Bruce Charlton's Notions

The phrase, the karma of untruthfulness, is taken from a series of lectures by Rudolf Steiner, and it can be understood to mean that untruthfulness - lying, dishonesty, deliberate misleading - carries a 'karma'. 

This I mean in a Christian sense (and one different, in several important respects, from that implied by several of Steiner's metaphysical and empirical assumptions):

Sin necessarily carries a cost; and untruthfulness without repentance is a sin; and un-repented sin is the prime path of a soul, to self-chosen damnation. 

The karma of untruthfulness operates at the level of our Western civilization, at regional and national levels, for social institutions of all sizes; and, most importantly, for individual human beings. 

We already, and increasingly, live-by untruthfulness: untruthfulness structures the main aspects of our public life, policy, and discourse; and (ever-more-so) our private discourse - even within marriages, families, and among close friends.

And, at its core; untruthfulness structures the basic reality assumptions (metaphysics) and thinking of many or most Western people.  

The usefulness of the term karma is in its unavoidability; the idea that the costs are intrinsic. 

This is not a matter of costs coming if people 'don't get away with' their lies. It is that our 'world' of untruthfulness brings its own punishment immediately and necessarily - as well as cumulatively through time. 

A world in which people choose to believe and live-by that which is false is already a world that is self-damned; and self-damnation manifests at every level; because it is a choice of negation, of hostility to divine creation - a choice of meaninglessness, purposelessness, and chaos.  

Here and now - truthfulness is of supreme importance; a truthfulness that needs to extend down to the roots of our understanding of the world itself, as well as to the minutiae of everyday living. 

The role of the media is key - because it is through the media that people get their information and form their ideas; and it is ideas that determine human action. 

In The Philosophy of Freedom, Rudolf Steiner shows how vital it is that we combine the correct thought with the object; find the concept that truly corresponds to the percept - as distinct from illusory or sentimental abstractions. 

 

When our ideas about the world are full of untruth, empty phrases and dead abstractions; we cannot but create a deeply sick society; and catastrophes like the wars of the twentieth century are bound to recur. 

Meanwhile, the media go on distracting us from awakening to the realities of world events by presenting an endless circus of celebrity, sport, sex and shopping....

 

What can we do? Steiner's answer was simple and direct: endeavour to understand! See through things!

Thoughts are forces, and have effects.  

It is not supposed to be easy for humans to enter spiritual life. Crises are opportunities for change. 

Clear and proper understanding of what is going-on is the only way - "Nothing else is of any use". 

Excerpted and freely-edited from Terry Boardman's Introduction to Rudolf Steiner's lecture series The Karma of Untruthfulness - Volume 2 - Steiner's lectures are from 1916, Terry Boardman's Introduction from 2005. See also this 20 minute documentary. 

A century ago; in "The Karma of Untruthfulness" Steiner gave the first 'media studies' course in which he analysed the causes of the ongoing Great War. 

And he gave what I believe is the best advice for those and these times: our first duty is to understand, clearly and truly, what is happening: to See Through Things. 

And this is primarily a matter of having true ideas, true concepts - with which to understand the 'facts', observations and perceptions. 

'Evidence is a red-herring'. Everybody has, more or less, the same' data; and certainly enough data: 

It is having right ideas/ true concepts, that differentiates the rare wise man from the mass of fools.  

 

Understanding truth, and then recognising that Thoughts Are Forces - have general effects; so that thinking truth is a positive intervention in The World. 

Indeed, clearly to understand; to think, to know Truth - is the single most positive intervention we can make in the world. 

NOTE ADDED: The above imperative of understanding marks a cleavage point from a more mainstream spirituality of oneness, quietism, 'mindfulness', and Zennish, Hinduish-type New Age teachings - which assert the totality of the present moment, non-discrimination, non-judgmentalism, neither thinking nor choosing, reducing or eliminating the 'ego', 'consciousness' etc...

If, indeed, a person was genuinely to be utterly Unworldly - taking no notice At All of the mass media or officialdom, and deriving no information At All from media, official or any bureaucratic sources; having No Opinion on any of the issues of the day (especially the Litmus Test issues); and if he took No Part At All in any public discourse on such matters... 

- Then (but only then) there would, indeed, be no reason to understand the truth behind the mainstream media/ official/ bureaucratic Untruthfulness. 

Otherwise - which category embraces every single person of whom I am aware, because I know of nobody wholly-unworldly - we must discern lies from truth, evil from Good, the side-of-Satan from those (few?) affiliated with God. 

We must therefore follow Steiner's advice, this needs to be a conscious choice; and actually to do so in practice we must be convinced, in particular, that "Thoughts are forces, and have effects" - otherwise we would simply not take the daily mission seriously enough, nor give it sufficient priority against the many other distractions, temptations and compulsions of modern living.

I have been contemplating again (albeit not yet re-reading) the highly suggestive series of World War I lectures by Rudolf Steiner entitled The Karma of Untruthfulness - which might be translated as "the spiritual consequences of truth-indifference".

One of Steiner's core ideas is that the Great War was a direct consequence (i.e. "karmic" outcome) of the preceding decades of "untruthfulness" - untruthfulness being a highly-useful term that encompasses deliberate misrepresentaions, distortion, cover-ups, and all forms of ignoring realities; as well as outright lies.   

Well, I suppose that there has never been a time in history when there have been so many, such large Untruthfulnesses, so widely believed as Now. And by Steiner's understanding (and my own) this must and shall have very large and negative "karmic" consequences - at every level at which untruthfulness is propagated and believed: from the global and national, down to institutional and individual. 

This is inescapable. Untruthfulness has been built-into so many civilizations, societies, institutions and lives; that its consequences are unavoidable; and are-being, will-be encountered for considerable time to come.

What this means - initially for each of us as individuals, but also for every form of organization, corporation, bureaucracy - is that the quest for truth; leading toward explicit repentance based-on understanding of untruthfulness; ought to be a primary and core activity of every life.

No matter how 'truthful' you currently regard yourself (e.g. by comparison with 'other people'); there is A Lot of work for you to do! 

In doing the work of truth, we not only benefit our-selves (spiritually), but (because right-thinking is a kind of power) we benefit every-body, and every-thing, else. 

Ever since this crisis broke, I have been awaiting with anticipation Terry Boardman's analysis: here it is - I excerpt a few of the more striking (and accessible) insights (lightly edited - italics are mine):

Again and again in his lectures on The Karma of Untruthfulness, Steiner emphasised the importance of the search for truth. He began with the question that was in everyone’s minds at that time of the First World War: “what can I do in this crisis?” – and answered simply and directly: “Endeavour to understand! See through things!”

Thoughts, he said, are forces and have effects. What people think is far more important than what they do, because thoughts become deeds in the course of time. 

We live today on the thoughts of past times; these thoughts are fulfilled in the deeds of today. Clear and proper understanding of what is going on is the only way – “Nothing else is of any use”. 

We need wide-awake vigilance and discrimination in all things. All forms of atavistic mediumism and spiritual practice that avoid the conscious mind are anti-modern and harmful. At the very beginning of his public life, in his book The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (1894; a.k.a. The Philosophy of Freedom), Steiner showed how it is vital to combine the correct thought with the object, to find the concept that truly corresponds to the percept. 

Nothing is better for a person, he said, than real insight into how things work in the world. The truth can never be as damaging as an untruth and to adhere to the truth is a solemn and holy act of worship. Have courage for truth, he urged; stand on the foundation of truth, even if it is harmful or embarrassing. 

It is essential “to develop the will to see things, to see how human beings are manipulated, to see where there might be impulses by which people are manipulated. This is the same as striving for the sense for truth. ….

This Consciousness Soul epoch (1413-3573), which according to Steiner lasts 2160 years, will continue until the middle of the 4th millennium. A crucial aspect of this epoch is for individuals to become conscious of themselves as spiritual beings and of their relationship to the worlds of spirit, nature and other human beings. This is something that only individuals can do in freedom; it cannot be done en masse, as a group... 

In this epoch the main challenge is for individuals to penetrate their mental life so that they can become the conscious masters of their thinking. The Consciousness Soul Age will be followed by the Age of the Spirit-Self, the first period in which the spirit of man will be developed, as distinct from the soul. The focus in that epoch will not be so much on individuals and thinking but on the development of new communities and a higher, more refined life of feeling...

The current coronavirus crisis in this 21st century since the time of Christ is taking place within this struggle for the corona (crown) of world power between China and America... 

From the early 1970s until today we have seen countless examples of this animalisation. In their paranoid overreaction to the coronavirus, governments have sought to reduce whole nations to sheep, locked up in domestic ‘pens’, unable to move freely until their ‘shepherds’ allow, and whole nations have meekly complied. 

Public social and cultural life has all but been sheared off and we wait dumbly for we know not what. Perhaps a vaccine that, like sheep, we shall all be required to take for purposes of “health and safety”, our vaccination records accessible on an implanted ID chip in our bodies, just as farm animals already have...

Meanwhile, as we are not in fact sheep but human beings, we can at least use this current imposed detention in our ‘pens’ to study, research, think and meditate, and try to understand what is going on, even though much of that research and study may have to be in the ahrimanic realm of the Internet (the inspiration for which, like almost all modern technology, came from that realm). 

We can take courage from the knowledge, a result of Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual research, that in this Age of the Consciousness Soul, in this 21st century of the Christian Era, and in this Michaelic Age, since the 1930s17 the Christ Being, the Divine Logos, has been visible to those who can perceive Him in the etheric mantle of the Earth, which is the realm of the angels. 

There He is borne by an angel, as in Palestine He was borne for just three years by a human being. Since the Ascension he has united Himself with the Earth. This can become a great source of strength and comfort to people in times such as ours.

Way too much time and energy is spent exhaustively enumerating the myriad contradictions between official policies in theory and in practice.

But most of this effort is misplaced, or even counter-productive. It is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel to point out that the official reasons for doing things is contradicted by what officials actually are doing - but the point is to draw the correct inference from this.


When it comes to the birdemic it has become almost a hobby for people to point-out the many ways in which official actions contradict the professed goal of controlling the virus by increasing the rate of disease transmission.

Yet people repeatedly, persistently, systematically draw the conclusion that the reason is that officials are incompetent, stupid, crazy - maybe corrupt. People assume that officialdom is well-motivated, but messes-up the implementation.

People assume that pointing-out the contradictions in what-actually-is-happening, will lead to a coherent set of actions directed at birdemic control.


Almost never do people conclude that the reason for contradiction is because offical practice is not driven by the official theory.

Almost never do people even entertain the possibility that the outcome is intended, and the official explanation is dishonest.

Almost never do they assume that officials are wickedly-motivated, and what happens is (broadly) what They want to happen.


Yet, if we are able (at least hypothetically) to assume that the actual implemented practice is the outcome of being motivated to achieve that outcome - then, contradictions largely disappear!

Suddenly we observe that these supposed contradictions are not contradictions. They only appeared to be contradictions when we had made a wrong inference about what was motivating policy.

When the correct assumption is applied, we see a broadly-coherent set of policies, diving a broadly-coherent set of outcomes.


My point is that most people do not learn from experience. They never learn from experience - no matter how often it is repeated.

And the reason they do not learn from experience is (nearly always) because they interpret experience in light of their prior assumptions; which assumptions are seldom acknowledged, and even less often analysed or challenged.


What we see in the world now is a set of outcomes which are coherent on the basis of a motivation to achieve maximum power by means of increased population monitoring and increased regulation of specific behaviours. What we observe (from personal experience, via our own perceptions - as well as in the media) is a world rapidly moving towards omni-surveillance and micro-control.

This is very simply understandable, and non-contradictory, if we assume that power, monitoring and regulation are the primary motivation.

However, these changes are shot-full of contradictions if we assume that they are motivated by a desire to minimise deaths from the birdemic.

This isn't rocket surgery... It is about as clear and simple as anything of such a large scale ever can be.

So, can people learn from experience, or not?


Our primary spiritual task at present (as always, but more obviously now) is to learn from the experiences of mortal life. Can we see the obvious - or are we content to have the obvious explained-away by a mass of contradictory theories and policies relating to the birdemic.

God has made it easy for us! Which carries the implication that if people fail to see the obvious, and remain enmeshed in falsehoods; then they have chosen to live by lies instead of truth. And lies are sins (the devil being a liar and the father of lies).

And this choice of untruthfulness carries a 'karma' (in a Christian sense of the word) - that is, actively choosing sin entails consequences. And these consequences are not avoidable, since we have inflicted them upon our-selves - consciously, actively, freely (knowing the contradictions, but ignoring their obvious implications).


Spiritual warfare is endemic in this mortal life; but now it has reached the climax of a decisive battle; with the world transformed more rapidly, more completely, and at a larger scale than ever before in the history of Man.

Which side have you chosen?

Do you want to change your mind?