Becoming part of the solution

Fifteen minute/listen

In chapter 36 ‘The Politics of Reality’ Campbell explains how the perception of rationality is often an illusion, created by self-justifying beliefs and ego-driven biases.He argues that the tendency to define truth based on what feels good to our egos, and to justify our actions and beliefs, limits our potential for growth and understanding.

He also discusses the role of randomness, uncertainty, and psi effects in the growth of consciousness, and argues that the limitations on other people’s psi powers are necessary to prevent destructive outcomes. He challenges the assumption that the ego is rational and logical, arguing that many who think of themselves as rational are out of touch with their deeper motivations and intents.

Campbell highlights the limitations of analytical thinking and the need for a more holistic approach to truth. He suggests that important decisions in life are often based on subjective and intuitive processes rather than objective causal logic, and that the physical world is merely a theatrical set designed to help us unfold our personal dramas and evolve our consciousness.

Click On The Cover To View Original Text

Typically, your sense of being rational is produced by the self-justifying belief traps you are caught in. Your appearance (to yourself and others) of rationality and logical process is, for the most part, an illusion, a feel-good delusion of the ego that makes you appear to be competent and thus delivers a sense of correctness, and personal security to the self.

Each of us has a tendency to define the local truth to be whatever feels good to our ego and boosts our self-esteem. We justify our actions, feeling, attitudes, and beliefs and interpret events to support our needs, wants, desires, and expectations. Let’s tie this discussion of assumed logic and rationality in with some of the things we learned in previous sections. Do you see why randomness (or pseudo-randomness), uncertainty and the psi uncertainty principle are a necessary part of the space-time rule-set? Is it clear why divination, mind reading, telepathy, remote viewing, precognition, psychokinesis, and other psi effects are detrimental to the potential growth of a low quality, high entropy consciousness while generally irrelevant to the growth of a low entropy, high quality consciousness? Little boys, say five to ten years of age, would dearly love to be as strong as full grown men, but fortunately evolution is not that careless. If you still do not get it, imagine your boss, spouse, mother-in-law, children, or telemarketers having direct access to your mind. Great power in the hands of an irrational ego or manipulating intent is always frightening and usually destructive. For the most part, we are thankful for the natural limitations on other people’s power, as are they, no doubt, thankful for the limitation on ours. That huge difference between “us” and “them” is an illusion of ego. Irrationality and illogic are the norm, not the exception; belief that the opposite is true (at least for us) is a commonly held delusion. Take a moment to ponder how this discussion might apply to you and the people you know. Almost everyone will agree that ego typically ravages the rationality of others because we are all reasonably secure in the knowledge that we are an exception to that rule. You and me amigo, we’re not like all the others. Right? Are a gaggle of pre-schoolers rational? Are they logical? Are they highly interactive? What motivates them? Why do you think that you (at the fundamental level of interactive consciousness) interact substantially differently than they do? Think about that for a moment -I want a good, thoughtful answer. Are you sure the perceived difference is not either

superficial (you are better at maths, a better planner) or generated by an ego justifying itself and its significance (the things you do are more important)? Most people simply define themselves to be rational and that is that. 

When you find somebody who thinks that they are particularly rational and logical, often you have found instead somebody who is out of touch with their deeper motivations and intents. Simple analytical thinking often masquerades as basic intelligence and is used to support a superior claim to correctness – a self-serving logic and rationality that justifies dominance, wants, needs, and desires. 

People who live entirely out of their heads and exist primarily in intellectual space often are sadly shallow and severely limited by the belief that they are primarily logical beings and that the employment of rationality and logical analysis is the highest and loftiest goal they can aspire to. The most important things in life are not things that can be adequately dealt with or experienced through analysis and logical process. Such self-directed impoverishment and limitation is held up as an ideal in Western culture. 

Do not get carried away. I am not implying that all logical process is fraudulent and useless. It can be a wonderfully productive tool – I live and work by it every day. Science is based upon it – it is the foundation of My Big TOE. I am merely asserting that we in the West have elevated the value of belief-based rational process to the point that we are fooling ourselves most of the time and as a consequence, we have blocked our view of a more holistic process that reaches much deeper into the well of truth than mere logical analysis. 

Our sense of rationality has become twisted, self-referential, and based upon circular logic – a marvelous tool extended beyond its useful function. 

The non-rational, non-logical world that we actually live in is entirely different from the rational, logic-driven world that most of us pretend that we live in (particularly intellectuals and technical or scientific types). It seems typical that the information available to support making a logical interpretation or decision about the meaning or significance of our collected perceptions is inversely proportional to the importance of the correctness of that interpretation or decision. The majority of life’s important, significant, path-changing decisions are the ones whose outcomes are the most uncertain because of a lack of information. 

This state of affairs was not designed to frustrate you, but is a result of the fact that the physical causal world is simply a theatrical set (a playground with rules) provided to you to help you unfold your personal drama by forcing you to make significant subjective choices based upon your intent, not objective choices based upon causal logic. This arrangement allows you to evolve your consciousness, not just practice the relatively sterile art of correctly applying logic. The most important growth opportunities of your life will always be beyond your causal logic – will always be subjective and intuitive gropes dressed up in as much pseudo-logical justification as you can muster in order to make your life appear as orderly and rational as possible. The appearance of an orderly rational process driving our lives forward is a delusion that lowers anxiety and makes us feel better. Beyond that, the appearance of order in your life provides a coherent media or frame of reference for your experience that infallibly reflects the quality of your being. It would seem that our drive to rationalize our choices is a necessary part of what makes us work. 

By highly valuing the well behaved, dependable, easily understood objective aspects of your existence while discarding, devaluing, or bumbling through the subjective aspects, you are focusing upon the chaff and throwing away the wheat. This misguided assessment of where we should focus our effort wastes huge amounts of time and energy in logical objective cultures such as ours. The effort that we focus on our careers, status, and material success greatly outweighs the effort that we invest in raising our personal quality. The result is that most people live their lives within a continuous soap opera that seems to have no final episode until death liberates them from that particular part. 

The physical virtual reality set (PMR) is not intrinsically important to your purpose except that it provides the structured learning experience you need. The iterative expression of your intent as it assimilates feedback derived from the results of your interactions with others is what allows you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps (lower your entropy increment by increment through a long-term personal program of selfimprovement). That you can solve logic problems is helpful in mastering your rulebased space-time environment, but it is only the foil, a supporting, enhancing, enabling structure, not the main goal. Understanding the objective causality of your virtual learning lab is important like your house and car is important; understanding the subjective and intuitive nature of your most significant decisions is important like your children or parents are important. 

Big decisions, important decisions, are usually complex and span many uncertain issues and are therefore least amenable to a logical solution. Where did you leave your glasses? Use logic as best you can. Who should you marry? How should you go about improving the quality of your consciousness? Forget logic, it’s not going to help much. Because we seldom know how things will change or how relationships and interactions with others will progress (even if we could fully specify present states), how could our logical analysis penetrate very deeply? Our assumed rationality and logical process is a thin veneer, while love, truth, fear, want, need, and desire, run deep. 

How do we interpret our perceptions in the midst of this unknowing? Mostly we guess! We make assumptions and rely on beliefs. We go with a hunch, from the heart, or with a gut feeling. We pretend (usually without intellectually knowing that we are pretending) that we are logical or that we know more than we do. We develop theories; we extrapolate past experience into the future. We use our intuition, which is our normal connection to the nonphysical part of our being. How we ultimately interpret our perceptions depends on our knowledge, previous experience, understanding, wisdom, and the quality of our consciousness. We try the best we can to be rational, or at least to appear to be rational. 

I expect that you may have noticed the many feedback loops and functional interdependencies that connect perception, interpretation, logical analysis, experience, wisdom, belief, and the quality of your consciousness. If not, take a moment to ponder the maze of interdependent connections and interrelationships. Don’t rush, take as along as you need, I’ll wait for you. 

Audio 39 

Interpreting your experience can be tricky if the quality of your consciousness is low. Belief and ego can strongly color your interpretation as well as your perception. Many of man’s most horrific experiences – war (including holy wars), genocide, racism, ethnic cleansing and so forth – are motivated by ego in the service of belief. Humanity’s worst crimes are typically committed to maintain, preserve, and spread particular beliefs and individual power, or as an expression of ego-arrogance. Many ordinary, perfectly nice people become upset if a bigger picture (or someone else’s little picture) threatens their comfortable concept of reality. They will rationalize their attitudes and produce many good reasons why their particular delusion represents the only correct view. Such is the power of fear, belief traps, a closed mind, and a small picture combined. This is the politics of reality.