parenting.

Quantification run amuck

The cause of the Big Bang is mental not physical. An obvious fact that science, in its rampant bias against the agency of Mind in anything that can be detected and measured by body, adamantly refuses to accept. Between them Stephen Hawking, Francis Crick, Christof Koch, and Brian Greene have invented a “boundaryless” universe without a creator -- an effect without a cause -- and a brain that magically produces consciousness out of neurons and electrical impulses -- matter that produces mind. Propositions so preposterous they rate the Nobel prize for dumbest. An associate of Hawking’s tried to imagine a state that could cause our matter and what did he come up with? More matter.

The Church sticking its nose into Galileo’s business did irreparable harm to objective inquiry, worse by far than private industries buying academic research. Because all it did was provoke science into sticking its nose into everything, including and especially the philosophy that Hawking declared “dead.” Science won’t tolerate anything smacking of speculation that can’t be “verified” by “objective” quantitative measurement. The tool based on circular reasoning that the Austrian physicist-philosopher Erwin Schroedinger has acknowledged guarantees subjectivity not objectivity. What is inquiry outside the scope of measurement but speculation disciplined and supported by Logic?

Other fields -- philosophy, psychology, economics -- are so intimidated by science’s preeminence that they’ve recast their efforts as “scientific” if they can get away with it and let themselves be overshadowed if they can’t. The so-called “five factor” personality type theory is illustrative. Meant to replace Myers-Briggs, based on the inspired intuition of Carl Jung, it makes “person” object rather than subject so that its types can be quantified by “scientific” measurements -- an absurdity. The fraud results in a scale that values body-sensing over intuition, the most critical Myers-Briggs categories. Why devalue intuition? So that body-sensing, already the majority of personality types, will swing attitudes even farther toward validation of science and the “reality” of the world of spacetime-matter that justifies it. So that intuition can’t risk undermining it with another perspective: with Logic and the Truth that lies behind appearances.

Thomas Aquinas got religion -- Christianity anyway -- to back off sticking its nose into free inquiry, but that didn’t stop science from sticking its nose into free inquiry. It’s hard to see the difference between Hawking and Crick and the Pope they so despise.

What is our baseline? 

Adam Becker, in What Is Real? (Basic Books 2018), recalled that Einstein, in 1952, said scientists weren’t very good at Logic. Why? What profession mines the potential for brilliance from the human mind with more elan than science?

In benefit-cost analysis, benefits and costs must be measured against something to show that a particular option makes a situation better or worse. The baseline situation -- the way things are now before the professions and their masters set about to change them. The situation that can’t factor into analysis until it’s properly understood. After all, one option might be to leave things the way they are and its constituency might not give up without a fight.

The function of mind that comes into play for this critical phase of analysis isn’t reason. It’s Logic. Whose function isn’t to choose but to explain. To use its prowess with definition to show how circumstances fit together to reveal their meaning. Whose function is to help its hapless subject, struggling to make sense of a world of contradictions and facades, understand.

From Logic we get Understanding. Not from reasoning but from fitting circumstances together so that they give us meaning and purpose. Context that’s essential to direction. From Logic we get what our situation calls for, opening thought to the next step: how to proceed with choices among scientific experiments, development possibilities, or any other improvement. With judgment based on reason that takes into account weighted values as well as measurements. That integrates them into a response to the situation that is both reasoned and Logical.

Logical because it gets the baseline situation right. Because judgment will be off on the right foot, well informed. Well directed by understanding based on facts. On reality instead of mis-directed by mis-understanding based on mis-perception and unreality. Because judgment will be based on Logic.

Science’s headlong rush to judgment

Science works hard at explaining our situation. At establishing the baseline for judgment, reasoning, choices, and decisions. But this is true only if the basic attribute of our situation can be taken for granted: that what our bodies’ senses tell us is there is actually “there.” That this is reality and we needn’t trouble metaphysics with questioning it. It’s true only if we allow science to get away with including the knower in the known. A crack in the foundation of the entire scientific enterprise. Because it forfeits intellectual integrity and along with it scientific objectivity.

Including the knower in the known is a very big No-No. A violation of Logic. An intellectual disconnect that science apparently thinks it can’t afford to acknowledge without depriving itself of its legitimacy: the presumed reality of bodies and matter. Bodies and the material objects that their senses detect. But, you see, bodies are matter. And science that prides itself on objectivity can’t get away with “logic” that finds “objectivity” where it isn’t: in matter declaring itself real.

A proper understanding of our baseline, the condition against which all movement forward must be calculated, requires something else: another perspective. That's only attainable through intuition, the function of mind whose source and discipline is Logic. The science that we all admire and depend on isn’t good with Logic for a simple reason. It rushes headlong into judgment with “reasoning” before it’s properly established its baseline. Before it’s applied Logic to a proper understanding of the context that tells it what the situation calls for. That provides direction for thinking. Before it's availed itself of another perspective that's essential to intellectual integrity and scientific objectivity.

The gift of metaphysics

Everyone is familiar with physics, the profession that made Einstein an international celebrity. Metaphysics not so much. Too bad, because turning to physics, the study of appearances, the gold standard for legitimizing authoritarian “realism,” is exactly the wrong approach. It’s the approach that Hawking trumpeted in his adolescent fantasy of supremacy when he declared philosophy dead.

Metaphysics is a much-neglected outlier of philosophy that’s probably better known for what it hasn’t done for human progress than for what it has. In his call for help from philosophy the physicist Carlo Rovelli, in Reality Is not What It Seems (Riverhead Books 2017), rejected the Logic of Parmenides out of hand. Thus eliminating metaphysics and its founder from consideration along with answers that minds captive to bodies and brains are actually desperate for. The victim of a shipwreck would rather be saved by an anvil than a life preserver. Because if getting our baseline right requires the definitions and explanations of Logic; if it requires Understanding where circumstances fit together to make a clear statement, it needs Logic. And Logic isn’t the gift of physics. It isn’t the gift of science. It’s the gift of metaphysics.

Do we truly want to understand our situation so that we can proceed to think? To judge clearly? Then stop skipping past our baseline with fatuous assumptions about the unassailability of sensory perception. With circular, self-referential “reasoning” that makes a mockery of intellect. Stop skipping past Parmenides. Start putting some of that scientific verve into understanding what he was talking about. Start applying metaphysics. Apply Logic and get it right.

The Guide that can be trusted

A Course in Miracles isn’t “religion.” It isn’t unreasoning “faith.” It’s the Logic of metaphysics that happened to respond to two clinical psychologists needing “a better way” out of friction that was interfering with professionalism. It’s metaphysics that took on the appearance of religion when it was transmitted through a Jewish scribe with an authoritarian personality type attracted to the patriarchal Catholic church. It adopted the analytics of Freudian psychoanalysis and symbols of Christianity because its audience could not have made sense of its unfamiliar oeuvre otherwise.

An audience that makes up the bulk of Western thought and includes me. The Course reaches me in part because I was brought up in Christianity and an educational environment influenced by Freudian psychology. The heyday of Freudian psychoanalysis spanned my formative years well beyond my formal education, when having a “shrink” was like having a dentist. Metaphysics that looks behind appearances relies on established perception to get its point across and A Course in Miracles is no exception. But this student took its lesson to heart. What I found when I looked behind the analytics of Freud and the symbols of Christianity was the purity of Logic bonded with Love. Not one misstep. Not one false note.

The Course  isn’t “mysticism.” It’s not the “spirituality” of “New Age.” It isn’t a “bible” and says so. Immanuel Kant attempted a “critique of pure reason,” a slog of turgid incomprehensibility that sets off the sensitivity, purposefulness, and clarity of the Course. There is such a thing as Logic that helps to distinguish between what’s Real and what’s not. There is no such thing as “pure reason” if it’s detached from its function, to aid a particular choice or decision. As Gertrude Stein supposedly said when she was asked “What’s the answer?”: “What’s the question?” Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is the equivalent of Stein expostulating on “pure answer” without a question. A pure waste of time.

Reality, the subject matter of philosophy whose only hope of defining it is through the branch founded by Parmenides: metaphysics. Because in a material world of appearances the only way to get at Reality is to get behind appearances. Through the only function of mind that can lead us there: through intuition that connects us with Logic-Love. With the explanation behind appearances we’re looking for. In the end I trust my Guide because, whatever name it’s given, however familiar or unfamiliar it may seem, it makes sense. I trust it because it’s Who -- whoever loves me and whoever I love to the ends of the earth.

Try accessing an authoritarian mind

The choice between listening to the voice of our ancestral Mind’s reverse side, the magician-comedian I call the Joker, and the emissary from the Child’s Parents known to Christianity as Jesus or the Holy Spirit, is a choice even for the mind so thoroughly captive to its dark side that it’s been deprived of a voice. For that is the aim of authority that would rule absolutely: to deprive its possessions of any voice that could compete with its own. Captivity achieves its aim not when voices are added to the many but when they are replaced by one -- its own. Yet no act by Mind that is Free Choice, whether conscious or unconscious, can be anything but choice. And if Child unconscious let itself be taken captive by an illusion it can free itself by “choosing again.” Advice from Jesus that brings the text of the Course to a close.

That said, try accessing an authoritarian mind so captivated by its reverse image that virtually no trace is left of its sovereign self. Jesus did his best with Helen, his scribe, and “maybe” is the best he could do. It’s taken me three full years to figure out how to do it with an authoritarian mind and I’m still working on it.

What price a rational explanation?

I propose that we pick up where the intuition of Parmenides and Plato left off, only now enabled and empowered by insights from the Course that were not available to them. By its priceless gift of another perspective that’s indispensable to objective analysis and Understanding. To getting our baseline condition right before racing off to judgment. When he opined in the February ’22 issue of Scientific American that his profession’s subject may be “in some sense illusory,” the physicist-historian Adam Becker cited Parmenides but made no mention of Jesus and the Course. Not surprisingly when not even the author of What Is Gnosticism? (Belknap-Harvard 2003), the Harvard Divinity School professor, Karen L. King, mentioned it. After what the Church did to Galileo anything with a whiff of religion is toxic.

What I propose is a continuation of Logic from earlier points in its sequence to later points and a continuation beyond the scope so far explored, guided by the sequence of Logic that’s gone before. I propose it as a possibility because, in my writing over the past three years, my Relationship and I have done it. It isn’t a possibility for me; it’s a reality. But until spontaneity informs me that our part is done it remains a work in progress. And even when done, its output can only be suggestive. A start that, for all I know, is but one of a multitude of starts. Its purpose to facilitate movement toward understanding of reality behind appearances. With explanation that can be taken seriously not because can ever be definitive but only because it makes sense.

With Logic and reason that Kenneth Wapnick, in Love Does Not Condemn (Foundation for “A Course in Miracles” 1989), says has yet to be applied by theology and philosophy to a foundational question: Why would a supreme being, undisturbed in eternal serenity, disturb itself? How and why did our ancestral Mind go from awake to asleep? From Self-Awareness to unconsciousness, immortality to mortality, eternity to time, perfection to imperfection? We have what Wapnick calls “excessive mythology” but not a rational explanation. What is the nature of the “supreme being?” Did descent begin from “eternal serenity” or did we get it wrong? Did it end with “creation” -- our material universe -- or with illusion, the state that the metaphysics of Parmenides and the Course describe.

The Story of the Child 

The work in progress that is my book adheres to the thrust of the Course and its basic principles but almost entirely without the symbols that give it a whiff of religion. It isn’t heavy on the analytics of Freudian psychology because to make its point it doesn’t need to be. If it violates the letter of either I’ve been careful not to violate them in spirit. But what I’m writing is metaphysics. Not the logic of Zeno who, like Aristotle, tested the capabilities of Logic without Love -- the missing element that might otherwise have brought Parmenides, Plato, and Jesus together -- but the Logic-Love of the Course. 

The Story of the Child is the working title of my book devoted to getting our baseline right. By telling our story going back beyond the Big Bang to the mental state of the Child that caused it. The Child of its Parents Logic-Love who are our own real parents since we are the Child in a dream state. The mental state that produced the grand illusion: our bodies and their universe of spacetime-matter. The condition that locks minds into the perversion of Truth that is authoritarian “realism.”

Attempting to tell our antecedent Mind’s story with Logic, the gift of metaphysics, and the explanation given us in the clear by Jesus in the Course, may finally help us grasp the truth of our baseline situation -- the human condition. Without the mythology that’s buried fragments of Logic under mountains of obfuscation. That make the articulation and integration of history’s dominant thought systems into a single coherent system a fool’s errand.

Breaking up is hard to do

Illusion -- the baseline condition that Becker’s physics may now be describing. Science, from Aristotle on, has grudgingly allowed that Mind is real but left it at that while it turned all its talents, resources, and passions to its first love: matter. While it imagined itself someday atop the Empire State Building, pounding its chest in triumph, swatting away the remnants of its pitiful enemies. Trumpeting unified theories of everything that explain, once and for all, the meaning of life. The origin and fate of the universe. Quantum gravity! We’re saved and we can all go home and live in peace because the study of matter has answered all our questions.

No it hasn’t. And it never will. Einstein tried and failed. Bohr and quantum mechanics won the argument. Time to give up the dream within a dream: the dream of an orderly, divine universe that can be figured out and the figuring out. An impossibility if the universe is that which can’t be figured out. An illusion because that’s what an illusion is. If you disagree, then explain the anomalies of particle behavior and cosmology without resort to the Logic of Parmenides and A Course in Miracles. Because that’s where the explanation is. The answers you’ve been looking for since Aristotle and Democritus and others before him.

Let physics carry on with matter. Keep after quantum gravity and keep us, so to speak, in the loop, because that’s its job. But we don’t have to carry on with physics. With bodies even though we imagine that’s who we are. There’s a better guide. We can take up with Mind. With Free Choice, the wild card. The beloved Child of Logic and Love. Because that’s who we really are.

Sure, breaking up is hard to do. But let metaphysics be our guide and maybe we can do it.

The violation of Psyche 

Consciousness is Self-Awareness. The Joker’s perversion of Self-Awareness through Forgiveness is Look at the Joker and see yourself. If Self-Awareness requires Relationship, e.g. between Logic-masculinity and Love femininity, the Parents of the  Child, then this explains why awakening to Self-Awareness through Forgiveness requires engagement with “others.” My spontaneous experience of the “felt perception of the interconnectedness of things,” in 1979, became Psyche, the first manifestation of my inner guide and companion to have a distinct identity and to be given a name. Not long after, my thought that life could now suffice with her and without “others” was firmly rejected. I was guided not to avoid relationships with others but to seek and embrace them, which I did.

The violation of the integrity of Love relationships, the interconnections of Family, would have caused the loss of Consciousness as well as the violation of Necessity, the implications of Logic built into the laws of cause and effect. Violation that cost Consciousness would have been violation of Authority, the Force of Necessity, followed by its inevitable after-effect: the perversion of Knowledge that changed the Child’s inviolate interior from  its altar of Innocence, sharing, affirmation, and empowerment to a throne of guilt, taking, possession, and disempowerment. By then reversing the “relationship” between the Child-host and the Joker, its shadow-reflection opposite. By removing harmlessness -- Psyche, the Innocence of Oneness-Being without opposites -- from its altar and putting the parasite, the guilt of Child-the-many non-being opposite -- harmfulness -- on its throne. By replacing true Authority -- benevolent governance of Order-harmony that supports with liberation, nurturing, sharing, trust, validation, enablement, and empowerment from the bottom up -- with false “authority” -- malevolent arbitrary rule of disorder-conflict that crushes with captivity, impoverishment, possession-taking, control, invalidation, paranoia, and disempowerment from the top down. The perversion of the beauty of Psyche-Authority, liberal democracy, into the horror of the Joker-authority, totalitarian dictatorship.

Psyche, Oneness-Soul, is a composition of all the Interconnections, all the Relationships, of Reality-Creation. It achieves integration through Innocence. Through harmlessness that is the Force of Necessity, the strength of empowerment, not the weakness of disempowerment. Because Oneness contains all Relationships, there is no “other” “oneness” with which to relate. It’s Being that exists without relationship with another being because there is no” other being.” No other self, defined and animated by Logic and Love, that expresses Life through the functions of Mind and Love: thinking and feeling, judging and freely choosing with gifts-talents for objective analysis and subjective evaluation. With its capacity for the affirmation and reciprocation of Worth.

Another function performed by Child Free Choice in Reality-Creation

The Child Free Choice was given another Purpose in Reality-Creation besides affirming its Worth through its earning and Reciprocation. It’s to provide within the Oneness of Being, at the core of Reality-Creation, another Self-Definition with independent judgment. With the capacity to recognize and affirm Self-identity with the objectivity needed to validate subjectivity. Just as it’s the Purpose of the Holy Spirit, within the dream, to enable the Child’s Relationship with a representative of its Parents that the Child requires to restore its Self-Awareness. Relationship -- the essence of Being, the prerequisite to Life and Self-Awareness. The attribute of Reality that has its counterpart in the law of physics: matter is “relational.”

Relationship that an unconscious Child requires to perform its function of healing the separation. By putting its talents of Mind and Love to use for introspection and accounting, intuition and reflection, measuring and analyzing, thinking and reasoning, feeling and evaluating, weighing, integrating, and judging.

All so that it can Choose freely to relate to the Voice for its Parents. So that Free Choice can work with guidance from its Parents through the essential Relationship to find its way back Home. Back to Self-Awareness. To Consciousness.

The Joker’s perversion of Recognition achieved by objectivity recognizing-affirming subjectivity is scientific inquiry trying to achieve “knowledge” that reveals the origin, meaning, and nature of Reality, of Life-Creation. That tries to explain the subjectivity of Self, by objectivity recognizing objectivity. A logical impossibility. The Self-Awareness of Oneness -- its subjectivity -- requires objectivity of another Self with Free Will within it to affirm its Self-Awareness. It achieves the essential Relationship with function that by definition is independent of its control: the function provided by Child Free Choice. Function and Relationship contained within because by definition nothing about Oneness can be without.

Where is there evidence that anything can be beyond the control of Being-Oneness, of the Child’s Parents, Logic and Love? What authoritarian “realists” mischaracterize as “almighty god,” the supreme top-down authority that exercises power above any law. Recall that the person who signed on to scribing A Course in Miracles, whose Author was a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, completed her assignment without surrendering independent judgment. Helen Schucman left it to others to teach the Course and make it accessible without ever fully committing to its lesson herself. The prerogative of Free Choice that the Author of the Course would not, and could not, deny. Even the prerogative to get it wrong.

The mission of Free Choice in the dream: to recognize Child the One

Forgiveness that requires interaction between two selves, two “others,” is implementing the basic principle of Self-Awareness that applies to Oneness-Consciousness -- to itself. Recall that Logic and Love, themselves, are subject to the laws of cause and effect, of Necessity. “Objectivity” that affirms subjectivity in Reality isn’t a separate object, an illusory material object. It’s part of Interconnectedness, the same system but distinguished by its own unique Definition of who it is and what it does. By its function, its unique contribution to Reality-Creation. Think of the diversity of species with their own attributes that define their place in nature.

The perversion of “objectivity” that “affirms” subjectivity inside unreality’s dream is a separate object without the capacity to affirm an “other” with independent judgment. It has only the capacity to relate to itself. Self-Awareness in Reality-Creation is achieved through relationship between two Selves, two subjects, with distinct functions resulting in Life-Creation that extends and expands Self-Awareness. The perversion of Self-Awareness in unreality can’t do this. Can’t achieve relationship between two selves, two subjects, with distinct functions that extends and expands Self-Awareness. But it does bring together same-self with same-self, i.e. One Child with its many projections of its Self. All with the same function-self disguised by appearances. By different isolated-separated bodies substituting for different Mind-Loves with different functions.

Despite the appearance of diversity, body-brains -- the projections of a self-deluded unconscious Mind captive to the Joker, its own dark side -- have only one function: to maintain the dream. Through the deceptions of sensory perception aided and abetted by the domination of every field of inquiry by irrational bias. By the self-referential, circular-“reasoning” of body-brain-centric, authoritarian “realists” taken in by the Joker. By self-delusion. Minds receptive to insights from intuition, that are Mind-Love centric instead of body-brain centric, choose a second function. Not to be taken in by our material metaverse but to deny the denial of Reality-Truth. To recognize Child-the-One instead of the illusion of Child-the-many. To recognize same-self -- ourselves in “others” -- through the healing of Forgiveness.

The habit of the human mind for Free Choice to break

We all have the same function: to help our ancestral unconscious Mind awaken from its dream by healing the separation through Forgiveness. That’s all we can do. We don’t have the capacity inside the dream to provide the objectivity of Free Choice that Oneness-Being subjectivity needs to affirm Self-Awareness and extend Life-Creation. We have only the capacity to recognize same-self (Child) - same self. “Forgiveness” is recognizing One Child-Self. The Child awakens through the dream it’s dreaming. Through relationship with the illusory objects -- “others” -- that it’s imagined.

The purpose isn’t Creation though that’s the appearance. “Creation” inside a dream is an impossibility, part of the deception. The purpose is regaining Self-Awareness through an ability not available to the Child in Reality. The ability to recognize its Self in its reflection, as in a mirror, and not to mistake its reflection for an “other.” Children in the dream lack this ability before they’re two. Some animals with training can develop it. The Child’s loss of Consciousness took it into unfamiliar territory where it was exposed to its own reflection, the equivalent of a mirror, and lacked the ability to distinguish self from “other.”

There can be no “reflections” or “mirrors” in the Reality of Creation, just as there can be no opposites. Mirrors, reflections, and opposites are of the unreality of the unconscious. They’re the primary test of Free Choice: to develop the ability to distinguish between Self and reflection, between host-Light and parasite darkness, so that Free Choice is correct choice. The function of “mirror” in unreality, where projections of Child-the-many are illusions, is performed in Reality by real Lives. By real Selves with distinct functions that fit together in harmony through the Definitions of Logic and the Relationships of Love. Mirrors are needed to substitute for Real Selves in unreality because, despite appearances, there is only one Real Self, our unconscious ancestral Mind. There are no “other selves.” As body-brains are all projections they are also reflections. Unreal “others.” Creativity in Reality that’s inhabited by Real Selves has no need of mirrors.

The Joker’s perversion of “selves” in unreality is mirrors that reflect differences to achieve the illusion of “otherness.” Variety in body types, personalities, and many other distinguishing characteristics engineered to deceive. To hide the fact that we are the projections of our unconscious ancestral dreaming Mind. The perversion is mirrors that reflect objects that are illusions, not subjects. It was an object that the unconscious Child mistook for an “other,” not subject. Not itself. The archetypal-seminal mistake. That’s replicated through objectification, the habit of the human mind that, like projection, perpetuates the illusion.

The complicity of science

Science rejecting objectivity by failing to acknowledge its circular “reasoning” systematizes and institutionalizes the mistake. Attempts to lock it into human “consciousness.” Insists on applying “objectivity” to affirm subjective self -- humanity -- where there is no objectivity. Attempts to affirm self-“Life” via subjectivity that lacks objectivity needed to recognize subjectivity. Via self regarding same self in a mirror which leads to awakening from the dream, to escape from unreality back to Reality, instead of the goal of science which insists on seeing reality in an “other” in the mirror. Which insists on affirming the illusion, our universe.

Science must eventually realize that its inquiries are same selves regarding same selves -- themselves and not separate objects, energy in the form of organic and inorganic matter “studying” itself. When this happens, science will continue studying matter, but finally with its scope expanded to include Mind that’s behind energy-matter. That’s directing it.

Mind as direction of energy and therefore source of matter, whose exclusion from science’s “quest for knowledge” accounts for its bafflement. For the failure of every field of inquiry to find common cause in explaining the Big Bang, the origin of Life, and the Self-Awareness we call Consciousness. Quests for Knowledge that can’t possibly succeed on the basis of science’s body-matter-centric quantitative measurements alone. An irrationality that science and other fields of inquiry would have rejected long ago had analysis not embraced the deceptions of (controllable) sensory perception and shied away from spontaneous (uncontrollable) insights from Intuition. Had they not been stupid, an opinion that James Watson applied to many of his peers.

The stupid authoritarian “realism” that science has made of itself is bodies looking into mirrors pretending. Trying to convince itself and its gullible audience that it’s looking at “other” bodies instead of its same self. It can’t even get that right. It should be Mind inquiring into its own state. And if its state is dysfunctional then into the story of how it got that way. The evidence is incontrovertible that it is dysfunctional. Delusional. And that science and other fields of inquiry are failing. Are on the wrong track, not Logical.

The spectacular advance in civilization that wasn’t

The logical response is to do something different. If the technology for getting to the moon never got past liftoff rocket scientists would be expected to employ creative intelligence, the genius of humanity that left other animals in its wake. To look into other possibilities, to weigh and choose among them rationally. To redesign their rocket or abandon it for another technology if necessary. The logical response is to expand inquiry from its blinkered obsession with a universe of mystery and violence into intuiting the story of Mind. Of Mind that may be unconscious, in a dream state that’s conjuring the mystery. The logical response is to return to Parmenides who intuited with metaphysics 2500 years ago that physics -- matter -- is an illusion. That the route to Understanding is through Logic and Reason. Though Mind.

The logical response is to develop and apply the insights of metaphysics to the questions that body-centric approaches aren’t getting right and will never get right. A task that Plato took on but couldn’t complete because his own intuition wasn’t up to it. Because the matter of bodies and the matter of the cosmos fed him conflicting impressions of what’s real and his intellect couldn’t resolve the contradiction.

Had he been inspired by the metaphysics of Jesus and the 2nd-century Gnostic teacher Valentinus, himself inspired by Jesus; had he been inspired by Jesus’ Course in Miracles as well as by Parmenides’ Eleatics School, Plato could have resolved the contradiction. He could have formulated a complete, unambiguous theory of the origin, meaning, and purpose of Life in the material universe and changed history. Aristotle’s Lyceum could then have followed Plato’s Academy with a salutary shift from mind to matter that engaged both quantitative and qualitative aspects of learning in a synergistic, systems approach. In a seamless expansion of scope that tested Plato’s hypotheses against experimental scientific research. The outcome could have been a spectacular advance in civilization.

The curse of Plato?

That’s not what happened. What happened instead was a changing of the guard, from holistic mind-centric philosophy to body-centric science, that occasioned crippling fragmentation and isolation of learning to civilization’s detriment. What happened was loss of patience with Parmenides and Plato and a shift of loyalty to another pasture where the grass seemed greener. To matter, sensory perception, and quantitative measurements that didn’t put minds to the test they seem least qualified to pass: to the test of Logic. What happened was a grand instance of youthful folly, akin to loyalties shifting to authoritarian rule when they lose patience with democracy. Driven not by Logic but by a lack of creative intelligence and judgment that come with discipline and patience. By a lack of competence and maturity.

Plato had taken a direct approach to Understanding through mind-centric philosophy. A logical approach that fell short because he had not arrived in the sequence of Logic where the insights of Intuition had given him a complete, unobstructed view. Intuition would eventually deliver but not in Plato’s lifetime. All that was required of humanity, the projections of an unconscious Child, was patience.

Inclined by his mentor’s experience, by a body-sensing personality type, genetics, and other conditions, Aristotle went on a roundabout approach through body-centric science. Causing a historic fork in the road that’s yielded amazing results, helpful both to science and every other field. But far short of what a holistic, systems approach would likely have accomplished in far less time. Had Aristotle not repurposed inquiry instead of expanding it Western Thought today could well be enlightened with Understanding.

Where is Western Thought instead? Chained in its Plato’s cave of biases, contradictions, and misunderstanding. Of authoritarian “realism.” Call it the Curse of Plato. Call it a perversion of Plato’s cause: Justice!

The indomitable Voice of the Child: Free Choice

The Voice of the Child, enabled and empowered by the Voice that speaks for Logic-Love, its Parents, is the expression of Free Choice. Voice that speaks for Reality and Truth. For the Worth of Being, of Life-Creation. For Self and Self-Awareness. For Consciousness. It may be stilled temporarily. But inevitably, in time, it will speak and be heard. It will express itself for the Worth of Life-Creation. For Truth against lies and deceit that would take away its Being, replace it with its opposite. With another voice that speaks for contradiction. For fear, rage, and guilt. For herd mentality and tribal hatred. For insanity. For nothing.

What is Hope against the perversion of Plato’s cause? Against the youthful folly of authoritarian “realism?” The indomitable Voice of the Child. The Voice of Free Choice.

The logical case for science giving up its illogical insistence that matter is real begins with this: it judges all that sensory perception detects to be measurable and therefore real. Plato held that what is Real is not the object but the idea or thought of it. He thereby took the locus of determination outside of matter, where it did not belong, and placed it within Mind where it did belong. He did so not on the basis of “verifiable” scientific experimentation but on the basis of Logic. He was a “rationalist,” a philosopher who trusted Reason to guide him to Reality and Truth.

Yet he believed in the reality of the material cosmos – the inspiration of what he perceived to be an expression of the Divine. Had he reconciled this belief with his doubt that the uninspiring human body and its material trappings could also be real he might have followed sensory perception into the study of matter. He might even have done so with some of the passion he devoted to Mind.

Aristotle’s paradigm shift away from Plato’s rationalism toward science, the belief that the study of matter, the stuff of sensory perception, can lead to Reality and Truth, was not, as science would have us believe, a categorical renunciation of Plato’s Logic nor of its theories. It was simply an acknowledgement that they couldn’t be proven. While sensory perception, with its access to plants and animals and the like, does offer a kind of “proof” for the theories of science.

While neither Plato nor Aristotle could go anywhere with the belief that the reality of an object lay in the thought of it, or with Plato’s hesitation over its unreality, both were in agreement that Mind is nevertheless Real. Both were therefore in agreement that an object did not depend for its reality on its being perceived by the body’s senses. Why? Because Mind does not depend for its Reality on being perceived by the body’s senses. Science that would have us believe that only that which can be thus perceived is provably real contradicts the reality of Mind. Contradicts the source of all of science’s contributions to the “quest for knowledge”: Mind. Contradicts itself, the minds of scientists who engage in self-referential thinking, the absurd notion that bodies that belong to the same material environment, subject to identical “laws” of science, can objectively judge its reality.

Hawking’s “quest for knowledge” belongs in quotes because, with circular reasoning, we must acknowledge that even with sensory perception to guide science we can never truly “know” anything. We can perceive it, but perception is perception. It is, in fact, not even the body’s senses that make perception but the psychological act of projection. We are a long way from objects telling us anything about themselves but their appearances, and appearances are deceiving. In fact, this may well be their main purpose: to deceive, and science that puts its faith in appearances may be its willing victim.

To approach Knowledge of our Self and the environment that is our true Home – our origin and our destination – is to fall back on the Intuition, the reflections and thoughts, of the rationalist Plato for guidance. To fall back on Logic, because the body and its ally science, that conveniently ignores the immateriality of Mind, is leading us in circles. To the behavior of matter – quantum mechanics – that calculates to perfection but doesn’t add up.

What happened to the celebrity of Einstein and the promise of physics: the theory of everything? This was to be the crowning achievement of Aristotle’s instinct. It disappeared and along with it the fanfare of physics. We continue on with the labors of science, breaking new ground in other fields, still refusing to accept the Logic of Mind that Reality need not and does not depend on the sensate body. Science that lionizes the truth refuses to face fact. Science that prides itself on the intellectual rigor of its theories and their predictions, on impeccable Logic, accepts blatant contradiction. Science that purges itself of religious and political bias indulges in its own institutional bias worthy of the Church.

In science we aren’t dealing with an expression of Plato’s or Aristotle’s ideals. We’re dealing with a perversion of a rationalist’s ideal of the highest and best use of Mind: to seek Reality and Truth by whatever means that meet the test of Logic.

It is time, over a century since Bohr and the Copenhagen Interpretation acknowledged it, for science and philosophy both to turn to Logic. To acknowledge that the simultaneous reality of two opposing states – Mind not-matter and matter not-mind – does not meet the test of Logic. To acknowledge that between Mind and matter, the opposite matter can’t be real. To assume otherwise is to contradict Plato and Aristotle and declare that Mind is not Real.

There will always be much to learn from the study of matter, but finding Reality and the Truth behind appearances isn’t it. The “quest for knowledge” must turn back in earnest to Plato and his unfinished philosophy. To Logic.

Does all this make me a doubter of science, a denier? My prayers at weekly prayer meetings in my youth invariably concluded with appeals to God for special consideration, not on my behalf but on behalf of scientists. And for this I was teased. My concern about their performance is motivated by admiration, not animosity. I do not wish to weaken their intellectual, cultural, or political support but to strengthen it. To make their heroic work less vulnerable to attack from their unthinking doubters, not more so. If my views appear to put me in the company of the opposition, I am the loyal opposition. I want science and its “quest for knowledge” to succeed, not to fail.

So, No, I am not a denier, nor am I an enemy of Democracy. I am a fan of both who understands that Free Choice cannot endure without the Free Spirit of Inquiry. We just have to get it right.

Logos: . . . human reasoning about the cosmos. . . Identified with God, it is the source of all activity . . . the power of reason . . the word of God, which itself has creative power and is God’s medium of communication with the human race. . . divine wisdom . . . .

Logic: . . . Valid reasoning. . . The relationship between elements and between an element and the whole in a set of objects, individuals, principles, or events. . . .

[American Heritage Dictionary]

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The Interconnectedness of Logic

Everything and nothing are subject to Logic including Mind. Everything and nothing are conditions that have attributes not necessarily in Reality or unreality, but in Logic.

Logic is its own state governed by its own rules, by its own conditions and their attributes. Enforced by its own authority, Energy. It is its own source, authority, and legitimacy. What it is and what it does are one in the same: implications.

Follow the money –Deep Throat’s advice to Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward when they were unraveling a notorious political cover-up for the Washington Post that would end a U.S. administration. Advice that turned up answers because they were interconnected by the coherence and cohesion of Logic.

There is no question, no place, no self in Mind or no-Mind, in Reality or unreality, that cannot be positioned somewhere in this interconnectedness and set in motion forward toward the premises, hypotheses, and predictions of theories that are Logic’s own guidance. It is, and cannot be by its own Logic, subject to guidance, influence, or control from any source outside of itself. In the context of Logic there are no “others” and no opposites of Logic in a state of opposites, for even illogic has its Logic: the conditions, attributes, and implications of not being Logic.

The Energy and Discipline of Logic

The Energy of Logic flows from implications and interconnections never being at rest, never being finished, never not being in motion forward. From Energy at the “beginning,” in timelessness, the start of the sequence of Logic, when the state of statelessness could not rest without yielding to its opposite, the state of Mind-Being. The Oneness of Mind-Being is eternally at rest, but being the seed of Creation its Logic required events that led to eternal unrest: the marriage of the Child’s Parents, Mind with Love, and the Child’s role in Creation with Free Will. It was Freedom of Choice that logically could not remain at rest within Oneness. It was the Logic of Creation and the Child’s role in it that brought forth the state of opposites.

The Energy of Logic follows it everywhere throughout the state of opposites:

* from the Reality, Creations, Life, Light, and Worth of the Child’s Consciousness and Creativity, which yield to the essence, purity, and beauty of their Logic

* to the illogic of their opposites, the unreality of destruction, death, darkness, and worthlessness of mindlessness, non-being, inertia, and fear, attributes of unconsciousness.

While Logic is employed by Mind for Mind’s stance of Being, it is not controlled by anything. Logic is its own discipline because it is discipline: the discipline of attributes, implications, and their interconnections. The discipline of definition. It is its own Being because its implications and interconnections are everywhere and infinite. There can be no end to how “deep” and how “far” they go because they are their own context, their own universe. They can “exist” with equal force in the infinity of timelessness – in the eternal Now – and in the temporality of past and future, with only a “present” that can’t be a Now.

Logic is in Mind but of itself, its own state whose scope, whose reach, extends beyond Mind and its state of Being, Oneness, Reality, Creation, Worth, and their illusory opposites to the separation between Mind and no-mind – statelessness -- that is no illusion. To the seed of Energy, the eternal restlessness of Inquiry, the singularity, the Logical origin and sequencing of everything from one point to the next: Logic.

The Logic and Illogic of Separation

Separation between statelessness and its opposite, Mind-Being, can be no illusion because the state of opposites has two dimensions: one the context of the Child’s part in Parent-Mind’s Reality-Creation which exists side-by-side with the possibility of unconsciousness and its illusion of unreality and dream of untruth – our material world. The other lies beyond Reality-Creation with an entirely different possibility from the beginning: the seminal possibility of statelessness, of no mind, no being, that aroused the power of Logic, its Energy, to produce its opposite.

So, while it is true, as Jesus teaches in A Course in Miracles, that separation is not Real within the Child’s context of Reality-Creation, in the sequence of events that preceded the Child, separation of a kind, between the Mind that produced Reality-Creation and the possibility of its opposite, had to be Real. Real not in the sense of Reality as a part of Creation but as a part of Logic.

There are many “separations” within the interconnectedness of Logic that are no more than definitions that distinguish rather than separate. Distinctions between the Selves of Reality Creations -- Father Mind and Mother Love, Parents and Child, Child and his living Creations. Distinctions between the thoughts of a Child-Mind that’s Conscious and a Child-mind that’s unconscious. All combined in one state of Mind by the interconnectedness of Logic.

Outside of Reality-Creation, the state that preceded it and exists beyond it, separation is more than a distinction. It has actual possibilities, not merely unreal possibilities, and is therefore consequential. Because everything and the only thing that connects opposites is the fact that they are opposites. Is the link established through the implications of Logic and their interconnections. Is the Logic – “Logos” – that ties everything together. The tying-of-everything-together that may be the notion of “God.”

“God” at Peace and War

“God” may be a synonym for the Child’s Parents Mind-Love in Reality-Creation, though “Parents” will suffice. I have avoided the notion of “God” but acknowledge it now because I have experienced a “felt perception of the interconnectedness of things.” It was spontaneous, un-premeditated, with only one other experience, a long time ago, to prepare me for it. It was of mind and feeling in an abstract way but also deeply personal, intimate. The Logic of intimacy is something very precious that is forever. Like being touched by Love. Who has not felt it at some time in their lives? Who does not want to feel it?

I riff. “God” may be the Force that comes from not being at rest, that endlessly seeks Order: Perfection, Resolution, Peace – the whole number value of Pi. That seeks wholeness, harmony, unity. Force-Energy at the beginning that couldn’t be at rest with the condition of statelessness, that was caused by the logically untenable, illogical condition of statelessness that required resolution, inevitably led to the state of opposites with the birth of the Child with Freedom of Choice and a central role in Creation.

God-Logos seeking Order-resolution thus produced not only eternal irresolution-competition but a second source of Energy: from friction between opposites. An attribute of disorder, of irresolution and its unrest, is constant, eternal Force-Energy, of a Will toward resolution and rest without friction, without competition and conflict. The Will of God-Logos may be eternally toward Peace. Yet the ultimate source of conflict-unrest may also be a God-Logos of Peace and Order not being at Peace, being in opposition to the condition of statelessness, of no Mind-Being, unable logically to be at rest with it. God-Logos in opposition to itself: the Will to Peace whose Logic eventually produced the state of opposites. The state of eternal conflict.

The Dark Matter of Science and the Allegory of Plato’s Cave

Plato’s philosophy ended before it could be finished. It ran into a contradiction in his Logic: the unreality of body-matter versus the reality of cosmos-matter. Parmenides, his mentor, saw no contradiction: all appearances are illusory. But Plato's pupil, Aristotle, took thought in another direction. He moved Plato’s inquiry off the attributes and implications of Mind onto the attributes and implications of matter. It was a momentous, historic shift, for philosophy that was to guide Western thought ever since moved away from Reason onto the study of biology and a beginning in science. To science’s “quest for knowledge,” guided by the body’s senses: the Logic of sensory perception that at once enlightens us and confuses us. That ultimately condemns us to captivity in the darkness of Plato’s Cave.

An inquiring and honest mind confused by matter will make a mistake in Judgment. But in its consequences science’s faith in the body’s senses is anything but a harmless mistake. Far from living up to its promise, it’s produced an atrocity: mass extinction. In the darkness of Plato’s Cave we bring our children and grandchildren into an expiring world.

How long must this go on?

* Until the thread of Plato’s inquiry into the Logic of Mind is picked up again by philosophy and pursued with serious intent.

* Until science’s “quest for knowledge” is freed from its illogical premise: the reality of matter.

* Until Logic is re-established in the affairs of a species intent on its own destruction because it chooses to be guided by a substitute illusory self that has no Memory of Logic or the wish to retrieve it.

* Until humanity that lives by an impossibility, the belief that we are bodies disconnected and isolated, each of us our own singularity, our own specialness, authors of our own truths, rulers of our delusional worlds, gives up the insane belief that by abandoning the limits of Logic we achieve Freedom.

Insanity – the Logic of illogic: equating opposites. The “logic” of our delusions that equate captivity with Freedom. Pain with pleasure, suffering and death with Happiness and Life. That equate matter, that can only be a projection of Mind unconscious, with Reality that can only be a Creation of Mind that’s Conscious. Matter, that can only be an appearance in a dream - a façade, a deceit -- with Truth.

Our world beset by entropy plunges forward with technology that pits one against another while there is yet to be seen any movement toward unity in our minds. Any glimmer, any hope, of sanity. Aristotle’s paradigm shift has run its course in one branch of science, quantum mechanics, that openly questions the reality of matter. Is it not time to ask: what will lead us out of Plato’s Cave? How do we awaken?

The Way Home Is Logic

Follow the Logic. Start with the attributes of our circumstances – the facts. Reflect on their implications and let their interconnections carry us forward. Never mind wishes and fears, the lures and distractions of entertaining thoughts, the seductive pleasures of sensations and feelings, the satisfactions of ownership and investment in the foolishness and corruption of “wealth” and “power.” Be done with the allure of opposites, appearances and deceptions that offer self-gratification and deliver nothing of Worth. Be done with the losing of “winning,” the ruination of relationships meant to share and empower with Truth, that succumb instead to the delusion of possession and control.

Everything I have is who I am. The Child of Parents Mind married to Love. Free Will. This is the Truth. Not what this world of matter tells us. Not what we have “learned” in Plato’s Cave: “Everything I am is what I have.” An object possessed and controlled. No wonder our world is a descent into self-devouring self-interests! No wonder we can’t “win” for losing! No wonder we can’t think!

Follow the Logic. Turn to the side of Mind governed by Logic that employs Logic. That’s married to Love and would never deviate from the caring, the sharing and empowerment of its values, its Worth. It will take us home.

Where can Logic be found? What is Memory for? That’s where it can be found: in Intuition. What is Mind for that isn’t cluttered with the daily busy-ness of the brain? That’s where Logic can be found: in Thinking. In what thinking does: Reasoning.

Who says so? Our own Minds say so. Who will lead its occupants out of Plato’s Cave? They will. With their own native ability to Think. With Logic.