Bruce Charlton's Notions

The biggest public event arena (11,000 capacity) in my city of Newcastle upon Tyne, under pressure from the leader of the local government heading pressure from the usual suspects, and for the usual (fake, lying) reasons; has forbidden Billy Graham's son Franklin from speaking; has illegally cancelled the booking without compensation. The same has happened at all the other large venues throughout the UK.

This feels like another threshold crossed in the UK - because now the attacks on Christianity have become explicit and specific; there is now a high profile precedent for suppression of all public Christian meetings of any kind and size.

Up until now; the specificity of preventing Christians from gathering and evangelising has been indirect; masquerading as political (not religion) suppression - as being about the promotion of the sexual revolution agenda.

But this is undeniably specifically Christian; because while Christian evangelism is crushed to uniform approval from The Establishment and its mouthpieces; other religious that advocate (from the secular perspective) exactly the same sexual morality - Judaism, Islam, Sikhism etc - are by contrast publicly celebrated, government/ charity/ educational institution subsidised.

There are many officially propagandised and paid-for mass celebrations, festivals and consciousness-raising events in favour of these other religions.

The contrast between Christianity and the others - suppression versus promotion - could scarcely be starker! (To forbid Billy Graham's ministry; in England - for Heaven's sake!) The continued hypocrisy of denying this fact could scarcely be clearer.

So officially-sancioned and officially-led and Establishment-supported anti-Christianity is here to see, for everybody with eyes to see.

The question now becomes whether one actually has eyes?... And clearly not many Britons do.

Rudolf Steiner was a genius and one of the most important writers of the past couple of centuries; furthermore, he was someone who directly influenced other great writers such as Owen Barfield and Valentin Tomberg; and who continues to inspire some of the most important thinkers of today such as Jeremy Naydler and Terry Boardman.

But there are many serious problems about Rudolf Steiner the man and his legacy, which tend to render him beyond the pale, a 'hopeless case' for most serious Christians - even Romantic Christians.

So, here is some personal advice about how to 'tackle' Steiner in a way that does the most good - based upon about seven years of intensive study and thought concerning Steiner's work; but as an independent outsider to his movement.

Importantly, you can booth read and listen-to All of Steiner's major works (plus most of his minor work) free of charge at Rudolf Steiner Archive and Rudolf Steiner Audio.

You can start Now...


1. There are several books from you can take Steiner whole - his philosophical books and the history if ideas, where he is absolutely brilliant and fascinating. 

A theory of knowledge implicit in Goethe's world conception - 1886
Truth and Knowledge - 1892
The philosphy of freedom - 1894
Mysticism at the dawn of the modern age - 1901
Riddles of philosophy - 1914

2. Moving on from here, a different method is needed. Steiner is capable of tremendous, vital insights on a wide range of spritiual matters - especially to do with consciousness. Such gems are embedded all over the place, in the other books and the various collections from his thosands of transcribed lectures.

But these embedded gems (that you would not want to have missed) will be surrounded by a variable - sometimes a very large - amount of rubbish, nonsense, tedium; misleading and bad ideas.  And much of the bad stuff with be very complicated, dry, systematic - bureaucratic in style and tendency. I find this particularly the case when Steiner is writing about practical, applied, social questions - politics, medicine, education, agriculture and so on: this comes across to me as essentially pseudo-academic and pseudo-science.

3. When Steiner addresses individuals - one man speaking to another, across time - then he is at his best. But when Steiner addresses groups of people, or is focused upon matters of groups, or speaks as a The Doctor - leader/ guru/ administrator/ would-be man-of-action - then I think he is at his worst. Often you can tell when he switches from one mode to another.

4. Beyond the books on philosphy and history of ideas; I would therefore advise exploring - he is well worth reading. But read following Ralph Waldo Emerson's own practice, and practice skimming for 'lustres'; dance-across the text or swim-through the audio; seeking what speaks to you personally - and setting aside the rest.

That's the question.

And the real answer is - you can be almost completely wrong, and at a fundamental level; and most people are: nearly everybody is.

An arrogant statement? Probably - the question is: is it true?

Obviously nobody is likely to take anybody else's word for it, when it comes to the accusation that they are fundamentally wrong about most things; but if that is the actual situation, then somehow or another, sooner or later, this is something each will need to work-out for himself.

Change one, change all... once a single piece is removed from the machine of falseness (once we see through one of the Big Lies), then the machine breaks, incoherence is evident.

(That's where we are now, in the mainstream West.)

The usual response is to replace the missing piece as quickly as possible: to get 'things' working...

But if, instead, we refuse to go back to what we now know to be a lie - we will then remove another piece (another fundamental assumption) from our world picture, in the attempt to restore coherence. And find that instead this makes matters even worse!

Our world view is now crumbling, and every step we take to try and restore cohesion actually makes matters worse!

That's the way it is, when we have been living a complete lie, such as modern mainstream godless Leftism; and then attempt to live by a not-quite-so-bad falseness - such as the mainstream offers as possible alternatives - e.g. the so-called 'right wing' parties, the 'radical' ideologies', the traditionalist conservatives...

What we are left-with, at the end of all removal of wrongness; is something very simple, very basic, very easy to understand - some thing that is absolutely impossible even to speak of without seeming dumb, crazy or (by pragmatic standards) wicked...

That is exactly where we are. The true answer is pretty obvious and can be reached by anybody, even a child: especially a child.

But what when the coherent and true answer turns out to be Not an answer we can 'work with' in any kind of social, cooperative, public or organised way...

Well... then, again, each much decide for himself.


Note added: The above argument is intended to apply primarily to Christianity, also to any ideology; but also to politics. For example, if the current Brexit turns-out to be a genuine Brexit, this constitutes a qualitative reversal of many decades of a trend towards globalist system of totalitarian leftism. It is exactly the kind of thing I am talking about. Of itself, it is a small - almost insignificant - subtraction from the whole; but of itself, Brexit makes no sense in the context of how things are going; and therefore logically leads to undoing the change; or, if not, then more change, in the same direction.  

File this as an Albion Awakening retrospective - a lovely Border Ballad, performed with what could only be described as Pure Class; and a surprise happy ending:


The king had been a prisoner
At a prison long in Spain
And Willie of the Winsbury
Has lain long with his daughter at home

"What ails you, what ails you, my daughter Janet
Why you look so pale and wan
Have you had any sore sickness
Or yet been sleeping with a man?"

"I have not had any sore sickness
Nor yet been sleeping with a man
It is for you, my father dear,
For biding so long in Spain"

"Cast off, cast off your berry-brown gown
You stand naked upon the stone
That I may know you by your shape
If you be a maiden or none"

And she's cast off her berry-brown gown
She stood naked upon the stone
Her apron was low and her haunches were round
Her face was pale and wan

"Was it with a lord or a duke or a knight
Or a man of birth and fame
Or was it with one of my serving men
That's lately come out of Spain?"

"No it wasn't with a lord nor a duke or a knight
Nor a man of birth and fame
But it was with Willie of Winsbury
I could bide no longer alone"

The king has called on his merry men all
By thirty and by three
Saying "Fetch me this Willie of Winsbury
For hanged he shall be"

But when he came the king before
He was clad all in the red silk
His hair was like the strands of gold
His skin was as white as the milk

"And it is no wonder, " said the king
"That my daughter's love you did win
For if I was a woman, as I am a man
My bedfellow you would have been"

"Now will you marry my daughter Janet
By the truth of your right hand?
Oh will you marry my daughter Janet
I'll make you lord of my land"

"Well yes, I'll marry your daughter Janet
By the truth of my right hand
Well yes I'll marry your daughter Janet
But I'll not be the lord of your land"

He's mounted her on a milk-white steed
Himself on a dapple grey
He has made her the lady of as much land
As she shall ride in a long summer's day


Note: Apparently; the significance of the ending is that Willy, from his generosity of spirit, passes on the King's gift of land directly to Janet.

A post at Wm Jas Tychoneivich's blog discusses ways in which prayer may be effective. It stimulated me to add a comment about my own understanding of effective prayer - to answer that troubling question of how it is that my prayer might lead to good results that would not have happened without that prayer of mine. What is my contribution? Why is my contribution necessary?:

The way I think of this at present is that prayer is (or may be, for some people) a way of aligning ourselves with God's creative project, through love. 

Therefore the difference that is made by prayer (when there is a difference - when through love we are aligned with God's purposes) is by 'Final Participation'. 

That is we, as individuals, change God's creation our-selves, because (at that time, temporarily) we are fully in harmony with God's creative motivations: we personally add-to creation, from within-it.

In a nutshell; I see answered prayer as miraculous; and the miracle can be done by God alone (perhaps to confirm our faith - that worked for me!); but sometimes, by prayer, we participate in making the miracle.

Sometimes, indeed, the miracle could not have happened without our personal participation ("God could not have done it without me").

Such a view depends on my understanding that Men are destined to be (i.e God's hopes that we will become) full sub-creators, creating originally - generating from our true selves - within God's primary creation.  And that it is possible for people (including, perhaps, you and me) to become aligned with God (briefly and intermittently) during our mortal lives.

If or when this happens, then prayer could lead to effects origiating from our-selves. This would be a miracle that we personally had a hand in (in the same fashion that Jesus did miracles; and for the same basic reason and by the same basic mechanism - but Jesus was in the miracle producing state all of the time, for the years of his ministry, and potentially across the full range of creation).

One familiar example is genius. The truest and purest act of a genius is to perform a miracle that originated from himself, a miracle that could not have happened without that genius's specific contribution.

Genius I take to be a model for prayer that miraculously affects reality.

The post about Rudolf Steiner that I wrote a couple of days ago has provoked a rather long and (to me) valuable comment discussion - a good comment from Edwin Faust, and many from the pseudonymous 'Moonsphere' - both of whom contribute good material to William Wildblood's blog.

Anyway, if someone among the readership would like to contribute to this important subject - especially if they regard Steiner as both a valuable, and yet flawed, thinker and writer - then do please chip-in... either on that comment thread, or here.

I realised yesterday that it was not a coincidence that so much New Age thinking is aiming at some kind of 'healing' - because when 'healing' is the aim, we have already accepted that the current System is normative, is Good.

To say that somebody (or something) needs healing is to accept that 'dysphoria' - feeling bad in some way - is the proper focus, and the goal is to remove this bad-feeling.

Therefore, healing is another example of the kind of double-negative thinking that I regard as mistaken when it becomes the bottom line.  But even more importantly is that such motivation is locked-into the mainstream morality of modern life; which is 'hedonic' and rooted in assertions or imputations concerning the gratification or sufferings of people.

By the mainstream-modern-morality 'liberalism'): that is good which alleviates suffering - and 'evil' is reframed as infliction of suffering. But since suffering is part of the human condition; the hedonic morality reduces to a dread-full complex of anti-human, anti-freedom and ultimately anti-life ethic: since the only way to ensure zero suffering is not to live, and for the living to die.

This is why Romantic Christianity should not be framed in negative terms such as alleviating alienation, or the misery of materialism; or healing the rift between mind and body, subjective and objective or any such - because such a motivation will reduce to the liberal-hedonic ethic; which plays into the hands of the materialistic status quo will just become a part of The System, will just reinforce The System - as did New Age spirituality. 

Therefore, Romantic Christianity should be presented and explained in terms of what positive benefits it brings (e.g an individual purpose in life, a direct experiential basis of Christianity, that all of life in every detail has meaning etc.), rather than in terms of what negative harms it alleviates.

Regular readers will know that I have picked-up the phrase of Things Coming To A Point from CS Lewis in That Hideous Strength - it refers to the way that good and evil separate and clarify over time, until they reach the 'point' where we are faced by a very clear choice.

But that choice is the end product of what may be a prolonged and gradual process.

The statistician and Roman Catholic blogger William Briggs has encapsulated the whole business of things coming to a point in a pithy paragraph on his (invariably depressing, even when darkly-amusing) weekly roundup of contemporary insanity, culled from The News. Here it is:

If you say there is nothing wrong with, say, sodomy, then it follows that there is nothing wrong with sodomy. And if there is nothing wrong with sodomy, there is nothing wrong with teaching it to kids. One follows from the other.

That's the whole business of things coming to a point, in a nutshell. That's exactly where we are now, i.e. teaching sodomy to kids, young kids; and that's how we got here. And this situation is the challenge of our time.

On the one hand: Moral issues have never been simpler, never been easier - to those capable of basic moral discernment.

On the other hand: What we are seeing is how few modern Western people are capable of basic moral discernment.

Among 'Middle of the Road' singers (as they used to be called) Andy Williams stands in the front rank for quality of voice and musicianship. This can be seen in the 1970 hit single It's so easy.

The song begins with a cheery musical introduction that establishes its rhythmic style as a pastiche of the Motown beat (Ba Dum-dum, Ba Dum-dum); but the tune and lyrics are typical of the mainstream mood and melodies of the late sixties. This is Light Music - tuneful, toe-tapping, well-crafted but using standard situations and phrases. Good of its kind, but neither attempting nor displaying depth.

However, the thing about a great singer is that they transcend their material by something in the quality of the voice. Williams musicianship is evident in the way that he begins this short piece in an unhurried fashion, singing it 'straight' and in the middle register (mid-range) of the voice; just letting the listener appreciate his lovely, natural, effortless but absolutely distinctive tone. Evident is his ability both to sing perfectly on the beat and to use subtle syncopations once that is established.

But Williams was a virtuoso popular tenor, whose upper range and top notes were thrilling. Like nearly all the best tenors, his voice gets better as it goes higher, the vibrato faster - more dramatic. The song 'builds" throughout the second time through; he goes up an octave for certain passages, and hits the heights ("You make it easy").

The really special feature of this recording comes after about one minute, in the middle bridge section between the two verses. Williams starts with "Together you and me" and continues to hold the note right through 16 bars to include the first phrase of the next part of the song.

This is remarkable firstly because it is effortless, demonstrating superb control of breathing and support of the voice; and secondly because it is difficult to sing an 'ee' sound with good quality - but he does, and then transforms the vowel elegantly to the more open and resonant 'Oh', then continues seamlessly: "I never felt this way before, girl". Then he breathes again, quickly but without the slightest strain, to continue the song into the second verse, and the repeats at the end.

So: brilliant without being showy; always putting the song first - and never sacrificing the overall musical shape to vocal stunts.

Andy Williams could also be a very moving singer, as with that perfect ballad Solitaire, music by Neil Sedaka, words by Phil Cody - where Williams produces the definitive performance.

I have been exploring Rudolf Steiner over the past seven or so years - the amounts to a really large project of reading or listening-to scores of his works; tackling books and essays about his ideas; several biographies and memoirs... and reading online sources and watching videos of all kinds of people talking about Anthroposophy.

I did this initially because of Owen Barfield, who regarded Steiner as a thinker of world historical importance and who was an Anthroposophist from his middle twenties - one of the first in Britain. And then because I agreed with Barfield's estimate - but in an extremely qualified fashion.

I am gradually forming some kind of overview of the problem with Steiner; how it is that he can be so important - a major genius; and at the same time mostly, nearly always, productive of utter nonsense. How he can be so important, yet his legacy is mostly a series of essentially (i.e. in their essence) bogus initiatives in education, farming, politics, and medicine.

His writings on medicine, for example, are so terribly bad that I would not know where to begin in criticising them - they are wrong at almost every level - in their basic approach, their detail, the kind of mind set they encourage... they have nothing to do with medicine as I understand it.


But really this is nothing unusual for geniuses. When it comes to most geniuses, we are quite happy to take what we value and leave the rest behind. We value Isaac Newton for his mathematics and physics, and leave aside his theology and alchemy... and we do not find it hard to acknowledge that Newton was perhaps the greatest scientist ever and also a horrible man.

The deep problem with Steiner is that he insists over and again and with all the force he can muster - that his work is a wholly consistent and coherent whole which should be taken in toto. The Anthroposophical Society (in practice) regards Steiner in exactly this way - he is wholly well-motivated, wholly good, always right.

They really do regard Steiner as being as infallible as any human ever has been - and that is the way that his ourvre has been preserved and is presented to the world. It began during Steiner's life; and it has continued ever since. Any acknowledged faults are so minor and quibbling as merely to stress his overall and essential infallibility (rather like when job applicants admit to such 'faults' as perfectionism and working too hard).


But Steiner had flaws, including serious ones; and probably the worst was his defensive refusal ever to admit that he had changed his mind, said anything wrong or made a mistake. He was what Colin Wilson termed a Right Man - whose self-esteem depends on a brittle self-image that - ultimately, at root - he is always right, all the time, about everything.

If ever a Right Man is confronted with contradiction or incoherence - then he will explain (perhaps patiently, perhaps angrily) at endless length how this is not really contradiction or incoherence - at a deeper or higher level, everything fits together perfectly; and anyone who says otherwise is malign, foolish or incompetent.

The type is surely familiar to most people.


The problem for Steiner's self-image is that - at least at the level of obvious common sense; he changed a great deal, many times, throughout his life. And, being the massively productive genius that he was, the amount of information and assertion he generated was phenomenal - yet somehow all his life, and all his enormous body of work - had to be made into a unity, bound-together in a fully harmonious system...

This led Steiner into all kinds of tortuous assertion, selection, special pleading - and what would certainly be called dishonesty if it wasn't that he seemed to have been able to persuade himself; so I suppose it is a species of delusion.

In the last year of his life, Steiner wrote an autobiography The Story of My Life (published 1928) covering the first 2/3 of his life. It is very interesting, at times profound - I would recommend it. If you don't fancy reading; it is available free of charge and beautifully read by Dale Brunsvold in an audiobook format.

But it is a fiction of Steiner's life, not history. It isn't just that Steiner focuses (quite rightly) on spiritual aspects as contrasted with material one; it is that the picture painted is untrue: it is an old man looking back and making a unity of what was diverse, making coherent what was a sequence of U-turns and reversals. It is projecting the elderly Steiner back onto his childhood, youth and young adulthood.


The autobiography asserts that Steiner was secretly (on the inside) always exactly what he ended being - a magically insightful and charismatic figure of hypnotic presence; the dominant, confident leader of an international movement and but that this was necessarily hidden for various reasons, or people had misunderstood, or enemies had misrepresented, or whatever.

To the eye of common sense; Steiner was a very insecure young man, often lonely, dependent on being looked-after by others (including his first wife - that seems to have been almost the entirety of the relationship); apparently lacking direction and being rather passively led by offers and opportunities from others, rather than by any life strategy.  

Steiner was always extremely intelligent; but his personality underwent not one but many extreme transformations. The younger Steiner showed no signs of spirituality or clairvoyance; and was variously, explicitly, obviously at different times a Roman Catholic, Kantian, atheist, political radical, materialist, nihilist, Nietzchian, anti-Christian and much more.

Somehow this is all brought into a apparent coherence by a brilliant act of synthesis that has convinced Anthroposophists ever since. But the real story is much more interesting and remarkable. It is a story of one of the most extreme personal transformations in history; such that one can hardly recognise the older and younger Steiner as being the same person.


This is important to recognise because Steiner did himself a terrible disservice by his insistence on consistency, coherence, and system; he made it almost impossible for anyone but a disciple prepared to swallow everything uncritically to take him seriously.

By insisting on taking him in an all or nothing fashion, Steiner created a small minority of cult-followers who are intellectually servile and worshipping; and a barrier against the vast majority of people who are interested and impressed only by a small proportion of his output.

The best thing that could happen to Steiner would be if he came to be treated as just an ordinary genius.

This is just an example of the way my mind 'works' - the way a train of thought emerges, gets picked-up and followed-through...

I was thinking about Alan Garner's novel Boneland, which I disliked pretty strongly - but which (being by Garner) had some interesting aspects that stuck in the mind and worked there. One was that the protagonist Colin was a radio-astronomer who was (somehow) using the Jodrell Bank astronomical radio-telescope to try and dicover signs of his long-lost sister Susan in the night sky.

It is never explained what he was trying to do, what he expected to find or why - but that basic idea rather fascinated me: using a vast radio telescope to look for someone in the night sky.


I was also thinking, as one does, about the extraordinary fact of resurrection: that Jesus did not only promise us eternal life, as our-selves, but life everlasting as embodied persons. Eternal life might have been (usually is) thought to be in the form of a spirit; but no - we Christians are going to live forever with bodies. Amazing!

Because everything we know about bodies - in this world, in our mortal lives - suggests that a body could not be eternal; that it would (soon or late) wear-out, get-broken or somehow destroyed - maybe exploded... Yet not so: we will live forever, and we will have bodies.


(No wonder that so many people think Christianity incredible, in the sense of beyond credibility! No wonder so many Christians play-down this aspect of the faith - and indeed seem secretly, implicitly, to believe is discarnate spirit life beyond death.)


So, those who love, have faith in, follow Jesus will live forever in bodies that will not age, will not suffer disease - and are indestructible.

And since these are bodies, they have a location. Heaven is not some abstract state of being or consciousness - it must be an actual place (or places), inhabited by solid-bodied immortal human deities.


Where, then, is Heaven?

Well, I don't know - but it must be somewhere (or several/many somewheres). And, since it is apparently not here on earth - Heaven might well be somewhere in 'outer space' - somewhere out there among the stars...

Maybe a planet, or (and this is where it starts getting weird) it could be a star...  because if resurrected Men are indestructible, then they could inhabit... well, anything; even including a star that is hot enough to melt rock, hot enough to fuse hydrogen.

(Just imagine that! Being able to go right up to, get inside, our sun - or some other star...)


Therefore... Maybe it was not such a crazy idea for Colin to look for his sister Susan (who had 'died' from this world, in some way) among the stars, and - given that she may have become an immortal (small-g) god - maybe it would be possible for her to signal her presence to her brother in a way detectable by radio telescope; if, for whatever reason, there was some purpose to her doing so.

All of which brings an interesting new aspect to looking at the night sky: a fair sky-field, full of folk*, perchance.

*Piers Plowman by William Langland, c1380 - Lines 13-19.

Amo Boden has done a video in response to an earlier post I wrote about the future of civilisation, assuming that human consciousness develops towards Final Participation.

This is one of my apparently idiosyncratic obsessions - trying to detect and delete abstractions and aiming at redescription in the direction of a metaphysics of Beings having Relationships.

It is my step beyond what Barfield described as Residual Unresolved Positivism - in that I find all kinds of things that even Steiner and Barfield do to be abstract models. Therefore, if the world really is made of beings etc; by being abstract instead of personal, and models instead of relationships - these are Necessarily Ultimately Wrong.

So, civilisation seems to me to be built on abstract modelling of Men and behaviour - on categories of persons, laws, rituals etc - hence ultimately wrong.

My vision of reality, and Heaven, is a society of unique individuals, bound together by love, whose unity is that of common work on the everlasting 'project' of creation.

Hence I tend to think that mortal Man's destiny, in terms of the trend of consciousness, is movement towards this. I see our civilisation as tending to break down; as all its ultimately-wrong abstractions, its categories, its measurements... lose the natural and spontaneous authority that they had at an earlier stage of the development of human consciousness.

I see the Ahrimanic, bureaucratic totalitarian as the opposed movement - which is a demonic-evil attempt to prevent Final Participation by the mandatory (using force and saturation propaganda imposed by omni-surveillance) imposition of arbitrary structure, rule, category, numerical measurement etc.

In the end; we we have an evil official world that is an artificial and unfree 'civilisation' - a parody/ subversion of the ancient civilisation... Or - if we want Good - we will have a conscious and voluntary 'reversion' to the non-civilisation of our 'hunter-gathere' ancestors.

And therefore the end of civilisation.

 

Mark Felton's wonderful YouTube channel has a video tailored to appeal to people who, like me, would rather have flown in an English Electric Lightning than any other plane ever.

It tells the story of XR729 which, in a 1984 exercise, intercepted a US U-2 spyplane, then climbed even higher - and reached a record-breaking altitude of 88,000 feet (at which the sky was dark and the earth's curvature could be seen).

The same aircraft was also the only one (of many who tried) to be able to intercept Concorde when it was flying at Mach 2.

Great days!

The root of Christian belief is that we each need to make a choice between resurrected life eternal in Heaven - or not.

This choice is very simple indeed: do we (personally) want this, or not?


Of course, we first need to understand what it is that we are choosing (or rejecting) - but really, that is the only difficulty; and I presume that after death we will be shown - or rather we will come to know directly - exactly what it is we are being offered by Jesus Christ.

So for God, the Creator, the essence of human life is very simple, simple enough to be comprehensible to a child - and God's desire is for each of us to understand life in its absolute simplicity.

Even with complete clarity and grasp of the nature of resurrected life everlasting; there are some that will reject it - and presumably these clear-rejectors include (but are not confined to) the devil and his leading demons.


For the devil and his demons and servants; the opposite of clarity and simplicity is the desired state

The devil wants to induce a permanent and overwhelming impression of complexity, leading to a deep confusion - so that when we are offered the choice of resurrection, we cannot see it for what it really is.

This describes the distinctive evil of the modern Western mainstream world. It is a world in which complexity and confusion has reached levels many-fold beyond that attained in any previous society anywhere. A world in which fundamental - and correction-resistant - confusion is endemic, and still increasing. A world in which the powers of purposive evil have attained unprecedented sway. 

There is even a large category of people who describe themselves as Spiritual Seekers; and who remain seeking for year after year, decade after decade, preferring to stay enmeshed in complexity and confusion; rather than recognising The Choice, and making their choice - one way, or the other.


As I have mentioned before; I think that God's desire to make this choice clear and simple may be one significant reason behind the increased lifespan of modern Western Man, and the increasing levels of 'dementia', delirium and other mental impairments. 

For a typical modern Western Man; the progressive simplification of advancing senility may be exactly what he most needs in order to grasp life in its ultimate clarity. Illusions and wishful thinking, active sins and the lies we tell ourselves are demolished incrementally - until the soul finds itself in a body and/ or mind that are alive... but little more.

This may be, for some people, the best way to bring them to a recognition of the Human Condition, and The Choice. In which case a long life or declining quality (as measured on an axis of pleasure and its absence) may be for the long-term benefit of the person who experiences it.


Whether this is actually true in a given instance will depend on that specific individual - and may be knowable only to him... plus perhaps those who love him.

The end of the process would come after death, when that individual is brought to the point of decision: to follow Jesus through death to eternal resurrected life in Heaven - or not.

And I believe that we who remain alive for the present may be able to know the outcome of this decision for those we love; we may learn what happened after death to those we love by means of prayer or meditation.

Naturally, this would never be anything we could 'prove' to anybody else (nor should we attempt to prove it); nonetheless such knowledge could be of the very greatest importance to our-selves, here-and-now.   

If the primal reality of God is imagined before the beginning of creation, and if God is single and personal; then creation can be understood as God's 'play'.

This is made simple and explicit in God, the Player Friend; a rare 42 page booklet self-published by William Arkle in 1993, which I only discovered-about a couple of weeks ago, and which I am currently reading.


Typically (and valuably) Arkle boils it down to God alone becoming bored with a world in which everything was caused by himself; and from this dissatisfaction manifesting creation so that divine 'Friends' - that is, fully-developed men and women - could gradually evolve, and become genuinely independent sources of surprise and innovation.

As so often, much hinges upon the primary assumptions; and here Arkle makes the primary assumption that the beginning of everything - God - is a unity. When this is the assumption, then I think it is 'inevitable' that there is an 'arbitrary' quality of 'play' about everything in creation.

Reality is because creation is more 'fun' than no reality; as Arkle sometimes put it.


When creation is driven by something negative like boredom, and negativity is cured by the independent play of other agents or actors; then we get this kind of double-negative theology which I always regard as secondary.

Yet, if creation is dynamic, expansile (as I believe) then it must indeed be motivated by some kind of (negatively) discontent, or (positively) yearning.


My own understanding is different from Arkles, and is pretty-much the Mormon Christian theology; which is that 'in the beginning' God was two, a dyad, man and woman, Heavenly Father and Mother.

By this understanding there never was 'unity' - unless the unity is regarded as being divided in twain. The 'unity' comes from Love: love between our Heavenly Parents, which eternally 'binds' them (in a 'celestial marriage'). That is my primal reality.

The primal reality is therefore one that is dynamic, as love is dynamic; and it is one of yearning, as love contains yearning. By my understanding, then, creation is the result of an overflow of this yearning love; so that there be more autonomous, agent, independently-creative persons to love.

This is a familiar motivation arising between a loving husband and wife: the positive desire for children to expand the scope and possibility of love. The married couple's aspiration for pro-creation (and also to create a home, a family, ideally one that is ever-growing and inter-linking - with all that entails in terms of the context for such growth) is thus seen of a microcosm of the divine impulse to creation. 


The classical 'Trinitarian' formulation of Christian theology 'has it both ways' in asserting that God is both undivided-unity (with no sex) and hence of its nature static and self-sufficient; and also a triad of Father, Son and Holy Ghost (with no sex) - who are different enough to be bound together by love, hence dynamic and motivated to grow.

By this classical account; sexuality is secondary, temporary, inessential; whereas for Mormon theology sexuality is primary and causal; deriving from the nature of God - our Heavenly Parents. 

I can make no rational sense of classical Trinitarianism; but as a form of words, it covers all the bases!

However, for me, God must be either one or more-than-one; and my understanding is that God is (or rather was, primally) two. And these two were a man and a woman. And their love was the fount of creation.

I added the following note to my piece of last week about why and how I left the Establishment - which cleared the way to becoming a Christian:

Maybe the peak of my Establishment acceptance came when - in 2000 - I was a Visiting Distinguished Millennial Fellow at Kings College London.

I was surely the least in status of these Fellows, probably a substitute for someone who dropped out; nonetheless the other Fellows included political scientist Kenneth Minogue of the LSE, Melanie Phillips the journalist (a panellist, not Fellow), Julia Neuberger (another panellist: then the most famous UK female Jew - reformed liberal 'Rabbi'), Robert Winston (University of London, doctor) and Colin Blakemore (a panellist - Oxford, scientist) who both fronted major BBC TV series, Kay Redfield Jameson of Harvard (the global star of bipolar disorder), Rowan Williams (later Archbishop of Canterbury).

I gave a lecture to some hundreds of people at Southwark Cathedral, London; an extract of which was reprinted in The Independent newspaper.

[The Independent is an ultra-Leftist national title. You can see from the linked transcript how much of a Libertarian I was at that time - which indirectly shows that Libertarians are actually of-the-Left - if there had been any doubt.]

Oh! - I nearly forgot to mention the most significant 'evidence' that I was part of The Establishment (albeit on the fringe): my original debating opponent in Southwark Cathedral, was, until a late-ish stage of planning, Jimmy Carter. Yes, him. I really was scheduled to speak as one of only two lecturers with the ex-President of the USA. In the event, he cancelled; but still...

A recent post on the subject by William Wildblood helped clarify my views on the broad subject of 'genetic engineering' applied to humans - I mean, in general terms, the ethical questions relating to the technological modification/ take-over of human reproduction.

It strikes me that - from my Christian perspective - the real issue is about parents and children; about families. Our 'ethical' ideal* (that is our moral goal, based upon our understanding of the truth and reality of God's creation) - which we ought to aim for in all things; is that every child is the child of parents.

To repeat: Every child that is born should be the child of a mother and father; conversely no child should be born (or 'made') who is not the child of a mother and father.

The moral nightmare, the stark horror - which modern people have largely lost the capacity to discern, but which ought to be spontaneously obvious - is the scenario of human beings being made without any parents.

Such 'made' people would intrinsically be alone in a world that cared nothing for them as persons. A society that regarded them as made-hence-owned - enslaved 'human resources' at best; but in essence as 'subjects' for whatever experiment, exploitation or torment some person or group wanted to use them for.

(And - it seems clear to me - there are quite a few persons whose desire is to 'own', to have-full-control-of; a child, a person; whom they could 'legitimately' use - or dispose of - for whatever purpose suits their own wishes. This truly-demonic impulse is what lies behind the decades of legal removal of children from their parents' responsibility - to make all children (including those with the most-ideal married parents) both ultimately and proximately wards of The System, of the state bureaucracy, and the individuals that operate within it. Already The State bureaucrats determine whether children be educated, what they are taught and how, their medical treatment, and recently the content of private ideological-religious interactions within the family. Parents who dissent from State authority are increasingly likely to have their children 'confiscated' and subjected to the impersonal, non-loving, abusive regimes of the 'child-care' system.)

If such a moral bright-line were accepted, I think it would entail accepting the fundamental reality and divine authority of the family as God's way of structuring human, and ultimately divine, society in creation.

*Note: By 'ideal' I mean that it is what we, our laws, our social organisation, should be aimed-at. In practice, the family ideal will be unattainable for everybody, all of the time - but knowing and acknowledging the ideal is what enables us to live coherently, with meaning and motivation; aligned with divine creation.

I have been reading Gareth Knight recently, including his 2011 autobiography I called it magic.

From this, and several other, readings (over the years) it seems to me that ceremonial magic is a form of drama (akin to a pageant) that revived in the late 1800s and early 20th century; with magical intent, and based upon systems of symbolism and ritual (new syntheses, but based on what was known or believed of tradition) that were taught to the participants through prolonged and hierarchical initiations.


Through Gareth Knight's life, his own practice of ceremonial magic changed in ways that embodied changes in culture (and, I would argue, Western consciousness); in that the ceremonies became more innovative and improvisatory - less like the catholic mass and more like an experimental theatre company. I think this also reflected a reduction in the scale of ambition.

The early magical societies were aiming, and expecting, to change the destiny of the world and fate of nations (a late example being the 'Magical Battle of Britain', which I discussed recently. But in the post-war era my impression is that the aim was more like a lasting transformation of the consciousness of the participants in the ceremonies.

I relate this to what I perceive to be a progressive loss of effectiveness of general systems of symbolism; so that at first symbols must be made more personal (and novel), then later even this is diminished - and there is no effective vocabulary of general symbols that may be 'relied upon' to produce predictable effects in a wide range of people.


In the end we are each brought to our own condition and situation - each must actively seek his own meaning and cannot satisfyingly 'use' the meanings and systems of earlier generations. Activities of a spiritual nature that used to be best pursued as part of a group, find that the scale and power of group benefits are dwindling.

This can be seen in that the activities of ceremonial magicians as a whole seem to have become less Good, more evil.  The early practitioners - and Gareth Knight himself - were often serious Christians and well-motivated individuals.

Modern people who are interested by magic are - very obviously! - mostly anti-Christian, attracted by 'dark' and demonic themes; focused on personal issues of sex, power and thrills - their activities are bound-up with extreme self-mutilation and shocking 'the squares'; the politics this-worldly, materialist, anti-Christian/ pseudo-pagan, hedonic, pro-sexual revolution - thus Leftist, nihilistic - sinfully despairing.


The choices for a Christian seem to be either to accept a diminished thing (a materialistic, 'theoretical' kind of Christianity), or work on the same spiritual projects by ourselves and with less recourse to symbolism; or else to give-up and not to do anything seriously spiritual at all (which is, of course, the usual response, even among Christians).

My response is to develop the personal, experiential aspect of Christianity as an individual; but to seek inspiration and encouragement where I can find it. In one sense this is a version of the (notorious) New Age mantra 'what works for me'; but with the the absolutely crucial and transforming difference that 'what works' must be rooted-in and emergent-from the reality and truth of Christianity.

And Gareth Knight's work is something that does inspire and encourage me - even though I am not-at-all interested in participating in (even his kind of, which seems to be one of the the best kinds of) ceremonial magic.

One the most annoying experiences for those advocating revolutionary new theories occurs when their ideas are prematurely or erroneously rejected. Perhaps even more annoying is when a theory is adopted but its originator is not credited with the discovery.

This is embodied in the cynical description of the acceptance of revolutionary new scientific theories as having three stages in which the idea is first rejected as false, then dismissed as trivial, and finally accepted as obvious.

The three phases of response to a new theory on the road to its acceptance are

1. The theory is not true.

2. The theory is true, but it is unimportant.

3. The theory is true, and it is important – but we knew it all along.

The point of this joke is that (according to scientific theorists) new theories are never properly appreciated.

There is a superficial, but correct and important, level of critique in which premature or incorrect rejection of new theories is often a consequence of either the lack of sufficient attention being paid to the new theory, so that the critic never considers the new theory with sufficient care; or the sheer ignorance or incompetence of the critic such that – even if critics do pay sufficient attention – they are simply unable to comprehend the new theory due to knowledge deficiencies or a lack of brain-power.

Quantitatively, therefore, even when it is not ignored, a new idea tends get buried beneath shallow and dumb criticisms.

1. False: the theory is not true

At a deeper level, however, the ‘false, trivial, obvious’ joke implies that the reason theories are seldom appreciated is related to the primacy of theory in science.

Theories come before facts, since facts only get their ‘factual’ status from the theory in which they are embedded; such that science can most simply be conceptualized as a process of generating and testing theories against observations.

The defining feature of a revolutionary theory is precisely that it seeks to replace the assumptions of an already-existing theory – so a new theory cannot be evaluated on the basis of the assumptions of the old theory. This is why a new and revolutionary theory will almost invariably strike people as false.

In a sense, a new theory is perceived by an old theory as if the new theory were an observation. When a new theory is revolutionary, then it is perceived as an observation which is incompatible with the old theory. From this perspective either the new theory must be rejected, or else the old theory abandoned.

2. Trivial: the theory is true, but it is unimportant

The second phase is dismissing a revolutionary idea as ‘trivial’. This follows from a preliminary analysis which suggests that the new idea is not, after all, contradicted by the major existing evidence – so the new theory cannot simply be rejected as ‘false’.

However, although it may be true, the new theory seems unimportant; because its implications do not seem to lead anywhere interesting from the perspective of current theory.

A new theory may, therefore, seem trivial because it is trivial in the context of the old theory. Only from the perspective of the new theory itself can its importance be recognized.

In this sense, a theory must be ‘accepted’ (at least provisionally) before its importance can be appreciated.

2. (a) Trivial: the theory is true, and it is important, but dangerous

A stronger version of this second ‘trivial’ phase happens when the implications of a theory are regarded not merely as unimportant but actually dangerous.

It is never possible absolutely to exclude in advance the possibility of some catastrophe from a wide range of potential disasters. Nor is it possible to prove that the adoption of a new theory will almost certainly provide greater overall and general benefit compared with the old theory.

New theories often seem dangerous because their destructive effect is proximate and certain, while their potential to serve as a basis for future progress is distal and unpredictable.

In fact, the most compelling ‘danger’ of a new revolutionary theory is the real and present harm its acceptance would inflict on the power, wealth or prestige of adherents to the already-existing theory.

3. Obvious: the theory is true, and it is important – but we knew it all along

However, for reasons good or bad, and against these odds, some revolutionary theories do become adopted and displace the theories that went before.

Once a new theory is in place, its explanatory and predictive power is evident, its importance is ‘obvious’ (since the new theory now forms the framework for scientific investigation and communication), and indeed it becomes hard to imagine how anybody could ever (rationally) have believed anything else.

After a successful scientific revolution it seems (it ‘feels like’) everyone had always known that the new theory was true; because looking-back it is clear that the new theory makes sense-of, is explanatory-of, all observations of current-significance that went before.

Precursors and partial expressions of the new theory apparently abound, and it can become hard to recognize or acknowledge that past (‘pre-revolution’) scientists were operating on the basis of quite different over-arching theories.

Forgotten are the vast difficulties a new theory originally overcame in getting attention, refuting shallow and dumb criticisms, and demonstrating its validity and importance – so the achievement of the originating theorist may seem slight (and this is assuming the discoverer has not by this time been overlooked, forgotten, or robbed of credit by a more powerful colleague).

The path to fame as a theorist surely is long, winding and replete with pitfalls.

Like water for fish

So – theory for scientists is like water for fish: the invisible medium in which they swim. Observations and experiments, on the other hand, are like toys in the fish tank.

New toys are attention-grabbing; but when the tank gets cloudy, its water needs changing.


Bruce G. Charlton. False, trivial, obvious: Why new and revolutionary theories are typically disrespected. Medical Hypotheses. 2008; 71: 1-3

A couple of years ago, I wrote about the Netflix comedy series The Good Place. There were eventually four series and the last episode has now been shown. 

The first two series were really excellent: the cleverest and most consistently surprising, very-funny, tightly-written sit-com I have ever seen. But series three and four were much less good, apart from the occassional episode at the old standard; and lasped into cheap politically correct and topical references.

However, the final double-length episode was a remarkable tour de force. It was very funny at times, but also as serious as the makers could make it; because it was about the meaning of life, the possibilities of death, and the question of purpose in reality.


The Good Place deserves serious consideration as an unusally honest and rigorous (also funny and enjoyable) attempt to show in detail the consequences of modern mainstream Leftist morality.

As befits a mainstream media production, The Good Place was (or attempted to be) post-Christian. It was also non-theistic. The setting was a universe without God, a reality not-created, but merely administered (the supreme being was a 'judge' who applied a modern kind of emotivist morality). Every-thing Just Was.

Therefore there was never any possibility of genuine purpose in reality or the lives of the participants - and the plot was honest enough not to pretend otherwise.


In such a reality, the only possibility of morality is based around 'feelings' - a 'hedonic' ethical system; one based on trying to maximise pleasure and minimise suffering. For the 'evil' people/ demons it was 'my' pleasure being maximised, and/ or other-individuals suffering being taken-pleasure-in. Low level demons just maximised here and now pleasure, high level demons were strategically maximising a longer trerm.

For the 'good' characters, there was the 'altruistic' attempt to devise a system (of laws) that would maximise 'everybody's' pleasure and minimise suffering for all - but why this was 'good' had no in-show rationale. (At one point the philosopher John Rawls was mentioned - his view of goodness was pretty much that of the show.) In The Good Place, as with mainstream modern life, the desirability of altruism was simply asserted, when convenient - and the principle was ignored at other times.

The final episode was about the new 'paradise' that had been created by the protagonists. Entry to it was by modern mainstream standards of 'doing good' - and the people who went there were the  kind of people of whom upper middle class, Establishment people approve.

The implication was that the 'deplorables' - of the kind identified by mainstream mass media, and for that kind of reasons - continued to go to 'The Bad Place' (hell) and rightly so. For example, at one point Plato went to hell because he 'defended slavery'.I other words, those who violated current 'New York Times' views of good behaviour, were Bad People.


So The Good Place became a kind of perfected college campus of unlimited time and opportunities to learn, create, and enjoy the fun things in life - forever. Complete hedonism without harm to others, and no suffering. Life as a perpetual ideal holiday...

But the writers were honest enough to admit that this did not really suffice; that people would sooner or later become sated, bored, satisfied... And then they voluntarily went through a door to leave TGP and enter a state of (what was in effect) Nirvana: they would lose their self, and be re-absorbed back into the universe from which they originally came, and to which they rightly belonged.

In other words, reality was essentially Buddhist, with (as with Buddhism) tinges of Hinduism in the cyclical nature of reality.


The further question of why they had separated from the totality of reality in the first place? (why we did not just stay with the totality in the first place; instead of bothering to become mortal people, live and die, and go to paradise before becoming reabsorbed?) was not addressed - as it is not addressed by Buddhism or Hinduism.

The implication is that this is just How Things Happen. The metaphor used was that we are each a wave: a wave forms, it crashes ashore, the wave resturns to the ocean - then another wave reforms. This is Just What Happens.

This is not irrational as a belief. After all, all beliefs come down to the asuumption of It Just Is sooner or later.


But it is a metaphysics of pointlessness, and the rational human attitude is a kind of passive resignation: there is no reason to be loving, or creative, or to live rather than die.

It is, indeed, an religious view that regards death (non-being) as the ideal. And that is - pretty much - the final decision and implication of The Good Place.

This fits with the idea that Hinduism/ Buddhism is (more or less) what you get from human intelligence operating upon purely this-worldly phenomena, on what we observe for ourselves: it is a kind of natural paganism made abstract.

And therefore Nirvana is a natural end-point for an honest a rigorous modern materialist - amounting to a more thoughtful version of the absolute annihilation that materialists (whose understanding Is incoherent) assume to be the fate of all living beings, including Men.


What is an alternative to such a Paradise-Nirvana scenario?

Well, for me it is the vision of Heaven that was made lucid by Mormon (CJCLDS) theology with some help from William Arkle - that is  heaven of men and women who are en route to becoming gods (on a level with, and within the prior universe of, God the creator); gods whose motivations are harmonised by love and who are participating in the primary work of creation.

Heaven consisting of men and women who live in families - extended families, cross-linked by ('celestial' = everlasting, dyadic) marriage.


I did not realise until after the show had finished - but the Paradise of The Good Place had no children: none at all. The protagonists had parents, but no children. Get that? No Children.

After aeons of cohabiting life in this Paradise; a women still described herself as the 'girlfriend' of a man - there was no marriage. Their life was a perpetual holiday of visiting 'cool' places, partying, eating good food, having more elaborate sex... Modern 'dating', but without limit.

Relationships were just as contingent as upon earth, whether it was currently enjoyable - or not. Continuation was based upon each individual's appetite for more life of this kind - whether there was anything 'yet to do' that they still wanted to do (in one case; literally a written list of accomplishments, ticked-off as accomplished).

Thus all relationships and participation in Paradise likewise; at any time, anybody might decide they we ready to go through the door to Nirvana.

Sooner or later, everybody would decide this.
 

No children, no families, no commitments... Paradise was exactly like the modern 'singles' life of students, young professionals, media people, most of the most popular TV shows and movies, a social media lifestyle... shared, presumably, by most of the people responsible for putting together the show.

Implicitly, marriage, family, children - all these are evanescent pleasures (or pains), just like any other pleasure - but in practice inferior to personal growth, fun parties, sex, travel, good living... And then annihilation.


So, here it is. The Good Place describes accurately the best that can be offered by the mainstream, modern, media view of life.

It - without even comment - excludes precisely what I personally regard as The most important things in life. And ultimately; this exclusion comes about inevitably because there is assumed to be no creator, no God, and no divine purpose; no possibility of permanent committments; no eternal marriage and no eternal families.

Subtract all these: and The Good Place is a fair, honest, worked-through picture of what remains.