It was in the summer of 1978 that I first read Colin Wilson's The Outsider, borrowed from the Edinburgh City Library; and for only the second time I came across a book which addressed my condition directly and exactly (the first such book was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig, which I had read two years earlier).
I was, and am, one of those Outsiders which Wilson defined and (for a while) brought into popular parlance. His method is by following the argument through themed biographies, summaries and excerpts of those with what was then termed an existential relationship to the world.
(There are many such figures - e.g. TS Eliot, WB Yeats, Sartre, Camus, Van Gogh, Nijinsky, Lawrence of Arabia, Tolstoy, Dostoievski, Kierkegaard and many others.)
Since then I have read literally dozens of Colin Wilson's books, and browsed The Outsider frequently, but have not read it through. And indeed when I decided to re-read it a couple of weeks ago, I could not find my old Picador Paperback copy. Presumably I must have lent or given it... anyway I bought a new copy and set-to.
I was amazed at how good it was! Really superb! I would say that The Outsider is as good as anything CW ever wrote, and as good as any non-fiction I have ever read. It has a real strength and seriousness about it; a youthful vitality and incisive urgency. So much is there.
It is rather strange to realise that if I had been able or willing to give The Outsider serious consideration forty years ago, my life might have been different and better; because although it does not take the reader all the way to where I am now - it did take me to within shouting distance. Surely I could have filled in a few gaps and extrapolated where needed?
Well, I didn't - and the reason was mostly my impatience with those more religious sections of the book, which I think I skimmed over; certainly I did not given them genuine thought. Yet in The Outsider and its equally fine sequel Religion and the Rebel, Wilson was more genuinely religious than later in his life; and was especially attuned to the visionary mind, including William Blake.
As I approached the last few pages of The Outsider, I was feeling that it was a near-perfect literary-philosophical achievement; but for the last few pages and conclusion - specifically the section on the work of TE Hulme - the argument becomes convoluted and very difficult to follow; indeed Wilson does not make clear why Hulme is being included, since his expounded views seem to add nothing substantive, and instead thwart the books powerful momentum.
Perhaps it was the memory of this rather stumbling ending (after some 250 pages with hardly a mis-step) that had unjustly somewhat diminished the book in my memory?
Anyway, I would give Colin Wilson's first book the highest recommendation for anyone who feels himself to be an 'outsider'.
Sunday 4 June 2017
The zero point at which we Must have Christ to help us through
Against the background that our destiny is to become like God, we will all - sooner or later - reach a zero point from-which only Christ can transform us.
*
An analogy is adolescence. Through childhood, our self becomes more and more concentrated and detached until at a point we reach total isolation: the world becomes doubted, as being a delusion of our imagination of our own minds - and then at the zero point we feel that our own minds are a delusion too.
This zero point is one where all seems subjective, and subjectivity itself a temporary illusion.
But to grow-up we must go through this zero point...
(The zero point is very unpleasant to experience and fraught with spiritual dangers; But adolescence is a necessary step in growing up.)
How can this be done? We cannot do it ourselves.
We cannot do it ourselves because at the zero point we utterly lack resources to do it. We have been reduced to impotence - that is indeed the essence of the situation.
*
Our society is stuck at the zero point. We believe nothing is really-real and despair - and therefore we utterly lack the resources to escape this mental trap.
(But the trap is a necessary step in growing up.)
We deny in our basic assumptions the reality of any external, ordered and benign reality. So, even when we are offered help - we reject the offer as merely another delusion. In fact things are worse than this, much worse... We prefer to reject the offer of help even when we know it to be real.
We therefore respond to the trap by not-thinking about our situation as much as is possible - by distraction, intoxication, frenzied hedonism - and our ultimate hope is painless oblivion after mortal life.
When this fails we despair. And remain trapped.
For modern Man, there is nothing but Man; and at the zero point Man has been brought to nothing.
*
At the zero point we can only move forward with help - with help from something that is not ourself.
Some agency that will transform us - because we cannot transform ourselves. (It must be an agency; it must be some-thing - some being - that wants to transform us.)
This agency is Christ.
*
We might consider the transforming agent as God-within - not our human self but the immortal divine self we were born with and accompanies our 'human self' through mortal life; or we might consider it as external God, looking down with mercy upon our plight...
Either way this is Christ - because Christ was himself transformed. Christ was himself brought to point zero such that he had to be rescued and moved forward by God the Father.
(God the Father cannot himself help us through the zero point - because God has not been through the zero point: this is why Christ was necessary for human destiny to be fulfilled. By the Life, Death and Resurrection of Jesus - God was brought to-and-through the zero point.)
*
When we are helpless, we must be helped.
Yet even in the extremity of helplessness Men have agency. This is a fact of existence. Men choose.
At zero point Men choose whether or not to accept the help that Jesus Christ offers.
Because Man is always agent; help cannot be given where it is refused.
*
When we are brought to the zero point; when a society or civilisation is brought to zero point we cannot help ourselves, we can only be helped.
We will be offered effectual help: Christ will offer us the answer: He will bring us through point-zero and to the other side.
But this can only happen if we let it happen; if we agree to the reality, Goodness, love and authority of Jesus Christ.
(Christianity cannot be coerced - and I mean cannot be coerced. We can defy God - and that is the temptation of all temptations - called pride. We mortals can in fact defy the creator. He cannot compel us to acknowledge his reality, Goodness or love.)
This is not to be regarded as something like a threat, a legal condition, or a price to be paid for a privilege but instead as a simple recognition of reality and the consequence of recognition.
Christ cannot transform us if we do not agree to it; and we do not agree to it unless or until we regard Christ as real and Good - which is to acknowledge the actuality and Goodness of God's creation and its plan; and our own destiny in that creation. And if we regard Christ as loving us; that is having our own personal interests in his heart.
*
Christ can save us if we let him; but we will only let him if we know him as real and Good and loving of us, personally.
Note: The above has been stimulated by some sections of Owen Barfield's Unancestral Voice (1965)
*
An analogy is adolescence. Through childhood, our self becomes more and more concentrated and detached until at a point we reach total isolation: the world becomes doubted, as being a delusion of our imagination of our own minds - and then at the zero point we feel that our own minds are a delusion too.
This zero point is one where all seems subjective, and subjectivity itself a temporary illusion.
But to grow-up we must go through this zero point...
(The zero point is very unpleasant to experience and fraught with spiritual dangers; But adolescence is a necessary step in growing up.)
How can this be done? We cannot do it ourselves.
We cannot do it ourselves because at the zero point we utterly lack resources to do it. We have been reduced to impotence - that is indeed the essence of the situation.
*
Our society is stuck at the zero point. We believe nothing is really-real and despair - and therefore we utterly lack the resources to escape this mental trap.
(But the trap is a necessary step in growing up.)
We deny in our basic assumptions the reality of any external, ordered and benign reality. So, even when we are offered help - we reject the offer as merely another delusion. In fact things are worse than this, much worse... We prefer to reject the offer of help even when we know it to be real.
We therefore respond to the trap by not-thinking about our situation as much as is possible - by distraction, intoxication, frenzied hedonism - and our ultimate hope is painless oblivion after mortal life.
When this fails we despair. And remain trapped.
For modern Man, there is nothing but Man; and at the zero point Man has been brought to nothing.
*
At the zero point we can only move forward with help - with help from something that is not ourself.
Some agency that will transform us - because we cannot transform ourselves. (It must be an agency; it must be some-thing - some being - that wants to transform us.)
This agency is Christ.
*
We might consider the transforming agent as God-within - not our human self but the immortal divine self we were born with and accompanies our 'human self' through mortal life; or we might consider it as external God, looking down with mercy upon our plight...
Either way this is Christ - because Christ was himself transformed. Christ was himself brought to point zero such that he had to be rescued and moved forward by God the Father.
(God the Father cannot himself help us through the zero point - because God has not been through the zero point: this is why Christ was necessary for human destiny to be fulfilled. By the Life, Death and Resurrection of Jesus - God was brought to-and-through the zero point.)
*
When we are helpless, we must be helped.
Yet even in the extremity of helplessness Men have agency. This is a fact of existence. Men choose.
At zero point Men choose whether or not to accept the help that Jesus Christ offers.
Because Man is always agent; help cannot be given where it is refused.
*
When we are brought to the zero point; when a society or civilisation is brought to zero point we cannot help ourselves, we can only be helped.
We will be offered effectual help: Christ will offer us the answer: He will bring us through point-zero and to the other side.
But this can only happen if we let it happen; if we agree to the reality, Goodness, love and authority of Jesus Christ.
(Christianity cannot be coerced - and I mean cannot be coerced. We can defy God - and that is the temptation of all temptations - called pride. We mortals can in fact defy the creator. He cannot compel us to acknowledge his reality, Goodness or love.)
This is not to be regarded as something like a threat, a legal condition, or a price to be paid for a privilege but instead as a simple recognition of reality and the consequence of recognition.
Christ cannot transform us if we do not agree to it; and we do not agree to it unless or until we regard Christ as real and Good - which is to acknowledge the actuality and Goodness of God's creation and its plan; and our own destiny in that creation. And if we regard Christ as loving us; that is having our own personal interests in his heart.
*
Christ can save us if we let him; but we will only let him if we know him as real and Good and loving of us, personally.
Note: The above has been stimulated by some sections of Owen Barfield's Unancestral Voice (1965)
Saturday 3 June 2017
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom… If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise (in relation to the example of Richard Dawkins)
These two aphorisms from William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell...
http://www.levity.com/alchemy/blake_ma.html
....combine to elucidate something I have, in my own life, found to be a profound truth - Blake's is a profound insight into the path to truth. The aphorisms also explain why so many people so often get stuck in falsehood: stuck for all of their lives.
Error is self-correcting IF we stick by it honestly, and follow it through to conclusion.
Being wrong is not a spiritual disaster - it is dishonesty which is the disaster: it is living by expedient lies which leads to Hell. Because expedient lies prevent us from recognising error.
This created world has ultimate coherence, since it is the product of one God. Therefore, all error will reveal itself in incoherence.
(Of course, coherence is Not the same as logic; since logic, like mathematics - or which it may be the parent - is a partial model of reality; and logical coherence therefore leaves out most of reality.)
Some people with a reputation for blunt honesty are nothing of the sort! - they wriggle and writhe in the face of the conclusions of their assumptions.
A couple of decades ago I used to admire and defend Richard Dawkins - mainly because I considered he was unsually honest; because he was clear and blunt in expression and unafraid of contradicting people to their faces. But I gradually realised that, on the contrary, he was evasive and expedient in his reasoning.
Dawkins is a good example of one who refused to follow his path of excess to the palace of wisdom; because he was not even aiming at wisdom; he refused to persist in his folly, hence he remained a fool rather than becoming wise.
Two examples. The book Unweaving the Rainbow (1998) was an exercise in distraction, a non sequitur in response to the century-plus of observations that If natural selection were indeed regarded the ultimate truth, Then art, poetry, morality, science (including natural selection) and much else are invalidated.
(This is a fact; because all our feelings, indeed all our knowledge is revealed by the assumption as merely the side effects of adaptations to enhance reproductive success. For example, if natural selection is primary; the theory of natural selection destroys its own validity; all scientific theories being merely side-effects of the process of enhancing differential reproductive fitness.)
Somewhat later (but a couple of years before I was a Christian) I met Dawkins at a dinner party, and asked him - as, I intended, a preliminary to a deeper discussion, why the USA was both by far the leading scientific nation in the world and also by far the most Christianly-religious of the developed nations?
Dawkins's reaction made clear that this paradox had not occurred to him - and he did not have an answer ready.
But instead of noting the apparent contradiction and exploring it as possible evidence of an error in his oft asserted assumption that Christianity was intrinsically and necessarily anti-scientific; Dawkins visibly shook-off the potential discussion with the irrelevant comment that it was not the most Christian people who were the actual scientists. Then having dismissed the matter, he turned and walked away to terminate the discussion - leaving me standing and more-or-less gaping! - which had not gone further than a few sentences. After just a few steps Dawkins looked as if he had already forgotten the whole thing.
Dawkins's folly is to believe that natural selection is the primary reality. I know exactly what this feels like, because I have believed this too. Indeed, I have believed this probably considerably more deeply and comprehensively than Dawkins (reaching its peak in the appendix to my 2003 book The Modernization Imperative).
But I persisted in my folly - and kept coming up against paradoxes and contradictions. My excessive devotion to this particular simplification therefore led me towards the palace of wisdom, because I was honest enough that I would not be satisfied with irrelevant pseudo explanations.
If I have any virtue in a higher than usual degree it probably is exactly this - that I persist in my folly, with honesty, until its falsehood becomes evident and unavoidable; and then I abandon it.
I have, indeed, adhered to most of the starkest follies of modernity over my life; and my life has therefore been a process of adopting then exploring folly before abandoning it. This continues - however, the follies are probably less 'excessive' these days; since after becoming a Christian I perceived the starkest insanities and evils of mainstream modern secularism.
But mainstream modern secularism is foolish in the extreme, and yet at the same time avoids learning from its folly; because it is dishonest.
Modern media/ bureacratic culture is systematically and pervasively dishonest - dishonest in public, dishonest in private, dishonest with itself. (This is sufficient evidence of its demonic origin, since such thoroughgoing and peristing dishonesty must be purposive; and only supernatural purpose could span generations.) No folly of modernity is too extreme to escape the correction of even common sense and direct experience (for example, the current official and coercively-imposed belief that being a man or woman is - in actual practice - a reversible state).
This is why dishonesty dismays me far more than error. An honest fool will sooner or later become wise - indeed in essentials he already is wise, as such things are measured in mortal life.
By contrast; a dishonest man is a fool; no matter how great his knowledge, skill, status, wealth or power - and as such he is self-damned with a certainty that is sure, for as long as his dishonesty persists.
There is no cure for the dishonest soul.
http://www.levity.com/alchemy/blake_ma.html
....combine to elucidate something I have, in my own life, found to be a profound truth - Blake's is a profound insight into the path to truth. The aphorisms also explain why so many people so often get stuck in falsehood: stuck for all of their lives.
Error is self-correcting IF we stick by it honestly, and follow it through to conclusion.
Being wrong is not a spiritual disaster - it is dishonesty which is the disaster: it is living by expedient lies which leads to Hell. Because expedient lies prevent us from recognising error.
This created world has ultimate coherence, since it is the product of one God. Therefore, all error will reveal itself in incoherence.
(Of course, coherence is Not the same as logic; since logic, like mathematics - or which it may be the parent - is a partial model of reality; and logical coherence therefore leaves out most of reality.)
Some people with a reputation for blunt honesty are nothing of the sort! - they wriggle and writhe in the face of the conclusions of their assumptions.
A couple of decades ago I used to admire and defend Richard Dawkins - mainly because I considered he was unsually honest; because he was clear and blunt in expression and unafraid of contradicting people to their faces. But I gradually realised that, on the contrary, he was evasive and expedient in his reasoning.
Dawkins is a good example of one who refused to follow his path of excess to the palace of wisdom; because he was not even aiming at wisdom; he refused to persist in his folly, hence he remained a fool rather than becoming wise.
Two examples. The book Unweaving the Rainbow (1998) was an exercise in distraction, a non sequitur in response to the century-plus of observations that If natural selection were indeed regarded the ultimate truth, Then art, poetry, morality, science (including natural selection) and much else are invalidated.
(This is a fact; because all our feelings, indeed all our knowledge is revealed by the assumption as merely the side effects of adaptations to enhance reproductive success. For example, if natural selection is primary; the theory of natural selection destroys its own validity; all scientific theories being merely side-effects of the process of enhancing differential reproductive fitness.)
Somewhat later (but a couple of years before I was a Christian) I met Dawkins at a dinner party, and asked him - as, I intended, a preliminary to a deeper discussion, why the USA was both by far the leading scientific nation in the world and also by far the most Christianly-religious of the developed nations?
Dawkins's reaction made clear that this paradox had not occurred to him - and he did not have an answer ready.
But instead of noting the apparent contradiction and exploring it as possible evidence of an error in his oft asserted assumption that Christianity was intrinsically and necessarily anti-scientific; Dawkins visibly shook-off the potential discussion with the irrelevant comment that it was not the most Christian people who were the actual scientists. Then having dismissed the matter, he turned and walked away to terminate the discussion - leaving me standing and more-or-less gaping! - which had not gone further than a few sentences. After just a few steps Dawkins looked as if he had already forgotten the whole thing.
Dawkins's folly is to believe that natural selection is the primary reality. I know exactly what this feels like, because I have believed this too. Indeed, I have believed this probably considerably more deeply and comprehensively than Dawkins (reaching its peak in the appendix to my 2003 book The Modernization Imperative).
But I persisted in my folly - and kept coming up against paradoxes and contradictions. My excessive devotion to this particular simplification therefore led me towards the palace of wisdom, because I was honest enough that I would not be satisfied with irrelevant pseudo explanations.
If I have any virtue in a higher than usual degree it probably is exactly this - that I persist in my folly, with honesty, until its falsehood becomes evident and unavoidable; and then I abandon it.
I have, indeed, adhered to most of the starkest follies of modernity over my life; and my life has therefore been a process of adopting then exploring folly before abandoning it. This continues - however, the follies are probably less 'excessive' these days; since after becoming a Christian I perceived the starkest insanities and evils of mainstream modern secularism.
But mainstream modern secularism is foolish in the extreme, and yet at the same time avoids learning from its folly; because it is dishonest.
Modern media/ bureacratic culture is systematically and pervasively dishonest - dishonest in public, dishonest in private, dishonest with itself. (This is sufficient evidence of its demonic origin, since such thoroughgoing and peristing dishonesty must be purposive; and only supernatural purpose could span generations.) No folly of modernity is too extreme to escape the correction of even common sense and direct experience (for example, the current official and coercively-imposed belief that being a man or woman is - in actual practice - a reversible state).
This is why dishonesty dismays me far more than error. An honest fool will sooner or later become wise - indeed in essentials he already is wise, as such things are measured in mortal life.
By contrast; a dishonest man is a fool; no matter how great his knowledge, skill, status, wealth or power - and as such he is self-damned with a certainty that is sure, for as long as his dishonesty persists.
There is no cure for the dishonest soul.
Friday 2 June 2017
Joseph was not merely the adoptive Father of Jesus
The meaning of the fact that Jesus Christ was both Man and God has proved very difficult to elucidate - despite that it is true. Clearly, the fact does not fit our normal categories of explanation.
I'm not about to solve this mystery; but one aspect has become clearer to me as a consequence of reading Owen Barfield's elusive but inspired 1958 essay The Son of God and the Son of Man. What follows is my thoughts triggered by the essay and not a summary of Barfield's conclusions.
The parentage of Christ can be considered in two ways: Jesus is a direct Son of God due to God his Heavenly Father and his Mother the Virgin Mary; Jesus is also the Son of Man by his lineage from Abraham in particular - and ultimately Adam - and this descends to him by his Mortal Father, Joseph.
Joseph is asserted to be the true King of the Jews, by his lineage from David - and Jesus inherits this 'right' from Joseph - but this is not merely a legal claim but also a divine fact. Joseph is therefore more than just the husband of Mary, but in a mystical (not genetic) sense is also and vitally Jesus's true Father.
In other words, both of Jesus's mortal parents (not just his mother) were necessary to the fullness of his nature.
I think this is most clearly seen in the genealogies at the beginning of Matthew's Gospel and Chapter 3 of Luke's Gospel. These lineages are not identical - but my point here is that they are present in the Gospels and that they culminate in Joseph.
So - we must not be misled by our modern reductionism to suppose that if Jesus was not genetically related to Joseph, then he was not related at all; thus Jesus was Joseph's true Son.
Why is this important? Well, I think it relates to the historical placement of Jesus - to the fact that he was born where and when he was; and to the fact that he was a Jew with a valid and divine claim to the Kingship of that people.
It seems to have been necessary that Jesus's lineage was on Mary's side direct in its link with God - he was the direct Son: the Son of God; and at the same time he was also, on Joseph's side an indirect and lineal, multigenerational one: the Son of Man.
This is Christ in his simultaneously Cosmic and Historical aspects - and it seems that both were and are necessary.
I'm not about to solve this mystery; but one aspect has become clearer to me as a consequence of reading Owen Barfield's elusive but inspired 1958 essay The Son of God and the Son of Man. What follows is my thoughts triggered by the essay and not a summary of Barfield's conclusions.
The parentage of Christ can be considered in two ways: Jesus is a direct Son of God due to God his Heavenly Father and his Mother the Virgin Mary; Jesus is also the Son of Man by his lineage from Abraham in particular - and ultimately Adam - and this descends to him by his Mortal Father, Joseph.
Joseph is asserted to be the true King of the Jews, by his lineage from David - and Jesus inherits this 'right' from Joseph - but this is not merely a legal claim but also a divine fact. Joseph is therefore more than just the husband of Mary, but in a mystical (not genetic) sense is also and vitally Jesus's true Father.
In other words, both of Jesus's mortal parents (not just his mother) were necessary to the fullness of his nature.
I think this is most clearly seen in the genealogies at the beginning of Matthew's Gospel and Chapter 3 of Luke's Gospel. These lineages are not identical - but my point here is that they are present in the Gospels and that they culminate in Joseph.
So - we must not be misled by our modern reductionism to suppose that if Jesus was not genetically related to Joseph, then he was not related at all; thus Jesus was Joseph's true Son.
Why is this important? Well, I think it relates to the historical placement of Jesus - to the fact that he was born where and when he was; and to the fact that he was a Jew with a valid and divine claim to the Kingship of that people.
It seems to have been necessary that Jesus's lineage was on Mary's side direct in its link with God - he was the direct Son: the Son of God; and at the same time he was also, on Joseph's side an indirect and lineal, multigenerational one: the Son of Man.
This is Christ in his simultaneously Cosmic and Historical aspects - and it seems that both were and are necessary.
The spiritual consequences of 'Same Sex Marriage' - by William Wildblood
William Wildblood brings his usual calm, comprehensive and loving perspective to bear upon this vital theme. One of the most insightful pieces I have read on the subject:
http://meetingthemasters.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/same-sex-marriage.html
http://meetingthemasters.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/same-sex-marriage.html
Sacred Measurement
In which John Michell explains why feet and inches, pints and gallons, pounds and ounces are divine in origin - whereas metres, litres and grams are the devil's work...
http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/the-sacred-measures-of-albion.html
I got the idea for posting this from a similarly-themed post by Brett Stephens:
http://www.amerika.org/politics/there-is-nothing-wrong-with-hating-the-metric-system/
http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/the-sacred-measures-of-albion.html
I got the idea for posting this from a similarly-themed post by Brett Stephens:
http://www.amerika.org/politics/there-is-nothing-wrong-with-hating-the-metric-system/
Thursday 1 June 2017
Atheists don't understand sin...
So there is no point in discussing the subject.
Christian sin is a concept relating to the reality of God and his plan of salvation. Normal, mainstream, secular people deny this framework; hence they equate sin with illegal, and assume that sin implies some kind of physical punishment.
Such a misunderstanding is inevitable - if you don't believe that God is real, then naturally all morality must be secular, hence ultimately legalistic.
But it is an easy trap to engage in talking at cross purposes. Therefore, if a secular person asks 'do you/ Christians regard X as a sin?' - then you need to ask-back: 'What do you mean by 'sin' and what are its implications for you?'
Only then can you give an answer. There is no point in saying 'Yes! I/ we regard X as a sin' if that statement is absolutely certain to be misunderstood.
The only possibility for going further than such a denial is when there is a genuine interest from the other party in understanding what is meant by sin; and such a conversation would take at least several minutes of exposition and clarification. Most people can't be bothered; indeed they prefer to misunderstand.
The interesting thing is that - by the above test - 'liberal Christians' (e.g. the type who make a point of advertising the Diversity of their churches, or who make a point of apologising for past bad behaviour .. not by themselves, but of their predecessors); such types also fail to understand the nature of sin - in this respect they are just as ignorant as mainstream atheists; however much they dress-up their ignorance in Christian terminology.
(Which should, itself, be enough to remove any lingering doubts you may have gullibly entertained regarding their Christian falseness and fakery.)
Christian sin is a concept relating to the reality of God and his plan of salvation. Normal, mainstream, secular people deny this framework; hence they equate sin with illegal, and assume that sin implies some kind of physical punishment.
Such a misunderstanding is inevitable - if you don't believe that God is real, then naturally all morality must be secular, hence ultimately legalistic.
But it is an easy trap to engage in talking at cross purposes. Therefore, if a secular person asks 'do you/ Christians regard X as a sin?' - then you need to ask-back: 'What do you mean by 'sin' and what are its implications for you?'
Only then can you give an answer. There is no point in saying 'Yes! I/ we regard X as a sin' if that statement is absolutely certain to be misunderstood.
The only possibility for going further than such a denial is when there is a genuine interest from the other party in understanding what is meant by sin; and such a conversation would take at least several minutes of exposition and clarification. Most people can't be bothered; indeed they prefer to misunderstand.
The interesting thing is that - by the above test - 'liberal Christians' (e.g. the type who make a point of advertising the Diversity of their churches, or who make a point of apologising for past bad behaviour .. not by themselves, but of their predecessors); such types also fail to understand the nature of sin - in this respect they are just as ignorant as mainstream atheists; however much they dress-up their ignorance in Christian terminology.
(Which should, itself, be enough to remove any lingering doubts you may have gullibly entertained regarding their Christian falseness and fakery.)
Wednesday 31 May 2017
The experience of living under destiny
Through our weakness, as well as strength - failures sometimes more than success - being brought-low as often, or more than, raised-above...
Systole-Diastole: not just energy but passivity - time for filling-up...
Pain as well as euphoria. Wasting time as well as efficiency. Dependence as well as productive. Being-helped as much as helping.
Systole-Diastole: not just energy but passivity - time for filling-up...
Pain as well as euphoria. Wasting time as well as efficiency. Dependence as well as productive. Being-helped as much as helping.
A perspective of the symbolism of Ariana Grande - from the Rev Dr Peter Mullen
Ariana Grande-Filth - By Peter Mullen
The pop-star who performed at the event in Manchester at which 22 members of the audience were murdered by a Muslim terrorist is to appear on Sunday 4th June in a “benefit concert” for victims of the atrocity. Ariana is clearly very popular and I wanted to discover the secret of her appeal, so I looked at her website where I found the words of some of her songs and a few sample video films of her act.
In the first of these films Ariana, in a state of sexy semi-undress and suffused in soft lighting, sprawls provocatively on a bed, caressing her arms, and then simulates sexual coitus while she sings:
“Tell me something, I need to know
Then take my breath and never let it go
If you just let me invade your space
I'll take the pleasure, take away the pain
“And if in the moment I bite my lip
Baby, in that moment, you'll know this
Is something bigger than us and beyond bliss
Give me a reason to believe it
“'Cause if you want to keep me, you gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta got to love me harder
And if you really need me, you gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta got to love me harder
Gotta love me harder
Love me, love me, love me
Harder, harder, harder..”
I can’t think why I bothered to explore any further - perhaps I hoped to find that she is capable of singing about something other than sex? It’s not as if I imagined that on another recording she might give us Mozart’s Ave verum or even I did it my way. And indeed she didn’t. Instead she offered us:
“I'm talkin' to ya
See you standing over there with your body
Feeling like I wanna rock with your body
And we don't gotta think 'bout nothin' ('Bout nothin')
I'm comin' at ya
'Cause I know you got a bad reputation
Doesn't matter, 'cause you give me temptation
And we don't gotta think 'bout nothin' ('Bout nothin')”
I persevered for about an hour but there was little variation so, surfeited and sickened, I gave up and went away to think about it all. Two thoughts impressed themselves.
First, I wondered whether we do actually have a problem with paedophilia in this country. Of course we do. This crime is reported in the papers every day and, if the TV documentaries are anything to go by, it’s endemic in our institutions: the church, social work, schools, children’s care homes and so on. And I recalled that many of Ariana’s fans are preteens; indeed the youngest victim in the Manchester slaughter was just eight. I wondered, are we really going in for joined up thinking here – to abhor paedophilia and yet to celebrate performers such as Ariana?
Secondly, and in the light of the fact that the perpetrator of the Manchester attack was a jihadist, I wondered whether there is not, after all, something in the claim of Muslims that western society and culture are decadent.
We can do without suicide bombers. And we can do without the poisoning and corrupting of children’s minds and emotions by the sort of filth being offered by such as Ariana. Do we not care for the mental and emotional health of our children? She gave one concert and now she has been invited to repeat the dose, and on a much larger scale. Have we no shame?
“The dog returns to its vomit” (Proverbs 26:11).
Peter Mullen's Blog is All Things Considered
www.revpetermullen.com
The pop-star who performed at the event in Manchester at which 22 members of the audience were murdered by a Muslim terrorist is to appear on Sunday 4th June in a “benefit concert” for victims of the atrocity. Ariana is clearly very popular and I wanted to discover the secret of her appeal, so I looked at her website where I found the words of some of her songs and a few sample video films of her act.
In the first of these films Ariana, in a state of sexy semi-undress and suffused in soft lighting, sprawls provocatively on a bed, caressing her arms, and then simulates sexual coitus while she sings:
“Tell me something, I need to know
Then take my breath and never let it go
If you just let me invade your space
I'll take the pleasure, take away the pain
“And if in the moment I bite my lip
Baby, in that moment, you'll know this
Is something bigger than us and beyond bliss
Give me a reason to believe it
“'Cause if you want to keep me, you gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta got to love me harder
And if you really need me, you gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta got to love me harder
Gotta love me harder
Love me, love me, love me
Harder, harder, harder..”
I can’t think why I bothered to explore any further - perhaps I hoped to find that she is capable of singing about something other than sex? It’s not as if I imagined that on another recording she might give us Mozart’s Ave verum or even I did it my way. And indeed she didn’t. Instead she offered us:
“I'm talkin' to ya
See you standing over there with your body
Feeling like I wanna rock with your body
And we don't gotta think 'bout nothin' ('Bout nothin')
I'm comin' at ya
'Cause I know you got a bad reputation
Doesn't matter, 'cause you give me temptation
And we don't gotta think 'bout nothin' ('Bout nothin')”
I persevered for about an hour but there was little variation so, surfeited and sickened, I gave up and went away to think about it all. Two thoughts impressed themselves.
First, I wondered whether we do actually have a problem with paedophilia in this country. Of course we do. This crime is reported in the papers every day and, if the TV documentaries are anything to go by, it’s endemic in our institutions: the church, social work, schools, children’s care homes and so on. And I recalled that many of Ariana’s fans are preteens; indeed the youngest victim in the Manchester slaughter was just eight. I wondered, are we really going in for joined up thinking here – to abhor paedophilia and yet to celebrate performers such as Ariana?
Secondly, and in the light of the fact that the perpetrator of the Manchester attack was a jihadist, I wondered whether there is not, after all, something in the claim of Muslims that western society and culture are decadent.
We can do without suicide bombers. And we can do without the poisoning and corrupting of children’s minds and emotions by the sort of filth being offered by such as Ariana. Do we not care for the mental and emotional health of our children? She gave one concert and now she has been invited to repeat the dose, and on a much larger scale. Have we no shame?
“The dog returns to its vomit” (Proverbs 26:11).
Peter Mullen's Blog is All Things Considered
www.revpetermullen.com
Tuesday 30 May 2017
Here and Now we must turn-aside from politics, economics, society and sexuality - and as first priority sort-out our cowardly, despairing anti-spirituality
Men have been on the wrong track, hijacked and diverted, for many generations - probably about 200 years. Instead of pursuing the development of human consciousness and thinking, as was our destiny; we have (I mean in The West - where the change was intended to begin) been diverted into focusing on (in approximate order) politics, economics, society and sexuality.
We have had spiritual impulses, but at the social level these have been corrupted into evil. Impulses for freedom, for self-development, for agency; for a recognition of all Men as spiritual siblings and gods-in-embryo (because children of God) and of Life as based in universal consciousness...
All such have been taken and twisted by the great evil strategy of 'Leftism' (led, invisibly, by immortal demonic powers) - into pacifism, abolitionism, anti-clericalism and anti-Christianity, the class warfares of Marxism and socialism and communism, ecology and Green politics, feminism, antiracism and diversity, and the multifaceted sunversions and inversions of the revolution in sex and sexuality.
Indeed the phenomenon occurs with a sickening predictability! As soon as there is some kind of spiritual impulse that contains some kind of good; it is rapidly and near-completely diverted into some kind of programme - some scheme or plan - for externally changing society, for changing people... a law, regulation, system, blueprint, flow chart... nowadays typically into ultra-surveillance and micro-management.
As we look-around, here and now, we perceive a world of mass media and bureaucracy and leisure, in which the whole thing has been pretty much sewn-up. Attention is relentlessly fixed externally onto political, economic, social and sexual affairs.
Our capacity to think is blocked - apparently almost completely, and with just a few cracks remaining in the system through which experience and contemplation may, at rare times, penetrate.
THIS is why we must now, and for a while, stop ourselves from focusing our minds onto the 'problems' of our society - the problems of politics, economics, society and sexuality. Turn aside, turn inward.
Yet people are trapped, have been trapped. Our present attitudes will lead to defeat - that really ought to be clear by now! So we must change our deepest perceptions and understanding of the world. And if we must change the deepest pre-conceptions; then we must disengage to do this. And must means must - if we do not disengage and work on primary things we are doomed for sure and certain.
We cannot 'wait until things are sorted-out' and we have breathing space; we cannot first engage in practical problem-solving (about, say, the economy, immigration, evil laws) and then move on to spiritual matters. We cannot do this because we are already too deeply corrupted and demotivated to do any constructive work. A corrupt and cowardly population cannot 'fix' things - by meddling they will instead make them worse.
But because matters are worsening all the time, we fear to set-aside worldly concerns and focus on the spirit. We are afraid to let the forces of evil proceed unopposed - even though all that opposition can achieve is a minuscule slowing of the rate of corruption; yet we are afraid even to allow this, for fear that things may go too far, too fast...
Well, the fact is that we are not stopping the corruption, therefore the longer we delay - the further things will go. And yet the ultimate problem is not really things going too far, but the corruption of the population (by totalitarianism) to the point that we cease to be aware of the problem.
In other words, the primary problem is not the severity of corruption, but its invisibility. Any degree of corruption can be reversed where there is will and courage; but corruption continues to proceed when it is unperceived or the population are cowards; and, anyway, have no idea how to improve things because we are enslaved to evil, demonic metaphysical assumptions and perceptions, that drain us of common sense, virtue and courage.
There is no realistic alternative to turning aside from all those material problems that constitute the entire focus of the mass system of media, propaganda, laws and regulations - turn aside to focus instead upon our own deepest thinking and assuming.
Yes, things will indeed decline faster when we do this - that is the price we must pay for several generations of neglect and counter-productive activity. The process of spiritual recovery may be faster than we fear - if we are thorough and energetic about it: days rather than months, perhaps...
But however long it takes, we must do it anyway: because must is must. And soon. Or else will will cease to recognise that it must be done; and then it won't.
NOTE: By synchronicity; William Wildblood is saying much the same as the above in his post today:
meetingthemasters.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/liberalism-is-materialised-spirituality.html
We have had spiritual impulses, but at the social level these have been corrupted into evil. Impulses for freedom, for self-development, for agency; for a recognition of all Men as spiritual siblings and gods-in-embryo (because children of God) and of Life as based in universal consciousness...
All such have been taken and twisted by the great evil strategy of 'Leftism' (led, invisibly, by immortal demonic powers) - into pacifism, abolitionism, anti-clericalism and anti-Christianity, the class warfares of Marxism and socialism and communism, ecology and Green politics, feminism, antiracism and diversity, and the multifaceted sunversions and inversions of the revolution in sex and sexuality.
Indeed the phenomenon occurs with a sickening predictability! As soon as there is some kind of spiritual impulse that contains some kind of good; it is rapidly and near-completely diverted into some kind of programme - some scheme or plan - for externally changing society, for changing people... a law, regulation, system, blueprint, flow chart... nowadays typically into ultra-surveillance and micro-management.
As we look-around, here and now, we perceive a world of mass media and bureaucracy and leisure, in which the whole thing has been pretty much sewn-up. Attention is relentlessly fixed externally onto political, economic, social and sexual affairs.
Our capacity to think is blocked - apparently almost completely, and with just a few cracks remaining in the system through which experience and contemplation may, at rare times, penetrate.
THIS is why we must now, and for a while, stop ourselves from focusing our minds onto the 'problems' of our society - the problems of politics, economics, society and sexuality. Turn aside, turn inward.
Yet people are trapped, have been trapped. Our present attitudes will lead to defeat - that really ought to be clear by now! So we must change our deepest perceptions and understanding of the world. And if we must change the deepest pre-conceptions; then we must disengage to do this. And must means must - if we do not disengage and work on primary things we are doomed for sure and certain.
We cannot 'wait until things are sorted-out' and we have breathing space; we cannot first engage in practical problem-solving (about, say, the economy, immigration, evil laws) and then move on to spiritual matters. We cannot do this because we are already too deeply corrupted and demotivated to do any constructive work. A corrupt and cowardly population cannot 'fix' things - by meddling they will instead make them worse.
But because matters are worsening all the time, we fear to set-aside worldly concerns and focus on the spirit. We are afraid to let the forces of evil proceed unopposed - even though all that opposition can achieve is a minuscule slowing of the rate of corruption; yet we are afraid even to allow this, for fear that things may go too far, too fast...
Well, the fact is that we are not stopping the corruption, therefore the longer we delay - the further things will go. And yet the ultimate problem is not really things going too far, but the corruption of the population (by totalitarianism) to the point that we cease to be aware of the problem.
In other words, the primary problem is not the severity of corruption, but its invisibility. Any degree of corruption can be reversed where there is will and courage; but corruption continues to proceed when it is unperceived or the population are cowards; and, anyway, have no idea how to improve things because we are enslaved to evil, demonic metaphysical assumptions and perceptions, that drain us of common sense, virtue and courage.
There is no realistic alternative to turning aside from all those material problems that constitute the entire focus of the mass system of media, propaganda, laws and regulations - turn aside to focus instead upon our own deepest thinking and assuming.
Yes, things will indeed decline faster when we do this - that is the price we must pay for several generations of neglect and counter-productive activity. The process of spiritual recovery may be faster than we fear - if we are thorough and energetic about it: days rather than months, perhaps...
But however long it takes, we must do it anyway: because must is must. And soon. Or else will will cease to recognise that it must be done; and then it won't.
NOTE: By synchronicity; William Wildblood is saying much the same as the above in his post today:
meetingthemasters.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/liberalism-is-materialised-spirituality.html
Monday 29 May 2017
I'm on the Home Page of the Owen Barfield Literary Estate website
I'm feeling highly honoured that the new Home Page of the Owen Barfield Literary Estate web pages includes my summary of the core of Barfield's 'message':
www.owenbarfield.org
Our destiny is to become both conscious and free
Barfield was writing for everybody and for all time — his core concern was nothing less than the divine destiny of each individual person and of all people collectively.
Barfield's immediate relevance is profound; it is to solve the core problem of modern times - which is 'alienation': i.e. the deep sense of meaninglessness, purposelessness, and isolation from people and things.
The understanding which makes this possible is that history, the present and the future can be understood as aiming at both consciousness and freedom (where consciousness means awareness of our thinking and ourselves, and freedom refers to free will, or human agency).
Barfield's scheme is that humans began as conscious-but-not-free; and we evolved — evolved in the sense of changing by unfolding according to a (divine) developmental plan — to become free but not conscious (which is where we are now, in modern times — unaware of meaning, purpose, relation) — and we ought to be aiming at the condition where we are both self-aware and fully-conscious. Engaged with (and participating in) reality as free agents.
Even more briefly, humanity began as conscious, became free; and is destined to become both — simultaneously.
Barfield proposes real, coherent, and clear answers to the most fundamental problems.
— Courtesy of Bruce Charlton
www.owenbarfield.org
Owen Barfield (1898–1997)
Our destiny is to become both conscious and free
Barfield was writing for everybody and for all time — his core concern was nothing less than the divine destiny of each individual person and of all people collectively.
Barfield's immediate relevance is profound; it is to solve the core problem of modern times - which is 'alienation': i.e. the deep sense of meaninglessness, purposelessness, and isolation from people and things.
The understanding which makes this possible is that history, the present and the future can be understood as aiming at both consciousness and freedom (where consciousness means awareness of our thinking and ourselves, and freedom refers to free will, or human agency).
Barfield's scheme is that humans began as conscious-but-not-free; and we evolved — evolved in the sense of changing by unfolding according to a (divine) developmental plan — to become free but not conscious (which is where we are now, in modern times — unaware of meaning, purpose, relation) — and we ought to be aiming at the condition where we are both self-aware and fully-conscious. Engaged with (and participating in) reality as free agents.
Even more briefly, humanity began as conscious, became free; and is destined to become both — simultaneously.
Barfield proposes real, coherent, and clear answers to the most fundamental problems.
— Courtesy of Bruce Charlton
Freedom is good (if properly defined)
There aren't many people who sincerely value freedom.
The Left say they want sexual freedom; but what they really want is to shut-down dissent against their program of moral inversion; and many religious traditionalists regard demands for freedom as the battering-ram of apostasy and atheism.
Libertarians do value freedom as primary, but freedom is a means not an end, so liberty-first leaves matters open as to aims; and anyway libertarians are either powerless theoreticians or else they sell-out, first opportunity.
But there is a sense in which freedom really is Man's destiny within Christianity. Properly understood, freedom is agency - which is the real and divine 'self' thinking. To be free is to think from-and-with the divine part of ourselves.
Why? Because only the divine can be free - only the divine can be an 'uncaused cause' - to put it the other way, it is characteristic of the divine that it can think from itself; think not merely as a fixed or 'programmed' process, nor a passive consequence of inputs.
So freedom is divine and it is active - but it can also be seen that freedom is primarily in the realm of thinking; because, as is obvious, what we actually do is constrained by circumstances.
Whether freedom, in this sense, counts as important depends on how important thinking is - and that in turn depends on metaphysical assumptions. Most people's metaphysical assumptions are that thinking is secondary, optional, contingent, dependent on the brain and private to it... and so forth.
My understanding and assumption is that thinking - by which I mean exactly this kind of divine, free and agent thinking - is objective as well as subjective universal as well as private...
Therefore freedom is a part of the process of divinisation, or theosis - by which each Man becomes more god-like.
That's how important freedom is.
The Left say they want sexual freedom; but what they really want is to shut-down dissent against their program of moral inversion; and many religious traditionalists regard demands for freedom as the battering-ram of apostasy and atheism.
Libertarians do value freedom as primary, but freedom is a means not an end, so liberty-first leaves matters open as to aims; and anyway libertarians are either powerless theoreticians or else they sell-out, first opportunity.
But there is a sense in which freedom really is Man's destiny within Christianity. Properly understood, freedom is agency - which is the real and divine 'self' thinking. To be free is to think from-and-with the divine part of ourselves.
Why? Because only the divine can be free - only the divine can be an 'uncaused cause' - to put it the other way, it is characteristic of the divine that it can think from itself; think not merely as a fixed or 'programmed' process, nor a passive consequence of inputs.
So freedom is divine and it is active - but it can also be seen that freedom is primarily in the realm of thinking; because, as is obvious, what we actually do is constrained by circumstances.
Whether freedom, in this sense, counts as important depends on how important thinking is - and that in turn depends on metaphysical assumptions. Most people's metaphysical assumptions are that thinking is secondary, optional, contingent, dependent on the brain and private to it... and so forth.
My understanding and assumption is that thinking - by which I mean exactly this kind of divine, free and agent thinking - is objective as well as subjective universal as well as private...
Therefore freedom is a part of the process of divinisation, or theosis - by which each Man becomes more god-like.
That's how important freedom is.
Sunday 28 May 2017
Ripeness is all - childhood in the West Country
And the prevailing memory is of lushness, green-ness - and especially in late spring and early summer when things were freshest and growing fastest.
As I walked to and from the local Primary School - which I attended from age 5-11 - the hedgerows would change and at some times grow as if to push us off the narrow footpath and onto the road.
The plant that seemed most evident was a plant that we called Meadowsweet (others call it Hedge Parsely) - which grew tall above my head and had a heavy scent that was almost suffocating - at times I felt as if being overpowered with a soporific gas.
Smells were, indeed, almost too strong - the sharp smell of nettles ('stingers' we called them) was evidence of nastiness - and this smell grew stronger when we attacked the plants, scything them down with long sticks. (Somehow the dying nettles always got revenge - by stinging our hands or legs as they keeled over.) The oozing ditches and bogland of the Somerset levels was another sickening stench.
And the grass! It grew all year round - and in summer came up to my waist so that it could be flattened to make dens, invisible from a few yards away.
Yet - strangely - Devon always seemed even richer and more fertile to me. Having spent my earliest years in the Torbay region; I had the fixed idea that good soil ought to be brightly reddish in colour - and anything else seemed second rate!
A (real) poem by Clive James
Van Wyck Brooks tells us Whitman in old age
Sat by a pond in nothing but his hat,
Crowding his final notebooks page by page
With names of trees, birds, bugs, and things like that.
The war could never break him, though he’d seen
Horrors in hospitals to chill the soul.
But now, preserved, the Union had turned mean:
Evangelizing greed was in control.
Good reason to despair, yet grief was purged
By tracing how creation reigned supreme.
A pupa cracked, a butterfly emerged:
America, still unfolding from its dream.
Sometimes he rose and waded in the pond,
Soothing his aching feet in the sweet mud.
A moth he knew, of which he had grown fond,
Perched on his hand as if to draw his blood.
But they were joined by what each couldn’t do,
The meeting point where great art comes to pass—
Whitman, who danced and sang but never flew,
The moth, which had not written “Leaves of Grass,”
Composed a picture of the interchange
Between the mind and all that it transcends
Yet must stay near. No, there was nothing strange
In how he put his hand out to make friends
With such a fragile creature, soft as dust.
Feeling the pond cool as the light grew dim,
He blessed new life, though it had only just
Arrived in time to see the end of him.
by Clive James, 2010
Note: Clive James has been a celeb in the UK for more than 40 years - being the first master of the devastatingly facetious weekly TV criticism (his columns from The Observer still raise a laugh at their aptness). He has spent most of his career being (I am sorry to say) annoying, pretentious, show-offish or inept. Nonetheless, credit where due, the above is a real poem - which is a rare thing, especially nowadays. The Frost-ian echoes are unmistakable, but there is also a different flavour and phrase which makes it memorable and authentic.
Totalitarianism-in-a-good-cause - the commonest political desire?
It doesn't much matter what people say; but if you observe what they do, advocate, approve - it seems that many or most people favour totalitarianism.
All they really want is totalitarian in-line with their own ideology or religion.
And this applies to many or most Christians too - e.g. they dream of a society in which all discourse is Christian, minds are filled with the message - and opposition to this is excluded.
By totalitarian, I mean a political system that tends towards total thought-control: that is to inculcating favoured thought and prohibiting all other thought - by whatever systems and technologies are available, effective, practical.
Many societies of the past were totalitarian in this sense that it was what they wanted - but effectiveness of imposition was limited by primitive technologies of surveillance and propaganda, or the presence within society of effective opposition, or simply by disorganisation and corruption.
Why is totalitarian thought control so common a goal, even among Christians? I think the reason is that people wrongly value action above thought (just as, in practice, so many Christians behave as if action is ultimately more important than motivation).
In other words, the 'supporters' of totalitarianism are often being, as they suppose, 'practical' and focusing on what they suppose will be most effective at controlling social behaviour.
This contrasts with the intentions of those who are behind totalitarianism, which are directed at thinking rather than action.
So - on the one hand the theory of totalitarianism, its appeal, is practical effectiveness; but the actuality of totalitarianism is that it is focused on minds and interested in practicalities only as an excuse for mind-control!
The Christian message is clear that thinking is more important than action; but clearly the two interact - and actual Christians often lose sight of this fact... they become focused on 'society', on what people do - and lapse into short-cut thinking which is coercive. It has, indeed, been quite common to Christians to lose sight that they cannot impose Christianity, it is not so much forbidden as utterly impossible.
However, what happens is that the use of coercion creates a system of interpretation that is focused on actions (eg what people say, what people do) - and once this refocus has happened then totalitarianism is appealing to Christians; since it sets no limit on the totality of surveillance and control.
Whether the system is overall physically or psychologically coercive is a matter of expediency; but both are used.
My point here is that totalitarianism has a much broader appeal than commonly realised - totalitarianism is a subtle trick of the evil demonic ruling elites. They want to control minds, to induce damnation - but they offer the promise of controlling behaviour.
Can damnation really be induced? Well it can't be caused, but it can of course be encouraged. Agency (free will) is potential in everyone - but it may be rejected. We can allow our minds to become ruled by 'automatic' processes, we can refuse to engage our agency.
And that refusal to use agency - and instead to use superficial, inculcated, or not-human types of thinking - is exactly what the demonic powers aim-at. They aim to fill minds with thoughts that deny agency; they suppress ideas of agency, autonomy, inner reality; and at the end of this people will live and die disengaged.
Disengagement is the aim of totalitarianism - disengagement of agency. To have people so harried and trammelled that they just behave - and they never think. What such people imagine to be their own thinking is not their won - it is just some kind of superficial, robotic, habitual processing which has been drilled and applied.
In a materialist world view, totalitarianism makes perfect sense - and the desire for totalitarianism is a sign of covert materialism in Christians.
Totalitarian thinking is a kind of test - a test of our fundamental assumptions: a test of metaphysics. Most people nowadays have rotten metaphysics - and that is why totalitarianism is currently so popular among so many types of people. And that is why we have such a lot of it.
All they really want is totalitarian in-line with their own ideology or religion.
And this applies to many or most Christians too - e.g. they dream of a society in which all discourse is Christian, minds are filled with the message - and opposition to this is excluded.
By totalitarian, I mean a political system that tends towards total thought-control: that is to inculcating favoured thought and prohibiting all other thought - by whatever systems and technologies are available, effective, practical.
Many societies of the past were totalitarian in this sense that it was what they wanted - but effectiveness of imposition was limited by primitive technologies of surveillance and propaganda, or the presence within society of effective opposition, or simply by disorganisation and corruption.
Why is totalitarian thought control so common a goal, even among Christians? I think the reason is that people wrongly value action above thought (just as, in practice, so many Christians behave as if action is ultimately more important than motivation).
In other words, the 'supporters' of totalitarianism are often being, as they suppose, 'practical' and focusing on what they suppose will be most effective at controlling social behaviour.
This contrasts with the intentions of those who are behind totalitarianism, which are directed at thinking rather than action.
So - on the one hand the theory of totalitarianism, its appeal, is practical effectiveness; but the actuality of totalitarianism is that it is focused on minds and interested in practicalities only as an excuse for mind-control!
The Christian message is clear that thinking is more important than action; but clearly the two interact - and actual Christians often lose sight of this fact... they become focused on 'society', on what people do - and lapse into short-cut thinking which is coercive. It has, indeed, been quite common to Christians to lose sight that they cannot impose Christianity, it is not so much forbidden as utterly impossible.
However, what happens is that the use of coercion creates a system of interpretation that is focused on actions (eg what people say, what people do) - and once this refocus has happened then totalitarianism is appealing to Christians; since it sets no limit on the totality of surveillance and control.
Whether the system is overall physically or psychologically coercive is a matter of expediency; but both are used.
My point here is that totalitarianism has a much broader appeal than commonly realised - totalitarianism is a subtle trick of the evil demonic ruling elites. They want to control minds, to induce damnation - but they offer the promise of controlling behaviour.
Can damnation really be induced? Well it can't be caused, but it can of course be encouraged. Agency (free will) is potential in everyone - but it may be rejected. We can allow our minds to become ruled by 'automatic' processes, we can refuse to engage our agency.
And that refusal to use agency - and instead to use superficial, inculcated, or not-human types of thinking - is exactly what the demonic powers aim-at. They aim to fill minds with thoughts that deny agency; they suppress ideas of agency, autonomy, inner reality; and at the end of this people will live and die disengaged.
Disengagement is the aim of totalitarianism - disengagement of agency. To have people so harried and trammelled that they just behave - and they never think. What such people imagine to be their own thinking is not their won - it is just some kind of superficial, robotic, habitual processing which has been drilled and applied.
In a materialist world view, totalitarianism makes perfect sense - and the desire for totalitarianism is a sign of covert materialism in Christians.
Totalitarian thinking is a kind of test - a test of our fundamental assumptions: a test of metaphysics. Most people nowadays have rotten metaphysics - and that is why totalitarianism is currently so popular among so many types of people. And that is why we have such a lot of it.
Saturday 27 May 2017
Thinking is the problem - Not-thinking is to become unhuman - Thinking is the solution and way forwards
By the very process of thinking, of 'cognition', we create alienation: we create a reality in which there are 'things out there' and 'me in here'.
We then make the mistake of believing that what we have actually created by our thinking is true reality.
We then then alienated - either we assume that the things out-there are real and our inner life a subjective illusion (i.e. mainstream modern 'scientist' materialism); or, sometimes, that the inner me is real and the outside world an illusion, a creation of the mind (i.e. idealism or solipsism).
Alienation is an intolerable situation - so we seek escape in trying to stop our awareness of the consequences of thinking - by various means: we can try and stop thinking, perhaps by intoxication or ultimately by death; stop ourselves being aware of the alienated consequences of thinking, by distraction (compulsive socialising, mass media, novelty etc).
Sometimes, occasionally, someone confronts alienation - and tries to solve it.
And it can be solved, indeed it is solved - if we allow it. Because what thinking takes-away, thinking can also restore...
Thinking breaks the world into out-there and in-here; and then recombines the two into more thinking. That is, indeed, what most of our thinking is.
If we stop supposing that the splitting caused by thinking represents reality; and instead suppose that the recombined outer-inner world of our actual thoughts is actually a restoration of the wholeness of the world - then the problem of alienation is solved.
What this entails is that primary reality is in thinking.
Primary reality is not 'out there' - it is in thinking. Thinking is what re-combines reality into unity - it is both objective (out-there) and subjective (in-here) - thinking is the whole-thing.
Thinking is therefore the real world - and as such it is not merely-subjective but thinking is instead objective and universal.
Ultimately, it implies that human thinking is part of the divine plan- that our actual thinking (yours and mine) is potentially a co-creation of reality...
(Potentially because our minds are typically clogged with false thinking, pseudo-thinking, self-contradicting-thinking, automatic 'mental processes' into which we are trained and duped... the purpose is to think properly, do by aiming-at-it deliberately what we were intended to do spontaneously but have self-sabotaged.)
At any rate - the answer to alienation is in our own hand - or rather in our own minds; and at some level and however imperfectly we already do it. It is a matter of recognising, becoming more aware of, clarifying, strengthening making habitual what we already spontaneously are doing.
(Note - the above is a re-explanation of Rudolf Steiner's primary insight found in his early philosophical books - leading-up-to The Philosophy of Freedom - 1894.)
We then make the mistake of believing that what we have actually created by our thinking is true reality.
We then then alienated - either we assume that the things out-there are real and our inner life a subjective illusion (i.e. mainstream modern 'scientist' materialism); or, sometimes, that the inner me is real and the outside world an illusion, a creation of the mind (i.e. idealism or solipsism).
Alienation is an intolerable situation - so we seek escape in trying to stop our awareness of the consequences of thinking - by various means: we can try and stop thinking, perhaps by intoxication or ultimately by death; stop ourselves being aware of the alienated consequences of thinking, by distraction (compulsive socialising, mass media, novelty etc).
Sometimes, occasionally, someone confronts alienation - and tries to solve it.
And it can be solved, indeed it is solved - if we allow it. Because what thinking takes-away, thinking can also restore...
Thinking breaks the world into out-there and in-here; and then recombines the two into more thinking. That is, indeed, what most of our thinking is.
If we stop supposing that the splitting caused by thinking represents reality; and instead suppose that the recombined outer-inner world of our actual thoughts is actually a restoration of the wholeness of the world - then the problem of alienation is solved.
What this entails is that primary reality is in thinking.
Primary reality is not 'out there' - it is in thinking. Thinking is what re-combines reality into unity - it is both objective (out-there) and subjective (in-here) - thinking is the whole-thing.
Thinking is therefore the real world - and as such it is not merely-subjective but thinking is instead objective and universal.
Ultimately, it implies that human thinking is part of the divine plan- that our actual thinking (yours and mine) is potentially a co-creation of reality...
(Potentially because our minds are typically clogged with false thinking, pseudo-thinking, self-contradicting-thinking, automatic 'mental processes' into which we are trained and duped... the purpose is to think properly, do by aiming-at-it deliberately what we were intended to do spontaneously but have self-sabotaged.)
At any rate - the answer to alienation is in our own hand - or rather in our own minds; and at some level and however imperfectly we already do it. It is a matter of recognising, becoming more aware of, clarifying, strengthening making habitual what we already spontaneously are doing.
(Note - the above is a re-explanation of Rudolf Steiner's primary insight found in his early philosophical books - leading-up-to The Philosophy of Freedom - 1894.)
Friday 26 May 2017
The cursed conceit of being right and Rudolf Steiner
'I'll hae nae haufway hoose, but aye be whaur
Extremes meet - it's the only way I ken
To dodge the cursed conceit o' bein' richt
That damns the vast majority o' men.'
From 'A drunk man looks at the thistle' by Hugh MacDiarmid
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was prone to the cursed conceit of being right! - he always tried to show that he had been consistent in all his assertions (when looked at deeply), and never - really - changed his mind about anything.
Well, we all have our faults - but this one was very misleading when it comes to describing how it was, by what stages, that Steiner became one of the most insightful and important thinkers of recent centuries.
As a child and young man he was a natural 'clairvoyant' of the usual type seen throughout history - the state that Steiner later called 'atavistic clairvoyance' - a 'throw-back' to Man's original unreflective and unselfconscious state of perceiving spirits and being a part of everything.
That is, Steiner lived spontaneously in a dream-world that was true - yet imprecise. He could perceive the universal spiritual reality, but in a state of altered (and somewhat impaired) consciousness. By his own account; he found it difficult to focus on the material mundane world, he lacked interest-in and awareness-of specific details and was naturally forgetful of facts.
But from his later twenties, Steiner the philosopher created a theoretical world-view in which active, alert, purposive thinking - thinking of the real and universal self - was considered to be reality and truth. Indeed the key to all knowledge - past and present - including knowledge of meaning, purpose and morality.
This is brilliantly argued in his early works, at first only partly consciously but with increasing clarity and explicitness: developing throughout the prefaces to Goethe's scientific work from 1883, the book on Goethe's implicit philosophy (1886), the published PhD thesis of 1892 (Truth and Knowledge) up to The Philosophy of Freedom (published 1894) where it reaches its final and complete statement.
So - first Steiner was a dreamy-spiritual person; then from his early twenties to his middle thirties he developed a theoretical framework for a new kind of clairvoyant (clear seeing) spirituality based on thinking rather than dreaming.
But only when Steiner was in his mid thirties was he actually able to live this new kind of alert and thinking focused spiritual-seeing - which he later called Spiritual Science.
And that was not the end - because in his middle thirties Steiner was broadly hostile to Christianity. However, over the next seven or so years he used his new ability in spiritual science to explore Christianity; and at the end of this time, around 1900 and aged about 42, Steiner finally arrived at what was to be his resting point of Christianity as the basic metaphysical and theological frame within-which the method/ process of Spiritual Science operated.
Steiner changed - he ended up very different from how he started-out; and the change took many years - about twenty years, in fact, from beginning to end!
Why is this important? Because:
1. It shows that change is possible.
2. But change is slow. If it took Steiner twenty years, it might well take us longer...
3. Theory may be well worth doing, and productive and constructive - it can lead to a change of person.
4. Method (spiritual Science) is not enough: religion is also required.
5. Religion can be a thing of the spirit, primarily.
6. Steiner's personal trajectory was very unusual - in that he went from being naturally an atavistic (dreamy, passive, mediumistic) atavistic clairvoyant - to Spiritual Science; whereas most of those who wish to follow him will be coming-from the opposite direction - from an utterly un-spiritual materialism.
7. For me this explains the proven ineffectiveness of Steiner's spiritual 'exercises' - since they were implicitly designed to increase concentration and precision in people who were naturally dreamy-spiritual; while most of us nowadays are all-but unable to be dreamy spiritual and live in a meaningless, purposeless dead-materialism.
8. In sum - to end up where Rudolf Steiner was aged from 42 onwards; we modern Westerners need first to escape materialism and enhance our spiritual sensitivity - perhaps initially with dreamy-clairvoyance: but with the conscious eventual aim of both spiritual science as process, and Christianity as framework.
Extremes meet - it's the only way I ken
To dodge the cursed conceit o' bein' richt
That damns the vast majority o' men.'
From 'A drunk man looks at the thistle' by Hugh MacDiarmid
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was prone to the cursed conceit of being right! - he always tried to show that he had been consistent in all his assertions (when looked at deeply), and never - really - changed his mind about anything.
Well, we all have our faults - but this one was very misleading when it comes to describing how it was, by what stages, that Steiner became one of the most insightful and important thinkers of recent centuries.
As a child and young man he was a natural 'clairvoyant' of the usual type seen throughout history - the state that Steiner later called 'atavistic clairvoyance' - a 'throw-back' to Man's original unreflective and unselfconscious state of perceiving spirits and being a part of everything.
That is, Steiner lived spontaneously in a dream-world that was true - yet imprecise. He could perceive the universal spiritual reality, but in a state of altered (and somewhat impaired) consciousness. By his own account; he found it difficult to focus on the material mundane world, he lacked interest-in and awareness-of specific details and was naturally forgetful of facts.
But from his later twenties, Steiner the philosopher created a theoretical world-view in which active, alert, purposive thinking - thinking of the real and universal self - was considered to be reality and truth. Indeed the key to all knowledge - past and present - including knowledge of meaning, purpose and morality.
This is brilliantly argued in his early works, at first only partly consciously but with increasing clarity and explicitness: developing throughout the prefaces to Goethe's scientific work from 1883, the book on Goethe's implicit philosophy (1886), the published PhD thesis of 1892 (Truth and Knowledge) up to The Philosophy of Freedom (published 1894) where it reaches its final and complete statement.
So - first Steiner was a dreamy-spiritual person; then from his early twenties to his middle thirties he developed a theoretical framework for a new kind of clairvoyant (clear seeing) spirituality based on thinking rather than dreaming.
But only when Steiner was in his mid thirties was he actually able to live this new kind of alert and thinking focused spiritual-seeing - which he later called Spiritual Science.
And that was not the end - because in his middle thirties Steiner was broadly hostile to Christianity. However, over the next seven or so years he used his new ability in spiritual science to explore Christianity; and at the end of this time, around 1900 and aged about 42, Steiner finally arrived at what was to be his resting point of Christianity as the basic metaphysical and theological frame within-which the method/ process of Spiritual Science operated.
Steiner changed - he ended up very different from how he started-out; and the change took many years - about twenty years, in fact, from beginning to end!
Why is this important? Because:
1. It shows that change is possible.
2. But change is slow. If it took Steiner twenty years, it might well take us longer...
3. Theory may be well worth doing, and productive and constructive - it can lead to a change of person.
4. Method (spiritual Science) is not enough: religion is also required.
5. Religion can be a thing of the spirit, primarily.
6. Steiner's personal trajectory was very unusual - in that he went from being naturally an atavistic (dreamy, passive, mediumistic) atavistic clairvoyant - to Spiritual Science; whereas most of those who wish to follow him will be coming-from the opposite direction - from an utterly un-spiritual materialism.
7. For me this explains the proven ineffectiveness of Steiner's spiritual 'exercises' - since they were implicitly designed to increase concentration and precision in people who were naturally dreamy-spiritual; while most of us nowadays are all-but unable to be dreamy spiritual and live in a meaningless, purposeless dead-materialism.
8. In sum - to end up where Rudolf Steiner was aged from 42 onwards; we modern Westerners need first to escape materialism and enhance our spiritual sensitivity - perhaps initially with dreamy-clairvoyance: but with the conscious eventual aim of both spiritual science as process, and Christianity as framework.
This is spiritual warfare, and only spiritual answers will work (anything else is to side with the enemy)
It is simply hard-headed realism to recognise The Problem as spiritual in origin. It is just a fact that the Global (Leftist) Establishment has spiritual goals - by which I mean that they seek the damnation of mankind - not its torment or extinction, nor its enslavement.
The Global (Leftist) Establishment care about the state of Men's souls; even when those Men deny that they have a soul, or regard it as a matter of little importance compared with worldly priorities.
What this implies is that a majority of the self-styled (often self-deceived) opponents of the Global Establishment are their covert agents, doing the work of advancing the agenda of mass damnation. They do this simply by propagating a materialist, reductionist, soul-denying agenda in the form of analysis of problems and proposed policies.
Most of the (so-called) Right are materialists - they focus on economics, saying that things are bad because of poverty, or decline in science, or decline in the status of men, or of European races, or of Western culture or population or power. Or that there is a decline in health, of arts and sciences. That intelligence is declining, genetics is declining, people are feeling sadder, more afraid etc.
Things are analysed in such terms - and solutions to these problems are suggested, There is debate, discourse, action...
And indeed all of these are partially true - which is what gives them rhetorical force; but if any or all becomes the focus and aim of discourse, and claims to be the reason for organising society; then all such perspectives cause more of the problems they claim to solve.
(This is indeed obvious to those who can detect the tone, rather than the content, of discourse. When the tone is selfish-materialist - when the emotions stirred in us are fear, resentment and despair - we know the enemy is at work.)
In some instances this is clearly the intention. Clearly, there are cultural commentators and authors who are fifth columnists for those they purport to oppose - this applies to many of the secular Right. They simply advocate the same soul destruction as the mainstream Left, but by different means. Their vision is one of materialism; feelings (pleasure/ avoidance of suffering) are their highest value.
But these are foolish, incompetent or dishonest. The truth is that the enemy seeks our damnation, and therefore the fight against them must be understood and coordinated at the level of spiritual warfare: the first step in effective defence is to acknowledge the aim of one's attackers - and this must be done in a situation where disinformation quantitatively overwhelms truth, and spies and traitors are everywhere.
The truth is also that materialist motivations are weak, feeble, contingent, labile... and doomed to defeat when confronted by an enemy that is spiritually or religiously motivated - as are our supernatural foes.
The materialists of The Right affect to be tough-minded; yet they evade the basic reality of the situation and spin deceptive, enfeebling fantasies of earthly pleasure and ease, or gratified resentment.
Of course there must be material action; successful defence and ultimate victory will not come from purely mental attitudes. There is physical risk and probable hardship in store. But right action must be rooted in valid perception that this war is spiritual in its essence and each side organised for spiritual goals.
The principle is simple: Christian analysis, Demonic enemy, Christian strategy.
The Global (Leftist) Establishment care about the state of Men's souls; even when those Men deny that they have a soul, or regard it as a matter of little importance compared with worldly priorities.
What this implies is that a majority of the self-styled (often self-deceived) opponents of the Global Establishment are their covert agents, doing the work of advancing the agenda of mass damnation. They do this simply by propagating a materialist, reductionist, soul-denying agenda in the form of analysis of problems and proposed policies.
Most of the (so-called) Right are materialists - they focus on economics, saying that things are bad because of poverty, or decline in science, or decline in the status of men, or of European races, or of Western culture or population or power. Or that there is a decline in health, of arts and sciences. That intelligence is declining, genetics is declining, people are feeling sadder, more afraid etc.
Things are analysed in such terms - and solutions to these problems are suggested, There is debate, discourse, action...
And indeed all of these are partially true - which is what gives them rhetorical force; but if any or all becomes the focus and aim of discourse, and claims to be the reason for organising society; then all such perspectives cause more of the problems they claim to solve.
(This is indeed obvious to those who can detect the tone, rather than the content, of discourse. When the tone is selfish-materialist - when the emotions stirred in us are fear, resentment and despair - we know the enemy is at work.)
In some instances this is clearly the intention. Clearly, there are cultural commentators and authors who are fifth columnists for those they purport to oppose - this applies to many of the secular Right. They simply advocate the same soul destruction as the mainstream Left, but by different means. Their vision is one of materialism; feelings (pleasure/ avoidance of suffering) are their highest value.
But these are foolish, incompetent or dishonest. The truth is that the enemy seeks our damnation, and therefore the fight against them must be understood and coordinated at the level of spiritual warfare: the first step in effective defence is to acknowledge the aim of one's attackers - and this must be done in a situation where disinformation quantitatively overwhelms truth, and spies and traitors are everywhere.
The truth is also that materialist motivations are weak, feeble, contingent, labile... and doomed to defeat when confronted by an enemy that is spiritually or religiously motivated - as are our supernatural foes.
The materialists of The Right affect to be tough-minded; yet they evade the basic reality of the situation and spin deceptive, enfeebling fantasies of earthly pleasure and ease, or gratified resentment.
Of course there must be material action; successful defence and ultimate victory will not come from purely mental attitudes. There is physical risk and probable hardship in store. But right action must be rooted in valid perception that this war is spiritual in its essence and each side organised for spiritual goals.
The principle is simple: Christian analysis, Demonic enemy, Christian strategy.
Thursday 25 May 2017
Totalitarianism is made normal - fear, resentment and despair are enforced - self-chosen damnation follows...
The totalitarian state notched up another ratchet in Britain this week. Terrorism is now proposed and accepted as normal. Increasingly-complete mass surveillance - excused by, but not actually preventing, terrorism - is normal. Recurrent lockdown emergencies are normal. Armed police and troops in swarms are normal.
In institutional life micro-management, pervasive propaganda, constant monitoring and thought-control are now normal
The problems must continue, we are told - but in actual practice we are also told that we must adapt to them: and, it turns out, we must adapt by more totalitarianism.
The message is being hammered home by word, picture, deed and - most powerfully - by no change... except more totalitarianism.
(Totalitarianism doesn't work at preventing the problems - but that's okay, in fact that is the point! - because the problems are created as excuses for more totalitarianism, and therefore the solutions aren't supposed to prevent them!)
Modern people put up with all this because we are hollow men, stuffed with straw; men without chests; lacking any religion hence lacking any motivation to do anything inexpedient.
To take effective action would be to invite reprisals. And to endure short term suffering en route to long term good... but for us there is No long term good. (For us, death is the end of everything; a comfortable life is the ultimate we can hope for.)
We are cowards. Because atheism doth make cowards of us all. Because not to be a coward requires a goal beyond the immediate; and for a population not to be cowardly requires some clear social goal which would be thwarted by totalitarianism. People can only be brave when they have something to be brave about.
To resist totalitarianism requires courage and a reason; courage requires being able to imagine and believe a better goal that what totalitarianism promises; a reason requires being able to imagine and believe that we, personally and now ought-to work for that better goal.
(Courage cannot be conjured from nihilism. And we modern Britons/ Westerners believe in nothing. The frenzy of a cornered rat is not courage; and is anyway utterly ineffectual against a vast totalitarian system. What is needed to escape totalitarianism is cold courage - the hardest courage of all to attain, because it is a consequence of high and firmly-held impersonal ideals.)
Atheist societies are utilitarian - in their explicit aims at least - everything done justified by making people (some people) feel better. But when/ if people's feelings are the end-point of justification, then government becomes a matter of manipulating people's feelings - which is exactly what totalitarian systems are aimed-at; which is exactly what we now have.
But what is in it for those in the leadership who deliberately create the situations that create terrorism? Those who claim it is impossible to change what they have created (because effective change is unthinkable, unsayable); so we therefore must just-accept more-of-the-same causes, so we must therefore just-accept more-of-the-same consequences: accept this as normal.
(Even as 'normal' is very obviously and very quickly getting worse: getting more totalitarian.)
What they are actually doing - on purpose, planned, with deliberation - is to create an ever-more totalitarian state. Why is this strategy so hard for people to recognise?
They aren't incompetent, they aren't well-meaning fools, they aren't self-enriching hypocrites: they are doing what they want to do, and doing it more and better every month: they are implementing totalitarianism step-by-step and they are winning!
Why? Simple. The aim of totalitarianism, from a Christian's perspective, is not to kill us nor to make us miserable, but to get us damned. That is why they do it.
Thought control is desired in order that we will choose damnation over salvation - our thoughts will be policed, minds filled, actions directed, feelings manipulated towards sins: sins such as fear, resentment and despair.
That's it - in a nutshell: infuse fear, resentment and despair - all sins, all leading to self-chosen damnation. That is, to the active rejection of Good because Good is now considered to be evil.
This is a spiritual war. A Christian war.
We cannot conjure courage from cowards - and the Western population just are cowards - lacking cold courage. Because lacking ideals - indeed modern people cannot even imagine anything better than pleasure and comfort: that is the summit of fantasy.
First we need a basis for courage. What is needed are love and hope, based on faith in God (not feelings); and aimed at eternal joy (not comfort and convenience, amusement and the avoidance of suffering).
If totalitarian mind-control becomes complete; it will be because ultimately we did not want anything better.
In institutional life micro-management, pervasive propaganda, constant monitoring and thought-control are now normal
The problems must continue, we are told - but in actual practice we are also told that we must adapt to them: and, it turns out, we must adapt by more totalitarianism.
The message is being hammered home by word, picture, deed and - most powerfully - by no change... except more totalitarianism.
(Totalitarianism doesn't work at preventing the problems - but that's okay, in fact that is the point! - because the problems are created as excuses for more totalitarianism, and therefore the solutions aren't supposed to prevent them!)
Modern people put up with all this because we are hollow men, stuffed with straw; men without chests; lacking any religion hence lacking any motivation to do anything inexpedient.
To take effective action would be to invite reprisals. And to endure short term suffering en route to long term good... but for us there is No long term good. (For us, death is the end of everything; a comfortable life is the ultimate we can hope for.)
We are cowards. Because atheism doth make cowards of us all. Because not to be a coward requires a goal beyond the immediate; and for a population not to be cowardly requires some clear social goal which would be thwarted by totalitarianism. People can only be brave when they have something to be brave about.
To resist totalitarianism requires courage and a reason; courage requires being able to imagine and believe a better goal that what totalitarianism promises; a reason requires being able to imagine and believe that we, personally and now ought-to work for that better goal.
(Courage cannot be conjured from nihilism. And we modern Britons/ Westerners believe in nothing. The frenzy of a cornered rat is not courage; and is anyway utterly ineffectual against a vast totalitarian system. What is needed to escape totalitarianism is cold courage - the hardest courage of all to attain, because it is a consequence of high and firmly-held impersonal ideals.)
Atheist societies are utilitarian - in their explicit aims at least - everything done justified by making people (some people) feel better. But when/ if people's feelings are the end-point of justification, then government becomes a matter of manipulating people's feelings - which is exactly what totalitarian systems are aimed-at; which is exactly what we now have.
But what is in it for those in the leadership who deliberately create the situations that create terrorism? Those who claim it is impossible to change what they have created (because effective change is unthinkable, unsayable); so we therefore must just-accept more-of-the-same causes, so we must therefore just-accept more-of-the-same consequences: accept this as normal.
(Even as 'normal' is very obviously and very quickly getting worse: getting more totalitarian.)
What they are actually doing - on purpose, planned, with deliberation - is to create an ever-more totalitarian state. Why is this strategy so hard for people to recognise?
They aren't incompetent, they aren't well-meaning fools, they aren't self-enriching hypocrites: they are doing what they want to do, and doing it more and better every month: they are implementing totalitarianism step-by-step and they are winning!
Why? Simple. The aim of totalitarianism, from a Christian's perspective, is not to kill us nor to make us miserable, but to get us damned. That is why they do it.
Thought control is desired in order that we will choose damnation over salvation - our thoughts will be policed, minds filled, actions directed, feelings manipulated towards sins: sins such as fear, resentment and despair.
That's it - in a nutshell: infuse fear, resentment and despair - all sins, all leading to self-chosen damnation. That is, to the active rejection of Good because Good is now considered to be evil.
This is a spiritual war. A Christian war.
We cannot conjure courage from cowards - and the Western population just are cowards - lacking cold courage. Because lacking ideals - indeed modern people cannot even imagine anything better than pleasure and comfort: that is the summit of fantasy.
First we need a basis for courage. What is needed are love and hope, based on faith in God (not feelings); and aimed at eternal joy (not comfort and convenience, amusement and the avoidance of suffering).
If totalitarian mind-control becomes complete; it will be because ultimately we did not want anything better.
Christianity and 'mystery'...
Edited from William Wildblood at Albion Awakening:
Modern Christianity has lost its sense of sacred mystery. Now, mystery is the essence of any true religion and when that is no longer at its heart then the religion becomes just a worldly club for like-minded members to get together and socialise or do good.
Religion only exists because of the complete superiority of the next world over this one. As soon as this world becomes important or meaningful in itself, rather than being something only seen in the light of higher realities, then religion is dying and this is the situation we have now in practically all religions...
Christianity must rediscover its spiritual side and put that front and centre. It must emphasise holy mystery. It must not be afraid of confronting the world with a radically different view and nor should it ever seek to compromise with the world.
The essential message is simple and open to all, the wise and the foolish, the educated and the uneducated alike. But behind this simple message of salvation lie profound mysteries which must be seen as such and not brought down to our level.
For if you bring the high altar down to the people then the people have nothing to pull them up beyond the banalities of this world. They have nothing to inspire them and take them out of themselves.
More of this at: http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/christianity-and-mystery.html
Modern Christianity has lost its sense of sacred mystery. Now, mystery is the essence of any true religion and when that is no longer at its heart then the religion becomes just a worldly club for like-minded members to get together and socialise or do good.
Religion only exists because of the complete superiority of the next world over this one. As soon as this world becomes important or meaningful in itself, rather than being something only seen in the light of higher realities, then religion is dying and this is the situation we have now in practically all religions...
Christianity must rediscover its spiritual side and put that front and centre. It must emphasise holy mystery. It must not be afraid of confronting the world with a radically different view and nor should it ever seek to compromise with the world.
The essential message is simple and open to all, the wise and the foolish, the educated and the uneducated alike. But behind this simple message of salvation lie profound mysteries which must be seen as such and not brought down to our level.
For if you bring the high altar down to the people then the people have nothing to pull them up beyond the banalities of this world. They have nothing to inspire them and take them out of themselves.
More of this at: http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/christianity-and-mystery.html
Wednesday 24 May 2017
When the problem, the limitation, is in my-self...
It is hard, but not impossible, to change oneself - including for the better.
That, indeed, is the problem at present - the barrier to doing what needs to be done is not in The World nor in My Circumstances but in myself - or perhaps more specifically my-self.
I am the constraint. I cannot proceed further until I myself have developed further.
I think I know what needs to be done, but doing it is not quick and not straightforward (else there would be more examples of success - and indeed there are very, very few I have heard of who have ever done what I intend to do in terms of developing my way of experiencing, being and thinking).
But there is precedent; Rudolf Steiner wrote his early philosophical books (the one about Goethe's implicit world view, the PhD thesis and his Philosophy of Freedom) a few years before he actually made the breakthrough into the kind of thinking he had already described in such detail.
The one led to the other: metaphysics preceded an evolution of consciousness.
From The Story of my Life - Rudolf Steiner's autobiography, chapter 22:
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c22.html
At the end of the Weimar period of my life I had passed my thirty-sixth year. One year previously a profound revolution had already begun in my mind. With my departure from Weimar this became a decisive experience.
It was quite independent of the change in the external relationships of my life, even though this also was very great. The realization of that which can be experienced in the spiritual world had always been to me something self-evident; to grasp the sense world in full awareness had always caused me the greatest difficulty. It was as if I had not been able to pour the soul's experience deeply enough into the sense-organs to bring the soul into union with the full content of what was experienced by the senses.
This changed entirely from the beginning of my thirty sixth year. My capacities for observing things and events in the physical world took form both in the direction of adequacy and of depth of penetration. This was true both in the matter of science and also of the external life.
Whereas before this time the conditions had been such that large scientific combinations which must be grasped in a spiritual fashion were appropriated by me without mental effort, and that sense-perceptions, and especially the holding of such facts in memory, required the greatest effort on my part, everything now became quite different.
An attentiveness not previously present to that which appeals to sense-perception now awakened in me. Details became important; I had the feeling that the sense-world had something to reveal which it alone could reveal. I came to think one's ideal should be to learn to know this world solely through that which it has to say, without man's interjecting himself into this by means of his thought, or by some other soul-content arising within him. I became aware that I was experiencing a human revolution at a far later period of life than other persons.
But I saw also that this fact carried very special consequences for the soul's life. I learned that, because men pass early out of the soul's weaving in the spiritual world to an experience of the physical, they attain to no pure conception of either the spiritual or the physical world. They mingle permanently in a wholly instinctive way that which things say to their senses with that which the mind experiences through the spirit and which it then uses in combination in order to “conceive” things.
For me the enhancement and deepening of the powers of sense-observation meant that I was given an entirely new world. The placing of oneself objectively, quite free from everything subjective in the mind, over against the sense-world revealed something concerning which a spiritual perception had nothing to say.
That, indeed, is the problem at present - the barrier to doing what needs to be done is not in The World nor in My Circumstances but in myself - or perhaps more specifically my-self.
I am the constraint. I cannot proceed further until I myself have developed further.
I think I know what needs to be done, but doing it is not quick and not straightforward (else there would be more examples of success - and indeed there are very, very few I have heard of who have ever done what I intend to do in terms of developing my way of experiencing, being and thinking).
But there is precedent; Rudolf Steiner wrote his early philosophical books (the one about Goethe's implicit world view, the PhD thesis and his Philosophy of Freedom) a few years before he actually made the breakthrough into the kind of thinking he had already described in such detail.
The one led to the other: metaphysics preceded an evolution of consciousness.
From The Story of my Life - Rudolf Steiner's autobiography, chapter 22:
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c22.html
At the end of the Weimar period of my life I had passed my thirty-sixth year. One year previously a profound revolution had already begun in my mind. With my departure from Weimar this became a decisive experience.
It was quite independent of the change in the external relationships of my life, even though this also was very great. The realization of that which can be experienced in the spiritual world had always been to me something self-evident; to grasp the sense world in full awareness had always caused me the greatest difficulty. It was as if I had not been able to pour the soul's experience deeply enough into the sense-organs to bring the soul into union with the full content of what was experienced by the senses.
This changed entirely from the beginning of my thirty sixth year. My capacities for observing things and events in the physical world took form both in the direction of adequacy and of depth of penetration. This was true both in the matter of science and also of the external life.
Whereas before this time the conditions had been such that large scientific combinations which must be grasped in a spiritual fashion were appropriated by me without mental effort, and that sense-perceptions, and especially the holding of such facts in memory, required the greatest effort on my part, everything now became quite different.
An attentiveness not previously present to that which appeals to sense-perception now awakened in me. Details became important; I had the feeling that the sense-world had something to reveal which it alone could reveal. I came to think one's ideal should be to learn to know this world solely through that which it has to say, without man's interjecting himself into this by means of his thought, or by some other soul-content arising within him. I became aware that I was experiencing a human revolution at a far later period of life than other persons.
But I saw also that this fact carried very special consequences for the soul's life. I learned that, because men pass early out of the soul's weaving in the spiritual world to an experience of the physical, they attain to no pure conception of either the spiritual or the physical world. They mingle permanently in a wholly instinctive way that which things say to their senses with that which the mind experiences through the spirit and which it then uses in combination in order to “conceive” things.
For me the enhancement and deepening of the powers of sense-observation meant that I was given an entirely new world. The placing of oneself objectively, quite free from everything subjective in the mind, over against the sense-world revealed something concerning which a spiritual perception had nothing to say.
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