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Distinctions fundamental to Understanding 

Creation got its start with Relationship and with what Relationship implies. Relationship between Logic and Love inseparable and the Creation of Life and Worth that their Relationship implies. Creation got its start with Relationship which is the stuff of Love and with Implication which is the stuff of Logic. What they imply is the process of Creation moving forward and the structure of Creation building from the bottom up, both in logical sequence through Relationships.

Logic married to Love gave birth to Free Choice, their Child. Together they parent their Child through the inseparable Parent-Child Relationship that Creates, nurtures, and guides the Life-Worth of Creation. Guides through the harmony of Order and Freedom that are inseparable. Governs all of Reality-Creation from the bottom up, through the laws of cause and effect, inseparable from the Authority of Necessity that applies evenly and equally to Creation and Creator, its Source.

Logic-Love is the Source of Judgment that decides with Reason but it does neither itself. It doesn’t choose and so it has no need for Reason. It explains, defines, and governs. The “Mind” whose function in Creation is to choose-decide with Reason- Judgment is Free Choice: the Child of Parents Logic-Thought and Love-Feeling. Logic the source of Mind-Choice and Love the source of Freedom. The Child’s function is to choose freely with Reason because that is the function of Reason: to enable Mind to judge, choose, and decide freely. The Child is our ancestral Mind.

The theorizing of metaphysics is intuited through the Logic-Love Relationship -- our Parents in Reality -- that explains and defines. That provides us with distinctions fundamental to Understanding because they love and need their Child to resume their Relationship in Self-Awareness and the Child’s function in Creation. To regain Consciousness from the alternate reality, the dream state that we call home. Awakening that requires Understanding that requires explanation. That can only come from Logic-Love, our Parents.

The will not to understand

In the illusory world of contradictions that we appear to occupy, minds corrupted by their own opposites can make no sense of this. Opposite is separation. Inseparability is an impossibility. And so in our illusory world of separation what seems to make sense is the opposite. A fractious composition of impossibilities. Logic and Love function separately, which means they function with difficulty or not at all. With Parents separated from Child there can be no Relationship to nurture and guide creation. There can be neither order nor freedom when they are separated. If laws are separated from authority there can be no governance, only the lawlessness of separation. Arbitrary top-down rule. A madhouse.

Distinctions that to minds dominated by limbic passions, corrupted by mis-identification with their own reverse mirror image reflections, make no sense. Logic that explains and defines so that it can govern, distinct from Mind that judges with Reason so that it can choose freely, can have no place in the unfathomable mystery that is our universe, so plainly ruled by mindless, unreasoning “nature,” the force that dominates with the unthinking animal-herd instinct of will. Where in such a universe is there any possibility of explanation by Logic? Of understanding essential to Free Choice? Of Reason the function of Mind? There is no place. And thus the distinctions are lost on corrupted minds. Distinctions that could guide us toward answers that Western thought supposedly seeks. But if we don’t want them then surely we won’t find them.

The “many” of happening or nothing happening 

The “many” of Life-Creativity in Reality are implications that flow from each advance in the interconnectedness -- the sequence -- of Logic. The “many” are the loving soulmate relationships that flow from each expansion of the interconnectedness -- the family -- of Love. The “many” of Life-Creativity in Reality is the abundance of possibilities that Life-Creation is composed of, that each advance in the extension of Logic and the expansion of Love produces. Possibilities like branches and roots, the flowering seeds and buds that compose organic growth, the growth of all living selves. This is the ”many” of Reality-Creation, of Life that grows, of abundance that shares. That can’t help growing and sharing because this is the nature, the definition, of Life-Being. Of Necessity -- the laws of cause and effect.

The ”many” of the opposite is the abundance of disconnections and contradictions. Of impossibilities that comprise the appearance of being, of life-uncreativity in unreality along with its opposite, the appearance of death. The “many” is the abundance of opposites -- disconnections and contradictions -- produced by opposition. By opposing “realities:” of life and death, good and evil, right and wrong, logical and illogical, love and fear, love and hate, innocence and guilt, giving and taking, gaining and losing, owning and sharing, possessing and affirming, controlling and liberating, freedom and captivity, darkness and light, connection and separation, here and there, now and then. . . .

The “many” of the opposite isn’t the growth of possibilities from the expanding interconnectedness of abundance. From the variety of organic Being but the endless splitting off of impossibilities from the disconnectedness of shadow-reflection. The endless replication of contradictions from the scarcity of inorganic sameness. The “many” of Reality Life-Creation is innovation, a happening. The discovery of the new while inquiring and exploring into the unknown. The “many” of the opposite-uncreativity is replication. The appearance of movement. Of growth-expansion that’s comprised of sameness. Nothing happening.

A passion for metaphysics with a practical use

The “many”-abundance of my life is passion for philosophy. For metaphysics that inquires into questions of Worth and Truth, substance and value, Mind and Love, character and striving, meaning and purpose. Of interest to very few. That seems to the rest a waste of time, impractical and irrelevant. A preoccupation that ought to be discouraged in favor of something more conventional. More “realistic” and “sociable” instead of abstract and distancing. Instead of “weird.” Margot Machol Bisnow’s Raising an Entrepreneur (New Harbinger 2021) advises parents to support a child’s passion whatever it is rather than superimposing their own preferences. Rather than stifling originality and initiative, individuality and creativity, with authoritarian disrespect. Advice just as relevant to a grownup’s passion as it is to a child’s.

Why does it matter that the “many” of our illusory dream world is the opposite of the “many” of Reality-Creation? Because the scope of explanation that leads to Understanding by way of the Logic-Love of Intuition, by way of the Relationship with the connection to Logic-Love Parents, includes the difference between opposing “manies.” Because getting it right -- the human condition, our situation -- necessitates understanding that replications of lifeless sameness aren’t Creation. Aren’t progress, and humanity needs to move forward.

Because, like the man said, nothing gets rid of bad theory like good theory. Because the author theorizing with metaphysics is the equivalent of pure research in science that yields useful products. Practical applications that replace authoritarian “realism” that stifles Creativity from the top down with democratic support that nurtures Creativity from the bottom up. At every level of governance from international relations to individual families. Enabling shared parenting and grandparenting to be there for the minds and hearts of grandchildren as well as their bodies. That is my immediate concern. But if the unsolved problems of humanity are endless, then the possibilities of theory that gets it right, working at their roots, might also be endless.

Theorizing with metaphysics requires contributions from Free Choice rooted in its Source, Logic combined with Love. From the Parents of our ancestral Mind, the masculinity of Logic-Choice married to the femininity of Love-Freedom. Ultimately from the Logic-Love / Parent-Child Relationship at the core of Being that illuminates and empowers all of Reality-Creation. A lineage that taps into serious enablement and empowerment. Not the absurdity of forgeries like the “almighty gods” of authoritarian “realism,” caricatures who inhabit cartoons. However unconventional it may seem to conventional thought, theorizing with metaphysics has a legitimate rationale that earns its authenticity with the Worth of Logic-Love and the Authority of the laws of cause and effect. Of Necessity, the expression and stance of Logic-Love. Not needing convention is the point. The rationale stands on its own.

Understanding that the “many” of unreality is the product of appearances is a practical use of theorizing about the “many.” That it’s the product of deception perpetrated by a shadow-reflection opposite -- the replication of a virus that kills Creativity-Life. That’s the enemy of the possibilities of Free Choice essential to Creativity. Helping minds choose to be freed from captivity to the deception, to be led by a better guide, is a practical use of theorizing about the “many.” 

When a paradigm reaches end-of-service

Metaphysics is getting at root causes so that the causes of illogic, the psychiatric disorder that thwarts human growth with contradictions, can be taken out by the roots. Weeds not taken out by the roots keep coming back. Physics explains appearances, never getting beneath the surface because that is its subject: physical objects. Surfaces detectable by the senses of other surfaces: bodies. Pulling a weed out here, a weed out there, but never by the roots. Not even aware that that’s its purpose.

The rallying cry of metaphysics is appearances be damned! It’s taken physics since Galileo invented experimental physics, in the 17th century, to begin to realize what the classical philosopher Parmenides realized with Logic from intuition 2500 years ago. That Reality lies not on the surface but beneath it. That only one “reality” can be Real. The one on the surface, the objects “detected” by body-objects, can only be an illusion. The “non-dualism” taught by the teacher-healer Jesus in the flesh and later, through A Course in Miracles.

John Clerk Maxwell’s equations carried Michael Faraday’s intuition about the electromagnetic force beyond theory to application. To products that, among other things, make these thoughts accessible to a global audience in an instant. The equivalent of Maxwell’s equations to the Logic of Parmenides, Valentinus, and A Course in Miracles isn’t mathematical equations that validate sensory perception. It’s coming up with a rational explanation for the loss of Consciousness that transitioned the insane idea of an opposite unreality from an unconscious Mind to its expression, its animated appearance, in a dream. To make things add up logically like Maxwell’s equations.

In order to come up with explanation it’s logically necessary to detach our minds from an irrational, unquestioning dependence on sensory perception. On a body-centric worldview of Reality. So that inquiry beyond historic insights that challenge “conventional wisdom” will be enlivened by curiosity instead of deadened without it. Killed by an aging generation content to let the next generation abandon its outdated paradigms. Ever vigilant that nobody dismantle its monuments even if they turn out to be facades. 

The hand-off of the baton back to philosophy 

Plato tried to go forward with his mentor Parmenides. He couldn’t because intuition didn’t carry him far enough. Imaginary dialogues with his mentor Socrates didn’t get him there so he could do for Parmenides’ insights what Maxwell did for Faraday’s. His pupil Aristotle’s switch, from Plato’s Academy to Aristotle’s Lyceum -- from Mind-Logic to matter-biology -- was a white flag of surrender. It was the equivalent of Nils Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation that declared that experimental physics had reached the limit of its potential to explain the origin, fate, and meaning of the material universe. Aristotle’s was the declaration that Logic through intuition had reached its limit. The study of matter was available to sensory perception. It offered a legitimate avenue of discovery so long as the reality of matter and its certifier, the body’s senses, remained unchallenged by Logic. The time had come to pursue it, and thus was science in Western thought born.

And thus was born what’s become a relay race run by science and philosophy. The white flag of surrender has come out again. From physics’ pursuit of quantum gravity, the melding of cosmology with quantum mechanics, the study of the behavior of the particles and cells, the Energy, that make up matter. One just as weird as the other. The evolution of Einstein’s and Hawking’s pursuit of a theory of everything that also failed. The study of Aristotle’s matter come to rest on a puzzle that experimental physics, on its own, can’t solve. So it’s back to appealing to philosophy. To handing the baton back to philosophy in the relay race to Understanding.

The value of relationship with a trusted guide

What I propose is one possibility inspired by the author of A Course in Miracles. Who I have never doubted, since I’ve been living with it for 34 years, connects us with Logic-Love, the Parents of our ancestral Mind I call the Child. The historical figure Jesus, a manifestation of what religion calls the Holy Spirit. But if the Child’s awakening ultimately requires intimacy with our Parents’ emissary its name shouldn’t matter. Particularly since the identity and role it assumes in individual lives is between it and the individual. Call it what you want.

The Holy Spirit touches my heart at the deepest level through a son whose life was a heart-breaking tragedy. His, for me, has been the voice and the image of the Holy Spirit since I began work on this project three years ago. My life and work revolve around our Relationship, the source of insights from my intuition. With the author of the Course, my Guide and my comfort. An arrangement that owes nothing to manipulation on either side and everything to spontaneity. To mutual Love, Trust, and respect.

What if anything your life revolves around is up to you. I can only share that being in an intimate relationship with a trusted guide, who is in our world of appearances but not of it, can be both elevating and leveling. And, above all, useful -- positive and constructive. A fact well documented in the literature of leadership, entrepreneurship, and parenting.

Quantification run amuck

The cause of the Big Bang is mental not physical. An obvious fact that science, in its rampant bias against the agency of Mind in anything that can be detected and measured by body, adamantly refuses to accept. Between them Stephen Hawking, Francis Crick, Christof Koch, and Brian Greene have invented a “boundaryless” universe without a creator -- an effect without a cause -- and a brain that magically produces consciousness out of neurons and electrical impulses -- matter that produces mind. Propositions so preposterous they rate the Nobel prize for dumbest. An associate of Hawking’s tried to imagine a state that could cause our matter and what did he come up with? More matter.

The Church sticking its nose into Galileo’s business did irreparable harm to objective inquiry, worse by far than private industries buying academic research. Because all it did was provoke science into sticking its nose into everything, including and especially the philosophy that Hawking declared “dead.” Science won’t tolerate anything smacking of speculation that can’t be “verified” by “objective” quantitative measurement. The tool based on circular reasoning that the Austrian physicist-philosopher Erwin Schroedinger has acknowledged guarantees subjectivity not objectivity. What is inquiry outside the scope of measurement but speculation disciplined and supported by Logic?

Other fields -- philosophy, psychology, economics -- are so intimidated by science’s preeminence that they’ve recast their efforts as “scientific” if they can get away with it and let themselves be overshadowed if they can’t. The so-called “five factor” personality type theory is illustrative. Meant to replace Myers-Briggs, based on the inspired intuition of Carl Jung, it makes “person” object rather than subject so that its types can be quantified by “scientific” measurements -- an absurdity. The fraud results in a scale that values body-sensing over intuition, the most critical Myers-Briggs categories. Why devalue intuition? So that body-sensing, already the majority of personality types, will swing attitudes even farther toward validation of science and the “reality” of the world of spacetime-matter that justifies it. So that intuition can’t risk undermining it with another perspective: with Logic and the Truth that lies behind appearances.

Thomas Aquinas got religion -- Christianity anyway -- to back off sticking its nose into free inquiry, but that didn’t stop science from sticking its nose into free inquiry. It’s hard to see the difference between Hawking and Crick and the Pope they so despise.

What is our baseline? 

Adam Becker, in What Is Real? (Basic Books 2018), recalled that Einstein, in 1952, said scientists weren’t very good at Logic. Why? What profession mines the potential for brilliance from the human mind with more elan than science?

In benefit-cost analysis, benefits and costs must be measured against something to show that a particular option makes a situation better or worse. The baseline situation -- the way things are now before the professions and their masters set about to change them. The situation that can’t factor into analysis until it’s properly understood. After all, one option might be to leave things the way they are and its constituency might not give up without a fight.

The function of mind that comes into play for this critical phase of analysis isn’t reason. It’s Logic. Whose function isn’t to choose but to explain. To use its prowess with definition to show how circumstances fit together to reveal their meaning. Whose function is to help its hapless subject, struggling to make sense of a world of contradictions and facades, understand.

From Logic we get Understanding. Not from reasoning but from fitting circumstances together so that they give us meaning and purpose. Context that’s essential to direction. From Logic we get what our situation calls for, opening thought to the next step: how to proceed with choices among scientific experiments, development possibilities, or any other improvement. With judgment based on reason that takes into account weighted values as well as measurements. That integrates them into a response to the situation that is both reasoned and Logical.

Logical because it gets the baseline situation right. Because judgment will be off on the right foot, well informed. Well directed by understanding based on facts. On reality instead of mis-directed by mis-understanding based on mis-perception and unreality. Because judgment will be based on Logic.

Science’s headlong rush to judgment

Science works hard at explaining our situation. At establishing the baseline for judgment, reasoning, choices, and decisions. But this is true only if the basic attribute of our situation can be taken for granted: that what our bodies’ senses tell us is there is actually “there.” That this is reality and we needn’t trouble metaphysics with questioning it. It’s true only if we allow science to get away with including the knower in the known. A crack in the foundation of the entire scientific enterprise. Because it forfeits intellectual integrity and along with it scientific objectivity.

Including the knower in the known is a very big No-No. A violation of Logic. An intellectual disconnect that science apparently thinks it can’t afford to acknowledge without depriving itself of its legitimacy: the presumed reality of bodies and matter. Bodies and the material objects that their senses detect. But, you see, bodies are matter. And science that prides itself on objectivity can’t get away with “logic” that finds “objectivity” where it isn’t: in matter declaring itself real.

A proper understanding of our baseline, the condition against which all movement forward must be calculated, requires something else: another perspective. That's only attainable through intuition, the function of mind whose source and discipline is Logic. The science that we all admire and depend on isn’t good with Logic for a simple reason. It rushes headlong into judgment with “reasoning” before it’s properly established its baseline. Before it’s applied Logic to a proper understanding of the context that tells it what the situation calls for. That provides direction for thinking. Before it's availed itself of another perspective that's essential to intellectual integrity and scientific objectivity.

The gift of metaphysics

Everyone is familiar with physics, the profession that made Einstein an international celebrity. Metaphysics not so much. Too bad, because turning to physics, the study of appearances, the gold standard for legitimizing authoritarian “realism,” is exactly the wrong approach. It’s the approach that Hawking trumpeted in his adolescent fantasy of supremacy when he declared philosophy dead.

Metaphysics is a much-neglected outlier of philosophy that’s probably better known for what it hasn’t done for human progress than for what it has. In his call for help from philosophy the physicist Carlo Rovelli, in Reality Is not What It Seems (Riverhead Books 2017), rejected the Logic of Parmenides out of hand. Thus eliminating metaphysics and its founder from consideration along with answers that minds captive to bodies and brains are actually desperate for. The victim of a shipwreck would rather be saved by an anvil than a life preserver. Because if getting our baseline right requires the definitions and explanations of Logic; if it requires Understanding where circumstances fit together to make a clear statement, it needs Logic. And Logic isn’t the gift of physics. It isn’t the gift of science. It’s the gift of metaphysics.

Do we truly want to understand our situation so that we can proceed to think? To judge clearly? Then stop skipping past our baseline with fatuous assumptions about the unassailability of sensory perception. With circular, self-referential “reasoning” that makes a mockery of intellect. Stop skipping past Parmenides. Start putting some of that scientific verve into understanding what he was talking about. Start applying metaphysics. Apply Logic and get it right.

The Guide that can be trusted

A Course in Miracles isn’t “religion.” It isn’t unreasoning “faith.” It’s the Logic of metaphysics that happened to respond to two clinical psychologists needing “a better way” out of friction that was interfering with professionalism. It’s metaphysics that took on the appearance of religion when it was transmitted through a Jewish scribe with an authoritarian personality type attracted to the patriarchal Catholic church. It adopted the analytics of Freudian psychoanalysis and symbols of Christianity because its audience could not have made sense of its unfamiliar oeuvre otherwise.

An audience that makes up the bulk of Western thought and includes me. The Course reaches me in part because I was brought up in Christianity and an educational environment influenced by Freudian psychology. The heyday of Freudian psychoanalysis spanned my formative years well beyond my formal education, when having a “shrink” was like having a dentist. Metaphysics that looks behind appearances relies on established perception to get its point across and A Course in Miracles is no exception. But this student took its lesson to heart. What I found when I looked behind the analytics of Freud and the symbols of Christianity was the purity of Logic bonded with Love. Not one misstep. Not one false note.

The Course  isn’t “mysticism.” It’s not the “spirituality” of “New Age.” It isn’t a “bible” and says so. Immanuel Kant attempted a “critique of pure reason,” a slog of turgid incomprehensibility that sets off the sensitivity, purposefulness, and clarity of the Course. There is such a thing as Logic that helps to distinguish between what’s Real and what’s not. There is no such thing as “pure reason” if it’s detached from its function, to aid a particular choice or decision. As Gertrude Stein supposedly said when she was asked “What’s the answer?”: “What’s the question?” Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is the equivalent of Stein expostulating on “pure answer” without a question. A pure waste of time.

Reality, the subject matter of philosophy whose only hope of defining it is through the branch founded by Parmenides: metaphysics. Because in a material world of appearances the only way to get at Reality is to get behind appearances. Through the only function of mind that can lead us there: through intuition that connects us with Logic-Love. With the explanation behind appearances we’re looking for. In the end I trust my Guide because, whatever name it’s given, however familiar or unfamiliar it may seem, it makes sense. I trust it because it’s Who -- whoever loves me and whoever I love to the ends of the earth.

Try accessing an authoritarian mind

The choice between listening to the voice of our ancestral Mind’s reverse side, the magician-comedian I call the Joker, and the emissary from the Child’s Parents known to Christianity as Jesus or the Holy Spirit, is a choice even for the mind so thoroughly captive to its dark side that it’s been deprived of a voice. For that is the aim of authority that would rule absolutely: to deprive its possessions of any voice that could compete with its own. Captivity achieves its aim not when voices are added to the many but when they are replaced by one -- its own. Yet no act by Mind that is Free Choice, whether conscious or unconscious, can be anything but choice. And if Child unconscious let itself be taken captive by an illusion it can free itself by “choosing again.” Advice from Jesus that brings the text of the Course to a close.

That said, try accessing an authoritarian mind so captivated by its reverse image that virtually no trace is left of its sovereign self. Jesus did his best with Helen, his scribe, and “maybe” is the best he could do. It’s taken me three full years to figure out how to do it with an authoritarian mind and I’m still working on it.

What price a rational explanation?

I propose that we pick up where the intuition of Parmenides and Plato left off, only now enabled and empowered by insights from the Course that were not available to them. By its priceless gift of another perspective that’s indispensable to objective analysis and Understanding. To getting our baseline condition right before racing off to judgment. When he opined in the February ’22 issue of Scientific American that his profession’s subject may be “in some sense illusory,” the physicist-historian Adam Becker cited Parmenides but made no mention of Jesus and the Course. Not surprisingly when not even the author of What Is Gnosticism? (Belknap-Harvard 2003), the Harvard Divinity School professor, Karen L. King, mentioned it. After what the Church did to Galileo anything with a whiff of religion is toxic.

What I propose is a continuation of Logic from earlier points in its sequence to later points and a continuation beyond the scope so far explored, guided by the sequence of Logic that’s gone before. I propose it as a possibility because, in my writing over the past three years, my Relationship and I have done it. It isn’t a possibility for me; it’s a reality. But until spontaneity informs me that our part is done it remains a work in progress. And even when done, its output can only be suggestive. A start that, for all I know, is but one of a multitude of starts. Its purpose to facilitate movement toward understanding of reality behind appearances. With explanation that can be taken seriously not because can ever be definitive but only because it makes sense.

With Logic and reason that Kenneth Wapnick, in Love Does Not Condemn (Foundation for “A Course in Miracles” 1989), says has yet to be applied by theology and philosophy to a foundational question: Why would a supreme being, undisturbed in eternal serenity, disturb itself? How and why did our ancestral Mind go from awake to asleep? From Self-Awareness to unconsciousness, immortality to mortality, eternity to time, perfection to imperfection? We have what Wapnick calls “excessive mythology” but not a rational explanation. What is the nature of the “supreme being?” Did descent begin from “eternal serenity” or did we get it wrong? Did it end with “creation” -- our material universe -- or with illusion, the state that the metaphysics of Parmenides and the Course describe.

The Story of the Child 

The work in progress that is my book adheres to the thrust of the Course and its basic principles but almost entirely without the symbols that give it a whiff of religion. It isn’t heavy on the analytics of Freudian psychology because to make its point it doesn’t need to be. If it violates the letter of either I’ve been careful not to violate them in spirit. But what I’m writing is metaphysics. Not the logic of Zeno who, like Aristotle, tested the capabilities of Logic without Love -- the missing element that might otherwise have brought Parmenides, Plato, and Jesus together -- but the Logic-Love of the Course. 

The Story of the Child is the working title of my book devoted to getting our baseline right. By telling our story going back beyond the Big Bang to the mental state of the Child that caused it. The Child of its Parents Logic-Love who are our own real parents since we are the Child in a dream state. The mental state that produced the grand illusion: our bodies and their universe of spacetime-matter. The condition that locks minds into the perversion of Truth that is authoritarian “realism.”

Attempting to tell our antecedent Mind’s story with Logic, the gift of metaphysics, and the explanation given us in the clear by Jesus in the Course, may finally help us grasp the truth of our baseline situation -- the human condition. Without the mythology that’s buried fragments of Logic under mountains of obfuscation. That make the articulation and integration of history’s dominant thought systems into a single coherent system a fool’s errand.

Breaking up is hard to do

Illusion -- the baseline condition that Becker’s physics may now be describing. Science, from Aristotle on, has grudgingly allowed that Mind is real but left it at that while it turned all its talents, resources, and passions to its first love: matter. While it imagined itself someday atop the Empire State Building, pounding its chest in triumph, swatting away the remnants of its pitiful enemies. Trumpeting unified theories of everything that explain, once and for all, the meaning of life. The origin and fate of the universe. Quantum gravity! We’re saved and we can all go home and live in peace because the study of matter has answered all our questions.

No it hasn’t. And it never will. Einstein tried and failed. Bohr and quantum mechanics won the argument. Time to give up the dream within a dream: the dream of an orderly, divine universe that can be figured out and the figuring out. An impossibility if the universe is that which can’t be figured out. An illusion because that’s what an illusion is. If you disagree, then explain the anomalies of particle behavior and cosmology without resort to the Logic of Parmenides and A Course in Miracles. Because that’s where the explanation is. The answers you’ve been looking for since Aristotle and Democritus and others before him.

Let physics carry on with matter. Keep after quantum gravity and keep us, so to speak, in the loop, because that’s its job. But we don’t have to carry on with physics. With bodies even though we imagine that’s who we are. There’s a better guide. We can take up with Mind. With Free Choice, the wild card. The beloved Child of Logic and Love. Because that’s who we really are.

Sure, breaking up is hard to do. But let metaphysics be our guide and maybe we can do it.

What was lost? 

Until the End of Time, Brian Greene’s inquiry into “Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe,” (Knopf 2020), begins with a familiar refrain:

[P]rofound questions abound, like what or who created space and time, and what or who imposed the guiding grip of mathematics, and what or who is responsible for there being anything at all, but even with all that left unanswered we’ve gained powerful insight into the cosmic unfolding. (p. 53)

What was lost when humanity’s ancestral Mind lost consciousness? The Child of Parents, Logic (masculinity) married to Love (femininity), in the Reality that preceded ours. That produced our alternate “reality.” That parallels the dream of an unconscious Mind that is our “reality” and contains the explanation for everything that “happens” inside it. Including Brian’s evolving universe, a reverse mirror image of Reality and Truth -- the unconscious Mind that’s dreaming it. That only happens to be the biggest of the perversions of Reality and Truth that make up what we call “life.” A stew of contradictions that can only be the imaginings of a split mind. Child that lost its Mind when it lost consciousness.

Lost Connection -- the implications of Logic, the relationships of Love, and the Oneness of its Psyche-Soul -- that bind all of Reality-Creation together into one harmonious whole. Lost the faculties of Mind-thought and Love-feeling that gave it Self-Awareness. The capacity to think logically. The capacity to feel lovingly. To judge with values drawn from the Worth of Life, of Creation, the substance of Reality and its laws of cause and effect. Of the Necessity of Right and Good that serves and governs all of Creation. The authority of Authorship.

What wasn’t lost?

Had all this not been lost Greene’s Until the End of Time wouldn’t have to admit that its “search for meaning,” like Hawking’s “quest for knowledge,” only begs the question. The question that humanity must and can address, because the “meaning” of “life,” the “knowledge” of its origin and fate, is an absurdity without it. Physics, philosophy, psychology, and theology can’t keep entertaining their audience with erudite “answers” that fail to address the right question. With empty circumlocution based on circular, self-referential “reasoning.” They can’t keep getting away with it.

What wasn’t lost was Free Choice. Because the Child of Logic-Choice and Love-Freedom is Free Choice. It’s why the Child was brought into Being, to introduce the element of Free Choice without which the Worth of Reality-Creation cannot be affirmed and reciprocated.

What wasn’t lost was Intuition. Though we are but projections of a split and dreaming mind, a collective unconscious lacking Self-Awareness, we are part of Connection that can never be broken in Reality. We have access to Logic and Love, our Parents, through intuition. Through insights that come of their own accord, never to compromise Free Choice but only to respond to its call for Love and Guidance.

What does it take to access the answers that are missing? That ought to launch Greene’s flight into outer space? Using the connection to Logic and Love that can never be broken. Using Intuition and exercising Free Choice that can never be lost.

What follows are observations fed by the intuition of one individual who chooses to go where John Milton went in Paradise Lost. Into another Reality, a “paradise” that preceded the “fall.” That, unlike Greene’s universe of spacetime-matter, has a point. Inquiry made possible because it’s freed from captivity to sensory perception and the quantitative measurements of science. The dead weight of authoritarian “realism” that denies intuition and blocks insight.

What gives me the right? What is my “authority?” Logic itself, the root of metaphysics. And Love, the source of motivation. The Voice for Intuition and Free Choice that either makes sense or it doesn’t. That comes close and distances itself spontaneously. I’m not trying to lead. I’m trying to listen. Trying to follow. To get it right.

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The masses can’t lead the way

Quantum gravity is beyond the reach of experimental physics. Nils Bohr broke the news over a century ago with the Copenhagen Interpretation. Physicists attached to their work and its larger service to humanity carried on undaunted until a few years ago, when Carlo Rovelli, Adam Becker, and probably other chroniclers of their profession accepted the inevitable and turned to philosophy for help. Our physical environment seems to be telling us that of course everything is as it appears to be on one level while nothing is as it appears to be on other levels. The human scale we take for granted versus the macroscopic cosmos and microscopic particles, both notorious for forms and behavior of energy that can’t be pinned down. Like a rodeo bull determined to buck its rider, spacetime-matter resists all efforts to turn it into a pet: knowable, predictable, and obedient to the rules of the household. The mind of its own doesn’t want to cooperate.

At a moment like this --

  • When humanity’s assumption has fallen flat, all the way back to Galileo and Aristotle before him -- that science, the study of matter, will explain everything. T hat explanation can be verified through experiments, and then we will finally know.
  • That Hawking’s “quest for knowledge” will have rewarded humanity’s patience with his profession leading the way. Will have rewarded humanity’s patience, its faith in it, with answers. With Understanding that finally frees us from endless squabbles over ideologies that compete for Truth and supremacy, in our minds and the arena of physical conflict beyond.
  • That even though sensory perception -- the guide to understanding provided by the body’s senses -- and the quantitative measurements of science obviously can’t tell the whole story, since mind and qualitative considerations beyond bodies and laboratories have their own stories to tell, the study of matter bodies can detect, can see, touch, hear, taste, and smell, ought to be enough.
  • Because if it isn’t enough, what other shared source of experience can certify its legitimacy so readily? So convincingly? What other source can deserve to be labeled “realistic” when other sources have already resulted in a crazy quilt of irreconcilable differences? Have already discredited themselves with departures from Logic and common sense. With frightful rubbish.

At a moment like this --

  • Hope gives way to despair. Hope that collective efforts in any field -- science or economics, philosophy or psychology, engineering or theology -- will get the job done.
  • Because physics had made great strides without having to parse the movements of every particle. It could do with calculations based on probabilities -- how great masses of particles were likely to behave.
  • Because other fields had made great strides the same way, basing their paradigms on assumptions about the judgments of masses of minds.
  • It seems we can’t do that anymore. Letting great masses of anything lead the way is a dead end. What “most people” think or do isn’t the reliable guide to common sense it’s always seemed to be.

Sister Sledge was right: We are family

At a moment like this, one is thrown back on one’s own judgment. Realizing that we are as individual particles whose behavior does have to be parsed. That the answers we long for are somewhere out there if they aren’t here in our own minds, in the minds of other individuals thinking like us or on different tracks. But either way, getting somewhere on their own, individually, without peer pressure to conform with hidebound convention, with party lines, with careers and employers. To submit to the tyranny of groups, the graveyard of individuality. The barrier, once and for all, to real progress.

But how, without groups, can one search the data base of individuals to find those who are getting somewhere? Thinking logically, systematically, of their own Free Will, to weave their way through all the analytical dead ends, the deceptions, temptations, and flawed reasoning, to come up with solid theories, plausible story lines that free us from the confinement of bodies. That take us beyond “grounding” in an illusion that energy built in service to an unconscious, dreaming mind.

Why does it matter that there may be other individuals whose minds are similarly connected? Occupied with the same cause, aided by the same function of mind -- Intuition -- that produces insights from the same source, Logic bonded with Love. While we are individuals we are also family. Family interconnected through our Psyches, our Souls. Not through massed bodies that create the illusion of unity only to fragment into quarreling factions. It matters because we aren’t isolated, separate bodies. The thoughts and feelings of individuals shared through our common ancestral Mind, the Child of Logic-Love whose story defines ours, have substance. Brought into compelling relevance every day by Relationship: us to Child, Child to Parents.

Between Parent and Child: Love that will not be denied

Though our world of incessant contradiction and conflict wants us to believe otherwise we are all one Child. Not split minds as we appear to be but of one Mind. And the Child, our ancestral Mind, doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists in Relationship with its Parents. Parents who are far from indifferent to its condition. Their will is to have their Child back with them in Self-Awareness. Not the state of self-delusion that condemns the Child and us, its imagined projections, to foolishness. To perversity that is the state of “reality” in an entropic universe and the bodies and brains that occupy it. Occupants of Plato’s Cave, so thoroughly indoctrinated with delusion no force on earth can part them from it.

If the Child’s condition and story defines ours, it is the will of the Child’s Parents to awaken it that won’t let the story rest until it gets there. Until Free Will animated by the will of Necessity, the laws of cause and effect, guided by Relationship, extricates the Child from its self-imposed confinement, from Its dream.

There are no two greater forces at work, here and now, than these: the Child wanting to be back with its Parents and its Parents wanting their Child back.  One searches for other individuals engaged in the same cause because in Relationship there is healing and in healing there is Force. Relentless and not to be denied. Because aligning with the shared purpose of healing, to restore the Relationship, cannot fail.

The embrace of Necessity

A Course in Miracles (ACIM) is not religion. It’s not “faith.” New Age or group of any kind. It’s not even “Christianity,” even though it borrows terminology and concepts from a religion hard-wired into a culture that crosses national and continental boundaries and so serves as a common language. It’s a voice helping us with elements of the laws of cause and effect sourced from Logic married to Love. With Necessity that we need to guide us toward awakening, the bottom-up authority backed by Force that can’t be deceived or bargained with by wills who would replace it with illogic, fear, guilt, and hatred from the top down. With the lawlessness of arbitrary rule if they could.

ACIM’s antecedents in human thought are many. Human thought venturing through the minds and unique circumstances of individuals, relying mainly on authoritarian “realism, hasn’t woven a coherent pattern. Pieces of ACIM seem to ricochet off points along the way but rarely with recognition. They’re tracked in Kenneth Wapnick’s Love Does Not Condemn: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil According to Platonism, Christianity, Gnosticism, and A Course in Miracles (Foundation for “A Course in Miracles” 1989). They include, among others, Neo-Platonism and Gnostic Christianity.

But all ACIM is, for me, is Logic married to Love. What Parmenides was trying to get at with metaphysics: a version of our story that takes us beyond appearances, only much more. Beyond the faux “reality” framed by sensory perception, the imagery of bodies, into the Reality of Mind. Mind whose functions don’t limit us to curiosities and anomalies of matter that can’t be explained by brains but free us instead to observe, reflect, reason, evaluate, and judge wherever Logic and Love lead us. Responding to the will of our ancestral Mind’s Parents to return Free Choice to its role in Creation. When it has learned its role from the trial and error of experience, When it shares their will. When it’s ready of its own Free Will to align with Logic-Love and embrace Necessity instead of opposing it.

What’s it like? Every day a fresh harvest

Feed the body and what comes out the other end is waste. Feed the mind and what comes out the other end is creativity. My mind before I took two and a half years to read ACIM received insights from intuition, enough to keep me functional but at a sluggish rate. Thirty years of reflection and practical application brought about a dramatic change. My perspective went from close identification with the Child to the first glimmers of identification with the Parents. From the Child’s craving to the Parents’ craving restoration of their Relationship to its state of awareness before the Child lost awareness.

Three years ago, January 2020, nourishment from the Logic-Love of ACIM began producing an outpouring of insights from intuition that was unprecedented. Not for extraordinary minds whose creativity accounts for human progress, but certainly for ordinary me. The transition in my mind’s ability to free itself from convention, from unremarkable to remarkable, was startling. As though a portal had opened that allowed me to free-associate across different perspectives. To ride the implications of logic to fresh insights. To germinate ideas from questions to answers as though they were fruit waiting to be picked from trees. Every day a fresh harvest.

Welcome to the world of the thinker and the writer. In relationship with Logic and Love through their agent, a friend. Brother or sister -- take your pick. Name? It doesn’t matter.

From explanation to Understanding

“Jesus,” the author of ACIM, isn’t an instrument of blind faith meant to sweep aside the free spirit of inquiry. To substitute arbitrariness for Reason. For the laws of science to suffocate discovery with the dead weight of “morality,” with “culture” and “tradition.” All the resistance to the name “Jesus,” all the skepticism, is based on misperception. Of what and who he represents and what he does. If he's resisted, misrepresented, mischaracterized, then he’s misunderstood. And so are the Parents, Logic-Love, the source of his agency in our lives. Why must Logic-Love strive to be heard? Because it’s precisely who they are and what they do that we don’t get: Logic and Love. It’s precisely to bring the gift of Logic and Love into our minds, our thoughts, our feelings and values, our judgment, that Jesus makes himself available. Touches us when we allow ourselves to be touched. Answers when we ask and are ready to listen. Comforts us when we fear and despair.

“Jesus” is a construct that comforts. That allays fears among many and particularly the individuals addressed by the voice heard in ACIM.  But in different circumstances. Meant to comfort, to allay fears because when addressing humanity, this would be the first requirement before a voice could be heard. The occupants of Plato’s Cave are as fearful of their situation as they are determined to cling to it. “Jesus” can’t be a “savior” because to be accepted and used as such would defeat his purpose: to guide ours, the Child’s efforts, to open our minds of our own Free Will to Understanding. Our own understanding from independent judgment, not someone else’s imposed from the top down. ACIM and its guide have no need for religious “faith” or for “saviors.” It’s an expression of Logic and Love combined that offers us the tools we need to intuit the Truth of circumstances and role models their use. So we can not only grasp Reality behind appearances but apply it. To guide us through passages in our everyday lives that present us with obstacles to remove and issues to resolve. With problems that require practical solutions.

A misperception accounts for the mother of all injustices, the attribution of a will to rule from the top down to the Parents of the Child. Whose authority governs from the bottom up, not to own, possess, and dominate but to share, affirm, enable, and empower. The same misperception also accounts for the attribution of character and intent to ACIM and its source that don’t fit. What would correct it? An understanding of Logic combined with Love, for that is what ACIM is. The undoing of illogic delivered through the voice of authority, from the bottom up, that shares the perspective of both Parents and Child. These prerequisites to awakening are deceptively simple in the telling but complicated in their application. For Understanding, Logic and Love were casualties of the Child’s loss of consciousness. And recovering them through self-awareness isn’t optional. It’s built into the laws of cause and effect. It’s necessary. 

Authorship from the bottom up: the ultimate source of authority 

The role sought by the shadow-reflection, the self-delusion I call the Joker, is the role of its opposite: the Author. The individual projection taken captive by the Joker, a virus who misperceives authority as top-down. Who practices authoritarian politics in a bottom-up democracy, seeks to turn democracy on his head. Seeks to fill the role of top-down authority which in Reality-Heaven doesn’t exist. What does exist is Reality-Truth based on laws of cause and effect given Force by Necessity. The role of Logic-Love that supplies the substance of laws-Necessity isn’t enforcer. It’s Author. Its function is Authorship. The source of empowerment, not dictatorship.

The Joker assumes, wrongly, that authority must come from power to rule from the top down. Authorship empowers from the bottom up with laws of cause-effect armed with the Force of Necessity based on and consisting of the Oneness of Logic-Love, its own authority. Its own legitimacy, its own authority based on Logic-Love and Laws-Necessity. The authority of Logic-Love, the lessons of Jesus in ACIM, need no external legitimacy. The Relationship between laws and Necessity is the source of Force that can’t be opposed without self-denying consequences. Without self-elimination from Reality-Creation. Authorship is self-empowering Oneness-Innocence without opposition. Self-empowering by what it is, by Being that has no opposites, no opposition. The source of Necessity because Necessity is the Force, the implication of Being, that can have no opposite in Reality.

Innocence without opposites: the ultimate source of power

This is the ultimate “Necessity.” If the self-delusion Joker, an opposite, presumes to replace Authorship, it goes up against Authorship that by definition can have no opposite in Reality. It will therefore cause its own elimination. Elimination by Necessity is self-elimination because the “opponent” is Oneness harmlessness-Innocence. Because Authorship in Reality that supports and governs Life-Creation is harmless.

Necessity is harmless. And therein lies the misperception of the Joker: the perception that in the harmlessness of Innocence is weakness. When in Reality it’s the source of empowerment. All empowerment originates in the harmlessness of Oneness-Innocence because this is the point in all of Reality-Creation where by definition there can be no opposites. Where opposition does not and cannot Be. Cannot exist. The Joker’s perception that power resides in Reality where there is the capability to harm is exactly wrong. It’s wrong in Reality and it’s wrong here in unreality. Harmfulness is not strength, it’s weakness. The contrary view is but one of the Joker’s many perversions of the Truth -- a joke.

Impossibility: alternate reality, alternate authorship

The Joker’s ambition is insane: to replace Authorship so it can exercise “power” by inflicting harm, by denying Free Will. A direct contradiction of laws of cause-effect and Necessity that can only find expression in illusion composed of impossibilities, of perversions of Truth. It can’t “succeed” for long in unreality composed of split minds that align with the agent of Logic-Love as well as submit to self-delusion. Unreality must be contradiction; therefore split minds are minds in a state of contradiction.

The role of Jesus is to demonstrate the insanity of contradiction through miracles that demonstrate the unreality of one side of the split mind. It’s to role model the benevolence and harmlessness of Authorship, its being its own source of authority. Necessity which in our state of unreality is helpful, healing. To demonstrate the miraculous effectiveness of Logic-Love Reality-Truth Authorship in contrast to yielding unreality. The example set by Jesus demonstrated not just the Force of Reality-Truth, of Authorship, but also the powerlessness of unreality-untruth, the insanity of replacement authorship. Top-down “authority” is a lie, an illusion. A contradiction of laws-Necessity.

The controlling consideration for the play-actor entertainer, the Joker with its jokes, is how it’s perceived when it gets the attention its act requires: as an innocent, “exonerated” in the devious act of “winning” its uncontested supremacy. Truth and Honesty are sacrificed for perception and deception if they conflict. And they always do. The controlling consideration for the Joker can never be Truth and Honesty.

Get in the shower!

I’m talking about the politics of polarization and misinformation that plagues us today. And a lot else. I’m giving an explanation from the roots of Reality that shows us, if we’re willing to listen, the error of our ways and how to fix it. The patterns of misperception and misjudgment that are taking us and our one-and-only habitat, Mother Earth, down. Rooted in the story from the Reality that preceded ours and accounts for ours. A story rooted in illogic, a mistake that can only be corrected by Logic. By Logic married to Love.

Can it be articulated with clarity? To minds that are mostly authoritarian “realists.” Corrupted and compromised by self-delusion, occupants of Plato’s Cave chained to their seats. Does it matter if anyone listens? If one individual gets it, bonds with an emissary from Logic-Love, and truly forgives, it matters.

Exploring beyond the scope of ACIM needn’t be beyond minds guided by Logic-Love from Intuition. The question that is beyond imagining is the bonding: when and how it will occur. When and how one individual will become so intimate with an emissary from Logic-Love, the Child’s Parents, that perspective will transcend the illusion and see the Truth. We get just a whiff of it when we step into the shower and are instantly visited by insight.

So OK. You want practical solutions to practical problems? Get in the shower!

Authority done wrong

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

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

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

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

Authority done right

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

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

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

Authority from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

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

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

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

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

The mistake that polarizes our politics

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

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

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

The metaphysics of error

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

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

Giving the mistake no quarter

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

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

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

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

“Almighty God”: the mother of all injustices

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

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

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

Time to retire the mistake

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

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

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

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

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

So we can all go home

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

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

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

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

When the lights were on

Imagine that you are a child who comes from a place where existence is an unbroken flow of Abundance. Where striving is effortless play. Where every mate is soulmate, the warmth of intimacy and the assurance of belonging, and all their personalities and compositions fit together in perfect harmony. Where everything and everyone shares the purpose and meaning of Life. The cause of all that is right and good, kind and just, happiness and contentment.

The cause of Logic and Love inseparable, your Parents. Where you are defined by your inheritance: judgment and choice, freedom and creativity. By Free Will -- Freedom of thought, expression and choice, sovereignty and individuality. The attributes of Self with an indispensable role to play in Creation: ensuring the worth and integrity of Interconnectedness. The process and structure of Creation. Of Reality governed with wisdom and caring. Not through intervention that confines and contracts from the top down but through the free spirit of Creativity that liberates and expands from the bottom up. That consummates every Connection, every Relationship, with the satisfaction, passion, and beauty of reciprocation.

Lights off!

Imagine that you now find yourself removed from familiarity and dumped into strangeness. Suddenly and without warning. With no recognizable coordinates to navigate by and no capacity to navigate even if there were. Because the flow of sharing, affirmation, and empowerment that were your life blood, the source of all that defined you, that gave you motivation and direction, has been cut off. Because you’ve lost consciousness, and the strangeness that you now occupy is the strangeness of a dream. A dream yet without form. Waiting for the characters and story that will animate it. You’re lost, adrift, and utterly helpless. A fool unable to make sense of anything.

Imagine that there is an explanation for what happened. That the strangeness can be navigated, but, for now, you haven’t the experience to know how. Your mind and memory are a blank slate, wiped clean. But even if they weren’t, there is no known playbook for the situation you are now in, none that could have prepared you for this. If there is to be a playbook, you’ll have to write it yourself.

You figure it out

And so when you detect your own reflection, a shadow opposite, you don’t recognize it. Don’t recognize its clue to where you have landed: In the strangeness of opposites. The opposite of the familiarity, the Reality, of where you were. You’ve lost consciousness without  being aware that it was even possible to lose it. And been deposited from the land of all things possible to a never-never land of all things impossible. Into the strangeness, the lawless chaos, of unreality.

All inevitable and for a purpose. But it’s for you and your gifts to figure it out -- character, integrity, independent judgment, and Free Will. And now you have a choice. With faculties impaired, with knowledge gone, you are to make sense of this strange opposition, your own reflection – your mirror image opposite. Your shadow. An apparition unknown to Reality that can only be detected in a dream. Defined by your own attributes because it’s part of your self but in reverse. Its code a derivation, entirely lacking in originality because it has no self. Derived from the definition of everything that you are not.

Only you don’t know it. Why should you when Home, the place you came from, had no opposites? When your Parents could not have prepared you for this.

A case of mistaken identity

In your acute vulnerability – in your desperation to find your way back -- you can’t be aware that the savior you seek, the guide who knows where you are and can help you navigate, is nothing of the kind. It’s the opposite. A thing of the imagination, a parasite attached to its host and entirely dependent on its host. With no sense or sensibility of its own, incapable of guiding itself let alone its host. A lifeless viral code. A predator that would take its host captive and replicate itself. A Joker that would entertain itself and distract its replications with perversions of the Truth. Jokes at their expense. Why? Because that’s all the code of opposition can do.

If only its host mistakes it for an other. Which, of course, you do. In your desperation, the breakdown of your faculties, your lack of experience and discernment, you mistake your own shadow-reflection for an other. Imagine it to be your guide and savior. And once it’s given your own voice with which to fool you, let it fool you into taking you captive. Into reversing roles and turning you into its parasite. Into replacing mindfulness with mindlessness. How can you not trust it when the voice it speaks with is your own?

Escape into captivity: our world of appearances

Imagining, all the while, that you have entrusted your fate to an other who will guide you out of strangeness, if not back Home at least to a safe place. When in truth your mind taken captive is now imagining that you are your captor. You have surrendered self-awareness to self-delusion, the delusion that you are your own opposite. And that the dream world of impossibility where it has taken you – the world where we seem to be now – is real. A world composed of bodies that are apparitions, appearances that are deceptions. All of it a magician’s act, the performance of a gifted illusionist.

A narrative that strikes the mind of a realist, embedded in the dream, as unrealistic. Until, that is, physics speaks for what this world of strangeness is telling us: that maybe it isn’t real. Maybe in some sense it is an illusion. Because not only physics but every field of inquiry that assumes that it is real has failed to prove it. Has started out with the promise of human invention and ingenuity and made great progress, only to fall short of its goal.

Science doesn’t have the answer

Albert Einstein sought an elegant equation to describe the material universe that he revered. That he believed harbored the elegance, simplicity, and beauty of perfection. That brought together the physics of cosmos with particles – quantum gravity. But what he also wanted was to prove that the subject matter of his profession, physics, is real. To put an end, for all time, to the debate between idealists and realists over the subject matter of philosophy: reality. He wanted to be the one with the Answer, and he wasn’t. He failed at both objectives. Quantum gravity remains beyond reach. Where physics today is beginning to acknowledge the illusion that the universe is, the failure of Einstein proved the reality that it isn’t.

Einstein wasn’t alone. Every field of inquiry has failed to explain the origin of appearances, the contradictory laws that govern their behavior. That break down at the extremes. When only another reality can explain the singularities, the anomalies, the mysteries of dark matter, dark energy, and black holes. Particles that are here, there, everywhere, and nowhere, for which time doesn’t exist. The random mutations of cells and the never-to-be-found seat of consciousness.

Energy did it: the dark side of the Force

The common thread through it all: the indivisibility, the inseparability of the creative force of Energy that animates appearances. The agent of Mind that enables Creation and imagination with equal facility. That animates the unreality of unconsciousness as well as the Reality of consciousness and so is complicit in the deception. Because it follows direction, and direction comes from Mind. Mind whether conscious of Reality or only dreaming an illusion. When Energy produced spacetime-matter at the Big Bang, it did so not at the direction of Mind creating Reality from possibilities. It did so at the direction of mind dreaming unreality from impossibilities.

When you lost consciousness, mistook your own reflection for another self, were taken captive by your other self – your dark side, -- and then mistook who you are and where you are, you activated the “dark side of the Force.” The lights gone out, your thoughts were no longer enlightened by Abundance and Innocence, hallmarks of sanity. They were plunged by the false innocence of victimhood into insanity: a hellish pit of fear, blame, rage, hatred, and guilt – wounding emotions conjured by your captor, rival to your Parents. Rival to Reality and Truth. Coded to bring down all of Creation with psychopathic lies. With a barrage of made-up grievances and resentments.

Your mind was a cauldron of torment that it could not tolerate. And so it got rid of its torment. It projected its unwanted emotions out of mind into a separate reality, an act conjured by the illusionist and animated by Energy. The Big Bang. Sheer madness since thoughts can’t leave their source, and “separate reality” can only be a joke. The projection climaxed the illusionist’s magic tricks, but the madness nevertheless remains firmly seated in your mind. Its unwanted emotions went nowhere.

Still, you’re the source of the Big Bang! You invented our universe!

Why?

Your purpose then can’t be to affirm the reality of what’s not real, to exploit it for pleasure until all that’s left is pain. Your purpose must be to learn and grow from experience. To gain the competence to tell the difference between host and reflection, truth from deception, reality from illusion. To tell the difference between right and wrong, good and bad, the light side from the dark side of the Force. Your purpose is to attain the maturity of self-awareness. The awareness that self-the-many is Self-the-One. The knowledge that there are no “others” but reflections of our Self, and in each one of us is the one Self.

To what end? That you may reclaim your identity. Reclaim you Free Will, your individuality and Creativity, and wake up from your self-imposed dream of worthlessness. That you may regain awareness of the connection with your Source that was never lost and return Home. Home to the joyfulness and Worth of Life and Creation. To the oneness, beauty, and perfection of Reality. To having a job to do and the competence of Logic, Love, and experience to do it.

 

 

 

 

 

Let Go Your Appearances

From an old channel island, the new
rises out of the mist
hovering over the water in the stillness
borderline
between the graduated blue of the sky
reaching up to the quarter moon on high
and the textured blue of the ocean below
dotted with specks of white

Bodies navigating trails down the waterless slopes
voices caught
by the wind, birds gliding on the wind,
pine branches dancing in the wind
come to rest and fall silent

In the shadow of my relief from the sun
who is to notice?
Who wills chronicle to life and adds notations
to its log? As if another will, long hence,
would need to know. Would care to know

What unnamed hand scrawls its signature
on the record of time
soul of anonymity, here and gone?
Self or opposite? Host or parasite?
Is it possible to choose?

Can’t I just be whatever for a little while
and be done with it?
"Easy come, easy go. As it came, let it go."
Is that what the view, the wind, the stillness
has to say?

I am the liberation of Love
The peace of Mind
I am Now, the Living. I am Forever.
Let go your appearances
Your dead weight of the past
And return Home with Me.

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Mind dreaming can “detect” what’s not really there

The whole Child resides in every individual. There is only one Child. So, anyone can say, honestly and truly, that they are the Child.  When it matters, they can be the Child. Not the Child’s Parents but their Child. The Child’s projections of itself in this unreality appear to be children, presumably of the same Parents, but they’re all the same Child.

Why doesn’t it feel this way? Opposites. There are not one but two sensors recording the stillness of the shades of blue, the crawl of the containership that’s slicing here and there in two. One is a projection of the dreaming Child sensing through Intuition with the vision of Logic.

The other is a body sensing as only as it can, with eyes and ears, a nose, mouth, and skin. With brain atop its spine, ever alert to threats, to prey, to food, and mates. Ready to act on its own behalf, for or against its kind, with the force of animal instinct and feeling detached from thought. A copy of the Child’s shadow. Replication of a virus that occupies the mind of its unconscious host. Senses that detect itself: a world of allure and distraction, flickering shapes and intriguing sounds. A grand image of mind’s opposite, the mesmerizing universe. A neural network, projection of a shipwrecked self.

Except that it’s all appearances. Here and gone, of no real consequence. Wedded to senses that are here and gone. All of it an illusion ingested by the black hole of time. Of nevermore, meant to hide Truth that can only be sensed by the vision of Logic. By vision able to see behind and beyond the lie of appearances. To the face behind the mask of the shadow. A mocking self-delusion. A nobody. The Joker.

Able to see behind appearances if the individual who is the Child understands that it is the Child. If in the body’s replication of the virus the individual hasn’t repeated the error: the Child’s mistaking its shadow opposite for an “other.” The Child who lost consciousness and, in its desperation to regain it, sought help from the only source that helplessness and defenselessness, unsensing unconsciousness, could detect. Its own reflection. A mirror image opposite of itself that had nowhere been evident before. A clinging parasite – lifeless, mindless, loveless, soulless. Whose every attribute is derived.

Opposite coded like the reverse of DNA. Illusion that can only be detected and brought to “life” by a mind unconscious and thus capable of dreaming what’s unreal – what’s not there. Nothingness without its host and nothingness with its host. Unreality projected by its host into a facsimile of reality not by wheeling Frankenstein’s monster to the tower of the laboratory on a stormy night, to be brought to life by a bolt of lightning. But by self-delusion.

Nothing that the shadow code did. The shadow code can’t “be” or “do” anything on its own. Like a pivot, it can only switch the Child’s identify from its self to its shadow by an act of the Child. By “choice” because the Child is choice: free when it’s conscious, captive when it’s not. Captive to the unreality and illusion of unconsciousness. By an act that is choice and therefore can be undone, but not free choice, conscious choice. Self-awareness replaced by self-delusion. All that transpired between the Child and its reverse mirror-image reflection was perpetrated by the Child in a severely compromised state.

There is no speaking to the Child – or anyone -- as though it were an “other”

Choosing to view Santa Catalina Island across the bay with the vision of Logic instead of the body’s senses sounds like a stretch. A radical change of perception since the vision of Logic can’t detect appearances. Ask the Child to navigate to Avalon with the vision of Logic and it might wind up on another planet, in another universe, or in another reality altogether. The Child navigating anywhere with the vision of Logic will eventually take it back home. To self-awareness that replaces self-delusion. To its role in Creation: awareness of Self and all possibilities, including awareness of the possibility of unconsciousness and the unreal consequences of impossibility; affirming the Worth of Creation, the Worth of Life, by earning it, freely choosing it, and proving the Good – the morality – of it.

The view of Santa Catalina Island from across the Bay is an appearance meant to block real vision. To perpetuate the self-delusion. To validate the body and its senses, embodiment of the shadow’s code, a false identity. Choosing to understand it for what it is takes but one step toward acknowledging and welcoming the Child’s true identity. Is acting on behalf of the Child who lies unconscious in a troubled, profoundly unhappy sleep, dreaming a nightmare of self-alienation. Of apparitions that, in the uncertainties of “life” and the certainties of loss, are also troubled and profoundly unhappy.

Ask the Child if it wants its projections, the virus’s replications, to view Santa Catalina Island through its own vision of Logic instead of theirs. Its answer will be the question. An echo chamber. Question addressed to the Child and answer from the Child are to and from the same source: the projection – the individual – who contains the whole Child. There is no addressing to the Child as though it were an “other. Though embodiments of the shadow code insist otherwise, there is no addressing other individuals – projections-replications – as though they were “others.”

Any mind in any state that speaks to or from the Child in this state of unreality-appearances is the one Child. Choosing to view Santa Catalina Island through the vision of Logic instead of the body’s senses is choosing to be the one Child rather than its self-delusion, its shadow-opposite. Is exercising Free Will to stand for Reality-Truth in place of unreality-deception. Is nudging the unconscious Child back to the sanity of Logic. To awakening and Reality.

The choice is between right and wrong, good and bad

Logic would attempt an honest account of what’s wrong with this transient sense of peace, this grand view of earth, sky, and water, all living things caressed by a gentle ocean breeze. A tableau belying the violence to both mind and matter that put it “there.” An appearance affirmed by its own “eyes” that now bear witness. An absurdity – Red Riding Hood dressed in the wolf’s clothing pretending to be Red Riding Hood. In short, an opposite. Not knowing who or what it is. Just coded, just programmed, to be the opposite of whatever its host is. An impossibility that can’t be real, can’t make sense, grafted onto possibility.

Why? Because if a thing implies the “existence” of its contradiction then an accommodation must be made. Must be made of necessity, because the sum and substance of everything that is, is the implications of Logic. The accommodation must be unreal. Because Logic does not permit contradiction, does not permit two opposing realities.

And since “Reality” implies the “existence” of its opposite, unreality becomes the logical repository for all opposites. For illogic. Logic and illogic “co-existing” in harmony, fitting together in peace in the Interconnectedness of Everything, by one Being and its derivative, the other not-being. The accommodation a placing by Reality of opposites where they belong, into the pocket reserved for opposites, Reality’s own opposite: unreality. That can be allowed to “exist” in harmony with Reality because it doesn’t exist.

What’s implied by impossibility is that Reality at the level of the Child, the doing-choosing phase of Creation, is a choice. That there is a right choice and a wrong choice, a good choice and a bad choice. Because “impossibility” – this and any other opposite that contradicts Logic’s implications – is clearly an assault on Logic itself. Which makes it an assault not only on Mind but also on Worth measured by its investment and evaluated by affect. On the Force and Immediacy of Love. Only if Logic is assumed to be up to no good can an opposite be considered an angel of justice, an absurdity that nevertheless finds support in an objectified world of bodies with brains substituting for Mind, devoid of affect, oblivious to Worth.

Free Choice can’t perform without training

The training of Child Free Choice to perform its role in Creation forms the context, the meaning and purpose of circumstance, the “human condition.” That defines all that is encompassed in the experience of “life” in this make-believe world. The one Child’s projections must learn how to make the right choice, as individuals, from experience. As stakeholders who stand to gain or lose from right or wrong decisions. Who will understand costs and benefits why? Because they will experience them firsthand. Because they will know the pain of error and will thus have the discipline of experience, of wisdom and maturity, for guidance when they apply Free Will.

Because Understanding can’t be inherited from the Child’s Parents in Reality. Can’t be handed down, can’t be given. It must be learned and earned at the ground level, from the bottom up. By the Child’s projections exercising independent judgment, with guidance from Logic through their own Intuition freely chosen. Were it otherwise the Child could not be Free Choice. Were it otherwise unreality under the control of the Child’s Parents could no longer be unreal. The training of Free Choice through the “experience” of unreality is ordained by the Laws of cause and effect. By Necessity.

The Deus ex Machina that bailed blundering fools out of their messes in ancient Greek playmaking won’t be making an appearance. Nor will “saviors” of Church mythology. Though, in a setting fashioned out of whole cloth by magic, penetrations from Mind’s memory of Reality – “miracles,” the “paranormal” – are inevitable.
_________________________________________________________________________________________

Unconsciousness: the illusory opposite of Consciousness 

Consciousness: the state of sanity and consequence where it is always Now in the light of day, in the light of Reality. Where there are no beginnings and endings, only the orderly sequence of Logic, the workings of its Implications, the judgment of Mine-reason and Love-feeling working together in harmony with Psyche, the soul of Being, to extend and expand the flower, the inexpressible beauty, rapture, and Worth of Life. Earned, affirmed, and reciprocated through the Relationship. Through relationship between Parent and Child, the Innocence-being of Psyche-Soul joined in integrity with the independent judgment, the doing and risk, of Free Choice.

Unconsciousness: a derivative of Consciousness. The state of insanity and inconsequence where it is never Now, in the darkness of night, in the darkness of unreality and dreams, the temporal where all is beginnings and endings, the illusion and absurdity of time. A “present” defined as somewhere between “not the past” and “not the future,” in a universe of nowhere the same Now. The decay and disorder of entropy and illogic. Misperceptions of Mind detached from Love, misjudgments without reason rooted in value. Staging its performance of appearances and distractions for bodies, isolated and separated, blinded by their senses, deluded by worthlessness. Ruled in captivity by disconnection, the opposite of whatever Is. The dependence, the derivation, the undoing and apparition that is the joke of nothingness.

The split mind of the unconscious Child: connection to its Reality of Consciousness through the Holy Spirit and the voice of its illusory shadow-code detected by self-delusion through unconsciousness, neither capable of awareness of the other. Neither aware of what the other is up to, because if Consciousness were aware, it would make the shadow-code, an unreality, real. And unawareness can only detect itself -- what’s not Real. Neither right nor left hand (or hemisphere) knowing what the other is doing even though they occupy the same mind.

The stirring ascent of neuroscience up the Empire State building 

Relationship between Mind and brain: the more Mind focuses attention on brain, the more it inquires into the brain’s functions and performance, the less aware it is of Mind and its performance. The Child’s self-delusion, its shadow-opposite, made the brain, like the body, as a substitute for the Child’s real self, a distraction from circumstances-facts that would confuse the Child in its efforts to judge meaning and purpose from its context. That would steer it away from correcting its mistaken identity, away from its archetypal projection of self onto its shadow.

Brain-study – neuroscience -- attracts and distracts in inverse proportion to the self-deluded Child’s attention to itself, i. e. to its Mind since Mind-Love is what it is. Mindlessness is the ultimate goal of the embrace of body and its brain. The brain “seat of consciousness” is the ultimate conclusion that the Big Lie seeks because it would signify the triumph of the Child’s shadow-code over Mind the seat of Consciousness. The truth is the brain is Mind’s illusory opposite. This defines their relationship. “Neuroscience” is the ultimate distraction because it takes Mind-recognition’s attention away from Mind-Self, minimizes Self-awareness, while luring attention into the mysteries of an indecipherable organ, leading nowhere and maximizing self-unawareness, the illusion-deception.

In his book, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (MIT Press 2012), Christof Koch, a Caltech neuroscientist, described how he acted on an impulse to climb the San Gabriel mountains and bellow his indomitability into the night when his marriage broke up. King Kong climbing the Empire State building. What else could it be but the triumph of primitive limbic emotion, animal instinct? A body’s brain and its senses parted from Mind, pretending to substitute for introspection, reflection, reasoning, evaluation, and judgment. For conscious deliberation that leads with Logic toward explanation and understanding. Toward the self-awareness of Mind whose absence even the captive brain of a Caltech neuroscientist couldn’t recognize or acknowledge.

Mind the seat of Consciousness. Brain the seat of unconsciousness

The study of physics – cosmology and quantum mechanics -- lures Mind away from attention to the relationship between body-senses and external sensed environment, just as neuroscience lures Mind away from attention to the relationship between Mind and brain. The scholarship of physics and neuroscience pays scant attention to the question that deserves it, the relationship between body-universe and brain-Mind. Why? Because understanding the nature-Logic of the relationship would reveal the truth: that body-brain and universe are imaginings of an unconscious, dreaming, self-deluded Mind. Are unreal. Are illusions.

Mind-host is the seat of Consciousness. Its parasite-derivative, the brain-appendage, is the seat of unconsciousness. Mind is the seat of Reality-Truth, One Child, Oneness-Innocence, Love, Free Will. Brain is the seat of unreality-appearances, Child the many-guilt, fear-rage-hatred, limbic animal instinct, and captivity. Mind is the seat of learning-growth, evolution, maturity, and Free Will. Brain is the seat of status quo, arrested development, immaturity. Mind is the seat of Introversion, Intuition, Reason-Evaluation, Judgment. Brain is the seat of extraversion and sensory perception. Mind is INTJ, brain is ESFP. Mind is idealist-progressive futurist. Brain is realist-regressive traditionalist. Mind is Definition, brain is its opposite whatever the definition.

Dualism vs. non-dualism is the pull between control of Child-Self by illusory brain vs. Mind’s choosing to regain awareness of its real Self. Between shadow-code unconsciousness and Child-host Consciousness. A Course in Miracle’s uncompromising non-dualism is the stance required to prevent making unreal real. It must be uncompromising because any gesture that accommodates opposition might imply its recognition and thus make it real.

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All for the Good: the Necessity of training and the inevitability of error

Departure from the implications of Logic explains why and how the Child lost Consciousness within the context of the Interconnectedness of Reality-Creation. But the event took place within not one but two contexts. In the constantly broadening context of Everything, where the Governance of Logic and its Laws of cause and effect accommodate the impossibility and unreality of opposites, there is a Logic to the departure that gives it purpose and meaning.

The departure was necessitated by the Laws of cause and effect without its consequences being intended by Logic, which cannot govern above the Law and cannot intend anything illusory, including unconsciousness. The departure and all of its consequences – unconsciousness and the dream of unreality – were no accident. They belong within the larger context of Everything, where the Child, Free Choice, must perform the doing of Creation on its own plane of Creation, choosing among possibilities that include impossibilities. Opposites that it alone can be aware of without making them Real because its Consciousness, unlike the Consciousness of its Parents, is not defined by Logic to make Real. It is only defined to distinguish between Real and unreal so that the Good may be Freely Chosen and thereby attain its Worth.

So that the Good may be Freely Chosen and earned. Earned, that is, by Free Choice, no longer a Child but grown to maturity through the training of experience. Experience with the impossibilities of unconsciousness as well as the Possibilities of Consciousness. With the consequences of self-delusion, the misidentification of Self. With error that projects the Child’s unconscious mind into unreality, an impossibility that can only be a dream, a cockpit where Free Choice can train to fly through trial and error without crashing. Without real consequence except for gaining competence in its exercise. In the practice and application of Free Choice: doing what’s right and doing it right. But first: Getting it right. Getting it right through the explanation and Understanding of Logic.

“Lucifer” be damned!

The role defined by Logic for the Child in Reality-Creation – Free Choice bonded with Psyche, the Soul of Oneness and Innocence in the Force of the Now, the Holy Instant – necessitated departure from Consciousness, from Reality-Creation, from the Now into the illusion of time, so that Free Choice could undergo training implied by the Logic of its role. So that it could become a fully-grown, fully invested, stakeholder in Reality. The mistake committed by a disoriented, badly compromised Mind that lost track of itself, a newborn Child who had not been trained in the exercise of Free Will in Creation, who had not grown to maturity, was no accident.

This could not have been treachery by a full-grown “fallen angel.” Lucifer betrayed by “original sin” and sent to eternal damnation in hell. By the all-too-familiar attributes of human folly, a projection of corrupted, misguided human minds. Projection by a projection. Not if the evil shadow-code was its host Free Choice, the Child self-deluded by its mistake, sent by Necessity into training, destined to learn right from wrong, correct its mistake, and return Home to Reality.

Again, It was the inevitable act of an immature Mind unconscious, in desperate straits, who detected its own reflection, its own shadow. Identified with its own illusory opposite as though it were an “other.” As though it were everything that in its desperation it craved, including a return Home to its Parents in Reality. And if that were not possible, escape to substitute parents in another reality. As though its illusory “other” were a “savior” who could deliver whatever it craved.

The error could not have been by any means committed by Free Choice, an impossibility. But, because the Child is Free Choice, it was still necessarily choice that can eventually be undone. The mistake, like the tableau of peace across the Bay, is an accommodation with the illusion of time that can be undone in time.

To choose to see as the Child is to choose to be governed under the Law

Logic might want to posit possibility without impossibility. Might want the perfection of resolution so all can come to rest – Reality without subjecting Creation to unreality, pleasure to pain, happiness to misery, Good to evil. But until it can figure out how to prevent its implications from implying opposites, real possibilities from implying unreal impossibilities, it must continue its striving for resolution. For a whole number value of Pi that may be logically unattainable. The blessing and curse of eternity that may want to be done with striving. To affirm once and for all the good of Worth, of Being-Life, context with purpose and meaning, finish its task, and come to rest. Move on to something else or vanish into the mystery that is context with ever-shifting circumstance.

Whatever or however the sequence of Logic “began,” whatever caused the first movement, it’s only certain that it occurred at the instigation of circumstance. Certain because its instigation and response both were required by Logic – the Laws of cause and effect enforced by Necessity. Composed of the implications of Logic but necessarily autonomous. Necessarily not controlled by Logic because Governance can’t govern, can’t manage the interconnectedness of causes and effects, ideas, feelings, values and their animate expressions, where anything, even Logic itself, is above the Law.

To choose to view the vision of peace across the Bay, to feel the caress of the ocean breeze, to hear the happy voices, to get just a brief taste of tranquility in a world of strife -- as the Child rather than as its shadow-opposite, the strange apparition grown familiar through the body -- is to choose to govern and be governed under the Law. Is to understand how and why the specter of arbitrary rule, of lawlessness and disorder above the Law, insists on insinuating itself into the gatherings of bodies and souls who might otherwise just go about their business. Children choosing to learn and grow, to attain the maturity of competence. To do what they’re “here” for so they can move on. To get it right. To be Good.

Without the endless, meaningless distraction of conflict and violence. Endlessly repeating the same mistake: choosing the wrong “self.” A bull charging the bullfighter’s muleta until it’s killed, and more bulls are brought into the ring, worn out by distraction, a red piece of cloth, and they, too, die.

No ”fun” in games and no “innocence” in victimhood

The wrong “self” – the contradiction, the reverse mirror image, the opposite, the lifeless shadow-code of contrariness – isn’t benign. It’s not a fun parlor game of harmless competition that misperception makes of it. Brought to “life” by projection, by identity misplaced by a disoriented Child, it’s everything implied by the opposite of Good: sin, guilt, fear, rage, and hatred.

It’s the Child crying out in pain. Masculinity screaming with terror, roaring with impotent rage. Femininity wailing with separation and abandonment, grief and bereavement. Misplaced self wailing with the endless grievances and resentments of self-imposed crucifixion, of victimhood on the cross. The false “innocence” of righteous woundedness bent on wholesale vengeance until it reigns supreme. Until it “wins.” Until it has no opposites because they’re all vanquished. All dead. Because the goal of competition is to eliminate competition. To eliminate itself, an expression of opposite: the shadow code. This is the “harmless game” of competition.

This is the tableau that produced bodies, the illusion, the pretense of Child the many instead of one, self-deluded into overlaying its source in insanity with fleeting images of peace. Of beauty and tranquility. The sights, sounds, and taste of beauty as bodies sense it without the Memory of Home and Sanctuary as Logic Knows it. As the Child-the-one experienced it. Beauty permanent, indelible. Not apparitions that lull and lure minds detached from Logic with self-indulgence and complacency, like pigs fed before they’re slaughtered. Choosing to be the one Child instead of its shadow.

In vivid color: seeing the Child, seeing Self, in an “other”

Oskar Schindler watched impassively from a distance a Nazi atrocity against children. All in black and white until one child stood out. Not all the children being hunted down like animals and massacred but just one. In vivid color in the Stephen Spielberg film, the child who caught Schindler’s eye. Who opened the Nazi’s mind and heart to the wound and its call for Love. Turned him from an insensate extension of his limbic animal emotions – a monster – to intelligence with affect. With compassion so determined that his factory and its employees -- Schindler’s List -- went on to save hundreds of lives from the Holocaust.

I scan the procession of middle school graduates from a distance, with binoculars, until one comes into view who opens my mind and heart. A strawberry blonde, a rhapsody of peach and crimson lifted out of the dull uniformity of gray. The atrocity our separation, grandchild from grandparent. The wound and its call for Love.

What did Schindler and I see that sweeps aside misperception? That replaces it with feeling and commits us to this vision as though it were Soul itself? As though it replaced all Logic, all reason, all judgment, with one act. An act of Understanding. That requires no long and labored explanation. That arrives of its own accord with grace and ease, as if it were there all along, which it was. The cascade of tints, brilliant and warm, that played with the assurance of Innocence behind the mask of atrocity. That brought every child into vivid color, every heart into opening, every mind into Knowing.

The vision altered by binoculars was altered again, imperceptibly. The mind conscious of searching was got out of the way. In my own vulnerability I became the Child, was the Child, able to recognize Child: an indescribably precious being. Innocent, adorable, irresistible, vulnerable. A thing of beauty. A work of art.

The mind that led me there gave way to the Worth that came into view. To the Worth that holds all of it together in a rapture of Love. Of vulnerability that lies at the heart of Soul, the Oneness that can do no harm, that Knows no fear, because it contains everything. Because by definition it can have no opposites. A species from Galapagos ripe for extinction except that the Oneness, the Innocence that revealed itself in vivid color, has no predators. This, for fools who seek power through conquest, is Real power.

Reality isn’t a crapshoot

Schindler the child and I the child, brought to recognition of Child in an “other” with all the power and determination of affect, still, in the upwelling of caring and compassion, have a ways to go. Unconditional embrace of our own vulnerability in the vulnerability of an “other” has not healed the separation. The “other” in vivid color is no longer gray casting its shadow over the “many,” but it remains an “other.” With one attribute of Self that connects with rapturous Love beyond appearances, but still unknown, unseen for the one Self that it really is.

What is this gift of the “other” that we are to receive when we learn the truth of “relationship?” What makes all of “Reality” of idea and the unreality of matter “relational?” Quality of life in a world of appearances defined by apparitions – transitory bodies and their senses – at any given moment is a crapshoot. Purpose and meaning dependent on circumstances changing haphazardly hardly register on minds already compromised, battered incessantly with distractions. For minds paying attention all that can be hoped for is faith and a dollop of comfort. For those who take appearances at face value it’s make hay while the sun shines and leave the rest to “fate.”

Quality of life that’s a crapshoot shares the allure of a casino that delivers the euphoria, the magic, of an occasional win even though it’s accompanied by the funereal coldness guaranteed by loss. Quality of life that’s based on unexamined appearances becomes itself nothing more than an appearance, a trailer for a film that promises entertainment that’s only more appearances. Propped up by stage props – the facades of a studio lot.

The “circumstances” of context that are only appearances can only produce the appearance of purpose and meaning. Brought to life sporadically, intermittently, by shafts of light from Reality and Truth that penetrate the veil, that touch intuitions with awareness spontaneously, with Love, with insight. But still a crapshoot.

Reality isn’t a crapshoot. It doesn’t suffer from ambiguity. There are no qualifiers except for the implication and therefore the Necessity of factoring opposites into the Child’s role of Free Choice in Creation. Aside from the Definitions of Logic, there are no barriers to the functions and expressions of Mind, Love, and Soul. To the exuberance and spontaneity of Being, of Life. To the integration of diversity and profusion into coherence, meaning, and shared purpose. Into connections that consummate relationships with passion. That complete the exchange of givers and giving both, that would not be complete otherwise. That bring all givers and gifts into one harmonious whole, the Interconnectedness of Reality-Creation, through the Logic of Definition.

Child beloved and beautiful is who its Parents want to see

The Child assigned a role in Creation by Logic, whose genealogy traces back to possibility, the premise and circumstance that first moved the sequence of Logic, is Loved passionately and unconditionally by its Parents. Without reservation. To its Parents, Father-Mind and Mother-Love, this kid is irresistibly adorable. Perfect. It is this Child its Parents want awakened, out of its dream of ambiguity and shadows come to “life,” back Home into Reality-Creation when its training is done. It is this Child whose identity, whose presence, whose face, can only be recognized behind the appearance of an “other.”

By an individual. That is, by one projection of an unconscious, self-deluded mind corrupted by the replication of its shadow opposite, a parasitic virus. For that is who bodies appear to be: projections and replications. Just as the universe is one part projection of mind and one part replication of mind’s shadow code. One part the physics of ordinary matter that yields to the “laws” of science and a semblance of order. The other part the cosmic singularities that don’t yield: the Big Bang and black holes, dark energy and dark matter. The anomalies of quantum mechanics that yield instead lawlessness and disorder, confounding quantum gravity and physics’ attempts to make sense of it. Replications of the Child’s shadow code.

Why Forgiveness? To replace guilt with Innocence

This is where it gets to be fun. Where we, the Child’s projections, find out what we’ve been missing. To a mind that’s being swallowed up in the black hole of time choosing not to be fooled by its own shadow sounds like a chump choosing not to be scared by its own Hallowe’en costume. No big deal. Whereas, choosing the Self behind the mask is a very big deal.

More than tossing away a silly mask, switching from the illusion of time to the Reality of Now, the Holy Instant, is switching from table scraps to a smorgasbord of abundance. Now radiates with all the elemental attributes of Being. It’s alive with Life -- with real sound, real vision. With every sensation that bodies, fooled by the distractions and substitutes of appearances, can never experience. The Light radiated by Now is what all of Reality and Creation depend on for illumination. To enable the Consciousness of Logic and Mind to see, the Creativity and Worth of Love to Feel, the Free Will of the Child to express itself in spontaneity and Happiness.

The Now of Being, of Life that radiates Happiness, is Psyche, the Soul of Self that expresses Life’s Perfection, Purity, and Beauty. Its core value the Innocence of Oneness. Not the opposite of guilt, the Innocence of the Child. But the Innocence of Oneness that Knows no opposites. Its capacity to combine and contain every attribute of Reality-Creation within itself.

The lie of lies that brought an unconscious Child to mis-identity and captivity to its self-delusion was the lie of guilt. This was the psychopathology of the wrong choice, the Understanding that A Course in Miracles explained to clinical psychologists at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. The lie coded into the illusion of its shadow-opposite: that the Child caused its own loss of Consciousness. Carried an unbearable load of guilt and, moreover, an equally unbearable load of fear. Fear of punishment by wrathful, hateful Parents who could no longer be trusted, because they allowed all this to happen. Willed it to happen.

And on and on with the Joker’s foolishness and nonsense that, nevertheless, was taken in by impaired judgment. By an Innocent Child now writhing in the torment of guilt. Now willing, desperate, to project itself out of its torment and into another “reality.” Into the dream. This was the "bad thing” that Freudian psychoanalysis searched for in vain in the suppressed memories of bodies’ infancy. Freud might have found it if he had searched the Memory of unconscious mind. But he was a "realist" who couldn't be persuaded that the cause wasn't physiological.

Why Forgiveness? Because its acceptance by the Child is the being and doing of its release from the Big Lie. From guilt. Think of the torpedo that targeted the vulnerability at the core of the Death Star in Star Wars. Forgiveness is the torpedo that denies, disables, and undoes all of the shadow-code’s lies at one stroke.

Just as the code appeared to replace all of Reality-Creation in the Child’s Mind by striking at its Psyche, its Soul of Innocence, by replacing it with guilt, Forgiveness exposes the delusion. Quietly, imperceptibly replaces guilt with Innocence and restores Psyche to its place on the Child’s altar. Removes the perversion of Innocence – the absurdity of victimhood on the cross, wounded righteousness, "sacrifice," the ludicrous “helpless innocent victim” -- and restores Mind to sanity.

Why Forgiveness? Because It’s Justice that Works

A barrier to personal growth toward self-awareness is of the mind that fails to understand the Logic, the Truth, of non-dualism: that contradiction, the essence of the Child’s shadow-opposite, is illogic and therefore unreal. It’s a barrier that can be overcome with explanation so long as its source is authentically the Logic of the Holy Spirit.

There’s yet another barrier. One that needs more than explanation because it’s not of the mind. The philosophical understanding of opposites has no counterpart in emotional understanding. Not when coming to terms with conflicting emotions means coming to terms with Love opposed to hate, attraction opposed to repulsion, combined in the same mind that’s relating to the same “other.” Not when we’re asked to accept the presence of limbic animal feelings that deny the truth of who we want to be, imagine ourselves to be: selves who have feelings sorted out as well as thoughts.

How can Forgiveness get off the ground in a mind that denies the presence of limbic emotional conflict? That’s locked into competition demanding justice through retribution. Through the elimination of an opponent instead of recognition, affirmation, and reciprocation. Where there’s no perceived emotional support, no Love, to reciprocate. Where there’s no external authority to adjudicate even-handed justice. And even if there were, how could mind step aside for impersonal adjudication when limbic emotions take the injustice of offense personally? When the wound is felt and therefore taken personally. How can limbic emotions of fear, rage, hatred, and guilt be disabled so that the Holy Spirit can replace the body’s senses with its vision of Logic?

The Child’s shadow-reflection is coded for opposing feelings as well as contradictory thoughts. Activating the code through misidentification activates feelings that compete-conflict with Mind-Love. That pit the Child’s projections-replications against themselves, with wounded psyches. With psychopathologies that all trace to the conflict between Love-Truth / Self and unlove-illusion / anti-self shadow.

The first step to re-ordering psychology is to re-order the Logic-understanding of mind through the clarity of Understanding that teases emotions hidden in the limbic-animal brain out of the shadow. It’s replacing self-unawareness with self-awareness with help from an “other” who has evoked conflicting emotions, that conflict with the self-image of Mind-Love Innocence that we want to be.

The function performed by “other” in unreality – “special relationships” -- can’t be to pad the nest of heavenly perfection. But it can be to goad us into recognizing ourselves as our misidentification with our shadow has made us: a mass of contradictions philosophical and emotional. Goad us into acknowledging limbic-animal emotions that horrify us. That contradict the ideal of perfection, the image of goodwill and kindness, personal-social qualities of sharing, affirmation, cooperation, and agreeability, that we assume is our heritage. That force us to see our mistake, to change our minds because we can’t avoid pain from our own limbic animal emotions by changing “others.”

Change must come from within, and “relationships” with “others” who can’t deliver heaven on earth is what forces it. There is no other way. In this context, relationships that evoked fear, rage, hatred, and guilt did their jobs. They forced us to confront our limbic animal emotions, to change our minds from within because we can’t change “others.” If the Holy Spirit works through us to move “others” one way or the other, it’s not for us to know and cannot be for us to control.

How can a Child’s projection hold itself out to be worthy and Innocent in the presence of unworthy feelings? Awakening through Forgiveness requires that the Holy Spirit set body-senses / mistaken selves aside with its vision of Logic because of the answer to this question. The answer is that the Child projection, without the Holy Spirit’s help, is fatally condemned to feel the guilt-shame of unworthiness. Fear, rage, and hatred, coded by the Child’s shadow-opposite and rooted in its brain, have defined the Child’s projections, defined its viral replications. We cannot substitute the vision of Logic-Innocence for limbic emotions without our Guide, the Holy Spirit, replacing false definition with True Definition. An act that can only come at the invitation of the Child Free Choice. We must understand what is needed, want it, and choose it.

The key is connection with the Holy Spirit that communicates the will to Forgive. That lets go of the false logic of rectifying injustice through retribution, through the condemnation and punishment of “others.” That turns the judgment of justice over to the Holy Spirit through Forgiveness-Truth. Forgiveness replaces judgment-condemnation of “others” not by negating the desire and will for justice but by redirecting it. Directing it away from “others” who cannot satisfy it to the Source that can, the Holy Spirit.

Forgiveness is the solution to the demand for justice that works. World War II was exactly the wrong approach by Germany seeking redress from the injustice of the Treaty of Versailles. An approach that was not only devastating for its “enemies” but even more so for itself. This is the lesson to be learned from the horrifying specters of the Nazi swastika and the visage of Hitler that still goad their victims to retribution. The lesson is the catastrophe that results from seeking justice through retribution against “others.”

Justice that works is Forgiveness that replaces the insanity of conflicting thoughts and emotions with the vision of Logic. With the Reality-Truth about the Child’s misidentification: there is no “other.” Retribution can’t work.

At the instant of Recognition

Why does the Necessity of Logic require that one individual, inside the dream, recognize the Child beloved of its Parents in Reality behind the appearance of an “other”? First, so that the wrong choice can be corrected where it occurred, within unconsciousness. Second, so that Forgiveness required of awakening can be complete. So that the one Child seen in vivid color yet still seen as an “other,” however sympathetically, can be seen by an individual identifying not with an individual projection of the Child, however innocent and vulnerable, but with the Child itself.

Can be seen in the same instant by the one Child’s Parents. By Father-Mind and by Mother-Love in Reality. By the wellsprings of Choice and Freedom, the Logic of Reality, the animating Energy-Force of Oneness, the Soul of Being, of Life. For the act of recognition of one Child by one individual identified with one Child, that penetrates the illusion and lifts the veil, cannot occur, cannot replace unreality with Reality, in the absence of Relationships that Define and complete the Whole Child: Relationship between Child-projection and the Holy Spirit, the vision of Logic; and Relationship between Child and Parents, the capacity of Consciousness to recognize Reality, the capacity of Love to Connect, to Relate. The capacity of both to awaken. The act of Forgiveness, correction of error, the undoing of mistaken identity, necessarily engages the Whole Child in its awakening.

At this instant of recognition by the Parents, brought about through Relationships that are part of the Child’s identity, its Definition by Logic, the unconscious Child’s dream of unreality ends. The illusion of time ends, and the Child is restored to the Oneness, Being-Life, and Force – the Consciousness, the Awareness and immediacy -- of Now. The Holy Instant.

Forgiveness corrects error

To recap: Seeing one another through the body’s eyes we see with “eyes” of the shadow-code. We see reflection. We are only capable of seeing “others” as others. As separate objects. When an individual with self-awareness identifies with one Child rather than its shadow, it is only capable of seeing one Child in “others.”

Solving the mystery of how to truly Forgive is realizing that each individual contains the whole Child. This is why the focus of ACIM is not on groups, on the many, but on individuals. The individual can therefore choose to identify with the one Child, to see only the Truth of one Child in “others.” In reflections, the illusion of the many, the insanity of separation. Can choose, therefore, to see only the Truth of Innocence in “others,” to Forgive by not being able to see guilt in “others.” By seeing the Reality beyond “others” rather than illusion, which means not seeing in the one Child or any of its projections an “other” at all. 

Which is what the Child should have detected in its shadow-reflection: no “other” but only an illusory part of itself. Forgiveness corrects error. This is why the focus of ACIM is on Forgiveness. One individual truly Forgiving.

The individual’s task is done when the many are one

The individual’s task is done:

  • When it has removed the last obstacle to Forgiveness, the last trace of self-delusion and mis-identity from the Child’s unconscious and still dreaming mind.
  • When it “sees” in an “other” its one Child Self, not a shadow-reflection, not a competitor, predator, prey, mate, or any other kind of opposite.
  • When it sees in its one Child Self light and Innocence instead of a phantasmagoria of darkness and guilt, Reality-Truth instead of a reflection of unreality-appearances.
  • When, in Relationship with its Guide, the Holy Spirit, it has thus prepared safe entry for awareness of Relationship with Parents Mind-Love, the purity and perfection of Psyche, of Oneness. Into a now uncorrupted Child’s Mind, uncontaminated by any trace of its shadow code, and gotten out of the way.
  • When it has thus demonstrated competence in the exercise of Free Will.
  • When it has learned and grown to maturity and its training is complete, forever the Child beloved of its Parents but in its responsibility no longer a Child.

The individual has allowed the Reality of who it is, the Child’s identity, to present itself, spontaneously, of its own Free Will, to its Parents. To be recognized by its Parents Consciousness-Love and welcomed back Home. To be awakened from the dream, the self-deception, and restored to its role, its work and play, in Creation. The individual Child’s task is done when, with the awakening of the one Child, the many disappear. The dream and all its occupants, all its apparitions, ends. Including the individual Child projection.

True Forgiveness is the act of turning over responsibility for restoration of Consciousness, of Peace, Truth, and Sanity, to the only source capable of accomplishing it. To Logic that defines, governs, and protects the harmony of Everything. That ensures that no trace of impossibility, the unreal, can invade, disrupt, and contaminate the purity, peace, perfection, and Interconnectedness of Reality. Our Protector. Our Friend. We, the projections and replications of a tormented, split mind, are the intrusion.

Timing and the principle of Alignment 

The principle that determines the timing of Forgiveness-Awakening is the principle of Alignment, its definition so synonymous – so closely aligned -- with Logic that it can be thought of as Logic itself. If Logic is Definition, then it is also Alignment.

The loss of Consciousness projected an unreality whose components-circumstances, expressing illogic, are out of alignment and therefore need Logic to put them back into alignment. Logic is getting it right: the context, purpose, and meaning of our circumstances before we manage circumstances to achieve our purpose. Before we try to do what’s right and do it right. Alignment is the all-important task of getting it right.

Science is but an attempt to figure out alignment that itself needs to be in alignment. If it fails in its mission, as it does, then it is a failure of Logic, which it is. The dominant paradigm of every major field of inquiry – science, philosophy, psychology, and theology -- is failing to get it right. Because in its mindless rush to get to Reason, it bypasses Logic, which it doesn’t understand. If it doesn’t understand Logic it can’t explain anything. Can’t Understand anything. Logic is thoroughness: everything in its time and place. The oriental tea ceremony: no corner-cutting, no shortcuts. We now have the explanation for human folly. The answer to why shit happens.

Alignment is Order, Peace, Harmony, Unity, Community. It is Justice, Fairness, Balance, Equality. Revolution against rule by injustice is collective attempt to establish rule by justice. – a realignment-refitting of relations of power, society, economy. Relationships in unreality are done by alignment in the moment and undone when changing circumstances and their contexts undo alignment. In each case – disorder, injustice, disconnection – healing requires Logic.

Circumstances reveal purpose-meaning when their Logic-pattern – their alignment -- is revealed. What is the timing of Awakening through Forgiveness? When will the Child correct error and regain Consciousness? What pattern are we looking for? Alignment of the circumstances of the Story of the Child. Circumstances that reflect progress in the Child’s training will be decisive. A Course in Miracles teaches that it’s a matter of choice when to learn its lesson but not whether. There are no shortcuts.

Must humanity experience mass extinction? Will it be necessary that groups-nations first come together in shared purpose to manage their natural habitat? To preserve world peace. Is humanity – Child the many – destined to experience death on a global scale as well as individually, i. e. to experience extinction as a species before its training is complete? These seem more relevant considerations than the alignment of stars and planets, but astrology may in some way reflect the Child’s progress nonetheless because it is based on the principle of alignment. 

Replacing time-mortality with Now-eternity. The Holy Spirit’s vision of Logic will replace the “vision” of the body’s eyes at the invitation of the individual / Free Choice, liberated from self-delusion. This will set in motion a chain reaction in the sequence of Logic that necessarily replaces time-mortality with the Holy Instant, with eternal Now that replaces the illusion-dream with Reality-Truth.

Free Choice is the key to liberation. The shadow-code is the archenemy of choice. The precise point when the Child Free Choice overturns captivity by the code-virus is when an individual Child projection chooses to identify with one Child instead of the shadow-code. Free Choice is therefore the essential cause that sets off the logical chain reaction of events that produce Forgiveness-Awakening. Further confirmation, if confirmation is needed, that the Child’s training in unreality centers on the exercise of Free Will just as it centers on Free Choice in Reality-Creation.

The first object of Forgiveness is liberation. To identify with one Child is to identify with Free Choice, independence not captivity, with liberating Mind-Love, the Child’s true identity. Identification with Mind-Awareness plus Love-Freedom is to identify with Reality-Creation, with spontaneity-Now, the opposite of the shadow’s captivity. The object of Forgiveness is therefore liberation from the shadow-code’s captivity.

Self-awareness equates with Forgiveness. The individual’s choice of Self-awareness is the act that triggers and authenticates correction of error. Self-awareness equates with Forgiveness because it obviates any possibility of recognizing an “other.”

How will Awakening be experienced? What becomes of the universe?

Awakening will be imperceptible, The dynamics of mind-change that affect the individual whole Child will simultaneously affect its entire environment, resulting in an identical experience of imperceptible transformations. Imperceptible because replacement of unconsciousness by Consciousness can’t be detected by unconsciousness that’s only able to detect shadow-unreality.

Awakening will be gentle and painless. Spontaneous insight is experienced as a pre-existing fact because unconsciousness can’t detect fact-Truth. Can’t detect the workings of change through Intuition guided by the Holy Spirit, by the vision of Logic. Consciousness can’t recognize the unreality of unconsciousness. The Child’s experience of awakening will therefore be a gentle, imperceptible transformation from unreality to Reality. So unthreatening, painless, and familiar that the Child is unaware of it.

The experience will be the exact opposite of the wrenching dislocation that the corrupted Child-mind imagines it to be, fears it to be, and therefore resists. The exact opposite of how the Child experienced the loss of Consciousness.

The universe will retract into Child-Mind. The illusory universe will retract back into Child-Mind that it never left with reversal of the illusory-insane projection. It will transform through replacement of self-deception by Self-awareness, the reversal of error in the Child’s Mind. And thus the dream of spacetime-matter will end.

Clinging to the dream: the choice whether to “exist”

The individual has done its job, has truly Forgiven, when it not only gets out of the way but freely, joyfully, and spontaneously, chooses not to “exist.” To relinquish its “specialness” and all the other trappings of captivity to a chimera, a substitute for all that was lost to unconsciousness: a string of worthless beads. Flickering shadows echoing disembodied voices in a darkened cave. A rip-off, a joke.

A humanity captive to the illusion, clinging to its worthless beads, seeks to perpetuate itself by colonizing other planets. Should it? Should slave states in the antebellum South have been allowed to extend slavery into new states? Does earth want humanity to stick around, or might it have second thoughts? As it heads inexorably toward what might be as bad or worse than the Permian “Great Dying," 252 million years ago, when 70-80 percent of land-ocean species went extinct because of global warming, might it be forgiven for thinking good riddance?

Do we really want to “exist”? Must we “exist”? Do we still have a choice?

1

What will go away?

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

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

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

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

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

What will replace it?

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

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

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

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

The end of the universe can only be explained by Logic

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

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

Preface

Why bother with “mind” and “Logic”?

Behind any transgression is a mind whose ability to introspect, reflect, reason, evaluate, judge, and decide is under-developed, impaired, or both. Given that the human mind is both under-developed and impaired, the life we experience is seldom, if ever, free of transgressions.

The world I was born into had fallen into the pit of a Great Depression in between two devastating world wars. Three years into the second war it was by no means certain that the good guys would win. But even if they didn’t humanity would have carried on. That’s not a given any more. The same human mind that makes of life one uninterrupted transgression has put everything at risk with global warming.

When will minds change? When bodies tell them to. That’s not true for everyone but global politics seems to confirm it. Minds will change not when common sense prevails but when physical discomfort and limbic emotions trigger an instinctive fight-or-flight response. When the animal is rousted out of its cave or jungle lair to defend itself. The response of an animal threatened, not logic comprehending.

Why do my essays tire readers with abstruse philosophizing about irrelevance and impracticality when the enemy is at the gate? Why bother with “mind” and “logic” when it’s action we need? Why am I hunkered down in metaphysics, fussing with what’s beneath the surface of things, instead of answering the call to duty from the front lines?

Centuries of learning and we’re still not getting it right

It seems because my mind is answering another call: the call from Logic. A call I could refuse since it would violate Logic if I couldn’t. But I don’t. The impaired mind that’s behind all our transgressions – world wars, depressions, global warming, and the rest – betrays one compelling attribute: the absence of Logic. Why? Because Logic says in its situation humanity clearly needs guidance and it’s misled. Misled not necessarily by a malevolent guide, though certainly it may seem that way. But by not getting something right about humanity’s situation.

We’ve poured centuries of effort into learning,. Nearly every field of inquiry has made impressive gains. Yet who would argue that the promise of all these gains has been realized? That gains on the horizon will do any more than ease a task or extend life? Logic says humanity will still be misled, that it will need to end its resistance to Logic and open up to possibilities that it so far won’t consider.

Why trouble ourselves?

The essay that follows addresses one possibility: that humanity’s situation is not what it appears to be – literally. Instead of the hard-and-fast reality our senses make of it our situation is an illusion. A dream. A prospect that intrigues more of us privately, I suspect, than we let on publicly. But judging from the general mood most don’t want to go there. See no reason to go there. If humanity’s calamities have so far passed them by; if its situation seems real enough and it hasn’t brought about the end-of-days for everyone – not yet – why trouble ourselves?

If you’re of this opinion my essays won’t trouble you. You’ll neither get what our situation is telling us nor what I’m trying to get across about our situation. That if we change our minds about it; if we are willing to suppose that there’s another Reality that’s Real; that ours isn’t; realizing the difference may bring about the change in humanity’s thinking that its situation calls for.

To open minds to the right guide: to Logic

What it may accomplish is the opening of minds to Logic. To replacing the body-centered guide -- a perversion of ourselves, the caricature I call the Joker – that’s been misleading us with what our situation has needed all along: a mind-centered guide not misled and distracted by our material world of appearances.

The task my thoughts seem intent on is to help replace the wrong guide with the right guide. Will this “solve problems?” If the switch is made Logic tells me it could eventually solve everything. For minds only willing to change if bodies, in a state of discomfort and inflamed limbic emotions, tell them to change, aren’t just blocking progress. They’re threatening the survival of our species. They’re ultimately behind our planet’s Anthropocene mass extinction that may engulf us.

Minds guided by Logic won’t need to wait for existential threats. For narrow self-interests to be catered to before the interests of community come into play,. Won’t need to agonize over insanities and atrocities one after the other, like world wars, depressions, and global warming. Like stupidities that interfere with basic functions of governance that should be taken for granted. When we should pride ourselves on the stability of civilization instead of being mortified by its frailty.

“Dark matter” shouldn’t be a metaphor for “dark ages.” But with Logic still blocked by body-centered thinking; by every field of inquiry still captive to sensory perception; by humanity’s not getting its situation right, that’s where we may be headed. The flip side of the possibility this essay is about.

To marry science to Logic

What follows is hard on physics. Not because it hasn’t acquitted itself well but because it has. It doesn’t seem to realize just how well. Its brilliant discoveries put humanity on the threshold of a new paradigm, one that finally grasps the illusory nature of its physical surroundings and their inherent illogic. So that a mind-centered reflective humanity, duly aware of its precarious situation, can finally adjust its inquiries, its expectations and priorities, in philosophy, psychology, and theology, to a new Reality. To understanding that ends ambiguity, ends ambivalence, and promises a more hopeful outcome.

I love science. But I also love Logic. What, then, is this and other essays trying to accomplish? What is my book in progress, The Story of the Child, trying to accomplish? To bring them together. To change minds so that, finally, in this generation or the next, or maybe the one after that, we can solve problems. Without waiting for bodies and limbic emotions to get around to it. When it’s too late.

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What Is Dark Matter Telling Us?

The invincibility of sensory perception is no more

Dark matter is credited by physics with holding the universe together and making life possible. And yet it’s undetectable. Undetectable by our bodies' senses that all of science and mainstream philosophy, psychology, and theology swear by to distinguish between what’s real and what’s speculation. This is why dark matter is “dark”: to science it’s indisputably real and yet it isn’t. So are quanta, microscopic particles that aren’t always detectable, sometimes “entangled,” flouting the laws of physics with “superposition.” “Spooky” to Einstein rather than dark, but still a mystery that needs to be explained.

Dark matter is telling us that sensory perception is not the authority that it’s made out to be on what’s real. Its reputation is undeserved, its invincibility shattered. What’s real is no longer automatically assumed to be that which can be “proven” by senses. The door is now open to Mind. To Logic and Intuition where Logic has its home in the human mind.

Contradictory realities are not a logical possibility

Dark matter is telling us that our world and its universe are unreal. Because the only possible explanation for the unquestioned “reality” of something undetectable and therefore logically unreal, in a universe of appearances assumed to be real, is that the universe of appearances is unreal. A reality of un-appearance within a universe of appearance logically contradicts the reality of appearance. Only one can be real.

Contradictory realities are not a logical possibility. Either undetectable dark matter is real or detectable appearances are real, but not both. If the Logic of physics absolutely requires that undetectable dark matter be real then it must concede that detectable appearances are not real.

The universe of appearances along with its contradictory anti-matter / dark matter must be an illusion, its pose of reality undone by the logical necessity of reconciling opposites: matter and anti-matter. By acknowledging the rule of Logic that governs everything: everything has an implied opposite and of two opposites whose existence contradicts the other only one can be real. Everything that Is must have an implied opposite that isn’t. If anti-matter or its altered-state “dark matter” that’s undetectable can’t “exist” without contradicting a reality that must consist of detectable appearances, then either dark matter or appearances must go.

The challenge that dark matter presents to science is by no means unique or unprecedented. Quantum mechanics presents the same challenge on the same scale, because every corner of the universe of spacetime and matter that harbors dark matter is flooded with mysterious quanta, too. But while our minds can ignore microscopic particle behavior, they can’t ignore a cosmos in full view every night that fascinates. And now “dark matter” that’s woven into the very fabric of perception, essential to who we are and every living thing, is present and yet not present. A state that, for a field of inquiry that prides itself on rigorous “realism,” must be disconcerting if not intolerable.

Absent Now, absent Reality

As obvious as it must be that our universe of quantum mechanics and dark matter is an illusion it can’t compare with the evidence of Einstein’s special relativity. His stunning insight that, here, in this strange place, it is never Now. We occupy a bizarre category of time: “an ‘intermediate zone,’ an ‘extended present’; a zone that is neither past nor future.”

“Just now” does not exist. . . . In physics . . . “spacetime” (is) the set of all past and future events, but also those that are “neither-past-nor-future”; these do not form a single instant: they have a duration. . . . The present is like the flatness of Earth: an illusion. . . . saying “here and now” makes sense, but. . . saying “now” to designate events “happening now” throughout the universe makes no sense. (Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems (2017, pp. 71-76)

Our “intermediate zone” is a twilight zone. if we could occupy “now” it would transplant us into a Reality and state of mind wholly unlike ours. That physics has sat on this discovery for over a century without acknowledging the doubt it casts on the reality of spacetime and matter is as stunning as the discovery itself. Compelling affirmation for DNA scientist James D. Watson’s admission that “a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.” (The Double Helix (1968, p. 14)

Does physics not stand face-to-face with revelation without recognizing what it’s looking at? Without minds being changed? If it’s not Now then we occupy a dream, an Alice-in-Wonderland where all manner of strange things happen. Where we go about our business as though, as Ivan Karamazov would put it, “everything is lawful.” Dostoevsky’s character ended his part in The Brothers Karamazov with “brain fever.” Fitting diagnosis for a physics taking its cues from Rod Serling in its Twilight Zone.

“The stuff that dreams are made of”

Rovelli observes that Einstein’s general relativity offers “a glimpse of reality . . . that seems to be made of the same stuff our dreams are made of but is nevertheless more real than our clouded daily dreaming.” (op cit. p. 90) If so, dark matter must account for a very large part of the stuff. Is it a stretch to carry the thought one step farther? To theorize that it is a dream?

What could possibly explain it if the “reality” of physics can’t? What supplies Logic when the logic of matter can’t explain matter that won’t meet the definition of matter? How and why is the rationale for physics falling short? Where is the flaw in its Logic? Because circumstantial evidence for the existence of dark matter is irrefutable. It’s there. What could explain it if physics can’t? What premise of physics’ “realism” is leading our thinking astray? How did physics come to be unrealistic?

Where matter ends, Mind has always been there

One theoretical possibility is that our universe of spacetime and matter is not real. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of because it may be a dream. A premise we won’t hear from physics because an entire profession, an entire field of inquiry going back to classical antiquity, is conscience-bound to deny it. Trapped by the boundaries of its context, Immobilized by limitations placed on logic, and unable to navigate. Stuck in the finiteness of its own making and of no further use in this phase of our journey. That requires another mind that thinks, another logic that navigates, another vision that can see. With no less rigor and discipline than minds guided by the senses but now minds guided by thought. By everything that Logic is and does.

If the universe is a dream and dark matter proves it, what then explains it? What is its logic? What produces dreams? Minds do. Minds that are unconscious. Asleep. How and why did our universe – and maybe many more – come to be the subject of a dream by an unconscious Mind? What other explanation could there be for what preceded the Big Bang? The physicist Roger Penrose (Cycles of Time, 2010) has postulated that the universe was preceded by an earlier universe and questioned assumptions about singularities, the Big Bang, and the need for quantum gravity. But even if he’s right, where did all this stuff that dreams are made of come from?

Physics that leaves off where matter leaves off can’t answer by definition. The laws of science take us to the brink and leave off just as they do with the origin of what we experience as life. Where matter ends Mind must have been there all along. Not just before the universe of spacetime and matter appears but all the while that we, our bodies’ senses, have been witnessing it. Our senses assuring us that, yes, it’s happening, it’s real, when all they’re attesting to is themselves. Matter on the witness stand testifying to its own presence, as if this were enough. As if this were not a conflict of interest. Circular reasoning. A logical absurdity.

Mind and its miscreation that made unreality real

So who is this Mind and what is its story? How did it lose consciousness? Why would it project itself into a dream of physics so bizarre that physics itself can’t make sense of it? If it ever was in possession of its senses how did it conjure a dream so senseless, so disfigured by grotesque contradictions, as our world? If it was ever in a safe place how did it come to imagine itself in a place so precarious, savage, and depraved, as ours?

The answer that human speculation has assumed over the ages is that something went wrong. Dark suspicions that it was our fault, rooted in our wounded psyches, have insinuated themselves into our culture, contaminated our souls, and condemned us to lives on the cross of victimhood. As though what happened there must be of the same ambiguity and profanity as what happens here. In the “dark matter” of the human mind. As though the “laws” that produce chaos and entropy here must rule there.

The “story” of the Mind that’s dreaming, that the dream itself has so far produced, alienates the scientific mind for a reason. It’s nuts. Why admit philosophy, psychology, and theology into physics if they can’t do any better than this?

The story, once it’s cut free from the dream, once it’s freed from the laws of chaos and is allowed to access Logic, makes sense. It’s plausible, supported by the implications of Logic going all the way back to the beginning. To where there was Logic and human thought and feeling can go no farther. And, yes, something did go wrong. It wasn’t anticipated or intentional because logically it couldn’t Be.

Venturing into the unknown, into the unexpected, is ingrained in the Worth of Creation. And if something went wrong, a circumstance unanticipated or unintended, then the result wouldn’t be wrongdoing; it would be miscreation. Miscreation that could throw Mind out of the Reality of Creation into another reality, by rendering it unconscious. To prevent the Force of consciousness that animates new life from animating what doesn’t belong. It’s a state of mind familiar to us. But since we’re conditioned to associate bodies with matter instead of mind we miss its significance: its capacity to dream. To make unreality seem very real.

Who can help fix what went wrong?

Our world is plausibly the result of miscreation caused by Mind rendered unconscious by the nature of Creation. By circumstances that are part of its normal process and structure. Miscreation that carries no trace of wrongdoing, by commission or omission. A circumstance or event that caused an unintended effect, no more than an unavoidable gap in Knowledge. Logical within the context of what was known and so not an intentional violation of Logic. A gap in Knowledge, in Awareness, that isn’t and can’t be “all-knowing,” but is evolving. If it has any part in Creation how could it be otherwise?

The gap in Knowledge quite logically may be our privilege, our honor, to help fix. Instead of milling about aimlessly in our primordial soup of amino acids, waiting for a bolt of lightning to save us, maybe we have a purpose. And maybe it isn’t beyond comprehension. Maybe we have a job to do, to get us back to the job Mind was about before something went wrong. That is, if we can ever break free from the tyranny of appearances, of sensory perception.

Another take on sensory perception from dark matter

What does it imply about dark matter if our universe isn’t real? If it actually is a dream? Two opposite states can’t co-exist in Reality. If the existence of one thing implies the existence of its opposite the Logic of Governance decrees that only one can be real. Reality-Creation wouldn’t be governable, couldn’t hold together, otherwise.

When matter and anti-matter showed up at the beginning of our universe, only one could be real. Thus the mystery of what became of anti-matter. Thus speculation that there are other universes where anti-matter may dominate instead of matter. Anti-matter here became unreal. And yet, as we’ve all learned about opposites, they may only be shadows but they don’t go away.

How does something unreal fit into the logic, the nature, of an environment that’s already unreal? That’s made up of appearances. By disappearing. By breaking with unreality’s general rule that if a thing is to exist it must be part of appearances. Must be part of the illusion, the dream. Anti-matter forced into a state of unreality within a state that’s already unreal, logically had to become invisible. To become undetectable to the body’s senses.

For it’s sensory perception that’s relied upon to certify the “reality” of matter and to exclude all else. The same source that physics relies upon to certify the reality of matter cancels the reality of anti-matter by making it undetectable. And in so doing gives dark matter the only place it can occupy logically in an unreal universe: the darkness of undetectability.

In the other Reality creations are made real by the Consciousness of Mind – by Mind’s Awareness – relying on the Authority of Logic responsible for governance. In our world, matter that’s unreal is made real by minds relying on the body’s senses. Anti-matter could not register with sensory perception, be made real, and still occupy a place in the universe alongside matter. Two opposites cannot co-exist. Anti-matter had to yield, and where it’s to be accounted for is dark matter – unreality in an unreal universe.

Another take on physics from dark matter

Everything is defined by Logic according to what it is and what it does. Its central attribute is its use in the Reality of Creation. Because Creation itself is use: the purpose and meaning of its context, to take a stand for Worth. When its logical opposite is worthlessness, synonym for nothingness, statelessness. To be part of the Reality of Creation is to be put to work creating, affirming, and reciprocating Worth. The Worth of Being-Life and therefore the Worth of Creation itself. Is to have a role defined and assigned by the Logic of Governance to a place in the interconnected network of roles and relationships that make up Reality. That Create.

Physics defines dark matter by what it does. It has a use. But physics so far has no idea of what it is. It won’t consider the possibility that it’s anti-matter made unreal and therefore undetectable because to do so would expose the unreality of physics. The fact that by its sacred and inviolate premise, that matter is real, it makes of itself one part science and one part religion. Like the universe: one part sanity, the other spooky. An inquisition in the form of bodies’ senses condemning doubters with verdicts of blasphemy, with heresy that warrants excommunication.

Hypotheses to rescue physics from its cloud

Physics might understand dark matter, quantum mechanics, and maybe even quantum gravity with only one change in its process; if it allowed itself to hypothesize that matter is unreal. To hypothesize that the universe is the stuff that dreams are made of because it may be a dream. More “real” certainly than “our clouded daily dreaming,” but, for all its vastness and seeming consequence, still a cloud. Physics might also do well with another hypothesis: that matter is relational to Mind.

The science, Logic, and limits of hypothesizing

Science distances itself from philosophy, psychology, and theology because they’re perceived to be casual with facts and Logic compared to the rigor and discipline of science. To its “iron rule” extolled by Michael Strevens in The Knowledge Machine (2020). Their comfort with different hypothesized realities is perceived to be unprofessional and inexcusable, hardly less so than the “alternate facts” of politics.

What reality does science recognize as inalterably fixed in place if not that which answers to its self-interest? If not captive to bodies whose minds can and do question it.

Physics’ premise that matter must be real puts an artificial limit on its ability to hypothesize. Its premise that it must not yield to philosophy, the field of inquiry concerned with reality, limits its ability to interpret. Its premise that metaphysics, the search beyond appearances to their essence, is similarly non-grata, deprives if of the very attribute that its subject – appearances – demands. Insisting that its subject is real while depriving itself of the ability to consider another point of view is unscientific. It’s not just advocacy for self-interest, the usual pitfall for human logic. Given the lofty aims of science’s “quest for knowledge,” it’s unjustifiable.

Hypothesizing that matter isn’t real, that our universe is an illusion, needn’t be motivated by an alien cause when it’s amply justified by physics’ own discoveries. What is dark matter telling us? It may not be telling so much as mocking. The mask of the Joker, our opposite self, looking back at us with wry amusement because, by our own instrument of measurement, our bodies’ senses, the force of nature we put our faith in to hold the universe together and make life possible – dark matter – is nothing. The Joker's signature. The universe is a cup only half full, and what to make of it? That the cosmos is divinity as Plato thought, and maybe the deist Einstein, too? Or a fraud: something promised that can never deliver, like the simplicity and elegance of a calculation that eluded Einstein to the end. The unifying theory of quantum gravity that eludes physicists still.

Where and when does Reason take over and rationalizing end?

The implications of Logic are to be followed, not controlled

Who defines Reality? Is it science? Theology? Philosophy? Psychology? Or would it be Logic itself? Are we not dependent on Logic’s big picture to guide us, since not one of us has the big picture? Can our self-interests take precedence over the roles and relationships that Logic manages with its definitions and implications? Over the self-interest of Being, the stance of Life? The harmony that is the Reality of Creation?

Would the implications of Logic ever go along to get along and yet remain “logical”? Would they yield to the influence of their patrons? Are they ready to perform tricks at the crack of a whip? Is science that’s baffled by quantum mechanics and dark matter not pleased with the tricks its domesticated and trained “logic” performs? Is further domestication and training the remedy? Can matter already enshrined in reality be domesticated and trained some other way? Appeased? Placated?

Or has the time come for science, philosophy, psychology, and theology all to seriously consider a different Truth, the one their cramped self-interest has been avoiding? The Truth that the implications of Logic, the Free Spirit of Inquiry, are to be followed, not controlled.

If quantum mechanics and dark matter imply that matter may not be real, that there may some better, more logical theory to explain the universe and life than the one that’s failing us, then this is a fact that we had best acknowledge. If we don’t acknowledge it, this becomes another fact with its own implications that must be acknowledged. The more we misperceive, the more we will misjudge.

Logic governs us or we are not governed. We don't define Logic: it defines us. Build this reality into our self-interest and see what happens to misperceptions and misjudgments. Not when matter changes to fit our paradigms but when minds change to fit Logic.

The self-interest of Logic is infinitely inclusive

The geologic forces uplifting democracy and the Truth are more powerful by far than the forces that would suppress them. Logic’s definitions write the rules. Reality and Creation require Governance. Governance from the bottom up. Governance that derives its meaning, purpose, and motivation from circumstances on the ground, from ever-changing contexts that form the process and structure of evolution. From Creation, the extension and expansion of Life. The Choice, affirmation, and reciprocation of Worth. All of it driven by inexorable force: the Implications of Logic that can never end, that will find a way through and around any insane, illusory obstacle placed in their path. The force of ever-changing contexts and the implications of Logic called upon to manage and govern the Reality of Creation.

The implications of Logic can’t be set in motion toward Reality and Truth by insisting that motion begin with an arbitrarily exclusive self-interest. If Logic has self-interest it would be infinitely inclusive; its evolution through Creation would encompass Everything now and Everything to come.

Physics cannot legitimately aim its inquiries in a logical direction if self-interest demands that an open philosophical issue – the reality of matter, the body’s senses and its sensed environment -- be excluded. Can’t succeed if one profession is contented with things the way they are, sees no reason to inquire further, and doesn’t want to be inconvenienced. Isn’t open to questioning the Logic behind its shaky premises, the source of its confusion.

Logic doesn’t limit itself in its questioning. It doesn’t question only that which won’t inconvenience the questioner. It’s a free spirit whose implications must be followed wherever they lead.

Parting with Logic is parting with Reality

If energy that produces particles isn’t under the direction of Mind, if Force isn’t an agent rather than its own source, then there can be no order, structure, or discipline to Reality-Creation. There would be no purpose, meaning, or sense to it. There would be no Logic, no Governance.

The object of metaphysics is to establish not only provenance but intent. Without intent there is no order, no point; nothing is accomplished. The “quest for knowledge” is the quest for intent that can only come from Mind.

Walling off the free spirit of inquiry walls off both Mind and Logic. Logic is Free. To get it right its practitioners must follow wherever it leads. Is physics following where dark matter’s implications lead? Parting with Logic is parting with Reality.

Force turned against Logic by Mind that’s unconscious

The exhortations of physics to remain disciplined in its premises would be laudable if its search for answers didn’t call its premises into question. The mind that imagines:

• that Logic is its agent and will do what it’s told
• that it may only accept premises, posit hypotheses, weigh considerations, and present findings that meet its host’s definition of what’s practical, useful, relevant, and “realistic” rather than its own
• that the spirit of inquiry must be denied its freedom lest it uncover inconvenient truths

must be a mind that’s unconscious and dreaming, in mortal conflict with itself. It must be mindless. For it denies itself the most elementary understanding of Logic:

• that it can be no one’s agent
• that all thought, all feeling, begins with Logic
• that its implications must lead where they will or fail to lead at all
• that its source must connect of its own will to what it delivers
• that cause must connect of its own will to effect or it can be neither source nor cause.

Logic cannot be owned, possessed, controlled, or dominated by any influence and still Be the purpose and meaning that is its own source, its own Logic.

Energy in service to Logic -- Force that gives thoughts their consequences, causes their effects, implications their interconnections -- cannot be turned against Logic by Mind whose thoughts and feelings align with Logic, seek harmony, and Create with the protection, support, and authority of its Governance. By a mind that’s Conscious: thinking, feeling, evaluating, and judging.

Force can only be turned against Logic by a mind that’s not conscious. By a mind that’s unconscious. By mind corrupted by the thought of separation, by the act of projection, by the insanity that produced the dream: the insane hallucination that is our incomprehensible body-sensed world. A world seeming to make sense on a human scale that degenerates into bizarre nonsense on any other scale.

The false innocence of victimhood in a shared world

Force can only be turned against Logic by the endless conflict that is our tormented internal world. Why do our minds not see this? Why do they refuse to see it? Because the unconscious mind that projected them has deluded itself. Imagines that Logic is dead, replaced by a substitute more favorable to its interests because it can be controlled. Because instead of divining purpose and meaning from circumstances with Logic, from the bottom up, it can get by with a formula imposed from the top down. Mindlessly -- without thought or feeling, without mind or Logic at all. Because if Logic is dead mind and all its functions must be unnecessary. It must be dead as well.

This would be the “governing” agent of our incomprehensible, tormented world: corrupted mind that has taken dead aim at Logic. At Governance itself. Mindlessness. This is the mind of science that imagines that it can be and do whatever it wants because it owns its subject. Because the source, protection, and authority that should be its guide has been made its captive, possessed. A state logically impossible either for the free spirit of Inquiry or for the free spirit of Love.

And so neither is with us. Neither Love nor Logic nor the reciprocity that holds Interconnectedness in place -- the Reality and Creation, the Home, that unconscious mind, a stranger to the Truth, yearns to return to. Home that it will never find until it lets go of delusion. Lets go of the insanity of ownership, possession, control, and dominance, the false innocence of victimhood, in a shared world. Until it chooses of its own free will to be guided by Logic. Until it regains Consciousness and sanity.

Two Necessities of Logic

Parents in the other Reality function within the Necessity of its Logic: that opposites must be unreal. Therefore, they cannot make unreality real. Necessity also requires that they do everything to preserve their Child’s Free Will. Why? Because it’s essential to Creation’s affirmation of Worth. Essential because the Worth of anything can’t be determined without its being freely chosen. By a stakeholder invested in it. Because Creation is Worth and its opposite is worthlessness, gravity that pulls all of us and our universe into the black hole of the void.

Another Necessity of Logic: to be free, choice must be conscious of a range of possibilities, those that are known, available, and not arbitrarily excluded. The Child may not share the Parents’ power of Consciousness to make Creations Real because its unconsciousness is a possibility. The consequences of unconsciousness can’t be anticipated or known to Reality-Consciousness because they are unreal.

Two Necessities are thus built into Logic’s definition of who the Child’s Parents are and what they do:

(1) Do not make unreality real, therefore do not be Conscious of opposites or their possibility.
(2) Preserve and protect the Child’s Free Will.

These are givens in Reality. But within the Child’s state of unconsciousness and compromised Free Will, where we appear to be, they are not.

Two corresponding imperatives are implied by their unreality-opposites:

(1) Make unreality real
(2) Compromise free will by taking Child-mind captive.

Two forces that block human progress

There can be no tension between Being and non-being over conflicting imperatives in the harmony of Reality governed by Logic. But in the unreality that is our world, corrupted by the dream of opposites made real by an unconscious mind, the tension is constant and, at times, unbearable. It is the fallout of Logic’s rule that opposites must be unreal, the price to be paid by an unconscious Child for a logical impossibility: Being without the shadow code of non-being, its illusory opposite.

Forces that block human progress are mainly those that (1) make unreality real and (2) compromise the Child’s / humanity’s Free Will. What are dark matter, quantum mechanics, and never-Now telling us?

(1) that science that insists that spacetime-matter is real in the face of evidence to the contrary is deluded by Being’s shadow code opposite. By the Joker. “Questing for knowledge” instead of searching for Reality and Truth is making unreality real.

(2) that science that disrupts the free flow of Logic’s implications, that attempts to control the Free Spirit of Logic that is the source of the Child’s Free Will, is undermining Free Choice essential to the Creation, Affirmation, and Reciprocation of Worth, the purpose of Creation. It is compromising the Child’s and humanity’s Free Will.

Harsh lesson from a “wonderful world”

Physics hypothesizing that the universe may be unreal can make better sense of particle superposition, never-Now, dark matter, and other strangeness by assuming that the “other Reality” is governed by Logic and our unreality is not. By assuming that our world is ruled instead by Logic’s opposite: a reverse mirror-image caricature of everything that makes sense. In other words, the two worlds are exact opposites and it’s ours that bears the face of the Joker, not the other.

Protests from diehards who prefer Louis Armstrong or Walt Disney rhapsodizing about our “wonderful world” must inevitably account for the calculations of quantum mechanics. Those that unfailingly validate the lack of cooperation from particles -- particles that prefer the permissiveness of Bohr’s stewardship to the strict discipline of Einstein. If particles, time, and dark matter refuse to accommodate wishful thinking about an orderly universe then perhaps it’s time we changed our thinking. Time we paid attention to what they’re trying to tell us, face the possibility of another Truth, and accommodate them.

Would it inconvenience physics? Sure! Did it inconvenience Big Tobacco to resist the truth about its product? Does it inconvenience the fossil fuel industry to come clean about its product? Didn’t the Church eventually have to own up to the harm done by its Inquisition and pedophilia?

Could physics, in the intractability of its own misperceptions sanctified by its “quest for knowledge,” have produced its own demographic of victims needing reparation? A humanity not so much duped by appearances as ignoring them? A humanity facing extinction because it prefers the laws of chaos sanctioned by science to the laws of cause and effect?

The Joker mocking us from dark matter, never-Now, and errant particles may have a harsh lesson to relate. That is, if we would listen.