*
I have mentioned before the Golden Thread that runs back through my life into the mythical mists of remembered childhood: a thread of memories and images (snapshots of moments, mostly) drawn from my personal experience over the decades, also the arts and sciences, particular landscapes, and also some imaginations - which carry the sense of a special significance for me.
I call it a thread because there is the sense that these all link-up, and run through the great mass of everyday matters - nearly all of which melt-away (even if they seemed terribly important at the time).
For some periods of my life, there is a lot of detail in the golden thread - in others (many years) there is almost nothing: that is to say I have memories, but they don't enter into the golden thread.
The content of the golden thread feels solidly meaning-full, although I could not say what the meaning actually is.
*
For obvious reasons I am not intending to reveal much about the specific content of this golden thread, but it will come as no surprise for me to say that there is a lot of Tolkien in it! Things like the memory of reading specific passages in specific circumstances, thinking about particular themes while I was in certain landscapes, and a special feeling about some episodes from the book: for example the cloaked and hooded Silvan (= 'wood') elves sitting on the tree platform in Lothlorien at night, with their arms around their knees.
Before I became a Christian, I think it would be fair to say that of all the content that was not unique to me and my family and friends, and my unique experiences, Tolkien formed the most significant and enduring part of the golden thread - leading back to age 13, and foreshadowed before that in fairy tales, fantasies and myths - for example images from the Marvel Thor comic 'Tales of Asgard', and Longfellow's Hiawatha - things like this linked-up with Tolkien's world.
But if I was to mediate, then these were among the things I felt gave my life significance and a mythic reality - whereas the vast mass of my experiences, triumphs and traumas, school and work and leisure, seemed at best irrelevant and more often a horrible waste.
*
Since I became a Christian, it has been a recurrent project, desire and hope to link up my new Christian life with the golden thread. My childhood experiences of Christianity had very little to do with the golden thread - they were mostly the other kind of memories: like school dinners, and long car journeys, and reading 'set books'.
(In fact, it applies to people and relationships too: by the test of the golden thread, some were real, others were not.)
The failure of some Christian endeavours to become a continuation of the golden thread has indeed been a major factor in discarding them: if I cannot continue the golden thread by my current Christian practice, then I must be making a mistake: I am on the wrong track; I am trying to force the pace; I am doing things for the wrong reasons; there is some pretence or dishonesty going-on.
As it turns out, there is a lot among the Christian traditions that is utterly dead to me, as measured by the test of the golden thread.
*
The golden thread is therefore the most important, most fundamental discernment in my life - but it is slow, it is retrospective, it is not very precise. It is more likely to tell me where I have gone wrong, and where I have been on the right track may not become clear for quite some time - when it emerges that significant new material has continued the golden thread.
Why should I take any notice of this golden thread thing, anyway? Perhaps it is just a self-gratifying or self-justifying delusions.
No - the golden thread is real, it is the other stuff that is a delusion so far as I personally am concerned. But what is a delusion for me - a fake, a forced and feeble thing - may be primary reality for another person: part of another person's golden thread.
(Although it looks to me as if many, indeed most people violate, mock, ignore or deliberately invert their golden threads - they are living a lie; unintegrated strivings; nothing deep or continuous but only superficiality and unnatural assemblage; their life has no myth. At least, that is how it looks to me.)
*
Where does it come from, this golden thread: what is it? I think it comes from and is that tiny glowing coal of my personal essence - the soul, self, agency - that stretches back into pre-mortality.
What is this personal essence supposed to do? Ultimately its destiny (which can be, and sometimes is, rejected) is to grow from experience (experience of the right kind) into harmony with the divine, and with other souls.
The golden thread is my picture of its longitudinal growth.
*
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query golden thread. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query golden thread. Sort by date Show all posts
Tuesday 7 October 2014
Saturday 25 April 2015
What makes the Golden Thread?
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The Golden Thread is that private, mythic thread of memory which links our realest experiences back into our past. It is made of those moments when I was fully alive; when my true self, my soul, inhabited and suffused both the 'public' self and the environment- and both were lit-up. The Golden Thread is these moments of irradiation, joined-up.
Conversely, life led at the level of the external and public self was lost, was empty, meaningless - and therefore hard to remember as real. Whole years can be lost this way, barely registered; even when these were experienced as years of achievement.
Hundreds and hundreds of hours of life when I merely-existed, lived according to the world, or my public self... whereas when the soul was activated and dominant - even though that be 'merely' in yearning, aspiring; even in states of profound discontent and conscious misery - these times become linked into the Golden Thread.
By the most rigorous criteria, I am forced to regard the life as wasted that was not part of the Golden Thread; even when that includes much that others would regard as most significant. And that is a great deal of my young adult life.
I have experienced successes in several aspects of life; but these have proved to be almost-wholly illusory; when judged by the standards of the Golden Thread.
It took marriage to re-awaken the Golden thread, and it too Christianity to recognize the Golden Thread as objectively real and valuable - and not merely a guilty, childish, secret fantasy; something merely in my mind which would die with me as was vulnerable to loss and distortion of memory.
Before Christianity, then, I feared that the all-but-forgotten hours, days, months and years might be reality, and the Golden Thread merely subjective illusion, wishful thinking. Now I realize that the Golden Thread is the only thing which is not an illusion.
In an adult life which was mostly automatic, unfree, reactive; the moments in the Golden Thread are probably the only ones that are finally-significant, endure into eternity.
*
Monday 16 December 2019
The learning of mortal life is part-of the Golden Thread (And, How do we know we are engaged in Final Participation?)
If the purpose of the (sustained, post-incarnation) mortal life of a Christian could be described as 'learning'; then the nature of this special quality of learning needs to be elucidated.
In our lives we have many experiences, but most of them (perhaps, sometimes - especially for non-Christians, all of them) are unlearned-from and/or irrelevant to our post-mortal future of resurrected immortality in Heaven.
Furthermore, the way in which we learn from Life is distinct from the psychological or neurological processes of 'memory'. In other words, that which we may remember most insistently may not be of ultimate importance; and conversely, we may have learned vital matters despite having never had a memory, or a distorted memory, or having lost a memory.
Deep, intuitive and permanent learning thus reaches forward - so that after death, when all triviality and illusion has fallen-away - this is what remains.
But the vital learning may well be accessible during this our mortal life, by the activity of our real Self (that is our true, eternal and divine self; by which we incarnate into this world as already children of God). And such real learning then constitutes what I have termed the Golden Thread of life.
The Golden Thread is a part of (not the whole of) that which is immortal during mortality. Our purpose in life is to work-on our Golden Thread - to make choices and engage in those behaviours that add to the Golden Thread as we know it now; that is to theosis (that process of spiritual development also known as divinisation or sanctification).
We cannot 'prove' such learning to other people; it cannot (typically) be 'communicated'. The 'proof' (and only proof, in this life) is 'intuition'; and that intuition may be confirmed by the incorporation of material into the Golden Thread (if or when we become aware of it).
To turn it around; if we ask the question - How to do know we are currently engaged in Final Participation? The answer is that we cannot always know, and especially not while-it-is-happening.
But when in retrospect we confirm that some situation has been included in the Golden Thread, then we can be pretty sure that the situation was one of Participation, and if we are conscious of that situation while still 'in it', then we are probably dealing with 'Final Participation.
Why can't we know that we are in Final Participation at the time, or indeed in a situation that will become a part of the Golden Thread?
I think the answer is that reality is a continuous unbroken 'process', and 'moments' do Not have categorical boundaries. Therefore, when we try to establish the status of a cross-sectional 'unit' of life, we are thwarted by the fact that it is not a real category - that moment flowed-from what went before and flowed-into what came after; and was connected-with innumerable other aspects of things.
We are trying to separate-out that which is not truly separate - and that is the problem.
Furthermore, as (real) life goes-on, and the Golden Thread continues to extend (into an unbounded future) - then meanings of events are changed by this new and expanding context. As we develop spiritually (towards greater divinity) our understanding expands, therefore meanings are not fixed.
In our lives we have many experiences, but most of them (perhaps, sometimes - especially for non-Christians, all of them) are unlearned-from and/or irrelevant to our post-mortal future of resurrected immortality in Heaven.
Furthermore, the way in which we learn from Life is distinct from the psychological or neurological processes of 'memory'. In other words, that which we may remember most insistently may not be of ultimate importance; and conversely, we may have learned vital matters despite having never had a memory, or a distorted memory, or having lost a memory.
Deep, intuitive and permanent learning thus reaches forward - so that after death, when all triviality and illusion has fallen-away - this is what remains.
But the vital learning may well be accessible during this our mortal life, by the activity of our real Self (that is our true, eternal and divine self; by which we incarnate into this world as already children of God). And such real learning then constitutes what I have termed the Golden Thread of life.
The Golden Thread is a part of (not the whole of) that which is immortal during mortality. Our purpose in life is to work-on our Golden Thread - to make choices and engage in those behaviours that add to the Golden Thread as we know it now; that is to theosis (that process of spiritual development also known as divinisation or sanctification).
We cannot 'prove' such learning to other people; it cannot (typically) be 'communicated'. The 'proof' (and only proof, in this life) is 'intuition'; and that intuition may be confirmed by the incorporation of material into the Golden Thread (if or when we become aware of it).
To turn it around; if we ask the question - How to do know we are currently engaged in Final Participation? The answer is that we cannot always know, and especially not while-it-is-happening.
But when in retrospect we confirm that some situation has been included in the Golden Thread, then we can be pretty sure that the situation was one of Participation, and if we are conscious of that situation while still 'in it', then we are probably dealing with 'Final Participation.
Why can't we know that we are in Final Participation at the time, or indeed in a situation that will become a part of the Golden Thread?
I think the answer is that reality is a continuous unbroken 'process', and 'moments' do Not have categorical boundaries. Therefore, when we try to establish the status of a cross-sectional 'unit' of life, we are thwarted by the fact that it is not a real category - that moment flowed-from what went before and flowed-into what came after; and was connected-with innumerable other aspects of things.
We are trying to separate-out that which is not truly separate - and that is the problem.
Furthermore, as (real) life goes-on, and the Golden Thread continues to extend (into an unbounded future) - then meanings of events are changed by this new and expanding context. As we develop spiritually (towards greater divinity) our understanding expands, therefore meanings are not fixed.
Monday 9 November 2015
Encouraging lessons of the Golden Thread
The Golden Thread is a person's real autobiography - the sequence of deep, significant, mythic-seeming, remembered experiences stretching back into childhood like a Golden Thread.
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=golden+thread
That we have such a thing, and know we have it, is a cause for gratitude and could be seen as evidence of our relationship with a personal god - because we do not experience our life as merely the present built on nothing more than oblivion; and our life is unique.
In a sense, our Golden Thread is incommunicable, a secret reality - certainly it is not always communicated, and attempts to communicate it may prove futile as we may fail to put it into effective words, and other people may not be interested. Indeed there is no reason why others should be interested in the special significance we feel about incidents and thoughts that may seem utterly individual and trivial when placed into the public arena.
The fact that a great novelist might be able to show us the transcendent importance of the tiny incidents of everyday life does not mean that this aptitude is general. If I were to describe to you an incident from my own Golden Thread, it would indeed require something like the structure of a novel to be placed around it, for you to be able to grasp what it was about that particular moment which was so important to me... but the fact is that, in most instances, I do not know the reason.
Man is not an island, and we cannot live from our memories alone - nor are we supposed to. In a sense we live-off hope more than from memories - but the 'we' that lives comes partly from the past, and some experiences shape us far more than others, and the most significant experiences are not necessarily the most impressive, nor are they those the significance of which we can articulate most effectively. This is the mystery and depth of the Golden Thread phenomenon.
But why think about it at all? I suppose many or most people do not, in fact, think much about such matters - although who knows for sure what the scale of importance really is for others.
From my own experience, I find the reasons why thinking about such matters feels like 'a good thing' is that it makes for a mythic sense of my own life.
Instead of life being a detached sequence of this then this, passively experienced as being caused, mostly influenced from outside, mostly of little interest or approval to others... there is instead the experience of life as significant, our specific life as being bound-up-with, involved with, the world; a sense of unrolling yet unpredictable destiny, where the past makes some kind of sense and therefore - presumably - the future also will.
This is simply given to each of us as a phenomenological reality - the reality of subjective, inner, experience - by the existence of the Golden Thread and the experience of thinking about it.
The necessary additional step we may chose to make is to believe that all this is just what it seems: a kind of knowledge - something true, real, significant.
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=golden+thread
That we have such a thing, and know we have it, is a cause for gratitude and could be seen as evidence of our relationship with a personal god - because we do not experience our life as merely the present built on nothing more than oblivion; and our life is unique.
In a sense, our Golden Thread is incommunicable, a secret reality - certainly it is not always communicated, and attempts to communicate it may prove futile as we may fail to put it into effective words, and other people may not be interested. Indeed there is no reason why others should be interested in the special significance we feel about incidents and thoughts that may seem utterly individual and trivial when placed into the public arena.
The fact that a great novelist might be able to show us the transcendent importance of the tiny incidents of everyday life does not mean that this aptitude is general. If I were to describe to you an incident from my own Golden Thread, it would indeed require something like the structure of a novel to be placed around it, for you to be able to grasp what it was about that particular moment which was so important to me... but the fact is that, in most instances, I do not know the reason.
Man is not an island, and we cannot live from our memories alone - nor are we supposed to. In a sense we live-off hope more than from memories - but the 'we' that lives comes partly from the past, and some experiences shape us far more than others, and the most significant experiences are not necessarily the most impressive, nor are they those the significance of which we can articulate most effectively. This is the mystery and depth of the Golden Thread phenomenon.
But why think about it at all? I suppose many or most people do not, in fact, think much about such matters - although who knows for sure what the scale of importance really is for others.
From my own experience, I find the reasons why thinking about such matters feels like 'a good thing' is that it makes for a mythic sense of my own life.
Instead of life being a detached sequence of this then this, passively experienced as being caused, mostly influenced from outside, mostly of little interest or approval to others... there is instead the experience of life as significant, our specific life as being bound-up-with, involved with, the world; a sense of unrolling yet unpredictable destiny, where the past makes some kind of sense and therefore - presumably - the future also will.
This is simply given to each of us as a phenomenological reality - the reality of subjective, inner, experience - by the existence of the Golden Thread and the experience of thinking about it.
The necessary additional step we may chose to make is to believe that all this is just what it seems: a kind of knowledge - something true, real, significant.
Sunday 17 June 2018
The Brown Swamp, those vast tracts of insignificant times - Life Not of the golden thread
I have written previously about the 'golden thread' that highlights certain times, places and events of my life - running back as far as I can remember. But the opposite side of that coin is the vast tracts of forgotten times in my life. The many things that happened that I remember about - but which feel-unreal and made very little lasting impact... this can amount to the bulk of many years of some situations, places, people...
I can remember that such things happened, but not feel what it was like; things that may have been psychologically overwhelming at the time, or of great duration, or unusual... but which did not link up with anything real.
This really is the obverse of the golden thread - where the moments may have seemed insignificant at the time, apparently ephemeral - maybe even things I thought very briefly, momentary insights or flashes of self-awareness... yet which have taken-on a mythic weight and permanence.
SO: the golden thread is myth, it is archetype, it is really-real - whereas most of life, including most of the most 'impressive' things in life (socially regarded as significant, quantitatively most dominant) are... the opposite of myth... just stuff, arbitrary, time-filling; unsuccessful attempts to live but in fact dishonest, contrived.
Such a lot of this stuff! Such a Brown Swamp! And such futile efforts expended! And such self-dishonesty of evaluation to cover the insignificance that was - in truth - the real experience... There was certainly, always, a part of me that realised I was thrashing around and failing - merely filling-time, occupying mind; that I was trying to manufacture-on-demand something that could only be discovered and known.
How badly I misinterpreted things. I thought my alienation was caused by dullness of circumstance, by being trapped in mundane and restricted situations - and that if-only I could change the circumstance and situations, then life would become real - which is to say mythic.
But in fact the problem was metaphysical - that I was constantly in-denial-of the reality of the real, of the insights of intuition, of the importance of that which I knew important - I was (mostly - except in golden thread moments) trying to live by external criteria, get my meaning from circumstances and my satisfaction from approval.
In sum, the Brown Swamp - its size, pervasiveness, the way it swallowed-up so much of Life; this was a consequence of an almost continuous denial of the reality of the real, of my own capacity to know the real, of the permanence and objectivity of significance; and this was at root a denial of God.
(All that was supposedly-real was felt to be unreal; and that which was experienced as real was categorised as merely personal and ephemeral.)
This is not about 'happiness'. At least on the surface, happiness can be dissociated from meaning - indeed it nearly-always is, for more people and most of the time. I was often happy.
But happiness without meaning or purpose or permanence or the reality of relationships... well that is alienation, and that is what I mean by the Brown Swamp; and that was me, and I think it is 'normal' - and that it is entailed by genuine unbelief in God.
Belief in Jesus is a separate thing. It is unbelief in God, in deity; in the sense of creator, that entails alienation; entails that apparent meanings and purposes in living are subjective and evanescent delusions merely; entails that life is necessarily a Brown Swamp.
And therefore my experience of the golden thread was a consequence of my failures in atheism; it was a negative attainment; those times and situations of unconscious belief and faith: intuited reality not-effectively-denied...
I can remember that such things happened, but not feel what it was like; things that may have been psychologically overwhelming at the time, or of great duration, or unusual... but which did not link up with anything real.
This really is the obverse of the golden thread - where the moments may have seemed insignificant at the time, apparently ephemeral - maybe even things I thought very briefly, momentary insights or flashes of self-awareness... yet which have taken-on a mythic weight and permanence.
SO: the golden thread is myth, it is archetype, it is really-real - whereas most of life, including most of the most 'impressive' things in life (socially regarded as significant, quantitatively most dominant) are... the opposite of myth... just stuff, arbitrary, time-filling; unsuccessful attempts to live but in fact dishonest, contrived.
Such a lot of this stuff! Such a Brown Swamp! And such futile efforts expended! And such self-dishonesty of evaluation to cover the insignificance that was - in truth - the real experience... There was certainly, always, a part of me that realised I was thrashing around and failing - merely filling-time, occupying mind; that I was trying to manufacture-on-demand something that could only be discovered and known.
How badly I misinterpreted things. I thought my alienation was caused by dullness of circumstance, by being trapped in mundane and restricted situations - and that if-only I could change the circumstance and situations, then life would become real - which is to say mythic.
But in fact the problem was metaphysical - that I was constantly in-denial-of the reality of the real, of the insights of intuition, of the importance of that which I knew important - I was (mostly - except in golden thread moments) trying to live by external criteria, get my meaning from circumstances and my satisfaction from approval.
In sum, the Brown Swamp - its size, pervasiveness, the way it swallowed-up so much of Life; this was a consequence of an almost continuous denial of the reality of the real, of my own capacity to know the real, of the permanence and objectivity of significance; and this was at root a denial of God.
(All that was supposedly-real was felt to be unreal; and that which was experienced as real was categorised as merely personal and ephemeral.)
This is not about 'happiness'. At least on the surface, happiness can be dissociated from meaning - indeed it nearly-always is, for more people and most of the time. I was often happy.
But happiness without meaning or purpose or permanence or the reality of relationships... well that is alienation, and that is what I mean by the Brown Swamp; and that was me, and I think it is 'normal' - and that it is entailed by genuine unbelief in God.
Belief in Jesus is a separate thing. It is unbelief in God, in deity; in the sense of creator, that entails alienation; entails that apparent meanings and purposes in living are subjective and evanescent delusions merely; entails that life is necessarily a Brown Swamp.
And therefore my experience of the golden thread was a consequence of my failures in atheism; it was a negative attainment; those times and situations of unconscious belief and faith: intuited reality not-effectively-denied...
Monday 21 October 2019
The strangely chaotic nature of life, contrasted with the golden thread
Since I was (officially) adult, life has always seems strangely chaotic - 'despite' that my actual, externally-visible, life was much more ordered than most.
The chaotic-ness is not in anything spectacular but in the the way that some aspects of it, quantitatively most of it, crumbles away behind me on a daily, hourly, basis.
Life, it seems, is not a structure; not something that is built - piece by piece - into any kind of edifice. One can add pieces - but they won't stay where they are put - they will fall-out, they will distort or crumble.
When I look back - expecting to see an edifice - with evidence of my handiwork, I find my labours are not to be discovered. Most of what I did (and thought supremely important, at the time) I not longer 'remember'.
That is, I merely remember about it; but the memory is as unreal as a newspaper report or an advert. I - personally - am not there in the memory; even if I can see it through my past eyes, from my past perspective.
Instead there is something very different - a single golden thread that constitutes my mythical life. This represents what I have learned that was important - spiritually and eternally important - specifically important to me.
This seems like a microcosmic clue to the nature of universal reality, to Heaven. Not everything is remembered; but what is significant to Heavenly Beings is permanent.
'Everything' is infinite and has no structure; what is truly remembered is because of its important relation the perspective of a Being. It is the consciousness of that Being which interacts with chaotic reality to create what we see as structure.
This is, indeed, the primary act of creation. It was God's interaction with primal chaos that began creation - all of significance depended upon the perspective of God (and God is incarnate; so God necessarily has perspective).
A great deal of what happens falls-away. This contributes to that feeling of chaos. But what matters does not fall away - this contributes to the feeling of life as cumulative, structural.
Of course, in mortal life, the falling-away is compounded by the impermanence of our bodies, and of earthly things. This aspect does not happen in the resurrected world of Heaven.
But in the eternity of Heaven, I would expect that still there is falling away, still not everything is permanent, still there will be trial and error - because this is an aspect of creation.
Whenever we have Beings, and relationships between Beings (and that is an approximation of ultimate reality), there will be a 'dynamic' living situation; and part of aliveness is perspective, and perspective means partiality.
Or, from the opposite perspective, it means focus - it means a permanent thread deriving from personal significance and importance.
The chaotic-ness is not in anything spectacular but in the the way that some aspects of it, quantitatively most of it, crumbles away behind me on a daily, hourly, basis.
Life, it seems, is not a structure; not something that is built - piece by piece - into any kind of edifice. One can add pieces - but they won't stay where they are put - they will fall-out, they will distort or crumble.
When I look back - expecting to see an edifice - with evidence of my handiwork, I find my labours are not to be discovered. Most of what I did (and thought supremely important, at the time) I not longer 'remember'.
That is, I merely remember about it; but the memory is as unreal as a newspaper report or an advert. I - personally - am not there in the memory; even if I can see it through my past eyes, from my past perspective.
Instead there is something very different - a single golden thread that constitutes my mythical life. This represents what I have learned that was important - spiritually and eternally important - specifically important to me.
This seems like a microcosmic clue to the nature of universal reality, to Heaven. Not everything is remembered; but what is significant to Heavenly Beings is permanent.
'Everything' is infinite and has no structure; what is truly remembered is because of its important relation the perspective of a Being. It is the consciousness of that Being which interacts with chaotic reality to create what we see as structure.
This is, indeed, the primary act of creation. It was God's interaction with primal chaos that began creation - all of significance depended upon the perspective of God (and God is incarnate; so God necessarily has perspective).
A great deal of what happens falls-away. This contributes to that feeling of chaos. But what matters does not fall away - this contributes to the feeling of life as cumulative, structural.
Of course, in mortal life, the falling-away is compounded by the impermanence of our bodies, and of earthly things. This aspect does not happen in the resurrected world of Heaven.
But in the eternity of Heaven, I would expect that still there is falling away, still not everything is permanent, still there will be trial and error - because this is an aspect of creation.
Whenever we have Beings, and relationships between Beings (and that is an approximation of ultimate reality), there will be a 'dynamic' living situation; and part of aliveness is perspective, and perspective means partiality.
Or, from the opposite perspective, it means focus - it means a permanent thread deriving from personal significance and importance.
Saturday 5 January 2019
Spiritual experiences - If not, then what?
A few days ago I stated my view that the 'standard methods' of attaining spiritual experiences have the disadvantage of failing to be associated with spiritual development; such that people who have frequent and intense spiritual experiences are often entirely lacking in spiritual wisdom.
Specifically, I said that magic and ritual systems of divination on the one hand; and training in meditation methods or induing of altered consciousness on the other hand; were both ineffective when it comes to developing the Romantic Christian life which I believe ought to be our priority, in The West.
Yet the Romantic Christian life is one that aims to restore the spiritual to life, so that we may reconnect with creation, and ultimately participate in creation; because Western people are dying of alienation - and mainstream Christianity does not even begin to address this core malaise - mainly because it emerged in an already alienated world, and grew to incorporate the alienated consciousness.
This is why the spiritual 'techniques' above operate separately from the kind of development in consciousness that is needed; the needed development is in the future and unprecedented; while the methods of the past only draw us back towards an obsolete consciousness that we cannot return to, nor would it be good for us if we could return.
This seems to set-up an impasse, in which on the one hand we must-have spiritual experiences - and I mean must; because I think that this is an absolute essential in The West if we are to avoid continuing down our path to mass chosen damnation... yet on the other hand we must-not seek such spiritual experiences using any of the standard, historical methods of doing so.
So, if not, then what? If not these methods, yet we must become more spiritual - then what should we do?
My answer is related to the idea of final participation as being our goal in consciousness (to use Owen Barfield's term); this is the consciousness that we will attain as resurrected beings dwelling in Heaven - but we need to attain this same quality of consciousness, as much as possible (as frequently and intensely as possible), during mortal life; in order to respond to the special challenges of this era.
To be in final participation is to participate in God's ongoing work of creation; it happens when we are thinking from our real self - because our real self is divine. Our real self - being divine - is free, and therefore our personal thinking adds to God's creation, is woven-into it; and this is indeed the main 'work' of our Heavenly lives.
When we attain to Final Participation in our mortal lives, we are having a spiritual experience. We are a part of the ongoing work of creation, which we experience in the mode of thinking. Our thinking is also divine thinking. Yet when this happens it is not in an 'altered state of consciousness' such as a trance or a dream; nor is it the narrowed and channelled consciousness of a ritual - it is simply ordinary thinking, rooted in the real self and raised to the fullness of clarity and simplicity.
Such thinking is, if we let it, self-validating - intuitively valid. We know that we know.
And I think many people have experienced this kind of thinking; although they seldom have a name for it; and very often deny its special significance. In my own life, the times when I have been thinking in this way make up a special sequence of memories I have termed the Golden Thread; the times and events that feel as if they were the only truly significant things (with all the great mass of routine and shallow pleasures falling away, barely remembered).
(These might include phenomena such as peak experiences, flow states, self-remembering, holiday consciousness, epiphanies and the like - as discussed often in the works of Colin Wilson.)
Yet these Golden Thread moments include many seemingly 'trivial' things, often unplanned and surprising; and apparently 'not real' things like reading something, or imagining something. And in the past I was more puzzled by them than inspired by them.
And this is the danger - that we have spiritual experiences but fail to notice and learn from them, for the simple reason that we discount them, disvalue them - regard them as trivial instead of The most Important Things in our lives.
In sum, spiritual experiences - properly understood - happen as a by-product of a proper way of living and understanding. And, as many people have noticed; the more they are noticed and learned-from; the more often they will happen.
So - the proper action to take is a kind of self-awareness, not simply to drift through life half-asleep; but be aware of what is happening, as it happens; and to recognise value the best of life as it deserves on the basis of intuitive experience rather than theory.
Specifically, I said that magic and ritual systems of divination on the one hand; and training in meditation methods or induing of altered consciousness on the other hand; were both ineffective when it comes to developing the Romantic Christian life which I believe ought to be our priority, in The West.
Yet the Romantic Christian life is one that aims to restore the spiritual to life, so that we may reconnect with creation, and ultimately participate in creation; because Western people are dying of alienation - and mainstream Christianity does not even begin to address this core malaise - mainly because it emerged in an already alienated world, and grew to incorporate the alienated consciousness.
This is why the spiritual 'techniques' above operate separately from the kind of development in consciousness that is needed; the needed development is in the future and unprecedented; while the methods of the past only draw us back towards an obsolete consciousness that we cannot return to, nor would it be good for us if we could return.
This seems to set-up an impasse, in which on the one hand we must-have spiritual experiences - and I mean must; because I think that this is an absolute essential in The West if we are to avoid continuing down our path to mass chosen damnation... yet on the other hand we must-not seek such spiritual experiences using any of the standard, historical methods of doing so.
So, if not, then what? If not these methods, yet we must become more spiritual - then what should we do?
My answer is related to the idea of final participation as being our goal in consciousness (to use Owen Barfield's term); this is the consciousness that we will attain as resurrected beings dwelling in Heaven - but we need to attain this same quality of consciousness, as much as possible (as frequently and intensely as possible), during mortal life; in order to respond to the special challenges of this era.
To be in final participation is to participate in God's ongoing work of creation; it happens when we are thinking from our real self - because our real self is divine. Our real self - being divine - is free, and therefore our personal thinking adds to God's creation, is woven-into it; and this is indeed the main 'work' of our Heavenly lives.
When we attain to Final Participation in our mortal lives, we are having a spiritual experience. We are a part of the ongoing work of creation, which we experience in the mode of thinking. Our thinking is also divine thinking. Yet when this happens it is not in an 'altered state of consciousness' such as a trance or a dream; nor is it the narrowed and channelled consciousness of a ritual - it is simply ordinary thinking, rooted in the real self and raised to the fullness of clarity and simplicity.
Such thinking is, if we let it, self-validating - intuitively valid. We know that we know.
And I think many people have experienced this kind of thinking; although they seldom have a name for it; and very often deny its special significance. In my own life, the times when I have been thinking in this way make up a special sequence of memories I have termed the Golden Thread; the times and events that feel as if they were the only truly significant things (with all the great mass of routine and shallow pleasures falling away, barely remembered).
(These might include phenomena such as peak experiences, flow states, self-remembering, holiday consciousness, epiphanies and the like - as discussed often in the works of Colin Wilson.)
Yet these Golden Thread moments include many seemingly 'trivial' things, often unplanned and surprising; and apparently 'not real' things like reading something, or imagining something. And in the past I was more puzzled by them than inspired by them.
And this is the danger - that we have spiritual experiences but fail to notice and learn from them, for the simple reason that we discount them, disvalue them - regard them as trivial instead of The most Important Things in our lives.
In sum, spiritual experiences - properly understood - happen as a by-product of a proper way of living and understanding. And, as many people have noticed; the more they are noticed and learned-from; the more often they will happen.
So - the proper action to take is a kind of self-awareness, not simply to drift through life half-asleep; but be aware of what is happening, as it happens; and to recognise value the best of life as it deserves on the basis of intuitive experience rather than theory.
Wednesday 2 August 2017
How to be a visionary of final participation: intensification of the experience of thinking
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.
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.
Friday 29 November 2013
When was I happy? Not when I used to think I was
*
When I look back on my life, I find that since being a Christian my memories have (mostly involuntarily) undergone considerable, radical re-evaluation - so that things I used to regard as happy events or happy times may now have been reallocated to a very different category: things I repent.
Contrariwise, that slender golden thread of personal memories which always went through, and referred to private and family things, solitary contemplation, a few writings and musical moments, mostly everydayness and seeming-triviality but seen in a numinous light.
Since I became a Christian, this thread has become clearer - more prominent, more luminous to memory - and following it back, I see that the happy times have a very mundane quality such that they are of essentially zero-interest to other people - and indeed inexplicable.
This perspective is very subversive of the way we talk about happiness in which happiness is linked to doing certain types of event such as holidays, successes, the sepcial treat, the foreign and the spectacular.
Seldom do I read or speak of anything which captures the mundane reality of the deepest and true-est happiness.
But here is one, from Living at the End of Time by John Hanson Mitchell - 1990:
*
Whenever I crossed the meadow with my children on summer evenings the year I lived in my cottage, we would select a few stones from the ground and thrown them in front of... bats and watch them dive to investigate.
Sometimes it would seem to me, standing there in the pale evening while my children tossed stones to the sky, that this was the way the world should be-- a simple life without praise or blame, casting lures to bats on green evenings.
I know just what he means...
*
When I look back on my life, I find that since being a Christian my memories have (mostly involuntarily) undergone considerable, radical re-evaluation - so that things I used to regard as happy events or happy times may now have been reallocated to a very different category: things I repent.
Contrariwise, that slender golden thread of personal memories which always went through, and referred to private and family things, solitary contemplation, a few writings and musical moments, mostly everydayness and seeming-triviality but seen in a numinous light.
Since I became a Christian, this thread has become clearer - more prominent, more luminous to memory - and following it back, I see that the happy times have a very mundane quality such that they are of essentially zero-interest to other people - and indeed inexplicable.
This perspective is very subversive of the way we talk about happiness in which happiness is linked to doing certain types of event such as holidays, successes, the sepcial treat, the foreign and the spectacular.
Seldom do I read or speak of anything which captures the mundane reality of the deepest and true-est happiness.
But here is one, from Living at the End of Time by John Hanson Mitchell - 1990:
*
Whenever I crossed the meadow with my children on summer evenings the year I lived in my cottage, we would select a few stones from the ground and thrown them in front of... bats and watch them dive to investigate.
Sometimes it would seem to me, standing there in the pale evening while my children tossed stones to the sky, that this was the way the world should be-- a simple life without praise or blame, casting lures to bats on green evenings.
I know just what he means...
*
Saturday 31 October 2020
How to live 'spiritually'?
Clearly it is not enough to Be A Christian nowadays - we must also live spiritually, from the spirit - that is, we need to have direct and personal experience of that vast area of life which lies beyond the materialist stuff to which modern public discourse is ever-more-tightly restircted.
As the world becomes more-and-more a single, global Leftist-bureaucracy-media complex; we can handily define the spiritual realm as everything ignored, deliberately left-out, or excluded from serious consideration by that uni-world of public, official discourse.
But most people are addicted to this world, and have developed deep habits and unexamined primary assumptions that rule-out the spiritual - treating it variously as childish, insane or evil - nipping in the bud any nascent emergence of the spirit into consciousness.
How then to begin to live by the spirit? Clearly (here-and-now) it must be a deliberate and conscious choice - it is not going to Just Happen - not any more. So first make that choice.
And remember that it is not enough to think About the spiritual, it must be Experienced to be valuable.
Start by noticing. Feelings are a good place to start noticing. All kinds of things - knowledge, discernments, impulses - are being (at present) un-consciously signalled to us.
When we feel a mood, a premonition, a dream, a synchronicity (a strange 'coincidence'), feel an impulse which does not apparently derive from externally... When we seem to discern some speial good or sinister evil in a person, institution, communication...
Take it seriously. Consider it further.
But let that consideration not be on the one hand based on 'evidence, nor on the other hand based on gut-feelings; but instead try to consider that thing with your real self, your heart, your truest being. This again requires conscious intent.
To know what that direct-heart-intuitive knowing feels-like; it may be worth considering the most significant events of your past - significant in your own private soul - what I have termed The Golden Thread.
All this is not easy - because it is going against external constraints and internal habits - but it is possible, and it will succeed - although neither permanently nor with overwhelming effect.
In this mortal life we are here to learn; and that learning is only cashed-out in-full beyond biological death. But every-thing learned will be of value in Heaven - if Heaven is what you choose*.
*(If, instead of accepting Jesus's gift of resurrected life eternal, you instead choose some destination other-than Heaven; then indeed this mortal life is not of value, and the above advice does not apply. I that case you really are On Your Own - but you have nobody to blame for the fact but your-self.)
Friday 25 August 2017
A sketch of an abstract autobiography of consciousness and Christianity ('Bildung')
The German concept of Bildung refers to the partly experiential, partly willed, potentially destined; developmental unfolding of a person from the advent of adulthood in adolescence to some kind of viable spiritual maturity. In its highest form it describes a seeking for 'the answer' to living, and its finding (to at least some significant extent).
The proper form of Bildung is therefore some kind of linear, biographical account - necessarily in an abstracted, often actually fictionalised, form - and always, underlying, there must be autobiography: a true and honest work of Bildung must be rooted in personal experience or powerful imagination of the phases depicted and described.
Such a work only became both possible and necessary with the advent of Romanticism in the late 1700s - and the Bildungsroman, the novel-of-Bildung. This hit the European mind with Goethe's Wilhelm Meister novel, and has been theorised by many philosophers since.
A debased modern offspring of the Bildungsroman is the coming-of-age movie or series, which typically focuses almost wholly on sex. Indeed, the post-mid-twentieth century cult of youth seems to be a selective, distorted, fixated conceptualisation of the interest in the process of personal transformation.
*
It all began for me in my middle teens and associated with the area of Bristol which is centred on College Green - beside the City Library and Cathedral; and runs up Park Street past coffee shops and esoteric suppliers to George's Bookshop. JRR Tolkien was the first and enduring talisman, Robert Graves another, Thoreau followed soon after. There was a deep dissatisfaction with the thinness and futility of modern life, and a yearning for something deeper, more mythic.
This was the continuation into adulthood of that Golden Thread of the most intense, significant and memorable events and impressions of childhood.
Since then certain places have drawn me repeatedly - often with obscure reason - to live, to stay for holidays, to visit - while other places, books, music, ideas, themes, activities - theoretically, perhaps, better suited? - when experienced and lived left me... well, perhaps diverted; but at depth unmoved; they failed to ignite the fire which turned out to be so essential, and lacking which life was drained of meaning.
Life was a zig-zag of trial and error; knowing better what was wrong than what was right - indeed (in retrospect) I certainly lacked any correct or clear understanding of what was right: what I was and should be aiming at, and why. There was certainly, I see now, a lot less 'luck' in it than I supposed at the time; and much more of destiny, and consequences.
(Making mistakes, and suffering for them - making partially correct decisions but misunderstanding and following false leads until I bogged down in the slough of despond.)
There was, in fact, no possibility of getting anywhere until I became a Christian: the Christian context was vital. But, after becoming a Christian, there was (for me) no possibility of getting very far until I could escape the vitality-draining sensation and conviction of suffocation and constraint, the 'school dinners' aspect of churches etc, which came from my trying to accept 'on trust' and without personal revelation (without working through for myself) the spiritual authority of actual Christian institutions.
In sum, there was an absolute necessity that my Christianity be based upon personal conviction and personal experience; and that this was known to be non-arbitrary, indeed the ultimate authority.
In sum, I remained true to the aspirations of Romanticism, but needed to move beyond its errors: in particular the error of aiming for the past, at tradition. I explored this option, in imagination, to a possible conclusion, and found that it was mistaken and unacceptable in multiple ways, as well as being incoherent here and now.
The key was provided, in the past three or four years, by Mormon theology, the work of Owen Barfield, Rudolf Steiner's early philosophy, and William Arkle's overall context: all of these remain crucial, and continue to yield depths and delights; motivation, direction and purpose.
Key elements needed to come together, among which are the following... that there is a universal realm of thinking (pure thinking, primary thinking of the real/ true/ divine self), of think-ing, conceptualised as a dynamic activity that need perpetually to create-itself; and does so from polarities that are regenerated.
This conceptualisation means that our personal thinking is involved in this dynamic process of universal thinking - so that such thinking is true and universal reality. We participate in reality by this thinking - which means that we both experience and know reality as it already is; and at the same time from our unique perspective (and because reality is always re-making) we are reshaping the context of that universality. We add our personal selves to the multiple polarities that maintain the livingness and development of reality.
Since we may (in principle, although perhaps seldom or never in actual practice) participate in reality; then all problems and paradoxes of 'communication' are abolished - all concerns about the limitations, distortions, and misinterpretations of communication are deleted; all fears that there is no real and reliable communication... all these are superseded by the actuality of direct knowing, including direct person-to-person and person-to-God knowing.
So there is the incremental, then sudden, dawning of clarity and comprehension which comes as the conclusion of a Bildungsroman; and the motivated purpose that points forward to more Bildung. I
Isn't this what most thoughtful persons have wanted since Romanticism? - if they are honest with themselves, and are able to put aside paralysing fears? I mean a general understanding of their destiny and purpose, which is based in the reality of God, and aligned in accordance with God's hopes and plans; yet unique, personal, needing me-specifically?
Isn't this what is implied by 'the meaning of life?'
But/ And we also see that each of us must attain this meaning of life for himself or herself - it cannot be attained at second hand: certainly not for us here and now. Thus Bildung remains, as it has been for more than 200 years, the quintessential Western form.
The proper form of Bildung is therefore some kind of linear, biographical account - necessarily in an abstracted, often actually fictionalised, form - and always, underlying, there must be autobiography: a true and honest work of Bildung must be rooted in personal experience or powerful imagination of the phases depicted and described.
Such a work only became both possible and necessary with the advent of Romanticism in the late 1700s - and the Bildungsroman, the novel-of-Bildung. This hit the European mind with Goethe's Wilhelm Meister novel, and has been theorised by many philosophers since.
A debased modern offspring of the Bildungsroman is the coming-of-age movie or series, which typically focuses almost wholly on sex. Indeed, the post-mid-twentieth century cult of youth seems to be a selective, distorted, fixated conceptualisation of the interest in the process of personal transformation.
*
It all began for me in my middle teens and associated with the area of Bristol which is centred on College Green - beside the City Library and Cathedral; and runs up Park Street past coffee shops and esoteric suppliers to George's Bookshop. JRR Tolkien was the first and enduring talisman, Robert Graves another, Thoreau followed soon after. There was a deep dissatisfaction with the thinness and futility of modern life, and a yearning for something deeper, more mythic.
This was the continuation into adulthood of that Golden Thread of the most intense, significant and memorable events and impressions of childhood.
Since then certain places have drawn me repeatedly - often with obscure reason - to live, to stay for holidays, to visit - while other places, books, music, ideas, themes, activities - theoretically, perhaps, better suited? - when experienced and lived left me... well, perhaps diverted; but at depth unmoved; they failed to ignite the fire which turned out to be so essential, and lacking which life was drained of meaning.
Life was a zig-zag of trial and error; knowing better what was wrong than what was right - indeed (in retrospect) I certainly lacked any correct or clear understanding of what was right: what I was and should be aiming at, and why. There was certainly, I see now, a lot less 'luck' in it than I supposed at the time; and much more of destiny, and consequences.
(Making mistakes, and suffering for them - making partially correct decisions but misunderstanding and following false leads until I bogged down in the slough of despond.)
There was, in fact, no possibility of getting anywhere until I became a Christian: the Christian context was vital. But, after becoming a Christian, there was (for me) no possibility of getting very far until I could escape the vitality-draining sensation and conviction of suffocation and constraint, the 'school dinners' aspect of churches etc, which came from my trying to accept 'on trust' and without personal revelation (without working through for myself) the spiritual authority of actual Christian institutions.
In sum, there was an absolute necessity that my Christianity be based upon personal conviction and personal experience; and that this was known to be non-arbitrary, indeed the ultimate authority.
In sum, I remained true to the aspirations of Romanticism, but needed to move beyond its errors: in particular the error of aiming for the past, at tradition. I explored this option, in imagination, to a possible conclusion, and found that it was mistaken and unacceptable in multiple ways, as well as being incoherent here and now.
The key was provided, in the past three or four years, by Mormon theology, the work of Owen Barfield, Rudolf Steiner's early philosophy, and William Arkle's overall context: all of these remain crucial, and continue to yield depths and delights; motivation, direction and purpose.
Key elements needed to come together, among which are the following... that there is a universal realm of thinking (pure thinking, primary thinking of the real/ true/ divine self), of think-ing, conceptualised as a dynamic activity that need perpetually to create-itself; and does so from polarities that are regenerated.
This conceptualisation means that our personal thinking is involved in this dynamic process of universal thinking - so that such thinking is true and universal reality. We participate in reality by this thinking - which means that we both experience and know reality as it already is; and at the same time from our unique perspective (and because reality is always re-making) we are reshaping the context of that universality. We add our personal selves to the multiple polarities that maintain the livingness and development of reality.
Since we may (in principle, although perhaps seldom or never in actual practice) participate in reality; then all problems and paradoxes of 'communication' are abolished - all concerns about the limitations, distortions, and misinterpretations of communication are deleted; all fears that there is no real and reliable communication... all these are superseded by the actuality of direct knowing, including direct person-to-person and person-to-God knowing.
So there is the incremental, then sudden, dawning of clarity and comprehension which comes as the conclusion of a Bildungsroman; and the motivated purpose that points forward to more Bildung. I
Isn't this what most thoughtful persons have wanted since Romanticism? - if they are honest with themselves, and are able to put aside paralysing fears? I mean a general understanding of their destiny and purpose, which is based in the reality of God, and aligned in accordance with God's hopes and plans; yet unique, personal, needing me-specifically?
Isn't this what is implied by 'the meaning of life?'
But/ And we also see that each of us must attain this meaning of life for himself or herself - it cannot be attained at second hand: certainly not for us here and now. Thus Bildung remains, as it has been for more than 200 years, the quintessential Western form.
Wednesday 7 March 2018
Longfellow - a pure poet
A Psalm of Life
What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
Longfellow might well have been the first poet to touch my heart - since I was mysteriously affected by Hiawatha aged only about nine, and actually read the whole thing (as far as I remember); which left me a permanent romantic daydream for the northern Indians of the forests and lakes. Hiawatha is, indeed, an aspect of my personal 'golden thread' - which I have mentioned before.
Nature
As a fond mother, when the day is o'er,
Leads by the hand her little child to bed,
Half willing, half reluctant to be led,
And leave his broken playthings on the floor,
Still gazing at them through the open door,
Nor wholly reassured and comforted
By promises of others in their stead,
Which, though more splendid, may not please him more;
So Nature deals with us, and takes away
Our playthings one by one, and by the hand
Leads us to rest so gently, that we go
Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay,
Being too full of sleep to understand
How far the unknown transcends the what we know.
Longfellow is one of the most prolific of those 'pure' poets, whose fluid lyricism and magical-easy turn-of-phrase puts the efforts of so many more-complex verse writers to shame.
When that purity, that essence of poetry, is present - I ask for nothing more, but am content.
It is the rarest, and most precious of gifts a writer can offer.
The day is done
The day is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of Night,
As a feather is wafted downward
From an eagle in his flight.
I see the lights of the village
Gleam through the rain and the mist,
And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me
That my soul cannot resist:
A feeling of sadness and longing,
That is not akin to pain,
And resembles sorrow only
As the mist resembles the rain.
Come, read to me some poem,
Some simple and heartfelt lay,
That shall soothe this restless feeling,
And banish the thoughts of day.
Not from the grand old masters,
Not from the bards sublime,
Whose distant footsteps echo
Through the corridors of Time.
For, like strains of martial music,
Their mighty thoughts suggest
Life's endless toil and endeavor;
And to-night I long for rest.
Read from some humbler poet,
Whose songs gushed from his heart,
As showers from the clouds of summer,
Or tears from the eyelids start;
Who, through long days of labor,
And nights devoid of ease,
Still heard in his soul the music
Of wonderful melodies.
Such songs have power to quiet
The restless pulse of care,
And come like the benediction
That follows after prayer.
Then read from the treasured volume
The poem of thy choice,
And lend to the rhyme of the poet
The beauty of thy voice.
And the night shall be filled with music,
And the cares, that infest the day,
Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,
And as silently steal away.
Monday 10 September 2012
Unsurprised by vitality
*
C.S Lewis's biography was entitled Surprised by Joy - and joy points us towards God (of course we can refuse to accompany it).
(It points to God because it points beyond this world: joy is a desire, the experience of which is beyond happiness but the satisfaction of which is impossible on earth and thus implies Heaven.)
*
A golden thread of joyful experiences constitutes our true biography - yet about these inner delights we cannot communicate; or only seldom, and to few.
(I would guess there are many more people who have scorned Lewis's account of joys than have resonated with it.)
Certainly, modern culture has supplanted joy, in its usual manner: by subversion.
*
Joy, which comes upon us as a surprise and is private, has been supplanted by vitality, by energy, by actions on a public stage - witnessed, video-recorded, broadcast to the world.
The modern idea of a joyful person is one who does a lot of cool stuff - the kind of stuff which plays well in the arena and sounds good in casual conversation with strangers... abseiling 2000 feet into an active volcano to provide clean water to orphaned African cripples, perhaps.
By contrast, Lewis's prime example was when his brother showed him a miniature garden made from mosses and constructed in a biscuit tin.
*
Vitality is elite: but joy is for anyone (although, sadly, not everyone.)
Even the wretched may experience joy.
And it may be that media exemplars of vital, high energy extreme-happiness have never experienced joy, not even once.
*
C.S Lewis's biography was entitled Surprised by Joy - and joy points us towards God (of course we can refuse to accompany it).
(It points to God because it points beyond this world: joy is a desire, the experience of which is beyond happiness but the satisfaction of which is impossible on earth and thus implies Heaven.)
*
A golden thread of joyful experiences constitutes our true biography - yet about these inner delights we cannot communicate; or only seldom, and to few.
(I would guess there are many more people who have scorned Lewis's account of joys than have resonated with it.)
Certainly, modern culture has supplanted joy, in its usual manner: by subversion.
*
Joy, which comes upon us as a surprise and is private, has been supplanted by vitality, by energy, by actions on a public stage - witnessed, video-recorded, broadcast to the world.
The modern idea of a joyful person is one who does a lot of cool stuff - the kind of stuff which plays well in the arena and sounds good in casual conversation with strangers... abseiling 2000 feet into an active volcano to provide clean water to orphaned African cripples, perhaps.
By contrast, Lewis's prime example was when his brother showed him a miniature garden made from mosses and constructed in a biscuit tin.
*
Vitality is elite: but joy is for anyone (although, sadly, not everyone.)
Even the wretched may experience joy.
And it may be that media exemplars of vital, high energy extreme-happiness have never experienced joy, not even once.
*
Saturday 5 December 2020
Old age is (partly) about re-evaluating your earlier life
I have written before about the fact that mainstream modern culture has no distinctive role for the elderly; and that all the old people held-up for admiration by the mass media are simply continuing to do what young people do as a matter of course - such as looking young, doing strenous physical activities, being very active (lots of sex, holidays and socialising - pre 2020).
In the end, however, for modern culture; old people are merely second-rate/ fake young people.
The idea - and indeed the actuality - of old people as wiser then young, has disappeared. Modern 'exemplary' old people are Not wiser - unless 'wisdom' consists in pretending to be young; by ever-increasing usage of plastic surgery, cosmetics and drugs (lots of drugs!).
Modern old people are a failure! At present, especially in 2020, they are often much worse than the young in their cowardly and credulous embrace of the totalitarian Healthist agenda that (in reality) aims to imprison and (eventually) kill them.
Why are old people such a failure? The brief and truthful answer is Solzhenitsyn's phrase that They Have Forgotten God. Modern Old People are mostly Godless children of the fifties and sixties - even/ especially when they self-identify as Christian.
This is significant, because one of the main roles of old gage - and the potential source of that wisdom associated with old age, is retrospective re-evaluation.
When one is a Christian, retrospective re-evaluation happens almost spontaneously - which is why wisdom became stereotypical.
What happens is that the past becomes as important as the present; and indeed looms larger in the attention of the elderly. Old people remember the events of their early life more often and more vividly than they remember the events of yesterday or last week.
I don't mean due to the memory loss of dementia - although that is a pathological exaggeration of the natural phenomenon. I mean in terms of spontaneous attention and concern.
The elderly find themselves going-over the events of earlier life in a way that is far more focused and concerned than they have ever previously experienced. What is then supposed to happen, is that these events are considered with Christian discernment.
Here, as in many places, we see that the purpose of this mortal life is Christian - and when one is Not a Christian it follows that mortal life is drained of purpose - as so many billions of people are experiencing at present.
What happens when we re-evaluate our earlier life from a Christian perspective; is that events and periods we regarded as being 'good times' often turn-out to be bad.
For example, successful hedonism was enjoyable at the time; but we can now see that 'happiness' was merely pleasure - and often represented successful selfish short-termism.
Periods of social success, high status, triumph - we now recognise were often bad for us; and ended by reinforcing the worst aspects of ourselves; generating pride, entitlement, passivity and other vices.
We may see that these supposedly 'happy' periods led to habits and attitudes, choices and decisions, that led to misery and alienation in the longer-term. Or led to harm done to other people - of which we were (selfishly) unaware at the time.
On the plus side; we find that some of periods of 'ordinary' everyday experience, for example family life, which seemed at the time dull, mundane, constricting; were in truth the best and most important things we ever did!
That (then un-noticed) time, sitting or walking alone - looking at a view, or 'just thinking' - was actually of great and lasting importance! Part of our Golden Thread.
Superficially, 'nothing was happening' - yet now we find such events rising to the surface of awareness - and their magical transcendence is revealed for the first time.
But none of this work of discernment and re-evaluation is possible unless we are Christian, and understand our mortal lives in terms of our choice to follow Jesus to resurrected life in Heaven.
So it turns-out that one of the real functions of old age has been lost along with theism in general, and Christian faith in particular.
Restore Christianity, and we recover the value of old age.
Monday 17 August 2020
Real learning, and the reality of Time
It is an error, a self-deception, to harp-on about Time: to use concepts of Time as an-always-present, simultaneous, reversible, meaningless... Or that Time is No Time, All Time, Arbitrary Time...
I have read a great deal of Christian and New Age writing that uses some non-common-sense version of Time as the core explanatory concept. These are 'explaining' phenomena and spiritual ideas in terms that Time is Not (as it seems) linear and sequential and irreversible - but instead Time is actually something else... Such as every moment always present, Time is an illusion of mortal life, that the future creates the present, that the past can be changed - and so forth.
I know from my own case; that such Time talk may produce a bewildered and disorientated frisson of 'enlightenment', 'insight', spiruality'... It temporality provides an aura of mystery and magic. But I also know that it goes nowhere. Time talk paralyses life if taken seriously - and if not taken seriously it dissipates and diverts proper effort.
People have been harping about Time in the mainstream for more than a century, and if one examines the results - they are not impressive. The very mode by which people describe their Time ideas tends towards extreme abstraction, the mathematical, bureaucratic; it is dull, life-less.
It Doesn't Work.
Okay - we may agree on what does Not work, and we can stop doing Those Things. Yet that knowledge is of little value unless we know what to do instead: as always it's a case of: If Not - Then What?
Well, we should accept that we live in Time, amd that time is linear, sequential, irreversible - albeit it may run at different speeds for different persons and in different places. And this is especially the case for Christians; because Christianity is about a Saviour born at a particular point in Time, who changes reality from that Time; and whose gift is a resurrection to Heaven that may happen to either or both of us in the future, but has not happened yet.
We need, I suggest, to avoid Time as an abstraction; and also abstraction and sytematisation in general: no schemes, no models, no lists, no bullet points...
For Christians we start with Love; and that means from actually-existing Love. Start from where we are, as particular persons - Not starting from what we 'ought' to love, but from what we do love. And we shouldn't expect, strive for, hope-for permanence in the things of this mortal life; we should not aim at progress in the transient things of our life on this earth.
Mortal life is about Learning, but this is Not the learning of 'psychology', nor the learning sustained by memories - which are transient, brain-dependent, mortal things...
Real learning could be defined as experienced-experience! Learning happens when we really live and notice our experience.
Real learning is when our real-self (which is divine) has an experience.
Our real-self is eternal, and does not depend on our body: this real-self is what lived as spirit before this mortal life, and what gets resurrected after death - if we accept the gift of Jesus Christ. Therefore, anything learned by the real-self is learned forever.
No amount of shallow experience by our false, transient, 'personality' selves amounts to the learning we need...
Backpacking across the Sahara or up Everest is completely worthless unless the real-self experiences something; as should be obvious from the shallow dullness of nearly-all the breed of travellers and explorers; and the spiritual trivialisation that has increased with the range and scope of journeying in the modern world.
The real self never experiences the desert or the mountain - only the transient personalities are affected by it. "I took my fake-self through X and Y extreme and exotic experiences". In the end - who cares? It has no more profound or lasting a significance than watching tonight's 'news' on TV.
One who actually experiences, with his real-self, the act of sitting on a chair and gazing out of the window - has learned something in his life; which very probably cannot be said of another individual who walked on the moon.
Obviously!
But really-experiencing experience is (for most people) difficult, intermittent, brief. There is no obvious way that we can make such things happen: certainly methods and training have proved themselves ineffectual.
Is spiritual 'progress' then even a possibility? And what would such progress mean, in terms of the real-self? - how could we know?
Well, yes progress is possible whenever the real self has experience; and significant progress actually-happens when that experience is one that we personally need.
We are all incarnated into this mortal life with different needs from our earthly lives; and when our real-self has experiences that address those needs, then we have made spiritual progress.
Often, these needed experiences are to-do-with Love; and that is why we should look for such experiences in relation to those we Love. That is our only 'method' the only 'technique'...
In other words; if we want to make spiritual progress - we would be best advised to starts from whatever person or other entities that we now-and-already Love; and Not to start from any kind of external-generic description, prescription, formula, flow-chart...
And when we die, our real-selves will be that-much-better from those experiences.
This can be understood as our destiny. Our destiny is those experiences that we need from this temporary incarnation, and would benefit-from. And it is a task of our life to experience those experiences in particular... Not just to have the experiences in an external and behaviouristic sense, but for the real-self to experience them.
Can we know that this has actually happened? Well here I cannot speak for others; but it seems to me that I do know the broad nature of my spiritual progress through life by the Golden Thread of enduring and special memories.
I'm not sure what each of these experiences on the thread means; but I am sure that these experiences happened when real-learning happened.
Like all memories, these are presumably dependent on the temporarily incarnate body; but they seem to have a special quality by which they were marked-out; and which reassure me that 'progress has been made', and that my life has not been in vain.
I have read a great deal of Christian and New Age writing that uses some non-common-sense version of Time as the core explanatory concept. These are 'explaining' phenomena and spiritual ideas in terms that Time is Not (as it seems) linear and sequential and irreversible - but instead Time is actually something else... Such as every moment always present, Time is an illusion of mortal life, that the future creates the present, that the past can be changed - and so forth.
I know from my own case; that such Time talk may produce a bewildered and disorientated frisson of 'enlightenment', 'insight', spiruality'... It temporality provides an aura of mystery and magic. But I also know that it goes nowhere. Time talk paralyses life if taken seriously - and if not taken seriously it dissipates and diverts proper effort.
People have been harping about Time in the mainstream for more than a century, and if one examines the results - they are not impressive. The very mode by which people describe their Time ideas tends towards extreme abstraction, the mathematical, bureaucratic; it is dull, life-less.
It Doesn't Work.
Okay - we may agree on what does Not work, and we can stop doing Those Things. Yet that knowledge is of little value unless we know what to do instead: as always it's a case of: If Not - Then What?
Well, we should accept that we live in Time, amd that time is linear, sequential, irreversible - albeit it may run at different speeds for different persons and in different places. And this is especially the case for Christians; because Christianity is about a Saviour born at a particular point in Time, who changes reality from that Time; and whose gift is a resurrection to Heaven that may happen to either or both of us in the future, but has not happened yet.
We need, I suggest, to avoid Time as an abstraction; and also abstraction and sytematisation in general: no schemes, no models, no lists, no bullet points...
For Christians we start with Love; and that means from actually-existing Love. Start from where we are, as particular persons - Not starting from what we 'ought' to love, but from what we do love. And we shouldn't expect, strive for, hope-for permanence in the things of this mortal life; we should not aim at progress in the transient things of our life on this earth.
Mortal life is about Learning, but this is Not the learning of 'psychology', nor the learning sustained by memories - which are transient, brain-dependent, mortal things...
Real learning could be defined as experienced-experience! Learning happens when we really live and notice our experience.
Real learning is when our real-self (which is divine) has an experience.
Our real-self is eternal, and does not depend on our body: this real-self is what lived as spirit before this mortal life, and what gets resurrected after death - if we accept the gift of Jesus Christ. Therefore, anything learned by the real-self is learned forever.
No amount of shallow experience by our false, transient, 'personality' selves amounts to the learning we need...
Backpacking across the Sahara or up Everest is completely worthless unless the real-self experiences something; as should be obvious from the shallow dullness of nearly-all the breed of travellers and explorers; and the spiritual trivialisation that has increased with the range and scope of journeying in the modern world.
The real self never experiences the desert or the mountain - only the transient personalities are affected by it. "I took my fake-self through X and Y extreme and exotic experiences". In the end - who cares? It has no more profound or lasting a significance than watching tonight's 'news' on TV.
One who actually experiences, with his real-self, the act of sitting on a chair and gazing out of the window - has learned something in his life; which very probably cannot be said of another individual who walked on the moon.
Obviously!
But really-experiencing experience is (for most people) difficult, intermittent, brief. There is no obvious way that we can make such things happen: certainly methods and training have proved themselves ineffectual.
Is spiritual 'progress' then even a possibility? And what would such progress mean, in terms of the real-self? - how could we know?
Well, yes progress is possible whenever the real self has experience; and significant progress actually-happens when that experience is one that we personally need.
We are all incarnated into this mortal life with different needs from our earthly lives; and when our real-self has experiences that address those needs, then we have made spiritual progress.
Often, these needed experiences are to-do-with Love; and that is why we should look for such experiences in relation to those we Love. That is our only 'method' the only 'technique'...
In other words; if we want to make spiritual progress - we would be best advised to starts from whatever person or other entities that we now-and-already Love; and Not to start from any kind of external-generic description, prescription, formula, flow-chart...
And when we die, our real-selves will be that-much-better from those experiences.
This can be understood as our destiny. Our destiny is those experiences that we need from this temporary incarnation, and would benefit-from. And it is a task of our life to experience those experiences in particular... Not just to have the experiences in an external and behaviouristic sense, but for the real-self to experience them.
Can we know that this has actually happened? Well here I cannot speak for others; but it seems to me that I do know the broad nature of my spiritual progress through life by the Golden Thread of enduring and special memories.
I'm not sure what each of these experiences on the thread means; but I am sure that these experiences happened when real-learning happened.
Like all memories, these are presumably dependent on the temporarily incarnate body; but they seem to have a special quality by which they were marked-out; and which reassure me that 'progress has been made', and that my life has not been in vain.
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