Bruce Charlton's Notions

I fell to thinking about what would be the most useful and beneficial cultural first step, and (as has happened before) I came up with honesty.

At present, escape from our death-course is thwarted at every step by dishonesty. In a culture of dishonesty nothing can be relied upon, no person can be relied on, no institution can be relied on, contracts cannot be relied on - trying to understand anything is like gazing through murk: even worse, gazing through murk onto which are projected distortions and false inventions.

It can't be done.


Even the age old solution of retreat from public culture into one's own judgement based on experience and God-given common sense has been thwarted by decades of subversion of experience ('anecdote', 'biased'. 'self-serving') and common sense ('arbitrary', 'authoritarian', 'ultimately subjective').

So a restoration of the habit of truth would seem to be an absolute essential - I mean an ethic that people will not lie, will not mislead, but will instead try to be as honest as they can all of the time and about everything. This was not rare when I was younger - it is extremely rare now.


Yet honesty alone is not enough - the phrase 'brutal honesty' comes to mind. Decontextualized honesty is often aggressive and demoralizing - because honesty is ultimately a means to an end; and lacking a good end, honesty becomes a means to a bad end - which is exactly why honesty has become so rare.

In a world without religion there are no 'ends', so no reason to be honest except expediency, which is precisely the current situation: people are just as honest as they need to be in the circumstances, and abandon honesty when it leads to problems.

The typical self-proclaimed 'truth-speaker' nowadays is often a hard-hearted individual, full of pride and inflated ego at his ability to see-through the murk; despising the dupes who fall for the lies. He regards truth as brutal because for him truth leads to despair - but he embraces despair; and defeats it and energizes himself by building a solid core of steely pride fuelled by his admiration of his own courage in embracing despair.

Not a good person, not a good situation, not something which would lead to desirable outcomes...


So we must be truthful but warm-hearted - or rather, we must be warm-hearted and then truthful. That seems like the only way to avoid honesty leading us badly astray. Not to use honesty like a sledge hammer or a scalpel, but inflexibly and in a quietly insistent fashion to be absolutely honest about everything, while opening our hearts and feeling the consequences - both good and bad.

If, as I have been arguing, Imagination is the next step for Man - the step towards a future that include the best of both the participation in life of the pre-modern past and the self-awareness and freedom of the 'modern period - the situation of living in relationship with a living, sentient, conscious world including the divine.

If so, then what could or should be done about it? How, in particular, can we set about developing our Imagination towards such a goal.


It seems obvious that the necessary Imagination needs to be active and purposive, needs to originate in us and to be direct-able by us - and therefore that developing imagination is not going to be a business of more or better passive or guided imaginative experience; not even when that experience is provided by first rate Art.

In general, and taking into account some lessons from cultures of the past, it seems that Imagination can be increased and improved, and that is by experience. In particular by that kind of experience sometimes termed 'initiation' - which might be defined (very generally) as sequential experience leading to incremental development of mental capacities.

I do not mean here a specific mode of initiation into a specific institution, since I don't think there are any suitable institutions - at least not in The West - which provide this type of initiation leading to Imagination. It is something we need to manage for ourselves, as best we may.


It is very difficult in a mass media and hyper-inputted world, but I think we need to restore (or allow ourselves again to experience) that sense of the sacredness and power of representations. It used to be thought, for instance, that a name, a written word, a picture, a small statue... any representation was also (to a greater or lesser extent) infused with life, purpose, personality and therefore powerful and effective. Speaking a name gave power, a picture was a window onto another world, to write something was somehow to will it and make it happen.

This was the ancient and spontaneous way of thinking - and it was of course set aside under modernity so that we made the world a neutral thing which we could understand, predict and manipulate without having any lived relationship to it.

But there seems to be a sense that we now need to move on from that 'objectivity' yet not simply to return to pre-modern subjectivity - indeed, I think that the need has been increasingly obvious for 200 years.

This can be seen in a partial and perverted form in the way that in the past couple of decades Political Correctness has given exaggerated significance to the utterance, writing or depiction of certain taboos, the increasing rigour of speech codes, the continual reinvention of language in line with and in pursuit of ideology. I think this is tapping into a widespread desire to re-sacralise the whole world; but twisting this desire to an anti-spiritual and destructive socio-political agenda.


So, the politically correct are right (but for wrong reasons) that words matter, depictions matter, in a sense everything matters down to the smallest level of interpretation and interaction (even including micro-aggressions!) - but the reason that these things matter is that in a world made and permeated by the divine (and only in such a world) everything does matter; everything matters because we live in a universe of purpose, meaning and universal relationships.


This implies that in order to enhance Imagination, we need to develop (or allow to re-emerge in us) a far greater sensitivity to the depictions and representations and implicit communications around us - nothing being regarded as too small or insignificant.

Yet, if we accept this, we find ourselves almost-intolerably bombarded almost-all-of-the-time by subversive, dishonest, evil-intended communications - mostly emanating from the same advocates of political correctness who have developed such hyper-sensitivity to representations which go against their own ideologies.

For example, the use of sexual images, words, personal displays has been taken to quite extraordinary levels - what would happen if we allowed ourselves to become sensitive to these? Given our innate sensitivity, the typical situation of modern life would be overwhelming from this cause alone - and then add-in the deliberate depictions of disgust and horror; the sympathy-grabbing manipulations, the hate generating manipulations; the scale and brutalism of architecture, the overpowering noise, smells, tastes, drugs... all these together in a perfectly statistically-normal life would seem likely to stimulate a sensitive soul into some kind of rapid sensory overload and functional breakdown.

The natural tendency is to allow ourselves to become blunted, unresponsive, unreactive - to crush our own imagination as an act of self-defence.


How to escape this dilemma?

Obviously we can and should do as much as possible to protect ourselves from this onslaught - to cure our addiction to stimulation, to provide safe havens from the mass media, to avoid the deadliest powers... but that which we can do may be little, may be too little - it may well be insufficient. What then?

Perhaps we can learn in this from the ancients - from their use of spiritual protections? From words, prayers, gestures, objects, rituals of warding. We would usually regard the deployment of such things as primitive superstition, as magic, perhaps (for example, to the iconoclastic or puritan mind) as anti-Christian; yet I think the consensus of devout and Holy persons of the past would here be strongly against us.


So, in living through the multiple, near-continuous, sensory and psychological and spiritual assaults of everyday life - in a condition of high imaginative sensitivity to these stimuli - I think we can, and perhaps must, avail ourselves of whatever devices we find to be an effective ward and protection against their malign influence.

Then, within the bubble of such protection (whether provided by short prayers or other inner verbal formulae, or gestures, or artefacts, clothing... whatever works, within reason) - it may be possible to move through a hostile world while yet warm-hearted, open and sympathetic to what is going on around us.

The advent of the wearable computer presents us all with the challenge as to how far and how warmly we are prepared to extend our embrace of digital technology, as we move towards the projected merger of human and machine...

There is yet another, more formidable challenge, however, which runs alongside this moral question. And this is the challenge of addressing the hunger that humanity feels so strongly for greater connection with the realm of spirit, and which many mistakenly seek to satisfy through greater connection with technology.

For the strength of the enticement of the virtual world may best be understood as being due to its offering an alluring counterfeit to the genuine spiritual experience that alone can satisfy this spiritual hunger.

Here we have to face a different kind of choice, which concerns our own cognitive development. Are we prepared to take in hand the difficult task of inner development, as a conscious decision, followed through in daily practice? It seems to me that only when we do this can we stand a chance of coming into the right human relationship with our technologies. Whatever is happening at a collective level, we still have the freedom as individuals to make choices and embark on resolves...

Given its addictive nature, the technology actually presents an opportunity for us, by resisting it, to lift the veil on what it is concealing from us, and to glimpse that greater, more authentic experience from which it continually diverts us.

From The advent of the wearable computer by Jeremy Naydler (2012)
http://www.abzupress.co.uk/pdf/Advent_of_the_Wearable_Computer.pdf


This often insightful essay makes the important point that the digital world we inhabit - especially via the internet based mass media, does not just inundate us with images and data (mostly malign) but also affects the way that we think - making us less human and more machine-like.

Yet the hunger which leads us into mass media/ computer addiction is in fact a spiritual one - and the addiction is sustained because the internet experience is 'an alluring counterfeit' of real spiritual experience. In the short term, being connected provides us with partial gratification - while disconnecting rapid induces cravings, boredom, a need for stimulation and quasi-engagement.

As so often, things have to get worse before they can get better - and there are no guarantees -
withdrawal always causes suffering.

The first step is to want something more; the second step is to recognize that this 'more' really-exists - only then we can embark on mass media and computer detoxification, and again start to think and feel like humans should.

I am a monarchist - in the sense that I regard a good King as the ideal form of government (although not always the best in any specific time and place). Many people assume from this that I would want the country to be run by The Queen. But that is not really the case.

This year there are some national celebrations of Queen Elizabeth having become our longest reigning monarch, including celebrations of her achievement. I like the Queen as a person, and she conducts herself extremely well in her role - but surveying so many years, I find it hard to recognize what the Queen has done to make a positive difference to the United Kingdom.

Despite having an 'on paper' role in many important things like choosing the Prime Minister and heading the Church of England, the constitutional monarch is either mostly or perhaps entirely 'a figurehead', and so far as I am aware, the Queen has never used her powers directly - except via the Governor General of Australia to dismiss the Australian Prime Minister in 1975.

Aside from the Queen herself, The Royal Family are a pretty disgraceful bunch, who have epitomized most of the pathologies of modern life. And since the 1969 BBC TV documentary The Royal Family, the publicity people employed by the Queen have encouraged the tendency to regard the monarchy as a long running soap opera; justified by their entertainment value, their 'common touch' (they certainly display that), and the supposed goodwill created among foreigners and the related boost to tourism and imports...

With the British monarchy, after so many centuries of being willingly subordinated to parliament, there seems to be near zero resistance to being used as media puppets and rubber stamps and a strong sense that - with the exception of the Queen herself - they see the whole thing as a family business rather than a sacred responsibility. They grasp the privileges, but reject the responsibilities - especially the moral responsibilities, of their positions.

As is usual in modern bureaucracies, people fiddle with the rules but are unprincipled about applying them when they go against Leftist principles - and when Queen Elizabeth dies Prince Charles is not, according to the rules traditionally-interpreted, eligible to become King - because he is divorced and is not an Anglican (indeed, he is not a Christian) and is married to a Roman Catholic. Since the monarch is Head of the Church of England, this rules him out; but hardly anybody mentions this, and modern Brits would regard the enforcement of such rules as 'discriminatory'.

In sum, I find no desire in me to celebrate the long rule of Queen Elizabeth; despite my personal regard for her. I suspect that she deplores many of the things that I deplore about Britain, I know she wants us to be a Christian nation, I know she works behind the scenes - but I am afraid that this is not enough, by no means sufficient.

The Queen ought to have been an example of principle, she ought to have provided us with leadership, her views on fundamental matters ought not to be in doubt At some point - and many more times than once - she should have used her veto powers to prevent obviously anti-Christian laws and to prevent evil persons from assuming positions of power (indeed, the Queen's friendship-with and patronage-of the likes of Jimmy Savile and Anthony Blunt seems to betray an extreme moral blindness): her position on these matters should have been clear and explicit and to have led to action. She should have put the monarchy on the line while it still had something to contribute.

Forty years ago the monarchy had great prestige and potential for good - but the prestige was dissipated and the potential for good was unused.

In a nutshell, under Queen Elizabeth's reign, the British monarchy has become indefensible. That is not a cause for celebration.

http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/review-of-detective-fiction-reviews-of.html

Note: The meaning of 'mouse utopia' can be seen in various posts on my Intelligence, Personality & Genius blog:
http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=mouse+utopia
**

The thesis is that we are already living in mouse Utopia, and that this will become more and more apparent until its reality will become... well, I was going to say 'undeniable' but that is silly: people can and do deny the most obvious things, and the process of population wide and cumulative mutational damage of the genome is certainly not obvious; but rather, at present, invisible.

So Mouse Utopia will never be undeniable, and indeed it is likely that the vast majority of mankind will never know what has hit them, and continues to hit them; nor will it ever be easy to disentangle the effects of genetic damage from other causes of maladaptive behaviour and disease. But at any rate, let's just say that the hypothesis of mutational accumulation in the human species will presumably gather more and more consistent evidence as time goes by.


What will life be like in Mouse Utopia? In The Narrow Roads of Gene Land Volume 2, WD Hamilton partially described that world in a chapter entitled The Hospitals are coming, and that is perhaps a good starting point - the idea that everyone will be damaged and most will be sick, in one way or another; so that life will resemble a hospital in which (some of) the less-sick (or the damaged but not-yet sick) tend the more-sick, as best they may - in intervals between doing whatever it takes to stay alive.

But this is not by any means an unusual or unprecedented situation for humans through much of the history of the species. For much of the time, Malthusian mechanisms have been in force, and populations have been limited by various combinations of starvation and infectious disease. Infections - in particular - have sometimes been endemic at a high prevalence, so that the majority or even all of the population might be suffering from, be affected by, some chronic parasitic disease - but at a relatively low degree of severity.

And with respect to the Mouse Utopia society being a Hospital, it is important to recognize that much of the pathology will be psychiatric rather than physical - this can be seen from the fact that the problems of the original Mouse Utopia were most behavioural rather than physical; and it follows from the fact that the highly complex human brain is exceptionally sensitive to random mutational damage.


Intelligence is probably damaged by mutation accumulation in an incremental and quantitative fashion - the more mutations, the more the lowering of intelligence. Therefore, decline of intelligence as mutations accumulate is likely to be relative smooth (rather than step-like).

But intelligence is 'general' intelligence, and is unusual in being a general attribute of cognitive function - it roughly corresponds to speed of processing, or coordinated functional efficiency. By contrast, most psychological functions are specific; and genetic damage is likely to be more qualitative and either step-like, or all-or-nothing.


What I think would happen, is that accumulating mutation damage would most likely show-up as varieties of specific brain functional damage leading to specific behavioural impairments of a social and sexual type - in a general context of continuing declining intelligence. (See reference below)

The kind of damage I am talking about represents a decline in functional adaptation of the human organism to its environment (its sexual, social and surrounding environment) - that is, a loss of effective functionality. This represents a decline in fitness, but not just relative fitness (because it is happening throughout the population) - it is a decline in group fitness - ultimately in species fitness.

If fitness is measured in terms of the capacity to raise sufficient viable offspring in a given environment; then the sexual and social changes induced by mutation accumulation will be such as to reduce the probability of doing this: partly by damage causing reduced brain processing speed and efficiency (detectable as reduced intelligence) and partly by damage causing specific functional impairments (detectable as sexual and social pathologies).


So, Mouse Utopia will be not so much be a hospital of sick people with the less sick tending the more sick; but more like the less crazy looking after the more crazy: a case of the lunatics have taken over the asylum because there is nobody left but the lunatics - so everyone in Mouse Utopia is mad, more-or-less; but with the sanest and most sensible people in charge.

At least, that would be optimal.

If the world is a psychiatric hospital where everyone is socio-sexually dysfunctional to some extent, then the people running the hospital ought to be the most coherent of the patients. Indeed, sanity is probably more of a priority than high intelligence - since a moderately intelligent coherent person (at least arguably) makes a better leader than a more highly intelligent crazy.

However, for the past fifty years and increasingly, we have been getting a taste of something different; and most nations and large organizations are now being run by - not the least impaired people - but energetic incoherent semi-lunatics; because in a mass media democracy, that is what the more-seriously-crazed majority seem to want.

Democracy as a system for choosing government has never made much sense; mass democracy in a mass media addicted world makes even less sense; democracy in a lunatic asylum is... crazy.

In saying that imagination is the primary aspect of true understanding, an example might be helpful. When I was working on my book Psychiatry and the Human Condition:

http://hedweb.com/bgcharlton/psychhuman.html

I decided not to include any theories about illnesses which I had been unable to confirm by imagination.

Imagination was not the term I used at the time; I instead called it phenomenology and introspection. Phenomenology is the term for the subjective description of psychological symptoms - e.g. what it is like to experience an hallucination, an endogenously depressed mood etc.

So, in my discussions of psychiatric phenomena and the effects of psychotropic drugs, I only wrote about theories which I had been able to enact imaginatively in myself - by examining my inner state and extrapolating from personal experience.

For example, in discussing mania I drew on experiences of staying up all night - when working as a doctor on call, or on a transatlantic flight - and the different stages about how it felt. For depression I had experiences of glandular fever and influenza, and recovering from them. For psychotic states I had memories of dreams, and the brief hypnagogic hallucinations when dropping off to sleep.

For psychotropic drugs, I had the 'advantage' of having taken many of the therapeutic classes of agents as attempted (and failed) curative or preventive treatments for migraine. Since I never found an effective preventive agent, I went through quite a large number of therapeutic trials before giving up. In addition I had for several years been very attentive to the effects of any drugs I was taking for anything: for example the antihistamines taken for treating Hay Fever, or introspectively studying the effects of simple pain killers, and how they got rid of pain.

So I had a kind of 'library' of knowledge about how drugs affect the way I feel, and this - combined with scientific knowledge about drugs and their effects - meant that I had a basis for understanding what drugs might to to psychiatric illness.

This amounted to an imaginative knowledge of psychiatric phenomena - and clarifies that imagination can be understood in terms of looking-within and becoming aware of subjective feelings.

The value of imagination was both at the beginning and at the end of theorizing. In the first place, phenomenology provided the primary basis of theories of how diseases may be caused, what is their essence, and of drug actions.

Then, after the theory was developed and elaborated and tested against the existing scientific literature using normal 'scientific' knowledge; phenomenology also provided a final test of plausibility and adequacy - could I imagine, could I experience within myself, the hypothetical cause or illness or treatment? If I could enact the proposed mechanism in imaginative experience, then the hypothesis would be allowed to stand - but if I could not enact them, then I would eliminate the hypothesis.

For example, the book was delayed for a few months by my initial inability to imagine experiencing mania - and this was helped by discussing mania empathically with someone who had experienced it and remembered the experience (by 'empathically', I mean in such a way that I could feel and experience what that person felt). Only when I could imagine myself as manic, and then imagine how that mania might be treated - how the manic inner state could be alleviated by inner change, could I finish the book. So this is yet another use of imagination - empathic or sympathetic imagination; so as to share the experience of another person.

This, then, is an actual example of how imagination can work - in a scientific context. Of course, when I wrote the book I mostly left-out the subjective and imaginative aspects - or used them only as illustrative examples. So the published Psychiatry and the Human Condition book is written and justified almost as if everything in it comes from the scientific literature and with reference to the experience of eminent psychiatrists and other objective and publicly available sources of information.

However, in reality, in terms of scientific creativity - the imagination was primary. It was primary in terms of generating hypotheses, and also exercised a veto in terms of testing hypotheses.

Liberals have, over the past several generations, come to dominate all the mainstream self-defined Christian denominations; and all these churches have declined.

Furthermore the most liberal parts of these denominations have declined the fastest. Indeed, quite often the most conservative minority parts of churches have been growing, while themajority liberalest parts are declining.

In a very obvious, in-your-face, kind of way; it would seem that there is at least a plausible case that liberalism has been bad for Christian churches, and has perhaps been substantially (although not wholly) responsible for killing them.


Liberals might at least entertain this hypothesis; or they might even acknowledge its truth but claim that liberalisation was necessary anyway; or they might admit that liberalization had caused short-term decline, but that in the long-term it would lead to a revival... but no.

Liberal Christians have never - so far as I have seen - ever even acknowledged that there was a very straightforward and potentially significant correlation between liberalization and decline.

For example, the advocates of the ordination of women to the priesthood, or as bishops, never seriously consider the strongly-evidenced hypothesis that such change will, on the basis of considerable experience, almost certainly lead to the swift and massive decline of that denomination? 


(Somebody must have said something of the sort somewhere, of course; but I have never seen this hypothesis even discussed in hundreds of thousands of words advocating liberalization either of specific denominations or Christianity in general.)


Why is this? Is it sheer ignorance of the correlations? Maybe, but if so, that ignorance would have to be wilful - therefore not true ignorance.

Or is it just plain dishonesty? Do they actually know that liberalism is killing their mainstream churches - but choose to deny the fact because they want the liberalism to continue?


Yes, I think so; that's it.


And this would then mean that liberal Christians, who now dominate all mainstream churches, objectively value liberalism more than their churches - an interpretation which seems to be consistent with all the facts.

**

Note added: I think the key to thinking about this is honesty. We need to ask whether it really is possible nowadays to be an honest liberal Christian (except for the brand new and utterly un-experienced convert). I don't think it is - especially not in terms of the relationship between liberalism and the churches. It's not as if liberalism is anything new in Christianity, there are several generations of experience.

This fact of lying about the institutional consequences of liberalism would not necessarily of itself mean that liberal Christians also valued liberalism above Christianity itself - only that they valued liberalism more than their churches.

But of course they do also value liberalism above Christianity, and this is shown by the fact that liberal Christians always redefine Christianity to fit with modern Left Wing ideology, to a greater or lesser extent; and never the other way around. 

The assumption is that the ideal is an impartial analysis of the two sides in a sociopolitical dispute and that this should proceed by outlining the dispute in a symmetrical fashion.

This is, as I say, an assumption. there is nothing whatsoever to suggest that any of this is true.

Think of the way in which the tow sides are typically outlines in such classics as monarchical versus republican government, or capitalist versus socialist economics, conservatism and progressivism, Right and Left, one Presidential candidate against another...

Or the two sides in some kind of public dispute.

The deep problem is that the idea that there is an impartial, equally fair to both sides, way of articulating an significant disagreement, is itself an ideology - and a very modern ideology at that.

Impartiality, indeed, can only really have any operational meaning when applied to very highly controlled situations of procedural justice - asking, are the procedures being adhered to strictly, explicitly, with sufficient precision? But as legal experience shows, even here there is no objectivity, since there are different degrees of minuteness to the procedural examination.

So a procedure which is valid at one level of analysis may break down as the microscopic analysis of sub-procedures, and sub-sub-procedures reveals irregularities.

The ideal of impartial analysis of symmetrical disputes is indeed an utterly prejudiced and blinkered ways of conceptualizing a dispute - as our ancestors would instantly have recognized.

By contrast, the reality is that justice is the judgement of a wise, informed individual who wants to find the correct decision from the perspective of what is Good. Justice, rightness... these are aspects of Goodness; and it is the nature of Goodness that is at issue in all significant disputes.


Note: These reflections were stimulated by this interview - in which Ruth A Johnston engages in what is represented as an impartial analysis - one aspect of which is to regard the tow sides in a dispute in a symmetrical fashion. Yet, so far as I am aware, a symmetrical dispute has never, ever, happened in the history of the world - so such an analysis cannot possibly be valid:
http://www.ljagilamplighter.com/2015/09/10/superversive-blog-wherefore-art-thou-culture-war

It seems natural and spontaneous to humans to regard the dead (the ancestors) as a living and powerful reality, sometimes present, sometimes accessible; retaining an interest in the living world and sometimes having some role to play in it.

Christians are divided on this subject - for example some denominations prohibit prayers for the dead, mainly on the grounds that the living can do nothing to assist them - but it may be that practices which support an awareness of the dead will support belief in the reality of life after death, and sustain hope in the expectation of Heaven.

In a modern secular context, to be interested in the dead and to claim a knowledge of their condition, or to communicate with them, is regarded as the most pitiful type of wishful thinking; but even the slightest knowledge of the many historical societies with such interest contradicts this.

An active interest in the next world and in the dead is accused of encouraging escapism, an avoidance of harsh realities and in general rendering people unfit for this world. Those who maintain a belief in the importance of the dead must expect to be laughed-at and despised for their embarrassing childishness (unless they are 'ethnic', when such beliefs are not just permitted but admired and praised - demonstrating that secular moderns covertly regard ethnics as pitifully, laughably juvenile)

Yet there has never in history been a more escapist, avoidant and all-round unfit culture than our current society of media-addicted passive spectators, fans and gossipers! The faddish, effete decadence of modernity stands in the sharpest possible contrast with the enduring courage and toughness of societies where the dead were regarded as real and important.

It is secular modernity, with its hedonistic alienated nihilism, that has lost touch with reality - and is projecting its own deepest faults onto the religious.

Indeed, what is really going-on is that those who despair are accusing those who do not despair of living in a state of delusion - the secular modern accusation against religion is not so much of dumb-happy avoidance, as of a failure to acknowledge the reality of utter hope-less-ness.

For modernity, the definition of courage has become to acknowledge and embrace existential despair as the underlying reality.

To the extent that acknowledgement of the continued reality of the dead is part of a world view of hope, engagement and eternal human relationships; then naturally it needs to be mocked and scorned and embarrassed out of existence.

If meditation is regarded as a means to an end (rather than as a state valuable in its own right) then how you do it - the method you attempt it - depends on yourself and your goal.

If the goal is something like Owen Barfield's Final Participation - that is, starting with a strong awareness of the Self and unawareness of the living, conscious world around - then moving towards an attempt to communicate (again, in some way) with natural and invisible spiritual entities... then there might be two basic strategies for meditation.


1. Concentration with opening-out

This is (roughly speaking) the path recommended by Rudolf Steiner and Colin Wilson - which is to retain the typically modern clarity and awakeness of typical consciousness and - by intense and sustained concentration on some specific thing, to open-out this consciousness into an absorbed awareness of this thing usually regarded as non-sentient and its connections with other things...

The contrast with 'normal' (non-meditative) concentration is that there is an opening-out from the thing which is concentrated upon - and this opening-out is 'allowed' uncritically, without moral censorship or critique (these come later).

Well the above is probably not a very good explanation; because this strategy for meditation via concentration is one I cannot myself employ and have not been able (or indeed inclined) to follow through; indeed, I find it extremely aversive. But it clearly works, and works well, for some people, starting at some points, and with some needs and goals.

For example, Steiner trained himself (and had a natural aptitude) for doing this when he met people for the first (and perhaps only) time, As I understand it, he would concentrate intensely upon the person and would allow the wider field of associations to come to mind: by this he used intuitive evaluations to understand the person, and their problems, and what they might do about them.


2. Diffusion with retained awareness

This (which is my own preferred method) is done by holding the self in continued awareness - but not by concentrating - while allowing the rest of the mind to relax and open-out. This a the opposite of alert concentration because its basis is a relaxed and dream-like state.

What is wanted is a partial drowsiness while retaining purposive thinking and also memory; and the state to avoid is full sleep, which is passively associative and does not retain memories.

How to retain the purposive self while moving towards sleep? There is no single method. One is to meditate while walking (slowly, semi-automatically, in some safe place that does not require vigilance), which naturally keeps the self awake. Another is (while sitting, or lying propped-up) to stimulate the mind and retain purpose by intermittent stimulus - e.g. reading, note-taking - to aim at an oscillating state of consciousness in which there is a drowsy relaxation towards sleep for a few seconds, then a reversal towards waking for a few seconds.


The point is that both of these meditative tactics - and I am sure there are several or many others - can be deployed in pursuit of the same long-term strategy.

It is a surely mistake to focus too much on meditative strategy, or training people for meditation; because it may be that each person needs to chisel-out their own specific strategy. Also, all methods are prone to error and misleading - especially if they are being deployed as techniques.

Steiner himself fell into this source of error and misleading, by his belief that he had discovered and devised an intrinsically-valid method for generating knowledge, which he could induce at will and direct at any subject: this was (I believe) why there is such a great deal of over-precise and unjustifiably-confident nonsense mixed-in with his great insights and wisdom.


1. Meditation is important, perhaps vital, for many or most (not all) modern people - but only a means to an end.

2. Different people are different. What works is different for each, what may help one may be a waste of time or harm another - each person needs to chisel-out his own method

3. All methods are limited in application and prone to generate error if used over-confidently or as an end not a means.

4. Whatever comes from meditation (of whatever method) sooner-or-later needs to be integrated with other authoritative sources of knowledge and wisdom.

I have just received a photo of William Arkle! - probably taken when he was about 70.

Colin Wilson remarked that Arkle looked somewhat like Charlton Heston - that was my memory also, and is confirmed by this picture.

There are a few extra biographical snippets as well, kindly provide by correspondent Malcolm, which I have added to the short account of his life.

http://williamarkle.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/william-arkle.html

I came across a strikingly thought-full and thought-provoking interview with a philosopher/ gardener called Jeremy Naydler - I was impressed by his quiet, slow-spoken honesty.



From about 16 minutes there is a sequence of reflections on the change of consciousness since ancient (pre-Christian) times.

For the ancients: it wasn't a question of belief or superstition - they were living with a direct awareness of the world being full of these spiritual beings... an invisible reality was interpenetrating the visible reality...

It makes you notice that today our consciousness is incredibly reduced, and we don't realize the extent to which we have become ignorant of things which are incredibly important...

The gods have had a terribly hard time! The one thing they want is for us to become aware of them again - or to at least acknowledge that there is something beyond what we perceive through the five senses or through all our amazing instruments and machines.  


The work of Owen Barfield, or of Rudolf Steiner (which is the immediate context for Naydler's interview), is a about the change from this 'original participation' in a world of spirits, via an intensification of the ego/ self such that we can no longer perceive the world of spirits, towards a 'final participation' in which we will retain our strong sense of self and freedom of choice while reconnecting with the spiritual world - the world perceived as alive and conscious.

I explain this to myself as:

1. living immersed in the world, then
2. isolated-from the world and aiming at a future when we are
3. in a relationship with the world.

But a first step towards this desirable goal may be a simple acknowledgement of the potential reality of imperceptible spiritual beings (in some form or another, by some description or another) - involving an acknowledgement that we have no reason to assume that ancient peoples were always and necessarily being childish, ignorant, gullible or deluded on this subject.

For John C Wright's blog:


http://www.scifiwright.com/2015/09/the-moral-decay-of-star-trek/#more-14550

I have never been a huge fan of Star Trek - although I watched with enjoyment the original series and the Next Generation when they first came out - but the moral trajectory described in this introduction is accurate and - as Wright makes clear - all-but inevitable. The same applies to Doctor Who, which I have followed with somewhat more attention and engagement.

These series were launched in the sixties when the residue of inertial Christian morality was still effectual, and things were not as corrupt and depraved as present, but the path of secualr Leftism was established and was well advanced. Since both shows were and are about morality more than action, they are bound to show up the morality of their makers and audience, and to track the decline of this morality into self-righteous but impotent incoherence.

Of course, at their best, Doctor Who (I don't know about recent Trek verions) retains the archetypal force of its main character - and the episodes are made with cleverness, wit and skill - sometimes this can give an impression that there is, morally, more about them then meets the eye... but this is a superficial illusion. The explicit and covert morality is one of subversion of Christian and traditional values and the shoving-forward of the Leftist agenda of perpetual revolution against The Good.

Death is something nearly everyone fears and dreads - and yet it is for our benefit.

I infer that this means that there is, for each of us, a 'time-to-die' - and our challenge (everybody's challenge) is to recognize and accept this time-to-die, when it comes it us or to someone we love.

In a deep sense we are born to die - that is, dying is the primary task of our life and the one task which everybody will accomplish.

We die so that we may be resurrected and move to a higher and more divine state; so if we were not to die we would fail to reach this higher state: and that would be the greatest tragedy and suffering.

To want not to die, to yearn for immortality in this life, is thus a sin - it is a profound rejection of God's plan.

Luke 7: 28 For I say unto you, Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist: but he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.

This means that the least person who dies and is resurrected to salvation will be greater than the greatest Man that had lived until the time of Jesus - greater than Abraham, Moses, David or John the Baptist... than any. I extrapolate this also to suggest that the same applies to even the greatest Saints who have lived since Christ - in reference to their greatness while yet mortal Men (although not in reference to their ultimate stature in Heaven).

So it represents a really colossal error to want never to die, to crave immortality in your current incarnation - or even to want to extend life beyond the proper time-to-die. Because it can be done, and it does happen, and not infrequently - people can and do live beyond the proper time-to-die - and that is why the temptation is real.

Moral inversion is based on the hedonic calculus - that morality is a matter of happiness and suffering, pleasure versus pain. This has it that there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about anything - only the consequences for human happiness and suffering.

*

Perhaps it began with divorce. It was argued that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with divorce as such (because it is just a legal procedure - obviously, because marriage has no divine dimension, because there is no God); therefore, the only thing wrong with divorce is that it makes people unhappy. 

It therefore follows that there is nothing wrong with divorce. Because sometimes staying married makes people more unhappy than divorce. In fact (according to this line of reasoning) if divorce makes people happier, then divorce is good.

And if there is nothing wrong with divorce, except unhappiness, and if sometimes (perhaps usually?) divorces make people happier - then the only people who are really wicked are those who make divorced people feel guilty and miserable.

Therefore, we must campaign and propagandise in favour of divorce, for a free and easy and accepting attitude to divorce - because then life would be happier (and happiness is the ultimate 'good').

The only wicked ideologies are those that strongly-discourage or prevent divorce (because they enforce misery), the only evil people are those who (by their attitudes, words, behaviour) make divorcees feel guilty and miserable. Therefore Christianity and Christians are (among others) the bad ones; and those who promote uncomplicated, simple, cheap, quick and easy, cheerful divorce are virtuous.

And here we are - moral inversion: what was bad (divorce) is now good: what was good (Christianity) is now evil.

*

In my youth it was promiscuity.

Sex (between consenting adults, as the phrase ran) made people happy, and happiness is good (and God and Christianity are childish nonsense) - so there was 'nothing wrong' with promiscuity... so long as it made people happy.

But promiscuous people were not always happy: why? Well often because they felt guilty, or felt jealous. So the problems were the ideologies and people who made promiscuous people feel guilty, and the ideologies and psychological habits that made people feel jealous.

Happy, charming, attractive, successful promiscuous people were massively portrayed in the mass media and the arts - they were supposed to show us 'how to do it'. Utopia was simply a matter of being open, free, relaxed, accepting, non-judgemental... of getting rid of the oppressive baggage of organized religion (especially Christianity) and Victorian values (which were actually capitalist, oppressive, sexist, and racist).

Then we too could become like these people (pop stars, actors, artists and other cool types) that we read about in the newspapers - they were moral heroes, pointing the way into a world of jealousy-free, guilt-free expanding possibilities for happiness. the ideal was those who would have sex with anybody, anywhere, any time - and just enjoy it for what it was; staying cheerful, always having fun and being fun, everybody's friend, everybody's lover (when anybody felt like it)...

*

(This was the ideal - of course, diseases got in the way, although antibiotics cured most (sensible people would take a course of meds after each cheerful encounter - indeed they were taking antibiotics almost continuously): sexutopia was invaded first by incurable Herpes, then potentially fatal AIDS put a crimp in the swinging lifestyle - but the ideal of free and easy universal promiscuity did not change. It was still the highest value, and the restrictions imposed by disease were portrayed as a tragedy because ending the utopian lifestyle; not-never as a nemesis brought-on by that lifestyle.)

*

The only really evil people were those who wanted to interfere with this utopian lifestyle of promiscuity - the people who said that promiscuity was intrinsically wrong (even when it was fun and did make people happy, and even when nobody felt jealous about their partner's promiscuity); these evil people were against happiness, they were kill-joys, they were the oppressors.

So on the one hand there were depicted the good, fun, funny and happy, admirable heroes of promiscuity; and ranged against them the evil, boring, depressing, miserable, pathetic and despicable villains who were against promiscuity (although we also knew that they were really hypocrites, and really just as promiscuous as everybody else, but pretending not to be).

This process of moral inversion has, decade by decade, been extended through all manner of sexual behaviours. preferences, identity claims - always premised upon the assumption that 'there is nothing intrinsically wrong with...'.

*

So we may see that morality depends on assumptions about what is intrinsically good and bad, and why.

The West replaced revealed religion with a hedonic calculus of maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering, but we did not destroy morality - instead we inverted it. The utopia of sex in a context of permanent marriage with children was replaced by the utopia of free and easy fun sex with anybody and everybody all of the time.  

What was virtue is now wickedness; and vice versa. This is Nietzsche's 'transvaluation of values'. It is not a theory: it happened - it is now - it is mainstream.

It is, indeed, compulsory.

Now the definition of a good and admirable person is a successful and care-free pleasure seeker - and an evil person is anyone or any set of ideas that who attempt to limit or thwart successful pleasure-seeking.

The following is reckoned by many, including me, to be the best TV advert ever.

Tapping into centuries of Anglo-French conflict, full of brilliant details, it builds to an unforgettable climax. 

One example of destructive nonsense which has been imposed on Christianity is the notion of 'universalism' - that a good Christian should have, or must have, equal regard for everybody - and that love for one person more than another is a failure and a corruption.

It is hard to know where this idea comes from, but its pseudo-plausibility and destructive potential is so great, and it has been so hard to eradicate, that probably it originated with Satan.


Perhaps the clearest and quickest way to refute the universalist fallacy is to show that Jesus did not live by it. This was brought out for me by a few sentences from William Arkle:


http://www.billarkle.co.uk/prose/hologram/page4.html


It is clear throughout the Gospels that Jesus had a special love for this Apostle - evidenced by (for instance) John's unique non-abandonment of Christ at his arrest and presence at the crucifixion, Jesus leaving his Mother in John's care, and John's special mission to live until Christ's second coming.

(Yes, this does mean that John is still alive today - somewhere on earth; which knowledge should be a source of great wonder, consolation and hope.)

Jesus's special love of John seems to have led to some jealousy from the leader of the Apostles, Simon Peter. After Peter had been told of his own mission including a prophecy of the sufferings of its ending - this led to a mild rebuke from Jesus and a statement of John's contrasting destiny (this is one of several occasions when Jesus found it necessary to rebuke Peter!).

John 21:


('The disciple whom Jesus loved' is the way that the Apostle John refers to himself in his Gospel.)

At any rate, Jesus's clearly special love for John ought to be enough, in and of itself, to refute the incoherent and anti-Christian notion that our ideal should be a personally-indifferent universalism.

No matter how well expressed, the secular polemics against political correctness and its leadership of the Social Justice Warriors (SJWs) always seem to underestimate the depth, pervasiveness and severity of the problem of secular Leftism; implying that 'if only' enough people would 'fight back'; then the sorry business of political correctness could be destroyed and a more sensible, reasonable kind of politics re-established. 

I have previously argued (see link below) that 'animism' is correct, and it makes sense to regard everything as alive - that, indeed, the mainstream modern belief that some things are alive (humans, trees, plankton) but most things are not alive (water, rocks, fire) is unstable - and the denial of life to chemicals and minerals has led inexorably to the de facto denial of life to plants, animals, and humans.

This is evidenced in the extraordinary confusions of mainstream science about what counts as alive - with a strong body of opinion stating that computers could be, or may become, alive, aware, conscious Artificial Intelligences - while treating humans as deluded zombies, consciousness as an epiphenomenon, free will as a rationalization.


(Indeed, although the argument is differently structured, I think the same applies to meaningfulness. The current official belief is that some, few, things in the world are meaningful - but most things are meaningless and a consequence either of simple causality or, more often, random chance. However this meaningful-meaningless division has, in practice, proved unstable and our culture treats everything as meaningless. Therefore, since this is psychosocially unsustainable, metaphysically self-refuting, and contradicts spontaneous human beliefs and religious revelation - it is necessary to assume that everything is meaningful in some way - although typically we do not know the meaning and never will.)


With life, there is a serious problem of borderlines between living and non-living - these borderlines (viruses, prions, alive-and dead) are not dealt-with (indeed, they cannot be dealt-with except by obviously arbitrary definitions), but merely ignored; which itself serves to undermine the significance of life.

For example, I heard the top British doctor-expert on coma and other 'near-death' states, assert that we should not think of death as an event, but rather as a process. So there was no 'moment of death' but only a period of time on one side of which was life, and the other death. The implication was that some people are stuck in this process for very long periods - maybe years.

(He was responding to the fact that various definitions of death may conflict - cessation of the heart, activity in various parts of the brain, responsivity of the pupils, decomposition of internal organs such as the pancreas and adrenal - these signs do not co-occur simultaneously, and may be dissociated in some situations (i.e. signs of death while still alive); plus of course they are, to some degree, reversible - so death cannot be conclusively pronounced until there are several or all of these signs in place for some length of time.)

The doctor was unaware or unconcerned that this pragmatic clinical rule-of thumb, if taken as truth, actually destroyed the distinction between a living person and a rotting corpse; or between a living rotting person and an apparently perfectly-preserved corpse. In our culture, if life and death are not distinguished, the assumption is that nothing is really alive - 'life' is merely an arbitrary - indeed legal - definition, a matter of operational convenience, of opinion. When the law changes, or opinion changes, the boundary between life and death is moved - therefore clearly it is not real.


So, is the Sun alive?

The 'scientific' importance of the Sun is that life on earth depends on it, it drives climate changes and differences, causes seasons and weather... there is no end to what the Sun does and many of the greatest civilizations have regarded the Sun as the most significant divinity.

Are we depending on a purely physical process (partly random, partly determined) to sustain life on earth? Or are we depending upon a living entity? - perhaps a living consciousness, perhaps a thing with a purpose?

From Rupert Sheldrake comes the striking perspective that even by mainstream scientific criteria, it is perfectly reasonable to regard the Sun as alive, conscious, purposive: here is a summary of his argument:

http://www.lifebridge.org/historySun.cfm

Considered in this way, it becomes not so much wrong as perverse to regard the Sun as anything but alive; and if alive possessing purpose - which would potentially have implications for Men on Earth.

So, is the Sun alive? Yes!


What that fact means, how it impinges on us, is another question - but the Sun is indeed alive by the dual criteria that 1. The Sun displays many of the scientifically defined signs of life, and this must be important because the Sub is so important; and of course, 2. Everything is alive , therefore The Sun is alive - but things are alive in different degrees and in different ways; and the fact of being living does not necessarily have special significance.

Interestingly, it is the general animist (such as myself) who believes everything is alive who does not necessarily see the life of the Sun as of special importance; but for the mainstream scientist who regards life as restricted to only some thing - the aliveness of the Sun must be of massive significance; and understanding (or inferring) what the Sun wants and how it operates, would necessarily be regarded as a major task for the future.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/the-reason-and-function-of-my-basic.html 

We want more than this world can provide - we want the best that we can imagine.

Of course, some people don't have much facility for imagination - yet at the very least, we want what this world cannot sustain. This would be Paradise - the best things of this world (or, the feelings induced by the best things of this world), sustained; Paradise is engineered as a place of happiness - but it would not be Heaven.

Some people most want very evil things - power, domination, destruction, to see others suffer - to themselves be the cause of suffering, to take pleasure from the suffering they have inflicted... and so on. Paradise for such people would be a place dedicated to their own satisfactions (therefore indifferent to others) - it would not be any kind of Heaven.

Heaven is for divine beings - can we imagine ourselves as divine, yet still our-selves; can we imagine life in a world of similar divine beings? in general - we need help in imagining Heaven, whereas Paradise comes naturally and spontaneously.

Indeed, Paradise does not need to be imagined - because we already know what it is like; all we have to suppose is that it is like the best things that we have felt, and sustained - this does not need imagination, it is merely an extrapolation.

Heaven does require imagination, indeed in mortal life Heaven could be said to exist only in imagination. This is not to say Heaven is 'imaginary' and false - but that imagination is the primary reality - and if Heaven cannot be imagined, then it does not exist during our mortal lives.

We need help in imagining Heaven, and if we do imagine it, we may not be able to communicate that knowledge - because the task is to induce that imagination we have experienced in the mind of another person. Speaking of our imagined Heaven, or writing it down, or painting it - does not necessarily do this - indeed it may induce some quite different and false imagination in another person.

Nonetheless, communication of imagination can happen, and imagination is the place where knowledge of Heaven exists (and no other place) - and I think perhaps more people lack this knowledge, and need this knowledge, more urgently than ever - so Heaven is something that needs experiencing and communicating, if at all possible; and this has to be by imagination - with imagination taken seriously, and imagination recognized as knowledge.

People who can imagine, and can imagine Heaven have a job to do. They can only do half the job - but that half, they should be doing.


Note: Imagined depictions of Heaven which have helped me include from Tolkien the Undying Lands, Rivendell, Lothlorien and the afterlife in Leaf by Niggle; from CS Lewis the end of The Last Battle, the end of The Screwtape Letters, and most of The Great Divorce, from Joseph Smith the King Follett Discourse, and from William Arkle his Letter from a Father.