Bruce Charlton's Notions

Of course not! But most modern people - especially intellectuals - think much like computers; and more so with every passing year.

They think in very narrow, passive, unintuitive, unimaginative ways - plugged-into and dependent-upon almost constant inputs from the mass media and social media, as bureaucratic functionaries...

Modern thinking has been entrained into machine-cognition - and a machine cannot be Christian.

So modern Man cannot be a Christian, any more than a computer can be a Christian.

Oh, modern Man can say he believes this or that doctrine or dogma - but that is just a print-out; he can transport himself to a church and make singing or praying noises - but that is just an audio-broadcast; he can read Scripture - but that is just another memo from central management...

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Before modern Man can be a Christian in any meaningful sense, he must discover or re-learn how think in a human way - not a computer/ machine way.

This is why the aspect of consciousness, of spirituality; of such themes as the livingness and consciousness of all the world, the truth of imagination, the primacy of intuition, the possibility of personal revelation, the reality of supersensory perceptions... such themes are not just optional extras (and certainly they are not forbidden to Christians!), but such matters are vital to Christianity being or becoming more than an alternative software package for computer-Men.

Christians cannot be meaningfully Christian and think/ reason/ evaluate/ 'feel' just like mainstream modern people - to be really Christian here and now, in The West, requires a radical metamorphosis of thinking; of form as well as content; and all serious Christians need to be aware of this necessity.

(This important question - or something like it - was posed by William Wildblood in the comments to the previous post on Screwtape and Wormwood - here is my attempt to answer it concisely.)

The difficulty I am having in responding to your question may be related to the several assumptions embedded in it - for example, about our nature as Men and God's potential powers, and the purpose of mortal life.

If we accept that these in The West are the most evil times in history - in the sense that more (numerically and proportionately) people would reject salvation than ever before, due to the prevalence of value-inversion; then the first thing that strikes me is exactly that Men do not want to be saved from their current situation - indeed they want more of the same.

The situation resembles that of loving parents whose child has left home to live with an exploitative brainwashing cult to which she has become devoted. The parents know where she is, and could go and get her - but they also know that she would strongly resist being rescued (let's say she is devoted to the cult leader who abuses and enslaves her), and if rescued would be utterly miserable and try to return to her captors.

The parents may write to her, may send all kinds of messages to assure their daughter of their continued love, but she will not read the messages.

God is in this situation with the added aspects that the cultists and their victims and the weeping parents are all equally his beloved children; and the children are able to deny God's existence and assume that they arise spontaneously and accidentally and have no responsibility to anybody else.

In such a situation God cannot do much more than stand ready to respond to individuals if and when he is acknowledged and asked. Or else the whole scenario can be wound-up - which is the end of this earth, and the trajectory of humanity in it arcing to a conclusion; the end of the 'experiment' of mortal life.

The prophecies are that - sooner or later - this point will be reached, and the earth and all the people on it will be ended (and a New Jerusalem arise) - and it seems that we are now in the End Times, or Latter Days as it becomes clear that the point approaches and can only be delayed but not averted.

But why does God allow the demons to work? Well, the demons are his children too; and the demons are at one end of a continuum of goodness and evil in which everyone is mixed (in Mormon theology, Satan and demons are pre-mortal spirit children who have chosen the wrong side, and are forbidden to incarnate).

I think that God's tolerance of the continued existence of demons indicates that they cannot be beyond hope of reform - across the vast timescale of eternity. God could not 'kill' demons, but they could be stripped of their powers or confined if or when they were beyond possibility of repentance - and perhaps this has indeed happened to some of them (we would not know) but the ones we do experience presumably have not reached that point.

(A microcosm of the problem God faces can be imagined if a loving Father had many children among whom there was one in particular of great ability who preyed upon, tormented and corrupted the other children; and others who were themselves similarly wicked and had chosen to side-with the one most-wicked child. There comes a point at which a loving Father will feel that he must 'write-off' (e.g. dis-able, exile, imprison, 'kill') the one worst, and perhaps some more of his more-wicked children - for the sake of the less-wicked ones. But that is a last resort, and would probably lead to an eternity of irreconcilable fear, resentment and hatred from the written-off children - and may also have a terrorizing and paralysing effect on the less-wicked children who are, after-all, themselves all somewhat wicked, and who have experienced in themselves exactly the same kind of wickedness as was more extreme in some of their siblings.)

Why are the demons not sequestered from good people? If we consider the problem from a spiritual level - I think that demons are like vampires, and can only spiritually-harm those who 'invite them in' - so the demons remain present and active in human affairs because humanity has invited them to stay and continues to want them as guests.

The earth and mortal life are partly what we need, and partly what we make of them - a mixed picture. The reasons why bad things happen are therefore manyfold and must be understood in an individualised way and from an eternal perspective of soul.

I don't think humans are cognitively capable of understanding why everything happens everywhere and to everyone, and how it all interacts. But I do believe that we can learn by revelation why this particular thing has happened to us here-and-now; if we are open to accepting the true answer when God gives it, which may not be the answer we wanted to hear.

One of the most important reasons for reading CS Lewis's The Screwtape Letters (and its 'follow-up', Screwtape Proposes a Toast) is to understand the difference between senior demons whose behaviour is strategic and oriented towards maximising the harvest of damned souls; and the low level minion types of demon - who are short-termist, impulsive, destructive theiving, lustful, sadistic etc. The value is that most people assume that demons work in the latter way - and thereby fundamental misunderstand and misinterpret the past six or so decades in The West.

A particular key moment in the Letters comes when the apprentice Wormwood gets excited at the prospect of war; but his 'uncle' Screwtape - the senior tempter and strategist - points out that while war is delightful in terms of human suffering, from a strategic demonic perspective war is often counter-productive, and 'peace' (comfort, convenience, idleness, affluence etc) is preferable.

When I told you not to fill your letters with rubbish about the war, I meant, of course, that I did not want to have your rather infantile rhapsodies about the death of men and the destruction of cities. In so far as the war really concerns the spiritual state of the patient, I naturally want full reports. And on this aspect you seem singularly obtuse. Thus you tell me with glee that there is reason to expect heavy air raids on the town where the creature lives.

This is a crying example of something I have complained about already - your readiness to forget the main point in your immediate enjoyment of human suffering. Do you not know that bombs kill men? Or do you not realise that the patient's death, at this moment, is precisely what we want to avoid?

[Note ' the patient' is what Screwtape calls the human that Wormwoord is trying to corrupt.]

He has escaped the worldly friends with whom you tried to entangle him; he has "fallen in love" with a very Christian woman and is temporarily immune from your attacks on his chastity; and the various methods of corrupting his spiritual life which we have been trying are so far unsuccessful. At the present moment, as the full impact of the war draws nearer and his worldly hopes take a proportionately lower place in his mind, full of his defence work, full of the girl, forced to attend to his neighbours more than he has ever done before and liking it more than he expected, "taken out of himself" as the humans say, and daily increasing in conscious dependence on the Enemy, he will almost certainly be lost to us if he is killed tonight.

[Note: The Enemy is what Screwtape calls God - since the perspective of the book is the inverted one of demons.]

This is so obvious that I am ashamed to write it. I sometimes wonder if you young fiends are not kept out on temptation-duty too long at a time - if you are not in some danger of becoming infected by the sentiments and values of the humans among whom you work. They, of course, do tend to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the greatest good. But that is because we have taught them to do so.

Do not let us be infected by our own propaganda. I know it seems strange that your chief aim at the moment should be the very same thing for which the patient's lover and his mother are praying - namely his bodily safety. But so it is; you should be guarding him like the apple of your eye. If he dies now, you lose him. If he survives the war, there is always hope.

This is vital to understand in our materialist Western world - although the junior apprentice demons may get 'carried away' with delight in human suffering; the demonic strategists have recognised that war, socio-economic collapse, epidemics, starvation and the like are counter-productive.

The infliction of mass extreme human suffering was thoroughly tried out in the early twentieth century with the Russian Revolution, Communism generally and the 1914-18 and 39-45 wars, and one major result was to trigger a massive spiritual-Christian revival - just as Screwtape warned.

Since 1945, a new demonic strategy has been in place (described in detail in '...Proposes a Toast'), Christianity has been in continual decline down to its current level of near-extinction; and the other remaining spiritual perspectives in modernity are either ineffectual, or else thoroughly assimilated to the demonic agenda - of lulling and gradualism: SDI = Subversion, Destruction and - ultimately - Inversion of The Good (Truth, Beauty, Virtue) and all positive values.

It seems pretty clear that The Establishment wants to control every human down to the smallest level. Those few remaining areas of technological 'advance' which are being squeezed out from the mostly-collapsed science and engineering base are focused on population monitoring and therefore control (especially the so-called 'smart' technologies) or on demotivating and inducing despair (eg. the population drugging with mass media and social media; and manyfold over-prescribed medications such as so-called antidepressants, mood stabilisers, statins etc. - which dull and demotivate and create dependence in tens/ hundreds of millions).

This truly vast international effort of population monitoring and control - a strategy extending over many decades - has not been pursued for trivial ephemeral satisfactions: its scope is eternal and its consequences are primary.

It is not being done merely in order that the elites can make (even) more money from the masses (the reverse is the case), nor is it sadistically to make people suffer pain and misery (although that is a side effect they enjoy). It is not even being done to gratify the anti-normal, unloving and perverse sexuality of the elites (although that has been an obvious side effect). No: the motivation and steadiness of purpose across multiple human lifespans betrays the supernatural, not-human - indeed demonic - purpose, origin and nature of the global conspiracy.

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The reason for this long-term and immense effort, is the intention (or hope) that by monitoring and controlling all aspects of life for all humans; people can be fed a set of fundamental, metaphysical assumptions that will (the demons hope) ensure the population actively reject Good and embrace evil.

So the goal, in simple terms, is to maximise the harvest of souls for 'Hell' - on the understanding that Hell is a self-chosen state - the consequence a deliberate decision to reject the offer and gift of salvation and Heaven. Heaven is the consequence of repentance - which means acknowledgement of the reality and Goodness of God's creation. The Establishment aim to frame reality so that people will do this, make this rejection of salvation, en masse.

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When The Establishment have the fullest control of the human environment, they can monopolistically enforce the 'materialist' basic assumptions which lead to rejection of salvation; assumptions such as that there is no god, no 'free will', no higher consciousness, no real communication; that life is a meaningless and purposeless accident of physics, chemistry and biology; that there is no eternal soul, that there is no reality beyond that of the five senses, that humans are ultimately alone, human death is total extinction of individuality - and so on...

For a person induced to accept these metaphysical assumptions, which are essentially rejections of natural spontaneous human beliefs, the only thing to do is pass the brief time before death - presumably to avoid suffering and try to do things that are pleasant and exciting... or at least distracting.

And, more than that, people need to be made to feel that the natural and spontaneous, the hope-full and purposive, are actually evil.

It is not enough to merely reject true values - there must be actual value inversion if people are actively to reject Heaven.

People need to be made to feel that repentance is not just nonsense - but wicked nonsense. People need to be made Proud of their sins... made to feel that their sins are what define them, that their Pride in sin makes them better than the 'conventionlly good' people.

Simply to state this is to recognise how normal and mainstream and officially prompted and enforced has become value inversion.

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From this inverted metaphysical perspective (which appears to be normal and normative in The West), humans will voluntarily reject salvation and will choose damnation - because they will disbelieve even the possibility of anything better than psychological subsistence, and because they will actually want damnation, and will feel pride in having chosen it. Such Men will despise the choosers of salvation as timid, conventional, boring, dumb, killjoy, straight, hypocritical, sanctimonious, bourgeois, pale-male, repressed, goody-two-shoes, puritanical... and all the rest of it. For the choosers of Hell, as for demons - Evil is the new Good: the self-damned feel themselves to be not just fun-loving, life-embracing, realists - but also better people than the Saints.

(Just look around at the global leadership class - this is exactly their state of being.)

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In sum, the evil global conspiracy works by material means, by monitoring and controlling our material lives; and works to build-in the philosophy of materialism which has life as ephemeral and a matter of evanescent feelings - but nonetheless its ultimate goals are spiritual and eternal.

The materialism is just a means to the end of damnation; the focus on the ephemeral is a means to the eternity of damnation.

If material life becomes thoroughly controlled by evil, and Men can be induced to believe that the material is the only thing that is really-real, then we will have materialism both outside us and inside  of us, therefore dictating what we are; and the success of the evil agenda is all-but guaranteed.

Why has The Establishment*, for half a century full-on, favoured replacing men with women leaders?

Obviously, we can be sure that the real reason has nothing whatsoever to do with benefiting women! While the occasional woman (a tiny minority) may be happier and more fulfilled as a 'leader', the mass of women are systematically immiserated by becoming manipulated pawns, and their lives wasted.

You doubt this assertion? Look At Their Eyes! (...The windows of the soul - the entrenched misery, desperation.)

But why? The answer is simple. The Global Conspiracy of Purposive Evil are behind official feminism - as they are behind all mainstream ideas of recent decades - and what they want is control of the world population - and therefore they want the most controllable personnel: and women are more controllable than men.

Think about it: Men and women are psychologically different, so one or the other is going to be more controllable than the other, on average - and that would be women.

More exactly, women are more inclined to want to control themselves and each other.

The Establishment want control, but ideally they do not want to impose control - they want people to choose to be controlled to the extent that they deny being controlled, so much have they internalised their situation. To know one is being controlled is to invite resistance and reaction. But if the person regards the state of being controlled as their own choice and necessary and for their own well-being - well, that person is self-damned and actively resistant to repentance and liberation.

The modern, preferred, kind of control is via invisible and impersonal media and mechanisms - via the likes of perceived peer pressure, fashion and social approval/ sanctions. Women are much more manipulate-able by these indirect mechanisms than are men; because they are more sensitive to them and voluntarily collude in imposing them.

Women constitute the great majority of mass media and social media addicts (see who are glued to their 'smart'-phones as they walk along busy streets); and can be induced to do almost anything to themselves and each other! - Up to and including gross and permanent uglifying mutilations such as genital surgery, foot binding, plastic surgery and tattooing - as well as the more normal and obvious rotating absurdities of hair, makeup and clothing fashions.

(Women will not only do these things to themselves and each other, but will believe and argue that it is both necessary and good to do them.)

The relative manipulability of women is also seen in terms of the fact that in all developed countries women have chosen sub-fertility and the extinction of their tribes in order to pursue 'leadership' goals - such that the representative modern woman chooses (and fights!) to become a middle manager drone embedded n a bureaucracy, instead of a wife and mother running a home - and this is the other side of the coin of mainstream 'official feminism' focused upon women as favoured leaders.

In sum, from the perspective of a global ultra-elite with an evil agenda for the destruction of values, and the strategy of seeking this via control; it is easy to understand why they should want women as leaders rather than men - and why this agenda should have been consistently, and increasingly, pushed for so many decades, across the full spectrum of mass media, government and official propaganda, via the arts and charities, and through the systems of law, education, mainstream so-called-Christianity, and all other powerful social influences.


*Note: For those new to this blog, I should make clear that I regard the ultimate core-controllers of The Establishment to be demons - literally those supernatural personages of purposive evil as described in the New Testament and familiar to modern people via CS Lewis's The Screwtape Letters. These immortal spirits provide the long-term strategy and direction which can be perceived in history - but the great mass of their servants, serfs and slaves are men and women.

The matter of human creativity - and whether it is 'a good thing' has profound implications for religious thinking, including Christianity.

There is a divide in religious thinking concerning the extent to which Men can or should participate in creation.

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At one - common among major religions - extreme; creation is a 'finished work', and Men cannot make any substantive difference to that fact. Reality is already complete, static, perfect. All creation is/ was a matter of god or the gods.

In such a world, Man's role in life is passive - he should (for example) obey the rules of creation, should worship the creator, should be grateful for having been created etc. But Man as a species, and each Man as an individual, does not have any essential - nor even important - role in creation.

Man may create something to god's glory - but it doesn't really matter either way; because, with respect to creation, Man is utterly dispensable: a mere recipient.

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If a value is accorded to Man's creative work, then matters become much more complex: indeed an utterly different kind of reality (and nature of god) is implied: that is how important the concept of creativity is to religion!

A view assigns to Man a destiny as sub-creator. It is intended/ desired, supposed that Man will be a creator himself (and from-himself - not merely as a conduit for divine action) within the already-existing context of creation. So - there is creation as it exists when the Man begins work, and there is potentially a larger and more complex reality which exists as a consequence of that Man's work - and this later state is conceived to be better than the former. It is each Man's job potentially to contribute to that better future.

By including creation among Man's roles, an element of real Time has been introduced - along with an element of Evolution. Reality is being seen as not a finished static thing, but as a dynamic process, perpetually unfolding as creation proceeds.

This implies that reality is not and never has been perfect - and probably never can be; which idea  strikes at the heart of some conceptualisations of the nature of god (in terms of his completeness, perfections and infinites). Because a god that asks for Man's 'help' in creation is a very different kind of god than one who creates everything in eternal perfection and coherence - and who requires of Man only that he praise the creation and live in harmony with it.

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This may be the root of that clash between the most-creative Men and religion - their deep-seated conviction that Man is not superfluous and that each Man potentially has something of specific and reality-changing value to contribute; the demand that Man has something substantive to do in his life. (In contrast with the perceived inadequacy of an eternity of passive, superfluous worship, obedience and gratitude.)

Naturally, this attitude is regarded as pride-driven by those who deny the need or possibility of subcreation, and may indeed be such - but whether it is necessarily pride-driven, depends on one's concept of creation and the possibility (or not) of genuine subcreation.

A philosophy of life which takes seriously the role of Man as subcreator is one which necessarily  extends to considering man as co-creator - because any real subcreation becomes a part of created reality; so any Man who subcreates makes some contribution to the totality of creation and is therefore co-creator with god (albeit within the context of god's original and primary creation; and himself being created and using created materials).

This affects our understanding of the nature of God; because a god who made us to be subcreators and then co-creators is a god who apparently sees us as potential 'friends' rather than 'subjects' - on-a-level of sorts, a god who seems to want us to have an increasingly-equal relationship with him.

And this is a long way from the utterly remote, all knowing/ all powerful god of some religious conceptions: and the fact that such gods always seem to regard active subcreation by Men as an activity always unnecessary, and usually harmful. 

It is so difficult to stick to the subject - so easy to drift off the point: The Point is what is this world for in relation to me, my life, everybody else and their lives - and everything that is. Unless each of us has formed some answer to this question, then sooner or later - and it practise sooner rather than later - you will miss the point badly, and start talking about something else altogether.

Then there is the matter of how it works. Suppose you have decided what life is about in some ultimate sense... Then how does it work specifically? Supposing that you have some idea about spreading the word, changing people's attitudes and improving their behaviour - persuading them to stop doing this or that... Then you need to have an idea of how the world works in order to decide how this might be done: what could be effective, and what ineffective. 

Let's get specific. I happen to believe the Western world in in an extremely bad state of self-imposed alienation, nihilism, self-hatred and covert suicidality. The context is that this world was made by creators who are our divine parents, we chose to be born and were placed in the kind of situation that best suits our needs; and that everybody's main purpose is to incarnate and die (this applies to all humans who have ever lived, including those who died before being born) - and also for some people - and to varying degrees and in various ways - to gain experiences we need to advance spiritually towards divinity. 

So - what next? There is an absolutely colossal world of lies and deception and evil - which has led and continues to lead masses of people to various forms of spiritual disaster, using a vast array of mass media, arts, official and unofficial communication channels - and there is me.

But are these monopolised communication channels the only possible way of communicating - do I actually believe that? Of do I believe in a multitude of other ways and forms of, and reasons for, communicating... Well I believe that there are a multitude of ways, some imperceptible.  I believe, for example, in telepathy communications via dreams, that God and angels can reveal knowledge directly into our minds...

Beyond this, I believe that the natural, spontaneous, underlying basis of reality is a state of total communication and minimal differentiation - that things began as a kind of sea of consciousness, with separate elements as vestigial seeds of potential but hardly-actual awareness.

What this implies is that the problem of my communicating the truth as a minority of one in a world of lies is actually a non-problem; because communication happens, it cannot not happen - everything I do, including everything I think, is very generally available, and makes a difference.

See how it works? Before I have thought this through, I felt as if the world was against me, and I had no chance against the world. But by refocusing on clarifying and reasoning-from my primary assumptions, I recognise that this was a false conclusion.

And as a result I feel greatly energised and motivated to continue to do my best, at the highest level. Such is the power of framing.

Owen Barfield claimed not to be very clear about the nature of that Final Participation which he saw as the destiny of human evolution of consciousness.

(Original Participation is that immersive and unselfconscious living in-the-world of hunter-gatherers and similar tribal peoples, and modern man is detached from the world, and even his own thoughts, in the Consciousness Soul).

But I think that sufficient clarity can be arrived at by considering the phases of human love through human life as an analogy (or rather, as more than an analogy - since the one is an example of the other).

Infant and young childhood love is an Original Participation; immersive and undifferentiated - the child is hardly aware of himself as distinct from his parents and family; his experience of the world is of a world alive and sentient because he is himself a part of everything he perceives. Love is everywhere (in an ideal childhood) like a sea in which everything is immersed, or like a gas in which each individual thing is merely a slight concentration of the element. We know everything, but we hardly know our-selves, and everything blurs into everything else.

With adolescence comes self-consciousness, which intensifies until the Self experiences itself as detached from the world. Indeed the Self experiences most mental activity as detached from itself - our Selves are cut-off from all experience, looking out upon the world, such that they world seems uncertain and unreal (how do we know that it is real), and indeed the Self is also experienced as perhaps unreal - since it changes, and can only rely upon itself for validation.

The point of Consciousness soul is 'freedom' in the sense of agency: to be free we need to be able to live from our-Selves (our true Selves). The consciousness soul is the condensation and concentration of the self, such that we can work from it. This is, indeed, a divine state of being - and that is what this phase is necessary to human spiritual progression.

To evolve towards a fully divine state of being, we must pass-through the Consciousness Soul. But it is meant to be a transitional phase, a short-lived phase - a phase we merely touch upon in passing...

This Consciousness Soul state of consciousness is also the state of modern culture. Modern culture is stuck, arrested, in stasis in the consciousness Soul - so intensely subjective that subjectivity itself is destroyed - experiencing the external world only via perceptions and instruments, and unsure about the reliability of these senses and mechanisms... THE problem being epistemological - how do I know if I really know? No answer forthcoming (because the assumption is of a gulf between the self and the world) and Modern Man is stuck in Consciousness Soul - held, trapped, imprisoned by the assumptions of modern culture.

Modern Man is stuck in Consciousness Soul - and that was not, and is not, meant to be - the CS is meant to be just a phase (albeit a necessary phase) on the way to Final Participation. Being stuck in the Consciousness Soul is a precise analogy to being stuck in adolescence, unable to grow-up, paralysed in that state of alienation, in which uncertainty erodes all potential solutions - and unable to move on.

Final Participation is like the ideal of spouse - indeed married love is a type of Final Participation.

In married love at its highest, each individual retains the full self-consciousness of the Consciousness Soul, but has a certainty of contact with another, distinct, self-conscious human being. There is no problem of communication, indeed there is a certainty of communication. Each party is not trapped in the nutshell of their own skulls but is able to share, participate in the life of the other, but with full self-integrity and self-awareness.

On the one hand individuality is assumed and valued, and is part of the essence of married love; on the other hand there is no problem of communication between these individuals - because the universal immersive state of Original Participation still is real and exists as much as it ever did. We are still part of each other and of everything - but with Final Participation our individuality, our Self, has been clarified, strengthened... has become a free, autonomous agent.

Final Participation is Original Participation plus the Consciousness Soul - it is the sea of infant family love, plus the individual island of adolescent self-awareness. 

There is no desire among loving spouses either for a return to the detachment of the Consciousness Soul (the state before love) or to return to the immersive and undifferentiated love of childhood family. They have the best of both worlds. The differentness and individuality and self-awareness of the other is essential, and so is the given background of universal communication.

In conclusion, when married love works as it is meant to, then it is a species of Final Participation - which is to say a state beyond Consciousness Soul, a moving-forwards and not a regression (or atavism).

Culturally, human destiny is to have an analogous relationship to ideal married love, but inclusive of all reality - and that is what Barfield meant by Final Participation.

If there is a spiritual awakening happening in England, Western Europe or the West generally; if awakening is beginning to happen - or if we are each approaching a moment of choice about our specific (and the general) spiritual future...

If such a thing happens then how could it be detectable - given the private nature of such things?

I think there will be more-or-less inevitable behavioural hence measurable consequences of any serious spiritual awakening.

For example, if many people begin to awaken to a broader and higher form of consciousness, to a living and sentient reality, then I think there would have to be changes...

For example, more attention paid to introspection, to innate motivation, to imagination; a movement towards 'heart' and intuition based living (and therefore less mind or instinct, less head- or gut/ gonad- driven behaviour)...

And linked with this, people would want to stop wasting their time - for example, cut back on engaging with the mass media, cut back on watching and reading trivial and harmful rubbish and lies; cut back on expensive and decadent stuff done for status - buy fewer and cheaper possessions; reduce entertainments, holidays, cosmetics and self-mutilations; stop show-off parties; in general, they'd want to stop wasting money on buying and doing things done just because 'the system' wants people to do them...

And perhaps especially people would begin stopping doing harmful things, things that make things worse - stopping things that promote corruption, destroy Good; they might stop lying, stop praising and working to promote lies and ugliness and the inversion of values...

This kind of thing should be detectable - detectable as changes in trends, in averages and even more so in the behaviour of the awakening sector and spread of change from these sectors.

There might be detectable economic changes, measured inevitably as economic shrinkage, decline and damage (since most of the economy is about bad things, harmful things); detectable in changes of net work efficiency and effectiveness (given that most work is overall harmful); and changes in media usage and engagement (since that is the major waste of time, and the major self-harming use of energy).

Such things would, no doubt, be 'explained' as due to other causes - since their real cause would be imperceptible and immeasurable; plus of course the desire of 'the system' would be to hide any spiritual cause.

Furthermore, such positive trends (if they were strong) would be interpreted and spun as 'bad' - so that people stopping doing bad things, stopping wasting their time and expending great effort on making things worse... people making such changes en masse would for sure be interpreted as economic collapse, productivity collapse, inefficiency, impaired consumer 'demand', deflation, sales reductions and so on and so forth.

Interesting!
 

People get confused about the nature, and even the existence, of evil - but if one recognises the reality of Good, then evil is straightforward: evil is the strategic destruction of Good.

(Good may itself be operationally-defined as Truth, Beauty and Virtue in Unity - TBV in U - with TB&V being regarded as real and objective values.)

Strategic means purposive, deliberate; that evil works over time with the objective of destroying Good.

(Note: It is not necessary that evil is self-aware that it is aiming to destroy Good - indeed most evil is done by the self-deceived; dupes and servants of only a small - but necessary - minority who know what is Good and know that they are aiming to destroy it.)

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But destruction of good can be done in different ways, and at different extremes. So actual destruction of the Good is a middle term in a spectrum. That spectrum is Subversion, Destruction and Inversion - or SDI.

Think of marriage, as an example of Virtue - a Good institution. Evil first works by subversion of marriage - for example by propaganda (including works of art - novels, dramas, movies...) focused on the miseries and injustices of bad marriages, constraints of marriage, the joys and excitements of un-married and extra-marital relationships etc.; and by laws for 'no fault', quick, sanction-free divorce to encourage the breakdown of marriages. Marriage is weakened by subversion, to the point that strong marriage becomes statsitically rare and the 'normal' or average marriage is seen as a feeble, evanescent, faddish kind of thing.

At a greater extremity; evil may try to destroy the institution of marriage, to eliminate it altogether. This could be done incrementally, by making it acceptable, then fashionable, then positively valued to cohabit without marriage - and removing any social differences between cohabitation and marriage. It could be done by discouraging marriage through taxation, and unjust arbitration - favouring spouses who are the most selfish and short-termist etc. At the ultimate, marriage could be abolished.

Inversion, however, is actually a greater extremity of evil than destruction. This is important to understand - because it is a fundamental insight into the nature and motivation of evil without which it may be difficult to detect and to resist. The greatest extremity of evil is to invert the meaning while having people assume that nothing important has been changed.

So, beyond the evil of destroying marriage is the greater evil of inverting the nature, content, meaning and purpose of marriage, while maintaining that what results is real marriage. Inversion of marriage is a greater triumph and provides a greater satisfaction to evil than would the deletion of marriage from human society.

Or consider the virtue of Beauty as a different type of Good, from the perspective of SDI. Evil might subvert beauty - for example by inducing people to judge the quality of art in accordance with the sex, class or race of its producer, or the nature of the society which produced the work. Or beautiful art may be attacked and destroyed, or looted - as has happened in various times and places under the excuse of religious iconoclasm. But at the extreme is inversion of Beauty - especially ugliness praised for its beauty: examples include praise, prestige and professional prizes given to objectively-ugly art, architecture, novels, music and poetry (this is, of course, standard mainstream practise).

If Truth is the focus, as in science, the Inversion has been almost-completed. The social structure of science (funding, personnel, buildings, machines...) has been vastly expanded; but inside this structure the value of Truth has been removed and replaced. Science is now almost-wholly a generic managerial bureaucracy. The Truth has been hollowed-out and replaced by values such as career, public relations, money, and political values. Science has been inverted, yet people have not noticed - and still praise and support science as if it had something to do with the Truth.

*

My main point here is that inversion of Good is a greater evil than destruction of Good.

To have the Good denigrated as evil, to have evil persons and institutions lauded as exemplars of Good - such is the ultimate triumph of evil; and such is quite normal and usual in modern society.

The reason why inversion is a greater evil than destruction is that the war between Good and evil takes place in the spiritual realm; and the ultimate aim of evil is to create a situation where people - that is human souls, the true inner self - actively choose to reject the Good because it is Good, and instead actively to choose evil as their personal Good.

And for this purpose, inversion is far more effective than destruction.

The fact is insufficiently appreciated, hence the suggestion of an SDI abbreviation for the spectrum of evil from Subversion to Destruction to Inversion, as a way of remembering it.


Note: Probably the greatest and most crucial victim of SDI has been sexual identity - sexuality itself: man and woman as the differentiated, complementary, binary-basis of the eternal divine human soul. As an exercise, I leave the reader to work-out just how sex has been subverted, destroyed and inverted for apparently a majority of the Western peoples. This must surely count as the most remarkable and improbable - therefore deadly - triumph of evil over fundamental values thus far in recorded history.

Just then a high, mournful sound broke in upon Stephen's dream – a slow, sad song in an unknown language and Stephen understood without ever actually waking that the gentleman with the thistle-down hair was singing.

It may be laid down as a general rule that if a man begins to sing, no one will take any notice of his song except his fellow human beings. This is true even if his song is surpassingly beautiful.

Other men may be in raptures at his skill, but the rest of creation is, by and large, unmoved. Perhaps a cat or a dog may look at him; his horse, if it is an exceptionally intelligent beast, may pause in cropping the grass, but that is the extent of it.

But when the fairy sang, the whole world listened to him.

Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy's song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.

Stephen began to dream again. This time he dreamt that hills walked and the sky wept. Trees came and spoke to him and told him their secrets and also whether or not he might regard them as friends or enemies. Important destinies were hidden inside pebbles and crumpled leaves.

He dreamt that everything in the world – stones and rivers, leaves and fire – had a purpose which it was determined to carry out with the utmost rigour, but he also understood that it was possible sometimes to persuade things to a different purpose.

From Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a novel by Susanna Clarke (2004)

An early post in this blog described my childhood love of the idea of Robin Hood and his Merry Men, contrasted with much less greater enthusiasm for King Arthur and Round Table:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/robin-hood-what-is-appeal.html

Indeed, although I have written a fair bit about the Arthurian legends over the years, I am not really much interested by the King or his knights, but mostly by Merlin. The appeal of Robin has also faded - I think a lot of it was related to the boyhood ideal of a gang or club; especially one in which each person has a special ability and role.

For this reason I disliked the beautiful and feminine Maid Marian - My basic idea was that girls were fine, but not in a gang - unless they were tomboys.

In fact my best friend aged about 7-9 was a tomboy - not from shortage of available boys, but because I liked her best. The ultimate accolade was that she was 'as good as a boy' - she looked somewhat like a boy (short hair), could climb trees, run fast, and when playing football she was usually 'picked' as one of the earliest choices.

Anyway, the appeal of Robin Hood is simple enough - especially on a beautiful summer's day like today, when The Greenwood is clearly the place to be...

I am trying to escape from physics meatphors in my fundamental understanding of things (also called metaphysics - get it? meta-physics!). But physics metaphors are everywhere in writings on spirituality, consciousness and Christianity.

Consciousness is described as having lower and higher frequencies, or vibrational levels. Classical Christian metaphysics is very physicsy, as I have previously described - when people think of Love they often think of a kind of force-field.

It is terribly difficult to get away from this impersonal, non-living based ways of talking about fundamental things. Another example, when we imagine the beginnings of everything, we tend to see it as a 'big bang' or a massive fusion/ explosion/ condensation etc.

When we think of a religious revival, we may suppose the Holy Ghost (nowadays more often named the Holy Spirit which again is more physicsy) streaming through the earth and the people on it like cosmic rays, or maybe wind.

No wonder that 'Eastern' religions seem more plausible to intellectual Westerners, and in their most abstract forms - because these envisage ultimate reality in physics-like terms, as forces, energies, balance, dynamics - and the like. 

Yet I think that deep down the way things work is personal - not physical. That Christian Love is a personal thing, rather than a physical force - or rather than the physical force conception is merely an abstract model of what is truly personal; and indeed that physics itself is a simplified abstraction of complex personal attributes.

We recur to physics because it is grossly simplified, to the point where we feel we can use the concepts as tools, means to an end - but on the other hand we don't deeply understand physics concepts, because they are alien.

Therefore, I do try not to regard physics as descriptive of underlying reality but only as a radically-incomplete half-way-house kind of explanation - until I can re-frame my understanding at the highest level - which is persons, their character, their motivations.

I shall try to review this book without spoilers - by focusing upon its form and the impression it made upon me, rather than the specific content.

Overall, I would say that the book is OK; but unimpressive and underwhelming - I was never at any point grabbed by it, and had to push myself to continue reading.

(This was not because I am unfamiliar with reading plays in script form - in contrast I have read hundreds of modern plays, for my own pleasure or interest - e.g. nearly all of the canonical plays of the British theatre from Shakespeare's time, including all of GB Shaw, and most of the mainstream published British plays from about 1945-80.)

Like most popular theatre throughout history, the script for Cursed Child is at the level of farce and melodrama; and did not at any point rise to comedy or tragedy. The prose is merely functional (considerably below the quality of the Harry Potter novels), and never poetic - and it is only by poetic qualities to its language that a play (qua play) can rise above farce/ melodrama.

Aside, the vast majority of plays achieve their higher or deeper qualities by factors of the production rather than by their words - i.e. the special qualities of acting and stagecraft (plus topicality and novelty) - or by the working of music, in the case of musicals and operas.

In sum, the most impressive factors are usaully extraneous to the writing. and confined to the live performance situation and thus do not long survive -- Which is why the permanent literary canon of plays is so slender compared with that of poems or novels; and also compared with the vast number of plays that are - for a while - a popular or critical success.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/drama-is-nearly-all-ephemeral.html

The best way to approach reading The Cursed Child is to think of it as a dramatised Soap about Harry Potter et al; or as a canonical Fan Fiction - because its focus, scope and nature is most like FanFic. I mean by this than FanFic is mostly about 'shipping' or relation-ships, and takes a strategy of getting the characters and making them a different age, or putting them into a different setting, or taking minor characters and making them protagonists - which is what Cursed Child does.

The Soap aspects are dominant because Cursed Child is utterly without the underpinning spiritual, indeed religious, aspects that raise the Harry Potter novels to the level of works of a work of genius.

The highest point to which Cursed Child rises, is the level of interpersonal relationships considered from a 'utilitarian' ethical perspective - of that being best which makes the  most people happiest for most of the time, and especially that which minimises suffering. From this angle; there are several heart-warming moments - as well as several more unconvincing, contrived and clunky male-male interactions.

The 'moral' of the two play cycle (as it came-through to me) is superficial and implausible: that evil is caused by childhood loneliness. In other words, the plays have a very secular, modern 'psychodynamic' kind of ethic (whereas the moral of the HP novels was very traditional - that the most important virtues are Love and Courage; and their importance goes beyond mortal life).

So - should you read it? That depends.

If, like me, you found the Harry Potter novels to be a deep experience, then probably better not to read it; because this book may tend retrospectively to trivialise and 'poison' some of the best aspects of the novels (in  the way that a movie of a book more often does).

If, on the other hand, you regard the Potter novels as mainly about human relationships and intricate plotting, then the plays would probably be of interest.

And if you are a Potter FanFic writer or aficionado, then you will probably be this play's ideal audience. 

Serious Christianity has been all-but destroyed in the lives of people in Western Europe, and the US seems not far behind. But it would be hard, from here, to have a Christan revival, because the whole way of thinking of modern people has been so-narrowed that Christianity is now though-of like everything else.

Before Christianity could revive (in a meaningful sense, and not simply as part of a mainstream  secular-Leftish lifestyle) Western man must recover his ability to think spiritually, at a higher - or more accurately broader - level of consciousness: to think from the heart.

I mean that for most people, people who think in the normal, mainstream, modern Western way - which probably increases with each generation, reaching a peak in the current youth of social/ mass media addicts - their consciousness is materialistic, unspiritual, literalistic - and therefore cannot think about Christianity without reducing its content to the same form as bureaucracy, laws, regulations, scientific hypotheses, engineering blueprints... Or, on the other side of modern life, as ideology, brainwashing, advertising, hype, spin, propaganda, disinformation.

Typical modern Man is an utterly unspiritual being - his though has been narrowed to the theme of manipulation. He sees life as manipulation, and his condition as being-manipulated; and his hope rests on increased capability of self-manipulation.

The ideal condition of Modern Man is something along the line of having maximum control of one's own inputs - especially mass media and social inputs, but also mind and body-shaping receptions of inputs (e.g. by drugs, genetic modification, technological surfacing - cosmetics, plastic surgery etc. - and technological implants) - and therefore control of one's own 'self'.

In practise this means that the false self (which is malleable and purposively constructed by modern society under demonic influence) will eventually eliminate all activity-of and awareness-of the true self (which is divine in origin, and eternal). Modern Man is therefore consciously aiming at his own extinction - his ideal is to be... someone else, some-thing else. To live inside an artificial and constructed technological shell - and for that which lives within the shell to be equally artificial and constructed.

[Scenario: A typical modern Western youth - plugged-into  social media or the internet when not at work; lesiure consisting of intoxication of psychodramatic relationships... becomes A Christian. Life retains its form, but with a different content: different apps on the mobile phone, different websites to browse, perhaps a different social group and different kinds of exciting leisure activity to 'share' on social media. But what has really changed? Unless that needs more than content: needs time away from external controlling influences; needs to begin to live from himself or herself; needs to experience a wider range of 'inputs' - utterly unfamiliar to the secualr mind; needs to think in a different way and and from a different source.]

To escape from this willed-fate of self-manipulation for self-gratification, the 'content' of Christianity will not suffice, because all possible content is assimilated to the materialist way of thinking. Before there can be any meaningful revival of religious thinking there must first be a broadening of human consciousness - so that we recognise, take-seriously, and finally regard as potentially-valid that which lies beyond the current form and content of mainstream culture.

In sum, modern Western public discourse - and increasingly also private discourse - is a head and gut kind of think - bureaucratic rationalism, scientific materialism, legalism etc on one side,; with the self subordinated to the system - and on the other side the instinctive world of urges, impulses, desires - especially sexuality... given an absolute personal primacy of self-expression; with the world subordinated to the individual will.

What is required is an opening-out to the discourse of the heart, of intuition, of discernment; of a world beyond the five senses and the measurable and detectable-by-technology - and equally a world beyond the 'biological' instincts.

This is the expansion of consciousness we need - and I mean need: it is a necessity if we are to avoid the fate of damnation. Because a Christianity confined to the allowed-scope, the perceptual field, of modern Western culture is not a saving faith - it is merely a mainstream institution and a mainstream lifestyle.

As nearly-always, for beneficial change we need two things, not one - and they must follow fast the one upon the other or else secualr modernity will heal-over and leave one or another, incomplete and pretty-much-useless, half-way house of either lifestyle Christianity (new content but maainstream form) or New Age spirituality (new form but mainstream content).

Christianity and Consciousness both - Content with Form - new things to think and a new way of thinking.
 

There is a fair degree of consensus among thinking spiritual and (Mere) Christian people that the forces of evil have by-now won the culture war, and now control human perceptions of reality in the realm of 'the five senses' (mainly vision and hearing).

In other words, that the great bulk of audio-visual inputs for most Western people, day by day, is more or less as wished by the forces of purposive evil.

But what relationship does this have to the spiritual realm? In principle, Men remain free to accept salvation - so why go to all the bother of incrementally (over decades) taking-over culture and creating a delusional world of lies and inversion?

The answer is that the strategy is two-pronged - and involves two simultaneous brainwashings.

One is to take over culture and, by the mass media, to immerse people in it, and addict them to it, so they are continually subjected to cultural brainwashing (remembering that this is only partly a matter of content because the form of the mas media - the medium itself - is even more important than its specific content).

The other, equally important, brainwashing is to indoctrinate people into thinking that the realm of public perception is the only valid source of knowledge.

Because if people still retained their self-directed and intuitive forms of thought - if they were able to intuit knowledge directly for themselves, and regarded the real world as extending beyond the realm  of the five senses (including the abstract but public realm of the measurements of scientific instruments, machines, statistics etc) - then clearly Men could not be led into self-damnation merely by controlling the world of culture.

Intuitive Man is able to see-through culture, and to know reality directly - and this would represent an insuperable barrier for creating and sustaining a world of inverted delusion.

So, the ideology of materialism, 'Enlightenment' rationalism, scientism, positivism (it has had various names) had to become mainstream, normal, and assumed before cultural indoctrination could have a direct effect on human spirituality. 

And this has happened! The two prongs have had the desired effect - modern Western Man lives inside the artificial world of materialist culture, and also believes that only this materialist culture is real and true.

The loop has been closed.

But the way out from the loop is clear - because while it is hard to overturn a vast system of mass media and official lies and inversions - it is nothing like so difficult for any individual person to reject the modern metaphysics of materialism, and to assume instead the validity of their own intuition as a source of knowledge.

And it many people do this, and share the perspective and amplify it - then that would be IT for the vast system of lies and inversions.

Wisdom - Bill Arkle, August 1976

Wisdom has to start with our ordinary understanding of the term 'wisdom' which we know is a relative term, in the same way as we know the term 'beauty' is a relative term - relative to the attitude and the perception, as it were, within the eye of the beholder. And so wisdom also is relative to the perception and the eye of the beholder of actions and responses which are measured in terms of being more wise or less wise. But, behind the ordinary terminology of wisdom, we may suppose that there is a deep absolute form of wisdom which is in line with, and in tune with, the absolute level of our being and the absolute creative intention behind the manifestation of the universes at all their levels, from the most ethereal level, which we call the heavenly levels, down through the more and more dense levels to the most dense and concrete, which we call the earthly levels.

My understanding of this absolute form of wisdom depends on an ability I believe we have to resonate with the deep heart of our being into the deep heart of the Creator's being and feel, with that very deep sense of in-feeling, how the Creator felt towards creation before it began. In other words one can learn to feel what it was that the Creator was longing for, aspiring to, or simply desiring, from the great work and the great effort that he has engaged in in what is known to us as creation. Now, if we can feel with all our deepest understanding, our deepest intelligence and our deepest perception, what it was that the Creator looked for, above all else, in creation, then, and only then, shall we be close to the absolute point of wisdom which I believe is in the absolute point of deepest desire in the heart of the Creator's being.

As I myself attempt to do this, I come away with the understanding that the greatest longing that was in the Creator's heart before creation, and which brought about creation and brought into existence the individual beings, who each of us is in the Creator's eyes and to one another, was the desire to have real individual friends, in the deepest possible meaning of that word. Friends to share his understanding, his joy and his wisdom within the context of real friendship, which creates a vital relationship between each friend and the other friend, from which ever-renewing possibilities and responses can grow. My feeling is that the Creator first of all wished to bring into existence real and individual children, whose nature was based on a part of his own divine nature, but the characteristics of which were to be developed by each of those individual children as they grew up in the universes, or the universities, of his creation. They would develop in the nature of their own individual spirits, so that each of those children would become a unique individual child and then, hopefully, would become more than a child - would wish to grow into a mature condition which was not as a child to the Creator, but was as an individual being to the Creator. Thus all these beings could each have creative relationships of friendship and gladness with one another and with the Creator. Not with the Creator as a special 'God' individual, who was not approachable as other friends are approachable, but He himself wanted to be able to befriend us and have a creative friendship with us as we befriend one another and have a creative friendship with one another.

In the heart of the Creator's being we find all manner of wonderful things; but we find, above all, great love, great affection, great beauty, great sweetness, great gentleness and great strength. We find all the great qualities, such as courage and devotion, which to us become deeply valuable properties of our most valuable relationship. Now, the nature of wisdom as we will try to define it, is something other than the nature of love.


We can understand that the Creator's nature is, as it were, all love, but wisdom is the application of that love to the purposeful aspiration or desire which emanates from that love which, in the case we are talking about, was to bring into existence real individual children who have unique characteristics of their own and who were truly separate and autonomous beings. These would learn to live and grow amongst one another according to the specieshood of the divine nature, but within that specieshood, would develop the ability to express their own unique characteristics and express the initiative and spiritedness which emanates from any healthy spiritual being. Thus they would be able, as they gained more strength, to stand apart and upon their own feet, in a metaphorical sense, in order that each of these individuals could be a unique polarity to which other individuals could relate, and between which living polarities, new, ever growing, vortices of creative potentiality would develop.

Now wisdom, as I would understand it, is the appreciation of the value that comes out of the effort, and the means to bring about this great desire, as the means become available in terms of this created universe at all its levels. We understand that, after the universe was created and prepared, the spirits, the particles of the Creator's being, which were individual units of his own being nature, were sown into this universe as pupils are placed in a university. In it they work from the lowest level of the university up to the highest level of the university and, eventually, learn to appreciate the nature and value of the university as a whole, from the highest level to the lowest level. Wisdom begins by understanding that these potential children cannot become real, in any sense of that word, if they are prestructured or pre-programmed in such a way that their individuality and their sense of selfhood cannot be properly developed and appreciated by them.

If the Creator in any way subverts the processes which maintain the individual autonomy of each of these children as they grow and mature, then the Creator is allowing the desire and longing to slip away from the possibility that the universe contains for the bringing about of that great longing. So, from the beginning, the Creator had to work with wisdom to create processes which would allow for the potentiality of each of these Divine particles, who were individual children in a potential condition, gradually to become aware of the structure of values and relationships that it was living in with regard to nature and to other individual beings. And this had to be brought about in such a way that at no time was the individual overawed or over-dominated by the too great nearness or presence of the Creator's own personality. For, if that occurred, then the dominance of the Creator's personality would stamp itself completely upon the individuality of the individual child and prevent that individuality flourishing in its fullness; which it must do if it is to carry any real value as a real child in its own right.

So we can understand that, from the beginning, a great wisdom was needed which understood that, although the Creator was longing that each of his children should understand the value of, and the nature of, each of the Divine qualities, these children could not have an objective understanding of divine qualities if they were not able to experience them in a condition which would allow for the opposites of those qualities to be experienced at the same time. Thus to enter into the judgement of the value of the qualities which each of them must learn to apply for themselves. It would have been very beautiful and very happy for us all to have been born into a perfect and heavenly environment, perhaps close to the person and, shall we call it, the home of our Divine Creator, but this would not have produced in us the qualities which the Creator's heart most longed for; which was a longing for the quality of unique individuality which each of us longs for in a friend.

A friend is one who can stand apart from us in strength and values us in freedom as we would value them in strength and freedom. We value our friends not so much in terms of their cleverness or their special abilities, but for their profound uniqueness of characteristics which they exhibit towards us as completely separate autonomous individuals.

Now wisdom has to learn to discriminate between the lower forms of love and affection and the higher forms of love and affection. The lower forms of love are not true forms of love at all, but are the desire and the need for one another to supply the gratifications which are necessary to the outer forms of our being nature and the appetites which go along with the outer forms of our being nature. The deeper and real forms of love and affection are not based on the desire to use individuals as a source of gratification of needs, but rather we are very deeply glad about the existence of the other individual in an entirely undemanding way. The basis of the friendship is nothing other than the deep and instinctive recognition of the divine individuality in that other being, and all that divine individuality implies in terms of potentiality.

So real friendship and real love is a very creative, purposeful, ongoing situation, which desires that new things, new possibilities, new responses, should forever arise from that friendship. Wisdom is that knowledge which recognises the nature of true loving relationships and true friendships, and recognises the way that the individual children of God have to be brought in a very slow and gradual state to a condition of self awareness, through which their individuality will receive the greatest encouragement to grow and develop without being overshadowed and overruled by the potency of the Creator's own being and characteristics.

So we can see that wisdom is that understanding which realises the value of the means, and every moment that those means are striving to achieve the end, which was the initial desire for divine children and divine friends to share divine life with. We are saying that wisdom is that understanding which realises that you can only have a deep friendship with an individual who has a deep set of experiences and characteristics; who has deep awareness, which is supported by strength and integrity, of the objective significance of each of the divine qualities which are exhibited in the university, the universe, and which come to us through the activities that each of us play out for the other in the processes or life.

Wisdom will therefore be at great pains to draw out the potentialities and the benefits from the rich mixture of spontaneous responses that all of the individual children of God produce for one another. So far as those responses are unique and individual, then so far do they carry the possibility of producing some spontaneous mixture which did not exist before, and, upon which, other spontaneous mixtures and responses may be built, to produce new possibilities for new understandings and new growth, not only in creation but in terms of eternal purpose and eternal value.

So we can see then that wisdom is that ability in us that can stand back and, through its knowledge that you can only have a thin relationship with a thin personality, can appreciate the thickening of the characteristics of individuality which occur in a very rich and spontaneous and uninhibited form of existence, which is full of initiative and spontaneity. This is the spontaneity which makes mistakes and realises, through its own sense of responsibility, the fact that it has made mistakes, and, through its own sense of responsibility, wishes to put those mistakes right again and correct them. Now this sort of richness can only come to those individual children in a level of the university in which mistakes can occur. My own feeling is that these mistakes can only occur at the lower end of the university, and, as our nature gravitates to a more and more ethereal level of experience in the university, so does the possibility of creative spontaneity and endeavour become less and less.

Whereas, at the higher levels, the enjoyment and adoration of the beautiful divine qualities, that are not only in the Creator's being but present as potentialities in our own being, absorb our whole attention, the desire to use our initiative and the desire to enter into creative and exploratory forms of life, disappear. We can understand that if our educational processes at the lower end of the university were perfect as they are in the higher and more heavenly level of the university, then the initiative to make mistakes and correct them again may be lacking. We would be unable to experience the opposite of all the values of the divine nature, such as love being experienced against the quality of hatred, and kindness being experienced against the quality of cruelty, and weakness being experienced against the quality of strength, and beauty being experienced against the quality of ugliness.

Now this ability for us not only to see and feel and experience the qualities which we come to value most deeply in terms of their opposites, but our ability to get into situations, through the use of our own initiative, which have to be corrected and thoroughly understood before we become clear of those situations again, does not occur at any other level than that of the most concrete and separate forms of creation, which the physical level of creation represents. It represents the most crystallised form of the Creator's spirit in action and therefore, at this level as in no other, are we able to define the specific significance of all the divine potential qualities which exist in our nature and in the Creator's nature; through perceiving them and understanding them, being involved with them, having to use them, having to use them correctly, and correct them when we use them incorrectly.

This sort of experience produces true wisdom and true understanding, and produces in us a deep awareness of the significance of the Creator's great work on our behalf. This attitude towards the significance of wisdom helps us to understand why it was, in the allegorical sense, that the Creator allowed us to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and yet, at the same time, warned us that it would be a thing which would cause us pain. The Creator knew that in order to fulfil the great longing in his heart to produce craggy, leathery, strong individuals, who had deep characteristics of individuality in them, we would have to enter into a level of experimental living in which mistakes occurred and which pain would be felt as a result of those mistakes occurring. As the source of love and affection, the Creator himself could not force us into that situation; he could not place us in that place in which pain must come to us. But on the other hand, he could Go straight to large imagetake us close to the door which led into this field of experiment and pain, and hopefully wait for our initiative to become strong enough to take us through that door. So that we, from our initiative, entered into the realm of pain and suffering through the spiritedness of our spirit and the desire to know all things; to register the true value of ourselves in a deep sense and to register a sense, which is very strong in us, of being the arbiter of our own actions and the carrier of responsibility for those actions.

In other words, it was the deep, instinctive sense of the godlike creative experimental and responsible individuality which led us through that door into the world of the knowledge of good and evil, and caused us to be engaged with good and evil in a way which we were not engaged with them before. Because, before we entered that door and experimented unwisely with the forces of our own being, we were not engaged with the processes and the qualities of evil, we were only engaged with the processes and the qualities of good.

Although we may have chosen to remain on the good side of that door and not pass through it, if we had done so we would have lost the potentiality of growth and development which can only come to us through the deep, tragic, heroic and painful experience which comes to us through the misuse of our godlike abilities, but which also registers in us the godlike remorse and the godlike desire to correct the mistakes we make as we make them.

So that great wisdom, whereas it will not force people into situations which it knows are incorrect and painful, at the same time will learn to wait for the individual to work out the results of such wrong engagement in life. Because wisdom knows that it is only through the wrong engagement in life that some greater value than obedient perfection can arise, which is not an ability to be in perfect harmony with all the beautiful qualities of the divine nature, but is, in fact, the ability to know on its own account, to know for itself, to know objectively within its own experience, why the divine values are divinely valuable, and what the values are which detract from and destroy those divine values.

From that type of knowledge arises a great strength and a great wisdom and a great love, which cannot arise if that spirit has not passed through the gate into the world of knowledge of good and evil. It is only on the other side of that gate that great strength will be required to recover from mistakes, and it's only on the other side of that gate that great mistakes will be made and great understanding developed in order to recover from those mistakes.

So we can see that great wisdom is not engaged in interfering with the processes of life in order to tidy them up, in order to do away with disharmony, in order to do away with the crosscurrents of life which stir the pot of experience and produce a rich soup of opposing currents and values and desires and attitudes. Yet, at the same time, wisdom is certainly not indifferent to suffering, and it is not indifferent to the fact that continually the experiences produce a stumbling and a faltering, and mankind has to be rescued and brought back to a reasonable level of buoyancy again from which further movements and further experiments can be made.

In a sense, although wisdom does not interfere, wisdom is always on the lookout for a situation which has gone too far, and become so negative that nothing of value can arise from the situation anymore. Then wisdom will try and suggest to an individual who is stuck in such a situation that there is a way out which that individual hasn't yet seen.

Thus, the way out will produce a form of recovery which will lead to the individual realising why he has fallen, why he has got stuck in a situation which has stopped life happening to that individual, stopped experience growing and developing, stopped understanding and awareness growing in the individual.

Wisdom, while it will stand back and allow people and individuals to make mistakes, will equally engage in rescuing people from mistakes and from over-stressed situations, from which those individuals cannot rescue themselves. We can see that wisdom is a very deep awareness which is continually balancing out all the processes engaged in building deeper and deeper characteristics into the individuality which exists in each of the divine children of the Creator.

Wisdom is encouraging each of those divine children to grow into a level beyond childhood, which is more mature than childhood is, which is a level of growth in which divine friendship can occur between the individuals and their Creator.

Wisdom will forever be observing the balance occurring in experience, particularly at a physical level, in order that this absolute value can be extracted and made use of in every situation. So that wisdom is not so much engaged in easing the burden of life, as it is engaged in the harvesting of the fruits of the burdens of life. Wisdom develops an ability to see that the harvest in life is not at the level of ease, happiness, bliss and joy, but exists in a level of beingness in our nature which is at a very deep level of strength and integrity and selfhood which, while it is being autonomous and highly individual, is also becoming aware of its unity and loving relationship with all other forms of selfhood.

So we are saying that the deep wisdom which exists in the Creator's nature, and which we can learn to understand, is a deep wisdom which values not only the individual who is a friend to each other individual, but values the depth of character and strength and integrity, the leathery, craggy, strong, warrior-like toughness and individual responsiveness that each individual can develop in their own right. And wisdom recognises that individuality which doesn't have strength and doesn't have deep experience, is less valuable.

Although all the divine qualities of heaven are something we must have an experience of, and a taste of, wisdom recognises that, if these qualities are not understood arid lived at this outermost physical level of the universe, they are not fully appreciated in terms of their opposites, and therefore do not produce the deep understanding, the objective valuation, and the deep strength which can support them and which is needed in any true individual.

Wisdom recognises that there are three things that we need to achieve. First of all our unique separate beingness, then the objective understanding of values, which produces the ability to understand the real quality and value of all things, and then the strength and integrity which is necessary to support the being and the understanding; and it is on earth that these experiences have been made available for us, to a degree which they may not be available for us in any other form of experience. That is why there is a wisdom that is able to grow from the earth which is so valuable.


The essay Wisdom, published in The Great Gift, by William Arkle - 1977

It is one of the most profound, yet simple, insights of Mormon theology that to be incarnate - embodied - is a higher state than being a pure spirit.

The idea is that God is incarnate, and that this mortal life is primarily about 'getting a body' - the work of Jesus Christ was (in part) to enable all men to be resurrected, and live eternally incarnate (and cleansed of corruption).

This was a breakthrough in theology because the religious tradition has tended strongly towards seeing pure spiritual life as a higher form of life than embodiment - perhaps because the spirit was unconfined, incorruptible, and apparently lacked the multiple constraints of boundedness that a body seems to imply.

However, the Christian fact of the divine Jesus becoming incarnate, dying and then being resurrected in a perfected but human body - strongly implies that incarnation is a higher state than immaterial spirit life.

Yet the fact of incarnation and resurrection has been, for most of Christian history, confused by the dogmatic assertion that God the Father was disembodied, an immaterial spirit - despite multiple scriptural references which seem to imply the  opposite. An anti-body bias, an equation of the body with sin and limitation, was not merely confined to the Gnostics, but has been a constant temptation and lapse among mainstream Christians.

Christianity has been confused and inconsistent on this subject of incarnation through most of its history; and often lapsed into talking about the body as corruption and the spirit as higher and purer and more divine. Consequently, mortal incarnate life was often perceived as intrinsically second rate or actually pointless, compared with spiritual life in Heaven. Many Christians craved the release from suffering and potential for absorption into the divine offered by the discarnate, spiritual state (and 'Eastern religions' throughout continued to regard pure spirit as a higher spiritual state than incarnation). 

By clearly stating that God the Father has a body, of the same nature as the resurrected Christ, of the same nature as Men, then this historic confusion was transcended.

Having a body is potentially better, a higher state, than not having a body - with greater potential for power in general and for creation in particular. The history of a human soul begins with pure spirit, and ascends to incarnation. The history of life into consciousness can be seen as a process of 'condensation'.

So, why is incarnation a higher state than pure spirit? Why is it a spiritual progression to 'get a body'?

In the first place it needs to be recognised that when we are incarnate, it is not a matter of the body 'clothing' the spirit - rather, the two become one: an irrevocably (when the body and spirit are spilt apart at death this is not a restoration of the spirit life, but a maiming of the spirit. Resurrection reunite the severed body and spirit, enabling the purification of both).

Indeed, it is not incarnation if we imagine that the spirit merely inhabits and controls a body - as if it was inside a diving suit, or a 'mech' suit - this is a spirit being creating the illusion of a body, a projection of a body - this would be a spirit merely manipulating the material world but not inhabiting it.

What happens with incarnation is that the immaterial spirit comes to inhabit the material world. The soul thereby attains the fullest possible integration with the whole of reality.

(Note - I am using a omenclature here where the soul is our eternal personal self; the spirit is the first and immaterial form which the soul attains. The immaterial is contrasted with the material - in terms not so much of nature as of properties such as detectability, measurablility, confinability. The incarnate soul includes both spirit and body in fusion.)

Consider: assuming the spirit is immaterial, then as a pure spirit the human soul is excluded from the material form of reality.

By incarnating, the soul attains the fullness of integration with reality: material as well as immaterial.

The discarnate soul of pure spirit lacks a full sense of itself from-which to work - it lack boundaries, and therefore cannot be fully free. Freedom is the basis of creativity, and freedom must have a discrete origin. Hence incarnation.

Incarnation is more a matter of concentration than of constraint - and enhanced creative power is a product of that greater concentration and of fuller self-awareness, which is characteristic of the incarnate soul.

The world can be divided into serious and recreational readers - serious readers are re-readers: they read mostly in order to find those books that they can re-read. The rest are the recreational readers.

It is interesting to speculate on what it is that can make re-reading - especially the second time around - even more enjoyable and satisfying than the first reading.

The first time I read a book there is a part of me holding-back, waiting to see if the author can be trusted. Because if I open my heart to a book, and then it betrays me... well, that can be a wounding experience.

(Like confessing your innermost thoughts - then having them used to mock you.)

There are, after all, many books that at first seem to be one thing, and yet are another - books that start off apparently going one place, but end up somewhere much worse; books that fill you with hope until they turn, strike and eviscerate you with disgust or despair...

Most commonly there are books which build towards something, but in the end cannot deliver whatever it was, and fizzle out into... well, nothing much at all.

Therefore, during the first run-through I tend to hold-back, and wait to see whether this is a book that will deliver on its promises; whether this is a book which is of good motivation and honesty.

After I have read a book - I know the answer; and if it is a good book, then I always want to re-read it - this time giving myself fully to the experience, opening my heart to the book.

It is rather like meeting someone for the first time compared with subsequent meetings, On the first meeting both sides hold back something; and it is only as trust builds that we open ourselves to each other. Friendship with a real friend therefore gets better - whereas for the mass of others, an impressive or entertaining first impression inevitably yields to cumulative disillusion, boredom, irritation, repulsion...

Most of modern life is all about making striking 'first impressions' - including a serious concern with even the assumed-impressions we make on strangers who glimpse us in the crowd. Much modern literature: the same - engineered instantly to impress.

And as with encountering people, we ought sometimes to read for long-term growing friendship; and not always consume interactions with books in pursuit of instantaneous distraction - not always reading for one-off entertainment, thrills or consolation - or else we will never know any books, and find ourselves without friends among the library. 

People keep asking me what I think about the US Presidential election - it is not a topic I want to spend much time on; but to answer the question the title is a summary of my views.

Both sides of the 'race' are actively managed by the same establishment ultra-elite controlled by puposive supernatural evil; but the parties are different in the sense that Hillary Clinton is the preferred candidate because she is (overall) a candidate for explicit and direct evil, appealing to those who are most fully corrupted; while Donald Trump is an Antichrist candidate in the sense that his evil agenda is implicit, and his support substantially comes from less-corrupt people wanting to have the 'good' aspects of his platform.

(Note - Antichrist is not one person nor the oppsoite of Christ - but there have been and are many Antichrist figures - the idea is that they are welcomed and supported because they deceptively simulate Christ in some ways - but covertly pursue an Anti-Christian - nowadays a secular Leftist - agenda behind this facade.)

A Christian perspective sees Trump as an Antichrist figure in the sense that the forces of explicitly demonic evil (e.g. the mainstream mass media) differentially attack his 'good' policies - i.e. they attack him mostly on the basis of those true or virtuous aspects of his campaign. By contrast, they praise Clinton on her evil nature and policies.

The Global Conspiracy prefers Clinton, becuase their ultimate aim is to have humanity actively-want evil; they wish for humanity to become so deeply corrupted as to will our own damnation, by inversion of The Good - so that we ask-for and vote-for lies, ugliness and wickedness - by claiming these are 'higher forms' of real truth, beauty and virtue.

But the Global Conspiracy always tries to control both sides; so that whatever the result of any election, they get what they want eventually.

In this election, perhaps for the first time, they are running an overtly-evil candidate who would pursue the demonic agenda directly and rapidly - but as a back-up they have put-forward a candidate who will pursue the same agenda, but indirectly and therefore more slowly.

This is the question addressed by William Wildblood in a recent blog post to which I have contributed a comment:

http://meetingthemasters.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/question-on-justice-and-mercy.html

It is an important observation that modern spiritual people are indeed notably left/ liberal in outlook; because it leads to the recognition that they are left/ liberal with greater intensity and conviction than they are spiritual. Their spirituality is eclectic, flexible, changeable - their leftist politics is dogmatic, solid and often fanatical. It is easy to see which they are most serious about. 

I became interested in New Age type spirituality from the late 1990s (i.e. before I was a Christian), in the sense of reading some of the recent and still active US writers. Up until then I had read a great deal of CG Jung, upon which much of New Age is based; and a lot of Colin Wilson - who never quite fitted into this category but overlapped with it. But from 1998 I read John Hanson Mitchell, James Hillman and some of his 'disciples' such as Daniel C Noel and Thomas Moore; and a smattering of others across the field, including most of the best known writers. 

At that time I was a libertarian centrist in politics - and would have been a Republican if I was American; and I noticed in interviews and personal reminiscences that these and other writers came across as fanatical Democrats of the most partisan type for whom even the mildest libertarian or conservative ideas were demonised - and on the other hand openly advocating seedy, corrupt, dishonest careerist Democrats as if they were spiritual exemplars leading the world to a higher future (e.g. the likes of Al Gore!).

And New Age writers were typically, almost universally, utterly in thrall to New Left concerns - and structured their theories inside such a world view. For example Ecopsychology (look it up) was supposed to be a fundamental biological-spiritual perspective on the earth - but in practise made all kinds of recent and ephemeral leftist socio-political assumptions - and seemed to operate as a Left Wing pressure group. 

A book that I read with great attention - the Soul of Shamanism, by Daniel C Noel - structured its entire analysis and argument within a context of politically correct 'sensitivity' to the imagined perceptions of 'indigenous peoples' - with an intensely moralistic inflection to this demand that stood in complete contrast to the 'amoralism' of the spirituality being advocated. I mean, those individuals who were deemed to have behaved disrespectfully to the supposed sensitivities of American Indians (by 'appropriating' their spiritualities and adapting them for modern Western usage) were 'damned' pretty strongly!

This happened so often that I eventually realised that it was structural to New Age spirituality; and undercut the depth and validity of that spirituality. The New Age was, in fact, being led by people whose own spirituality was at best shallow and insincere; and at worst merely a front for their primary aims which were Left-political. 

Nowadays, I see one of my main tasks as resynthesising spirituality with Christianity, in a Christian frame - i.e. with Christianity as primary but spirituality given full value as a necessary modern priority. 

And in this task I realise that very little of modern spirituality is relevant, because very little is worthwhile. Those authors who are worthwhile are those for whom politics is a very secondary concern - the likes of William Blake, ST Coleridge, Rudolf Steiner, Owen Barfield; and more recently William Arkle, Colin Wilson, Jeremy Naydler, and William Wildblood himself. 

By no coincidence these are also those whose spirituality is honest, sincere, often deep: and primary.