Bruce Charlton's Notions

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Loneliness is the huge undiscussed problem of modernity.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/loneliness.html

But perhaps the most striking thing about loneliness is that almost nobody does anything to cure it.

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Instead of curing loneliness, people distract themselves from it; mostly by losing-themselves in the mass media, and also by drink and drugs, sex, travel and other stimuli.

And these distractions are a cause of, or contribution to, much of the evil of modern life.

Perhaps the clue is that loneliness drives people to seek these distractions - so the forces of evil want people to be lonely, and to remain lonely, because:

1. Loneliness itself makes people miserable.

2. The attempt to achieve distraction from loneliness is a continual pressure towards sin - because most distractions are either sinful or involve an opening-up towards sin (for example propaganda, situations of temptation etc).

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Perhaps the most usual cure advocated for loneliness is 'friends' - friends are supposed to be 'good' in and of themselves; modern people desperately want friends - and as many as possible to provide 24/7 cover.

Yet such desperation for friendship leads to a lowering of standards, to false friends; and false friends are a powerful - for many people an irresistible - inducement to evil.

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The fact of loneliness, its miseries and inducements to evil, and the fact that social institutions which provide a cure for loneliness (e.g. marriage, the family, college, monastery) have been continually attacked and often destroyed by modernity...

And the fact that nothing whatsoever has been done to improve the situation - despite unprecedented resources...

All this tells me that loneliness is no accident - it is not an accidental side-effect of modernity, is not an unfortunate cost for greater benefits: but is strategic; and that the forces of evil do what they can to make and sustain loneliness as a weapon against the Good.

If, at its best family life is a foretaste of Heaven; then loneliness is a foretaste of hell. 

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One true thing, at least, was said by Kurt Vonnegut - that loneliness was the big problem of modern life.

People are not built to live alone, to eat alone - yet so many people do, more and more as marriage and families are avoided and destroyed against a background of secularism.

People use their wealth to live alone, to be independent of ties and hassles - they are addicted to mental isolation.

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I used to suppose that the increasing numbers of single and divorced would lead, spontaneously, to new forms of group living - to something like colleges, where people could eat together and share social activities. 

Yet if people are plagued by loneliness, neither are people built to live herded randomly in institutions - they are meant to live in organic groupings, tied by meaningful affiliations.

New forms of group living have not arisen - atomistic disintegration proceeds apace. 

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The pain of loneliness may be alleviated or blotted-out by distractions; by immersion in the mass media, by communication technologies, by the serial psychodrama of modern sexual relationships, by travel, by consumerism and fashion, by drugs - but these are analgesics: the problem remains.

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Indeed, the problem of loneliness is ultimately spiritual, not a matter of proximity to and contact with 'other people'.

The reality is that we are never alone because God is with us always; therefore loneliness is a part of our state of sin - which is why loneliness is ever-more prevalent.

Loneliness is a side effect of alienation. A society without meaning or purpose or a personal relationship between the individual and the world, is a society where loneliness is intrinsic, existential and un-assuage-able.

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I have previously blogged about the serious problem of loneliness in modern society - loneleiness as the modern 'poverty'.

Well, Problem Solved. (Edited)

Theresa May has appointed the country’s first minister for loneliness in order to tackle the misery endured by around nine million Britons. Tracey Crouch will take on the role on top of her current job as Sports minister.

As well as announcing the new minister, Mrs May said a cross-government strategy to find ways to stop people feeling lonely will be published later this year. She said: For far too many people, loneliness is the sad reality of modern life. I want to confront this challenge for our society and for all of us to take action to address the loneliness endured by the elderly, by carers, by those who have lost loved ones, people who have no one to talk to or share their thoughts and experiences with.”

…a ministerial lead for loneliness who will work with the Commission, businesses and charities to shine a light on the issue and pull together all strands of Government to create the first ever strategy. We should all do everything we can to see that we bring an end to the acceptance of loneliness for good.

The Office for National Statistics will help to devise a method of measuring loneliness and a fund will be set up to allow Government and charities to find innovative ways to deal with the problem across all ages, backgrounds and communities. 

Ms Crouch said: "I am sure that with the support of volunteers, campaigners, businesses and my fellow MPs from all sides of the House, we can make significant progress in defeating loneliness".

It is dismaying to see so many basically decent people who are drawn into the net of evil and corruption woven by the demon-possessed ruling elites such that they cannot discern evil even when it is standing in front of them and haranguing them with anti-moral tirades based on an increasingly obvious loathing for the people they are supposed to be representing and leading.

The process of corruption is long and incremental - and often begins with loneliness. Modern life creates loneliness, disaffection, alienation; and the way out from this state (so nearly intolerable for social beings such as ourselves) is to join in with the fake empathy demands of the mass media; join in with the (more-or-less) sexualized, intoxication-focused and mutually exploitative events that go by the name of 'social life'; just, basically, Join In.

I presume that this is why the elites are so keen that as many as possible vulnerable and impressionable 18 year olds should be torn away from their friends and families and planted somewhere (anywhere!) else among people who they do not know and who care nothing for them, in spiritually barren colleges where their only escape is into meaningless mass media, superficial social interaction, sexual adventures, intoxication events, and self-righteous moral grandstanding --- the only alternative being to sit in your room, a cafe, a library for hours... alone and silent.

Here and now, pretty much all high volume, widely-available social interactions are thoroughly permenated by mass media attitudes, which are secular and leftist attitudes; any group of 'friends' casually interacting, or interacting on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or whatever (and - so far as I can see - everyone is doing this all of the time, unless physically prevented) will be participating in a festival of shallow secular evil - will be thought-policing each other for crimespeak, will be demanding and eliciting 'appropriate' attitudes and responses to an agenda supplied and hourly updated by the mass media.

The only way out from this is solitude and silence, and the only way that solitude and silence are tolerable (let alone rewarding) is in a loving and nurturing context - which is, pretty much, restricted to the family context (i.e. embedded in the context of sociality and responsibilities which is - or should be - family life).

Of course families are themselves infected by the same anti-spiritual culture, including the culture of busyness - of over-planning, of always doing something (or feeling guilty about not doing something) - but at any rate, the family makes this basic life stance possible in a way that the public world simply disallows - there is the possibility of genuine human contact: soul to soul.

In the public world you can have solitude and silence, but at the cost of paralysing despair --- Or you can 'join-in' with the agenda of always inane and ever-more-frequently evil chit chat, opinionating, endorsing, mocking, cheering and ritually-condemning that is 'modern life'.  

Nobody is going to solve this for us, because everybody is the problem. 'Society' won't reform because they don't want to 'reform'; they don't perceive anything wrong that coudn't be fixed by more-of-the-same; and anyway they personally are not the worst, so 'don't judge/ blame me'?

Once you have made the diagnosis, only you can implement (or work towards) a solution.

Being reasonable, friendly, agreeable, empathic... these are enemies of Life in this world. Sad but true. If you don't like it for yourself, get on with changing it for yourself - as best you can.

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Christians have become very mixed-up about poverty.

The idea (which I have heard from the current leaders of the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches) that alleviation of poverty is a particularly urgent task of our day and ought therefore to become the major priority of the Christian churches is especially misguided - indeed, not just a mistake but actually a dangerous and harmful policy.

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The fact is that poverty, in the Biblical sense, is pretty-much abolished from the modern world. 

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/almsgiving-what-ought-christians-to-do.html


Biblical poverty was about working all the hours of the day and indeed being worked to death, starving to death, dying of disease... it was about death.

In the modern developed countries, by contrast, so-called-poverty is characterized by what the Bible would have called something like 'luxury and idleness': over-eating, obesity, alcohol and drug over-use, and un-employment (not working), and by living longer than anybody in history - but having on average few children.

In undeveloped countries, nowadays, poverty has a lot more hunger and disease than in developed countries - but is nonetheless characterized by societies rearing unprecedented numbers of children, with the population being added-to faster than ever in the history of the planet: an extra billion people every 12 years since 1975 and another billion expected in the next 14 years.

(As context, there was only one billion people in the whole world circa 1800 and it took more than a century to add the next billion.)

Thus Biblical 'poverty' was about populations collapsing due to famine and plague - while modern 'poverty' is about luxury and idleness in the West, and an exploding population in the poorest nations.

Two different things.

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Furthermore, Westerners live in a world with a previously-unimaginable focus on this-worldly materialism, a world of short-termist hedonism, addiction to technological distractions, and intolerance for discomfort, a world of grotesque spiritual deficiency - so that to ask for a greater focus on relieving material poverty is precisely the worst possible emphasis for Christian leaders to recommend.

A greater focus on examining the distribution of material resources and on re-distributing material resources is exactly what we do not need; exactly what would be most harmful  to us - it is even further to subordinate Christians under the Marxist materialist preoccupations of Leftism.

I regard such policy as following the agenda of The Adversary, not of God.

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(This is why the secular Leftist mass media have given such a positive reception to Pope Francis. Because he is assisting their demonic agenda.)

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But we are told that the poor are always with us - so who are they?

I would say that the modern poor are the lonely.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/what-endemic-loneliness-tell-us-about.html

Therefore perhaps Christians could or should focus on the area of greatest need - that is to say visiting the lonely - as with the Biblical instruction to 'visit orphans and widows in their affliction' - but expanded to visiting the lonely of whatever nature or cause.

(I hasten to add that up to now I have personally failed in this, as in so many charitable imperatives. This is a case of don't do as I do...)

Visiting would therefore be a more worthy and more necessary aim, less counter-productive and less actively-harmful, than pandering to the already dominant corrosive priorities of Leftism; which merely fuels the tendency to see the world primarily in economic terms.

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Nonetheless, if modern Christians were to focus much more on visiting the lonely, they would not have the slightest difficulty in finding people who needed to be visited - in contrast to the way that people have great difficulty in finding people who resemble the Biblical depictions of poverty. 

To find the lonely, Christians would NOT have to travel thousands of miles to war-torn Africa, or home-in on disaster zones; they would not even need to cross to the other side of town. 

Christians could just step-out of the front door of their home or office, turn right or left - it doesn't matter; and walk for just a few seconds or minutes to find someone who needs visiting. 

Because loneliness is everywhere in the modern world. It is the main form of modern poverty.

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That we should try and understand creation from God's point of view was a recurrent theme in the work of William Arkle - and one of the valuable things I got from reading him. 

In particular, I found it useful to consider why God created in the first place - what was God trying to achieve by it? 

But the imaginative exercise also highlights several vital metaphysical assumptions that must be made prior to the procedure. 

For instance; Christians know (or ought to know) that we are like God and God like us in some very fundamental ways - for instance, because Jesus (a Man) was fully divine, and because Men are described as Sons of God. 

It is this sameness of kind that makes it a valid exercise. 

If, on the other hand, we regard God as qualitatively different from us - than the exercise must be misleading. But then, it seems not to be Christian to insist on absolute difference. 

 

When we identify with God before creation, in broad terms God's motivator seems to be something-like loneliness; and God's overarching purpose seems to be to make companions... 

And the best possible companions are similar but not identical, free and agent 'divine friends' who are bound-together by love and a common (overall) purpose - for which we have the earthly-mortal analogy of the best kind of human family.

That is, 'creation' is about making individuals and situations, the-result-of-which is intended to be: more Beings of the same kind, and at 'the same level', as God. 

Also, we need to decide whether or not God was single and utterly alone before creation. 

And if not alone, then with whom? Another god or gods, presumably - by which I mean, others who are different/distinct Beings of the same kind and level.  

This is especially relevant because if God was a solitary god before creation; then He could not actually love until after he had created. 

This makes a big difference - because if God was initially alone, then embarking on creation seems likely to be necessarily of a self-gratifying, gratuitous, 'playful' and indeed experimental act - indeed this was how Arkle eventually seemed to regard it.  

(Arkle regarded god as initially one - then dividing into Heavenly Parents, and then further to procreate Jesus Christ, who contained both the male and female aspects.)

I have not thought-through the implications of multiple god; but my own conviction is that God's original situation was dyadic: a Heavenly Father and Mother. And it was from their mutual love that creation originated.  

In other words, before creation there was both the loneliness of Heavenly Parents as the only divine Beings; and also the experience hence knowledge of love, which pointed the way ahead to a creation of more-and-more divine Beings living (and creating) in a harmony rooted in love. 

A creation rooted in the experience of love is not gratuitous, nor a game; and is 'experimental' only in terms of creation being a trying-out of various means towards a known end.  

And such a creation is understood to be open-ended (endlessly expansible); because the more loving divine companions that eventuate: the better. Each - being different - adds to the totality ad potential of creation. 

Yet because all such divine companion Beings are harmonized by love; then there is no limit to how many can be integrated in the 'project' of creation. The more the better!

My understanding is that - however unwise - it is not irrational to reject salvation.

Damnation is a rejection of The Good, and a rejection of the possibility of Good; especially in the sense that damnation is ultimate and isolated subjectivism.

My understanding of Satan's grievance is that he was made a Son of God without his consent; and became conscious to find himself in a world in which all Goodness, all meaning, purpose and all possible relationships are God's creation and therefore operate in accordance with God's rule and plans.

There is no other world - except the world of chaos (outwith creation) and the world of the ego, which has some residue to the primordial, non-conscious entity from-which God made Satan his child.


My (Mormon metaphysical) understanding is that God the Father found himself as the only conscious intelligence among many primordial unconscious intelligences - and God's primal decision was to make us, these unconscious intelligences, His Children; and making us His children was (from Man's perspective) His primal act. 

(I am leaving aside the role of Heavenly Mother in this, for simplicity and also because I am unsure of it - but naturally She was vital in the generation of God's children.)

It is important to recognise that this primal act was, necessarily, done without our consent - because we were not capable of consent until after we had become children of God. Furthermore, God's motivation in making us his children is open to interpretation: there are those of us who know that it was done from love, and for our progression and elevation to a fully-divine status such as has been achieved by Jesus Christ, and may be achieved by others.

But there are others - Satan is one - who resent being made children of God, resent being presented with a fait accompli of an ordered universe; and who believe that God made us His children from selfish, not loving, motives - perhaps that He created us to serve and worship Him - as creatures to Lord it over, to Boss about, that we were created as inferiors to make God feel important... that kind of interpretation. 


Satan is intelligent enough to know that by rejecting God's Goodness, he has rejected all possibility of Goodness; by rejecting God's order - meaning, purpose, plan - he is rejecting all possibility of order; by rejecting God's family, he is rejecting all possible relationships and choosing ultimate, existential isolation...

But this knowledge does not lead Satan to repentance, nor even to sadness; but instead to greater hatred of God and resentment of his own predicament.

Thus far Satan's choice is a choice to reject salvation, Goodness and relationships - but thus far Satan would be the main person to suffer (although God clearly grieves deeply at the loss of a loved Son, the ultimate rejection by a loved Son). Thus far, Satan's choices are mainly a matter for sorrow and sympathy.

But Satan went beyond this sad situation, to wish for others to make the same choice as himself - despite that Satan knows for sure that this choice can lead only to misery, loneliness, futility. And in doing this, Satan made the active choice of evil.

Satan's attaining of consolation and taking of pleasure from the contemplation of others being induced to choose misery, loneliness, futility... his attempt to achieve this outcome by dishonesty - by selection, distortion and outright lies...

It is this choice that makes Satan - and those others who have made his choices and who, more-or-less, serve him (or at least unite in opposition to God) - from a cause for pity into an evil that is abhorrent, and which must be fought and defeated.  

I have had the privilege of reading in manuscript a collection from letters from William Arkle to a young friend and spiritual-disciple/ -colleague; spanning from the middle 1980s to near the end of Arkle's life (in 2000).  

These have provoked all kinds of thoughts on that vital matter which Arkle 'made his own': questions on the nature of God, and God's hopes and aims in creation. 

 

For all Christians; God is (or should be) a person, not an abstraction. 

We are God's children (that is related-to, descended-from God); and God loves us. 

Beyond this, there are differences of understanding; and there is indeed a difference in my understanding and that of Arkle. More precisely, in his early work, Arkle described what I believe is true: God is a dyad, Father and Mother in Heaven: God is our Heavenly Parents. 

This is also the understanding of Mormon thelogy; and it natually goes-with an understanding of each Human Being as - in his or her eternal primordial essence, and eternally in future - either a man, or a woman (never neither, nor both). 

This metaphysical reality does not necessarily map-onto what may happen to an individual man or woman in terms of biological sex and/or sexuality during this mortal, earthly incarnation - which has the nature of a temporary experience for us to learn-from. My understanding is that - whatever happens 'superficially' in mortal life - each of us eternally has been, and eternally will be, essentially (by the nature of our true and divine self) a man or a woman eternally. 

 

But by the 1980s, Arkle had apparently moved to a view of God as primarily both man and woman simultaneously (a He/ She); and this goes-with an idea of sex as relatively superficial to the essence of Human Being - and with reincarnation as potentially alternating (as 'required') between the sexes; neither being the essence of a Human Being. Or with sex (and marriage, and procreation) being 'discarded' when a Human Being has reached Heaven

(Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield also share this understanding of sex. And it also goes-with an understanding of spirit-form as both the past and future of Man: Man was a spirit, will become a spirit; and physical incarnation is an intermediate stage, for experience and learning only.)

Whereas by contrast; my view (and the Mormon view) is that physical incarnation is higher than spirit life: bodies are better. Including that God is embodied - i.e. God is physically-bounded and in the same as human form (or rather, causally vice versa); God is not an omnipresent spirit. 

So, for me, God is embodied, and indeed two bodies: God is a dyad: Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother.

This matter of "what God is like", whether God is One or Two, is a vital to our metaphysics; because it decides our understanding of why God embarked on creation. Our inferred motivation of a unitary, solo God is very different from that of two Heavenly Parents, distinct but united by their mutual love. 

 

(Traditional Christian theology has it that God was utterly self-sufficient, and without needs (or desires). Trinitarian theology makes the love of this unitary God also be (somehow) sub-divided into the mutual love of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. But either way, the creation of Men and everything-else by God is an ultimately gratuitous act - and Not a matter of God seeking greater satisfaction, Not a matter of God needing, wanting, desiring or yearning. I personally reject this line of reasoning on the basis that God is a person, like our-selves in an ultimate sense; and that God does have passions, wishes. In particular I regard Love as the primary passion of God, and I regard Love as having in its nature many aspects such as needing, wanting, desiring and yearning.) 

Arkle's inference, based on his understanding of God as unity and a real person - is that God before creation must have been lonely and bored. God's greatest need was for things to do, and people to do-things-with. 

From this, Arkle derives an understanding that creation is essentially a matter of overcoming loneliness and boredom; of creating Beings who can develop to become like himself, and of creating many other things 'for fun'. 

Arkle encapsulates this in the ideas that in making Men who can evolve towards full-deity God is literally Making Friends; creating Beings who - it is hoped - will become 'friends' at the same divine level as God. And secondly that all the other Beings of Creation are made as a kind of ultimate 'play'. So that for Arkle life is - at its highest, most divine - created life is about play with and among friends.  

It should be noted - and this comes through repeatedly in these late Arkle letters, that loneliness and boredom are negative motivations - therefore creation is a kind of cosmic therapy for the unitary God.  

My own view, based on God as the loving-dyad of celestial husband and wife, of Heavenly Parents; is that creation is a natural consequence of the existential nature of Love. Creation is the positively-motivated overflow and expansion of spousal love. 

This is nothing esoteric, but a motivation that has been experienced (albeit perhaps partially and temporarily, as is the nature of mortal life) by countless husbands and wives through Man's history. Parental love seeks its own increase through children; and through a creative attitude to life and living.

In different words, the spontaneous expression (consequence) of parental love; is to co-create (in harmony with God's already in-progress creating) an open-ended, expanding-and-harmonious world; in which the family lives creatively. 

In a nutshell, God is like the perfection of married love, and what God wants from creation is analogous to what a loving husband and wife want, given a husband and wife who are themselves members of loving families. 

Thus (in an eternal persepctive) God wants children, and loving-developing family relations; wants new family and friends (i.e. permanent friends, maintained in harmony by analogously-familial love); wants a whole created-world of other (increasingly creative) Beings of many kinds, natures, motivations - but (ideally, and in actuality in Heaven) all maintained in Harmony by their mutual love. 

 

I am posting another talk from the delightful John Butler, which he discusses his books, his life, and his spirituality - which I have previously called Christian Zen. 

I call it this because it uses Christian language to describe an 'Eastern' spiritual way that neither wants nor aims at the resurrected life eternal with God, Jesus, and other sons and daughters of God, dwelling in Heaven - that Jesus made possible for those who followed him. 

Instead, JB's desire is for self/ego-less, body-less, peace, stillness, oneness and unity with God and every-thing - which I will tern Nirvana. 

What is instructive about this video is that it seems to make clear why John Butler wants this. He mentions the core problem of life as 'How do you cope with the world' - and the impossibility of escaping from the world due to the constraints of the body. Clearly the hope permanently to be rid of the body is not the same as the hope of resurrection. 

JB also mentions his aim of 'less me, more God' (not my will but God's will) - which equates closeness to God with dissolution of 'me', the self, the distinct ego. 

The great hope is for total and perfect unity - in which whatever makes us distinct and unique is removed. This is holiness. He suggests the special virtues of losing the individual in the community (family, village, nation); absence of criticism between Men; and patient, forbearance and waiting - which he (from experience) regards as better lived in Russia. 

Butler describes his books on Russia (which I have read, and recommend) as describing How spirit may strengthen to bear an unbearable world. 

This phrase is, I think, a great clue to this Christian Zen perspective. It describes the basic stance that 'the world' is intrinsically unbearable, that this un-bearability comes from the detached and observing conscious self; and therefore implies that the best and only hope is to escape the un-bearability by dissolving consciousness (and the underlying self) - so that we will just-be. 

   

By his own account John Butler has had (until recently) an 'unbearable' life of misery, loneliness and depression - alleviated only by the discipline of (oneness-type, 'transcendental') meditation. Some fifty years of meditation practice have enabled him to cope with the world, while he awaits death.

But why did JB experience life as unbearable? Well, his biography shows that this came from within; it came from the way he was and from what he wanted. And the Christian will, naturally, focus on the matter of love - because love is the principle of God's creation. 

Now, for Christians, love ought to be between persons - on earth and in Heaven (because God and Jesus Christ are also persons). But John Butler's aspirational idea of love is not between persons, but a blissful the loss of personhood into oneness. 

In this video; JB describes the great 'love' event of his life. This was a time when he and a woman friend (not his wife) were meditating together, and he experienced a vivid and compelling vision of their two souls leaving their bodies and joining into a single spiritual unity. This led to nothing relational between the two; but triggered JB to leave his wife and led to several years of a life wandering alone and miserable. 

So, the experience of 'love' drove JB further away from the world; because (I would say) this was not relational-love between persons, but was the 'annihilational'-love a loss of self (a microcosm of the hoped-for dissolution into the divine). 

From what I have gathered of John Butler's life (from the several books of his I have read) his only experience of relational love (Christian love) was with his mother; and this was warm, constant and long-lasting. 

Yet, I think this love, because it was with his mother, probably pointed backwards into a lost childhood; rather than forwards into eternity - and (in other of his work) I judge that JB regard all inter-personal and conscious love in terms of a negative attachment to the unbearable world.

He seems to regard Christian love as a narrowly-specific, immature and anthropomorphic perspective on life; something which ought-to-be set-aside in favour of the universal, 'abstract' undifferentiated 'love' of complete unity with the impersonal-and-universal-divine. 

In sum, I believe that (so far as I can tell) John Butler is an example of someone who does not want what Jesus has to offer. He does not, indeed, want to be a Man - because he finds distinct consciousness so unbearable in its suffering, that he would 'hand back the entrance ticket' of becoming a Son of God and return to a situation of pre-creation blissful mere-being. 

I think he regrets being budded-off God, because of the existential loneliness and isolation it engenders (at least in adults); and wishes to lose all awareness of himself as a separate entity - lose all awareness altogether.

From this perspective, this mortal life is nothing but a Vale of Tears; without any essential function or purpose. It is a kind of punishment, or accident; something to be coped-with by learning Not to think. And something from-which death is a deliverance.

For me, none of this is true. I see this incarnated mortal life as having a purpose that is essential to what I most want: which is resurrected life eternal in Heaven with other persons - including at least some of those whom I love from this earthly time. 

I regard this mortal life as made good (albeit intermittently, and temporality) by inter-personal love, I see love of God and Jesus as between me and other persons and living beings; and I see the aim of both earth and Heaven (the thing I most want to 'do') as being creation/ creating from and for this 'web' of loving relationships. 

As I have often said before; it seems apparent that there are some people who are (apparently from young childhood, and perhaps related to the pre-mortal spiritual nature) wanting something very different from the gift that Jesus brought us - and John Butler seems to be one of them. 

Instead of opting-into Heaven, and different from choosing the Hell of opposition to God - these people want to stop being people. 

I regard this as a consequence of the fact that when God (our Heavenly parents) took our primordial and unconscious selves and procreated them into being sons and daughters of God with consciousness and free agency; some regretted the event. 

Among those who regret being sons and daughters of God are those who respond by blaming and hating God and divine creation - these are the demons who work to destroy.

And there is this other group - of whom John Butler (along with perhaps vast numbers of adherents of Eastern religions) is one; who want to return to the state of a primordial and unconscious self. I don't think this is literally possible, because I believe that the sons and daughters of God are eternal.

But God can certainly remove all self-consciousness and all awareness of difference from the sons and daughters of God ; so that after death fully, and to some extent, during mortal life (e.g. in oneness meditation) - Men can blissfully feel and experience themselves as-if they are an impersonal and abstract part of the divine. 

This is not what God most wants for us and from us; but I think it is something he will do for his children who choose to opt-out of Heaven but without being hostile to the Heavenly project. 

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Note added. While I believe that all the above applies in an abstract and ideal sense; I think that here-and-now (in these 'end times') it is very difficult for anyone to reject (real) Christianity without damning themselves. 

In other words; as of the conditions in The West in 2021, Christian Zen is mostly in practice anti-Christian. 

When the world is ruled by a demonic cabal - so that all which is mainstream, official, 'approved' is strategically on the side of evil in the spiritual war - then those who reject the gift of Jesus will find it very difficult not to find themselves accepting the assumptions and motivation of those who actively oppose Jesus. 

To put matters differently; because the Christian Zen adherent rejects discernment (i.e. rejects 'judgmentalism') - its becomes all-but impossible for anyone with any kind of engagement with The System (and surely we all depend on The System to keep us alive, and not to kill us) to avoid joining-with the system in pursuit of damnation. 

I would say that discernment of Good from evil has become an absolute necessity in 2021. The default is nowadays to take the side of Satan, and it requires almost an active choice to reject damnation. 

As an example, in another video John Butler demonstrates a belief in the CO2 Global Warming agenda which is deceptive and evil agenda based on several Big Lies; and speaks approvingly of the Extinction Rebellion organization - which is a tool created-by and working-for the goals of the totalitarian world government: the Global Establishment. 

This kind of gross failure of discernment seems almost inevitable when one combines a rejection of judgment with a climate of pervasive authoritarian evil. 

To put it very simply: For most people, most of the time, here-and-now; the choice is binary: Christ or Satan - and those who in other cultures and at other times might genuinely have wanted Nirvana, will sooner or later find themselves wanting Hell. 

Expanding on :
http://www.jrganymede.com/2016/01/09/mother-in-heaven-is-feminism-delaying-the-fullness-of-this-doctrine/
And complementary to:
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/letter-from-your-heavenly-father-part.html
I have the following intuitions, which could and probably should be regarded as something like a fantasy fiction rather than theology.
**


My Dear Child,

I feel a need to write this letter because I am grieved at the misery and despair of so many of my children in their earthly lives - your loneliness and isolation. My hope is that knowing a little more about me, and learning of the love I always have for you, will help you through the adolescent trials of mortality, and inspire you to make the choice to return as adults to dwell again in Heaven.

It may be helpful for you to know something of the history of the long and loving relationship between us, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, to know the reason why you hear so little about me during your mortal existence - why we encourage you to speak directly with God your Father, and to think much on your Brother Christ, but not - as a rule - to focus your attention on me.

Your Heavenly Father and I are the original co-creators and rulers of creation - but we have different areas of responsibility. Briefly, your Father is more concerned with 'creation' and I with 'generation'.

Your Father made the universe, and - with him - your Brother Jesus made the earth and then gave you the possibility of resurrection to eternal life. You may wonder what I was doing all this time? The simplest answer is that my special responsibility was with you spirit children, during the long ages of your pre-mortal sojourn in Heaven.

As you know, I am your spiritual mother - it was through my divine parturition that you transformed from being merely unaware primordial 'intelligences' to persons; but at first you were 'spiritual babies' and only gradually became more mature as pre-mortal spirits.

Somewhat like an earthly mother, it was my particular job to nurture and care for you during pre-mortal life, when you were developing and growing as spirit children.

Clearly some of you have hazy memories of the blissfulness of that time, the era when you were new-born or young and dependent child spirits - when you were barely self-aware, knew little of the past or future, but lived in a an eternal joyous present, a surrounding atmosphere of sustaining love.

You and I may never again experience the un-self-conscious bliss of that time of early spiritual childhood - and that is bittersweet for me, as it is for you.

But it is our plan and hope that you will grow beyond that to develop towards becoming like your Brother Jesus Christ - who lives and works with your Father and I; in other words, that you will become independent, self-aware god-children who will - from your achieved freedom, power and autonomy - choose to return and dwell with us as divine friends, participating in the great and endless work of loving creation.

And ultimately, that you may eventually have spirit children of your own - so that we all may dwell together as a loving extended and ever-growing family.

So, as pre-mortal spirits you lived constantly in my presence for many ages; but you grew, and developed, and eventually you decided to venture into mortal life and join the plan of salvation: of mortality and resurrection.

Then you made the brave step: you voluntarily left behind the reality of that atmosphere of sustaining love, and your left behind your continuous awareness of me. This was necessary in order for you to experience and develop your own independent selves, something which was not possible in the conditions of pre-mortal life.

My deepest hope is that you will pass through the painful isolation of spiritual adolescence during your mortal life on earth; and be resurrected to spiritual adulthood. That is my wish - that you will separate from me, in order to return - but to freely choosing to return.

I know that mortal life is not always as anticipated, and some of you - having tasted the isolation of autonomy - want nothing more than to return to the un-self-conscious bliss of our pre-mortal child life together. Since I cannot, and would not wish to, coerce you - but only to move forward step-by-step with your full consent and willingness - and it is your choice, you can return to your former state and remain in that situation until such a time as you are ready and willing to move on.

Otherwise, it may assist your time of learning by experience to know that although we are currently separated; I am lovingly concerned with you every moment and every step of your life. In a thousand invisible ways that you can scarcely imagine, I help you - nearly always without drawing your attention to the fact. I am aware of, and consoled by, your prayers and meditations to the Father and Son.

Be assured: I rejoice in your happiness and spiritual progress, I feel your sufferings, and I am most deeply worried by your hostility and rejection and the resulting despair.

And I yearn for nothing more than your safe return as mature, grown-up sons and daughters.


With all my love,
Your Mother in Heaven

*

There are three broad categories of dissatisfaction with the mainstream secular world view:

1. The self-refuting nature of relativism.

2. The arbitrariness of ethics without religion.

3. Hopelessness and alienation.

*

Hopelessness and alienation are the hardest to identify and pin down, and are always deniable - but maybe they are the most damaging aspect of the modern malaise because - on the one hand -  they render the individual unable to stand firm and make an effort to escape their situation; while - on the other hand - they lead the sufferer to escape his existential loneliness into distractions and intoxications (especially sexual) which take him further and further from the truth and from virtue.

*

Christianity solves all these problems; and that should be enough to recommend it conclusively when someone has nothing coherent or motivating to offer as an alternative - yet clearly this seldom happens, and conversion is typically a drawn-out process that is easily derailed (certainly it was for me).

What happens is that each Christian solution to each class of problem is met by a change of ground and criticized from a different perspective - so that the cure of alienation is met by the charge that Christianity is a made-up fairy story, while the cure of Christianity offering a coherent truth is met by objections that this system is immoral (according to modern secular norms); yet the grounded ethical system of Christianity is said to be arbitrary or alienating.

Such objections can go round and round without termination for weeks, years, decades...

*

It seems very difficult, in a world in of cognitive fragmentation/ specialization, to bring matters to a point - to force a total-world-view confrontation between Christianity and mainstream secular Leftism - a confrontation which Christianity would immediately and easily win.

Modern mass media culture, the partial professional cultures (e.g. politics, law, science, the arts), the weakness and wickedness of the human heart, and the cumulative corruptions of purposive evil at work around us all conspire to prevent such a confrontation.

But this is the great latent strength of Christianity. If, or when, a person brings themselves or is brought by circumstance to the point of balancing Christianity against secular modernity - and can hold themselves or be held at that point for more than a moment - then there is no doubt of the outcome.

*

*
From The Great Gift - by William Arkle, 1977

http://www.billarkle.co.uk/greatgift/text/resolutionofgrief.html

I suppose we can develop anger and impatience with the Creator and the way He has designed His system of teaching. We might feel angry that He hasn't stepped in and done more to remind us of what we would have liked to have been doing.

(Continuing from: http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=mother+in+heaven )

Our contemporary problems require recognition of our Mother in Heaven (wife of our Heavenly Father, literal Mother of us all in our pre-mortal lives as spirits) - who is concerned by the minute details of her childrens' lives - such matters are the crux of things.

Having recognised her reality we surely cannot, and should not, continue to ignore or reject her?

When Feminism asserted that The Personal is Political this was an attempt at total thought-control and subversion by the political (paternal) realm - henceforth nothing was to be exempted from regulation by feminist ideology. This constitutes a theft from the domain of Mother in Heaven; whose concern is not ideological but whose concern is a consequence of the fact that she loves us and wants the best for us.

When ideologies - or even religions, even Christianity - seek to regulate the minutiae of life according to ideas, laws, regulations and the like abstractions and generalisations - then this is a theft from the domain of Mother in Heaven; it is a subversion of love by principles.

(It is ironic, but in no way surprising, that feminism operates by imposing a tyranny of crushing, one-sided paternalism into the maternal realm. Unsurprising because Feminism is rooted in hatred of Motherhood.)

Once we know that Mother in Heaven is real (which knowledge comes from personal revelation) then we cannot rest until we know her (which is not the same as knowing-about her). That is what Mothers want.  Mothers want to stay in touch with their children.

The centuries, millennia, of neglect and rejection of Mother in Heaven is a great sorrow to her, and a constant source of loneliness to us. She does not at all want worship; there is nothing whatsoever here about setting-up as a rival deity to her beloved eternal husband God the Father. What she wants is something altogether different - less public, formal, aesthetic - much more direct, personal and homely.

Mother in Heaven is complementary with our Father. The Father cannot adequately substitute for the Mother. What is natural and proper and fully-wholesome and requisite from the Mother; is totalitarian dictatorship - an iron cage - emanating from the Father.   

A Man appreciates, sometimes even understands, a Woman. But he cannot be woman, he cannot think it. At the conceptual level his truth is one that is external; empathy but not identity. Therefore for a Man or a Woman the opposite sex is necessary for wholeness; necessary and not an optional enhancement; but absolutely required.

Organised religion is necessary; and it just-is innately patriarchal. (If not, to the extent it is not, it very rapidly dwindles to extinction - always and without exception.)

That is a clue - Mother in Heaven is necessary as part of our Christian religion but not as part of official discourse. So our relationship with Mother in Heaven cannot truly be a part of religious dogma, public worship and communal praise, rites, rituals, sacrifices or whatever else may be regarded as more or less necessary for God the Father. She is not far off, but just over the shoulder; merely a whispers length distant.  

In sum, Mother in Heaven does not want our worship; she wants to know, to help, to comfort, to nurture, to teach, to advise, to share our living and to be involved; day to day. Nothing is too small a matter, nothing too individual, everything is significant. She has billions of children - each one of us endlessly interesting, always important.

For her there is no Big Picture - but billions of infinitely detailed miniatures.

Although I have quite recently read and listened to the audiobook of The Silmarillion several times with some appreciation; my reaction to this work remains coloured by my first encounter; still retains much of the negative affects from my earliest encounter.

The Silmarillion was published on 15 September 1977; after some four years of ever more impatient waiting and speculation following the death of the author.

The publication date was just before I left home to go to medical school - which was itself a time of intense ambivalence; of excitement and expanding horizons mixed with loneliness and homesickness.
I therefore bought The Silmarillion as soon as it was available, and of course took it with me to stand on the bookshelf in my room, but I didn't read it immediately. Instead, I saved-up actually reading it until I had arrived at college.

My excitement at reading this volume, at long last (as it seemed to me), was therefore bound-up with my excitement at leaving the family and beginning university. Tolkien, especially Lord of the Rings, stood for much that was best about my teenage years - and I was hoping that this spirit would be extended into the new era.

My sense of anticipation was therefore about as great as was possible. Yet I was so disappointed with the Silmarillion that I did not even manage to finish it - or rather, found myself skipping largish sections to get to the last chapters. So, it was less 'disappointment' than an actively-unpleasant experience - I would have preferred, indeed I expected, something much like the Appendices of The Lord of the Ring; but I was actually offered something that seemed more like the Old Testament.

In The Silmarillion there was no editorial voice (such as was present in the Prologue and Appendices of LotR) to mediate between myself and the events described (these editorial voices were sometimes Tolkien at other times Bilbo or merry or various others). Instead, there were just these rather dull, bare-bones accounts of the doings of Valar and Elves; each free-standing and disarticulated; and with no hints of how to make sense of them.

At any rate, this was my negative impression - and this accounts for my residual sense of distaste on seeing that spine on my book-shelves.

Clearly I was not also, and Christopher Tolkien expressed regret for exactly the problems that most struck me, when he came to embark upon the History of Middle earth - and he certainly set them right.

In stark contrast was my encounter with the Book of Unfinished Tales, which was published in 1980 but which (thanks to the above aversion) I only read in about 1986, when I found a copy left behind in a holiday cottage in Keswick. I liked Unfinished Tales so much, that I always carried it around since; still have the same dog-eared paperback copy; and before long it kick-started a Tolkien resurgence of interest - strengthened by reading the Biography and Selected Letters and Tom Shippey's 'Road to Middle Earth' (again, rather later than their actual publication).

And this second phase never stopped but has continued up to the present. But still, deep down, I hold my grudge against the Silmarillion of 1977...

More on this theme: 
http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=silmarillion
 

I read quite a few Philip K Dick novels and stories back in the early 1980s, and have always regarded him as one of the very best science fiction writers - although no more than adequate as a prose artist. But I have never re-read any of his books, and indeed to some extent avoided them - as one does with effective dystopias.

Partly this was due to a very unpleasant 56 hour weekend stint as the solo doctor resident and on call in a psychiatric hospital; when I made the mistake of reading the powerful  Time Out of Joint during the gaps between clerking and treating psychotic patients.

The novel is about a man for whom the paranoid delusion of all the society being organized around him is literally true - and I found it very unsettling to read the novel then talk with people who believed themselves to be in more or less the same situation - which set me to wondering about myself... It was, altogether, a very meta-Philip K Dick situation, like being inside one of his dystopias.

What I retained from the totality of PKD was a suffocating sense of the meaninglessness of life - life in general - which was brought into awareness (but not created) by the artificiality of his technologically enwrapped (and often off-world) environments. A world where the difference between a robotic animal and a real one, between a replicant android and a human, is almost impossible to discern - a world where the animal or human is not significantly different from a robot or replicant: both equally arbitrary and mechanical.

I have just bought and begun reading Valis, a novel which was written shortly before Dick's death and which is a semi-autobiographical  account of his later years of brooding on an experience of his which was either a divine enlightenment or a psychotic break or some combination.

The events of the first chapters (which are all I have read) depict a burnt-out Californian society of the early 1970s, in which the protagonist and his circle are all ex-druggy, hippy, hedonistic types suffering from heavy casualties of extreme loneliness (existential isolation), suicide, psychosis, neurosis and nihilistic cynicism - so it is not an enjoyable read, so far!

But what is portrayed is metaphysically the avant garde of what has (minus the LSD) since become mainstream in The West. In the first place, it is the futile struggle of people who have rejected God, the soul, the afterlife etc to find meaning in a world of mortality which they have further degraded by mechanistic explanations;  but in the second place (so far) there is the almost-equally-futile attempt of people to escape from this dead-ly set of metaphysical assumptions into a very abstract conception of God.

The protagonist has (like Philip K Dick) experienced a kind of revelation - which may or may not be from God - involving a pink beam of light; and this is interpreted (so far) in terms of physicsy ideas of God as 'information'. Friends of the protagonist with 'simple' Christians faiths (a cancer patient who has a rosary beside her bed) are rejected as a faith of naive wish-fulfilment which does  not take seriously the metaphysical problem of suffering... the striving is clearly for a very pure, abstract, physics-like faith in a God who fits in with the world of computers, information, archives, science, technology, psychoactive drugs and so forth.

What seems impossible for the hero is a faith based on God as primarily our loving, heavenly Father. That simple thing seems difficult, or impossible, to picture or believe - instead the abstract God is no sooner proposed than He gets bogged down in abstract metaphysical dichotomies concerning omnipotence versus helplessness, goodness versus suffering, meaning versus meaninglessness... any solution to these problems seems contrived, arbitrary and unconvincing.

So on the one hand there is the visceral  nature of human (or animal) suffering - a friend plans and kills herself calmly and without passion, a friend's cat runs out under the wheel of a car and is crushed, a friend dies after pain, blindness, deafness from cancer and radio-/ chemo-therapy and so on... While pitted against this is a very abstract, intellectual, information-theory, pink light beaming across the void type of understanding of God.

There is a gross mismatch between the nature of the problem, and the search for a solution. The proper answer, which is to understand God not a a set of abstract metaphysical properties but as our Father, and other people as His children and our siblings, and other things in the environment as being alive-like-us (rather than us being dead-like-them)... the protagonist is pre-immunized against these obvious and effective and satisfying answers and explanations as being too obvious, too simple, too much in conformity with what we would most wish.

The frame for explanation has narrowed from eternity to... well not even to the span of the mortal life of Men; rather it has narrowed to the span of the mortal life of one single consciousness... Then this assumed frame (a frame which was not really possible, and certainly not mainstream, until very recently in human history - and only in a minority of people and situations) has been accepted as utterly compelling - and any other frame is regarded as simply childish and stupid...

How could this happen? How could such a very socially and historically contingent world view ever be supposed to be entailed so strongly that to deny it is seen as foolish and unintelligent and weak?

What evidence is there that the people who adhere to the atomistic, alienated nihilism of the 1970s drug-devastated Californian milieu have a superior wisdom and insight almost all humans who dwelt in other times and places?

There is a truly cosmic level of arrogance, of pride, about all this - is there not? Combined with a truly cosmic level of condescension that amounts to despising almost everybody, everywhere and at all points of history.

In sum, a staggering degree of evil.

Yet, this evil metaphysical system spread from California to the rest of the West, where it now rules supreme and is enforced upon us a million times every day at every level of public discourse from the government, civil administration and legal system down through education and health care to the all pervasive mass media and casual human interactions.

PKD was certainly a canary in the coalmine, with respect to noticing and describing and diagnosing. I will be very interested to see whether he was able to solve - through the course of this novel - the deep problems he so acutely experienced; but I fear that he will not. Simply because he was looking in the wrong place, and had ruled-out or rejected the right place.

The one place where he would not search happened to be the place the answer was hidden - because he already 'knew' the answer and had rejected it. Indeed the whole edifice of evil PKC depicts was built upon this prior rejection.

And the evil was experienced as inescapable precisely because - given that a priori rejection - the evil was inescapable; just as you cannot escape from a burning building if you have already decided that the fire escape is the one and only route that leads nowhere.

  

It has been quite usual, since the self-styled 'Enlightenment' for Men to look back on previous generations with condescension at the childish misunderstandings and imaginary explanations. But there is nothing from history to compare with the blindness of modern Man - his inability to perceive the obvious - things he can see in front of him; and to deny obvious common sense.

This blindness is very general through society - probably we all exemplify some kinds of blindness, while being immune to others - but there is no doubt that modernity is in a crucial sense about this blindness - modernity is about making Men unable to perceive some things which used to be so clear that they required no emphasis or explanation, but were simply the basis of explanation.

And, as the Enlightenment makes clear, modernity is about assuming that such blindness is a virtue and mark or superiority - to be blind is to be better and wiser.

Most examples of gross blindness are to do with secular Leftism (political correctness) and almost all instances of modern blindness are inculcated by the mass media, or by official channels such as the educational or legal systems - they are about replacing the obvious perceptions and inferences with an abstract interpretation that renders them either invisible or else reverses their meaning.

Examples of blindness include the failure to perceive gross levels of dishonesty in, for example, the workplace, the legal system (nature and application of laws), educational evaluations and examinations; failure to see the gross and intentional ugliness of modern built environments; failure to recognize the wickedness-promoting and sin-denying and insanity-enforcing nature of policies and propaganda in relation to sex and sexuality, marriage and families. 

The point is that modernity is now substantially about inculcating and enforcing such blindness - and one inference is that there is a lot more going on in the world than people notice - as can be seen by a comparison of modern writing with older writings. And, when we find discrepancies between the older and current world views, we can be almost certain that it is our current world view which is most at fault, least accurate, most fundamentally misguided.

If we can unveil our eyes and other senses and simply perceive... then a very, very different world comes into sight - a far richer, more meaningful and purposive world; a world capable of engaging us in a way this the mainstream world does not (and is indeed intended to prevent). It is suddenly obvious that most people, most of the time are selectively blind.

The modern world view is an artificially created abstraction compounded of images, interpretations and explanations, asserted imperatives... it is an interlocking whole, a web, that incorporates the mass media (primarily, as the major implicit validator) and also most of politics, law, public administration, modern 'science', 'medicine', 'religion' and indeed the realm of public discourse.

Because it is abstract it is arbitrary, and we are disengaged from it - at may (and does) command and indeed compel our attention; it controls us, it shapes our senses and our actions... but it does not satisfy.

Our participation is an addiction, not a thing with meaning or purpose - and we know this, but cannot break free. Just as so many people cannot break free from sexual relationships they know are pathological - they are trapped by the consequent prospect of loneliness and misery and boredom. So Modern man is addicted to the pathologies of the mass media, fashion, the official abstractions - and his Blindness is the price he pays - and it is this Blindness which keeps him enslaved so he cannot see the escape routes (into meaning purpose and real relationships) which are located all about him...

For all Modern man knows, he is surrounded by nature spirits, gods, angels and elves; by miracles and 'paranormal' phenomena and all manner of remarkable events; and is himself part of a grand and terrible destiny! - as our ancestors perceived.

Surrounded, but self-blinded to them all.

It seems to be that most people are negatively-motivated - for example by fear, loneliness, pain, boredom, resentments - from-which they seek relief, seek to escape. 

Insofar as they have an aim; it is for a place of ease, release, comfort, security (in practice; freedom from worry) etc. A place without suffering - including that nobody-else suffers (so that we will not suffer empathically from their suffering). 

The problem is that there exists no permanent answer, no permanent escape, in this mortal life - because everything is temporary, nothing lasts, every-thing ends - there is disease, degeneration, decline, and death. 

Therefore negative motivations in this life ultimately point-towards 'death' (or some simulation of death) - when death is primarily desired to be loss of the self, loss of thinking, loss of consciousness, loss of caring... as the only permanent possibility of escape from suffering. 

When there are positive goals; it is sooner-or-later realized that nothing in the world, nothing in this mortal life on earth, will suffice; because (again) everything is ephemeral, nothing is permanent. 

This is a deep problem. 

What emerges is some variation on the pattern of seeking short-termist palliation in this life, maximizing immediate pleasure/ fun and minimizing current pain/ angst; but trying not to think about the inevitable future - which future is regarded as inevitable annihilation of our awareness/ destruction of all that is us... 

(So we won't be there to suffer the future, anyway.) 

The reasoning is that if life is ephemeral, if decline is inevitable, if death is annihilation; then it is rational to make the most of my life here-and-now, rational to regard the rest of the world as existing for 'my' personal benefit; and try to forget about the future, other people, anything that might interfere. 

In other words; the 'logic' of the situation - the way to be motivated - is oneself to 'be a psychopath' - while trying to persuade others to be altruistic. 

That is; inducing other-people to live for other-people and for the future - so that these others will be amenable to here-and-now psychopathic exploitation.  

In practice; psychopathy requires an incapacity for love - an innate human deficiency. 

Therefore, people who are capable of love are (spontaneously, 'viscerally', for reasons they can't necessarily understand) appalled at such 'worldly' reasoning - and they cannot or will not take this path to embrace psychopathy - or, if they do try to become psychopathic, they will find themselves unable to adopt the requisite 'heart-less' attitudes, and will be tormented by guilt for their actions. 

(A common combination in the world today - it seems to me.)

Instead of taking the worldly path; people may reject The World. 

They may conclude that this-world is useless at best (everything temporary) and evil at worst (because of the expediency and success of psychopathy; of exploitation, parasitism, predation).

Such people may instead embrace the ancient ideal of trying to ignore this-world and focus on the-next: live now for the life to come after death. 

But such an ideal makes this mortal life worthless - indeed worse than worthless - because this is a world of illusion, cruelty, suffering... many bad things. 

The bad things spoil this world, while any good things are temporary (and perhaps illusory anyway).  

Thus; to live for the next world points towards death as something which is desired as soon as possible. And someone who really believed this, would not be alive to tell anyone else about it. 

Consider: Someone who really believed this world was illusion and pain, would not be concerned with morality - indeed he would have no value-preferences for truth, beauty or virtue - since values are merely part of the illusion.  

One who really lived for the next-world would not be concerned about converting others to his belief, or persuading others of his rightness and their wrongness.

One who really lived for the next world would do nothing to sustain himself alive - would, in fact, die within days at most. 

What instead we get (and have had for some thousands of years, apparently) is people who argue for the primacy of the next-world, and who try to prove that it is "better" to live indifferently to this world and be focused on the life-to-come... And many other absurd and incoherent variations on this theme. 

What this tells me, is that just as there is something in most people that rebels-against and is revolted-by the ideal of living as a psychopath; so there is something in most people that values some-things about this mortal life - and cannot write it off as wholly illusion and suffering.  

This is intuition at work in us.

What intuition tells us is that this mortal life should- not either be wholly-accepted nor wholly-rejected; but this-life needs discernment. 

Some of it is good and some is evil, some genuinely ephemeral, other parts can and should become eternal; and we need to know which is which, in order to embrace good and reject evil. 

We need discernment in order to know what to keep, and what to leave-behind...

(In Christian terminology to know what is sin, and what can be carried-through to Heavenly life.) 

Such discernment would need to be comprehensive and accurate, because if this mortal life is valuable we need to preserve some of it for eternity, yet we also need to know what is wrong - or else we would be carrying-through into Heaven the evils of this mortal world, so it would then not be Heaven!  

And yet sufficient discernment is impossible: because there is way too much that needs to be discerned rightly in this world! 

At any given moment, every person is wrong in some ways (probably many ways) about what is good and evil; and there are more and more problems and issue presenting themselves every hour of everyday.  

Although we have both inner-and outer-guidance that leads us towards correct discernment; this operates by trial-and-error, and across time. At any particular moment - we will always be confused and in a state of error. 

Yet another double-bind!... We can neither accept nor reject this world. We must, it seems, discern within this world; yet we cannot sufficiently discern. 

We need Heaven, but cannot find our own way to Heaven. 

This was the situation until the advent of Jesus Christ.

Jesus can be considered a way out from this double-bind; because Jesus was uniquely able to discern his way to resurrected life eternal! 

This was possible, indeed perfectly natural and spontaneous, for Him - because he was in perfect harmony with the purposes and methods of God and of Heaven. 

Because Jesus 'did it' we can do it as well, by following Him. 

After our mortal death, Jesus will be there to will lead us through all necessary discernments about what to take and what to leave-behind. 

All that we need to do is follow Him, and agree to whatever is necessary. 

Which means we must want to follow Jesus. 

A way of saying this; is that we must 'love' Jesus. 

Only that! But that is necessary. 

Edited from a 1912 lecture by Rudolf Steiner:

1. The soul has a natural confidence in thinking. It feels that if it could not have this confidence, all stability in life would be lost.

2. The healthy life of the soul comes to an end when it begins to doubt about thinking. For even if we cannot arrive at a clear understanding of something through thought, we may yet have the consolation that clearness would result if we could only rouse ourselves to think with sufficient force and acuteness.

3. We can reassure ourselves with regard to our own incapacity to clear up a specific problem by thinking; but the thought is intolerable that thinking itself would not be able to bring satisfaction, even if we were to penetrate as far into its domain as was necessary for gaining full light on some definite situation in life.

4. The thinker who doubts the validity and power of thought itself is deceived about the fundamental state of his soul. For it is often really his acuteness of thought which, being overstrained, constructs doubts and perplexities. If he did not really rely on thinking, he would not be tormented with these doubts; doubts which themselves are the result of thinking.

5. Thought offers to the soul the consolation which it needs when face to face with the feeling of utter loneliness in the world. 

- It is possible to experience the feeling: “What am I?... considered in the current of universal cosmic events, flowing from one infinity to another? - What am I? With my petty feelings, desires, and will? - All this stuff can surely be of merely subjective importance, of concern to myself only?”

- Directly the life of thought has been rightly realised, this feeling is confronted by another: “I am living-in those events when I, through thinking, let their being flow-into me.” 

- It is then possible to feel oneself taken into the universe and secure therein.

6. It is but another step from this feeling to that in which the soul says: “It is not only I who think, but something thinks-in-me; the cosmic life expresses itself in me; my soul is the stage upon which the universe manifests itself as thought.”

7. It may be a good preparation for the apprehension of spiritual knowledge to have felt frequently what invigorating force there is in the attitude of soul which says: “I feel myself to be one, in thought, with the stream of cosmic events.”

It is not only a question of recognising what there is in a thought of this kind, but of experiencing it. The thought is recognised when once it has been present in the soul with sufficient power of conviction; but if it is to ripen and bear fruit, this thought must be made to live in the soul again and again.

**

Note:

If the power and scope of thinking can be grasped; if we can have confidence in the validity and potential of our thinking; if thinking can be clarified to its primary nature - the thinking of our true self: in full freedom, agency and creativity; if this thinking can then be practised - practised both in terms of repeated until habitual, and making it the basis of living  -- then we have the answer to many of the deepest yearnings and the solution to the most intractable deficiencies of modern Man.

That is, by such thinking, we may (potentially, over time, with effort) participate-in reality without restriction, know true reality in the fullness of which we are capable; and do so in a manner that is autonomous of the corruption and lies of the world. 

*

"If you dip into any college, or school, or parish, or family–anything you like–at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow room and contrasts weren’t quite so sharp; and that there’s going to be a time after that point when there is even less room for indecision and choices are even more momentous.

Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of even apparent neutrality are always diminishing.

The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder...”

(That Hideous Strength - by C.S. Lewis - p. 283)

*

Over the past few weeks, things certainly are coming to a point in the Church of England: the gloves are coming off, the wolves are discarding their sheeps' clothing, and the Christian and Anti-christian sides are revealing themselves with ever-greater lucidity.

**

On one side is Giles Fraser, sometime Canon Chancellor of St Paul's Cathedral, London and a hero/ martyr of the radical Left establishment in the Church of England.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/06/why-gay-bishops-have-to-lie


And on the other side, the Archbishop of Uganda:

http://www.anglican-mainstream.net/2013/01/07/archbishop-stanley-ntagali-responds-to-decision-of-church-of-england-to-allow-gay-bishops/

It is very discouraging to hear that the Church of England, which once brought the Gospel of Jesus Christ to Uganda, has taken such a significant step away from that very gospel that brought life, light, and hope to us.

The recent decision of the House of Bishops to allow clergy in civil partnerships to be eligible to become Bishops is really no different from allowing gay Bishops.  This decision violates our Biblical faith and agreements within the Anglican Communion.

When the American Church made this decision in 2003 it tore the fabric of the Anglican Communion at its deepest level. This decision only makes the brokenness of the Communion worse and is particularly disheartening coming from the Mother Church.

We stand with those in the Church of England who continue to stand for the Biblical and historic faith and practice of the Church.

Our grief and sense of betrayal are beyond words.