Bruce Charlton's Notions

The slow movement of the Concerto for Double String Orchestra, by Michael Tippett; and the Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis by Vaughan Williams.

These were both featured on one of the earliest LP recordings I owned, while at school.

Simply gorgeous.

P.S: Here is the Psalm from which the Tallis theme was derived:

 

https://williamarkle.blogspot.com/2019/09/bruce-charltons-introduction-to.html

The above link is for the once-checked first-draft of my Introduction to the new edition of William Arkle's A Geography of Consciousness.

It is about 6500 words, and would need to be copied, pasted, and printed-out for you to read it conveniently.

If you are interested in commmenting on this, or if you notice additions or corrections that are needed, please do so within the next couple of days; because I am up against a tight deadline.

Thanks in advance!

Magic is primarily perspectival - in that if you can't see it, you won't see it. Many people go through life and almost-never notice magic.

But even if or when you can perceive magic, it is not everywhere. Young children, tribespeople, all discriminate - they recognise some places and people as magic, and others not.

There is no magic in bureaucracy (in a spiritual sense, this is the main point about bureaucracy); and that is why there is less and less magic in the world.

As the world is integrated into The System - so magic is suppressed and destroyed, so attention is focused on the world regarded as dead things to be manipulated. So fewer and fewer places are magical - not in the solid and dependable ways that some places used to be magical. 

And this applies to people, too. In my life there have never been many magical people in any environment, they were always a small minority; but now they are fewer, and probably for the same reason that there are fewer magical places. People who were magic, or would have been, are now substantially assimilated into The System (by the extension of mass and social media, by omni-surveillance and micro-management); and they are System-assimilated by their own choice.

If this was something that people resisted, seriously by deep conviction - their magic would up-well from the deep source of the true self...

But people do not resist, and on the contrary they have identified-with The System at a deep motivational level, at the level of primary assumptions and convictions; and thereby have joined-in with crushing their own source of magic. Hence the focus upon appearances, impressions, and manipulation of perceptions - the modern Self is become merely a Public Relations executive for the Modern Man.

Lacking the help of magical places, people, institutions... we are, as usual, thrown-back on our own resources; and must find for ourselves (from ourselves) much that used to be absorbed passively from outside.

If we value a magical world; we ourselves must become more than magic detectors; more than mobile connoisseurs of enchantment -- we must become, if only for our-selves, geniuses of magical creativity.   
  

Edited from A Geography of Consciousness by William Arkle (1974) - the chapter 'Relating Levels of Consciousness', pp 134-7. This, coming halfway through the book, probably represents the centre of the argument and the key teaching. It represents Arkle's diagnosis of why our life is typically and mostly so dull and oppressive; and how a fundamental change of attitudes and assumptions about this world could make it qualitatively better.  

The seat of consciousness is in the Absolute, and not in what is ordinarily considered as manifestation at all.

The proposition is that the function and purpose of manifestation [or creation] is to create the ground for experience and the communication of experience. The experience itself is only valid when it is a part of this absolute consciousness which we ourselves are not normally in a position to be aware of and properly identify with. The manifested worlds are consequently no more than the ‘stuff’ of communication itself.

To put the idea very simply, the whole of manifestation is a communication on the part of the creative cause. Manifestation with its many universes and planes is something which God wished to say. We are the individuals that God wishes to say it to. Thus the real significance of every instant is the response being made by us to events... not the events themselves.

This suggests that the world we live-in is the world of absolute consciousness; and that the worlds we are identified-with are statements - are communications of qualities and principles. When we look around us what we are really seeing is a prolonged lecture; but the language it is given-in is not the one used in man-to-man communications but an infinitely more complete and efficient language.

This language is the one of the rain and sunlight, trees and grasses, children, mountains, clouds, colours, scents, sounds, responsibilities, loves, dangers, mothers, fathers, wives, lovers, friends, facts and foods, happy times, sad times, beautiful times, absorbing times, boring times and futile times.

To try and equate reality with the physical worlds of communication and to try and equate human consciousness with the human body, is like trying to understand and identify the reality of a book by measuring its proportions and analysing the paper and the ink. Such an attitude could only arise if it was not realised that a book was meaningless as a physical phenomenon but meaningful as a communication.

While the book is a real phenomenon and capable of physical analysis, the secret of understanding it is to realise that it is a continuing statement of qualities and attitudes of consciousness. To know what a book is one has to let it speak, and speak to one’s real Self.

If this is not done, the most searching analysis of the paper and the molecules and atoms and atomic particles and energies and proportions of the paper, will completely fail to explain the reality of the book as a phenomenon. We may gather a very impressive knowledge of the way that the universe is built, but this will be as nothing to understanding what the book and the universe is saying.

The stuff of the physical world we live in is thus no longer to be considered as ‘mere stuff’, if we ourselves are to be more than ‘mere clever things’. If we are to discover ourselves as significant living consciousness, we must accept the world we live in as an important communication. A tree must not only be a potential source of timber and money. A tree must be one side of a conversation, the language of which we must take the trouble to learn and respond with.

The sort of statement that has just been made will not be understood by anyone unless they want to understand it. It is a statement from outside the accepted culture of our day and would be easily ridiculed by any person wishing to do so. Nevertheless it is intended to be a serious factual suggestion as to why so many people find so little meaning in life.

The painful part of failure to observe and read the communications that are continually being made to us through natural phenomena is the experience of extreme boredom. If the theory is correct the boredom arises because the valid and most real part of the individual feels itself to be fulfilling no purpose, in fact it feels ignored and forgotten. It knows it is something of great value and potential, but for some reason it is unable to become responsive and alive except in a few minor ways.

Without knowing it, the individual is creating this misery for himself because he is living in certain restricted categories with which he has classed earlier experiences and has long ago ceased to let events speak for themselves. The person lives in a world of labels of his own making, perhaps in the grounds that he thinks he will be unable to cope with real events themselves and perhaps be unable to make the significance of the events fit into his ‘safe’ but ‘uncomfortable’ philosophy of reality.

Because of this situation such a person is extremely aware of the apparently concrete unalterability and stony-faced aspect of the world around him. He is very aware of matter seeming to be dead, heavy and dull and monotonously unalterable, in fact the walls of a prison. When, however, responsiveness is felt within his being, then immediately the situation alters. The boredom ceases, the unalterability is not noticed, the prison vanishes and time goes quickly. Meaning and purpose creep back into life and the question of what it is all about seems partly answered and, indeed, only an important question is thought of as ‘what can be done in co-operating with life?’

This sense of being aware of matter as a prison, as the beginning and ending of something hopeless and meaningless is not uncommon, particularly among people who have grown beyond the first hectic and unconsidered flush of youth. The world of physical material becomes part of a ‘solid’ identification which, for the purposes of this argument, can simply be termed 'matter'.

This is not the matter of the physicist but matter as experience. Not the matter that is measured but the matter that is felt. Not analysed but identified-with. In this context the following statement can be suggested as a verbal equation: ‘Awareness of matter is failure to communicate.’

Non-awareness of the materiality of matter is thus the result of success in communication.

Matter as materiality only exists in the experience of human beings who have ceased to remain responsive. To the rest of nature materiality presents no problems. It is consciously or unconsciously accepted as a most interesting and absorbing communication of qualities related to survival at the lower end of the third vector or related to beauty and idealism at the upper end of the third vector.

Matter can also be thought of as space and time experience. In the imprisoned mood of materiality, time drags and assumes very obvious characteristics of its own. It intrudes. Together with this the size and number of phenomena becomes over important. The daunted observer reflects on the littleness of his own body and the insignificance of his own single identity among so many thousands of his fellows. 

...He looks from the world out into the universe and his senses are numbed at the thought of the vastness of the cosmic system and the distances that are involved on every side. The background of his whole existence becomes unmanageable by his consciousness. It does not even appear hostile for what is worse is the fact that it appears indifferent, quite unaware of him.

Solidity of life as an experience, or matter as an experience can now be related to a degree of responsiveness of the true Being. It can also be related to the level of consciousness of the individual Being. When 'matter' in this sense obtrudes into our life, it indicates that we are not being our-Self.

When matter does not obtrude, whether we are at a chronic high level or low level of consciousness, we are being ourself as much as we can be, responding with all we have available... A false personality has not been allowed to form and insinuate itself between our Self and the world of communication.

I have often heard it emphasised by Christians how remarkable, how shocking, it was that God was incarnated as a little baby, lived, suffered and died an ignominious and agonising death.

But is it really so shocking? All of these are familiar possibilities for a being that is an 'avatar' of a God - a spirit part of God that takes on human form and lives as a human, perhaps a super-powered human, maybe even breeds with humans etc.

(Jesus is not an avatar - but my point is that the general idea of a God taking on a human form is common enough.)

Neither is it all that shocking when the incarnated God comes back to life after being killed - since all societies seem to have believed in some kind of continuation of existence after biological death (so nothing really dies altogether), posited some kind of afterlife; and Gods in particular would be expected to be unkillable. 


What is really shocking that that when the divine Jesus came back to life it was not as a spirit. Instead God became a Man again, in a Man's body, and for eternity. Jesus was resurrected.

I think that this is so shocking that - as far as I can tell - most Christians still don't believe it, and have never really believed it; but instead have always tried to claim that Jesus's resurrected body was 'not really' what it seemed, but some kind-of embodied spirit.

I think it is very difficult for people to accept that a creator God could have a body like ours, eternally; and still be God. To most intellectuals, at any rate, this seems intrinsically ridiculous that something solid and unbounded might be superior to something unbounded of pure spirit; so they resort to various types of 'yes, but'... argument, that retain the appearance of an incarnate body while replacing its inner reality with spirit.

If this was so, the question is why? Why did Jesus bother with resurrection, if the body was merely a kind of illusion? Why didn't he make eternal life a thing of pure spirit?

Why go to all the trouble of making it 'look like' Jesus had an absolutely humanish body, why the emphasis on how normal his body seemed?

(An emphasis, but not not exclusive; after all Jesus was hard to recognise, could apparently appear and disappear etc; but certainly the primary point being made is that this was in some essential way the same human body that Jesus had inhabited before he died, with the same appearance, wounds etc; and it was certainly solid to touch, and he ate food.)


If we take the Fourth Gospel as primary (and the other Gospels as partial confirmations) it is evident that the resurrection was into a 'normal', solid, material human body - and that was the main thing about it.

We should not allow secondary explanations to remove that major - and shocking - fact.

The distinctive thing about Christianity is therefore not 'eternal life' in Heaven; but eternal life in some version of our actual solid human body. 

There Must Be something very important about The Body, if it is to become eternal for us, in Heaven.


Note: On further reflection, the fact of resurrection has very wide-ranging implications for the nature of ultimate reality; including the nature of life in Heaven. In a nutshell, resurrection implies that the life eternal promised by Jesus to those who follow him is A Resurrected Life - a life certainly including resurrected entities, beings, things from this mortal life. Not, therefore, a life of pure spirit or thought; but a life of everlasting solid beings and objects of many kinds - thought consisting-of/ interacting-with solid things. Perhaps CS Lewis intuited this, in his fantasy of The Great Divorce? 

"The thing that defines us as Men is the fact that we die."

A three minute video which nonetheless (and with the help of quotes and enactments of Tolkien and his 'Three rings for the elven kings...' poem) manages to say some wise and encouraging things about death.


Note: Readers will know that I do not see eternity as 'beyond' time, since I understand time to be a given, necessary, linear, sequential: the context for everything. 

Instead I see eternity as unbounded in both directions from the present - an unbounded future and past; with all beings, including our-selves, as eternal. 

Nonetheless JP's qualitative distinction between 'immortality' and 'eternity' is maintained.

In the modern condition - aiming at Final Participation - most Men realise that truth is something chosen.  Truth is no longer compelled upon us from outside; truth active and us passive.

Our modern truth can only be active - if we are not active, there will be no truth.

 What is not realised, or denied, is that there is only one reality.

 So the situation really-is that there is only one reality, and we must choose it.

The modern sin of pride is manifested in assuming that because we must choose truth, therefore we can invent truth. And because modern truth is invented, then we can deny truth.
 

I've written often over the past decade about why it is a mistake for those in The West who oppose the Left to put their faith in nationalism.

Another reason I have not mentioned directly is a consequence of the universal corruption affecting all large and powerful Western institutions - their loss of specific functions, and their convergence into the single, global totalitarian bureaucracy of New Left Political Correctness.

The problem is simply that the nation is an institution. So, because it is an institution, the nation is Leftist. 

This fact is often missed because the nation is not just an institution; a nation is also (potentially, and to a variable extent) a mystical entity. But it is a mystical entity only insofar as people are able and willing to recognise the reality and importance of mystical entities - which, in the case of modern states, is Hardly At All.

Nationalism was only a strong force in the immediate post-religious generations (from about the middle 19th to 20th centuries) when people were still capable of living by and from mystical beliefs.

But that time is long gone, and mystical nationalism is now far too weak, or non-existent - and what we are left-with is a corrupt, converged national institution, a Leftist national institution.

How can people then realistically hope that nationalism might defeat Leftism? Right-Nationalists are in the position of supporting, trying to build-up and make supreme an institution that solidly and increasingly opposes their goals.

It isn't going to work, is it?

The only genuine possibility, remote and slight though it is; would be a religious revival first, and then (but only then) all kinds of good things become possible.
  

I am currently writing an introduction for the first re-publication of William Arkle's A Geography of Consciousness since it was originally issued 45 years ago. (There are also plans for a second volume of his other writings such as Equations of Being, Letter from a Father and The Hologram and Mind.)

I will announce specific details when the book is ready to buy.

The publisher of this venture discovered Arkle via my blog, most of the content of which first appeared here. So you readers have been instrumental in this encouraging development.

Therefore, I would be interested to know how many of you there are who have found Arkle to be a significant beneficial influence in their lives, since we are probably at the vanguard of his rediscovery.

Please let me know if you are one of this number. Thanks!

Field of Dreams is a movie I like - I rewatched it recently to check. At the time I first saw it, which was perhaps 1991, it coincided with an awakening of yearning for what I would now regard as Original Participation. In other words, I sought meaning and purpose in life in something like a return to the consciousness of early childhood of early tribal Man.

(Spoiler alert.)

Original Participation is participating in the creative love of the universe by a passive immersion in it; in the way that we all did in early childhood. And this is what the Field of Dreams 'dream' is about - it is about recovering and reliving that child's-perspective; by watching baseball games featuring  long-dead players, in an idyllic situation which literalises a common set of yearnings and fantasies.

That is what I wish to emphasis. Much 'fantasy' is popular because it suggests that 'if only' we could literalise our fantasies, then we would be perfectly happy forever. Of course, they are seldom foolish enough to state explicitly the idea that any kind of external objective situation would really make us perfectly happy forever; but that is what innumerable works of art (novels, plays, movies, tv series) show us.

In Field of Dreams we are shown a man who (obediently) follows his deepest promptings (in the form of an hallucinatory voice, unsought), and is rewarded by what looks to be a wholly satisfying life (with his wife and daughter; and an expanding circle of aficionados, who pay him for the privilege and continue to make it possible...) of watching old-time baseball and tending to the ball park where it happens.

Or, as the movie blurb has it: His dreams came looking for him.


Thus, the 'lesson' is that our destiny comes to us from externally, as a perceptual communication; and our job is to obey it - the reward is to be 'made' happy. It is the theme of so many fantasies; If Only (we think) fairies, Middle Earth, Hogwarts or whatever were literally true and I could live there, or meet them - then I would have a wholly-satisfying-life.

Yet, the stark reality is that if we had everything we wanted; exactly as we most want it - if our fantasy situation was literalised - it would pretty soon cease to be wholly-satisfying. We would get used-to-it; and probably we would get fed-up of it.

Watching the Chicago 'Black Sox' ghosts play every day, a couple of times a day, while feasting on hot dogs would certainly be great At First... but it is very far from enough!


For post-adolescents the fact is that a literalisation of Original Participation would not suffice, and we only suppose it would suffice because we know it cannot happen. We can daydream that the Field of Dreams would 'make us' perfectly happy forever, because we know it wont happen - this the illusion is maintained, and may harden into delusion.

(I mean - and this is a position I personally reached before I became a Christian - we may come to believe that the best possible life would be a benign delusion; that is, something gratifying but untrue that we nonetheless believe. This seems to be the logical conclusion of atheistic hedonic materialism; and is the underlying reason why transhumanism is becoming mainstream; since that promises that technology will provide us with a life of benign delusion by means of drugs, genetic engineering, virtual reality etc.)  

This is the way in which we - modern Men - are maintained in a state of spiritual paralysis. A bureaucratic, materialistic, totalitarian ('Ahrimanic') machine - such as Hollywood, big business and the mass media - produce multiple ('Luciferic') dreams of passive, immersive Original Participation; which we yearn for but which we know cannot happen... We simply try to spend as much time as possible living 'in' these dreams; in the (shrinking) gaps between serving the machine.

The sixties showed, and the lesson has been confirmed multiple times since; that we are not going to be able to return to Original Participation, that we don't truly want to; and most importantly that even if we did, it would not suffice.


We simply must find a third path into the future - that which Barfield terms Final Participation. This is the state we can confidently hope for in Heaven; but also a state which we can inhabit and cherish for periods of time, and rather imperfectly, here on earth - as part of that learning from experience which is our task.

Because, on closer examination; even the daydreams of Original Participation have elements of Final Participation about them; they are often highly conscious, active rather than passive, exist in the realm of thinking rather than inarticulate Being, and are developing situations into which we bring creativity from our-selves.

If we recognise that our goal should not be a static-suspended-state of blissful passive immersion with minimal consciousness; but instead a process of participating and joyful active creation with our unity attained in the world of thinking - then we are most of the way to where we ought to be.

From SK Orr's Steeple Tea blog


Down the gravel road to home this evening, the dust hanging in the air from a hurrying tractor, and then into the tunnel of shade created new each day by the tall poplars lining the driveway.

Walk in the house and see the old dog waiting for me on the steps, her tail thump-thump-thumping as she grins her “Oh, you came back!” grin. Kiss my wife and listen to her etude of a Southern voice run the scales and describe something someone did and said.

Shed the work clothes and put on my soft home clothes, the t-shirt gleaming white as a saint’s robe, the scent of bleach and detergent like incense. A short period of reading and unwinding while that pretty little woman makes good sounds and better smells in the kitchen. Next thing I know she’s bringing me a plate and a glass, and the same for herself, and we settle into our chairs and say grace and turn to.

Oh, and what a feast. Toasted kaiser rolls buttered so heavily they weep gold if you press your finger into the patterned surface, and they’re piled with loose meat, finely chopped ground beef that’s been slow-cooked all day in a special concoction of spices and sauces, and on top of the mounded meat goes a slice of nice cheddar, so thin you can read the almanac through it, and on top of that goes several sliced, spiced pickles, and if heaven won’t have such pickles available then let me find another mansion because it’s location-location-location, and next to the sandwich on the plate is a hill of macaroni & cheese, and isn’t it a sin to eat that quickly, but the flesh is weak and goodnight, nurse, did you say you made a pan of caramel brownies? So now the question is how quickly can this plateful settle, and come to think of it, yes, I do want milk with mine.

Ingratitude is a great sin. Being unaware of one’s blessings is a close cousin.

I am in no danger of this sort of transgression. Some things are ever close to my surface.

~ S. K. Orr

Edited from Divine Purpose - from The Great Gift by William Arkle (1977):  

There are a number of matters which I would like to define which are matters that seem to cause a deep stirring in the heart of our being and which require some response from us.

I will quickly go by the opinions of those people who do not see the need for a purposeful creative consciousness behind the manifestation of this universe. Such understanding must come to us as a simple observation beyond doubt, or it does not come at all.

We realise that there are people who are able to conceive of this manifest universe as an outgrowth from some haphazard life which is fumbling its way by accidents from one thing to another. I cannot sustain such a theory since I am aware that the organisation of matter has to reach an extremely high degree indeed before life can even begin a fumbling of any sort. 

Our time and attention is too valuable to remain in, what are for me, such unproductive fields. We must observe all things, but not limit them to the tangible and the 'scientific', particularly when we realise that our own consciousness is neither tangible nor 'scientific'.

My observations lead me to a purposeful God, a living responsive creative source, whose motives we may begin to discover in the way of our own nature and environment are formulated. Many of these qualities have become so clear to me that I would like to bring them to your notice in a direct manner...


I (sort of) wish I had seen, and attended-to, and recognised the truth of, this passage many years, many decades ago. I say 'sort of' because the fact is I probably would have ignored it on the basis that there 'must' be something wrong with such simple and clear reasoning.

After all, our culture and society has succeeded in putting the mass of its people into a state of perpetual undecided uncertainty on this matter for several generations. I mean this crucial matter of whether this universe is a purposeful (therefore meaningful) creation (or a manifestation as Arkle terms it) -- or whether it is some combination of causal determinism and randomness and therefore (necessarily) has zero purpose or meaning.

The modern mainstream 'line' on this subject is that there is no purpose or meaning to the universe but there is purpose and meaning to the individual lives of human beings - because somehow each person 'makes' his own purpose and meaning...

The fact that this is incoherent and self-contradicting nonsense somehow doesn't strike people - presumably because the only possibility of coherence comes from a universe that is created and purposive - so when people 'doubt' the reality of creation they immediately become incoherent when they attempt to do reasoning of even moderate complexity.

The whole thing is done by inducing 'doubt' - and the one thing that never is doubted is the grounds for doubt! Modernity has this created a metaphysics of doubt; a set of primary beliefs and assumptions implicitly stating that doubts are primary; and unless there is 100 percent certainty of perfect and unchangeable knowledge, with which every rational person must agree totally - then doubt will prevail. (And therefore doubt always and necessarily prevails.)

As Arkle says; the knowledge that this universe and reality is the product of a purposive and creative conscience - a God - is something that can only come to us as a single intuitive act, a thing we know directly. The difficulty is that 'beyond doubt' phrase - because for modern Man strategically-directed doubt has become a primary principle of our social discourse. We are officially required to doubt God, creation, the soul, objective morality; and increasing numbers of observed and experienced facts.

For modern Man, nothing is placed beyond here-and-now doubt; except for the current political abstract expediencies of the Global Establishment - and these change every few years; so among our many confusions and incoherences is moving from one unassailable dogma to its inversion, every few years.

But modern Man apparently finds this easy - because he has decided to doubt God, creation and the Good. And for such a person, nothing can be done. If 'manifestation' is doubted, nothing can stand - and incoherence becomes a permanent way of life.

I am not easily impressed by singers; but when I stumbled across this live recording of a young Canadian bass-baritone called Philippe Sly performing some arias from Handel's Messiah I was immediately impressed; and this was confirmed by several re-listenings to this and other pieces.

Solo singers are born - not made. The quality of a singing voice is essentially God-given; technique can be manufactured - to a considerable extent - by training; but voice quality cannot (although it can, of course, be ruined).

(Intonation - i.e. singing genuinely in-tune - is also mostly natural.)

This chap has an exceptionally elegant and beautiful tone - which seems especially difficult (or at least rare) among bass baritones; who have a distinct tendency to bellow and rasp; and they often have insecure intonation (disguised by wide vibrato).  Sly's quality of tone and intonation are both exceptional throughout his range; his voice smoothly darkens and lightens as it goes higher and lower; and I find myslf looking forward to both extremes.

But of course it is the middle range, where the singer spends most of his 'time' which must be exceptional; and where vocal acting is needed. After all, the bass-baritone roles are the big acting roles in most operas - the villains, or the rogueish and devious type of heroes (the 'Fifth Business' as Robertson Davies - another Canadian - termed them). This is where the 'pointing' of individual words and expression is mostly used - but in most BBs acting comes at the expense of musicality; whereas Sly keeps the musical line in first place throughout, and he 'expresses' (very well) within that.

He also has a way of phrasing the musical lines which is another of those instinctive things... it is what brings a piece of music 'alive'. I've heard this aria sung by several people before - but this is the only time that its musicality and lyricism came-through - and this is because of how Sly phrases it.

It probably does not need adding that, unlike most of the best singers, Sly is distinctly 'easy on the eye' and has a considerable charismatic physical presence. 

If this is a just world, Sly will have a secure and illustrious future, and will leave a legacy of many recordings; meanwhile enjoy the pieces that are available.    

From 1922 - this was played every week on Children's Favourites throughout the nineteen sixties; never then or since have I been able to listen without... laughing.

The following is from shortly afterwards, sung in some kind of dense Sussex dialect; I have no real idea what he is saying or what it is all about - but a friend at university had a 78 rpm recording which we used to puzzle over... I'm sure it would have creased me as a youngster, had I heard it.


More about this strange recording, and its singer, HERE

I don't intend to answer this question (nor to publish comments that try to give answers) - but I ask the question to highlight a common and deadly assumption built into modern discourse.

We commonly fail to distinguish between those who genuinely hold to a religion (in whatever way that religion defines) and those who are apostate. By an apostate I mean someone who has (to a significant, and perhaps near total, extent) abandoned, forsaken, left his or her religion; who has lapsed, and - usually - absorbed mainstream secular materialist Leftist values and embraced some or all aspects of the sexual revolution.

Also among the apostate are those who now actively oppose their earlier religion - by mockery, subversion, attack - and by inversion of key doctrines and practices (usually in the name of 'reforming' them).

It is usually a matter of human judgement to discern the apostate from the adherent (which is Not the same as discerning the heretic from the orthodox!). But this discernment is absolutely vital for religious adherents.

For Christians, it is vital to discern who is Christian and who not; and, when considering churches or denominations, it is vital to discern who is 'in', and who is not.


So what kind of apostate is the worst - Christian, Jew or something else? What type of ex-Christian is worst? The answer does not depend primarily on the religion or denomination, but on the motivation for leaving it.

The real reason/s for leaving do, admittedly... to an extent, depend on the religion and what it emphasises and requires of its adherents (and, of course, the characteristics of its adherents; which vary considerably for various reasons). But probably most apostates end up aligned-against any and all religions; that is, their motivation is implicitly against some-thing/s shared by all religions.

When discerning the status of apostates, the key factor is therefore motivation: why did that particular person leave a church, denomination, community; why did that particular person cease to practise? When that person ceased to put religion first; what did they substitute for religion? - And what was it that became his or her first priority instead?

The specific person is often, indeed usually, deluded and dishonest about what made them apostate; and that is itself related to why they are apostate. A specific person may try to achieve high status or approval for their decision to leave or lapse - and the community from-which they seek approval may be an indication of their underlying motivation.

As usual, such a judgement cannot be made on the basis of factual or objective 'evidence' - because it requires personal, conceptual, ultimately metaphysical evaluation in order to make-sense of 'facts'. Because there is no such thing as 'evidence' without a theory that states what is evidence and what evidence means: Theory Comes First.

So our judgement - and any possible judgement - will be from-a-perspective; yet we must judge, we must evaluate, we must discern...


Our world is full of fake and lapsed religious people - many in positions of power and influence; and since religion was once of primary importance to these people, we need to know what replaced it in their hearts.

Because there is always, for everyone, a bottom-line; there is always something they value more than anything else. As GK Chesterton said; the single most important thing to know about a Man is his philosophy - but we must also be aware that this ruling philosophy may be something of which a Man is unaware, or something he denies; it is something we must usually infer, as best we may. 

Edited from the essay Divine Love in The Great Gift by William Arkle (1977)

We can realise for ourselves that love can be passive or active. We can know for ourselves that it is possible to sit down and simply radiate love, like a light bulb radiates light, in all directions but not directed in any particular way to any particular thing. This is passive love. 

We can feel that love becomes a more active if we begin to direct it onto an object, say a stone; but we can feel a difference if we direct this loving attention onto something more fully alive, such as a plant or a flower. 

This time we recognise a relationship which has a wider range of responses in it, and it is easier and more satisfying to love such a responsive thing. But now, if we look at how we feel if we direct our loving attention to even more living objects such as pet animals, human beings and children we realise that our love and relationship can grow again and become even more valuable. 

And if these human beings are of a more deeply beautiful and gracious order, then the activity of our love leaps into higher and higher expressions which are more valuable and delightful. Finally from the experience of our love directed actively to a most valuable human being, we can move again to a situation in which we are able to love a perfectly beautiful and gracious person, and this is our God of love. 

Because our God is the most alive and responsive being, this experience of actively directed love can be the most sublime. 

In this highest form of active love we must therefore have the one who loves and the one who is loved in order to arrive at a responsive situation. So we have two individuals, our God of love and the one who loves God. In this situations, the one who loves God enters into a Divine relationship in which both individuals are of the same order, even if God is far more mature than the individual who is loving him. 

So, at the moment that the individual really loves God as another individual who can be loved, then the two of them become friends in the Divine nature to which they both belong. 

This means that God no longer has to be God, but can become a friend to the one who loves Him and can love his friend back again in the way that love must if it is to express the fulfilment of its nature. 

The one who loves God also gradually realises that he is loving a real responsive individual with whom he is now a friend, and this experience is confirmed by all the other experiences of love to be different from worship. For worship is a sort of one-sided love which does not allow for a response and therefore cannot move into friendship, because in worship we do not relate to God as a living being but we idealise God in a fixed image that we have in our own understanding and thus we prevent Him coming alive. 

We do this, no doubt, out of a diminished sense of our own value and adequacy and out of a sense of modesty. But we only have to look at the nature of love for a moment to realise that the truest form of love does not have to behave in this manner. In fact it is unkind to worship others, rather than to love them, because it fixes them in a mould they do not wish to be fixed in; in fact by worshipping people we imprison them. 

But love does not wish to imprison the one it loves, above all, love longs to give expansion and enhanced beingness to the one it loves. Love longs to be in a creative and growing relationship with the one it loves. 

Love is the highest expression of life itself, and life is never static, but always wishes to be aspiring and developing towards new and untried possibilities ties. 

So what I feel the term a loving God really means, is that this God is trying to develop us to a stage where we can become His friends in this deeply loving, active, personalised way which allows the creative fruits of a friendship to arise between them which constantly keeps pace with the liveliness and creative aspiration of the living spirit of our common Divine nature. 


This passage from Arkle, and some others on a similar theme, worked on me over time to create a powerful recognition of validity; that we ought not to aim to worship God, but to become 'divine friends' with God; because this is what God most wants from us, and there is an answering desire from deep within us.

God ultimately does Not want to be 'worshipped' by his grown-up children, any more than any Good Man wants to be worshipped by his grown-up children. That is, worship is accepted as a normal and necessary phase of maturation; but it is not the eventual or permanent ideal. The hope is that it will give way to a relationship of complementary, each-different, and loving, friends - both of whom are united in loving God and participating (with God and each other) in the ongoing work of creation.


Another way this passage affected me, is that there is a personal and directed love which is higher and more active, more dynamic than the 'passive' love which radiates out in all directions. This distinguishes between the personal active love idealised by Christianity - which is as strong as our strongest and most personal love; and the passive, impersonal, static state of abstract love that is the ideal of 'Eastern' religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism.

Such love has more recently been adopted (in a materialistic and distorted form) by the modern advocates of Leftism. In terms of the 'universalist' ethic of equal altruism - mainstream modern Leftism supposes that we love everybody and everything equally regardless of response or outcome. This kind of 'universal' love is passive and cut-off; implies a static state of being - rather than an active and developing relationship; and is as weak as our weakest affection.

The secular 'Right' (which is actually just a subset of the Left) may modify and restrict the universalism of love to some category as nation, race, party - but are also abstract and passive in terms of the nature of this love.

Religions other than Christianity (and Christians who have missed the point) fail to recognise the primacy of love in God's nature; and develop theologies that may include love but - again - love of the universal, abstract, static and passive type. 


For Christians, only love that is personal and active/dynamic will suffice; and this love is spread only as far and as fast as networks of personal love may link us; that is, person by person within families (including especially our divine family) and among real (divine) friends.

Edited from The Resolution of Grief, an essay published in The Great Gift (1977) by William Arkle:

From what I understand, the motivation for the whole of creation is that out of it should come a number of individuals who have chosen their own unique path to individuality and therefore become true unique individuals.

The Creator longed for many of these true individuals to choose to realise 'Himself' and 'Herself' as a father and mother and as a friend; should choose to relate to this Creator as a friend, not so much as a God, but more as a friend.

The more we grow in our understanding of our own reality and 'the gift', and the attitude behind the gift, from the Creator's position, the more we shall become able to take up this position of divine friendship with our Creator as well as with one another.

We shall be able to take up this position of divine friendship because, in our desire to read the heart of the Creator, we shall become more and more certain that it is the deepest thing that the Creator longs for. 

And with any friend this is the only motive we have - it is to read the deepest level of their Being and help to fulfil for them the deepest longings in their Being. This is what friends long to do for one another. It is a very creative activity, and out of it comes an endless series of creative attitudes and creative activities.


Notes from BGC:

This is apparently a very different understanding of God's motivation than most religious people have held throughout history. This is the insight that God wants that there be more gods with whom he can can live in loving and creative 'friendship'.

(Although friendship as commonly used is too weak a word - a model for this friendship is an ideal and eternal version of the love between grown-up children and their parents; this extended family working together - and with other families - on all the tasks and joys of living.)

This is a personal motivation of God; and God is therefore envisaged as a person - indeed as two  persons: the primal Father and Mother.

This entails that at the very bottom of reality, at the most fundamental level; reality consists of Beings; and the most important thing about the Beings is their relationships - specifically their love. And the most important thing that these loving Beings do is creating.

So 'the creation' is actually an 'ing' not an 'ion' - creation wasn't done, it is doing; and the hope of God is that we will choose to become - like our Heavenly parents - engaged in that doing.

This raises the point of 'true individuals', and that they cannot be 'made' but at most 'encouraged' and 'educated'. This world is made as a place where people can each have the experiences they most need to learn from (if they so choose), to learn and grow towards fuller godhood.

The need of creation is for individuals who are capable of love and have chosen love; and who are also capable of true creation - which is (to be valuable) something to which each individual brings something unique...

We create from our uniqueness. Being an individual is an essential part of the plan; in other words, God has as many plans as individuals - and each plan is a collaboration.

Therefore, the nature of this world is such as to encourage each of us to develop that creative uniqueness - within a context of love.
 

I saw a version of this road sign on top of the Pennine Hills overlooking Cumbria, beside the burn remains of a hilltop cafe. I can only presume it was advertising a gruesome new trade being pursued on the derelict premises. Similar signs have appeared elsewhere round the country.

England today...

Comments are closed.

Some things are just too horrific to discuss.

(...!...)

Edited from The Resolution of Grief, an essay published in The Great Gift (1977) by William Arkle:


Behind the ordinary ego, or within the ordinary ego, is the divine ego. So there's nothing wrong with being egotistic - in the proper sense of the word.

There is something wrong with being egotistic in a narrow sense of egotism, in which everything is built up around the importance of its own self centre. But as this egotism grows, as it should do in a healthy being, it naturally grows into its bigger self, and the bigger self naturally grows into the little self, and the two integrate.

This is what psychologists describe as integration. It is the integration of the true self with the personality self of the physical body situation, and the two learn to live together and integrate completely. Then the personality becomes a wonderful instrument through which the divine self can experience, and learn, and interpret its learning, and communicate with other beings through physical forms, and through physical means of expression.

In doing that, it learns a great deal, and helps others to learn a great deal, and it builds and builds and learns to express the divine potentialities that we've been talking about - the divine friendships and the endless possibilities which emanate from its true nature.


So there is nothing wrong with being an ego, which is another word for 'I' and 'Iness'. You never lose the sense of 'Iness'.

You might lose the sense of knowing who your 'I' is, who you are, because the narrow sense of the personality ego - the smaller ego - often gets a very complete but restricted image of who it is, and it spends the rest of its life conforming to that image of who it is.

But the divine ego, the spiritual ego, the true self, is able to be itself and, at the same time, know that it is in a state of becoming. It isn't very concerned to circumscribe itself, to give itself a definite image, because it knows that if it does, that it's going to limit its ability to respond in an ever new way to new possibilities.


So what happens in life, is that we gradually learn to integrate the smaller sense of ego with the deeper and greater sense of ego; and, without losing a sense of 'I', the 'I' begins to become equally concerned with the well-being of others as it is with its own well-being; equally concerned with the happiness and the beauty and the possibility of the others in creation, its brothers and sisters, as it is concerned with its own reality.

So what happens, in a successful life, is that the ego broadens-out and gets bigger in a proper loving, caring way; not bigger in a grasping way, which is centred on its own small and selfishly oriented appetites; more a growing, which is able to grasp the meaningfulness, and the value to itself, of the fulfilment of all other forms of life, and all other beings, and all its other brothers and sisters.

Then the ego just grows and grows to include the well-being of all other egos. But there's nothing wrong in the sense of ego awareness.


What we call 'egotism', on the whole, reflects an unhealthy attitude in which everything is drawn into the small-self for a small-self satisfaction, small-self fulfilment of the wrong order, not large-self fulfilment for the higher order. The small-self fulfilment is a lower order appetite such as appearing to be important in the eyes of other people, appearing to be clever, appearing to be valuable in some way which is superior to other people, trying to be 'one up' on other people and so forth.


Note added (by Charlton): Arkle here is an antidote to the prevalent error that Christianity is aimed-at the loss of self; rather than the true Christian aim of expansion of self. Another error is that the ego-less human may then achieve a union with God that is an assimilation; rather than the true aim of a loving relationship between God (the creator) and his divinised children - the Sons and Daughters of God.

People break down into two groups. When they experience something lucky, group number one sees it as more than luck, more than coincidence. They see it as a sign, evidence, that there is someone up there, watching out for them. 

Group number two sees it as just pure luck. Just a happy turn of chance. I'm sure the people in group number two are looking at those fourteen lights in a very suspicious way. For them, the situation is a fifty-fifty. Could be bad, could be good. But deep down, they feel that whatever happens, they're on their own. And that fills them with fear. 

Yeah, there are those people. But there's a whole lot of people in group number one. When they see those fourteen lights, they're looking at a miracle. And deep down, they feel that whatever's going to happen, there will be someone there to help them. And that fills them with hope. 

See what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you? 

Are you the kind that sees signs, that sees miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky? 

Or, look at the question this way: Is it possible that there are no coincidences? 


The above is a quote from the very interesting 2002 movie Signs, written and directed by M Night Shyamalan and starring Mel Gibson as a widowed single-father ex-priest (implicitly High Church Episcopalian) who has lost his faith and quit his ministry.

The movie is superficially 'about' an alien contact event, presaged by crop circles (some of the 'signs' of the title); but almost entirely from the perspective of how it effects a family consisting of the father and his brother (who lives with them), and the two kids.

It is not immediately obvious, but the whole movie is actually 'about' that first question - about whether life is significant and therefore things that happen in life are 'signs' - or whether life is meaningless, purposeless and 'stuff just happens'.

It turns-out to be one of those movies in which almost everything has a role in the plot; and things become clear (for us and the protagonist) only at the very end.

I found it gripping throughout (the mystery and tension are very well evoked, with minimal means) and thought-provoking - it keeps coming to mind...

There are three types of consciousness we experience: Deep Sleep, Waking and Dreaming.

The relative rate of Time runs differently in each state. While inside each state, time is experienced as if running at the same rate - because our thinking can only be at the speed of thinking. But a huge amount of subjective experience can be fitted into a dream of a few minutes; while hours of Deep Sleep may pass without any awareness of time having passed...

To use an audio analogy; from the perspective of our Waking consciousness, playing a vinyl LP recording at 33 revolutions per minute (rpm); Deep Sleep sounds something like it was recorded at 33 revs per second - so at 33 rpm everything is so slowed-down, that it sounds like almost nothing happening except low groaning noises... Whereas a Dream sounds as if it was recorded at 33 revs per day - so that when played at 33 rpm the audio is so fast as to be incomprehensible gabble.

Or, with a video metaphor - from the Awake state, Deep Sleep is so slow that it is like a still picture, a photograph; while Dreaming is on ultra-fast-forward.


A Being living in Deep Sleep would see our Waking life whizzing past in a blur. (This looks to be what is happening when a waking person tries to interact with a sleep walker - who is in Deep Sleep; the sleep walker stares uncomprehendingly in response to blurringly fast movements and sounds). Whereas a Being in Dreaming time would see our Waking lives in slow motion; every moment 'dissected' into a sequence of tiny sub-components; like the super-slo-mo action-replay, analysing the precise details of releasing a cricket ball from a spin-bowler's fingers...

It is this difference in the relative speed of experience in Deep Sleep, Waking and Dreaming; that probably explains why we cannot recall Dreams, and why nothing seems to happen in Deep Sleep.

If that observing Being was divine, and was intervening to affect our lives; a Deep Sleep Being could only affect the broad outlines and shapes of our lives, and after a delay; whereas a Being in Dreaming Sleep time would be able to affect many detailed things in Waking life, almost instantly.


If we then consider the purpose of our three states of consciousness, in terms of our mortal lives having the purpose of giving us experiences from which we may learn that which we (personally) most need to learn; it seems likely that Dreaming has a very important role in our lives - because in Dreaming we can experience a far greater range of experiences than in waking life.

Since dream experience feels pretty much the same as Waking experience, but we can fit (say) 100 times more into an hour of Dreaming than an hour of Waking; and since furthermore Dreaming is not constrained by material limitations, but can provide any experience that can be imagined; it may be that most of our experience of life is achieved in the Dreaming State.

Perhaps in Dreaming we get the greatest breadth and quality of experience; but the experience is not as powerful as Waking experience - which is narrower, deeper and simpler; and is dominated by external, sensory input.

And then Deep Sleep provides experiences that are extremely simple and relatively few; experienced derived via inner sources - but perhaps the most powerful experiences of all.

Perhaps - in other words - there is a trade-off between the speed of time, and the depth of experience; such that the three states of consciousness - between themselves, and overall - provide each person with what they need to experience, in ways suited to their capacity for learning.


Note: I think that Deep Sleep, Waking and Dreaming all continue all of the time; to varying degrees - and consciousness moves between them. So, as we are awake, as you read this; Dreaming is ongoing, and also the slow motion of Deep Sleep. For instance' when we 'nod-off' to sleep, our consciousness can suddenly 'drop-into' an already on-going Dream, or the on-going process of Deep Sleep.

The sources of experience, the source of 'content' of these states of consciousness, is likely to differ; although probably this is a difference in emphasis rather than absolute. For example it seems likely that Waking States are dominated by the senses, and perhaps especially vision. Dreams seem to be in the universal realm of consciousness - the underworld, the 'dwat' of the Ancient Egyptians, the realm of what Jung misnames the Collective Unconscious (because it is actually as Conscious as we ourselves are conscious in dreams). Deep Sleep probably derives its content from emotion; that is from our inner world of organs and vegetative functions.

So Dreaming, Waking Deep perhaps broadly correspond to our persepctive on universal reality, immediate external environment, internal environment.