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We speak different languages

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

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

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

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

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

The Self that we are and are not

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

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

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

The roots of our self-delusion

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

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

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

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

The work that we have to do

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

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

Physics is questioning its faith in sensory perception

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

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

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

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

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

Where the thought process of Logic-Love can lead us

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

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

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

Heaven is other people

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

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

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

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

Plato’s Cave still needs an answer

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

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

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

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

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

The ”better way” that is A Course in Miracles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our alternate reality is a joke

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We get in our own way

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

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

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

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

The rule of the herd

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

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

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

The level at which the choice must be made

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A lesson in psychology from A Course in Miracles 

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

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

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

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

To fill empty minds with Logic and Love

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

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

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

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

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

Vale to Caesar and captivity

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

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

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

Let Go Your Appearances

From an old channel island, the new
rises out of the mist
hovering over the water in the stillness
borderline
between the graduated blue of the sky
reaching up to the quarter moon on high
and the textured blue of the ocean below
dotted with specks of white

Bodies navigating trails down the waterless slopes
voices caught
by the wind, birds gliding on the wind,
pine branches dancing in the wind
come to rest and fall silent

In the shadow of my relief from the sun
who is to notice?
Who wills chronicle to life and adds notations
to its log? As if another will, long hence,
would need to know. Would care to know

What unnamed hand scrawls its signature
on the record of time
soul of anonymity, here and gone?
Self or opposite? Host or parasite?
Is it possible to choose?

Can’t I just be whatever for a little while
and be done with it?
"Easy come, easy go. As it came, let it go."
Is that what the view, the wind, the stillness
has to say?

I am the liberation of Love
The peace of Mind
I am Now, the Living. I am Forever.
Let go your appearances
Your dead weight of the past
And return Home with Me.

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Mind dreaming can “detect” what’s not really there

The whole Child resides in every individual. There is only one Child. So, anyone can say, honestly and truly, that they are the Child.  When it matters, they can be the Child. Not the Child’s Parents but their Child. The Child’s projections of itself in this unreality appear to be children, presumably of the same Parents, but they’re all the same Child.

Why doesn’t it feel this way? Opposites. There are not one but two sensors recording the stillness of the shades of blue, the crawl of the containership that’s slicing here and there in two. One is a projection of the dreaming Child sensing through Intuition with the vision of Logic.

The other is a body sensing as only as it can, with eyes and ears, a nose, mouth, and skin. With brain atop its spine, ever alert to threats, to prey, to food, and mates. Ready to act on its own behalf, for or against its kind, with the force of animal instinct and feeling detached from thought. A copy of the Child’s shadow. Replication of a virus that occupies the mind of its unconscious host. Senses that detect itself: a world of allure and distraction, flickering shapes and intriguing sounds. A grand image of mind’s opposite, the mesmerizing universe. A neural network, projection of a shipwrecked self.

Except that it’s all appearances. Here and gone, of no real consequence. Wedded to senses that are here and gone. All of it an illusion ingested by the black hole of time. Of nevermore, meant to hide Truth that can only be sensed by the vision of Logic. By vision able to see behind and beyond the lie of appearances. To the face behind the mask of the shadow. A mocking self-delusion. A nobody. The Joker.

Able to see behind appearances if the individual who is the Child understands that it is the Child. If in the body’s replication of the virus the individual hasn’t repeated the error: the Child’s mistaking its shadow opposite for an “other.” The Child who lost consciousness and, in its desperation to regain it, sought help from the only source that helplessness and defenselessness, unsensing unconsciousness, could detect. Its own reflection. A mirror image opposite of itself that had nowhere been evident before. A clinging parasite – lifeless, mindless, loveless, soulless. Whose every attribute is derived.

Opposite coded like the reverse of DNA. Illusion that can only be detected and brought to “life” by a mind unconscious and thus capable of dreaming what’s unreal – what’s not there. Nothingness without its host and nothingness with its host. Unreality projected by its host into a facsimile of reality not by wheeling Frankenstein’s monster to the tower of the laboratory on a stormy night, to be brought to life by a bolt of lightning. But by self-delusion.

Nothing that the shadow code did. The shadow code can’t “be” or “do” anything on its own. Like a pivot, it can only switch the Child’s identify from its self to its shadow by an act of the Child. By “choice” because the Child is choice: free when it’s conscious, captive when it’s not. Captive to the unreality and illusion of unconsciousness. By an act that is choice and therefore can be undone, but not free choice, conscious choice. Self-awareness replaced by self-delusion. All that transpired between the Child and its reverse mirror-image reflection was perpetrated by the Child in a severely compromised state.

There is no speaking to the Child – or anyone -- as though it were an “other”

Choosing to view Santa Catalina Island across the bay with the vision of Logic instead of the body’s senses sounds like a stretch. A radical change of perception since the vision of Logic can’t detect appearances. Ask the Child to navigate to Avalon with the vision of Logic and it might wind up on another planet, in another universe, or in another reality altogether. The Child navigating anywhere with the vision of Logic will eventually take it back home. To self-awareness that replaces self-delusion. To its role in Creation: awareness of Self and all possibilities, including awareness of the possibility of unconsciousness and the unreal consequences of impossibility; affirming the Worth of Creation, the Worth of Life, by earning it, freely choosing it, and proving the Good – the morality – of it.

The view of Santa Catalina Island from across the Bay is an appearance meant to block real vision. To perpetuate the self-delusion. To validate the body and its senses, embodiment of the shadow’s code, a false identity. Choosing to understand it for what it is takes but one step toward acknowledging and welcoming the Child’s true identity. Is acting on behalf of the Child who lies unconscious in a troubled, profoundly unhappy sleep, dreaming a nightmare of self-alienation. Of apparitions that, in the uncertainties of “life” and the certainties of loss, are also troubled and profoundly unhappy.

Ask the Child if it wants its projections, the virus’s replications, to view Santa Catalina Island through its own vision of Logic instead of theirs. Its answer will be the question. An echo chamber. Question addressed to the Child and answer from the Child are to and from the same source: the projection – the individual – who contains the whole Child. There is no addressing to the Child as though it were an “other. Though embodiments of the shadow code insist otherwise, there is no addressing other individuals – projections-replications – as though they were “others.”

Any mind in any state that speaks to or from the Child in this state of unreality-appearances is the one Child. Choosing to view Santa Catalina Island through the vision of Logic instead of the body’s senses is choosing to be the one Child rather than its self-delusion, its shadow-opposite. Is exercising Free Will to stand for Reality-Truth in place of unreality-deception. Is nudging the unconscious Child back to the sanity of Logic. To awakening and Reality.

The choice is between right and wrong, good and bad

Logic would attempt an honest account of what’s wrong with this transient sense of peace, this grand view of earth, sky, and water, all living things caressed by a gentle ocean breeze. A tableau belying the violence to both mind and matter that put it “there.” An appearance affirmed by its own “eyes” that now bear witness. An absurdity – Red Riding Hood dressed in the wolf’s clothing pretending to be Red Riding Hood. In short, an opposite. Not knowing who or what it is. Just coded, just programmed, to be the opposite of whatever its host is. An impossibility that can’t be real, can’t make sense, grafted onto possibility.

Why? Because if a thing implies the “existence” of its contradiction then an accommodation must be made. Must be made of necessity, because the sum and substance of everything that is, is the implications of Logic. The accommodation must be unreal. Because Logic does not permit contradiction, does not permit two opposing realities.

And since “Reality” implies the “existence” of its opposite, unreality becomes the logical repository for all opposites. For illogic. Logic and illogic “co-existing” in harmony, fitting together in peace in the Interconnectedness of Everything, by one Being and its derivative, the other not-being. The accommodation a placing by Reality of opposites where they belong, into the pocket reserved for opposites, Reality’s own opposite: unreality. That can be allowed to “exist” in harmony with Reality because it doesn’t exist.

What’s implied by impossibility is that Reality at the level of the Child, the doing-choosing phase of Creation, is a choice. That there is a right choice and a wrong choice, a good choice and a bad choice. Because “impossibility” – this and any other opposite that contradicts Logic’s implications – is clearly an assault on Logic itself. Which makes it an assault not only on Mind but also on Worth measured by its investment and evaluated by affect. On the Force and Immediacy of Love. Only if Logic is assumed to be up to no good can an opposite be considered an angel of justice, an absurdity that nevertheless finds support in an objectified world of bodies with brains substituting for Mind, devoid of affect, oblivious to Worth.

Free Choice can’t perform without training

The training of Child Free Choice to perform its role in Creation forms the context, the meaning and purpose of circumstance, the “human condition.” That defines all that is encompassed in the experience of “life” in this make-believe world. The one Child’s projections must learn how to make the right choice, as individuals, from experience. As stakeholders who stand to gain or lose from right or wrong decisions. Who will understand costs and benefits why? Because they will experience them firsthand. Because they will know the pain of error and will thus have the discipline of experience, of wisdom and maturity, for guidance when they apply Free Will.

Because Understanding can’t be inherited from the Child’s Parents in Reality. Can’t be handed down, can’t be given. It must be learned and earned at the ground level, from the bottom up. By the Child’s projections exercising independent judgment, with guidance from Logic through their own Intuition freely chosen. Were it otherwise the Child could not be Free Choice. Were it otherwise unreality under the control of the Child’s Parents could no longer be unreal. The training of Free Choice through the “experience” of unreality is ordained by the Laws of cause and effect. By Necessity.

The Deus ex Machina that bailed blundering fools out of their messes in ancient Greek playmaking won’t be making an appearance. Nor will “saviors” of Church mythology. Though, in a setting fashioned out of whole cloth by magic, penetrations from Mind’s memory of Reality – “miracles,” the “paranormal” – are inevitable.
_________________________________________________________________________________________

Unconsciousness: the illusory opposite of Consciousness 

Consciousness: the state of sanity and consequence where it is always Now in the light of day, in the light of Reality. Where there are no beginnings and endings, only the orderly sequence of Logic, the workings of its Implications, the judgment of Mine-reason and Love-feeling working together in harmony with Psyche, the soul of Being, to extend and expand the flower, the inexpressible beauty, rapture, and Worth of Life. Earned, affirmed, and reciprocated through the Relationship. Through relationship between Parent and Child, the Innocence-being of Psyche-Soul joined in integrity with the independent judgment, the doing and risk, of Free Choice.

Unconsciousness: a derivative of Consciousness. The state of insanity and inconsequence where it is never Now, in the darkness of night, in the darkness of unreality and dreams, the temporal where all is beginnings and endings, the illusion and absurdity of time. A “present” defined as somewhere between “not the past” and “not the future,” in a universe of nowhere the same Now. The decay and disorder of entropy and illogic. Misperceptions of Mind detached from Love, misjudgments without reason rooted in value. Staging its performance of appearances and distractions for bodies, isolated and separated, blinded by their senses, deluded by worthlessness. Ruled in captivity by disconnection, the opposite of whatever Is. The dependence, the derivation, the undoing and apparition that is the joke of nothingness.

The split mind of the unconscious Child: connection to its Reality of Consciousness through the Holy Spirit and the voice of its illusory shadow-code detected by self-delusion through unconsciousness, neither capable of awareness of the other. Neither aware of what the other is up to, because if Consciousness were aware, it would make the shadow-code, an unreality, real. And unawareness can only detect itself -- what’s not Real. Neither right nor left hand (or hemisphere) knowing what the other is doing even though they occupy the same mind.

The stirring ascent of neuroscience up the Empire State building 

Relationship between Mind and brain: the more Mind focuses attention on brain, the more it inquires into the brain’s functions and performance, the less aware it is of Mind and its performance. The Child’s self-delusion, its shadow-opposite, made the brain, like the body, as a substitute for the Child’s real self, a distraction from circumstances-facts that would confuse the Child in its efforts to judge meaning and purpose from its context. That would steer it away from correcting its mistaken identity, away from its archetypal projection of self onto its shadow.

Brain-study – neuroscience -- attracts and distracts in inverse proportion to the self-deluded Child’s attention to itself, i. e. to its Mind since Mind-Love is what it is. Mindlessness is the ultimate goal of the embrace of body and its brain. The brain “seat of consciousness” is the ultimate conclusion that the Big Lie seeks because it would signify the triumph of the Child’s shadow-code over Mind the seat of Consciousness. The truth is the brain is Mind’s illusory opposite. This defines their relationship. “Neuroscience” is the ultimate distraction because it takes Mind-recognition’s attention away from Mind-Self, minimizes Self-awareness, while luring attention into the mysteries of an indecipherable organ, leading nowhere and maximizing self-unawareness, the illusion-deception.

In his book, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (MIT Press 2012), Christof Koch, a Caltech neuroscientist, described how he acted on an impulse to climb the San Gabriel mountains and bellow his indomitability into the night when his marriage broke up. King Kong climbing the Empire State building. What else could it be but the triumph of primitive limbic emotion, animal instinct? A body’s brain and its senses parted from Mind, pretending to substitute for introspection, reflection, reasoning, evaluation, and judgment. For conscious deliberation that leads with Logic toward explanation and understanding. Toward the self-awareness of Mind whose absence even the captive brain of a Caltech neuroscientist couldn’t recognize or acknowledge.

Mind the seat of Consciousness. Brain the seat of unconsciousness

The study of physics – cosmology and quantum mechanics -- lures Mind away from attention to the relationship between body-senses and external sensed environment, just as neuroscience lures Mind away from attention to the relationship between Mind and brain. The scholarship of physics and neuroscience pays scant attention to the question that deserves it, the relationship between body-universe and brain-Mind. Why? Because understanding the nature-Logic of the relationship would reveal the truth: that body-brain and universe are imaginings of an unconscious, dreaming, self-deluded Mind. Are unreal. Are illusions.

Mind-host is the seat of Consciousness. Its parasite-derivative, the brain-appendage, is the seat of unconsciousness. Mind is the seat of Reality-Truth, One Child, Oneness-Innocence, Love, Free Will. Brain is the seat of unreality-appearances, Child the many-guilt, fear-rage-hatred, limbic animal instinct, and captivity. Mind is the seat of learning-growth, evolution, maturity, and Free Will. Brain is the seat of status quo, arrested development, immaturity. Mind is the seat of Introversion, Intuition, Reason-Evaluation, Judgment. Brain is the seat of extraversion and sensory perception. Mind is INTJ, brain is ESFP. Mind is idealist-progressive futurist. Brain is realist-regressive traditionalist. Mind is Definition, brain is its opposite whatever the definition.

Dualism vs. non-dualism is the pull between control of Child-Self by illusory brain vs. Mind’s choosing to regain awareness of its real Self. Between shadow-code unconsciousness and Child-host Consciousness. A Course in Miracle’s uncompromising non-dualism is the stance required to prevent making unreal real. It must be uncompromising because any gesture that accommodates opposition might imply its recognition and thus make it real.

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All for the Good: the Necessity of training and the inevitability of error

Departure from the implications of Logic explains why and how the Child lost Consciousness within the context of the Interconnectedness of Reality-Creation. But the event took place within not one but two contexts. In the constantly broadening context of Everything, where the Governance of Logic and its Laws of cause and effect accommodate the impossibility and unreality of opposites, there is a Logic to the departure that gives it purpose and meaning.

The departure was necessitated by the Laws of cause and effect without its consequences being intended by Logic, which cannot govern above the Law and cannot intend anything illusory, including unconsciousness. The departure and all of its consequences – unconsciousness and the dream of unreality – were no accident. They belong within the larger context of Everything, where the Child, Free Choice, must perform the doing of Creation on its own plane of Creation, choosing among possibilities that include impossibilities. Opposites that it alone can be aware of without making them Real because its Consciousness, unlike the Consciousness of its Parents, is not defined by Logic to make Real. It is only defined to distinguish between Real and unreal so that the Good may be Freely Chosen and thereby attain its Worth.

So that the Good may be Freely Chosen and earned. Earned, that is, by Free Choice, no longer a Child but grown to maturity through the training of experience. Experience with the impossibilities of unconsciousness as well as the Possibilities of Consciousness. With the consequences of self-delusion, the misidentification of Self. With error that projects the Child’s unconscious mind into unreality, an impossibility that can only be a dream, a cockpit where Free Choice can train to fly through trial and error without crashing. Without real consequence except for gaining competence in its exercise. In the practice and application of Free Choice: doing what’s right and doing it right. But first: Getting it right. Getting it right through the explanation and Understanding of Logic.

“Lucifer” be damned!

The role defined by Logic for the Child in Reality-Creation – Free Choice bonded with Psyche, the Soul of Oneness and Innocence in the Force of the Now, the Holy Instant – necessitated departure from Consciousness, from Reality-Creation, from the Now into the illusion of time, so that Free Choice could undergo training implied by the Logic of its role. So that it could become a fully-grown, fully invested, stakeholder in Reality. The mistake committed by a disoriented, badly compromised Mind that lost track of itself, a newborn Child who had not been trained in the exercise of Free Will in Creation, who had not grown to maturity, was no accident.

This could not have been treachery by a full-grown “fallen angel.” Lucifer betrayed by “original sin” and sent to eternal damnation in hell. By the all-too-familiar attributes of human folly, a projection of corrupted, misguided human minds. Projection by a projection. Not if the evil shadow-code was its host Free Choice, the Child self-deluded by its mistake, sent by Necessity into training, destined to learn right from wrong, correct its mistake, and return Home to Reality.

Again, It was the inevitable act of an immature Mind unconscious, in desperate straits, who detected its own reflection, its own shadow. Identified with its own illusory opposite as though it were an “other.” As though it were everything that in its desperation it craved, including a return Home to its Parents in Reality. And if that were not possible, escape to substitute parents in another reality. As though its illusory “other” were a “savior” who could deliver whatever it craved.

The error could not have been by any means committed by Free Choice, an impossibility. But, because the Child is Free Choice, it was still necessarily choice that can eventually be undone. The mistake, like the tableau of peace across the Bay, is an accommodation with the illusion of time that can be undone in time.

To choose to see as the Child is to choose to be governed under the Law

Logic might want to posit possibility without impossibility. Might want the perfection of resolution so all can come to rest – Reality without subjecting Creation to unreality, pleasure to pain, happiness to misery, Good to evil. But until it can figure out how to prevent its implications from implying opposites, real possibilities from implying unreal impossibilities, it must continue its striving for resolution. For a whole number value of Pi that may be logically unattainable. The blessing and curse of eternity that may want to be done with striving. To affirm once and for all the good of Worth, of Being-Life, context with purpose and meaning, finish its task, and come to rest. Move on to something else or vanish into the mystery that is context with ever-shifting circumstance.

Whatever or however the sequence of Logic “began,” whatever caused the first movement, it’s only certain that it occurred at the instigation of circumstance. Certain because its instigation and response both were required by Logic – the Laws of cause and effect enforced by Necessity. Composed of the implications of Logic but necessarily autonomous. Necessarily not controlled by Logic because Governance can’t govern, can’t manage the interconnectedness of causes and effects, ideas, feelings, values and their animate expressions, where anything, even Logic itself, is above the Law.

To choose to view the vision of peace across the Bay, to feel the caress of the ocean breeze, to hear the happy voices, to get just a brief taste of tranquility in a world of strife -- as the Child rather than as its shadow-opposite, the strange apparition grown familiar through the body -- is to choose to govern and be governed under the Law. Is to understand how and why the specter of arbitrary rule, of lawlessness and disorder above the Law, insists on insinuating itself into the gatherings of bodies and souls who might otherwise just go about their business. Children choosing to learn and grow, to attain the maturity of competence. To do what they’re “here” for so they can move on. To get it right. To be Good.

Without the endless, meaningless distraction of conflict and violence. Endlessly repeating the same mistake: choosing the wrong “self.” A bull charging the bullfighter’s muleta until it’s killed, and more bulls are brought into the ring, worn out by distraction, a red piece of cloth, and they, too, die.

No ”fun” in games and no “innocence” in victimhood

The wrong “self” – the contradiction, the reverse mirror image, the opposite, the lifeless shadow-code of contrariness – isn’t benign. It’s not a fun parlor game of harmless competition that misperception makes of it. Brought to “life” by projection, by identity misplaced by a disoriented Child, it’s everything implied by the opposite of Good: sin, guilt, fear, rage, and hatred.

It’s the Child crying out in pain. Masculinity screaming with terror, roaring with impotent rage. Femininity wailing with separation and abandonment, grief and bereavement. Misplaced self wailing with the endless grievances and resentments of self-imposed crucifixion, of victimhood on the cross. The false “innocence” of righteous woundedness bent on wholesale vengeance until it reigns supreme. Until it “wins.” Until it has no opposites because they’re all vanquished. All dead. Because the goal of competition is to eliminate competition. To eliminate itself, an expression of opposite: the shadow code. This is the “harmless game” of competition.

This is the tableau that produced bodies, the illusion, the pretense of Child the many instead of one, self-deluded into overlaying its source in insanity with fleeting images of peace. Of beauty and tranquility. The sights, sounds, and taste of beauty as bodies sense it without the Memory of Home and Sanctuary as Logic Knows it. As the Child-the-one experienced it. Beauty permanent, indelible. Not apparitions that lull and lure minds detached from Logic with self-indulgence and complacency, like pigs fed before they’re slaughtered. Choosing to be the one Child instead of its shadow.

In vivid color: seeing the Child, seeing Self, in an “other”

Oskar Schindler watched impassively from a distance a Nazi atrocity against children. All in black and white until one child stood out. Not all the children being hunted down like animals and massacred but just one. In vivid color in the Stephen Spielberg film, the child who caught Schindler’s eye. Who opened the Nazi’s mind and heart to the wound and its call for Love. Turned him from an insensate extension of his limbic animal emotions – a monster – to intelligence with affect. With compassion so determined that his factory and its employees -- Schindler’s List -- went on to save hundreds of lives from the Holocaust.

I scan the procession of middle school graduates from a distance, with binoculars, until one comes into view who opens my mind and heart. A strawberry blonde, a rhapsody of peach and crimson lifted out of the dull uniformity of gray. The atrocity our separation, grandchild from grandparent. The wound and its call for Love.

What did Schindler and I see that sweeps aside misperception? That replaces it with feeling and commits us to this vision as though it were Soul itself? As though it replaced all Logic, all reason, all judgment, with one act. An act of Understanding. That requires no long and labored explanation. That arrives of its own accord with grace and ease, as if it were there all along, which it was. The cascade of tints, brilliant and warm, that played with the assurance of Innocence behind the mask of atrocity. That brought every child into vivid color, every heart into opening, every mind into Knowing.

The vision altered by binoculars was altered again, imperceptibly. The mind conscious of searching was got out of the way. In my own vulnerability I became the Child, was the Child, able to recognize Child: an indescribably precious being. Innocent, adorable, irresistible, vulnerable. A thing of beauty. A work of art.

The mind that led me there gave way to the Worth that came into view. To the Worth that holds all of it together in a rapture of Love. Of vulnerability that lies at the heart of Soul, the Oneness that can do no harm, that Knows no fear, because it contains everything. Because by definition it can have no opposites. A species from Galapagos ripe for extinction except that the Oneness, the Innocence that revealed itself in vivid color, has no predators. This, for fools who seek power through conquest, is Real power.

Reality isn’t a crapshoot

Schindler the child and I the child, brought to recognition of Child in an “other” with all the power and determination of affect, still, in the upwelling of caring and compassion, have a ways to go. Unconditional embrace of our own vulnerability in the vulnerability of an “other” has not healed the separation. The “other” in vivid color is no longer gray casting its shadow over the “many,” but it remains an “other.” With one attribute of Self that connects with rapturous Love beyond appearances, but still unknown, unseen for the one Self that it really is.

What is this gift of the “other” that we are to receive when we learn the truth of “relationship?” What makes all of “Reality” of idea and the unreality of matter “relational?” Quality of life in a world of appearances defined by apparitions – transitory bodies and their senses – at any given moment is a crapshoot. Purpose and meaning dependent on circumstances changing haphazardly hardly register on minds already compromised, battered incessantly with distractions. For minds paying attention all that can be hoped for is faith and a dollop of comfort. For those who take appearances at face value it’s make hay while the sun shines and leave the rest to “fate.”

Quality of life that’s a crapshoot shares the allure of a casino that delivers the euphoria, the magic, of an occasional win even though it’s accompanied by the funereal coldness guaranteed by loss. Quality of life that’s based on unexamined appearances becomes itself nothing more than an appearance, a trailer for a film that promises entertainment that’s only more appearances. Propped up by stage props – the facades of a studio lot.

The “circumstances” of context that are only appearances can only produce the appearance of purpose and meaning. Brought to life sporadically, intermittently, by shafts of light from Reality and Truth that penetrate the veil, that touch intuitions with awareness spontaneously, with Love, with insight. But still a crapshoot.

Reality isn’t a crapshoot. It doesn’t suffer from ambiguity. There are no qualifiers except for the implication and therefore the Necessity of factoring opposites into the Child’s role of Free Choice in Creation. Aside from the Definitions of Logic, there are no barriers to the functions and expressions of Mind, Love, and Soul. To the exuberance and spontaneity of Being, of Life. To the integration of diversity and profusion into coherence, meaning, and shared purpose. Into connections that consummate relationships with passion. That complete the exchange of givers and giving both, that would not be complete otherwise. That bring all givers and gifts into one harmonious whole, the Interconnectedness of Reality-Creation, through the Logic of Definition.

Child beloved and beautiful is who its Parents want to see

The Child assigned a role in Creation by Logic, whose genealogy traces back to possibility, the premise and circumstance that first moved the sequence of Logic, is Loved passionately and unconditionally by its Parents. Without reservation. To its Parents, Father-Mind and Mother-Love, this kid is irresistibly adorable. Perfect. It is this Child its Parents want awakened, out of its dream of ambiguity and shadows come to “life,” back Home into Reality-Creation when its training is done. It is this Child whose identity, whose presence, whose face, can only be recognized behind the appearance of an “other.”

By an individual. That is, by one projection of an unconscious, self-deluded mind corrupted by the replication of its shadow opposite, a parasitic virus. For that is who bodies appear to be: projections and replications. Just as the universe is one part projection of mind and one part replication of mind’s shadow code. One part the physics of ordinary matter that yields to the “laws” of science and a semblance of order. The other part the cosmic singularities that don’t yield: the Big Bang and black holes, dark energy and dark matter. The anomalies of quantum mechanics that yield instead lawlessness and disorder, confounding quantum gravity and physics’ attempts to make sense of it. Replications of the Child’s shadow code.

Why Forgiveness? To replace guilt with Innocence

This is where it gets to be fun. Where we, the Child’s projections, find out what we’ve been missing. To a mind that’s being swallowed up in the black hole of time choosing not to be fooled by its own shadow sounds like a chump choosing not to be scared by its own Hallowe’en costume. No big deal. Whereas, choosing the Self behind the mask is a very big deal.

More than tossing away a silly mask, switching from the illusion of time to the Reality of Now, the Holy Instant, is switching from table scraps to a smorgasbord of abundance. Now radiates with all the elemental attributes of Being. It’s alive with Life -- with real sound, real vision. With every sensation that bodies, fooled by the distractions and substitutes of appearances, can never experience. The Light radiated by Now is what all of Reality and Creation depend on for illumination. To enable the Consciousness of Logic and Mind to see, the Creativity and Worth of Love to Feel, the Free Will of the Child to express itself in spontaneity and Happiness.

The Now of Being, of Life that radiates Happiness, is Psyche, the Soul of Self that expresses Life’s Perfection, Purity, and Beauty. Its core value the Innocence of Oneness. Not the opposite of guilt, the Innocence of the Child. But the Innocence of Oneness that Knows no opposites. Its capacity to combine and contain every attribute of Reality-Creation within itself.

The lie of lies that brought an unconscious Child to mis-identity and captivity to its self-delusion was the lie of guilt. This was the psychopathology of the wrong choice, the Understanding that A Course in Miracles explained to clinical psychologists at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. The lie coded into the illusion of its shadow-opposite: that the Child caused its own loss of Consciousness. Carried an unbearable load of guilt and, moreover, an equally unbearable load of fear. Fear of punishment by wrathful, hateful Parents who could no longer be trusted, because they allowed all this to happen. Willed it to happen.

And on and on with the Joker’s foolishness and nonsense that, nevertheless, was taken in by impaired judgment. By an Innocent Child now writhing in the torment of guilt. Now willing, desperate, to project itself out of its torment and into another “reality.” Into the dream. This was the "bad thing” that Freudian psychoanalysis searched for in vain in the suppressed memories of bodies’ infancy. Freud might have found it if he had searched the Memory of unconscious mind. But he was a "realist" who couldn't be persuaded that the cause wasn't physiological.

Why Forgiveness? Because its acceptance by the Child is the being and doing of its release from the Big Lie. From guilt. Think of the torpedo that targeted the vulnerability at the core of the Death Star in Star Wars. Forgiveness is the torpedo that denies, disables, and undoes all of the shadow-code’s lies at one stroke.

Just as the code appeared to replace all of Reality-Creation in the Child’s Mind by striking at its Psyche, its Soul of Innocence, by replacing it with guilt, Forgiveness exposes the delusion. Quietly, imperceptibly replaces guilt with Innocence and restores Psyche to its place on the Child’s altar. Removes the perversion of Innocence – the absurdity of victimhood on the cross, wounded righteousness, "sacrifice," the ludicrous “helpless innocent victim” -- and restores Mind to sanity.

Why Forgiveness? Because It’s Justice that Works

A barrier to personal growth toward self-awareness is of the mind that fails to understand the Logic, the Truth, of non-dualism: that contradiction, the essence of the Child’s shadow-opposite, is illogic and therefore unreal. It’s a barrier that can be overcome with explanation so long as its source is authentically the Logic of the Holy Spirit.

There’s yet another barrier. One that needs more than explanation because it’s not of the mind. The philosophical understanding of opposites has no counterpart in emotional understanding. Not when coming to terms with conflicting emotions means coming to terms with Love opposed to hate, attraction opposed to repulsion, combined in the same mind that’s relating to the same “other.” Not when we’re asked to accept the presence of limbic animal feelings that deny the truth of who we want to be, imagine ourselves to be: selves who have feelings sorted out as well as thoughts.

How can Forgiveness get off the ground in a mind that denies the presence of limbic emotional conflict? That’s locked into competition demanding justice through retribution. Through the elimination of an opponent instead of recognition, affirmation, and reciprocation. Where there’s no perceived emotional support, no Love, to reciprocate. Where there’s no external authority to adjudicate even-handed justice. And even if there were, how could mind step aside for impersonal adjudication when limbic emotions take the injustice of offense personally? When the wound is felt and therefore taken personally. How can limbic emotions of fear, rage, hatred, and guilt be disabled so that the Holy Spirit can replace the body’s senses with its vision of Logic?

The Child’s shadow-reflection is coded for opposing feelings as well as contradictory thoughts. Activating the code through misidentification activates feelings that compete-conflict with Mind-Love. That pit the Child’s projections-replications against themselves, with wounded psyches. With psychopathologies that all trace to the conflict between Love-Truth / Self and unlove-illusion / anti-self shadow.

The first step to re-ordering psychology is to re-order the Logic-understanding of mind through the clarity of Understanding that teases emotions hidden in the limbic-animal brain out of the shadow. It’s replacing self-unawareness with self-awareness with help from an “other” who has evoked conflicting emotions, that conflict with the self-image of Mind-Love Innocence that we want to be.

The function performed by “other” in unreality – “special relationships” -- can’t be to pad the nest of heavenly perfection. But it can be to goad us into recognizing ourselves as our misidentification with our shadow has made us: a mass of contradictions philosophical and emotional. Goad us into acknowledging limbic-animal emotions that horrify us. That contradict the ideal of perfection, the image of goodwill and kindness, personal-social qualities of sharing, affirmation, cooperation, and agreeability, that we assume is our heritage. That force us to see our mistake, to change our minds because we can’t avoid pain from our own limbic animal emotions by changing “others.”

Change must come from within, and “relationships” with “others” who can’t deliver heaven on earth is what forces it. There is no other way. In this context, relationships that evoked fear, rage, hatred, and guilt did their jobs. They forced us to confront our limbic animal emotions, to change our minds from within because we can’t change “others.” If the Holy Spirit works through us to move “others” one way or the other, it’s not for us to know and cannot be for us to control.

How can a Child’s projection hold itself out to be worthy and Innocent in the presence of unworthy feelings? Awakening through Forgiveness requires that the Holy Spirit set body-senses / mistaken selves aside with its vision of Logic because of the answer to this question. The answer is that the Child projection, without the Holy Spirit’s help, is fatally condemned to feel the guilt-shame of unworthiness. Fear, rage, and hatred, coded by the Child’s shadow-opposite and rooted in its brain, have defined the Child’s projections, defined its viral replications. We cannot substitute the vision of Logic-Innocence for limbic emotions without our Guide, the Holy Spirit, replacing false definition with True Definition. An act that can only come at the invitation of the Child Free Choice. We must understand what is needed, want it, and choose it.

The key is connection with the Holy Spirit that communicates the will to Forgive. That lets go of the false logic of rectifying injustice through retribution, through the condemnation and punishment of “others.” That turns the judgment of justice over to the Holy Spirit through Forgiveness-Truth. Forgiveness replaces judgment-condemnation of “others” not by negating the desire and will for justice but by redirecting it. Directing it away from “others” who cannot satisfy it to the Source that can, the Holy Spirit.

Forgiveness is the solution to the demand for justice that works. World War II was exactly the wrong approach by Germany seeking redress from the injustice of the Treaty of Versailles. An approach that was not only devastating for its “enemies” but even more so for itself. This is the lesson to be learned from the horrifying specters of the Nazi swastika and the visage of Hitler that still goad their victims to retribution. The lesson is the catastrophe that results from seeking justice through retribution against “others.”

Justice that works is Forgiveness that replaces the insanity of conflicting thoughts and emotions with the vision of Logic. With the Reality-Truth about the Child’s misidentification: there is no “other.” Retribution can’t work.

At the instant of Recognition

Why does the Necessity of Logic require that one individual, inside the dream, recognize the Child beloved of its Parents in Reality behind the appearance of an “other”? First, so that the wrong choice can be corrected where it occurred, within unconsciousness. Second, so that Forgiveness required of awakening can be complete. So that the one Child seen in vivid color yet still seen as an “other,” however sympathetically, can be seen by an individual identifying not with an individual projection of the Child, however innocent and vulnerable, but with the Child itself.

Can be seen in the same instant by the one Child’s Parents. By Father-Mind and by Mother-Love in Reality. By the wellsprings of Choice and Freedom, the Logic of Reality, the animating Energy-Force of Oneness, the Soul of Being, of Life. For the act of recognition of one Child by one individual identified with one Child, that penetrates the illusion and lifts the veil, cannot occur, cannot replace unreality with Reality, in the absence of Relationships that Define and complete the Whole Child: Relationship between Child-projection and the Holy Spirit, the vision of Logic; and Relationship between Child and Parents, the capacity of Consciousness to recognize Reality, the capacity of Love to Connect, to Relate. The capacity of both to awaken. The act of Forgiveness, correction of error, the undoing of mistaken identity, necessarily engages the Whole Child in its awakening.

At this instant of recognition by the Parents, brought about through Relationships that are part of the Child’s identity, its Definition by Logic, the unconscious Child’s dream of unreality ends. The illusion of time ends, and the Child is restored to the Oneness, Being-Life, and Force – the Consciousness, the Awareness and immediacy -- of Now. The Holy Instant.

Forgiveness corrects error

To recap: Seeing one another through the body’s eyes we see with “eyes” of the shadow-code. We see reflection. We are only capable of seeing “others” as others. As separate objects. When an individual with self-awareness identifies with one Child rather than its shadow, it is only capable of seeing one Child in “others.”

Solving the mystery of how to truly Forgive is realizing that each individual contains the whole Child. This is why the focus of ACIM is not on groups, on the many, but on individuals. The individual can therefore choose to identify with the one Child, to see only the Truth of one Child in “others.” In reflections, the illusion of the many, the insanity of separation. Can choose, therefore, to see only the Truth of Innocence in “others,” to Forgive by not being able to see guilt in “others.” By seeing the Reality beyond “others” rather than illusion, which means not seeing in the one Child or any of its projections an “other” at all. 

Which is what the Child should have detected in its shadow-reflection: no “other” but only an illusory part of itself. Forgiveness corrects error. This is why the focus of ACIM is on Forgiveness. One individual truly Forgiving.

The individual’s task is done when the many are one

The individual’s task is done:

  • When it has removed the last obstacle to Forgiveness, the last trace of self-delusion and mis-identity from the Child’s unconscious and still dreaming mind.
  • When it “sees” in an “other” its one Child Self, not a shadow-reflection, not a competitor, predator, prey, mate, or any other kind of opposite.
  • When it sees in its one Child Self light and Innocence instead of a phantasmagoria of darkness and guilt, Reality-Truth instead of a reflection of unreality-appearances.
  • When, in Relationship with its Guide, the Holy Spirit, it has thus prepared safe entry for awareness of Relationship with Parents Mind-Love, the purity and perfection of Psyche, of Oneness. Into a now uncorrupted Child’s Mind, uncontaminated by any trace of its shadow code, and gotten out of the way.
  • When it has thus demonstrated competence in the exercise of Free Will.
  • When it has learned and grown to maturity and its training is complete, forever the Child beloved of its Parents but in its responsibility no longer a Child.

The individual has allowed the Reality of who it is, the Child’s identity, to present itself, spontaneously, of its own Free Will, to its Parents. To be recognized by its Parents Consciousness-Love and welcomed back Home. To be awakened from the dream, the self-deception, and restored to its role, its work and play, in Creation. The individual Child’s task is done when, with the awakening of the one Child, the many disappear. The dream and all its occupants, all its apparitions, ends. Including the individual Child projection.

True Forgiveness is the act of turning over responsibility for restoration of Consciousness, of Peace, Truth, and Sanity, to the only source capable of accomplishing it. To Logic that defines, governs, and protects the harmony of Everything. That ensures that no trace of impossibility, the unreal, can invade, disrupt, and contaminate the purity, peace, perfection, and Interconnectedness of Reality. Our Protector. Our Friend. We, the projections and replications of a tormented, split mind, are the intrusion.

Timing and the principle of Alignment 

The principle that determines the timing of Forgiveness-Awakening is the principle of Alignment, its definition so synonymous – so closely aligned -- with Logic that it can be thought of as Logic itself. If Logic is Definition, then it is also Alignment.

The loss of Consciousness projected an unreality whose components-circumstances, expressing illogic, are out of alignment and therefore need Logic to put them back into alignment. Logic is getting it right: the context, purpose, and meaning of our circumstances before we manage circumstances to achieve our purpose. Before we try to do what’s right and do it right. Alignment is the all-important task of getting it right.

Science is but an attempt to figure out alignment that itself needs to be in alignment. If it fails in its mission, as it does, then it is a failure of Logic, which it is. The dominant paradigm of every major field of inquiry – science, philosophy, psychology, and theology -- is failing to get it right. Because in its mindless rush to get to Reason, it bypasses Logic, which it doesn’t understand. If it doesn’t understand Logic it can’t explain anything. Can’t Understand anything. Logic is thoroughness: everything in its time and place. The oriental tea ceremony: no corner-cutting, no shortcuts. We now have the explanation for human folly. The answer to why shit happens.

Alignment is Order, Peace, Harmony, Unity, Community. It is Justice, Fairness, Balance, Equality. Revolution against rule by injustice is collective attempt to establish rule by justice. – a realignment-refitting of relations of power, society, economy. Relationships in unreality are done by alignment in the moment and undone when changing circumstances and their contexts undo alignment. In each case – disorder, injustice, disconnection – healing requires Logic.

Circumstances reveal purpose-meaning when their Logic-pattern – their alignment -- is revealed. What is the timing of Awakening through Forgiveness? When will the Child correct error and regain Consciousness? What pattern are we looking for? Alignment of the circumstances of the Story of the Child. Circumstances that reflect progress in the Child’s training will be decisive. A Course in Miracles teaches that it’s a matter of choice when to learn its lesson but not whether. There are no shortcuts.

Must humanity experience mass extinction? Will it be necessary that groups-nations first come together in shared purpose to manage their natural habitat? To preserve world peace. Is humanity – Child the many – destined to experience death on a global scale as well as individually, i. e. to experience extinction as a species before its training is complete? These seem more relevant considerations than the alignment of stars and planets, but astrology may in some way reflect the Child’s progress nonetheless because it is based on the principle of alignment. 

Replacing time-mortality with Now-eternity. The Holy Spirit’s vision of Logic will replace the “vision” of the body’s eyes at the invitation of the individual / Free Choice, liberated from self-delusion. This will set in motion a chain reaction in the sequence of Logic that necessarily replaces time-mortality with the Holy Instant, with eternal Now that replaces the illusion-dream with Reality-Truth.

Free Choice is the key to liberation. The shadow-code is the archenemy of choice. The precise point when the Child Free Choice overturns captivity by the code-virus is when an individual Child projection chooses to identify with one Child instead of the shadow-code. Free Choice is therefore the essential cause that sets off the logical chain reaction of events that produce Forgiveness-Awakening. Further confirmation, if confirmation is needed, that the Child’s training in unreality centers on the exercise of Free Will just as it centers on Free Choice in Reality-Creation.

The first object of Forgiveness is liberation. To identify with one Child is to identify with Free Choice, independence not captivity, with liberating Mind-Love, the Child’s true identity. Identification with Mind-Awareness plus Love-Freedom is to identify with Reality-Creation, with spontaneity-Now, the opposite of the shadow’s captivity. The object of Forgiveness is therefore liberation from the shadow-code’s captivity.

Self-awareness equates with Forgiveness. The individual’s choice of Self-awareness is the act that triggers and authenticates correction of error. Self-awareness equates with Forgiveness because it obviates any possibility of recognizing an “other.”

How will Awakening be experienced? What becomes of the universe?

Awakening will be imperceptible, The dynamics of mind-change that affect the individual whole Child will simultaneously affect its entire environment, resulting in an identical experience of imperceptible transformations. Imperceptible because replacement of unconsciousness by Consciousness can’t be detected by unconsciousness that’s only able to detect shadow-unreality.

Awakening will be gentle and painless. Spontaneous insight is experienced as a pre-existing fact because unconsciousness can’t detect fact-Truth. Can’t detect the workings of change through Intuition guided by the Holy Spirit, by the vision of Logic. Consciousness can’t recognize the unreality of unconsciousness. The Child’s experience of awakening will therefore be a gentle, imperceptible transformation from unreality to Reality. So unthreatening, painless, and familiar that the Child is unaware of it.

The experience will be the exact opposite of the wrenching dislocation that the corrupted Child-mind imagines it to be, fears it to be, and therefore resists. The exact opposite of how the Child experienced the loss of Consciousness.

The universe will retract into Child-Mind. The illusory universe will retract back into Child-Mind that it never left with reversal of the illusory-insane projection. It will transform through replacement of self-deception by Self-awareness, the reversal of error in the Child’s Mind. And thus the dream of spacetime-matter will end.

Clinging to the dream: the choice whether to “exist”

The individual has done its job, has truly Forgiven, when it not only gets out of the way but freely, joyfully, and spontaneously, chooses not to “exist.” To relinquish its “specialness” and all the other trappings of captivity to a chimera, a substitute for all that was lost to unconsciousness: a string of worthless beads. Flickering shadows echoing disembodied voices in a darkened cave. A rip-off, a joke.

A humanity captive to the illusion, clinging to its worthless beads, seeks to perpetuate itself by colonizing other planets. Should it? Should slave states in the antebellum South have been allowed to extend slavery into new states? Does earth want humanity to stick around, or might it have second thoughts? As it heads inexorably toward what might be as bad or worse than the Permian “Great Dying," 252 million years ago, when 70-80 percent of land-ocean species went extinct because of global warming, might it be forgiven for thinking good riddance?

Do we really want to “exist”? Must we “exist”? Do we still have a choice?

Getting it right

Expanding context beyond immediacy. Defusing limbic emotions and the rush to judgment, the urge to project guilt. Distinguishing between ourselves and the opposites that shadow everything – our mirror-image reflections. Understanding. The change of mind that tests us this time of year. Have we more? Are we more? How can it be possible when Consciousness is gone? The rule of law, protection from the shadow when the many were one, when we were awake and real. While the disembodied voice of our reflection is heard in waves of misinformation and authoritarian grievance, forgeries of stolen sovereignty. Its rule arbitrary, its necessity misunderstanding.

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

The Joker’s every perversion of Reality is a joke. Making itself right by making others wrong. Scripting truth and rules to suit itself. Heads I win, tails you lose. A lifeless viral parasite coded for self-replication, the “winning” of self-delusion. An imaginary magician that couldn’t perform unless we, the rabbit, asked it to pull us out of a hat. Misidentification of ourselves for an “other” that isn’t real makes it real. Correction is Understanding that we are not our reflection. That it can’t substitute for the Self we seek whose home is in Reality. Not here but where Mind will lead us if we allow it.

If evil itself can be understood without blame then there must be hope for Understanding. For elevating context from the false “realism” of bodies in captivity, to the truth of Mind liberated to think. To the Truth of another Reality that isn’t a joke. That parallels ours, was there before ours, is responsible for ours, and explains ours. To getting it right: Forgiveness is Understanding. So minds undeluded can do what’s right and do it right.

Where can undeluded minds take their pleas? To illumination from Intuition instead of deception from bodies. To awareness that alights on markers navigating back to consciousness. With Insights to recognize one at a time. Implications of Logic to follow wherever they lead. Guidance from Necessity, the authority of Logic, that enables and protects freedom of thought, expression, and choice -- the Integrity of Creation. That responds to pleas with Love -- sharing, empowerment, and affirmation of Worth -- instead of fear -- ownership, possession, and control. With the Innocence of Now, Psyche intact, instead of victimhood addicted to woundedness, self-pity, and guilt.

The Gift of Logic

Abundance and its comforts taken for granted replace hope with expectation, respect with entitlement, knowing our place with arrogance, adaptation with reverence for the status quo. An unsustainability brought on by not getting around to it. By somnolence. The set of a mind that could be equal to the task of awakening but for lack of Logic. Not for lack of the Free Spirit of Mind and Love that’s been there for us since the room went dark. But for the will and the ability to listen to it. To pay attention. To avail ourselves of its Gift: the judgment of Innocence, the understanding, of Logic. The noesis of Logos – God.

Misinformation is being orchestrated by a source that identifies itself as “god,” with books, podcasts and the like. Showcasing accessibility and erudition so confounding that otherwise discerning minds fall for it. A Course of Love and God: An Autobiography are a W.C. Fields flimflam act that deserves the price of admission, not for its wisdom but for the laughs. Minds are duping themselves in the clear, not in slow motion but in alarming acceleration. Waking up can’t wait. Not till we’ve extracted every last bit of pleasure and resource from body and planet. Not till we get around to it.

The next generation building character, in harmony with its environment and in spite of it, offers hope. For youth and for the rest of us, that though we are animals anchored by brain to matter we still have minds and free will. We will yet prove to be better than limbic systems that keep us rooted in unconsciousness. In threatening shadows and autonomic passions that overwhelm deliberation and judgment. We can overcome.

The place in our hearts

Paul Desmond riffing on his alto saxophone. For All We Know. Reflections on a stream that come and go with the intricacies of improvisation. That can’t help but be what they are. Us in reverse. That we never get to see as we are. Never get to know as we are. Haunted by beauty. Drawn by scent and touch imagined. By the taste of Memory heard and gone. A here and now, place and time, that can never be. Yet the Now that you will always be to me.

Shorty Baker riffing on his trumpet. I Didn’t Know What Time It Was. A call for love from time out of time. And I didn’t know. Notes gently trailing a caress across the whorl of preoccupation, lifting me out of cold blankness into the warmth of acceptance. By the vulnerability of subject in a room full of objects. Cause beyond effect that needs no intoxicant, no commotion, to excuse the brashness of its intrusion. I’m not done with it. Can never be done with it, your call for Love.

Alyosha bidding Dostoevsky’s farewell. The Brothers Karamazov. “There is nothing more wholesome and good than sacred memory preserved from childhood. Let us be kind, then honest and then let us never forget each other. You are all dear to me. From this day forth I have a place in my heart for you all, and I beg you to keep a place in your hearts for me.”

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Logic and Feeling cannot be separate

Mind-thoughts and Love-feelings are both corrupted in our unreal, material world. Feelings are corrupted by non-being’s shadow code that doesn’t just rely on deceptions made “true” by flawed Logic but also convincingly by corrupted-manipulated feelings. How can both be corrected when feelings seem unrelated to thoughts? When what corrects mind can seem powerless to change feelings? Are they even related?

Jesus in A Course in Miracles makes Logic clear how to un-corrupt thinking and by inference how to rationalize the relationship between thinking and feeling so that uncontrolled feelings don’t contradict Reason. I.e. so they don’t contradict Logos, a representation of “God” favored by ancient Greek, Judaic, and Christian thought.

Favored also here with one possible distinction. “Logos” here is Logic / Authority-Judgment, and its definition centers on Reciprocity, the essence of Love. The interconnections of Logic’s implications, that govern all of Reality-Creation, are accomplished by the Reciprocity of Love: giving and giving back. Just as Mind and Love cannot be separate, neither can Logic and Feeling be separate. This is the attribute of “God” that undercuts the false premises, the misperceptions that deny the Logic of Authority-Judgment: its infinitely benevolent Reality and Truth.

Reversing the psychology of guilt’s projection

Brain-body sensing instincts that are tied to fight-or-flight fear, to food-procreation satisfaction, and other emotions attracting and repelling, are rooted in the origins of body-life, in the instinct for individual survival, in species propagation, dominance and protection. All reinforce the psychology of guilt-fear and hatred rooted in the origin of the unconscious Child-mind’s illusion, his dream of our material world. Our bodies’ sensing and feelings of guilt-fear manifest the Child-mind’s psychology of guilt-fear.

This defines the relationship between body-sensing emotions and emotions associated with the Child-mind’s psychology of guilt. They are all of one piece. They are not separate, unrelated. One produced the other; one is dependent on the other. Correcting source-one will remove the dependent-other.

Correcting the Child-mind’s psychology of guilt-fear will reverse its signature projection of guilt-fear. It will withdraw the illusion-dream back within Child-mind and cause its manifestation to de-materialize, i.e. to disappear. Corrupted feelings hard-wired into the human psyche from the origin of life will then align with Logic / Authority-Judgment, i.e. with Reason. It will happen when Child-mind corrects error, regains Consciousness with help from his Parents-Innocence, and ends the illusion-dream. It will happen when sensory perception and the material world of appearances that upholds it – when brain-body sensing -- is ended.

Until then, the practice of “Forgiveness” in our material world can never be free of contradictory feelings of guilt-fear and hate that are hard-wired into brain-body sensing. True Forgiveness requires an act of Child-Psyche that stops the projection of guilt. That opens Child-mind to recognition of his Innocence and triggers his awakening to Consciousness. It’s an act preceded and enabled by his choice of the correct Guide, the Holy Spirit, his link to Reality-Creation and Truth, and by his abandonment of the ego unreality-untruth, the wrong guide.

Logic / Authority-Judgment protects Innocence and Freedom

When guilt-projection stops, the “other” ceases to be “there.” Because all “they” are – all “we” are – is a projection of guilt by an unconscious dreaming Child. “They” disintegrate like the hobo in Polar Express even though they evoked feelings that seemed to verify their existence. That seemed to verify that they’re “there” because feelings seemed to connect us.

When projection of guilt stops, when the “other” is gone, it’s because self discovers that there’s no guilt at its source to project. The “other” became instrumental in recognizing the truth of self-Innocence by removing the object of projection, the illusion of an “other” to project guilt onto. The lure of an “other” who can be the object-target of projection perpetuates the act of self-punishment for guilt. The act of mis-identification of self as the embodiment of guilt that must be projected out-onto “others” to get rid of it. Projection of guilt imagined as lethal attack against others is the ego’s perversion of the Child’s otherwise harmless attempt to recognize himself as Innocent.

Recognition of self-Innocence requires Intuition from the Holy Spirit, the gift of Reason: Intuition that the Reality-Truth of Logic / Authority-Judgment is that it is for the Protection of Innocence and Freedom. That the Order and Discipline of Logic are not meant for condemnation. Not meant for oppression, control, guilt or captivity. These are ego-projections of guilt by an unconscious Child not in his right mind. They are projections by our corrupted minds that alienate us from the Will of Benevolence that would free us. That would restore Innocence and remove the need for Forgiveness.

Projection of guilt is guaranteed to fail

Projection of guilt entraps Child-mind / humanity in cyclical attempts to reclaim Innocence that are guaranteed to fail. Getting rid of guilt by expelling it from mind is impossible: thought cannot be separated from mind its source. Irrationality is not the way to reclaim Innocence. Insanity is not the way to reclaim Freedom.

There’s no “other” to project guilt onto. There’s no guilt to project because Logic / Authority-Judgment and the Child’s Parents, Mind-Love Innocence, could not put it there in the first place. Authority is the Necessity of Logic’s laws of cause and effect. Neither Necessity nor Order, prerequisites for Freedom, can be dictatorship or captivity. The lies of the ego non-being are perversions of Logic and its laws as captor not liberator, of its Judgment, its protection of Innocence, as projection of guilt.

These are two seminal errors of corrupted mind-thought and Love-feeling: Logic as captor, Authority-Judgment as projection of guilt. Thus corrupted, Child-mind then “chose” ego guide’s insane thought system, accepted ego’s illogic as captor, and projected “guilt.” Undoing the ego’s lies requires denying that Logic is captor, that Authority-Judgment is projection of guilt.

Forgiveness is undoing the Big Lie

What is the root of the ego non-being’s deception? Mischaracterization of Logic / Authority-Judgment. Perversion of Logic’s Innocence into guilt. Perversion of God / Love into illogic-ego / hate. One of five laws of chaos cited by the Course that disrupt our world. The Big Lie that alienates us from our Parents and from one another with guilt, fear, and hatred.

Forgiveness is undoing the Big Lie:

(1) The assumption of Judgment-guilt that isn’t here within us.
(2) The projection of Judgment-guilt to reclaim Innocence that isn’t possible.
(3) The assumption of “others:” objects of Judgment-guilt that aren’t “there” outside of us, that were only put “there” to sustain the illusion.

Forgiveness is recognizing the Truth about Logic / Authority-Judgment: Love-Innocence, the opposite of ego-guilt, fear and hate.

Forgiveness is freely choosing the right Guide

Forgiveness is a matter of free choice: Do we choose the Holy Spirit for our guide or the ego? The Intuition of mind or the sensing of body? The Judgment, Order, and Discipline of one personality type or the perception without Judgment of another? Choice requires Free Will, the Child’s unique gift to Creation. To the Creation and Reciprocation of Worth, the purpose and meaning of Creation that depends on the Child’s Free Will. In alignment with Logic’s laws of cause and effect and always with guidance from our Parents, Mind-Love, who gave their Child Free Will.

In their interactions with their Child through the Holy Spirit our Parents consistently role-model respect for it. It is an example we are meant to follow. The ego invades; the Holy Spirit guides when asked, consciously or sub-consciously. As the Course says, the ego’s voice always speaks first and it’s always wrong.

Can a Child endowed with Free Will and a central role in Creation do his job by joining a “flock?” Freely choose in Reality or in unreality by “surrendering?” Think about it.

Must Horton really hear every Who?

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

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

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

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

The choice: whether to crush individual Worth or affirm it

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

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

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

Respect for Free Will means respect for the individual

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

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

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

The context where there is Meaning and relevance

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

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

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

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

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

Not long ago, I asked a friend for a favor. It was a bit unusual and I knew it would require some thought, but not so unusual that it could upend a friendship. But it did, at least for a while, quite emphatically. The way my friend and I interpreted what happened was a study in contrasts. It was as if we lived in two separate realities, spoke different languages, and transacted business with different currencies, hers as worthless to me as mine was to her.

It was one of those things, a train wreck in a relationship we’re all familiar with. And yet it turned out to be very interesting. It revealed that my friend and I, who have been close over the years, are exact opposite personality types. I’m an INTJ and she’s an ESFP: INTJ for Introvert-Intuition-Thinking-Judgment, ESFP for Extravert-Sensing-Feeling-Perception. These are from Isabel Briggs Myers’ Gifts Differing, not as “scientific” as other theories some might prefer, but my Intuition trusts her Intuition.

The holidays are all about one universal value: everything that makes us family. Forgiveness is one of those things, and let me be the first to admit: If you’re reading this it probably means you’re a big nuisance but you’ve been forgiven – many times. “I love you in spite of your many faults” my dad liked to joke, usually to a good laugh. But it’s no laughing matter, because real forgiveness is beyond reach. At least it is for me. Especially if the big nuisance happens to be my exact opposite personality type.

My instinct in this case was to bail for good. I was on my way out the door. Then I read Gifts Differing and discovered that Isabel’s theory doesn’t stop at showing us how opposites wreak havoc with relationships. It shows remarkably how opposites can be used to bring us closer together and, in the process, promote personal growth and self-awareness. What philosophy, what faith, couldn’t use an analytical tool like this to bring about peace and forgiveness!

It’s done by accessing the opposites of your weak personality traits – mind-Intuition, for example, if you’re a body-Sensing type, -- preferably in consultation with someone who’s your opposite. You “pool your resources,” and at the end you’re both more fully developed, better balanced personalities, more sympathetic, more adaptable to change, and better equipped to forgive. That's the theory and, so far, it's working for me.

Isabel’s theory is inspired, not least because the metaphysics of A Course in Miracles calls for its practical application to individual circumstances, and students of the Course intent on practicing forgiveness will find that it’s a big help. If my friend is reading this she might be incensed that I’m talking about us, but not if her Feeling has accessed Thinking, and Perception has accessed Judgment. You see, what this is all about is making everyone more like me. Proof that what I've learned from her is the joy of spontaneity and laughter. Pity the poor INTJ Scrooge who never learns it!

Wishing you the Joy of Life and laughter for the holidays and all through the New Year.

His god is a lie that does not exist
That hangs over no man’s land like a flare in the night

That casts the dream in the shadows of its evil
Willing us to kill, willing us to die.

I rush across no man’s land to meet his god
Who wishes me dead, there in his trench

The enemy who begs to be killed with a hug
And I pray to my god who wishes him dead

Let me do this
Let us go.

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Explanation

Students of the modern Gnostic version of Christianity taught by Jesus in A Course in Miracles learn that our minds are corrupted by irrational beliefs that place us in a hellish world where we project our guilt onto others to regain our lost innocence. It is within this no man’s land of condemnation and endless deadly conflict, that’s depicted in this poem, that the Christian message of forgiveness – “love thine enemy” – must be absorbed and put to use.

We can undo the deception in principle by reasoning, with ACIM, that we did not sin in Reality when we lost conscious connection with our Source. Reinforcing this message is the point of my forthcoming book. But in this world of separate bodies meant to absorb and inflict punishment, reason doesn’t stand much chance against the passions of fear and hatred.

Though it’s unreal, our no man’s land is a place “where the unreal has been made real.” It is within this hellish environment that overwhelms our sensibilities, our pitiful attempts at reasoning, with its ear-splitting clamor for deception and passion, that I have tried to imagine the only way to put a stop to it. Instead of savaging my “enemy” in his trench, I need only to give him a loving hug. “The hug” would then represent the precise moment when the deception is undone, and its illusory vision of hell is removed from my mind.

It will do this not by my killing the person but by killing what makes the person in my mind my “enemy.” My enemy begs to be “killed” with a hug because only then, with a gesture of Love, will innocence be restored to the image of him that exists within my mind. Only then can the innocent person that he really is be spared from the projection of my own imagined guilt, from my condemnation, and my savage attack.

What the poem tries to convey is an honest humility, if not total despair, in the presence of a simple request that asks the impossible, that I love my “enemy” at precisely the point when my external circumstances and the passions they invoke overwhelm my humanity. I acknowledge its impossibility because I have no pretensions, at this stage of my training, of being a role model for forgiveness under any such circumstances.

Should I ever encounter my enemy in his trench, for real, of this I am certain: giving him a hug instead of making him pay for his infuriating offenses, his inflammatory provocations, will have to be a pure act of Grace. It will occur because another Mind – the Child’s right mind – has gently moved my corrupted mind out of the way. And only then if I have truly asked for it. It will do this if it has finally trained my corrupted mind to reject the deception of guilt and to affirm the Truth of Innocence. Otherwise, my clear expectation is that I would kill the bastard.

Praying to the darkness – to “my god who wishes him dead.” – to allow the hug to happen. is an admission that my mind is not ruled by reason in this world. It’s ruled by madness or I would not be so desperate for help that it would occur to me to ask an executioner practiced in cruelty -- the god of war -- for help with an act of compassion.

But “The Hug” is not the hopeless capitulation that it may seem. My training continues. The Holy Spirit speaks for the Truth, and, in time, the deception will lose its force. “Where the Trouble Lies” notes that energy, the force that keeps the illusion of material reality in place, is dying out. The illusion is in a state of entropy, coming apart. Our bodies will find a better use, and our passions, too.

What put my “enemy” there was hating him in the first place, before he committed any offense. What put him there was fear and hatred in my own mind that needs to revert back to its natural state of Love – back to Reality. The restoration of Reality, with our Free Will doing its part, is inevitable. Reason will prevail. The innocent Child that we really are will prevail. I am sure of it. My “enemy” will get his hug.

There is yet another meaning to the poem that’s implied by its military setting: conflict between opposing armies whose combatants have surrendered their individual sovereignty, and thus free choice, to a group, presumably to their respective countries. The “barriers to an awareness of Love’s presence” ACIM speaks of are many, and this is one of them: signing onto groups – employers, professions, organized causes, faiths, etc. -- that then superimpose their imperatives for survival onto our freely-chosen personal morality.

The “Sophie’s Choice” that The Hug presents is between loyalty to the ethics of individual free choice or to the amoral dictates of our group masters. In praying to the god of war – to Caesar – for permission to hug my “enemy,” I am asking, in effect, for manumission: for release from subservience to his army so that I may exercise free will and reclaim my integrity, my spirituality. I seek freedom from the curse of humanity: serving two masters, doing what’s right while “following orders” – an impossibility. We don't often have the option of separating from organizations that feed us, that trap us in situations where our only choice is some form of death no matter what we decide. If there remains a tone of discouragement, of hopelessness to "The Hug," this would account for it.