Bruce Charlton's Notions

1. Religion: A vigorous, pervasive, personally-engaged, positively-inflected religious life.

2. Love: Above-replacement fertility rates; loving families are valued and usual.

3. Soul: Individuals who are acting-from their own souls (not passively-controlled by the external environment). This means relationships are deep and valid; and also means that what people do is expressive of their real selves. 

NOTE: I didn't mention anything about Peace, Prosperity or Comfort - because although they are very nice, they are at best a means to an end - and, lacking RLS, the country/ society/ culture lacks meaning, purpose or genuine relationships - so PP&C are merely ephemeral epiphenomena.

This analysis gives a very different result from the kind of survey which focus upon stats derived from the likes of Longevity, Health, Economics, Political systems, Crime, Violence, Education, Innovation etc.

We have a certain amount of freedom of choice, but we are in a situation where we do not necessarily gain what we want by using this freedom. Rather do we profit best by sensing which are the sweet apples and which are the sour apples, and accepting the fact that we have no control over what is in the baskets.

At the moment our idea of freedom is the ability to make ourselves miserable and ill by eating all the apples in the first basket we choose. We don't like people to think we have made a mistake, and we feel that to possess and to consume a larger number of apples than other people is a measure of our success and intrinsic worth.

But freedom is far more subtle than that, for it involves the ability to choose that which is most fitting for the nature we possess and the situation in which we find ourselves.

Since we typically hardly concern ourselves with what we are, or what the significance of the universe is, it is not surprising that our concept of freedom is nothing more than a tribulation to us, and a mockery of our potential responsibility and aspiration. So not only is it virtually impossible for us to have freedom of motivation, or as people call it 'free will', but neither is there any particular point in possessing it, since it will not bring us to what we really want, but only bring us to what we think we want, or what we think we should want.

The little motivation we have should all be concentrated on the very light touch necessary to manipulate the helm of our ship.

We must realise that our job here is to learn to sail our ship well; then, and only then, to make a journey in it. We do not control the wind or the water and it does little good to pretend to be a type of boat which we are not. We must take a good look at our ship and our sails for they are already there. We must study the wind and the sea and learn to use them to move about safely and efficiently. We must ask and seek to know what lands are at hand, and we must decide which are the most favourable to the capability of our craft and the direction of the wind and state of the sea and visibility. We must record of how much food we can take and how well we can sail. By the time we have done all this, there will be no 'choice'!

To make a journey in a craft which we cannot handle to a destination we are not in a position to reach, just for the sake of feeling we have made a free choice, is a form of insanity which we are all inclined to indulge in, but which has no place in the scheme of things. The sooner we understand this the better, and it will save us the time and energy we waste in talking about freedom; for what we are really doing is trying to avoid the experience and understanding which is beyond the verbal level and beyond the level of prestige and self satisfaction.

This is the poetic and intuitive consciousness which enables us to begin to have a true knowledge of what is. After we have achieved this consciousness, the idea of freedom of choice or freedom of motivation no longer concerns us, because we will be too busy living our true nature.

What freedom of choice really means - how we should understand the matter - is as the ability we must develop to sense the whole of the situation in which we are involved, both in our own nature and in the world around us, and then to take the best course available.

Then we will recognise that real freedom is not in choosing, it is in seeing the irrelevance of choice.

Edited from the end of the chapter 'Conditioning Factors', in A Geography of Consciousness by William Arkle (1974)
http://williamarkle.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/william-arkle.html


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COMMENT
We cannot be free unless we have "the ability to choose that which is most fitting for the nature we possess and the situation in which we find ourselves." This includes the matter of what I term living from our True Self - because a very big problem for modern people is that they cannot be free because they do not know themselves - they merely know a constellation of false selves which are partly adopted (eg. for increasing efficiency at work, the 'hardening' used to cope with an alien and hostile environment) and partly imposed (by the mass media, including advertising; and propaganda from many sources including the arts and entertainment). 

If a typical modern person tries to be 'free' , he will typically be freeing, trying to develop, some kind of created and constructed fake-identity - which is likely to do more harm than good. Hence the failure of 'self-realisation' movements in modern secular culture. 

For example, in a culture where everybody is not just a fake but a whole constellation of contradictory fakes, self-realisation typically leads to nothing higher or better than a life of impulsive, short-termism and self-indulgence - such as sexual promiscuity, increased drug and alcohol usage, declining personal hygiene, sponging and tantrums. 

As nearly always, the difficulty of improving our selves and our condition involves at least tow, more-or-less simultaneous, moves: find our true selves and discover the truth of our essential situation (which is a matter of transforming our basic assumptions and explanations). 

But only if both these can be done, can we know what we ought to do in our lives. Lacking such knowledge, we will not do what we ought; but with such knowledge then there are not multiple lifestyle 'options', there is only the 'choice' of walking our destined, optimal, best path - or not.  

In The Hobbit chapter Riddles in the dark, Bilbo asks Gollum the riddle

Thirty white horses on a red hill, 
First they champ, 
Then they stamp, 
Then they stand still.

But people have thirty-two teeth, assuming there is a full set - and not 'thirty'!

Indeed, it would be unlikely to have thirty teeth, since the number is not divisible by four, which means that two of the teeth would (presumably, if the upper and lower jaws have the same kind of teeth) be unopposed and bite onto gum.

Interestingly, this error was missed in The Annotated Hobbit by Douglas A Anderson (2002). although I noticed, and was puzzled by, it decades ago (and plenty of other people on the internet have noticed the discrepancy).

Therefore, the riddle is - strictly, insoluble - unless we allow for congenital abnormality, dental surgery, or traumatic loss (of lesser severity than that which led to Gollum having 'only six' teeth)...

Note: I should clarify that Tolkien didn't invent this riddle - which is 'traditional'; as are most of theother riddles in this chapter.

If I am reading the current situation correctly; They (that is The Establishment; that is the global conspiracy led by demonic forced of evil, and those humans possessed by them, and their enslaved or servile helpers) are responding to the current potential awakening of Men with a strategy of terrifying, terrorising, Western populations.

Q: What do they hope to achieve? A: Such an extremity of daily fear that the mass of the population switch to appeasement of that which is feared; or become psychologically-frozen with overwhelming anxiety.

These states of appeasement and 'tonic immobility' are described in an important overview of the evolutionary aspects of anxiety from a New Zealand psychiatrist called Chris Cantor - which I excerpt below.

*

The take home message, is that when anxiety becomes overwhelming and is perceived to be inescapable, then behaviours result which seem superficially paradoxical. An example of appeasement is when a kidnap, or torture, victim gives up hope and befriends, defends, worships the person or group who are tormenting them (e.g. Stockholm Syndrome). An example of tonic immobility is when rabbits confronted by a predator almost upon-them will freeze instead of fleeing and accepts the will of the predator - this may be part of a 'dissociation' state in which animals become insensitive to pain - because the body expects agony, the 'mind' becomes detached from the body.

The reason I believe that modern Western populations are being systematically 'groomed' for appeasement and immobility is that on the one hand the Establishment is working (mostly behind the scenes, and deniably) to encourage ever-more acts of terror all over the place - and of implementing 'responses' which both fail to stop the terror (and punishing those who might stop the terror) while themselves increasing awareness of terror; and also lyingly refusing ever to join-the-dots (that is Conspiract Theory Wingnuttery!) and thereby claiming that atrocities are 'random' - inexplicable, unmotivated, by 'normal people' same as you and me - and therefore dishonestly implying that terror atrocities could (and will) be done by anybody, happen to anybody, at any time or place.

Fear is thereby channelled into being pervasive, extreme and inescapable; and the response to such fear is usually appeasement of that which is feared; or an anaesthetic state of passive acceptance of the worst.

Perfect! Job done! Self-chosen damnation en masse!

*

The answer?

No matter what happens: Do Not Fear.

Rise above it. Take the eternal perspective, proper to an immortal soul.

Know that you are ultimately untouchable by any evil the world can throw at you - unless you choose to invite it into your soul and accept it at its own evaluation.

Recall that the creator of everything is your loving Father, and no matter what you have done up to now, you will be washed clean and given a fresh start merely by acknowledging the goodness, truth and beauty of his plan for our salvation and raising to be Sons and Daughter of divinity.

Each individual who refuses to fear, but trusts in eternal hope, will sabotage to a significant extent the demonic plan - enough such people will defeat the terror plan altogether by irresistible yet unseen causes.  

**

Abstract from - Chris Cantor. Post-traumatic stress disorder: evolutionary perspectives. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. 2009; 43: 1038-1048 http://anp.sagepub.com/content/43/11/1038.full 

Fear is the key emotion of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Fear's evolved function is motivating survival via defensive behaviours. Defensive behaviours have been highly conserved throughout mammalian species; hence much may be learned from ethology. Predation pressure drove the early evolution of defences, laying foundations in the more ancient brain structures. Conspecific (same species) pressure has been a more recent evolutionary influence, but along with environmental threats it has dominated PTSD research. Anti-predator responses involve both avoiding a predator's sensory field and avoiding detection if within it, as well as escape behaviours. More effective avoidance results in less need for escape behaviours, suggesting that avoidance is biologically distinct from flight. Recognizing the predation, environmental and conspecific origins of defence may result in clearer definition of PTSD phenomena. Defence can also be viewed in the stages of no threat, potential threat, encounter and circa strike. Specific defences are used sequentially and according to contexts, loosely in the order: avoidance, attentive immobility, withdrawal, aggressive defence, appeasement and tonic immobility. The DSM-IV criteria and PTSD research show substantial congruence with the model proposed: that PTSD is a disorder of heightened defence involving six key defences used in conjunction with vigilance and risk assessment according to contexts. Human research is reviewed in this respect with reference to laboratory and wild animal observations providing new insights. Understanding individual perceptual issues (e.g. predictability and controllability) relevant to these phenomena, combined with defence strategy recalibration and neuronal plasticity research goes some way to explaining why some traumatized individuals develop PTSD when others do not. 

Excerpts:

Appeasement 

Cantor and Price recently published in this Journal a detailed review of appeasement reactions, providing animal and human observations suggesting that appeasement is the foundation of complex PTSD [13], and so I only make brief mention of it here. Appeasement's association with conspecifics suggests a more recent triune brain heritage than defences evolving from predation. De-escalation is one of appeasement's core functions [45]. Defeated primates have been observed to retreat, only to return to the dominant conspecific and protest until signals of acceptance are elicited, a phenomenon known as ‘reverted escape’ [46]. It involves flight to the source of the threat. The dominant may engage in further coercion, with the subordinate responding with more appeasement, reinforcing their social bond with due recognition of status. This is commonly observed with abused spouses and children [13]. From an evolutionary perspective subordinates often have to maintain group membership for survival, and dominants need to maintain group cohesion. A specific traumatic context, traumatic defeat plus an inescapable relationship with a dominant oppressor, resulting in specific PTSD symptoms, suggests that PTSD research may benefit from greater consideration of contexts: predator, conspecific and environmental, combined with other contextual characteristics. This might lead to greater understandability and predictability of treatment responses. It contrasts with a general malfunctioning disease-based approach. ‘PTSD’ may be better viewed as the ‘PTSDs’ (plural).

Tonic immobility

Tonic immobility is the final defence in the chain of anti-predator responses: nature has one last desperate measure [47]. It is widely represented throughout the animal world in insects, crustaceans, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds [27,31]. It arises in situations of immediate ‘predatory imminence’ (and its conspecific or environmental counterparts). It is an involuntary state of profound motor inhibition despite fully preserved consciousness, activated by extreme fear, perceived inescapable circumstances, usually involving an obviously more powerful predator or conspecific [3,48]. In animals it usually involves restraint. On termination of tonic immobility sudden recovery and flight may occur but this is neither as precipitous nor as reliable as that following attentive immobility [10]. Tonic immobility may persist beyond release [27] and in chickens has been observed to last up to 5¾ h [49]. It may promote survival through inhibition of predator killing reflexes, confusion of predators, deterrence through raising the possibility of diseased dead meat and lowering of blood pressure, which reduces blood loss from injuries [3,31]. With conspecifics its submissive aspects may serve also as appeasement to deter more serious assault. During tonic immobility animals remain largely unresponsive to external stimuli. The immobility involves either muscular hypo- or hyper-tonicity, waxy flexibility, suppression of vocal behaviour, intermittent eye closure, parkinsonian-like tremors with changes in heart rate, decreased temperature, increased respiratory rate and electrocardiogram changes [27,49,50]. Experimental pre-induction shocks stimulating fear and/or adrenalin injections can greatly extend tonic immobility, whereas increasing familiarity with the threat decreases it. Waxy flexibility in combat victims presenting with tonic immobility may be misdiagnosed as psychotic catatonia [51]. There are many similarities and differences between tonic immobility and catatonia [52]. Tonic immobility evolved as a fear response for present threats. With humans such responses may be activated by fear but maintained by a cognitive focus on potential (i.e. future) threats, with those threats remaining undetected, resulting in a protracted state of immobility commonly described as catatonic stupor. The linkage of catatonia with defence against ill-defined threats is further supported by catatonic excitement being associated with undirected assaultativeness. Some conversion reactions may reflect animal defence behaviours [12,53]. Accounts of the immobility involved in World War I shell shock are often difficult to differentiate between catatonia, conversion or tonic immobility. Some support for this arises from neurophysiological findings of hyperactive monitoring during motor-initiating decisions in subjects with conversion paresis of one arm [54]. In contemporary humans tonic immobility is commonly experienced with conspecific encounters in rape-induced paralysis [27,30,55]. A total of 37% of 35 rape victims were found to have experienced tonic immobility [56]. It also has been found in victims of other sexual abuse and some non-sexual violence. Heidt et al. found that 52% of women with histories of childhood sexual abuse reported tonic immobility in response to the abuse [57]. Older perpetrators and greater age differentials (suggesting perceived inescapability) between the abusers and children were both associated with greater tonic immobility, which was associated with greater distress, peritraumatic dissociation, depression, anxiety and PTSD. Similarly, 41.7% of survivors of adult sexual assault reported significant immobility during their most recent assault, and 10.4% reported extreme immobility [58]. Rape victims may be insensitive to pain during tonic immobility [27]. Tonic immobility may be a key determinant of PTSD outcome following sexual assault. Tonic immobility was found to partially mediate the relationship between fear and both overall PTSD symptom severity and PTSD avoidance/numbing [49]. Further, the relationship between perceived inescapability and PTSD symptom severity and avoidance/numbing was fully mediated by tonic immobility. No relationship was found between tonic immobility and hyperarousal symptoms, suggesting that, like appeasement, tonic immobility may generate specific PTSD symptomatology and that tonic immobility-driven PTSD may be less responsive to arousal-lowering treatments. Non-sexual conspecific assaults have also involved tonic immobility, with 43% of victims of urban violence reporting peritraumatic tonic immobility, which emerged as a marker for poorer responses to psychotropics [59]. Tonic immobility, but not dissociation or panic, predicted PTSD symptom severity after controlling for potential confounders in urban violence victims [60]. The preservation of awareness with an inability to voluntarily respond implies dissociation [3]. Depersonalization (detachment from self) but not derealization (detachment from environment) was found to be associated with tonic immobility, but the reverse occurred with fear [58]. This fits with depersonalization having an internal focus on why one is not responding, whereas in derealization the focus is more external. Dissociative identity disorder patients often become immobile, enter trance-like states and report out-of-body experiences or dissociative amnesia [30]. While tonic immobility is not associated with all types of dissociation, might there be a subtype of dissociation specific to tonic immobility?

Things change, and evolve, and sometimes - at some point - we have to say that they have become something different; even if they retain the same name.

Cricket evolved, and fused with rounders, to become baseball - and got a different name (justified, in this instance). Cricket evolved, and became T20 - and kept the name (which also, overall seems right... but moving towards the edge of plausibility).

In the modern world, where managers have taken-over from do-ers, there are two managerial trends - one is to rename things despite the fact they stay the same, and the other is to keep the name but obliterate what used to go by that name and do something almost-completely different.

Both are, of course, covertly motivated by the desire to destroy and disorientate everything and everybody.

In Britain many of the counties were renamed in the 1970s - names that went back to medieval, or even earlier, times were obliterated and replaced. In Scotland, Clackmannashire - named after a Celtic tribe - was renamed... Central Region. At a lower level, it is standard routine for bureaucrats to rename organisations - new signs, logos, letterheads etc.

Renaming is nearly always a sign of an organisation succumbing to BS management - the modern European Union is an exemplar, having begun as the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community.

Schools and Colleges that change their names are typically those that have decided to invest in PR rather than substance. Also school 'pupils' are now renamed 'students' by the media, even in the early teens - whereas until a dozen years ago this referred only to those in higher education.

(For all that , the names are often indicative of the true nature of what is going on. When the EEC became the EU is was a signal of aiming at a single totalitarian Euro state. And all the British places re-named 'Mandela' (after either Nelson, or his egregious wife) during the 1980s and 90s were a solid sign of Political Correctness and Leftist subversion/ inversion becoming The Establishment.)

Among Schools, Colleges and Universities; there has been a hollowing-out and near-complete replacement of what these institutions actually do; the same applies to science, medicine, law, the police... the phenomenon is very general, almost universal.

It is most obvious in 'charities' - where the trend has been for all national, wealthy charities to become almost-completely Left Wing lobbying and activist groups, with just a 'front' of their former functions kept-going. Oxfam was originally an Oxford-based organisation for providing famine-relief, 'Barnados' used to run orphanages, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds used to... protect birds, the Salvation Army used to be a Christian denomination. The Army Benevolent Fund used to assist wounded soldiers until shortly before it was renamed The Soldier's Charity...

But these and all other major national charities are now 'NGOs' - whose (astonishingly well-paid) leaderships are part of the we of The Establishment, and dedicated to the strategic and incremental demoralisation and self-damnation of humankind.

We live in a public world in which 'nothing is what it seems' - at least at the level of what gets into the mass media and official communications.

Yet to notice such obvious facts, is supposed to be cynical, negative and paranoid; despite that cynicism, negativity and paranoia in other contexts are the favoured modern attitudes; assiduously propagated by the mass media.

And many of these things are designed to create a background and continual state of angst and fear among the populace - a low-level of consciousness, a short-termist and reactive survivalism. 

Let us not, then, dwell upon such matters - but simply accept that this is how things actually are (no point in trying to persuade other people who don't want to know); personally ignore and reject the official and media agendas on the basis that they are always false in some important way - and get on with making ourselves more spiritual and religious people (people who who don't depend on being fed the agenda, who are not addicted to the day's talking-points); and deal with the stuff we actually believe to be important, and know from personal intuition and experience amplified with common sense.

We took a rail trip out to Hexham yesterday - a favourite place. The Abbey, in an earlier version built by St Wilfrid during Northumbria's 'golden age' was once the largest building in Europe, north of the Alps.

The views of the River Tyne and its valley, seen from the train window, are evidence of the wonderful strength of beauty that remains, waiting; and it is delightful that the buskers (i.e. street musicians - a melodeon player in one place, and two fiddlers in another) were playing folk music - including this (first) tune:


Anyway, as I travelled out I was reading a collection of John Michell's essays (Writings and rants of a radical traditionalist - recommended by this site's sometime guest blogger John Fitzgerald: Thanks!) - and reflecting on Michell's popularisation of the idea of the sacred landscape of Britain.

But Michell was a 'geomancer' and described the sacred landscape in terms of straight tracks, roads and Ley Lines of energy force - the ancient sites along along such alignments - and the detailed geometric/ astronomically-oriented  diagrams of monuments such as Stonehenge - this kind of thing:




But, I am struck by exactly the opposite!

That the sacred landscape of England - in large and in microcosm is extremely irregular, asymmetric and un-geometric - and this applies to Neolithic/ Bronze Age - Celtic or Anglo Saxon designs, sites, roads etc - I see little in the way of straight lines, sharp points, repeating patterns:




So, although I am pleased that John Michell drew attention to the subject of sacred landscape - I feel he was barking up the wrong tree in discussing it in terms of geometry and numerology.

This would, indeed, be appropriate to somewhere like Ancient Egypt, with its stereotypical obelisks, pyramids, right-angles - sharp edges, smoothed and polished stone - all silhouetted against a plain blue sky...

But England is all mists, rugged rocks, and wavy lines - it was an English painter (Hogarth) who said the line of beauty was a curve - and English literature prizes its array of unique characters (not 'representative' 'types') which fill Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens... Harry Potter.

John Michell was a Christianised (but not actually Christian) Platonist - with a strong element of the Pythagorean number mystic. This is alien to my temperament! - I find it a mystery why anyone would want to 'explain' spiritual beauty with mathematics!

Why would so many people want so much to describe everything as ultimately a matter of geometric shapes, or of 'fractals'!

Yet to regard mathematics as the underlying truth or reality - the archetypal world of 'forms' - is a deep and powerful urge among many, probably most, Western intellectuals since Ancient Greek times. So they see nothing absurd or contrived about covering the British landscape with abstract lines, angles and shapes drawn on maps, and aligned.

Although I reject this approach, I don't have any equally comprehensible and depict-able alternative for the sacred landscape - so me it is a miracle of intuitively sensed but undescribable rightness - like an unique character from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or Shakespeare's plays, the 'design' can be shown and felt, but not made into a formula.

Of course not! But most modern people - especially intellectuals - think much like computers; and more so with every passing year.

They think in very narrow, passive, unintuitive, unimaginative ways - plugged-into and dependent-upon almost constant inputs from the mass media and social media, as bureaucratic functionaries...

Modern thinking has been entrained into machine-cognition - and a machine cannot be Christian.

So modern Man cannot be a Christian, any more than a computer can be a Christian.

Oh, modern Man can say he believes this or that doctrine or dogma - but that is just a print-out; he can transport himself to a church and make singing or praying noises - but that is just an audio-broadcast; he can read Scripture - but that is just another memo from central management...

*

Before modern Man can be a Christian in any meaningful sense, he must discover or re-learn how think in a human way - not a computer/ machine way.

This is why the aspect of consciousness, of spirituality; of such themes as the livingness and consciousness of all the world, the truth of imagination, the primacy of intuition, the possibility of personal revelation, the reality of supersensory perceptions... such themes are not just optional extras (and certainly they are not forbidden to Christians!), but such matters are vital to Christianity being or becoming more than an alternative software package for computer-Men.

Christians cannot be meaningfully Christian and think/ reason/ evaluate/ 'feel' just like mainstream modern people - to be really Christian here and now, in The West, requires a radical metamorphosis of thinking; of form as well as content; and all serious Christians need to be aware of this necessity.

(This important question - or something like it - was posed by William Wildblood in the comments to the previous post on Screwtape and Wormwood - here is my attempt to answer it concisely.)

The difficulty I am having in responding to your question may be related to the several assumptions embedded in it - for example, about our nature as Men and God's potential powers, and the purpose of mortal life.

If we accept that these in The West are the most evil times in history - in the sense that more (numerically and proportionately) people would reject salvation than ever before, due to the prevalence of value-inversion; then the first thing that strikes me is exactly that Men do not want to be saved from their current situation - indeed they want more of the same.

The situation resembles that of loving parents whose child has left home to live with an exploitative brainwashing cult to which she has become devoted. The parents know where she is, and could go and get her - but they also know that she would strongly resist being rescued (let's say she is devoted to the cult leader who abuses and enslaves her), and if rescued would be utterly miserable and try to return to her captors.

The parents may write to her, may send all kinds of messages to assure their daughter of their continued love, but she will not read the messages.

God is in this situation with the added aspects that the cultists and their victims and the weeping parents are all equally his beloved children; and the children are able to deny God's existence and assume that they arise spontaneously and accidentally and have no responsibility to anybody else.

In such a situation God cannot do much more than stand ready to respond to individuals if and when he is acknowledged and asked. Or else the whole scenario can be wound-up - which is the end of this earth, and the trajectory of humanity in it arcing to a conclusion; the end of the 'experiment' of mortal life.

The prophecies are that - sooner or later - this point will be reached, and the earth and all the people on it will be ended (and a New Jerusalem arise) - and it seems that we are now in the End Times, or Latter Days as it becomes clear that the point approaches and can only be delayed but not averted.

But why does God allow the demons to work? Well, the demons are his children too; and the demons are at one end of a continuum of goodness and evil in which everyone is mixed (in Mormon theology, Satan and demons are pre-mortal spirit children who have chosen the wrong side, and are forbidden to incarnate).

I think that God's tolerance of the continued existence of demons indicates that they cannot be beyond hope of reform - across the vast timescale of eternity. God could not 'kill' demons, but they could be stripped of their powers or confined if or when they were beyond possibility of repentance - and perhaps this has indeed happened to some of them (we would not know) but the ones we do experience presumably have not reached that point.

(A microcosm of the problem God faces can be imagined if a loving Father had many children among whom there was one in particular of great ability who preyed upon, tormented and corrupted the other children; and others who were themselves similarly wicked and had chosen to side-with the one most-wicked child. There comes a point at which a loving Father will feel that he must 'write-off' (e.g. dis-able, exile, imprison, 'kill') the one worst, and perhaps some more of his more-wicked children - for the sake of the less-wicked ones. But that is a last resort, and would probably lead to an eternity of irreconcilable fear, resentment and hatred from the written-off children - and may also have a terrorizing and paralysing effect on the less-wicked children who are, after-all, themselves all somewhat wicked, and who have experienced in themselves exactly the same kind of wickedness as was more extreme in some of their siblings.)

Why are the demons not sequestered from good people? If we consider the problem from a spiritual level - I think that demons are like vampires, and can only spiritually-harm those who 'invite them in' - so the demons remain present and active in human affairs because humanity has invited them to stay and continues to want them as guests.

The earth and mortal life are partly what we need, and partly what we make of them - a mixed picture. The reasons why bad things happen are therefore manyfold and must be understood in an individualised way and from an eternal perspective of soul.

I don't think humans are cognitively capable of understanding why everything happens everywhere and to everyone, and how it all interacts. But I do believe that we can learn by revelation why this particular thing has happened to us here-and-now; if we are open to accepting the true answer when God gives it, which may not be the answer we wanted to hear.

One of the most important reasons for reading CS Lewis's The Screwtape Letters (and its 'follow-up', Screwtape Proposes a Toast) is to understand the difference between senior demons whose behaviour is strategic and oriented towards maximising the harvest of damned souls; and the low level minion types of demon - who are short-termist, impulsive, destructive theiving, lustful, sadistic etc. The value is that most people assume that demons work in the latter way - and thereby fundamental misunderstand and misinterpret the past six or so decades in The West.

A particular key moment in the Letters comes when the apprentice Wormwood gets excited at the prospect of war; but his 'uncle' Screwtape - the senior tempter and strategist - points out that while war is delightful in terms of human suffering, from a strategic demonic perspective war is often counter-productive, and 'peace' (comfort, convenience, idleness, affluence etc) is preferable.

When I told you not to fill your letters with rubbish about the war, I meant, of course, that I did not want to have your rather infantile rhapsodies about the death of men and the destruction of cities. In so far as the war really concerns the spiritual state of the patient, I naturally want full reports. And on this aspect you seem singularly obtuse. Thus you tell me with glee that there is reason to expect heavy air raids on the town where the creature lives.

This is a crying example of something I have complained about already - your readiness to forget the main point in your immediate enjoyment of human suffering. Do you not know that bombs kill men? Or do you not realise that the patient's death, at this moment, is precisely what we want to avoid?

[Note ' the patient' is what Screwtape calls the human that Wormwoord is trying to corrupt.]

He has escaped the worldly friends with whom you tried to entangle him; he has "fallen in love" with a very Christian woman and is temporarily immune from your attacks on his chastity; and the various methods of corrupting his spiritual life which we have been trying are so far unsuccessful. At the present moment, as the full impact of the war draws nearer and his worldly hopes take a proportionately lower place in his mind, full of his defence work, full of the girl, forced to attend to his neighbours more than he has ever done before and liking it more than he expected, "taken out of himself" as the humans say, and daily increasing in conscious dependence on the Enemy, he will almost certainly be lost to us if he is killed tonight.

[Note: The Enemy is what Screwtape calls God - since the perspective of the book is the inverted one of demons.]

This is so obvious that I am ashamed to write it. I sometimes wonder if you young fiends are not kept out on temptation-duty too long at a time - if you are not in some danger of becoming infected by the sentiments and values of the humans among whom you work. They, of course, do tend to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the greatest good. But that is because we have taught them to do so.

Do not let us be infected by our own propaganda. I know it seems strange that your chief aim at the moment should be the very same thing for which the patient's lover and his mother are praying - namely his bodily safety. But so it is; you should be guarding him like the apple of your eye. If he dies now, you lose him. If he survives the war, there is always hope.

This is vital to understand in our materialist Western world - although the junior apprentice demons may get 'carried away' with delight in human suffering; the demonic strategists have recognised that war, socio-economic collapse, epidemics, starvation and the like are counter-productive.

The infliction of mass extreme human suffering was thoroughly tried out in the early twentieth century with the Russian Revolution, Communism generally and the 1914-18 and 39-45 wars, and one major result was to trigger a massive spiritual-Christian revival - just as Screwtape warned.

Since 1945, a new demonic strategy has been in place (described in detail in '...Proposes a Toast'), Christianity has been in continual decline down to its current level of near-extinction; and the other remaining spiritual perspectives in modernity are either ineffectual, or else thoroughly assimilated to the demonic agenda - of lulling and gradualism: SDI = Subversion, Destruction and - ultimately - Inversion of The Good (Truth, Beauty, Virtue) and all positive values.

It seems pretty clear that The Establishment wants to control every human down to the smallest level. Those few remaining areas of technological 'advance' which are being squeezed out from the mostly-collapsed science and engineering base are focused on population monitoring and therefore control (especially the so-called 'smart' technologies) or on demotivating and inducing despair (eg. the population drugging with mass media and social media; and manyfold over-prescribed medications such as so-called antidepressants, mood stabilisers, statins etc. - which dull and demotivate and create dependence in tens/ hundreds of millions).

This truly vast international effort of population monitoring and control - a strategy extending over many decades - has not been pursued for trivial ephemeral satisfactions: its scope is eternal and its consequences are primary.

It is not being done merely in order that the elites can make (even) more money from the masses (the reverse is the case), nor is it sadistically to make people suffer pain and misery (although that is a side effect they enjoy). It is not even being done to gratify the anti-normal, unloving and perverse sexuality of the elites (although that has been an obvious side effect). No: the motivation and steadiness of purpose across multiple human lifespans betrays the supernatural, not-human - indeed demonic - purpose, origin and nature of the global conspiracy.

*

The reason for this long-term and immense effort, is the intention (or hope) that by monitoring and controlling all aspects of life for all humans; people can be fed a set of fundamental, metaphysical assumptions that will (the demons hope) ensure the population actively reject Good and embrace evil.

So the goal, in simple terms, is to maximise the harvest of souls for 'Hell' - on the understanding that Hell is a self-chosen state - the consequence a deliberate decision to reject the offer and gift of salvation and Heaven. Heaven is the consequence of repentance - which means acknowledgement of the reality and Goodness of God's creation. The Establishment aim to frame reality so that people will do this, make this rejection of salvation, en masse.

*

When The Establishment have the fullest control of the human environment, they can monopolistically enforce the 'materialist' basic assumptions which lead to rejection of salvation; assumptions such as that there is no god, no 'free will', no higher consciousness, no real communication; that life is a meaningless and purposeless accident of physics, chemistry and biology; that there is no eternal soul, that there is no reality beyond that of the five senses, that humans are ultimately alone, human death is total extinction of individuality - and so on...

For a person induced to accept these metaphysical assumptions, which are essentially rejections of natural spontaneous human beliefs, the only thing to do is pass the brief time before death - presumably to avoid suffering and try to do things that are pleasant and exciting... or at least distracting.

And, more than that, people need to be made to feel that the natural and spontaneous, the hope-full and purposive, are actually evil.

It is not enough to merely reject true values - there must be actual value inversion if people are actively to reject Heaven.

People need to be made to feel that repentance is not just nonsense - but wicked nonsense. People need to be made Proud of their sins... made to feel that their sins are what define them, that their Pride in sin makes them better than the 'conventionlly good' people.

Simply to state this is to recognise how normal and mainstream and officially prompted and enforced has become value inversion.

*

From this inverted metaphysical perspective (which appears to be normal and normative in The West), humans will voluntarily reject salvation and will choose damnation - because they will disbelieve even the possibility of anything better than psychological subsistence, and because they will actually want damnation, and will feel pride in having chosen it. Such Men will despise the choosers of salvation as timid, conventional, boring, dumb, killjoy, straight, hypocritical, sanctimonious, bourgeois, pale-male, repressed, goody-two-shoes, puritanical... and all the rest of it. For the choosers of Hell, as for demons - Evil is the new Good: the self-damned feel themselves to be not just fun-loving, life-embracing, realists - but also better people than the Saints.

(Just look around at the global leadership class - this is exactly their state of being.)

*
In sum, the evil global conspiracy works by material means, by monitoring and controlling our material lives; and works to build-in the philosophy of materialism which has life as ephemeral and a matter of evanescent feelings - but nonetheless its ultimate goals are spiritual and eternal.

The materialism is just a means to the end of damnation; the focus on the ephemeral is a means to the eternity of damnation.

If material life becomes thoroughly controlled by evil, and Men can be induced to believe that the material is the only thing that is really-real, then we will have materialism both outside us and inside  of us, therefore dictating what we are; and the success of the evil agenda is all-but guaranteed.

Why has The Establishment*, for half a century full-on, favoured replacing men with women leaders?

Obviously, we can be sure that the real reason has nothing whatsoever to do with benefiting women! While the occasional woman (a tiny minority) may be happier and more fulfilled as a 'leader', the mass of women are systematically immiserated by becoming manipulated pawns, and their lives wasted.

You doubt this assertion? Look At Their Eyes! (...The windows of the soul - the entrenched misery, desperation.)

But why? The answer is simple. The Global Conspiracy of Purposive Evil are behind official feminism - as they are behind all mainstream ideas of recent decades - and what they want is control of the world population - and therefore they want the most controllable personnel: and women are more controllable than men.

Think about it: Men and women are psychologically different, so one or the other is going to be more controllable than the other, on average - and that would be women.

More exactly, women are more inclined to want to control themselves and each other.

The Establishment want control, but ideally they do not want to impose control - they want people to choose to be controlled to the extent that they deny being controlled, so much have they internalised their situation. To know one is being controlled is to invite resistance and reaction. But if the person regards the state of being controlled as their own choice and necessary and for their own well-being - well, that person is self-damned and actively resistant to repentance and liberation.

The modern, preferred, kind of control is via invisible and impersonal media and mechanisms - via the likes of perceived peer pressure, fashion and social approval/ sanctions. Women are much more manipulate-able by these indirect mechanisms than are men; because they are more sensitive to them and voluntarily collude in imposing them.

Women constitute the great majority of mass media and social media addicts (see who are glued to their 'smart'-phones as they walk along busy streets); and can be induced to do almost anything to themselves and each other! - Up to and including gross and permanent uglifying mutilations such as genital surgery, foot binding, plastic surgery and tattooing - as well as the more normal and obvious rotating absurdities of hair, makeup and clothing fashions.

(Women will not only do these things to themselves and each other, but will believe and argue that it is both necessary and good to do them.)

The relative manipulability of women is also seen in terms of the fact that in all developed countries women have chosen sub-fertility and the extinction of their tribes in order to pursue 'leadership' goals - such that the representative modern woman chooses (and fights!) to become a middle manager drone embedded n a bureaucracy, instead of a wife and mother running a home - and this is the other side of the coin of mainstream 'official feminism' focused upon women as favoured leaders.

In sum, from the perspective of a global ultra-elite with an evil agenda for the destruction of values, and the strategy of seeking this via control; it is easy to understand why they should want women as leaders rather than men - and why this agenda should have been consistently, and increasingly, pushed for so many decades, across the full spectrum of mass media, government and official propaganda, via the arts and charities, and through the systems of law, education, mainstream so-called-Christianity, and all other powerful social influences.


*Note: For those new to this blog, I should make clear that I regard the ultimate core-controllers of The Establishment to be demons - literally those supernatural personages of purposive evil as described in the New Testament and familiar to modern people via CS Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. These immortal spirits provide the long-term strategy and direction which can be perceived in history - but the great mass of their servants, serfs and slaves are men and women.

The matter of human creativity - and whether it is 'a good thing' has profound implications for religious thinking, including Christianity.

There is a divide in religious thinking concerning the extent to which Men can or should participate in creation.

*

At one - common among major religions - extreme; creation is a 'finished work', and Men cannot make any substantive difference to that fact. Reality is already complete, static, perfect. All creation is/ was a matter of god or the gods.

In such a world, Man's role in life is passive - he should (for example) obey the rules of creation, should worship the creator, should be grateful for having been created etc. But Man as a species, and each Man as an individual, does not have any essential - nor even important - role in creation.

Man may create something to god's glory - but it doesn't really matter either way; because, with respect to creation, Man is utterly dispensable: a mere recipient.

*

If a value is accorded to Man's creative work, then matters become much more complex: indeed an utterly different kind of reality (and nature of god) is implied: that is how important the concept of creativity is to religion!

A view assigns to Man a destiny as sub-creator. It is intended/ desired, supposed that Man will be a creator himself (and from-himself - not merely as a conduit for divine action) within the already-existing context of creation. So - there is creation as it exists when the Man begins work, and there is potentially a larger and more complex reality which exists as a consequence of that Man's work - and this later state is conceived to be better than the former. It is each Man's job potentially to contribute to that better future.

By including creation among Man's roles, an element of real Time has been introduced - along with an element of Evolution. Reality is being seen as not a finished static thing, but as a dynamic process, perpetually unfolding as creation proceeds.

This implies that reality is not and never has been perfect - and probably never can be; which idea  strikes at the heart of some conceptualisations of the nature of god (in terms of his completeness, perfections and infinites). Because a god that asks for Man's 'help' in creation is a very different kind of god than one who creates everything in eternal perfection and coherence - and who requires of Man only that he praise the creation and live in harmony with it.

*

This may be the root of that clash between the most-creative Men and religion - their deep-seated conviction that Man is not superfluous and that each Man potentially has something of specific and reality-changing value to contribute; the demand that Man has something substantive to do in his life. (In contrast with the perceived inadequacy of an eternity of passive, superfluous worship, obedience and gratitude.)

Naturally, this attitude is regarded as pride-driven by those who deny the need or possibility of subcreation, and may indeed be such - but whether it is necessarily pride-driven, depends on one's concept of creation and the possibility (or not) of genuine subcreation.

A philosophy of life which takes seriously the role of Man as subcreator is one which necessarily  extends to considering man as co-creator - because any real subcreation becomes a part of created reality; so any Man who subcreates makes some contribution to the totality of creation and is therefore co-creator with god (albeit within the context of god's original and primary creation; and himself being created and using created materials).

This affects our understanding of the nature of God; because a god who made us to be subcreators and then co-creators is a god who apparently sees us as potential 'friends' rather than 'subjects' - on-a-level of sorts, a god who seems to want us to have an increasingly-equal relationship with him.

And this is a long way from the utterly remote, all knowing/ all powerful god of some religious conceptions: and the fact that such gods always seem to regard active subcreation by Men as an activity always unnecessary, and usually harmful. 

It is so difficult to stick to the subject - so easy to drift off the point: The Point is what is this world for in relation to me, my life, everybody else and their lives - and everything that is. Unless each of us has formed some answer to this question, then sooner or later - and it practise sooner rather than later - you will miss the point badly, and start talking about something else altogether.

Then there is the matter of how it works. Suppose you have decided what life is about in some ultimate sense... Then how does it work specifically? Supposing that you have some idea about spreading the word, changing people's attitudes and improving their behaviour - persuading them to stop doing this or that... Then you need to have an idea of how the world works in order to decide how this might be done: what could be effective, and what ineffective. 

Let's get specific. I happen to believe the Western world in in an extremely bad state of self-imposed alienation, nihilism, self-hatred and covert suicidality. The context is that this world was made by creators who are our divine parents, we chose to be born and were placed in the kind of situation that best suits our needs; and that everybody's main purpose is to incarnate and die (this applies to all humans who have ever lived, including those who died before being born) - and also for some people - and to varying degrees and in various ways - to gain experiences we need to advance spiritually towards divinity. 

So - what next? There is an absolutely colossal world of lies and deception and evil - which has led and continues to lead masses of people to various forms of spiritual disaster, using a vast array of mass media, arts, official and unofficial communication channels - and there is me.

But are these monopolised communication channels the only possible way of communicating - do I actually believe that? Of do I believe in a multitude of other ways and forms of, and reasons for, communicating... Well I believe that there are a multitude of ways, some imperceptible.  I believe, for example, in telepathy communications via dreams, that God and angels can reveal knowledge directly into our minds...

Beyond this, I believe that the natural, spontaneous, underlying basis of reality is a state of total communication and minimal differentiation - that things began as a kind of sea of consciousness, with separate elements as vestigial seeds of potential but hardly-actual awareness.

What this implies is that the problem of my communicating the truth as a minority of one in a world of lies is actually a non-problem; because communication happens, it cannot not happen - everything I do, including everything I think, is very generally available, and makes a difference.

See how it works? Before I have thought this through, I felt as if the world was against me, and I had no chance against the world. But by refocusing on clarifying and reasoning-from my primary assumptions, I recognise that this was a false conclusion.

And as a result I feel greatly energised and motivated to continue to do my best, at the highest level. Such is the power of framing.

Owen Barfield claimed not to be very clear about the nature of that Final Participation which he saw as the destiny of human evolution of consciousness.

(Original Participation is that immersive and unselfconscious living in-the-world of hunter-gatherers and similar tribal peoples, and modern man is detached from the world, and even his own thoughts, in the Consciousness Soul).

But I think that sufficient clarity can be arrived at by considering the phases of human love through human life as an analogy (or rather, as more than an analogy - since the one is an example of the other).

Infant and young childhood love is an Original Participation; immersive and undifferentiated - the child is hardly aware of himself as distinct from his parents and family; his experience of the world is of a world alive and sentient because he is himself a part of everything he perceives. Love is everywhere (in an ideal childhood) like a sea in which everything is immersed, or like a gas in which each individual thing is merely a slight concentration of the element. We know everything, but we hardly know our-selves, and everything blurs into everything else.

With adolescence comes self-consciousness, which intensifies until the Self experiences itself as detached from the world. Indeed the Self experiences most mental activity as detached from itself - our Selves are cut-off from all experience, looking out upon the world, such that they world seems uncertain and unreal (how do we know that it is real), and indeed the Self is also experienced as perhaps unreal - since it changes, and can only rely upon itself for validation.

The point of Consciousness soul is 'freedom' in the sense of agency: to be free we need to be able to live from our-Selves (our true Selves). The consciousness soul is the condensation and concentration of the self, such that we can work from it. This is, indeed, a divine state of being - and that is what this phase is necessary to human spiritual progression.

To evolve towards a fully divine state of being, we must pass-through the Consciousness Soul. But it is meant to be a transitional phase, a short-lived phase - a phase we merely touch upon in passing...

This Consciousness Soul state of consciousness is also the state of modern culture. Modern culture is stuck, arrested, in stasis in the consciousness Soul - so intensely subjective that subjectivity itself is destroyed - experiencing the external world only via perceptions and instruments, and unsure about the reliability of these senses and mechanisms... THE problem being epistemological - how do I know if I really know? No answer forthcoming (because the assumption is of a gulf between the self and the world) and Modern Man is stuck in Consciousness Soul - held, trapped, imprisoned by the assumptions of modern culture.

Modern Man is stuck in Consciousness Soul - and that was not, and is not, meant to be - the CS is meant to be just a phase (albeit a necessary phase) on the way to Final Participation. Being stuck in the Consciousness Soul is a precise analogy to being stuck in adolescence, unable to grow-up, paralysed in that state of alienation, in which uncertainty erodes all potential solutions - and unable to move on.

Final Participation is like the ideal of spouse - indeed married love is a type of Final Participation.

In married love at its highest, each individual retains the full self-consciousness of the Consciousness Soul, but has a certainty of contact with another, distinct, self-conscious human being. There is no problem of communication, indeed there is a certainty of communication. Each party is not trapped in the nutshell of their own skulls but is able to share, participate in the life of the other, but with full self-integrity and self-awareness.

On the one hand individuality is assumed and valued, and is part of the essence of married love; on the other hand there is no problem of communication between these individuals - because the universal immersive state of Original Participation still is real and exists as much as it ever did. We are still part of each other and of everything - but with Final Participation our individuality, our Self, has been clarified, strengthened... has become a free, autonomous agent.

Final Participation is Original Participation plus the Consciousness Soul - it is the sea of infant family love, plus the individual island of adolescent self-awareness. 

There is no desire among loving spouses either for a return to the detachment of the Consciousness Soul (the state before love) or to return to the immersive and undifferentiated love of childhood family. They have the best of both worlds. The differentness and individuality and self-awareness of the other is essential, and so is the given background of universal communication.

In conclusion, when married love works as it is meant to, then it is a species of Final Participation - which is to say a state beyond Consciousness Soul, a moving-forwards and not a regression (or atavism).

Culturally, human destiny is to have an analogous relationship to ideal married love, but inclusive of all reality - and that is what Barfield meant by Final Participation.

If there is a spiritual awakening happening in England, Western Europe or the West generally; if awakening is beginning to happen - or if we are each approaching a moment of choice about our specific (and the general) spiritual future...

If such a thing happens then how could it be detectable - given the private nature of such things?

I think there will be more-or-less inevitable behavioural hence measurable consequences of any serious spiritual awakening.

For example, if many people begin to awaken to a broader and higher form of consciousness, to a living and sentient reality, then I think there would have to be changes...

For example, more attention paid to introspection, to innate motivation, to imagination; a movement towards 'heart' and intuition based living (and therefore less mind or instinct, less head- or gut/ gonad- driven behaviour)...

And linked with this, people would want to stop wasting their time - for example, cut back on engaging with the mass media, cut back on watching and reading trivial and harmful rubbish and lies; cut back on expensive and decadent stuff done for status - buy fewer and cheaper possessions; reduce entertainments, holidays, cosmetics and self-mutilations; stop show-off parties; in general, they'd want to stop wasting money on buying and doing things done just because 'the system' wants people to do them...

And perhaps especially people would begin stopping doing harmful things, things that make things worse - stopping things that promote corruption, destroy Good; they might stop lying, stop praising and working to promote lies and ugliness and the inversion of values...

This kind of thing should be detectable - detectable as changes in trends, in averages and even more so in the behaviour of the awakening sector and spread of change from these sectors.

There might be detectable economic changes, measured inevitably as economic shrinkage, decline and damage (since most of the economy is about bad things, harmful things); detectable in changes of net work efficiency and effectiveness (given that most work is overall harmful); and changes in media usage and engagement (since that is the major waste of time, and the major self-harming use of energy).

Such things would, no doubt, be 'explained' as due to other causes - since their real cause would be imperceptible and immeasurable; plus of course the desire of 'the system' would be to hide any spiritual cause.

Furthermore, such positive trends (if they were strong) would be interpreted and spun as 'bad' - so that people stopping doing bad things, stopping wasting their time and expending great effort on making things worse... people making such changes en masse would for sure be interpreted as economic collapse, productivity collapse, inefficiency, impaired consumer 'demand', deflation, sales reductions and so on and so forth.

Interesting!
 

People get confused about the nature, and even the existence, of evil - but if one recognises the reality of Good, then evil is straightforward: evil is the strategic destruction of Good.

(Good may itself be operationally-defined as Truth, Beauty and Virtue in Unity - TBV in U - with TB&V being regarded as real and objective values.)

Strategic means purposive, deliberate; that evil works over time with the objective of destroying Good.

(Note: It is not necessary that evil is self-aware that it is aiming to destroy Good - indeed most evil is done by the self-deceived; dupes and servants of only a small - but necessary - minority who know what is Good and know that they are aiming to destroy it.)

*

But destruction of good can be done in different ways, and at different extremes. So actual destruction of the Good is a middle term in a spectrum. That spectrum is Subversion, Destruction and Inversion - or SDI.

Think of marriage, as an example of Virtue - a Good institution. Evil first works by subversion of marriage - for example by propaganda (including works of art - novels, dramas, movies...) focused on the miseries and injustices of bad marriages, constraints of marriage, the joys and excitements of un-married and extra-marital relationships etc.; and by laws for 'no fault', quick, sanction-free divorce to encourage the breakdown of marriages. Marriage is weakened by subversion, to the point that strong marriage becomes statsitically rare and the 'normal' or average marriage is seen as a feeble, evanescent, faddish kind of thing.

At a greater extremity; evil may try to destroy the institution of marriage, to eliminate it altogether. This could be done incrementally, by making it acceptable, then fashionable, then positively valued to cohabit without marriage - and removing any social differences between cohabitation and marriage. It could be done by discouraging marriage through taxation, and unjust arbitration - favouring spouses who are the most selfish and short-termist etc. At the ultimate, marriage could be abolished.

Inversion, however, is actually a greater extremity of evil than destruction. This is important to understand - because it is a fundamental insight into the nature and motivation of evil without which it may be difficult to detect and to resist. The greatest extremity of evil is to invert the meaning while having people assume that nothing important has been changed.

So, beyond the evil of destroying marriage is the greater evil of inverting the nature, content, meaning and purpose of marriage, while maintaining that what results is real marriage. Inversion of marriage is a greater triumph and provides a greater satisfaction to evil than would the deletion of marriage from human society.

Or consider the virtue of Beauty as a different type of Good, from the perspective of SDI. Evil might subvert beauty - for example by inducing people to judge the quality of art in accordance with the sex, class or race of its producer, or the nature of the society which produced the work. Or beautiful art may be attacked and destroyed, or looted - as has happened in various times and places under the excuse of religious iconoclasm. But at the extreme is inversion of Beauty - especially ugliness praised for its beauty: examples include praise, prestige and professional prizes given to objectively-ugly art, architecture, novels, music and poetry (this is, of course, standard mainstream practise).

If Truth is the focus, as in science, the Inversion has been almost-completed. The social structure of science (funding, personnel, buildings, machines...) has been vastly expanded; but inside this structure the value of Truth has been removed and replaced. Science is now almost-wholly a generic managerial bureaucracy. The Truth has been hollowed-out and replaced by values such as career, public relations, money, and political values. Science has been inverted, yet people have not noticed - and still praise and support science as if it had something to do with the Truth.

*

My main point here is that inversion of Good is a greater evil than destruction of Good.

To have the Good denigrated as evil, to have evil persons and institutions lauded as exemplars of Good - such is the ultimate triumph of evil; and such is quite normal and usual in modern society.

The reason why inversion is a greater evil than destruction is that the war between Good and evil takes place in the spiritual realm; and the ultimate aim of evil is to create a situation where people - that is human souls, the true inner self - actively choose to reject the Good because it is Good, and instead actively to choose evil as their personal Good.

And for this purpose, inversion is far more effective than destruction.

The fact is insufficiently appreciated, hence the suggestion of an SDI abbreviation for the spectrum of evil from Subversion to Destruction to Inversion, as a way of remembering it.


Note: Probably the greatest and most crucial victim of SDI has been sexual identity - sexuality itself: man and woman as the differentiated, complementary, binary-basis of the eternal divine human soul. As an exercise, I leave the reader to work-out just how sex has been subverted, destroyed and inverted for apparently a majority of the Western peoples. This must surely count as the most remarkable and improbable - therefore deadly - triumph of evil over fundamental values thus far in recorded history.

Just then a high, mournful sound broke in upon Stephen's dream – a slow, sad song in an unknown language and Stephen understood without ever actually waking that the gentleman with the thistle-down hair was singing.

It may be laid down as a general rule that if a man begins to sing, no one will take any notice of his song except his fellow human beings. This is true even if his song is surpassingly beautiful.

Other men may be in raptures at his skill, but the rest of creation is, by and large, unmoved. Perhaps a cat or a dog may look at him; his horse, if it is an exceptionally intelligent beast, may pause in cropping the grass, but that is the extent of it.

But when the fairy sang, the whole world listened to him.

Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy's song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.

Stephen began to dream again. This time he dreamt that hills walked and the sky wept. Trees came and spoke to him and told him their secrets and also whether or not he might regard them as friends or enemies. Important destinies were hidden inside pebbles and crumpled leaves.

He dreamt that everything in the world – stones and rivers, leaves and fire – had a purpose which it was determined to carry out with the utmost rigour, but he also understood that it was possible sometimes to persuade things to a different purpose.

From Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a novel by Susanna Clarke (2004)

An early post in this blog described my childhood love of the idea of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, contrasted with much less greater enthusiasm for King Arthur and Round Table:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/robin-hood-what-is-appeal.html

Indeed, although I have written a fair bit about the Arthurian legends over the years, I am not really much interested by the King or his knights, but mostly by Merlin. The appeal of Robin has also faded - I think a lot of it was related to the boyhood ideal of a gang or club; especially one in which each person has a special ability and role.

For this reason I disliked the beautiful and feminine Maid Marian - My basic idea was that girls were fine, but not in a gang - unless they were tomboys.

In fact my best friend aged about 7-9 was a tomboy - not from shortage of available boys, but because I liked her best. The ultimate accolade was that she was 'as good as a boy' - she looked somewhat like a boy (short hair), could climb trees, run fast, and when playing football she was usually 'picked' as one of the earliest choices.

Anyway, the appeal of Robin Hood is simple enough - especially on a beautiful summer's day like today, when The Greenwood is clearly the place to be...

I am trying to escape from physics meatphors in my fundamental understanding of things (also called metaphysics - get it? meta-physics!). But physics metaphors are everywhere in writings on spirituality, consciousness and Christianity.

Consciousness is described as having lower and higher frequencies, or vibrational levels. Classical Christian metaphysics is very physicsy, as I have previously described - when people think of Love they often think of a kind of force-field.

It is terribly difficult to get away from this impersonal, non-living based ways of talking about fundamental things. Another example, when we imagine the beginnings of everything, we tend to see it as a 'big bang' or a massive fusion/ explosion/ condensation etc.

When we think of a religious revival, we may suppose the Holy Ghost (nowadays more often named the Holy Spirit which again is more physicsy) streaming through the earth and the people on it like cosmic rays, or maybe wind.

No wonder that 'Eastern' religions seem more plausible to intellectual Westerners, and in their most abstract forms - because these envisage ultimate reality in physics-like terms, as forces, energies, balance, dynamics - and the like. 

Yet I think that deep down the way things work is personal - not physical. That Christian Love is a personal thing, rather than a physical force - or rather than the physical force conception is merely an abstract model of what is truly personal; and indeed that physics itself is a simplified abstraction of complex personal attributes.

We recur to physics because it is grossly simplified, to the point where we feel we can use the concepts as tools, means to an end - but on the other hand we don't deeply understand physics concepts, because they are alien.

Therefore, I do try not to regard physics as descriptive of underlying reality but only as a radically-incomplete half-way-house kind of explanation - until I can re-frame my understanding at the highest level - which is persons, their character, their motivations.

I shall try to review this book without spoilers - by focusing upon its form and the impression it made upon me, rather than the specific content.

Overall, I would say that the book is OK; but unimpressive and underwhelming - I was never at any point grabbed by it, and had to push myself to continue reading.

(This was not because I am unfamiliar with reading plays in script form - in contrast I have read hundreds of modern plays, for my own pleasure or interest - e.g. nearly all of the canonical plays of the British theatre from Shakespeare's time, including all of GB Shaw, and most of the mainstream published British plays from about 1945-80.)

Like most popular theatre throughout history, the script for Cursed Child is at the level of farce and melodrama; and did not at any point rise to comedy or tragedy. The prose is merely functional (considerably below the quality of the Harry Potter novels), and never poetic - and it is only by poetic qualities to its language that a play (qua play) can rise above farce/ melodrama.

Aside, the vast majority of plays achieve their higher or deeper qualities by factors of the production rather than by their words - i.e. the special qualities of acting and stagecraft (plus topicality and novelty) - or by the working of music, in the case of musicals and operas.

In sum, the most impressive factors are usaully extraneous to the writing. and confined to the live performance situation and thus do not long survive -- Which is why the permanent literary canon of plays is so slender compared with that of poems or novels; and also compared with the vast number of plays that are - for a while - a popular or critical success.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/drama-is-nearly-all-ephemeral.html

The best way to approach reading The Cursed Child is to think of it as a dramatised Soap about Harry Potter et al; or as a canonical Fan Fiction - because its focus, scope and nature is most like FanFic. I mean by this than FanFic is mostly about 'shipping' or relation-ships, and takes a strategy of getting the characters and making them a different age, or putting them into a different setting, or taking minor characters and making them protagonists - which is what Cursed Child does.

The Soap aspects are dominant because Cursed Child is utterly without the underpinning spiritual, indeed religious, aspects that raise the Harry Potter novels to the level of works of a work of genius.

The highest point to which Cursed Child rises, is the level of interpersonal relationships considered from a 'utilitarian' ethical perspective - of that being best which makes the  most people happiest for most of the time, and especially that which minimises suffering. From this angle; there are several heart-warming moments - as well as several more unconvincing, contrived and clunky male-male interactions.

The 'moral' of the two play cycle (as it came-through to me) is superficial and implausible: that evil is caused by childhood loneliness. In other words, the plays have a very secular, modern 'psychodynamic' kind of ethic (whereas the moral of the HP novels was very traditional - that the most important virtues are Love and Courage; and their importance goes beyond mortal life).

So - should you read it? That depends.

If, like me, you found the Harry Potter novels to be a deep experience, then probably better not to read it; because this book may tend retrospectively to trivialise and 'poison' some of the best aspects of the novels (in  the way that a movie of a book more often does).

If, on the other hand, you regard the Potter novels as mainly about human relationships and intricate plotting, then the plays would probably be of interest.

And if you are a Potter FanFic writer or aficionado, then you will probably be this play's ideal audience. 

Serious Christianity has been all-but destroyed in the lives of people in Western Europe, and the US seems not far behind. But it would be hard, from here, to have a Christan revival, because the whole way of thinking of modern people has been so-narrowed that Christianity is now though-of like everything else.

Before Christianity could revive (in a meaningful sense, and not simply as part of a mainstream  secular-Leftish lifestyle) Western man must recover his ability to think spiritually, at a higher - or more accurately broader - level of consciousness: to think from the heart.

I mean that for most people, people who think in the normal, mainstream, modern Western way - which probably increases with each generation, reaching a peak in the current youth of social/ mass media addicts - their consciousness is materialistic, unspiritual, literalistic - and therefore cannot think about Christianity without reducing its content to the same form as bureaucracy, laws, regulations, scientific hypotheses, engineering blueprints... Or, on the other side of modern life, as ideology, brainwashing, advertising, hype, spin, propaganda, disinformation.

Typical modern Man is an utterly unspiritual being - his though has been narrowed to the theme of manipulation. He sees life as manipulation, and his condition as being-manipulated; and his hope rests on increased capability of self-manipulation.

The ideal condition of Modern Man is something along the line of having maximum control of one's own inputs - especially mass media and social inputs, but also mind and body-shaping receptions of inputs (e.g. by drugs, genetic modification, technological surfacing - cosmetics, plastic surgery etc. - and technological implants) - and therefore control of one's own 'self'.

In practise this means that the false self (which is malleable and purposively constructed by modern society under demonic influence) will eventually eliminate all activity-of and awareness-of the true self (which is divine in origin, and eternal). Modern Man is therefore consciously aiming at his own extinction - his ideal is to be... someone else, some-thing else. To live inside an artificial and constructed technological shell - and for that which lives within the shell to be equally artificial and constructed.

[Scenario: A typical modern Western youth - plugged-into  social media or the internet when not at work; lesiure consisting of intoxication of psychodramatic relationships... becomes A Christian. Life retains its form, but with a different content: different apps on the mobile phone, different websites to browse, perhaps a different social group and different kinds of exciting leisure activity to 'share' on social media. But what has really changed? Unless that needs more than content: needs time away from external controlling influences; needs to begin to live from himself or herself; needs to experience a wider range of 'inputs' - utterly unfamiliar to the secualr mind; needs to think in a different way and and from a different source.]

To escape from this willed-fate of self-manipulation for self-gratification, the 'content' of Christianity will not suffice, because all possible content is assimilated to the materialist way of thinking. Before there can be any meaningful revival of religious thinking there must first be a broadening of human consciousness - so that we recognise, take-seriously, and finally regard as potentially-valid that which lies beyond the current form and content of mainstream culture.

In sum, modern Western public discourse - and increasingly also private discourse - is a head and gut kind of think - bureaucratic rationalism, scientific materialism, legalism etc on one side,; with the self subordinated to the system - and on the other side the instinctive world of urges, impulses, desires - especially sexuality... given an absolute personal primacy of self-expression; with the world subordinated to the individual will.

What is required is an opening-out to the discourse of the heart, of intuition, of discernment; of a world beyond the five senses and the measurable and detectable-by-technology - and equally a world beyond the 'biological' instincts.

This is the expansion of consciousness we need - and I mean need: it is a necessity if we are to avoid the fate of damnation. Because a Christianity confined to the allowed-scope, the perceptual field, of modern Western culture is not a saving faith - it is merely a mainstream institution and a mainstream lifestyle.

As nearly-always, for beneficial change we need two things, not one - and they must follow fast the one upon the other or else secualr modernity will heal-over and leave one or another, incomplete and pretty-much-useless, half-way house of either lifestyle Christianity (new content but maainstream form) or New Age spirituality (new form but mainstream content).

Christianity and Consciousness both - Content with Form - new things to think and a new way of thinking.