Bruce Charlton's Notions

In the beginning Men were merely primordial selves immersed in the ocean of universal consciousness; and the history of everything has included the progressive and incremental separation of these selves from the universal primary reality.

We began as immersed in universal reality - joined with everything, and everything joined with us - with permeable selves... We end with a Self that is aware of its own separation from things, from other people, from memories - and even from its own thoughts...

Why? Because separation is necessary for freedom, for agency; we must first be separate in order to be free. And free in order, ultimately, to share the divine status of the Creator - because God is free.

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This separation of the self can physically be be imagined as a process of precipitation - of solid bodies coming from gaseous spirits.

Or as a biological analogy; as development. A baby lives at first in the ocean of amniotic fluid, inside the mother; and only gradually, incrementally, does the baby's self become separate from the mother's self - first by birth, then by development and increasing independence... but only in adolescence does the child at some point become existentially separate - an agent.

And once reached, and attained, that cannot be undone - he can get stuck in adolescence, or move on to adulthood; but he cannot return to childhood. Consciousness, separation, can temporarily be obliterated by disease, or intoxication - or suspended during sleep - but is essentially permanent.

(Incarnation is an example. When we became embodied, we could not return to the spiritual state; the preceding spiritual being could not be restored - because our selves are in our bodies, and if the body is then subtracted, what remains is not what there was before. Therefore after death the only alternatives are resurrection - with a renewed body - or else a fundamental change of the spiritual self with loss and distortion.)

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So we begin by participating in the whole of reality - that was given. But our selves were only feebly independent, and not sufficiently separate that we could be free agents. Then a process began in the history of the human race, which is recapitulated in individuals - we developed agency by separation of the self from everything else.

At some moment the self is cut-off from everything else - and therefore unfree, because isolated. So there is a step beyond, which is a return to participation with universal reality.

Universal reality is always there - that is, everywhere - we used to be in reality but the future, the destiny, is that we should think reality.

The self now needs to - voluntarily and by an effort - engage with universal reality in a free relationship; knowing that this is happening.

The task or destiny is to re-engage with universal reality - which is everywhere for everybody, as it always has been, in a deliberate, explicit, way. This is not a matter of 'thinking about' universal reality - it is a matter of thinking-universal-reality; in other words, by thinking to become part of it.

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But universal reality is everything - does this mean we can know everything? Not exactly and not in practice.

It does mean that there are not ultimate limits to knowledge - excepting other selves, which lie outside the system. But in practice we must navigate through this unbounded and vast world of universal reality - and for our experience to lead to valid knowledge, we ourselves must be Good and the experience we encounter to be undeceptive.

In practice, we navigate universal reality with love. It is love which leads us to the people (and entities) we can learn from; it is love which leads us to the truth rather than the falsehoods and misleadings, the evil entities, which also lie within universal reality.

Love is the cohesion and structure of everything in God's creation. And love is our safe-guard against the possibilities that would emerge is we were motivated by power, or even merely by 'curiosity'.  

Imagine yourself as a self, guided by love, navigating the ocean of universal reality! That is the possibility. It is love which guides us to our Heavenly families and which guides them to us; it is love which guides the great composer to the beautiful music with universal meaning; it is love which guides the real scientist to the intuitive truths about reality...

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So participation is given, knowledge is given... but what must be achieved is the autonomy of our-selves; and having been achieved the destiny is to return to participation; to take it up again but not to be inside it, but outside of it while yet part of it.

In a sense, with Final Participation, the vast world of universal reality is experienced as 'within us' - within our thinking. Instead us us being immersed in the ocean - the ocean is, somehow, in our own thoughts! And therefore we engage with the ocean from a place outside the ocean - and our relationship with the ocean is one of self-awareness, purpose and will.

And this is, of course, a godlike state; in the sense that a god is a cause not a consequence; outside the system and not contained-in the system; a creator not that which is created. And that is the whole point! For us to become adult, grown-up children of God, we must become like God in our nature, including our consciousness.

This moving towards divine consciousness can only happen by our choice, as an act from the agent-self.

*

Therefore, the task is to set-aside nostalgia for the original state of immersive participation: this is now impossible. It is to acknowledge the state of Modern Man as an error - a failure to move-on; a perpetual adolescence in which freedom has reached the absurd and self-refuting point of existential isolation - and got stuck.

Universal reality awlays was and still is there. We have cut-ourselves off from it. This was necessary as a phase - but is lethal as an end-point. We must re-engage with universal reality - and again participate in that universality; but from outside - in purposive thinking from our true selves.

Participation is given, knowledge is given, even love is given; but from where we are now, we need to make the choice and effort to acknowledge then create a new autonomous and free relationship with this reality.

Our task is to re-engage with universal reality in what eventually may become fully divine consciousness, but at first will be a partial, distorted and temporary kind of divine consciousness; which is thinking engaged with universal reality, and guided by love.



(The above is a development of the ideas of Owen Barfield, which were substaintially influenced by Rudolf Steiner.)

An extract edited from John Fitzgerald's essay at Albion Awakening:
http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/the-hidden-shrine-of-king-charles-martyr.html  

Shrine of King Charles the Martyr? I've lived in or around Didsbury for most of my life and had never heard of such a place...

It was an intriguing discovery, nonetheless - though odds-on a joke or a spot of wishful thinking - and I set off at once to explore...

The area between the park and the cricket club is occupied by a business park now. It's a nice, tree-lined part of town, but I had never visited the business park and never seen any reason why I should. I walked around for a good half-hour in the mist and drizzle. I thought I'd hate it but I actually found it quite a peaceful, almost Zen-like, place...

I saw nothing anywhere to suggest the existence of a shrine. The only old-looking thing I found was a small, chapel-like structure on a grassy roundabout with a triangular roof and an arch-shaped door of dark and heavy wood. I tugged the round, iron handle. The door didn't budge. I walked around to the other side and peered through the window. Nothing to see ... so shrugging my shoulders I went on my way, feeling more let down than I'd expected, given that I hadn't really, deep down, expected to come across a shrine at all.

'Maybe it's hidden' I mused, 'Maybe it's always been hidden. Maybe you can only see it with the eye of faith and imagination.' I was disappointed, I recall, that I didn't appear to have much of either...

I walked to the bus stop by the cricket club. It's only three stops from there to the Village. It was almost fully dark and the lights were on everywhere. The sky was clear and the air mild.

The bus was busier than I'd anticipated.. it stopped at the traffic lights next to the business park.

Then, where the squat glass buildings should have been, I was blessed (and wounded) instead by the most extraordinary sight - a colossal edifice - a Cathedral or Abbey of some kind - with tall high windows all ablaze in golden light. The roof was a giant triangle, with the thick silhouette of a cross standing out on top against the Western sky. I glimpsed a lawn, a bonfire, a ring of people and a flash of red.

Then the lights changed and the bus rolled forward.

Someone was playing a violin. I stood up on tiptoe and saw a girl with a fiddle in front the fire. She had dark hair and a red bandana, and the music I heard through the open window will sustain and inspire me, I swear, through this world and the next - mournful and fierce, exultant and yearning - a funeral dirge and a triumphal march at one and the same time. It was cut from a different cloth - that's all I can say - music from a higher level - a sphere of beauty and intensity that was all too soon behind me as the gears whirred and the bus gathered speed, powering on into the night.

I looked around but could tell straightaway that none of my fellow passengers had seen or heard a thing.

... And that's where I left it.

Some things, I reckon now, are hidden because they're meant to be. They rest in the invisible realm - accessible only to the eye of imagination and faith - until the time for their appearance (or reappearance) in this world is ripe.


http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/the-hidden-shrine-of-king-charles-martyr.html

When Owen Barfield described the evolution of consciousness, he used 'evolution' in a pre-Darwinian sense of a developmental change analogous to the fertilised egg 'unfolding' to become a mature, adult organism.

In other words, Barfield regarded evolution not merely as change, but as purposive change, change with an aim or 'teleology'.

If the evolution of consciousness has a unified purpose and aim (isn't just a different purpose and aim for each entity), then this implies that there is a deity - as the source of purpose. Therefore, the evolution of consciousness is a consequence of some divine plan.

What could this divine plan be? For many Christians it will be 'theosis' - or the process of Men becoming more and more like God; aiming at becoming Sons and Daughters of God.

So, the evolution of consciousness is about our consciousness - that is, our way of thinking - becoming more divine, more like God's way of thinking.

This is a measure of the importance of the evolution of consciousness; and the need for it. Our life on earth is about 1. Accepting that salvation which is the gift of Jesus; and 2. Theosis - or working on the task of making ourselves more divine in our nature.

The moral aspect of theosis is very well known - but the consciousness aspect of theosis is almost wholly neglected - especially in mainstream Christian life.

In theosis we are not supposed only to 'do the right things', nor even to think the right things - but to think in the right way...

We should strive for a divine quality of thinking.

That is how important the evolution of consciousness is.  

From the perspective of the global elite, their servants in the mass media and the corrupted dupes among the intelligentsia who sustain them; populism means to be opposed to the rulership of the the global elite, their servants in the mass media and the corrupted dupes among the intelligentsia who sustain them.

And indeed, those who oppose the rulership of the global elites etc. would agree!

The difference of opinion about 'populism' is what it implies...

The question is: does populism imply 'fascism' or its opposite? 

The global elites etc. imply that to oppose their rule is to favour 'fascism'.

But those who oppose the global elites etc. believe that 'fascism' is exactly what the global elites etc have given us, what they approve of, and what they are intending to give us more of.

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(I put 'fascism' in quotes, because I believe the term is being misused by both sides - my understanding of fascism is that it was secular anti-communism - a non-religious reaction against communism. Since class-based utopian communism doesn't exist anymore in The West, but since has 'evolved' into the permanent revolution of New Leftism - 'identity politics'/ feminism/ antiracism/ multiculti/ sexual revolution/ political correctness - any modern 'fascism' must mean something qualitatively different from what it did in the past. Also. modern 'fascism' is (unlike the real thing) a label that nobody of significance explicitly embraces for themselves.)

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I disagree with all secular politics as inadequate, ineffective and ultimately evil; although naturally - not being utterly insane, dishonest or corrupted - I disagree with the intentions of the global elite etc. much more than I disagree with the political aims of those who oppose them.

But opposition to the intentions of the global elite is not sufficient actually to improve things - at all depends on what is instead being aimed at.

And if the aims are secular - economic, political, utilitarian etc - then they cannot lead to anything more morally compelling than the world conceptualised as a glorified farmyard - an 'animal farm' indeed - where life is merely and ultimately about a choice of defining winners and losers, haves versus have-nots, exploiters and exploited...

In such a secular world; whoever is chosen, or whoever currently is a winner by 'luck' or force or skill...; in the end everybody will lose due to age, disease... and death.

Although I have quite recently read and listened to the audiobook of The Silmarillion several times with some appreciation; my reaction to this work remains coloured by my first encounter; still retains much of the negative affects from my earliest encounter.

The Silmarillion was published on 15 September 1977; after some four years of ever more impatient waiting and speculation following the death of the author.

The publication date was just before I left home to go to medical school - which was itself a time of intense ambivalence; of excitement and expanding horizons mixed with loneliness and homesickness.
I therefore bought The Silmarillion as soon as it was available, and of course took it with me to stand on the bookshelf in my room, but I didn't read it immediately. Instead, I saved-up actually reading it until I had arrived at college.

My excitement at reading this volume, at long last (as it seemed to me), was therefore bound-up with my excitement at leaving the family and beginning university. Tolkien, especially Lord of the Rings, stood for much that was best about my teenage years - and I was hoping that this spirit would be extended into the new era.

My sense of anticipation was therefore about as great as was possible. Yet I was so disappointed with the Silmarillion that I did not even manage to finish it - or rather, found myself skipping largish sections to get to the last chapters. So, it was less 'disappointment' than an actively-unpleasant experience - I would have preferred, indeed I expected, something much like the Appendices of The Lord of the Ring; but I was actually offered something that seemed more like the Old Testament.

In The Silmarillion there was no editorial voice (such as was present in the Prologue and Appendices of LotR) to mediate between myself and the events described (these editorial voices were sometimes Tolkien at other times Bilbo or merry or various others). Instead, there were just these rather dull, bare-bones accounts of the doings of Valar and Elves; each free-standing and disarticulated; and with no hints of how to make sense of them.

At any rate, this was my negative impression - and this accounts for my residual sense of distaste on seeing that spine on my book-shelves.

Clearly I was not also, and Christopher Tolkien expressed regret for exactly the problems that most struck me, when he came to embark upon the History of Middle earth - and he certainly set them right.

In stark contrast was my encounter with the Book of Unfinished Tales, which was published in 1980 but which (thanks to the above aversion) I only read in about 1986, when I found a copy left behind in a holiday cottage in Keswick. I liked Unfinished Tales so much, that I always carried it around since; still have the same dog-eared paperback copy; and before long it kick-started a Tolkien resurgence of interest - strengthened by reading the Biography and Selected Letters and Tom Shippey's 'Road to Middle Earth' (again, rather later than their actual publication).

And this second phase never stopped but has continued up to the present. But still, deep down, I hold my grudge against the Silmarillion of 1977...

More on this theme: 
http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=silmarillion
 

There is a sense of timeliness about some things that need to be done now - it is not meant to be exhaustive but...

1. Freedom
We need to be free because it is divine. Only if we are free can we be purposive.

2. Consciousness
...And freedom requires consciousness - self-awareness, or awareness of the Self (otherwise we are just responding to externals).

3. The self
It is the self which is (potentially) free. Our self is primordial, and also (partly) divine (God within). So we must work from The Self, and that is the basis of freedom.

4. Creation
Creation is pretty much the same thing as acting from our Self - our true, primordial and divine Self - because that is the only basis for true creation. Creation is further defined in terms of its harmony with the divine plan - in creating we are joining God's team. Creation (in this sense) is what we are supposed to Do in life.

5. Thinking
Thinking is the realm of reality in mortal life - not 'action'. This is because in true, real, primary thinking we are participating in a universal world, in principle perfectly accessible to everybody at any time or place henceforth.

6. Purpose
To have purpose requires the above. To do this, not another thing; to act from the Self as a Cause - and not be merely driven and a passive consequence... This is what makes sense of our having purpose in life. It is God and his plans (destiny) which makes that purpose non-arbitrary/ meaning-full. It is our Freedom to join in with this destiny, and Thinking which is the reality of our being participators, not-existentially-alone.

7. Love
So where is Love? Not something fitted-into - but some thing which contains. Love is why everything is related, and not detached; what even makes meaning and purpose possible. And why only in God's creation can there be meaning, purpose and the rest. God's realm is the realm of love - outside of which there is just stuff, chaos, isolated conscious entities.

The primary choice is therefore, to join with God's created realm of Love.

Everything nowadays and from now must be purposive. All must be clear, conscious, explicit (including repentance for past sins).

This is easy - but also difficult.

It makes choosing easier - because the choice is between the explicit and conscious on the one hand; and on the other, anyone (any organisation) who isn''t: that has a covert agenda, treats truth 'strategically', claims to be pursuing a good goal in some secretive way. All such is bad.

Our first aims must be spiritual, not material; and these spiritual aims must be acknowledged and taken into account upfront and explicitly.

This will, of course, be awkward and embarrassing; it will be regarded as crazy.

I personally must be clearer in speech and writing - not allow myself to be expediently misunderstood: this is a battle for the soul of each individual and of the nation.

The new perspective must be brought into whatever context it fits; not as propaganda but simply as a matter of honesty and clarity. My own position must be clear - as clear as I can make it (of course, it will be misunderstood wilfully - but that can't be helped).

Why? Because the time is now. What would have been futile or merely provocative and troublemaking a year ago now becomes a duty.

From this everything Good flows - without this, efforts will be hopeless. The actual medium of modern discourse, the mode by which we communicate, is the problem - it prevents utterly and in principle the core problem being solvable; and when people sense that the problem is insoluble they will not make the necessary effort.

Christianity without a spiritual awakening leaves modernity intact - leaves us alienated and lacking in meaning and cut-off from The World. Why should people bother with Christianity if it is only a set of 'beliefs' of the same kind and quality as the pre-existing beliefs? How can salvation and theosis be understood from a world view that is materialist, reductionist, positivist, dead?

Ideally spiritual awakening and Christianity should come together; but if not then spiritual awakening may need to come first - hope of relief from the daily, hourly, torment of meaninglessness and an undead life is (for most people) the most urgent need.

This spiritual craving is what drives the inversion of Good and the sexual revolution and the clinging to drugs and distractions. 

The need should be met head-on; and everywhere possible.

Once that is decided, then the business of how to do it - here, now and by me - can be addressed.

 

I'm in the midst of an exceptionally bad migraine (one and a half days, so far); and (unusually) I can't think of anything I want to say.

So I have re-opened comments (moderated, of course) for readers to submit questions - which I may be able to respond-to...

The need of the hour is for repentance.

Of course, the need is always for repentance, but it is more essential now than ever because we are so unrepentant. We don't see the need for it because we are convinced of our own rectitude.

A perfect example of this comes from the recent marches against President Trump... it is quite evident that those demonstrating see themselves as pillars of goodness. This is one of the most spiritually dangerous of places to be. It leads to pride, usually unrecognised and even regarded as a sign of virtue, self-satisfaction and so deep sin.

Repentance is always on offer but you have to ask for it. It is essential for any sort of spiritual progress.

The people on the anti-Trump demonstrations (like most demonstrators) are excellent examples of the unrepentant. To a man (or woman) they are convinced that they are good people. In fact they are projecting their own fears, hatreds and insecurities onto someone who is probably more bluster than anything else.

Their spiritual pride is plain to see, as is their refusal to consider the possibility that they are acting egotistically.

The actual rights and wrongs of the object of their ire is relatively unimportant. It is their assumption of personal and group virtue that makes them such good examples of the spiritually unrepentant and shows their fundamental lack of love and forgiveness.

They are like the crowd chasing the woman caught in adultery. Though they take the moral high ground it is transparently obvious that their real motivations are more to do with anger and self-righteousness than anything else.

From William Wildblood - more of the article at:
http://meetingthemasters.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/the-need-of-hour.html

The latest 'setback' to Brexit (Supreme Court stating that Brexit cannot happen without parliamentary approval) is actually another clarification of the issues at stake - if any English people hadn't yet woken-up to their situation, and the nature and plans of the ruling media-bureaucratic elite, then this will have helped greatly.

All sorts of positive things may eventuate - perhaps ideally a 'single issue' snap general election (if Parliament rejects Brexit).

But the short-medium term political outcome is secondary to the absolute and primary necessity for national spiritual awakening.

And all events like this current 'legal challenge' to Brexit are solid gold revelations of the agents of global conspiracy and their assorted puppets, dummies, dupes and stooges... there they all are! - lined-up, on parade, spouting their opinions and plans, hopes and fears...

The English should be deeply grateful for how things have turned-out (or rather, how divine providence has gifted them). Our choice is made stark and binary - each person will be confronted by the need to exercise their agency with an understanding of the direction each possibility is aiming-at.

We now know - because it is being demonstrated - that Brexit is a mere proxy; it is a litmus test for approval versus disapproval of the on-going agenda of nihilism, despair and self-damnation.

The surprises keep coming, nobody has been able to predict anything for months - but this is good, because our state was so bad.

The longer it has gone on, the better the chance that the English people may (en masse) shake-off the spell of distraction and addiction - wake from their sleepwalk into Hell - and come to their senses.

What we need is for a great hush to descend, in our minds and in the world, and a season of watching and waiting to begin... a radical stillness and decluttering - creating space within so that we can hear the only thing we need to tune into at this time - the distant but approaching hum of the Great Music - the wild, thrumming call of the Divine that frees us from the drudgery of Economics and the illusion of limitless activity and growth.

From John Fitzgerald:
http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/a-radical-stillness.html

The content of dream images has no great significance. But the drama, the flow, is of great significance...

Whether there is anticipation, whether the anticipation leads to resolution, whether the anticipation leads to crisis. All the relationships of feeling become transposed into the life of the dream.

Anyone who is familiar with dreams knows that ten or even more people may tell of dreams with utterly different contents, yet the underlying state of affairs is the same in all of them.

One man will say that in his dream he was climbing a mountain and on reaching the top had a delightful surprise; another says that he was walking through a dark passage and came to a door which opened quite unexpectedly; a third will speak of something else. 

In the course they take, the dreams have no outer resemblance whatever, yet they originate from an identical experience, namely tension and relaxation which are symbolised in different pictures at different times.

What is of essential importance, therefore, is not the factual reality of the dream, but its inner dramatic action. 

From the sequence of the meaningless pictures we must be able to recognise this dramatic action, for that is the reality in which the soul with its spiritual core of being is living while it dreams. 

This is an entirely different reality from what is expressed in the pictures presented in the dream. 

With the dramatic action you have the gist of the matter. The dream points to deep subconscious and unconscious grounds of the life of soul. But the pictures unfolded by the dream are only a clothing of what is actually being experienced in the course of it.

--- Two passages combined and edited from Sleep and Dreams by Rudolf Steiner - a selection edited by Michael Lipson, 2003---

**

NOTE: I have found the above insight, combined with a renewed  conviction that dreams are meaningful and significant, to be a key which has had immediate effect on my own dreaming experience.

I have suddenly, and for the first time, been aware of my dreaming on wakening (or beginning to awaken) and remembered that I wanted to understand the dream...

I have then (while still hardly awake) easily been able to recall some of the dream and understanding it in the way described by Steiner above - in terms of a dramatic flow.

The process of recall and dramatic interpretation did not (so far) leave behind much in the way of specific 'knowledge' but does leave a sense of satisfaction, and an awareness of profundity of dreaming (whereas my usual experience of dreaming - 19 times out of 20, is of boring or annoying triviality).

The test of experience is therefore that it is the dream structure which matters, not the specific content; it is the structure expressed in terms of a dramatic flow of emotions or convictions akin to the emotional sequence induced by an effective story (e.g. in a novel, play or movie).

The significance of the dream needs to be 'reverse engineered' from one's sequential pattern of emotional responses to the dream...

This feels like progress!

Edited from Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - by Susanna Clarke - 2004.

"England is full of magicians. Hundreds! Thousands perhaps! Tell them this: Tree speaks to stone; stone speaks to water. Magic is not so hard as we have supposed. Tell them to read what is written in the sky. Tell them to ask the rain! All of John Uskglass's old alliances are still in place. I am sending messengers to remind the stones and the sky and the rain of their ancient promises. Tell them . . . I cannot explain it," he said...


http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/england-is-full-of-magicians.html

This was a walk in which I was almost immediately aware that I was in the grip of synchronicities.

The first I noticed as a lovely Orange Pink sky in the East, with high wisps of clouds making lines and planes. Then, as I descended the street, there was a large crow perched on a slender tree top (the tree naked of leaves, and very tall and slender) - such sights always remind me of The Raven King in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell - especially when I saw another crow in a similar situation on a tree across the road.

What brought me to a standstill, with an intake of breath, was that the newly risen sun was a glowing orange ball - sufficiently obscured that I could look directly at it, yet bright enough that its light was bathing all in the East.

Going past the ruined medieval chapel, a thought of the day before when I had watched a greater spotted woodpecker 'drumming' on a tree trunk in front of me - and been able to understand this phenomenon for the first time, and by direct personal observation (the primary basis of all Science!).  listened out, and sure enough there was more woodpecker drumming to be heard.

Then, my progression was again arrested by the glorious sound of a song thrush - with its characteristic and unique 'fruity' tones, amidst a variety and inventiveness equal to the blackbird or nightingale. As I listened for a few minutes, I never heard it repeat.

Then - having to explain to a passer by why I was standing and staring up at a tree - I had a brief and pleasant conversation with a man from Yorkshire who was visiting the city to watch a football match, and was very interested by the parkland nearby (Jesmond Dene).

Since I "never" speak with any passers by on my walks, my guess is that this conversation was the purpose of these synchronicities - although I have no idea why. At any rate the sense of 'magic' dissipated after this; but it was lovely while it lasted - the world unfolding before me, revealing beauty and significance everywhere I looked.

Catholics believe that the church (e.g. its priests, its sacraments) is essential to salvation. Protestants believe that the essential relationship is between each Man and God - the church being variously more or less helpful; but not absolutely necessary to salvation.

I think this is the nub of the disagreement. When stated thus baldly I find I do not believe the church is essential to salvation. So I suppose I am 'a Protestant', by the above definition.

Why? Because I honestly cannot (I tried) believe that our loving Father - the creator - would have set-up this world on that basis.

I am, however, in agreement with the Catholic, especially Orthodox, focus on theosis (or progression towards a greater state of divinity) as the main business of life; what we are supposed to do. We are, I think, meant to make the choice that is salvation, which is something personal between each Man and God - and then to embark on theosis as the main focus of living... which for many people in many circumstances, leads to a church.

However, any specific church (or church-situation) may be either helpful or a hindrance (indeed a threat) to theosis - and may even attack the conditions of salvation.

So this, again, is a very Protestant attitude of mine; that ultimately I judge the church (in both general and specific manifestations) by the deepest discernment I can attain; not vice versa.

Therefore, I have to say that The Reformation was A Good Thing - despite everything! A good thing because its main point was true.

NOTE: I am talking here about the difference between Catholic and Protestant denominations as ideal types. In practice, many individual Catholics are Protestant, by the above definition - and practising Protestants (perhaps especially in Lutheran or Anglican churches) and members of new Christian groups (such as Mormons) may be 'Catholic' in their personal beliefs or assumptions.

In this modern secular world, there are two main views about death - both deficient.

The usual view is that death is a bad thing, because it is extinction, annihilation. Only life can be good because death is nothing. 

The more covert but increasing view is that death is a good thing for exactly the same reason.

In other words; because life entails suffering, sometimes extreme suffering; from this (actively pro-suicide/ pro-euthanasia) perspective, death is the only sure safety and escape.


The truth of the matter, so far as I can understand it, is that over the long terms mortal life requires death, because death is the only means of transition to resurrected everlasting life - so death is a good thing...

But also that a good death needs to come at the right time for a particular person, according to that person's destiny and life experience.

Thus death can be too early (for example when a person is killed as a consequence of the evil choice of another); or death can be too late (as when a person clings to life, when they know in their hearts that their proper time for dying has come).


So death is a good thing overall; but not all death. More precisely death a good thing when it comes at the right time and in the right manner; but the reason for a particular death in a particular circumstance may be bad - bad overall, for the person that dies, or for someone else.


(Note: This leaves aside the process of dying - which is a a major concern for many people - because of the fear of extreme suffering, especially pain. The point to recognise here is that dying can only be understood in the context of death. A further matter is also what happens to each specific person after death - again only answerable in context.) 

The sexual revolution has become - more-and-more over the past fifty years, and continuing to build - the primary socio-political litmus test.

*

The sexual revolution is therefore not an epiphenomenon of our cultural malaise - it is core: the single most effective and enduring agent of permanent Leftist revolution.

*

So far as I know, none of the supposedly 'right wing' or 'populist' movements in the West have yet made clear their collective (as well as personal) repentance of the sexual revolution; and until they do, they will simply remain what they currently are - which is merely a different species of Leftism (just as National Socialism was merely a different species of Socialism).

*

In a context where the sexual revolution is at the very core of the problem of secular Leftism  - repentance of the sexual revolution must be upfront, clear and explicit.

Lacking repentance - as with the new Trump Presidency; we are merely seeing more-of-the-same; awakening has not happened; and there will be no change of direction for The West.

*

Read more at:
http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/repentance-of-sexual-revolution-must-be.html

The extent to which the Global Establishment control the content of mainstream public discourse is by now... well, as close-to 100 percent as is necessary. This control is not just at the large scale; but down at a fine level of micro-management of the content of a multitude of small scale meetings and events all over the Western world.

This struck me as I was examining the forthcoming programme of weekly public lectures at a Northern English university - fully 75% were explicitly on pro-Political Correctness/ Social Justice/ Leftist themes - and the others apparently neutral. And it is the same everywhere else.

Back in 1981 Thomist philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote After Virtue in which he described the ethical incoherence of modernity - and in later books such as Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry he explored the possibility of re-unifying society around a single ethical system.

As well as his favoured Aristotelian Thomism he considered the 'postmodern' radicalism exemplified by Nietzsche and later Foucault - but it was very obvious that such philosophies could not produce coherence; they were riven by internal contradictions.

Ernest Gellner wrote - about the same time - about how modern societies were characterised by functional specialisation among functional systems - but that the 'natural' default was for traditional societies to be unified by a single power structure. So that economics, science, education etc would all reflect the priorities of a ruling class (rather than pursuing their specific functions). In this sense a single unified 'bureaucracy' was spontaneous in large societies.

Well, the Modern West has a single unified bureaucracy, and it has as its philosophical basis exactly the incoherent radicalism which traces its ancestry to Nietzsche, and on back to Rousseau - a negative 'anti-philosophy' of protest against - originally - Christianity and especially sexual constraint.

So we have a unitary social system of morality and it is an incoherent system. 

The strangeness of our current situation is less strange when it is realised that incoherence is a feature, not a bug. What is wanted is a single, global bureaucratic-media monolith controlling everything -- but in order to create conflict.

The Establishment have created class conflict, sex conflict, sexuality conflict, race conflict, immigration conflict, East-West conflict, inter- and intra-religious conflict, religious versus anti-religious conflict - and that is exactly how they want things to stay.

They don't want any winners - they want (and are getting) universal losers: all resentful, all constantly engaged in fighting-off incipient despair with brittle pride and desperate distraction.

This situation is probably unique in world history - to have a tyranny that deliberately creates and sustains and exacerbates confusion, conflict - and ultimately despair; and that is for the simple reason that it is demonic, not human, in its origins and stategic aims; and the demons have never been in strategic control before.

Our world is ruled by supernatural forces that have convinced everyone in power that there are no supernatural forces; with a spiritual agenda being implemented in a world for which the spiritual is a ridiculous delusion.

Until we can recover our ability to acknowledge, recognise and discern the spiritual and supernatural in Life - we will remain what we currently are: helpless pawns in their game of damnation.

Further reading:
http://thoughtprison-pc.blogspot.co.uk
http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk 

THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYÁM OF NAISHÁPÚR
By Edward Fitzgerald - 1859

Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:
And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught
The Sultán's Turret in a Noose of Light.

What a wonderful start! to one of the very greatest long lyrical poems in the English Language - by one of the great one-hit-wonders of poetry.

I re-read this last night, astonished as so often before by its sustained richness and quotability; and moved to tears by the bitter-sweet sadness of its nihilistic hedonism.

The success of the poem was, perhaps, ensured by its having not just a superb beginning but an even better ending - with the final four verses:

Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth's sweet-scented Manuscript should close!
The Nightingale that in the Branches sang,
Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows!

Ah, Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits—and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!

Ah, Moon of my Delight who know'st no wane,
The Moon of Heav'n is rising once again:
How oft hereafter rising shall she look
Through this same Garden after me—in vain!

And when Thyself with shining Foot shall pass
Among the Guests Star-scatter'd on The Grass,
And in Thy joyous Errand reach the Spot
Where I made one — turn down an empty Glass!

As well as being great poetry - Omar Khayyam is perhaps the most accessible and moving account of the Epicurian philosophy of life; which is one response to the assumption and belief that death means extinction.

As such, it is a far deeper and more honest philosophy than the mainstream of today; Fitzgerald knew that if there is no God and mortal life is everything, and all meaning and purpose ultimately an illusion - then life was a sad business, and self-doping (with wine, or whatever works) and a painless, swift demise the only rational response.

Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring
The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To fly — and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.

(...)

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse—and Thou;
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

Omar is clear that if death is the end, then life is tragic - and the fact is inescapable. By contrast, Modern Man is too muddled, distracted and dishonest to acknowledge even such a simple inference. 

Yet the protagonist, again and again; by the very act of composing this poetry and his noticing of so much beauty and irony - and by his communication of it to the reader - implicitly denies his own assumptions... before lapsing back into doubt and regret.

And look—a thousand Blossoms with the Day
Woke—and a thousand scatter'd into Clay:
And this first Summer Month that brings the Rose
Shall take Jamshýd and Kaikobád away.

So, I read again, and entered that thought-world. And I realised again that either death is a good thing (when it happens in the right way, at the right time) or else it is a terrible thing which washed everything away - and the best we can hope for from it is to be overwhelmed by some relatively-pleasing delusion.

And that this is metaphysics - a matter of assumptions and not (contra Omar) evidence; this basic decision we make (inevitably) on the deepest of intuitive grounds. The problem for Modern Man is that we believe our culture, rather than our intuitions.

But - I will give Omar the last word:

Think, in this batter'd Caravanserai
Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day,
How Sultán after Sultán with his Pomp
Abode his Hour or two, and went his way.

They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshýd gloried and drank deep:
And Bahrám, that great Hunter—the Wild Ass
Stamps o'er his Head, and he lies fast asleep.

I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Cæsar bled;
That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in its Lap from some once lovely Head.

And this delightful Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River's Lip on which we lean -
Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen!

Ah! my Belovéd, fill the Cup that clears
Today of past Regrets and future Fears;
To-morrow? - Why, To-morrow I may be
Myself with Yesterday's Sev'n Thousand Years.

Lo! some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That Time and Fate of all their Vintage prest;
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to Rest.

And we, that now make merry in the Room
They left, and Summer dresses in new Bloom;
Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth
Descend, ourselves to make a Couch—for whom?

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the Dust Descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer and - sans End!

*
Read the whole thing at:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Rubaiyat_of_Omar_Khayyam_(tr._Fitzgerald,_1st_edition)

This is the second example from my recent project of understanding the Inklings - and especially their four most influential members CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield - not as a collection, average or sum of individuals, but instead as a complementary unit:
http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/the-romantic-theology-of-inklings.html

In their souls, human beings more and more come to resemble the thought, to resemble that which they regard as knowledge. This will seem a strange truth to the modern mind, but it is so, nevertheless. To see certain things in their proper light, with clarity of thought, with thoughts saturated with reality — that is vitally important.

For example; to regard Darwinism as the one and only valid conception of the world, believing the only possible truth to be that man descends from the animals  - that I descend entirely from forces which also produce the animals ... such thoughts, in our age, tend to make the soul resembles its own conceptions of itself.

When the body is discarded, the soul is then confronted with the sorry fate of having to perceive its resemblance with its own thought! A man who lives in the physical body believing that animal forces alone were at work in his evolution, fashions for himself a kind of consciousness in which he will perceive his own likeness to animal nature.

It is ordained that in times to come, what the human being considers himself to be, that he will become.

This development is part of the wise guidance of worlds, in order that the human being may attain full and free consciousness of the Self. On the one side the Gods were bound to make it possible for man to become what he makes of himself; and in order that he might imbue this self-created being with super-sensible meaning, that he might be able to find in this self-created being, something that gives him an eternal aim — in order that this might be, Christ Jesus fulfilled the Mystery of Golgotha.

*

Harmony with the Self, together with a knowledge which lets man after death be truly man, — this will arise for future times only if human beings become aware, here, in the physical body, of their true connection with the spiritual world.

Those who are afraid of concrete facts of spiritual knowledge because of their materialistic ideas will, of course, for a long time yet be unwilling to acknowledge that any such change took place - nevertheless it will have to be acknowledged sooner or later.

In order to further their aims, the Spirits of Darkness will need to attach particular value to the breeding of confusion among men so that they will not succeed in forming the right thoughts and ideas into which, after death, they are transformed.

What man thinks himself to be, that he is obliged to become... This is a truth that was destined, after the great changes in the nineteenth century and from then onwards, to find its way to men. The human being must be voluntarily anything that he can be really; he must be able to think about his own being if he is to be truly himself in his life of soul.

*

Spirits of Darkness, who oppose Man's destiny, inspired human beings to announce the following: “Man is what he eats.” And although this is not, in theory, widely acknowledged, the practical conduct of life amounts very nearly to being an acknowledgement of the principle that man is what he eats — that and nothing else.

Indeed this principle is more and more being applied and developed in external life. To a far greater extent than people believe, the grievous and tragic events of the present time are an outcome of the tenet: Man is what he eats. Humanity is already infiltrated by the principle that “man is what he eats.” And it gives rise, indirectly, to much contention.

That is why the spread of thoughts and ideas corresponding to the realities of the times is so very necessary. Thought will gradually have to be known as a concretely real power of the soul, not merely as the miserable abstraction produced so proudly by the modern age.

Men living in earlier times were still linked, by an ancient heritage, with the spiritual world. Although for many centuries now, atavistic clairvoyance has almost entirely ebbed away, this heritage still lives in the feeling and in the will. But the time has come when everything that is conscious must become a real power — hence the Spirits of Darkness strive to counter really effective thoughts by abstract thoughts in the form of all kinds of programmes for the world.

*

Thoughts must be imbued with greater and greater reality. There are still many people who say: “Oh, well, in all good time we shall discover what transpires after death; why trouble about it now? Let us attend to the requirements of life and when we reach yonder world we shall soon discover what it is.”

But if it is true that in yonder world a man becomes what he has pictured himself to be, then something else is also true. For example: A man dies, leaving relatives behind him. Although thought may not be entirely lacking in these relatives, they may be materialistically minded, and then, quite inevitably, they will think either that the dead man is decaying in the grave or that what still exists of him is preserved in the urn.

This thought is a real power; it is an untruth. When those left behind think that the dead man no longer lives, is no longer there; this thought is real and actual in the souls of those who form it. And the dead man is aware of this thought-reality, is aware of its significance for him.

It is therefore a matter of fundamental importance whether those left behind cherish in their souls the thought of The Dead living on in the spiritual world, or whether they instead succumb to the woeful idea that the dead man... well, he is dead; he lies there decaying in the grave.

**

Edited from Lecture 2 of Behind the Scenes of External Happenings - a lecture given in Zurich, 1917.
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA178/English/RSPC1947/BeScen_index.html
I would recommend these two lectures as superb examples of Steiner at his prophetic best - not an easy read, but densely-packed with profound insights and wisdom.