Bruce Charlton's Notions

We are incarnated into this mortal life - and each person finds himself or herself in a different situation: different times in history; different places on the planet; different sex, class, race; different parents...

There seems to be only two basic possibilities:

1. That the allocation of souls to bodies is a random process. We are equally likely to end up anywhere.

2.  God 'places' us into some specific situation.

The first 'random' possibility implies that our situation and sex is a matter of indifference to God and to our-selves - one situation is as good as another. This choice is pretty much entailed by the mainstream Christian belief that each soul is created some time between conception and birth - each soul starts out identical, so there is no point or purpose in placing a specific soul in one place rather than other.

The second 'placing' idea implies that we have different needs in mortal life - and this implies that souls are different at the point of incarnation, which also implies that we have a pre-incarnation existence. This doctrine of pre-existence has been non-mainstream for Christians since about the time of Augustine of Hippo - but is held by Mormons among others.

This is a good example of the way that metaphysical assumptions affect theology. Mainstream Christians are pretty-much compelled to assume that our situation in life is random, and meaningless - in now way is our actual life-situation 'tailored' to our spiritual needs.

Whereas Mormons, and others who believe in pre-existence, are compelled to assume that God must have placed us into our specific life-situation with at least some regard for what situation will benefit us; and potentially this placing would be highly-exact (although human free will or agency will surely make it impossible for the placing to be fully-exact - since any niche would be changed by the choices of the people around it).

Aside: the question of sexual identity - man or woman - is another point of disagreement between mainstream and Mormon. The mainstream view sees the human soul as newly-created from-nothing - and sexual identity therefore as secondary, and in principle it might be male, female of something-else, or nothing. This links with God being neither man nor women, but containing both.

But for Mormons it is doctrine that every person is either man or woman - nothing else is possible in a deep and ultimate sense (whatever the effects of disease or environment), and this identity goes all the way down and back to eternity. Furthermore God is a dyad of Man and Woman: Heavenly Father and Mother; Jesus was a man; angels are either men or women etc...

It can be seen that Mainstream and Mormon Christianity, while both being genuinely Christian, are based upon distinct metaphysical assumptions.

And these basic assumptions lead to big differences in  how we personally regard our specific situation in life: for Mormons our situation is meaningful because designed for our needs; whereas for mainstream Christians our situation (and indeed our sex) is random.

God did not create 'from nothing' but by shaping and organising - by animating - pre-existent stuff; which included primordial men and women: seeds of consciousness.

Thus God's work of creation was to bring life and consciousness to reality - only that which is alive has meaning and purpose and the potential for relationship. Only that which is alive can be brought within God's reality of Love.

The work of creation continues; it is substantially a building coherence of love, and a bringing to higher consciousness - which is awareness.

The divine plan is for ever-increasing awareness of reality; and that reality is underpinned by love (love is the principle of coherence). Love can only be between alive and conscious entities (relationship) - so the universe coheres only by virtue of its being animate.

Love cannot be coerced, so God's creation is chosen: it is offered to us, and we are not compelled to accept it. We accept it because we want it. We accept developmental enhancement of our consciousness only because we want to.

And if we do not want these things, loving provision is made for us - as any loving parent would (sadly, but willingly) make provision for any child who chose not to grow up, or chose not to become more conscious, or chose to go-it-alone.

What convinces people, in the modern world?

The modern world is full of contradictory and confusing communications; on the other hand there is a denial of the reality and relevance of metaphysical assumptions concerning the nature of reality - so this confusion (being based on conflicting assumptions) is intractable.

Lacking clarity, modern people are - in practice - convinced by propaganda and power; that is by emotional manipulation and by fear.

This makes cowards of us all - because we lack confidence in anything; lacking confidence we lack courage.

To be courageous we need to be convinced - and if we lack courage we will lack all virtue, because we will be slaves of expediency...

What, then, would or could convince modern people they are wrong - in a world where propaganda and power are controlled by an evil Establishment?

Explanation does not work; because explanation depends on the already-existing framework of assumptions, which are incoherent.

Evidence does not work; for the same reason - what counts as 'evidence' is dependent on the incoherent explanatory framework...

The only answer I can think of is that people can only be convinced when they discover reality for themselves; in such a way that this discovery is personally compelling.

To do this, people will need to do what it takes. Each individual must discover reality for himself; in whatever way he personally find so convincing as to serve as the basis for courage.

Otherwise he will remain what he is: a coward, a dupe of propaganda, a slave of fear.

Leftism is built-upon Positivist assumptions;

therefore to be a Leftist is to be Positivist;

therefore to be Leftist is to be anti-religious;

therefore Leftists are anti-Christian - in their basic assumptions concerning the very nature of reality.


Read the whole thing at the Owen Barfield Blog...

Over at the Albion Awakening blog; William Wildblood provides the latest evaluation in our on-going discussion of the prophet, artist and poet (and Albionist!) William Blake.

When I became a Christian; I following CS Lewis's advice and went to the nearest branch of the tradition into-which I had been baptised. This rapidly unravelled as I realised that the Church of England was split and at-war, and my local branch was firmly on the wrong side.

After a while of trying to find a (not dying and spiritually-helpful) place in the Anglican communion and Roman Catholic Church - and failing to escape endemic debate and fighting; I tried to avoid this whole arena of dispute by trying to become Eastern Orthodox, which I understood to be based on Tradition. I just wanted to believe and do what the church said - and leave myself out of it...

However, I found exactly the same bitter division and dispute going right through Orthodoxy, wherever I looked. I was driven to use personal discernment again and again...

And gradually I realised that we moderns cannot be orthodox or traditional - for us to live in mere obedience to The Church is impossible - because there is no The Church (without first discerning what that is...), there are only layers upon layers of dispute and disagreement. In All churches and without exception.

We simply cannot escape the requirement to use our own personal discernment again and again...

Then I thought - if this is indeed the situation everywhere and for everybody, there must be a reason. God must have made things this way (he would not leave us bereft). And the reason seems to be that this is our task and duty - we are bred as individuals, and we must be Christians as individuals whether we like it or not.

Orthodoxy and Tradition and self-effacing obedience are only possible when they are taken for granted. Here and Now they are Not taken for granted - and therefore we need to live as Christians by our own discernment, taking responsibility for our own salvation and theosis.

We have-to do this, and we are doing it - all of us. 

And we therefore need to be honest and clear about the fact - and do it well and openly, rather than covertly and in a state of self-denial.

Orthodoxy/ Tradition/ Obedience are not just impossible - they are not even optimal. They have not been possible or optimal since about 1800 - but man has failed to grasp the necessity to remain Christian, and really-real Christian; while becoming a new kind of Christian.

This is Not liberalisation, because it is not an excuse to ditch Christianity and replace it with Radical/ Leftist politics and the Sexual Revolution as life priorities.

We must be Christianly-motivated - honestly so; and we must take personal responsibility for the individual discernment that (anyway) we cannot avoid making: so we should make it a focus, make it explicit, make discernment clear to ourselves: that discernment is the basis of any and all possible Christain lives, here-and-now.

There is no other honest alternative.
 

Note added: To clarify, I am Not saying that the churches are obsolete or should be discarded or that real Christians should leave their churches... I Am saying that real church-Christians actually-are using their personal discernment to evaluate their churches, and to decide what to do, what not to do, which side to take, who is to be trusted, who is a demonic infiltrator and so forth. In other words, real Christians cannot (here-and-now) simply obey The Church, cannot 'passively' be ruled-by The Church, cannot opt-out of using personal discernment again-and-again - in sum, they cannot accord The Church ultimate authority over their personal salvation and theosis. And the same applies (from a Protestant perspective) to The Bible -- personal discernment must and will be used in choosing a translation (or in learning the original language - in discerning the meaing and context of words and phrases), in understanding and interpreting The Bible in terms of history (whose history?); in deciding which scholarship is necessary, which to believe and which to ignore. So I am first making a negative point - and the positive point which follows is that we can and should have faith that our powers of discernment are adequate to this task (because our God of love and power would not leave any single one of his children bereft of true-guidance, and if guidance is not to be trusted in the social or institutional environmment (as is the case), then we can be sure that true-guidance *will* be found by each man who seeks it).

Well first, what is Not reality?

Reality (we would agree) has nothing to do with what appears in the public domain: in the mass media, in official communications from politicians, government, educational, police, military, legal, health service, religious or any other of the major social institutions that dominate the arena.

We know that all such systems of communication are not just unreliable but fundamentally corrupted - in most cases their net (overall) intent and outcome is an inversion of their officially-proclaimed focus and motivation.

I repeat: we know this.

So where is reality?


One semi-plausible but overall-mistaken idea is that while the overall public arena is contaminated and corrupted - within-it may be found groupings of people that provide honest and properly-motivated communications.

This may be true in a specific instance - but the question is how do we, personally, know which groups can be trusted here-and-now?

(Especially considering that the corruption of truth, beauty and virtue is on-going: more-and-more groups and individuals succumb every month... So groups cannot be trusted on the basis of past reputation - not even on the basis of centuries of past reputation... after all, the ancient universities are the focus and origin of much of the worst dishonesty and inversion to be found in modernity.)

The only safe conclusion is that no groups are to be trusted except when we, personally - here-and-now, have evaluated them as trustworthy. We cannot rely on any other authority.

So where is reality?... Wrong question. The proper question is what is reality?


Reality is not any actual communication - so (assuming reality exists) it must be in a realm untouched by communication, not dependent on communication - a realm that we can know directly - each for himself.

So we acknowledge a reality that is universally and directly accessible... But at this point we need to make an assumption concerning whether this reality is something we can merely observe; or whether it is something we can affect. Do we appreciate reality - without changing it; or do we participate in reality?

My assumption is that we can participate in reality - but clearly this participation is not automatic nor is it unconstrained. There are requirements set on participation in reality - not least that our participation is compatible-with existing reality in terms of form and direction.

Thus we return to the matter of understanding what kind-of-thing reality is?


In brief: I assume that we can only know that reality we conceptualise, and conceptualising means thinking - we cannot know anything of un-thought reality, because to know is to think.

Therefore assuming God wants us to know reality, things must be set-up such that we can know reality by thinking...

This (I believe) entails that reality is itself a kind of thinking; else we could not know it.

Reality therefore seems to be God's thinking, and God's thinking is knowable creation.


At this point comes another crux: if we ourselves are to participate-in reality, we must affect the universal divine thinking - which (I believe) implies that we ourselves need to be divine.

In other words, if reality is God's thinking, and we can participate in God's thinking, we must be of the same kind as God... at least to the extent of the times and situations we are actually knowing reality and participating in divine thinking.

(We do not have to be fully divine, nor divine all the time, nor forever - but while actually knowing and participating we need to have attained divinity.)


We have come a very long way from the commonly-held idea that the way to now reality is by attending to communications; and that the way in change reality is to promote of alternative ideas in the public arena...

The situation seems to be that the real-action occurs not in group-orientated communication; but instead in the thinking of individuals.

Not much else could be so profoundly at-odds-with modern Life - with modern metaphysics and modern practice (practice being a large-scale and group-ish world of propaganda, hype, spin and rhetoric).

The conclusion seems to be paradoxical or else nonsensical, according to prior assumptions; reality is in thinking not acting, in direct-knowing not communication, on engaging the individual and not the mass, and is restricted by the mode and nature of thinking - and not by power, status or fame.

We tend, by sheer habit as well as conviction, to look-for reality in large scale communication, rather than in solo - albeit not solitary - thinking. We assume that the public arena is where serious things happen - yet serious Good may be restricted to the private realm of thinking.

The public realm of communications may indeed cause serious harm - by dishonesty and evil motivations, by misrepresentation and misdirection; but serious Good may, here and now and for you and me, be a matter of our personal thinking in the universal realm of reality.

The Oxford English Dictionary definition of Positivism is a philosophical system recognising only that which can be scientifically verified or which is capable of logical or mathematical proof, and therefore rejecting metaphysics and theism.

To be more exact - Positivism is itself a metaphysical assumption - and that assumption is as above. This despite that Positivism explicitly denies the meaningfulness and/or validity of metaphysics. In sum, that denial of metaphysics and its 'replacement' by science/ logic/ mathematics, is itself precisely a metaphysical (not scientific, not logical, not mathematical) assumption. 

On this clear and deadly contradiction is built modernity. 

Positivism is modernity - in essence; it is what underpins and drives the modern way of thinking as it developed from ? the 1600s and which came to dominate by the late 1800s; and Positivism is solidly in place and totalitarian in all 'Western' developed societies.


The dangers of Positivism have been explicitly known since the Romantic era - for example in the works of William Blake and ST Coleridge.They knew, they predicted, exactly where it would lead, exactly the nature of the modern malaise. (Where they, and everyone else, fell short was in imagining the size, pervasiveness, addictiveness and influence of the mass media.)

Why is Positivism so dangerous? Because Positivism is anti-God, it is sin; it is indeed death... Literally - Positivism implies a necessarily dead world.

It is literally death because Positivism is a denial (and indeed ridicule) of the idea of reality as alive, conscious and purposive - thus Positivism is also the assumption that everything is dead; in the sense that there is asserted to be no real or significant difference between what is generally regarded as alive and what is 'known' to be dead.

Fro instance; Cosmology, Physics, Mathematics are abstract and they concern dead (that is un-alive/ non-conscious) phenomena. However, under Positivism; Biology, Psychology, Consciousness all ultimately reduce to Physics: therefore Biology, Psychology and Consciousness are concerned with dead phenomena. 

So, what we conventionally regard as Life is actually (by assumption) an arrangement of dead things, and Consciousness is an illusion (just yet another arrangement of dead things). This is standard, mainstream public discourse - and is Positivist.  

Positivism is death and Abstraction is death - when abstraction is assumed to be 'true' rather than a model of truth.

Yet our spontaneous (built-in) assumption is of universal life and consciousness. In our childhood origins, and in the belief of the earliest known civilisations, the assumption is that everything-is-alive - we inhabit an animated, conscious reality. 

However, these assumptions are not articulated, nor analysed, nor defended - they are simply taken for granted: life is based-on them.

So - over history (and through our personal development) we went from dwelling in an animated-conscious universe to regarding ourselves as dead things inhabiting a dead/ meaningless/ purposeless reality. Our task is to return to animism but with full consciousness. 


In sum: God's work of creation is a work of animation - it is a bringing to life and consciousness of the stuff of reality.  

We used to experience this, but not know it; we currently deny and do-not-experience it...

Our task is to re-learn the reality of God's creation, to explain how and why reality is animate and conscious; to attain the level of consciousness in-which the consciousness, life, personification of reality becomes apparent.



(To use Owen Barfield's terminology - our task is to understand, choose and experience Final Participation.)

Explained, and transcended, at the Owen Barfield Blog...

Over seven-and-a-half years of daily blogging, and about 5000 posts, this is not spectacular! (Do the sums.) Evidence of staying-power, perhaps...

‘Talk-and-chalk’ is a slang term for the traditional, and I would say best, method of lecturing – although nowadays a whiteboard and dry-wipe marker pen is used rather than a blackboard and chalk. Talk-and-chalk means that the lecture content is delivered by some combination of the spoken word, and material written or drawn on the board in real time for the audience to copy.

The blackboard and chalk were very messy, and the chalk dust was unpleasant for the lecturer. However, for reasons I cannot altogether explain, I believe that the blackboard was overall a more effective teaching method than the whiteboard; and that classes enjoyed blackboard teaching more than whiteboard. One hunch is that writing and illustrating with chalks imposed on the lecturer a slow and stylised way of working, which exerted a kind of hypnotic fascination on the audience...

Anyway, it seems that blackboards have by now been removed from almost all universities and colleges – so ‘chalk’ is probably no longer an option.

With talk-and-chalk, the only cognitive transition the lecture audience needs to make, is between taking notes ‘aurally’ from dictation, alternating with copying words and pictures - and for most students this alternation is not a problem. Those parts of the lecture written on the board tend to be key facts and concepts – such as references, summaries, definitions, tables and diagrams. The spoken parts amplify and illustrate these key facts and concepts.

For example: the lecturer defines key terms at dictation speed and written on the board; then verbally explains a concept while students listen; then summarises the explanation on the board, while students copy. He may then invite questions.

‘Visual aids’ comprise media such as projected slides, audio-visual material such as videos or short movies, overhead projectors, ‘demonstrations’ at the front of the lecture theatre, and so on. While these may sometimes be necessary, and at other times provide a useful change and stimulus, I would argue that in general they are all significantly sub-optimal.

Although they break-up the lecture, and provide entertainment; the problem is partly that visual aids encourage passive observation, and discourage the creative process of making of lecture notes – since they typically contain too much information and/ or information of a kind which cannot be captured in lecture notes. But another problem is that visual aids generate the need for a ‘cognitive gear change’ between very different media – in the sense that learning from a photograph, detailed slide, or movie is of a different form than speaking, writing and drawing.

For example, if the audience has been watching a five minute video; when the video finishes and the attention needs to be reactivated for Talk and Chalk teaching, then there is a kind of mental waking-up, a ‘lurch’, that results from the need for a sudden effort after passive relaxation.

This gear change is not necessarily fatal to the cohesion of a lecture, but it is a difficulty which takes some time and discipline to overcome – and it leads almost inevitably to a psychological fragmentation of the lecture.

Therefore, I believe that lecturers should in general stick-to talk-and-chalk, and resist the temptation to add visual aids – except when absolutely necessary.

Such uniformity of the lecture medium does, however, imply a need to give the audience short breaks to refresh attention - to converse, stand and stretch limbs, and fidget. A fifty minute lecture requires at least one such break of a couple of minutes - just enough time for the lecturer to wipe the whiteboards.

The importance of making each lecture into a real time, here and now, unique and un-repeatable, active learning event; is what explains why hand-outs and internet ‘support’ are so often a problem, with negative effects on learning. The core problem is that anything which diminishes the importance of being-there, paying-attention, understanding and recording the information; will certainly diminish the learning.

Typically, education needs both sticks and carrots - that is; punishments and rewards to enforce attendance, alertness and cognitive effort. Otherwise, over the ups-and-downs (and temptations) of a long course of lectures; class attendance, and therefore the chance for active-learning, invariably fall-off to some extent (due to the weakness of will of a minority of students). But attendance and attention may collapse alarmingly and to low levels, even when lectures are of high quality, when lectures are not explicitly (and also implicitly) regarded by the authorities as being central and necessary to the teaching.

The idea may be promulgated that lectures are intended to be miss-able without disadvantage by provision of all ‘necessary’ material without need for attendance (or attention while attending) - for example by handouts, internet material, or making audio and/ or video recordings of lectures. This is something that administrators may emphasise as an amenity, or in order to ‘reassure’ students that they will not be ‘penalised’ for absences (unavoidable, or otherwise). Such an attitude, increasingly common - due to technological advances – is, however, lethal to the educational benefits of real lecturing.

In practice there needs to be occasional exceptions to the requirement for lecture attendance to obtain optimal educational benefit. But exceptions must be exceptional; arrangements and adjustments should be one-off, specific and tailored, not routine nor prescribed; and exceptions cannot without educational harm, be addressed in ways that compromise the integrity of the principle of attendance.

It ought clearly to be articulated and respected by the highest relevant university authorities that the mass of students will need actually to be present and participating in lectures to get the fullest benefit.

To put the matter curtly: if a student is not disadvantaged by failure actually to attend and be attentive during a lecture course; then there must be something seriously wrong with those lectures!

*

The 4-part Compleat Lecturer series is now compleat:
1. The first mass medium
2. The special effectiveness of lecturing
3. Lecture theatre size and design
4. Talk-and-chalk

Mike Oldfield's In Dulci Jubilo from the memorable and happy Christmas of 1975.

Dig-out that old recorder or guitar, and play along...

John Fitzgerald reveals his answer over at Albion Awakening...

There was a time, as a youth and young man, when I supposed that my interests would be, or would become, general interests - but the opposite has been the case. That which I now regard as best and most significant for myself, and for the world, is that which is known by a minuscule number of people (and - in proportion to the population) immeasurably small as a percentage.

My most significant intellectual influences over the past several years have been William Arkle, who is about as obscure as it is possible to be; Owen Barfield, who has reasonable name-recognition and some good secondary literature - but about-whom I have been able to obtain zero substantive personal discourse; and Rudolf Steiner...

My fascination with Steiner is extremely selective, to the point that (as far as I can judge) the entirety of the global Anthroposophical movement is fundamentally-wrong about him - so wrong as to have missed the main point completely and instead be doing much more harm than good!

(In a nutshell, Steiner's ouvre needed a massive degree of critical discrimination that it never got; and more obviously his official legacy has become wholly-absorbed-within the priorities and principles of mainstream Secular Leftism.)

There are about 15 million Mormons, but perhaps nobody else than myself who lives by an understanding of Mormon theology without being a church member - which is my path. And there appear to be just two people who are as deeply-engaged as myself by the deep-implications of Mormon theology - but for very different reasons than me; and I do not have any interaction with either of these two.

Then there is Tolkien. He is the main thing I have in common with large numbers of people - although I have to discount 'fandom' - which is merely a branch of mass media addiction; and I also have to discount nearly the entirety of academic interest in Tolkien - which is either mainstream Left-assimilated, or else interprets Tolkien within the frame of traditional Roman Catholicism...

But even with respect to Tolkien, my person fascination with the Notion Club Papers as a work of great implications has been met with solid indifference - almost nobody has read it, and even fewer more than once. And I have had no substantive discourse on the aspects of the NCPs that I regard as core and vital.

In sum, nobody-else in interested in Tolkien for the same reasons as I am! Or, if they are, then (for whatever reason) there has been no interaction on the subject.

My point here is that the fact of the situation is-that that which I regard as most important in Life, in The World, is de facto unshared.

And this, I believe, is not just typical, but intrinsic to the modern condition: My situation, in microcosm, is the situation of the world.

This situation is that with a part of us we crave to be deeply a part of a like-minded group; but in practice the choice is between being part-of-a-group at the price of corruption - of giving-up that which our hearts hold most significant; or else maintaining personal integrity at the cost of total isolation - of being in a minority-of-one about those things that really matter to our souls.

This just-is The Situation; and the spiritual-Christian philosophers best exemplified by Steiner, Barfield and Arkle, are those who have best explained this situation to me; and explained why it is in fact a necessary transition, and a necessary place-to-be, here-and-now.

...Including why being in a world-minority of one is neither a lonely, nor an ineffectual, place-to-be; since it is only via exactly this situation and its conscious recognition, that we can get true metaphysical-clarity of life, and about everything.

Charles Williams was clearly many things to many people, and the recent biography by Grevel Lindop has made clearer and more explicit the nasty and exploitative side of his charecter.

Yet the same man was regarded as an extraordinary, inspiring, sustaining spiritual leader and teacher, an almost saintly figure for his spiritual knowledge and wisdom, by CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, TS Eliot, Dorothy L Sayers and others of similar depth and substance - who knew Williams well over a long period.

How can we make sense of this?

I think there are two assumptions necessary. The first is that Charles Williams was essentially a conversationalist; that he was at his best and gave his best in person and in conversation.

The second is that - precisely because he lived so deeply in human interaction - Williams had chameleon attributes, taking on the 'colour' of his social context to an extreme degree...

The importance of sleep (which occupies about 1/3 of life) can only be understood once it is established (at least in outline) what is the importance of life itself - I mean mortal life as-a-whole.

My understanding is that this life is sandwiched between a pre-mortal spirit life (which goes back to the beginning of everything), and a post-mortal incarnated life (which is eternal); among the purposes of this life are to be incarnated, to die - and be resurrected, and to have experiences from which we may learn towards our ultimate - and remote - destiny (if we choose it, and keep choosing it) of divinity as sons and daughters of God.

In this context, sleep is one of the experiences from-which we may learn and develop.

Therefore sleep should be considered an activity - indeed it is (at least) two kinds of activity: deep sleep and dreaming sleep.

If we take things at face value - we are absent from our living-bodies during sleep; the body is alive, but pretty much cut-off from its surroundings, neither perceiving nor capable of purposive activity. So our conscious-self is absent, elsewhere during sleep - and this is indeed our subjective experience (insofar as we remember it).

Deep and dreaming sleeps are, in many ways, opposite experiences.

In deep sleep we seem to experience very simple states in a slowed-up time; such that when we awaken from this slow time-bubble, more time has passed in the rest of the world.

In dreams we are in a sped-up time bubble - our subjective experience in dreams is 'compressed' into a much shorter period of awake time. In contrast to the strong, basic emotional states of deep sleep; dreams provide social and narrative-type experiences.

Where do we go when asleep? Well, when we sleep we return to the spirit state of our pre-mortal existence; so our conscious-self is no longer localised in a body. We go into the universal and universally-accessible spirit world - inner space (as it used to be conceptualised); an unbounded space within everyone; but not contained by them; so it is a single space into which each person is a 'portal'. (e.g. The ancient Egyptian dwat, Jung's collective unconscious - same thing.)

By these sleep experiences everyone has a rich and various life; and sleep life is both complementary to and deepening of awake life. In sleep we can access our own experience, and universal experiences - this mortal life and the Heavenly world of pre-mortal life - also the persons of God, angels, the dead... (Some of whom are misguided and some of whom are evil.)

Thus sleep enables deepening and contextualising of our experiences: sleep makes us wiser persons (if we allow it).

Yet sleep itself is not profound, or not always - and thus we reach a point when the work is done, the sleep experience sufficient; and we awaken (or should awaken) to engage with the different experiences of awake life.

We typically remember little of dreaming sleep, and even less of deep sleep (where there is not much to remember) - we do not remember but we do learn (if we allow ourselves). Sleep affects our behaviour, and it affects us as persons - whether we can recall anything or not.

But the direction of human destiny is towards greater consciousness, so we should expect to become more aware of sleep and have more memories of it; as we progress spiritually through our mortal, and post-mortal, lives...

Men and women are different - as a strong true generalisation - so it should not be a surprise when they are seen to be different.

One difference relates to abstractions: men are more at home in the perilous world of abstractions, and when women live-by abstractions they may become seriously disorientated. Women are the preferred bureaucrats in modern, totalitarian institutions - because women are easier to corrupt into servility to the rules.

When it comes to abstractions; women are more prone than men to a kind of institutional Stockholm Syndrome - when captives identify-with their captors; when the miserable slaves of regulations become emotionally committed to the regulations that enslave them.

Women intrinsically hate regulations and prefer personal relations - but once persuaded that regulations are their defence and guarantor; they lose all sense of perspective. The only response to the problem of regulation is seen to be more regulation - and thus they are trapped. 

At worst (and that worst is not uncommon) women become helpless/ help-resistant pawns when manipulated by abstraction-wielders - which is why women are the prime, self-made, self-trapped victims of modernity and Leftism.

This is a simple fact - in the sense that so many women choose not to marry, to delay marriage until too late, choose not to have children, choose not to care for the children they have - and become blinded by anger and vengefulness when this insanity is pointed-out, or when any effective action is proposed to remedy it.

(For most women, not all but a very large majority...) In comparison with such self-inflicted - and remedy-resisting - life-destroying life-choices - nothing that modern culture can provide will come close to compensating. 

And given that modern women (like modern men) have become materialist religion-deniers; this life is everything, and when they self-wreck this life there is no compensation and no repentance. And narcissism, plastic surgery, drugs or becoming an attention/sex-junkie are no more than momentary compensations - massively worsening the underlying problem.

Yet (unless women are coercively-enslaved - in which case these domains are destroyed and life emptied), women innately rule the love-and-sexual arena, women determine the existence of families, women provide the peer networks that bridge between families... If women will not or cannot do these things, then they will not be done - and life is impoverished. 

The modern world depends on a spiritual-Christian awakening - both men and women are necessary; but it cannot happen without women. At present women are solidly driving the Left-Liberal-bureaucratic-totalitarian agenda (including within the fake-Christian churches); and if they do not stop, then the agenda will not stop (although it may be replaced by something different but equally bad).

The first step is for individual women to escape the toils of abstraction that enmesh them from early life; and take control of their own lives with reference to their true selves, their hearts - rather than being (as at present) dupes and tools for the implementation of the evil global Establishment strategy.  

William Arkle – who was called Bill by his friends - was born in 1924, and died in 2000. As well as composing music; Arkle was a spiritual philosopher, painter, poet, teacher and visionary.

Bill Arkle was a friend of the writer Colin Wilson and attracted a small group of dedicated students. During the nineteen seventies he published two books, was the subject of a local television documentary and collaborated with the progressive rock band The Enid. However, despite this modest celebrity; Arkle was never famous and he remains an obscure figure. (The figure whom Arkle most brings to my mind is that other visionary English ‘William’ – Blake; who died in almost equal obscurity but is now recognised as one of the greatest lyric poets and also an influential illustrator).

I know about Bill Arkle mainly because I lived nearby as a child: my sister knew his wife and daughter via ‘ponies’; and his next-door neighbours were my good friends. I also met him once, briefly, when visiting his son. I had dipped into the work from nearly forty years ago; however, it was only after a series of ‘synchronicities’ and having become a Christian in late life that I eventually made the effort to engage with Arkle’s work in a serious fashion – and discovered that he was one of the most inspiring spiritual philosophers of the twentieth century.

Arkle’s life was spent mostly in-and-around the city of Bristol. He served in the Royal Navy during the 1939-45 war, and trained as an Engineer – an unusually scientific and practical background for a visionary, but one which had a lasting effect on the way he expressed his spiritual ideas, often using metaphors drawn from optics, atomic physics, computers, holograms etc.. After the war Arkle became an art student in Bristol and married Julia Rae Hubbard in 1947. This marriage was short lived, and Bill married Elizabeth (Liz) in 1954. They later had two children called Nick and Rose.

Throughout the fifties and sixties, Bill participated in spiritual and Christian discussion groups in Bristol and produced a lot of paintings on mystical themes. He typically used ordinary household acrylic paints on hardboard, deployed luminous pastel colours, and his characteristic theme was of ordinary and everyday scenes transfigured by light to show-forth their inner reality.

At first the family lived in Clifton, then Alveston, in Bristol, making money by renovating and re-selling houses - apparently Liz was the business brain and Bill put his craft skills to good use. They later moved to Backwell Hill House, about 7 miles south west of Bristol – a dilapidated ‘mansion’ that had previously been a monastery (with a large chapel) and stood in large grounds. They had horses and various other animals.

Through the 1970s and into the 1980s the household was large and included people visiting to work on spiritual matters with Bill, and also people who helped with the horses and running the household. Bill made money from selling his paintings from a shop in the Whiteladies Road in Bristol, and from picture restoration – including pictures of horses.

In 1974 Arkle published A Geography of Consciousness, which had an introduction by Colin Wilson. The Great Gift, a book of his pictures with commentary and some essays, was published in 1977. In the same year BBC West broadcast a location-filmed TV program called William Arkle in the series Life Story.

In the mid-1980s the Arkle’s moved to the Cotswolds, then after some years moved back to Somerset in a house called Pigotts in Chelvey Batch (very near to Backwell Hill House). In 2000, Liz Arkle died, and Bill followed a few months later.

Right up until his death at the age of 76, Arkle remained active, creative, optimistic and spiritually aware. His final writings are, indeed, his happiest and most positive statements concerning the human condition. If a man’s abstract philosophy is to be judged by its practical effect on his own life, then William Arkle’s ideas must be counted a success.

I will attempt briefly to summarise Bill Arkle’s ideas. He regards the universe as created by Heavenly Parents (i.e. ‘God’) and inhabited by their children (men, women and angels). The divine children are free individuals each of whom is offered the gift of developing to full divinity in their own unique fashion. Thus, our mortal lives on earth are a mixture of joy and horror, encouragement and hazard, love and fear and so on – each person’s life with its own pattern. Life is set-up to provide each of us with those experiences that we most need to achieve the fullest, all-round, knowledge – and such that eventually we can work towards fully-divine status; to become friends of God on a level footing and participate in the work of creation in a spirit of family love. (Jesus has a vital role in this work – which is why Arkle must count as a Christina; albeit of an unorthodox type.)

Arkle’s understanding can be encapsulated as based-on the fact that we each have a spark of divinity; by means of which we can all potentially (if we are able to attain the necessary, undistracted and real form of consciousness) directly-know something of God’s true nature, mind and benign intentions. For Arkle; life is Good at its root and when correctly understood, because the world was made, and continues, for our ultimate benefit. What makes Arkle a mystic in that he personally had a vivid and immediate perception of God’s reality and activity in the world.

As many of his paintings depict; Arkle perceived life (ordinary, everyday; working, married and family life) as a communication from the divine and permeated by spiritual influences. Various paintings show a teapot and cups on a table by a window, a mountain landscape or a seascape, a bowler-hatted businessman, people doing holiday things – sitting, dancing, playing a flute… these typically illuminated by inner light; or with a mysterious glow or sparkle; or with large spiritual (and smiling) faces or enfolding hands invisibly present and waiting but unacknowledged.

(If this type of painting sounds simplistic, sentimental even saccharine; then this is indeed how they strike many modern people. But they arise from a base of tough resilience and immersion in practical life – and ought to be regarded as a higher, but true and realistic, vision of actual Heaven.)

In essence; Bill Arkle’s world is one of meaning and purpose, a world of experiences and learning (he often terms Life a ‘university’); and ultimately one underpinned by that unselfish loving affection we may know from our glimpses of ideal family living in which parents nurture and sustain the individuality, growth and freedom of each of their children. Each child is encouraged to grow-up, if and when ready to do so; and despite that the process necessarily entails suffering and loneliness; because the objective is an adult, autonomous child who voluntarily chooses to becomes a friend, colleague and collaborator in the endlessly creative work of reality. This is a partial-microcosm of Arkle’s Heaven – a dynamic world of evolution of absolutely-unique individuals, cohering by pure love.

Arkle’s friends have told me that the most characteristic and complete expression of his vision was to be found in semi-improvised multi-media presentations of visual, verbal and musical material. I have been studying Arkle’s writings and pictures intensely for the past five years; and find them an inexhaustible source of insight and encouragement. But until now, I have not heard any of his music.

This reissue of The Music of William Arkle, from the era of his collaboration with The Enid, is therefore very welcome to me; as rounding-out a more complete picture of this multi-faceted and inspiring man.

I was thinking about the magical systems in fantasy fictions that I am currently reading by 'Mr Magical System' himself (ie. Brandon Sanderson) - when it struck me that the magic we know most about, that of Jesus's miracles, was very different indeed.

While magic in books is usually an 'impressive' matter of light, electricity, noises, super strength/ speed/ endurance/ healing etc - the common feature is that you can See It Being Done.

Whereas nobody reports seeing the miracles of Jesus being-done, actually happening - instead people seemed to notice that they had-already-happened.

People noticed that the water had turned to wine, that a few loaves and fishes had (somehow...) already fed a vast crowd; that soldiers or a mob were surrounding Jesus intending to arrest or kill him - but that Jesus was gone, that after having mud on their lids - the eyes of a blind man could see...

Jesus walked on the waters, which was spectacular - but it just happened, they realised that he was already doing it.

Jesus's miracles re-arranged reality to produce the desired result - and this process of rearrangement was invisible, imperceptible - apparently took place 'behind the sces' or as if in another dimension: to human perception all that was noticed was that things-had-changed.

How to understand this? One way is by the idea of levels of being, or consciousness - in which higher levels are imperceptible - by more real - than the lower levels. So in normal life we are like a simple visible-light-detecting machine - and when what is happening is not light (but is instead accomplished by ultraviolet frequencies, or sound, or smell...) then the dial does not register any change.

Another is to recognise that a higher being might be able to re-arrange things to produce the desired changes, but without those who are changed knowing about it.

This is like a dream - in at least two ways. In a dream the situation is that things change - landscapes change, things appear or disappear, personalities shift.. and usually we see that they have-changed, we don't see it happening.

And when we are dreaming a vast amount can happen in dream time - a hundred times faster than things can happen in waking time. An epic and detailed dream narrative takes only ten minutes by the clock.

In the dream there is a dream-er, of which we who are dream-ing are typically unaware, or only partially and intermittently aware - and of whose exact nature we are uncertain (and it may vary). But the time-scale and level of operations of the dream-er is such that he can accomplish a great deal which is imperceptible to the mind that is dream-ing. 

I presume something of this general-kind may partly explain how Jesus's miracles occurred - and how magical results were observed without any sign of magic being-done.


Note: Among fictional magical systems that I know - the nearest to what I mean is the metal Atium in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy. 'Burning' of this metal by a mistborn in a fight, does not interfere with foes free agency, but predicts events slightly ahead of their reality by revealing consequences of actions already-initiated - at the same time the mind and body of the Atium-burner is as-if relatively accelerated so that he can calculate trajectories and take rapid compensatory or evasive actions with astonishing rapidity. So the mistborn can pass through a crowd of soldiers by knowing in advance where each sword blow will fall, and having time to dodge them all. 
     In the later Mistborn books, the Wayne character uses a 'bubble' to slow his own time, relative to the time outside the bubble. From within the bubble, the real world is seen as ultra-slo-mo - so the bubble can be erected to allow planning and evasion, even while (for example) a bullet is approaching. To those outside the bubble, Wayne repeatedly 'disappears' from imminent danger (only a brief blur is perceptible), to reappear somewhere safe.  
     If this sort of thing can be imagined greatly accelerated; and capable of reaching into the very innermost levels of matter - to adjust molecules, for example; then we may have a crude picture of the ways that divine powers could make magic seem already-to-have-happened without perceptible evidence - as with Jesus's miracles, perhaps.  

By my intuitive assumption... but some 'arguments' are presented at Albion Awakening