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Published on Leave a comment on Why Brain Can Never Be Mind’s Friend

Excerpt from draft of forthcoming post with working title “What We Owe to Self-Awareness and the Price We Pay for Avoiding It

Unscientific science and the “new normal”

Science leans into deeply challenging questions like quantum gravity, Einstein’s and physics’ holy grail, with remarkable persistence and ingenuity. It leans the other way when challenged by questions no less important. Its “quest for knowledge” is hobbled with irrationality. Launched with bias, subjectivity rather than objectivity, that inevitably blinds it to the explanation and understanding it seeks while deepening our world’s mysteries. The assumption that there can be no reality other than that detected by body-brains’ five senses: taste, touch, smell, hearing, and vision.

Irrational because the reality detected belongs to the same environment, the same system, as its detector. Rejecting any perspective that’s outside the system means science’s “reality” is verifying itself. Self-referential, like a case that’s made by citing itself. Circular “reasoning.” Blatantly illogical yet hidden behind business-as-usual, humanity’s stock response to anything that contradicts the status quo. The ”new normal.”

What's to be learned from the brain in the jar?

Nuttiness with a purpose, to hobble any progress where it’s most needed: toward self-awareness. Toward solving the mysteries of Consciousness with definition that makes sense so that its story can be told without science’s misguided bias. Bias that  prevents neuroscience from an honest treatment of the difference between “Mind” and “brain.” Concepts that it uses interchangeably even though they’re literally worlds-realities apart. Even though Mind that’s real can know nothing of the body-brain that’s not real. Even though brain’s purpose is an impossibility: to replace Mind. To be its substitute in another “reality” that’s substitutes for Reality. To oppose Mind as though it were its enemy.

Which, to the shadow-opposite of a deluded, unconscious Mind, it is. Because within Mind is the truth about the body-brain and the world it senses, that both are logical impossibilities. That neither is real.

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) cites many discoveries that relied on spontaneous insights from Intuition. That more often arrived in the shower than in the laboratory, yet there was no more attempt to explain this phenomenon than there was to explain how Einstein’s mind worked beyond preserving his brain in a jar.

An offer that could not be refused

Neuroscientists like Christof Koch insist that Consciousness is seated in the brain based on nothing more than interesting patterns of electrical impulses.  As though brain matter holds the secrets of Mind rather than Mind itself. Science’s defense of its irrational bias in favor of matter over Mind knows no limits.

What’s going on? The one Mind that we all share seemed to lose the attributes of Self when it lost consciousness. Its shadow-opposite that it mistakenly took to be an “other,” a reverse mirror-image of itself, made an offer that desperate Mind could not refuse. To conjure an alternate reality that replaced Self’s attributes with substitutes. That redefined Mind with the only attributes its shadow-opposite could offer: its own. A lifeless, mindless, loveless code that’s the reverse of the attributes that define its host.

Objectivity, Logic, and Truth: no match for professional bias

The result was an alternate reality. Competition among incompatible tribes composed of incompatible personalities, misguided by split minds thinking incompatible thoughts. The flowering of contradictions and disconnections that is our world, hospitable to “life” that came about through a series of accidents and mistakes. Breeding ground for misperceptions and misjudgments responsible for injustice, cruelty, savagery, and depravity, fear, hatred, guilt, and betrayal. Resentments and grievances. Selfishness.

What else can be expected from a world that’s entirely composed of substitutes? Substitutes for body and brain, Self and Mind. Opposites that by definition serve opposing authorities:

  • Egalitarian Logic-Love that governs with sensitivity-feeling for all creations from the bottom up vs.
  • Authoritarian-hierarchical animal instinct that rules insensitively with feeling for itself only from the top down.

Opposites that serve opposite purposes: Creation vs. competition. And opposite values:

  • peace-order vs. war-disorder
  • Creativity / Growth vs. immobility / paralysis
  • Free Choice / independent judgment vs. conformity / obedience
  • Innocence vs. Guilt: the interconnected Oneness of Reality-Creation, of Soul and Psyche-Innocence without opposites, vs. the separation-disconnection of opposites having neither Soul nor Innocence.

The discrepancies that set Mind and brain apart should be obvious. Yet they elude the persistence and ingenuity of science’s quest for knowledge. Science’s unbreakable alliance with body-brain and its five senses compels it to look the other way. To avoid objectivity rather than embrace it and risk losing prestige and funding to professional bias. All for an irrational fear of a precious gift: Intuition’s sixth sense.

What’s going on?

A Course in Miracles and its implications for personality type theory make the discrepancies obvious. Lesson 45 states that “God is the mind with which I [we] think. My real thoughts are in my mind. I [we] would like to find them.” The thoughts of uncorrupted Mind are real. The thoughts of the one Mind that was split – of its projections’ corrupted minds -- are not real. The same must be true of body-brains, the projections of a corrupted mind.

Traits identified by Jung / Myers-Briggs are either Mind-centered or body-brain-centered.

  • Mind is represented by Introversion, Intuition, Thinking-evaluating, and Judging-understanding (INTJ)
  • Body is represented by Extraversion, Sensing, Feeling (action-Instinct), and Perception (non-judging-understanding, specialness, victimhood (ESFP) [my descriptors in italics]*

By differentiating between mind- and body-centered personality types the theory takes the first step toward understanding the relationship between Mind and body-brain and the friction it causes between basic types. Friction rooted in psychodynamics explained by the Course when one Mind corrupted itself with the madness of its shadow-opposite, split in two, and turned against itself.

What’s going on is more than our planet’s astonishing diversity. More than tension between animal appetites and discipline – the ways we’re used to rationalizing the discrepancy. It’s Mind’s willing itself to be replaced by an impossibility, the illusion that is body-brain.

The Five-Factor personality type theory attempts to reverse the first step by not recognizing the distinction between Mind and brain, by eliminating the sixth sense of Mind-centered Intuition, and by recognizing only personality traits that are body-brain centered. Ostensibly so that Jung / Myers-Briggs will have a more “scientific” alternative when science’s actual intent is to discredit and replace it. To eliminate the threat to its body-centered bias.

The triumph of un-self-awareness

Body-brains are for forming tribes because tribes composed of many body-brains contradict the indivisibility of one Mind and thus define a substitute opposite self to replace it. Brains (prefrontal cortex) are for socializing that enforces conformity within tribes and for fighting among tribes (animal brain / amygdala).

The ESF personality type – ESFJs as well as ESFPs – are thus attracted to games of competition and to socializing. Activities that affirm their sense of self in a self-made alternate reality of externals. Functions of Mind centered on internals can’t do this for them, and they’re a threat to alternate reality besides.

ESFs characteristically exhibit indifference or hostility to functions of Mind:

  • Curiosity, learning, openness to other perspectives, maturation-growth
  • Introspection, self-awareness, self-evaluation-improvement
  • Intuition, Logic-Love explanation, reflection
  • Reasoning, evaluating, choosing
  • Interpersonal intimacy, empathy, feeling, sensitivity
  • Judging-understanding, self-discipline.

All because Mind’s functions get in the way of the brain’s ultimate goal: the triumph not of deliberative self-awareness but of un-deliberative un-self-awareness. Shadow-opposite’s perversion of the Force and Worth of Mind’s Creation: the triumph of animal will over opposites. The beast atop the Empire State building claiming supremacy over its domain. Absolute authority. A machine engineered to make war not Love.

The mind of an ESF tribal-realist

The mind of an ESF is the brain of the tribal-realist. ESF tribal-realists are good with some questions required by analysis but poor with others. The what, where, and when of things attracts them because of the objective of shadow-opposite: to project guilt onto its competitor-opponents for its supposed victimization so that it can justify retribution. And ultimately justify replacing its host which would eliminate all the competition. Mastery of what-when-where specifics – immediate, concrete facts – adds to the weight of guilt and to the play-act of wounded righteousness, thereby placing justification beyond dispute.

Competence of one kind can also mask incompetence of another. The pose of rational thinking hides gaps in Logic better suited for slapstick humor than serious discussion. ESF tribal-realists are repelled by the why and how of things. By the heart of analysis that enables choices based on reasoning and judgments based on Logic. That enables comity and cooperation based on understanding.

Mind that’s home to Logic-Love excels at judging used for understanding that affirms Worth and Innocence. Brain that’s home to predatory animal instinct excels at the opposite: judgment used to condemn worthlessness and guilt -- the unthinking animal instinct for retribution. For laying waste to anything that might limit its taking and doing, possessing and controlling, whatever it wants. The prerogative of absolute authority: reducing Worth to worthlessness. A perversion of rational thought. A joke.

“Innocence” that thrives on guilt

Like the "lost cause” that romanticized the defense of slavery “victimhood” that entitles mindless animal will to sympathy for its savagery instead of accountability is an obscenity. Shadow-opposite’s claim that it has been treated unfairly. Buried in unconscious Mind’s wounded Psyche and in ours is the grievance that impossibility deserves to be Real no less than Possibility. That the laws of cause and effect that are supposed to govern fairly through Logic-Love did not do so when they denied opposites equal status with their hosts in Reality.

Proof that the system is rigged. An injustice that demands retaliation. The cry for retribution that reverberates throughout history, from the violence of two world wars to the threat of nuclear annihilation. That’s splitting societies in two today, fueling grievances and resentments with anger and hatred, goading the “innocence of victimhood” toward civil war.

Opposites that thrive on contradiction

Why aren’t shadow-opposites deserving of equal status in Reality? What explains this injustice?

Mind aligned with the laws of cause and effect and true to itself – Logic-Love – acted in accordance with the sequence of its implications and relationships. Sequence that logically starts with Mind, the original circumstance – timeless Being – and proceeds with the implications of Logic and the reciprocal relationships of Love wherever they lead. The wellsprings of Creation and the Force that powers it.

The sequence of Creation that begins with the thought / feeling-value of Possibility. With the idea of Worth. That could not begin with impossibility. With an opposite that by definition is reactive not active, derived not original. A parasite that depends for its perversion of Logic-Love on the pre-existence and Reality of its host. But because it’s an opposite that by definition conflicts with its host it can’t be allowed to share the same status. To let Reality-Sense be defined as self-contradictory nonsense.

The rigger

The case for shadow-opposite’s victimization and all that it implies – license to break the rules rigged against it and persecute others at will – is based on nonsense. The idea that something originates with nothing. That nothingness can initiate anything and therefore shares the same defining attributes as something,. It’s an appeal to remain in its shadowland of opposites where acceptance into Reality is the lost cause and self-pity sets the tone. Into Plato’s Cave, a gruesome mockery of paradise, self-awareness, and togetherness.

In an alternate reality where anything goes any system can be rigged. But what the politics of grievance and division makes clear is that shadow-opposite's fraudulent pose of absolute authority in the fraudulent pose of victimhood is the rigger. Aglow with the innocence of victimhood, the mother-lode of opposites ripe for persecution. Shadow-opposite’s perversion of the Innocence of Soul-Oneness. Life-self that by definition can have no opposites. That interconnects Everything including Mind’s Reality-Creation and its Free Choice offspring. Whether conscious or unconscious and dreaming, because the Innocence of Soul-Oneness that has no opposites knows no boundaries.

Demon intellect

ESF tribal-realists may want to get it right so they at least appear to be doing what’s right. By continuing to get it wrong, only now with more emphasis on who-what-when-where while still avoiding the why and how. As if they’re oblivious to internals that analysis relies on to decipher meaning beyond appearances. As if they’ve willed themselves to avoid meaning so they won’t get it right. Because they’re only allowed by shadow-opposite’s code to recognize externals. To make appearances real instead of Truth that lies within. To attribute Reality to what isn’t real.

Either way, thinking that dispenses with why and how is more than a distaste for philosophy, psychology, and theology. More than disregard for science and pious grandstanding against “elites.” It’s a visceral fear of intellect. The capacity of Mind to welcome guidance and use its intelligence to learn, grow, and achieve. To get it right. Depriving analysis of why and how by demonizing intellect is a blunder that betrays a stunning lack of self-awareness, and maybe this is its purpose. For nothing would doom the machinations of self-delusion with more finality than intellect and self-awareness. The nemesis of reverse mirror-image and its nether world of reflections.

The trick

Governance that fits things together in order and harmony isn’t possible without Logic-Love’s understanding why and how they fit together in Reality and Truth. Creativity in peace is its concern. ESF tribal-realists will hammer away at the what-when-where of “facts” to make of alternate reality a “fact.” Making what is unreal appear real is their concern. For perpetuating misunderstanding based on unreality and untruth that darkens. But they won’t go near the why and how of understanding that enlightens.

Their dance with animal instinct is one part attraction and one part avoidance. Attraction to “action,” the risking of life and worth that is incessant competition. Games of chance among addicts at casinos that never close. Avoidance of thought that exposes the Truth: that the beast and its authority are made up. That Plato’s Cave and its shadow-master are the invention of its self-deluded occupants. No more real than a trick-or-treat costume. A trick that in time will be exposed when ESF tribal-realists let go of their fear of why and how.

Gateway to the Forbidden City

The foregoing is prologue for the subject of this essay. The faculty of Mind that more than any other sets Mind-centered personality type INTJ apart from the body-centered ESFP and its near-relative ESFJ. The ‘N’ in INTJ which represents Intuition, the portal to sixth sense. Condemned by body-sensing, its personality opposite, as the gateway to the Forbidden City of religious and “spiritual” psycho-quackology, of obsessions and passions of madness not grounded in “reality.”

Without the orderly governance of Logic-Love the magical world of appearances conjured by the magician -- split Mind captive to its shadow-opposite -- has no guiding intelligence. Only the laws of chaos and an overseer committed to maintaining appearances: the five senses of body-brains. The enforcer of conformity with fact and conventional wisdom. The holy ring that must be kissed.

We got here first!

What could penetrate such a defense other than another sense that sees through it? What could rattle a façade more than a voice from another world that isn’t made up?

The flashpoint between mind-centered authenticity and the body-centered reverse mirror-image that would replace it is the one faculty capable of preventing it: Intuition. No faculty is more offensive to split Mind’s projection, the five-sensed body-brain, than the faculty that would friend a sixth sense. The affront to all that is holy in the magic kingdom of appearances and its divine projector, sensory perception.

If impossibility had to be placed in the nether world of dreams where it couldn’t contradict Possibility which preceded it, sixth sense is just as deserving of being denied equal status with the five senses of appearances which preceded it. Sixth sense can only be a fraud, an interloper in alternate reality that must be expelled.

Such is the “logic” behind alternate reality’s “reality”: sensory perception was here first! Such was intuition’s welcome into the world of sensory perception: an indictment of injustice and a manifesto of retribution. A declaration of war. Such is the foundation upon which INTJs and ESFs are expected to make peace.

Excitement in Heaven

Intuition implies access to another perspective that lies outside the limits of body-brains. To another Consciousness whose spontaneous gifts of insights imply the existence of Mind beyond brain. Mind not of this world but accessible through an agent of Soul that knows no boundaries. An intermediary with a voice we can hear that can be understood. With a mission: to guide our halting efforts to make sense of our circumstances and to choose wisely how to deal with them. So that we eventually awaken to the truth of Mind and where its guidance comes from. By awakening to the truth of who we are and where we come from.

Self-awareness. Restored with guidance from Logic-Love logically in sequence. One implication at a time, one reciprocal relationship at a time. Because this is how Creation moves forward, propelled by the ever-expanding implications of Logic / knowledge-learning and the ever-expanding relationships of Love / abundance-sharing. By the force of Necessity that is the laws of cause and effect. Unlike the caricature of Heaven made up of haloed angels idling over clouds, plucking harps, while a bearded old guy decides who gets admitted to this paradise of eternal perfection. Of eternal boredom where all is being and there’s no doing.

“Almighty God:” Tribal-realism's role model

By fabricating alternate reality without Logic and Love, unconscious Mind’s shadow opposite deprived it of the Energy-Force that Creation needs to move forward. In its place it substituted a deception, the appearance of directed movement associated with a parody of action. The agitation of bodies-brains coping with incompatibilities among personalities, authorities, and values. Taking out their frustrations on one another in constant competition and combat. Resulting in destruction rather than Creation, regression rather than progression.

A process without a product that can only repeat itself because, being mindless and loveless, it has no originality. No force, Logic, or ideal to move it forward. Only yearning for an impossibility: absolute power and absolute freedom. The attributes of a god promised to a self-deluded Mind by its shadow-opposite. An “almighty god” that rules arbitrarily, cruelly, by animal instinct --the denial of Mind. The insanity of shadow-opposite welcomed into its host, unconscious Mind.

Who needs a Guide?

Where Mind transforms its contamination into another impossibility: the projection that magically separates thought from its source. The dream overrun by shadow-opposites posing as bodies-brains, their ephemeral likenesses hallucinated by a split mind. Dominated by tribal-realists, their Free Will forfeited to the supremacy of “action.” Taken in by the illusion, fearful of its undoing and so committed to making it real.

In such a “reality” where anything goes and, when it does, it’s accepted as the “new normal;” where split minds embrace conflicting thoughts; and where entropy and the laws of chaos upheld by tribal-realists reduce progress to a dog chasing its tail, supremacy-dominance is a will-o’-the-wisp and survival may be too. Guidance from a trustworthy source is essential, that speaks with authority for sanity and benevolence. For hope that’s constantly under attack.

The Necessity of relationship

Searching for Guidance in temporal externals, in ways that glorify groups and crush individuals – physical symbols, body-brain adornments and rituals, tribal mythology, mass ideological “movements,” – is searching where it can’t be found. Imagining that:

  • a better understanding of matter can tell Mind what to think
  • guidance can only come from organizations captive to Machiavellian tribal values and to their donors
  • authority owes its influence to symbols of legitimacy, wealth, and power – to form rather than content, appearances rather than Truth
  • guidance from organizations that’s authoritative and trustworthy can and must be beyond question -- “infallible.”

When all the guidance and authority that’s possible comes from one authentic source: Logic bonded with Love. Wisdom that defines, sustains, and governs Reality-Creation. The Parents of Mind Free Choice who will restore it to consciousness and its role in Reality-Creation when it regains Free Choice, changes with self-awareness, and becomes recognizable to its Parents.

Undoing its self-delusion -- the reversal of Reality-Truth that is the dream, the shadowland of opposites that is Plato’s Cave, the fortress of denial set against self-awareness -- is impossible if undertaken alone. Because guidance from wisdom requires relationship with Guide. And because “alone” means separation, the state of mind represented by shadow-opposite coded to dismantle the interconnectedness of Reality-Creation.

When listening to sixth sense takes daring

Six years ago the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli appealed to philosophy for help reconciling quantum mechanics and cosmic relativity-gravity. Physics’ quest for quantum gravity that might rationalize the universe of spacetime-matter. [Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (2017)]. He could have gotten his answer by now and the world has been enlightened. But it’s not likely if both mainstream physics and philosophy continue to tell Mind what to think instead of listening.

Insights that give voice to something worth listening to come spontaneously. They aren’t room service. They respond to minds whose own voices aren’t getting in the way. The difference is letting Mind lead with insights from Logic-Love instead of leading it with pre-judgments. With bias that forecloses guidance. By denying any need for Guide, any possibility of friendship with it, and any possibility that its voice will be heard.

Biases hard-wired into personalities, aspirations, and appetites dominate everyday behavior, but they’re out of place when insight into larger forces that influence everyday behavior is needed. It can’t respond to a set of pre-conditions. It can respond to relationship between Guide and individual that’s unconditional. To Logic-Love that’s unconditional. Physics that strait-jackets its Guide with personal and professional pre-judgments betrays the willfulness of immaturity. Of infantile self-absorption that blocks explanation and understanding because it refuses to listen. Because it dares not listen to any voice but its own.

Discoveries without meaning

The voice of “scientific” thought that speaks against Logic-Love instead of with it ensures that Rovelli’s appeal for help won’t get the response his profession needs. In distancing itself from both Guide and guidance physics is only doing what body-brain is coded by shadow-opposite to do: to shield the five senses of body-brain from contamination by Mind’s sixth sense. And to replace Mind with itself. With a coded instruction, lifeless, mindless, and loveless, that assigns the role of Guide to itself. An absurdity because a parasite that gets rid of its host gets rid of itself.

A perversion of authority that rules arbitrarily from the top down and has no patience with voices beneath it. A perversion of responsibility that excuses itself from accountability. A one-dimensional character lifted from an action-hero cartoon. A joke that claims, like Hawking, that “philosophy is dead.” When philosophy’s metaphysics may hold the guidance, the explanation, that physics seeks.

What hope is there for such “thinking?” That rejects objectivity in favor of bias? That intentionally denies itself the vision of Logic-Love. That contributes to self-awareness in spite of itself, with discoveries that un-self-awareness can’t understand.

Avatars and supermen

The personality type that can most readily be identified with Guidance-rejecting tribal-realism is the very body-centered ESFP. ESFP tribal-realists clinging to body despise Mind’s intuition because they fear losing the avatar that replaced real senses crippled by unconsciousness with the appearance of functioning body senses. Tribal-realists so attached to their avatars – substitute selves outfitted with sensory perception – that they prefer existence in an alternate reality. Even if its “reality” is a joke that makes no sense.

One Mind’s loss of power shut down self-awareness enabled-empowered with real vision and hearing, taste, touch-connection, and smell capable of experiencing all the ways that the joy and beauty of Life-Worth Creation express themselves. The fanatical attachment of tribal-realists to body-brains and craving for power, the appearance of strength, are explained by the loss of Energy that rendered one Mind powerless. The memory of humiliation that accounts for Nietzsche’s contribution to the dream: man deified as superman motivated solely by lust for power.

Shadow-opposite’s promise of another reality that one Mind could make real on its own terms was accepted even though it was literally too good to be true.  An imaginary-unreal life-existence was better than being disabled, powerless, and lost in the shadowland of opposites. Hell so unbearable that the self-delusion of Plato’s Cave is Heaven by comparison.

The ultimate defense against self-awareness

Tribal-realists fear and despise intuition because any faculty of Mind that offers a portal to another reality might deprive them of the alternate reality fashioned by Mind’s mistaken identity, its reverse mirror image. Its shadow-reflection’s code of opposition. Of non-being. Where tribal-realists rule, make up their own scripts, write their own rules, revel in the license of specialness, the entitlements “earned” by victimhood, and entertain themselves with the excitement and distraction of bloodletting. Of non-stop “action:” games and mortal combat. Instead of one Mind’s unique talent, its gift of Free Choice, being put to use with an indispensable role in Life-Worth Creation. Tribal-realists hate intuition because it could replace their fascination with hurt inflicted on others by “action” with purposeful, peaceful Creation.

Part of the Logic of Creation is the knowledge from self-awareness that Reality-Creation is one and there can be no “others” “out there.” Part of the rationalization for competition-combat is the misperception from un-self-awareness that there are “others” “out there.” Potential competitors and enemies to be resolutely put down by “conservatives” consumed with fear. Seeking protection from fear’s age-old remedy: authoritarian control. Ever more opposing, ever more absolute. As if cooperation and competition in a shared world can be eliminated by silencing every other voice. By neutralizing every threat to alternate reality, shadow-opposite’s ultimate defense against Reality. Against self-awareness.

This is realism?

Since there is only one interconnected Self in the eternal here and Now the tribal-realist committed to cyclical competition and violence is committed to making the unreal real -- our alternate “reality.” An impossible dream peopled mainly by the hapless occupants of Plato’s Cave. By tribal-realists terrified of change. Traumatized by the wounding of their archetypal Psyche, blindsided by the loss of Energy and Consciousness.

So how do tribal-“realists” conserve the status quo, block self-awareness, and assert their supremacy? By presuming to make a dream real.

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* The descriptors are attributions of intent to traits that the theory doesn’t consider, more an extension of its scope than disagreement. For I believe insights that guided Jung / Myers-Briggs as far as they went were inspired by Logic-Love. Had they had access to A Course in Miracles (1976) it might have led their thinking along the same lines as mine.

Published on Leave a comment on An Idealist’s Answer to “Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?”

Wisdom isn’t judgment. Wisdom is the relinquishment of judgment. -- A Course in Miracles

Rodney King’s lament

Rodney King wondered, “Why can’t we all just get along?’ and so do I. Here are three ways that personalities come into conflict: opposite personality types, opposite approaches to authority, and opposite values. The differences summed up in the labels that attach to the opposites: idealist and realist.

The divide between idealists and realists

How do idealists and realists differ? Realists rely exclusively on their bodies’ senses to tell them what’s real. That is, what actually exists as opposed to speculation. Idealists rely on a faculty of mind to tell them what’s real: thinking that produces ideas and feelings that value them, sometimes idealizing them. They don’t rely on their bodies’ five senses to access this faculty. They use their intuition instead, a kind of sixth sense that connects with Mind that’s distinct from the brain.

The Greek philosopher Plato, the father of Western thought, explained the difference this way: it’s not the apple that’s real -- matter that’s detected by the body’s senses. It’s the idea of the apple in Mind that thinks it. Mind that can’t be detected by the body’s senses but is nevertheless real. Plato had a choice whether to attribute reality to matter -- the apple -- or to Mind. Since he was a philosopher troubled by our world of appearances and injustice, who sought reality and valued Mind as the only means of discerning it, it wasn’t a difficult choice. Nor is it a difficult choice for realists when they trust only their five senses to say what’s real.

The difference then is “idealists” associate with Mind, “realists” with body or matter. This is the foundation for all that follows in differentiating between idealists and realists in the three categories of opposites: personality types, approaches to authority, and values.

Personality Types

The only explanation that makes sense

The existence of a thing implies the existence of its opposite. This is its Logic. But since contradictory things can’t co-exist opposites must exist in a state that doesn’t negate their hosts. Philosophy is concerned with reality because that state is unreality. And since our world is flooded with opposites it’s also flooded with unreality that requires philosophy to discern it. Distinguishing between what’s Real and unreal has led metaphysics, a branch of philosophy that looks behind appearances, to conclude that our entire universe is unreal. Illusory, the stuff of dreams. On the basis of Logic. Experimental physics is also being led there by its discoveries that defy understanding.

To the idealist-metaphysicist it’s not debatable. It’s a given: the only explanation for spacetime-matter and the human condition that’s logical. That makes sense.

Personalities and the Logic of opposites

Personalities are random mixtures of components that rarely reveal at first glance whether they incline toward idealism or realism. But when the two tiers of components are aligned in opposition to one another it’s clear that the logic of opposites, Reality and unreality, is expressed through personality types. It doesn’t require the contrast between INTJ and ESFP to reveal that all of us fall on one side of the divide or the other, and the falling isn’t a matter of conscious choice. If I’m an idealist it happened like everything else in the evolution of life on this planet: by accident, mistake, or just happenstance. By the guiding hand of unreality, the opposite of Logic. That wills us not to experience the perfect harmony of Logic but chaos and conflict.

Two tiers of opposites 

The idealist-realist divide is plainly reflected in the way that personality types are differentiated in the Myers-Briggs system. It’s also reflected in the alternative five-factor system put forth by realists opposed to the role that Jungian intuition played in formulating Myers-Briggs.

The personality  components identified by Carl Jung and expanded and interpreted by Myers-Briggs are opposites that form two tiers. Four components line up across the top: Introvert, Intuition, Thinking, and Judging. As love (values) cannot be separated from Logic (making sense), feeling or evaluation cannot be separated from thinking or reasoning. So, my system modifies Myers-Briggs by relabeling Thinking to Thinking-Feeling.

Their opposites across the bottom are Extravert, Body sensing, Feeling, and Perceptive. Feeling here is distinguished from Feeling linked to Thinking by its association with a part of the brain that’s decidedly not motivated or directed by thinking.  It’s our animal brain, the amygdala, that links us to animals -- to our predatory animal ancestors who survived not on conscious, thoughtful deliberation but on instinct and emotion that drive action. Emotion that drove the will of tribes to behave like herds, to dominate in competition with other tribes. To eliminate threats and defeat opposition. To ensure winning -- the triumph of the will.

Whereas the brain’s prefrontal cortex employs thinking to socialize the predator in us its animal brain -- a force of nature -- driven by its passion to dominate and by its fear of being dominated, acts on instinct whether it’s socialized or not. Myers-Briggs makes no distinction between Feeling linked to Thinking and primal emotion that’s linked to acting on instinct without thinking. My putting Feeling in this context is a significant departure from Myers-Briggs.

The myth of unlimited power and freedom

The same distinction accounts for the opposition between Judging and Perceptive. Judging here is not what we mean by “judgmental.” Nor does “Perceptive” fit with its ordinary use. Whereas Judging employs all the capabilities of Mind to understand, to make sense of relativity and changing circumstances, placing them in context that reveals meaning and implies purpose, Perceptive adheres exclusively to the instinctive force and absolutes of will for its direction. Whereas Judging requires the discipline of discretion, Perceptive throws off all limits. Its preferred field of action is force or power without opposition and freedom without limits, two absolutes that defy the limits of choice implied by Judging.

They also happen to be the absurd promises that lured our unconscious ancestral Mind out of Reality and into self-delusion. Into its dream of an alternate “reality” -- the fantasy that is our incomprehensible world of spacetime and matter. That was supposed to deliver unlimited power and freedom and couldn’t since neither is possible, here or in Reality.

The body is the apple

Introvert     Intuition    Thinking-Feeling     Judging
[internal]    [Mind]        [reason-values]      [understanding]

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Extravert    Sensing      Action-Emotion       Perceptive
[external]    [body]        [will-force]               [dominating]

The tier of personality components across the top is thus Mind-centered, concerned with choices among competing considerations -- selves, interests, ideas, and values -- that produce satisfactory results because they make sense. They’re logical. There are no absolutes that preclude discretion in choosing.

The tier across the bottom is body-matter centered. It’s concerned with success in competition among unthinking, un-choosing absolutes. Forces of nature answering to the imperatives of the animal brain, a beast that can’t be housebroken. Isolated, separated bodies bound together as one in herds or tribes. Bands of brothers revered for semper fidelis and bravery, sharing in the glory of violence.

Where the idealist and the realist dwell

The idealist dwells in the Mind-centered INTJ tier across the top where thoughts and feelings, ideas and ideals predominate. The selves served are individuals and families dedicated to developing every individual’s full potential. The main values served are individuality, originality, diversity, free will, and creativity. Plus service and support for these values by families. The idealist and the idealist’s personality type home are thus not only Mind-centered but also individual-centered.

The realist dwells, in contrast, in the body-centered ESFP tier of opposites across the bottom, where instinctive action and competition among herds or tribes for dominance predominates. The selves served are tribes made up of bodies of the same species that share tribal identity markers. The values served are sociability, conformity, and uniformity. Plus the rule of the tribe from the top down that imposes conformity by force.

The flash point: freedom of choice

The ideal served by the Mind-individual centered INTJ personality type is the individual fully enabled and empowered to play a unique role in creation with freedom of choice. Because it’s the very reason why Logic-Love gave birth to their child, our ancestral Mind, one might think of freedom of choice as sacred.

The contrasting ideal served by the body-tribe centered ESFP personality type is the authority of the tribe to impose its will without opposition on its members. That is, to rule arbitrarily instead of under the law and thus to deprive its members of a role in creation with freedom of choice, The ideal is triumph of the tribal will -- rooted in the animal brain -- over all competition whether from tribal members or other tribes. The contrast between the two personality types is nowhere more evident and consequential than their attitudes toward free choice.

Mind and brain are not the same

Realists insist that nothing can be real -- can definitely exist -- unless it can be detected by the body’s five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight, and sound. To them, “mind” is interchangeable with “brain.” Bodies that can be detected all have brains that can be detected. Realists have no concept of Mind that exists without being detectable and so they insist that consciousness is seated in the brain along with spontaneous insights. Insights whose origin is unknowable, and so while realists can’t deny that insights happen they avoid inquiring into why and how they happen.

Far from being interchangeable Mind and brain are opposites. The brain equips isolated, separated bodies with the capacity to survive in a predatory, competitive environment by uniting as one in groups or tribes. It does so by subordinating individuals’ will to the will of the tribe to enforce conformity and to dominate adversaries from within and without.

All of this is a testament to the force of nature acting by instinct, socialized just enough to create a semblance of order but otherwise without deliberation or reflection. Humans are animals, bodies with brains that unmistakably belong to animals. The prefrontal cortex is there to tame the herd so that it can act in concert, but in any contest between thought and action the amygdala, a beast programmed to act, will dominate.

Mind that’s split

Idealists do conceive of Mind that’s real even though it’s not matter that can be physically detected. Where realists stop at five senses idealists experience Mind through their sixth sense that delivers insights from Intuition, the opposite of Body sensing. Where idealists associate sixth sense with a legitimate source of discovery, growth, and creativity, with authentic guidance driven by Logic and Love, realists associate it with unverifiable speculation not subject to any scientific or professional discipline and therefore prone to crackpot theories that obstruct serious inquiry. The Mind in Mind-centered INTJ personality type is one Mind that knows nothing of many body-brains or tribes. In serving the needs of individuals for learning and growth its main priority is competence in the exercise of free choice, a talent that conflicts with tribal dominance and is therefore suppressed.

The one Mind in Mind-centered INTJ personality type that’s accessed through Intuition’s sixth sense delivers guidance from Logic-Love, but the one Mind that seeks guidance through individual humans is split. Split between the Logic-Love of its inheritance and its opposite -- illogic, fear, hatred, and guilt -- that make us imperfect and also distinguish the human animal from other animals. Where bodies and their senses are idolized by realists the Mind idealized by idealists is only the one accessed through Intuition, not the split mind of the idealist.

Self that’s split

Whether a personality type is Mind-centered or body-centered it has one thing in common: it’s human and it’s imperfect. What it doesn’t have in common is the same self. The self of the INTJ Mind-centered type is the individual. The self of the body-centered type is the tribe -- a group. This essential difference accounts for the sharp contrast in the types’ conception of authority and their values.

Interpretations of Authority 

Insensitivity from the top down

The earth-bound brain understands authority as it’s employed within the only self that it recognizes: not the individual soul but many bodies uniform in appearance and behavior obedient to the will of the tribe. Authority resides exclusively in those who rule the tribe from the top down. Theirs is the only voice to be heard, the only legitimate source of intelligence and feeling. Theirs are the only interests to be served with one exception: the material needs of those beneath them must be met to ensure conformity without dissent.

The central concern of this self-centered version of authority is to maintain itself by eliminating or dominating all opposition. The one and only consideration is its preservation, not the wellbeing of those it controls. The same earth-bound brain can only conceive of a supreme being, or “God,” who rules with absolute authority from the top down. Who issues commandments and judges and punishes those guilty of disobedience.

Sensitivity from the bottom up

Logic-Love accessible through Intuition holds that the opposite is true. Not only is it conceivable it’s also likely. If Logic-Love is the source of Reality and Creation then authority that’s its own objective can’t create anything by ruling from the top down. All it can accomplish is self-preservation through intimidation and force until its inevitable defeat by a superior adversary.

Authority that fosters the creation of varieties of worth -- of life, beauty, order, freedom, abundance, intimacy, and other values -- must enable and empower its creations to employ their free will and other attributes in the act of creation. Must serve from the bottom up rather than rule from the top down. Where the point of authority isn’t disempowerment to ensure conformity but empowerment to enable creativity.

Two distinctly opposite objectives, opposite means of attainment, opposite versions of authority: rule from the top down that’s unsupportive, insensitive, and cruel; service from the bottom up that’s supportive, sensitive, and kind. Which one is more conducive to the fullest development, expression, and use of a child’s competence to engage with the world on his or her own terms? With entrepreneurial imagination, ingenuity, and self-assurance? Which one is centered on the child’s welfare instead of on itself?

Governance under the law

Authority that rules from the top down is backed up by its own will. Which puts it above the law because it is the law. Arbitrary and capricious, which isn’t law at all. It’s chaos. Authority that serves from the bottom up is backed up by the laws of cause and effect that embody the values of Logic-Love and apply impartially to everything and everyone. This includes authority which cannot govern unless it governs under the law.

The discipline of alignment with laws meant to support free choice in creation contrasts with its opposite: the discipline of conformity to an arbitrary will meant to suppress free choice and creativity. Why? Because free choice and creativity pose a threat to absolute, unopposed authority. The perfect harmony of creation is achieved through the governance of Logic-Love guided by the laws that define Reality and Creation. In the absence of Logic-Love and laws authority that rules arbitrarily on its own behalf can only maintain the appearance of order through force.

Values 

Realism’s flight from Logic

The case for realism rests on the fact that who we are and where we came from -- what “life” and the universe are all about -- must involve speculation. Theories abound but none can meet accepted standards of proof. We are left as individuals each to decide what it’s all about. To decide what’s real. And if everyone has five senses but not everyone is endowed with an active sixth sense then realism rather than idealism must be our guide.

The flaw in this argument is its reliance not on Mind to persuade but on matter. On the body’s ability to detect other physical objects. Objects that belong to the same material world as the bodies detecting them. And so what’s “real” isn’t established by the objectivity prized by science; it’s nothing more than bodies detecting themselves. It’s entirely subjective. Matter proclaiming that it truly exists from a mirror. An obvious departure from reasoning acknowledged by the philosophy of science but conveniently ignored by science itself.

The flaw is the absence of a perspective not of our material “reality” that’s objective. The absence of Logic-Love, the faculty of Mind-Intuition that recognizes and rejects flawed thinking that interferes with its function, which is to support understanding with logical explanation. To help us make sense of things. Realists who find refuge in their bodies’ five senses are not only running toward unthinking, self-referential matter. They’re running away from our only means of making sense: Logic-Love that explains.

It's all bias

But whether we’re realists or idealists is just our bias. Our personality types can’t lead us to the truth but they do entrench each of us in subjective bias. So it’s just my bias when I declare that of the two categories of values -- one based on the individual, the other based on groups or tribes -- only the individual aligns with the laws of cause and effect that define Reality and Creation. The bias of my version of a Mind-centered INTJ personality type. The Logic that supports it explains that the billions of us are actually replications of one Self, one Mind not many. The many version of this one Self is the version implied by its opposite. An opposite that must in every respect be the opposite of its host, the one Mind-Self that’s real. And so its opposite must be unreal -- an illusion.

I conclude that the values associated with the individual align with Reality and Creation because the individual -- the one Mind-Self -- is real and the values associated with its opposite -- the many selves, groups, tribes -- cannot be real. I do so not because my five senses tell me so but because Logic-Love accessible through Mind’s sixth sense, not body-brain, tells me so.

Our distinctly human tribal values

The values associated with tribes are entirely the product of body-brains programmed to express a distinctly human version of our predatory animal nature, our competitive herd instinct:

  • Where idealist-individual values support free choice in creativity realist-tribe values support the abdication of free choice in conformity.
  • Where the individual prizes intimacy and free self-expression in loving, non-competitive relationships, the tribe prizes sociability and scripted self-expression in competitive relationships.
  • Where individual values are directed toward equality and empowerment in horizontal relationships, tribal values are directed toward hierarchical relationships that empower top-down authority and disempower those beneath it.
  • Where individual values above all respect individual worth and free will, tribal values inherently disrespect both.

Which may make tribal values distinctly human: they seem to define the human character judging from its inept stewardship of its natural and human resources.

It also makes them wrong, suitable for opposites opposed to Reality and Creation but not for the one Mind born of Logic-Love to play an indispensable role in the creation and reciprocation of Worth. To raise children. This is who I believe we truly are, not automatons manipulated by tyrants to dominate and destroy one another in endless conflict..

Do we really have a choice?

The split mind of humanity oscillates between these competing codes of ethics that were clearly differentiated when Niccolo Machiavelli published The Prince in 1532. So what I propose with two incompatible takes on morality is not new. Yet its implications for the human character and its propensity toward self-destruction seem not to have penetrated our awareness. Not to the point where it would make a human course correction.

Survival without functioning within groups or tribes isn’t feasible when we are born into a species that is itself a tribe. We can imagine ourselves disciplined by individual morality but, as Machiavelli showed, the realities of survival in competition often subordinate it to tribal top-down authority. We allow ourselves to go off course because there seems to be no other choice, and this applies to idealists as well as to realists.

The ESFP body-brain centered personality type is opposed to this choice as well as to choice generally since it’s a function of Mind. Realists and their ESFP apotheosis continue to serve Machiavellian tribal values without recognizing that they’re incompatible with morality. Without understanding that the mirror they hold up to us is humanity’s unreal dark side. They’re wrong because they’re immoral, the source of wrongdoing.

Why conscience?

Why make the difference clear? So that we put the gift of free will to good use. So that in defining our character with values we will make the right choice: for respect for the laws of cause and effect and their source, Logic and Love inseparable. So that when we are divided into competing groups or tribes we stay true to our sovereignty and integrity as individuals and don’t let our values, our morality, be compromised no matter what self-serving top-down authority demands of us. So that we have a conscience that wills us to do what’s right and listen to it.

Does history offer any examples of realists stricken by conscience after they sacrificed their will to the will of the tribe? J. Robert Oppenheimer was overwhelmed by guilt for his part in producing the Bomb, Robert McNamara for prosecuting the tragedy that was the Vietnam War. Many others, then and now, wish that they had not betrayed their humanity to a false idol.

Conflicting values, conflicting stories

The Mind-centered personality type that values individuals and families, free will, creativity, and service tells one story. The body-brain centered personality type that values tribes, captivity, conformity, and top-down rule tells another. Stories with different objectives and steps for getting there. The individual storyline is culturally explicit because it puts human nature in a positive light. These are values we can be proud of. The tribal storyline is culturally implicit because it puts us in a negative light. Only a perverse pride could own the conquests of red army ants.

The two storylines are contradictory, which helps to explain the friction between their adherents.

  • If Mind-centered individual values tell the story of humanity parting with appearances to help its one Mind-Self regain self-awareness, acceptance of its innocence, and consciousness, the body-brain centered tribal values of realists accept things as they appear to be and take it from there, proceeding directly to instinct-driven action without any need for mind-changing reflection or deliberation.
  • If individual values affirm the worth of Creation and the competence of free-spirited individuals enabled and empowered by authority to take part in it, tribal values affirm the necessity of competition and the submission of individual wills to tribal authority to win it. “Winning” measured not by creativity and free expression but by dominance. By ownership, possession, and control.

The story told by an idealist’s values

An idealist’s values might look something like this:

Home-Relationship
Innocence-Beauty
Wholeness-Wellness
Enablement
Empowerment
Spontaneity-Creativity

The story it tells is of humanity that has a Home in Reality and a Relationship with its one Mind-Self’s parents, Logic-Love. A Home and Relationship that belong to Reality-Creation, not to our alternate “reality.” So, the central driving force behind this and the following values is the urgency of awakening to Reality and regaining awareness of Home and Relationship. A feat that humanity can pull off when the perfection and Beauty of Innocence replace guilt in its psyche -- its soul. An accomplishment that lies within the power of any individual guided by Logic-Love, not within any tribe.

The integrity of the individual is restored with the healing of the Mind corrupted and split by its mistaking its opposite -- its unreal shadow -- for an other self and by surrendering its free will to give it access. Being in a state of Wholeness and Wellness signifies that healing has taken place: the individual -- the one Mind-Self -- has regained its sovereignty and thus the capacity to choose freely. This state of Mind is prerequisite for the values that follow: Enablement of the individual to exercise free will with competence, through trial-and-error learning in our alternate reality and Empowerment of competence in Free Choice to be part of Creation when consciousness is restored.

The attributes that the one Mind-Self must have to perform in Reality are Spontaneity and Creativity. Attributes of Free Choice that cannot be compromised by external influence from any source including the Child’s parents, Logic-Love. This explains the necessity of training by experience in an unreal environment where the Child’s parents couldn’t interfere even if they wanted to and there can be no real consequences -- no harm done.

This is our mission from this idealist’s perspective. What about the realist?

The story told by a realist’s values

From the realist’s perspective its values might look like this:

Will
Instinct-Action
Emotion-Force
Dominance-Winning
Sociability-Likability

Our mission would be survival through unending competition and conflict -- pointlessness. But if we look behind the mystique of the “Triumph of the Will” to what it actually implies we might find the following.

Alienation-Disconnection
Guilt-Imperfection
Division-Sickness
Disablement
Disempowerment
Captivity-Enslavement

These are terms that apply across the board to the body-brain centered ESFP personality type, its exercise of top-down authority, and its tribal values. The story that it tells is of a copycat -- a parasite shadow-self. A derivation without a life of its own and therefore without originality. Entirely incapable of individuality and creativity, that borrows its attributes from its host and reverses them into their opposites. To understand its action agenda take the attributes of its host and reverse them, starting with its host’s core attribute, that it is one entity not many, an individual not a group or tribe.

Which makes the entire tribal value system unreal -- the fact that explains the copycat’s greatest fear: self-awareness. And its fanatical obsession with authoritarian control since without forced conformity its secret will be exposed: the emperor wears no clothes. The emperor is a thing made up, a forgery who has neither existence nor authority. The work of an illusionist. An apparition. A mere reflection, without substance, incapable of casting a reflection on its own.

Of the two systems only the individual system is valid. The tribalist-realist system is but a deception that distracts from the Truth by conflict and dominance. Not only unreal but dangerous and wrong. Destined to be undone and abandoned when our one Mind again chooses Logic and Love, its source and true Self. When it chooses Reality and Truth that know nothing of competition and conflict. That know only the intimacy of Love and the Logic and Reality of Creation.

Whither goest thou. . . ? 

From an idealist’s perspective, these are the values of the idealist and realist that define our character. Each with a split mind, each with a light and a dark side, neither perfect. In an alternate reality of ambiguous appearances, in the presence of competing biases, can we say what it means? 

In the 40s, before climate change and mass extinction were a concern, my back yard was full of fireflies. We called them lightning bugs. Little blinking lights floating silently, lazily in space. A reminder that August is for letting up, slowing down. That in the life of the cosmos one life on our little planet is one blink. Loaded with meaning and meaningless at the same time.

. . . Into the wastebasket of time

A mandala is a geometric design, symbolic of the universe, that can be intricately beautiful. One I admired was created painstakingly with colored grains of sand. After a prescribed period for display it was taken to the point where two rivers form a third river and dumped.  All that work. All that talent, creativity, and beauty tossed out as if it had no value. To symbolize what? Perhaps that when a life is lived and examined for all that it means, whether it served the cause of Mind or submitted to the dictates of body, the show is over. It can be thrown away.

Into the wastebasket we call time, that never needs to be emptied because it doesn’t contain anything. What’s here and gone in the blink of a firefly or a life has meaning, but without substance, without permanence that’s only possible with timelessness, its meaning is here and gone with it. Meaning in the context of the temporal that’s meaningless in the context of the eternal.

The eternal, where there is no competition and dominance, only truth, creativity, trust, innocence, and intimacy.  Where it’s Real and the Idealist is the realist.

Published on Leave a comment on The Defining Values of Our Character [1st draft]

“God is the Mind with which I think. My real thoughts are in my Mind. I would like to find them.” -- A Course in Miracles, Workbook Lesson 45

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The first draft of this essay completed May 12, 2023 is reproduced here August 7 to restart the process of writing and editing after a three-month pause. The pause was recommended by the I Ching Hexagram 34 but was necessitated in any case by mental and physical burnout. I am pleased to resume work however at a slower pace, with less intensity, and hopefully not too serious a drop in performance. Thank you for your interest and patience. -- DCH

Coming to terms with the way things are 

“Confused and confusing,” an acquaintance’s judgment on a letter I’d written. “Thoughtful but somewhat disorganized,” a professor’s verdict on one of my essays. So when you’ve had enough with this essay it’s not you. No matter what the topic my poetic right-brained thinking will find a way to make it difficult. No excuses.

But it’s not all my fault. The topic is a killer. It’s defeated almost all the best minds of Eastern and Western thought, who would rather retreat into babbling mythology and mumbo-jumbo sorcery than figure it out. Mind in two states, Conscious and unconscious. Dwelling in two realities, one that’s real and one that’s not. That I call an “alternate reality” just to soften the blow, that it’s just a dream, an illusion. Our everyday world that we call home. Where the unreal has been made -- not created -- real. “Mother nature” who’s nobody’s mother but a magic trick our sleeping ancestral Mind is playing on itself.

“Conscious” and “Mind” in initial caps. To denote that they’re not of our “reality” but of Reality that is real. And quotes I often use to flag deception. That can be no part of the House of Truth that we once occupied and will again when our ancestral Mind awakens. A use of style to alleviate at least some of the confusion: initial caps to say we’re in the House of Truth. Not made-up reality but the real thing. Quotes to let you know that appearances can be deceiving, especially “reality” that’s unreality.

Some personality types can’t conceive of a Reality they can’t see, hear, and touch. For them the only help I can offer is a reminder: that we all have a sixth sense -- our intuition -- and psychic ability whether used or neglected. They can open their minds to another perspective or not -- their choice. If this is you and you’re more comfortable with things the way they are, you must be a “realist.”  Which is fine with me because I’m an idealist. I’m not comfortable with the way things are and I’m talking to you. If you stick with me I might make you a little less comfortable. It could be unpleasant, yes. But for both of us it would be a good thing.

Why a good thing? 

Values overlap. The vision of Logic is shared with the vision of Hope, Purpose, and Meaning. They in turn are inseparable, worthy of equal prominence among our most basic values, and yet what value doesn’t incorporate both?  “Value” implies Purpose and Meaning.

Worth is a value in and of itself that’s built into every value. The affirmation and empowering of Worth could express the entire point of Reality-Creation, the cause it serves. Not just to stand for anything but to stand for what’s Good. What is “Good?” Worth with the values of morality built into it -- justice, loving kindness, reason, and more. Values that distinguish family-individuality from tribal-conformity, Mind from body-brain-matter, idealist from “realist.”

To reflect on values is to realize that logically there is no way that Reality could not stand for Plato’s “Good.” That what we experience as “life,” that seems so often detached from, or opposite to it, so often de-moralizing, could not overflow with it. That it had to be values that Child-Mind, our one Self, was given by its Parents at birth in Reality, to use in endowing the creation and affirmation of Life-Worth with their essential attribute of Free Choice.

How can values not be embedded in the core, the essence, of existence and how can they not be Good? How then can we let ourselves be gulled into dismissing the ideal of Good and embracing in its stead a conception of “reality” that’s utterly devoid of motivation? That at its core is lifeless, loveless, mindless, and soulless. A misshapen image of pointlessness that allows us no more self-worth than a dung beetle.

To reflect on values is to realize that with every choice we make we’re choosing not only among them; we’re choosing to accept or reject who and what they stand for. The gifts that they are and the Giver. We’re choosing who we are and who we want to be. An ideal that tests us every day to reach higher until we get it right. Until we’re served our purpose here, gained the competence we sorely lack, and are ready to move on. Eventually to serve a useful role in Reality. Always -- always -- with Guidance. Because otherwise we’re sure to get it wrong.

Who or what would get in the way? Who or what is holding us back now? The believer? The idealist? Passion for Psyche, Logic, and Love? For Free Choice and Creativity? For Reality and Truth? Or could it be the “realist?” Addition to the opposite. 

Good neighbors 

Many years ago, I was presented with a “utility index” by Dr. Ruth Mack of the Institute of Public Administration, a group of policy analysts in Manhattan who were helping my employer, the New England River Basins Commission, with flood management policy in the Connecticut River basin. The index contained nine values that stakeholders could use to choose among different ways of avoiding or mitigating flood damage: intimacy or love; aesthetics; health; freedom; safety; self-esteem; material comfort; belonging; and control. A tenth was added later: hope.

Fairness was built into the index in the idea of belonging to a community of interests that can’t last long without it. And ultimately it was fairness that set regional policy. It wasn’t fair for downstream communities to burden their upstream neighbors with the costs of their exposure to flooding, by robbing them of their free-flowing tributaries and numerous other assets. Numbers didn’t carry the day; it was human nature. Neighborliness and respect. Sociology. Psychology.

Personality, character, and values  

I showed the list to my two pre-adolescent sons and was struck by how readily they connected with it. One instinctively alighted on intimacy or love, the other circled around, wanting to think about it. I knew Ruth had handed me something significant. Had I thought about it I would have realized that it was a mirror, and this is why they took an interest. They were looking at themselves. They were looking at terms that defined the persons they were or wanted to be. The persons they wanted to be to others. Their self-image. And this might have been a one-of-a-kind opportunity to consider whether they liked what they saw or might want to change it.

Already I had a sense of my sons’ personality types. They grew up. Their personalities evolved into different types that reflected not only adulthood but also the value preferences that define the different types. The images reflected in the mirror were no longer the blur of childhood innocence. They were high-resolution portraits of individuals. Persons defined by their personalities; each character defined by its values. Three components of individuality rolled into one: personality, character, and values.

Values have opposites

When persons and whole societies go off track, they’ve put down the mirror and stopped reflecting on who they want to be. On the values they want their image to stand for. Did they think that character doesn’t matter? That if they leave it to chance it will take care of itself?

If this is why they’ve wandered off track it can’t mean that they’ve left character to chance. It means they’ve put it in someone else’s hands. In the hands of someone or something who has no problem making the decision for them. As opposed to someone who would prefer to wait until they’re asked for help. The choice is between a voice that’s inherently intrusive and disrespectful or supportive and respectful. Respectful or disrespectful of our sovereignty and free choice. Clear indication that the former has its own agenda. That it’s up to no good because values, like everything in our world, have opposites. Dark sides.

Why utility index needs to be updated. . . .  

it's all by intent

There’s nothing light about the disrespect of uninvited boundary-crossing. About taking advantage of someone who’s let their guard down.

It's the way of the predator who wishes no one well, not even itself since it’s an opposite. In a world of chance, accidents, and fortunate events it’s easy to assume that no mind could possibly be behind it. But this would be a mistake. Because Reality or unreality, either way, is a state of Mind. Nothing occurs without occurring within Mind. It’s where everything occurs or it’s nothing.

If voices make their presence known while we manage or neglect the profile in the mirror, pulling us one way or the other, toward the light or toward the darkness, make no mistake: they are a state of mind. If the pull is toward darkness then the state must be unconsciousness.* Unawareness that would account for neglecting the profile in the mirror and going off track. A mistake of this magnitude, that turns us from an image we want to one we wouldn’t recognize, doesn’t just happen. It's intentional. Just ask Friedrich Nietzsche and Sylvia Plath. Minds aren’t possessed by chance. They’re possessed by intent. And if possession is involved it’s ill intent.

From family spats to global mayhem

The mind that’s supposed to be doing the tracking is us, which means the intent is coming from us. it’s our mistake. The corrective can’t be to passively wait for someone or something else to take over when that was the mistake. The corrective is to pick up the mirror and take another look. To get serious about self-awareness. Is this who we want to be? Is the image in the mirror attractive or unattractive? Good or bad? The corrective is to get over the idea that self-image is a mask. A marketing brand with a thousand angles to manipulate the other. A smile painted on the snout of the big, bad wolf.

The corrective is to invite the voice we neglected when we put the mirror down to help us discard the dark side of values and choose the light side. Help that only the respectful voice can provide because of where respect comes from: from Logic that understands and explains and Love that cares and connects. Two functions of one Mind that are inseparable because they complete one another.

That can’t be taken for granted in a world of opposites. Of contradictions that systematically interfere with understanding and connecting. That systematically foment misunderstanding, misjudgment, and disconnecting. Our world of incessant friction on every level, from individual families all the way to global powers.

Avoidance of self-awareness

Let a critic or skeptic try to convince me that this isn’t so and I will be convinced: that I’m hearing the wrong voice. That my opponent may never have looked in the mirror and, if it did, it might see no reflection. Because the wrong voice speaks for no one and nothing but itself, an opposite. The defining attribute of an opposite is that it can’t exist. There can only be one Reality. A mirror held up to an opposite can only be a reminder that it's not there. Another attribute is avoiding mirrors. Avoiding self-awareness. It’s what we’re doing when we put the mirror down: listening to the wrong voice and avoiding self-awareness.

Honesty

The mirrors we hold up to ourselves regularly reveal what we are doing. Art and entertainment, work and play, built into our everyday lives. But how often do they reveal what we are thinking? How often do they question how we are thinking? Take us to the source of what we are doing and thinking and why?

Reflecting on our values confronts us with the one question for which habits of deception and avoidance have no answer: why? The question that stops us in our tracks and persuades us at least to think about changing our minds, changing course. Before fear, frustration, rage, and guilt are placed again in the care of deception and avoidance. The therapist who likes things just the way they are. “Seek but do not find.” Anything but “I would meet you upon this honestly,” the mirror thrust before us in the poetry of T. S. Eliot. The morality of Truth that puts the lie to the therapist: Honesty.

Dishonesty

What else but dishonesty would make of Jesus the champion of guilt instead of Innocence? The excuse for tormenting an entire people, the Jews, with an eternity of persecution when no life he lived, no story he told, could do that? What else but dishonesty would put words in his mouth to justify and validate what it is, the insane idea of sin, the lie of guilt. To idealize tribal supremacy in the guise of ecclesiastical virtue, appropriating his words, his values, to its own fraudulent ends?

In a “reality” born of deception and avoidance there can be no “truth,” no definitive answer. But nothing stops us from asking an honest question. From asking why and choosing of our own Free Will to answer honestly. To think differently and change our minds if we mean to be honest with ourselves.

The face and the faceless mask in the mirror

Let me hold up my mirror and ask what you see. How can I do this? By going back to the utility index I was handed years ago. By updating it to reflect a higher resolution of character and values than was apparent then. For Logic and Love don’t stand still. They’re growing along with everything else alive. With all of Reality and Creation, expanding awareness with circumstances that never stop evolving. That extend into infinity.

It’s no longer one static list of separate values. It’s evolved into two lists that are dynamic and interrelated. The first is original: the values that account for individual morality within personal relationships among family and friends. The second is derivative, that accounts for relationships within and among tribes that march to the expedience of Machiavelli’s drummer. The former sourced ultimately from Reality that’s light and the latter its opposite derived from it. A shadow-reflection of a self-deluded mind that’s dark.

It's the strange “reality” of our world, the interplay of light and dark in the dream of a split Mind. If we’ve gone off track the second image in the mirror might shock an individual into doing something about it. Into awakening, since one individual truly reversing the lie of guilt back to the Truth of Innocence is all it would take. For who wouldn’t be shocked to find in our reflection the grotesque mask of Dracula leering back at us? Character that flaunts expedience without morality is hideous even to mind possessed by it.

The challenge to choose again

That is, if mind is willing to look. If the occupants of Plato’s Cave had any interest in bringing their enchanted darkness to the light of day. The Child would never have deluded itself into identifying with a perversion of the Truth if it hadn’t lost Consciousness. If it had been capable of paying attention and thinking freely. And we, its projections, wouldn’t either. Wouldn’t identify with the wrong guide, the delusion, instead of choosing freedom from its possession. To be guided by the agent of Psyche-Soul who would never possess us, back to awareness of our real Self.

Not if we looked at the values that define its character. Not if we were aware that Child Free Choice was responsible for choosing them. That we, its projections, are who we choose to be. 

What then is the mirror? An opportunity, an invitation, and a challenge to choose again.

The challenge here is to heal

How go about using Free Choice to heal a split Mind? By understanding whose Mind it is and what it does. Its function and how it functions. By being aware of the choices. The mirror provided by the defining values of our character is a device for learning how to exercise Free Choice so that we can heal the separation. Our task here, in our alternate “reality,” because Creation is beyond the capacity of a split mind.

Mind itself is a value with a function. The value of Consciousness. The Mind of the Child -- our ancestral Mind. Not the Mind of its Parents, Logic-Love, who account for Reality-Creation with their own functions on their own plane of Creation, but an extension of their Mind.

The indispensable element

The function of their Child-Mind in Reality is to introduce an indispensable element into the Creation and affirmation of Life-Worth: the element of Free Choice. Consciousness of all the possibilities. It’s who the Child is and what it does  Performed on its own plane of Creation because its function and a function of its Parents, Consciousness that determines Reality, cannot intermix.

Creation is the attributes of Logic, Love, and Psyche-Soul, and the talents of Child Free Choice, playing together purposefully in harmony to create compositions of gifts-values from the raw material of Creation: the continually expanding implications of Logic, the connecting-expanding relationships of Love, the radiating light of Psyche-Soul, and the talents and values given to the Child by its Parents, Logic-Choice and Love-Freedom. That express and affirm the Worth of Creation and its source with the attributes of originality, Innocence, Beauty, and Perfection that define it. An achievement that would be meaningless if it were not performed with Free Choice. If it could not also express the value of Free Choice. The Child -- us.

Time and entropy destined to end

One Mind and one Consciousness with two distinct identities and two distinct functions. One the Parents of the other whose Consciousness determines and defines Reality. The other the Child whose Consciousness enables its function, Free Choice, by arraying the possibilities. Identities and functions that perform through their inseparable Relationship, yet without interfering with one another.

For if there were interference it would automatically trigger a response from the laws of cause and effect that structure Reality-Creation. It would redirect Energy away from Child-Mind’s function. It would cause Child-Mind to lose Consciousness and put it into another state. The state of unconsciousness that got entangled with an opposite and split itself in two. That dreamed an alternate “reality” in a state corrupted by its opposite: our material world of opposites, time, and entropy, destined to end.

Analysis at the beginning

The task of Child-Mind here is to put its situation to good use. Can it be to learn from experience how to exercise Free Choice? Does it seem that we, the descendants of our ancestral Mind, need to learn? To gain competence that will be needed in Reality-Creation when our ancestral Mind regains Consciousness. If so, how does it do this? How does the Child-Mind function? How does it choose freely?

It begins with analysis. Philosophy and psychology combined in the work of Carl Jung, Katharine Briggs, and her daughter Isabel Myers to deconstruct Mind into components that enable analysis of its function. The gift of their talents enables our talents to put it to use. Start with four components from the type INTJ: introversion, intuition, thinking, and judgment.

INTJ

Introversion is looking within, not being distracted by what’s on the outside because in Reality there is no “outside.” There are no “externals.” Reality is all one Mind. Introversion is where we get introspection, the act of looking into the mirror of our character and values.

Intuition is Mind-Energy not in the form of matter detecting its Source through the agent of Soul. Through the Force of Oneness that knows nothing of boundaries. We get understanding from Logic and Love accessible through reflection. The act of accessing spontaneous insights through the sixth sense we call Intuition, to establish context from evolving circumstances that produces meaning and purpose. That articulates what the situation calls for, the baseline condition for the next step: choosing how to respond to what the situation calls for. What we learn from Logic-Love before we get into answering is how to frame the question. Getting it right.

We apply understanding from Logic-Love to guide choices among considerations by reasoning with Mind-Logic and feeling-evaluating with Mind-Love. Inseparable elements of Thinking with Mind. Here is the nerve center of a split Mind’s attempt to choose rationally and objectively. This is where the rigor of benefit-cost analysis comes into play, measuring the quantitative and evaluating the qualitative in logical sequence, ideally without bias, honestly and transparently. Foregoing the limits of body-addicted science to bring everything that’s relevant into play with systems thinking, holistically.

We use Judgment to make choices and reach decisions that express the values and serve the causes that we stand for. That define the character that we strive to be -- the image in the mirror of our values. It does this through a process of integration that utilizes all the functions of Mind: finding consciously and intuitively among all the considerations the one that controls. The value that for each set of circumstances pulls all the other considerations into alignment.

This is how Mind functions to choose freely. An amalgam of principles and procedures from many fields, among them three with which I am professionally familiar: public policy, jurisprudence, and benefit-cost analysis. All neatly gathered under the headings of Jung / Myers-Briggs personality type theory: introversion, intuition, thinking, and judgment. INTJ -- the opposite of ESFP and ESFJ.

When Intuition is obstructed

Intuition can’t be Mind being taken captive by shadow-parasite. This was Jung’s thought about Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a misperception. Captivity by shadow-parasite is prefrontal cortex overwhelmed by animal emotion amygdala -- a brain phenomenon. Intuition that produces spontaneous insights is Mind’s portal to Soul’s agent who connects us with Logic-Love and cannot be corrupted. But Mind can be interfered with. And it is obstructed by body-brain that would have us believe that our sixth sense can’t be trusted.

It can be trusted if we are mindful of the difference between body-brain and Logic-Love, the function of Mind-Consciousness. If we are alert to what brain is up to and guard our thoughts. Most notably against victimhood, the perversion of Intuition by the. Child’s shadow opposite. The portal to the twin fantasies of absolute authority and absolute freedom that lured the Child’s impaired judgment into self-delusion. That release deluded minds not to the Reality of Logic-Love but into a never-never land of self-indulgence and cruelty.  

When “Feeling” isn’t feeling

The premise by Jung / Myers-Briggs that thinking and feeling can be separated works if feeling, like thinking, has only one source and represents only one set of values. But it doesn’t, and this causes confusion. The source of thinking is one Mind-living energy not in the form of matter whose opposite is brain-dying energy in the form of matter. The source of feeling that Jung / Myers-Briggs posits is Love-Abundance and its values of caring, sharing, affirmation, and empowerment -- all the elements of morality-Good. The morality-Good of families and friendships among individuals devoted to one another.

The other source of feeling that Jung / Myers-Briggs overlooks is emotion seated in the part of the brain that connects the human animal with its pre-human animal ancestry. The amygdala that motivates behavior with the will of the predator to dominate. With the “will to power” that rules the human psyche in the fevered view of Nietzsche and the “triumph of the will” in the crazed view of Hitler. Driven by the fear, rage, and hatred of herd or tribe provoked by competition from other herds or tribes. Entirely devoid of the values of Love among individuals, replaced by devotion to herd in opposition to other herds. Offering not caring, sharing, and empowerment from Abundance but demanding ownership, possession, and control from hollowness.

The “feeling” of tribal belonging

If Logic and Love are inseparable in Reality then so must be thought and feeling. In our alternate “reality” of opposites, of entropy that sees that everything eventually comes apart that was held together by energy that’s dying, they’ve been separated, disconnected. A state of madness that guarantees personalities whose parts flip in and out of sync. Pulled this way and that by sun toward light and coherence, moon toward darkness and incoherence.

Madness is how it is in our alternate “reality.” It’s not just an appearance. But whereas mind and body can be usefully distinguished as they are with Intuition and body-sensing, and as they are with thinking distinguished from the emotion of body-animal brain, thinking and feeling are two aspects of Mind that can’t be separated. Not even in appearance if in Reality it turns out that they’re one and the same.

There are no hairs to be split between “feeling” and “emotion.” But there is a clear distinction between one kind of feeling and another. It is the feeling of family Love that forges relationships among friends not in competition that belongs with thinking and Mind-centered INTJ. It is the feeling of tribal belonging that provokes fear, rage, and hatred against tribes in competition that belongs with feeling and body-centered ESFP.

Nietzsche’s gift

The perversion of this Truth that madness has contrived is the unevolved emotion of animal will seated in the amygdala overtaking the socializing deliberation of the prefrontal cortex. Mob psychology: the herd demolishing the pretext of individual, of independent judgment.

The madness of Nietzsche renowned for his extraordinary fusion of thought with feeling in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Penguin Books 1969): “In a man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts” (Introduction by R. J. Hollingdale, p. 12). A talent also noted by Jung in Psychological Types (p. 319). When, in Truth, Thus Spoke Zarathustra was the voice of the Child-Mind’s shadow -- its unreal opposite -- announcing its triumph in the clear over the will of its host. Whose end would come prematurely in total captivity: mental and physical paralysis.

The opposite of thinking can’t be part of itself. Can’t be feeling whose source is Love when the source of thinking is Logic and the two are inseparable. One Mind, one definition. The “feeling” of ESFP can’t be the only attribute that’s copied from Mind-centered INTJ when all the other attributes of body-centered ESFP have their own definition. Moreover, all functions of Mind manifested in INTJ are of one Mind and inseparable. If an opposite must be found to INTJ-Mind that’s inseparable from Love-feeling then it would have to be the entirety of the opposite personality type. Not one part of it but all of it: Extravert-Sensing-Feeling with Judgment (ESFJ) or with Perceptive (ESFP).

Hostage to guilt

The distinction posed by Jung / Myers-Briggs between thinking and feeling is thus both useful for analysis and misleading. Among all the considerations the one that must control is the inseparability of Logic and Love, Child-Mind’s Parents who gave it definition: the being and doing of Free Choice. The culture of separation and opposition that dominates the corrupted Mind insists that they are separate to hide its illegitimacy. By perpetuating the injustice done to the Child when its Parents supposedly engineered its loss of Consciousness.

When the real injustice was done to the Parents. Because Logic-Love could not have done it. It was a smear perpetrated to lock in place the guilt of the Parents to go along with the guilt of the Child for its part in the separation. Guilt without which captivity to the shadow, the parasite, could not psychologically be sustained.

Humanity’s corrupted mind is held hostage to Child-Mind’s opposite by the colossal lie of guilt. By the lie that because a defenseless Child was betrayed by its Parents its self-image can’t be innocence beloved of its Parents. It must be the helpless innocence of wounded victimhood. A petulant child, gorging on self-pity, entitled to specialness. Excused from all restraint on absolute authority and absolute freedom to settle scores and even the balance. To define fairness on its own terms and no one else’s. To set the rules and write the script however it wishes. In the image of its source: Child-Mind’s opposite. An unreal shadow. Darkness. A parasite.

Toward deconstructing the Big Lie

What example can history offer of the beast that’s wounded victimhood when it’s let loose? Germany, the instigator of one World War set free to instigate another one. When it was “stabbed in the back” and treated unfairly by the peace. By the vindictive Treaty of Versailles that excused it from all restraint and accountability. The myth of wounded victimhood that started with the Child’s self-delusion. The defining values of the Child’s character from that point onward. That will go on replicating itself and re-enacting its wounding until the Mind of Free Choice puts a stop to it. 

Free us of the conviction that separation from our Parents was their doing and ours, from the fear of punishment, and our begging for Innocence by any means and the mockery that is our phony alternate “reality” must end. The nightmare of helpless innocence and wounded victimhood. Freely choosing to understand: that Logic cannot be separated from Love, thought from feeling-values; that the Child’s and our Parents in Reality could never separate from us or harm us in any way, leads us toward our goal. Toward regaining our Innocence that was never lost and Child-Mind’s Consciousness along with it. Toward deconstructing the Big Lie and restoring Truth.

ESFP and ESFJ 

The opposite of Mind is body-matter. Mind-Energy not in the form of matter vs. brain-energy not in the form of matter. So where do extraversion, body-sensing, feeling, and perception fit in? The layer of personality markers from Jung / Myers-Briggs theory that lie opposite INTJ. Markers that upon close examination do more than account for personality type differences. They’re an act of war.

To say that they “fit in” is to miss their source and its intent: to block awareness of Mind, the opposite of matter and body-brains that validate it with their five senses. To block access to the agent of Soul, its opposite and arch enemy. Our connection with Mind’s Logic and Love from Reality who know nothing of alternate realities or their source. That we can access through their gift of intuition, our sixth sense.

Extraversion is orientation toward “objective reality” of energy in the form of spacetime-matter projected “out there.” That’s external to Mind in a compromised state doing the projecting. Both logical impossibilities: projection and its handiwork. A world of body-brains meant to distract Mind from the truth of Reality-Mind and Reality-Creation, neither of which is spacetime-matter or detectable by the body’s five senses. By the gold standard of scientific “knowledge” known as sensory perception. Hubristic nonsense.

Body-sensing is Mind-energy in the form of matter detecting itself. Substituting the body and its five senses for the guidance of Logic-Love accessible through intuition’s sixth sense. The first step toward body’s final ascent to the throne that it imagines has been vacated by Mind. The throne of top-down authority that owns its sensed material domain and is therefore entitled to possess, control, and dominate it. Subjecting it to its mindless, primitive will seated in the amygdala, brain’s common ancestry with animal beast.

Nietzsche’s ideal of “Superman,” the figure transmogrified by Ayn Rand’s “objectivism” into Howard Roark, the noble architect atop his own towering creation. Or the neuroscientist Christof Koch, scrambling up the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in the dark of night, to proclaim the supremacy of King Kong. The beast. The “reductionist” -- romance.

Supremacy over what? Over the Child Free Choice and the Child’s Parents Logic-Love. Over Innocence laid low by guilt. Over Truth replaced by the Big Lie. The supremacy of an unreal shadow over its host, Reality. Creation that needs no Creator. Humanity orphaned and lost that needs no Parents, no guide. Buried now between Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton. The eternal adolescent, Stephen Hawking, yearning for adventure in limitless space.

The arbitrary authority so conjured dominates with absolute authority without opposites and imagines itself as “almighty god.” A perversion of the authority of the laws of cause and effect. Of the values of Logic and Love and the innocence of Soul without opposites that the laws of Reality express. The “triumph” of rage and cruelty over gentle loving kindness. The nightmare of predatory authoritarian supremacy that regularly overtakes our body-obsessed, body-possessed world. More hubristic nonsense.

Feeling that’s associated with the self mis-identified as body-brain rather than Soul-Mind is the unevolved emotion of animal-herd seated in the amygdala. Though it displays tenderness and other signs of nurturing required by procreation its dominant function is fear required for self-protection in space contested by predators like itself. Fear accompanied by rage necessary for intimidation of competitors who can be bullied and hatred for the elimination of enemies who can’t.

This is the emotion stored in body-brains that occupy a material world ruled by a perversion of authority. It is not the feeling described by Jung / Myers-Briggs personality type theory that didn’t venture into where either INTs or ESFs come from and therefore didn’t reflect on why they differ. The appearance of gentle loving kindness of the body-centered world is limited to animals identifying with herd caring for its own. To herd-tribe sharing among its own who forfeit individuality to tribal uniformity so they can belong. It isn’t about the virtue of caring and sharing. About inclusivity that recognizes and values the worth of all herds-tribes and individuals whether they belong or not. The ESF’s body-sensing feeling isn’t about Love.

ESFJ that attaches to the category Judgment becomes the animal beast that seizes control with cruel intent. With Reality’s judgment of innocence perverted by body-brain’s animal will into judgment of guilt. Justified by the perversion of innocence that is wounded victimhood. The all-purpose excuse for projection of condemnation onto “others” and execution by punishment, the infliction of every manner of abuse, every manner of persecution and atrocity available to self-pity. Guaranteed to entrench belief in the reality of its horrors and thereby perpetuate unreality -- the self-delusion of absolute authority without opposites. Tyranny.

Perceptive is brain without Mind-Judgment. Without discernment guided by introspection, reflection, thinking-feeling, values-morals, or discipline. ESF that attaches to Perceptive becomes an action comics caricature. The passive fool who fantasizes that submission to un-boundaried chance that body-brain can’t detect with its five senses attains absolute freedom without limits. Freedom from the limits of definition, the function of Logic-Love that can’t be seen, heard, or touched, and therefore must not exist. Unaware that friend chance is a parasite attached to its host, Mind-unconscious. No one’s friend. That’s all too visible, audible, and palpable to bodies in their made-up “reality.” A cartoon of impossibilities that can’t exist.

The “thinking” of a personality type: ESFP self identified with body that’s deprived itself of the ability to think. A rejection of Mind that imagines itself in a state of spontaneity attained by the magic of specialness. The mindset of a playactor in a one-dimensional entertainment. “Let’s Pretend,” a radio program that was a staple for little fantasists on Saturday mornings, a 1940s version of Disney’s Magic Kingdom. Entertainment that delivers constant “action” through contrivances: games of competition and conflict with no real substance or consequence. A world of superficiality skittering along the surface of a pond like a water-bug, unaware and uninvolved in the life below.

“War” between separation and healing

Two kinds of ESF, both ruled by authoritarian fantasies. ESF with judgment the fantasy of absolute authority without opposites. ESF with perceptive-specialness the fantasy of absolute freedom without limits. One a mask of condemnation and guilt. The other a mask of childlike innocence. Both mis-identification with impossibility, the face in the mirror that is infantile self-absorption. The arrested development of opposition to life that is lifelessness. Of opposition to learning and growth that is mindlessness.

The face of a demon conjured from the pits of hell. Not the fatuous Transylvanian count endeared to us by Hollywood and Bela Lugosi but the monster with hair on the palms of its hands scribed by Bram Stoker. The face of the predator. The face of serious terror, harm, and death.

Free Choice with Mind, no choice with body

Neither of which has any possibility of maneuverability or even existence in the presence of Mind-centered INTJ. Which makes of ESFs a mortal enemy of INTJ. Not that INTJ can return the favor since Mind in Reality can have no awareness of what’s not real. Of impossibilities like absolute authority and absolute freedom. So while conflict between them may sustain ESFs’ playacting fantasy and disrupt relationships, while it may account for the Armageddons of crazed mythology from Zoroaster to evangelical “Christianity,” all it does for INTs is move them to share the Logic-Love of understanding from intuition to heal the separation.

Two opposites that may appear to be in conflict but can’t be if one seeks Truth guided by possibility and the other escape from Truth guided by impossibility. That define our experience of life: healing and separation. And find expression in opposing personality types. In types distinguished by the values that define character. That enable analysis that leads to explanation. To asking Why and coming up with answers that make sense. That, when we hold up the mirror, we can recognize and use to arrest our arrested development and move forward. Choosing freely with Mind instead of body. Without obstruction by externals, bodies, tribal dominance, and the self-willed unawareness that is self-delusion.

Toward self-awareness. Toward Child-Mind’s liberation from self-delusion and awakening to Consciousness. To the sanity of Home in Reality-Creation. Where we started and never really left.

Where Order and Freedom reside 

The values that define character flow from the definition of Self, whether in Reality it is one Child-Mind or in alternate “reality” it is many projections of an unconscious, dreaming Child-Mind. Whether it is the Relationship that is Family in Reality, the basic unit of Creation, or tribe-herd group in alternate “reality,” the only self that the dreaming Child-Mind, corrupted by its shadow-opposite, is capable of recognizing. A self composed of isolated-separated bodies whose individuality-creativity is suppressed by tribe in contrast to Family in Reality where the point is to enable it.

The Family Relationship in Reality is Parent-Child: the bonding of Life-Being / Mind Logic-Love with Free Choice. The birth of the Child thus brought into Being two actors, two Selves, essential to Creation: Free Choice and Family. Whose purpose is to extend, expand, and affirm the Life-Worth of Creation Freely Chosen. This is Creativity -- the engine that drives Creation: the bond between Parent-Child (Family) plus Free Choice (Child).

Its structure is Reality. The laws of cause and effect that apply autonomously. With the Force of Necessity that is Reality without interference by the governance of Mind / Logic-Love. In the same way, the Worth of Life-Creation is affirmed autonomously, through Free Choice, without interference by the Mind / Parents who govern. Were it otherwise there would be no kiss from a handsome prince to awaken the Sleeping Beauty. Our ancestral Mind would be just as well off here.

In both cases the Mind / Parents who govern must abstain from interference for the protection of Authority that resides in Life-Creation itself. For the rule of law. For the democracy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address and not for the authoritarian beast that menaces our world. A Truth that Child-Mind corrupted by its shadow-opposite, obstructed by the body’s senses, struggles to grasp. That in Authority under the law reside both Order and Freedom. That in Authority above the law resides neither. It’s tyranny.

The Reality of Idealism and the call for healing

The values presented first are termed “idealistic” because they define the character of our ancestral Mind, the Child who is Free Choice of its Parents Logic and Love, before it lost Consciousness, lost awareness of its home in Reality-Creation, and dreamed the alternate “reality” that is humanity’s material world. Their origin is the Parents who intended the gift of values and talents for their Child’s use in applying Free Choice to Creativity. To the composition, expression, and reciprocation of the Life-Worth of Creation.

They’re idealistic because the expression of values as ideals is part of the function of Creation whereas it can’t be part of an alternate “reality,” dreamed by a corrupted Mind, that’s a perversion of Creation. That pretends to replace Authority that serves and supports the Creation of Life-Worth from the bottom up, under the laws of cause and effect, with a perversion of authority that rules arbitrarily-lawlessly from the top down, not for the Creation of Life-Worth but for its denial. To consummate the original injustice -- the turning of the Child’s Mind against its Parents by an illusion: its shadow-opposite. A virus. A parasite. By self-delusion. A world so defined can’t call for Creation. It can only call for healing.

Meant to be used

The values of Reality-Creation have no inherent ranking. They have their place in the sequence of Logic-Love that moves Creation forward and in the sequence that moves healing forward as well. From Guidance that beckons with Home and Relationship, Innocence and Beauty, Wholeness and Wellness, through Enablement and Empowerment to Spontaneity and Healing. And, hopefully, someday, back to Creativity.  Like all the elements of Creation supported by Logic-Love they have functions that fit together in harmony. One no better or more important than the other. In one interconnected whole -- the Oneness that is Soul.

They also vary in their application to compositions of circumstances, the purpose and meaning of context that’s continually changing and evolving. Values can stand alone in the abstract but they’re meant to be used. To be applied to circumstances that compose each individual’s granular world. To help us navigate the ever-shifting situations that we experience as “life.”

The unreality of “realism”

The ranking of values is left to hierarchy, the perversion of authority that is the dream of an unconscious, corrupted Mind. Our material world ruled by the illusion of absolute authority and absolute freedom. By the mad idea that the Child’s shadow-opposite has replaced Logic-Love, its Parents. Where there can be but one value: the authority of the mad idea ruling over the madness of disorder, disunity, separation. An impossibility. A perversion. A joke.

But because the body’s senses anchor us to this alternate “reality,” because we “know” no other reality, the values that belong to our material world are “realistic.” What must be termed “idealistic” from our perspective is therefore realistic, and what must be termed “realistic” is actually delusional. Such is the world of opposites where Logic and Love, the ultimate values, are gone -- eliminated. Such is our perspective.

From one to two sets of values 

Publication of The Prince in 1532, Machiavelli’s guidance for authoritarian rule, brought to an end the pretense that human behavior follows a single moral code. And with it the idealist’s dream of a “kingdom of heaven” on earth. The values practiced by Mind’s Family-Relationship in Reality have a place in Child’s split Mind. They’ve been adapted to its dream and are recognizably good because families of individuals reside here too. Along with Intuition and the agent of Soul that is our real Relationship.

But these values share uneasy space with a wholly different set of values. The values of tribes. Collections of individuals dedicated not to the development and expression of individuality but to its extinction in service to uniformity. To the direction not of Mind composed of Logic and Love, occupied with Peace, but to brain composed of a leash and the willful predatory instinct at the end of it, bent on war. The prefrontal cortex and the herd of animals that’s the amygdala. The beast that it’s supposed to socialize. It was for the ruler of the beast that Machiavelli shared his statecraft.

All positive values are ultimately subsets of the Energy-Force of Soul-Interconnectedness in Reality. Family Relationship-inclusiveness taking all into itself for Peace, Harmony, Freedom, and Order, and for the enablement, empowerment, and affirmation of the Worth of Relationship’s Creations. Its tribal opposite in unreality takes captive within itself for conformity, disconnection, exclusiveness, disablement, disempowerment, and conflict. This is the ultimate source of negative values -- the “dark side.”

When opposite values conflict

An impactful figure who stood for individual-family values was Jesus. He and the values he taught were not a frontal assault on tribal values but that’s how they came to be viewed by the reigning religious authorities. This is the context of his execution. He was misperceived to be a threat to their authority which, in the end, is what they care most about. Not right or wrong but their license to rule unopposed. Their rationale which holds tribes together in obedience and justifies competition with other tribes for dominance.

Jesus made it plain that he spoke for another rationale not of this world and meant no threat. But because it was attracting widespread interest it created the appearance of a movement. A movement that could replace established authority with another one, and so his innocence or guilt didn’t matter. He had to go. In Ri -- “King of the Jews” -- broadcast the point of his fate: a warning to all who would challenge established tribal authority. A warning and a lie. A projection by authoritarian rule centered on itself and only capable of recognizing itself. The judgment of guilt upon Innocence. Injustice.

Matter is the source of Consciousness? 

If the laws of Necessity that govern the Reality of Mind have a perversion it would be the laws of necessity that rule the alternate “reality” of body. There, energy is under the direction of Mind. Here energy stored in matter, our bodies, imposes its will on us. Bodies dictating to mind-brain how they are to be cared for. Matter telling mind what to do, mind following the direction of the laws of necessity: body survival, body pleasure, body conquest-dominance. There, Mind over energy. Here, matter-energy ruling brains.

Not just Stephen Hawking but all of body-centered science views individual-family values as a threat to its authority. Because it’s out to “prove” through experimental science that mind-consciousness equates with matter-brain. Otherwise, it would have to concede that the only rational explanation for spacetime-matter is that matter originates with Mind, which would overturn its entire rationale. Repeatedly in his book, The Idea of Brain (Basic Books 2020), Matthew Cobb insists that the only possible source of mind-consciousness is brain matter. I.e. matter produces mind instead of the other way around -- a logical absurdity. Proof that science isn’t centered on any “quest for knowledge” but on protecting its founding premise: the reality of bodies and their material environment.

The ultimate purpose served by science and the Church both isn’t discovery and morality but the justification for their tribal authority. Their dominance-supremacy. Expedience dictated by tribal survival-dominance; the only consideration that matters to tribes that otherwise have no logical premise for their rule. Because Truth-morality contradicts tribal expedience.

United in opposition

The two sets of values are thus related to one another not by symbiosis but by opposition. Because tribal values are opposition. Individual-family values don’t recognize the reality of any other system of values since the reality that is their source is Reality-Truth itself. Is Conscience, the faculty of Mind that’s absent in Machiavelli’s tribal expedience.

It’s the same non-relationship that existed between Jesus who spoke for another Reality that can’t recognize unreality and therefore has nothing to oppose. That’s opposed by unreality, its opposition by definition. Reality can’t oppose unreality without making it real, an impossibility. But unreality can “oppose” Reality if that’s what it “is:” opposition to Reality, an absurdity.

The voices in our ears  

If the choice is between two sets of values here on earth -- one set for families-individuals, the other for groups or tribes, one set moral, the other Machiavellian -- how are we made aware of it? Are we the cartoon character beset by two voices whispering in either ear, one in angelic blue under a halo, the other in satanic red sprouting horns? Actually, yes. They’re two versions of our own voice, the voice of our ancestral Mind, one Child.

The devil has it easier because it’s in this world and of it, as are we. And it was the influence of its voice on our ancestral Mind that conceived it. It’s at home here and it likes everything just the way it is: a land of contradictions where anything is possible. Absurdities like absolute authority without opposites and absolute freedom without limits. It can speak out of turn because it thinks it’s the boss, we’re wrongdoers, and we deserve no respect.

Where it can play the joker wearing a thousand masks. Likable or angry, personable and warm or impersonal and cold, reassuring or intimidating, erudite know-it-all or ignorant fool, agreeable ass-kisser or bull-necked warrior. Where it can play the entertainer with a thousand jokes, a thousand perversions of the Truth. Or a magician with a thousand tricks. Overlord, joker and magician -- masters of contradiction.

It's not so easy for the agent of the Soul. It’s in the dream, but Soul that connects with Possibility couldn’t have had a hand in designing a land of contradictions -- an impossibility. So it’s not at home here. And the forms it takes to connect with opposites can’t be contradictions. Not if it’s Soul that connects with Logic and Love who can’t pretend to be what they aren’t. It would never speak out of turn. Not if role modeling respect for the sovereignty, integrity, and Innocence of the individual and the indispensability of Free Will is what brought it here.

Transmissions in the clear

History has given us many profiles of the satanic voice, from philosophy, psychology, theology, and mythology. But why take their word for it when it does the honors itself? With works by minds either fooled or possessed by it that speak in its own words. Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Mari Perron’s A Course in Love, Jerry Martin’s God: An Autobiography. One creative talent not fooled or possessed by it, Fyodor Dostoevsky, brought the Joker into The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan’s disarming visitor to his living room. An engaging conversationalist who would be welcome anywhere.

The agent of Soul has weighed in with its own depiction in A Course in Miracles. With perfect Logic and Love: what the devil is -- the crackpot thought system of our own opposite, our ego; -- what it does -- endlessly splitting off into isolated, separated absurdities; -- how we came to be afflicted by it -- by Child-Mind misidentifying with its own shadow, its ego; -- and how we can be rid of it -- by doing our part to help the Child get its real Self and its right Mind back. By becoming friends with our light side -- the agent of Soul -- and listening to its voice instead of being fooled by our own dark side. By doing exactly what our ancestral Mind must do because that’s who we are: one Child, one Mind. Free Choice, Logic and Love, brought together as One by the Innocence and Force of one Soul.

Doubtless there are many more examples. The point being we aren’t cartoon characters and the voices whispering in our ears, with halos and horns, aren’t either. They’re part of our everyday lives. They’re making their presence felt. And the result is our everyday lives and our everyday world. Thwarted careers and relationships. Wrongdoing of every stripe on every scale. Personalities ruled by the ego striding across the world stage starting wars and taking down democracy.

Why bother?

So why bother with analysis? Why bother articulating the values these opposing influences are feeding into our ears? Because this is the line of scrimmage where the outcome will be determined. Because choice always comes down to values. We motivate ourselves to make the right choice when we look squarely at what we’re doing and what it will cost. When we acknowledge that ours is a world of competition between one way of being and another way. And the difference is expressed in what they stand for: values. The stuff of Worth which is what Reality-Creation is all about.

The mirror that a list of values holds up is the clearest expression of Self that we’re capable of. The choice of different selves that puts it to us: Who are we? Does our behavior and the state of our lives reflect the values we stand for? Is the state of our world the best that we can do? If not, who do we choose to be: our real selves or cartoon caricatures mocking us? Our own opposites. Our own shadows who speak with our own voices and aren’t real.

Why bother with analysis? Why bother holding up the mirror? This is why.

ESFs will rejoice

Ruth Mack’s utility index is one no more. I’ve divided it into two. In the spirit of Machiavelli’s honesty it now reflects the values that define the character of families-individuals and set the code of conduct for tribes. One recognizably idealistic, the other realistic. One on the side Creativity and Peace, the other on the side of obedience and conflict. One light, the other dark.

One reason for both that I find personally compelling is to part certain personality types from their habit of applying tribal values to individual family-type situations. The body-centered personality type extravert-body-sensing-feeling (ESF) programs itself to lock individuals into a tribal-social context where conformity rules. Where originality and creativity are devalued instead of affirmed. Ruinous for any personal-intimate friendship but particularly dangerous for adolescents who need support for the lives they want to live. They don’t need the crushing weight of tribal convention and disrespectful authoritarian parenting.

ESFs mean no harm. They just haven’t looked into the mirror. When they look closely at the two codes; when they see that theirs isn’t the only one; that there’s another; it’s motivated by Love instead of fear; and it doesn’t obstruct the lives of loved ones the way theirs does, they’ll choose the other. They’ll rejoice. They’ll shower me with appreciation. And I can go on being my type: fool that I am, a naïve, moralizing idealist.

*The term “unconscious” or “unconsciousness” is used herein to denote a metaphysical rather than a psychological state of Mind. The state of humanity’s ancestral Mind in the Reality not of spacetime-matter that dreamed an alternate “reality” of spacetime-matter -- our material universe. The Mind I refer to as Child-Mind in Reality who is our one real Self, not the many isolated, separated bodies that we appear to be in its dream. The “unconscious” of Jungian psychology is “an exclusively psychological concept. . . derived. . . in particular from psychopathological experience.” From experience, that is, with the psychologist’s human subjects within the dream and not from speculation about an ancestral entity from another reality. It is expressly “not a philosophical concept in the metaphysical sense.” (C. G. Jung, Psychological Types (Must Have Books 2019, pp. 613-614)

Jungian psychology does, nevertheless, leave open the door to psychic phenomena through the “collective unconscious.” While attributing these to “the inherited brain-structure” Jung includes in their definition “mythological associations. . . dreams and phantasies.” (Jung, op. cit. p. 616) Whose origins are just as readily traceable to metaphysical as to any other “reality.” In fact, the metaphysical rather than “the inherited brain-structure” is logically a truer-to-life source of insight by far into humanity’s story if its premise is correct. Which implies that “right-brained” may have little or nothing to do with it. The ultimate source of all our experience would rather be Mind in Reality, not of spacetime-matter, that’s unconscious and dreaming.

Elusive brain, elusive self

Neuroscience has tried to understand the brain by viewing it as a machine and taking it apart to see how it works since the Danish anatomist and future Catholic bishop Nicolaus Steno suggested it in 1665. It was “the moment that the modern approach to understanding the brain was set out.” [Cobb 1, 40-41]. Where things stand as of December 2019, when Cobb finished his book, is the brain doesn’t actually allow its parts to be so distinguished or localized. They overlap to the point where it can’t be said for certain, for example, that the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere don’t or can’t perform the same functions.

A useful discovery to keep in mind because despite the human tendency to separate itself out into clean divisions, say of motivation and morality, we aren’t all or none of anything. For all the limitations and transgressions I’m tempted to ascribe to personalities other than my own I’m forced to admit that more than a trace of every one lurks somewhere in my own performance. The brain responds to shifting circumstances as a collection of neural networks that shift. That refuse to be pinned down, and so it is with personality, character, and values. Much as I’m tempted to label my personality type the best and others less it won’t stick. What we’re engineered for isn’t status quo that’s static but context that’s flux. Like the brain we have to be anything and everything to be ready for anything and everything. If Darwin was right and species are geared for survival it can’t be otherwise.

From chaos to making sense

So while this essay suggests a neat division of values between idealism and realism, conscience and expedience, individual and tribe, where any individual personality fits in it, with its arrangement of faculties du jour, can’t be pinned down. Just as the law is whatever the court decides in any given case the individual’s fit is whatever choices the individual makes in any given situation. We can be pinned down but only for the circumstances du jour. If it seems I’ve got myself or you securely labeled don’t worry. Circumstances will change and we will too.

And anyway none of this is necessarily the truth. It’s just my bias. Harry Truman said if you want a friend in Washington get a dog. In our suspect reality of elusive everything -- chaos -- if you want the truth get another reality. Go home. That’s what I’m trying to do with these essays. To understand so that I can go home to a life of love, truth, and justice. Where all I ask is that it makes sense.

The Reality of unrest 

Making sense can’t mean perfect Peace if by that we mean inactivity. The end of doing -- everything coming to rest. Not if there is one Reality and it is circumstance that is Mind. The original circumstance for which there can be no previous circumstance that is not Mind and so it just is. Reality is changing circumstances always needing to be fit together, always needing order, always needing the Logic-Love of Mind to do it. A state of wonder and beauty where it’s done and confusion and frustration in our alternate “reality” where it’s not. A state that, for all its wonder and beauty, is still not at rest. Is anything but inactive.

The implication of impossibility that accompanied the first premise of possibility didn’t produce a voice to be shared with the Logic-Love of Consciousness. The Parents. That’s the “reality” of our ancestral dreaming Mind -- the Child. Born of the egg and the seed of Creation, the Oneness-Soul of Innocence without opposites. But it did give Mind its ideal to pursue while searching for rest through the always evolving, always changing contexts of Creation. For coming to rest in the resolution of opposites, the perfection of Peace. An unattainable ideal so long as Mind must abide by its own Logic, the unavoidable implication of opposites.

The unattainable ideal

What does it mean? We don’t owe the movement of changing circumstances here to the intruder that interferes with Logic-Love, though it is responsible for the difficulties they pose -- the churning pressure of events and the turmoil. We owe it to Mind, the ultimate source of all circumstances. To its logical implication of opposites and to the pursuit of its ideal that opposites imply. To the Force of Necessity behind it. “Rest in peace” is no less wishful thinking in Reality than it is in our alternate “reality.” What would be the point of Creation otherwise? There is only the Peace of harmony and order that is not just being but doing. That is not and never will be at rest.

The over-arching motivation for every aspect of doing, including Creation, is to bring all of it to rest without the implication of opposites. It isn’t Perfection. It is the unending search for Perfection, a work in progress that keeps Mind and all of Reality-Creation going. A logical impossibility. An unattainable ideal.

Nothing ventured nothing gained

What, then, is Mind, our ancestral Child-Mind’s Parents? Among other things, role models for creative idealists. The point of Creation isn’t just getting there. It’s also the effort it take whether we make it or not. Striving. Because the measure of the worth of a goal can’t be whether it’s easy or hard, doable or not. It’s the strength of character it adds to those it serves and to those who pursue it. What is the planet earth but a wailing wall of grief over broken hopes, aspirations, and attachments? A constant cry of despair from striving that falls short.

If Creation is all about the expansion and expression of Worth then character that engages with it will expand and express itself as well. With striving that earns it without focusing on payback but on the worth of the goal itself. Without insisting on the rewards of success but unconditionally on the service to be provided. On the truth that striving -- the effort to make a difference -- is its own reward and character is ultimately what we have to show for it. What we the participants in Creation are building in addition to Creation itself.

Are we serious about the life of Love, Truth, and Justice that lies ahead? Will waiting for saviors to do it for us make it happen? Is this the example our role models are setting for us? The idea that “heaven” is where all is peace, quiet, and rest is mistaken. Creation is striving with a purpose. The idealist’s credo: “Nothing ventured nothing gained.”

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Where you wind up on list of values is where you put yourself -- these are defining values. List 1 = Conscious Mind Reality-Creation idealist. List 2 = Realist split mind light unconscious alternate “reality. List 3 = Realist split mind dark alternate “reality.” 

[The following is a first-cut subject to extensive editing. DCH 08/07/23]

Family-individual morality (mind-centered) 

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Guide, Psyche, Agent of Soul, escort
    • Connection to Logic-Love, Reality
    • Guidance, mentoring, role modeling, leadership
    • Logic-Love, metaphysics, understanding, vision, recognition, awareness
    • Memory, awareness-Consciousness, awakening
  • Love
    • Service, support
    • Liberation, Free Spirit
    • Gifts, Talents
  • Logic
    • Decision-choice, Thought-Reason, rationality, sanity
    • Judgment, wisdom, discipline, making sense

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered)

  • Will
    • Tribal strength:
      • self-guide, detachment from Logic-Love
      • self-reliance, self-sufficiency, authorship of alternate reality
    • Willful preservation of tribal authority:
      • mind control, avoidance of individual questioning, understanding
      • heart control, avoidance of individual emotional detachment, disloyalty
      • memory control, avoidance of individual return to Consciousness, awakening
    • Belonging
      • Tribal strength: self-service, self-support
      • Tribal liberation, individual captivity
      • Tribal enablement, individual disablement
    • Animal instinct
      • Replacement of instinct for decision-choice, Thought-Reason, rationality, sanity
      • Replacement of instinct for Judgment, wisdom, discipline, making sense 

“Home” - “Relationship” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered) 

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Family interconnectedness
    • Timelessness, Here and Now
  • Love
    • Unconditional Love
    • Family intimacy-feeling, belonging
    • Inclusiveness, acceptance
    • Relationship -- Family-individual, egalitarian friendship, companionship
  • Logic
    • Understanding, fitting together, sequence
    • Lawfulness, order

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered) 

  • Will
    • Tribal unity
    • Time, temporal, there and then
  • Belonging
    • Conditional transaction
    • Fraternity
    • Exclusiveness
    • Relationship -- tribe-member, authoritarian alliance, comradeship
  • Animal instinct
    • Action
    • Arbitrary rule, dictation

“Innocence” - “Beauty” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered) 

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Spirit, essence, purity, perfection
    • Aesthetics, sensuous joy of nature, art or music
    • Sanctuary, shelter, safety
    • Peace, tranquility, compatibility
  • Love
    • Authenticity, Honesty, sincerity, truthfulness
    • Liberation from addiction, toxicity
    • Individuality-affirmation, validation, Worth
  • Logic
    • Definition, boundaries
    • Knowledge, Truth
    • Protection, security
    • Awareness-Self, recognition-introspection, Innocence-harmlessness
    • Awareness-Authorship, Parents-Creator
    • Authority of rule of law

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered)

  • Will
    • Fortress, bunker
    • Victimhood, guilt, Retribution, vengeance
    • Tribal predatory will to
      • conquer-replace purity, perfection
      • possess-accumulate aesthetic wealth-treasures of sensory perception
    • Belonging
      • Invalidation, punishment
      • Tribal dependence on expedience-inauthenticity, appearances-facades, deception-masks, dishonesty-insincerity, for preservation of tribal authority
      • Captivity to addiction, toxicity
  • Animal instinct
    • Tribal predatory instinct for appearance, deception, weakness of prey
    • Aggression, intrusion, invasion
    • Survival, self-defense, attack, predation
    • Awareness-other, extraversion, guilt-harmfulness
    • Denial-Authorship, self-creator
    • Self-authority, rule above the law

“Wholeness” - “Wellness” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered) 

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Wholeness, Interconnectedness
    • Health, healing
    • Self-integrity
  • Love
    • Abundance, benevolence, loving kindness, caring
    • Family belonging, equality, sharing
    • Affirmation, respect, Worth
  • Logic
    • Reality, structure, foundation, stability
    • Lawfulness, respectfulness, justice-fairness
    • Judgment, discipline

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered)

  • Will
    • Intra-tribal cohesion, inter-tribal competition, conflict
    • Individual provisioning for competition winning, survival
    • Individual Self-surrender, sacrifice
  • Belonging
    • Tribal bounty, largesse, charity
    • Tribal belonging
    • Individual subordination, surrender
    • Tribal affirmation, respect, Worth
    • Individual invalidation, disrespect, worthlessness
  • Animal instinct
    • Tribal glory-mythology, fantasy, facade, fabrication
    • Tribal arbitrary rule, above-the-law lawlessness, arrogance, injustice-unfairness
    • Tribal license, individual confinement

“Enablement” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered) 

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Belief, faith
    • Ideal
  • Love
    • Growth, expansion
    • Growth -- personal, character, spiritual
  • Logic
    • Development, competence, skill-ability, maturity
    • Progress, advancement, achievement, success
    • Learning, experience, discovery, exploration

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered)

  • Will
    • Tribal faith in its supremacy
    • Tribal pursuit of the ideal of absolutes: authority without opposition, freedom without limits
  • Belonging
    • Tribal hegemony, empire
    • Tribal unawareness of personal Growth
  • Animal instinct
    • Tribal nurturing of its young for group protection, supremacy
    • Tribal training in competitive skills
    • Tribal recognition for competitive superiority
    • Tribal support for scripted individual learning, preservation of status quo
    • Tribal hostility to unscripted individual experience, discovery, exploration, threat of change in status quo 

“Empowerment” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered)

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Inclusiveness, Oneness, Family unity
    • Interconnection
    • Empowerment, strength
    • Timelessness, Here and Now
  • Love
    • Feeling, intimacy
    • Creativity
    • Relationship-Connection
  • Logic
    • Implication, sequence, extension, evolution
    • Context expansion
    • Meaning, Purpose, Understanding
    • Judgment, discipline
    • Presence of Mind

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered) 

  • Will
    • Exclusiveness, multiplicity, tribal cohesion
    • Competition, separation, division
    • Force, power
    • Time inexorability
  • Belonging
    • Invulnerability, insensitivity
    • Conformity, sameness
    • Obedience
  • Animal instinct
    • Status quo, tradition
    • Context contraction
    • Fate, chance
    • Untamable wildness
    • Absence of Mind 

“Spontaneity” - “Creativity” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered)

  • Soul-Psyche
    • Soulmates, playmates, playfulness
    • Exaltation, joyfulness, happiness, laughter
  • Love
    • Relationship, intimacy-Trust
    • Creativity, individuality, originality, eccentricity
    • Free expression, diversity, variety
  • Logic
    • Awareness-Self, sovereignty, individual rights, Self-respect
    • Free Thought, Choice, Will
    • Judgment, independence

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered)

  • Will
    • Teammates, fans
    • Exultation
  • Belonging
    • Alliance, team loyalty, suspicion-distrust
    • Conformity, conventionality
    • Scripted expression, uniformity
  • Animal instinct
    • Awareness-tribe, tribal supremacy, individual Self-denial, Self-effacement
    • Scripted-ruled thought, choice, will
    • Vacated judgment, dependence

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

The spoiler

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

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

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

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

The world of personality types unexamined

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

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

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

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

Schiller’s choice: idealism or realism

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

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

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

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

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

Personality type is bias.

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

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

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

Fetch!

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

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

One or the “other”?

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

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

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

The underlying Reality

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

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

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

The nature of feeling 

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

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

The 5-Factor theory: Myers-Briggs in reverse

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

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

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

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

A manifesto of tribal dominance

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

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

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

The 5-Factor theory’s real intent

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

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

Myers-Briggs is on solid ground

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

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

Captive to the dark lord of the body

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

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

“Fate” isn’t happenstance.

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

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

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

The only “factors” that matter: Logic and Love

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

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

Why opposites?

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

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

Why Free Choice?

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

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

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

Why it’s hard to understand.

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

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

The mother of injustice

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

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

The authority of making sense

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

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

How and where opposites are resolved

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

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

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

The engine of awakening

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

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

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

Which will it be?

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

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

 

 

 

Published on Leave a comment on Whither Goest Thou? Reflections on the Missions of Institutions Devoted to A Course in Miracles and the Work of its Teacher Kenneth Wapnick

Tao reveals itself differently to each individual, according to his own nature. The man of deeds, for whom kindness and the love of his fellow man are supreme, discovers the tao of cosmic events and calls it supreme kindness -- ‘God is love.’ The contemplative man, for whom calm wisdom is supreme, discovers the tao of the universe and calls it supreme wisdom. The common people live from day to day, continually borne and nourished by tao, but they know nothing of it; they see only what meets the eye. For the way of the superior man, who sees not only things but the tao of things, is rare. The tao of the universe is indeed kindness and wisdom; but essentially tao is also beyond kindness and wisdom. . . . [T]his life-giving activity [growth], to which all things owe their existence, is something purely spontaneous. . . . [T]ao is omnipresent; everything that exists, exists in and through it. [The I Ching or Book of Changes, Bollingen Series XIX (Princeton University Press 1950, pp. 298-299]

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Trust and Relationship begin with Fact

Jesus informs us in A Course in Miracles that we have the choice when to learn its lesson but not whether, as though it could not possibly change or be changed. As though it were cast in concrete, and yet he also informs us that it is not a “bible.” He cautions us not to treat it as the holy Word of God, absolute Truth with which to condemn and reject all who fail to accept it. Why not if he means what he says: we’re screwed if we don’t comply? All that is in the Course, that focuses on the darkness within the human Psyche, the pain and anguish of guilt, is explanation meant for us to understand just how badly screwed we already are.

Though they concentrate on why the Course cannot be a bible the reflections that follow cannot imply that its lesson can be ignored. Why? Because the laws of cause and effect emanate from circumstances. That in their constellations change but in their individual parts may not change. For these are the stuff with which the purpose and meaning of their compositions, their contexts, is revealed. This is where the Force of Necessity comes from, not their explanation or interpretation but from fact.

The works of Logic and Love in Relationship with their Child, Free Choice, that make up Creation, are part of evolution but not the facts of Reality they’re based on. The Force of Logic and Love depends upon it, for this is the immutable Rule of Law that applies to Logic and Love as to everything else. That gives them their legitimacy. That enables and empowers Trust essential to all Relationships in Reality. Fact.

Uncompromising Fact that can’t be ignored

It is fact that cannot be ignored in the lesson of the Course that takes away choice. The fact that Kenneth Wapnick, its teacher, refers to as its “uncompromising non-dualism.” Uncompromising because the human condition is defined by its unreality. Because it derives its state from the condition of our ancestral Mind, the Child: its unconsciousness. If the state of Child-Mind is defined by its unconsciousness, that cannot be part of Reality defined by Consciousness, that cannot evolve, then we, projections in its dream, are also in a state of unconsciousness. In a state of unreality.

There cannot be dual realities. Only one can be Real. Though Jesus has promised never to leave us “comfortless” he can’t do it by denying fact. The denial of fact is the stock-in-trade of the Child’s self-delusion, the magician that is the error we, projections of Free Choice, must freely choose to correct. Detectable by no more obvious attribute than its dexterity with untruth, the sleight of hand of illusion, the lies of deception. “Making it up as it goes along.”

Form that must change, content that cannot change

How we approach our task, how we apply the lesson, will vary from individual to individual. And so it compounds error to treat the Course that was addressed to two individuals, two personalities, in their time and place, as holy writ for us in our personalities, our time and place. It won’t fit. And if the task of governance is to fit in harmony it will be a violation of Logic and Love who govern in harmony.

The form of the lesson must change even if its content can’t. Our alternate “reality” is unreal. Fact.

The Course is an act of Logic and Love

The business end of Mind in Reality is its two main components Logic and Love, whose function is to source everything necessary for the Worth of Creation. Everything under the law: the laws of cause and effect that stand for the values of Logic and Love, wisdom and compassion. Maintained in place by the Authority of the Interconnectedness of Soul that is Innocence without opposites and by the Authority of Truth that is Necessity empowered by Energy -- Force under the direction of benevolence, the Logic and Love of governance. Of Mind.

A Course in Miracles is an act of Mind, one part Logic, the other part Love. Each part a set of functions designed to help the unconscious Child to regain Consciousness through its projections. Through the minds and hearts of the occupants of an alternate “reality” when doing so doesn’t interfere with Free Choice.

Minds and hearts corrupted by the code that defines the Child’s opposite, its shadow. Impossibility that is unreality. The unreal code that is the opposite of Logic and Love, wisdom and compassion. The opposite of Mind, a reversion to unthinking will and emotion, instinct and action that distinguish uncivil animal from civil animal. From human. That conjure within Mind unconscious the uniquely human animal. A horror of insanity composed of impossibilities: absolute authority, absolute freedom, and absolute truth. The same impossibilities that lured unconscious Child into its dream of an alternate “reality” and now lure it toward self-destruction. The “triumph of the will” that is the Child’s shadow-code, a magician. Self-delusion.

The force of the tribe

The act of Mind that is A Course in Miracles gains traction toward the Child’s awakening from self-delusion through equal emphasis on its two main parts: Logic and Love. Emphasis that necessarily contends in unreality with resistance and opposition to both. With an authoritarian mindset deluded by absolutes into specialness: thought and feeling concentrated on itself. The shadow authoritarian ideal: self without opposites, a perversion of the Innocence of Psyche-Soul without opposites.

The pull of specialness in unreality interferes with the Course’s application by shifting its emphasis in two ways: from Logic to Love and from Love that is feeling that shares to its opposite, feeling that monopolizes. From feeling-inclusive to feeling-exclusive. Feeling that is Worth to feeling that is worthlessness.

The force behind specialness that works its will is the force of the tribe, the human version of animal-herd. The invention of the human authoritarian mindset that degenerates into mob psychology: a herd of enraged humans feeling and acting by mindless instinct as one. The force that interferes is sociability. The pretense of “oneness” enforced by the rules of going along to get along. Present in every human tribal activity, for it is the main function of brain distinct from Mind.

For the Love of Truth and Honesty

Brain whose self-identity is tribe. Whose task is tribal dominance by act of predatory animal will domesticated by sociability. Pretense that is likability, niceness, and pleasantness, that is until the inevitable conflict and civility gives way to uncivility. To the discipline not of sociability but to the law of the jungle. Kill or be killed.

Emphasis that tilts toward Love and away from Logic in the work of the Course does so in service to neither but to pretense. To the agenda of resistance and opposition to keep humanity in line through the iron will of tribe. The Love of the Course is not and never was likability and pleasantness to disarm and distract. It is and always has been caring for the values, the Truth and Honesty of Logic and Love. To enable and empower the sovereignty and Worth of individuality that is Free Choice, not will that is captive to predatory tribal instinct.

Logic and Love, equal and inseparable

Sociability is at cross-purposes with the Course. Its discipline of tribal integrity gets in our way anytime that niceness, agreeability, and pleasantness -- mockeries of Love -- are allowed to devalue or displace the Truth and Honesty of Logic. We serve Truth and Honesty by serving the cause of Logic equally with Love. The cause of wisdom equally with compassion. The state role-modeled by Jesus through the Course: the authority of gentle loving kindness. Authority that is the Logic of Love and the Love of Logic.

If to make the Course an absolute of anything is to kill it, to make it sociability of any kind will also kill it. If it is not “tribe” it cannot be “social.” It is an act of Mind, not brain. Mind that is in equal measure Logic and Love, equal and inseparable.

Mind and possibility at the beginning

The laws of cause and effect speak for the state of Mind that adheres at any point in evolution. In the sequence of the implications of Logic and the connections of Love in their response to circumstances that change in turn in response to the implications of Logic and the connections of Love. An interactive process mirrored in the evolution of English common law, the basis for American jurisprudence. A reciprocal process of questioning established precedent as well as its application to new issues in new contexts defined by changing circumstances. If there is no stopping change then there can be no stopping reconsideration both of the application of established precedent and the law that it’s based on.

The laws of cause and effect spoken for in the Course were not there at the beginning. What was there at the beginning was circumstance implied by Logic: Mind and possibility charged with its definition, the functions of Logic and Love, to respond to possibility with an act of Creation. With thought and feeling, ideas, reasoning, and values. An act that could not have been preceded by an opposite. By an impossibility, for opposite by implication of Logic -- by definition -- cannot precede the source of its contradiction.

The work in progress that is Reality and Creation

The laws of cause and effect spoken for by the Course are Necessity to that point in the evolution of Creation. Of the open-ended forward movement of Logic and Love that is implied by eternity, the eternal Now. The laws of cause and effect that are the Necessity of Truth, the Truth that supports the lesson of the Course, cannot be a “bible” because it cannot be absolute. In the movement of Logic and Love in their eternal dance of interaction with circumstance nothing can be absolute. Nothing can stand unquestioned when nothing can stop the process. When nothing can stop Creation driven by change that is question. If anything is “absolute” it is eternal question that implies the impossibility of absolute, the eternal answer that is and shall always remain a work in progress. The Course is no exception -- a work in progress integral to the process Creation and the structure of Reality that are a work in progress.

Marketing its lies to an unconscious and disempowered Child as the absolute truth is the mode of its shadow code of impossibilities. Not its Parents, Logic and Love, but a predator. The illusionist that lured it into captivity and keeps it there with its illusions: absolute authority. absolute freedom, and absolute truth. With arbitrary rule backed by the authority of law that’s status quo beyond change because it’s beyond questioning: a “Holy Bible.” A self-deluded fool’s perversion of governance that enables and empowers Creation with support from the bottom up that’s under the law. Law that necessarily expands with experience and Knowledge. With the ever-broadening context that is evolution -- Reality and Creation.

The dynamics of function 

To focus on what A Course in Miracles does is to focus on its function. Function is an attribute of Logic-Love’s definition of Reality-Creation and every part of it. An attribute whose essence is Energy, the dynamic of Force. The Force of Soul that Interconnects and of  the Authority of Necessity, the laws of cause and effect that cannot change. That define Reality and guide Logic-Love’s benevolent governance of Creation from the bottom up. Every part either has a use or it can’t exist. This applies to Mind-Consciousness and to Psyche-Soul both, the Interconnecting Force of Everything. Every part has agency under the law.

This applies to every cause including institutions dedicated to disseminating the Course and the work of its teacher. The work of doing is the work of Energy, the agent of doing for all of Reality-Creation. The dynamic of Force that gives cause its effect, the sequence of Logic-Love its forward movement. Always dynamic, always in motion because circumstances are always in motion, always changing. The Course is part of a dynamic process of growth and evolution within an alternate “reality” whose function is to guide it. To help Free Choice manage it, use it, and adapt to it dynamically.

The provocation that is honesty

The lesson of the Course is delivered authoritatively but always with gentle loving kindness. We’re given soft pillows when we board the plane, an assurance of service with wisdom and compassion. But the flight isn’t meant to lull us to sleep. Far from it. In an alternate “reality” that is dishonesty and untruth a perspective that speaks honestly for Truth is provocation. There’s bound to be turbulence. Turbulence with a purpose: not sleep but awakening. To get us off our butts and moving.

Jesus’ honesty when he walked among us showed how provocative Truth can be. The Course is sheer provocation capable of stirring the occupants of Plato’s Cave into a hornet’s nest of opposition. Into crucifying the messenger, because that’s what the crucifixion was meant to accomplish: the permanent end of messenger and message. The permanent end of fear that the Truth will ever again be told.

The comfort of gentle loving kindness, wisdom and compassion abates fear so that it won’t block accessibility. But it’s not a substitute for the lesson, nor is it meant to distract from the lesson. It only affirms its Source, the Logic-Love of Reality and its Peace. Because Logic-Love could not make its presence known otherwise.

Yet it’s provocation and a call to respond to it. A call from Logic-Love not to swoon in the ecstasy of “spirituality” but to act. Its meaning isn’t the pillow. It’s the journey out of untruth into Truth. Out of the nonsense of two realities into the sense of one Reality. The journey of provocation and turbulence that is Honesty.

The face behind the mask of pleasantness

The opposite is described in the Course as the “ego’s thought system.” It does offer substitutions and distractions. It has a thousand faces, none more sinister or familiar than likability. The devil that visited Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s novel was affable, conversational. The “god” of Jerry Martin’s God: An Autobiography is casual, erudite and entertaining, a regular guy you’d want to have a beer with. The “god” of Mari Perron’s apocryphal A Course of Love is a cheerleader for anything goes. Every one your best friend and every one a phony. Pleasantness whose purpose isn’t receptivity to Truth. It’s to hide the Truth.

Two perspectives, two functions

In applying the metaphysics of the Course to explain our alternate “reality” Kenneth Wapnick and I take off in different directions. No difference in our loyalty to the metaphysics of the Course but significant difference in what we do with it. A difference in function:

  • He taught what the Course says in its context: the specifics of two clinical psychologists at a medical-academic institution in mid-twentieth century Manhattan -- their personalities, psychologies, and relationships. I intuit what the Course may imply for specifics beyond its original context. Not on my own but in relationship with an agent of Soul, guided by Logic and Love.
  • Ken helped to interpret and communicate the Logic-Love of the Course within its scope: error committed after the Child (Father’s Son) lost consciousness. I am applying it to explore its implications for issues beyond its scope. To explain the Child’s loss of consciousness and what this implies for regaining it.
  • Ken brought his unique perspective, individuality and creativity to his task. I bring a different perspective, individuality and creativity to mine.
  • We respond to two different needs: his to clarify the lesson of the Course, mine to extend it. His to explain its metaphysics, mine to expand its metaphysics. His to focus on what the Course is, mine on what it can do.

“Absence of felicity,” absence of partiality

My differences with Ken show in our takes on two topics: Helen Schucman’s apparent ambivalence about the Course and the significance of Carl Jung’s intuition about personality type. Helen was the main scribe of A Course in Miracles which was channeled by Jesus. She was assisted by Bill Thetford, a professional colleague, in a support role. In essence, they took dictation and from it produced a manuscript suitable for publication. Neither sought nor was given editorial license to modify the lesson. Neither sought a role in teaching it.

In his biography of Helen, Absence of Felicity, Ken struggled with her reluctance to involve herself in the Course’s cause beyond recording it. Being her friend and admirer and a teacher of the Course, Ken might have been moved by personal bias that even though she held back it was not for lack of conviction. For lack of love and respect for its Author, for whom she had just completed an intensely intimate labor of love.

Had Helen not maintained neutrality skeptics could have cited this as evidence of her authorship just as any court observer would cry foul if the stenographer took sides in litigation. There were enough skeptics as it was, hard-core “realists” blocked by their bodies’ five senses from having anything to do with a sixth. A common occurrence that accounts for history’s split between two schools of thought: idealism and realism.

Helen’s gift back to the Course

The viability of the Course depends upon its source from another perspective, one that’s not tainted by human ambiguity. Its author needs to be an agent of spiritual Psyche or Soul, the agent of Logic and Love that interconnects everything including our alternate “reality.” Otherwise it won’t know what it’s talking about. How can any source talk to the occupants of one “reality” about events in another without convincing evidence of connection to both? If it can’t speak legitimately for Reality and Truth how can it make sense?

The Course owes its legitimacy and acceptance as much to its Author as to its lesson. Limiting Helen’s role to that of impartial stenographer ensured that the voice of spiritual Psyche would come through in the clear, unmolested by the human psyche. Protecting the integrity of its Author may have been Helen’s last and most sensitive act of service to the Course:

Misled by body-sensing “realism”

Ken’s unfinished work about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung may have reflected something of the person behind the professional: a subconscious preference for Freud’s “realism” and indifference bordering on aversion to Jung’s intuition about personality types. Though he observed that Jung hadn’t gone far enough Ken showed no interest to that point in Jung’s signal achievement. In particular in the critical difference between body-sensing and intuition that telegraphed the difference between Jung and Freud.

That telegraphed, as well, the aspect of Helen’s personality that suited her to her role of detachment in the story of the Course. An aspect that Ken’s brand of psychotherapy seems to have overlooked. Though Helen had experienced psychic episodes they hadn’t revealed a gift for insight or the soul of an intuitive behind the exterior of a realist. If they had it seems likely that she would have been all in for the Course. What gave her pause was the same patriarchal body-sensing that prevented teacher Freud from understanding pupil Jung. For who would balk at non-dualism, the point of “miracles” in A Course in Miracles, that our “reality” sensed by the body is unreal? That it’s so illogical it can’t be taken seriously. Who else but a body-sensing “realist?”

A taste of Heaven

Jung’s intuition tells us that personalities that define our individuality necessarily define us by what we do as much as by who we are. By our function in the evolution of context through changing circumstances. As true here as it is in Reality; nothing can exist without its part in some form of activity, whether purposeful or pointless. The role given to Helen was the business end of her personality that defined who she was to be by what she was to do in its context. The integrity of her role as scribe depended not on her going beyond its limits but on her staying within.

Helen’s willingness to devote a significant portion of her life to scribing the Course expressed core human values: satisfying work suited to the worker; meaningful work for a respected authority; support for individuality, talent, and creativity; personality and task performing as one; striving attuned to Free Will instead of smothering it. None of these brought to life to the same extent, if at all, by the regular job that frustrated her. Her talents weren’t flowering into soulful poetry on the job but they were when she was moonlighting with Jesus. The boss who never insisted that she take the job. She could tell him to shove it any time she wanted.

The act of Creation in Reality is Interconnection that’s joyful as well as effortless. Striving toward the affirmation and reciprocation of Worth. An act of benevolence defined by the governance of Logic-Love, given Life by the Force of Soul. That celebrates the Creativity of every one of its parts and every contribution shaped by its unique context. Who wouldn’t give up a part of their day to experience this? Jesus didn’t offer Helen a job; he gave her a taste of Heaven and she loved it. When Jesus taught that we are perfect just as God created us, Helen felt the Truth in it. It must have felt like an affirmation of Worth like no other.

“Success”

How did Helen’s personality fare in her work environment at Columbia Presbyterian? Exactly as a court stenographer might, who had no voice in the proceeding, if asked to speak with the voice of a litigant. Out of her element. Lost. Unsure what to say but sure she doesn’t want to be humiliated for saying it. In self-defense Helen might have taken on the hardness of certainty without to hide the softness of uncertainty within. The personality of an authoritarian realist could have been so unyielding, so demanding, that she was virtually impossible to work with. A misfit. Toxic.

If Heaven is the functions of self-awareness fitting together in harmony then our opposite “reality” must be the functions of un-self-awareness that collide in friction. Because to be un-self-aware is to be unaware of self’s individuality and function. “Success” in this life is more often than not a series of fortunate events that connect personality and function we’re unaware of with situations we’re unaware of. Everything spontaneous, beyond awareness.

Our personalities should help guide us to where our individuality and its talents belong, but if we lack self-awareness, if we undervalue Jung’s personality types, it won’t happen. In the event, it’s the agent of Soul from Logic-Love -- the tao -- that guides us when we allow it, unseen.

The “success” of one life is but a mirror image of the series of unplanned accidents and mistakes that accounts for all of life on our planet. Not to know what we’re doing is quite in step with the nature of our alternate “reality,” and Helen was in step. Demanding that the personality of a scribe take positions, whose job description is the opposite, would have made her at least hard to work with if not toxic. Her work space would have been toxic if she wasn’t alone. As it was it was so toxic that it put out the Call for Love -- for the “better way” -- that gave us A Course in Miracles.

The authenticity of the Course and its Author

Contrast the friction of misfits at work with Helen’s remarkable fit with Jesus. Their compatibility further evidence that the Jesus of the Course is authentic. That he’s an agent of Soul connected to Logic and Love, the same functions of Mind in Reality that fit all functions together in harmony. Further evidence that Jesus knew what he was doing when it was through Helen’s mind, through her personality and its function -- scribe, -- that he channeled the Course. Probable choice because of her function, improbable on the face of it because of her personality.

The Course’s authenticity is undermined anytime skeptics can mischaracterize its scribe as one of them. She wasn’t one of them. The impartiality of a scribe is just that: impartiality. Skepticism is taking sides, and Helen could not do that. Though she was obliged to signal impartiality it’s clear that she never meant it to detract from the Course or its Author. It wasn’t a stance, thumbs up or thumbs down. A state that concerned her biographer, who sought to correct it with an interpretation of thumbs up. But Ken needn’t have been concerned. The ornery scribe took care of the skeptics on her own.

Intuition’s gift of personality type

I cite Ken’s esteem for Helen and for Freud not as an indication of questionable scholarship. He was as respectful of scholarship as he was of their achievements. His grasp of the Logic of the Course was as uncompromising as its non-dualism -- reliably disciplined and on the mark. Articulate and professional. His passion for his cause and contributions almost as impressive as the Course itself. The same unerring judgment that offered Helen her job was clearly at work when it offered Ken his.

I cite it instead as an instance of a more general tendency of human illogic to overlook personality type and function in its understanding of our alternate “reality.” Of the human condition, and so to guide Free Choice in choosing how to address it. How to discern purpose and meaning correctly so that we progress beyond it instead of being stuck inside Plato’s Cave.

I cite it, too, as an instance of how original thinking with intuition can work productively with the Course when the Course itself doesn’t cover all the bases. Though he dives into the human Psyche to an unprecedented depth Jesus leaves it to us to explore its breadth. Breadth that could have included personality type to explain projection and the obstacles we face in reversing it, but it didn’t. The point being we can figure it out for ourselves. If Jesus had laid it all out for us would we still have Free Choice?

Jung and Myers-Briggs shared the gift of Mind -- the sixth sense that is intuition -- with their theory of personality type. With illumination that can make the occupants of the Cave aware that its darkness isn’t their only choice. They aren’t prisoners and neither are we. None of us is a victim except by our own hand. We aren’t truly stuck anywhere except by our own choice, delusion that we’ve inflicted on ourselves. 

Body-sensing’s corruption of personality type

“Science” has done the opposite with its “five factor” theory of personality type. With the five senses of the body insanely fearful of what Mind’s sixth sense will reveal about them: that they don’t serve the light. That they and their captive science are instruments of the dark. Keeping us inside the Cave. Aided and abetted by Freud, adamant that Psyche is confined to body just as science is adamant that Consciousness is confined to brain.

Where does such nonsense come from? Not from the Logic of Jung’s and Myers-Briggs’ intuition that makes sense. It can only come from illogic that doesn’t make sense. From the master of the Cave. From delusion, and what’s called for is voice to speak for something better. Full-throated support for understanding personality type and function with intuition, not for overlooking it.

Klaatu barada nikto!

Jung and his successors, Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers, were guided by the same source and produced results that were equally insightful. Not flawless but equally useful if only analysts and theorists like Ken were aware of it.

A foundation dedicated to Ken’s work won’t critique it. Yet I share my critique to make a point, that acknowledging the Course’s part in a living, ongoing reflection on the questions of life’s purpose and meaning would add to its relevance, not detract from it. Would expand the reach of Ken’s extraordinary contribution, not impede it.

No one can absorb every detail, every nuance, of what Jesus and Ken had to say through the Course. But anyone with Mind and its sixth sense, along with the uniqueness of their personalities, is qualified to reflect on its implications. Is qualified to apply its lesson from one set of circumstances -- the personalities, lives, and work of two clinical psychologists in twentieth century Manhattan -- to another.

Policies and principles given voice in one moment are meant not to be enshrined as though time had stopped, but to be applied. Applied to other moments because time hasn’t stopped. The world of the Course and Ken’s teaching is not The Day the Earth Stood Still. We are not Patricia Neal needing Michael Rennie’s robot Gort to protect us inside his flying saucer. It’s the Cambrian era: change and diversity so powerful that nothing can stop it.

Infinity in motion

The Course is more than the comfort of sanctuary. It’s the engine of Mind and intuition that enable and empower adaptation to change. Function that asks to be recognized and put to use. To overlook it is to miss not only the Truth of what it is but the Truth of what it’s for.

We can’t do as Jesus has asked without staying in step with change. Without aligning ourselves with the Logic and Love of Creation. With work that can never be done because the implications of Logic and the connections of Love -- Relationships that hold the Interconnectedness of Soul together as One -- aren’t temporal. They’re infinite. Eternal. Eternally in motion. If this is the Truth of Reality and Creation, then it must be the Truth of the Course and the use we make of it. To bring us to the light of self-awareness and the end of the darkness of our Cave.

The example set by Jesus

What did Jesus mean when he admonished teachers and students not to treat the Course as a “bible?” That to do so would thwart its use, just as the intended use of Jesus’ parables and miracles long ago, in a different context, was thwarted by captivity to authoritarian hierarchy and canon. By “Bible” that distracted minds detached from Reality with the false promise of absolute Truth. Just as the Child unconscious had been misled by the two-headed lie of absolute Authority and absolute Freedom. All of it a con.

Jesus didn’t respond to Helen’s and Bill’s Call for Love with the absolute Truth. With an external deus ex machina that, once imposed on their situations, would solve all problems in perpetuity. He responded with example. He role-modeled how to address their problems without telling anyone what to do. How to explain context -- individual and humanity -- with Logic combined with Love that leads to understanding. So that reasoning can address purpose and meaning grounded in facts instead of magical thinking. So that it will be guided by perception and judgment instead of misperception and misjudgment. All of it grounded in Reality and Necessity -- the laws of cause and effect  that take the mystery out of miracles.

The call for original thinking that provokes

Above all, he set an example for the use of Logic, Love, and Free Will to expose the lie that is our alternate “reality.” Courageously and honestly, for this is anything but a convenient truth. Unless we follow his example with explanation that leads to Understanding, based on Logic and Love, that's shared with wisdom and compassion, it will be taken by others as provocation. As attack that warrants response in kind: unthinking, unreasoning retaliation.

If we allow the Course to be treated as absolute unquestioned anything we kill it. It’s not a “bible” because its very purpose is to question and be questioned. To empower the implications  of Logic that is forever asking Why. To enshrine the Course in absolute Truth is to deprive it of its power. To do the work of insanity, the Child's shadow-code. Parsing its metaphysics and sharing lives is useful but so too is application that puts it to work. So too is original thinking that’s provocative or it’s not doing its job. A view that’s legitimate and even critical but under-represented. Why? Because it's provocative. 

Choose again

Application of its metaphysics is what makes the Course unique. Text, Workbook, and Manual. A point made eloquently through the work of its teacher, Kenneth Wapnick. Then can the Course and its teacher be honored as inspiration and guidance for their use? For their application by their students to changing contexts that require fresh understanding? Through the same independent judgment, the same sixth sense guided by Logic and Love, that Jesus affirmed when he closed with Choose again?

Institutions dedicated to the Course and its teacher’s work in their time might also help to reflect on what’s to be said through the same Logic and Love, the same sixth sense, in our time. To reflect and apply the Course as a living document in the spirit of Jesus, whose work is not done. Is this feasible? It’s worth asking.

The pheasant in its nest

The pheasant needs flight to adapt to the world around it. It can’t stay in its nest. Every institution needs to reflect on its mission to stay viable. When the Miracle Distribution Center, the Foundation for A Course in Miracles, and the Foundation for Inner Peace reflect again, what considerations arise from the example of Jesus? What suggestions might be offered by the provocation of Honesty and Truth and the dynamic of Love? By the eternal Why of Logic?

Thank you. Keep up the good work, and God bless!

Published on Leave a comment on Deconstructing a Lie: The Metaphysics of Authoritarian Supremacy

The Why of metaphysics

You can check your American Heritage Dictionary for a definition of metaphysics or get it from my essay, “A Concise Definition of Metaphysics” (posted on this website 02/04/23) https://davidclarkharrison.com/2023/02/04/definition-of-metaphysics/.

Why not be content with the dictionary? Because its definition is like saying a car is a thing with wheels, doors, a motor, and a license plate. It doesn’t get across what metaphysics does, what it’s for. Lets it lie there without bringing it to life. Here’s a definition that brings it to life for me and maybe it will for you:

Metaphysics is mind with passion for explanation. Why? Because explanation asks Why. Which takes mind into performing its favorite function: Logic that Loves. Which will lead explanation to its favorite destination: Understanding. Understanding what? Understanding Why. Getting at the root of things beyond dishonesty and appearances where it will find Honesty and Truth, the basis for Order combined with Freedom. The basis for the loving harmony of Peace and Happiness, the product of Authority that governs all of Reality and Creation supportively, with Logic and Love, from the bottom up. 

Metaphysics is a whole lot more than a “branch of philosophy” when philosophy is more like a branch of metaphysics. Inquiry doesn’t get serious about the main concerns of philosophy until it gets into metaphysics. My definition tries to fix this. That’s why I’m not content with the dictionary definition and maybe you shouldn’t be either.

Logic is making sense

What does a mind need to understand and work with metaphysics? Logic. The most important mental ability to develop is to think logically with Love because the difference between right (authority) and wrong (authority) is that one is logical and the other is not. What do I mean by “Logic?” Forget about Aristotle’s syllogisms and Zeno’s paradoxes. Forget about Kant’s “pure reason” and Venn’s diagrams. In my use it’s just making sense. Explanation that leads to understanding. Here’s what I mean.

We need to cross a neighborhood street. We can cross in the middle or walk a short distance and use the crosswalk. Why use the crosswalk? Because if we’re struck by a vehicle in the crosswalk it’s the driver’s fault but not so much if we’re jaywalking. Oh. The seven-year-old who asked was satisfied and we used the crosswalk. I was satisfied because I loved the seven-year-old, I was caring for her, and Logic is never complete without Love. She asked for an explanation that made sense and understood. The street was crossed safely and we didn't come to blows. Logic-Love explained the setting, we understood our choices, made the right one, and all’s well.

Five senses aren’t enough

The Myers-Briggs personality type system is an extension of Carl Jung’s breakthrough in psychology: accessing Logic through Intuition, the function of mind whose spontaneous insights can penetrate appearances to explain and understand. An extension of the precedent set by the founder of metaphysics, Parmenides, 2500 years ago, whose focus was physics rather than psychology but that’s the point. Logic through Intuition theoretically is equally effective in any field since appearances define our “reality.”

The case that Isabel Myers makes for personal growth, by exercising and expanding our personality types’ functions, i.e. by using under-utilized personality assets, is persuasive. Why? Not because it’s “scientific.” The quantitative measurements of science can play a support role in psychology as they can and do in many fields. Rather it’s persuasive because it’s intuitively logical. The only route to unraveling the mysteries of the human psyche beneath appearances. Below the surface where science lacks visibility. Where its five senses can’t guide it.

Where inquiry needs a sixth sense -- the Logic of Intuition. The gift of Mind that the human mind fears to use, clinging to the familiarity of appearances, imprisoned in its body, in thrall to its body’s senses. It’s no wonder that body-sensing personality types tend toward authoritarian supremacy while mind-Intuition types tend toward democratic equality. Body-sensing authoritarian supremacy is a towering fortress of rationalization opposing change. Mind-intuiting egalitarian democracy welcomes and adapts to change with imagination and creativity.

One perspective isn’t enough

A Course in Miracles is metaphysics and metaphysics is the same: accessing Logic through Intuition to explain and understand. The notion of personal growth was introduced to me through a friend 43 years ago. A professional mentor who noted that I didn’t “understand the process” until I did, and then she inspired her mentees with my progress. The process that accounted for it is accessing Logic through Intuition to explain and understand. Intuition -- the function of Mind and personality type that’s distinguished from body sensing in the Myers-Briggs system.

It doesn’t work alone. It works if Intuition serves as a portal to another perspective that’s in this world but only for the purpose of helping its host get behind its appearances to understand it. If it were of this world, like us, its perspective would lack objectivity and therefore would not be helpful. The other perspective offers help if the source of its insights is Logic paired with Love.

The lesson of the Course: “Choose again”

The Course’s metaphysics radiates objectivity and Truth through its unique intimacy with Logic and Love. It explains that we are not aware of the barriers to an awareness of Love’s presence. If Love and Logic are inseparable then we must also be unaware of the barriers to an awareness of Logic’s presence.

The Course’s authorship and its lesson owe their relative obscurity to minds and hearts choosing unawareness. For the host that the other perspective is addressing has Free Will. Is Free Choice, and any of its acts must then be a matter of choice. That can be chosen again. Otherwise the other perspective wouldn’t bother. Wouldn’t waste the effort of sailing through rough seas on a ship of darkness.

Pointlessness is an unchanging status quo

If Logic paired with Love doesn’t belong here it would be because it belongs elsewhere. In and of another “world.” Another reality. That must be Real since there can only be one reality that’s Real. Going backward, beyond the Big Bang to the origin of our universe in Reality that’s Mind instead of matter, isn’t a leap of faith. A departure from reality but the opposite: an act of Logic guiding awareness toward Reality. Minds lacking objectivity, choosing unawareness and wedded to “realism,” won’t get it. Won’t understand. But minds open to guidance from Logic, choosing to hear insights from objectivity -- from Intuition through another perspective not of this world -- will get it. Will understand.

The other perspective is an emissary from Life-Creation that grows. From Consciousness that’s constantly extending and expanding Self-Awareness through a constantly evolving and expanding context. A context of circumstances that consist of the implications of Logic and the relationships of Love in constant movement forward into the unknown. The Reality thus defined is anything but static. It’s dynamic. The essential defining attribute of the Creation of Life and Worth. The substance of Reality.

There is no such thing anywhere as an unchanging status quo. Wherever Life is present, in Reality or imagined in an alternate “reality,” it must grow or it would not be what it is. Minds lacking objectivity, choosing unawareness and wedded to “realism,” fear growth. Fear the forward movement of evolution and therein fear Life itself. In exchange for an imaginary unchanging status quo they receive what they’ve bargained for: “lives” going nowhere that end in death. Pointlessness.

The flip side of “harmless” entertainment

Metaphysics is served by the gift of storytelling if it tells the story of Mind that preceded and imagined the Big Bang. It’s served incidentally by stories grounded in our alternate reality, including those like Harry Potter grounded in yet another alternate reality. Flourishes of the same magician’s “art” that conjured both. J. K. Rowling and the “creators” of fanciful action-comics figures aren’t acting as agents of another perspective from Logic-Love. Their imaginings can be put to use to help with explanation just as there’s a message for us in every act.

But that’s not what entertainment is for. It’s to keep its audience content with appearances and distracted by “action” -- the antics of a magician. To keep its audience distracted from the real business at hand: focusing on the truth of its situation. On exposing its unreality. Exposing the lie and the liar.

The flip side of harmless entertainment is harmfulness itself. The magician-parasite borrowing its host’s talents to produce ever more sophisticated, more dangerous weaponry with which to destroy humanity. Technological “progress” -- the wonders of electronics, the Internet, and social media touted for healing and learning -- turns against humanity instead of for it in an unending cycle of animal-tribe conflict.

Purpose in the rediscovery of real Self

The thrust of the other perspective not grounded in this “reality” is notably not toward the technology of all things physical. Not toward the atrocity of combat among tribes, for that would make it real -- an impossibility. It’s toward possibility: understanding that our alternate reality has already been “saved” from its miseries by the Reality that preceded it and awaits it. The solution can’t be fixing what’s broken by definition. By anguishing over all the deficiencies and frustrations of unreality, but by awakening from it.

All of human “progress” that leaves animal-herd will free to pursue its mindless, loveless agenda of self-destruction is putting lipstick on a skeleton. Real progress is exposing the lie that is animal-herd will. The mis-identity of self. The loss of Self-Awareness caused by the loss of Consciousness. The rediscovery of real Self, the Child of Logic and Love: Free Choice. This is the purpose of The Story of the Child and the purpose of this website.

Where would Creation be without possibility?

Part of the lie is the false philosophy of “realism” that says metaphysics can’t do what it does. That insists that it’s impossible. True, Kenneth Wapnick has noted, in Love Does not Condemn, that one question has yet to find a rational answer: Why and how our ancestral Mind in Reality lost Consciousness and descended into an alternate “reality.” The mother of all unanswered questions.

My experience with metaphysics tells me that it is possible. That Intuition, guided by another perspective grounded in Logic and Love, can find rational answers to many questions. To the mother of all questions and those descended from it. If this makes me an “idealist” so be it. But where would Creation be without possibility? Where would Life be without ideals and idealists who believe in them?

The law of “realism:” seek but do not find

The Logic of metaphysics says that unconsciousness didn’t break the connection with Reality. Didn’t break the connection with Creation or with our ancestral Mind’s Parents. An impossibility since there can be only one Reality and Reality can be only One. Otherwise there would be many “realities” -- an impossibility. Unconsciousness only broke awareness of the connection through the thought of separation: a delusion. An impossibility, A lie.

Exposing the lie is a necessary first step toward restoring Consciousness. “Realists’” commitment to authoritarian supremacy commits them to maintaining appearances which works against awakening instead of for it. By attempting to block self-awareness with the false “authority” of the wrong identity: the isolated-separated body. An action-comics armor-plated caricature of “strength” that’s pitiful weakness.

There is abundant evidence of “realists” seeking for answers in the theories that dominate every major field. Abundant evidence, too, of determination not to find answers. Evidence of a peculiar mindset noted by the Course: “Seek but do not find.” A mindset embarked on a “quest for knowledge” that seeks neither knowledge nor to be known. 

The indispensable genius of metaphysics

Metaphysics follows Logic through Intuition into the story of the Child, our ancestral Mind, to expose the absurdity of ”realists’” “logic.” The flaws in their “reasoning” and perceptions, through the power of Mind. Through the power of ideas. The right ideas whose source is Logic and Love through Intuition guided by another perspective. The gift of metaphysics is the right ideas and their inherent Authority. The Authority of Logic and Love and its authorship of A Course in Miracles. Backed by the laws of cause and effect and the Force of Necessity. The only “power” there is. Real Authority.

Metaphysics is the Rosetta Stone that allows access not just to the Logic of philosophy but to any field of inquiry. To psychology, the framework for explanation given in the Course. To science, economics, and theology. Making sense is impossible without involving every aspect of human functionality, a fact that science confronts and acknowledges when cherished theories must yield to facts. This is the genius of metaphysics. The life-saver that philosophy has to offer physics when its quest for quantum gravity needs one. 

Fearless wisdom from a seven-year-old

This is the Logic of metaphysics. If a seven-year-old and I can understand it anyone can. That is, if they aren’t opposed to asking Why. Because that’s asking for help from Logic and not everyone wants help. Those who don’t are mostly “realists” afraid of what asking Why might reveal about their idea of “reality.” Metaphysics bears down hard on asking Why. It’s fearless. It doesn’t care about convention or what “others” think if they’re not thinking. It lets Logic take it wherever it leads. To where this essay will lead. If its readers are “realists” unable to think beyond their idea of “reality,” unwilling to be led by Logic, they’ll abandon the exercise. They won’t go there.

But the seven-year-old would. What she showed was a mind attuned to the free spirit of inquiry. Independent judgment that’s not captive to any authority but committed instead to Logic that makes sense. To letting guidance of mind take precedence over comforts of body, because there was no traffic and using the crosswalk was extra effort. When the time comes for her to choose wisely between the right and wrong kind of authority, there’s hope! She asked Why and showed respect for Logic. If she blossoms into an intuitive rather than body-sensing personality type she may become a metaphysicist! A recruit for having and exercising Authority on behalf of Logic-Love!

Misidentity brought home to identity

Speaking of ruling the galaxy I asked Wonder Woman -- the talented seven-year-old -- how she ranked values that were important to her. Her answer was along the lines of “I thought power was cool so I put it near the top.” OK. Like a lot of kids and grownups too. But are attitudes about power like so much chatter in pop culture that can be dismissed? Is a kid’s attraction to power guaranteed not to disrupt the lives of Dick, Jane, and Spot on Pleasant Street? If you’re thinking the pursuit of power isn’t a minefield of potential disasters what planet are you on?  

What follows is another perspective to help with the choice between the right and wrong kinds of authority. Metaphysics armed with insights from Intuition and illustrated by an event from the original episode of Star Wars: Darth Vader’s overthrow of Palpatine, the evil emperor of the Galaxy, to save his son, Luke. The redemption of Adam Skywalker through the rediscovery of his real Self. Misidentity brought home to identity.

Resistance from the Peanut Gallery

Is another perspective welcome? The voice of authoritarian supremacy, the zombie that holds sway over its mindless-obedient captives, will defend itself with the only accusation it’s capable of: with being what it is, a zombie. OK, let’s be honest. The source of the explanation I offer is indeed a mysterious voodoo cult.  Metaphysics. And I’m a high priest with but one goal: to poison minds and turn my captives into zombies.

But there’s a fallback. Since nobody understands metaphysics I’ll just put it out there that I’m peddling secrets. Everyone is a sucker for secrets as my seven-year-old, now twelve, is about to demonstrate. Oh, that’s different. I love secrets. If it’s a secret I want to hear everything.

The right and the wrong kind of authority

There’s derived power and power you earn on your own. Eva Duarte had a kind of power. She was played by Madonna in a 1996 film called “Evita.” She derived power from her husband, Juan Peron, the fascist dictator of Argentina. She did good things for her people with it. Eleanor Roosevelt did good things with the power she derived from being Franklin Roosevelt’s wife. My mother, Helen Harrison, helped save one of Pittsburgh’s most precious cultural assets -- the opera -- with influence derived from her husband Max.

No matter which it is we know that people with power don’t always do good things with it. It’s because where power comes from is authority and authority can be the right kind or the wrong kind. Original or derived.

Original is real. It’s right and it’s light, while the other kind is its opposite. “The dark side of the Force.” Not good or real either. Like Dracula, the shadow-reflection that casts no shadow or reflection. Those who aren’t careful, who choose power that’s based on the wrong kind of authority, will end up in a life-or-death duel with Rey Skywalker. She zapped Palpatine’s butt and she’ll do the same to them.

Laws of cause and effect

All of Creation must abide by the laws of cause and effect. The way things are and the way they must be. Real authority isn’t wishful thinking. It’s fact and it’s Necessity. We can imagine that we’re getting away with it when we make up another reality. Where we imagine that we can write the script and make up the rules. But we’re not.

“Laws” and “Necessity” sound confining. But the harmony of Order can’t come from laws that want us to conflict. Harmony is peace and happiness that make free will possible, not impossible. Free Will can’t be everyone doing whatever they want if it requires that there be no laws. If it does away with Order. Because then there would be wholesale conflict instead of harmony. Collisions at every intersection with no stop sign. Lawlessness. Violence. Mayhem.

Real authority is Necessity that applies to everyone and everything -- the laws of cause and effect that operate for our benefit. For Order and Freedom and Happiness. Because we don’t live in a world that’s divided into separate bubbles for each individual. It’s shared.

These are a few of the laws of cause and effect that metaphysics summons when we confront the absurdity of authoritarian supremacy:

  • Logic and Love are inseparable.
  • Freedom and Order are inseparable.
  • Free Will requires Order-Harmony.
  • Free Choice and Order-Harmony aren’t possible without Logic-Love Authority governing supportively-benevolently from the bottom up by defining roles logically and lovingly to fit together in harmony and peace.

What is ‘wrongdoing’?

Palpatine and his authoritarian empire can only “exist” in a delusional nightmare of chaos, cruelty, and violence. Star Wars is a myth for a reason. Because in presuming to write the rules authoritarian supremacy presumes to replace True Authority with false authority. Presumes to violate the laws of cause and effect. Presumes to deny the Force of Necessity. All impossibilities which make it resoundingly unreal.

To contradict the laws that define Reality is to leave it. Departure from reality is psychosis, a fit description for authoritarian supremacy. But that’s not all. Embedded in the laws whose substance is Logic and Love is the stance for Good that is the Worth, the meaning and cause of Life-Creation. The defining attributes of Good that are its Moral Code. Authoritarian supremacy that would defy the laws and Necessity of Reality is also defying its Moral Code: the very definition of wrongdoing. Thus Palpatine and his evil empire.

Time to turn up the house lights

When Rey zaps Palpatine’s butt he does his best to look and sound ferocious. As if the hooded demon in his scary makeup will lay waste to the entire galaxy if provoked. He grimaces and mouths the usual threats from wounded victimhood -- You’ll be sorry! I’ll get even, etc. But all he got out of me was laughs.

The absurdity that is Palpatine and his evil empire is a one-dimensional cartoon. An entertaining joke that lives on in sequels but never was. Just like authoritarian supremacy, the mindset of “realism,” only it’s not so entertaining. It’s a sick joke that will go on horrifying with outrage until its audience gets it. Until its audience chooses to turn up the house lights and be done with darkness and outrage. Done with entertainment, and chooses to get back to purpose and meaning. To Reality and Truth. To Creativity. 

Yossarian knew what he was doing 

My book-in-progress with the working title, The Story of the Child, ventures beyond the scope of the Course to offer a rational explanation for how and why the Child, our ancestral Mind, lost Consciousness. With the Logic of metaphysics based mainly on the Course. A theory that can never be “proven.” But if its insights on questions that matter align with experience and lead to a better understanding of what’s to be done about it, it’s done a good thing.

And wouldn’t you know: it's counter-intuitive. It flies in the face of “normal” assumptions that someone screwed up, this never should happened, there will be hell to pay, etc. The fact is the entire human conception of Reality-Creation, of “God” and “Heaven,” is bonkers. My theory says the Child’s loss of Consciousness was a natural, i.e. logical consequence of the introduction of Free Choice, a wild card, into Reality-Creation. With its potential to deviate from the laws of cause and effect and to conflict with the Force of Necessity which would logically necessitate the loss of Consciousness. 

Our alternate “reality,” a dream world, offers a perfect trainer cockpit where Free Choice, our ancestral Mind, can practice losing control and crash landing without real consequences until it masters the skills necessary to exercise Free Choice. Can practice through us, its projections in the dream, by trial and error. Until it demonstrates the competence needed to perform its role in Creation. A real-world Joseph Heller Catch 22 writ large.

The skills we need: self-direction and self-discipline

What role? The short answer is Free Will is an essential ingredient of Creativity. What besides Creativity is willing to “go boldly where no one has gone before?” Into the unknown? To blaze new trails, invent new products, design new styles? What besides Free Will, a wild card, gives Creativity the pizzazz, the chutzpah, the outlandish in-your-face uncontrollability to do this than Free Will? If Free Will is essential to Creativity then our ancestral Mind has an essential role to play in Creation: the spark, the life of Creation. Its authenticity.

What skills? The Child Free Choice needs to function autonomously not with its Parents directing it but self-directed. Wild cards like Energy and Free  Choice both need direction. But unlike Energy the Child Free Choice doesn’t exist to do what it’s told. The guidance it needs must come from mature judgment acquired and internalized through hard-knocks experience. From the capacity to perform its role that can’t be taught, can’t be gifted or it would surrender the essential ingredient. Free Will being handed anything without learning or earning it can’t be what it is. Can’t be self-directed Free Will.

Or self-disciplined. The competence to choose freely while staying within the bounds of Order, while respecting the laws of cause and effect and not contradicting Necessity, requires discipline. Discipline that must come from within because otherwise choice can’t be made freely. It’s controlled.

The gift of the auto-didact

Understanding that it is not and never has been the role of the Parents to control their Child with direction and discipline that compromise Free Choice is counter-intuitive. Because to the human mind, corrupted by the myth of authoritarian supremacy, if their child can’t be controlled by their direction and discipline they can’t be parents. Authority can’t be “authority.” To this point of view my theory is not only counter-intuitive, it’s dumbfounding.

Yet this is metaphysics. The gift of the auto-didact. Following Logic wherever it leads: not from preconceived nonsense like authoritarian supremacy that interferes with explanation but from an open-ended, unbiased Why. From simple curiosity and questioning that animate Free Inquiry. Where in all the major fields of inquiry, weighted with the bias of sensory perception, is inquiry so enabled? So free?

And away we go! Into the Mind of the Child

What triggered the Child’s loss of Consciousness couldn’t be anticipated. Nothing in its Parents’ experience before they gave birth to Free Choice could equip them with the Knowledge that anticipation required. What would Logic and Love know of the consequences of turning Free Choice loose into Creation? Of releasing a wild card into an environment that it would make wild until it learned self-direction and self-direction the only way it could: through experience? Through experience in a trainer cockpit, our alternate reality, where trial-and-error training and the inevitable misjudgments of immaturity can’t do any real damage.

Trial-and-error began not here but in Reality-Creation. With what may have been the first attempt at Creation involving Free Choice. It took place in a context of imperfect Knowledge: inexperience with the full range of possibilities including the possibility of unconsciousness, an impossibility for the Child’s Parents. Neither Parents nor Child knowing what they were doing. Circumstances that called for correction through training.

The mistake that could not have been prevented

The exact infraction of laws, the conflict with Authority-Necessity that triggered unconsciousness, could have been virtually anything. Any versions of flipping to the “dark side.” All inadvertent, sidetracking an untrained, inexperienced Free Choice into illogic. Causing the Child’s Energy, the Force of Necessity, to be redirected from Consciousness and Creation into unconsciousness. Into the dream of an alternate reality.

If the infraction was the seminal assertion of authoritarian supremacy then it would have been the Child’s attempting to express an illogical ideal of Freedom that’s separated from Order. Freedom without limits -- authoritarian nonsense that “liberty” is having and doing whatever you want. If the prominence of a particular error in our alternate “reality” is any indication, then this was likely where the Child messed up.

There was also the illogical thought that parts of Reality-Oneness that are inseparable can be separated. Order says you can do none of that. But Free Choice would not have inherited this awareness from Parents who Know nothing of separation, could not know it without making it real, and therefore could not anticipate the Child’s mistake. It was a mistake that could not have been prevented.

The “reasoning” of a madman

Order expresses the Necessity of the laws and the Force behind it. Order consists of the definitions and implications of Logic and the reciprocal relationships of Love that interconnect Everything -- the unreality of opposites as well as Reality - in harmony. Order is Creation’s Reality. Order is the Logic of Authority. No one including Authority itself can do whatever it wants. It’s called “the rule of law.” Without it both Freedom and Order are impossible. And if the rule of law is the foundation of Order and Freedom in Heaven then it matters just as much on earth.

The Child would not have been motivated to un-relate to its Parents, to replace their Authority with false authority, but only to make use of the gift of Freedom as it understood it. As it misunderstood it, for the first premise in the flawed logic that leads to authoritarian supremacy is Freedom without Order -- having and doing whatever you want. From there to the premise that having and doing whatever you want requires that Authority get out of the way. That you must be the authority. The “reasoning” of authoritarian “realists.” The “reasoning” of a madman.

Alienation and the intent of false authority

Painful separations from loved ones and other unpleasantness are all part of our ancestral Mind’s trial-and-error training. Through us, the projections of a dream. An integral part of its acquiring self-direction and self-discipline through personal growth. Toward the self-awareness of maturity that can distinguish between true Authority and its perversion -- authoritarian supremacy -- and make the correct choice. That can choose to understand that false authority cannot be an object of reverence but is an obstacle. To be overcome if the Child is to regain Consciousness and intimate Relationship with its Parents. If it’s to regain awareness of Logic and Love’s presence, the loved ones whose seeming absence is the ultimate cause of our emotional and psychological torment.

The cost of authoritarian supremacy is incompatibility that troubles every relationship. The relationship problem that it creates between Child and Parents: alienation. The intent of false authority is to replace true Authority. And if we’re serious about understanding why our Psyche is wounded, why psychopathology has yet to find a cure, this would explain it. Whether it’s an excess of religion-hating or religion-loving, authoritarian supremacy is godless.

The Truth of Relationship

Patricide doesn’t leave its perpetrators with peace of mind. Does nothing for compatibility, agreeability, harmony, and pleasantness. As Lady Macbeth can attest, it’s guilt. Perverted from guilt by the perpetrator desperate to get rid of it into a pretense of innocence. The state of permanent, unresolved grievance, vengeance, hatred and self-hatred, that is helpless “innocent” victimhood. A state unrecognizable to the Parents. A state that will exclude itself from the peace and happiness of Reality-Creation until the authoritarian “realist” gives up its foolish dream.

What is the object of training? Developing judgment essential to self-direction and self-discipline. Putting to work every function of mind to explain and understand our situation so that we can respond competently to every context, every set of evolving circumstances, that challenges us to get it right, do what’s right, and do it right. Functions of mind that deliver introspection, responsibility, and accountability. Intuition, insight, and reflection. Thinking, analyzing, and reasoning. Feeling and evaluating, Choosing and deciding with the wisdom and discipline of Judgment that puts it all together. That integrates every function, every consideration, into a clear assertion of who we are and what we stand for.

The Truth that we are: not a mindless, loveless action-comics dream of isolated, separated bodies but the Truth of Relationship. The Reality of Logic and Love at one with one another, inseparable from their Child. The Life and Worth of Creation.

I got a great deal for you on the Brooklyn Bridge

The focus of the book and these essays is on authoritarian supremacy for a reason. Because the event that followed the Child’s descent into unconsciousness and illusion was, in my view, its inevitable consequence. A choice that can and must be be revisited but not a choice. The mother of all transgressions: the perversion of Authority from benevolent in Reality to malevolent in unreality. By an intrusion of insanity that the Course refers to as “the ego’s thought system.” A psychological wrench in the gears of human progress, of human relationships, and of what I want to make of my life: to make a contribution and to be of service among family, friends, and community.

The shadow-reflection’s first purchase on the Child’s trust was its likeability. The persona charm of Bram Stoker’s aristocratic Dracula. The relatability of the devil while it chatted amiably with Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. The great guy posing as “god” in Mari Perron’s A Course of Love and Jerry Martin’s God: An Autobiography. Articulate and voluble. Affable, non-threatening. Offering equality and partnership; sharing its “story;” impressing with its erudition; at ease with non-stop “action,” all the more so if it involves anger and fighting. Fine with incarnation and fine with reincarnation, and why not? The life and death of bodies are the magician’s most awe-inspiring trick.

All to get its message across: if you want to do whatever you want, I’m your guy. The pitch that snookered our ancestral Mind and keeps us snookered today. Letting us know that if we don’t put our misleading fire-breathing image of the demon aside it will just go on charming our pants off and selling us the Brooklyn Bridge.

The pitch

This was the figure who responded in the Child’s own voice when the Child wondered, “Where am I?” That offered to guide the Child out of its strange, dark place into an alternate “reality.” The Child’s own shadow-reflection, a parasite that can only be “detected” when its host is unconscious and has lost all ability to distinguish between real and unreal, true and false, right and wrong. When the only figures it can detect are play-actors in the dream its compromised mind was about to project. All speaking with variations of its own voice, programmed by the code that defines its shadow: a mirror-image opposite. Their every attribute derived from its host.

Waiting to be animated, to be made “real,” by Energy at the direction of Mind. By delusion: the parasite-code’s host deluding itself into believing that Free Choice can be surrendered to its opposite. That to become its opposite is to secure escape from strange feelings that it had never known and didn’t want: fear, guilt, paranoia, and hatred stoked by distortion. By the sinister tale of malevolence and betrayal that its opposite was making of its condition, transforming an innocent and inadvertent mistake into intentional victimhood. Into danger from retaliation by the betrayers, angry Parents. In such a state the lure of attaining absolute freedom and authority in its own alternate reality, of healing the wound to its Psyche, the Innocence at the core of its Being, by getting rid of guilt, would be virtually irresistible.

Mina enjoyed it

What could dupe even an unconscious, desperate mind to surrender its Self to another “self”? To persuade Free Choice to give up freedom even temporarily? Once the Child heard about the wonders of this alternate “reality” it wondered how to make good its escape from Reality. Let me take control and I will lead you there. When we arrive I will give it back.

A prospect that would fill Free Choice with both anticipation and dread but for one consideration. The seeming loss of the Relationship with its Parents left an enormous void in its Psyche. Even if its Parents couldn’t tell Free Choice what to do the Relationship was its Home, critical to its sense of Being as well as connectedness. So critical to its part in Creation that “Relationship” and “Child” are interchangeable. Free Choice is inseparable from its Parents Logic and Love. Losing intimacy with the Source of its own Consciousness, its own Logic and Love, its own Soul along with its function, must have caused an unbearable ache of hollowness. An ache that cries out to be filled.

If its “other self” was offering to replace the Child’s Parents even partially or temporarily it would be doing what its host craved: to make the ache go away. To fill this awful void. And so the Child let itself be taken captive. Not with ambivalence but with relief. Maybe even with pleasure -- Mina dreamily giving herself up to the vampire and enjoying it.

Too good to be true

To be taken where? To a place that sounded too good to be true: where the Child could have and do whatever it wanted.  How? By being the author of the script and the author of the rules. It would even be its own author because there would be no competition from angry Parents bent on punishment for its mistake, threatening vengeance for betraying them.

None of it the truth. There were no angry Parents bent on vengeance. It was a mischaracterization of the loss of Consciousness perpetrated by mistaken identity. Nonsense peddled by a lifeless code, the Child’s mirror-image opposite, programmed to take its host captive by separating Will from Free. An illusory shadow-reflection that emerged from the Child’s shadow to act out its code of opposites. Of appearances and deceptions that are our alternate “reality.”

The sick joke that is authoritarian supremacy

The perversion of Authority that the Child fed itself has special relevance for our “reality.” It’s the ultimate source of the perversion of Authority that lies at the root of authoritarian supremacy. The illusory separation of Free from Will is the separation of Choice from Logic and Love, the atrocity that accounts for human intransigence, frustration, and misery. It helps to know where the atrocity comes from: from self-delusion. Not from “Satan,” “Lucifer,” the “Devil,” and a host of other separated “others.” It comes from a distortion of us. Mistaken identity.

A parasite. An opposite attached as all opposites must be to its host. A virus following a lifeless code that took our ancestral Mind captive so that it could replicate itself. So it could keep us, its replications, captive to its illusion. Imprisoned in Plato’s Cave. It comes from our ancestral Mind’s dark side -- a liar. This is the source of authoritarian supremacy: one overblown, illogical, malicious lie. A sick joke.

Paradise lost

Once the deed was done and Child-Innocent became corrupted with guilt, its dream of an alternate “reality” commenced. With the burst of Energy redirected from Reality into unreality, under the direction of Mind, that science has labeled the “Big Bang.” The source of our universe of spacetime-matter that the human intellect refuses to see for what it is: mental.

The event also known to psychology as projection: the insane idea that a thought can leave Mind, its source. Our universe is an insane thought of separation and guilt projected as though onto a screen through the “eyes” of the unconscious mind projecting it. A reverse mirror-image of the unconscious mind dreaming it.

When the Joker told the truth

Why does the Course say our alternate “reality” is “where the unreal has been made real.” Why does it seem so real? The Child’s opposite animates its fantasy of arbitrary authority with Energy surrendered by its host when its host surrendered control. Surrendering control placed Energy at the disposal of the delusion -- Energy which responds to direction from Mind and had already been redirected away from Reality into unconsciousness. The burst of Energy that produced the Big Bang within the deluded mind of the Child was Energy’s disconnect from its Source within the Oneness of Being. It was unreality’s noisy, violent disconnect from Reality. Like splitting the atom.

Our universe and everything in it, organic and inorganic, is a projection of dying Energy. Energy powering a dream and therefore cut off from its source in Reality. Destined by the second law of thermodynamics to die. Unreality heralded by its signature burst of violence. Entropy is dying energy, the inevitable dismantling of a dream. An elaborate fabrication where everything including the dream must die.

But until then Energy continues to animate the dream. Powering “lives” -- bodies’ senses and their physical surroundings -- procreation, conflict, and violence. This is what makes the illusion seem so real. A perversion of the Energy that empowers Creation-to-Life in Reality and powers replication-to-death in unreality. The “dark side of the Force.”

The ”other self” was as good as its word. The only time it told the truth: its takeover of control would be temporary. In its temporal “paradise” of mortality paradise itself must come to an end. If not with the Child’s coming to its senses then with the end of the Energy that powers it.

Metaphysics works

The Voice for the Parents known to theology as the Holy Spirit arrived only after the dream was projected. It could not have been present while the Child was deluding itself because it is itself a part of the projection. A replication of the Child’s unadulterated Self, the Psyche of Innocence. Its Soul from which nothing can be parted.

Which is why metaphysics can connect with the Holy Spirit and Logic-Love through Intuition. Among its plethora of appearances our alternate reality contains one appearance with a unique function: to guide us and our ancestral Mind back to Reality. To connect with us through metaphysics, the function of mind that offers a portal to Truth beyond appearances. The rationale for the presence of the Holy Spirit gives metaphysics its own rationale, the source of its legitimacy and credibility. The reason why Parmenides its founder was respected in his own time and is now being taken seriously by at least one physicist again. Metaphysics works.

Values that separate real from false Authority

The origin of authoritarian “values” is the shadow-code’s takeover of its host’s unconscious mind with extreme possession and control. Hallmarks of the disorder familiar to psychiatry as obsessive-compulsive narcissism. Here are values that define the benevolence and Truth of real Authority against the malevolence and falsehood of its would-be replacement:

  • The Authority of One Self in Reality has one set of attributes-values: Real Logic-Love, sharing, affirmation, enablement, and empowerment. The opposite has ownership-control, monopoly-possession, invalidation, disablement and disempowerment.
  • One Self Authority enables and empowers the Voice for universal, inclusive equality. The opposite enables and empowers the voice for an authoritarian supreme, exclusive ruler while disabling and disempowering the inclusive Voice for equality.
  • One Self Authority Creates and affirms Worth and builds character. The opposite invalidates and denies Worth, tears down character.
  • One Self Authority connects with Love and builds friendships among equals. The opposite disconnects with fear and blocks friendships among equals.
  • To One Self Authority in Reality our opposite alternate reality is implausible, strange, highly unusual, and unreal -- a fantastic collage of ridiculous, nightmarish, illogical impossibilities, contradictions, and absurdities. To us who don’t know any other reality the opposite’s alternate reality seems plausible, familiar, not unusual, and quite real.
  • The opposite’s illusion of unopposed-arbitrary authority is fulfillment of an insane fantasy of separation: specialness exempt from laws. Freedom separated from Order. Order and Will, Feeling-Force separated from Freedom and Choice, Logic and Love, Mind and Thinking. Animal-herd, beast-predatory brain separated from animal-individual, human-nurturing brain.

Star Wars and the myth of absolute authority

The absolute authority animated by stolen Force, imagining it’s its own dark side, is portrayed in Star Wars as the “galactic empire” ruled by Palpatine. A hierarchical nightmare of imprisonment, inequality, exclusiveness, injustice, conflict, violence, and suffering. An adolescent fantasy ruled by a singular power -- specialness exempt from laws. With a support cast of servile subordinates wielding power derived from their oppressor. All rulers one-dimensional cartoon characters devoid of feelings, values, and conscience. Devoid of responsibility, accountability, and a sense of justice.

Attempting to maintain order by intimidation and force. By loveless, mindless cruelty over vulnerable individuals with three-dimensional feelings, values, and conscience. With responsibility, accountability, and a sense of justice. A nightmare of guilt attempting to steal its victims’ innocence behind the facade of helpless “innocent” victimhood.

The galactic empire was a tableau of injustices by malevolent arbitrary authority all “justified” by mischaracterization: benevolent authority is malevolent like itself; “freedom” is slavery -- unquestioned obedience to itself; “innocence” is guilt -- victimization of innocents; “loving kindness” is cruelty; “abundance” is deprivation; “safety” is hazard, conflict, violence; “justice” is injustice;  ad infinitum. All appearances, all deceptions, all lies. All perversions of Logic into illogic, Love into fear, Truth into untruth, fact into fantasy.

The Authority that’s “pointless to resist”

Palpatine and his galactic empire are pretension that authority can do whatever it wants by opposing laws instead of respecting them. By denying free will with lawlessness from the top down instead of ensuring it with lawfulness from the bottom up. “Wrongdoing” is violating the laws that define right from wrong, good from evil. It’s breaking the laws of cause and effect, defying Necessity. So if Palpatine’s empire is a fantasy of lawlessness to let its rulers do whatever they want, they are definitely the bad guys. And they are destined to lose because laws established for the commonwealth can’t be broken. Necessity means Necessity. It can’t be defied.

Darth Vader spoke for the wrong kind of authority when he said it’s “pointless to resist.” Events proved him wrong when he changed sides, changed identities, and Adam Skywalker overthrew the evil emperor. The Force that helped the rebellion win is Force grounded in the people not in their rulers. So what is the Force that’s “pointless to resist?” The Authority of Logic and Love under the rule of law backed up by the Force of Necessity. This is the lesson of Star Wars.

Palpatine’s comeuppance

The “power” that Adam Skywalker wielded is power derived from choosing to be Lord Vader, a parasite dependent on the evil emperor. “Power” grounded in mistaken identity. He and his master did bad things because they’d become like figures in “action” comics with no feelings or values. With no conscience. That’s what happens when we turn to our dark side for “power:” it turns us into somebody that we’re not. Alienated from ourselves, alienated from others.

It took an emotional test of Adam Skywalker’s humanity for him to realize his mistake: watching Palpatine electrocuting his own son. Choosing between his heart and the heartless power that had owned him until then could have gone either way. And in human experience too often it does go the wrong way. But heart and Adam’s real Self won out. He went from serving authoritarian supremacy without question -- from doing what he was told -- to thinking and judging for himself. He stopped being a parasite, owned, possessed, and controlled by power. He regained his integrity and independence.

Thus liberated from mistaken identity Adam Skywalker taught Palpatine a hard lesson: no one can do whatever they want. Authoritarian supremacy is wrong. Adam stood up for the rule of law and for Necessity, the Force for Good. He stood up for the  right Authority.

What is the psychological inspiration for the myth of Adam Skywalker? The event that’s re-enacted in everyday events and stories like it all over the world:  our ancestral Mind’s mistaken identity. Deluding itself that it could rule an alternate “reality” and do whatever it wants. The myth of authoritarian supremacy. 

Table scraps from authoritarian supremacy

Bottom-up authority enables and empowers Free Choice and individual Worth. It delivers the capacity to achieve individual potential and to explore, develop, and Create in an environment open to possibility.

The wrong choice of authority turns Life into an impossibility, a lie. “Alternate reality” is deceptions from start to finish -- all appearances, all opposites:

  • “Welcome” that isn’t a welcome if it deprives its victim of a voice.
  • “Free will” that’s someone else’s voice writing the play-acting script that you’re “free” to follow.
  • “Liberty” that’s someone else’s voice writing the rules that you’re “free” to obey without question since you’ve been denied a voice.
  • “Order”-“harmony” that’s disorder: obsessive competition for supremacy.
  • “Triumph”-“winning” for supremacy at the top, defeat-losing for everyone else.
  • “Friendship” and “camaraderie” that are blocked by competition and conflict for supremacy.
  • “Fun” that’s nourishment for supremacy at the top and amusements-superficialities -- dog food -- for everyone else.

The wrong authority promises authoritarian supremacy, a fantasy of “liberty.” It actually delivers captivity, subordination, voicelessness, powerlessness, and forced allegiance to an arbitrary ruler -- a dictator or “boss.”

It delivers chaos ruled by warlords, thugs devoid of conscience accountable to no one. Palpatine was a warlord. Darth Vader was his dependent, a servant without honor or respect granted derived power with the empty pretense of “nobility:” “Lord Vader.”

The wrong authority that promises the “liberty” of no laws, of escape from rules by writing your own rules, actually delivers one supreme ruler at the top doing whatever it wants, with everyone below taken captive and allowed derived powers or denied any voice. Feeding off table scraps of superficial distractions and entertainments -- a scam. The wrong top-down authority delivers derived power or no power with no Free Will. Our ancestral Mind fell for the scam in extremis. But not all of us are in extremis. Shouldn't we know better by now?

Every individual’s Declaration of Independence

Individual Lives can’t achieve their potential without the benevolent Authority of Logic-Love their Source, enabling and empowering their Worth, their capacity to learn, mature, develop competence and Judgment, so they can choose freely and wisely. Free Choice requires Relationship with its Source Logic-Love to be earned and developed to maturity. It requires training, experience, and discipline. It can never be “doing whatever you want.”

Individual Lives can’t become the characters they choose by turning choice over to the animal-herd will of authoritarian supremacy. By allowing it to replicate itself by superimposing its illusory herd-tribal “self” on their individual selves To deny their individuality by depriving them of individual voices and rights. By putting them in uniforms of sameness and turning them into an army of clones.

The choice of the right Authority is the choice to support individual rights, democracy, and the rule of law. It is the choice to reject one-party rule by authoritarian dictatorship and lawlessness. It is every individual’s Declaration of Independence. 

What’s the question?

Logic-Love says that progress is supposed to be linear. Left to right moving forward -- in the Western manner anyway. And of course that’s how it’s been in many respects: our animal-herd will has seen to it that human red army ants have established themselves on the planet without destroying themselves or their planet -- so far. Yet linear progress forward doesn’t define our act. It’s the opposite. We keep cycling back as if to get something right that we’re getting wrong. The “progress” of human red army ants that keep bungling the same task, over and over, can’t end well.

And it isn’t ending well. The Anthropocene may be the shortest epoch in geological history. The public face of commentary is often “optimistic.” Based on generalities that depart from circumstances on the ground that actually define our situation. What I’ve learned from metaphysics so far is that there can be no ”answer” without getting the question right. And the question will always be drawn from the meaning of the specific circumstances that obtain in the here and now. This applies in our ancestral home, in Reality-Creation, as well as here.

King Kong’s manifesto

Ask Logic-Love, our Parents in Reality, why they embarked on Creation instead resting comfortably in a static state of Perfection and they will tell you that there is no such thing, They acted because it’s in the nature of who they are to do so and the nature of who they are was the circumstances. Getting the origins of Reality-Creation right comes down to getting right who our Parents are and understanding that this is the one and only point in Everything, including unreality, when circumstances don’t change. Otherwise, we are always at the mercy of changing circumstances, changing contexts. And so we had better get off our hobby horses of resistance to change and get serious about progress. We had better get started wanting it instead of wishful-thinking it away with bogus theories and ideologies. We had better start reasoning with Logic-Love instead of rationalizing.

Metaphysics says we’re cycling back because our red army ant will refuses to let go of its founding premise, that it rules without opposition. And so it’s entitled to keep laying waste to the countryside because it’s entitled to do whatever it wants and there’s no other authority to say it can’t. It’s the only act on stage with a voice and none other is to be heard. The ultimate expression of humanity’s embrace of all-powerful, all-knowing sensory perception. The authoritarian supremacy manifesto: King Kong owns the Empire State building. 

An echo from old-time religion

How can our red army ant will get away with such patent nonsense? Because of appearances. Bodies’ five senses don’t recognize another authority that exists let alone one that governs humanely. And so minds ruled by animal-herd will limited to the herd’s five senses continue on their destructive path, convinced that any other point of view can’t be valid and isn’t worth listening to. Convinced that authoritarian supremacy that sits atop our world view, our construct of what’s real and what’s right, is inviolate.

Unaware that there is a sixth sense and the Truth that it detects is the opposite. Not “optimistic” in the way that public commentary glosses over inconvenient facts. But certainly positive in the way that it recasts the meaning of our circumstances and the thrust of dialogue about it. In the way that it shows how, with self-direction and self-discipline, our animal will can be equipped with guidance from Logic-Love and so acquire the competence needed to move forward.

To borrow from the cliches of old-time religion, the Truth that metaphysics detects with its sixth sense -- Logic from Intuition -- is that “godlessness” rules humanity and it doesn’t work. Real Authority rests upon Relationship with our Parents Logic and Love. And we can’t expect to move forward without it. Period. Our sixth sense that animates metaphysics sits largely unused, locked away in its attic of dust with metaphysics, the unwanted, unrecognized step-child of philosophy that’s going nowhere without it. Nothing and no one is going forward without it. Period.

What’s the answer?

A common thread that runs through the self-assured pronouncements of human erudition is an appalling lack of mature reflection on who our Parents are and what Logic and Love are all about. Their mischaracterization by the Child’s nonsense-spouting delusional “other” as an angry tyrant, as “God” to be feared and loathed for its arbitrary power, its malevolence and betrayals, is a full-blown smear. The image of “God” outfitted in the Joker’s own hideous mask of authoritarian supremacy is a full-blown lie that continues to feed delusion and so “justify” our headlong escape from it.

And so I ask the Carlo Rovellis and the Steven Pinkers, the Brian Greenes and Jonah Goldbergs, the Christof Kochs and clones of Francis Crick-- the whole Caltech citadel of “realism,” -- when are you going to let go of hysteria at the thought of mind’s sixth sense joining the body’s five senses in the “quest for knowledge?” When will you live up to the spirit of Free Inquiry and open your minds? Let go of your religious faith in blind ignorance? You aren’t leading us forward. You’re tools of self-delusion that are taking us down.

What then does humanity need if not “optimism?” Purpose and meaning. Self-direction and self-discipline that can only come with aligning with our true friends Logic and Love. Seeking their guidance through the gift of our sixth sense, and parting with authoritarian supremacy once and for all.

Amen

Published on Leave a comment on The Force of Necessity: Reality’s Gift to Creation

The organs of Life

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

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

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

The dream of all things impossible

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

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

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

Reality is the authority of Mister Nice Guy

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

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

Reality is not No More Mister Nice Guy

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

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

What happened to Houdini’s elephant?

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

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

Avoidance doesn’t work

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

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

When do we tire of the joke?

And then what? It’s all over?

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

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

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

----------------------------------------------------------------------

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

Published on Leave a comment on The Indomitable Voice of Free Choice

The violation of Psyche 

Consciousness is Self-Awareness. The Joker’s perversion of Self-Awareness through Forgiveness is Look at the Joker and see yourself. If Self-Awareness requires Relationship, e.g. between Logic-masculinity and Love femininity, the Parents of the  Child, then this explains why awakening to Self-Awareness through Forgiveness requires engagement with “others.” My spontaneous experience of the “felt perception of the interconnectedness of things,” in 1979, became Psyche, the first manifestation of my inner guide and companion to have a distinct identity and to be given a name. Not long after, my thought that life could now suffice with her and without “others” was firmly rejected. I was guided not to avoid relationships with others but to seek and embrace them, which I did.

The violation of the integrity of Love relationships, the interconnections of Family, would have caused the loss of Consciousness as well as the violation of Necessity, the implications of Logic built into the laws of cause and effect. Violation that cost Consciousness would have been violation of Authority, the Force of Necessity, followed by its inevitable after-effect: the perversion of Knowledge that changed the Child’s inviolate interior from  its altar of Innocence, sharing, affirmation, and empowerment to a throne of guilt, taking, possession, and disempowerment. By then reversing the “relationship” between the Child-host and the Joker, its shadow-reflection opposite. By removing harmlessness -- Psyche, the Innocence of Oneness-Being without opposites -- from its altar and putting the parasite, the guilt of Child-the-many non-being opposite -- harmfulness -- on its throne. By replacing true Authority -- benevolent governance of Order-harmony that supports with liberation, nurturing, sharing, trust, validation, enablement, and empowerment from the bottom up -- with false “authority” -- malevolent arbitrary rule of disorder-conflict that crushes with captivity, impoverishment, possession-taking, control, invalidation, paranoia, and disempowerment from the top down. The perversion of the beauty of Psyche-Authority, liberal democracy, into the horror of the Joker-authority, totalitarian dictatorship.

Psyche, Oneness-Soul, is a composition of all the Interconnections, all the Relationships, of Reality-Creation. It achieves integration through Innocence. Through harmlessness that is the Force of Necessity, the strength of empowerment, not the weakness of disempowerment. Because Oneness contains all Relationships, there is no “other” “oneness” with which to relate. It’s Being that exists without relationship with another being because there is no” other being.” No other self, defined and animated by Logic and Love, that expresses Life through the functions of Mind and Love: thinking and feeling, judging and freely choosing with gifts-talents for objective analysis and subjective evaluation. With its capacity for the affirmation and reciprocation of Worth.

Another function performed by Child Free Choice in Reality-Creation

The Child Free Choice was given another Purpose in Reality-Creation besides affirming its Worth through its earning and Reciprocation. It’s to provide within the Oneness of Being, at the core of Reality-Creation, another Self-Definition with independent judgment. With the capacity to recognize and affirm Self-identity with the objectivity needed to validate subjectivity. Just as it’s the Purpose of the Holy Spirit, within the dream, to enable the Child’s Relationship with a representative of its Parents that the Child requires to restore its Self-Awareness. Relationship -- the essence of Being, the prerequisite to Life and Self-Awareness. The attribute of Reality that has its counterpart in the law of physics: matter is “relational.”

Relationship that an unconscious Child requires to perform its function of healing the separation. By putting its talents of Mind and Love to use for introspection and accounting, intuition and reflection, measuring and analyzing, thinking and reasoning, feeling and evaluating, weighing, integrating, and judging.

All so that it can Choose freely to relate to the Voice for its Parents. So that Free Choice can work with guidance from its Parents through the essential Relationship to find its way back Home. Back to Self-Awareness. To Consciousness.

The Joker’s perversion of Recognition achieved by objectivity recognizing-affirming subjectivity is scientific inquiry trying to achieve “knowledge” that reveals the origin, meaning, and nature of Reality, of Life-Creation. That tries to explain the subjectivity of Self, by objectivity recognizing objectivity. A logical impossibility. The Self-Awareness of Oneness -- its subjectivity -- requires objectivity of another Self with Free Will within it to affirm its Self-Awareness. It achieves the essential Relationship with function that by definition is independent of its control: the function provided by Child Free Choice. Function and Relationship contained within because by definition nothing about Oneness can be without.

Where is there evidence that anything can be beyond the control of Being-Oneness, of the Child’s Parents, Logic and Love? What authoritarian “realists” mischaracterize as “almighty god,” the supreme top-down authority that exercises power above any law. Recall that the person who signed on to scribing A Course in Miracles, whose Author was a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, completed her assignment without surrendering independent judgment. Helen Schucman left it to others to teach the Course and make it accessible without ever fully committing to its lesson herself. The prerogative of Free Choice that the Author of the Course would not, and could not, deny. Even the prerogative to get it wrong.

The mission of Free Choice in the dream: to recognize Child the One

Forgiveness that requires interaction between two selves, two “others,” is implementing the basic principle of Self-Awareness that applies to Oneness-Consciousness -- to itself. Recall that Logic and Love, themselves, are subject to the laws of cause and effect, of Necessity. “Objectivity” that affirms subjectivity in Reality isn’t a separate object, an illusory material object. It’s part of Interconnectedness, the same system but distinguished by its own unique Definition of who it is and what it does. By its function, its unique contribution to Reality-Creation. Think of the diversity of species with their own attributes that define their place in nature.

The perversion of “objectivity” that “affirms” subjectivity inside unreality’s dream is a separate object without the capacity to affirm an “other” with independent judgment. It has only the capacity to relate to itself. Self-Awareness in Reality-Creation is achieved through relationship between two Selves, two subjects, with distinct functions resulting in Life-Creation that extends and expands Self-Awareness. The perversion of Self-Awareness in unreality can’t do this. Can’t achieve relationship between two selves, two subjects, with distinct functions that extends and expands Self-Awareness. But it does bring together same-self with same-self, i.e. One Child with its many projections of its Self. All with the same function-self disguised by appearances. By different isolated-separated bodies substituting for different Mind-Loves with different functions.

Despite the appearance of diversity, body-brains -- the projections of a self-deluded unconscious Mind captive to the Joker, its own dark side -- have only one function: to maintain the dream. Through the deceptions of sensory perception aided and abetted by the domination of every field of inquiry by irrational bias. By the self-referential, circular-“reasoning” of body-brain-centric, authoritarian “realists” taken in by the Joker. By self-delusion. Minds receptive to insights from intuition, that are Mind-Love centric instead of body-brain centric, choose a second function. Not to be taken in by our material metaverse but to deny the denial of Reality-Truth. To recognize Child-the-One instead of the illusion of Child-the-many. To recognize same-self -- ourselves in “others” -- through the healing of Forgiveness.

The habit of the human mind for Free Choice to break

We all have the same function: to help our ancestral unconscious Mind awaken from its dream by healing the separation through Forgiveness. That’s all we can do. We don’t have the capacity inside the dream to provide the objectivity of Free Choice that Oneness-Being subjectivity needs to affirm Self-Awareness and extend Life-Creation. We have only the capacity to recognize same-self (Child) - same self. “Forgiveness” is recognizing One Child-Self. The Child awakens through the dream it’s dreaming. Through relationship with the illusory objects -- “others” -- that it’s imagined.

The purpose isn’t Creation though that’s the appearance. “Creation” inside a dream is an impossibility, part of the deception. The purpose is regaining Self-Awareness through an ability not available to the Child in Reality. The ability to recognize its Self in its reflection, as in a mirror, and not to mistake its reflection for an “other.” Children in the dream lack this ability before they’re two. Some animals with training can develop it. The Child’s loss of Consciousness took it into unfamiliar territory where it was exposed to its own reflection, the equivalent of a mirror, and lacked the ability to distinguish self from “other.”

There can be no “reflections” or “mirrors” in the Reality of Creation, just as there can be no opposites. Mirrors, reflections, and opposites are of the unreality of the unconscious. They’re the primary test of Free Choice: to develop the ability to distinguish between Self and reflection, between host-Light and parasite darkness, so that Free Choice is correct choice. The function of “mirror” in unreality, where projections of Child-the-many are illusions, is performed in Reality by real Lives. By real Selves with distinct functions that fit together in harmony through the Definitions of Logic and the Relationships of Love. Mirrors are needed to substitute for Real Selves in unreality because, despite appearances, there is only one Real Self, our unconscious ancestral Mind. There are no “other selves.” As body-brains are all projections they are also reflections. Unreal “others.” Creativity in Reality that’s inhabited by Real Selves has no need of mirrors.

The Joker’s perversion of “selves” in unreality is mirrors that reflect differences to achieve the illusion of “otherness.” Variety in body types, personalities, and many other distinguishing characteristics engineered to deceive. To hide the fact that we are the projections of our unconscious ancestral dreaming Mind. The perversion is mirrors that reflect objects that are illusions, not subjects. It was an object that the unconscious Child mistook for an “other,” not subject. Not itself. The archetypal-seminal mistake. That’s replicated through objectification, the habit of the human mind that, like projection, perpetuates the illusion.

The complicity of science

Science rejecting objectivity by failing to acknowledge its circular “reasoning” systematizes and institutionalizes the mistake. Attempts to lock it into human “consciousness.” Insists on applying “objectivity” to affirm subjective self -- humanity -- where there is no objectivity. Attempts to affirm self-“Life” via subjectivity that lacks objectivity needed to recognize subjectivity. Via self regarding same self in a mirror which leads to awakening from the dream, to escape from unreality back to Reality, instead of the goal of science which insists on seeing reality in an “other” in the mirror. Which insists on affirming the illusion, our universe.

Science must eventually realize that its inquiries are same selves regarding same selves -- themselves and not separate objects, energy in the form of organic and inorganic matter “studying” itself. When this happens, science will continue studying matter, but finally with its scope expanded to include Mind that’s behind energy-matter. That’s directing it.

Mind as direction of energy and therefore source of matter, whose exclusion from science’s “quest for knowledge” accounts for its bafflement. For the failure of every field of inquiry to find common cause in explaining the Big Bang, the origin of Life, and the Self-Awareness we call Consciousness. Quests for Knowledge that can’t possibly succeed on the basis of science’s body-matter-centric quantitative measurements alone. An irrationality that science and other fields of inquiry would have rejected long ago had analysis not embraced the deceptions of (controllable) sensory perception and shied away from spontaneous (uncontrollable) insights from Intuition. Had they not been stupid, an opinion that James Watson applied to many of his peers.

The stupid authoritarian “realism” that science has made of itself is bodies looking into mirrors pretending. Trying to convince itself and its gullible audience that it’s looking at “other” bodies instead of its same self. It can’t even get that right. It should be Mind inquiring into its own state. And if its state is dysfunctional then into the story of how it got that way. The evidence is incontrovertible that it is dysfunctional. Delusional. And that science and other fields of inquiry are failing. Are on the wrong track, not Logical.

The spectacular advance in civilization that wasn’t

The logical response is to do something different. If the technology for getting to the moon never got past liftoff rocket scientists would be expected to employ creative intelligence, the genius of humanity that left other animals in its wake. To look into other possibilities, to weigh and choose among them rationally. To redesign their rocket or abandon it for another technology if necessary. The logical response is to expand inquiry from its blinkered obsession with a universe of mystery and violence into intuiting the story of Mind. Of Mind that may be unconscious, in a dream state that’s conjuring the mystery. The logical response is to return to Parmenides who intuited with metaphysics 2500 years ago that physics -- matter -- is an illusion. That the route to Understanding is through Logic and Reason. Though Mind.

The logical response is to develop and apply the insights of metaphysics to the questions that body-centric approaches aren’t getting right and will never get right. A task that Plato took on but couldn’t complete because his own intuition wasn’t up to it. Because the matter of bodies and the matter of the cosmos fed him conflicting impressions of what’s real and his intellect couldn’t resolve the contradiction.

Had he been inspired by the metaphysics of Jesus and the 2nd-century Gnostic teacher Valentinus, himself inspired by Jesus; had he been inspired by Jesus’ Course in Miracles as well as by Parmenides’ Eleatics School, Plato could have resolved the contradiction. He could have formulated a complete, unambiguous theory of the origin, meaning, and purpose of Life in the material universe and changed history. Aristotle’s Lyceum could then have followed Plato’s Academy with a salutary shift from mind to matter that engaged both quantitative and qualitative aspects of learning in a synergistic, systems approach. In a seamless expansion of scope that tested Plato’s hypotheses against experimental scientific research. The outcome could have been a spectacular advance in civilization.

The curse of Plato?

That’s not what happened. What happened instead was a changing of the guard, from holistic mind-centric philosophy to body-centric science, that occasioned crippling fragmentation and isolation of learning to civilization’s detriment. What happened was loss of patience with Parmenides and Plato and a shift of loyalty to another pasture where the grass seemed greener. To matter, sensory perception, and quantitative measurements that didn’t put minds to the test they seem least qualified to pass: to the test of Logic. What happened was a grand instance of youthful folly, akin to loyalties shifting to authoritarian rule when they lose patience with democracy. Driven not by Logic but by a lack of creative intelligence and judgment that come with discipline and patience. By a lack of competence and maturity.

Plato had taken a direct approach to Understanding through mind-centric philosophy. A logical approach that fell short because he had not arrived in the sequence of Logic where the insights of Intuition had given him a complete, unobstructed view. Intuition would eventually deliver but not in Plato’s lifetime. All that was required of humanity, the projections of an unconscious Child, was patience.

Inclined by his mentor’s experience, by a body-sensing personality type, genetics, and other conditions, Aristotle went on a roundabout approach through body-centric science. Causing a historic fork in the road that’s yielded amazing results, helpful both to science and every other field. But far short of what a holistic, systems approach would likely have accomplished in far less time. Had Aristotle not repurposed inquiry instead of expanding it Western Thought today could well be enlightened with Understanding.

Where is Western Thought instead? Chained in its Plato’s cave of biases, contradictions, and misunderstanding. Of authoritarian “realism.” Call it the Curse of Plato. Call it a perversion of Plato’s cause: Justice!

The indomitable Voice of the Child: Free Choice

The Voice of the Child, enabled and empowered by the Voice that speaks for Logic-Love, its Parents, is the expression of Free Choice. Voice that speaks for Reality and Truth. For the Worth of Being, of Life-Creation. For Self and Self-Awareness. For Consciousness. It may be stilled temporarily. But inevitably, in time, it will speak and be heard. It will express itself for the Worth of Life-Creation. For Truth against lies and deceit that would take away its Being, replace it with its opposite. With another voice that speaks for contradiction. For fear, rage, and guilt. For herd mentality and tribal hatred. For insanity. For nothing.

What is Hope against the perversion of Plato’s cause? Against the youthful folly of authoritarian “realism?” The indomitable Voice of the Child. The Voice of Free Choice.

Published on Leave a comment on Respectful Parenting

Authoritarian rule on Pleasant Street

Value individuality and don’t try to dictate what. . . kids are curious about or how they express themselves. [Respectful parenting] is about seeing children as independent rational beings [instead of taking an] authoritarian [approach] where communication is one way with little consideration of a child’s emotional needs. 

CNBC on Apple News Feed 01/07/23, quoting Margot Machol Bisnow, author, Raising an Entrepreneur (BookBaby 2022).

[Disclaimer: This is the extent of my familiarity with this book. However, it’s on order and will be read in hopes that it will help with one of the main concerns of this website: the undoing of authoritarian “realism,” a dominant strain of philosophy that’s neither realistic nor rational. Responsible, in fact, for the abuse of children and every other living thing. The signature human mindset that’s become the signature of an entire geological epoch: the ongoing global atrocity we now call the Anthropocene.] 

What lay behind the image of pleasantness in our second-grade reader, the neighborhood of Dick and Jane on Pleasant Street? Pleasantness or an alternate reality -- the self-delusion of our ancestral Mind? The archetypal Child corrupted by the opposite of Logic and Love, ruled by its mistake: misidentification with its own reflection. Its own opposite, and so by the perversion of authority. Demanding arbitrary rule from the top down instead of governing, lawfully and compassionately, from the bottom up. Instead of nurturing -- the essence of authority that isn’t authoritarian. Helpfulness that’s harmlessness.

If the parenting that really goes on isn’t authoritarian disrespect why then is Margot Bisnow speaking up? Who is her audience? Why do so many need to listen?

The story of Dick and Jane that prompted Margot’s book is still playing out on Pleasant Street. Disrespectful authoritarian parenting wraps itself and its offspring into the ongoing madness of humanity. An injustice that’s all the more unacceptable for being so common. What are the philosophical roots of this perversion of authority so that it can be uprooted? To make way for respectful parenting so that children so dear to us have the loving support they need. Who is our “enemy?” How can we know our enemy so that we can be rid of it or at least mitigate its harm?

To set children off on their own course

The psychopathology of disrespectful authoritarian parenting on Pleasant Street is unpleasantness by many names:

  • Beginning with obsessive-compulsive narcissism, a psychiatric disorder that demands absolute authority, possession, and obedience. Absolute relentless control, the desperation of lives at the mercy of urges and cravings that are out of control.
  • Psychosis -- the denial of Reality and Truth. Their substitution by an alternate fantasy reality centered on self-pitying specialness and victimhood.
  • Arrested development -- adolescence clinging to the past, fearful of the future, that refuses to grow up. Fiercely resistant to the attainment of maturity and competence through learning and adaptation. Terrified of the truths that the wisdom of experience might reveal.
  • More arrested development. The creativity of personhood stunted by authority turned on its head. By the cruelty of invalidation and disempowerment imposed on individuality from the top down instead of the nurturing of gentle loving kindness and respect it needs from the bottom up.
  • Sociability obsequious to group, authoritarian ass-kissing, a thin veneer of hypocrisy hiding contradictions and conflict. “Harmony” dictated by uniformity, denied the freedom of individuality. “Peace” hiding the frustration of limbic emotions -- resentment, jealousy, anger, fear, guilt -- craving war.
  • The madness of alienation and war, the inevitable consequence of self-pitying authoritarian cruelty and rage.

Role modeling limbic emotions festering inside psychiatric disorder -- fear, anger, hostility, hatred, blame -- has a terrible cost. Replication in the minds and hearts of vulnerable children condemned to lives corrupted by psychiatric disorder. By the same beast and its shit parade of addictions, upside-down values, and animal emotions. By the pathology itself and its enablers: the crass submission of passivity to the tyrant. By weakness posing as strength. Allying with the perversion of democratic governance that is authoritarian rule. Obelix the Gaul gone over to the Romans. Bringing upon himself the fury of Justice for enticing his victims with seductive charm and humor into betraying the cause. Gulling them unawares into spreading the virus of self-delusion, misperception, and misjudgment.

All of it the opposite of what grown-up role modeling should be about: not invalidation but affirmation. The enabling and empowerment of individual expression -- strength, freedom, trust, and intimacy -- not its suffocation. Loyalty to Reality and Truth, not to denial and psychosis. Just as Bisnow’s book says, to set children off on their own course instead of replicating ancestral authoritarian pathology.

The perversion of democratic governance into authoritarian rule isn’t the flaming banner of “liberty,” the ultimate in satisfaction that’s advertised. It’s self-imprisonment in frustration -- the opposite. In the one-dimensional cartoon world of adolescent fools that a grown-up Pete Hamill abandoned in A Drinking Life. Self-delusion is deprivation of self-awareness and Free Will, our birthright: Truman risking his life to escape The Truman TV Show, the degradation of victimhood meant for the entertainment of voyeurs. Chumps finding amusement in their own servitude. Dick and Jane being groomed for lives in Plato’s Cave, addicted to substitutes for Worth. To dog food.

The sick lure of herd mentality

A perfect replica of deception that can’t fool the metaphysicist. Who’s aware of what’s behind appearances and will protest. The descendant of Parmenides and his Eleatics School that founded metaphysics. Devoted to intuiting the Reality of Mind, Logic and Love behind physics. Behind the study of material objects that make up our metaverse of spacetime and matter -- one grand appearance that distracts and deceives with sensory perception and quantitative measurements. With circular self-referential "reasoning " that purposely rejects Logic and Love.

To look thus behind appearances in the made-up world of Dick and Jane is, as Nancy Pelosi might say, “to throw a punch for the children.” At the Roman oppressors who take advantage of children, their captive audience, to deprive them of self-awareness, Free Will, and initiative. Of individuality, originality, and creativity. Of personhood, all in service to forced group conformance. To Pete Hamill’s “Brooklyn.” To the “Galactic Empire” of Star Wars. To the fortunes of tribes and their militaries. Of symbolic nations chanting supremacy in competition for world cups and super bowls. To the pleasantries of “sociability” -- manipulating us away from Truth to lies, from Reality to appearances, from the light and freedom of individuality into the darkness and captivity of uniformity.

All so that minds taken captive will submit to domination by limbic emotions. Will be forced into mindlessness so that the tribe may dominate without opposition. May have all that humanity’s limbic animal brain wants. Its agenda, and we are the unwitting agents of its will. Dick and Jane are literally being conditioned by irresponsible role modeling into thinking, feeling, and behaving like animals at war with other animals. In a dog-eat-dog world instead of in a shared world. Civilized by individuality, originality, and creativity. By sharing, affirmation, and empowerment in a shared world of Love, Trust, and Intimacy. Civilized by conscience and accountability, two attributes of character notably absent in the authoritarian.

Dick and Jane are naturally drawn to Freedom, naturally repelled by oppression. Drawn to the resistance of Gauls to Roman tyranny. They embrace the Logic and Love of authority that’s focused on their needs and feelings and not on itself, so that it can nurture strength instead of sapping it. Who then would want to impose the rule of madness for their own benefit on innocent children who despise it? Who would not want to share the Logic and Love, the wisdom, of learning and growth with children who crave it? Of self-awareness instead of self-delusion? What grown-up of conscience would want to lure children away from civilization that supports humanity into herd mentality that crushes it?

The one and only voice

Neuroscience has identified a part of the human brain that connects humanity to its animal origins. The “reptilian” or “animal brain” accounting for animal emotions with a distinctive attribute: the animal brain and its emotions have not evolved. A part of “civilized” humanity’s brain that connects it to humanity’s uncivilized, animal past: the limbic system of amygdala and hippocampus, located with the cerebellum at the base of the brain and the top of the spine. Driven not by the aptitude of the prefrontal cortex for deliberation and judgment, for the discipline of reason, values, and choice, but ruled by unreasoning animal instinct and will. Engineered not for subjective reflection but for objective action in a frightening world of disconnected objects. Disobedient to the laws of physics and ultimately disobedient to us. To our precarious family. Beyond anyone’s control.

Who are we? The question starts with humanity’s animal brain. With un-self-awareness unevolved. With humanity’s involuntary entrapment in a prison of tribal membership. What we have made of ourselves is service with a smile on behalf of our captor. The self-delusion’s lure of its host, our ancestral Mind -- the original Child, Self-Awareness -- into Plato’s Cave of un-self-aware animal submission. The self-delusion’s original target, its archetype for the mistake’s replications to follow: a Child. Amenable to its manipulations, susceptible to its deceptions.

The state of a world trapped in a cycle of blame, victimhood, and conflict is kept “alive” by the very transgression that lures its offspring into captivity. With the false promise of liberation in the pleasantries of “sociability.” Of unquestioning service to authority whose only cause is itself. With role modeling opposition to individuality, learning, and growth. The suppression of voices other than its own. The elevation of singularity to supremacy: one voice.

Toward the Love and Freedom of Intimacy

The duty of those not caught up in misguidance, the unpleasantness that is Pleasant Street, is to use our Free Will and our talents to stand for another voice. To deny the denial. In the spirit of the indomitable Asterix the Gaul, with the force of Authority that will teach the Romans a lesson. Our duty is to reverse the atrocity with the Authority of Logic and Love instead of tyranny, its perversion. To “throw a punch for the children.” By denying the transgression legitimacy with our withdrawal. By not engaging with foolishness. And if withdrawal implies invalidation of behavior that’s wrong then so be it. We owe Palpatine, the evil Emperor of the Galactic Empire, no apology for hurting his feelings if we do so to prevent his electrocuting our son.

No retaliation perpetrated by Roman arrogance can shut down a voice that would speak for Logic and Love on behalf of our children. Our cause not only the protection of children but the liberation of those who dominate them. The end of the Cave along with the self-delusion that produced it -- the illusory Joker that’s us and the joke that’s on us.

Our cause is not the cause of bestial rage but the loving kindness of the Relationship. The Relationship with our Parents Logic and Love consummated in unreality by their agent, the connection with Reality kept open by the Holy Spirit. Call it what you want. It isn’t the name that matters but its function: the connection. Relationship that no lies, no magic tricks, can break. The Authority of Necessity, the laws of cause and effect: expressions of the Logic and Love that composed them. Not the thrust and parry of weaponry that kills but the caress of music and radiance that enlivens. The Beauty of Oneness and Innocence, the Source and the Force of Life and Creation.

Their cause and mine is sharing to affirm and empower, not competing to “win” and dominate. It’s to bring darkness to light by enabling it to choose freely, of its own accord, to come to the light. With the leverage of family ties, tribal belonging certified by the animal brain that we all share. Not the contrivance of a cartoon, the one-dimensional top-down uniformity of Pete Hamill’s “Brooklyn,” but family governed by individual self-expression.

My cause the cause of the Gaul to respond to Romans luring children into captivity by liberating Romans from their self-imprisonment. By demonstrating Free Will, the birthright that can’t be surrendered, that captors can use to escape from their own captivity. From the Cave, to join the Gauls in Freedom. By demonstrating freedom of expression, the Creativity of civilizing individuality, of personhood, that liberates from entrapment by unevolved limbic emotion, the will of the beast, toward the Love and Freedom of Intimacy.

The premise behind The Story of the Child

Advice from the military based on experience with centuries’ worth of battles: Know your enemy. Advice from Pogo Possum, the sage of Walt Kelly’s Okefenokee Swamp: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Advice from the psychologist Sigmund Freud: the “bad thing” lies within the human psyche.

My mother shrank from looking too deeply within because she feared what she might find. What or who is “Satan” and where does it reside? Would the minds of history’s most notorious dictators offer a clue? Is it in the Hades of Greek mythology under the ground, whence the dark lord of the underworld emerged to snatch his bride, Persephone? Is it Dante’s Inferno, the terraced rings of vengeance and misery on the other side of the River Styx? Can it be anywhere in enchantment?

The ”enemy” lies within the dreaming Mind that we all share. Our ancestral Mind, the Child of Logic married to Love, its Parents. The Child, whose real identity is Free Choice and Love, who lost consciousness in the Reality of Creation that preceded the dream and produced it. A Course in Miracles explains the unconscious Child’s error that produced the dream. It doesn’t explain the loss of consciousness, although its Logic may enable an individual, working in relationship with the Holy Spirit, the emissary from Logic-Love, to intuit a rational explanation. This is the premise behind The Story of the Child, the working title of the book that insights from Intuition and I are well into writing.

The “enemy” within

The “enemy” is the “dark side” of the Child, the Mind in an unconscious state that thrust it from Reality into a state of illusion. Where it could encounter contradictions of Logic-Love and Reality that of Necessity are excluded from Reality and can only be detected within a dream. The dark side is an illusion, a code attached to unconscious Mind. An illusory dependent, a parasite that derives its definition, its genetics, from its host. A code that, like a virus, instructs an unconscious mind taken captive to fabricate its unreal dream world of opposites. Because this is what the code “is:” an opposite. The dark side is simply instructions for fashioning a dream that, when animated by Energy in service to Mind, brings to “life” the opposite of its host. All the aspects of what we experience as “life” are, in one way or another, fabricated or corrupted by these instructions.

The ”enemy” that I call the “Joker” is the Child’s unconscious mind’s mistaken identification of its own reflection code as an “other,” then allowing itself to be deluded into identifying with its own opposite. In the mistaken belief that this illusory other self could bail it out of the situation that unconsciousness put it in. The Joker is the Child’s own dark side that only has a “life” inside a state of mind that can’t exist in Reality that’s only capable of dreaming illusions. The specific change of Mind that mis-identifying with the opposite-code “caused” was imagining that the Child’s Psyche was replaced by the Joker. Where Psyche is the Child’s real Self -- Consciousness or Self-Awareness in Reality. Is Being replaced with non-being. 

The call for correction

If the Child’s real Self can be thought of as an altar surmounted by holiness radiating the Light and Life of Being, of Creation, then the Joker in the misguided, corrupted Child’s mind is an expression of its opposite occupying a throne of darkness. The slew of perversions of Being, Reality, and Truth that make up the Child’s unreal dream of insanity. The “master” of Plato’s Cave and its manipulations -- appearances, deceptions -- that keep its occupants secure in their self-delusion. Our universe of spacetime-matter and the isolated, separated bodies that we mis-identify as us.

The call through Intuition to correct error can’t come from the “enemy” but it can come from the Child’s Psyche. Its Soul or Being in its seemingly wounded state. Which is why correction takes us within, to reverse the apparent violation of the inviolate, our Self, our identity, We look within to find the “enemy.” To replace self-delusion, the Joker, with Self-Awareness, Psyche on our altar, the source of our psychology. The cause, mission, or function behind our story. That accounts for who we are and what we do. Why we exist. Why we’re here -- to do our part to restore consciousness and the sanity of Logic and Love. To heal separation that’s no more than a case of mistaken identity.

The route to correction is through philosophy, the Logic that explains Reality, and through psychology, understanding with Logic how the Soul, our Psyche, that interconnects all of Life-Creation, came to be contaminated in an unconscious mind with a reverse mirror image self. A code or “thought system” derived from its host that is the opposite of its host. Illogical by definition. An absurdity.

Inside the brooding castles of Transylvania

When we look within our individual selves to know our “enemy,” we find what we’re looking for. The bad thing that isn’t unique to us. The forms it takes and their attributes vary with each person, each personality with its unique genetics and circumstances bearing the stamp of the moment. Varying with each individual story and its psychodynamics -- needs, feelings, values, perceptions, cravings-addictions, conflicts, and motivations. All derived from the same Source, an ancestral Mind with one story that defines the seminal mistake, its archetypal parts and what happened between them to produce us. To produce our myriad variations on the same theme. The myriad stories that repeat the same mistake, and so it defines us.

Fooling us. Mocking us. Laughing at our foolishness because we can’t get it right. Because we will never know our enemy so long as we keep looking for explanations and Understanding where they aren’t. Without instead of within. In spacetime and matter. In bodies instead of the Mind whence we came. So long as we fall for its endless distractions and let ourselves be fooled. Beg to be fooled so the Truth won’t be exposed. So we won’t discover the Truth and have to change. To disturb our “peace” with the effort and difficulty, the unpleasantness of learning and growth it may take. So we won’t have to actually use Free Choice to choose again. To choose friend instead of enemy for our guide. Our real selves instead of a mistaken self, our own dark side. Our own shadow opposites who haunt brooding castles in Transylvania. The scary blood-sucking monsters of our nightmares who cast no reflections in mirrors. Because they’re reflections themselves.

The striving and difficulty of Free Choice

The bad thing that’s wounded our Psyche within is a nothing. But a reflection, our own opposite “dark side” that has no existence of its own. Only the “existence” and harmfulness it’s handed by us when we repeat the original mistake of the Child, our ancestral Mind. The Mind that’s dreaming our reverse mirror image world, haunted by its seminal mistake. Mind-the-one that transformed itself into bodies-brains, the many infected with mistakes-the-many.

To follow tried and true military advice, to “know your enemy,” doesn’t take much effort if you’re Pete Hamill’s “Dodgers” and the enemy is the “Giants.” If the bad guy advertises deception and superficiality with “Truth Social.” Anything “social” is skin deep, a tapestry of appearances and magic acts conjured by groups to defend themselves and assault others that can easily be unwoven. What takes effort to know your enemy is if you’re one individual, one mind. Then the direction isn’t horizontal, skittering across the surface of the pond like a water bug. The direction is perpendicular. Down beneath the surface. To connect with Reality and Truth that traces all the way back to the story of the original individual -- our ancestral Mind. The One Child that we all are.

The story that contains the explanation we’re looking for. That reveals the Logic and illogic of the bad thing, the seminal mistake. It takes effort and patience not only because the Logic of explanation moves in sequence at its own pace, but also because self-deluded minds influenced by the bad thing, sometimes captive to the bad thing, fear and resist knowing. Because humanity in its adolescent foolishness doesn’t want to grow up. Has all kinds of “reasons” why letting sleeping dogs lie is preferable to waking them up. Echoes from Plato’s Cave: Leave us alone! Because waking up by minds with Free Will must be a matter of choice. Their choice. It can’t be forced on them without compromising what makes them who they are. What gives them their usefulness, their function. If dogs choose to sleep that’s their choice. And because choice takes work. It doesn’t make itself and it can’t be delegated.

Humor that’s actually funny

So what does that make us if we carry on not knowing our enemy? Dogs that choose to sleep. Beings possessed of brains rooted in animal brains that never evolved. Animals socialized but not civilized, forced by circumstances to get along for a while until “sociability” gives way to the mistake. To the hostilities of authoritarian competition. The malign animosity that haunts castles in Transylvania. That’s not only allowed to remain intact beneath the surface but embraced -- protected and preserved as though it were savior instead of enemy. The ultimate expression of opposite, the definition of “enemy.” Insane, mindless contradiction that misleads like road signs pointing in the wrong direction. The psychology of madness.

What should make us willing to know our enemy? To want to make the effort to choose? To understand that the “enemy” is us. It dwells within. It’s accessible to Intuition, from a source we can trust, Logic and Love. It doesn’t require years of tail-chasing psychoanalysis trusting the judgment of authoritarian “realists” -- unhealed healers captive to the thinking of Freud, who insisted that what’s wrong with mind must be what’s wrong with body. An absurdity. And then there’s this: our “enemy” isn’t real. It’s a joke we play on ourselves. The dog mistaking its tail for another dog and then letting itself be deluded into identifying with its tail. The enemy is the tail wagging the dog. A sick perversity of the Truth.

But really -- it’s funny! It’s us. Our strange, mysterious metaverse. Ridiculous! Our bogeyman “enemy” is a very funny fool -- us. How will we celebrate when we finally know our enemy? When we look in the mirror and see ourselves instead of an “other.” How about congratulating ourselves by doing high fives with just our own hands? By recognizing that the “voice” that’s been misleading us, making fools of us, is our own. By having a good laugh. As for me, I’ve already made reservations: dinner and dancing for one.

Carry on, Centurion!

For the authoritarian “realist,” the disrespectful authoritarian parent who insists on lying there like a sleeping dog, getting in the way, a parting word: Just because your self-deluded mind is incapable of divining meaning and purpose doesn’t grant you the right to make up your own reality and force it on others. What it does give you is something more constructive: the obligation and opportunity to grow up. To recognize the Reality and Truth of who you are, Obelix the Gaul, and wake up. If you’re a Roman legionnaire who must follow orders then I will be your drill sergeant. See that you do it or you’ll be doing latrine duty.

Carry on, Centurion!

Published on Leave a comment on Who Was Helen Schucman?

Helen Schucman in Kenneth Wapnick’s telling

There’s strong evidence, besides ACIM, that Jesus isn’t a savior spoon-feeding us all the answers. An authoritarian determined to bend imperfection to Perfection by a dominating will.

The superlative mind and scholarship of Kenneth Wapnick, a PhD psychotherapist, were unerring in their interpretation of the Course, an astounding match for the unerring Logic of Jesus. But in his love of his subject and its scribe I believe that Kenneth’s biography of Helen Schucman may have erred. Absence from Felicity (Foundation for A Course in Miracles 1991) gave an account of Helen’s life that, toward the end, recorded not commitment but reluctance. Not passion but doubt. After years in everyday correspondence with Jesus, doing faithfully as she was asked, Helen ended their relationship not with intimacy but with distance. Her biographer was one of the small group of intimates who brought the Course to light. Much to his credit he could have finessed Helen’s distance but he didn’t. He stayed true to his conscience and his human subject, allowing readers to reach their own judgment. In spite of evidence to the contrary his judgment concluded that, at the very end, Helen resolved her conflict. Found sanctuary in the embrace of her Guide and the Course. Chose the high priestess of her imagination, the Voice of the Holy Spirit. Peace in Jesus and the Course. She became, at last, a true believer.

Another Helen Schucman

The end that a sympathetic biographer may have wanted but not necessarily what happened. Helen was an authoritarian “realist” drawn to the patriarchal Roman Catholic Church. This was, I believe, her personality type that determined whose truth she put on her throne and whose voice she heard. The “authority” that Helen thought she recognized in the teacher of the Course was a patriarch. Who belonged to her body-centered world and could deliver body-centered miracles if he chose to. Not supportively from the bottom up but arbitrarily from the top down. An Absolute answerable to nothing and no one. This was a misperception. This was not Logic and Love who cannot be above the Necessity of their own Laws of Cause and Effect, or else Order would become chaos, lawfulness lawlessness, governance dictatorship.

Despite all that Jesus taught, of Logic and Love who cannot be implicated in this body-centered world, Helen remained firmly anchored to her personality type. Clung to her misperception, her expectation for a savior who could bring light to darkness instead of letting darkness choose to come to the light. Who could choose for her. Helen didn’t abandon Jesus. She wandered away, an authoritarian waiting to be told how to think, how to behave. Not wanting to choose. Unable to choose. A victim of pancreatic cancer whose all-powerful Patriarch had failed her by denying her healing, the Miracle she imagined she had earned. Despite all that Jesus taught, she still got it wrong.

Helen anchored the family of intimates who produced the book. She showed little if any inclination or aptitude for marketing it. An object of respect, it was also a “pile of crap” when she didn’t want to seem taken in by it. The authoritarian “realist” views differences of any kind -- perspective or opinion -- as a contest of wills for supremacy. Can’t conceive of a “higher power” unless it’s “almighty god,” a cardboard cutout armored action hero championing the Israelites and smiting their enemies.

The mind of an authoritarian “realist” can’t be accessed to share different perspectives and ideas beyond the superficiality of groups. They have their own throne and it’s occupied by their own authorship: the grotesque mask of the Joker, a self-delusion. Their own lifeless, mindless, loveless, soulless dark side that’s nothing more than the code that defines their opposite. Not what they are but what they aren’t. An authoritarian arbitrary ruler above the law, a parasite that answers to a code derived from its host. The essence of weakness posing as strength. That has no rules of its own but is literally hell-bent to reject the Laws-Necessity of its host. To preserve an illusion: the unquestioned  dominance of its authorship. A thought so insane, so perverse, that it can never be taken seriously. A joke.

Kenneth’s choice: Freudian analytics vs Jungian intuition 

Just as Helen showed little inclination or aptitude for marketing the Course Kenneth showed little inclination or aptitude for running with intuition to explore its implications beyond its scope. To reflect on the Child’s loss of consciousness, its conditions and consequences. On its implications for the self-delusion of unreality that followed it. For the experience its projections call “life” in this strange world of spacetime-matter, of contradiction and conflict, impossibility and perversity, jubilance and defeat, hilarity and misery.

The analytics of Freud, his insistence that the “bad thing” that deforms the human psyche is ultimately the doing of bodies rather than minds, blocked his awareness of root causes. Awareness that can only come through intuition whose function has no explanation from the body’s senses and, therefore, no legitimacy in the body-idolizing minds of authoritarian “realists.” In the minds of those responsible for the dominant paradigms of science, philosophy, psychology, and theology, all of which rest on flawed, self-referential reasoning. On illogic. 

Kenneth’s own personality and its turn of mind joined enthusiastically with the hardened analytics of Freud. He mastered the analytics of the Course’s Logic to become the teacher whose voice is almost indistinguishable from that of its author. But in so doing he cut himself off from the potential of Jung’s intuition to explore the implications of the Course beyond its scope. He contented himself with understanding what is without being motivated to examine what else might be. He missed the significance of Jung’s insights into the personality of Psyche and so missed the impact of Helen’s personality on her relationship with, and ultimate response to, the author of the Course. To Jesus and the nature of his Authority.

Which Helen served Jesus’ purpose better?

Jesus’ choice of an authoritarian “realist” to scribe the Course worked to perfection if its only object was dictation taken accurately, without protest, over a period of years, and the publication of a book. If it was meant to demonstrate the power of “almighty god” to restore muddled unconsciousness to an enlightened state of consciousness, to convert authoritarian “realist” skepticism to intuitive idealistic conviction, it failed. Clearly, this was not the object. If anything, I believe the object was the opposite: to demonstrate the inability of any “power” to deny the Child and its projections their birthright: their capacity to choose freely for themselves without interference. To be of their own mind and not the mind of anyone or anything else, not even the Mind of their Parents in Reality.

Why otherwise are the agents of the Child’s Parents, manifestations of the Holy Spirit, so deferential to our own judgment? So careful not to interfere, or appear to interfere, with Free Choice?

All the inhabitants of Creation are defined by their roles. By their contributions to shared purpose whose definitions fit them together in logical harmony at the same time that they confer individuality. That mark them as Creations empowered to function independently of their Creators, to affirm the Worth of Creation freely without compromising their individuality. In the Reality of Order with Freedom, Freedom with Order, that defines Creation. In the harmony of the definitions and relationships of Logic and Love that govern Creativity and all its Creations. Not with dominance from the top down but with benevolence and support from the bottom up.

The right of Free Will that Helen stood up for: to get it wrong

The role that Helen performed to perfection wasn’t to be the convert. It was to be the insistence of the Child on choosing for itself, even if it erred. To be clear: the Course and Necessity don’t give our ancestral Mind or any of its imaginary projections a pass. Its lesson must be learned. Whether sooner or later in the illusion of time is up to us. Learning and growth in unreality may have been ordained by the laws of cause and effect that govern Reality-Creation. Unconsciousness that put the Child and its projections in this dream world, a trainer where learning by trial and error has no real consequences, may have been a Necessity. But neither Logic-Love nor the Necessity of their laws of cause and effect could have ordained that their Child’s training to maturity and competence would take forever. Still, that said, we have the right to be wrong. To refuse to acquire the competence the Child needs to perform its role in Creation as long as we like. To remain self-deluded in Plato’s Cave indefinitely. In the illusion of time long or short is meaningless. Unlike the eternity of timelessness, the illusion of time, like all illusions, has a beginning and it will surely have an end. The Child’s sojourn in the unreality of time had a beginning and it will have an end.

ACIM's author and his scribe proved it: the right to get it wrong. The prerogative of Choice without which it could not be Free. And even with Jesus in Helen’s mind dictating clarity from Logic and Love, she took her place on the podium and stuck her fist in the air. Proclaimed her sovereignty in an all-too human act of defiance and folly. The human spirit defending its “rights” against correction at the same time that it makes a fool of itself. Confederates defending their “rights” even if they’re defending the indefensible -- slavery. The right to choose wrong or even not to choose at all if “realists” must have their authoritarian “savior” to choose for them. Had Helen done otherwise, after being under Jesus’ influence for years, she might well have proclaimed untruth instead of Truth: the willful dominance of an imposter. The illusion of an alternate “reality” ruled by a replacement authorship. She proved her right to Free Choice. And in doing so left no doubt that Jesus is the author, and authority, he appears to be.

Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Helen!

Kenneth wanted Helen to join the fold. Ever faithful to the Logic of ACIM that’s where he believed she belonged. The case he made that she did join the fold bore his signature gifts for reason and compassion. But to this observer it was wishful thinking. I’m glad that she kept her distance. Kenneth and I both love and admire her. We both have reasons for identifying with her, but they’re not the same. One reason I can celebrate for Helen’s obstinance is the legitimacy it confers on what otherwise might seem my own presumption. My adherence to the Logic-Love of the Course while expanding on it. While taking the lessons it taught beyond their scope to explore the realm of intuition that physicists, theologists, and other authoritarian “realists” have declared beyond exploring. Creating the appearance, to some, of apostasy. The appearance that I’m going up against the Course when, in fact, I’m going forward with it. I am no less an acolyte of Jesus for risking the appearance of disagreement if that is where Intuition guided by Jesus takes me,

Maybe we’re supposed to figure out the Child’s loss of consciousness ourselves. Maybe we’re supposed to explore realms of intuition “beyond exploring.” Do you think? If authoritarian “realists” oppose it then idealists like me should probably pursue it. Venturing into the unknowable with the help of emissaries from Logic and Love, our Parents. Through Intuition that functions whether we use its insights or not.

“Blasphemy” was the curse of the Church’s Inquisition that thought nothing of burning innocents at the stake. There’s nothing of this in the Course. Nothing of “heresy,” though it’s clear about Necessity. The Author of the Course doesn’t accompany its students on their trek at one altitude only to abandon them at others. There are no barriers in unreality to Logic-Love from Intuition that connects with Reality. How can the perversities of a dream limit what’s real? What’s true? There are no barriers to purpose that fits our context: if we choose freely to regain the Self-Awareness that we are and the function that we do.

I’m going wherever I’m led. By the marvel that is the human mind, corrupted and compromised by delusion yet connected by Intuition and Free Choice to its Source. Together, we go where one individual mind chooses to go. One step at a time. Inspired by the example of Jesus and A Course in Miracles. Inspired by its scribe. Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Helen!

Published on Leave a comment on Why Do Particles Behave Differently When Observed? An Answer from Metaphysics

Parmenides’ invention: Metaphysics

Spacetime-matter, the material universe, “happened” with the assumed Big Bang without being observed by the body’s senses or being measured by physics. A universe-world of physical objects produced by Energy and interconnected by Energy -- electromagnetic force, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, gravity. All one neural network reverse mirror image of the unconscious Mind dreaming it. A “manifestation of the power of Mind” that produced bodies and their environment -- quantitative, observable and measurable. Bodies with senses with which to sense-observe and manipulate their environment.

What makes this environment real for bodies-brains is their senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, sound that appear to validate felt perceptions from thoughts of mind and feelings. Reinforced and certified by quantitative measurements. Self-referential, self-reinforcing evidentiary “proof” of the presence and reality of appearances.

The Greek philosopher Parmenides founded the Eleatics School and invented metaphysics 2500 years ago because the capabilities of Logic and Love, the source of mind-reason and feelings-values, go beyond the senses. Because Reality can’t be determined on the basis of quantitative appearances alone. And because appearances of material reality evolve. Change physical properties and attributes, functions and performance, connections, appear and disappear, via Energy, without rational explanation.

The etiology of Big Bang materiality is incomplete. Therefore, the case for its being Real is incomplete.

The challenge to sensory perception

The powers of mind-thought feeling-values go beyond observation to include the self-awareness of introspection, the spontaneous insight of intuition, the purpose and meaning of context that’s accessible through judgment employing all functions of mind. None of these qualitative capabilities are found in sensory perception or quantitative measurement which are entirely dependent on appearances. 

Competition between body-centered “realists”-physicists and mind-centered idealists-metaphysicists is over the issue whether Reality can be determined on the basis of appearances alone. On the basis of one dimension that won’t admit other dimensions because sensory perception and quantitative measurement can’t go there. “Realists” who swear by sensory perception insist that one dimension -- appearances -- is enough and refuse to entertain other possibilities.

Their allies in the physics profession, who must abide by the results of their experiments, can no longer swear by quantitative measurement. While their private views may have diverged from their public views since the Copenhagen Interpretation, their public views for a long time didn’t budge. But with the publication of Adam Becker’s article in last February’s issue of Scientific American, there is movement. It’s away from conventional “realism.” It presents a head-on challenge to the primacy of sensory perception.

Energy-matter takes direction from Mind

Metaphysics was founded to apply qualitative mind-thought love-feeling capabilities to the question by looking beyond appearances. Behind physics to get at the underlying Reality of physical body appearances. The Eleatics School concluded, with Logic and Reason, that the appearance of physical reality is an illusion. A conclusion that the physics profession is now obliged to accept as a possibility by its own discoveries.

That reveal that matter is, among other things, relational, interconnected-entangled, and changeable depending on whether or not it’s being observed-measured. Where physics bound by convention has no way of explaining this last anomaly metaphysics does have an explanation: matter is responding to the influence of Mind that produced it. Energy (stored in matter) that can’t exist unless it acts at the direction of Mind is responding to direction from Mind. If this seems a breach of common sense then ask common sense to describe existence where Energy, or Force, is operating without direction, independently.

Logic says Energy, by definition, must be an agent of Mind capable of providing direction. Without direction from Mind Energy would have no purpose, and if a thing has no purpose or function in Reality then it has no existence. Energy-Force without Mind to direct-apply it is unthinkable. Physical objects which are Energy stored in matter have every reason to perform-behave differently in the presence of minds because they’re in the presence of what produced matter, what wills it to perform, and for what purpose. Their behavior is a form of obedience.

Waiting for the order to reverse the projection

If particles respond differently to observing minds, might they also respond differently to what the observing minds are doing, what they intend, what their observation implies? Namely whether to validate-affirm the reality of matter by observing it or to withhold validation by ceasing to observe-measure it?

What keeps material appearances in place is minds persuaded by body-senses, plus physics measurements-attention, that appearances are real. Are the whole story. When measurements are revealing a “story” whose meaning contradicts this conclusion and supports the Eleatics School instead. The meaning of physics’ observation that matter responds to being observed by mind may be an early hint of Energy responding to direction from Mind to reverse the projection. To reverse the Big Bang, end the illusion-appearances (entropy), and return to animating Reality in an awakened, conscious Mind. 

The retraction of the projection that produced the Big Bang illusion must begin with retraction of the deception perpetrated by appearances with the collusion of body-brain senses. Aided and abetted by physics mind functions -- observation, quantitative measurement, flawed reasoning that’s circular and omits the qualitative. It must begin by self-deluded Mind suspending belief in appearances.

For disbelief in appearances is the correct attitude, both in response to Eleatics Logic and in response to the discoveries of physics. Disbelief is metaphysics, and metaphysics -- the Logic-Love of idealism -- gets it right.

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We speak different languages

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

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

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

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

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

The Self that we are and are not

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

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

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

The roots of our self-delusion

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

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

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

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

The work that we have to do

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

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

Physics is questioning its faith in sensory perception

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

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

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

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

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

Where the thought process of Logic-Love can lead us

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

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

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

Heaven is other people

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

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

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

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

Plato’s Cave still needs an answer

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

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

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

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

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

The ”better way” that is A Course in Miracles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our alternate reality is a joke

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We get in our own way

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

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

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

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

The rule of the herd

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

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

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

The level at which the choice must be made

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A lesson in psychology from A Course in Miracles 

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

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

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

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

To fill empty minds with Logic and Love

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

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

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

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

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

Vale to Caesar and captivity

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

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

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

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Learning from our mistakes

Edith Piaf, the world-weary French cabaret singer, famously sang Non, je ne regrette rien. “I regret nothing.” George Lichter, the WWII fighter pilot, titled his memoir Ups and Downs with No Regrets. What universe did they live in? Did they not make mistakes? Did they really have no regrets? Or were they just roaring defiance against adversity that had failed to take them down?

Or had they learned nothing? Our one shot at redemption in a world where we are condemned to make mistakes is learning from them. I didn’t know Edith Piaf, but George Lichter was my friend. He redeemed himself. He lived and died with amazing grace. An example to follow, because the one regret I hope to avoid is to have learned nothing. If learning from our mistakes is why we’re here, then there’s no reason not to.

Yet an iron resolve not to learn and grow accounts for much of the misery and mayhem that our species inflicts on itself. We cycle back on our horrors because something in our minds and hearts, our souls, won’t let us look back. Won’t let us reflect on what went wrong or our part in causing it. The fault always lies with someone or something else. The responsibility, the guilt, can’t possibly be ours. Like angelic little kids -- we didn’t do it! We’re innocent!

The war cry of chest-thumping supremacists who’ve taken up permanent residence atop the Empire State Building. Going King Kong one better by ruling over Reality and Truth itself. By fashioning their delusion – a psychotic impossibility – into irrefutable fact. What else is it but madness?  The refusal to learn and grow from our mistakes. The refusal to do what we’re here for.

Finding my voice

I commit to causes. Casting myself in advocacy, a role that naturally tests boundaries and attracts opposition. Emulating my ancestors but without their male supremacy, their ad hominem combativeness and grandiosity. Or so I thought. Some of it must have rubbed off on me. They were opinionated, outspoken – my masculine father and his father. Looking for a fight, giving as good as they got. Their voices both weapon and shield, and though I shied away from their noisy stage presence I joined the fight.

I let myself go with the pen. Voice and cause, pen and making a difference, went hand in hand. So long as right was to be served I was determined to be heard. And I was, and it did make a difference. The history of Boston’s expansion into its harbor, high dam building in the Connecticut River valley, flood management in the Red River valley of the North, and community leadership development in the Monongahela River valley, owe something to me. So does water diversion from the Missouri River, an unintended though not unwelcome byproduct of my work in the Red River valley.

The reformist not to be denied

My cause to reform the 1965 Water Resources Planning Act attracted support from congressional committee chairs and staff. They brought me to a meeting with White House liaison at the Capitol to endorse my proposal: a pilot project in an interstate river basin to demonstrate how policy should evolve under the direction of local governments, democratically from the bottom up, rather than top down from unrepresentative and biased government bureaucracies.  What the meeting revealed instead was that the new administration, under the influence of western water interests, would soon dismantle the act and any federal attempt to formulate national water policy. The U.S. Water Resources Council and every river basin commission were to be zeroed out of the federal budget. To accommodate a political faction the administration was ridding the country of its only process and structure for rationalizing the use and management of one of its most vital natural resources.

Denied one avenue I found another. I took my proposal to the former director of the National Water Commission who arranged an affiliation with the National Academy of Public Administration. The Academy put me and my ideas under the scrutiny of a cross-section of prominent authorities headed by the dean of the country’s leading school of public affairs. It then, with their approval, published my monograph on the need for a national water policy process. It attracted coverage in the National Journal, required reading for Congressional staff. It also drew rare tribute from Mo Udall (D-AZ), point man on national water policy in the House of Representatives, a tough critic who deemed what I wrote “one of the better things I’ve read.”

I find my river basin!

Being noticed led to another affiliation, this time with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The AAAS was charged with putting out a White House report on science and technology and I was to produce the section on water policy.

The report was cancelled but what I wrote did see the light of day. With oversight from another panel of experts I produced “Institutional Barriers to National Water Policy,” the lead article in an issue of Water Spectrum published by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The head of the South Florida Water Management District hailed it as the final word on the subject. My brother-in-law, so maybe it shouldn’t count. But maybe it should, because faculty at West Point – no relation -- ranked it one of the ten most important articles on the subject. I learned this through the editor of Water Information News Service, to which I was a frequent contributor.

It was a U.S. senator from Minnesota who brought me to my objective: a river basin where I could test my approach in a real world setting. He was besieged by millionaire farmers in the Red River Valley of the North desperate for help with flood management. I secured funding from the Ford Foundation and the Freshwater Foundation and affiliations with the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and with the Continuing Education department at the University of North Dakota.

I then organized the first Red River Valley International Water Summit Conference at UND in Grand Forks, an effort that brought together hundreds of regional leaders from two states and the province of Manitoba. In the account published by the Freshwater Foundation it “exceeded all our expectations.” Importantly the conference initiated a regular process of bottom up basinwide direction for flood management, which was its purpose. My approach worked as I knew it would. I shared its success with my profession in the peer-reviewed journal of the American Water Resources Association. Lessons learned that might help to bring a better day to the field.

At least one respected authority spoke to that. Frank Gregg was a force in the field who listened and was listened to. A veteran of the Water Resources Planning Act, river basin commission chairman, director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, and head of water resources research at a western university. Also keynote speaker at my Red River valley conference, mensch, and friend. Frank wrote years later to confirm that top-down had now given way to bottom-up in the federal approach. He was well aware that my advocacy had found an audience where it counted and it deserved some of the credit. I was “Big Dave.”

The price of advocacy: unacceptance

Paradigm change happens when generations that cling to old paradigms give way to new. Self-interests are bruised. They let you know it, and when they do, you know you’ve made a difference.

The National Journal’s coverage had been motivated by the same frustration that I felt. Things as they were were “terrible.” I said so. I was quoted, and my colleagues, devoted professionals, heard it. They had published my speeches and put me in charge of committees. I was a regular on Washington’s wine and cheese circuit. They had given me a home and a voice in the profession, and now I’d turned on them.

Years later, I sought an affiliation at the University of Colorado where I’d enjoyed the sponsorship of Gilbert White, a revered patriarch in the profession. The door was closed. Not by Gilbert, an accomplished reformist sympathetic to change, but by workers unsympathetic to change. Unsympathetic to reformists who competed for recognition and jeopardized their careers.

It wasn’t only careers that were threatened, I’d actually helped to kill major water projects – flood control dams on seven tributaries of the Connecticut River. Simply by bringing Manitobans into the conversation in the Red River Valley I’d imperiled the Garrison water diversion project on the Missouri River. Projects that inspired passions for and against. Canadians loved me because they were against the diversion. The New England Division of the Corps of Engineers and North Dakota’s state water manager did not love me.

I hadn’t set out to attack their projects. I was doing my job. But, confined by their own narrow contexts, they saw it differently. I was a change agent with one consuming bias: to do them and their beloved projects in. This is not an exaggeration. I know it to be true.

The price of advocacy: untruth

It was misperception that inevitably leads to misjudgment. My next project after the Red River Valley brought this home to me in a uniquely unpleasant way. While I was doing a victory lap with another river basin, I was slandered. By lies from a source that I didn’t bother with. Mainly because they were obviously ungrounded and the damage was slight. But making enemies can’t be ignored. It was OK if my father, an employer at war with organized labor, was targeted for assassination by a labor leader. That was his choice. But if an enemy lurking in the shadows was targeting me, it wasn’t OK. It was my intention to do what’s right, do it right, and get it right. It meant that I’d gotten it wrong.

I was learning that the dark side of the human mind, engaged with attack, will retaliate with what it is: unreality and untruth. The weapon of choice for a source that’s a mirror-imagine opposite reflection. That has no self. That mis-identity has turned into self-deception. The epidemic of misinformation crippling governance today is the response of a political herd captive to self-delusion. Reacting to defeat and the opportunity to superimpose its unreality on reality with mass denial. With wholesale detachment from reality. Mass psychosis. With madness.

“There must be a better way”

My work in the Monongahela River Valley attracted wide editorial support and the support of an impressive array of regional leaders, among them West Virginia’s Senator Robert Byrd, the president of Carnegie-Mellon University, the once and future governor of West Virginia, and the grassroots support of communities, businesses, and nonprofit groups up and down the Valley. The W.K. Kellogg Foundation funded community leadership training, a three-year collaborative effort among ten colleges and universities. I was given two faculty appointments at West Virginia University, subsidized housing, and organizational support from its Department of Continuing Education.

Yet at the same time, I was moving on. The original dream of regional leadership and policy coherence was giving way to something more compelling. While externals still mattered, their story was increasingly intersecting with internals that were telling another story. A Course in Miracles outlined its fundamentals with logic and love, clarity and authority, so authentically and respectfully that I felt myself to be in the presence of a trusted friend. Not a force that had come to take over but a resource for my help and guidance should I request it. Not a dominance that undermined independent judgment but a Free Spirit who empowered it.

The story that it told put every thought, every feeling, every act into a different context. Unfamiliar and from a different perspective, and yet at home in my mind, heart, and soul. At home with my Self. Gently and imperceptibly. I could not help but wonder where it might lead, about its purpose and meaning for me, one insight at a time.

Idealism of another kind

The end of my nine-year sojourn in the Monongahela River Valley marked the end of a calculated risk. That I could put all the resources of a privileged life – education, health, connections, and wealth – to work for an ideal and not be punished for my improvidence. I was punished. When I left Morgantown I was broke. Education and health were intact but wealth was gone and slander was eating away at connections. By the usual measures of the world I was ruined.

And yet I felt blessed with Abundance and prospects. Whether or not worldly “success” – wealth, status, power -- had accompanied my efforts I’d given idealism a shot. I hadn’t passed it up for an existence in T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land. I’d made enough of a difference to take pride in what I’d accomplished. The cost was high but so were the benefits. My calculated risk was worth taking. I had no regrets.

And now a new idealism was on the horizon: the chance to learn and grow with the living author of the Course. With Logic and Love. With a Soulmate of the Mind. To gain insight into its perspective and to apply it to all my relationships. To find purpose and meaning in my work even if it was just a means of earning a living. The fear that I’d be abandoned to a dusty law library in Allegheny County was gone.

ESFP vs. INTJ: when pleasantry meets honesty

Living a directed life with my Guide, values, causes and ideals naturally attracts opposites. This was the lesson that life had made obvious so far. Now it was to teach another lesson in opposites: personalities.

An intimate once observed that “You drive like you’re actually going somewhere.” The characterization of my personality type in Isabel Briggs Myers’ Gifts Differing – introvert, intuition, thinking, judging (INTJ) – explains why. My type actually is going somewhere. It’s not just living out its life, “waiting for the undertaker.” An authority on personality types once observed that “INTJs rule the world.” If so, this may be why.

It’s a heads-up to those who shelter under tact, diplomacy, and pleasantry when it conflicts with honesty, sincerity, and truth. Prudent if you’re dealing with groups, especially those ruled by psychopaths armed with weapons. But a poor strategy for dealing with intimates who depend on trust.

ESFPs – extraverts, (body) sensing, feeling, perceptive – are drawn to group-socializing rather than individual intimacy. They don’t mind sacrificing honesty, sincerity, and truth to social pleasantries. Or to wishful thinking that can excuse corner-cutting and wrongdoing. But in intimate relationships trust-busting dishonesty is fatal. INTJs do mind. Not because they’re moralists but because, as Isabel points out, they’re programmed to act. They can’t stand by and watch if they see something wrong. They will act to make it right.

The bull still has horns

Intervention and making it right require the Logic and Love of getting it right – no easy task. Especially if it’s correcting “youthful folly,” so hard that it’s considered a “holy task” by the ancient Chinese Book of Changes. It’s taken long experience with A Course in Miracles to discipline my INTJ so that it’s not a bull in a china shop. But the bull still has horns. In a world where Reality and Truth are subject to physical as well as intellectual assault it needs them.

So why should it surprise me to find my will obstructed by opposites when I act to do good? Even from families of blood relatives supposed to be intimates. Only once have I applied myself single-mindedly and received only affirmation: from the Boulder County Democratic Party. Where I was honored for my work in “infrastructure,” a special category that left out advocacy. A rare instance of being helpful and harmless. 

The sense that got knocked into me

Life in the arena of opposites didn’t begin well for me. Being the son of my combative father, lured by my warrior voice, I picked fights. My first mistake, a big one that I repeated into early adolescence. It started on the school playground when I recall Nancy Woollett picking burrs from my sweater after I’d gotten into a fight. I was hard-wired to fight.

On the way home I asked my big brother why we fight. If he’d had an answer it might have done me a big favor, because I had to be taught a lesson the hard way -- by picking the wrong fight. My opponent’s Two-Ton Tony Galento haymaker missed my face by barely an inch. This after I’d launched a pitiful punch to his gut that bounced off him like a puffball. What was I thinking! I called off the fight and had to suffer the humiliation of his taunting. But it was better than getting my brains knocked out. My fight-picking days were over. 

The sense that may never get knocked into me

In time, I came to learn a larger lesson, that I was letting myself be guided by the voice of an unreal self. A self-delusion. I was making unreality real as naturally as I was getting into fights on the playground. By engaging with the guides of “others” I made them real and did their bidding. I continued making this mistake all the way to the present. It’s so ingrained I doubt even today if I can stop. Not without more time and experience, and I’m running out of both.

My mistake was thinking that issues didn’t go beyond personalities to guides and conflicting realities. I assumed that their scope was limited to what was on the surface, to personalities and their commitments to values and priorities. I knew in theory that personality differences originate with guides and fixed agendas. That they can override conscious deliberation, but I didn’t practice it. I didn’t recognize the illogic of my adversaries that took intuition’s insights, aided by Logic-Love, back to the mistake that preceded the Big Bang. Unconscious Mind’s mis-identity of Self with its reflection, its shadow opposite.

Mind deluded is useless except for getting out of the way

My mistake that contributed to breakdown’s effects was emblematic of humanity’s mistake: making unreality real by engaging with it. By assuming that it is real. That it’s accessible and susceptible to direct intervention by “others” embedded in the same unreality. That it can be worked with as though the mistake never happened. The same mistake that science makes with its circular reasoning: imagining that it can succeed in its “quest for knowledge” by examining matter with its own eyes. Without objectivity.

Neither mind nor matter can be worked with as though the mistake never happened. The mistake can only be undone and replaced by Reality and Truth restored through explanation. Through the Understanding of Forgiveness that awakens the dreaming mind to its real identity. Not to an apparition conjured by delusion from its reflection but to its real conscious Self.

I engaged without explanation that leads to Understanding. Understanding the Logic of Forgiveness: that it’s awakening. That Self that’s awakened can’t be the mistake. Can’t be the deluded mind that I imagine myself to be without letting my Guide from Logic and Love transform self-delusion into Self-awareness. Without understanding that mind deluded is useless except for getting out of the way. When I engaged with unreality I was getting in the way.

I got it wrong. I failed to Forgive and paid the price. The one we all pay for repeating the same mistake: separation and retribution. Sent back, again and again, to the drawing boards.

One Soul with enough power to light a city

When I listened to another voice, I learned how to use my gifts instead of being used. Through disengagement from self-delusion, the hollow specter of rivalry, and engagement instead with my Self. With the call for Love and Innocence instead of the lure to hate and guilt. With Reality and Truth instead of unreality and lies.

One logically and gently undoing the other just by being itself. By being light that’s seen and voice that’s heard. The sharing, affirmation, and empowerment of Understanding. Not the false peace of inertia but the Peace of Force engaged with the one Self – my real Self – rather than the illusion of self-the-many. The individual not the group.

Understanding where progress is to be made, at the level of the smallest circumstance in an ephemeral world of many – one soul. Like the atom, with enough force to illuminate a city of millions.

The universal bond of language 

The difference between making unreality real or not making it real is where the rubber meets the road. The difference between guides and philosophies, personalities and values. One lives to record appearances, the crowning achievement of the body’s senses – unreality. The other lives by the vision of Logic-Love that searches beyond appearances to find Reality and Truth.

With the gift of insight that mind intuits, with no need for the body’s senses. That needs no images to represent reality but accomplishes its purpose another way. With the reciprocations of Logic’s implications, Love’s relationships, and Soul’s bonding. Integrated into purpose and meaning by the tools of Logic and Love: language, like Energy, a universal presence of Mind.

Language that in Reality needs no words. That’s equally at the disposal of the Truth of Mind conscious or the untruth of mind dreaming. Because, like Energy, it is the Interconnectedness of Everything, indivisible and inseparable. The power of voice to communicate throughout Reality-Creation and be heard whether it’s the voice of the Self conscious of Reality or self dreaming a made-up reality. The host or its reflection. The “information” that unaccountably unites all of quantum gravity, its elements bound in communication from one end of spacetime-matter to the other. Because no matter the difference, it’s all one Self with one voice. One self dreaming and, therefore, one self with two faces: one real, the other not. One light, the other dark.

The lesson for the Idealist still to be learned

When the mistake was made, it could not attain its illusory effect without Energy. Nor could the deception be pulled off by the magician without language. Without words to deceive and the voice to speak them. Energy and voice, whose direction comes ultimately from Mind conscious. Direction that can’t be cut off. And therefore Energy, voice, and language that can’t be put to the exclusive use of the self-delusion. The mistaken identity and its derived code of unreality, non-being, and opposites.

What was the mistake? Losing our voice. What’s to be learned? Finding it and using it.

 

 

 

Published on Leave a comment on Standing Up for Logic: Why Idealism Makes Sense and “Realism” Doesn’t

The Logic that Dr. Johnson’s foot can never refute

An idealist recognizing Reality, the facts-Truth behind appearances, strikes realists as an absurdity. Realists who lack the vision of Logic and can only recognize appearances on the surface with the body’s senses that are one with the appearance.  This is the real absurdity: self-referential circular “reasoning” that takes staring into a funhouse mirror as objective reality.

The idealist recognizes Reality, the facts-Truth behind appearances, by its function. By what it does, its usefulness, as well as by what it is. By its Definition which necessarily includes Purpose. Recognizing Reality behind appearances could not be logical otherwise. The definitions of Logic center upon the function-usefulness of its subject. Upon its Purpose which, to be logical, must fit within the larger order of Reality-Creation harmoniously. The fitting-together of every aspect of Reality-Creation is its Logic, that makes it governable.

The idealist’s recognition of one Reality behind appearances may strike realists unable to see with the vision of Logic as an absurdity. But when this one fact, one Purpose, takes its place within a harmonious composition of facts that serve a logical Purpose, that explain its composition through the implications of Logic, its interconnections with consistency and clarity -- a feat that all of human inquiry has yet to achieve through the realist’s reliance on body-sensed appearances, -- it can no longer be dismissed as an absurdity. The arch-realist Dr. Johnson can no longer “refute it thus” by kicking a wastebasket.

Explanation that leads to Understanding can only be the end result of Logic, and Logic is not an absurdity. Absurdity lies not in the idealist’s reliance on the vision of Logic but in the realist’s lack of it. In the realist’s so-called reasoning that attempts to find Purpose and meaning in constructs of “fact” without Logic. That can’t hold together without it. That defy explanation and contradict Understanding.

What physics, neuroscience, and biology can’t explain 

Physics can’t explain its subject – the material universe, unreality – when the point of its origin is singularity. The state of inaccessibility to the laws of physics. “Laws” which particle physics – quantum mechanics – flout anyway simply because the magician behind the magic of illusion is energy, inseparable and indivisible, the agent of Mind whether conscious or unconscious. Energy, the Force of Creation, which can, if called upon by mind unconscious, animate its dreams almost as convincingly as it can the Reality of Mind that’s conscious. Energy, the connection between the neurons of body-brains, powered by electrical impulses in unreality and imagining, while connecting with the thoughts and feelings, the Logic and Love, of Mind in the Now, in Reality Creating.

Neuroscience ruled by the arbitrary bias of realists falls for the deception and claims consciousness for the brain. The organ split between left and right hemispheres, the judgment of choice and the spontaneity of freedom. Split between its limbic system, the mindless willful act of herd instinct and the reflective deliberation of its prefrontal cortex. Between captivity to a false self and receptivity to its Real Self. In step with itself or at war with itself. Programmed to join with other brains in shared Purpose or to confront other brains in lethal combat – take your pick.

Neuroscience served by thoughtfulness instead of mindless bias isn’t so sure. Allows for the possibility that Mind and its consciousness are not the province of Energy stored in bodies – cells encased in matter that live and die, come and go, appear and disappear, without notice in cosmic time. Neuroscience split by consciousness like its subject, mind as well as brain, into two incompatible views.

Molecular biology, empowered by the discovery of DNA-RNA and the genome, still can’t explain its subject – organic cellular life – when the point of its origin is singularity, the state of inaccessibility to the laws of biology. Still can’t heal the psyche’s wounds, fix the mind’s psychiatric flaws. Despite the gains of the past, all of body-centric science leaves us in a state of not-knowing. Despite the gains to come, that is where it will leave us.

The ultimate realist’s ultimate fantasy

All of human inquiry into inorganic matter and organic life, armed with philosophy, psychology, and theology, dutifully subservient to its insistence on “realism" -- on the dictates of appearances, the body’s senses -- has marched forward with confidence that enlightenment will come. Answers will reveal themselves and finally! we will know.

This mysterious situation we find ourselves in will be mystery no more. And we can continue our march forward together, in harmony and shared Purpose, at last! Without conflict and misery, pain and suffering, that insist that this is the only reality and nothing can change. The promise of bodies and their senses brought to reality: heaven on earth. The apotheosis of Hawking’s “Quest for knowledge:” his boundaryless universe of Being that needs no source.

Why? Because bias hard-wired into animal-instinct willed it. Because it’s creation and he’s the creator, the ultimate “realist’s” ultimate fantasy. The ultimate absurdity of “realism:” there can be no other Reality because I’m God and the world is my creation. This is the mind of the “realist.” The authoritarian at heart who yearns to be arbitrary rule above the law. Who craves “liberty” – Freedom without Order, an impossibility. The lawlessness of insanity.

Where is the real realism?

Confidence once unbroken is now broken. Inquiry that relies on the falsehood, the blatantly illogical unreality of “realism,” has failed. The mystery is still with us. Pointlessness is still with us. Contradiction, confusion, and ambiguity are still with us. And we still fight, at war with ourselves and among ourselves. The issue unresolved while our disappearing habitat goes about resolving it for us.

Who’s getting it right? Idealists looking inward toward substance guided by the vision of Logic? Or realists peering outward toward an absurdity: form detectable only by itself?

Who sees Purpose and meaning that add up? That hold together and explain themselves? Where is the “proof” that was promised from experimental science – physics, neuroscience, and biology? Where is coherence from this mad aggregation of unruly atoms and mutating cells, conflicting mass ideologies and personalities, incurable psychiatric disorders, unmanageable family dynamics, convoluted theologies and mythologies, haunted, schizophrenic minds?

Where is the real realism?

Published on Leave a comment on True “Realism:” The Relevance and Practicality of The Story of the Child

The great philosophical divide: “realism” vs. “idealism”

The great philosophical divide is between those who do (“idealists”) and those who don’t (“realists”) want to replace the unreality of replication / disconnection-separation:

  • illogic-insanity / self-delusion
  • lawlessness-chaos / opposites-contradictions / competition-disunity
  • captivity / conformance / oppression
  • isolated bodies-matter
  • appearances-deceptions
  • misunderstanding / projection-blame / guilt-fear / victimhood
  • punishment-retribution / conflict-violence / destruction
  • uncreativity / ignorance / stagnation
  • invalidation-disempowerment / worthlessness
  • non-being / mortality

with the Reality of Oneness / Relationship-Interconnection:

  • Logic-sanity / Self-Awareness / Knowledge
  • Governance-Order / Harmony / Sharing-Community
  • Freedom / Free Will / Expression
  • Interconnected Minds-Selves
  • Reality-Truth / Honesty-Integrity
  • Understanding / Love / Innocence / Psyche-Soul Harmlessness
  • Creation / Learning / Growth / Progress-Development
  • Affirmation-Empowerment / Worth
  • Being / Life-Eternity

In the philosophical divide “idealists” committed to the Reality of Oneness consider themselves the true “Realists.” To “idealists” “realists” are the true self-deluded “unrealists.” To “realists” it is the reverse.

This author’s perspective belongs with historic idealists who consider themselves true realists. The Story of the Child is therefore written from the perspective of one Child-mind convinced by Logic of its Reality. If it earns-deserves “authority” it is not by virtue of the qualifications of its author or the subjectivity or objectivity of his perspective. It is by virtue solely of its internal Logic.

Alignment with A Course in Miracles

It does not seek identification with any philosophical or religious thought. But it does claim inspiration from the Logic of Jesus in A Course in Miracles. Any contradiction in the Logic of The Story of the Child with ACIM is to be resolved in favor of ACIM.

The Story of the Child is not intended to be in any sense an alteration of, or improvement on, ACIM. Though it shares its basic purpose with ACIM – explanation to help with Understanding-Forgiveness and thus with awakening – it does not share the same scope. The Story of the Child is a conscious attempt to extend the scope of ACIM’s Logic back in the Sequence of Logic from an act by a mind unconscious that produced the dream of unreality to the event that explains the mind’s loss of consciousness.

It hopes thereby to provide a foundation for Understanding context that will support logical interpretations of what happened and why. So that attempts to explain, Understand, and correct human behavior driven by this event and its consequences will cease conflicting with Logic. Will cease perpetuating error and putting off the unhappy Child’s awakening from its nightmare. So that future attempts will succeed because they align with Logic. 

Is this relevant? Is it “practical?”

Tell me that our world isn’t spiraling into another cycle of authoritarian horrors, lawlessness, delusion, and destruction. Tell me that the “optimism” of “realists” is warranted against all the evidence that the unreasoning, insensitive, self-absorbed children that we are refuse to grow up. That our world is tending toward freedom and compassion instead of more oppression and cruelty.

Tell me that the “optimism” of “realists” deserves center stage instead of the countless victims of self-delusion who don’t share their “optimism.” Who know better. Whose voice will be heard when the “optimism” of “realists” makes certain that there are no voices left. To what is the “optimism” of “realists” attributable? To happenstance: to the fact that their misguided “realism” – their self-delusion -- hasn’t, so far, made them victims.

Tell me that our fields of inquiry – science, philosophy, psychology, theology – have good explanations that all add up to Understanding. So that the voice of self-delusion that’s got the field to itself won’t turn this century into a worse horror show than the last. Or have we forgotten? Two world wars, the Great Depression, the cold war and its threat of nuclear annihilation. More pandemics and the greatest horror of them all: Anthropocene. Mass extinction dismissed as “climate change” in the popular imagination so that infantile, self-absorbed children, who refuse to grow up, won’t be inconvenienced.

What The Story of the Child will show

If the “explanations” offered by the dominant paradigms of our fields of inquiry brought us to this, are they “relevant?” Are they “practical?” What The Story of the Child will show is that they are neither. Their “realism” is dead wrong, and they have brought us to this. They are accountable. They are the issue, not the Logic of another perspective. If they can’t explain the reality behind appearances then let them explain why their veneration of appearances has failed.

I would meet you upon this honestly.

Published on Leave a comment on The Warmth, Comfort, and Wisdom of “Radical”

Mama Mallard’s road to nowhere

The Joker’s version of “reality” is the exact opposite of Reality. A departure from Truth that couldn’t be more radical. The biggest of Big Lies. Stunning in its enormity.

Yet the traumatized and dreaming Child was taken in, of course because it had no choice. Not really, considering the context. So, its projections and the Joker virus’s replications all follow along like ducklings, quacking their way across the road behind mama, unaware that they’ve been duped. That they and the road and everything else are a figment of their imaginations put there by a mistake. By the unconscious Child mistaking in the darkness its own reflection – a shadow – for an “other.” Crying out in pain and terror for help from its opposite. Whose offer to “help” came from a lifeless recording, a code of non-being derived from the Child’s Being.

A code that can’t help but “respond” with everything opposite to Reality and Truth, upside down and inside out. From the Big Truth of Reality to the Big Lie of unreality. A pattern obvious to the sensibility of Logic but obviously not to the insensibility of illogic. One would think that even a self-deluded Child, absorbed in a dream, would eventually catch on, but, so far, it hasn’t. Mama Mallard keeps leading her ducklings across the road and her ducklings keep following, even when it’s obvious that their “journey” is taking them nowhere in circles and it isn’t safe.

What the emperor doesn’t want to know

Why hasn’t the Child caught on? It’s not because the Truth hasn’t surfaced in various forms – art, music and literature, philosophy, psychology and theology, and now even in science, the last bastion of delusion. Many have heard, since at least the sixth century BCE, that their experience of “life” is a strange dream – an illusion -- and the Child only needs to awaken to return to Reality. But the message hasn’t gotten through. They’re not listening.

As horrific as its nightmare is for the victims of the Big Lie, they seem to fear the Big Truth even more. So much so that they’ve become an army of opposition against it. So deep is their self-delusion that its protection from attack has found its way into the core of their DNA, their very identity. The shadow code of non-being has substituted itself for the genetic code of their Being. If only one should speak to the Truth – should mention that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes – he might be put to death. In fact, one of them did years ago and what happened? He was crucified.

Why? What makes a simple statement of fact, the Logic and Reason, the Worth of Truth, come across as a hostile act? An attack? As an unforgivable breach of faith? A violation of social and moral order more threatening than irrational disorder that invades neighborhoods of schools, churches, malls, and grocery stores with homicidal maniacs armed with lethal weapons. This is sanity? This is ”normal?”

What’s so funny? That the Truth is radical

What makes the Truth so hard for the self-deluded to swallow is it’s radical. The Child’s opposite, a lifeless, mindless, loveless code, convinces it that unreal is real and wrong is right, and the Child is OK with that. The Child is OK with hanging out with false “friends,” adolescents wishful-thinking that smoking won’t kill them. But when a real friend approaches with the Truth, that there’s been a mistake and it will kill them, that’s not OK. Seeing is believing, the Child says. Even if the body’s “eyes” can only see the mistake. Even if the body is just a replication of the shadow code that replaced the thinking and Logic of Mind and invented the mistake.

Seeing the Truth, seeing Reality, is too much of a stretch, too much of an effort, if it requires abandoning bodies with eyes that can’t see for Logic with vision that can see. The ultimate in radical – coded viral instructions for the opposite of Being, the opposite of Life, Mind, Love, and Soul – has convinced its unaware, self-deluded host that its opposite is radical. And so crucifixion is too good for anyone who presumes to disagree. The embodiments of the self-delusion, the virus's replications and their senses, have spoken. They’ve produced a joke.

The Child’s new lord and master, the Joker, whose one genuine talent is appearances, perverts every sign of Logic and sanity into a joke whose malign humor feeds off the delusion of fools. The Truth is radical. The occupants of Plato’s Cave can’t be persuaded that their Cave master, the Joker, can possibly be wrong. The Cave master who invented the Cave, its occupants the replicates of a virus, the original Child-the-many “group.” The Cave master who invented “society,” with its hare-brained “rules” that encourage and facilitate mayhem, rules with absolute authority, above the law. And who could possibly question it?

It only takes one individual

But it doesn’t take an imaginary “group,” a mass-ideology “movement,” to assault fortress denial. All it takes is a single replication of the virus -- one human -- to reach the Child beyond the Cave, to reach its Memory beyond the dream, with the Truth. One mind gifted with real thoughts, one self gifted with real senses, to see through the ruse. To understand and to share its understanding with one “other.” In an act of Understanding that recognizes “other” as self. Not duped by insanity into mistaken identity but guided by Logic into recognition of correct identity. Not isolated, separated, mortal bodies, apparitions that come and go, but one Soul of Mind married to Love, living and connecting in the unity, the Force and eternity, of Now.

Is it possible? What is the premise, the step in the Sequence of Logic that launched all of Creation, that drives its Creativity with the Energy, the exuberance of Life? Possibility! What is every aspect of the Joker’s dark lie designed to do? To close off possibility. To hide it. To shut down Creation, stifle Creativity, and replace it with nihilism, with destruction, impossibility. Who will “win” between Logic and a joke when there can’t even be a contest between Reality and illusion? Who will win between the Child’s real identity and its delusion? Of course it’s possible! How could it not be?

Far out!

What’s “radical:” the Joker struggling repeatedly to “unite” all the occupants of its Cave – all of humanity – against the Truth? Against the Child’s awakening? With one flawed, spirit-crushing ideology after another? Or the Child being awakened by just one of its projections – one individual – who listens to the spontaneous voice of Logic, earns and accepts its gifts, and freely chooses to accompany it back home? Not to be “chosen” but to choose of its own Free Will. For that’s the Child’s true identity that will restore its place in Reality: Free Choice without which nothing can have Worth. Not even Life itself, Creation itself.

How can anything have Worth if it isn’t earned and freely chosen? What is the purpose of the Child’s immature projections, in this morass of contradictions, confusion, and pain, if it isn’t to exercise their free will, to grow up, and to earn their way back Home?

Who says so? Not unreasoning, authoritarian “faith,” one of the many masks worn by the Joker, but Logic. Logic says so. And someday, the mind, heart, and soul of one individual, undistracted by the body, will take it in, the Truth of who the Child is, who we are, not the delusion. And it will be far out. It will be radical.

Published on Leave a comment on Logic: The Ultimate Path to Common Sense

What The Story of the Child has to tell us

The main thesis of The Story of the Child isn’t non-dualism – the understanding that of two competing realities only one can be real: the reality of Mind-Love and not spacetime-matter. Its main thesis is that the ultimate path to understanding is the thinking-reasoning of Mind that respects the orderly Sequence of Logic. It’s that if Child minds choose to be guided by Logic, by the orderly Process of Creation, by the Interconnections of Logic’s Implications, patiently and attentively, they will be rewarded with the Learning and Growth, the Judgment of maturity, they need in order to awaken to Reality and Truth.

They will be rewarded with the capacity to distinguish:

  • between what’s real and what’s not.
  • Between appearances that are a magician’s act performed by the body’s senses and the Truth that lies behind appearances that’s visible to the Logic of Mind.
  • Between senseless distractions – chaotic apparitions – and the real thing that makes sense and is here to stay. That offers context of purpose and meaning that comfort while growing Child minds learn to Understand and heal. While they grow out of the captivity of infantile self-absorption into the freedom of self-awareness. From deluding themselves with the lies and perversions of illogic to recognizing themselves with the Truth, the common sense of Logic.

The awakened Child will be rewarded with the competence it needs in order to do its job in Creation.

Logic: the ultimate path to sanity

The main thesis of The Story of the Child isn’t a challenge to overturn common sense but to restore it. Not to challenge Reality but to see and accept it. Why? So that Child minds can receive, enjoy, and use the benefits of Logic. Beginning with sanity that discerns Order – the fitting together in harmony of things – instead of embracing contradictions – disorder that pits things against one another in endless conflict.

What’s so compelling about strife that it must be protected by “realists” and the frantic rationalizations of “realism?” What are they afraid of if all that’s being offered to end it is the friendship, the common sense, of Logic? And, yes, non-dualism: the Reality of eternal Peace -- Mind married to Love -- and the unreality of Plato’s Cave -- our universe of inscrutable spacetime-matter, mortality, and eternal, senseless violence.

Published on Leave a comment on What Logic’s Explanation and Metaphysics Ask of Us

Six elemental questions 

Explanation wants us to answer questions in pursuit of Understanding. Metaphysics wants us to answer questions in pursuit of Reality-Truth behind appearances. Both require that we do so in an orderly way according to the Sequence of Logic. Rationally, using Reason to employ both thought and feeling, Mind and Love, to analyze, discriminate, evaluate, and judge.

The immediate issue that Logic’s Explanation and Metaphysics want us to address is how to redirect human thought-feeling:

  • away from conflict, deception, and insanity toward peace, truth, and sanity
  • away from cyclical breakdowns in collective and individual relationships that threaten humanity with extinction, toward relationships with shared purpose that endure.

A broader issue that Logic’s Explanation and Metaphysics want us to address is the context that gives purpose and meaning to “life” as we know it and its world of spacetime-matter: is it part of the solution or is it the problem? If it’s the wrong context is there a right context – another Reality that does have the solution? That provides answers that work. That offer the hope of possibility, grown from the bottom up instead of the despair of impossibility, the unchanging status quo imposed from the top down, by authoritarian “realism.”

Logic’s Explanation and Metaphysics ask us to answer six elemental questions:

  • Who are we?
  • What are we doing to one another?
  • Where are we doing it?
  • Why are we doing it?
  • How can we stop doing it?
  • When will we stop doing it?

Who are we?

An answer to Who are we? is self-delusion: projections by an unconscious-dreaming Child-mind and replications of its shadow-reflection, an imaginary “other” defined by a lifeless code of non-being, a derivative of Being. A parasitic-viral opposite that goes by its preferred name here, the “Joker, because all of its deceptions in our made-up world are perversions of the Truth. They are all jokes that derive their humor from the self-delusion of fools.

We are illusory embodiments of the Child’s shadow-reflection “other” meant to conceal the Reality-Truth of who we really are: Mind-Love Life-Being, the Child of Mind-Love Life-Being Parents, who exist in another Reality. We the many, projections of the One dreaming Child, even in unreality, are Free Will combined with Psyche-Soul Oneness-Innocence. Our defining Relationship that affirms and Reciprocates the Relationships between Mind-Love Parents and Parents-Child in Reality. We are Possibility. We are not non-being lifeless, soulless, mindless-loveless, impossibility.

What are we doing to one another?

An answer to What are we doing to one another? is misusing our differences. Instead of using them to cross boundaries and make common cause in Creation we are misusing them to justify condemnation and punishment, retribution and retaliation, victimhood’s vengeance, in the cause of miscreation. Instead of using them to learn and grow toward the maturity of Understanding, compassion, peace, and unity we misuse them to preserve a status quo of unawareness, intolerance, conflict, and disunity. Instead of using them to promote healing, mindfulness, and Love, to build character and values, we use them to promote mindless separation -- to target one another with fear, guilt, and hate.

Where are we doing it?

An answer to Where are we doing it? is in the unreality-dream that is our illusory universe of spacetime-matter. A dualistic “reality” that can’t be Real, that requires abandoning bodies’ sensory perception, abandoning the disingenuous, hollow philosophy of “realism” and choosing another guide. An authentic guide or muse by any name – Apollo, Holy Spirit, poetic genius, soulmate, divine afflatus, whatever – through insight from Mind-Intuition.

Why are we doing it?

An answer to Why are we doing it? is to eliminate “others.” To attain an unattainable state of resolution-peace without opposites. To execute the Joker’s perversion of Logic’s, or Logos-God’s, striving for eternal Perfection-Peace without opposites, without contradictions or impossibilities, through reconciliation of Everything in harmony under the Laws of Cause and Effect, under Necessity. I.e. through Understanding. The Joker’s perversion is getting rid of opposites by getting rid of possibilities, Laws and Necessity, and Logic. By getting rid of Logos-God. An answer to What are we doing to one another? is choosing the Joker’s perversion rather than the Ideal role-modeled for us by Logic.

How can we stop doing it?

An answer to How can we stop doing it? is to reverse-retract the self-delusion, our mistaken identity – the Joker, our own shadow-reflection, a Schmoe punching bag of sin, guilt, condemnation, fear, and hatred, an imaginary “other” – and choose another guide. A guide from the Memory of who we really are -- from our Parents Mind married to Love -- to help us align with Logic in the exercise of Free Choice to regain self-awareness. To lead us back Home to our Temenos in Reality, where there’s Innocence, Trust, playfulness, and work to do with real Purpose and Meaning.

When will we stop doing it?

An answer to When will we stop doing it? is when the mind-love of one individual Child projection / Joker replication perceives with Real senses, thinks with Real thoughts, and “sees,” i.e. Understands, the Reality-Truth of who the “other” really is: our One Child-Self Innocent, not the many Joker-replications guilt. Deserving of Love, not fear-blame, anger-hate, punishment-vengeance.

An answer is when one dreamed individual, enabled and empowered with self-awareness:

  • brings its self-awareness back to the unconscious-dreaming Child-mind through its Memory.
  • brings the Child back to its Parents’ Consciousness, its mind changed from the self-delusion of guilt and insanity to the self-awareness of Innocence and sanity.
  • brings the Child back to awakening from its dream of unreality-untruth by being recognized and welcomed back to Reality-Truth and Creation by Consciousness. By its Parents: the Life-Being, the Psyche-Soul, the Oneness and Innocence, of Mind married to Love.

We will stop doing it when the Child’s return to self-awareness, the end of its self-delusion, returns it to the Reality of Now -- to eternity-infinity, and to the end of the illusion of time, the illusion of the temporal, of mortality and death.

We will stop doing it when three steps have been taken in the orderly Sequence of Logic:

  1. One individual Child projection-replication freely chooses self-awareness and rejects self-delusion.
  2. The dreaming Child regains self-awareness through its mind’s connection with the self-aware dreamed individual’s changed mind, freely choosing to reject self-delusion. Thus will the dream end – our senseless world of bodies, spacetime, and matter and who knows how many other universes.
  3. The Child’s return to self-awareness – to Psyche-Soul Innocence and qualification for re-entry to Reality-Creation – is recognized by its Parents-Consciousness.

What we the Child are really asked to do: Grow up

The Child restored to Reality-Creation, having experienced unconsciousness and its dream of unreality-untruth, is now aware of impossibilities-opposites as well as possibilities. Is now familiar with the database of Choice to be navigated by the Child’s unique Gift, its role in Creativity, Free Choice, in the Creation, sharing, affirmation, empowerment, and Reciprocation of Worth, the Purpose and Meaning of the Life and Love of Creation.

Thus will the real purpose of the unconscious Child’s dream and its correction have been served. Its maturation toward the competence it needs to do its job in Creation. What Logic’s Explanation and Metaphysics really ask of us: to grow up.

Published on Leave a comment on The “Realist”

Hidden from Reality

The mind of the “realist” entertains us with the appearance of intellectual honesty and analytical brilliance in every way but one: the reality and truth of Logic. With adamance that borders on hysteria, it refuses to follow the path of thinking:

  • that it doesn’t own, possess, and control
  • that necessarily begins with things as they are rather than with things as the realist imagines or wants them to be
  • that is subject to laws of cause and effect, to the authority and discipline of Necessity, that no will can contradict, not even the will of Logos, of God, whose governance is under, not above, the law
  • that doesn’t imagine all of Creation to be a game, a contest between isolated-separated opposites, conflicting self-interests with but one object: to “win.” An object with zero tolerance for rules that the realist can’t write to suit itself. Which means zero tolerance for Logic that can’t be “rigged,” can’t be unfair
  • that won’t yield to the “realist’s” obsession with supremacy, the myth of an unquestioned, absolute authority whose rule is above the law, a fantasy of “liberty” that knows no limits in its unhinged pretense of divinity, its blind quest to replace Necessity, to be “god.”

The ”realist” who hides its intentions behind facades of reasonableness, bland sociability, ever-smiling pleasantness, passive conformance, harmless agreeability, seductive humor and personal charm, can’t stand the light of Logic. To venture outside the darkness of Plato’s Cave ruled by illusion into the light of Truth shone by Logic. To venture into the domain of Reality and Creation governed with wisdom, compassion, and fairness by Logic. With inclusiveness that shares, affirms, empowers, and reciprocates Worth instead of exclusiveness that monopolizes it. Preserving its unquestioned “right,” the authority to indulge its “liberty” to have and do anything its specialness wants-- its infantile, separated, out-of-control willfulness.

To save us from Reality

This is the profile of the “realist” that lies beneath the surface. Behind appearances. That takes minds not trapped in make-believe to task for being exactly what it is: trapped in make-believe. For being “fooled” into questioning appearances that “realists” are allowed to detect with bodies, by the intuition of Mind that “realists” are forbidden to use. Intuition guided by Logic that would explain things as they really are, behind appearances that deceive, if “realists,” in their wounded righteousness, obsessed with winning and conquest, would only allow it. Logic whose understanding enables minds to perform as they must to exercise Free Will, the true path to Freedom instead of its grotesque caricature – the joke – of “liberty.”

Free Will, the capacity to choose freely enabled and empowered by judgment guided by reason and values. Guided by the giving of Creativity that opens minds to possibilities instead of the taking of unreasoning authority. Authority that closes minds to all but one consideration: its supremacy. Its demand for obedience, the “gift” of captivity, uncreativity, and impossibility. Captivity that offers the blessings of “liberty.” “Paradise” ruled by psychosis – detached from reality – that styles itself “realism.”

What would the idealist offer? Intellectual honesty. The Logic of who we really are: minds with thoughts and feelings that live. What does the “realist” offer? Intellectual dishonesty. The self-delusion of who we really aren’t: bodies and senses that die. Parasites clinging to their host, mistaken for “others.” Illusions who can “save” us from all the limits, the definitions and implications, of Logic. From Reality.

Who is the “realist” really? Our own shadow. Our opposite. Our captor. The Joker.

A joke.

Published on Leave a comment on Debunking the Five-Factor Personality Type Theory

The five factors

Asher Lawson and Kermant Kakkar reference the “widely-used” “five-factor psychological system for identifying personality traits” in the April 2022 issue of Scientific American [“Fake-News Sharers” p. 78]. Here are the five factors underlined (my interpretation added in brackets):

  • Openness to experience [i.e. involvement in external affairs vs. active pursuit of inner life / learning-growth through introspection, reflection-Intuition, contemplation; also vs. inaccessible mind stuck in unchanging status quo,]
  • Conscientiousness: orderliness, impulse control, conventionality, reliability [vs. social non-conformance but not relevant to individual Judgment without Feeling-Values / morality, order-fairness, discipline, accountability]
  • Extroversion
  • Agreeableness [vs. social unpleasantness but not relevant to individual Understanding, Honesty, sincerity. I.e. not relevant to individual recognition of / respect for Reality-Truth]
  • Neuroticism [Possible interpretation: wounded-crucified Psyche victimhood, hollowness-scarcity, unaccountability, specialness-taking , unfairness / wounding crucifying vs. sharing of Abundance, affirmation, empowerment, reciprocation, adaptability to changing contexts-circumstances, responsibility for improvement-progress, i.e. for changing-moving contexts forward.]

What’s wrong here?

The five-factor theory doesn’t allow for the crucial distinction between personality types in individual-intimate contexts-relationships vs. social-group contexts-relationships. Its categories overplay attributes associated with social types oriented to group activity-relationships in the external-material body-sensed environment and severely underplay attributes associated with individuals oriented to the Intuition-sensed inner life of mind and soul:

  • involvement in external experience without reference to involvement in internal experience
  • conscientiousness measured by social conventionality-reliability without reference to internal moral-values
  • extroversion / outward orientation without reference to introversion / inward orientation
  • agreeableness (pleasantness) without reference to alignment with Logic. Necessity, Reality or Truth that can be disagreeable (unpleasant).

By putting outward-oriented body-sensing attributes on the surface and muting inward-oriented mind-intuited attributes five-factor categories can be judged a clear attempt to invalidate the distinction. It can therefore be judged an attempt by the scientific community rabidly biased in favor of the philosophy of “realism” based on the presumed reality of bodies and material-sensed environment and against the philosophy of “idealism” based on reality of mind and soul.

If so, it stands in opposition to the philosophy of physics which is open to questioning “realism” based on the progress, or lack of progress, toward quantum gravity [ref: Adam Becker, “The Origins of Space and Time: Does Spacetime Emerge from a More Fundamental Reality?”, in Scientific American February 2022 pp. 28-33]. It also would stand in opposition to the philosophy of Plato which distinguishes between ideas-subjects within Mind and their material expressions-objects in the external world and, between the two, attributes reality to the former, not the latter. Except for Plato the person’s felt perception of divinity in the image of the cosmos, his philosophy, the foundation of Western thought, places reality firmly within Mind, not matter.

Myers-Briggs personality type theory and the rationality of Intuition

Myers-Briggs personality type theory, descended from Jungian psychology, is enriched by insights from Intuition that recognize the distinction between outward and inward orientations and project no evident bias between the two. Competition from the five factor theory would appear to be motivated by opposition-resistance to an “unscientific” approach that strays from quantifiables. By opposition to any theory, however rational, that challenges the supremacy (tyranny) of science’s sensory perception.

If so, science’s position is highly irrational because the scientific measurements of “quantifiables” cannot be up to the task of understanding the whole of human motivation. The very thought that it can is laughable. Who would disagree that human motivation incorporates the qualitative – minds, introspection, reflection, intuition, reasoning, subjective values-evaluating, judging, choosing – along with the quantitative – external objects, bodies and sensory perception? If science had its way personalities would be “measurable” chess-piece objects – automatons -- being maneuvered on a game board by binary search algorithms, not by minds, hearts, and souls thinking, feeling, and judging for themselves,. Not by sentient beings endowed with Psyches and Free Will.

Why debunk the five-factor personality type theory? Because it’s bunk.

Published on Leave a comment on How do we restore Consciousness and regain self-awareness?

Switch from focus on matter to focus on mind

First, by letting go of certainty that our material world of sensory perception is real. By going with the implications of what Adam Becker has posited, that it's illusory. Quantum gravity -- the goal that was beyond even Einstein -- has opened the door.

This is the real achievement, the real end-product, of centuries of physics studying matter: Eliminating certainty that bodies and sensory perception are the gold standard for establishing definitively what's real / "realistic" and what's not. Just as a physician would eliminate a diagnosis that doesn't fit the symptoms. Sticking with this one is increasingly uncool. It is wrong.

Addiction to sensory perception is the biggest barrier to restoring Consciousness. Physics / Becker is saying maybe the time has come to take it down. It could have come down long ago when Erwin Schrödinger acknowledged that science relying on sensory perception is circular self-referential reasoning -- matter citing itself. It's irrational -- not the best basis for a field that prides itself on objectivity and reliability.

Empirical measurements and experimental research have their place. But the door must open to Logic, where Parmenides and Plato began 2500 years ago. To insight from Intuition that connects minds to our collective Memory and Logic. To revelation that can only come from intuiting the story of Mind. The story of thought-reason and feeling-values. To the qualitative as well as the quantitative, to perception and judgment that include Worth.

Embrace the whole person with a systems approach

The quantum physicist Rovelli's Reality Is Not What It Seems calls for help from philosophy. Becker is not alone. Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolution says science should stay away from purpose. From supporting or "proving" any particular aspiration, philosophy, or ideology. Michael Stevens' The Knowledge Machine holds science to the same "iron rule" of detachment.

But meaning is impossible without engaging the total person, mind-feeling's entire story. Meaning-purpose is impossible without Understanding the whole context. Psychology and theology must be part of the mix along with philosophy and science. Regaining Consciousness requires a holistic, collaborative, systems approach.

Disengage from the wrong guide and choose the right Guide

Our world is a delusion whose source is an event from another Reality: The Child's mistaking its shadow-reflection for a savior that would substitute for its lost Parents, that would guide it to a substitute reality where it would be safe and could endlessly project its imagined guilt onto objectified-imagined "others." Where it could preserve its Innocence, thus ensuring endless conflict and misery. This is the psychopathology of the Child's error explained in A Course in Miracles (ACIM).

We do our part to restore Consciousness by correcting the error in all our choices. By not making unreality real, i.e. by not making our shadow-reflections real. By learning to recognize the Joker we've made of our shadow-reflections. By consciously withdrawing belief in its reality, by disengaging from it. By consciously undoing and invalidating all its appearances-deceptions / lies.

We do our part to restore Consciousness by learning to recognize the Guide that's been provided by Intuition-Memory to help with awakening. By consciously choosing the right Guide, seeking and following its Guidance in all our choices. By utilizing our talents and faculties of mind to build awareness through the exercise of Free Will: introspection, reflection-intuition, thinking-reasoning, feeling-evaluating, judging-choosing. By taking responsibility and holding ourselves accountable for our own learning and growth.

In the face of determined resistance: Never give up!

We restore Consciousness and regain self-awareness by taking issue with Hawking when he declared that "philosophy is dead." In an illusory world the goal is to get at reality, the purpose of philosophy. The goal is to get beyond appearances to the Truth beyond appearances: The purpose of metaphysics, the invention of Parmenides and his Eleatics School of Reason.

We do our part to restore Consciousness by supporting Philosophy and Metaphysics while we continue to support Science. The change of mind that's needed will meet determined resistance from many quarters. Mass extinctions from climate change may deny the attempt altogether. The unconscious Child may need to continue its saga on another planet in another universe.

There’s meaning embedded in the idea that begins the sequence of Logic: the idea of Possibility. The idea that lies at the heart of Creation. Perhaps a gift of Logos-God that’s meant to inspire our efforts now. It’s We will not be denied. It’s Never give up.