Bruce Charlton's Notions

The development of human consciousness over the past several hundred years (the "modern" era, from c1500) has been towards great self-consciousness - often experienced negatively as cut-off-ness, alienation, isolation, solipsism, despair...

But, in a positive sense; this change has been towards greater freedom or "agency"; and it sustained (during its earlier generations) a great burst of individual geniuses who deployed this new agency in great works of literature, art, science, ideas etc. 

Yet the major developments of modern culture - especially over the past century or so) have been towards a more complete - "totalitarian" control of the human mind.

This, by means of ever-larger and more cross-linked bureaucracies; covering ever-more of life; integrated with a vast apparatus of propaganda and manipulation we term the Mass Media; and these systems have moved from national to multi-national ("global") control, over recent decades.  

In other words; the social trends have been in the opposite direction than the development of consciousness. 

This opposition of social and personal can be understood in terms of the perceived-need for rulers to monitor and control their - more potentially-autonomous - citizens more thoroughly. And this entailed getting them to respond to external motivations rather than to their (increasingly powerful) inner motivations. 

In other words; external society has fought-against the inner trend towards greater freedom, agency, creativity. 

And, so far; external and social control has been winning - hands-down! - against the individual and inward developments of consciousness; especially since the massive spread of Mass, then Social, media from the 1990s. 

But this expanding external control System (of bureaucracy and media) has been overwhelmingly and increasingly evil in its motivations; and this has triggered resistance to this evil among those who were less thoroughly and less-deeply mind-controlled. 

In other words; there have been reactionary movements, opposing the mainstream; and some of these "reactionaries" are Christian. 

Yet, (overwhelmingly) Christian reactionaries have not opposed the social trend towards increased external control - but instead have sought to replace evil-motivated external control with various forms of (putative, because they have not happened) Good-motivated external-control. 

Christian reactionaries are just as opposed to the modern-era developments of human consciousness as are the globalist leftists. 

The difference is that Christian reactionaries are, or aspire to be, totalitarians on-behalf-of-God. 

Thus we can observe all kinds of proposals for what is believed to be a "restoration" of Christianity as an external system of monitoring and control; but replacing the secualr-leftist global leadership with "The" Church... with the the specific identity of this church varying among the advocates. 

The scale of proposed change may be international - for those who adhere to an actual international church - by means of changing the leadership and enforcing the practices of that church. Or the proposed change may be local and piecemeal e.g. setting-up a small personal dictatorship, purporting to be "on behalf of" the real international church - whether institutional or spiritual. 

What Romantic Christianity does, in contrast, is to accept and embrace the inner development towards greater self-consciousness - for its enhancements in agency and creativity; and argue that inner-motivation should become the core of Christianity. 

This implies a move away from, in opposition to, all forms of external control; whatever ideal they serve, or purport to serve. 

It entails each individual accepting ultimate responsibility for his spiritual situation and choices; and moving towards an attitude that evaluates and discerns all forms of external control, and attempts at external motivation. 

Society cannot be eluded, nor opted-out-from; society is necessary and inevitable - and contains much good. 

But the Romantic Christian faces all societies with an attitude of inner-evaluation towards all external influences - including all actual churches, and all possible churches. 

He seeks ultimate motivations from within - and direct from the divine; to clarify and strengthen such motivations; and, insofar as his faith is rooted in the promises of Jesus Christ of resurrected life eternal - then external social influences cannot prevent him achieving what he most desires.  

It may be helpful to consider God (the creator, the creat-ing) as, from our perspective, a polarity.

We know God directly and personally in two ways - from outside and from inside: that is, we know God from inspiration (e.g. of the Holy Ghost), and from intuition of the divine within each Man.

The idea of polarity is that both external and internal divine elements are always necessarily present, because we are dealing with an active 'process', ongoing through time; and the polarities are twin poles of that process, generated-by that process.

So God (the divine) is not a structural, separable thing (which would be static, dead, unmoving), but God is a person - and as a person God extends through time.

And we are involved-with God by our inheritance as children of God: we each are, in essence, divine - so we too are (abstractly) processes through time.


We have the divine within each of us (the True Self) and God is also outside of us (as persons, in God and in Men). So there is a kind-of Divine Web - of individuals divine selves in relation with all other divine selves.

In other words, fundamentally, reality is beings in relationships.

As Man has developed to become more conscious, he begins at one pole by being 'inspired' primarily by external sources of divinity; and as Man grows in consciousness he is supposed-to move, voluntarily and by choice, to the other pole of living primarily from personal intuition of his True Self.

This is also a movement from passivity to activity; from being-controlled to being free. 


So, the completeness of divinity is always when external divinity meets with inner divinity; but in a child or in early Man the external source of divinity was primary; and each man was unconsciously, passively driven-by the external. In such a situation, obedience to the authority of external divinity was the primary virtue; and the primary sin was to rebel against divinity.

As Man's consciousness grows (partly by development in his mortal life, partly at a species level and through human history) he becomes more aware of the distinction between himself and external deity. At a certain point (the culmination of spiritual adolescence), he experiences the reality of separation between external deity and the True Self.

At this point, experience of the polarity of deity is lost; because the experience is a static 'moment' of awareness, insight, 'enlightenment' - an epiphany - the truth of which is true in an abstract cross-sectional way (at a particular moment, 'outisde' of time); but the experience of separation from divinity is untrue in terms of life really being longitudinal, experienced through time.

The reality is that the dynamic process of polarity is always the case - and each man is always a meeting between external and internal divinity; but a snap-shot experience of a dynamic process is a 'frozen moment', in which the dynamic and reciprocal relationship is lost.


Man's divine destiny is to move from the child-like, un-free pole of external and passive immersion-in deity, to the free-agent, grown-up pole of working primarily from our own inner divine True Self. But because these are poles, both sides are always actually present.

So, the divine world begins as dominated by God, with Men as little-conscious (and other even less conscious beings), unconsciously and spontaneously (almost wholly, albeit never quite fully so - because this is a polarity) doing what God directs; and through time moving towards a situation in which some Men are much more powerfully conscious, and have chosen to live in mostly from their own inner divinity.

Instead of being unconsciously and passively directed-by God; such men have consciously and actively chosen to work from their independent agency and with God.

And this is the evolutionary movement from inspiration (primarily, not entirely, external divine guidance) to intuition (primarily, not entirely, inner divine guidance).


When we consciously choose to live primarily from the polarity of our True (and divine) self and with God, this is to become our-selves divine (albeit in a much less-continuous and less-able way than the creator). We become active participants in the process of creation.

And at a personal level, we become something more like God's grown-up 'adult' children; and friends (or 'junior colleagues') of God in his work of creation.


This is the plan of creation. God loves all his children - both the young one, the grown-up ones, and the (many) adolescents somewhere in between. But God certainly wants and hopes to have other 'adult' divinities with whom to relate in a loving and comnpanionable fashion; because grown-up divinities are working mainly from their unique selves.

When at least some of God's children choose to grow-up and join with God in the work of loving creation; divine creation becomes an harmonious interaction of increasing complexity and richness, as compared with the original and lesser situation of unitary, top-down control.


In sum, God wants us to participate, actively and consciously, in the process of creation.

And to do this we need to become more conscious, and by this consciousness to choose to live primarily from our inner divinity.

Yet, because of polarity, because inspiration and intuition are poles of the same single process; this inner motivation is necessarily harmonised with all other external sources of divinity.

Thus the universe of creation coheres.

 

Man has been becoming detached from his original, spontaneous, natural contact with the god/s, spirits, nature and other Men for many generations - indeed for many hundreds of years. Originally Men lived in a kind of immersive telepathic contact with all of these and with each other - but that has been dwindling for a long time - and at about the millenium the separation became complete for almost everyone, from adolescence onwards. 

Lacking such an immersive awareness, almost everyone is now utterly dependent upon external perceptions - incoming 'information' from the senses, communications, images etc. And because 'information' includes both the symbolic code and the decoder; Modern Man not only absorbs what specifically to think (ideas, beliefs, facts) - but much more significantly, how to interpret perceptions: how to think about things. 

Modern Man blots-up concepts along with data; absorbs his software as well as his inputs. 

 

Modern Man is therefore pathetic in his extreme vulnerability to external influence - and since both perception and interpretation are equally open and adrift; there is no easy answer. 

In particular, there is no way in which large-scale (mass) external influence can cure this fundamental deficiency in the ability to resist external influence!

We need and must have the ability to interpret, think and be motivated-from our inner reality - which reality is also the only possible route to the realities of the god/s, spirits, nature and other Men. 

 

Access to inner reality - which is actually the divine within us - is made difficult by the entirety of mainstream public discourse (and all kinds of institutions, including churches), by inculcated habits; and access if made impossible when our conceptual framework rejects all inner realities that contradict our imposed-programming; as meaningless, trivial or (increasingly) immoral. 

 

(For Modern Man the source of evil is the individual's soul; the path of 'salvation' is to be open to 'the right kind' of external influence; and the only disagreement between people concerns the 'right kind' of source of external influence to which we should open our-selves. But then any person's discernment between rival sources is equally open to external influences...)

 

The stark nature of our condition is that the answer lies within everyone (at least, every person or being capable of love); but the answer is almost-wholly dependent upon each person both diagnosing his continuous state of sinful passivity to the demonic; and also seeking his own cure. 

Unless or until an individual initiates the seeking of his own salvation from his own divine inner resources by means of 'intuition'; his situation is literally hope-less. 

I mean he has No Hope.

Yet, if any Man does seek salvation within; vast creative divine resources will immediately be available  to assist. The merest pinhole made by inner-divine-soul intent is all that is required as an entry point for help from the god/s, spirit, nature and other Men (including the so-called dead). 

But that initiatory intent is absolutely required.

Traditional and orthodox church-based Christianity is extremely complex; and so are many of the 'occult' forms of Christianity involving graded initiations, rituals, symbolic systems, and training of the mind. Indeed, in a generic sense; traditional churches and occult Christianity can be seen as variations on the same theme: aiming-at the same endlessly-complex way-of-living as a Christian.

The Litmus Tests* may seem crude and formulaic as a way of discernment applied to a person or institutions; but in reality they are almost the opposite. 

The Litmus Tests include the birdemic-peck 'healthism' agenda; support of the opponents of the Fire Nation in the ongoing war; antiracism; pro-sexual revolution; CO2 Climate-change/ warming; and any other form of leftism such as socialism, environmentalism, equality, diversity, libertarianism etc. 

The Litmus Tests refer not so much to specific beliefs, but to the core agenda items of the global totalitarian System, which - properly understood, from a Christian perspective - is evil in its intent -- i.e. the dominant System ultimately seeks the damnation of souls; which requires that (in the end) each soul desires and chooses to be damned. 

Therefore, to fail a Litmus Test means to be subordinated - in at least one major aspect, although typically many or most of the tests are failed - to the external ideology of evil. 

When somebody, or some institution, supports one of the Litmus test agenda items; this is evidence of value-inversion; which is evidence that they are self-subordinated to the dominant external agenda. 

In a sense, from the perspective of making an overall evaluation of somebody's (or some organization's) affiliation in the spiritual war of this world; this affiliation tells us all we need to know: Are they on the side of God/ divine creation/ The Good -- or are they opposed? 

Anyone who accepts, defends, follows, actively advances any of the Litmus Tests - has placed his motivations, thinking and actions under external control from those powers who oppose The Good.

This matter of external control is very significant. 

Because the world (here, now) is so pervasively and top-down corrupted by evil; all powerful external influences are evil. 

Therefore; to be externally-motivated - including by any large or mainstream church, of any denomination) is to be a part of the agenda of evil.  

(This is evil. Evil is Not about niceness or good works or devoutness... Evil is about taking the side of Satan against God. Simple as that. One on-the-side-of Good is Good; no matter what his personal sins - because anyone on the side of Good will/ must have repented his sins; will know, acknowledge, and reject his sins. That is what it means to "be Good".)

Such is the nature of Litmus Tests: they function as an index of whether some person or group has chosen subordination to fundamental, ultimate, external control. 

As of here-and-now; only one who seriously seeks to detach himself from external control can be on the side of God, divine creation and The Good. 

Such a detached person may Not be on the Good side - because he might choose evil from his own inner motivations; but only a detached person can affiliate to Good. 

In our totalitarian and media-saturated world; only inner evaluation and motivation can be a source of commitment to the motivation of Goodness. 

We are Good as individuals - from our inner choices - or not-at-all. 

Affiliation to any external authority is to subscribe to one, more, or many of the negative, incoherent, and oppositional Litmus Tests; and this represents a decisive affiliation to the work of Satan. 

Note added: It should not really be necessary to say so; but maybe it needs saying anyway: that the state of someone's soul now - e.g. affiliation to the Satanic agenda, as evidenced by Litmus Test failure - does not mean that they will choose damnation at the last. Indeed; I think it almost certain that an individual person is only sustained alive for as long as he is judged capable of repentance; which means that where there is life there is hope. However; the same does not necessarily apply to institutions/ groups/ corporations - including churches. Whereas there are many (including recent) examples of individual persons (and, presumably, other Beings) who seem very likely to have repented and chosen salvation despite previous servitude to evil - and done so very late, very near to death; there seem to be none among recent institutions. This may be because the kind of corruption that afflicts most modern institutions is one that excludes the ultimacy of the kind of "presiding spiritual Being" that used-to stand-behind traditional institutions (variously conceptualized as patron saints, angels, and the like). I would guess that so long as there is a presiding spiritual Being, then repentance is possible. But when there has been a hollowing-out, bureaucritization, self-subordination of an institution to external influences, then there can be no basis for repentance. 

Since we are each, from eternity, unique souls - then there is an unique destiny, a personal destiny, for every individual.

But discovering (and then, of course, following) one's unique destiny is a difficult matter, and many people don't know how to start - or how an unique destiny differs from randomness or arbitrariness.


To make an unique destiny possible requires both internal and external guidance, and it is from the dynamic polarity of their relationship that we can navigate our destined (but not pre-destined) path through life.

Our external guidance is known as the Holy Ghost, and is accessible to all Christians; since the Holy Ghost (according to the Fourth Gospel) was provided by Jesus after his ascension.

Yet if the Holy Ghost had been the only kind of guidance, then our destiny would be 'given' to us; and our task would merely be to consult the Holy Ghost, and then passively to 'follow' its instructions, as best we could.This would be a life a spiritually children (and was indeed our own life as children, and probably the life of all Men in earlier periods of Man's history.)

Such a life of obedient passivity is a one-sided caricature, because it never was, nor could be, wholly the case; but this life of child-like obedience to external dictates was surely once regarded as an ideal; wheras now a passively obedient life is Not the task of modern Man.

(Such a life is simply Not An Option. Modern Man is an adolescent in spiritual terms, negatively rejecting of passive obedience; and as adolescents we cannot return to childhood. Our task is freely to choose to develop, to grow-up, into spiritual adults... or else we will remain, as we are: perpetually adolescent.) 

Due to the evolutionary-development of human consciousness since the time of Jesus, our task is now to take an active, conscious path through life - freely chosen. This does Not At All mean that the Holy Ghost has been superseded, but instead that we now have a 'dual guidance system' formed from the interaction of outer and inner.

The inner guidance comes from our real self; the eternal self that is divine; albeit an undeveloped divinity; which is how it can be the creative source of uncaused thinking, primary thinking. A life guided solely by the inner guidance system would be merely egotistic, prideful, rebellious, hedonistic, impulsive - adolescent. 

But outer and inner guidance combine to form a classic polarity; in the sense that the outer guidance is centripetal, constraining, receptive, 'feminine'; while the inner guidance is centrifugal, generative, exploratory, 'masculine'.

This is a polarity because although they can legitimately be distinguished, neither guidance can exist in actual detachment from the other - and this union arises because at a deep level outer and inner are continually-being-produced-consequences of a single, living, conscious, dynamic process.

So our task in this mortal life is therefore actively to work from our own inner motivation, which is in continual interaction with the Holy Ghost. The result is experienced as 'intuition', which is our directly known direction and purpose through life.   

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If the standard 'natural selection' model of creativity is regarded as deficient, as previously argued - I mean the 'Simonton' model in which creativity is explained as a product of the high-Psychoticism-trait (high-P) personality producing wide-ranging and abundant random variations on old ideas, and high intelligence sieving and sorting-through these abundant randomly-varied ideas on the basis of coherence and memorized knowledge - then what do I propose to put in its place?

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The key relevant difference between my view and the natural selection view - and the difference which leads to the following alternative model for creativity - concerns the nature of the high-Psychoticism trait.

Eysenck sees Psychoticism in terms of a tendency towards loose or broad associations - in other words a partially-pathological state. Psychoticism is seen as a partial breakdown in the normally tightly controlled and narrow associations of ideas to a situation being more like we have all experienced in dreams, and some people have experienced in delirious states of illness or alcohol withdrawal, or psychotic illnesses such as mania or schizophrenia, or under the influence of psychosis-inducing drugs (such as mescaline or LSD).

By contrast, I regard high-Psychoticism-trait as being an innate, substantially heritable, hard-wired set-up of the nervous system in which some individuals experience a higher dominance by 'inner' states than do most normal people. High-P individuals are inner-attentive, inner-aware, inner-engaged and inner-motivated.

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So how does high-P work in producing 'creative solutions'?

The short answer is that the creative insight is preceded by a period of focused 'quest' (which may last many years) during which the mind is filled with more-or-less relevant ingredients. The inner-directed processes then observe, work-on, try to understand these various facts and concepts - try to select among them, achieve a clear view of their proper or best organization or arrangement,

This means that such high P individuals are attentive to their inner states (i.e. their thoughts and emotions, their 'stream of consciousness'), they are more spontaneously aware of their thoughts and feelings, they find these inner experiences more engaging, spontaneously more interesting than external matters such as social and sexual interactions (which fascinate most people for most of the time) - and these inner states provide the dominating motivations for such people, such that they are therefore substantially autonomous - that is to say indifferent to, independent-from peer pressure and socialization.

The process by which the mind works on these ingredients to give a breakthrough is a 'black box' - so far as science is concerned. (Although it can be said that the inner, unconscious mind works by different rules than those of conscious logic.) But it is the high-P person who has the focused abstract interest to bring together the ingredients, to watch the processes of understanding and organization, and to get a clear view of the answer as it emerges; and then powerfully to feel the rightness of the right answer as energies and positive emotions are triggered and experienced.
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Although this inner-dominance can be caused by diseases and toxicity or brain damage; which can cause any normal person to be overwhelmed by powerful and pathological inner stimuli, or cut-off-from outer perceptions - the idea of Psychoticism is that high-P is a relatively rare but hereditary personality trait - commoner in men than women, inborn, emerging in childhood and persisting through maturity and adulthood.

The reason that high-P is hereditary, is that it is an evolved adaptation with a useful functional role to play - i.e. creativity - and the reason it is rare is that not many (i.e. not a high proportion) of creative people are required by a society; and high-P tend to be associated with lower reproductive success overall (as would be expected when individual invest more time and other resources in the inner life, and therefore relatively less resource into social and sexual life).

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So high-P creative people are sometimes very useful to a particular human society (assuming that society 'takes advantage' of their special abilities) but there cannot be too many and indeed not many are needed.

The reason that high-P people are needed, but not often, is that most socially relevant problems (of population survival and expansion) are dealt-with by habitual and traditional means - the individual is socialized into the usual way of dealing with problems through childhood, and these usually work.

But most human societies have recognized (whether explicitly, or more often implicitly, tacitly, that some problems do yield to tradition or habit, and other problem do not always yield to tradition or habit - and what then?

In a nutshell, then is the time to bring in the creative specialist - the Shaman, the mystic, the intuitive priest, the scientific or inventive genius, the Holy Fool: someone who has resisted socialization and instead thinks by different rules, because he is more engaged with the inner world

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So the assumption is that high-P has evolved at a low frequency by some (unknown) group-selection mechanism that leads to a reliable but rare supply of high-P individuals to do this vital but infrequent job. And part of this group-selection must also be a recognition from the majority of low-P individuals that these high-P 'oddball' or 'eccentric' individuals must be tolerated, supported, and asked for advice and guidance in certain relatively unusual circumstances when their special abilities are the best (or only) hope for group survival.

Since the supposed mechanism is group selection, and different human group shave experienced widely different selection pressures; then it is likely that high-P is not found with identical frequency everywhere. This presumably explains why creative genius is very unevenly distributed by time and geographical space - and why its frequency varies over time within the same culture - not least because group selection is always open to being subverted by individual-level selection.

This group selected nature of high-P potentially explains why creative genius is all-but absent from many continents and nations, and also why it may appear in abundance (e.g. in ancient Greece) then disappear. However since genius also requires high general intelligence (high-g) then too low an average level of g, or a decline in g, may also be a cause of declining rates of genius.

But I think it fair to say that high-P is a more crucial aspect of genius than high-g, because any high-P individual who is sufficiently higher in intelligence than the majority of his group can perfom his creative social role; while a low-P person will not be creative, no matter how high his intelligence.

So I imagine that the 'shamans' of a recent hunter gatherer tribe will typically have had an intelligence level that is high for their tribal group, but of a lower than average level for a Western nation (as measured by IQ tests). However, such (by Western standards) 'low-IQ' individuals could nonetheless perform their highly valued and effective social function - so long as they had the high-P, creative personality trait.

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Also posted at:

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/the-inner-nature-of-trait-psychoticism.html
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The stage that Modern Man has reached in his evolutionary development is one where, sometime in adolescence, his consciousness becomes cut-off from the collective consciousness in-which he used (in early childhood) to be immersed (as was 'early man'). 

Modern Man becomes alienated such that his only direct experience is self-consciousness. There is coherence within his mind; but outside his mind is an incomprehensible chaos - and all communication are uncertain and prone to distortion and 'wishful-thinking'.  He finds himself alone, isolated. 

What does he do? Man cannot be alone, and so he must somehow reconnect with the collective, with other Beings... 

There are two options - one is mainstream and common - the other rare and regarded by the majority as childish and dumb wishful-thinking. 

The mainstream attempt to reconnect is to open the mind to dominant external influence. 

Each Man reconnects with the collective by voluntarily immersing himself in the dominant, powerful, most authoritative current-opinion; and thereby alleviates his lonely isolation and again feels a part of a greater whole. 

This mainstream strategy is a chosen passivity; a decision Not to think, but instead to be... what ever the collective is currently dictating. 

In the modern West, this is the decision to live in accordance with The System (the decision that most people have clearly made - including most self-identified Christians) - by this; one's facts, concepts and attitudes absorbed-from the powerful bureaucracies, officialdom and the mass media. 

And by this - to some subjective extent - one escapes isolation and becomes a part of the human collective: a materialist world backed-by a de facto monopoly on propaganda/ education and coercion/ bribery, and therefore assumed to be 'real'. 

And now that all of these institutions agree monolithically on all issues that They regard as essential; and now that individuals are plugged-into communicatiouns systems for most of every day - it has never been easier to feel a part of the collective by the simple decision to be passive and absorptive. 

Of course; this sense of belongingness is impaired by the covert fact that such cohesion is man-made and arbitrary - and by the intermittent awareness that the unity of perspective is (substantially) manipulative and exploitative. 

Nonetheless, it is regarded as the only alternative to utterly alienated isolation - so such doubts are suppressed or ignored; on the basis that 'there is no alternative' - at least none that are real. 

But there is an alternative to the mainstream outer-to-inner, switching-off thinking and opening one's mind to external meanings; and that alternative is to work from the inside outwards. 

In other words; the alternative is to start from the cohesion of one's isolated mind, and then choose to align this inner coherence with divine coherence. 

By choosing to align with God's creation; we thereby reconnect our inner mind with the larger world, and escape from alienation by re-joining God and God's people, the inhabitants of Heaven and those who have chosen (while on earth) to follow Jesus Christ to resurrected Heavenly life after their deaths.

So these are the choices. We are driven to escape the isolation of modern consciousness; and can choose either to open our minds to the external; or to connect of inner divine natures with the greatness of divine creation. 

This inner-outer reconnection is done for the sake of Love - or else it is not done at all. We must want to live by-Love. 

And why would we want this? Because, in essence, we have chosen to believe the hints and glimpses of a life rooted in Love (hints and glimpses from family life, romantic love or intense friendship) that are afforded by this mortal life. Those who choose to believe that these point-at the possibility of Men living eternally with the divine (and other Men); having made an eternal commitment to live-by-Love.  

 

Conversely (and this seems to be the normal, mainstream, dominant view of Modern Man) we can choose to regard the hints and glimpses of a life lived by Love as merely delusions or manipulative deceptions - such that the only realistic decision is to subordinate our-selves to whatever currently are the dominant external influences. 

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When Christians think of God - we should do so from a dual perspective that he is both out-there - external to us; and also within us - inside our awareness.

(We are Sons and Daughters of God: that is how God is IN us.)

However, the externality of God has been much more greatly emphasized in Christianity, to the point that it has been seen as a religion of 'some God up-there in Heaven, telling us what to do' - because the externality of God has in times and places been used to make a religion of rules and obedience only.

By contrast, 'Eastern' religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism often have a much stronger emphasis on a god-within - that we are ourselves gods, and that the way to contact the gods is to look within - by meditation and spiritual disciplines.

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In the nineteen fifties and sixties, the spiritualism of the time made much of this difference between Western Christianity with its God out-there, and Eastern mystical traditions which look within.

Reading Joseph Campbell, who was raised as a devout Roman Catholic in the Irish tradition of the early 20th century, he makes this contrast repeatedly and persistently in explaining the difference between West and East - and he personally had rejected the externalizing 'objective' concept of Christianity and embraced a 'subjective' inner directed Eastern spirituality.

For people like Campbell (brought-up Christian), Eastern spirituality was about a fresh and exciting emphasis on personal growth, creativity, aesthetic appreciation, embrace of modern science - it was all positive, expanding, joyful. 

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But a god who is merely inner is inadequate, just as a God who is outer is inadequate - very obviously so.

A god who is merely inner is just our-selves - and such a religion is (or soon becomes) a disguised form of self-indulgence; while a God who is merely outer is just a tyrant, running a political system (it would perhaps seem more noble to defy such a purely external god than to worship him). 

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Joseph Campbell had had a solid grounding in Christianity as a child, therefore when he embraced an inner-orientated Eastern Mysticism, in reality he was bringing the effect of that up-bringing with him into the East, and was living a hybrid.

Likewise, the actuality of Eastern religions is that there is a very large element of the external gods about them; gods who set rules and expect obedience - and this objectivity may be very heavily emphasised in the lives of ordinary adherents.

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But it is a damning indictment of the Christianity Campbell grew-up with that it had drifted into a near-exclusive emphasis on the externality of God. That style of Christianity emphasized obedience to rules to the extent of crushing the qualities of personal growth, creativity, aesthetic appreciation, embrace of modern science which Campbell and others like him actively needed.

Yet God must be out-with us in order that He explains anything; in order to structure our lives and to make us a community of believers, in order that life has purpose and meaning.

And God must be carried with-in us in order that the meaning of life may be experienced as alive; that we have a personal destiny as creative, imaginative, exploring individuals.

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So to find God we can look outside; and we also can look inside.

God is wherever we are because he can always be contacted in prayer, and God is wherever we are because we always carry him around.

We can pray to our Father in Heaven, and we can do this in a group and share the experience; and we also can meditate, attune with our inmost being in solitude - and we will find God there too.

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How is this achieved? - mostly through knowing God in a relationship - as our Heavenly Father. God is out-with me because he is not me - he is another person. And God is with-in me because I am my Father's Son, and my Father is therefore intrinsic: part of my make-up.

To use a biological metaphor - I am unique, in being a one-off combination of heredity and experience and specific circumstances; but I also have genes which I got from my parents, and which I share with all other humans - men and women.

Therefore, I am both generic and distinctive.

And I must be both to be Human.

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So Christians should take care not to neglect God within us - actual Christian doctrine and life should never make it possible to draw the outer versus inner contrast that Campbell experienced and taught.

*

We are at a profoundly maladaptive stage in the degenerative pathology of modern consciousness; that is to say the Consciousness Soul - in which we experience our-selves as cut-off from the world and other people. 

The subjective experience of the self now regards itself as a meaningless epiphenomenon, a free-spinning cog; with no access to reality, and no validity to its thoughts. 

Therefore, people do not trust their own thinking, do not even trust their own powers of observation and reasoning. They doubt (to the point of paralysis) any conclusions that they may themselves reach - even about the simplest and most obvious of matters. 

Yet people need to live - so lacking anything from-within (anything that they will believe, or can motivate them); they must by default respond to external guidance. 

Consequently, modern people (especially women) have become almost wholly passive and dependent-upon external inputs of facts and values; which mostly come via mass and social media, and from 'official' institutional sources. 

Women are most prone to this passivity and gullibility, since their evolved disposition is to rely on the peer group for life-guidance; and for motivating their behaviour.  

(Or in practice they rely upon whatever modern simulacrum psychologically most-approximates the ancestral peer group: i.e. mass/ social media and the official consensus of those with power) 

The desire to fit-in to the norms of this perceived peer group is very powerful - and when people are lacking any more powerful inner motivation it is overwhelming, irresistible; and people become incapable of learning from experience. 

And as men have become much more behaviourally-feminized (apparently from many contributing reasons); men too have become increasingly helpless against their own perceived (but actually Establishment-manufactured) peer group motivations.  

Consider the birdemic, or any other of the Big Lies such as climate change, antiracism or the sexual revolution. There is, in the first place, no reason At All to believe the mass Media, the official bureaucracy, the corporate PR, the international or national politicians - since they are known to be incompetent and have bad incentives. 

On top of that; they are known habitual and extreme, grossly inconsistent and incoherent in their statements, and show zero capacity to evaluate the consequences of their policies or learn from experience. 

Further; they have now all-but prevented (made impossible, punishable, illegal) all public dissent from the dishonest, manipulative gibberish they spout...

Yet the mass of the public cannot see this, cannot comprehend it, will not think about it, will not question it - and have shown an open-ended and apparently infinite capacity for zealous credulity. The masses regard whatever happen-to-be today's facts and theories as 100% good, true, vital and necessary. 

What this means is that the typical, majority, modern Man ignores that which he knows from his own experience and by his own reasoning (which he believes to be worthless); and therefore, necessarily, thinks and does whatever the dominant external sources tell him to think and do - without limit and regardless of changes and contradictions in this external input. 

This is exactly what we see everywhere around us in the world today. 

It is therefore completely ineffective, therefore futile, to explain and show modern Man the arbitrary, dishonest, and inconsistent behaviour of the Global Establishment/ officialdom and the mass media - because that is an appeal to his own motivation to think, discern, reason and act upon the outcome. So, modern Man will believe powerful external authority regardless...

There is an answer; but it is religious and metaphysical. Modern Man must consciously choose (because that is what the Consciousness Soul requires) to believe in God; and specifically believe-in the Good creator God of Christianity, who is our divine Father - we his children...

And from this modern Man must come to understand and believe that his own thinking is potentially valid: and that his own best discernment of truth is the best possible motivation for life. 

The best motivation - because he is a child of God, who shares in the divine; and the best because his loving God will provide specific and individual guidance for his life. 

Only then can modern Man come to see-for-himself, think-for-himself, and learn from his experiences; and become sufficiently motivated to over-ride the external, pervasive, evil-seeking programming from the Global Establishment.  

In the previous post, I finished by saying:

This era really is one of potentially unprecedented awakening. It is not an era for great works, but an era for great insight and understanding - for learning things never learned before.

Such an attitude seems important, if a siege mentality (and ultimately demoralisation) is to be avoided. And it is implied by our actual situation.

Since this is a materialistic, spirit-denying age in which you see Beings as Things; it is not surprising we always look to external explanations for our problems; and if external things are the causes, then we seek external solutions: socio-political solutions.

Yet there are two sides to this era - and the inner factors are primary. The driving force of change has been the development of human consciousness. And this is part of divine destiny. To put matters crudely: We needed to become capable of not believing in God, so that we can truly choose to believe.

So the inner consciousness of Western Man has, incrementally, become detached from the world (alienated), and detached from external authority; so that now it is (for most people) the power of tradition and external authority has been lost, unconscious instinct and common sense are ineffectual - and we can disbelieve anything.

The foolish and invincible credulity of modern Western Man (mainstream leftism in general including 'global warming', the 'trans' agenda etc) is actually an expression of dis-belief in tradition, instinct and common sense. Therefore people believe only what is short-term expedient; and are grossly demotivated such that life has become an affair of short-termist hedonism, distraction, and petty status competitions. 

However, this is a narrative of loss... By this account; yes, we have more freedom, but it is a negative freedom due to loss of authority. Yes matters are clearer to us as Good and evil diverge, and things come to a point - but this is again an advantage for the negative reason that evil has become more extreme, open and insane - and is therefore easy to discern.

What we most need to know is our positive new strengths. Surely, God would not have put us into such a situation unless we were equipped to benefit from it. How has the evolution of consciousness equipped us to better lead Good lives?

As socio-political conditions move towards a greater totalitarian evil; and the mass of life is more obviously false, fake, dishonest, manipulative, ugly - designed to induce resentment and despair... As public avenues for creativity and expression are closed off; as Good public discourse is suppressed and punished...

That which is loving and creative; that which is virtuous, beautiful and truth-full... Each individual person's proper and destined path - All this, here and now, at each moment - will be much clearer than ever before.

And the detachment of modern human consciousness will be seen as a marvellous strength, indeed a divine strength - the capacity (when making the right choice, following the right path, doing the right thing) to become a primary source of divine loving-creativity.

So long as we remember that his mortal life is for experiencing and learning; and not for achieving any fixed and final state of being; we will not become dismayed at the temporary nature of our successes - at the fact that gains are usually incomplete and never permanent; but we will acknowledge and take-seriously all such positive achievements; confident, with faith, that all such (mortal, temporary) learning-experiences are eternal in their significance.

It was not always thus; but since around the millennium is has become evident that Men become what they think; and Men can choose what they think...

But we cannot think whatever we choose!

It superficially seems that we could think... whatever we wanted! - but this is not the case. In order to think most of the things that Mass men now think; each Man must choose to switch-off awareness of his own real-divine Self and plug-into external thought-control.  

This is why the masses are willingly addicted to the media - because it is the mass media that externally controls each Man's thinking, in the way that he has chosen to allow his thinking to be controlled. 

Consequently, Man has mostly become... whatever the dominant world power currently want him to become...

One who denies his own nature as a Man, his own divine destiny - and who instead chooses to regard himself (a bottom line) as a soul-less animal without free agency; an accidental collection of chemicals doomed at death to eternal and absolute annihilation. 

Or a frenzied and resentful partisan for one or another of the abstract, demonic, leftist projects that drive -forward the agenda of evil.  

The only compensation of Mass Man is from feelings; and feelings are also (and increasingly) controlled by the same external powers - who induce fear and despair or optimism and pleasure; social isolation or purposive-belonging; idealism or pragmatism... according to Their external goals.    

But God desires that we each be actively and consciously responsible for our own thinking. 

If you decide to do this; you will find it hard to break the habit of allowing external control, and to become aware of your Real Self thinking. 

And (far from being able to think whatever we want, and make ourselves whatever we thus think) we become aware that this Real Self is divine, and aligned with God's creative nature and plans. 

Thus we can only think that which is Good - yet that Good must still be chosen if we want Good to eventuate from our thinking.  

(Nothing Good happens automatically or passively; God works his creation by consent and choice.) 

If this inner-awareness of the Real Self Thinking can be attained (albeit briefly and infrequently) you will sooner or later (if alert for it) also become somewhat aware of another external source of guidance - The Holy Ghost. 

This is not something we can control: for instance, it is seldom we can get an answer from the Holy Ghost to any old question we try to put to Him. This is because most questions are meaningless or wrongly-motivated. 

But when a real and well-motivated question is formed - it is answered instantly and effortlessly. We will get the guidance we need, the knowledge we need - and nothing else!

To ask properly is to be answered. It is the asking of a proper question that is so difficult. 

I know of nothing more encouraging and energizing than the sense of range and positive creative value that is intrinsic to thinking from the real self (primary thinking, as I have termed it).  

It is that solid assurance which sustains faith. It is a knowing that dispels doubt. It underpins assurance purpose and meaning in this mortal life. It is of boundless scope, and positively-transformative value. 

Real Thinking, and that understanding which Thinking enables, is the most important thing we can do; and the most necessary - for our-selves and The World. 

Note added: The above discourse sounds as if each individual Man was isolated and alienated - but not so! Primary thinking is also what enables us to 'connect' directly with other Beings in this created universe - consisting-of Beings. Thus we can (to some extent - albeit only as frequently and only for as long as both Beings maintain alignment with God's creative will) experience direct-knowing of other Beings; including (but not restricted to) men and women (as well as the Holy Ghost). 

I have written before about what I think is really going-on in the discussions of The Mandela Effect. Another way of thinking about it; is that it is to do with concepts of Time. 

Some twenty years ago; I wrote an essay about the contrast between Ceremonial Time and Technological Time. Ceremonial Time could be called subjective time, based on human memory as it works in an oral and illiterate culture; whereas Technological Time is the, now dominant, modern idea of time as objective, consensual; and where the bottom line is in written history, and scientific concepts and measures. 

My feeling is that much discussion of The Mandela Effect is rooted in a spontaneous (to young children, and ancestral men), unconscious, and instinctive desire to reassert the primacy of Ceremonial Time; rooted in spontaneous, emotionally-inflected, and human-centred, memory. 

But this is (exactly because rooted in the unconscious and instinctive - hence opaque to analysis) confused by trying to hold-onto various aspects of Technological Time.

For instance the reality of the Mandela Effect is asserted by referencing books and other written material; or movie films, TV, computers, and other technologies that have significant roots outside of the mind; in memory cues that are materialized in symbolic, encoded, linguistic, and visual representations.

The debate focuses on asserts about differences between past and present artifacts. And it focuses on trying to convince other people about the validity of our own memories compared with current public information.  

I find this contradictory. 

This is moving back and forth between the official and external, now and then; and back and forth between our own subjective memories and the attempt to make others regard our assertions about these memories as externally-valid truths. 

But if we desire to assert the primacy of the subjective, directly-known and human; then we should not use the objective, symbolic and technological as evidence. 

Discussion of the Mandela Effects seems to arise from a profound dissatisfaction at the destructive violence that our bureaucratic-mass media and totalitarian world is doing to both our basic humanity and freedom, and furthermore our spiritual nature and destiny. 

As such, I think it points at a much more extreme and radically-different way of thinking and being, then such discourse currently attains.

I think the concern over would-be Mandela Effects should be addressed by making the choice to root our primary assumptions concerning reality in that which is not just our own memories and reasoning (which are, after all, subject to change, including distortions); but to root them in a vision of life as - ultimately - a matter of living Beings who are in relationships. Therefore, altogether separate from (and immune to!) the domination of external, institutional and codified forms of knowing.  

We each need to develop a separate interior discourse from that which imposes upon us from externally: from the public, officialdom, the media...

This interior discourse needs to be Christian, by which I mean our inner discourse needs to be aligned-with, in harmony with, the purposes and nature of divine creation - insofar as we can know this.  

If such an inner and God-orientated discourse includes significant knowledge that contradicts what we are being told by public institutions that we know to be corrupt (at best) and (increasingly) demonic in overall-control...

Well, then we know what we ought to believe in our hearts - don't we? 

In which case, trying to convince others that 1. their understanding of 2. our reports of 3. what we currently remember.. is pretty irrelevant - both to us, and even more to them. They ought to be doing the inner work for themselves - otherwise, their discourse will simply be a different variant of passively accepting external data; which is (both cognitively and spiritually) much like soaking-up official-media propaganda.  

One of the ways in which 'modern' stories (of the past few decades) differ from literature up to the middle twentieth century - is that now the 'hero' (protagonist) of a story will nearly always fight against his own 'destiny'. And, indeed, that fight takes-up a good deal of the narrative. 

Thus if the 'chosen-one' of a mythic narrative swiftly and decisively takes-up his heroic role and does his best with what ought-to-be done (like Frodo) - this is regarded as unsatisfactory. But if the appointed-hero struggles (at length) against adopting his role, if he is tempted strongly to abandon it, if he acts in violation of his role and needs to be brought-back... this stuff gets a writer critical 'Brownie points'. 

Struggle-against-destiny has become the usual thing for a modern hero. 

My impression is that this inward fight against what he (or she) ought to do, is expected and approved-of by those who consume and comment on novels, TV, movies etc. For instance; introduction of this self-doubting, inner-conflicted element to several major characters, over and again (Aragorn, Theoden, Faramir...), was perhaps the major distortion of the Lord of the Rings movies, compared with the original fiction. 

If such inner conflict is not present, the writer is likely to be accused of childish simplicity, of having 'black and white' characters; whereas a hero divided-against his destiny is regarded as complex, subtle, realistic, mature.

But the anti-heroic-hero is not a wise Man, nor is he a Man who is consciously adopting what he regards to be the highest path. The focus of stories is moved away from what needs to be done - and trying to do it; towards inner psychological - even psycho-pathological - rumination and conflict. 

Drama has become psychodrama - myth has become a psychoanalytic explaining-away of myth. 

What this means, when repeated again and again stereotypically and in context in which the 'hero' is implicitly admirable, whatever he does (so long as he is in at least two-minds about it) - and when the 'embrace my destiny' hero is excluded; is that the question of a Man's proper aim of life has been deleted; the possibility of wisdom has been deleted - because wisdom is to know what one ought to do, and to do it as best possible. 

Furthermore, the anti-hero makes all stories mundane - all are diminished to the level of endless soap operas (who are eventually driven to deploy this 'inner division' to permutate character motivations and actions over the long term). There can be no real 'myth' or 'magic' - because mythical and magical characters are excluded. 

A real, wise hero is not one who wallows interminably in uncertainty; nor one who is only compelled to - finally! - do the right thing by elaborate coincidences of external circumstances, or the harsh (yet, somehow always reversible!) lessons of selfishness, short-termism, hedonism and cowardice. Wisdom is - by contrast - knowing quickly what is needed, and then doing it as best possible, despite problems. 

In real life - as we used to know - it is not the mixed-up, self-indulgent, inwardly conflicted Man who does the right thing and saves 'the world' - and fiction cannot convince us that he is. 

Instead, we take-home, absorb and learn a message that there is no real heroism because there is no real destiny: because there is nothing to be heroic-about!

We learn that action comes from mixtures of self-centred motivations and external compulsions; and the sophisticated, admirable Man is one who talks extensively about his feelings and paradoxes - such as the incompatibility of the things he wants (home and adventure, flee or fight, wife or mistress... whatever).

Since the best fiction is also a kind of vicarious experience; the conflicted anti-heroic protagonist is likely to be worse than useless (i.e. harmful) as a model for how we personally ought to approach this mortal life.  

But unfortunately, writers have become addicted to this kind of protagonist; because the delay in adopting destiny, and 'getting on with what he ought to be doing' can be spun-out narratively for astonishing periods: many volumes of a book series, many episodes of a TV programme, most of a long movie...  

When a writer is praised for such shameless and easy padding-out of stories; little wonder that so many succumb to the temptation - and thereby contribute their mite to the corruption of Men and culture. 

At least from the 20th century onwards; I find the results of 'spiritual techniques' to be so unimpressive as to suggest that they are at best useless and more likely spiritually-harmful. 

By spiritual techniques I mean the use of all types of external assistance from symbolism and ritual, through prayer and meditation (of many kinds) - to reading, group work (of many kinds), vigils, magic, music, fasting, pilgrimage and the power of place... everything you can think of.

People are always claiming that one, other or all such things are helpful and yet - just look at the results! And look where we are now? 

It strikes me that this apparently counter-productive effect of almost any 'method' of spirituality may have a very simple explanation; which is that all such techniques are external, when what is needed is internal.  

The more external spiritual assistance we seek, or come to rely upon - of whatever possible type; the weaker and more-passive becomes our inner spiritual strength. 

Any yet it is this inner spirituality which is needed now above all. 

If not, then what? 

If I am saying that any and all external methods or techniques are harmful - then what is left for us to do? 

I suppose the answer lies within us: That all which is both good and also strengthening over the longer term needs to come from within our-selves and/or be discerned and chosen by our-selves (with a sense of fullest responsibility and in light of the ideals of salvation and theosis); aiming at our resurrection to Heaven, and that of those we love; and to learn the spiritual lessons of our own mortal life. 

And everything else is a - more-or-less harmful - distraction. 

In the classical theology of mainstream Christianity; God outside of us is 'transcendent' and God inside us is 'immanent' (in the sense that God is in all of creation) - so they are 'the same thing'. This seems to imply that if we have one, then we did not need the other - and that having both God-without and God-within is redundant.

Traditionally - from the early days of a church - this was interpreted to mean that God would come to the Christian primarily from outside; the revelation was interpreted by the church and given to the follower. Later, from the Reformation (with the Quakers as an extreme version); God-within was given primacy. But both extremes share the understanding that both inner and outer God are the same - because God is a unity.

However, the pluralistic theology which I believe holds that God inside us includes our own unique and eternal self - which has been, has existed, eternally - as well as that divinity we have from the creator as consequence of being a child of God. Whereas God outside does not have our-own self in it.

So God-without and God-within are distinct, and both are necessary*.


God-without is generic, and applies to all Men - indeed to all creation: this makes us a part of God's destiny and all of Men our brothers and sisters.

God-within is what makes each of us a child of God, and makes God a matter of concern to each of us individually and personally.

We need both God-within and God-without if God's creation is to be both universal and specific.

And therefore revelation has both external and internal aspects. There is a universal revelation and a personal revelation possible - and both are necessary.


In navigating our way through life - we need both inner and outer God. It is the meeting of inner and outer that defines our own path, distinct from the path of any and every other person - but equally God-given.

It is the interaction of God-within and God-without that enables Men to become gods: in other words enables Men to participate in creation. It is love - between each Man and God and between Men - that makes the interaction of internal and external divine sources an harmonious interaction; each a positive and mutually-reinforcing contribution to creation.

(This is one reason why love is fundamental to Christianity - love is the cohesion of creation.) 

And it is the meeting of inner and outer - which differ - that is the basis of our participation in creation. When we became God's children, it became possible for us to join with God in the ongoing work of creation - precisely because we each bring something unique and distinctive and potentially valuable to creation.


God-within is unique, and yet also includes God as consequence of being a child of God; this is how we can make a contribution to the creation which was begun only by God; but continues with the participation of newly made gods.

These newly made gods were men and women always with some divine nature, but able to develop to become fully-divine in nature.

It is because men and women were not wholly made by God, but instead each have something eternal which existed before we were made children of God, that we are unique Beings, and able to become gods - of the same kind as our Heavenly Parents and Jesus Christ.


*(God is not, therefore, a unity. God is, in the first place, a Heavenly Mother and Father; and later included Jesus who began as a Man and became fully divine. Because of the work of Jesus, potentially all Men could become divine - although in practice not all Men make this choice.)

Note: the above is an interpretation of Mormon theology, which I have also discussed further in my mini-book Speculations of a Theoretical Mormon from five years ago.

In 2011, Gareth Knight (1939-2022) published an autobiography titled I call it Magic which is easy and enjoyable to read on the surface; yet contains several deeper layers of implied content that have only revealed themselves on re-reading.

Of particular interest was his account of the transformation in his own 'magical life' throughout his adult life; especially the changes in what he 'called' magic, the means by which he reached the state of enchantment or poetry, and the actual content of these magical-states. 

Knight began as a formal ritual magician, ascending through the prolonged training and initiatory steps of the Society of the Inner Light (founded a generation earlier, as a Christian organization, by Dion Fortune); he went on to found his own ritual magic group - on similar, though looser, lines; then to 'staging' much larger annual weekend events (almost 'happenings') at an anthroposophical centre called Hawkwood. 

By Knight's own account, in the 1970s to the early 1980s, these weekends attained a very powerful level of magical activity among the participants (who had been trained in the requisite methods of concentration and visualization). He then stopped doing this, and moved on to less formal and more improvisatory styles of magic either alone, with his wife and daughter, or in small and private groups. 

After the turn of the millennium his magic practice had changed further. In December of 2004 he was invited back to the Hawkwood weekend; which had changed considerably over the previous couple of decades (the following quotations are from Chapter 31 of I called it Magic) :

The occasion was a jolly romp, with the place filled to capacity, and a rich variety of activity. [But] Power was not ramped up to the degree that it had been in the early Hawkwood days...   

In other words, the experience was less-strongly magical, less enchanted than it had been. In other words; this corresponds to my observations on the declining power of symbolism and ritual through the late 20th century.  

Knight does not draw attention to the meaning of these changes for his inner life; but describes how in fact his practices changed - in the direction of becoming more individual, personally based, and exploratory (rather than relying-on an established and quasi-objective system of symbols, rituals, and group activity). 

Rooted in his study of French language and literature (in which subject he did a degree in later life); Knight embarked on an engagement with the medieval French Arthurian poet Chretien de Troyes:

I took upon myself the task of going through each of Chretien's romances as if both he and I were present, travelling through the whole scenario from start to finish as a kind of directed visualization, and writing it all down...

It then filtered into my head the realization that much that I had witnessed in this was was not chivalrous knights going to the aid of damsels in distress but accounts of their initiation into fairyland - for there was a strong case for seeing the principal female characters as faery rather than human. 

This led on to what Knight termed faery 'contacts' - which then led to writing several books deriving from these contacts. What this meant he explains further: 

It dealt in imagery but with a philosophical intent, yet a wisdom expressed more through the medium of a story than by intellectual definitions. To make the contact it was necessary to build a scenario [i.e. in imagination] something like a questing knight discovering a castle in a particular symbolic shape, and then entering into it... with a ... direct feeling of relationship with the fabric of the building itself. 

After further description of his imagined but real-seeming experiences; Knight elaborates the resulting new and deeper engagement with nature:

This kind of thing was at a different level from local countryside experiences where contact was virtually devoid of intellect but impacted more on the emotional and etheric levels... Along with contacts... came a greater sense of presence and communion with the world of nature, and particularly trees...

It may well be that experience and wisdom of this nature comes with age, which is [an] aspect of the Merlin and Nimue story... But there is no real need to await one's dotage for a realization of these things.

  

What Gareth Knight seems to me to be describing here, is a kind of recapitulation of Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield's scheme of the development of consciousness. The ritual magic was the Intellectual Soul era, characteristic of classical and medieval culture. 

Contact bears some relationship to 'channeling' of spiritual Beings - which he also did for example in a channeled series of direct communication (much like taking dictation) of 1993, published as The Abbey Papers. 

But 'contact' comes across to me as much more of a two-way interaction between himself and a spiritual Being - and not necessarily in words, nor in images - i.e. more direct than language- or symbol-mediated. 

Knight then moved towards what sound very much like Final Participation - which is something like a recapitulation in conscious thinking of what was a much more passive and unconscious in the spontaneous animistic Original Participation of early childhood and tribal Man. 

Animistic, because it recognizes the world as consisting of living, conscious Beings with which one may have relationships and communication. Knight also seems to be moving towards a communication less based on perceptions and visions, and more a matter of what I have called Direct Knowing: that is direct, wordless and imageless communication in thinking. 

In other words, a direct communion between Beings, such that the thinking of one is participated-in by the thinking of another. 

Once Gareth Knight had reached this kind of 'magic' I think he has largely left-behind the formal and institutional roots of his practice, and indeed its 'objective' aspects, where experiences were shared via a common language and symbolism that could be relied-upon to evoke the same inner states in its participants.

It seems he has - in practice, if not in terms of theorization - fully Romantic Christian; in that he takes an inner, intuitive and personal responsibility for whatever 'methods' he uses to attain magical states of mind (within the over-arching and primary Christian metaphysical framework).   

Knight puts this change down to his own personal development, experiences, expediency, and ageing - but such is the generality of such a development that I interpret it as driven by inner and divinely-destined changes in the human consciousness of Western Man. 

What all this seems to mean is that (here and now) we cannot rely upon external and institutional forms of spirituality to attain 'participation' in the world; and the language of 'objective' communication of spiritual experiences has weakening and withered. 

Yet, on the positive side, we can develop distinctive (perhaps unique) personal 'aids' and methods (i.e. 'contacts' occurring inside thinking, rather than as external 'events), that will achieve the participation which is natural, good, and divinely-intended. 

Also, that strong forms of achieved participation are likely to be more animistic and personal - engagement with particular Beings - than the abstract forms of earlier symbolism. 

     

Whether Gareth Knight would have agreed with my interpretation of his life and development is perhaps doubtful... 

It does rather involve a cutting-off of the branch upon which his life's work rested: that is, the general validity of some particular kinds of ritual, symbols, group-activity; and the communication of these in abstract and written forms, and by speech. 

But his desire to use more narrative story-like communications; his primary mode of magic in later life being a personal, inter-Being and two-way 'contact'; and the continually-evolving nature of the subject matter and formal techniques of his magic - all suggest that there was exactly such an evolution; and that Gareth Knight's life ended with him being implicitly a genuine and fully-realized Romantic Christian. 

*

Since modernity broke apart the moral universes of action and motivation (of faith and works)...

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2010/11/faith-and-works-in-secular-modernity.html

...it cannot put Humpty together again.

Political Correctness (PC) therefore can find no satisfactory basis for moral action.

*

The moral universe of PC subsists on two distinct realities - good causes and good intentions, but never the twain can stay stuck-together.

A collection PC socially-approved acts confronts the individual; and it is up to him to manufacture his own subjective motivations for these acts (and pass them off to himself and others as convincingly as possible).

Or else he starts with his motivations - his sympathies and desires - and manufactures more-or-less plausible symbolic acts by which these motivations are (supposedly) implemented; and it is up to the intellectual elite to manufacture some more-or-less plausible evidence that these acts flow from these motivations and are (or have potential to be) effective in the real world.

*

Somehow, motivations and acts never add-up to a morally cohesive world.

The sympathetic motivation to (for instance) relieve the suffering poor in Africa and the social-status-earning acts of raising and spending aid money 'for' Africa never add-up to virtue: the suffering of the Africans is exacerbated and made permanent, the sympathy is swamped by guilt.

Wishful-thinking 'love' for abstract Africans is swamped by hatred of nearby ideological opponents among the elite who challenge the genuineness of PC motivations and the effectiveness of PC actions.

*

The spontaneous up-welling of self-disgust at self-pride seeks its opposite not in humility but in guilt-ridden submission.

The guilt-ridden and submissive state of numbed paralysis is utterly demotivating and destructive of the capacity to act.

And therefore natural vitality up-wells to save the individual from despair.

So, wretched submissiveness oscillates with arrogant moral grandstanding.

*

The peculiarity of Political Correctness comes from its nihilism, its denial of the reality of the real - therefore the continual conflict between the subjectivity of individual motivation and the subjectivity of group-sanctioned rules; between the changeable inner self, and the changeable external sanctions.

Neither inner nor outer subjectivity arise from depths, and any connections between the inner and the outer are abstract, arbitrary, willed - and evanescent.

Act stands as a symbol, and the symbolic meaning is subject to continual change.

(PC is intrinsically self-transcending - each new wave continually superseding and leaving-behind the previous rule and sanction system.)

Even as act is intended to be an objectification of subjective motivation, it remains objective only for as long as the social consensus holds; and the social consensus does not hold, but instead 'progresses'.

*

Since progress is defined in terms of leaving-behind, the good is that which has left-behind the wicked; the wicked is that which has been left-behind by the movement of progress.

If being left-behind is due to ignorance or incompetence, then that is okay - tolerated, even indulged and made the object of missionary work ('consciousness raising') - which is itself (somewhat) morally gratifying (being both socially approved and in-line with motivations); albeit missionary work (in a world where nothing is real or permanent or lastingly superior) is also disgustingly arrogant, self-superior and guilt-inducing.

But if being left-behind is wilful, if being left-behind is a matter of refusing and resisting the next step in the march of moral progress - then this is plain wicked and hatred-justifying.

Which is pleasant for PC - because hatred for the informed and wilful reactionary is its main under-pinning motivation - hatred is what gets it out-of-bed on cold winter mornings. 

*

Under a system of PC, here and now in the West, the individual must adjust, again and again, to the widening wave of socially-defined progress, of moral denial, extrapolation and inversion.

Such repeated and unending adjustment is the individual's non-negotiable moral duty as a responsible adult member of the ruling elite.

So, the essence of PC morality is to keep-up with moral progress - to match one's inner motivation with the changing nature of socially-approved action (i.e. socially-approved by the ruling elite).

*

And the moral exemplar, the hero of PC ethics, is he whose convincingly-stated motivations are slightly ahead of the current state of socially-sanctioned actions, perceptibly 'advanced': further along in the direction that social progress is trending.

Nice work if you can get it. 

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I have heard of the Mandela Effect several times; but until yesterday I did not really get what was being proposed - in its full and astonishing scope. 

Vox Day describes the ME as 'supernatural gaslighting' - meaning a demonic activity. In this particular instance the assertion is that everybody who is informed and competent knows that the Bible talks of the Lion laying down with the Lamb - but when somebody nowadays looks-up this reference in a Bible, he finds that it is the Wolf which lays down with the Lamb. 

The basic idea is that supernatural evil has operated to change the Bibles of the world (this happening at a certain point in recent history), has changed what is written in them; so that now our memory conflicts with the 'evidence'. 

And this was done as a Satanic PSYOP; in order to have a disorientating psychological effect - so that people will no longer trust their memories, or their own judgment, and will easily be manipulated by The System (which is itself controlled by the devil). 

(Aside: This proposed mechanism - of a spirit literally re-writing history - reminds me of an ability of the evil god Ruin in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn Trilogy. Ruin can affect any writing, unless it is inscribed on certain types of metal.) 

The Mandela Effect is therefore is a specific (asserted) instance of a large and vital issue of these times about which I have blogged many times recently; which is whether to believe our inner memories or 'external evidence', to believe our own experience or external authority, to believe what we have worked-out for ourselves or to accept the interpretations of 'experts' - And, for Christians, whether to build our fundamental faith on The Church; or from our personal knowledge-of and relationship-with God and Jesus Christ. 

The difficulty I have with the Mandela Effect is that I am not very sure of my own memory in any of the famously-cited instances. 

For example - the example which gave the name was that apparently many people remember being told that Nelson Mandela died in jail - before he was released and became President; but I don't have any such memory of him dying in jail. 

So, for me to accept that this was an instance of memory conflicting with 'evidence' - would, in fact, merely be an instance of my preferring one form of external evidence over another. 

And, although I certainly agree that everything I have ever heard was about the Lion laying down with the Lion, and never about a Wolf - I do not have any specific memory of words in the Bible where this was supposedly written in the past; because I think I got all the remembered Lion and Lamb examples secondhand.

One aspect of some instances of the Mandela Effect is that it attributes to the demonic power the ability to affect-remotely and to re-write already existing books from a certain time-point - and indeed ancient manuscripts. But this is something that I do not accept: I do not believe that Satan can physically tamper-with all the Bibles of the world. 

But I do believe that Satan can do something of this kind with electronic media and communications; i.e. that demonic spirits can (in some sense) inhabit and interact with these and with computers; and I believe that fact this lies behind the push to put everything online, and to induce us to live virtually via the internet. 

So much so; that nowadays rewriting electronic media would appear almost exactly the same as having re-written all the Bibles of the world. 

As small instances; e-books I have in the past purchased through Kindle have periodically been changed - without informing me or asking permission; simply via my reading device being connected to the internet. 

And it is easy to make a program to search for and change specific words, so that when one views the page of an online newspaper, the text has already been modified as instructed.  

All that is needed is to imagine scaling-up this kind of intervention by intelligent spirits with evil purpose that dwelt within the electronic media. 

...Although, if so, then there would almost certainly also be some good spirits, angels, that were able to do something similar but with opposite intent to the demons. 

Yet it may be that (as Rudolf Steiner intuited) the world of electricity is in a profound sense a demonically-created medium or sub-nature; that may therefore be more conducive to evil than good. 

If so, unless I was myself physically to check an old Bible, and communicate my findings verbally and face to face, or by snail mail; then any electronic communication could (in principle) be intercepted and changed. Everything we found on the internet might (theoretically) have been thus tampered-with. 

This would look exactly as-if all the Bibles in the world had been re-written. 

In conclusion, I accept that the Mandela Effect may, in this modified sense, be a Real Thing; and that it represents yet another challenge for spiritual discernment; in which - to pass the test - we need to believe and live-by that which comes from within and from direct knowledge of the divine; instead of being credulously manipulated by external public media - which nowadays includes everything recently-produced, and anything accessed via the internet, computers, or other electronic phenomena. 

Looking back and surveying memories; there are periods of my adult life when I seem never to have experienced participation. 

I mean those memories (characteristic of childhood, especially) that have a special and "romantic" quality. For example the visual memories that of are surrounded by a literal hazy glow; that seems to represent the experienced reality of us being part of the scene. The haziness represents that entities are not separate objects, but entities are instead concentrated or condensed from a single reality-field. 

(You might say barriers between entities are "permeable" or that entities are "connected" - but actually it is more that entities were not separated in the first place - that it is the separation which is secondary and illusory.) 

But it strikes me that there were long periods (extending up to a few years) throughout  my adult life when my memories indicate that I did not experience this - when my memories are wholly mundane. 

It is as if I remember that something happened, but in memory I am observing from the outside, as a mere description - I am not "in the scene", and indeed memory says I was not really in my life at these times. 

And these periods when genuine participation was apparently absent, now seem in retrospect to be times when I was off the "destined" spiritual path of my life. 

Analyzing the phenomenon; I seem to need both to personally to have the right attitude, and to be in the proper situation. 

When I was not in the proper situation - for instance when I was pursuing the wrong aims or with the wrong people, or in the wrong place - then no amount of striving was able to induce that sense of participation. 

In a basically-wrong situation - the harder I tried to attain romantic participation the more mistakes I made, the wronger the things I did. 

Furthermore; even when I was in the right situation and properly aimed; there were situation in which I was deluding myself... 

I mean, the things I "wanted" would need that I be an impossibly different person; or would need to inhabit a non-existent place or time (maybe somewhere else I could not go, or a time in the past and gone)...

For example; after becoming a Christian, I was sometimes drawn to types of Christianity that were fundamentally alien to my nature; that were, it now seems, based on a fantasy about what kind of person I would like to be but was not, and life-circumstances that I felt would be preferable but did not actually exist (and in which, even if they did exist, I would not be able to function). 

All this has to do with a lack of intuition - to do with a superficial and external scheme of myself and the world; a fantasy scheme that, while appealing in a day-dreaming way, lacked positive and deep inner endorsement. Also, for which a deep inner endorsement simply could not be manufactured; instead only a kind of fake conformity and public support.

I seem to detect exactly this faked inner-endorsement in most of what I read from most self-identified Christians. 

I do not believe that they intuitively believe that which they publicly affirm. It rings false. I infer they life in the same kind of superficial conformity to external structures and systems that I myself professed, and which memory now reveals was inauthentic.  

I suppose that some people must live for such long periods (maybe all their adult lives?) without that "romantic" quality of experience I describe above. Maybe this happens because they have the wrong aims, or are in the wrong place, or among the wrong people... 

Whatever the cause; because they are off the proper path of their spiritual destiny, they are like I was for those months or years in which memory indicates that I was not really "in" the world. 

Perhaps they rationalize this situation as Real Life, or Necessary, or even as Best? 

This may explain the active hostility to romanticism that is so prevalent.

The idea that romanticism is either outright evil, or at least liable to lead to evil: the insistence that the Good Life - the Christian life - ought to be lived at the secondary level of my memories "about" things, and to eschew those hazy, participative memories of being "in" my life and world.

Or that romanticism is deluded, a day-dream, people fooling themselves...

Whereas my memory tells me that it is romanticism that is reality, and the mundane is when people are fantasizing and telling themselves lies...  

Self-lies which, deep down, they don't themselves believe, and which consign them to the mundane and the secondhand in life. But they dishonestly respond to their endemic and self-inflicted alienation by refusing to acknowledge their own unbelief - and by scorning the romantic.   

I can't think of any arguments that would persuade such people. As usual - it is down to intuition applied to fundamental assumptions. Either we intuitively know that romanticism is right and best - or we don't. 

NOTE ADDED: Why is this important? Well, it is not necessarily important too all people, all of the time; but it becomes important for some people when (on the one side) their faith is not strong enough to resist the many temptations from all around, to put the values of this world above eternal resurrected life in Heaven - or (on the other side) to regard this mortal life as ultimately futile, or essentially negative in its potential.