There Are No Skunks Here, I Promise!
Third time’s the charm
What is the marketplace of ideas? Fredrick Siebert championed it in the book, Four Theories of the Press.
Fredrick Siebert echoed the idea that free expression is self-correcting in Four Theories of the Press: “Let all with something to say be free to express themselves. The true and sound will survive. The false and unsound will be vanquished. Government should keep out of the battle and not weigh the odds in favor of one side or the other.”
Let us bow our heads.
While the debate for and against the marketplace of ideas rages, let’s steer ourselves down a little country lane where the air is pure, the breeze gentle, and a crystal creek burbles a joyous Hallelujah. God be praised. Hallelujah.
You might be right to ask this question…
Just how fresh are my insights? Well, they’re fresh to me. I mean, they’re fresh to my ego. My soul already knows this stuff. Yours does too.
My ego runs rampant these days. Institutions fall and crumble before my eyes. I relish the daily decay while I eagerly join in the fray. Fuck ’em all, I say!
The day Adrian Lamo died, Barrett Brown tweeted, “Ding, dong the snitch is dead. Which old snitch? The bitchy snitch!” I was the first to retweet Brown, adding my own two cents, “Well deserved, snitch.”
You see, I’d spent months, then years, agonizing over Bradley Manning’s arrest and trial for espionage, followed by his incarceration at the military prison at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan.
Manning was released last year.
President Obama, in one of his final acts in office in January, commuted her sentence after deciding that she had been punished enough for handing a trove of military and diplomatic reports to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks.
One of the leaked documents was later titled Collateral Murder. It was this particular leak that put Wikileaks on the map.
This link leads to the short version and the complete version of the Collateral Murder videos. Viewer discretion advised.
It was around this time I picked up on Glenn Greenwald’s compelling defense of Manning. While some were calling for the death penalty or life in prison, Greenwald argued that “…he is a consummate hero, and deserves a medal and our collective gratitude, not decades in prison.”
Let’s return to that little country lane for a look at the insights I alluded to earlier.
Last night I dreamed I was in a very exclusive store which sold terribly realistic masks. Like this. Each mask was positioned on top of a mannequin head. I went up to one and pulled the mask up only to discover another face beneath. Even while dreaming I understood the mask was my ego and the face beneath was my true face, my soul face.
I’ve been reading/studying A Course in Miracles (ACIM). This is what the course is doing to me. Almost every day I’m gaining new and refreshing insights into Jeffrey Michael Field. It’s almost as thrilling as motorcycling. In fact these two pursuits are much the same. There’s an old adage in motorcycling… “Look where you want to go.” When riding, don’t look at that gaping pothole just ahead, rather look where you want to go. If you fixate on the pothole, you’ll likely drive into it.
My first attempt to explain my thinking was titled Balancing Act, Ergo the Ego, but I got skunked. My second attempt also failed.
Today I prevail! Presenting the conflict between the ego and the soul, based on my understanding of A Course in Miracles. Please understand, I’m just a kindergartner, so I’ll be relying on some quotations in what’s to come.
A Course in Miracles began with the sudden decision of two people to join in a common goal. Their names were Helen Schucman and William Thetford, Professors of Medical Psychology at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. It does not matter who they were, except that the story shows that with God all things are possible. They were anything but spiritual. Their relationship with each other was difficult and often strained, and they were concerned with personal and professional acceptance and status. In general, they had considerable investment in the values of the world. Their lives were hardly in accord with anything that the Course advocates.
Their lives were hardly in accord with anything that the Course advocates. Helen, the one who received the material, describes herself:
Psychologist, educator, conservative in theory and atheistic in belief, I was working in a prestigious and highly academic setting. And then something happened that triggered a chain of events I could never have predicted. The head of my department unexpectedly announced that he was tired of the angry and aggressive feelings our attitudes reflected, and concluded that “there must be another way.” As if on cue, I agreed to help him find it. Apparently this Course is the other way.
What It Is
As its title implies, the Course is arranged throughout as a teaching device. It consists of three books: a 669-page Text, a 488-page Workbook for Students, and a 92-page Manual for Teachers. The order in which students choose to use the books, and the ways in which they study them, depend on their particular needs and preferences.
The curriculum the Course proposes is carefully conceived and is explained, step by step, at both the theoretical and practical levels. It emphasizes application rather than theory, and experience rather than theology. It specifically states that “a universal theology is impossible, but a universal experience is not only possible but necessary” (Manual, p. 77). Although Christian in statement, the Course deals with universal spiritual themes. It emphasizes it is but one version of the universal curriculum. There are many others, this one differing from them only in form. They all lead to God in the end.
What It Says
Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.
This is how A Course in Miracles begins. It makes a fundamental distinction between the real and the unreal; between knowledge and perception. Knowledge is truth, under one law, the law of love or God. Truth is unalterable, eternal and unambiguous. It can be unrecognized, but it cannot be changed. It applies to everything that God created, and only what He created is real. It is beyond learning because it is beyond time and process. It has no opposite; no beginning and no end. It merely is.
The world of perception, on the other hand, is the world of time, of change, of beginnings and endings. It is based on interpretation, not on facts. It is the world of birth and death, founded on the belief in scarcity, loss, separation and death. It is learned rather than given, selective in its perceptual emphases, unstable in its functioning, and inaccurate in its interpretations.
The crux is that we have “two distinct thought systems” in conflict. Every morning I retweet every negative thing I can find on Donald Trump, on the Republican Party, on Vladimir Putin, on Benjamin Netanyahu, on the Democratic Party, on Cambridge Analytica, on the NRA… you get my point, yes?
But, what is my point?
The world we see merely reflects our own internal frame of reference — the dominant ideas, wishes and emotions in our minds. “Projection makes perception” (Text, p. 445). We look inside first, decide the kind of world we want to see and then project that world outside, making it the truth as we see it. We make it true by our interpretations of what it is we are seeing. If we are using perception to justify our own mistakes — our anger, our impulses to attack, our lack of love in whatever form it may take — we will see a world of evil, destruction, malice, envy and despair. All this we must learn to forgive, not because we are being “good” and “charitable,” but because what we are seeing is not true. We have distorted the world by our twisted defenses, and are therefore seeing what is not there. As we learn to recognize our perceptual errors, we also learn to look past them or “forgive.”
This is my balancing act… raging at world events while doggedly pursuing higher truths through ACIM. My soul knows exactly where I should be, but my ego obscures my quest at every opportunity. That’s just the nature of humanity. The conflict is not specific to any one person or group of people. Like Helen Schucman, I’m tired and angry and in search of another way of living. That is my quest. The road will be long and with many pitfalls. But, in the end, I will will prevail with the help of the many faces of God.
