Skip to content

Tag: learning

Published on Leave a comment on How He Does It: The Phenomenon of Jesus’ Lasting Appeal

In service to the Free Spirit of Inquiry

The meaning of circumstances couldn’t be sorted out in the Chinese Book of Changes without the “creative” and the “receptive,” “firm” and “yielding,” “light” and “dark.” Without “Yang” and “Yin.” Principles that would include “masculinity” and “femininity” except that it can’t be substantiated by the Book The themes of opposites and boundaries, intuition, spontaneity and free choice, archetypes and images, are formative in the Book’s and my theories both. Particularly the idea of one state of non-materiality preceding a material state, although my theory parts ways on whether the former “expresses” the latter and whether they’re both Real.

Suggesting that my theory was inspired as much by the I Ching as by A Course in Miracles. That my purpose has been to craft a combination of the two, when that isn’t the case. What I brought to both was a clean slate. Independent judgment in Relationship with Guidance, with only the unavoidable biases of limited perspective. In my case an acknowledged bias toward the innate Innocence of Mind-Child rather than guilt and against willful tampering with the free spirit of inquiry.

Usefulness that’s alive and growing

Because I believe its source to be not of this unreal material world. To be accessible instead through Guidance from the unity of Logic and Love, shared with their Child, Free Choice, by Self-Awareness. Brought to Life in timelessness by Creation, the function, expression, and sharing of Mind. Defined by the Ideal and Reality of Relationship, the inseparability of Logic from Love, ingrained in the laws of cause and effect. The boundaries of Order inseparable from Freedom that guide and protect the integrity of Creation and Creator both.

Boundaries that neither require strict compliance with what is “written” nor its taking out of one context to fit another. Like everything of Creation’s Worth, it can only “live” if it grows, and it can only grow if it’s questioned from different perspectives. If it contributes to learning under the Guidance of Logic-Love. If it’s useful. 

The sine qua non of progress

Yet it’s also true that while I went to the Course for explanation I did not go to the I Ching for explanation. Elements of its explanation came to me. They were already there, ahead of the Course in sequence. I did not become aware of their intersection with my thoughts until after the fact.

Suggesting that once I set about to explain personal events my mind with Guidance took me into metaphysics, where the Course, the I Ching, Parmenides, Socrates, Plato and others, had brought Understanding to a certain plateau. Suggesting that it might be productive to carry thought forward with Guidance from Logic-Love while I attended to my immediate circumstances. Guidance that helps by giving talent and erudition a head start with intuition. The sine qua non of progress from self-unawareness to Self-Awareness. From hallucination seeing what’s not there – itself orchestrating its own extinction  -- to clarity seeing what is there – the capacity to regain Choice that’s free and to free itself from hallucination.

In the state of Yin

It wasn’t unnatural that my perspective seemed to come from oriental wisdom of its own accord. If Mind-Parents Logic-Love extended themselves by adding a function to Creation – their Child, Self-Awareness with Free Choice – it was in keeping with their Definition ingrained in the laws of Necessity: the sharing of Self-Awareness through Creation. If sharing doesn’t mean that thoughts within one Mind thinking Creation can interconnect spontaneously, even with Mind-Child hallucinating in recovery, then it would be unnatural. A paranormal phenomenon beyond understanding. When Guidance from Logic-Love suggests otherwise. It would be paranormal if it couldn’t happen.

In their entirety the I Ching and the Course seem born and bred from the same source. So closely related that I trust both implicitly. Not as look-alike twins but as siblings working toward the same goal. By being there for us when asked, but never to presume that their business is our business. Never to get in our way by compromising Free Choice. Respectful. Validating. Helping individuals when they’re ready to learn, in the state of Yin, when they’re receptive.

Guidance with Relationship

What A Course in Miracles added to explanation’s baseline was the centrality of Love through its metaphysics and psychology and their application to the immediate circumstances of two persons who had called for Guidance. For “a better way” of professional collaboration without the corrosive heat of friction. A call for help that Jesus characterized as one instance of every call for help: a call for Love.

A dynamic that converted a system of ideas interconnected by Logic – a “thought system” – from Guidance without Relationship between Guide and seeker to Guidance with Relationship. The closing of the loop of reciprocity between the source of Love’s sharing and its recipient. An extension and expression of the event that illuminated and energized Self-Awareness: spontaneous Relationship between Logic and Love. The source and definition of Creation. The bringing of Life to Reality. Relationship between Logic and Love, Mind’s primary functions, through Guidance, its intermediary, with recipient.

The means of going beyond one lesson

One Mind-Child through its projections in its dream: persons. Each embodying in their individuality the characterization of one Mind-Child rather than its mischaracterization as a herd of animal-instinct predators: beasts. The notion of “tribe” from Mind-Child’s opposite. A reflection in a mirror rooted in instability, the source of friction essential to everything that is. The creative force of Energy.

Manifest in the lesson of the Course delivered with Logic combined with Love combined with Logic. In an expression of the dynamic of Life in the infinite Creativity and reciprocity of Interconnection. In the evolution of learning and growing through the infinite interconnecting of Logic’s implications and the family interrelationships of Love’s sharing. An advance in the evolution of self-unawareness in unreality toward Mind-Child’s recovery of Self-Awareness. That delivered not only explanation in one lesson but the means of extending and expanding it beyond one lesson. “I will make you fishers of men.”

Until Choice can be Free again

By adding to the Why of explanation the How of explanation. An invitation and incentive to independent judgment – the Creative power of Choice – to grow explanation’s baseline rather than let it lie fallow and unavailing. As the immutable “word of God.” The barrier to learning and growth, sharing and Relationship, of mindless obedience. The barrier to Mind-Child’s recovery of Self-Awareness, our purpose in “life on earth.” The use of independent judgment brought to Life by Relationship with Guidance. For advancing explanation toward Understanding, until Choice can be Free again. Until Mind-Child and its projections liberate themselves from delusion.

The lesson of relatability

The mystery of Jesus’ miracles is mystery no more. The Course personalized its lesson, making it relatable. Through the centrality of Love in Relationship with the person – the individuality – of its recipient. Love’s centrality centered on recipient as well as source. Giving to self-worth rather than taking from it. The gift of expansion rather than contraction. Largeness rather than smallness. The gift of recognition: being seen and heard. Validation.

The gift of Love that welcomes into its Self every individual through sharing its Self rather than centering on it. Inclusion rather than exclusion. Bringing into partnership the person of seeker and Guide both. Into intimate, trusting friendship with shared purpose: healing here in unreality and Creation in Reality.

The same dynamic that attracted adulation in numbers to the biblical Jesus and to his Guidance since. That will ensure his lasting appeal with the resonance of Love. The message of the Course in the character of its messenger. Impervious to opposite’s attempts to depersonalize it and make it unrelatable. Through mischaracterizations In defense of opposite’s “character:” Loveless and mindless.

Behind the mask of the tyrant: a simpleton

Yet if Creation is protected from the tyranny of one perspective it would be because opposite guarantees more than one perspective. The Creative power of opposition lies in its contribution to Energy from friction and from another source: the spirit of dissent. As justified in insisting on its right to be heard as the voice of one perspective is unjustified in silencing it.

The upper side of Definition and the underside that opposes it function as one when they’re kept out of one another’s way. By boundary management that recognizes opposite’s unreality and maintains it in a state of inactivity. Like Definition, Mind-Parents Growth and Mind-Child Free Choice also need to function as one in Relationship while they stay out of one another’s way.

When the authoritarian mindset intrudes, attempting to force its one-sided, one-perspective will on others, it upends the Relationship and Creation along with it. It’s opposite not protecting Creation from tyranny. It’s the tyrant. Identification with opposite in its mimicry of animal will invincibility may seem to confer the limitless prerogatives of arrogance on its subject. But it will also confer something else: the truth of one perspective, that it’s a simpleton.

The Love-Child

Respect for Free Will, evident in Guidance from Jesus of the Bible and the Course and from the I Ching, is a sure sign of their authenticity. That their source is Logic-Love. Guidance from Jesus that’s loving, personal, and relatable. Validation for self-Worth that’s neither tyrant nor simpleton but who it actually is: the Love-Child of Parents who love it. Unconditionally.

Published on Leave a comment on Origin’s Lesson

Flimflammery from the start 

Child’s disempowerment – its loss of Self-Awareness – would have parted it from existence in Reality-Creation, from Mind Logic-Love its Parents, if Choice itself were among its functions shut down. It had Choice because it was Choice. Like Creation and all of its parts, it was its function. Service and support for Creation’s cause. The affirmation of Spontaneity and Creativity and its Source, Mind Logic-Love. Not its obliteration by its opposite: mindless, loveless authoritarian dominance.

Since Mind-Child was an extension rather than separation from Mind -- an impossibility, -- it was still Choice that bought the Brooklyn Bridge. That grabbed the chance to own Florida real estate under water because it wasn’t free. It had been disabled. Its situation was so dire that it might have “believed” anything.

“Belief” implies choice among different possibilities or propositions that requires independent judgment if it’s to be free.  Had the Child not lost independent judgment, had it not been deluded into dependence on the “judgment” of its con-artist reflection, it would have been aware that something was amiss. That the boundaryless “paradise” tantalizing it was flimflammery from the start.

The giveaway from the start

Because needing its delusion to make it “exist,” not already “existing,” was a tipoff that it needed a beginning. A boundary at this end that required a second boundary at the other end. To satisfy its definition with ending. Bracketing a boundaryless cornucopia of promises too good to be true with boundary. Evidence enough that they are too good to be true. Contradiction so obvious that its author couldn’t have been serious.

The boundary of time. “Timeless paradise” defined by time. A deal-killing contradiction that Free Choice, functional in timelessness, could not have missed. But once it was dysfunctional and all in with hallucinating an absurdity, its projections, conceived in time, wouldn’t know the difference. Unlike Reality, the hallucination is temporal – time limited. “Temporal” means exactly that: we and our mysterious environment had a beginning and it will end.

Would Child have chosen to escape from Reality if the alternative’s ending could be its own? Non-existence by time expiring or worse, return to Reality and vengeance at the hands of enraged beasts? Authoritarian Parents now offended by their Child’s disappearance. Adding insult to its inexcusable loss of Self-Awareness, their irreplaceable gift -- an unforgiveable injury. The nightmare of Parenting by Logic-Love re-imagined as authoritarian irrational hate, meant to scare its deluded host into the “freedom” of captivity. Into the “innocence” of victimhood only to condemn it to a universe of persecution and guilt.

Waiting for the letters of transit

Hawking theorized a boundaryless universe so that the Child’s choice could have been free. So that his passion, the subject matter of physics, would defy all obstacles, all common sense, to last forever. Enshrining it in divinity and himself its agent, worthy of burial between Newton and Darwin. But neither the Child nor its hallucinating projections would buy it if they had a shred of common sense.

The grammar of our “alternate reality” is so permeated with the guideposts of time that even quantum physicists, free to calculate without them, seem reluctant to face the obvious. Once absolute in Newtonian physics, then relative in Einstein’s, demoted to a curiosity in quantum physics, time can’t be real. Just as timelessness was the Child’s reality from its origin, ours is time. And until self-unawareness – the delusion – ends, we’re stuck with it. We and our five body-brain senses. waiting, like wartime refugees in Casablanca, to get on the last plane to Lisbon.

Where Order matters

But on the other side of sixth sense, mind’s portal to another perspective, there is common sense and laughter with it. Because the idea that Mind and its works had a “beginning” necessarily implies that it will have an ending. That it’s temporal. Just another thing, like us and our mysterious universe, destined to come and go. Leaving unanswered Origin’s Question: originate what? Back to where it started.

The idea of “origin” implies to the human mind bracketed by time, handicapped by the Child’s self-delusion, that explanation, of course, must start long ago at the “beginning.” At the beginning of time. When what it must mean instead is the first principle in the sequence of Mind’s thought. In the sequence of Logic-Love, boundaryless eternity. Because that’s how Logic-Love works: implication-connection, relationship-connection, one after the other in logical sequence. Where the relationship between before and after matters. Where Order matters or nothing does.

The missing Now

The flaw in human thought that exposes irrationality: subjecting sequence to willful thinking. The same “thinking” that’s comfortable with contradiction. With “alternate facts,” the comic lunacy of a character out of Mad Magazine. The sheen of his glamour reflected in his fish-tailed ’57 DeSoto making the scene in Manhattan. Assured of acceptance into the society of the like-minded: fatuous narcissists inhabiting worlds of their own making, constructed of mirrors. Enchanted by their sophistication while holding opposing thoughts. Nitwits. Fools.

The concept of Now is so alien to the human mind that it can only be conceived in the context of time. “Now” and “eternity” are the best we can come up with, both definitions by what time isn’t. If time were Now it wouldn’t “exist.” The discovery of physics, that nowhere in the universe is it Now. Only an unsatisfying, troubling substitute: “present” that’s neither “past” nor “future.”

Begging for explanation. For if we and our universe aren’t “here” Now, where are we? Do we “exist” at all? What does exist in the Now? In timelessness? Could it make more sense than apparition “present” here today, absent tomorrow?

Brain “science” for nut jobs

Hawking and fellow tribal “realists,” Penrose, Crick, and Kristof, infatuated with body-brains, their five senses, and the universe that they sense, demand that the question not be asked. So adamant that they flaunt their disdain for objectivity. For the free spirit of inquiry, with absurdities like neuroscientific “proof” that “consciousness” is seated in the brain. Proving only that if they understood that “consciousness” is Self-Awareness and consulted it, they wouldn’t put it anywhere near the brain.

Focusing all their attention on the brain diverts the magician’s audience from where attention belongs, on Self-Awareness. On its loss and recovery that, by every indication, drives the Child’s narrative and ours. Minds captive to the “reality” of hallucination, dismissive of their sixth sense, are comically inept at grasping its fundamentals. Parodying the “scientific method” like a chemist’s experiments with aluminum and hydrochloric acid, unaware of their properties.

If neuroscientists can’t do better than, yeah, we all know what consciousness is, then they don’t belong on the stage. They’re agents of the image in the mirror, keeping its real estate deal alive in perpetuity. The big boundaryless lie. Keeping the Child and its progeny from learning about Self-Awareness by asking about it. The job of philosophy that Hawking declared “dead,” glamorizing the nut job in the mirror with the panache of scientific aristocracy.

The appearance of inquiry

“Origin” in this telling has nothing to do with “time” and everything to do with questioning. The first step in the sequence of Logic-Love’s answer, or else the cart is put before the horse. An all-too-common phenomenon in our “reality.” Questioning that has no need of “time” to perform its function, only the timeless condition of instability that gives it context. That necessitates it since the friction generated by instability’s opposing parts has an interesting property. It strikes a spark.

When we see earth’s rotation in motions of the night sky, we are looking at a version of what happened when the spark was struck. The version that defines what happened by what didn’t happen: our temporal universe of spooky apparitions. If there’s a lesson to be learned from Origin it might be that nothing happens that doesn’t begin with questioning. With asking first and proceeding from there. That nothing happens that’s of any consequence that begins with self-delusion: that no question is needed since it already has an answer.

The so-called objectivity of “rational” thinking that dominates humanity’s perception of itself and its environment: the appearance of inquiry. The reality of opposition to inquiry. Terminally loyal to irrationality. Hallucination. The occupants of Plato’s Cave fixated on flickering shadows and disembodied sounds. A joke. A trick. An atrocity seeking its own destruction.

The meaning of Origin

The lesson of Origin may be that the force of friction that empowered both Question and Answer wasn’t an act of will seeking to dominate the field. To add more instability to a field already reeling from a demolition derby of Mad Magazine ’57 DeSotos. From the chaos of churchgoers in bonnets and suits sharing the frontier with saloon-brawling, gunslinging psychopaths. It was an act of Spontaneity governed by a code of laws, principles, and ethics above any will to manipulate it. Not the way things are if they don’t have to be, but the way things must be if they are. The Reality defined by our “alternate reality” by what it isn’t.

The meaning of Origin may be that Question can’t be answered until Child and its projections part with self-delusion. The delusion that the apparition in the mirror is the voice for what is, when its only value to us is its unfailing portrayal of what isn’t. Until we learn from Origin instead, with the perspective of Guidance, to define Reality by what is.

Published on Leave a comment on Learning from Our Opposites: The Truth of Who We Aren’t

A conversation with the author's in-house critic on the occasion of Saint Patrick's Day. The critic's contributions are in italics.

______________________________________________________________________ 

The artist’s model

I have something to share. Will it make me happy? What makes you happy? Relationships. Friendships. Then it might someday. Or at least keep you from being unhappy because it’s insights about relationships. They could be useful, maybe not today but someday. OK. Just understand that we’re on a bus and the driver does what I tell her. 

Insights make me happy. And make me sleepy. The philosopher’s dilemma: wanting to share exciting revelations that nobody cares about or understands, so they can’t be shared. They could if you got someone to pose for them. A model like I do for my painting. Like a naked, uh, dog? Would that help? Sure, if you’re philosophizing about exhibitionist dogs. What a coincidence! That’s just what I’ve been doing. Driver! We can go now.

What’s on TV?

How can insights make anyone happy? When they come spontaneously from Relationship they can. Like from a friend who wants us to get to where we’re headed faster and enjoy the ride. I’ve heard about self-love. Everything is Self. There’s nothing outside of Self. The trick is getting “Self” right.

Meaning?  Self isn’t one – a monolith. It’s two. “Oneness” is “twoness?” Wait! I can explain! Driver, this is my stop! Everything that’s Self is everything that’s two. That’s what got Creation started: Relationship between two functions of Mind brought together spontaneously by the power of attraction. Huh?

Mind is Relationship between Logic and Love that illuminated Mind’s Self-Awareness and defined its function. Creation is Life made living by Relationship, the source of Self-Awareness, sharing itself, sharing its function. Life doing what all living things do: growing and reproducing themselves. Clogging the 405 with too many drivers. 

Worth is Life. Being and doing what produced it: Self-growth. Relationship’s power of attraction and Self-Awareness within Mind that started Creation. Physics says particles only exist when they connect. Our universe is “relational.” Money grows too. It earns interest. How do you know all this nonsense? I saw it on TV. Try watching video games instead. That’s your problem. 

A waste of perfection

Spontaneous insights come from another perspective. Happiness is becoming aware that it’s Self-Awareness-Relationship sharing itself with us, being helpful and loving us. Discovering that the love we share back is spontaneous too. Like the event that illuminated Self-Awareness: the marriage of Logic with Love. Relationship. That didn’t need Mind to will it. Mind needed Relationship to define its function, Self-Awareness, with Logic and Love. So there's no possibility that it would become what it's not: an absolute without limits. A self-centered authoritarian narcissist ruling for its own benefit. By force from the top down, silencing all voices but its own. "Almighty God."

I’ve heard that God is Love. “God” is Mind, its function. Mind is spontaneous Relationship between Logic and Love. Creation is the interconnectedness of shared Relationship and the spontaneity of Creativity. This may help to make sense of “God is Love,” because “creation” that’s “God’s will” controlling everything can’t be Love. It would be the opposite. If God isn’t putting everything on a report card I’m being perfect for nothing!

Like Logic inseparable from Love Creation is Relationship inseparable from Spontaneity. Not will that’s controlling but will that’s Freedom inseparable from Order. Insights build on one another in logical succession because Mind that’s Relationship is interconnection. Interconnection is power to create because it’s all held together by Energy, the power of attraction.

Pure amazement!

What about relationships that come apart? That’s not attraction. It’s the implicit power of opposition made explicit in unreality. Both powers essential to Creation except that they can’t both be explicit and equal. Why? Because they’ll cancel one another other out. Force can’t serve Relationship Logic-Love and its Creation if opposition cancels out attraction.

Where does opposition come from? From all of Creation’s functions defined by their implied opposites: what they aren’t as well as by what they are. Possibility defined in part by impossibility. Logic and Love are no exception. Defining them with implied incompatibilities as well as compatibilities. One all about ordering with boundaries, staying within laws that define the way things are. The other all about ordering with spontaneity, freedom that needs Logic’s order but can’t survive under arbitrary rule. The way things aren’t. Disorder. Tyranny. Illogic.

Nor can Logic survive under Love’s implied opposite: the wildness of animal will opposed to Mind and all its defining boundaries. The wild Siberian tiger that ate the Ruler of the Wild Siberian Galactic Empire. May she rest in peace. Yes. I was fond of her but maybe it’s just as well. Careful! She may be in the next room!

So attraction came first and is Real, and its opposite came second because it’s derived from the first. It’s not Real because an opposite that’s implicit in Reality can only be explicit in unreality. Reality can’t contradict itself. Cool! That’s right! Aren’t I amazing?

What relationships are meant to be

None of this has anything to do with me but I’m beginning to enjoy the ride. Driver! Is there a psychiatrist on board? It matters to every living thing, in unreality as well as Reality, that the power of attraction is necessarily greater than the power of opposition. If it weren’t Creation would be stillborn. It does have something to do with you. What if Mind spent all day on the sofa? Playing video games. There would be no Super Bowls to watch on TV. Poor Mind! Let’s send meals on wheels. 

It matters because keeping attraction more powerful is part of why we’re here. Opposition obstructs evolution but it can’t stop it. Evolution toward what? Toward the expression, affirmation, and reciprocation of Self-Awareness in Reality. Of the sharing of Self-Awareness that’s Life-Worth in Reality. Toward the recovery of Self-Awareness in unreality. What’s unreality?  Our world where implicit opposites have been made explicit. Brought to “life” by hallucination, self-unawareness “made real.”

I need to know this? If you want relationships to be what they’re meant to be instead of trying to make them what you want them to be, yes. Knowing the difference can advance learning and avoid pain and frustration. What are relationships meant to be? If the Mind dreaming us needs to recover Self-Awareness then that’s where evolution will lead us. Through relationships that teach us what we need to learn to advance Self-Awareness.

When we’ve done our best

Even relationships that don’t work?  We’re in a world where opposites inactive in Reality have been activated by unreality. Maybe the reason why isn’t to put us at their mercy. Maybe it’s the opportunity for the Mind dreaming us to learn from opposites. How? Through our experience with them and their unreal world.

What do opposites have to teach us? Who and what we aren’t. The definition of everything is what it is and also what it isn’t. Where opposites come from. It’s built into the DNA of Self-Awareness. The laws of cause and effect that define Mind’s will put there spontaneously by Relationship outside of Mind’s will.

So if we need to complete our definition we must experience its negative side: who and what we aren’t. That’s where opposites can help. We can waive the opportunity until we’re ready, but there’s no ”waiving” opposites and what we must learn from them.

Oneness is twoness. And now bad relationships that make us miserable are good relationships. Driver! Next stop! If we understand that we learn from “bad relationships” who we aren’t, and that may be all they’re meant for, yes. They’re “good relationships.” 

Aren’t relationships that resist healing failed relationships? Sure, but if they’ve moved us closer to Self-Awareness they’re also a precious gift. Of learning and growth, making better sense of things in a confusing world of opposites, A success that may be all that they were meant for.

So when we don’t make headway with others we thought were our friends it’s OK? We don’t have to feel bad about ourselves? We can be grateful for anything they’ve taught us because learning from Relationships is why we’re here. And we definitely don’t have to feel bad about ourselves if we’ve done our best. There can’t be any “failing” in learning from mistakes if it brings us closer to our destination.

The price of success

Getting it right so the Mind dreaming us can get it right, recover Self-Awareness, and perform its role in Creation. What’s that? Managing Definition’s and Relationship’s boundary between what is and what isn’t. Between Reality and unreality, spontaneity and willfulness. Possibility and impossibility, morality and immorality.

It hurts when relationships don’t return the love we put into them. But others need Self-Awareness too. Teaching us with the power of opposition – not-relationship – may be all they’re capable of until evolution moves on and circumstances change. They’re on their own track moving at their own pace.

Recovering Self-Awareness makes learning what we really want and need. Letting understanding take others into its largeness as well as ourselves, because we’re all headed in the same direction. If  we make that the most important thing we’ll see our hurts for what they are: the price of success, not failure.

Happiness lies within, where we relate to Guidance from Logic-Love, our best Friend. Relationships with others deserve the effort we put into them not because they define our lives with happiness or misery but because they’re part of our training. Because what we learn from them helps us define ourselves, and others can define themselves with our help if they choose.

The mistake of avoiding mistakes

What can go wrong if I try to put this in practice? Avoidance and its opposite: combativeness. Aggressive confrontation. Mistakes equally harmful that detract from character.

Avoidance of what? Difficulties with relationships. The attitude that the best way to deal with them is not to deal with them. To avoid them. To run away from conflict with opposites instead of working through it responsibly and honestly. To reach understanding and learn from it. And if the capacity to do this is weak, to strengthen it so it can do its duty.

Passivity leads instead into wishful-willful thinking. The self-centered idea that uninvolvement takes care of number one. It’s not willing to accept the risks and difficulties that come with being there for family and friends. Of taking sides when lives and values that depend on them are under attack. Out of fear that it won’t be there for itself, so it’s not really interested in friendship.

Out of fear of emotional abandonment, so it displaces it onto others. You’ve been abandoned? Emotionally, sure. But who hasn’t when personality differences and changing circumstances can put the ideal of “being there” for one another out of reach? Fear of abandonment when relationships force them to deal with conflict may be a factor when family and friends retreat from their duty. When they seek safety in invisibility.

But courage can’t be willed in advance. Like Creativity, it’s either there or it isn’t. What conflict with opposites teaches all of us is humility: understanding that discretion is the better part of valor. We’re all susceptible to avoidance.

Always a work in progress

What about you? I don’t avoid conflict when I see the need to put it to constructive use, like righting an injustice, preventing harm. But not running away from conflict isn’t running toward it.

I’ve experienced the harmfulness of avoidance. Combativeness too, the mistake that’s retaliation. Neither passive uninvolvement nor retaliation is worthy of character that’s being there for others as well as itself. Friendship that reciprocates honest commitment with either mistake is trust betrayed. An opportunity to learn from the power of opposition while letting go of friendship that can’t be trusted.

I’ve learned much from relationships undone by these mistakes. But while mistakes may not get in the way of love they can get in the way of friendship. I try to bring character to relationships. And you're succeeding. It's the core value of doing what the situation calls for. Getting it right. Always a work in progress. 

What better gift to give your in-house critic on Saint Patrick’s day than a big dose of malarkey. Thank you. Anytime! Faith and begorrah to you, too.

Published on Leave a comment on The Gift of Christmas: Sharing Self-Awareness with Self-Unawareness*

Reflections on the meaning of Christmas                                    December 2023

“Let’s Pretend”

“Let’s Pretend” was a radio program that entertained kids on Saturday morning. They grow out of that when they learn to distinguish between pretending and thinking that’s not. When they learn that not being grounded in facts is being absent rather than present. Remote, inaccessible. Not being there for family and friends who need them because they’re somewhere else, being there for themselves. Lost in make-believe worlds of wishful thinking. One-dimensional cartoons featuring them in the lead role, producing, directing, script-writing, and setting the rules. “Let’s Pretend” for arrested-developed “adults:” “The Truman TV Show.” Adolescent self-absorption. Narcissism. With harmful consequences to them and to those who need them.

Unreality TV made "real" by the two masks of narcissism:

  • one the disciplinary “parent” with unquestioned “authority.” The angry, hostile, threatening face of judgment: harmfulness.
  • the other the undisciplined “child” with unquestioned “freedom.” The carefree, ingratiating, unthreatening face of non-judgment: harmlessness.

Bad cop and good cop enforcing the "ideal" of “supremacy.” A perversion of the Oneness of Reality that is Innocence without opposites. Of Freedom and Order that complement one another and are inseparable instead of resolute opponents. The “judgment” of “innocence” preserved by projecting “guilt” onto “others.” “Innocence” preserved by projecting the innocence of others back onto itself. One “giving” its “guilt” away, the other stealing “innocence” back. With one purpose: to place "supremacy" beyond questioning. By seduction and intimidation that rob its captives of personhood. That dehumanize with mindless conformity.

Both made-up worlds of wishful thinking. “Ideals” of unaccountability that’s beyond questioning. Impossibilities since thoughts can’t leave their source, there are no “others” in the Oneness of Reality, and perversions of Oneness, Order, and Freedom can’t be real. Nightmares of psychosis reflected in the narcissist’s sees-all, knows-all mirror. The crystal ball of the original illusionist: the misperception of itself in its shadow-opposite by the Child of Logic-Love. The one ancestral Mind that we all share. Seeing in its reflection the “supremacy” of unlimited power and freedom. Nietzsche’s “superman.” Mistaken identity. Self-unawareness. Whose remedy can't be condemnation and punishment but understanding that’s awareness of the mistake. Awareness of Self instead of its reflection that will restore harmony and creativity.  

Scripted by self-unawareness 

The prefrontal cortex, an instrument designed for “use” by the animal brain, only “knows” “self” that is herd or tribe, not individual. It keeps peace within and among tribes by hiding the menace of anti-sociability behind the pretense of “sociability.” Both masks –  amiable pleasantness and angry unpleasantness – serving one overriding purpose: to silence the voices of their captives with mindless docility. To prevent questioning.

The meaning of Christmas that Jesus shares with us: the contradiction of self-unawareness by the gentle loving kindness of Self-Awareness. A lesson that couldn’t come from any part of brain matter. Or from any other instrument invented for use by groups or tribes because the Self that we all share is one Child, one Mind. The beast in the narcissist’s mirror is the mask of a fiction: Child-the-many, ruled by tribal values. The offense to Western morality codified in the 16th century by Niccolo Machiavelli and “legitimized” by the Church. Idolatry of the body demanding of its herd, a “flock” of anesthetized sheep, that it never be questioned.

The underside of Christmas that Jesus never intended to “found.” Re-enacting the glorious “victory” of shadow-reflection over its host with the figure on a cross who dared to question its self-proclaimed “authority.” The “authority” of wounded victimhood: injustice that cries out not for compassion but for damnation and vengeance. Against Self-Awareness for sharing itself for the benefit of the self-unaware. An implicit contradiction of the “infallibility” of the established order. An unchanging status quo guarded by body-animal brains: bulls protecting their sacred pasture. An ominous warning to anyone else who dared to trespass.

The meaning of Christmas isn’t that Caesar or the pharisees be overthrown but that individuals learn to manage their relationship with them. Following the example of Jesus, with explanation that helps the one Child, our ancestral Mind, recover Self-Awareness. To get out of body-dominated “ownership,” “competition,” and conformity and back to Mind-enabled sharing, intimacy, and Creativity. That recognizes that malevolence, the underside of contradiction, isn’t caused by Self-Awareness but by self-unawareness.

The error in the reflection

The attraction of narcissists for absolutes mirrors the event that disabled the Self-Awareness of Free Choice, the Child’s function in Creation, and removed it from Reality. Lack of awareness of opposites built into its own definition and the definitions of values it was given to work with. Missing from the knowledge base it received from its Parents since they can’t be aware of opposites without making them real.

The Child’s apparent attraction to the undersides of Free Choice, Freedom, and Order -- absolutes, impossibilities in Creation – was a consequence of the laws of cause and effect, not their violation. An unintentional mistake that sent the Child to the unreality of self-unawareness where it can learn from experience. By seeing through its cyclical re-enactments, the *triumph” of animal will over Mind, to their cause: the error that projected Love onto its reverse mirror-image reflection. A mask of impossibilities: the “supremacy” of absolute power and absolute freedom that may not be questioned.

A call for maturity, competence, and re-definition

Our military tries not to leave anyone out or anyone behind. It honors the memory of the fallen and sometimes honors enemy combatants too. It respects the individual soldier with values inherited from the original ideal of American democracy. That insisted on individual rights against tyranny and defined what “America” stood for. The value of authority that governs with service and support from the bottom up. To enable Creativity with Growth and Free Choice instead of ruling cruelly, from the top down, to demand conformity with an unchanging status quo.

An ideal and values that have always had opposites but today are losing touch with the Logic of Necessity and passion of Love that contradicted them. Because the ideal, like all values, requires realignment with changing times and changing contexts. With awareness of what context today implies about the correct path forward. A call for Guidance from Logic and Love uniquely qualified to provide it, because only with their help can self-unawareness detect meaning and purpose behind appearances.

Circumstances that seem favorable to a resurgence of the authoritarian mindset are a recurring test of progress toward Self-Awareness. Whose measure is whether the path forward is to be governed by the benevolence of Logic-Love – Mind -- or ruled by the cruelty of predatory animal instinct – body-brain. The only difference between the choice now and the choice in 1776 is circumstances.

The narcissist authoritarian, robbed of independent judgment by its own reverse mirror image, can only impose its own unchanging context on changing circumstances. We need a better guide.

The one whose birthday we’re honoring has the right connections. To the Child’s Parents Logic-Love and their unique talent for seeing beyond fiction. Beyond made-up “reality” to facts and what they mean: a call for learning and growth toward the competence of maturity. Capabilities demonstrated by Jesus’ living among us, by his authorship of A Course in Miracles, and in other ways known only to the individual Minds and lives he’s touched. All it takes is Free Choice questioning. Questioning the status quo. Contradicting. Asking for Guidance. 

The gift of good contradiction 

Christmas spirit is the honesty of the Voice that explains with the Vision of Logic-Love what lies behind appearances and questions its source, bodies affirming matter with their senses. That agrees when agreement validates Self-Worth and contradicts when it doesn’t. Questions as well as affirms. Minds open to questioning and intimacy in friendship instead of mindless animal brains disguised by “sociability” competing for “supremacy.” Contradiction that helps instead of regimentation that harms. Stands up to the authoritarian reflection in the mirror that can’t tolerate standing up. Helping to define Self as it evolves by understanding the Logic of contradiction in every context. Disciplining independent judgment to anticipate and prepare for pushback that will keep it honest, focused on its task, and striving to excel.

And making sure that it doesn’t take itself or its job too seriously. For whatever it is, it comes with contradiction. The possibility that it may not always be right but sometimes wrong. Not always be correct but sometimes mistaken. The attribute of Authority under the law, defined and defining with opposites, that can never be absolute.

With the gift of good contradiction we can see through the deception. To the Truth revealed by the Vision of Logic-Love, that in all of its attributes the animal brain beast reflected in the mirror is an imposter. A lifeless, loveless code “intending” to end everything. Our shadow-opposite. This is its nature. Its so-called logic that its self-deluded host – us – is supposed to take seriously.  An alternate “reality” so illogical and absurd that it can be hilarious. Something between total catastrophe and a Three Stooges food fight.

Jesus in A Course in Miracles encourages questioning and humor too, because getting the “joke” is part of undoing error and getting back to work. So go ahead and laugh. Have a Merry Christmas!

The gift of Christmas

We are all reflections in a made-up world that’s the dream of a Mind thinking it’s a reflection. So we are all narcissist authoritarians in our own way, body-centered personality types more than Mind-centered types, but it’s only a difference in degree. 

In a world that’s a shadowland of opposites, a reflection made up of appearances, contradiction can be a very good thing. The contradiction that’s our Christmas gift from our Helper. From the Mind with which we really think: Logic-Love. Where we will find our real thoughts when we aren’t contradicting them with an unreal dream. Good contradiction of bad contradiction. Denial of the denial that put a layer of appearances over Reality-Truth. That substitutes unreal reflection for Real Self. 

All of this the role performed by Jesus: an opposite that’s helpfulness in a shadowland of authoritarian opposites – harmfulness. Contradiction on the side of the good guys – conscience. The will not to profit from mistake selfishly but to correct it for the sake of gentle loving kindness. No symbol of pathos on a cross but the living Force of Voice that cannot be silenced. The Voice for Self-Awareness and not self-unawareness. The Voice for Mind and not for its “substitute,” body-brain matter.

The Gift of Christmas. A role model for the ages.

_________________________________________________________________________________________

*Christmas letter 2023. Originally titled “The Gentle Loving Kindness of Contradiction”

Published on Leave a comment on On the Threshold to High School: May Which Force Be With You?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most important choice is choice

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

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

The Way of the Master: Vince Lombardi

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

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

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

The fans of George III never left us

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

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

Understanding personality types is critical to self-awareness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Context: the Force of unconscious Mind, capable of dreaming

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

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

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

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

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

Will change of mind come in time?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is the choice not clear?

Published on Leave a comment on Thirteen: Reflections on Character and Values at the Beginning of Adolescence

Goodbye childhood, hello adolescence!

If you just turned thirteen it may be the most important date in your life. When hormones kick in bodies change – you’ve heard all this. What you may not have heard is that minds can change, too. Minds and selves, so different that what they see out there and in here is hardly recognizable.

That’s how it was for me and my classmates when we were thirteen. Kids fresh out of grade school and Sunday school. Challenged by adolescence, one of the biggest transitions of our lives then and thereafter. While we were also adjusting to Phillips Academy at Andover, then an all-male preparatory school with a no-nonsense approach to education. With a world of opportunity for character development, too. We were destined for four incredible years of education and growth that would put us all in the best universities: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, MIT, Caltech, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Oxford, Cambridge, the rest of the Ivies, and more.

But we didn’t know it yet. All we knew was this thing called childhood was over. We were adolescents. Instead of reading Justin Morgan Had a Horse (1945) now we were reading The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Anticipating a strange new world: the mysterious, sophisticated world of adults. Where safe passage through ambiguity -- the murkiness and deviousness of human motivation -- was by no means assured. We were intrigued, scared, ambivalent. That’s how it was. That was adolescence.

What’s life all about anyway?

We could feel ourselves changing. But changing into who or what was confusing. Because we couldn’t tell where all these forces of humanity and nature were taking us. Decisions coming at us faster than we knew how to decide. Not: Do we run with the crowd or go it alone? Keep up with our homework or blow it off? But: What really interests us? What really matters?

What did we want our one shot at life to be all about? Have something to show for it or just go with the flow? How could we apply ourselves in school to become the person we wanted to be? To develop character with solid values and abilities that helped us grow? To be of service. What was life all about anyway?

Creating something beautiful in the here and now

What can be more exacting, more exciting, than learning to think for ourselves? The beginning of adolescence is when everyone who has learning to share with us gets serious about it. What we learn or don’t learn counts. All the curricular and extra-curricular activities, competitions, assignments, social interactions, and entertainments give us an array of possibilities to choose from. Different beliefs and causes that will bless us with purpose, meaning, and satisfaction the rest of our lives. That will help us discover who we are and how we choose to apply our ideals and powers to create something beautiful -- an expression of what we stand for.

The world of the university may be some years away. But for the thirteen-year-old student who wants to make something beautiful of her life, it starts here. It starts now. it’s not too soon to reflect on her potential. Not If she means to qualify for the best universities. It’s not too soon to realize how satisfying, how much fun, it can be to be responsible for developing her own potential. To be in charge of it. To think for herself. Because no one else can do it for her.

What are the right values?

Kids from families that practice gentle loving kindness are already familiar with the best value of all. They’re halfway there to building character with strong values. For the rest adolescence is their chance to make up for lost time. In either case it’s a pleasure to talk with them about values. Because if they’ve just turned thirteen they want to grow. Their minds and hearts are open. They’re a work in progress, beauty put there to create beauty. Creativity that may not last, because with the onset of “maturity” minds and hearts often close to the possibilities, become set in their ways. Thirteen is beautiful. Keep minds and hearts open and you’ll make it.

Character and values are certainly role-modeled in school but they aren’t expressly taught. We could learn some of the best values in other venues, like church, and also some of the worst. Being parted from independent judgment to demonstrate “faith” in someone else’s judgment is not being mindful. Not when the value of mindfulness is right up there with gentle loving kindness. This is why it’s important to talk about values: there are no “saviors” to do our thinking for us. Building character with strong values is a do-it-yourself proposition. Do it yourself with lots of help, to be sure. Help from other people. Help from philosophy, psychology, theology, and any of the sciences that resonate with Mind and Love. With Logic. Help above all from our own intuition, the source of insights that guide and inspire the arts, sciences, and all of human progress. But always grounded in our own judgment, our own free will. Always.

Values are many things: ideals to inspire us, attributes to define us, instruments to be used. But the place to start is that they’re gifts. And what they require from us, if they’re going to do their job, is thankfulness and respect. Because they come from a Source that deserves thankfulness and respect – from Love. From the Source of our Being and our Worth.

What are the right values? Whatever values fit the situation we’re in. What’s the right fit? Whatever we figure out if we get it right. Choosing values to serve for different situations requires thought, feeling, and conscience. Mind and heart working together.

One thing it does not require is a formula. Minds unable or unwilling to do the work will make a show of values. Minds without conscience or character whose only value is what’s in it for them. If their “values” don’t feel like the real thing they probably aren’t. They’re just appearances for taking advantage, a clever formula someone learned to fool us and hide the truth. It’s not loving or kind. It’s cheating to avoid values. Cheating isn’t getting it right.

Character and values anchor us

We can’t think for ourselves without evaluating. Without being aware of our values and being true to them when we make up our minds. Using our minds to reason and evaluate fortifies us with understanding and good judgment. With conscience that knows right from wrong and displays good character. It assures others that we can be trusted. That we’re safe to be close to at work and play.

Children follow a path laid down for them. Adolescents learning to think for themselves begin choosing their own path. It’s how they transition to becoming young adults. Character isn’t defined for them anymore. They have to define it themselves, and it begins with choices. Choices among values that pull in different directions. The best defense against being pulled in the wrong direction is to choose the right values.

Character isn’t about blowing with the wind. It’s about the values that we choose and commit to. That define and anchor us. The best defense against choosing the wrong path is building the right character.

The ways we express our values

They’re things people need, want, or otherwise care about. One dimension belongs here with us on our planet of spacetime and matter. Another belongs in a part of our mind that’s not spacetime and matter. It’s called “intuition.” It produces spontaneous insights that guide thinking in science and every other field, but no one knows where they come from. A third dimension is their opposites – the “dark side.”

So if we think of “Wealth,” for instance, it could mean property we accumulate for our comfort beyond necessities, like yachts and jewelry. Or it could mean the thought and feeling of Abundance that motivate us to share our Love, Power, and Worth. Those are very different takes on “Wealth,” but they’re equally valid in their contexts. “Scarcity” is one word for their opposite.

Here are ways of labeling ten basic categories of human values or needs:

Love (family-intimacy)
Belonging (community)
Worthiness (affirmation)
Empowerment (energy, control)
Abundance (wealth, material comfort)
Protection (safety, security)
Freedom (free will)
Health (healing)
Beauty (purity, essence)
Hope (faith, purpose).

Like rivers they branch outward into tributaries that contain all kinds of things important to us. Values that we use to make up our minds. “Core values” that apply across humanity and values we choose and express as individuals. They’re part of our everyday experience, as concrete and immediate as the food we eat. If “belonging” doesn’t sound important “fairness” certainly will, and it’s part of belonging.

There are too many values to list all the ways we express them, but some that are implied by our needs are listed in the appendix. Terms that catalogue their opposites are given as well. This should give us a feel for how familiar and relevant values and their opposites are, like “kindness” and “scarcity.” How they influence our work and relationships and how important it is to be aware of them.

One perspective on our choices doesn’t tell us what to think. But by presenting the dark side as well as the light it does give us an idea how values pull in different directions. What choices can imply and where they might lead if we’re not mindful. If we don’t exercise solid independent judgment that comes from introspection, reflection, reasoning, evaluating, and discipline. So when we decide our eyes will be open. So the consequences – especially the costs – won’t be an unpleasant surprise.

Role modeling values

What grandparents learn from their grandchildren is the joyfulness of living in the moment. Of spontaneity that opens minds and hearts. That frees them to laugh and love, to play and think creatively in ways they’ve forgotten or may have never learned before. Time with their grandchildren is well spent. In fact, it can be enormously helpful. What grandparent isn’t grateful for being admitted into the world of a precious child?

We are all role models. Children no less than grownups. But the values a thirteener might learn from a grandparent can’t be following in anyone’s “footsteps.” Grownups’ lives and careers are also a work in progress. They’re not meant to be footsteps for anyone to follow. Let role models guide and motivate us, but don’t let them take over.

Are character and education worth the effort?

Three accomplished role models have written primers on adolescence, worthy causes, and qualifying for some of the best universities:

Being a Teen: Everything Teen Girls and Boys Should Know About Relationships, Sex, Love, Health, Identity, and More, by Jane Fonda (Random House 2014)

It’s Your World: Get Informed, Get Inspired & Get Going!, by Chelsea Clinton (Penguin 2017)

The Ultimate Teen Guide to Getting into the Ivy League: The 10-Step System, by Courtney Malinchak (Strauss Consultants 2017)

These are just a sample of what’s out there. Whatever our situations someone else has been there, thought about it, and come up with insights and information to stimulate our thinking and ease the way. If it seems like we’ve been abandoned the truth is very different. Whatever our situation it puts us into a community that wants to help. Just like our intuition, it only needs to be asked. So don’t let change come of its own accord: bone up on it and master it.

Even the best high schools and preparatory schools can’t make it easy to get into places like Harvard and Caltech. It takes extra effort. If what we’re looking for is “easy” why bother with school at all? Why bother with Life? What lies ahead for all of us is deciding whether we want to make the effort. Malinchak’s book could scare us away or fill us with determination. Which will it be?

Here’s one reason for making an extra effort. At Andover I was an average student with one distinction: I tried hard. I may have been the only athlete recommended for a varsity letter without scoring points for the team. My coach’s recommendation said my work ethic inspired my teammates to score points, and that’s why I deserved the award. The best universities look for applicants who want to excel. Who are passionate about pushing themselves beyond their limits. And one way they measure passion is by level of effort. I made it to Harvard. Andover might have gotten me there without extra effort, but maybe it wouldn’t.

Having an education from a world-class university is like being able to board a plane at a busy airport without going through security. Everyone wants you on board and they want to make it easy. Because the source of your education puts their minds at rest about your mind. About your character, talent, and values. You’re trusted. People can put their confidence in you. A degree from the top universities, like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Caltech, or Stanford, that’s put to good use, can gain acceptance into the highest circles of wealth, power, and society. I know this from experience. Without my Harvard degree the opportunities that put accomplishment, satisfaction, and joy into my career would not have been there. This is a solid reason for making an extra effort. It might be stressful but you’ll never regret it.

Just as the best universities open up worlds of possibilities, only the values of good character can get us into those worlds. Can give us the power and ability to realize our potential once we’re there. Good education and good character are gifts that never stop giving.

Career or no career? What does Mona Lisa say?

If an adolescent girl is unsure of her motivation Mona Lisa Smile, with Julia Roberts, might help. It’s a 2003 film that tells the story of an art professor at Wellesley College who encouraged her students to pursue careers. The professor’s students divided themselves into women who wanted careers and those who didn’t. I knew a graduate of Wellesley who earned a degree in economics. After that, she earned a law degree from Harvard and a license to practice law in Massachusetts. She had a very good mind. But even though she earned a profession she never actually wanted it. And as soon as she could, she abandoned it.

Do you want training for a professional career? Or are you one of the Wellesley students who don’t want a career? It can be a difficult choice for a conscientious girl that requires a lot of thought. This film may help, because it dramatizes the choice from both sides. Good thinking and great entertainment!

The values of a grandparent: Mindfulness, learning and growth

What this grandparent wants others to know about him is that he places a high value on mind – on learning and growth. That he believes that Mind and Love, thought and feeling, are inseparable. That he will be honest with others and places a high value on facts, Logic, and Truth. He believes that we make the world a better place by making ourselves better persons, and we make ourselves better persons by making the world a better place.

We choose Life when we choose not to be satisfied with the way things are. When we choose to explore the possibilities open to us by our minds. When we allow and encourage our minds to reflect. To see things from perspectives different from our own, To explore new approaches to our work, relationships, and wellbeing. Our values are to be used for creativity, to build character and self-worth.

The “niceness” of sharing, empowerment, and affirmation

In five different regions this grandparent practiced the value of service. Service through ideas (mindfulness), sharing, empowerment, and affirmation. He helped others come together to make good things happen. He shared his ideas, organized, and put them in charge. In one region he helped to secure community leadership training through twelve colleges and universities. Accumulating wealth and power for himself wasn’t a consideration. Attracting support for his career today, in thinking and writing, is a consideration. But he’s still committed to the same values.

The values that make a grandparent loving are gentle loving kindness, service, sharing, empowerment, and affirmation. These are the “niceness” that secures a grandparent’s place in his grandchildren’s hearts, that can cover him with hugs and kisses from grandchildren who need and appreciate it. That secures a place for them in his heart and makes them Best Friends Forever.

What is “empowerment?” It’s sharing our strength and energy with another person to make them stronger. To support their efforts. To help them compete. To cheer them on instead of trying to take them down so we can always be the “winner.” When we empower others we empower ourselves. It makes us all winners.

“Affirmation” is applause. It’s sharing all that we value in ourselves to affirm another’s worth. It’s making sure that if we think we’re important they’re important, too. In a world that can make us all feel overlooked affirming another’s worth can make the difference between hope and despair, between succeeding or giving up. Sharing our worth is sharing our Abundance. It’s Love. And anytime we love another it always comes back. It’s what it was meant to be: Love and affirmation for you and me.

Where did these values come from? From many sources over time. But none more important than the values that shaped this grandparent’s character in adolescence. None more important than what he learned at Phillips Academy, Class of ’55. From teachers, coaches, administrators, and classmates, all devoted to excellence. To making an effort. To being and doing your best. This was Andover. The best.

Sharing or ownership? One way of looking at it

This grandparent’s take on what values are all about is just one perspective out of many. If it stimulates an adolescent’s thinking then it’s done some good. But if she already has high ideals and it messes with them, then it hasn’t. These reflections aren’t “wisdom” if they don’t do any good. All they’re for is to help adolescents think about values so they can learn to think for themselves.

Values are gifts given to us to be shared by a source that is Sharing. It’s Love, and what Love does is share. If we want to know what to do with our gifts we can follow the example set by their Source: we can put them to good use for everyone by sharing. By using our values to empower all of Life and Creation and to affirm its Worth. When we feel truly loved then we feel Love’s power and its affirmation. We feel gentle loving kindness. This is what we share when we share our values. We connect.

Ownership pulls in a different direction. If Love is Freedom ownership is containment. Responsible ownership is sensitive to its impacts on others. But we live in a world where ownership is often abused, where instead of sharing and sensitivity to community it pulls toward possession and control for itself. Owning our gifts can pull us toward misusing them to attain dominance and supremacy by empowering ourselves and affirming our own worth. To compete to “win” by making others lose. To achieve “rightness” by making others wrong. This isn’t gentle loving kindness. If it looks like it don’t be fooled. It’s just appearances – formulas that avoid values. Formulas that avoid mindfulness. It doesn’t connect us with others. It disconnects.

The choice is: Are values to be shared following the example of Love, their Source? Are they to be “owned” responsibly? Or are they to be used only for possession and control? Are they to be used to empower ourselves and others, to express our individuality? Or used to control others to suppress it? Are they to be used to affirm everyone’s worth as equals deserving respect? Or to deny others’ worth?

Friendships and ownership don’t mix

The rules that govern competitive relationships done wrong are beating the other guy, owning, possessing, controlling, dominating, attaining supremacy, and always being right. The rules that prevail in personal friendships are the reverse: share, empower, affirm, respect the other guy’s free will, and keep everyone safe. The rules aren’t win-lose; they’re win-win. They’re both are right.

If it seems like we can’t avoid values owned instead of shared it’s because we spend a lot of time in groups. And group behavior either encourages or tolerates competition. What it offers is belonging, but that’s not the same as Love. Rather than individuals sharing their Abundance, their worth, it’s the group gathering up our worth and sharing it back. As if we were worthless without it. Loyalty to groups and their credos is inevitable, but it can be too much of a good thing. Ownership – the rules that govern group competitive relationships -- never works in individual family relationships and friendships. What does work is sharing. What works is Love.

Competition done right

Ownership focused on supremacy isn’t even the rule when competition is done right. Olympians do compete to win. But what they’re really doing is competing with themselves to excel. They’re feeding off competition to push themselves beyond their limits. The distinction of Olympic gold is excellence, not dominance. If the mindset of Olympians were otherwise they wouldn’t win. They wouldn’t even be in the Olympics.

What we learn at the best schools and universities is the pursuit of excellence. Competing with ourselves to push beyond our limits, not to dominate. Not to puff ourselves up with “winning” and “supremacy.” The pursuit of excellence is the value, the learning, that animates character with strength and energy at schools like Andover and Harvard. Not everyone can qualify for the Olympics. But anyone with talent and motivation, anyone who’s shown that they’re worthy of their values, their gifts and talents, can strive for an Olympic-grade education. For excellence. The best schools and universities are there for us if we qualify. If we’re committed to character and the right values.

What’s the use?

We build and express character according to how we use our gifts. Misusing our gifts is a mistake. Our gifts were given to us for a purpose: to create, support, and affirm the worth of Life. Using them for any other purpose is a mistake. Owning our gifts instead of sharing them so they can be used as weapons is the dark side. A very big mistake.

Strong character and education are developing our talents so they can be used. Weak character is putting talents to the wrong use or letting them go to waste. Sharing and ownership of values are the use and misuse of values.

The goal of values is to be worthy of them, to deserve them. To show their Source and others that they belong to us. They belong to us when they’re shared. The values we own for possession and control aren’t being used for their intended purpose, so they don’t belong to us. They shouldn't be entrusted to us.

The ideal of sharing isn’t always attainable in a world that’s not always “nice.” That conditions us from birth to think of our values as things to be owned and used for our own benefit, to gain wealth and power in competition with others. The wrong values are like toxins that keep us in a state of paralysis, an unchanging status quo without learning and growth, where development is arrested.

Depending on how we use them values are the sun that radiates light with the force of Love and sharing or they’re black holes that consume light with the gravity of ownership and containment. When we turn values into black holes the first object that they consume is our self because we’ve betrayed it.

The goal of learning and growth: sound judgment based on strong ideals

Taking it to the next level in our education and taking on adolescence at the same time can be fulfilling and frightening. Learning and character development are meant to take us out of our comfort zones. That’s natural. What all this shouldn’t be is painful. It can be painful if we’re not prepared. If we’re looking back instead of looking forward. We need to recognize that turning thirteen puts our lives in a different context, with new meaning and purpose. With minds opened to the possibilities from books and thoughts like these, it can make all the difference.

We can choose Love and share our gifts. We can resist the pull of its opposite, because character matters, and so does the truth.

The pull of our ideals is strong but so is the pull away from them. This is the thought to share on the eve of adolescence. A time of exploring and experimenting when an adolescent needs good judgment for protection, based on strong ideals.

As children entering adolescence begin thinking and evaluating for themselves one view is that the best use of our gifts and values is sharing. But that’s just one view. It’s their take that matters. When they’ve taken on the challenge of adolescence and education, when they’ve learned to think for themselves, what will they believe?

From the Class of ’55 to the Class of ’25, with Love

To all thirteen-year-olds may the next four years take you beyond the challenges, adjustments, and frustrations of adolescence. May they take you to a taste, a passion, for its incomparable gift: for learning and growth that never end. For Life as it’s meant to be lived, with meaning, purpose, and joyfulness. May you never be content with the way things are. May you never stop questioning.

Good luck and God bless!

Appendix: Values derived from human needs

Love: spiritual wealth and abundance, giving and receiving, openness, generosity, feeling, empathy, caring, kindness, affirmation-validation, tenderness, home, family and intimacy, interconnecting web of creativity, timelessness, immediacy (the here and now), awareness, unconditional acceptance

[The dark side] Fear: separation, abandonment, judgment and condemnation
(blame), abuse, cruelty, savagery, terror, hatred, rejection, anxiety, hollowness,
invalidation, retribution, neglect

Belonging: roots, extended family, community, fairness, equity, justice, emotional support

[The dark side] Alienation: isolation, loneliness, grievances, resentments,
bigotry, prejudice, inequality, unfairness, injustice

Worthiness: character, enlightenment, presence of mind, competence, gifts, talents, learning, discovery, work, worthy causes, growth (spiritual, personal, character), perseverance, achievement, recognition, largeness, self-respect, innocence

[The dark side] Worthlessness: quitting, surrender, failure, shame, guilt,
littleness, invisibility – not being seen or heard

Empowerment: order, control, strength and energy, forcefulness, assertiveness, will, resolve, conviction, truth, centered, grounded, competitive, prevailing, enduring

[The dark side] Disempowerment: emasculation, humiliation, embarrassment,
debilitation, disorder, disorientation, deception, confusion, doubt, loss, subjugation,
defeat, extinction

Material comfort: food, clothing, shelter, material wealth and abundance, having

[The dark side] Scarcity: impoverishment, homelessness, hunger, deprivation,
exposure, not having

Safety and security: protection and peace, trust, harmlessness, sanctuary (temenos), joyfulness and spontaneity, happiness, playfulness and laughter, immortality

[The dark side] Endangerment: vulnerability, exposure, harmfulness,
betrayal, treachery, pain, injury, mortality

Freedom: choice and expression, independence, individuality, liberation

[The dark side] Enslavement: confinement, restriction, addiction, the
tyranny of judgment and condemnation (blame), oppression, conformity, suffocation

Health (mental, physical, spiritual, emotional): wellness, wholeness, healing (the separation-wound), reason, integrity, miracles

[The dark side] Sickness: woundedness, insanity, delusion, depravity,
grievances, resentments, dismemberment, impairment

Beauty: perfection and purity in forms and functions, appearances and essences, thoughts and ideals, artistic, inspiriting, inspiring, sacred, uncorrupted, aesthetic, sensory attraction and pleasure – sights, sounds, taste, touch, smell

[The dark side] Repugnance: revulsion, aversion, deadening, flawed, marred,
desecrated, violated, corrupted, impure

Hope: faith and purpose

[The dark side] Despair: depression, surrender, collapse, purposelessness,
nihilism, ambivalence, confusion, disbelief

1

Published on 1 Comment on Defining Logic, Defining the Child, Defining Us

The utility of Logic

Nothing gets done unless it’s done by a relationship. Matter is relational: particles exist only when they connect. Logic, like everything else, is a relationship. Many relationships. One is the relationship Logic establishes between conditions – facts-circumstances – and their meaning to form context that yields purpose. Another is the relationship Logic establishes between purpose and Reality-Creation: belonging or not belonging.

If meaning attributed to conditions is mistaken then their purpose yielded by context must be mistaken. Since Reality-Creation can only consist of the Logic of Being, the perfection of Mind conjoined with Love, anything mistaken would necessarily only be attributable to what is impossible by definition: to its opposite. Opposite and impossible by definition, which is to say, by Logic. And therefore, not belonging to Reality-Creation. The status of not-belonging established by Logic on the basis of purpose, whether in harmony with the meaning of conditions or in opposition to it.

This is a definition of Logic that derives not from the abstract but from use: the purpose of Logic which applies the same standard of utility, of practical application, to its definition that it applies to the definition of every context: its purpose.

Unfinished business in the definition of the Child

Logic is what keeps the unreal, the uncreative, the unmindful and unloving, out of Reality and provides protection-sanctuary for what is Real. We are here because the Child who we are, who is active within our collective unconscious mind, needing our help to awaken, offering her help through the Holy Spirit to free us from unreality, came into a context for which she was unprepared. Unprepared by the conditions and context that defined her up to that point in the sequence of Logic. That gave her Logic, the purpose that granted her status and the role that accompanied it in Reality-Creation.

An element missing in her definition, that could not have been provided either by Logic or by her Parents Mind-Love, was revealed to be unfinished business, a gap in Knowledge upon her first attempt to fulfill her role. Revealed by experience to be incomplete, whose completion could only be learned by experience. We live, suffer, and die in this context of opposites, of confusion, guilt, and dread, of desperation to reclaim our innocence and being at one another’s expense, to learn from experience the element missing in the Child’s definition. In her Logic, her protection, so that she may fulfill her role in Creation without violating Logic, without abandoning its protection and leaving its sanctuary. Without being barred from a Reality that would cease to be Reality if she were not.

The lesson to be learned from experience

The lesson to be learned is awareness of the stakes of Creation: the possibility of loss of Consciousness from unawareness and its consequences. The costs-consequences of unreality made real that is our world of appearances and deceit. That our Source, the Child’s Source, could not be aware of by definition, because Consciousness to be aware of anything makes it Real.

Without the Child’s awareness of the stakes of Creation her exercise of Free Will, to freely choose to establish and reciprocate Worth, would have no meaning. Would not be free. This is her function, her responsibility, not her Parents’. We go through this hell of suffering and death, of unreality made real, hand in hand with the Child:

• to claim the Child’s birthright: her role in Creation and the function that enables it, her Free Will.
• to reestablish communication with our Parents Mind-Love and win admittance from Logic to its protection, its sanctuary in Reality.
• to demonstrate that the Child’s definition, her Logic is now complete. That we have learned our lesson from experience and provided the missing element: the awareness of what’s at stake. In relationship with the Holy Spirit, our Guide. Our one and only connection with Logic.

The ultimate affirmation of Free Will

The Child had to have a hand in her own Creation, her own completion, her own perfection: in the ultimate affirmation of Free Will. Because not everything was handed to her so she could set off into the unknown of Creation with nothing to learn of herself, nothing to strive for within, fully grown. Fully grown with nothing to learn of herself would be a contradiction, for she’s a Child. With an adventure to live, the necessity, the gift of Growth.

In this world of unreality the death of an innocent Child is needless if she can choose Life. By learning from the gift of Mind and Love and by learning from Growth and experience. That there’s another Reality. The Reality of her Parents and ours: Mind and Love that are not the unreality of matter. The unreality of suffering and death made real by bodies and their senses. By the “logic” of matter that isn’t.