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Published on Leave a comment on Personality Type Theory: the Problem of Opposites and the Lure of the “Other”

The spoiler

Maybe it was because she was born at the turn of the 20th century, in 1900. Her thoughts and feelings always teetering on the edge, drawn back into the 19th century. The glory days of the Clays of Kentucky, her ancestors -- statesmen, aristocrats. That gave my mother her gift for reflection. We both liked to reflect when the meal was done. Her gaze would drift out the window, through the trees into the sky beyond, and she was gone. Lost in thought. Lost to memory.

She could have gone on forever about her childhood. In a small college town in the hills of Western Pennsylvania, her family a single working mother with an only child. Church, piano, and friends. Silliness and laughter. College football and dances at the Fort Pitt Hotel in Pittsburgh. Familiar names and faces waving back from trolleys. She knew them all. An ideal of Utopian innocence that became the Utopian innocence of my childhood. Not particularly Utopian or innocent in either case, yet transcendent.

She wouldn’t go on forever if the subject was herself. She said she was afraid of what she would find if she looked too far within. Her voice went to singsong. And then it was over. The reflections stopped. Utopian beacons of innocence OK, guilt lurking in the shadows not OK. Leave it be.

Leave everything be that’s actually interesting. About ourselves and the people in our lives. Be content instead with what’s on the surface. With trinkets and dog food. Let guilt or whatever it is smash up the furniture in the darkness unmolested. Keep your distance.  Don’t be unsociable. Mustn’t shine a light. Mustn’t disturb the demon. Mustn’t intrude with the Truth. 

The world of personality types unexamined

Personality type theory intrudes. With analysis that would expose the fearsome thing within clinically, objectively. Deprive it of its animal passion dispassionately. The mindless will of the beast that resides in our animal brain: allegiance to the tribe, blood and soil. Honoring the code of loyalty. Unquestioning loyalty to Plato’s Cave and its Cave-master. To its unquestioned authority.

All of it a masquerade. A farce that mocks us with its provocations for being unable or unwilling to understand it. For being afraid to go there, afraid of the Truth. For being so easily separated from all that’s dear to us by a con artist behind a silly mask. A mask that goads us into making something of nothing. Whose only weapon is the treasure that we hand over to it. The cache of powers and abilities, valuables and talents, that is us. Our identity. Our Self.

Projected in two parts into a strange new world. An alternate “reality” of body-brains divided into personality types guaranteed to keep the farce going. Into compositions of parts that take the stage each in its own costume with its own tribal insignia. Ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, function and rank, talents, tastes, predatory styles, family mythology, and more. A few revealing individuality, the rest hiding it behind uniforms with numbers. Clones marching in lockstep.

All at the ready to manage the differences without understanding “there” or how or why they got there. Without self-awareness. All at the ready not to manage the differences but to bring them into conflict. To imagine that this must be their purpose and so to throw themselves into the melee with abandon. Into chaos, the state of a world of personality types unknown, unexamined, misunderstood. 

Schiller’s choice: idealism or realism

Myers-Briggs personality type theory evolved from the disciplines of philosophy and psychology. Specifically from the practice and intuition of the Swiss analytical psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) and, before him, the ideas of the German poet, philosopher, and playwright Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). Jung’s Psychological Types (1921) is the first formulation of the basic types popularized by Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers: introvert-extravert, intuition-sensing, thinking-feeling. [Isabel Myers, Gifts Differing (1980)]

The choice presented to the observer logically takes the form of competition between two Myers-Briggs personality opposites: intuitive-reflective thinking vs. body-sensing feeling. The former inherently introverted, introspective-subjective, the latter inherently extraverted-objective. The choice is thus between types fashioned by sources whose reality resides within Mind, i.e. the world of thoughts-ideas, or in the external world of bodies-brains and other objects discernible by bodies’ senses.

Myers-Briggs captures the deep divide within the self-deluded Mind of the one Child, and therein lies the brilliance of its intuition. In the clarity of opposition between two sets of faculties, one concentrated in INTJ, the other in ESFP: introversion-reflection-thinking-judging vs. extraversion-sensing-feeling-perceiving. The former entirely mind-centered, the latter entirely body-centered, although to say that feeling can be entirely distinguished from thinking is an oversimplification. Not so but close enough.

INTJ is associated with the conscious thinking of mind that subjectifies. ESFP is associated with the unthinking will of emotion, seated in the body’s animal brain, that objectifies. INTJ is associated with the deliberation and civilizing conscience of Logic and Love that resides in mind. ESFP is associated with action and its socializing discipline seated in the brain’s prefrontal cortex. INTJ is associated with being, ESFP with doing. INTJ with right, ESFP with win. Share vs. own-possess. Affirm vs. rule. Empower from the bottom up, control from the top down. Individual Worth vs. group-tribal supremacy.

The choice is between “idealism” and “realism,” two irreconcilable worlds described by Schiller as “. . . an opposition which is responsible for the fact that no work of the mind and no deed of the heart can make a decisive success with one class, without thereby drawing upon it a condemnation from the other. This opposition is, without doubt, as old as the beginning of culture. . . .” [quoted in C. G. Jung, Psychological Types (Must Have Books 2019, p. 168)].

Personality type is bias.

The mind that imagines itself to be above the fray, objective, dispassionate, and so qualified to heal the separation, only adds to the turmoil. Personality type sitting in judgment of personality types is a fool. The bias of personality type compromises the Logic of explanation. Turns discussion among friends into debate among competitors.

Plato’s virtuous philosopher who blunders into the Cave may view himself as Truth-bearing sunlight, but to the menagerie of personality types within he’s just another personality type. Who happens to be Truth-bearing sunlight, but who asked for Truth? Who wants sunlight? They don’t or they wouldn’t be there. If the houselights need to be turned up on their fun, their delusion, it’ll happen when someone gets around to it.

So let the author confess and maybe we can get on with it. Let the reader put whatever the author has to say into context where it might add to understanding instead of misunderstanding. Are you eager to listen or itching to retaliate? In either case it could be because I’m an introvert. An intuitive-thinking-judging introvert. Either the thoughtful, compassionate, accessible, respectful, lovable INTJ or the moralizing, superior, elitist, aloof, interventionist, hated INTJ. All depends on your point of view. On your personality type. If you see me as one or the other it would be because I am one or the other.

Fetch!

How does my bias affect my judgment? According to Jung, the American philosopher William James (1842-1910) “was the first to indicate . . . the extraordinary importance of temperament in the shaping of philosophical thinking,” and what James noticed was that the idealist and “empiricist” (realist) “believes the other to be inferior to itself.” [quoted in Jung, op. cit. 373-374).

I, the idealist, believe that “realists” are fools. Chasing after material objects their senses detect without realizing that they’re playing fetch. Without realizing that the objects are their own tail, put there by their own bodies’ senses, directed by their own corrupted minds. Being chased for a purpose: so they’ll make fools of themselves. So their easily distractable minds won’t realize that they’re canines on a leash. And the figure at the other end of the leash is amusing itself at their expense. Keeping them from the Truth: that it, their bodies, and their fascinating material universe, are an illusion. Action-comics escapist nonsense. A flimsy, one-dimensional joke that I find genuinely amusing when it isn’t horrifying. This is how my temperament affects my judgment.

One or the “other”?

Delving within to uncover the mysteries of the human Psyche with personality type theory has another drawback besides bias. It implicitly reinforces a lie. One of the central pillars that hold up an entire edifice of lies, the alternate “reality” that we call home. “Life” on “earth,” each an illusion. The premise that we are isolated-separated bodies with brains inhabiting a material world of objects organic and inorganic. A world of interaction among individual selves and “others.” An illusion because it’s a logical impossibility. It can’t be.

The designation of personality types for purposes of analysis necessarily objectifies them. It recognizes them as “others” separate from our one ancestral mind when logically there can only be one ancestral Mind. A Mind that metaphysics tells me is a Child. The Child of Parents who reside in Reality linked to our alternate “reality” by a sequence of cause and effect.

A Child who was given a critical role in Creation: the role of Free Choice. Who lost consciousness and mistook its own shadow-opposite for a separate self. Who was thereby misled into projecting a perverted version of itself into an alternate “reality” -- the dream that is our material world -- to escape Reality. Who must now pass through this world to gain maturity and the competence to perform its role. Who must, with the help of its projections -- us -- regain Consciousness.

The underlying Reality

If humanity is to do its part it can’t repeat the Child’s mistake. It must recognize that Reality is one Child-Mind and there are no “others.” It must stop objectifying its own dark side as an “other.” And it must stop making its own dark side and the dark sides of “others” real by projecting unwanted, painful aspects of itself onto “others.”

Unless personality type analysis recognizes the underlying Reality of one ancestral Mind, one Child, at the outset; unless it takes a position against objectifying any type as an “other,” it will be misunderstood. It will perpetuate the cycle of misperception and misjudgment instead of achieving its purpose: to break the cycle with Understanding.

Myers=Briggs doesn’t inquire into its origin in metaphysics. It doesn’t ask or explain why or how it came about beyond the study of human psychology within the physical environment defined by sensory perception -- humanity’s “reality.” Beyond spontaneous insights from humanity’s sixth sense, the voice that can’t be silenced. These are my speculations. Myers-Briggs stands on the accuracy of its formulation -- on how well it aligns with subjective experience and perception. That is, on whether it makes sense and delivers results, and it does. 

The nature of feeling 

There are two types of feeling, one that’s an essential part of thinking, the other that’s opposed to thinking. Values required for evaluation are rooted in feeling, and evaluation is required for reasoning that supports the choices and decisions of judgment. Logic and Love can’t function independently and neither can thinking-reasoning and feeling-evaluation. For the same reason: one completes the other. To be a thinking type in the Myers-Briggs sense would be to limit judgment to quantitative measurements without input from subjective values, the incomplete “reasoning” of a machine. If personality type categories are to represent complete human functions then thinking requires feeling.

The brain’s amygdala -- our animal-reptilian brain -- is a source of unevolved emotion that ties back to pre-human ancestors and also to tribal-predatory passion. Which makes it a source for body-sensing’s feeling-sensation and reasoning-evaluation both. Yet it makes more sense for this source to be associated with the body-sensing type than the mind-centered thinking type. Animal will is notoriously opposed to thinking. It’s the cherished ideal of those who march in lock step to the force of “nature.” To the Triumph of the Will over all opposition. Body-sensing types opposed to thinking.

The 5-Factor theory: Myers-Briggs in reverse

Albert Einstein once observed that scientists aren’t strong in Logic. Logic is the faculty of Mind that enables analysis; that in turn fits parts together in logical order to form explanation; that in turn enables understanding. Its function is to establish purpose and meaning from the baseline condition. To establish context, not to reason what to do about it which is a separate faculty of Mind.

A good illustration of Einstein’s observation is the so-called “5-Factor” theory of personality type. The theory and its five factors -- extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism -- claim scientific legitimacy by its use of quantitative measurements. As if this alone legitimizes its “quest for knowledge.” It can’t if their accuracy and relevance to the subject are open to question. Quantitative measurements can’t be any more conducive to legitimacy than the qualitative analysis that went into the other theory. Not if the subject is forces beyond the observable universe that shape the human Psyche.

The difference between the two theories is the difference between mind-centric and body-centric. Specifically the difference between the qualitative intuition of subjectivity which can’t be verified by sensory perception and quantitative measurements which can. The Logic of the Myers-Briggs types is based on the empirical practice of psychology as well as the a priori Logic of philosophy. Both solid analytical ground for their subject. To suggest that the 5-Factor theory is more “scientific” for being quantitative is to demean any analysis that can’t be quantitative.

Spontaneous intuition plays a prominent part in every field; science included. Intuition couldn’t have played a part in the 5-Factor theory if Jung and Myers-Briggs came first. What did play a part was retaliation: the definition of an alternate theory by its opposite. Which is all that the 5-Factor theory is: not original thinking from anywhere but a copycat version of Myers-Briggs in reverse. The difference between the two theories is the difference between sense and nonsense.

A manifesto of tribal dominance

What are its “factors” but a transparent ploy by bias? To redirect humanity’s self-identity away from the possibility of mind-awareness and individuality suggested by the intuition of Myers-Briggs back toward the body-awareness and collectivity of the herd. Back toward “nature:” the beast swinging from trees. What are the five factors but deceptions:

  • “Extraversion” that leaves out introversion would make of introversion an unnamed, unrecognized subset of itself. The “logic” of which can only be numbers that confirm that, yes, there are more extraverts than introverts. And so extraverts “win” and whoever “wins” dominates. The law of the animal will. Numbers deployed in service to the irrational.
  • “Agreeability” is sociability required by tribal conformity that triumphs over independent judgment required by individual character, honesty, and integrity. Agreeability is smiling, ass-kissing obeisance to authority, superficiality that masks its mindless animal will. Incapable of trusting or being trusted. Positive on the surface, something very different underneath.
  • “Openness” is the pose of inclusiveness and accessibility adopted by sensory perception. “Open” in the exhilaration of discovery to the world of its five senses, closed to the Logic and Love of Understanding, purpose and meaning, from its sixth sense. The triumph of matter and senselessness over mind and sense. Of body-sensing over mind-intuition.
  • “Conscientiousness” is the tribe’s self-congratulatory feeling for its own: tenderness toward its children and specialness toward its members. Set off against the unfeeling that it directs toward “others,” the competition: indifference, insensitivity and cruelty, rage and hatred. Self-justification, the false innocence of helpless victimhood that masks harmfulness and guilt. The absence of Love.
  • “Neuroticism” is psychosis -- detachment from reality -- that affirms the root of psychological pain not in Mind corrupted by self-delusion but in neurons of the brain contaminated by chemicals. That would relegate any dissent from independent judgment against the unquestioned authority of “agreeability” to the status of mental illness.

The 5-Factor theory is five values shared and reinforced by tribe. A manifesto of tribal identity over one Self, supremacy over other tribes, and dominance over individuals. Crushing the spirit out of individuality, the atrocity that is authoritarian supremacy and the global threat to democracy and world order. The opposite of science’s vaunted objectivity and anything but “conscientious.” It is the work of a con artist. A farce.

The 5-Factor theory’s real intent

If there is bias in the choice between theories it is the bias of personality type that’s built into the claim of every field whether “subjective” or “objective.” Mine is the bias of the INTJ type. But the so-called “more scientific” theory has its own bias: the extraverted objective body-sensing feeling type. Which accounts for Einstein’s observation that Logic is not the strong suit of scientists: they’re letting bodies’ senses dominate their “thinking” instead their minds. Instead of mind over matter they put their faith in matter over mind. A logical absurdity.

The 5-Factor theory may present itself as an alternative to the idealist Jung / Myers-Briggs theory but the realist’s actual intent is to replace it. Their opposition is part of a larger philosophical divide that’s been with us forever and may go on forever so long as realists cling to their five senses and fear their sixth.

Myers-Briggs is on solid ground

It bears repeating that the mindset of science is grounded in the religion of sensory perception. In the unquestioned supremacy of the body’s senses -- taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound -- to establish the baseline condition. Thereby denying any but a tangential role for the sixth sense of intuition. For a perspective not grounded in sensory perception that our sixth sense routinely reminds us is there. Which makes of science not a mindset grounded in Logic but in professional and institutional bias as irrational as any it’s had to deal with from its ancient enemy, the Church.

It bears repeating that personality type theory that’s grounded in the Logic of mind-centered philosophy, corroborated by the practice and intuition of analytical psychology, is on far more solid ground, more accurate and more to be trusted, than theory that relies on the quantitative measurements of a body-centered science that distrusts the intuition and Logic of Mind.

Captive to the dark lord of the body

Freudian psychoanalysis was earthbound. Centered on physiological causes of behavior termed “neurotic” because neurons -- brain chemistry -- explained it. Freud’s protégé, Carl Jung, broke with his mentor to look elsewhere, into what mind had to reveal about the condition of the human Psyche instead of mindless, procreative urges of the body. The distinction between mind- and body-centered psychology brought about a seismic shift in orientation away from humanity identified with tribes, disciplined by the conformity of belonging, to humanity identified with individuals liberated, enabled, and empowered by family.

The shift didn’t go far enough to liberate Jung from an earthbound perspective. But turning away from the body’s five senses to mind’s sixth sense did liberate others who followed his lead. The lead of a personality type now flooded with insights into what caused his seismic break with Freud: the baffling difference in their personality types that impeded communication and understanding and yet accounted for a remarkable intuitive grasp of moving parts that make up the personality. The psychological equivalent of physics breaking down the atom, opening up a new world of possibilities for analysis and discovery. Not without resistance, because even though analysis guided by Logic-Love from the sixth sense has made inroads, every field remains captive to the tyranny of the five senses. To the dark lord of the body.

“Fate” isn’t happenstance.

Hence the appearance of body-centered competition with Jung’s mind-centered personality type theory. The 5-Factor system that matches the number of senses that produced it. Beginning with “agreeability” that, like the other components has but one overriding purpose: to pull humanity’s identity back from the Jung / Myers-Briggs system’s focus on the individuality to tribe. Because this is how the mind of one Child corrupted by its opposite, Child-the-many, views itself. Not as an individual but as a group. Not as an individual with self-awareness and Free Choice, guided by deliberation, but as an animal-herd willed by instinct, driven by emotion.

It's a mistake to think that because evolution seems to progress by happenstance that it’s not willed by mind. It is willed by mind but in a state that’s captive to delusion. And it’s for us, its projections inhabiting a mad dream, with guidance from Logic-Love, to help break the cycle of happenstance, restore order, and bring it back to Reality.

The captivity is intentional. Whether we are aware of it or not. It is willed by Mind in a state that’s not functioning properly. That’s corrupted -- out of its mind. And the will that won’t allow us to understand who we are, that insists that we can’t be individuals supported by family, that we can only be tribes forcing their members into conformity, competing with one another for dominance, destroying one another in a mad quest to rule without opposition, to eliminate competition, is anything but happenstance. Is anything but the accidents and mistakes that define evolution as we know it. It’s purposeful. And when it shows up in the guise of “agreeability,” all good-guy likability and humor, it does not wish us well. It means to keep us captive to what it is and all that it is: self-delusion. Mistaken identity. The idea that we are who and what we aren’t: our opposites.

The only “factors” that matter: Logic and Love

By abandoning the straits of physiology in Freudian psychology Jung’s sixth sense took a first step toward accessing another perspective. The perspective of Logic-Love that never left the Mind that’s mistaken. The perspective that never deluded itself into mistaken identity. That recognizes us only for who we are and not for who we aren’t. And offers the choice of a guide who has no intention of anything but our freedom to grow and create as we will, according to our own unique gifts and our own individuality. Individuality that Jung’s intuition with personality types can now be managed not for the purpose of service to warring animal tribes but in service to Creativity -- the order and harmony of Logic inseparable from Love.

This is the context of Jung’s insights and the personality type theory that evolved into Myers-Briggs. This is the context, too, of the body-centered so-called “scientific” 5-Factor theory that means to replace it. That’s doing the bidding not of science but of self-delusion. The only “factors” that matter are Logic and Love.

Why opposites?

Logic-Love says everything in Reality-Creation must have a definition that defines what it is and what it does. So that it can be known and recognized by Logic-Love, the gatekeepers to Reality-Creation responsible for fitting all its constituents together. In logical harmony or order, which means without contradiction.

The definition of anything except Oneness logically implies the existence in some form of its opposite. If one thing must exist then why not its opposite? A question that Logic-Love can’t wave away because it’s inconvenient. Or because it spoils perfection if perfection is a state of rest where there are no more implications of Logic to pursue, no more connections and relationships of Love to be made. Where Energy has no more work to do. In short, where there is no point to Reality-Creation and so what can it do but shut down.

Why Free Choice?

Eternal Peace -- a state of impossibility so long as Mind / Logic-Love exists. Since it, too, is defined by what it does as well as by what it is. Since Reality-Creation is both what it is and what it does. Everything under the laws of cause and effect, the Force of Necessity: Reality-Creation is Worth and has Worth because it earns Worth. “Worth” that can’t come about any other way. Thus there can be no Being without Doing. Observing, thinking, feeling, or judging without acting.

The notion of “heaven” as eternal peace, where all is at rest and nothing happens, is the flip side of the notion that we are where the “action” is. Because we aren’t at rest. We’re in eternal conflict and therefore something must be “happening.” Both sides of an absurd notion equally deluded, equally mistaken.

The original circumstance that calls for Logic-Love to define with meaning and purpose was and is itself. Where we come from: Worth. We have Worth because we are Worth. And the affirmation, enablement, and empowerment of Worth by Free Choice is our mission whether we are one Child-Mind functioning with Free Choice unimpaired in orderly Creation or the appearance of many body-brains trying to function with Free Choice messed with in a disorderly dream.

Why it’s hard to understand.

The relationship that emerges between opposites and Reality-Creation is a strange one that’s baffled the best minds down through the ages. It’s hard to grasp that opposites can’t co-exist with Reality-Creation when it’s also true that they’re a necessary part of it. It’s hard to grasp:

  • when the explanation involves one Mind, one Consciousness, that performs two distinct functions that would contradict one another if they overlapped and thereby un-define all of Reality-Creation.
  • When one of these functions cannot encounter error and exist in a state of unconsciousness while the other can.
  • When the second function must operate on a lower plane of Creation since it and its plane are extensions of the first. Inferior to the superior in line of authorship-succession but not in line of control since neither superior nor inferior has anything to do with control.
  • When the second function encounters the parasite that is its opposite in a state of unconsciousness, deludes itself into reversing roles, and imagines that it has projected itself into a world opposite to Reality-Creation.
  • When the alternate “reality” is our world made “real” by Energy, the source of matter and the agent of Mind. And now the agent of its opposite, an illusionist. The enabler of a magician’s act meant to perpetuate its world of opposites. Our self-delusion.

The mother of injustice

“Control” is misperception of the laws of cause and effect of Reality-Creation, backed by the Force of Necessity, to which Mind itself and all of its definitions are subject. Think of the “Force” in Star Wars without the rule of absolute authority dispensed arbitrarily from the top down. Applied instead from the bottom up at the direction of Logic and Love in enablement and empowerment of Creation instead of itself.

Otherwise Reality-Creation is distinguished not by the presence of control but by its complete absence. A Truth that the collective mind of humanity, corrupted by its captivity to control, finds virtually impossible to grasp. A Truth that accounts for virtually every injustice known to history including the crucifixion: misperception of authority and misjudgment in its application. Injustice that breeds animal rage and hatred and accounts for history’s turn, time and again, to conflict to assuage it.

The authority of making sense

I know of one source in literature that provides a coherent, comprehensive context for understanding opposites. For understanding how they’re reconciled in Reality-Creation by both Logic and Love. Fragments have shown up here and there: notably Parmenides’ metaphysics, the Truth implied by the miracles of Jesus taught by the Gnostic Christian Valentinus, and Advaita Vedanta Hinduism. Otherwise, it’s not from Laozi’s Tao, Siddhartha Gautama’s Buddhism, Hinduism’s Upanishads, classical philosophy, biblical Christianity, or anything “new age.”

It’s A Course in Miracles, metaphysics taught by a source that appears to be Jesus but isn’t biblical Christianity. The name given to its author may not matter in any case so long as it’s an agent of Soul. Authenticated not by any earthly affiliation, by any ideology, philosophy, or religion, but by the authority of Logic and Love. By making sense. The “authority” that gave the life of Jesus resonance and the Course too.

How and where opposites are resolved

What to do with opposites is resolved by the one possibility in Reality-Creation of a state where opposites may “exist” without contradicting it: the state of a Mind that has consciousness but isn’t defined by it, so that it can lose consciousness and still be what it is. If Mind / Logic-Love is Consciousness by definition then it can’t lose consciousness. But if it extends itself to produce a Child-Mind with a different function that it Free Choice, then its extension is given a different definition that can’t be Consciousness. It’s Free Choice that has consciousness that can be lost and still exist.

And in this state of existence without consciousness, a mind, as we well know, can dream anything. Anything it wants, where what it wants lies beyond awareness and may include opposites. Opposites that now “exist” but only in a dream where they can’t contradict Reality-Creation. Where they can’t have any real consequences, and so the issue of what to do with opposites is resolved.

The one thing is Real by virtue of Parent-Mind Conscious; the other is unreal by virtue of Child-Mind unconscious. A state of Reality-Creation Parent-Mind Consciousness plus unreality Child-unconsciousness we can call “Everything.” A state held together by the attribute of Parent Mind-Consciousness that is the Interconnectedness of Soul-Energy. The attribute of Being or Oneness that is the unique state of Innocence without opposites. Soul-Energy that can embrace Everything because it knows no boundaries. Because it is its own enforcer: Energy, the Force of Necessity. And therefore it alone is impervious to the contradictions of opposites.

The engine of awakening

All attributes of Parent-Mind that is Logic-Love. Our best friend in our world of illogic, fear, guilt, and hatred. That’s accessible through the gift of Mind that is, thankfully, our sixth sense. The sense that one unconscious Child-Mind corrupted by its opposite, dreaming that it’s many animal-brains trapped in their five senses, fears for the end that it can bring to the dream. To the self-delusion that Child-Mind is its opposite.

How can Child-Mind restore sanity? Not by Logic-Love, its Parents, waving a magic wand for this would end Free Choice and their Child along with it. Not by sending a “savior” to do what Free Choice must do for itself. But by helping with explanation that leads to Understanding accessible to projections in the dream when they liberate themselves from captivity to their body-brains’ five senses. When they learn to listen to an agent of Soul through their sixth sense that connects them to Logic-Love, Child-Mind’s source.

That could never interfere with Free Choice by coercion, intrusion, or captivity of any kind but can guide with Logic-Love when asked. Because Relationship between Parent-Child has existed since the Growth of Creation when the Child was born. It can never be broken, and guidance is part of what it does. It’s the engine of Creation, and now that Child-Mind has lost consciousness it must be the engine of its awakening. Healing the separation. 

Which will it be?

We can’t do what we’re here for without Relationship between Parent-Child. We don’t “exist” alone. Like the inorganic stuff of the dream we are “relational.” We only “exist” in relationship. Not with one another but with Logic-Love through one another: the understanding that our one ancestral Mind only exists in Relationship with its Parents and therefore its projections in the dream can only “exist” in relationship with the same Parents. Whether we choose to be aware of it or not.

Carl Jung’s and Myers-Briggs’ contributions to personality type theory start from appearances and let us follow theirs and our sixth sense beyond. To connect with the source of their intuition and ours that can lead us, if we let it, not into troubled encounters with others but through them to the Truth of reconciliation beyond. Get it right with Logic-Love and we do our part to help Child-Mind awaken. Get it wrong and we continue on our path to a “paradise” of “action” in a universe of violence. Which will it be?

 

 

 

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We speak different languages

Across the divide minds and hearts receptive to love and wisdom join together to honor their source with gifts and remembrance and to wish for another year of grace. To be there with light when the darkness chooses to come to the light. Nice opening, David. What?! Who said that? Your long-suffering readers. Darn! I thought I got rid of them. What’s this business about “being there with light?” Try to make sense for a change. 

I’ll try, but fair warning. Humanity is hard-wired to recognize one reality, the world of physical objects, space, and time we’re familiar with. It’s the default world of every field of inquiry – science, philosophy, psychology, and theology. It limits the language of discourse to concepts and terminology that are permissible within this paradigm. I speak a different language that isn’t permissible, and there is no Rosetta Stone to help my readers translate. My language is the language of a different paradigm. What paradigm? 

My reality is the Reality of Mind. Of Logic-Love. Yours is the reality of sensory perception – the body and whatever its senses detect. Even if it’s dark matter or dark energy that, so far, can’t be detected. Your reality in my paradigm, my worldview, is an alternate reality that came about because of events in my Reality of Mind that preceded it. My language confuses because it postulates not only two realities, one preceding and causing the other, but one that’s real and the other isn’t. No one who’s been following my website posts has so far shown any inclination to understand, let alone embrace, this theory. Then why do you persist?

Because E=MC2 brought humanity a long way toward clarity about our universe. And if physics can bring complexity into clear focus metaphysics can do the same with its complexity. If I’m not making sense it’s because the picture I’m describing, the story I’m telling and the concepts and language I’m using to tell it, aren’t coming into focus. It’s all coming into focus for me. But translating it for readers who resist parting with a familiar paradigm takes time. Especially when they still fervently believe, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that it serves them well. Einstein had a receptive audience for his elegant equation. I don’t.

To further complicate matters my website isn’t intended to attract a crowd or start a movement. You’re in no hurry to make sense? There’s no point in being in a hurry, but there is purpose in what I’m doing so I am motivated. I’m only hopeful that minds aware of our situation will find my search for understanding helpful in their search. Individuals, not groups. You’re right. A worldview that isn’t limited to one world and wants me to believe that mine is made up – that’s mind-boggling. Where’s the waste basket! But you are cleared to carry on.

The Self that we are and are not

Being there with the light means Understanding. Understanding what?  How to let go of the divide. All this nonsense that separates us. Imagining that we’re the many instead of one. That there’s authority in groups that can’t be questioned. That there’s meaning and excitement in an alternate reality that’s actually the opposite. A made-up world that resists understanding because it’s afraid of being exposed. OK. That’s the What. How be there with the light?

Replace self-delusion with self-awareness. Recognize the Self that we really are so that when we project it onto “others,” we’re not projecting something we don’t like because it’s unfamiliar. Unrecognizable because it’s alien. A concoction of differences in appearance, personality, and psychology so forbidding that we dare not come close. We need to see ourselves in “others.” And it has to begin with seeing the right self. The one Self beloved of its Parents in Creation, Logic and Love. Who in Reality is Love and Innocence, Creativity and Free Will. Even though, in its unconscious state, the Child imagines itself to be otherwise. Then what? Then there won’t be any need to project. Why? When fear and guilt are gone, there won’t be anything to get rid of. Projection, the idea that a thought can leave its source, is an impossibility. It never happened in Reality, which means our alternate reality didn’t happen either. All that will end is an illusion – the nutty idea of projection. Who is this wrong self that’s cluttering up our minds?

It's a fun house mirror-image of an object that can’t see or hear, think or feel. A clown that’s funny if you can laugh at yourself and you have a taste for irony. The Joker. A reflection that’s a shadow, defined by a code derived from its host. A parasite that claims all of our attributes only in reverse. In the dark, perverse and sinister. Hiding behind an appearance that it’s an “other” when it’s just us, the Child deluding itself. How did the Child delude itself? 

The roots of our self-delusion

Driven by desperation and paranoia, fear, confusion, and guilt, into wishful thinking, the Child deluded itself into dreaming that there can be another home, a substitute reality where it can escape, even if it’s into conflict and mortality, from the Home of creativity and eternity where it now fears punishment for an unforgivable sin: its loss of consciousness. The mortifying sin of separation from its Parents, their Reality and their gifts of Creation. Escape from the Home that in Reality it can never leave because it’s the only Home there is. The Child did something horribly wrong? So we must be bad too? 

The loss of consciousness was a consequence of the circumstances surrounding its arrival in Creation. In its context the loss of consciousness aligned with Logic-Love’s laws of Necessity. It was unintended, yet it couldn’t have been an accident or a mistake. It has always been assumed from unreality’s perspective to be a violation, a flaw or deficiency that accounts for the darkness. For humanity’s egregious behavior. But it was not. The Child did nothing wrong for which the Child and humanity deserve punishment. Nor did the Child's Parents. Believing otherwise is buying into the self-delusion. It’s perpetuating it and perpetuating evil along with it.

However, in its desperation to escape from the consequences of what it mistook for a blunder the Child certainly made a mistake. Not an act with intent to do wrong, a sin that took away its Innocence, but an act brought about by the tumultuous change in its circumstances. The Child, being Free Will, is nevertheless accountable for its mistake and it does have to correct it. Of its own Free Will and not with the intervention of a "savior."

Its mind unconscious and groping in the darkness, imagining that it was hearing a strange voice, the voice of its own shadow-reflection that it mistook for an other, it imagined that it projected its real Self onto its own reflection, a coded opposite that it mistook for a savior. The same mistake we make when we mistake authoritarian rulers, religious and political, for saviors. The “savior” projected itself along with its captive host into an alternate reality. Automatically, mechanically, because its cause was a lifeless viral code. An event that registers with us as the “Big Bang.” And all of it the inevitable consequence of Energy in service to Mind, activating a dream defined by the code. 

The work that we have to do

Strange as it may seem, our experience of disorder fits within the larger context of Order. Everything is as it should be. Not to say that Creation is a chaotic mess but only that it’s not the dreamy la-la land that we imagine it to be. Neither the loss of consciousness nor the animation of a dream coded by illogic was the consequence of accident or malign intent. The Innocence of the Child remained intact throughout. But it was the consequence of Creation that requires that Free Choice learn from trial-and-error experience. That the Worth of anything in Creation be affirmed by reciprocation and earned. What does all this mean? 

It means that the Child has work to do and so do we: reversing its mistake and learning from it from within the dream. Regaining consciousness by working with the agent of Logic-Love, an emissary that’s part of the dream, to get right what must be right before the Child can take on its role in Creation. This requires gaining maturity and competence, the lack of which defines Child-the-many in our alternate reality. Our world of recycling violence, irrationality, and rank incompetence. All of it another story for another time. A narrative that could have been written by philosophy, psychology, and theology. Where does science come in? 

Physics is questioning its faith in sensory perception

Science knows enough to trace matter back to Energy, but it refuses to trace Energy back to where it comes from. Back to Mind. Because every field of inquiry understands that parting with the body is parting with the supposed gold standard for determining what’s real. Is venturing into Mind that can’t be detected with the body’s senses and supposedly can’t determine what’s real. They’ve got it in reverse. When he took Plato’s philosophy in a different direction, away from theorizing into the practice of science, from the exploration of Mind toward the exploration of matter, Aristotle at least acknowledged that Mind is real. A view that science today doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge, as though it weren’t true or isn’t important. Science thinks that parting with our alternate reality, supposedly something that can be understood – spacetime-matter – is engaging with something that can’t – Mind. Even though physics is so flummoxed by the universe . . . or is it the metaverse? Definitely the metaverse if you write for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. . . that it’s begun to wonder if it’s an illusion. Really?

Really. Lead article, February issue of Scientific American. Adam Becker. Hawking’s “quest for knowledge” and the quests for Einstein’s unified field theory and quantum gravity aren’t reprising the heady days of general relativity. They’re breathing new life into the metaphysics of Parmenides, who intuited with Logic, before Plato, that our alternate reality is an illusion. Really? Really. Lead article, February issue of Scientific American, cites Parmenides. Adam Becker, its author, is the author of What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (Basic Books 2018).

The question posed by Becker’s article is, “Does spacetime emerge from a  more fundamental reality?” That would be the Reality I've been writing about where the Story of the Child took place. I showed the article to a committed “realist.” Was he upset? Shocked? Evasive, with a memorable show of mental acrobatics. He flew right past the question into a safety net of irrelevancies he wove from the rest of the article. As though falling into the net was the act the audience paid to see. Scratch one flattop. Yeah. But at least his artful diversionary tactics made a show of reflection. Becker is exceptional. A realist yet serious about getting at the truth despite his bias. Other “realists” cling to their bias.

I also showed the article to four students at Caltech, the citadel of “realism,” thinking they would at least be curious. But they weren’t? I tried engaging one of them in email correspondence. Didn’t get a rise out of anyone. I thought maybe theorists on the faculty would be challenging them to entertain different perspectives, but there was no sign of it. You were expecting free thinkers and got budding careerists. I got automatons marching in lockstep toward the glitzy rewards of a Caltech degree. The new generation has already committed their careers to the current paradigm. If Thomas Kuhn’s structure of scientific revolution is going to deliver another earthquake it will take the next generation. Meantime, I won’t expect science’s hallowed institutions, like Caltech, to emulate Becker’s courage and intellectual integrity anytime soon.

After all, who’s willing to take on change so radical there’s nothing in the history of science to compare it with? Who with a career and wants to raise a family. Who imagines that our made-up world is an invention and it’s who we are. Who’s willing to part with playing god in the world we made up, even if its rewards and pleasures come with pain and then go? Are you? For thinkers, theorists, and writers, mind provides plenty of excitement without distractions. How’s that?

Where the thought process of Logic-Love can lead us

By letting Mind take us to where science and the body’s senses fear to tread. To Logic-Love that explains what we need to understand. Like a stream filling a dry streambed, each hole one at a time at its own pace, in logical sequence. The image of wisdom from The Chinese Book of Changes, Hexagram 4, “Youthful Folly.” If we get impatient and try to control it, it won’t happen. Like the sweet bird of Love it comes and goes of its own accord. Not controlling us and not being controlled are its strictest rules, for in their essence both Logic and Love are Free Spirits. As are we, their offspring. Not the many captive to our alternate reality but their one Child, Free Choice, in Reality. Whose Free Will must be respected and preserved. We have to get out of the way. Reciprocate by just taking it in, putting the pieces together. Because that’s what Logic-Love does: fitting its implications and the connections of Love together in perfect harmony. So where’s the explanation? 

The answers we need, when we open our minds and hearts to them, come from the fitting together, the harmony, of Logic-Love. Once we let Logic-Love’s agent that’s in our minds guide us to who and where we are, we can begin to use our Free Will to choose with reason how to deal with it. With the values we were given before the Child lost consciousness. Where to go with it. And that would be? To recognize the rational Mind and innocent Love that we are, the Home that Logic-Love has provided for us. To stop trying to escape by projecting ourselves onto our own shadow-opposite and letting it, a delusion, project its unreal image onto imagined “others” in a made-up world.

We forgive when all projection and its acts of magic end. When self-awareness brings our awareness back to the Home we never left. One Self, Mind and Love, pure and Innocent. In a state of awakening where opposites can’t be detected and projecting thoughts from their source – an impossibility – could never make sense. All well and good for you. But it sounds like you’re writing me, your long-suffering reader, out of the script.

Heaven is other people

To love an other is to recognize that they aren’t an “other.” “Soul-mates” belong to one Soul.  I don’t know if that’s how my granddaughters and I love one another but that’s how it feels. Friendship. Friends certain that something connects them that can be trusted. That’s safe and can’t be broken. We are “others” to one another and yet we aren’t. I’m a philosophical idealist. Do I describe a relationship that’s unique to idealists or one that is not? We can’t presume to know what Logic-Love is up to. There’s no way of telling.

If in truth we’re all one Self then there’s no “you” and no “we.” Our conversation isn’t with an “other.” It’s with the agent of Logic-Love that’s in our dreaming mind, whose voice can sometimes be heard above the racket of distractions, reminding us who we are and how we came to seem not who we are. How we got here. Calling us Home. This is “Forgiveness?”

No way can I “forgive” with my dreaming-projecting mind. With my brain’s amygdala and hippocampus, its limbic system adulterating every act with a hint or blast of animal-herd rivalry. With the raw, unevolved fear, rage, lust, and blind will of a beast to dominate. The agent of Logic-Love and I must be so close that when the time comes we’re acting as one. I can’t be listening to the voice of shadow-delusion and Logic-Love at the same time. I can only be hearing one voice, and when that happens I’ve reclaimed my Free Will. No longer captive to the dream. The self-delusion. The alternate reality. No more “you.” No more “we.” No more isolated, separated “I” either. Just the real one Self. The Self who has Free Choice because it is Free Choice, its indispensable role in Creation.  Borne of Free Spirits. Good. It wouldn’t be fair if you were still around and I wasn’t.

None of this happens by coercion. Nothing happens that’s not by our wanting it, choosing it, and willing it. Without reservation. If we feel we must cling to our alternate reality for any reason – sentimental attachment, fear of the unknown, whatever – then Logic-Love will let us be. “Free will” is one part free, one part will. Seeking and accepting guidance isn’t giving up our will. We have to be ready and willing to let go and not look back. Not look back at the flaming crucifix beneath skies inflamed with the fires of hell, no matter how seductive the lure of victimhood once was. Is this how we escape from Plato’s Cave? 

Plato’s Cave still needs an answer

The darkness of Plato’s Cave is occupants who’ve tricked themselves into believing they are their captor, their master. Who imagine that the Cave is their invention, and so they are proud of it, identify with it, cling to it. The Cave is one organic, objectified image of captivity and illusion – a Truman TV Show -- that can only be liberated when it chooses to bring its darkness – itself -- to the light. With Free Will that can never be surrendered but can be denied by a mind deluding itself. By the fool that is self-delusion.

Entering the Cave from outside, bearing light that contradicts the will of its occupants to make it real, won’t make its occupants ready. This was the narrative posed by Plato. It will only subject the light to the distortions of the darkness and extinguish it. The bearer will fare no better, for the will that he’s contradicted is a hornet’s nest. We in our alternate reality are the darkness. We are the Cave. Idealists search for the light. In their fanatical resistance to contradiction “realists” are the hornet’s nest.

The philosophical question posed by the allegory of Plato’s Cave isn’t how to free others from their chains by penetrating illusion with truth. How to clear others’ minds of deception. It’s how to clear our own minds. How to undo the chains of delusion that we’ve clamped on our own necks that keep us from turning toward the light. From recognizing the truth. The truth that we are Free Choice. The Child’s mistake was a mistake made by Free Choice even if unconsciousness removed conscious intent. It wasn’t made by a beast with no control over its own destiny. And so the Child can correct its mistake. The philosophical answer is we can choose to undo the chains of delusion ourselves.

The authorities in Athens who enraged Plato with their injustice, the execution of his mentor Socrates, were the minds he sought to enlighten. Theirs was the injustice he sought to explain. To understand so that philosophy, his gift, his talent, could correct it. But because he never fully sided with Parmenides, because he couldn’t part with the deceptions of sensory perception, the body, he never approached his task fully through Mind. Couldn’t let the agent of Logic-Love guide his philosophy to its logical conclusion because in the cosmos he thought he sensed the divine.

Plato’s reasoning that elevated Mind to the highest state of virtue went as far as it could go without recognizing its parity and bonding with Love. Logic would have taken it all the way had it opened his mind to the illusion of all matter. But the body, as it always does, got in the way. Plato’s Cave was handed down to us, a question still seeking an answer. Its occupants in their darkness – us – still unrelieved by the light. Is there hope? Are we making progress?

The ”better way” that is A Course in Miracles

Science, philosophy, psychology, and theology all resist the enlightenment of Logic-Love and cling to body-Cave with the tenacity of madness. Because that’s the state of our mind ruled by body-sensing “realists.” The agent of Logic-Love can take many forms. The agent known as Jesus brought light to the darkness, perhaps bidden by the Israelites’ yearning for a “messiah.” Looking for a savior who would deliver them from the yokes of all their oppressors. A paladin in the mold of their mythical King David who would champion their cause, not change their minds.

Jesus set about releasing them from oppression far worse than Caesar’s, the kind that comes from within. Changing minds with parables and miracles was what he sought. A mission that inevitably attracted opposition from without. From authorities jealous of his appeal, fearful of being deposed. Aphrodite jealous of Psyche’s beauty, fearful of humiliation by a mere human. Cave occupants defending their turf. Projection in the form of a cross attempted to crush Christ-Innocence under the weight of its own guilt. But though it failed and the Truth of Innocence lives on, the form it took was perverted into institutions and agendas opposed to its intent. Shards from the violence done to his cause survived to make existence less uncomfortable for some, inspiring hope and idealism in others. But in the end the Cave, its occupants, and their delusion remained intact.

Jesus has since brought light to the darkness, not incarnate but through an expression of Logic-Love: A Course in Miracles. Bidden by two clinical psychologists not seeking a messiah. Not seeking a savior but yearning for “a better way” to navigate through fractious working relationships. They got it, and the sharing of it through the Course opened a better way to other individuals, like me, who need it. And who, in turn, share what they make of it in gratitude. So they may truly have it and you may, too, if you’re interested. The metaphysics of my website and its experiments with application. Its elaborations on the lessons of the Course that go beyond its scope, for the Course doesn’t explain why the Child lost consciousness. Its focus is on the Child’s mistake afterward that led to our alternate reality. All of it an attempt at solving “real-world” problems because this is what the Course is for. New Age is for feel good, not for solving problems.

The Course is not “New Age.” When New Age holds that the universe and bodies were created by God, it teaches the opposite of the Course. “Prosperity consciousness” and its overriding emphasis on people’s positive experiences are New Age markers that conflict with the Course’s focus on our feelings of guilt. Where the Course makes clear that God is our Source, New Age promotes the idea that we are God.

In my attempts to apply its metaphysics I’ve found that the Course doesn’t require the terminology of religion, faith, mysticism, or even “spirituality.” As “realists” would have it these are giveaways for superficiality when in fact nothing is given away because the terms don’t apply. What “realists” miss in their own silliness is the simplicity and eloquence of common sense. Facts and Logic that have no need of the deceptions of bodily apparitions to establish their depth.

Soul is Spirit. Essence, Beauty, Purity, Innocence. But Mind doesn’t need “spirit” to get across that it’s not body. “God” who functions as His Child’s Parents, Logic and Love combined, who governs under the law, compassionately and subjectively with Love and Wisdom from the bottom up rather than ruling arbitrarily, objectively, and cruelly from the top down, has more relevance as “Parents.” Because He has both masculine and feminine aspects essential to Creativity, and I am not satisfied with “God the Father” and all the masculine attributes of the domineering, Old Testament authority that it implies.

Necessity belongs to the laws of cause and effect that apply to Everything, including God. If you can’t live without a dominating authority then be satisfied with Necessity, the laws that flow from Logic-Love but are not controlled by it. You will not find your patriarchal authority in the gentle loving kindness of our Parents. Father Logic and Mother Love, inseparable. Nor will you find it in Necessity. But you will find Necessity! The laws are what they are and they can’t be violated. The one Child’s being out of alignment with Necessity, needing to learn how to align, is what brought us, Child the many, to this moment in illusory time. This break with the Now and eternity. With sanity.

Our alternate reality is a joke

The state of our mind is the “collective unconscious” intuited by Carl Jung. So long as any individual can truly forgive, that would break the spell. It would restore us to Reality and our one Self’s role in Creation. That’s our audience. My audience. “You” could be that individual if “I” am not. The single torpedo. All it takes to destroy the Death Star, the intricate web of facades, the trickster’s illusions, the Joker’s perversions of the Truth that make up our alternate reality. Our unreality, one Big Lie. Big to us but literally nothing to Logic-Love, our Parents. One Big Joke on us.

Unraveling and exposing the lie is why I think, read, and write. It’s my cause. It’s why the excitements of Mind are my entertainments. The Joker’s jokes can amuse once their perversity is exposed, the foolish mischief that plays havoc with the truth. They’re funny? They are. Its version of Freedom is “liberty.” Liberty is Freedom without Order, an absurdity. Imagine traffic without regulations so travelers can navigate streets and highways without having to obey the rules of the road. Imagine busy intersections without stop lights or stop signs. Ghostbusters demons driving New York cabs. That’s the Joker’s idea of Freedom. What about Order without Freedom? 

Another joke that’s funny if you can overlook wholesale suffering, “I love order!” was the parting sentiment of Stalin’s security chief, Lavrentiy Beria, before he was executed by Stalin’s successors. Order in Reality is creations and Creators – subjects -- fitting together in a happy dance choreographed from the bottom up by Logic and Love. A celebration of Creation and Life. Of individual sovereignty, Free Will, and harmony. It's the farthest thing from coercion.

The Joker’s version is absurdities: regimented assemblies of uniformed bodies and faces – objects -- forced into grotesque images of mindless obedience to arbitrary authority. Truman TV performances by persons gutted of personality, individuals gutted of individuality, wills stripped of their voice. Displays of homogenized sameness paid to follow the script. To abide by the rules and project contentment or be written out of the script. Not to exist. Or never mind pretense and just do it Lavrentiy’s way: terror. A pistol to the head. All to one end: to maintain phony order required by phony authority so that nobody catches on to the truth. That it’s all a delusion. A joke.

Perversions of the Truth like this are the building blocks of our alternate reality, the low-hanging fruit of a tree groaning under the weight of them. They’re everywhere, laughing at us, making fun of us. “Liberty” is authoritarians’ idea of arbitrary rule above the law so we can get rid of democracy under the law. That’s not funny. No, nor is an entire universe that science takes seriously that’s also a joke. The handiwork of a Dr. Frankenstein with a mad idea.

The Child in dire straits made a mistake that must be corrected. Because even though no harm has been done to Reality the Child can’t emerge from unconsciousness, prepare for its role in Creation, and get back to work until what’s done is undone. Yet the seriousness of its task doesn’t belie the nature of the mistake. Mistaking your own shadow-reflection for someone else is dumb. Then deluding yourself into thinking you are the other and being taken in by your own deceptions, your own magic tricks, is beyond dumb. It’s the very definition of a fool. To begin to understand that the alternate reality we inhabit is the work of a fool, to understand that this is why it defies understanding and seems so perverse, is to begin to understand the fools that we are. To have a good laugh on ourselves. But then shed the role of the fool, let go of the self-deception, the Joker. Undo the mistake, stop wasting time on pointless distractions, and get to work.

I’m not alone in my attitude. I share the amusement of another who encourages us to laugh at ourselves and the absurdity we have wrought. Jesus, the author of A Course in Miracles, our guide, our comforter, who can’t help being the amused audience of our self-delusion. We the court jester paid to make royalty laugh. We the fool are at least succeeding in this.

We get in our own way

The simple yet wondrous revelations of Logic-Love surprise and delight me. That explain simply and beautifully what science and all the rest struggle to explain. Their frustrations with Ghostbuster demons who refuse to behave: particles that can’t make up their minds whether they’re particles or waves. That can’t even exist unless they interconnect. And when they do, they’re “non-local:” interacting across distances as though time and space don’t exist. Richard Feynman’s bizarre “sum of histories” has a logical explanation, but don’t expect his illogical profession to provide it. Who said “illogical?” Albert Einstein in 1952. Who said anything about physics’ circular reasoning, its inherent lack of objectivity? The Nobel laureate physicist-philosopher Erwin Schroedinger.

Imagine the irony of particles that interconnect everywhere but can’t explain how or why to minds that also interconnect everywhere but can’t explain because they aren’t even aware of it. Because they’re trapped in their bodies, enabled by their bodies’ senses to sense appearances but blocked by the same senses from understanding what lies behind appearances. Therefore, they must refuse to explain in order to maintain the validity of their bodies’ senses. Of all they think they “know” and understand about who they are. Bodies and brains are getting in the way.

Like the occupants of Plato’s Cave who identify with their illusory environment, minds trapped in their bodies and mistaken for brains must oppose explanation to preserve a compromised “existence.” And, therefore, they must oppose understanding. Preserving misunderstanding – our illusory environment – is, for physics that would survive by its own rules, an existential necessity. Depriving both matter and mind of voices and themselves ears with which to hear the meaning of what the eyes see. Minds that approach the study of matter in such a strange way observe interesting things and there the story must end. No wonder we’re stuck!

Science that opposes understanding aligns not with Logic-Love’s laws of cause and effect but with the laws of chaos. And so, lost in the mysteries of quantum gravity, it calls for help from philosophy. From a source deceived by the same “realism” that can only throw it a rope without a life-preserver. Both following the Joker’s playbook: seek but do not find. Quest for “knowledge” that’s misperception. “Understand” by misunderstanding. A dog chasing its own tail. 

The rule of the herd

Physics isn’t destined to combine its four forces into one Force, unified field theory, or combine gravity-relativity with quantum mechanics. Certainly not with the Force of Star Wars that levitates X-wing fighters out of swamps. If there’s hope in the behavior of groups there’s little evidence of it. Individuals aren’t managing our planet. Institutions do that and are supposed to preserve governance, too. The kind that gives everyone a voice from the bottom up, and we can see where that’s headed. The lessons of WWII should have lasted at least through its survivors’ lifetimes but they seem to have been forgotten. Institutions are groups; groups are one-the-many, and that takes us, like never being in the Now, into uncharted territory. Into the dream land of unconsciousness, alternate realities, and chaos.

Groups are vestiges of the herd, and the herd is its own pasture. The pasture of the bull. The beast that wills its dominance over intruders and reserves the specialness of victimhood for itself. The dominant beast borne of a shadow deprived of self, a parasite dependent on its host. A pathetic victim ridden with jealousies and resentments, clothed in the “innocence” of helplessness. Harboring anger toward the perpetrators of the injustice. Anger at its core toward its host – everyone and anyone, unrelenting and undifferentiated. What is the bull in the pasture but anger itself? License to eliminate all opposition.

Authoritarian dictatorships and world wars haven’t made us ready as a species -- as a group. And now the prospect of losing our habitat, mother earth, isn’t making us ready either. Instead of saving it authoritarians, with the herd’s perverse appeal to weakness that craves derived strength, are taking all of us, strong and weak, in the opposite direction. The individual is our best hope?

The level at which the choice must be made

Our only hope. How much more experience do we need with groups before we understand that entrusting them with our readiness is a mistake? The herd can only “lead” itself, like stampeding buffaloes, over a cliff. The herd can only recognize its own and repel intruders with blind instinct. It has no vision and therefore no sense of direction. Its only “guidance” is its will to seize authority and dominate. Its much overblown “triumph of the will,” a sick joke. Think Berlin April 1945. Let the herd make babies and keep the grass cut. But do not let it lead.

Our only hope is the voice of the agent of Logic-Love that’s part of every individual’s dreaming mind. But only certain personality types in certain contexts – intuitives, “idealists” -- seem interested in hearing it. Or were interested in hearing it. Lesley Chamberlain, the author of Rilke: The Last Inward Man [Pushkin 2022], believes that some “will always be attracted to the mystical and the metaphysical,” but “the age of inwardness, the flowering of cultures in the West that were individualistic and reflective, has passed.” [Review by John Banville, NYRB 11/03/22, p. 2]  Your epitaph? 

The epitaph of an age, but to the individual it makes no difference. “’Age” and “culture” = group. Whether “inwardness” rises in the “West” or anywhere else is appearance without consequence, neither cause nor effect. I don’t lament the passing of an appearance nor do I work toward the revival of an appearance. If there is a creative force at work it lies within the individual. Within you and me. We will go away in due time but for the moment we are “here.” This is all that matters. 

Catholic saints, notably, have begged in extremis for a visual. “Give me a sign, oh Lord.” Such was their craving some claimed to have gotten it. But visions in the darkness of unconsciousness are an impossibility. Hallucinations that would implicate Truth in the fabrication of a lie. They’re “signs” that can’t be credited beyond the trickster’s illusions, the talents of the body’s senses to deceive. The darkness of unconsciousness negates light but not sound when the sound is the Child’s own voice, imagined from its own shadow-reflection. When the sound is the voice of the emissary sent by the Child's Parents to guide it Home.

Individuals not seduced by bodies into sizing up everything through eyes that can’t see and ears that can’t hear detect the voice from Logic-Love through minds’ intuition. Through insight that’s not controlled but spontaneous. Thus respecting our Free Will. Not having its way with us through blandishments one minute and bullying the next. The agent of Logic-Love doesn’t waste its time with groups, and that includes the “movements” of philosophy and religion that divert our attention. For all their razzmatazz mythologizing none has explained how the Mind of the Child lost consciousness, that’s dreaming our alternate reality. [Kenneth Wapnick, Love Does Not Condemn: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil According to Platonism, Christianity, Gnosticism, and A Course in Miracles (Foundation for A Course in Miracles 1989)] Because, being of groups, their intent was to distract, not to explain. To steer explanation away from the Truth, not toward it.

Maintaining the authority of the herd is what matters to jerry-built movements. “Realists” whose loyalty is now and forevermore to the alternate reality that is their invention. The herd. And judgment that would be independent, that would be free, wants nothing to do with it. Groups don’t choose. As Machiavelli informed us they have their own “morality.” Instinct to impose their will. To dominate their rivals. Individuals can choose. Because they can employ Free Will guided by Logic, Reason, and the character and values of Love and feeling, to choose. To decide with morality for the right, Plato’s Good. With the Force and discipline, the compassion and Judgment, of Understanding.

If the darkness must choose to bring itself to the light, if the agent of Logic-Love must respect our Free Will because that is our role, the Child’s indispensable role, in Creation, then this is the level at which the choice must be made. To what? To Forgive? To awaken? To not make unreality real? To let darkness choose to bring itself to the light? 

A lesson in psychology from A Course in Miracles 

All of that, But first: to get out of the way, As Jesus says in the Course, empty our minds of everything. Everything?? Yes, including the Course. Why? So long as any trace of the Joker and its jokes, the self-delusion, remain in the Child’s mind the agent of Logic-Love won’t be truly welcome -- the agent whose perspective can recognize the Child’s one Self, the Soul Innocent and perfect as it was Created. The invitation can’t come from a split mind, from ambiguity and ambivalence, when the change is from adulteration to perfection. The switch from the Joker self-delusion’s voice to hearing the agent’s voice must be complete. No corner cutting! No short cuts! Otherwise we’re back to the wrong voice. Free Choice will continue to be compromised and nothing will change. This sounds like no philosophy or religion I’ve ever heard of.

A Course in Miracles doesn’t purport to be anything more than a response to a plea for a “better way” from two clinical psychologists equipped with theoretical tools for mastering disagreeability yet struggling to apply them. Their plea was a voice from a profession that had taken aim at what was wrong with the human psyche – the “bad thing” addressed by Sigmund Freud – and was giving up. Andrew Scull’s Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness (Belknap Press Harvard 2022) explains how they got there, through decades of dashed hopes for miracle cure after cure, including Freudian psychoanalysis and genetics. What’s different about the Course? Why do you persist?

The Course is psychology that centers on the source of the bad thing: not the body-brain but Soul-Mind. The Soul or Psyche of the Being whose story in Reality accounts for all our miseries -- the Reality that preceded and caused our alternate reality. Freud, a “realist” to the core, gave us a vocabulary for analysis but insisted that the source is physiological. Jung disagreed and added a dimension not limited to the body – the “spiritual” dimension. Between them they created an opportunity to communicate insights from the Course that take us back to the deepest recesses of our childhood memories. Like Freud? Into repressed sexuality? 

Beyond the childhood of bodies into the childhood of Mind. Into what I’ve been calling “The Story of the Child.” The story that takes place not in our alternate reality but in Reality. The Course examines the psychodynamics of the Child’s mistake to explain for us the source of our pain and to help us understand how, as Jesus puts it, to “correct error.” To free ourselves from pain by freeing ourselves of the self-delusion by the Child that’s causing it. Not to get rid of the fact of repressed sexuality but to get rid of the idea of it, an illusion. Freud and Jung gave us the vocabulary for making sense of our circumstances. Jesus took their vocabulary, applied it to the plea from the two psychologists, and made sense of it. Would this be the “second coming” of Christ? 

To fill empty minds with Logic and Love

The Course makes its case with the vocabulary of Christianity as well as Freudian-Jungian psychology. “Christ” as a familiar symbol of Innocence plays a central part if only because Innocence plays a central part. This was a language familiar to Helen Schucman, the psychologist who was Jesus’ scribe when he channeled the Course. Although a Jew she was a “realist” personality type drawn to the authoritarian imagery and ritual of Roman Catholicism. If you’re thinking Christianity is my language it isn’t. My mother and her mother saw to it that I was imbued with Protestant Christian values. But the language I’m trying to learn is the language of the agent of Logic-Love, which belongs to no church, no religion.

Just as Jesus departs from body-centered psychology he departs from the body-centered rituals and dogma of organized religion to focus on the individual. To focus on the Free Will of Mind and independent Judgment. I’ve found no references to “Christianity” and “church” in the Course. No exhortations to go forth and revive or reform Gnosticism or any other form of Christianity. To found a new philosophy or religion or to compete with those that already exist. And no declarations that the Course is the only form that its lessons can take. That it's a “Bible” or the so-called “second coming.”  To view it as such would be to miss the point. And the point is?

As I understand it, three points. The first is we need to get it right before attempting to do what’s right and do it right. Before trying any longer to get rid of the bad thing through psychology, chemicals, or any other means. And we can’t do it without inviting the agent of Logic-Love into our minds and hearts and listening to its voice. Which means dumping the voice of the bad thing. And that means getting rid of the idea that the body and its senses are the arbiter of all things with purpose and meaning. All things real. Because they aren’t. They’re the opposite.

Its second point is “uncompromising non-dualism.” Getting it right is understanding and accepting that the alternate reality our bodies’ senses insist is real is unreal. There can be only one Reality and it’s the Reality of Logic-Love. The Reality of Mind that has Purpose and Meaning, its own story to tell. The story of Creation, where the Child with its Free Choice is needed once it gains the self-awareness and competence that the exercise of Free Choice requires.

Its third point is to follow the Course’s unique combination of Logic-Love to apply its metaphysics to our everyday lives. The Course isn’t an excuse for ignoring circumstances so we can engage in yet more delusional thinking. It’s a call to listen to what’s coming from within and all around us and to take in what it means with patience and compassion. In the comprehensiveness of its context, the poetic perfection of its Logic, its system – its interconnectedness – it provides a portal, a vantage point. A vantage point into what?

Vale to Caesar and captivity

Into understanding. Understanding what? Understanding anything and everything the Child needs to understand in order to let go of illusion. To empty its mind and welcome its Parents’ agent, the voice of Logic-Love, into its thoughts. To reclaim the individual’s voice, power, and morality from its captivity to groups, to Child-the-many, the Joker who is us. So that we can Forgive. So that we can awaken and return Home. If “rendering unto Caesar” has become an intolerable burden, then let go of Caesar. Be done with him once and for all and wake up! So, you would question the ways of the master after all. That does it. I’m outta here! 

And I’m outta here. I can’t take any more either.

Happy birthday, Jesus! And happy Holidays to you, hapless reader. I hope this hasn’t been too trying. Don’t worry. I’ll manage somehow. Merry Christmas to you, David, and to your lovely granddaughters! 

Published on Leave a comment on Understanding Jesus and A Course in Miracles: Liberal Democracy’s Best Friend

ACIM is neither “religion” nor “New Age”

The explanation Jesus offered to help us with understanding came in two parts. The first was parables delivered orally in the flesh to any individuals willing to listen without committing anything to writing. His lessons were backed up by demonstrations that his incarnation in the flesh was not limited as his listeners were to the “laws” that define their “reality” of spacetime-matter. His miracles demonstrated that he clearly belonged to another dimension. The second part was writing delivered by disembodied Mind-Love through an embodied human scribe, again to any individuals willing to listen. Its purpose is to explain this other dimension and its practical relevance to the human experience.

In both cases, a few absorbed his gift with understanding while many more misunderstood. Part of my project in advancing his cause toward understanding must therefore include helping to correct misunderstanding of both Jesus and ACIM. I accept this responsibility. Minds paying attention to my task also have a responsibility. That is to suspend judgment about Jesus and his work so long as they choose not to reflect on it.

Reading ACIM is their choice. It’s none of my business. But it is my business to call out minds that weigh in on my project and the work of Jesus that inspires it without doing their homework. To familiarize themselves not with the layers of distortion that misunderstanding has covered Jesus with but with who he actually was – and is – and the explanation he actually offers. It’s there in black and white, written in the king’s English and translated into every conceivable language.

His explanation is not “religion.” The concept of “Christ” is front and center in ACIM because of its purpose and the Innocence it means, but with no reference to any of the usual trappings of organized religion – “Christian,” “Christianity,” and especially “Church,” the instrument not of “Christ’s” purity but its defilement. “Church” is anathema. ACIM is not compatible with orthodox biblical Christianity, the guilt- and fear-ridden, top-down authoritarian travesty perpetrated by the Church both Catholic and Protestant.

Jesus’ explanation is not “New Age.” New Age teaches dualistic metaphysics, the idea that the physical universe including the body was created by God. It teaches “prosperity consciousness” and emphasizes people’s positive experiences without acknowledging their unconscious feelings of guilt. It teaches that we are God. ACIM does none of this. ACIM draws upon traditional Freudian psychoanalytic principles, the Neoplatonic tradition, and themes common to early Christianity and the Gnostic systems of the second and third centuries. New Age does none of this. For these reasons ACIM is not categorized by the Library of Congress under “New Age.”*

ACIM is liberal democracy’s deepest philosophical root and its best friend

An honest and principled response to misunderstanding about Jesus and ACIM can’t be to disavow or disguise it for fear of yet more misunderstanding. It must be to include it in the explanation. Going against centuries of  conditioning by misinformation and misinterpretation may be “unrealistic,” but then so were Jesus’ miracles. Its title wasn’t given to Jesus’ book for no reason; it’s to be taken literally.

Were minds closed to understanding to open they would discover that not only are Jesus and ACIM compatible with bottom-up liberal democracy, their explanation is its deepest philosophical root. It is the clearest refutation of the lie that is authoritarian rule above the law that all of Logic, reason, passion, and goodwill can muster.

Jesus and ACIM aren’t an embarrassment, an anachronism, an awkward afterthought. They are in fact our best friend. A friend who doesn’t demand acceptance on faith. Who doesn’t demand anything. But who does offer understanding if minds freely choose to accept it. Not knuckling under to superior power. But acknowledging the only “authority” its explanation needs: its internal, intrinsic Logic.

What is the practical benefit?

If the cruel insensitivity of the Joker’s arbitrary above-the-law rule is constructed of a web of lies founded on the illogic-insanity of impossibility then the logical response is to undo its lies with the truth and the practical benefit will be release-Freedom from its cruelty.

*Source: Kenneth Wapnick, "Why A Course in Miracles is not New Age" (Letter to the Library of Congress 1990's, email received by the author from Foundation for A Course in Miracles, April 23, 2019)

 

Published on Leave a comment on The Most Important Choice We Will Ever Make

Objectifying the “dark side”

A 13-year-old boy found my essay Thirteen: Reflections on Character and Values at the Beginning of Adolescence useful in part for its appendix. Entitled “Values Derived from Human Needs,” the appendix gave words to describe both the light and dark sides of values. He thought the description of the dark side was particularly helpful.

The human mind’s fascination with the “dark side” can have unfortunate consequences. Here is an observation about “evil” in Understanding, the second of my two Christmas letters:

Evil isn’t what “others” do to us. It’s what we do to ourselves. Imagining that our flip side – our reflection, a shadow – is an “other” that has a life, a voice of its own with something to offer. When all it has to “give” is a reverse image, what we aren’t. It’s nothing more than an implication of Logic that all things have opposites. That if two realities can’t be real then our reflections can’t be real. They’re the Joker whose joke is “I’m you.” Whatever its offense making it real by engaging with it is what causes it.

Two mistakes in our thinking put the dark side into our thoughts, make it real, empower it, and bring it to life. The first is objectification. We objectify something that’s a part of ourselves when we mistake it for something that’s not a part of ourselves. When we imagine that it’s a separate object, like a stick or a ball, or a pet or another person that we can relate to. When it’s just the reverse side of ourselves – subject, not object, a shadow or reflection – and has no separate existence of its own.

Bringing the dark side to life with projection

Once we’ve imagined that our shadow-reflection is a separate object we can relate to, we commit a second mistake: projection. We project attributes of ourselves onto this object that give it the “existence” it had heretofore lacked. We project our self, that is, our identity, our sovereignty, and our free will that enable the objectified shadow-reflection to act with authority and autonomy as though it were real.

The thoughts and feelings we project onto the object are those that we are uncomfortable with, that we don’t want. It is these that give our dark side its menace, the aspect of danger, of the appearance of purpose and meaning – something happening -- that fascinates and misleads human awareness into wrongdoing and harm.

These uncomfortable thoughts and feelings were precipitated by an event that preceded our engagement with our shadow-reflection. The event was loss of consciousness, and it set in motion a succession of misperceptions and misjudgments beginning with the misperception that our shadow-reflection is a separate self – an object – and the misjudgment that we can safely entrust our wellbeing to its guidance.

The wrong guide is our own creation

For that is what has come of our mistakes. Objectifying our shadow-reflection and giving it autonomy and authority over us by projecting our selves onto it has turned it into a guide. A very serious misjudgment, because once it’s activated its genetic code has no interest in guidance. Its only interest is captivity: controlling its host so that it can replicate itself like a virus and remain in “existence.” All because we have given it the ability and power to do so that come from ourselves. This is what it means that “Evil isn’t what ‘others’ do to us. It’s what we do to ourselves.”

These reflections are part of the core of Christianity that teaches mindfulness, love, and free will – attributes that belong firmly on the light side of values and not on the dark side. To practice Christianity is to recognize, disable, and disempower the dark side in everything we do. And this means understanding that our shadow-reflection is nothing:

  • Nothing that can be objectified – made into a separate object.
  • Nothing that can be brought to life by projecting ourselves onto it.
  • Nothing that can entertain us with the appearance of danger, of “action,” conflict, violence, hurt, anger, and all the other manifestations of values turned against themselves. Of purpose and meaning taken out of context by minds that misperceive and misjudge.

The most important use of our mind

The choice presented by the light and dark side of our values is whether to lead with gifts given to us – our own ability and authority – for our own purposes or with something that’s been given away and “given” back to us for the wrong guide’s purposes. Whether to lead with our own power given to his Child by God or with derived power that isn’t ours and can’t be used for our own benefit.

The right guide is Jesus or the Holy Spirit, a gift to us from God to his Child, who wishes us well and wants us to succeed, to be free, and to be happy. The wrong guide is the Joker, our mistake, a nothing that can’t wish anything and if it could, would only wish us to be its mindless captive and be unhappy. The choice between these two guides is a function of mind possessed of free will. It is the most important choice we will ever make and the most important use of our mind.

Will that is truly free is an informed will. Will guided by mind that understands. That’s no longer under the spell of our shadow-reflection: nothingness – the “power” of the “dark side.”

Published on Leave a comment on Focus on the Individual: The Context that Matters

Must Horton really hear every Who?

One of philosophy’s recurring preoccupations is the pull of thought in opposite directions: toward the individual and toward humanity. Is there any point, any validity, to changing minds on a mass scale? Or is it only worthwhile to focus on one mind at a time?

If the latter, how can the unconscious-dreaming Child – humanity – ever regain Consciousness if Horton the elephant must hear every Who? Is sharing the Holy Spirit with others meant to create movements and save humanity? Or is it really only to bring comfort to those who share our space? Is it more humane to create global juggernauts of idealism or just to be there for a friend?

The Nag Hammadi library begs Karen King’s question, What Is Gnosticism? But Valentinus and the other Gnostic Christian teachers did have one distinction: they were not a church. They were a school that taught individuals. They left the conversion of the “flock” to the Church, and that is where the story is picked up by Jesus in A Course in Miracles. The Course speaks to its readers, one at a time, where they’re at. It’s Christianity, but it’s not a church. Its focus is decidedly on individuals.

If some minds and hearts align with the Course’s message and others don’t, how can its message have any effect on the Child? If it doesn’t require every mind falling in line, what definitive choice, what specific confluence of conditions or issues, will trigger the awakening? After all the skating around and passing back and forth, after all the bumping and shoving, what will finally make the puck go into the net?

The choice: whether to crush individual Worth or affirm it

The Child’s progress toward awakening can’t be visualized or measured as though humanity is acting in concert toward any objective when the ego’s laws of chaos and ego-corrupted minds ensure that the opposite is true. There can be no orchestrated mass-group / societal movement toward a common purpose in a snake pit of clashing personalities, conflicting contexts, “realities” and “truths.” Where possession, control, dominance, and competition – crushing individual Worth -- rule social-group behavior instead of sharing, empowerment, and affirmation of individual Worth.

Think of the guy blocking a line of tanks at Tiananmen Square in 1989.

The focus must be on individual minds choosing the correct Guide and removing the ego’s lies, the barriers to an awareness of Love’s presence. The barriers to perceptions of Reality and Truth that align with the protection of Logic, the Laws of cause and effect, and affirm the Worth-Innocence of the individual. The focus must be on individual minds sharing their Guides and perceptions they’ve been led to in service to healing and Innocence-awakening.

Respect for Free Will means respect for the individual

Attempting to impose behavior conformance en masse from the top down is the ego’s soul-crushing approach. Vulnerable minds stripped of Free Will and sovereignty yield to meet their material needs and whatever else mindless red army ant movements force upon them. The Holy Spirit’s mission is to work through the Child’s projected body-selves to help him change his mind from the bottom up, not leaving anyone out, not skipping any steps. The individual approach from the ground up is a lesson in thoroughness and character taught in the I Ching’s hexagram 4, Youthful Folly.

Focusing on individuals ensures respect for their circumstances, the unique contexts that frame the choices their Free Wills must work with. Respect for Free Will implies respect for individuals, their contexts, and choices. It’s because individual minds are derived from one Child unconscious mind and interconnected, because separation is neither real in Reality nor in unreality, that one mind at a time is an illusion. In the realm of mind not bound by matter the reality is every mind is one mind.

Whether and how individuals converting their contexts from separation, delusion, and unreality to healing, awakening, and reality help to restore the Child’s Consciousness must be left to the psychology of the Child’s mind that made up the dream when it projected guilt. To the specific confluence of conditions that triggers the awakening, a spontaneous act of Innocence, the Child’s Psyche. It must be left to the Child's freely chosen Innocence to reverse the imagined projection, to bring the imagined thought back to its Source of his own Free Will, and end the dream. With help from his Parents, readmitting and welcoming his real Self, the Innocence of a Child, his Soul, back to Consciousness, back to Reality.

The context where there is Meaning and relevance

Whether the change requires the participation of all or most of humanity or only a few is meaningless and therefore irrelevant. Whether participation is engineered from the ground up, spontaneously, or orchestrated from the top down, is equally irrelevant:

• if “humanity” is a projection of Child’s unconscious mind
• if more or less of an illusion makes a difference: zero times 1 or a million is still zero.

What matters is each individual mind’s connection with the Child through the Holy Spirit. Through our own Intuition and what each mind chooses to do with the connection:

• looking to our own responsibilities.
• trusting in the power, kindness, and protection of the Holy Spirit – the Gift of Logic -- to put our choice to good use.

The Course says that if only one person truly Forgave it would upend the ego’s entire edifice of lies and end the dream. All it would take to trigger the awakening is one individual. The only context where there is meaning and relevance. The only context that matters.

Published on Leave a comment on The Great Divide in Philosophy and Theology: Mind vs Matter

We got to this point simply by starting with the thought of Mind and letting Mind trace its implications for us. The entire story of Mind and our own, the Story of the Child, can be readily explained by asking what is implied by “Mind.” It’s an exercise of what Mind does: it Reasons. We can start with what Mind is and move on to what it does. From there we can move on to How it does it, When and Where, and to the always intriguing question: Why?

The ground we’ve covered so far is a few conclusions meant to awaken the thinker in us. Without more reasoning, more context, they won’t make much sense. They’re meant to stimulate interest, and if I’ve succeeded you’ll have the patience to wait me out. There are insights ahead that might be worth a Huh? before we move on or they might change our minds. And if we change our minds it might change the world, because our world may only be a projection of our minds.

What “Mind” implies is Consciousness. I give the word an initial cap, like certain other words, to make an important distinction. “Mind” also implies unconsciousness, because, as we well know, we all have minds and they can be in one of two states: conscious or unconscious. The distinction is critical to the story of Creation that the Logic of Mind tells in its Consciousness. It’s equally critical to the story that the Logic of Mind’s Child tells in his unconsciousness, the story of our material world – our bodies with their brains and senses and their physical universe of time and space, organic and inorganic matter.

Terms that refer to Mind in its Consciousness are flagged by their initial capital letters. If the same terms are lower case they belong to the unconscious world of Mind’s Child. This distinction raises as many questions as it answers but I don’t want initial caps to be a distraction. Just remember that an initial cap refers to the Reality of Mind-Parent Consciousness while lower case for the same term refers to the unreality of Mind-Child in his unconscious state.

The Child was not always in an unconscious state. When his Parents gave birth to him he was Conscious. Everyone, you might say, was in “Heaven.” There was no sign of matter and bodies, no suffering and mortality. Something happened that caused the Child that we were at the beginning to lose Consciousness. It was this event that triggered a chain reaction of events that produced us and our universe of violence, a very different place than “Heaven.”

What I am attempting is an explanation for this seminal event. To my knowledge you won’t find a rational explanation anywhere in metaphysics or theology, though that’s not to say there aren’t home-grown philosophers all about who are working on it and may already have come up with good explanations. What gives us the right to be so bold? The answer is we all have within our minds a shared Memory of who we are, where we came from, and specifically what happened that triggered this chain of events. We don’t have to access a deus-ex-machina to do it for us. We don’t need “saviors” or “redeemers.” We need nothing external, because what we seek lies within. We only have to access our own minds – to do it ourselves.

That is, using our Intuition, because Intuition takes us beyond our brains, beyond our bodies’ senses, to insights that are the gifts of Memory, the Memory of who we are and the Reality we came from, whose purpose is to guide us to the answers we seek, to guide us back. These are the same familiar, well-documented insights that inform the physical sciences, technological progress, the arts, and every other field of human learning and endeavor that depend on spontaneous revelation – on being “gifted.” Those of us so bold as to speculate about things “divine” are only doing what comes naturally. We are using a “God-given” talent: our minds and our power and ability to Reason with help from Intuition.

Why haven’t philosophy and theology explained this phenomenon, the Child’s loss of Consciousness? All the thinking that’s gone into the Story of Mind and the Story of its Child to follow is needed to answer this question, and it will be answered. Let me only say at this point that there is a distinct pattern that runs through the history of philosophy and theology: a split between thinkers who believe that Reality is to be found in the reasoning of mind and those who insist that there can be no credible reasoning that does not acknowledge and account for the reality of matter.

“Rationalists” stand resolutely with their thoughts, “empiricists” or “materialists” just as adamantly with their bodies. Rationalists predate Plato with his predecessor and mentor Parmenides, whose School of Reason questioned the reality of matter. It was Aristotle, a student at Plato’s Academy, who broke with Plato and opened the split, stood firmly for matter, founded science, and inspired all the empiricists and materialists to come. With one important exception: he believed in the Reality of Mind. He believed in “First Cause.” So even then, philosophy was of two minds about Reality, and the course of thinking since then has been a dance between two views that can’t find their footing: mind tripping over matter, matter tripping over mind.

The same split runs through theology, the history of religious thinking, rather violently in the branding of Gnostic Christians as “heretics” by Church orthodoxy and their suppression by force. Biblical Christianity allies itself emphatically with the materialists though, paradoxically, it leaves unquestioned the miracles of its founder and even encourages belief in miracles. Did the miracles of Jesus not expose the illusion of matter? In fact, the version of Christianity channeled by Jesus in A Course in Miracles surrounds his miracles with a unique, fully developed thought system, grounded in Reason, that leaves no doubt that he is on the side of Mind. The same tension between mind and matter, “spiritual” reality and “concrete” reality, permeates Eastern and Western religions.

What’s to account for the divide? It could be something mysterious or diabolical, the stuff of conspiracy theories. But we all have minds corrupted with some degree of darkness that comes from the same source. We will get to that when we come to the event that followed the Child’s loss of consciousness. The likely explanation is nothing more exotic than differences in personality types.

Four Myers-Briggs categories are at the root of it: Intuition and thinking, on one hand, and their counterpoints sensing and feeling, on the other. An “Intuition-thinking” type puts their faith in mind-reasoning. A “sensing-feeling” type is firmly grounded in the body. They speak different languages and come to different conclusions, and precisely where they disagree is at the juncture of opposing philosophies: What is Real? What’s real for one type is not real for the other. Period.

Published on Leave a comment on The Philosopher who Got It Right

In The Poseidon Adventure the Gene Hackman group sought rescue in the stern, and that’s where they were found by their rescuers. En route, they passed a group heading the opposite direction toward the bow. Each thought they were right and couldn’t be persuaded to change direction. Only one was right.

The history of thinking about who we are, where we came from, and where we’re supposed to be headed, is divided into two groups, one suspecting that reason – our minds’ logical thoughts -- should be our guide, the other certain that only our bodies’ senses – our material world -- can be trusted. The great preponderance of opinion now and throughout history has sided with the latter, and it’s dead wrong. The great names in philosophy all struggle to make sense of Reality because, over and over again, they can’t reconcile what their minds want to tell them with what their bodies and their brains are telling them. The deception of appearances blocks their understanding and they come away confused, leaving us with the brilliance of insights that fall into this school or that and solve nothing.

Who is the great philosopher who got it right? Jesus! The institution and doctrine of the Church brought his light to the darkness instead of the other way around, perverted it into its opposite so that only fragments remain to connect and resonate. A Course in Miracles begins to fix all that by dredging up the darkness that was planted in our minds when the Child lost consciousness and exposing it to the light. Practicing the Course doesn’t mean pretending we’re serene boobs who are unaffected by all the shit that’s happening. It means looking right at the shit and understanding that it’s coming from within our own minds, our own psyches, it’s totally insane, and it has a totally insane purpose which is to distract us from the Innocent Child that we all are and from our Purpose which is to wake up, to get the hell out of here, get back to Creation, and get back to work!

The great names in philosophy were great minds with promising insights here and there that nevertheless couldn’t navigate through appearances and deceptions to put them together in one great and simple answer the way Jesus did. Jesus did it by leading us toward the stern, into mind, not matter, and into the dark shit that’s been interfering with great minds’ ability to reason. We do well to go to churches that remind us that we’re all nice, comfort us, and encourage us to do nice. But we could do just as well, or better, to get together and face the fact that we’re not nice; look right at our not-niceness; be horrified and dismayed at first; come to understand its absurdity and manipulative intent; laugh it right out of the building; and thus disarm it.

If only Gene Hackman didn’t have to give up his life for his group. Oh well.

Published on Leave a comment on Critique of “Introduction to Realistic Philosophy,” by John Daniel Wild

John Wild's book, Introduction to Realistic Philosophy (Harper and Row 1948) (RP) has made a contribution to my thinking and thus to my forthcoming book, for which I am very grateful. However, as I hope these reflections will show, it makes a better case for my book than it does for his. [See "My Forthcoming Book" and "On Circular Reasoning" posted to this website 4/25/20] We agree on the need for "realistic" philosophy, but we disagree on the fundamental question of what's real. What's real for him is matter; what's real for me is Mind.

My understanding of what’s going on with us and our world is that the Child we are, our spiritual ancestor, was stripped of the knowledge base he depended on for free choice when he lost consciousness. He lost much else, besides, but here, in this world, his focus has been on rebuilding his knowledge base. Without it he is operating in the dark, and getting out of the dark, returning to the light of consciousness by exercising free choice, is what he must accomplish.

This provides the context for my understanding of RP, its contribution to this broader purpose. Its specific contribution is to the pursuit of knowledge through experimental and theoretical science, which has, until recently, relied exclusively upon sensory perception, because RP does provide an argument to support it, if inadvertently. Its argument, not coincidentally, joins with body-centered Church dogma which, through Thomas Aquinas, gave cover to science when other faiths did not.

“Inadvertently” because science seems to play hardly any part in RP. Einstein isn’t registered in its name index even though general relativity upended Newtonian concepts of absolute space and absolute time. This dealt a momentous blow to certainties about material reality that one theoretical physicist, Rovelli, has likened to “the stuff that dreams are made of.”

RP makes no mention of Einstein’s theory in its discussion of time, a significant omission which suggests that undermining dark-age enemies of science played little or no part in its motivation. RP’s declaration that “Time is to be sharply distinguished from spatial extension;” that it’s “a mental measure with a foundation in extra-mental reality,” [p. 347], that we experience a “now” that’s more definable than Einstein’s “present” that’s neither future nor past, [pp. 375-376] are at odds with the science of its day.

The injustice that RP seems intent upon righting is “idealistic philosophy,” the synthesis of “empiricism” and “rationalism” propagated by Immanuel Kant. Its exact offense was positing reality in the eye of the beholder, a subjectivist take on reality that made a bystander of the body and its senses. But where idealistic philosophy rates a rebuttal, “spiritualism which reduces the physical to the mental” [p. 400], is dismissed with nothing more than it’s “far removed from the common insight of mankind.” [p. 395]

Had RP hypothesized the existence of a spiritual reality its reasoning would, I think, have yielded an opposite result. This is because its own take on reality treats as extrinsic any material object outside the body that senses it. Thus, it can claim “objectivity;” it becomes a common-sense “objectivist” philosophy; and “facts” are its exclusive domain. Since this assumption is intertwined with our everyday perceptions and feelings, it rings true.

But were a spiritual entity given a voice, the logic behind it would quickly be revealed for the fallacy that it is. Bodies integral to a system of material appearances are logically unqualified to pass judgment on their own system’s reality, i.e. on themselves. To grant them this status – to include the knower in the known -- is to grant rationality to circular, self-referential reasoning, which is irrational. Of even greater concern to RP, it would substitute subjectivity for objectivity, the ultimate violation of its logic.

In the event, RP is at pains to keep this from happening. Not only is spiritual reality not allowed to challenge “the realistic analysis of hylomorphic substance,” [p. 400], RP doesn’t allow Plato, its co-founder, to interpret the meaning of his Allegory of the Cave in his own words. These are the words RP uses: “perfection,” “sound social order,” “social justice,” “jointly ordered, cooperative community,” “just community,” “unjust community,” “bad society.” “good society.” [pp. 173-174]

How can the primary issue with captives of deception imprisoned in a cave be about justice and not about appearances and reality? About truth? Here are Plato’s own words:

“[O]nce seen, [the form of the good] is inferred to be responsible for whatever is right and valuable in anything, producing in the visible region light and the source of life, and being in the intelligible region itself controlling source of truth and intelligence. . . . When the mind’s eye is fixed on objects illuminated by truth and reality, it understands and knows them.” [Quoted in Wapnick pp. 298-299, my emphasis added]

“[O]ur true lover of knowledge naturally strives for reality” is a statement attributed to Plato in an earlier passage about Plato’s philosopher-kings, “the truly wise,” in Wapnick’s words, “who. . . no longer value the appearance of the Good but the Good itself; the reality illuminated by the truth and not the shadows.” [Wapnick p. 300. Wapnick’s and my emphasis added] Socrates, killed by Athenians, was the model for the freed prisoner “because he tried to awaken in them the truth of the difference between appearance and reality.” [Wapnick p. 298, my emphasis added]

If they relied on its interpretation alone, RP’s readers would not only miss the gist of Plato’s allegory, they would be mis-led. They would be victims of an intellectual cover-up that presents itself as beholden to the highest ideals of reason, common sense, and objectivity. Manipulation of facts is a predatory manipulation of people who depend on facts to make informed choices, a betrayal of their trust, and a sign of disrespect that would make fools of them.

The basis of RP’s logic is that if a thing appears real to body’s senses then it must be real. There’s no possibility that anything internal or external to our minds can be real that isn’t detectable by the body’s senses, an assumption about the place of the body in all of Creation that is breathtakingly ego-centric.

If I were to interview one of the shackled prisoners who occupied Plato’s Cave about what he was observing, I would expect a near-perfect articulation of Realistic Philosophy, a viewpoint that’s firmly committed to the logic of the Cave and oblivious to anything outside it. I would expect something on the order of, “What I observe in these flickering shadows is real because it appears real.”

The point of Plato’s allegory is to suggest that appearances may deceive, and, indeed, when an occupant frees himself to discover the reality outside, he confirms it. Plato’s philosopher king, modeled on the prisoner liberated from the deception of appearances, is possessed of an awareness supported by reasoning derived not from ignorance and misapprehension but from knowledge and truth. Elevating his subjects’ minds out of ignorance and misapprehension into the light of knowledge and truth – liberating them from appearances through reason and virtue, – was the inspiration for the philosopher king’s rule and for Plato’s Academy.

On the strength of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave alone I disagree with RP's claim that Plato "co-founded” its school of thought. [p. 379]

In another instance of selective truth-telling, RP begs off anything to do with “theology.” But it can’t resist noting that it accords with body-centered Church dogma and in so doing takes sides in theological controversy:

"Genuine Christianity. . . has much more in common with authentic materialistic thought. . . than with that extremely widespread spiritualism, , , which tries to deny matter and other basic facts of life. How surprised most of our contemporaries would be if they could discover the fact that Christianity, , , is actually a hardheaded campaign for the conquest of ourselves and the world we inhabit, , , , [F]or nothing is of more decisive importance for a people and its civilization than its religion, and how this is understood." [pp. 234-235]

Though gratuitous, RP’s acceptance of added cultural legitimacy from Western civilization’s most influential religious institution would be acceptable were it not for the fact that it’s also disingenuous. “Hardheaded” Church dogma contains an obvious contradiction which RP fails to mention: miracles. Miracles whose purpose was to demonstrate that our world, our material universe, our “laws” of science, our bodies and their senses, are illusory.

The author of miracles inspired Gnostic Christianity that was unpersuaded by Church dogma and was forcibly suppressed as a result. He has restated his message in A Course in Miracles, a unique system of thought and practical guidance based not on unquestioned faith but on tightly-reasoned philosophy and psychology. Its affirmation of Jesus’ miracles and their purpose was not available at the time RP was published, but the elephant was certainly in the room. How could this aspect of Church dogma not have drawn RP’s attention?

The answer must be that RP would have been obliged to confront a central article of Church followers’ faith and thus potentially offend many in its audience. The Church would be obliged to weigh in, and “the common insight of mankind” would be common no more. It would have been better had RP given spiritualism a hypothetical voice – the voice, say, of authority, reason, and compassion from Conscious Mind, like A Course in Miracles -- not only to correct philosophical subjectivity in its argument for sensory perception but also to practice the Platonic virtue of honesty.

Acknowledging that there were competing versions of Christianity; that “genuine Christianity” – Church dogma – achieved dominance only by force; and miracles that were part of dogma and opposing theologies flatly contradict RP, would be honest.

RP: I’m sorry, dear reader, but Realistic Philosophy says your revered miracles could not have happened. You’ll have to try another religion.
Believer: Yeah, well how about trying another philosophy?

Reliance on sensory perception is being questioned among theorists, I suspect, in many fields, and so it’s highly unlikely that RP could be put out there today with a straight face. Its author will have read books by Becker and Rovelli on quantum physics, a field whose discoveries are so bizarre that physicists protective of their careers steer clear of it. The search for quantum gravity -- the synthesis of general relativity / cosmology with quantum mechanics -- shreds “the common insight of mankind.” Neuroscience going back to the 19th century has questioned RP’s notion that consciousness resides in the brain. A material world that has become strange, incomprehensible, disorderly, and threatening can no longer anchor our sense of place and familiarity.

But why rely on RP’s argument to refute it when sensory perception can do better? Let it run its own course with cosmic reality and it will self-destruct.

The “potency” that RP depends upon for many of its conclusions is Energy. The Energy that powers our universe originated with Logic that powers Creation. The Big Bang was a release of energy from Reality-Consciousness – from the irrational thought of splitting up the oneness of Being -- that initially empowered our material, illogical universe. It is an imagined break with the real Logic-Energy of Creation, a disconnection, not a connection. Which implies that it is not a real-living current that can maintain its force but an illusory-dying current. It’s the flip side of real Energy -- flip side like everything else in our universe, the opposite of what’s real. Which explains why our illogical, illusory universe is in a state of entropy, destined to decay, tending toward disorder, and becoming inert.

This means that all the forms of energy – nuclear strong and weak, electromagnetic, and gravity – will gradually weaken until matter will no longer be produced by energy and its components will no longer hold together, from the quanta level on up. When the energy that’s locked up in matter dissipates, bodies will be long gone and nothing will be left that’s detectable by their senses. The Achilles Heel of RP is its reliance on "potency," i.e. energy, that eventually will abandon it. So, all that's really needed to put it to rest is time-lapse photography and a lot of time on our hands.

While it supports the physical sciences RP can also be appropriated by a less enlightened pursuit. This would be “objectivism,” the personal credo of Ayn Rand and her libertarian followers who noisily denied the legitimacy of any interest beyond individual self-interest. They suffered the handicap of narcissists unable to see beyond themselves, to accept the presence of a larger, communal self-interest, that makes governance in the public interest, for fairness, justice, peace, and civilization possible.

Objectivism makes a close match with the thinking behind “conservatism” that masks its will toward unopposed power, the license for its followers to do whatever they want behind the flag of “freedom:” their freedom to take away your freedom. It’s a prescription for fascist dictatorship which frees the dictator to take himself and his captive audience to the bottom of a sea of contradictions and “appearances.”

The reasoning that supports RP is that of a human mind corrupted by irrationality – the ego and its purpose to deceive. RP’s reasoning is flawed because its knowledge base is both unintentionally and intentionally mischaracterized and omits critical material that has since come to light. RP’s reasoning is flawed because it has been invaded by the ubiquitous manipulations of power relations – by self-interest in our state of competition and conflict. And RP’s reasoning is flawed because it intentionally compromises with the truth, not the minor infraction of everyday discourse but a betrayal of Philosophy’s Hippocratic Oath.

The reasoning that supports Jesus’ A Course in Miracles is reasoning from Conscious Mind, the spiritual perspective that could have corrected RP’s flawed reasoning had it been given the hypothetical hearing that the logic of philosophy, science, and fairness demanded. ACIM’s knowledge base lies beyond human access, but it invites the reader to dismantle the logic of its guidance with reason. After over thirty years of reflection, this reader so far cannot. The ubiquitous manipulations of self-interest are beneath it, but this is not to say that it lacks self-interest when all Creation is composed of self-interest. The difference lies in the logic, the definition, of “Self” that is Reality, that is Truth. Guidance from ACIM that cannot compromise with the Truth, by definition, that cannot betray itself, leads to the Truth about ourselves, our Worth and our Purpose, that cannot be compromised.

The search for scientific “knowledge” was supposed to end successfully before it reached the end of useful experimentation. But quantum physics-gravity requires that inquiry extend beyond physical experiments into philosophy, which takes us back to Plato’s unfinished business, the philosophic system that he never fully developed. It takes us back to the unified theory of everything that Einstein never finished.

A Course in Miracles accomplishes what Plato, Einstein, and experimental science have failed to do: construct a coherent thought system that isn’t shot through with contradictions and irrationality. It accomplishes this through uncompromising non-dualism, the proposition that between Mind and matter only Mind can be real.

It must have been in the backs of the minds of those who have clung to sensory perception –the learning disciplines, the professions, politics, the arts, communications, religion -- that it’s the first and last line of defense for civilization. They must have feared what populist politics, pop culture, the internet, and social media have wrought, a breakdown of consensus around reality, truth, morality, and the institutions – the “establishment” -- charged with maintaining it. Fears around replacing a paradigm as ingrained in the human mind as sensory perception are not to be taken lightly. The stability it has provided cannot be taken for granted.

This could have been the larger purpose of RP’s case against “idealism” and “spiritualism,” philosophies it considers subjective and irrational and, therefore, unrealistic, a threat not only to the reign of sensory perception but also to common sense, learning, and civilization. It takes its place among the Child’s evolving experiments with regaining its knowledge base for informed choice, a flawed product of the insights, the threats, the irrationality, and the politics of its time, but a worthy cause, nonetheless. It deserves respect.

Works cited:
Kenneth Wapnick, Love Does Not Condemn: the World, the Flesh, and the Devil According to Platonism, Christianity, Gnosticism, and 'A Course in Miracles' (Foundation for A Course in Miracles 1989)
Adam Becker, What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (Basic Books 2018)
Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (Riverhead Books 2017)
A Course in Miracles (Foundation for Inner Peace 1975)

Dave Harrison
May 5, 2020