Bruce Charlton's Notions

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/english-types-review-of-rivals-by-rb.html

Our summer holidays this year included staying in Greta Hall, Keswick - which was the house inhabited by ST Coleridge in 1800-1803 together with his friend Robert Southey and their families (Southey spent the rest of his life there).

Above I am being pretending to be inspired by the spirit of Coleridge, by working in the room that was his study. Pretence aside, it is an inspiring room; and I spent several hours there, tackling Coleridge's main prose work Biographia Literaria (Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions). 

(This was an old Everyman edition bought cheaply a few days earlier from Bookcase in Carlisle, one of the great secondhand bookshops; an actual exemplar of Terry Pratchett's concept of 'L-Space'.)

But I have rather reluctantly concluded - after several months of intense effort - that Coleridge is 'not for me' in terms of the detail and specificity of his philosophy.

https://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/ingwaz-metaphysics-of-ing-of-polarity.html
https://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/reality-is-constituted-by-polarity-and.html

From Owen Barfield's wonderful book What Coleridge Thought, I recognised that Coleridge provided a philosophical solution to the primary problem of modernity; but I soon found the memory of this answer slipping away from me; and now - after four months, and despite continuing to struggle with Coleridge - it has altogether gone.

The problem is my inner resistance to the abstract, geometric-mathematical nature of the schema. I can grasp this when I am immersed in the work, but only in the way I grasp mathematical concepts - I don't feel it in my heart, I could not base my life on it - nor could I persuade anybody else of it.

Similarly, Coleridge's metaphysics of Christianity (focused on the mystery of the Trinity) is too abstract and paradoxical for me to find it moving, compelling, inspiring or encouraging.

In sum, Coleridge's ideas are ultimately incompatible with my primary metaphysical understanding of the nature of reality - which is why they keep slipping-away from me. 

My conclusion is that Coleridge's solution to the problem of modernity is valid and works for some people such as Owen Barfield - but I will need to find my own philosophical way of understanding and articulating the way forward beyond alienation, nihilism and despair.

This will need to fit with my fundamental metaphysical beliefs; which are pluralist (in William James's sense); and based on the Mormon concept of the destined mortal human condition as a voluntary, incremental exaltation of each man or woman towards ever-fuller deity; including William Arkle's clarity that this process is an ever greater participation in a creation unified and essentially characterised by loving familial relationships.

In other words, as so often, I return to the master metaphor and concrete reality of God being our loving Father; and the human condition as one of (if we choose) developing, growing-up through experience and striving, over a vast timescale - eventually hoping to rise to the same level of being as our heavenly father, and able to know him in an adult (that is fully divine) way.

Albion and England are different even if, from a higher standpoint, they are related aspects of the same overall entity. 

This means that just because you are English you don't necessarily know anything about Albion. It may totally escape you or you may think you know it but are confusing your understanding of England with Albion, the White Country. 

And I would add that just because you are not English does not mean that you do not know Albion. You may attune yourself to it through heredity or just through an inner resonance or fellow feeling. Indeed, the key is feeling or sympathy or even love.

If you feel yourself attracted to Albion, if you are drawn to it through a sense of mystery and enchantment, if you respond to it at all, then you are a part of it wherever you come from because Albion is a country of the imagination. 

This does not mean it is not real. On the contrary, it is very real as a true spiritual archetype.

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/albion-and-england.html

We watched the new Swallows and Amazons film in Keswick, where it was actually filmed in part (on Derwentwater); and the kind of Lake District area where Arthur Ransome's book was set. The omens seemed good, and the movie was clearly traditional in look and feel. But nonetheless, the whole family found the movie to be an unsatisfying experience.

For all its attention to detail - in terms of set, costumes and props - the structure of the script was incompetent - and in a way that affects many mainstream movies.

The problem in such a film is to create a child's world from the child's perspective; in which the business of sailing on a lake, camping and cooking, and the 'wars' between rival groups of children, are all genuine, gripping adventures.

(This is not really all that difficult because it is the truth - it is how things really are for real children. And many adults are pleased to remember the fact - only adolescents find this to be 'kid's stuff'.)

And in much of the early half of the movie this was done well.

But all this is destroyed by introducing genuine, adult perils and perspectives - international espionage, violence, assassins and guns (with even one the kid's handling a gun, and threatening to kill a baddie).

These aspects subvert and ruin the child's perspective by making their adventures look trivial/ escapist by comparison (they aren't really trivial at all, nor are they escapist - but that is how they are made to look).

Furthermore, the espionage elements in this movie are unconvincing - full of gross implausibilities, plot holes and ridiculous coincidences.   

So what we have here is a potentially classic short childrens' film, ruined by the addition of an alien, lame and stupid adult (or teen) 'action movie' - rendering the whole exercise ultimately a waste of time and money and resources. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

The 1974 film version of Swallows and Amazons, by contrast, does the job properly. It is 'corny' but charming and good-hearted; and maintains the proper child's-eye-view throughout.


Note: I have never read the book of Swallows and Amazons, nor any other of Ransome's books, beyond a brief inspection - although I shall probably do so at some point, as they seem very good of their type.

An increasingly necessary skill in a world set-up to inculcate universal, permanent, free-floating angst - done in order to enable more effective mass manipulation by the global Establishment.

Some suggestions at:

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/how-not-to-fear-courage-comes-from.html

... is the theme today at:
albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk

Posts by William Wildblood and John Fitzgerald at Albion Awakening

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk

For a few days I will be posting at my Albion Awakening blog, so please follow the link...

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk

RVI - Recognise, Validity, Importance

To experience a phenomenon in the world as alive, meaningful, significant to us personally; we need to Recognise the experience is happening; acknowledge the Validity of the experience (that it is something real and true); and recognise that the experience is Important (not an accident, not random nor an epiphenomenon - but a significant occurrence that needs to be taken note of).

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/britain-land-under-enchantment-rvi.html

I thought I had already watched this interview, but if I really had then I had forgotten: it is excellent.

I have read a lot of Jung up to about eight years ago and even more (purportedly) about Jung - but this is the best and clearest and most impressive I have ever seen.

Reading Jung is mostly an exercise in boredom and frustration; and most of the books about him don't get him right, or focus on some of the many things wrong with the man and his life. In his writing he seems paralysed by the "Germanic Professorial" mode of defensive prose - so that nothing is ever said clearly because there is so much qualification that it amounts to obfuscation; and this sometimes reaches the point of dishonesty, where Jung is often deliberately misleading the reader about his own more 'outlandish' views.

Anyway, in this interview done near the end of Jung's long and vigorous life, Jung seems to have set-aside his self-defeating caution, and is very open and candid in his answers, despite using his second language - and reveals himself to be a theist, living in sure expectation of continued existence beyond mortal death, and indeed a mystical Christian of solid conviction (he says he knows, not 'believes' such things - something which is very hard to be sure of, in the writings).

The interview is interesting in its form. The interviewer (John Freeman - who was also a left-wing professional politician) comes across as a typically modernist and materialistic journalist - whose personal interest is more Freudian than Jungian (Freeman asks Jung Freudian questions about his childhood, and probes the relationship with Freud); but he listens respectfully and patiently to Jung's more dsitinctive and significant spiritual and religious discussions, and does not distort the final cut to suit his own prejudices.

The result is a vivid personal portrait - which made me recogise for the first time how impressive Jung was 'face to face' and verbally; and how this must have been the primary basis of his reputation; as was also the case for Coleridge, for example - or Charles Williams. How fortunate that we have this interview to show us what could otherwise only have been assumed about Jung - and how such an interview might have been to help us understand some geniuses of the more remote past, who gave their best in speaking rather than writing.

If you wish to try reading Jung, the only two things I could recommend are the spiritual autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections which was written from dictation by Aniela Jaffe; and another late piece: The Undiscovered Self.

Ultimately, I think that Jung did not succeed in solving the fundamental problems of modernity - either in theory or in practice. What he was advocating, in the search for meaning and purpose - amounted to an alternation between public life as a normal mainstream alienated modern 'official' consciousness; and regenerating, therapeutic interludes of something like the immersive consciousness (ie. Barfield's Original Participation) of childhood and tribal Man - including the visionary, divinatory and animistic life of those modes.

Jung did not - as did his older contemporary and Swiss neighbour Rudolf Steiner (or his younger contemporary Owen Barfield) perceive a way beyond this dichotomy. Nonetheless Jung provided an accurate 'diagnosis' and a partially-helpful therapy for the modern condition.

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/coleridge-and-future-of-human.html

Divination enables us to become aware of the subtle psychic and spiritual forces that are at work in the background of our lives, determining the events that arise. Contemporary divinatory systems [e.g. Astrology, Tarot, Runes, the I Ching] are by no means atavistic throwbacks to an age long since surpassed, but are underpinned by a new and subtle understanding of the subtle energies that are active behind the scenes of our conscious knowing...

Nevertheless, divination does need to be approached in a different way from how it was approached in antiquity, because although it may reveal to us the spiritual and archetypal condition that lie behind a given situation, our relationship to these factors cannot be the same as that of people in antiquity...

We fail to realize our true human potential to the extent that we do not act freely... If, therefore, we practice divination, we do not do so to submit ourselves to the will of the gods, but rather to gain greater insight into our situation in order to come to a freely chosen decision as to how best to act. 

From pp 180-1 of The Future of the Ancient World, by Jeremy Naydler, 2009.


Throughout my life, and including my younger days, long before I was a Christian, I intermittently tried various divinatory practices. In my mid-twenties I bought Jung's book about the I Ching and tried to use it with coins; later I tried using runes drawn from a bag, and Tarot cards. I never persisted long with any of these things and never reached any conclusion about them - indeed, it was the lack of any validating intuitive feedback which made me give up so easily.

It now seems to me that I was self-blocked from getting attached, or addicted, to divination on the basis that I was trying to use it for the wrong reasons and with the wrong underlying motivation. For me these were technologies of power and/ or evidence of underlying 'atavistic yearnings' (yearning for the past un-conscious and immersive participation in reality, characteristic of childhood and hunter gatherer states).

Rudolf Steiner provides some clarification of this in his repeated cautions and strictures against the deployment of altered states of consciousness as technologies of clairvoyance - his insistence that the modern and future mystic should be alert, awake and purposive: that the modern clairvoyant (as a general rule, although there are exceptions) would work-from the 'consciousness soul'; and not therefore from 'passive' experiences and states such as dreams, dreamlike trances, sedating or hallucinatory drugs; not characterised by visions, hallucinations, speaking in tongues or similar signs; and we should eschew automatic writing, Ouija boards, unaware channelling and so forth.

(Probably - ultimately - excluding therefore the likes of astrology, the I Ching, runes and Tarot - excluding them, that is, as routine or focal spiritual practices - although presumably these could be acceptable and valuable as occassional, educational and remedial practices.)  

As a generalisation I believe Steiner was correct and making an important point - that the destined spiritual future is not one that incorporates technologies of divination; but that regards them as at most temporary expedients: ways of moving to the next step, means to an end.

What we ought to be aiming-at is simply to know - but to know from the basis of our alert, awake, purposive real selves (our souls).

This is true intuition - not the act of 'looking within', but the act of locating, then living-from our real selves. 

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/birth-of-prince-many-of-us-remember-too.html

The first Albion Awakening post from John Fitzgerald.

Before the fifteenth century, men did not speak in indefinite terms as was current later, and this very indefiniteness was untruthful. When speaking of intuitions, of moral intuitions he spoke of that which rose up in his inner being, of which he had a picture as real as the world of Nature when he opened his eyes in the morning. 

Outside he saw Nature around him, the plants and the clouds; when he looked into his inner being, there arose the Spiritual, the Moral as it was given to him. 

The further we go back in evolution the more we find that the rising tip of an inner realm into human experience was a matter of course...

 In the days when speech, from being an inner reality was lapsing into untruthfulness, proof for the existence of God came into evidence. Had anyone during the first centuries of Christianity spoken about proofs for the existence of God, as Anselm of Canterbury, people would not have known what was meant. In earlier times they would have known still less!

For in the second or third century before Christ, to speak of proofs for the existence of God would have been as if someone sitting there in the first row were to stand up and I were to say: “Mr. X stands there,” and someone in the room were to assert “No, that must first be proved!” 

What man experienced as the divine was a Being of full reality standing before his soul. He was endowed with the faculty of perception for what he called divine; this God appears primitive and incomplete in the eyes of modern man... 

The men of that age had no desire to hear about proofs, for that would have seemed absurd. Man began to “prove” the existence of the divine when he had lost it, when it was no longer perceived by inner, spiritual perception. 

http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA217/English/AP1967/19221007p01.html

So - Man began with a direct, obvious, common sense experience of the divine in life. Then, by stages went into a state of mind (in which we still dwell, in the modern West) where we not only fail to perceive the divine, but deny its reality and even deny its possibility.

This process of becoming cut-off from the divine bears a significant resemblence to the phase of adolescence, when the individual Man becomes cut-off from his family and the mythic world of childhood, and finds himself utterly, existentially, alone - unable to believe in the reality of anything outside of his own mind.

This is, however, supposed to be a phase - a necessary phase in the development of full self-consciousness and autonmy - but a phase and not a lasting state. 

The phase of adolescence is, like the phase of being cut-off from direct apprehension of the divine, needs to be and is meant to be no more than a 'moment', a minima or 'dead-centre' between the main possibilities of child like absorption-in the divine world, and an adult state of a loving relationship-with the diivine world.

Modern Man is stuck in the phase of being cut-off from the divine, and has been stuck for so long that he has begun to doubt not just the reality of the world outside the mind but the mind itself, so all reality begins to dissolve into nihilism.

Therefore the great need, the first step - here and now - is not for 'proof' of God but for experience of the divine - acknowledged as divine.

From that first step may come understanding of the nature of the divine - but first we need to know the divine is real; know this by personal experience. 

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/and-did-those-feet.html

Fairly obviously, things weren't meant to be as they have turned out! - we are living aganst God's plan for us: God's Plan A failed because we didn't want it, wouldn't have it.

But, if we have - as a civilisation, and most individuals - rejected Plan A which was the fastest, best and highest possible plan for Man's future; then we are instead living under divine Plan B.

The condition of Modern Western Man - his life divided between an Official World of pseudo-rational bureaucracy, and a Mass Media World of the deification of impulse and identity...

Man as just-an-Abstraction versus Man as just-an-Animal...

Since, that is, we find ourselves in a state of desperation; divided between, oscillating between, Intellect and Instinct, and without Heart -- a choice neither remotely satisfying nor adequate to our needs -- Then this can be seen as a long, slow-and-painful route to the same goal as Plan A.

Man is an agent, choice is intrinsic to the human condition - we are 'free' to reject God, divine order, the supersensible - free to reject purpose meaning and divine love as the basis of creation - free to reject creation itself...

And we have rejected all of these - but God has not given up on us! We rejected Plan A and are therefore living under Plan B.

Plan B is severely suboptimal - but it can get us to the same place in the end - thanks to Plan B we will be given another chance and choice.

Consequent upon our choice to reject a unified and divinely-ordered world where we recognise all Men as Sons and Daughters of God; the world as alive and our destiny through eternity to become fully children of God -- we are living in a world of despair interspersed with distraction; where life is draining of the last vestiges of purpose and meaning, and human relationships devolve to a dynamic balance of exploitation...

The division between subjective and objective, instinct and intellect, get greater and greater until - as individuals and as a society - we come to a point where they are unendurable.

We will be forced to choose between living purely-selfish, short-termist and self-gratifying lives - slaves to our animal impulses - and allowing civilisation, social organisation, virtue, to collapse altogether; or else live as slaves to The System, cogs in a machine, microchips serving the internet, serfs of The demonic Establishment - 'transhuman' because much-less-than human.

Or, when Plan B has run its course; we will at long last abandon the Modern Western assumptions - no God or gods, no reality of Good (no truth, no beauty, no virtue), no soul, no life beyond mortality, no objective purpose or meaning, no real relationships, no permanence, no validity - those seductive metaphysical poisons that have led us - finally - to an insane choice of false options.

Of course, we may still choose damnation

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/albion-fairest-island-in-world.html

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/albion-england-scotland-and-wales.html

I awoke from nostalgic dreams into a sad, pessimistic, weak-feeling and almost despairing frame of mind - hard to shake-off, self-perpetuating.

And yet within not many minutes I snapped right out of it, in a moment - a matter of seconds - by listening to a few words from William Arkle that reminded me what I was and of my situation.

http://www.wessexresearchgroup.org/digital_08.html 

Instead of seeing myself in the materialistic light of 'this world' with its inevitability of transience and decline of all good things; I very suddenly remembered that I was: an unique, eternal, immortal being - experiencing this life on earth in the context of permanence and growth towards a state of fuller divinity and love. 

We don't need a complex analysis and a list of prescriptions; what we need and crave is that state of consciousness which is the end point of our striving.

Hearing just a few of Arkle's words reminded me of that 'wide-angle' state of consciousness; and the state of consciousness I then became, was itself the best possible thing that I could possibly do in the world. 

That state of consciousness was the best thing I could do in the world.  


We aren't aiming at some specific better arrangement of people and stuff the world - but are aiming at a way of being; and if we achieve this in ourselves, then that is the first - but also in a sense the last - step in the matter.

If we can be in the right way then that is what 'has an effect' - true consciousness is both end and means.

http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/the-prophecy-of-john-uskglass-raven.html

https://thewinnower.com/papers/5208-seven-year-units-in-science-general-lessons-from-the-personal-experience-of-working-on-adrenal-cortex-innervation-and-cortisol-secretion