Excerpt from draft of forthcoming post with working title “What We Owe to Self-Awareness and the Price We Pay for Avoiding It
Unscientific science and the “new normal”
Science leans into deeply challenging questions like quantum gravity, Einstein’s and physics’ holy grail, with remarkable persistence and ingenuity. It leans the other way when challenged by questions no less important. Its “quest for knowledge” is hobbled with irrationality. Launched with bias, subjectivity rather than objectivity, that inevitably blinds it to the explanation and understanding it seeks while deepening our world’s mysteries. The assumption that there can be no reality other than that detected by body-brains’ five senses: taste, touch, smell, hearing, and vision.
Irrational because the reality detected belongs to the same environment, the same system, as its detector. Rejecting any perspective that’s outside the system means science’s “reality” is verifying itself. Self-referential, like a case that’s made by citing itself. Circular “reasoning.” Blatantly illogical yet hidden behind business-as-usual, humanity’s stock response to anything that contradicts the status quo. The ”new normal.”
What's to be learned from the brain in the jar?
Nuttiness with a purpose, to hobble any progress where it’s most needed: toward self-awareness. Toward solving the mysteries of Consciousness with definition that makes sense so that its story can be told without science’s misguided bias. Bias that prevents neuroscience from an honest treatment of the difference between “Mind” and “brain.” Concepts that it uses interchangeably even though they’re literally worlds-realities apart. Even though Mind that’s real can know nothing of the body-brain that’s not real. Even though brain’s purpose is an impossibility: to replace Mind. To be its substitute in another “reality” that’s substitutes for Reality. To oppose Mind as though it were its enemy.
Which, to the shadow-opposite of a deluded, unconscious Mind, it is. Because within Mind is the truth about the body-brain and the world it senses, that both are logical impossibilities. That neither is real.
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) cites many discoveries that relied on spontaneous insights from Intuition. That more often arrived in the shower than in the laboratory, yet there was no more attempt to explain this phenomenon than there was to explain how Einstein’s mind worked beyond preserving his brain in a jar.
An offer that could not be refused
Neuroscientists like Christof Koch insist that Consciousness is seated in the brain based on nothing more than interesting patterns of electrical impulses. As though brain matter holds the secrets of Mind rather than Mind itself. Science’s defense of its irrational bias in favor of matter over Mind knows no limits.
What’s going on? The one Mind that we all share seemed to lose the attributes of Self when it lost consciousness. Its shadow-opposite that it mistakenly took to be an “other,” a reverse mirror-image of itself, made an offer that desperate Mind could not refuse. To conjure an alternate reality that replaced Self’s attributes with substitutes. That redefined Mind with the only attributes its shadow-opposite could offer: its own. A lifeless, mindless, loveless code that’s the reverse of the attributes that define its host.
Objectivity, Logic, and Truth: no match for professional bias
The result was an alternate reality. Competition among incompatible tribes composed of incompatible personalities, misguided by split minds thinking incompatible thoughts. The flowering of contradictions and disconnections that is our world, hospitable to “life” that came about through a series of accidents and mistakes. Breeding ground for misperceptions and misjudgments responsible for injustice, cruelty, savagery, and depravity, fear, hatred, guilt, and betrayal. Resentments and grievances. Selfishness.
What else can be expected from a world that’s entirely composed of substitutes? Substitutes for body and brain, Self and Mind. Opposites that by definition serve opposing authorities:
- Egalitarian Logic-Love that governs with sensitivity-feeling for all creations from the bottom up vs.
- Authoritarian-hierarchical animal instinct that rules insensitively with feeling for itself only from the top down.
Opposites that serve opposite purposes: Creation vs. competition. And opposite values:
- peace-order vs. war-disorder
- Creativity / Growth vs. immobility / paralysis
- Free Choice / independent judgment vs. conformity / obedience
- Innocence vs. Guilt: the interconnected Oneness of Reality-Creation, of Soul and Psyche-Innocence without opposites, vs. the separation-disconnection of opposites having neither Soul nor Innocence.
The discrepancies that set Mind and brain apart should be obvious. Yet they elude the persistence and ingenuity of science’s quest for knowledge. Science’s unbreakable alliance with body-brain and its five senses compels it to look the other way. To avoid objectivity rather than embrace it and risk losing prestige and funding to professional bias. All for an irrational fear of a precious gift: Intuition’s sixth sense.
What’s going on?
A Course in Miracles and its implications for personality type theory make the discrepancies obvious. Lesson 45 states that “God is the mind with which I [we] think. My real thoughts are in my mind. I [we] would like to find them.” The thoughts of uncorrupted Mind are real. The thoughts of the one Mind that was split – of its projections’ corrupted minds -- are not real. The same must be true of body-brains, the projections of a corrupted mind.
Traits identified by Jung / Myers-Briggs are either Mind-centered or body-brain-centered.
- Mind is represented by Introversion, Intuition, Thinking-evaluating, and Judging-understanding (INTJ)
- Body is represented by Extraversion, Sensing, Feeling (action-Instinct), and Perception (non-judging-understanding, specialness, victimhood (ESFP) [my descriptors in italics]*
By differentiating between mind- and body-centered personality types the theory takes the first step toward understanding the relationship between Mind and body-brain and the friction it causes between basic types. Friction rooted in psychodynamics explained by the Course when one Mind corrupted itself with the madness of its shadow-opposite, split in two, and turned against itself.
What’s going on is more than our planet’s astonishing diversity. More than tension between animal appetites and discipline – the ways we’re used to rationalizing the discrepancy. It’s Mind’s willing itself to be replaced by an impossibility, the illusion that is body-brain.
The Five-Factor personality type theory attempts to reverse the first step by not recognizing the distinction between Mind and brain, by eliminating the sixth sense of Mind-centered Intuition, and by recognizing only personality traits that are body-brain centered. Ostensibly so that Jung / Myers-Briggs will have a more “scientific” alternative when science’s actual intent is to discredit and replace it. To eliminate the threat to its body-centered bias.
The triumph of un-self-awareness
Body-brains are for forming tribes because tribes composed of many body-brains contradict the indivisibility of one Mind and thus define a substitute opposite self to replace it. Brains (prefrontal cortex) are for socializing that enforces conformity within tribes and for fighting among tribes (animal brain / amygdala).
The ESF personality type – ESFJs as well as ESFPs – are thus attracted to games of competition and to socializing. Activities that affirm their sense of self in a self-made alternate reality of externals. Functions of Mind centered on internals can’t do this for them, and they’re a threat to alternate reality besides.
ESFs characteristically exhibit indifference or hostility to functions of Mind:
- Curiosity, learning, openness to other perspectives, maturation-growth
- Introspection, self-awareness, self-evaluation-improvement
- Intuition, Logic-Love explanation, reflection
- Reasoning, evaluating, choosing
- Interpersonal intimacy, empathy, feeling, sensitivity
- Judging-understanding, self-discipline.
All because Mind’s functions get in the way of the brain’s ultimate goal: the triumph not of deliberative self-awareness but of un-deliberative un-self-awareness. Shadow-opposite’s perversion of the Force and Worth of Mind’s Creation: the triumph of animal will over opposites. The beast atop the Empire State building claiming supremacy over its domain. Absolute authority. A machine engineered to make war not Love.
The mind of an ESF tribal-realist
The mind of an ESF is the brain of the tribal-realist. ESF tribal-realists are good with some questions required by analysis but poor with others. The what, where, and when of things attracts them because of the objective of shadow-opposite: to project guilt onto its competitor-opponents for its supposed victimization so that it can justify retribution. And ultimately justify replacing its host which would eliminate all the competition. Mastery of what-when-where specifics – immediate, concrete facts – adds to the weight of guilt and to the play-act of wounded righteousness, thereby placing justification beyond dispute.
Competence of one kind can also mask incompetence of another. The pose of rational thinking hides gaps in Logic better suited for slapstick humor than serious discussion. ESF tribal-realists are repelled by the why and how of things. By the heart of analysis that enables choices based on reasoning and judgments based on Logic. That enables comity and cooperation based on understanding.
Mind that’s home to Logic-Love excels at judging used for understanding that affirms Worth and Innocence. Brain that’s home to predatory animal instinct excels at the opposite: judgment used to condemn worthlessness and guilt -- the unthinking animal instinct for retribution. For laying waste to anything that might limit its taking and doing, possessing and controlling, whatever it wants. The prerogative of absolute authority: reducing Worth to worthlessness. A perversion of rational thought. A joke.
“Innocence” that thrives on guilt
Like the "lost cause” that romanticized the defense of slavery “victimhood” that entitles mindless animal will to sympathy for its savagery instead of accountability is an obscenity. Shadow-opposite’s claim that it has been treated unfairly. Buried in unconscious Mind’s wounded Psyche and in ours is the grievance that impossibility deserves to be Real no less than Possibility. That the laws of cause and effect that are supposed to govern fairly through Logic-Love did not do so when they denied opposites equal status with their hosts in Reality.
Proof that the system is rigged. An injustice that demands retaliation. The cry for retribution that reverberates throughout history, from the violence of two world wars to the threat of nuclear annihilation. That’s splitting societies in two today, fueling grievances and resentments with anger and hatred, goading the “innocence of victimhood” toward civil war.
Opposites that thrive on contradiction
Why aren’t shadow-opposites deserving of equal status in Reality? What explains this injustice?
Mind aligned with the laws of cause and effect and true to itself – Logic-Love – acted in accordance with the sequence of its implications and relationships. Sequence that logically starts with Mind, the original circumstance – timeless Being – and proceeds with the implications of Logic and the reciprocal relationships of Love wherever they lead. The wellsprings of Creation and the Force that powers it.
The sequence of Creation that begins with the thought / feeling-value of Possibility. With the idea of Worth. That could not begin with impossibility. With an opposite that by definition is reactive not active, derived not original. A parasite that depends for its perversion of Logic-Love on the pre-existence and Reality of its host. But because it’s an opposite that by definition conflicts with its host it can’t be allowed to share the same status. To let Reality-Sense be defined as self-contradictory nonsense.
The rigger
The case for shadow-opposite’s victimization and all that it implies – license to break the rules rigged against it and persecute others at will – is based on nonsense. The idea that something originates with nothing. That nothingness can initiate anything and therefore shares the same defining attributes as something,. It’s an appeal to remain in its shadowland of opposites where acceptance into Reality is the lost cause and self-pity sets the tone. Into Plato’s Cave, a gruesome mockery of paradise, self-awareness, and togetherness.
In an alternate reality where anything goes any system can be rigged. But what the politics of grievance and division makes clear is that shadow-opposite's fraudulent pose of absolute authority in the fraudulent pose of victimhood is the rigger. Aglow with the innocence of victimhood, the mother-lode of opposites ripe for persecution. Shadow-opposite’s perversion of the Innocence of Soul-Oneness. Life-self that by definition can have no opposites. That interconnects Everything including Mind’s Reality-Creation and its Free Choice offspring. Whether conscious or unconscious and dreaming, because the Innocence of Soul-Oneness that has no opposites knows no boundaries.
Demon intellect
ESF tribal-realists may want to get it right so they at least appear to be doing what’s right. By continuing to get it wrong, only now with more emphasis on who-what-when-where while still avoiding the why and how. As if they’re oblivious to internals that analysis relies on to decipher meaning beyond appearances. As if they’ve willed themselves to avoid meaning so they won’t get it right. Because they’re only allowed by shadow-opposite’s code to recognize externals. To make appearances real instead of Truth that lies within. To attribute Reality to what isn’t real.
Either way, thinking that dispenses with why and how is more than a distaste for philosophy, psychology, and theology. More than disregard for science and pious grandstanding against “elites.” It’s a visceral fear of intellect. The capacity of Mind to welcome guidance and use its intelligence to learn, grow, and achieve. To get it right. Depriving analysis of why and how by demonizing intellect is a blunder that betrays a stunning lack of self-awareness, and maybe this is its purpose. For nothing would doom the machinations of self-delusion with more finality than intellect and self-awareness. The nemesis of reverse mirror-image and its nether world of reflections.
The trick
Governance that fits things together in order and harmony isn’t possible without Logic-Love’s understanding why and how they fit together in Reality and Truth. Creativity in peace is its concern. ESF tribal-realists will hammer away at the what-when-where of “facts” to make of alternate reality a “fact.” Making what is unreal appear real is their concern. For perpetuating misunderstanding based on unreality and untruth that darkens. But they won’t go near the why and how of understanding that enlightens.
Their dance with animal instinct is one part attraction and one part avoidance. Attraction to “action,” the risking of life and worth that is incessant competition. Games of chance among addicts at casinos that never close. Avoidance of thought that exposes the Truth: that the beast and its authority are made up. That Plato’s Cave and its shadow-master are the invention of its self-deluded occupants. No more real than a trick-or-treat costume. A trick that in time will be exposed when ESF tribal-realists let go of their fear of why and how.
Gateway to the Forbidden City
The foregoing is prologue for the subject of this essay. The faculty of Mind that more than any other sets Mind-centered personality type INTJ apart from the body-centered ESFP and its near-relative ESFJ. The ‘N’ in INTJ which represents Intuition, the portal to sixth sense. Condemned by body-sensing, its personality opposite, as the gateway to the Forbidden City of religious and “spiritual” psycho-quackology, of obsessions and passions of madness not grounded in “reality.”
Without the orderly governance of Logic-Love the magical world of appearances conjured by the magician -- split Mind captive to its shadow-opposite -- has no guiding intelligence. Only the laws of chaos and an overseer committed to maintaining appearances: the five senses of body-brains. The enforcer of conformity with fact and conventional wisdom. The holy ring that must be kissed.
We got here first!
What could penetrate such a defense other than another sense that sees through it? What could rattle a façade more than a voice from another world that isn’t made up?
The flashpoint between mind-centered authenticity and the body-centered reverse mirror-image that would replace it is the one faculty capable of preventing it: Intuition. No faculty is more offensive to split Mind’s projection, the five-sensed body-brain, than the faculty that would friend a sixth sense. The affront to all that is holy in the magic kingdom of appearances and its divine projector, sensory perception.
If impossibility had to be placed in the nether world of dreams where it couldn’t contradict Possibility which preceded it, sixth sense is just as deserving of being denied equal status with the five senses of appearances which preceded it. Sixth sense can only be a fraud, an interloper in alternate reality that must be expelled.
Such is the “logic” behind alternate reality’s “reality”: sensory perception was here first! Such was intuition’s welcome into the world of sensory perception: an indictment of injustice and a manifesto of retribution. A declaration of war. Such is the foundation upon which INTJs and ESFs are expected to make peace.
Excitement in Heaven
Intuition implies access to another perspective that lies outside the limits of body-brains. To another Consciousness whose spontaneous gifts of insights imply the existence of Mind beyond brain. Mind not of this world but accessible through an agent of Soul that knows no boundaries. An intermediary with a voice we can hear that can be understood. With a mission: to guide our halting efforts to make sense of our circumstances and to choose wisely how to deal with them. So that we eventually awaken to the truth of Mind and where its guidance comes from. By awakening to the truth of who we are and where we come from.
Self-awareness. Restored with guidance from Logic-Love logically in sequence. One implication at a time, one reciprocal relationship at a time. Because this is how Creation moves forward, propelled by the ever-expanding implications of Logic / knowledge-learning and the ever-expanding relationships of Love / abundance-sharing. By the force of Necessity that is the laws of cause and effect. Unlike the caricature of Heaven made up of haloed angels idling over clouds, plucking harps, while a bearded old guy decides who gets admitted to this paradise of eternal perfection. Of eternal boredom where all is being and there’s no doing.
“Almighty God:” Tribal-realism's role model
By fabricating alternate reality without Logic and Love, unconscious Mind’s shadow opposite deprived it of the Energy-Force that Creation needs to move forward. In its place it substituted a deception, the appearance of directed movement associated with a parody of action. The agitation of bodies-brains coping with incompatibilities among personalities, authorities, and values. Taking out their frustrations on one another in constant competition and combat. Resulting in destruction rather than Creation, regression rather than progression.
A process without a product that can only repeat itself because, being mindless and loveless, it has no originality. No force, Logic, or ideal to move it forward. Only yearning for an impossibility: absolute power and absolute freedom. The attributes of a god promised to a self-deluded Mind by its shadow-opposite. An “almighty god” that rules arbitrarily, cruelly, by animal instinct --the denial of Mind. The insanity of shadow-opposite welcomed into its host, unconscious Mind.
Who needs a Guide?
Where Mind transforms its contamination into another impossibility: the projection that magically separates thought from its source. The dream overrun by shadow-opposites posing as bodies-brains, their ephemeral likenesses hallucinated by a split mind. Dominated by tribal-realists, their Free Will forfeited to the supremacy of “action.” Taken in by the illusion, fearful of its undoing and so committed to making it real.
In such a “reality” where anything goes and, when it does, it’s accepted as the “new normal;” where split minds embrace conflicting thoughts; and where entropy and the laws of chaos upheld by tribal-realists reduce progress to a dog chasing its tail, supremacy-dominance is a will-o’-the-wisp and survival may be too. Guidance from a trustworthy source is essential, that speaks with authority for sanity and benevolence. For hope that’s constantly under attack.
The Necessity of relationship
Searching for Guidance in temporal externals, in ways that glorify groups and crush individuals – physical symbols, body-brain adornments and rituals, tribal mythology, mass ideological “movements,” – is searching where it can’t be found. Imagining that:
- a better understanding of matter can tell Mind what to think
- guidance can only come from organizations captive to Machiavellian tribal values and to their donors
- authority owes its influence to symbols of legitimacy, wealth, and power – to form rather than content, appearances rather than Truth
- guidance from organizations that’s authoritative and trustworthy can and must be beyond question -- “infallible.”
When all the guidance and authority that’s possible comes from one authentic source: Logic bonded with Love. Wisdom that defines, sustains, and governs Reality-Creation. The Parents of Mind Free Choice who will restore it to consciousness and its role in Reality-Creation when it regains Free Choice, changes with self-awareness, and becomes recognizable to its Parents.
Undoing its self-delusion -- the reversal of Reality-Truth that is the dream, the shadowland of opposites that is Plato’s Cave, the fortress of denial set against self-awareness -- is impossible if undertaken alone. Because guidance from wisdom requires relationship with Guide. And because “alone” means separation, the state of mind represented by shadow-opposite coded to dismantle the interconnectedness of Reality-Creation.
When listening to sixth sense takes daring
Six years ago the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli appealed to philosophy for help reconciling quantum mechanics and cosmic relativity-gravity. Physics’ quest for quantum gravity that might rationalize the universe of spacetime-matter. [Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (2017)]. He could have gotten his answer by now and the world has been enlightened. But it’s not likely if both mainstream physics and philosophy continue to tell Mind what to think instead of listening.
Insights that give voice to something worth listening to come spontaneously. They aren’t room service. They respond to minds whose own voices aren’t getting in the way. The difference is letting Mind lead with insights from Logic-Love instead of leading it with pre-judgments. With bias that forecloses guidance. By denying any need for Guide, any possibility of friendship with it, and any possibility that its voice will be heard.
Biases hard-wired into personalities, aspirations, and appetites dominate everyday behavior, but they’re out of place when insight into larger forces that influence everyday behavior is needed. It can’t respond to a set of pre-conditions. It can respond to relationship between Guide and individual that’s unconditional. To Logic-Love that’s unconditional. Physics that strait-jackets its Guide with personal and professional pre-judgments betrays the willfulness of immaturity. Of infantile self-absorption that blocks explanation and understanding because it refuses to listen. Because it dares not listen to any voice but its own.
Discoveries without meaning
The voice of “scientific” thought that speaks against Logic-Love instead of with it ensures that Rovelli’s appeal for help won’t get the response his profession needs. In distancing itself from both Guide and guidance physics is only doing what body-brain is coded by shadow-opposite to do: to shield the five senses of body-brain from contamination by Mind’s sixth sense. And to replace Mind with itself. With a coded instruction, lifeless, mindless, and loveless, that assigns the role of Guide to itself. An absurdity because a parasite that gets rid of its host gets rid of itself.
A perversion of authority that rules arbitrarily from the top down and has no patience with voices beneath it. A perversion of responsibility that excuses itself from accountability. A one-dimensional character lifted from an action-hero cartoon. A joke that claims, like Hawking, that “philosophy is dead.” When philosophy’s metaphysics may hold the guidance, the explanation, that physics seeks.
What hope is there for such “thinking?” That rejects objectivity in favor of bias? That intentionally denies itself the vision of Logic-Love. That contributes to self-awareness in spite of itself, with discoveries that un-self-awareness can’t understand.
Avatars and supermen
The personality type that can most readily be identified with Guidance-rejecting tribal-realism is the very body-centered ESFP. ESFP tribal-realists clinging to body despise Mind’s intuition because they fear losing the avatar that replaced real senses crippled by unconsciousness with the appearance of functioning body senses. Tribal-realists so attached to their avatars – substitute selves outfitted with sensory perception – that they prefer existence in an alternate reality. Even if its “reality” is a joke that makes no sense.
One Mind’s loss of power shut down self-awareness enabled-empowered with real vision and hearing, taste, touch-connection, and smell capable of experiencing all the ways that the joy and beauty of Life-Worth Creation express themselves. The fanatical attachment of tribal-realists to body-brains and craving for power, the appearance of strength, are explained by the loss of Energy that rendered one Mind powerless. The memory of humiliation that accounts for Nietzsche’s contribution to the dream: man deified as superman motivated solely by lust for power.
Shadow-opposite’s promise of another reality that one Mind could make real on its own terms was accepted even though it was literally too good to be true. An imaginary-unreal life-existence was better than being disabled, powerless, and lost in the shadowland of opposites. Hell so unbearable that the self-delusion of Plato’s Cave is Heaven by comparison.
The ultimate defense against self-awareness
Tribal-realists fear and despise intuition because any faculty of Mind that offers a portal to another reality might deprive them of the alternate reality fashioned by Mind’s mistaken identity, its reverse mirror image. Its shadow-reflection’s code of opposition. Of non-being. Where tribal-realists rule, make up their own scripts, write their own rules, revel in the license of specialness, the entitlements “earned” by victimhood, and entertain themselves with the excitement and distraction of bloodletting. Of non-stop “action:” games and mortal combat. Instead of one Mind’s unique talent, its gift of Free Choice, being put to use with an indispensable role in Life-Worth Creation. Tribal-realists hate intuition because it could replace their fascination with hurt inflicted on others by “action” with purposeful, peaceful Creation.
Part of the Logic of Creation is the knowledge from self-awareness that Reality-Creation is one and there can be no “others” “out there.” Part of the rationalization for competition-combat is the misperception from un-self-awareness that there are “others” “out there.” Potential competitors and enemies to be resolutely put down by “conservatives” consumed with fear. Seeking protection from fear’s age-old remedy: authoritarian control. Ever more opposing, ever more absolute. As if cooperation and competition in a shared world can be eliminated by silencing every other voice. By neutralizing every threat to alternate reality, shadow-opposite’s ultimate defense against Reality. Against self-awareness.
This is realism?
Since there is only one interconnected Self in the eternal here and Now the tribal-realist committed to cyclical competition and violence is committed to making the unreal real -- our alternate “reality.” An impossible dream peopled mainly by the hapless occupants of Plato’s Cave. By tribal-realists terrified of change. Traumatized by the wounding of their archetypal Psyche, blindsided by the loss of Energy and Consciousness.
So how do tribal-“realists” conserve the status quo, block self-awareness, and assert their supremacy? By presuming to make a dream real.
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* The descriptors are attributions of intent to traits that the theory doesn’t consider, more an extension of its scope than disagreement. For I believe insights that guided Jung / Myers-Briggs as far as they went were inspired by Logic-Love. Had they had access to A Course in Miracles (1976) it might have led their thinking along the same lines as mine.
