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Published on Leave a comment on Authoritarian Rule: Fact vs. Fiction

Fiction:

  • All relations are power relations between groups / tribes-herds competing for dominance.
  • Individuals “exist” with voices and feelings worthy of recognition only to the extent that they belong to groups, identify with groups, and are loyal to groups.
  • The gift of belonging that groups confer upon their members substitutes for Love and reciprocates individuals’ Love for their group.
  • Love of individuals for their group is to be encouraged. Love between individuals that can take precedence over group loyalty is to be denied and suppressed.
  • Group / tribe-herd loyalty is the highest good, the most important core value. More important than individual sovereignty and integrity. More important than respect for morality and the truth.
  • Questioning the supremacy of group authority is a sin. There is no worse sin than disobedience to group authority.

Fact:

  • One Child is Real and True. Child-the-many is a delusion perpetrated by the Child’s mistaken identity, its shadow-reflection opposite. By its “dark side” that can only be detected by Mind while in an unconscious state dreaming illusions.
  • Power relations between groups / tribes-herds competing for dominance are illusory “action” meant to distract their audience of individuals from the Truth, to convince them that Child-the-many is not what it is: the opposite of the Truth -- one Child -- and therefore unreal. It is an illusion.
  • Individuals have Free Choice enabled by Mind thinking-loving that is not subject to the mindless-loveless animal will of groups / tribes-herds.
  • There is no substitute for Love.
  • Group “belonging” that condemns its members to the suppression of sovereign individuality, the denial of Mind, Free Will, and Love, and to endless conflict is a curse, not a gift or blessing.
  • Free Will is the natural birthright of every individual. Bodies can be controlled and behavior suppressed. Minds and hearts endowed with individuality and Free Will cannot.
  • There is no more important core value than valuing the one Self that is Love shared and expressed through Oneness-individuality. There is no higher good than respect for Good itself -- morality, Logic-Love, and the Truth.
  • There is no more harmful mistake than loyalty to the mindless, loveless, soulless animal will of group / tribe-herd taking precedence over the mindful, loving Free Will of individuality.

Fiction:

  • Consideration whether the ownership and use of a product is to be adjusted to accommodate others affected by its use, that denies them feelings and a voice with which to express their feelings, that ignores what their voice has to say, is moral and “reasonable.”
  • A response to a request that’s accompanied by reasons based on values, that makes no reference to the reasons and values given, is moral and “reasonable.”
  • Ownership that confers the right to do whatever the owner wants without regard to the interests of others affected in a shared world is ownership that’s responsible, moral, and “reasonable.”
  • It is “reasonable”-possible to have and do whatever you want without violating the natural rule of law that defines morality and enables civilization.
  • Explanation and understanding are possible without analysis. Free Choice is possible without analysis. Analysis is possible without reasoning and evaluation. 

Fact:

  • In a shared, just, civilized world no one may have and do whatever they want with ownership or any other context without conflicting with the natural rule of law and morality.
  • “Doing” is process that always requires structure. Structure is Order that consists of natural laws of cause and effect, sourced by Benevolence -- Logic and Love -- and backed up by the Force of Necessity. It’s morality and it applies to owners as well as everyone.
  • It applies to Benevolence -- the Authority that governs all of Reality-Creation because otherwise its governance would be arbitrary and capricious and therefore immoral and lawless.
  • The “right” to have and do whatever anyone wants in any context is a myth that authoritarian narcissists employ in order to “justify” injustice: acts that are inherently selfish, insensitive, cruel, and therefore immoral.
  • It is being promoted today by selfish, immoral demagogues to “justify” the takeover of democratic bottom-up governance by authoritarian top-down rule.
  • It is a lie that accounts for humanity’s long history of unresolved tension between civilizing Reason and tribalizing herd-emotions, between harmony and conflict, Good and evil, peace and war.
  • It is the ultimate affront to the rule of law that enables a just, reasoning-accommodating, egalitarian civilization as opposed to authoritarian dominance by unreasoning, unjust, combative tribal will.
  • The idea that anyone can have and do whatever they want without violating the natural rule of law and morality is detached from Reality, psychotic, and therefore insane.

Fiction:

  • Having a voice and the right and duty to be heard is the sole prerogative of authoritarian rule. No one else is entitled to it.
  • Denying others a voice when they have the right and duty to be heard cannot be of any consequence to them or inflict any cost on them.
  • It is of no consequence and inflicts no cost because others are not entitled to feelings. Having feelings that can be offended is the exclusive preserve of authoritarian rule.
  • Authoritarian rule that claims exclusive rights to a voice and feelings can do no harm to those denied a voice and feelings and is therefore exempt from responsibility and accountability since there are no consequences-costs to account for.
  • Authoritarian rule is exempt from accountability because rule that’s arbitrary, capricious, and lawless may do whatever it wants. 

Fact:

  • Everyone in a shared, just, and civilized world is entitled to a voice and has the right to be heard when their interests are affected.
  • Everyone has feelings and the right to use their voice to express their feelings when they are offended.
  • Authoritarian rule that denies others a voice and deprives them of feelings when they are affected is unfeeling. It’s insensitive, cruel, immoral, and uncivilized.
  • Unfeeling authoritarian wrongdoing can evoke feelings of rage, hatred, and a “terrible resolve” to right the wrong among its victims. Admiral Yamamoto feared that democratic America would be filled with a “terrible resolve” to punish authoritarian Japan for its attack on Pearl Harbor, and America did so.

Fiction:

  • Authoritarian rule must be unquestioned because it is flawless as it is, it is absolute, and has no opposite. 

Fact:

  • Authoritarian rule can have no opposite because it is an opposite: the opposite of the natural laws of cause and effect and morality backed by the Force of Necessity that govern supportively and compassionately from the bottom up instead of ruling cruelly, destructively, and lawlessly from the top down.

Fiction:

  • Structure-Order is possible without natural laws of cause and effect and a moral code backed by the Force of Necessity.
  • Structure-Order is made possible by arbitrary-capricious authoritarian rule that’s lawless. That “rules” by the “laws” of chaos.
  • In Structure-Order made possible by lawless authoritarian rule it’s possible, moral, and just to have and do whatever you want without consequences or costs.

Fact:

  • Arbitrary-capricious authoritarian rule that’s lawless is the opposite of Structure-Order and morality.
  • Freedom is impossible in the absence of Structure-Order.
  • The absence of Structure-Order -- lawlessness -- is the denial of Freedom. It’s imprisonment, enslavement. 

Fiction:

  • “Action” is mindless, loveless, and soulless.
  • “Action” is bodies directed-disciplined by animal herd instinct toward dominance-supremacy of will in physical competition-conflict.
  • “Action” that results in winning and losing in physical conflict stands for the ultimate purpose and meaning of Life: the “Triumph of the Will.” 

Fact:

  • Action that stands for purpose and meaning is mindful, loving, and soulful.
  • Action is self-directed, self-disciplined minds and hearts functioning with guidance from their sixth sense -- spontaneous insights from Intuition -- toward explanation that leads to understanding how to address issues and solve problems with honesty, integrity, and compassion.
  • Action is the application of understanding that addresses issues and solves problems, that alleviates suffering and advances the cause of a just and free society.

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“Wildness” that translates into authoritarian supremacy is a joke

“Wild card” autonomy logically implies detachment from controls -- anything that would limit its range of movement, any superior authority that would “tame” it. The Joker’s pitch would have offered unconscious Child an alternate reality where there would be no limits on its movement, no structure to contend with, no interconnectedness. Where the Child Free Choice, Creation’s wild card, could be wild -- a definition of “free” that the Interconnectedness of Reality can’t satisfy. Our unreal material world is a fantasy of “wildness” which implies chaos -- no laws. It’s Ivan Karamazov’s “lawlessness” which implies arbitrary-capricious top-down rule.

This is the philosophical root of Palpatine’s authoritarian supremacy, the “wildness” of the Child Free Choice, a ”wild card.” In Truth nothing in Reality-Creation can be a wild card without definition, without the structure-Order of Interconnectedness that Freedom requires. The alternate reality offered by the Joker-opposite was an impossibility without the definitions-connections of Logic-Love.

A perversion that’s a joke: “wild card”-“wildness” that translates into authoritarian supremacy, the opposite of freedom-wildness. Plato’s Cave occupants are fools imagining themselves to be “wild and crazy guys.” “Born to raise hell” motorcyclists are expressing a version of “freedom” that’s wildness: impossible, delusional foolishness. Freedom without Order is delusional. Yet Child Free Choice can logically imply wildness because it’s free of Parents’ control. It’s not free of Creation Structure-Interconnectedness but it must be free of Parental control within Process.

How the Joker pulled it off -- the reversal of Creation

The distinction between Creation’s Structure and Process is critical to understanding the Child’s loss of Consciousness. The Child’s wild card freedom from Parental control of its choices within Process may have implied to an inexperienced Child, lacking self-direction and self-discipline, that the laws of cause and effect and the Force of Necessity in Process didn’t apply to Child. It thus may have implied that laws-Necessity in Structure didn’t apply either. It may have implied that wild card absence of Parental control of Free Choice exempts Free Choice from laws-Necessity in Process and Structure of Creation both.

Humanity attempting to express Free Choice wild card as “liberty,” i.e. as exemption from laws-Necessity, is an impossibility that can only be re-enacted in a dream where “anything goes.” It’s re-enacting the Child’s confusion of its wild card autonomy from Parental interference with a broader exemption from laws-Necessity. It’s the impossibility of authoritarian supremacy that is specialness. That leads not to “liberty” but to surrendering of Free Choice to an arbitrary-capricious captor, to lawlessness-chaos. It is the opposite of Structure-Order required by Freedom.

Correction of error addressed by A Course in Miracles (ACIM) was mis-identification of Self caused by confusion between real Self and illusory shadow-reflection inside unconsciousness. Correction of error addressed by The Story of the Child was confusion between Free Choice’s freedom from Parental control and the impossibility of Freedom from laws-Necessity within Consciousness.

The Joker’s perversion of Creation is its reversal of definition within Creation’s Process and Structure that disables both and renders their connection-relationship meaningless. Process Free Choice becomes no process because no free choice, i.e.  imprisonment in Plato’s Cave. Structure becomes top-down authoritarian because no Parental support from bottom up and thus becomes no structure. Allowing the Joker’s “authority,” the chaos of no process-structure, to replace them. Coming apart within and between both is the consequence of the Child’s mis-identification with coded separation-disconnection. With coded coming apart -- its shadow-reflection opposite.

The lesson

The practical lesson for humanity is to use metaphysics to understand the Reality-Creation that preceded and produced the Big Bang -- our material, illusory universe. That exists not within the dream but whose story furnishes the root of every event, every interaction, that comprises it. The practical lesson is that Reality-Creation consists of Structure and Process, that process requires structure, and structure must be bottom-up to enable process that’s Creativity with Free Will.

The lesson is that unfeeling top-down authoritarian supremacy gets Structure wrong and smothers the Free Will and Creativity of Process. It's irrational fear of change and innovation -- “conservatives,” “traditionalists,” and “realists” -- forcing Structure onto Process not to enable and empower Free Choice and Creation but to disable and disempower it. Not to break humanity out of its self-destructive cyclical status quo but to lock it permanently into place and thereby preserve its unquestioned "authority." It’s serving the wrong guide and its wrong, self-destructive agenda. The exact opposite of what Logic-Love, the Parents of our ancestral Mind in Reality, intend. It's a massive offense to the laws of cause and effect that presumes supremacy over the Force of Necessity -- an absurdity whose proud achievement is the dominance that homo sapiens has always craved: the Anthropocene that's taking it to its own extinction. Worse than madness -- it’s evil.

“Doing whatever you want” is a fantasist’s dream. It’s exactly what the Joker promised to the unconscious Child because the Child’s opposite code, the Joker, is a fantasist. Surrendering Free Choice / Mind to the Joker is what enables us to be fooled. To cling to the fantasy because only Mind thinking with Logic-Love -- making sense -- can explain the Truth.

How long will we be fooled without it? Indefinitely.

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?

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

Published on Leave a comment on Who’s Fooling Whom?

The mistake

There may be many kinds of fools. Two kinds for sure are those who are fooled and those who do the fooling. If our world is perversions of the truth, jokes meant to deceive and amuse, then the entertainer who’s deceiving us belongs to the second category. The fool doing the fooling.

Those who choose to identify with the entertainer, to be its ally and servant, must do so in the belief that this will insulate them from obloquy, the fate of those who don’t. In the certainty that they will avoid the ignominy of losing by guaranteeing a “win.” By being on the delivering side of humiliation instead of the receiving side. Thus their “reasoning.”

And so our topsy-turvy world treats its inhabitants to the spectacle of fools being fooled not only by appearances but also by fools fooling themselves: agents of the circumstance responsible for appearances. The court jester dressed like a clown, the apparition who presents itself as our opposite. The opposite of our ancestral Mind. That materialized out of thin air like a magician’s trick, in the sound of our Mind’s own voice. Articulating rank nonsense to unconsciousness bereft of Judgment, ready to be led back home by anything that offered help. Ready to identify with its opposite babbling incoherence, to be its ally, if only it would turn on the lights. Darkness turning to darkness to bring it to the light. A state of delusion deluding itself.

How can the opposite of a Mind unconscious in a state of delusion be anything other than an agent of delusion? How can an agent of delusion be anything other than complicit in its act -- the source of foolishness that can’t be anything other than a fool? The source of losing that can’t be anything other than a loser? The source of deception that can’t be anything other than deception itself, an apparition of self-deception mistaken for an “other.” Whose “existence” is mistaken identity. A mistake.

The joke

And so our topsy-turvy world treats its inhabitants to the spectacle of losers fooled by themselves into the delusion that they are “winners.” Into the delusion that the world of appearances they have crafted with their deceptions is a great work of art. A monument to their genius instead of the witches’ brew of contradictions, the wizard’s sleight of hand, that it is. All smoke and mirrors. When all it is is a mistake. A reflection perpetrated by a reflection that can only be the “work” of a fool. The opposite of an opposite: the dark side of Mind unconscious that cannot see,. Deprived of Judgment, the ability to distinguish between itself and its own shadow. Real from unreal, correct from incorrect, right from wrong, good from evil. The ability to understand who it is, what happened to it, why it happened, when it happened, where it is, and how it’s supposed to find its way back.

The very essence of helpless victimhood. The perfect prey of the victimizer, the mistaken “other” in the unreality of unconsciousness. The only state of Mind where there can be “others.” The opposite of Consciousness. Of Self-Awareness where there is only one Reality and it is One. Where separation into one-the-many is an impossibility, An absurdity. A flight of fancy into cloud cuckoo land. A riotous, illogical joke.

A better cause

The turn of mind that identifies with the Joker and allies with its “cause” imagines itself to be amusing. Armed with the power to fool with its distractions, its amusements. When in truth there is laughter. Riotous laughter at its ridiculous “cause” and the self-deluded fool who serves it. At the Joker who is the joke.

If understanding the who, what, when, where, why, and how of our situation -- our topsy-turvy world that’s a mistake -- must begin somewhere, then let it begin with its source. With disillusionment that can unravel all of it at one stroke. With the unveiling of un-self-awareness. With the understanding that joining the dark side isn’t escape from being its prey. From being deluded. From being made a fool of. From the ignominy of losing. It’s the opposite. It’s playing the fool. It’s exactly what you don’t want: to be the butt of its jokes. To be your own predator, the source of your humiliation. Your own downfall.

Do you really want to show off your amazing talent for avoidance? For escaping seriousness that hinders entertainment? Houdini, history’s greatest magician, was an escape artist. Do you really want to avoid the pain and humiliation of losing? To be safe? Then join another cause. A real cause instead of perpetuating a mistake. Help us all restore the one Mind that we are to Consciousness. Help us all escape from the fecklessness and miseries of un-self-awareness back to the satisfactions and joys of Self-Awareness. Of knowing who we are, where we are, and what we’re about. Help us all grow up. To restore mature judgment and be done with foolishness.

Help us all stop playing the fool.  

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 The Drill Sergeant

Seeing things

Two of the many intriguing notions to emerge from physics’ study of matter beyond the human scale are Feynman’s “sum of histories” and Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle.” The first implying that time doesn’t exist at the level of particle physics (quantum mechanics), the other that matter is “relational,” that is, that it doesn’t exist unless particles connect with, or relate to, one another. “Sum of histories” means that the route taken by a particle to connect with another particle is every possible route taken simultaneously. “Uncertainty” means there’s no way of knowing where the particle is in between connecting-relating at any point in time. Heisenberg’s insight came when he observed a pedestrian vanishing in the darkness at night in between street lights.

If we were to observe these odd phenomena on a human scale we would see a horse in a pasture with many paths travel from one end to the other taking every path at once. Only we wouldn’t actually see it because in between the horse’s start and finish it would disappear. We would only observe a horse on one end disappearing and reappearing magically at the other having taken every possible route simultaneously without our seeing it. A clear violation of the laws of physics on a human scale that validate, and are validated by, sensory perception.

We would conclude that our sense of vision that produces data and our brain that processes data had malfunctioned. That we were “seeing things.” And we would take ourselves to a vision clinic to have our eyes examined and then to a medical-psychiatric clinic to have our head examined. Finding that our faculties didn’t malfunction, we would then be forced to conclude that the reality our senses have been feeding us on a human scale hasn’t been telling us the whole story. If something isn’t “right,” if it’s malfunctioning, it must be with what’s going on in spacetime-matter beyond the human scale, at the level of particles and the cosmos.

Let’s be honest

Applying the “laws” of physics that work for us on our scale to these scales gets us nowhere. Obviously we’re dealing with other realities responding to other “laws." And what’s more, they can’t be reconciled.   The greatest minds in physics in the time of Einstein and today have tried and failed to tie together the laws that govern what we observe through telescopes with what we observe through microscopes. To bring the mathematics of objects so massive they warp spacetime into the mathematics of objects so small it’s not certain whether they’re coming or going.

The search for a unified theory -- “quantum gravity” -- was discouraged by the Copenhagen Interpretation over a century ago. Physicists pressed on with their experiments until they called for help from philosophy. And now they’re wondering if the whole thing isn’t a wild goose chase. If matter that can’t always be detected, that doesn’t make sense even when it can, is even “there.” Let’s be honest: if a thing behaves like it’s imaginary, like it’s some kind of magician’s trick, maybe it is.

The path taken to understanding

Two minds, two personalities, trying to connect through communication, like particles, face similar obstacles to understanding. If communication succeeds and connection occurs the route taken from non-understanding or mis-understanding to understanding must involve every possible path simultaneously. Because what we’ve learned from particles is this is how it’s done. In another reality of timelessness that governs the matter our bodies are made of. If we put all our faith in our bodies’ senses to tell us what’s actual, and our bodies are matter that’ acts weird, then let’s be honest: our so-called “reality” is weird. It’s not in sync with the way even our body-matter wants to behave. Newtonian and even Einsteinian physics, that assumed something like divine order in the cosmos, is a distant memory. The divinity that Plato felt in his bones when he gazed upon the stars is chaos -- a joke.

No possible path to connection through understanding can be ignored if personalities intersect in many combinations under many conditions. If motivation depends on which behavioral codes, guides, or value sets predominate. Will it be an intrusive voice dictating to captive minds how to think and behave? Speaking for wounding? Or a respectful voice that helps with spontaneous insights when invited? Speaking for healing? Voices that we’re aware of or not even though Free Will has no more important task than choosing the right one.

Understanding will eventually present us with a manageable set of considerations. But that doesn’t mean that every consideration -- every spark of energy in our personalities, our motivation, and the voice or voices we choose to hear -- isn’t vibrating and foaming with energy like so many quanta filling and connecting every corner of the universe. The image serves a purpose: to make us aware of the scale of consideration that understanding can entail. When not only personalities but also motivations conflict. When the voices we adhere to aren’t on the same page. When all is cacophony until Logic is allowed to make sense of it. Until minds are free to think for themselves.

The incompatibility of idealist-mind and realist-will

One way of coping with the dilemma is to broaden our perspective, the context we rely on for purpose and meaning. To embrace every possible consideration so that if understanding isn’t perfect at least we’ve reduced the likelihood of misunderstanding and minimized its costs. This is the preferred route of “idealists” already disinclined to limit themselves to bodies’ faculties. To eyes and brains when they’ve learned from experience to rely on insights from minds’ intuition to guide them. On the vision of Logic instead of eyes that “see” horses magically disappear and reappear. Galloping from one end of the pasture to the other, in many places at the same time, out of sight. Idealists prefer not to accept and rely on “logic” that makes no sense.

“Realists,” on the other hand, scoff at all of it. Their way out of the dilemma is to put faith in the body and its brain entirely. To leave mind out of it. Don’t “think” at all, so why bother with perspectives and contexts, purpose and meaning. Why bother with considerations if you don’t have to? Let the part of the brain take care of everything that was put there from the beginning, to will behavior by instinct. The blood-and-soil part that whips up tribal passions with the gravity of Wagnerian Tannhausers, florid poetry, monumental architecture, ornate art, bombastic oratory, nocturnal Nuremberg rallies framed in klieg lights.

If navigating through circumstances is all about bodies and their survival then let the part of the brain that’s engineered to serve the body -- to feed it, procreate it, protect it, pleasure it -- cut through unfathomable complexity and bring us to our destination the easy way. With short cuts -- acts of instinct that require no awareness, no effort. By acts of will that instinctively integrate all the considerations and possibilities into one stance mechanically, automatically. The stance of authority backed up by force that can’t be questioned. Why? Because it’s dispensed with questioning. How? By dispensing with mind that does the questioning.

One approach -- the idealist’s -- all about mind. About the limitless capacity of mind to understand, to support, and to create. To take responsibility and be accountable. The other approach -- the realist’s -- all about the unstoppable will of bodies and brains to act. To dispense with minds and thinking and let some other unseen force planted in the brain take over. To take responsibility and spare us the inconvenience, the difficulty and unpleasantness, of accountability. To put ourselves at the service of this unseen force and go forth like an army of clones doing its bidding, sacrificing ourselves to the triumph of its will. To Rome. To Berlin.

There can be no “meeting of the minds”

What chance is there for communication between idealist-mind and realist-will? Between one horse at one end of the pasture relying on awareness to navigate -- every function of mind, every faculty of individuality -- and another horse at the opposite end, blinkered and hooded, relying on blind instinct to navigate. Dismissive of any effort to communicate other than conclusions handed to it beyond its awareness, convinced that it’s already arrived at its destination if nothing is required of it but to submit to another power. There is no chance for communication unless and until the horse at the opposite end of the pasture abandons blind faith in an unseen force to dominate its pasture and everything in it, including the other horse. Unless it ceases abdicating responsibility for its thoughts, feelings, and actions, ceases surrendering its sovereignty to a fantasy of supremacy.

For all that this unseen force cares about or is capable of, this animal brain that accounts for instinct and will surrounded by senseless objects, is domination. Capture prey, kill the competition, take mates and every other object captive, or flee if it’s outmatched. There can be no “meeting of the minds” without two minds. Between mind-judging and will that opposes mind-judging. There can be no common cause between wills if one must submit to the other. They cannot survive and compete on an equal plane. One must prevail over the other, for that is the goal of competition. This is the “realist’s” reality: the dominance of authority that must be unquestioned. That has no tolerance for mind because that is what mind does: question. Asking Why.

The real “authority” in sergeant’s stripes

In this situation there is but one possibility for forward movement. For communication of a kind that can’t connect but at least it can remove the obstacle to communication. Can create conditions less unfavorable to communication. And that is for the realist to meet its opponent on its own ground. On its own turf, the turf of will. If the realist claims superiority from accessing a part of the body’s brain that exercises un-free will -- willpower divorced from Logic -- the mind of the idealist has a willpower of its own. The necessity of Logic. The laws of cause and effect that yield to nothing. Not because they’re agents of will that wields authority from the top down to crush opposition. That’s weakness. But because they’re agents of no force greater than themselves.

They are the law that’s above everything. And they’re there not to crush opposition from the top down but to make possible order and harmony from the bottom up. Through Logic, Love, and Peace rather than their opposites -- illogic, hatred, and conflict. They are the real power on the throne. A vision of authority that the animal brain of the realist has perverted into its mirror-image opposite.

The laws of cause and effect speak for Reality and Truth. And when confronted with foolishness that presumes to speak for anything else there is no give in them. The laws are what they are -- Necessity. Reality and Truth are what they are -- Logic and Love. Fantasies of the “triumph of the will” that presume to be above the law, in an alternate reality of opposites, are no match for it. 

We’re just getting started

The “realist” fancies himself a jack-booted commandant entitled to rule his domain without opposition. An unrealist in a shared world and a fool. OK then, the idealist has someone he’d like the realist to meet. The only character the military mind will listen to. The guy who seriously outranks him. Whose word is law. Who’s way better at not listening than he is, so he’ll show respect. A nice drill sergeant. With a lesson that, one way or another, our comic book action hero will learn. And until he does, he can just go on screwing up in boot camp, peeling potatoes and shoveling shit.

If blind unthinking will that seeks supremacy has a military bent, the mind of an idealist has an answer. A drill sergeant “explaining” to the usurper who would rule its domain unopposed the facts of life. You ain’t nuthin’ but a hound dog. You’re private first class nobody and welcome to Camp Swampy. We don’t “explain” stuff here so everyone can play pat-a-cake. We drill procedure -- the way it’s gotta be -- into everyone’s head so they get with the program.

There’s Logic to the way things are and you align yourself with it or you get your ass busted. You get stuck at the bottom of the pile and you stay there until you get the message. Anybody thinks he's master of the universe and doesn’t have to listen, doesn’t have to think, doesn’t have to communicate or relate, can do KP duty peeling potatoes. Anybody thinks he doesn’t have to answer to a higher power can do latrine duty shoveling shit until he’s learned his lesson.

Son, you didn’t wind up here so we can pamper your foolish ass with pleasantries. You’re here so you can get the facts of life drilled into your thick skull. By will that is will instead of a Marvel Comic joke, a magic act performed by a Joker hiding behind a mask. An act meant to trick gullible fools into imagining what’s not there instead of seeing what is there. Welcome to Necessity. Welcome to Reality. Welcome to boot camp where the real work begins. Where understanding begins.

We’re just getting started.

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 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 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.