Bruce Charlton's Notions

Solipsism is the belief, usually quite brief, that the thinker is the source of everything that is - my  feeling that everything is just a product of my own thinking and has no independent existence: my life is a dream.

Solipsism seems to me a state which we must go-through during our spiritual development towards divinity - because it represents the exact point at which we become wholly 'free': the point at which we become fully agents, and detached from the causes of everything else which impinges upon us.

We are conceived and born, unselfconsciously immersed in the universal world which we simply accept; but the moment of solipsism is when we become independent of that world.

Solipsism is therefore - momentarily - necessary, if we are to move from being immersed in the world to a situation in which we engage with the world from a position of free agency.

If we are to become grown-up children of God, at some point our selves (or 'souls') need to become god-like - which means that our relationship to universal reality but alter profoundly from immersion-in to engagement-with - we need to have a relationship with reality that is voluntary, agent, purposive, and conscious of itself.

To be fully free we must be fully conscious - which means that we must know what we are doing. Sadly, this means leaving-behind the un-self-consciousness of childhood and of early stages in our cultural history; and it really is left-behind - because the process of detachment signalled by solipsism is irreversible.

We have grown a shell, and breaking that shell (voluntarily or with with drugs, or by disease perhaps) is not a return to innocence, but some kind of pathology.

We can really only go forward - indeed we must go forward because if we get stuck in solipsism - as so many modern people seem to have chosen to do - then nihilism and despair are inevitable. In solipsism we begin by regarding the world as our own thought, but soon (and inevitably) we begin to doubt the reality of these thoughts - after all, thoughts change, they are not solid...

The self in solipsism surveys the world paralysed by doubt - the thoughts are transient, the world a product merely of thoughts - everything slips away. The self doubts its own reality... (The situation was depicted many decades ago in the world of Samuel Beckett.)

In solipsism the mind thus alternates between an assertion that the self is the only reality, and the recognition that if this is true then there is no self.

Thus solipsism is a necessary and inevitable phase in spiritual development - but ideally it should occupy only a very short time, a full recognition as brief as possible - we should go through solipsism to a new, free-and-agent relationship with universal reality - a state that is qualitatively the divine relation with reality.  

I used to be much troubled by questions of epistemology - how did we know that we knew something - how did we even know that knowledge was possible?

As far as I could see, there seemed no way that anything could be known.

But nowadays I am no longer plagued by such nihilism - and this is the solution I have worked-out (it seems valid enough to be going on with).

1. God knows - because he is the creator

2. We know because we are God's children

Explanation: We are God's literal (not symbolic) children - and therefore have inherited something of God in us, including the knowledge of the creator.

This establishes that validity of human knowledge is possible; because we have somthing of the creator (who made things) in each of us.

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There remain many questions about explaining or deciding between disagreements in knowledge claims, errors, imprecision, uncertainty, changes etc.

But I find that the above simple epistemology does most of the heavy lifting in getting the weight of solipsism off my shoulders.

(Solipsism is the belief, or perhaps rather the fear, that I am the only thing which exists; and everything else is just in my mind.)   

Excerpted from: http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/mythopoeia-by-jrr-tolkien-1932-or-1933.html

From Fantasy we come to appreciate the realities of our (primary, 'real life') world, but refreshed because we have come across familiar basics such as men and women, bread, stone, trees... in the magical and coherent context of a Secondary world.

The key to the value of Fantasy – here and now – is its contrast with the modern world.

Modern ‘reality’ is most deficient in the most important aspects of Life. We are alienated from the world - our Self is cut-off from experienced relationships with anything else: nihilistic solipsism is a constant threat.

And this is ever more so, because modern reality is, mostly and ever-increasingly, a mass media-generated ‘virtual’ kind of reality.

Thus modern ‘Primary’ reality is deficient in terms of lacking destiny, meaning and purpose for Life; in its ignorance, denial, or blind terror of ageing and death; in terms of regarding the Human Condition as a mixture of mechanical determinism and random chaos; in its regarding of the major virtues of Love and Courage as mere products of social-conditioning and evolution; and its understanding that Tolkien’s joyful ‘eucatastrophe’ – the unexpected ‘turn’ of events in a Fairy Story that snatches the Happy Ending from apparently-inevitable defeat – as merely statistical coincidence…

Fantasy may indeed be our only sustained experience in which these real-realities are encountered. But how is it that Fantasy may be able to supply what the Primary word so horribly lacks?

Our imaginative participation in an internally consistent world of wonders, provides us with stimuli, with perceptions, that do not automatically get plugged-into the subversive and inverting theories of modernism.

The magic and wonders of Fantasy quite naturally and spontaneously attach themselves to our built-in, universal concepts – those mythic understandings and interpretations of the ‘collective unconscious’, or our shared divine-endowments. And it is these universal concepts which enable us to apprehend and share reality.

More at: http://notionclubpapers.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/mythopoeia-by-jrr-tolkien-1932-or-1933.html

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From the middle 1990s for a decade, I was reading and re-reading Emerson with tremendous avidity - not only in a literary way, but as a guide for life.

Having not looked at him for several years, and not since I became a Christian, I have returned to re-read some favorite bits and pieces in the past couple of weeks - and was struck by two things.

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1. Emerson is a really good writer; I mean really good. The quality of his prose is unique and unsurpassed (that is, other writers are equally good, but in different ways) - I find it elating, intoxicating, almost too powerful to bear for any length of time.

2. Emerson's anti-Christian agenda is now blazingly clear and obvious to me, from almost everything he ever wrote and said; as is his staggering egotism/ pride, and these are linked. Emerson's work is a vast and unbounded, extended assertion of himself, his potential and his adequacy against anyone or any thing (including God) that tries to constrain or direct it.

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(Emerson was raised as a Unitarian and became a prominent Unitarian minister - and Unitarianism is already anti-Christian in its profoundest implications - although the first generation of Unitarians refused to acknowledge this, and generational inertia meant that the fundamental anti-Christanity of Unitarianism took a while to emerge. So, Emerson was never a Christian, although perhaps he supposed he was - but nonetheless he found the rebel sect of Unitarianism to be already stultifying, empty and spiritually dead: which was a just criticism since it amounted to merely a system of secular ethics and an ungrounded and unjustifiably exclusive usage of Christian scriptures and form loosely associated with an impersonal theistic God. Naturally this rapidly slid into exactly the kind of eclectic 'spirituality' - that we now term New Age - which Emerson pioneered with such glorious eloquence.) 

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I conclude that Emerson is, exactly has his contemporaries saw him, a terribly perilous writer! - precisely because he is such a great writer, and has so many stunning insights - yet ultimately these are put to the service of a doctrine of such extreme, such total self-centredness that I struggle to comprehend it.

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Perhaps Emerson's greatest and most valuable (and most often repeated) insight is that each person must appropriate the world for himself and in his own terms; a living religion (that is to say any true religion) simply cannot be just a following of rules and rituals.

To put it as Emerson did in an early work, to be properly alive, each individual must experience (again and again, day by day, indeed hour by hour) their own personal revelation - they must experience direct and divine communications of reality.

For Emerson this imperative was pretty-much the entire aim of life - so that the ideal life became in one sense that moment of revelation timelessly filling all; in another sense (because, experience seemed to show that these moments did come to an end) an incessant search for the next moment of revelation - life as a sequence of such moments.

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But Emerson's error, which led him into paradox and the evil advocacy - if not practice - of Pride as a principle of life - as indeed the only principle of life; was to reject the past, to reject the unity of humanity, to perceive himself (his soul) as the only thing that was really real - to argue for a subjectivism so extreme as to amount almost to solipsism. 

In his burning desire to shed the constraints of history and society, which seemed to be shackling his imagination, and focus all meaning on his own individual moments of revelation (the total affirmation of Me! Here! Now!); Emerson destroyed the basis of humanity, of sharing, shape and purpose - and consequently his influence (among those who actually read what he wrote and try to live by it) has been substantially pernicious.

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What was needed and what was necessary was to accept Emerson's assertion of the absolute necessity of personal revelation, albeit perilous, as an addition (or restoration) to Christianity.

This absolute and inflexible demand for modern, personal revelation, I perceive as the point of unity between Emerson and the other great long-term spiritual influence born in the United States at almost exactly the same time: Joseph Smith, the Mormon 'living prophet' of modern, latter day revelation.

Joseph Smith could have endorsed Emerson's cry by which he opened his first great published work Nature -


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The religious difference between Emerson and Smith is essentially that Emerson took this demand to behold God face to face, and enjoy an original relation to the universe as his sole aim and principle, while Smith added it (and its products, such as the Book of Mormon and his other collected revelations) to existing Christianity.

Smith thus achieved what Emerson, in his scandalous 1838 address to Harvard Divinity School, had declared was impossible:

I confess, all attempts to project and establish a Cultus with new rites and forms, seem to me vain. Faith makes us, and not we it, and faith makes its own forms. All attempts to contrive a system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason, — to-day, pasteboard and fillagree, and ending to-morrow in madness and murder.  

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Even as Emerson wrote his speech, Joseph Smith had already built a new city (the first of three) as headquarters for the saints in Kirtland, Ohio; and the years since the above words were spoken, Smith's 'Cultus' - with its 'new rites and forms' added-to, modifying, re-interpreting existing modes of Christianity - was (contrary to Emerson's characterization of it as 'vain') indeed 'established'; and has continued to grow into a major world religion - and has been neither a dead religion of pasteboard and fillagree (rather, a tremendously motivating religion which sustains great devoutness and other-worldliness), nor has it ended in madness and murder.

But, on the other hand, a stripped-down New Age version of Emerson's spirituality of individualism and subjectivism has merged with mainstream secular Leftism, and grown and grown to become the dominant mode of thought in the West almost entirely discarding Emerson in the process.

(And quite naturally so, since Emerson was not necessary to the development of New Age spirituality - rather he was a prophet, herald or advance guard of it.).

But what a fascinating divergence from such close roots and similar demands are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Joseph Smith - both emerging in the North Eastern corner of the USA in the 1830s!

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Since the advent of the Romantic Movement with Coleridge and Wordsworth, it has been a counter-current of mainstream life to assert the truth of imagination, the validity of fantasy. But modern people, by and large, want to know how imagination is truth: they require an explanation; otherwise they cannot feel that imagination really-is valid.

But this is just part of a much larger problem for modern people; which is that they cannot feel the truth of anything. They suppose that if only they are presented with enough strong-enough evidence, that they will believe with indomitable certainty whatever is thus proven, and that this belief will sustain them through whatever may happen.

Somehow this never happens - and the usual excuse is that the evidence is insufficient, and they are (like any good modern person) simply awaiting more evidence before committing themselves. But the fact is that they never do quite seem to commit themselves. They may fool other people by acting as if they have a core of solid conviction, around which their lives are built - but they do not manage to fool themselves.

The modern consciousness is cut-off from its own thoughts, it words and emotions. And this does seem to be a modern phenomenon - in this respect something seems to have changed. Things were, for instance, different in the European Middle Ages (up until about the fifteenth century)

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Consider the following edited excerpts from pp 53-5 of Romanticism Comes Of Age by Owen Barfield (1944):

In the Middle Ages, words and thoughts began to be identified. Hence the medieval period was above all the age of Logic - it worshipped Logic, in which the word and the thought are kept as close together as possible. 

But if we scrutinize the men of the Middle Ages we shall find something yet more significant. They identified themselves with their thoughts.

It is this which strikes a modern observer as most incomprehensible and alien about the men of that time - for example, their intolerance. 

Identifying the thought with the words, they felt that truth could be wholly embodied in creed and dogma; and, identifying the self with the thought, they were - quite rightly - intolerant. A wrong thought could strike them as far more immoral than a wrong action. 

When confronted with the universal intolerance of the Middle Ages, we can only explain it in one of two ways. Either common sense, kindliness and self-control have miraculously increased among us, and the great men of that time were therefore a kind of foolish children compared with ourselves; or thinking was actually something different from what it is now - not only believed to be different, but actually different. 

Today, everybody is tolerant. We are extraordinarily polite to each other, even on such subjects as religion. Does this universal tolerance arise from the fact that we have at last succeeded in subduing the evil passions that formerly drove men to quarter and burn one another for their opinions? 

Or is it, can it possibly be, that we no longer care very much whether people agree with us or not?

There is no doubt at all about the answer. The fact is that we have ceased to identify ourselves with our thoughts - at any rate with such thoughts as can be expressed in words. We distinguish between thinking and believing. This is indeed one of the most typical modern experiences. 

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This is modern alienation. But the fact that we have ceased to identify ourselves with our thoughts cannot, I think, be solved by re-asserting medieval Logic, and the identity between thoughts, words and reality.

When I say we 'cannot' do this, I mean that it simply does not work. We can, or course - and many people have tried, assert that we are adopting that 'medieval' assumption that truth is wholly embodied in creed and dogma - but for us moderns it is an 'as if'.

The way our minds work means that our selves feel separated from creeds and dogmas. Since this is what we feel, an assertion of identity can only remain an assertion. In a sense we are all solipsists now...

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But not so, because - as the romantics discovered - the imagination enables us to escape from this solipsism. But the escape is limited - limited in time, context, and fullness. The Romantics escaped - but sooner or later - and usually all-too-soon - they returned to their predicament.

Since then, we have got no further. Currently, we have immersive distraction by the mass media, but clearly it is no more effective - probably much less effective - than the Romanticism of the 19th century. Nobody seriously advocates that increased engagement with the mass media is a solution to the fundamental alienation of the modern condition - we know that (even if it were desirable, which it is not) it would be ineffective, we know it would not work.

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So, we are not able to go back, we hate where we are, we must go forward - and seek to understand the imagination in new terms, by new kinds of explanation - and the validity of our explorations will be tested by our feelings.

Our feelings will not be fooled - if any new way of thinking fails to satisfy our innermost soul (currently trapped by its own operation, trapped by its own solipsism) then it will not carry sufficient conviction to be an effective solution.

Our appeal is not to logic (as in the Middle Ages) nor to Evidence (as in the modern age) nor to assertion of the intrinsic validity of the Imagination and Fantasy (as with Romanticism) - it must be an appeal which is not an appeal to anything else; but a kind of validation in-action.

Our consciousness must become such that it is satisfied by its own fundamental operations.

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In philosophical terms this is first-philosophy - i.e metaphysics. To get where we want to go, we need to turn philosophy back upon itself, and examine the fundamental assumptions of modern consciousness.

Metaphysics is perhaps the single most important intellectual activity of our time.

This is neither futile nor paradoxical - because we have separate ground to stand upon - the ground of the imagination. The lesson of more than two centuries is that Romanticism, the power of imagination, is too incomplete and feeble to replace modern consciousness; but it is different enough to analyse modern consciousness from a separate evidential basis - and I think this analysis can point-to the next necessary step.

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The future of consciousness, the cure for alienation, is something we can know - but it is not necessarily something we can, yet, do. Doing comes later, requires different circumstances; indeed doing may not come this side of death.

In a sense we could regard our task as trying to describe Heaven.

Heaven has currently lost its psychological effect, because our descriptions of Heaven typically have all the faults of our current predicament. But if Heaven can be described in a way that uses the Imagination, satisfies feeling, and if Imagination can also be validated as a genuine source of truth... well, then we have achieved our goal.

But knowing where we are going, even if we cannot expect to get there for a considerable while, can be a source of hope and an antidote for despair.

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If you push any belief system - any set of metaphysical assumptions or any theology or philosophy - back to its logical roots, then you will find some kind of 'infinity' which is hard to defend, hard to believe, absurd in a sense.

Something of the sort is unavoidable, so far as I can tell.

However, some of these infinities seem easier to believe than others.

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My understanding of hunter gatherer metaphysics (reinforced by the world-view of early childhood) is that they believe that the essence of life is something like energy in a fixed quantity which permanently circulates while transforming into different forms (different people and some animals, maybe some other beings); and this has 'always' been the situation.

So, there does not seem to be a problem in believing:

1. An infinite regress of ancestors - or else, if pushed... termination of that regress in a primordial ancestor (or several ancestors) who was 'always' there.

2. An acceptance of what is (tradition) as best, and always and everywhere valid

3. A world - matter, stuff, energies - which was 'always' there; albeit in a state of cyclical transformation.

4. A personified world, a world of intelligence, awareness, relationships.

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What does not seem natural or spontaneous to humans are ideas such as:

1. Eternal stasis, purposelessness

2. Eternal progress, purpose, an end-point to things

3. Creation from nothing

4. Domination by impersonal entities such as forces, rules, laws

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These (or something similar) built-in dispositions to believe some things, and fail to understand other things underpin all belief systems - and create unresolvable tensions in all religious systems at a deep level - these tensions being experienced as phenomena such as alienation, despair, solipsism, anger - and disbelief; where disbelief = the inability live-by an idea.

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As so often - the two most-available mainstream options are both wrong, ineffective, and unsatisfying when it comes to 'my' role in 'life'.  

On the one hand there is a conceptualization of 'religion' that regards The Church - its tradition, rituals and practices - as an objective and overwhelming reality; to which the individual must conform. the church does not need me; but I need the church... The church objectively is, while I am just subjectivity...

I can recall this as a child - the dull, deadening weight of Christianity as I experienced it. It was something that pressed on me in a crushing way, always trying to shape and mould me - yet offering none of the future excitement, hope, engagement that I found in (for example) science, literature, music when I contemplated a life 'in' them...

I felt I personally could contribute to the arts, philosophy etc; in a way that was impossible for religion - therefore the future was one of being actively-entwined with life-unfolding; rather than incrementally being squeezed into standard shapes in a set-pattern. 

Yet the other option of these times was also hope-less. The idea of self-development; the idea that each Man would 'make' his own world - the ideas of the relativity of truth and values... These were experienced as toxic; because such a 'freedom' and creativity is at the price of its irrelevance. 

We can believe whatever we want - but none of it matters. We can explore human relationships in unconstrained fashion - but in the end it is just a game of mutual manipulation and attempted exploitation. We can do whatever we feel we desire, but in the end we die and all is washed-away. 

Nothing really matters, nothing lasts... When life is no more than 'whatever I want' then it is meaningless, purposeless, wearisome; and demotivating because there is no point in doing what will not lastingly satisfy. It is just a matter of doing whatever is easiest, short-term pleasantest - and of Not thinking about the future - because the future is irrelevant to the present, unpredictable, and never adds-up.

Both these options are wrong and utterly unsatisfying. And that dissatisfaction means that life Must Be futile - if church and subjectivism are the Only options. 

What is needed is something else quite simple to state; which is that we need to live in a way that recognizes both the objective reality of a life beyond our-selves; and also that we personally - our subjectivity, our efforts and aspirations, will be able (in principle) to make-a-difference to objective reality.  

The trouble is that our usual mainstream (and going back to ancient times) assumptions about objectivity and subjectivity, about reality and the human mind, are such that we keep on channeling the possibilities down to just the two above: either subjectivity conforms to objective reality - and subjectivity is some kind of an irrelevant illusion; or, if subjectivity is all-there-is, then we fall into some kind of nightmarish solipsism of life as a random dream-nightmare. 

 

This is why I return over and again to the need to understand and expose our underlying metaphysical assumptions (i.e. our basic conceptual model of reality); and to revise them. 

We need a picture of objective reality in which we - each and personally - can change objective reality - which must therefore be one in which objective reality is known to be dynamic, developmental, 'evolutionary'.

However we formulate it (and any specific and communicable formulation, or state-able 'model', is bound to be incomplete and distorted, compared with the boundless and openly-interconnected nature of reality) - we need to have this kind of picture in-mind; if we are to envisage life in a way that is both motivating and true. 

At the level of communication, it sounds unsatisfactory. But we are part of creation, as well as participants. We are children of God (the primary creator) as well as immortal beings with agency. 

At the ultimate level, beyond the capacity of symbolic representations (such as language) we have this experiential-knowledge of our-selves and of reality.

We have lived-through a vast (cosmic) background of events; all of which form that ground of understanding which makes possible a sufficient grasp of our role in Life.  

For reasons I described earlier; the most famous Christian conversion of the twentieth century - i.e. that of CS Lewis - is not valid for modern Man. 

Modern Man must choose to become a Christian - and that choice typically comes from a context of disbelief not only in God, but the objectivity of Good, the existence of spirit and the soul; and indeed disbelief in any purpose or meaning in the universe. 

Contrast this mainstream, normal modern nihilism with Lewis's well-known account of how he came to believe in God (the belief in the necessity of Jesus came later). From Surprised by Joy: 

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.

I fully accept the truth of Lewis's account - I am sure that is how it was for him. But Lewis was born in 1898 in a socially-enforced, strictly Christian-church part of Ireland; where people then and later would suffer, risk and die for their church - and for Lewis conversion involved return. 

Furthermore, in Lewis's Godless youth and younger-adulthood, atheists retained (unconsciously) most of the metaphysical assumptions of theism and the ethical assumptions of traditional Christianity. They were a long way from the generations-deep nihilism that is mainstream and normal nowadays. 

Nowadays; I would say that the experience of being hunted-down by a relentless God, out to reclaim his own; a God that must actively be resisted! - must be very rare indeed. 

In such a world as this, the idea that we convert when we can no longer resist God is probably counter-productive. It was for me. 

I read Surprised By Joy in about 1985, when I was exploring Christianity quite actively (Note: I did not actually become a Christian until 2008). I enjoyed the book, but took away the idea that the time to believe in God was when that belief could not be resisted - when one was overwhelmed by God. So I was - to an extent - waiting for that to happen.  

I did not take personal responsibility for my belief - but equated truth with being-overwhelmed; and of course what one is overwhelmed by in modern life is not God but the ideology of secular leftism as it impinges from all-directions. 

So, if our assumption is that belief is dictated by a sense of being hunted-down and compelled by external ideas; this now leads to mainstream, secular, leftist nihilism - not to God*. 

Ironically; all this was fully and deeply understood by CS Lewis's best friend Owen Barfield; whose 'conversion story' is so lacking in drama that it has no real beginning or end. He simply, gradually, chose to believe in God and the necessity of Jesus; and (in middle age) joined the Church of England (without strictly subordinating himself to its rules - e.g. he remained an Anthroposophist and believed in that type of reincarnation). 

Barfield realised (and wrote - in essays and books that CS Lewis read and, apparently, liked!) that modern Man's consciousness experiences the world in an alienated fashion and from-this chooses to believe what it believes. 

But Barfield was Not any kind of relativist or post-modernist: he believed in a real-reality, a really-real God, that Christ was the single most important 'event' in the history of the universe etc. But he also recognized that these 'objective' truths do not force-themselves upon modern Man from outside; but must be recognized by modern Man with a free act of choice and from a state of alienation, from a detached consciousness.

(Modern Man chooses God or Not-God, from a state beyond even that 'solipsism' in which the reality of other people is doubted. Modern Man has reached a nihilism in which even the reality of one's own thinking consciousness is doubted! It is now quite normal and mainstream for Men to (choose to) believe that their own consciousness is an epiphenomenon, an inessential and non-functional artifact of brain electrical activity. People even discuss - with bland unconcern - that they themselves might be no more than software simulations in some kind of Matrix...) 

Barfield also made clear that this situation led to the opposite possibilities of either the first freely-chosen Christianity in history; or else to types of moral and aesthetic inversion and depravity never before seen in history (which is what has actually happened).  

At any rate; my advice to modern people who are interested in the possibility of becoming a Christian would be very different from what Lewis described. 

I would emphasize that anyone who relies on being overwhelmed by the strength of external persuasion or compulsion will almost certainly accept the dominant nihilism and evil; whereas God, truth, beauty and virtue must be chosen, and by a responsible inner act deriving from absolutely free agency. 

In brief; Truth is real but must be chosen; and then we get what we want. 

So we need to be sure that we really (from our true-selves, by full acceptance of responsibility) actually-want, what we suppose-we-want.  

*I am thinking of those evangelists who make the error of assuming that anyone not a Christian must actively be resisting the obvious dictates of reason and the promptings of their deepest and most spontaneous emotions. Yet, such is the depth of skepticism, cynicism, nihilism; that modern people reflexively doubt all their good impulses, all logic and reason, all choices that lead to life eternal, happiness, love, creativity! Increasingly, as of 2021; we see that 'belief' is just for here and now and today; passively adopted for reasons of expediency - especially from fear and despair (fear of being exiled-from and scapegoated-by the 'community' - which is now obviously controlled top-down by the Establishment; and despair of a materialist life without the 'optimism' offered as carrot for obedience to the Establishment).  

The difference is that infinity is defined abstractly, i.e. without any reference to consciousness; it is posited as a 'thing'. The open-endedness, un-boundedness of reality is, by contrast, an experience.

The following paradoxes might help - they are paradoxes because the explanations assume divisions that are in reality unity. So they are fingers pointing at the moon, ladders to be kicked away after use...

Consciousness is necessary for the concept of infinity, or for any other knowledge, but that fact is ignored in 'definitions' of infinity - this is the root of the falseness and error of infinity.

We know infinity only by consciousness; but infinity dispenses with consciousness. But really, knowing is a part of creating - it is the active/ process, in-Time interaction of Being with reality that is creation.

(Whenever we find ourselves discoursing without recognition of the fact that Being is Be-ing - 'ing' meaning something that is in-Time, includes Time - then we are in error. Since Infinity does not take account of Time, it is an error.)

Chaos is made-into creation by the be-ing of Beings, by the existence of Beings; knowledge arises from a Being perceiving - it is the insertion of Beings into chaos that makes creation.

By the very process of Being, is creation.

We cannot contemplate chaos; because our contemplation is creation. Thus - simply by Being, all 'things' create. (That is, there are no things, only Beings.)

Consciousness is a part of this, and consciousness is quantitative. All Being entails knowledge - albeit mostly non-conscious knowledge. All Being has consciousness - although mostly this is minimal - minimally conscious Beings are what we mischaracterise as 'things', minerals etc.

As consciousness increases it first looks outward; so we first become aware of external creation but not our our own role in creating it: we tend to set creation against our-selves. creation is, at first, realer than our-self; and the separation seems like an aberration to be solved by the self re-entering into, losing itself in, creation. (

(Our subjective world is apparently illusion/ maya - the external world of creation is the only objectivity.)

As consciousness increases further, it turns inward, we become aware of our-selves; and the suspicion arises that all creation is of our-selves, and outside is only chaos - the suspicion that we are deluded about external creation.

(This is solipsism, or 'relativism' - or subjectivism... apparently we are real and everything else a 'projection'.)

Later still - modernity - it is recognised that the absolute separation of the self and the world mean that neither is real; both are illusion. The world has no meaning without the self - it is chaos. The self has no meaning without the world - it is a delusion encapsulated.

(This is nihilism - mainstream modern discourse.) 

If consciousness can be increased yet further, to a divine level, then we can become aware (albeit temporarily) that all creation is a participation of the self in the totality of everything: both are real, both are needed.

The world and self never were separated - creation happened and continues because Beings live, develop, and are conscious. Indeed it is the process of separation and recombination, necessarily caused-by the insertion of Being into chaos - that is itself Creation.

That is, we can experience the fact that we are divine, and necessarily engaged in the creation of this world (and this is all possible because we are children of the creator).

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Excerpted from Nihilism by Eugene Rose (later Father Seraphim Rose)

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/nihilism.html

*

"We have discussed, in an earlier chapter, the universality of faith, seeing it as underlying all human activity and knowledge; and we have seen that faith, if it is not to fall prey to subjective delusions, must be rooted in truth.

"It is therefore a legitimate, and indeed unavoidable question whether the first principles of the scientific faith--for example, the coherence and uniformity of nature, the transsubjectivity of human knowledge, the adequacy of reason to draw conclusions from observation--are founded in absolute truth; if they are not, they can be no more than unverifiable probabilities.

"The "pragmatic" position taken by many scientists and humanists who cannot be troubled to think about ultimate things--the position that these principles are no more than experimental hypotheses which collective experience finds reliable--is surely unsatisfactory; it may offer a psychological explanation of the faith these principles inspire, but since it does not establish the foundation of that faith in truth, it leaves the whole scientific edifice on shifting sands and provides no sure defense against the irrational winds that periodically attack it.

*

"In actual fact, however,--whether it be from simple naivete or from a deeper insight which they cannot justify by argument-most scientists and humanists undoubtedly believe that their faith has something to do with the truth of things. Whether this belief is justified or not is, of course, another question; it is a metaphysical question, and one thing that is certain is that it is not justified by the rather primitive metaphysics of most scientists.

"Every man, as we have seen, lives by faith; likewise every man--something less obvious but no less certain--is a metaphysician. The claim to any knowledge whatever--and no living man can refrain from this claim--implies a theory and standard of knowledge, and a notion of what is ultimately knowable and true. This ultimate truth, whether it be conceived as the Christian God or simply as the ultimate coherence of things, is a metaphysical first principle, an absolute truth.

"But with the acknowledgement, logically unavoidable, of such a principle, the theory of the "relativity of truth" collapses, it itself being revealed as a self-contradictory absolute.

*

"The proclamation of the "relativity of truth" is, thus, what might be called a "negative metaphysics"--but a metaphysics all the same. (...)

"The "pragmatist" and the "agnostic" may be quite sincere and well-meaning; but they only deceive themselves--and others--if they continue to use the word "truth" to describe what they are seeking. Their existence, in fact, is testimony to the fact that the search for truth which has so long animated European man has come to an end.

"Four centuries and more of modern thought have been, from one point of view, an experiment in the possibilities of knowledge open to man, assuming that there is no Revealed Truth.

"The conclusion (...) of this experiment is an absolute negation: if there is no Revealed Truth, there is no truth at all; the search for truth outside of Revelation has come to a dead end.

*

"The scientist admits this by restricting himself to the narrowest of specialties, content if he sees a certain coherence in a limited aggregate of facts, without troubling himself over the existence of any truth, large or small; the multitudes demonstrate it by looking to the scientist, not for truth, but for the technological applications of a knowledge which has no more than a practical value, and by looking to other, irrational sources for the ultimate values men once expected to find in truth. (...)

"Logic, thus, can take us this far: denial or doubt of absolute truth leads (if one is consistent and honest) to the abyss of solipsism and irrationalism; the only position that involves no logical contradictions is the affirmation of an absolute truth which underlies and secures all lesser truths; and this absolute truth can be attained by no relative, human means.

"At this point logic fails us, and we must enter an entirely different universe of discourse if we are to proceed. It is one thing to state that there is no logical barrier to the affirmation of absolute truth; it is quite another actually to affirm it. Such an affirmation can be based upon only one source; the question of truth must come in the end to the question of Revelation.

*

"The critical mind hesitates at this point. Must we seek from without what we cannot attain by our own unaided power? It is a blow to pride--most of all to that pride which passes today for scientific "humility" that "sits down before fact as a little child" and yet refuses to acknowledge any arbiter of fact save the proud human reason. It is, however, a particular revelation--Divine Revelation, the Christian Revelation--that so repels the rationalist; other revelations he does not gainsay.

"Indeed, the man who does not accept, fully and consciously, a coherent doctrine of truth such as the Christian Revelation provides, is forced--if he has any pretensions to knowledge whatever--to seek such a doctrine elsewhere; this has been the path of modern philosophy, which has ended in obscurity and confusion because it would never squarely face the fact that it cannot supply for itself what can only be given from without.

"The blindness and confusion of modern philosophers with regard to first principles and the dimension of the absolute have been the direct consequence of their own primary assumption, the non-existence of Revelation; for this assumption in effect blinded men to the light of the sun and rendered obscure everything that had once been clear in its light. To one who gropes in this darkness there is but one path, if he will not be healed of his blindness; and that is to seek some light amidst the darkness here below.

"Many run to the flickering candle of "common sense" and conventional life and accept--because one must get along somehow--the current opinions of the social and intellectual circles to which they belong. But many others, finding this light too dim, flock to the magic lanterns that project beguiling, multicolored views that are, if nothing else, distracting, they become devotees of this or the other political or religious or artistic current that the "spirit of the age" has thrown into fashion.

"In fact no one lives but by the light of some revelation, be it a true or a false one, whether it serve to enlighten or obscure. He who will not live by the Christian Revelation must live by a false revelation; and all false revelations lead to the Abyss."

*

Comment:

This passage contains the key to this end-stage of modernity in which we now dwell: Four centuries and more of modern thought have been an experiment in the possibilities of knowledge open to man, assuming that there is no Revealed Truth. The conclusion of this experiment is an absolute negation: if there is no Revealed Truth, there is no truth at all; the search for truth outside of Revelation has come to a dead end.

On this blog I often 'fulminate' against regarding God as an abstraction - something I regard as an error by which Christians 'collapse into' pure monotheism; characterised by an emphasis on worship and submission without need for comprehension or (more than minimal) agency.

The historic and continuing success of Islam at displacing Christianity is (I believe) ultimately because it is based-upon the clear authority of an absolute and abstract conceptual God; and so much more coherently than mainstream, traditional Christianity: this purity of monotheistic power being what many (past and current) Christians apparently most want from their deity (rather than what Jesus showed and told and tells us).


At another extreme is the causal, chatty, man-to-man way of relating to God; which I associate with the short stories about the Italian priest Don Camillo, written by Giovannino Guareschi. If you don't know these tales, I'd certainly recommend them as very enjoyable pieces.

One feature is that the parish priest Don Camillo pops-into his church, addresses Jesus on the cross, and has two-way conversations with God (or Jesus on the cross) characterised by a very down-to-earth and humorous tone. In context, these are great fun; but theologically there is a lot wrong with having a chat with God as if he were a cosmic uncle or bishop.

Don Camillo is Roman Catholic, but this a style that may also be associated with 'low church' protestants; who may report an active spiritual life of this 'conversational' type; reporting their prayers in such a way.


What is wrong with such a mode of interaction with God is that it is mundane, worldly, shallow, materialistic. Modern Man craves and needs so much more.

A chatty, friendly relation with God is no different in quality from our relations with other people in this materialistic world. Modern Man is alienated - that is, he finds life shallow, meaningless, purposeless - and adding God as just another 'pal' (albeit a cosmic and powerful pal) to one's collection of friends does not address this deep sense of isolation.

(Alienation is the experience of subjectivity being cut-off from objectivity; the problem of solipsism - regarding the external world as unreal,  combined with the problem of regarding our own self as unreal, labile, unreliable...)

I am saying that Don Camillo is absolutely correct that God is indeed a Being, a Person; and that we ought-to relate to him as a person; but relating to God as we relate to other modern people in a mainstream kind of way is grossly inadequate. Don Camillo relates wrongly to God, because he relates wrongly to everybody; if he was real his life would be alienated, his contact at secondhand.


In sum, we do not want merely to communicate with God (or other people) - no matter how comfortably or comfortingly; we want more. We need more - because that is not enough, nothing-like enough...

The 'everyday' does not answer. We want to experience direct contact, to have a direct and shared knowledge of God, and of other persons - bypassing the distance and uncertainty of language, bypassing the problems of intention and understanding - a direct, shared, knowing.

This is not highfalutin, not abstract, not an intellectual process at all; it is as down to earth as Don Camillo - but it is conscious and freely chosen. Many of us have experienced it with love - that wordless and direct and conscious knowing that answer all our craving, and in-which we are (for a while) perfectly satisfied.

Don Camillo is depicted as if perfectly satisfied; but he is like a child or someone from an earlier simpler and much-less-conscious era. In reality he would not be - he is an educated man, trained in abstraction. He cannot be unconscious, spontaneous, genuinely simple.

We are not Shire hobbits, and cannot go-back to that spontaneous rustic instinctive life. If taken as a life plan, that would be a false fantasy, a pretence, an ineffective fake; no matter how enjoyable the fantasy may be to read-about.

But we cannot stay where we are now, stuck in our alienation; because here we despair, here we are existentially isolated and paralysed by doubt; and our societies are are consequently demotivated unto death.

The proper course is to go forward beyond communication to communion, beyond conversation to intuition. To do this requires Love, and to realise that Love is not an emotion but a chosen commitment to shared purpose.

  

Every faithful Methodist that has lived up to and faithfully followed the requirements of his religion,... will have as great a heaven as he ever anticipated in the flesh, and far greater. Every Presbyterian, and every Quaker, and every Baptist, and every Roman Catholic member, - ... that lives according to the best light they have,... will have and enjoy all they live for... This is the situation of Christendom after death.

You may go among the Pagans, or among all the nations there are... and if they have lived according to what they did posses, so they will receive hereafter.

And will it be glory? you may inquire. Yes. Glory, glory, glory.

Brigham Young - President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints 1847-77. Quoted in Wrestling the Angel by Terryl Givens, 2015, p253.

Givens goes on to cite Wilford Woodruff saying 'there will be few, very few, if any, who will not accept the Gospel'; meaning at some point in the endless time of post-mortal life. And Lorenzo Snow stating: 'very, very few of those who die without the Gospel will reject it on the other side of the veil' - meaning the veil of mortal death. 


I was very pleased to see these, and other, endorsements of my own inferences about salvation (several times posted in this blog ever the past years) cited by Terryl Givens as typical of the Mormon Apostles and Prophets from the years up to the early 20th century (perhaps especially related to the Presidencies of Lorenzo Snow, and that of Joseph Fielding Smith who, in 1909, published an article called Salvation Universal); after which such near-universalist ideas of salvation became less often  articulated, or contradicted.

But it is, from our perspective more than a century later, to notice that near-universalism with respect to salvation is Not universalism; not all are saved, because always there has to be the exception of the 'unpardonable sin' of the 'sons of perdition' - which recognises that human agency (or 'free will') means that a choice in favour of damnation may be made by a person; 'in perfect clarity and understanding' (p252).

As Givens says: 'It is unforgivable not because [the sin] is so grievous or offensive, but because it is the only sin a human can make with no mitigating circumstances that could be the basis of re-choosing under different conditions... Only the choice of evil made in the most absolute and perfect light of understanding admits of no imaginable basis for reconsideration or regret.'

Such a sin is comparable to that of Lucifer's, and as such there is no possibility of repentance. Hell has been chosen.  


What we need to recognise is that the average Methodist, Presbyterian, Quaker, Baptist or Roman Catholic of 2018 would not want the heaven that was desired by their namesakes of the middle 1800s - indeed, the modern adherents probably would not be considered Christians at all, by the men of the past.

And that brings us back to the Sons of Perdition and the strategy of the powers of evil for damning as many Men as possible...

If you accept (as I do) that Hell is ultimately only for those who want it, who actively-choose it (and all others will go to a degree of glory in accordance with their own deepest wishes - bearing in mind that apparently many or most people do not aspire to any very high degree of glory, if the promises of their religions are regarded as a guide) - then the task of the demons is a difficult one...

The demons must bring a Man to the point where he clearly understands what Heaven is, and that (thanks to the work of Jesus Christ) Heaven can be his dwelling at an astonishingly cheap price - And Yet, at this point of clarity and understanding; that Man will permanently reject this gift of Heaven and Glory; and instead choose Hell.  

Let us suppose that that is the difficult task of the demons; then, for the powers of evil to win a human soul for Hell is, in most cases, not going to be easy...

Such was one of key, repeated, messages of CS Lewis in both The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. And Lewis gave many hints towards an accurate prediction of what seems to have been the demons' answer in Screwtape Proposes a Toast - which is: to work gradually towards the inversion of Good. So that a Man will (overall) regard Good as evil, and evil as Good. Such a Man will regard Heaven as Hell; and by choosing his-personal-Good, he will in fact be choosing Hell. 

This was, Lewis implies, a major strategic shift requiring great restraint on behalf of the demons; because it required them to set-aside the short-term gratifications of Men suffering and dying (as with the world wars of the early twentieth century); and instead to be contented with progress (decade by decade since the 1950s) towards a long-term goal of mass moral-, aesthetic- and truth-inversion among Western Men.

Men were to be corrupted by comfort, prosperity, materialism; by irony, hedonism and despair. By a pride so absolute and individual and cut-off; that it attained to solipsism: in doubt of its own existence, cynical of its own capacity for knowledge; and denying of external reality...

And the tremendous success of that demonic strategy explains the strange - unprecedented - nature of the modern condition, the way in which it resembles a self-chosen and cure-rejecting insanity. The average condition of modern Man is, in fact, the precise state of soul required to make someone actively choose Hell - in perfect clarity and understanding.


Note: I was not so clear or solidly confident as I am now; but I first made this kind of argument in Thought Prison (2011) and Addicted to Distraction (2014). 

As I stood and looked at the stars; I had an insight that the world of thinking was the primary world -- Not that it was the only world: not solipsism nor idealism: not that the material is unreal...

But that the proper place and destiny is known in the mode or realm of thinking. And only there (in its fullness).

That in thinking I was divine, and that in thinking there were no limits on knowing.

(In practice thinking is partial, distorted, limited - but in principle there is no barrier or constraint on knowledge.)

Of course, love comes before all - and love is also in thinking: love is active and binding in thinking; and this is why I felt such happiness there-and-then. And this love includes those who have died or are estranged: that is a measure of the boundless power of thinking.

But is thinking good? - Is it always and necessarily good?

Well, it may be contaminated with falsehood, resentment, despair etc - which all amount to the failure of thinking. Because thinking of the kind I mean is intrinsically pure, real, good - its concepts are universal and eternal truths.

Anything which is known in the light of pure, real eternal truth is itself true.

That is exactly how we know truth.

(We don't know truth from facts - we know facts from truth)

And understanding of facts (not their 'factual nature') is then the quest.

If we use the nomenclature of 'self' to express our true, innermost and embryonically-divine nature, and 'persona' to describe the public, interactive aspect - the 'personality' which is a consequence of experience; then we can see that while they need to be distinguished, the two are bound together as a polarity.

We start-out as the self, interacting with nature (the environment, everything that is not-the-self) and participating in it. At this stage life is real and involving because our selves are interacting with it and we know, therefore, moment to moment; that everything 'out-there' is known only by the interaction with the self 'in here'.

But at this stage, 'nature' overwhelms us and drives us, because pretty much all of the self is used in this interaction. We do not feel separate from the environment (or hardly so) but the cost is that we are unfree - because we cannot separate our self, the self is swept-along by the environment.

(The environment is experienced as real, alive, conscious - but the self is unnoticed and has no distinctive role: life is lived, the self does not live life.)

So, the self develops the persona - the public mask - which serves the useful purpose of interacting with the environment using automatic algorithms. The persona is like a protective robot which does the routine work of dealing with nature (including other people) - and the robot leans from experience how to do this.

(In each life, a human moves - to some extent - from the naked self dealing with the environment in the un-self-consciousness of early childhood, absorbed in the mother and family, home and community; to the later childhood and adolescent experience of becoming self-conscious - when the self is experienced as distinct from, potentially set-against, the environment (both social and physical).

The self benefits from the persona (at least initially, potentially) by having the persona do much of the routine work, and thus the self becomes increasingly aware of itself, and aware that it is separate from the environment - because now the persona is interposed. The self has autonomy, time and energies to devote to contemplating its self, its condition and situation, and to considering strategy beyond the moment to moment interactions with nature. Philosophy becomes possible.


As the environment becomes more complex and demanding (for example with increasing complexity of society) so the self diminishes in significance, and the persona increases in importance; until the persona is doing almost everything, using the 'automatic' (robotic) processes it has evolved. The self begins to lose contact with reality, because it no longer deals with nature; the self - that was master - becomes a helpless prisoner of its slave, the persona  - the robot takes-over and imprisons the divine self.

(Initially the self was like an ideal manager who deals with strategy; while the persona was like the front-like workforce who mostly implement standard protocols to deal with the outside world. The manager knows about the outside world via the workforce and has a strong sense of the identity of the whole organization. But later the front-line workers imprison the manager and there is then no strategy at all, nobody has any knowledge of the overall situation of the organization in term of its own goals or the organizations situation in the environment: there is just the workforce, who are unconscious of everything except the immediate business of implementing predetermined protocols.)

So the persona is now doing pretty-much all the work and the self is no longer aware of 'nature' nor is the self directing the persona strategically; but is living in enforced idleness and impotence, having no direct contact with outer reality. Since we as individuals live ultimately in the self as the default to which we revert when not actively engaged with the outer world; insofar as we are aware at all, we experience our state (i.e. the state of the self) as alienation, impotence, meaninglessness, frustration - and indeed begin to doubt first our significance and then our reality.

Thus nihilism; when our self begins to doubt first its own reality (materialism, positivism), then - by a natural inference - doubt the reality of everything else (solipsism).

However, the relationship between self and persona is one of polarity; they cannot really be divided. The self can be overwhelmingly dominant, or the persona can be - as in modern culture; but they are both part of the same phenomenon (there must be an inner core and there must also be a periphery where this inner core interacts with what surrounds it - although the relative size of core and periphery may vary widely) and the reality is that the persona is generated continually by the self, and vice versa.


There are three possible futures:

1. We might stay as we are (and have been for more than two centuries in The West): We have a self that is unaware not just of the outer world but of its own reality - and therefore utterly unaware of the work of the persona: a self that simply takes for granted the persona, and since it lacks contact with environment it is unconscious of that too. So there is just a demoralized and self-despizing isolated self, for whom 'reality' is the product of the persona - and the self is alternately overwhelmed by this reality and doubting of its own reality; or doubts outer-reality and supposes that everything is a product of the self: the state of solipsism.

2. We might go back to the earlier stage of the self interacting directly with the outer world (unprotected by the persona), and unconscious of itself - the persona shrinking back to its earlier minimal state. This could probably only happen if the environment was greatly reduced in complexity (including size). This move to extinguish self-consciousness also amounts to a kind of death wish by which consciousness wills its own extinction.


3. We might go forward to a state of greater consciousness. The Self becomes aware of the persona, aware of the reality of the persona (and therefore of the outer environment with which the persona deals), and aware of the work-methods of the persona - aware that is, of the standard protocols of the persona in dealing with nature.

 This is metaphysics as an active process; it is awareness of our fundamental assumptions. Stage 3 is, indeed, primarily about increased awareness - new awareness of that which we previous took for granted hence were constrained by. It is therefore awareness that makes us ultimately free.

(It is as if we are currently sleepwalking, and have indeed been sleepwalking through all history - either unconsciously dominated by or unknowingly cut-off-from the outer environment. The evolution of consciousness is about increasing that of which we are aware, of bringing it to consciousness: a matter of waking-up!)

The self again becomes real - remains free and autonomous, because it retains the benefits of being protected by the persona. But the persona is no longer taken for granted nor assumed to be giving a complete and unbiased picture of the outer environment - rather, the persona is brought to awareness in its reality and qualities.

We will know that the outer environment is real, and we will also know that we are inextricably and necessarily involved in that outer environment - because everything we know about it comes from interaction. The division between inner and outer is therefore erased, and replaced by awareness of the distinction (but not division) between the self and the persona.


So, with the polarity of self and persona we reach an ultimate reality - beyond which we cannot go, because it makes no sense to try and do so. The polarity of self and persona is the conscious recognition and awareness that the two are different but make up a single process operating through time - indeed, operating eternally.

It is meditation on, contemplation of, the polarity between self and persona that holds the key to moving onto Stage 3.

**
(Beyond an ultimate reality of the polarity of self and persona, lies the ultimate polarity of God and Man - but that is already dealt with by Christian faith; within which the above schema should be embedded.)

By the very process of thinking, of 'cognition', we create alienation: we create a reality in which there are 'things out there' and 'me in here'.

We then make the mistake of believing that what we have actually created by our thinking is true reality.

We then then alienated - either we assume that the things out-there are real and our inner life a subjective illusion (i.e. mainstream modern 'scientist' materialism); or, sometimes, that the inner me is real and the outside world an illusion, a creation of the mind (i.e. idealism or solipsism).

Alienation is an intolerable situation - so we seek escape in trying to stop our awareness of the consequences of thinking - by various means: we can try and stop thinking, perhaps by intoxication or ultimately by death; stop ourselves being aware of the alienated consequences of thinking, by distraction (compulsive socialising, mass media, novelty etc).

Sometimes, occasionally, someone confronts alienation - and tries to solve it.

And it can be solved, indeed it is solved - if we allow it. Because what thinking takes-away, thinking can also restore...

Thinking breaks the world into out-there and in-here; and then recombines the two into more thinking. That is, indeed, what most of our thinking is.

If we stop supposing that the splitting caused by thinking represents reality; and instead suppose that the recombined outer-inner world of our actual thoughts is actually a restoration of the wholeness of the world - then the problem of alienation is solved.

What this entails is that primary reality is in thinking.

Primary reality is not 'out there' - it is in thinking. Thinking is what re-combines reality into unity - it is both objective (out-there) and subjective (in-here) - thinking is the whole-thing.

Thinking is therefore the real world - and as such it is not merely-subjective but thinking is instead objective and universal.

Ultimately, it implies that human thinking is part of the divine plan- that our actual thinking (yours and mine) is potentially a co-creation of reality...

(Potentially because our minds are typically clogged with false thinking, pseudo-thinking, self-contradicting-thinking, automatic 'mental processes' into which we are trained and duped... the purpose is to think properly, do by aiming-at-it deliberately what we were intended to do spontaneously but have self-sabotaged.)

At any rate - the answer to alienation is in our own hand - or rather in our own minds; and at some level and however imperfectly we already do it. It is a matter of recognising, becoming more aware of, clarifying, strengthening making habitual what we already spontaneously are doing.

(Note - the above is a re-explanation of Rudolf Steiner's primary insight found in his early philosophical books - leading-up-to The Philosophy of Freedom - 1894.)

It is hard to conceptualize Final Participation - not least because it is usually explained in terms of what it is not.

But just as Final Participation is the same thing as development of the individual person - but at the level of groups or societies - so Final Participation can be understood as what happens with an ideal marriage as the most mature form of human relationship.

The child is, to start with, in Original Participation - immersed in parental love and with his self not differentiated from this environment. Everything is conscious and alive in a delocalized, overlapping and undifferentiated way. He lives inside Love.

With maturation and especially adolescence, the child differentiates himself from this diffuse and unlocalized state. At some stage he reaches a point of inflexion when he is cut-off from love, loses all ties of relationship, and find himself a fully detached self, observing his environment - sometime the environment seems real and himself an illusion (positivism/ materialism), sometimes the opposite (solipsism). This adolescent phase of alienation may last a moment, or it may persist for the rest of his life (as - apparently - with so many modern people).

Marriage is (ideally) Final Participation: it is engaged objectivity. The spouse is seen not as a subject (about whom we can think whatever we choose, indifferent to the person), nor an object (to evaluate you spouse objectively - by checklist - is a failure of marriage) - but as a as a spiritual subject.

We do not see our husband or wife as we see other people: he or she is one-off and incomparable. The spouse is past, present and future all at once - and eternally. The spouse is always changing, yet his or her immaterial essence remains the same.

So it is Love which makes for Final Participation in marriage - and in everything else. Love is the primary reality.

Ideal marriage is the model for all human inter-relation with all things. And the further extension of Final Participation is itself therefore though Love - which is why no real work is ever done in science, art, crafts or anything else without Love.

What do the social conditions in the modern West tell us of the nature of souls being incarnated in this era? These are, after all, novel conditions - unique in the history of Man.

We may potentially be able to reverse engineer our features and trends; that is, we may be able to discover the spiritual functionality, on the assumption that God has designed this world for the salvation of souls.

The features include a pervasive arrested adolescence due to a refusal to grow-up spiritually. This includes an extreme of adolescent detachment from The World, self-consciousness, solipsism, sensitivity, mood instability. Alternations between hedonistic excitement and existential despair. And the usual tradition/ parent detaching adolescent rebellion perpetuated to the point of subversion and then a satanic, systematic value-inversion.


So far, so bad - and the evidence of increasing demonic domination is undeniable; but the fact that this is allowed to continue should lead us to suspect that God is 'using' the evil with the intent of turning it to some good.

Specifically, it may be that the people (that relatively small and shrinking minority of the human race) who are born into The West include many souls for whom this is a suitable environment for them to attain salvation (paradoxical though that may, at first, seem).

Here is a guess. The Modern West takes us to an historically unprecedented extreme point of driving home harsh lessons; to the point that there is No Escape. The soul is finally stripped down to a level at which Life has nothing to offer, and then the soul looks at God... Eventually, there is nowhere else to look.

This is things coming to a point - this is the point toward which things are tending.


We live in a world of increasing incoherence, and this incoherence is increasingly coerced. What might be learned from an environment of mandatory incoherence, official insanity, moral/ aesthetic and truth inversion?

The answer: to experience these, each for himself, in the fullest possible degree; to have them strike deeper and deeper; past the many and superficial facets of personality and fakery; and in towards our true and divine selves.  This is the confrontation that God (perhaps) is engineering; the starkest possible contrast between our naked self and the literally-hellish environment of The World...

A stark contrast leading to a stark choice: affirmation of that which we know (from experience) to be incoherent and nihilistic; or affirmation of God. That is, affirmation of love.

A hammered-home knowledge of meaninglessness, purposelessness and utter isolation in a dead world of materialism; and then, a direct knowing of creation, Being, and the friendship of Jesus Christ.


Things are brought to a point where the experiential knowledge confronts our divine self, by virtue of being children of God; our true self with its innate and hereditary knowledge of the divine. And this need not be taught - it is a fact, spontaneously knowable.  

If we further assume that many or most people born into the modern West are souls who were, before incarnation and from our pre-mortal spiritual existence, exceptionally beset with sins... then this extreme harshness of experience may be necessary for there to be the best chance of salvation. These are souls so short-termist and selfish that these sins must be stripped-away by despair to leave-behind what may be a small residual core of divine goodness.

In other words, the consequences of the sins are allowed the fullest operation to provide the harshest spiritual outcomes in order that their true nature may become as obvious as may be contrived; such that at the moment of choice the starkest possible contrast with salvation will become apparent to the densest and most recalcitrant of selfish hedonic natures (such as seem to prevail here and now).


Of course, Men are free agents and there is always the possibility of denial - every Man can deny God the creator of the universe (it was his prideful intoxication by this astonishing fact that seemed to corrupt the Lucifer, and many others). Yet we can imagine that at the 'moment' of death, that 'moment' can be concertinaed-out - much as we experience in a dream - so that the full consequences of Life may be surveyed fully and the choice made.

And not just our own life is relevant, not a person's residual love; but also the love of others will (at that expansile 'moment') be known as experienced reality.

Those whom we love, those who love us; this goes into the balance at the moment of choice, and tends to draw us to choose salvation and the Heaven where such love may be sustained and increased for eternity.


Thus evil is used against itself. The worse the evil, the deeper and more considered the evil, the more sustained and systematic the evil - the greater the incoherence and despair at the last - and the more complete the stripping away to reveal the residuum of the true self in its nakedness.

So long as there is indeed love, there is a chance. But those souls that lack love have nothing to set against the evil. They have nothing to weigh in the balance; and their choice is highly likely to be for damnation, where their sins are retained, and the 'promise' is that they may be indulged without restraint. What would such people want with a Heaven that is eternal loving creation?

But God cannot see-into our divine self to know whether there is, or is not, love. The conclusion of our time of choice cannot be foreseen. And this is exactly why the earthly experiences and trails are necessary; why - in our current extreme - the situation is engineered that things are brought to a point of maximum contrast and clarity.


Our time is one by which love will be revealed no matter how small and feeble: if love is there, somewhere, hidden, buried deep and covered-over by sins... by superficial materialism, short-termism, selfishness, hedonism; no matter how distorted by value inversion and lusts for sex, power, status...

The conditions of modernity are well-suited to bring those who most need it to a clear recognition of the nature of good and evil, the distinction and difference between them - and to the making of a final choice based upon the malign experience of sin that is intense, painful; and very hard (but not impossible) to deny.

I have very often used Owen Barfield's categories to describe the evolution of consciousness over the past three years. These are Original Participation (OP), the Consciousness Soul (CS) and Final Participation (FP).

However, I have not been happy about the actual names, which are partly uninformative and, as I now have come to feel, somewhat inaccurate.

Original Participation is not truly a participation in reality and creation because it is a passive and unconscious state. The Consciousness Soul (this term comes from Steiner, rather than Barfield) is simply uninformative. And  the term 'Final' in Final Participation is not descriptive - but rather it informs us that this is the qualitative mode of divine consciousness, and therefore no further evolution (except quantitatively) is possible.

So I will be trying-out a new set of terms: Original Immersion, Detached Agency and Agent Participation.


This refers to the original state of consciousness for Man. Original in the sense of its being both the mode of consciousness of young children, and also of early tribal man - foragers/ hunter-gatherers.

It is a state of passive and unconscious immersion in reality - 'animistic', regarding the world as alive and conscious.

There is little in the way of a separate self - therefore little in the way of agency. The content of thought is mostly caused.

The child's thinking is therefore essentially a consequence, rather than being internally-generated. So, the child is not 'creative' - does not originate or generate thinking. 

It is also something of a 'twilight' state, in some ways intermediate between the awake and asleep state of modern Western adults - and a modern adult can experience Original Immersion in some altered states of consciousness such as trances, delirium and certain 'drugged' states and psychosis (for example).


This refers to the characteristic state of consciousness of an awake, alert, modern Western Man.

Our self is detached from the world, observing it through the senses; and we are strongly aware of this separate self and its agency in thinking.

The evolutionary step is in agency - thinking becomes a primary cause, self-caused: thinking emerges-from the self intrinsically. Thinking need not be a consequence of external factors.

With detached agency, Man becomes creative - originates thinking. However, this thinking is at the level of ideas and imaginations. These thought must be translated into the external world - by 'actions'. And actions are known only via sensory perceptions.

Therefore in the stage of the process is indirect. Thinking does Not participate in reality 

Initially the self may feel cut-off, and doubt the reality of the world ('solipsism'); and ultimately - by inference - may doubt its own reality.

The agent self experiences the world as perceptual/ sensory input that is made-sense-of by reasoning - i.e. a matter of facts and theories. Thus is it is literalistic, scientistic, materialist and reductionist. Reality is dead/ not-alive.

There is no experience of objective meaning nor purpose nor relationships: these are just theories.
Subjectivity is the dominant experience; objectivity is conceptualised sensation.


The thinking of the creative and agent self participates in reality - directly. This is the divine mode of thinking.

That is, thinking is real, and reality is thought - and there is a unity, no separation - therefore reality is changed (expanded) by thinking.

So, with Agent Participation, the Man directly knows reality - not indirectly via senses and reason or facts and theories. Direct knowing means there is no mediation, which means that there is unity.

For a divinity, reality is 'made' by thought; and known directly because the reality is the divine thought.

However, Agent Participation is partial, from a perspective. Thus some of reality is known directly, and creativity has also a limited scope. 

Thus, in Agent Participation, everything than can be thought is real - but only some things can be thought. Everything than can be thought is known - only some things can be thought.

And in Agent Participation with respect to creativity: everything that can be thought is original, uncaused and self-generated (although, naturally, it may and probably will use the existing knowledge of that self).

Everything that can be thought is participated-in, and therefore this thinking is directly creative (without mediation) - but only some things can be thought and only some kinds of creativity are possible.


The idea is that scheme describes the (ideal) development of a child to an adult who is divine - being a son or daughter of God: Original Imersion being young childhood, transforming to Detached Agecy at Adolescence. Most modern men are arrested at this adolescence of consciousness, but almost all will have periods of Agent Participation - even though they may be brief, feeble, and not taken seriously.

The scheme also describes the development of human society from earliest Man through modern Man to the divinely destined future of man. And it describes states of consciousness which we each may move-between - even during one day of our lives.

But the main 'lesson' or value of these categories is that Agent Participation is what we ought to - and need to aim at in our lives - as indeed the primary aim of a Christian.

In other words, these categories are a description of spiritual progression, theosis, sanctification or divinisation. Therefore, Agent Participation cannot be achieved except insofar as a person is Good and motivated by Love.

Because to participate-in creation is to participate in the loving work of God, it is the most profound alliance-with God.

Hence the absolute nature of the first and second commandments: Love of God, and of Neighbour (our neighbour being our co-participant). Only thus may creation proceed.


Note: These three states are - strictly speaking - 'polarities' in the sense that although they can be objectively distinguished (as above) they cannot be fully separated or detached one from another. For example, even a young child is not fully without agency or creativity; and certainly some hunter gatherers display these traits at some times.  

In other words, these are extremes or emphases of a unitary process of human consciousness. Any categorical scheme, when applied to a process, can only result in such polarities - because ultimately the unity cannot be divided without destruction of its nature. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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