The experience of living under destiny

Through our weakness, as well as strength - failures sometimes more than success - being brought-low as often, or more than, raised-above...

Systole-Diastole: not just energy but passivity - time for filling-up...

Pain as well as euphoria. Wasting time as well as efficiency. Dependence as well as productive. Being-helped as much as helping.

A perspective of the symbolism of Ariana Grande - from the Rev Dr Peter Mullen

Ariana Grande-Filth - By Peter Mullen

The pop-star who performed at the event in Manchester at which 22 members of the audience were murdered by a Muslim terrorist is to appear on Sunday 4th June in a “benefit concert” for victims of the atrocity. Ariana is clearly very popular and I wanted to discover the secret of her appeal, so I looked at her website where I found the words of some of her songs and a few sample video films of her act.

In the first of these films Ariana, in a state of sexy semi-undress and suffused in soft lighting, sprawls provocatively on a bed, caressing her arms, and then simulates sexual coitus while she sings:

“Tell me something, I need to know
Then take my breath and never let it go
If you just let me invade your space
I'll take the pleasure, take away the pain

“And if in the moment I bite my lip
Baby, in that moment, you'll know this
Is something bigger than us and beyond bliss
Give me a reason to believe it

“'Cause if you want to keep me, you gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta got to love me harder
And if you really need me, you gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta gotta got to love me harder
Gotta love me harder
Love me, love me, love me
Harder, harder, harder..”

I can’t think why I bothered to explore any further - perhaps I hoped to find that she is capable of singing about something other than sex? It’s not as if I imagined that on another recording she might give us Mozart’s Ave verum or even I did it my way. And indeed she didn’t. Instead she offered us:

“I'm talkin' to ya
See you standing over there with your body
Feeling like I wanna rock with your body
And we don't gotta think 'bout nothin' ('Bout nothin')
I'm comin' at ya
'Cause I know you got a bad reputation
Doesn't matter, 'cause you give me temptation
And we don't gotta think 'bout nothin' ('Bout nothin')”

I persevered for about an hour but there was little variation so, surfeited and sickened, I gave up and went away to think about it all. Two thoughts impressed themselves.

First, I wondered whether we do actually have a problem with paedophilia in this country. Of course we do. This crime is reported in the papers every day and, if the TV documentaries are anything to go by, it’s endemic in our institutions: the church, social work, schools, children’s care homes and so on. And I recalled that many of Ariana’s fans are preteens; indeed the youngest victim in the Manchester slaughter was just eight. I wondered, are we really going in for joined up thinking here – to abhor paedophilia and yet to celebrate performers such as Ariana?

Secondly, and in the light of the fact that the perpetrator of the Manchester attack was a jihadist, I wondered whether there is not, after all, something in the claim of Muslims that western society and culture are decadent.

We can do without suicide bombers. And we can do without the poisoning and corrupting of children’s minds and emotions by the sort of filth being offered by such as Ariana. Do we not care for the mental and emotional health of our children? She gave one concert and now she has been invited to repeat the dose, and on a much larger scale. Have we no shame?

“The dog returns to its vomit” (Proverbs 26:11).

Peter Mullen's Blog is All Things Considered
www.revpetermullen.com

Here and Now we must turn-aside from politics, economics, society and sexuality - and as first priority sort-out our cowardly, despairing anti-spirituality

Men have been on the wrong track, hijacked and diverted, for many generations - probably about 200 years. Instead of pursuing the development of human consciousness and thinking, as was our destiny; we have (I mean in The West - where the change was intended to begin) been diverted into focusing on (in approximate order) politics, economics, society and sexuality.

We have had spiritual impulses, but at the social level these have been corrupted into evil. Impulses for freedom, for self-development, for agency; for a recognition of all Men as spiritual siblings and gods-in-embryo (because children of God) and of Life as based in universal consciousness...

All such have been taken and twisted by the great evil strategy of 'Leftism' (led, invisibly, by immortal demonic powers) - into pacifism, abolitionism, anti-clericalism and anti-Christianity, the class warfares of Marxism and socialism and communism, ecology and Green politics, feminism, antiracism and diversity, and the multifaceted sunversions and inversions of the revolution in sex and sexuality. 

Indeed the phenomenon occurs with a sickening predictability! As soon as there is some kind of spiritual impulse that contains some kind of good; it is rapidly and near-completely diverted into some kind of programme - some scheme or plan - for externally changing society, for changing people... a law, regulation, system, blueprint, flow chart... nowadays typically into ultra-surveillance and micro-management.

As we look-around, here and now, we perceive a world of mass media and bureaucracy and leisure, in which the whole thing has been pretty much sewn-up. Attention is relentlessly fixed externally onto political, economic, social and sexual affairs.

Our capacity to think is blocked - apparently almost completely, and with just a few cracks remaining in the system through which experience and contemplation may, at rare times, penetrate.

THIS is why we must now, and for a while, stop ourselves from focusing our minds onto the 'problems' of our society - the problems of politics, economics, society and sexuality. Turn aside, turn inward.

Yet people are trapped, have been trapped. Our present attitudes will lead to defeat - that really ought to be clear by now! So we must change our deepest perceptions and understanding of the world. And if we must change the deepest pre-conceptions; then we must disengage to do this. And must means must - if we do not disengage and work on primary things we are doomed for sure and certain.

We cannot 'wait until things are sorted-out' and we have breathing space; we cannot first engage in practical problem-solving (about, say, the economy, immigration, evil laws) and then move on to spiritual matters. We cannot do this because we are already too deeply corrupted and demotivated to do any constructive work. A corrupt and cowardly population cannot 'fix' things - by meddling they will instead make them worse.

But because matters are worsening all the time, we fear to set-aside worldly concerns and focus on the spirit. We are afraid to let the forces of evil proceed unopposed - even though all that opposition can achieve is a minuscule slowing of the rate of corruption; yet we are afraid even to allow this, for fear that things may go too far, too fast...

Well, the fact is that we are not stopping the corruption, therefore the longer we delay - the further things will go. And yet the ultimate problem is not really things going too far, but the corruption of the population (by totalitarianism) to the point that we cease to be aware of the problem.

In other words, the primary problem is not the severity of corruption, but its invisibility. Any degree of corruption can be reversed where there is will and courage; but corruption continues to proceed when it is unperceived or the population are cowards; and, anyway, have no idea how to improve things because we are enslaved to evil, demonic metaphysical assumptions and perceptions, that drain us of common sense, virtue and courage.

There is no realistic alternative to turning aside from all those material problems that constitute the entire focus of the mass system of media, propaganda, laws and regulations - turn aside to focus instead upon our own deepest thinking and assuming.

Yes, things will indeed decline faster when we do this - that is the price we must pay for several generations of neglect and counter-productive activity. The process of spiritual recovery may be faster than we fear - if we are thorough and energetic about it: days rather than months, perhaps...

But however long it takes, we must do it anyway: because must is must. And soon. Or else will will cease to recognise that it must be done; and then it won't.

NOTE: By synchronicity; William Wildblood is saying much the same as the above in his post today:
meetingthemasters.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/liberalism-is-materialised-spirituality.html

I'm on the Home Page of the Owen Barfield Literary Estate website

I'm feeling highly honoured that the new Home Page of the  Owen Barfield Literary Estate web pages includes my summary of the core of Barfield's 'message':

www.owenbarfield.org

Owen Barfield (1898–1997)

Our destiny is to become both conscious and free

Barfield was writing for everybody and for all time — his core concern was nothing less than the divine destiny of each individual person and of all people collectively.

Barfield's immediate relevance is profound; it is to solve the core problem of modern times - which is 'alienation': i.e. the deep sense of meaninglessness, purposelessness, and isolation from people and things.

The understanding which makes this possible is that history, the present and the future can be understood as aiming at both consciousness and freedom (where consciousness means awareness of our thinking and ourselves, and freedom refers to free will, or human agency).

Barfield's scheme is that humans began as conscious-but-not-free; and we evolved — evolved in the sense of changing by unfolding according to a (divine) developmental plan — to become free but not conscious (which is where we are now, in modern times — unaware of meaning, purpose, relation) — and we ought to be aiming at the condition where we are both self-aware and fully-conscious. Engaged with (and participating in) reality as free agents.

Even more briefly, humanity began as conscious, became free; and is destined to become both — simultaneously.

Barfield proposes real, coherent, and clear answers to the most fundamental problems.

— Courtesy of Bruce Charlton

Freedom is good (if properly defined)

There aren't many people who sincerely value freedom.

The Left say they want sexual freedom; but what they really want is to shut-down dissent against their program of moral inversion; and many religious traditionalists regard demands for freedom as the battering-ram of apostasy and atheism.

Libertarians do value freedom as primary, but freedom is a means not an end, so liberty-first leaves matters open as to aims; and anyway libertarians are either powerless theoreticians or else they sell-out, first opportunity.

But there is a sense in which freedom really is Man's destiny within Christianity. Properly understood, freedom is agency - which is the real and divine 'self' thinking. To be free is to think from-and-with the divine part of ourselves.

Why? Because only the divine can be free - only the divine can be an 'uncaused cause' - to put it the other way, it is characteristic of the divine that it can think from itself; think not merely as a fixed or 'programmed' process, nor a passive consequence of inputs.

So freedom is divine and it is active - but it can also be seen that freedom is primarily in the realm of thinking; because, as is obvious, what we actually do is constrained by circumstances.

Whether freedom, in this sense, counts as important depends on how important thinking is - and that in turn depends on metaphysical assumptions. Most people's metaphysical assumptions are that thinking is secondary, optional, contingent, dependent on the brain and private to it... and so forth.

My understanding and assumption is that thinking - by which I mean exactly this kind of divine, free and agent thinking - is objective as well as subjective universal as well as private...

Therefore freedom is a part of the process of divinisation, or theosis - by which each Man becomes more god-like.

That's how important freedom is.

Ripeness is all - childhood in the West Country

My childhood was spent in the West Country of England - Devon and Somerset. The climate there is temperate - warm summers, and not-very-cold winters, and wet - due to the prevailing South Westerly winds off the atlantic.

And the prevailing memory is of lushness, green-ness - and especially in late spring and early summer when things were freshest and growing fastest.

As I walked to and from the local Primary School - which I attended from age 5-11 - the hedgerows would change and at some times grow as if to push us off the narrow footpath and onto the road.

The plant that seemed most evident was a plant that we called Meadowsweet (others call it Hedge Parsely) - which grew tall above my head and had a heavy scent that was almost suffocating - at times I felt as if being overpowered with a soporific gas.

Smells were, indeed, almost too strong - the sharp smell of nettles ('stingers' we called them) was evidence of nastiness - and this smell grew stronger when we attacked the plants, scything them down with long sticks. (Somehow the dying nettles always got revenge - by stinging our hands or legs as they keeled over.) The oozing ditches and bogland of the Somerset levels was another sickening stench.

And the grass! It grew all year round - and in summer came up to my waist so that it could be flattened to make dens, invisible from a few yards away.

Yet - strangely - Devon always seemed even richer and more fertile to me. Having spent my earliest years in the Torbay region; I had the fixed idea that good soil ought to be brightly reddish in colour - and anything else seemed second rate!

A (real) poem by Clive James

Van Wyck Brooks tells us Whitman in old age
Sat by a pond in nothing but his hat,
Crowding his final notebooks page by page
With names of trees, birds, bugs, and things like that.

The war could never break him, though he’d seen
Horrors in hospitals to chill the soul.
But now, preserved, the Union had turned mean:
Evangelizing greed was in control.

Good reason to despair, yet grief was purged
By tracing how creation reigned supreme.
A pupa cracked, a butterfly emerged:
America, still unfolding from its dream.

Sometimes he rose and waded in the pond,
Soothing his aching feet in the sweet mud.
A moth he knew, of which he had grown fond,
Perched on his hand as if to draw his blood.

But they were joined by what each couldn’t do,
The meeting point where great art comes to pass—
Whitman, who danced and sang but never flew,
The moth, which had not written “Leaves of Grass,”

Composed a picture of the interchange
Between the mind and all that it transcends
Yet must stay near. No, there was nothing strange
In how he put his hand out to make friends

With such a fragile creature, soft as dust.
Feeling the pond cool as the light grew dim,
He blessed new life, though it had only just
Arrived in time to see the end of him.

by Clive James, 2010


Note: Clive James has been a celeb in the UK for more than 40 years - being the first master of the devastatingly facetious weekly TV criticism (his columns from The Observer still raise a laugh at their aptness). He has spent most of his career being (I am sorry to say) annoying, pretentious, show-offish or inept. Nonetheless, credit where due, the above is a real poem - which is a rare thing, especially nowadays. The Frost-ian echoes are unmistakable, but there is also a different flavour and phrase which makes it memorable and authentic.

Totalitarianism-in-a-good-cause - the commonest political desire?

It doesn't much matter what people say; but if you observe what they do, advocate, approve - it seems that many or most people favour totalitarianism.

All they really want is totalitarian in-line with their own ideology or religion.

And this applies to many or most Christians too - e.g. they dream of a society in which all discourse is Christian, minds are filled with the message - and opposition to this is excluded.

By totalitarian, I mean a political system that tends towards total thought-control: that is to inculcating favoured thought and prohibiting all other thought - by whatever systems and technologies are available, effective, practical.

Many societies of the past were totalitarian in this sense that it was what they wanted - but effectiveness of imposition was limited by primitive technologies of surveillance and propaganda, or the presence within society of effective opposition, or simply by disorganisation and corruption.

Why is totalitarian thought control so common a goal, even among Christians? I think the reason is that people wrongly value action above thought (just as, in practice, so many Christians behave as if action is ultimately more important than motivation).

In other words, the 'supporters' of totalitarianism are often being, as they suppose, 'practical' and focusing on what they suppose will be most effective at controlling social behaviour.

This contrasts with the intentions of those who are behind totalitarianism, which are directed at thinking rather than action.

So - on the one hand the theory of totalitarianism, its appeal, is practical effectiveness; but the actuality of totalitarianism is that it is focused on minds and interested in practicalities only as an excuse for mind-control!

The Christian message is clear that thinking is more important than action; but clearly the two interact - and actual Christians often lose sight of this fact... they become focused on 'society', on what people do - and lapse into short-cut thinking which is coercive. It has, indeed, been quite common to Christians to lose sight that they cannot impose Christianity, it is not so much forbidden as utterly impossible.

However, what happens is that the use of coercion creates a system of interpretation that is focused on actions (eg what people say, what people do) - and once this refocus has happened then totalitarianism is appealing to Christians; since it sets no limit on the totality of surveillance and control.

Whether the system is overall physically or psychologically coercive is a matter of expediency; but both are used.

My point here is that totalitarianism has a much broader appeal than commonly realised - totalitarianism is a subtle trick of the evil demonic ruling elites. They want to control minds, to induce damnation - but they offer the promise of controlling behaviour. 

Can damnation really be induced? Well it can't be caused, but it can of course be encouraged. Agency (free will) is potential in everyone - but it may be rejected. We can allow our minds to become ruled by 'automatic' processes, we can refuse to engage our agency.

And that refusal to use agency - and instead to use superficial, inculcated, or not-human types of thinking - is exactly what the demonic powers aim-at. They aim to fill minds with thoughts that deny agency; they suppress ideas of agency, autonomy, inner reality; and at the end of this people will live and die disengaged.

Disengagement is the aim of totalitarianism - disengagement of agency. To have people so harried and trammelled that they just behave - and they never think. What such people imagine to be their own thinking is not their won - it is just some kind of superficial, robotic, habitual processing which has been drilled and applied.

In a materialist world view, totalitarianism makes perfect sense - and the desire for totalitarianism is a sign of covert materialism in Christians.

Totalitarian thinking is a kind of test - a test of our fundamental assumptions: a test of metaphysics. Most people nowadays have rotten metaphysics - and that is why totalitarianism is currently so popular among so many types of people. And that is why we have such a lot of it.   

Thinking is the problem - Not-thinking is to become unhuman - Thinking is the solution and way forwards

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.)

The cursed conceit of being right and Rudolf Steiner

'I'll hae nae haufway hoose, but aye be whaur
Extremes meet - it's the only way I ken
To dodge the cursed conceit o' bein' richt
That damns the vast majority o' men.'

From 'A drunk man looks at the thistle' by Hugh MacDiarmid

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was prone to the cursed conceit of being right! - he always tried to show that he had been consistent in all his assertions (when looked at deeply), and never - really - changed his mind about anything.

Well, we all have our faults - but this one was very misleading when it comes to describing how it was, by what stages, that Steiner became one of the most insightful and important thinkers of recent centuries.

As a child and young man he was a natural 'clairvoyant' of the usual type seen throughout history - the state that Steiner later called 'atavistic clairvoyance' - a 'throw-back' to Man's original unreflective and unselfconscious state of perceiving spirits and being a part of everything.

That is, Steiner lived spontaneously in a dream-world that was true - yet imprecise. He could perceive the universal spiritual reality, but in a state of altered (and somewhat impaired) consciousness. By his own account; he found it difficult to focus on the material mundane world, he lacked interest-in and awareness-of specific details and was naturally forgetful of facts.

But from his later twenties, Steiner the philosopher created a theoretical world-view in which active, alert, purposive thinking - thinking of the real and universal self - was considered to be reality and truth. Indeed the key to all knowledge - past and present - including knowledge of meaning, purpose and morality.

This is brilliantly argued in his early works, at first only partly consciously but with increasing clarity and explicitness: developing throughout the prefaces to Goethe's scientific work from 1883, the book on Goethe's implicit philosophy (1886), the published PhD thesis of 1892 (Truth and Knowledge) up to The Philosophy of Freedom (published 1894) where it reaches its final and complete statement.

 So - first Steiner was a dreamy-spiritual person; then from his early twenties to his middle thirties he developed a theoretical framework for a new kind of clairvoyant (clear seeing) spirituality based on thinking rather than dreaming.

But only when Steiner was in his mid thirties was he actually able to live this new kind of alert and thinking focused spiritual-seeing - which he later called Spiritual Science.

And that was not the end - because in his middle thirties Steiner was broadly hostile to Christianity. However, over the next seven or so years he used his new ability in spiritual science to explore Christianity; and at the end of this time, around 1900 and aged about 42, Steiner finally arrived at what was to be his resting point of Christianity as the basic metaphysical and theological frame within-which the method/ process of Spiritual Science operated.

Steiner changed - he ended up very different from how he started-out; and the change took many years - about twenty years, in fact, from beginning to end!

Why is this important? Because:

1. It shows that change is possible.

2. But change is slow. If it took Steiner twenty years, it might well take us longer...

3. Theory may be well worth doing, and productive and constructive - it can lead to a change of person.

4. Method (spiritual Science) is not enough: religion is also required.

5. Religion can be a thing of the spirit, primarily.

6. Steiner's personal trajectory was very unusual - in that he went from being naturally an atavistic (dreamy, passive, mediumistic) atavistic clairvoyant - to Spiritual Science; whereas most of those who wish to follow him will be coming-from the opposite direction - from an utterly un-spiritual materialism.

7. For me this explains the proven ineffectiveness of Steiner's spiritual 'exercises' - since they were implicitly designed to increase concentration and precision in people who were naturally dreamy-spiritual; while most of us nowadays are all-but unable to be dreamy spiritual and live in a meaningless, purposeless dead-materialism.

8. In sum - to end up where Rudolf Steiner was aged from 42 onwards; we modern Westerners need first to escape materialism and enhance our spiritual sensitivity - perhaps initially with dreamy-clairvoyance: but with the conscious eventual aim of both spiritual science as process, and Christianity as framework.

This is spiritual warfare, and only spiritual answers will work (anything else is to side with the enemy)

It is simply hard-headed realism to recognise The Problem as spiritual in origin. It is just a fact that the Global (Leftist) Establishment has spiritual goals - by which I mean that they seek the damnation of mankind - not its torment or extinction, nor its enslavement. 

The Global (Leftist) Establishment care about the state of Men's souls; even when those Men deny that they have a soul, or regard it as a matter of little importance compared with worldly priorities. 

What this implies is that a majority of the self-styled (often self-deceived) opponents of the Global Establishment are their covert agents, doing the work of advancing the agenda of mass damnation. They do this simply by propagating a materialist, reductionist, soul-denying agenda in the form of analysis of problems and proposed policies.

Most of the (so-called) Right are materialists - they focus on economics, saying that things are bad because of poverty, or decline in science, or decline in the status of men, or of European races, or of Western culture or population or power. Or that there is a decline in health, of arts and sciences. That intelligence is declining, genetics is declining, people are feeling sadder, more afraid etc.

Things are analysed in such terms - and solutions to these problems are suggested, There is debate, discourse, action...

And indeed all of these are partially true - which is what gives them rhetorical force; but if any or all becomes the focus and aim of discourse, and claims to be the reason for organising society; then all such perspectives cause more of the problems they claim to solve.

(This is indeed obvious to those who can detect the tone, rather than the content, of discourse. When the tone is selfish-materialist - when the emotions stirred in us are fear, resentment and despair - we know the enemy is at work.)

In some instances this is clearly the intention. Clearly, there are cultural commentators and authors who are fifth columnists for those they purport to oppose - this applies to many of the secular Right. They simply advocate the same soul destruction as the mainstream Left, but by different means. Their vision is one of materialism; feelings (pleasure/ avoidance of suffering) are their highest value.

But these are foolish, incompetent or dishonest. The truth is that the enemy seeks our damnation, and therefore the fight against them must be understood and coordinated at the level of spiritual warfare: the first step in effective defence is to acknowledge the aim of one's attackers - and this must be done in a situation where disinformation quantitatively overwhelms truth, and spies and traitors are everywhere. 

The truth is also that materialist motivations are weak, feeble, contingent, labile... and doomed to defeat when confronted by an enemy that is spiritually or religiously motivated - as are our supernatural foes.

The materialists of The Right affect to be tough-minded; yet they evade the basic reality of the situation and spin deceptive, enfeebling fantasies of earthly pleasure and ease, or gratified resentment.

Of course there must be material action; successful defence and ultimate victory will not come from purely mental attitudes. There is physical risk and probable hardship in store. But right action must be rooted in valid perception that this war is spiritual in its essence and each side organised for spiritual goals.

The principle is simple: Christian analysis, Demonic enemy, Christian strategy.

Totalitarianism is made normal - fear, resentment and despair are enforced - self-chosen damnation follows...

The totalitarian state notched up another ratchet in Britain this week. Terrorism is now proposed and accepted as normal.  Increasingly-complete mass surveillance - excused by, but not actually preventing, terrorism - is normal. Recurrent lockdown emergencies are normal. Armed police and troops in swarms are normal.

In institutional life micro-management, pervasive propaganda, constant monitoring and thought-control are now normal

The problems must continue, we are told - but in actual practice we are also told that we must adapt to them: and, it turns out, we must adapt by more totalitarianism.

The message is being hammered home by word, picture, deed and - most powerfully - by no change... except more totalitarianism.

(Totalitarianism doesn't work at preventing the problems - but that's okay, in fact that is the point! - because the problems are created as excuses for more totalitarianism, and therefore the solutions aren't supposed to prevent them!) 

Modern people put up with all this because we are hollow men, stuffed with straw; men without chests; lacking any religion hence lacking any motivation to do anything inexpedient.

To take effective action would be to invite reprisals. And to endure short term suffering en route to long term good... but for us there is No long term good. (For us, death is the end of everything; a comfortable life is the ultimate we can hope for.)

We are cowards. Because atheism doth make cowards of us all. Because not to be a coward requires a goal beyond the immediate; and for a population not to be cowardly requires some clear social goal which would be thwarted by totalitarianism. People can only be brave when they have something to be brave about.

To resist totalitarianism requires courage and a reason; courage requires being able to imagine and believe a better goal that what totalitarianism promises; a reason requires being able to imagine and believe that we, personally and now ought-to work for that better goal.

(Courage cannot be conjured from nihilism. And we modern Britons/ Westerners believe in nothing. The frenzy of a cornered rat is not courage; and is anyway utterly ineffectual against a vast totalitarian system. What is needed to escape totalitarianism is cold courage - the hardest courage of all to attain, because it is a consequence of high and firmly-held impersonal ideals.)

Atheist societies are utilitarian - in their explicit aims at least - everything done justified by making people (some people) feel better. But when/ if people's feelings are the end-point of justification, then government becomes a matter of manipulating people's feelings - which is exactly what totalitarian systems are aimed-at; which is exactly what we now have.

But what is in it for those in the leadership who deliberately create the situations that create terrorism? Those who claim it is impossible to change what they have created (because effective change is unthinkable, unsayable); so we therefore must just-accept more-of-the-same causes, so we must therefore just-accept more-of-the-same consequences: accept this as normal.

(Even as 'normal' is very obviously and very quickly getting worse: getting more totalitarian.)

What they are actually doing - on purpose, planned, with deliberation - is to create an ever-more totalitarian state. Why is this strategy so hard for people to recognise?

They aren't incompetent, they aren't well-meaning fools, they aren't self-enriching hypocrites: they are doing what they want to do, and doing it more and better every month: they are implementing totalitarianism step-by-step and they are winning! 

Why? Simple. The aim of totalitarianism, from a Christian's perspective, is not to kill us nor to make us miserable, but to get us damned. That is why they do it.

Thought control is desired in order that we will choose damnation over salvation - our thoughts will be policed, minds filled, actions directed, feelings manipulated towards sins: sins such as fear, resentment and despair.

That's it - in a nutshell: infuse fear, resentment and despair - all sins, all leading to self-chosen damnation. That is, to the active rejection of Good because Good is now considered to be evil.

This is a spiritual war. A Christian war.

We cannot conjure courage from cowards - and the Western population just are cowards - lacking cold courage. Because lacking ideals - indeed modern people cannot even imagine anything better than pleasure and comfort: that is the summit of fantasy.

First we need a basis for courage. What is needed are love and hope, based on faith in God (not feelings); and aimed at eternal joy (not comfort and convenience, amusement and the avoidance of suffering).

If totalitarian mind-control becomes complete; it will be because ultimately we did not want anything better. 

Christianity and 'mystery'...

Edited from William Wildblood at Albion Awakening:

Modern Christianity has lost its sense of sacred mystery. Now, mystery is the essence of any true religion and when that is no longer at its heart then the religion becomes just a worldly club for like-minded members to get together and socialise or do good. 

Religion only exists because of the complete superiority of the next world over this one. As soon as this world becomes important or meaningful in itself, rather than being something only seen in the light of higher realities, then religion is dying and this is the situation we have now in practically all religions...

Christianity must rediscover its spiritual side and put that front and centre. It must emphasise holy mystery. It must not be afraid of confronting the world with a radically different view and nor should it ever seek to compromise with the world. 

The essential message is simple and open to all, the wise and the foolish, the educated and the uneducated alike. But behind this simple message of salvation lie profound mysteries which must be seen as such and not brought down to our level. 

For if you bring the high altar down to the people then the people have nothing to pull them up beyond the banalities of this world. They have nothing to inspire them and take them out of themselves.

More of this at: http://albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/christianity-and-mystery.html

When the problem, the limitation, is in my-self...

It is hard, but not impossible, to change oneself - including for the better.

That, indeed, is the problem at present - the barrier to doing what needs to be done is not in The World nor in My Circumstances but in myself - or perhaps more specifically my-self.

I am the constraint. I cannot proceed further until I myself have developed further.

I think I know what needs to be done, but doing it is not quick and not straightforward (else there would be more examples of success - and indeed there are very, very few I have heard of who have ever done what I intend to do in terms of developing my way of experiencing, being and thinking).

But there is precedent; Rudolf Steiner wrote his early philosophical books (the one about Goethe's implicit world view, the PhD thesis and his Philosophy of Freedom) a few years before he actually made the breakthrough into the kind of thinking he had already described in such detail.

The one led to the other: metaphysics preceded an evolution of consciousness.

From The Story of my Life - Rudolf Steiner's autobiography, chapter 22:

http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c22.html

At the end of the Weimar period of my life I had passed my thirty-sixth year. One year previously a profound revolution had already begun in my mind. With my departure from Weimar this became a decisive experience. 

It was quite independent of the change in the external relationships of my life, even though this also was very great. The realization of that which can be experienced in the spiritual world had always been to me something self-evident; to grasp the sense world in full awareness had always caused me the greatest difficulty. It was as if I had not been able to pour the soul's experience deeply enough into the sense-organs to bring the soul into union with the full content of what was experienced by the senses. 

This changed entirely from the beginning of my thirty sixth year. My capacities for observing things and events in the physical world took form both in the direction of adequacy and of depth of penetration. This was true both in the matter of science and also of the external life. 

Whereas before this time the conditions had been such that large scientific combinations which must be grasped in a spiritual fashion were appropriated by me without mental effort, and that sense-perceptions, and especially the holding of such facts in memory, required the greatest effort on my part, everything now became quite different. 

An attentiveness not previously present to that which appeals to sense-perception now awakened in me. Details became important; I had the feeling that the sense-world had something to reveal which it alone could reveal. I came to think one's ideal should be to learn to know this world solely through that which it has to say, without man's interjecting himself into this by means of his thought, or by some other soul-content arising within him. I became aware that I was experiencing a human revolution at a far later period of life than other persons. 

But I saw also that this fact carried very special consequences for the soul's life. I learned that, because men pass early out of the soul's weaving in the spiritual world to an experience of the physical, they attain to no pure conception of either the spiritual or the physical world. They mingle permanently in a wholly instinctive way that which things say to their senses with that which the mind experiences through the spirit and which it then uses in combination in order to “conceive” things. 

For me the enhancement and deepening of the powers of sense-observation meant that I was given an entirely new world. The placing of oneself objectively, quite free from everything subjective in the mind, over against the sense-world revealed something concerning which a spiritual perception had nothing to say.

Why - ultimately - is civilisation intolerable?

I certainly appreciate the benefits of civilisation (indeed I once wrote a book-length 'hymn' to the advantages of the post-industrial revolution); but ultimately the degree of compulsion and distortion of human life (by specialization, partiality, repetition - the need to treat the world as raw material; the need to treat people as 'human resources'...) is probably not possible to justify; and - really - we shouldn't even try.

Perhaps it was acceptable and spiritually advantageous for Man to have a period of this kind of thinking, knowing, being... but any such advantages were exhausted long before the end of the 19th century. Since then we have just been digging deeper and deeper into error and desolation.

The predictable consequence is that now - as well as being thoroughly addicted to materialism and distraction; we have accumulated an extra six billion people who would die if humanity was to advance to the kind of life which we ought to be aiming at.

Nonetheless - let not the good become the enemy of the best! Let's not idealise the tyranny of civilisation. 


Note: The above was partly stimulated by reflecting on the social policies advocated by Rudolf Steiner - such as the 'threefold' organisation of society and the Waldorf schools. What strikes me about these is the mismatch between Steiner's soaring and open-ended vision of humans enaged in becoming gods by the evolution of consciousness through vast timescales on the one hand; and on the other his elaborate schemes and plans for making states and schools just a little bit better... 

Illiterate, tribal Christianity - The Outsider's utopian hope for society and politics - The Outsider's Handbook and Pocket Companion

Past Outsiders have been blocked and trapped by their assumptions: primarily by their belief that Christianity was superseded. This is an error: the future is Christian; and the only relevant question is Christianity of what kind?

In terms of the desired social changes - Outsiders have lacked ambition and radicalism - hopes have seldom been more than keeping society in its basic nature but wanting to make more niches for Outsiders such as themselves - and, of course, according a higher status to Outsiders...

But a society based upon the creative and self-motivated individual would need to be utterly different from any society since the agricultural revolution about 12,000 years ago.

Indeed, a society based on the aptitudes and destinies of individuals would need to be a tribal and familial society - in basic form much like those of hunter-gatherers.

Such a society is the only type which can be natural and spontaneous, which can avoid the alienation inextricable from complex social organisation - specialisation, coercion, planning: fitting people into pre-decided roles...

The difference is that the original hunter gatherer type societies are largely un-conscious; lacking in awareness of their knowledge. Such societies are similar to the life of early childhood in the way that tradition is simply accepted, society is accepted, morality is accepted... indeed such things are not consciously known, there is no awareness of 'religion' or 'law' - for example - these are simply how life is done...

But a future society which would fulfil the hope of Outsiders would - inevitably - be aware of its behaviours; including that all behaviours are partly-given and partly-chosen - that is: humans participate in creating the meaning and purpose of Life.

In effect, the future (the intended or destined future) is that we return to the same kind of spontaneous and natural way of living as in the simplest early societies - yet with the enhanced awareness, knowledge and participation of fully agent individuals.   

(Children and hunter gatherers are hardly aware of themselves as distinct from their societies - but human destiny is to be conscious agents; so the future is of living in 'tradition' as it happens quite naturally, with full awareness and by choice.)

Such a society is not likely to be literate - nor is it likely to have a priesthood - nor rituals; no churches or temples - and presumably no scriptures.

We need to be able to imagine a Christianity which is orally-transmitted; indeed more than this. We should recall that there are immaterial, non-sensory modes of communication; and Christianity can and should be known by such ways (if or when we lived in a higher state of consciousness).

Christ was a fact, a cosmic fact, a living fact - he changed everything, forever...

Therefore, Christ can be known without scripture, and without us being told about him - he can be known directly, and in a way fully adequate to the needs of a Christian life.

If/ when such a time arrives when Men have developed their consciousness to a level that we can simply perceive reality; we will be able to know Christ (rather than merely know-about him). Such a Christianity might be very simple, in some respects perhaps fluid; yet it could be true in all necessary respects, and of immense personal power, because fully experienced.

The Outsider therefore needs to be able to think, to imagine, beyond beyond complexity, organisation, specialisation, books, plans and fixed institutions... beyond what we take for granted (and which will, indeed, be necessary and beneficial for a long time to come, very probably).

We cannot, therefore, root our ultimate convictions in things that may be contingent upon particular and temporary types of civilisation - when the future may well undo civilisation - as something which has served its purpose; and must give-way to higher and better things.  

Inspiration, Imagination and Intuition: The Outsider's Handbook and Pocket Companion -

1. Be open to Inspiration

2. Grasp with Imagination

3. Test with Intuition


The aim is to base assumptions on self-validating intuitions.

Whatever is - is obvious

(...When clarity has been attained; which typically takes right-motivation, effort and time.)

We can only rest on that which we spontaneously acknowledge - acknowledge from our real-true-divine self. During consciousness at its best and highest. That is intuition.

(The test of intuition is intuition: it is self-validating. The process may be repeated as often as subjectively required to check for foundational solidity.)

The Outsider's Handbook and Pocket Companion - What to do and what not to do

What to do and what not to do

What to do: Recognise, firmly, that you need to be both spiritual and Christian - a more spiritual experience of living is the means, and Christianity reveals the end.

Christianity is the frame; greater consciousness the method; either without the other is futile.  


What not to do: Commit to any aspect of the sexual revolution.

Sex and sexuality have been the corruption and inversion of nearly all Outsiders for the past century and more - and the main reason why most recent geniuses have been evil in their effect.

(The Sexual Revolution is the stiletto and the sledge-hammer of Satan: the major means of damning the world. Sex is, after all - and after religion - the second most powerful human motivation; we cannot and should-not do without it - making sex an uniquely plausible and powerful mechanism for corrupting humanity.)


What then? Find your individual but divinely-ordained destiny - the first and most important step is to recognise that there is a destiny; that it is both personal and universal.

(You probably won't know how your destiny works, but so long as you discover what you should be doing that does not matter, at present.)

A viable future of The West must be Christian and spiritual (not primarily nationalist - which merely advances the evil totalitarian agenda)

It seems to be common for people to conflate, to assume the sameness of, a revival of national power and prestige with a revival of Christianity. This conflation seems to happen both on the mainstream political 'Right' as well as the Left (who bracket nationalism and Christianity under the category of 'fascism' which they bestow indiscriminately upon all their opponents).

But although de-nationalisation and anti-Christianity are being simultaneously pursued by the Leftist Establishment; the two do not necessarily go together, indeed I think they cannot (in principle) be pursued in parallel - we must choose one or the other as priority.

If it is accepted (which I argue elsewhere at length) that the Global Establishment is purposively evil, being tools of the demonic powers dedicated to the damnation of Man - then we can see that the anti-Christian agenda is primary; and the globalist agenda is a means to that end.

The Right-wing nationalist agenda sees engineered mass immigration and population replacement as a toll for destroying Western Civilisation; and the main modern problem. But from a Christian perspective this is a secondary problem, and not the main goal of those who pursue demographic destruction.

For Christians, the role of demographic destruction is to induce fear, hatred and chaos - justifying the extension and completeness of the materialist, surveillance and micro-managed totalitarian state which is already substantially in-place.

This planned totalitarian society will be used to (attempt to) destroy Christianity, and indeed all transcendental thought - by deluging the mind with constant input, by rendering the will passive, by filling thought with bad stuff, and by manipulating emotions: by burying our true free selves under layers of engineered and automatic habits and responses.

But the planned totalitarian future can only be resisted by a society that has higher goals than the modern 'utilitarian' public ethic of maximising pleasure and minimising suffering during mortal life. If our feelings and pleasures are to be the bottom line, the totalitarianism will not be resisted, because totalitarianism can sell itself as the best and only means to human 'happiness' (as with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World).

So a Christian revival is the priority; and this would be welcome from whatever source - however, to be effective against the prevalent materialism of modernity, any Christian revival needs to be spiritual.

Spiritual sounds vague - but what is needed is anything-but vague. It is indeed radical beyond anything we have yet experienced (except among a tiny minority). Recent and current Christianity (and I mean among good and sincere Christians) is very materialist - very assimilated to modernity; it is a set of beliefs, a set of assented 'fact'; rather than that different way of thinking, perceiving, and experiencing which is required.

To get back to priorities - the observable fact is that over the past twenty years the British population, hence culture, has been replaced by a variety of other people and cultures - typically non-Western. This has been enabled and facilitated by native sub-fertility; which is itself the major symptom of nihilism and despair - i.e. the British people in a deep sense, en masse, want to become extinct.

That national despair (consequent upon wholesale and near-complete abandonment of Christianity - including among self-identified mainstream Christians and especially their leaders), ultimately, is also why the British have passively-consented-to being substantially replaced; with very little discussion, indeed very little awareness of what is visibly and rapidly happening.

This analysis reveals that nihilistic despair, hope-less-ness, demotivation is the core problem for Britain (and The West generally). Also, awareness of the evil agenda of demographically-induced chaos leading to fear and hatred makes clear that the evil agenda will not be prevented, but will instead be assisted and advanced, by any nationalism based upon fear and hatred.

In a nutshell; there is only one positive option for Britain and that is a Christian awakening distinguished by a new and qualitatively-different perspective on reality; a new and spiritual way of perceiving and thinking.

Furthermore; such a Christian awakening needs to encompass regent migrants to Britain - if hate, fear and chaos are to be avoided.

In other words, National cohesion must be based on religion first, transcending cultural and racial differences. Indeed, religion (and only some religions) are the only known effective basis of long term, non-tyrannical social cohesion among people of different cultures and natures.

To put it another way; the future is totalitarian tyranny or a society based on one, shared religion; and that can only be Christianity; and an effective Christianity needs to be spiritual (non-materialist).

Unless there is Christianity and that Christianity embodies a different and spiritual (non materialist) way of being - then we will remain trapped in nihilism and despair.

(Note: The reason to be Christian, and to aim for a new and spiritual Christian way of being, is that this is true, and best, and indeed divinely destined. Above I am arguing for its expediency - which is true - but secondary.)

Men understand women better than women understand men...

Since equality 'never' happens in nature; either men must understand women better than women understand men; or else women understand men better than men understand women – on average.

(Or, the difference could be too small to make a difference, except perhaps at the extremes.)

So which is it?

I would say the answer is obvious: men understand women better than vice versa!

More exactly, over time most men learn to understand women better and better; but women instead learn to tolerate that which they do not ever understand.

Why? Perhaps because biologically men court and women choose; so men are in surplus and women a shortage; therefore a man typically wants and needs to understand women, so that a women will mate with him and raise his offspring (because if she doesn't, they will all die - so mating is only a first step). 

(There may also be more existential reasons why men are more motivated to understand 'reality'.)

But a woman (a young healthy woman, anyway) is intrinsically in-demand, and doesn’t really need to understand men – just to pick the best one available…

Cross posted from jrganymede.com/2017/05/19/do-men-understand-women-better-than-women-understand-men - where there are some comments. 

Fascism was the problem, not the 'horsewhipping' incident: Was Colin Wilson the first victim of political correctness in 1956?

Colin Wilson had a meteoric rise to fame in 1956 when his first book 'The Outsider' was published - but within months he was being vilified and shunned by the British Establishment; and his reputation has never yet recovered among their descendants.

The usual reason given is 'the horsewhipping incident' which was splashed all over the newspapers - in which Wilson's cohabiting girlfriend's father arrived at his door to threaten him with a horsewhip as punishment for various sexual acts (some real - e.g Wilson was married to someone else at the time; some imaginary and based on having read a fictional diary as if it was factual).

Supposedly, after this salacious incident, Wilson became a mere 'tabloid' character ('famous for being famous') and nobody could ever again take Wilson seriously.

But I don't believe this is true. Sexual misdemeanours and embarrassing, even humiliating, sex-related media scandals were quite normal - indeed more usual than not - for radical Left-wing intellectuals throughout the whole twentieth century; and particularly in from the mid fifties and into the later sixties. The horsewhip incident would normally have enhanced Wilson's reputation --- If he had been a Leftist...

The real 'problem' for Colin Wilson is that he was regarded as a fascist - and that was, and is, unforgivable. It was, and is, enough to exclude him from approval by the Establishment forever.

It must be recognised that Wilson's fascism was as that word is defined by the communist-sympathising Left of his era. In other words Wilson's fascism was because he was known to be anti-Communist. At the time Wilson was mildly Leftist in politics; but that did not, and does not, matter - fascism was and is defined by the Left as being against whatever happens to be the dominant Leftist ideology of the era, and in the fifties that was Soviet Communism.

On top of that Wilson was known to be focused on religious and spiritual matters - rather than socio-economic equality - and this was (and still is) regarded as fascist (despite that fascism was a secular, typically anti-Christian, ideology). But the Left was correct that most thoughtful and coherent religious people are anti-Communist, and anti running society on primarily Leftist lines; and that was (and remains) enough to make them a fascist.

On top of this, Wilson was a close friend of Bill Hopkins, who really was a kind-of fascist! Other, later, friends included Brocard Sewell and Henry 'Tarka the Otter' Williamson who were friends and supporters of Oswald Mosley - the would-be British Nazi dictator of the 1930s. So Wilson's circle in 1956 and later did contain 'real' fascists - Wilson did not shun and vilify them, as the Establishment require/d.

At any rate, the emerging Angry Young Men literary group, of which Wilson was one of the originals; was soon divided (and divided itself) into Left and not-Left/ religious sides - and Wilson found himself on the shunned side of that divide; as did Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd, whose careers were also permanently blighted.    

I am not claiming that the horsewhip incident and the sexual scandal was utterly irrelevant to Wilson being regarded for the next sixty years as either a pariah or a joke; but that 1. it was insufficient to account for Wilson's lifetime of shunning and 2. that the scapegoating sanctions would not have been applied to Wilson if he had been an adherent of the mainstream, pro-communist establishment.

So, in a sense, Colin Wilson was the first prominent person to be a victim of what would later be called a political correctness witch-hunt; and which is so regular a feature of modern public life.



Biographical reference: Beyond the Robot: the life and work of Colin Wilson, by Gary Lachman, 2016.

The nature of atheism (and other undermining un-beliefs)

It is natural, normal, spontaneous to believe in God and in the world of the spirit (which I here term the Holy Ghost - I simply mean the immaterial divine as it permeates everything).

So how is it that modern people do not believe in either God or the Spirit? It is a matter of explaining-away - a matter of having alternative explanations for universal human experiences.

I know this from the decades when I was an atheist and a materialist - I had all the spontaneous intimations of the divine which people had in the past and continue to have in non-Western societies. That is, I felt that the universe of reality had purpose, hence meaning - that it was ordered rather than chaotic; that what happened mattered.

But I explained away this spontaneous insight as being, for example, a product of the way that humans evolved, or the way our sensory organs or brain just-happened to be made. This was a tragic thing for me, or anyone else, to do; because it meant that deep down I regarded everything that was and had been and could be - absolutely everything - as pointless and meaningless.

Such a conviction lay behind, or below all experience - undermining it, eroding it, subverting it into a conviction of delusion; it meant that I did not believe in my own experience, my own thinking...

The experience of everything being alive and sentient was equally solid - it was how I responded to the situation I was in, whenever I was aware of it. Sometimes it was a delightful benign and beautiful situation - at other times it was a deadly, oppressive sense of malignity around me. This I explained-away as a projection of my own emotions onto the surroundings.

And what of Jesus Christ? It is possible (many do) to believe in God and the Holy Ghost but not in Christ; but what is missing from such a belief. From my perspective the reality of Christ is mainly (but not only) about the possibility of becoming like Christ - Jesus was God as Man who was resurrected to eternal life and full divinity, as a gift which we may choose to accept.

In a nutshell, the reality of Christ is the reality of eternal family - which is, for me, necessary to a hope-full life. An eternity of solitude, even if it were blissful, is a sad, sad thing - a thing which would negate much of what has been most valued in my mortal life.

And more? Well, in this mortal life there is the mystery and magical otherness of Woman, and there is marriage; and the possibility that this too will be permanent and eternal. For me, this has become bound-up with my belief in the reality that God is both man and woman: both Heavenly Father and Mother. To accept the common idea that sex is a temporary state and marriage must end at death... these too are sad and lonely beliefs; which also undermine my spontaneous experience of life at-its-best.

Yet more? Creativity... this has been a big factor in my life; I mean the need to be writing, playing music, singing, connecting with literature, art... Is this just a pastime, a lifestyle? Or is it the same kind of thing that I would be expecting to do in eternity? Is eternity active, evolving, open-ended?

The alternative notion of an eternity that is timeless and in essentials changeless; perhaps worshipping or simply being... to some this is an ideal but to me this devalues my experience of what is Good. It is a kind of unbelief. I was delighted to discover and feel the truth of a view of Heaven and eternity as endless creativity.

In sum - the ideal is love: love implies people, family, marriage, children, creativity - all these, and more no doubt. Before any may be believed they must be understood and imaginatively entertained as possibilities - conviction may, or may not, follow....

Sex and sexuality - back to basics

The division of people into men and women is treated superficially; but it is a fundamental, indeed metaphysical, matter.

I think there are ultimately three basic possibilities: the distinction may be an accident, an increment or permanent.

If an accident; sex is erased at death, a temporary contingency, and of zero ultimate significance to our ultimate self and its fate.

If an increment; sex is an aspect of mortal life that has permanent consequences - it is a step towards higher things.

If permanent; humanity is divided into men and women from eternity to eternity, there are two types of self; and the implication is that the complete person is a dyad of man with woman.

(This reality of sexual distinction is - by the above account - a fact; prior and post to earthly accidents and appearances.)

Which of the three is a matter of metaphysical discernment, not a matter of evidence (because evidence is a product of metaphysical assumptions).

What seems coherent to me, overall, is that sex is permanent; and I have confirmed this to my satisfaction by intuition and personal revelation.

We have forgotten God

The quote is from Alexander Solzhenitsyn - as the ultimate reason for the modern malaise

http://www.roca.org/OA/36/36h.htm

This is covered very well in a recent podcast in the context of US youth alienation/ disaffection/ drug-and-social-media addiction/ abuse - and Fake News created by the mainstream media from the excellent Anglican Unscripted:

Freedom and the internet/ computers (and the limits of epistemology without metaphysics) - from Stephen Talbott

(Edited from an essay Computers, the Internet, and the Abdication of Consciousness by Stephen Talbott - square brackets indicate my addition.) 

Freedom only seems to make sense as a name for the movement towards responsible wakefulness, and not as a name for a presumed ideal state. 

The ideal of freedom applies only to a state of [directional] transition. We are works in progress. 

Every move towards health is also a move towards wholeness and integrity. Insofar as the Net succeeds in distracting us from ourselves, it will prove a personal and social disaster. 

The temptations for distraction and sleepwalking [our lives away] are on every hand. But we should not forget that these temptations are also invitations to discovery within ourselves a higher power of wholeness and integrity. 

The computer is our hope if we can accept it as our enemy. As our friend [i.e. if we trust it] the computer will destroy us. 

http://natureinstitute.org/txt/st/jung.htm

**

Stephen Talbott is an Anthroposophist (follower of Rudolf Steiner) whose work was much appreciated by Owen Barfield. He is indeed extremely insightful and interesting, and makes many vital suggestions which ought to be adopted; and I would recommend browsing his copious writings.

http://natureinstitute.org/txt/st/index.htm

However, Talbott is also one of those frustratingly incomplete writers - because he restricts himself to epistemology (the philosophy concerning knowledge) without ever clarifying his metaphysics (his fundamental assumptions); in particular - he apparently never references Christianity or even God.

Therefore, ultimately, Talbott's only argument for changing 'the way we know' is that this would be better for our here-and-now health and happiness - as when, above, he references our ultimate goals as integrity and wholeness, and our ultimate ills as personal and social disaster (implicitly suffering).

Lacking a basis in metaphysics, and indeed God; this is all that can ever be argued in favour of anything.

And modern people will simply, and rationally, be able to respond that they, personally, happen to feel differently about their happiness and what they need to do to avoid suffering.

But a Christian discussing epistemology or any kind of fundamental philosophy can and should reference to the fact that we are God's children and we inhabit God's creation - and our ultimate purpose in life (our reason for living) is not, therefore, health and happiness - but the co-fulfilment of God's purposes for creation.

Only thus can we get outside of the modern ethic of utilitarianism, with its absurd assertion of arbitrary, labile and manipulable personal feelings as the bottom-line justification and purpose of everything.

‘Rejection due to imperfection!’ versus ‘If not – then what?’

We need to evaluate in terms of comparisons with the actual – including actual historical and actual elsewhere (but overall, as a package; not by cherry-picking one aspect from an integrated whole) – and even comparison with the actual possible, when that is done with honesty and care.

Modern Leftism is essentially negative – lacking even the utopia of Marxism; it is based on generating outrage about decontextualised imperfections (because decontextualised, the outrage is unbounded… ‘Death to micro-aggressors!’).

Never: ‘Rejection due to imperfection!’ – and always: ‘If not – then what?’

'My' church in the international media for doing a Good and Brave Thing

Last week, the church I am mainly associated-with, Jesmond Parish Church (JPC), hit the international mass media headlines for doing a good and brave thing. This is the church I most support, and where my family members have been attending services, and a variety of clubs and events, for the past decade.

jpc.org.uk

What they did, was to have one of the senior priests ordained as a bishop, outside the normal Church of England channels.

Most of the Anglicans in the world are outside the Church of England - it is indeed the third largest Christian denomination after Roman and Orthodox Catholics - and JPC had Rev Jonathan Pryke made a bishop by another branch of the Anglican church from South Africa. 

The significance of this act is that the Church of England (CoE) is an episcopal church - i.e. run by bishops, who ordain priests. But the CoE has become taken over by Leftists (aka 'Liberal' Christians), who are engaged in incrementally eradicating real Christians; and converting the organisation into a Christian-tinged Leftist political pressure group.

Liberalisation/ corruption of the CoE has been done mostly top-down; by controlling who was appointed bishops. This involved excluding 'conservatives' - i.e. theologically serious Anglo Catholics and conservative evangelicals such as the clergy of JPC: essentially everyone who disagrees with the sexual revolution is excluded.

And because bishops control the ordination of priests, this has corrupted the training colleges; and because bishops appoint priests to CoE churches this has been used to destroy conservative churches whenever their Vicars or Rectors come-up for replacement (when they retire or move-on). In other words, the CoE is being systematically purged of real Christians.

The JPC action is the first step in creating alternative arrangements for the besieged Christians who remain in the Church of England - presumably Jonathan Pryke will be the first of several 'conservative' bishops who can ordain new priests, validate new training arrangements, perform confirmations and organise missionary work within Britain.

In some ways it is a small step - but in terms of the CoE this is a big deal - opening possibilities of all kinds of sanctions (official and unofficial); most importantly this is the first proactive counter-strike by UK Anglican conservatives, who have been used-to decade after decade of defeats and retreats.

I can take zero credit for this; but I am delighted that this bold step was taken by 'my' church!


More information on the legal and political ramifications can be found at Gavin Ashenden's blog:
ashenden.org

Where do true hypotheses come from?

It is a justifiable demand of science that we should limit ourselves to experience.

But it is a no less justifiable demand that we should seek for the inner law of experience.

Therefore this “inner” must itself appear at some place in experience.

Experience is thus deepened by the help of experience itself. Our theory of knowledge makes the demand for experience in the very highest form; it repels every attempt to introduce something into experience from without.

This theory finds even thought-characterizations within experience. The form in which thought enters into manifestation is the same as that of the rest of the world of experience.

From Rudolf Steiner's The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception. (1886). C. THOUGHT: VIII: Thinking as a Higher Experience within Experience.

http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA002/English/AP1940/GA002_c08.html

Since there are an 'infinite' number of false hypotheses - but only one true; how is it that true theories can sometimes be discovered?

(If the 'search space' is essentially infinite, how could we ever find the truth? It would be harder than finding a needle in a haystack - indeed it would be impossible.)

The answer is that the concepts of science (hypotheses and theories) are given by experience itself - when science is being done properly. They are not invented, nor are they arbitrary - they are found in thinking, in the same thought-world where we are aware of perceptions.

Theories are not derived from facts; nor are facts controlled by theories - but both are found together in the process of thinking.

This happens and is possible and objective (the same always and for everybody, regardless of their mental makeup) because the world of thinking is single, unified - and therefore thinking is not inside each individual mind, but is a universal realm.

We discover true hypotheses by attaining to a clear knowing, by achieving a transparency of thinking. (Such transparency must, in practice, be achieved actively - not least by rejecting false assumptions.)

Truth is then seen - but it is not imposed on us; it is possible to know and to deny (that is a consequence of human agency, or free will).

The proper conduct of science involves attaining this clear seeing - which is a question of attitude, which is dependent on motivation: on wanting, more than anything, to know.

The way in which thought-content 'meets us' is the guarantee of its essential truth. In other words intuition.

Error in science is therefore essentially a matter of dishonesty - (usually) failure to await the attainment of transparency and the occurrence of clear seeing and its intuitive validation - and instead dishonestly to 'invent' an hypothesis; or else (more rarely) dishonest denial of what has been clearly seen and known.

What was Robert M Pirsig's IQ?

Since his death a few weeks ago, I have been thinking about Robert Pirsig and his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZAMM):

https://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/remembering-robert-m-pirsig.html

I have started listening to the audiotape version of ZAMM as my 'kitchen chores' book; and re-reading Mark Richardson's valuable roadtrip/ Pirsig biography 'Zen and Now'.

I also remembered an earlier blog post about Robert Pirsig's oft-mentioned IQ being 170 - and the case for suggesting it could equally well have been described as an IQ of 127-135 (about two standard deviations above average, rather than about five).

This chart gives the IQ percentages and rarities, for a test average 100 and a standard deviation of 15 - however, I think the Stanford Binet would have had an SD of 16 at that time:

http://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/iqtable.aspx

The piece seems worth re-posting:

**


IQ is not a precise measurement - especially not at the individual level, and especially not at the highest levels of intelligence when the whole concept of general intelligence breaks-down and there are increasing divergences between specific types of cognitive ability. 
 
iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/problems-with-measuring-very-high-iq.html
 
There is a tendency to focus upon a person's highest-ever IQ measure - for example in the (excellent!) philosophical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance the author Robert Pirsig notes the startling fact (and it is a fact) that his (Stanford-Binet) IQ was measured at 170 at the age of nine - which is a level supposedly attained by one in fifty thousand (although such ratios are a result of extrapolation, not measurement).

But an IQ measure in childhood - even on a comprehensive test such as Stanford Binet, is not a measure of adult IQ - except approximately (presumably due to inter-individual differences in the rate of maturation towards mature adulthood). 
 
A document on Pirsig's Wikipedia pages (Talk section) purports to be an official testimonial of Pirsig's IQ measurements from 1961 (when he was about 33 years old) and it reads:

**

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
COLLEGE OF EDUCATION
MINNEAPOLIS 14

 INSTITUTE OF CHILD DEVELOPMENT AND WELFARE
  
   June 14,1961
  
   To Whom it May Concern:
  
   Subject: Indices of the Intellectual Capacity of Robert M. Pirsig

Mr. Pirsig was a subject in one of the institute’s longitudinal research projects and was extensively evaluated as a preschool, elementary, secondary, college and adult on various measures of intellectual ability. A summary of these measures is presented below.

Childhood tests: Mr. Pirsig was administered seven individual intelligence tests between the ages of two and ten. He performed consistently at the 99 plus percentile during this period.

His IQ on the Stanford Binet Form M administered in 1938 when he was nine and a half years old was 170, a level reached by about 2 chilldren in 100,000 at that age level.

In 1949 he took the Miller's Analogy at the Univer. of Minn.. His raw score was 83 and his percentile standing for entering graduate students at the University of Minnesota was 96%tile.

In 1961 he was administered a series of adult tests as part of e follow up study of intelligence. The General Aptitude Test Battery of the United States Employment Service was administered with the following results:
  
   General Intelligence .......99 % ile
  
   Verbal Ability .............98 % ile
  
   Numerical Ability ..........96 % ile
  
   Spacial Ability ............99 % ile
  
  
   John G. Hurst, PhD   Assistant Professor

**

So, as well as the stratospheric IQ 170, there are other measures at more modest levels around 130 plus a bit (top 2 percent).

Of course there may be ceiling effects - some IQ measures don't try to go higher than the top centile.

But still, lacking that age nine test - and most nine year old's don't have a detailed  IQ personal evaluation - Pirsig's measured IQ would be quoted at about around one in fifty or one in a hundred - rather than 1: 50,000.

Ultra-high IQ measures must be taken with a pinch of salt; because 1. at the individual level IQ measures are not terribly reliable; 2. high levels of IQ do not reflect general intelligence, but more specialized cognitive ability; and 3. even when honest, the number we hear about may be a one-off, and the highest ever recorded from perhaps multiple attempts at many lengths and types of IQ test.
 
charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/remembering-robert-m-pirsig.html



Note: I find it rather annoying when people describe those with a very high IQ as being a 'genius' for that reason, and without taking into account creativity. Most very high IQ people are not especially  creative - and very few of them are geniuses. 

In Terman's prospective study of  1,444 very high IQ Californian children there was many high achievers but no geniuses.  By contrast Terman's Stanford Binet IQ test failed to detect two Geniuses - William Shockley and Luiz Alvarez - very probably because they just had a bad test day, but maybe because the Stanford Binet was mostly a word based test, and Shcokley and Alvarez were both physicists. All IQ tests are, in the end, just tests - and only an indirect measure of 'g'.

However, Pirsig did have a creative personality, as well as high intelligence; and the achievement of writing ZAMM - a first-rate book of its genre - was enough for me to call him a genius; albeit the fact that it was his only achievement at that level (his other philosophical novel Lila being much inferior) would make him a somewhat minor genius by world-historical standards.

Utopia and imagination

While it is an error of the first order to suppose that we can make a solid paradise around us during our earthly mortal life; it is also an error of similar magnitude to suppose we can do without an earthly utopia to aim at.

Lacking any reasonably clear and comprehensible notion of what kind of earthly mortal society we want, we become either short-termist/ expedient or demotivated/ suicidal.

My conviction is that none of the past utopias are viable - being either too unbelievable or else too uninspiring - therefore our future utopia must be imaginative.

For example; the 'Shire' like utopia of William Cobbett/ Distributism/ Small is Beautiful/ Self Sufficiency - I mean an agrarian society of free peasants (and no Lords), each with 'three acres and a cow' - has proven itself to be unviable and (in practice) unappealing... insufficiently motivating.

More exactly, it needs to be imagin-ative but not imagin-ary.

I think the creative thinkers, poets, artists and dreamers of the past have already told us what this imaginative utopia should be - in broad brush-strokes.

If we can identify empathically with the visionary mental landscapes of William Blake or Wordsworth, we can get some idea of the glorious scope and depth I am thinking of. Or, more exactly, there is the mindscape of Goethe or his amplifier Rudolf Steiner; or some of Jung's accounts of the Collective Unconscious - with its vivid myths and archetypes...

My contention is that all these are perspectives on the same thing, the same place; a real place - objective, universally accessible and of primary importance and yet/also a country 'of the mind'.

We need to develop that understanding - pioneered by ST Coleridge, and clarified by Owen Barfield - which recognises that we already live in a world co-constructed by our own imagination.

And we have the possibility of first becoming aware of this world of imagination - and dwelling in it; and then, ultimately - and this is the utopia - becoming an active participant in its creative processes.

Beyond the Grey Havens... by John Fitzgerald

(Excerpted from John Fitzgerald's essay at Albion Awakening)

And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance in the air  and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.

... This luminous vision, I believe, is the intended destiny of each and every one of us, articulating, in its primal beauty and simplicity, the deepest longing of the human heart. It points us to the root and source of our being, which ultimately lies beyond the parameters of this world. In his essay, The Weight of Glory, C.S. Lewis says that we all have a desire for a 'far off country' like an inconsolable inner pang - 'a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience...'

The Deceiver, however, wishes us to believe that our deepest desires can be satisfied here in this world. He offers us a range of seductive options that promise everything but deliver nothing, leading only to the dusty corridors and empty lumber rooms of his barren, mechanistic universe.

We live and move and have our being in this world. We are meant to enjoy it and do good in it, but it should never be mistaken for our abiding home. It can never fully satisfy...

Tolkien was fully grounded in the flesh and blood reality of this world, while at the same time keeping his gaze fixed on the deeper, wider, truer reality beyond the Grey Havens. As very young men, before the First World War, Tolkien and his friends believed that they had been 'granted some spark of fire ... that was destined to kindle a new light, or, what is the same thing, rekindle an old light in the world.' (Tolkien, Letters no. 5). Tolkien, through his writings, certainly succeeded in this mission.

It is for ourselves, as apostles and evangelists of a new spiritual Christianity in this land, to build on his (and Lewis's) work of imaginative engagement. The way to do this, in my view, is to speak directly to the human heart, the place where this deepest longing sits. This comes before anything else - dogma, ideology, and even our frustration with the societal decay and dissolution of values gathering pace around us.

No matter how corrupted, compromised or confused a person has become, that deepest desire - that primal beauty and simplicity - is always there, waiting for a look, a word or a gesture to kindle it into life, blaze forth and shock the world.

More at: albionawakening.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/beyond-grey-havens.html

Our world of alienation

Alienation

The main problem now, and for a couple of hundred years, is alienation. It is more obvious now than ever before, because so many people have led lives of peace, comfort, convenience and prosperity – lives that might have seemed paradisal to those in the past. Yet people are deeply discontented; and indeed expend great time and effort on distracting themselves and in blotting out consciousness with intoxication.

Materialism says we ought to be happy and fulfilled; but daily, hourly experience is of emptiness, meaninglessness, purposelessness and disconnection. Modern people are lonely from simple lack of human contact with those (mostly family) who love them; but modern people are also existentially lonely in the deep sense that even when surrounded by others, they feel cut-off – even when surrounded by pleasures and comforts, they are pressed-upon by a horrible recognition that it is all arbitrary, futile, temporary…

Some of us can remember times in our childhood when this was not so; when everything around us was alive, conscious – we were part of the world and the world was extended from us. Life might be pleasurable or miserable; but it meant something, and it was going somewhere – and we were immersed in this process, an integral part of it.

This childhood relation to reality was not, of course, an explicit awareness – indeed that was a vital part of its reality. Our lack of awareness of our selves as separate was the reason why we experienced life as an undivided whole. And it was the incremental increase in self-awareness which caused us to become cut-off from the world: which led to us regarding the rest of the world as things rather than beings.

Indeed, so extreme is the alienation of the modern world that not only do we regard the rest of reality as things – we even regard ourselves as things. In public discourse it is normal, in a sense compulsory (if you don’t want to be seen as crazy) to speak of humans as accidental products of contingent evolutionary processes, as passive ‘victims’ of our childhood experiences; and of personality and ability and uniqueness as being the kind of information pattern that could n principle be downloaded into a computer, or transferred to another person.

In fact we are even alienated from our own thoughts - which means that we don't trust the content of our own minds. This is common nowadays, indeed regarded as sophisticated. Yet - in a world-historical perspective - this is a quite extraordinary situation. And, unless the intrinsic absurdity and nihilism is explicitly recognised, it is a hellish trap from which we cannot ever escape, because we do not perceive that we are trapped.

The expression ‘meat robot’ encapsulates this mainstream world view – the view underpinning the mass media; the single, linked mega-bureaucracy of the modern state; the world of mainstream arts and ideas… it is constantly pressing upon us as an underlying and mostly explicitly-denied anti-reality.

Our thought world is one in which everything solid and objective points to the meaninglessness, purposelessness and isolation of life – that our life is indeed an illusion, a self-deception – and at the same time all this is being implicitly denied by the demands for our compassion, generosity, hard work, good behaviour… and all the idealisms of mainstream politics which must be taken with the utmost seriousness – egalitarianism, anti-sexism, anti-racism… all that socio-political stuff we ‘meat robots’ are supposed to be committed to, to sacrifice our livelihoods and futures to…

Alienation is a nightmare – a self-contradictory state which imposes itself and denies itself simultaneously. We are blamed for not being contented with materialism, and it is demanded that we feel and express ‘concern’ for vague ideals; we are manipulated and pressured into the shallowest consumerism and slavish fashion-following and mocked for it. Alienation is a nightmare because all possibilities within that world are bad, incoherent, and purposeless – according to the world of the nightmare there is nowhere to escape from the nightmare – the nightmare is everything and everywhere because it is metaphysical. We have been trapped by our assumptions.  

But change the assumptions and we are free.