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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 Why Brain Can Never Be Mind’s Friend

Excerpt from draft of forthcoming post with working title “What We Owe to Self-Awareness and the Price We Pay for Avoiding It

Unscientific science and the “new normal”

Science leans into deeply challenging questions like quantum gravity, Einstein’s and physics’ holy grail, with remarkable persistence and ingenuity. It leans the other way when challenged by questions no less important. Its “quest for knowledge” is hobbled with irrationality. Launched with bias, subjectivity rather than objectivity, that inevitably blinds it to the explanation and understanding it seeks while deepening our world’s mysteries. The assumption that there can be no reality other than that detected by body-brains’ five senses: taste, touch, smell, hearing, and vision.

Irrational because the reality detected belongs to the same environment, the same system, as its detector. Rejecting any perspective that’s outside the system means science’s “reality” is verifying itself. Self-referential, like a case that’s made by citing itself. Circular “reasoning.” Blatantly illogical yet hidden behind business-as-usual, humanity’s stock response to anything that contradicts the status quo. The ”new normal.”

What's to be learned from the brain in the jar?

Nuttiness with a purpose, to hobble any progress where it’s most needed: toward self-awareness. Toward solving the mysteries of Consciousness with definition that makes sense so that its story can be told without science’s misguided bias. Bias that  prevents neuroscience from an honest treatment of the difference between “Mind” and “brain.” Concepts that it uses interchangeably even though they’re literally worlds-realities apart. Even though Mind that’s real can know nothing of the body-brain that’s not real. Even though brain’s purpose is an impossibility: to replace Mind. To be its substitute in another “reality” that’s substitutes for Reality. To oppose Mind as though it were its enemy.

Which, to the shadow-opposite of a deluded, unconscious Mind, it is. Because within Mind is the truth about the body-brain and the world it senses, that both are logical impossibilities. That neither is real.

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) cites many discoveries that relied on spontaneous insights from Intuition. That more often arrived in the shower than in the laboratory, yet there was no more attempt to explain this phenomenon than there was to explain how Einstein’s mind worked beyond preserving his brain in a jar.

An offer that could not be refused

Neuroscientists like Christof Koch insist that Consciousness is seated in the brain based on nothing more than interesting patterns of electrical impulses.  As though brain matter holds the secrets of Mind rather than Mind itself. Science’s defense of its irrational bias in favor of matter over Mind knows no limits.

What’s going on? The one Mind that we all share seemed to lose the attributes of Self when it lost consciousness. Its shadow-opposite that it mistakenly took to be an “other,” a reverse mirror-image of itself, made an offer that desperate Mind could not refuse. To conjure an alternate reality that replaced Self’s attributes with substitutes. That redefined Mind with the only attributes its shadow-opposite could offer: its own. A lifeless, mindless, loveless code that’s the reverse of the attributes that define its host.

Objectivity, Logic, and Truth: no match for professional bias

The result was an alternate reality. Competition among incompatible tribes composed of incompatible personalities, misguided by split minds thinking incompatible thoughts. The flowering of contradictions and disconnections that is our world, hospitable to “life” that came about through a series of accidents and mistakes. Breeding ground for misperceptions and misjudgments responsible for injustice, cruelty, savagery, and depravity, fear, hatred, guilt, and betrayal. Resentments and grievances. Selfishness.

What else can be expected from a world that’s entirely composed of substitutes? Substitutes for body and brain, Self and Mind. Opposites that by definition serve opposing authorities:

  • Egalitarian Logic-Love that governs with sensitivity-feeling for all creations from the bottom up vs.
  • Authoritarian-hierarchical animal instinct that rules insensitively with feeling for itself only from the top down.

Opposites that serve opposite purposes: Creation vs. competition. And opposite values:

  • peace-order vs. war-disorder
  • Creativity / Growth vs. immobility / paralysis
  • Free Choice / independent judgment vs. conformity / obedience
  • Innocence vs. Guilt: the interconnected Oneness of Reality-Creation, of Soul and Psyche-Innocence without opposites, vs. the separation-disconnection of opposites having neither Soul nor Innocence.

The discrepancies that set Mind and brain apart should be obvious. Yet they elude the persistence and ingenuity of science’s quest for knowledge. Science’s unbreakable alliance with body-brain and its five senses compels it to look the other way. To avoid objectivity rather than embrace it and risk losing prestige and funding to professional bias. All for an irrational fear of a precious gift: Intuition’s sixth sense.

What’s going on?

A Course in Miracles and its implications for personality type theory make the discrepancies obvious. Lesson 45 states that “God is the mind with which I [we] think. My real thoughts are in my mind. I [we] would like to find them.” The thoughts of uncorrupted Mind are real. The thoughts of the one Mind that was split – of its projections’ corrupted minds -- are not real. The same must be true of body-brains, the projections of a corrupted mind.

Traits identified by Jung / Myers-Briggs are either Mind-centered or body-brain-centered.

  • Mind is represented by Introversion, Intuition, Thinking-evaluating, and Judging-understanding (INTJ)
  • Body is represented by Extraversion, Sensing, Feeling (action-Instinct), and Perception (non-judging-understanding, specialness, victimhood (ESFP) [my descriptors in italics]*

By differentiating between mind- and body-centered personality types the theory takes the first step toward understanding the relationship between Mind and body-brain and the friction it causes between basic types. Friction rooted in psychodynamics explained by the Course when one Mind corrupted itself with the madness of its shadow-opposite, split in two, and turned against itself.

What’s going on is more than our planet’s astonishing diversity. More than tension between animal appetites and discipline – the ways we’re used to rationalizing the discrepancy. It’s Mind’s willing itself to be replaced by an impossibility, the illusion that is body-brain.

The Five-Factor personality type theory attempts to reverse the first step by not recognizing the distinction between Mind and brain, by eliminating the sixth sense of Mind-centered Intuition, and by recognizing only personality traits that are body-brain centered. Ostensibly so that Jung / Myers-Briggs will have a more “scientific” alternative when science’s actual intent is to discredit and replace it. To eliminate the threat to its body-centered bias.

The triumph of un-self-awareness

Body-brains are for forming tribes because tribes composed of many body-brains contradict the indivisibility of one Mind and thus define a substitute opposite self to replace it. Brains (prefrontal cortex) are for socializing that enforces conformity within tribes and for fighting among tribes (animal brain / amygdala).

The ESF personality type – ESFJs as well as ESFPs – are thus attracted to games of competition and to socializing. Activities that affirm their sense of self in a self-made alternate reality of externals. Functions of Mind centered on internals can’t do this for them, and they’re a threat to alternate reality besides.

ESFs characteristically exhibit indifference or hostility to functions of Mind:

  • Curiosity, learning, openness to other perspectives, maturation-growth
  • Introspection, self-awareness, self-evaluation-improvement
  • Intuition, Logic-Love explanation, reflection
  • Reasoning, evaluating, choosing
  • Interpersonal intimacy, empathy, feeling, sensitivity
  • Judging-understanding, self-discipline.

All because Mind’s functions get in the way of the brain’s ultimate goal: the triumph not of deliberative self-awareness but of un-deliberative un-self-awareness. Shadow-opposite’s perversion of the Force and Worth of Mind’s Creation: the triumph of animal will over opposites. The beast atop the Empire State building claiming supremacy over its domain. Absolute authority. A machine engineered to make war not Love.

The mind of an ESF tribal-realist

The mind of an ESF is the brain of the tribal-realist. ESF tribal-realists are good with some questions required by analysis but poor with others. The what, where, and when of things attracts them because of the objective of shadow-opposite: to project guilt onto its competitor-opponents for its supposed victimization so that it can justify retribution. And ultimately justify replacing its host which would eliminate all the competition. Mastery of what-when-where specifics – immediate, concrete facts – adds to the weight of guilt and to the play-act of wounded righteousness, thereby placing justification beyond dispute.

Competence of one kind can also mask incompetence of another. The pose of rational thinking hides gaps in Logic better suited for slapstick humor than serious discussion. ESF tribal-realists are repelled by the why and how of things. By the heart of analysis that enables choices based on reasoning and judgments based on Logic. That enables comity and cooperation based on understanding.

Mind that’s home to Logic-Love excels at judging used for understanding that affirms Worth and Innocence. Brain that’s home to predatory animal instinct excels at the opposite: judgment used to condemn worthlessness and guilt -- the unthinking animal instinct for retribution. For laying waste to anything that might limit its taking and doing, possessing and controlling, whatever it wants. The prerogative of absolute authority: reducing Worth to worthlessness. A perversion of rational thought. A joke.

“Innocence” that thrives on guilt

Like the "lost cause” that romanticized the defense of slavery “victimhood” that entitles mindless animal will to sympathy for its savagery instead of accountability is an obscenity. Shadow-opposite’s claim that it has been treated unfairly. Buried in unconscious Mind’s wounded Psyche and in ours is the grievance that impossibility deserves to be Real no less than Possibility. That the laws of cause and effect that are supposed to govern fairly through Logic-Love did not do so when they denied opposites equal status with their hosts in Reality.

Proof that the system is rigged. An injustice that demands retaliation. The cry for retribution that reverberates throughout history, from the violence of two world wars to the threat of nuclear annihilation. That’s splitting societies in two today, fueling grievances and resentments with anger and hatred, goading the “innocence of victimhood” toward civil war.

Opposites that thrive on contradiction

Why aren’t shadow-opposites deserving of equal status in Reality? What explains this injustice?

Mind aligned with the laws of cause and effect and true to itself – Logic-Love – acted in accordance with the sequence of its implications and relationships. Sequence that logically starts with Mind, the original circumstance – timeless Being – and proceeds with the implications of Logic and the reciprocal relationships of Love wherever they lead. The wellsprings of Creation and the Force that powers it.

The sequence of Creation that begins with the thought / feeling-value of Possibility. With the idea of Worth. That could not begin with impossibility. With an opposite that by definition is reactive not active, derived not original. A parasite that depends for its perversion of Logic-Love on the pre-existence and Reality of its host. But because it’s an opposite that by definition conflicts with its host it can’t be allowed to share the same status. To let Reality-Sense be defined as self-contradictory nonsense.

The rigger

The case for shadow-opposite’s victimization and all that it implies – license to break the rules rigged against it and persecute others at will – is based on nonsense. The idea that something originates with nothing. That nothingness can initiate anything and therefore shares the same defining attributes as something,. It’s an appeal to remain in its shadowland of opposites where acceptance into Reality is the lost cause and self-pity sets the tone. Into Plato’s Cave, a gruesome mockery of paradise, self-awareness, and togetherness.

In an alternate reality where anything goes any system can be rigged. But what the politics of grievance and division makes clear is that shadow-opposite's fraudulent pose of absolute authority in the fraudulent pose of victimhood is the rigger. Aglow with the innocence of victimhood, the mother-lode of opposites ripe for persecution. Shadow-opposite’s perversion of the Innocence of Soul-Oneness. Life-self that by definition can have no opposites. That interconnects Everything including Mind’s Reality-Creation and its Free Choice offspring. Whether conscious or unconscious and dreaming, because the Innocence of Soul-Oneness that has no opposites knows no boundaries.

Demon intellect

ESF tribal-realists may want to get it right so they at least appear to be doing what’s right. By continuing to get it wrong, only now with more emphasis on who-what-when-where while still avoiding the why and how. As if they’re oblivious to internals that analysis relies on to decipher meaning beyond appearances. As if they’ve willed themselves to avoid meaning so they won’t get it right. Because they’re only allowed by shadow-opposite’s code to recognize externals. To make appearances real instead of Truth that lies within. To attribute Reality to what isn’t real.

Either way, thinking that dispenses with why and how is more than a distaste for philosophy, psychology, and theology. More than disregard for science and pious grandstanding against “elites.” It’s a visceral fear of intellect. The capacity of Mind to welcome guidance and use its intelligence to learn, grow, and achieve. To get it right. Depriving analysis of why and how by demonizing intellect is a blunder that betrays a stunning lack of self-awareness, and maybe this is its purpose. For nothing would doom the machinations of self-delusion with more finality than intellect and self-awareness. The nemesis of reverse mirror-image and its nether world of reflections.

The trick

Governance that fits things together in order and harmony isn’t possible without Logic-Love’s understanding why and how they fit together in Reality and Truth. Creativity in peace is its concern. ESF tribal-realists will hammer away at the what-when-where of “facts” to make of alternate reality a “fact.” Making what is unreal appear real is their concern. For perpetuating misunderstanding based on unreality and untruth that darkens. But they won’t go near the why and how of understanding that enlightens.

Their dance with animal instinct is one part attraction and one part avoidance. Attraction to “action,” the risking of life and worth that is incessant competition. Games of chance among addicts at casinos that never close. Avoidance of thought that exposes the Truth: that the beast and its authority are made up. That Plato’s Cave and its shadow-master are the invention of its self-deluded occupants. No more real than a trick-or-treat costume. A trick that in time will be exposed when ESF tribal-realists let go of their fear of why and how.

Gateway to the Forbidden City

The foregoing is prologue for the subject of this essay. The faculty of Mind that more than any other sets Mind-centered personality type INTJ apart from the body-centered ESFP and its near-relative ESFJ. The ‘N’ in INTJ which represents Intuition, the portal to sixth sense. Condemned by body-sensing, its personality opposite, as the gateway to the Forbidden City of religious and “spiritual” psycho-quackology, of obsessions and passions of madness not grounded in “reality.”

Without the orderly governance of Logic-Love the magical world of appearances conjured by the magician -- split Mind captive to its shadow-opposite -- has no guiding intelligence. Only the laws of chaos and an overseer committed to maintaining appearances: the five senses of body-brains. The enforcer of conformity with fact and conventional wisdom. The holy ring that must be kissed.

We got here first!

What could penetrate such a defense other than another sense that sees through it? What could rattle a façade more than a voice from another world that isn’t made up?

The flashpoint between mind-centered authenticity and the body-centered reverse mirror-image that would replace it is the one faculty capable of preventing it: Intuition. No faculty is more offensive to split Mind’s projection, the five-sensed body-brain, than the faculty that would friend a sixth sense. The affront to all that is holy in the magic kingdom of appearances and its divine projector, sensory perception.

If impossibility had to be placed in the nether world of dreams where it couldn’t contradict Possibility which preceded it, sixth sense is just as deserving of being denied equal status with the five senses of appearances which preceded it. Sixth sense can only be a fraud, an interloper in alternate reality that must be expelled.

Such is the “logic” behind alternate reality’s “reality”: sensory perception was here first! Such was intuition’s welcome into the world of sensory perception: an indictment of injustice and a manifesto of retribution. A declaration of war. Such is the foundation upon which INTJs and ESFs are expected to make peace.

Excitement in Heaven

Intuition implies access to another perspective that lies outside the limits of body-brains. To another Consciousness whose spontaneous gifts of insights imply the existence of Mind beyond brain. Mind not of this world but accessible through an agent of Soul that knows no boundaries. An intermediary with a voice we can hear that can be understood. With a mission: to guide our halting efforts to make sense of our circumstances and to choose wisely how to deal with them. So that we eventually awaken to the truth of Mind and where its guidance comes from. By awakening to the truth of who we are and where we come from.

Self-awareness. Restored with guidance from Logic-Love logically in sequence. One implication at a time, one reciprocal relationship at a time. Because this is how Creation moves forward, propelled by the ever-expanding implications of Logic / knowledge-learning and the ever-expanding relationships of Love / abundance-sharing. By the force of Necessity that is the laws of cause and effect. Unlike the caricature of Heaven made up of haloed angels idling over clouds, plucking harps, while a bearded old guy decides who gets admitted to this paradise of eternal perfection. Of eternal boredom where all is being and there’s no doing.

“Almighty God:” Tribal-realism's role model

By fabricating alternate reality without Logic and Love, unconscious Mind’s shadow opposite deprived it of the Energy-Force that Creation needs to move forward. In its place it substituted a deception, the appearance of directed movement associated with a parody of action. The agitation of bodies-brains coping with incompatibilities among personalities, authorities, and values. Taking out their frustrations on one another in constant competition and combat. Resulting in destruction rather than Creation, regression rather than progression.

A process without a product that can only repeat itself because, being mindless and loveless, it has no originality. No force, Logic, or ideal to move it forward. Only yearning for an impossibility: absolute power and absolute freedom. The attributes of a god promised to a self-deluded Mind by its shadow-opposite. An “almighty god” that rules arbitrarily, cruelly, by animal instinct --the denial of Mind. The insanity of shadow-opposite welcomed into its host, unconscious Mind.

Who needs a Guide?

Where Mind transforms its contamination into another impossibility: the projection that magically separates thought from its source. The dream overrun by shadow-opposites posing as bodies-brains, their ephemeral likenesses hallucinated by a split mind. Dominated by tribal-realists, their Free Will forfeited to the supremacy of “action.” Taken in by the illusion, fearful of its undoing and so committed to making it real.

In such a “reality” where anything goes and, when it does, it’s accepted as the “new normal;” where split minds embrace conflicting thoughts; and where entropy and the laws of chaos upheld by tribal-realists reduce progress to a dog chasing its tail, supremacy-dominance is a will-o’-the-wisp and survival may be too. Guidance from a trustworthy source is essential, that speaks with authority for sanity and benevolence. For hope that’s constantly under attack.

The Necessity of relationship

Searching for Guidance in temporal externals, in ways that glorify groups and crush individuals – physical symbols, body-brain adornments and rituals, tribal mythology, mass ideological “movements,” – is searching where it can’t be found. Imagining that:

  • a better understanding of matter can tell Mind what to think
  • guidance can only come from organizations captive to Machiavellian tribal values and to their donors
  • authority owes its influence to symbols of legitimacy, wealth, and power – to form rather than content, appearances rather than Truth
  • guidance from organizations that’s authoritative and trustworthy can and must be beyond question -- “infallible.”

When all the guidance and authority that’s possible comes from one authentic source: Logic bonded with Love. Wisdom that defines, sustains, and governs Reality-Creation. The Parents of Mind Free Choice who will restore it to consciousness and its role in Reality-Creation when it regains Free Choice, changes with self-awareness, and becomes recognizable to its Parents.

Undoing its self-delusion -- the reversal of Reality-Truth that is the dream, the shadowland of opposites that is Plato’s Cave, the fortress of denial set against self-awareness -- is impossible if undertaken alone. Because guidance from wisdom requires relationship with Guide. And because “alone” means separation, the state of mind represented by shadow-opposite coded to dismantle the interconnectedness of Reality-Creation.

When listening to sixth sense takes daring

Six years ago the theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli appealed to philosophy for help reconciling quantum mechanics and cosmic relativity-gravity. Physics’ quest for quantum gravity that might rationalize the universe of spacetime-matter. [Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (2017)]. He could have gotten his answer by now and the world has been enlightened. But it’s not likely if both mainstream physics and philosophy continue to tell Mind what to think instead of listening.

Insights that give voice to something worth listening to come spontaneously. They aren’t room service. They respond to minds whose own voices aren’t getting in the way. The difference is letting Mind lead with insights from Logic-Love instead of leading it with pre-judgments. With bias that forecloses guidance. By denying any need for Guide, any possibility of friendship with it, and any possibility that its voice will be heard.

Biases hard-wired into personalities, aspirations, and appetites dominate everyday behavior, but they’re out of place when insight into larger forces that influence everyday behavior is needed. It can’t respond to a set of pre-conditions. It can respond to relationship between Guide and individual that’s unconditional. To Logic-Love that’s unconditional. Physics that strait-jackets its Guide with personal and professional pre-judgments betrays the willfulness of immaturity. Of infantile self-absorption that blocks explanation and understanding because it refuses to listen. Because it dares not listen to any voice but its own.

Discoveries without meaning

The voice of “scientific” thought that speaks against Logic-Love instead of with it ensures that Rovelli’s appeal for help won’t get the response his profession needs. In distancing itself from both Guide and guidance physics is only doing what body-brain is coded by shadow-opposite to do: to shield the five senses of body-brain from contamination by Mind’s sixth sense. And to replace Mind with itself. With a coded instruction, lifeless, mindless, and loveless, that assigns the role of Guide to itself. An absurdity because a parasite that gets rid of its host gets rid of itself.

A perversion of authority that rules arbitrarily from the top down and has no patience with voices beneath it. A perversion of responsibility that excuses itself from accountability. A one-dimensional character lifted from an action-hero cartoon. A joke that claims, like Hawking, that “philosophy is dead.” When philosophy’s metaphysics may hold the guidance, the explanation, that physics seeks.

What hope is there for such “thinking?” That rejects objectivity in favor of bias? That intentionally denies itself the vision of Logic-Love. That contributes to self-awareness in spite of itself, with discoveries that un-self-awareness can’t understand.

Avatars and supermen

The personality type that can most readily be identified with Guidance-rejecting tribal-realism is the very body-centered ESFP. ESFP tribal-realists clinging to body despise Mind’s intuition because they fear losing the avatar that replaced real senses crippled by unconsciousness with the appearance of functioning body senses. Tribal-realists so attached to their avatars – substitute selves outfitted with sensory perception – that they prefer existence in an alternate reality. Even if its “reality” is a joke that makes no sense.

One Mind’s loss of power shut down self-awareness enabled-empowered with real vision and hearing, taste, touch-connection, and smell capable of experiencing all the ways that the joy and beauty of Life-Worth Creation express themselves. The fanatical attachment of tribal-realists to body-brains and craving for power, the appearance of strength, are explained by the loss of Energy that rendered one Mind powerless. The memory of humiliation that accounts for Nietzsche’s contribution to the dream: man deified as superman motivated solely by lust for power.

Shadow-opposite’s promise of another reality that one Mind could make real on its own terms was accepted even though it was literally too good to be true.  An imaginary-unreal life-existence was better than being disabled, powerless, and lost in the shadowland of opposites. Hell so unbearable that the self-delusion of Plato’s Cave is Heaven by comparison.

The ultimate defense against self-awareness

Tribal-realists fear and despise intuition because any faculty of Mind that offers a portal to another reality might deprive them of the alternate reality fashioned by Mind’s mistaken identity, its reverse mirror image. Its shadow-reflection’s code of opposition. Of non-being. Where tribal-realists rule, make up their own scripts, write their own rules, revel in the license of specialness, the entitlements “earned” by victimhood, and entertain themselves with the excitement and distraction of bloodletting. Of non-stop “action:” games and mortal combat. Instead of one Mind’s unique talent, its gift of Free Choice, being put to use with an indispensable role in Life-Worth Creation. Tribal-realists hate intuition because it could replace their fascination with hurt inflicted on others by “action” with purposeful, peaceful Creation.

Part of the Logic of Creation is the knowledge from self-awareness that Reality-Creation is one and there can be no “others” “out there.” Part of the rationalization for competition-combat is the misperception from un-self-awareness that there are “others” “out there.” Potential competitors and enemies to be resolutely put down by “conservatives” consumed with fear. Seeking protection from fear’s age-old remedy: authoritarian control. Ever more opposing, ever more absolute. As if cooperation and competition in a shared world can be eliminated by silencing every other voice. By neutralizing every threat to alternate reality, shadow-opposite’s ultimate defense against Reality. Against self-awareness.

This is realism?

Since there is only one interconnected Self in the eternal here and Now the tribal-realist committed to cyclical competition and violence is committed to making the unreal real -- our alternate “reality.” An impossible dream peopled mainly by the hapless occupants of Plato’s Cave. By tribal-realists terrified of change. Traumatized by the wounding of their archetypal Psyche, blindsided by the loss of Energy and Consciousness.

So how do tribal-“realists” conserve the status quo, block self-awareness, and assert their supremacy? By presuming to make a dream real.

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* The descriptors are attributions of intent to traits that the theory doesn’t consider, more an extension of its scope than disagreement. For I believe insights that guided Jung / Myers-Briggs as far as they went were inspired by Logic-Love. Had they had access to A Course in Miracles (1976) it might have led their thinking along the same lines as mine.