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Published on Leave a comment on The Wild Card

The making of a good fit

Peace in relationships -- family and friends, work and play, individual and group. Peace of mind. World peace. Is harmony. The fitting together of parts engaged in shared purpose. Performing a function that contributes toward the creation, expression, or affirmation of Worth. To the Worth of the parts striving toward it.

Psychology concerns itself with human psyches and groups that must fit together so that individuals function in harmony, within and among themselves, internally and externally. The “engine” of engineering performs the same function with physical objects rather than subjects. The quantitative measurements of science play a part in both disciplines, but between the two psychology leans heavily toward the subjective-qualitative, engineering toward the objective-quantitative. Two approaches with one function: fitting parts together harmoniously. With Logic.

Peace-harmony requires definitions whether subject or object, qualitative or quantitative. Parts that fit together harmoniously to perform the functions defined for them must each have their own definition that distinguishes them individually before they can be distinguished and function collectively. That distinguishes what they are -- their being -- and what they do -- their doing. The being must fit the doing and the doing must fit the being. As in architecture “form follows function.”

It is the function of Logic to define. The “Word” associated with “Logos” from classical thought stands for the essential output of Logic: the expression of the idea of a thing, subject-self or object. The definition or design of a thing produced by mind before it’s put into play to fit with other definitions-functions to perform shared purpose. The idea of object “apple” that Plato held to be where the reality of “apple” resides: within mind that thinks it. In human thought “Logic” or “Logos” refers to the concept of “God,” the Being responsible for definitions. For fitting parts together logically, harmoniously, with feeling. Lovingly, so Creation’s parts function smoothly.

“Word” or “Logos” also refers to what’s produced by harmonious definitions: a state of being-doing shared purpose referred to as “Creation.” The whole of it -- Creator-Logos and Creation-Logos -- necessitating another descriptor: “Reality.” Because the human experience embraces opposites including “unreality.” There is no need in Creation in Reality for the descriptor “Reality” because unreality is a definition, a state or condition of impossibility that is unknown. But in human experience Reality and unreality state the critical distinction between mind logical-sane and mind illogical-insane. Critical to Understanding. Critical to humans fitting together internally-externally in peace and harmony, because it can’t happen without Understanding. 

Logos has no tolerance for contradictions

Failures of humanity to function harmoniously in a shared world that requires shared purpose are failures of Understanding that depends on Logic to explain how parts must fit together. To explain their definitions -- what-who they are and what they do that must fit together with what other parts do. As individual psyches we are composed of parts internally that must fit together harmoniously and as groups we are composed of individuals that must fit together harmoniously. Reality-Creation is one large composition composed of families that are compositions of individual selves. Selves that are compositions of parts that, in turn, are relationships fitting together. All of it held together by the definitions of Logic. An expression of the idea of fitting together or “relationship.”

Failures of human functioning together in harmony are psychopathology: psyches harboring opposites or contradictions out of alignment with Logic. With Logic’s laws of cause and effect. With the Necessity expressed by the Word-Logos “law.” Law or Necessity has no tolerance for contradiction. Minds that would compose functions from parts that oppose-contradict are attempting the impossible. “Impossible” is illogical, the opposite of one of two primary founding principles of Logic: “Possibility.” The other is “Relationship.”

Minds that attempt to compose peace-harmony out of parts that contradict-conflict in their definitions, their Logic, are attempting the impossible. A definition of illogic or insanity. “Insanity” -- the state of mind that can’t create, can’t be part of Creation that exists harmoniously, at peace, in Reality. It can only dream a fantasy of unreality. Mind dreaming a fantasy of unreality composed of contradictions isn’t awake. A dreaming mind is unconscious.

The failures of humanity to function harmoniously are of Necessity failures of minds not thinking logically and therefore in a dream state not conscious. Logic or “Logos,” Logos or “God,” has no tolerance for contradictions or for the state of mind -- unconscious -- that dreams of contradictions and chaos, unreality and insanity. A thing defined cannot be what it is and what it isn’t. Cannot be or do its opposite.

The autonomy of Free Choice

The source of the flawed composition of contradictions that defines human unreality is an attribute of Logos-Creator and its Creation peace-harmony. A distinct being-Self with a distinct function in Reality-Creation. A unique function of Mind that, like Logic-Logos, is Relationship combining thought with feeling, Mind with Love. The attribute is the Mind-Love function of Free Will or Free Choice. That is, in its being, Free Choice. The source of the flaw that defines human unreality has its origin in Reality and performs an essential function in Reality-Creation. Reality-Creation could not be affirmed without it. The Self-Awareness of Consciousness itself could not exist without it.

Being essential to Self-Awareness and Worth makes Free Choice indispensable to Reality-Creation. What gives it the capacity to perform its role are two unique attributes:

  • the freedom to choose, in its explorations of the unknown, to remain at Home in Reality-Creation with its identity Free Choice, in Relationship with its Parents, or to explore alternate “realities” with unanticipated consequences. Consequences that may entail loss of Awareness of Self and Relationship and apparent loss of Free Choice. Consequences that, empowered by Energy in service to Mind, may appear real but cannot be Real. A consequence of the function of Free Choice to learn as it performs through trial and error: the necessary freedom to risk choosing incorrectly as well as correctly, illogically as well as logically, though not with the status conferred by Logic and Love of remaining Conscious at Home with Parents in Reality-Creation if trial ends in error. To explore alternate “realities” with intent would be an expression of the unique attribute of Free Choice: the freedom not to choose impossibility, to be another Self in Reality, but to imagine or dream another self in unreality. Not to be wrong but to risk being wrong. And in so doing to learn all that's to be learned from the disorder, the unpredictability, the give-and-take, of experience.
  • Free Choice cannot be owned, possessed, or controlled. Its only limits are the limits set by the Logic-Love of its definition in Reality-Creation. By the laws of cause and effect, the authority of Necessity that applies to Everything. These confine it to what it is: Free Choice. Within the scope of Reality-Creation it cannot choose any role other than Free Choice, to be any Self other than who it is, any function other than what it does. In all circumstances, in all contexts, its core identity, its true identity, remains Free Choice. The Child of Parents Logic-Choice and Love-Freedom, it cannot be any other Self.

Other Creations owe their being and function to organic growth. To the implications of Logic and the relationships of Love. To the interconnections of laws-Necessity, to the evolution of Creation that is the Order, the harmony-peace of Reality. Free Choice originated from its Source as a distinct Self with the attribute of independence, occupying its own plane in the structure and process of Creation. Interconnected with all of it because Reality-Creation is the Oneness of interconnection. But a distinct Self functioning autonomously beyond its control. Whose definition by masculine Logic-Choice and feminine Love, its Parents, endowed it with the capacity to choose freely within the Order, the peace-harmony, of Creation.

From the One of Reality to the many of illusion

Whose definition endowed it with the capacity to function as a wild card subject to its own guidance, its own judgment, its own discretion. Exercising its capacity independently in Relationship with its Source, its Parents, but by definition not owned, possessed, controlled, or dominated by any part of Creation. A wild card that has the free run of Creation and so puts a premium on Judgment. On its maturity and competence to judge correctly in its choices in all contexts of constantly evolving Creation. In the acts that share, affirm, enable, and empower the Life-Worth of Creation and Self of the Self-Awareness / Consciousness that creates it.

Though Free Choice is identified as a distinct self with a distinct function independent of its Source-Creator, its Parents Logic-Love, it is bonded with them in a reciprocal Relationship of Knowing and Love. A Relationship between Parent-Child that supplies the dynamo of Energy at the core of Oneness. The passionate stance of Being:

  • empowering and illuminating all of Reality-Creation with the Energy and Light of Self-Awareness.
  • embracing Everything, all possibilities including the state of mind that is Free Choice when Free Choice cannot choose correctly and lapses into the dream state of unconsciousness. That is, when it lacks the Knowledge and competence necessary to choose freely.
  • making of all of Reality-Creation a Heaven of joyfulness, peace, and harmony. The ideal that haunts the human Psyche with the memory of a long-ago utopian Home where we, one Child, existed in the embrace of Logic and Love, peace and freedom, our Parents, without contradictions, without opposites, in the Perfection of Innocence.

Our minds not troubled with the concomitants of our predatory animal nature: bodies sharing space with bodies, tribes with tribes. With familiar and alien objects, “others” triggering primitive limbic dominance, fear, possessiveness, lust, rage, and hatred. Reverberating through a dystopia of guilt, the memory of the long-ago projection of injustice, limbic emotions, guilt, and insanity that transformed the One of Reality into the many of illusion. That made us, projections of a dream, and put us here.

Secrets of our ancestral Mind revealed

That Free Choice put us here should be no surprise. A wild card with the run of Creation. A Child learning and growing to maturity and competence through the trial and error of experience. In the context of Reality and Creation that know nothing of opposites yet are constantly expanding, exploring, discovering, and creating among all the known possibilities into the unknown. In the broader context of Everything that does include opposites: the illusory inhabitants of the flip side of Reality that is Mind unconscious. Mind dreaming an alternate “reality” of shadow-reflections, derivations coded to be the opposite of their hosts. To be dependents along for the ride, troublemakers, parasites. An unreality coded to be everything opposite to Reality.

The Why of what put Free Choice here should tell us that having the maturity and competence to choose correctly as well as freely is important if we prefer success rather than failure. If we want to avoid mistakes that get us into trouble. A great deal of speculation and story-telling have been devoted to Why the Child’s Parents would allow or perpetrate its departure from immortality to mortality. The logical answer would appear to be they did neither. That it was probably inevitable, the consequence of Free Choice. The laws of cause-effect. Of Necessity that governs the process and structure of Creation.

The Why of it still matters. But the How of what put Free Choice here may be the more important question. Because it’s from the story of how the Child Free Choice, our ancestral Mind, imagined itself into an alternate “reality” that we, its “descendants” -- projections of a dreaming mind -- can gain insights into the deepest roots of human behavior. To the roots of human psychopathology that has so far eluded Understanding and defied cure by the healing professions. By psychology, the study of behavior, and psychiatry, the study of illness.

There are patterns. And try as we might to detect and understand them we can’t succeed until we free ourselves from the tyranny of bodies and sensory perception. From putting our faith in counterintuitive "scientific" absurdities like the search for configurations of particles and cells, neurons, chemistry, and electrical impulses in brains that will someday, somehow, magically produce consciousness. Until we liberate mind to inquire where the answers are: in the How of what put Free Choice here. In the Logic, the story, of what led our ancestral Mind from one state into another. One Reality into another whose every attribute is an expression or reflection of the Reality it was projected from. Whose every actor, every relationship, is driven, one way or another, by the sequence of events that brought them to “life” in another “reality.”

Simple intuitive Logic  

How shall you and I resolve our differences? When it looks hopeless whether we’ve tried everything or nothing? By Understanding that goes beyond the hopelessness, the intractability, of human conflict. The pointless, circular “reasoning” of minds captive to matter. By trying something new. Something even more entertaining than the mythologies of entertainment and religion, sports and politics. Than the hallucinations of psychedelics and the psychoses of addicts. The ravings of wishful thinking fabulists, self-serving opportunists -- mad men making it up as they go along. Try something that actually enlightens: simple intuitive Logic. Metaphysics: the invention of Parmenides that takes us beyond appearances. The revelations of Jesus, the Holy Spirit, whose Course in Miracles takes us into the story of our ancestral Mind. The One Child that we are and the one story. Our story.

So, what's the "wild card?" We are. Free Choice.

Published on Leave a comment on What Fools These Mortals Be!

The Mother of all Mistakes 

If not only mental illness is intractable but also basic functions of governance, like maintaining order and managing the environment, might one wonder what’s causing misjudgment? Where the misperceptions are coming from that stand in the way of Understanding who we are and what we’re about? Where we are and how we got here? If one archetypal misperception, one seminal misunderstanding, occurred somewhere in the evolution of Mind, wouldn’t we want to track it down? Wouldn’t we want to know the story of Mind? Get straight what happened. Understand what went wrong?

Isn’t it logical to assume that one mistake in the functioning of the Mind that we share could be responsible for every mistake that followed? Could be the Mother of all Mistakes. To assume that a miscalculation of some sort sent thinking and perceptions that followed off on the wrong track. If an unintentional navigation error could get an intercontinental passenger jet so far off course that it got shot down over Russia, couldn’t an unintentional error in recognition get Mind and its replications off course, too? So far off course that their efforts to navigate bring them repeatedly to the wrong destination. To disorder and mismanagement. To repeatedly getting their hopes shot down.

Inert dummies strapped to their seats after a crash

Isn’t it logical, then, to wonder if such a consequential error occurred and what it might be? Have we surrendered our Free Will, our mobility? Or are we paralyzed by inertia and fear? Like passengers strapped to their seats after their plane has crash landed, dummies in a state of shock.

Do we really have the right answers? Or are we condemned to endlessly repeat our mistakes and expect different results? Without acknowledging our failures, taking responsibility, and fixing what’s broken? What happened to accountability? Where in all this fevered activity is there a hint of real sapience? Of our species’ vaunted self-awareness? Of openness and honesty? Of leadership and conscience? Or is it all submerged in the self-justification of groups, our Machiavellian overlords who have no use for moral codes. Their only “code” their survival, their authority.

Can we be so sure of basic assumptions that keep producing frustration that they don’t need to be questioned? Is faith in the sideshow pyrotechnics of matter -- astronomy and molecular biology, genetics and telecommunications gadgetry -- well placed if they reveal nothing new about Mind? Nothing that would prevent humanity’s animal instinct, its mindless reptilian brain, from continuing to misuse and abuse them? Did I fail to mention weaponry? Let us take pride in ingenuity that mows down defenseless innocents in schools, churches, theaters, and grocery stores. 

The Big Bang was a Big Nothing

Could the intractability of mental illness, the virtual dead-end of psychiatry’s ability to cure it, be telling us something about Mind in general? After assuming that the cause is brain matter, that maybe the problem goes deeper than that? A lot deeper.

That the cause is Mind, not brain. And where Mind comes from. Where it remains, traces its pathology, its origins, well beyond bodies’ experience of infancy in a world of matter. Well beyond the event so enshrined in the human imagination as the beginning of everything, the “Big Bang.” When the Big Bang may be only one of a multitude of Big Bangs. May be in the Reality, the universe of Mind, effect, not cause. An imaginary event – a Big Nothing that has no real consequences and physics can never explain.

A Big Nothing in the dynamics of archetypal thought and feeling that can be explained. In the life and evolution of the Logic of Mind that preceded and caused it. Because conscious Mind has Logic, the only source of explanation and Understanding, and matter, the projection of Mind unconscious and dreaming, does not.

Why should this be of no interest to fields of inquiry – science, philosophy, psychology, theology – whose minds profess to want answers? Whose minds profess to have answers when they haven’t allowed themselves to ask the right questions. For this is what’s wrong.

They persist in their misjudgments, trapped by their misperceptions. Expecting different results either because they’re sure they Understand the situation humanity is in that yields our Understanding of purpose and meaning – our context. Or because they’re terrified that they don’t.  That there may be another context, and it will be a discomfort, a major inconvenience, to figure it out. Or an embarrassment to hand it off to those who can. To theorists like Democritus, Parmenides, Plato, and Michael Faraday, who intuited with Logic what materialist body-centric science couldn't.

Caught forever in Erich von Stroheim’s Grand Illusion

Sticking with answers to the wrong questions is illogical. Illogic can’t yield Understanding or good results. The Logic of our context, our situation, is virgin territory, unexamined and unexplained by the paradigms that dominate our thinking. Because the reality of our context, handed to us by our bodies equipped with reptilian brains, that’s taken as a given, is, in fact, an appearance. A deception. The real Big Lie. That blocks examination and prevents explanation.

If the mentally ill must be abandoned en masse to the streets, if our children and grandchildren must be condemned to Anthropocene extinction, victims of mass insanity, doesn’t it make sense to remove the barrier to Logic? To change our focus from bodies and brains to Mind? From illusion that can’t yield answers to Reality that can. Because that’s where the problem is -- the emotion and the tears.

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Published on 1 Comment on Call of the Mood

Another pearl of wisdom from Captain Kirk

Moods are coalescences of affect evoked by evolving circumstances and their interpretation by conscious (thinking-reasoning left-brained) and subconscious (feeling-intuiting right-brained) states of mind. Reflected expressions of judgment rather than direct, opaque, and hard to detect, they nevertheless sway individual and herd behavior with the power of the moon’s gravity upon the tides. Moods involve an interplay between subjective psychodynamics experienced over time and outer sensed-perceived objective environment experienced in the moment. That is, interplay between contexts that are opposites in competition: one subjective mind-centered, the other objective body-centered.

Moods reflect the Logic, the character, of emotions and associated thoughts rooted in the values that move their subjects. The primary considerations drawn from context -- the stakes, benefits and costs, inputs -- that control decisions and determine outputs, the acts of behavior. Primary considerations like performance-productivity, pleasure-gratification, worthiness-validation, acceptance-belonging, euphoria-excitement, satisfaction-contentment, hopefulness-anticipation, health-wellbeing vs. listlessness-inertia, pain-loss, grief-loneliness, abandonment-worthlessness, wistfulness-nostalgia, disorientation-confusion, insecurity-vulnerability.

If music is the language of feeling and poetry is the language of Intuition, then mood may be the language of the subconscious. Mood may be an emotional echo, a memory of the loss of Free Will, of identity to captivity, reverberating through the Child’s many illusory “lives.” As if calls from the Child unconscious, echoes of the Big Bang, while it awaits Awakening through Forgiveness, release from self-imposed captivity, and a return Home. A self-deluded Child with a split mind, ambivalent and confused, whose response to its fortunes in an unreal dream world colors the response of its individual projections with moods ranging from euphoria to confusion to despair.

If the Child is profoundly unhappy, then moods, whatever their cast, may be weighed down by a sense of unhappiness, disappointment, or loss from the echo of an unknown but persistent source. It could explain Captain Kirk’s remark, in a Star Trek film, that the inhabitants of our planet are “haunted.”

The species humanity is driven by mass psychosis

Moods sway judgment with perceptions and senses inflected by the mysticism of affect. A sip of Talisker single-malt scotch whisky can instantly overwhelm sense of the present with the atmospherics of a sepia-colored past. Moods affecting groups – communities and whole societies -- can drive mob psychology on a massive scale. Can produce the mass euphoria of patriotic nationalism, like the eruption of patriotism in Britannia after the ruler of the waves annihilated Phillip II’s Spanish armada in 1588. Like the eruption of Teutonic patriotism when Kaiser Wilhelm I blundered into the genesis of two World Wars in 1914.

The species humanity is driven by mass affect. By the emotional dynamics not of individuals but of groups, by herds, and therefore detached from Logic. From Reason and all the other functions of intelligence, of Mind, and therefore from Reality. The species humanity is driven by mass psychosis.

Herd mentality is unstoppable

It's driven by group psychology ruled by the all-consuming lust for survival, dominance, and the “triumph of the will.” Driven to its ultimate end – self-destruction – by the passion and force of corrupted “love.” By “liberty” unhinged from Order, from the discipline of Judgment. Limbic animal-instinct feelings of individuals -- fear, anger-rage, hatred -- overwhelmed and corrupted by the psychology of their groups -- species, nations, tribes, religions, and whatever else differentiates them -- convert into genocidal rage and mob psychology. Into the disastrous, tragic corruption of mood by competing, conflicting, warring groups.

Groups inevitably weaponize themselves into military forces, into armies, no matter what their founding moral principles, their missions, or core values. The 16th century Pope Julius II, descendant of the Prince of Peace, the embodiment of Christianity, lead armies against Italian city-states. All groups are potential weapons subject to group affect-mood that translates into situations that mandate war against competing groups. This is the dynamic, the emotional mechanics, the mood-affect of war. Corrupted feelings translated by corrupted perceptions of mind from harmony and peace into disharmony and conflict.

Corrupted emotional moods lead to corrupted illogical contexts that then shape, define, and demand corrupted action. Andrew Carnegie tried to use his unparalleled wealth and personal influence with world leaders to prevent WWI. He failed because Kaiser Wilhelm and the others were locked into madness. Into an insane response to context driven by group affect-mood. By herd mentality. Once group mob psychology starts it’s unstoppable. Driven by limbic body-brain, animal-instinct emotions. Devoid of self-awareness. Captive to self-delusion: to the Child’s shadow code arbitrary-lawless rule of mindless action.

The cure for insanity is sanity

Chronically disturbed moods rooted in self-delusion, the Child’s misidentity with its shadow-reflection -- the source of all psychosis, detachment from Reality -- aren’t found in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. They are susceptible neither to diagnosis nor “treatment” by body-brain-centered psychology, cognitive behavioral therapy, pharmaceuticals, or psychedelics. Nor are they accessible to medical science, neuroscience, or genetics / molecular biology.

They are accessible to the vision of Logic from Intuition and its spontaneous insights from the Memory of the Child. They are accessible not to body-brain but to mind. They are “treatable” by release from the captivity of self-delusion and by the restoration of Consciousness. They are “treatable” by Awakening through Forgiveness. By the replacement of insanity – the dualism of two contradictory “realities” – with the sanity of non-dualism. With Understanding that there can be only one Reality, and it is manifestly not the mass of contradictions, the temporary apparition, the ambiguity that is material objects. That is bodies and the bizarre physics of their inhospitable “home,” the violent, chaotic, pointless, and ultimately inscrutable universe of spacetime-matter.

All “mental illness” is detachment from Reality

Not long ago, in psychiatry’s era of Freudian psychoanalysis, patients sought relief from discord within by un-hiding and un-suppressing physical and emotional urges that lurked in their subconscious since infancy. While talking about their discomfort did some good, Freud’s body-brain-centered theory and its limited use of mind, to summon memories of infantile yearnings in this material world, ultimately didn’t yield results. Its focus on “psycho” held promise and the tools of “analysis” inspired. But their application -- their scope – did not. His female patient, whose “cure” initially advanced his career, relapsed and subsequently retracted her endorsement.

Psychiatry today relies on pharmacology to pair treatment with symptoms, with scant understanding of the causes of symptoms and the drugs’ effects and dangerous side-effects. Like physics that’s stumped by quantum gravity, psychology-psychiatry refuses to venture beyond bodies and brains. To explore the Logic of Mind and what it implies about “Reality” and the various ways that “mental illness” detaches from it. About the state of psychosis that describes all human “consciousness,” or what Carl Jung, who broke with Freud, described as the “collective unconscious.”

We are all psychiatric patients in a madhouse

Restoring Order to mind that eliminates contradictions and ambiguity produces Peace of mind. The simple, basic process of Logic that fits things together in harmony. That provides context whose occupants can navigate with confidence in coordinates that make sense without contradiction and ambiguity. That’s accessible through the spontaneous insights of Intuition. That’s all any psychiatric patient needs whose mind is assailed by opposites: the healing awareness of Understanding why and how this is happening. With Understanding that we are all patients in a madhouse, a mental ward shot through with contradictions and ambiguity. With help from pharmacology, yes, but not letting drugs substitute for mind.

Until the mental health profession understands that its scope needs to expand, to venture beyond the dualism of unreality, insane by definition because it’s a contradiction, it will continue to seek and not find. Diagnosis will continue to be off target, treatment will continue to be hit-or-miss, and the DSM will continue to be a fabrication, a convenience for the profession and the insurance industry but no source for getting it right.

The mindless beast at the gates of Democracy

Instinctive submission to arbitrary rule, to dominance by will substituting for reasoned judgment, for Free Choice, for Love’s affect and compassion – all perceived to be “weak,” – condemns and condemns itself by lack of self-awareness. It is the mindless beast, the enemy at the gates of Democracy today. A segment of the electorate indifferent to transgressions of any kind because it has become its own shadow-reflection: a herd, a beast out of control. The servant of “will:” mindless and unaware.