“I think, therefore I am!”

Philosopher Rene Descartes

Symbols and Color

• Palette: Artisan Set
• Labyrinth: Centers Group
• Penny: Ordinal Orientation – individual
• Diamond: Expression Axis
• Border Color: Violet

Implications of the Upright Position or the Positive Pole

Rodin’s iconic sculpture, The Thinker, adorns the positive pole of the Intellectual Center. One must turn inward to truly contemplate a thought. The mind can do many things: memory, pattern recognition, calculation, and sensory organization, but the real capacity that give humans a spiritual ability is that of abstraction. In the vastness of cognitive space, anything can be created or discovered, it is all a matter of what matters.

Card messages in the Illuminated position.

+ Contemplation

(Thought, cognition, deliberate, reason, explanation, concentration, elaboration, anticipation, cogitation, visualization, insight, thick narrative)

1. The power of thought has built empires, expanded science, and created beautiful compositions of music, writing, and art. Focus your mind and conceptualize  your world.
   
2. “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” espoused Dr. Martin Luther King. He knew that our progress would only advance when everyone would use their full capacity to think. Concentrate.
3. Test your assumptions. Engage your reason and thought processes. The logic of your actions appears solid. Stick to the facts about what is and you will be sure to find the truth.
4. Can you think of another solution? If you can’t try changing your assumptions?
5. Your brain has ta rational calculating (left) and sensing intuitive (right) hemisphere. Look at the situation in a nonlinear right brained way. It is not so black and white an answer as the analytical left. Merge both conclusions and you are likely to come up with a more complete assessment. 
6. Your brain has ta rational calculating (left) and sensing intuitive (right) hemisphere. Look at the situation in a nonlinear right brained way. It is not so black and white an answer as the analytical left. Merge both conclusions and you are likely to come up with a more complete assessment. 
7. Anticipation is a function of the brain where it forecasts possible events. These are usually based on experience but as one gets more intuitive and wiser, the higher minds realizes events that can only be guessed at. Develop your consciousness and you will be able to see more than is obvious.
8. You must think like the other party if you want to gain an understanding and reach a solution.
9. Act on what you already know. Stop looking for more proof, you have enough!
10. An Intellectually Centered person may not be any more or less overtly emotional than a person in a different center. But you will see in there eyes a processing of information, evaluating, sorting and comparing, as an active part of their interaction with reality.
11. Evaluate your options, reason them through. A solution will arise.
12. The logic of your actions appears sound. Stick to the facts about what is and you will be sure to find the truth.
13. Make your questions more thorough and probing than your answers sound smart or pithy. You will gain what you need if you ask the rights questions and give only required answers.
14. . Can you think of a different solution? If you can’t try changing your assumptions.
15. “The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.” Plutarch
16. Time to dream journal, or brainstorm, or sketch out a new frame of reference; any medium you choose! Do it deliberately but without the constraints of “logic”. Heck, call it a wish list or bucket list, but DO IT TODAY!
17. Positive thinking is fine when coupled with forward action. Make sure you follow through on what you aspire to.

Quotation Illustrating this concept…

• “Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth, more than ruin, more even than death.  Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit.  Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid.  Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. ” Bertrand Russell
• He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.  ~William Drummond, Academical Questions
• “It is the mind which creates the world around us, and even though we stand side by side in the same meadow, my eyes will never see what is beheld by yours, my heart will never stir to the emotions with which yours is touched.”~ George Gissing
• “It is not how much space there is, but rather how it is used. It is not how much information there is, but rather how effectively it is organized.” — Edward Tufte

Implications of the Reversed Position or Negative Pole

The Intellect collects data in packets of experience and snippets of sensory code in the same way as a computer. Frequently data is assembled incompletely, but in ways where the puzzle pieces seemingly fit together, even if the picture they form doesn’t make any sense. Rationalization is taking puzzle pieces
of different colors but roughly the same contours and forcing them together to arrive at a decision.

Card messages in the Shadow position.

– Rationalization

(Polemic, rhetoric, dialectic, hypothesis, denial, stupidity, thin narrative, justification, excuse, scatoma, myopia, rightness, tautology)

1. If all you can think about is rationalization and judgment, it is obvious that your view point is stuck. Extract your seventh chakra from you first chakra and things will be much clearer.
2. Rationalization is the feature of the mind that Ego uses to selectively build a justification for whatever thought or action it chooses to defend. Tangible facts are factored by some calculus known only to the one who ciphers it. Other ideas are in play based upon faulty reasoning. Ferret out the erroneous assumptions.
3. This card is about the mind, being analytical, or stuck in thought. The situation might require rethinking or has become an intellectual mishmash.
4. Some ideas are in play based upon faulty reasoning. Ferret out the erroneous assumptions.
5. Analysis paralysis has taken hold. You are locked inside your mind and are somehow not taking meaningful action or expressing your concerns correctly. Find out what you feel first, and then ask why.
6. GIGO stands for garbage in-garbage out. In computer science this is the surest way to get precise but erroneous results. The premises being asserted here is this: fail to make the bridge from theoretical to practical, and you will generate elegant nonsense! Start over.
7. You might just need an attitude adjustment. The content of your thoughts, or the process by which you are evaluating them, are way off! Remember, just because you believe something doesn’t make it true, let alone factually accurate. Reconsider.
8. The situation is an intellectual mishmash. Don’t mistake simple correlation with causation.
9. One of the greatest flaws of the mind is its fear of being wrong and therefore to believe what it thinks is right. Limited scope of awareness, with partial knowledge made people think the sea horse was a horse. Restrain beating yourself when you discover that there is still data to be included and an obvious blunder in your calculation of the situation. Judgments are what make rationalizing so tempting to the Ego in the first place. It is fear masked under the need to be smart or clever. Instead, be wise and intelligent.
10. Rationalization is the feature of the mind that Ego uses to selectively build a justification for whatever thought or action it chooses to defend. Tangible facts are factored by some calculus known only to the one who ciphers it. If you are confused by someone’s explanation, be wary!
11. If it sounds like bullshit because you know someone is trying to deceive you, then stop listening. But, if you are feeling threatened that what they are saying makes sense, and it will prove you wrong, have the guts to listen more closely.
12. “Only the good die young,” and other stupid aphorisms, reveal the tendency to justify not thinking because it is simpler to believe that one-size-fits-all. Never is one solution suited for every situation. Think about it.
13. Unless you change the narrative playing in your head, your life is just the same old story. Is it time for a rewrite?

Quotation Illustrating this concept…

• “Begin challenging your own assumptions.  Your assumptions are your windows on the world.  Scrub them off every once in awhile, or the light won’t come in.” Alan Alda
• “The forceps of our minds are clumsy things and crush the truth a little in the course of taking hold of it.” H.G. Wells
• “A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
• [Thinking is] what a great many people think they are doing when they are merely rearranging their prejudices. ” ~William James
• “Feelings are not supposed to be logical. Dangerous is the man who has rationalized his emotions.” David Borenstein
• “Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.” – Edmund Burke
• “Thinking is hard work; that is why so few people do it.” Albert Einstein

Relevance in the Michael Teaching

The Intellectual Center, or 5th chakra is the source of our ability to formulate and communicate ideas.  When an Essence has chosen to make this aspect the primary receiver in its information reception and interpretation system, it is seeking to balance a tendency to react to visceral or emotional stimuli and forestall an immediate knee jerk response. That momentary disengagement of the stimulus-response dyad, infuses a moment of conscious deliberation and consideration which is the vehicle by which we travel the path of conscious evolution.

The Mind is truly the Center which has advanced humans more so than any other species. While the mammalian brain increased in complexity through progressive steps of Devic evolution, the brain only begins to house a “conscious mind” when it reaches the stages of sentience. In this case, the human species.

The primary difference that sets the human mind apart from the animal mind are three: 1) speaking in structured syntax with words that have meaning outside a phonetic or concrete limitations. 2) The ability to transfer information exogenetically (recorded outside of the DNA molecule) in the form of writing, symbols, and images. No other animal can write an autobiography! 3) Humans with the two preceding qualities in play are the only species to have the choice to willfully disregard what they have learned. A quality not to be confused with the misnomer of ignorance, but rather more accurately addressed as stupidity. Note: While self reflexivity is considered a part of sentience, there is no guarantee that a person actually performs this task of witness, let alone tracking their thoughts, behavior and emotions. The question Why is the doorway back into the Self.

Stupidity derives from the negative pole of rationality. The meaning of which has been confused with a very useful function of the mind which when employed empirically and inclusively, is reason. Taking selective pieces of historic events, selective interpretation (Emotional – Intellectual part), incorporate some belief or dogma about a thing and the resulting product at the end of the cognitive assembly line is a rationalization.

People in industrialized countries like America put great stock in the Intellectual Center as the overseer of scientific objectivity and purity of knowledge. Because of the proliferation of invention in both arts and industry, this belief permeates this and other cultures. Seldom is their any reasonable questioning of this premise. When the mind makes a meaning and embeds it deeply within the neural pathways of its cultural narrative and operating beliefs, it is loathed to give it up. Why? Because without some value to place in the equation of life, the resulting variability is frightening. That is an example of the true operation the negative pole of rationalization.

In the positive pole of thought and conceptualization, we can witness the systemic course of formulating an idea. This is the right consideration of reason. It is the forerunner to both logic and mathematics. Symbols, processes, and images emerge from the depths of the Instinctive Center or from the opening vistas of the Higher Intellectual Center. In either case, the Mind acts as a communication hub between the animalistic concerns/fears of the Ego and the direction and innate wisdom possessed by the Essence. No wonder it takes 5 full Soul Ages and the innumerable lifetimes occurring within the seven stages in each, for an individual to organize them all in their Soloverse!

Having primarily wired the intellect as one’s data reception zone, the appearance of that person’s focal point will tend to be the eyes and forehead. Thinking for the purposes of identification, sorting, proportionalizing, and class assignment, goes on continually to one degree or another. Being visual learners, they in turn must find words to verbalize and thus designate what they mean. Someone in this Center is not necessarily removed from from their feelings. They will tend to be of either lesser importance or of secondary access, making more difficult for them to understand how they may “feel” about something. Of course, other Overleaves will enhance or mitigate these effects.

Qualifying the idea of Intellectual Centering is necessary because of the tendency to align the word Intellect with what we think of as intelligence or sapience.  No amount of mind time from a confused, muddled, or limited device will produce anything but shoddy thinking. Cunning, clever, devious, and smart are words that most readily accept as having intelligence. But the more accurately reflect the negative pole where rationalizing for fear driven selfish gain is taking place. Whereas true intelligence acquires knowledge, fear seeks out and rejects information based upon its need to be right…truth be damned!

Famous Examples

William F. Buckley,  James Franco,  Harrison Ford, Diane Sawyer, Michelle Bachman, Barack Obama, Thomas Aquinas, Bill Gates,  Meryl Streep, Margaret Thatcher, Brad Pitt, Billy Crystal, Werner Erhard, J.S. Bach, Lauren Bachal, Tom Brokaw, Lennie Bruce, George Carlin, Stephen Hawking, Hillary Clinton, Pres. George Bush, Truman Capote, Dick Cavett, Arther C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, Karl Rove, Jerry Falwell, Jane Fonda, Justin Beiber, Simon Cowell, Dustin Hoffman, Henry Kissinger, Confucius, Mitt Romney, Prs. John Kennedy, Michelangelo, Bill Murray, Ralph Nadar, Georgia O’Keefe,

Cultural Significance

Man’s love affair with his own intelligence shows the paradox of the mind-emotions interplay.  As Stanislaw Lec noted in his book Unkempt Thoughts,  “Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man.  But they don’t bite everybody.” And the reason they don’t sting? Because there is no emotional reaction which catalyzes events and acts as a spark holding the germ of the idea in place to grow. Thoughts may formulate in the billions every day within the collective mind of humanity but only a few, like seeds in a desert, take root naturally. Others are cultivated and harvested by a few, but would never germinate in natural conditions, without the loving care of some one. These we might call personal creations.  Only when sufficient time and confluence of group emotion arising from hope, need or anger, do these propagate to become the ideas that change the world.

From the Greeks, Chinese, Moslem-Arabs, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution and now the Information Age, the mind takes quantum leaps.  Our brain, the transceiver of all types of data: sensory, emotional, conceptual, and transcendental, is the central processor of all these inputs.  Indeed, the terms just used are those winnowed out and have become a part of our human effort to mimic the brain: the computer, the mind: artificial intelligence (AI), and the global mind: the internet. Each advancement allows us to reflect with greater breadth and depth into every aspect of our knowledge and potentially, expand our consciousness. If we allow ourselves to do so.

Minds, like the robot Number 5 in the movie Short Circuit, want “input”. And with input, stimulation.  The excitement concurring with incoming stimuli does not by any means correlate with or generate new, thought.  The modern video game industry has taken cinema and the computer and combined them into an amazing and potentially stifling world of  “virtual reality.”  Learning new reactions or their times my be heightened and situation specific strategies may be trained  but is contemplation and greater comprehension occurring?  This is a question we face not about technology, the child of the mind, but how we use technology: with or without awareness.  When the mind is used to see itself as creator and as tool, then we might enter a broader realm where we know not its limits, but its purpose. To assist us in understanding ourselves, not the object or manufacturing ourselves. In such an environment, we deploy our mind in the monstrous of amoral ways, as ruthless as Skynet, the Matrix, and VICI all put together. We become robots and cogs in the machine. No longer human beings, but replaceable parts.

With its potential for exploring so many dimensions and unleashing so much energy, we stand at an epoch moment in our history. A period where glorification of complicated schemes passes for genuine reasoning. In a word: rationalization.  It is no wonder or accident of language that when philosophers derived one of the most useful and profound languages of our existence – mathematics; when they could not come up with a variable to fit logically into an equation they called the process “rationalizing the denominator.” In everyday life, when the circumstances of reality seem to exceed our ability to make sense of the complexity and our fear of being vulnerable arises to merge with that idea, the mind obliges us in its same unflagging process and spews out strings of arguments which upon honest assessment reveal themselves as nothing more than rationalizing our own behavior or beliefs.

Realizing that our minds produce both from the result of contemplative or reasoned thought and a regurgitation of previous beliefs rationalized to fit situations it deems a threat. Taking the humorous bumper sticker to heart “don’t believe everything your mind thinks.” And thus understand the equation put forward by the following anonymous poem:

“Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.” ~ Author Unknown

by Stephen Cocconi ©2011, Updated, 2024

For a Motivations Cards Reading or Channeled Consultation call: 209.768-4956 or email Stephen at channeling@themichaelteaching.com