The Meaning of the Mucks and Glucks Parable

The way I conceive of the moment where we’re in right now can be taken in the form of a simple equation: Post-modernism plus the internet plus emotions equals a rising temptation for authoritarianism.

The key takeaway I intended with the Parable of the Mucks and the Glucks is it was nobody’s fault that this happened. Okay, I’ll step back in my logic and say, it was either nobody’s fault or it was everybody’s fault. There’s an old adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Just because good intentions are not executed properly, or seen for what they are doesn’t make them bad intentions. It just makes them poorly executed or unseen. We all make mistakes, and we have grace to correct for those mistakes.

Here's a quote from A Course in Miracles that supports this idea:

The moment we’re presently in could be accurately described as a crisis, that came from the sum of three elements being mixed into a cocktail. Post-modernism and the internet are inventions of humans and they both had good intentions behind them, to resolve conflict and connect people, respectively. The third element, emotions, is a fundamental part of the human experience which humans simply have to contend with. The first two were not well thought out. They were solutions to problems on one hand, but like with the game of whack-a-mole, new problems kept shooting up out of them. The book How to Change the World by Changing Your Mind offers a very different solution.

I read the bible as a teenager out of simple curiosity. I was not coerced by anyone into believing my eternal soul could be in danger if I didn’t believe every word, so I didn’t experience any fear while reading it. I was confused though. The God portrayed in the Bible seemed like someone with borderline personality disorder. He was sometimes loving, and sometimes vengeful and suspicious. It didn’t make sense to me.

Thirty years later, my therapist told me about the book A Course in Miracles and here I found a far more sane God that I could believe in. The author self-identified as Jesus, and I didn’t doubt it. He portrays a God that doesn’t know or care whether you praise him or not. The ACIM God doesn’t have an ego and so s/he doesn’t need our praise. This God would consider our seeing the innocence and light in all of our brothers and sisters, praise enough. In the language of ACIM this is called seeing the Christ in them or seeing their holiness. ACIM provides a map for our personal and collective healing, and it also claims that there are many other maps that get people to the same place. It doesn’t claim to be the only path.

Here’s another couple of quotes which demonstrate that ACIM is not a dogmatic religion.

ACIM doesn’t insist that we need to believe in God. God believes in us, and that’s sufficient. It takes a far less dogmatic tone. Instead of “you should believe this or else you’ll burn in hell for all eternity” it’s saying “you might want to consider this alternative explanation for why you’re suffering now, and then, realizing that suffering is a choice, choose not to suffer anymore.” It claims that all of our suffering comes from our belief in the following premise, that we are a separate self; an ego, and that we are self-made.

Anyone who has been through a high school level science course knows that it appears that everything in this world, including our bodies, are made up of atoms which are comprised of mostly empty space. How much empty space? 99.9999999999999 percent. In the parable, I talked about how wobbly we feel emotionally when we doubt the physical reality around us, so by some device, perhaps involving the neurons in our brains, we construct a consistent physical reality to provide us with a sense of stability.

A man named Wilfred Sellar’s once said, “The aim of philosophy, absolutely formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” Besides for constructing seemingly solid images, we also construct a timeline for ourselves by stringing instants in time together into a consistent story that we call our life. We make another metaphorical cocktail where we mix this story with the beliefs and attitudes we hold about the meaning of this story, constructing an image of an identity in relationship to the world around us.

Due to the virtues of post-modernism, we tell ourselves and each other that nobody but ourselves can establish who we are. That is our ultimate freedom, and what we decide to do with this freedom is entirely up to us. I appreciate this stance, but it comes with some warnings for the user. Be careful what you believe you are. If you believe that you are a victim of the world, for instance, your experience will reflect that belief back to you. You made that. If you believe you are guilty because you have harmed and manipulated other people in your past, then you have made yourself guilty and there is a part of you that feels you deserve punishment, rather than joy, peace and love which are your natural inheritance. Post-modernism does come with some complications.

The level of conscious awareness is where we construct a reality indistinguishable from identity because we refer to it as “my life,” and it happens on the level of thought. There’s a famous quote from a psychologist, named Donald Hebb: “Neurons that fire together, wire together." He’s describing a process whereby the electrical and chemical event that get “fired” as information travels from neuron to neuron via spaces, called synapses, which lie between each successive pair of neurons in a greater chain. They get strengthened each time they are fired meaning that they get more “trigger happy”. If one of these chains represents a particular thought, like “The world is out to get me!” the probability for that thought to be repeated in the future has been strengthened by being fired in this moment. Seen in this neuroscientific framework, it's easy to see how thoughts turn into strongly held beliefs over time.

The metaphor I like to use to make this neuroscience more relatable is that of a sledding hill. Your first run of the day, on fresh powder, could be compared to the first time you thought a particular thought. With the following runs, you notice that if you fall into the groove made by the initial run, you’ll stay in that groove; it’s the path of least resistance. A belief is just an interpretation of how things hang together or how things work.

According to A Course in Miracles, God created us with the free will to think for ourselves for one simple reason, because God is not a tyrant. There are two opposing thought systems. There is the ego thought system, one that is premised on us being separate selves with separate agendas, and one that is based on the premise of One mind, which ACIM refers to as the Holy Spirit. Both systems of thought are logical within themselves, although the ego thought system always ends up eating its own tail. These two opposing thought systems do not communicate with one another. The ego thought system itself is an illusion; it is in opposition to the capital T Truth of who we are. According to A Course in Miracles, God implanted the Holy Spirit in us in the same moment we invented the ego with the thought, “I wonder what would it be like to be separate?” It was God’s last intervention in this world, laying guardrails that would inhibit our ability to destroy ourselves.

For us to heal this split will, we must deny one of these thought systems, and there’s only one that we have the ability to deny because it’s the one we made ourselves. To deny the ego means to deny ego-derived thoughts, or fearful thoughts, or thoughts that are not True. Comparing the ego thought system to the idea of post-modernism, it’s clear they’re in alignment, but it was only through being created by something other than a tyrant that we can eat this apple in the first place. Yes, symbolically speaking, eating the apple in the Garden of Eden represents the acceptance of the idea of a separate self. It was the birth of the ego. After eating the apple, Adam falls asleep. Nowhere in the Bible does it ever mention Adam waking up again. Inferring that we might all still be sleeping.

One great question many students of A Course in Miracles ask is “Why did we entertain the thought of separation in the first place?” An even better question, that would be more applicable to right now, is “Why am I entertaining it now?”

Because the whole thought of separation (the ego) is an illusory idea; a construct of our making, it can’t possibly prevail. But it’s going to fight like hell, since its very survival depends on it.

That brings us back around to the beginning of the thread of this page, and the polarized moment we’re in. Right now, most of our heads are spinning, what with drones or UFOs being spotted all over the east coast, vaccinations being either good or evil, billions of fingers pointing blame out in every direction, every day. The exhaustion of post-modernism, mixed up with emotions and the internet has gotten too overwhelming for many people and I think we have to accept there is a trend in the world today towards authoritarianism. Now we must all choose the proper authority, and guess what?

Here again, the ego always speaks first and loudest. The USA is now electing someone who could be viewed as the embodiment of the ego ideal. “Get more for yourself!” is the ethical premise of the ego after all. I'm not saying this person is evil. Let me be very clear on that. The potential for evil exists in each and every one of us because the ego thought system is alive and well in all of us. Including myself. If William Shakespeare was right that all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players, this person I speak of might just be fulfilling his role in a larger plan. Since we're stuck with him, we might want to consider this possibility. More to the point though:

This next quote explains what happens when we choose projecting with the ego instead of extending with the Holy Spirit:

Projecting blame by pointing fingers out into the external world is not a viable solution to our shared problems. I justify this statement by saying it has simply never worked before and it would be insane of us to keep trying the same thing and expect different results.

There’s another candidate out there actually aligned with the Truth about us. Did you know that one of the first great teachers and ambassadors for "A Course in Miracles" has been running for president in the last two election cycles? Her name is Marianne Williamson. I feel confident, though it’s unconfirmed, she intends to run a third time. Who knew this whole thread was just me working my way around to a political endorsement. I honestly didn’t know I was heading there, but I’ll just go ahead and make my endorsement. Marianne Williamson for President in 2028! She’s also right here on substack so you can subscribe to her substack to hear more of what she is proposing. She is clearly focused on right action. Many ACIM students are focused on their own right thinking. She is right thinking too. She wants to establish a Department of Peace, for Christ’s sake.

Suppose that I mean “for Christ’s sake” literally. What is the Christ? According to “A Course in Miracles” to see the Christ in someone acknowledges the perfect, wholly innocent, and divine essence of who they truly are. There is not a single exception to Christ and you have the ability to see him in even your worst enemy. You can take it as far as seeing your greatest enemy as your greatest teacher. Your peace and joy rely on your seeing him or her in this way. Eventually, we will all figure out that OUR collective peace and joy relies on our seeing everyone, including ourselves, as invulnerably innocent. “How to Change the World by Changing Your Mind” aims to provide evidence from various modes of research that points at this truth.