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Published on 2 Comments on Everything Is a Call for Love

What value most expresses Mind’s stance of Being in opposition to no-being? In opposition to no-life, no-mind? What value anchored in the philosophy of Jesus most accounts for its unprecedented influence on Western thought, personal behavior, relationships, and religious practices? What value lies at the heart of “Life,” that gives it its psychic force and purpose both in the telling of the Story of Mind and the Story of its Child, in Consciousness and unconsciousness? It’s Love.

“Worth” is all of Love’s expressions put together, all of its constituent values: the beauty of purity and innocence, family, community, freedom, health, self-worth, purpose, learning and growth, abundance, protection, empowerment, and hope. There are no values that do not express their root value of Love. “Worth” is the sum and integration of all values. It is the ultimate consideration in all things.

When we say our purpose is the Creation and reciprocation of worth, we simply mean our purpose is to Love and be Loved: to Love ourselves, our Parents, and our Creations. To “Love our enemies” is simply to overlook the unreality of who they are in our state of unconsciousness – guilt -- and to Love their Reality in Consciousness – our Innocent Self.

No statement of our purpose in Life, in Being, is complete that does not begin and end with Love. What motive that accounts for the feeling, the force behind Creation, behind Life, can arise without Love? What force could possibly arise in Reality and Truth in response to the awful implications of nothingness, to its implied power to rule the state of opposites, if not the power of Love?

What is the cause of Being if not Love? What is our cause if not Love? This is what “the Creation and reciprocation of Worth” – our purpose – means. These are not arid speculations about academic abstractions, distinctions in search of relevance, “pure” research with no discernible application. How can they be if the Logic of Mind holds that every thought is driven by feeling and every feeling in Reality is guided by thought?

Without feeling thoughts which are causes can have no effects. There are many ways to understand Energy, the force of Logic that gives the thoughts of Mind their power to connect, to make Real, to give Life, to Create, that gives Mind and its extension, the Child, its authority to enforce the Logic of Mind with order and discipline. But beyond its eternal restlessness the most important way is to understand that Energy expresses and applies the power of feeling. Feeling that no less than any other gift, any other value, can be perverted by the Child’s mind in its unconscious state to serve its opposite. And this is where we find ourselves, coping in our confusion with the very thing that Being does not stand for: fear, guilt, and hatred.

What brings Love, feeling, and Energy or force into the Story of Mind now? They were present at the “Beginning” when they as much as Mind-Consciousness and Logic pierced the darkness with light when Consciousness was switched on. They and Mind are joined at the hip, all of one piece, equal partners in Being and Creation. They come into the story now because they are the working end of Consciousness, the dynamic that sets Mind in motion toward its purpose of Creation once we establish what it is. Now we are into the fun part -- the joyous, open-ended adventure into the unknown that gives the free spirits of Inquiry and Love their meaning, their outlet, their voice.

Without Love thoughts are just thoughts of no consequence. “Being” is just a word without Love. Why? Because Love is their purpose. Our purpose in Creating and reciprocating worth through Creation is to bring Love into Creation, to use and apply it, express and connect with it, in everything we think and do. The great thought systems of human history, our philosophies and theologies, are striving through trial and error to reconstruct the Child’s obliterated Consciousness, to find his way – our way – back to Love. Our purpose in validating Mind’s stance, Being, to stand for Life against the possibility of no-life, is to Love Mind, to Love the Consciousness, the Oneness, the seed of Creation and Innocence that gave birth to us and gave us our role, our purpose in Creation – our Source, our Parents Father Mind and Mother Love.

Love isn’t an afterthought when Mind-Consciousness switched on and took its place. It’s what Mind-Being is all about. It’s what we’re all about: gratitude that consummates the gift of Love, of Worth – all the values that Love represents. Thankfulness for our Reality and for the opportunity to learn and grow in knowledge and freedom, so that we can all awaken and return to Reality. To our Source: Love.

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.

Published on Leave a comment on What Knowledge Doesn’t Know

What is implied by the Story of Mind is that it is the Story of Logic. Everything that flows from Mind in the “beginning” either extends Consciousness in an unbroken network of logical connections or it becomes a perversion of logic when the Child’s mind becomes unconscious. We deal either with Logic or its logical opposite, but one way or the other we are dealing with the essential attribute of Mind which is Logic. It is the source of “necessity,” the notion favored by philosophers who also speak of the “nature” of things, the “laws” of cause and effect. It’s all about Logic.

To violate Logic is to violate Mind itself, because Mind can’t be what it is not. If you are born within Mind as the Child was and you violate Logic there’s only one possible outcome. You can’t not Be, because you are part of Being itself. But you can lose Consciousness. It may be tough on you, but if there isn’t a breaker to trip from Consciousness into unconsciousness think of what happens to Mind. Mind can’t hold contradictory illogical thoughts and still be what it is, Logic.

This just to emphasize, before we get out ahead of ourselves, that Mind and Logic are joined at the hip. Logic is what Mind does but it is also what Mind is. Which means that everything is governed by Logic. Everything has attributes and these are defined by Logic. Even unconsciousness. Reality and unreality both. Even Feeling -- Mother Love, the Free Spirit who can’t be captured by anything, even by definitions, yet she is contained within Oneness, the Seed of Creation, and accepts the Logic of Purpose, the birth of hers and Father Mind’s Child and their Child’s part in Creation. This attempt to explain the Child’s loss of Consciousness stands or falls on Logic, because there can be no other basis for it, neither blind faith nor experience.

“Mother Love” / “Father Mind.” How did gender get into it? Must their Child be referred to as “he?” There is no word in the English language that’s gender neutral that also captures the reality and force of Self – the Who instead of the What. “It” does not suffice and I usually prefer not to resort to “their.” My choice of the feminine for Mother Love and masculine for Father Mind follows our cultural norms but is otherwise entirely arbitrary and free of bias. As is my choice of the masculine for the Child which could be either, though it will be seen that the Child’s masculine or feminine attributes do play a part in his/her story and are not incidental.

Imagine that you get to decide whether anything shall Be. You’re a nice person so you don’t want a black hole of death and nothingness to have your name on it. You want something nice, so you say let there be Life. And presto, there it is: Life! You’ve begun the process with your mind which makes choices based on thoughts-reasons and feeling. With Logic. With definitions and attributes. And the Logic of your choice is a Self endowed with its definition and attributes: Life.

If that were all there is to it we would all have eternal life and it would be nonstop fun, joyfulness, and laughter. But that’s not all there is to it. “Life” wasn’t a given with no opposite. It was a choice, and just because you chose it doesn’t mean that Life doesn’t imply the potential existence of its opposite, death, or the opposite of Being which is nothingness. The Logic of “Life” includes the possibility of its opposite. The definition of Life can’t be detached from the definition of what it is not. One implies the existence -- the definition, the Logic -- of the other. So, in choosing Life you have set in motion a scenario – a logical sequence of events -- that must include the possibility of opposites. And as we will find, the Logic of opposites and their attributes can make their presence felt in the mind of an unconscious Child.

The Logic of Mind implies the possibility of the thought of its opposite: mindlessness. But because its true opposite, as opposed to the derivatives non-mind or non-being, is entirely separate and mindless, Mind has no Knowledge of it. Mind that is Consciousness by definition can have no Knowledge of the possibility of its own unconsciousness. This is because by definition it can’t be unconscious. This is an attribute of Mind-Consciousness that will be decisive in the Child’s loss of Consciousness, so we need to remember it.

Popular culture and mythology, religion and philosophy, all condition us to think of “God” as “all-powerful” and “all-knowing.” One among many definitions of Mind is “Knowledge.” Yet the Logic of Mind, as we will see, implies that there is much that Mind does not know. All that is Real is what Mind Knows, and it is Mind that Creates Reality. It cannot know what it is not, for to do so would make its opposite Real. It cannot Know the unknown into which Creation, by definition, ventures. The effects of causes cannot be brought to Consciousness, cannot be made Real, without following in logical sequence, where there is a before and after. Mind-Consciousness does not Know effects of causes, does not bring them to Reality, until it recognizes them. To recognize a violation of Logic in cause and effect, to bring it to Consciousness, would violate the Logic of Mind and throw it into unconsciousness – an impossibility. As we will see, it was to prevent a violation of Logic of the Child’s Conscious Mind that his Mind lost Consciousness.

The Logic of timelessness does not imply that everything that is and is to be is already Known. Consciousness that does the Knowing and therefore the Creating -- the Child in Relationship with his Parents – is timeless and eternal. Yet it proceeds with Creation in logical sequence into the unknown; is therefore constantly extending and expanding itself; engaged in change; and it is the glory and wonder of Creation, of Life, that in its presence it is eternally yet to come.

Published on Leave a comment on A Response from Philosophy to Quantum Gravity

Letter to Carlo Rovelli, Director, Quantum Gravity Group
Centre de Physique Théorique (CPT), Aix-Marseille University
Author, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (2017)

Re: Appeal from theoretical physics to philosophy for help understanding the meaning of quantum gravity

The approach to the task of physics presented in Reality Is Not What It Seems strikes me as reasonable. This in contrast to the approach propounded by Stephen Hawking, because you acknowledge the limits of experimental science and allow a role for philosophy while he, notoriously, did not. For him, “Philosophy is dead.” For you, it becomes essential.

The occasion to express my thanks and admiration has finally arrived. Today, I submitted a letter to the Mind / Brain Editor of Scientific American commenting on an article by a neuroscientist, Christof Koch. The article, “Tales of the Dying Brain,” prompted my letter because it adheres to the article of faith in sensory perception that has rooted science in subjectivity and irrationality from its very beginning, and I believe the time has come, with your appeal to philosophy, to place it on firmer logical ground.

My letter cites yours and Adam Becker’s recent book, What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for Meaning in Quantum Physics. Both authors, troubled and confused as Einstein was by matter that doesn’t respect science’s article of faith, appear to believe that a road still lies ahead for traditional physics. You, in particular, breezed by Schroedinger’s observation that science by sensory perception is circular reasoning without reflecting on it, nor did you credit Parmenides and his School of Reason with common sense.

Yet both sources should be taken as prominent red flags for science, for I believe they point in the direction of the “philosophy” that can make sense of quantum gravity. That is, if the “other reality” that I allude to in my letter to Scientific American is understood for what I’ve implied that it is: one of two competing realities, only one of which can be real. Science has been insisting that the incorrect one is real -- matter rather than mind, -- not in service to the truth but in service to its own institutional purposes.

Hawking was unapologetic in championing his profession and made his own and his profession’s bias very clear. It was his, and yours and Becker’s prerogative, to do so. But it comes at a cost. The cost is continuing to lead human understanding down the wrong road, to incorrect conclusions devoid of meaning and purpose. Add to this the cost of not leading human understanding toward correct conclusions that awaken us to meaning and purpose.

Weaning science off rigid dependence on sensory perception must be a paradigm shift too far or it would have happened over a century ago. I do not make light of yours or science’s institutional self-interests. But more than Professor Koch’s article, it is the state of our world that says it’s time for change, and what must change is our thinking. What must change is for theorists in every field, like yourself, to state the obvious: that humanity is succumbing not only to mass irrationality but also to mass extinction, that it’s flawed reasoning that got us here, and we must shift to a new paradigm of thinking before it’s too late.

My letter to Scientific American alludes to attributes of mind -- “intuition” and “reason beyond appearances” – that can access the objectivity this new paradigm will need. They deserve an explanation, and, hopefully, they will get it in the book I’m preparing for publication, tentatively titled The Story of the Child. I have criticized science for overplaying the story of matter when it’s the story of mind that can explain what it’s all about. My book is an attempt, from one individual’s perspective, to explain what it means to “tell the story of mind.”

With integrity, honesty, and humanity, you are no doubt making great progress in your work. I would be honored if my letter to Scientific American, posted on my website, and my book were any help. Quantum gravity has called for help from philosophy, and I am pleased to humbly offer one response.

David C. Harrison
May 31, 2020