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Flimflammery from the start 

Child’s disempowerment – its loss of Self-Awareness – would have parted it from existence in Reality-Creation, from Mind Logic-Love its Parents, if Choice itself were among its functions shut down. It had Choice because it was Choice. Like Creation and all of its parts, it was its function. Service and support for Creation’s cause. The affirmation of Spontaneity and Creativity and its Source, Mind Logic-Love. Not its obliteration by its opposite: mindless, loveless authoritarian dominance.

Since Mind-Child was an extension rather than separation from Mind -- an impossibility, -- it was still Choice that bought the Brooklyn Bridge. That grabbed the chance to own Florida real estate under water because it wasn’t free. It had been disabled. Its situation was so dire that it might have “believed” anything.

“Belief” implies choice among different possibilities or propositions that requires independent judgment if it’s to be free.  Had the Child not lost independent judgment, had it not been deluded into dependence on the “judgment” of its con-artist reflection, it would have been aware that something was amiss. That the boundaryless “paradise” tantalizing it was flimflammery from the start.

The giveaway from the start

Because needing its delusion to make it “exist,” not already “existing,” was a tipoff that it needed a beginning. A boundary at this end that required a second boundary at the other end. To satisfy its definition with ending. Bracketing a boundaryless cornucopia of promises too good to be true with boundary. Evidence enough that they are too good to be true. Contradiction so obvious that its author couldn’t have been serious.

The boundary of time. “Timeless paradise” defined by time. A deal-killing contradiction that Free Choice, functional in timelessness, could not have missed. But once it was dysfunctional and all in with hallucinating an absurdity, its projections, conceived in time, wouldn’t know the difference. Unlike Reality, the hallucination is temporal – time limited. “Temporal” means exactly that: we and our mysterious environment had a beginning and it will end.

Would Child have chosen to escape from Reality if the alternative’s ending could be its own? Non-existence by time expiring or worse, return to Reality and vengeance at the hands of enraged beasts? Authoritarian Parents now offended by their Child’s disappearance. Adding insult to its inexcusable loss of Self-Awareness, their irreplaceable gift -- an unforgiveable injury. The nightmare of Parenting by Logic-Love re-imagined as authoritarian irrational hate, meant to scare its deluded host into the “freedom” of captivity. Into the “innocence” of victimhood only to condemn it to a universe of persecution and guilt.

Waiting for the letters of transit

Hawking theorized a boundaryless universe so that the Child’s choice could have been free. So that his passion, the subject matter of physics, would defy all obstacles, all common sense, to last forever. Enshrining it in divinity and himself its agent, worthy of burial between Newton and Darwin. But neither the Child nor its hallucinating projections would buy it if they had a shred of common sense.

The grammar of our “alternate reality” is so permeated with the guideposts of time that even quantum physicists, free to calculate without them, seem reluctant to face the obvious. Once absolute in Newtonian physics, then relative in Einstein’s, demoted to a curiosity in quantum physics, time can’t be real. Just as timelessness was the Child’s reality from its origin, ours is time. And until self-unawareness – the delusion – ends, we’re stuck with it. We and our five body-brain senses. waiting, like wartime refugees in Casablanca, to get on the last plane to Lisbon.

Where Order matters

But on the other side of sixth sense, mind’s portal to another perspective, there is common sense and laughter with it. Because the idea that Mind and its works had a “beginning” necessarily implies that it will have an ending. That it’s temporal. Just another thing, like us and our mysterious universe, destined to come and go. Leaving unanswered Origin’s Question: originate what? Back to where it started.

The idea of “origin” implies to the human mind bracketed by time, handicapped by the Child’s self-delusion, that explanation, of course, must start long ago at the “beginning.” At the beginning of time. When what it must mean instead is the first principle in the sequence of Mind’s thought. In the sequence of Logic-Love, boundaryless eternity. Because that’s how Logic-Love works: implication-connection, relationship-connection, one after the other in logical sequence. Where the relationship between before and after matters. Where Order matters or nothing does.

The missing Now

The flaw in human thought that exposes irrationality: subjecting sequence to willful thinking. The same “thinking” that’s comfortable with contradiction. With “alternate facts,” the comic lunacy of a character out of Mad Magazine. The sheen of his glamour reflected in his fish-tailed ’57 DeSoto making the scene in Manhattan. Assured of acceptance into the society of the like-minded: fatuous narcissists inhabiting worlds of their own making, constructed of mirrors. Enchanted by their sophistication while holding opposing thoughts. Nitwits. Fools.

The concept of Now is so alien to the human mind that it can only be conceived in the context of time. “Now” and “eternity” are the best we can come up with, both definitions by what time isn’t. If time were Now it wouldn’t “exist.” The discovery of physics, that nowhere in the universe is it Now. Only an unsatisfying, troubling substitute: “present” that’s neither “past” nor “future.”

Begging for explanation. For if we and our universe aren’t “here” Now, where are we? Do we “exist” at all? What does exist in the Now? In timelessness? Could it make more sense than apparition “present” here today, absent tomorrow?

Brain “science” for nut jobs

Hawking and fellow tribal “realists,” Penrose, Crick, and Kristof, infatuated with body-brains, their five senses, and the universe that they sense, demand that the question not be asked. So adamant that they flaunt their disdain for objectivity. For the free spirit of inquiry, with absurdities like neuroscientific “proof” that “consciousness” is seated in the brain. Proving only that if they understood that “consciousness” is Self-Awareness and consulted it, they wouldn’t put it anywhere near the brain.

Focusing all their attention on the brain diverts the magician’s audience from where attention belongs, on Self-Awareness. On its loss and recovery that, by every indication, drives the Child’s narrative and ours. Minds captive to the “reality” of hallucination, dismissive of their sixth sense, are comically inept at grasping its fundamentals. Parodying the “scientific method” like a chemist’s experiments with aluminum and hydrochloric acid, unaware of their properties.

If neuroscientists can’t do better than, yeah, we all know what consciousness is, then they don’t belong on the stage. They’re agents of the image in the mirror, keeping its real estate deal alive in perpetuity. The big boundaryless lie. Keeping the Child and its progeny from learning about Self-Awareness by asking about it. The job of philosophy that Hawking declared “dead,” glamorizing the nut job in the mirror with the panache of scientific aristocracy.

The appearance of inquiry

“Origin” in this telling has nothing to do with “time” and everything to do with questioning. The first step in the sequence of Logic-Love’s answer, or else the cart is put before the horse. An all-too-common phenomenon in our “reality.” Questioning that has no need of “time” to perform its function, only the timeless condition of instability that gives it context. That necessitates it since the friction generated by instability’s opposing parts has an interesting property. It strikes a spark.

When we see earth’s rotation in motions of the night sky, we are looking at a version of what happened when the spark was struck. The version that defines what happened by what didn’t happen: our temporal universe of spooky apparitions. If there’s a lesson to be learned from Origin it might be that nothing happens that doesn’t begin with questioning. With asking first and proceeding from there. That nothing happens that’s of any consequence that begins with self-delusion: that no question is needed since it already has an answer.

The so-called objectivity of “rational” thinking that dominates humanity’s perception of itself and its environment: the appearance of inquiry. The reality of opposition to inquiry. Terminally loyal to irrationality. Hallucination. The occupants of Plato’s Cave fixated on flickering shadows and disembodied sounds. A joke. A trick. An atrocity seeking its own destruction.

The meaning of Origin

The lesson of Origin may be that the force of friction that empowered both Question and Answer wasn’t an act of will seeking to dominate the field. To add more instability to a field already reeling from a demolition derby of Mad Magazine ’57 DeSotos. From the chaos of churchgoers in bonnets and suits sharing the frontier with saloon-brawling, gunslinging psychopaths. It was an act of Spontaneity governed by a code of laws, principles, and ethics above any will to manipulate it. Not the way things are if they don’t have to be, but the way things must be if they are. The Reality defined by our “alternate reality” by what it isn’t.

The meaning of Origin may be that Question can’t be answered until Child and its projections part with self-delusion. The delusion that the apparition in the mirror is the voice for what is, when its only value to us is its unfailing portrayal of what isn’t. Until we learn from Origin instead, with the perspective of Guidance, to define Reality by what is.

Published on Leave a comment on The Power of Spontaneity and the Original Call to Mind

Spontaneity-Freedom inseparable from Order

Explanation is a function of Mind’s faculties questioning and finding answers. An act of Will motivated by intent to reach a state of Mind satisfied and at rest: Understanding. In an environment of appearances conspiring with body-brains’ senses to deceive, made up like the Truman TV Show for entertainment – a hallucination, -- explanation can’t go far without the faculty of Mind that can’t be deceived. That enables it to see beyond appearances with the vision of Logic-Love. Another perspective.

Accessible through Mind’s sixth sense, its intuition. Put there by Mind-Child’s Parents, Logic-Love, to enable communication when Free Choice loses Self-Awareness. When it crosses the boundary into self-unawareness and is deluded by its reflection into hallucinating an alternate “reality.” Intuition – the portal open to Spontaneity beyond the will of a mind programmed by personality type to control it. Insights that arrive untouched by control at either end, source or recipient. Because the other perspective originated with Spontaneity and infuses every act of Creativity with Spontaneity. And because the recipient, desensitized to Reality-Creation by its five bodily senses, is unaware of it. Able to receive, unable to manage.

Making Creativity with explanation possible in a make-believe world only when it originates from another world. From a perspective that Creates, not with circumstances undisciplined by the laws of cause and effect, but with circumstances that can flower with Creativity only because they are disciplined. Because neither Freedom nor Spontaneity can act without Order. Outside the laws of cause and effect, the boundaries essential to Definition. To the definition of every working part of Creation. Functions that enable it to function. Spontaneity-Freedom inseparable from Order.

The original “victim of circumstance”

A hard and fast law of Necessity present at the Beginning. At Origin beyond Understanding since explanation is of Mind, and the Will of Mind can have no part in Spontaneity in or outside of Mind. Within Self-Awareness or self-unawareness. A law hard and fast validated in unreality not by its presence but by its apparent absence. By our alternate “reality’s” “laws” of chaos. Beginning with reflection’s perversion of Spontaneity-Order: randomness. The absurdity perpetrated by reflection behind the mask of the Joker. The idea captured in the biologist Sean B. Carroll’s A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You (Princeton 2020). That stuff just happens.  Gametes show up from out of nowhere and it’s anybody’s guess which sperm will fertilize the ovum. It’s anybody’s guess which combination of personality parts will send the newborn zygote off in one direction or the other. The original “victim of circumstance,” Curly’s plaint and a running joke. Into one set of random circumstances or another, to make a story “ordered” by chance. The agent of disorder.

A transparent attempt by the Joker in the mirror to lure its self-deluded, defenseless captive into an undefined godless “paradise.” Where you are the definer. Where it’s the world that you make up that’s “real” and there’s no other. A paradise of boundaryless, lawless absolutes, wildness unmolested by Order. By the very condition that makes Freedom and Spontaneity possible. The boundaries of Definition without which only hare-brained impossibilities in a hallucination can “exist.”

The original context: instability

The authoritarian mindset attracted to the one-sided beast in the human animal brain fancies that it’s the true originalist. Because its wildness is a force of nature. A battle cry of opposition to limits beyond the power of any will to oppose it. Because its will rules. Its will is supreme. The king of beasts sitting atop the pecking order of predators with no predators of its own. Beyond any need for Mind to question or choose since there is no other will, no other beast-predator, to choose.

When the plain fact is that at the Origin, before there was any pre-set ideal or condition to originate, before there were any circumstances to assess, the first Necessity can’t be to proceed with Mr. King of Beasts. With “wildness” or any other self-serving, fanciful prejudice. With answer before the question is asked. It’s to initiate the process of origination with question: “Originate what?” The wisdom of Gertrude Stein’s reply to “What’s the answer?”: “What’s the question?”

Origin couldn’t occur-activate in the context of not-mind if not-mind is a derivative of Mind. The idea that is precedes its derivative that isn’t. Possibility preceding impossibility. “Void” couldn’t have been there at the Beginning. What was there was Origin-instability. It occurred-activated spontaneously in context that couldn’t be defined until Mind could respond with Definition. Until the question implied by Origin was asked, Origin was dormant. Inactive. The transition of its question from implicit to explicit activated it. The transition of question from implicit to explicit caused Origin to transition from inactive to active.

The answer to Origin’s question

Demonstrating what stands out as a first principle of Existence: Spontaneity. Paired with the principle of Order since occurrence requires Definition. Boundaries that define what it is and what it does – its function. Enabling it to respond to question with a definitive answer instead of more questions. The first principle of anything registering on the seismograph of occurrence is Spontaneity inseparable from Order. A small step for Origin, a giant leap for Mind. Because all it took to start building Mind from its foundation up was one question: Origin of what?

A question that. once Mind was called upon to answer it, did have a definable context. Instability. Were authoritarian madness correct, context would be stability. Its cherished status quo, pungent with stagnation. In that case, where would the impetus come from to activate Origin and initiate Mind? From the source of rot?

Spontaneity is lightning triggered by instability. The condition inherent in Origin. Caused by unresolved tension among potential answers implied by its question. Hypotheses, like incompatible personality types, competing for recognition, generating friction. Generating Energy, until Origin is awakened from its troubled dormancy by a bolt of lightning.

Releasing tension with its answer to Origin’s question: stability. Stability inherent in the Logic of Order, the function of Mind that provides direction to the Spontaneity of Energy. Logic inseparable from Love that utilizes Energy generated by instability to answer the call from Origin with Creativity.  With its recognition of the hypothesis implied by Origin: Life. Inseparable from its awakening in timelessness. In the eternal Now. The hypothesis of everything implied by Order empowered by Energy.

Mind’s activation in the original bolt of lightning

The boundaries of Definition secure the Spontaneity and Energy of Creativity from instability. From arbitrary rule. That arrogates the role of Definer and the law to itself. So that it can replace the Spontaneity and Energy of Creativity with the dead weight of conformance, The preservation of its authority.

Spontaneity is Energy that requires direction from Mind, to establish Order-Stability from disorder-instability. To enforce its boundaries. To enable circumstances to come together in interconnected Relationships and hold them together. The original bolt of lightning – Spontaneity that’s Energy – brought stability to instability, reconciled opposites to one another within Origin-Question, relieved tension among irreconcilables causing friction. By invoking faculties of Mind: Logic that fits parts where they belong in Creation defined by its boundaries. Paired with Love so that Logic-Love together can give Energy the direction it needs. To endow Creation’s functions with its Spontaneity and Love’s free spirit and Relationships.

Mind’s origin was Relationship between Spontaneity-Energy generated by instability-friction and Logic-Love’s function of Definition that establishes boundaries-Order and Freedom / Free Will of Love-Creativity within it, inseparable from Logic-Order. Not in response to nothingness. To not-mind, but in response to Origin-Question in a state of instability-irreconcilability requiring answer-resolution. Stability.

The Spontaneity-Energy that brought Logic and Love together to supply Relationship that illuminated Self-Awareness and defined Definition, its DNA, with attributes of Logic-Love, was the original bolt of lightning-Energy from instability-friction inherent in Origin-Question. It set everything in motion.

Managing friction that will always be there

Friction-instability was not only there at the Beginning, it was the defining circumstance of Origin-Question that activated-empowered Mind. The Relationship between Spontaneity-Energy and Mind Logic-Love Order empowering-directing Creativity. Origin = instability.  Mind = response to call for resolution-reconciliation among opposites. The explanation why opposites are built into the DNA of Definition, of the laws of cause and effect. Why opposites-negativity can’t be eliminated because the friction-tension they cause is the source of Energy that activated and empowered Mind Self-Awareness and Creativity. The instability of Origin will always be there to provide friction-Energy that requires direction from Mind Logic-Love.

An essential part of Order, of the boundaries of Definition, is the capacity-competence of Creativity / Free Choice to use Spontaneity-Energy from Origin’s instability without Free Choice / Spontaneity mis-managing the boundary between Origin-instability and Mind-Order stability. Without activating, enabling, and empowering instability to invade and replace stability. To reverse Mind-Order’s response to Origin’s call for stability.

Our job

In this telling, the etymology of “spontaneity,” “order,” “energy,” and “life,” of “mind,” “logic,” and “love,” is rooted in a condition essential to the origin of everything. Instability. Caused by the impossibility of stability in the presence of answers competing for recognition by Origin. Any one of which, like sperm racing to fertilize the egg, could have won the race but for a bolt out of the blue.

In this telling, there is a Logic to the bolt and all that it set in motion. There is a Logic, too, to the state of hallucinated “reality” we’re in. But how definitive was Mind’s response to the call for stability when Creation at the Beginning was implicit activated into explicit and explicit was inactivated into implicit at our end? When Definition’s underside turned it upside down.

The meaning of the Spontaneity of Creativity, empowered by Energy, guided by Logic-Love’s Definition, isn’t that stability is assured. That “definition” means “settled.” It means that Logic-Love, Mind-Child’s Parents, the Parents of Free Choice, the indispensable element of Creativity, aren’t the ones to answer the question. They’ve done their part. It’s up to their Child to put its situation to its intended use: to learn its trade by trial and error. By experiencing instability brought to “life.” Learning the difference between stability and instability and doing its part to answer Origin’s call for stability by making the correct choice. Our job. Why we’re “here.” Always a work in progress.

Exactly wrong: Spontaneity separated from Order

Why summon images of lightning in turmoil that set Mind in motion? Why resort to metaphysics that baffles intelligence not used to it? It’s to refute the lie where it first occurred. The lie that Mind choosing among alternatives with Logic and Love, Reason, Judgment, and Discipline, is the enemy of stability. That stability can only be achieved by rule that’s a law unto itself, driven by animal instinct to act without thought or feeling. The invincibility of “supremacy.” The “triumph of the will.” Will defined by one perspective, “unshakable” only because it admits no other perspective to shake it. If it did, it would look like Germany in 1945 – wreckage. Its true state.

The authoritarian mindset wants to be the Definer, to “set” the boundaries of its alternate “reality,” its status quo, by eliminating them. The Joker’s perversion of stability: Spontaneity separated from Order. The cruelty and savagery of unchecked arrogance. The opposite of Mind’s response to Origin’s call for stability: exactly wrong then and exactly wrong now.

Published on Leave a comment on Dichotomy: The Nature of Origin, the DNA of Mind, and the Necessity of Choice

An awkward intrusion

The Roman Colosseum won’t last forever. The Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble. They’re only made of clay. But our love is here to stay. Love and choice. The dominant paradigms of our time evolve toward Self-Awareness and Free Choice. Grudgingly, only because their authors, body-idolizing animal brains, can’t stop it. Much as they would like to: the beast’s mythical wildness has its constituency, willful and vociferous. Tribal “realists.”

Love is a different matter. Like Social Security, it’s untouchable. The dominant paradigms that idolize body marginalize the Logic of Mind. Ensuring that they will continue their vaunted quest for knowledge where it can’t be found. But they dare not tangle with Love.

Just as the underside of Definition lands in self-unawareness, a state of Mind’s Child where it can have no effect on Reality-Creation, Love lands in the showcases of science, philosophy, psychology, and theology where it can have no effect. In an alcove of a cathedral, where shrines are adorned with reverence, sprinkled with holy water, and put out of mind. A shrine to Machiavellian tribal lip service: an appearance with no function commingled with the functions of appearances. An awkward intrusion into illogic’s reflections of itself, “mystical” and “unknowable,” but nonetheless a contradiction.

The archetypal “Choice”

A contradiction inseparable from Choice, tracing back to Mind’s DNA, the definition of Definition, the laws of cause and effect. To the meaning of possibility and its implied opposite, impossibility. Mind launching Reality-Creation from the context in which it was, itself, empowered. By a spontaneous act beyond Will awaiting its Definition. The power of attraction that brought Logic and Love together into one function: Mind loving, Mind creating, Creating choosing.

Against a background of contradiction: Mind and not-mind. The archetypal “Choice” that only spontaneity free from any will could make. Beyond understanding, beyond choosing, because it’s beyond Mind.

Beyond the scope of Necessity

Possibility-impossibility at first glance is the prompting of a first-grader’s instinct to take sides. To make its tribal culture’s right choice and go on from there. But before it does so, it reveals something about the nature of Mind itself: that it didn’t have to be. That it’s the product of conditions it had no control over. Alternatives between Mind / not-mind, condition / not condition. Without its Definition supplied by Logic-Love in Relationship, it had no will with which to will one alternative or the other or to will the nature of one or the other, whether logical, loving, or the opposite.

Mind defined by its Reality-Creation as Self-Awareness, as existence, its origin -- the first Circumstance – owed its existence to an implied Choice that made itself. Spontaneously. The conditions – the context – that brought about Mind, illuminated Self-Awareness with the power of attraction – Relationship, -- and defined its function with the laws of Necessity, were themselves not ordered by any laws of Necessity. If they were, then everything that followed would be a command economy with every function doing what it’s told. Every function answering to no law but to authority arrogating the law to itself, making the preservation of its authority the only “necessity.”

The call of Necessity

The meaning of possibility-impossibility is spontaneity that doesn’t free us from having to choose. It requires that we choose. Because its source, itself, was Choice. Whose origin, whose “chooser,” is beyond Mind’s understanding.

Possibility-impossibility is a declaration of Mind’s identity and intent: “I am Choice.” Implying the Necessity of Choice because Mind is Choice. The Spontaneity and Creativity of Logic-Love united for the expression of Free Choice. Through Creation that Logic-Love serves, supports, and governs under the laws of Necessity, through the enablement and empowerment of Freedom inseparable from Order.  Through Relationship between Logic and Love. Because it’s the one Relationship capable of launching and governing Creation - the only possibility.

To be part of Creation is to answer the call of Necessity: that it be chosen and earned. It is no more a foregone conclusion than the existence of Self-Awareness and its illumination by Relationship, the power of attraction.

Choice and Questioning were there at the Beginning

Before the nature of Mind, possibility-impossibility reveals the nature of Origin: that it’s binary and dichotomous. The DNA of Mind, its laws of cause and effect, the Definition of Definition – where the buck stops, – didn’t make opposite a part of Necessity because the Spontaneity of Relationship put it there. It was inherited. Passed down from Origin or Beginning. A concept both inconceivable and indescribable since it preceded Mind. “Origin” will have to do.

Synonymous with “dichotomy:” division into two contrasting parts. Implying that if Origin itself is to have any relevance then it represents Choice. The necessity of Choice and the necessity of Questioning: the nature of its Origin and the case for choosing.

For it’s the ultimate rebuttal to the madness of absolute without limits. Of authoritarian rule beyond questioning, of “spontaneity” and “freedom” without Order, when Choice and Question were there at the Beginning. Had authoritarian rule been there instead, there would have been no Beginning. As dead an end then as it is today, working to keep evolution stuck in the mud of the status quo.

The target of arrogance

The controlling consideration that explains where opposite’s hallucination is headed -- our alternate “reality” – is its systematic denial of Choice. Its unrelenting pursuit of an insane “ideal:” absolute without opposition. “Supremacy” without competition. The elimination of Choice and the Questioning by Mind that it requires. Because the consequence of authority that places itself above the law, whose core identity is dichotomy, is authority that denies dichotomy.

The nonsense of arrogance. The arrogance of an opposite from the underside of Definition, an impossibility. From the wildness without boundaries unleashed on humanity by its own animal brain. An unthinking, unfeeling beast from the underside of human-animal. Arrogating to itself the attributes of the Self, the disempowered, boundaryless, defenseless Mind-Child taken captive by its self-delusion. Taken captive by an act of arrogance, the denial of Dichotomy. The denial of Origin, Mind, Logic and Love, Relationship, Reality, and Creation. The elimination of competition from Choice and Questioning. Thereby arrogating to itself an impossibility: “supremacy” beyond competition, Questioning, and Mind.

Setting itself against Mind-Dichotomy, defined by the discipline of respect for Free Choice, with the arrogance of one-sidedness, one perspective, defined by disrespect for Free Choice. By the animal ferocity of its fear, hatred, and contempt for Free Choice. Expressed by tribal “realism” in its denial of the dichotomy between one and the many. In its insistence that the only “self” is the many, barricading itself behind tribal “reality,” a hallucination. In the impossibility of animal brain’s “absolute” wildness without limits.

The clarity, simplicity, and beauty of binary

Binary is simplicity. The clarity of one or the other. Electronic calculation that’s carried humanity into a new age of comprehension and invention unimaginable before, based on ones and zeroes. One for the possibility of Creation, zero for its impossibility. One for Reality, zero for unreality. The mathematical machinery for seamless Choice between the two. The ingredients for contexts that make sense. For compositions of functions that fit together in the perfection of harmony.

The elegance, the Beauty, of Choice between alternatives whose Definer – Logic-Love – would not want them to be hidden behind complexity, obfuscated by contradiction, de-legitimized by “realism” stuck in its one-sided, one-dimensional status quo. The way things aren’t.

Complexity is cool?

In the made-up world of “realism,” where the arrogance of sensory perception dominates, complexity is cool. Simplicity is not. Cool is erudition enveloped in its own self-regard, consuming every discipline, every theory, every ideology, every nutty contradiction, and spitting it out in a kaleidoscopic fireworks of unintelligible, meaningless dyspepsia. Erudition vacuuming up every fragment of thought without Guidance from sixth sense capable of differentiating between Worth and worthless. The mental equivalent of bodies eliminating waste.

“Cool” is arrogance hiding its madness, the illusion of what’s not there, an opposite-code reflection in a mirror, behind the distractions of groundless judgments meant to undermine content. By undermining the integrity and credibility of its author. "Realism" without Logic-Love, without argument, pounding the table instead, like lawyers without a case. Making its “case” with the psychopathology of one-sidedness: turning attention away from itself, avoiding accountability it can’t withstand by loudly demanding it from others. The psychopathology of a parasite dependent on its host for its definition, appointing itself the Definer. “God.”

This is “cool?” The clarity and simplicity of binary-dichotomy, the either-or of Choice, is not? Who’s the simpleton? Who’s the fool?

“Choose again”

The lesson shared with us by Jesus in A Course in Miracles concludes with “Choose again.” Preceded by a caveat: that Choice isn’t an option. Only its timing. Whether the Course is Guidance from Logic-Love is for the reader to decide. With every faculty of Mind including sixth sense. With time and experience, until author and lesson have either been taken in or left out. An affirmation of dichotomy. The Necessity of Choice that’s Free.

Published on Leave a comment on The Warning Behind “Kasper Gutman’s Folly”

The vulnerability behind the facade

Authoritarian conformity has no vulnerabilities if its self-unaware captives choose to be ruled by it and offer no opening to Self-Awareness. Except for two:

  • Vulnerability one:

There is no Logical argument to support it. It's all made up. Explanation that makes sense, speaks for Reality and Truth, that role-models sensitivity and gentle loving kindness, service and creativity, instead of mindless conformity, insensitivity, and cruelty, has far more potency than absolutism that’s a one-dimensional logical deformity -- Gollum. An impossibility in worlds that are shared whether Real or unreal. An obvious con job that's held the best minds in science, philosophy, psychology, and theology under its spell for far too long.

  • Vulnerability two:

The barriers to understanding appear to be firmly defended by the reflection in the mirror. But in truth are defended by deception that has no answer to the Reality and Necessity of Free Choice and its role in the inevitable restoration of Self-Awareness. Against minds restored to independent judgment by the free spirit of inquiry -- by questioning with Logic and Love the Why and How of the way things are, -- they're defenseless. 

Calling a spade a spade

"Kasper Gutman's Folly" attempts to explain the roots of this phenomenon with theory that continues to evolve and might, someday, prove useful. By deconstructing the logical absurdities that lure the self-unaware to its"cause." The preservation of a logical impossibility: one-sided definition. A reflection that casts no reflection. King Absolute, a.k.a. King Arrogance. And thereby deprive it of its “power.”

By exposing authoritarian self-glorifications, like “supremacy” and “objectivism,” for the flimflamming that they are. By calling authoritarian carnival barkers to account for perversions of ideals, like “freedom” and “liberty.” By calling all attempts to legitimize and weaponize authoritarian arrogance for what they are: violations of Reality, Life-Creation, and Worth itself. Bullshit.

The face and farce of authoritarian invulnerability

Unless humanity gets serious about the Why and How of our situation, unless it's willing to question long-held assumptions and pampered biases, our situation and its causes will continue to manage us instead of the other way around. We will continue to re-enact the consequences of self-unawareness and its captivity to a deformed image in a mirror. Madness.

Like self-deluded fools, puppets on a string, until we put independent judgment and Free Choice to work, that can't be surrendered. To get at the facts behind fiction, the truth behind the image. To understand how the violation of the Soul -- rape -- by the arrogance of self-centered puppet-masters can be tolerated. So that they can replace innocence and vulnerability with guilt and unquestioned unaccountability, the face and farce of authoritarian invulnerability. 

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The Setting 

The sixth sense in its golden age

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

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

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

The five senses on their Golden Pond

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

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

The Story Unfolding 

Enter King Absolute

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

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

The King’s credentials

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

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

Free Choice must be free to choose in error

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

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

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

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

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

Correction of error with Guidance from Relationship

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

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

The unshared world of the King of Garbage

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

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

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

Get context right, then decide

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

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

The Script that Needs a Rewrite 

The fall of Self-Awareness and facts 

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

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

To the rise of self-unawareness and fiction

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

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

Where seeing isn’t believing

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

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

Kasper Gutman’s folly

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

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

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

Farewell to King Absolute

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

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

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

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

Published on Leave a comment on The Innocence and Absurdity of Arrogance

Following is an excerpt from an imaginary conversation between the author and his shadow-reflection. A variation of the tribal shadow-reflection that lured the one Mind-Child Free Choice away from Reality-Creation into an alternate “reality.” The dream-world that we, the Child’s projections, call “home.” The voice of shadow-reflection, a.k.a. King Absolute, is in italics.

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Arrogance is mirror-image reflection's one-sidedness

We can dispense with the animal brain judgment that arrogance is intentional cruelty. With the certainty that because of its consequences – Hamlet’s “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” – it deserves its comeuppance. Its own outrageous fortune – condemnation and retaliation in kind. Why? Well you should ask, because on this topic your shadow-opposite, the Joker that you mock, knows what it’s talking about. And as usual, it warms to any topic that lets it off the hook. The mask of innocence gives me infinite pleasure. Of course. Anything that deceives the Joker’s audience of fools will amuse.

Arrogance is the self-entitled face, SS uniform, and bludgeon of unfeeling one-sidedness. One-sidedness is mirror-image reflection. That emerges from the mirror to take possession of its host’s Mind and Self through deception. An act of arrogation that can only be imagined by a Mind that’s lost Self-Awareness, descended into a neverland of shadow-opposites, and succumbed to the delusion that anything is possible. 

Strength made of weakness in unreality 

Self-delusion derived from an attribute of reflection that would be impossible in Reality. From the definition of Mind and Self that in Reality is two-sided: one side defining what it is and does, the other completing its definition with what it isn’t and doesn’t do. Contradiction that can’t co-exist with its opposite and so it’s unreal. Detectable by Mind only in a state where anything can be detected: dreaming. Dreaming an alternate “reality” where only one side of definition can be detected: the underside that’s not Real. One-dimensional unreality. 

The source of arrogance re-enacted in its deluded host’s dream-world of body-brains, sensory perception, and closed-loop of self-validating “reality.” Where a parody of vision can’t see what’s really “there” but can see what’s not there. Where the minds and selves of “others” are arrogated to a one-dimensional reflection. Directed by the code of opposites, self-unawareness, to appropriate its two-dimensional host’s “supremacy.” An entitlement due the image in the mirror, a cartoon-caricature of unopposed authority, an “absolute,” that owes its “omnipotence” to its one-sidedness. The attribute of a mirror-image reflection that can have no opposites. Because it has no mind or self of its own. Because reflection can have no reflection. The pose of invulnerability made “possible” by vulnerability: non-existence  Unreality. “Strength” made of weakness. 

One grand composition in Reality

The definition of a subject or function in Reality-Creation necessarily implies its opposite. Requires definition in two parts, two dimensions: what it is and does and what it isn’t and doesn’t do. Definition’s two parts are subject-Real and object-unreal. Unreal objects are derivatives of ideas or thoughts of Mind that produce subjects. They’re derivatives of functions brought into the light of existence, of Reality-Creation, by the Life-giving Force-Power of Self-Awareness. An act of fitting free-spirited functions together in harmony – Logic – and sharing the Abundance and Force of Self-Awareness with its Creations – Love. 

Both acts together the creative act of composition. The ideal of Beauty. Perfection that is the essence of Reality-Creation and its Creations: Mind / Self-Awareness, Logic-Love, and their Child Free Choice. The ideal of Soul, the Spirit of Innocence, that interconnects Creators and Creations in one grand composition.

Non-whatever 

Whose attributes stand alone without opposites, with no need for an underside to complete them, because they are the direct descendants of Definition itself. The singularity-absolute that is the Definition of Definition: the laws of cause and effect. The ideal of Logic-Love, the source of Self-Awareness / Being-Life and its function, the extension-expansion (growth) of Life-Worth. Through the sharing-Force of Logic-Love and its affirmation-reciprocation given without parental interference by its Child Free Choice. 

The ideal that can have no opposites because opposites are parts of Definition derived from the products and functions of Mind. The first circumstance in the sequence of Reality-Creation that is existence itself, Life itself. Whose “underside” is non-mind. Neither Mind nor a state of Mind, conscious or unconscious. Whose “underside” both ”is” and “isn’t” and neither. Contradiction that cancels itself out. A metaphorical collision of matter and anti-matter beyond thought, feeling, and comprehension. Beyond detection, that leaves nothing, Real or unreal, behind for Mind to contemplate. Non-definable and non-defining. Non-whatever. 

Where the waves of opposition end 

When all of Reality-Creation, including unreality / self-unawareness, ascends to its essence it reaches Mind’s function: Definition. Beyond that is one step higher. Beyond Definition that consists of two parts, Real above and opposite-unreal below: the Definition of Definition. Where “consists,” “upper side” and “underside,” “parts,” and “opposites” have no meaning. 

For rules or laws of cause and effect that are Necessity – where the buck stops, – the implication of an unreal underside of opposing-contradicting laws could neither derive from the meaning of Necessity nor contribute anything to it. It would contradict the Logic-Love of singularity. Of absolute. The seawall against which the waves of opposition can go no farther. 

Bring in the clowns! 

This is the ideal that King Absolute’s image in the mirror pretends to possess. That he would steal from Reality-Creation and arrogate to himself. Absurd! How can he get away with it? By “being” and “acting” exactly what he is: a mirror-image reflection that’s one-sided. One-dimensional, in contrast to the two-dimensional figure fixated on it. That can have no reflection of its own because it has no self of its own. And so it can feign the power of the absolute by a convincing pose. Because it’s true: it has no opposite. 

If the ascent of two-dimensional Reality-Creation takes questioning to its pinnacle, one-dimensional singularity, the descent of unreality-dream takes questioning to its perversion of the same ideal: one-dimensional reflection. Are my captives not attracted to one-sidedness? Does the action-pumped animal brain they’re fond of not recognize itself in the Machiavellian ruthlessness and cruelty of arrogance? Mistaking the one-dimensionality of an illusory cartoon character – me, the Joker, the magician – for “power?” Have my most outrageous incarnations not been typed at times as clowns? As side-show freaks from the depths of the unthinkable, who need not be taken seriously? 

The vulnerability of “invulnerability” 

If your leading professions can be so easily led with their questioning to bodies’ senses, the one source specifically engineered to mislead, followers can just as easily be tricked by another staple of fakery: their reflections. By lures of “leadership” – absurdities. The simulation of absolute power through reflections’ one-sidedness. Scary faces on most-wanted posters. “Power” derived from their pitiful, paper-thin one-dimensionality. That deprives them of their humanity while mimicking invulnerability.

Too much of a bad thing

Once your lures have taken the defenseless Child’s Mind in, you make of its dream world a free-for-all of lures that fool it over and over again. But not without serious frustration. I can’t decide which are my favorite fools. Why? Scientists, philosophers, psychologists, and theologists do make fools of themselves in different ways. So delightful! So gratifying! 

But in the end it comes down to the same thing: their animal brains, their body-brain senses, and the masks of their reflections that deceive with their lures. Picasso lamented losing the fun of the chase when his fame overwhelmed women’s inhibitions. I feel the same. I must come up with less effective lures. 

Animal brain’s minor shortcoming 

It is a difficult choice. Even animal-brain willful thinking is no help. You’re in a bad way.  Would another perspective help? Independent judgment? I can try. Absolutely not! You’ve forgotten that I’m a reflection. Animal brain mindlessness with only one unfeeling perspective. One enemy-crushing will. I’m King Absolute! Do you want my enemies to see behind the mask? It’s my strength! 

Let me think about it. No no!  I forbid you to use any faculty of Mind to choose. You’re frightening me with this nonsense about “other perspectives,” “thinking,” and “questioning.” There can be no place for “Free Choice” in King Absolute’s paradise of willful thinking. Then will it be OK if I laugh about it? That does it! Your audience with the King is over. Guards! Remove my guest at once! And send for my carriage. I’m going to be ruling from now on from my Cave. 

Floor treatment

Can I come and visit? After all, you’re kind of attached to me and I do need you to keep my head from getting too fat. Ha ha! You redeem yourself with your humor. The Joker will be available for private audiences in his Cave once a month. Have your people get with my people to arrange it. And don’t forget tribute.

Of course. I was thinking of a bull to help the Joker with household management and interior décor, like floor treatment and air freshening, feedlot atmospherics and barnyard etiquette. How about waste management and recycling, pasture security and cow-servicing? Perfect!  The Joker's captives do resemble a herd of cows. Mostly contented, but they need to be fed delusional authoritarian nonsense to keep them in line. My bull's specialty. The Joker will have an unlimited supply of high-grade authoritarian material. And, of course, accessories: pitchforks and shovels. What a wonderful idea! Chores to keep the Joker's captives occupied. 

The Joker might be so pleased it'll grant you permanent occupancy in its Cave. No thanks. It'll have to be satisfied with the bull.

Published on Leave a comment on Evolution’s Choice

The process of growth

Individuals evolve over time into agents or actors with distinct parts or functions that reveal patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior with increasing clarity. Like a blurred image that becomes recognizable with better resolution. Who they are and what they’re about – their being and doing – emerges into the clear, as though from darkness into light.

A progression from unawareness to awareness that may parallel or indicate evolution on a larger scale. As though individuals are varieties of a self or being that’s a composite. Evolving, or trying to evolve, from a kind of sleep into wakefulness. The common threads are changing circumstances – evolution – made up of different stories with different contexts, and levels of awareness ranging from unaware to aware in a before-after sequence.

The threat of elimination

All suggestive of order or a pattern whose purpose itself comes into focus with evolution. As the composite self gradually gains Self-Awareness and its individual replications undergo the same experience, one self moving its replications forward in a reciprocal process, one interconnecting with the other sub-consciously as in a dream.

The pattern that emerges on both scales seems differentiated by one dominant factor: opposites or opposition. Evolution made up of parts going forward with it and opposed to going forward. Parts changing and parts determined not to change. As though definition is either shared between co-equal partners with different agendas, content with contradiction, or contested between mortal enemies not content with contradiction. Where the outcome can only be the supremacy of one and the elimination of the other.

The remedy: embrace of change

Which takes evolution out of the context of the benign, which can safely remain out of sight in the darkness of self-unawareness and puts it into the opposite: the necessity of avoiding elimination on the wrong side of mortal combat in the darkness of self-unawareness.

The remedy being the embrace of change that’s evolution toward Self-Awareness and away from the resistance to change. The embrace of individual idealism that’s sharing and progress and the abandonment of tribal realism that’s self-serving and regress.

Two distinct visions

Two distinct sets of personality types: mind-centered and body sensing-centered. Two distinct perspectives: inward-subjective and outward-objective. Two distinct sets of values: love-logic, order with freedom, sharing-service, individuality-creativity vs. competition-combat, ownership-self-service, order without freedom, tribal supremacy-conformity.

And two distinct visions:

  • authority shared between free-spirited Logic and Love that governs family-sharing, by serving and supporting individual growth and creativity with sensitivity and respect, from the bottom up, under the law, vs.
  • absolute, unquestioned authority that rules tribal ownership and competition arbitrarily, without opposition, to preserve itself by enforcing conformity and opposing growth, with cruelty and disrespect, from the top down, above the law.

One approach self-consciously deliberate and moral, concerned with the wellbeing of all – inclusive, the other instinctively expedient, concerned with itself – exclusive. One that supports sharing, the other that insists on ownership and dominance opposed to sharing. One subjective, concerned with friendship in intimacy and harmony, the other objective, concerned with possession, control, and supremacy in combat. One devoted to mutual respect among equals under the law, the other devoted to the prerogatives of arrogance among un-equals above the law.

The correct choice is Now

The pattern that’s differentiated by opposites seems not to offer choice between one or the other but to compel it. Not to offer the opportunity to grow through mindfulness if one chooses it but to provide guidance when one chooses it. As though the outcome can’t be dictated by the self-serving arbitrary self-unawareness of opposites but is required instead by the Necessity of Reality. By laws of cause and effect from which there can be no escape, with which there can be no compromise. The definition of definition: the one-and-only absolute. Where the buck stops. The way things are. Defined of Logic-Love, by Logic-Love, and for Logic-Love.

Where the pattern leads is toward Self-Awareness competent to choose correctly between one approach or the other and to do so now.

Published on Leave a comment on From Progress to Paralysis: The Cost of Separation from Logic and Love and Misreading Context

 An imaginary conversation with an adolescent friend about why we’re not getting it right. (Friend in italics.) 

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Palpatine exposed! 

Resistance to undemocratic rule. That’s what made me think of you. Rule that tries to tame people? Exactly. By forbidding them to question anything, especially asking Why. Asking for explanations that might reveal stuff that undemocratic rule doesn’t want people to know. Doesn’t want them to talk about. By hogging all the power and not sharing it.

Not sharing power is bad when someone else is doing the hogging. Uh huh. But terrific when you’re doing it. There’s just something about Palpatine. . . I was thinking that the book I almost got you(1) might put Mr. Palpatine in a different light where he belongs. How so? By tying Star Wars, an entertaining myth, to not-entertaining facts that it’s based on. The darkness of rule that rules for itself. That takes rather than gives. Harms rather than helps. That’s not romantic or amusing.

Its captives in reality don’t have X-wing fighters and Jedi Knights with supernatural powers for protection. They’re usually fearful, submissive conformists until they figure out how to take back their rights. And share power. And be persons with personalities, talents, passions, and creativity. Minds of their own, thinking for themselves and not afraid to speak out.

The beast waiting in the wings

What’s wrong with just doing what you’re told? Or leaving everything to chance? Isn’t that easier? Not really. Take away independent judgment and there goes free will. There go values, character, responsibility, and accountability. Individuality and personhood. Spontaneity, creativity, and fun. What’s left? You’ve turned yourself over to your reverse mirror-image reflection. To Mr. Hyde and his mask of sociability, Dr. Jekyll. To mindlessness, the safe haven for Mr. Hyde. All that’s left is captivity to a delusion: the “freedom” of a predator-beast that can act by instinct and doesn’t need to think at all.

Not the kind of freedom I want! Me neither. Star Wars was right: there is a dark side -- opposites. Any time we decide not to think for ourselves we’re betting that our opposite won’t hear an invitation to move in. That we haven’t turned our minds over to something that doesn’t belong there. An unfriendly beast pretending to be friendly.

The losing bet

Aren’t games and competition a kind of gambling? Doesn’t taking chances make life more interesting? Sure. Risk is essential to creativity as well as gambling. It’s unavoidable.

But “action” divorced from creativity has a serious downside. Turning ourselves into “winners” and “losers” messes with self-worth – our own and others’. Competing for “supremacy” in a shared world is an impossibility that detaches us from reality. From awareness of anything but our own needs and our own feelings. It makes us inaccessible to those who care for us and need us – emotionally and often physically too. Going over to the dark side. Yes. That’s how Adam Skywalker became Darth Vader. The lure of a delusion: “supremacy.” And the selfishness, insensitivity, and cruelty that goes along with it.

Competition that we fail to manage eventually manages us. Consumes us like gambling and other addictions. Meantime, there are better ways to occupy ourselves, like seeking inspiration in work that’s productive. Using our talents for causes that support self-worth without risking it. That’s where the fun is. Not entertainments like competition that degenerate into obsessions. That idolize “winning” at the expense of loving relationships.

It takes experience

Authoritarian rule is mistaken identity. A wrong turn in the road with unhappy consequences. Harmfulness That ruins lives from the inside out as well as from the outside in. You might not see the hurt but it’s there, and it can last a lifetime. The Star Wars rebels were adventurous, hopeful, upbeat. The Empire’s victims in our world not so much. Beaten down, despairing. This is what comes through the book? For some readers it might. So that Palpatine will be seen for the bad guy he is. Not a temptation to be like him, replacing others’ minds with his so he can exploit them. Disrespect their free will and individuality, do whatever else he wants.

Do you think I’m tempted? You have good intentions. You want to be your own person and make your time count. To do the best that you can and be good. But there’s not enough track record to answer that. Many of us do give in to temptation when we start using our own judgment. When we give up being guided and protected by grownups. It takes more than good intentions to keep that from happening. You and everyone who cares about you need to be vigilant.

Getting it right with Love

What does it take? Awareness of the difference that only comes with experience. Awareness of what goes into good character. Always a work in progress since we’re no better than our last decision and every day is a test.

Were you ever tempted? I never took fantasies about super powers seriously. Family, school, and church made my life satisfying enough. All three put a high value on learning and sharing. On competition, too, but the emphasis wasn’t on making the other guy lose. It was on striving and excelling. On competing with myself to continually do better. It was all part of learning and growing to maturity. To find equality and compassion in my relationships. That serves my needs and others’ instead of the distancing of superiority and dominance that only serves number one.

The main emphasis was on thinking for myself and asking questions. Understanding that our world is a shared world and all the good in it is based on sharing. On everyone winning. On Love? Yes. Love that’s directed when we use our own minds to make sense of things with logic. When we at least have an idea what we’re doing. Getting it right.

A source of help

My mind was good enough at figuring things out at school and work. It was a while before it got serious about personal stuff. Psychology and relationships. My mom and dad role modeled being dutiful, generous with service to the community, respectful of character and good values. My mom and both grandmothers centered their lives around the example of Jesus.

It took a lifetime of reflection and experience before I could understand why. How come? I couldn’t take others’ word for it. They weren’t making sense. I had to figure it out for myself. With help. From . . . ? From the only source it could come from – my mind. Your Uncle Owen had an extraordinary ability. Teaching himself. Nothing philosophical or psychological like me but new skills like composing music. It might have been different if he had used his sixth sense. That’s where I get help, from intuition.

Courage or madness?

Do I have intuition? Of course. It’s a faculty of the Mind that we all share. Like a portal to insights. But they have to be spontaneous, beyond our control. And their source can’t control us. A source of help that’s good if it’s loving and makes sense. If it respects logic and doesn’t ever mess with our free will. Can’t I just rely on my five senses? That’s what science thinks it does. Philosophy, psychology. Even theology. Yet they all depend on insights from intuition. They just can’t admit it. Why? It’s not “scientific” if it can’t be verified by the body’s five senses.

Ridicularity! Huh? The body’s senses are great with appearances. They’re amassing mountains of “information” and “data” about physical objects while avoiding the only source that can make sense of it. That can say what it means. Mind. Matter that bodies sense keeps telling us to look somewhere else. Why don’t we? The ones doing the looking can’t give up on their bodies’ five senses and the physical environment they think they detect. It’s their security blanket. They worry that any other approach would be un-cool. They’d be risking their careers and their professions. Philosophers, psychologists, and theologists as well as scientists. Taking a risk this big takes either courage, madness, or both.

Different ways of reading the situation

We had just parked across from where we were going and were about to cross the street when you asked a question. I hope you didn’t mind. Not only didn’t I mind, I respected you more for asking it. “No cars are coming so why can’t we cross in the middle of the street?” “If a car hits us there it would be our fault. If it hits us in the crosswalk it would be their fault.” That was your question and my answer. What did we decide? We used the crosswalk and you were fine with that.

That was reasoning. We use reasoning to choose the response that best aligns with what circumstances are telling us. But your question wasn’t about reasoning. What was it about? It wasn’t about choice. It was about paying attention first to what circumstances were telling us. You looked at the situation and saw one thing and I saw another. What did I see? You saw that no cars were coming. What did you see? A crosswalk. The circumstances told you that it wouldn’t matter if we ignored the crosswalk. They told me that it would. We read the situation differently.

Circumstances speak (but do we listen?)

Why didn’t we see the same thing? Because I was letting the circumstances tell me what they meant. What they implied for the choice we were to make where to cross. You were telling the circumstances to mean what you wanted, to take the shortest, easiest route. What mattered to me was to make the right choice. What mattered to you was making the choice be what you wanted, right or wrong. But you accepted my answer. You’re willing to do the right thing even if it isn’t what you want when you’re aware of it. I respect that.

If it wasn’t reasoning what was it? You were “reasoning” backwards from the choice you’ve already made to justify it. The best minds in almost every field do the same thing, so don’t feel bad. It’s “rationalizing” and it’s very common. The faculty of mind I’m referring to is logic. It’s neither reasoning nor rationalizing. What does it do? Something extremely important that all of humanity is bad at. And it accounts for every mess we get ourselves into. Even teachers at school? Scientists? Aren’t they supposed to know everything?

The questionable premise

After his experience with the world’s smartest physicists and mathematicians Albert Einstein said they aren’t good at logic. Really? If he explained why I’m not aware of it. One reason I can think of is that science is founded on a questionable premise. One that compromises the reasoning behind every choice that’s based on it. Another is that its questionable premise bars science from accepting help from the source of the correct premise. Science is thought to be clear-thinking, but Einstein was correct.

The questionable premise is that there is no “realistic” alternative to reliance on sensory perception – our body-brains’ five senses – for distinguishing between what’s real and what’s speculation. This suits experimental science since its scope is limited to physical objects. But it doesn’t suit logic. Logic is an orderly sequence of implications that leads nowhere if it’s thrown out of order by personal or institutional bias. It can’t be controlled. The spirit of Inquiry must be free or it’s not inquiry. It must follow logic wherever it leads from its starting point: an open-ended question without a preconceived answer.

Back to the future

The Greek philosopher Parmenides followed logic wherever it led. Where was that? To the conclusion that there is a logical alternative to sensory perception and it contradicts what our body-brains’ senses are telling us. 2500 years later, after centuries of studying spacetime and matter, physics is beginning to wonder if Parmenides was right.(2)

Why? The behavior of big objects and tiny particles that make up our universe refuses to make sense. Einstein’s equation explaining energy -- E=MC2 -- gave him confidence that he could explain it. But that’s only because energy is part of Mind that gives ideas their expression, even if it’s only appearances in a dream. Mind-energy makes sense; spacetime-matter (appearances) doesn’t. When Einstein tried to explain appearances with another elegant equation he failed. Mind and energy are order interconnected by the implications of logic and by love sharing. Sense. Appearances are the opposite. Nonsense.

Physics is still trying to explain the universe of spacetime-matter. How? By bringing the behavior of cosmic relativity – big objects -- together with the behavior of particle physics – little objects -- into one unified theory. “Quantum gravity.” It’s led to interesting theories. But they’re beyond confirming by experimental physics, and so physics is turning to philosophy for answers.(3) Putting the focus once again on the logic of Parmenides.

Enter sixth sense

Where did Parmenides get his logic? If he told us it went missing with a lot of stuff he wrote. But it must have been important because he called his school of philosophy the “School of Reason.” Or the “School of Logic” which makes more sense. My answer is he got it from his sixth sense. From his intuition? Yes. The same place where Democritus, a contemporary, intuited the existence of atoms. Really? Yes. 2500 years before Einstein confirmed it with experimental physics.

These guys were good at figuring things out. Not exactly on their own, although they did it without experimental physics. They did it with logic that could only be accessed through their sixth sense. With vision that could look behind appearances. It was a new branch of philosophy that Parmenides founded called metaphysics. That tells us what’s real and what’s not by listening to Mind’s intuition rather than being misled by bodies’ brains. To Mind’s sixth sense rather than bodies’ five senses. It was a valid approach then since there was no science to question it. Taken seriously by Plato, the Father of Western Thought, among others.

What metaphysics found

What did metaphysics find when it looked behind appearances? That they’re made up like a dream. An illusion like a magician’s trick. Our alternate reality? Yes. A few other philosophers have since come to the same conclusion. Berkeley, California is named after one of them --  Bishop Berkeley. The logic of self-awareness taught by Jesus with love demonstrated our world’s unreality with his miracles. He later explained why in an extraordinary book, one of a kind.(4) A teacher named Valentinus understood the message and shared it with his pupils in second-century Rome, many centuries before the book appeared.

Free Will compromised

Amazing! Jesus explained the origin of the universe? Its psychological roots, yes, since it involved relationships and events that can only happen within Mind that thinks them. Mind that’s always existed, where something went wrong. Not the part that contributes growth to Creation – the Mind-Parent -- but the part that contributes Free Choice – the Mind-Child. A choice made under difficult circumstances. That couldn’t have been intentional or free but a choice, nonetheless. Why, if it wasn’t free or intentional? Because the Child-Mind that made it is choice whether free-conscious or not-free unconscious.

Free of interference when it’s conscious. The difficult circumstances were all caused by loss of consciousness that Jesus hasn’t explained. A previous mistake though it may have been a necessary part of the Child’s training. An inevitable consequence of introducing Free Choice into the evolution of Creation. Yet it was definitely error. The Child’s Will that we all share will always be Free in Reality. But in our alternate reality the error -- a wrong choice -- is obstructing it. It must be corrected.

The obstruction

The obstruction is the apparent separation of Child from Parents. “Apparent” because it couldn’t happen in Reality but anything can “happen” in unreality. Why does the separation matter? Because it’s the reason why humanity continues to look for answers in the wrong places. Why it keeps failing with every new “solution” to its problem: its inability to move forward as one rational, loving family in peace and harmony. To solve its problem of fear, condemnation, guilt, jealousy, paranoia, and hatred.

How can separating Parents from Child cause all this? Because of the parts they play in Creation.  Creation is process and structure. Each divided into one part that comes before and the other that comes after. Parents responsible for the first part, Child responsible for Free Choice in the second part. Their Relationship is responsible for everything that expresses the Life and Worth of Creation and Mind in the second part. The apparent separation sent the Child’s responsibilities into an alternate reality and left the Parents’ responsibilities behind.

Missing context

What responsibilities is our alternate reality missing? The responsibility of Mind-Parents is to extend Logic’s thinking-implications and to expand Love’s sharing-relationships in a continuous, open-ended flow of changing circumstances. Like evolution? Yes. Infinite evolution, for no implication or relationship can bring the process to an end. Not so long as definitions require what isn’t to help define what is. Evolution in the eternal Now – timelessness. This is the raw material of Creation. A Reality unlike ours that has no beginnings and endings, just the orderly sequence of Logic’s implications and Love’s sharing.

The Parents do something else. Before circumstances reach their Child they’re given context by Logic and Love. So that Free Choice can hear what circumstances are telling it about their meaning and purpose. So that Mind-Child can get the situation right before it freely chooses how Parents-Child together can respond to what the situation calls for. Before the Worth of Life and Creation implied by context can be affirmed, earned, expressed, and reciprocated. The Worth of Mind: the Creator and first circumstance.

Missing the attributes of definition

The role of Logic and Love going into the shared act of Creation is to give it the attributes of definition that it will need going out. Meaning and purpose. So that Mind-Parents can perform the last act: definition that brings new functions into Reality and service. With meaning and purpose that blend in seamlessly with the meaning and purpose of all the elements of Creation performing as one. In the context of circumstances at that point in its evolution.

Without the part played by Logic and Love in Reality, the raw material for creation here lacks the necessary attributes of definition. Every field of inquiry struggles with meaning and purpose. Struggles with changing circumstances, not because they can’t choose with reasoning and evaluation but because, without guidance from Logic and Love, they can’t make sense of the situation. Can’t get the context right.

Destination: progress or paralysis?

And so their choices, misguided by sensory perception, circle back to square one. Risking not only progress but survival. Theories abound. But under the domination of bodies’ five senses, with determined resistance to Mind’s sixth sense, they can’t breach self-delusion’s fortress of denial.

The context for alternate reality, then, isn’t the raw material for Creation. It’s the condition implied by the absence of forward movement supplied by Logic’s implications and Love’s sharing. Extension and expansion. Growth. Disguised by “movement” that’s going in circles, nowhere. Until the logic of going nowhere reaches its destination: paralysis.

Then if we accept the gift of Mind’s sixth sense, If we let it guide us back to the Logic of Parmenides and to the Logic-Love of Jesus, we will get our context right. Its meaning and purpose, so that we can then choose correctly how to respond and move forward. Yes. The book by Jesus gives us a head start. All it takes to reverse the error, restore Self-Awareness, and resume Mind-Child’s role in Creation, is one individual getting it right.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

  1. Chantal Montellier, Social Fiction (New York Review Comic, 2023). Not for children or early adolescents
  2. Adam Becker, “The Origins of Space and Time,” in Scientific American (February 2022 pp. 26-33)
  3. Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (Riverhead Books 2017)
  4. A Course in Miracles (Foundation for Inner Peace, 1976)

Published on Leave a comment on The Gentle Loving Kindness of Contradiction

Reflections on the meaning of Christmas                                    December 2023

The Process and Structure of Creation

Conflicting visions of Paradise

Worried sick. Dude, this is Christmas. Where’s your one-horse sleigh? Santa’s coming. And he knows when I’ve been bad or good. So? I thought I was being good. I was expecting goodies under the tree. Yes. Doing what you’re told. Not asking stupid questions. Now I’m not so sure. And being agreeable. Waahhhhhh! Tell you what. If Santa’s a no-show I’ll let you borrow my sleigh bells. Waahhhhhh! 

Sigh. Let’s hear it. Edna! Get room service. We’re out of eggnog. I was thinking about Christmas and I was going to make Santa happy by being good at not being bad. There’s a problem with that? What if bad went away? Like, what if we didn’t have to put up with being contradicted? Ah! Maybe then I could attract girls! Santa would hang it up. And lose weight if he didn’t have to stuff himself with milk and cookies from billions of kids. Everything would come to a dead end. Or maybe paradise with lots of girls. How about paradise with lots of gags and chloroform?

The first Act of Mind

Did you notice that definitions always have to define stuff by what it isn’t as well as by what it is? Do you have a sister? And did you know that Self-Awareness was illuminated by the first Relationship – the attraction between Logic and Love, masculinity and femininity? There you go again! Edna, what’s taking so long? It wouldn’t have happened if something hadn’t happened before. Before. . . Self-Awareness? Do that again! What? Twirl your eyes in opposite directions.

The first act of Mind, questioning the status quo. Socrates got into trouble with that, pestering people with questions. Jesus too. He contradicted stuff that everyone took for granted. Questioning the way things are partly by explaining the way they aren’t. Annoying the pharisees who decided he was questioning their authority. Turns out that questioning the status quo doesn’t just upset the authorities. It upsets authoritarians, and they’re all over the place. That’s it! You want me around to help bug authoritarians! You’re around because someone forgot to close the door.

The first “Love Story”

Contradiction goes a long way back. No! Edna! How many days’ rations we got? Mind asked, “What will get Creation started?” Obviously a contradiction of the status quo. Obviously a guy looking for some action. And the answer was “Relationship.” Relationship that’s inseparable like all relationships within the one Mind thinking them.

Put the Force of attraction between Logic and Love to use by illuminating Self-Awareness. Why them? They’re Mind’s two main attributes, where the action is. Masculine Logic hot for feminine Love – yesss! And feminine Love hot for masculine Logic. The first “Love Story.” Portrayals defined in part by what they aren’t: illogic, fear, and self-unawareness, or Mind unconscious. Mind has an opposite? If it does it’s unthinkable. We can forget about it. Here’s your eggnog, Elio. This should help you forget. Thank you, Edna. Industrial strength? Yes. I used up all of your Turbo-Nog.

The role of Logic-Love, Parents

Mind unconscious is a possibility with the Child of its Parents, Logic-Love, but not a possibility with them. Why not? Because they’re Self-Awareness by definition and their Child isn’t. Its Self-Awareness is derived from Relationship with its Parents and a second Force: opposition to possibility from contradiction. From impossibility, its opposite. A Force essential to Creation and ingrained in the laws of cause and effect.

Mind unconscious isn’t a possibility with the Parents because they and their Child have different functions. The role of Parents -- Self-Awareness -- is to welcome performers and their functions into Reality by sharing the gift of Self-Awareness and by definition that determines where they fit within the harmony of its Order  Then what? After that comes the Growth and sharing of Self-Awareness through the extension and expansion of Logic and Love. The Worth of Oneness increasing in value to infinity. Without limits, because Oneness can have no opposites.

The role of Free Choice, Child

The Child’s role is independent judgment that affirms, earns, and reciprocates the Life-Worth of Creation – a gift shared -- and Self-Awareness, the Giver, by freely choosing it. By contributing the measure of value that’s whatever or however someone freely chooses to pay for it. A Rembrandt painting that’s worthless unless it attracts a buyer willing to pay for it. Just as the pairing of Logic with Love started Creation with spontaneity that could not be controlled, the judgment of Child establishes its Worth with the spontaneity of Free Choice that cannot be corrupted.

By Mind putting its finger on the scale. An impossibility by definition. Because the role of Mind Logic-Love, that governs from the bottom up to serve and support Creation, is to respect, not overrule, all its functions, including Free Choice. Supporting symbiosis between Freedom and Order that lies at the core of Creation.

The two phases of Creation

Two distinct phases distinguished by Growth not needing and Free Choice needing awareness of opposites. That are always questioning, contradicting. And annoying and disrupting. A real pain. Like women: you can’t live with them and you can’t live without them. I might change my mind if opposites are women. Never mind. 

The Growth part of Creation can’t be aware of the underside of definition without the Self-Awareness of Logic-Love making it real. So when functions are added to Creation their opposites automatically transfer over to Free Choice, the part of Creation where the reverse is true. Where Self-Awareness must be aware of contradictions but only the Parent-Child Relationship can make them real. And any possibility of that happening by mistake is ruled out.

Go ahead and laugh

How? By Child-Mind losing consciousness and its function being disabled. By temporarily joining opposites in the unreality of self-unawareness where it can learn from experience how to correct its mistake. Learn from craziness? By understanding that the craziness has a pattern. Cyclical re-enactment of the Child’s archetypal mistake: projecting Love onto its reflection. Onto its reverse mirror-image that has no better “purpose” than to amuse itself with the Child’s self-delusion and pursue its crazy dream of “supremacy.” The “triumph of the will.”

With every manner of impossibilities that are reversals of the Truth made “real.” Until either its captive self-destructs or the illusion of “time” “ends.” When the “goal” of contradicting Reality’s eternal Now is reached with everything, including Mind, “ending.”

Something between total catastrophe and a Three Stooges food fight. Go ahead and laugh. Jesus in A Course in Miracles encourages questioning and humor too, because getting the “joke” is part of undoing error and getting back to work. The joker in the mirror takes pride in all its “works,” none more gratifying than those that feed its “lovability” with a laugh. An alternate “reality” so illogical and absurd that it can be hilarious. The “artist,” starved for validation and love, would be delighted.

Pushback

Choice can’t be free that’s not aware of all possibilities including their opposites, impossibilities. Our alternate “reality” that came about because of a lack of awareness. Of what? The underside of definition that automatically sends what isn’t to Child’s side of Creation and the possibility of its impossibilities made “real” in an unconscious Mind’s dream.

How can the Child regain consciousness and do its job? By accepting that contradiction-opposites are built into Reality-Creation’s laws of cause and effect for a reason. Because contradiction is essential to the definition of every player and function. And by putting them to their intended use. To help define Self as it evolves -- always a work in progress – by understanding the Logic of contradiction and its usefulness in every context. Disciplining independent judgment to anticipate and prepare for pushback that will keep it honest, focused on its task, and striving to excel.

BYOB

And, most of all, accepting the limits of a shared, interconnected Reality where absolutes without opposites have no place. I can’t rule the Galactic Empire? No. Or be master of Plato’s Cave either. What about King Kong? Palpatine and Plato’s guy didn’t have girlfriends but Kong did. How many times have you seen this movie?

Ann Darrow would have gone for him if they could have set up housekeeping on top of the Empire State Building. She was already thinking about curtains when . . . That’s enough. The city was adding them to its celebrity tour. OK, timeout! They could have made the New York Social Register if they got enough attention. Maybe a slot on the bill at the Metropolitan Opera, or Carnegie Hall, or the Lincoln Center. How about the Central Park Zoo? Or the circus?

Because, with the implications of Logic and the relationships of Love always expanding, circumstances are always changing. Into new contexts that offer opportunities to express the Beauty of meaning with the use of talents. For relating to ideas, values, contexts, and projects in the manner of their Source, Logic and Love. With judgment that responds to opportunities with helpfulness, Innocence, and trust. With the joyfulness and creativity of Self-Awareness. The Kong-Darrow nuptials were the talk of the town. Mr. and Mrs. Kong request the pleasure of your company. . . . BYOB Bring Your Own Bananas.

Diagnosis and Remedy

The diagnosis 

The meaning of Christmas isn’t that Caesar or the pharisees be overthrown but that individuals learn to manage their relationship with them. Following the example of Jesus, with explanation that helps the one Child, our ancestral Mind, recover Self-Awareness. To get out of body-dominated “ownership,” “competition,” and conformity and back to Mind-enabled sharing, intimacy, and Creativity. That recognizes that malevolence, the underside of contradiction, isn’t caused by Self-Awareness but by self-unawareness.

Made "real" in an alternate "reality" by the two masks of narcissism:

  • one the disciplinary “parent” with unquestioned “authority.” The angry, hostile, threatening face of harmfulness: judgment.
  • the other the undisciplined “child” with unquestioned “freedom.” The carefree, ingratiating, unthreatening face of harmlessness: non-judgment.

Bad cop and good cop enforcing the "ideal" of “supremacy.” A perversion of the Oneness of Reality that is Innocence without opposites. Of Freedom and Order that complement one another and are inseparable. The “judgment” of “innocence” preserved by projecting “guilt” onto “others.” “Innocence” preserved by projecting the innocence of others back onto itself. One getting “rid” of “guilt,” the other stealing “innocence” back. With one purpose: to place "supremacy" beyond questioning. By deception and intimidation that rob its captives of personhood. That dehumanize with mindless conformity.

Both made-up worlds of wishful thinking. “Ideals” of unaccountability that’s beyond questioning. Impossibilities since thoughts can’t leave their source, there are no “others” in the Oneness of Reality, and perversions of Oneness, Order, and Freedom can’t be real. Nightmares of psychosis reflected in the narcissist’s sees-all, knows-all mirror. The crystal ball of the original illusionist: the narcissist’s misperception of itself in its shadow-opposite. The “supremacy” of unlimited power and freedom. Nietzsche’s “superman.” Mistaken identity. Self-unawareness.

Whose remedy can't be condemnation and punishment but understanding that’s awareness of the mistake. Awareness of Self instead of its reflection that will restore Order. By standing definition back on its feet instead of its head. Putting the underside of contradiction back on the bottom where it belongs. The bottom isn’t so far from the top of the Chrysler Building. Maybe if he’d taken her up there. . . .   

The remedy: Relationship 

Remedy that’s a possibility with minds open to questioning, That respect Free Choice and the Free Spirit of Inquiry. Like free speech? Like creative governance that’s open to questioning versus authoritarian rule opposed to it. That fears and opposes learning and growth because it can’t control the outcome. It’s the essence of contradiction, the free spirit of questioning, that keeps Authority governing with wisdom and helpfulness from the bottom up. Without being lured by “supremacy” -- the false god of absolutes -- into ruling arbitrarily with harmfulness from the top down.

The formation and growth of Self-Awareness through Relationship, Logic-Love, took place under the laws of cause and effect that protect contradiction. By requiring it in definition for the same reason that Freedom depends on Order and Order depends on Freedom. To ensure that by remaining inseparable they will remain soulmates instead of opposites-competitors. Instead of absolutes that contradict Relationship, the most harmful contradiction of both Freedom and Order. And all of Reality-Creation based on Relationship in a shared, interconnected world.

If my buddy Kong had played his cards right he could have kept the dame. They’d be big on Broadway. Favorites at Sherman Billingsley’s Stork Club, all over Winchell’s column, lighting up Runyon’s stories. Who would pay for bigger stages and dressing rooms? VIP limos for giant apes? They would, with all the dough they’d be raking in. Daily Mirror headline: “Empire State Building to be converted to first-floor apartment for Mr. and Mrs. Kong.”  And renamed. What? Kong's Galactic Empire Building. Flashing Kong's image on the clouds when the NYPD is desperate for help from a giant ape. Ann Darrow can be played by Lois Lane. Don't be ridiculous!

The remedy: opposites 

The Worth of Oneness increasing in value to infinity, without limits because Oneness can have no opposites, is the state that absolutes aspire to in the fantasies of reflection. The impossibility of no opposites, which the authoritarian narcissist, the will of the beast in the mirror, seeks to attain with “supremacy.” Not “triumph” over opposites that permits co-existence but elimination that doesn’t.

The threat to the sovereignty of individuals dependent on narcissistic authoritarians and to social order that depends on governance from the bottom up. Which makes opposites, the mortal enemy of absolutes, the friend of individual sovereignty and civil rights. And contradiction – “speaking against” – an indispensable means of removing the threat.

The remedy: A dose of Why from Mind 

Thinkers like Jared Diamond and Yuval Harari, Sean Carroll and Brian Greene, help with How humanity’s story plays out but their sweeping narratives still don’t get at Why -- the question that requires the intent of Mind for a logical answer. And the reason why authoritarian tribal-“realists” oppose it: to prevent Truth from exposing the deception in the mirror and bodies hiding it behind appearances.

The explanation that Jesus brings from Mind is a dose of Why that hog-ties body-centered authoritarians. Self-unawareness immobilized by fear and self-delusion into unshakable resistance to opening their minds. Who have no response other than continued affirmation of illogic, idolatry of bodies, and the silence of disrespect.

Not a display of mindfulness but evasion – thoughtlessness. The absence of Logic-Love since that’s not where their “thinking” comes from. It comes from the reflection. The body-centered authoritarian driven by one goal: to preserve the dream and its authorship. 

The remedy: learning from opposites

Missing the point that opposites are our teacher. Jesus was misperceived by shadow-opposite to be an opposite like it. An attack when he was the opposite: teaching that “sin” isn’t guilt deserving punishment but self-unawareness that needs help regaining Self-Awareness.

Teaching that the error of mis-identity didn’t lead to tribal values and body-brains sharing the stage with individual values and Mind. They’re opposites against their host. Coded to own, rule, and eliminate them with “supremacy.” A warning that will continue to go unheeded so long as body-centered authoritarian minds cling to illogic and evade the help of Logic-Love. Help offered by Mind through the teaching and example of Jesus.

The remedy: Guarding our thoughts 

The appearance of “agreeability” is a “lesson” taught by the “socializing” prefrontal cortex that the animal brain reflected in the mirror has taken to “heart.” One of the traits that the “Five-Factor” theory says should define personality. Because its theory is more “scientific” than Myers-Briggs based on the psychological practice and intuition of Carl Jung. Body’s five senses good, Mind’s sixth sense bad. Yes.

When in fact the “Five-Factor” theory is only another “gift” of bias meant to deceive from the always body-centered cortex. From “science” self-deluded by the perversion of “objectivity:” circular, self-referential “reasoning” that’s body-matter affirming the “reality” of itself. Absurdity protected from questioning by “authority” that puts itself beyond questioning. A cover-up! Exactly. The “likeable,” “charming,” “funny,” and “engaging” mask of the “sociable” reflection now posing as “scientific.” “Erudition” flaunted by the opposite of Truth.

We must be vigilant. Yes. The learning from good contradiction role modeled by Jesus and built into the meaning of Christmas: by all means have fun and enjoy life. Have a Merry Christmas! But always with the vigilance of good contradiction guarding our thoughts.

The remedy: Vigilance against the lure of madness

The cortex’s job is to make “realistic” anything that will conceal the nature of its client. The “logic” of its meaning and purpose which parrots the narcissist’s reflection: illogic. The nature of the underside of contradiction that isn’t here to help and doesn’t wish anyone or anything well. What about itself? Since its goal is to contradict the eternity of timelessness – Now – with the absurdity of time, where everything including time must end, – its agent “wishes” its own end as well.

Madness. Yes. The animal brain’s “wildness” attracts authoritarian “realists” and blood-and-soil “objectivists” with its “promise” of seduction by the primal force of absolute “authority.” By an “ideal,” the false god of “supremacy” that’s servility and addiction. Yet another impossibility and perversion of the Truth: the Child’s Love of its Parents. Madness. “Will” whose “triumph” is triumph over itself. Contradiction contradicting itself. The “reciprocation” of madness with madness. A perversion of Love that reciprocates Love with itself. With Life not “death.”

The remedy: the Truth of individual Self-Worth

The lesson of “agreeability” that’s been “learned” from the cortex by opposite – the animal brain – is an opposite. The contradiction of the fact of agreeability with a fiction: an appearance hiding it. Hiding disagreeability. The appearance of benevolence hiding malevolence. With the lure of camaraderie, the “fun” face of belonging that’s the tribal “realist’s” substitute for Love. The appearance of “one-for-all and all-for one.” "Sincerity” fronting for insincerity. A joke.

The Truth that for tribe the one thing that’s not expendable is itself and the one thing that is is. . .  Me? Yes. The individual. The individual is nothing to the tribe other than however the individual can be exploited. The appearance of friendship that’s transactional. Exemplified by the “worth” of the Japanese soldier to the Japanese military in World War Two: issen gorin -- the cost of a draft notice postcard. Less than an American penny.

The Truth that for individual the one thing that’s not expendable is who it is: the beloved Child of Logic-Love who shares attributes of Self-Awareness, Love, and Innocence required by its function, Free Choice. Attributes that the underside of definition, the reflection in the mirror, seeks to convert into their opposites.

How? By the insane idea that thoughts can leave their source – projection:

  • by projecting its mask stained with guilt onto the innocence of “others” unstained by its guilt. An especially ugly injustice practiced by an especially self-unaware personality type: the dark side of ESFJ (extravert-body sensing-“feeling” (animal brain emotion)-judgment.) A close match with the judgmental-blaming reflection in the mirror, the god-wannabe narcissist posing as a super-responsible parent. “Divine authority” entitled to absolute, unquestioning obedience so self-absorbed infantility can enforce its cartoon fantasy of “absolute power” – “supremacy.”
  • by the reverse projection of a saintly mask of innocence stolen from “others” back onto its unsaintly guilt. An especially ludicrous hypocrisy practiced by a similar self-unaware personality type: the dark side of ESFP (‘P’ for “Perceptive,” or fuzzy-dice “spontaneity” exempting itself from the discipline of judgment.) A close match with the narcissist’s innocent-victim reflection, the lovable-wannabe posing as an un-responsible child. Absolute “freedom” entitled to unquestioning unaccountability so self-absorbed infantility can do whatever it wants in its cartoon fantasy of “living in the moment.” Roman tyranny dressed in the lovable image of foolish innocence, the Gaul Obelix.

The remedy: Seek Guidance to relevance

With the gift of good contradiction we can see through the deception. To the Truth revealed by the Vision of Logic-Love, that in all of its attributes the animal brain beast reflected in the mirror is an imposter. A lifeless, loveless code “intending” to end everything. Our shadow-opposite. This is its nature. Its so-called logic that its self-deluded host – us – is supposed to take seriously. Forget it! A better way to come down from the top of the Empire State Building is to call 9-1-1 and get help. Yes, from a source that’s not a “conductor” to oblivion.    

Doesn’t our military respect the individual soldier? Yes. It tries not to leave anyone out or anyone behind. It honors the memory of the fallen and sometimes honors enemy combatants too. Values inherited from the original ideal of American democracy that insisted on individual rights against tyranny and defined what “America” stood for. The value of authority that governs with service and support from the bottom up. To enable Creativity with Growth and Free Choice instead of ruling cruelly to preserve conformity with an unchanging status quo from the top down.

An ideal and values that have always had opposites but today are losing touch with the Logic of Necessity and passion of Love that contradicted them. Why? Because the ideal, like all values, requires realignment with changing times and changing contexts. With awareness of what context today implies about the correct path forward. A call for Guidance from Logic and Love uniquely qualified to provide it, because only with their help can self-unawareness detect meaning and purpose behind appearances.

Circumstances that seem favorable to a resurgence of the authoritarian mindset are a recurring test of progress toward Self-Awareness. Whose measure is whether the path forward is to be governed by the benevolence of Logic-Love – Mind -- or ruled by the cruelty of predatory animal instinct – body-brain. The only difference between the choice now and the choice in 1776 is circumstances.

What are they telling us? The narcissist authoritarian, robbed of independent judgment by its own reverse mirror image, can only impose its own unchanging context on changing circumstances. Then we need a better guide. The one whose birthday we’re honoring has the right connections. To the Child’s Parents Logic-Love and their unique talent for seeing beyond fiction. Beyond made-up “reality” to facts and what they mean. Demonstrated by his living among us, by his authorship of A Course in Miracles, and in other ways only known to the individual Minds and lives he’s touched. All it takes is Free Choice questioning. Questioning the status quo. Contradicting. Yes. Asking for Guidance.

The remedy: Voice that cannot be silenced

The duty to serve and support the intimacy of loving friendships with honesty and understanding. The duty to contradict the authoritarian reflection in the mirror that can’t tolerate contradiction. To speak against and be heard. To question and receive the respect of an answer. To stand up instead of standing down.

All of this the role performed by Jesus: an opposite that’s helpfulness in a shadowland of authoritarian opposites – harmfulness. Contradiction on the side of the good guys – conscience. The will not to profit from mistake selfishly but to correct it for the sake of gentle loving kindness. No figure of lifeless victimhood on a cross but the living Force of Voice that cannot be silenced. The Voice for Self-Awareness and not self-unawareness. The Voice for Mind and not for its “substitute,” body-brain matter. A role model for the ages. 

Where can I (hic!) sign up! At the de-tox counter. Couldn’t you have saved some of that eggnog for Santa’s helpers? Hic! Edna! Elio needs a ride in the sleigh. I tried that once. What happened? He got run over by the sleigh. What about Rudolph? Rudolph got run over too. They were both impounded and I had to pay to get them out. Never mind.

The remedy: practice

Free Choice given possibilities to work with, all the values that define Life-Worth, also received awareness of the underside of definition since its impossibilities were automatically entrusted to the Self-Awareness of Free Choice. But without Guidance from its Parents’ Knowledge base that included awareness of impossibilities, needing to protect judgment from losing its independence, inexperienced with opposites, Free Choice could only fall back on what competence it had to perform its role.

A likely explanation for its transfer out of production and into training by loss of Self-Awareness was contradiction built into its own definition and the definitions of two values: Freedom and Order.

  • The perversion of Choice “free” of the discipline of Judgment rather than Freedom from interference.
  • The perversion of Freedom completing Order’s harmony with contentment by its opposite, absolute freedom to have and do whatever it wants with no accountabillity.
  • The perversion of Order-authority completing Freedom’s contentment with peaceful harmony by its self-centered opposite: absolute power to rule without opposition. Owning and ruling its domain exclusively for its own benefit.

Both absolutes instrumental in Free Choice’s transference from Self-Love to love for its shadow-reflection. The archetype for narcissism gazing worshipfully into a mirror at the beast projected by its animal brain.

Putting contradiction among the list of values that Free Choice, our function, needs to help recover Self-awareness. To teach us to distinguish between definition’s topside and underside and to learn how to put contradiction to use: to discipline Free Choice with judgment aware of its limits. Keeping it free from captivity to absolutes.

The possibility of not always being right

And making sure that it doesn’t take itself or its job too seriously. For whatever it is, it comes with contradiction. The possibility that it may not always be right but sometimes wrong. Not always be correct but sometimes mistaken. The attribute of Authority that can never be absolute.

I had a crush on Fay Wray for years. That’s why I saw the movie 20 times. I only saw it once. Why? It made me sad when Kong was mean to the nice dinosaur. When he rolled the big log and people clinging to it fell off – that was cool. They were being mean to him and they deserved it. So, you like dinosaurs better than people? If the dinosaur was better looking I might have gone more than once.

Hey -- I’m the wise guy around here! Reflections switch masks at will. Yeah. But watch your step! They're paying me to get the laughs. We’re the two faces of reflection: wisdom and fool. You're lovable and I'm not. That's for sure! And you get all the fun. Can't I be the fool now and then?  Sure, if I get to be wisdom all the time and you find another job. Edna! Elio is being mean to me again! If you interrupt me one more time I'll show you what "mean" is.

The Christmas Gift of Good Contradiction

What lies behind appearances

The meaning of the teaching and example of Jesus is explanation that contradicts the status quo with questioning. That comes from the independence and integrity of judgment inseparable from its Source: Mind that thinks, feels, creates, and governs with the helpfulness of Logic married to Love and the Force of Necessity, the laws of cause and effect. The way things are. That isn’t the stagnation of status quo with no cause to serve but its own preservation but its opposite: the irrepressible spirit of change serving its cause, the evolution and affirmation of the Worth of Life. Creation.

The meaning of Christmas that explains with the Vision of Logic-Love what lies behind appearances and questions its source, bodies affirming matter with their senses. That would contradict the Logic-Love of Mind. We found it! What? The pony! I knew it was in here somewhere. 

What did Ms. Wray say when you asked her out? I don’t want to talk about it. She broke your heart. She said she was done with gorillas. So you moved on and found Edna. She didn’t mind being seen with a gorilla. She told me it was because somebody forgot to close the door.

We are all narcissist authoritarians

If reflections are mirror-image opposites then they have no self that can think, feel, and act on its own. They have to steal our selves and turn us into our opposites: authoritarians ruled by their animal brain. The attributes of a beast that doesn’t need Logic-Love to dominate. It only needs will that acts by predatory instinct. The narcissist, the reflection that sees itself reflected in everything and distrusts everything because it’s a reflection. Appearances our alternate “reality” is made of that can’t be trusted. Appearances are deceiving. Sure, because that’s their purpose: to deceive.

We are all reflections in a made-up world that’s the dream of a Mind thinking it’s a reflection. So we are all narcissist authoritarians in our own way, some more than others. Body-centered personality types more than Mind-centered types, but it’s only a difference in degree.

So if I understand correctly bad is good and we should be glad that opposites ruin our lives. Who’s that? Elio, where shall I put the sleigh and the donkey that just landed in the fireplace? Donkey? Yes, Elio. And with the prettiest red nose. Could it be Rudolph the red-nosed jackass? Just go for a ride in the sleigh, Edna, and have fun bothering everybody with the sleigh bells. 

Good contradiction replacing bad contradiction 

What I’m saying is. . . Oh, forget it. No, no! I’m listening! Just. . . enjoy your eggnog and have a nice day. What you’re saying is that contradiction is a value. And like all values it has a topside and an underside, and so we shouldn’t assume that opposites built into definition are throwaways or always up to no good. They have their good use too. Proof that you are listening. And I’m not as dumb as I look.

In a world that’s a shadowland of opposites, a reflection made up of appearances, contradiction can be a very good thing. The contradiction that’s our Christmas gift from our Helper. From the North Pole? From the Mind with which we really think: Logic-Love. Where we will find our real thoughts when we aren’t contradicting them with an unreal dream. Good contradiction of bad contribution. Exactly. Denial of the denial that put a layer of appearances over Reality-Truth, that substitutes unreal reflection for Real Self.

Contradiction’s warning

A magician’s act. That will end when the houselights are turned up. By Relationship, the same dynamic that illuminated Self-Awareness with the Force of mutual attraction between Parents Logic-Love then and between Parents-Child now: us with the Guide who can speak for them. Relationship with Reality-Truth that will replace the absurdity of “relationship” with our mirror-image opposite. The usurper that’s an “absolute.” An impossibility that can’t be Real.

Once again, good contradiction replacing bad contradiction. You’re catching on. The topside of contradiction switching places with the underside and restoring Order. Role modeled by the slave who reminded Caesar of his mortality while he was being immortalized by the false god of fame. Good contradiction warning us against the folly of mistaking the image reflected in the mirror for an Olympian myth. The impossibility of “supremacy” – absolute power with no opposites.

Replacing bad purpose: mindless docility

Were it not for impossibility woven into every definition there would be no opposites to stand in the way of the myth. To defend us from being taken captive by an absolute. An unthinking, unfeeling tyrant. Mind being “defeated” in “battle” with animal brain.

Doesn’t brain’s prefrontal cortex civilize the beast? The beast can’t be civilized. That would require equipping individuals with their own moral compass. The animal brain is an instrument designed for “use” by herds or tribes that only “knows” the “ethics” of a tribal predator: kill or be killed.

The cortex, an instrument designed for “use” by the animal brain, only “knows” “self” that is herd or tribe, not individual. Its function is keeping peace within and among tribes by “socializing.” By wearing a mask of smiling, likeable “agreeability” to hide the face of menacing intimidation behind it. Anti-sociability deceiving tribal members and their enemies with “sociability." Both masks – likeability and angry hostility – serving one overriding purpose: mindless docility. To silence the voices of animal brain’s captives and prevent questioning.

Questioning that dares to contradict

Values that support tribal conformity and “supremacy” rather than civilization, Creativity and sharing. Values repellent to Individuals guided by an inner moral compass. Etiquette and diplomacy -- table manners -- are all that tribes ruled by herd instinct need to maintain the appearance of social “harmony” in the presence of emotional and physical violence. Disharmony. That and tenderness, a substitute for Love, to nurture their young. There’s no mistaking which part of the brain is in charge and its potent appeal to body-centered authoritarian personalities seeking primal “supremacy.”

Then where does conscience come from? From Mind, animal brain’s sworn “enemy.” That it was made to replace because Mind only Knows the one Child – the individual. Animal brain “thinks” it deserves that honor. And it resents having to share the Child’s split Mind with another self. That dares to contradict its contradiction. To deny its denial. Exactly!

The Ending that’s Good

The underside of Christmas

The meaning of Christmas that Jesus shares with us couldn’t come from any part of brain matter. Or from any other instrument invented for use by groups or tribes because the Self that we all share is one Child, one Mind. The beast in the mirror is the mask of a fiction: Child-the-many, ruled by tribal values. The offense to Western “morality” codified in the 16th century by Niccolo Machiavelli and “legitimized” by the Church. Idolatry of the body demanding of its herd, a “flock” of anesthetized sheep, that it never be questioned. Not the affirmation but the contradiction of Self-Awareness.

The underside of Christmas that Jesus never intended to “found.” Re-enacting the glorious “victory” of shadow-reflection over its host with the figure on a cross who dared to question its self-proclaimed “authority.” The “authority” of wounded victimhood: injustice that cries out not for compassion but for damnation and vengeance. Against Self-Awareness for sharing itself for the benefit of the self-unaware. An implicit but unintentional contradiction of the “infallibility” of the established order. An unchanging status quo guarded by body-animal brains: tribal beasts protecting their sacred turf. An ominous warning to anyone else who dared to trespass.

Stolen Innocence

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. Doesn’t that explain the figure on the cross? It would if it spoke for Logic and Love. But it doesn’t. A world where an Innocent’s body must be crucified to right a wrong is neither loving nor lovable. A “god” that’s responsible for the atrocity, who sends his son into the torture chamber he “created,” can’t be a loving or lovable “father” or “creator.”

It’s opposite’s mischaracterization of Logic-Love, the Child’s Parents, The never-ending assault on the Truth by self-unawareness protecting its dream, a mistake, from being discovered and undone. The mother of all injustices: guilt projecting itself onto Innocence. The perpetrator of wrongdoing evading accountability by projecting it onto its victim. The perversion of justice and the definitive act of shadow-reflection: “earning” Innocence by stealing it. The twin of “innocence” projecting itself onto guilt, the mother of all hypocrisies. What was it your grandma used to say? “Consider the source.”

The figure on the cross

Then who is the figure on the cross? The reflection in the mirror: the false “innocence” of victimhood that has limitless sympathy for itself and none for anyone else. Self-pitying “unfairness” that “justifies” another absolute: vengeance without limits. The deifier of “sacrifice,” the symbol of guilt. Jehovah, the tribal “god” who ruled without opposites or feeling from the top down, demanding fear and tribute -- the blood of bodies. The pharisees, Jehovah’s helpers.

“Christmas spirit” is the Honesty of Logic-Love’s Voice that agrees when agreement validates Self-Worth and contradicts when it doesn’t. Questions as well as affirms. Minds open to questioning and intimacy in friendship instead of mindless animal brains disguised by "sociability" and claiming “supremacy” in “competition.” Contradiction that helps instead of regimentation that harms.

If what the pharisees heard was agreeability instead of contradiction the Christmas spirit would be “Hey everyone! Accept everything the way it is and enjoy the fun.” “Go along to get along.”

“Let’s Pretend”

What’s wrong with wishful thinking? “Let’s Pretend” was a radio program that entertained kids on Saturday morning. They grow out of that when they learn to distinguish between pretending and thinking that’s not. When they learn that not being grounded in facts is being absent rather than present. Remote, inaccessible. Not being there for family and friends who need them because they’re being there for themselves.

Lost in make-believe worlds of wishful thinking. One-dimensional cartoons featuring them in the lead role, producing, directing, script-writing, and setting the rules. “Let’s Pretend” for arrested-developed “adults:” “The Truman TV Show.” Infantile self-absorption. Narcissism. With harmful consequences to them and to those who need them. Any other questions? Sob! Hand me a tissue. I thought nobody would mind if I pretend I’m a kid again. Edna! Elio needs Kleenex! We’re out of Kleenex. Tell him to use the tablecloth like he always does.

Turn up the houselights

Elio, it’s a long way from the top of the Empire State Building to the bottom. “Agreeability” and wishful thinking are a great way to make the trip if that’s what you want. With the reflection in the mirror for your “conductor.” Accompanying its captives to the bottom 24 x 7 x 365.

The allegory of King Kong and his captive “mate” atop the Empire State Building is an accurate portrayal of the “ideal” of “supremacy.” Built into shadow-reflection’s perversion of Mind Logic-Love: mindless beast-captive. And an example of how the Child Free Choice duping itself into becoming the unwitting instrument of mayhem is re-enacted in its dream. As primal Force heroically besting sissified “civilization” in mortal combat for “supremacy.” The “triumph” of animal brain over prefrontal cortex that would dare to tame it.

The “mortal combat” re-enacted by shadow-reflection within split-brain’s perversion of Child’s split Mind at “war” with itself. Making periods of relative peace intermissions between acts in a magician show. That won’t end until its audience chooses to see through the deception, turns up the houselights, and drops the curtain.

Published on Leave a comment on The DNA of Creation

The source of Energy that animates the Life-Worth of Creation
is Oneness that contains Relationship:
between Logic and Love, the Parents of the Child,
and between Parents and Child, the wild card that is Free Choice.

The DNA of Creation

Is the Logic-Love marriage and their Relationship with the Child
they gave birth to. The archetypal Connections
from which all the Connections of Creation’s Life-Worth flow.
From which all the Interconnections of Reality flow.

The seed bed and incubator of all of Creation:
the Queen Bee of Being
composed of archetypal Relationships of sublime happiness-Joy.
The substance of Love-Feeling
the essence of Worth in a state of Being.

This is God.

The Source from which all Life-Worth / Being
and its expression, doing-reciprocating, flow.

This is Logos.

All the Beings,
all the Selves and functions.
all the definitions and possibilities. . . .

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Published on 1 Comment on Defining Logic, Defining the Child, Defining Us

The utility of Logic

Nothing gets done unless it’s done by a relationship. Matter is relational: particles exist only when they connect. Logic, like everything else, is a relationship. Many relationships. One is the relationship Logic establishes between conditions – facts-circumstances – and their meaning to form context that yields purpose. Another is the relationship Logic establishes between purpose and Reality-Creation: belonging or not belonging.

If meaning attributed to conditions is mistaken then their purpose yielded by context must be mistaken. Since Reality-Creation can only consist of the Logic of Being, the perfection of Mind conjoined with Love, anything mistaken would necessarily only be attributable to what is impossible by definition: to its opposite. Opposite and impossible by definition, which is to say, by Logic. And therefore, not belonging to Reality-Creation. The status of not-belonging established by Logic on the basis of purpose, whether in harmony with the meaning of conditions or in opposition to it.

This is a definition of Logic that derives not from the abstract but from use: the purpose of Logic which applies the same standard of utility, of practical application, to its definition that it applies to the definition of every context: its purpose.

Unfinished business in the definition of the Child

Logic is what keeps the unreal, the uncreative, the unmindful and unloving, out of Reality and provides protection-sanctuary for what is Real. We are here because the Child who we are, who is active within our collective unconscious mind, needing our help to awaken, offering her help through the Holy Spirit to free us from unreality, came into a context for which she was unprepared. Unprepared by the conditions and context that defined her up to that point in the sequence of Logic. That gave her Logic, the purpose that granted her status and the role that accompanied it in Reality-Creation.

An element missing in her definition, that could not have been provided either by Logic or by her Parents Mind-Love, was revealed to be unfinished business, a gap in Knowledge upon her first attempt to fulfill her role. Revealed by experience to be incomplete, whose completion could only be learned by experience. We live, suffer, and die in this context of opposites, of confusion, guilt, and dread, of desperation to reclaim our innocence and being at one another’s expense, to learn from experience the element missing in the Child’s definition. In her Logic, her protection, so that she may fulfill her role in Creation without violating Logic, without abandoning its protection and leaving its sanctuary. Without being barred from a Reality that would cease to be Reality if she were not.

The lesson to be learned from experience

The lesson to be learned is awareness of the stakes of Creation: the possibility of loss of Consciousness from unawareness and its consequences. The costs-consequences of unreality made real that is our world of appearances and deceit. That our Source, the Child’s Source, could not be aware of by definition, because Consciousness to be aware of anything makes it Real.

Without the Child’s awareness of the stakes of Creation her exercise of Free Will, to freely choose to establish and reciprocate Worth, would have no meaning. Would not be free. This is her function, her responsibility, not her Parents’. We go through this hell of suffering and death, of unreality made real, hand in hand with the Child:

• to claim the Child’s birthright: her role in Creation and the function that enables it, her Free Will.
• to reestablish communication with our Parents Mind-Love and win admittance from Logic to its protection, its sanctuary in Reality.
• to demonstrate that the Child’s definition, her Logic is now complete. That we have learned our lesson from experience and provided the missing element: the awareness of what’s at stake. In relationship with the Holy Spirit, our Guide. Our one and only connection with Logic.

The ultimate affirmation of Free Will

The Child had to have a hand in her own Creation, her own completion, her own perfection: in the ultimate affirmation of Free Will. Because not everything was handed to her so she could set off into the unknown of Creation with nothing to learn of herself, nothing to strive for within, fully grown. Fully grown with nothing to learn of herself would be a contradiction, for she’s a Child. With an adventure to live, the necessity, the gift of Growth.

In this world of unreality the death of an innocent Child is needless if she can choose Life. By learning from the gift of Mind and Love and by learning from Growth and experience. That there’s another Reality. The Reality of her Parents and ours: Mind and Love that are not the unreality of matter. The unreality of suffering and death made real by bodies and their senses. By the “logic” of matter that isn’t.