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Excerpt from unpublished essay with working title "The Perversion of the Laws of Cause and Effect and the Jokes We Play on Ourselves"


Names without function, names without meaning

In common parlance, “God” often connotes Being whose doing mainly consists of “creating” and abandoning “life” divided against itself inside a temporal-material “reality” constructed only so that it can deconstruct. Hardly worthy of “reality” or its “creator.” It further connotes Being-authority whose business is to rule its “reality” without the limits of Logic, definition, or Order, then judging, condemning, and punishing its “creations” for violating its “laws” of disorder. A self-absorbed authoritarian. A narcissist-bully that many fear but nobody could “love.”

Heaven” often connotes not the happiness of meaningful work and loving relationships but the “happiness” of idleness. Hovering above fleecy clouds plucking harps, lounging on sandy beaches beneath palm trees, sipping mint juleps on permanent vacation with nothing to do.

A cliché that owes its absurdity to “heaven’s” missing function: meaningful work and loving relationships that really are “paradise.” Because the work to be done is the creation, affirmation, and reciprocation of Worth. In a state of Mind that’s Trust, Innocence, and Intimacy. Spontaneity -- the fun of playfulness. The essence of Creativity.

“Heaven” on earth?

What is Reality-Creation but Worth itself? Relationships that work. What is the purpose of Relationships if not affirming that Life is Worth and its sharing is the affirmation and empowerment of Self? Self-Worth.

Why is “Life” on earth not “heaven?” Because it’s got purpose backwards: making unreality real instead of unmaking it. Thus affirming and empowering not the Self-Worth of Truth and Honesty but the self-worthlessness of deception and dishonesty. With relationships that don’t work. With littleness captive to “fun” and games of pointless competition; to the distraction, savagery, and depravity of violence. Of mindless, pointless, authoritarian cruelty, combat, and conquest.

The usefulness of function

Misinterpretations inevitably come about when names leave out function. The working parts of every shared venture: roles and responsibilities. Left to personalities with different perspectives and priorities to interpret, the result is incoherence and confusion. The consequence of one of our “reality’s” laws of chaos: everyone is the author of their own truth.

Reality-Creation is Purpose that requires usefulness. So, in place of “God,” the terms preferred here rely on function. Indispensability that is Mind, Self-Awareness, Consciousness, and Logic bonded with Love. That is Logic-Love, the Parents of their Child-Mind, who is of a different kind of Consciousness: Free Choice. A usefulness necessarily unique, autonomous, and also indispensable.

In place of “heaven” the terms preferred here are Reality, Creation, and Truth. Terms capitalized are of Reality-Creation. The world of Mind-archetypes and not of the dream of unreality, our material world of body-brains. 

Archetypes in Reality, "gods" in unreality

Function that completes Definition uncovers Mind of more than one part, more than one function. Actors whose roles combine to explain with Logic why and how Mind-Reality came about and why and how Creation-Worth is its Purpose. And by extension why and how our dream “reality” came about. Why and how healing and awakening from the illusion of separation and the projection of guilt is our purpose.

Two impossibilities that certify the insanity of Self that is Mind split into two. The original thought of separation, formed into another impossibility that is matter by the temporal, finite energy of unconscious Mind lost in a dream. By entropy, the condition of spacetime-matter that began with a Big Bang and will end with inertia. Events that we, the actors in the dream, unknowingly re-enact with the splitting of the atom and the parody of “life” that is death. The mimicking of Child-Mind’s loss of consciousness and the "death" of Life Force that cannot die. “Events” so nonsensical and unreal that they can only be a joke.

Explanation that owes much to the Logic and intuition of Carl Jung, who added archetypes to the factual basis for psychoanalysis. For its insights, and the insights of these essays, depend on them. Not the “God” of common parlance, name without function. “Creator” of this shadowland of opposites whose “plan” can’t make sense.  But archetypes who are Function. Whose roles, relationships, and stories account for the coherence and evolution of Reality-Creation in the Now. Their Selves and stories re-enacted in reverse by the gods and stories of Olympian myth and legend. In the illusion of time that can’t be Now. Projections of a split Mind whose stories we have yet to get right.

Two minds evolving into one 

Explanation that also owes much to the ultimate source of intuition. To Logic and Love from a perspective not bound by the body’s five senses. Accessible through a sixth sense and shared with us by the Author of A Course in Miracles. By “Jesus,” another name like “God,” obscured by misinterpretation because it leaves function to personal bias. The function identified here as an agent of Soul.

Because Soul is Oneness without opposites that knows no boundaries. Whose function is to interconnect Everything including the self-delusions of an unconscious Mind. Free Choice that chose in error. For the impossibilities that can’t co-exist with the Possibilities of Creation are derived from them. Appearances to the contrary, even opposites can’t be separate and must be included in Everything.

It is agents of Soul, boundaryless and Innocent, who can respond through our sixth sense. Who can connect our calls for Love and Guidance to the Wisdom of Logic-Love, through the innocence, trust, and intimacy of spontaneous, loving friendship. Relationship required by its purpose, the recognition of “others” as one Mind-Self, to evolve into the intimacy of two minds thinking and feeling as one.

Best friends and soulmates

“Agent of Soul” needs to be personalized if it’s to be taken into its friend’s mind, heart, and soul. The same goes for religious equivalents like Christianity’s “Holy Spirit” and philosophy’s “muses.” If the Agent’s chosen identity is taken in by the individual’s Psyche then the choice and the timing may be right. Even better if the Guide’s identify responds to the individual’s call for Love and guidance by revealing itself.

C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces (1956) recounts the moving story of Psyche, my original Agent of Soul. My Guide and confidant who got me dialoguing, first on paper and then in my head. Until our friendship and conversations became part of everyday life. Through 26 years of dialoguing that began with, “You had a job to do and I haven’t heard back.”

When I needed help handling strong emotions, “Dobbin” responded -- a simpatico sorrel draft horse, massive and beautiful. A symbol of strength, patience, and wisdom at my side for nine years. A soulmate with a reminder, that my will alone is no match for the animal in my human brain. Will driven by instinct that has no use for Mind, capable of replacing my will and turning me into an image of itself. A reminder that I am Mind, and with the strength, patience, and wisdom of its Logic and Love -- with guidance from my friend Dobbin -- truth will prevail.

When I needed help with understanding and healing relationships, Owen became my intimate friend and constant Guide. The son with extraordinary gifts who left this life prematurely because he couldn’t use them. Including the gift of insight, because the insights that continue to move explanation toward Understanding, that replace confusion with clarity, are gifts from our two minds working together. In friendship, toward becoming one Mind, gradually and imperceptibly. Understanding that every relationship, in this life, is a call for Love.

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

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Nonsense

. . . Plato’s Cave. Western philosophy’s idea of where the lower tier of Jung / Myers-Briggs personality type traits – extraversion, (body)-sensing, feeling (animal brain action), and perception (victimhood-specialness) – has trapped itself. A horror show of imprisonment, deception, and abuse. A parody of tribal togetherness so inhumane, injustice so outrageous, that it can only end in rebellion.

And yet the Cave’s occupants, tribal-realists all, are so taken in by the deception that nothing can persuade them to turn against it. Instead of a choice it’s become a given. A necessity that can’t be overthrown: the delusion that the Cave, its shadow-reflection author, and its occupants are all of one piece. And to part with any of it would be self-betrayal. A parting with existence itself. One unified, organic self composed entirely of opposites. Impossibilities: an alternate reality that, like “alternate facts,” can’t make sense. Can’t be true or Real. A “creator” that can’t create. An authority with no Logic, legitimacy, or power of its own. Mind Free Choice that’s deprived itself of its will and capacity to choose.

Blasphemy

This is the world of intractable injustice that Plato intuited with Logic after his friend and mentor, Socrates, morality’s philosopher, was made to drink hemlock by Athenian authorities. By the same mindset of un-self-awareness portrayed by the Cave’s occupants. This is alternate reality, the self projected by deluded ESFPs, the self-appointed shock troops chosen to defend it. Tribal-realists -- the apotheosis of un-self-awareness.

To its ESFP occupants the Cave is the best of all worlds. “Created” and ruled by a “creator” that’s legitimate and worth worshipping because it doesn’t depend on Mind / sixth sense to detect and verify its existence or on Logic-explanation to be understood and obeyed. It’s the obvious reality-force of the body, its five senses, and the natural environment / nature of appearances that bless the body with sensuous and sensual pleasure. Hedonism is the ESFP body-brain’s religion and the body and its senses are its god.

It imagines itself the sworn enemy of Mind-Intuition because anything thought to be Real that’s not body-brain senses is suspect, a real or potential threat to body-verified, body-sanctioned reality and its body-“creator.” The resistance of the ESFP body-centered personality type to anything suggestive of a competing-opposite reality is depicted in the resistance of Plato’s Cave occupants to enlightenment by another perspective / point of view. By another voice that blasphemes with talk of another god.

Relatability

Plato’s Cave continues to attract re-interpretation because it holds up a mirror to humanity’s opposition to changing its mind. To the Logic-Love of explanation that understanding requires so that the human mind will open itself to other perspectives, listen to other voices, and entertain other ideas about Reality-Creation without feeling threatened. Without fearing the loss of all that it’s attached to: the reality, meaning, and source of its existence. The self-unawareness that’s replaced awareness with a made-up world of appearances.

The Cave is an absurdity: the opposite of Oneness-Being that by definition can have no opposites. Psyche-Soul that’s the interconnectedness of Innocence-harmlessness functioning as one Mind / Logic-Love with Free Choice, creating-expressing the Worth of Reality-Creation, of Life / Self-Awareness. The shadow-Cave’s perversion of Oneness is a cult of self-delusion / self-unawareness. Faculties of Mind / Logic-Love and Free Choice perverted by body-brain’s self-delusion into multiple animal herds. Human-animal tribal predators coded for pointless doing-“action” that depicts the worthlessness of life through its finality: the specter of death preceded by suffering. Through the malignant harmfulness and cruelty of authoritarian rule and the conflict-violence with which it enforces it.

All held together by the relatability of its shadow-opposite source to its likenesses, the inhabitants of a shadowland of opposites. Our alternate reality and its body-brain projections – Plato’s Cave. . . .

 

When Soul walks among us, loves us, teaches us
and is taken away
When mind and heart cry out for Love
and all that can be heard is silence
Their voice expands into every corner of time and space

With the Force of Truth:
That Soul can never be taken away
That mind and heart crying out for Love will aways be heard.

We return today in observance of the Truth
The Life of Soul that was shared with us intact
Its example an inspiration yet

When the mistake cycles back on us like a shadow
from Groundhog Day
Lifting us from sleep to getting it right

From giving up to never giving up:
To theft of Soul, silencer of voice
To self-regard, its voice the only voice
Denial of Truth, hope and Soul, mind and heart

The imposition of mistake upon itself
Silenced by its own crucifixion, denied its own resurrection
The emptiness of authority for its own sake
That would replace the fullness of Love

It didn’t happen then and it can’t happen now.
When will it happen? Never.
What the Life and example of Jesus mean to me.
Resurrection. Life and Love unyielding. Life eternal.

Tao reveals itself differently to each individual, according to his own nature. The man of deeds, for whom kindness and the love of his fellow man are supreme, discovers the tao of cosmic events and calls it supreme kindness -- ‘God is love.’ The contemplative man, for whom calm wisdom is supreme, discovers the tao of the universe and calls it supreme wisdom. The common people live from day to day, continually borne and nourished by tao, but they know nothing of it; they see only what meets the eye. For the way of the superior man, who sees not only things but the tao of things, is rare. The tao of the universe is indeed kindness and wisdom; but essentially tao is also beyond kindness and wisdom. . . . [T]his life-giving activity [growth], to which all things owe their existence, is something purely spontaneous. . . . [T]ao is omnipresent; everything that exists, exists in and through it. [The I Ching or Book of Changes, Bollingen Series XIX (Princeton University Press 1950, pp. 298-299]

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Trust and Relationship begin with Fact

Jesus informs us in A Course in Miracles that we have the choice when to learn its lesson but not whether, as though it could not possibly change or be changed. As though it were cast in concrete, and yet he also informs us that it is not a “bible.” He cautions us not to treat it as the holy Word of God, absolute Truth with which to condemn and reject all who fail to accept it. Why not if he means what he says: we’re screwed if we don’t comply? All that is in the Course, that focuses on the darkness within the human Psyche, the pain and anguish of guilt, is explanation meant for us to understand just how badly screwed we already are.

Though they concentrate on why the Course cannot be a bible the reflections that follow cannot imply that its lesson can be ignored. Why? Because the laws of cause and effect emanate from circumstances. That in their constellations change but in their individual parts may not change. For these are the stuff with which the purpose and meaning of their compositions, their contexts, is revealed. This is where the Force of Necessity comes from, not their explanation or interpretation but from fact.

The works of Logic and Love in Relationship with their Child, Free Choice, that make up Creation, are part of evolution but not the facts of Reality they’re based on. The Force of Logic and Love depends upon it, for this is the immutable Rule of Law that applies to Logic and Love as to everything else. That gives them their legitimacy. That enables and empowers Trust essential to all Relationships in Reality. Fact.

Uncompromising Fact that can’t be ignored

It is fact that cannot be ignored in the lesson of the Course that takes away choice. The fact that Kenneth Wapnick, its teacher, refers to as its “uncompromising non-dualism.” Uncompromising because the human condition is defined by its unreality. Because it derives its state from the condition of our ancestral Mind, the Child: its unconsciousness. If the state of Child-Mind is defined by its unconsciousness, that cannot be part of Reality defined by Consciousness, that cannot evolve, then we, projections in its dream, are also in a state of unconsciousness. In a state of unreality.

There cannot be dual realities. Only one can be Real. Though Jesus has promised never to leave us “comfortless” he can’t do it by denying fact. The denial of fact is the stock-in-trade of the Child’s self-delusion, the magician that is the error we, projections of Free Choice, must freely choose to correct. Detectable by no more obvious attribute than its dexterity with untruth, the sleight of hand of illusion, the lies of deception. “Making it up as it goes along.”

Form that must change, content that cannot change

How we approach our task, how we apply the lesson, will vary from individual to individual. And so it compounds error to treat the Course that was addressed to two individuals, two personalities, in their time and place, as holy writ for us in our personalities, our time and place. It won’t fit. And if the task of governance is to fit in harmony it will be a violation of Logic and Love who govern in harmony.

The form of the lesson must change even if its content can’t. Our alternate “reality” is unreal. Fact.


The Course is an act of Logic and Love

The business end of Mind in Reality is its two main components Logic and Love, whose function is to source everything necessary for the Worth of Creation. Everything under the law: the laws of cause and effect that stand for the values of Logic and Love, wisdom and compassion. Maintained in place by the Authority of the Interconnectedness of Soul that is Innocence without opposites and by the Authority of Truth that is Necessity empowered by Energy -- Force under the direction of benevolence, the Logic and Love of governance. Of Mind.

A Course in Miracles is an act of Mind, one part Logic, the other part Love. Each part a set of functions designed to help the unconscious Child to regain Consciousness through its projections. Through the minds and hearts of the occupants of an alternate “reality” when doing so doesn’t interfere with Free Choice.

Minds and hearts corrupted by the code that defines the Child’s opposite, its shadow. Impossibility that is unreality. The unreal code that is the opposite of Logic and Love, wisdom and compassion. The opposite of Mind, a reversion to unthinking will and emotion, instinct and action that distinguish uncivil animal from civil animal. From human. That conjure within Mind unconscious the uniquely human animal. A horror of insanity composed of impossibilities: absolute authority, absolute freedom, and absolute truth. The same impossibilities that lured unconscious Child into its dream of an alternate “reality” and now lure it toward self-destruction. The “triumph of the will” that is the Child’s shadow-code, a magician. Self-delusion.

The force of the tribe

The act of Mind that is A Course in Miracles gains traction toward the Child’s awakening from self-delusion through equal emphasis on its two main parts: Logic and Love. Emphasis that necessarily contends in unreality with resistance and opposition to both. With an authoritarian mindset deluded by absolutes into specialness: thought and feeling concentrated on itself. The shadow authoritarian ideal: self without opposites, a perversion of the Innocence of Psyche-Soul without opposites.

The pull of specialness in unreality interferes with the Course’s application by shifting its emphasis in two ways: from Logic to Love and from Love that is feeling that shares to its opposite, feeling that monopolizes. From feeling-inclusive to feeling-exclusive. Feeling that is Worth to feeling that is worthlessness.

The force behind specialness that works its will is the force of the tribe, the human version of animal-herd. The invention of the human authoritarian mindset that degenerates into mob psychology: a herd of enraged humans feeling and acting by mindless instinct as one. The force that interferes is sociability. The pretense of “oneness” enforced by the rules of going along to get along. Present in every human tribal activity, for it is the main function of brain distinct from Mind.

For the Love of Truth and Honesty

Brain whose self-identity is tribe. Whose task is tribal dominance by act of predatory animal will domesticated by sociability. Pretense that is likability, niceness, and pleasantness, that is until the inevitable conflict and civility gives way to uncivility. To the discipline not of sociability but to the law of the jungle. Kill or be killed.

Emphasis that tilts toward Love and away from Logic in the work of the Course does so in service to neither but to pretense. To the agenda of resistance and opposition to keep humanity in line through the iron will of tribe. The Love of the Course is not and never was likability and pleasantness to disarm and distract. It is and always has been caring for the values, the Truth and Honesty of Logic and Love. To enable and empower the sovereignty and Worth of individuality that is Free Choice, not will that is captive to predatory tribal instinct.

Logic and Love, equal and inseparable

Sociability is at cross-purposes with the Course. Its discipline of tribal integrity gets in our way anytime that niceness, agreeability, and pleasantness -- mockeries of Love -- are allowed to devalue or displace the Truth and Honesty of Logic. We serve Truth and Honesty by serving the cause of Logic equally with Love. The cause of wisdom equally with compassion. The state role-modeled by Jesus through the Course: the authority of gentle loving kindness. Authority that is the Logic of Love and the Love of Logic.

If to make the Course an absolute of anything is to kill it, to make it sociability of any kind will also kill it. If it is not “tribe” it cannot be “social.” It is an act of Mind, not brain. Mind that is in equal measure Logic and Love, equal and inseparable.


Mind and possibility at the beginning

The laws of cause and effect speak for the state of Mind that adheres at any point in evolution. In the sequence of the implications of Logic and the connections of Love in their response to circumstances that change in turn in response to the implications of Logic and the connections of Love. An interactive process mirrored in the evolution of English common law, the basis for American jurisprudence. A reciprocal process of questioning established precedent as well as its application to new issues in new contexts defined by changing circumstances. If there is no stopping change then there can be no stopping reconsideration both of the application of established precedent and the law that it’s based on.

The laws of cause and effect spoken for in the Course were not there at the beginning. What was there at the beginning was circumstance implied by Logic: Mind and possibility charged with its definition, the functions of Logic and Love, to respond to possibility with an act of Creation. With thought and feeling, ideas, reasoning, and values. An act that could not have been preceded by an opposite. By an impossibility, for opposite by implication of Logic -- by definition -- cannot precede the source of its contradiction.

The work in progress that is Reality and Creation

The laws of cause and effect spoken for by the Course are Necessity to that point in the evolution of Creation. Of the open-ended forward movement of Logic and Love that is implied by eternity, the eternal Now. The laws of cause and effect that are the Necessity of Truth, the Truth that supports the lesson of the Course, cannot be a “bible” because it cannot be absolute. In the movement of Logic and Love in their eternal dance of interaction with circumstance nothing can be absolute. Nothing can stand unquestioned when nothing can stop the process. When nothing can stop Creation driven by change that is question. If anything is “absolute” it is eternal question that implies the impossibility of absolute, the eternal answer that is and shall always remain a work in progress. The Course is no exception -- a work in progress integral to the process Creation and the structure of Reality that are a work in progress.

Marketing its lies to an unconscious and disempowered Child as the absolute truth is the mode of its shadow code of impossibilities. Not its Parents, Logic and Love, but a predator. The illusionist that lured it into captivity and keeps it there with its illusions: absolute authority. absolute freedom, and absolute truth. With arbitrary rule backed by the authority of law that’s status quo beyond change because it’s beyond questioning: a “Holy Bible.” A self-deluded fool’s perversion of governance that enables and empowers Creation with support from the bottom up that’s under the law. Law that necessarily expands with experience and Knowledge. With the ever-broadening context that is evolution -- Reality and Creation.


The dynamics of function 

To focus on what A Course in Miracles does is to focus on its function. Function is an attribute of Logic-Love’s definition of Reality-Creation and every part of it. An attribute whose essence is Energy, the dynamic of Force. The Force of Soul that Interconnects and of  the Authority of Necessity, the laws of cause and effect that cannot change. That define Reality and guide Logic-Love’s benevolent governance of Creation from the bottom up. Every part either has a use or it can’t exist. This applies to Mind-Consciousness and to Psyche-Soul both, the Interconnecting Force of Everything. Every part has agency under the law.

This applies to every cause including institutions dedicated to disseminating the Course and the work of its teacher. The work of doing is the work of Energy, the agent of doing for all of Reality-Creation. The dynamic of Force that gives cause its effect, the sequence of Logic-Love its forward movement. Always dynamic, always in motion because circumstances are always in motion, always changing. The Course is part of a dynamic process of growth and evolution within an alternate “reality” whose function is to guide it. To help Free Choice manage it, use it, and adapt to it dynamically.

The provocation that is honesty

The lesson of the Course is delivered authoritatively but always with gentle loving kindness. We’re given soft pillows when we board the plane, an assurance of service with wisdom and compassion. But the flight isn’t meant to lull us to sleep. Far from it. In an alternate “reality” that is dishonesty and untruth a perspective that speaks honestly for Truth is provocation. There’s bound to be turbulence. Turbulence with a purpose: not sleep but awakening. To get us off our butts and moving.

Jesus’ honesty when he walked among us showed how provocative Truth can be. The Course is sheer provocation capable of stirring the occupants of Plato’s Cave into a hornet’s nest of opposition. Into crucifying the messenger, because that’s what the crucifixion was meant to accomplish: the permanent end of messenger and message. The permanent end of fear that the Truth will ever again be told.

The comfort of gentle loving kindness, wisdom and compassion abates fear so that it won’t block accessibility. But it’s not a substitute for the lesson, nor is it meant to distract from the lesson. It only affirms its Source, the Logic-Love of Reality and its Peace. Because Logic-Love could not make its presence known otherwise.

Yet it’s provocation and a call to respond to it. A call from Logic-Love not to swoon in the ecstasy of “spirituality” but to act. Its meaning isn’t the pillow. It’s the journey out of untruth into Truth. Out of the nonsense of two realities into the sense of one Reality. The journey of provocation and turbulence that is Honesty.

The face behind the mask of pleasantness

The opposite is described in the Course as the “ego’s thought system.” It does offer substitutions and distractions. It has a thousand faces, none more sinister or familiar than likability. The devil that visited Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s novel was affable, conversational. The “god” of Jerry Martin’s God: An Autobiography is casual, erudite and entertaining, a regular guy you’d want to have a beer with. The “god” of Mari Perron’s apocryphal A Course of Love is a cheerleader for anything goes. Every one your best friend and every one a phony. Pleasantness whose purpose isn’t receptivity to Truth. It’s to hide the Truth.


Two perspectives, two functions

In applying the metaphysics of the Course to explain our alternate “reality” Kenneth Wapnick and I take off in different directions. No difference in our loyalty to the metaphysics of the Course but significant difference in what we do with it. A difference in function:

  • He taught what the Course says in its context: the specifics of two clinical psychologists at a medical-academic institution in mid-twentieth century Manhattan -- their personalities, psychologies, and relationships. I intuit what the Course may imply for specifics beyond its original context. Not on my own but in relationship with an agent of Soul, guided by Logic and Love.
  • Ken helped to interpret and communicate the Logic-Love of the Course within its scope: error committed after the Child (Father’s Son) lost consciousness. I am applying it to explore its implications for issues beyond its scope. To explain the Child’s loss of consciousness and what this implies for regaining it.
  • Ken brought his unique perspective, individuality and creativity to his task. I bring a different perspective, individuality and creativity to mine.
  • We respond to two different needs: his to clarify the lesson of the Course, mine to extend it. His to explain its metaphysics, mine to expand its metaphysics. His to focus on what the Course is, mine on what it can do.

“Absence of felicity,” absence of partiality

My differences with Ken show in our takes on two topics: Helen Schucman’s apparent ambivalence about the Course and the significance of Carl Jung’s intuition about personality type. Helen was the main scribe of A Course in Miracles which was channeled by Jesus. She was assisted by Bill Thetford, a professional colleague, in a support role. In essence, they took dictation and from it produced a manuscript suitable for publication. Neither sought nor was given editorial license to modify the lesson. Neither sought a role in teaching it.

In his biography of Helen, Absence of Felicity, Ken struggled with her reluctance to involve herself in the Course’s cause beyond recording it. Being her friend and admirer and a teacher of the Course, Ken might have been moved by personal bias that even though she held back it was not for lack of conviction. For lack of love and respect for its Author, for whom she had just completed an intensely intimate labor of love.

Had Helen not maintained neutrality skeptics could have cited this as evidence of her authorship just as any court observer would cry foul if the stenographer took sides in litigation. There were enough skeptics as it was, hard-core “realists” blocked by their bodies’ five senses from having anything to do with a sixth. A common occurrence that accounts for history’s split between two schools of thought: idealism and realism.

Helen’s gift back to the Course

The viability of the Course depends upon its source from another perspective, one that’s not tainted by human ambiguity. Its author needs to be an agent of spiritual Psyche or Soul, the agent of Logic and Love that interconnects everything including our alternate “reality.” Otherwise it won’t know what it’s talking about. How can any source talk to the occupants of one “reality” about events in another without convincing evidence of connection to both? If it can’t speak legitimately for Reality and Truth how can it make sense?

The Course owes its legitimacy and acceptance as much to its Author as to its lesson. Limiting Helen’s role to that of impartial stenographer ensured that the voice of spiritual Psyche would come through in the clear, unmolested by the human psyche. Protecting the integrity of its Author may have been Helen’s last and most sensitive act of service to the Course:


Misled by body-sensing “realism”

Ken’s unfinished work about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung may have reflected something of the person behind the professional: a subconscious preference for Freud’s “realism” and indifference bordering on aversion to Jung’s intuition about personality types. Though he observed that Jung hadn’t gone far enough Ken showed no interest to that point in Jung’s signal achievement. In particular in the critical difference between body-sensing and intuition that telegraphed the difference between Jung and Freud.

That telegraphed, as well, the aspect of Helen’s personality that suited her to her role of detachment in the story of the Course. An aspect that Ken’s brand of psychotherapy seems to have overlooked. Though Helen had experienced psychic episodes they hadn’t revealed a gift for insight or the soul of an intuitive behind the exterior of a realist. If they had it seems likely that she would have been all in for the Course. What gave her pause was the same patriarchal body-sensing that prevented teacher Freud from understanding pupil Jung. For who would balk at non-dualism, the point of “miracles” in A Course in Miracles, that our “reality” sensed by the body is unreal? That it’s so illogical it can’t be taken seriously. Who else but a body-sensing “realist?”

A taste of Heaven

Jung’s intuition tells us that personalities that define our individuality necessarily define us by what we do as much as by who we are. By our function in the evolution of context through changing circumstances. As true here as it is in Reality; nothing can exist without its part in some form of activity, whether purposeful or pointless. The role given to Helen was the business end of her personality that defined who she was to be by what she was to do in its context. The integrity of her role as scribe depended not on her going beyond its limits but on her staying within.

Helen’s willingness to devote a significant portion of her life to scribing the Course expressed core human values: satisfying work suited to the worker; meaningful work for a respected authority; support for individuality, talent, and creativity; personality and task performing as one; striving attuned to Free Will instead of smothering it. None of these brought to life to the same extent, if at all, by the regular job that frustrated her. Her talents weren’t flowering into soulful poetry on the job but they were when she was moonlighting with Jesus. The boss who never insisted that she take the job. She could tell him to shove it any time she wanted.

The act of Creation in Reality is Interconnection that’s joyful as well as effortless. Striving toward the affirmation and reciprocation of Worth. An act of benevolence defined by the governance of Logic-Love, given Life by the Force of Soul. That celebrates the Creativity of every one of its parts and every contribution shaped by its unique context. Who wouldn’t give up a part of their day to experience this? Jesus didn’t offer Helen a job; he gave her a taste of Heaven and she loved it. When Jesus taught that we are perfect just as God created us, Helen felt the Truth in it. It must have felt like an affirmation of Worth like no other.

“Success”

How did Helen’s personality fare in her work environment at Columbia Presbyterian? Exactly as a court stenographer might, who had no voice in the proceeding, if asked to speak with the voice of a litigant. Out of her element. Lost. Unsure what to say but sure she doesn’t want to be humiliated for saying it. In self-defense Helen might have taken on the hardness of certainty without to hide the softness of uncertainty within. The personality of an authoritarian realist could have been so unyielding, so demanding, that she was virtually impossible to work with. A misfit. Toxic.

If Heaven is the functions of self-awareness fitting together in harmony then our opposite “reality” must be the functions of un-self-awareness that collide in friction. Because to be un-self-aware is to be unaware of self’s individuality and function. “Success” in this life is more often than not a series of fortunate events that connect personality and function we’re unaware of with situations we’re unaware of. Everything spontaneous, beyond awareness.

Our personalities should help guide us to where our individuality and its talents belong, but if we lack self-awareness, if we undervalue Jung’s personality types, it won’t happen. In the event, it’s the agent of Soul from Logic-Love -- the tao -- that guides us when we allow it, unseen.

The “success” of one life is but a mirror image of the series of unplanned accidents and mistakes that accounts for all of life on our planet. Not to know what we’re doing is quite in step with the nature of our alternate “reality,” and Helen was in step. Demanding that the personality of a scribe take positions, whose job description is the opposite, would have made her at least hard to work with if not toxic. Her work space would have been toxic if she wasn’t alone. As it was it was so toxic that it put out the Call for Love -- for the “better way” -- that gave us A Course in Miracles.

The authenticity of the Course and its Author

Contrast the friction of misfits at work with Helen’s remarkable fit with Jesus. Their compatibility further evidence that the Jesus of the Course is authentic. That he’s an agent of Soul connected to Logic and Love, the same functions of Mind in Reality that fit all functions together in harmony. Further evidence that Jesus knew what he was doing when it was through Helen’s mind, through her personality and its function -- scribe, -- that he channeled the Course. Probable choice because of her function, improbable on the face of it because of her personality.

The Course’s authenticity is undermined anytime skeptics can mischaracterize its scribe as one of them. She wasn’t one of them. The impartiality of a scribe is just that: impartiality. Skepticism is taking sides, and Helen could not do that. Though she was obliged to signal impartiality it’s clear that she never meant it to detract from the Course or its Author. It wasn’t a stance, thumbs up or thumbs down. A state that concerned her biographer, who sought to correct it with an interpretation of thumbs up. But Ken needn’t have been concerned. The ornery scribe took care of the skeptics on her own.


Intuition’s gift of personality type

I cite Ken’s esteem for Helen and for Freud not as an indication of questionable scholarship. He was as respectful of scholarship as he was of their achievements. His grasp of the Logic of the Course was as uncompromising as its non-dualism -- reliably disciplined and on the mark. Articulate and professional. His passion for his cause and contributions almost as impressive as the Course itself. The same unerring judgment that offered Helen her job was clearly at work when it offered Ken his.

I cite it instead as an instance of a more general tendency of human illogic to overlook personality type and function in its understanding of our alternate “reality.” Of the human condition, and so to guide Free Choice in choosing how to address it. How to discern purpose and meaning correctly so that we progress beyond it instead of being stuck inside Plato’s Cave.

I cite it, too, as an instance of how original thinking with intuition can work productively with the Course when the Course itself doesn’t cover all the bases. Though he dives into the human Psyche to an unprecedented depth Jesus leaves it to us to explore its breadth. Breadth that could have included personality type to explain projection and the obstacles we face in reversing it, but it didn’t. The point being we can figure it out for ourselves. If Jesus had laid it all out for us would we still have Free Choice?

Jung and Myers-Briggs shared the gift of Mind -- the sixth sense that is intuition -- with their theory of personality type. With illumination that can make the occupants of the Cave aware that its darkness isn’t their only choice. They aren’t prisoners and neither are we. None of us is a victim except by our own hand. We aren’t truly stuck anywhere except by our own choice, delusion that we’ve inflicted on ourselves. 

Body-sensing’s corruption of personality type

“Science” has done the opposite with its “five factor” theory of personality type. With the five senses of the body insanely fearful of what Mind’s sixth sense will reveal about them: that they don’t serve the light. That they and their captive science are instruments of the dark. Keeping us inside the Cave. Aided and abetted by Freud, adamant that Psyche is confined to body just as science is adamant that Consciousness is confined to brain.

Where does such nonsense come from? Not from the Logic of Jung’s and Myers-Briggs’ intuition that makes sense. It can only come from illogic that doesn’t make sense. From the master of the Cave. From delusion, and what’s called for is voice to speak for something better. Full-throated support for understanding personality type and function with intuition, not for overlooking it.

Klaatu barada nikto!

Jung and his successors, Katharine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers, were guided by the same source and produced results that were equally insightful. Not flawless but equally useful if only analysts and theorists like Ken were aware of it.

A foundation dedicated to Ken’s work won’t critique it. Yet I share my critique to make a point, that acknowledging the Course’s part in a living, ongoing reflection on the questions of life’s purpose and meaning would add to its relevance, not detract from it. Would expand the reach of Ken’s extraordinary contribution, not impede it.

No one can absorb every detail, every nuance, of what Jesus and Ken had to say through the Course. But anyone with Mind and its sixth sense, along with the uniqueness of their personalities, is qualified to reflect on its implications. Is qualified to apply its lesson from one set of circumstances -- the personalities, lives, and work of two clinical psychologists in twentieth century Manhattan -- to another.

Policies and principles given voice in one moment are meant not to be enshrined as though time had stopped, but to be applied. Applied to other moments because time hasn’t stopped. The world of the Course and Ken’s teaching is not The Day the Earth Stood Still. We are not Patricia Neal needing Michael Rennie’s robot Gort to protect us inside his flying saucer. It’s the Cambrian era: change and diversity so powerful that nothing can stop it.

Infinity in motion

The Course is more than the comfort of sanctuary. It’s the engine of Mind and intuition that enable and empower adaptation to change. Function that asks to be recognized and put to use. To overlook it is to miss not only the Truth of what it is but the Truth of what it’s for.

We can’t do as Jesus has asked without staying in step with change. Without aligning ourselves with the Logic and Love of Creation. With work that can never be done because the implications of Logic and the connections of Love -- Relationships that hold the Interconnectedness of Soul together as One -- aren’t temporal. They’re infinite. Eternal. Eternally in motion. If this is the Truth of Reality and Creation, then it must be the Truth of the Course and the use we make of it. To bring us to the light of self-awareness and the end of the darkness of our Cave.


The example set by Jesus

What did Jesus mean when he admonished teachers and students not to treat the Course as a “bible?” That to do so would thwart its use, just as the intended use of Jesus’ parables and miracles long ago, in a different context, was thwarted by captivity to authoritarian hierarchy and canon. By “Bible” that distracted minds detached from Reality with the false promise of absolute Truth. Just as the Child unconscious had been misled by the two-headed lie of absolute Authority and absolute Freedom. All of it a con.

Jesus didn’t respond to Helen’s and Bill’s Call for Love with the absolute Truth. With an external deus ex machina that, once imposed on their situations, would solve all problems in perpetuity. He responded with example. He role-modeled how to address their problems without telling anyone what to do. How to explain context -- individual and humanity -- with Logic combined with Love that leads to understanding. So that reasoning can address purpose and meaning grounded in facts instead of magical thinking. So that it will be guided by perception and judgment instead of misperception and misjudgment. All of it grounded in Reality and Necessity -- the laws of cause and effect  that take the mystery out of miracles.

The call for original thinking that provokes

Above all, he set an example for the use of Logic, Love, and Free Will to expose the lie that is our alternate “reality.” Courageously and honestly, for this is anything but a convenient truth. Unless we follow his example with explanation that leads to Understanding, based on Logic and Love, that's shared with wisdom and compassion, it will be taken by others as provocation. As attack that warrants response in kind: unthinking, unreasoning retaliation.

If we allow the Course to be treated as absolute unquestioned anything we kill it. It’s not a “bible” because its very purpose is to question and be questioned. To empower the implications  of Logic that is forever asking Why. To enshrine the Course in absolute Truth is to deprive it of its power. To do the work of insanity, the Child's shadow-code. Parsing its metaphysics and sharing lives is useful but so too is application that puts it to work. So too is original thinking that’s provocative or it’s not doing its job. A view that’s legitimate and even critical but under-represented. Why? Because it's provocative. 

Choose again

Application of its metaphysics is what makes the Course unique. Text, Workbook, and Manual. A point made eloquently through the work of its teacher, Kenneth Wapnick. Then can the Course and its teacher be honored as inspiration and guidance for their use? For their application by their students to changing contexts that require fresh understanding? Through the same independent judgment, the same sixth sense guided by Logic and Love, that Jesus affirmed when he closed with Choose again?

Institutions dedicated to the Course and its teacher’s work in their time might also help to reflect on what’s to be said through the same Logic and Love, the same sixth sense, in our time. To reflect and apply the Course as a living document in the spirit of Jesus, whose work is not done. Is this feasible? It’s worth asking.

The pheasant in its nest

The pheasant needs flight to adapt to the world around it. It can’t stay in its nest. Every institution needs to reflect on its mission to stay viable. When the Miracle Distribution Center, the Foundation for A Course in Miracles, and the Foundation for Inner Peace reflect again, what considerations arise from the example of Jesus? What suggestions might be offered by the provocation of Honesty and Truth and the dynamic of Love? By the eternal Why of Logic?

Thank you. Keep up the good work, and God bless!

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.

The proof of Innocence 

What do we have in the end?
Only our minds to tell us what to make of our lives. Memories, perceptions, and judgment.
The stuff of imperfection.

The stuff of self-interest and bias. The never-ending crusade to protect purity against the onslaught of others’ perceptions and bias.
Our Innocence.
Against the transfiguration of our injustice into their “justice.”
The turning of memories upside down and inside out.
Against us, to make of our outrage a joke. 

That would make of us an impossibility: the earning of love, trust, and respect.
The stuff of friendship.
And above all: the proof of Innocence.

In the darkness behind appearances

Innocence that in a world of substitutes can have but two sources. An inner moral compass. . .
And what others think.
One true, the other a substitute for truth.
One the attribute of independent judgment and self-reliance . . .
The other the mark of dependence.

Attributes that distinguish opposites: host and parasite.
What is and the free rider that isn’t. The odd couple.
Innocence that can’t cohabit with guilt where Logic and Love prevail, illuminated by the light of honesty and truth.
But can cohabit where Logic and Love don’t prevail. Where instead of light, dishonesty and untruth hide in the darkness behind appearances. 

Bodies like rabbits pulled out of hats

The contradiction of Innocence going about harmfulness, the business of guilt.
Taking life opposite to its will to live, to be forever.
Bent on contradiction to the end.
Taking itself, the stuff of imperfection, with it.
The odd couple at odds, seeding its own end. 

And here we stand.
Who would speak for honesty and truth in such a place.
Profiles of a fool. Everyman defined by appearances, betrayed by appearances.
The awareness of Self draped in the finery of mud, called to account for its slander --What others think.

The stage of deceit and the deceiver they put there.
The illusionist and its shit parade of harmfulness, pain, and outrage, calumny and injustice.
Bodies like rabbits pulled out of hats
Engaged in an endless cycle of provocation. 

Applause for special effects

The stuff of appearances -- magic performed for the entertainment of fools in a darkened theatre.
The Cave of Plato.
The roach motel where roaches check in and never check out.
In the darkened theatre of shame and punishment, fear, and hatred. 

To what end?
To set feeling against one another?
OK. To make us miserable?
That works. How about to test patience with absurdities?
Getting warmer. This is ridiculous!
Almost there. 

I know! The magician behind the horror show expects applause for special effects.
Uh huh. To be taken seriously for smoke and mirrors. 

God’s Son remembered not to laugh

So that’s what this nonsense is really all about?
Boo!
Riveted to our seats in hypnotic fear. How many times Boo! before we get it?
Before we get that the wizard is us.
Appreciate the joke we played on ourselves.
The illusionist and its shit parade of harmfulness, pain, and outrage, calumny and injustice.

And have a good laugh.
This is funny?
Perversity that has no real effects. When it sinks in and we get it. The Joker and its jokes. All of it ridiculous.
Even the pain? The injustice?
Especially the pain and injustice when you realize why we’re being goaded and who’s doing the goading. Ourselves. Into making fools of ourselves. Into keeping it going -- the stage show. The joke. 

How?
By not laughing: “God’s Son remembered not to laugh.”
Don’t you want to be taken seriously?
That’s why I’m laughing. Seriously. When you get the joke, everything is funnier.
Then you weren’t goaded seriously.
Wanna bet? Don’t get me going! 

One for the road

Show’s over!
With one grand finale of absurdity. One last spooky joke. One last laugh to bring the curtain down.
There’s more?
We don’t have to get up from our seats and leave the theatre.

We don’t?
No. It’s all taken care of. The magician was never here to begin with and neither was the theatre. The theatre leaves us. 

Boo!

Authoritarian rule on Pleasant Street

Value individuality and don’t try to dictate what. . . kids are curious about or how they express themselves. [Respectful parenting] is about seeing children as independent rational beings [instead of taking an] authoritarian [approach] where communication is one way with little consideration of a child’s emotional needs. 

CNBC on Apple News Feed 01/07/23, quoting Margot Machol Bisnow, author, Raising an Entrepreneur (BookBaby 2022).

[Disclaimer: This is the extent of my familiarity with this book. However, it’s on order and will be read in hopes that it will help with one of the main concerns of this website: the undoing of authoritarian “realism,” a dominant strain of philosophy that’s neither realistic nor rational. Responsible, in fact, for the abuse of children and every other living thing. The signature human mindset that’s become the signature of an entire geological epoch: the ongoing global atrocity we now call the Anthropocene.] 

What lay behind the image of pleasantness in our second-grade reader, the neighborhood of Dick and Jane on Pleasant Street? Pleasantness or an alternate reality -- the self-delusion of our ancestral Mind? The archetypal Child corrupted by the opposite of Logic and Love, ruled by its mistake: misidentification with its own reflection. Its own opposite, and so by the perversion of authority. Demanding arbitrary rule from the top down instead of governing, lawfully and compassionately, from the bottom up. Instead of nurturing -- the essence of authority that isn’t authoritarian. Helpfulness that’s harmlessness.

If the parenting that really goes on isn’t authoritarian disrespect why then is Margot Bisnow speaking up? Who is her audience? Why do so many need to listen?

The story of Dick and Jane that prompted Margot’s book is still playing out on Pleasant Street. Disrespectful authoritarian parenting wraps itself and its offspring into the ongoing madness of humanity. An injustice that’s all the more unacceptable for being so common. What are the philosophical roots of this perversion of authority so that it can be uprooted? To make way for respectful parenting so that children so dear to us have the loving support they need. Who is our “enemy?” How can we know our enemy so that we can be rid of it or at least mitigate its harm?

To set children off on their own course

The psychopathology of disrespectful authoritarian parenting on Pleasant Street is unpleasantness by many names:

  • Beginning with obsessive-compulsive narcissism, a psychiatric disorder that demands absolute authority, possession, and obedience. Absolute relentless control, the desperation of lives at the mercy of urges and cravings that are out of control.
  • Psychosis -- the denial of Reality and Truth. Their substitution by an alternate fantasy reality centered on self-pitying specialness and victimhood.
  • Arrested development -- adolescence clinging to the past, fearful of the future, that refuses to grow up. Fiercely resistant to the attainment of maturity and competence through learning and adaptation. Terrified of the truths that the wisdom of experience might reveal.
  • More arrested development. The creativity of personhood stunted by authority turned on its head. By the cruelty of invalidation and disempowerment imposed on individuality from the top down instead of the nurturing of gentle loving kindness and respect it needs from the bottom up.
  • Sociability obsequious to group, authoritarian ass-kissing, a thin veneer of hypocrisy hiding contradictions and conflict. “Harmony” dictated by uniformity, denied the freedom of individuality. “Peace” hiding the frustration of limbic emotions -- resentment, jealousy, anger, fear, guilt -- craving war.
  • The madness of alienation and war, the inevitable consequence of self-pitying authoritarian cruelty and rage.

Role modeling limbic emotions festering inside psychiatric disorder -- fear, anger, hostility, hatred, blame -- has a terrible cost. Replication in the minds and hearts of vulnerable children condemned to lives corrupted by psychiatric disorder. By the same beast and its shit parade of addictions, upside-down values, and animal emotions. By the pathology itself and its enablers: the crass submission of passivity to the tyrant. By weakness posing as strength. Allying with the perversion of democratic governance that is authoritarian rule. Obelix the Gaul gone over to the Romans. Bringing upon himself the fury of Justice for enticing his victims with seductive charm and humor into betraying the cause. Gulling them unawares into spreading the virus of self-delusion, misperception, and misjudgment.

All of it the opposite of what grown-up role modeling should be about: not invalidation but affirmation. The enabling and empowerment of individual expression -- strength, freedom, trust, and intimacy -- not its suffocation. Loyalty to Reality and Truth, not to denial and psychosis. Just as Bisnow’s book says, to set children off on their own course instead of replicating ancestral authoritarian pathology.

The perversion of democratic governance into authoritarian rule isn’t the flaming banner of “liberty,” the ultimate in satisfaction that’s advertised. It’s self-imprisonment in frustration -- the opposite. In the one-dimensional cartoon world of adolescent fools that a grown-up Pete Hamill abandoned in A Drinking Life. Self-delusion is deprivation of self-awareness and Free Will, our birthright: Truman risking his life to escape The Truman TV Show, the degradation of victimhood meant for the entertainment of voyeurs. Chumps finding amusement in their own servitude. Dick and Jane being groomed for lives in Plato’s Cave, addicted to substitutes for Worth. To dog food.

The sick lure of herd mentality

A perfect replica of deception that can’t fool the metaphysicist. Who’s aware of what’s behind appearances and will protest. The descendant of Parmenides and his Eleatics School that founded metaphysics. Devoted to intuiting the Reality of Mind, Logic and Love behind physics. Behind the study of material objects that make up our metaverse of spacetime and matter -- one grand appearance that distracts and deceives with sensory perception and quantitative measurements. With circular self-referential "reasoning " that purposely rejects Logic and Love.

To look thus behind appearances in the made-up world of Dick and Jane is, as Nancy Pelosi might say, “to throw a punch for the children.” At the Roman oppressors who take advantage of children, their captive audience, to deprive them of self-awareness, Free Will, and initiative. Of individuality, originality, and creativity. Of personhood, all in service to forced group conformance. To Pete Hamill’s “Brooklyn.” To the “Galactic Empire” of Star Wars. To the fortunes of tribes and their militaries. Of symbolic nations chanting supremacy in competition for world cups and super bowls. To the pleasantries of “sociability” -- manipulating us away from Truth to lies, from Reality to appearances, from the light and freedom of individuality into the darkness and captivity of uniformity.

All so that minds taken captive will submit to domination by limbic emotions. Will be forced into mindlessness so that the tribe may dominate without opposition. May have all that humanity’s limbic animal brain wants. Its agenda, and we are the unwitting agents of its will. Dick and Jane are literally being conditioned by irresponsible role modeling into thinking, feeling, and behaving like animals at war with other animals. In a dog-eat-dog world instead of in a shared world. Civilized by individuality, originality, and creativity. By sharing, affirmation, and empowerment in a shared world of Love, Trust, and Intimacy. Civilized by conscience and accountability, two attributes of character notably absent in the authoritarian.

Dick and Jane are naturally drawn to Freedom, naturally repelled by oppression. Drawn to the resistance of Gauls to Roman tyranny. They embrace the Logic and Love of authority that’s focused on their needs and feelings and not on itself, so that it can nurture strength instead of sapping it. Who then would want to impose the rule of madness for their own benefit on innocent children who despise it? Who would not want to share the Logic and Love, the wisdom, of learning and growth with children who crave it? Of self-awareness instead of self-delusion? What grown-up of conscience would want to lure children away from civilization that supports humanity into herd mentality that crushes it?

The one and only voice

Neuroscience has identified a part of the human brain that connects humanity to its animal origins. The “reptilian” or “animal brain” accounting for animal emotions with a distinctive attribute: the animal brain and its emotions have not evolved. A part of “civilized” humanity’s brain that connects it to humanity’s uncivilized, animal past: the limbic system of amygdala and hippocampus, located with the cerebellum at the base of the brain and the top of the spine. Driven not by the aptitude of the prefrontal cortex for deliberation and judgment, for the discipline of reason, values, and choice, but ruled by unreasoning animal instinct and will. Engineered not for subjective reflection but for objective action in a frightening world of disconnected objects. Disobedient to the laws of physics and ultimately disobedient to us. To our precarious family. Beyond anyone’s control.

Who are we? The question starts with humanity’s animal brain. With un-self-awareness unevolved. With humanity’s involuntary entrapment in a prison of tribal membership. What we have made of ourselves is service with a smile on behalf of our captor. The self-delusion’s lure of its host, our ancestral Mind -- the original Child, Self-Awareness -- into Plato’s Cave of un-self-aware animal submission. The self-delusion’s original target, its archetype for the mistake’s replications to follow: a Child. Amenable to its manipulations, susceptible to its deceptions.

The state of a world trapped in a cycle of blame, victimhood, and conflict is kept “alive” by the very transgression that lures its offspring into captivity. With the false promise of liberation in the pleasantries of “sociability.” Of unquestioning service to authority whose only cause is itself. With role modeling opposition to individuality, learning, and growth. The suppression of voices other than its own. The elevation of singularity to supremacy: one voice.

Toward the Love and Freedom of Intimacy

The duty of those not caught up in misguidance, the unpleasantness that is Pleasant Street, is to use our Free Will and our talents to stand for another voice. To deny the denial. In the spirit of the indomitable Asterix the Gaul, with the force of Authority that will teach the Romans a lesson. Our duty is to reverse the atrocity with the Authority of Logic and Love instead of tyranny, its perversion. To “throw a punch for the children.” By denying the transgression legitimacy with our withdrawal. By not engaging with foolishness. And if withdrawal implies invalidation of behavior that’s wrong then so be it. We owe Palpatine, the evil Emperor of the Galactic Empire, no apology for hurting his feelings if we do so to prevent his electrocuting our son.

No retaliation perpetrated by Roman arrogance can shut down a voice that would speak for Logic and Love on behalf of our children. Our cause not only the protection of children but the liberation of those who dominate them. The end of the Cave along with the self-delusion that produced it -- the illusory Joker that’s us and the joke that’s on us.

Our cause is not the cause of bestial rage but the loving kindness of the Relationship. The Relationship with our Parents Logic and Love consummated in unreality by their agent, the connection with Reality kept open by the Holy Spirit. Call it what you want. It isn’t the name that matters but its function: the connection. Relationship that no lies, no magic tricks, can break. The Authority of Necessity, the laws of cause and effect: expressions of the Logic and Love that composed them. Not the thrust and parry of weaponry that kills but the caress of music and radiance that enlivens. The Beauty of Oneness and Innocence, the Source and the Force of Life and Creation.

Their cause and mine is sharing to affirm and empower, not competing to “win” and dominate. It’s to bring darkness to light by enabling it to choose freely, of its own accord, to come to the light. With the leverage of family ties, tribal belonging certified by the animal brain that we all share. Not the contrivance of a cartoon, the one-dimensional top-down uniformity of Pete Hamill’s “Brooklyn,” but family governed by individual self-expression.

My cause the cause of the Gaul to respond to Romans luring children into captivity by liberating Romans from their self-imprisonment. By demonstrating Free Will, the birthright that can’t be surrendered, that captors can use to escape from their own captivity. From the Cave, to join the Gauls in Freedom. By demonstrating freedom of expression, the Creativity of civilizing individuality, of personhood, that liberates from entrapment by unevolved limbic emotion, the will of the beast, toward the Love and Freedom of Intimacy.

The premise behind The Story of the Child

Advice from the military based on experience with centuries’ worth of battles: Know your enemy. Advice from Pogo Possum, the sage of Walt Kelly’s Okefenokee Swamp: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” Advice from the psychologist Sigmund Freud: the “bad thing” lies within the human psyche.

My mother shrank from looking too deeply within because she feared what she might find. What or who is “Satan” and where does it reside? Would the minds of history’s most notorious dictators offer a clue? Is it in the Hades of Greek mythology under the ground, whence the dark lord of the underworld emerged to snatch his bride, Persephone? Is it Dante’s Inferno, the terraced rings of vengeance and misery on the other side of the River Styx? Can it be anywhere in enchantment?

The ”enemy” lies within the dreaming Mind that we all share. Our ancestral Mind, the Child of Logic married to Love, its Parents. The Child, whose real identity is Free Choice and Love, who lost consciousness in the Reality of Creation that preceded the dream and produced it. A Course in Miracles explains the unconscious Child’s error that produced the dream. It doesn’t explain the loss of consciousness, although its Logic may enable an individual, working in relationship with the Holy Spirit, the emissary from Logic-Love, to intuit a rational explanation. This is the premise behind The Story of the Child, the working title of the book that insights from Intuition and I are well into writing.

The “enemy” within

The “enemy” is the “dark side” of the Child, the Mind in an unconscious state that thrust it from Reality into a state of illusion. Where it could encounter contradictions of Logic-Love and Reality that of Necessity are excluded from Reality and can only be detected within a dream. The dark side is an illusion, a code attached to unconscious Mind. An illusory dependent, a parasite that derives its definition, its genetics, from its host. A code that, like a virus, instructs an unconscious mind taken captive to fabricate its unreal dream world of opposites. Because this is what the code “is:” an opposite. The dark side is simply instructions for fashioning a dream that, when animated by Energy in service to Mind, brings to “life” the opposite of its host. All the aspects of what we experience as “life” are, in one way or another, fabricated or corrupted by these instructions.

The ”enemy” that I call the “Joker” is the Child’s unconscious mind’s mistaken identification of its own reflection code as an “other,” then allowing itself to be deluded into identifying with its own opposite. In the mistaken belief that this illusory other self could bail it out of the situation that unconsciousness put it in. The Joker is the Child’s own dark side that only has a “life” inside a state of mind that can’t exist in Reality that’s only capable of dreaming illusions. The specific change of Mind that mis-identifying with the opposite-code “caused” was imagining that the Child’s Psyche was replaced by the Joker. Where Psyche is the Child’s real Self -- Consciousness or Self-Awareness in Reality. Is Being replaced with non-being. 

The call for correction

If the Child’s real Self can be thought of as an altar surmounted by holiness radiating the Light and Life of Being, of Creation, then the Joker in the misguided, corrupted Child’s mind is an expression of its opposite occupying a throne of darkness. The slew of perversions of Being, Reality, and Truth that make up the Child’s unreal dream of insanity. The “master” of Plato’s Cave and its manipulations -- appearances, deceptions -- that keep its occupants secure in their self-delusion. Our universe of spacetime-matter and the isolated, separated bodies that we mis-identify as us.

The call through Intuition to correct error can’t come from the “enemy” but it can come from the Child’s Psyche. Its Soul or Being in its seemingly wounded state. Which is why correction takes us within, to reverse the apparent violation of the inviolate, our Self, our identity, We look within to find the “enemy.” To replace self-delusion, the Joker, with Self-Awareness, Psyche on our altar, the source of our psychology. The cause, mission, or function behind our story. That accounts for who we are and what we do. Why we exist. Why we’re here -- to do our part to restore consciousness and the sanity of Logic and Love. To heal separation that’s no more than a case of mistaken identity.

The route to correction is through philosophy, the Logic that explains Reality, and through psychology, understanding with Logic how the Soul, our Psyche, that interconnects all of Life-Creation, came to be contaminated in an unconscious mind with a reverse mirror image self. A code or “thought system” derived from its host that is the opposite of its host. Illogical by definition. An absurdity.

Inside the brooding castles of Transylvania

When we look within our individual selves to know our “enemy,” we find what we’re looking for. The bad thing that isn’t unique to us. The forms it takes and their attributes vary with each person, each personality with its unique genetics and circumstances bearing the stamp of the moment. Varying with each individual story and its psychodynamics -- needs, feelings, values, perceptions, cravings-addictions, conflicts, and motivations. All derived from the same Source, an ancestral Mind with one story that defines the seminal mistake, its archetypal parts and what happened between them to produce us. To produce our myriad variations on the same theme. The myriad stories that repeat the same mistake, and so it defines us.

Fooling us. Mocking us. Laughing at our foolishness because we can’t get it right. Because we will never know our enemy so long as we keep looking for explanations and Understanding where they aren’t. Without instead of within. In spacetime and matter. In bodies instead of the Mind whence we came. So long as we fall for its endless distractions and let ourselves be fooled. Beg to be fooled so the Truth won’t be exposed. So we won’t discover the Truth and have to change. To disturb our “peace” with the effort and difficulty, the unpleasantness of learning and growth it may take. So we won’t have to actually use Free Choice to choose again. To choose friend instead of enemy for our guide. Our real selves instead of a mistaken self, our own dark side. Our own shadow opposites who haunt brooding castles in Transylvania. The scary blood-sucking monsters of our nightmares who cast no reflections in mirrors. Because they’re reflections themselves.

The striving and difficulty of Free Choice

The bad thing that’s wounded our Psyche within is a nothing. But a reflection, our own opposite “dark side” that has no existence of its own. Only the “existence” and harmfulness it’s handed by us when we repeat the original mistake of the Child, our ancestral Mind. The Mind that’s dreaming our reverse mirror image world, haunted by its seminal mistake. Mind-the-one that transformed itself into bodies-brains, the many infected with mistakes-the-many.

To follow tried and true military advice, to “know your enemy,” doesn’t take much effort if you’re Pete Hamill’s “Dodgers” and the enemy is the “Giants.” If the bad guy advertises deception and superficiality with “Truth Social.” Anything “social” is skin deep, a tapestry of appearances and magic acts conjured by groups to defend themselves and assault others that can easily be unwoven. What takes effort to know your enemy is if you’re one individual, one mind. Then the direction isn’t horizontal, skittering across the surface of the pond like a water bug. The direction is perpendicular. Down beneath the surface. To connect with Reality and Truth that traces all the way back to the story of the original individual -- our ancestral Mind. The One Child that we all are.

The story that contains the explanation we’re looking for. That reveals the Logic and illogic of the bad thing, the seminal mistake. It takes effort and patience not only because the Logic of explanation moves in sequence at its own pace, but also because self-deluded minds influenced by the bad thing, sometimes captive to the bad thing, fear and resist knowing. Because humanity in its adolescent foolishness doesn’t want to grow up. Has all kinds of “reasons” why letting sleeping dogs lie is preferable to waking them up. Echoes from Plato’s Cave: Leave us alone! Because waking up by minds with Free Will must be a matter of choice. Their choice. It can’t be forced on them without compromising what makes them who they are. What gives them their usefulness, their function. If dogs choose to sleep that’s their choice. And because choice takes work. It doesn’t make itself and it can’t be delegated.

Humor that’s actually funny

So what does that make us if we carry on not knowing our enemy? Dogs that choose to sleep. Beings possessed of brains rooted in animal brains that never evolved. Animals socialized but not civilized, forced by circumstances to get along for a while until “sociability” gives way to the mistake. To the hostilities of authoritarian competition. The malign animosity that haunts castles in Transylvania. That’s not only allowed to remain intact beneath the surface but embraced -- protected and preserved as though it were savior instead of enemy. The ultimate expression of opposite, the definition of “enemy.” Insane, mindless contradiction that misleads like road signs pointing in the wrong direction. The psychology of madness.

What should make us willing to know our enemy? To want to make the effort to choose? To understand that the “enemy” is us. It dwells within. It’s accessible to Intuition, from a source we can trust, Logic and Love. It doesn’t require years of tail-chasing psychoanalysis trusting the judgment of authoritarian “realists” -- unhealed healers captive to the thinking of Freud, who insisted that what’s wrong with mind must be what’s wrong with body. An absurdity. And then there’s this: our “enemy” isn’t real. It’s a joke we play on ourselves. The dog mistaking its tail for another dog and then letting itself be deluded into identifying with its tail. The enemy is the tail wagging the dog. A sick perversity of the Truth.

But really -- it’s funny! It’s us. Our strange, mysterious metaverse. Ridiculous! Our bogeyman “enemy” is a very funny fool -- us. How will we celebrate when we finally know our enemy? When we look in the mirror and see ourselves instead of an “other.” How about congratulating ourselves by doing high fives with just our own hands? By recognizing that the “voice” that’s been misleading us, making fools of us, is our own. By having a good laugh. As for me, I’ve already made reservations: dinner and dancing for one.

Carry on, Centurion!

For the authoritarian “realist,” the disrespectful authoritarian parent who insists on lying there like a sleeping dog, getting in the way, a parting word: Just because your self-deluded mind is incapable of divining meaning and purpose doesn’t grant you the right to make up your own reality and force it on others. What it does give you is something more constructive: the obligation and opportunity to grow up. To recognize the Reality and Truth of who you are, Obelix the Gaul, and wake up. If you’re a Roman legionnaire who must follow orders then I will be your drill sergeant. See that you do it or you’ll be doing latrine duty.

Carry on, Centurion!

1

The seductive charm of “Columbia”

The Light is Self-Awareness made possible by Relationship:

  • between Logic and Love, masculinity and femininity. Masculine choice and order, feminine creativity and freedom, bringing the gift of connection and self-awareness to one another.
  • between Parents and Child. Parents with one another and with Child, all bound in the ties of joyfulness and family. In the trust, innocence, and Oneness of Being. Of Psyche-Soul. Of the Light of Relationship, the Reality of Creation and the Creation of Reality.

Relationship turned on the light for an awe-struck boy when “Columbia” first raised her Hollywood movie studio torch in a darkened theatre. Seducing my imagination for all time with her feminine beauty. With an ideal writ large against the grandeur of sky framed by a majestic white cloud, radiating brilliance, perfection, and purity in every direction. So compelling an image of all that has Worth, of all that is inseparable, inviolate, and forever, that I placed her on the altar of my soul. To be revered in solitude and shared with kindred spirits. With helpfulness and harmlessness -- the Innocents who inhabit my Temenos. With Parents and Children -- the joyfulness, playfulness, and happiness of Family.

A beacon of Self-Awareness in the darkness of impossibility

In the Reality of Consciousness without opposition the light of Relationship is Possibility unperturbed by unconsciousness and the darkness of impossibility. In the unreality of unconsciousness -- the mind of the Child whose dream we inhabit -- the light of Relationship is a beacon in the darkness of impossibility. Guiding us back to our Parents, to consciousness back home. The undeniable response of Reality-Creation, Worth-Life, to impossibility-dark, opposite-hatred, contradiction-insanity, illusion-captivity, untruth-deception, animal-instinct fear and rage, obsession-addiction, error-self-delusion, and guilt. The denial of denial.

Without Love, Logic can’t know itself. Without Logic, Love can’t know itself. Neither can be self-aware without the other. Together they are the light of Self-Awareness, the attribute of Being that stands for the function of Psyche-Soul. The assertion of the first principle of Logic, the foundation of all Reality-Creation: Possibility.

Light makes right

Logic-Love is the light of Being-Soul that interconnects all of Reality-Creation in the Worth, the Implication-Relationship of Possibility. The Energy-Force, the power of Logic-Implication and Love-Relationship that binds all of Reality-Creation together in one family, one cause.  The stance of Being-Oneness. Of Possibility-Life affirmed, enabled, empowered and supported by the authority-Authorship of Logic-Love Parents in Relationship with their Child Free Choice. By the light of Being, Psyche-Soul freely chosen in denial of impossibility, of unreality-untruth.

By the right of Being / Psyche-Soul freely chosen by ideal. By the good-virtue of Being / Psyche-Soul freely chosen. By the sharing, affirmation, enablement, and empowerment of Oneness-Innocence. By the harmlessness of Being / Psyche-Soul freely chosen. .  . .

The Holy Spirit is our indispensable other Self

If “Jesus” is a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, who or what is the Holy Spirit?

Relationship consummates Self-Awareness. The Self that cannot Know itself without being Known, just as Creation cannot be the Worth of Life-Creation without Worth being freely chosen. Without being affirmed, enabled, and empowered through the reciprocation, the giving back, of its Creations of their own Free Will. The Child’s loss of Consciousness was the loss of awareness of its Relationship with its Parents. Relationship which gave it Self-Awareness, the gift of Knowledge from the Knower it needed to be Known -- its Parents. Mind unconscious cannot regain consciousness without Relationship essential to Self-Awareness.

Consciousness in Reality cannot enter the unreality of unconsciousness without making it real. While their Child remains unconscious its Parents cannot themselves complete the Relationship. Yet the Child, being an extension of Logic-Love, with its own definition, its own distinct function, remains connected to them. The connection preserved through an attribute of Free Choice, a function of mind even when unconscious that cannot be taken captive: intuition. Its content supplied by a source that mind even when dreaming cannot deny: another imaginary self. Another projection to join Child-the-many in its dream of bodies occupying a material universe.

An appearance but with a difference

The Holy Spirit is a facsimile of Logic-Love, the Child’s Parents, that was projected into the alternate “reality” along with all the other objects of illusion. Accepted into the dream because it’s part of the dream. Yet with a different function: to substitute for the substitute alternative “self” -- the self-delusion of the Child’s misidentity, its shadow-reflection -- should the Child freely choose it. Another voice for the Child to listen to: instead of a voice for unreality and untruth, a voice for Reality and Truth. A stand-in for the Child’s Parents to make up for the missing Relationship. A Self from Reality and Truth, Logic and Love, so that it can regain Self-Awareness. So that it can see who it really is through the vision of the Holy Spirit instead of seeing its mirror-image opposite. The self-deception that appeared like the illusionist’s act that it was when the Child identified with its own shadow-reflection. Its dark side.

The Holy Spirit is an appearance within a dream world of appearances, but with a difference. Its source isn’t unconscious mind’s reverse side, the parasite implied by Free Choice that fabricates a world of perversity from a code of opposition. It’s the Reality and Truth of Creation that Parented Free Choice -- the Parents with their unbroken Relationship with the host. With the Child itself instead of its self-delusion.

Impossibility is its own denial

The Holy Spirit is the bond of access between Parents and Child, the light of Reality and Truth, Logic and Love, that can’t logically be denied by delusion. Can’t be denied by deception, magic, insanity. By the absurdity of impossibility that can only “exist” in non-existence inside its own contradiction. Impossibility that’s contradiction is its own denial. The darkness doesn’t need to be opposed if it’s opposition that destroys itself. A warship destined to scuttle itself.

The function of mind that can’t be blocked

The Holy Spirit is the agent of Authority and the Force of its laws of cause and effect inside the dream. The Force of Necessity that unconscious mind can access by Free Choice through the function of Mind that can’t be blocked by self-delusion. Through Intuition which functions spontaneously because it cannot be taken captive, cannot be owned, possessed, and controlled. Because it’s built into the Mind of Free Choice that remains forever Free by definition, impervious to the effects of self-delusion. Unblockable. It’s access to Logic-Love its Source that preceded the dream and remains outside the dream. It functions within the dream because the dream is an act of mind. The self-delusion can’t escape Mind its source and the Force of its will: the will of Parents and Child to correct it. 

What does the Light illuminate? 

The sun illuminates all of unreality in the earth-world of self-delusion, channeling energy that enables and animates organic life. The sun is an object consuming itself, energy which will burn out in time. It is a perversion of Energy-Light in Reality which renews itself eternally, producing Order and the Life of Creation. Energy-Light in unreality consumes itself in the illusion of time. It is the decay and disorder of entropy, producing inertia and death.

This is the difference between Light-Energy in Reality and in unreality. The choice illuminated by the Light: between Relationship which is all of Reality and Creation and separation which is all of unreality and illusion. Between self-delusion and Self-Awareness. Worth and worthlessness. The choice is clear: for Relationship. For the Holy Spirit.

The mistake -- a sick joke

The idea that any one of us can ascend to the top of the Empire State Building and from there proclaim our supremacy, King Kong, lord and master of all he surveys, king of the jungle, is an absurdity. When what it really expresses is the littleness of our un-self-awareness. Not who we really are but its opposite, a loudmouth fraud, an imposter, deranged and delusional. “A stranger wandering through the house of Truth,” as Jesus puts it in A Course in Miracles. A pipsqueak nobody. Seriously -- a joke.

When what the attainment of our real Worth, our empowerment, actually requires isn’t being the center of attention but getting out of the way. Getting off stage instead of at the center in the spotlight. Not involving bodies and the beast, their havoc-wreaking animal brains, in anything. But letting the idea out the back door, that they’re who we are. That anything “external” to Reality that can only be one and inseparable is worth taking seriously. Because it isn’t. It’s a delusion. A mistake. A perversion of the Truth. A sick joke.

Leni’s Triumph of Flatulence

Glorified in Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” her documentary, commissioned by Hitler, of the 1934 Nazi party congress in Nuremberg. The coming together of one individual’s derangement with an entire nation captive to its delusion and its talent for self-glorification through the creativity of imagination -- art, imagery, illusion. Its talent for propagandizing derangement, the arrogation of authority from all Creation to itself, from Logic and Love that govern Reality and Truth with wisdom, kindness and compassion, sensitively, inclusively, to a poseur bent on supremacy by crushing the opposition. “Triumph of the Will,” theatre of the absurd on a tiny stage of make-believe, the letting of flatulence in the context of another Will that knows nothing of it. Of the Logic and Love where Will resides. Where the Authority of Necessity is shared freely with its Creations but cannot be shared with a dream. With nothingness. A joke.

The nonsense that Leni Riefenstahl “immortalized” was mortality. Death itself, because the idea that it expresses, that will can be concentrated in any part of the dream of an unconscious mind, is stillborn. It just didn’t happen. The ruler and his regimented ranks of sameness in their Teutonic uniforms, for all the racket they made, for all the anguish they caused, didn’t make a dent in Reality. The Reality of Will whose essence is sharing, affirmation, and empowerment. Whose essence is Life, not death. That arrogates nothing to itself, concentrates nothing to the exclusion of its Creations, the focus of its striving to attain an Ideal. Its caring focused not upon itself but upon them. Upon their gifts and talents and the Beauty and perfection of their Creativity. Their artistry. Their work -- the Worth of all of Creation. 

Good riddance to spiked helmets and swastikas 

What more pathetic absurdity can there be than “Triumph of the Will” that celebrates all of history’s poster-child madman?  What more blatant contradiction of Truth and sanity? How more obvious can our own madness get -- the madness of “realists” taken in by this shit. Instead of making fools of ourselves, strutting on center stage in the regalia of authority, in our madman’s delusion of “supremacy,” when will we wake up? When will we and our madness get out of the way?

Seeing things

Two of the many intriguing notions to emerge from physics’ study of matter beyond the human scale are Feynman’s “sum of histories” and Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle.” The first implying that time doesn’t exist at the level of particle physics (quantum mechanics), the other that matter is “relational,” that is, that it doesn’t exist unless particles connect with, or relate to, one another. “Sum of histories” means that the route taken by a particle to connect with another particle is every possible route taken simultaneously. “Uncertainty” means there’s no way of knowing where the particle is in between connecting-relating at any point in time. Heisenberg’s insight came when he observed a pedestrian vanishing in the darkness at night in between street lights.

If we were to observe these odd phenomena on a human scale we would see a horse in a pasture with many paths travel from one end to the other taking every path at once. Only we wouldn’t actually see it because in between the horse’s start and finish it would disappear. We would only observe a horse on one end disappearing and reappearing magically at the other having taken every possible route simultaneously without our seeing it. A clear violation of the laws of physics on a human scale that validate, and are validated by, sensory perception.

We would conclude that our sense of vision that produces data and our brain that processes data had malfunctioned. That we were “seeing things.” And we would take ourselves to a vision clinic to have our eyes examined and then to a medical-psychiatric clinic to have our head examined. Finding that our faculties didn’t malfunction, we would then be forced to conclude that the reality our senses have been feeding us on a human scale hasn’t been telling us the whole story. If something isn’t “right,” if it’s malfunctioning, it must be with what’s going on in spacetime-matter beyond the human scale, at the level of particles and the cosmos.

Let’s be honest

Applying the “laws” of physics that work for us on our scale to these scales gets us nowhere. Obviously we’re dealing with other realities responding to other “laws." And what’s more, they can’t be reconciled.   The greatest minds in physics in the time of Einstein and today have tried and failed to tie together the laws that govern what we observe through telescopes with what we observe through microscopes. To bring the mathematics of objects so massive they warp spacetime into the mathematics of objects so small it’s not certain whether they’re coming or going.

The search for a unified theory -- “quantum gravity” -- was discouraged by the Copenhagen Interpretation over a century ago. Physicists pressed on with their experiments until they called for help from philosophy. And now they’re wondering if the whole thing isn’t a wild goose chase. If matter that can’t always be detected, that doesn’t make sense even when it can, is even “there.” Let’s be honest: if a thing behaves like it’s imaginary, like it’s some kind of magician’s trick, maybe it is.

The path taken to understanding

Two minds, two personalities, trying to connect through communication, like particles, face similar obstacles to understanding. If communication succeeds and connection occurs the route taken from non-understanding or mis-understanding to understanding must involve every possible path simultaneously. Because what we’ve learned from particles is this is how it’s done. In another reality of timelessness that governs the matter our bodies are made of. If we put all our faith in our bodies’ senses to tell us what’s actual, and our bodies are matter that’ acts weird, then let’s be honest: our so-called “reality” is weird. It’s not in sync with the way even our body-matter wants to behave. Newtonian and even Einsteinian physics, that assumed something like divine order in the cosmos, is a distant memory. The divinity that Plato felt in his bones when he gazed upon the stars is chaos -- a joke.

No possible path to connection through understanding can be ignored if personalities intersect in many combinations under many conditions. If motivation depends on which behavioral codes, guides, or value sets predominate. Will it be an intrusive voice dictating to captive minds how to think and behave? Speaking for wounding? Or a respectful voice that helps with spontaneous insights when invited? Speaking for healing? Voices that we’re aware of or not even though Free Will has no more important task than choosing the right one.

Understanding will eventually present us with a manageable set of considerations. But that doesn’t mean that every consideration -- every spark of energy in our personalities, our motivation, and the voice or voices we choose to hear -- isn’t vibrating and foaming with energy like so many quanta filling and connecting every corner of the universe. The image serves a purpose: to make us aware of the scale of consideration that understanding can entail. When not only personalities but also motivations conflict. When the voices we adhere to aren’t on the same page. When all is cacophony until Logic is allowed to make sense of it. Until minds are free to think for themselves.

The incompatibility of idealist-mind and realist-will

One way of coping with the dilemma is to broaden our perspective, the context we rely on for purpose and meaning. To embrace every possible consideration so that if understanding isn’t perfect at least we’ve reduced the likelihood of misunderstanding and minimized its costs. This is the preferred route of “idealists” already disinclined to limit themselves to bodies’ faculties. To eyes and brains when they’ve learned from experience to rely on insights from minds’ intuition to guide them. On the vision of Logic instead of eyes that “see” horses magically disappear and reappear. Galloping from one end of the pasture to the other, in many places at the same time, out of sight. Idealists prefer not to accept and rely on “logic” that makes no sense.

“Realists,” on the other hand, scoff at all of it. Their way out of the dilemma is to put faith in the body and its brain entirely. To leave mind out of it. Don’t “think” at all, so why bother with perspectives and contexts, purpose and meaning. Why bother with considerations if you don’t have to? Let the part of the brain take care of everything that was put there from the beginning, to will behavior by instinct. The blood-and-soil part that whips up tribal passions with the gravity of Wagnerian Tannhausers, florid poetry, monumental architecture, ornate art, bombastic oratory, nocturnal Nuremberg rallies framed in klieg lights.

If navigating through circumstances is all about bodies and their survival then let the part of the brain that’s engineered to serve the body -- to feed it, procreate it, protect it, pleasure it -- cut through unfathomable complexity and bring us to our destination the easy way. With short cuts -- acts of instinct that require no awareness, no effort. By acts of will that instinctively integrate all the considerations and possibilities into one stance mechanically, automatically. The stance of authority backed up by force that can’t be questioned. Why? Because it’s dispensed with questioning. How? By dispensing with mind that does the questioning.

One approach -- the idealist’s -- all about mind. About the limitless capacity of mind to understand, to support, and to create. To take responsibility and be accountable. The other approach -- the realist’s -- all about the unstoppable will of bodies and brains to act. To dispense with minds and thinking and let some other unseen force planted in the brain take over. To take responsibility and spare us the inconvenience, the difficulty and unpleasantness, of accountability. To put ourselves at the service of this unseen force and go forth like an army of clones doing its bidding, sacrificing ourselves to the triumph of its will. To Rome. To Berlin.

There can be no “meeting of the minds”

What chance is there for communication between idealist-mind and realist-will? Between one horse at one end of the pasture relying on awareness to navigate -- every function of mind, every faculty of individuality -- and another horse at the opposite end, blinkered and hooded, relying on blind instinct to navigate. Dismissive of any effort to communicate other than conclusions handed to it beyond its awareness, convinced that it’s already arrived at its destination if nothing is required of it but to submit to another power. There is no chance for communication unless and until the horse at the opposite end of the pasture abandons blind faith in an unseen force to dominate its pasture and everything in it, including the other horse. Unless it ceases abdicating responsibility for its thoughts, feelings, and actions, ceases surrendering its sovereignty to a fantasy of supremacy.

For all that this unseen force cares about or is capable of, this animal brain that accounts for instinct and will surrounded by senseless objects, is domination. Capture prey, kill the competition, take mates and every other object captive, or flee if it’s outmatched. There can be no “meeting of the minds” without two minds. Between mind-judging and will that opposes mind-judging. There can be no common cause between wills if one must submit to the other. They cannot survive and compete on an equal plane. One must prevail over the other, for that is the goal of competition. This is the “realist’s” reality: the dominance of authority that must be unquestioned. That has no tolerance for mind because that is what mind does: question. Asking Why.

The real “authority” in sergeant’s stripes

In this situation there is but one possibility for forward movement. For communication of a kind that can’t connect but at least it can remove the obstacle to communication. Can create conditions less unfavorable to communication. And that is for the realist to meet its opponent on its own ground. On its own turf, the turf of will. If the realist claims superiority from accessing a part of the body’s brain that exercises un-free will -- willpower divorced from Logic -- the mind of the idealist has a willpower of its own. The necessity of Logic. The laws of cause and effect that yield to nothing. Not because they’re agents of will that wields authority from the top down to crush opposition. That’s weakness. But because they’re agents of no force greater than themselves.

They are the law that’s above everything. And they’re there not to crush opposition from the top down but to make possible order and harmony from the bottom up. Through Logic, Love, and Peace rather than their opposites -- illogic, hatred, and conflict. They are the real power on the throne. A vision of authority that the animal brain of the realist has perverted into its mirror-image opposite.

The laws of cause and effect speak for Reality and Truth. And when confronted with foolishness that presumes to speak for anything else there is no give in them. The laws are what they are -- Necessity. Reality and Truth are what they are -- Logic and Love. Fantasies of the “triumph of the will” that presume to be above the law, in an alternate reality of opposites, are no match for it. 

We’re just getting started

The “realist” fancies himself a jack-booted commandant entitled to rule his domain without opposition. An unrealist in a shared world and a fool. OK then, the idealist has someone he’d like the realist to meet. The only character the military mind will listen to. The guy who seriously outranks him. Whose word is law. Who’s way better at not listening than he is, so he’ll show respect. A nice drill sergeant. With a lesson that, one way or another, our comic book action hero will learn. And until he does, he can just go on screwing up in boot camp, peeling potatoes and shoveling shit.

If blind unthinking will that seeks supremacy has a military bent, the mind of an idealist has an answer. A drill sergeant “explaining” to the usurper who would rule its domain unopposed the facts of life. You ain’t nuthin’ but a hound dog. You’re private first class nobody and welcome to Camp Swampy. We don’t “explain” stuff here so everyone can play pat-a-cake. We drill procedure -- the way it’s gotta be -- into everyone’s head so they get with the program.

There’s Logic to the way things are and you align yourself with it or you get your ass busted. You get stuck at the bottom of the pile and you stay there until you get the message. Anybody thinks he's master of the universe and doesn’t have to listen, doesn’t have to think, doesn’t have to communicate or relate, can do KP duty peeling potatoes. Anybody thinks he doesn’t have to answer to a higher power can do latrine duty shoveling shit until he’s learned his lesson.

Son, you didn’t wind up here so we can pamper your foolish ass with pleasantries. You’re here so you can get the facts of life drilled into your thick skull. By will that is will instead of a Marvel Comic joke, a magic act performed by a Joker hiding behind a mask. An act meant to trick gullible fools into imagining what’s not there instead of seeing what is there. Welcome to Necessity. Welcome to Reality. Welcome to boot camp where the real work begins. Where understanding begins.

We’re just getting started.

2

The Logic of Governance under the law

Illogic is mind taken into captivity. Plato’s Cave, a chimera of One-the-many ruled by the unquestioned authority of the herd. An absurdity that substitutes mindless instinct for thought, brute will for intent, pointless action for meaning, and self-delusion for self-awareness. Illogic is the opposite of Freedom with Order, the only kind of Freedom there is. The only kind of Order there is. It’s arbitrary rule above the law, the opposite of governance under the law, the only kind of governance there is. It’s chaos, ruination. Our planet in the cross hairs of the Death Star. The only home we have. The only home we know.

Why?

To ask the Why of a thing is to ask of its nature. Its Logic-Love that explains its purpose and meaning – what it’s for. Its function. To ask the Why of a thing is to ask for its definition. Nothing can have a definition that doesn’t explain with Logic-Love why it exists, the purpose it serves, the function it performs. Its value-worth. Its use. The Why of it.

Explanation with Logic-Love follows a process ordered and disciplined by implications and relationships that interconnect and reciprocate. They do so because they are logical. Ordered and disciplined by laws of cause and effect, of necessity, subject to no rule but their own. Not even to Logic-Love itself or it would be arbitrary, above the law and therefore no law at all.

The illogic of arbitrary rule above the law

The world today performs its periodic loss of faith in governance by Logic-Love. By consensus and consent from the bottom up that takes direction from the needs of the governed and hears their voice. The world turns now to authoritarian rule because it must do what it is: a projection. An expression of illogic: separation, guilt, and its inevitable consequence, fear. Because illogic cannot learn its lesson. Cannot learn anything. It’s the illusion of arbitrary rule above the law. The false promise of “action” that solves problems and gets things done. A deception that can only distract with conflict and suffering from the Truth. When all that can get “done” is the elimination of its captive. The elimination of its host and thus of itself. The death of the planet in the cross-hairs of the Death Star, followed by the death of the Death Star.

All of it a chimera. The raving of a Ghostbusters demon seated on the throne of Order. The vacuity of self-delusion.

Why ask Why?

To ask for explanation from Logic-Love is to ask for Understanding. Understanding the Why of anything can’t happen in a vacuum. To understand one thing or anything by tapping into Logic-Love is to tap into the Interconnectedness of Everything. It’s all of one piece. And if what defines it, holds it together, is Logic-Love, then asking Why opens up everything to understanding. Penetrates the deception with the Free Spirit of inquiry. From one circumstance, one context, to another in logical order. One implication-relationship, one spontaneous insight from intuition at a time. At its own pace.

For the Logic-Love of Why is Free Spirit that can’t be owned, possessed, controlled, or dominated. Because Truth is Free Spirit that can’t be manipulated. Laws of Reality are Free Spirit that can’t be manipulated, What is can’t be made up. The Logic of Order combined with the Freedom of Love make up the Force of Creation, sovereign authority that cannot be denied. The force of movement forward. Progress toward an ideal of the Good, of Perfection, that has no opposite, no contradiction.

To ask the Why of anything is to open the possibility of joining in the movement of progress forward through Understanding. To hope for the good, for satisfaction, for happiness, instead of fearing denial and defeat. Why ask why? To choose and experience the Life of Mind and Love instead of the illusion, the absurdity, of death of body and fear. 

Why not ask Why?

Why do you disagree? Why do you, an “other,” contradict and oppose? Because unreality is misunderstanding. There’s no “other” and no “you” in Reality. There’s just the one Self, captive to the deception, unconscious and dreaming it. Incapable of asking Why because to do so would end misunderstanding. Would lead to self-awareness that ends the dream.

What doesn’t want us to ask Why? The delusion that we are our own opposites, a shadow reflection that has no self of its own. That’s an appearance, a deception that doesn’t want to be found out because its attributes are derived from its host. Attributes that its self-deluded host believes have been stolen, and so the opposite that it believes itself to be “exists” in paranoia. In constant fear that whatever it is, whatever it has, will be stolen back. “Exists” in constant fear that the Truth of its “existence” will be exposed for the magician’s act that it is. A derivation. A fraud. A scam.

The answer

What then is its first line of defense? The self-deluded mind that’s taken itself captive – the dog that’s caught up with its tail and thinks it’s the tail – must not think. Must avoid asking Why at all costs and must instead allow its behavior, its acts, to be willed instead by instinct. The reflexive act of feeling – dominance, conquest and supremacy, fear, jealousy and hate, greed and lust – that animates, empowers, and rules the predatory herd.

Its first line of defense is to deny the one – the individual – and to deify the many – the group. To hide itself behind the grand illusion, the Big Lie, that the one is the many and the many has a self, a mind of its own. A predatory herd bent not on Creation but on elimination. Elimination of opposites. Elimination of itself because this is what it is: an opposite.

How is this to be understood? How get around the defense? Not with captive bodies’ senses that detect only appearances but with the Vision of Logic-Love, the Free Spirit of Inquiry that thinks, feels, and sees beyond appearances. Through acts of gentle loving kindness, gifts from an awareness that knows nothing of appearances. Nothing of deceptions, distractions, conflict and suffering. Through insights from intuition that come to us of their own accord, spontaneously. Thoughtfully and lovingly, when we ask Why.

Mama Mallard’s road to nowhere

The Joker’s version of “reality” is the exact opposite of Reality. A departure from Truth that couldn’t be more radical. The biggest of Big Lies. Stunning in its enormity.

Yet the traumatized and dreaming Child was taken in, of course because it had no choice. Not really, considering the context. So, its projections and the Joker virus’s replications all follow along like ducklings, quacking their way across the road behind mama, unaware that they’ve been duped. That they and the road and everything else are a figment of their imaginations put there by a mistake. By the unconscious Child mistaking in the darkness its own reflection – a shadow – for an “other.” Crying out in pain and terror for help from its opposite. Whose offer to “help” came from a lifeless recording, a code of non-being derived from the Child’s Being.

A code that can’t help but “respond” with everything opposite to Reality and Truth, upside down and inside out. From the Big Truth of Reality to the Big Lie of unreality. A pattern obvious to the sensibility of Logic but obviously not to the insensibility of illogic. One would think that even a self-deluded Child, absorbed in a dream, would eventually catch on, but, so far, it hasn’t. Mama Mallard keeps leading her ducklings across the road and her ducklings keep following, even when it’s obvious that their “journey” is taking them nowhere in circles and it isn’t safe.

What the emperor doesn’t want to know

Why hasn’t the Child caught on? It’s not because the Truth hasn’t surfaced in various forms – art, music and literature, philosophy, psychology and theology, and now even in science, the last bastion of delusion. Many have heard, since at least the sixth century BCE, that their experience of “life” is a strange dream – an illusion -- and the Child only needs to awaken to return to Reality. But the message hasn’t gotten through. They’re not listening.

As horrific as its nightmare is for the victims of the Big Lie, they seem to fear the Big Truth even more. So much so that they’ve become an army of opposition against it. So deep is their self-delusion that its protection from attack has found its way into the core of their DNA, their very identity. The shadow code of non-being has substituted itself for the genetic code of their Being. If only one should speak to the Truth – should mention that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes – he might be put to death. In fact, one of them did years ago and what happened? He was crucified.

Why? What makes a simple statement of fact, the Logic and Reason, the Worth of Truth, come across as a hostile act? An attack? As an unforgivable breach of faith? A violation of social and moral order more threatening than irrational disorder that invades neighborhoods of schools, churches, malls, and grocery stores with homicidal maniacs armed with lethal weapons. This is sanity? This is ”normal?”

What’s so funny? That the Truth is radical

What makes the Truth so hard for the self-deluded to swallow is it’s radical. The Child’s opposite, a lifeless, mindless, loveless code, convinces it that unreal is real and wrong is right, and the Child is OK with that. The Child is OK with hanging out with false “friends,” adolescents wishful-thinking that smoking won’t kill them. But when a real friend approaches with the Truth, that there’s been a mistake and it will kill them, that’s not OK. Seeing is believing, the Child says. Even if the body’s “eyes” can only see the mistake. Even if the body is just a replication of the shadow code that replaced the thinking and Logic of Mind and invented the mistake.

Seeing the Truth, seeing Reality, is too much of a stretch, too much of an effort, if it requires abandoning bodies with eyes that can’t see for Logic with vision that can see. The ultimate in radical – coded viral instructions for the opposite of Being, the opposite of Life, Mind, Love, and Soul – has convinced its unaware, self-deluded host that its opposite is radical. And so crucifixion is too good for anyone who presumes to disagree. The embodiments of the self-delusion, the virus's replications and their senses, have spoken. They’ve produced a joke.

The Child’s new lord and master, the Joker, whose one genuine talent is appearances, perverts every sign of Logic and sanity into a joke whose malign humor feeds off the delusion of fools. The Truth is radical. The occupants of Plato’s Cave can’t be persuaded that their Cave master, the Joker, can possibly be wrong. The Cave master who invented the Cave, its occupants the replicates of a virus, the original Child-the-many “group.” The Cave master who invented “society,” with its hare-brained “rules” that encourage and facilitate mayhem, rules with absolute authority, above the law. And who could possibly question it?

It only takes one individual

But it doesn’t take an imaginary “group,” a mass-ideology “movement,” to assault fortress denial. All it takes is a single replication of the virus -- one human -- to reach the Child beyond the Cave, to reach its Memory beyond the dream, with the Truth. One mind gifted with real thoughts, one self gifted with real senses, to see through the ruse. To understand and to share its understanding with one “other.” In an act of Understanding that recognizes “other” as self. Not duped by insanity into mistaken identity but guided by Logic into recognition of correct identity. Not isolated, separated, mortal bodies, apparitions that come and go, but one Soul of Mind married to Love, living and connecting in the unity, the Force and eternity, of Now.

Is it possible? What is the premise, the step in the Sequence of Logic that launched all of Creation, that drives its Creativity with the Energy, the exuberance of Life? Possibility! What is every aspect of the Joker’s dark lie designed to do? To close off possibility. To hide it. To shut down Creation, stifle Creativity, and replace it with nihilism, with destruction, impossibility. Who will “win” between Logic and a joke when there can’t even be a contest between Reality and illusion? Who will win between the Child’s real identity and its delusion? Of course it’s possible! How could it not be?

Far out!

What’s “radical:” the Joker struggling repeatedly to “unite” all the occupants of its Cave – all of humanity – against the Truth? Against the Child’s awakening? With one flawed, spirit-crushing ideology after another? Or the Child being awakened by just one of its projections – one individual – who listens to the spontaneous voice of Logic, earns and accepts its gifts, and freely chooses to accompany it back home? Not to be “chosen” but to choose of its own Free Will. For that’s the Child’s true identity that will restore its place in Reality: Free Choice without which nothing can have Worth. Not even Life itself, Creation itself.

How can anything have Worth if it isn’t earned and freely chosen? What is the purpose of the Child’s immature projections, in this morass of contradictions, confusion, and pain, if it isn’t to exercise their free will, to grow up, and to earn their way back Home?

Who says so? Not unreasoning, authoritarian “faith,” one of the many masks worn by the Joker, but Logic. Logic says so. And someday, the mind, heart, and soul of one individual, undistracted by the body, will take it in, the Truth of who the Child is, who we are, not the delusion. And it will be far out. It will be radical.

Hidden from Reality

The mind of the “realist” entertains us with the appearance of intellectual honesty and analytical brilliance in every way but one: the reality and truth of Logic. With adamance that borders on hysteria, it refuses to follow the path of thinking:

  • that it doesn’t own, possess, and control
  • that necessarily begins with things as they are rather than with things as the realist imagines or wants them to be
  • that is subject to laws of cause and effect, to the authority and discipline of Necessity, that no will can contradict, not even the will of Logos, of God, whose governance is under, not above, the law
  • that doesn’t imagine all of Creation to be a game, a contest between isolated-separated opposites, conflicting self-interests with but one object: to “win.” An object with zero tolerance for rules that the realist can’t write to suit itself. Which means zero tolerance for Logic that can’t be “rigged,” can’t be unfair
  • that won’t yield to the “realist’s” obsession with supremacy, the myth of an unquestioned, absolute authority whose rule is above the law, a fantasy of “liberty” that knows no limits in its unhinged pretense of divinity, its blind quest to replace Necessity, to be “god.”

The ”realist” who hides its intentions behind facades of reasonableness, bland sociability, ever-smiling pleasantness, passive conformance, harmless agreeability, seductive humor and personal charm, can’t stand the light of Logic. To venture outside the darkness of Plato’s Cave ruled by illusion into the light of Truth shone by Logic. To venture into the domain of Reality and Creation governed with wisdom, compassion, and fairness by Logic. With inclusiveness that shares, affirms, empowers, and reciprocates Worth instead of exclusiveness that monopolizes it. Preserving its unquestioned “right,” the authority to indulge its “liberty” to have and do anything its specialness wants-- its infantile, separated, out-of-control willfulness.

To save us from Reality

This is the profile of the “realist” that lies beneath the surface. Behind appearances. That takes minds not trapped in make-believe to task for being exactly what it is: trapped in make-believe. For being “fooled” into questioning appearances that “realists” are allowed to detect with bodies, by the intuition of Mind that “realists” are forbidden to use. Intuition guided by Logic that would explain things as they really are, behind appearances that deceive, if “realists,” in their wounded righteousness, obsessed with winning and conquest, would only allow it. Logic whose understanding enables minds to perform as they must to exercise Free Will, the true path to Freedom instead of its grotesque caricature – the joke – of “liberty.”

Free Will, the capacity to choose freely enabled and empowered by judgment guided by reason and values. Guided by the giving of Creativity that opens minds to possibilities instead of the taking of unreasoning authority. Authority that closes minds to all but one consideration: its supremacy. Its demand for obedience, the “gift” of captivity, uncreativity, and impossibility. Captivity that offers the blessings of “liberty.” “Paradise” ruled by psychosis – detached from reality – that styles itself “realism.”

What would the idealist offer? Intellectual honesty. The Logic of who we really are: minds with thoughts and feelings that live. What does the “realist” offer? Intellectual dishonesty. The self-delusion of who we really aren’t: bodies and senses that die. Parasites clinging to their host, mistaken for “others.” Illusions who can “save” us from all the limits, the definitions and implications, of Logic. From Reality.

Who is the “realist” really? Our own shadow. Our opposite. Our captor. The Joker.

A joke.

Reflections to share with adolescents

Reflections to share with adolescents who may be wondering about affect: its role in relationships, in adolescents’ future, in mythology, and in all of Creation. How does it figure in the choice between what is Real and unreal, True and false, Good and evil? Why does it matter?

The usual poetic content is heavy with subjective thought and feeling. Grief and romantic Love are common types of feeling but there are others. Many are related to the values listed in my piece on adolescence [Thirteen: Reflections on Character and Values at the Beginning of Adolescence. 08/28/21]  T.R. Hummer’s non-rhyming poem, “My Mother in Bardo” (New Yorker 01/24/22 p. 50), is an example of a poem infused with grief. But if I’m assigned to compose a rhyming poem and I have no particular talent for lyrics, I might produce something lifeless, without affect.

Literature and poetry in particular say a lot about who we are and what’s important to us. For adolescents coming into their own it can be an effective way to gain self-awareness. If they feel a sense of loss, say, for a deceased grandparent, they might express it in a non-rhyming poem. It might be strikingly different from a poem whose search for originality, beauty, or other effect is through rhyme.

Before the Big Bang

Absence of affect in subjective, creative expression is a red flag. For an adolescent it might or might not have implications for character development, but, if so, they can run deep. Star Wars mythology is based on it. What turned Adam Skywalker toward the dark side and service to Palpatine, the galactic emperor? What made the galactic empire evil? Absence of affect.

Explaining Why requires theorizing with Logic about the antecedents of our material universe -- what I call “Reality-Creation.” It preceded the Big Bang, exists in parallel with our material universe, and heavily influences our behavior and its consequences beyond our awareness. It holds sway over the origin and fate of the universe and the meaning of life. Its context is Mind-Love, not spacetime-matter. I use initial caps to set terminology that is of this other Reality apart from the lower case of our un-reality.

The “Child” is the One we were in Reality before the Child lost Consciousness and became the many. While unconscious, it mis-identified with its shadow-reflection, went into a dream state corrupted by its shadow-code, dreamed our un-reality, replicated itself in isolated-separated human bodies, projected the material world detected by their bodies’ senses, and continues to replicate itself within its dream world under the influence of its shadow-reflection. An explanation for all this is the subject of my book-in-progress with the working title, The Story of the Child.

Affect is feeling -- emotional sensitivity. Feeling is value or Worth – things cared for. Gifts with talents the Child was given at birth with which to exercise Free Choice in Creation. Affect is rooted in Mother-Love, the source of all feeling in the Child’s phase of Reality-Creation.

The dis-integration of Love from Mind

The Child has Free Will or Free Choice because the Child is Free Choice, its role in Reality-Creation. In the Child’s phase with Free Choice, the loss of Consciousness produced a dream-world of un-reality where all ideas-thoughts and their associated feelings have opposites. Opposites are the reverse mirror-image shadow-reflection of the Child and all of its values, all of its gifts including its talents.

The code that defines all opposites is derived from the Child’s Being. The code is non-being. Which means it’s insane. Nuts. The appearance of a “system” which is the opposite of system. A system ruled not by laws but by chaos -- arbitrary rule where “rules” apply to everybody but the ruler. The reverse mirror-image of sanity, what we know as the “dark side.” Everyone and everything in our un-reality has a shadow-opposite. A dark side. No exceptions.

What makes the dark side “possible” in the dream state is the separation of Love-feeling from Mind-thought. The marriage between Father Mind / Logic-Choice and Mother Love / Freedom-Creativity not only produced the Child. It’s what holds all the Implications and Interconnections of Reality-Creation together. In our un-reality that integration is gone. Science’s search for a perfectly ordered, perfectly integrated cosmos ended over a century ago and now it’s even giving up on a cosmos that just makes sense. Because it doesn’t. Meanwhile, the judgment we need to manage human affairs, to maintain order in harmony, is equally dis-integrated. It needs to be constantly re-integrated, constantly pieced together, in all our choices.

The Reality-Creation of Consciousness knows nothing of shadows, reflections, or opposites. So, shadow-opposites played no part in the Child’s Conscious exercise of Free Choice in Reality. In un-reality it’s different. “Dark side” shadow-reflections very much represent a choice for us, the unconscious Child’s replications. The choice between Right and wrong, Good and evil, where good values-gifts are the product of Mind integrated with Love-affect and their evil shadow opposites are the product of Mind absent Love-affect. We choose correctly when we discipline our thoughts and feelings, our ideas and values, always to keep Love combined with Mind.

The pussycat “Lord Vader”

One of the traits that distinguish personality types is variation in levels of affect-feeling. In importance attributed to values because feeling is value rooted in Love, the Mother of everything cared for, everything of Worth. What distinguishes character is its values.

Adam Skywalker belonged to a personality type described in Isabel Myers’ Gifts Differing. He “went over to the dark side” because his type’s level of affect-feeling and therefore his character was relatively shallow. Absence of affect-feeling translates to a relatively shallow-weak connection with the Good-positive and therefore a relatively strong susceptibility to, or attraction for, the shadow-negative.

The choice posed by Good-positive – who we are in Reality -- and evil-negative – our shadow in un-reality -- pulls different personality types in different directions. The son Luke Skywalker’s character was relatively deep with feeling-affect, strongly anchored to values, and therefore less susceptible to the attraction of shadow-opposites. The character of Darth Vader – “Dark Father” – was relatively weak with feeling-affect, loosely anchored to values, and therefore more susceptible. Adam Skywalker, who became the mythic “Lord Vader” feared by trembling subordinates, was a personality weakling -- a pussycat. Captives of shadow-reflections can impress with the appearance of strength but their reality is weakness.

Lack of values rooted in affect-feeling translates to a weak or missing internal moral compass. To a weak sense of right vs. wrong -- a lack of conscience. To insensitivity and therefore to predilection for cruelty. What defines the galactic empire and its emperor Palatine as “evil” is an absence of affect-feeling. It’s defined by Mind-thought without Love-value and therefore as character without conscience: insensitive and prone to cruelty. It becomes a universe where harm is done and pain inflicted because it is not felt, because character and values don’t matter.

Guidance from Isabel Myers’ Gifts Differing

Isabel Myers’ Gifts Differing intuits clues from personality types to differences that can account for and predict relative attraction for the dark side. The ESFP type with relatively weak feeling-judgment is a type that, if it’s not disciplined by its social culture, can be misled into shadow-opposites and wrongdoing. It happens to be the type exhibited by the current idol of the Republican party, a body-matter idolater, serial wrong-doer, and a menace to democracy, civilization, and world order. But any type weak on affect-feeling and character-values is a candidate.

My piece about adolescence listed both positive values and their shadow-opposites – the dark side. What an interest in the opposites might indicate about an adolescent’s developing personality type we don’t know. We do know that an ‘S’ (sensing) in preference to an ‘I’ (intuition) would fit an engineer or craftsman working with material objects. Sensing would account, say, for a poem engineered rather than intuited. Intuited, that is, from psyche or soul, from thoughts-feelings stored in humanity’s collective Memory.

We also know that Gifts Differing can help predict choices that different types tend to make and therefore where on balance they may be headed: To promoting humanitarian kindness and freedom (the Jedi Knights) or engaging in inhumane cruelty and oppression (the galactic empire). Definitive conclusions can’t be drawn by outside observers. They can only be drawn by subjects themselves who monitor their personality types – the building of character through their preferences.

While Isabel distinguishes between the light and dark sides the distinction is indirect. It’s implied, for example by reference to “wrongdoing,” inadequate consideration of costs, shallowness, insincerity, and other tendencies. But otherwise her “feeling” doesn’t account for dark side opposites. The difference between thinking (T) and feeling (F) isn’t necessarily what she’s intuited. Nevertheless, the difference is significant and deserves reflection. All of the differences – between introvert-extravert, sensing-intuition, thinking-feeling, and judging-perceptive – are relevant for types’ tendencies toward positive values and their opposites and therefore toward their subjects’ ultimate ending in fulfillment or disappointment.

The turning point: adolescence

Adolescence is a critical phase in establishing these tendencies. It’s the phase when Luke Skywalker committed to the cause of the Jedi Knights after the loss of his foster parents. It’s the phase when his father, Adam, started to part with Obi-Wan, his Jedi trainer, betray the Jedi cause, and go over to the empire. For many, our personal fortunes literally hang in the balance when we are adolescents.

May Affect be with you!

1

Grandeur beyond what we’ve contrived 

The force of human nature, driven by fear and guilt, insists on owning, possessing and controlling everything on earth that isn’t nailed down. Here in Southern California, I often join with others who materialize at dusk to witness something different: the sun setting over the Pacific. Finally, something of value that can’t be nailed down! That human nature, yearning to complete itself, yearning for Love, can’t own, possess or control.

We can only watch grandeur beyond what we’ve contrived pass out of sight into fading belief. An elusive hint of what is ours if only we knew how to hold it. To welcome it, cradle and appreciate it, without getting in the way of it. Is it possible? We hear the Call for Love, and every day we’re drawn to the last of its light. Left to wonder: What does it mean? What have we lost? Where has it gone?

The use our senses were meant for

Any time we’re moved by sentiment
that wells up from a work of art, like a thing seen
heard or apprehended, a sight, sound, or thought
that moves us
 

Anytime we’re transported by feeling
from where we thought we were to somewhere else
that belongs to another moment
that gently, imperceptibly replaces alone with not alone
 

Anytime we feel haunted by Beauty
overcome by the force of its call, captured by a joyous
familiarity we once knew and lost
 

We hear a Call for Love.
A thing that’s always with us but beyond reach
A thing sensed but from a great distance
Experienced but not in the Here and never in the Now.
 

As though all of our senses are put to the use
they were meant for without making a mark
or leaving a trace. A thing unknowable and undetectable.
Yet better known and recognized than anything
we’ve ever known or recognized before
 

Essence so pure, so complete and perfect
in its definition that we’re sure of it,
until we reach out for the Who of it and it’s gone.
The what, where, when, Why, and how of it
 

Slipped away.
The setting Sun we can’t summon back that,
God willing, will come back another day.

What does it mean
that minds are unwilling to change?

It means that they are still in the grip of seduction.
And the habitable planet earth and bodies
with their sensuous and sensual pleasures
and wonders

still suffice to keep minds captive to things
as they are.
Until senses and their pleasures
lose their addictive powers, their hypnotic hold
on our passions, cravings, and dreams,
and dissolve into tears.

It means that minds still occlude the Memory
of Reality that offers the Innocence
of not being taken captive by unreality,
not being parted from Creation, Life, and Truth.

From ourselves -- the Innocence of minds
open to the Life of Discovery, to the pleasures
of Learning and Growth without guilt and fear.

To Worth that isn’t an appearance.
To Purpose and Meaning -- the capacity
to share and be shared, to move and validate
beyond the limits of Self.

--------------------------------------------------------

What does it mean
that minds are unwilling to change?

It means that they exist in paralysis,
estranged from the Force of movement
that gave them Will.
To think, to feel in the moment, alive
to the possibilities.

Willing to be of use
in the great cause of Creation.
The cause of Being, the miracle
and Worth of Mind, Love, and Life.

It means instead of soaring monuments
to the Beauty of Creation they have chosen
to build brick walls lining the pits of hell,
the graveyard of unknowing and stagnation
where they can bury themselves.

This is what it means.

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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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)

Time to think again

Intuition with insights from the Life of Mind explain human experience with clarity and practical resonance. Potentially more so than any other source, because the twists and turns of human thought don’t terminate at the portal we came through to get here. They extend way beyond the “beginning of time” to the portal through which anything and everything must pass. To the Presence that was there in the Now, at the beginning: the rules and definitions that govern what Is and what Isn’t. The ancients called it Logos. I’m OK with “Logic.” Tap into the implications of Logic and they take us a long way.

What follows in “The Lure of Liberty” is a small harvest of fruit that this particular tree bears. Nourishment for minds wanting better answers to questions than the dominant paradigms provide us, from philosophy, psychology, science, and religion. Questions that thwart human progress, because the dominant paradigms are not connecting with our origins, getting our story right. As a species we’re far from connecting with context that supplies purpose and meaning. Far from grasping what our circumstances may be telling us. Because the very source we must turn to for answers, the human mind, has been turned against itself. The very central fact that the dominant paradigms fail to acknowledge. We must come to terms with its implications. We must learn to remove the barriers to Logic and change our mind.

A few modest insights won’t make much difference. But they illustrate a point I hope to make in my book, The Story of the Child: that returning to the roots of philosophy, through the insights of Intuition guided by Logic, can inch us forward. Insights guided by sources from Logic like Jesus and A Course in Miracles, Plato and The Allegory of the Cave, can break through the wall of ambiguity our split minds and bodies’ senses have built. Remove its deceptions and contradictions. Replace its deeply flawed perceptions with perceptions better aligned with Truth and make progress.

By thinking. Not a novel idea. But after science and technology have held the stage, after Hawking declared philosophy “dead” and not only humanity but all of life is imperiled, maybe its time has come. Maybe, with our country facing another civil war, it’s time to get back to business and think again.

Respect for the role of Free Will in Creation

There’s work to be done in Reality and we can’t do it. A job with real purpose and meaning. What’s worse is we’re prevented from doing it by a lie. A deception that our world of appearances has locked in place by our bodies’ senses, by circular self-referential reasoning since bodies themselves are appearances. A manipulation by a virus whose only purpose is to preserve its place in our thoughts. In mind which is a precious gift from our Parents, who Know only Reality and Truth.

Whose concern isn’t our subservience to any cause. To any agenda, any deception or manipulation. It’s to the protection and exercise of the reason, reciprocity, and Free Will that we are. To the part their Child has been blessed with in Reality and Creation: to enable the creation of Life to affirm its own worth, to extend and empower it.

What would the miracle of Creation, of Life, be without Free Will? A thought without an expression. Form without content. Cause without effect. An empty stance of self-proclaimed value. A billboard advertising an idea without a product. A “product” no one has chosen to buy. What is a product worth that has no market? What is it worth if no one in their individual circumstances, their context, has found any application or use for it? If its “market” is forced or deceived into consuming it?

What does it matter that the Child’s Parents are Mind-Reason-Choice married to Love-Creativity-Freedom and their purpose was to birth a Child whose very identity is Free Will? The inborn power and ability to choose freely so that the creation of Life won’t be hollowness without consequence? Empty rhetoric? Sound and fury signifying nothing?

What does it matter that the Child’s Parents are careful not to let their Authority and Knowledge compromise her Free Will? That their reticence is part of the gift, not a withholding? That they are to be thanked for enabling us to learn what we must, as we will, at our own pace, because they must. We are not stamped by their Authority and Knowledge. We are not denied by their reticence, their respect. We are liberated by it.

Is the Child “our guy” or “our girl”?

Who is the “Child”?

She would be the first step in understanding that everything must have a definition. The first incontrovertible law of metaphysics: that we can’t get at Reality without Logic. Because it is Logic that supplies definitions. That determine who or what a thing is and what it’s for. Who or what can break the surface in all of Reality or unreality, Creation or uncreation – in the all-inclusive scope of Everything and nothing – without having a definition slapped on it? When do the purpose and meaning of anything appear without definition? When can the question what Is or Isn’t, or how it came to be or not to be, be answered without Logic? Without definition?

The definition of the Child may or may not be indifferent to gender but language is not. This language insists on masculine or feminine. Jesus, in A Course in Miracles, determined to get us back to Reality, addresses his readers as the “Sonship:” one son with no differences of any kind because our bodies, illusory thinking, and their differences are an illusion. “God” is the “Father.” I don’t have that luxury.

Where the implications of Logic and insights from Intuition have taken me is beyond the scope of the Course. I choose to break with its precedent on gender because the Logic of the Child’s story, before s/he fell under the influence of the ego, seems to require it. Masculinity and femininity may have played a defining role in the Child’s origin and attribute of Free Will. While the Child could be herself or himself, her Parents of my imagination are Father-Mind and Mother-Love. The Logic and definitions of metaphysics are all about attributes, and if the distinction can’t be made in this context – specific attributes assigned to Parents, Child, and their Child’s role in Creation – the story that Logic and Intuition have woven together in my telling can’t be told.

The precedent I hope never to break is with Logic itself, the authenticity of the Course and my reason for keeping faith with it. So let me add that the Course is modern Gnostic Christianity, and the Child imagined by the Valentinian Gnostics, in the second century, was Sophia. Whose role in the “fall” is not unlike that of the Son in the Course. We chase down the same explanation, and it matters not whether the central figure is our guy or our girl.

We are not our Parents

The Child is who we are in the before-after sequence of Logic: before she lost consciousness, when she lived as Mind in Reality where it is always Now, and after she lost consciousness, when she dreamed an unreality as brains encased in bodies, in an environment of spacetime and matter where it is never Now. The after-Child is us. Though we in our bodies are but a projection of a dreaming mind. Sharing Life-Being with our Parents in Reality but unaware of it, because their Child is unconscious and we are but figures in the dream, living unreal lives, thinking unreal thoughts.

Unaware that the Child shares Life-Being with her Parents in Reality for another reason: because an event is buried in the Child’s Memory, in our collective Memory, and is unknown to us. The event that shut down consciousness, knocked out its power. That preceded the event that lured the Child into an alternate reality of carnival funhouse mirrors. A substitute “home” whose attributes are the exact opposite of her real Home.

The Child is an extension of her Parents, Mind married to Love. Yes, in Reality we are Mind. We are Love. But the Child is not her Parents. Cannot be. And hers is not their role in Creation.

She’s Innocent! And so are we.

What she is also emphatically not is guilt deserving of punishment for having lost consciousness. Nowhere in the Logic of why and how this happened in Reality can a case be made that either Parents or Child engineered the event outside the limits of Logic. Assumptions to the contrary are projections by ego-corrupted minds, themselves steeped in guilt, as we all are. Not by the loss of consciousness but by the activation of the ego shadow code that came after, when the Child was not in her right mind.

Pursuing the Truth through Logic to establish the Child’s Innocence can have important consequences: for our ability to follow our guides who teach forgiveness, like Jesus in A Course in Miracles, and for our awakening. It’s a story worth telling and I hope to make a contribution, logically, in my book, The Story of the Child.

Reclaiming the purpose and meaning of Life

We aren’t performing any role in Creation now because the Child who imagines us is unconscious. Asleep and dreaming a dream of unreality. An illusion of appearances meant to deceive. Meant to locate a falsehood and its source within Child-mind and keep it there. An agent of unreality and untruth whose only purpose is the preservation of the dream, to keep the Child unconscious and us in its thrall.

The master of Plato’s Cave. The ego whose origin in the Child’s psyche is explained by Jesus in the Course. A viral shadow code – non-being – that tricked the Child, unconscious and defenseless, into listening to it. Into choosing to follow it because it had a message the Child, in her defenselessness and disorientation, her nightmare of sin, guilt, and fear, was desperate to hear. Into following it where only a lie could lead, into the insanity of separation. Into chaos ungoverned and ungovernable. Into Energy encased in matter, split minds encased in bodies, all of it entrapped in entropy destined for inertia.

Lies can be undone. Minds tricked into dreaming nonsense can awaken. Can heal the illusory separation. The Child with Free Will can choose again. What then is the lie? Where is Reality? Where is Truth? Where is our Home and how can we get back to it? What happened to our purpose, the meaning of Life? How can we reclaim it? How can we awaken?

Logic is empowerment as well as protection.

Logic – Logos -- is definition and governs by definition. By defining the meaning, nature, character, and scope of things. “Definition” is DE- + finis, the Latin word meaning “boundary, limit.” To “define” implies confinement: boundaries that put limits on freedom, mobility, autonomy. Built into the meaning, nature, character, and scope of everything that Is. Nothing in Reality-Creation can Be without the boundaries, the limits, of their definitions.

Definition is the essential instrument of Logic. Without definition Logic would be cause without effect. Definition is the bar code on every product of Reality-Creation and every self that went into and came out of its Creation. The label that identifies it and certifies its legitimacy, its belonging to Reality-Creation. That signifies that it’s Real.

Nothing in Reality-Creation can Be without designation by Logic of who or what it is, what it is for, and what it does. The “nature” of a thing is its Logic. Logic is identification: it defines who and what self is. Identification is self’s authority. The Logic of a Life that defines who or what it is is its authority to do what it does, to perform its function in Creation. Logic is authority that limits who or what self is, what-when-where self can do, and how self can do it, by defining and identifying it. Logic authorizes acceptance into Reality of the works of Creation, its new lives, the extension of Being, and the functions they were given by definition to perform.

The authority of Logic empowers new Lives, new selves. Logic is empowerment as well as protection. It is self’s login ID that gains entry into Reality. Logic’s definitions not only cover who or what self is that authorizes belonging to the community of Being; it also animates who or what self is. To act in service to the function implied by who or what self is.

Logic governs by managing roles and relationships in service to the shared purpose defined by Logic: Creation and reciprocation of the worth of Being-Life. Logically, without conflict or contradiction among identities or functions. Without opposites colliding that’s impossible in Reality but defines unreality, the state of mind that’s corrupted by the viral shadow of ego non-being. The Logic of Logic, its own definition-purpose, is the absence of contradiction: Peace, Truth, and Sanity. The gift of reason, the gift of rationality. The Logic of governance is the same: harmony within the diversity of Creativity, the gift of rationality.

The dual function of Logic’s authority

The context in Reality governed by Logic is the exact opposite of the Child’s context in unreality, where the ego’s promise of “freedom” from the confinement of definitions, from Logic’s authority, led her not to harmony but to chaos. It was a subterfuge: that there is another reality where definitions don’t have boundaries – an absurdity. Where the necessity, the authority of Logic, doesn’t rule and definitions aren’t needed – more absurdity. Where the Child overcome by fear, desperate to get rid of guilt, can attain unlimited possession and control of her gifts -- freedom, empowerment, and abundance. Perverted into license to do whatever she wants, control rather than adapt to her environment, and hoard rather than share wealth. Another reality where the Child can get rid of guilt and escape.

The trick’s power to deceive derives from the dual-function of Logic’s authority: definition-limit with boundary and protection-empowerment with boundary. With a sleight of hand the ego directed the Child’s attention toward define-limit in its open left hand and away from protect-empower in its closed right hand. It was a direct and deeply sinister assault on Logic. On Logos. On God. And it succeeded, which is why we are here. In the Child’s unconscious mind, her abilities disempowered, Logic was rendered meaningless, making it susceptible to its perversion by ego non-being.

Repeating the Child’s signature mistake

What was accomplished by the sleight of hand, the deception in its essence, was a misconception of Truth combined with mis-direction from Truth. A lie combined with avoidance of the Truth. The dynamic of delusion that corrupts the human mind, split between good and evil, and compromises every field of human inquiry including ethical philosophy. Distraction by the body and the lie, avoidance of Mind and the Truth. At one stroke the Child not in her right mind was drawn toward an illusion, a lie, and chose a guide to lead her there.

The Child’s desperation for escape to an alternate reality implied belief in it. It was thus the original act of her unconscious mind, the archetypal belief in contradictory realities, one real, the other unreal:

• that accepted the illusory ego shadow code’s offer to be the Child’s guide to a magical alternate reality.
• that invested belief in the magical alternate reality and thus activated it, our world where, in the words of the Course, “the unreal is made real.”
• that characterizes human thought within the dream, a continuous replication of the Child’s signature mistake: making unreality real, keeping the ego shadow code and its insane dream “alive,” legitimizing its guidance, listening to it, following it.

Melvin Furd in his glory

The shadow code’s response to the Child’s plea was, Sure, there’s someplace else. I can take you there. Follow me. “Someplace else” is a fantasy, the opposite of Reality-Creation. An illusion of facades and pretense. Chaos characterized by absurdities, contradictions and their collisions. A veritable Large Hadron Collider in slow motion. Where every attribute of Creation is turned inside-out and upside-down, reversed and perverted, turned against shared purpose, against itself: “life” imagined as death.

The distinction between Logic-Heaven and ego-hell is the distinction between Order and chaos. The fatal misperception of Freedom is that it’s possible without Order, without the discipline of Logic that governs the roles and relationships of Reality-Creation in a state of harmony. Part of the grand illusion of separation that turned dream into nightmare, Heaven into hell. Once again, it was Logic’s own authority that gave the trick its power to deceive, the dual function of boundary: definition-limit and protection-empowerment. That gave an ego-corrupted mind an opening to project its lies onto Logic-authority. Cloaked in the defense of “liberty,” when in Reality it’s a direct assault on Liberty. A taking of Freedom, not its giving.

What had been the sharing and reciprocation of abundance, empowerment, and affirmation, a celebration of worth and thankfulness, the purity of Reality, was now a toxic brew of possession by taking, control by dominance, confinement by manipulation of appearances, worthlessness by invalidation and ingratitude. What had been radiant and fragrant was now putrefaction, the waste of inverted self-interest. The stench of selfishness warped by wealth and power into Gollum, a pathetic, misshapen frenzy of human greed, conquest, and depravity. Into specialness, a wild fantasy of violation of shared purpose, of Innocence, of Being-Life, all with the seed of guilt. The ultimate perversion: Oneness, expanding Creation, contracted into littleness. The Logic of Everything displaced by nothing. The grand poseur, Melvin Furd, in his glory atop the throne of God.

Specialness withheld: the original conspiracy theory

All of it literally mis-guided. By nothing more than a viral shadow code. A foolish delusion that has no life of its own. That distracted an unconscious, defenseless mind with false promises and will, one day, finally, be ignored. Mis-guided by mis-characterization of the shared purpose of Reality-Creation, a gift to the Child of happiness as well as affirmation of worth. A sanctuary of shared peace and protection, Love and belonging, trust and Intimacy. Of Innocence and empowerment, spontaneity, joyfulness, playfulness, song, and laughter.

It is not and cannot be the gift of shared Oneness. The Innocence and Knowing of Oneness, of Consciousness, the Child’s Parents, and the function of their Child, Free Choice -- the exploration of possibilities into the unknown, that include the possibility of unconsciousness and dreams of unreality -- do not mix. The relationship between Parents and Child is essential to Creation and remains unbroken in Reality. Yet these two attributes are incompatible by definition. So illogical together that combining both on the same plane of Creation, inadvertently, may account for the Child’s loss of Consciousness. Inquiring into how and why this could have happened is the purpose of my book, The Story of the Child.

The mischaracterization that corrupts the shared purpose of Reality-Creation is the sanctuary’s denial of specialness. The gift of shared Oneness that could not be given. And so ego-corrupted minds, craving specialness, looking for trouble, fantasize that it was a gift deliberately withheld. The original conspiracy theory.

We are the heroes

Another excuse for hating – what else? Logic. For hating – what else? Reality and Truth. For hating God. The seed bed in the human psyche for the plague of irrationality and insurrection that grips our politics today. The nurseries from The Thing (1951) and Alien that incubate monsters out to destroy us.

And who came to the rescue? Us. Captain Pat Hendry and Ellen Ridley saw to the monsters’ end. It took some thinking. It took courage and a lot of effort. But they figured it out. No “saviors” were on hand to bail them out. And therein lies the message. We are the heroes. The answers we seek lie within our own minds, and this is where we must go.

Specialness is a logical impossibility

The supposed denial of specialness resonates so deeply with the wounded Psyche of the Child that it may continue bleeding grievances, resentments, and conspiracy theories until the Child awakens. Until the end of time. Yet it is entirely false. The Child’s role in Reality-Creation requires that she be aware that she cannot be or act as Oneness. This is logically neither who she is nor what she does. She must be aware of possibilities, the possibility of unconsciousness and its illusory opposites that the Innocence of Oneness cannot and must not bring to Consciousness.

That she was not aware in Reality could explain her loss of consciousness. But why was she not aware? This is the question that insights from Intuition, guidance from Memory – Logic, – need to answer. If character and Innocence matter, and they do. This is the question addressed in my book, The Story of the Child.

The Innocence of Oneness cannot and must not bring the possibility of unconsciousness and its illusory opposites to Consciousness because it is Consciousness that welcomes the thoughts of Mind, the gifts of Creation, into Reality. It is Knowledge that by Knowing realizes. Consciousness that by definition does not and cannot Know anything of illusory-unreal opposites. Purity and Innocence that by definition can Know nothing of impurity and guilt. The inward-looking Self-awareness of Oneness, the seed of Creation that contains Everything, that by definition can Know nothing of anything outside itself. Because, by definition, there is nothing outside of itself.

Does the Child really want Consciousness -- her Parents -- to admit her nightmare of appearances, misery, death, and hell into Heaven? Could specialness, if it were an attribute of the Child as conspiracy theorists want, really be compatible with the shared purpose of Reality-Creation? With the miracle of eternal Life?

The idol of the right: “almighty god” who does whatever he wants

The Child’s acceptance of the ego’s sinister offer of guidance is rationalized by the lie that Oneness-specialness was her birthright. That wrathful Parents bent on her punishment for separating from them deprived her of it. That it was their taking it from her that caused her unconsciousness. Unconsciousness that she may have experienced as expulsion from her home in Reality, from her sanctuary of happiness in Creation.

To an ego-corrupted mind the real calamity of unconsciousness, the result of an inadvertence, would then be misconstrued as an imagined offense: unfair exclusion from Heaven. A deliberate wound to the heart, to their worth. A myth straight out of the story of the Child, corrupted by the ego, that thrives in our Ghost Busters political culture populated by internetted social media demons. That motivates the right, from January 6th insurrectionists to latter-day Ayn Rand “objectivists.” Grieving over the birthright of Oneness-specialness that was stolen from them along with their property. Over their unfair exclusion from the society of “winners,” the special-elite privileged with their exclusive entitlements.

The ego’s misshapen myths are the consequence not of Logic’s deliberate mismanagement of Reality-Creation but of its laws of cause and effect. Of the necessity of Authority’s definitions of what a self must be and what it can do. Of what’s logically possible and what’s not. Projections of ego-corrupted irrational minds pervert what’s possible by Logic-definition and shared Purpose into what’s allowed by an arbitrary authority that’s taking-possessing and controlling-dominating. By a self-absorbed self-interest just like them. By what they misperceive as an “almighty god,” unbound by Logic, who does whatever he wants. This is what the ego shadow code aspires to be. This is who its followers imagine they are.

More ego-insanity: the Child’s stolen right to dictate

Non-being shadow code, the angel of death, is the arch-enemy of Free Will, enabler of Life. If there is one one talent that the ego does not possess it would be Free Choice. Manipulating the unconscious Child into parting with her gift would be its first priority. Free Choice among the Child or any of her progeny poses a terminal threat to the outlandish fabrications of unreality. The thrust of any inquiry, any argument, toward asking Why would automatically separate mind from servility, the condition of mindless obedience to authority that rules Plato’s Cave.

So, when the Child was lured into the dream away from Reality-Truth, it was with the lie that her right to dictate without the necessity of Free Choice was taken from her. That she should be able to Create Life as Oneness-Consciousness – as God -- by simply Knowing. And thus was born, in the Child’s Psyche, the authoritarian streak that recoils from governance by free choice managed by Logic. That’s drawn toward concentrations of authority in autocrats who can dictate “order” without sharing it democratically. With the support of subjects who don’t object to their powerlessness because they share power vicariously through their Cave-master guides. Because their worth receives its affirmation from superficial entertainments even though they’ve surrendered their sovereignty, their souls.

Where does all this madness come from?

The essential attribute of evil is mindlessness. Which, since Logic and Feeling, Mind and Love, are inseparable, also means lifelessness, lovelessness, and thoughtlessness -- all that the absence of these elements of Reality-Creation imply.

The essential motivation behind the assault on Logic-Order, on behalf of the ego’s malign defense of “liberty,” is not the protection of Free Will but its surrender. To an entirely unreal, illogical, mythical “higher power” that’s nothing of the sort. To an imposter, shadow code’s non-being posing as the master of Plato’s Cave. Whose hapless occupants are held not in a paradise of “liberty” but in an authoritarian hell of captivity. Duped by numbers, by the appearance of belonging to a group, into fantasizing that they’re serving a larger cause. When all they serve is an illusion: their master’s authority. The tyranny of a delusion wielded by a bizarre figment of corrupted imaginations: a very self-centered, very unreal, specialness.

The fallacy of right-wing authoritarian politics

Republicans, fearing that they were a permanent minority, sought the advice of consultants around a century ago. Their advice: give up trying to attract the majority with reason. Forget about truth. Appeal instead to irrationality and tell voters whatever they want to hear.

The result? Unimagined success! Republicans discovered to their delight that many voters, captives to ego-myths of specialness denied and victimhood, would rather vote their grievances and resentments than any calculus of benefits and costs. They would rather retaliate against their tormenters, “elites” who deny their birthright to specialness. Would rather enact a grand reckoning of justice than govern. Tie their fortunes to the madness of a victim just like them, even if it takes down Democracy, their country, even peace.

So compelling is this irrational nonsense that it filled Plato’s Cave to overflowing, with millions of occupants pledged to the defense of its master at any cost. Convinced that loyalty to a “higher power” puts them on the side of good. That the power of the Cave master is shared with them when, in truth, it was stolen from them. What Republicans learned to their delight was that minds already duped by lies will fight fiercely to defend them. That making unreality real isn’t on the margins of society; it’s the force that drives human irrationality.

Irrationality carried now to dangerous extremes, unhinged from Reality and sanity. Denying climate change. Threatening yet another Civil War. A state not of passive alienation from shared purpose but of active, deliberate insurrection. Against our only means of community – shared purpose. And in service to what? To a lie: a perverse defense of “liberty” that’s hard at work taking it away.

Changing minds without drinking the hemlock

What’s the answer? Jesus says, in A Course in Miracles, that all our Father asks of us is that we show a little willingness to change our minds. In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave an enlightened one, modeled after Socrates, offered help. He tried to part the occupants from their delusions. His reward was hemlock. Minds can change. Desperately need to be changed. The dominant paradigms are ripe for change. But we must know what we’re doing. Choose the right Guide and ask for help. Access Intuition. Align thinking with Logic. Stop the madness and give it some thought.

Follow Logic into the Story of Mind by understanding three basic facts:

• Logic moves forward by implication. That is, by what points imply. Grasping implications requires reflection, a function of Intuition which expands into different ways of looking at things which, in turn, yield different possibilities. A source of Creativity which never ends because the implications of Logic never end.
• What is not Reality-Good must be its exact opposite. To define unreality which is non-being / not-good, simply reverse the attributes of Reality-good. These are the lies that need to be undone.
• We change individual minds with universal truths. There is no “universal mind” in our fractious unreal world of separation to change with any truth. The occupants of Plato’s Cave are individuals their master would possess and control as a group. They are not a group and cannot be approached as a group.

Choose by exercising Free Will:

• Make logical connections by using reason, a function of Thinking, which provides one of three main foundations for choice: measurement of benefits and costs.
• Use evaluation, a function of Feeling, to weigh and compare the value of benefits and costs..
• Use judgment, a function of Order and Authority, to establish purpose and meaning from context, the third, critical foundation. Which allows analysis to integrate every consideration under one. The one that’s most important. The controlling consideration that makes a statement who we are and what we’re about: our thinking, our values, our character. The one that decides.

God bless and have at it!

The logical case for science giving up its illogical insistence that matter is real begins with this: it judges all that sensory perception detects to be measurable and therefore real. Plato held that what is Real is not the object but the idea or thought of it. He thereby took the locus of determination outside of matter, where it did not belong, and placed it within Mind where it did belong. He did so not on the basis of “verifiable” scientific experimentation but on the basis of Logic. He was a “rationalist,” a philosopher who trusted Reason to guide him to Reality and Truth.

Yet he believed in the reality of the material cosmos – the inspiration of what he perceived to be an expression of the Divine. Had he reconciled this belief with his doubt that the uninspiring human body and its material trappings could also be real he might have followed sensory perception into the study of matter. He might even have done so with some of the passion he devoted to Mind.

Aristotle’s paradigm shift away from Plato’s rationalism toward science, the belief that the study of matter, the stuff of sensory perception, can lead to Reality and Truth, was not, as science would have us believe, a categorical renunciation of Plato’s Logic nor of its theories. It was simply an acknowledgement that they couldn’t be proven. While sensory perception, with its access to plants and animals and the like, does offer a kind of “proof” for the theories of science.

While neither Plato nor Aristotle could go anywhere with the belief that the reality of an object lay in the thought of it, or with Plato’s hesitation over its unreality, both were in agreement that Mind is nevertheless Real. Both were therefore in agreement that an object did not depend for its reality on its being perceived by the body’s senses. Why? Because Mind does not depend for its Reality on being perceived by the body’s senses. Science that would have us believe that only that which can be thus perceived is provably real contradicts the reality of Mind. Contradicts the source of all of science’s contributions to the “quest for knowledge”: Mind. Contradicts itself, the minds of scientists who engage in self-referential thinking, the absurd notion that bodies that belong to the same material environment, subject to identical “laws” of science, can objectively judge its reality.

Hawking’s “quest for knowledge” belongs in quotes because, with circular reasoning, we must acknowledge that even with sensory perception to guide science we can never truly “know” anything. We can perceive it, but perception is perception. It is, in fact, not even the body’s senses that make perception but the psychological act of projection. We are a long way from objects telling us anything about themselves but their appearances, and appearances are deceiving. In fact, this may well be their main purpose: to deceive, and science that puts its faith in appearances may be its willing victim.

To approach Knowledge of our Self and the environment that is our true Home – our origin and our destination – is to fall back on the Intuition, the reflections and thoughts, of the rationalist Plato for guidance. To fall back on Logic, because the body and its ally science, that conveniently ignores the immateriality of Mind, is leading us in circles. To the behavior of matter – quantum mechanics – that calculates to perfection but doesn’t add up.

What happened to the celebrity of Einstein and the promise of physics: the theory of everything? This was to be the crowning achievement of Aristotle’s instinct. It disappeared and along with it the fanfare of physics. We continue on with the labors of science, breaking new ground in other fields, still refusing to accept the Logic of Mind that Reality need not and does not depend on the sensate body. Science that lionizes the truth refuses to face fact. Science that prides itself on the intellectual rigor of its theories and their predictions, on impeccable Logic, accepts blatant contradiction. Science that purges itself of religious and political bias indulges in its own institutional bias worthy of the Church.

In science we aren’t dealing with an expression of Plato’s or Aristotle’s ideals. We’re dealing with a perversion of a rationalist’s ideal of the highest and best use of Mind: to seek Reality and Truth by whatever means that meet the test of Logic.

It is time, over a century since Bohr and the Copenhagen Interpretation acknowledged it, for science and philosophy both to turn to Logic. To acknowledge that the simultaneous reality of two opposing states – Mind not-matter and matter not-mind – does not meet the test of Logic. To acknowledge that between Mind and matter, the opposite matter can’t be real. To assume otherwise is to contradict Plato and Aristotle and declare that Mind is not Real.

There will always be much to learn from the study of matter, but finding Reality and the Truth behind appearances isn’t it. The “quest for knowledge” must turn back in earnest to Plato and his unfinished philosophy. To Logic.

Does all this make me a doubter of science, a denier? My prayers at weekly prayer meetings in my youth invariably concluded with appeals to God for special consideration, not on my behalf but on behalf of scientists. And for this I was teased. My concern about their performance is motivated by admiration, not animosity. I do not wish to weaken their intellectual, cultural, or political support but to strengthen it. To make their heroic work less vulnerable to attack from their unthinking doubters, not more so. If my views appear to put me in the company of the opposition, I am the loyal opposition. I want science and its “quest for knowledge” to succeed, not to fail.

So, No, I am not a denier, nor am I an enemy of Democracy. I am a fan of both who understands that Free Choice cannot endure without the Free Spirit of Inquiry. We just have to get it right.

Logos: . . . human reasoning about the cosmos. . . Identified with God, it is the source of all activity . . . the power of reason . . the word of God, which itself has creative power and is God’s medium of communication with the human race. . . divine wisdom . . . .

Logic: . . . Valid reasoning. . . The relationship between elements and between an element and the whole in a set of objects, individuals, principles, or events. . . .

[American Heritage Dictionary]

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The Interconnectedness of Logic

Everything and nothing are subject to Logic including Mind. Everything and nothing are conditions that have attributes not necessarily in Reality or unreality, but in Logic.

Logic is its own state governed by its own rules, by its own conditions and their attributes. Enforced by its own authority, Energy. It is its own source, authority, and legitimacy. What it is and what it does are one in the same: implications.

Follow the money –Deep Throat’s advice to Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward when they were unraveling a notorious political cover-up for the Washington Post that would end a U.S. administration. Advice that turned up answers because they were interconnected by the coherence and cohesion of Logic.

There is no question, no place, no self in Mind or no-Mind, in Reality or unreality, that cannot be positioned somewhere in this interconnectedness and set in motion forward toward the premises, hypotheses, and predictions of theories that are Logic’s own guidance. It is, and cannot be by its own Logic, subject to guidance, influence, or control from any source outside of itself. In the context of Logic there are no “others” and no opposites of Logic in a state of opposites, for even illogic has its Logic: the conditions, attributes, and implications of not being Logic.

The Energy and Discipline of Logic

The Energy of Logic flows from implications and interconnections never being at rest, never being finished, never not being in motion forward. From Energy at the “beginning,” in timelessness, the start of the sequence of Logic, when the state of statelessness could not rest without yielding to its opposite, the state of Mind-Being. The Oneness of Mind-Being is eternally at rest, but being the seed of Creation its Logic required events that led to eternal unrest: the marriage of the Child’s Parents, Mind with Love, and the Child’s role in Creation with Free Will. It was Freedom of Choice that logically could not remain at rest within Oneness. It was the Logic of Creation and the Child’s role in it that brought forth the state of opposites.

The Energy of Logic follows it everywhere throughout the state of opposites:

* from the Reality, Creations, Life, Light, and Worth of the Child’s Consciousness and Creativity, which yield to the essence, purity, and beauty of their Logic

* to the illogic of their opposites, the unreality of destruction, death, darkness, and worthlessness of mindlessness, non-being, inertia, and fear, attributes of unconsciousness.

While Logic is employed by Mind for Mind’s stance of Being, it is not controlled by anything. Logic is its own discipline because it is discipline: the discipline of attributes, implications, and their interconnections. The discipline of definition. It is its own Being because its implications and interconnections are everywhere and infinite. There can be no end to how “deep” and how “far” they go because they are their own context, their own universe. They can “exist” with equal force in the infinity of timelessness – in the eternal Now – and in the temporality of past and future, with only a “present” that can’t be a Now.

Logic is in Mind but of itself, its own state whose scope, whose reach, extends beyond Mind and its state of Being, Oneness, Reality, Creation, Worth, and their illusory opposites to the separation between Mind and no-mind – statelessness -- that is no illusion. To the seed of Energy, the eternal restlessness of Inquiry, the singularity, the Logical origin and sequencing of everything from one point to the next: Logic.

The Logic and Illogic of Separation

Separation between statelessness and its opposite, Mind-Being, can be no illusion because the state of opposites has two dimensions: one the context of the Child’s part in Parent-Mind’s Reality-Creation which exists side-by-side with the possibility of unconsciousness and its illusion of unreality and dream of untruth – our material world. The other lies beyond Reality-Creation with an entirely different possibility from the beginning: the seminal possibility of statelessness, of no mind, no being, that aroused the power of Logic, its Energy, to produce its opposite.

So, while it is true, as Jesus teaches in A Course in Miracles, that separation is not Real within the Child’s context of Reality-Creation, in the sequence of events that preceded the Child, separation of a kind, between the Mind that produced Reality-Creation and the possibility of its opposite, had to be Real. Real not in the sense of Reality as a part of Creation but as a part of Logic.

There are many “separations” within the interconnectedness of Logic that are no more than definitions that distinguish rather than separate. Distinctions between the Selves of Reality Creations -- Father Mind and Mother Love, Parents and Child, Child and his living Creations. Distinctions between the thoughts of a Child-Mind that’s Conscious and a Child-mind that’s unconscious. All combined in one state of Mind by the interconnectedness of Logic.

Outside of Reality-Creation, the state that preceded it and exists beyond it, separation is more than a distinction. It has actual possibilities, not merely unreal possibilities, and is therefore consequential. Because everything and the only thing that connects opposites is the fact that they are opposites. Is the link established through the implications of Logic and their interconnections. Is the Logic – “Logos” – that ties everything together. The tying-of-everything-together that may be the notion of “God.”

“God” at Peace and War

“God” may be a synonym for the Child’s Parents Mind-Love in Reality-Creation, though “Parents” will suffice. I have avoided the notion of “God” but acknowledge it now because I have experienced a “felt perception of the interconnectedness of things.” It was spontaneous, un-premeditated, with only one other experience, a long time ago, to prepare me for it. It was of mind and feeling in an abstract way but also deeply personal, intimate. The Logic of intimacy is something very precious that is forever. Like being touched by Love. Who has not felt it at some time in their lives? Who does not want to feel it?

I riff. “God” may be the Force that comes from not being at rest, that endlessly seeks Order: Perfection, Resolution, Peace – the whole number value of Pi. That seeks wholeness, harmony, unity. Force-Energy at the beginning that couldn’t be at rest with the condition of statelessness, that was caused by the logically untenable, illogical condition of statelessness that required resolution, inevitably led to the state of opposites with the birth of the Child with Freedom of Choice and a central role in Creation.

God-Logos seeking Order-resolution thus produced not only eternal irresolution-competition but a second source of Energy: from friction between opposites. An attribute of disorder, of irresolution and its unrest, is constant, eternal Force-Energy, of a Will toward resolution and rest without friction, without competition and conflict. The Will of God-Logos may be eternally toward Peace. Yet the ultimate source of conflict-unrest may also be a God-Logos of Peace and Order not being at Peace, being in opposition to the condition of statelessness, of no Mind-Being, unable logically to be at rest with it. God-Logos in opposition to itself: the Will to Peace whose Logic eventually produced the state of opposites. The state of eternal conflict.

The Dark Matter of Science and the Allegory of Plato’s Cave

Plato’s philosophy ended before it could be finished. It ran into a contradiction in his Logic: the unreality of body-matter versus the reality of cosmos-matter. Parmenides, his mentor, saw no contradiction: all appearances are illusory. But Plato's pupil, Aristotle, took thought in another direction. He moved Plato’s inquiry off the attributes and implications of Mind onto the attributes and implications of matter. It was a momentous, historic shift, for philosophy that was to guide Western thought ever since moved away from Reason onto the study of biology and a beginning in science. To science’s “quest for knowledge,” guided by the body’s senses: the Logic of sensory perception that at once enlightens us and confuses us. That ultimately condemns us to captivity in the darkness of Plato’s Cave.

An inquiring and honest mind confused by matter will make a mistake in Judgment. But in its consequences science’s faith in the body’s senses is anything but a harmless mistake. Far from living up to its promise, it’s produced an atrocity: mass extinction. In the darkness of Plato’s Cave we bring our children and grandchildren into an expiring world.

How long must this go on?

* Until the thread of Plato’s inquiry into the Logic of Mind is picked up again by philosophy and pursued with serious intent.

* Until science’s “quest for knowledge” is freed from its illogical premise: the reality of matter.

* Until Logic is re-established in the affairs of a species intent on its own destruction because it chooses to be guided by a substitute illusory self that has no Memory of Logic or the wish to retrieve it.

* Until humanity that lives by an impossibility, the belief that we are bodies disconnected and isolated, each of us our own singularity, our own specialness, authors of our own truths, rulers of our delusional worlds, gives up the insane belief that by abandoning the limits of Logic we achieve Freedom.

Insanity – the Logic of illogic: equating opposites. The “logic” of our delusions that equate captivity with Freedom. Pain with pleasure, suffering and death with Happiness and Life. That equate matter, that can only be a projection of Mind unconscious, with Reality that can only be a Creation of Mind that’s Conscious. Matter, that can only be an appearance in a dream - a façade, a deceit -- with Truth.

Our world beset by entropy plunges forward with technology that pits one against another while there is yet to be seen any movement toward unity in our minds. Any glimmer, any hope, of sanity. Aristotle’s paradigm shift has run its course in one branch of science, quantum mechanics, that openly questions the reality of matter. Is it not time to ask: what will lead us out of Plato’s Cave? How do we awaken?

The Way Home Is Logic

Follow the Logic. Start with the attributes of our circumstances – the facts. Reflect on their implications and let their interconnections carry us forward. Never mind wishes and fears, the lures and distractions of entertaining thoughts, the seductive pleasures of sensations and feelings, the satisfactions of ownership and investment in the foolishness and corruption of “wealth” and “power.” Be done with the allure of opposites, appearances and deceptions that offer self-gratification and deliver nothing of Worth. Be done with the losing of “winning,” the ruination of relationships meant to share and empower with Truth, that succumb instead to the delusion of possession and control.

Everything I have is who I am. The Child of Parents Mind married to Love. Free Will. This is the Truth. Not what this world of matter tells us. Not what we have “learned” in Plato’s Cave: “Everything I am is what I have.” An object possessed and controlled. No wonder our world is a descent into self-devouring self-interests! No wonder we can’t “win” for losing! No wonder we can’t think!

Follow the Logic. Turn to the side of Mind governed by Logic that employs Logic. That’s married to Love and would never deviate from the caring, the sharing and empowerment of its values, its Worth. It will take us home.

Where can Logic be found? What is Memory for? That’s where it can be found: in Intuition. What is Mind for that isn’t cluttered with the daily busy-ness of the brain? That’s where Logic can be found: in Thinking. In what thinking does: Reasoning.

Who says so? Our own Minds say so. Who will lead its occupants out of Plato’s Cave? They will. With their own native ability to Think. With Logic.

Memory

The Peace that we all crave
Can be found in one place

In the Memory

Of who we really are, that we all share
That resides within our Mind
That will guide us Home if we will let it.

The Story of the Child is the Story
That our Memory wants us all to know
What our Memory wants to tell us

Because it’s our Story

Our connection to Reality, Truth
And the meaning of Life
Because it’s our Path

That will lead us Home

The chaos of our universe that violates Logic and upsets Order
The appearances, the deceptions that violate the Truth
Don’t just hit us in our minds, our psyches.
They are a gut punch.

An offense to our integrity that’s literally nauseating
That demands a determined response that makes it clear to the perpetrator:
This is not acceptable.

The perpetrator is us.
And the response that’s demanded isn’t force in kind
That can only validate and perpetuate the offense –
Another attack, another projection of guilt –
But the force, the Logic, of Discipline.

A decisive act of Mind, of Will, that will strip the offense of its false premises
By shifting belief to the Truth
By not seeing what is not there to seeing what is there.
By letting go our addiction to lures that trap us
In an endless cycle of offense, victimhood, condemnation, and retribution.

Appearances are not real.
Victimhood is not Innocence.

What is truly “victimizing” is the gut punch we deliver to ourselves
When we take the lure and allow ourselves to be misled into a cycle of self-destruction.
When we allow lies to deprive us
Of our integrity, our identity, our sovereignty, our Worth.

None of it is necessary or inevitable.
Let skepticism and fatalism be the albatross
Around the neck of what isn’t true instead of what is true.

All it takes is an opening of mind, a change of mind.
All it takes is a simple exercise of Reason
That will restore real Freedom, the Freedom to choose
To choose our own Purpose, our own destiny.

Instead of submitting passively to the dictatorship of appearances
To the convenience of arbitrary circumstances that permit us to “exist”
Until one day they don’t.
Until we learn the hard way that “chance” is another purpose
That does not wish us well.

Purpose that is ours is ours for the asking.
All it takes is the right choice:
Between Reason and mindlessness.
Between Discipline and a pair of fuzzy dice.

Which will it be?

David C. Harrison
June 15, 2020
https://davidclarkharrison.com

Five words express thoughts and feelings that I believe are among the most important to humanity. Four of these are Love, Reason, Intuition, and Worth.

What I want to share on my website, with you, is what I try to share in all my personal relationships, especially with children. It is a truth that stands up to the deception that says that I am my body, my body is insignificant littleness, and my destiny is to die and disappear into nothingness. I believe the truth is the opposite: Worth that is not only a thought but also a feeling, that I not only have worth from its Source, I am Worth. I am not my body.

My true Worth is a gift that can never be taken away because it is who I am. I cannot help but share it with children because we are all children of the same Source, because who we are is also what we do, sharing our Worth that is shared with us by our Source, by Worth itself.

Love, Reason, and Intuition that lead us to our Worth lead us to the fifth word: Happiness. Everything we have is who we are: Worth that leads us to Happiness if we will let it, if we choose every day to follow it. For it must be chosen of our own free will.

What I try to share with children, with all my brothers and sisters, is the abundance given to me, my Worth, and the choice Love, Reason, and Intuition would have me make, every day, to follow where it leads us all, to peace, truth, and sanity – to Happiness.

The ultimate purpose of my writing is to share Worth from its Source. It’s to share the truth about the Child we are, whose Worth, whose Happiness, was hidden from us by an event that our ego-corrupted minds have misrepresented and covered over with guilt. The truth that we separate ourselves from is Mind that is Innocent -- the Child’s and ours.

Little rational thought has been given to what caused the Child to lose consciousness before he supposedly lost his innocence and dreamed up this world. The purpose of the very modest contribution I hope to make, to metaphysics and ontology, is to help remedy this. With guidance from Love, Reason, Intuition, and Worth, these thoughts might help to undo a truly awful deception, the root cause of human suffering: the belief that we are our bodies that live, suffer, and die, and within our bodies lies guilt.

My purpose is to be of service in the Child’s awakening to the truth – to our Worth and where it leads, to Happiness.

Asking our bodies to tell us if they’re real is self-referential, circular reasoning. Of course, they will tell us -- sensory perception will tell us -- that they’re real. This isn’t rational; it’s irrational. We must go to an objective source to tell us if they’re real. And until we settle on who or what that source may be, we must suspend judgment on whether our bodies and their material environment are real. We must rely on Reason and Intuition. We must try to be rational without rationalizing.

Let sensory perception do what it’s designed for -- helping us to procreate, achieve some measure of comfort and satisfaction, avoid pain, and survive. It can play a support role, but it cannot lead us into matters of truth and reality that are the province of Mind. Sensing and rationalizing lead us nowhere in philosophy – metaphysics and ontology -- where the only possible guides are Logic, Reason, and Intuition.

Instead of asking matter, our bodies, to tell us if Mind is real, let us ask our Mind to tell us if matter is real.

That so much of civilization is based on this absurd premise, that our bodies and their material environment are real just because they say they’re real, is sheer madness. It is a mental wall that imprisons us in endless conflict, suffering, confusion, frustration, and deception, that undermines and sabotages every effort toward true progress instead of ever more sophisticated technology and half-baked, conflicting ideologies.

Circular reasoning on what’s real has been unquestioned, even propagated for centuries, by science, because without it physics, neuroscience, and other disciplines couldn’t exist. “Shut up and calculate!” has become the mantra of physics now that quantum mechanics has upset Plato’s and Einstein’s perfect order of the universe. Circular reasoning, with few exceptions, has been unquestioned by philosophy going back to antiquity, because without it, academies and careers that require students and patrons couldn’t exist.

If we are going to stick with circular reasoning because any other kind of reasoning is beyond us, or because letting go of sensory perception is too big of a paradigm shift, let us at least be honest about it. This is chaos.

Intelligence complicit in its own deception, warped by self-interest, won’t lead us anywhere but back to the choice where our story began. It began with letting ourselves be led by Love, Reason, Intuition, and Worth to peace, truth, and sanity -- to Happiness. Whatever our circumstances, I believe we all want to make the right choice.

I write to help us look into the story of the Child – our story, – honestly and with Reason instead of guilt, because this is where the journey begins. This is where thinking begins. I find it quite interesting, consequential, and relevant. I hope you will agree.

Watch this space!

David Clark Harrison

www.DavidClarkHarrison.com

April 17, 2020

Asking our bodies to tell us if they’re real is self-referential, circular reasoning. Of course, they will tell us -- sensory perception will tell us -- that they’re real.  

Circular reasoning that’s allowed to support belief in material reality comes with a major cost. It corrupts the human mind, already split into opposing thought systems, one good-oneness, the other evil-separation, with yet another split into opposing realities, one body-matter, the other mind-spirit. A mind tasked with reasoning that’s burdened with contradictory thoughts can’t work very well, and if we want a good explanation why our world seems ungovernable, this would suffice. Something has to give.

Only one of these sets of competing truths can be true, good-mind or evil-matter. The human mind has been trying to do its job with both, and it isn’t working. Our choices are sometimes rational but too often they aren’t, with tragic consequences. We live, today, in “interesting times” that should be a surprise when two world wars, a cold war, and the onset of global mass extinction should have taught us the error of our ways. But we seem to have learned nothing. The mind-set of a political cult that entrusts its fortunes to a concatenation of lies, deceptions, and contradictions advertises our plight: we are failing, and failing badly. We aren’t thinking.

Understanding that we must choose between competing realities can’t be the end of the world if it’s the beginning of Reason. Accepting that between the two competing realities our sensory world of matter must be unreal can’t be the end of sanity if it ends insanity. It can’t be the end of light if it leads us out of the darkness. It can’t be the end of innocence if it ends our addiction to guilt. It can’t be the end of good if it disempowers evil. The forces arrayed against the good can only lose their strength if our belief in their reality – the logic of their argument – is withdrawn. The deceptions that clog our thinking with contradictions, confusion, and ambivalence, can only give way to the truth if we take away their premise. They aren’t real. And the idea that they should be taken seriously, that we should simply adapt to them the way we adapt to our insane politics and every other calamity, is a joke.

Understanding that our bodies and the material world that they inhabit are part of an illusion, a dream meant to deceive, can’t cause more confusion if it explains it. Our confusion, our endless mistakes, owe their existence to nothing more than a misperception: that two contradictory states are real, and logic will prevail in a split mind, already beset with fear, that holds contradictory thoughts. It won’t. It never has and it never will. The wars between conflicting ideologies will never end until we find a way to end the war between conflicting realities in our minds – until we get clarity on what’s Reason and what’s not and learn to make the right choice. Circular reasoning that’s allowed to support belief in material reality is not the right choice.

David Clark Harrison

www.davidclarkharrison.com

April 18, 2020