It seems to me that William Arkle explained this (in terms I can grasp and validate intuitively) better than almost anyone else I have encountered.
Arkle generally used the word 'friends' (specifically defined) to try and capture what God wanted us to become (in the fullness of eternity) - meaning by this that God wanted to raise us to full divinity, to bring us to a spiritual maturity, such that we could become like ideal friends.
This raising and maturing of God's children is the purpose of creation - to provide the necessary experiences.
Friends is nowadays, however, a rather weak word - since most modern people have few (or no) friends in Arkle's sense - just colleagues, acquaintances, buddies... Friendships, as we know them, are far feebler than marriages and families (even the trivialised and besieged modern marriages and families)... how many friends would move house to be near a friend, or give-up work to look after an ill friend? It happens, but far less often than with spouses, parents or children.
In that sense family relationships are closer to what God wants from us - and Arkle used the analogy of a father's possible relationship with (for example) a grown-up son who has himself married and has a family; in an ideal situation when both become friends as well as remaining father and son. If this ideal is extended horizontally, to include non spouses and not family - we have a vision of the heavenly society.
As a picture of this ideal and its extension, the Fourth Gospel explicitly shows us Jesus and his disciples; and the siblings Lazarus, Martha and Mary; and Jesus teaches us the way that this love works.
We can also see how this Love grows and extends incrementally, person by person, through time - and not by some sudden generalised and imposed state of being. So we need tot suppose that Christians are supposed - suddenly and somehow - to love everybody in this world indifferently; and the same would no doubt apply in the eternity to come.
As both friends and as family we therefore have a vision of God's ideal, and we can see how and why Love is the central quality necessary; and we can see the reason for the emphasis on love in the Fourth Gospel. But this love is - in an important sense - incomplete; because it describes a static state; whereas we know that love is dynamic, fluxing, changing - we love people as we do things together...
So what is it that God wants that we do, ideally, in Heaven? The answer is simple enough - it is to participate in Creation; to become colleagues in the work of Creation.
But for this to be clear and comprehensible, we need to remember that God's Creation is composed of Beings, and only Beings. God did not create by some kind of celestial physics of life-less minerals; on the contrary, everything God created is and always has been alive, conscious and purposive. It is this living, developing Creation in which we are to participate. And this includes the creation, begetting, of persons - in a general sense the having of 'children'.
What God wants from us is two fold. We are God's children, and God wants us on the one hand to grow to become fully divine friends, bound by love; and on the other hand God wants us to participate in the divine work of Creation.
The two things go together, and indeed grow together.
Sunday, 30 September 2018
Death as dreaming sleep (and the coming of Hell)
What is it like to be dead?
Modern materialist Man seems to have decided that to be dead is like being permanently in deep sleep, unaware of the self, unaware of anything.
The ancient world also seems to have regarded death as like being asleep; but like dreaming sleep. The Hades of the Greeks and Sheol of the Jews were states of being much like the world of dreams - the self was feeble, agency was feeble, the individual had little control and was merely swept-along by events.
In the ancient underworlds, as in dreams; memories slipped away almost as soon as formed, motivations likewise; understanding likewise. To be dead was thus to be delirious, or demented - to become a ghost - living in a perpetual present mostly dominated (like dreams) by perplexed incomprehension, confusion, angst - but presumably with interludes of pleasure and satisfaction.
We should note, therefore, that the ancient understanding of death as underworld, Hades, Sheol was Not that all men 'went to Hell'. The state of dead souls was one to be dreaded, as a modern Man would dread delirium or dementia - but it was Not a state of perpetual misery or torment.
*
Among Rudolf Steiner's ideas is that our self is spiritual and not located, and our body is like a mirror for the external self; the self sees-itself in the body. A similar idea from Rupert Sheldrake is that memory is like an electromagnetic field - a radio signal - and the brain is like a receiver - a radio - which intercepts this field, interprets and broadcasts it.
Common to such ideas is the notion that the human brain, the body, are not the origin of our-selves; but these solid things are necessary for our immaterial/ extensive selves to become centred, focused, autonomous, agent...
Back to Steiner... he suggested that during sleep the consciousness and the self left-behind the living body - so deep sleep without dreams is our experience of merely being alive in the body, rather like a plant; whereas dreaming sleep was when we became 'located' with the consciousness outside the body, in the spirit.
By such an account, sleep is closely analogous to death; because with death the physical body dies - but not human consciousness. The body dies, but the soul continues. If our awareness becomes cut-off from our bodies; we might expect that the remaining consciousness would be incomplete, and we would experience its life much as does the dreamer.
An immortal soul detached from its living body is in much the same situation as the dreaming consciousness.
*
So - until the work of Jesus Christ - Man's death was universally like sleep, but like dreaming sleep; and this state seemed to be the permanent fate of the dead.
But since Jesus; the universal fate of Men has been resurrection; and resurrection reunites consciousness with the body; but with a permanent immortal body.
This suggests that resurrection would be analogous to awakening from dreaming sleep; and with a similar sense of renewed agency, freedom, self-awareness, control. The consciousness returns to its living body - but not to the mortal body left-behind a few hours ago; but instead to to a new living body, the resurrected eternal body.
The choice of Heaven of Hell is a choice of where this resurrected Man will dwell. Indeed, Hell was not possible until resurrection had been instituted.
In sum; BC there was universal Sheol but no Hell; after Christ Sheol was abolished, there was universal resurrection and the possibility of Heaven - but the coming of Christ was also the coming of Hell.
With Sheol there was no possibility of Men choosing Hell, because the dead lacked free will, so the dead could not choose. But Christ's gift of life everlasting brought the post-mortal capacity to choose - to choose evil, as well as to choose Good.
Modern materialist Man seems to have decided that to be dead is like being permanently in deep sleep, unaware of the self, unaware of anything.
The ancient world also seems to have regarded death as like being asleep; but like dreaming sleep. The Hades of the Greeks and Sheol of the Jews were states of being much like the world of dreams - the self was feeble, agency was feeble, the individual had little control and was merely swept-along by events.
In the ancient underworlds, as in dreams; memories slipped away almost as soon as formed, motivations likewise; understanding likewise. To be dead was thus to be delirious, or demented - to become a ghost - living in a perpetual present mostly dominated (like dreams) by perplexed incomprehension, confusion, angst - but presumably with interludes of pleasure and satisfaction.
We should note, therefore, that the ancient understanding of death as underworld, Hades, Sheol was Not that all men 'went to Hell'. The state of dead souls was one to be dreaded, as a modern Man would dread delirium or dementia - but it was Not a state of perpetual misery or torment.
*
Among Rudolf Steiner's ideas is that our self is spiritual and not located, and our body is like a mirror for the external self; the self sees-itself in the body. A similar idea from Rupert Sheldrake is that memory is like an electromagnetic field - a radio signal - and the brain is like a receiver - a radio - which intercepts this field, interprets and broadcasts it.
Common to such ideas is the notion that the human brain, the body, are not the origin of our-selves; but these solid things are necessary for our immaterial/ extensive selves to become centred, focused, autonomous, agent...
Back to Steiner... he suggested that during sleep the consciousness and the self left-behind the living body - so deep sleep without dreams is our experience of merely being alive in the body, rather like a plant; whereas dreaming sleep was when we became 'located' with the consciousness outside the body, in the spirit.
By such an account, sleep is closely analogous to death; because with death the physical body dies - but not human consciousness. The body dies, but the soul continues. If our awareness becomes cut-off from our bodies; we might expect that the remaining consciousness would be incomplete, and we would experience its life much as does the dreamer.
An immortal soul detached from its living body is in much the same situation as the dreaming consciousness.
*
So - until the work of Jesus Christ - Man's death was universally like sleep, but like dreaming sleep; and this state seemed to be the permanent fate of the dead.
But since Jesus; the universal fate of Men has been resurrection; and resurrection reunites consciousness with the body; but with a permanent immortal body.
This suggests that resurrection would be analogous to awakening from dreaming sleep; and with a similar sense of renewed agency, freedom, self-awareness, control. The consciousness returns to its living body - but not to the mortal body left-behind a few hours ago; but instead to to a new living body, the resurrected eternal body.
The choice of Heaven of Hell is a choice of where this resurrected Man will dwell. Indeed, Hell was not possible until resurrection had been instituted.
In sum; BC there was universal Sheol but no Hell; after Christ Sheol was abolished, there was universal resurrection and the possibility of Heaven - but the coming of Christ was also the coming of Hell.
With Sheol there was no possibility of Men choosing Hell, because the dead lacked free will, so the dead could not choose. But Christ's gift of life everlasting brought the post-mortal capacity to choose - to choose evil, as well as to choose Good.
Saturday, 29 September 2018
Canonical Gouldberg
Here is a video of Glenn Gould (in 1964) playing (live) the Aria and Canons from Bach's Goldberg Variations; without repeats and performed as a continuous concert piece:
https://vimeo.com/268671712
This is tough, intense, inspired music; and although I have listened to this piece hundreds of times over the past 39 years (various version by Gould and by many other interpreters), I haven't ever reached the bottom of it, or anything like - nor have I become fed-up with it.
As so often when Gould plays Bach, he shares the compositional credit in the sense that he recreates the music afresh (and differently from his album recordings). It is fascinating to watch him as he rocks his body and hums ('stimming' - for self-stimulating - as it is termed in Asperger's syndrome) yet without interfering with his hand control.
And look at those hands moving! They seem like weirdly shaped alien creatures; each pursuing its own independent agenda - and indeed each finger seems almost detached and autonomous of the hands.
The precision of playing is unsurpassed - and perhaps unequalled; and is especially evident in that Gould shapes each individual note, with as much attention to the note's ending as to its beginning - yet holds the musical idea with only the rarest and minor lapse in the sustained lines.
Gould's live playing is more accurate than any other great pianist I have ever seen; I only spotted one small actual mistake in the Aria and Canons (just about 9:50). Significantly, this is towards the end; and then there are a few mistakes in the separate Quodlibet - showing, I think, that Gould was becoming fatigued or losing the ecstatic state of concentration.
Gould is (in)famous for being the first great musician to eschew live performance - in his later career; and I think here we have the clues why. The way he played was so accurate, so exposed, and yet he made so remarkably few errors when playing well - that his standards were (even) higher than other greats, and even harder to maintain.
But such perfection was not attainable in live perfomance due to the need for sheer stamina: the exhausting travelling, setting up, socialising; the logistics of performance (new instruments, auditoria etc); the length of time he needed to play without a break. And Gould himself was so prone-to/ affected-by ailments and illnesses... That, in sum, I imagine it was excruciating for Gould (of all musicians) to be forced into playing suboptimally - to an external timescale; forced into 'faking it' for the audience.
Gould was subject to a great deal of ill-informed gossip (at least in the UK) about his technique - and some thought that he recorded exclusively because his pianism was faulty, and his playing needed to be patched-up by retakes and editing in order to pass muster.
In fact, almost the opposite was the case...
https://vimeo.com/268671712
This is tough, intense, inspired music; and although I have listened to this piece hundreds of times over the past 39 years (various version by Gould and by many other interpreters), I haven't ever reached the bottom of it, or anything like - nor have I become fed-up with it.
As so often when Gould plays Bach, he shares the compositional credit in the sense that he recreates the music afresh (and differently from his album recordings). It is fascinating to watch him as he rocks his body and hums ('stimming' - for self-stimulating - as it is termed in Asperger's syndrome) yet without interfering with his hand control.
And look at those hands moving! They seem like weirdly shaped alien creatures; each pursuing its own independent agenda - and indeed each finger seems almost detached and autonomous of the hands.
The precision of playing is unsurpassed - and perhaps unequalled; and is especially evident in that Gould shapes each individual note, with as much attention to the note's ending as to its beginning - yet holds the musical idea with only the rarest and minor lapse in the sustained lines.
Gould's live playing is more accurate than any other great pianist I have ever seen; I only spotted one small actual mistake in the Aria and Canons (just about 9:50). Significantly, this is towards the end; and then there are a few mistakes in the separate Quodlibet - showing, I think, that Gould was becoming fatigued or losing the ecstatic state of concentration.
Gould is (in)famous for being the first great musician to eschew live performance - in his later career; and I think here we have the clues why. The way he played was so accurate, so exposed, and yet he made so remarkably few errors when playing well - that his standards were (even) higher than other greats, and even harder to maintain.
But such perfection was not attainable in live perfomance due to the need for sheer stamina: the exhausting travelling, setting up, socialising; the logistics of performance (new instruments, auditoria etc); the length of time he needed to play without a break. And Gould himself was so prone-to/ affected-by ailments and illnesses... That, in sum, I imagine it was excruciating for Gould (of all musicians) to be forced into playing suboptimally - to an external timescale; forced into 'faking it' for the audience.
Gould was subject to a great deal of ill-informed gossip (at least in the UK) about his technique - and some thought that he recorded exclusively because his pianism was faulty, and his playing needed to be patched-up by retakes and editing in order to pass muster.
In fact, almost the opposite was the case...
Friday, 28 September 2018
Active versus passive Christianity
Most of the Christianity of the past was too passive; and the powers of strategic evil have long-since worked-out how to deal with it...
Subvert/ corrupt the authoritative leadership, peer groups and high status intellectual influences; do the same for the texts, the interpretations, the rituals and symbols, morals and ethics... all can-be/ has-been repurposed for evil.
Anybody whose Christianity is passive, here and now, in the modern West, is like a ticking time-lock: sooner-or-later the door will open, evil will get-in and take-over.
To be passive is to be defensive - you only need one error or lapse and you are done-for.
Being active clearly isn't a matter of action, of behaviour; since most of he most active people are among the most passive. Evangelism - yes! But evangelism to what: when so much has been repurposed?
Active refers to a basic, inner and motivational stance. I can't see any way around the fact that it must be individually-rooted and based on a direct knowing - I just can't see how this implication can be avoided (despite all the obvious and real hazards). Personal destiny needs to be found, known explicitly, and lived-by.
In essence we need to step outside The System - and everything external, objective and social (including actual Churches) is (more or less, usually more) inside The System.
Only outside The System can we found solid ground to work from.
But what kind of work, when so much is subjected, and we are intending to be active and to support the activity of others?
Outside The System is not imaginary, subjective, unreal - but the opposite: direct, personal, universal reality. That's the place we need to work.
But what specifically to do for me, here, now?
Well, nobody can tell you - you must actively discover it. That's the first active step.
Subvert/ corrupt the authoritative leadership, peer groups and high status intellectual influences; do the same for the texts, the interpretations, the rituals and symbols, morals and ethics... all can-be/ has-been repurposed for evil.
Anybody whose Christianity is passive, here and now, in the modern West, is like a ticking time-lock: sooner-or-later the door will open, evil will get-in and take-over.
To be passive is to be defensive - you only need one error or lapse and you are done-for.
Being active clearly isn't a matter of action, of behaviour; since most of he most active people are among the most passive. Evangelism - yes! But evangelism to what: when so much has been repurposed?
Active refers to a basic, inner and motivational stance. I can't see any way around the fact that it must be individually-rooted and based on a direct knowing - I just can't see how this implication can be avoided (despite all the obvious and real hazards). Personal destiny needs to be found, known explicitly, and lived-by.
In essence we need to step outside The System - and everything external, objective and social (including actual Churches) is (more or less, usually more) inside The System.
Only outside The System can we found solid ground to work from.
But what kind of work, when so much is subjected, and we are intending to be active and to support the activity of others?
Outside The System is not imaginary, subjective, unreal - but the opposite: direct, personal, universal reality. That's the place we need to work.
But what specifically to do for me, here, now?
Well, nobody can tell you - you must actively discover it. That's the first active step.
It is important that Lazarus was resurrected, not just brought back to life
The Fourth Gospel is our only contemporary account of the 'raising' of Lazarus - and its central and pivital position in this most important of all scriptures suggests that the event is crucial.
One way it is crucial is consequential - in that it provoked the Chief Priests and Pharisees to decide that is was expedient that Jesus be killed for the greater good (a misunderstood true prophecy).
The Fourth Gospel - as nearly always - tells us the story as evidence that Jesus really is the Christ, sent by God, and would become (after his ascension) fully the Son of God.
Beyond this, there are two possible interpretations. The usual is that the miracle was restoring Lazarus to normal life; the other, which I think is the one we are meant to infer, is that the miracle was resurrecting Lazarus to the eternal life that Jesus promised to all who 'believed on' his name.
The Gospel is really pretty clear that we are meant to understand the raising of Lazarus as a real resurrection, that same resurrection which we are all promised by Jesus following our mortal life and death - and which Jesus himself experienced.
1. The Gospel establishes that Lazarus really is dead, properly dead, irrevocably; such that (because he is rotting - 'stinketh') he cannot be brought back to mortal life. Because of this, Jesus shares the general grief and wept - as is appropriate with real, permanent mortal death.
2. In the discussion between Jesus and Martha, he makes clear that Lazarus is to be resurrected.
3. Lazarus is entombed in a cave, blocked by a stone - which explicitly prefigures the death and resurrection of Jesus.
4. The references to the people witnessing the glory of God are appropriate to a resurrection. Glory is associated with the ascension of the resurrected Jesus - for people to see the glory of God in the resurrection of Lazarus suggests more than simply restoring him to mortal life. I am not sure; but I think it means that, in the act of resurrecting Lazarus - with the assistance of his Father, Jesus is displaying the power he will attain after his ascension to full divinity
With such in-your-face evidence - it is hard to explain the general mainstream view that Lazarus is Not resurrected. This I regard as an example of the way that scholars read the Bible through their pre-existing general theological considerations; and they seldom see the obvious, but only confirmation of the pre-existing theories of what they expect to find.
Most regard it as theologically vital that Jesus is the first Man to be resurrected - and therefore even the possibility of the resurrection of Lazarus is edited out of consideration.
Perhaps the supposed lack of further reference to Lazarus in the Fourth Gospel is seen as another problem - in that the first resurrected Man would presumably have some part to play in God's plan for Men.
But this is only a problem if you regard the author of the Fourth Gospel (never self-named, but self-described as the 'beloved' disciple) as John the son of Zebedee - however, if you regard the author of the Fourth Gospel as the resurrected Lazarus (as I do) then 'it all fits'.
Relevant passages in bold...
John 11: 1 Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus, of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha. 2 (It was that Mary which anointed the Lord with ointment, and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick.) 3 Therefore his sisters sent unto him, saying, Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick. 4 When Jesus heard that, he said, This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby. 5 Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus. 6 When he had heard therefore that he was sick, he abode two days still in the same place where he was. 7 Then after that saith he to his disciples, Let us go into Judaea again. 8 His disciples say unto him, Master, the Jews of late sought to stone thee; and goest thou thither again? 9 Jesus answered, Are there not twelve hours in the day? If any man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of this world. 10 But if a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him.
11 These things said he: and after that he saith unto them, Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep. 12 Then said his disciples, Lord, if he sleep, he shall do well. 13 Howbeit Jesus spake of his death: but they thought that he had spoken of taking of rest in sleep. 14 Then said Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead. 15 And I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent ye may believe; nevertheless let us go unto him. 16 Then said Thomas, which is called Didymus, unto his fellow disciples, Let us also go, that we may die with him. 17 Then when Jesus came, he found that he had lain in the grave four days already.
18 Now Bethany was nigh unto Jerusalem, about fifteen furlongs off: 19 And many of the Jews came to Martha and Mary, to comfort them concerning their brother. 20 Then Martha, as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming, went and met him: but Mary sat still in the house. 21 Then said Martha unto Jesus, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. 22 But I know, that even now, whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God will give it thee. 23 Jesus saith unto her, Thy brother shall rise again. 24 Martha saith unto him, I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day. 25 Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: 26 And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this? 27 She saith unto him, Yea, Lord: I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world.
28 And when she had so said, she went her way, and called Mary her sister secretly, saying, The Master is come, and calleth for thee. 29 As soon as she heard that, she arose quickly, and came unto him. 30 Now Jesus was not yet come into the town, but was in that place where Martha met him. 31 The Jews then which were with her in the house, and comforted her, when they saw Mary, that she rose up hastily and went out, followed her, saying, She goeth unto the grave to weep there. 32 Then when Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw him, she fell down at his feet, saying unto him, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.
33 When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled. 34 And said, Where have ye laid him? They said unto him, Lord, come and see. 35 Jesus wept. 36 Then said the Jews, Behold how he loved him!
37 And some of them said, Could not this man, which opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died? 38 Jesus therefore again groaning in himself cometh to the grave. It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it. 39 Jesus said, Take ye away the stone. Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.
40 Jesus saith unto her, Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?
41 Then they took away the stone from the place where the dead was laid. And Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. 42 And I knew that thou hearest me always: but because of the people which stand by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast sent me. 43 And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. 44 And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go.
One way it is crucial is consequential - in that it provoked the Chief Priests and Pharisees to decide that is was expedient that Jesus be killed for the greater good (a misunderstood true prophecy).
The Fourth Gospel - as nearly always - tells us the story as evidence that Jesus really is the Christ, sent by God, and would become (after his ascension) fully the Son of God.
Beyond this, there are two possible interpretations. The usual is that the miracle was restoring Lazarus to normal life; the other, which I think is the one we are meant to infer, is that the miracle was resurrecting Lazarus to the eternal life that Jesus promised to all who 'believed on' his name.
The Gospel is really pretty clear that we are meant to understand the raising of Lazarus as a real resurrection, that same resurrection which we are all promised by Jesus following our mortal life and death - and which Jesus himself experienced.
1. The Gospel establishes that Lazarus really is dead, properly dead, irrevocably; such that (because he is rotting - 'stinketh') he cannot be brought back to mortal life. Because of this, Jesus shares the general grief and wept - as is appropriate with real, permanent mortal death.
2. In the discussion between Jesus and Martha, he makes clear that Lazarus is to be resurrected.
3. Lazarus is entombed in a cave, blocked by a stone - which explicitly prefigures the death and resurrection of Jesus.
4. The references to the people witnessing the glory of God are appropriate to a resurrection. Glory is associated with the ascension of the resurrected Jesus - for people to see the glory of God in the resurrection of Lazarus suggests more than simply restoring him to mortal life. I am not sure; but I think it means that, in the act of resurrecting Lazarus - with the assistance of his Father, Jesus is displaying the power he will attain after his ascension to full divinity
With such in-your-face evidence - it is hard to explain the general mainstream view that Lazarus is Not resurrected. This I regard as an example of the way that scholars read the Bible through their pre-existing general theological considerations; and they seldom see the obvious, but only confirmation of the pre-existing theories of what they expect to find.
Most regard it as theologically vital that Jesus is the first Man to be resurrected - and therefore even the possibility of the resurrection of Lazarus is edited out of consideration.
Perhaps the supposed lack of further reference to Lazarus in the Fourth Gospel is seen as another problem - in that the first resurrected Man would presumably have some part to play in God's plan for Men.
But this is only a problem if you regard the author of the Fourth Gospel (never self-named, but self-described as the 'beloved' disciple) as John the son of Zebedee - however, if you regard the author of the Fourth Gospel as the resurrected Lazarus (as I do) then 'it all fits'.
Relevant passages in bold...
John 11: 1 Now a certain man was sick, named Lazarus, of Bethany, the town of Mary and her sister Martha. 2 (It was that Mary which anointed the Lord with ointment, and wiped his feet with her hair, whose brother Lazarus was sick.) 3 Therefore his sisters sent unto him, saying, Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick. 4 When Jesus heard that, he said, This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby. 5 Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus. 6 When he had heard therefore that he was sick, he abode two days still in the same place where he was. 7 Then after that saith he to his disciples, Let us go into Judaea again. 8 His disciples say unto him, Master, the Jews of late sought to stone thee; and goest thou thither again? 9 Jesus answered, Are there not twelve hours in the day? If any man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of this world. 10 But if a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him.
11 These things said he: and after that he saith unto them, Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep. 12 Then said his disciples, Lord, if he sleep, he shall do well. 13 Howbeit Jesus spake of his death: but they thought that he had spoken of taking of rest in sleep. 14 Then said Jesus unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead. 15 And I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent ye may believe; nevertheless let us go unto him. 16 Then said Thomas, which is called Didymus, unto his fellow disciples, Let us also go, that we may die with him. 17 Then when Jesus came, he found that he had lain in the grave four days already.
18 Now Bethany was nigh unto Jerusalem, about fifteen furlongs off: 19 And many of the Jews came to Martha and Mary, to comfort them concerning their brother. 20 Then Martha, as soon as she heard that Jesus was coming, went and met him: but Mary sat still in the house. 21 Then said Martha unto Jesus, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died. 22 But I know, that even now, whatsoever thou wilt ask of God, God will give it thee. 23 Jesus saith unto her, Thy brother shall rise again. 24 Martha saith unto him, I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day. 25 Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: 26 And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this? 27 She saith unto him, Yea, Lord: I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world.
28 And when she had so said, she went her way, and called Mary her sister secretly, saying, The Master is come, and calleth for thee. 29 As soon as she heard that, she arose quickly, and came unto him. 30 Now Jesus was not yet come into the town, but was in that place where Martha met him. 31 The Jews then which were with her in the house, and comforted her, when they saw Mary, that she rose up hastily and went out, followed her, saying, She goeth unto the grave to weep there. 32 Then when Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw him, she fell down at his feet, saying unto him, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.
33 When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled. 34 And said, Where have ye laid him? They said unto him, Lord, come and see. 35 Jesus wept. 36 Then said the Jews, Behold how he loved him!
37 And some of them said, Could not this man, which opened the eyes of the blind, have caused that even this man should not have died? 38 Jesus therefore again groaning in himself cometh to the grave. It was a cave, and a stone lay upon it. 39 Jesus said, Take ye away the stone. Martha, the sister of him that was dead, saith unto him, Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he hath been dead four days.
40 Jesus saith unto her, Said I not unto thee, that, if thou wouldest believe, thou shouldest see the glory of God?
41 Then they took away the stone from the place where the dead was laid. And Jesus lifted up his eyes, and said, Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me. 42 And I knew that thou hearest me always: but because of the people which stand by I said it, that they may believe that thou hast sent me. 43 And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. 44 And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go.
Thursday, 27 September 2018
Social division/ polarisation in The West
There are many mainstream media and official bureaucracy complaints about the current and increasing social division - or 'polarisation'.
At the same time the reason for increasing social division is the mainstream media and the bureaucracy and their systematic inculcation and direction of fear and resentment against their enemies (or scapegoat friends; symbolically punished for their insufficient enthusiasm).
What they mean by 'division' is that some people disagree with them; that some people dissent (or have been dishonestly or arbitrarily labelled as dissenting - equally effective) from the totalitarian politically correct leftist materialism that is now the core ideology.
If that is what is meant by division, there is - in fact - very little division in modern society.
Almost everybody is on-message overall and on average and in terms of fundamental assumptions - but a few scattered persons dissent in various specific details (or are said to), and these are The Problem of Polarisation. The approved answer is that such people get in-line, and cease to divide themselves from the mainstream.
So, by this definition of division/ polarisation - I hope that there would be a lot more of it, I'm disappointed there is so very little (even in people's private minds and wishes, there seems to be very little dissent).
Nonetheless, even when everyone is 'on side' there will continue to be a manufactured division and persecution - permanent war and also internal conflict (as depicted by Orwell in 1984, represented by Emmanuel Goldstein and his imaginary secret society of saboteurs); because leftist materialism is incoherent (it seeks no specific attainable end-point - except the maximum chosen self-damnation of individual souls); and leftist materialism seeks the most favourable-to-itself societal state of continuous, endemic fear and resentment.
As for the problems of coercion, repression and violence causes by division; I have noticed that the mainstream enforcement is, indeed, far more aggressive and vicious than before, when dealing with accused/ supposed dissent; and the level of induced hatred justifies this and the division of society into Us and Them makes it easier to target (so long as the boundary between us-and-them can be shifted as is expedient).
So, we could perhaps agree that 'division' is only a real problem when it is dissent from reality, truth, beauty and virtue; and that division from incoherence, lies, ugliness and evil would be A Good Thing.
Indeed; in these End Times we should expect that clear and extreme social division is both necessary and positive; because the only alternative is universal self-chosen damnation.
At the same time the reason for increasing social division is the mainstream media and the bureaucracy and their systematic inculcation and direction of fear and resentment against their enemies (or scapegoat friends; symbolically punished for their insufficient enthusiasm).
What they mean by 'division' is that some people disagree with them; that some people dissent (or have been dishonestly or arbitrarily labelled as dissenting - equally effective) from the totalitarian politically correct leftist materialism that is now the core ideology.
If that is what is meant by division, there is - in fact - very little division in modern society.
Almost everybody is on-message overall and on average and in terms of fundamental assumptions - but a few scattered persons dissent in various specific details (or are said to), and these are The Problem of Polarisation. The approved answer is that such people get in-line, and cease to divide themselves from the mainstream.
So, by this definition of division/ polarisation - I hope that there would be a lot more of it, I'm disappointed there is so very little (even in people's private minds and wishes, there seems to be very little dissent).
Nonetheless, even when everyone is 'on side' there will continue to be a manufactured division and persecution - permanent war and also internal conflict (as depicted by Orwell in 1984, represented by Emmanuel Goldstein and his imaginary secret society of saboteurs); because leftist materialism is incoherent (it seeks no specific attainable end-point - except the maximum chosen self-damnation of individual souls); and leftist materialism seeks the most favourable-to-itself societal state of continuous, endemic fear and resentment.
As for the problems of coercion, repression and violence causes by division; I have noticed that the mainstream enforcement is, indeed, far more aggressive and vicious than before, when dealing with accused/ supposed dissent; and the level of induced hatred justifies this and the division of society into Us and Them makes it easier to target (so long as the boundary between us-and-them can be shifted as is expedient).
So, we could perhaps agree that 'division' is only a real problem when it is dissent from reality, truth, beauty and virtue; and that division from incoherence, lies, ugliness and evil would be A Good Thing.
Indeed; in these End Times we should expect that clear and extreme social division is both necessary and positive; because the only alternative is universal self-chosen damnation.
Wednesday, 26 September 2018
Mass media fasting just gets easier all the time; indeed, easier than the alternative
When I wrote my mini-book about the mass media, I advocated a substantial withdrawal from the mass media.
I used to find this advice difficult to follow, but it gets easier all the time - since I find nearly everything online, on TV, in newspapers and magazines, in modern books... to be intolerable.
It is really no hardship to do-without the dull or disgusting propaganda for evil that makes up almost every form of communication nearly all of the time.
Indeed; I find it increasingly difficult to get myself to engage with any form of mass media; because it is just so actively-unpleasant. I start quite a lot of books/ movies/ TV series; but cumulatively I cannot bear the in-my-face preaching of political correctness.
It's like I'm being subjected to a behavioural modification program designed suppress and to extinguish my old addiction; with each media engagement being punished.
Which is (unintentionally) A Good Thing.
I used to find this advice difficult to follow, but it gets easier all the time - since I find nearly everything online, on TV, in newspapers and magazines, in modern books... to be intolerable.
It is really no hardship to do-without the dull or disgusting propaganda for evil that makes up almost every form of communication nearly all of the time.
Indeed; I find it increasingly difficult to get myself to engage with any form of mass media; because it is just so actively-unpleasant. I start quite a lot of books/ movies/ TV series; but cumulatively I cannot bear the in-my-face preaching of political correctness.
It's like I'm being subjected to a behavioural modification program designed suppress and to extinguish my old addiction; with each media engagement being punished.
Which is (unintentionally) A Good Thing.
Tuesday, 25 September 2018
Bad Vestments revisted - a Welby-watch special
The fun thing about living in the End Times is the way that evil is so obvious that it's ridiculous. Who could be so mean-spirited as not to enjoy the above photo?
Archbishop Justin Welby is as ridiculous-looking a man as any in public life. His weak, spiteful, dopey face is simply a product of his inner nature; but he must take be allowed to get personal credit for the choice of vestments with their many horrible features.
Most obviously the colours... what could be more approriate than those yellows? And the red cuffs and maroon collar are master strokes of visual incompetence!
Especially fitting are the subtle references to flames rising from hell to engulf him... but - in line with the true man - even these are feeble, blueish, calor gas type flamelets.
Taken in toto this is a perfect get-up for a person of Welby's type - not one of Satan's savage predators; but a runtish puppy; pathetically eager to serve his demonic masters; hoping and expecting to be petted and pampered for loyal service to the anti-Christian mission; but in practice merely pricked, kicked and mocked for his bumbling ineptitude.
This post is an homage to Bad Vestments, a website that provoked many a 'supertruth laugh' until it became inactive some six years ago - well worth a browse...
The fallacy of the Inner Eye
There is a recurrent spiritual idea that there might be an organ of spiritual perception - an inner 'Third Eye' - by which we might see reality; see, in particular, spiritual phenomena imperceptible to the ordinary senses.
But this idea is conceptually incoherent; because any inner spiritual eye would be prone to the same problem as any ordinary eye; which is that the meaning of reality is not Out There, but requires our own thinking. To know The World therefore requires not merely perceptual information (what we see, hear, touch, taste or small) but instead the true conceptual understanding of perceptual information.
This 'combination' of perceptual and conceptual can happen in thinking, and only in thinking; and only when thinking is truth-full, real - is, in sum, the thinking of that aspect of each Man that is divine. So, it does not matter whether an eye is one of the usual two organs that are located on our faces, or if it is an inner Third Eye - anything that is perceived by any means always requires to be interpreted and understood.
Seeing is Not believed, not even with an inner eye, because we do not comprehend the meaning of what we see unless we are able to interpret what we see in light of true concepts, true theories.
Read the whole thing at Albion Awakening...
But this idea is conceptually incoherent; because any inner spiritual eye would be prone to the same problem as any ordinary eye; which is that the meaning of reality is not Out There, but requires our own thinking. To know The World therefore requires not merely perceptual information (what we see, hear, touch, taste or small) but instead the true conceptual understanding of perceptual information.
This 'combination' of perceptual and conceptual can happen in thinking, and only in thinking; and only when thinking is truth-full, real - is, in sum, the thinking of that aspect of each Man that is divine. So, it does not matter whether an eye is one of the usual two organs that are located on our faces, or if it is an inner Third Eye - anything that is perceived by any means always requires to be interpreted and understood.
Seeing is Not believed, not even with an inner eye, because we do not comprehend the meaning of what we see unless we are able to interpret what we see in light of true concepts, true theories.
Read the whole thing at Albion Awakening...
A thought experiment about thinking
Suppose, as a thought experiment, that your job/ role/ destiny in this mortal life was to think in a certain way some particular thing/s...
This is what you need to do, I need to do, everyone needs to do - but not to think the same thing, rather some particular thing tailored to personal needs. This makes matters more difficult, because each must discover what is their-own thing.
Most would say something like: 'What! Is that all?" It seems that to be required to think some-thing-particular in some particular way is very little to ask; a very small achievement. Surely anybody could think any-thing at any time - what would be the point of it?
Yet think again - think about the nature of modern Western life, think about its busyness, distraction, the deluge of stimulus. Think about the deep assumptions held by nearly everybody... including that thinking is a purely subjective, temporary and trivial activity, an epiphenomenon, unreal...
Then reconsider... To be required to think some-thing in some-way is in practice an impossible demand for most people - not least because to think in the desired and necessary way is something actively-resisted.
And to be required to find something personal to think, something that must be discovered each by his own efforts - some-thing the instruction for which is not to be found anywhere in 'culture' or 'communication'.
In this scenario; you need to think something vital to your destiny, but something that nobody is going to tell you to think. Yet you are living in a world where everybody is telling everybody else what to think all the time - everything except what you actually need to know...
It seems that something simple can also be something that is - in practice and in real life - rare and difficult of attainment.
Yet, if we children of God truly are unique individuals, and if our life has meaning and purpose, and if there is such a think as real-true thinking; then something of this sort is surely required of us.
This is what you need to do, I need to do, everyone needs to do - but not to think the same thing, rather some particular thing tailored to personal needs. This makes matters more difficult, because each must discover what is their-own thing.
Most would say something like: 'What! Is that all?" It seems that to be required to think some-thing-particular in some particular way is very little to ask; a very small achievement. Surely anybody could think any-thing at any time - what would be the point of it?
Yet think again - think about the nature of modern Western life, think about its busyness, distraction, the deluge of stimulus. Think about the deep assumptions held by nearly everybody... including that thinking is a purely subjective, temporary and trivial activity, an epiphenomenon, unreal...
Then reconsider... To be required to think some-thing in some-way is in practice an impossible demand for most people - not least because to think in the desired and necessary way is something actively-resisted.
And to be required to find something personal to think, something that must be discovered each by his own efforts - some-thing the instruction for which is not to be found anywhere in 'culture' or 'communication'.
In this scenario; you need to think something vital to your destiny, but something that nobody is going to tell you to think. Yet you are living in a world where everybody is telling everybody else what to think all the time - everything except what you actually need to know...
It seems that something simple can also be something that is - in practice and in real life - rare and difficult of attainment.
Yet, if we children of God truly are unique individuals, and if our life has meaning and purpose, and if there is such a think as real-true thinking; then something of this sort is surely required of us.
Monday, 24 September 2018
Cherchez la femme... the qualitative change in Rudolf Steiner's life from 1900
Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) founded a movement called Anthroposophy, and has been (pretty much) ignored or ridiculed outside that movement.
So the attitudes to Steiner have tended to fall into extremes of uncritical acceptance and approval of everything he said - or wholesale rejection. My own attitude is that Steiner was a genius of world-historical importance and vital to Western concerns here-and-now; but that most of his best work came in the late 1800s and before he was an Anthroposophist; and, quantitatively, the great bulk of what he wrote after 1900 is wrong.
Because of my interest in Steiner, and the qualified nature of my admiration, I have been interested in his biography; but I have found it difficult to grasp due to the uncritical/ hagiographical nature of his admirers.
Also, until recently, not much has been known about Steiner's life except what he wrote in his autobiography (or in admiring memoirs by insider anthroposophists); and this document - while very interesting and well worth reading - is clearly framed by the requirement to justify and synthesise everything Steiner ever did; to present his life as a consistently-developing whole.
Indeed, Steiner spent a great deal of time and energy in his late lectures and books (and revised editions of books) works insisting that he had never really changed in any fundamental way, that the entirely of his work and life were part of a single coherent project; and that any contradiction or qualitative changes are an illusion.
Anyway, I am currently, carefully reading the first biography of Steiner that is sufficiently detailed to provide sufficient data to get past the hagiography and allow the reader a chance to reach his own conclusions about Steiner's life. This is excellent the multi-volume Peter Selg biography - Rudolf Steiner: Life and Work.
In fact; Selg is a professional Anthroposophist, and in his interpretations he generally endorses Steiner's own version of his motivations - but the detailed information he provides does allow for alternative views to be developed.
To cut to the chase; from Selg I have found confirmation of what was previously just a hunch:
1. Until at least 1897 Steiner was Not a Christian; but was essentially anti-Christian - a Nietzschian individualist, atheist. And largely disdainful of spiritual matters.
2. The period from 1898-1900 is essentially unrecorded, unfortunately; because during this time (according to Steiner's Autobiography written in the mid 1920s) Steiner had become a Christian due to a direct mystical experience; but was not yet a Theosophist.
3. In 1900 Steiner met Marie von Sivers at a series of lectures he delivered to the Theosophical Society. She bowled him over (younger, attractive, talented, charismatic, aristocratic); and became first Steiner's close collaborator/ secretary; then later his second wife. MvS was - from the start - keen for Steiner to be a movement-leader, and had a socio-political (rather than primarily spiritual/ Philosophical) focus of interest.
4. And from 1900 and the embrace of MvS as lifelong companion; Steiner became first a Theosophist and later set up his own splinter Theosophical group called Anthoposophy - which rapidly grew-away-from the parent organisation. But for Steiner, the early years of the 20th century were occupied in re-presenting the major pre-existing elements of Theosophy in a way compatible with Steiner's personal philosophy. These then became permanent and core elements of Anthroposophy.
5. Steiner was a very political young man, for sure - whereas there is near zero objective contemporary evidence for him having been 'spiritual' until about 1900. Up to the early 1900s he was involved in radical anarchistic left-wing society and politics; via articles in magazines (including editing magazines), a book strongly advocating the person and ideas of Nietzsche, and heavy professional involvement in lecturing at socialist working men's colleges.
6. Steiner worked closely with Marxists, but was himself an individualist - and hated the collective aspects of socialism/ communism.
7. Steiner's later political activities focused on building the Anthroposophical Society as an international movement; including extending Theosophy/ Anthroposophy into dance, speech, drama, music, medicine, agriculture, education, architecture and indeed every possible human sphere of action.
8. From the 1914-18 war period and for several years, Steiner's political activities focused on promoting his Threefold Society ideas - this briefly gained high level national influence, and led to a powerful and dangerous backlash against Steiner and his movement (e.g. an assassination attempt, the destruction by arson of his new headquarters building).
9. Immediately after Steiner's death, the leadership of Anthroposophy was taken-on by Marie von Sivers; and she presided over many years of bitter schism, infighting and legal battles among Anthroposophists. In many ways, the movement has never recovered.
10. Nowadays, Anthroposophy has all-but disappeared into the socio-political side of Steiner's work (especially Steiner 'Waldorf' Schools) - but now with a collectivist mindset, in-line with modern Leftism (and with the preferences of Marie von Sivers). So far as I can establish, all modern Anthroposophists are assimilated to collectivist New Leftism (except for one correspondent of mine!)
In sum; it looks as if the inflexion point in Steiner's life and the many new initiatives of his post-1900 career was primarily due to Marie von Sivers. From my perspective she was 'to blame' for most of what I find unacceptable about Steiner!
My regret is that nothing is known from contemporary sources of Steiner's self-reported (but not externally-validated) brief period as a Christian-but-Not-a-Theosophist - from 1898 to the summer of 1900.
So - for those - like me - who regard Steiner's philosophical and spiritual insights as vital, but want to set-aside his Theosophical and socio-political aspects; there is a large task of sifting and discriminating, extracting and reconstructing, to be done!
An enjoyable task - and extremely worthwhile!
Sunday, 23 September 2018
The synergy of CS Lewis and Owen Barfield
I have a new essay on L. Jagi Lamplighter's Superversive Inklings blog.
An excerpt:
Starting with Lewis; we can see that he was the more creative and accomplished writer, and that he was able to express instinctively more than he could (or would) comprehend explicitly. For example, there are depths, there is heart and resonance in Lewis’s imaginative fiction – especially the Narnia stories but also the Planetary trilogy, and also in his imaginative essays such as The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce – that are absent from, and even contradicted-by, Lewis’s theoretical and explicitly-Christian writings.
Barfield was a deeper, more rigorous and honest theoretician than Lewis. Indeed, Barfield understood Lewis and Lewis’s writing, better than Lewis understood himself. In this sense, Barfield was ‘larger’ than Lewis – but Barfield could not accomplish what Lewis did – so it could be said that Lewis expressed Barfield better than Barfield expressed himself!
This is why they are complementary.
Read the whole thing...
An excerpt:
Starting with Lewis; we can see that he was the more creative and accomplished writer, and that he was able to express instinctively more than he could (or would) comprehend explicitly. For example, there are depths, there is heart and resonance in Lewis’s imaginative fiction – especially the Narnia stories but also the Planetary trilogy, and also in his imaginative essays such as The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce – that are absent from, and even contradicted-by, Lewis’s theoretical and explicitly-Christian writings.
Barfield was a deeper, more rigorous and honest theoretician than Lewis. Indeed, Barfield understood Lewis and Lewis’s writing, better than Lewis understood himself. In this sense, Barfield was ‘larger’ than Lewis – but Barfield could not accomplish what Lewis did – so it could be said that Lewis expressed Barfield better than Barfield expressed himself!
This is why they are complementary.
Read the whole thing...
Friday, 21 September 2018
Would an ideal parent do IT to a loved member of his family?
This question may be a better, more valid and comprehensible, way of analysing moral difficulties and dilemmas than the more usual method of establishing and assuming some general principles or rules, and trying to reason logically from then to the specific situation - in light of other established and assumed principles... which method rarely seems to work in practice, and rarely seems to convince impartially, except in simple and extreme cases.
Is capital punishment (execution) acceptable - if so, by what method? Is torture acceptable - and if not, then what level of coercion counts as torture? Is it acceptable to charge interest on a loan - and if so how much and under what situation?
Such matters can perhaps be clarified by assuming that you are dealing with a loved member of your family. This is the most relevant consideration because it is the exact situation of God in dealing with Men - we are all, and without exception, loved children of God.
If we can imagine ourselves as an ideal parent, dealing with problems among our children - perhaps we can see what is acceptable, appropriate - and the reverse.
In doing so we need to bear in mind that dealing in a loving fashion with one's children does Not etail letting them do what they want at this moment - especially Not doing what they want To Each Other.
being an ideal loving parent Does entail being tough at times, using coercion at times - it Does entail making the best of an often very difficult situation in which time, resources and effort are all finite. It Does entail often feeling great sorrow for what must be done, what ought to be done.
Tackled in a fashion that combines realism with practicality; I think this parental approach to life answers many, perhaps most, of the moral dilemmas and cruxes I have come across.
Is capital punishment (execution) acceptable - if so, by what method? Is torture acceptable - and if not, then what level of coercion counts as torture? Is it acceptable to charge interest on a loan - and if so how much and under what situation?
Such matters can perhaps be clarified by assuming that you are dealing with a loved member of your family. This is the most relevant consideration because it is the exact situation of God in dealing with Men - we are all, and without exception, loved children of God.
If we can imagine ourselves as an ideal parent, dealing with problems among our children - perhaps we can see what is acceptable, appropriate - and the reverse.
In doing so we need to bear in mind that dealing in a loving fashion with one's children does Not etail letting them do what they want at this moment - especially Not doing what they want To Each Other.
being an ideal loving parent Does entail being tough at times, using coercion at times - it Does entail making the best of an often very difficult situation in which time, resources and effort are all finite. It Does entail often feeling great sorrow for what must be done, what ought to be done.
Tackled in a fashion that combines realism with practicality; I think this parental approach to life answers many, perhaps most, of the moral dilemmas and cruxes I have come across.
Thursday, 20 September 2018
What would losing the culture war look like?
Put aside such notions as the collapse of civilisation, civil war, mass invasion; put aside mass death by famine, plague and violence...
All those might happen yet we could still have won the culture war.
A global totalitarian society, an all pervasive leftist bureaucracy, a society of omni-surveillance and dictated behaviour are all merely mechanisms to advance us towards the real goal of the culture war...
If we truly lose the culture war, we will not be able directly to see the results - because losing the culture wars is about mass rejection of Christ's gift of life everlasting - it is about mass self-chosen damnation.
It is possible that really terrible things may happen to you and me and our world; yet, as a consequence, people may wake-up to the spiritual truth of our situation.
There is no sign of this (that I can discern) at present - but if the demonic forces that rule our planet make an error in their strategy of damnation, then all or some of the terrible things might bring people to clarity, and in that clarity they may directly perceive reality; and from that position then they may choose Good.
So, although the demons are indeed behind the policies and propaganda for global chaos, pervasive fear, group resentments, personal pride and the 'politicisation' (i.e. absorption to evil ideologies) of all human activities from morn to night and cradle to grave... some of these are means, and only one is the end.
Don't forget this - try to remember.
All those might happen yet we could still have won the culture war.
A global totalitarian society, an all pervasive leftist bureaucracy, a society of omni-surveillance and dictated behaviour are all merely mechanisms to advance us towards the real goal of the culture war...
If we truly lose the culture war, we will not be able directly to see the results - because losing the culture wars is about mass rejection of Christ's gift of life everlasting - it is about mass self-chosen damnation.
It is possible that really terrible things may happen to you and me and our world; yet, as a consequence, people may wake-up to the spiritual truth of our situation.
There is no sign of this (that I can discern) at present - but if the demonic forces that rule our planet make an error in their strategy of damnation, then all or some of the terrible things might bring people to clarity, and in that clarity they may directly perceive reality; and from that position then they may choose Good.
So, although the demons are indeed behind the policies and propaganda for global chaos, pervasive fear, group resentments, personal pride and the 'politicisation' (i.e. absorption to evil ideologies) of all human activities from morn to night and cradle to grave... some of these are means, and only one is the end.
Don't forget this - try to remember.
Wednesday, 19 September 2018
How The West was destroyed in four steps
1. Science proves its power and usefulness. 17th to early 19th century.
2. Science establishes itself as the Only valid form of knowledge, 'hence' mode of reasoning. Late 19th-early 20th century.
3. Bureaucracy subsidises, infiltrates, occupies, subverts, destroys science. Middle to late 20th century.
4. Bureaucracy established as the only valid form of organisation, knowledge and thinking - global totalitarian system in place.
Corresponds to: 1. Voluntary collaboration of individuals, 2. Formal institutional structure of individuals, 3. Control by committees/ peer review, 4. Individuals serve abstract processes and procedures.
Corresponds to: Scientists as Christians, Scientists brought up as Christians, Scientists as atheists, 'Scientists' as careerists.
2. Science establishes itself as the Only valid form of knowledge, 'hence' mode of reasoning. Late 19th-early 20th century.
3. Bureaucracy subsidises, infiltrates, occupies, subverts, destroys science. Middle to late 20th century.
4. Bureaucracy established as the only valid form of organisation, knowledge and thinking - global totalitarian system in place.
Corresponds to: 1. Voluntary collaboration of individuals, 2. Formal institutional structure of individuals, 3. Control by committees/ peer review, 4. Individuals serve abstract processes and procedures.
Corresponds to: Scientists as Christians, Scientists brought up as Christians, Scientists as atheists, 'Scientists' as careerists.
Tuesday, 18 September 2018
Monday, 17 September 2018
We are dreaming all the time - and need to become aware of the fact
As I have mentioned before in this blog; I believe that we are dreaming all the time that we are awake - underneath waking life, we are continually dreaming. And sometimes, when we are napping, we may dip into and out-of this continual dreaming.
In dreaming, we are in contact with divine, presumably angelic, influences; which is why dreams are a mode of archetype and myth. Ancient man lived always in this kind of dreamlike state, and we all lived this way as young children. Thus human history and our personal development was a process of becoming more alert, awake, conscious during waking life - but also a process of becoming cut-off from unconscious and pervasive divine influences.
So, for modern Man dream is our last vestige of that old mythic consciousness; but our task and destiny is - consciously and by choice - to return to a state of contact with divine beings. My understanding is that this was supposed to happen in The West from the late 1700s, at the time of the Romantic era.
In terms of dreaming while awake, we were supposed to become aware of it; become aware of the nature of the angelic influences from that mythic, archetypal undercurrent. However, this did not happen, Instead, Western man took the path of atheism, materialism; and embraced a metaphysics which regards God, angels, soul, myth, destiny, ultimate purpose and meaning (etc) as not-really-real. These were all relegated to the world of subjective imagination. Real-reality - the objective - that is the public realm of discourse upon which law, morality and policy are based, excluded all such matters by assumption.
The result is that we are self-blinded to the continual influences of waking dreams, which we experience only as 'gut-level' instincts, impulses and urges. Because we will not acknowledge their true nature and origin; these influences can be (and are) pervasively, systematically misinterpreted by public discourse. Thus divine destiny has been perverted in many ways, and turned to harm and evil.
An example is the sexual revolution. We all experience a divine impulse towards a different, more personal, less group-based, relation between men and women. Properly, this ought to signal a development towards our ultimate divine goal of an eternal loving and creative married union - a creative dyadic relationship.
But this has, in multiple ways, misinterpreted as a gut level instinct for personal gratification in this world - leading to all sorts of harms such as (via the public policy, the mass media and arts) mocking, maligning and subverting marriage and the family; promoting casual and lust-based promiscuity; dividing men and women into interest groups, set against each other; and the enforced promotion of same sex activity and wholesale delusion and contradiction about sexual identity. This has led to misery and suffering in this world, contributed to a pervasive atmosphere of resentment and selfish short-termism, and most significantly anti Christianity and the embrace of self-damnation.
My understanding is therefore that we must become aware of our waking dreams, or else be destroyed by them.
Currently, we are blocking our own awareness - so what we must do is to stop doing this. Stop it by whatever works, whatever means tends-to that end.... But first by acknowledging the problem.
In dreaming, we are in contact with divine, presumably angelic, influences; which is why dreams are a mode of archetype and myth. Ancient man lived always in this kind of dreamlike state, and we all lived this way as young children. Thus human history and our personal development was a process of becoming more alert, awake, conscious during waking life - but also a process of becoming cut-off from unconscious and pervasive divine influences.
So, for modern Man dream is our last vestige of that old mythic consciousness; but our task and destiny is - consciously and by choice - to return to a state of contact with divine beings. My understanding is that this was supposed to happen in The West from the late 1700s, at the time of the Romantic era.
In terms of dreaming while awake, we were supposed to become aware of it; become aware of the nature of the angelic influences from that mythic, archetypal undercurrent. However, this did not happen, Instead, Western man took the path of atheism, materialism; and embraced a metaphysics which regards God, angels, soul, myth, destiny, ultimate purpose and meaning (etc) as not-really-real. These were all relegated to the world of subjective imagination. Real-reality - the objective - that is the public realm of discourse upon which law, morality and policy are based, excluded all such matters by assumption.
The result is that we are self-blinded to the continual influences of waking dreams, which we experience only as 'gut-level' instincts, impulses and urges. Because we will not acknowledge their true nature and origin; these influences can be (and are) pervasively, systematically misinterpreted by public discourse. Thus divine destiny has been perverted in many ways, and turned to harm and evil.
An example is the sexual revolution. We all experience a divine impulse towards a different, more personal, less group-based, relation between men and women. Properly, this ought to signal a development towards our ultimate divine goal of an eternal loving and creative married union - a creative dyadic relationship.
But this has, in multiple ways, misinterpreted as a gut level instinct for personal gratification in this world - leading to all sorts of harms such as (via the public policy, the mass media and arts) mocking, maligning and subverting marriage and the family; promoting casual and lust-based promiscuity; dividing men and women into interest groups, set against each other; and the enforced promotion of same sex activity and wholesale delusion and contradiction about sexual identity. This has led to misery and suffering in this world, contributed to a pervasive atmosphere of resentment and selfish short-termism, and most significantly anti Christianity and the embrace of self-damnation.
My understanding is therefore that we must become aware of our waking dreams, or else be destroyed by them.
Currently, we are blocking our own awareness - so what we must do is to stop doing this. Stop it by whatever works, whatever means tends-to that end.... But first by acknowledging the problem.
Sunday, 16 September 2018
How to become a 'spiritual' (Direct) Christian...
Christian writers and teachers have generally been happy to focus their advice on what Christians do - and to assume that right-thinking will follow right-doing. CS Lewis is a good example of this - he has a tendency to favour action over thought; practical Christian living over the mystical or spiritual tradition.
But, while this works for some people some of the time, this is unsatisfactory for many reasons; the most important of which is that - ultimately - thinking is more important than action. I won't rehearse why, but this blog has argued the point over the past several years, from many angles.
Other problems are that modern Christians, even when they follow Christian rules, generally think in the same materialist leftist way as the mainstream secular world - and over time, the wrong-thinking subverts, erodes and overthrows the 'right' practical aspects - as we have seen in all the major Christian churches. So that the meaning of acts becomes, in many cases, reversed. We get churches who say the same old things, but means by them the opposite - Christian forms with materialist-atheist content.
However, there is a big problem for those (like me) who advocate that Christian living ought to be rooted in Christian thinking - which is the question: How to change thinking?
People know how to change for the better their behaviour, their actions, what they do; but have no idea how they might set-about changing their thinking. The answer to What should I do? is not obvious.
The usual, but unsatisfactory, answer involves some kind of training of thinking, usually by some kind of meditative or prayer practice. But this leads to a kind of 'bootstrap problem' of how to use thinking to change thinking. How can we get a purchase on unwanted thoughts, adopt one sort of thought over another?
Furthermore, it may well be that meditation or prayer is (in practice) just another type of change of behaviour, without change in the mode of thinking. Using words like God and Jesus, but in the same mundane way we would discuss politics, law or holidays.
Also, it generally doesn't work...
By contrast; the way I would advise setting-about changing thinking for the better is to examine you metaphysical assumptions; bring to conscious awareness the basic assumptions you make concerning the nature of reality and all fundamental matters... in particular those that are most important to you.
This is simply a matter of honestly and rigorously questioning yourself why you think something, and following the answers through until you reach something that is a basic assumption, without any further reason for it.
Then examine these basic assumptions.
I have found that this leads to some assumptions that I regarded as wrong, false, or something I did not really believe; and that when these were revised that the whole of thinking - the superficial ideas and thoughts that had previously been supported by these wrong deep-basic assumptions, would begin to change.
So, conscious thinking is used to bring-out unconscious assumptions. And change in false or incoherent deep beliefs is used to reshape and re-order the great mass of surface thoughts.
The stream of thinking is not tackled directly, by trying (usually failing) to use one set of current thoughts against another. Instead, the focus is on bringing-to-conscious-awareness. The trigger for change is that what was unconscious and implicit, becomes conscious and explicit.
It is a matter of redigging the foundations, and then the old building will collapse and a new building will - spontaneously - become constructed upon the new foundations, simply in the course of everyday living and thinking, experiencing and learning.
And because the foundational assumptions are different in form, they are the basis of a different kind of thinking. If the new foundations include deeper depths and wider possibilities, then so will the new daily thoughts deriving from them.
And when we find these everyday thoughts have drifted back into mainstream materialism (as they will...); we can respond by reflecting consciously on our deep assumptions; and from them a new and better kind of thinking will emerge.
Note added: It might very well, and quite reasonably, be argued that if the transformed thinking of Direct Christianity is indeed our task at this time, and if such Direct Christianity necessarily requires the kind of metaphysical reflection I recommend... then there are going to be very few people who will actually do what is really needed. I suspect that this is likely to be correct.
But, while this works for some people some of the time, this is unsatisfactory for many reasons; the most important of which is that - ultimately - thinking is more important than action. I won't rehearse why, but this blog has argued the point over the past several years, from many angles.
Other problems are that modern Christians, even when they follow Christian rules, generally think in the same materialist leftist way as the mainstream secular world - and over time, the wrong-thinking subverts, erodes and overthrows the 'right' practical aspects - as we have seen in all the major Christian churches. So that the meaning of acts becomes, in many cases, reversed. We get churches who say the same old things, but means by them the opposite - Christian forms with materialist-atheist content.
However, there is a big problem for those (like me) who advocate that Christian living ought to be rooted in Christian thinking - which is the question: How to change thinking?
People know how to change for the better their behaviour, their actions, what they do; but have no idea how they might set-about changing their thinking. The answer to What should I do? is not obvious.
The usual, but unsatisfactory, answer involves some kind of training of thinking, usually by some kind of meditative or prayer practice. But this leads to a kind of 'bootstrap problem' of how to use thinking to change thinking. How can we get a purchase on unwanted thoughts, adopt one sort of thought over another?
Furthermore, it may well be that meditation or prayer is (in practice) just another type of change of behaviour, without change in the mode of thinking. Using words like God and Jesus, but in the same mundane way we would discuss politics, law or holidays.
Also, it generally doesn't work...
By contrast; the way I would advise setting-about changing thinking for the better is to examine you metaphysical assumptions; bring to conscious awareness the basic assumptions you make concerning the nature of reality and all fundamental matters... in particular those that are most important to you.
This is simply a matter of honestly and rigorously questioning yourself why you think something, and following the answers through until you reach something that is a basic assumption, without any further reason for it.
Then examine these basic assumptions.
I have found that this leads to some assumptions that I regarded as wrong, false, or something I did not really believe; and that when these were revised that the whole of thinking - the superficial ideas and thoughts that had previously been supported by these wrong deep-basic assumptions, would begin to change.
So, conscious thinking is used to bring-out unconscious assumptions. And change in false or incoherent deep beliefs is used to reshape and re-order the great mass of surface thoughts.
The stream of thinking is not tackled directly, by trying (usually failing) to use one set of current thoughts against another. Instead, the focus is on bringing-to-conscious-awareness. The trigger for change is that what was unconscious and implicit, becomes conscious and explicit.
It is a matter of redigging the foundations, and then the old building will collapse and a new building will - spontaneously - become constructed upon the new foundations, simply in the course of everyday living and thinking, experiencing and learning.
And because the foundational assumptions are different in form, they are the basis of a different kind of thinking. If the new foundations include deeper depths and wider possibilities, then so will the new daily thoughts deriving from them.
And when we find these everyday thoughts have drifted back into mainstream materialism (as they will...); we can respond by reflecting consciously on our deep assumptions; and from them a new and better kind of thinking will emerge.
Note added: It might very well, and quite reasonably, be argued that if the transformed thinking of Direct Christianity is indeed our task at this time, and if such Direct Christianity necessarily requires the kind of metaphysical reflection I recommend... then there are going to be very few people who will actually do what is really needed. I suspect that this is likely to be correct.
Saturday, 15 September 2018
Father William Sirr (1862-1937) by John Fitzgerald
At Albion Awakening, John Fitzgerald discusses an English Anglican monk, hermits, Narnia and the needs of these times...
Why obedience and surrender to God's will are wrong descriptions of what God ultimately wants from us
They may have been getting 'carried away' and overstating things for rhetorical effect; but Christian's have quite often stated that obedience and surrender to God's will are the primary Christian virtues. But this is wrong; these are clearly the wrong words, the wrong concepts.
Obedience, surrender, submission to divine will is, indeed, apparently the primary virtue for Muslims; but not for Christians.
Men are sons and daughters of God; that is, children who are intended to grow-up; and, from the work and gift of Jesus Christ, we have the possibility of becoming divine and attaining life eternal.
Christians need to distinguish what is appropriate for children, and early stages of development - by contrast with God's main purpose underlying creation. Ultimately; good needs to be chosen, not obeyed; actively-embraced not passively-followed.
In this, as in most things, Jesus is the example for Men.
God's plan and project of creation needs to be understood, and each needs to affiliate with it. The ultimate aim is a alliance between Man and God; with Man raised to the level of divine. Obedience is, at most, a phase en route to this ideal - a developmental means towards the end of grown-up virtue.
Meanwhile, obedience and surrender to God's will may be necessary at specific times and places - but if it is implied that this is the end as well as the means - then we are misrepresenting the whole divine creation, and making Christianity incoherent - or else implying that the creation is a botched job.
Such incoherence of argument has become very obvious to modern Men, so by over-emphasising obedience (perhaps on grounds of immediate expedience), the cause of Christianity may well be impaired.
This is one reason why theosis - the voluntary development of Men toward ultimate divinity - ought to be given a much greater, central, place in the primary description of Christianity (as it is in the Fourth Gospel).
Obedience, surrender, submission to divine will is, indeed, apparently the primary virtue for Muslims; but not for Christians.
Men are sons and daughters of God; that is, children who are intended to grow-up; and, from the work and gift of Jesus Christ, we have the possibility of becoming divine and attaining life eternal.
Christians need to distinguish what is appropriate for children, and early stages of development - by contrast with God's main purpose underlying creation. Ultimately; good needs to be chosen, not obeyed; actively-embraced not passively-followed.
In this, as in most things, Jesus is the example for Men.
God's plan and project of creation needs to be understood, and each needs to affiliate with it. The ultimate aim is a alliance between Man and God; with Man raised to the level of divine. Obedience is, at most, a phase en route to this ideal - a developmental means towards the end of grown-up virtue.
Meanwhile, obedience and surrender to God's will may be necessary at specific times and places - but if it is implied that this is the end as well as the means - then we are misrepresenting the whole divine creation, and making Christianity incoherent - or else implying that the creation is a botched job.
Such incoherence of argument has become very obvious to modern Men, so by over-emphasising obedience (perhaps on grounds of immediate expedience), the cause of Christianity may well be impaired.
This is one reason why theosis - the voluntary development of Men toward ultimate divinity - ought to be given a much greater, central, place in the primary description of Christianity (as it is in the Fourth Gospel).
Friday, 14 September 2018
Agency is the main limitation and constraint on divine knowledge and power ('omni-science/ potence')
Regular readers will know that I regard the characterisation of 'an omni-God' - that is a God described in terms of abstract absolutes such as omnipotence, omniscience and omnipresence - as a wrong, tendentious, harm-tending error of mainstream Christianity. God is not all-knowing, not all-powerful - and one major and vital limitation on God is agency, or Free Will.
God's knowledge and power is rooted in his being The Creator; and the crux of the problem for mainstream Christianity is that if God created Free Will, if he created the 'mechanism' of agency - and because creation is something on-going and continuous (not something done once in the past then left), then God would have knowledge of and power over Free would... But then agency would not be truly autonomous and free: merely just another expression of God's ongoing creation...
To me, the above mainstream Christian explanation is seriously incoherent; and given the importance of Free Will to Christianity, we need to try and do better...
Since (as I assume) agency is real and will is indeed free; then these need to be regarded as Not having been created and sustained by God. But instead, agents with free will are pre-existent to God's creation - already-there when creation began - used-by God in doing creation, but not made-by God.
So; the nature of reality is that God's creation is the means by which he pursues his divine plan, a plan to have children and to raise them to become divine like himself (and this has now been fully accomplished by Jesus Christ - so all Men have a model and method) - working-around the constraint, a 'constraint' which is itself necessary for full divinity, of Man's agency.
Thus we have God's creation, inhabited by living, conscious agents with (various degrees of) Free Will - God controlling many aspects of the situation, but neither knowing nor controlling the 'inner workings' of agency.
In other words the real-self is divine, and opaque to God the creator. God must therefore pursue his goals 'indirectly'. However, this indirectness is a feature, not a bug, since it is only genuine free-agents who can fulfil God's plan.
(The alternative being a universe of unfree, wholly-controlled automata; fake/ simulated persons merely.)
And insofar as reality consists of many agent beings of many kinds - including what we currently (mainstream) think of as minerals, vegetables, and animals; which are alive and conscious to different degrees and in different ways - the nature of reality consists of God setting up situations and responding to the consequences of agency, in a continually purposive but not-predetermined fashion.
It explains why Free Will is a necessary part of the plan; God had to work-around agency in order that the plan could be achieved; and without Free Will there could have been no plan for divinisation.
This description seems to me an exact fit for the nature of reality as I perceive and understand it; which is why I share it here.
God's knowledge and power is rooted in his being The Creator; and the crux of the problem for mainstream Christianity is that if God created Free Will, if he created the 'mechanism' of agency - and because creation is something on-going and continuous (not something done once in the past then left), then God would have knowledge of and power over Free would... But then agency would not be truly autonomous and free: merely just another expression of God's ongoing creation...
To me, the above mainstream Christian explanation is seriously incoherent; and given the importance of Free Will to Christianity, we need to try and do better...
Since (as I assume) agency is real and will is indeed free; then these need to be regarded as Not having been created and sustained by God. But instead, agents with free will are pre-existent to God's creation - already-there when creation began - used-by God in doing creation, but not made-by God.
So; the nature of reality is that God's creation is the means by which he pursues his divine plan, a plan to have children and to raise them to become divine like himself (and this has now been fully accomplished by Jesus Christ - so all Men have a model and method) - working-around the constraint, a 'constraint' which is itself necessary for full divinity, of Man's agency.
Thus we have God's creation, inhabited by living, conscious agents with (various degrees of) Free Will - God controlling many aspects of the situation, but neither knowing nor controlling the 'inner workings' of agency.
In other words the real-self is divine, and opaque to God the creator. God must therefore pursue his goals 'indirectly'. However, this indirectness is a feature, not a bug, since it is only genuine free-agents who can fulfil God's plan.
(The alternative being a universe of unfree, wholly-controlled automata; fake/ simulated persons merely.)
And insofar as reality consists of many agent beings of many kinds - including what we currently (mainstream) think of as minerals, vegetables, and animals; which are alive and conscious to different degrees and in different ways - the nature of reality consists of God setting up situations and responding to the consequences of agency, in a continually purposive but not-predetermined fashion.
It explains why Free Will is a necessary part of the plan; God had to work-around agency in order that the plan could be achieved; and without Free Will there could have been no plan for divinisation.
This description seems to me an exact fit for the nature of reality as I perceive and understand it; which is why I share it here.
Notes on 'Free Will' (or agency), God and Creation
There are so many incoherent ideas-about and explanations-of Free Will, and yet its reality is so vitally important, that this is something that almost everybody needs to sort-out for themselves (assuming that they cannot ignore the explanations).
For Christians, Free Will is at the heart of the religion; and indeed, when (as has quite often happened) Christians neglect the matter of Free Will then the whole nature and practice of the religion gravitates into something quite un-Christian.
Indeed, when Free Will is taken out of Christianity, we get something approximating to Islam - in which obedience to God's will becomes the central virtue.
Nonetheless, taking Free Will seriously (as I think we must) takes us to places a long way from mainstream Christianity
1. Free Will is about thinking, not about actions. (Necessary to avoid incoherence.) Free Will is not all of thinking, not even most of thinking: Free Will is one kind, and the most fundamental kind, of thinking.
2. Free Will needs to be considered an uncaused cause - that is, the thinking of Free Will cannot be explained in terms of being a consequence of anything else. So we should not try to do so.
3. This means that the thinking of Free Will can be observed only after it has emerged. We cannot, and never could, perceive what is going-on in Free Will: Free Will emerges from a black box. We might observe it as it emerges from the black box, but could never see it being formed.
4. And when I say 'we' could not perceive or observe the workings or causes of Free Will - I also mean our-real-selves cannot do this. The (obvious) reason being that Free Will emerges-from our real-selves. So we-our-selves are in the position of observing thoughts as they emerge from our-selves - we can do so only after they have separated from ourselves.
5. What applies to our-selves also applies to God. God cannot, does not, perceive and know what is going-on where the thinking of Free Will comes-from. God cannot see-into our real selves; cannot analyse of Free Will: nothing can.
6. The 'workings' of Free Will are opaque, even to the creator - the reason is that God did not create that-which from-which Free Will emerges. That entity from-which Free Will (our real-selves) emerges is prior to creation.
7. God's creation works-around this; but Free Will is not a regrettable constraint. Creation is about bringing the Free Will of personal agents into voluntary, loving harmony and further creativity.
Note: What I have done above to is make a metaphysical assumption that Free Will is really-real and really-free (because implied and entailed by Christianity); and to reason from that assumption.
For Christians, Free Will is at the heart of the religion; and indeed, when (as has quite often happened) Christians neglect the matter of Free Will then the whole nature and practice of the religion gravitates into something quite un-Christian.
Indeed, when Free Will is taken out of Christianity, we get something approximating to Islam - in which obedience to God's will becomes the central virtue.
Nonetheless, taking Free Will seriously (as I think we must) takes us to places a long way from mainstream Christianity
1. Free Will is about thinking, not about actions. (Necessary to avoid incoherence.) Free Will is not all of thinking, not even most of thinking: Free Will is one kind, and the most fundamental kind, of thinking.
2. Free Will needs to be considered an uncaused cause - that is, the thinking of Free Will cannot be explained in terms of being a consequence of anything else. So we should not try to do so.
3. This means that the thinking of Free Will can be observed only after it has emerged. We cannot, and never could, perceive what is going-on in Free Will: Free Will emerges from a black box. We might observe it as it emerges from the black box, but could never see it being formed.
4. And when I say 'we' could not perceive or observe the workings or causes of Free Will - I also mean our-real-selves cannot do this. The (obvious) reason being that Free Will emerges-from our real-selves. So we-our-selves are in the position of observing thoughts as they emerge from our-selves - we can do so only after they have separated from ourselves.
5. What applies to our-selves also applies to God. God cannot, does not, perceive and know what is going-on where the thinking of Free Will comes-from. God cannot see-into our real selves; cannot analyse of Free Will: nothing can.
6. The 'workings' of Free Will are opaque, even to the creator - the reason is that God did not create that-which from-which Free Will emerges. That entity from-which Free Will (our real-selves) emerges is prior to creation.
7. God's creation works-around this; but Free Will is not a regrettable constraint. Creation is about bringing the Free Will of personal agents into voluntary, loving harmony and further creativity.
Note: What I have done above to is make a metaphysical assumption that Free Will is really-real and really-free (because implied and entailed by Christianity); and to reason from that assumption.
Thursday, 13 September 2018
God the Father is incarnate - and 'incarnate' refers to a mode of consciousness
Reading the Fourth Gospel ('of John') it is almost incomprehensible how mainstream Christians became dogmatically fixed on the idea that God the Father was a spirit, and not incarnate; given the multiple and clear references to Jesus stating that he and the Father are the same in form.
The Father, we are told, is incarnate, has a body - this isn't in doubt, but the question is what this state of incarnation means.
Part of the prevalent misunderstanding that The Father is spirit derives from the already-existing philosophical idea among Classical pre-Christian intellectuals that God 'must be' a discarnate spirit, because spirit was the highest form. They regarded bodies as matter, and matter as lower than spirit - more restricted, prone to corruption etc...
Another element is that the nature of purpose of incarnation is mis-stated by the word in-carn-ation itself, with its reference to the body - asif that was the most-important aspect of the definition.
But if we accept that the ultimate reality of creation is consciousness, and that God 'thinks' creation into manifestation and sustains it as such, and that it is by our thinking that we may come to be like God... then matters become clearer.
The facts of Jesus being incarnated (from his pre-mortal state as a discarnate spirit), and that he was resurrected into the same incarnate form as ourselves, ought to show us that incarnation is a higher form than spirit. But it is not the addition of 'matter' or 'solidity' that makes incarnation higher than spirit (matter/ solidity etc. are merely consequences of incarnation) - rather it is the mode of consciousness of an incarnate that is higher than a spirit.
Incarnation is a necessary step towards divine consciousness - towards the form of consciousness of the Father and the Son.
We began as children of God in the form of pre-mortal spirits, immersed-in the divine consciousness. As such we were all happy and good; but in the incomplete, immature ways that a young child is happy and good - by virtue of our environment, not from-our-selves.
Spirit consciousness lacks full agency - a spirit is, to a considerable extent, immersed-in the consciousness of other spirits - the individual is not divided clearly from other spirits, or from God the Father. Therefore, our pre-mortal spirits were passively immersed-in the divine consciousness - we lacked 'free will'.
To fulfil a destiny of becoming fully Sons of God, of the same kind as Jesus became; entails that our consciousness become rooted in itself; and then (like Jesus) chooses (from this state of autonomous agency) to ally with God, with creation.
Physical, material bodies are 'merely' the manifestation, the consequence, of a greater degree of separation, greater self-generated activity, greater agency.
Therefore, mortal incarnation is the first step towards that agency without which we cannot become full children of God. Jesus needed to become incarnate to become fully divine.
When Jesus was incarnated as a mortal - and after he had been baptised by John to commence his ministry; Jesus had the divine mode of consciousness. He was separated from the Father, and could have rejected Him. Thus, Jesus needed to make a choice, an act of will; to Love the Father, to align-with the father's creation. And of course he did.
And after death Jesus was resurrected to a permanent and incorruptible incarnation - but he remained incarnate because it is a higher mode of consciousness; and this Jesus needed to become fully-divine.
What this aims-at, what it is 'about', is divine consciousness; which is consciousness of truth and reality. More exactly; when Jesus was thinking - he thought only and always in truth and reality and with Love for it. And - because Jesus did this; this is what we can now be offered as a choice.
It was this choice and act of Jesus to align with The Father in truth and reality, in his thinking; that made it possible for our-selves to follow the same path. Once Jesus had done it, reality was changed (because Jesus's thought was reality) - now, because reality has been changed, this path and choice is universally available for anyone else to do.
We can know this directly (without any mediation of 'communication'), and for our-selves (regardless of circumstances) by thinking in the divine way; which thinking is made possible by two things: first the fact of us being children of God; and second the fact of the Holy Ghost which will show us the way, if we seek it.
In this sense, consciousness is the centre and unifying fact of the Christian scheme. It was in order that all Men could become fully-divine, children of God, that Jesus did what he did; and it was necessary for Jesus to do what he did in order for Jesus himself to become fully-divine: he needed to become incarnate, like his Father.
By recognising The Father as incarnate, we can therefore quite easily recognise why Jesus needed to become incarnate - and (at least in outline) how the incarnation of Jesus made it possible for other Men to become fully children of God.
(Note: These End Times have the characteristic of locating and amplifying what seem like small errors in Christian theology, to make them decisive in chosen damnation. The error of insisting that The Father is spirit and not incarnate was not very important in earlier times and places; but it has become important now - because it is has become the tip of a wedge that leads to rejection of the goodness of incarnation, hence to the denial of Christ's necessity to Man's salvation.)
The Father, we are told, is incarnate, has a body - this isn't in doubt, but the question is what this state of incarnation means.
Part of the prevalent misunderstanding that The Father is spirit derives from the already-existing philosophical idea among Classical pre-Christian intellectuals that God 'must be' a discarnate spirit, because spirit was the highest form. They regarded bodies as matter, and matter as lower than spirit - more restricted, prone to corruption etc...
Another element is that the nature of purpose of incarnation is mis-stated by the word in-carn-ation itself, with its reference to the body - asif that was the most-important aspect of the definition.
But if we accept that the ultimate reality of creation is consciousness, and that God 'thinks' creation into manifestation and sustains it as such, and that it is by our thinking that we may come to be like God... then matters become clearer.
The facts of Jesus being incarnated (from his pre-mortal state as a discarnate spirit), and that he was resurrected into the same incarnate form as ourselves, ought to show us that incarnation is a higher form than spirit. But it is not the addition of 'matter' or 'solidity' that makes incarnation higher than spirit (matter/ solidity etc. are merely consequences of incarnation) - rather it is the mode of consciousness of an incarnate that is higher than a spirit.
Incarnation is a necessary step towards divine consciousness - towards the form of consciousness of the Father and the Son.
We began as children of God in the form of pre-mortal spirits, immersed-in the divine consciousness. As such we were all happy and good; but in the incomplete, immature ways that a young child is happy and good - by virtue of our environment, not from-our-selves.
Spirit consciousness lacks full agency - a spirit is, to a considerable extent, immersed-in the consciousness of other spirits - the individual is not divided clearly from other spirits, or from God the Father. Therefore, our pre-mortal spirits were passively immersed-in the divine consciousness - we lacked 'free will'.
To fulfil a destiny of becoming fully Sons of God, of the same kind as Jesus became; entails that our consciousness become rooted in itself; and then (like Jesus) chooses (from this state of autonomous agency) to ally with God, with creation.
Physical, material bodies are 'merely' the manifestation, the consequence, of a greater degree of separation, greater self-generated activity, greater agency.
Therefore, mortal incarnation is the first step towards that agency without which we cannot become full children of God. Jesus needed to become incarnate to become fully divine.
When Jesus was incarnated as a mortal - and after he had been baptised by John to commence his ministry; Jesus had the divine mode of consciousness. He was separated from the Father, and could have rejected Him. Thus, Jesus needed to make a choice, an act of will; to Love the Father, to align-with the father's creation. And of course he did.
And after death Jesus was resurrected to a permanent and incorruptible incarnation - but he remained incarnate because it is a higher mode of consciousness; and this Jesus needed to become fully-divine.
What this aims-at, what it is 'about', is divine consciousness; which is consciousness of truth and reality. More exactly; when Jesus was thinking - he thought only and always in truth and reality and with Love for it. And - because Jesus did this; this is what we can now be offered as a choice.
It was this choice and act of Jesus to align with The Father in truth and reality, in his thinking; that made it possible for our-selves to follow the same path. Once Jesus had done it, reality was changed (because Jesus's thought was reality) - now, because reality has been changed, this path and choice is universally available for anyone else to do.
We can know this directly (without any mediation of 'communication'), and for our-selves (regardless of circumstances) by thinking in the divine way; which thinking is made possible by two things: first the fact of us being children of God; and second the fact of the Holy Ghost which will show us the way, if we seek it.
In this sense, consciousness is the centre and unifying fact of the Christian scheme. It was in order that all Men could become fully-divine, children of God, that Jesus did what he did; and it was necessary for Jesus to do what he did in order for Jesus himself to become fully-divine: he needed to become incarnate, like his Father.
By recognising The Father as incarnate, we can therefore quite easily recognise why Jesus needed to become incarnate - and (at least in outline) how the incarnation of Jesus made it possible for other Men to become fully children of God.
(Note: These End Times have the characteristic of locating and amplifying what seem like small errors in Christian theology, to make them decisive in chosen damnation. The error of insisting that The Father is spirit and not incarnate was not very important in earlier times and places; but it has become important now - because it is has become the tip of a wedge that leads to rejection of the goodness of incarnation, hence to the denial of Christ's necessity to Man's salvation.)
Wednesday, 12 September 2018
Snake eyes and zombie eyes
A while back, I wrote about the snake-eyed ones - the people one meets whose eyes have the hard, calculating, hypnotic, manipulative stare of snakes or lizards (or dragons).
On the whole, these are probably people who are 'demonically possessed' - who have invited evil spirits into their souls, on promise of gaining some worldly goal (e.g. money, power, sex, sadism).
Zombie eyes are another, and probably more common, phenomenon - perhaps especially among women. These are dead eyes, eyes that utterly lack agency, free will, inner motivation.
While snake eyes seem to indicate the presence of a purposive evil being in the soul; zombie eyes seem to indicate something like mind-control. That person's real self has been switched-off, suppressed, buried... and their actions are being controlled...
The dead eyes show that the mind has become a conduit - and has no source of being in-itself. The soul has been bypassed and the body, the movements, the emotions are all externally-driven.
The cause of zombie eyes could be - at the extreme - a mental enslavement imposed on an initially-willing victim; or it could be (in more susceptible persons) simply the result of living in a bureaucratic world at work, and a mass/ social media world during leisure... many people simply open their minds and let the world flow-through.
Such are these End Times... On the positive side, it can be quite easy to identity the as-yet un-corrupted - those (few) who are not the allies, servants or slaves of the demons. One meeting of the eyes may be enough - the open-hearted gaze or smile of a child, for example. How few adults one meets who have that clarity and goodness of soul! - yet there are some.
On the whole, these are probably people who are 'demonically possessed' - who have invited evil spirits into their souls, on promise of gaining some worldly goal (e.g. money, power, sex, sadism).
Zombie eyes are another, and probably more common, phenomenon - perhaps especially among women. These are dead eyes, eyes that utterly lack agency, free will, inner motivation.
While snake eyes seem to indicate the presence of a purposive evil being in the soul; zombie eyes seem to indicate something like mind-control. That person's real self has been switched-off, suppressed, buried... and their actions are being controlled...
The dead eyes show that the mind has become a conduit - and has no source of being in-itself. The soul has been bypassed and the body, the movements, the emotions are all externally-driven.
The cause of zombie eyes could be - at the extreme - a mental enslavement imposed on an initially-willing victim; or it could be (in more susceptible persons) simply the result of living in a bureaucratic world at work, and a mass/ social media world during leisure... many people simply open their minds and let the world flow-through.
Such are these End Times... On the positive side, it can be quite easy to identity the as-yet un-corrupted - those (few) who are not the allies, servants or slaves of the demons. One meeting of the eyes may be enough - the open-hearted gaze or smile of a child, for example. How few adults one meets who have that clarity and goodness of soul! - yet there are some.
Tuesday, 11 September 2018
Useless and actively-harmful intelligence (and creativity, and technologies)
Intelligence is a means to an end - but when the aim to which intelligence is harnessed is a useless, or actively harmful, one... well intelligence simply accelerates the damage.
And that is precisely the situation that has increasingly prevailed in The West for the past 200 years. In such a situation, intelligence becomes a social evil, and extreme intelligence even more so.
Add to intelligence creativity and inner motivation, and you have (pretty much) genius. A genius may be completely ignored - but if attended-to the effect of a genius is sometimes multiplied to an equivalent of hundreds, thousands or even millions of non-genius people.
So, if a genius is evil-motivated, or even simply self-ish and short-termist in his aims (or is appropriated by such people); then he may inflict truly colossal damage on societies. There are also an abundance of examples of this phenomenon over the past couple of hundred years, but particularly in the late nineteen and early twentieth centuries - Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Picasso, Schoenberg...
(After which geniuses began to get rarer - and now they have largely disappeared from public discourse; although some exist, mostly disregarded.)
My point is that the problems of the Modern West cannot be solved by intelligence, nor by geniuses; because of the pervasiveness of evil motivation - especially among the middle, intellectual and ruling classes that contain most such people.
Only when or if there was a Christian spiritual awakening that reorientated people from aiming-at evil towards aspiring to Good; would brains and creativity become valuable.
And what applies to human psychological capacity, applies equally to technological capacity: we cannot be saved but only have our doom accelerated by progress in science, computers, medicine, or any other mechanism or technology.
And this also applies to politics, to administration, bureaucracy, management and mass media.
When the End is evil, better means only make matters worse.
It's Common Sense, really - but easily forgotten.
And that is precisely the situation that has increasingly prevailed in The West for the past 200 years. In such a situation, intelligence becomes a social evil, and extreme intelligence even more so.
Add to intelligence creativity and inner motivation, and you have (pretty much) genius. A genius may be completely ignored - but if attended-to the effect of a genius is sometimes multiplied to an equivalent of hundreds, thousands or even millions of non-genius people.
So, if a genius is evil-motivated, or even simply self-ish and short-termist in his aims (or is appropriated by such people); then he may inflict truly colossal damage on societies. There are also an abundance of examples of this phenomenon over the past couple of hundred years, but particularly in the late nineteen and early twentieth centuries - Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Picasso, Schoenberg...
(After which geniuses began to get rarer - and now they have largely disappeared from public discourse; although some exist, mostly disregarded.)
My point is that the problems of the Modern West cannot be solved by intelligence, nor by geniuses; because of the pervasiveness of evil motivation - especially among the middle, intellectual and ruling classes that contain most such people.
Only when or if there was a Christian spiritual awakening that reorientated people from aiming-at evil towards aspiring to Good; would brains and creativity become valuable.
And what applies to human psychological capacity, applies equally to technological capacity: we cannot be saved but only have our doom accelerated by progress in science, computers, medicine, or any other mechanism or technology.
And this also applies to politics, to administration, bureaucracy, management and mass media.
When the End is evil, better means only make matters worse.
It's Common Sense, really - but easily forgotten.
Our Ahrimanic computer consciousness
I was rewatching a marvellous video interview of Jeremy Naydler in relation to a review I am writing of his new book on the 'ancient' history of the computer concept: In the Shadow of the Machine.
I should say that I regard Naydler as one of the most insightful people thinking and writing in modern Britain, and this was confirmed when I visited him a couple of years ago. Anyway, at 22 minutes he begins to talk about the Ahrimanic influence on modern consciousness; and how computers and bureaucracy are training/ compelling Men to think like machines.
That's an alternative way to conceptualise the failure of modern consciousness that so obsesses me; the way that Western Man did not take up the true Romantic Revolution around 1800; but instead - for what were basically sin-full reasons to do with the pursuit of worldly pleasures - we embarked on the continuing project of reducing and assimilating the human mind to the machine; with Luciferic, mainly sexual, interludes for R&R.
Jeremy's books and publications are listed at: http://www.abzupress.co.uk/webcat.htm
Everything Naydler writes is at least interesting, and some of it is exceptionally original and important - my favourite is probably The Future of the Ancient World (2009).
I should say that I regard Naydler as one of the most insightful people thinking and writing in modern Britain, and this was confirmed when I visited him a couple of years ago. Anyway, at 22 minutes he begins to talk about the Ahrimanic influence on modern consciousness; and how computers and bureaucracy are training/ compelling Men to think like machines.
That's an alternative way to conceptualise the failure of modern consciousness that so obsesses me; the way that Western Man did not take up the true Romantic Revolution around 1800; but instead - for what were basically sin-full reasons to do with the pursuit of worldly pleasures - we embarked on the continuing project of reducing and assimilating the human mind to the machine; with Luciferic, mainly sexual, interludes for R&R.
Jeremy's books and publications are listed at: http://www.abzupress.co.uk/webcat.htm
Everything Naydler writes is at least interesting, and some of it is exceptionally original and important - my favourite is probably The Future of the Ancient World (2009).
From the comments: Chiu ChunLing on living in the End Times
Tough thinking from 'CCL' in response to yesterday's post on 'strategy' and its current undesirability...
I think that the key thing is that there is no strategy that does not involve the basic and unavoidable evil of war, i.e. collateral damage.
And the collateral damage we must accept to form a realistic strategy at this stage is stupendous.
Essentially, the sacrifice of all civilization and everything that depends on it, saving only ourselves and what we can personally conserve. This would be an evil strategy if the wider culture were viable, and thus had to be actively undermined.
What makes this strategy less evil is that it requires nothing of us but that we individually disengage and stop actively serving the unsustainable evil of the wider culture. But by the token of being a movement of individuals moved by personal conscience, it ceases to seem anything like a strategy at the scale of events we're facing.
Nor is it one, because the larger scale culture is not our concern. What matters is the individual, personal decisions of each of us and our accountability to God for them.
I think that the key thing is that there is no strategy that does not involve the basic and unavoidable evil of war, i.e. collateral damage.
And the collateral damage we must accept to form a realistic strategy at this stage is stupendous.
Essentially, the sacrifice of all civilization and everything that depends on it, saving only ourselves and what we can personally conserve. This would be an evil strategy if the wider culture were viable, and thus had to be actively undermined.
What makes this strategy less evil is that it requires nothing of us but that we individually disengage and stop actively serving the unsustainable evil of the wider culture. But by the token of being a movement of individuals moved by personal conscience, it ceases to seem anything like a strategy at the scale of events we're facing.
Nor is it one, because the larger scale culture is not our concern. What matters is the individual, personal decisions of each of us and our accountability to God for them.
Monday, 10 September 2018
The strategy is that there can be No strategy
We are accustomed to assuming that 'the thing is' to have a strategy if you want to change culture. And certainly one can strategically wreck culture - think of government departments, 'new initiatives', five-year-plans; think of Mission Statements (actually, that's too nasty - you had better not...).
But there is no evidence that culture (or science, or literature, or music, or morality, or virtue - or anything Good) can be improved by a strategy except in the short term (if a system is already good, and resources are thrown at it, then there will initially be an improvement in so far as the good aspects are resource-constrained - before the overall system is corrupted). Indeed all the evidence is that a sustained strategy always wrecks every-thing it addresses.
One reason is that strategy treats of people in the lump, and assumes that individual differences don't really matter. But if every-body really is different from each other in their eternal essence; if we began different and are intended (by God) to end as different - then we ought to give-up strategic thinking at the fundamental level... if we can (it's hard).
This is a place in which traditionalist thinkers are as badly in error as radicals: both envisage a world in which the individual is fitted to the system. But Heaven won't be like that, and it is not what the Christian God wants from the sons and daughters of God (or else he created the world very ill, or is not Good - both of which we must reject).
To give-up on strategic thinking at first induces a sense of despair; because it is how we tend to conceptualise progress. Yet that assumption is itself a corruption of exactly the kind we hope to overcome.
And then, when we continue to reject strategic thinking - and cease to make plans to resist and fight, and plans to expand and conquer, and abandon plans to be better... and more consistently so - there is a great sense of rightness: the heart informs us that we have done-good, that we are on-the-right-lines. That this is truth and based on truth.
Only then may we be able to think properly; to think from our true-self, to think intuitively.
We feel secure, and - in a deep (not surface) sense: indomitable.
Saturday, 8 September 2018
Friday, 7 September 2018
Is this the dawning of the Age of Aquarius?
Would you buy a used spiritual prediction from this man?
In a new post at Albion Awakening, William Wildblood concludes... Well maybe - sort-of - but not in the way you are thinking!
Thursday, 6 September 2018
My experience of trying to 'reform' science, medicine, psychiatry, and higher education
I spent quite a long time (from - say - 1985 to 2010) trying in all possible ways to reform (or at least prevent the rapid decline and corruption of) the areas in which I was employed and worked without the slightest degree of success.
The reason was simple, and I expressed it most fully in relation to science; and it was that the rot was already too extensive, and there were insufficient people who wanted to reform the subjects.
There are, indeed, (here and now) extremely few people who work in any area, that have any kind of vocation for work - almost everybody has a careerist attitude; and is therefore obedient primarily. So when it comes to stopping the rot; the rot itself isn't usually very keen to make an effort, or even to be associated with an effort. Typically, people just melt-away...
So - despite writing about things, speaking about things in lectures, seminars etc, making-waves as and when - I just watched the whole horror story unfold.
This has had a permanent effect on my attitude; because I realise that when the mass of people in an organisation, an institution, a profession, a nation... are complicit in corruption, when they are careerist, when they are motivated by short-termism, by the attempt to maximise pleasure and status or minimise suffering or risk... then there is no realistic prospect of overall and positive reform.
(This fact of what people were like was one of the great disappointments of my life - and I found it dominant everywhere and everwhere worsening, although not everywhere equally bad.)
Minor specific victories, or delays; when all around is collapsing and stampeding in the wrong direction, are really not worthwhile - and, indeed, I have experienced a success being twisted round and used in exactly the opposite way from that intended.
This happened from about 1990 when I initiated an idea of a 'core and options' medical curriculum, which was taken up by the General Medical Council and adopted widely - but not to enhance the depth of understanding of a specific subject, but instead to destroy the vital educational aspects of traditional medicine, such as gross anatomy. 'Core and options' therefore overall did more harm than good; or else was merely used to do something bad that would have been done anyway, but perhaps with a different excuse.
Anyway, my lesson was that all systems depend on people; and goodness depends on good people - which means people motivated by good. And this in turn depends on the definition of good.
If/ when good is defined in a broadly utilitarian fashion, as in all modern societies through the West, then goodness is equated with happiness, pleasure, absence of suffering - and all systems (science, medicine, psychiatry, universities, nations etc) are always and necessarily corrupted. How could they not be?
With the prevalent utilitarian morality as bottom line - there will be generalised corruption, and there will not be any traction to deal with it - so corruption will continue. Modern institutions cannot ever be reformed because they do not want to be reformed.
Only if, or when, people adopt a transcendental, religious, god-centred morality can there be any reform of institutions. In the meantime, we can only reform our-selves (and perhaps a few loved ones).
The reason was simple, and I expressed it most fully in relation to science; and it was that the rot was already too extensive, and there were insufficient people who wanted to reform the subjects.
There are, indeed, (here and now) extremely few people who work in any area, that have any kind of vocation for work - almost everybody has a careerist attitude; and is therefore obedient primarily. So when it comes to stopping the rot; the rot itself isn't usually very keen to make an effort, or even to be associated with an effort. Typically, people just melt-away...
So - despite writing about things, speaking about things in lectures, seminars etc, making-waves as and when - I just watched the whole horror story unfold.
This has had a permanent effect on my attitude; because I realise that when the mass of people in an organisation, an institution, a profession, a nation... are complicit in corruption, when they are careerist, when they are motivated by short-termism, by the attempt to maximise pleasure and status or minimise suffering or risk... then there is no realistic prospect of overall and positive reform.
(This fact of what people were like was one of the great disappointments of my life - and I found it dominant everywhere and everwhere worsening, although not everywhere equally bad.)
Minor specific victories, or delays; when all around is collapsing and stampeding in the wrong direction, are really not worthwhile - and, indeed, I have experienced a success being twisted round and used in exactly the opposite way from that intended.
This happened from about 1990 when I initiated an idea of a 'core and options' medical curriculum, which was taken up by the General Medical Council and adopted widely - but not to enhance the depth of understanding of a specific subject, but instead to destroy the vital educational aspects of traditional medicine, such as gross anatomy. 'Core and options' therefore overall did more harm than good; or else was merely used to do something bad that would have been done anyway, but perhaps with a different excuse.
Anyway, my lesson was that all systems depend on people; and goodness depends on good people - which means people motivated by good. And this in turn depends on the definition of good.
If/ when good is defined in a broadly utilitarian fashion, as in all modern societies through the West, then goodness is equated with happiness, pleasure, absence of suffering - and all systems (science, medicine, psychiatry, universities, nations etc) are always and necessarily corrupted. How could they not be?
With the prevalent utilitarian morality as bottom line - there will be generalised corruption, and there will not be any traction to deal with it - so corruption will continue. Modern institutions cannot ever be reformed because they do not want to be reformed.
Only if, or when, people adopt a transcendental, religious, god-centred morality can there be any reform of institutions. In the meantime, we can only reform our-selves (and perhaps a few loved ones).
Wednesday, 5 September 2018
Fascism? Racism? - they aren't even things
I have previously tried to make sense of the term Fascism - but the fact is that it was merely secular anti-Soviet-Communism; which isn't even a thing; and even as a negative-reaction it has long-since disappeared from the world.
I have never tried to make sense of the term Racism, because that very-obviously isn't a thing.
Since racism is supposed to be the most evil sin in the world; that is a problem - or should be regarded as such...
But since we live in a world that is necessarily insane from incoherence (due to the subtraction of God and the assertion that all is either random or blindly determined) then we, as a culture, have become used-to insane incoherence...
It is the air we breathe.
But of course, nobody can ever refute the presence, or importance, or anything-else, of Fascism and Racism - and when you are a supernatural demon bent on the destruction of all that is good, that fact is a feature, not a bug.
I have never tried to make sense of the term Racism, because that very-obviously isn't a thing.
Since racism is supposed to be the most evil sin in the world; that is a problem - or should be regarded as such...
But since we live in a world that is necessarily insane from incoherence (due to the subtraction of God and the assertion that all is either random or blindly determined) then we, as a culture, have become used-to insane incoherence...
It is the air we breathe.
But of course, nobody can ever refute the presence, or importance, or anything-else, of Fascism and Racism - and when you are a supernatural demon bent on the destruction of all that is good, that fact is a feature, not a bug.
Re-reading George Orwell's Inside the Whale
Inside the Whale is a long essay by George Orwell published in 1940; it is one I read more than 40 years ago and again sometime since, and which stuck in my mind as having made some valid criticisms of literary culture in the twentieth century.
So I re-read it yesterday; and was very disappointed!
Now, Orwell is one of those writers who never wrote anything that is altogether not worth reading... because he wouldn't have written anything structured like the preceding sentence! Orwell developed a tremendously sinewy style of clear positive statement. He also wrote in a very personal and opinionated way; yet (somehow) never egotistically. And he strove to be honest.
Since he was an interesting person, he wrote many interesting things; and did so in a way that sticks in the mind.
But Orwell was basically wrong about Life - which is to say he was incoherent. Not slightly incoherent, but extremely so - and this is brought-out by his verbal clarity, and that honesty which prevented him 'editing' his spontaneously-expressed feelings-views into any kind of coherence.
Inside the Whale is incredibly incoherent; just astonishingly so! In terms of a statement, it is all over the place; and I can't imagine what it is supposed to imply. What I remembered from it was the critique of the then-fashionable Macspaunday group (MacNeice, Spender, Auden, Day-Lewis) of upper-class, communist/ pro-USSR, socially-'engaged', anti-fascist then pacifist ('corduroy panzers' as Orwell called them, when they fled to the USA to escape the war), and homosexually-inclined poets
(Orwell was pro-hetero-sexual-promiscuity, but broadly hostile to homosexuality as he knew it, as Established among the English upper classes. Orwell was indeed a pro-natalist - he regarded a high birth rate as a sign of a healthy national psychology.)
What I had forgotten was that the essay was, actually and in its essence, a critique of everybody and everything that in some way - indeed in many and incompatible ways - annoyed or irritated or bored Orwell. Which seems to have been literally everybody, without any exception (Orwell doesn't much like or respect Henry Miller - the subject of the piece). And that's pretty much all that it is...
Thus Inside the Whale is negativistic and has no positive ideal. From this we get a superficial impression that Orwell is writing from the standpoint of common sense - of the ordinary, decent, working, family Man; but of course he wasn't. He was sympathetic to such people and valued them; but very clearly also found them narrow, boring and trivial. The bulk of Inside the Whale is about the surprising virtues (as Orwell perceives them) of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer novel - and that book is not by, about, for, or respectful of, genuinely-ordinary people.
I now think I see Orwell's fatal flaw as a thinker, reasoner and commenter - which is that by rejecting God he rejected even the possibility of objective coherence; and instead substituted the mere fact that these were his feelings, each powerfully stated, as each feeling emerged here and now, in a sequence that was tied together only by the fact that it was George Orwell's feeling. And that's it: nothing more.
Orwell is driven to extraordinary inconsistencies by his rejection of God! He simply cannot accept the fact that ordinary people through history have believed in the reality of God and that religion is the most important thing. Orwell is sure that there is no God; so regards the idea as an upper class tool for manipulation - indeed (and this is a terrible error) Orwell regards national rule on religious principle (theocracy) as identical with totalitarianism - because ruling on behalf of deity can only be fraudulent.
This view makes ordinary Men, through history - who are believers in God, into dupes about the single most important thing in their lives. Which would mean they are - basically - idiots whose views cannot be trusted on any topic.
Or else it means that ordinary men never really believed in God, and always were comfort-seeking materialists at heart; concerned merely with getting by, getting a living, surviving... And I think Orwell sometimes believed just this; believes that the toughness of real life means that people have no time or energy for thinking about Big Issues - matters such as what God is like, what God wants, what Men are supposed to do, and the nature of life after death. Orwell thinks that concern of ideas and morality is a product of comfort and leisure!
Yet, as we now know - we having lived in a world of unprecedented and general peace, prosperity, comfort and convenience for more than 60 years; that Orwell is completely wrong and the opposite is true! It was the upper classes, such as himself, who first had the leisure and opportunity and material optimism to become hedonistic atheists who regard life as purely material; and when these conditions spread down the classes, so did the disaffection with any religious restriction which imposed suffering or stood in the path of comfort and pleasure.
But of course Orwell died at just 45 years old. And at his age I had much the same views as he did. His great virtue was a capacity to learn from experience; and maybe Orwell would in later life have learned about fundamental metaphysical assumptions, in the way that he certainly learned about superficial political assumptions. However, there was not much sign of such incipient wisdom at the time he died; since, perhaps weakened by illness, he re-married: with a young, attractive but notoriously manipulative and (ahem) flirtatious woman just a few months before his demise.
At the time of his death, and considering the 'positive message' of 1984; I don't think Orwell had gone any deeper than the lethal illusion of the sexual revolution: that sex - freed from religious constraints - could and should replace God as the focus of Life. As a member of the upper classes, Orwell had already experienced and embraced the sexual revolution (in the earliest form of extra-martial promiscuity positively regarded) a couple of generations before it later filtered-down to the common man.
So, in the end, I am forced to regard Orwell as a great writer of genuinely-memorable - but mostly negative and critical and hope-destroying - fragments; and as such wholly representative of the (evil-tending) incoherence and subjectivism that has plagued Western intellectual life. This scattergun destructivism, presumably, is why Orwell gets cited-in-support by almost everyone in mainstream politics; from Margaret Thatcher to the extreme Left! - he provides excellent cover for attacking enemies, because everybody shares some of Orwells many enemies.
Orwell was, in fact, a major contributor to exactly the cancerous cultural decadence and decline - and indeed totalitarianism - that a part of him so much loathed. Because totalitarianism - transhumanism and the omni-monitoring and micro-control of thought in pursuit of material and hedonic goals - is an inevitable end-point of the atheism that was Orwell's foundational belief.
So I re-read it yesterday; and was very disappointed!
Now, Orwell is one of those writers who never wrote anything that is altogether not worth reading... because he wouldn't have written anything structured like the preceding sentence! Orwell developed a tremendously sinewy style of clear positive statement. He also wrote in a very personal and opinionated way; yet (somehow) never egotistically. And he strove to be honest.
Since he was an interesting person, he wrote many interesting things; and did so in a way that sticks in the mind.
But Orwell was basically wrong about Life - which is to say he was incoherent. Not slightly incoherent, but extremely so - and this is brought-out by his verbal clarity, and that honesty which prevented him 'editing' his spontaneously-expressed feelings-views into any kind of coherence.
Inside the Whale is incredibly incoherent; just astonishingly so! In terms of a statement, it is all over the place; and I can't imagine what it is supposed to imply. What I remembered from it was the critique of the then-fashionable Macspaunday group (MacNeice, Spender, Auden, Day-Lewis) of upper-class, communist/ pro-USSR, socially-'engaged', anti-fascist then pacifist ('corduroy panzers' as Orwell called them, when they fled to the USA to escape the war), and homosexually-inclined poets
(Orwell was pro-hetero-sexual-promiscuity, but broadly hostile to homosexuality as he knew it, as Established among the English upper classes. Orwell was indeed a pro-natalist - he regarded a high birth rate as a sign of a healthy national psychology.)
What I had forgotten was that the essay was, actually and in its essence, a critique of everybody and everything that in some way - indeed in many and incompatible ways - annoyed or irritated or bored Orwell. Which seems to have been literally everybody, without any exception (Orwell doesn't much like or respect Henry Miller - the subject of the piece). And that's pretty much all that it is...
Thus Inside the Whale is negativistic and has no positive ideal. From this we get a superficial impression that Orwell is writing from the standpoint of common sense - of the ordinary, decent, working, family Man; but of course he wasn't. He was sympathetic to such people and valued them; but very clearly also found them narrow, boring and trivial. The bulk of Inside the Whale is about the surprising virtues (as Orwell perceives them) of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer novel - and that book is not by, about, for, or respectful of, genuinely-ordinary people.
I now think I see Orwell's fatal flaw as a thinker, reasoner and commenter - which is that by rejecting God he rejected even the possibility of objective coherence; and instead substituted the mere fact that these were his feelings, each powerfully stated, as each feeling emerged here and now, in a sequence that was tied together only by the fact that it was George Orwell's feeling. And that's it: nothing more.
Orwell is driven to extraordinary inconsistencies by his rejection of God! He simply cannot accept the fact that ordinary people through history have believed in the reality of God and that religion is the most important thing. Orwell is sure that there is no God; so regards the idea as an upper class tool for manipulation - indeed (and this is a terrible error) Orwell regards national rule on religious principle (theocracy) as identical with totalitarianism - because ruling on behalf of deity can only be fraudulent.
This view makes ordinary Men, through history - who are believers in God, into dupes about the single most important thing in their lives. Which would mean they are - basically - idiots whose views cannot be trusted on any topic.
Or else it means that ordinary men never really believed in God, and always were comfort-seeking materialists at heart; concerned merely with getting by, getting a living, surviving... And I think Orwell sometimes believed just this; believes that the toughness of real life means that people have no time or energy for thinking about Big Issues - matters such as what God is like, what God wants, what Men are supposed to do, and the nature of life after death. Orwell thinks that concern of ideas and morality is a product of comfort and leisure!
Yet, as we now know - we having lived in a world of unprecedented and general peace, prosperity, comfort and convenience for more than 60 years; that Orwell is completely wrong and the opposite is true! It was the upper classes, such as himself, who first had the leisure and opportunity and material optimism to become hedonistic atheists who regard life as purely material; and when these conditions spread down the classes, so did the disaffection with any religious restriction which imposed suffering or stood in the path of comfort and pleasure.
But of course Orwell died at just 45 years old. And at his age I had much the same views as he did. His great virtue was a capacity to learn from experience; and maybe Orwell would in later life have learned about fundamental metaphysical assumptions, in the way that he certainly learned about superficial political assumptions. However, there was not much sign of such incipient wisdom at the time he died; since, perhaps weakened by illness, he re-married: with a young, attractive but notoriously manipulative and (ahem) flirtatious woman just a few months before his demise.
At the time of his death, and considering the 'positive message' of 1984; I don't think Orwell had gone any deeper than the lethal illusion of the sexual revolution: that sex - freed from religious constraints - could and should replace God as the focus of Life. As a member of the upper classes, Orwell had already experienced and embraced the sexual revolution (in the earliest form of extra-martial promiscuity positively regarded) a couple of generations before it later filtered-down to the common man.
So, in the end, I am forced to regard Orwell as a great writer of genuinely-memorable - but mostly negative and critical and hope-destroying - fragments; and as such wholly representative of the (evil-tending) incoherence and subjectivism that has plagued Western intellectual life. This scattergun destructivism, presumably, is why Orwell gets cited-in-support by almost everyone in mainstream politics; from Margaret Thatcher to the extreme Left! - he provides excellent cover for attacking enemies, because everybody shares some of Orwells many enemies.
Orwell was, in fact, a major contributor to exactly the cancerous cultural decadence and decline - and indeed totalitarianism - that a part of him so much loathed. Because totalitarianism - transhumanism and the omni-monitoring and micro-control of thought in pursuit of material and hedonic goals - is an inevitable end-point of the atheism that was Orwell's foundational belief.
Tuesday, 4 September 2018
A world immune to miracles, but which needs (and gets) billions of miracles every day...
Some of the thousands of witnesses of the Fatima miracle of 1917; an event effortlesslesly rejected by modern pseudo-skeptical materialism - on the prior (but dishonestly unacknowledged) metaphysical assumption that miracles cannot be real.
I am reading an interesting and amusing book called The Rough Guide to Unexplained Phenomena by the (late great) John Michell and Bob Rickard - and it struck me that, although some people call for miracles to 'prove' the reality of God; the modern world is immune to miracles.
Indeed, I think it would probably be counterproductive; because a spectacular mass miracle would surely be interpreted materialistically - as a mass psychosis, or mass deception, a mass scam, or an example of mass mind-control. Certainly, an impressive miracles seen by thousands of people would not be taken as evidence of the reality of a God who is the creator and our loving Father.
This is, perhaps, not so surprising; because all miracles are indirect communications that rely on human senses and human interpretations; and then rely on more human senses and interpretations in communicating the conclusions more widely.
At the level of phenomena, reason and communications; there is a vast (and unbridgeable) gulf between what really happened in a miracle, and the understanding of what happened, in the minds of Men - and this gap has been made de facto infinitely great by the assumptions of modern materialist metaphysics.
We can see that the only kind of knowledge that will suffice for Modern Man is knowledge which is absolutely direct (without any mediation of sensory data, communication, reasoning etc) and absolutely personal (not secondhand, not based on report of others, not dependent on authority).
In other words; Modern Man needs knowledge which is conceptualised as direct and personal - and might be 'explained', perhaps, as either transmitted directly mind-to-mind; or else comprises minds in sympathy, or empathic identity, knowing exactly the same reality: as many minds thinking the same thoughts.
Therefore, the miracles we ought to be looking for are for our-selves not for 'everybody', and their job is to be graspable, wholly know-able, solidly believe-able by our-selves.
(And so Not a generally-observable public phenomenon, buttressed by that kind of 'objective evidence' that would (supposedly, but not in actuality) prove a miracle to hostile, materialist skeptics...)
And what we seek, we will find: Because personal, direct miracles are needed by Modern Man, therefore miracles are supplied, and in abundance, by our loving God. It is merely a matter of choosing to notice them.
Monday, 3 September 2018
What is a family? Not this...
Three youngish women outnumbering two kids! A family?
Perhaps you recognise it? This (ahem) stereotypical family is what I get shoved at me every time I sign into this blog.
In this world it is vital to remember that there are no accidents.
Therefore, the aspirational fun family: no men, ?plural SSM, Total Fertility Rate of 0.66 (less than one third of minimum needed for population replacement).
Self-willed extinction as an ideal?
Comments are closed (don't waste your time on this kind of stuff; I shouldn't be...)
What did the Romans ever do for Britain?
From Asterix in Britain - tres amusant...
I ponder the balance of benefits and harms at Albion Awakening...