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Following is an imaginary conversation with a bright, talented, creative, and dutiful pre-adolescent. Her voice is in italics, mine in regular font. We’re talking about the meaning of Easter and the poem I wrote about it: “Resurrection: Live and Love Unyielding, Life Eternal.”

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The Why of Easter 

I like “Resurrection.” Good! It’s short. Anything else? Did they do Easter eggs when Jesus was around? It doesn’t say anything about eggs. Next year you can write a poem about eggs. “Our legs beg for kegs of eggs with pegs.” Something creative like that. I’m so glad I have your talent and wisdom to brag about (snicker snicker). We color eggs at Easter because. . . That’s enough! You’re just going to say something stupid. . . Because someone figured out that it’s a great way to keep kids off the streets. What about chickens? It’s a great way to keep chickens off the streets too. That’s it. I’m outta here! 

Since you like my poem you must want to learn more about it. Of course I don’t. Anything would be better than that -- unless the poem is about me. Is it about me? Easter is about you and me and everybody. I thought it was just about Jesus. Because he couldn’t be killed and that’s good for the rest of us. OK, then Easter isn’t just about Jesus. It is about everybody. Why? 

Our world can’t seem to settle down in peace. People do wrong because they don’t seem to know any better. Jesus brought information and a way of thinking that helps us know better so we can do better. So we can get it right before we try doing what’s right. So we understand. With insights from another perspective that sees beyond appearances. With vision that isn’t limited to what we can see with our bodies’ eyes. He could do all that?

Walking on water

He was a nobody at first. The Romans who ruled Israel then had nothing to do with him. The authorities from his own country who told people what to believe and how to behave paid no attention to him at first. He just went around on a donkey talking to individuals, families, small groups -- whoever would listen to him. And then the groups got larger. How come if he was a nobody? 

What he was saying was different but it made sense. It seemed to connect with people at the level of their soul, their Psyche, where it was deeply moving. So moving that it seemed true even if it was hard to believe. It had psychological force so compelling that it could change minds. That was unusual.

He was also doing amazing stuff. Healing people like healers before him had done but also things that no one had ever done. Miracles like making a dead guy come back to life. He fed his audience outdoors one day with food out of thin air. He was on a boat with some followers when a storm came up. Everyone thought it would sink the boat and they would all drown. They were terrified. Jesus brought the sun back out and calmed the water. Wait a minute! And just to make sure his followers got the point he got out of the boat and walked on the water! Whoa! How could he do that?

The gift of Intuition

He was thinking with Mind conscious instead of dreaming with Mind unconscious. Showing us what we can do when we do the same. He explains how in the book he authored not long ago called “A Course in Miracles.” You mean he’s still here? He is. Just not in a body. He’s accessible to everyone through Soul. Soul that’s Spirit and not body. Soul and Energy that interconnect everything plus a part of Mind we call Intuition or sixth sense. It was through his connection with the Soul or Spirit of an individual’s body that he authored the Course. She wrote down what he authored. Amazing! 

What does the Course say? It makes it clear that getting to where Jesus got requires a big change of mind. We have to ignore what our bodies and brains and our world have been telling us and turn to another guide. The one we’ve chosen hasn’t been telling us the Truth. We’ve been misled. Will it take long? it could take one or more lifetimes or generations to get to where Jesus got. Or it could happen overnight. How?

Mind conscious is timeless, always in the Now. Always Love, and Love is free, spontaneous. Anytime we’re controlling we’re dealing with fear, not Love. Love can’t have anything to do with forcing or being forced. Spontaneous changes of mind are among the psychic events that are abnormal here. Spontaneous is normal there. History tells us of individuals who’ve gone from one way of thinking to the reverse in an instant. In a burst of light that revealed something different. As if Intuition or sixth sense were showing off. Change of mind can be imperceptible over time or spectacular in the moment. One way or the other it can happen. And it happens not in our bodies or brains but in our Mind. Through Intuition.

Why we’re getting help

Where did Jesus get this ability? Just as there are spontaneous permutations of genetics over long periods that bring about radical change there can be spontaneous permutations of other kinds that change things. A human with the ability to be with us in the state I’ve described as a dream and to be in another state that’s not a dream at the same time is a permutation. Extremely rare but, after all, where else can anything abnormal happen but in dreams where abnormal is normal?

How could just one rare person have such a large impact? It’s not because the dream isn’t revealing its source to us every moment. In a Mind that was conscious before it became unconscious. In the presence of Energy that activates whatever Mind asks of it, conscious or unconscious, and the presence of Soul that interconnects everything whether it’s real or part of a dream. Energy and Soul don’t pay any attention to boundaries and that includes the boundary between reality and the dream. Then there are paranormal events -- near-death, psychic, and other experiences that are so frequent and familiar that we just shrug them off.

Right-brain stuff is weird but by itself it can’t convince us that we’re in a dream. The left brain maintains order with judgment. When it can’t -- when order becomes disorder -- animal will acts on instinct without judgment. A state of chaos that’s also frequent and familiar. Destructive and painful, and maybe a reason why we’re getting help to do something about it. To end a dream that only seems safe and stable until it becomes unsafe and unstable.

Why now?

The rare person had a large impact because he integrated energy, Soul, right and left brain -- all our circumstances, everything -- and put it into context that gave it meaning. Gave it purpose. To awaken us from the dream and return to the reality of consciousness. To the world that he knew that we don’t know. The world defined by Logic, Love, and Innocence, not our world that’s illogic, fear, and guilt. Where other signs of consciousness don’t seriously contradict the dream Jesus' lesson and his miracles did seriously contradict it. All of it. As if it were a lie and he was trying to help us replace it with the Truth.

Which is exactly what he was trying to do. It demanded a response not from parts of the dream but the entire dream, because when he succeeds with any individual it will end the dream. So that’s what he got: a response in space over time from the entire dream that was extraordinary. Who’s winning, Jesus or the dream? Jesus and conscious Mind are forever, dreams are temporary. This one will end regardless.

Then what’s the point? To make the dream end sooner rather than later. The Course makes it clear that the Mind that’s unconscious has real work do to once it wakes up. When it’s learned what the Course teaches it will be needed in Creation. Since Reality and Creation are Now you can say we’re needed there now.

We have nothing to fear. 

The main point of all of Jesus' miracles was that another world lies behind the appearances that our bodies’ five senses detect. Our bodies’ senses may be preventing us from detecting that world and misleading us about the nature of our world. If we insist that there can only be one world and the only way to detect it is with our bodies’ senses then we will miss the point of Jesus’ miracles. We will be denying that we have a sixth sense -- Intuition. That it is through its spontaneous insights from Logic and Love that we can follow his example and eventually access his world. What makes his world different?

  • When he brought Lazarus back from the dead, Jesus was showing us that in the other world behind appearances Life can’t die. In a world that’s Creation death makes no sense. Even here the energy that brings life to our bodies still exists after it departs. It can’t be destroyed.
  • When he fed his audience with loaves and fishes that seemed to come from nowhere, Jesus showed us that in the world behind appearances to Love is to share its abundance. By sharing his Love in that way he showed that he’s our friend from the other world that’s not limited by appearances. He is an agent of Love -- the real thing -- here to help us and he loves us.
  • When Jesus calmed the storm and walked on water, he showed that when his followers understood what he understood fear would go away just like the storm. They would see that there’s nothing to fear. Fear would be replaced by understanding. By the sunlight of Love.

Take all three miracles together and they tell us that in his world where we belong we are Love, we are Loved, and Life is eternal. The Love of one Soul that connects all of us can’t be contained by our physical world. We have nothing to fear because his world is real and ours only seems real. Unbelievable!

To a perspective that’s limited to our bodies’ senses Jesus must seem unbelievable. But to our sixth sense that’s open to Logic and Love, open to seeing things differently, not at all. He makes perfect sense.

Numbers don’t count. Individuals do count.

Though he demonstrated amazing power Jesus had no interest in being powerful the way we think of it. He wasn’t trying to start a movement like a new religion or a church. Didn’t he found a church? The Church said so but it was just putting words in his mouth. He wasn’t trying to organize anything, and that was the point. That each of us has the capacity as individuals, as souls that are part of one Soul that extends beyond our world, to fix what’s broken. It was OK if he attracted many people but he would have been satisfied with only one if that individual truly understood. That’s how uninterested he was in numbers. In churches and their religions, tribes and their members, countries and their citizens, that claim strength in body counts. You've lost me.

Our world is an expression of an idea that’s the opposite of the Truth. What’s that? The Truth that Jesus spoke to was that the Soul to which we all belong is One. It is Oneness, and the ancestral Mind that imagines us is one Mind. One Child of its Parents, Logic and Love, motivated to Love and Create in Peace. The opposite is that the Child isn’t one but many. That we only exist as groups or tribes. That individuals have no Worth. Only groups have Worth. We are many bodies whose brains only know us as animals. As tribes that behave like herds in perpetual conflict, driven by the will of animal brains to dominate, by the frenzy of mob psychology to hate and destroy in war.

And so to express the Truth that we are one Mind, one Child, by forming yet another group wouldn’t make sense. It could only reinforce the original deception, that the Child as one has no Worth. Only its shadow opposite -- bodies in numbers all organized into competing groups -- has Worth. The Truth that Jesus helped us to understand wouldn’t be served if he yielded to appearances and made little of the individual. If he showed respect for numbers as though only groups have the power to bring his vision to life and give it Worth. He stood for Child-the-one, not Child-the-many. This is why everything he said and did was centered on the power and Worth of the individual.

The Truth that lives on

Those who came after to repeat what he taught were teachers who followed his example. Individuals speaking to individuals who showed no interest in organizing a church. What became of them? They lasted into the second century until the world of groups took over and organized a church.

The Church turned what Jesus taught into what it was never meant to be: a theocracy based in Rome, modeled on the Roman Empire. Controlled by authority ruling unquestioned from the top down, imposing conformity instead of empowering individuality and creativity. All for one overriding purpose: to preserve its dominance. Any teacher not embedded in its hierarchy, sanctioned by the Church, was branded a heretic and silenced by force.

The original teachers disappeared. But the world of groups can never have the last word. That’s for the meaning of the Resurrection: that the Truth that Jesus taught, the Worth and power of the one Child, the individual, lives on. And so long as we need him, our teacher, the agent of Soul that’s oneness, will not disappear. He Loves us. He will always Love us. And he will never leave us.

The gift of Understanding with Mind

One Mind and many body-brains are of two different worlds, and if Jesus addressed individuals and had no interest in numbers this placed him unmistakably in the world of Mind. Of Authority that enables and empowers. A world beyond the “laws” of physics, the authority of matter that disables and disempowers.

What Jesus got across with simple stories about right and wrong and his amazing acts was that Love connects us to another Reality. It was a lesson in Logic as well as Love. Logic defines the world of Creation, peace, and harmony that Jesus reached through Soul. The world of Mind. But even if there can be no logical definition for an illogical world of bodies and brains, the Logic of Mind can at least explain it.

The gift to Jesus was a foot in both worlds. In and of his world, in our world but not of it. The gift that enabled him to share understanding with understanding from Logic and Love.

The threat that is another voice

How could it make someone mad if he was just trying to explain? If he wasn’t trying to take over? It didn’t at first. Jesus had no army to threaten anyone with so the Romans weren’t concerned. But the following he attracted did scare Israel’s religious authorities. They thought they should be the only voice and here was another voice, a nobody drawing attention away from them. Through powers they could neither understand nor control -- Innocence and gentle loving kindness, Soul and Truth that transcend the visible world, the Worth of the individual. The opposite of what they taught: unquestioning obedience to power in the visible world. Their power.

Authority serves.

It wasn’t a miracle that showed how Jesus’ version of authority broke with what the authorities taught. It was a simple act of service: washing the feet of a few of his followers. Why did he do that?

The definitions of Logic and the relationships of Love fit all of Creation’s beings and their functions together in harmony. This is how authority governs in Jesus’ world. If Order were forced it would block Free Will and end Creativity. Real Authority doesn’t dominate; it facilitates. Even more remarkable, it serves. You mean like being a servant? Yes, but not in the sense of servant-to-master. Only in the sense that Authority must provide a foundation of support for all the elements of Creation.

This means seeing that its Creations’ receive the help they need when they call for it. If Jesus had provided individuals with computers that were his invention then he would be on call for tech support -- a service. Jesus’ point in washing feet was to show that governing is also serving from the bottom up, the same point Lincoln made at Gettysburg. Rule that dominates from the top down would never do that. It would deprive people of the support service they need to work creatively and it would be wrong. 

The strategy that backfired

Jesus became so revered that he was taking on the aura of a prophet of God, putting him and his followers beyond the rule of the religious authorities. They couldn’t allow it. What did they do? They chose a way to get rid of Jesus so awful that nobody would ever think of doing what he did. That made sure that he and his teaching and special powers disappeared and never came back. I guess they didn’t succeed. 

They didn’t succeed. Instead of putting Jesus in the past and out of sight their cruelty undone by resurrection only brought him back up front and center. Stronger than ever. Though not in the way he thought of it because he wasn’t after numbers. Stronger in the way that our world thinks of it. The mistake of the authorities helped to turn the voice of a nobody into a force of unimaginable numbers. His words and example spread all over the world and keep on spreading today. They couldn’t kill Mind or body because even his body rose from the dead.

Your guess is as good as mine

What does it mean? It means whatever we choose to make of it using our own judgment. Not as members of any group but each of us as individuals. Then I have to figure it out for myself? You’re not going to tell me? I can share my perspective if you like, just as Jesus shared his. And you can reflect on it and make up your own mind. We don’t learn and grow by closing ourselves off to others’ perspectives. We do it by sharing them.

Life evolves where Jesus comes from. Where Creation moves forward naturally with changing contexts, perspectives, thoughts, and feelings. Circumstances change here too though with a lot of resistance, and since what’s broken isn’t getting fixed it doesn’t seem like movement is forward. Our perspectives are only what they are in the moment. Yours and mine, so what you’re hearing from me now can’t be the last word. Just take it for what it is.

The joy of Easter. The love and reverence for Jesus

Whatever you hear can never be substituting my mind or my voice for yours. Jesus would never do that and neither would I. You’d be sorry if you tried. My Siberian tiger has sharp claws! We wouldn’t deny anyone’s Free Will. Free Will is indispensable to Creation where Jesus comes from and here too, though if we’re not moving forward we’re not really creating. Maybe all we can do is fix what’s broken and hope to get back to Creation.

Anytime we allow Free Will to be taken from us we’re making ourselves useless or worse. We’re letting ourselves be instruments of someone else’s will, doing their bidding. Making common cause with Jesus is OK but we can’t make ourselves into copies of anything. That’s looking for trouble. Unless we become the persons we choose to be of our own Free Will, able to see with our own unique perspective and think with our own unique judgment, we can’t be individuals. We can’t be any use to Jesus. All he can do is comfort us when we hurt. Free Will must always be respected.

Ideologies that command vast numbers so far haven’t fixed what’s broken. They always use force that denies Free Will to change things and that just makes it worse. That would be why Jesus paid no attention to numbers. Why he didn’t care about founding movements and churches. Why he shows so much Love and respect for us as individuals. Because we’re the only way to fix what’s broken, with our Free Will. That makes me feel pretty important. Me too. Maybe now we can understand why so many individuals came to love and respect him. Why we’re glad that he resurrected and we celebrate Easter.

Who’s the “savior?”

Jesus could have used his supernatural powers and his following to team up with Caesar and rule the Roman empire. Just like Adam Skywalker with his Jedi Knight powers teamed up with Palpatine to rule the Galactic Empire. Jesus and his following could have taken over moral authority in Israel which is why the people who already had it were so anxious to get rid of him. He spoke for things that are true that can’t be any other way, but he didn’t hand people a book and tell people it was the Truth and they had to obey it. He was serious about being understood and heard but not to take over people’s minds and think for them.

Wasn’t he a “savior?” What he taught was we’re our own saviors but we need help. We can’t do it alone without a trusted guide. Guiding us is the only sense in which he can be our “savior.” He didn’t offer to do anything that we can do for ourselves. And what he taught was what’s important. Just as its lesson can be taught in different ways its teachers can have different identities. Whatever we’re comfortable with. So long as our minds and hearts are on the right track our guide doesn’t have to be “Jesus.” It can have any name. He and what he taught are inclusive, not exclusive.

Demanding obedience messes with Free Will. It doesn’t give people power; it takes it away. What made Jesus so unusual was that even though he spoke with authority and attracted a following he didn’t use it to mess with Free Will. He made a point of empowering other individuals, respecting their voice instead of making it all about his. He made their Worth the center of attention, not his. He didn’t even tell his own story. What we learned about him is what others wrote. Humility like his could never be the arrogance and disrespect of a bully like Palpatine.

Perspective that’s hard to understand

Visitors from another galaxy would have a different perspective from ours. But at least they would be from the same universe and it might be possible to understand one another. The other world that Jesus spoke for wasn’t another galaxy. We can think of it as another reality where authority worked the way Jesus showed us, focused not on itself but on its creations and their creativity. Loving and supporting from the bottom up, not demanding obedience with force from the top down.

It was a perspective so unusual that it couldn’t be understood. Not by authoritarians who rule from the top down and that’s the way it was then. Not in a world where “God” was “the almighty” who had to be feared because anyone who disobeyed him went to hell. There was a lot of misunderstanding about Jesus and what he taught then and there’s still a lot of misunderstanding now.

Powers that can’t be given or taken away

The Church that came along later said it spoke for Jesus and we would be in big trouble if we didn’t obey it. A view of authority that was the reverse of what Jesus taught, so I don’t believe it. The authority that resides in each individual soul has innate Worth. Innate power that comes from being Love and being loved. From being part of the Mind and loving heart, the Soul that we come from and share. We don’t depend on any authority on earth for these things.

They aren’t for those who govern on our behalf to give or take away. Lincoln’s Gettysburg address is revered because it spoke for the same kind of authority that Jesus taught, the system of governance we call democracy. “Authorities” who rule by force on their own behalf are the opposite. All of Palpatine’s “power” resided in him, not the people. And he had no respect for individuality or Free Choice.

Praise for the tyrant?

But didn’t his empire maintain order? Didn’t the Roman empire? Didn’t the Church do good? Yes. And Hitler built the Autobahn and made Volkswagens. Mussolini made the trains run on time.

Tyrants pride themselves on imposing order and stability when at its core it’s disorder and instability. The overthrow of true authority is destabilizing and the end result of authoritarian rule is always its own overthrow. Violence captured by Greek mythology in the overthrow of the Titan tyrant Uranus by his son Cronus followed by the overthrow of the Titans by Zeus and the Olympians. Zeus the paranoid predator, ever alert to challenges to his authority posed by any movement beyond his control, especially by his own offspring.

It's important to be careful with affirmation for the good that authoritarians do. Why? Their mindset turns every reflection on its performance into a judgment on its legitimacy because of the nature of its origin. Which is? Illegitimacy. It’s the opposite of true authority. And if it’s not true then it can’t be part of Reality. Part of Creation. Part of Life which shares, affirms, and empowers. Authoritarian rule, whether it’s over a single family, an ideology, or an entire nation, takes, invalidates, and disempowers. It systematically hollows out the individual, robs it of its creativity, its life, to fill itself. Like a giant virus taking cells captive so it can kill them and replicate itself. It’s not about life. It’s about death.

Its “truth” isn’t the overwhelming power and security that it seeks to project. At its core it’s weakness and insecurity. It obsesses over what’s said about it because the source of its justification can’t be self. It has no self. It’s a parasite that depends for its existence on its host. Which gives it an insatiable craving for approval. For self-justification. Every comment on its performance is either justification for the predator or opposition that must be crushed. Any word of praise for Il Duce making the trains run on time would be twisted into the legitimacy of fascism. It would be swallowed up by the authoritarian’s bottomless appetite for what it can’t give: approval.

We must be careful with affirmation for the good that authoritarians do because it will be swallowed up by self-justification that doesn’t reinforce the good. It can only perpetuate the bad. The authoritarian mindset is ugly. I don’t like it. Nobody should. But since it’s with us we can only do our duty: stand up to the bully, replace it, and stand by true authority that doesn’t bully.

Love and Innocence, vulnerability and betrayal

If Jesus could walk on water and change minds couldn’t he have protected himself? Did he have to submit to the authorities? Jesus spoke with authority because he spoke for Authority. The Will of the Truth of Logic and Love that’s not of our world but serves us when we let it. So he had not one but two wills to respect: ours and the Will that he served.

He could only trust both in innocence to let him engage with us in safety. Not to approach in trust and innocence would have compromised the Trust and Innocence that he spoke for. Nor could he interfere with our will if it compromised Free Will. To understand Jesus is to understand innocence. The Truth he shared of the Innocence of the Soul to which we belong. Oneness that has no reason to fear harm from opposites. An agent of Soul that’s Innocence couldn’t protect himself against what he couldn’t know.

Wherever the emptiness of authority for its own sake would replace the fullness of Love; wherever it would displace Free Will, the Trust and Innocence of Love can be betrayed. It’s vulnerable in our world, and Jesus was betrayed. By a follower that he trusted. By religious authorities that he trusted. By betrayal -- an act that Innocence would know nothing of and could not anticipate. This may help to explain why Jesus couldn’t protect himself.

Protection

But it made no difference. The Authority that Jesus served, the Life that’s the Truth of Logic and the fullness of Love, was all the protection he needed. It can’t be killed no matter how cruel and unjust its opposite.

Denying death meant to cow an entire people into submission to authority was the last act of his body while Jesus was among us. Its Resurrection proof that respect for individuality, creativity, and Free Will that comes from Logic, Love, and Truth is real Authority. Proof that authority that’s disrespectful and rules by force, that overrides every voice with its own voice because it’s afraid of individuality, creativity, and Free Will, has no real power over us. Proof that souls confined to bodies that come and go don’t come and go. Their Life force is forever. We have nothing to fear.

When there’s a beast to be slain

So then we can ignore disrespectful authority? Jesus was asked what to do about Caesar, the Roman emperor. What did he say? That disrespectful authority is an unavoidable fact of life in our world that requires accommodation. Otherwise leave it alone. Our purpose is to serve real Authority while it serves us and that should be our focus.

We’re not supposed to rebel? To stand up to Caesar? When Caesar demands that we surrender our minds and hearts to him, our individuality and integrity, an agent of Soul that’s Innocence can’t be our guide. The world of Jesus has no boundaries. Our world does. We do what’s necessary to protect our independence and democracy. Join together not as a tribe bent on cycles of destruction but as family with one specific, shared purpose: to keep the beast from crossing our boundaries.

When that’s done, we get back to our real work. This is why World War II was thought of as a “good” war. There was a beast to be slain, we came together as one to slay it, disbanded, and resumed peaceful lives when we were done.

When Eros took a stand for Love

The story of Jesus took one approach to authority that's unloving. There's another? The myth of Psyche and Eros. Psyche was a girl so innocent and beautiful that she was attracting people away from the temples of Aphrodite. Just like people were paying attention to Jesus instead of their religious rulers. Aphrodite was an Olympian goddess, jealous of her power and cruel toward anyone who questioned it. She didn’t crucify Psyche but she did make her perform tasks that would have killed her if she didn’t have help.

What happened? The last task -- an errand to the underworld -- almost did kill her. While she lay unconscious her lover Eros came and rescued her. Aphrodite’s son, who was also an Olympian. He brought his Love up to Mount Olympus to be with him. Like Jesus, she ascended to Heaven.

Wasn’t Aphrodite mad? Very! To save Psyche Eros had to escape from the room his mother had locked him in. Which means he had been forced to yield to cruel and unjust authority and he rebelled. Once her son made it clear that his mother couldn’t control him she had to give way. Because nothing can control Free Will and character when it stands up for itself. Like the wild Siberian tiger that is your spirit of Free Will and character. Eros stood up to his mother and when he did, he stood up for Love.

Trust in Jesus, Soul of Innocence

This was the form that Psyche’s “resurrection” took: rescue by rebellion. Jesus couldn’t role model rebellion against a force that Innocence couldn’t recognize. That would only make it real. Any form of attack always implies that its opponent exists. And if Jesus came to represent another world that exists attacking our world wouldn’t make a very good case for it. It would tell us that he’s an ordinary person we can’t trust. Exactly!

The reappearance of Love and Innocence after fear and guilt tried to make it disappear was his “rebellion.” An act of Truth that attacked no one, yet it helped with understanding that authority that rules by force can’t be Truth. It can only “be” an appearance. A specter of fear and guilt. A deception that’s meant to deceive. A boogeyman. Not like Jesus. No. Not like the Soul of Innocence and Honesty that we can trust.

Whither sixth sense?

Whether we can trust the way that ordinary persons and their institutions have represented Jesus over the years is open to question. The way that he represented himself is not. When we apply the Logic and Love that he shared to his story it resonates with Truth. That’s what my sixth sense tells me. What does yours tell you? When the eggs are all dyed and hidden I'll definitely think about it.

Happy Easter to you! Happy Easter Jesus! I love you! Me too!

Isabel’s theory

Isabel Myers’ theory of personality types* says the answer to the question posed by this essay is yes. In theory one individual can coach a personality opposite in the use of faculties that his or her type typically underutilizes. In the example addressed here those would be introspection, reflection-intuition, thinking-reasoning, feeling-evaluation, and judging (INTJ), faculties typically under-utilized by the opposite type extravert, sensing, feeling, and perceptive (ESFP).

According to Isabel’s theory the faculties that make up our types are preferences, and since they’re largely responsible for performance it’s only a matter of preference whether we improve our performance by making better use of them, specifically by expanding into faculties associated with our opposites. This must happen routinely, for example when circumstances compel perceptives who prefer to experience life in the moment to use their judging faculty to plan ahead. What seems less likely is that any type would seek help from an opposite to gain competence with the opposite’s faculties.

Isabel’s theory is intriguing nonetheless, not just because it makes sense but because, if it could be put into general practice it would help with personal growth and better relations. How often do relationships and projects come apart because personalities lack the will or ability to share what they’re experiencing? Because, lacking a feel for other types, they blunder unintentionally into misjudgments that end goodwill and cooperation.

One faculty too many

The ideal setting assumed by Isabel’s theory would be two individuals with opposite personality types in cheerful collaboration. Two opposite types could be the best of friends, and if they are one might even welcome the other’s kindness. But what if the type being coached senses that the other is turning him into a copy of himself? Is manipulating preferences to assume control over the relationship?

It would be remarkable if even an individual crippled by ineptness with under-utilized faculties were aware of it. Or, if he were, comfortable exposing his ineptness to an opposite type for strengthening unless the other were already a trusted personal friend or a paid professional. Our personality types and how we go about relating to them are our psychological underwear. By a certain age we’re partial to our preferences. We don’t take change lightly if it can just as easily create distance as close it. Perhaps help with one or two faculties won’t feel like a humbling makeover, but what if help is needed with three or four?

Guides locking horns

Isabel’s theory would still be feasible in the right moment for the right relationships. That is, if they’re the only voices in the room. But what if one or both is self-consciously submitting its judgment -- the product of its Judging faculty -- to guidance from another voice? What if “opposites” are not only opposite faculties but opposite guides? The individual might be the soul of agreeability but not if his guide recoils at being sidelined by an opposite guide. By the competition. By the enemy if the guides represent opposite takes on the values of moral character or competitive prowess.

We may have begun not with John Locke’s tabula rasa but with Carl Jung’s psychological types locked and loaded for combat. Which means there could be four voices in the room to manage instead of two. There could even be a situation where two plus two doesn’t equal four. Where the guides of one or both have become so involved in shaping their personalities that the boundary between self and guide is obliterated. Two plus two could now equal three or only two. Two individuals with opposite personality types who consciously or subconsciously identify with their guides. Guides who themselves are personality types with their own faculties and preferences. Committed to blocking their host from even detecting another voice let alone listening to it. 

Two models of authority

The mind’s faculty of sixth sense or Intuition that led to the theory of psychological-personality types presupposes a quasi-professional setting where self-analysis can be conducted objectively and safely. Where both parties are open to faculties of mind -- introspection, reflection, reasoning, evaluation, and judging. But if one or both has identified with will instead of mind to direct behavior, for the very reason that its perceived strength compensates for weakness, then self-analysis isn’t an option. It will be strenuously opposed. The type who identifies with will won’t want anything to do with it because of its purpose: to overturn the iron rule of mindless will with the civilizing governance of mind.

The theory of personality type opposites has then strayed into the great divide in human thought and behavior: between the “realist” model of authority that deifies rule without opposition from the top down -- the authoritarian “triumph of the will” that crushes individuality and free choice -- and the democratic ideal of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: governance from the bottom up that cultivates and respects individuality and free choice. Absolute authority, a mythical beast, vs. the indomitable spirit of freedom. Not absolute freedom without limits that’s another mythical beast but freedom of thought, expression, and choice that recognizes the necessity of Order in a shared world.

Respect for Free Choice

Personality types in the grip of either of these impossibilities -- absolute authority or absolute freedom -- will treat self-analysis as an existential threat because it threatens self-delusion, the state of mind of anyone lost to nonsense. All that can be done to rescue mind from captivity, with Isabel's theory, is to coach an empty room, record the attempt, and leave it to the spontaneity of intuition to bring it to its host’s attention. That is, when the beast has let down its guard. When its host decides with his own intuition, on his own, to exercise his indomitable Free Choice.

It's all an act

Alternate “reality” is an intentional act of self-delusion by Child-Mind, disabled and disempowered by unconsciousness, corrupted by misidentity with its own shadow, the code that defines its opposite, the Joker-magician. Which makes alternate “reality” an act. A performance by a magician. A magic act meant to hypnotize and captivate with its “entertainments:” hilarious perversions of Truth and horrifying perversions of Justice. All of it an impossibility that can’t be taken seriously. Adding the lure of magic and retribution -- the consummation of victimhood -- to the lures of the absolutes: authority and freedom. The lure of “fun.”

Plato’s Cave would then be a stage and its occupants play-acting puppets. Like the actors in the Truman TV Show, some so deluded, so closely identified with the Cave master, that they think they’re the producer. The occupants would then resist Truth because it would turn up the house lights. It would ruin the atmospherics of darkness, disembodied voices, laughter and screams, flames and flickering shadows -- the smoke and mirrors required to sustain illusion and fend off disbelief. It would expose the trick and stop the show. It would take away everyone’s “fun,” and, make no mistake, they think this is fun. So long as it’s “others” who are at the wrong end of violence and retribution they’re living the dream.

The boredom of “fun”

The Cave and its magic act are the production of a split Mind that’s Free Choice as well as corrupted. Its occupants may be deluded and confused, but given direction and incentive, they’re capable of folding the show on their own. The Mind that was lured into the Cave still retains the faculty of Intuition. The portal to spontaneous insights and understanding that is the sixth sense, that can neither be blocked entirely nor indefinitely. From awareness of an incentive to stop pretense more powerful by far than the magician’s lures: the will to Freedom. The indispensable function of Free Choice. Somewhere in the back of their minds is the memory of Free Choice and the ability to reclaim it. Whenever they choose.

When “fun” isn’t fun anymore. When Pete Hamill looked down at his drink and realized he was done with it. Done with the drinking life and its one-dimensional comic book “reality.” Done with “Brooklyn.” Done with adolescence, taverns, street fights, and mock comradeship. Ready to live a life with intimacy, maturity and responsibility, talent and creativity. Ready to have fun.**

The delusion then isn’t fully a delusion. It’s a self-willed adventure-fantasy conjured by adolescence to get into mischief with impossibilities. With dangerous toys in a shallow make-believe world. A universe of scary objects like black holes that fascinates with its vastness, complexity, violence, and pointlessness. All to avoid Reality mischaracterized by the Joker as boring.***

Bubbles within a bubble

Preoccupied with its production, the Cave’s fantasy troupe is inaccessible to anyone but its own members. It can’t be concerned with consequences beyond the show that must go on. And if any of its members carry the fantasy into their own lives; if they choose to live an adventure-fantasy, they, too, will be inaccessible.

For what will their lives be but re-enactments? Mimicking the Joker-corrupted Mind’s projection of an alternate reality. Monkey-see, monkey-do. Dragooning family and friends into playing scripted parts to keep the act alive. The wishful thought that action-comic impossibilities are possible: fantastic characters, hair-raising encounters, nonstop “action.” To keep themselves persuaded that it’s “real.” To keep the “fun” going at all costs. At the cost of wholesale disrespect for character, honesty and integrity, individuality and creativity. Their own and the captives to their adolescent, senseless will.

What will their lives be but alternate realities within an alternate “reality.” Bubbles within a bubble. Detached from reality. Wholly out of touch. 

Persuasion from a leash correction

An adolescent Child’s corrupted mind intentionally “choosing” self-delusion was an act of wrongdoing and so is its re-enactment. While the Cave’s troupe gets around to stopping the show it might motivate them if individual re-enactments in our midst receive a leash correction. The correction administered to untrained dogs by leashes when they race off in pursuit of prey. They learn that the costs of misadventure can’t all be displaced onto others with impunity. That there’s a price to pay -- a dose of Reality.

What then is Isabel’s contribution? An intelligent analytical approach to the problem posed by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave that complements leash correction. That will work beautifully someday when its light reaches the occupants of the Cave not from without but from within. When they tire of delusion and choose of their own free will to work toward self-awareness instead. With help from Intuition’s gift: respect for Free Choice and the Logic and Love of explanation that leads to Understanding.

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*Gifts Differing (Consulting Psychologists Press 1980) based on Carl Jung’s Psychological Types (Must Have Books 2019)
**A Drinking Life (Little, Brown 1994)
***Jerry L. Martin, God: An Autobiography (as Told to a Philosopher) (Caladium Publishing Company 2020)

The organs of Life

All of Reality-Creation is one Being. One Self that contains within itself Relationships between aspects of itself that perform functions. Functions that enable Creation to function. The process and structure of Creation are one interrelated whole. One living, organic Being expressing the value, the Worth, of Life, of Being, and its works: the extension and continuous expansion of Life. The evolution and growth of Life.

The exhortation from Being’s emissaries that reach us from Reality-Creation, that we Love one another and live in Peace, is, at the most elemental level of Understanding, no more than a reminder that we are all part of One Self. The exhortation that reaches us in our illusory material world, that we not hate and attack one another, is no more than a reminder that it's impossible to separate from one another let alone attack, injure, and destroy one another. For when we try to do so we are only turning against ourselves.

The Relationships contained within Creation’s One Self are between different aspects of the same Self. They are not and cannot be between separate parts. They are between distinct functions of the same One Self that serve and share in the unified purpose of Creation. One organic Life composed of organs each with its own function.

The dream of all things impossible

Einstein tried to theorize with physics and mathematics how the principle of unity is expressed through our material universe. Plato tried to theorize with philosophy how it’s expressed through Mind in the presence of the cosmos. Where both sensed the divine, feeling the presence of Psyche, the Soul that connects all Life with its Source, the One Self of Creation. Unaware, because we occupy a dream of its opposite, that the principle expressed through our material universe cannot be unity, and so they failed.

The principle instead is separation. The impossibility which can only be an appearance, the delusion of an unconscious mind that’s dreaming. For even if separation appears to be real everything within our universe is interconnected. It is, as physics tells us, “relational.” Particles are, as quantum mechanics tells us, “entangled.” Thoughts like these that reach their audience through electronics because the cosmos is interconnected by electronics -- the electromagnetic force. A cosmos described as a neural network, as though it were a single brain. Which it may be: the reverse mirror image of the sleeping Mind that’s projecting it. Where separation cannot be real, even in a horror show of contradiction, conflict, and violence meant to fool its occupants into thinking it’s real.

All things impossible, all things contradictory and illogical, become possible in an illusion. All Order disorder, all laws lawless, all authority powerless when script and rules are both written by a Mind making up an alternate “reality. By the dreamer, the only possible identity for the authoritarian who would rule above the law. Arbitrarily, subject to no law but its own whim. A day-dreaming fool.

Reality is the authority of Mister Nice Guy

The Reality of Creation is expressed as a distinct aspect of the One Self, the function of Order that fits together all the parts, the functions of Creation defined by Logic-Love through its laws of cause and effect. The Reality of Creation is the Beauty of Order expressed through harmony, the joyful spontaneity of Peace and Freedom. Order that cannot be the handiwork of authority imposed from the top down, arbitrarily, above the law.

The Reality of Order that makes Beauty and its attributes possible can only be expressed logically through the function of Necessity, the Force of laws of cause and effect, distinct from the function of Creation. So that the Worth of Creation may be shared, affirmed, enabled, and empowered from below. So that it may not be compromised by ownership, possession, and control from the top down.

Reality is not No More Mister Nice Guy

Within the One Self that is Life-Creation there is the Reality of Necessity: the immutable sequence of Logic and authorship, distinctions between before and after, author and authored, Creator and Created, Parent and Child. Relationships that may be defined by firsts and seconds in logical succession but do not and cannot logically imply the dominance and “supremacy” of authority that rules from the top down. That cannot imply ownership, possession, and control, the perversions of authority implied by a material world of appearances occupied by illusory bodies and other physical objects.

Dominance, “supremacy” and the rest are attributes of an alternate “reality” that can only “exist” within a Mind unconscious and dreaming. Within an illusion where anything goes. Creation is all parts fitting together in harmony within One Self that is Reality, distinct from Creation, that cannot be where “anything goes.” That is and must be defined by the laws of cause and effect. By the Force of Necessity that doesn’t rule from the top down, above the law, arbitrarily, but enables governance and Order supportively from the bottom up. Symbiotically, synchronously, with the Logic and Love, the sharing, affirmation, enablement, and empowerment of the Soul and Source of Creation. The One Self that is Creation.

What happened to Houdini’s elephant?

The distinction between Reality and Creation occasions a deception within the dreaming Mind, the function of Free Choice, that is uniquely harmful: the reversal of the relationship between Reality and Creation. Accomplished by the perversion of Reality that necessitates harmony supportively through laws-Necessity from the bottom up into unreality that necessitates disharmony through arbitrary lawlessness from the top down. A reversal of the Energy-Force of Necessity from its light side -- Life --in Reality to its illusory dark side -- death -- in unreality. A consequence of one magic trick by the illusionist, the shadow reflection of unconsciousness, our ancestral Mind’s self-delusion. Its mistaken identity: the disappearance of Reality from Creation, of the harmony, peace, spontaneity, and Freedom of Order made possible by the laws of cause and effect, and its replacement by unreality and its laws of chaos. Like the disappearance of Houdini’s elephant with no explanation, no Logic, into thin air.

The disappearance of sanity and its replacement by insanity with no explanation, no Logic, into thin air. A state of Mind that in our terminal confusion we take to be “normal.” That we adapt to until -- what? Until insanity and chaos have brought total disorder and there is no more room to maneuver. No more room to adapt.

Avoidance doesn’t work

How could this happen? It could happen because, as the founder of modern neuroscience once observed, “The ‘destructive phase’ always reappears, and each iteration of wars is more horrible than the last.” Because “Our nerve cells continue to react in the same way as in the Neolithic Age.”*

It could happen because, so long as we allow ourselves to be fooled by the illusionist’s trick, by our own limbic mindless will; so long as we passively submit to the illusion, to our Neolithic animal fears, chained to our seats in Plato’s Cave by self-delusion, events that we imagine we have avoided by not understanding will overtake us.

When do we tire of the joke?

And then what? It’s all over?

Actually no. Because the function defined for the Child Free Choice within the One Self of Creation is still needed and must be performed. Free Choice that we are, wild card that we are, we are still governed by Logic-Love and subject to the Force of Necessity. Though authoritarian “realists” may think otherwise we author neither ourselves nor the rules that define Reality.

Our choice is when to learn our lesson. There is no whether. What’s Real is what must be. There’s no fooling around forever with escapes into made-up “reality.” Into substitutes for consequence. For the satisfactions of three-dimensional Life that is Life instead of the one-dimensional facsimile, the antics of a cartoon, that only delusion can inhabit.

So when do we get it together? When do we tire of the joke and get serious? When do we turn to insights from Intuition, our pathway to Logic and Love? To metaphysics for explanation that leads to Understanding? Why not Now?

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*Alec Wilkinson quoting Santiago Ramon y Cajal in “Illuminating the Brain’s ‘Utter Darkness’.” Review of Benjamin Ehrlich, The Brain in Search of Itself: Santiago Ramon y Cajal and the Story of the Neuron. In New York Review of Books (February 9, 2023, p. 32)

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

The DNA of Creation

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

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

This is God.

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

This is Logos.

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

The making of a good fit

Peace in relationships -- family and friends, work and play, individual and group. Peace of mind. World peace. Is harmony. The fitting together of parts engaged in shared purpose. Performing a function that contributes toward the creation, expression, or affirmation of Worth. To the Worth of the parts striving toward it.

Psychology concerns itself with human psyches and groups that must fit together so that individuals function in harmony, within and among themselves, internally and externally. The “engine” of engineering performs the same function with physical objects rather than subjects. The quantitative measurements of science play a part in both disciplines, but between the two psychology leans heavily toward the subjective-qualitative, engineering toward the objective-quantitative. Two approaches with one function: fitting parts together harmoniously. With Logic.

Peace-harmony requires definitions whether subject or object, qualitative or quantitative. Parts that fit together harmoniously to perform the functions defined for them must each have their own definition that distinguishes them individually before they can be distinguished and function collectively. That distinguishes what they are -- their being -- and what they do -- their doing. The being must fit the doing and the doing must fit the being. As in architecture “form follows function.”

It is the function of Logic to define. The “Word” associated with “Logos” from classical thought stands for the essential output of Logic: the expression of the idea of a thing, subject-self or object. The definition or design of a thing produced by mind before it’s put into play to fit with other definitions-functions to perform shared purpose. The idea of object “apple” that Plato held to be where the reality of “apple” resides: within mind that thinks it. In human thought “Logic” or “Logos” refers to the concept of “God,” the Being responsible for definitions. For fitting parts together logically, harmoniously, with feeling. Lovingly, so Creation’s parts function smoothly.

“Word” or “Logos” also refers to what’s produced by harmonious definitions: a state of being-doing shared purpose referred to as “Creation.” The whole of it -- Creator-Logos and Creation-Logos -- necessitating another descriptor: “Reality.” Because the human experience embraces opposites including “unreality.” There is no need in Creation in Reality for the descriptor “Reality” because unreality is a definition, a state or condition of impossibility that is unknown. But in human experience Reality and unreality state the critical distinction between mind logical-sane and mind illogical-insane. Critical to Understanding. Critical to humans fitting together internally-externally in peace and harmony, because it can’t happen without Understanding. 

Logos has no tolerance for contradictions

Failures of humanity to function harmoniously in a shared world that requires shared purpose are failures of Understanding that depends on Logic to explain how parts must fit together. To explain their definitions -- what-who they are and what they do that must fit together with what other parts do. As individual psyches we are composed of parts internally that must fit together harmoniously and as groups we are composed of individuals that must fit together harmoniously. Reality-Creation is one large composition composed of families that are compositions of individual selves. Selves that are compositions of parts that, in turn, are relationships fitting together. All of it held together by the definitions of Logic. An expression of the idea of fitting together or “relationship.”

Failures of human functioning together in harmony are psychopathology: psyches harboring opposites or contradictions out of alignment with Logic. With Logic’s laws of cause and effect. With the Necessity expressed by the Word-Logos “law.” Law or Necessity has no tolerance for contradiction. Minds that would compose functions from parts that oppose-contradict are attempting the impossible. “Impossible” is illogical, the opposite of one of two primary founding principles of Logic: “Possibility.” The other is “Relationship.”

Minds that attempt to compose peace-harmony out of parts that contradict-conflict in their definitions, their Logic, are attempting the impossible. A definition of illogic or insanity. “Insanity” -- the state of mind that can’t create, can’t be part of Creation that exists harmoniously, at peace, in Reality. It can only dream a fantasy of unreality. Mind dreaming a fantasy of unreality composed of contradictions isn’t awake. A dreaming mind is unconscious.

The failures of humanity to function harmoniously are of Necessity failures of minds not thinking logically and therefore in a dream state not conscious. Logic or “Logos,” Logos or “God,” has no tolerance for contradictions or for the state of mind -- unconscious -- that dreams of contradictions and chaos, unreality and insanity. A thing defined cannot be what it is and what it isn’t. Cannot be or do its opposite.

The autonomy of Free Choice

The source of the flawed composition of contradictions that defines human unreality is an attribute of Logos-Creator and its Creation peace-harmony. A distinct being-Self with a distinct function in Reality-Creation. A unique function of Mind that, like Logic-Logos, is Relationship combining thought with feeling, Mind with Love. The attribute is the Mind-Love function of Free Will or Free Choice. That is, in its being, Free Choice. The source of the flaw that defines human unreality has its origin in Reality and performs an essential function in Reality-Creation. Reality-Creation could not be affirmed without it. The Self-Awareness of Consciousness itself could not exist without it.

Being essential to Self-Awareness and Worth makes Free Choice indispensable to Reality-Creation. What gives it the capacity to perform its role are two unique attributes:

  • the freedom to choose, in its explorations of the unknown, to remain at Home in Reality-Creation with its identity Free Choice, in Relationship with its Parents, or to explore alternate “realities” with unanticipated consequences. Consequences that may entail loss of Awareness of Self and Relationship and apparent loss of Free Choice. Consequences that, empowered by Energy in service to Mind, may appear real but cannot be Real. A consequence of the function of Free Choice to learn as it performs through trial and error: the necessary freedom to risk choosing incorrectly as well as correctly, illogically as well as logically, though not with the status conferred by Logic and Love of remaining Conscious at Home with Parents in Reality-Creation if trial ends in error. To explore alternate “realities” with intent would be an expression of the unique attribute of Free Choice: the freedom not to choose impossibility, to be another Self in Reality, but to imagine or dream another self in unreality. Not to be wrong but to risk being wrong. And in so doing to learn all that's to be learned from the disorder, the unpredictability, the give-and-take, of experience.
  • Free Choice cannot be owned, possessed, or controlled. Its only limits are the limits set by the Logic-Love of its definition in Reality-Creation. By the laws of cause and effect, the authority of Necessity that applies to Everything. These confine it to what it is: Free Choice. Within the scope of Reality-Creation it cannot choose any role other than Free Choice, to be any Self other than who it is, any function other than what it does. In all circumstances, in all contexts, its core identity, its true identity, remains Free Choice. The Child of Parents Logic-Choice and Love-Freedom, it cannot be any other Self.

Other Creations owe their being and function to organic growth. To the implications of Logic and the relationships of Love. To the interconnections of laws-Necessity, to the evolution of Creation that is the Order, the harmony-peace of Reality. Free Choice originated from its Source as a distinct Self with the attribute of independence, occupying its own plane in the structure and process of Creation. Interconnected with all of it because Reality-Creation is the Oneness of interconnection. But a distinct Self functioning autonomously beyond its control. Whose definition by masculine Logic-Choice and feminine Love, its Parents, endowed it with the capacity to choose freely within the Order, the peace-harmony, of Creation.

From the One of Reality to the many of illusion

Whose definition endowed it with the capacity to function as a wild card subject to its own guidance, its own judgment, its own discretion. Exercising its capacity independently in Relationship with its Source, its Parents, but by definition not owned, possessed, controlled, or dominated by any part of Creation. A wild card that has the free run of Creation and so puts a premium on Judgment. On its maturity and competence to judge correctly in its choices in all contexts of constantly evolving Creation. In the acts that share, affirm, enable, and empower the Life-Worth of Creation and Self of the Self-Awareness / Consciousness that creates it.

Though Free Choice is identified as a distinct self with a distinct function independent of its Source-Creator, its Parents Logic-Love, it is bonded with them in a reciprocal Relationship of Knowing and Love. A Relationship between Parent-Child that supplies the dynamo of Energy at the core of Oneness. The passionate stance of Being:

  • empowering and illuminating all of Reality-Creation with the Energy and Light of Self-Awareness.
  • embracing Everything, all possibilities including the state of mind that is Free Choice when Free Choice cannot choose correctly and lapses into the dream state of unconsciousness. That is, when it lacks the Knowledge and competence necessary to choose freely.
  • making of all of Reality-Creation a Heaven of joyfulness, peace, and harmony. The ideal that haunts the human Psyche with the memory of a long-ago utopian Home where we, one Child, existed in the embrace of Logic and Love, peace and freedom, our Parents, without contradictions, without opposites, in the Perfection of Innocence.

Our minds not troubled with the concomitants of our predatory animal nature: bodies sharing space with bodies, tribes with tribes. With familiar and alien objects, “others” triggering primitive limbic dominance, fear, possessiveness, lust, rage, and hatred. Reverberating through a dystopia of guilt, the memory of the long-ago projection of injustice, limbic emotions, guilt, and insanity that transformed the One of Reality into the many of illusion. That made us, projections of a dream, and put us here.

Secrets of our ancestral Mind revealed

That Free Choice put us here should be no surprise. A wild card with the run of Creation. A Child learning and growing to maturity and competence through the trial and error of experience. In the context of Reality and Creation that know nothing of opposites yet are constantly expanding, exploring, discovering, and creating among all the known possibilities into the unknown. In the broader context of Everything that does include opposites: the illusory inhabitants of the flip side of Reality that is Mind unconscious. Mind dreaming an alternate “reality” of shadow-reflections, derivations coded to be the opposite of their hosts. To be dependents along for the ride, troublemakers, parasites. An unreality coded to be everything opposite to Reality.

The Why of what put Free Choice here should tell us that having the maturity and competence to choose correctly as well as freely is important if we prefer success rather than failure. If we want to avoid mistakes that get us into trouble. A great deal of speculation and story-telling have been devoted to Why the Child’s Parents would allow or perpetrate its departure from immortality to mortality. The logical answer would appear to be they did neither. That it was probably inevitable, the consequence of Free Choice. The laws of cause-effect. Of Necessity that governs the process and structure of Creation.

The Why of it still matters. But the How of what put Free Choice here may be the more important question. Because it’s from the story of how the Child Free Choice, our ancestral Mind, imagined itself into an alternate “reality” that we, its “descendants” -- projections of a dreaming mind -- can gain insights into the deepest roots of human behavior. To the roots of human psychopathology that has so far eluded Understanding and defied cure by the healing professions. By psychology, the study of behavior, and psychiatry, the study of illness.

There are patterns. And try as we might to detect and understand them we can’t succeed until we free ourselves from the tyranny of bodies and sensory perception. From putting our faith in counterintuitive "scientific" absurdities like the search for configurations of particles and cells, neurons, chemistry, and electrical impulses in brains that will someday, somehow, magically produce consciousness. Until we liberate mind to inquire where the answers are: in the How of what put Free Choice here. In the Logic, the story, of what led our ancestral Mind from one state into another. One Reality into another whose every attribute is an expression or reflection of the Reality it was projected from. Whose every actor, every relationship, is driven, one way or another, by the sequence of events that brought them to “life” in another “reality.”

Simple intuitive Logic  

How shall you and I resolve our differences? When it looks hopeless whether we’ve tried everything or nothing? By Understanding that goes beyond the hopelessness, the intractability, of human conflict. The pointless, circular “reasoning” of minds captive to matter. By trying something new. Something even more entertaining than the mythologies of entertainment and religion, sports and politics. Than the hallucinations of psychedelics and the psychoses of addicts. The ravings of wishful thinking fabulists, self-serving opportunists -- mad men making it up as they go along. Try something that actually enlightens: simple intuitive Logic. Metaphysics: the invention of Parmenides that takes us beyond appearances. The revelations of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, whose Course in Miracles takes us into the story of our ancestral Mind. The One Child that we are and the one story. Our story.

So, what's the "wild card?" We are. Free Choice.

August 17, 2022: a date which will be long remembered. . . .

High school marks a new phase in individuals’ maturation in many ways. One is progress toward development and expansion of gifts and talents. Because that’s the business end of lives, our being, our selves: what we are to do with who we are. How we are to make ourselves useful. Because ours and others’ happiness and wellbeing rely on us to make use of ourselves through the expression and application of our talents. Through performance.

There will be many distractions, but this is our true course toward living lives of accomplishment, meaning, fulfillment, and happiness: making use of ourselves through our talents. There may also be a good deal of waste, because we typically have too many potential talents and uses to develop in one life. We must make a choice.

August 17, our debut at high school, will mark the first serious phase in choosing which of our talents to work and play with. To learn and grow with. For an adolescent girl of character, ambition, and conscience, what will it be? Creativity through artistry and the performing arts? Excellence through competitive sports? Character development through leadership?  Healing and intimacy through relationships? Innovation through discovery?

How do we engage with an expanding world that’s engaging with us?

Relationships with others continue in high school as before, but with a subtle difference. High school is adolescence that breaks with childhood, a period when individuals shed a skin that kept them insulated within a protective enclosure. A bubble of unawareness that served as an extension of the mother’s womb. To shield vulnerable and unformed selves from potentially hostile and harmful influences outside the womb.

Adolescence exposes individuals to some of these influences. Releases them from their sheltered world and expands it. Makes them aware for the first time that they share something larger: an expanding world composed of many worlds. Not just a place but a Force. Way larger than themselves and their immediate environment, the only environment that a child knows. They must now choose how to adapt to it. How to relate to it, engage with it. How to replace the protection afforded by the womb, to protect their vulnerability in new ways. Because their parents’ protection, for better or worse, is giving way to this Force. And we’re not just engaging with it. It’s engaging with us.

The most important choice is choice

High-schoolers must confront the need to make choices for themselves. And the very first and most important choice is choice itself: whether they prefer to choose freely, with independent judgment, or avoid it. Duck the responsibility -- pass it off to someone or something else. The most important choice is whether to run toward the functions of mind that enable Free Will or to run away from them.

With the onset of adolescence, humanity in high school begins to divide itself into two basic personality types: those who embrace the independent judgment of Free Will and those who reject it in favor of something else. Something with a seductive yet sinister appeal: will that isn’t free. Judgment that’s made for them, ready-made and easy.

The Way of the Master: Vince Lombardi

The Force of nature that accounts for humanity and its environment also accounts for its division into two opposing interpretations of where it originates. One interpretation assumes that it originates with a source that’s benevolent. That’s conscious, self-aware, and alive with thoughts, feelings, soulfulness, and creativity. That wills humanity to choose its way forward freely and happily, with guidance and support from this Force but not its intrusion or dominance.

The other interpretation assumes that this Force originates from a source that exhibits none of these attributes. It’s mindless, loveless, and soulless. It has no “self” to be aware of. It’s simply a will, or “fate,” that one either sides with and survives or doesn’t side with and gets run over. That one can either join and benefit from its derived power or oppose and wind up powerless, with no resources and no prospects.

If the supremacy of “fate” so decrees, one can be a “winner.” If it doesn’t, one becomes a “loser.” The stark choice offered by the second interpretation is dominate or be dominated. Not just in sports but in every relationship: see only a contest of wills and win the contest. At any cost, especially understanding, reality, and truth. Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.

The fans of George III never left us

But regression to savagery, whether the noble savage of Rousseau or the ignoble savage of Hobbes, can’t be obvious in civilized society. Aside from politics where anything goes, the appearance of civility must be maintained. The cult of animal instinct must be clothed in “sociability” without compromising its not-so sociable reality.

Our shared environment – “civilization” --requires getting along in peace and harmony, with some semblance of mindfulness and thoughtfulness, affect and empathy, and independent judgment. Beyond semblance, the second interpretation’s lust for dominance wants nothing to do with a shared environment. Its will is to dispense with it altogether.

Understanding personality types is critical to self-awareness

These are radically different interpretations, and the adolescents who commit to one or the other do well to understand their consequences. Do well to understand that personality types that identify with mind and its intuition and those that identify with body and its senses account for the difference.

Self-awareness is essential. And it begins with the first indications in adolescence which of these directions personalities are taking. Mind that feels through Intuition a Force within that’s Mind – will that’s relatable, conscious, and benevolent? Or body that detects through senses an external Force of nature – will or “fate” that’s neither relatable, conscious, nor benevolent? One a sentient Being, subject, the other an insentient object. One with the attributes of Being, the other a senseless beast.

The difference in the psychology of personality is between individuals who prefer to rely on mind-intuition to interpret their reality – the way things are, the way the Will of Force has made them, wants them – and those drawn to the body for interpretation. One “sees” (understands) its environment as originating from Force that’s subject-self, like itself. The other “sees” (understands) its environment as originating from Force that’s object-self, like itself. The difference is critical for the individual, critical for everyone.

Mindless “action:” the will that sets the rules through animal instinct

What would account for these two possibilities? A source of Force with attributes of consciousness – creativity that’s alive with purpose -- and source with attributes of unconsciousness – creativity that’s random happenstance, undirected “fate.”

The answer is Mind that can exist in two states: one conscious, the other unconscious. The second state asleep and possibly dreaming.

If the Force of nature that manifests our world could be an instrument of Mind, of Will that’s either awake or asleep, it could manifest the attributes of one or the other. Mind-centered personalities, guided by the vision of Logic, intuit source-Mind that’s awake, alive and benevolent.

Body-centered personalities, dependent on physical senses for interpretation, are grafted onto the only environment they can detect: our physical environment. Their preference for sensing over intuition leaves them with no awareness of the existence of Being or anything else beyond their physical environment. With no awareness of Mind or Will in another Reality, awake or asleep. Without the vision of Logic, they don’t “see” the source that mind-centered interpretations see because they can’t. 

What they “feel” with their senses is only its Force exerted on their immediate environment, the effect of sensed experience with no sense of cause or the attributes of cause. What they infer from its effect is their own entrapment in unconsciousness: dumb will that makes the rules, that sets the terms of engagement not through conscious choice or Free Will, not through affect or values that distinguish between right and wrong, but through dumb animal instinct.

Through mindless action defined as the dominance of Force. Through behavior that bypasses reflection, deliberation, sensitivity, loving kindness, judgment, and discipline. That finesses conscience and frees its subjects to engage with their world without moral responsibility or accountability. With only the cloak of “civility,” the cover of “sociability,” the blanket of “pleasantness” to keep them in line. Substitutes for an inner moral compass. The proverbial wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing.

Context: the Force of unconscious Mind, capable of dreaming

Both interpretations are correct within their separate contexts. The question isn’t which interpretation is correct, but which context is correct. A question that only Logic, accessible through Intuition, can answer. Because objectivity requires another perspective, and bodies’ senses grafted onto our material world cannot provide it. Another Reality can only be “seen” and understood through the vision of Logic.

If it’s assumed that our material world is the only possible reality, then Force that originates with unthinking-unfeeling object, rather than thinking-feeling subject, is exactly how the body-centered interpretation “sees” it: mindless, loveless, and soulless. A Force-will and nothing more. That we either ally with to survive or not ally with and take our chances.

If we assume that our material world  is not the only possible reality, that another Reality preceded it, somehow caused it, and parallels it, then Force must originate not with the effect of this other Reality – our world – but with its cause. “Cause” not necessarily “create,” “design,” or “intend,” if the dream of an unconscious mind can't be Real. Only cause, for now, that belongs to another dimension, another Reality.

If this other Reality is cause, then it cannot share the attributes of a temporal, material universe. And if it has the capacity to express itself in effects – to Create in the Now – it must do so through the Logic of Mind in combination with Love. It must do so through the agency of Force in service to Logic and the Laws of Cause and Effect. In service to Necessity -- conditions beyond the capacity of anything temporal and physical. Mind Conscious or unconscious, but, either way, capable of self-awareness, thought, feeling, judgment, and creative imagination in its Conscious state. Capable also of dreaming an illusion in its unconscious state. Dreaming an imagined unreality within the broader context of Reality. Within this context, mind-centered personality’s interpretation of Force with a benevolent source must be correct.

It all depends on psychology expressed through the individual’s personality type: whether the individual’s Psyche, or Soul, connects with the Memory of Mind conscious in Reality, accessible through Intuition, or remains captive to an imagined “fate” through mind unconscious and its dream of bodies and unreality. It all depends on how the individual summons awareness of one or another source of Force-will and attempts to engage with it: through intuition's vision of Logic or the unconsciousness of body.

Will change of mind come in time?

Is personality type a given or a preference? Preordained or not? Can an individual choose?

What must certainly correct choice of the wrong context is its consequences, and nothing is more certain than that the choice between these opposing interpretations will have consequences. Immediate and concrete. And these are already evident in the world and in lives that share it.

Only one of their opposing contexts can be correct, and Logic says the one that insists on the “reality” of unreality, a dream, on opposing “realities,” on a logical impossibility, cannot be correct. Then personality types who witness and personally experience the impacts of contradiction, of insanity, might realize their mistake. Might engineer a mind-change, a course correction, that cuts our losses.

If it’s not too late. The incorrect interpretation – our alliance with blind animal dominance, “the dark side of the Force” -- is already condemning every species on the planet to extinction. The stakes couldn’t be higher. The atrocity of warfare perpetrated by humanity in the twentieth century would have killed us off if nature had lent a hand. If we want to kill ourselves off, the twenty-first century is our chance, because nature is lending us a hand. Through climate change that may already be beyond reversal.

To Reality with Mind and Love. To hell with dominance!

What is the ultimate source of the “Force of Nature” and how should adolescents adapt to it? How should we all adapt to it? We can align with benevolent Logic within to Create in lawful Order, disciplined Freedom, Sensitivity, Peace, and Harmony. Or we can feed off a beast without to satiate lust for power. To indulge savage impulses to destroy in lawless disorder, undisciplined license, cruelty, conflict, and dominance.

Is the choice not clear?

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.
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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?

One source of information about Reality-Creation

What the Child Knows in Reality, how it “sees”-Understands, is with the vision of Logic / Logos-God. Seeing with the vision of Logic is how the Child Understands its context, its role, purpose and meaning in specific circumstances. Nothing can be correctly seen-Understood without Logic. Logic is the eyes and ears of all Selves, all Creators-Creations in Reality. It is their senses. They sense Reality-Creation through Logic / Logos-God.

This is how and why Logic / Logos-God connects-functions through Creations grown on the Child’s Parents’ plane of Creation. This is how it governs Everything with Laws of cause-effect / Necessity. How it manages roles and relationships once they’re defined: not by directing or controlling Selves-Creations but by enabling and empowering them to see-sense their contexts. To Understand what causes imply from contexts-circumstances about what’s to be decided and done to produce effects.

Logic is the only source of information about Reality-Creation that it governs and manages, that it supports, enables and empowers. The means of sharing this information to enable Selves functioning in Reality-Creation is their senses supplied by Logic. Logic is Logos-God Source that connects information-circumstances of contexts with Selves-Creations’ senses. In unreality, bodies’ brains connecting material “facts” with bodies’ senses to perform a parallel function derived from the function of Logic in Reality.

Can the Child’s self-misidentification be corrected?

In Reality, information acquired through Logic vision-senses is Knowledge. In unreality “information” acquired through bodies’ senses is perception based on appearances that are misleading. Perception based on misleading appearances is misinformation that feeds misperception. Judgments-choices based on misperception are misjudgment / incorrect choices. They are error.

In unreality, bodies’ sensory perception substitutes the wrong-reverse vantage point for the vision of Logic – i.e. illogic. The self-deluded Child then knows and sees-understands nothing. This is a consequence of the harm done by the Child’s mis-identification with the original “other,” its shadow-reflection, the non-being code of victimhood, fear, guilt, and hate.

The Child’s self-misidentification was the second of two events that interrupted the Child’s role in Creation and led to the unreality of spacetime-matter. The first event, its loss of Consciousness, was a system event rather than an error on the part of the Child, for which The Story of the Child proposes a rational explanation.

The second event is explained in A Course in Miracles (ACIM) as a mistaken choice – “error” that the Child can correct by “choosing again.” Choosing, that is, to discard the illusory voice of the ego and listen, instead, to the Holy Spirit. Neither ACIM nor The Story of the Child impugns the motives of the Child with intentional wrongdoing or carelessness that would contradict its Perfection and Innocence, that would justify a projection or sentence of guilt.

Mistaken identity occurred without sense or senses

The unconscious Child, not seeing-understanding with the senses-vision of Logic, deprived of it by its loss of Consciousness, as yet had no senses with which to perceive or misperceive. As yet had no body with senses. Was not yet dreaming a projected illusion of spacetime-matter with a dreaming mind’s “consciousness.” But the Child didn’t need senses or dream “consciousness” for its own shadow-reflection code to be “detected.” For its coded “response” to the desperate Child’s cries for “saving” to be “recognized.” The unconscious Child’s mistaken identity, its self-delusion, occurred without senses. It occurred without the vision of Logic or the “vision” of body. 

The “presence” of the Child’s shadow-opposite was an intrusion not through the front door of Consciousness but through the back door of unconsciousness. It was detection by a state of mind unfamiliar to Child – unconsciousness. That had the capacity to detect illusion-unreality because it had the capacity to detect itself. Beginning with the unconscious mind’s shadow-reflection, the Child-Being's opposite.

This is the flip side of Conscious Mind’s capacity to see-detect itself -- Reality. The capacity of unconscious mind was derived from Conscious Mind just as the code of non-being is derived from Being. It didn’t require the body’s senses.

Mind’s capacity to detect Reality or unreality is a prerequisite of senses both of Logic and body. This is because its source is the Logic of Reality; is the Laws of cause and effect / Necessity whose content is provided by Logic. The Logic of Reality, subject to Laws / Necessity, requires that impossibility-opposites be paired with Possibility-Creations, shadows with Hosts, dark sides with Light Sides, unreality-illusion with Reality-Truth. Provided that impossibility not share the Reality of Possibility. Not share the Life of Creation. Not share in Being but only in the logical implication of its opposite, non-being.

Not on the Parents’ plane of Creation where unconsciousness-impossibility has no logical place, but on the Child’s plane of Free Choice, where it does. Both the Child’s Consciousness and its Free Choice require the capacity to distinguish between Reality-Truth and unreality-illusion, Host and opposite. Its competence to perform its role in Creation depends on this capacity, and it was its absence, attributable to the state of the system that was then possible, that caused its loss of Consciousness.

The only act of Mind that was possible

Unconscious Child mind’s capacity to “detect” unreality initially enabled it to detect its shadow reflection. Its mis-identified shadow self was then enabled through its derived non-being code to detect the projected dream of spacetime-matter through its viral-replication bodies’ senses.

The Child’s loss of Consciousness, its descent into the illusory state of unconsciousness, occasioned instant detection of illusion -- its shadow-reflection -- without the senses of Logic or bodies. In this disabled and disempowered state it sought guidance that it couldn’t provide itself. It turned to its opposite non-being code, an imaginary “other.” A self-delusion. The only potential source of “help” that unconsciousness could detect, and its code responded in the only way it could. It responded with a reverse-engineered “rationale” for being “saved:” the bizarre psychology of victimhood-guilt, the nonsensical “thought system” of the ego described by ACIM.

Child unconscious mind, with its capacity to detect illusion shadow opposites and lacking Conscious-logical Mind’s capacity to recognize Reality-Truth, to think and Freely Choose, thus responded with the only act of mind it was capable of: projection. It didn’t “choose” its wrong identity or its rationale of salvation but projected itself – its identity – onto its shadow code. Its code, a virus, then directed its host’s captive mind to project its insane dream of victimhood-guilt – our universe of bodies, spacetime and matter.

All of this happened while Child unconscious mind was flying blind. While it had no senses to guide its “thinking” that had stopped with loss of Consciousness. Projection (1) onto shadow code, (2) onto dream, occurred without the Child’s capacity to think or to sense, to see-Understand what it was doing. 

The Child became an instrument for making unreality real

The Child’s misidentification – a self-delusion since it could not be “deluded” by its own shadow-reflection -- was predetermined by its loss of Consciousness. Because unconsciousness deprived it of the capacity to see-sense and to think-reason. Restoring its capacity to sense and to think would have been a prime motivating force behind the Child’s yielding to its shadow code’s apparent “offer” of a substitute “reality” with a substitute mind and senses, i.e. with brains and bodies.

Loss of Consciousness thus impaired the Child’s judgment-Understanding in two ways: (1) by removing its capacity to think and to see-sense while (2) simultaneously enabling the Child to detect shadow opposites-reflections and to project. I.e. to imagine that it could project its thoughts and feelings out of mind onto “external” objects – the dream of spacetime-matter, “others”-bodies – to separate thoughts and feelings from their source, a logical impossibility. An impossibility that Conscious mind could not even be aware of let alone accomplish.

Unconsciousness was a trap engineered by the Child’s opposite, its shadow programmed by its derived non-being code, to take the unconscious child, like a fly caught in a spider web, into captivity. The Child’s disabled mind was thus converted into a perfect instrument:

  • for shadow code to use to animate its reverse-engineered version of Reality, the unreality of spacetime-matter.
  • for a virus that’s taken a living cell captive to replicate itself in bodies.

The Child’s Conscious Mind and its Free Will had nothing to do with it. 

Where was the Holy Spirit? 

Where was the Child’s connection to Logic through its Memory of Reality, the Holy Spirit? Why could it not guide the unconscious Child away from its self-delusion?

The Voice of the Holy Spirit couldn’t be triggered and heard until projection took “effect.” Until the shadow code took the Child’s mind captive and the deed was done. For that would be the only evidence that there was an opposite “voice” to counter. Until then, the Child was “engaged” with an impossibility, in a state of unconsciousness but not yet dreaming, without the means of “choosing” either one.

The Holy Spirit responds when called upon for guidance when to do so cannot compromise Free Will. “Saving” the Child from its predicament, deprived of Free Will by blind, unthinking unconsciousness, would have betrayed both the purpose of the Child and the Holy Spirit. Its presence had to wait until the Child, corrupted by its self-delusion, the imaginary “other,” projected the dream and occupied it. Until the dreaming Child, who is Free Choice / Love in Reality, equipped by its dream with body’s senses, had the capacity to sense and think with independent, albeit impaired, judgment. To hear the Voice of the Holy Spirit and to respond to it.

Again, at the point where the Child self-deluded and mis-identified with its shadow-opposite, its non-being code was the only source of “help” that its unconscious mind, senseless and unthinking, could detect. 

To act with sovereignty and integrity

The self-delusion was an algorithm built into loss of Consciousness, a series of programmed steps that necessarily accompany this state-event. The algorithm can be reversed by Free Choice exercised by Child through maturing, through Learning and Growth. It can do so in its state of dreaming with bodies’ senses guided by Logic through Memory / Holy Spirit, by undoing and reversing the non-being shadow code’s deceptions.

One individual can undo the illusion of Child-the-many, of victimhood, fear, guilt, and hate:

  • provided that it’s connected to Logic and the Child’s Memory through the Holy Spirit
  • provided that its mind is thinking with Real Thoughts guided by Real Senses, the vision of Logic, that see-Understand the Reality of One Child Self-Innocence.
  • provided that its Self-awareness and capacity to Freely Choose are thus restored.

One individual, having regained through Free Choice and the guidance of the Holy Spirit what the Child lost with loss of Consciousness -- the capacity to think, to see-sense Reality, – can reverse the mis-identification, restore the Child’s Self-Awareness, and end the dream.

In the individual’s undoing of the dream, Logos-God would be enabling choice with powers and abilities of mind lost to unconsciousness. It would not in any sense be controlling the Child’s choice. It would still be the Child’s choice to use its capacity to think-sense / see-Understand offered through the Holy Spirit. Even when the Child is enabled with Real Thoughts and Senses, it would still have to Freely Choose to recognize One Child-Innocent. To act autonomously, with sovereignty and integrity, and not mechanically. In sharp contrast with the Child’s self-delusion which was mechanical; it was not Free-Conscious choice. Evidence that unconsciousness is captivity, the necessary prelude to its object, the projected, insane illusion of appearances -- spacetime-matter, the bodies that sense it, and the brains-minds deceived by it.

In the being and doing of Free Will. . . 

An act of mind coerced by circumstances can nevertheless be reversed if the mind that committed it has Free Will, is Free Will, and therefore cannot forfeit Free Will. All of this applies to the Child. Being Free Choice -- the Child of Father-Mind Choice married to Mother-Love Freedom -- means that every act of the Child is in some form, to some degree, Choice. For this is the essence of its role in Creation. A role in turn hard-wired by Logic / Logos-God, by the Laws-Necessity of Reality, into the purpose, meaning, and Worth of Life – of Creation.

Any act by mind so defined, so charged, remains in its essence Choice that can be re-chosen at the discretion of mind when it has regained discretion. Even in a context that depends on Intuition and Logic extracted from Memory to access the Truth: inside the unconscious mind’s dream. Where it was when ACIM was written and Jesus urged its students to “choose again.”

If the intrusion of an alien psychology of victimhood into an unconscious, defenseless mind was a theft of Free Choice, mind that is Free Choice, coming to its senses, can return to the offense and take it back. Though The Story of the Child acknowledges that unconsciousness was a trap, and the Child’s “choice” of the wrong “self” was by no means free, its Logic and the Logic of ACIM speak as one on this essential point.

The Child has both the Necessity and the capacity to “choose again.”

We are to judge for ourselves

What does all this mean for us? In its interpretation and application of ACIM’s lesson, The Story of the Child has stood for independent judgment. It has expressed itself in the spirit of Jesus’ teaching, that in choosing again we are to use our own Judgment, our own gifts and talents, and be guided by Logic. In the being and doing of Free Will, we are to think, feel, and judge for ourselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1

The Child must choose and earn what it cannot inherit

If Heaven-Creation is all about Worth then it’s logically-necessarily all about being chosen and earned. These are the attributes, the Definition, of Worth-Creation: that it must be freely chosen and earned to exist, to Be.

The Child’s travails in unreality are choosing and earning its functions that give it the capacity to Be-belong and Do-perform in Creation, functions that it could not inherit:

  • Oneness-Innocence of the kind-Definition that can only exist on the Child’s plane of Creation, with the possibility of shadow-opposites in an unconscious dream state. The Innocence of Oneness of the kind that can only exist on Parents’-Being plane is the impossibility of opposites by Definition.
  • Free Will of the kind-Definition that can only exist on the Child’s plane of Creation, the Doing-performing / choosing kind, with the possibility of shadow-code captivity in an unconscious dream state. The Free Will of the kind that can only exist on the Parents’-Being / Consciousness plane, the Being / Growing-birthing kind -- marriage of Father-Mind / Choice with Mother-Mind / Freedom – that is impossibility of captivity by Definition.

Humanity’s unreality – our world of bodies and spacetime-matter -- is a learning device, a stage that is a testing-proving ground. Since unreality is unreal this temporal “life” is a dress rehearsal without an audience, i.e. without Consciousness, for the Child’s performance in Reality with Consciousness, when the Child has corrected error and chosen-earned Free Will / performing and Innocence / Soul-Oneness Being.

All it takes is one individual

Unreality = trial and error. All of humanity’s ideologies-belief systems, all its established paradigms-religions of science, theology, philosophy, and psychology, based on the irrational faith-bias of circular reasoning rather than Logic, are trials that resulted in error, have failed and are failing. Failing not in spite of but because of dualism, i.e. flawed / circular self-referential “reasoning” that corrupts choice rather than undoing unreality-untruth. Ideology failures include top-down authoritarian, guilt / fear-based, biblical-orthodox “Christianity.”

The uncompromising non-dualism of A Course in Miracles (ACIM) is bottom-up Logic that aspires to change the mind of the One Child through the individual, the logical stand-in for all of Child’s mirror-image illusory replications. It is not an ideology targeted at illusory “humanity” as a group-species but at the Real One-Child through the Holy Spirit, the mind-Intuition, Logic-connection of the individual. For if the mind of one mirror-image replication of the One Child is corrected then they’re all corrected because there’s no “they,” no “others.”

ACIM teaches that if one individual truly forgave it would overturn the ego’s house of lies and replace illusion with Truth. So, Jesus isn’t organizing anything. He’s not interested in founding a church because he’s fishing for one individual.

Overview: Is there any real reason why we need the answer?

If the measurements of science / quantum gravity, DNA genetics and molecular biology can't explain the origin and fate of the universe or the meaning of life without philosophy, psychology, and theology doing their part, and the dominant paradigms in every field of inquiry are still manifestly not getting it right, then there is "reason why we need the answer."

If the material universe, everything in it, and everything desirable and undesirable about humanity's and all life's experience of it traces back to an event or events in the state of immateriality or mind that preceded it; If it is but a mirror-image reverse -- a perversion -- of another Reality whose dynamics preceded it, caused it, and continue to influence it, then in the name of science's "quest for knowledge" and material "facts," in the name of philosophy's order and ethics, psychology's self-Worth and Understanding, religion's healing and "salvation," there is "reason why we need the answer."

Every error, every defect in what self-deluded minds experience in this illusory "life," even this "life" itself, traces back to the Child's archetypal mistake: the objectification of its own shadow, the projection of its self and its sovereignty onto its imagined "other," and its activation of its shadow-reflection's code or "thought system," a mirror-image reverse -- the opposite -- of all that is Real, True, and Good. All for the purpose of substituting another reality for the Reality that was lost with the loss of Consciousness. The illusion, everything about it and wrong with it, is a replication of this same mistake. The "reason why we need the answer" is (1) to stop the replication; (2) to restore Consciousness;  (3) to correct the mistake.

The main barrier to minds being guided to the answer is the misperception-misjudgment that they don't need to seek it. That even if they do they're not self-deluded; they don't misperceive and misjudge; the status quo is satisfactory; and therefore they don't need guidance. The main barrier is opposition and resistance from a mis-identified shadow-reflection -- an imagined "other." The "reason why we need the answer" is to regain self-awareness. To understand the Truth of who we are: the host, not our shadow-reflection.

Preface

Michael Strevens, in The Knowledge Machine (Liveright 2020), tells us that in their public truths scientists don't trouble their audience with other truths they may be harboring privately. Adam Becker's confession, in February's Scientific American, that quantum gravity is so baffling that physicists wonder if spacetime-matter is "somehow illusory," may be a truth that could no longer be kept private. Not if the profession is to retain any shred of honor or credibility.

Logic takes this astounding about-face from science and asks simple questions:

  • If our bodies and their physical surroundings -- the universe -- are "somehow illusory," what could cause the illusion?
  • If illusions can be caused by dreams, what mind is dreaming?
  • If unconscious minds produce dreams that are illusions, whose unconscious mind is dreaming this particular illusion?
  • What caused this mind to lose consciousness?
  • How did we come to "exist" inside an illusion being dreamed by a mind that's unconscious?
  • What is the story of this mind? Can it be told?
  • If we owe our "existence" to a mind's loss of consciousness -- a calamity on a scale equal to at least one universe and maybe many universes -- shouldn't we at least try to tell its story? Won't this help us fix what's broken? Shouldn't we try?

My metaphysical theorizing is an attempt to answer these questions. With Logic. My latest post was prompted by the scientist Adam Becker's astounding public confession. It offers insights from Logic into how and Why the Mind that produced our world lost consciousness. How and Why the illusion of spacetime-matter "happened" as a result.

The whole story is coming into focus, but it's still writing itself. Understanding may yet have a long way to go. It can't be pushed. It can't be hurried. It reveals itself at its own pace, in logical sequence, one implication, one insight, at a time.

Who is the “Child?”

The Story of the Child is about a character who existed in another Reality before the Big Bang and who exists in the same other Reality now. A character referred to in mainstream philosophical and religious mythology as the offspring of divine beings who willed our universe into existence and populated it with their offspring and its progeny. In this telling, the universe and its inhabitants are unreal, an illusion made by an unconscious-dreaming Child that could not have been Created by Logic-God or by its Parents Mind-Love.

In A Course in Miracles the Child is a he, and he is the Son of the Father. He collectively, in this world, is the “Sonship.” In my telling, it’s the Child, and “it” is both masculine and feminine, he and-or she. It collectively, in this world, is the Child’s “replications” – the many derived from the One. The Child was given birth by Father Mind and Mother Love because in my telling, following the implications of ACIM, the Child is Free Choice, and Free Choice requires that marriage between Mind-Choice and Love-Freedom be its Parents.

Opposite worlds: The Child and its shadow-reflection

The Story of the Child has not one but two dimensions: one Real and the other unreal. There is its own story, the story of its unreal shadow-reflection, and the relationship between the two. A relationship that developed in error. That should not have developed because “relationship” between what is Real and what is unreal – between contradictory, mutually exclusive “realities” – is illogical. “Relating” in this context is a logical impossibility. Because it was illogical, the “relationship” took the Story of the Child seriously off track, onto a siding where it goes round and round, nowhere. Where all that’s wrong and painful, frustrating and calamitous with our world, has settled in, waiting for the Story of the Child to get back on track.

Alternating between two “realities” with the same terminology throws Understanding off track. Terms given initial caps, like “Reality,” refer to the Reality of Mind that preceded the Big Bang and parallels our material universe. The same terms without initial caps, or in quotes, relate to the Child’s state of unconsciousness and all things imagined by it. This includes the unreality of the material universe, bodies and sensory perception, all organic “life” and inorganic matter. In short, everything illusory.

Two mutually exclusive planes of Creation

The Child is profoundly unhappy. It’s not satisfied with the substitute reality its delusion has produced – the delusion that its reflection is an “other” endowed with its own capacities, capable of saving it from the situation its loss of Consciousness put it in. It wants to return to Consciousness, to go Home, reconnect with its Parents, Father Mind and Mother Love, in its Sanctuary of Creation. It yearns to get back to work. It wants to reclaim its powers of thought and feeling, its Free Will, its sovereignty. To bring itself back to Reality and Truth, to Logic, with the Guidance of the Holy Spirit. To be Loved, useful, and happy again.

It doesn’t want “saved” or “saviors” who compromise Free Will. It’s dependent on the Holy Spirit for Guidance, but the Holy Spirit and all of Creation are dependent on the Child for Free Choice. For without Free Choice, the Creation, Affirmation, and Reciprocation of Worth is impossible. So critical is Free Choice that it must occupy its own plane in Reality-Creation where the Consciousness of the Child’s Parents cannot be present.

Conversely, Child / Free Choice cannot logically occupy the same plane of Creation as the Parents. They are connected but their functions must logically be mutually exclusive. The Child’s Consciousness is not defined by the same attributes as the Parents’ Consciousness, and their Free Spirit is not defined by the same attributes as the Child’s Free Choice. Explaining all of this, and more, through The Story of the Child, is meant to expand Understanding and shorten the time to awakening.

The decline and fall of sensory perception

The self-delusion that converted the Child’s shadow-reflection from a dormant code, the mirror-image opposite of the Child’s Being, into the illusion of a self-motivating “other” capable of making its unreality real, is composed of attributes that block the Child and its replications – humanity – from awareness of the Truth that lies behind our material world’s appearances. The main barrier is the assumption that bodies are real and anything detected by bodies’ senses must also be real – the paradigm that today dominates mainstream science, philosophy, psychology, and theology.

Its domination shows signs of being weakened, however, by the findings of experimental and theoretical physics. Adam Becker, the physicist-historian of quantum gravity and author of What Is Real? (Basic Books 2018) has authored the lead article in the February issue of Scientific American (pp. 28-33). Entitled “The Origins of Space and Time: Does Spacetime Emerge from a More Fundamental Reality?”, the article reviews progress toward quantum gravity and concludes with “a question of whether time and space are somehow illusory.” A question raised by an ancient Greek philosopher, Parmenides, 2500 years ago, “an unsettling prospect that has haunted Western philosophy for over two millennia.”

Unsettling, I would add, because science is being forced by its own logic to consider, for the first time, another Reality. The Reality of Understanding that doesn’t depend on the circular, self-referential “reasoning”’ and subjectivity of bodies and sensory perception. That depends instead on Logic – the Order of Mind instead of the chaos of matter. The objectivity of another perspective not of this world, the perspective that led Parmenides to conclude that Mind is Real and matter is not.

Body-centered or Mind-centered: which shall it be?

Parmenides, relying not on experimental physics which had not been invented but on Logic, reasoned that time and space are illusory. The theory and practice of metaphysics, which he invented, influenced Plato, whose mind-centered idealistic philosophy helped to define Western thought. Under the influence of his pupil, the biologist Aristotle, its orientation shifted toward body-matter centered “realism,” and thus did science start.

Then, centuries later, a unique breed of metaphysicist-practitioner appeared. Jesus upended all speculation with astounding departures from familiar “reality” -- miracles that flouted the “laws” of physics. His message of Love, Innocence, and Forgiveness flouted the norms of relationships to equal astonishment. He was a tour-de-force of Logic, a simple itinerant teacher with no connection to officialdom, his only “authority” the power of what he taught, felt, and expressed. The power of Connection through gentle loving kindness. It was, all told, an electrifying, mind-bending introduction to the possibility of another Reality. An upheaval meant to part minds from this “reality.”

But while a few were convinced, like Valentinus, the second-century Gnostic Christian teacher, that material reality is unreality -- an illusion, – the body-matter centered paradigm soon reasserted itself. It did so not under the influence of philosophy but under the dominance of organized religion. The Church, claiming legitimacy from Jesus that Jesus could not have intended, obliterated all opposition as “heresy” and the true intent and legacy of Jesus along with it. Mainstream philosophy flirted with Parmenides from time to time – Bishop Berkeley, for example, -- but it was rare.

The world, for now, remained unchanged. For what are mainstream science, philosophy, psychology, and theology, after all, but waystations of trial and mostly error in the time it will take for the Child and its replications to attain maturity? Accidents and mistakes in the evolution of organic and inorganic matter that Sean B. Carroll chronicles in A Series of Fortunate Events (Princeton 2020).

The self-delusion of an imagined “other” and the train wreck of evil

A Course in Miracles could be the explanation, the book Jesus couldn’t write two thousand years ago, because his audience wasn’t ready. Channeled last century, it explains the psychopathology of the Child’s interaction with its shadow-reflection that produced the illusion: a self-delusion that set an unconscious Child to dreaming a world of spacetime and matter. The dream replicated in our own self-delusions with our own shadow-reflections.

What, then, is “good?” The host. That is, the Child who hosts a shadow-reflection that is its mirror image opposite, a lifeless, mindless, loveless code that, when it’s mistaken for an imagined “other,” behaves as one would expect the opposite of Being to behave: like a virus. Not interested in Life or Freedom but only in taking its host’s mind captive and replicating itself.

What, then, is “evil?” The host’s shadow-reflection mistakenly “recognized” as an imagined other. That is, a part of the subject host that’s been objectified into an imagined other that the host then tries, through projection, to enable and empower with its own capacities – an impossibility. For the only “capacities” a shadow-reflection can activate, that’s only a coded opposite, is its own viral code.

The final step in the self-delusion that gives it – and the imagined “other” – its misperceived capacity to torment the Child and its replications – humanity, the “many” – is the captivity of the Child’s mind and self-identity by the code. That is, by the Child now imagining that it is its reflection. By the Child and its replications – us – no longer distinguishing between captor and captive. In extreme cases this means the disappearance of the self into the imagined “other.”

The dog is being wagged by its own tail

To encounter an individual in this condition would then be to encounter an individual unaware that they have become their own shadow-code, that they are, therefore, evil incarnate. Such appears to be the case with the current leaders of the Republican party and Russia, two demented autocrats who have been taken captive by their shadow-reflections and seem to have lost all awareness of themselves, their shadows’ host.

The pattern in all of humanity’s train wrecks originates with a host’s delusion that its shadow-reflection is a separate, autonomous “other.” A dog deluded into imagining that its tail is another dog, being wagged by its own tail. This is how humanity goes about managing its affairs, and we see the results: train wrecks all the way from individual relationships to relations among nations, ethnic groups and races on a global scale. Replicating the Child’s archetypal mistake, never getting it right. A pattern that will continue unabated until we do get it right. Until we apply Logic to an Understanding of our context, to an Understanding of the mistake and correct it.

How and Why did this happen?

Why was the Child not forewarned of the misperception and misjudgment to come when it was given birth in Reality? Why did not its Parents simply reach into the illusion, restore Consciousness, and rescue it? How could Logic – Logos, God -- have failed to design Creation with a failsafe process and structure? Why do the Child and its  replications, though illusory, nevertheless experience suffering that’s real?

The long answer requires The Story of the Child and its subtext, the story of its shadow-reflection, the Joker. The short answer is Reality-Creation is not one but two distinct parts, and, though connected, they are mutually exclusive. The idea-premise that “launched” the sequence of Logic at the “beginning” – in quotes because Logic and its sequence are Being by definition, their own definition as they are their own Source, and none of this can have a “beginning” – was something on the order of the Word, which roughly translates to Possibility. The Consciousness of the Child’s Parents-Being that gave birth to the Child “Knows” or recognizes only Reality. For this is its function, to bring Reality into existence by Knowing it, i.e. being Conscious of it, and at this phase of Creation only Consciousness and one Reality are logically possible.

The phase of Creation marked by the birth of the Child, who is Free Choice, had a very different beginning. It wasn’t launched by an idea-premise that expressed itself in Consciousness with the capacity – the ability and Force – to move Reality and Creation toward Being by defining and recognizing it, by designing its process and structure.  It was launched by another kind of Consciousness with another function: the capacity to Choose. That is, by the capacity to reason, evaluate, and judge among different choices.

It was launched not by Possibility alone, which poses no choice in Reality, but by Choice between Possibility and its opposite, impossibility -- between Reality and unreality. The attribute of the Child’s Consciousness that requires its own plane of Creation, that cannot blend with its Parents’ Consciousness on their plane of Creation, is the possibility that, with Free Choice, the Child will choose illogically, incorrectly. That the Child will thereby lose Consciousness. And once Consciousness is lost, unconsciousness will be overtaken by illusion and make unreality – the dream of an alternate reality -- real. 

Mind with Free Choice that can lose Consciousness, dream an alternate reality, and thereby make (not create) unreality “real,” performs an essential role in Creation – in Creating, affirming and reciprocating Worth. But it doesn’t belong on its Parents’ plane of Creation. The Consciousness of Parents-Being, that establishes what belongs in Logic-Reality, i.e. Possibility, Existence, Truth, doesn’t belong on the Child’s plane of Creation where only one Consciousness can function and it must allow for Choice between Possibility and impossibility, Reality and unreality, i.e. between the consequences of Consciousness and unconsciousness.

Why was the Child not forewarned?

Why was the Child not forewarned of the misperception and misjudgment to come when it was given birth in Reality? Because its Parents Knew nothing of the risk of unconsciousness and its consequences and could not Know, by definition. Because in Logic there must always be sequence: what precedes and what succeeds – before and after. In Creation and evolution what is Known is before, what is unknown is after. Even if the Child’s Parents could have Known of the risk they could not have Known of the event itself in advance. In the end, they did not Know because they could not know.

Why wasn’t the Child rescued by its Parents?

Why did not the Child’s Parents simply reach into the illusion, restore Consciousness, and rescue it? Because to do so they would have had to “Know’ the illusion and thereby make it Real. Because to do so they would not only have disabled their Child’s Free Will, they would have willed their Child out of existence. Why? Because their Child is Free Will. Is Free Choice. It’s who their Child is. Because they, its Parents, are Father Mind-Choice and Mother Love-Freedom, incapable of giving birth to any other Child.

How could Logic have failed to design failsafe Creation?

How could Logic – Logos, God -- have failed to design Creation with a failsafe process and structure? Because it is in the very nature – the Logic – of Creation that it advances into the unknown. Logic, the Free Spirit of Mind-Inquiry and Love-Creativity, governs and protects from the bottom up, from circumstances that are constantly changing and evolving from one context to another. Logic, the definition of Everything, is constantly defining and redefining Reality in response to Creation. Logic, subject itself to the laws of cause and effect, to Necessity, evolves. Evolves in alignment with Creation that advances by experience. By experiment. And because the Creation of Worth must advance by Free Choice, it must advance by trial and error.

The possibility of error is built into the Logic of Creation. Logic, which cannot rule arbitrarily and still Be what it Is, cannot rewrite the rules to guarantee success. Cannot design Creation to be what it is not. Cannot design the process and structure of Creation – the functions of Mind and the planes where they operate – to be failsafe. Logic cannot design Free Choice to be what it is not: always the right choice, always the logical choice. Logic and the Child’s Parents cannot control the Child and its choices, for to do so would deprive it of Free Will and sabotage Creation’s purpose: the Creation, affirmation, and reciprocation of Worth. They must allow the Child to choose freely and to learn from experience, to expand its Consciousness, to acquire Knowledge – to grow and mature -- from trial and error. With their guidance but never their control.

Why is our suffering unreal yet experienced as real?

Why do the Child and its replications, though illusory, nevertheless experience suffering that’s real? Because while the switch from Consciousness into unconsciousness is a switch into illusion, the switch itself is Real. It happened. Made Real by the Child’s identity and capacity for Free Choice. While separation is not real and the Child remains connected to its Parents and Reality, its awareness of the connection has been lost. The cause of the apparent separation is illusory but, with the loss of the Child’s awareness, its effect seems real. Has been made real by the dream of unreality. It is therefore experienced as real. We in our world of illusion, dreaming of unreality and untruth, experience the alternate reality “promised” by our reflection, our imaginary “other,” as very real. We suffer.

The Real “Good News:” the freedom to choose again

The bad news is that the Child has mistakenly and inadvertently chosen to suffer in unreality. It did so in circumstances explained by A Course in Miracles and elaborated by The Story of the Child, that disposed it to mistake its reflection for an “other.” To imagine that the “other” was a substitute parent, an external “savior” who would save it from its trauma and restore Order. It was a colossal misjudgment that produced the absurdity of the Big Bang, a universe of organic and inorganic matter whose origins and meaning the “laws” of science have not explained and can never explain.

The good news is that the Child can choose again. And we, by empathizing with the Child instead of prolonging its agony, by Understanding our situation, by choosing to align with Logic instead of foolishness, can help it Choose correctly. To choose Peace, Truth, and Sanity. To rid us of our nightmare of conflict, deception, and insanity. To awaken and return Home.

A purpose of my forthcoming book is to question the structure of our “reasoning” – its knowledge-information base and its premises -- by examining it from another perspective, the one implied and given form by A Course in Miracles.

The break we need in our circular reasoning can be accomplished by reflecting on the role of Energy-Force: in defining appearances that our bodies’ senses register; in establishing the properties-attributes that distinguish them and describe how they behave, how they interact to produce the variety of forms they take, the variety of compositions with different functions and uses; that collectively prop up our sense that we belong to a grand movement of causes and effects that must have an intelligible purpose, because they constantly change, and the changes have consequences.

Energy, whether or not it enlivens-animates appearances that mean what we think they mean, still attests to the connection to our Source, whatever or whoever it is, that cannot be broken. Even if it enlivens what mind is only imagining, Energy is still Energy, and even if our thoughts are trapped in self-referential reasoning, the Force that powers our flawed reasoning is still active, is still here.

Breaking through the circular chain of thoughts so infused with Energy and dominated by it can be accomplished by changing one assumption, one premise. This is the premise that the Mind, the Logic that produced the Energy that animates our appearances and now our reflections on what they mean, can only be in a conscious state. That because the appearances Energy makes seem so real for us, seem so consequential, only a mind in a conscious state could possibly cause them.

Have we not ever experienced vivid dreams? Have none of us ever hallucinated? Do not some of us exist in a mental state that’s divorced from “reality?” Is not the record of psychological states replete with bizarre three-act dramas that Freud himself couldn’t unravel?

Another premise that’s ripe for questioning is that Energy itself can only “exist” in one state. In a context, an environment, that clearly includes substances of endless variety, varieties that pit opposites against one another, why is it not possible that the attributes we associate with Energy, for instance, that it can neither be created nor destroyed, are only the attributes that can be “detected” in one state? What if the attributes of Energy serving the Logic, the Thoughts, of Mind in a Conscious state were distinguishable from mind that’s in an unconscious state?

What if Energy that enables the Creation of eternal Life, by joining in its extension and expansion, does just the opposite if it enables an illusion, a dream of death? What if Energy there, in Mind’s Conscious state, in Reality, is living, while here, in mind’s unconscious state, is dying? What is “entropy” telling us if not this?

What is entropy telling us about appearances? About vitality and decay, order and disorder? About how things can transform from energized to inert? Why should Energy not be subject to the same laws of cause and effect that govern everything else in our state of opposites?

What we assume about perspective is another premise that can break through self-referential reasoning. This is the assumption that the “knower” that we connect with the “known,” the mind that interprets appearances, is capable of only one perspective. Certainly if our perspective is confined to bodies consulting one another on our little planet, in our little solar system, in our little galaxy, in our little universe that may be only one of billions of universes, in a moment of time that stretches into infinity, we might draw our conclusions with relative confidence even if appearances on a human scale bear no resemblance to reality on a micro-quanta or a macro-cosmic scale.

But what if we interrupted our conversation with one another to bring in another point of view? One that isn’t bound by the attributes of our existence, by our appearances, that answers to a Reality governed by their opposites?

Just because our bodies’ senses won’t let us sit down and talk to this perspective can’t mean that it’s not there, that it’s not accessible to mind, when, actually, it may be here in a way that we aren’t. Must our little bodies that come and go, and our little planet that comes and goes, lock us into one point of view that can’t possibly admit another, that doesn’t come, declare its singularity, its infallibility, and then disappear?

Must the tortured reasoning that’s led us to a standoff on this question stand in testimony to our irrationality, our fecklessness, forever? Must we really wait for an outside force, a magical “redeemer,” to rescue us from helplessness? Or is it enough for some to lead the good life, La Dolce Vita, to amuse themselves in Rome’s Trevi Fountain while others can’t, and everyone eventually runs out of energy and dies?

Three premises: that Mind can only be in a conscious state; that Energy can only exist in one state; that sensory perception only allows us one perspective, could free us from circular reasoning if we let Logic and Intuition, with the Holy Spirit’s help, reflect on their implications. If we gave ourselves the opportunity to exercise Free Choice: the power to change our minds.