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When Soul walks among us, loves us, teaches us
and is taken away
When mind and heart cry out for Love
and all that can be heard is silence
Their voice expands into every corner of time and space

With the Force of Truth:
That Soul can never be taken away
That mind and heart crying out for Love will aways be heard.

We return today in observance of the Truth
The Life of Soul that was shared with us intact
Its example an inspiration yet

When the mistake cycles back on us like a shadow
from Groundhog Day
Lifting us from sleep to getting it right

From giving up to never giving up:
To theft of Soul, silencer of voice
To self-regard, its voice the only voice
Denial of Truth, hope and Soul, mind and heart

The imposition of mistake upon itself
Silenced by its own crucifixion, denied its own resurrection
The emptiness of authority for its own sake
That would replace the fullness of Love

It didn’t happen then and it can’t happen now.
When will it happen? Never.
What the Life and example of Jesus mean to me.
Resurrection. Life and Love unyielding. Life eternal.

2

The original premise

The original-archetypal circumstance was the Necessity of circumstance: a premise. A premise that any state or no state is circumstance that cannot ever be at rest. Not at the “beginning” because there can be no “beginning” without time, nor at the “end” because there’s no “end” to the eternal Now. And because circumstance will still be a Necessity that moves forward with Logic-Love.

The question what was the original circumstance that preceded Reality-Creation is meaningless in the context of eternal Now without beginning-ending. Its meaning is limited to another context: the context of the instrument whose function is implied by the premise of circumstance: to give circumstance existence in a state of Reality-Creation that has Order and Worth. The instrument that is Mind composed of Logic inseparable with Love. And its function was the “original” implication of Logic and the value / relationship-connection of Love.

Unrest at the “beginning”

Within the context of Mind and its function the meaning of the “original” circumstance was unrest.  Circumstance poised-unconsummated until the Connection-Relationship between circumstance and Mind was established that processed it into existence. That thereby set Reality-Creation in motion with the necessary attributes of Logic / Order and Love / Purpose-Worth.

“Circumstance” defines the state of anything or nothing, state or statelessness. There is no “state” that is not in some way “circumstance.” It necessarily implies the function of Mind to process it. If a definition is needed of the “tao” that exists beyond any discernible purpose or meaning, right or wrong, it would be “circumstance,” because circumstance and Mind are one and the same. One cannot exist without the other.

“Unrest” defines the “original” state of circumstance because it necessitated the function of Mind, they’re inseparable, and the connection necessarily implies a reciprocal-infinite process: circumstances feeding into Mind reciprocating its implications and relationships to produce more-changing circumstances.

The pitch for self-delusion

The idea that Reality-Creation began with a state of rest that could remain unchanged in perpetuity, to which our souls may return at some point to linger forever in “heaven,” is an impossibility in any context. It’s a deliberate deception whose purpose isn’t to entice us into paradise after death. It’s to set off the excitement of stuff happening in our alternate “reality” against the boredom of “heaven” and so to keep us firmly locked into our alternate “reality.”

To keep us captive to our self-delusion because the alternative is worse. To pitch reincarnation that keeps the “action” going here -- endless cycles of cruelty and injustice, fear, guilt, and existential threats -- instead of waking up to the scam and finding our way Home. When we realize that what’s going on with Mind-circumstance in Reality-Creation and our role in it is where the action is. And the only “action” here is ending our delusion.

The Why of metaphysics

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

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

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

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

Logic is making sense

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

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

Five senses aren’t enough

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

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

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

One perspective isn’t enough

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

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

The lesson of the Course: “Choose again”

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

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

Pointlessness is an unchanging status quo

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

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

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

The flip side of “harmless” entertainment

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

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

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

Purpose in the rediscovery of real Self

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

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

Where would Creation be without possibility?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The indispensable genius of metaphysics

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

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

Fearless wisdom from a seven-year-old

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

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

Misidentity brought home to identity

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

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

Resistance from the Peanut Gallery

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

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

The right and the wrong kind of authority

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

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

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

Laws of cause and effect

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

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

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

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

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

What is ‘wrongdoing’?

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

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

Time to turn up the house lights

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

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

Yossarian knew what he was doing 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The gift of the auto-didact

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

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

And away we go! Into the Mind of the Child

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

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

The mistake that could not have been prevented

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

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

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

The “reasoning” of a madman

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

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

Alienation and the intent of false authority

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

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

The Truth of Relationship

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

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

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

I got a great deal for you on the Brooklyn Bridge

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

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

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

The pitch

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

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

Mina enjoyed it

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

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

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

Too good to be true

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

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

The sick joke that is authoritarian supremacy

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

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

Paradise lost

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

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

When the Joker told the truth

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

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

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

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

Metaphysics works

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

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

Values that separate real from false Authority

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

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

Star Wars and the myth of absolute authority

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

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

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

The Authority that’s “pointless to resist”

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

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

Palpatine’s comeuppance

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

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

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

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

Table scraps from authoritarian supremacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every individual’s Declaration of Independence

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

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

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

What’s the question?

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

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

King Kong’s manifesto

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

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

An echo from old-time religion

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

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

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

What’s the answer?

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

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

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

Amen

What was lost? 

Until the End of Time, Brian Greene’s inquiry into “Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe,” (Knopf 2020), begins with a familiar refrain:

[P]rofound questions abound, like what or who created space and time, and what or who imposed the guiding grip of mathematics, and what or who is responsible for there being anything at all, but even with all that left unanswered we’ve gained powerful insight into the cosmic unfolding. (p. 53)

What was lost when humanity’s ancestral Mind lost consciousness? The Child of Parents, Logic (masculinity) married to Love (femininity), in the Reality that preceded ours. That produced our alternate “reality.” That parallels the dream of an unconscious Mind that is our “reality” and contains the explanation for everything that “happens” inside it. Including Brian’s evolving universe, a reverse mirror image of Reality and Truth -- the unconscious Mind that’s dreaming it. That only happens to be the biggest of the perversions of Reality and Truth that make up what we call “life.” A stew of contradictions that can only be the imaginings of a split mind. Child that lost its Mind when it lost consciousness.

Lost Connection -- the implications of Logic, the relationships of Love, and the Oneness of its Psyche-Soul -- that bind all of Reality-Creation together into one harmonious whole. Lost the faculties of Mind-thought and Love-feeling that gave it Self-Awareness. The capacity to think logically. The capacity to feel lovingly. To judge with values drawn from the Worth of Life, of Creation, the substance of Reality and its laws of cause and effect. Of the Necessity of Right and Good that serves and governs all of Creation. The authority of Authorship.

What wasn’t lost?

Had all this not been lost Greene’s Until the End of Time wouldn’t have to admit that its “search for meaning,” like Hawking’s “quest for knowledge,” only begs the question. The question that humanity must and can address, because the “meaning” of “life,” the “knowledge” of its origin and fate, is an absurdity without it. Physics, philosophy, psychology, and theology can’t keep entertaining their audience with erudite “answers” that fail to address the right question. With empty circumlocution based on circular, self-referential “reasoning.” They can’t keep getting away with it.

What wasn’t lost was Free Choice. Because the Child of Logic-Choice and Love-Freedom is Free Choice. It’s why the Child was brought into Being, to introduce the element of Free Choice without which the Worth of Reality-Creation cannot be affirmed and reciprocated.

What wasn’t lost was Intuition. Though we are but projections of a split and dreaming mind, a collective unconscious lacking Self-Awareness, we are part of Connection that can never be broken in Reality. We have access to Logic and Love, our Parents, through intuition. Through insights that come of their own accord, never to compromise Free Choice but only to respond to its call for Love and Guidance.

What does it take to access the answers that are missing? That ought to launch Greene’s flight into outer space? Using the connection to Logic and Love that can never be broken. Using Intuition and exercising Free Choice that can never be lost.

What follows are observations fed by the intuition of one individual who chooses to go where John Milton went in Paradise Lost. Into another Reality, a “paradise” that preceded the “fall.” That, unlike Greene’s universe of spacetime-matter, has a point. Inquiry made possible because it’s freed from captivity to sensory perception and the quantitative measurements of science. The dead weight of authoritarian “realism” that denies intuition and blocks insight.

What gives me the right? What is my “authority?” Logic itself, the root of metaphysics. And Love, the source of motivation. The Voice for Intuition and Free Choice that either makes sense or it doesn’t. That comes close and distances itself spontaneously. I’m not trying to lead. I’m trying to listen. Trying to follow. To get it right.

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The masses can’t lead the way

Quantum gravity is beyond the reach of experimental physics. Nils Bohr broke the news over a century ago with the Copenhagen Interpretation. Physicists attached to their work and its larger service to humanity carried on undaunted until a few years ago, when Carlo Rovelli, Adam Becker, and probably other chroniclers of their profession accepted the inevitable and turned to philosophy for help. Our physical environment seems to be telling us that of course everything is as it appears to be on one level while nothing is as it appears to be on other levels. The human scale we take for granted versus the macroscopic cosmos and microscopic particles, both notorious for forms and behavior of energy that can’t be pinned down. Like a rodeo bull determined to buck its rider, spacetime-matter resists all efforts to turn it into a pet: knowable, predictable, and obedient to the rules of the household. The mind of its own doesn’t want to cooperate.

At a moment like this --

  • When humanity’s assumption has fallen flat, all the way back to Galileo and Aristotle before him -- that science, the study of matter, will explain everything. T hat explanation can be verified through experiments, and then we will finally know.
  • That Hawking’s “quest for knowledge” will have rewarded humanity’s patience with his profession leading the way. Will have rewarded humanity’s patience, its faith in it, with answers. With Understanding that finally frees us from endless squabbles over ideologies that compete for Truth and supremacy, in our minds and the arena of physical conflict beyond.
  • That even though sensory perception -- the guide to understanding provided by the body’s senses -- and the quantitative measurements of science obviously can’t tell the whole story, since mind and qualitative considerations beyond bodies and laboratories have their own stories to tell, the study of matter bodies can detect, can see, touch, hear, taste, and smell, ought to be enough.
  • Because if it isn’t enough, what other shared source of experience can certify its legitimacy so readily? So convincingly? What other source can deserve to be labeled “realistic” when other sources have already resulted in a crazy quilt of irreconcilable differences? Have already discredited themselves with departures from Logic and common sense. With frightful rubbish.

At a moment like this --

  • Hope gives way to despair. Hope that collective efforts in any field -- science or economics, philosophy or psychology, engineering or theology -- will get the job done.
  • Because physics had made great strides without having to parse the movements of every particle. It could do with calculations based on probabilities -- how great masses of particles were likely to behave.
  • Because other fields had made great strides the same way, basing their paradigms on assumptions about the judgments of masses of minds.
  • It seems we can’t do that anymore. Letting great masses of anything lead the way is a dead end. What “most people” think or do isn’t the reliable guide to common sense it’s always seemed to be.

Sister Sledge was right: We are family

At a moment like this, one is thrown back on one’s own judgment. Realizing that we are as individual particles whose behavior does have to be parsed. That the answers we long for are somewhere out there if they aren’t here in our own minds, in the minds of other individuals thinking like us or on different tracks. But either way, getting somewhere on their own, individually, without peer pressure to conform with hidebound convention, with party lines, with careers and employers. To submit to the tyranny of groups, the graveyard of individuality. The barrier, once and for all, to real progress.

But how, without groups, can one search the data base of individuals to find those who are getting somewhere? Thinking logically, systematically, of their own Free Will, to weave their way through all the analytical dead ends, the deceptions, temptations, and flawed reasoning, to come up with solid theories, plausible story lines that free us from the confinement of bodies. That take us beyond “grounding” in an illusion that energy built in service to an unconscious, dreaming mind.

Why does it matter that there may be other individuals whose minds are similarly connected? Occupied with the same cause, aided by the same function of mind -- Intuition -- that produces insights from the same source, Logic bonded with Love. While we are individuals we are also family. Family interconnected through our Psyches, our Souls. Not through massed bodies that create the illusion of unity only to fragment into quarreling factions. It matters because we aren’t isolated, separate bodies. The thoughts and feelings of individuals shared through our common ancestral Mind, the Child of Logic-Love whose story defines ours, have substance. Brought into compelling relevance every day by Relationship: us to Child, Child to Parents.

Between Parent and Child: Love that will not be denied

Though our world of incessant contradiction and conflict wants us to believe otherwise we are all one Child. Not split minds as we appear to be but of one Mind. And the Child, our ancestral Mind, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in Relationship with its Parents. Parents who are far from indifferent to its condition. Their will is to have their Child back with them in Self-Awareness. Not the state of self-delusion that condemns the Child and us, its imagined projections, to foolishness. To perversity that is the state of “reality” in an entropic universe and the bodies and brains that occupy it. Occupants of Plato’s Cave, so thoroughly indoctrinated with delusion no force on earth can part them from it.

If the Child’s condition and story defines ours, it is the will of the Child’s Parents to awaken it that won’t let the story rest until it gets there. Until Free Will animated by the will of Necessity, the laws of cause and effect, guided by Relationship, extricates the Child from its self-imposed confinement, from Its dream.

There are no two greater forces at work, here and now, than these: the Child wanting to be back with its Parents and its Parents wanting their Child back.  One searches for other individuals engaged in the same cause because in Relationship there is healing and in healing there is Force. Relentless and not to be denied. Because aligning with the shared purpose of healing, to restore the Relationship, cannot fail.

The embrace of Necessity

A Course in Miracles (ACIM) is not religion. It’s not “faith.” New Age or group of any kind. It’s not even “Christianity,” even though it borrows terminology and concepts from a religion hard-wired into a culture that crosses national and continental boundaries and so serves as a common language. It’s a voice helping us with elements of the laws of cause and effect sourced from Logic married to Love. With Necessity that we need to guide us toward awakening, the bottom-up authority backed by Force that can’t be deceived or bargained with by wills who would replace it with illogic, fear, guilt, and hatred from the top down. With the lawlessness of arbitrary rule if they could.

ACIM’s antecedents in human thought are many. Human thought venturing through the minds and unique circumstances of individuals, relying mainly on authoritarian “realism, hasn’t woven a coherent pattern. Pieces of ACIM seem to ricochet off points along the way but rarely with recognition. They’re tracked in Kenneth Wapnick’s Love Does Not Condemn: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil According to Platonism, Christianity, Gnosticism, and A Course in Miracles (Foundation for “A Course in Miracles” 1989). They include, among others, Neo-Platonism and Gnostic Christianity.

But all ACIM is, for me, is Logic married to Love. What Parmenides was trying to get at with metaphysics: a version of our story that takes us beyond appearances, only much more. Beyond the faux “reality” framed by sensory perception, the imagery of bodies, into the Reality of Mind. Mind whose functions don’t limit us to curiosities and anomalies of matter that can’t be explained by brains but free us instead to observe, reflect, reason, evaluate, and judge wherever Logic and Love lead us. Responding to the will of our ancestral Mind’s Parents to return Free Choice to its role in Creation. When it has learned its role from the trial and error of experience, When it shares their will. When it’s ready of its own Free Will to align with Logic-Love and embrace Necessity instead of opposing it.

What’s it like? Every day a fresh harvest

Feed the body and what comes out the other end is waste. Feed the mind and what comes out the other end is creativity. My mind before I took two and a half years to read ACIM received insights from intuition, enough to keep me functional but at a sluggish rate. Thirty years of reflection and practical application brought about a dramatic change. My perspective went from close identification with the Child to the first glimmers of identification with the Parents. From the Child’s craving to the Parents’ craving restoration of their Relationship to its state of awareness before the Child lost awareness.

Three years ago, January 2020, nourishment from the Logic-Love of ACIM began producing an outpouring of insights from intuition that was unprecedented. Not for extraordinary minds whose creativity accounts for human progress, but certainly for ordinary me. The transition in my mind’s ability to free itself from convention, from unremarkable to remarkable, was startling. As though a portal had opened that allowed me to free-associate across different perspectives. To ride the implications of logic to fresh insights. To germinate ideas from questions to answers as though they were fruit waiting to be picked from trees. Every day a fresh harvest.

Welcome to the world of the thinker and the writer. In relationship with Logic and Love through their agent, a friend. Brother or sister -- take your pick. Name? It doesn’t matter.

From explanation to Understanding

“Jesus,” the author of ACIM, isn’t an instrument of blind faith meant to sweep aside the free spirit of inquiry. To substitute arbitrariness for Reason. For the laws of science to suffocate discovery with the dead weight of “morality,” with “culture” and “tradition.” All the resistance to the name “Jesus,” all the skepticism, is based on misperception. Of what and who he represents and what he does. If he's resisted, misrepresented, mischaracterized, then he’s misunderstood. And so are the Parents, Logic-Love, the source of his agency in our lives. Why must Logic-Love strive to be heard? Because it’s precisely who they are and what they do that we don’t get: Logic and Love. It’s precisely to bring the gift of Logic and Love into our minds, our thoughts, our feelings and values, our judgment, that Jesus makes himself available. Touches us when we allow ourselves to be touched. Answers when we ask and are ready to listen. Comforts us when we fear and despair.

“Jesus” is a construct that comforts. That allays fears among many and particularly the individuals addressed by the voice heard in ACIM.  But in different circumstances. Meant to comfort, to allay fears because when addressing humanity, this would be the first requirement before a voice could be heard. The occupants of Plato’s Cave are as fearful of their situation as they are determined to cling to it. “Jesus” can’t be a “savior” because to be accepted and used as such would defeat his purpose: to guide ours, the Child’s efforts, to open our minds of our own Free Will to Understanding. Our own understanding from independent judgment, not someone else’s imposed from the top down. ACIM and its guide have no need for religious “faith” or for “saviors.” It’s an expression of Logic and Love combined that offers us the tools we need to intuit the Truth of circumstances and role models their use. So we can not only grasp Reality behind appearances but apply it. To guide us through passages in our everyday lives that present us with obstacles to remove and issues to resolve. With problems that require practical solutions.

A misperception accounts for the mother of all injustices, the attribution of a will to rule from the top down to the Parents of the Child. Whose authority governs from the bottom up, not to own, possess, and dominate but to share, affirm, enable, and empower. The same misperception also accounts for the attribution of character and intent to ACIM and its source that don’t fit. What would correct it? An understanding of Logic combined with Love, for that is what ACIM is. The undoing of illogic delivered through the voice of authority, from the bottom up, that shares the perspective of both Parents and Child. These prerequisites to awakening are deceptively simple in the telling but complicated in their application. For Understanding, Logic and Love were casualties of the Child’s loss of consciousness. And recovering them through self-awareness isn’t optional. It’s built into the laws of cause and effect. It’s necessary. 

Authorship from the bottom up: the ultimate source of authority 

The role sought by the shadow-reflection, the self-delusion I call the Joker, is the role of its opposite: the Author. The individual projection taken captive by the Joker, a virus who misperceives authority as top-down. Who practices authoritarian politics in a bottom-up democracy, seeks to turn democracy on his head. Seeks to fill the role of top-down authority which in Reality-Heaven doesn’t exist. What does exist is Reality-Truth based on laws of cause and effect given Force by Necessity. The role of Logic-Love that supplies the substance of laws-Necessity isn’t enforcer. It’s Author. Its function is Authorship. The source of empowerment, not dictatorship.

The Joker assumes, wrongly, that authority must come from power to rule from the top down. Authorship empowers from the bottom up with laws of cause-effect armed with the Force of Necessity based on and consisting of the Oneness of Logic-Love, its own authority. Its own legitimacy, its own authority based on Logic-Love and Laws-Necessity. The authority of Logic-Love, the lessons of Jesus in ACIM, need no external legitimacy. The Relationship between laws and Necessity is the source of Force that can’t be opposed without self-denying consequences. Without self-elimination from Reality-Creation. Authorship is self-empowering Oneness-Innocence without opposition. Self-empowering by what it is, by Being that has no opposites, no opposition. The source of Necessity because Necessity is the Force, the implication of Being, that can have no opposite in Reality.

Innocence without opposites: the ultimate source of power

This is the ultimate “Necessity.” If the self-delusion Joker, an opposite, presumes to replace Authorship, it goes up against Authorship that by definition can have no opposite in Reality. It will therefore cause its own elimination. Elimination by Necessity is self-elimination because the “opponent” is Oneness harmlessness-Innocence. Because Authorship in Reality that supports and governs Life-Creation is harmless.

Necessity is harmless. And therein lies the misperception of the Joker: the perception that in the harmlessness of Innocence is weakness. When in Reality it’s the source of empowerment. All empowerment originates in the harmlessness of Oneness-Innocence because this is the point in all of Reality-Creation where by definition there can be no opposites. Where opposition does not and cannot Be. Cannot exist. The Joker’s perception that power resides in Reality where there is the capability to harm is exactly wrong. It’s wrong in Reality and it’s wrong here in unreality. Harmfulness is not strength, it’s weakness. The contrary view is but one of the Joker’s many perversions of the Truth -- a joke.

Impossibility: alternate reality, alternate authorship

The Joker’s ambition is insane: to replace Authorship so it can exercise “power” by inflicting harm, by denying Free Will. A direct contradiction of laws of cause-effect and Necessity that can only find expression in illusion composed of impossibilities, of perversions of Truth. It can’t “succeed” for long in unreality composed of split minds that align with the agent of Logic-Love as well as submit to self-delusion. Unreality must be contradiction; therefore split minds are minds in a state of contradiction.

The role of Jesus is to demonstrate the insanity of contradiction through miracles that demonstrate the unreality of one side of the split mind. It’s to role model the benevolence and harmlessness of Authorship, its being its own source of authority. Necessity which in our state of unreality is helpful, healing. To demonstrate the miraculous effectiveness of Logic-Love Reality-Truth Authorship in contrast to yielding unreality. The example set by Jesus demonstrated not just the Force of Reality-Truth, of Authorship, but also the powerlessness of unreality-untruth, the insanity of replacement authorship. Top-down “authority” is a lie, an illusion. A contradiction of laws-Necessity.

The controlling consideration for the play-actor entertainer, the Joker with its jokes, is how it’s perceived when it gets the attention its act requires: as an innocent, “exonerated” in the devious act of “winning” its uncontested supremacy. Truth and Honesty are sacrificed for perception and deception if they conflict. And they always do. The controlling consideration for the Joker can never be Truth and Honesty.

Get in the shower!

I’m talking about the politics of polarization and misinformation that plagues us today. And a lot else. I’m giving an explanation from the roots of Reality that shows us, if we’re willing to listen, the error of our ways and how to fix it. The patterns of misperception and misjudgment that are taking us and our one-and-only habitat, Mother Earth, down. Rooted in the story from the Reality that preceded ours and accounts for ours. A story rooted in illogic, a mistake that can only be corrected by Logic. By Logic married to Love.

Can it be articulated with clarity? To minds that are mostly authoritarian “realists.” Corrupted and compromised by self-delusion, occupants of Plato’s Cave chained to their seats. Does it matter if anyone listens? If one individual gets it, bonds with an emissary from Logic-Love, and truly forgives, it matters.

Exploring beyond the scope of ACIM needn’t be beyond minds guided by Logic-Love from Intuition. The question that is beyond imagining is the bonding: when and how it will occur. When and how one individual will become so intimate with an emissary from Logic-Love, the Child’s Parents, that perspective will transcend the illusion and see the Truth. We get just a whiff of it when we step into the shower and are instantly visited by insight.

So OK. You want practical solutions to practical problems? Get in the shower!

When the lights were on

Imagine that you are a child who comes from a place where existence is an unbroken flow of Abundance. Where striving is effortless play. Where every mate is soulmate, the warmth of intimacy and the assurance of belonging, and all their personalities and compositions fit together in perfect harmony. Where everything and everyone shares the purpose and meaning of Life. The cause of all that is right and good, kind and just, happiness and contentment.

The cause of Logic and Love inseparable, your Parents. Where you are defined by your inheritance: judgment and choice, freedom and creativity. By Free Will -- Freedom of thought, expression and choice, sovereignty and individuality. The attributes of Self with an indispensable role to play in Creation: ensuring the worth and integrity of Interconnectedness. The process and structure of Creation. Of Reality governed with wisdom and caring. Not through intervention that confines and contracts from the top down but through the free spirit of Creativity that liberates and expands from the bottom up. That consummates every Connection, every Relationship, with the satisfaction, passion, and beauty of reciprocation.

Lights off!

Imagine that you now find yourself removed from familiarity and dumped into strangeness. Suddenly and without warning. With no recognizable coordinates to navigate by and no capacity to navigate even if there were. Because the flow of sharing, affirmation, and empowerment that were your life blood, the source of all that defined you, that gave you motivation and direction, has been cut off. Because you’ve lost consciousness, and the strangeness that you now occupy is the strangeness of a dream. A dream yet without form. Waiting for the characters and story that will animate it. You’re lost, adrift, and utterly helpless. A fool unable to make sense of anything.

Imagine that there is an explanation for what happened. That the strangeness can be navigated, but, for now, you haven’t the experience to know how. Your mind and memory are a blank slate, wiped clean. But even if they weren’t, there is no known playbook for the situation you are now in, none that could have prepared you for this. If there is to be a playbook, you’ll have to write it yourself.

You figure it out

And so when you detect your own reflection, a shadow opposite, you don’t recognize it. Don’t recognize its clue to where you have landed: In the strangeness of opposites. The opposite of the familiarity, the Reality, of where you were. You’ve lost consciousness without  being aware that it was even possible to lose it. And been deposited from the land of all things possible to a never-never land of all things impossible. Into the strangeness, the lawless chaos, of unreality.

All inevitable and for a purpose. But it’s for you and your gifts to figure it out -- character, integrity, independent judgment, and Free Will. And now you have a choice. With faculties impaired, with knowledge gone, you are to make sense of this strange opposition, your own reflection – your mirror image opposite. Your shadow. An apparition unknown to Reality that can only be detected in a dream. Defined by your own attributes because it’s part of your self but in reverse. Its code a derivation, entirely lacking in originality because it has no self. Derived from the definition of everything that you are not.

Only you don’t know it. Why should you when Home, the place you came from, had no opposites? When your Parents could not have prepared you for this.

A case of mistaken identity

In your acute vulnerability – in your desperation to find your way back -- you can’t be aware that the savior you seek, the guide who knows where you are and can help you navigate, is nothing of the kind. It’s the opposite. A thing of the imagination, a parasite attached to its host and entirely dependent on its host. With no sense or sensibility of its own, incapable of guiding itself let alone its host. A lifeless viral code. A predator that would take its host captive and replicate itself. A Joker that would entertain itself and distract its replications with perversions of the Truth. Jokes at their expense. Why? Because that’s all the code of opposition can do.

If only its host mistakes it for an other. Which, of course, you do. In your desperation, the breakdown of your faculties, your lack of experience and discernment, you mistake your own shadow-reflection for an other. Imagine it to be your guide and savior. And once it’s given your own voice with which to fool you, let it fool you into taking you captive. Into reversing roles and turning you into its parasite. Into replacing mindfulness with mindlessness. How can you not trust it when the voice it speaks with is your own?

Escape into captivity: our world of appearances

Imagining, all the while, that you have entrusted your fate to an other who will guide you out of strangeness, if not back Home at least to a safe place. When in truth your mind taken captive is now imagining that you are your captor. You have surrendered self-awareness to self-delusion, the delusion that you are your own opposite. And that the dream world of impossibility where it has taken you – the world where we seem to be now – is real. A world composed of bodies that are apparitions, appearances that are deceptions. All of it a magician’s act, the performance of a gifted illusionist.

A narrative that strikes the mind of a realist, embedded in the dream, as unrealistic. Until, that is, physics speaks for what this world of strangeness is telling us: that maybe it isn’t real. Maybe in some sense it is an illusion. Because not only physics but every field of inquiry that assumes that it is real has failed to prove it. Has started out with the promise of human invention and ingenuity and made great progress, only to fall short of its goal.

Science doesn’t have the answer

Albert Einstein sought an elegant equation to describe the material universe that he revered. That he believed harbored the elegance, simplicity, and beauty of perfection. That brought together the physics of cosmos with particles – quantum gravity. But what he also wanted was to prove that the subject matter of his profession, physics, is real. To put an end, for all time, to the debate between idealists and realists over the subject matter of philosophy: reality. He wanted to be the one with the Answer, and he wasn’t. He failed at both objectives. Quantum gravity remains beyond reach. Where physics today is beginning to acknowledge the illusion that the universe is, the failure of Einstein proved the reality that it isn’t.

Einstein wasn’t alone. Every field of inquiry has failed to explain the origin of appearances, the contradictory laws that govern their behavior. That break down at the extremes. When only another reality can explain the singularities, the anomalies, the mysteries of dark matter, dark energy, and black holes. Particles that are here, there, everywhere, and nowhere, for which time doesn’t exist. The random mutations of cells and the never-to-be-found seat of consciousness.

Energy did it: the dark side of the Force

The common thread through it all: the indivisibility, the inseparability of the creative force of Energy that animates appearances. The agent of Mind that enables Creation and imagination with equal facility. That animates the unreality of unconsciousness as well as the Reality of consciousness and so is complicit in the deception. Because it follows direction, and direction comes from Mind. Mind whether conscious of Reality or only dreaming an illusion. When Energy produced spacetime-matter at the Big Bang, it did so not at the direction of Mind creating Reality from possibilities. It did so at the direction of mind dreaming unreality from impossibilities.

When you lost consciousness, mistook your own reflection for another self, were taken captive by your other self – your dark side, -- and then mistook who you are and where you are, you activated the “dark side of the Force.” The lights gone out, your thoughts were no longer enlightened by Abundance and Innocence, hallmarks of sanity. They were plunged by the false innocence of victimhood into insanity: a hellish pit of fear, blame, rage, hatred, and guilt – wounding emotions conjured by your captor, rival to your Parents. Rival to Reality and Truth. Coded to bring down all of Creation with psychopathic lies. With a barrage of made-up grievances and resentments.

Your mind was a cauldron of torment that it could not tolerate. And so it got rid of its torment. It projected its unwanted emotions out of mind into a separate reality, an act conjured by the illusionist and animated by Energy. The Big Bang. Sheer madness since thoughts can’t leave their source, and “separate reality” can only be a joke. The projection climaxed the illusionist’s magic tricks, but the madness nevertheless remains firmly seated in your mind. Its unwanted emotions went nowhere.

Still, you’re the source of the Big Bang! You invented our universe!

Why?

Your purpose then can’t be to affirm the reality of what’s not real, to exploit it for pleasure until all that’s left is pain. Your purpose must be to learn and grow from experience. To gain the competence to tell the difference between host and reflection, truth from deception, reality from illusion. To tell the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, the light side from the dark side of the Force. Your purpose is to attain the maturity of self-awareness. The awareness that self-the-many is Self-the-One. The knowledge that there are no “others” but reflections of our Self, and in each one of us is the one Self.

To what end? That you may reclaim your identity. Reclaim you Free Will, your individuality and Creativity, and wake up from your self-imposed dream of worthlessness. That you may regain awareness of the connection with your Source that was never lost and return Home. Home to the joyfulness and Worth of Life and Creation. To the oneness, beauty, and perfection of Reality. To having a job to do and the competence of Logic, Love, and experience to do it.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

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The Child must choose and earn what it cannot inherit

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

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

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

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

All it takes is one individual

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

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

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

In a world perpetually at war
we do our duty
standing clear or standing up
to the onslaught

Pacifists and soldiers doing our duty
In our own way
caught up in forces of our own making
larger than ourselves

But not beyond our duty
to unmake the forces of our own making

To Understand
to strive for context in the moment
the Memory of purpose and meaning
to answer the Call for Love

It was just a polite request:
Make me understand, and you did
With definitions at first, words
That frame a thought and then
We moved on
To the thoughts themselves and where
They come from

Make up a story you said,
And so I did, a fable from out of nowhere
And then a poem
That made them wonder more

Questions I couldn’t leave alone
And what for? And so I moved on
Trailed by my retinue of words
Definitions, thoughts, questions
Skimming the surface unaware
Of what lay below

I thought to get at it that day
My friend and I, Royal Portable, but not now
Just the California sun to caress my soul
The wonder of it all, the life yet to be lived
With nothing yet to say, so the publisher
Was right

Blank again the page and silence its message
Staring back at me when next I tried
In earnest, not content to feel
I would meet you upon this honestly
But who are you? What is it that’s there?

[to be continued]

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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.

Time to think again

Intuition with insights from the Life of Mind explain human experience with clarity and practical resonance. Potentially more so than any other source, because the twists and turns of human thought don’t terminate at the portal we came through to get here. They extend way beyond the “beginning of time” to the portal through which anything and everything must pass. To the Presence that was there in the Now, at the beginning: the rules and definitions that govern what Is and what Isn’t. The ancients called it Logos. I’m OK with “Logic.” Tap into the implications of Logic and they take us a long way.

What follows in “The Lure of Liberty” is a small harvest of fruit that this particular tree bears. Nourishment for minds wanting better answers to questions than the dominant paradigms provide us, from philosophy, psychology, science, and religion. Questions that thwart human progress, because the dominant paradigms are not connecting with our origins, getting our story right. As a species we’re far from connecting with context that supplies purpose and meaning. Far from grasping what our circumstances may be telling us. Because the very source we must turn to for answers, the human mind, has been turned against itself. The very central fact that the dominant paradigms fail to acknowledge. We must come to terms with its implications. We must learn to remove the barriers to Logic and change our mind.

A few modest insights won’t make much difference. But they illustrate a point I hope to make in my book, The Story of the Child: that returning to the roots of philosophy, through the insights of Intuition guided by Logic, can inch us forward. Insights guided by sources from Logic like Jesus and A Course in Miracles, Plato and The Allegory of the Cave, can break through the wall of ambiguity our split minds and bodies’ senses have built. Remove its deceptions and contradictions. Replace its deeply flawed perceptions with perceptions better aligned with Truth and make progress.

By thinking. Not a novel idea. But after science and technology have held the stage, after Hawking declared philosophy “dead” and not only humanity but all of life is imperiled, maybe its time has come. Maybe, with our country facing another civil war, it’s time to get back to business and think again.

Respect for the role of Free Will in Creation

There’s work to be done in Reality and we can’t do it. A job with real purpose and meaning. What’s worse is we’re prevented from doing it by a lie. A deception that our world of appearances has locked in place by our bodies’ senses, by circular self-referential reasoning since bodies themselves are appearances. A manipulation by a virus whose only purpose is to preserve its place in our thoughts. In mind which is a precious gift from our Parents, who Know only Reality and Truth.

Whose concern isn’t our subservience to any cause. To any agenda, any deception or manipulation. It’s to the protection and exercise of the reason, reciprocity, and Free Will that we are. To the part their Child has been blessed with in Reality and Creation: to enable the creation of Life to affirm its own worth, to extend and empower it.

What would the miracle of Creation, of Life, be without Free Will? A thought without an expression. Form without content. Cause without effect. An empty stance of self-proclaimed value. A billboard advertising an idea without a product. A “product” no one has chosen to buy. What is a product worth that has no market? What is it worth if no one in their individual circumstances, their context, has found any application or use for it? If its “market” is forced or deceived into consuming it?

What does it matter that the Child’s Parents are Mind-Reason-Choice married to Love-Creativity-Freedom and their purpose was to birth a Child whose very identity is Free Will? The inborn power and ability to choose freely so that the creation of Life won’t be hollowness without consequence? Empty rhetoric? Sound and fury signifying nothing?

What does it matter that the Child’s Parents are careful not to let their Authority and Knowledge compromise her Free Will? That their reticence is part of the gift, not a withholding? That they are to be thanked for enabling us to learn what we must, as we will, at our own pace, because they must. We are not stamped by their Authority and Knowledge. We are not denied by their reticence, their respect. We are liberated by it.

Is the Child “our guy” or “our girl”?

Who is the “Child”?

She would be the first step in understanding that everything must have a definition. The first incontrovertible law of metaphysics: that we can’t get at Reality without Logic. Because it is Logic that supplies definitions. That determine who or what a thing is and what it’s for. Who or what can break the surface in all of Reality or unreality, Creation or uncreation – in the all-inclusive scope of Everything and nothing – without having a definition slapped on it? When do the purpose and meaning of anything appear without definition? When can the question what Is or Isn’t, or how it came to be or not to be, be answered without Logic? Without definition?

The definition of the Child may or may not be indifferent to gender but language is not. This language insists on masculine or feminine. Jesus, in A Course in Miracles, determined to get us back to Reality, addresses his readers as the “Sonship:” one son with no differences of any kind because our bodies, illusory thinking, and their differences are an illusion. “God” is the “Father.” I don’t have that luxury.

Where the implications of Logic and insights from Intuition have taken me is beyond the scope of the Course. I choose to break with its precedent on gender because the Logic of the Child’s story, before s/he fell under the influence of the ego, seems to require it. Masculinity and femininity may have played a defining role in the Child’s origin and attribute of Free Will. While the Child could be herself or himself, her Parents of my imagination are Father-Mind and Mother-Love. The Logic and definitions of metaphysics are all about attributes, and if the distinction can’t be made in this context – specific attributes assigned to Parents, Child, and their Child’s role in Creation – the story that Logic and Intuition have woven together in my telling can’t be told.

The precedent I hope never to break is with Logic itself, the authenticity of the Course and my reason for keeping faith with it. So let me add that the Course is modern Gnostic Christianity, and the Child imagined by the Valentinian Gnostics, in the second century, was Sophia. Whose role in the “fall” is not unlike that of the Son in the Course. We chase down the same explanation, and it matters not whether the central figure is our guy or our girl.

We are not our Parents

The Child is who we are in the before-after sequence of Logic: before she lost consciousness, when she lived as Mind in Reality where it is always Now, and after she lost consciousness, when she dreamed an unreality as brains encased in bodies, in an environment of spacetime and matter where it is never Now. The after-Child is us. Though we in our bodies are but a projection of a dreaming mind. Sharing Life-Being with our Parents in Reality but unaware of it, because their Child is unconscious and we are but figures in the dream, living unreal lives, thinking unreal thoughts.

Unaware that the Child shares Life-Being with her Parents in Reality for another reason: because an event is buried in the Child’s Memory, in our collective Memory, and is unknown to us. The event that shut down consciousness, knocked out its power. That preceded the event that lured the Child into an alternate reality of carnival funhouse mirrors. A substitute “home” whose attributes are the exact opposite of her real Home.

The Child is an extension of her Parents, Mind married to Love. Yes, in Reality we are Mind. We are Love. But the Child is not her Parents. Cannot be. And hers is not their role in Creation.

She’s Innocent! And so are we.

What she is also emphatically not is guilt deserving of punishment for having lost consciousness. Nowhere in the Logic of why and how this happened in Reality can a case be made that either Parents or Child engineered the event outside the limits of Logic. Assumptions to the contrary are projections by ego-corrupted minds, themselves steeped in guilt, as we all are. Not by the loss of consciousness but by the activation of the ego shadow code that came after, when the Child was not in her right mind.

Pursuing the Truth through Logic to establish the Child’s Innocence can have important consequences: for our ability to follow our guides who teach forgiveness, like Jesus in A Course in Miracles, and for our awakening. It’s a story worth telling and I hope to make a contribution, logically, in my book, The Story of the Child.

Reclaiming the purpose and meaning of Life

We aren’t performing any role in Creation now because the Child who imagines us is unconscious. Asleep and dreaming a dream of unreality. An illusion of appearances meant to deceive. Meant to locate a falsehood and its source within Child-mind and keep it there. An agent of unreality and untruth whose only purpose is the preservation of the dream, to keep the Child unconscious and us in its thrall.

The master of Plato’s Cave. The ego whose origin in the Child’s psyche is explained by Jesus in the Course. A viral shadow code – non-being – that tricked the Child, unconscious and defenseless, into listening to it. Into choosing to follow it because it had a message the Child, in her defenselessness and disorientation, her nightmare of sin, guilt, and fear, was desperate to hear. Into following it where only a lie could lead, into the insanity of separation. Into chaos ungoverned and ungovernable. Into Energy encased in matter, split minds encased in bodies, all of it entrapped in entropy destined for inertia.

Lies can be undone. Minds tricked into dreaming nonsense can awaken. Can heal the illusory separation. The Child with Free Will can choose again. What then is the lie? Where is Reality? Where is Truth? Where is our Home and how can we get back to it? What happened to our purpose, the meaning of Life? How can we reclaim it? How can we awaken?

Logic is empowerment as well as protection.

Logic – Logos -- is definition and governs by definition. By defining the meaning, nature, character, and scope of things. “Definition” is DE- + finis, the Latin word meaning “boundary, limit.” To “define” implies confinement: boundaries that put limits on freedom, mobility, autonomy. Built into the meaning, nature, character, and scope of everything that Is. Nothing in Reality-Creation can Be without the boundaries, the limits, of their definitions.

Definition is the essential instrument of Logic. Without definition Logic would be cause without effect. Definition is the bar code on every product of Reality-Creation and every self that went into and came out of its Creation. The label that identifies it and certifies its legitimacy, its belonging to Reality-Creation. That signifies that it’s Real.

Nothing in Reality-Creation can Be without designation by Logic of who or what it is, what it is for, and what it does. The “nature” of a thing is its Logic. Logic is identification: it defines who and what self is. Identification is self’s authority. The Logic of a Life that defines who or what it is is its authority to do what it does, to perform its function in Creation. Logic is authority that limits who or what self is, what-when-where self can do, and how self can do it, by defining and identifying it. Logic authorizes acceptance into Reality of the works of Creation, its new lives, the extension of Being, and the functions they were given by definition to perform.

The authority of Logic empowers new Lives, new selves. Logic is empowerment as well as protection. It is self’s login ID that gains entry into Reality. Logic’s definitions not only cover who or what self is that authorizes belonging to the community of Being; it also animates who or what self is. To act in service to the function implied by who or what self is.

Logic governs by managing roles and relationships in service to the shared purpose defined by Logic: Creation and reciprocation of the worth of Being-Life. Logically, without conflict or contradiction among identities or functions. Without opposites colliding that’s impossible in Reality but defines unreality, the state of mind that’s corrupted by the viral shadow of ego non-being. The Logic of Logic, its own definition-purpose, is the absence of contradiction: Peace, Truth, and Sanity. The gift of reason, the gift of rationality. The Logic of governance is the same: harmony within the diversity of Creativity, the gift of rationality.

The dual function of Logic’s authority

The context in Reality governed by Logic is the exact opposite of the Child’s context in unreality, where the ego’s promise of “freedom” from the confinement of definitions, from Logic’s authority, led her not to harmony but to chaos. It was a subterfuge: that there is another reality where definitions don’t have boundaries – an absurdity. Where the necessity, the authority of Logic, doesn’t rule and definitions aren’t needed – more absurdity. Where the Child overcome by fear, desperate to get rid of guilt, can attain unlimited possession and control of her gifts -- freedom, empowerment, and abundance. Perverted into license to do whatever she wants, control rather than adapt to her environment, and hoard rather than share wealth. Another reality where the Child can get rid of guilt and escape.

The trick’s power to deceive derives from the dual-function of Logic’s authority: definition-limit with boundary and protection-empowerment with boundary. With a sleight of hand the ego directed the Child’s attention toward define-limit in its open left hand and away from protect-empower in its closed right hand. It was a direct and deeply sinister assault on Logic. On Logos. On God. And it succeeded, which is why we are here. In the Child’s unconscious mind, her abilities disempowered, Logic was rendered meaningless, making it susceptible to its perversion by ego non-being.

Repeating the Child’s signature mistake

What was accomplished by the sleight of hand, the deception in its essence, was a misconception of Truth combined with mis-direction from Truth. A lie combined with avoidance of the Truth. The dynamic of delusion that corrupts the human mind, split between good and evil, and compromises every field of human inquiry including ethical philosophy. Distraction by the body and the lie, avoidance of Mind and the Truth. At one stroke the Child not in her right mind was drawn toward an illusion, a lie, and chose a guide to lead her there.

The Child’s desperation for escape to an alternate reality implied belief in it. It was thus the original act of her unconscious mind, the archetypal belief in contradictory realities, one real, the other unreal:

• that accepted the illusory ego shadow code’s offer to be the Child’s guide to a magical alternate reality.
• that invested belief in the magical alternate reality and thus activated it, our world where, in the words of the Course, “the unreal is made real.”
• that characterizes human thought within the dream, a continuous replication of the Child’s signature mistake: making unreality real, keeping the ego shadow code and its insane dream “alive,” legitimizing its guidance, listening to it, following it.

Melvin Furd in his glory

The shadow code’s response to the Child’s plea was, Sure, there’s someplace else. I can take you there. Follow me. “Someplace else” is a fantasy, the opposite of Reality-Creation. An illusion of facades and pretense. Chaos characterized by absurdities, contradictions and their collisions. A veritable Large Hadron Collider in slow motion. Where every attribute of Creation is turned inside-out and upside-down, reversed and perverted, turned against shared purpose, against itself: “life” imagined as death.

The distinction between Logic-Heaven and ego-hell is the distinction between Order and chaos. The fatal misperception of Freedom is that it’s possible without Order, without the discipline of Logic that governs the roles and relationships of Reality-Creation in a state of harmony. Part of the grand illusion of separation that turned dream into nightmare, Heaven into hell. Once again, it was Logic’s own authority that gave the trick its power to deceive, the dual function of boundary: definition-limit and protection-empowerment. That gave an ego-corrupted mind an opening to project its lies onto Logic-authority. Cloaked in the defense of “liberty,” when in Reality it’s a direct assault on Liberty. A taking of Freedom, not its giving.

What had been the sharing and reciprocation of abundance, empowerment, and affirmation, a celebration of worth and thankfulness, the purity of Reality, was now a toxic brew of possession by taking, control by dominance, confinement by manipulation of appearances, worthlessness by invalidation and ingratitude. What had been radiant and fragrant was now putrefaction, the waste of inverted self-interest. The stench of selfishness warped by wealth and power into Gollum, a pathetic, misshapen frenzy of human greed, conquest, and depravity. Into specialness, a wild fantasy of violation of shared purpose, of Innocence, of Being-Life, all with the seed of guilt. The ultimate perversion: Oneness, expanding Creation, contracted into littleness. The Logic of Everything displaced by nothing. The grand poseur, Melvin Furd, in his glory atop the throne of God.

Specialness withheld: the original conspiracy theory

All of it literally mis-guided. By nothing more than a viral shadow code. A foolish delusion that has no life of its own. That distracted an unconscious, defenseless mind with false promises and will, one day, finally, be ignored. Mis-guided by mis-characterization of the shared purpose of Reality-Creation, a gift to the Child of happiness as well as affirmation of worth. A sanctuary of shared peace and protection, Love and belonging, trust and Intimacy. Of Innocence and empowerment, spontaneity, joyfulness, playfulness, song, and laughter.

It is not and cannot be the gift of shared Oneness. The Innocence and Knowing of Oneness, of Consciousness, the Child’s Parents, and the function of their Child, Free Choice -- the exploration of possibilities into the unknown, that include the possibility of unconsciousness and dreams of unreality -- do not mix. The relationship between Parents and Child is essential to Creation and remains unbroken in Reality. Yet these two attributes are incompatible by definition. So illogical together that combining both on the same plane of Creation, inadvertently, may account for the Child’s loss of Consciousness. Inquiring into how and why this could have happened is the purpose of my book, The Story of the Child.

The mischaracterization that corrupts the shared purpose of Reality-Creation is the sanctuary’s denial of specialness. The gift of shared Oneness that could not be given. And so ego-corrupted minds, craving specialness, looking for trouble, fantasize that it was a gift deliberately withheld. The original conspiracy theory.

We are the heroes

Another excuse for hating – what else? Logic. For hating – what else? Reality and Truth. For hating God. The seed bed in the human psyche for the plague of irrationality and insurrection that grips our politics today. The nurseries from The Thing (1951) and Alien that incubate monsters out to destroy us.

And who came to the rescue? Us. Captain Pat Hendry and Ellen Ridley saw to the monsters’ end. It took some thinking. It took courage and a lot of effort. But they figured it out. No “saviors” were on hand to bail them out. And therein lies the message. We are the heroes. The answers we seek lie within our own minds, and this is where we must go.

Specialness is a logical impossibility

The supposed denial of specialness resonates so deeply with the wounded Psyche of the Child that it may continue bleeding grievances, resentments, and conspiracy theories until the Child awakens. Until the end of time. Yet it is entirely false. The Child’s role in Reality-Creation requires that she be aware that she cannot be or act as Oneness. This is logically neither who she is nor what she does. She must be aware of possibilities, the possibility of unconsciousness and its illusory opposites that the Innocence of Oneness cannot and must not bring to Consciousness.

That she was not aware in Reality could explain her loss of consciousness. But why was she not aware? This is the question that insights from Intuition, guidance from Memory – Logic, – need to answer. If character and Innocence matter, and they do. This is the question addressed in my book, The Story of the Child.

The Innocence of Oneness cannot and must not bring the possibility of unconsciousness and its illusory opposites to Consciousness because it is Consciousness that welcomes the thoughts of Mind, the gifts of Creation, into Reality. It is Knowledge that by Knowing realizes. Consciousness that by definition does not and cannot Know anything of illusory-unreal opposites. Purity and Innocence that by definition can Know nothing of impurity and guilt. The inward-looking Self-awareness of Oneness, the seed of Creation that contains Everything, that by definition can Know nothing of anything outside itself. Because, by definition, there is nothing outside of itself.

Does the Child really want Consciousness -- her Parents -- to admit her nightmare of appearances, misery, death, and hell into Heaven? Could specialness, if it were an attribute of the Child as conspiracy theorists want, really be compatible with the shared purpose of Reality-Creation? With the miracle of eternal Life?

The idol of the right: “almighty god” who does whatever he wants

The Child’s acceptance of the ego’s sinister offer of guidance is rationalized by the lie that Oneness-specialness was her birthright. That wrathful Parents bent on her punishment for separating from them deprived her of it. That it was their taking it from her that caused her unconsciousness. Unconsciousness that she may have experienced as expulsion from her home in Reality, from her sanctuary of happiness in Creation.

To an ego-corrupted mind the real calamity of unconsciousness, the result of an inadvertence, would then be misconstrued as an imagined offense: unfair exclusion from Heaven. A deliberate wound to the heart, to their worth. A myth straight out of the story of the Child, corrupted by the ego, that thrives in our Ghost Busters political culture populated by internetted social media demons. That motivates the right, from January 6th insurrectionists to latter-day Ayn Rand “objectivists.” Grieving over the birthright of Oneness-specialness that was stolen from them along with their property. Over their unfair exclusion from the society of “winners,” the special-elite privileged with their exclusive entitlements.

The ego’s misshapen myths are the consequence not of Logic’s deliberate mismanagement of Reality-Creation but of its laws of cause and effect. Of the necessity of Authority’s definitions of what a self must be and what it can do. Of what’s logically possible and what’s not. Projections of ego-corrupted irrational minds pervert what’s possible by Logic-definition and shared Purpose into what’s allowed by an arbitrary authority that’s taking-possessing and controlling-dominating. By a self-absorbed self-interest just like them. By what they misperceive as an “almighty god,” unbound by Logic, who does whatever he wants. This is what the ego shadow code aspires to be. This is who its followers imagine they are.

More ego-insanity: the Child’s stolen right to dictate

Non-being shadow code, the angel of death, is the arch-enemy of Free Will, enabler of Life. If there is one one talent that the ego does not possess it would be Free Choice. Manipulating the unconscious Child into parting with her gift would be its first priority. Free Choice among the Child or any of her progeny poses a terminal threat to the outlandish fabrications of unreality. The thrust of any inquiry, any argument, toward asking Why would automatically separate mind from servility, the condition of mindless obedience to authority that rules Plato’s Cave.

So, when the Child was lured into the dream away from Reality-Truth, it was with the lie that her right to dictate without the necessity of Free Choice was taken from her. That she should be able to Create Life as Oneness-Consciousness – as God -- by simply Knowing. And thus was born, in the Child’s Psyche, the authoritarian streak that recoils from governance by free choice managed by Logic. That’s drawn toward concentrations of authority in autocrats who can dictate “order” without sharing it democratically. With the support of subjects who don’t object to their powerlessness because they share power vicariously through their Cave-master guides. Because their worth receives its affirmation from superficial entertainments even though they’ve surrendered their sovereignty, their souls.

Where does all this madness come from?

The essential attribute of evil is mindlessness. Which, since Logic and Feeling, Mind and Love, are inseparable, also means lifelessness, lovelessness, and thoughtlessness -- all that the absence of these elements of Reality-Creation imply.

The essential motivation behind the assault on Logic-Order, on behalf of the ego’s malign defense of “liberty,” is not the protection of Free Will but its surrender. To an entirely unreal, illogical, mythical “higher power” that’s nothing of the sort. To an imposter, shadow code’s non-being posing as the master of Plato’s Cave. Whose hapless occupants are held not in a paradise of “liberty” but in an authoritarian hell of captivity. Duped by numbers, by the appearance of belonging to a group, into fantasizing that they’re serving a larger cause. When all they serve is an illusion: their master’s authority. The tyranny of a delusion wielded by a bizarre figment of corrupted imaginations: a very self-centered, very unreal, specialness.

The fallacy of right-wing authoritarian politics

Republicans, fearing that they were a permanent minority, sought the advice of consultants around a century ago. Their advice: give up trying to attract the majority with reason. Forget about truth. Appeal instead to irrationality and tell voters whatever they want to hear.

The result? Unimagined success! Republicans discovered to their delight that many voters, captives to ego-myths of specialness denied and victimhood, would rather vote their grievances and resentments than any calculus of benefits and costs. They would rather retaliate against their tormenters, “elites” who deny their birthright to specialness. Would rather enact a grand reckoning of justice than govern. Tie their fortunes to the madness of a victim just like them, even if it takes down Democracy, their country, even peace.

So compelling is this irrational nonsense that it filled Plato’s Cave to overflowing, with millions of occupants pledged to the defense of its master at any cost. Convinced that loyalty to a “higher power” puts them on the side of good. That the power of the Cave master is shared with them when, in truth, it was stolen from them. What Republicans learned to their delight was that minds already duped by lies will fight fiercely to defend them. That making unreality real isn’t on the margins of society; it’s the force that drives human irrationality.

Irrationality carried now to dangerous extremes, unhinged from Reality and sanity. Denying climate change. Threatening yet another Civil War. A state not of passive alienation from shared purpose but of active, deliberate insurrection. Against our only means of community – shared purpose. And in service to what? To a lie: a perverse defense of “liberty” that’s hard at work taking it away.

Changing minds without drinking the hemlock

What’s the answer? Jesus says, in A Course in Miracles, that all our Father asks of us is that we show a little willingness to change our minds. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave an enlightened one, modeled after Socrates, offered help. He tried to part the occupants from their delusions. His reward was hemlock. Minds can change. Desperately need to be changed. The dominant paradigms are ripe for change. But we must know what we’re doing. Choose the right Guide and ask for help. Access Intuition. Align thinking with Logic. Stop the madness and give it some thought.

Follow Logic into the Story of Mind by understanding three basic facts:

• Logic moves forward by implication. That is, by what points imply. Grasping implications requires reflection, a function of Intuition which expands into different ways of looking at things which, in turn, yield different possibilities. A source of Creativity which never ends because the implications of Logic never end.
• What is not Reality-Good must be its exact opposite. To define unreality which is non-being / not-good, simply reverse the attributes of Reality-good. These are the lies that need to be undone.
• We change individual minds with universal truths. There is no “universal mind” in our fractious unreal world of separation to change with any truth. The occupants of Plato’s Cave are individuals their master would possess and control as a group. They are not a group and cannot be approached as a group.

Choose by exercising Free Will:

• Make logical connections by using reason, a function of Thinking, which provides one of three main foundations for choice: measurement of benefits and costs.
• Use evaluation, a function of Feeling, to weigh and compare the value of benefits and costs..
• Use judgment, a function of Order and Authority, to establish purpose and meaning from context, the third, critical foundation. Which allows analysis to integrate every consideration under one. The one that’s most important. The controlling consideration that makes a statement who we are and what we’re about: our thinking, our values, our character. The one that decides.

God bless and have at it!

Where the Action is

“Sanctuary” for the Child’s role in Creation, within the protection of Logic in the Here and Now of Reality, equates with the depth of felt experience defined as “Romance” and “Meaning.” Why? Because it’s where Creation happens: thoughts-feelings and choices with Real consequences that define Romance and Meaning.

In the ego’s made-up world of spacetime and matter there is no Sanctuary. There is no real experience of Romance and Meaning, only unsatisfying temporary substitutes contrived by a corrupted mind’s imagination. Because unreality can only be where nothing happens.

Attachments from the “past” are forever

Imagination’s attachment to the “past” is recognition that time is illusion. That the Reality of people, places, and events that formed attachments wasn’t dependent on bodies-matter. It was a function of Mind which doesn’t need bodies. Attachment beyond the present into the unlimited past is being there for whoever and whatever were objects of affection. For those who were and continue to be loved. Communicating with those welcomed into Memory recognizes that the connection can’t be broken by anything to do with the dream. It can’t be broken by the lie of “death” and time.

Remembering and communicating with those we loved in the “past” isn’t making unreality real. It’s denying the denial. It’s assuring subjects loved that Love is eternal, unaffected by time. That they haven’t been abandoned. Jesus concludes the Text in A Course in Miracles with a promise: “I love you. I will always love you. I will never leave you comfortless.” It means we can’t be abandoned-separated. It means his promise not to abandon-separate us can’t be broken by time.

Where the Action isn’t

Romance and Meaning are inherent in timelessness, in the Here and Now. What breaks up Romance and Meaning in this life is the absence of Now plus the separation of past and future from “present” which is not Now. The ego’s illusory made-up world is one-dimensional. To substitute for the absence of the three-dimensional Romance and Meaning of Reality the Child’s ego-corrupted mind orchestrates contrived “events:” “action” involving bodies-matter, competition and conflict, that distract sensory perception with meaningless movement and noise, pleasure and pain.

Real vertical timelessness incorporates past and future into Now which accounts for the three-dimensional depth, the Romance and Meaning of Reality. Unreal horizontal time flatlines past, present, and future into a separated sequence. This accounts for the absence of depth, the absence of Romance and Meaning, in the ego’s unreal material world. If this “life” feels flat and in dire need of depth, that’s because it is flat.

Vodka Martini, “shaken not stirred”

Alcohol temporarily aligns past and future with the present in a vertical configuration, causing the illusion of experiencing all three in the moment -- the illusion of depth, This brain-altering effect accounts for alcohol’s appeal. Being cut off from three-dimensional Reality starves human lives of a basic need: the need for Romance and Meaning. It accounts for the universal appeal of entertainments, storytelling, and mythmaking. For addiction to brain-altering substances that mimic the intensity of beliefs, the passions that stimulate imaginary experiences beyond the limits of the ego’s artificial “reality.”

All driven by craving for Romance and Meaning. All rooted in the same condition: the absence of Romance and Meaning in the one-dimensional everyday unreality of time. By the absence of Creation’s Sanctuary, the Child’s Home – our Home -- in Reality.

Life can’t just happen

A thing that has purpose, meaning, and worth can’t just happen. If it’s Life it has to be the Source or come from the Source that has purpose, meaning, and worth. Life by definition has purpose, meaning, and worth. It has to be Created.

Life has Logic, this is its Logic, and Logic is its Source. “Creation” by definition has purpose, meaning, and worth. This is its Logic and Logic is its Source.

Life on this planet, like the planet itself, is an apparition. Produced in a troubled mind imagining that it’s disconnected from its Source. Imagining that it’s to blame and punishment is sure to come. That there’s escape from fear and guilt in a separate world where it can hide itself in bodies and a wrathful Mind will never find it.

Life is Growth

Science that can’t agree on what “life” is looks for its definition in matter. Just as physicists trying to explain the universe look for answers in the behavior of matter. What does matter tell them? That some cells replicate and others don’t. That particles only exist if they connect. That particle behavior responds to being observed by mind. And time exists unless it doesn’t, and even then it’s no match for gravity. The “laws” of science died with Newton. Hawking didn’t even make a pretense of objectivity.

Schroedinger acknowledged that sensory perception validating the reality of what it senses is only validating itself – circular reasoning that physics is based on and so objectivity is dead on arrival. Yet the great minds of science march on in lockstep oblivious to the truth. Objectivity and reason are faculties of Mind. Purpose, meaning, and worth can only be attributes of Mind. Growth, the essence of Life, implies purpose, meaning, and worth. It’s impossible without Creation by Mind, its only possible Source.

The real “Big Lie”

Yes, something like “Life” “exists” on earth. We’re sure of it and so we apply our wits and energies to figuring out what it is, busying ourselves with the latest in technology to subject bits of stuff to ever greater scrutiny. Reeling corpses up to the top of gothic castles on gurneys, with electrodes in their necks, hoping that lightning will restore “life”. Imagining that pulpy stuff in our skulls with electrical charges, that can never tell us what we want to know, is the source of “consciousness.” It must be so because the authors of the American Heritage Dictionary assure us that it’s so.

The confused dreaming mind that imagines matter can’t allow itself to think otherwise or it will lose its hiding place, the real Big Lie. The place that hides itself in plain sight of the mind that can’t and won’t look for it where it is, inside itself. The bull insists on charging at a piece of red cloth not the matador. Missing over and over again until it’s exhausted and ready for the kill. Will the bull ever learn? Will science ever learn? Will humanity intent on its own destruction ever figure out where it came from? From matter? If so, does it matter? If Mind can be the only Source of Life that is Growth, that can’t be without purpose, meaning, and worth, then the answer to both is No.

Questions worth looking into

How do we get “Life” out of cells? How do we get “consciousness” out of brains? When interstellar travel is possible, maybe the great minds of science can tell us. Until then, the answer must be we don’t.

Real “Life” comes from Child-Mind taking part in Creation when he's Conscious. Matter doesn’t “create” anything. Anything that involves “Creation” can’t have anything to do with matter. Matter is illusion. Matter is dreaming. “Life” that we seem to get out of cells and “consciousness” that we seem to get out of brains are part of the dream. Appearances. Substitutes for the Real thing that speak not for the reality of “Life” but for the appearance of death. For a substitute mind, confused and misguided, whose thoughts can’t be Real.

Might we wonder why it’s confused? Whether it really is unconscious instead of Conscious? What caused Child-Mind to lose consciousness? What can Logic aided by Intuition, our Holy Spirit Guide, tell us about it? These are questions worth looking into. Do the lines of inquiry we’ve been following show any more promise?

Might we wonder about the state of mind that tolerates assaults on governance? That imagines that poetry, art, romance, and meaning are to be found in conflict and violence? That tolerates weapons everywhere, random eruptions of mayhem in schools, grocery stores, movie theaters? Shrugs and walks away as if nothing can be done about it? Until the weapons are turned on us and it’s too late?

Might we wonder about the state of mind that can’t be trusted with “Life”? That confuses “Creation” with destruction? That imagines there’s protection in numbers until the numbers are gone and the truth is exposed: we’re individuals huddled together in fear, finding strength in groups that hide our individuality but still can’t protect us? Who are we fooling? Surely this insanity has an explanation! Surely there’s a better way.

Putting mind to good use

Anything that’s pointless, meaningless, and worthless has no Logic. Can’t be the product of Creation and can’t be Life. Can’t be recognized by Logic and admitted into Reality. It's an impossibility that belongs in the Child's dream.

The purpose, meaning, and worth of human-body “lives” and their illusory material world consists entirely of the use that Child-mind is guided to put it to by his Intuition-Memory, the Holy Spirit. Meaning given to illusory human “life,” “relationships,” “happenings,” is not inherent in an unreal world that was made not Created. It’s derived and dependent on Child’s free choice of Holy Spirit guide instead of non-being ego guide.

The illusory projection of guilt from Child’s unconscious-dreaming mind and the illusory material world of human bodies that resulted is otherwise without real purpose, meaning, and worth. It is not Reality. It is not Life. It is not Creation.

What can we do about it? Choose the right Guide, change our minds, and wake up.

Code's function is to ensure the coherence and integrity of Reality

Logic-God isn’t code or product of code; code is product of Logic-God / Source. Essential attribute of Logic-God is Source of code that defines Reality-Creation. Source does not / cannot code / pre-define unique compositions of changing-evolving circumstances that give rise to contexts of Purpose-Meaning that supply conditions for Logic’s response.

Code’s function is to ensure that its organic-genetic outgrowth – its products-manifestations – are aligned with Logic and therefore certifiably Real. Nothing illogical-irrational that would interrupt the sequence of Logic, disrupt its Implications-Interconnections, violate its coherence-integrity, is admissible-possible in Reality. The essential attribute of Reality-Creation is Logical. Event #1 that cost Child his Consciousness was necessarily a violation of Logic.

Changing circumstances that can't be coded are built into the Meaning of Logic

Logic can have no viral shadow code / opposite because:

It’s the source of code rather than code itself.
It’s an ongoing sequence that involves-requires responses to circumstances-situations / contexts that can’t be preordained-anticipated or controlled. These are of Necessity built into the definition-Meaning of Logic for which there can be no coded opposite. Without the “question” there can be no “answer.”

The sequence of Logic depends on circumstances to establish context for Purpose-Meaning / Worth in timelessness, on unique situations in the Now, in between before and after, that require spontaneous determinations of controlling considerations to enable action that connects before with after and moves sequence forward. What is subject to Logic-definition codes are the elements of Reality-Creation – Selves, roles and relationships, and Gifts-Values – that can be assigned Logical attributes needed to Create-Reciprocate Worth from circumstances-contexts.

Statelessness was the original condition-circumstance, the “before” with implication of non-Logic in the Now, that prodded Logic-Energy sequence into motion toward logical consequence “after.” Logic-Energy’s response to illogic of statelessness is ongoing and present. It’s reflected in mirror-image opposite of material universe’s ongoing expansion-response to Child’s projection of guilt that caused Big Bang.

The ego is blind to our individual-intimate circumstances

Shadow opposite codes for products of Logic’s Reality-Creation codes never evolve from circumstances-contexts that give rise to Purpose-Meaning / Worth because Logic-code definitions can’t be applied to what comes after in sequence of Logic. The ego’s lies-deceptions being viral-coded are necessarily-inevitably blind to their subjects’ individual circumstances-contexts in the moment which are a part / attribute of their Logic that can’t be coded.

Pointlessness that physicists attribute to the cosmos traces back to its source within the unconscious Child’s ego-corrupted mind for just this reason: the ego’s viral coded “thought system” systematically contradicts Reality-Truth, but not being grounded in the context of circumstances it cannot have Purpose or Meaning. Where Meaning can be found is not in the study of matter but in the psychology of the Child’s mind, deceived by the ego’s coded lies, that projected guilt.

Physicists looking for Meaning in the origin and fate of the universe through the study of matter look in the wrong place. The circumstances they seek lie within mind that’s unconscious. Within a mind so desperate to rid itself of the guilt of separation that it dreamed that it could project guilt and its fear of punishment outward and in the process made the illusion we call the world. Where are the circumstances? Within the Psyche of humanity, our own Memory. Not projected bodies that are part of the illusion but thoughts that cannot leave their source. We are the sleeping Child.

The ego's answer to Creation: Plato's Cave

The ego has an antithesis for the sequence of Logic and for Creation that extend-expand into the unknown. Into circumstances constantly-unpredictably changing. Into contexts whose Purpose and Meaning are as yet undivined. Into implications that have not yet interconnected to form logical Reality. Into compositions of thoughts, feelings, and values that have not yet created new Life. Into situations that by definition cannot be coded to ensure their Logic because the Child’s Free Will is essential to their choice.

The ego’s antithesis is the sameness of an unchanging status quo, an expression not of the liberation of Free Will to divine Purpose and Meaning out of a profusion of possibilities but of the subjugation of wills imprisoned by the denial of possibilities. By the authority and unquestioned dominance of its inaccessible viral-coded author – conditions that make a perfect fit with Plato’s Cave. Where the presence of its Cave master ego and his absolute control are all that the ego can offer for the absence of changing circumstances. For the absence of contexts with their Purpose and Meaning. Where a status quo of sameness, of fabricated appearances devoid of meaning substitutes its own authority for the necessities of Freedom, the Logic, order, and discipline of Judgment.

Its message is an absurdity of circular self-referential reasoning: It is because I say it is and you will obey. Unpersuasive to all but to Cave occupants who have surrendered their Judgment, their Free Will, in exchange for the superficial entertainments of fantasy. For being excused from having to adapt to the reality of changing circumstances while their powers and abilities to survive and thrive in Reality atrophy. And instead of receiving Protection from their master they are condemned to incompetence, impotence, and death. To circumstances that inevitably bring change despite the Cave’s founding premise: that change of minds, the ego’s undoing, the undoing of oppression and deception, is impossible.

The permanence of change

Logic-Energy permanently at rest would imply that existence-presence of a thing doesn’t necessarily imply possibility of its opposite, i.e. would imply the absence of a rule of Logic, a logical impossibility. Therefore Logic-Energy permanently at rest is an impossibility as is Reality-Creation being in an unchanging-stationary state.

Source: notes from book in progress: Story of the Child, section 1. State of Opposites

The first Implication of Logic

The original act that began the sequence of Logic that began everything was an Implication of Logic:
• from a condition of statelessness, the opposite of Creation -- worthlessness vs. Worth, pointlessness vs Purpose, meaninglessness vs Meaning, lifelessness vs Life, non-being vs Being:-- that state must Be and it must be the state of Creation.
• from statelessness, the opposite of Reality-Knowledge: that state must be Real and that it must be the state of Reality.
* from statelessness, the absence of everything: that state must be the presence of everything.

Statelessness – the absence of Everything -- prodded the sequence of Logic into motion with the Implication of Reality-Creation because “absence of Everything” implied “absence of Logic,” a Logical impossibility and therefore a condition of unreality. Logic’s response was an act of Necessity and self-assertion: the presence and inviolability of Logic.

The original act that began the sequence of Logic that began everything was thus an Implication of Logic from statelessness, the opposite of Reality-Creation, the opposite of Being-Life. The Implication contained DNA genetics with coded instructions for the design, development, and activation of the state of Reality-Creation, the state of Being-Life, attributes with the Force of Logic that holds all Implications and their Interconnections together.

The first Implication caused the first Interconnection in the sequence of Logic that required:
• Connection-match between before-after in the sequence to move it forward
• Reciprocity to complete the Connection and its effect.

Existentialism: Meaning that flows from the bottom up

Precedent was set with universal Implication for Meaning-Worth: that it always begins with Implications drawn from circumstances on the ground, from the situation in the Now involving whatever Selves and stakes-considerations, whatever Values-Worth compose the situation. This is what is meant by "Existentialism." The Logic of Meaning-Worth requires context for establishing Meaning, and context must be provided by circumstances at the current “before” point in the sequence of Logic.

The original activation by Energy, the Force of Logic

Energy is the electromagnetic Force that interconnects the Implications of Logic, the gravitational Force that holds the Interconnections of Logic together, and the nuclear Force that keeps opposites apart.

The original activation by the Force of Logic -- by Energy, -- that activated Reality-Creation, was its activation of the seed of Creation: Oneness that contained genetic code-instructions for everything at that point in the sequence of Logic in those circumstances. It did not contain everything that was to come because it had not happened yet. That is, it had not been recognized by Mind-Consciousness, validated by Love-Values, and authorized by Logic, so it belonged to the “after” part of the sequence of Logic and was yet to become Known. It was yet to be part of the exploration, the advance-extension into the unknown that is Creation.

The original activation of Energy, the Force of Logic, was caused by an Implication of Logic from statelessness. The sequence of Logic at the beginning thus began with an Implication of Logic that awakened Energy from a state of rest to engage with Creation and perform its first application: activating Logic’s seed of Creation, that is. activating its coded instructions for the design and development of Reality and the seeding of new Life that is Creation.

The first act by Oneness, the seed of Creation

The first act by Oneness-Innocence, the seed of Creation-Life, was an act of organic growth in alignment with Logic, that is, in the sequence of Logic deploying its Energy. The first act was organic evolution from Oneness into the marriage between two attributes of Logic: Mind-Masculinity Reason-Thought with Love-Femininity Value-Passion. It was an act of Reciprocity that holds all of Logic's Implications and their Interconnections together. It was in essence an affirmation of Worth, an act of Love which is an attribute of Logic.

The Implications and Reciprocity of Logic give Mind its ability to think and reason, to analyze and judge. The Force of Logic’s reciprocal Interconnections gives Mind its power to think and reason, to analyze and judge with consequences, i.e. to act, to decide, choose, and connect, to make Mind-Thoughts causes with effects. The Interconnections and Reciprocity of Logic give Love its ability to feel, to care and value. The Force of Logic’s reciprocal Interconnections gives Love its power to feel and care, to value and judge with consequences, i.e. to act, to share, affirm, evaluate, and connect, to make Love-Feelings causes with effects. It is the Implications and Interconnections of Logic that bind Mind and Love together into one Creative Force.

The first act of Oneness was thus to form the first intimate-loving Relationship capable of Parenting a Child, thereby capable of forming the first intimate family Relationship. The Couple was the first Parents of Creation-Life: Father-Mind and Mother-Love. The first act by Oneness, the seed of Creation-Life, was thus to form the first Relationship between Selves that are attributes of Logic which is the Source of Oneness, the Source of Reality-Creation which is everything that Is and everything that is to Be.

All steps in the sequence of Logic, then and Now, are part of a logically Interconnected succession of Implications.

The original engagement of Energy that led to the activation of Oneness was caused by an Implication from Reality-Creation, the opposite of statelessness. All causes in the Laws of cause and effect are Implications of Logic.

The Logical impossibility of separation

“Absence of Everything” and “presence of Everything” kept apart by Energy nuclear Force are still Interconnected / held together by Implications of Logic / Energy electromagnetic Force and by gravitational Force that Interconnects Logic / Everything. So long as opposites kept apart by Energy nuclear Force are still Interconnected by Implications of Logic and Energy electromagnetic Force, so long as the “separation” between Mind and no-mind is maintained both by the gravitational Force of Logic’s Interconnections and the nuclear Force of Logic’s opposites, it is in this sense that there can be no “real separation.”

Yet the Child’s experience with unconsciousness does establish that there is a sense in which separation is real: within the Child’s dream – our illusory material universe -- when it is “made real” and the possibility of no-mind / extinction, the original illogical and therefore unreal condition of statelessness, hangs over the illusion.

Reciprocity: the original Thought of Self-awareness

The original Thought of Self-awareness, of Consciousness, i.e. Mind that includes the capability of Choice, and the original Feeling of Value that includes the incentive, the Motivation, of Freedom i.e. Love, both core attributes of Logic, was Reciprocity. Giving and giving back that formed a Parental Relationship, a couple united as one, capable of producing a third Self, a Child. An extension of Mind and Love, a shared Self, to join with family in a second Relationship, Parents with Child. The Child with the Authority of Logic, empowered by Energy and enabled by Free Choice, was brought into Being to play an indispensable role in the central mission of Creation: the Creation of Worth. The opposite of statelessness. The opposite of worthlessness.

All of this is implied by the Necessity of Logic for activating Reality and Creation, Being and Life. For applying the laws of cause and effect. All implied by the Authority, the Force, and the Loving Kindness of Logic.

What, then, explains ethics and metaphysics? The alignment with Logic in the circumstances in which it finds itself. In its context, that gives everything that is and is to come its Meaning.

3

Encased in every word is the memory of what gave rise to it
Events in human experience that caused a thought
Or discovery, that brought forth a feeling
Of melancholy or joy, regret or pleasure, satisfaction
Or despair.

Encased in every word is the story of how it came to be
And the message it has just for us alone
In the place where we are at
If we will let it flow through our minds and hearts
Our bodies, their sensations

Affect us until we alight in its place like a butterfly
In a clearing
Come to a woodland of strange and wonderful sights
Creatures of sound and movement, touching
And laughter wanting us to be there with them
Their place of wonder

With poetry
With words
Our friends

To a friend with love and whimsy
Saint Patrick’s Day March 17, 2021

Inspired by P Is For Poetry: Poems from Irish Poets
Edited by Seamus Cashman, Illustrated by Corinna Askin and Alan Clarke
(The O’Brien Press, Dublin, 2020)