Every life tells a story.
Every story has meaning.
Every meaning traces to an idea.
Every idea traces to its archetype: an Ideal.
Every Ideal is rooted in the story of Mind,
its source.
In the meaning and purpose of Creation,
its work in progress.
Its cause.
The story of every life is its contribution
to the cause of Creation:
the Character and Integrity of Life.
Worth learned, earned, and freely chosen.
Relationship in Loving Friendship
The risk of vulnerability and innocence.
Of Love.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Foreword
The animal in ‘human-animal’
This is armchair stuff not scholarship. Unsponsored and unsubsidized. An imaginary conversation with an imaginary adolescent girl with attitude. Just to make things interesting – for me not for you. More fun to banter with life outdoors while I orate than to bore myself to death inside an echo chamber. It’s nothing more than theorizing and opinionating that doesn’t aspire to ‘official’ anything. Especially to professional and academic standards meant to ensure credibility when in fact they destroy it. With subjectivity and bias, the very things they’re supposedly against. Bias against ‘speculation’, which they attribute to anything intuitive rather than ‘scientific’. In a misguided effort to preserve the world we all share for ‘realism’.
A code word for a world of the body-brain’s senses, by the body-brain’s senses, and for the body-brain’s senses. A world that was better understood by the ancients than it is today. Classical philosophers who had nothing better to figure it out than Logic and reason, intuition and common sense. Than insights, whose origin will always be ‘speculative.’ Yet without them paradigm-changing discoveries would never have happened. In any field including ‘science,’ everyone’s idea of truth-in-thinking even if the politics of lies can’t stand it.
The politics of ‘conservatives’, the ultimate ‘realists’. Know-it-alls whose mission is to replace all discovery with the ultimate in speculation: the ‘big picture’ that they alone possess. A joke they hold to be the solution to all our problems if we but surrender our judgment, character, and integrity to their superior will. Authoritarians. The animal in ‘human-animal’. The Joker.
Where ‘nature’ went off track
This animal embraces insights. And instead of fearing to venture beyond what’s in front of my body-brain nose I welcome it. To where discovery lies, in the metaphysics of our frustrations. Human-ape’s chronic bouts of self-sabotage whose origin will ever be a mystery until it learns to look beyond its nose. Au naturel. The novel idea that minds thinking and feeling can figure out what’s going on without having to touch it. Or taste, smell, hear, or ‘see’ it. With bodies that just might be blocking us from what we need to know instead of revealing it.
Or ‘measure’ it, the gold standard of ‘objectivity’ imposed by ‘science’ wedded to objects. Quantifiable matter, the only thing that matters. Of course, or ‘science’ would have no ‘knowledge’ to ‘quest’. Its ‘iron rule’ so iron that not even the Pope can compete with its infallibility. The religion of self-imposed unawareness. Of fascination with things dark and mysterious. No accident that Hawking’s embrace of physics led him straight to black holes and physics to dark matter, the ultimate in adolescent adventure. The distractions of esoterica. Carnival freak show thrills, where ‘nature’ goes off track .
The presence of Mind to question
‘Nature’ in the way insights have conditioned my thinking means ‘Logic’. A term that’s upper case to distinguish it from the same term when it’s not. The distinction between two realities: one Real, the other not real. The latter sometimes referred to as ‘virtual reality’. Not in the sense of make-believe special effects but in the sense of ‘reality’ that’s hallucinated. Seeing things. Terms that wouldn’t exist if they weren’t needed to describe something that does exist. Body-brains meant to detect what’s in front of their noses talented at doing the opposite. For putting what’s not there in front of their noses. Making things much easier for the master of Plato’s Cave, who could leave it to its prisoners to hallucinate their shadowy world without the bother of pyrotechnics.
Terms like ‘reality’, ‘real world’, and ‘creation’ naturally refer to us and our universe, right? The way things are. That will get you knee-capped and your knuckles broken if you disagree. I do disagree. And though that may sound like courageous dissent I suspect that it’s shared by a sizeable minority of everyday thinkers. Human-animals who think with minds as well as smell with snouts, cowed into silence by the general run of things. Herd mentality.
When ‘Reality’ and ‘Creation’ enter into the conversation they do not refer to us, our universe, or planet Earth. They refer to the product of Mind thinking. To the world of ideas. The sum and substance of idealism, where stuff actually happens and has real consequences. In the world of metaphysics. Whose byways are paved with philosophy and psychology. Where it’s the willfulness of ‘realism’, the self-referential science of body-matter, that will get you kicked out. No body-idolatry here. Just respect for ideas and curiosity open to what they have to tell us. If we have the presence of Mind to question and the good sense to listen when they answer.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
1. Motivation
On the flip side of questioning
Questioning the story of Movement is relevant if it’s getting at the root of motivation. For all human-apes are human. Hermann Goering no less than James Watson. The question is what motivates them? To do the amazing-good and amazing-awful things they do.
Awful things? Like herd mentality that puts human monsters in our face like Goering. ‘Human’? Sure. But to portray him in “Nuremberg” by Russell Crowe turns character on its head. Equates it with ‘regular guy’ who can be trusted in human society, radiating self-possession and discrimination. While downplaying the fact that he’s a predatory beast who stinks of rank cynicism, proud that he did his best to destroy it. As if it would be in poor taste to acknowledge one of history’s ugliest episodes and one of its most despicable perpetrators.
We can’t let him off the hook? Everyone’s off the hook. Really? How could ‘human’ put itself on the path to self-destruction when the flip side of its ancestral Self had already done it? A rogue Ape? No. A function-to-be of Creation. Metaphysical, the function of Choice. That to be Free must learn and earn its way out of psychopathy into Character with Integrity. With our help, its embodiments in our physical world, by liberating ourselves from the ravenous appetites and corruption of herd mentality. No choice.
To which we’re supposedly in debt for transforming ape into super-ape. King Kong? Better: Homo Sapiens. Or worse, if you’re the tormentors cursed by Manny in “Runaway Train.” It you’re anyone paying attention. By manipulating ape genetics. So that a sub-species of ape, all aglow with its ‘supremacy,’ can be stricken with self-sabotage. The legacy of ‘tribe’, its zoological classification. That indulges self-regard with fantasies of invulnerability while making a mockery of it. By mixing the satisfactions and horrors of bodily pleasure, pain, and tribal war indiscriminately in our social-animal brain. The apotheosis of nuts.
I thought God did the manipulating. You’d be right, but maybe we need to question what we mean by ‘God’. Why? Didn’t human-ape take dominion over nature so it could make life better? Just as likely to destroy it. By wrecking the Earth’s climate system. By this and other means. . . risking mass extinction? No. It’s actually happening. While we wait for the Apocalypse, sucking our thumbs. Because of the nature of herd mentality and its ‘God’. The nature of our self-sabotage: not doing any better because not knowing any better. On purpose. Unwilling to learn and unwilling to grow. Stuck on the flip side of questioning. Unquestioning.
When Conscience takes precedence
There’s hope? If ape’s genome evolved spontaneously with the potential for making things better there could be. Endowing its new species with differentiation and empathy, faculties of Mind that define us as individuals. And evidence that Love and Logic had something to do with it. Motivators of questioning behind evolution and Creation that have no need for manipulation. The signature of ‘tribe’ that has no use for any of it. Any of what? Differentiation or empathy. Love or Logic. Evolution or Creation.
The distinction between individual and tribe is crucial if we’re questioning motivation. Between Person relating and herd mentality acting out the nightmares of its animal brain. Predatory instinct unevolved and unevolving. Frankenstein’s contraption clomping around with the guidance system of Jack the Ripper. A not-personator portrayal of animal instinct. The guidance system that tribes do have a use for. The mentality of herd. The mentality of an animal.
Beloved of women who appreciate animal passion in their men. Yes. Madeline Kahn having a roll in the hay with the contraption in “Young Frankenstein.” One way that incompatibilities make common cause. But once body idolatry has to give way to mindfulness the setup here manipulates its way out of it. In a cycle of its reversals of the way things are being re-reversed, only to be re- re-reversed back to the way they aren’t. Until evolution catches up with manipulation and individual Conscience takes precedence at last over tribal expedience.
Lessons in human animal management
Don’t hold your breath. Human-ape refuses to look in the mirror and accept its purpose in evolution. To part with its psychopathic herd mentality so it can learn who it really is and learn its role in Creation. Why? Because of its metaphysical origin. Because while individuals and tribes carriy on with their usual preoccupations in their physical world its metaphysical world languishes in irrelevance. In the shadows, and it’s because the source of herd psychopathy is kept in the dark that it continues to exert a disproportionate influence on human-ape dysfunction.
Having no mission on Earth and all this energy with nowhere to go, herd mentality has decided that the best use for it is for its entertainment. Make a spectacle of going off stage. Burn down the theatre of the absurd! This is happening? Sure looks like it! Politics wants to take credit, but it’s the flip side of Creation that craves and deserves the attention. Where it all began, in the realm of ideas. At the beginning. Beginning of what? Movement. Whatever lies at the root of our situation stood for Change, and you don’t get Change without Movement.
We’re going back to the beginning? Why not? Maybe it’s trying to tell us something and we just haven’t been listening. We’ll learn something? How to dissuade ourselves from taking herd mentality seriously. How not to be manipulated by its distractions and provocations. Lessons in human-animal management. How to remove the mask of a joke so that we can have a good laugh and move on.
The ultimate standard of Strength
Sexual gratification is an act of animal passion supposedly free of inhibitions. A state hard to achieve when the source of passion is psychological and it’s inhibited rather than released by a compulsive physical act. Mindfulness passionate when touched by the power of attraction between femininity and masculinity, distracted and incapacitated when assaulted by bodily appetites. By human-animal wildness and herd-mentality willfulness. Per-versions of Love’s Spontaneity and its completion in Logic’s embrace. The experience and meaning of ecstasy for which there is no substitute.
Not much we can do about our animal appetites except maintain good habits to save motivation from being overtaken. Lots of luck with that. Leaving the psychology of compulsion to descend into periodic bouts of impatience. At cross-purposes, unable to find satisfaction in order, seeking it in the only way that herd mentality knows. In attacks on other bodies out ‘there’. In disorder. From petty blame-shifting at home all the way to Mayor Daley’s finest venting frustration on anti-war protesters on national TV. A convenience built into the sales pitch for virtual reality, when our psychopathic ancestral Self was persuaded to dump its fear, guilt, and frustration on an external ‘reality’. To continue doing it in perpetuity.
One of the few ‘promises’ made when the deal closed that proved to be true. Nothing has brought the wars of animal instinct’s pent-up fury to an end. Then there’s no hope? All this is pre-ordained? Herd mentality would have us believe so. Being caged itself it goes about caging all its captives — what the flip side of questioning did to its unwitting host. As though we’re all wild beasts like itself and this is the only way to ‘relate.’ Our situation with life on Earth: caged and caging. Our planet a zoo ‘maintained’ behind bars by its inmates.
Even so, herd mentality has its work cut out for it. If the function caged at its beginning was Choice and its mission here is to learn and earn its Freedom, then idealism can’t be hooted off stage. Herd mentality’s bullying wildness and temper-tantrum willfulness are no match for the function in Creation that we really are. Nor for the prime mover behind all of Motivation. Behind Movement at the beginning — Love. Two wild cards in the deck that make of Creation what it is: a test of Freedom and Integrity with every choice. A risk to the vulnerability of Character, stronger and more durable than anything that could harm it. The state perverted into ‘invincibility’ by herd mentality. Free Choice and Love denied. Destined for its own denial once Person abandons tribe to bond with Guidance in Loving Friendship. In a re-enactment of the act of Love and Logic when they formed into one function. One Self, the source and ultimate standard of Strength. Relationship.
The making of one person
It was to manage animal passions and the body idolatry of Church-warped ‘Christianity’ that my Presbyterian-Calvinist ancestors put the clamps on outward expressions of feeling. A fatal lack of differentiation that threw Love’s tender mercies out with the bathwater. Animal instinct. Making me wonder after constant reminders from my Mom, how many other households weren’t ‘demonstrative’. How many families depended on the atmospherics of Thanksgiving and Christmas for basic human warmth. And Sundays in the fall and winter, when an evening after a visit to Grandma’s could bring family together around the fireplace. And around the radio, for a touch of music and laughter. But never flesh touching. Never a hug or a kiss.
Then you got lucky. I sure did! Maurice Chevalier got it right. “Thank Heaven for Little Girls.” Earthly personifications of the vulnerability and innocence of Psyche. Here and gone, but while they’re here irresistible. Precious to a Grandfather if Psyche is Friendship and it’s with the Feminine. Indescribably Loved and Loving. Indescribably Beautiful. Granddaughters.
When knowledge and perspective are constitutionally limited virtual reality falls back on perception. That’s not only blurred by lack of differentiation but distorted by lack of affect. Hallmarks of herd mentality. Bent out of shape by senses alert to movements that could mean anything, equivalent to winning the lottery or to being administered the last rites. Ready in either case with binary instinct: kill or be killed, fight or flight. Once and done, no questions asked. Efficient. The meaning of ‘perception’ when it forms and is applied without Guidance. To be its casualty is to know the meaning of ‘expedience.’ Ruthless.
A phase of life past to which I was especially attached. And when it hit me. . . you hit back. The know-it-all attached to its made-up big picture breaks down in lugubrious self-pity when faced with the loss of any part of it. Unable to stand the pain when a beloved stage prop is removed. I did not break down in tearful sentiment. We are not stage props and you aren’t the know-it-all. You and I are persons. We ‘hit back’ when we maintain faith with personhood, the target of herd mentality’s frustrations. That it can’t be who we are and have what we have: life that rises now and then above ‘animal’. We hit back when we role model the creativity and originality, the initiative and industry, that go into the making of a person. Character with Integrity. Proof that ‘herd’ isn’t the only self in town. Proof that character matters.
Levitating on the streets of Winnipeg
I was working on a project of my own making in the Red River Valley of the North. Walking the streets of Winnipeg, Manitoba, a province of Canada, on my way to my next appointment with prominence — one of the region’s interest-group leaders. A region that included Minnesota and North Dakota below the international border with the U.S. When it felt as though I were levitating. Making me conscious that what I was doing was deeply satisfying, professionally but also psychologically.
I was engaged in a passion of mine, bringing people together to make common cause whom I thought of as ‘regional statesmen’ (and women). So that they could bring a regional perspective to bear on fractious public policy: the use and management of water. That flowed downhill without regard for human borders, in this case the borders dividing farmland that had been an ancient lakebed. So flat that millionaire farmers were forced by nature to get rid of floodwater onto one another’s property. A cause of so much friction that water managers needed sidearms. And I needed to be detained at the border with Canada before I could levitate on the streets of Winnipeg.
Organizing a regional perspective from the ground up isn’t usually a big deal, but here it was. And I’d attracted foundation support to make it happen. On my own initiative. This wasn’t just a job; it was a dream personal to me, and I was making it happen. If it didn’t happen water policy would be left to the agendas of government agencies and private interests, none of which served everyone’s interests. Relationships between farmers on different sides of borders would deteriorate but also relationships between states. Between states and Manitoba which brought in two countries. It was a mess.
Just as it was in the Connecticut River Valley, where downstream and upstream passions were inflamed by a government agency proposal. To restrict the flow of seven tributaries so that Hartford and other cities nearby wouldn’t be damaged by the next flood. I was put in charge of an effort to come up with a better solution, and it was then that I developed my passion for leadership networking. Because there was a better solution. The matter was put to rest and I’d done the heavy lifting. This was my baby and I got the credit for it. That’s what put me and my passion on the streets of Winnipeg.
Three passions
Where I now realize that it consisted of three passions. My Dad’s, for leadership networking. A man of principle demonstrating the principle of Reciprocity: talents recognized as gifts to be given back. By putting them to use for solving real-world problems for the betterment of the community. Essential to his efforts to market himself so he could market Harrison Construction Company. The family business that supported him and his family. Bring it to the attention of the kind of clients he sought among Pittsburgh’s corporate and cultural elite. Sending his three children to prestigious schools so he and they could move freely among them.
The second passion was my Mom’s, for standing up in her own life, her own person, for the statesmanship that her ancestors were renowned for. The Clays of Kentucky. Chiefly Henry Clay, known as “the Great Compromiser,” for his role in temporarily averting civil war. Speaker of the House of Representatives, U.S. Senator, Secretary of State, and candidate for President. Abraham Lincoln’s political inspiration and character role model. For Lincoln and a generation of Democracy’s leadership. My Mom held politics in low regard but she knew character and held herself high. A Clay and an ‘aristocrat’. Anchoring her family with civility, dignity, and respect.
The third passion was metaphysical. Humanity’s common ancestor, Mind-Relationship, for bringing a broad, system-wide perspective to bear on all the endeavors of Creation. An essential service to all the actors of Creation and their functions, who otherwise would be left to their own devices to act in the interests of everyone. Making this a moment for me of psychological fulfillment, when currents within flowed together as never before. To form motivation so powerful that it felt like I was walking on air. So powerful that my efforts exceeded expectations. Not mine, because I knew what I was about, but others’ who didn’t. Everyone involved.
The first Red River Valley International Water Summit Conference, in Grand Forks, North Dakota, delivered on its promise and then some. It initiated annual events bringing the leadership together of the two states and Manitoba. Entirely my passion and its vision that brought it about. And it owed everything to the three passions inherited from my ancestry. Physical, of this world, and metaphysical, of the world that preceded and accompanies it. Beneath my awareness at the time but charged with life and involved, nonetheless.
Out of the darkness into the light
An illustration of the relevance of psychological currents that drive human passions. In a good direction when they flow together but also potentially in a bad direction. The result of cross-currents, with which you would be familiar by now. Critical to our success or failure. Illustrative, also, of the broader principle of alignment: that if our lives and work aren’t aligned with the positive within us they can be buffeted by the negative and even align with it. The dark side. Yes. The flip sides of psychological forces. It pays to be aware of what they’re up to. How they’re motivating us when it really matters.
Your paternal grandmother wasn’t motivated. She chose a life of ease without work supported by her worker-mate without reciprocity. The know-it-all’s ‘paradise’ is a blank page without motivation. She was psychologically and emotionally undetectable toward the end of our marriage for being unmotivated. Both my parents’ types were motivated and so is mine. Sometimes in my case to the point of overdoing it. When I can be compulsive. Willful and self-defeating until balance and common sense are restored.
How can I be aware of how I’m motivated by my flip side? By questioning. Yourself and the world around you. By not letting yourself off the hook if things go wrong and your behavior played a part. By using a mirror not only for cosmetics but for learning and growth. Taking an honest look at yourself to understand what’s motivating you. Having the courage and strength of character it takes to risk change and commit to it. To seek help from sources who’ve been there before. Who’ve built up a body of experience and knowledge, wisdom and insight, that can help show the way.
Through psychology but also philosophy. Not to be ignored for being irrelevant and boring but welcomed for the difference they make. Immediate and concrete. Personal. Be your own inner psychologist and philosopher if necessary, but get your motivation out of the darkness into the light. Because that’s how mistakes, misunderstandings, and hurtful behavior perpetuate themselves. By being left in the dark where they can do as they please. What it means when you’re encouraged to stand up for yourself. Not only to bullies out there but to bullies in here. To the flip side of yourself. One-dimensional, one-sided arrogance. The animal in ‘human-animal’. The fool that would have us believe it’s ‘smart’.
Competition for approval
The role models of relatability portrayed in these thoughts are different examples of parenting. That we experience in our everyday lives while our parents are here and in the memory of them when they’re gone. Is that a problem? It depends. Incompatible personality types can make life difficult for our types when we encounter them in our work and off-work. In social situations, but they’re especially challenging when we encounter them and their flip sides in personal situations. In relationships we have to live with like it or not, and that’s what parents are.
Situations in waiting for us, their children, to learn from things the way they are. That aren’t perfect. That have their moments but inevitably require adaptation. I know from experience that it can be difficult. It can’t be taken for granted. And before I absented myself physically what I was observing in your life at home was striving to adapt. Under conditions similar to mine when I was a child with parents.
Similar to yours? My Dad was an outstanding role model for being there for his community. Making sure that its support was reciprocated by his – for community, church, business, politics, culture, public service, and charity. He left it all out there, an outsized reputation for good works. Character and integrity you could trust and depend on. The Max Harrison brand, and it was authentic. It wasn’t a pose.
You were proud of your Dad? I was, and I loved him. And yet the side of himself that he presented to me was different. His human side, that was there for me materially but not emotionally or psychologically. Not an inspiration for pride but a goad for something else. Acceptance and learning. Adaptation. That went beyond disappointment with imperfection to making use of it. In the manner of our role model at the beginning of Creation: Mind faced with imperfection. Not whining and complaining, feeling sorry for itself. Putting everything to good use. Adapting without resentment or rancor but in good cheer.
The authenticity in my Dad’s act was in his psychology. His passion for work and competing for approval. He deserved his reputation for character and integrity, honesty and commitment. For taking risks when circumstances called for it. He was loved and deserved to be. I never regretted or questioned my love for him. Yet he wouldn’t risk vulnerability if it conflicted with invulnerability. The inauthenticity of self-imagery. The ‘big baby’ armor-plated by masculine invincibility. The pose adopted to preserve the image of ‘strength’. Arrested emotional growth. His and mine for being denied the vulnerability of Love.
My Dad could obsess over approval but not over approving. His own self-worth but not yours. His family, as he saw it, was tribe whose members’ priorities derived from his. As though he and ‘family’ were indistinguishable. My priorities were expendable any time they conflicted with his, as they did when I earned admission to Harvard and drew his wrath. He wasn’t proud? Far from it. He was mortified, and he made sure I knew it. Punishment for choosing an institution whose economics department offended his political tastes. When in retrospect, had I been competent to judge Harvard on more than its credentials it would have added to my motivation. To aspire to its standards of service and scholarship and not be limited to his one-sided self-interest.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
2. Un-Motivation
Caught in the cross hairs
My mother joined in family card games with my Dad before he took over his company and got too busy. She got busy too, with volunteer work and her piano. But one day, in August 1945, she did something unusual. She sat down with me, just the two of us, in the playroom, to consult our Ouija board. What about? The exact date that the Second World War would end. It had already ended in Europe that May and now everyone was waiting for it to end in Japan.
What did the Ouija board say? We each touched the piece that moves lightly, neither of us knowing where it would land. At least I didn’t, and it landed on a date. That I always remembered as August 15. VJ Day – Victory in Japan. Nine days after the first of two atomic bombs had been dropped, on Hiroshima. An introduction to the uncanny, another side of everyday experience. That involved questioning a source outside it, in relationship with an other. As though with a Guide. That could have involved reflecting on its meaning, though I don’t recall that either of us did. It was a one-off: the only time I’ve played with a Ouija board.
My generation escaped nuclear holocaust during the cold war. Was it frightening? Enough that school kids like me were put to diving under their desks during air raid drills at school. Silly to think that anything would save us if an A-bomb hit, but we’d been doing drills through WWII and someone thought it made sense. Our reprieve was temporary in hindsight. Because nuclear holocaust is still possible post-cold war and now there’s mass extinction already occurring. That humans responsible for the Anthropocene seem strangely unwilling to acknowledge. Like the deer immobilized by the headlights of an oncoming car. As they’ve been unwilling to acknowledge for over a century that experimental physics is done adding to their understanding of the origin and fate of the universe. Caught in the cross hairs of something they don’t recognize.
Class dismissed!
Beyond recognition? Waiting. For what? To re-enact an event at the beginning that also involved waiting. That then went on to take matters in hand and produce something good. Spontaneously — Worth itself. Character with Integrity. Life-Creation eternal. One of many events that can’t be ignored. When their implications – their meaning – extends down into everyday life today through their inheritors. The minds with which we think. The psyches with which we absorb experience, translate it into meaning, and interconnect. With Understanding.
To assume that our thoughts and feelings operate free of any influence from their origin isn’t thinking. It’s self-defeating. To leave meaning to be willed into existence by make-believe and superimposed on the way things are – our story, the story of Mind – is mindless and absurd. Self-destructive.
Early tribal existence called upon someone to divine the larger meaning of things. A shaman, who had no idea but had to come up with something. So ignorance made it up. The origin of what may become your chosen field: entertainment. The production of stories until whole segments of human thought were wall-to-wall with tale-telling. From Homer’s Iliad and The Odyssey, Greek and Roman mythology, Biblical legends, Grimms’ fairy tales, blood-and-soil supermen, and operatic arias. All the way down to Spiderman and Five Nights at Freddy’s. All with one purpose: to distract. To divert awareness away from fact into fiction so it will never wake up. To what? To the fact that it’s being manipulated. Deceived. Making a fool of itself.
The premise the deception is founded on is that even though we don’t have the answers tribal supremacy requires that it appear that we do. The heavy hand of tribal authority forcing its captives to accept non sequiturs so they can pass unimpeded into the general consciousness. The French king Louis XIV ruling by ‘divine right.’ As if he, the Pope, and other tribal masters of authoritarian infallibility were aware of its littleness and needed cover by something big. A mission suited to entertainment since it’s good at make-believe and just as good at pleasure. “Music and laughter prevent disaster.” The familiar refrain of distraction.
Distraction from what? From Meaning. Understanding. From what’s really happening — the way things really are. Why? Because if minds are allowed to reflect on fact instead of constantly being diverted into fiction an entire world will vanish. Virtual reality. The land of make-believe and the entertainment industry along with it. What makes it ‘virtual’ is its audience drawn by the skill of the performing artist into accepting it for real. If the house lights are turned up by honesty, the artist’s powers of deception and distraction, handmaidens of the darkness, will be shone away. You’ll be abandoned on stage without an act. Disempowered and exposed to posterity – an empty auditorium. No longer needed or wanted. The descendant of the original shaman who knew his or her days were numbered. A fraud.
I’ve done nothing wrong! True, if you’ve willed yourself into unawareness of anything that could suggest otherwise. Who can be accused of wrongdoing if they’re unaware of it? Who, me? Exactly. Mara Hari went to the gallows unjustly accused of espionage, right? You may not drag the good name of my hero through the mud! Except that she did do something wrong. Never! Class dismissed! If you go you could be making the same mistake your hero made.
She did something wrong!
What mistake? Mata Hari belonged to long line of actors who put their faith in will. Actors in entertainment but in other fields as well. The power of will to accomplish the aim that it’s coded for: to erase Self-Awareness. By side-tracking it. Its being the product of self-unawareness. The only hope that will’s make-believe ‘achievement’ can have for not being erased itself is to distract and divert Self-Awareness. To get it to douse its searchlight or at least to aim it away. How can it do this? By deception: deception of its observers and of itself. Crucially in the case of Mata Hari and potentially in yours as well. Because it was her self-willed self-deception that ended her act. Death by ostrich.
If she wasn’t spying on the French for the Germans why practice deception? To preserve her act. By a remarkable feat of will she had persuaded herself and her audience that, on stage and off, she personified mystery and intrigue. When Margaretha Geertruida Zelle was actually a former Dutch kindergarten teacher and later an impoverished mother and divorcee stuck in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). A nobody. By the same remarkable feat of will she carried on with German as well as French notables while their countries were at war with one another, aware only of the identify she had manufactured. As much a victim of its spell as her rapt audience. Innocent of its consequences because unaware of them.
An act of arrogance. How so? For placing herself beyond the limits of hearing and questioning. Deeming it unnecessary to pay attention to what others think. Making herself inaccessible. To inquiry and to criticism that would have helped her make course corrections in her career and in her personal life. Risking her life. Oblivious to others who were being observant even if she wasn’t. Because, after all, if what she willed to be true was all it takes to be true, then she knows it all. She’s got a corner on the market of knowledge and others can be dismissed. Arrogance.
Herd mentality. You got it! The know-it-all in charge of its land of make-believe. The big-picture big-answer, and this is the image of ‘power’ that Mata Hari put her faith in. So impressed with the power of make-believe over her gullible audience that she took it abroad. Extended it to include everyone. She the know-it-all and anyone who saw it otherwise didn’t exist.
She destroyed her enemies. By being ‘smart’. Willing them out of her awareness. Not by provocation, retaliation, or otherwise intentional harm but by making them not exist for her. Willed her critics into silence. Not by shutting them up but by shutting her senses down. An effective way of empowering existence for them, by giving them an incentive to destroy her. By reversing her audience’s sympathies into hatred for ignoring its doubts. Stoking suspicions and intensifying resentments when French soldiers were being slaughtered by Germans. When loyal French citizens were rallying to their support and to a just cause. An entire nation inflamed by rage as only a great injustice can cause.
Only a catastrophic failure of self-awareness could allow a star of Paris’s glittering night life to be seen dilly-dallying with Kaiser Willy’s generals and not be aware of the consequences. That she would be suspected of padding her income by passing along French military secrets. That she could be executed for treason. Only catastrophic willfulness could cause it.
Dumb! Yes, very. Nobody needed to prove that secrets changed hands if Mata was so good at making it look like it. Making enemies with her insensitivity and arrogance. Giving them all the evidence they needed to end her act without her being aware of any wrongdoing. An act of will. One-dimensional and one-sided. She did something wrong! And it cost her. It could cost anyone who follows her example.
Everyone does it
Where does this kind of not-thinking come from? From our infancy, like Freud believed? The “bad thing” in the human Psyche? Karen Horney thought not, that the root of it is social. The German psychoanalyst and contemporary of Freud’s. As I do — not biological and not psychosexual. ‘Social’ meaning ‘herd’ or ‘tribe,’ as distinct from ‘Person’. My addition to her theory, though it’s my own intuition and reasoning that brought me here.
I’m listening. Where does herd mentality come from? By not listening and asking, Mata Hari got in her own way. Depriving herself of learning and growth, enemies of herd mentality-willfulness. The arch-enemy of mindfulness: the mistaken belief that appearances are acts of will, they’re real, and the will that makes them up is responsible for reality. That everything real is an act of will, the ‘creator’ and ‘definer’. Of Virtual Reality. Artificial Intelligence.
The triumph of entertainment. Form over content, triviality over substance. Mass devaluation, the prelude to extinction. Dehumanization, the prelude to extermination. We’ve seen it before. “Triumph of the Will,” an expression from history’s darkest days that should send a shudder down everyone’s spine but doesn’t. Because of herd mentality. Source and defender of the banality of horror. “Everyone does it.” Going ‘viral’. Pay tribute to the ‘God’ of spectacle! Entertainment, its architectural emblem the Roman Colosseum, where human sacrifice got top billing. As it did atop Mayan temples and on their playing fields. Winner take all. Take lives.
Always destined for self-sabotage
You may not listen for long if herd mentality’s story isn’t relatable. To you here and now. Concrete and immediate. Let me be the judge of that. By being the judge of what’s relatable you’ll give first priority to image. To a mask rather than the Self behind it. You’ll retain control over the narrative and there goes objectivity. There goes my voice and any chance at honesty. If it preserves my image so be it.
Performers need to be known if they’re going to attract an audience. ‘Known’ for the image they want to project on stage. Mess with my image and you’re dead meat. They don’t take kindly to being outed for who they are. Who they really are is irrelevant, and if it’s flawed character its only importance to them is that it not interfere with their image. Flaws in their image affect their fans and the box office. Flaws in their character make individuals miserable, but individuals don’t count with herd mentality.
If we’re going to out herd mentality we’ve got to reverse the dynamic. We can’t let image interfere with honesty. Now are you listening? Get it through your head: only one of us can be smart. The other one plays dumb. I’m the smart one. That’s who I am on stage and who I am on stage is all that matters. I call the shots. You do as you’re told. The act you’re part of with me is a game that I make up and I win. Always.
Performers are jealous of their self-images. Warning others away from trespassing like dogs with their food dishes. And yet they can’t help showing off who they really are. Why? Because it’s in the nature of performance art to express themselves. To bare all, and that’s you. An exhibitionist. As surely as you’re the master of games at the Tree of Victory playing Goats. The unbeatable competitor at Alta Vista playing Grounders. Always competing, always in control, always on top. Of course! Where’s the fun if I’m not? Fun for you maybe but what about others? Individual girls and individual boys don’t rule or drool. That’s what herds do.
If we untie honesty from self-image and let it speak for itself it might have relatable things to say. That you might find interesting if they’re not exactly fun. Like what? That ‘smart’ and ‘understanding’ aren’t the same thing. That relationships aren’t games. Contests of wills to be won or lost by who outsmarts whom. Competing to ‘win’ in a personal relationship loses the relationship. Anything willful is herd mentality and anything herd mentality is self-defeating. Always focused on its own fortunes, always insensitive to the expense to others. Always unmindful that we live in a shared world and always destined for self-sabotage. Because that’s what it wants.
The Great Motivator
Who could ever want to sabotage themselves? Indeed. Where does irrationality come from that gets in our way? That sets a person up to be the smartest while the world passes them by. To win at games and disrupt relationships that evolution needs to move forward. So convinced that evolution is a game that the outcomes of games take on historic significance. I was, myself, so moved by the miraculous finish of a game in Harvard Stadium that for years afterward I lumped it together with the March on Washington, the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and other events that year of global moment. A grand tide of banner headlines that included “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29.”
Pathetic! Yes. Though it still gives me pleasure to think of it. You and I live in a larger world shared by the same animal-human. Equally capable of overriding it with our smaller worlds and putting us at the center of it.
What’s to be done! Up to Choice to figure out for itself. Avoiding situations when the animal-herd in us is likely to take over, and in a world overrun with tribal competition that can’t suffice. We need help, beginning with our innate ability to judge our situations and go from there. Would you be helping now? Myself definitely. You if you’re open to being helped and my perspective has something to offer. If I’ve made it relatable, and that would be if we’re both motivated. How would we know? If we’re both helped and Feeling had something to do with it. The Great Motivator – Love.
Getting out ahead of itself
Once upon a time. . . Yes? There was a very interesting situation. The world was about to welcome me and my Galactic Empire into it. Shut up! There was complete silence. No theatre, no actors, and no theatrics. No audience, overwrought operatic arias, or cigar smoke in the foyer. No action? You’ve got to be kidding! To be there you wouldn’t even think it was a place. Then what was it? The best answer I can come up with is a situation waiting. For what? For something to happen. A door to open and the doctor will see you now. Grass to grow if you ask me. Or a seed to sprout. Anything to break the monotony! I seem to have touched a nerve with my situation-in-waiting. I hate waiting!
What would you prefer? Pregnancy! Waiting for childbirth! The situation in waiting was a delivery room and the Creator was an obstetrician. Of course! Held up in traffic. Femininity did have its day if you’ll be patient. And there will be childbirth but not up front. Waiting for something to move. To break the silence and get it all going. The starting gun at a footrace. How about a kind of lightning strike, although I don’t know about thunder. Femininity and childbirth! Lightning and thunder! Cool!
The answer I’ve posed is ‘situation’. An idea with a word from our language to represent it. Can’t we go back to before ideas? Why? Because if we’re starting from ideas then there must be a Mind somewhere to think them. My apologies. You aren’t as dumb as you look. We’re exploring a labyrinth and there’s no door leading out the back side. Where there’s truly nothing. So long as all possibilities are ideas then all possibilities are Mind. You’re right. Mind is around. The chicken that laid the egg. Or did the egg come first?
I must put my herd mentality to work on this. Your herd mentality did get to work on it. Eventually, but at the start it was just an implication. A half-baked idea triggered by the idea of Movement. Half baked? Its definition derived, having no definition of its own. Movement did have definition. Responsible for triggering the first sign of irrationality. But let’s not get out ahead of ourselves. Meaning at the beginning is neither Movement nor the weirdness that came along. It’s what was waiting for something to happen. The ‘situation.’
The original idea that plays an outsized role in life on Earth. That, just like now, human-ape will rush by in search of meaning where it isn’t. In the elements of situation that can’t make sense until they’re put into context. Which is? Seeing them from a broader perspective. From what the situation is trying to tell us about itself if we would ask and listen. About ourselves and why we’re here. So that we can respond rationally to what the situation calls for. Among the ways of summing up how herd mentality gets it wrong “getting out ahead of itself” does nicely. For explaining why it makes sense to trace both good and bad back to the beginning. Why the metaphysics of rationality and irrationality is accessible and relatable, relevant and practical. For not getting out ahead of itself.
The not-so-great un-motivator
And you have a tidy definition for it. Conventional wisdom from herd mentality says the situation wasn’t waiting for something to happen. It had already happened, and it was one beautiful big picture. The proud accomplishment of its “creator’, who naturally knew everything. A paradise of perfection since it had been fashioned by “God’s will” and, being a finished work of art, needed nothing more to perfect it. Paradise with a stairway and ‘God’ the ‘Supreme Being’ at the top of it.
The mirror-image of herd mentality’s sacred hierarchy on Earth, with infallibility ruling unopposed atop it. The premise underlying both: that there’s no need for Movement where all is answer, all is perfection, and its ruler knows everything there is to know. Nothing to be learned, no need for growth. We can all sit back and enjoy ‘life’ that’s nothing happening and nothing to do. And let ‘God’ the ‘Supreme Being’ – herd mentality – reign supreme.
A ’paradise’ of paralysis that rules out Life if it rules out Movement, rules out Growth if it rules out Life. So how can this be ‘paradise’? It isn’t. It can’t ‘be’ anything. It’s an echo. A shadow or a reflection. A derivation with no definition of its own, whose meaning is conveyed by the idea of reverse or mirror-image opposite. Of black-hole neglect. The idea of absence instead of presence. The notion familiar to us as the flip side or dark side. The not-so-great un-motivator.
One big lie
Ah! The dark side. Fascination at last! Here its prototype, the mother of all flip sides. Whose properties come into focus as the original impossibility: a big picture-answer willed into being by a know-it-all ‘supreme being’. Everything owned and possessed, controlled and dominated, by lord arrogance. The template for all things ‘animal’: boundary-crossing wildness set loose by boundary denying willfulness. Predatory instinct inaccessible to all things Mind:
- ‘Smart’ for being self-assured. Undifferentiating and one-sided.
- ‘Invincible’ for lacking empathy. Insensitive, conniving, and indiscriminately cruel.
- ‘Strong’ for being unmoved, unmoving, and unmovable. Changeless.
- ‘Supreme’ for being one-dimensional and unrelatable. A pose struck at the top of animal kingdom hierarchy. King of beasts.
The phenomenon of psychopathy. The sickness of a wounded Psyche staking its claim to ‘supremacy’ on make-believe at the beginning. ‘Reversal’ re-imagined as ‘versed’ before the thing re-versed. ‘Derivation’ re-imagined as ‘arrived’ before the thing de-rived. Second at the head of the line ahead of first. ‘After’ replacing ‘before’ in the sequence of Logic. The way things are yielding to the way they aren’t in the culture of the casual. Whatever it takes to make things ‘interesting.’ The endless distractions, provocations, and manipulations of human-animal irrationality. Sick and sickening, entertained and entertaining. Beginning with cart before the horse. The unnatural. The most ‘natural’ thing in our world. Getting out ahead of itself.
One grand reversal of Movement and one grand reversal of common sense. A pile of manure whose ‘pony’ is one big manure spreader. A liar and its proud ‘achievement’ one big lie.
Another face of herd mentality
Part of the situation waiting for something to happen. Its flip side. Impossibility to possibility, negative to positive, that couldn’t ‘happen’ at all let alone happen first. That nevertheless came along for the ride because of properties of its host:
- The ability to question awareness. Essential to the idea of Self-Awareness
- Motivation to question the principles and values of Character. Essential to the Ideals of Integrity, Striving, and Conscience.
- The practice of questioning the limits of possibility. Essential to the idea of Life- and Worth-Creation.
- The necessity of questioning Definition that cannot be definitive with totality and finality in the presence of Movement. Essential to the humanizing idea of perspective in all things – “putting things in perspective.” Of humility, adaptation, and reciprocity among equals in Relationship. Essential to the Ideals of Family, Community, and Loving Friendship.
Relatability. The essence of Mind that’s Relationship, Creation that’s interrelationships. The essence of Life that’s Growth, evolution that’s Movement. Free Choice that’s Character with Integrity, capable of choosing in error. That if it were to attain ‘perfection’ all would come to rest in perfect peace. Without a flip side. Without questioning. Could no longer Be.
You mean we owe eternal Life to the flip side? We do in part. As improbable as it might seem and counter-intuitive. Its dark side too? Yes. The questioning of questioning. The nihilist that would end Movement altogether once it’s done reversing it. How can this make sense? Questioning, for reasons just given. The questioning of questioning – the wholesale abandonment of principle and value – because it has its function in Creation. Nihilism is useful? Not that ‘usefulness’ is any part of its meaning. It’s the Meaning of Creation that has a place for it. An element indispensable to the evolution of Free Choice that, in turn, is indispensable to the evolution of Creation. Anarchists tossing bombs in Haymarket Square. We owe it all to them!
What’s ‘owed’ to the myth of the Galactic Empire and Adam Skywalker’s turn to the dark side is testing. The same condition that defined the character of leadership during the Battle of Britain. When Churchill stood his ground while others in his government wanted to cave to the enemy. They were tested, and Churchill showed what he was made of. You and I show what we’re made of when our choices are tested every day. The building of Character that’s only as good as the last test it was given. The test of Integrity, whether we commit to choosing freely or surrender independent judgment to the will of others. “Go along to get along.” Thereby surrendering integrity and sovereignty both, to become less than ‘Person.’ Another face of herd mentality.
A Waste Land
The meaning of ‘free’ in Choice is Character. The meaning of ‘Character’ in Free Choice is Integrity. Creation can have no intrinsic Worth if its parts are herded into one room, issued uniforms, handed mops, and willed by force to get to work or else. Its Worth depends on Character with Integrity, which in turn depends on every function chosen and choosing freely without force. Performing with Guidance from Spontaneity, and so in the total absence of willfulness.
The function of Free Choice in Creation can’t be performed by the same source responsible for Movement. Why not? Because of the limitation of its scope to situations that occur within Movement. The principle responsible for Creation is Growth. The principle responsible for the authenticity of Worth in every act is Free Choice. Of Character with Integrity, tested and re-tested with every Choice by sovereign actors freely and independently choosing. In every situation.
Meaning that Creation is ‘situational’. Where functions of Creativity come together to participate in interpretations and expressions of the act and art of Creation at its origin. The original situation-in-waiting that evolved spontaneously from individual ideas in motion into one Movement, cohesive and coherent. One function dedicated to the Ideal of Being There for every manner of use that went into it. To the Cause of Loving Friendship among equals in Worth. Brought together by the Power of Attraction and held together by the Reciprocity of Love, the Order of Logic, and the Integrity of Character. A closed system of Self-Worth.
Everything, in short, that can’t be meant by ‘winning’ in a magic kingdom of endless distraction. Entertainment. Fun and games. In an animal kingdom of competition and combat, conquest and captivity. ‘Motivated’ by ass-kissing hierarchy. ‘Supremacy’ in a ‘paradise’ of moral rot. Paralysis overseen by the dark lord of neglect. A nihilist. Arrogant, unthinking and unfeeling. The big ‘answer’ that’s no questioning, no movement, and no situations. A Waste Land.
Give Spontaneity a chance
The function of Free Choice in Creation can’t be performed by the same source responsible for Movement because to be free it must be free to choose in error. And because of the critical difference that this implies between the Self-Awareness of its Parents and its own. Theirs confers Life by its sharing. Choice free to choose in error cannot wield that kind of power without contradicting Reality. It would end Movement. The Self-Awareness inherited from the Child’s Parents is limited to one function: recognition and management of the boundary that separates it from self-unawareness. From the state of Mind that enabled its training in a virtual reality of hallucination, when there was no boundary to cross because Free Choice had yet to learn its function.
You mean the bad guys are running wild, breaking laws, because they’re unaware of them? Because it doesn’t suit ‘animal’ to be even aware of the idea of ‘boundary’ let alone be responsible for it. If and when boundaries replace chaos with Order it will be when ‘animal’ is replaced by Character. When ‘human’ is fully motivated by its talents for differentiation and empathy to choose freely who it wants to be. Not to be any longer a sub-species of ape, and makes it happen. Whether to achieve in one step its liberation from its planet of apes or to enter another dimension later TBD. To be determined. Enough for now to concentrate on the task at hand and give Spontaneity a chance to help.
The pile of non sequiturs at the beginning
Free Choice can’t be performed by the same source responsible for Movement for yet another reason. Its specific function called for an extension of Movement’s Source that operates independently, free of interference, but is nevertheless inseparable from its Source. Their Relationship intact but circumscribed by the requirements of Integrity. That Choice be given the space it needs to function without external interference. Offered Guidance from the same source as all of Creation but free to take it or leave it.
Then it’s free to ignore Perspective that takes it all in? From Mind-Relationship its Parents? Absolutely. How else could ‘Free’ be taken seriously if it must obey Mommie and Daddy? Arrogance might demand obedience but they don’t. Resort to Guidance and Perspective is always a possibility, but where Choice must be Free to endow Worth with Character and Integrity it can’t be a given. It must be chosen.
How else could ‘parents’ be taken seriously if they can’t demand obedience? ‘Obedience’, like ‘commandment’, belongs to the terminology of herd mentality. Authoritarian rule for its own sake. A more appropriate approach to help children come into their own would be any appeal to conversation. To relate to them as subjects rather than forcing them to comply as objects. The difference in outcome between sovereign Person and impersonal gofer, life with growth potential and life stuck in the mud, is wrapped up in this one distinction.
Still the school of hard knocks
Maybe I’d rather be forced to comply as an object. You would? If it gets me out of having to make sense of ‘’human’ when it’s bad enough without free choice. With it it sounds untrainable. Like a wild card that nobody can play. Like a herd of cats if Free Choice were a herd. Then how does it get tested? Fortunately Creation comes equipped with a classroom and teachers. The dark lord of arrogance and its pile of non-sequiturs at the beginning.
A myth that’s inactive within the Source of Movement but becomes active within Source’s extension. And useful, because its negativity is just the test that Character needs to hone its positivity. To strengthen its commitment to Integrity through the many temptations and distractions of corruption. From willfulness within and without. From the animal-brain within every individual and its herd mentality, from every group. The onslaught of pushes and pulls this way and that – daily life on Earth. The story of human-animal.
Why does Source’s extension harbor the dark lord’s non-sequiturs? Because of a critical difference between the Source of Movement and its extension, Free Choice. One incapable of self-unawareness and the other capable. The Source of Movement, being Self-Awareness, the Source of Creation, can’t be what it is and do what it does if it loses Consciousness. A non-starter. Whereas the presence or absence of ‘Consciousness’ figures prominently in human thought. About its situation and its progress, and the reason is that Free Choice can’t train while its Source is Conscious. It can’t be free to learn by trial and error, interact with arrogance and its manipulators, make mistakes and cause consequences.
Even if they’re ‘happening’ while its Source is unconscious. Even if they’re not really happening but have to seem like it. Why? If tests delivered by light sabers don’t cause wounds students will brush them off. They won’t be taught a lesson. No pain no gain. For all that we’ve been taught and all that we’ve been helped, this is still the school of hard knocks.
Out of mind and out of sight
Everything began with situation. Mind judged it to require Creation standing for Worth when ‘situation’ was waiting to ‘happen.’ ‘Situation’ implying a spontaneous assortment of circumstances calling for Mind to act. Process re-enacts and replicates here on Earth when thoughts coalesce spontaneously around a point to be made and the representations of ideas – words — needed to express it.
The idea of Worth at the beginning was in a state of potential preceding its realization. Lacking definition with meaning and purpose, lacking function and usefulness, and therefore unable yet to stand up for itself. Its un-realization derived from its state of inactivity which in turn derived from the evolution of Mind, itself a work in progress. Neither one in a state of worthlessness, the half-baked idea propagated by its questioning in reverse. By negativity, the self-glorified ‘dark side’. Which can’t precede or initiate positivity. Impossibility which can’t precede or initiative possibility. Neither of which can initiate Movement, activation, evolution, or Creation. Worthlessness that can only recognize mirrors of itself stuck in paralysis.
The original situation role-models the situation of Mind-Child Free Choice and the approach it can emulate for dealing with it. Our situation, if we choose to learn from it. Humanity inhabiting its hallucination while Choice trains to attain its freedom.
The I Ching (Chinese Book of Changes) posits an array of situations that may differ from ours in their particulars. But in the principles that shaped them they don’t. They can align with ours in a way that lets us know that there’s nothing new under the sun. So long as mischaracterization is allowed to mischaracterize its situation in an endless cycle of repetition. “Ground Hog Day.” Until questioning gets it right and the un-motivator is put in its place. Out of mind and out of sight. Herd mentality.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
3. Movement
No better analog
‘Flip sides’ and ‘dark sides with good guys and bad guys sound like a great ensemble for an act, but who’s in charge? Ah! Our exotic dancer is intrigued. She wants to meet the choreographer. The Busby Berkeley of “The Gold Diggers of 1933.” The Zach (Michael Douglas) of “A Chorus Line.” Yeah. Who’s this dude who puts it all together and makes it happen?
Let’s start with a name. ‘God’, right? Emphatically no. A suitable name for the know-it-all because it’s hierarchical and monolithic. Supposedly ‘relatable’, but too ambiguous, too contradictory for my taste. You do have a better name? More suitable but unwieldy. “Mind-Relationship.” We’re lifting the veil to observe the holy-of-holies at the beginning and this is the best you can come up with? We could re-invent ‘God’ but herd mentality would have a fit. One invention is enough! We need something original. ‘Self-Awareness’ doubles for Mind-Relationship in some contexts, but we need to get across its central attribute: that the Self, that was itself ignited spontaneously along with evolution and Creation, is Relationship. One function central to Creation but consisting of two functions from which everything in and of Creation flows.
What’s so important about ‘relationship’? Without it there’s no source of Energy to motivate Movement. No Power of Attraction. No Self to do the motivating. No motivation. Without Relationship nothing happens. In any context that’s Real, where there are real consequences to demonstrate that something is happening. No source of Energy to activate Mind so that it can choreograph your dance. To illuminate Self-Awareness so that it can bathe all of Creation in its brilliance. No source of talent for happening that’s multi-dimensional and many-sided, instead of the pastiche of superficiality offered by the know-it-all and its big picture: one-dimensional and one-sided. Cartoonish.
What were Berkeley’s works but amazingly creative, stunningly beautiful patterns of relationships? Exotically costumed dancer-figures brought together and turned loose by a lavish talent for fitting things together in logical sequence. There may not be a better analog for the Creativity waiting to happen at the beginning. The striking combination of Spontaneity with Order. Awesome!
The Force
The two functions from which everything flows are essential to another attribute of Relationship. To the identity of the situation waiting at the beginning and its central role in all of Creation: ‘Parents’. Whose identity and role would be entirely eclipsed by the notion of ‘God’. Monolithic and grimly masculine, so as to fortify herd mentality with its authoritarian chops. To ensure that whatever incentive herd-members have to fall in line includes fear. An eternal moan of ‘beware’ from the crypt. A Hallowe’en character in all but name.
In contrast to ‘Parents’ going about Creation sympathetically and supportively. Relating to their Child, Free Choice, in conversation with unconditional Love. Illuminating Self-Awareness with its Energy and Light, to be shared in Creation’s seminal act of Relatability. All attributable to the Power of Attraction. Between two functions complementing one another, that aren’t complete without one another, and so role-modeling the Ideal of Loving Friendship. The Beauty of ‘marriage’ that’s so compelling and yet so hard to replicate and sustain in an animal kingdom of hierarchy. Of incessant competition among conflicting personality types and herd mentality agendas. Compassion and generosity. Higher aspirations of ‘human’ that can’t shed itself of the insensitivity, selfishness, and neglect of ‘animal’.
The ‘happening’ that situation at the beginning was waiting for was holy matrimony? Some dude intoning “husband and wife?” The gong that started it all? Sure! Charlie Chan unraveling the mystery in suitable oriental fashion, with preternatural wisdom and flair. Great atmospherics! Except that ‘holy’, ‘mystery’, and ‘oriental wisdom’ only hint at the enormity of what’s beyond human understanding. The phenomenon – the Force – that brought Parents together in Relationship was Spontaneity.
Ignition
Couldn’t it have been something comprehensible? Why beyond understanding? What herd mentality doesn’t get about the situation at the beginning is that it can’t be anything like itself. Willful that’s arrogant. Wild that’s disrespectful of discipline. Unloving and irrational. A know-it-all hogging the spotlight at center stage so that arrogance can make an ass of itself.
When Spontaneity is an expression of boundaryless, ineffable Love. When Order is an expression of boundaried, directional Logic. When, together, they comprise a complete Self. Perspective that knows and accepts its incompleteness and so holds its head high with humility. Capable of Creation composed of interrelationships because it’s Relationship. Capable of purposeful function with Meaning because it combines the values of Love’s feeling within the defining principles of Logic. Empathy combined with differentiation. The substance and exquisite Beauty of Order protecting and enabling Freedom within the shared environment of Creation. Within the Ideal of Being There for one another.
The electric and electrifying phenomenon of Spontaneity with Order that activated the situation in waiting. Mind with Relationship, and ignited the first Movement of evolution and Creation. Put something there that wasn’t there. Another aspect of “waiting at the beginning” that herd mentality can’t grasp. Can’t abide, because it negates its absurd premise that its vaunted big picture-answer was already there. Its reverse-version of ‘waiting’: waiting to be invaded by an upstart intruder with no legitimacy. No right to exist let alone tramp on other people’s sacred turf.
The wisdom of Definition
Lay it on me! The lightning strike of Spontaneity with Order was definitive. The idea that what happens can’t happen without meeting requirements. Of Meaning and Purpose, Substance and Consequence. That would be dispensed with if ‘happening’ could be pulled off like a magic act.
Which is how herd mentality thinks of it: the presence of something ‘there’ that was already there and, therefore, needs no explanation. ‘Explanation’ then would be an affront to divinity, the cornerstone of religion and its affront to Logic. The ultimate ‘sin’ of ‘blasphemy’. Testing ‘God’ when righteousness knows that ‘God’ is beyond testing. Beyond questioning. Beyond Logic and anything humane that’s common sense. ‘Blasphemy’ is blasphemy. Yes. The dagger hidden under the wraps of make-believe meant for anyone who questions its ‘authority’. Aimed at the blasphemer’s heart by the know-it-all, arch-enemy of Logic.
‘Waiting’ has ‘time’ written all over it. Present tense, past tense. The act that invites questioning and a good thing we’re doing it. The object under our microscope is the wisdom of Definition. Logic’s signature expression without which Love would be feckless. A loose cannon. The idea that every part of Creation to exist must have a use. Must have a function that requires definition or there would be no means of its fitting within a larger, shared enterprise. The idea that though Creation expresses the Ideal of Love, of Strength that’s Growth, boundaryless and inexorable, it cannot do so without limits. Without the boundaries of Definition.
Sacre bleu!
The indispensability of Logic. Of Order indispensable to Spontaneity and Freedom, attributes of Love. The indispensability of Logic to Love. The situation in waiting could be herd mentality’s laboratory for understanding the first principle of how to get things done. Right! The system not working? Let Caesar fix it! The strong man. Didn’t we try that already with Benito and Adolf? The situation in waiting could be herd mentality’s role model for Understanding the way things are. The way they actually work if herd mentality wanted to know. But it doesn’t. Make-believe has no use for Understanding.
Why? If make-believe had to contend with the requirements of facts and Logic it couldn’t be what it is. Understanding just gets in the way. Offering explanation to make-believe doesn’t help. It’s an existential threat if it’s in the nature of make-believe to dispense with every tool of analysis. The foundation beneath everything true and Real: explanation and Understanding.
Understanding that there’s a Logic to Creation’s getting things done. Its nature and structure. The principle dear to engineering that for anything to work it needs to be fit together in logical sequence. And if it’s structure then it needs a firm foundation. To be structured from the bottom up in stages, like the Eiffel Tower. Mais oui! What would Paris be without it? Always there. Unthinkable that anything so iconic had to be built by a mere mortal from the ground up in pieces. Sacre bleu!
Augustus Ignoramus
The wisdom of situation-in-waiting has a great deal of itself to impart if we look carefully. Before and after in the sequence of Logic. In the stages of evolution and Creation that can’t proceed unless in logical order, interconnecting one step at a time. Where what comes next can’t be separate and it can’t be known. It can only be a connection that’s implied until it happens and then it’s known. Added to what’s understood about situation that’s always and forever evolving. Literally and truly, In Reality.
An attribute of the way things are that the human animal whizzes right by, habitually and to its disadvantage. Getting out ahead of itself. Skipping steps and cutting corners as though it didn’t matter. The frayed edges of Character that needs to keep coming back until it gets it right. The prompt for the I Ching’s Hexagram 4: “Youthful Folly.” Helter-skelter ‘multi-tasking’ distractions that pass for purposeful activity. That habitually fail to grasp the Meaning of the situation that self-centered immature minds can’t be bothered with. Lacking Character with Integrity, Why not? Because herd mentality thinks it already knows what’s to be known. Why be careful and attend to detail when the know-it-all it’s put its faith in knows it all? Augustus Ignoramus.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
4. Test of Character
The madness of movement backward
Herd mentality’s home is the crazy big picture? Where there’s no movement and nothing going on? Isn’t herd mentality responsible for all the hot action here? You mean the commotion pumped out by the entertainment industry? The bloodshed on the battlefield? The politics of provocation? The injustices and rage propagated by sensation-peddling ‘news’ and ‘social’ media? Misinformation and anti-social if you ask me. The know-it-all manipulating the minds of herd mentality thugs and goons can get away with snoozing on its divan when its crazy nothing-happening fantasy is implicit in Mind that’s awake. But not when – hey, guys! We’re on! – the mind of Free Choice, the Child of its Parents, isn’t awake. When it’s dreaming and the fantasy is explicit.
You mean life on Earth, our virtual reality, is this big picture thing brought to life? We can sing along with Louis Armstrong about the wonderful world that it is. Full of blessings. But were we brought here to wax euphoric when there are so many curses to contend with? There’s got to be another purpose. Doesn’t training to manage the curses without succumbing to them seems like an obvious possibility? It does to me.
An opportunity to rise above herd mentality. An animal driven by predatory instinct to plunder and consume its wonderful world until all that’s left is waste. The prototype for all the so-called great empires of history. Ravenous greed let loose upon cultures unable to defend themselves so that everything of value in their possession could be plundered. From the artifacts of antiquity to the raw materials for making war and the people to fight them. Until everything essential to quality of life is gone. Until life itself is gone. Leaving behind the absurdity that attached to Movement at the beginning: the stagnation and stench of no movement. A Waste Land presided over by lord stinker.
The unreal has a use in Creation. Testing to see what we’re made of, every choice a test of Worth. Mind-Child was entrusted to the principle of Growth when it undertook its training by trial-and-error in Creation’s reverse mirror-image. In the virtual reality of life on Earth — or anywhere in this or any other universe of spacetime-matter.
Herd mentality says life on Earth happened because someone screwed up and had to be thrown out of ‘heaven’ to teach them a lesson. In truth, Free Choice could never have been turned loose in Creation to function without the kind of training that its function needs. The lesson it needed to be self-taught from scratch. Which included learning, above all, that it can’t be self- if ‘self’ doesn’t include and embrace Guidance in Relationship. Guidance from the way things are. From Definition, the Conscience and constitution of Creation, without which Creation would be willfulness ruling make-believe arbitrarily above the law.
Our species struggles to advance ethically and psychologically beyond separation from ape. If there’s one reason why it would be its manipulation by the know-it-all presiding over its pile of manure when Movement forward triggered self-questioning. That now, here on Earth, challenges Choice to free itself from the madness of movement backward and it needs help from Guidance to do so. To free itself from its backward-looking know-it-all ‘God’ and its backward-looking know-it-all ‘religion’ both.
Waiting for its baptism
The training of Free Choice could only have been learned and earned in the kind of setting provided by life on Earth. That provides opportunities to build Character with integrity with every choice. With every exercise of judgment in an animal kingdom of herd mentality. Of hierarchy and ass-kissing corruption; games and lethal combat; appearances and distractions; make-believe and magic; manipulations and provocations; self-imagery and hypocrisy; pretense and duplicity; fear and suspicion; distrust and character assassination; irrationality and psychosis; psychopathy and insanity; arrogance and oppression; victimhood and vengeance; injustice and rage; insensitivity and cruelty; savagery and depravity.
What better environment than dehumanization waging dismemberment for Character to prove Integrity ready to be tested by Creation? What better environment than life on Earth, the big time for standing up to moral rot and getting it right, for Character to prove it’s ready for Life in Creation, the big time for standing up for Conscience and doing what’s right?
There must be a job for us to do in Creation that isn’t crazy make-believe. When Choice has learned to be Free. When it’s ready for the big time and awake. Competent after being tested and proving itself on the field of hierarchical combat. In the jungles of animal kingdom ass-kissing debasement, to bring the Worth of Character to Creation. To contribute to its authenticity with Integrity. The free-standing, free spirit of individuality, originality, and Creativity that nothing can own, possess, or control. That no pretense of entitlement or arrogance can steal for plunder, consumption, and waste. Its own Integrity learned and earned from the example of its Source: the Self-Awareness of Free Choice, Child of its Parents, the Self-Awareness of Creation.
Creation including life on Earth? Creation meaning Life where it isn’t compromised by herd mentality. In the Reality of the situation at the beginning, when Ideas and Mind, evolution and Creation, were together activated by the Power of Attraction. By the coming together of Spontaneity-Love with Logic-Order in the Energy of the Instant. In timelessness, that can be visualized as a light piercing the darkness. Not of nothing happening but of Mind coming of age, waiting for its baptism. Waiting for ignition.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
5. Ideas – Movement
Situation
Fraction
Meaning
Origin: situation at the beginning
Attraction
inseparability
Spontaneous Self-Awareness
Self-Relationship
Reciprocity
Function
Initiative
Movement
Prototype
Ideals
Vulnerability
Being There – Guidance
Perspective
‘Here and Now’
Real
Re-reversal
Situation
Movement accompanied by the implication of its questioning. Asking why not maturation? Why not inertia when Energy and all this fuss can rest in peace? Why not all questions answered so class can be dismissed? The putative voice from the mythical big picture demanding recognition for perfection. Got everything covered so we can all go home. Yes. Why not? ‘Rest in peace’ sure sounds good to me. Been a long time since you visited a cemetery. Or went out trick-or-treating, because this paradise of permanent rest you crave isn’t life. It’s the false lure of stasis – an unchanging status quo – that can’t be in the presence of Movement. Of change. Then what can it be? Morbidity, the condition of the body. The Joker in its mask of ‘death’.
The situation of waiting for something to happen – why couldn’t it have been waiting for a chore to be performed or an errand to be run that could be finished? If it was the ‘beginning’ why didn’t it come with an end? The nature of the situation beginning was definition with no attainable end. Evolution whose Ideal was continuous evolution, expressed here in the idea of total quality management. An idea can always extend beyond itself through its implications. The idea of Growth branching. Relationship extending itself by creating new connections, new partners. Always extending and expanding. Continuous improvement. Like Newton’s third law, central to the nature of human-animal evolution.
Yet your questioning can have a point. Why? If the Logic of evolution is Order that expresses itself in before-after sequence, if Order combined with Freedom = change, then change can theoretically bring evolution to an end. You mean bring itself to an end. Right. Return Creation with its many-splendored Worth, Character and Free Choice with Integrity, back to the original situation-in-waiting. The end of Movement. Or to another situation-in-waiting. Who can say? For us to try to understand the nature of evolution but not to re-write it. Congratulations! You don’t know everything after all! Not under the influence of herd mentality. For the time being, anyway, because herd mentality will try to re-write it.
Fraction
The origin of the phenomenon, too, of a house divided. Its mathematical expression the fraction. Movement forward the enumerator, resistance to movement the denominator. Above the line oriented to the right and forward, below the line oriented up and against above. The thing seeking its fulfillment accompanied by its flip side seeking to divide it. The idea of restlessness expressed by fraction. That, like the value of pi, can never come to rest in a whole number except in life on Earth. A hallucination of impossibilities and absurdities, where ‘whole number’ can be achieved by denominator-divider replacing enumerator. To become the one-and-only Dude, except that then restlessness would end and so would the hallucination. The “triumph of the will:” not-happening. Everyone loses.
The line between above in the fraction and below has a characteristic that’s uniquely challenging for Free Choice. The Child of its Parents and tutee of Conscience, neither of which has any experience with it. That while it’s in training gives Mindfulness fits: Connection and separation both. Like Siamese twins who can’t deal with friction by going bye-bye. Like my mother used to joke, “Women. You can’t live with them and you can’t live without them.” An instrument in the hands of willfulness, that delights in tormenting its host when there’s no way of getting rid of it. We have to make our peace with it. And that means looking within like Mind did at the beginning and defining ourselves to be and evolve the best we can be. Then to understand the nature of our tormenter, that it’s part of who we are. It has a use and it’s for us learn how to use it. Instead of attacking and punishing ourselves thinking we’re teaching ‘others’ a lesson.
We sure do a lot of punishing! We do, and it never works. Our reverse-reflections take our blows, reappear, question us, cross our boundaries, offend and enrage us, and we’re back at it again. All our offended righteousness is doing is breaking mirrors. Our victimhood bent on vengeance. Our blame-shifting judgments that deplete others’ self-worth but do nothing for our own.
It’s in the nature of restlessness that any movement will generate an equal and opposite reaction. Newton’s law. In the nature of situation that’s a fraction. It was in the nature of Mind-Relationship Spontaneity-Order to bring order to the chaos of restlessness by differentiating between Movement and its questioning by anti-movement. On the basis of their defining attributes, beginning with the presence or absence of defining boundaries and the nature of their boundaries: whether connecting, dividing, or both.
The connecting-dividing boundary was recognized as the responsibility of Child Free Choice to recognize and maintain. The boundary between the enumerator of Definition and its denominator dividing it from below. Parents couldn’t handle this responsibility without Self-Awareness making unreal real — the boundary differentiating between Self-Awareness and self-unawareness. Self-unawareness is the source of the echo that made the situation-in-waiting an echo chamber, once Love-Logic illuminated and empowered Self-Awareness. Echo being evidence that its source is but an echo of Reality and not real itself.
Meaning
It’s in the nature of ‘idea’ that it captures the meaning of its situation. And if we eliminate “situation in waiting” and try to imagine what was ‘there’ without it we come up with an impossibility. Which was? No idea, no meaning. The meaning captured by the first idea to form was the impossibility of anything without meaning. Recognition by the first idea to form that its absence couldn’t be the way things were. It couldn’t rest on the telephone wire; it had to be the first to fly off. Recognition of the central idea behind evolution: of Movement. Conditions at the beginning couldn’t be at eternal rest if they couldn’t tolerate the absence of Meaning and Movement.
The phony big picture peddled by know-it-all nihilists, consumed by fear of change, obsessed with their own prospects and unaware of any others’. Self-entitled to annihilate anything that gets in their way. Especially themselves, because it’s herd mentality that’s in everyone’s way. Willfulness.
Then evolution began with the first idea reacting against the absence of meaning and movement. The phony big picture. Isn’t this what the know-it-all has been saying? No. All we’re establishing is that the central idea behind evolution was restlessness. Not unlike the agitation observed by quantum physics when it puts the smallest particles under the microscope. Evolution’s inability to remain stationery when its nature is to move forward. To be something or do something that satisfies the nature of the idea: happening. Without definition yet of what’s to happen but accompanied by the implication of what it isn’t: not-happening.
A reductionist view of the origin of everything. Indeed! We can say from hindsight that not-happening wasn’t the way things are. Yet there they were, two unlike ideas of equal legitimacy until one demonstrated that the other wasn’t legitimate. Wasn’t the way things are. How did they work their differences out? They were connected, one the flip side of the other. Inevitably brought into compatibility not by being proven equally legitimate but by being put into proper juxtaposition with one another. One before the other when it happened. Above the other when what happened was defined. In the event, the idea of happening moved forward according to its nature.
And left not-happening behind? No. Being different sides of the same idea, not-happening automatically came along. The origin of the phenomenon of questioning attached to evolution. To forward Movement, the nonsense about big-picture know-it-all. That lacks any source of propulsion of its own but, being connected to Movement, goes wherever Movement goes. Wherever evolution takes it, always resisting in principle. Always the unhappy camper who wants to stay home. Sometimes just a whimper, a nuisance. Sometimes raising hell and breaking things.
Origin: situation at the beginning
What was present at the beginning? Whatever it was had to be ideas. Mind at the beginning implied ideas implied Mind. Ideas are the genetics of Creation. Seeds of Growth, cells of biology. Situation-in-waiting at the outset was scrambled. Ideas of all stripes plus flip sides in no particular pattern, sometimes in harmony, sometimes friction. An obvious call for Order, although Mind would have to mature along with ideas in order to answer it. A call for Movement: Love-Logic, Growth-evolution forward. Which got an exemplary response: this is how it’s done. Now let’s see you do it. Humanity’s call to recognize and accept Guidance for addressing its situation.
What situation? Look no farther than inside your Mind. Your thoughts and feelings. Scrambled if they’re anything like mine,. A mess. A call for Order if there ever was one. For Meaning to rescue us from insanity. From contradictions forced upon us by the animal within, insisting on having its way. Constantly in need of leash corrections so that it doesn’t yank itself, leash, and us off into the woods in pursuit of porcupines.
Attraction
How did they meet? Being formative ideas they would have been preoccupied with their development and its unfinished business. Seeking friends and potential partners among other ideas waiting for casting call. So they could form an act together that would attract notice. Get them a part in a production or just a place on the playbill at a theatre.
The idea of Relationship would have been gestating along with the idea of Movement and Mind, since these are all basic components of Creation. So it’s likely that the force that brought Love and Logic into contact was as natural to Life as the idea of Growth. The power of attraction. Energy, the workhorse and implementer of Mind-acting, whose function is supplying the Force that interconnects all the parts of Mind-Creation functioning as one interrelated System.
Love and Logic, the Parents of Movement and their Child Free Choice, met through Happening itself: the constitution of all of Creation. Of Relationship, by Relationship, and for Relationship. The Beauty and elegance of one simple Ideal: caring for one another. What Life is about. It doesn’t get any better than that.
inseparability
What was “present at the beginning” was dynamic not static. Vibrant with possibilities not moribund with denial. Teeming with Life in the making that could have gone in a number of directions. In principle, but in the event went definitively in one. One of the ideas was more potent than the other? None had the capacity to move on its own as this one did. Not even Logic.
The ideas divided into two groups: one associated with Movement, the other reactive. Denial of movement. One group stand-alone, the other its flip side. Not stand-alone but derivative. Reflective. With the situation in its formative stage Mind was in its formative stage, not yet able to bring its perspective to bear. In the absence of Order the situation depended entirely on one idea for its resolution.
Which was? Love. Why Love? Because it’s the ultimate hell-raiser that nothing can stop. Your Wild Siberian Tiger whose theme song is “Don’t Fence Me In.” The wild card in the deck. The Mother of all the wild cards in Creation: Free Choice. That nothing can tame. Nothing can corrupt. Not the presumption of wildness beyond the limits of Definition. Nor even corruption that’s predatory animal instinct: willfulness in the absolute. Absolute arrogance. The presumption of authority beyond questioning. The fallacy of infallibility. The manipulator, wellspring of injustice, provocation, and rage.
Because without boundaries by itself, Love cannot be defined. It’s beyond questioning and beyond Knowing. The essence and Beauty – the spirit — of Movement itself.
Nice Granny Sweetpants has uncouth manners? A wrecking ball of Movement if she’s not reined in. Just gotta Love everything and everyone. Connect with everything, form intimate relationships all over the place. Gorge everyone with sweets until they turn green. A Force of Nature that knows no boundaries because she has no boundaries. And, wouldn’t you know it, she’s the feminine principle. I’d never guess! Who fell head over heels for Logic. A he. The masculine principle who lost it for her. Mr. Boundaries. The only other idea that could provide her with the definition and guidance her lack of boundaries called for. Order that her Spontaneity and Freedom call for. And protection for her vulnerability.
Spontaneous Self-Awareness
Enter the bride and groom. Mind’s functions Love and Logic, brought together by a phenomenon familiar to the romantics among us. Falling in Love. Cue the wedding march! Brought together by the spontaneous spark of attraction. A power unlike any other, able to move mountains. Able to start Movement itself. The source of Mind’s evolution and the activation of its Self-Awareness. The familiar sensation we experience with insight. That what we just learned was already there, waiting.
Self-Relationship
How was the outcome avoided by the situation-in-waiting at the beginning? The idea of Love accompanied by not-love questioning was Self in its formative stage. Feeling that was vulnerable, having values but unable to navigate because lacking boundaries. Incomplete until it acquired protection and direction from the boundaries of Logic. From Order. The element essential to civilization articulated in the philosophy of Oliver Wendell Holmes. A jurist who conceived of laws as restraints essential to freedom.
The outcome was avoided when Love bonded with Logic to form the prototype Self. To establish the founding principle of Creation: that Relationship makes it happen. That the Power of Attraction between Love and Logic made this Relationship happen. Between Spontaneity and Order, defining attributes of Love and Logic. Brought into existence and consequence by Energy in the Now. By an act that breathed Life into Self and started evolution with Movement guided by Definition of the way things are. First things first. Movement before the implication questioning it. Implication derived from the idea implying it. Having no definition of its own, and therefore to be differentiated from its host. One real, the other unreal.
A signatory act of Mind differentiating. Between the logical order of things and illogical. Between what’s definable and real and what’s undefinable and unreal. This is how reconciliation of Movement with questioning was achieved. How the outcome was avoided, of pointless breaking of mirrors. The example set by Mind-Relationship at the beginning. The Parents of Mind-Child. Free Choice training for its role in Creation, who will pass the tests of Character when it gets it right. When it learns to think, feel, and act Mindfully, logically, realistically, and empathetically. Guided by Conscience like its Parents. Like all of Creation. Unopposed by willfulness, the Hallowe’en mask of herd mentality glowering at it from its mirror.
What happened then was the idea of happening responded to the force behind evolution. To Movement, the way things are, and evolved. Into the idea of Love that’s Meaning with Worth cared for. Purpose that has work to do, to relate with ideas like it. With ideas unlike it that complement it and are complemented by it. To evolve in Relationship with the idea of Logic into Mind-Self – Self-Awareness that shares itself through Creation.
Reciprocity
Reciprocal evolution of ideas and Mind confounds herd mentality unable to comprehend either reciprocity or evolution. Essentials of Growth, when all that it can make sense of is willed by a ‘higher authority’. Namely itself: willfulness. Lord arrogance, the highest of authorities and essential of paralysis. Unable to comprehend idea interconnecting with Mind to serve as cause when it produces an effect without a separate will to accomplish it. The phenomenon of self-activation that, however mysterious it seems to herd mentality, had to be.
Why? Because where was another Mind to do the honors? To flip a switch or cross its wire with Mind’s and start the engine? Mind had to be its own ignition. But it could do so only if it did so spontaneously and in logical Order. To be the Character with Integrity, the Definition with Order-differentiation and Spontaneity-empathy, that it is.
Function
What triggered the flip side? None other than the Mind whose activation and evolution stand for the Reality, the Truth, and Beauty of Spontaneity combined with Order. Triggered its flip side as all forms of Movement do whether in Creation or self-unawareness hallucinating. When the restlessness of Movement is its self-questioning and the flip side of self-questioning is self-defeating. There is no point to function unless it’s to manage the boundary between Self-Awareness and its flip side, self-unawareness. In all its non sequiturs and lies, its implications and imaginary consequences.
The dividing line of differentiation between Love and Logic set an example for combining elements of one Self while respecting their inviolability. Their sovereignty, ratified by Definition of usefulness in their own right. The sovereignty of function, original and Creative, fitting together in harmony with others original and Creative. The nature of Creation: spontaneous, unforced collaboration among autonomous living subjects in shared enterprise. Fitting cause with effect in a graceful ballet of Order, Freedom, and Beauty. The unfolding of a flower.
In contrast to make-believe: willed into appearance by know-it-all arrogance. Herd mentality unaware of functions and dismissive of ideas. Uncomprehending of the whole or any of its parts. Lord and master of regimentation among unliving objects, forced to execute its per-version of shared enterprise. By supine obedience to its commandments, mis-fits misfitting cause with effect. The ‘unfolding’ of frustration and misery, friction and conflict.
And entertainment. When played out on film by ‘handymen’: buffoons soon to be brought down in a tangle of water pipes and electrical wires. Mis-connectors sent out on a job of misconnection. Their heads in the sand like an ostrich, a per-version of Mind’s going within. Avoiding the mirror. Guidance has to be from Logic-Love Relationship, the only legitimate Source. There’s no direction without it, intellectual or moral. Without Conscience, Psyche’s inner moral compass.
Initiative
What ideas? Ideas like birds on a telephone wire waiting for one to fly off first. The idea of Movement implied by ‘flight’. Like ‘presence’. Here and Now in the sense of happening sequentially but not temporally. Always in motion. Ideas in their formative stages. Hypothetical. Theoretical. Causes in waiting without effects.
Movement
The controlling consideration – Movement. To understand the way things are is to understand the idea – the principle – of Movement. To align with Energy that moves evolution forward is to align with the way things are and not to be pushing or pulling in the opposite direction. Doing either is sickening. Psychopathy. The Child not just unconscious but sick. Herd mentality is sickness from a virus.
Then Logic was first off the telephone wire too? Along with Love. Yes. But even though they took flight together and history was made, the booster for this rocket was Lady Love. He was the controls that they operated, useless without the values of feeling that she contributed. Together the Guidance, Discipline, and Force of Conscience that Creation required. But just as there would have been no instruments of control if Order hadn’t put them there, there would have been no irresistible Force of boundaryless Spontaneity to lift off first if Love hadn’t put it there.
Had things been left to him the birds would still be sitting there and situation-in-waiting would still be waiting. For ignition anyway since its Creation is forever a work in progress. His controls needed a hand on the wheel with motivation. His to move forward with Learning not enough if it needed to be in service to her values. To go this way or that, that only caring one way or the other could decide. Rooted in feeling where values come from – things cared for. The same source as passion, and Love had it. Together they ignited Movement with Direction.
Had things been left to Love she would have gone off course without knowing she’d been on one. Gotten lost and accomplished nothing. The two of them individually were a couple of character actors waiting around for casting call. Together they were Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers: Ideals of performance art, skill, and grace. Of incomparable Beauty and accomplishment. Dancing Cheek to Cheek. Yes, song of the year 1935. A breakthrough in entertainment here that can only hint at the enormity of what happened there. When their coming together provided the ignition that the situation was waiting for. The first Self of Creation and its first Movement: the illumination and activation of Self-Awareness. Part of a chain reaction of Creation that Free Choice will be part of – if and when it chooses to be.
Prototype
Physics can’t tell us how Energy that’s formless forms itself into particles. If it could maybe we could then close the final gap of ignorance and explain how our material universe began. But experimental science has run out of experiments to explain it. We can forget about understanding the Big Bang through the study of matter. The path forward calls for the study of Mind. “This is where we came in.” Uh huh. “Back to the Future.” Back to where the intuitive philosophy of the ancients left off. But neither can one explain how the first idea formed into a function that resulted in everything.
Philosophy doesn’t have an answer? Not philosophy or its branch metaphysics. The principle we’re presented with is self-sufficiency. Mind at the beginning enabling itself, or being enabled, from within. The phenomenon of Definition of the way things are defining itself from the inside out instead of outside-in. Bottom-up instead of top-down. The mystery of the idea of evolution: what stared it? The mystery of the idea of initiative: what makes a bird fly off the telephone wire be the first one? The mystery of leadership. What accounted for the first stirrings of Movement to produce the first idea that formed into function? What or who took the lead and got it done? What was the ignition and who or what turned it on?
We need to know? Whether or not definitive answers are accessible to human Psyches there are implications and they are accessible. Important because they define the original situation, and the original situation is the prototype in some way for every situation to follow. ‘Situation’ being the crucible for Meaning and Purpose. The test of our attributes that determines the nature of our Character and its role. Here and in Creation once it passes its test and finishes its training. Whenever we feel the need for Guidance it’s because we’re in a situation. Our circumstances have rounded to a condition that calls for understanding it.
For Mindfulness that gets it right and not for herd mentality. For willfulness that gets it wrong. For handling our situation in some way like the way the original situation was handled. Because it sure made a statement! Even I’m impressed. Once Movement got started nothing could stop it. Not in Reality, though animal instinct hypnotized by the non sequiturs of herd mentality here on Earth take issue. Convinced by invincibility, fortified by invulnerability, that they’re immovable object and irresistible force wrapped into one.
Ideals
But there are other sides to it. One is the flip side’s dark side, the nihilist. That will seize any opportunity to turn technology against its inventors. The other is the distressing habit of herd- and Mind-centered types both of leaving Love out of conceptual-qualitative analysis. Out of the professions, public policy, and academic scholarship, philosophy in particular. In agreement with the sage of “Star Trek,” Mr. Spock, that irrationality is the stepchild of human emotion. When feeling is the source of values and Meaning can’t do without evaluation. ‘Rational’ as Jung understood it to be. When quantitative measurement has its place, but without evaluation numbers can’t add up. Beavers may alter the landscape but persons decide whether it’s needed.
Ideas at the beginning and throughout evolution reflect in their composition and their expression the central attribute of Love inseparable from Logic. Spontaneity combined with Order. Energy with the instant. With timeless Now. The essential ingredients of Life and Growth, Movement and Direction. To affect or be affected by any kind of ‘happening’ is to be the subject or object of an idea. Like Mind at the beginning? Yes. The prototype and role model for all minds of Creation to follow: aware of the Creative power of ideas in the Self-Awareness of Reality, only fitfully aware of it in the self-unawareness of life on Earth.
Again, ideas are the genetics of Creation. The seeds that, once planted, grow into expressions of the thoughts that produced them. Talents performing services, plants flowering or bearing fruit – however Love and Logic defined their usefulness to Creation at their birth. ‘Self’ defined by function. With Guidance from Definition, representation of the principles and values of Love and Logic through the idea of institution. Conscience, the working part of Definition, the expression and protection of its Ideals. The Ideal of Loving Friendship. Of Guidance and support for Meaning and Purpose. Benevolently and spontaneously from the bottom up rather than arrogantly and willfully from the top down. The Ideal of Creation, a work in progress toward the Ideal of Eternal Life.
Vulnerability
Take me to your leader! The ‘leader’ was vulnerability. The stirrings of an idea that evolved into what we call ‘Love’. Soft cuddly love – huh? The first beating of the butterfly’s wings that started the hurricane. Something more gentle and innocent, harmless, powerless, and innocuous, we can’t imagine. But why? This isn’t strength, it’s weakness! So the lords of arrogance tell us, but they’re wrong. Whatever the situation at the beginning it had to be in some sense an idea. In its essence the idea of Movement. Meaning and Purpose with Direction. Love Relating. Logic Defining. Empowered from within by the nature of what it is: Life Growing.
Like a spout growing out of a crack in the pavement. To convey the idea of Life that’s inexorable. Though not to imply that the pavement was there first. What was there first? Idea and Mind evolving alongside in parallel. In sequence, with no pavement, no big picture anywhere in sight. Accompanied in tandem by their flip sides. Implied questioning with their questioning flip sides in tandem, dark sides. Implied variations of the know-it-all and its big phony answer. Palpatine and his Galactic Empire.
Being There – Guidance
This the ballet of Relationships that work for Creation. Ideas doing their part in harmony for love of their shared enterprise, for love of their functions, and for one another when they relate to one another. In complementary pairs and mixes formed in the context of the moment, to produce situations and to respond to situations. Under the Guidance of Conscience and the oversight of Governance. Parents being there for their Creations, with the playfulness and Creativity of Love to support them and the boundaries and discipline of Order to protect them. With both to liberate Creation and each of its parts to reach their potential. However it offers itself to them with Guidance. Spontaneously, in the moment.
In contrast to herd mentality, the inventor of ‘God’ the ‘supreme being’, that would have all the animals that it’s put in their cages sing with one voice, a chorus of praise for itself. The arrogance of authoritarian rule scripted of itself, by itself, and for itself. A per-version of character and integrity fit for delivery not at Gettysburg, not at the Lincoln Memorial, but in a castle somewhere in Transylvania.
What matters is what we do with the cards we’re dealt. It doesn’t matter that we’re separated and in cages except for what’s to be learned from it. It can always be worse. There’s no point in complaining. All that matters is caring for one another, and if we can’t do it one way we’ll do it another.
When would ‘the right time’ be for Guidance to help? When circumstances put us in situations that call for thought and the answer isn’t obvious. When we’ve let it be known that we’re ready. A determination to be made not by ‘time’ or ‘happenstance’. Illusions. But sequentially, in the orderly flow of conversation.
With whom? With whatever form Guidance takes. A service offered by our Psyche if we want it, and so Psyche herself could be the form. As she was for me when conversation graduated from sub-conscious to conscious. A turning point that changed everything. When we’ve committed to learning and growth. When we’ve opened our minds to questioning and being questioned. When our Psyches are receptive and ready for insemination by the seeds of Understanding that come from Self-Awareness. Alive and well in the memories of our birth. Not here in the embodiments of big-picture absurdity but in the situation brought to life by the Child’s Parents. By the Power of Attraction.
Perspective
Mind at the beginning didn’t know in advance how it would play out between Love and its flip side mirror and between Love and Logic. It couldn’t know because in its state of evolution it hadn’t been brought to Self-Awareness yet. To awareness of the Self that it was to be and the function in Creation that it was to perform. It was a work in progress this side of activation — ideas in progress. Parts waiting for assembly when it was settled what they were for. In a process for Creation evolving from the inside out, structured from the bottom up. Driven by an impetus at once compelling and incomprehensible, involved and elusive.
But even if it had been brought to Self-Awareness, it wasn’t in the nature of Mind’s role, its cause or effect, to intervene in evolution. In Creation’s process and structure with manipulation contrary to ideas that originated and took on their functions without it. Autonomously and spontaneously. It wasn’t a worker.
What was in its nature was to be what all the sovereign elements of Creation needed. Perspective. That though it couldn’t take in a fictitious big picture and play the pretender know-ot-all, its unique Self could take in the system that had evolved within its Awareness. It could take every situation in changing circumstances and perform the function of governance. While Guidance ensured that the living elements of Creation had access to questioning and insights, Mind ensured that no element that belonged in the process was left out. Doing so with differentiation and empathy that respect the Integrity of Character. The nature of Free Choice: needful of Guidance, respectful of Governance, but never to be preempted or compromised by either.
You’re saying Mind played the hand it was dealt? Mind-Energy are everything everywhere. So, it couldn’t have been passively playing a hand it was dealt. It was in its way the dealer, in a state of evolution, itself, that would have prevented it from knowing or willing the outcome. From determining how the process and structure of its own evolution, its own story, played out. Just as Creator can’t foresee what’s ahead when Creation is advancing into the unknown, Mind-evolving couldn’t manipulate its own effect before the fact. The situation in waiting was Creation waiting to gather its parts together, its functions, and begin performing the first phase of evolution.
The first phase?
Two minds:
- 1st = two-dimensional, 2nd = one-dimensional herd mentality.
- 1st = Reality on top-surface active, unreality beneath, shadow-reflection inactive.
- 2nd = virtual reality with no underneath. No shadow-reflection.
Two stories:
- two beginnings, one reversal of the other
- two relationships:
- Love-Logic (+ Energy)
- Parent-Child (+ Energy)
Two psychologies:
- one-Parent-Aware inward-looking, the other Child-unaware reverse-mind outward-looking
- one Parent Movement, the other Child reverse-mind anti-movement.
All properties-attributes must be tested for Character-Integrity.
Child-human attributes being tested are differentiation and empathy.
‘Here and Now’
You’re bushwhacking. All I can see of a trail is stumps behind and you ahead. Is there one? Or are you blazing a new trail? Where are we? The question always with the answer always: in Relationship with Guidance. The only point of reference in a situation that’s its own reference. Relationship is the who, what, when, where, why, and how of Reality. The ultimate answer to every question whose ultimate expression is Loving Friendship. Being there for one another.
There is no ‘other’ Mind in Reality. No other ‘situation’ to which our metaphysical Self, Free Choice, can repair while it’s in training. Inside an airlock of reality in reverse. Virtual reality. Hallucinating specters from hell intent on proving it powerless and worthless. An animal debased and corrupt, willing to do anything for the pleasures of the body and avoidance of pain. Driven by its appetites, compulsive, addicted, and terminally self-unaware. A Gollum of body idolatry and greed distorted beyond recognition. Where we aren’t until Choice is Free to recognize where we are.
We are always playing ‘against’ ourselves, testing ourselves. Holding up mirrors to others for them to use in testing themselves. Mind-Situation had no ‘other’ to compete with, to compare with. To test or be tested by. To mirror or be mirrored. ‘Winning’ was fitting pieces together in proper order, making sense out of nonsense, bringing Order to chaos. Setting example for Mind-Child Free Choice learning to question itself.
Real
How could what happened at the beginning be already there? The situation waiting can be thought of as ‘happening’ that’s becoming. Inactive only in the sense of not ready to perform. In a state of evolution that precedes performance. In the nature of the situation – the way things were and still are – that for anything to be, for any function to do, it has to be an idea first. A thought or premise that Plato adopted, from which he concluded, correctly, that what’s real about the apple is the idea of it. Placing the idea of Reality where it belongs, within Mind, rather than within matter. And if it’s an idea then Mind must be evolving along with idea to think it.
The idea that ideas and Mind thinking them evolved sequentially but not in tandem. What? With each implication and connection that carried Movement forward, each sign of Growth, thoughts grew and Mind grew together. The principle of inseparability that binds Mind with its thoughts. With every aspect of Creation, wholly an act of Mind.
All well and good. But matter sure seems real. It does. And Einstein made it hard to argue with it when he gave physics E=MC2 and its beloved universe hard evidence that the Energy present in it is real. The same Energy present at the beginning when Mind’s constituent functions were brought together by the Power of Attraction. Love and Logic. When their core ideas came together with them, Spontaneity and Order, and ignited Movement, evolution, and Creation with their Life Force. Energy. When Energy illuminated Mind-Relationship with Awareness and Self-Awareness then shared and expressed itself through Creation. All of it held together by the same Life Force. Living Energy.
Living? The Energy that accompanied Mind-Parents’ Child into life on Earth for its training is time-limited. As everything is in our material universe, that had a beginning in time and will end in time. The idea of ending whose process is entropy. Energy winding down to inertia, not holding things together but letting them come apart while it dies. Life on Earth that’s not the Creative upside of restlessness but its self-destructive downside. Playing out the idea of separation that can’t be in Mind that’s interconnected. In its living ideas of Creation that are interrelated. Enabled by the same Energy that enabled Creation but in an illusory state. Part of the Parents’ extension of Mind, its function Free Choice. Enabling a state of self-unawareness, life on Earth, so that their Child could learn its function before joining them in the Self-Awareness of Creation.
Then Life on Earth is death on Earth. Like everything here except the Energy that produced it, ’death’ can’t be if it isn’t ‘life’ first. In either case an illusion. Unreal. Part of the self-unawareness needed for the training of Free Choice before it’s let loose in Creation. Where Energy is Real, choices are for real, and all the risks and excitement that this implies. Action! ‘Heaven’ isn’t an old guy standing around and angels plucking harps after all. Yes. So maybe you can rethink your Galactic Empire where the ‘action’ is all make-believe special effects. That is, if Free Choice chooses to complete its training and be what it is and do what it’s meant for. Not a sure thing.
What told Truman in “The Truman Show” and Ellie Arroway in “Contact” that their physical environment was fake? A stage set. When they reached out and could touch it. And what did it do? It quivered. What has physics discovered that our universe does when massive black holes collide? You tell me. It quivers. Why has physics characterized the universe as a neural network and a mirror? I can’t imagine. Maybe because it’s a projection of Mind in a dream state. Dreaming of itself as a brain encased in a body encased in a universe that’s a projection of itself. A reverse mirror image of Mind that isn’t dreaming. An implication that comes with the restlessness of Movement and Creation.
Ideas are weird. What makes them so is the difference between real and unreal. The ultimate test of herd mentality’s legitimacy, because it’s unreal. A mischaracterization of Reality. An echo in an echo chamber. That will go on haunting and flummoxing its earthly embodiments until they’re in on the joke and transfer belief to something believable. To Reality.
Re-Reversal
There’s no good in entertainment? Most certainly in what Guidance makes of all of the know-it-all’s per-versions. Including make-believe, an element of Creativity that’s being there with support for self-Worth and development. Indispensable relief from the weight of gravitation. The principle that’s reversing the reversal. The idea that received my tongue-lashing is the reversal. That needs to be understood for what it is, minus Jack Oakie’s parade of euphoria. The idea of reverse attached to Movement: the phony big picture. Trash from a dumpster primped and perfumed for sale to the glitterati on Rodeo Drive.
If your contrariness is motivated by re-reversing reversals then we have something in common. A restlessness ingrained in our nature that’s not comfortable with the way things are here unless we question it. You’re a contrarian too? A pain in the ass that’s hopefully a useful pain in the ass. We can talk about it when we get to “The Performer.” That’s me? Thoughts about you that you’ll be comfortable with if you’re OK with mirrors. You thought it was rude when I held up a mirror to your sister’s batting performance. If “The Performer” strikes you as rude maybe then we’ll know.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
6. Ideas – Anti-Movement
Fate
Numbers
‘Self’ the Many – herd mentality
Hierarchy
Invulnerability
Reversal
Guilt
Projection
Resistance
Paralysis
Annihilation
Smart
Fate
If ideas are the genetics of Creation personalities are the genetics of life on Earth. Seeds that grow into flowers and fruit-bearing plants. And weeds. What would the know-it-all be? How about a thistle weed overseeing a weed patch.
Is it more important to act on instinct or to act on Understanding? To relate to others or to compete with others? To find strength with Guidance or turn it over to chance? We learn how to tell the difference when we’re put to the test. So we’ll know ourselves. Like chemicals tested to identify their properties by extremes of temperature, pressure, and other conditions. Herd mentality erases the properties of individuals, subordinates personhood to kings and queens with their retinues of sycophants. Doesn’t want to know the difference if all it’s got is a borrowed self with no properties and no reflection of its own.
If it’s Creativity you want and relatability, try Spontaneity. Letting what it’s meant to be happen from within. Meaningful and potentially useful. To you and to those important to you, and always interesting because you’ll be taking a risk. Of not knowing. Of ‘losing’ and being hurt. The risk that comes with harmlessness, humility, and vulnerability. With Love. Instead of leaving it to wishful thinking. That everything without will be what it’s willed to be by ‘fate’ or ‘chance’. An unseen ‘force of nature’ that can be counted upon to bring good fortune to the anointed. Arrogance. Gifted with supremacy, destined for veneration, alone at the top.
‘Fate’ is the know-it-all. A nihilist. The reverse of Spontaneity that’s inseparable from Order, Love inseparable from Logic, feeling inseparable from thinking. It’s boundaries that make Freedom free. Not lawlessness, that turns movement anywhere into guaranteed collision. Any gamble into snake eyes. ‘Supremacy’ into humiliation.
Many more implications can be drawn from Mind-Relationship and its flip side nihilist. A metaphysical paradigm, the primal context from which all variations of Meaning and Purpose can be drawn. Perspective that might seem to have gone with the wind except that it doesn’t blow with the wind. A resource to be applied when situations call for it. As yours may now, and mine. To be guided by a few implications or not, as we wish.
Numbers
Being ‘many’ is why the know-it-all of willfulness is characterized as ‘herd’. Its distinction thus woven into its existence: it has meaning for Creation because of numbers. Giving herd mentality a leg up on the reflective thinking of Mind-centered individuals when numbers need sorting out instead of concepts. Quantitative analysis. Where you’ll find concentrations of body-centered personality types. Beavers indulging their passion for measurement, churning their way through equations, altering landscapes, while making life better for all of us.
Numbers measure the size of the ape that’s due herd mentality’s obligatory gesture of respect. Not a handshake between equals but a bow to head-touching-the-ground to register submission to superior rank in hierarchy. The submission of individuality’s moral code to Machiavellian herd mentality’s expedience. Character to corruption. Ass-kissing self-debasement. Characteristic of the authoritarian mindset that separates ‘conservative’ and Church hierarchy both from Integrity.
Population size / regeneration and market-audience size measured by numbers of bodies supply herd mentality’s appetite for consumption, making the body the indispensable cog in the wheel of economic performance and the object of idolatry that it is. Herd mentality being an attribute of the body that it is. Rationalized by a ‘conservative’ politician not long ago who equated ‘corporation’ with ‘person’.
Wasn’t he right? The law says so! He was stretching legality to include flesh-and-blood people. The idea of personhood. Individual sovereignty, around which a body of philosophical principles, values, and universal protections evolved over centuries, not with authoritarian ‘conservative’ support but opposition. Amidst violence and bloodshed, exposing corporate ‘personhood’ for the self-serving hypocrisy that it is. The idea of subjective life would not have entered language with the intent of applying to an unliving object. A convenience to facilitate traffic among artificial social entitles, now re-imagined to allow one political herd to gain advantage against another. Flaunting herd mentality’s disdain for limits. Here the limits of definition so that corporations could corrupt campaign financing and Democracy with their money.
19th-century imperial British and French businesses in the Caribbean would make unlikely candidates for corporate ‘personhood’. When their ‘business’ put them to ownership and rampant abuse of persons. So abusive that Haiti owes its independence to slave rebellion and the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 to its redirection of Napoleonic strategy. Away from the New World and back to the Old. Nor would Reinhard Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen be good candidates. That took up their mission with the efficiency of a business. Slaughtering persons on an unprecedented scale. ‘Corporations’: Machiavellian herd mentality. Capable of whatever it takes to prevail in competition with other ‘corporations’, including organized mob violence. World war. The opposite of ‘Person.’
Answerable to what ‘conservative’ wants rather than to what a thing is. To the self-serving politics of herd mentality indifferent to the pain it causes. Whether to scope, intensity, or both of no concern to animal instinct. Willfulness that can’t differentiate or empathize, think or feel. The reverse-reality rooted in the mythical big picture at the beginning: the one-dimensional monolith risen from unchanging inertia, lord and master of nothing happening, cast in the role of ‘action hero’.
‘Self’ the Many – herd mentality
Quantitative analysis is aided by insights of one kind, qualitative by another. What does it matter whether one or the other? It matters because our species doesn’t do well with both and it needs to. The STEM fields – science, technology, engineering, and math – are responsible for spectacular breakthroughs in telecommunications and information technology, news and social media, weaponry and security, transportation and space exploration. On and on. All based on equations and numbers.
Science-technology is quantitative numbers-centered inquiry, philosophy-theology qualitative. Psychology and public policy are both. Intuitive psychology is exclusively qualitative. Freudian psychology is qualitative affecting legitimacy from neuroscience-physiology quantitative. Neuroscience is conflicted because it can’t agree on an explanation for Consciousness, whether it’s seated in the brain or in Mind.
Ideas that flowered into science, technology, engineering, and math products extended-expanded by objective-unfeeling implications-interconnections of Logic. Herd mentality suspicious of Love-empathy inhibits flowering of ideas extended-expanded by interrelationships subjective-feeling.
Why is this? The Mind-Relationship behind the Movement of evolution and Creation functions as one unified, integrated Mind-Self. Without a body. Guided in all its parts by Definition. The not-relationship know-it-all behind the not-movement of its make-believe big picture, is a dysfunctional herd of animals. Its flip side. Bodies. Wild and willful. Lacking either guidance or definition. The reverse mirror-image of its host. Their difference lying principally in numbers: one body-less Mind-Self vs. many isolated, separated body-brain selves. The absurd notion that body-brains organized into tribes can not only function as though they’re one interrelated ‘self’, they are one interrelated self.
Hierarchy
“Do not underestimate the power of the dark side.” Everything in the nothing-happening reverse of questioning that accompanied Movement, that’s brought to ‘life’ here, is a hallucination of borrowed ideas. Per-versions of the Life of Movement because the mirrors that reflect them are fun-house mirrors. Distorted by the anti-movement, anti-truth lies that produced the hallucination. ‘Seeing’ what’s not there as though it were there. But one of countless ways that life on Earth mimics Creation but in reverse. The only way it can make-believe because that’s its perspective: reverse mirror-image. The reversal alluded to by Mr. Vader in “Star Wars” is reverse Energy. Directed by Child-Mind in a state of self-unawareness to hallucinate reverse reality.
‘Reverse energy’? What you get when you tell Energy to activate another ‘reality’ that’s time-limited. A hallucination that, by definition, has a beginning that wasn’t already there and an end that surely will be there. It will deliver the material universe and embodiments that the idea of body-centered herd mentality requires. The reverse of Movement. All of it an extension of Energy stored in particulates. The particles of quantum mechanics whose behavior can be explained but not to physicists ‘thinking’ with herd mentality. Winding down toward inertia at the end of time. The process known to physics as entropy. Stuff formed and held together by energy at the beginning while dying energy heading toward the end lets it decay and come apart.
In the meantime giving “the power of the dark side” the illusion of equality with the light side and Mr. Vader the opportunity to discipline underperforming underlings with his thoughts alone. The Power of Attraction that illuminates Self-Awareness that, in turn, serves as a beacon of Guidance for its shared Creation. When there’s no equality. One eternal Life powered by living Energy: spontaneous and Creative, consequential with Purpose and Meaning, and Relatable. The other winding down to inertia: willed by Mind self-unaware, corrupted by its reverse-reflection. Hallucinating animal kingdom hierarchical nonsense — pointless, inconsequential, and unrelatable.
Invulnerability
A selling point of the know-it-all ‘God’ and herd mentality is their ‘promise’ of invulnerability. Identity with a larger self, accomplished not by sharing but by knocking it off. Replacing it, as in son replacing father, usurper replacing ruler. Regicide. The ‘spot’ that Lady MacBeth wanted out to alleviate guilt. Finding herself dug deeper into self-doubt rather than out of anything. All for the sake of an impossibility: unquestioned authority. Divinity and safety in numbers. ‘Supremacy’ ruling alone from the top.
Animal instinct fear. Slow to trust, quick to distrust. Ever alert to threats that only need movement to give themselves away. The threat of Change. Calling for all hands on deck in response. Hysteria. The killer in the toxicity served up by the authoritarian mindset and so-called conservative ‘ideology.’ As if idea were its legitimacy instead of its mortal enemy, animal instinct. Cruelty. The nature of invulnerability that would de-nature its appearance with personal acts of kindness. A per-version of Reality and Truth derived from the original triggered by Movement at the beginning. The know-it-all big picture. The mother of all de-naturing.
The situation of Mind and its ideas from the beginning was vulnerability. It’s being in the nature of Movement initiated and guided by Love and Logic. By Energy constantly evolving in the eternal Now. Learning and Growth broadening perspective toward understanding into the unknown. Toward Loving Friendship, the Ideal of Creation’s interrelationships open to the honesty and risk of trust. All freely chosen while subjecting Worth to the risk of error. Character with Integrity — the spirit of restlessness in uncertainty, enterprise in restlessness, relatability in imperfection. The vulnerability of Feeling and indomitability of boundaryless Love at its core. The spirit of Movement.
It was the myth of invulnerability that shaped Roy Cohn’s advice for the political neophyte. That motivates herd mentality to flee into its embrace after one taste of romantic love. Vulnerability that reduces it to tears. Preferring instead the safety of the dark side of Psyche where Love and Movement can’t be. Unfelt and unfeeling, unmoved and unmoving. Unaware, unexplaining, and unapologetic for the hurts that it causes. Adam Skywalker’s humanity erased by a Nazi imperial helmet. By a Madame Tussaud’s wax museum piece, Lord Vader. The mask of invulnerability. Plastic trash.
A nightmare whose avoidance may only be a matter of personality type. One preferably with mind and heart open to questioning. Open to personal growth toward maturity. Willing to risk hurt. Committed to Learning and Growth, the capacity to make sense of situations. Instead of sticking them in the mud where there’s no movement, no-feeling. Where there’s only the cruelty and horror of invulnerability. A comic book action hero – Nietzsche’s ‘superman’. Life on Earth: a projection of the know-it-all big picture. The apotheosis of invulnerability. The role model from hell.
Integrity is a personality type preference whether it’s hard-wired into Character or not. Because of the iron rule of Movement: situations change. Here and in Creation either one. It’s a commitment to be learned and made from the inside-out. For managing questioning ingrained in Definition of the way things are. Of evolution and Creation. Invulnerability negating vulnerability is equally a preference and a commitment. Equally susceptible to being broken by Movement that cannot be negated. Cannot be willed out of awareness and certainly not out of existence.
Movement is the rule, anti-movement the court jester, whose job is to remind Movement of what it is not and can never be. By attracting laughter and derision to its benighted demons from the crypt. In the macabre spirit of Hallowe’en, instead of the veneration given to them by the operatics of herd mentality. To the know-it-all’s one-size-fits-all ‘answer’. One-dimensional for having no reverse-reflection of its own, incapable of self-awareness for being incapable of self-questioning. One-sided for having but one perspective. Its own. Narrow, self-centered, and benighted. Self-unaware and unaware of others. Unevolved and unevolving, un-learning and un-growing.
The reverse-reflection of Mind-Relationship that’s two-dimensional, many-sided and Creative. Capable of differentiation and empathy. Hallmarks of Sapiens when it isn’t debasing itself with herd mentality. Of Choice when it’s serious about ‘liberty’ instead of mocking it with tyranny. By affecting ‘sociability’ as though ‘belonging’ were the blessing of loving friendship instead of the curse of entrapment. Denial of emotional reciprocity among equals, as though genuflection to bigger apes in animal kingdom hierarchy were testament to family and community. Ingratiation a substitute for intimacy. Convention a substitute for originality. Not doing unto others as you would have them do unto you but doing as others do. Going along to get along on a conveyor belt of anonymity. Alone, emotionally abandoned, and frightened. The face behind the mask of herd mentality.
Reversal
“Situation-in-Waiting” was Mind-Relationship’s own test of Character. That we should be very glad that it passed. Why? If it didn’t we’d have no opportunity to pass our test on Earth. Why not? There’d be no Movement. Of course if there were, herd mentality would have everything to gloat about. Mind would be its flip-side know-it-all instead of Relationship. Then it couldn’t be the Parents of Free Choice sent to learn Character with Integrity in life on Earth. And even if it could we could never evolve beyond ape since the know-it-all, Earth’s ‘creator’, doesn’t like mindfulness. Animal instinct gets off on willfulness, the reverse of differentiation with empathy. Didn’t Tarzan have Jane? That looked like a great life to me. Uh huh. Romance on the vine. You wouldn’t have liked it.
Why not? If you like your indulgences brought up by room service and served on a platter there would be none of that. The only martini served by life in the jungle would have been a mixture of work with waiting, anathema to the connoisseur of shaken not stirred. ‘Waiting’ by itself is enough to frighten willfulness away, the cause of its frustration. The obvious, most common, and most pernicious of herd mentality’s many torments: impatience. Willing its demands to be met faster, then lapsing into self-pity when they don’t. Making dumb-head mistakes by being in a hurry, then finding somebody to blame. Resistance to movement pressuring the way things are to move faster so they’ll be done.
Why? So they’ll get back to its paradise of no movement. Your action-hero strong man owes its reputation for “getting things done” to what it’s really about: eliminating things so there’s nothing left to do. Including us. Humanity done in by self-destruction that got everything ‘done’ and wound up in a paradise of mass extinction. It cleared the decks didn’t it? Definitely! We can start over now with a clean slate. Hooray for Mr. Can Do! The know-it-all wielding the ultimate feather-duster: guaranteed removal of house and contents along with the dust. The action-hero of herd-mentality politics, the guarantee that there’ll be no swamp once it’s drained. No Rome once it’s sacked.
The principle kept hidden by the know-it-all’s promises of too-good-to-be-true. The inevitability of meaning embedded in ‘idea’: that the ‘promise’ that it will deliver on is what it is and ultimately stands for. The truth behind deception.
Behind all forms of make-believe: that they’re predatory and self-centered. No matter how alluring and entertaining. Taking not giving. Wild, willful, and self-destructive. Nothing like Creation’s being there for every manner of use since they’re nothing and of no use. They’re waste. Neglect. The truth behind hallucination’s promise of paradise in an alternate reality, where anything goes and you can write your own script. The grandiloquence of make-believe. Jack Oakie’s “Hollywood on Parade.”
Guilt
The story of Mind is the story of Psyche. That contains the memory of the beginning and infancy of two minds and two beginnings, Parents and Child. Psyche the connector and motivator of psychology that welcomed the know-it-all in its state of self-unawareness and was attacked by the know-it-all in return. A Course in Miracles is a conceptual formula for undoing the mistake. The idea of forgiveness that denies the attacker the status of an ‘other’ attacking. Replacing it with us doing it to ourselves, forgiving ourselves. Recognizing that what could never be never happened.
Freud validated guilt, the idea of ‘original sin’, by locating taboo violation within the brain. A Course in Miracles invalidates guilt by locating guilt within Mind self-unaware. That was influenced by its unreal ego-self’s thought system based on the mad idea of separation. The Course uses Freudian analytical tools to reverse the validation of guilt by revealing the ego to be madness. Unreal. Freud equated ‘ego’ with human self-awareness mediating between Conscience (super-ego) and animal instinct wildness and willfulness (id). To the Course it’s the ego that’s animal instinct wildness and willfulness. The id is the unreal body, its appetites and five senses, that enable the ego to prey on its victims.
Instruments of authoritarian religious doctrine appear in the Course associated with the Church’s silencing of questioning. ‘God’s will’ and the ‘Father-Son’ relationship, not ostensibly Freudian in origin but certainly compatible with Freud and his theory. Compatible with the Freudian psychologists who put out the call for the Course’s help. Its so-called primary teacher, Ken Wapnick, who studiously avoided questioning the Freudian-Course party line. Who show a consistent lack of imagination in his interpretation and application of its principles. Most notably a lack of intuition, lest it contaminate his oeuvre with Jungian apostasy.
Guilt is a segment of the big lie perpetrated by Movement’s reverse mirror-image reflection. In addition to a static know-it-all big picture-answer it’s an inter-weaving of conspiracy theories meant to convince its beholder of wrongdoing that then requires a remedy that only the big answer can provide. Wrongdoing by the Child’s Parents, for engineering its self-unawareness and disempowerment. For abandoning it, while the Child stands accused of abandoning them for another reality, for replacing them at its head.
All an occasion for guilt that needs expiation. Through a labyrinth of mind changes between Innocence and guilt, ‘self’ and ‘other’, condemnation, punishment, and ‘forgiveness’. That can only be engineered through religious doctrine: hierarchical and infallible, ‘mystical’ and incomprehensible, deceptive and corrupt. If quantum gravity has found that Reality is not what it seems, the Church has done away with Reality and common sense too. Replacing simple Logic with melodrama, the contemplations of Mind with the ‘action’ of bodies. The appearance of something ‘happening.’ The glorification of the body, the distractions of separation, and its wallowing in sin. An overwrought tale of somebody done somebody wrong: dense with addiction and convoluted with contradiction. A hilarious put-on, wringing its hands. Ridden with guilt.
The Course has taken on this segment of the big lie to put the myth of guilt to rest. A benefit to those whose psychology must deal with guilt and/or psychopathy. Who can’t or won’t look within to put the myth to rest themselves. Which the Course does handsomely by differentiating between Real and unreal with a combination of philosophy and psychology. Metaphysics. While involving itself in the contrivances of religion so that it can expressly undo them. Relieving us of the need to ‘worship’ body in any form, including its mutilation affixed to a cross.
A task that these thoughts don’t attempt to do. Putting guilt in its proper context so that we can focus on the larger situation-in-waiting and the task at hand: of coming up with a paradigm that makes sense. Without getting bogged down in conspiracy theorizing and guilt-ridden hand-wringing. That works simply because it helps and helps because it works.
Projection
The principle that refutes the distressing habit observed by Freud, of ‘projection’. Imagining that unwanted material from within can be gotten rid of by projecting it out. By dumping the self-hatred of guilt, for example, onto others so they can presumably be punished without guilt. The idea that thoughts can be separated from the mind thinking them. Responsible for the hallucination when our metaphysical Self, in a state of psychopathy, imagined that it could get rid of guilt by projecting it onto another reality. Life on Earth.
Resistance
Learning here is by reactionary force of resistance to Movement. Not by Power of Attraction. Incompatibility, not by compatibility. Here ‘compatibility’ means identical personality types coming together to make not-happening happen. Two psychopaths reinforcing psychopathy. Two mindsets driven by fear and suspicion, hidden away inside airlocks of distrust.
Paralysis
Silence in response to questioning from the mirror can project strength. Though what could be behind it is more likely paralysis. The fate of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose self was taken over by his reverse not-self. Whose “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” like Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel”, was the work of its voice. Sounding off for history about ‘supermen’ before reducing its inventor to impotence. Mental and physical paralysis. Anointing Plath a victim of archetypal persecution. The slaughtering of the Jews, before putting her head in a gas oven.
Annihilation
Herd mentality holds that Movement is residue when its winner-take-all ‘triumph’ occupies the field, unopposed for having no more opposition, nothing more ‘happening’, to contend with. Game over. When nothing-happening-game-over at the beginning is mockery of sense. Residue of anti-movement, the way things aren’t and can never be. A Waste Land.
Adam Skywalker’s ‘dark side’? Herd mentality’s conspiracy-theorizing. ‘God’s will’ and ‘His’ big picture paradise, defined not as Movement come to rest in perfect peace but as ‘peace’ denied any movement. As though it were possible for death never to have lived. Rudely, wickedly disturbed by Movement. By a caricature of itself: arrogance. An offense to the Fatherland that can never be forgiven, and so every effort of Movement must be reversed to atone for it. The ultimate explanation for the psychology of reaction. The mindset of the ‘conservative’ and its authoritarian ideology. Reactionary. Regressive. Unhappy with evolution and determined to reverse it. Out to avenge its intrusion by slaying the intruder. Itself. Self-defeating. Self-destructive.
Why couldn’t Movement get things going without weirdness coming along? Then it would be a paradise of paralysis itself, needing no movement. The impossibility of a big picture that needs no movement and can’t change, that’s overseen by an absolute, implies that any other possibility could only be ungovernable chaos. The idea of anything goes. Accusing its host of being itself.
If arrogance prevents disobedience doesn’t that establish order? It’s the reversal of Freedom inseparable from Order, the crazed idea of separation targeting both. ‘Order’ can only be established under the law, not above it, and the same with Freedom. Order and freedom ‘established’ by ‘absolute’ anything is a fallacy. The fallacy of ‘anything goes’ that can deliver freedom and order both when it can deliver neither.
The whim of arbitrary, absolute rule, unbounded even by the limits of Definition, is pretense. Where the ‘law’ is whatever the ruler says it is – no ‘law’ at all. License to ‘rule’ undisciplined by anything other than what the ruler wants. Lawlessness licensed to silence its questioning. ‘Order’ accomplished by force begets force opposed to it, its object. Violence, open-ended and lethal. Movement turned against itself. Nihilism licensed to annihilate. Its ultimate objective. Annihilation.
The know-it-all having no definition of its own means that it has no story of its own with meaning and purpose. So its purpose derives from its host in reverse is lack of support for the purpose of its host. Pointlessness with a raft of talents borrowed, inherited, or stolen = nihilism. Its purpose annihilation. Imagined as towering achievement: burning down the theatre of the absurd. Deserving validation worthy of a reflection-shadow of its own.
Smart
‘Brain’ isn’t an idea that can associate with Mind if its function is to regulate the body. To extract pleasure from it and avoid pain. How can it serve both at the same time – Mind and body – if the idea behind it opposes Mind? How can Consciousness be seated side-by-side with the idea of unconscious – the animal brain? Self-Awareness side-by-side with self-unawareness? Willful predatory animal instinct, the amygdala.
Mind = Person. Body-brain = herd mentality. Mind at the beginning, one Perspective evolving with Movement in the eternal restlessness and Creativity of questioning. Contradicted by the big picture. The madness of one perspective combining all, made possible by the madness of no movement and no questioning. The madness of many body-brains stuck in paralysis, lost to the neverland of make-believe. ‘Smart’.
Siding with hierarchy is siding with arrogance. Not smart that seeks in all things to outsmart the competition. When competition is anathema to an entire phase of human existence. The personal phase. Herd mentality centers on self-interest, not on what the situation calls for. It sizes up situations through myopia – the lens of self-interest. It cuts corners, letting the path of least resistance do the choosing. Whereas smart that’s actually smart is self-aware. It asks why. It seeks and accepts logical explanations with help from Guuidance. It strives to understand the nature of things for good reason. So that it can align with it. Rather than be marginalized or crushed by its own willfulness.
The object of the performer and performance is to move the audience. Storytelling with provocative plots involving injustice-wrongdoing can be expected to arouse feelings, romances, and tragedies too, using make-believe to accomplish in appearance-facsimile what genuine events-feelings accomplish through Creativity. The purpose of competition-combat is to simulate movement-happening. Rule with herd mentality is always self-defeat. Lured by ‘winning’. ‘Pleasure’ for the entertainer is setting fire to the theatre. Dumb!
Ad infinitum
- The idea of ‘situation’, because no matter what was present at the beginning or if nothing was present it was a situation.
- ‘Order’ if everything was nice and tidy.
- ‘Chaos’ if formative ideas were more likely a mix of incompatibilities and contradictions.
- ‘Happenings’ that tell a ‘story’ through a ‘sequence’ of situations.
- ‘Unsolvability’ expressed in the idea of ‘fraction’.
- ‘Restlessness’ to which Movement, all its forms and all its situations, owe their existence. Including its hallucination through make-believe: the embodiments of ideas through ‘life on Earth’.
- ‘Evolution’ moving forward with meaning toward purpose – the idea of ‘progress’.
- ‘Meaning’ if the situation was about something. Chaos calling for Order.
- ‘Growth’ or ‘maturation’ if ideas ‘live’ and acquire the capacity to join in ‘Relationship’. Then to form new ideas and new lives, new relationships and new ‘selves’, with the capacity to join in the interrelationships of ‘Creation’. Herd mentality doesn’t recognize networks of friendships, only alliances.
- ‘Thought’. The ‘thinking’ of ideas by Mind Self-Aware and functioning.
- ‘Affect’, the ‘feeling’ of ideas. The dramatics of Joyfulness in song. ‘Music’. Inspiration for Creation derived from the idea of ‘muse’. Of ‘harmony’ through the phrasing and progressions, the relationships and sequence, of chords.
- ‘Perspective’ essential to ‘inclusion’ and its constituents: ‘context’, ‘framework’, and ‘system’. The idea of the whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. The meaning of all the stories of all the situations in progress expressed by all the functions of Movement.
- ‘Awareness’ sharing, expressing, and actuating itself through ‘Energy’. The Force of Attraction between Love-Spontaneity and Logic-Order that brought Mind to its Awareness of Self without the need for ‘mirror’. Without ‘will’ projecting the image of ‘other’ from within mirror.
- ‘Cause’ translating itself into ‘effect’ through the idea of ‘Creation’.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
7. The Performer
The answer to “What’s the answer?” is “What’s the question?”
The question is “What is our situation?”
The answer to “What is our situation?” is whatever Mind
Employing differentiation with empathy can make of it.
What Conscience can make of it.
Character with Integrity. Free Choice.
Independent judgment aided by Guidance.
That knows what it’s doing
Because Sapiens unaided doesn’t know.
Then go from there and hope something good comes of it.
That evolution moves forward instead of backward.
Aware at least that if you have no big answer
Then what you’re left with is question.
The stuff of fascination
Moi? Fascinating? Yes. Without wearing a blonde wig and stilettos. Can that even be possible? Possible even without false eyelashes, mascara, and fingernail attachments, the most dysfunctional accessories ever invented. I’ve tried to imagine myself shopping for groceries or pumping gas all faked-up so my eyes look gorgeous and my fingers so pretty but I can’t see or use my hands. How do girls manage? If I explained you wouldn’t think I’m fascinating and that’s all that matters. So, when I’m done with my costume change we’ll just have to move on. What? Putting on my blonde wig and stilettos. How do I look?
If I left you on top of the monkey bars in that getup you’d need another helicopter to get you home. Poor boy. You try so hard to be rational. Give it up! I don’t wanna and you can’t make me. So there! I can if you want to stay in my retinue. No! Don’t expel me! I’ll do anything. I’ll. . . That’s better. You do understand after all. Great performers like me need an audience to appreciate them and their art. When I was done performing on the monkey bars and you were done appreciating, what happened next? Uh, hmmm. I walked back to the pool in regal solitude. I left you to straighten out the monkey bars and remove the cigarette butts for the next act.
“Birth of the One-and-Only-Dude.” You got it! On her way to a career in the art of self-invention. Of fencing my audience in so they can’t fence me in. Ah! So that’s how it works. Reserve seats for your retinue in the front row where you can keep an eye on them. Ply their emotions with hints of grandeur to come. For them to share, then vanish offstage and reappear in another act. Radiating more Olympian mythology, the stuff of dreams. Yes. The stuff of fascination.
What really matters – the show
Entertainment. Moi, an entertainer? It’s sure in your blood. Everyone’s to an extent since we’re not only playing off of one another we’re playing to one another. Always an implicit point to the act: “How am I doing? Do you like my act?” Beholder on stage questioning audience, its mirror and beholder. A closed-loop of self-regard, insulation for unawareness with another purpose: search for Self. For Awareness. Just tell me what you like. We can talk about awareness another time.
Entertain: 1. To hold the attention of (someone) with something amusing or diverting. . . . Entertain often implies a pleasure actively pursued by the imagination or through play. . . . children entertaining themselves with games and puppets. It also refers to the enjoyment derived from artistic performance. [American Heritage Dictionary]
Similar words: . . . distraction, diversion. [from Oxford Languages]
Why the definition? Don’t we already know what it means? What anything ‘means’ is one of those things that doesn’t stop at one answer. Like words and whole situations. Situations as simple as finding ourselves loaded up with groceries at the checkout counter and we forgot to bring money. Or as complicated as economic conditions around the world that can’t be understood in isolation. It can get philosophical. It can require an understanding of human psychology. Science and theology too since all these fields are ultimately looking for meaning. A lot of work to come up with good answers and who’s got the time? Who cares that much, and so time marches on, on crutches. On half-baked answers and misunderstanding until conditions deteriorate and it’s clear we have to do better.
Like now? Like now. The situation our species faces that doesn’t take rocket science to understand that it’s in trouble. With all its environments – physical, social, economic, and moral. Moral? However we address our tasks shows our mettle. Our character – what we’re made of, as individuals and as groups. Who we are. Who are we then, that we keep bringing ourselves to the brink? By trying to fail at our mission while we’re supposedly trying hard to succeed? We think of ourselves as good, well-intentioned. So why is bad so prevalent in our nature? Doesn’t this call for understanding? For getting at meaning? If we’re living a story and we can’t get at the meaning of it, where’s the story?
Time for some light reading at the beach where we can nod off and it won’t matter. The antidote. Give me a dose of that and the show can go on. What really matters – the show. Well, it does, doesn’t it?
Thankfulness — the ultimate in adaptation
Mata maintained her aura of intrigue by waving off anything that would break the spell. Other perspectives, worse than turning up the house lights when the whole idea is to draw the audience into virtual reality. Into the ultimate in entertainment: where the line between real and made-up no longer exists. Where ‘real’ is make-believe.
You like my act? Definitely! There’s serious intent to get it right. With more than a touch of Mata Hari’s intrigue, for good or for ill too early to tell. Good reason to remind ourselves not to repeat her mistake. Walling ourselves off from other perspectives. Shutting them down or by making ourselves unable to hear them by an act of will. Think ostrich, with its head buried in the sand. Getting in our own way. Conflicted? I can’t say. Part of us does want to listen so we can learn and grow into our chosen fields. Into our character, but there’s the other part, and we never want to lose track of it.
The nourishment that relationships require can’t be taken when one or both their partners are feeding through airlocks. They have to be accessible. The process must be two-way, and willing ourselves out of the loop can’t help. No matter how effective it is as an entertainment device, insulating performer and performance from audience intrusion. The model of performance art cum appreciative audience works for entertainment, but relationships can’t be limited to entertainment.
They’re especially not games. If they are there’s a risk they’ll wither and die. Leaving us on our own, feeling emotionally abandoned. Dependent on warmth from a fireplace or Christmas tree lights, from the family pet or music and laughter from the radio, instead of the touch of a human. From a real, life Person who’s being there for us.
An opportunity, to learn at an early age a lesson that an ambiguous world must teach. The necessity and wisdom of adapting. Awareness that the name of the game isn’t always having what we want. Always winning, but adapting. By making good use of the hand we were dealt. Understanding that being dealt a hand at all is a gift to be thankful for. Thankfulness – the ultimate in adaptation. Role-modeled by our metaphysical Parents at the beginning, who couldn’t have been sure they’d be granted Life themselves if it couldn’t be willed. If it couldn’t be magic.
Undeniably
A wounded Psyche can deal with its wound by running away from wound and cause both into another reality. Into denial that accomplishes nothing. Or by learning from its wound how to heal itself and help with others. By adapting. There’s always a risk that resistance will prove stronger than love and loyalty. But the gift of parents is to be thankful for, not despite their imperfections but because of them. Where would Creation be without imperfection? Without relatability?
The flip side big picture offers the absurdity of the one-and-only ‘way’ and another absurdity. The false way out of difficulty by denial. Denial of Mind that Creates, adapts, and produces. Denial of its Reality, that it couldn’t act until Love and Logic together enabled and empowered it to act. Spontaneously, beyond its power to will it. When all that flip side make-believe needs is to will it. With a flip of the switch. Magic!
There’s a risk that resistance will find satisfaction in denial. In the magic of make-believe. That we will follow the example of herd mentality that cannot, and will not, adapt. When it’s found what it craves in the false power of denial. In invincibility, the stuff of cartoons. One-dimensional and one-sided. Family lost to grandparents at their beginning, at their children’s beginning, and the possibility of their grandchildren’s.
You love me after all
If I’m an imaginary imp then I must be the stuff of cartoons and you must be the cartoonist. Guilty as charged. You’re my entertainment while I tend to the uninteresting business of figuring stuff out. Lost in thoughts backstage with my muse. I’ve made you into a Vaudeville staple, the flip side of a lake sprite. Lake sprite? Curious, thoughtful, and playful. Whose reverse side is a misbehaving brat. An amused and amusing imp.
All I’m good for then. Laughs. Finding satisfaction in the magic of make-believe. Following the example of herd mentality, finding what I crave in invincibility. Carrying on the tradition of humans lost to family because they’re lost to relatability. A writer’s contrivance only. A fiction that happens to be the lead role in the theatre of the absurd. Life on Earth, where character-building Free Choice must learn to distinguish between who’s for Real and who’s not.
My feelings are hurt. You don’t care? Then you would be speaking for someone who’s for Real. A Person precious and adorable, whose lake sprite has been my inspiration for its reverse. The example of feeling whose opposite is the cartoon character without feeling. Then it should be a comfort to know that between me and the sprite there have been many moments of feeling. Spontaneous harmony and intimacy that only Trust can orchestrate. The simplicity and innocence of Honesty. Not the fiction of make-believe but plain fact. That someone for Real has bought into as passionately as I have. Undeniably.
You love me after all. The Real you and your imaginary imp both. Because they’re the same Self. We love each other. But I can think of another reason why your feelings needn’t be hurt.
When the imp draws a laugh
The situation-in-waiting at the beginning was ideas plus Mind inchoate. That when it became choate sorted things out, between Real ideas, definitive and orderly, and their flip sides that were a mess. Lacking definition: the reverse of order. The word for the mess was the idea Cole Porter immortalized in “Anything Goes.” The song and Broadway hit. The flip side of the flip side. The phony big picture. The proposition that, well, if the know-it-all can’t have its big answer to rule then its nasty persecutors can see how they like anything goes. The reverse of the big answer.
Anything goes — heaven! An imp would think so. But there’s no more truth to anything goes than there is to the big picture and its make-believe know-it-all. Life on Earth sure seems like it. Neither idea makes sense — big picture or anything goes – when Reality is Creation and everything that goes into it. All making sense for being under the law and evolving in logical sequence. Instead of the absurdity of ‘lawfulness’ being above the law and illogical. Cart-before-the-horse ‘anything goes’. To be dismissed for what they are: half-baked ideas. Derivatives of ideas that do have definitions That do have meaning and purpose, attributes of Reality and Creation singularly absent in their cartoonish reverse-reflections.
In the absence of a big answer, in the presence of restlessness, ideas from Movement on must be accompanied by their implied self-questioning. THERE IS NO BIG ANSWER. A state of anything goes is NUTS. If all of Mind is ideas, all of Creation must be questioning. If Definition is Order, then it can’t be anything goes. Creation is perspective with limits. With structure set by the process that produced it. These are ideas. And none of them involves judgment or condemnation, conspiracy-theorizing or any other kind of wickedness. Certainly anything in the nature of guilt, that would require forgiveness. Your imp isn’t meant as a rebuke to your sprite. It’s meant as a mockery of an absurdity: that there’s any truth to the flip side of Good that’s evil. The questioning-of-questioning. The ‘dark side’. IT’S ALL MAKE-BELIEVE. A joke. And when the imp draws a laugh, this is the joke.
Takes one to know one
And yet another reason why your feelings needn’t be hurt. Given that life on Earth is a mass of contradictions and distractions, provocations and manipulations. A fortress of denial. A labyrinth of reversals, all dedicated to thwarting perception that gets it right so that herd mentality can get away with murder, what the situation calls for is re-reversing the reversals. And who better to stand up to them than a contrarian? The lake sprite whose flip side with attitude wills itself into the opposite direction no matter how big the ape confronting it. No matter how persuasive the case presented to it. I take guff from nobody. Obviously!
The Real you doesn’t take guff either. You’re not reversal’s contrarian. You’re re-reversal’s contrarian. There’s a difference? There is, and there’s evidence that you’re on the right side of it. Not given to ingratiation. To dishonesty and prevarication. Difficult yourself. A quick study with rules that you’d prefer to write yourself. But not so ready to cozy up to the wrong kind of difficulty in others. Make believe meant for distraction. For connivance and deception. Not your style. Yours is meant to take a stand. For Character. Don’t fence me in. Yes. Do not put me in a cage! The contrarian that I’ve always been. Takes one to know one. Exactly! Neither of us ever meant to be in a cage or wanting anything to do with them.
Naturally
Our lineage goes beyond earthly all the way back to the original model. To the prime mover and primal source. The original Parents and their flip side. That made its debut onto the stage when the Parents’ Child, the function Free Choice, underwent training under an anesthetic. That permitted the flip side’s dark side to also take the stage. The ‘anesthetic’ was the requirement intrinsic to the definition of Free Choice: that it choose its function, learn and earn it from the bottom up.
The know-it-all and Mind are two different models of Learning and Growth. Of maturation. The flip side is all-at-once on demand. The know-it-all’s ‘context’ a prefabricated not-self. A caricature. Once and done, no assembly required. Easy! While its host is evolution one step at a time. In orderly sequence, following the implications of ideas guided by Conscience. By feeling, values, and intuition. Seeking and recognizing relationships until the whole system of interrelationships assembles itself. Into the idea critical to our task, of ‘situation’ or ‘context’.
The call for Understanding that can’t be definitive without Free Choice. Character and Integrity built one choice at a time, from the ground up. Not always easy but naturally. Aligned with the nature of things the way they really are.
The Mind behind Movement can be our role model for adapting when “having our way” isn’t possible. When having it is wrong, posed by its flip side, a make-believe ‘paradise’ that’s the ‘way’ – its way. A demand for obedience. Instead of an offer of help adapting to situations that require it when our minds can’t grasp everything involved. When we lack perspective. Adapting to situations that become manageable when we seek and accept help from Guidance. From Mind that does have the perspective. From Awareness.
Happening or not happening?
Is it upsetting if our perspectives differ on whether the Mind behind all this movement, all this interconnecting and interrelating, is accessible and relatable? Loving and thoughtful, being here for us. Humble with its own limited perspective. Having to adapt as we do, to the way things are that can’t be perfect in the absence of the all-knowable. In the presence of continuous Movement and the need and the opportunity it presents for continuous improvement. For Growth that learns to adapt. For activity with Meaning and Purpose.
Instead of inactivity, a condition whose only ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ is an excuse for self-indulgence. The absurd ‘ideal’ of everything done and no more to do. Propagated by not-mind. Predatory animal instinct that’s arrogant and willful, remote and inscrutable. Not being here for us but for sure being there for itself. In its own tidy little world of make-believe. Inaccessible and unrelatable.
To be reminded that I’m admired, appreciated, and loved isn’t upsetting. Through thoughts, feelings, and gifts, That there’s enough strength for a lifetime in my Worth if I go about developing it in the right way. Thoughtfully. Sensitively. Learning and earning character with integrity instead of waiting for life’s blessings to fall in my lap. Adapting to the way things are once I’ve questioned it. Making myself useful instead of demanding that things be useful to me. It’s reassuring, and I’m thankful for it.
When our dreams die we give in. “It’s not happening.” Will your life story come to happening or not happening? My best friend over the past six years has been the son who didn’t make it in this life. Making it now, being there for me. At my side, help with making my dreams happen. I could be there for you someday if I get the call. I would like that.
