Bruce Charlton's Notions

'Doing' heart-thinking is not the point; we are all doing it, all of the time. The task is not to do it, but first to become conscious of it; and then to follow its dictates. 

In childhood (and earlier phases of human history, apparently) many/most people lived in accordance with heart-thinking - but did so without awareness, and automatically. 

Now, on the other side of our spiritual adolescence, we have lost the capacity (and now, in 2020, even the opportunity) for such spontaneous, natural life; and our choice now is whether to return to heart-thinking as a conscious decision, and to follow the dictates of the heart (which are aligned-with God's creation). 

Or, in contrast, the choice may be to continue with the socially-prevalent (and dominant) alternations between bureaucratic pseudo-rationalistic materialism ('Ahrimanic' evil) and selfish instinctive hedonism ('Luciferic' evil). This (here-and-now) reliably leads to the choice of damnation.

 

Heart-thinking is the first goal of 'meditation', or prayer: to become aware of our own heart-thinking; which means to make matters so that our heart-thinking is in our conscious stream of thoughts.  

Heart-thinking is always there, always going-on - the task is to bring it to awareness - to locate it among distractions, clear a path, encourage emergence... to notice and take-seriously our heart-thinking. (Because the purity of heart-thinking is an ideal, it is the divine within us; and as such in harmony with God.)*

To know and live-by heart-thinking does not happen spontaneously, but by decision. And we are not compelled to live-by heart-thinking; but must make a discernment to do so.

 

It is the role of head-thinking to fit that ideal to daily practicalities and constraints; and in this job we have (if we choose to access it) the universal spirit that is the Holy Ghost to inform and guide us, and provide encouragement. 

And, although the above seems abstract - the reality is personal. The thinking of the heart is our real inner person - as opposed to our superficial (and typically fake, dishonest, manipulative or pathological) 'personality'. The Holy Ghost is a person. Our living in the world is a matter of living in relationship with Beings. 

Living is ideally a matter of harmony with ongoing creation; which is a personal and purposive product of God's intention.

 

Our modern task (which extremely few have recognised, fewer still attempted) is (put simply) to do consciously and by choice that which was once done unconsciously and spontaneously; that is, freely and from personal agency, to do what was once done from lack of individual capacity and alternative possibilities. 

We have greater capacities and more possibilities; and must choose The Right from among them - this is what requires to be done If, we wish to have eternal resurrected life in Heaven. 

If Not; we can simply carry on as the mass majority do at present.

 

*Note: This means that our awareness of heart-thinking comes after the heart-thinking itself. The heart-thinking has already happened by the time we are aware of it. Consciousness tells us what heart-thinking has decided. A consequence is that heart-thinking comes temporally before consciousness; and consciousness - logical reasoning, factual information and the like - does not necessarily have any influence on heart-thinking, and any later influence consciousness does have, will be due to the 'internal' imperatives of heart-thinking. 

Further added: To take-up a metaphor of William Arkle, heart-thinking is rather like trying to tune an analog radio to get a particular and previously-undiscovered channel. First we must know-about that 'real' channel, and want to find the signal. Then we may need to maximise reception by finding the best direction to point the arial, and exclude adjacent sources of 'noise': sparks, crackle, hum etc. This corresponds to spiritual guidance (where to look) and meditation (reducing distraction). Then comes the actual tuning, i.e. the precise twiddling of the dial and listening to discover... what? Well, we need to know the real channel when we find it among all the wrong and perhaps misleading channels; which entails both an inner recognition and an external confirmation of the validity of that recognition (recognition by the divine within us by virtue of being God's children; and confirmation from the universal divine outside us: ie. the Holy Ghost). This stage braodly corresponds with prayer. Finally we must choose to attend to the real channel, regard it seriously, and take note of its content in our lives.  

If we succeed in attaining a higher mode of consciousness, i.e. what I have variously termed primary thinking, direct-knowing, intuition or Final Participation - here I will call it Heart Thinking - that we strive- and hope-for; then what would be the implications? 

What might we expect?

 

Nothing that could 'happen to us in the world' can be of any help to our alienated condition. What happens must happen in us; and furthermore what happens must be a qualitative transformation - quantitative change in consciousness does not suffice. 

What needs to happen is a change in our basic relationship with The World (including other people).

This new and distinct way of being-in-the-world is heart-thinking

 

If an apprehension of new-ness is driven by heart modes of thinking; then new phenomenon (which we observe in The World) are Not perceived by those who do Not share this new heart-based mode of thinking. So, when higher consciousness does happen, it is scary - as well as exciting, because - being qualitatively distinct - it sets us apart. 

Nothing that is perceived by 'everyone' can be a part of the higher thinking. Objective and putatively 'paranormal' phenomena (such as UFOs or Crop Circles) cannot be a part of the new heart consciousness, precisely because they are observable by everyone. 

Anything which can be observed by everyone is Not what is needed. 

This means that heart-thinking, qualitatively higher modes of consciousness - must and will appear psychotic (delusional, hallucinatory) to those who do not share that new mode of thinking. 

In sum: qualitative heart-thinking implies that we will experience qualitatively distinct, non-'objective' phenomena - insights, clarifications, knowings; perceived only by those who are heart-thinkers (therefore perhaps only ourselves, so far as we know). 

Furthermore, it is the nature of this mortal life on earth that we can attain higher modes of thinking only relatively briefly and intermittently. 

Therefore, the heart-thinking phenomena (resulting from higher consciousness) are going to be imperceptible for most of the time. Imperceptible, even to those who are able to live in the higher mode of consciousness. 

In other words, when I am living in a lower mode of consciousness - when I am Not heart-thinking, which is going to be most of the time - then I cannot at that time know-by-experience what I know-by-experience at times when I Am heart-thinking.

And this, in turn, implies that I must choose to be guided by that which I have-known in my highest mode of consciousness - those times of intuitive heart-thinking.  

Therefore, I think this is the way that we need to proceed in tackling what may be the primary task of this era for Christians; which is to become heart-thinkers. In the first place, heart-thinking is done actively and by conscious choice; and it must be discerned from the other - more obvious and distracting - types of thinking. 

And then there is a further decision to regard heart-thinking as primary - despite that it isn't forced upon us (nor yielded-to passively, often unconsciously); as happens with the dominant modes of 'objective'/ universal sensory perceptions, the compelling and pervasive ideologies of public discourse, or our biological instincts. 

(When we are passive, unconscious, automatic, yielding, accepting, surrendering, submitting - when we are thinking in terms of expedience, pragmatism, being-sensible - then we are not the mode of heart-thinking.)

Following which, we need to be prepared to live-by the direct-knowing attained during heart-thinking (our insights, clarifications, knowings) - even through those times (which is most of the time) when we are unable to live in the mode of heart-thinking.

 

The great lesson I got from Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield, is that reality is co-created by consciousness - that is, by thinking. We make the world by our thinking - and the kind of world we make - or unmake, depends on the kind of thinking. 

The only thing out-there and independent of us is formless chaos - all that can be known has been created; and creation formed by consciousness, and all consciousness has this property of creative formation. 

The primary creation that we inhabit was formed by God's consciousness (God is the prime creator); but our own consciousness affects divine creation - either positively or negatively. 

As our consciousness has become detached from God - we must now choose whether again to affiliate with the living reality of primary creation through love and heart thinking; or to remain alienated, to regard reality as consisting of dead things affected by material processes - and thereby to affiliate with the entropic, parasitic, destructive cognitive processing of mainstream modern life. 

It has become very obvious that humanity is splitting into Christians and anti-Christians; into those who affiliate with God, The Good and Divine Creation - and those who oppose these. 

This split can also be seen as between heart thinking and entropic thinking. We are being compelled to choose between these. 

It is the choice between loving creation; or the subversion, deconstruction and destruction of creation. 

Entropic thinking is normal, abstract, mainstream, 'materialist' thinking - it is 'brain thinking', which is increasingly conformed to machine or computer thinking. 

Entropic describes how you are (almost certainly) thinking now; and how nearly everybody (or everybody) around you is thinking - it is how everybody in societal authority and institutional leadership are thinking. It is the processing embodied in public discourse, bureaucracy, computers, management, media, laws, regulations, procedures...  

This entropic thinking assumes the world is made of dead things, and these dead things are subject to life-less processes, energies and forces. Built-into this is the assumption that entropy rules the world - rules reality - entropy in one place can only be reversed or delayed by increasing entropy elsewhere - thus 'creation' is actually the predatory consumption of one source of order by another - and (because entropy is relentless) this predation (or parasitism) must continue until all order is consumed and formless chaos remains.

Thus, entropic thinking is the world view of the self-damned, the demonic; those who believe in Satan's conceptualization of reality: the sin-motivated war of each against all (only expediently delayed by transient mutually-exploitative demonic alliances directed against God and creation).

Heart thinking is in complete contrast and opposition to the entropic in its nature, origin and motivation. 

Heart thinking is based in love and life; it assumes a living universe of beings - and God's creation gets its origin, form, order and coherence from love. 

Thus, love and creation are polarities of the same essence - loving-creation and creative-love.  

This love - which made creation, and holds-together creation - and which is self-sustaining - is between beings. Beings are living and conscious entities - all beings are alive and conscious, but there are different degrees of aliveness and forms of consciousness.  

Heart thinking is of those beings who have first become modern and alienated; who have first assimilated into entropic thinking - where the reality of God is not entailed. Those who from that position of detached freedom have consciously chosen to recognize, embrace and align-with the reality of God and of a 'universe' consisting of beings living in a divine creation. 

Those who choose heart thinking will find that they need to recognize the greater authority, depth and truth of a thinking based in love, and operating with love - in order to reject the otherwise overwhelming powers and persuasion of entropic thinking. 

It is the terrible choice of modern Man to choose - and his choice lies between the divine work of co-creating the world, or else the demonic project of destroying creation. 

Those who think entropically will do entropy. 

By the way they conceptualize the world, they project deadness onto the living world, they project abstract forces and energies onto a creation that is actually sustained by love; and by these projections these remake their world in the image they have chosen. 

Despite the opposition (implicit and explicit) of The World; heart thinking will need to be accorded primacy again and again, as it conflicts in method and motivation with the dominant, prevalent this-worldly entropic thinking - which asserts its monopoly of objectivity and that heart thinking is childish, foolish or insane.

Entropic thinking labels heart thinking as wishful thinking; yet the truth is both heart and entropic are wishful - and the wishes become reality.  

The entropic thinker wishes entropy onto divine creation - converting that which is alive and conscious through love into a meaningless, purposeless dead universe. 

It is entropic thinking that is destroying our civilization, our humanity - and beyond that it destroys the possibility of eternal resurrected life in Heaven. Because the entropic thinker (and he is apparently most people in the world, including most self-identified Christians) is co-engaged in the progressive killing of beings, the elimination of love, the reduction of life and consciousness into 'people' who self-identify as Dead Things. 

The heart thinker instead works from the love in his heart, from actual interpersonal and inter-being love (not abstract love); he recognizes and affirms that love, and makes it the motivation for knowing reality. He regards reality as that which known by this loving thinking. 

The heart thinker regards the world from his heart - it is his love of particular beings which connects him with reality; it is his love that motivates the connection-with and knowledge-of reality. 

That which is outwith his love is not truly known - but merely hypothesized, modelled from simplified and incomplete variables, and therefore certainly false. 

Thus the primacy of the two great commandments: love of God and neighbour. In heart thinking; modern Man chooses to participate in co-creating his own reality (and potentially the reality of other heart thinkers) by rooting his knowledge in love of God. And the scope of this knowledge is defined by the scope of those other beings ('neighbours') whom he also loves. And if he wishes this active joining-with loving creation to be an eternal state - this is attained by loving and following Jesus Christ to resurrected life in Heaven. 

Note: The above analysis is indebted to a section of a lecture on Crop Circles from Stanley Messenger to the Wessex Research Group, delivered in the middle 1990s. Stanley Messenger was an expert on Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy, having been a Waldorf teacher. He was also involved in, and approving of (in what I regard as an uncritical and credulous way) pretty much all of the New Age crazes of his era; and was also a proponent of the sexual revolution. He was highly intelligent and knowledgeable, and a gifted improvisatory lecturer (having been a professional actor). My eveluation is that Stanley Messenger was (much like his Master, Steiner) someone who sporadically generated some superb and vitally-important insights, which are scattered among a great deal else that I must set aside as mistaken and wrongly-motivated. Anyway; my above post was inspired by re-listening to a genuinely-intuitive, superbly truth-full section of the linked lecture which runs from about 23 minutes to 42 minutes. This section strikes me as more vivid, comprehensible, exciting and motivating than anything Steiner ever expressed (that I have come across) - while being deeply and explicitly indebted to Steiner. 

It is one thing to understand that this is a living, purposive and conscious ("animated") world we inhabit; but another and more difficult matter to experience it as such.

At least that has been my experience, and apparently the experience of many others: we find ourselves stuck, thinking in the materialistic fashion that innately imposes the usual alienated life in which everything is experienced as a 'thing' - and we find ourselves unable to relate the our environment.

Of course I have tried to experience the world as alive and conscious - but it seldom works. Indeed, the very act of trying is what seems to block the process. It is as if my willing forms a skin around my-self.

As so often - it seems I had things the wrong way around; I was trying to do the opposite of what was actually required. The clue came from reflecting upon a passage about Heart Thinking in a talk by Stanley Messenger that I have posted before.


I regard it as a primary insight that we need to make a conscious choice in order to move forward to the next and destined development of consciousness.  It won't just happen-to us: we must actively choose to make it happen: meet our destiny half-way...

I also regard it as necessary that we recognise the primacy of intuitive thinking - thinking which is based-upon direct contact between beings (not merely indirect communications, such as language)...

So that, in effect, we think each others thoughts, without perception or mediation; without need for language or any other symbolism.


At one point in that above-linked lecture entitled "Crop Circles: gateways to new worlds"; Stanley M comments that Beings (such as angels, or the so-called dead - or, implicitly, the manyfold Beings that surround us in our environment (sun, moon, stars, wind, mountains, trees, animals...) - cannot talk to us unless we first our-selves produce a language, more exactly a channel of contact, in which we can talk to them.

Now; SM actually meant 'talk', as the mode of contact - and he deployed 'channeled' conversations as his medium. However, I would regard such perceptual and 'hallucinatory' experiences as being pretty-much inaccessible-to, as well as mostly inappropriate-for, modern Men. But if I modified 'talking' to the kind of direct and intuitive knowing that I regard as primary and necessary; I found that my question was partly answered...

It became clear that what was needed was for me - consciously and by choice - to initiate direct intuitive contact with Beings, thereby to dicover from experience that they were alive.

And this was different from what I had been trying to do - which was to be receptive to the 'communications' from things around me. I had been trying to experience the world as I did when a young child - but this time consciously. I had been looking, listening and feeling; when what was actually required was for me to make an active approach...

That is what I tried to do. The problem was that It Never Worked. What never? Well, hardly-ever. 


My conclusion was that this is not sufficient, it was not specific enough, thus it didn't work.

The questions arose: what (from all the infinite environment) should I approach, and how should I make this approach for it to be effective?

One clue is that this must involve 'heart thinking'; a term which means the same as intuition - and thinking with the heart is distinguished from head-thinking/ reason/ logic on the one hand; and gut-thinking/ instinct/ spontaneous impulse on the other hand. In practice, heart thinking is happening when knowledge 'appears' in conscious thinking, knowledge that we know to be from another Being (not our-selves) inserts-itself into our stream-of-thought.

So, that tells me how to know when it has-happened (and it is characteristic of heart thinking that it is retrospective. We know that an intuition has-happened - but do Not know when it is-happening.

A further characteristic of heart-thinking is that it is self-validating; while it is happening, I am sure of it, I don't doubt it. It brings with it that faith which is the natural consequence of trust. And trust is the consequence of love.

So, we begin to see how all the necessary elements are fitting together... Still, the problem remains - how exactly to initiate this process of heart thinking, how to make contact, and with-what to make contact?


(Because there are plenty of ineffective recommendations knocking-around; notably the 'exercises' prescribed by Rudolf Steiner - despite that most of these ideas come (whether directly or indirectly) from Rudolf Steiner. Steiner suggested an essentially arbitrary method, by which some-arbitrary-thing is picked-out (e.g. a plant) and then a mental-concentration form of meditation is practiced; whereby (through practise) thoughts are compelled to remain focused on the object, and to follow certain prescribed themes. I mention this only as an example of something well-meaning that has proven itself solidly-ineffective over the course of a century, during which Anthroposphy has become ever-more Ahrimanic, passive and politicised - and nearly all Anthroposophists (who practice these exercises) have become psychologically-indistinguishable from the mass of mainstream, bureaucratized, totalitarian-minded leftists.)


I got the clue for this next and final step from another comment Stanley Messenger made in the 'crop  circles' talk, from about 1h 22mins before the end; which was (in my slightly edited transcription):

The huge evolutionary step that has been taken over thousands of years in Man's history is that a conscious being now exists in the universe which can arrogate to its own consciousness the freedom to decide what is true - to create universes. 

And this is a perilous and devilish capacity; and is at the same time a capacity that can raise mankind to the level of the gods.

What is the difference between those two possibilities? The difference is whether, in this growth of self-awareness, mankind will come to the realisation that the perceptions of the heart are more fundamental than the perceptions of the brain. The realisation that our capacity to know through the heart reaches a more profound and truth-filled level than can be reached by perception, hypothesis and analysis.

The difference between this new freedom on the one hand to deny and destroy the reality of the cosmos; and the opposite capacity that it can create new universes of its own; depends, in the end, entirely on whether there is love in the heart - or not.

If there is no love in the heart, then this advance to a freedom of knowledge is the most Satanic thing that could possibly have happened to Mankind.


In the first place, this distinction is a stunning clarification of the catastrophes of 2020. We are ruled by those who have-not love in the heart, and the masses have allowed/ chosen that love should leach from their hearts in all world-relations excepting some of the human. Hence we have embarked upon the perilous, demonic, Satanic pathway - which is the terrible consequence of Man's choice to misuse his new freedom to create new universes.

The 'reality' that that is being created - before our eyes - is literally a Satanic hell; in which people's capacity to choose what they believe, is being used to believe the inversion of those true values that derive from God and creation.

We have created, and are developing, a 'universe' where lies are truth, the ugly and disgusting is celebrated as beautiful, evil plans are celebrated as idealistic visions; and where all representations of God, the Good and Creation are being subverted, mocked, destroyed, vilified and punished. Then all this is being locked-in by a global totalitarianism based on fear, resentment and despair. 


But most vitally this 'love in the heart' requirement is the final clue to how to experience our living in an animated world; a world of Beings.  How do we come to know these Beings, how do we begin to have a relationship with these Beings?

Firstly, we focus on those Beings we love.

Only by love can there be heart thinking. So anything and every-thing we love - but nothing else - is suitable for us to address. As well as people alive and around us we may love someone we have never met, perhaps one who has died; or an author, composer or artist from the past. We may love a pet, or other animal. And we may love any environmental 'thing' - a particular plant or tree in our garden, a landscape or hill, the crescent moon or the constellation of Orion.

We may love something 'made' like a house, a church building, a picture, an old car, a much-used tool...


But love is not arbitrary. The point is that we must truly, spontaneously, already love the Being we address.

Love is not an aspiration, but a necessity: an absolute requirement.

Start with what we actually love: that is vital.


Secondly, we ourselves actively, by conscious choice, express our love: and so we open the channel of communication.

A mistake is to try and manipulate, or get-something-from, that which we address. Animistic thinking is magical - but it is not magic. (Magic is an attempt at manipulating reality.)

What is needed is analogous to the difference between telephoning your mother, and making a sales call; the difference between patting a dog, and using a carrier pigeon to send a message; between a real fan-letter expressing gratitude and delight, and asking for an autograph.

Love is - in the proper sense - disinterested.

Being based in Love; we might rightly express such emotions as gratitude, appreciation, respect, admiration, even adoration.


Putting all this together:

If we want to experience the whole of reality as living and conscious - experience the animated universe - be in relation-with the world; then we begin by knowing this is true, selecting that which we actually love; and then opening the channel for direct contact by expressing that love in positive, generous, affirmative and appreciating ways.

After which we may expect to become aware of our heart thinking - so that the responses to our consciously-chosen initiation of contact becomes consciously known by us, as having appeared in our own consciousness.

We will know that we have-been in direct communication; and will intrinsically (at the time it happens) know the validity of this process.

Excerpted from the ninth of a 1910 lecture series entitled Macrocosm and Microcosm (GA 119). I have made cuts indicated... and added italics for emphasis:

...In ordinary life we have the feeling that we think with the head. That of course is a pictorial expression, for we actually think with the spiritual organs underlying the brain; but it is generally accepted that we think with the head... We have a quite different feeling about the thinking that becomes possible when we have made a little progress. The feeling then is as if what had hitherto been localised in the head were now localised in the heart...

This thinking of the heart is very different from ordinary thinking. In ordinary thinking everyone knows that reflection is necessary in order to arrive at a particular truth. The mind moves from one concept to another and after logical deliberation and reflection reaches what is called ‘knowledge’. It is different when we want to recognise the truth in connection with genuine symbols or emblems. They are before us like objects, but the thinking we apply to them cannot be confounded with ordinary brain-thinking. Whether they are true or false is directly evident without any reflection being necessary as in the case of ordinary thinking.

What there is to say about the higher worlds is directly evident... This is the characteristic of heart-thinking.


There are not many things in everyday life that may be compared with it but I will speak of something that may make it intelligible.

There are events which bring the intellect almost literally to a standstill. For example, suppose some event confronts you like a flash of lightning and you are terrified. No external thought intervenes between the event and your terror. The inner experience — the terror — is something that can bring the mind to a standstill. That is a good expression for it, for people feel what has, in very fact, happened...

Experiences which arise when an action or inner state of mind directly follows the first impression are the only kind in everyday life that may be compared with those of the spiritual investigator when he has to say something about his experiences in the higher worlds. If we begin to reason, to apply much logical criticism to these experiences, we drive them away. And furthermore, ordinary thinking applied in such cases will usually produce something that is false.

Essential as it is first of all to undergo the discipline of sound, reasoned thinking before attempting to enter the higher worlds, it is equally essential to rise above this ordinary thinking to immediate apprehension... With ordinary intellectual thinking we are incapable of judging rightly in the higher world, but equally we are incapable of judging rightly in that world if we have not first trained our intellectual thinking in the physical world, and then, at a suitable moment, are able to be oblivious of it...


In the ordinary life of today man experiences — or can at least experience — these three stages. — The majority of people are at the stage where in their normal consciousness an immediate, innate feeling tells them: this is right, that is wrong; you ought to do this, you ought not to do that... That is the first stage of development.

At the second stage, man begins to reflect. More and more people will be prone to abandon their original feeling and to reflect about the circumstances and conditions into which they have been born. This is why there is so much criticism today of creeds and of sacred traditions from the past. All this criticism is the reaction of the intellect and the reasoning mind against what has been accepted out of feeling and left unproven by the intellect...

Thus there are these two stages in the development of the human soul. In respect of what a man accepts as true he may be at the stage where he is guided by primitive, undeveloped feeling, feeling that is inborn or has been acquired through education. A second factor is what is called intellect, intelligence.

But anyone who has a little insight into the nature of the soul knows that a very definite quality of this intelligence is that it has a deadening effect upon the emotional life... Hence those who out of certain primitive feelings — which are entirely justifiable at one stage of development — incline towards this or that truth are reluctant to let these beliefs be affected by the withering and devastating effect of intellectuality. This reluctance is understandable.

If, however, it goes so far as to make people say that in order to rise into the higher worlds they will avoid all thinking and remain in their immature emotional life, then they can never reach the higher worlds; all their experiences will remain on a low level.


It is inconvenient, but necessary, to train the power of thinking — which is of course invaluable for life in the external world, although for those who aspire to reach the higher worlds thinking serves merely as a preparation, as training. The validity of truths of the higher worlds cannot be established through logic.

The thinking that is applied to machines, to the phenomena of outer nature, to the natural sciences, cannot be applied in the same way to experiences connected with the higher worlds... Without intellect we could not construct machines, build bridges or study botany, zoology, medicine, or anything else; its use in those domains is apparent inasmuch as it is applied to the immediate objects. For higher development, intellect has approximately the significance that learning to write has in youth. Learning to write is the exercise of a faculty that must be behind us when it has to be applied; it has significance only when we have got beyond it...

So it is too, with thinking. Anyone who wants to undergo higher development must for a certain time also undergo training in logical thinking and then discard it in order to pass over to thinking with the heart. Then there remains with him a certain habit of conscientiousness with regard to the acceptance of truth in the higher worlds. Nobody who has undergone this training will regard every symbol as a true Imagination or interpret it arbitrarily; but he will have the inner strength to draw near to reality, to see and interpret it rightly.

The very reason why a thorough training is necessary is because we must then have an immediate feeling as to whether something is true or false. To put it exactly, this means that whereas in ordinary life we use reflection, in the higher worlds our thinking must previously have been developed sufficiently to enable us to decide spontaneously about truth or falsity.


Other thoughts on heart-thinking can also be found described under the categories of primary thinking, direct thinking and Final Participation. It is the basis of Romantic Christianity. 

That's what Rudolf Steiner meant when he said "Hearts must begin to have thoughts". 

The head changes its function. It becomes the place where the thoughts the heart has, are reflected back to us, where we can perceive them...

Instead of the head being the place where thoughts originate at the behest of sense-perception. 

Slightly edited from a passage in an unpublished novel called The Intraterrestrials, by Stanley Messenger, 1995-6. 

This may be helpful in understanding the Steiner-derived concept of heart-thinking, and what it entails. 

The existing situation (in this era of the Consciousness Soul) is that the conscious thoughts in our head (our brain) derive from sense perceptions, including memories that derive from sense perceptions. That is, our head-thinking originates from the six senses of sights, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and proprioception (perception of inner viscera). 

Heart-thinking is not like this: it is non-perceptual - it is direct-knowing. Therefore, we 'Just Know' heart thinking - although it can be translated into words, pictures or other perceptions. 

The idea is that in Owen Barfield's idea of Final Participation; the function of head-thinking switches from a basis in awareness of our perceptions, to awareness of our heart-thinking. 

And, primarily, this head-thinking awareness is therefore direct - wordless, pictureless, touchless - a case of Just Knowing what is in our heart-thinking.  

In other words: In Primary Thinking we become aware of what we Just Know. 

Note: if any of the above terminology is unfamiliar or unclear, I suggest doing a word search on this blog, using the search box in the upper left corner of the page. 

It is the special and unprecedented feature of these times that Men choose what to believe. 

It is evident that Modern Men believe whatever they want to believe - and having made that decision they simply rationalize it - effortlessly explaining-away whatever threatens that belief. 

This means that each person is wholly responsible for what he believes, and what he does not believe; in a way that was not the case in the past. 

For example; someone who says 'I would like to be a Christian, but I can't believe it' is wrong - he has chosen not to believe in Christianity, just as he has chosen to believe vast quantities of arbitrary and incoherent lies and nonsense.

We are all like this, we are all (pretty much) in the same boat, we are all rationalizers. 

Nobody (and I mean nobody) nowadays genuinely derives their beliefs from evidence, observation and common sense. In the past that was possible, but not any more. 

Belief is always chosen; but what distinguishes people is whether they are intuitive heart-thinkers or passive-believing-machines. 

There are no other alternatives. 

It is our primary choice whether to give primacy to the thinking of the heart; or else to try, and fail, to base belief upon impossible and obsolete, rationalistic 'brain-thinking'. 

The vast majority of Men pretend to base their belief on brain-thinking, and the consequence is that they become incapable of brain-thinking - because that is not a viable option. It is one of the most striking aspects of modern life that Men cannot think. 

Sometimes this seems like a sheer incapacity, sometimes it seems like a phobia of thinking, sometimes it seems like a dishonest calculation - perhaps for purposes of manipulation. But the fact is they cannot think - and this inability applies to financiers, scientists and philosophers every bit as much as to  politicians, celebrities and the uneducated masses. 

Men have developed through the centuries, and we in the West reached a point when we became detached from spontaneous, unconscious knowledge, based on personal observation and common sense. For example; Men began to able able to doubt the reality God; then later men reached a state that (whether they liked it or not) they lost a belief in God. From that point, faith became an active choice only. 

This was ordained by God as a part of our destiny, so that Men could, for the first time, become believers wholly by their own free personal decision. Men had become unable to perceive the spiritual in life, and no longer passively absorbed it from nature and society - and this was needed in order that there was no compulsion. 

But on what grounds could Men then believe in God, once they had become detached from the world of the spirit, once there was no compulsion from observation and common sense? 

The divine intent, Man's destiny, was that the time had come when Men should undergo a transformation in the basis of their choices; from the external to the internal; from brain-thinking to heart-thinking. 

This transformation was superficially observable in the movement of thought termed Romanticism - with its origins evident in the likes of Herder, Goethe and Novalis in Germany; or Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth in England. 

Now - because this is a developmental transformation - it is non-optional; it is like adolescence: it happens - unless prevented by some pathology.

And if the transformation does not happen, then there is pathology. And that is what we see. 

The transformation did not happen, it was (almost wholly) refused - and therefore what we observe is a mass pathology of thinking. People refuse to think from the heart, and have lost the capacity to think with the brain. 

People who refuse heart-thinking (and that is all of us, for much of the time - but for most of us: all the time) have mostly become passive-believing-machines; mere conduits for external influence; believing... whatever happens to be going through their minds at present. . 

We constantly, but dishonestly, try to rationalize these current belief by reference to old head-thinking criteria such as evidence, logic, knowledge - facts and figures. But observation of people over time reveals that this is a fake; and their beliefs are incoherent, inconsistent, meaningless and purposeless.   

Hence people are pervasively dishonest, but have become cognitively incapable of detecting their own gross dishonesty. 

But - Men are all sinners; and to become a heart-thinker entails swimming against a rising tide of evil rationalization. So even someone who - like myself - tries his best to practice heart-thinking end-up tries to rationalize beliefs with 'evidence' and 'facts' and 'logic' in a way that is misleading at best, but ultimately dishonest, by its denial of the true origins of these beliefs.  

As usual, we try and will usually fail, and will continually fail - so the first necessity is to recognize and repent our failures; and to return again and again to heart-thinking. 

In this mortal life it seems that God wants us to work things out each for himself; rather than passively following guidance.

But further, it is desired that we are to learn to value and follow heart thinking (the free, agent, thinking of the real and divine self) - whereas we spontaneously use a mixture of head thinking (reasoning, logic) with gut instinct.

The great advantage of heart thinking is that it takes "everything" of relevance (conscious and unconscious ) and focuses it down to what is required by me, here, and now. Or, it takes account of everthing-relevant, from the exact perspective of me/here/now.

Heart thinking is thus a divine attribute, and requires that we temporarily align fully with God's creative intentions. This is why God desires for us to know and do heart thinking.

By contrast, head thinking is our conscious usage of few and specified, generalized and abstract, concepts; and the "evidence" they generate. Head thinking is thus intrinsically generic, not specific; and uses abstract models of reality.

...While gut instinct is likewise generic; being an application ( to the unique here and now of an unique individual), of general rules derived from an "average" of past, ancestral experiences and learning.

Because we are only partly God-aligned mortal beings in an entropic world, and part way on a developmental path to God-nature; we can only attain to heart thinking temporarily and intermittently.

Nonetheless, that is what we should strive to do.

Yesterday I made a conceptual breakthrough in understanding the concept which is at the heart of that alternative metaphysics which seems to have emerged in the Romantic era - in the life of Goethe and the philosophy of Coleridge, but to have been rejected by the Zeitgeist and to have since led an underground and marginal or unarticulated existence in the likes of Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield (from whom I mostly got it).

Barfield focuses on the term polarity, derived from Coleridge - but I have found that this term - with its inner picture of a solid, rectangular bar magnet - is making it harder for me to grasp and use. The essence of the concept is not its having poles but that it is a dynamic process, an active thing: an -ing, as in think-ing, reason-ing, understand-ing, and imagin-ing.For me this philosophy only makes sense if I regard reality as happen-ing.

So I have decided to replace polarity with '-ing' which is the name and sound of a rune - more often called Ingwaz (and of a Norse god, also called Freyr - not the same as Freya). So the rune Ingwaz can serve me as a symbol of 'polarity', in my notetaking.

Like most good metaphysics, Ingwaz comes from the solid, primary, necessary intuition that we are thinking. From this comes the inference that whatever we think, do, know or whatever - thinking is involved. There is no way of getting-at any objective reality that does not involve thinking - it is nonsense (makes no sense) to be thinking there is an objective realm of 'facts' that are autonomous from thinking.

However, this is NOT the 'idealism' of stating that there is only mind, and 'reality' is an illusion; what is being stated is that thinking is involved in everything - therefore, everything includes thinking. The thinking cannot be detached from anything, thinking is always involved in everything.

So the division of inner mind and outer reality/ nature is nonsense; we are always and inevitably involved in everything we ever consider by thinking.

However, this thinking can be (usually is) something of which we are unaware. We therefore tend (unthinkingly) to regard the 'outside' world as if it was independent of our thinking. We tend to suppose that the outside world is real and solid, while our thinking (which is reality is involved in everything we know or imagine about that outside world) is merely ephemeral and pointless.

This is because if we divide thinking from the outside world, thinking dies - it becomes static, inert, it stops '-ing' and is a mere dead specimen ('thought'). What is really happening is that we have started thinking about a situation where there is no thinking, and are unaware that in thinking this we have not actually imagined a situation where there is no thinking - we are merely unaware of the thinking that is engaged in imagining it!

This is the modern condition. Modern analysis is unaware of - and denies - the pervasiveness of thinking at all times and in all situations. This state of unthinking doubt about thinking can be called cynicism.

So, the first move is to become aware of our own thinking in any and every situation - to recognize that everything involves thinking - we are therefore always engaged with everything, involved with everything: there is no objective alienation.

But is thinking valid? That is the fear that haunts cynical, nihilistic modern man. The fear is that - even though it makes no sense and cannot be done to use thinking to doubt the validity of thinking; maybe thinking is not valid anyway - maybe we just live in an un-avoidable delusion? The idea accepts that it makes no sense to be thinking about thinking being 'unreliable' - but maybe that is true anyway!

This cynicism, I believe, is the modern condition; it is a fear rather than a philosophy, it is a cynical suspicion that there is really no purpose, meaning or reality - and this state was facilitated by Natural Selection which seems to have 'discovered' that that is how nature works. This is untrue, and makes no sense; but the effect is rather to implant a fear, a suspicion that it might all be a delusion than to make any kind of logical point.

That has been the point at which Western thought has been stuck for more than 200 years - the fear that everything we think we know about everything comes from thinking, and that thinking - the very basis of knowing itself - might be a circular system of unavoidable but nonetheless false assumptions.

This places Man into an existential state where he does not know where to start in escaping. Once he has come to doubt thinking, then he cannot get out. All he can do is try to manipulate his emotions so as to feel better, here and now.

In fact this sense of existential nakedness is the perfect basis and understanding and clarity for feeling the necessity and reality of religious faith - which is trust - and only a loving God can be trusted... So the modern condition points to Christianity in a clearer way than anything ever has done.

(Kierkegaard probably said this too - but I can't read enough of him to be sure, and if he did say it, then he has usually been misunderstood or at least ignored.)

But the actual modern condition is an incomplete state of doubt - therefore it does not compel Christianity. The modern condition is a combination of doubt and arbitrary faith - which is so perfectly engineered to create despair, so perfectly being constantly adjusted to maintain this sense of hope-less-ness, that it implies the modern situation is a product of purposive evil (i.e. of demonic influence).

Because modern Man is not cynical enough. Or, rather, the cynic is flawed by its lack of questioning - his questioninsg of superficialities and his unthinking acceptance of deep assumptions. The modern cynic (i.e. pretty much everybody) uses thinking to deny the necessary validity of thinking on some topics (sex, esepcially), but leaves intact enough unthinking to prevent him seeing the situation as it really is.

He is obsessed by some illusions of thinking - but not others, and cynical about all positive faith - but unthinking and credulous about so much else.

Modern Man will go so far as to deny even the reality of thinking-about-thinking (i.e. metaphysics) - he will state that there is no such thing as metaphysics - simply because he does not DO metaphysics (or stops himself if he happens to start thinking about his own thinking).  He arbitrarily decides that thinking about thinking is meaningless nonsense - and is therefore trapped by his own despair-inducing assumptions - which would dissolve if ever recognized as involving thinking.

It is the residual unthinking 'faith' in thinking about some subjects (for example, faith in the idea that cynicism implies that hedonism is rational) which is destroying modern Man.

From here we can go back into unthinking acceptance of thinking - or forward into thinking about thinking: becoming aware that Everything necessarily involves thinking.

Thinking is process: Everything therefore includes process, and the world can only validly be analyzed into processes - analyzed into -ings and not into things.

This is, in fact, the metaphysical solution to the modern condition: the solution to alienation, purposelessness, meaninglessness, relativism and so on. Once grasped, the problem for each of us as individuals is then to make it our normal, indeed habitual, way of thinking.

Two related second thoughts - the first on thinking. I've written much about primary thinking and heart thinking. On reflection it strikes me that 'thinking' is not the right word, because what 'it' is, is not much like thinking, and the word may mislead. 

The problem with conscious thinking is 'the will' in the sense of explicit plans, schemes and strategies that gets explicitly articulated; and which we then try to follow and impose on reality. This is a big problem indeed. It affects religious people, it affects Christians, just as badly - and fatally. It is this idea of making a (necessarily simplified) abstract model of reality, then trying to impose that model which lies behind much of the presently world-dominant 'Ahrimanic' and bureaucratic evil. 

It's hard to conceive of a thinking that is not 'will-full' in this bad sense. The man from whom I took much of this, Rudolf Steiner, fell into exactly this snare, I believe; that is, he gave primacy to a will-full and consciously-controlled 'method' of thinking, which he then forcefully applied to whatever subject matter was before him. This led him into a great mass of what I regard as systematized error. 

I have used primary thinking and heart thinking as synonyms for what might otherwise (and better) be termed intuition; but for many people intuition is mixed up with instinct. Yet I regard intuition as being divine (God in us) - hence always right; whereas instinct is animal, hence often wrong (and even more-often inapplicable). 

My idea of Final Participation (which ought to be my aim) is that it is primary and unanalysable - and identical with intuition; but that to be 'final' it needs to be conscious. The will ('thinking' should be subordinated to intuition. My goal is that I am trying to be aware of my intuition. And, if so, I do not need to 'think' it, or to 'think about' it. 

It strikes me that Jesus (in the Gospels) doesn't 'think'. He knows what to say or do, and does it. 

And that this surely ought to be my ideal too? (As best as possible in mortal life, and as an aim; and fully in Heaven.) So maybe all this stuff I've written about the importance of thinking is mistaken?   

I have also written against ideas of one-ness as the idea, of the aimed-at extinction of self or ego (dissolving-into the divine...); and I hold to that rejection - and I also reject the conception of ultimate reality as a static state of time-less-ness, complete joining, and all space as one infinite. Instead what is wanted is the 'dynamic' state of open-ended creation, in-which God and other being may participate. Time is sequential with a before and and after; space is not infinite but instead un-bounded, endlessly expansile. Creation is growing as well as developing.

As young children we were passively immersed-in divine creation; and what we need to aim at as adults (spiritually adults) is to be consciously active in divine creation; but that doesn't need thinking. Our true creativity is natural and spontaneous - and it is Good, as well as true. 

(This has been my experience also in ordinary mortal-life creating; as a scientist, especially.)

So, in successful meditation, we might first become aware of 'Me, Here, Now' - and then of the loving presence of the divine: the Holy Ghost. We don't lose our-selves in this, but ideally enter into a here-and-now loving relationship, aware of our-selves, aware of the Holy Ghost - and aware too of all other men and women who are in this same state of active creating. Love entails beings. Love is impossible with unity/ one-ness. So, since love is primary for Christians; one-ness is ruled-out as a goal.

We are at that time in meditation (usually brief, perhaps just a moment) tuned-into the ongoing work of creation, and we are aware of that creating; and by our relationship with the Holy Ghost we are playing some part in it. We are then participating, actively and consciously; yet (I would now say) without thinking.

It may seem as if consciousness is here acting merely as an observer, but it is something more; it seems that our consciousness is what makes the choice to do this, to enter into this, to contnue to participate in this; consciousness either embodies or brings with it the totality of our being. 

By contrast, as young children, we may be swept-along by divine creation; caught-up in its flux; unconscious of it, and without any need to choose it (and without any way of choosing otherwise). 

In our spiritual adolescence (from which sadly few emerge) we are isolated and cut off from the divine, and from this participation in creation. This is the state of existential alientation. To escape the consequent despair; we need consciously to choose to re-enter participation... To become aware of the workings of God, and the presence (here and now) of the Holy Ghost, and the possibility (the actuality, indeed) of a personal relationship with these: Me, Here, Now.

It seems that my task, in this situation of the world-at-present, is to make these conscious choices, and to have these experiences; so that I can learn from them to make a firm committment to accept Jesus's offer of resurrection into everlasting life; because this is exactly a foretaste of that Heavenly state. 

By knowing it (and with a transcendental and eternal 'knowing' - not by means of mortal memory, doomed to fade and die), I then know that I want it. 

And this seems necessary given all the false reasons and instinctual manipulations of Satan triumphant - that would probably otherwise seduce me into rejecting the call to follow Christ.

It is a very striking aspect of the 2020-21 situation that has become blazingly obvious to those capable of discernment; is that 'brain-thinking', reason, logically-coherent thought - the kind of processing typically associated with Science (in its largest conception as procedural systematic knowledge) - has all-but collapsed, very nearly disappeared; almost everywhere - and at every level of society from top to bottom. 

From the tiny minority of globalist planners in their invisible but totalitarian planetary government, down to the increasingly ignorant and credulous masses; and through the supposedly expert class in-between - all are unable to think coherently or in a sustained fashion.

All that happens now is an ignorant 'parroting' of the superficial forms of brain-thinking - such as managerialist flow-charts and checklists - whose application is rigid but whose content is increasingly arbitrary and incoherent. More exactly, people can do single-step thinking - "if we do this, then that should happen; If A then B" - but they cannot continue their thinking beyond a single step to address what will happen next, what will be C after B. 

People cannot connect or relate even as few as two facts when they occur in separate one-step sequences; so that 'knowledge' now consists of isolated, atomic 'facts' which have no discernible relationship or pattern (and any suggested pattern that relies upon two-step - or more than two-step logic, is regarded as crazy/ wild/ speculative 'conspiracy theorizing'). 

Life seems impossibly complex to nearly-everyone; because they have rejected the heart thinking/ intuition which is the only thing that can make sense of it. 

Even if you can guide somebody through thinking, in a one-step-at-a-time fashion, from A to be and beyond to C and perhaps D; reminding them continually of the validity of each step... by the time they have reached the conclusion, they have long-since lost their grip on the process. They (accurately) no longer trust their own capacity to reason. 

So, after the detailed explanation, they simply reset to... whatever was their prior assumption. 

Thus - once established - error is intractable. 

I say unable to think, because that is the problem. It is not that they can think but are too lazy, or too distracted, or are prevented by their ideology; nor am I talking about a quantitative decline in thinking ability (due to reduced intelligence and increased mutational accumulation) - I am talking about an actual incapacity to think. 

Why? Well, at the deepest explanatory level I believe this is because Mankind has rejected destiny, has rejected final participation, heart thinking and the primacy of intuition - has rejected a life based upon the reality of God and the spiritual realm. 

Instead, Man has chosen to remain in what was supposed to be a transitional 'adolescent' phase of the 'consciousness soul' - which state is innately self-destroying. 

When proper development is rejected; we cannot just choose to stay as we are - because what we are is non-viable. 

Insightful individuals foresaw that if we did not move onwards from the alienated state of positivistic, reductionist, scientistic, materialistic thinking, then we would cease to be able to do even that. 

This has come to pass, and is all around us. 

People have given-up on understanding because they have rejected meaning and purpose in life; without which there can be no understanding. 

Thinking can only be purposive, and without purpose thinking will wither and die. Has died. 

So, although many of the Global Establishment envisage a single international society of monolithic ideology and socio-economic control; they cannot achieve this, because their inability to think (compounded by their compulsion to lie), is continually sabotaging their own desires. 

The same inability of the expert class and the masses, then further ensures that any System will be incoherent and ineffective, continually self-corrupting, collapsing faster than it can be built.

On top of which there are now increasingly powerful and influential 'Sorathic' Beings (whether human or demonic) whose purpose is almost-wholly negative and destructive; and who delight in corruption, collapse, fear and suffering - and who add a positive purpose to the down-trend established by negative incapacity.   

But even as the corruption and collapse happen as a matter of daily experience; the capacity to recognize it has declined even faster. As individuals are submerged beneath the tsunami of accumulating chaos, they will remain utterly puzzled and clueless about what is happening to them, and why. The just cannot think it through...

WmJas Tychonievich clarifies that the invented 'ethical' imperative against 'ex-clusion' masks the fact of coercive and mandatory in-clusion of all individuals within the global totalitarian System ('the Matrix'); also that, increasingly, self-exclusion (that is, anybody choosing to live outside of the System and its tightly-controlled ideology) is forbidden. 

But does forbidden mean impossible? Well... not exactly. Because the System is - by design - a machine of damnation - Therefore They want everybody to want to live inside it. This is why They invited the fake positive morality of inclusion, and manufactured abhorrence of exclusion. The built-in covert assumption behind-which is that everybody, necessarily and always, wants to be on the inside.  

Because the crucially damning (i.e. salvation-rejecting) effect of the System is when people embrace and endorse the System - think by it. To regard the System as Good is a demonic value-inversion; which entails regarding Heaven as bad. 

However, the System ceases to be an effective instrument of evil when someone knows the nature of evil (i.e. opposition to God, divine creation, The Good), has recognized the System as being evil, and has rejected the System for that reason. 

The global totalitarian System is a material one, which excludes the spiritual (denies the reality of the spiritual) - because only the material realm is controllable. The System now includes all of public discourse, and all major institutions (including the churches); and its grip increases daily. 

Of course, those demonic Beings who control the System are not themselves material - and They know perfectly well the reality of God, creation and The Good (which they oppose). It is this larger perspective of the demons that enables them to control the System and to make it served the goals of damnation - while their human servants and dupes are mostly oblivious. 

The strategy of totalitarian evil is to induce an habitual, passive, unconscious materialism among all humans; thus to confine them completely within the System - hence to be able fully to monitor and control them.   

So, it is not - after all - difficult to escape the System; because the spiritual realm lies beyond. But escape is not in the physical realm - not in the realm of society or culture - not in any institution (including not in a church - when church is functioning in the public realm) - since all of these are by-now net-absorbed-into the System (corrupted, converged); and the System is evil. 

The spiritual real is explicitly known only in the realm of thinking; and within thinking in that kind of thinking that could be called direct knowing, conscious intuition or heart-thinking: in other words the spiritual is to be found in thinking that comes from our real (and divine) self. 

Such thinking is undetectable and uncontrollable by the System. 

And such thinking participates in a realm of primary thinking that is shared by, contributed-to, accessed-by - all other Beings who are engaged in intuitive direct knowing. So, we are not alone. 

Yet, heart-thinking and direct knowing are only temporary and partial states in this mortal life - which is instituted for our experience and learning - for our 'education'. We who live in this era of global totalitarianism have each, personally, much to learn from the experiences (which is indeed why we are alive, now).  

And we may - if we have made the right choices and have the right values - also have a life outside of the System in addition to the spiritual realm of primary thinking; I mean the realm of love: love of family, spouse, children, real-friends - and including (for some people) love that crosses the portal and encompasses some of the 'so-called-dead'.

So there is life outside the System; life which always and necessarily escapes the System and is free! Yet, as the System increases its scope and grip, this free and loving life is a more-and-more completely a spiritual life, which we may consciously know almost wholly in the realm of (primary) thinking.  

Final Participation (thinking from the real self: from that which is divine in us - God Immanent) is inhibited or blocked by many habits, assumptions and convictions that are nearly-universal among modern adults. 

To an atheist-materialist; real self thinking is childish, psychotic, demented or merely wishful fantasy. 

To an orthodox- (i.e. Not Romantic) Christian; real self thinking is pagan, demonic; contradicts church tradition, church authority, The Bible and mainstream theology. 

To almost everyone; it is contradicted by mainstream institutions, officialdom and the law, economics, science, medicine and the mass media. 

That is to say: in this mortal life of today; the thinking of our real self is socially maladaptive (and very probably biologically maladaptive). 

For all these reasons; thinking from the real self tends to be incomplete, unintegrated or brief in duration. Soon we will cease to attend to our real self in face of one or several of these other factors. 

Consequently, the tendency is to ignore it altogether - especially when intuitive heart-thinking contradicts whatever other factors to which we give primary authority and to which we accord validity. 

But we can choose consciously to attend to the thinking of our real self; and give it primacy over other sources of thinking. We can choose to allow it to dominate. 

And, in a world of loving creation - such as Heaven - thinking from the real self (Final Participation) is wholly (indeed necessarily) adaptive; it both fits-into and contributes-to that world. 

*

In the many decades in which I was an atheist, one of the things that most annoyed me about many Christians who argued for the reality of God what there assumption that there must be an explanation, a cause for what exists.

This especially applies to the question which is being answered by 'creation from nothing'. 

But I never saw then - and I don't see now - why there must be an explanation or cause for what exists; instead my baseline assumption is that what exists always existed.

*

That was my spontaneous intuition but I used to assume that this was idiosyncratic and most other people assumed that everything must have a cause, and therefore one was driven back to the inference that everything originally came from nothing.

In fact the opposite seems to be the statistically normal assumption among the inhabitants of most simple societies, and probably among children too that the bottom line is that some things were 'always' in existence.

Similarly, when anthropologists ask hunter gatherers how long they (as a people) have lived where they do, the answer is along the lines of always.

They have no record or memory of any time they lived anywhere else, and little curiosity about the matter - indeed rest on the assumption that what is now always was, and if this is challenged then this is interpreted as disputing that they belong where they are - preparatory to taking their land from them (or rather, taking them from their land, rather as someone might be taken from their parents).

*

I think this is how the human mind naturally works. Beyond a certain point, beyond just a couple of levels of explanation and an explanation of that explanation - a cause and a cause of that cause; people rest in the assumption that this was how things always were, how things always worked - and it is a minority of philosophically-minded modern people, with their abstract concepts of time and causality, who come to see a problem in this.

*

These inbuilt ways of thinking are difficult to overcome without creating confusion, alienation and disorientation - it is easier for philosophers to challenge and probe naive ways of thinking than to come up with better alternatives - it is easier to induce people to lose confidence in natural ways of thinking than it is to generate confidence in other ways of thinking.

Hence the history of philosophy.

*

The big problem is conviction. I might (for a while - an hour, a few days, months or years) subscribe to a philosophical explanation yet this explanation may never carry my heart.

This is not just the fickleness of the human will - it is a matter of depth.

Some things I can't deeply believe - and others I can't not believe!

*

This is relevant for Christian apologetics and evangelism - converting to Christianity from secular Leftism ought to bring (among other things!) a sense of moving onto solid ground, a grounding on realities which one can believe with the heart and not (as with so much of modern secular culture) believe only with the mind (easily manipulated by the establishment elite) or the body (easily manipulated by the mass media and fashions).

A belief of the heart carries both intellectual conviction and emotional warmth - but its intellectual convictions are resistant to mainstream academic manipulations, while its warmth is like the slow-smouldering heart of a fire, rather than the flickering flames that come and go. 

*

This - if successful - is a risky business, and it is hard to predict where exactly it will lead; which is why in practice most Christian denominations are reluctant to go down the path of the heart.

To go down this path would mean that Christians must test all propositions with their heart, and build their faith from that which is endorsed by their heart, and set aside (even if not reject) that which does not carry the heart or which quenches the heart.

A Christian faith is thus a work in progress; and an active thing - and for many Christians this will be seen as lacking in humility and obedience, and in a sense it is.

But these are desperate times. We need the heart to detach us from the pervasive and increasing evils of modern secular culture, and we need the heart to sustain us through the process and after the reality of detachment.

*

A strong, warm heart grants autonomy, and the heart also generates the strength required for autonomy - so that as we are restored to reality, we are also en-couraged (filled with courage).

Thus to be Christian is possible - despite the feebleness and incompleteness of the churches and the all-but-overwhelming hedonic evils of secular society.

IF a Christian faith can be built from the heart, all this may be possible.

*

Without the heart to sustain feeble spirits in such hostile environments, real Christianity may be so difficult, miserable, lonely - as to be both rare and weak.

So, by this argument, intuitions - metaphysical intuitions concerning reality - probably should be accepted the basis of a heart-felt Christianity since only they enable the faith to resist a hostile and invasive world.

And I cannot see how such a faith can avoid being metaphysically, philosophically heterodox - positively and negatively, in many instances - so I think that must be accepted too.

Yet heterodoxy must be combined with strong loyalty to The Church (that mystical reality of the actual corrupt institutions) - which seems like a difficult trick...

*

It is possible, I think, but there is no formula - and perhaps if heart-unity with The Church is actually achieved it will violate both head and body reasoning.

But the wonderful thing about the heart is that this is indeed possible; a faith in Christ that is grounded in the heart and fueled by the heart can reject any amount of negative evaluations and conclusions and be sustained through a maelstrom of bodily distractions.

Such a faith is in fact unstoppable and inevitable - if it is wanted: if it is asked for. 

*

I began trying to live by heart-thinking a good while before I became a Christian - but I found that it provided only a negative form of guidance - as in This Poem - by Robert Graves.

In other words, my heart would tell me when I was on a wrong path, had made an error - by the psychological consequences of meaninglessness, alienation, disenchantment... I would know I needed to get off the current track, and find a different way of living.

Different - yes; but how?

But it was no use at all in deciding what I ought to be doing - what my purpose should be - because, as a non-Christian, a non-theist, I did not acknowledge any purpose to reality, nor to my life. Or, that is; my purpose reduced to attending to my current psychological well-being.

That is the kind of partial (and unsatisfactory) insight into the need for primacy of intuition of, say, New Age, Neo-paganism, Jungianism and the like. That is; Non-Christian (or anti-Christian) romanticism - in general - of which Robert Graves was an exemplar.  

Therapy is as far as this can take us.

Only after becoming a Christian, and indeed a Romantic Christian, was I able to see why and how the thinking of the heart could be a guide to the future.

In other words, for heart-thinking genuinely and fully to replace intellect as the primary (not the only) way of thinking requires Romantic Christianity.

I may be a bit strange this way; but there are few subjects that excite me as much as thinking! 

I have come to regard thinking as an-end-in-itself; indeed probably the highest activity of which we are capable. 

Of course, I am immediately compelled to clarify that I certainly do Not mean all kinds of thinking have thus supreme value; nor even most kinds of thinking... 

Indeed, I would go so far as to say that it is possible that many people may never experience the kind of thinking that I am talking about - not least because to experience this highest kind of thinking one must simultaneously recognize its supreme value. One must regard this thinking as intrinsically valid and intrinsically valuable. 

And that recognition is very far from the case!

Indeed, for most people, thinking is just a means to an end - and that end is 'action'. 

Most people would say that thinking but not doing is just a waste of time; and empty activity. Good thinking is that which leads to good outcomes in the perceptible world...

Most people nowadays would say that unless something is changed in the material, objective, external world - then thinking is a free-spinning-cog: futile, just wasteful of energy and effort. 

This seems like simple common sense to the modern, mainstream mind - its ideology and assumptions. To suppose that thinking had intrinsic value or validity is for such Men a kind of delusion; sheer insanity. 

For other people; thinking is a kind of illusion; and indeed a wicked illusion. 

Thinking is regarded as an aspect of maya: in other words, thinking is one of those snares or nets that keep us trapped in a world of appearance and suffering instead of the blissful reality that lies behind maya. 

Many of the influential 'gurus' of Eastern and New Age spirituality emphasize that we should aim to eliminate thinking, instead our striving should be towards not-thinking-being. 

We should strive for non-thinking awareness; because (they understand) thinking is what leads to our (false) sense of separation from the world; and the illusion of separateness leads to suffering. If thinking can be eliminated, so can suffering. 

For those who regard reality as One, and assume we began as unconscious spirit aspects of that One; our task as going beyond the body and back to pure spirit - and also going beyond thinking to pure being-awareness.  

Yet I have the solid conviction that thinking is of primary importance; and that our destiny lies in the direction of 'more and better thinking' - rather than no-thinking, or material-action. 

For many years this was an un-conscious and inarticulate conviction - and it only began to reach awareness and clarity by reading the work of Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield. I found both of these authors very difficult to 'get' and spent years tackling them before the penny dropped. 

But the penny  dropped when reading Steiner's Truth and Knowledge followed immediately by re-reading the later part of Philosophy of Freedom. I then returned to Barfield and was immediately clear what I had been missing. 

The excitement of this perspective is now latent - and can be awakened or re-awakened by coming across the same view in these or other authors. For instance, yesterday I was listening (on Rudolf Steiner Audio) to a lecture from early 1914; the opening words of which triggered that joyful lifting of the heart (emphasis added).  

Man experiences within himself what we may call thought, and in thought he can feel himself directly active, able to exercise his activity. 

When we observe anything external, e.g. a rose or a stone, and picture it to ourselves, someone may rightly say: “You can never know how much of the stone or the rose you have really got hold of when you imagine it. You see the rose, its external red colour, its form, and how it is divided into single petals; you see the stone with its colour, with its several corners, but you must always say to yourself that hidden within it there may be something else which does not appear to you externally. You do not know how much of the rose or of the stone your mental picture of it embraces.” 

But when someone has a thought, then it is he himself who makes the thought. One might say that he is within every fiber of his thought, a complete participator in its activity. 

He knows: “Everything that is in the thought I have thought into it, and what I have not thought into it cannot be within it. I survey the thought. Nobody can say, when I set a thought before my mind, that there may still be something more in the thought, as there may be in the rose and in the stone, for I have myself engendered the thought and am present in it, and so I know what is in it.” 

In truth, thought is most completely our possession. 

If we can find the relation of thought to the Cosmos, to the Universe, we shall find the relation to the Cosmos of what is most completely ours. This can assure us that we have here a fruitful standpoint from which to observe the relation of man to the universe.

For me, this expresses in a nutshell a deep and vital truth. Thinking is potentially our most complete and valid form of knowing. Therefore, the big question becomes: How this knowing is related to 'reality' - to divine creation? 

If thinking turns-out to be in a direct relationship with reality - and not merely having some kind of indirect, 'translated', representational or linguistic 'communication' with reality - then this is of the greatest possible significance. 

We begin to see (as Steiner goes on to articulate later in this lecture) that the distinction between this 'primary' thinking, and the kind of 'secondary' thinking which most people do most of the time (and some people do all of the time) - is related to language.

Most thinking is in words, it is language - therefore secondary; therefore either a means to an end, or perhaps illusion. 

(This is the level of all public discourse and most private conversation: language responding to language - and nothing more. Our secondary thinking is no better than this.) 

But some thinking may be primary, and not in words or any other symbolism; but thinking 'in' the primary creative essence of reality. 

This kind of primary thinking is indeed itself reality. 

Thus we can come to know reality.

You see why I regard thinking (of the right sort - primary thinking) an end in itself?

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.