Thoreau was probably the first writer of the Romantic movement (called Transcendentalism in New England) that I deeply engaged-with, some four decades ago; and he has continued to be a favourite - I have read several scores of books by and about him. I regard Thoreau as one of the greatest prose writers ever, a genius of high rank, and one with whom I feel a special affinity.
But...
But if considered in terms of the evolutionary development of human consciousness, Thoreau was a dead-end; and indeed a clear exemplar of where Romanticism went wrong and failed to fulfil its destiny as intended the future of Man.
In the first place, Thoreau abandoned Christianity - replacing it with a very relativistic, fluid, not really serious, imprecise kind of deism and interest in Hinduism. This was a disaster, intellectually speaking; because it is never clear in Thoreau whether he regards nature as truly meaningful, or merely a 'projection' of his own psychological wishes. Indeed, there are passages of Thoreau in which he seems to regard the world almost solipsistically - as if the essence of his relationship with the world was only the maximisation of his own psychological gratifications. In the Economy chapter of Walden he explicitly depicts Life as a zero-sum transaction between his own selfishness and the world's demands on him; and expresses a determination that he will get the best of this bargain.
By abandoning any serious theism; Thoreau rendered his entire thought arbitrary - and opening his interpretations to the gravitational pull of the modern hedonic bottom-line of Life-as-therapy. It is in this sense that Thoreau can justly be called escapist; in that he advocates (and to some extent practised - although not consistently) the idea of avoiding responsibility, living for the moment (ie short-term gratification), living for oneself (pleasing oneself, self-training an indifference to the evaluations of anybody else).
But, putting that aside - let us concentrate on Thoreau's consciousness. In the autobiographical Walden, Thoreau's own consciousness is depicted in a very appealing fashion. The Thoreau character in the book lives in nature in a fashion and with a thoroughness that is most appealing to alienated modern Man: he notices everything in nature and is sensitive to the slightest changes, he responds powerfully, and is deeply-satisfied by his responses... His whole life is depicted as simply moving from one intense, epiphanic experience to another - all the while in an elevated, ecstatic stream of consciousness...
Of course this is writing. And Walden was written and re-written many times over many years - it is a carefully, brilliantly, crafted artifact - it is not an account of Thoreau's actual life or his mind. If we compare the book Walden with Thoreau's journals, we can see that his working life at about this time consisted of walking and writing; he would take walks, during walks he would make notes, and then he would write-up these walks for his journal; the journals were then the source of his books (some of them only published posthumously). The walks, the life, the experiences were (in a sense) fuel for the writing.
However, the point is that Thoreau's consciousness was a modern self-consciousness; he was not immersed-in nature in the way that American Indians were (or seemed to be). Thoreau had a great love for, and knowledge of, the American Indians - but the consciousness he saw in them was not his own consciousness. They were in nature in a largely unselfconscious and passively-accepting way that was utterly alien to Thoreau. By contrast, when Thoreau experienced nature it was purposively, to be remembered, reflected-on and written-about.
My point here is that this actuality is concealed in Walden and the other books. The Thoreau character is depicted rather as if he were himself an Indian.
In essence, Thoreau's consciousness - his experience of Life, including Nature - took place with full self-consciousness and in thinking. (And of course writing - but primarily in thinking.) Yet he did not depict himself as a man who experienced Life in the way he actually did; and furthermore, he seemed to regard the actuality as an intrinsically second-rate and still-alienated way of being.
My contention is that for Thoreau to have taken to completion the impulse of Romanticism, he would have needed to depict himself as he was: that is, a man who lived primarily in thinking. It was in thinking, self-consciously, in full alertness, that Thoreau was aware of Nature and of himself in nature - and the two were brought together deliberately, purposively, in the process of actual thinking.
Yet the yearning, the aspiration, the hope of Thoreau is seemingly for a life immersed and unselfconscious; a life like an idealised Indian who simply is, within nature, a part of nature.
What would have been needed for Thoreau to fulfil the destiny of Romanticism, would have been for him to develop a Christian understanding of the world as creation, as having meaning and purpose and himself as a part of this - but with his own unique role; an agent and an active co-creator, not merely a passive component.
And Thoreau would need to have recognised that his own self-conscious thinking was not only the place and activity within which he actually lived; but that this was a good thing, indeed the best thing! Instead of implicitly denying (by leaving-out) the aware observer, his world view should have recognised that this was exactly his destiny.
It would have been a matter of validating in theory what he actually did in practice.
And instead of trying to lose-himself in the epiphanic moment, and claiming that the moment included all; Thoreau should have aimed at strengthening his active, aware thinking so that it could match and surpass the power of the unselfconscious, passive, immersed experience.
This would, of course, have entailed a recognition that thinking is not merely a second-rate version of experience; not merely a pale reflection of the engaged life; but that thinking is Real Life; that thinking is real, really-real - that, in thinking, Man is potentially tasting the divine life and and becoming an actual co-creator.
In saying that about what Thoreau should have done, I am asserting also that Thoreau really could have done this. Had he made different choices, he really could have taken this other path I outline above.
Why did he not? Well, in a nutshell, because he made bad decisions, wrong decisions - he equated Christianity (and theism) with Calvinism and churches and rejected both; he accepted that thinking was merely theory and experience was superior; he focused more upon crafting a work of genius (Walden) and seeking recognition for this, than on living life as a genius; he came to regard politics, and telling other people what was right and what to do, as being more urgently important than Man living a truly spiritual life - or, at least, he dishonestly tried to conflate the two.
The work that Thoreau chose not to do has still not been done; although we who live now have the good fortune that Owen Barfield has been able to explain all this; building on the insights of the early Rudolf Steiner.
But the primary task remains; and the solution has been indicated in theory and our task is to realise it in practice; in our own lives. The task is to live spiritually, as the Thoreau character mostly does as depicted in Walden. But to realise that to attain this entails a new and better kind of thinking, which is more like that practiced by Thoreau in the process of writing Walden.
This entails achieving a metaphysical understanding of thinking which recognises its validity and potential; and then practising this in our own living, as best we can - and (while patiently) this as our first, most urgent and significant priority.
Thursday 10 August 2017
Taliesin - Bard of Britain. Written by John Fitzgerald and illustrated by Rob Floyd
Three drops of inspiration, by Rob Floyd
There is a treat for those who love Welsh and Arthurian legend over at Albion Awakening - written by John Fitzgerald and illustrated by his friend and collaborator Rob Floyd:
The whole thing is at Albion Awakening
Notice of the new movie Dunkirk
This can be brief: Dunkirk is one of the best movies I have seen.
I was rather dragged-along to the cinema by my wife, who is currently reading the history of World War II; but from a couple of minutes into the movie I was gripped, held, and never let go until the end. It is extremely exciting, deeply moving, indeed inspiring.
(And - related - there is no trace whatsover of political correctness - what a blessed relief that was!)
The movie seems very original in many ways: it is done as a classical epic, when we are thrown into the middle of action without set-up or explanation. It has little (but telling) dialogue. There is no padding - every scene tells. It relies on excellent acting rather than stars.
That said, it was almost unbearably affecting at times - both positively as well as negatively. Indeed, the moment when I came nearest to losing control, and had to gulp-back an actual sob - not entirely effectively, was actually the happiest scene. But it would be hard to watch the movie again, knowing the effect it will have.
Anyway, I hope have said enough that you can make up your own mind about whether this is the kind of thing you want to experience.
I was rather dragged-along to the cinema by my wife, who is currently reading the history of World War II; but from a couple of minutes into the movie I was gripped, held, and never let go until the end. It is extremely exciting, deeply moving, indeed inspiring.
(And - related - there is no trace whatsover of political correctness - what a blessed relief that was!)
The movie seems very original in many ways: it is done as a classical epic, when we are thrown into the middle of action without set-up or explanation. It has little (but telling) dialogue. There is no padding - every scene tells. It relies on excellent acting rather than stars.
That said, it was almost unbearably affecting at times - both positively as well as negatively. Indeed, the moment when I came nearest to losing control, and had to gulp-back an actual sob - not entirely effectively, was actually the happiest scene. But it would be hard to watch the movie again, knowing the effect it will have.
Anyway, I hope have said enough that you can make up your own mind about whether this is the kind of thing you want to experience.
Wednesday 9 August 2017
We need to cure our impatient addiction to understanding, predicting and shaping the world (it just leads to fakery, anyway)
Modern people have an impatient addictive compulsion towards understanding, predicting and intervening in the world to change it in more gratifying directions - and being both modern and secular; they combine this impatient addiction with short-termist selfishness.
The combination of demanding Capability-Now results in error and dishonesty on a scale never before seen - with the global We Can Control The Future Climate Of The Earth (if only you will give us enough power) Scam utterly-dwarfing any self-deceptive idiocy of earlier times.
Attempts to introduce some degree of critical thinking or prudence into public policy have been completely without effect; so I think we can only begin to break-out of the destructive cycle of dishonest motivations, fake knowledge and fake technology by first stepping back from the pernicious urge to shape everything in-line with whatever today's urgent imperative happens to be being-peddled by the mass media.
But this, of course, will not work nor even be attempted unless embedded in a large scale religious perspective that informs the human condition and our personal destiny; but if we do have such a perspective then we can and should take several large steps back from the interventional mania - which is wholly manipulated by what David Icke has neatly termed the Problem-Reaction-Solution news cycle.
That is, the Western rulers create a problem, which evokes a reaction - and then they offer a (pre-planned) 'solution' that is calculated to maintain and amplify the original problem (this being conducted via the mainstream mass media).
Think of mainstream discourse on immigration, terrorism, education, poverty, foreign policy... No 'solution' ever 'solves' the problem; instead all 'solutions' feed the problem.
So long as we respond to every manipulated 'outrage' with a reflex and urgent demand for solutions, this will just continue happening and happening; and the underlying structural reality will just keep getting worse and worse.
We need to start relating to the world in a baseline fashion more like that of young children or hunter gatherers - that is, we need to acknowledge the realities of the world rather than trying to manipulate the world.
Insofar as modern Western Man really has learnt to manipulate the world in some ways; this has been a product of the sustained and honest effort of a relatively small number of well-motivated individuals - if the effort is badly-motivated, too short or poisoned by hype, spin, and lies - then the results are guaranteed to be bad, one way or the other.
Absent Truth, Beauty and Virtue we will not, in fact, be manipulating the world, but instead facilitating the manipulation-of ourselves.
The combination of demanding Capability-Now results in error and dishonesty on a scale never before seen - with the global We Can Control The Future Climate Of The Earth (if only you will give us enough power) Scam utterly-dwarfing any self-deceptive idiocy of earlier times.
Attempts to introduce some degree of critical thinking or prudence into public policy have been completely without effect; so I think we can only begin to break-out of the destructive cycle of dishonest motivations, fake knowledge and fake technology by first stepping back from the pernicious urge to shape everything in-line with whatever today's urgent imperative happens to be being-peddled by the mass media.
But this, of course, will not work nor even be attempted unless embedded in a large scale religious perspective that informs the human condition and our personal destiny; but if we do have such a perspective then we can and should take several large steps back from the interventional mania - which is wholly manipulated by what David Icke has neatly termed the Problem-Reaction-Solution news cycle.
That is, the Western rulers create a problem, which evokes a reaction - and then they offer a (pre-planned) 'solution' that is calculated to maintain and amplify the original problem (this being conducted via the mainstream mass media).
Think of mainstream discourse on immigration, terrorism, education, poverty, foreign policy... No 'solution' ever 'solves' the problem; instead all 'solutions' feed the problem.
So long as we respond to every manipulated 'outrage' with a reflex and urgent demand for solutions, this will just continue happening and happening; and the underlying structural reality will just keep getting worse and worse.
We need to start relating to the world in a baseline fashion more like that of young children or hunter gatherers - that is, we need to acknowledge the realities of the world rather than trying to manipulate the world.
Insofar as modern Western Man really has learnt to manipulate the world in some ways; this has been a product of the sustained and honest effort of a relatively small number of well-motivated individuals - if the effort is badly-motivated, too short or poisoned by hype, spin, and lies - then the results are guaranteed to be bad, one way or the other.
Absent Truth, Beauty and Virtue we will not, in fact, be manipulating the world, but instead facilitating the manipulation-of ourselves.
William James (in 1909) on the fundamental problems of mainstream classical Christian theology
In this passage, from A Pluralistic Universe, of 1909, a set of lectures by the most eminent of US philosophers William James, expresses very exactly my own view of what is fundamentally wrong with the normal mainstream Christian philosophy. It is telling that these remarks come from a century ago; and of course such matters have become much clearer and more extreme since then.
On the surface level, it is for such reasons that Western culture will not, indeed cannot, go back to traditional forms of Christianity; but the deeper reason is that Man's consciousness has changed, has developed according to divine destiny; and Christians need to - and eventually they will - attain a basic (metaphysical) understanding which reflects this changed consciousness.
**
The generic term spiritualism, which I began by using merely as the opposite of materialism, thus subdivides into two species, the more intimate one of which is monistic and the less intimate dualistic. The dualistic species is the theism that reached its elaboration in the scholastic philosophy, while the monistic species is the pantheism spoken of sometimes simply as idealism, and sometimes as 'post-kantian' or 'absolute' idealism. Dualistic theism is professed as firmly as ever at all catholic seats of learning, whereas it has of late years tended to disappear at our british and american universities, and to be replaced by a monistic pantheism more or less open or disguised. I have an impression that ever since T.H. Green's time absolute idealism has been decidedly in the ascendent at Oxford. It is in the ascendent at my own university of Harvard.
Absolute idealism attains, I said, to the more intimate point of view; but the statement needs some explanation. So far as theism represents the world as God's world, and God as what Matthew Arnold called a magnified non-natural man, it would seem as if the inner quality of the world remained human, and as if our relations with it might be intimate enough—for what is best in ourselves appears then also outside of ourselves, and we and the universe are of the same spiritual species. So far, so good, then; and one might consequently ask, What more of intimacy do you require? To which the answer is that to be like a thing is not as intimate a relation as to be substantially fused into it, to form one continuous soul and body with it; and that pantheistic idealism, making us entitatively one with God, attains this higher reach of intimacy.
The theistic conception, picturing God and his creation as entities distinct from each other, still leaves the human subject outside of the deepest reality in the universe. God is from eternity complete, it says, and sufficient unto himself; he throws off the world by a free act and as an extraneous substance, and he throws off man as a third substance, extraneous to both the world and himself. Between them, God says 'one,' the world says 'two,' and man says 'three,'—that is the orthodox theistic view. And orthodox theism has been so jealous of God's glory that it has taken pains to exaggerate everything in the notion of him that could make for isolation and separateness. Page upon page in scholastic books go to prove that God is in no sense implicated by his creative act, or involved in his creation. That his relation to the creatures he has made should make any difference to him, carry any consequence, or qualify his being, is repudiated as a pantheistic slur upon his self-sufficingness. I said a moment ago that theism treats us and God as of the same species, but from the orthodox point of view that was a slip of language. God and his creatures are toto genere distinct in the scholastic theology, they have absolutely nothing in common; nay, it degrades God to attribute to him any generic nature whatever; he can be classed with nothing. There is a sense, then, in which philosophic theism makes us outsiders and keeps us foreigners in relation to God, in which, at any rate, his connexion with us appears as unilateral and not reciprocal. His action can affect us, but he can never be affected by our reaction. Our relation, in short, is not a strictly social relation. Of course in common men's religion the relation is believed to be social, but that is only one of the many differences between religion and theology.
This essential dualism of the theistic view has all sorts of collateral consequences. Man being an outsider and a mere subject to God, not his intimate partner, a character of externality invades the field. God is not heart of our heart and reason of our reason, but our magistrate, rather; and mechanically to obey his commands, however strange they may be, remains our only moral duty. Conceptions of criminal law have in fact played a great part in defining our relations with him. Our relations with speculative truth show the same externality. One of our duties is to know truth, and rationalist thinkers have always assumed it to be our sovereign duty. But in scholastic theism we find truth already instituted and established without our help, complete apart from our knowing; and the most we can do is to acknowledge it passively and adhere to it, altho such adhesion as ours can make no jot of difference to what is adhered to. The situation here again is radically dualistic. It is not as if the world came to know itself, or God came to know himself, partly through us, as pantheistic idealists have maintained, but truth exists per se and absolutely, by God's grace and decree, no matter who of us knows it or is ignorant, and it would continue to exist unaltered, even though we finite knowers were all annihilated.
It has to be confessed that this dualism and lack of intimacy has always operated as a drag and handicap on Christian thought. Orthodox theology has had to wage a steady fight within the schools against the various forms of pantheistic heresy which the mystical experiences of religious persons, on the one hand, and the formal or aesthetic superiorities of monism to dualism, on the other, kept producing. God as intimate soul and reason of the universe has always seemed to some people a more worthy conception than God as external creator. So conceived, he appeared to unify the world more perfectly, he made it less finite and mechanical, and in comparison with such a God an external creator seemed more like the product of a childish fancy. I have been told by Hindoos that the great obstacle to the spread of Christianity in their country is the puerility of our dogma of creation. It has not sweep and infinity enough to meet the requirements of even the illiterate natives of India.
Assuredly most members of this audience are ready to side with Hinduism in this matter. Those of us who are sexagenarians have witnessed in our own persons one of those gradual mutations of intellectual climate, due to innumerable influences, that make the thought of a past generation seem as foreign to its successor as if it were the expression of a different race of men. The theological machinery that spoke so livingly to our ancestors, with its finite age of the world, its creation out of nothing, its juridical morality and eschatology, its relish for rewards and punishments, its treatment of God as an external contriver, an 'intelligent and moral governor,' sounds as odd to most of us as if it were some outlandish savage religion.
From A Pluralistic Universe by William James, 1909 Available at Project Gutenberg.
On the surface level, it is for such reasons that Western culture will not, indeed cannot, go back to traditional forms of Christianity; but the deeper reason is that Man's consciousness has changed, has developed according to divine destiny; and Christians need to - and eventually they will - attain a basic (metaphysical) understanding which reflects this changed consciousness.
**
The generic term spiritualism, which I began by using merely as the opposite of materialism, thus subdivides into two species, the more intimate one of which is monistic and the less intimate dualistic. The dualistic species is the theism that reached its elaboration in the scholastic philosophy, while the monistic species is the pantheism spoken of sometimes simply as idealism, and sometimes as 'post-kantian' or 'absolute' idealism. Dualistic theism is professed as firmly as ever at all catholic seats of learning, whereas it has of late years tended to disappear at our british and american universities, and to be replaced by a monistic pantheism more or less open or disguised. I have an impression that ever since T.H. Green's time absolute idealism has been decidedly in the ascendent at Oxford. It is in the ascendent at my own university of Harvard.
Absolute idealism attains, I said, to the more intimate point of view; but the statement needs some explanation. So far as theism represents the world as God's world, and God as what Matthew Arnold called a magnified non-natural man, it would seem as if the inner quality of the world remained human, and as if our relations with it might be intimate enough—for what is best in ourselves appears then also outside of ourselves, and we and the universe are of the same spiritual species. So far, so good, then; and one might consequently ask, What more of intimacy do you require? To which the answer is that to be like a thing is not as intimate a relation as to be substantially fused into it, to form one continuous soul and body with it; and that pantheistic idealism, making us entitatively one with God, attains this higher reach of intimacy.
The theistic conception, picturing God and his creation as entities distinct from each other, still leaves the human subject outside of the deepest reality in the universe. God is from eternity complete, it says, and sufficient unto himself; he throws off the world by a free act and as an extraneous substance, and he throws off man as a third substance, extraneous to both the world and himself. Between them, God says 'one,' the world says 'two,' and man says 'three,'—that is the orthodox theistic view. And orthodox theism has been so jealous of God's glory that it has taken pains to exaggerate everything in the notion of him that could make for isolation and separateness. Page upon page in scholastic books go to prove that God is in no sense implicated by his creative act, or involved in his creation. That his relation to the creatures he has made should make any difference to him, carry any consequence, or qualify his being, is repudiated as a pantheistic slur upon his self-sufficingness. I said a moment ago that theism treats us and God as of the same species, but from the orthodox point of view that was a slip of language. God and his creatures are toto genere distinct in the scholastic theology, they have absolutely nothing in common; nay, it degrades God to attribute to him any generic nature whatever; he can be classed with nothing. There is a sense, then, in which philosophic theism makes us outsiders and keeps us foreigners in relation to God, in which, at any rate, his connexion with us appears as unilateral and not reciprocal. His action can affect us, but he can never be affected by our reaction. Our relation, in short, is not a strictly social relation. Of course in common men's religion the relation is believed to be social, but that is only one of the many differences between religion and theology.
This essential dualism of the theistic view has all sorts of collateral consequences. Man being an outsider and a mere subject to God, not his intimate partner, a character of externality invades the field. God is not heart of our heart and reason of our reason, but our magistrate, rather; and mechanically to obey his commands, however strange they may be, remains our only moral duty. Conceptions of criminal law have in fact played a great part in defining our relations with him. Our relations with speculative truth show the same externality. One of our duties is to know truth, and rationalist thinkers have always assumed it to be our sovereign duty. But in scholastic theism we find truth already instituted and established without our help, complete apart from our knowing; and the most we can do is to acknowledge it passively and adhere to it, altho such adhesion as ours can make no jot of difference to what is adhered to. The situation here again is radically dualistic. It is not as if the world came to know itself, or God came to know himself, partly through us, as pantheistic idealists have maintained, but truth exists per se and absolutely, by God's grace and decree, no matter who of us knows it or is ignorant, and it would continue to exist unaltered, even though we finite knowers were all annihilated.
It has to be confessed that this dualism and lack of intimacy has always operated as a drag and handicap on Christian thought. Orthodox theology has had to wage a steady fight within the schools against the various forms of pantheistic heresy which the mystical experiences of religious persons, on the one hand, and the formal or aesthetic superiorities of monism to dualism, on the other, kept producing. God as intimate soul and reason of the universe has always seemed to some people a more worthy conception than God as external creator. So conceived, he appeared to unify the world more perfectly, he made it less finite and mechanical, and in comparison with such a God an external creator seemed more like the product of a childish fancy. I have been told by Hindoos that the great obstacle to the spread of Christianity in their country is the puerility of our dogma of creation. It has not sweep and infinity enough to meet the requirements of even the illiterate natives of India.
Assuredly most members of this audience are ready to side with Hinduism in this matter. Those of us who are sexagenarians have witnessed in our own persons one of those gradual mutations of intellectual climate, due to innumerable influences, that make the thought of a past generation seem as foreign to its successor as if it were the expression of a different race of men. The theological machinery that spoke so livingly to our ancestors, with its finite age of the world, its creation out of nothing, its juridical morality and eschatology, its relish for rewards and punishments, its treatment of God as an external contriver, an 'intelligent and moral governor,' sounds as odd to most of us as if it were some outlandish savage religion.
From A Pluralistic Universe by William James, 1909 Available at Project Gutenberg.
Tuesday 8 August 2017
What is Romanticism? How should the relations of men and women be understood? The key to our destiny
Romanticism is the future, even after more than 200 years of its incompleteness, its failure; because Romanticism is the only movement of honest men's minds that is a third path: not the past of institutionally-based religious traditionalism; not the present of secular Leftist materialist individuality; but a future of individually-based religiousness.
Romanticism is based on the texture of life itself, and the discernment of the heart. It is the antithesis of the bureaucratic, office life and of the shallow, atomised, emotional manipulations of modern mass media and leisure; it also rejects the ideals of obedience, submission and group-conformity that traditionalism put at the centre of its moral systems.
Romanticism takes its measure from the texture of life and finds what it seeks in the best moments of actual life, and in a more sustained fashion in the romantic arts.
For example in what-it-is that makes the world of Lord of the Rings so deeply appealing to some modern minds, or (to go back to its beginning) the worlds of Blake, Wordsworth, Goethe, Novalis... It is that quality of enchantment, of being-enchanted - but being-enchanted not deceptively, not as a false day-dream; but the kind of enchantment that is a disenchantment, a clarification and revealing of beauty, truth and reality.
(A matter almost of dramatising life, and knowing it is dramatised, and living-in this drama.)
Romanticism is what makes us look around with such profound dissatisfaction at culture; at mass culture, official culture, high culture, at the culture of existing churches and their services; at the people who speak out in the public realms and what they say and - even more - how they say it. They are all talking heads or dancing puppets, they are all disengaged and lost, they are never serious about the realities of mortal life!
What we need, and need is the word for it; is the element represented by elves in Lord of the Rings - indeed we need that and more. But we do need a sense of life as continuing creation, meaning and purpose and of us each as engaged in this living, conscious activity. We need to be within this aliveness and consciousness - and at the same time to know that we are within it - so we may rest and work in this state without evasion or blindness: the maximum of consciousness.
Enchantment, magic - these are terms we use. Children - young children - experience life this way; but they are inside the stream of life, and hardly conscious of themselves; whereas we are all overwhelming conscious of our-selves except when we (our selves) deliberately self-obliterate with the mass media, with drugs, with numbing frenzy or despair.
Only God can produce and sustain the enchantment we seek - there is no secular magic: it cannot even be simulated.
...Think of the most wonderful of godless utopias: William Morris's News From Nowhere (1890) - a great creative genius pulls-out the stops to depict the best world he can imagine, and it is utterly dead! So much more the ideal societies of now - those vile politically-correct utopias of micro-managed abstract symbolism, made by what people 'ought' to enjoy but actually can't; and yet enjoyment is their only bottom-line. Utopias of guilt and despair made worse by faked morality and manufactured appreciation - like the depicted worlds of propaganda and public relations emanating from committees of the managerial drones and psychopaths who run modern institutions, here and now...
Enchantment comes only from a group that is made of individuals affectively-affiliated - that is from families and marriages, and from real friendships (which are precious but exceedingly rare, especially nowadays; modern friendships are nearly-all mutual emotional exploitation and tactical alliances). All this needs a totally different conception than exists of what life is about, and how life needs to be arranged: around-what life needs to be arranged.
At present we can barely even speak about this - especially not in the public arena. And of course nobody can be persuaded - the need to be persuaded and resistance to persuasion are the depth of the problem and why it has resisted solution for 200-plus years...
No that is wrong, it is not 'the problem' but we ourselves who have been and are resisting solution for 200-plus years; trapped by our fear of awareness, our desire for pleasure, our lust for power; trapped by the forces of darkness which offer short term gratifications of many kinds, and promise protection from horror and despair, and the misery of those we most resent. We are being willingly led by the nose into our doom - and that is why we are damned: I mean the willingness, expressed by the stubborn, deep-rooted resistance to embarking on the proper life we used-to know we ought-to be doing.
If we are experts in anything, it is in self-blinding; failing to see the obvious - stridently-denying the almost-overwhelming in our-selves; which is the radical, profound, incurable unsatisfactoriness of present and past living - and the different and only-yet-imagined nature of that which we are destined to strive-for.
As a concrete example - that vital subject of the relations between men and women.
How can anybody (I mean from our hearts, here and now) be happy with how this matter has been approached; how it has been enforced at any point in history up to the present, and with the public ideas proposed for the future?
The current state of sexual politics is evil; but the past state was also wrong, distorted, crudely-simplistic... And the problem was the nature of past past societies in which the individual was forced to conform to group ideals - it was the group which was dominant; and since each human is unique, every possible, every imaginable group ideal represents a harsh distortion and a mental tyranny.
The only future our hearts endorse is one in which men and women are complementary individuals; that is both known to be different and complementary (the two complements making one) and individuals (each different from every other in the past, present and the future).
(If our deepest understanding of the relationship between a man and a woman can be captured in a rule, law, bureacratic regulation; then we know for sure it is wrong. I mean we - each of us - know for sure. In our hearts we know it. And don't tell me that we 'have to' have this, that or some-other principle - I am not interested in expediency, indeed expediency is precisely what is paralysing our thought. We must first think - indeed imagine, fully - with absolute clarity, about what should-be; expediency is entirely a different matter.)
This is a situation that cannot be captured, and ought not be controlled, by any form of groupish social organisation, any law or generalisation. It requires an entirely different basic understanding, a different logic.
And that goes back to the beginnings of Romanticism. The necessary logic was defined, albeit abstractly and in a way that is very difficult to understand, by Coleridge; in the concept of polarity or polar logic. But the answer was given, and we can make it clearer and simpler now that the pioneering and heavy-lifting has been done by a genius.
Let that be a guide... Until we have each reached a position from-which we can explain how the relations of men and women can be conceptualised such as to satisfy the deepest desires of our hearts - until such a time, we shall remain lost and despairing, and doomed to self-damnation.
Romanticism is based on the texture of life itself, and the discernment of the heart. It is the antithesis of the bureaucratic, office life and of the shallow, atomised, emotional manipulations of modern mass media and leisure; it also rejects the ideals of obedience, submission and group-conformity that traditionalism put at the centre of its moral systems.
Romanticism takes its measure from the texture of life and finds what it seeks in the best moments of actual life, and in a more sustained fashion in the romantic arts.
For example in what-it-is that makes the world of Lord of the Rings so deeply appealing to some modern minds, or (to go back to its beginning) the worlds of Blake, Wordsworth, Goethe, Novalis... It is that quality of enchantment, of being-enchanted - but being-enchanted not deceptively, not as a false day-dream; but the kind of enchantment that is a disenchantment, a clarification and revealing of beauty, truth and reality.
(A matter almost of dramatising life, and knowing it is dramatised, and living-in this drama.)
Romanticism is what makes us look around with such profound dissatisfaction at culture; at mass culture, official culture, high culture, at the culture of existing churches and their services; at the people who speak out in the public realms and what they say and - even more - how they say it. They are all talking heads or dancing puppets, they are all disengaged and lost, they are never serious about the realities of mortal life!
What we need, and need is the word for it; is the element represented by elves in Lord of the Rings - indeed we need that and more. But we do need a sense of life as continuing creation, meaning and purpose and of us each as engaged in this living, conscious activity. We need to be within this aliveness and consciousness - and at the same time to know that we are within it - so we may rest and work in this state without evasion or blindness: the maximum of consciousness.
Enchantment, magic - these are terms we use. Children - young children - experience life this way; but they are inside the stream of life, and hardly conscious of themselves; whereas we are all overwhelming conscious of our-selves except when we (our selves) deliberately self-obliterate with the mass media, with drugs, with numbing frenzy or despair.
Only God can produce and sustain the enchantment we seek - there is no secular magic: it cannot even be simulated.
...Think of the most wonderful of godless utopias: William Morris's News From Nowhere (1890) - a great creative genius pulls-out the stops to depict the best world he can imagine, and it is utterly dead! So much more the ideal societies of now - those vile politically-correct utopias of micro-managed abstract symbolism, made by what people 'ought' to enjoy but actually can't; and yet enjoyment is their only bottom-line. Utopias of guilt and despair made worse by faked morality and manufactured appreciation - like the depicted worlds of propaganda and public relations emanating from committees of the managerial drones and psychopaths who run modern institutions, here and now...
Enchantment comes only from a group that is made of individuals affectively-affiliated - that is from families and marriages, and from real friendships (which are precious but exceedingly rare, especially nowadays; modern friendships are nearly-all mutual emotional exploitation and tactical alliances). All this needs a totally different conception than exists of what life is about, and how life needs to be arranged: around-what life needs to be arranged.
At present we can barely even speak about this - especially not in the public arena. And of course nobody can be persuaded - the need to be persuaded and resistance to persuasion are the depth of the problem and why it has resisted solution for 200-plus years...
No that is wrong, it is not 'the problem' but we ourselves who have been and are resisting solution for 200-plus years; trapped by our fear of awareness, our desire for pleasure, our lust for power; trapped by the forces of darkness which offer short term gratifications of many kinds, and promise protection from horror and despair, and the misery of those we most resent. We are being willingly led by the nose into our doom - and that is why we are damned: I mean the willingness, expressed by the stubborn, deep-rooted resistance to embarking on the proper life we used-to know we ought-to be doing.
If we are experts in anything, it is in self-blinding; failing to see the obvious - stridently-denying the almost-overwhelming in our-selves; which is the radical, profound, incurable unsatisfactoriness of present and past living - and the different and only-yet-imagined nature of that which we are destined to strive-for.
As a concrete example - that vital subject of the relations between men and women.
How can anybody (I mean from our hearts, here and now) be happy with how this matter has been approached; how it has been enforced at any point in history up to the present, and with the public ideas proposed for the future?
The current state of sexual politics is evil; but the past state was also wrong, distorted, crudely-simplistic... And the problem was the nature of past past societies in which the individual was forced to conform to group ideals - it was the group which was dominant; and since each human is unique, every possible, every imaginable group ideal represents a harsh distortion and a mental tyranny.
The only future our hearts endorse is one in which men and women are complementary individuals; that is both known to be different and complementary (the two complements making one) and individuals (each different from every other in the past, present and the future).
(If our deepest understanding of the relationship between a man and a woman can be captured in a rule, law, bureacratic regulation; then we know for sure it is wrong. I mean we - each of us - know for sure. In our hearts we know it. And don't tell me that we 'have to' have this, that or some-other principle - I am not interested in expediency, indeed expediency is precisely what is paralysing our thought. We must first think - indeed imagine, fully - with absolute clarity, about what should-be; expediency is entirely a different matter.)
This is a situation that cannot be captured, and ought not be controlled, by any form of groupish social organisation, any law or generalisation. It requires an entirely different basic understanding, a different logic.
And that goes back to the beginnings of Romanticism. The necessary logic was defined, albeit abstractly and in a way that is very difficult to understand, by Coleridge; in the concept of polarity or polar logic. But the answer was given, and we can make it clearer and simpler now that the pioneering and heavy-lifting has been done by a genius.
Let that be a guide... Until we have each reached a position from-which we can explain how the relations of men and women can be conceptualised such as to satisfy the deepest desires of our hearts - until such a time, we shall remain lost and despairing, and doomed to self-damnation.
Sunday 6 August 2017
Spiritual Destruction or Awakening - The Choice is Ours
William Wildblood is on fine form at Albion Awakening - here is an excerpt:
Present day conditions are well nigh ideal for spiritual destruction. We have a comfortable material existence and a superficially plausible explanation for why life exists, plausible enough to satisfy those who aren't willing to look more deeply anyway, coupled with a technology that gives us an abundance of toys to distract us from our inner emptiness.
Furthermore the sexual revolution has led to a spiritual desensitivity which would have shocked our ancestors, the wisest of whom knew that releasing the sexual energy from a proper constraint (constraint not repression) is profoundly destructive on many levels, both spiritual and material. The wisest knew and the rest more or less followed, certainly in terms of how society and culture were ordered which is the important thing. Laws will always be broken but without law there is chaos, and that's what we have today if you observe from the vantage point of the spiritual plane.
Now this deferment of collapse can't go on forever but it seems it will go on for as long as possible, the better to entrap as many souls as possible in a downward spiral.
Continued...
Present day conditions are well nigh ideal for spiritual destruction. We have a comfortable material existence and a superficially plausible explanation for why life exists, plausible enough to satisfy those who aren't willing to look more deeply anyway, coupled with a technology that gives us an abundance of toys to distract us from our inner emptiness.
Furthermore the sexual revolution has led to a spiritual desensitivity which would have shocked our ancestors, the wisest of whom knew that releasing the sexual energy from a proper constraint (constraint not repression) is profoundly destructive on many levels, both spiritual and material. The wisest knew and the rest more or less followed, certainly in terms of how society and culture were ordered which is the important thing. Laws will always be broken but without law there is chaos, and that's what we have today if you observe from the vantage point of the spiritual plane.
Now this deferment of collapse can't go on forever but it seems it will go on for as long as possible, the better to entrap as many souls as possible in a downward spiral.
Continued...
Reincarnation versus Pre-mortal existence
The above is a live issue for me - because several of the thinkers on religion whom I most respect believe in (some version of) reincarnation - that is, of a 'system' by which people have more than one mortal, incarnate life.
Reincarnation is, indeed, apparently the usual belief of tribal 'hunter gatherer' peoples, who generally believe that souls are of a fixed number but may be re-born, and/or may transform to and from souls of animals and other beings; so it may seem that some intuition of this kind is 'built-into' human beings.
I suspect that what is actually built-in, but to degrees varying between individuals, is the sense or memory that our personal, individual life did not begin with our conception or birth; but that we had a previous existence before we were incarnated (i.e. before we got a body).
This, for me personally, is a basic datum; it is a solid feeling - that I personally existed before the time I had this mortal life and body.
But how to interpret this basic datum of pre-existence is where the major disagreement comes-in.
The usual idea among intellectuals in this modern corner of the earth over the past couple of hundred years is that this datum of pre-existence either does not exist or else that it is a delusion derived from wishful thinking, primitive and unscientific world views, immaturity, manipulation by ruling elites, or something or another... merely incoherent nonsense without any actual, or even possible, factual or evidential basis.
I am quite happy to acknowledge that the pre-existence datum is not universal to each and every individual; in the sense that many/ most people apparently cannot remember how differently they thought as a child, and many people apparently cannot introspect, and many people are dishonest; and quite a few people suffer from mental pathologies of various kinds, some of which so dominate their minds that they cannot be clear about much else...
Leaving that aside, my personal conviction is that this pre-existence datum is true; and/ but also that this, here-and-now, is the first and only time I have lived on earth with a body - this is my only incarnation.
Such is, indeed, the standard Mormon view which convinces me on intuitive grounds and by personal revelation; but it is perhaps unique among the overall majority of mankind of the past and present (Hindus and Buddhists for instance) who assert multiple reincarnations, and the majority of Christians who have asserted that our personal life was created by God from nothing at some point at or between conception and birth.
Like the tribal hunter-gatherers, Mormons tend to regard pre-existence as a datum - so that our essential souls or spirits or selves 'always have been' in some form or another, before they are incarnated. It follows that at any point some souls, spirits, selves are not incarnated - this perhaps being the basis of the 'spirit world' of the unseen.
There is disagreement over whether, or how, these non-incarnated spirits are present in this world, and the possible extent of our interaction; but my current understanding is that pre-mortal spiritual life is engaged with mortal life on earth - that these spirits are present and involved; and that is, I think, why some people (so many people) have a sense of having lived before their current lives, a sense of having lived in the past.
In other words; the datum is (I think) having been alive before this incarnation, and present and engaged with earthly life; but there is a difference of interpretation of this datum with some people (who believe in reincarnation) feeling that the datum implies past incarnate mortal lives; while other people (such as myself, and some Mormons) believing that the datum is due to our previous spirit existence being active in earthly affairs.
But whether as pre-mortal spirits or in previous incarnations; what may be the purpose of our prior involvement with earthly affairs? In principle, the reasons might include that we were present: 1. As servants, for the good of the mortals alive in that era; or 2. As learners, gathering experiences aimed-at our own long-term spiritual progress.
Or both. We may have been 'angels' - i.e. spirits who were helpers and messengers of the divine; and we may also have been experiencing, learning and becoming more spiritually advanced.
(And there is, of course, the dark side to be considered. As pre-mortal spirits, according to what seems to be given in Christian scriptures and revelations, some unincarnated spirits are evil anti-angels - actively intervening in mortal life but against the divine plan: hinderers rather than helpers. And some mortal incarnates also take the same side.)
Anyway - my point here is that If we agree on the truth of the datum of a reality-based sense of our personal pre-existence and involvement in earthly affairs; then there can be agreement that each of us has direct knowledge of previous eras (times and places) based on our own experiences.
Note: a further disagreement about the datum concerns the extent to which our pre-existence was defined. Some assert that pre-existence may include having lived as non-human entities, or as humans of the other sex; whereas my intuition is that we have 'always' been Men in general and men or women in particular; and that feelings of qualitatively-other identities are due to us having worked-with e.g. the other sex, animals, plants, minerals... rather than having actually-been e.g. the other sex, animals, plants, minerals. The confusion (as I interpret it) arises from our pre-mortal unincarnated and spiritual nature; which was less bounded, more overlapping, and with a much less-fully-differentiated 'self'.
Reincarnation is, indeed, apparently the usual belief of tribal 'hunter gatherer' peoples, who generally believe that souls are of a fixed number but may be re-born, and/or may transform to and from souls of animals and other beings; so it may seem that some intuition of this kind is 'built-into' human beings.
I suspect that what is actually built-in, but to degrees varying between individuals, is the sense or memory that our personal, individual life did not begin with our conception or birth; but that we had a previous existence before we were incarnated (i.e. before we got a body).
This, for me personally, is a basic datum; it is a solid feeling - that I personally existed before the time I had this mortal life and body.
But how to interpret this basic datum of pre-existence is where the major disagreement comes-in.
The usual idea among intellectuals in this modern corner of the earth over the past couple of hundred years is that this datum of pre-existence either does not exist or else that it is a delusion derived from wishful thinking, primitive and unscientific world views, immaturity, manipulation by ruling elites, or something or another... merely incoherent nonsense without any actual, or even possible, factual or evidential basis.
I am quite happy to acknowledge that the pre-existence datum is not universal to each and every individual; in the sense that many/ most people apparently cannot remember how differently they thought as a child, and many people apparently cannot introspect, and many people are dishonest; and quite a few people suffer from mental pathologies of various kinds, some of which so dominate their minds that they cannot be clear about much else...
Leaving that aside, my personal conviction is that this pre-existence datum is true; and/ but also that this, here-and-now, is the first and only time I have lived on earth with a body - this is my only incarnation.
Such is, indeed, the standard Mormon view which convinces me on intuitive grounds and by personal revelation; but it is perhaps unique among the overall majority of mankind of the past and present (Hindus and Buddhists for instance) who assert multiple reincarnations, and the majority of Christians who have asserted that our personal life was created by God from nothing at some point at or between conception and birth.
Like the tribal hunter-gatherers, Mormons tend to regard pre-existence as a datum - so that our essential souls or spirits or selves 'always have been' in some form or another, before they are incarnated. It follows that at any point some souls, spirits, selves are not incarnated - this perhaps being the basis of the 'spirit world' of the unseen.
There is disagreement over whether, or how, these non-incarnated spirits are present in this world, and the possible extent of our interaction; but my current understanding is that pre-mortal spiritual life is engaged with mortal life on earth - that these spirits are present and involved; and that is, I think, why some people (so many people) have a sense of having lived before their current lives, a sense of having lived in the past.
In other words; the datum is (I think) having been alive before this incarnation, and present and engaged with earthly life; but there is a difference of interpretation of this datum with some people (who believe in reincarnation) feeling that the datum implies past incarnate mortal lives; while other people (such as myself, and some Mormons) believing that the datum is due to our previous spirit existence being active in earthly affairs.
But whether as pre-mortal spirits or in previous incarnations; what may be the purpose of our prior involvement with earthly affairs? In principle, the reasons might include that we were present: 1. As servants, for the good of the mortals alive in that era; or 2. As learners, gathering experiences aimed-at our own long-term spiritual progress.
Or both. We may have been 'angels' - i.e. spirits who were helpers and messengers of the divine; and we may also have been experiencing, learning and becoming more spiritually advanced.
(And there is, of course, the dark side to be considered. As pre-mortal spirits, according to what seems to be given in Christian scriptures and revelations, some unincarnated spirits are evil anti-angels - actively intervening in mortal life but against the divine plan: hinderers rather than helpers. And some mortal incarnates also take the same side.)
Anyway - my point here is that If we agree on the truth of the datum of a reality-based sense of our personal pre-existence and involvement in earthly affairs; then there can be agreement that each of us has direct knowledge of previous eras (times and places) based on our own experiences.
Note: a further disagreement about the datum concerns the extent to which our pre-existence was defined. Some assert that pre-existence may include having lived as non-human entities, or as humans of the other sex; whereas my intuition is that we have 'always' been Men in general and men or women in particular; and that feelings of qualitatively-other identities are due to us having worked-with e.g. the other sex, animals, plants, minerals... rather than having actually-been e.g. the other sex, animals, plants, minerals. The confusion (as I interpret it) arises from our pre-mortal unincarnated and spiritual nature; which was less bounded, more overlapping, and with a much less-fully-differentiated 'self'.
Saturday 5 August 2017
The Method of Jesus - So absolutely right; but why so indirect?
Giving somebody the Gospels to read can provide a confusing experience. Assuming that Jesus was - through his life and ministry, trying to tell us something new and important, he went about it in a strange way. Why?
Why are the stories of Jesus's life mostly a matter of him telling parables, performing wonders and making enigmatic comments? What did he mean by this?
Owen Barfield has an astonishing chapter called The Mystery of the Kingdom in Saving the Appearances (1957) which suggests the answer. He analyses the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 20: 9-13; Mark 4: 9-12; Luke 8: 9-10) - in particular "For whoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance; but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away, even that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing, see not; and hearing, they hear not, neither do they understand."
Barfield remarks that, taken as it stands, this seems immoral, indeed brutal. But traced to the relevant implied passages of the Old Testament, the parable seems to be talking about idolatry - and in Jesus's time, the major Jewish idolatry was of Pharisaism: idolatry of The Law. That is, seeing the word of God as something 'out there', something literal, something interpreted by expert-rulers to which 'we' need (merely) to submit, passively.
To paraphrase Barfield (as I understand him) the suggestion is that Jesus is introducing a new era in which we must live from-within, from God-in-us, creatively and imaginatively. In the Gospels; Jesus himself seems to 'model' this life for us; living from the heart, from inner evaluations - by personal prayer, personal revelations, by intuitive and imaginative acts of many kinds.
Suddenly, the whole Method of Jesus seems to make sense! The parables are designed to compel people to use their imagination in understanding (or else, merely be confused) - in their very nature, parables are the opposite of legalism: they are non-rule-like, indirect, inexplicit/ implicit, un-paraphrase-able...
Much the same can be said of the miracles - their 'meaning' is not something that can satisfactorily be set out 'in prose' - in the same way that the meaning of a true poem cannot be set out in prose. And more generally, perhaps especially in John's Gospel (written by his beloved disciple, and one of the great artistic and philosophical geniuses of the ancient world - at least on a par with Plato); Jesus will seldom give a straight answer to a straight question - nearly always he is allusive, poetic, hinting...
The idea seems to be that to understand the Gospels we must meet the words and actions of Christ with a response from within ourselves - and nothing else will suffice! Attempts to extract a 'system of laws and instructions which can be codified and forced-upon people are thwarted (or such attempts at paraphrasing are made to feel, to the evaluation of our hearts, deeply unconvincing, obtuse, manipulative).
Barfield is saying that to someone 'that hath' the capacity to meet Jesus's words and actions with an imaginative response from that which is divine within them; then there is given understanding - and growth towards god-hood. But to someone 'that hath not' this capacity... well the whole thing seems absurd and nonsensical at best, and perhaps a cynical and brutal exercise in evasion and arrogance.
In cosmic terms; the life of Christ marks the (divinely intended) turning-point in the historical evolutionary unfolding consciousness of Man - the subtleties and many aspects of of which I will have to leave-aside at present. (Please read the chapter - and indeed the book; but don't expect a quick and easy comprehension.)
What I take from all this, is a new appreciation of the absolute appropriateness of what Jesus said and did, and the wrong-headed (indeed idolatrous) literalness with which this has been so often misinterpreted by those who 'hath not', who do not understand, who are seeking to make Christianity into just-another-religion of obedience to social control: of passive submission external laws, rituals and rules.
We cannot be given Christianity, we cannot be given an understanding of the meaning of Jesus; each person must gain this for himself or herself by developing within that which Christ wanted us to develop, and gave us the means of developing. But we, personally, must do it - and there are no shortcuts or signposted paths; the Method is active, creative, imaginative, intuitive.
How should I understand a poem, a painting, a piece of music? Think of the nature of the only true answer to such questions, and how an inner development of imagination is required... Analogously; 'what did Jesus teach; what did he mean?' are questions of the same general type.
Why are the stories of Jesus's life mostly a matter of him telling parables, performing wonders and making enigmatic comments? What did he mean by this?
Owen Barfield has an astonishing chapter called The Mystery of the Kingdom in Saving the Appearances (1957) which suggests the answer. He analyses the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 20: 9-13; Mark 4: 9-12; Luke 8: 9-10) - in particular "For whoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance; but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away, even that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing, see not; and hearing, they hear not, neither do they understand."
Barfield remarks that, taken as it stands, this seems immoral, indeed brutal. But traced to the relevant implied passages of the Old Testament, the parable seems to be talking about idolatry - and in Jesus's time, the major Jewish idolatry was of Pharisaism: idolatry of The Law. That is, seeing the word of God as something 'out there', something literal, something interpreted by expert-rulers to which 'we' need (merely) to submit, passively.
To paraphrase Barfield (as I understand him) the suggestion is that Jesus is introducing a new era in which we must live from-within, from God-in-us, creatively and imaginatively. In the Gospels; Jesus himself seems to 'model' this life for us; living from the heart, from inner evaluations - by personal prayer, personal revelations, by intuitive and imaginative acts of many kinds.
Suddenly, the whole Method of Jesus seems to make sense! The parables are designed to compel people to use their imagination in understanding (or else, merely be confused) - in their very nature, parables are the opposite of legalism: they are non-rule-like, indirect, inexplicit/ implicit, un-paraphrase-able...
Much the same can be said of the miracles - their 'meaning' is not something that can satisfactorily be set out 'in prose' - in the same way that the meaning of a true poem cannot be set out in prose. And more generally, perhaps especially in John's Gospel (written by his beloved disciple, and one of the great artistic and philosophical geniuses of the ancient world - at least on a par with Plato); Jesus will seldom give a straight answer to a straight question - nearly always he is allusive, poetic, hinting...
The idea seems to be that to understand the Gospels we must meet the words and actions of Christ with a response from within ourselves - and nothing else will suffice! Attempts to extract a 'system of laws and instructions which can be codified and forced-upon people are thwarted (or such attempts at paraphrasing are made to feel, to the evaluation of our hearts, deeply unconvincing, obtuse, manipulative).
Barfield is saying that to someone 'that hath' the capacity to meet Jesus's words and actions with an imaginative response from that which is divine within them; then there is given understanding - and growth towards god-hood. But to someone 'that hath not' this capacity... well the whole thing seems absurd and nonsensical at best, and perhaps a cynical and brutal exercise in evasion and arrogance.
In cosmic terms; the life of Christ marks the (divinely intended) turning-point in the historical evolutionary unfolding consciousness of Man - the subtleties and many aspects of of which I will have to leave-aside at present. (Please read the chapter - and indeed the book; but don't expect a quick and easy comprehension.)
What I take from all this, is a new appreciation of the absolute appropriateness of what Jesus said and did, and the wrong-headed (indeed idolatrous) literalness with which this has been so often misinterpreted by those who 'hath not', who do not understand, who are seeking to make Christianity into just-another-religion of obedience to social control: of passive submission external laws, rituals and rules.
We cannot be given Christianity, we cannot be given an understanding of the meaning of Jesus; each person must gain this for himself or herself by developing within that which Christ wanted us to develop, and gave us the means of developing. But we, personally, must do it - and there are no shortcuts or signposted paths; the Method is active, creative, imaginative, intuitive.
How should I understand a poem, a painting, a piece of music? Think of the nature of the only true answer to such questions, and how an inner development of imagination is required... Analogously; 'what did Jesus teach; what did he mean?' are questions of the same general type.
CS Lewis in Newcastle
In early 1943, CS Lewis and his brother came to Newcastle upon Tyne to give the Riddell Lectures; later published as The Abolition of Man - regarded by Owen Barfield (and some others) as Lewis's greatest essays of all.
The subject matter of the lectures, and a visit to Durham City 20 miles south, also provided the germ of That Hideous Strength (1945) - which is one of Lewis's most loved and influential novels (and Walter Hooper's favourite of all Lewis's works).
So an account of the Lewis brother's trip to the North East of England is of more than merely parochial significance - this is now freely available thanks to Joel Heck's Chronologically Lewis web resource.
The subject matter of the lectures, and a visit to Durham City 20 miles south, also provided the germ of That Hideous Strength (1945) - which is one of Lewis's most loved and influential novels (and Walter Hooper's favourite of all Lewis's works).
So an account of the Lewis brother's trip to the North East of England is of more than merely parochial significance - this is now freely available thanks to Joel Heck's Chronologically Lewis web resource.
Friday 4 August 2017
Advanced spiritual warfare: How the demonic powers are attempting (successfully) to hijack human imagination, the future evolution of consciousness, and the nature of perceived-reality
Towards the end of his magnum opus Saving the Appearances (1957), Owen Barfield makes a vital, but chilling, point about the future of human imagination and how it was (and is, much more than in 1957) being poisoned and inverted by artists, writers, musicians and other creative contributors to the mass media (including especially the avant garde, high-brow, elite, academically-validated and critically-approved media).
[Edited from pages 145-6]
Imagination is not, as some poets thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. But so long as art remained primarily mimetic [i.e. 'realistic'], the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature.
[But now that the artist has become self-conscious of his ability to create non-natural phenomena; he can create aberrations].
In so far as these aberrations are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has personally experienced the world he represents. In insofar as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move towards seeing the world that way - and ultimately, therefore, seeing that kind of world.
Barfield is saying that imaginings of evil will tend, more and more as they become more popular, to become realised in the actual world as we experience it.
In short, popular and powerful evil imaginings become social reality.
As modern Man comes to recognise that his imagination is an inextricable and necessary part of his perception of reality, and as he becomes more free to use his imagination; so there is a new possibility of corruption by imagination.
Barfield gives the example of the kind of surreal-hideous fantasy pioneered by Salvador Dali - but nowadays (and increasingly over the past fifty years) this kind of thing is the average content of majority, mainstream' officially-endorsed 'art' of all kinds. We live in a world in which 'subversive' is a term of artistic approbation.
In terms of the destined and desirable consciousness state of Final Participation (in which we become aware of the ways in which our minds, our thinking, participates in the making of the world as we experience it); it is therefore vital to become aware of the effects of our personal choices in the creation of perceived-reality - that is, the effects of our choices on the nature of the world, as we know it.
Since we cannot, in the end, resist Final Participation (it is our destiny), we have a stark choice as to whether it will be deployed for Good or evil.
Barfield hopes that our choices will be 'exercised with the profoundest sense of responsibility, and with the deepest thankfulness and piety towards the world as it was originally [unconsciously] given to us in original participation'.
In short, Final Participation will be positive and valuable only in a Christian context; even more shortly - it is our task and responsibility to return to the essential values and realities of childhood and early tribalism, but this time in a willed and conscious fashion.
This, I believe, relates to the hundreds of years of lack of success and retreat by traditionalism in the face of Leftism/ Liberalism/ Progressivism. Yes, we do need to return to the traditional values which were once natural spontaneous, unselfconscious; but no, this cannot be done by a restoration of the unconscious traditional situation; by instinct, by simply perceiving and accepting the traditional values in the world around us. That possibility is past (and was, anyway, pagan in its purest form).
Instead, we need to move forwards to an aware, thinking version of traditional values - which are not identical with, but which will retain the heart and soul and motivations of tradition; which will, however, not be identical-with traditional values, as if the traditions were a recipe for good living.
My understanding is that we cannot, and should not try to, recreate the past (not least because the fullest and most natural spontaneous past consciousness was pagan; hence only partially and distortedly true); but must move forwards into an unknown future that will, however, be in its essence deeply akin to the conditions and natural practices of early childhood or early tribal living; the difference being an inner, imaginative, free and agent, consciously-knowing and directly-experienced Christianity.
[Edited from pages 145-6]
Imagination is not, as some poets thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. But so long as art remained primarily mimetic [i.e. 'realistic'], the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature.
[But now that the artist has become self-conscious of his ability to create non-natural phenomena; he can create aberrations].
In so far as these aberrations are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has personally experienced the world he represents. In insofar as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move towards seeing the world that way - and ultimately, therefore, seeing that kind of world.
Barfield is saying that imaginings of evil will tend, more and more as they become more popular, to become realised in the actual world as we experience it.
In short, popular and powerful evil imaginings become social reality.
As modern Man comes to recognise that his imagination is an inextricable and necessary part of his perception of reality, and as he becomes more free to use his imagination; so there is a new possibility of corruption by imagination.
Barfield gives the example of the kind of surreal-hideous fantasy pioneered by Salvador Dali - but nowadays (and increasingly over the past fifty years) this kind of thing is the average content of majority, mainstream' officially-endorsed 'art' of all kinds. We live in a world in which 'subversive' is a term of artistic approbation.
In terms of the destined and desirable consciousness state of Final Participation (in which we become aware of the ways in which our minds, our thinking, participates in the making of the world as we experience it); it is therefore vital to become aware of the effects of our personal choices in the creation of perceived-reality - that is, the effects of our choices on the nature of the world, as we know it.
Since we cannot, in the end, resist Final Participation (it is our destiny), we have a stark choice as to whether it will be deployed for Good or evil.
Barfield hopes that our choices will be 'exercised with the profoundest sense of responsibility, and with the deepest thankfulness and piety towards the world as it was originally [unconsciously] given to us in original participation'.
In short, Final Participation will be positive and valuable only in a Christian context; even more shortly - it is our task and responsibility to return to the essential values and realities of childhood and early tribalism, but this time in a willed and conscious fashion.
This, I believe, relates to the hundreds of years of lack of success and retreat by traditionalism in the face of Leftism/ Liberalism/ Progressivism. Yes, we do need to return to the traditional values which were once natural spontaneous, unselfconscious; but no, this cannot be done by a restoration of the unconscious traditional situation; by instinct, by simply perceiving and accepting the traditional values in the world around us. That possibility is past (and was, anyway, pagan in its purest form).
Instead, we need to move forwards to an aware, thinking version of traditional values - which are not identical with, but which will retain the heart and soul and motivations of tradition; which will, however, not be identical-with traditional values, as if the traditions were a recipe for good living.
My understanding is that we cannot, and should not try to, recreate the past (not least because the fullest and most natural spontaneous past consciousness was pagan; hence only partially and distortedly true); but must move forwards into an unknown future that will, however, be in its essence deeply akin to the conditions and natural practices of early childhood or early tribal living; the difference being an inner, imaginative, free and agent, consciously-knowing and directly-experienced Christianity.
If you wish to support secondhand booksellers...
You may wish to order directly from them, since Amazon have just imposed a massive increase in their cut of the income.
Thursday 3 August 2017
The Western Ruling class are Not trying to provoke civil war or engineer economic collapse. (Our situation is much worse than that.)
One reason why secular, supposedly 'Right Wing' politicians and commentators are unable to awaken Western society to its existential peril, is that they are mistaken about the nature of this peril; and therefore impute false motivations to the evil overlords of the Left, while being blind to the true nature of our situation.
Mormon metaphysics of Love between actual persons as a description of ultimate reality
For mainstream Christianity the ultimate reality is described in abstract, physics-like terms (especially in the assumed/ attributed nature of God - the omni qualities, God's absolute unity (monotheism); creation from nothing, existing outside of time and space etc).
Consequently, the core Christian value of Love is also understood abstractly - and it is not at the heart of reality, it is not the first thing. For many mainstream Christians; these abstract attributes of God are far more important than anything else: e.g. that there is one God, and that he is of total power, that God is qualitatively infinitely different-from and greater-than Men... these is in practice are more important than God being a loving God.
This has often been a problem for mainstream Christianity - where it has proved very difficult to hold Love at the centre of Christian belief and life; and where officially-recognised heresies have often been at the level of abstract and 'physics-like' metaphysics - e.g. the bitter and vicious Christology disputes of the second century AD onwards (i.e. how Christ is both God and Man), the disputes of the nature and relations of the Trinity (i.e. how Christ is God yet there is only one God), disputes over the possibility of free will/ agency (i.e. how that can be genuine agency in a reality with a totally known past, present and future) etc.
In general; the abstract metaphysical principles are accepted, and other things have to give-way to them (including common sense and normal logic - as with the standard definitions of the nature of Christ and the Trinity).
Mormonism assumes a biological, indeed human, ultimate reality. The primary reality is heavenly parents (who love and marry eternally), and primordial intelligences (divided between male and female), in a chaotic universe.
Creation involves God/ our heavenly parents organising the chaos, and procreating the primordial intelligences into sons and daughters of God.
At bottom, therefore, there is sexual differentiation (men and women) and human relationships.
Consequently (for Mormon metaphysics) Love is the 'first thing' in creation and in sustaining reality; i.e. the primary event in organising creation was the love of Heavenly parents; and their love for their children.
And this divine love is continuous-with/ qualitatively the same kind of human love as we know among men and women, parents and children, at the best moments of mortal life on earth.
Mormon metaphysics is that Love is the basis and reason for creation: meaning love between actual persons - not a physics-like abstraction.
Drawing this out as *explicit* metaphysics was something done considerably after Joseph Smith's death, by various intellectuals (Sterling McMurrin especially, but earlier BH Roberts) - but the substance was revealeed by JS and embodied in the doctrines of the church.
Consequently, the core Christian value of Love is also understood abstractly - and it is not at the heart of reality, it is not the first thing. For many mainstream Christians; these abstract attributes of God are far more important than anything else: e.g. that there is one God, and that he is of total power, that God is qualitatively infinitely different-from and greater-than Men... these is in practice are more important than God being a loving God.
This has often been a problem for mainstream Christianity - where it has proved very difficult to hold Love at the centre of Christian belief and life; and where officially-recognised heresies have often been at the level of abstract and 'physics-like' metaphysics - e.g. the bitter and vicious Christology disputes of the second century AD onwards (i.e. how Christ is both God and Man), the disputes of the nature and relations of the Trinity (i.e. how Christ is God yet there is only one God), disputes over the possibility of free will/ agency (i.e. how that can be genuine agency in a reality with a totally known past, present and future) etc.
In general; the abstract metaphysical principles are accepted, and other things have to give-way to them (including common sense and normal logic - as with the standard definitions of the nature of Christ and the Trinity).
Mormonism assumes a biological, indeed human, ultimate reality. The primary reality is heavenly parents (who love and marry eternally), and primordial intelligences (divided between male and female), in a chaotic universe.
Creation involves God/ our heavenly parents organising the chaos, and procreating the primordial intelligences into sons and daughters of God.
At bottom, therefore, there is sexual differentiation (men and women) and human relationships.
Consequently (for Mormon metaphysics) Love is the 'first thing' in creation and in sustaining reality; i.e. the primary event in organising creation was the love of Heavenly parents; and their love for their children.
And this divine love is continuous-with/ qualitatively the same kind of human love as we know among men and women, parents and children, at the best moments of mortal life on earth.
Mormon metaphysics is that Love is the basis and reason for creation: meaning love between actual persons - not a physics-like abstraction.
Drawing this out as *explicit* metaphysics was something done considerably after Joseph Smith's death, by various intellectuals (Sterling McMurrin especially, but earlier BH Roberts) - but the substance was revealeed by JS and embodied in the doctrines of the church.
Wednesday 2 August 2017
How to be a visionary of final participation: intensification of the experience of thinking
Most recorded visionary experiences are expansions of perception – seeing or hearing things that other people cannot. For example William Blake saw angels and conversed with his deceased brother. Often these visions occur in altered states of consciousness – trances, lucid dreams, delirium or intoxication.
These are aspects of what Rudolf Steiner termed Atavistic Clairvoyance implying a throw-back or regression to an early type of consciousness more typical of childhood and tribal societies; and Owen Barfield classified as Original Participation. And in the scheme of evolution of human consciousness the aim is not to go back, but forward to a new state of consciousness that Steiner called the Spiritual Soul and Barfield termed Final Participation.
A visionary of Final Participation would not experience ‘visions’ in the sense of hallucination-like, quasi-sensory, perceptual experiences; but would instead experience imaginative thinking, or direct knowing. To put it simply: the visionary of Original Participation would experience things appearing in one or more of his senses; while the visionary of Final Participation would experience things appearing in his stream of thoughts.
It might be asked why this counts as an evolutionary development in consciousness? The answer would be that the imagination is a direct and unmediated form of knowing truth and reality; whereas perceptual experiences are prone to sensory distortions and require to be interpreted. Furthermore, the visionary experiences of Original Participation often occur in states of altered consciousness when attention, concentration, purposive thinking and memory may all be distorted or impaired; whereas in Final Participation the state of consciousness can be alert, clear and focused.
Finally, thinking is intrinsically capable of complete integration of any and all phenomena. Anything which can be thought about is included in the stream of thoughts, and can be subject to any or all of the analyses and manipulations of thinking.
This is straightforward enough; but of course very few people are aware of, or would endorse, the idea of thinking as a primary way of knowing truth and reality. And one reason for this is that typically thinking is much less powerful and compelling than perception. For example, people say things like ‘seeing is believing’ or ‘I’ll believe that when I see it’ – indicating that perceptual experience seems to overwhelm and impose itself in a way that thinking apparently does not. For instance, most people would be more likely to believe in the reality of ghosts or angels if they saw one than if they thought one (even though they are aware of the distortions and hallucinations to which perception is prone – and they would not necessarily believe in them even if they did see one).
Alternatively, people may only believe things for which they have what they regard as ‘evidence’ – and they will believe such things even when they think or perceive differently, and even when they cannot think it or have never had any confirmatory sensory experience; even when experience and common sense refute it.
In practice, ‘evidence’ is so vaguely defined as to be impossible to define or pin down – for some evidence comes from some trusted or authoritative source; but often enough people don’t know from where they got the ‘evidence’, and it could have been from sources which they do not trust or in fact disbelieve (such as the mass media, novels or fictional movies) but despite not knowing the provenance of their beliefs they nonetheless find themselves compelled to believe. Indeed, it is typical that a great deal of modern mainstream beliefs are false or have zero evidence, but are almost universally and indeed fanatically enforced on a global scale - for example the officially imposed assertions that people can change sex by means of drugs and surgery, or that political policies can control the earth’s climate.
Either way, it is clear that thinking is, in practice, low-rated as a human activity. People regard thinking as less important than action, or doing; less important than perceiving (feeling, seeing or hearing, especially); and less important than whatever is culturally-defined and propagandised. Consequently, people do not think very often, very diligently, very sustainedly about things; and they do not take much notice of the consequences of their own thinking.
It is perhaps regarded as little more than a waste of time, a joke or an excuse for idleness when someone claims to have been thinking. This applies even or especially, in academia; where to be caught thinking ‘in office hours’ would be even more shameful than to be caught reading a book! Thinking does not count as ‘work’.
It could therefore justly be said that – in the mainstream modern world - thinking is a low status activity.
Yet, for those who are – like me – convinced by the philosophical arguments of Owen Barfield (and of his acknowledged master Rudolf Steiner); thinking is the most important human activity and a necessity for the future evolutionary-development of our consciousness. Thinking ought to be our number one priority in life (number one, that is, within the prior, essential frame and context of Christianity).
What seems to be needed is that thinking, including imaginative thinking, become at least as powerful - indeed as overwhelming, as potentially motivating and life-changing - as actions, perceptions, and official/ media propaganda. We need both to know, and to feel, that thinking is real and true knowing.
Barfield therefore referred to the need for ‘strengthening’ thinking, and regarded Steiner as the most successful and advanced exponent of the necessary type of strengthened thinking. But how to do this? Steiner left behind various suggestions, instructions and exercises in how to strengthen thinking. For example to focus attention on some-thing, such as a plant, and try to experience its life as a dynamic historical and unfolding reality. However, my impression is that these exercises seem either not to work very well, perhaps only partially and very slowly; at any rate, extremely few people have apparently got anywhere near Steiner in terms of their ability to think in that visionary fashion which is destined for Final Participation.
So, something stronger and faster than Steiner’s exercises seem to be required. The weakness of Steiner’s exercises is, I think, a consequence of people lacking genuine, internal motivation to do them; which is itself a consequence of the subject matter being arbitrary. While Steiner himself, or Goethe before him, would be passionately interested in a plant, and in understanding a plant – this does not apply to most people. Genuinely motivated interest of the kind that will generate and sustain someone’s best efforts is something that cannot be manufactured to order; it is not arbitrary but is idiosyncratic. Indeed, such motivated interest may be unique and specific to each person; furthermore, many people do not even know what it is that most interests and motivates them in this way – since they have neither reflected nor developed their spontaneous, intrinsic nature (for example; they are instead dominated by the pressures of the social environment, expediency, the wish for immediate distractions and proximate pleasures, status, wealth; and things like envy, revenge, spite etc.).
Yet nothing else is likely to suffice in developing the intensity of thinking than that each person be pursuing his or her own deepest, most naturally arising fascination or perplexity.
So – we need to think in such a way as to strengthen and intensify the act of thinking – to increase its power to change us. But for this to happen we also need to take a step back – indeed the ultimate step back into the most fundamental of all considerations: metaphysics – our most basic assumptions concerning the ultimate nature of reality.
For thinking to be strengthened, our metaphysical framework needs to be one in which thinking (of the right kind) is real and true, and universally valid. If our metaphysical assumptions tell us that thinking is primary then our experience of thinking will be one of greater importance, seriousness and attention. It is the fact that the normal mainstream metaphysics of the modern West regards thinking as secondary, indeed trivial, that we find thinking so feebly impactful, so weakly effective in motivating us, as compared with other phenomena such as perceptions, actions and social conventions.
That thinking is indeed primary to human experience is the core argument of Rudolf Steiner’s early work culminating in the Philosophy of Freedom (1894); and Barfield’s Saving the Appearances (1957) – I refer readers to these books for a careful and compelling justification. However, in the end, metaphysics must be endorsed by our direct intuitions – which requires first that we acknowledge we indeed have primary metaphysical assumptions, then to make these explicit to ourselves. Only then can we evaluate whether or not we really endorse and believe our own assumptions – and if not, we may (indeed should) seek to replace them.
For thinking to take its proper place at the heart of Life; it must be of the greatest possible power, intensity and strength. Thinking should be experience – it should be experienced as much, in fact more-than ‘things that happen to us’. We need to know why and how that thinking which we make happen from our freedom and agency, from our real self (our soul) is not arbitrary nor wish-fulfilment, but on the contrary it is intrinsically and necessarily real, true and universal.
Thus prepared and equipped we can each commence work on the Life Task of intensification and strengthening of our own thinking! What does this entail? If you are already engaged in some spontaneously-arising creative endeavour then this may be straightforward – if you are a real scientist, artist or writer; then what you think about is already-decided – and the main difference is to take seriously, attend to, the actual process of thinking.
For me, a good example is what I have termed The Golden Thread. When I think back through my life, and what is important, there are relatively few things among the mass of dullness and duties – and these things seem to link-up to make a golden thread connecting childhood past with the present. It was taking this seriously, as a reality and truth rather than regarding it as some arbitrary fantasy; which helped me to become a Christian and of the mystical type. It also caused me to revise my subjective autobiography, to reshape my understanding of how my life had developed – including wrong turns, blind alleys, and descents into the pit.
Whatever it is that is your deepest motivation then forms the basis of strengthening your thinking. You will need to recognise (at a fundamental level) that you are dealing with something true, real - and in principle universally so, its truths and realities accessible to anyone competent; not merely a private delusion or day dream.
You may then learn from your experiences of thinking how best to intensify it. For instance you may learn that certain times of day are better for thinking; you may identify supportive attitudes, places or positions; helpful activities (such as reading, writing, doodling, walking, music…).
You will need to develop a habit of seriousness about thinking – so that you talk about thinking respectfully, lay stress on its primacy, refrain from casual denigration and invidious comparisons. It may be helpful to take notes, and to rehearse memories of thinking. A strategic devotion to thinking is the requisite.
You will find that creativity is nothing more or other than a consequence of primary thinking; it is a natural consequence of thinking from your unique and real self. While your true thoughts are in a universal realm, nobody thinks them quite like you do; and you will make discoveries in this realm (probably small discoveries, but personally valuable nonetheless).
You will quite spontaneously think about things beyond your past experience, beyond your senses, outside of this world and your times. This is the ‘visionary’ aspect; because the future visionary is a thinker, nor a see-er.
And with endeavour, and rapidly; your thinking will incrementally become strengthened; increased in power, motivating; rooting-you in the world and enhancing your awareness of everything true; curing the typical modern malaise of feeling cut-off, alienated because everything real and valid will come together and be related and integrated in your thoughts.
These are aspects of what Rudolf Steiner termed Atavistic Clairvoyance implying a throw-back or regression to an early type of consciousness more typical of childhood and tribal societies; and Owen Barfield classified as Original Participation. And in the scheme of evolution of human consciousness the aim is not to go back, but forward to a new state of consciousness that Steiner called the Spiritual Soul and Barfield termed Final Participation.
A visionary of Final Participation would not experience ‘visions’ in the sense of hallucination-like, quasi-sensory, perceptual experiences; but would instead experience imaginative thinking, or direct knowing. To put it simply: the visionary of Original Participation would experience things appearing in one or more of his senses; while the visionary of Final Participation would experience things appearing in his stream of thoughts.
It might be asked why this counts as an evolutionary development in consciousness? The answer would be that the imagination is a direct and unmediated form of knowing truth and reality; whereas perceptual experiences are prone to sensory distortions and require to be interpreted. Furthermore, the visionary experiences of Original Participation often occur in states of altered consciousness when attention, concentration, purposive thinking and memory may all be distorted or impaired; whereas in Final Participation the state of consciousness can be alert, clear and focused.
Finally, thinking is intrinsically capable of complete integration of any and all phenomena. Anything which can be thought about is included in the stream of thoughts, and can be subject to any or all of the analyses and manipulations of thinking.
This is straightforward enough; but of course very few people are aware of, or would endorse, the idea of thinking as a primary way of knowing truth and reality. And one reason for this is that typically thinking is much less powerful and compelling than perception. For example, people say things like ‘seeing is believing’ or ‘I’ll believe that when I see it’ – indicating that perceptual experience seems to overwhelm and impose itself in a way that thinking apparently does not. For instance, most people would be more likely to believe in the reality of ghosts or angels if they saw one than if they thought one (even though they are aware of the distortions and hallucinations to which perception is prone – and they would not necessarily believe in them even if they did see one).
Alternatively, people may only believe things for which they have what they regard as ‘evidence’ – and they will believe such things even when they think or perceive differently, and even when they cannot think it or have never had any confirmatory sensory experience; even when experience and common sense refute it.
In practice, ‘evidence’ is so vaguely defined as to be impossible to define or pin down – for some evidence comes from some trusted or authoritative source; but often enough people don’t know from where they got the ‘evidence’, and it could have been from sources which they do not trust or in fact disbelieve (such as the mass media, novels or fictional movies) but despite not knowing the provenance of their beliefs they nonetheless find themselves compelled to believe. Indeed, it is typical that a great deal of modern mainstream beliefs are false or have zero evidence, but are almost universally and indeed fanatically enforced on a global scale - for example the officially imposed assertions that people can change sex by means of drugs and surgery, or that political policies can control the earth’s climate.
Either way, it is clear that thinking is, in practice, low-rated as a human activity. People regard thinking as less important than action, or doing; less important than perceiving (feeling, seeing or hearing, especially); and less important than whatever is culturally-defined and propagandised. Consequently, people do not think very often, very diligently, very sustainedly about things; and they do not take much notice of the consequences of their own thinking.
It is perhaps regarded as little more than a waste of time, a joke or an excuse for idleness when someone claims to have been thinking. This applies even or especially, in academia; where to be caught thinking ‘in office hours’ would be even more shameful than to be caught reading a book! Thinking does not count as ‘work’.
It could therefore justly be said that – in the mainstream modern world - thinking is a low status activity.
Yet, for those who are – like me – convinced by the philosophical arguments of Owen Barfield (and of his acknowledged master Rudolf Steiner); thinking is the most important human activity and a necessity for the future evolutionary-development of our consciousness. Thinking ought to be our number one priority in life (number one, that is, within the prior, essential frame and context of Christianity).
What seems to be needed is that thinking, including imaginative thinking, become at least as powerful - indeed as overwhelming, as potentially motivating and life-changing - as actions, perceptions, and official/ media propaganda. We need both to know, and to feel, that thinking is real and true knowing.
Barfield therefore referred to the need for ‘strengthening’ thinking, and regarded Steiner as the most successful and advanced exponent of the necessary type of strengthened thinking. But how to do this? Steiner left behind various suggestions, instructions and exercises in how to strengthen thinking. For example to focus attention on some-thing, such as a plant, and try to experience its life as a dynamic historical and unfolding reality. However, my impression is that these exercises seem either not to work very well, perhaps only partially and very slowly; at any rate, extremely few people have apparently got anywhere near Steiner in terms of their ability to think in that visionary fashion which is destined for Final Participation.
So, something stronger and faster than Steiner’s exercises seem to be required. The weakness of Steiner’s exercises is, I think, a consequence of people lacking genuine, internal motivation to do them; which is itself a consequence of the subject matter being arbitrary. While Steiner himself, or Goethe before him, would be passionately interested in a plant, and in understanding a plant – this does not apply to most people. Genuinely motivated interest of the kind that will generate and sustain someone’s best efforts is something that cannot be manufactured to order; it is not arbitrary but is idiosyncratic. Indeed, such motivated interest may be unique and specific to each person; furthermore, many people do not even know what it is that most interests and motivates them in this way – since they have neither reflected nor developed their spontaneous, intrinsic nature (for example; they are instead dominated by the pressures of the social environment, expediency, the wish for immediate distractions and proximate pleasures, status, wealth; and things like envy, revenge, spite etc.).
Yet nothing else is likely to suffice in developing the intensity of thinking than that each person be pursuing his or her own deepest, most naturally arising fascination or perplexity.
So – we need to think in such a way as to strengthen and intensify the act of thinking – to increase its power to change us. But for this to happen we also need to take a step back – indeed the ultimate step back into the most fundamental of all considerations: metaphysics – our most basic assumptions concerning the ultimate nature of reality.
For thinking to be strengthened, our metaphysical framework needs to be one in which thinking (of the right kind) is real and true, and universally valid. If our metaphysical assumptions tell us that thinking is primary then our experience of thinking will be one of greater importance, seriousness and attention. It is the fact that the normal mainstream metaphysics of the modern West regards thinking as secondary, indeed trivial, that we find thinking so feebly impactful, so weakly effective in motivating us, as compared with other phenomena such as perceptions, actions and social conventions.
That thinking is indeed primary to human experience is the core argument of Rudolf Steiner’s early work culminating in the Philosophy of Freedom (1894); and Barfield’s Saving the Appearances (1957) – I refer readers to these books for a careful and compelling justification. However, in the end, metaphysics must be endorsed by our direct intuitions – which requires first that we acknowledge we indeed have primary metaphysical assumptions, then to make these explicit to ourselves. Only then can we evaluate whether or not we really endorse and believe our own assumptions – and if not, we may (indeed should) seek to replace them.
For thinking to take its proper place at the heart of Life; it must be of the greatest possible power, intensity and strength. Thinking should be experience – it should be experienced as much, in fact more-than ‘things that happen to us’. We need to know why and how that thinking which we make happen from our freedom and agency, from our real self (our soul) is not arbitrary nor wish-fulfilment, but on the contrary it is intrinsically and necessarily real, true and universal.
Thus prepared and equipped we can each commence work on the Life Task of intensification and strengthening of our own thinking! What does this entail? If you are already engaged in some spontaneously-arising creative endeavour then this may be straightforward – if you are a real scientist, artist or writer; then what you think about is already-decided – and the main difference is to take seriously, attend to, the actual process of thinking.
For me, a good example is what I have termed The Golden Thread. When I think back through my life, and what is important, there are relatively few things among the mass of dullness and duties – and these things seem to link-up to make a golden thread connecting childhood past with the present. It was taking this seriously, as a reality and truth rather than regarding it as some arbitrary fantasy; which helped me to become a Christian and of the mystical type. It also caused me to revise my subjective autobiography, to reshape my understanding of how my life had developed – including wrong turns, blind alleys, and descents into the pit.
Whatever it is that is your deepest motivation then forms the basis of strengthening your thinking. You will need to recognise (at a fundamental level) that you are dealing with something true, real - and in principle universally so, its truths and realities accessible to anyone competent; not merely a private delusion or day dream.
You may then learn from your experiences of thinking how best to intensify it. For instance you may learn that certain times of day are better for thinking; you may identify supportive attitudes, places or positions; helpful activities (such as reading, writing, doodling, walking, music…).
You will need to develop a habit of seriousness about thinking – so that you talk about thinking respectfully, lay stress on its primacy, refrain from casual denigration and invidious comparisons. It may be helpful to take notes, and to rehearse memories of thinking. A strategic devotion to thinking is the requisite.
You will find that creativity is nothing more or other than a consequence of primary thinking; it is a natural consequence of thinking from your unique and real self. While your true thoughts are in a universal realm, nobody thinks them quite like you do; and you will make discoveries in this realm (probably small discoveries, but personally valuable nonetheless).
You will quite spontaneously think about things beyond your past experience, beyond your senses, outside of this world and your times. This is the ‘visionary’ aspect; because the future visionary is a thinker, nor a see-er.
And with endeavour, and rapidly; your thinking will incrementally become strengthened; increased in power, motivating; rooting-you in the world and enhancing your awareness of everything true; curing the typical modern malaise of feeling cut-off, alienated because everything real and valid will come together and be related and integrated in your thoughts.
Tuesday 1 August 2017
What will the great awakening look like?
When the change came there were signs. The sun was different, the moon also - the airs and winds and waters...because all are sentient and knew (in their way) that the time had come. the very earth, too - in its slow vast movements.
Invisible waves, forces, radiations also changed. Everywhere there were signs - for those who could think, and knew their thinking to be true.
As for the others - their dreams knew; whenever their egos were stripped away, their emotions knew.
The children knew - the younger they were, the more they perceived it.
But the change was primarily in Men - because that is reality; that is how creation is organised...
*
There was change - the choice was recognising this change - because it was a change in thinking. It was not, essentially, out-there - and it did not impose itself on people. It was deniable.
Some Men inverted their thinking, systematically inverted their evaluations, inverted their discernment. Shielded their real selves and thought by inculcated habits - or refused to think for themselves, to know for themselves.
True thinking was consciously prevented.
More at:
https://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/jerusalem-in-albion-what-would-national.html
Invisible waves, forces, radiations also changed. Everywhere there were signs - for those who could think, and knew their thinking to be true.
As for the others - their dreams knew; whenever their egos were stripped away, their emotions knew.
The children knew - the younger they were, the more they perceived it.
But the change was primarily in Men - because that is reality; that is how creation is organised...
*
There was change - the choice was recognising this change - because it was a change in thinking. It was not, essentially, out-there - and it did not impose itself on people. It was deniable.
Some Men inverted their thinking, systematically inverted their evaluations, inverted their discernment. Shielded their real selves and thought by inculcated habits - or refused to think for themselves, to know for themselves.
True thinking was consciously prevented.
More at:
https://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/jerusalem-in-albion-what-would-national.html
Coleridge's core concept of Polarity re-explained anthropomorphically (by the metaphor of marriage and family Love)
In his masterful book What Coleridge Thought (1971), Owen Barfield identified Polarity - or Polar Logic - as ST Coleridge's core philosophical concept; and the key to understanding his completion of Romanticism.
I read this book twice, with deep attention, and was convinced by it; however, when I came to try and use the concept of polarity in my everyday life, with the aim of transforming my life for the better - I couldn't. Polarity was just too abstract.
This is probably unsurprising - after all a system of logic is not really the kind of thing which is fundamental; it is more of a tool than a basis for existence. The cognitive domain 'logic' is, indeed of interest to only a tiny minority of very specialised people who have had systematic training.
Furthermore, my experience has been that Christianity ought not to be based upon abstractions, but upon the core analogy of Loving Family Relationships - this is both the reality and the master metaphor (or symbolism) of the Christian religion.
Therefore I need to re-express, re-explain, Polarity in anthropomorphic terms - to make it a matter of human and divine relationships.
Polarity is a way of conceptualising necessary and inseparable opposites: the core physical example (cited by Coleridge) is of a force that coheres and a force that disperses; centripetal (centre-seeking) and centrifugal (centre-fleeing) - the varied combinations of such polar forces then accounts of the dynamic nature of the world, and life.
I then saw that Love - which is the heart of Christianity - is of precisely this nature; because love is a cohesion, a holding together, as with marriage and family relationships; and love is an open-ended creative force, as with children being born, developing, and forging new relationships.
Love is dynamic: it cannot be just cohesion or it will die, it cannot be just expansion or it will die - it must be the polarity of both, which is infinite in its capacity for self-renewal and strength.
Love comes from the dyadic relationship of man and woman, husband and wife, in cohesive relation for eternity and also open-endedly reproducing, having children who have children. The relationships cohere forever, but in a state of continual change and interaction forever.
Love depends on distinction: one person from another, man from woman, parent from child, each sibling from another, each friend unique; and Love also depends on the constancy of the fact of relationship. Many loving relationships changing by an organic, unfolding development. But each relationship sustained in its core nature - husband and wife, father and son, mother and son, brother and brother and so forth.
There are all, in Coleridge's or Barfield's abstract sense, polarities: the insight is true and it is deep. Yet when expressed in terms of relationships it is simple common sense and everyday observation... all we need to do is recognise the ideal for which our earthly family relationships are striving; and then we can know the actuality which will (if we choose it) be the reality in Heaven.
I read this book twice, with deep attention, and was convinced by it; however, when I came to try and use the concept of polarity in my everyday life, with the aim of transforming my life for the better - I couldn't. Polarity was just too abstract.
This is probably unsurprising - after all a system of logic is not really the kind of thing which is fundamental; it is more of a tool than a basis for existence. The cognitive domain 'logic' is, indeed of interest to only a tiny minority of very specialised people who have had systematic training.
Furthermore, my experience has been that Christianity ought not to be based upon abstractions, but upon the core analogy of Loving Family Relationships - this is both the reality and the master metaphor (or symbolism) of the Christian religion.
Therefore I need to re-express, re-explain, Polarity in anthropomorphic terms - to make it a matter of human and divine relationships.
Polarity is a way of conceptualising necessary and inseparable opposites: the core physical example (cited by Coleridge) is of a force that coheres and a force that disperses; centripetal (centre-seeking) and centrifugal (centre-fleeing) - the varied combinations of such polar forces then accounts of the dynamic nature of the world, and life.
I then saw that Love - which is the heart of Christianity - is of precisely this nature; because love is a cohesion, a holding together, as with marriage and family relationships; and love is an open-ended creative force, as with children being born, developing, and forging new relationships.
Love is dynamic: it cannot be just cohesion or it will die, it cannot be just expansion or it will die - it must be the polarity of both, which is infinite in its capacity for self-renewal and strength.
Love comes from the dyadic relationship of man and woman, husband and wife, in cohesive relation for eternity and also open-endedly reproducing, having children who have children. The relationships cohere forever, but in a state of continual change and interaction forever.
Love depends on distinction: one person from another, man from woman, parent from child, each sibling from another, each friend unique; and Love also depends on the constancy of the fact of relationship. Many loving relationships changing by an organic, unfolding development. But each relationship sustained in its core nature - husband and wife, father and son, mother and son, brother and brother and so forth.
There are all, in Coleridge's or Barfield's abstract sense, polarities: the insight is true and it is deep. Yet when expressed in terms of relationships it is simple common sense and everyday observation... all we need to do is recognise the ideal for which our earthly family relationships are striving; and then we can know the actuality which will (if we choose it) be the reality in Heaven.
Bursting asunder the Dark Satanic Mills...
Vesuvius by Joseph Wright of Derby
Blake is complementary to Shakespeare; because if Shakespeare represented every kind of man except the mystic, Blake could apparently conceive of no other!
To Blake, logic is something that has to be, not ignored, but conquered
Imagination and the redeemer are almost synonymous; and Albion is a symbol for universal Man...
Nature is to be redeemed by Imagination, is to become Imagination.
What does it mean to 'build Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land'? What can it mean except to rise from the Consciousness Soul to the Imaginative Soul?...
The 'Satanic Mills' which have arisen in England since Blake's time, will never be thrust down from their hideous tyranny until those Mills of which he actually sang (that is, the dead thinking of Newton, Locke and Hobbes) have been burst asunder from within.
More at:
https://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/shakespeare-blake-and-albions-mission.html
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