Bruce Charlton's Notions

[Note: this was, I think, one of the best things I ever wrote about political correctness; but, for reasons I don't recall, it didn't get into Thought Prison, my book on PC,.]

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The politically correct are people who do not believe in absolute truth.

Yet they insist that everyone should believe what they are telling them today.

Or else if you do not believe whatever they tell you today, you are evil.

Yet the politically correct do not believe in evil.

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What they do believe in is culture - culture is the bottom line 'reality'.

And culture is consensus.

Yet the politically correct believe in the liberation of individual desire: that is, they believe in the overthrow of consensus.

So the bottom line reality for political correctness is... a continually changing, compulsory consensus.

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This leads to the 'enlightened false consciousness' of the modern cynic.

Enlightened = realistic; False consciousness = self-serving illusion.

The cynic combination is a clear-eyed awareness that one's own fundamental beliefs are self-manipulating fantasies: yet insistence on absolute belief in these acknowledged fantasies.

To make reality and then to forget one has just made it, and then to remember, critique and re-make reality; and again to forget it - and so on and so forth...

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Neither ironical nor detached; enlightened false consciousness is a severe, rational, anger-fuelled stance which aims to impose meaning and purpose onto life via the continual bureaucratic and authoritarian process of creating and moulding culture - undoing and reversing the inequalities and miseries of the past, and chasing always after the flickering fashions in upper class status.

Culture is arbitrary, yet it is reality; culture is managed, yet it is contingent; culture us everything and irresistible, yet it is nothing and as insignificant as the life of a mayfly.

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This enlightened false consciousness collapses into careerism, which collapses into parasitism (life as a permanent holiday, travel, good living), which collapses into the secret-guilty cult of the openly instinctual and unashamed psychopath: the invincible gangster, the irresistible and expert sexual predator, the envied permanently-stoned junkie.

This opposite to the disaffected cynic is what Sloterdijk (in his Critique of Cynical Reason) terms the kynic.

The kynic has (merely) discarded consciousness; has solved the problem of being a modern human in a modern society by becoming an animal and preying upon society.

(Trying, always, to obliterate the final, residual human awareness that this is what he is doing - trying to become wholly animal, wholly instinctual.)

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The cynic and the kynic exhaustively describes the possibilities for modern secular life - either the cynic bureaucrat who lives inside-of and builds a culture he knows to be meaningless and temporary; or the junkie who lives outside-of and eats that culture.

Most often, the characteristic modern elite are both cynic and kynic: public bureaucrat and private junkie - paid moralist, part-time amateur hedonist.

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http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/cynicism-and-kynicism-in-political.html

You probably are living in false consciousness NOW - at least for nearly all the time; because almost everybody in the West lives in false consciousness.

This has a definite meaning - it means that you consciousness, your sense of self-awareness is located in the persona and not the self. Your persona is the public you; the set of learned, automatic, expedient responses built-up through childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. For many - most - people this is where they dwell consciously almost the whole time - with only brief flickers and glimmers of cosciousness from the self.

How do you know where you consciousness is currently located? One way is that when you are living from the self you are aware that everything is alive, communicating, and you respond to this.

If, on the other hand, the 'outer' world is experienced as material, inert, dead, unresponsive, non-communicative; then you are living from your persona: you are in a state of false consciousness.

This is bad, because it is the self which is partly-divine; and living with-out it, your life will have neither meaning nor purpose. 

Note: The self and the persona can be distinguished but not divided or separated - neither can exist without the other and both are always present in a person; and the persona has a vital role. However, we are meant to use the persona only to do jobs that are best done as automatic routine and without constant attention - including skills such as such as driving a car or playing a musical instrument. We are not supposed to have the persona living our lives for us - according to unthinking routine; but that is the sitiation for most modern people most of the time - and apparently for some people all of the time - where the self never gets activated in communication with other people and the environment.

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The politically correct are people who do not believe in absolute truth.

Yet they insist that everyone should believe what they are telling them today.

Or else if you do not believe whatever they tell you today, you are evil.

Yet the politically correct do not believe in evil.

What they do believe in is culture - culture is the bottom line 'reality'.

And culture is consensus.

Yet the politically correct believe in the liberation of individual desire: that is, they believe in the overthrow of consensus.

So the bottom line reality for political correctness is... a continually changing, compulsory consensus.

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Is this to be what Richard Rorty described as a 'liberal ironist' - to live passionately by understandings one knows to be temporary and contingent?

Not really - political correctness is better characterized by Peter Sloterdijk's 'enlightened false consciousness' of the modern cynic.

Enlightened = realistic; false consciousness = self-serving illusion.

The combination is a clear eyed awareness of one's own self-manipulating fantasies; fantasies which one also believes absolutely.

To make reality and then to forget one has just made it, and then to remember, critique and re-make reality; and again to forget it - and so on and so forth...

*

Neither ironical nor detached; enlightened false consciousness is a severe, rational, anger-fuelled stance which aims to impose meaning and purpose onto life via the continual bureaucratic and authoritarian process of creating and moulding culture - undoing and reversing the inequalities and miseries of the past, and chasing always after the flickering fashions in upper class status.

Culture is arbitrary, yet it is reality; culture is managed, yet it is contingent; culture us everything and irresistible, yet it is nothing and as insignificant as the life of a mayfly.

This enlightened false consciousness collapses into careerism, which collapses into parasitism (life as a permanent holiday, travel, good living), which collapses into the secret-guilty cult of the openly instinctual and unashamed psychopath: the invincible gangster, the irresistible and expert sexual predator, the envied permanently-stoned junkie.

This opposite to the disaffected cynic is what Sloterdijk (in his Critique of Cynical Reason) terms the kynic.

The kynic has (merely) discarded consciousness; has solved the problem of being a modern human in a modern society by becoming an animal and preying upon society.

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But in the cynic and the kynic, Sloterdijk has exhaustively described the possibilities for modern secular life - the bureaucrat who lives inside of culture OR the junkie who lives outside (and upon) culture.

Make your choice.

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Except that the normal, mainstream, generally accepted thing is to alternate between these states.

Hence PC is remarkably tolerant of the kynic; because (to parody Solzhenitsyn):

...the line separating cynic and kynic passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts.

This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years.

Even within hearts overwhelmed by kynicism, one small bridgehead of cynicism is retained; and even in the most cynical of all hearts, there remains a small corner of kynicism.



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A lot of modern people who pride themselves on 'realism', harbour the delusion that - sooner or later - reality will force itself upon people. 

But this is not true. 

Unless reality is consciously sought and chosen; then people (both individually, as in masses or as institutions) will never awaken from falsehood to reality; but will instead merely move from one false understanding to another. 

Men of earlier eras who tried to live in a virtual world of falsity used to revert to reality. 

This happened because (in pre-modern times; to varying degrees in different ties and places) Man's consciousness used to live inside-of reality. 

Like it or not; that is how we were made and organized. Consciousness was not (as now) fully-separated from the environment. 

Men were immersed-in their environment; therefore the (real) environment had direct power to impose itself upon our awareness, spontaneously.

In pre-modern times, reality would become conscious spontaneously; and it took effort and choice to reject reality; and therefore there was a tendency for Men living in falsehood to revert to reality. 

However, nowadays, modern Man's consciousness is cut-off from reality. 

Modern Man is alienated. 

And it is exactly this cut-off-ness of consciousness that enables Men of the modern world to live - for decade after decade - in falsehood, in illusion, in a virtual reality.  

Ironically, modern self-described 'realists' often exemplify this cut-off-ness of modern consciousness from reality; by the fact that they reject the divine, the spiritual, the soul, life beyond death etc - all of which used to be spontaneously known - and quite obviously real! - to Men of pre-modern eras. 

These modern (self-styled) 'realists' - like the rest of us - lack the ancient spontaneous and passive realism of consciousness; and mistake their unawareness of phenomena for the absence of phenomena.  

It is our consciousness that provides all the meanings and explanations for the stimuli and perceptions - which makes conscious-sense of the world around us.

All the meaning of which we are aware is therefore separated from reality; therefore (in modern Man) reality has no way of imposing itself upon consciousness.

So long as our consciousness is passive - reality cannot get at it. 

We can only know reality by consciously choosing it; by an active process.

Nowadays, we all consciously choose the reality that we believe, and in-which we dwell. 

The difference lies in whether we choose to discover and believe the one true reality; or one of the innumerable false realities. 

And in this world of now, dominated by evil powers; if we take the path of passivity, and decline to choose; then it is one (or many) of the false realities of which we will become conscious. 

True reality is something each must find for himself; and himself choose.

One of William Arkle's core insights is that - in normal, everyday life - people act from a multitude of false selves. The true self, which is of divine origin and potentially able to become a god, is what makes us what we are - but it may be completely buried beneath false selves; the true self may be utterly ineffectual.

These false selves are of many types. Some are the collections of traits - hereditary and socialised - that constitute our 'personality' as described and measured by psychology. Others are that mass of automatic, robotic skills and responses that we learn to deal with the problems of living; including skills like typing or driving, small-talk and routine social interaction.

You can see that false selves are the totality of what a person presents to the world; and usually also everything that a person is aware of in himself, insofar as he is aware of anything. So, our consciousness is not the same thing as our true self, because it may be unaware of the true self, may even deny the reality of any such thing as a true self.

False selves are therefore necessary but a problem, because whenever we make an effort to change ourselves in any way, the probability is that this will be a matter of one or more of the false selves trying to change us in a superficial and false direction.

This is why methods of meditation,. methods of self-improvement, will-power... all such endeavours are nearly always ineffective. It is just a matter of distorting ourselves by exaggerating one or more false selves.

And how can we consciously strive to discover and nurture our true self, when the striving is being done by a false self?

Or if we try to relax and let-go the true self; simply 'allowing' the true self to emerge from under the false ones; there is a likelihood that we will instead be releasing one or more of the false selves...

The problem is not insoluble, because it has been achieved by others (and perhaps even by our-selves, albeit infrequently and briefly); but Arkle makes clear that there is no method to it; and indeed part of solving the problem is to recognise why there is no method. We must 'quarry out' our real self from the false ones, by some kind of trial and error - discovering what works for us, here and now; but never able to make the process a standard one.

The answer can be summarised as 'intuition' - but that is just giving a name to the fact that there is no method. But the start of a solution is to define the problem - and after that to recognise when the true self is emerging and strengthening. And this can be done by learning to recognise the uniquely self-validating quality of the true self.

Once you know it is there, real and vital - we can feel the reality of the true self in an absolutely distinctive way - even though we cannot describe it.

 

One of the difficulties about understanding Owen Barfield, is that he did not really understand himself! 

If we consider the relationship between human consciousness and the spiritual or divine consciousness - then mortal Man is alienated from the divine to some - very varied - degree; in the sense that there is always a sense of separation that must be overcome.

Even in the most spiritual societies, there is a need for some act of will or, more often, ritual process, in order to overcome this alienation.

Among animistic hunter gatherers, the shamans will undergo fasting, or prolonged dancing, or drumming, or something like lucid dreaming - in order to reach a state of transformed consciousness in which the spiritual realm may be contacted. In ancient Egypt, there was a prolonged and elite training, and many symbols, talismans and rituals, to bridge the gap between the mundane and the divine.

Among Hindus there is the discipline of yoga, among Zen Buddhists there is the prolonged training of sitting, and monastic disciplines.

Among Christians there are the monastic traditions, rules and supervisions of Eastern and Western Catholicism - fasting, vigils (prolonged wakefulness), sustained and repeated prayer, and other ascetic practises.

Modern man is, of course, far more alienated than any of these. Indeed, it seems that some Men are wholly alienated - and never at any times in their waking life achieve a bridging of the gap between human consciousness and the spiritual realm (and they regard dream consciousness as a mere delusional epiphenomenon).

So severe is modern alienation that I regard it as the most subjectively obvious of spiritual pathologies - modern Man's existential aloneness, his sense of being cut-off from the spiritual and the divine is probably more acutely painful than his lack of meaning and purpose in life. Modern man's alienation is, indeed, apparently so severe that he feels dead-inside.

Alienation can be solved by a fundamental change in conscious attitude - but to be effective this change must be accompanied by a new metaphysical system that regards the new consciousness as potentially real (therefore not merely a delusion, not just wishful thinking).

But the Christian needs to know that alienation is not all bad! In the sense that our aim is a relationship with God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost - and relationship entails separation.

Our goal is not an obliteration of our consciousness, not a fusion with the divine nor an absorption into the divine - not a loss of self - instead a loss of false selves and a living from our real self in a loving relationship.

What of those who do not want to retain the self, but who do want to become One with the divine? My understanding is that this is allowed by God - although it is not what he most wants for us and from us. Since it was God who (necessarily) unilaterally gifted us with consciousness, He is aware that there are some who prefer not to accept this gift - and it is a gift which must be accepted voluntarily, without coercion. So we can take back this gift and return to the primordial state of non-consciousness (in a state of eternal bliss in the present).

But for Christians we should not crave such a state, because we have Love as our primary value, which entails relationships, which entails consciousness. There is always therefore some barrier, some line between our-self and other-selves - some element which could be termed alienation.

What we need is to be able to cross this line more easily and more often - to the degree of becoming aware of, communicating with, the spiritual and divine realms. 

This is a secret world - consider Arkle's businessman painting above. The man is in the loving, caring embrace of a spiritual being - is he aware of the fact, or is his awareness turned away? The picture is enigmatic, and we would have no way of knowing how the man is experiencing the situation.

But the benign divine and spiritual realm is always there, waiting for our attention, hoping for our communication, yearning for acknowledgement of the loving relationship.

Happy Christmas.

I've said it before, but it's a hard truth to grasp and hold onto; that our terminal condition of being is caused by a twofold error/sin, and can only be escaped by a twofold correction/repentance. 

Our basic beliefs are false and evil, such that our good impulses and experiences are ignored, explaied-away or (increasingly) inverted in meaning. 

At the same time, our actual lived experiences are defective. We think in a crude and unsustainable way - which means that we seek and value experiences that are needed to perpetuate this defective consciousness. 

That is, we seek constant affirmation and stimulation to keep the wrong ideas going; and/or we seek to obliterate our consciousness of the wrongness of things - e.g. by intoxication and other forms of dulling or obliteration. 

Escape is yearned-for but in a mistaken form. We passively seek to have the answer imposed-upon-us; because only thus are we prepared to believe it. Yet, simultaneously, we are aware that all the answers within our kind of consciousness are merely hypothetical models; that we pickup and discard with high frequency. 

Modern consciousness is so obviously shallow, labile, provisional... defective that we have lost trust in our capacity to know. 

We disbelieve our-selves - because we hardly know our-selves. We have no direct and experiential contact with other people, or other Beings (including deities) that comprise the living universe; therefore all of these are unreal, and unmotivating. 

And if  they are, briefly, experienced as real and compelling, we doubt this insight and suspect the motivations. We cannot chose, because all choices seem feeble and short-lived conjectures. 

In the end, the only safe thing is to assimilate to the currently-dominant external inputs...

   

Therefore escape requires a twofold move: to know the reality of ourselves and divine creation, and at the same time to direct our feeble and sustainable consciousness to participate in our-selves, other men and the Beings that comprise reality. 

But this cannot be done be any technique or method - because these are aspects of the very Modern Consciousness that we wish to escape. This doing can only be accomplished by Love, which is the basis of creation. 

Since we intend to re-connect our consciousness with creation - this entails Love. 

And again we meet with false understandings; since the passive modern consciousness believes real love, or the highest love, to be universal an impersonal, abstract and ideal - whereas real-actual love is particular and personal, 'concrete' and particular. 

The notion of ideal, impersonal and universal love is indeed another evil-absorbed-hypothesis of modern consciousness. 

So we must start-from actual, 'given', specific love of a person or other Being: that is the only basis of genuine escape; of re-connection with reality and the sustaining power of creation. We need to be guided-by love; not attempting to guide love by using that Modern Conscious which is causing the problem.  

Not technique but love; and love as specific and 'personal'; together with the conviction that this is indeed the ultimate reality of this creation in which we dwell. 

Both together and at the same time.  

Originally, Men simply perceived and believed the suprasensory reality - they saw and heard the voices of spirits, gods and demons...

Then the world became more confined to perception by the five senses. The spirit reality could only be perceived as a result of special rituals.  First there were shamans who specialised in contacting the spirit realm, then there were priests...

Now the spirit reality is so remote to us that we cannot perceive it at all, except in altered states of consciousness such that our consciousness, our self of self awareness, is suppressed - by drug intoxication, disease, in sleep... When we are awake, alert and in clear consciousness we live in a world of five senses merely, from which spirits, gods and demons are absent.

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But we are supposed to be aware of spirit reality by a different means - not by passive sensory perception but by active direct knowing.

Instead we live in an age of passive delusion: people do, in fact, believe without sensory evidence, they believe in what is Not actually perceived or/ or is contradicted by experience. That is the delusional 'virtual world' of modern mainstream reality - enforced by officialdom, mass media and large institutions...

But what modern mainstream people believe is not merely false because self-contradicting, but also frequently changing; this being sustained by an incoherent brew of metaphysical assumptions of 'relativism', individualism, biological reductionism, abstract imprecise principles and imperatives (Justice, Equality, Diversity...) and the inaccessibility of real-reality and true-truth...

The one thing moderns know they know, deep down - is that they do not really know...

Modern man is therefore, and rightly, alienated from the world, from other people, and even from himself and his own thoughts: he doubts everything, including his doubts - and he fears.

(Alienation is our friend - it is the divine inner guidance system telling us we are on the wrong track utterly - not merely unhappy but living under false assumptions and in false delusions.) 

Modern Man's only release is in seeking un-consciousness: oblivion in distraction or pleasure. His great 'hope' is therefore to cease to be a Man, to revert to animal un-self-consciousness...

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In principle, modern Men are right to live in 'delusions' - in the sense that we are meant to know without external evidence; to know by direct apprehension. That is the evolutionary destiny.

But we must live by 'true delusions' - that is, by the intuitive insights of our own real selves - not those fake delusions of multiple, contradictory, labile and socially/ media created selves...

Man's destiny is to be free and agent, like God: as a god. To know everything, incrementally and asymptotically, from our selves thinking. Because true thinking is reality, because it is divine. 

We must know by active and true thinking; not by passive absorption.

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A hunter gatherer walked through life seeing and hearing spirits, they took this for granted; and were passive in relation to the spirit world; they assumed it was 'out there' and its meanings were 'out there' - not knowing that spirits are not just out-there but also in-here, and we participate in them.

(Man is necessary for reality.)

Modern Man cannot see spirits, and assumes that because they are not merely out-there, then they are nowhere! - yet he also assumes that what is believes is not really real. Modern Man is trapped by his metaphysical assumptions in a loop of nihilism and despair.

We are meant to walk through life not perceiving but directly knowing the reality of spirits (and many other things out-with sensory phenomena); knowing more-and-more of the reality of things without any ultimate bounds to that knowledge - while aware of our real selves; alert and in clear consciousness.

SO - do not expect to see spirits and other 'supernatural' phenomena out-there and 'objective' - instead expect to know spirits, angels, demons, God: know directly; that is simply by thinking properly, from our (true) selves.

And in such thinking we will (quite naturally and spontaneously) know for ourselves and by direct experience what is real and relevant.

It used to be almost universal that becoming more-good, a better person, was a thing that was imposed from externally. 

Society imposed values in a mandatory and exclusive fashion; or maybe the individual's role was to choose (from available external options) what set-of-values he would impose on himself. 

And when (with the advent of "romanticism") the increasingly-alienated people of The West began to become concerned with attaining higher consciousness; the solution was presented in similar terms: as externally-defined methods or techniques that were practiced until habitual. 

But we cannot, anymore, impose goodness from outside; neither can we achieve a higher, more spiritual or romantic consciousness by learning techniques. 

Both goodness and higher consciousness need to be be discovered within - and their sources are different, albeit related. 

They are related because attaining higher consciousness requires that our selves simultaneously be aligned with divine creation: only from a basis of harmony with God's creative intent, can we "connect" with our True Selves within, and with The World all around us. 

All of which explains both the failure of all systematic attempts to raise human consciousness, and also the failures of Christian (and other) churches to attain their goals. 

There are, it turns out, serious problems with what used to be standard procedures for self-improvement. 

First that we are unwilling to leave-off from seeking external solutions. We want answers to come from public discourse, and be applicable generally. 

Another problem is that we are not spontaneously conscious of our True Selves; and are instead conscious of a variety of superficial and "false" selves that have been constructed by our net-evil society interacting with those of our values that are dissonant-with or opposed-to divine creation. 

In other words, our consciousness (that from-which we are aware) is not located inside the True Self, but needs to discover and become aware of it. 

Since we are creatures of mixed motivations, it is difficult for this state of awareness-of-True Self to be sustained - we are easily distracted by mundane considerations that seem to promise current gratifications, or seem more urgent. 

After all, during this mortal life almost-anything can seem in the here-and-now - and in a way it is! - more urgent than the meaning and direction of divine creation - including our death and resurrection.

Furthermore, the True Self cannot be discovered by the exercise of Will Power - if (as is usually the case) that Will is located in a an external-false self!

So, to escape the Normal Human Condition of alienated consciousness is alliance with the powers of this-worldly evil, turns out to be a completely new and different kind of problem than anything else we are ever likely to have heard-of or tried!

To genuinely improve ourselves is not just difficult (that has always been the case) but traditional-methods diligently pursued - indeed "methods" as such! - are at best useless, and may well make things even-worse. 

Which helps explain why genuine self-improvement (whether of goodness or higher consciousness) seems only rarely and temporarily to be achieved. 

To take the next divinely destined step in the development of Man's conscious being (i.e. Primary Thinking) is extremely difficult. It can't be done by starting from where we are and then trying hard, doing exercises, concentrating, analysing, working at it... Primary Thinking is not a technique.

The reason is because what is needed is the Thinking of the Real Self - and we, here and now, are not 'located' in our real self; but instead in a variety of false selves. Changing this is difficult. How do we locate the real self? How does a false self (which is where we are, now) find the real self - allow its thinking to take-over...

What block us? The answer is (put simply) fear.


Fear is the problem: endemic, existential fear - why? Because (to progress as God wishes us) we must choose reality - choose to set aside fake knowledge. Yet we are locked into unreality and fake knowledge by our materialism, our worldliness, our fear of what will happen if we abandon them...

If we continue to focus on this world - on how this world makes us feel (happy, sad, pleasure, pain, suffering etc) as an end in itself - then we are trapped, because this is a false perspective. By adhering to it - by trying to optimise our responses to the experience of personal mortal life in this world - we are trapped in a vicious cycle.

So why do we continue doing it? Fear. Fear that if we fail to focus on how we feel and the material facts-of-life, then we will feel unbearable and our lives will fall to pieces. This seems very reasonable - everything about this world tells us that it is necessary to focus on such matters - and makes us deeply, existentially afraid not to focus on such matters...

What can possibly overcome such a reasonable, sensible, evidential, existential fear?  


Faith, Hope and Charity (Charity being Christian Love) must come first - and without FHC there will be so significant progress or advance or raising of consciousness.

How can this be? - How does it work?

Faith is trust in God, and the God that we can trust is a God that is wholly good, and loves us as a child (Charity).

Faith is the maximum extreme of an ideal of the child's trust of his parents - it is the ground of a young child's existence that his parents want the best possible for him - over the long run. But God, unlike our mortal parents, is the creator - so our trust in God is also a trust in creation; a trust that the world is set-up for our personal ultimate benefit in the kind of way an ideal parent might set up the home as a place of experiencing and learning.

We need also to know that the point of this life (our mortal life) is Not only this mortal life; but our mortal life is one of experiences from-which we can learn: learn for the benefit of our eternal life (after death).


Mortal life is extremely important, indeed vital for our ultimate goal because we must become incarnate and die in order to be resurrected into that everlasting and Heavenly life that Jesus promises. 

But the importance of our experiences during mortal life are related to what we most need to learn. The experiences of mortal life are not an end-in-themselves; the experiences of our mortal lives are real and important because they have eternal significance.

It is Faith which gives us this perspective, the faith is made possible and reasonable by God's Charity/ Love for each of us an an unique individual in God's creation - and that leads to the validity of Hope.


Hope is what enables us to overcome fear - and Hope is reasonable, valid, believable; because we know that this world and our specific life has been set-up by God for our own personal ultimate benefit... 

(As well as the benefit of our brothers and sisters among God's children; the analogy with ideal earthly parents is exact - they want the best for each individual child; and for all of their children.)

Hope is what allows us to see beyond the pleasures, pains, happiness, sadness and sufferings of our mortal lives.

Hope is what overcomes fear. 


We can escape our false selves, and escape the trap of our low-level and false consciousness, only by transcending fear so that we can know reality; and we can transcend fear only by knowing reality - by FHC...

By knowing in our hearts that there really-is something beyond and more-significant-than the subjective experiences of this world.

We need to know that our experiences in this mortal life are 'in God's hand' and for our ultimate personal benefit - that our life really-is that detailed and personal and specific.

On such a basis (and only on such) we can drop our worldly-materialist-fear-based 'defences' and 'do' Primary Thinking' - we can allow ourselves to think from our real selves; because we are confident that this is what we should do, and can do.

Edited from A Geography of Consciousness by William Arkle (1974) - the chapter 'Relating Levels of Consciousness', pp 134-7. This, coming halfway through the book, probably represents the centre of the argument and the key teaching. It represents Arkle's diagnosis of why our life is typically and mostly so dull and oppressive; and how a fundamental change of attitudes and assumptions about this world could make it qualitatively better.  

The seat of consciousness is in the Absolute, and not in what is ordinarily considered as manifestation at all.

The proposition is that the function and purpose of manifestation [or creation] is to create the ground for experience and the communication of experience. The experience itself is only valid when it is a part of this absolute consciousness which we ourselves are not normally in a position to be aware of and properly identify with. The manifested worlds are consequently no more than the ‘stuff’ of communication itself.

To put the idea very simply, the whole of manifestation is a communication on the part of the creative cause. Manifestation with its many universes and planes is something which God wished to say. We are the individuals that God wishes to say it to. Thus the real significance of every instant is the response being made by us to events... not the events themselves.

This suggests that the world we live-in is the world of absolute consciousness; and that the worlds we are identified-with are statements - are communications of qualities and principles. When we look around us what we are really seeing is a prolonged lecture; but the language it is given-in is not the one used in man-to-man communications but an infinitely more complete and efficient language.

This language is the one of the rain and sunlight, trees and grasses, children, mountains, clouds, colours, scents, sounds, responsibilities, loves, dangers, mothers, fathers, wives, lovers, friends, facts and foods, happy times, sad times, beautiful times, absorbing times, boring times and futile times.

To try and equate reality with the physical worlds of communication and to try and equate human consciousness with the human body, is like trying to understand and identify the reality of a book by measuring its proportions and analysing the paper and the ink. Such an attitude could only arise if it was not realised that a book was meaningless as a physical phenomenon but meaningful as a communication.

While the book is a real phenomenon and capable of physical analysis, the secret of understanding it is to realise that it is a continuing statement of qualities and attitudes of consciousness. To know what a book is one has to let it speak, and speak to one’s real Self.

If this is not done, the most searching analysis of the paper and the molecules and atoms and atomic particles and energies and proportions of the paper, will completely fail to explain the reality of the book as a phenomenon. We may gather a very impressive knowledge of the way that the universe is built, but this will be as nothing to understanding what the book and the universe is saying.

The stuff of the physical world we live in is thus no longer to be considered as ‘mere stuff’, if we ourselves are to be more than ‘mere clever things’. If we are to discover ourselves as significant living consciousness, we must accept the world we live in as an important communication. A tree must not only be a potential source of timber and money. A tree must be one side of a conversation, the language of which we must take the trouble to learn and respond with.

The sort of statement that has just been made will not be understood by anyone unless they want to understand it. It is a statement from outside the accepted culture of our day and would be easily ridiculed by any person wishing to do so. Nevertheless it is intended to be a serious factual suggestion as to why so many people find so little meaning in life.

The painful part of failure to observe and read the communications that are continually being made to us through natural phenomena is the experience of extreme boredom. If the theory is correct the boredom arises because the valid and most real part of the individual feels itself to be fulfilling no purpose, in fact it feels ignored and forgotten. It knows it is something of great value and potential, but for some reason it is unable to become responsive and alive except in a few minor ways.

Without knowing it, the individual is creating this misery for himself because he is living in certain restricted categories with which he has classed earlier experiences and has long ago ceased to let events speak for themselves. The person lives in a world of labels of his own making, perhaps in the grounds that he thinks he will be unable to cope with real events themselves and perhaps be unable to make the significance of the events fit into his ‘safe’ but ‘uncomfortable’ philosophy of reality.

Because of this situation such a person is extremely aware of the apparently concrete unalterability and stony-faced aspect of the world around him. He is very aware of matter seeming to be dead, heavy and dull and monotonously unalterable, in fact the walls of a prison. When, however, responsiveness is felt within his being, then immediately the situation alters. The boredom ceases, the unalterability is not noticed, the prison vanishes and time goes quickly. Meaning and purpose creep back into life and the question of what it is all about seems partly answered and, indeed, only an important question is thought of as ‘what can be done in co-operating with life?’

This sense of being aware of matter as a prison, as the beginning and ending of something hopeless and meaningless is not uncommon, particularly among people who have grown beyond the first hectic and unconsidered flush of youth. The world of physical material becomes part of a ‘solid’ identification which, for the purposes of this argument, can simply be termed 'matter'.

This is not the matter of the physicist but matter as experience. Not the matter that is measured but the matter that is felt. Not analysed but identified-with. In this context the following statement can be suggested as a verbal equation: ‘Awareness of matter is failure to communicate.’

Non-awareness of the materiality of matter is thus the result of success in communication.

Matter as materiality only exists in the experience of human beings who have ceased to remain responsive. To the rest of nature materiality presents no problems. It is consciously or unconsciously accepted as a most interesting and absorbing communication of qualities related to survival at the lower end of the third vector or related to beauty and idealism at the upper end of the third vector.

Matter can also be thought of as space and time experience. In the imprisoned mood of materiality, time drags and assumes very obvious characteristics of its own. It intrudes. Together with this the size and number of phenomena becomes over important. The daunted observer reflects on the littleness of his own body and the insignificance of his own single identity among so many thousands of his fellows. 

...He looks from the world out into the universe and his senses are numbed at the thought of the vastness of the cosmic system and the distances that are involved on every side. The background of his whole existence becomes unmanageable by his consciousness. It does not even appear hostile for what is worse is the fact that it appears indifferent, quite unaware of him.

Solidity of life as an experience, or matter as an experience can now be related to a degree of responsiveness of the true Being. It can also be related to the level of consciousness of the individual Being. When 'matter' in this sense obtrudes into our life, it indicates that we are not being our-Self.

When matter does not obtrude, whether we are at a chronic high level or low level of consciousness, we are being ourself as much as we can be, responding with all we have available... A false personality has not been allowed to form and insinuate itself between our Self and the world of communication.

An aspect of Romantic Christianity that is given special emphasis by Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield is the need to become conscious of that which was previously unconscious.

(Or, this is not so much a need, but our divine destiny (at least, in The West) - it is what we are incarnated to do during our mortal lives in this era; and something which if rejected will seriously imperil our salvation, and our culture. As indeed it has.)


By my understanding, with the modern development of consciousness there is an element of returning to the spontaneous 'animism' of young childhood, a recognition that the world is 'made of' Beings - alive and conscious, with motivations - in relationships with each other; but this time the animism is one with awareness of all elements of our world view (not merely a perspective passively resulting from instincts and socialisation).

The importance of consciousness is that it enables agency, or freedom (as in the title of Steiner's 1994 Philosophy of Freedom) - because only when we are conscious of some thing, are we free to to embrace or reject that thing. Without consciousness we are 'slaves', automatic products of our environment and instincts.

That development of consciousness which is desired is a necessary step towards a full quality of divinity that may participate in creation; without consciousness we are a part-of creation, with consciousness we are participants in creation; potentially able to join with God in this work.

Thus in this current phase of culture we have separated from God; our task (if we wish for Life Eternal in Heaven) is to rejoin with God, but this time with consciousness and by personal choice - and this entails awareness of that which was previously unconscious.


But what does this becoming conscious actually mean - and what does it Not mean?

First, we need to take into account that this is mortal life, and our world is one or impermanence - of decay, disease and death. So nothing in this world is permanent for us (as mortal Beings). That recognition immediately clarifies that the attaining of consciousness aimed-at is something that may not be remembered, may not have permanent effect, may not be acted-upon...

(...At least so far as our knowledge in this world is concerned. We have faith that such temporary attainments in this world do indeed have permanent reality in the post-mortal context of resurrected life  eternal in Heaven - but not in this world.)

So in seeking consciousness, what we are seeking us something much like 'a moment of clarity'.

This is the intuitive sense of direct knowing - and typically of becoming, for a moment, clear about something we already 'knew' but unconsciously... We knew, but until this moment did not know that we knew...


The key point is that these (and there may be many, should be many such) moments of clarity, awareness and direct knowing are IT. These moments are precisely what we seek in the evolution of consciousness - and indeed, such moments are all that we can seek.

They are our maximum attainment because the moment may be forgotten, it may be distorted by memory, may be misinterpreted retrospectively... it is only in the moment, at the moment, that it is what it should-be.


We need to understand this; because otherwise (given our habits, and Men's habits for the past couple of millennia at least) we will try to seek consciousness in the form of articulated concepts, of models - that is, we will attempt to capture the direct knowing in words or symbols and to make it part of a system.

And this is an error; because these are secondary phenomena. Direct intuitive knowing cannot be reduced to a few words or a few symbols or a simple model - of course not! Nothing can be - not even such everyday matters as the appearance of a daisy, the performance of a song, the smell of a pine forest can be described accurately and completely!

Ineffability - inexpressibility, incommunicability... this is the mystical insight, but not at all specific to mystical experiences; it is just an obvious fact.

Our experience is not pre-divided into chunks that can be separated completely - no, all is interrelated to the extent of creation. And there is no end to the inner detail of anything. We are confronted by open-ended limitlessness of complexity both as we look without and also within.

So, all that we symbolise in actual words, or communicate in language or image - all such is necessarily simplified, distorted, incomplete, secondary. The direct and immediately apprehended knowing is the only primary experience; and our awareness likewise cannot be captured nor can it be communicated except as a model - which is certainly wrong!


Therefore we should avoid going down that path which was pursued by Rudolf Steiner; in which he attempted to describe, summarise and communicate his transitory experiences of direct knowing in a truly vast, intricate and interlinked system - of a form suitable for presenting in lectures and diagrams, and publishing in scores of books, and teaching to tens of thousands of 'followers' at that time and for another century, so far.

Steiner's compounded error led to the illusion that it was necessary - or at least desirable - for us to learn, understand, memorise, further communicate this systemic model of reality, as if it was a description of real-reality. Which it not only cannot be - but the gap between such a model (any such model) and directly apprehended reality is unknowable.

The vastness and complexity of Steiner's communicated model therefore misled bot Steiner and his followers into assuming that it really captured reality, better than a simple model would or could. Yet the gap between a simple model and reality and a complex model and reality are equally limitless! Complexity does not allow us to approach closer to the truth - the truth remains as far away as ever; but the potential for delusion does increase with a model's complexity and difficulty of mastery.


(We can explicitly know that a model is simplified and distorted - but not how much it is wrong, nor in what ways it is wrong. And this fact is not affected by the 'size' of the model. Typically, a more complex model is more precise. We will tend towards ever more more-precise error - precision is a false promise of accuracy. Hence the greater potential for misleading.)

This all helps explain the sorry history of Steiner's Anthroposophical Society - which has now become just-another converged secular leftist organisation that embraces the Global Totalitarian agenda; albeit one that, currently, expresses a lot of eccentric pseudo-factual beliefs.


What of coherence? Well, coherence is also a thing that needs to be directly known. The coherence, or incoherence, of our knowing is something that we already know but unconsciously - our task is to bring this knowing to awareness.

For example, we may intuit that our knowledge is incoherent still, and needs more work, more clarification - or we may realise that it is indeed coherent, and we have grasped reality - for a moment.

But we cannot take things further than that moment of clarity, nor should we seek to do so - because any such attempt will fail, and in attempting to describe direct knowing in communicable language, we may become (as Steiner apparently did) dominated-by that false model - and assertive of its rightness, true-ness; we may assert that our ridiculously simplified System is actually itself reality and truth and that to 'know' this System is necessary, or even that to understand the System and be able to expound that System is equivalent to, or better than, the momentary clarify of direct knowledge.

Such an error is likely (and very tempting) because the System made-from direct knowing is durable and discussable, it can be a part of 'objective' public discourse; while by contrast the actuality of direct knowing is evanescent and private.

Making a fake model (untrue, but presented as if true) is therefore a possible route to status and power. For instance one might found a society, a religion or a business, which purports to be based-on direct knowing - but which is inevitably only a distorted, summarised and systemised account of the experience.


Setting aside such temptations and recognising that that which we seek will be temporary and will not be articulable; we find that becoming conscious, direct knowing, Final Participation is a much more attainable life strategy than might have been supposed.

This is great news!

Our task is (merely!) to seek such momentary clarity of insights, clarity of coherence's; and to be satisfied with that quality of experience - but (the difficult thing...) to continue to keep seeking for such moments for as long as we are alive.

Because, for as long as we are alive, we have important work to do; and that is why we remain alive.


Note: All this has been clarified for me by reading Philip K Dick's Exegesis (2011), which strikes me as exactly the book I most needed at exactly this point of my life. 

Most recorded visionary experiences are expansions of perception – seeing or hearing things that other people cannot. For example William Blake saw angels and conversed with his deceased brother. Often these visions occur in altered states of consciousness – trances, lucid dreams, delirium or intoxication.

These are aspects of what Rudolf Steiner termed Atavistic Clairvoyance implying a throw-back or regression to an early type of consciousness more typical of childhood and tribal societies; and Owen Barfield classified as Original Participation. And in the scheme of evolution of human consciousness the aim is not to go back, but forward to a new state of consciousness that Steiner called the Spiritual Soul and Barfield termed Final Participation.

A visionary of Final Participation would not experience ‘visions’ in the sense of hallucination-like, quasi-sensory, perceptual experiences; but would instead experience imaginative thinking, or direct knowing. To put it simply: the visionary of Original Participation would experience things appearing in one or more of his senses; while the visionary of Final Participation would experience things appearing in his stream of thoughts.

It might be asked why this counts as an evolutionary development in consciousness? The answer would be that the imagination is a direct and unmediated form of knowing truth and reality; whereas perceptual experiences are prone to sensory distortions and require to be interpreted. Furthermore, the visionary experiences of Original Participation often occur in states of altered consciousness when attention, concentration, purposive thinking and memory may all be distorted or impaired; whereas in Final Participation the state of consciousness can be alert, clear and focused.

Finally, thinking is intrinsically capable of complete integration of any and all phenomena. Anything which can be thought about is included in the stream of thoughts, and can be subject to any or all of the analyses and manipulations of thinking.

This is straightforward enough; but of course very few people are aware of, or would endorse, the idea of thinking as a primary way of knowing truth and reality. And one reason for this is that typically thinking is much less powerful and compelling than perception. For example, people say things like ‘seeing is believing’ or ‘I’ll believe that when I see it’ – indicating that perceptual experience seems to overwhelm and impose itself in a way that thinking apparently does not. For instance, most people would be more likely to believe in the reality of ghosts or angels if they saw one than if they thought one (even though they are aware of the distortions and hallucinations to which perception is prone – and they would not necessarily believe in them even if they did see one).

Alternatively, people may only believe things for which they have what they regard as ‘evidence’ – and they will believe such things even when they think or perceive differently, and even when they cannot think it or have never had any confirmatory sensory experience; even when experience and common sense refute it.

In practice, ‘evidence’ is so vaguely defined as to be impossible to define or pin down – for some evidence comes from some trusted or authoritative source; but often enough people don’t know from where they got the ‘evidence’, and it could have been from sources which they do not trust or in fact disbelieve (such as the mass media, novels or fictional movies) but despite not knowing the provenance of their beliefs they nonetheless find themselves compelled to believe. Indeed, it is typical that a great deal of modern mainstream beliefs are false or have zero evidence, but are almost universally and indeed fanatically enforced on a global scale - for example the officially imposed assertions that people can change sex by means of drugs and surgery, or that political policies can control the earth’s climate.

Either way, it is clear that thinking is, in practice, low-rated as a human activity. People regard thinking as less important than action, or doing; less important than perceiving (feeling, seeing or hearing, especially); and less important than whatever is culturally-defined and propagandised. Consequently, people do not think very often, very diligently, very sustainedly about things; and they do not take much notice of the consequences of their own thinking.

It is perhaps regarded as little more than a waste of time, a joke or an excuse for idleness when someone claims to have been thinking. This applies even or especially, in academia; where to be caught thinking ‘in office hours’ would be even more shameful than to be caught reading a book! Thinking does not count as ‘work’.

It could therefore justly be said that – in the mainstream modern world - thinking is a low status activity.

Yet, for those who are – like me – convinced by the philosophical arguments of Owen Barfield (and of his acknowledged master Rudolf Steiner); thinking is the most important human activity and a necessity for the future evolutionary-development of our consciousness. Thinking ought to be our number one priority in life (number one, that is, within the prior, essential frame and context of Christianity).

What seems to be needed is that thinking, including imaginative thinking, become at least as powerful - indeed as overwhelming, as potentially motivating and life-changing - as actions, perceptions, and official/ media propaganda. We need both to know, and to feel, that thinking is real and true knowing.

Barfield therefore referred to the need for ‘strengthening’ thinking, and regarded Steiner as the most successful and advanced exponent of the necessary type of strengthened thinking. But how to do this? Steiner left behind various suggestions, instructions and exercises in how to strengthen thinking. For example to focus attention on some-thing, such as a plant, and try to experience its life as a dynamic historical and unfolding reality. However, my impression is that these exercises seem either not to work very well, perhaps only partially and very slowly; at any rate, extremely few people have apparently got anywhere near Steiner in terms of their ability to think in that visionary fashion which is destined for Final Participation.

So, something stronger and faster than Steiner’s exercises seem to be required. The weakness of Steiner’s exercises is, I think, a consequence of people lacking genuine, internal motivation to do them; which is itself a consequence of the subject matter being arbitrary. While Steiner himself, or Goethe before him, would be passionately interested in a plant, and in understanding a plant – this does not apply to most people. Genuinely motivated interest of the kind that will generate and sustain someone’s best efforts is something that cannot be manufactured to order; it is not arbitrary but is idiosyncratic. Indeed, such motivated interest may be unique and specific to each person; furthermore, many people do not even know what it is that most interests and motivates them in this way – since they have neither reflected nor developed their spontaneous, intrinsic nature (for example; they are instead dominated by the pressures of the social environment, expediency, the wish for immediate distractions and proximate pleasures, status, wealth; and things like envy, revenge, spite etc.).

Yet nothing else is likely to suffice in developing the intensity of thinking than that each person be pursuing his or her own deepest, most naturally arising fascination or perplexity.

So – we need to think in such a way as to strengthen and intensify the act of thinking – to increase its power to change us. But for this to happen we also need to take a step back – indeed the ultimate step back into the most fundamental of all considerations: metaphysics – our most basic assumptions concerning the ultimate nature of reality.

For thinking to be strengthened, our metaphysical framework needs to be one in which thinking (of the right kind) is real and true, and universally valid. If our metaphysical assumptions tell us that thinking is primary then our experience of thinking will be one of greater importance, seriousness and attention. It is the fact that the normal mainstream metaphysics of the modern West regards thinking as secondary, indeed trivial, that we find thinking so feebly impactful, so weakly effective in motivating us, as compared with other phenomena such as perceptions, actions and social conventions.

That thinking is indeed primary to human experience is the core argument of Rudolf Steiner’s early work culminating in the Philosophy of Freedom (1894); and Barfield’s Saving the Appearances (1957) – I refer readers to these books for a careful and compelling justification. However, in the end, metaphysics must be endorsed by our direct intuitions – which requires first that we acknowledge we indeed have primary metaphysical assumptions, then to make these explicit to ourselves. Only then can we evaluate whether or not we really endorse and believe our own assumptions – and if not, we may (indeed should) seek to replace them.

For thinking to take its proper place at the heart of Life; it must be of the greatest possible power, intensity and strength. Thinking should be experience – it should be experienced as much, in fact more-than ‘things that happen to us’. We need to know why and how that thinking which we make happen from our freedom and agency, from our real self (our soul) is not arbitrary nor wish-fulfilment, but on the contrary it is intrinsically and necessarily real, true and universal.

Thus prepared and equipped we can each commence work on the Life Task of intensification and strengthening of our own thinking! What does this entail? If you are already engaged in some spontaneously-arising creative endeavour then this may be straightforward – if you are a real scientist, artist or writer; then what you think about is already-decided – and the main difference is to take seriously, attend to, the actual process of thinking.

For me, a good example is what I have termed The Golden Thread. When I think back through my life, and what is important, there are relatively few things among the mass of dullness and duties – and these things seem to link-up to make a golden thread connecting childhood past with the present. It was taking this seriously, as a reality and truth rather than regarding it as some arbitrary fantasy; which helped me to become a Christian and of the mystical type. It also caused me to revise my subjective autobiography, to reshape my understanding of how my life had developed – including wrong turns, blind alleys, and descents into the pit.

Whatever it is that is your deepest motivation then forms the basis of strengthening your thinking. You will need to recognise (at a fundamental level) that you are dealing with something true, real - and in principle universally so, its truths and realities accessible to anyone competent; not merely a private delusion or day dream.

You may then learn from your experiences of thinking how best to intensify it. For instance you may learn that certain times of day are better for thinking; you may identify supportive attitudes, places or positions; helpful activities (such as reading, writing, doodling, walking, music…).

You will need to develop a habit of seriousness about thinking – so that you talk about thinking respectfully, lay stress on its primacy, refrain from casual denigration and invidious comparisons. It may be helpful to take notes, and to rehearse memories of thinking. A strategic devotion to thinking is the requisite.

You will find that creativity is nothing more or other than a consequence of primary thinking; it is a natural consequence of thinking from your unique and real self. While your true thoughts are in a universal realm, nobody thinks them quite like you do; and you will make discoveries in this realm (probably small discoveries, but personally valuable nonetheless).

You will quite spontaneously think about things beyond your past experience, beyond your senses, outside of this world and your times. This is the ‘visionary’ aspect; because the future visionary is a thinker, nor a see-er.

And with endeavour, and rapidly; your thinking will incrementally become strengthened; increased in power, motivating; rooting-you in the world and enhancing your awareness of everything true; curing the typical modern malaise of feeling cut-off, alienated because everything real and valid will come together and be related and integrated in your thoughts.

In the years approaching 2000 there was a great deal of expectation in New Age circles that this time was to be a spiritual threshold crossing; and I myself first became interested in such matters at this time - initially focused on hunter gatherer beliefs. 

Yet, the first impression as we went into the early 2000s was that 'nothing had happened' - certainly there was no significant spiritual revival: there was no clear raising of human consciousness to a higher level. The New Age movement continued - but as an increasingly commercial, psychological, 'self-help' activity. 

Meanwhile, materialism began to take-off with an accelerating expansion of bureaucracy and managerialism - and the solid domination of increasing-leftism through the entirety of mainstream politics, law, churches, the media, academia, arts, science, health services - and then into the police and military. 

There was not the expected re-enchantment of life; but instead more and more dis-enchantment.  

So - did anything happen? Was a threshold of human consciousness crossed?

I now think that yes, something happened: something Big; and yes there was a change in human consciousness. And that change was (approximately): more and more people began to live in a world of their own creation. 

This was, in its form, exactly the consciousness transition that had been foreseen several decades earlier by Rudolf Steiner and then Owen Barfield. They foresaw that Men were going to become so detached from 'nature' that they would 'make their own reality'. 

But, the reality that Men chose to make was not the one hoped for by 'spiritual people' - it was instead the made-reality of the mass media and the pervasive, extensive, unifying bureaucracy (which was  linked-up globally by early 2020 - as was first evident from the birdemic-response). 

From 2000; Men came to inhabit a willed world (a virtual world) - yet this was not the 'spiritual' world of high consciousness that had been hoped-for, nor was it a world that individual Men had personally discerned and chosen. It was instead a matter of millennial New Man passively-absorbing a dominant, mainstream 'official world' - devised and propagated by those with the greatest power and influence.  

The millennial change in consciousness was 'about' Men having a new capacity to create their own reality; in other words to 'choose what was true'. It was hoped by some that Men would use this new power to choose to live in a world of meaning, purpose and personal involvement with nature and the divine spirit world - and that Men would therefore create such a reality. 

Because Men could now choose what to believe, and could make these beliefs real; they might have chosen to acknowledge the reality of God, creation and Heaven. Of course, as a Christian, I know these to be really-real - but since the millennial transition the really-real needs to be chosen and self-created in the same way as the false and evil.

Since the millennium; Men have overwhelmingly chosen to co-create a reality without meaning, purpose or humanity; a reality based on fear, resentment and despair; a reality which denies their own capacity (and right!) to choose. 

In effect men have chosen a world of alienation, futility, and inescapable death; and then chosen to deny that they have chosen!

And they have chosen to regard their choice as inevitable, the only possibility that ever-was real. 

Why have so many Men made this choice? A choice which had led directly to the current (and unprecedented) world government of evil and systematic destruction based on fear, resentment and despair?  

Why, to put it differently, have so very few Men chosen to co-create (as they could have) a world of faith, hope and love? 

...Rejecting the chance of a world where reality really-was enchanted. 

The reasons are many - but I focus on two. 

The first was leftism - which by 2000 had infected and become established in almost everyone; and leftism is intrinsically evil; being anti-Christian and metaphysically materialist, built-on and incorporating many Big Lies. 

The entire spectrum of mainstream opinion was, by 2000, merely variations on leftism. All significant political parties and movements - left and 'right' were leftist. All New Agers were leftist, in one or other respect - and many were very leftist. 

Leftism was assumed to be the bottom line of any 'good' morality - anything else than leftism was rejected as abhorrent. Reality was fitted-into leftism...

The second was passivity. New Age expectations of the millennium were that something would happen-to people. There would be some kind of shift - which was conceptualized in terms of raised frequency, vibration, energies or the like - and this external change would would raise humanity. 

Humanity, consciousness, would be lifted by external forces; and the primary act of choice was consenting to be thus raised. 

Yet, the truth was that Men needed to make an active choice to benefit from the millennial transformation. All the good options (God, Creation, Jesus Christ, a living conscious and personal universe...) required positive, active choice. 

By remaining passive, and by regarding leftism as the fundamental truth; when the millennial threshold was crossed; Men made the world that was all around them, the world that was easiest. The world that was everywhere, powerful, persuasive, fun, socially-high-status. The world view that brought in money and led to most pleasure - that is, the world of the media, or leftist socio-politics, of materialism...

So Man did cross the threshold at the millennium, and with new powers of consciousness to create his own reality...

And then Man chose to use these new powers to make the whole world a locked-down, hope-less, dead prison - for himself and everybody else. 

Consider the phenomenon of consciousness, of self-awareness; which is part of mainstream culture in the form of official, corporate and media outputs concerning Artificial Intelligence, the possibility of Sentient computers, robots, vehicles etc. 

It is clear that the mainstream culture has abstractly defined consciousness and abstracted it from the context of living beings; and is now off into the reals of untrammeled speculation about where it might or does exist in some electronic or informational kind, independent of life and of humans. 

But my baseline metaphysical assumption - which is apparently the built-in assumption of all (?) human beings as young children - is that everything is alive (or part of a living being) - and that consciousness is an aspect of being alive. 

In other words, consciousness cannot be separated from life. All living things are conscious to some degree and in some way; and all conscious things are living. 

Therefore; if/when a non-being seems to be conscious, then this consciousness is either not real, or else coming from a living being. 

 

A separate question is why our culture has assiduously implanted the idea that non-beings can or will be conscious. This has been portrayed in fiction, or wrongly claimed in media, so often that many people believe it is true - or at least possible and imminent. 

The answer to 'why' is partly because of the innate error of modern consciousness, which allows people to believe the false idea. 

And partly because of purposive, strategic evil supernatural beings; which aim to confuse and/or brainwash people, for purposes tending to make them choose their own damnation by desiring it. 

 

Although it will strike many as implausible, including myself at some times; I think it is accurate to say that all modern people must strive to become more divine, more god-like; must organise their life around theosis.

'All' meaning all in The West, all who have moved out of the unconscious, taking-it-for-granted type of Christianity of earlier generations (including all who have been atheists) - all who have at any point been materialists, or put socio-political issues in a position of primacy...

All such people have no viable alternative but to strive for theosis (for the divine mode of consciousness, as well as salvation. To put it another way; here-and-now, and for everybody reading this, salvation is not enough. More exactly, if we strive only for salvation, a 'simple' salvation without theosis; then we will not get salvation.

This is because of the times; over the past 200 years a situation has developed in which the modern consciousness has an absolute need for theosis; such that when it is lacking, then salvation is sabotaged.

There is perhaps a brief time window in the new convert of Christianity when salvation is 'enough'; but the modern materialism, atheism, evil - is so pervasive, that we cannot just hold-on to salvation. We are compelled either to move on towards a move divine consciousness; or else to lapse back out from real Christianity, and into a secular worldly materialism that implicitly, or explicitly, rejects salvation - does not even want life everlasting in Heaven.

We moderns need to know about life everlasting, we need to know about Heaven in order to want these things enough to resist the temptations to let them slide. The kind of vagueness on such matters that sufficed in the remote past will no longer suffice. Negative theology is useless. Modern Christians must be clear, simple, explicit about Heaven and the divine consciousness.

In a sense, we must all strive to be 'saints' - but not saints in the medieval pattern. The greatest saints were not those who did good works, but those who attained to a divine consciousness while mortal - those who 'had their heads in Heaven even as their feet walked on the earth'.

And that task is now universal; we all most strive (each is our own and unique fashion) to move towards that goal.

The divine mode of consciousness is what Barfield has termed Final Participation, and I have discussed under the name of Primary Thinking. It can only be effective within the Christian framework - although it does happen spontaneously to many secular, materialist people and those from other religions - who inevitably misinterpret the experiences, because only the Christian framework is both true and sufficient.

(An individual may not be fully aware of, or able coherently to articulate, their Christian framework - often because they try to express it in a false metaphysical system - but that framework must nonetheless be in-place.) 

Of course we will not succeed in becoming saints in any permanent and complete fashion, because that is the nature of mortal life; change, decay, disease, weakness... these prevent perfection; or rather, mortal perfection is attainable but always temporary.

But the success is in the striving, and the outcome in in resurrected life eternal; mortal success is in the experiencing of momentary and infrequent successes, and in the value we place upon these experiences.

Conscious experiencing of the divine consciousness is what makes the qualitative difference between salvation and self-chosen damnation.

Rudolf Steiner and his 'disciple' Owen Barfield wrote about their conviction that - from around the year 2000 - Mankind would inevitably go-through a progressive process of transformation of consciousness. This had two aspects: 

First the inevitable transformation of consciousness, which meant that Men would create their own 'reality'. 

Second, the open question (which neither Steiner nor Barfield lived to see answered) of whether this transformation would merely happen-to Men - who would remain passively unconscious of it; or else whether Men would consciously and by choice participate in the co-creation of 'reality'. 

This transition is desirable (and part of God's plan) because it brings Men closer to the divine - as free agents who can potentially contrinute to the ongoing of creation. But such a more-divine consciousness could either be angelic (true, and working with God) or demonic (untruthful, and in opposition to the reality of divine creation) 

 

To recapitulate, this approximately-millennial transformation of consciousness would represent the culmination of a centuries-long transition from a time (back in the middle ages) when Men understood objective reality to be 'out there' - something which was perceived by the senses...

To a situation where Men would no longer find objective reality 'out there' and would need to take up the job of consciously being co-creators of reality; by means of their own thinking. 

A transition, that is, between reality being present in The World, and being present in thinking. 

 

It is vital to recognise that while the transformation of consciousness is inevitable - something that just 'unfolds' as part of the development of the species (according to divine destiny); what situation this threshold-crossing leads-us-to; is a contingency that hinges-upon whether the transition is conscious and chosen, or whether it is unconscious and passive. Whether we 'make it happen, or whether it just happens-to-us. 

Both Steiner and Barfield prophesied what kind of thing lay in store for Mankind if Man did not consciously and voluntarily embrace the trasition, through the choice of developing our spiritual knowledge (based on a kind of intuitive thinking, or direct knowing). 

Steiner (for instance) set out the consequences in a 1918 lecture The Work of the Angels in Man's Astral Body; while Barfield wrote about it philosophically in Saving the Appearances and in a more explicit, science-fiction sexual dystopian form in Night Operation. 

 

Let us assume (as I believe is true) that Mankind did indeed cross just such a threshold of consciousness gradually and over the past several decades - then we can see that the Steiner/ Barfield model can make sense of where we are now; and what we ought to do about it. 

We can easily see that modern Man in 2020 is living in a self-contructed reality; a 'virtuality' in which the masses passively imbibe Man-made lies and inverted-values from The System - emanating from a global bureaucracy including governments, the mass-media and official sources such as the legal, health and educational sub-systems. 

And Christians can easily see that this 2020 virtuality is demonic in nature: such that, in choosing to remain unconscious and passive, Mankind as taken the demonic path described prophetically by Stainer and Barfield. 

 

So Men no longer root their knowledge in personal experience and common sense. Due to the development of consciousness, these have become regarded as merely subjective, too labile; and are therefore too weak and unmotivating to overcome the imposed virtual world. 

Modern Man in 2020 instead passively and unconsciously accepts a 'made'-reality which is imposed-upon him, top-down. 

Indeed, so far has this process reached - that in here-and-now we can see that the masses do not even check the claims of The System - but will accept, internalise and defend blatant falsehoods and contradictions asif reality. 

And, because Men remain unconscious and passive and rejecting of the spiritual; we remain also spiritually-isolated and alienated from a world which we perceive as dead, meaningless and without purpose. 

A world of inverted values, compulsory falsehoods, crushing inhumanity; and the near universal prevalence and increasing dominance of fear, denial, resentment and despair - is the natural, inevitable, consequence. 

 

The answer to the current horrors of our post-threshold-crossing virtual world is also provided by Steiner and Barfield; which is that Men need consciously to accept their active role in the co-creation of reality with God. 

(In other words, what I have termed Romantic Christianity, based upon intuitive direct knowing.)

This can, in principle, be begun by anybody at any time - however, the fact that this active, conscious, Christian spirituality has been so delayed (since it first became possible in the late 1700s) means that in the first place Men are living under a weight of false metaphysical assumptions that have been uncosnciously absorbed and passively accepted. 

Also that there has been a tremendous amount of accumulated societal damage over 250 years; which must be overcome but cannot be fully reversed - and which will lead to severely sub-optimal outcomes, compared with what 'might have been'. 

 

Nonetheless, what we need to do is clear - and the rewards for doing it are immediate...

We can experience participation in God's ongoing creation - that is, we can experience the universe as alive, conscious and purposive; and ourselves as unique individuals with a special destiny even in this mortal life* 

And who may also (if we accept the offer of Jesus Christ) lead to an harmonious world of relationships with those who also accepted Christ's offer (i.e. Heaven). 

 

*Albeit the rewards and accomplishments will be, like everything in mortal life, incomplete and temporary - needing to be done and redone, over and again, as long as our mortal lives continue.