Why Free Choice?
Can the “South” rise again?
The mediating link between Sapiens’ hallucinating unreality and its metaphysical Self’s Creation is Free Choice. The function, idea, and ideal produced by all of Creation’s functions, ideas, and ideals that came before it. In the sequence of evolution, beginning with the first stirrings of Love-Spontaneity, Logic-Order, and Energy-Now before it. All of the faculties of Mind-Relationship organized for this one purpose: to enable its cause to stand on its own.
To demonstrate the possibility and Reality of Worth able to withstand adversity inherent in unrest. In instability questioning and contradicting itself because, through all the vicissitudes of uncertainty, doubt, and self-contradiction, the one quality of its being that can be thrown off track is its freely choosing not to be thrown off track. To remain true to its mission, dedicated to the Ideal and Worth of Life-Creation, of Loving Friendship among equals. To the Ideal of evolution moved by Character serving the Cause of. Choice. Always at risk of getting it wrong, making a mistake, but resolved nonetheless to learn from experience and do better the next time.
To the pride and joy of the Parents who brought Free Choice into being: the one quality of their living-being that cannot be stopped by contradiction: the irresistible, inexorable Force of Growth. The two qualities together – Learning and Growth – accounting for the Strength of Creation’s Definition but also for its humility. The quality of Character that the willfulness and wildness of corruption’s arrogance can never get.
The gift of insight in the mind of Abraham Lincoln that he thought would be little noted nor long remembered. A timeless expression instead of a universal Ideal. Giving a damn about Life, Love, and Democracy. Standing up for it. The Gettysburg Address: humility giving arrogance a lesson in moral strength. A kiss-my-ass to ass-kissing corruption that sought to break its spirit. With hand-to-hand savagery in a peach orchard. With the harvest of massed human flesh in a wheat field. And couldn’t, because the spirit that Abraham Lincoln spoke for can’t be broken. Couldn’t be broken during the Battle of Britain when Winston Churchill spoke for it. Can’t be broken today. Like the littleness infesting public service today, the “South” that left its stench of death behind at Cemetery Ridge is an abomination. The moral rot of arrogance and slavery. What will rise again is character with humility. Choice that’s Free.
Can “God’s will” fail?
Then the Cause taken up by Creation can’t fail? Character will come to its rescue every time. Bugles sounding the charge, flags flying, enemy dispersing in disarray. It can’t fail but with a big if, and we’re part of the ‘if.’ Which is why Lincoln and Churchill are needed once again.
The fallacy perpetrated by “God’s will” is that Sapiens needs only to learn its ABCs and show a little willingness to change its Mind. And, yes, in due time it will be rescued. Because “God’s will” cannot fail. This is how it’s presented in the Course but not the way I’ve so far personalized it. While working in Loving Friendship with its author, who teaches the point of questioning. Contradiction. Yes. So it doesn’t seem inconsistent with the spirit of the Course even if departs from its letter.
Creation can’t be touting its Worth if anything is propping it up, even “God’s will.” Mind either returns to inactivity if there’s a screw-up by Free Choice or it’s just another commercial parting fools from their money. Mind can’t cease to exist, but in a state of inactivity it won’t be rescuing anything. Creation will be back in drydock. It will have to start all over again.
What cannot fail in theory is Character with integrity able to differentiate between choice corrupted by will and Choice guided by empathy. That’s Free, and therefore choosing correctly. What can fail in practice is Choice, Free or not, that can choose in error because that’s the nature of it. Its Logic: that in an open-ended environment where there is no fixed, static definition of the way things are, choosing one perspective or another, one cause or another, is a crapshoot. No matter how much effort goes into getting it right or achieving perfection.
Two bucks to show on “Sapiens”
There is no one definition of getting it right. There is only your definition, your perspective. And if you’ve put your money on an ideal centered on Free Choice, that allows for the possibility of error, then the Reality you’ve chosen can fail. Whoa! You’ve just rocked my boat! You said Reality is Heaven and Heaven isn’t perfect. It’s relatability so it can be Relationship, everyone lovey-dovey. I get it. But now you’re saying it’s a fly-by-night operation that can go out of business if Free Choice screws up??
Does Sapiens’ progress so far warrant confidence that it will help its metaphysical Self come to its right Mind? That it will stop letting itself be insulted and manipulated by a herd of beasts? I get the impression it likes getting pie in the face. It can’t wait to soil itself in the sewer of politics and incinerate itself with the help of extractive industries. What are “foreign relations” but money-makers competing to exploit mineral resources wherever they are: on land, under water, and in each other’s back yards. Until the planet is mined out and then what? On to Mars to do the same thing all over again? What are “governments” but agents of money-makers doing the exploiting? While the rest of us drift about on our clouds of “principle” and “impartiality.” Who are we kidding?
When this dude – Sapiens — presents itself at the threshold of Creation with creds like this, even if it has merged with Guidance, can anyone be certain that it won’t revert to form? Of course not if choice is subject to Spontaneity that’s beyond control and prediction. You can close the parimutuel windows. There’s no guarantee that the race itself will finish let alone the nags with their riders and their odds.
Where it can do no real damage
When Mind-Relationship took off on its mission to do great stuff it was taking sides. There being an open-ended invitation to do so when nothing had been resolved and never will be. The eternal unresolved question of what’s to be or not to be. Whether ‘tis nobler to move forward toward resolution or to suffer the slings and arrows of always questioning itself, dividing itself. Until the matter is solved by the questioner going nowhere replacing movement going somewhere. Voila! Your whole number! Resolution!
Our president reducing our country to another sleazebag deal-maker devoid of ideals and Character. Of meaning except the deal-maker’s caring for himself. A creature of the eternal divide between movement-change and status quo opposed to change. A grotesque caricature of resistance to change: “Make America Great Again,” whose meaning is make it a herd of beasts competing for supremacy among other herds of beasts. Then to descend into an unchanging status quo, the nightmare of paralysis that “conservatives” misconstrue as heaven doing nothing. Adding to the insult instead of rising above it. That would add to the friction fueling all of Creation if it weren’t fueling all of separation and self-destruction.
Mind-Relationship taking sides in an issue unresolved by definition would have been aware that whatever stance it took was no guarantee of success or permanence. Which would explain why it doesn’t market itself as perfect. Why it doesn’t pretend that resolution is an attainable ideal. Why the focus is on the principle at the heart of it instead of any specific fixed product: the principle of Free Choice at the heart of Character with Integrity. That accommodates the eternal unresolved issue by allowing for the underside of Definition, the denominator of the fraction, to penetrate Mind if only when it’s in a self-unaware state. Where it can do no real damage.
A huge risk
Fair enough. The lesson of the Course. But if Definition could render Mind-Child Choice self-unaware for training purposes, what might Choice choose to do once it’s Free? Once it’s earned and learned its role in Creation and not even Mind-Relationship itself, not even Love-Logic Self-Awareness its Parents themselves, can prevent its choosing in error without compromising its integrity.
Choosing in error in rehearsal, a hallucination, is one thing. But if there was no choosing in error in Reality beforehand, no disobedience that precipitated the “fall,” then bringing Free Choice on stage for the production is taking a risk. Any operation that depends on all the pieces fitting together and working smoothly would balk at the idea of one piece given the freedom to fit together and work smoothly or not as it sees fit. To follow the script or not as it sees fit. What’s this guy getting paid for?
If it’s part of Creation the answer is it’s getting “paid” for Creation’s legitimacy. For letting it be known that Creation isn’t an act of willfulness pretending to be worth something if all it is, is an appearance. A billboard advertising Worth paid for by willfulness whose goal is to part you from your worth. It’s authentic. It is what it appears to be. And it can’t achieve this measure of Worth without subjecting the whole operation to the risk of failure.
The key word being “risk.” The selling point of the hallucination where “action” is gamblers risking huge losses. Hitler gambling everything on his invasion of the Soviet Union. Our president risking everything on a tariff war, no more sensible than Neville Chamberlain’s “plan Z” gambit: “peace in our time.” Inspired by comic book foolishness, flying to Berlin to get Hitler’s signature on a worthless piece of paper. “Action.” “Entertainment” that Creation is supposed to lack for being everything taken care of for eternity. When it is what it is: a huge risk. And we, in our beloved shakedowns of corruption, are part of its machinery. Believe it or not.
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The Medium Is not the Message!
Ideas make history
The lesson of the Tarot Devil card is that the link between Sapiens’ hallucinating unreality and its metaphysical Self’s Creation is not a rope. It’s not a tether attached to a manipulative “savior” meant for hanging. To administer the judgment of guilt by a reverse-reflection phony: lifeless, mindless, and loveless. Desecrating all signs of life and movement around it with arrogance, deceit, and denial.
No way is Sapiens going to evolve beyond a species of animal inhabiting a dream of absurdities like this into a Life with an indispensable role in Creation unless it makes it to the threshold under its own power. Relying on its own talents and inner Guidance connected with character, honor, and integrity. Conscience in its essence. Definitive of all that is Life, Worth, and Real. Respectful of Free Choice.
There was Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Martin Luther King’s I-Have-a-Dream speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. A repeat of 95 Theses posted four centuries before by his namesake, a moral theologist, questioning practices by corrupt moral authority suggesting that character can be bought. Helping to put integrity back into the example of Jesus and stoke yet another tribal cataclysm: the Reformation. Occasions when Sapiens was moved by the feeling of ideas behind words. As it was by Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, described as “a small pamphlet [by an obscure immigrant] that ignited independence in America and shifted the political landscape.”
Youthful Folly in 3-D
“Ideas make history” was the motto of the History department at Harvard when I majored in American History. A thesis that makes sense when accompanied by illustration. Imagery, the stuff of feeling present here in metaphors, where ideas come first in logical sequence, imagery second. Whose Logic and therefore meaning has been virtually destroyed by Sapiens’ culture of visuals. The curse of graphics brought to such dominance by sight and sound in every media that it’s become an end in itself.
The message referred to by Marshall McLuhan that’s the medium. “We shape our tools, and therefore our tools shape us.” Another one of his quotes that captures the down side of Sapiens’ obsession with technology: the complete absence of Conscience to guide it. Tool-making wealth-creators falling all over themselves to capture the potential of artificial intelligence the way they did the Internet and computers before that. Without doing first what Martin Luther hoped Sapiens would do with his 95 theses: reflect on the questions they raise. Parse their implications. Follow the connections to see where they lead.
Can anyone have the patience to do this when imagery has been separated from ideas and put first instead? Cart before the horse. iPhone before personal contact. I don’t want complete sentences! I want brevity! Yes. So you can get back to formulas and algorithms and designs and visuals! That challenge us to reshape appearances without challenging us to re-think the ideas behind them. To produce every form of representation on the center field scoreboard except a plain statement of what’s actually happening. In logical sequence, one step at a time.
Hexagram 4: Youthful Folly. Ideas without images lacking relevance and motivation. Images without ideas lacking wisdom. The former thinkers in their ivory towers. The latter fools wasting time and money at Dave and Buster’s. A modern-day Plato’s Cave with more fanciful images and a louder barrage of idiotic sounds, all simulating something happening. Another version of hallucination’s separation of Love from Logic: keeping its play-actors captive to its script.
Never to make that mistake again
“We have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.” With that thought, more or less in those words, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto is said to have summed up Japan’s miscalculation on December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor day. When the Empire of the Sun attempted at one stroke to take control of the Pacific. In a stunning display of arrogance in military planning and international relations. The presumption that none but itself would have a say in the future of its “sphere of influence.” It alone would have the right to choose.
Like comatose Pearl Harbor, all the faculties of Sapiens’ Mind had been disempowered. Designed for the sole purpose of its function, Free Choice. Deprived of the judgment and self-discipline of differentiation and Logic, the motivation and sensitivity of empathy and Love. Reduced to a boundaryless, defenseless, shapeless object. Like Ungit:
“the goddess representing Aphrodite in the non-Greek world of Glome, . . . described as a “shapeless stone” (in C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces (1956) . . . (highlighting) the distorted and monstrous nature of love in this world. Ungit’s shapelessness embodies the unknowable, terrifying aspect of this love, . . demanded through blood sacrifices. The people of Glome find comfort in worshipping this faceless deity, even though it doesn’t resemble the traditional understanding of Aphrodite.” (Wikipedia)
The grotesque image of our common metaphysical ancestor that appeared in its mirror: a reverse-reflection mistaken for an “other.” Waiting to be sculpted by an “artist” with a talent for magic. Offering its beleaguered host a dream too good to be true, where the people of Glome – Sapiens — can find comfort in worshiping Love in reverse: a faceless, monstrous deity.
Sapiens’ metaphysical Self is a sleeping giant who someday will be filled with a terrible resolve to reverse its miscalculation. To awaken from the arrogance of its reverse-reflection and the humiliation of its insult. Deprived of Choice. Never to make that mistake again.