Bruce Charlton's Notions

I am fond of British Light Classical Music - and, while melody is (of course) the most important thing; I have noticed that some of the best pieces achieve their greatest effect by some 'novelty' of arrangement.

Perhaps the most inspired arranger was Ronald Binge - who began by working for Mantovani, and apparently invented the sound of massed 'silver strings', with the famous cascading/ overlapping 'waterfall' effect for which this orchestra became so well known:


Binge, as composer, wrote a handful of unsurpassed classics within his genre. As well as lovely tunes - these each have something distinctive about the arrangement.

My favourite must be the sublime Elizabethan Serenade, with its very special repeating flute-dominated phrase from the woodwinds, alternately contrasted with flowing violins, and a repeated choppy rhythm from the lower strings:


Another piece that is famous in Britain is Sailing By (from its use some decades ago by the BBC, when the radio station closed-down each night). This has a gorgeous melody, gorgeously-developed. But what makes it extra-special is the bubbling accompaniment - again, on flutes and woodwind.


Ah, the delicate art of arrangement!

I have read quite a lot of UFO writing over the years. The reason I haven't blogged about it is that I don't have a great deal to say on the matter. But yesterday somebody asked - so here goes.

I don't rule out that - at some level - the UFO phenomenon is, or was, genuinely 'paranormal' and purposive. Yet I somehow don't regard the matter as very serious or significant - at least, not unless an interest in UFOs was to lead-onto a more spiritual way of thinking and living, as happened with John Michell (Michell's first book was about Flying Saucers).

My main hypothesis is that UFOs are part of the spiritual warfare between angels and demons; and how this is manifested to certain people in certain circumstances. However, the matter is of UFOs nearly always discussed in a materialist (and unChristian/ anti-Christian) context. In other words, some UFO phenomena are probably angels (or made by them) while others are demonic.

But UFO appearances do not seem to be a very effective method of spiritual intervention - at least not for the angels. Why would angels do such a daft thing? Well, I regard angels as fallible creatures - being not a separate creation from Men, but pre-mortal and resurrected that are Men active in earth life. That is, angels are the not yet born, and the so-called-dead. Such angels are doing their best and learning from the experience; but it is inevitable that some of their ideas will fail to achieve their intended results - and maybe UFOs are an example?

UFOs, when they originated in the late 1940s, might have been modern miracles; spiritual manifestations designed to break the belief in materialism. For example, the Fatima miracles of 1917 would probably have been interpreted as UFOs if they had occurred in 1947*.

So what may be happening with UFOs is that spiritual phenomena of light (with its ancient symbolism of divinity) were misinterpreted materialistically; as high tech spaceships piloted by aliens. Then demons (who are pre-mortal, un-incarnated-spirit Men that are actively opposed to God, Good and divine creation) may have exploited this situation; and engineered other manifestations and contacts, in order to reinforce a world view that favours their evil agenda.

This is just a vague idea, and I don't have much interest in making it more precise; but it is part of my more general understanding that modern people are so deeply and habitually materialistic; that they will reduce anything spiritual into this framework.

Many millions of people very quickly developed strong and detailed beliefs in alien existence, contact, communication and plans that were based on no more than hearsay and dishonest mass media accounts, or (more rarely) on very ambiguous personal experiences of strange phenomena.

And this happened at such a large scale and so rapidly, because modern people find aliens possible (no matter how unlikely); while angels (and demons) are ruled-out a priori - because the metaphysical Christian beliefs that make sense of angels and demons are nowadays (generally and officially) regarded with bored disdain or loathing.


*Indeed, pretty much all the ancient supernatural events of the Christian Bible, and records from other religions, have (at one time or another in the UFO literature) been re-re-interpreted and explained as early examples of interactions between humans and various combinations of alien beings, alien-advanced technologies and flying saucers. Either this - or the opposite mainstream Establishment attitude of complete rejection, mockery and denial - is how a metaphysics of extreme and convinced materialism inevitably deals with anomalous phenomena. 

Leftism is materialism, and materialism has it that human life ends with biological death and has no meaning. Thus a our life has no other goal than hedonism - to be got-through as pleasantly, and with as little suffering as possible.

Yet Leftism include some of the most fanatical, zealous, venomous, ruthless moralists ever to have lived.

There is an apparent contradiction. But since this contradiction is seen in so many tens of millions of people; in private as well as in almost all mainstream, high status, public discourse - it can't really be a contradiction. 

How can moral relativists also be moralists? How can solipsistically-selfish hedonists also be maniacal humanitarians, pathological altruists and suicidal empaths?

Well, this apparent-contradiction is statistically-normal in the modern West, it is mandatory - anything else is severely sanctioned; but what is going-on?

Given that there is zero philosophical coherence, I must assume that there is a strong psychological coherence - and it must be quite a simple and straightforward kind of coherence, since so many people seem to be able to hold Leftist views, over the long term, and resistant to alternatives.

Fortunately, I have the advantage of having been a Leftist atheist for most of my life - so all I need to do is look back on what was my own state of mind. And that yields the simple answer that my psychological coherence came from what I was against, not what I was 'for'.

As a Leftist atheist, I knew what I was Not - and I knew this very clearly. I was not a Christian, I did not believe in God or anything spiritual. Just like tens of millions of others - I was against all forms of authority justified by tradition. I was against distinctions of class, sex and race. I was against the infliction of suffering. I was against Conservatives, Republicans, and any other party that was identified as to the Right.

This is psychologically coherent, and it is perfectly simple on the basis of 'us' and 'them', in-group and out-group.  Throughout human history; most people, most of the time have defined themselves more strongly by what they hate than by what they love. 

(While it seems that everybody can hate; not all that many people seem able to love...)

Indeed - what people are 'for' is very seldom coherent; and people don't seem to mind all that much - probably because people think in short, detached, sequences.

When incoherence is noticed, this requires holding several things in mind simultaneously (in 'working memory'), which is difficult to manage and impossible to sustain... and then this fades-away and the incoherence problem disappears. 


So we can see that having major motivations defined negatively and by opposition is quite 'normal', even when it makes no sense.

On the other hand, it does make a difference.

In the short term - well, there no problem from incoherence. After all we can only do one thing a a time. People simply focus on the task in hand...

But holding mutually incompatible convictions over the long-term, across a span of human life - well, then, and inevitably, contradiction makes that life meaningless, lacking in purpose, and at war with itself.

And this is what we find.

I have previously noticed that this current era is strange, even within context of the past couple of centuries of the post-industrial revolution era, in terms of matters that used to be regarded as having great significance being now regarded as utterly trivial or non-existant.

Perhaps the most extreme devaluation is the role of those who have died: the so-called dead.

We now experience a total denial that the dead have any active role in everyday life - indeed, the idea strikes modern people as ridiculous, since death is understood to be the opposite of life. For modern people, where there is death, there is no life; and life excludes the presence of death.


Yet it seems that Men of the past dwelt in a world composed of both the living and the - far more numerous - dead. 

In the most remote past, the dead were apparently perceived as present 'here and now' - the dead were often seen, heard, felt... There was a social relationship between the living and the dead much the same as between the living. The presence and activity of the dead was therefore a matter of everyday sensory experience.

Indeed the dead were not dead as we understand the world. We understand biological death to be the extinction of life and Being; but in the past death was regarded as a transition, the crossing of a threshold - a change of form.

Therefore the dead remained alive but in a different form. When a person had died biologically, he continued to to play an active part in life - and this was potentially a permanent situation.

The living and the dead had a two-way interaction; they could help or harm each other - they were mutually engaged in the making of the world. The presence of the dead was sensed, was known - the dead provided all manner of guidance and warning; the living might do things to please and assist the dead.


If this were the only factor at work; the dead would tend become more numerous, more important, with each generation. But working in the opposite direction, was the dead undergoing a transformation back into life; by some kind of reincarnation. Another aspect was the potential for transformation between men and other types of Being - such as animals - the same 'soul' being able to remain a spirit, or to take-on different forms.  


Needless to say, modern Man typically does not experience the world this way, and believes that ancient men did Not really perceive the dead around them, and did Not really interact with them - they were in error and only imagined this situation.

What was really happening (we believe) was that the living were doing everything... and the dead were absent - because they we obliterated by having died.

However, such an interpretation is based on two things: the absence of sensory awareness of the dead combined with the theoretical assumption that death is the end.

Of these, the assumption is stronger than experience; because the assumption that death is the end is so powerful, so overwhelming; that when a modern person does experience the presence of the dead - by seeing, hearing, touching, interacting with a dead person - then this (and any possible) perceptual experience is always explained-away.

Any perceptual or experiential account of contact with the dead is always (for typical modern Men) interpreted as being the result of some kind of pathology (an hallucination due to mental illness or sickness) - or a self-deception, wishful thinking or imagined fears.

At the extreme, the claimed experience is stated never to have happened: to be a fraud.

In other worlds, our assumptions about the finality of death are stronger than any possible experience that the dead remain present and active.  


This open-up the possibility that the dead are still actually 'with us', as much as ever they were; and that the difference between ancient and modern Men is at the level of perception: they perceived the dead, we do not.

The possibility is confirmed when modern men are (rarely) conscious of the dead - despite not perceiving them... when we simply know that the dead are present. For example I may know that I am are interacting with someone dead, and may know what he wants, and how he is responding to me.

In other words, the awareness and relationship with the dead may be something that happens in Consciousness - and without Perception. The theoretical basis, the metaphysical assumptions, that explain the primacy of Consciousness, the primacy of Thinking, for modern Man; are something I have often written about.

But here I simply want to say that modern Man may, on this basis, return to the situation of ancient Man - to a situation in which ordinary everyday life is lived in awareness of the presence of the dead, and indeed in a social interaction with the dead. 


Furthermore, this may lead to an awareness that the dead are concerned-with this mortal life on earth, and we are concerned with the continuing life of the dead: both sides have roles to play, jobs to do, destiny to pursue.

Further-more, we may come to agree that this is a matter of primary importance; and that the typical modern failure to acknowledge the presence of the dead is seriously damaging to us and to them - in a manner closely analogous to an act of denial of the existence of other living people, despite that they are all around us: as if, solipsistically, we regarded all 'other people' around us as merely hallucinations and delusions.


The typical modern, and absolute, metaphysically-rooted refusal to acknowledge the presence and importance of the (so-called) dead is - at root - a denial of Love; having the inevitable consequence of spiritual isolation and existential loneliness.

When modern man assumes that death is annihilation, and holds to that assumption in despite of all experience - this acts like a wish: the wish to be cut-off from reality.

And this deep yearning for the nothingness of total isolation fulfils itself in a horrible fashion, as we see all around us.    

How does the “two steps forward, one step back tactic work?”

First step forward

Evil sets an objective that might help it attain its ultimate end goal. It seeks to achieve this goal in step two, but does not reveal this. Instead, it merely floats the idea or subtly introduces the evil through minor actions or events. Reaction to this is gauged.

Second step forward

The evil course of action is implemented, often in a severe or extreme manner. The goal set in the first step forward is achieved here. This is met with opposition only after the damage has already been inflicted.

One step back

Evil is finally resisted and it deliberately takes a step back to feign weakness or seem diplomatic, but it leaves the achieved goal and the consequent damage it has caused intact. Those resisting evil feel as if they have won some sort of victory, as if they have forced evil into some kind of compromise. There exists the illusion of regained territory, but nothing has been gained at all because the territory evil won in step one remains firmly within its control. In other words, it has advanced while its opponents have been pushed back.

Cue the music again

Evil begins planning its next “two step forward, one step back tactic” on the same battlefield to gain further ground if needed; or it opens a new front somewhere else if all of its objectives on a given battlefield have already been achieved.

***

From Francis Berger's excellent blog - read the whole thing.

Francis is a regular and valued commenter here, but I only recently started reading his blog. He posts daily at present, and this contains some of the best writing and wisest thinking you'll currently find on the blogosphere.

Why not take a look?

At Albion Awakening (excerpt)...

The question is, can humanity progress from this current state of awakening intelligence to a deeper awareness before it destroys itself spiritually?

To put it at its simplest, can we move on from a state in which knowledge is our chief aspiration and focus to one of wisdom? In a state of ignorance, the majority of the populace could be guided by traditional religion. In essence, they did as they were told.

Now, as we leave our spiritual childhood we are learning to think for ourselves, but knowledge without wisdom has led to our corruption because, although we have begun to think for ourselves, we are not yet capable of thinking very deeply.

These are the two problems that confront us and to which we must find a solution.

In a dark year of my life, while a House Officer (or medical 'Intern' in the US nomenclature), I went fast and deep into the works of Kurt Vonnegut - and experienced their brilliance and their despair.

I was introduced by the Scottish novelist Alasdair Gray in the autumn of 1982, when I first met him in Glasgow - he either quoted from memory or read aloud something deeply amusing from Breakfast of Champions, and lent me a copy of Slaughterhouse Five. I rapidly went on to read everything by Vonnegut written up to the middle 1970s. It made my life A Lot worse.

(...After the mid 70s publication dates, I found the work unreadable - a kind a embarrassing, contrived self-parody. Interestingly, I believe this happened because Vonnegut so insightfully explained-himself, in the non-fiction collection Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons. Having explained himself, made his methods conscious and explicit in lectures and essays; he could no longer do them spontaneously and naturally - and it destroyed his genius. This is what Glenn Gould called the 'centipedal' problem in relation to piano technique - that when the centipede tried to explain how it was he could manage to coordinate so many legs, he then found he could no longer do it: this was why Gould refused to teach pupils.)

I think Vonnegut's best work is Cat's Cradle - which is written with extraordinary wit and deftness, and is packed with very clever ideas. But it is deeply subversive and despair-inducing, exactly because it gets so deeply and sympathetically into the religious impulse, the impulse to perceive and know life as meaningful and purposive... which it then alternately mocks and pities as false: a self-gratifying and socially-beneficial delusion.

This is the Vonnegut mood: surface wit, powerful depth charge jokes; empathic explanation and description - then the resigned shrug that the whole thing is a trick; either a trick we play on ourselves to keep ourselves going, or a trick played on us by rulers who are manipulating us for their own benefit.

Vonnegut is therefore an extreme example of the nineteen-sixties counter-cultural ideology that has since grown and taken-over as the dominant mainstream. He is both a hedonist (because nothing else matters) and a pathological altruist (especially in God Bless You, Mr Rosewater).

Vonnegut combines that paralysing pacifist pity with shallow, slavish and partisan Leftism, in the way so familiar from nearly all Western ruling elites. The pity makes them feel superior, their careerist hatred of the less-extremely-Left is what daily-motivates them. 

My point is that Vonnegut really was a genius - albeit a minor genius, but undoubtedly - and consequently the harm he did (especially via Slaughterhouse Five, in context of the Vietnam War protest movement) was massively amplified in a world where the social ethos so exactly matched his own.

Vonnegut and the late sixties-early seventies shared a dangerous resonant frequency -  much as he did with my own pervasive misery, self-righteousness and failure of courage.  

People often talk and behave as if someone can get power for serving the demonic agenda; but they never can. What they can get (for a while) is pleasurable rewards for self-subordination to the demonic agenda.

For example, someone may pledge (explicitly, more often implicitly) to serve the evil, demonic agenda - and in return he will be rewarded sexually, or in terms of high salary and social status. This trade is perfectly normal, mainstream - and applies to the great majority of successful people in The West.

But - whatever their initial hopes or motivations, and whatever their short term pleasurable payment - such people do not actually get enhanced power; they never get to impose their own personal agenda on the world.

Demons are not that stupid: the one thing a demon will never yield is power over himself. He will never allow himself to be harnessed to a weaker person's agenda - because that, by definition, can unilaterally be made irreversible.

Selling your soul in return for the reward of power is therefore always a trick - in both the short and long term. It is, in fact, a bait-and-switch - where instead of power the person is given pleasure (i.e. something they crave - often sex, perhaps revenge).

(Among and between those in service - control is 'hedonic'; by fear and lust, sticks and carrots, threats and bribes. Escape is always possible; but requires repentance - and repenting typically entails immediate hedonic penalties.)  

The end result is always that the self-enslaved power-seeker lies to himself that in being compelled to serve the demonic agenda - in doing what is required of him - he is 'really' doing just exactly what he most wants to do.

Many or most people achieve Final Participation quite frequently - and in a reductionistic, psychological sense it isn't all that difficult to do so.

The problem is that achieved Final Participation is not noticed; or when noticed it is rejected as unimportant.


In a minimal sense - Final Participation is happening to me in those, mostly brief, 'moments' when I look at the stars or a beautiful and beloved landscape, read and really 'get' The Lord of the Rings, am suddenly moved by music and recognise it happening to me, or become aware of myself among my family, or awaken in the night feeling my-self to be at the centre of a great field of awareness.

That is IT - but it is generally regarded as trivial or delusional - just a random firing of neurons, or evidence of the human ability to imagine themselves more significant than they really are... In a word: the subjective experience is regarded as merely subjective - and having no relevance or importance to anybody else or any-thing else.

And this interpretation is understandable; because by this-worldly criteria it is nearly-always true.


For a start - we expect to be overwhelmed by reality (when it is really-real). We figure that anything real will impose-itself on us, so that we cannot resist it - that we will be swept-along by real-reality... so brief and delicate moments are not what we are looking for.

But being overwhelmed would not be a good thing; not for an adult; not for a soul that is aimed at becoming fully a part of the divine family...

If we are ultimately to become fully divine, and to participate in God's works of creation - then (to be valuable, for each to make a substantive contribution) we must be operating from a situation of full agency.

This, in turn, means that we need to to be consciously aware of our own thoughts, and of the ultimate realities external to our-selves. We cannot be immersed unconsciously in reality, we ought not to be overwhelmed nor swept away by reality. In contrast, we need to be able to stand-outside of reality and perceive reality and our-selves, and the creative integration of original thought from our-self and the already-existing reality.   


And secondly - our interest in reality is typically a (covert) interest in power. We are prepared to believe that something brief, delicate and subjective is real if - like mathematics, science, and engineering - it promises to bring us power.

Such power might be personal enhancements (such as money, a job, high status) or it might be more remote and idealistic power - the power to build a bridge or cure pneumonia... but our interest in subtle, non-overwhelming reality is linked to our optimism that it will have 'cash-value' in our mortal lives. 

(To put it another way: Almost all people, almost all of the time - are doing things for reasons of 'power' (by this broad definition); and, for obvious reasons, none of these people can be allowed anywhere near teh process of creation - or else creation would be poisoned and destroyed. But the prevention it does not really work by exclusion; it works by inability... Anyone motivated by person power - 'egotism', pride etc. - thereby automatically and totally excludes himself from participating in the creative process.) 

So we seldom notice Final Participation because it is outside of our metaphysical assumptions about what is really real - but even when we do notice it, our interest usually fades rapidly when it becomes apparent that we cannot (under any circumstances) use that knowledge to get power to improve our mortal lives: when we realise that such knowledge is not power.


Indeed, the knowledge that we get from such moments as I listed is not easy to share - it is not translatable into the common language of our times - partly because that common language excludes such matters, and partly because we don't even know how we might be able to communicate or explain such matters beyond (as I did above) merely describing the situation in which it happened.

It seems that an important part of it is that there must be a direct form of knowing, a knowing without communication - so that two people might know exactly the same thing without sensory perception or having to interpret symbols... by some mechanism whereby the same knowledge is being (simultaneously) shared...

Since the entirety of modern culture is based on the assumption that no such mechanism can exist, that all knowledge arises by a complex, multistage and unreliable chain of communication-steps... well we can barely even formulate the possibility of direct knowing.


However, however, however... If we are able to understand that these brief and delicate moments of Final Participation are In Fact direct glimpses of truth and reality; attained because our minds are (briefly) attuned with the divine creation - we can see why they are brief and incommunicable; and we can also see why the knowledge we attain is disconnected from power.

When we are directly observing divine creation, we are indeed only one step away from actually joining-in-with divine creation - but that is a vast step, seldom taken. It is one things to observe reality - but another and qualitatively more-difficult thing to engage in the making of reality; because for creation to continue entails that it be coherent, harmonious - that all additions to creation be fruitful and (of course) Good.

You and I are (almost certainly) a very long way from being able to contribute to divine creation; because we are not in harmony with the divine. (In other language, we are creatures of sin.) But I am not saying it is impossible for a mortal Man to add something to creation - indeed, that is precisely what a true creative genius has done (done objectively; whether or not recognised by fellow men).

But we can also see that the situation in which this happens is rare and unstable. When the situation is right, when a person is (however briefly) truly aligned-with the goals of divine creation - when he observes and loves creation... then it may be that his own divinity, his own agency, may not only observe but also contribute to on-going creation in some way - quantitatively microscopic, but eternal and therefore significant.


Perhaps, indeed, there is do distinction between observing and co-creating; perhaps these ephemeral moments of Joy are in fact our own, individual, nano-contributions to the actuality of divine creation? I would not rule it out - and indeed perhaps this is why we are mortally alive - our destined purpose. Perhaps the contributions of mortal men - no matter how small and infrequent - offer something of great and permanent value to the vast totality of God's creation? 

Yet even if or when this happens, there need not be any observable relationship with mortal life in this world. Such a happening is Not about power, Not about 'will power', not about the limited situation of a 'successful' (comfortable, convenient, pleasurable) mortal and earth-bound life; but way beyond and above and far wider-than such superficial and ephemeral considerations.

There are many prehistoric monuments in England - the earliest seem to be under the ground - such as West Kennet Long Barrow of some five and half thousand years ago, perhaps the centre of the religious landscape of that time...


While somewhat later are the more famous stone circles such as Avebury (near to West Kennet, and part of the same 'ritual landscape')


In general, through human development it has become more and more difficult to contact the divine. And this may be related to the assumed whereabouts of the divine.

Probably (there are no records), the earliest humans lived always 'in' the divine world - there was no separation between divine and mundane. Later, among the recorded simple hunter gatherers - contact with gods and spirits was more difficult; only attainable intermittently by a minority of specialist 'shamans' - who had to undergo some training, or else learn to use altered conscious states.

I would guess that the next stage - after the development of agriculture, and corresponding to the early Neolithic as at West Kennet - involved a professional priesthood, each of whom would experience a prolonged initiation. And also sensory deprivation and isolation - hence the underground sacred places.

(The Pyramids of Ancient Egypt are likely a highly developed version of this - the inside of the pyramid being the sacred space.) 

Under-ground was also the place of the divine - corresponding to the intuition that the divine was 'within' everyone and every-thing.

The monument Seahenge had an upside-down oak tree at its centre - roots above the surface, trunk and branches projecting deep into the earth - perhaps linking the divine underworld with this mundane surface world...


In the later neolithic, and into the bronze age - it seems likely that the contact with the divine became even more difficult - such that the gods were no longer experienced 'inside' - but in the sky, far away, imperceptible - and only indirectly and abstractly contactable by such methods as divination.

Hence the great stone circles (and pyramidal 'mounds' such as Silbury) were 'sky temples' - astronomically-shaped and aligned. I also assume that there was a supreme single god, by this time (henotheism); corresponding to centralised priestly government. 'Heaven' also means sky.

(The gods-under-ground, and god-in-the-sky temples seem to have co-existed for a long time - perhaps catering to different types of person; but the distinct impression is that the sky temples to the supreme god had the highest status, at least among the ruling group - since the greatest efforts were put into these structures.)

By this point, the kind of knowledge-based, abstract, priest-led religion was established which survived (gradually changing, becoming more theoretical and less direct) right through to the Reformation, and (somewhat modified) into modernity - after which it declined.

Until, from the advent of modernity (?1500s) increasing up-to nowadays, most people cannot contact the divine at all, under any circumstances - and deny its reality.

The idea of Romantic Christianity is that - starting with a few people from about the middle 1750s, and increasing, modern people are implicitly aware of the divine in a different, and individual, way; but which is not recognised as divine contact.

This is the process of conscious intuition, which I have often tried to describe on this blog. My understanding is that it happens to many (or most) people - but that nearly-always its validity is denied, and it implications ignored.

The modern sacred space is each Man's consciousness.

Note: If you are interested by the above line of argument, although not the specifics, you can find it superbly explored in Jeremy Naydler's The Future of the Ancient World, 2009.

This is the modern condition - unavoidable, in one of its aspects. We now, that is - nearly everybody in The West, have-to choose who (or what) to believe. This matter can no longer be taken for granted (i.e. to follow tradition).

And that is what we actually do - all of us; most especially those who most vehemently deny that they are making a choice, or that there is any choice. We choose who or what to believe.

Thus this is the era of personal responsibility - unshirkable - and, again, those who claim otherwise do so on the basis of having chosen to believe someone who tells him he has no responsibility for what he believes.

I often find myself shocked at my own credulousness; at the way I have believed something for no good reason or for bad reasons; at the way I have 'passively' absorbed stuff from sources I am convinced are dishonest and of malign intent.

I am shocked at the way I hold vehemently to information I know only indirectly and without any confirmation; via the mass media, or government agencies.

If epistemology (the problem of knowledge) has been the focus of philosophy in the 'modern' era (since the 17th century, increasingly) then this is why. Because each is responsible for what each knows.

This requirement - because that's what it is: a thing required of us - to know for yourself is what I call the Romantic impulse. Because to know for yourself is intuition - self-validating knowing. And I regard this as right and proper so long as it is followed-through to its implications.

instead, people reject traditional knowledge, and credulously cleave to false information from the mass media or lying officials and ideologues; they embrace incoherent nonsense such as materialism, the secular revolution, fake news and fake science - and they absolutely refuse to learn from their repeated experience of betrayed trust, of detected lies, of the discovery of malign agendas.

But if we follow-through on this fact of modernity, and believe only what we really know and test for our-selves; this will lead (by a zag-zag route, no doubt) to where we ought to be going.

Establishment mouthpieces (whether deliberatly, or as dupes) often assert that there is 'no need' to posit conspiracies to explain bad things, given that people are so prone to cock-ups, or errors.

(This 'no need' argument smuggles in the illegitimate assumption that it is only allowable to recognise a conspiracy when all possibility of accident has been excluded; whereas common sense would suggest that the existence or not of a malign conspiracy is a matter of fact (to be determined) - and has nothing to do with an imagined necessity first to exclude all alternative 'random' explanations.)

One way to try and discredit the evidence of conspiracies is to point out that many things happen, and are planned and aimed-at, which contradict the supposed aim of conspiracies. Life is too chaotic to suppose that 'everything is planned' by wicked powers.


This argument has some weight; in the sense that any plausible conspiracy posited, even one that emanates from the Global Establishment, cannot be regarded as all-powerful; since that would not allow for the reality of genuine opposition, or even the reality of noticing the conspiracy! So, no matter how powerful the conspiracy, there must be the possibility of effective resistance.

But also there is real conflict within the Global Establishment - i.e. among the identified conspirators. In other words; there is conflict within the mainstream, modern Left - who dominate all major social institutions.

This conflict arises from the fact that although all share the same, long-term ideological Leftist goals; different institutions have different short-term interests, and different powerful individuals likewise and even more so.

For example, the Western military Establishment contains people whose goals relate to traditional military objectives of effective application of force. But the same organisation contains people who are - indirectly - sabotaging military effectiveness by 'affirmative action' personnel policies that systematically give preference to certain groups (not-men, non-white races, non-Christians, non-natives, non-heterosexuals etc).

So, on the one hand, the Global Establishment want to have a highly effective military force (including police) to impose their ideology on anyone, anywhere, who resists it; on the other hand they also want to promote inter-personal and intergroup resentment and conflict (between the sexes, classes, sexual preferences, races, religions and ideologies) everywhere, among all humans, and without any exceptions. 

Similar conflict scenarios apply in all social institutions (education, science, health, law etc) because these withn-bureaucracy groups are rooted-in genuine oppositions of proximate interest - despite that all parties share the same distal (long-term) goals...


Therefore, all modern organisations - like all bureaucracies (like all evil entities - and bureaucracy is intrinsically evil) - are (at this level of analysis) alaways at war within themselves; and this endemic conflict is an inexhaustible source of cock-ups by organisations. The left hand is always sabotaging what the right hand is trying to accomplish; and vice versa.

So, things go wrong often and in a big way without those specific wrong things being deliberately planned. But the fact that cock-ups are endemic, is built-into the organisation, as a consequence of its over-arching Leftism.

Why? Because the 'unity' of Leftism is a unity of opposition. Leftism is defined by not what it proposes - which nowadays changes every decade. (Approximately...) In the sixties in the US it was the blacks, in the seventies it was women, by the eighties is was homosexuality - nowadays it is transhumanist transgender-ed/ing).

Since these cannot all be The Priority, there is conflict built-in; but there is a unity in what is being opposed - which ultimately is God - specifically Jesus, The Good, the transcendent, the spiritual reality... all of these interchangeable priorities on the Left are temporary expedients for attacking Christianity.

(Or, more specifically, for ensuring that Christianity does not become what it ought-to become - does not become truly Christian.)


The Left is, in other words, ultimately unified only by the long-term objectives of its Satanic, demonic, immortal and spiritual leadership - who operate invisibly, behind the scenes, across the decades and spanning the huuman generations.

These and can only be known directly by spiritual discernment; or indirectly inferred from the gap between the feebleness and limitations on human strategic action (given individual corruptibility, short-termism, selfishness etc); compared with the actuality we observe of a coherent-but-negative, evil-motivated plan, unrolling over at least two centuries.

The conspiracy is seen in the fact that the implicit strategy of the mainstream, modern, Global Establishment ideology makes comprehensive sense only when regarded as aiming-at constant, endemic conflict - designed to induce fear, resentment, pride, nihilism and despair.

At this level, cock-up and conspiracy are united, because the demonic supernatural conspiracy designs the situation that creates multiple and severe cock-ups; and the cock-ups are intended to maintain further conflict; and the conflict is intended to promote the agenda of fear, resentment, and all the rest of it.

In a sense: the conspiracy is cock-up. 

I once had a very interesting conversation with a man who was briefly influential for having invented what he (and others) regarded as an objective and quantifiable measure of the quality of life. The idea was that this could then be used to calculate how best to deploy health care resources to get the greatest amount of health per unit resource.

Sounds great! (Or, at least it does to a health service bureaucrat.)

The actual method entailed doing surveys (on, inevitably, non-representative groups) to ask individuals numerically to rate and compare various alternative scenarios of health. These opinions were then subject to mathematical procedures - of averaging, standardising and the like - to come up with what was supposedly an objective unit.

(A further, normal, assumption here is that people are inter-changeable units; so that what applies on average also applies to all individuals. The average quality of life with a disease - whatever that may mean - is applied to each individual with the same disease, when it comes to policy. That such an assumption lacks any scientific/ statistical validity seems to make zero difference.) 

The chap was educated and - in a way - intelligent - I recall him quoting Aristotle. But he simply could not understand that this procedure was arbitrary and anything-but objective: that it did Not At All measure the quality of life.


Modern bureaucracy is full of this Emperor's Nose* kind of thing (the definition of 'quality' is itself another very influential and long-lasting example); indeed such abritrary-mandatory-definitions must come from the very top of the bureaucracies, or else they would simply be laughed out of court as being obvious nonsense. Nobody knows how to do something, so an elaborate and expensive process is devised - which is officially declared to have solved the problem.

Exactly the same thing happened with Evidence Based Medicine - a particular type of research method (the very-large, randomised controlled trial) was declared to be The Best, most authoritative, only truly valid source of evidence concerning therapeutic effectiveness.

The assumption is established that procedure leads to truth. Q: Why do bureaucrats do this? A: Because bureaucrats control procedure - therefore truth.


But what is very interesting is that bureaucrats seldom stick to their own rules.

I worked for a couple of years in the National Health Service bureaucracy (as a part-time public health physician trainee); and the normal thing was to expend massive time and energy on establishing 'objective' procedures and rules that dictate proper decisions by agreed criteria; and then ignoring them half the time, and doing things for entirely different reasons.

Some of this is simply corruption: short-termist selfishness of individuals. Some of it is ideological - because Leftist imperatives always trump the proper-procedures, and bureaucrats affirm-to-themselves, and advertise-to-others, their own morality whenever they do this.

For example, a high-up explained to me how he was first to sack ('let go') more than a hundred staff in compliance to central government directives to 'cut red tape' etc; and that this tough cull was advertised in press statements. But that in reality essentially all of the 'sacked' staff were merely being re-deployed within the organisation, or sacked and rehired for the same function a few days later (and other similar scams) - this sticking to the letter and violating the spirit was a source of managerial pride; intended as educational evidence of competence.

Another analogous instance was that I was assigned to see what types of treatment could (and by implication should) be eliminated from state-provision because they were not really about health. What was envisaged was probably cutting provision of Alternative therapies. One major possible saving that I noticed was fertility treatment; on the basis that being infertile was a misfortune but not a health problem.

This was instantly and decisievly removed from the table of possible cuts to be considered; on the basis that one of the chiefs said that it was exactly the kind of thing the NHS ought to do, and indeed should do much more of - because (when effective) it made people so happy. Which was true; but making people happy is an entirely different matter than the official 'mission' of providing health care to (for example) reduce suffering, restore functionality and save lives.

I was trying to be a 'good bureaucrat' by applying the rules; but here was a harsh lesson in the truth of how things really work. Fertility treatment was a 'pet project' of a senior bureaucrat (for whatever reasons, good or bad) - and 'therefore' the rules did not apply, and indeed the rules were reversed.


My point is that people often complain about the materialism 'mindless' bureaucracy; that modern society runs like a machine ignoring the individual. But that is only half the truth of it.

We are indeed bound ever more extensively and deeply by the Iron cage of bureaucracy; with rules and procedures extending to more and more of life.

And at the same time; these rules and procedures are applied according to not procedural criteria; and the rules and procedures are frequently changed - in response to non-rule-based, non-procedural imperatives.

A vital factor in this is catch-all rules such as Terms of Service, or catch-all laws such as Hate Crimes. These make everybody in breach of regulations all of the time; hence every application is arbitrary - or more exactly, dictated by the whims and preferences of managers.

This duality is captured by the two dominant aspects of modernity: bureaucracy and the mass media. Bureaucracy represents arbitrary procedure; the Media represent arbitrary morality. Both procedures and morality are subject to frequent change - and different procedures and morals may potentially be applied to the same situation.

From the low level (you and me) this is experienced as arbitrary - on one side, a life encaged by strict rules, but arbitrarily applied; on the other a crazy life of evoked mob passions of excitement, lust, disgust and hate arbitrarily aimed-at unpredictable targets - with unpredictable outcomes.


Many modern people, especially women, crave a world of safety and predictability - which bureaucracy seems to offer; yet in practice it does not - in fact the world is much less safe and predictable with every year.

When understanding modern society and where it is going, we need to be careful not to be one-sided. For example, the European Union is often interpreted in terms of being a (Germanically thorough, French administrative elite ruled) bureaucratic paradise: a dull but safe technocratic project; by which all of Europe will be bound-together and unified by the imposition of thousands of helpful laws and rules...

An economic powerhouse - of 'free trade', planning, efficient allocation of labour and resources... of the unconstrained mobility of people and goods... A place where Human Rights are guarateed to all. A place where Hatred is illegal. A place where everybody is repected, and where such respect is enforced. A place where nobody - or no reasonabl person - will ever be offended by any-thing they abhor.

Or, alternatively and as-well, the EU is - mass media style - interpreted as the creation of a 'free space' within which culture can interact without constraint - a smorgasbord of cuisine, languages, architecture, landscapes - holidays and travel and cosmopolitanism...

Yet the primary, inflexible, strategy of the European Union is not captured by either of these. The one thing upon which the actually-existing EU insists above all else is mass immigration from outside the EU - from Africa, South Asia and the Middle East...

Mass immigration to the UK brings out the stark contradiction at the heart of modernity. We have a bureaucratic society in which more and more is monitored and controlled; into which comes unknown, unmeasured, uncounted but very large numbers of people to whom the rules are not applied.

The mass media do not notice this. From 2000-2010 through England towns were visibly and rapidly transformed, schools transformed, health service usage transformed; but the local news media did not notice while this was happening - when I looked at the records of my local newspaper there was nothing at all, ever.


So we do not live in an efficient bureaucracy, nor do we live in a world where a crazy out-of-control media can do what it wants. Rather, there is a long-term strategy above and beyond these and all other human organisations.

Everything important happens, or has already happened, at the level of the basic assumptions that lead to bureaucratic rules, that lead to media stories and ignorings.  But these basic assumptions are concealed and protected by every means possible, including by contradictory means.

There is, in our society - as it is organised - never a time, and no place or situation, in which it is regarded as appropriate to identify and discuss the basis assumptions upon which everything is based.

These basic assumptions that dictate everything, which justify everything; just 'appear' and get imposed. These basic assumptions are denied because they are arbitrary - and they are arbitrary in a way that is obviously false. 

That is how our society is controlled. Because the means of control - i.e. the basic assumptions that lead to all the specifics of control - are kept invisible; and because imperceptible their existence is therefore deniable, and is in fact denied.

What we see, down-here, is something like the health service rejecting some treatment because it objectively does not benefit quality of life, or that there is no objective 'evidence' (ie mega randomised trails of the right sort) to support it; and this is implemented by chains of committees endorsed by the votes of experts panels and 'independent' regulatory agencies... And perhaps the mass media run scare campaigns, based upon the 'evidence' that they report that somebody says that the treatment did their child some kind of horrible harm; and this is endorsed by a charity or pressure group (nature and funding not known, nor cared about) that advocates in favour of something that sounds nice...

And so a drug is banned - or a new drug is implemented... or anything else.

There is a juggernaut of expert evidence, a juggernaut of hysterical public opinion. There is a facade of procedure - but nothing important is ever decided by procedure ...

Bureaucracy is just for the little people.


*From 'Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman': This question of trying to figure out whether a book is good or bad by looking at it carefully or by taking the reports of a lot of people who looked at it carelessly is like this famous old problem: Nobody was permitted to see the Emperor of China, and the question was, What is the length of the Emperor of China’s nose? To find out, you go all over the country asking people what they think the length of the Emperor of China’s nose is, and you average it. And that would be very “accurate” because you averaged so many people. But it’s no way to find anything out; when you have a very wide range of people who contribute without looking carefully at it, you don’t improve your knowledge of the situation by averaging.

I see that the question of the truth-status of the theory of evolution of all forms of life by natural selection is coming around again; as it does every few years and will continue to do until the matter is properly understood.

Because there is an answer, and it is quite straightforward: the theory that all forms of life on earth (all 'species') evolved exclusively by natural selection is a metaphysical assumption; not a scientific theory.

This is the plain truth of the matter - although to appreciate the fact requires that you understand the distinction (which is perfectly objective) between a metaphysical assumption and a scientific theory.

It also requires that you understand the distinction between the observable fact that humans (as well as other species) have 'traits' that evolve by natural selection (such as height, personality, strength); and the metaphysical assumption that this mechanism is the sole factor responsible for the many different forms of life on earth (past, present and future). 

I have written on this subject in the past - and published an online mini-book (10,000 words) for the interested 'lay' reader called The Christian Evolutionist some five years ago. A deeper consideration was published in 2016 as a 10,000 word essay aimed at professional biologists.

Note: Anyone seriously wanting to engage with either or both of these pieces, is recommended to print-out paper copies - especially of the academic essay; because they are too long and complex to read on screen. 

I can understand why so may who oppose the slide into totalitarian nihilism, despair, suicide and self-damnation are so focused on discerning who is 'us' and who is 'them' - but the reality is that although there is a Them, there is not an Us - not in the same sense.

There is a Them united by their opposition to good, opposition to God. They can therefore police their boundaries, and they do.

But the Us is a collection of individuals. There is no boundary to police - and trying to make a boundary is destructive - tending to make Us into Them.

Christianity is in its essence about individuals bound by love, exactly like Families - it isn't about objectively definable groups/ organisations/ institution; except secondarily, contingently, always changingly...


Note added: One implication is that (here-and-now) if you want to run an institution, an organisation (including a church) that is not going to be absorbed into the single, evil, bureaucracy-media-plex; then you need to exclude Them... But you cannot achieve this by including only Us as defined... however. However Us is defined, it will - over time - come to include Them. 'They' can only be reliably and effectively excluded on an individual basis. (Here-and-now) Us must be a collection of individuals that cannot be captured by any definition that also excludes Them. It may (or may not) also be relevant that the attempt to exclude all of Them by a very restrictive group-definition will very probably cripple the institution, by excluding vital Us-es... This further implies the absolute necessity for individual judgment as primary: all Systems will lead to corruption. 

I describe myself as a Romantic Christian - and in this usage 'Romanticism' has a precise meaning of 'knowing by direct personal experience'.

My contention is that the era of Romanticism in The West (beginning in the middle 1700s) is that we need to know By Personal Experience. That must be the foundation of our lives.

Other forms of knowing  - e.g. from authority, by tradition, from philosophy or science, or from any external source, may be helpful, but these cannot be the basis of life.

Romanticism is a development of human consciousness; it is ordained by God as part of the development of each Man and of Mankind. It does not apply to all eras, nor to all Men, nor to all cultures - but when it does apply it is unavoidable.

It applies to me, and almost certainly it applies to you. We must seek knowledge in our personal experience - else we will not really believe it, will not be sufficiently motivated by it, will not be engaged by Life, will not be part of Reality: and we will lapse into nihilism and despair (indeed, most people are already in that state).

Since Christianity is true - the implication is that modern Western Christians will nearly always need to know by their personal experience; and will ultimately need to do so. Other sources of knowledge will not suffice (although they may help). 

This is Romantic Christianity: the recognition that modern Western Christians (nearly always) need to have faith by their direct, personal experience of the grounds for faith.

It is not that church, scripture, tradition, philosophy &c. are obsolete - but that they cannot be the basis of Christianity any more, for you and me. And cannot means cannot - we must seek direct experience if we are to be sufficiently real Christians in this time and place.

The difference is that infinity is defined abstractly, i.e. without any reference to consciousness; it is posited as a 'thing'. The open-endedness, un-boundedness of reality is, by contrast, an experience.

The following paradoxes might help - they are paradoxes because the explanations assume divisions that are in reality unity. So they are fingers pointing at the moon, ladders to be kicked away after use...

Consciousness is necessary for the concept of infinity, or for any other knowledge, but that fact is ignored in 'definitions' of infinity - this is the root of the falseness and error of infinity.

We know infinity only by consciousness; but infinity dispenses with consciousness. But really, knowing is a part of creating - it is the active/ process, in-Time interaction of Being with reality that is creation.

(Whenever we find ourselves discoursing without recognition of the fact that Being is Be-ing - 'ing' meaning something that is in-Time, includes Time - then we are in error. Since Infinity does not take account of Time, it is an error.)

Chaos is made-into creation by the be-ing of Beings, by the existence of Beings; knowledge arises from a Being perceiving - it is the insertion of Beings into chaos that makes creation.

By the very process of Being, is creation.

We cannot contemplate chaos; because our contemplation is creation. Thus - simply by Being, all 'things' create. (That is, there are no things, only Beings.)

Consciousness is a part of this, and consciousness is quantitative. All Being entails knowledge - albeit mostly non-conscious knowledge. All Being has consciousness - although mostly this is minimal - minimally conscious Beings are what we mischaracterise as 'things', minerals etc.

As consciousness increases it first looks outward; so we first become aware of external creation but not our our own role in creating it: we tend to set creation against our-selves. creation is, at first, realer than our-self; and the separation seems like an aberration to be solved by the self re-entering into, losing itself in, creation. (

(Our subjective world is apparently illusion/ maya - the external world of creation is the only objectivity.)

As consciousness increases further, it turns inward, we become aware of our-selves; and the suspicion arises that all creation is of our-selves, and outside is only chaos - the suspicion that we are deluded about external creation.

(This is solipsism, or 'relativism' - or subjectivism... apparently we are real and everything else a 'projection'.)

Later still - modernity - it is recognised that the absolute separation of the self and the world mean that neither is real; both are illusion. The world has no meaning without the self - it is chaos. The self has no meaning without the world - it is a delusion encapsulated.

(This is nihilism - mainstream modern discourse.) 

If consciousness can be increased yet further, to a divine level, then we can become aware (albeit temporarily) that all creation is a participation of the self in the totality of everything: both are real, both are needed.

The world and self never were separated - creation happened and continues because Beings live, develop, and are conscious. Indeed it is the process of separation and recombination, necessarily caused-by the insertion of Being into chaos - that is itself Creation.

That is, we can experience the fact that we are divine, and necessarily engaged in the creation of this world (and this is all possible because we are children of the creator).

First you need to believe that Jesus was divine - otherwise he could not deliver on his promises.

To believe Jesus was divine you need to believe in the divine, and further that the ultimate divine is personal.

How could someone get to believe this? Well, if you trusted the Bible, or the authority of a church, then you might believe on that basis - but why would anyone trust such things unless they already believed in divinity, and that Jesus was divine?

I take it that these are matters we must come to know for ourselves, we must experience them. We must experience God, and experience that God is a person, and experience that Jesus (who is, of course, still alive - if he really is divine) was divine.


So, a religious experience is necessary - and this means that we need to believe that a religious experience can be real, and decisive.

Most modern people don't believe this; they have a prior assumption that religious experiences are delusions, that can be explained away as some kind of mistake, illness, deception or wish-fulfilment.

So, even to get to knowing by personal religious experience that Jesus was divine requires overturning a lot of contrary basic assumptions of the modern world. And this means recognising that these are indeed assumptions - and are not any kind of evidence... once we have recognised that the exclusion of Jesus's divinity is entirely a matter of prior assumptions, really - the first step of the battle is won. 


But there is a second step - which is that we need to want what the divine Jesus offers us: Life Everlasting. And to want it we must understand that the Life Everlasting Jesus offers has certain features:

1. It is attained via death. We must first die before we can live forever - as happened to Jesus himself.

2. Eternal Life is as a resurrected person; that is we have an indestructible body. Many people believe is a life beyond death as some kind of spirit, or without a self; but what Jesus offers is for his followers (those who love him) to live forever as a person with a body.

3. This life eternal is a life in 'community', with other followers of Jesus; it is a life in some kind of 'place' called Heaven.

Now - the second step to being a Christian is that we must want this Life Everlasting that Jesus offers us. And it seems pretty clear that some people do not want it, or anything like it.


But how can we know, personally, by our own experience, that Jesus did make this offer, and the  nature of the offer?

We might read the Fourth Gospel and experience its truth - this is what I did. But suppose we didn't have access to the Fourth Gospel, or only in a fake translation? What then?

We would then have to receive this information by direct revelation from Jesus himself - because there would be no alternative.

Is this likely? Well, yes it is likely - it is in fact certain.

Because if it is true that Jesus is a living, active God; then he will be able (some way or another) to do whatever is necessary for those who believe in him. Presumably, exactly how the knowledge is transmitted or shared will depend on the person and the situation.  


So, there are two basic ways of Not being a Christian - one is not to believe in the reality of what Jesus offers: to regard the whole thing as a fraud. The other is to believe in the reality of Life Everlasting, but not to want it.

We cannot get what is offered [by the Creator] if we try and snatch it for the wrong reason, because the reason is part of it... Mankind's leaders and guides are those who are able to interpret to us the values that our nature needs in order truly to become itself. Only those values are sufficient which our nature is designed to employ; and wrong values must be rejected by our real-self recognising that they are indigestible. How these higher values come to us through certain people can be very complex. Sometimes the process is conscious and sometimes unconscious or mediumistic... To become free-will individuals in this complex world is much harder than we think. In fact, freedom is not really what we want. What we are really in need of is more like fulfilment. 'Freedom of choice' should not exist except in unimportant matters. Real freedom is freedom from the need to choose by being fully aware of what is best and correct. 

Edited from the Summary to Chapter 10 'Conditioning Factors', from The Geography of Consciousness by William Arkle (1974). 


The above passage, and the relevant parts of the chapter following, have been lodged in my mind for a few years; as I gradually understood them.

Arkle initially focuses on the 'leaders and guides' to whom we turn for understanding (religious leaders, philosophers, poets, composers, scientists, inspiring political figures...). He notes that some combination of the 'great artist, scientist, philosopher, mystic and political leader' could be seen as an approach towards the ideal towards which we unconsciously strive - and towards which we ought consciously to strive.

Arkle then notices that 'leaders and guides' typically claim that their material 'comes to them' by processes that are - to some extent - 'unconscious or mediumistic'. A composer or poet may say that a great work 'came to him' and his job was not in 'inventing' - but accepting it as valid, then communicating it as best he could (which is usually stated to be somewhat incomplete, or unsatisfactory).

In other words, that which most deeply motivates these Great Men is partly external to them, somewhat unconscious, and therefore not wholly (although it is partly) consciously constructed. 

The implication is that if free will is being conceptualised as consciously making choices from known alternatives; then this understanding misses-out much of what we would regard as the best and highest of human attainment - therefore there is something wrong with this ideal of free will. 'Free will between choices' does not capture what we most need (and - implicitly - what we most want.)

What then do we most need and want? The last sentence puts it: we want to become 'aware of what is best and correct'. At that point of understanding, there is no 'choice' - because we know what we ought to do, and what we need to do.

Any other choice would be just-plain-wrong. We neither need nor should strive for the 'freedom' to make wrong choices!

Arkle does not use the word intuition; but it is a shorthand for the conclusion of the final words in the chapter (edited): 'The ability we must develop is the ability to sense the whole of the situation in which we are involved, and then to take the best course available. Freedom is not in choosing; it is in seeing the irrelevance of choice.'

In other words, the ability we must develop is intuition of reality, of truth; and when we intuitively comprehend the situation, we will know what to do. Any idea of of 'freely' choosing-between-choices simply does not come into it.

And this is the ideal, the divine state. A god does not wrestle with choices, because a god knows what should be done - and does it.

The 'real' meaning that 'free will' tries to capture is that we are each (primordially) a Being with a self that is a primary (i.e. uncaused) source of motivation, purpose, and thinking. These come 'from within' us, and constitute our unique contribution to God's creation that we inhabit.

This situation is just 'a fact'; or rather we can metaphysically assume it as a primary aspect of reality. And as young children this was the situation - although we were not aware of it.

When we become fully conscious this fact does not change, but we become aware of the situation. As awareness increases we see what we call 'choices', but these choices are merely the consequence of our lack of understanding of reality - because properly understood there is no choice: there is just the right thing.

Our task is to get to the situation when we can intuit the right thing. And that is fulfilment. 

If we imagine the Real Self as the yolk of an egg, surrounded by the white which is Consciousness - and the egg being immersed-in the World - then the evolutionary development of consciousness can be (crudely!) envisaged as the thickening of the white (Consciousness) until the yolk-Self is absolutely cut-off from the World.

This thickening, and reducing permeability of Consciousness develops through the lifespan, and also through the history of  Man - reaching its maximum in The West: first and at the greatest extreme in England. We begin with our Self in direct contact with the World - but this contact diminishes through development.

What happened is that our sense of perspective, our sense of who we are, became located in the white of the egg, in Consciousness - from-which we can look-out at the World; or inward at the Real Self... thus we get the separation of the objective and the subjective; and modern alienation.

The usual solution is to try and weaken Consciousness, to obliterate the white - for example by trances and other altered states, perhaps by taking intoxicating drugs such as alcohol. This creates a simulacrum of the childhood/ early man state of the yolk-self immersed in the World. But it is only partly effective, and at the cost of generalised behavioural impairment, reduced memory etc.

Another idea is to try and strengthen Consciousness by some kind of training in concentration, meditation or the like. This also fails, because we are still alienated; because when Consciousness leads, it will be all about planning, simplified modelling, narrowing and focusing... It is like trying to live by a flow chart, or by protocols.

Such life - located in Consciousness - feels dry and two-dimensional, and is prone to gross error; because it forces its simple systems onto reality - it imposes itself, and Man remains isolated.

What, then, is the proper (divinely destined) future? It strikes me that we need to regard Consciousness as more like a forum, a medium; a place where the Self and the World meet and join-up. 

Our real self, our Being, generates thought; and the Beings of the World generate thoughts; and these thoughts both meet in our Consciousness, so that we are no longer cut off.

But Consciousness does Not impose itself; does Not attempt to control either the Self or the World. We need to cease to strive, plan, organise, choose... instead we need to allow the right behaviours to emerge, in full consciousness, from the interaction of Self and World.

This is what intuition ought to be; that 'knowing' when something is true, beautiful and virtuous because we observe it is real; because we observe it is creation. But this happens, consciously, 'in' the egg-white of Consciousness - whereas in childhood, in early Man, it was un-conscious - we then simply were; we were being but did not know it. Now we know it; because the joining of Self and World happens in Consciousness; instead of (in the past) joining directly.

This is to have a creative relationship with the World, it is to participate in divine creation, and to know we participate, and how. 

There is no place for our Consciousness to try and impose itself on creation - when we are in the proper mode of Consciousness our original thoughts meet with the thought of the Beings of the World; and naturally these are harmonious and coherent aspects of the totality of creation.

What I get from this, is that the attempt to stand-outside the process is the mistake. We want to be a part of it; which means that our Consciousness ought to be much more like observation than (a failing attempt to) control.

Another mistake is to suppose that Free Will is conscious choice; or that Agency is about consciously inserting our-Selves into reality... 'Agency' ought to be a matter of our real Self Participating-in reality; and this must be a loving co-operation - there is no place for 'will'.

We should neither strive to obliterate Consciousness, nor to pump-up Consciousness into a pseudo-God; instead we acknowledge that the Consciousness can 'watch' as our thinking emerges from the primary source of the Self, but cannot penetrate the Self; can 'watch' as the thoughts from the Self interact with the thoughts flowing in from the World - but ought not to try and distort or compel what happens between these realities.

It can't anyway - but the attempt to do so is what keeps us alienated.

It is surprising how much information about crop circles I have gathered over the years - mostly because some of the people whose writings I enjoy for other reasons (such as John Michell) were also very involved in the crop circle phenomenon (Michell called himself a 'cereologist'!).

Since all our 'external' knowledge (including all of science, and academic research) is based on reliable eye-witness reports, and several people whom I regard as reliable have reported strange crop circle phenomena; I am now happy to accept that there is 'something' mysterious about some crop circles.

Most of the people I have encountered who write and speak on the subject are not convincing individuals by my judgement. Nonetheless some of them are; and because some such people are convincing to me, therefore (to put it negatively) I don't believe that the whole crop circle business is a hoax. Positively stated - some crop circles have had a 'supernatural' cause - beyond mainstream possibilities.

But what do I believe?

I believe crop circles are 'real' but trivial, in the same way that most 'mediums' who 'channel' spirits provide some information that may really be of supernatural origin, but which is trivial. Supernatural does not equal profound. Spiritual beings are real, but many of them (even among the broadly-benign) are foolish, conceited, ignorant - just like mortal Men.

Supernatural phenomena may also be evil - indeed they usually are either evil or trivial; esepcially when they are deliberately sought-for, by 'techniques' or strenuous meditational practices. We ought not to be too impressed by such things, esepcially not by their specific content. Yet our cultural materialism has made us naive and credulous of almost anything we believe to be real that we find 'scientifically' inexplicable. This is supernaturally equivalent to believing something simply because 'a bloke in the pub' told us; or because we 'read it in an old book'.  

Over more than thirty years - before and after I became a Christian; my ineradicable conviction is that any spiritual being, or alien visitor, who uses shapes flattened into corn to 'communicate' with humans, when these shapes are enigmatic and can only be seen from the air, must be either crazy or joking! Of all the possible ways to communicate, this has to be one of the silliest imaginable.

If you were a serious angel (or an alien) who wanted to establish contact with people, and to pass on an important message - why on earth would you choose to make patterns in a crop field in Wiltshire; in vague hope that a light aircraft pilot (or nowadays a drone) might fly over and photograph it? Then that 'somebody' would correctly interpret the photographed corn shapes, and disseminate the information so that it reaches the relevant individuals...

The other problem for me is that corn circles are a material phenomenon inviting a materialist explanation; so that they are probably not a good way of inducing people to acknowledge the reality of a spiritual realm.

Nonetheless, there are example of corn circle fascination having served as a kind of 'entry drug' for some people. It gets them out into the countryside to experience things for themselves; makes them suspect the validity-of, and eventually learn to ignore, the mass media; it widens and opens their thinking. It is more possible that such a person may eventually come to Romantic Christianity, than someone who is locked-into the media-bureaucratic mainstream evil virtual reality.

So - while trivial in themselves; for such people, although not for me, crops circles have had a value.

Yet even so I am suspicious of the kind of value - in that sense that even when the speculations about crop circles are not simply materialistic (after all, technologically advanced aliens intervening in the earth using powerful forces or floating balls-of-light are just an extension of mainstream Western scientistic positivism); the focus on the abstract implications of abstract patterns printed on fields is (I believe) not what is required for the healing and progression of modern Man.

What is needed (by my understanding of things) is a recognition of reality as consisting of living, conscious beings with whom we may have direct (unmediated, not indirectly communicated) relationships: a kind of 'conscious animism' in the context of a Christian metaphysics.

By contrast, a spirituality of expert investigators technically unravelling enigmatic geometry, binary codes, fractal shapes and mathematical relationships is pretty the opposite of what I would most wish to see - of what we most need.