First, read this article from 2001 - when I was essentially an adherent of New Age spirituality - it was published in Abraxas - a Colin Wilson focused magazine photocopied and home-published by an eccentric and likeable, Somerset-born writer called Paul Newman (now, alas, deceased):
http://hedweb.com/bgcharlton/ceremonialtime.html
At that time I could see that there was an ancient, participative, immersive and unselfconscious-consciousness which I call here Ceremonial Time; then there was the dead materialistic and nihilistic way of thinking which was economically efficient and necessary to survival in the modern world.
And that was it.
I could see no realistic way out of this impasse: either you were an ineffectual but connected hunter-gatherer or an efficient but alienated modern.
Neither were more nor less ultimately true (I regarded both as more-or-less false) except that - realistically - nobody could live by the unalienated life unless cut-off from modernity. So I regarded this unalienated life as only, in practice, accessible by altered states of consciousness:
http://hedweb.com/bgcharlton/animism.html
Since then, one big step is that I now know that there is something beyond the above two possibilities - there is a third stage which Owen Barfield calls Final Participation: it combines the best of both worlds because it has all the connectedness of the ancient spirituality and all the consciousness and precision of modern consciousness.
This state of mind can be achieved - if you know what you are aiming-at (which needs metaphysical insight and restructuring) - to varying degrees of completeness and intermittently - but this takes will, work, effort and resistances must be overcome.
It is not a matter of surrender, relaxation, just-seeing - it is not a going-back but a going-forward - it cannot be done by artificial or technological means - and it is not a by-product of any actual religion but must be done by individuals (although information on this can, and should, be shared and discussed).
THIS is what I am mostly working on doing, and describing on this blog, at present.
These three stages are childhood, adulthood, and maturity. They are captured in the zen saying of spiritual work, "First there is a mountain; then, there is no mountain; then, there is a mountain."
ReplyDeleteAs I age, they seem to me characterized by first innocence, then power, then humility.
Reading your description of the third stage, I am reminded of the High Scholastic Synthesis of the late medieval, when it was perfectly possible to be a clear-eyed Thomistic Aristotelian *who recognized the reality of angels.* This was shamanic apprehension *through* crystalline rationality. The same sort of integral fusion was achieved in the East at about the same time, albeit with different emphases (or perhaps just different terms).
"Such reasoning will however require that we have already succeeded in freeing ourselves from a framework of reality which is confined to what is known as normal perception of normal man, which in our day has become biased towards a purely physical view of reality and has lost faith in the spirituality of life and of the non-physical value and identity of it’s Being nature."
ReplyDeleteFrom William Arkle's, Equations of Being.
If I have understood this correctly, then what this is aiming at is a 'final participation' and elevation of consciousness therein. When the spirit child becomes fully aware of his or her divine nature and is thus awakened or enlightened spiritually, they are able to share their being through a deeper congruence with reality, predicated on a realisation of certain metaphysical truths, foremost of which include, although there are many, the conscious awareness of the hierarchical primacy of spirit over physicality (A Platonic insight superior to the blunted materialism of Aristotle). Another being the key personal relational aspect of reality (love is not a purely abstract force but a divine dance between subject and object, creator and created, parent and child, father and son or daughter) and a third being the primacy of the divine ground upon which our individual independence is predicated (ie the existence of God or the creator). The final participant experiences a conscious awareness of these things even whilst participating in the mundane with full awareness of the subtext. It might seem like what is known as mindfulness meditation, superficially, but it is much deeper than that because it includes the metaphysical subtext and awareness of divinity. In such terms it is the closest I can imagine what the experience of a heavenly kingdom consciousness might be like and the wonderful possibilities of living amongst other beings whom with joy and love as core aspects of their being are able to share in a far richer and more real congruence with the actual divine reality as opposed to the distortions and clouded glimpses of true reality we experience in mortal reality; distorted by false metaphysics as well as sin and the false habits of egoistic pride and other misperceptions of spritual immaturity that currently impede entry into this state of 'final participation ' or perhaps 'kingdom consciousness.' We are preparing for heaven in our approach to this final participation.
It is a joy to speculate thus and I can feel heavenly father delights in our attempts to develop our understandings. I sense I am personally making progress now in some important way.