Bruce Charlton's Notions

It strikes me that dreaming sleep (of the usual, broadly nightmarish or bewildering kind) is often like the 'underworld' death as envisaged by the Ancient Greeks (Hades) and Ancient Hebrews (Sheol) - that is a 'demented', passive state of very partial awareness - with perplexity as the dominant emotion.

In sleep; life happens-to-us and we strive, and fail, to make sense of it, and to cope with it. Our minds are porous and connected with the dream environment - we are like the 'gibbering ghosts' of the underworld.

In dreams the environment affects our mind - and our mind affects the environment in a reciprocal causality. We are acted-upon rather than acting: there is no freedom in a dream...

The gift of Jesus is to be born-again, to waken from this unending nightmare - awaken to resurrected eternal life - that is by incarnation to be separate from the environment and act to act in free agency from it; to be alert and conscious and creative in relation to the environment rather than swept-along passively, uncomprehendingly, in perpetual bewilderment.

Dreaming sleep is a temporary death - although modern Man assumes that death is a non-being much like deep sleep: unconsciousness and oblivion, rather than the underworld, nightmare state of dreaming sleep. But by dreaming sleep, of the nightmarish/ bizarre/ confusing/ helpless kind... we can know what it is we are being rescued-from.

Jesus came to rescue Man from the inevitability of the underworld nightmare of death - by resurrection; and with the offer of a gift of life eternal, which is a creative state of divine being.

(But death is necessary: to be reborn we must die; and death is bitter vinegar, as well as purifying hyssop.)
 

We are born as children of God, thus have within-us that which is divine.

As such we can recognise, we can know the Holy Ghost - which is divine.

Indeed, the Holy Ghost is Jesus Christ himself, which he sent after his ascension; as is expedient for us because the Holy Ghost is universal; available to all Men.

To believe in Jesus is the same as to trust, have faith in, and to love the Holy Ghost. (And vice versa.)


This, everyone and anyone can do - no matter what their personal circumstances.

Because all have a divine self, and all have access to the Holy Ghost.

And this is to be 'A Christian'. A real Christian.


(Even if when you have never heard of Christ; even if/ when Jesus is misidentified or misunderstood explicitly...)


Because what Men say, what Men teach is contingent and cannot be 'controlled' (even if God wished to control it).

What is needed must - in contrast - be certain, universal, immune to Men's wishes or abilities, and the uncertainties of circumstances.

What is needed must not depend upon prior knowledge.

And what is needed must be sufficient (even if it is not optimal).


Obviously so: Jesus loves us and is the creator and sustainer of this world; and he would surely not have left us with anything less?

Not, I hasten to add, in order that they might therefore be stopped... That is a different matter of probabilities and choices involving multiple 'other people' as well as God's plans.

The real reason is essentially twofold - first that we be not misled; and secondly that if our discernment cannot detect the ruling evil, then we are ourselves deficient.

I mean that when a person cannot detect evil when they encounter evil; then there is something seriously wrong with them. Often this wrongness is self-inflicted (people do detect evil - at first, but over-ride their own alarm systems, ignore the evil - and end-up denying evil, hence serving evil).

But if we do not recognise the evil of the powers of the world, then they will divert us away from God and from Jesus Christ. In a thousand and more ways; evil powers will consume our attention, effort and time in thinking/ feeling/ doing things that are not what we ought to be doing.

Yet, knowing the evil of the powers of this world is only a beginning. It does not make us right, of course.

But it is - for most people - impossible to function as we should function in this world (which is, after all, a world in which a single, vast, linked, totalitarian bureaucracy and social manipulation system penetrates everywhere and into all human affairs) unless we understand that the world is against us: that what the world wants for us is the opposite of what God wants for us (including that the world wants us to deny the reality of God).

This is the flipside of economic/ political/ legal globalisation and the vast expansion of the mass/ social media... In the past people didn't need to know much about the nature of powers of the world (which were local and limited in scope, anyway). Now we pretty much have-to.

It used to be possible to be 'neutral' about the motives of the Big Powers and Top People, or at least to ignore the issue... But now we can only choose between regarding them as overall-Good, or net-evil.

And upon that decision may hinge our eternal destiny.

My earliest blog (that wasn't merely a repository) was about cricket - it was called The Doosra, and was somewhat focused on the question of how this method of bowling was being attempted by a new breed of offspin bowlers.

I came late to an enjoyment of cricket - it was the summer of 1992, the 18th June, second day of the Lord's Test Match - and I was listening to Test Match Special on the car radio as I drove back to Glasgow in Scotland (where I then lived) from an overnight stay in Kircudbricht. I think the only reason I was listening is that - in this rather remote part of Scotland, Radio 4 Long Wave was the only accessible channel, and that was broadcasting cricket...

My original interest was to discover what 'leg spinner' meant; and this proved surprisingly difficult! But after that my interest in cricket grew rapidly, and was mostly focused on the craft of spin bowling.

(I can't do it myself; and never have been able to bowl or throw without shoulder pain - even as a kid; so the interest was purely theoretical. Indeed, I was permanently put off playing cricket as soon as we were compelled to use a hard leather ball instead of a tennis ball, from about aged 10 - due to repeated finger injuries. Yet the fact that in India and Pakistan (especially) they uses a duct-taped tennis ball for cricket up to semi-professional level doesn't seem to have impaired their prowess one whit.)

Anyway, my love of cricket became integrated with daily life - and (as for many people) reached its peak in the famous 2005 Ashes (i.e. England versus Australia) series; then had a second peak when England won the beat Australia-at-home in 2010-11. 

When T20 (20 overs per side) cricket was invented, I at first enjoyed it a lot; although I immediately saw that the bowlers should be allowed five overs maximum, each, instead of the current four, if the game was to retain the proper balance.

But domestic franchise T20 cricket (led by the Indian Premier League; IPL) became a vast money spinner, as a monochrome slugfest of about 8 runs per over or more; while 50 overs-per-side one day cricket and 5-day test match cricket have dwindled.

Currently I find the IPL unwatchable - a huge, dull, fake; and test matches duller and more depressing with each series; and am only really engaged by good 50 over cricket in the context of a five match competition or the World Cup...

For me the decisive moment was the year the Doosra was banned - 2015. (Especially the banning of the world's premier spinner - the immaculate Saed Ajmal.)  It was banned (rather than modifying the laws of cricket to accommodate this delightful innovation, as had happened often in the history of the game) essentially because the batters found it too hard to deal with when trying to hit sixes, and it limited the colossal run totals in T20...

Anyway, I have fallen out of love with cricket. The essence of cricket is personality; and the longer forms of the game provided unmatched opportunity to see personality unfold in a competitive context. Cricket really could be a microcosm of Life. But with its commercialisation and simplification, that has ceased to be the case - and cricket players in context of actual matches have become almost as dull as tennis players, swimmers and cyclists; and nearly as thuggish and graceless as footballers...

Plus, political correctness has, and it took a long time, finally penetrated and permeated the heart of cricket; destroying truthfulness and integrity, and making everything beautiful into a political/ bureaucratic attitude - as it always does...

I still watch in hopes - and there are still highlights (the England versus New Zealand series recently was good, far better than The Ashes - although the 'crowds' watching were tiny). But the fact is that the love has dwindled, the magic has all-but gone. 

John Fitzgerald and I come up with two lists of our personal 'greats' but with zero overlap! John's choice of authors is modernist and 'epic'; mine, traditional and lyric.

Just goes to show the richness of choice...

The following is edited from Lecture 5 of The Karma of Materialism (1917) by Rudolf Steiner and translated by Owen Barfield

It was also inevitable that an ahrimanic [i.e. Satanic-materialistic] code of law should be particularly in evidence and concentrated, so to speak, at one particular spot on the earth at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha [i.e. the death and resurrection of Jesus].

Such circumstances did not prevail everywhere, but in this one place the social structure was completely ahrimanic. 

Therefore the appearance of its very antithesis - the appearance of a God - was for this society the most hateful thing that could happen, it had to be eliminated...

Two things in particular brought about this social structure. First, the kind of thoughts that had evolved out of Judaic law, were so saturated with ahrimanic forces that by means of them there was no possibility of grasping the fact that a God could come so close to man as was the case of Christ Jesus. This was something Judaic law had of necessity to reject. 

Secondly, the Romans were also responsible for the death of Christ Jesus; they were a powerful and efficient force in establishing the external side of the social structure. One cannot imagine a more powerful example than the social structure created by Roman Imperialism, particularly at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Yet at the moment the Mystery of Golgotha is enacted, Pilate, the representative of the strongest earthly power, proves a weakling when faced with spiritual power. He is incapable of coming to any insight or to make any decision about what is to happen.

This phenomenon of satanic materialism is therefore connected with the Mystery of Golgotha... it took place at a time when mankind was least able to understand. 

In earlier times the advent of Christ would have been understood, but when it actually happened it was not understood.

**


Note: Rudolf Steiner's idea of 'Ahriman' is a demonic being/ set of beings - roughly similar to the concept of Satan is the character of The Devil - a demon whose distinctive tempting of Men is this-worldly materialism, legalism, denial of the reality of the spiritual; who works by-means-of procedures and laws, organisation and systems; and who typically works-via emotions such as fear, resentment and demotivation.

Clearly, the ahrimanic has been The rising ideology in The West since the modern era (post 1600s) and since about 1800 is now globally dominant in the form of the single-interlinked, expanding totalitarian bureaucracy.

Steiner's point is that the timing and placing of Christ's life was such that the reality of the Son of God could not be acknowledged by either of the dominant institutions.

The Jews could see no further than that Jesus transgressed The Law - that was the whole of their perspective (just like any typical modern official with her standard practices, or the PC Thought Police and their many and multiplying taboo words/ facts); the Romans regarded stability of their systematic regime as the priority; and Jesus as having provoked a dangerous, albeit irrational, response from the Jews.

Both Jews and Romans were blinkered to any genuine and significant spiritual realities; such that it was either impossible or irrelevant that Jesus might be exactly who-and-what he said he was. Contrary evidence was by definition false; all eye-witnesses were by definition fools or manipulators.

The 'obvious' and apparently unavoidable, conclusion for Jews and Romans alike was to 'eliminate the problem' - by killing Jesus.

So, despite that all the people involved in the death of Jesus had free will, and any of them could have chosen Not to kill him; in an era of established and accepted Ahrimanic dominance it was almost inevitable that Jesus would be killed by 'the authorities' one way or another, living in that place and at that time.

(And this was why the death by murder of Jesus could be fore-known, prophecied - despite the free will of Men.) 

The many lessons for today are obvious enough...

I think that if I had been born into less evil times, I probably would never have become a Christian.

The reason is that I have always had an ethic of truthfulness - that was what I tried hardest to live up to. And this was a reason why I studied science and became a scientist...

What if I had been just left-alone to get-on-with my science? - as the previous several generations had been 

- Well, then I would never have realised the incoherence of my convictions; I would never have become a Christian.

Thus the evil of the world, the increasing evil of the world, brought me to a point of clarity and choice that otherwise I might never have reached. 


Read the whole thing at Albion Awakening...

Atheism is the disbelief in God, which really means the lack of 'faith' in God, which really means not trusting God...

Of course modern atheists actually deny any kind of deity whatsoever. But that is really just a symptom of a very temporo-spatially-restricted metaphysical incapacity - the inability or unwillingness to think-about first things.

From the Fourth Gospel (written by the Beloved Disciple often called John) it is clear that if we have Jesus, we have everything - and Jesus is with us each directly in the person of the Holy Ghost.

Jesus is what brings eternal life - Heavenly life as children of God destined to a similar quality of divinity as Jesus himself (if we want it); and it is Jesus in whom we must have the same trust as a loving child of loving parents. A trust based-upon direct personal knowledge, personal contact of a spiritual kind.

It's really very simple, and is there for the asking. But we must ask. This gift is not forced-upon us. Heaven is only for those who want to be there, who love to be there.

(Historical evidence suggests that such persons may be a minority, and perhaps a small minority. This self-exclusion is very sad indeed for those who love the self-excluders. They will be missed greatly, and the gap they leave cannot be filled. All we can do - but this would should do - is try to ensure that they make their decision based on truth about the nature of the gift.)

It is really very simple - terrifyingly so, in a sense... And of course it changes everything - just as being the loving child of loving parents changes everything by contrast with being a feral child, or the resentful child of coldly-exploitative parents.

It changes everything - forever.

When Owen Barfield writes about 'the evolution of consciousness' - he is talking process that is driving human development.

Barfield is not, therefore, regarding consciousness is something which respond-to historical change; but the opposite. So, he is saying that it was a change in the consciousness of Western Man that drove the scientific revolution and 'materialism': first consciousness changed and then science arose...

And therefore Barfield is contradicting any idea that 'modern Man's different way of thinking is a product of the scientific revolution. He was also contradicting the idea that the change in consciousness was due to natural selection. Rather Barfield is stating that changes in consciousness have been driven-by the unfolding of a divine plan (or 'destiny') for Man.

(A plan/ destiny aiming, ultimately, at the divinisation or theosis of Man - Man becoming a god (or full Son of God, as the New Testament terms it), with a god-like way of thinking.)

The development of new forms of human thinking is something which has (again according to Barfield) happened several times in human history, and indeed prehistory. However, in the past the changes in consciousness were driven at an unconscious level and required only the passive acceptance of Men.

Currently (at least since the Romantic movement of the late 1700s), and for the first time, we are experiencing an unconscious drive towards a new kind of consciousness that will not happen unless and until it becomes conscious and chosen.

So, our current situation is that we are being driven 'instinctually' (unconsciously) towards a new consciousness / a new way of thinking. But for it actually to happen requires that we become 1. consciously, explicitly aware of what is going-on; 2. then accept this destined change, but; 3. not just accept it, because we need also to; 4. actively embrace and work-at creating this change in ourselves.

In sum; the modern situation is that we must each, personally, want-to ally our-selves with the destined change in thought and consciousness, and must make efforts to make these changes in our-selves.

Or... it will not happen; and because we cannot go-back to an earleir state of consciousness (any more than an adolescent can become an actual child again), we will remain 'stuck' in the current phase of alienated consciousness - the problems from which will continue to be cumulative.

So far, very few individuals have done this four stage process of theosis - and the great majority of people in the West remain entirely unconscious of what is going-on behind-the-scenes.

Nonetheless, at an unconscious level - the instinctive drive towards the next, and final (because divine) qualitative development of thinking continues; and leads to many undesirable outcomes.

Can be found at Junior Ganymede.

We should not complain about being excluded from the high levels of modern mainstream discourse - we should want an end to it, not to become complicit.

If someone does get-into a position of high status, power, fame; and remains there for more than a short time - it can easily be seen what happens to them: sooner rather than later they change (you can see it for yourself); they change from being one of the dead-eyed masses to one of the snake-eyed elite manipulators.

(Zombie to reptile...) 

To be elite is to be an active servant of evil, necessarily: because The System is evil.

(The System is a godless materialist bureaucracy, which means totalitarian, which means intrinsically and necessarily destructive of Good - of even the possibility of Good).


To make a wall in the mind between types of thinking is first to suppress and then to imprison the real (divine) self: this is to become a dead-eyed one.  

The light goes-out as the soul leaves the eyes.

The dead-eyed masses are, mentally, a loose collection of superficial selves - merely cognitive-processes: artificial, externally-driven, passive, unfree. The real self is gone, inaccessible - God-within-us has been imprisoned.

When the real self has-been walled-off, the eyes go dead. People are tools, not selves.


The snake-eyed ones are what our ancestors would have called 'demonically posessed' - that is, their real-divine self has not only been imprisoned, but replaced with demonic will.

Their eyes are not dead, but demonically-alive - snake-eyes: manipulative, lacking empathy; coldly enjoying only domination, deception, the destruction of beauty; the infliction of all types of suffering and (especially) of fear.

Sometimes a dead-eyed one will become 'useful enough' to become snake-eyed - the once dead eyes begin to glitter with calculating malice. This is promotion! This is to join the elites! The demon sits within, looking-out, gleeful at the situation.


To be dead-eyed is the norm among adults - although they can more-often be observed among teens, and even some younger children. It is the common response to the evil of the world - to ignore, cut-off, imprison the real self and develop a 'shell'. To do what 'works' instead of what we ought.


Only belief, faith, trust in the Holy Ghost is a defence - otherwise everybody succumbs, sooner or later.  Just look around...

But the soul may rekindle - this can only be done consciously, by choice, deliberately. And it can only be done with external help.

The opportunity of repentance and belief is always there, but we our-selves must grasp it; and to do so we must know it to be real and Good.

The soul may re-kindle, the real-self may break-free and activate; and the eyes may come-alive, may light-up with a glowing warmth!

For the past couple of years I have understood the essence of Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield in relation to thinking, and during that time I have striven to re-express these more simply in order to make them more widely known. But it has been hard to achieve this goal, and my estimate of my own success has not been great. 

For example the vital idea of 'polarity'. If you follow the previous link you will see some of my attempts at explicating polarity. However, I have come to realise that root problem relates to polarity being a metaphor derived from physics (i.e. from magnetism) - often with mathematical (e.g. geometric) aspects. And this makes it difficult to apply to the situation of human reality.

So Coleridge, for example, argued cogently and (to me) convincingly 200 years ago that we must have a logic based on polarity - but it is terribly difficult to grasp what he meant by this, and how we would go about such a change, and what positive difference it might make... William Blake seemed to express much the same conviction as Coleridge in some of his poems - especially the early aphorisms... but again it's a big jump from appreciating poetic 'paradoxes' to changing the structure of mainstream thinking.

But is, instead, we use biological metaphors and analogies to explain the same essential situation, then it is much more comprehensible. So, if we do our philosophy in terms of life, development, growth etc - then we find that we don't need a special concept of polarity. A living being generates contrasts and differences that can be distinguished (as we validly and usefully distinguish the several organs of a body, such as the heart); yet these distinctions are not separable (as we cannot separate the heart from the rest of the body, without killing both).

In fat, a thoroughgoing animism, or anthropomorphism, seems to be the best solution to many difficulties. And this has the added advantage of fitting with our own childhood experiences as well as the evolutionary-developmental-history of human consciousness. We can see that our task is to return to the simple, childlike animism and anthropomorphism - but this time not unconsciously and because we know no differently, but deliberately and in full awareness of what we are doing.  

In a sense; Coleridge, Steiner and Barfield all knew this and explicitly said this; but they did not follow-through with the task of ejecting physics and mathematics from their explanatory schemata and replacing them with the child-like way of thinking of reality as alive, conscious, purposive - and with the relations between entities understood as relationships between beings.

Or consider the way that Steiner and Barfield describe the evolution of consciousness through various stages - and the possible future of the Imaginative Soul/ Final Participation. We seem to see a mechanical universe going-through various phases towards a predetermined outcome (and Steiner, especially, attaches all kinds of mystical-numbers of years to these phases and the way they play out - with predictions stretching millennia into the future).

How much clearer it is to state that the evolution of consciousness happens because God wants it to happen and influences the world accordingly; but only insofar as each Man chooses (from his agency) to ally himself with God's plan. Man's destiny is therefore what God hopes will happen, it can be achieved only incrementally, but each individual must choose to cooperate; and might well choose to oppose.  

Animism and anthropomorphism are only 'childish' in a bad sense insofar as the child knows nothing different than them (and much the same applies to Men in simple, tribal hunter gatherer societies). Modern Man knows many different ways of thinking - especially the simplified-modelling of reality with mathematics and the sciences; and every model is partial and distorted and of ultimately unknowable generalisability... all of the explanations of mathematics and science are at bottom only simplified models that may, or may not, be useful for some specific purpose and situation.

Yet reality is as it always was. There is nothing childish about recognising that we were correct about the ultimate nature of reality when we were children and before Men had civilisations - after all nothing has ever disproved it!

My own understanding is that the Creator, who is also God, is self sufficient in a sense. That is to imply that, although we need God, in every meaning of that term, God does not need us in the same way.

Against this we have to set the understanding that if God didn’t have a purpose which included us, no doubt He would not have gone to all this trouble of bringing us into existence. But to have a purpose in which we can play some part is quite a different thing from having an absolute need of us in the way that we have an absolute need of God.

In the way that a child needs its mother and father, we need God for sustenance and support of our own reality because our own reality rests upon the reality of God, and all our sustenance comes from that reality. But in quite a different way, I believe, our God wishes us to come to life, to come to a full expression of our potential, our Divine reality, and that must be for a purpose which is not essential to the Being of the Creator, but which may be essential to a particular longing and delight in the heart of the understanding of that Creator.

In simple words, I think that the Creator wishes to have other individual divine Beings who can be His friends with whom He can share the content of His own reality, with whom He can enter into conversation, understanding and discussion about possible experiments in living, in trying to go beyond the understanding that God has already, which to us, at our stage of development, seems infinite, but this is obviously only a relative term, and is not infinite to the Creator’s possible understanding.

Therefore we can suggest that it is within our understanding that the Creator wishes to go beyond His own highest qualities. It is not outside the bounds of possibility that this is a fact, and the Creator is aware of His desire, of His longing, not only to share His understanding with friends, but also to enter into life and living experiments with those friends, in such a way that their collective understanding can go beyond the qualities which the Creator has within His understanding already; qualities of beauty, of virtue, of character, which the Creator already knows about but which, in the depth of His spirit, He will never be satisfied to rest in.

An extract from the essay The Nature of God, from The Great Gift by William Arkle, 1977 

Owen Barfield's understanding of Romanticism as an uncompleted destiny is of primary importance to an integrated view of The Inklings. Barfield articulated this very clearly in Romanticism Comes of Age (1944) as well as subsequent books; but none of the other Inklings seems to have understood or been-persuaded-by the argument.

Read the whole thing at The Notion Club Papers: an Inklings blog...

How may we actually, in practice, assist in sustaining and developing the spirit of Albion; or anything else in this mortal life that we love?

In a nutshell; we do it by being fully here and fully conscious - such that my own thinking of that time, place and nature is woven-into the evolving web of creation.

More at Albion Awakening...

I have been a contributor to that line of thought which asserts that intelligence has declined significantly over the past six to eight generations - and I would expand that argument to include a decline in human genetic fitness in general.

But that isn't the main problem - because even if we were more able - we would merely use our greater ability in pursuit of evil.

The problem is that our society is Not Even Trying to do Good or to be Good.


Instead we have an actively evil (i.e. deliberately destructive-of-Good) leadership class that is implementing its evil policies via and upon the materialistic, hedonic, despairing, and cowardly masses - who, by their unrepented acceptance of the evil agenda, thereby themselves become evil.

When we are pointed and marching (or shambling) in exactly the wrong direction, our increasing incompetence and inefficiency at moving rapidly is not the main problem.

We need to turn around.


The core priority, without which there can be no effective change, is to turn around: to face in the correct direction.

So, what is stopping us? Simply the fact that people have no idea of what good is.

Why have they lost a sense of what good is? Simply the fact that they have rejected God, hence they have rejected even the possibility of Good...

It is not just that people don't know Good - they don't know anything - people have become mere shells of temporary notions and emotions, passively responding to changing situations.


People are utterly unfree. They could be free, with a change of mind; but people choose not to be free; because they make assumptions about ultimate reality that destroy even the possibility of freedom.

People have given-up before they have begun.

And, what is worse, modern people won't even take responsibility for having rejected God, Good or the possibility of freedom! They have chosen mental slavery and rejected the gift of Heaven - yet they will not acknowledge that they had any choice in the matter!


Thus the decline in culture, science, technology, law, education... the decline in competence, efficiency, happiness, cooperation, idealism... all these are true but merely a froth on the surface of the real problem.

We might perhaps skim-off the froth - but the river still flows in the wrong direction.

Creation doesn't reverse - so how may the consequences of bad choices be dealt with?

On the one hand, all necessarily choices have consequences... or else the choices would not be real; on the other hand, this seems to suggest that every sin by every person who ever lived will be 'woven-into' the web of history and will permanently mar it.

Creation will therefore (apparently) be 'imperfect' - and yet Christians are (apparently) promised some kind of perfection in the Heavenly state...  


The problem with the above statement is that it has the inbuilt assumption of life tending towards a final static state - like a carpet that has-been woven. It also has that nasty word/ concept of 'perfection' inbuilt - which implies that Heaven is a single, predetermined and preplanned state of perfection - any departure from which is therefor a shattering of that perfection...

Nonetheless, if Heaven is love, and yet people so often reject love, and this has unloving consequences - then how can Heaven be a loving state?


Well, there is an answer - a satisfying answer! - and it is underpinned by the proper (as I regard it) understanding of love: specifically of love.

And therefore we already know the answer, because we all have sufficiently experienced love and its workings (even if it was more of a lack-of and yearning-for love - which is built in as a hope and indeed expectation).


Reality is a process in time, changing, dynamic - it is creation, which entails change; it is love, which entails change - reality is not a timeless state; and Heaven is therefore an ideal situation, but not a state-of-perfection.

(In fact, process is too physics-y a word for it, so is dyynamic - biological metaphors are preferable: reality is life, growth, development, transformation, evolution, consciousness etc...)


Therefore Heaven is not a 'blueprint' (any departure from which is necessarily im-perfect/ flawed/ not-Heaven...) but instead a matter of establishing that ideal situation.

Another way of thinking about it is that Heaven is not something imposed upon us from above, not something we are fitted-into; rather heaven is a 'bottom-up process of discovering, learning, loving, creating...

It is not built to a plan, but generated moment-by-moment by free, agent, conscious entities...


We have perhaps already experienced this (at least so far as love goes) - but did not know we were experiencing it; I mean in early childhood in the context of loving and being loved. We just lived immersed in the current moment - and when that was good, then it was ideal.

But Heaven withdrew from us even as the capacity for knowledge arose - the capacity to know can arise only by separation from what is experienced. And as we know, we fear; so that the current is no longer ideal, since we fear that it may be - will be - lost.

Consciousness ejects us from Heaven. (At first...)

Insofar as we know, of can imagine, the happiness of a loving family through generations; we can know or imagine Heaven.


Heaven is a return to what we have already experienced, but this time with consciousness. We return to the immersive experience of happy childhood in a loving family; while knowing that this is happening, that this is the situation we are in.

But instead of immersion we have creation. Instead of taking everything for granted, being swept-along by events, just in a state of 'being'; in Heaven we participate in God's work of creation.

That is what it is to be - like Jesus - a Son of God. A co-creator with The Father.

Not only to be part-of creation; not only to be an observer of creation; but to become a participant in creation.

That is - indeed - our 'job' in Heaven.


So, how does sin not mar Heaven?

Because sin does not mar the family - not when there is repentance and love.

All families are made-up entirely of sinners - yet even on earth and during mortal life we know (because we have experienced) that loving families can be ideal, for periods of time.

And that which is ideal, is not marred.

 

Materialist leftism is triumphant throughout the world leadership, and leftism is anti-Good. Attempts to organise groups to oppose it will not get anywhere - being wrong, doomed, futile etc.

What - then - is pro-Good is this world. The answer is that Good is derived only from specific individual persons (and perhaps not many of them).


Groupishness really is gone as a basis for the future - nobody now truly regards the group as superior to the individual, at least not in The West. For example - whatever they claim - I don't believe that those who affect to propound reaction really regard the group as superior to their own judgement.

Even the modern left - who so often use arguments or rationalisations about democracy, the people, the majority, consensus, the greater good, the intrinsic deservingness of oppressed groups... use these arguments cynically, expediently and dishonestly. The mass majority of leftists are, if anything, merely scared of 'the group' (whatever that group may be) - rather than regarding a group as intrinsically more-valid or more-virtuous than themselves (as their leftist ancestors sometimes used-to).


The significant division is first between those who regard the individual as a material entity and those who regard the individual as spiritual. Then - between those who regard the individual as spiritual - those who are on the side of creation (and God); and those who set themselves against creation (and ally with the demonic powers).

The new, Good individualism is therefor unified as a common alliance, all working on the same side, which is the side of reality; which is the side of creation; which is that which has been and is-being created.


The alliance for is of those who (in William Wildblood's phrase) Remember the Creator - or try to do so and repent when they do not.

These look out upon the world as a creation, ongoing - created by a personal God whose nature and character is known to them; and with whom they - voluntarily and from love - affiliate.

They do so because they believe-in Jesus Christ - that is to say they trust, they have faith in, Jesus; who created this world - and His Father, who is also Our Father.

And when the creator loves you, personally; that is the best possible reason for belief/ trust/ faith - and for alliance with creation.


How such a spiritual alliance of individuals will work-out in the Big Bad World is something I cannot predict and can barely imagine.

But I know that if it is what The Creator wants to happen - because it is what is best for us; then it will (somehow or another) be woven-into the always-being-generated web of reality.

And I also know that we should not be afraid nor should we be motivated by fear: faith casts-out fear, and fear is the opposite of love. 

As I have mentioned several times, I am engaged on an intense, poetic reading of the fourth Gospel ('John's) in which I read with the assumptions that this is the primary and most valid communication concerning Jesus.

Why? Because the author of this gospel is the beloved disciple who is Lazarus (-raised), who is the brother of Mary of Bethany, who is the same person as Mary Magdalene, who is the wife of Jesus (them having married initially in a normal Jewish way in Cana, and then in some heavenly and eternal fashion in Bethany: the episode of the spikenard ointment).

The author of the Fourth Gospel was therefore Jesus's best friend, an ex-disciple of John the Baptist (who had an essential role in the ministry of Jesus), Jesus's brother-in-law on earth and eternally, and himself an eternal being - the first resurrected Man.

The primary validity of such a 'source' is self-evident. 


My assumption is that at the time of writing of the fourth gospel, its readers will all have known the identity of the author, his nature, and his close and unique relationship with Jesus. This is therefore taken for granted in the text; and the text makes perfect sense in light of such knowledge.

This is certainly not an arcane, secret, occult, or gnostic interpretation of the fourth gospel! Quite the opposite. The fourth gospel was and is perfectly clear, its message was and is on the surface and not hidden between the lines. Its message is available to all and not restricted to the 'initiated'.

The fourth gospel is simply the story of Jesus written by such a man as Lazarus was known to be, as clear as possible given the nature of the material, and in the 'poetic' way that such matters were written - at that time and and in that place.


By 'poetic' reading, I mean that I am reading in a manner that empathises with the consciousness of the author and era, and therefore regards the language as poetry not prose.

Naturally, I am reading and re-reading the 'King James'/ Authorised translation of the gospel; as being the only divinely-inspired English version. And the KJB is poetic - indeed it is one of he greatest works of literature in its language, or any language.

Since poetic language (like all ancient language) is poetic, it cannot be translated word-by-word, nor concept-by-concept. Ancient languages meant many things at once in ways that are now impossible to express, except by more poetry (and poetry is currently extinct, or all-but). The nearest - which is not very near - is a list of semi-synonyms based on etymology; from-which a jump of sympathy, empathy, identification may be helped.


Furthermore, my understanding is that because the fourth gospel is by far the most valid and important part of the Bible - to understand Jesus and his work and message I need initially to understand it from the fourth gospel alone - without the endless-distractions and misleading tendencies of attempting to triangulate other and less valid New and Old Testament sources.

In other words, if I can attain clarity of the correct issues from the fourth gospel, regarded as valid; then this understand may then be applied to the other parts of the Bible (and indeed other sources).


Note: The method of the fourth gospel seems to be in working through great sweeps of text which clarify; by approaching a question or point from many 'angles', and aiming to remove ambiguities or incomprehension. It seems necessary to read, therefore, at sufficient length to notice these convergences.  It is proving to be an astonishingly rich experience, yielding wave after wave of clarification and insight.


Most important is the essence of what Jesus offers - that he variously calls by terms such as the word meaning 'thought', making, creation, life, light... So that Life is the key word/ concept; and everlasting life is the main thing that Jesus brings or offers.

Everlasting life (and light) is everlasting creativity, generation - it is thus more like biology (with  development and growth); than it is like physics. Therefore, what Jesus offers us is something 'in' time; it is active, dynamic, changing as living entities - it is not a blueprint for some final static state.

And he offers this on the basis that we 'believe' him - that is we trust him, have faith and confidence in him, love and esteem him, ally with him - and in doing so we ally with the primary creator who is Jesus's Father, with whom Jesus is in complete accord and whose mission he is fulfilling.

It really does seem that simple (and that complex): Jesus offers everlasting life (which is a situation arrived at via death and by bodily resurrection) by-means-of our attitude to the person of Jesus.


Simple, but...

There are many passages in which, by his attitude and teachings, Jesus is clear that many or most people will-not-want-to-take-up his offer of everlasting life - for various reasons.

It seems that it is a mistake to try and persuade people that they want everlasting life.

Jesus works by trying to make clear the situation, and the nature of what he offers, what he brings; he explains things in several ways - with parables, and sayings, with miracles, and with analogies. Sometimes Jesus answers direct questions - but often there comes a point when he refuses to say any more to people; when he realises that they understand and know but reject his gift.

In effect: You asked me, I told you. You will Not accept my answer, yet you ask me again! I am not going to repeat myself. You ask for evidence, I give you evidence. You will not accept the evidence yet you ask for more evidence!

My distinct impression is that Jesus did not expect his offer to be taken-up by everybody; he anticipated that everlasting life would be rejected by many people.


'Belief' in Jesus is clearly something conceptually simple (albeit that concepts such as belief were then far more complex/ multi-valent/ symbolic than they are now) and potentially instantaneous.

But this was when Jesus was physically present on earth in his mortal, or resurrected, life - and therefore his 'influence' was spatially limited.

Jesus explains to his disciples that this limitation will be overcome after he ascends to his Father, when he will send the Holy Ghost or Comforter - who will be an improvement on the physical presence of Jesus.

We moderns find this hard to believe, but Jesus was quite definite: it is better to have the Holy Ghost than the physical presence of Jesus. Because the Holy Ghost provides what Jesus did - but universally and from within each person.


Jesus makes clear that the Holy Ghost is in fact himself - the Holy Ghost is our direct and personal contact and communication with the ascended Jesus; that, without any other source, potentially provides every person with knowledge and guidance sufficient for eternal life.


Sometimes Jesus is talking to and about the disciples as a specific group - it was clearly of great importance that the disciples be a coherent and loving group after Jesus had ascended; at other times he seems to be to be referring to everybody alive and hereafter...

But, rather than the work of the disciples and their descendants; I think the fourth gospel is telling us that the core 'method' of Christianity is the direct contact with Jesus himself, in his universal form as the Holy Ghost/ Comforter.


Much more can, and I hope will, be said on these matters.

William Wildblood has done an important post at his Meeting the Masters blog; which he gives the provocative title The World Is Perfect.

This truth flies in the face of common modern morality to such as extent that probably most people would regard it as actively-evil, insane or seriously-dumb even to consider the validity of the idea that my life and your life, and the lives of everybody who ever has been - has been the life we most needed (although almost never is it the life we ought-to lead, since people apparently very seldom learn from their experiences).


1. The first step is to recognise that this mortal life, the life between biological conception and death, is on the one hand extremely-important; and also on the other hand not the only life - and especially not the end of our lives.

We have an eternity to live after mortality; therefore much of what happens during this mortal life can be understood and made sense of only in that context.

2. As Christians; we know that God was the creator, and that we live in the midst of his creation; also that God is our loving Father and designed creation for our (ultimate, eternal) benefit.

For modern people, this entails that we reject the almost ubiquitous (and incoherent) idea that this world is some mixture of rigidly-determined and random; that each thing is just an effect of some previous cause - without end or beginning; or else things happens unpredictably and for no reason.

By contrast, we need to assume that everything happens for a reason and by some intent or another.

This means that the world is, ultimately, alive and conscious and therefore intentional - there are ultimate reasons for everything (although, naturally, we don't personally know the reason for more than a minuscule number of these happenings - but that they do have a reason, we do know).

3. Another closely-related modern confusion that we need consciously to reject is that there is no such thing as 'free will'.

A better world for free will is agency in the old sense of the word; or autonomy... meaning simply that an autonomous entity is one from-which intentions, motivations, thoughts can arise (without being-caused).

That is, a free entity is one which is (to some extent) its own cause, or a source of causes.

That is just what-agency-is.

(It is a metaphysical assumption that there are such entities. It is not something to be proved - and neither can it be proved. Determinism of everything, and the possibility of randomness are equally metaphysical assumptions - and indeed they are very recent metaphysical assumptions, held by only a small minority of modern people. The possibility of coexistant determinism and randomness is also a meatphysical assumptino - and one which is incoherent. Another common but incoherent assumption, for example in physics, is that something may occur randomly and yet also be statistically predictable.)

There are many agent entities in this world (for example people, but others as well) - and there is also God.

This means that this actual world we experience is on the one hand God's on-going creation and it is also the outcomes of multiple autonomous entities.

4. For a Christian, God has a destiny - a hoped-for development - for each one of us, as individuals.

God does not want every human to be the same ('clones'); but like any good parent, God rejoices in the differences between his children, and loves to see each (beloved) child develop uniquely and in-line with his own nature, abilities and aspirations.

At the same time, God's creation is bound together by love - and the unique development of each individual must cohere with that of each other in a heavenly harmony.

The first commandment is love God and the second to love our 'neighbours' - and these are the prime commandments - thus it is love, and only love, which enables creation to be Good.

5. This is the world which we each inhabit, as mortals.

God is always present and active in his creation - but mostly 'behind the scenes' - because it is a major part of the divine plan that we each develop our own uniqueness in our own way: actively not passively - by free choice and not by compulsion.

By 'behind the scenes' I mean that God ensures that the experiences we most need for our development will come our way. This is not something we need concern ourselves about - our proper concern is to experience these experiences fully (and not, for example - a common modern response -  to avoid thinking about them) and to learn from them.

Each of us has different learning priorities; plus some people learn fast, while others do not learn at all. Others draw the opposite conclusions from their experiences than God intends... all of this is a necessary and intrinsic part of the free will/ agency/ autonomy of people.

So, often we need multiple repetitions before we learn that which we (personally) most need to learn), often we need extremely harsh experiences before we learn. (This is a matter of common observation and experience.)

And at the end of the day (as Jesus stated clearly) there were and are people who simply will not learn, who will neither listen to nor hear The Word. They can be given all sorts of experiences - they are shown miracles, shown love, hear or see divine communications - yet they will not learn.

This is because people really are autonomous agents. That is what people are. Necessarily. For better And for worse.

(And for worse, perhaps more frequently than for better...)

6. There are many and vital inferences to be drawn form the previous five points; but one that requires specific emphasis is that we must personally and in our own lives (as Christians) believe that this is indeed the best of possible worlds.

This is just not 'an option' - it is mandatory.

Actually understanding this is somewhat difficult, given the number of lies and errors that surround us, and the modern disinclination to think. And having understood it - it is difficult to live-by that understanding. Indeed, this is precisely one of the lessons we must learn!

So we must know this for ourselves, and for our own life. And we can expect that God will ensure that we have all the understanding we need for this purpose.


But we must Not try (and - always - fail) to explain why every detail of God''s creation is the best possible experience for every single one of the people alive now and throughout human history!

How could we possibly know this; and why would we need to?


So when someone comes-up with a (real or imagined, factual or garbled) description of some innocent or good person who either seems to have suffered very badly during mortal life - or some evil person who apparently had a gratifying (healthy, high status, powerful, cheerful...) mortal life... And when such 'examples' are put forward as contradicting the assertion tha this is the best possible world... We should never allow ourselves to be drawn-into trying to explain how exactly this example fitted into God's plan for creation!

(What was ridiculous about Dr Pangloss in Voltaire's Candide was not his assertion that this was the best of possible worlds; but his ludicrous and arrogant attempts to explain the precise reason for why every possible disaster to every individual actually contributed to the greater-ultimate-good, often in this mortal world. As if Pangloss personally knew the entirety of God's intent and creation's-causal web!)

We do not know all persons destinies, we do not know their inner minds and how they were actually gratified or suffered, we do not know what happens after a person dies...


In sum, we personally cannot link the events of someone else's mortal life with their individual destiny (and what that person most needed to know, or whether they indeed learned it); nor with the lives of all other people (whom God equally loves, as his children - albeit we are wicked children, he still loves us and want the best for every one of us); nor with the other entities of God's creation; nor can we understand how a person's mortal life was linked with their post-mortal eternal and resurrected life.


We cannot do such things, and if we try to do so - and to persuade another person of our rightness - then we only reveal our ignorance and makes ourselves ridiculous.

On the other hand, it is perfectly reasonable and to-be-expected that we can know a great deal of this kind of thing about ourselves; insofar as such knowledge is helpful to the main purposes of our mortal life - much of which is about learning to be active agents.

So it is quite likely that God wishes us to work-out such things for ourselves (rather than simply 'telling us') - partly because that is the basis mode of mortal life, and partly because that is the only way that many people can actually learn.

It is a commonly observed fact that many people can only learn many important things the hard way.

And when these 'things' that need to be learned are extremely important (for eternity), then that means that 'the hard way' is precisely the way that many such things will, of necessity, actually be learned. 

As can be seen from the announcement on the official blog of the Owen Barfield Literary Estate, I have been given the 2018 Owen Barfield Award for Excellence!

This award is mainly for my work on the Owen Barfield Blog which has accumulated about a hundred posts since it began in November.


The award is a great satisfaction to me; especially since the award was made by Owen A Barfield, grandson of, and literary executor to, the great man; and Jane Hipolito, one of the premier Barfield scholars and a good friend to Barfield.

Understanding and extending the work of Owen Barfield has been a major focus for the past few years; but I must again acknowledge the crucial stimulus I had from reading the group Inklings biography The Fellowship, by Philip and Carol Zaleski. Until I read The Fellowship, I had struggled to get attuned to Barfield's mind - although I had bought and read many of his major books.

But the Zaleski's book 'unlocked' Barfield for me; and since reading it I have felt very-much 'on Barfield's wavelength', sharing his world view and his concerns - and this to a greater extent than any of the other Inklings.

When considering the Inklings as a spiritual group of souls linked by a kind of implicit destiny - Barfield's work intuits, theorises and makes explicit what the others did in creative terms. By a fairly close and appropriate analogy; Barfield was Coleridge to JRR Tolkien/ CS Lewis's Wordsworth!


I therefore feel it is no exaggeration to claim that understanding and extending the major theme of Barfield's work on consciousness and its development, constitutes the single most important issue in the Western world today.