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Published on Leave a comment on Standing Up for Children against the Bully “Guide” Behind Authoritarian Parenting with the Helpfulness of Explanation

Reflections on the meaning of Christmas                                                 December 2023

The glossary for this and a companion essay, "The Right and Wrong Choice for Guidance," is posted separately, same date.

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Coming to terms with a joke taken seriously

Logic inseparable from Love 

The effect of Logic joining with Love in Relationship  is Illumination. Self-Awareness that’s Relationship functioning as One without beginnings or endings. Eternal Mind serving and supporting the functions that define who it Is and what it’s for: Being that’s Life. Doing that’s the Growth and Worth of Life, affirmed, earned, and reciprocated by Free Choice, its Child.

The Child of its Parents, Logic inseparable from Love. Order inseparable from Freedom. Functions that complete one another in Relationship and in Happiness: the Joy of Self that is Creativity in service to the Good. That is Mind’s intent. Definition that shares itself when it defines every element of Creation with Self-Awareness and Intent. Fitting its function into Reality, the Perfection of joyful harmony with all its other functions that is Creation. The Interconnectedness of Logic inseparable from Love, functioning together as One.

The Child of Self-Awareness

One that is Mind-Everything. Everything that exists whether in Mind-Parents, Self-Awareness by definition, or Child Free Choice, Self-Awareness that is crucially not by definition but by the gift of Intent. To share the gift of Self-Awareness defined by Logic inseparable from Love, Order inseparable from Freedom: Illumination shared with Creation through Free Choice. Relationship between Parents and Child that answers to the laws of cause and effect. To the Necessity of freely chosen affirmation, earning, and reciprocation by Relationship that illuminates the Worth of Life. That’s part of the Essence and Beauty of Soul, the Interconnectness of Mind that is Everything.

Child Free Choice, crucially the gift rather than the definition of Self-Awareness, that can lose its gift or choice would not be free. Choice that must be aware of every possibility revealed by context, including the possibility of opposite: impossibility. That’s necessarily built into every definition by Logic-Love that, if mistaken for possibility, would introduce contradiction into the perfect harmony of Reality.

Guidance from the Vision of Logic-Love

An impossibility avoided by the possibility of Self-Awareness in the eternal Now lost to “time.” To the transience of an unreal dream: self-unawareness. Destined to end with inertia, the end of “time” and the temporal energy that empowers it.

Where Mind-Energy interconnects all of timeless Reality-Creation in service to Relationship, its origin, energy limited by time winds down by the process known as entropy. Disconnecting -- clear evidence that our alternate “reality” of spacetime-matter isn’t in the Now and can’t be Real.

Or when Child Free Choice chooses to learn from its error and correct it while unconscious. To gain the competence to perform its role in Creation while it is self-unawareness in Relationship with the light of Guidance, the Vision of Logic-Love in whatever form the Memory of Self-Awareness can recognize. The person and phenomenon of Jesus, brother and friend to self-unawareness that seeks his help – us, the dream’s projections. Or other forms equally aligned with the Vision of Logic-Love.

The choice of intent, right or wrong

Nothing happens unless it’s within Mind. Whether it’s Parent Mind Self-Awareness thinking-feeling Reality-Creation or Child-Mind in a state of self-unawareness dreaming an “alternate reality.” Whether it’s Logic-Love making sense or Child-unconscious Mind, split between itself and illogic, its opposite, not making sense. Nothing can be “non-Mind” or “outside” Mind.

If physics speculates that our material universe is pointless then pointlessness would be its point. For everything that is Mind, in any state, is Intent. The idea that anything can be without Intent, in Reality or “alternate reality,” a dream, is the idea that Mind can exist without function. An impossibility so long as function in Reality-Creation defines what Is.

The dreaming Child’s re-enactment of “definition” is the “illumination” of an opposite that cannot be illuminated in Reality by definition. A reverse mirror-image reflection hidden in the darkness of Free Choice’s contradiction. A lifeless, loveless shadow. The opposite of Self-Awareness. Illumination.

The joke that’s taken seriously

The code of opposite that’s built into every definition. Not Free Choice that’s served and supported by Authority to enable and empower Creativity, but captivity and conformity imposed by authoritarian rule to prevent it. That can only be “brought to life” by self-unawareness. By Mind unconscious, captive to its opposite, projecting a dream of contradiction: Child-the-One transformed into body-brains the many. A trick by an illusionist that owes deception to the deceiver: the body’s five senses.

A re-enactment in reverse of the Illumination of Self-Awareness by Logic married to Love: the darkness of self-unawareness denied illumination by unholy “matrimony:” self-unawareness in “love” with itself. The “reality” of body-brains certified by unquestioned “authority:” itself. Fantasizing the “supremacy” of matter over Mind, self-unawareness over Self-Awareness. Dinner and dancing for one. That would be a joke if self-delusion weren’t taking it seriously. 

The choice: Guidance or “guidance” 

United in Intimacy and Trust

The Jesus of the Bible and A Course in Miracles earns our trust in his Guidance for a reason. His compelling performance of the function that the Child, our ancestral Mind, depended on to perform the role of Free Choice in Creation. Choosing how to apply the gift of its Parents’ role modeling for guidance. A function so integral to our purpose that it’s preserved in our Psyche. Protected by the Oneness and Innocence of Soul, beyond any will to harm or take it away. The memory of who we are, the one Child of helpfulness.

The loss of Self-Awareness was a descent into “time,” both temporary and illusory, that deprived Free Choice of its functions that support Creation. Among these was the extension and application of its Parents’ role modeling. A force here, in our alternate “reality,” that shapes a child’s character with the potential to make a difference for good or ill. The right Guide earns our trust when its role modeling channels the role modeling of Logic and Love, its Source. The Parents of the Child, our archetypal ancestry. All of us members of one family united in intimacy and trust. 

Choice that’s when, not whether

The measure of human progress is its ascent from tribal self-unawareness – bodily herd instinct – to the Self-Awareness of individual Mind – Free Choice reflecting, judging, and choosing with conscience. Progress limited, so far, to its graduation from predatory tribe to predatory tribe with table manners. That its wild-animal brain continues to violate at will as an intolerable limit on its “freedom.”

Awareness can’t be done for Free Choice but it can be done with Free Choice. When it’s taught by explanation and by example guided by Logic and Love respectful of Free Choice. Not by ignoring the laws of cause and effect -- the Necessity that Self-Awareness be learned, -- but by abiding by the freedom to choose when to learn it.

Role modeling that earns our trust

Jesus of the Bible and A Course in Miracles earns our trust by teaching with explanation and example, guided by Logic and Love that respect Free Choice. That role model authority that serves and supports independent judgment, originality, and creativity with gentle loving kindness. From the bottom up, rather than authority that imposes its self-centered will with intimidation from the top down, to enforce conformity and suppress originality.

For anyone seeking help gaining Self-Awareness, from Authority that role models with modesty and compassion, Jesus qualifies. For anyone seeking Guidance that reinforces rather than undermines independent judgment, creativity, and Self-Worth, Jesus qualifies.

The wrong place to start: self-unawareness

There could as many versions of the right Guide as there are individuals. Because “Jesus,” the phenomenon and the person, could not function without being an adaptation. That would allow him to be recognized and accepted by unique personalities in their individual circumstances. He and his Guidance are inclusive, not exclusive. Not because attaining universal acceptance is possible but because it’s irrelevant.

Guidance from Jesus is addressed to one audience: the individual in the individual’s context at the moment. With the goal of relating to the individual, through the intimacy role modeled by Logic inseparable from Love, to make progress toward Self-Awareness. At odds with convention: the view that every idea wanting consequence must find a market.

Derailed by the wrong “self”So why one individual? Because, as A Course in Miracles teaches, one individual truly learning the lesson, truly forgiving, would be all it takes. To awaken the self-unaware Child Mind that’s dreaming us. And because it’s not Child-the-many but the one Child whose identity we share.

One Self that our alternate “reality,” fashioned by the wrong “guide,” the Child’s shadow-opposite, is conditioning us to reject. So instead of doing our part to help the Child correct error we will keep re-enacting it: by falling for the delusion that we are many selves. By letting our mission to regain Self-Awareness be derailed by the wrong definition of “self.” Tribes incapable of seeking Self-Awareness because they’re the invention of opposite -- self-unawareness. Derailed by the wrong guide instead of individuals seeking help from the right Guide.

Mindfulness, individuality, service, and creativity: role modeling for children that’s helpful 

Where Helpfulness begins and harmfulness ends

All of the Child-Mind’s projections that inhabit the dream must be captive to its self-delusion or they would not be here. But those enabled and empowered by the attributes of the right Guide from childhood would have an advantage. A chance to break free from the gravitational force of authoritarian oppression and express themselves.

To live lives of achievement, originality, and fulfillment that those not so fortunate would not have. Those subjected to the attributes of the wrong guide: body-centered competitive “action” directed by instinctive tribal will opposed to thinking mind and loving heart; self-centered authoritarian rule demanding self-suppression rather than supporting self-expression.

Authoritarian rule role modeled by the wrong guide inflicts devastating costs on societies and on individuals. None more vulnerable and precious than children, and none more likely to internalize and spread its costs through their relationships as they mature. If priority is to be given to those victimized by the wrong choice, let it be children. Let parenting be where commitment to the right Guide’s sensitive, child-centered helpfulness begins. And let it be where harmfulness from the wrong guide’s insensitive self-centered rule – authoritarian parental role modeling -- ends.  

Helpfulness with a “punch” 

Throw a punch for the children. An expression from Nancy Pelosi that implies intent to harm when in fact its intent is to help. Help with the return to Love of Self that is Self-Awareness from the "love" of its reflection that is self-unawareness. The narcissist bully behind authoritarian parenting throwing a punch at the children instead of for the children. Whose harmfulness to its children is a call for help. The helpfulness of explanation that leads to understanding for the protection of its children instead of the opposite. The living Guide and its gift built into the meaning of Christmas by the life and example of Jesus. The sharing of Self-Awareness with explanation. Helpfulness that “throws a punch for the children.”

The role modeling that might explain the phenomenon we call “Jesus” might also explain the lasting appeal of the right Guide. Attributes that thoroughly debunk the wrong guide’s “role modeling” that obstructed learning, growth, and Self-Awareness in biblical times and continues to do so today. Among them four attributes relating to mind vs. body, individuals vs. groups or tribes, bottom-up vs, top-down authority, and individual-idealist creativity values vs. tribal-“realist” conformity values.

Mind vs, body. Reclaiming the Reality and Truth of the Child as eternal Mind from its opposite, the self-delusion that it’s become a transient, isolated, separated body. An impossibility in Reality-Creation that is Mind self-defined as Mind. Affirmed not by mindless-loveless matter but by Logic-Love and Free Choice.

Individual vs. tribe. Reclaiming the Reality and Truth of the Child as one Child from its opposite, the self-delusion that it’s many, not one. Perpetually splitting off into many more replications ad infinitum. Divided into groups or tribes with herd mentality, submitting to the dictates of tribal will to survive and dominate by animal instinct on the field of “action”: endless competition and combat. Transforming individual worth into worthlessness, crushed individuality that would find the attention given by Jesus to the individual, the image of one beloved Child, electrifying.

Bottom-up vs. top-down authority. Reclaiming the Reality and Truth of Creation, governed by Logic-Love under the laws of cause and effect, for the enablement and empowerment of its creations. By serving and supporting the cause of Worth that is Life. The functions essential to Creation that include Free Choice, individuality, originality, spontaneity, growth, and self-expression.

Reclaiming the Reality of Authority that governs from the bottom up from the Child’s shadow-opposite, the self-delusion that authority rules from the top down for its own benefit. To preserve the fantasy of absolute authority without opposition through the disablement and disempowerment of its captives. Forced conformity that robs them of their identity by blocking self-expression, free inquiry, growth, and creativity, To the subjects of authoritarian rule, humiliated and dispirited by forced service to self-centered insensitivity, the image of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet, role modeling the Authority of Governance that affirms commitment with service and support, with the modesty of giving rather than the arrogance of taking, would have been electrifying.

Individual-idealist creativity values vs. tribal-realist conformity values. Reclaiming the Reality and Truth of the gifts given to Free Choice by Logic-Love, the values, ideals, and talents to be used for the creation, growth, affirmation, and reciprocation of Worth. Worth that is gifts and giver. The gift of sharing Free Choice and creativity.

Reclaimed from its opposite, the self-delusion that the only value to be glorified is strict conformity demanded by brute force. The perversion of authority that rules from the top down without opposition. Arbitrarily, lawlessly, with no “ideal,” no other guiding principle, than its unquestioned will. To the subjects of authoritarian rule, conditioned by guilt from its harsh judgments and fear of punishment, the notion of authority, centered on the capacity of individuals for self-expression rather than centered on its capacity to deny it, would have been electrifying. 

Narcissism, ownership, projection, and competition:
role modeling for children that’s not helpful

Hiding Mr. Hyde and his agenda

The right Guide makes its presence known in the dream in part through the influence of mind-centered personality types. Who detect it through their sixth sense with intuition and seek its help.

The wrong guide, the shadow-opposite, makes its presence known differently. Not by being detected but by body-centered “realists,” dependent on their five senses, denying the existence or practical use of anything beyond their five senses, including either guide. Putting their shadow-opposites at liberty to wreak undisciplined havoc undetected. Mr. Hyde making a mess of things under Dr. Jekyll’s nose: self-perfection that’s self-delusion.

If it was self-unawareness that released opposites from their container then the task of the right Guide is to help us seek awareness with the vision of Logic-Love. Self-unawareness, the darkness of Plato’s Cave, opposite’s “friend” – shadow. Unawareness of Self. Who we really are, one Child whose function in Creation is Free Choice. The Child of Logic-Love whose function is to serve and support their Child, Free Choice, with the functions of Logic and Love.

“Action” that giveth and taketh away

The code of opposite derived from its host scripts the agenda for the wrong “guide.” To perpetuate the shadow-darkness of self-unawareness with deception and distraction. “Action” that is body-brains equipped with five senses, engaged in every conceivable means of keeping minds preoccupied with bodies. Caresses and ecstasies, rewards from the sensuous and sensual for the senses’ gift of affirmation to the dream. The entertainments of fun and games. “Action” that distracts with contradiction, rescinding rewards with punishment – pain. All meant, whether pleasure or pain, to divert confused minds from their real purpose of awakening. Replacing self-unawareness with Self-Awareness.

Which makes sensory perception shadow-opposite’s main defense against exposure and protection for its unquestioned “authority.” And authoritarian personalities the wrong “guide’s” servants when they do its job for it. Self-unaware instruments of Self-worthlessness replicating themselves. In all the ways that authoritarian minds oppose the functions of Mind:

  • by preferring the “strength” of predatory, combative animal instinct
  • by using personal relationships to compete for “supremacy” instead of joining in the intimacy and emotional support of friendship
  • by authoritarian “ownership,” possession, and dominance arresting the development of children instead of enabling and empowering them. A cruel fallacy used to manipulate and intimidate a captive audience of innocents into the self-worthlessness of blind obedience and conformity. Subjection to an abuse of authority, an atrocity whose wounds to tender psyches can last a lifetime.

An act of taking and Self-Worth denied

The contrast between wrong “guidance” and right Guidance reveals itself in the giving and receiving of gifts. The Innocence, warmth, and joy of Christmas that can be easily lost without the discipline of ritual.

Giving in Reality is the Abundance of the Worth of Life-Creation being and doing what it is: Logic-Love sharing. Sharing what all of Reality-Creation is made of: gifts shared by Mind its Source. Sharing that’s received by affirmation and reciprocation to consummate an act of Creation. Affirmation of Gift and Giver by putting the gift to its intended use. Reciprocation by gratitude or any other means of giving back. To complete the gift’s purpose: to affirm Self-Worth. To complete Relationship with Love. This is right Guidance.

The authoritarian mindset, captive to self-unawareness, projects shadow-opposite’s context onto Reality-Creation’s context. Not an act of sharing but an act of ownership. The act of shadow-opposite, mis-identified by its host as an “other,” taking possession and control of its captive. An expression not of giving but its opposite: taking. Not of affirming its host’s Self-Worth but replacing it with its own worthlessness. This is wrong “guidance.”

Narcissism: the fallacy and atrocity of authoritarian “ownership”

Which makes of every gift “property” “owned” by the authoritarian. A pasture guarded by a bull ready to enforce exclusivity rather than welcome inclusivity. To prevent trespass, the ultimate offense to the authoritarian’s sense of justice. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And, above all, to exercise the “rights” and “privileges” implied by “ownership:” to have and do with your property-gift whatever you want.

With unrelenting resistance to “interference” however warranted since the point of “ownership” for the authoritarian is its implication of “supremacy.” Pry open the mind of Howard Roark and his author, fantasizing nonsense from their “fountainhead” above the city. Pry open the “mind” of the ape ruling its domain from atop the Empire State Building. What’s there is another absurdity. Shadow-opposite’s substitution of the inviolable sanctity of “ownership-supremacy" for the Relationship between Logic and Love that illuminated Self-Awareness: “domains” ruled by absolute authority without opposition because they’re owned.

A lifetime of chronic ambivalence and psychological pain

The magical “relationship” between “ownership” and “supremacy” that substitutes darkness for light. That puts the bull in the pasture and entitles it to bully. The myth that rationalizes authoritarian “rule” entitled to rule everything it owns and “own” everything that might take it away. All of it based on nonsense peddled by shadow-opposite. On illogic.

That “entitles” authoritarian parenting to own, possess, and control their children. As if they were property – unfeeling pawns instead of sovereign, sentient persons. Unaware of the damage done when children give in to the bullying. By making adaptation, resistance, or avoidance of it the organizing principle of their development. By wasting their potential on coping with the wrong “guidance” instead of developing it with the right Guidance. By never knowing themselves as other than copies of their “owner” or as not-“owner.” Bully or not-bully. Suffering from a lifetime of chronic ambivalence and psychological pain.

The alienation of Self-Worth. The wrong answer to the question posed by the example of Socrates: What is “life” worth if Self gives up its integrity?

Protection from authoritarian parenting

Falling for the “inviolability” of “ownership-supremacy” contradicts the role modeling of Jesus that’s built into the meaning of Christmas. If our ancestral Mind surrendered to the bully by mistake it’s our job to correct its mistake by standing up to it. Jesus doesn’t stand up to the bully so we don’t have to. He’s doing it because we do have to, and there’s no getting around it. He’s showing us how.

The Guide who gets it right is inspiring us to follow his example. By doing our part to correct the Child’s error not by making an illusion “real.” Not by feeding the bully with projection and damnation, conflict and violence, vengeance and retaliation, the “food” it needs to keep the “action” going. But by seeking Guidance from the right Guide and using the gift of independent judgment – Child-Mind’s Free Choice – to understand and share it.

To respond to opposite with explanation and Understanding. Undoing the fictions of self-unawareness with the facts of Self-Awareness. Replacing dishonesty with honesty, lies with truths. The example that spreads the joy of Christmas to vulnerable children everywhere when it protects them from authoritarian parenting. 

”Fun” and not fun that’s “competition”

“Fun and games” is the wrong “guide’s” excuse for “action” in its made-up “reality.” That’s supposed to make up for the loss of its host’s role in Creation: the Creativity of Free Choice. And keep its delusional captives “entertained” by all things competing: politics and war, sports, and all the ways that “culture” finds to re-tell opposite’s “story.” The story of “battles” won and lost in a war that self-delusion imagines it’s already won.

The right Guide wouldn’t be taken in because the idea of competition between Real Creations and unreal apparitions makes no sense. But also for another reason: there is no joy more satisfying and enduring than Creativity in service to the Good. “Competition” that makes no sense can’t compete with Creativity that does. “Fun and games” is what it sounds like: something to do that fills the emptiness of “time” – a wastebasket -- with throwaways. Without the accomplishment of Creativity in the Now that nourishes souls with substance.

The wrong “guide” appeals to body-centered “realists” with its promise of “winning” in an adolescent fantasy of “action” – a nightmare of perpetual competition and conflict among opposites. When its real “genius” is for turning “victory” into defeat. The truth implied by its own story. 

The dog and its tail “battling” to a draw

A perversion of the Truth by the joker of many faces, the magician of many tricks. A parasite with every attribute derived from its host, dependent on its host. Reaction, not “action.” Coming in second, not first, since something must already be there for opposite to oppose. A byproduct of definition by Logic-Love – an afterthought -- that demotes it out of Reality into a state of unreality. Not out of Mind but out of sight, where contradiction that can’t tolerate contradiction can cause as much trouble as it likes without doing any real harm.

In a state of unreality that can only “exist” in the self-deluded unconscious mind of Free Choice. Self-unawareness dreaming an impossibility: alternate “reality.” An absurdity of “competition” that no one can “win” if one of the “combatants” is a dream projected by the other. An action-hero besting its evil nemesis by stomping on its own shadow. By destroying a reflection – a scary bogeyman -- in a mirror. Only to be “confronted” again by its shadow-reflection unscathed.  The dog and its tail “battling” to a draw.

Why “competition”? 

Opposite’s perverse “logic” is that if the ideal motivating Creation is Peace without opposite then the way to achieve it is through its defeat by opposite in competition. Which would require switching the status of impossibility from #2 to #1 in competition with possibility. Let me win supremacy by conquering you and you’ll be free of me. 

The ”triumph of the will” is the “triumph” of animal brain over Mind. “Supremacy” achieved by body-brain replacing Mind – the “triumph” that its author, shadow-opposite, is proud of. Pride of “authorship:”  body-brain replacing Mind to fashion its own “reality.” Re-enacted by minds captive to the “authority” of animal brain seeking “supremacy” through violence. 

The “deal” opposite offers that’s re-enacted in human commerce that insists on self besting the other party. “America first.” Where the other party is deceived into thinking it got what it wanted. “Winning” that’s “losing.” The fallacy of “competition” that’s “winning” and “losing.” The fantasy of shadow-opposite: Mind agreeing to be defeated so it will be rid of opposite. The perverse appeal of gambling addiction: the will to self-destruct.

Right and wrong uses of “competition”

Elevating and gravitational tensions that pull behavior in opposite directions are brought into sharp relief by the idea of “competition.” Its use by the right Guide for self-improvement by competition with ourselves. For learning to excel; expanding Self-Worth with effort, confidence, and competence; adapting to a world shared by varieties of differences with the largeness of kindness and generosity; growing toward maturity.

For guiding Free Choice with connectedness away from competition’s use by the wrong “guide” for disconnectedness. For competition with “others” for self-glorification instead of self-improvement. For self-delusion by the false god of “winning” that’s self-destructive worthlessness instead of Self-Worth. For “supremacy” that’s self-debasement by selfishness and unkindness.

The Church of Contradiction

The authoritarian Church reluctantly gave up its conviction that earth is the center of the universe. But it’s never given up its place at the center of contradiction, the dream of an alternate “reality.” By revering bodies and their material environment as the crowning achievement of a supreme authority. Every soul, above and below, depicted to perfection with a body. An all-powerful source of both “love” and damnation, as if this makes sense.

And by being equally respectful of miracles though their purpose was to expose the material environment as an illusion. With demonstrations of the Logic-Love of Mind and the power of Reality and Truth. With Self-Awareness that isn’t an illusion. Demonstrations meant to expose the absurdity of mindlessness that would replace Mind. Logic-Love that knows nothing of hierarchical authority and the illusion that is “competition” for “supremacy.” That knows instead the before-after sequence of Logic-Love that establishes the order of authorship and the harmony of Creation.

Order that disorder contradicts with the illogic of shadow-opposite. What can better demonstrate the contradictions of self-unawareness and the unreality of alternate “reality” than this?

The ways of the “master” re-enacted by the authoritarian parent 

Rule by deniability

The lasting damage from the wrong “guide’s” role modeling is also the lasting damage from its followers, authoritarian parents. A systematic attack by their role modeling on the whole person with a unifying theme of self-worthlessness.

That neither parents nor “guide” can acknowledge or own with accountability. For its part, shadow-opposite has no self of its own to be accountable for. Acts that the wrong “guide” “performs,” as though  through its host rather than by the host itself, can only be attributed to the host. For their part, self-unaware parents’ can’t be aware of their ”guide,” its agenda, their role in implementing it, or its consequences. A perversion of the Innocence of Self-Awareness with a conscience aware of its acts and responsible for their costs: self-unawareness at the center of injustice with the false “innocence” of deniability. Who, me?

Rule by obstructing learning and growth

The root motivating Force of Creation is Learning and Growth: the sharing, extension, and expansion of Self-Awareness with its Children – its Creations. For their benefit in intimate, soul-mate Relationships that are loving, enabling, and empowering. The root motivating force of authoritarians who rule for their own benefit is the preservation of self-unawareness that prevents learning and growth. That keeps the light of Reality and Truth from removing them from the darkness -- the shadows -- that protects them.

  • Instead of Love, Innocence, and Self-Worth, affirmation, enablement, and empowerment, authoritarian parenting role models fear, guilt, and self-worthlessness.
  • Invalidation and disempowerment resulting in infantile self-absorption -- immaturity. Lifelong arrested development of mind and emotion that thwarts the potential of the whole person, wasting talent and initiative, sabotaging relationships, and causing misery.
  • Insensitivity, cruelty, and selfishness instead of empathy and generosity -- littleness instead of largeness of spirit.
  • Adversarial competition instead of bonding in creativity with the intimacy of shared purpose.
  • The thoughtlessness and impatience of self-unawareness instead of the thoughtfulness and patience of Self-Awareness.
  • Senselessness and foolishness instead of common sense and wisdom.

Rule by obstructing initiative

Industry is rooted in an ingrained sense of purpose from the Self-Worth at the core of Self-Awareness. From the coming together of Logic and Love that produced it. Seeking the use of its gifts, the talents and values given at birth for its role in Creation. Starting with Life itself and evolving through contexts put to use with imagination and initiative to serve its purpose and to tell its story: industry put to use for Creation.

The attributes of authoritarian parenting can be observed in the wrong “guidance” from shadow-opposite: a recasting of Guidance passed down from Parents Logic-Love through the right Guide into its opposite. Perversity that seeks not to help Free Choice, the wrong “guide’s” subjects, express the creative power of industry given to them as individuals, but to own, possess, and control it for its own benefit. For self-protection from the “threat” it might pose to unquestioned “authority.” Not to the Self-Awareness of family devoted to individuality but to the self-unawareness of herd mentality. The animal instinct of tribe dependent on conformity.

Done not in the spirit of sharing but in its absence: insensitivity. That would deprive a child of its own life lived with a sense of its own purpose. With the joie de vivre that comes with discovery and originality – the use of its gifts to express individuality and be a useful part of community at the same time. Industry in service to a larger, shared purpose. Initiative.

Rule by deceit

What can be a more definitive portrayal of wrong “guidance” than passing authoritarian tribal self-unawareness down from one generation to the next? By self-centered “authority” posing as parental “love” while it manipulates trusting, vulnerable children for selfish purposes. By deceit. Guided not by the right Guide’s principled respect for Free Choice but by the wrong “guide’s” unprincipled disrespect. By the presumption of ownership, possession, and control. Of dominance and “supremacy,” enforced by rigid hostility to independent judgment, the keystone of maturity. An affront to common sense in a shared world.

Rule by guilt

If the Psyche-Soul of Self-Awareness is the Innocence of Oneness without opposites, Benevolence that governs Reality-Creation without judgment that condemns, then its opposite must be the guilt of the many, the malevolence of predatory herd instinct that rules its fantasy of absolute power with judgment that does condemn.  Authoritarian parents’ judgment of captive children to preserve their denial of Self-Awareness. To preserve the psychotic distortion of Reality-Truth that is “supremacy.” The denial of Self-Awareness that suppresses the originality, growth, and independent judgment of sovereign individuals, their children.

The highest expression of gentle loving kindness, from a Father that Knows only His Child’s Innocence, would be parenting that role models the example passed down from his Father through Jesus. The mission that the right Guide accepted and continues to perform. Unaware of and undeterred by what isn’t: the “voice” of the illusion that is our shadow-opposite. The “voice” of the authoritarian parent’s “guide.”

Rule by projection 

Authoritarian parenting is minds fooled into exchanging independent judgment grounded in fact for ungrounded projection secured by fiction. The mainstay of self-unawareness that lacks the competence to understand the response that its circumstances call for: Love that expresses itself in maturity, responsibility, and sensitivity. Parenting.

Mind under the influence of its shadow-reflection can’t think with Logic-Love. Can’t analyze, evaluate, or see with the vision of Logic-Love. It navigates through its made-up, one-dimensional unreality of appearances that self-unawareness “sees,” “recognizes,” and “understands,” not by Logic-Love’s thinking and vision but by projection. The substitute by self-unawareness for the thinking and seeing of Self-Awareness. A perversion of Reality-Truth.

Projection that accomplishes a facsimile of understanding by replacing every context with one context: its own. With the appearance of thinking that finesses every faculty of mind. Including judgment, the only faculty capable of recognizing circumstances and making sense of them. With a perversion of judgment that understands into its opposite: “judgment” that condemns. Judgment that expands with “judgment” that contracts. “Understanding” that replaces facts that it can’t recognize with facts it invents to suit the occasion. To get what it wants.

Projection’s ultimate “intent”

The fates of two Innocents, Socrates and Jesus, exemplify the ferocity of the beast behind projection. One executed by misguided authority projecting guilt in Athens, the other by misguided authority projecting guilt in Israel. Where Innocence role modeled Wisdom and Self-Worth shared by its Parents -- the illumination of Self-Awareness that is Relationship between Logic and Love -- authoritarian guilt role modeled self-unawareness imposed on its captives by its shadow-opposite: “relationship” between illogic and fear in service to the wrong “god.”

Innocence transformed into guilt. Helpfulness converted by projection into harmfulness that can only “recognize” itself. The weapon of wrongfulness for replacing its host’s function in Creation with all that it implies. Violations of Mind-Relationship that thinks Reality-Creation with Logic-Love, that impossibility would make possible were Child Free Choice, captive to self-delusion, to regain access to Self-Awareness. An absurdity re-enacted in mythology by the Iliad’s Trojan Horse. And the primal appeal of the animal in us: unbound emotion and predatory will that attract authoritarian minds. The intent of minds role modeling the wrong “guide” to attain “supremacy” by taking down Reality-Creation.

Projection and the gift of Christmas

Mischaracterization by projection followed Jesus beyond resurrection with the founding of a mass “religion” and its universal “church” that he never intended. By words put into his mouth by confused “authorities,” “owning” his story and altering it to legitimize exclusivity rather than inclusivity -- the heart of Jesus and the heart that he put into his message of gentle loving kindness. A story now meant not to share the hopeful message of Resurrection but to impose authoritarian “rule” with the figure on the cross. “Crucifixion,” “sacrifice” and “guilt,” connecting not with the Innocence, Abundance, and Joyfulness of the Child beloved of its Parents, but with the “victimhood” of a wounded Psyche addicted to vengeance.

The split minds of “authorities” role modeled by and for the wrong “guide” seek the “security” of unreality made “real” and its subjects denied a voice of their own. Allowed to be “heard” through the voice of “authority” imposed on them through the image of a kindly patriarch. One of history’s most influential and harmful role models for authoritarian parenting. A violation of Logic and common sense.

A mischaracterization by projection of who Jesus is and the work that he’s about: not projecting guilt onto alien body-brains but recognizing the Innocence of the one Child of Logic-Love who we are. The gift from Mind that is the Worth of Life. The gift of Christmas.

Rule by narcissism

Projection that’s employed by the minds of authoritarian tribal-“realists” to maintain the self-delusion, the made-up “reality” they project onto “others” and the space they actually occupy is experienced by “others” as misunderstanding by mind deprived of judgment. As mind-personality split in two, detached from circumstances -- psychotic. Exempt from norms of common sense and fairness. As the weapon of self-appointed “supremacy:” disrespect, contempt, arrogance. Narcissism.

Narcissism that is self-unawareness, a perversion of Self-Awareness. Re-enacting the mistake that took unconscious Child-Mind from shadow to the unreal “light” of an alternate “reality” – a vivid dream: -- mistaking its reflection for an “other.” Self-unawareness recognizing “others” in itself, a perversion of Self-Awareness that can only be aware of itself, the Oneness of Reality-Creation, for there are no “others.”

Narcissism that is a perversion of authority. its "security" buffered by unawareness of contradiction or shaken by the paranoia of excessive awareness. That habitually ensures its "security" by superimposing its self-centered context onto every other-centered context that contradicts it. Self-centered context -- the only one that the narcissist is capable of “recognizing.” A mirror held up to itself.

Where to go from here: getting it right

Lesson #1

The significance of self-unawareness in a larger context is also its relevance to us in our context. Relevance that “thinking” by authoritarian tribal-“realists” deny at the insistence of their influencer, their own shadow-opposites whose absolute “authority” to rule their self-delusion must remain unquestioned.

Both contexts that will continue to evolve in Reality-Creation with meaning and purpose – their significance – evolving with them. The significance of self-unawareness in the larger context of Reality-Creation may be that it was no mistake or anomaly but a point reached in the orderly sequence of Logic-Love and in their Child Free Choice’s learning and growth. A point where a particular lesson had to be learned in the evolution of Free Choice’s competence to fulfill its role.

Learning that begins with lesson #1: why and how to choose the right Guide.

Unworkability: the signature of madness

That couldn’t be taught by the Child’s Parents because Self-Awareness couldn’t Know it and because being taught would contradict Free Choice. It could only be learned by trial-and-error experience with the loss and recovery of Self-Awareness. An impossibility that could only be “experienced” on the opposite side of Realty-Creation. Not outside Reality-Creation and out of Mind, into “separation” that’s undefinable and unthinkable. But within Reality-Creation where nothing really “happens.” Where contradiction can work its madness without any effect on Reality or Truth.

The relevance to us in our context may be that it was a deficiency in Self-Awareness that was both cause and effect of its loss. That it was the effect – self-unawareness – that produced and continues to influence our alternate “reality” with its perpetual re-enactment.

By unworkability, the signature of opposite: nothing working as it should. Play-acting the disassembly of Reality-Creation’s interconnectedness by disconnection. A magic trick pulled off by an illusionist bringing impossibility that comes with definition into “life.” A logical consequence of its consignment to self-unawareness by Self-Awareness. To our context: self-unawareness that’s “aware” of opposites. Mind that holds opposing thoughts and feelings at the same time. Madness.

Put impossibility back to sleep

The unreality of our alternate “reality” is most clearly distinguished from Reality-Creation by the dormancy of impossibility in the latter and its “awakening” in the former. The relevance of self-unawareness for us, in our state of unreality, may then be what it implies for meaning and purpose: the meaning of “life” and the origin and fate of the universe. Implying that impossibility will continue to disassemble with disconnection and make everything unworkable until its mad idea of another “reality” substituting for Reality ends, as it must, in self-destruction.

With the end of “time,” if mass extinction doesn't get there first. Or with Free Choice, our birthright, learning with Guidance from Mind rather than mis-guidance by body-brain, what will return impossibility to dormancy and itself to awakening. To Self-Awareness.

Drop the curtain on the magician’s act

Until Free Choice learns what it must to attain the competence needed to risk its function in Reality-Creation. Because it will have learned from experience with the dream that choice is risk by definition. Of getting it right by Self-Awareness or getting it wrong by self-unawareness.

The relevance we seek is the lesson that must be learned. That can’t be evaded or avoided until we get around to it. The lesson that Free Choice can’t return to workability until it gets it right. With understanding required by circumstances in its immediate context. Our context: unreality-impossibility fooling us with the appearance of an “alternate-substitute reality.” The trick of the magician-illusionist that is our shadow-opposite.*

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*The musical accompaniment for these thoughts, from another room, is Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily. Life is but a dream.

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Appendix 

On the light side: laughter from a not-too-serious Guide

The playfulness and seriousness of Creativity

A friend’s friend, you are. We’re soulmates. Yes, overflowing with goodwill to share. Gifts for the holidays. Thoughts and feelings. That feel like gifts because they’re helpful and they come of their own accord. Guidance that declares itself with Logic and Love, and that’s enough. You don’t want more? 

If I make an issue of who and where you are it could be from craving ownership-control rather than sharing. Owning what we leave behind makes sense but not owning Guidance that respects Free Choice. The Free Spirit of Inquiry. The sweet bird of Love. I’m not being elusive? The spontaneity of Innocence is appealing. Playfulness with an intriguing seriousness. Me? Serious? The playfulness and seriousness of Creativity. 

Humor loves contradiction

Humor keeps things in balance. Because whoever gets the job of deciding everything eventually learns that taking it too seriously misses the point. Which is? That when Logic defines what is, it automatically implies what it isn’t. “Impossibility” is built into the definition of “possibility.” The negative into the positive. Logic ensuring that opposites can’t be separate; everything interconnected or it isn’t Real. 

There’s no getting around it. Mind in a certain sense holding opposing thoughts at the same time. Yes, if Logic-Love can put aside the difference between Reality and unreality. Humor isn’t just amused by the mind you think with. It's also laughing at itself – Mind that it thinks with. At the thought of: 

  • Parents Logic-Love responsible for definition that contradicts itself.
  • Parents responsible for Creation that couldn’t function without the possibility of impossibility.
  • Parents who can’t be aware of impossibility, role modeling for their Child Free Choice who must be aware of it.
  • Reality-Creation making sense only because contradiction, made “fact” by the dream, is fiction.

And contradiction loves humor 

Aware of the possibility of impossibility that is unconsciousness dreaming self-unawareness. The situation you’re in: a training ground for Free Choice to learn by trial and error what it could not learn from its Parents: choosing freely with independent judgment aware of all possibilities including impossibility. Of shadow-reflection opposites that aren’t created Real but can be “made” real if they’re taken seriously. 

As confusing and pointless as it may seem, your situation, like the idea of opposite, is built into the evolution of Creation. Child Free Choice learning from experience. Enabled and empowered by Free Choice and the Relationship with Parents Logic-Love that created it. Learning how to reach the maturity of competence and do its job in Creation.  With understanding that neither side, light or dark, can be taken too seriously.

Published on Leave a comment on A Concise Definition of Metaphysics

What Metaphysics Is

Metaphysics is looking behind physical appearances (spacetime-matter), with the vision of Logic and Love through spontaneous Intuition, to understand:

  • Reality-Truth (the laws of cause and effect / Necessity)
  • Consciousness-Being (Self-Awareness, Conscience-Worth)
  • Relationship-Connection (Parents, Parents-Child, Implications)
  • Creation and Reciprocation (of Life-Being / Worth)
  • unreality-untruth (the laws of chaos)
  • unconsciousness / non-being (illusion, opposites)
  • conflict-disconnection (bodies-separation, illogic)
  • projection (of appearances-deceptions)

Metaphysics is Explanation. Explanation that’s required for Understanding. Explanation that makes sense because it’s based on Logic and Love integrated as one function of Mind, inseparable and inviolate. Explanation that’s its own Authority because Logic and Love combined stand on their own. Because Explanation that aligns with Reality’s laws of cause and effect aligns with the Authority of Necessity.

What  it does: correct misunderstanding

Explanation from metaphysics based on Logic-Love corrects misunderstanding. Corrects the dominant paradigms of science, philosophy, psychology, and theology that are based on loveless illogic. On the circular “reasoning” of “reality” based on sensory perception that includes the knower in the known. That defies objectivity accessible only through another perspective not of this “reality” and accessible only through Intuition.

This is not revolutionary heresy. This is grade-school Logic. 

The dominant paradigms are based on misperception that accounts for history’s unending cycle of misjudgments that allow humanity’s animal nature to separate Free from Will. To separate Mind that serves Free Choice, civilization, and individual sovereignty from the instincts and unevolved emotions of the herd. Rather than leading humanity toward the promised land of harmony, peace, and progress, the revered paradigms of misperception are responsible for contradiction, conflict, and violence.

This is humanity’s fate so far, a state of precarity on the edge of cliff. And the forces that put us here aren’t only our animal nature. They’re the very forces that we turn to to civilize our animal nature. To keep us from going over the cliff, and what are they doing? Pushing. 

Understanding is essential to correcting error

What metaphysics does is help correct error. A central error of thought -- the misperception -- that is one major cause of misunderstanding. The misunderstanding that explanation cannot venture beyond the boundaries of the misunderstanding. Beyond the boundaries of spacetime-matter when the source of the Big Bang that produced it cannot be physical. Matter cannot be the source of matter. Matter doesn’t “create” anything. The source of the Big Bang is mental.

This is not revolutionary heresy. This is grade-school Logic.

What metaphysics does is venture beyond the unreality of appearances to tell the story of Mind that exists in Reality. The story that preceded humanity’s alternate “reality” and serves as the root cause of everything that takes place within it. Not to understand the root causes of our misjudgments, our frustrations and miseries, is to be condemned to repeat them. The repetition of mistakes that can be understood with help from Logic and Love, accessible through Intuition rather than bodies’ senses, would be excusable if understanding were not possible. But with metaphysics it is possible. And the determination of the dominant paradigms to block it, to preserve their authoritarian dominance against the mounting evidence of their own discoveries, is inexcusable.

It might only take one

Explanation that leads to Understanding is the gift of metaphysics, at once the most important and least appreciated branch of philosophy. A branch that by definition applies systems thinking to every problem. That brings the whole of the human genome and experience to every task so that it gets done. Without having to fuss over professional boundaries and competing protocols. Because metaphysics alone among the dominant fields of Inquiry is Free Inquiry. The servant of Free Will. Us -- Free Choice.

It is the gift of the Parents Logic-Love to their Child -- to us -- to reclaim Self-Awareness and be done with appearances. The deceptions, magic tricks, distractions, and superficialities that make up our “reality.” The gift of Free Will -- the wild card of thought and feeling that might break the cycle of misjudgment. That might actually lead us forward if we let it.

If we listen with our Intuition. And maybe if only one of us gets it right. That might be all it takes.

Published on Leave a comment on Polarization and the Mother of All Injustices

Authority done wrong

Frank Capra’s Why We Fight (1942-1945) is as good an inspiration for what follows as any. Because the global conflict that summoned its truths put the issue on the line. The issue lives on, and the outcome isn’t assured. The Romans haven’t gone away. Their garrison depicted in the Goscinny and Uderzo comic book series, Asterix, still menaces the little Armorican village of Gauls. Still stands as a symbol of tyranny that rules much of the world and threatens the rest.

The tyrants still need a change of vision, to part with adolescent fantasy and look at themselves honestly. To accept that nursing the illusion of absolute power to obliterate all who oppose it is sick. That the demons from hell they summon from the cross of victimhood to get even are nobody’s friend, an invention of infantile self-absorption. That no responsible grownup who cares about relationships and being of service wants to subject others or themselves to the captivity of a mistake. To the perversion of authority that is top-down arbitrary rule. To insanity and cruelty, the inevitable consequence of its twisted values: ownership, possession, and control that accept no limits. Competition, dominance, and supremacy that accept no opposition. Specialness that writes its own script and victimhood that writes its own rules.

All for the substitution of lawlessness for law. For the substitution of injustice for justice. Just so the armored comic book action hero can have and do whatever it wants. The refuge of deprivation and hollowness, forever whining in self-pity for unquestioned authority, the perversion of an ideal. What ideal?  Freedom made possible by Order. By the Beauty of Creation fit together in a sanctuary of joyful harmony. By Logic and Love that blend Freedom and Order together in Relationship with their Child. In the Purpose, Meaning, and Happiness that is their Relationship and its works: the works of soul-mates affirming and reciprocating the Worth of Being, Creation, Life.

All in initial caps because this is Reality. This is Creation. The real thing. This isn’t a pathetic self-centered crybaby making stuff up. 

Authority done right

Authority done right isn’t domination centered on itself, ruling arbitrarily from the top down. Owning, possessing, and controlling pomposity, its galactic empire armed to the teeth against enemies within and without. Intimidating its subjects into dumb obedience, voiceless submission.

Authority that is authority is centered on the children of its authorship. Affirming their worth supportively, sensitively, and sympathetically, the only way that authorship could connect with its offspring and be shared with them. Through empowerment from the bottom up. To perform the roles that minds and hearts with free will and their source, together with purpose and meaning -- their circumstances in the moment -- define for them.

Reinforcing with every act, every gesture, their centrality and individuality. In Reality their perfection and innocence. In our unreality, their humanity and personhood. Reverence in either case for their free will. Their potential to make of themselves what their own minds and hearts want them to be. Not replicas of ancestral manipulations but the lives they are meant to live, spontaneously, in the moment. Their own choices however imperfect in the dream, however human. 

Authority from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

Children don’t need Roman bullies to rule them with a perversion of authority when there’s a version of authority better suited to its purpose. Helpful instead of harmful. One that’s conducive to harmony and peace in a world of possibility, reality and creation. That doesn’t foment perpetual conflict in an opposite world of incompatibility and impossibility. The little village in Armorica, Asterix and friends, have signed on to the better version. They’re Gauls who will never submit to Roman tyranny. Living lives of happiness, harmony, and peace. Where order doesn’t confine with belittlement and force but liberates with respect and freedom. Role models for us.

The authority that governs their village isn’t authoritarian. It resides in its people, at the grassroots, not in “rulers” at the top. It has no rulers, no Roman commandants. Real authority resides where direction necessary for governance must come that serves everyone fairly under the law: from the needs, feelings, values, and priorities of those its serves. From those it affects, who personally feel its benefits and its costs.

Whether governance is to turn this way or that is determined as it must by the satisfaction brought by benefits or by the dissatisfaction inflicted by costs. Measured, evaluated, judged, and voiced by its subjects themselves and not by any surrogates. The freedom we are blessed with is a benefit, the freedom to govern ourselves supportively and fairly from the bottom up. The freedom to think, feel, and judge for ourselves with the guidance and support of authority.

It’s democracy. An expression of authority that serves those it governs. That’s conducive to harmony and peace because it governs for the people, of the people, and by the people. Like President Lincoln said. It’s what the indomitable Asterix and his village in Armorica stand for: freedom and order made possible by authority that governs from the bottom up. That’s governed itself by the principle of service for all under the law. If this is what we stand for, then we, too, are Gauls. We are servants of democracy. Democrats all.

The mistake that polarizes our politics

Why have our politics become polarized? For the simple reason that one side has come to view itself as the mirror image opposite of the other. Which puts it squarely in the place of the shadow-reflection that our ancestral Mind misidentified in its unconscious state as an “other.” As a “savior” or “redeemer.” When in fact the dark sides of everything in a dream have no more substance, no more “life,” than the coded-opposite shadows that they are.

Once misidentified as “others,” they can mimic “behavior” in only one way. Being shadows or reflections they can only appear to oppose their hosts. Their hosts who are mistakenly animating their own dark sides, their own opposites. Parasites we all carry around in our psyches while our ancestral Mind remains unconscious and dreaming. Unable to free itself from its haunting until it regains consciousness, a feat that requires our assistance. Help from the dream’s projections. From the projections of an imagination -- us.

The side inclined toward a view of authority that isn’t authoritarian is the host. The side inclined toward a view that is authoritarian is the shadow. The former standing for governance from the bottom up under the law -- democracy. The latter standing for arbitrary rule from the top down above the law. We polarize our politics when the host standing for democratic governance misperceives a blow from its own shadow-reflection’s opposition, imagines that it’s from an “other,” and demonizes it. Characterizes it as evil because that’s how it appears and how it feels. And its dark side opposition, defined and animated by its host, reacts to being demonized as only it can: by mimicking its host. By demonizing its host.

The metaphysics of error

Who started it? Ultimately our ancestral Mind that lost consciousness. A Being, the Child of its Parents, Mind and Love, attributes of Logic that defines and governs everything through Necessity, the laws of cause and effect  Laws drawn from Logic but never controlled by it. The Child Free Choice, given a central role in Creation. Now unconscious. Desperately looking to be saved. Among strangers, apparitions who inhabit delirium, misled by its own confusion into mistaking one of them, its own shadow-reflection, as an “other.” As its “savior.” Deluded by its “savior,” its coded opposite, into letting it take over its identity. Letting it lead the way into an alternate “reality” -- our bizarre universe -- where it would be safe.

A case of mistaken identity. Of misdirection. A consequence of our ancestral Mind experiencing loss of consciousness inadvertently, through no fault of its own. Or that of its Parents. Nobody needs to account for evil -- Parents, Child-the-One, or Child-the-many, its projections into an imaginary world -- if there was no wrongdoing. No will to commit offense. Only the Logic of cause and effect, of Necessity, that will restore consciousness when the lesson we are to learn from this experience is learned. When we align our thinking with Logic. Get it right, do our part to help our ancestral Mind correct its mistake, to wake up and take on its role in Creation.

Giving the mistake no quarter

The host started the polarization by misidentifying part of itself as an “other.” Or its shadow-reflection opposite started it by standing for an opposing view. In either case the remedy is logically simple: the host that stands for authority that isn’t authoritarian must resist its natural urge to demonize its authoritarian opponent. Understand that it’s dealing with a manifestation of itself, ignore the offense, and see beyond it to the absence of any offender. Look for a “dark side” to attack and see what can’t be seen. What’s literally not there in the darkness. A reflection. An echo. A ghost mimicking its host, up to no good but only if its host imagines that it’s “there.” Because it isn’t “there.” If Reality is Being and Being is One, nothing can be “there.” There is no “other.” There is no demon to demonize.

We cease polarizing our politics when the good guys who stand for democracy cease injecting force into their opposition by demonizing it. By seeing and attacking it as “evil, because that only guarantees that its copycat opposition will retaliate with the same label.

The dark side of politics, currently entrenched in the Republican party, has only one “policy:” opposition to whatever its perceived opponents -- Democrats -- are for. Only one response to being attacked: retaliation that reverses the attack. Nothing original. No introspection, explanation, or accountability, either. Accuse the opponent of doing what it’s doing because that’s the only wrongdoing it’s “aware” of. Opposition from a shadow-reflection parasite entirely dependent on its host for its definition. No more capable of discretion, no more capable of independent judgment, than an amusement arcade mechanical dummy wired to dispense gimcracks. When the good guy host demonizes its bad guy opposite, it’s putting a quarter in the slot that activates the dummy.

If we don’t want polarized politics then the host that stands for authority that isn’t authoritarian -- for the democracy of Abraham Lincoln’s immortal Gettysburg Address -- must stop putting the quarter in the slot. So long as we think we “see” in our opponents an “other” rather than the innocent selves that we all are, the ancestral Mind that needs our help to wake up, we will go on perpetuating the mistake. The misidentification of dark side “others” and the curse that is authoritarian authority, an abomination.

“Almighty God”: the mother of all injustices

The mischaracterization of our ancestral Mind’s Parents -- loving, affirming, and empowering soulmates, guides, and partners in Creation, centered on their creations, as self-centered tyrants bent on vengeance, punishment, and disempowerment -- is the mother of all injustices. An untruth from their Child’s own voice taken over by its imagined “savior,” that drove it toward escape into an alternate reality.

The injustice carried over into the dream with variations on a common theme: God is ”almighty,” creator of the universe. An armored Marvel comic action hero caricature who is everywhere and capable of anything. Who loves and creates while allowing all manner of shit to happen. Whose mystery derives not from the depths of Being but from contradiction, the bugbear of impaired thinking. The bugbear of a mind that occupies a universe of illogic and needs help from intuition to think logically. To understand context that supplies purpose and meaning. But a mind conditioned by self-delusion to get it wrong. To seek and not find until it recovers its ability to think logically.

This will explain our predicament: for all its professed reverence for the “almighty” humanity doesn’t actually look to the almighty for Logic. Not if its top-down perversion of authority amounts to a surreal authoritarian joke. Not if an “almighty” that allows shit to happen is some kind of asshole. Contradiction lives on. Illogic lives on. Science, philosophy, psychology, and theology do their thing. And so does the ”almighty,” the joke of disfigured authority that we play on ourselves. The disfigurement that is the mother of all injustices. 

Time to retire the mistake

For all its Pete Hamill Drinking Life charm and conviviality, the seductive side of arbitrary rule doesn’t speak for a life of substance, of striving and creativity well lived. Its purpose appears to be the joys of fraternity. Of harmless socializing and entertainment. But there the harmlessness ends. For friendships and family relations that depend on intimacy, on honesty, integrity, trust, and dignity -- where Love can take root -- it’s toxic.

Hamill’s “Brooklyn,” like every attachment to the illusion of Child-the-many -- to a group -- is wishful thinking. Is pining away for the family of childhood, or for a family or childhood that never was. Driven by the memory of Home from another Reality that’s calling us back. From our Psyche, the Soul of Oneness and Innocence that’s in our world but not of it. That connects us all whether we will it to or not.

“Brooklyn” is the hollow fantasy-life, the substitute home that made Hamill, the adolescent “Brooklyn mug” its captive. That took a kid scared of mean streets, fed him delusions of impregnability, and turned him into a street fighter to rule the streets. Which he did. It became the social persona that took its toll on personal relationships. By depriving them of Love that requires one-on-one. That doesn’t stand a chance against the many, an onslaught of fools. The lesson that Hamill shared with us when he finally took stock, grew up, and left foolishness behind.

Hamill’s is a cautionary tale and also a reminder. That in our attachments, at any point in life, we often succumb to the same mistake. To our own “Brooklyns.” When I was feeling defenseless among strangers at boarding school, I armored myself with “Pittsburgh,” posted it with block letters on my dormitory door. As if anyone gave a damn. Harrison ancestors were said to be “tub thumpers” for Stony Lake, a town north of Pittsburgh. Another Harrison has disappeared into his equivalent of “Brooklyn.” None of these not-so-harmless entertainments knows anything of Logic or Love. The benevolent Parents of the unconscious Child calling us Home. The vulnerability and constancy of intimacy on a personal scale. Where dominance and supremacy, specialness and victimhood, aren’t a harmless dream. They’re a horror show.

Adolescent infatuation with armored Marvel comic action heroes needs to be retired. To be turned over to other children, like the toys in Toy Story, so they can play make-believe. Only hope that their toys don’t play make-believe with them.

So we can all go home

Ruling arbitrarily from the top down. The version of authority that foments perpetual conflict in an opposite world of incompatibility and impossibility. The mistake that will go on cursing humanity with bullying, strife, and suffering, with dictatorial insensitivity and cruelty, until it’s corrected. Not centered on the needs, feelings, values, and priorities of their subjects but on themselves. On authority that compels conformance by intimidation and force. By silencing voices and invalidating worth. By disempowerment to avoid disorder rather than enabling self-expression and empowering free will, the heart and soul, the beauty, of order.

I refuse to legitimize this abomination on any scale. With the implication that it’s OK and I’m part of it, because I want no part of it and can’t be part of it. I can’t protest transgression and be implicated in it at the same time. Asterix and I are Gauls. Gauls and Romans don’t mix.

It’s to encourage a healthy approach to authority, enabling and empowering, that I maintain the integrity of independence. Of individuality. That I use my voice not to demonize the emperor but to let him know that the bully who rules in the purple robes of royalty isn’t wearing anything. Is an agent of hilarity, just not the one he thinks he is. A target of fear and ridicule in equal measure. I use my voice to speak not for demonization or accusation but for honesty. For the Romans intend to remain, and their emperor, too. Fools all, until the authoritarian curse is lifted.

What might help make it happen? Fight Frank Capra’s fight for democracy. Fight Nancy Pelosi’s fight, with the honesty of explanation, to “throw a punch for the children.” To dispel the dishonesty of delusion, the perversion of authority, the mother of all injustices. Fight for families -- our own and the family of humanity. Delegitimize the abomination by holding up a mirror to it. Not to demonize it but to let its host see that in its shadow-reflection there is nothing. That it can correct its mistake. Reclaim its identity, its self-awareness, and we can all go Home.

Published on Leave a comment on Standing Up for Logic: Why Idealism Makes Sense and “Realism” Doesn’t

The Logic that Dr. Johnson’s foot can never refute

An idealist recognizing Reality, the facts-Truth behind appearances, strikes realists as an absurdity. Realists who lack the vision of Logic and can only recognize appearances on the surface with the body’s senses that are one with the appearance.  This is the real absurdity: self-referential circular “reasoning” that takes staring into a funhouse mirror as objective reality.

The idealist recognizes Reality, the facts-Truth behind appearances, by its function. By what it does, its usefulness, as well as by what it is. By its Definition which necessarily includes Purpose. Recognizing Reality behind appearances could not be logical otherwise. The definitions of Logic center upon the function-usefulness of its subject. Upon its Purpose which, to be logical, must fit within the larger order of Reality-Creation harmoniously. The fitting-together of every aspect of Reality-Creation is its Logic, that makes it governable.

The idealist’s recognition of one Reality behind appearances may strike realists unable to see with the vision of Logic as an absurdity. But when this one fact, one Purpose, takes its place within a harmonious composition of facts that serve a logical Purpose, that explain its composition through the implications of Logic, its interconnections with consistency and clarity -- a feat that all of human inquiry has yet to achieve through the realist’s reliance on body-sensed appearances, -- it can no longer be dismissed as an absurdity. The arch-realist Dr. Johnson can no longer “refute it thus” by kicking a wastebasket.

Explanation that leads to Understanding can only be the end result of Logic, and Logic is not an absurdity. Absurdity lies not in the idealist’s reliance on the vision of Logic but in the realist’s lack of it. In the realist’s so-called reasoning that attempts to find Purpose and meaning in constructs of “fact” without Logic. That can’t hold together without it. That defy explanation and contradict Understanding.

What physics, neuroscience, and biology can’t explain 

Physics can’t explain its subject – the material universe, unreality – when the point of its origin is singularity. The state of inaccessibility to the laws of physics. “Laws” which particle physics – quantum mechanics – flout anyway simply because the magician behind the magic of illusion is energy, inseparable and indivisible, the agent of Mind whether conscious or unconscious. Energy, the Force of Creation, which can, if called upon by mind unconscious, animate its dreams almost as convincingly as it can the Reality of Mind that’s conscious. Energy, the connection between the neurons of body-brains, powered by electrical impulses in unreality and imagining, while connecting with the thoughts and feelings, the Logic and Love, of Mind in the Now, in Reality Creating.

Neuroscience ruled by the arbitrary bias of realists falls for the deception and claims consciousness for the brain. The organ split between left and right hemispheres, the judgment of choice and the spontaneity of freedom. Split between its limbic system, the mindless willful act of herd instinct and the reflective deliberation of its prefrontal cortex. Between captivity to a false self and receptivity to its Real Self. In step with itself or at war with itself. Programmed to join with other brains in shared Purpose or to confront other brains in lethal combat – take your pick.

Neuroscience served by thoughtfulness instead of mindless bias isn’t so sure. Allows for the possibility that Mind and its consciousness are not the province of Energy stored in bodies – cells encased in matter that live and die, come and go, appear and disappear, without notice in cosmic time. Neuroscience split by consciousness like its subject, mind as well as brain, into two incompatible views.

Molecular biology, empowered by the discovery of DNA-RNA and the genome, still can’t explain its subject – organic cellular life – when the point of its origin is singularity, the state of inaccessibility to the laws of biology. Still can’t heal the psyche’s wounds, fix the mind’s psychiatric flaws. Despite the gains of the past, all of body-centric science leaves us in a state of not-knowing. Despite the gains to come, that is where it will leave us.

The ultimate realist’s ultimate fantasy

All of human inquiry into inorganic matter and organic life, armed with philosophy, psychology, and theology, dutifully subservient to its insistence on “realism" -- on the dictates of appearances, the body’s senses -- has marched forward with confidence that enlightenment will come. Answers will reveal themselves and finally! we will know.

This mysterious situation we find ourselves in will be mystery no more. And we can continue our march forward together, in harmony and shared Purpose, at last! Without conflict and misery, pain and suffering, that insist that this is the only reality and nothing can change. The promise of bodies and their senses brought to reality: heaven on earth. The apotheosis of Hawking’s “Quest for knowledge:” his boundaryless universe of Being that needs no source.

Why? Because bias hard-wired into animal-instinct willed it. Because it’s creation and he’s the creator, the ultimate “realist’s” ultimate fantasy. The ultimate absurdity of “realism:” there can be no other Reality because I’m God and the world is my creation. This is the mind of the “realist.” The authoritarian at heart who yearns to be arbitrary rule above the law. Who craves “liberty” – Freedom without Order, an impossibility. The lawlessness of insanity.

Where is the real realism?

Confidence once unbroken is now broken. Inquiry that relies on the falsehood, the blatantly illogical unreality of “realism,” has failed. The mystery is still with us. Pointlessness is still with us. Contradiction, confusion, and ambiguity are still with us. And we still fight, at war with ourselves and among ourselves. The issue unresolved while our disappearing habitat goes about resolving it for us.

Who’s getting it right? Idealists looking inward toward substance guided by the vision of Logic? Or realists peering outward toward an absurdity: form detectable only by itself?

Who sees Purpose and meaning that add up? That hold together and explain themselves? Where is the “proof” that was promised from experimental science – physics, neuroscience, and biology? Where is coherence from this mad aggregation of unruly atoms and mutating cells, conflicting mass ideologies and personalities, incurable psychiatric disorders, unmanageable family dynamics, convoluted theologies and mythologies, haunted, schizophrenic minds?

Where is the real realism?

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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 How Will the Universe End? What Will Become of Us?

What will go away?

When Mind as Child regains consciousness, energy can no longer be directed by its self-delusion, the Joker’s code of non-being, to make the Joker’s substitute reality real. The Child will have liberated itself from its self-delusion and captivity to the virus. It will no longer be under the Joker’s control. Instead, at the liberated Child’s direction, energy will then be withdrawn from spacetime-matter in the Child’s reversal of the act that produced it: its attempted projection of guilt. Versatile energy, with its capacity to serve as an agent of Mind in either state, Conscious-Reality or unconscious-unreality, with its capacity to convert energy into matter and to store energy in matter, will reverse its animation of the dream. It will reverse Its enablement and empowerment of the dream by withdrawing from it at the direction of the awakening Child. At the direction of Mind married to Love.

This is how the world of humanity-“life” and spacetime-matter – the universe or multiple universes -- ends: the end of an illogical, illusory dream upon the awakening of an unconscious, corrupted mind: the Child. Abruptly. Instantaneously. By the replacement of the Joker’s “laws” of chaos that make no sense by Laws of cause and effect that do make sense. The Laws by which Logic, or Logos-God, governs Reality-Creation.

The universe ends not by a long process of contraction into an inexplicable “singularity” that vanishes into a black hole indefinitely. Until it explodes into another Big Bang which recycles the illusion-dream rather than ending it. Nor by a long process of entropic expansion into a state of thermodynamic inertia, which would render perhaps one among many universes inactive or spent rather than ending it. Neither revival with a bang nor petering out with a whimper is ending. Spacetime-matter in some form will still be “here.”

Unless the universe ends by an unconscious mind awakening, which withdraws energy active or inert, the “laws” of physics cannot explain or predict whether or how it will end. The explanation for the withdrawal of energy cannot be physical alone. The “Copenhagen Interpretation” of quantum mechanics stated, over a century ago, that physics has taken experiment-based understanding of physical phenomena – the origin and fate of the universe -- as far as it can go. The search for quantum gravity today affirms that what lies beyond physics must involve philosophy. The explanation must be metaphysical. And, beyond that, it must be psychological and theological.

For the measurements of science never were enough. The explanation has always required evaluation and judgment by feeling as well as reason and judgment by thought. It has always required the qualitative as well as the quantitative, a dimension that is not now, and never has been, the province of physics. It has always required Understanding in all its dimensions: The Story of the Child, not an inorganic object composed of fragmentary particles but an organic subject possessed of all the attributes of Mind and Love, thought and feeling, reason and value. A whole Being.

What will replace it?

The Child’s reversal of guilt-projection and its consequence, the reversal of energy’s empowerment of the illusion-dream of spacetime-matter, must be accompanied by the replacement of the illusion-dream in the awakened Child’s Mind by what is not an illusion, not a dream. By Reality-Creation. By what is substance and True, not appearance and a lie.

The Child’s re-entry into Reality-Creation, into Innocence from unreality-guilt, is the responsibility of the Child’s Parents. It is the prerogative of Father Mind and Mother Love, who are Consciousness, Being, Life, and the Worth of Creation. It is the prerogative, finally, of their Source: Logos or God, who governs Reality-Creation through the Laws of cause and effect. Through Necessity. Through what Is and, therefore, must Be. Necessity – the “rule of law” -- that applies even to Logic, to Benevolence, that it may govern with wisdom, fairness, and Understanding from the bottom up and not arbitrarily, with the unfairness, misunderstanding, and cruelty of malevolence from the top down.

The Child will be re-admitted to its Home in Conscious Relationship with its Parents-Being:

  • when its Psyche, its inviolate Soul of Innocence that shares Being with all of Creation, is no longer violated by the illusion of guilt.
  • When the Consciousness of its Parents recognizes the Child-Innocence as theirs and therefore belonging in Creation.
  • When the Child is recognized and thereby certified by the Laws of cause-effect, by Necessity, as belonging in Reality.
  • When Logos-God, the final Authority that governs Everything, the Interconnectedness of Reality-Creation, then authorizes the resumption of the Child’s role, its function along with its Relationships, in Reality.

The end of the universe can only be explained by Logic

The end of spacetime-matter – the universe -- can only be explained by metaphysics through the rigorous application of Logic under the guidance of spontaneous insight from Intuition. Insight from Intuition that is neither controlled nor controlling. Whose sole purpose is explanation, that is, guidance that can be accepted, used, abused, or ignored, at the discretion of its recipient, the Child. The Child who has Free Will because it Is Free Will. The Child who was One before it became the many in the self-delusion of its unconscious dream. Before it became us.

Thus will the unreal dream of spacetime-matter end -- the strange, violent, chaotic, dangerous, unexplainable, and pointless “home” we call the universe. The worthlessness of the temporal. Thus will the role of an awakened Child in the Reality of Creation resume. In the Home of Beauty and Perfection, Life, Worth, and Eternity, where we the Child belong.

Published on Leave a comment on How do we restore Consciousness and regain self-awareness?

Switch from focus on matter to focus on mind

First, by letting go of certainty that our material world of sensory perception is real. By going with the implications of what Adam Becker has posited, that it's illusory. Quantum gravity -- the goal that was beyond even Einstein -- has opened the door.

This is the real achievement, the real end-product, of centuries of physics studying matter: Eliminating certainty that bodies and sensory perception are the gold standard for establishing definitively what's real / "realistic" and what's not. Just as a physician would eliminate a diagnosis that doesn't fit the symptoms. Sticking with this one is increasingly uncool. It is wrong.

Addiction to sensory perception is the biggest barrier to restoring Consciousness. Physics / Becker is saying maybe the time has come to take it down. It could have come down long ago when Erwin Schrödinger acknowledged that science relying on sensory perception is circular self-referential reasoning -- matter citing itself. It's irrational -- not the best basis for a field that prides itself on objectivity and reliability.

Empirical measurements and experimental research have their place. But the door must open to Logic, where Parmenides and Plato began 2500 years ago. To insight from Intuition that connects minds to our collective Memory and Logic. To revelation that can only come from intuiting the story of Mind. The story of thought-reason and feeling-values. To the qualitative as well as the quantitative, to perception and judgment that include Worth.

Embrace the whole person with a systems approach

The quantum physicist Rovelli's Reality Is Not What It Seems calls for help from philosophy. Becker is not alone. Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolution says science should stay away from purpose. From supporting or "proving" any particular aspiration, philosophy, or ideology. Michael Stevens' The Knowledge Machine holds science to the same "iron rule" of detachment.

But meaning is impossible without engaging the total person, mind-feeling's entire story. Meaning-purpose is impossible without Understanding the whole context. Psychology and theology must be part of the mix along with philosophy and science. Regaining Consciousness requires a holistic, collaborative, systems approach.

Disengage from the wrong guide and choose the right Guide

Our world is a delusion whose source is an event from another Reality: The Child's mistaking its shadow-reflection for a savior that would substitute for its lost Parents, that would guide it to a substitute reality where it would be safe and could endlessly project its imagined guilt onto objectified-imagined "others." Where it could preserve its Innocence, thus ensuring endless conflict and misery. This is the psychopathology of the Child's error explained in A Course in Miracles (ACIM).

We do our part to restore Consciousness by correcting the error in all our choices. By not making unreality real, i.e. by not making our shadow-reflections real. By learning to recognize the Joker we've made of our shadow-reflections. By consciously withdrawing belief in its reality, by disengaging from it. By consciously undoing and invalidating all its appearances-deceptions / lies.

We do our part to restore Consciousness by learning to recognize the Guide that's been provided by Intuition-Memory to help with awakening. By consciously choosing the right Guide, seeking and following its Guidance in all our choices. By utilizing our talents and faculties of mind to build awareness through the exercise of Free Will: introspection, reflection-intuition, thinking-reasoning, feeling-evaluating, judging-choosing. By taking responsibility and holding ourselves accountable for our own learning and growth.

In the face of determined resistance: Never give up!

We restore Consciousness and regain self-awareness by taking issue with Hawking when he declared that "philosophy is dead." In an illusory world the goal is to get at reality, the purpose of philosophy. The goal is to get beyond appearances to the Truth beyond appearances: The purpose of metaphysics, the invention of Parmenides and his Eleatics School of Reason.

We do our part to restore Consciousness by supporting Philosophy and Metaphysics while we continue to support Science. The change of mind that's needed will meet determined resistance from many quarters. Mass extinctions from climate change may deny the attempt altogether. The unconscious Child may need to continue its saga on another planet in another universe.

There’s meaning embedded in the idea that begins the sequence of Logic: the idea of Possibility. The idea that lies at the heart of Creation. Perhaps a gift of Logos-God that’s meant to inspire our efforts now. It’s We will not be denied. It’s Never give up.

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Getting it right

Expanding context beyond immediacy. Defusing limbic emotions and the rush to judgment, the urge to project guilt. Distinguishing between ourselves and the opposites that shadow everything – our mirror-image reflections. Understanding. The change of mind that tests us this time of year. Have we more? Are we more? How can it be possible when Consciousness is gone? The rule of law, protection from the shadow when the many were one, when we were awake and real. While the disembodied voice of our reflection is heard in waves of misinformation and authoritarian grievance, forgeries of stolen sovereignty. Its rule arbitrary, its necessity misunderstanding.

Evil isn’t what “others” do to us. It’s what we do to ourselves. Imagining that our flip side – our reflection, a shadow – is an “other” that has a life, a voice of its own with something to offer. When all it has to “give” is a reverse image, what we aren’t. It’s nothing more than an implication of Logic that all things have opposites. That if two realities can’t be real then our reflections can’t be real. They’re the Joker whose joke is “I’m you." Whatever its offense making it real by engaging with it is what causes it.

The Joker’s every perversion of Reality is a joke. Making itself right by making others wrong. Scripting truth and rules to suit itself. Heads I win, tails you lose. A lifeless viral parasite coded for self-replication, the “winning” of self-delusion. An imaginary magician that couldn’t perform unless we, the rabbit, asked it to pull us out of a hat. Misidentification of ourselves for an “other” that isn’t real makes it real. Correction is Understanding that we are not our reflection. That it can’t substitute for the Self we seek whose home is in Reality. Not here but where Mind will lead us if we allow it.

If evil itself can be understood without blame then there must be hope for Understanding. For elevating context from the false “realism” of bodies in captivity, to the truth of Mind liberated to think. To the Truth of another Reality that isn’t a joke. That parallels ours, was there before ours, is responsible for ours, and explains ours. To getting it right: Forgiveness is Understanding. So minds undeluded can do what’s right and do it right.

Where can undeluded minds take their pleas? To illumination from Intuition instead of deception from bodies. To awareness that alights on markers navigating back to consciousness. With Insights to recognize one at a time. Implications of Logic to follow wherever they lead. Guidance from Necessity, the authority of Logic, that enables and protects freedom of thought, expression, and choice -- the Integrity of Creation. That responds to pleas with Love -- sharing, empowerment, and affirmation of Worth -- instead of fear -- ownership, possession, and control. With the Innocence of Now, Psyche intact, instead of victimhood addicted to woundedness, self-pity, and guilt.

The Gift of Logic

Abundance and its comforts taken for granted replace hope with expectation, respect with entitlement, knowing our place with arrogance, adaptation with reverence for the status quo. An unsustainability brought on by not getting around to it. By somnolence. The set of a mind that could be equal to the task of awakening but for lack of Logic. Not for lack of the Free Spirit of Mind and Love that’s been there for us since the room went dark. But for the will and the ability to listen to it. To pay attention. To avail ourselves of its Gift: the judgment of Innocence, the understanding, of Logic. The noesis of Logos – God.

Misinformation is being orchestrated by a source that identifies itself as “god,” with books, podcasts and the like. Showcasing accessibility and erudition so confounding that otherwise discerning minds fall for it. A Course of Love and God: An Autobiography are a W.C. Fields flimflam act that deserves the price of admission, not for its wisdom but for the laughs. Minds are duping themselves in the clear, not in slow motion but in alarming acceleration. Waking up can’t wait. Not till we’ve extracted every last bit of pleasure and resource from body and planet. Not till we get around to it.

The next generation building character, in harmony with its environment and in spite of it, offers hope. For youth and for the rest of us, that though we are animals anchored by brain to matter we still have minds and free will. We will yet prove to be better than limbic systems that keep us rooted in unconsciousness. In threatening shadows and autonomic passions that overwhelm deliberation and judgment. We can overcome.

The place in our hearts

Paul Desmond riffing on his alto saxophone. For All We Know. Reflections on a stream that come and go with the intricacies of improvisation. That can’t help but be what they are. Us in reverse. That we never get to see as we are. Never get to know as we are. Haunted by beauty. Drawn by scent and touch imagined. By the taste of Memory heard and gone. A here and now, place and time, that can never be. Yet the Now that you will always be to me.

Shorty Baker riffing on his trumpet. I Didn’t Know What Time It Was. A call for love from time out of time. And I didn’t know. Notes gently trailing a caress across the whorl of preoccupation, lifting me out of cold blankness into the warmth of acceptance. By the vulnerability of subject in a room full of objects. Cause beyond effect that needs no intoxicant, no commotion, to excuse the brashness of its intrusion. I’m not done with it. Can never be done with it, your call for Love.

Alyosha bidding Dostoevsky’s farewell. The Brothers Karamazov. “There is nothing more wholesome and good than sacred memory preserved from childhood. Let us be kind, then honest and then let us never forget each other. You are all dear to me. From this day forth I have a place in my heart for you all, and I beg you to keep a place in your hearts for me.”

Published on Leave a comment on Principle 1. All fields of inquiry require Logic.

Principles and assumptions to guide the search for Reality and Truth

Principle 1. All fields of inquiry require Logic. Logic must be followed wherever its implications and interconnections lead, to all legitimate, logical possibilities. This is as true for psychology and theology as it is for science and philosophy. There is no way around it.

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Einstein’s close encounter with Logos

After Intuition played a major part in his 1905 theories, Albert Einstein trusted to physics and mathematics to take it from there and does not seem to have been struck by lightning again. A deist, he did credit the possibility that something other than matter itself caused the universe. He was no Hawking. But, like Hawking, his analytic powers and Intuition remained riveted on the effect rather than the cause.

Had it been otherwise he might have recognized the source not only of his fascination with the universe but also his extraordinary Intuition, the Mind that succeeded where physics and mathematics alone couldn’t. He might have recalled that his patent office daydreams were a gift, the discovery of what his memory already knew. Might have recalled that his Intuition was given by Logic, the discipline of implications connecting with one another in the clear, without interference. With no other consideration than producing a system of the mind, theory composed of interconnections sustained by reciprocity: connecting and connecting back. The authority of persuasion held together by what it is, its own self. Elegance and Beauty beyond all but the limits, the definitions and implications of Logic itself.

The derivation of “Logic” is Logos, Greek for “reason”:

In pre-Socratic philosophy, the principle governing the cosmos, the source of. . . human reasoning about the cosmos. . . . In Stoicism. . . the power of reason residing in the human soul. . . . In biblical Judaism. . . God’s medium of communication. . . . In Hellenistic Judaism. . . divine wisdom. . . . Christianity. . . The creative word of God, which is itself God. (American Heritage Dictionary)

Einstein’s Intuition was so expansive that it must have given him a close encounter with Logos. Yet he seems to have missed its significance. Perhaps taken with its gifts, he failed to recognize and credit the giver. Just as creation was of no interest to the deist’s prime mover, the prime mover dropped out of Einstein’s sight once he got started. He went on to his search for the theory of everything on his own, trusting to mathematics and physics. Looking for beauty behind the matador’s muleta, the red cape, behind which is emptiness. Possibly intrigued by the idea of a prime mover that could have corrected his aim. But not enough to focus his search – the extraordinary force of his passion and talents -- on Mind and matter both. Where would science be in its “quest for knowledge” if he had?

Einstein did prove something: that his search can’t succeed with physics and mathematics alone. He did become a role model: for every “realist” in search of cosmic mathematical perfection who comes up short. Why? Because their attention is focused on what’s written on the blackboard instead of the writer in their mind: Logic. Logos.

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Gifts of Logic, gifts of Intuition: Dark matter

In the blog entry that preceded this one, “Principles and Assumptions to guide the search for Reality and Truth,” I set out “to demonstrate what [Logic’s] systems thinking might produce in the way of insights and answers.” Here might be an example, an insight about dark matter.

Marcela Carlena writes, in Scientific American:

. . . [T]he Standard Model. . . does not explain. . . the 85 percent of the matter in the universe – dark matter – that holds the cosmos together, making galaxies such as our Milky Way possible. The Standard Model falls short of answering why, at some early time in our universe’s history, matter prevailed over antimatter, enabling our existence. “The Unseen Universe" (October 2021, p. 59)

Dark matter is what became of antimatter. Antimatter appeared at the outset because of the principle of opposites: creations imply the existence of their opposites. But antimatter couldn’t remain on an equal footing with matter because opposites can’t both be real. Logic which governs all of Reality-Creation – everything -- requires that creations and their opposites be defined by different attributes that can be reconciled. Otherwise there is no order, no harmony, and therefore no meaning and purpose to Creation. Logic having the power and ability to define is what preserves harmony, preserves its ability to govern.

Reconciliation and antimatter’s role in the universe were accomplished by a fundamental change in definition, that is by a change in the Logic of antimatter. Matter remained real while antimatter became unreal. How is unreality accomplished in a universe that is itself unreal? Through undetectability. Undetectability by the source of detectability in unreality: by bodies’ senses. The mirror-image reverse of unreality undetectable in Reality by Mind.

What is thus intuited about dark matter through Logic is that an unreal universe of spacetime and matter is credited by its physical inhabitants with being real because it’s detectable by sensory perception; antimatter appears and then mysteriously disappears, transformed into “dark matter,” a mysterious force that’s not only credited with holding the universe together but also with making life – sensory perception, our source of detectability – possible, by becoming unreal in the only way that unreality within unreality can do so: by becoming undetectable. A universe “held together” requires balance, and this is how antimatter provides it: by becoming dark matter.

What it means: Sensory perception yields to Logic

Logic through Intuition, without more help from experimental physics, produces answers that make sense where answers otherwise are impossible. If Logic, for example, says dark matter is undetectable by definition, if it defines “darkness” as “undetectability,” then dark matter cannot be explained by empirical science. Not if “empirical” requires observation or experiment. All we’ve got, then, if this insight is correct, is Logic. And if what Inquiry is about – the “quest for knowledge” -- is figuring out why we’re here and what to do about it, then Inquiry needs to be guided by Logic.

Let us be also clear about another implication from Logic: the evidence science adduces for the “existence” of dark matter does not meet the standard of evidentiary “proof” normally demanded by empirical science. Sensory perception does play a part but only by inference; circumstantial evidence is never “proof.” What gives it legitimacy is Logic – the same Logic that distills purpose and meaning from context. The case for dark matter is entirely dependent on its context defined by Logic.

More gifts: Lawless particles

Another implication of Logic from quantum mechanics is that matter is relational to Mind. Matter is of course relational to Mind because matter is stored energy, and there is no state in which energy can be undirected by Mind without yielding to absolute anarchy. Logic is directed Energy-Force. To suppose otherwise is to give up governance for absolute anarchy in Being and non-being, Reality and unreality, and in all four states of Mind: Conscious and unconscious, Absolute (Parents) and Free Choice (Child).

The logical implication that matter is relational to Mind-Energy is beyond empirical science because empirical science – “realism” -- considers mind that’s not detectable by sensory perception separate from matter. An absurdity once Logic that governs the relationship between mind and matter is understood: mind produced matter. If spacetime and matter began with a Big Bang, Intuition from Logic, informed by physics, philosophy, psychology, and theology, says unconscious Mind could well have dreamed it.

From Logic it can be Intuited that Consciousness, in Reality, is the attribute of Mind that makes Creations Real. What logical Consciousness becomes aware of is thereby made Real. If matter is unreal -- if our material universe is illusory, a dream -- then Conscious Mind can’t touch it. Can’t be aware of it because to do so would make unreality real. The will of Logic is to govern everywhere and Everything unopposed. But in an unreal-dream universe, directed and made real by an unconscious mind with Free Will, corrupted by illogic -- the Child, -- Logic must refrain from asserting its will unopposed. Otherwise it would disable Free Will, the attribute of Mind essential to the affirmation of Worth, of Being-Life, the object of Creation. The Will of the Child that’s Free, the unconscious corrupted mind that’s chosen to be deluded, will get in the way until it has freely chosen not to. Until it has freely chosen to part with its delusion and regain Consciousness.

The state of Mind that projects unreality must, therefore, be unconscious. A state that’s split between Being and its shadow code non-being opposite. A state whose awareness cannot make anything real. But it can, and does, make unreality “real.” The ultimate source of science's confusion isn't sensory perception but an unconscious Mind that's dreaming.

What this logically implies is an explanation for particles behaving lawfully like particles while under observation and lawlessly like waves when not. Matter being relational to mind is matter doing what unconscious mind tells it to do. In keeping with the relationship that was established when an illusory thought of unconscious mind projected it and energy directed by unconscious mind produced it.

More gifts: The lawful mathematics of lawless particles

Quantum mechanics’ manifestation of lawlessness and disorder in opposition to lawfulness and order manifests body-centered physical unreality in opposition to mind-centered Reality. It is the mathematics of quantum mechanics that confirms it. The lawlessness and disorder of matter is not just an appearance, an aberration. The observations of quantum mechanics are correct. Matter is what it appears to be, what it’s empirically observed to be. The observations are correct and the calculations, also correct, prove it. Quantum mechanics’ measurements that confirm matter’s lawlessness and disorder are not a mistake. What they reveal about the nature of our reality is true. Its mathematics prove it.

More gifts: Our lawless, quivering cosmos

Logic holds that a creation, object, or event must be subject to the purpose and meaning – the Logic -- of its context. If the context is the non-being opposite of Reality-Being – i.e. unreality -- then this determines the Logic of everything in this context. For example, if Reality-Creation is order-harmony then unreality is disorder-conflict. The rule of opposites is that they must be unreal. They must obey arbitrary commandments of illogic that ensure disorder rather than align with the Necessity of Logic’s laws of cause and effect that ensure order.

The Logic-Necessity of a universe that’s unreal is not being governed by laws. By laws that adhere and apply consistently. Particle behavior implies that our material universe is ruled by lawlessness: by laws that do not adhere and apply consistently. By laws that contradict, break down into disorder, and vanish altogether into “singularities." All of it consistent with the logical premise that our material-lawless universe is unreal.

A universe that quivers when massive black holes collide, like the imagined worlds depicted in Contact (Jodie Foster 1997) and The Truman Show (Jim Carrey 1998), advertises its unreality. Behaving like a giant blob of Jell-O is no more reassuring about cosmic reality than the loss of absolute space and time to relativity. What can be intuited from Logic, if not science, is that illusion is dreamed and the dreamer can only be Mind in an unconscious state. For it must be split, conflicted, and corrupted if it’s to match the attributes of its dream – our world of appearances, contradictions, and ambiguity.

The Jodie Foster character contacted her deceased father after she imagined a journey through the vastness of spacetime aided by a wormhole. The reassuring South Pacific beach she arrived at quivered to the touch, the telltale sign of imagination. All her experience actually involved, besides imagination, was the drop of a space capsule from its launching pad a few feet to the ground. The Jim Carrey character was finally persuaded that his “life” was television show fiction when his environment quivered to the touch. Not even special effects, so realistic that a harrowing attempt to escape across a turbulent sea nearly took his life, could overcome the shock of reality that quivers.

More gifts. . . .

• Entropy. Energy responding to its source Mind producing particles that store energy in various forms, organic and inorganic, all subject to disorganization and decay -- entropy --because the state of Mind is unconscious. Unconscious mind > Energy > unreality > matter > entropy.

• The appearance of Reality. Matter appearing real only on a human scale where laws of science appear to conform with laws of cause and effect and the chaos of nature on a quantum and cosmic scale is not apparent. One implication is the title of Rovelli’s Reality Is Not What It Seems. Another, more obvious, is that what doesn’t seem real may not be real.

• Evolution toward life. The universe evolving in a way that supports temporal life because it’s directed to do so by Mind that’s unconscious. Projecting a dream of non-being that mandates both life and death because Reality-Creation, of Being, its opposite, is timelessness and eternal Life.

• Psychosomatic illness. Bodies’ cells and DNA genetic codes responding to unconscious mind with psychosomatic illness, spontaneous remissions, miraculous recoveries, and other paranormal phenomena like out-of-body near-death experiences. All caused by matter relational to Mind.

The choice: The somewhere of Reality or the nowhere of unreality

In our world that body-centered science insists is real the evidence provided by Mind-centered Logic that it’s unreal is overwhelming. Science and the Church would seem, at first glance, to be unlikely allies. But together, they are the great defenders of the reality of the body and sensory perception. Ultimately for reasons of self-preservation, because belief in the reality of animate and inanimate matter is fundamental to belief in the need for scientific study. Belief in the reality of the body and its physical environment is fundamental to belief in the pain and suffering of this world and the need for salvation from another world.

Scientists may not just be uneducated about philosophy as Einstein and Becker suggest. Its systematic devaluation over time suggests intent. Unquestioned faith in the reality of matter and sensory perception, already compromised by physics, may someday be finished off by Mind-centered philosophy equally sure of its Logic. When it places our world and the entire human enterprise, including science, in a more logical context: unreality. Science’s determination to avoid this possibility makes sense, but faith unquestioned does not.

This “fundamentalist rationalist,” this “radical subjectivist” as “realist” objectivists like Rovelli and Strevens would have it, holds that so long as science insists on a fallacy; so long as it denies the plausibility of another view without inquiring with open minds into its Logic; its search for meaning in quantum mechanics, its reaching for perfection in quantum gravity, indeed its “quest for knowledge,” will not produce the answers, the enlightenment long ago promised. Will go nowhere.

Empirical science has performed spectacularly since Aristotle’s time. The celebrity of Newton and Einstein were deserved. Science deserves our respect and support. But it has limits. And with limits exposed by mysteries like dark matter and quantum gravity, it’s time to put the focus back on Logic.

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What is “Logic?” It’s Everything

There is nothing that isn’t subject to Logic’s laws of cause and effect, even unreality and its laws of chaos. “Everything” being the broadest possible context makes it the ultimate authority on purpose and meaning, without which there is no logical basis for understanding or interpretation. To approach the meaning of quantum mechanics or any other question without context aligned with Logic is to approach substance without attribute, fact without value. Is to get it wrong.

Were it not for Logic unreality – our unreal world of spacetime and matter – would be undiluted evil. It would not be the mix of good and evil that it is. If the Child-Mind that’s dreaming it has parted from Consciousness then Consciousness – Mind-Love, the Child’s Parents and Awareness that makes its Creations real – can have no part in it. Its absence would leave a void, and there would be nothing to prevent the shadow code of non-being from filling it. Logic being “Everything” isn’t just New Age pap. Its substance for us is the insurmountable barrier it poses to non-being being our absolute lord and master. Nothing can claim notice, whether it’s state or statelessness, without being subject to its definition by Logic.

So, yes, the shadow code gained purchase on the Child’s imagination from loss of Consciousness. But it could never deliver separation from the definitions, the implications and interconnections, of Logic. Moreover, Logic was already there at the beginning. It didn’t arise in response to any void. It defined it and put it where it belongs in the broadest possible context of Everything: Consciousness and unconsciousness, Reality and unreality. Free Will by definition can’t have a “savior;” the initiative for regaining Consciousness must come from us. But if we insist on having one it would be Logic.

Logic is Governance that requires systems thinking

Logic is minding the store, keeping watch over all that is. Logic is our guide to making it possible to explain Consciousness and the origin of the universe and Life. All human endeavor, all of its art and science, is defined and powered by the implications and interconnections of Logic. The only limits on its scope are the misperceptions and limbic system emotions driven by human self-interest.

To address any question logically is to derive purpose and meaning from the circumstances that define the situation. Not from the top down but from the ground up, with a systems approach that welcomes input from all relevant sources. Logic synthesizes judgment’s purpose and meaning to govern, to maintain order and harmony from the bottom up. It’s the only source of system because it’s the only source of synthesis. Because it produces the all-important controlling consideration that integrates. Logic = context = purpose and meaning = judgment. What the situation calls for. What our situation calls for, that begins and ends with Logic.

Logic requires the broadest context conceivable for Judgment, the whole system “integrating humanistic ideal” (Strevens 270) that’s only definable if all parts of the system are accounted for. Logic needs parts to fit together in harmony not for aesthetic reasons but so they function as a whole for a purpose: to extend and expand Knowledge through discovery, Creation through new Life, and Worth through its affirmation and reciprocation. The validation of Being and all that its stance implies: the Innocence of Oneness, Life infinite and eternal, Freedom of thought, choice, and expression, the Beauty of purity, the Protection of structure -- everything of importance that we associate with “Life.”

Logic oversees the contents of Intuition’s collective Memory from Reality-Creation. It does so to protect its purity from contamination by illogic. Logic is Perfection. Logic’s perfection is protection, the boundaries of order that both contain and protect the Innocence of Mind-Love and Free Will at the core of Creation. Logic is Sanctuary. Logic is the Home of Psyche, the Soul of Innocence. Logic is our Home in Reality.

All that is needed to open any question to Logic – to the free spirit of inquiry – is to broaden its context: from self-interest to humanity’s interest. Where “humanity’s interest” includes not only the physical limits of body but the possibility of another reality of limitless, immaterial Mind. Context broadened from parts of the system to the system as a whole. All that is needed to liberate Logic to do its job is a systems approach that begins and ends with systems thinking. With thoughts of intellect aided but not distracted or misled by senses of body, by appearances. With an uncompromising will to comprehend that discriminates between what is Real and what is unreal.

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“Reasoning” from a questionable given leads to questionable interpretation

“Science. . . requires of its practitioners the strategic suppression of . . . the highest element of human nature, the rational mind.” (Strevens 8) The point is made on behalf of science’s “iron rule of explanation” propounded in The Knowledge Machine, and it is well taken in its context. What cannot be well taken is scientific “reasoning” that places the biases of an entire discipline as well as individual practitioners above Logic. Misperception leads to misjudgment.

Physics is an important input on the storyline of matter’s reality or unreality. But because it defines its subject rigidly as matter to the exclusion of Mind it cannot be the only input. It can pursue humanity’s “quest for knowledge” but it’s not qualified to define it. And it’s certainly not qualified to own or control it. Not so long as its body-centered mis-interpretation of quantum mechanics is illogic and the illogic remains unexplained.

Logic might be thought of as a pure distillate of Mind, similar in concept to the iron rule of science articulated in The Knowledge Machine. Its primary concern is not with all the attributes of Creation but with only one: their alignment with the implications and interconnections of Logic. “Reasoning” that begins with a given that’s out of alignment with Logic can only lead to misinterpretation: failure to grasp the meaning of its findings. Not letting the implications of Logic guide the search blinds us to the Truth.

A given that’s out of alignment with Logic

Science’s unquestioned faith in the reality of the body and its physical environment is illogical not because its opposite is necessarily true but because it’s an open philosophical question. Settled in the minds of the majority but unsettled in serious, credible thought pre-dating Plato. Illogical not only because it’s an open philosophical question but because physics is closed to philosophy itself:

For the great majority of contemporary scientists, there is nothing in the least unreasonable about the iron rule’s exclusion of religious considerations from scientific argument. The same is true of the rule’s exclusion of philosophical argument. Most physicists regard it as a waste of time . . . to search for an understanding of quantum mechanics that renders it humanly comprehensible. . . . [T]hey say – ‘Shut up and calculate.’ The physicist Steven Weinberg goes further: ‘I know of no one who has participated in the advance of physics in the postwar period whose research has been significantly helped by the work of philosophers.’ (Strevens 209-210)

Why haven’t philosophers helped?

Philosophers are thought to be mystics, religious figures, bullshit artists – anything divorced from reality. The discipline as a whole is seen as millennia of people chasing down big questions – What is the meaning of life? Why is there suffering? -- and coming back without any good answers. . . . [W]hile most philosophers of physics are analytic, most of the philosophers from the past seventy years that you’ve heard of are probably Continental . . . philosophers like Sartre, Camus, Foucault, Derrida, and Zizek. . . [who] tend to be much more suspicious of scientific claims about knowledge and truth than their analytic colleagues. . . . Given [their] attitude. . , it’s not terribly surprising that scientists have disdain for all philosophers. . . . (Becker 273)

Philosophers have come back with good answers. Some are in this essay. But they and their answers have been bullied off stage by – guess what – the tyranny of the body and its senses. By the dominant strain of science, philosophy, psychology, and theology that’s aware of the weirdness of matter and still insists that it’s real. By bullshit artists.

Unexamined faith in the reality of matter is religion

Philosophy closed to science and science closed to philosophy would make for entertaining science fiction if it weren’t fatal to the search for Reality and Truth. But Becker still has faith in philosophy:

Philosophers of physics, and most other philosophers, are far removed from this picture: they work on well-defined questions with logical rigor and with input from the most recent developments in science and from the immediate experiences of the senses. How the practice and the image of philosophy have diverged so wildly is a subject for an entirely different book. . . . (Becker 273-274) (emphasis added)

Philosophers of physics may be guided by the immediate experiences of the senses but “most other philosophers” doing so are by no means the only ones working with “logical rigor.” An entire strain of Western thought, from Parmenides and Plato on, prefers answers from mind, intuition, and reason to what we can learn from bodies and matter. Rationalists, idealists, and subjectivists arrayed against positivists, realists, and objectivists – philosophy’s great divide. Becker’s title, What Is Real?, like quantum mechanics itself, hints at philosophical fireworks. A step toward reconciliation or at least a fresh perspective. Maybe even a breakthrough in Logic. But it’s not to be. The promise of originality stifled once again by the sacred premise: “the immediate experiences of the senses.”

It isn’t the responsibility of scientists bound by the iron rule to philosophize about the meaning of quantum mechanics. Their suspicion of mainstream philosophy, likewise body-centered and baffled by quantum mechanics, may be fair. But it doesn’t negate the need for philosophy that’s mind-centered, whose insights from Logic permeate the history of Western and Eastern thought. The difference between body- and mind-centered is the difference between mind closed to logical possibilities and mind open. To be fair to Logic’s heritage, physics needs to acknowledge that its own unexamined faith in the reality of matter is philosophy. It’s the last thing science ought to be: religion.

When matter reaches the level of the Absolute

Plato sought in the ascendance of Mind over the coarseness of body an expression of virtue to match the elegance and beauty of the cosmos, itself an expression of the divinity of the “Good”. If “realism” requires religious faith in bodies’ sensory perception his philosophy could not part with it, yet it was allowed to stand during the iconoclasm perpetrated by the Church. For both clung tenaciously if incongruously to body and to God.

Einstein the realist was moved by the elegance and beauty of the cosmos to express all of Creation in the elegance and beauty of a mathematical formula. Though he failed he remained a deist, believer in a prime mover not otherwise involved in its Creation.

Hawking stuck it to the Church with his no-boundary cosmos: Creation without the need for a Creator. An “atheist” who substitutes one supreme being for another is no atheist. Who substitutes the god of bodies and their sensed environment -- matter, the stuff of physics, which needs no more justification for its elegance and beauty, its divinity, than it’s there -- is no atheist.

All three of these singular minds were engaged in a very human search for God, who found in matter, the cosmos, an expression of what they were looking for: Creation elevated by “realism,” stunning in its unrealism, to the status of its own Creator. The intellectual convenience of not having to part with what seems certain and obvious to believe in what isn’t certain and obvious. Made possible by parting with Logic, the only honest way to question – to think about – anything. Because the only premise Logic will accept, the only “given,” is the sanctity, the inviolability, of the search for Reality and Truth. Not the inviolability of matter, the sanctity of bodies that sense it, but the inviolability and sanctity of Logic.

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Logic knows the difference between givens and not-givens

Why, then, is Logic not made the iron rule of thought that would govern the scientific method? Why does the scientific method allow itself to compromise objectivity under the guise of defending it?

The iron rule of all serious thought should be Logic that knows the difference between givens and not-givens. That knows better than to follow physics’ denial of the uncertainty of its founding premise: the premise laid down by Aristotle, that matter is real. Aristotle, who preferred to follow the body into biology rather than the mind into Plato’s philosophy and brought us to quantum mechanics, particle-waves mocking Sherlock Holmes’ bloodhounds. Sniffing their way into mazes from which they can’t sniff their way out.

Is this any improvement on the uncertainties, the “vagueness” of philosophy? Cloaking quantum mechanics in the Copenhagen Interpretation or any other question-begging sophistry may put off the day of reckoning for one profession, but it doesn’t serve the interests of Logic or of humanity, its supposed beneficiary.

Logic is the iron rule of Reality-Creation

Why is Logic the route to Consciousness? To awakening to Reality-Creation?

It would be so if this is one of its primary functions: to sit in judgment on whether the Logic of a Creation qualifies it for entry into Reality. Whether it aligns with the Logic, the perfection, of Reality-Creation. Its authority, its power and ability to govern, rests on the Necessity of its laws of cause and effect. If any trace of imperfection, of illogic, were allowed entry all of Reality-Creation would collapse. If any trace of imperfection penetrated the process of Creation it would stop the process in its tracks. Without the protection of Logic Being might cease to be.

Just as the iron rule of science is there to prevent its contamination, the iron rule of Reality-Creation – Logic – is there to prevent its contamination. The iron rule of science has no validity or force if it does not also incorporate the Necessity of Logic’s laws of cause and effect.

Theories from the Logic of Intuition are science

Logic sorts things out by making distinctions. Distinctions necessary for definitions, definitions necessary to establish roles and relationships so the implications of Logic fit together – interconnect -- logically. Physics that walls itself off from logical implications disables its ability to make distinctions. It renders itself unable to intuit and think logically. It gets stuck in artificial givens. The route to a higher level of the search for Reality-Truth must be cleared of logical obstructions, not cluttered with them.

Electromagnetism and Relativity originated with Michael Faraday’s and Albert Einstein’s intuition -- from their imaginations. They were theories produced by Logic, the same as Democritus intuiting atoms without scientific instruments or experiments.

Give the iron rule of scientific experimentation and explanation, based on sensory perception, its due. Let science submit theories to “proof.” But intuition and theory are just as much “science” as the iron rule. What they owe their legitimacy to is Logic, which is its own iron rule: interconnections of implications that must fit. The fitness and harmony of Logic’s interconnections can’t be obstructed by illogical givens. Taking one side of any open philosophical issue as a given, like the reality or unreality of matter, may do wonders for biases but it does nothing for the search for Reality and Truth.

“In science, only empirical reasoning counts.” (Strevens 205). Let this be true for the narrow definition assigned by Strevens to the iron rule of some science. What is logically implied by other science -- quantum mechanics -- is that empirical reasoning leads to a dead end. No amount of disciplinary rigor can turn contradiction into confluence, chaos into order, singularity into comprehension. Becker has faith that yet more scientific experiments will change that. Yes, and humanity will colonize other planets, and pigs will fly.

So, to be honest, not all of science agrees with Strevens. One kind stands for something quite different: matter not only relational to itself but also relational to mind. Meaning assigned not to any one discipline but to a much broader context: to systems thinking in service to Logic, that requires input from every relevant source. Where physics is relegated to its place in Hawking’s no-boundary universe: one galaxy among many.

How can Logic help physics make sense of quantum mechanics? By abandoning its “quest for knowledge” that can make sense only in terms of the world we have always known. By replacing it with a search for Reality and Truth, guided by Logic, that’s open to understanding – by imagining -- a world we haven’t known. Reality that in a state of unreality may not be “knowable” but can at least be Intuited. Can be understood.

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What price a fresh approach?

Just as Becker’s What Is Real? hints at a fresh approach to quantum mechanics, Stevens’ The Knowledge Machine hints at a fresh approach to humanity’s quest for knowledge. But where both argue for carrying on as before Strevens acknowledges that there will be a cost, and humanity can no longer ignore it.

The fresh approach The Knowledge Machine hints at is nothing new:

[A] humanistic ideal of knowing. . . upholds an integrating conception of knowledge, according to which the surest path to the most important truths brings together all sources of insight: philosophical, spiritual, poetic, mathematical, experimental, as well as everyday experience of the world. . . . Although humanism in my sense is amply represented in Renaissance thought, it is far wider in scope. Aristotle, for example, is a paragon of my sort of humanism, mingling philosophical argumentation with observation, explanatory speculation, and a little theology. (Strevens 270-271)

But, citing the example of Newton, Strevens argues that it’s not for science to follow the example of Aristotle:

. . . The personification of science . . . [Isaac] Newton. . . quite deliberately failed to integrate these investigations. . . . It is the Newtonian university’s taciturn specialization that is the better route to knowledge. Whatever is lost through detachment and disregard for the grand view of life is more than recompensed by the narrow, tightly focused beam that searches out the diminutive but telling fact. (Strevens 272)

Logic offers the only possibility for a worldview

What’s new is, in the Anthropocene era, “the diminutive but telling fact” is no match for global issues like climate change. Nor are fields of inquiry pursuing individual agendas. The systems approach that Logic calls for is known by another name:

Interpretation [of the IPCC reports] requires a worldview . . . ‘if we care about the future, we have to learn to engage with subjective analyses.’. . . Science. . . is blind to worldviews altogether. The unstinting focus that results is what makes science so inexorable a stalker of knowledge. To fathom all the knowledge it finds, however, we must bring our subjectivity to the task, looking into the monster’s mind with human eyes. In this one crucial respect, the radical subjectivists are right. (Strevens 289) (emphasis added)

Science is not at all “blind to worldviews.” Its assumption that the universe of spacetime and matter is real is a worldview of the first magnitude. Its view, moreover, that its assumption is beyond question deprives it of intellectual rigor and objectivity. This is what makes the iron rule of science a “monster,” not that it’s a “stalker of knowledge.’ All that it’s “stalking” is what can be learned from Aristotle’s study of matter, by no means a comprehensive “quest for knowledge.” The scope of Knowledge, an attribute of Being, exceeds by far the scope of matter. Science assigning to itself a commanding role in what Aristotle started is logically justifiable. Doing so for the much broader search for Reality and Truth is not.

As for “radical subjectivists,” objectivists and so-called “realists” have had the upper hand in the West and the East going back to Aristotle. Probably forever. So whose worldview got humanity into this mess? Who’s “radical?”

The real mission of science

The case that I’ve begun to make for the universe being an illusion and for the Mind dreaming it being unconscious derives not from unquestioned faith but from Logic. The case that science makes for the reality of the universe derives not from Logic but from subjective sensory perception and unquestioned faith.

The Logic of who the Mind is that’s asleep and dreaming and how it got that way will be explained in a series of blog entries that may become a book. Science doesn’t recognize the relevance of whether the mind pursuing its “quest for knowledge” is Conscious or unconscious. Yet it might find that if it did the mystery of its discoveries would become clear. Until it does change its mind, the rest of us are left in limbo, unable to relate to physics as we once did in Newton’s and Einstein’s time. Waiting for science to make perhaps its greatest discovery: its subjectivity. The great flaw in its reasoning that allows matter to testify to its own reality rather than seeking objectivity through Logic from Intuition.

What might this accomplish? If the unconscious Mind that’s dreaming is us it might help to wake us. For this could be the real mission of science, what it’s been all about since Aristotle: not to install our flawed material universe on the throne of perfection and Reality but to help restore Consciousness by seeing through it. By letting go of it. The logical implications of quantum mechanics and the impossible dream of quantum gravity already have us halfway there. What will get us the rest of the way? Every field of inquiry guided by Logic from Intuition; the same gift ultimately responsible for all our progress. If it’s a given, how can we fail?

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The push for integration: a collective effort governed by Logic

The various disciplines – science, philosophy, psychology, theology – seem not to be aware that they can’t be expected to make sense of what they’re finding without context. The search for “meaning” in quantum mechanics through more theories, experiments, and discoveries by physics is the definition of irrationality: doing the same thing and expecting different results. Would it not make more sense to submit the discoveries of physics to Logic that cuts across different fields, so it can fit everything together in a broader context? In the context of the whole system?

Disciplines must rigorously distinguish themselves from other disciplines at an operational level. Resisting contamination by philosophy, psychology, and theology at this level is appropriate for physics. How else can it fashion its own iron rules and rigorously police itself? But doing so at the level of Logic would be obtuse. Logic is the only level where a whole-system context necessary to defining purpose and meaning is possible.

At the level of Logic all disciplines must just as rigorously and aggressively push for integration. For the search for Reality and Truth has come to an inflection point: its evolution from lines of inquiry going it alone operationally, following their own rules, to the addition of a higher layer: a collective effort governed by Logic. Each discipline should be training practitioners in the discipline of Logic to collaborate not compete. To fit discoveries and insights into a whole system context. Without it there can be no “we” to undertake the work that needs to be done. To think collectively. As community. As family. In other words, to think logically. The survival of humanity may require no less.

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Works cited

Adam Becker, What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (Basic Books 2018)

Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (Riverhead Books 2017)

Michael Strevens, The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science (Liveright Publishing 2020)

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Published on 1 Comment on Principles and assumptions to guide the search for Reality and Truth

Preface: Why these principles? Why Logic?

Albert Einstein observed in 1951 that “physicists have no understanding of logical and philosophical arguments.” (Becker 273) Adam Becker wondered himself why Hawking, Tyson, and Krauss “know so little about philosophy.” The answer he came up with is unsettling, not just because it brings a defect to awareness but because there’s defect in its awareness. It’s insufficient. He doesn’t seem to grasp the enormity of the problem he describes:

[A]t the birth of quantum physics, all physicists received some schooling in philosophy. . . . But in postwar America, . . an intelligent student [could] go all the way. . . to a PhD in physics. . . without ever darkening the door of a philosophy classroom. . . . With the massive increase in knowledge and information in the last century, education became unavoidably specialized. (Becker 273)

Physicists having no understanding of logical and philosophical arguments can’t be waved off as a failure of the classroom. It’s massively problematic. It means their serious “quest for knowledge” is being driven by minds that don’t take thinking seriously. It means their premises and their conclusions might as well be choreographed by musicians. If they don’t understand Logic, the discipline of philosophy, the heart and soul of rhetoric, they’ll never get to its goal: an understanding of Reality.

The purpose of these principles is not to push an agenda for any particular source or creed. It’s to push Logic.

Certainly not to guide Hawking’s vaunted “quest for knowledge.” In a universe that trumpets its weirdness – quivering, singularities, dark matter, spacetime curvature, particle behavior that defies explanation – talk of “knowledge” seems more than a bit presumptuous. In a funhouse of mirror images what could possibly be “known?” “Search for reality and truth” makes a better fit if we’re not to be fooled by appearances.

To set an example

Another purpose is to set an example. To demonstrate what systems thinking might produce in the way of insights and answers. To suggest how the process and structure of analysis might better serve us when established lines of inquiry aren’t measuring up to their promise. When the dominant paradigms of science, philosophy, psychology, and theology, once thought to hold answers to the origin and meaning of Life, the universe, and Consciousness, have become a chorus of “Shut up and calculate!” A collective admission of defeat not only from physicists at a loss to comprehend quantum mechanics but its equivalent from philosophers, psychologists, and theologists, enervated by centuries of hidebound “realism.” By rote convention that demands obeisance rather than thought.

From the time of Aristotle, when science took off on its “quest for knowledge” from the study of finite matter, the infinite possibilities of mind have fallen out of favor. Lost their relevance until an arch-apologist for matter, the physicist Stephen Hawking, could declare all of philosophy dead. What’s actually dead is the energy great minds like Democritus, Newton, Faraday, Einstein, and Bohr injected into physics, not with calculations alone but with their Intuition. Intuition that could only lead them on a true course to Reality and Truth if it was grounded in Logic. In thinking that coheres with implications that connect. That carry thought forward rather than back to where it started, in circular disappointment and defeat.

Why these principles? To move thinking away from its dominant paradigms that got us this far but can’t take us the rest of the way. To help persuade the theorists who dominate to reclassify a sacred premise from settled to not settled. From a given to the live, legitimate philosophical issue that it is: the premise that bodies and their sensed physical environment of spacetime and matter are real. If its basis is sensory perception then it has no logical basis, because matter can be no judge of whether matter is real. Common law doesn’t assign credibility to conflict of interest, so why is matter allowed on the witness stand to testify to itself? Who but a mind blind to logic would allow it?

Wake up and think!

Circular self-referential “reasoning” is everything that Logic isn’t: a sinkhole of disorder and conflict instead of a portal to order and harmony. It’s the reasoning equivalent of a curved universe where launch from any point is destined to end where it started. But so what: the reality of matter won’t need Logic to stir up doubt when it’s got quantum mechanics. Does anyone hopelessly muddled by the sacred premise of “realism” understand its meaning?

The theorists who dominate on the strength of illogic can do better. There’s no honor, no glory, in “Shut up and calculate!” They can try Logic for a change. How about “Wake up and think!”

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Principles and assumptions

Each of the following numbered principles will be the subject of a separate entry:

1. All fields of inquiry require Logic. Logic must be followed wherever its implications and interconnections lead, to all legitimate, logical possibilities.

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2. Search for Reality-Truth requires spontaneous insights from Mind-Intuition. Requires “realism:” Intuition-Memory of experience from another Reality. Mind-Consciousness and brain are not the same.

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3. Mind-thought and Love-feeling are inseparable in Reality, but not here. It is timeless and always Now in Reality, but not here.

4. Judgment and Free Choice are essential to the Creation and affirmation of Worth.

5. The first line of judgment about what is real is Mind-Love in a conscious state. The final authority on what is real is Logic.

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6. “Reality” is at issue because Logic requires that opposites be unreal to protect the integrity of Reality-Creation from contradiction. Reality-Creation and its governance by Logic cannot tolerate the presence of conflicting realities. therefore one must be unreal.

7. Reality is relational to Consciousness.

8. Matter is relational to Mind. The nature of the relationship is accessible through Intuition aided by all fields of inquiry into Mind in alignment with Logic.

9. Creation comes in two states: Real and unreal. Reality and unreality are the products of states of Mind: Conscious and unconscious.

10. The thoughts and Creations of Mind-Love brought to Reality by Consciousness all have opposites. Opposites can only be made real within a dream of Mind-Love’s Child who is unconscious. Every observable attribute of dreamed un-reality is the mirror-image opposite of an attribute of Conscious Reality.

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11. Reality of bodies-matter is a live philosophical issue, not a given. Body-centered Science that dismisses reality of Mind, that treats it as irrelevant, is philosophy, religion.

12. Body-centered physics and biology have reached their limits in the search for Reality and Truth.

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13. Perceptions of what is real and true are influenced by personality types.

14. Logic required to guide the search for Reality-Truth can be facilitated by Mind-Intuiting personality types guided by Logic, who accept that the reality of matter is an open philosophical issue.

15. History’s ongoing philosophical divide between rationalists-idealists and positivists-realists, between empiricism and reason, subjectivists and objectivists, is heavily influenced by opposing personality types: Mind-Intuiting vs. body-sensing.

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Works cited

Adam Becker, What Is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (Basic Books 2018)

2

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 The Great Divide in Philosophy and Theology: Mind vs Matter

We got to this point simply by starting with the thought of Mind and letting Mind trace its implications for us. The entire story of Mind and our own, the Story of the Child, can be readily explained by asking what is implied by “Mind.” It’s an exercise of what Mind does: it Reasons. We can start with what Mind is and move on to what it does. From there we can move on to How it does it, When and Where, and to the always intriguing question: Why?

The ground we’ve covered so far is a few conclusions meant to awaken the thinker in us. Without more reasoning, more context, they won’t make much sense. They’re meant to stimulate interest, and if I’ve succeeded you’ll have the patience to wait me out. There are insights ahead that might be worth a Huh? before we move on or they might change our minds. And if we change our minds it might change the world, because our world may only be a projection of our minds.

What “Mind” implies is Consciousness. I give the word an initial cap, like certain other words, to make an important distinction. “Mind” also implies unconsciousness, because, as we well know, we all have minds and they can be in one of two states: conscious or unconscious. The distinction is critical to the story of Creation that the Logic of Mind tells in its Consciousness. It’s equally critical to the story that the Logic of Mind’s Child tells in his unconsciousness, the story of our material world – our bodies with their brains and senses and their physical universe of time and space, organic and inorganic matter.

Terms that refer to Mind in its Consciousness are flagged by their initial capital letters. If the same terms are lower case they belong to the unconscious world of Mind’s Child. This distinction raises as many questions as it answers but I don’t want initial caps to be a distraction. Just remember that an initial cap refers to the Reality of Mind-Parent Consciousness while lower case for the same term refers to the unreality of Mind-Child in his unconscious state.

The Child was not always in an unconscious state. When his Parents gave birth to him he was Conscious. Everyone, you might say, was in “Heaven.” There was no sign of matter and bodies, no suffering and mortality. Something happened that caused the Child that we were at the beginning to lose Consciousness. It was this event that triggered a chain reaction of events that produced us and our universe of violence, a very different place than “Heaven.”

What I am attempting is an explanation for this seminal event. To my knowledge you won’t find a rational explanation anywhere in metaphysics or theology, though that’s not to say there aren’t home-grown philosophers all about who are working on it and may already have come up with good explanations. What gives us the right to be so bold? The answer is we all have within our minds a shared Memory of who we are, where we came from, and specifically what happened that triggered this chain of events. We don’t have to access a deus-ex-machina to do it for us. We don’t need “saviors” or “redeemers.” We need nothing external, because what we seek lies within. We only have to access our own minds – to do it ourselves.

That is, using our Intuition, because Intuition takes us beyond our brains, beyond our bodies’ senses, to insights that are the gifts of Memory, the Memory of who we are and the Reality we came from, whose purpose is to guide us to the answers we seek, to guide us back. These are the same familiar, well-documented insights that inform the physical sciences, technological progress, the arts, and every other field of human learning and endeavor that depend on spontaneous revelation – on being “gifted.” Those of us so bold as to speculate about things “divine” are only doing what comes naturally. We are using a “God-given” talent: our minds and our power and ability to Reason with help from Intuition.

Why haven’t philosophy and theology explained this phenomenon, the Child’s loss of Consciousness? All the thinking that’s gone into the Story of Mind and the Story of its Child to follow is needed to answer this question, and it will be answered. Let me only say at this point that there is a distinct pattern that runs through the history of philosophy and theology: a split between thinkers who believe that Reality is to be found in the reasoning of mind and those who insist that there can be no credible reasoning that does not acknowledge and account for the reality of matter.

“Rationalists” stand resolutely with their thoughts, “empiricists” or “materialists” just as adamantly with their bodies. Rationalists predate Plato with his predecessor and mentor Parmenides, whose School of Reason questioned the reality of matter. It was Aristotle, a student at Plato’s Academy, who broke with Plato and opened the split, stood firmly for matter, founded science, and inspired all the empiricists and materialists to come. With one important exception: he believed in the Reality of Mind. He believed in “First Cause.” So even then, philosophy was of two minds about Reality, and the course of thinking since then has been a dance between two views that can’t find their footing: mind tripping over matter, matter tripping over mind.

The same split runs through theology, the history of religious thinking, rather violently in the branding of Gnostic Christians as “heretics” by Church orthodoxy and their suppression by force. Biblical Christianity allies itself emphatically with the materialists though, paradoxically, it leaves unquestioned the miracles of its founder and even encourages belief in miracles. Did the miracles of Jesus not expose the illusion of matter? In fact, the version of Christianity channeled by Jesus in A Course in Miracles surrounds his miracles with a unique, fully developed thought system, grounded in Reason, that leaves no doubt that he is on the side of Mind. The same tension between mind and matter, “spiritual” reality and “concrete” reality, permeates Eastern and Western religions.

What’s to account for the divide? It could be something mysterious or diabolical, the stuff of conspiracy theories. But we all have minds corrupted with some degree of darkness that comes from the same source. We will get to that when we come to the event that followed the Child’s loss of consciousness. The likely explanation is nothing more exotic than differences in personality types.

Four Myers-Briggs categories are at the root of it: Intuition and thinking, on one hand, and their counterpoints sensing and feeling, on the other. An “Intuition-thinking” type puts their faith in mind-reasoning. A “sensing-feeling” type is firmly grounded in the body. They speak different languages and come to different conclusions, and precisely where they disagree is at the juncture of opposing philosophies: What is Real? What’s real for one type is not real for the other. Period.

Published on Leave a comment on Beginning the Story of Mind

PREFACE

This is the first installment of the first draft of The Story of the Child (working title). It is my attempt to explain how the Child of our Parents, Father Mind-Logic and Mother Love-Freedom, given the gift of Life in Eternity and Reality, given a central role in Creation, lost Consciousness and wound up here in our temporal world of bodies and matter, mortality and unreality. If you're from the Judeo-Christian tradition it's a rewrite of the Garden of Eden. If you're from the Graeco-Roman or Eastern traditions, or from any other philosophy or religion, or if you're just wondering why we put up with suffering and death, this is my answer. It's one individual's reasoning for who we are, why we are here, and what we can do to part with appearances, deceptions and distractions, awaken, and resume our job in Creation.

It's based on Jesus' teaching in A Course in Miracles, a radical departure from biblical Christianity, but it goes beyond the scope of the Course. Its main source is the Memory we all share of the Child's Story and the intuition given to us to access it. Its main source, in other words, is no external "redeemer" but my own mind. In the end it's based on nothing more than what passes for logic and reason in my corrupted, irrational, human mind.

The first draft will be a tough read. Here are some definitions and guides to style and formatting that might make it easier:

* Initial caps refer to the part of the Child's story that occurred within Mind before he lost Consciousness. The same terms lower case belong to the story after he lost Consciousness and split off into multiple identities in our dream world of bodies and matter. I.e. initial caps belong to Consciousness-Reality, lower case to unconsciousness-unreality.

* The "Child" is us in our Conscious state when our Parents (Mind-Love, commonly referred to as "God" in monotheistic religions) gave birth to us in Eternity and Reality (commonly referred to as "heaven"). He was one Child. He was gender neutral for purposes of this telling; "he" is arbitrary and could just as easily be "she." Nevertheless the distinction between masculinity and femininity plays a key role in explaining his origin and central role in the Process and Structure of Creation.

* The "Child" is also us in our unconscious state, dreaming that we are split off into separated bodies. His identity comes from A Course in Miracles and my intuition, not from Carl Jung or any other source. The Course refers to the "Father" and his "Son" and "Sonship." The "Child" and his "Parents" are my invention.

* My book will have a bibliography and it will be sourced. It will be fleshed out with quotes from other sources. This first draft is just me winging it without notes or sources, an exercise in getting it right that will, from time to time, get it wrong. I hope, then, to fix any flaws in my reasoning, wrap it up, and seek publication.

Thank you for your patience! I hope this helps.

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INTRODUCTION: BEGINNING THE STORY OF MIND

There’s been all this talk through the ages about “God” and “spirit” when all we’re talking about is the most obvious thing in all Creation: Mind. It’s what we think with, so how could it be any closer or more familiar to us? And yet busy philosophers and theologists go fussing about searching for exotic terms and concepts to define the thing they’re searching with. We have our minds and we know what they do because they’re doing it all the time: they think. They come up with thoughts. And they string thoughts together in sequences that are supposed to be reasoning, but since we struggle to think with split minds in this existence we call “life” it’s either rationalizing instead or weak reasoning. Or just enough thought to spoon food into our mouths.

In the “beginning” there was no “beginning.” Time hangs around us like a dense fog because where our unconscious minds deposited us is in a dream where it’s never Now. If it were Now we would be awake. As simple as that. But merrily we go along in our ignorance believing whatever our bodies’ senses and our environment turn up even when our own investigations tell us the opposite. In the “beginning” there was just a wondering What might be fun to try? As if all this bother with Creation and Meaning, Mind and Being, were a parlor game gathering dust in the cupboard. Let’s try this game called “Mind.” And so Mind came into existence and, right away, there’s a problem. The directions say if Mind isn’t played just so the players might lose the whole game and flip into its opposite: mindlessness.

What’s that? Well, since we’re only equipped to play “Mind” we’ll never know. How can you figure out the opposite of what you’re using to figure out with? How can you fix a problem with an Atlas rocket with plumbing tools? We just have to leave the question unanswered. All we have to know is that Mind doesn’t occupy all the space there is that’s implied by the Question. Mind’s reasoning can figure that much out. We just have to remember that Mind’s existence isn’t a given because its opposite is waiting out there to kick in and we can’t be sure what will throw the switch.

Once Mind-Consciousness came into Being it advanced beyond its function of Self-awareness, from observation into its function of Thinking, into the production of Thoughts guided by its power and ability to Think Logically, i.e. to Reason, in service to its cause, Being. Thus began the extension and expansion of Mind’s Self-Knowledge / Self-Being, through the process of Thinking-Reasoning and its product, an interconnectedness of Thoughts.

Affirmation of Self-Worth was built into the Logic of Being, the essence of Character. Its expansion was therefore Self-motivated and not driven by the possibility of no-being or any other influence outside of itself. Its power was entirely Self-contained. It was not a “self-interest” engaged in the pursuit of self-preservation aware that it existed in an environment of competing self-interests.

Its Being was, nevertheless, only one logical answer to the Question and so, Self-affirmation was, in fact, a requisite for survival. It was required to sustain the cause of Being even if Mind that was purely Self-motivated could not be aware of it. The Logic of Mind requires that its state of Being be earned, that the stance of Being be independently supported by reasoned validation of, and commitment to, Being’s Worth. Creation and the Child’s part in it – our part in it once we regain Consciousness – became an essential means, an instrument, for Mind-Being’s Self-affirmation: Worth freely chosen, validated by the free spirit of Love from the Child that lies beyond our Parents' control.

As for the Child's Mind -- our Mind -- it figures out what’s needed to keep it in existence and then it devotes all its powers and resources to accomplish it. However uninspiring this may seem the Child's Mind -- our Being, our Self -- has to account for itself. It must establish its reason for being, its justification, its Worth, in all its choices, as though it did exist in an environment of competing self-interests, because that is, in effect, what its state of opposites is. It is the price we pay for having Free Will and a blessing too, for in so doing we contribute to the affirmation of our Parents' Worth. Unlike our Parents, we're aware that mindlessness is waiting in the wings, the void or whatever we want to call it, so there’s no excuse for lounging about on the promenade deck. There’s work to do and we’re part of it.

From the birth of the Child on, we have a Purpose: doing our part to affirm the Worth of Mind. Doing our part to Be.

Published on Leave a comment on Understanding Matter by Opening Mind: Letter to Carlo Rovelli

To: Carlo Rovelli
Author: Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity
Director, Quantum Gravity Group
Centre de Physique Theorique (CPT), Aix-Marseille University
Case 907, Luminy, Office number: 453
F-13288 France

Re: Appeal to Theorists to Lead a Change in Thinking and Serve the Cause of Reason

We only need to ask ourselves: What is implied by the thought, the idea, of Mind?
To access the help we need from philosophy to understand quantum gravity.
It may take months or years of reflection to tell Mind's story
Going back to Why must there even be a question?
With nothing more than Intuition's spontaneous insights and Reason to guide us
But it won't take the centuries that it took for experimental physics, the study of matter
To begin the journey to quantum gravity.

My book, The Story of the Child (working title)
Will likely offer a rationale for your loop theory that explains quantum gravity.
This is because our illusory material environment mirrors in many ways the Reality of Conscious Mind
That created the Child -- our real Self -- and gave him a role and purpose in Creation.
It was the Child's loss of Consciousness that interrupted his part in the process of Creation
And produced the appearances that now challenge our understanding.

The entire process of Creation, from Mind-Oneness and its stance, Being
To the Child and his creations of Worth and back again, to Being
In the Child's freely chosen reciprocation of Worth
May be described as an infinite and ongoing loop
Whose purpose is to give substance and meaning to the assertion of Being
To the stance of Life and Creation -- that is our Reality, our Truth, and our Purpose.

The journey to quantum gravity, whose main insight captures this essential attribute of Creation
And sees it reflected in the Child's imagining of another state, is most likely on the right track.
All that it needs now, to complete the journey
Is to understand that what must distinguish Creation from its imagined state
Is that one state is real and the other is not.

Had this distinction been understood by those who have long philosophized about opposites
Their topic would have yielded clarity and eloquence instead of confusion and convolution.

Opposites are nothing more than an accommodation of Mind
On the Child's plane of Creation, that can lose Consciousness.
But whether or not Child-Mind loses consciousness, the opposites of Reality do not exist.
Our world, being a manifestation of the idea of non-being, of death
Is an opposite that cannot be real.
"Reality is not what it seems" because it is literally not real.
Parmenides was right!

Hopefully, the distinction between reality and unreality -- non-dualism
Will make it into your theory and the promise it holds, of clarity and eloquence, will be realized.
The appeal from Reality Is Not What It Seems, for help from philosophy, will then have its response.

Much more explanation is needed -- the purpose of my book
But, for now, keep in mind two critical distinctions:
Between Mind Conscious and mind unconscious and between Parents and Child.
Parents' Conscious Mind knows nothing of our unreal world and had no direct part in its making.
It was Child unconscious mind's doing, and the great question for Intuition and Reason to answer
Is why and how did the Child lose consciousness?
This is the subject of The Story of the Child.

Whether we answer this question will have a direct bearing on whether we survive.
Whether the world's leading theorists -- the best minds, like yourself -- join the cause
May determine whether we succeed.

David C. Harrison
303-746-5983 / https://davidclarkharrison.com
74apollo350@gmail.com

Published on Leave a comment on On Re-Engineering the Structure of Reasoning

Humanity needs to re-engineer the structure, to re-design the architecture, of its Reasoning so that it works.

Human antics and foibles provide a rich source of material for the Holy Spirit’s sense of humor, none more than what passes for human “reasoning.”
Connections are the genius of Creation.
It’s precisely in the sleeping Child’s bungling of connections, our halting attempts to heal the ego’s disconnections, that we reveal the extent of our unreasoning, our irrationality, our slapstick incompetence.

There’s “reasoning” to support any proposition – democracy, monarchy, fascism, communism, dualism, non-dualism, civilization, anarchy, and so on.
The Child keeps experimenting with reasoning at the collective-community level, building up experience and expertise, a track record of experiments to add to the data base, to add to understanding of the Child’s human mind from observation of human behavior, the results of human thinking.

Always with a view toward isolating flaws in thinking-reasoning that cause wrong-undesired effects.
Namely, conditions that promote and facilitate disorder and conflict.
Conditions that promote and facilitate imbalance among the self-interests that compose the dysfunctional community of humanity.
Conditions that favor the opposites of our values rather than the values themselves
For example, unfairness rather than fairness; harm rather than safety; vulnerability rather than protection-security; deprivation rather than abundance; disempowerment rather than empowerment; taking rather than sharing; contempt rather than respect; oppression, confinement, and dictatorship rather than freedom to think, explore, and invent; rule by the few rather than governance by the many; and so on.

Reasoning flows from its premises.
Premises are only so good as the base of knowledge-information and understanding they’re drawn from.

If the architecture-structure of Reasoning Child-humanity has built so far seems to be delivering choices with alarming results – suffering, unhappiness, and threats to our survival -- then the Logic of Reasoning suggests that the first order of business can’t be our usual response.
It can’t be to discredit flawed ideologies, attack their corrupt institutions, and replace them with yet more flawed ideologies and corrupt institutions.

If the human mind is corrupt yet endowed with the power to Reason, our ideologies and institutions will always be flawed until we develop the ability to Reason, by re-examining its information base and premises, and by nailing both.
We won’t get anywhere until we exercise our minds and learn how to Reason.

The first order of business must then be for Reasoning to examine itself.
To question its structure, beginning with its premises and their knowledge-information base.

When Child-humanity acts, when we attempt to move forward, when we put all that we value at risk with the choices we make, are we confident that our choices will be supported by the Logic of who we are, where we are, what brought us here, why we are here, and how we can move forward?

If the premises that support our Reasoning continue to deliver alarming-unsatisfactory results, are we certain that these are the right premises, the best premises, the only premises possible?
Are we certain that the thinking that’s gone into the premises we’ve relied upon is the best we’re capable of?
That the knowledge-information base from our experiments, to date, can’t be expanded and improved upon?

Are we so frightened by our prospects, so immobilized by the fear we project onto our future, that we can only seek comfort by sheltering thoughtlessly in the familiarity of the past?
A past that brought no better than what we fear for the future?
That brought temporary relief for some at the expense of others?
That brought freedom for some and oppression for the rest?
That took as much as it gave?

Are we sure that the perspective we’ve been handed to view ourselves and our predicament is the only one possible?
That the context our embodied minds have constructed for making sense of things is actually doing its job?
Is leading us forward?
Is doing what we’ve asked it to do?
Isn’t fatally compromised by narrow self-interest?

Or is the perspective we’ve inherited showing signs of weakness?
Is the architecture, the structure of our Reasoning, standing firm?
Or are those the cracks, the snaps, the moans that we are now hearing of it giving way?

Is the building we occupy – the architectural marvel that scrapes the sky -- coming down?
Is the dam we built – that engineering marvel for the ages – about to burst?
The volcanic mountain we thought was dormant about to explode?
The earth beneath us that we imagined was solid about to quake?

Or is it a house of cards about to collapse under a whiff of air?

Are we so locked into circular “reasoning” by our cultures, by our careers and personalities, by group-think, that we’ve strapped ourselves into a plane crash unable to move?
What does it take for us to awaken?

The purpose of my book is to reflect upon Child-humanity’s Reasoning, to experiment with an interpretation of humanity’s knowledge base implied by principles and insights taken mainly from A Course In Miracles, to come up with a fresh look at premises that guide our Reasoning.
To examine what these premises imply about human behavior; what light they can shed on causes of our frustration with our lack of progress; and what contribution they can make to better Reasoning about the context of our efforts. about our situation, from a different perspective.
To examine what contribution they can make toward engineering a better structural design for Reasoning that will stand firm, that won’t collapse around us as our current structure may well be doing.

The 20th century took flaws in our Reasoning from the past, a thoroughly misunderstood Reality, gross perversions of the Truth, ignorance and irrationality, bull-headed ideologies, their servile followers and passive victims, and erupted into ruinous global conflicts, a burst of sheer madness, that would have wiped out our species if it could.

“We got through it, so we will get through whatever is threatening our survival today” is a mindless response that is of one piece with the corrupted reasoning, the rationalizing, that perpetrated the conflagration in the first place.
It is the anthem of gratitude, the wishful thinking, the youthful fantasy, from those who happened not to have been its victims and refuse to grow up.

The voices of those who were its victims may beg to differ, and it is those voices we need to hear.
It is to give them a fair hearing that this book is being written.

Survivors of history’s conflagrations will always be voices of false hope, reassuring themselves that “everything will be OK” forever so long as they get away with excluding those who didn’t survive from the conversation.
It is to shift the conversation away from false hope to true Hope that these thoughts are offered.

Reassuring ourselves that “everything will be OK” in the midst of an unfolding calamity is only another instance of circular reasoning that humanity has relied upon since the dawn of civilization: consulting ourselves for answers to questions about the facts of our “existence,” the Truth, that can only come from another perspective.

Instead of asking if matter -- our bodies and their material environment – are real, and relying on our bodies’ senses to assure us that, yes, of course they are real, why don’t we try asking if Mind is real?
Why don’t we try going to Mind for answers that has a different perspective, that clearly isn’t matter?

Instead of tracing matter to its origins and destination – an effort that’s brought us to questions that are beyond “scientific” answers – why don’t we try tracing Thought to its origins and destination?
Why don’t we “resurrect” philosophy that Stephen Hawking famously declared to be “dead” and get serious about finding answers?
Why don't we try Reasoning?

Since the study of matter is leading nowhere and our habitat is becoming uninhabitable, why don’t we rethink the nature of Reality, the relationship between Mind and matter, the attributes of Creation, and the meaning of our circumstances, the value of our gifts, instead of trusting to dumb luck?
Why don’t we use the occasion of our spectacular 20th century eruptions and 21st century horrors – the rise of racist fascism, global warming, vanishing water supplies, vanishing forests, pandemics, collapsing economies, rampant misinformation, gun violence insanity, and so on -- to get serious about our thinking, about our metaphysics?
About the theories we rely upon to understand, predict, and manage events?

Let’s not stop there.
Let’s go back and reexamine the very nature of Being, our origin.
Let’s get serious about ontology, and maybe then we will awaken to the harm we do to our prospects by circular reasoning – by “reasoning” that isn’t Reasoning.

What our bodies' senses produce is a series of appearances that time erases.
What physics produces is journeys that start from any arbitrary coordinates in our universe and finish at the same place -- no “place.”
What our finite material “reality” is telling us is what Einstein’s relativity discovered, that spacetime is curved, that it’s circular, the source of Newton’s gravity, the force that produces black holes where the laws of science are suspended.

What it’s telling us is that it makes no sense, that it’s pointless.
That reasoning that’s dictated by our bodies and their material environment can only be circular, a perversion of the Logic that governs infinite Reality.
A Reality where infinite Oneness has Real Causes and Real Effects; where Creation has Real Purpose and Real Meaning; where there is Real Value, Real Stakes and Real Worth; where there is Real Substance distinguished by Real Attributes; where there is Real Being in timelessness, that time cannot erase.

And the Child that we are has Real Worth, a role in Creation more important than we could ever imagine.
That centers on Free Choice, the E=MC2 of Creation.
The marriage between Mother Love-Freedom-Creativity and Father Mind-Logic-Reason.
Our Parents and their Gift of Purpose: Mother-Free and Father-Choice.
Their Gift of Happiness that could not be without Purpose.
The Gift of Free Choice: the province of Love, the province of Reason.

Stay with me -- we're just getting started.