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

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

Rodney King’s lament

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

The divide between idealists and realists

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

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

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

Personality Types

The only explanation that makes sense

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

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

Personalities and the Logic of opposites

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

Two tiers of opposites 

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

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

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

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

The myth of unlimited power and freedom

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

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

The body is the apple

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

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

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

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

Where the idealist and the realist dwell

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

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

The flash point: freedom of choice

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

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

Mind and brain are not the same

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

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

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

Mind that’s split

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

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

Self that’s split

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

Interpretations of Authority 

Insensitivity from the top down

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

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

Sensitivity from the bottom up

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

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

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

Governance under the law

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

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

Values 

Realism’s flight from Logic

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

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

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

It's all bias

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

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

Our distinctly human tribal values

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

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

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

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

Do we really have a choice?

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

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

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

Why conscience?

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

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

Conflicting values, conflicting stories

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

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

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

The story told by an idealist’s values

An idealist’s values might look something like this:

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

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

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

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

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

The story told by a realist’s values

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whither goest thou. . . ? 

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

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

. . . Into the wastebasket of time

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming to terms with the way things are 

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

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

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

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

Why a good thing? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good neighbors 

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

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

Personality, character, and values  

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

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

Values have opposites

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

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

Why utility index needs to be updated. . . .  

it's all by intent

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

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

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

From family spats to global mayhem

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

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

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

Avoidance of self-awareness

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

Honesty

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

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

Dishonesty

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

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

The face and the faceless mask in the mirror

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

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

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

The challenge to choose again

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

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

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

The challenge here is to heal

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

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

The indispensable element

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

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

Time and entropy destined to end

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

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

Analysis at the beginning

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

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

INTJ

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

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

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

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

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

When Intuition is obstructed

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

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

When “Feeling” isn’t feeling

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

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

The “feeling” of tribal belonging

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

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

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

Nietzsche’s gift

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

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

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

Hostage to guilt

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

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

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

Toward deconstructing the Big Lie

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

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

ESFP and ESFJ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“War” between separation and healing

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

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

Free Choice with Mind, no choice with body

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

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

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

Where Order and Freedom reside 

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

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

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

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

The Reality of Idealism and the call for healing

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

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

Meant to be used

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

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

The unreality of “realism”

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

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

From one to two sets of values 

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

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

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

When opposite values conflict

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

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

Matter is the source of Consciousness? 

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

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

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

United in opposition

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

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

The voices in our ears  

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

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

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

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

Transmissions in the clear

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

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

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

Why bother?

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

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

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

ESFs will rejoice

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

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

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

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

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

Elusive brain, elusive self

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

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

From chaos to making sense

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

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

The Reality of unrest 

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

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

The unattainable ideal

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

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

Nothing ventured nothing gained

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

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

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

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

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

Family-individual morality (mind-centered) 

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

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered)

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

“Home” - “Relationship” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered) 

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

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered) 

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

“Innocence” - “Beauty” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered) 

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

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered)

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

“Wholeness” - “Wellness” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered) 

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

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered)

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

“Enablement” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered) 

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

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered)

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

“Empowerment” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered)

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

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered) 

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

“Spontaneity” - “Creativity” 

Family-individual morality (mind-centered)

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

Tribe-social morality (body-brain-centered)

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

Published on Leave a comment on Who Was Helen Schucman?

Helen Schucman in Kenneth Wapnick’s telling

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

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

Another Helen Schucman

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

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

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

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

Kenneth’s choice: Freudian analytics vs Jungian intuition 

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

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

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

Which Helen served Jesus’ purpose better?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Helen!

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

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

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

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

Published on Leave a comment on Torpedo Girl – In the Beginning

Bildungsroman: n. A novel whose principal subject is the moral, psychological, and intellectual development of a usually youthful main character.
American Heritage Dictionary, Fifth Edition (2016) 

The dark side of beans

What is that look on your face? Horror. Despair You don’t like hearing from an old guy with a beard? So many! So many what? Pages! Words! What have I done to deserve this? Beans. You ate too many beans, and this is your punishment. I’ll never eat beans again. I promise! 

This is an interesting story. You might enjoy it. It has lots of action. And a girl just like you. Two girls in fact. One is in big trouble, and she needs help. She will if she’s strapped to a torpedo. Don’t spoil the ending! The other is the only person in the universe who can help her. Seriously. I’m not making this up. Will I understand it? Old guys mumbling in their beards tend to lose me.

It’s a lot like Star Wars, the original episode where there was this wonderful Death Star. Cool! It blew up whole planets. That was fun. Does Torpedo Girl get to blow up another Death Star? When our girls are done with it there will be nothing left of the Death Star. OK. But fair warning: I’ll be eating a lot of beans. Oh no! You just spoiled the ending. That’s how they blew up the Death Star!

We’ll be talking a lot about “opposites.” I knew there was a catch. Opposites are just another name for the dark side of the Force. You’ll enjoy all the hot action better if we understand the “dark side” and opposites. Opposites of what? Opposites of anything they’re attached to. What are they, parasites? Yes. We think of the dark side as Palpatine and his evil galactic empire crushing pitiful rebellions. And Lord Vader breathing hard into his dorky helmet while he chokes hapless underlings without touching them. But all they are is opposites. Weak, not strong. This had better be good. 

Mind starting Creation requires thought

What-if stories stimulate our imaginations. This What-if story will put your imagination on steroids. Oh, like Tik Tok. Pah! Another pitiful rebellion! Storm troopers – remove the silly game! 

Imagine that you’re the only thing that is. I do that every day. Then we’re off to a great start. You’re Mind. Yes – pure genius! What a great story! Do you mind if I have another can of beans? Sorry, Mind isn’t matter. It doesn’t need that kind of food. What other kind of food is there? Haven’t you ever heard of food for thought? That’s what this story is. Boring. Beans generate much more excitement.

Can you handle being able to see stuff and make stuff happen without a body? Easy. I’ve always thought of myself as a great mind. Good. You’re Mind and you’d like to make something nice happen. But it won’t be nice if you don’t do it right. You mean I actually have to think? If we’re talking about Mind starting Creation, yes. You’ll have to think. And don’t forget, the Jedi Knights had to go through rigorous training. Then they had to figure out how to deliver the torpedo that blew up the Death Star. That took a lot of thinking.

Logic and Love say no one is above the law

Anything that “happens” needs a definition. A definition that says what it is and what it does. No exceptions. How come? So its definition doesn’t conflict with other definitions or duplicate them. There has to be Order so everything fits together, and everyone gets along. Already it sounds like I don’t get to do anything I want. You can do anything you want so long as it’s possible. It can’t be possible because I want it?

Everything must be part of Order including Mind that defines things. Wow! I thought Mind would be in charge of everything! How can this be? You’ll be OK with this because this is how Order defines itself, and nothing nice can happen without Order. If Mind or anything could run around and do whatever it wants, there would be no Order. Order is harmony. It’s the same principle as democracy: no one is “above the law.” Not even the president. What law? 

Think of the laws that govern making stuff happen as laws of cause and effect. You’ve heard the expression, “That’s the way it is.” Well, the laws are the way things are and that’s that. It’s Necessity. You’re frowning. You know me. I’m not happy if I can’t mess with the rules. Sorry about that. These are rules no one can mess with. Not even the Logic of Mind that laws are based on. Without this law none of the other laws can have any effect. Say it again. No one is above the law, not even the president. Not even the Logic of Mind itself.

You mean Mind is the source of laws but it can’t control them? Yes. The attribute of Mind that’s responsible for governance is responsible for its laws that make governance possible, and they’re made up of equal parts Logic and Love. “Mind” throughout implies Logic and Love combined as one. Then we should say “Mind-Love.” We could, but we might need that to refer to another character. We can infer it without stating it.

No Freedom without Order in a shared world

Definitions are like laws that establish what things are and they can’t be anything different. Mind can make stuff happen so long as it abides by the laws of Necessity. Once it’s defined a thing that’s the way it is. Give me liberty or give me death! Freedom from the tyranny of George III but not Freedom from Order. There can’t be any “liberty” without Order and any Order without laws. The good news is that since the laws are there to ensure Order and Mind can’t change them, they’re also there to ensure Freedom.

If I can’t do anything I want, how is this Freedom? OK. You can have that kind of “freedom,” but only if you decide not to make something nice happen. If you’re happy being the only show in town and having it all to yourself. If not, you’ll be sharing your world with your creations, and no one can share a world with others and be happy if some yo-yo is doing whatever she wants. People in our world do that a lot. They sure do. And it’s what gets them into trouble. Sometimes into jail. They don’t like living in a shared world. They’re a colossal nuisance.

Gertrude’s wisdom

When do I get to make something nice happen? When you learn about what’s possible in a shared, orderly world. Imagine that you’re in a classroom with a blank video screen. Oh good -- video games! Let’s get started! Would you rather have a blank blackboard instead? No video games allowed! Something blank – a blackboard or a video screen – must have been there when Logic and Love first set thinking and feeling in motion. Then I have to think logically. What’s that mean? Think with feeling logically, yes, because you’ll be thinking with values, and feeling is where values come from. Values put the “nice” into making something nice happen.

Logic tells Mind what situation it’s in. It describes circumstances so Mind can figure out where it is and what it means. Then it can use Reason to choose what to do about it. It can’t reason without having a purpose, and Logic makes sure that purpose fits the circumstances. There’s an old joke. Alice Toklas asked Gertrude Stein when Gertrude was very old and wise, “What’s the answer?” Gertrude answered, “What’s the question?” What she meant was, “What are the circumstances?” Without circumstances in the moment and Logic figuring out what they’re telling us, how can we know the question? That was Gertrude’s wisdom.

The Force can’t be a couch potato

We call purpose that fits the circumstances “context.” Even Mind that’s getting started with a blank video screen needs context to know whether and how to do anything. Making anything happen won’t be nice if it doesn’t have the right values and fit the circumstances. Our circumstances are nothing has happened yet and I’m getting bored!

Torpedo Girl is getting bored, so Mind had better get cracking. Its context is nothing is happening, and you know what? What? That would help to explain why Mind did get cracking, because “nothing happening” could be a situation that Mind, which is definitely not nothing, can’t tolerate. Maybe it can Be forever, but it can’t not Do forever. Why not? 

Because how can Mind that’s Logic combined with Love just sit around not doing anything? Not taking care of something or someone? Showing that they care? Mind’s circumstance in the classroom where nothing is happening is a whole lot of thinking and loving that needs to be doing to be what it is. You mean Mind needs stuff just like us? Logic combined with Love is passion. It’s Force. Like the Force in Star Wars? Certainly! Force can’t be Force without acting. It can’t be motivated to act if its passion to respond to circumstances and express itself is a couch potato.

Getting it right: beer, pizza, and football

Wow! I was thinking our Mind is a brain inside a bottle in school where nothing happens. This is different! Very. It’s a dynamo instead, bursting with passion and Energy eager to get going. A powerful locomotive sitting in a train station ready to take its passengers on a grand excursion to an intriguing destination. Once Logic sets up the context.

Good for you! You’ve learned one important lesson. What’s that? Deciding with Reason and acting before we’ve let Logic tell us what our situation is, is a big mistake. Doing what’s right is doing “what the situation calls for.” We can’t do what the situation calls for without first letting our situation tell us what it is. Without first getting it right. Mind needs Logic and Love for that. In our world, easier said than done. It requires lots of intuition, but more about that later.

Get it right before do it right. Are there more circumstances to tell us what our situation calls for? Pay attention to the video screen. It’s about to feed us the most important circumstance for our story. The most important circumstance for another context, too: the world we live in. Ah -- I knew it! Lipstick! Women need lipstick! Yes. And men need beer and pizza. And football. Don’t forget the chips. Beer, pizza, chips, and football. And lots of makeup. Torpedo Girl can go home. We’re already in Heaven.

The impossibility of Mind without Love

The wisdom of Logic is like a stream flowing down a dry streambed, filling each hole at a time, each in its own time. We are the stream, and this is what Wisdom requires of us. We can also think of Logic as flowing in a sequence from left to right. From premise to implication, from before to after. Indefinitely, because one implication always leads to another. Like the geometric value of Pi that never resolves to a whole number. It just goes on and on. You’re going on and on.

It matters what the first premise is, but we don’t have to be too fussy how it’s worded. “Possibility.” This could be the first premise that comes to Mind when Logic and Love have defined its context. You’re Mind and you want to make something “nice” happen, but what do you mean by “nice?” What are the possibilities? This is always the first question when minds begin to choose.

This is it? The most important circumstance? Almost. Possibility could be the first premise because of what it implies: creation, ideals, vision, hope. It’s kind of a North Star we can focus on to help us navigate through distractions, contradictions, adversity, and discouragement. If you’re Mind and you have your heart set on making something nice happen. . . . Heart?

Did you forget? Mind and heart go together. It bears repeating -- they’re inseparable. I was hoping to be a comic book super action hero with no feelings. Not possible. “Possibility” can’t be Mind without Love. Not in our What-if world where everything so far is fine. It’s very different in our world but only because it seems that way. More about that later.

The impossibility of impossibility

For now, if you have your heart set on making something nice happen, you’ll definitely want to stay focused on possibility. Then what is the video screen telling us that’s the most important circumstance? Impossibility. The opposite of possibility. Imagine “possibility” showing up like a link you can click on, and it will take you somewhere. It’s an active link. Then the same instant another link shows up beside it, faded out like it’s not active. A word that’s the first word’s exact opposite. It’s obviously meant to take you somewhere, too, but not while “possibility’s” link is active. Creepy. I’m not sure I want to know where “impossibility” goes if it’s the opposite of “possibility.” Why does it have to show up at all? Do we have to bother with opposites? 

It has to show up because of the same Logic that puts anything on the screen. If a thing is to exist and it implies the existence of its opposite, then some way must be found for its opposite to “exist,” too. The implications of Logic are Force that accounts for Creation along with the connections of Love. But the same implications can’t help accounting for contradiction. And if the definition of a thing implies contradiction, its definition must accommodate contradiction. 

The dark side is opposites 

Logic and Love don’t like contradiction any more than we do, but there you have it. Have what? The “dark side.” The dark side is opposites, and they “exist” because Logic put them there. And if Logic put them there, nothing can be done about it. What’s “logical” about a thing and its contradiction existing side-by-side in the same place at the same time? Sounds crazy to me. 

It is crazy. Order requires Logic and Logic doesn’t tolerate contradictions. The ideal of Logic is to arrive at a place of Peace where there are no contradictions, where the Force can come to rest at last. It will never happen. Not as long as Logic supports Creation. Not as long as Mind wants to make something nice happen.

Meanwhile, we’re stuck with opposites – with “impossibility.” Some way must be found to get all impossibilities – opposites -- out of the picture. How do we do that? The inactive link for impossibility on the video screen offers more than a clue. It’s already taken care of it. Logic has found a way for opposites to exist without “existing.” On a computer we would know to go to a different page on a website, to a different website, or to a different app to find where impossibility’s link is active. To another computer world.

Logic acknowledges the implication of opposites without requiring that they inhabit the same world as their hosts. The parasites are given their own world with its own properties that don’t conflict with their host’s world. Why doesn’t it conflict? 

The faded link to unreality 

If the “existence” of a parasite-opposite is entirely derived from its host’s existence, then it obviously has no existence of its own. Or attributes of its own, either, because its entire definition is derived from its host. It’s defined as its host’s opposite. It has no definition of its own, and nothing can exist that hasn’t been given its own definition. Parasite-opposites don’t get their definition from Logic. They get it from an implication of their hosts’ definition.

The faded link to impossibility takes us to another world that matches its essential attribute: non-existence. It’s unreal. The parasite-opposites world doesn’t conflict because it’s unreal. How can unreality conflict with Reality if it doesn't exist?

For now, Mind is assured that wherever possibility’s link is active impossibility’s won’t be. It may not even see it or be aware that it’s there. But it’s been forewarned. That’s why we started here in the classroom with the video screen. To wave a red flag called “impossibility,” because that’s what parasite-opposites are: an impossibility in Reality. The link will be there, inactive and waiting for the right circumstances for something or someone to make it active. A snake waiting for someone to step on it.

Can it be a cow pie? I won’t finish her story if Torpedo Girl is going to step on a snake. OK, but only if it’s a huge cow pie. I won’t enjoy Torpedo Girl’s story if she only steps in a little cow pie.

Living the dream

The inactive link is waiting for a parasite-opposite’s host to click on it by mistake and make its unreal world “real.” Not really Real, but “real” like a vivid dream. It can’t be Logic that determines whether impossibility’s link becomes active and someone clicks on it. It wouldn’t be Logic’s mistake. It depends on the parasites’ hosts. It depends on Torpedo Girl. It depends on us. It would be our mistake. We are forewarned.

Our story revolves around how understanding this basic circumstance, or fact, can be used to get our girl out of trouble. So, if I’m Mind and I’m going to make something nice happen, I have to be aware that everything has an opposite, and opposites aren’t real. Yes. There’s a dark side, but this is its essential property: it isn’t real. We can only make it seem real when we’re dreaming. Otherwise, it’s an illusion, a magic act. I’m glad we got this settled, because dark sides are everywhere in our world, and they sure seem real. They tell me that our world is a What-if world, but we don’t have to go into that now.

Freedom of Will, Freedom of Choice

Imagine that the nice thing your Mind wants to make happen is to create a world of beauty and peace, Logic and Love. A world that provides a safe, nurturing haven for Life. The miracle of eternal Life that exists in timelessness, where it’s always Now. Life that has Worth because it has purpose, it’s freely chosen and earned. Because it’s exploring, learning, and growing. Having great fun with creativity -- endless diversity evolving in an environment of exquisite Beauty, a soul-sharing sanctuary of innocent work and play. Because all this is a gift from Logic and Love that’s reciprocated – appreciated and given back. Wow! That is a nice thing.

Imagine that Creation requires another Being to achieve its purpose. To see that the Worth of Life and Creation is freely chosen and earned. A Being with its own definition, its own identity, so that Mind and Creation aren’t just patting themselves on the back. Who would that be? 

Our girl, the Child. The Child of the Mind-Love we mentioned, her parents. Father Mind-Choice and Mother Love-Freedom, whose role is to give birth to the Being that Creation requires: Free Choice. The same as Free Will? The Child is an extension of her parents’ Will, their Being. This places her in Relationship with her parents. They are inseparable, and their Relationship is inseparable from the Child’s function. She can’t do her job without it.

But because she is, and has, the capacity to choose independently, she is also Choice. And Choice can never, ever, be controlled by an external influence. Not by her parents or by their Relationship. So, while they’re in Relationship and inseparable, their roles must be kept apart. This is true whether the Child is awake, doing her job in Creation, or asleep and dreaming she’s somewhere else. Free Will and Free Choice refer to the same Child performing different functions: choosing freely while extending the Will, the Being, of her parents.

It's all about character

We will see that the Child doing her job isn’t anything like we imagine it on earth. How’s that? We think of “heaven” as a place where an old guy with a beard watches over angels with wings playing harps on little clouds. As if having a purpose and striving to attain it couldn’t compare with the satisfaction of doing nothing. There’s no change, no “action,” which here must mean some form of gambling, addiction, conflict, and violence.

The Child your Mind-Love brings into Being and Creation leads a very interesting life without any of this. No silly harps and no bullets flying around either. There’s plenty of purpose and meaning. Plenty of risk-taking, too, which requires courage as well as alertness. Plenty of change and innovation. It’s all about character, and that’s always interesting. Is there a reward?

You bet! The  satisfaction of contributing to the Worth of Life. To the meaning of Creation. Every relationship a soulmate. The rapture of intimacy with Mind-Love itself. Of loving and being loved more than you can ever imagine. Happiness! What more could you ask? Wow! She’s got a life! Yes. And Torpedo girl does, too. She’s got a job to do. They both have interesting lives, and they are about to get much more interesting.

[To be continued]

Published on Leave a comment on What Happens When We Remove the Shadow Code from Its Shadow?

More Big Bangs than science or comic books can count

Life created in Reality wants to be detected by Logic-God and by the Child’s Parents Mind-Love. That’s how it’s welcomed into Reality-Being: by being recognized. By being loved. By being noticed by Consciousness whose function is to bring all Creation into Reality by its awareness. For Consciousness to be Conscious of a Life newly created is to accept it into the Interconnectedness of Reality: to make it Known by Knowledge. To make it Real.

This is what happened to us when our Parents gave birth to their Child. Only something happened afterward that caused the Child, who is an extension of Mind-Love, to lose Consciousness. And when she did something got into her mind, a foreign, illogical thought with an alien, uncomfortable feeling –guilt and fear -- that she tried to expel. Thoughts and their associated feelings can’t logically leave their source in Reality. It’s impossible, though in our world of illogic perception is projection. Our perverse habits of mind would be lost without it.

So, to accomplish her end the Child’s unconscious mind was only able to get rid of the discomforting thought by expelling it into an imaginary place. A dream still locked within the Child’s mind. Into unreality. Her distraught mind was only able to do it by imagining it. What she imagined – this expulsion – produced our universe of spacetime and matter. Probably many universes according to both physics and Logic. More Big Bangs than science or comic books can count. Ours was a new world very strange to the Child but all too familiar to us because it’s the only world we’ve ever known: our bodies and their physical environment. Our senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell that enable us to navigate our unreal world.

“You’re making it up”

We’re imaginary versions of the Child whose unconscious mind imagined it was projecting an alien thought-feeling into a separate-substitute reality. A reality perversely made real for us by our bodies’ senses. A reality whose definition is the opposite of the Reality the Child will awaken to when she regains Consciousness. Which has no need of spacetime-matter and Knows nothing of it. Her Reality is Being, the Creativity of Life. Of organic, living Growth realized by the definition of what it is and what it does. Defined by Logic and by Mind-Love, the Child’s Parents, themselves products of Logic, its implications and definitions.

Our reality, here, is non-being. Whose definition is derived from Being turned inside out and upside down. Everything the reverse of what Is. Everything detectable by our bodies’ senses is by definition the opposite of what’s Real. “Life” in a state of unreality is “made” rather than “created,” as in “made up.” As in “make it up,” “you’re making it up.” Like an illusion fantasized by an illusionist-magician or a mythmaking story-teller. It’s not really “life,” just an approximation of it, an appearance. The “reality” that can’t even compare with near-death experiences their subjects describe as “more real than real.” It’s the product of the alien thought and feeling that got into the Child’s unconscious mind that the Child was desperate to get rid of.

All it is, this intruder, is a version of what we perceive from experience that accompanies everything of seeming value: its shadow opposite. The “dark side.” There’s the dark side shadow opposite of kindness which is unkindness. Selfishness the dark side of generosity. Our dictionaries have terms for every imaginable form of perversity and depravity and we’re familiar with pretty much all of it. So, it’s not a stretch to imagine the dark side of all of it: an all-encompassing shadow-code opposite of Being.

Call it non-being. Follow the implications and Interconnections of Logic and we’ll have all of its attributes, starting with the central fact that it doesn’t exist. Non-being can’t be. If a primary attribute of a thing created in Reality is organic, growing Life, then a primary attribute of its opposite must surely be inorganic, static lifelessness. Mindlessness and lovelessness, too, since Life in Reality is Created by Mind-thought bonded with Love-feeling.

Never asking Why

A virus is a lifeless, mindless-loveless code that instructs cells it takes captive to replicate itself. It has no home of its own but, like a hermit crab that occupies empty shells, it makes itself at home wherever there is one. The intruder non-being, an illusory thought that took the Child’s unconscious mind captive like a cell, replicates itself in our dream world. Perpetuates itself by bodies procreating. Maintains itself and its appearances by being continually detected by bodies’ senses and necessarily goes to great lengths to maintain appearances that can be detected.

But “existing” in unreality makes shadow necessarily averse to detection of another sort: to exposure. To awareness of the truth that it doesn’t exist. That it’s unreal, just an unliving virus occupying its captive, a once-living host. Dracula the undead shielding himself from the rays of the dawn. A cockroach desperate to evade detection. This would be the defenses built into the code: where Life Created in Reality is drawn to the light of awareness, for the recognition of Logic and Mind-Love that sanctions its Reality, the shadow code avoids the light of awareness that would shine it away. It can’t be “known.” It can only be imagined. And its imagining can only be sustained by appearances.

The viral shadow code that demands detection by bodies evades detection by minds. Minds that seek awareness so the Child can awaken. Minds that seek awareness by learning, growing, developing, and expanding. That seek awareness by thinking, questioning, and by following the implications of Logic that lead to answers. To understanding. Minds that ask Why. The intruder viral shadow code instructs its captives to put all their faith in their bodies’ senses and none in their minds. To abandon mind entirely by forbidding it to ever ask Why.

Why? So minds can never uncover the truth about the code that’s taken their minds captive: that it doesn’t exist. That it’s all made up – an illusion. That it has no life, no power or authority of its own. That the appearance of “the power of the dark side” is energy appropriated from the life of its host. That the host has been duped by its occupier, a nothing, into deceiving itself. Into imagining that its attempt to get rid of an unwanted thought-feeling by expelling it into a dream world actually succeeded when nothing actually happened. The guilt, the fear, and their devious sponsor are still there.

There are no “saviors”

We’ve been scammed. The Child in her unconscious state has dreamed up a bizarre conspiracy theory whose absurdities are everything non-being. Everything non-existent. The Child and her viral replications – us in our bodies – have been gulled. We are all fools being led around by the nose by a passel of deceptions. Of lies. Of arguments that would collapse into nothingness the instant they’re exposed to the truth.

Why couldn’t the Parents have protected their Child from this calamity? If Being were to Know what lies in its shadow it would bring it out of the shadow into the light of Reality. It would create a contradiction – two opposing realities -- that could not survive Logic. The possibility of unconsciousness and its illusory consequences are for the Child with Free Will to be aware of, not Awareness itself. The same element missing in the Child’s awareness at birth, that caused her to lose Consciousness -- awareness of that which her Parents could not be aware of, -- led her into the Joker’s trap.

The Parents whose awareness makes Creation Real could not prevent their Child’s fall from her Sanctuary of Creation into unconsciousness and illusion. Neither could they prevent her fall from illusion into the Joker’s substitute reality of lies, the world we call “home.” It’s for the Child and her Guide, activated by Logic, to extricate herself and prevent another calamity. It’s our responsibility. With guidance to be sure, but not with “saviors.”

Reclaiming minds by following the implications of Logic

How does one address a mind that’s been taken captive by a viral shadow code? To let it know that something is amiss. That the “reality” it’s been conditioned-coded to detect isn’t really “there?” If it’s been taken captive then it’s mindless and it can’t be addressed. How does one address its captor to make it go away? How does one address anyone in Plato’s Cave, its master or its occupants? One doesn’t. Addressing the captor with or without opposition – fury, projection of guilt, attack – only reaffirms its “reality.” Makes it real. It responds to being addressed lovingly or hatefully the same way, by not going away. This is a form of detection that the Joker relishes.

The only recourse isn’t to validate the intruder’s feigned presence but to undo its lies. To expose the truth. To question the appearances that prop up the pretender to the throne. Its fraudulent rule. The imposter’s usurpation of its hosts’ minds. Beginning with the premise that we aren’t mind. That we’re bodies instead and all that’s real can only be what our bodies’ senses tell us.

We begin the long, arduous task of reclaiming our freedom, our sovereignty and self-awareness, by reclaiming our minds: the ability and power to think for ourselves. To ask the forbidden question: Why? and follow the implications of Logic, of Reason, to the answers. To the truth. To self-awareness that’s not defined by anything to do with the intruder. With non-being that insists that our unreality of spacetime and matter are real. That our bodies whose senses lock it into place in our imaginations are substitutes for god. That they’re the final authority on who we are and what we do, to be venerated like idols. That in a world where God can't be sensed by bodies the veneration of bodies and their illusory author -- idolatry -- is good.

We begin to do our part to help the Child reclaim her freedom and sovereignty, her place in Reality and her role in Creation, by understanding that everything we’ve been conditioned from birth by our bodies to believe is real is unreal. Our world was not “created by God.” Though it’s certainly a manifestation of the power of Mind, it’s only a dream within an unconscious mind where the unreal has been made real. Made real by bodies’ senses built into the dream. A dream made real by itself, so at odds with Logic that it can’t be taken seriously.

We begin to do our part by letting go of our addiction to appearances. To the satisfactions and pleasures of the sensuous and sensual, scarce compensation for the misery of separation, sickness, injury, and death. By embracing another reality we’ve been conditioned – hoodwinked – into believing isn’t real. The reality of Mind. The Child’s Mind. The Memory of our own Mind embedded in our soul. Protected by our Psyche inviolate. Where everything that Is can be intuited and eventually accessed by Logic as the Child awakens. A reality of timelessness and eternal Life instead of wretched mortality. Accessed by Reason and Love that are inseparable. Inseparable because a mind with Free Will that would choose cannot do so without evaluating. Evaluating with values supplied by their only conceivable source, the source of all feeling: Love.

We begin to do our part when we’ve opened our minds to guidance from Reason-Love and detached from the Joker. From the absurdities of non-being that infected the Child’s unconscious mind and led it into a terminal state of psychosis. Into a fevered hallucination. Into insanity, the state of mind that rules – not governs – our planet today.

Freedom for the occupants of Plato’s Cave, freedom for us

How does one free the occupants of Plato’s Cave? When Plato’s enlightened one saw daylight and its source, the sun, he returned to tell of his discovery. He informed his cave-mates that the images cast by firelight weren’t real, thus implying that all the meaning his cave-mates had been attributing to them, all their value and “benefits,” were of no consequence other than to delude. He asked his cave-mates to question the reality of flickering shadows based solely on his discovery of sunlight. What he failed to do – what Plato’s philosophy didn’t lead him to do – was to question the reality of the cave-master based on his discovery of the source of light: the sun.

The discovery that should have brought about enlightenment wasn’t things illuminated but the source of the illumination: the sun. The sun and the source of the illusion: not firelight but the master of the Cave. Had the enlightened one grasped the significance of the sun, had he turned his cave-mates’ attention to its absurd knock-off in the cave -- the prison master nothingness hidden by the darkness -- they would have grasped the fallacy behind the wile in all its implications. They would have understood, finally, that the “benefits” of the flickering images were not only an illusion, they were actually costs. Revealing this essential truth about their captor, that it’s unreal, that its authority is a lie, would have removed the premise that held all of its lies together. Would have revealed the pointless cruelty behind the entire deception. It would have freed the occupants’ minds and restored their free will. They would have retracted their projection of power, their own authority, onto a nonentity and abandoned the cave gladly, without further persuasion. Instead of killing their liberator for depriving them of their “benefits,” they would have thanked him.

Had Plato’s unfinished philosophy separated what he understood to be mind and matter into Reality and unreality, as Jesus has done in A Course in Miracles and Parmenides before him, he would have understood that the light of the sun represented the Reality of Mind. That the darkness inside the Cave, its opposite, represented the unreality of matter. Not just the flickering shadows but their author, the Cave master. The source of the power of the Allegory of the Cave -- its lasting influence in Western thought -- is the truth it implies about the human condition: that we are the occupants of the Cave. It is our world; we are being deceived by its ruler; and its ruler is a fraud. A truth buried in our psyche, where it permeates our subconscious, never quite reaching the surface.

Bringing truth to the surface

It’s pointless, in this context, to address the captor if it’s not “there” or its captives if their minds aren’t accessible. When the tyranny of sensory perception won’t credit minds with escaping from the darkness into daylight. But it is possible to use our own minds to undo the lies and speak for the truth. To put it “out there” until minds weary of captivity and delusion respond to glimmers of light. Until cracks appear in the armor of bodies’ senses that let in the light, and Life and Reality, Beauty and Creativity, stir again.

Until we get the point: the Joker’s joke is on us. The “power of the dark side” comes from us. All that’s needed to reclaim it for ourselves, to take ownership back from the intruder, is to change our minds. All that’s needed to convert ownership of body-sensed matter to sharing, empowerment, and affirmation, to free us from its baleful influence - the scourge of possession and control, competition and “winning,” dominance and supremacy, specialness and the perverse innocence of victimhood – right predicated on someone else’s wrong, – is to remove the shadow code from its shadow. To change guides and expose it to the light of Reality and Truth. To Logic.

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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

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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.

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Mind-Oneness Knows no opposite. It is self-Consciousness unaware of “others” by definition. It alone is the arbiter of what’s Real. It is Reality itself. It is Being itself within Reality-Creation. It therefore cannot have an opposite that takes any part in its own definition. Otherwise none of this would be true. Not in its context of Reality and Creation or it would violate the Logic of Reality-Creation. In contrast to the illusory “non-mind” of the Child’s unconscious mind’s dream, “no mind” means having nothing to do with mind. It means having nothing to do with anything. Because it is outside the range of Mind’s Logic it has its own Logic, the Logic of the condition of statelessness.

It is the nothingness that is the unreal opposite of the Child’s Mind with Free Choice. But though it cannot be the opposite of Consciousness and Oneness, the Parent Mind that by definition can have no opposites, it must be the opposite of the state of Mind-Being outside the context of Reality and Creation. This is so because of the inviolable rule of Logic: that there can be no state without an opposite if the existence-possibility of an opposite is implied by its Logic-definition. The condition of no state nothingness implied the opposite of its attributes: the state of Mind-Being. Logic bestirred itself from its own state of unrest because of implications: the logical implication of stateless nothingness without an opposite and its own restlessness.

The state of Mind-Being and the condition of statelessness that preceded it are separate. Their separation cannot be an illusion because the logical possibility of the condition of statelessness – not thereness -- is still “there.” It remains a possibility not as a condition that precludes Mind, Reality, and Creation but as a condition that could logically replace it. Because there is no more rest, no more peace in the state of opposites occupied by Creation’s Child, no more of the resolution sought by Logic, by Energy, by “God,” than if Logic reverted to the statelessness that preceded it.

Yet the Logic of interconnectedness still holds. In its context there can be no such thing as “separation.” This is the fundamental Truth, the fundamental rule of Logic, that we, in our attempts to regain Consciousness, must observe. Whether separation between Mind and its predecessor, the condition of statelessness, is a “real” possibility or unreal between the Child’s unconscious mind and his dream of separation from Source and Reality, it’s all bound up in the interconnectedness of Logic.

The overarching context of Logic, its attributes, implications, and interconnections, rules out any possibility of separation from itself. This is the separation that ultimately cannot be real. The necessity of separation between Mind’s stance of Being and its opposite, the statelessness of no mind, no being, is still subject to the overriding necessity of Logic.

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Logos: . . . human reasoning about the cosmos. . . Identified with God, it is the source of all activity . . . the power of reason . . the word of God, which itself has creative power and is God’s medium of communication with the human race. . . divine wisdom . . . .

Logic: . . . Valid reasoning. . . The relationship between elements and between an element and the whole in a set of objects, individuals, principles, or events. . . .

[American Heritage Dictionary]

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The Interconnectedness of Logic

Everything and nothing are subject to Logic including Mind. Everything and nothing are conditions that have attributes not necessarily in Reality or unreality, but in Logic.

Logic is its own state governed by its own rules, by its own conditions and their attributes. Enforced by its own authority, Energy. It is its own source, authority, and legitimacy. What it is and what it does are one in the same: implications.

Follow the money –Deep Throat’s advice to Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward when they were unraveling a notorious political cover-up for the Washington Post that would end a U.S. administration. Advice that turned up answers because they were interconnected by the coherence and cohesion of Logic.

There is no question, no place, no self in Mind or no-Mind, in Reality or unreality, that cannot be positioned somewhere in this interconnectedness and set in motion forward toward the premises, hypotheses, and predictions of theories that are Logic’s own guidance. It is, and cannot be by its own Logic, subject to guidance, influence, or control from any source outside of itself. In the context of Logic there are no “others” and no opposites of Logic in a state of opposites, for even illogic has its Logic: the conditions, attributes, and implications of not being Logic.

The Energy and Discipline of Logic

The Energy of Logic flows from implications and interconnections never being at rest, never being finished, never not being in motion forward. From Energy at the “beginning,” in timelessness, the start of the sequence of Logic, when the state of statelessness could not rest without yielding to its opposite, the state of Mind-Being. The Oneness of Mind-Being is eternally at rest, but being the seed of Creation its Logic required events that led to eternal unrest: the marriage of the Child’s Parents, Mind with Love, and the Child’s role in Creation with Free Will. It was Freedom of Choice that logically could not remain at rest within Oneness. It was the Logic of Creation and the Child’s role in it that brought forth the state of opposites.

The Energy of Logic follows it everywhere throughout the state of opposites:

* from the Reality, Creations, Life, Light, and Worth of the Child’s Consciousness and Creativity, which yield to the essence, purity, and beauty of their Logic

* to the illogic of their opposites, the unreality of destruction, death, darkness, and worthlessness of mindlessness, non-being, inertia, and fear, attributes of unconsciousness.

While Logic is employed by Mind for Mind’s stance of Being, it is not controlled by anything. Logic is its own discipline because it is discipline: the discipline of attributes, implications, and their interconnections. The discipline of definition. It is its own Being because its implications and interconnections are everywhere and infinite. There can be no end to how “deep” and how “far” they go because they are their own context, their own universe. They can “exist” with equal force in the infinity of timelessness – in the eternal Now – and in the temporality of past and future, with only a “present” that can’t be a Now.

Logic is in Mind but of itself, its own state whose scope, whose reach, extends beyond Mind and its state of Being, Oneness, Reality, Creation, Worth, and their illusory opposites to the separation between Mind and no-mind – statelessness -- that is no illusion. To the seed of Energy, the eternal restlessness of Inquiry, the singularity, the Logical origin and sequencing of everything from one point to the next: Logic.

The Logic and Illogic of Separation

Separation between statelessness and its opposite, Mind-Being, can be no illusion because the state of opposites has two dimensions: one the context of the Child’s part in Parent-Mind’s Reality-Creation which exists side-by-side with the possibility of unconsciousness and its illusion of unreality and dream of untruth – our material world. The other lies beyond Reality-Creation with an entirely different possibility from the beginning: the seminal possibility of statelessness, of no mind, no being, that aroused the power of Logic, its Energy, to produce its opposite.

So, while it is true, as Jesus teaches in A Course in Miracles, that separation is not Real within the Child’s context of Reality-Creation, in the sequence of events that preceded the Child, separation of a kind, between the Mind that produced Reality-Creation and the possibility of its opposite, had to be Real. Real not in the sense of Reality as a part of Creation but as a part of Logic.

There are many “separations” within the interconnectedness of Logic that are no more than definitions that distinguish rather than separate. Distinctions between the Selves of Reality Creations -- Father Mind and Mother Love, Parents and Child, Child and his living Creations. Distinctions between the thoughts of a Child-Mind that’s Conscious and a Child-mind that’s unconscious. All combined in one state of Mind by the interconnectedness of Logic.

Outside of Reality-Creation, the state that preceded it and exists beyond it, separation is more than a distinction. It has actual possibilities, not merely unreal possibilities, and is therefore consequential. Because everything and the only thing that connects opposites is the fact that they are opposites. Is the link established through the implications of Logic and their interconnections. Is the Logic – “Logos” – that ties everything together. The tying-of-everything-together that may be the notion of “God.”

“God” at Peace and War

“God” may be a synonym for the Child’s Parents Mind-Love in Reality-Creation, though “Parents” will suffice. I have avoided the notion of “God” but acknowledge it now because I have experienced a “felt perception of the interconnectedness of things.” It was spontaneous, un-premeditated, with only one other experience, a long time ago, to prepare me for it. It was of mind and feeling in an abstract way but also deeply personal, intimate. The Logic of intimacy is something very precious that is forever. Like being touched by Love. Who has not felt it at some time in their lives? Who does not want to feel it?

I riff. “God” may be the Force that comes from not being at rest, that endlessly seeks Order: Perfection, Resolution, Peace – the whole number value of Pi. That seeks wholeness, harmony, unity. Force-Energy at the beginning that couldn’t be at rest with the condition of statelessness, that was caused by the logically untenable, illogical condition of statelessness that required resolution, inevitably led to the state of opposites with the birth of the Child with Freedom of Choice and a central role in Creation.

God-Logos seeking Order-resolution thus produced not only eternal irresolution-competition but a second source of Energy: from friction between opposites. An attribute of disorder, of irresolution and its unrest, is constant, eternal Force-Energy, of a Will toward resolution and rest without friction, without competition and conflict. The Will of God-Logos may be eternally toward Peace. Yet the ultimate source of conflict-unrest may also be a God-Logos of Peace and Order not being at Peace, being in opposition to the condition of statelessness, of no Mind-Being, unable logically to be at rest with it. God-Logos in opposition to itself: the Will to Peace whose Logic eventually produced the state of opposites. The state of eternal conflict.

The Dark Matter of Science and the Allegory of Plato’s Cave

Plato’s philosophy ended before it could be finished. It ran into a contradiction in his Logic: the unreality of body-matter versus the reality of cosmos-matter. Parmenides, his mentor, saw no contradiction: all appearances are illusory. But Plato's pupil, Aristotle, took thought in another direction. He moved Plato’s inquiry off the attributes and implications of Mind onto the attributes and implications of matter. It was a momentous, historic shift, for philosophy that was to guide Western thought ever since moved away from Reason onto the study of biology and a beginning in science. To science’s “quest for knowledge,” guided by the body’s senses: the Logic of sensory perception that at once enlightens us and confuses us. That ultimately condemns us to captivity in the darkness of Plato’s Cave.

An inquiring and honest mind confused by matter will make a mistake in Judgment. But in its consequences science’s faith in the body’s senses is anything but a harmless mistake. Far from living up to its promise, it’s produced an atrocity: mass extinction. In the darkness of Plato’s Cave we bring our children and grandchildren into an expiring world.

How long must this go on?

* Until the thread of Plato’s inquiry into the Logic of Mind is picked up again by philosophy and pursued with serious intent.

* Until science’s “quest for knowledge” is freed from its illogical premise: the reality of matter.

* Until Logic is re-established in the affairs of a species intent on its own destruction because it chooses to be guided by a substitute illusory self that has no Memory of Logic or the wish to retrieve it.

* Until humanity that lives by an impossibility, the belief that we are bodies disconnected and isolated, each of us our own singularity, our own specialness, authors of our own truths, rulers of our delusional worlds, gives up the insane belief that by abandoning the limits of Logic we achieve Freedom.

Insanity – the Logic of illogic: equating opposites. The “logic” of our delusions that equate captivity with Freedom. Pain with pleasure, suffering and death with Happiness and Life. That equate matter, that can only be a projection of Mind unconscious, with Reality that can only be a Creation of Mind that’s Conscious. Matter, that can only be an appearance in a dream - a façade, a deceit -- with Truth.

Our world beset by entropy plunges forward with technology that pits one against another while there is yet to be seen any movement toward unity in our minds. Any glimmer, any hope, of sanity. Aristotle’s paradigm shift has run its course in one branch of science, quantum mechanics, that openly questions the reality of matter. Is it not time to ask: what will lead us out of Plato’s Cave? How do we awaken?

The Way Home Is Logic

Follow the Logic. Start with the attributes of our circumstances – the facts. Reflect on their implications and let their interconnections carry us forward. Never mind wishes and fears, the lures and distractions of entertaining thoughts, the seductive pleasures of sensations and feelings, the satisfactions of ownership and investment in the foolishness and corruption of “wealth” and “power.” Be done with the allure of opposites, appearances and deceptions that offer self-gratification and deliver nothing of Worth. Be done with the losing of “winning,” the ruination of relationships meant to share and empower with Truth, that succumb instead to the delusion of possession and control.

Everything I have is who I am. The Child of Parents Mind married to Love. Free Will. This is the Truth. Not what this world of matter tells us. Not what we have “learned” in Plato’s Cave: “Everything I am is what I have.” An object possessed and controlled. No wonder our world is a descent into self-devouring self-interests! No wonder we can’t “win” for losing! No wonder we can’t think!

Follow the Logic. Turn to the side of Mind governed by Logic that employs Logic. That’s married to Love and would never deviate from the caring, the sharing and empowerment of its values, its Worth. It will take us home.

Where can Logic be found? What is Memory for? That’s where it can be found: in Intuition. What is Mind for that isn’t cluttered with the daily busy-ness of the brain? That’s where Logic can be found: in Thinking. In what thinking does: Reasoning.

Who says so? Our own Minds say so. Who will lead its occupants out of Plato’s Cave? They will. With their own native ability to Think. With Logic.

Published on Leave a comment on Reality in Its Essence

That was “satan” we were looking at. The “no-mind” whose essential attribute is that it doesn’t exist. It’s a long road to explain how a not-thing can assume such a compelling, terrifying place in the human imagination, as though it were very much real, were endowed with super-human, super-natural attributes of its own so powerful that they compete with the powers of “almighty God” himself. Yet it happened. Welcome to the human psyche, the darkness within, to “evil.” This is where it started.

The Story of Mind will lead us to unimaginably beautiful states, so we needn’t despair. The Home we came from and the Sanctuary of Creation that succeeded it are secure in our Memory, and we will make it back. All this stirring of horror in the thought of no-mind requires is Discipline: our resolve not to make it real. The prospect of the switch toggling us out of Mind and into oblivion presents us with the first inviolable rule of the Logic of Mind: do not make opposites real. Do not make unreality real. It is a rule as mandatory in Reality and Creation as it is here in unconsciousness and unreality and as compelling as the other rule we have been taught: Never interfere with the Child’s Freedom of Choice. Never interfere with his Free Will.

It is the Thoughts of Mind that make up Reality. Anything “Real” is the product of a Thought of Mind. Plato’s “ideas.” “Emanations” to others wondering of old how “God” moved in his Fullness. The precedent set in the “Beginning” is that Mind’s answer to the Question does not logically exclude the possibility of a contrary answer. From this possibility must logically flow the possibility of opposites throughout Reality and Creation and into our world of appearances.

The possibility of a contrary answer is not a function of the Logic of Mind but of the Logic of the Question which precedes Mind and is not of Mind. The “Question” is only implied by the switch, and both it and its “Logic” are projections not of Mind but of the author of these speculations. The Child in his unconscious state is driven to expand his knowledge of the event that interrupted his role in Creation, to fully inform his choices so that they may be Free, so that the event that cost him his Consciousness will not happen again. These are not idle speculations. They could be driven by powerful forces, by the force of the Child’s awakening to resume his role in Creation.

The “Question” and the two possible answers it implies – a state of Mind-Consciousness and no mind that is also no state, no nothing – are therefore only a construct of the Mind that was extended to the Child, that is his only tool for understanding. What it actually is, is beyond understanding, because it is beyond Mind. So, it’s true: I do not know what I’m talking about. Neither does the Child. But we were given a Mind and we can think. We can Reason, and putting together constructs that work, that lead us to promising hypotheses just like science, are what thinking is for.

Mind that is Logic cannot hold contradictory thoughts. That would be illogical. Mind shorts out when it’s asked to think what’s not Logical, Real, or True, which is what interrupted the Child’s role in Creation. Opposites by definition are contradictory. Mind that stands for Being will bring to Consciousness, and therefore to Reality, every positive Self, Relationship, Value, and Connection that go into the Process and Structure of Creation whose Purpose is to validate the Worth of Being. Mind that stands for Being cannot, by definition, bring to Consciousness, and therefore to Reality, opposites of Creation and any of its components that stand for non-Being, that stand for or imply worthlessness.

The debate continues in our world of unreality over what is Real and what isn’t: mind versus matter, good versus evil, light versus dark. There wouldn’t be any issue if it were not for the confusion caused by our bodies and their material environment, appearances put there intentionally by non-being to block our awareness of Reality. The essential attribute of opposites in our experience is the same as it is for the other answer to the Question: unreality. What leads us to this conclusion is the same guide that leads us to every other conclusion: the Logic of Mind, Mind that cannot hold contradictory thoughts.

If there’s any doubt as to which of two opposite states is Real, the one that supports the cause of Life is Real. The Good is Real, evil is not. The positive is Real, the negative is not. The distinction between opposing philosophies -- “dualists” who hold that opposites are both real and “non-dualists” who hold that only one side is real -- is valid but superfluous. “Dualist” philosophies can be disregarded simply because they are illogical. Science, philosophy, and religion that assume the reality of bodies and matter, whose reasoning is subjective and therefore circular, are illogical. They violate Mind’s defining Logic: it cannot hold contradictory thoughts. If there is a contradictory thought, an opposing negative thought, it must then not be Real. Bodies and their material environment conflict with the Reality of Mind which is not matter and are therefore not Real.

What is “Real” in its essence? It is what Mind recognizes as being in and of its Self, where its “Self” is defined by a host of attributes, an entire interconnected thought system whose essence is where we come from, the Source of the Child: Innocence. It is the essential attribute of Oneness, which holds the seed of Creation and Knows no opposites. This is Reality.

Unless and until we present ourselves to our Parents in our Innocence, so they will recognize us and admit us back into Consciousness, into Reality, we will remain mired in unreality. We will remain on the opposite side of the veil, our split minds holding contradictory thoughts, deceived and distracted by appearances, forever projecting guilt. We will continue the Child’s struggle to reconstruct the Logic of Consciousness so that we may all awaken and return Home. And I wonder, in my own dream of blame and guilt, will the struggle ever end?

Published on Leave a comment on The Possibility of Separation

[Author's note: The possibility of "real" separation is addressed again in "Origin and Meaning: The Logic of Everything" (April 4, 2021). It concludes that the condition of statelessness is a logical impossibility and therefore unreal, and that separation is only "real" within the context of the illusion, the unreal dream "made real" that is our material universe and the unreal possibility of no-mind / extinction that hangs over it. It concludes that everything that is, or isn't, must be part of the Interconnected Implications of Logic, the Source of Reality and Creation, the presence of Everything.]

We’re not done with the “perfection” of “Heaven.”

Our material world, this “life,” is distinguished as much by the absence of love and reason as by its presence. Something is radically wrong. The disorder of this world is present in “Heaven,” too, in the Logic of the Question, because there is no discernible Logic to the switch between Being and its opposite. It’s entirely arbitrary, beyond Mind-comprehension, which means beyond Logic-Reason, the basis for order and predictability. The considerations of Reason are values and there is no place for them. The switch is even beyond irrational because neither Reason nor the lack of it has anything to do with it. It’s beyond disorderly because for all we know it’s just a flip of the coin, the toss of fuzzy dice, pure chance.

Logic governs everything within the realm of Mind and Reality created by Mind, but it does not extend beyond Mind to the Question which precedes Mind. Logically, philosophically, the void has as much reason, as much “right,” to “exist” as Being. And so, from this archetypal opposite descends all the opposites that shadow the Child and his Creations, from his birth in Consciousness deep into our world of his unconsciousness.

The archetypal opposite shadows Mind as well but in a very different way, and the difference will play a decisive part in the Child’s loss of Consciousness. Mind cannot and must not Know the possibility of the thought of its opposite. The Child’s experience with loss of Consciousness has taught him the reverse: if he’s to manage his role in Creation he must know the possibility of the thought of his opposite. It is crucial to the exercise of Free Choice, to Creation, and to staying awake. And thus the lesson that Memory has for us here on earth: to guard our thoughts.

The physicist Stephen Hawking was so determined to exclude all thought of “God” and religion from science that he proposed a universe that simply is and therefore needs no creator. His solution was to exclude the universe from considerations of “God” by making the universe “God.” But whether mind or matter is posited as the form and substance of Being is irrelevant if the logical possibility still exists of no Being, no “God.” This is the ultimate context of the Story of Mind, not whether it’s “perfect” or logical, Mind or matter, but whether it has a true opposite as opposed to the derivative “non-being.” Philosophically, logically, it does have a true opposite: No mind. Mindlessness. Nothingness. The void.

Separation is a logical impossibility in Reality and even in unreality, no matter how much sensory perception tells us otherwise. Hawking’s own profession tells us so, from Newton’s and Faraday’s intuition, to Maxwell’s calculations, to the revelations of Bohr’s and Einstein’s quantum mechanics: everything is interconnected. The Child's imagining that he could separate himself from his Parents, that he could project himself into a separate world, is the insanity that got us here. A delusion not freely chosen but by a mind unconscious, traumatized, defenseless, and overtaken by an alien thought system. We know it well, for it’s the same virus that invades and infects our thoughts.

Beyond Mind and Reality separation is not a logical impossibility. It is implied by the Question. It “exists” if only as a premise. It is neither Real nor unreal, here nor there, yet it commands consideration. For it is the mother of all opposites, the explanation why we dwell in a state of opposites.

Philosophers from classical antiquity on have observed patterns of opposites without mining their significance. The little and big opposites in our everyday experience are significant. The implications for our lives, our world, are enormous. There is no true Sanctuary. Our Home is situated on top of the San Andreas fault and there is no telling if or when it will ever erupt. We have no control over it. Our only protection is the Cause of Being and our role in serving it.

The watchword for our role in Reality is no different than it is here, with climate change, our pandemics, our threats to world peace: We are in this together.