First thing is that such a person needs to be prepared to work at finding an answer. modern people are often extremely lazy and distractible - and this is encouraged by our culture. If you are expecting a snappy answer, or a stepwise recipe - Forget It.
You have to be prepared to work at discovering the truth of Christianity At Least as hard as you have worked at your views on politics - which you have probably been discussing and reading-about daily for many years.
Religion is more fundamental than politics - and if you aren't prepared to work at it, then you are self-excluded from the truth; and you will have to accept passively being fed lies and distortions by the mass media and state bureaucracies.
OK - if you are prepared to grant the subject some sustained attention and thought; and you want to find-out about Christianity/ Jesus - then the first question to ask is about authority. What source would you believe on this subject?
As you are not a Christian and unsure about Jesus; there is no point in advising you to consult the Bible, since you have no reason to assume that any of it is true.
Likewise, it is useless to advise consulting a church, because in the first place why should churches be authoritative for a non-Christian? And in the second place (without begging the question) which church? (Especially as many or most self-described Christian churches are primarily leftist political organisations.)
Equally, there is no point in referring you to tradition, because you have already rejected the authority of tradition. Or theology or philosophy, because you won't believe it else you would not be where you are.
There is no point even in saying you should 'use common sense' - or base belief on 'your own personal experience', and start with that - because mainstream modern society operates in opposition-to and denial-of common sense and personal experience.
In sum - there are no short-cuts - the only viable way is the long way around and through.
If not, then what?
If you are an ordinary, typical modern person; then the only conceivable place you can start is from whatever is your own personal intuitive bottom line; whatever is solid and self-validating for you; whatever you personally and actually rely-on and build-on.
What is it that really matters most to you and would matter most even if you were alone on a desert island and could not communicate with anyone; what is it that you are prepared to believe, trust, have-faith-in and know in your secret heart to be true and good - even in contradiction of everybody, every organisation and nation?
This is your discernment, your inner-compass, your personal guidance-system.
You need to know you have such a thing, and you need to be aware of it - to know when it is in-operation and what it is telling you.
You then need to approach the question of Jesus/ Christianity using this personal guidance system to navigate, evaluate and choose-from the many, varied, contradicting sources of information.
It will take considerable time and effort, and only you can do it, and you must choose to do it; but this effort of inner discernment will work, and it will answer your questions.
The process will answer your questions to your own satisfaction (which is what matters) because it does not depend upon any external source of authority. It depends instead on what you already regard as the ultimate source of authority.
Thursday, 31 October 2019
Positive possibilities of this time and place
In the previous post, I finished by saying:
This era really is one of potentially unprecedented awakening. It is not an era for great works, but an era for great insight and understanding - for learning things never learned before.
Such an attitude seems important, if a siege mentality (and ultimately demoralisation) is to be avoided. And it is implied by our actual situation.
Since this is a materialistic, spirit-denying age in which you see Beings as Things; it is not surprising we always look to external explanations for our problems; and if external things are the causes, then we seek external solutions: socio-political solutions.
Yet there are two sides to this era - and the inner factors are primary. The driving force of change has been the development of human consciousness. And this is part of divine destiny. To put matters crudely: We needed to become capable of not believing in God, so that we can truly choose to believe.
So the inner consciousness of Western Man has, incrementally, become detached from the world (alienated), and detached from external authority; so that now it is (for most people) the power of tradition and external authority has been lost, unconscious instinct and common sense are ineffectual - and we can disbelieve anything.
The foolish and invincible credulity of modern Western Man (mainstream leftism in general including 'global warming', the 'trans' agenda etc) is actually an expression of dis-belief in tradition, instinct and common sense. Therefore people believe only what is short-term expedient; and are grossly demotivated such that life has become an affair of short-termist hedonism, distraction, and petty status competitions.
However, this is a narrative of loss... By this account; yes, we have more freedom, but it is a negative freedom due to loss of authority. Yes matters are clearer to us as Good and evil diverge, and things come to a point - but this is again an advantage for the negative reason that evil has become more extreme, open and insane - and is therefore easy to discern.
What we most need to know is our positive new strengths. Surely, God would not have put us into such a situation unless we were equipped to benefit from it. How has the evolution of consciousness equipped us to better lead Good lives?
As socio-political conditions move towards a greater totalitarian evil; and the mass of life is more obviously false, fake, dishonest, manipulative, ugly - designed to induce resentment and despair... As public avenues for creativity and expression are closed off; as Good public discourse is suppressed and punished...
That which is loving and creative; that which is virtuous, beautiful and truth-full... Each individual person's proper and destined path - All this, here and now, at each moment - will be much clearer than ever before.
And the detachment of modern human consciousness will be seen as a marvellous strength, indeed a divine strength - the capacity (when making the right choice, following the right path, doing the right thing) to become a primary source of divine loving-creativity.
So long as we remember that his mortal life is for experiencing and learning; and not for achieving any fixed and final state of being; we will not become dismayed at the temporary nature of our successes - at the fact that gains are usually incomplete and never permanent; but we will acknowledge and take-seriously all such positive achievements; confident, with faith, that all such (mortal, temporary) learning-experiences are eternal in their significance.
This era really is one of potentially unprecedented awakening. It is not an era for great works, but an era for great insight and understanding - for learning things never learned before.
Such an attitude seems important, if a siege mentality (and ultimately demoralisation) is to be avoided. And it is implied by our actual situation.
Since this is a materialistic, spirit-denying age in which you see Beings as Things; it is not surprising we always look to external explanations for our problems; and if external things are the causes, then we seek external solutions: socio-political solutions.
Yet there are two sides to this era - and the inner factors are primary. The driving force of change has been the development of human consciousness. And this is part of divine destiny. To put matters crudely: We needed to become capable of not believing in God, so that we can truly choose to believe.
So the inner consciousness of Western Man has, incrementally, become detached from the world (alienated), and detached from external authority; so that now it is (for most people) the power of tradition and external authority has been lost, unconscious instinct and common sense are ineffectual - and we can disbelieve anything.
The foolish and invincible credulity of modern Western Man (mainstream leftism in general including 'global warming', the 'trans' agenda etc) is actually an expression of dis-belief in tradition, instinct and common sense. Therefore people believe only what is short-term expedient; and are grossly demotivated such that life has become an affair of short-termist hedonism, distraction, and petty status competitions.
However, this is a narrative of loss... By this account; yes, we have more freedom, but it is a negative freedom due to loss of authority. Yes matters are clearer to us as Good and evil diverge, and things come to a point - but this is again an advantage for the negative reason that evil has become more extreme, open and insane - and is therefore easy to discern.
What we most need to know is our positive new strengths. Surely, God would not have put us into such a situation unless we were equipped to benefit from it. How has the evolution of consciousness equipped us to better lead Good lives?
As socio-political conditions move towards a greater totalitarian evil; and the mass of life is more obviously false, fake, dishonest, manipulative, ugly - designed to induce resentment and despair... As public avenues for creativity and expression are closed off; as Good public discourse is suppressed and punished...
That which is loving and creative; that which is virtuous, beautiful and truth-full... Each individual person's proper and destined path - All this, here and now, at each moment - will be much clearer than ever before.
And the detachment of modern human consciousness will be seen as a marvellous strength, indeed a divine strength - the capacity (when making the right choice, following the right path, doing the right thing) to become a primary source of divine loving-creativity.
So long as we remember that his mortal life is for experiencing and learning; and not for achieving any fixed and final state of being; we will not become dismayed at the temporary nature of our successes - at the fact that gains are usually incomplete and never permanent; but we will acknowledge and take-seriously all such positive achievements; confident, with faith, that all such (mortal, temporary) learning-experiences are eternal in their significance.
Tuesday, 29 October 2019
The surprising survival of Good people in an increasingly evil world
There aren't many of them, but there are some reasonably well-known net-Good people in public life; people on the side of God and creation - people publicly and effectively opposed to the mainstream, wealthy, powerful and influential agenda of evil; and known to the Establishment...
And yet these Good people are still alive and have continued their Good activities.
This seems surprising. Yet there are examples from now and from history.
It seems - and this is Not surprising - that God is able to preserve such people in spite of what look like impossible adverse conditions.
Thus this era really is one of potentially unprecedented awakening. It is not an era for great works, but an era for great insight and understanding - for learning things never learned before.
And God can be seen at work in making this possible.
(It is, of course, up to each one of us to take this astonishing opportunity.)
And yet these Good people are still alive and have continued their Good activities.
This seems surprising. Yet there are examples from now and from history.
It seems - and this is Not surprising - that God is able to preserve such people in spite of what look like impossible adverse conditions.
Thus this era really is one of potentially unprecedented awakening. It is not an era for great works, but an era for great insight and understanding - for learning things never learned before.
And God can be seen at work in making this possible.
(It is, of course, up to each one of us to take this astonishing opportunity.)
The age of veterinary politics... When we ignore what leaders say, and watch for ourselves what they do
About 25 years ago I was active in university politics, nationally and locally; and after several experiences I realised that we were in an era in which the leadership were not bound by words.
They would say anything that was currently expedient, but it meant nothing. In particular promises, resolutions and commitments meant precisely nothing.
I began to adopt a veterinary attitude. The term comes from my training in medicine. When patients are unable to talk (e.g. children) or unreliable 'historians' of their symptoms (e.g psychosis or dementia) then we practiced veterinary medicine, like a vet, based purely on our own observations.
So it is a long time since I took notice of what chief executives, politicians, bishops or any kind of bureaucrat has to say. I don't believe what they claim they are doing or have done. I wait to see what I observe for myself.
Brexit has led to an unprecedented concentration and sustained output of empty speech, and this continues. I do not believe any of it. I will not believe it even if They say we have 'now' left the EU. I will wait to see if I can observe it myself in my own life or immediate circle of trusted and competent persons.
Veterinary politics has advantages! It frees up a lot of time and energy for other and more fundamental activities, including the most important of all.
They would say anything that was currently expedient, but it meant nothing. In particular promises, resolutions and commitments meant precisely nothing.
I began to adopt a veterinary attitude. The term comes from my training in medicine. When patients are unable to talk (e.g. children) or unreliable 'historians' of their symptoms (e.g psychosis or dementia) then we practiced veterinary medicine, like a vet, based purely on our own observations.
So it is a long time since I took notice of what chief executives, politicians, bishops or any kind of bureaucrat has to say. I don't believe what they claim they are doing or have done. I wait to see what I observe for myself.
Brexit has led to an unprecedented concentration and sustained output of empty speech, and this continues. I do not believe any of it. I will not believe it even if They say we have 'now' left the EU. I will wait to see if I can observe it myself in my own life or immediate circle of trusted and competent persons.
Veterinary politics has advantages! It frees up a lot of time and energy for other and more fundamental activities, including the most important of all.
Monday, 28 October 2019
Personal divine revelations and the snare of generalisation
I seems that quite a few people have divine revelations of one kind or another - knowing, visions, understanding, miracles...
I regard this as the most profound source of insight. However...
Such experience often does people no good, or harm - because they try to make this personal gift into something public, universal or in some way general.
This may be for reasons of pride, or to try and gain prophetic status... or it may be from a humble desire to do good - but it is usually an error.
As a rule, I'm pretty sure God works with individuals, communicates one to one. To describe such interactions is rather like reporting to third parties a private conversation between husband and wife. It is a kind of betrayal.
It seems right to acknowledge that such things happen and are vitally important. But we should not, or seldom and only selectively, discuss the details.
I regard this as the most profound source of insight. However...
Such experience often does people no good, or harm - because they try to make this personal gift into something public, universal or in some way general.
This may be for reasons of pride, or to try and gain prophetic status... or it may be from a humble desire to do good - but it is usually an error.
As a rule, I'm pretty sure God works with individuals, communicates one to one. To describe such interactions is rather like reporting to third parties a private conversation between husband and wife. It is a kind of betrayal.
It seems right to acknowledge that such things happen and are vitally important. But we should not, or seldom and only selectively, discuss the details.
The evilness of global homogeneity
If it is true (as I believe) that we are each unique Beings who are placed (incarnated) such as best to have the experiences we most need to learn from; then a differentiated world (of many niches) is the best kind of world.
This is why those who are most closely associated with the demonic powers who oppose God are globalists - seeking one world government and (by mass migration) a homogeneous world.
And why they strategically work - by subversion and bribes - to destroy marriage and family.
A single-chambered, massive black iron prison Empire... That is the ideal form of government for which Satan and his minions are striving - or the nearest possible approximation thereto.
This is why those who are most closely associated with the demonic powers who oppose God are globalists - seeking one world government and (by mass migration) a homogeneous world.
And why they strategically work - by subversion and bribes - to destroy marriage and family.
A single-chambered, massive black iron prison Empire... That is the ideal form of government for which Satan and his minions are striving - or the nearest possible approximation thereto.
Sunday, 27 October 2019
God in us, and/or outside us
Is God outside of us and/ or is God within us? This is often framed in terms of transcendent or immanent - but these are freighted terms, and create an either/or dichotomy that cannot be resolved except by 'mystery' formulations.
God is outside us because God is the creator of this world. And God is also within us because we are his children, and inherited divinity from him.
This is not generally accepted in any simple or literal sense by mainstream Christians, because they regard God as transcendent, utterly other, beyond, and qualitatively different from us... outside time, space and creation. Such a God cannot really be within us and also a part of us because so utterly alien from us.
Those who regard God as wholly immanent do not see God as a personal creator. They cannot coherently regard life as meaningful or purposive - things just are.
But if we instead regard time as part of primary reality, then we can understand this in a sequential fashion.
God (Heavenly parents, man and woman - that is persons) is in the universe, which always existed in uncreated form. And this primal reality also contained the primordial Men - some eternal essence distinct from God: these are the Beings.
Thus God is outside of us. God is separate persons from us, God created this world - and we did not.
God created creation (as it were ) around-themselves (and this is continuous); and also took the Beings that are potential God (i.e. primordial men and women) and procreated us into the children of God. Therefore God is now within us; by inheritance.
This is how Jesus could become fully divine, on a par with our Heavenly parents (although still their children, and still living in their creation) and how we too can potentially become fully divine; because God is literally within us.
As Jesus tells us in the Fourth Gospel - we can become full children of God, and have that Life Everlasting. As fully divine; we can then participate in continuing creation - expanding the pre-existent creation by our own unique creativity (that we have by virtue of having been primordially distinct from our Heavenly parents - so we are not merely copies nor combinations of them).
And this is what God wants, more than anything, and is the reason behind creation. So that our Heavenly parents are no longer alone, but surrounded by a divine family of divine children; engaged in the divine work of creation.
And what makes this all fit together, so that creation is a harmony despite being the open-ended work of many and diverse minds, is Love. Love is the primary value and basis of creation.
It is Love that means there is no conflict but instead glorious harmony, between God without and God within.
God is outside us because God is the creator of this world. And God is also within us because we are his children, and inherited divinity from him.
This is not generally accepted in any simple or literal sense by mainstream Christians, because they regard God as transcendent, utterly other, beyond, and qualitatively different from us... outside time, space and creation. Such a God cannot really be within us and also a part of us because so utterly alien from us.
Those who regard God as wholly immanent do not see God as a personal creator. They cannot coherently regard life as meaningful or purposive - things just are.
But if we instead regard time as part of primary reality, then we can understand this in a sequential fashion.
God (Heavenly parents, man and woman - that is persons) is in the universe, which always existed in uncreated form. And this primal reality also contained the primordial Men - some eternal essence distinct from God: these are the Beings.
Thus God is outside of us. God is separate persons from us, God created this world - and we did not.
God created creation (as it were ) around-themselves (and this is continuous); and also took the Beings that are potential God (i.e. primordial men and women) and procreated us into the children of God. Therefore God is now within us; by inheritance.
This is how Jesus could become fully divine, on a par with our Heavenly parents (although still their children, and still living in their creation) and how we too can potentially become fully divine; because God is literally within us.
As Jesus tells us in the Fourth Gospel - we can become full children of God, and have that Life Everlasting. As fully divine; we can then participate in continuing creation - expanding the pre-existent creation by our own unique creativity (that we have by virtue of having been primordially distinct from our Heavenly parents - so we are not merely copies nor combinations of them).
And this is what God wants, more than anything, and is the reason behind creation. So that our Heavenly parents are no longer alone, but surrounded by a divine family of divine children; engaged in the divine work of creation.
And what makes this all fit together, so that creation is a harmony despite being the open-ended work of many and diverse minds, is Love. Love is the primary value and basis of creation.
It is Love that means there is no conflict but instead glorious harmony, between God without and God within.
The divine revelations of Philip K Dick
Some eight years before he died in 1982, the science fiction writer Philip K Dick had a series of powerful divine revelations with a Christian theme. (These are fictionalised in his novel Valis, 1981.)
I have been reading excerpts from Exegesis - the massive private journal he kept over those last eight years in which he tried to make sense of the events of February and March 1972, and the changes that followed.
PKD's revelation was, I believe, genuine: he really was communicated-with by God. And it made a qualitative difference to his inner self. But the 'fruits' of revelation were extremely mixed, and Dick's life did not improve significantly - he continued with the kind of chaotic, impulsive, self gratifying, self destructive Californian lifestyle of that era - in an extreme version.
To my eye, Dick's personal fate is representative of what went wrong with the 1960s spiritual awakening, except with Dick I am sure that the awakening was genuine (whereas most were fake).
In a nutshell, PKD could not do anything with his awakened life because he remained in thrall to the 1960s ideology of promiscuous sex, mind altering drugs and leftist radicalism.
Trying to lead an awakened Christian life in such a context, without repenting these errors, is impossible.
So PKD had a real experience of divine revelation, and knew this, and never gave up on it; but it never yielded its potential because he constrained the revelation within an unchanged, primary, secular, false socio-political framework.
I have been reading excerpts from Exegesis - the massive private journal he kept over those last eight years in which he tried to make sense of the events of February and March 1972, and the changes that followed.
PKD's revelation was, I believe, genuine: he really was communicated-with by God. And it made a qualitative difference to his inner self. But the 'fruits' of revelation were extremely mixed, and Dick's life did not improve significantly - he continued with the kind of chaotic, impulsive, self gratifying, self destructive Californian lifestyle of that era - in an extreme version.
To my eye, Dick's personal fate is representative of what went wrong with the 1960s spiritual awakening, except with Dick I am sure that the awakening was genuine (whereas most were fake).
In a nutshell, PKD could not do anything with his awakened life because he remained in thrall to the 1960s ideology of promiscuous sex, mind altering drugs and leftist radicalism.
Trying to lead an awakened Christian life in such a context, without repenting these errors, is impossible.
So PKD had a real experience of divine revelation, and knew this, and never gave up on it; but it never yielded its potential because he constrained the revelation within an unchanged, primary, secular, false socio-political framework.
Saturday, 26 October 2019
The three main crises facing The West: War, Transhumanism and Environmental damage
This is a very interesting recent video featuring Terry Boardman.
In the early section (about 29 minutes) he discusses the three major threats of The West; which he identified in order of imminence as:
1. Superpower War, He feels this could happen at any time, but in a scale of a few years - war between the US and China and or Russia. And if it does; it will - like previous such wars - happen very fast.
I don't have anything to add to this, except that it is certainly possible - but would probably be an unintended consequence of other strategies. I think the Global Establishment are aiming at endemic intra-social conflict or low-grade civil war - rather than international war.)
2. The Transhumanist assault of Artificial Intelligence and computer/ electric technology. The aim is to merge-replace the human mind, thinking, and biological being - with technological substitutes. This is on a timescale of about a decade - with 5G the main current manifestation.
Boardman says some very interesting stuff on this topic, about the way scientists and technologists know a lot less on these matters than they pretend, and the disdain for biology evidenced. He also makes the argument that this is the third stage of replacement - that the Western Church abolished the unique individual (incarnating) spirit, then the industrial revolution took over from the body - transhumanism intends the replacement of the only remaining human distinction - the living mind and its thinking.
3. The environmental crisis - by which he means the real crisis unfolding over the next 80 years or so, and due to massive overproduction/ over-consumption. I got from this that our materialism drives all forms of over-production and also the consumerism that fuels it - whether this is capitalism, state controlled-regulated or something else is irrelevant - since everybody wants ever-more stuff/ entertainment/ building/ comfort/ convenience/ excitement etc., as their primary life goal (there being nothing else).
The proper response to the real environmental crisis is to reduce production and consumption, to have a differently orientated life, a life including the spirit, recognising this world as God's (and potentially our) creation.
Boardman characterises mainstream 'environmentalism' as a dishonest manipulation... the Global Warming movement (Greta and Extinction Rebellion) as a manufactured fake emergency. The intention is to create a terrified/ self-righteous wartime panic - leading ASAP to an immediate and irreversible handover of power and resources to the Establishment.
The popular aspects are merely a contrived front for international finance and multinationals who hope to benefits from a colossal expansion of self-styled Green/ Sustainable technologies. Yet the scale of this exercise is by far the largest in human history - the International powers of finance and funding are very serious, and very much want things to happens imminently.
Real environmentalists want a less material life. Fake environmentalists want to maintain and indeed expand the current world-focus on production and consumption; but to replace the existing infrastructure, and expend billions-trillions of dollars to make it (supposedly) green-and-sustainable.
My interpretation of this propaganda-hysteria is an attempted power and money grab designed to fund and rationalise the demonic forces of evil. The billions-trillions spent on replacing infrastructure will be skimmed and redirected into the agenda of evil.
There is a lot of evil to be done in the world, and Climate Emergency is how it will get paid-for.
The Climate Emergency's significance is that it will pay for the Transhumanism - and Transhumanism is the central rationale for advancing totalitarian agenda of omni-surveillance and micro-control.
(Even though the AI agenda is impossible, and its pursuit inefficient and ineffective; it justifies and enables the real but hidden agenda.)
Putting these together - I see behind all of these is the spiritual disease of materialism that sees all problems and solutions in economic and political terms; and creates paralysing alienation, demotivation, despair - and increasingly desperate attempts to treat these technologically and by consumption or mob crazes.
As so often, we return to the stark fact that all of these bad things, or similar ones, will happen unless we repent our reductionism, materialism, positivism, scientism; unless we recover religion, the spiritual, the romantic-as-real.
This happens only at the individual level, and must be a voluntary choice. And if it doesn't happen, we know in broad terms what shall happen - keep happening - and keep getting-worse.
(Note: The later part of Terry's video presentation focuses on Rudolf Steiner's ideas of Threefold organisation of society - which I regard as 100 years obsolete and currently absolutely impossible; and indeed, undesirably backward-aiming in terms of Steiner's own deeper insights.)
Is the self/ ego anti-God?
Many, perhaps most, people think so - or say so. The idea is that we need to remove the self, destroy or discard the ego - so that the divine may be expressed through us.
The idea that religion is altruism, living for others, is related.
Behind such are assumptions that the ego/ self is the cause of illusion and evil. Get rid of it, and the goodness of God, or reality, can flow through unimpeded.
It is not far from this to the idea that we all ought to be obedient automata, willing servants of the divine-public good; as this is told us by authority. Any dissent is seen as egotism, selfishness.
But on this basis, God created the world badly, in filling it with individual selves. Better not to have bothered at all. Why bother making people if obedient automata are required? Why bother having individuals if they are subordinated to each-other.
The correct understanding is that God hopes for individuals to contribute what each can uniquely bring to the work of creation. God wants our selves and our egos to become divine, or rather to become fully divine - because there is divinity in each and every person, each son and daughter of God.
We should not discard ego, but transform ego to a divine quality. We should not cease to think but begin to transform our thinking by originating thought in this transforming ego.
The real self/ego is good... What is evil are false selves, passively absorbed; materialist and malformed egos that seek pleasurable consumption or prideful domination...
God had a reason to make Men, and that wad so that Men could participate in God's creation, could each individually bring something original to contribute to the developing whole.
For this divine purpose, each Man must be an unique and loving centre of creativity. That's what we should be aiming at... And forget about annihilating the "I".
The idea that religion is altruism, living for others, is related.
Behind such are assumptions that the ego/ self is the cause of illusion and evil. Get rid of it, and the goodness of God, or reality, can flow through unimpeded.
It is not far from this to the idea that we all ought to be obedient automata, willing servants of the divine-public good; as this is told us by authority. Any dissent is seen as egotism, selfishness.
But on this basis, God created the world badly, in filling it with individual selves. Better not to have bothered at all. Why bother making people if obedient automata are required? Why bother having individuals if they are subordinated to each-other.
The correct understanding is that God hopes for individuals to contribute what each can uniquely bring to the work of creation. God wants our selves and our egos to become divine, or rather to become fully divine - because there is divinity in each and every person, each son and daughter of God.
We should not discard ego, but transform ego to a divine quality. We should not cease to think but begin to transform our thinking by originating thought in this transforming ego.
The real self/ego is good... What is evil are false selves, passively absorbed; materialist and malformed egos that seek pleasurable consumption or prideful domination...
God had a reason to make Men, and that wad so that Men could participate in God's creation, could each individually bring something original to contribute to the developing whole.
For this divine purpose, each Man must be an unique and loving centre of creativity. That's what we should be aiming at... And forget about annihilating the "I".
Friday, 25 October 2019
Yearning for union?
All religions seem to agree on a primal state of undifferentiated union, from which we have become tragically separated.
The mystical path seeks again that primal unity, by trying to discard that which differentiates, that which separates.
However, that is an end to the individual and to freedom. It is to regard this mortal life as wholly error, useless - it would be better not to have been.
The Christian yearning is instead for love. Love means that there is a joining that is not unification. Love means that individuals, from their individuality and freedom, join again with reality.
This is something most have experienced. For Christians, love is the highest state, the highest goal. That which is yearned for more than unity.
Heaven is a place of love, not unity.
Those who wish for Heaven, find the way by love of Jesus, not by becoming one with Jesus.
The mystical path seeks again that primal unity, by trying to discard that which differentiates, that which separates.
However, that is an end to the individual and to freedom. It is to regard this mortal life as wholly error, useless - it would be better not to have been.
The Christian yearning is instead for love. Love means that there is a joining that is not unification. Love means that individuals, from their individuality and freedom, join again with reality.
This is something most have experienced. For Christians, love is the highest state, the highest goal. That which is yearned for more than unity.
Heaven is a place of love, not unity.
Those who wish for Heaven, find the way by love of Jesus, not by becoming one with Jesus.
Thursday, 24 October 2019
What makes for strong cohesive and reproductive nations and institutions - instead of the usual Western (purposively, but covertly) suicidal nations, self-hating institutions
The West is crumbling towards death.
There is nowadays a strong assumption against positive purposiveness. The modern mind wants to explain everything in terms of negative causes such as accident, randomness, incompetence, selfishness.
And this is partly true - this is 'natural' - and a consequence of the failure of cohesion. This is due to the loss of religion - specifically Christianity. Nothing has ever been found to replace religion as a cohesive motivation for any length of time. Without religion it is rational to live in a selfish and short-termist way because - why not?
But the decline is also suicidal and self-hating. Plenty of nations have died, plenty of institutions have gone-under - but the way that Western nations are seeking their own destruction is unusual - and needs explanation.
By 'suicidal' I mean something more than an entropic tendency to chaos and crumbling; I mean actively, strategically self-destructive. By self-hating I mean that institutions do not want to do what they are supposed to do - to not put this function as their priority. Schools and colleges do not want to teach their proper subjects; police do not want to prevent and prosecute real crimes, the military does not place offence and defence as their priorities; churches are not longer.
Instead (of course) they want - more than anything else - do do Leftist politics, the usual stuff - sexual revolution, antiracism, pseudo-equality etc. This is termed 'convergence' - all nations and institutions are converging on the same ideology as primary.
On that basis - Western nations, and all the major Western institutions and professions are suicidal, and this is based on inculcated self-hatred, such that Western people do not feel they deserve to defend themselves, to promote their own survival. This is quite extraordinary.
We need to be clear about this. The destruction of Western nations and institutions is purposive - actual destruction is being sought.
This is not merely a side-effect of the selfishness and short-termism of people - that is a constant factor among people; whereas suicidality of groups is relatively unusual. Plenty of nations have died, plenty of institutions have gone-under - but the way that Western nations are seeking their own destruction (most rapidly by mass immigration and subfertility leading to population and cultural repllacement) needs explanation.
And it has the same explanation as the negative decline, of the crumbling entropic collapse - loss of religion. Without religion people are crazy, psychotic, insane - that is they have lost their basic instincts for survival and (overall) seek their own death and also are actively seeking that which is false and which harms them.
It is the loss of religion, the denial of the spiritual, the denial that this is a created world with purpose and meaning, that has made Men seek their own annihilation, and consequently institutional annihilation, national annihilation.
That is the root of it all - that is the primary cause - and if it is not cured, then will will die with absolute certainty; we will die (en masse) physically but also (more importantly) spiritually - both my neglect of that which is needed to survive and by death being an expression of what people most deeply want.
There is nowadays a strong assumption against positive purposiveness. The modern mind wants to explain everything in terms of negative causes such as accident, randomness, incompetence, selfishness.
And this is partly true - this is 'natural' - and a consequence of the failure of cohesion. This is due to the loss of religion - specifically Christianity. Nothing has ever been found to replace religion as a cohesive motivation for any length of time. Without religion it is rational to live in a selfish and short-termist way because - why not?
But the decline is also suicidal and self-hating. Plenty of nations have died, plenty of institutions have gone-under - but the way that Western nations are seeking their own destruction is unusual - and needs explanation.
By 'suicidal' I mean something more than an entropic tendency to chaos and crumbling; I mean actively, strategically self-destructive. By self-hating I mean that institutions do not want to do what they are supposed to do - to not put this function as their priority. Schools and colleges do not want to teach their proper subjects; police do not want to prevent and prosecute real crimes, the military does not place offence and defence as their priorities; churches are not longer.
Instead (of course) they want - more than anything else - do do Leftist politics, the usual stuff - sexual revolution, antiracism, pseudo-equality etc. This is termed 'convergence' - all nations and institutions are converging on the same ideology as primary.
On that basis - Western nations, and all the major Western institutions and professions are suicidal, and this is based on inculcated self-hatred, such that Western people do not feel they deserve to defend themselves, to promote their own survival. This is quite extraordinary.
We need to be clear about this. The destruction of Western nations and institutions is purposive - actual destruction is being sought.
This is not merely a side-effect of the selfishness and short-termism of people - that is a constant factor among people; whereas suicidality of groups is relatively unusual. Plenty of nations have died, plenty of institutions have gone-under - but the way that Western nations are seeking their own destruction (most rapidly by mass immigration and subfertility leading to population and cultural repllacement) needs explanation.
And it has the same explanation as the negative decline, of the crumbling entropic collapse - loss of religion. Without religion people are crazy, psychotic, insane - that is they have lost their basic instincts for survival and (overall) seek their own death and also are actively seeking that which is false and which harms them.
It is the loss of religion, the denial of the spiritual, the denial that this is a created world with purpose and meaning, that has made Men seek their own annihilation, and consequently institutional annihilation, national annihilation.
That is the root of it all - that is the primary cause - and if it is not cured, then will will die with absolute certainty; we will die (en masse) physically but also (more importantly) spiritually - both my neglect of that which is needed to survive and by death being an expression of what people most deeply want.
Wednesday, 23 October 2019
A Geography of Consciousness plus Letter from a Father by William Arkle (with a new introduction by Bruce G Charlton)
Just published. These two works (GoC and Letter from a Father) are unsurpassed in my experience as an ever-fresh source of wisdom and encouragement.
Available from Amazon UK and Amazon USA.
At the fair price of 20 US dollars (when secondhand copies on Amazon US are going at $133-220!)
What relation does the resurrection body have to the mortal body?
My understanding is that an eternal and indestructible resurrected body has no physical relation to the mortal body; but is 'regenerated' from the soul: regenerated from that which survives death.
This is confirmed for me by the possibility of reincarnation, which seems to have been the 'normal' thing for souls in many parts of the world throughout history - including the ancient Hebrews and first Christians - since the possibility or prophecy of prophets being reborn is mentioned several times in the Old and New Testaments (including the Fourth Gospel Chapter 1, when discussing the identity of John the Baptist).
If a person is to be reincarnated, especially when widely separated by time, then this must presumably be with different bodies - showing that the principle is established whereby a soul may be housed in different bodies - including, potentially, the resurrection body.
On the other side; the indications that resurrection involves re-animating the mortal body can be taken to be implied by two episodes in the Fourth Gospel ('John'): the raising of Lazarus (assuming, like me, you regard this as a resurrection) and by the episode in the 20th chapter where the resurrected Jesus twice shows the wounds in his sides and hands to the disciples.
Some would assume that Lazarus is brought to life in the same physical body that has died, presumably after it had been miraculously repaired; and that the continued presence of wounds in Jesus's hands and side means that we all should expect to be resurrected in the same physical bodies in which we died - or at least one that looks the same.
Instead, my assumption is that these particular public demonstrations of resurrection are not intended to be a pattern for all possible ones. In these; I assume that the resurrected body formed in more-or-less the same physical space as the dead mortal body; as a proof of continued identity for bystanders. But this is not necessary - nor indeed usual.
Unless resurrection was intended to be restricted only to those who had died without serious damage to their bodies, the process of resurrection (whatever it is) cannot depend on the survival intact of the physical body. There is no indication anywhere in the Fourth Gospel that resurrection is so restricted.
Furthermore, I personally do not hang too much on the 'showing of the wounds' episode, since it may well be a later addition to the Gospel by another hand and is unconfirmed by other parts of the Gospel. For example, when Mary Magdalene first met the risen Jesus at the tomb, she seems not to have seen any wounds - or else she would (surely?) immediately have recognised him.
(It is characteristic of the Fourth Gospel that all key points are repeated in different sections; I suppose so that they are emphasised, and also in order to better explain them using different 'metaphors' and contexts.)
Therefore, lacking confirmation, I would not want to depend on the showing of the wounds as decisive evidence; especially as I am sure that the immediately adjacent and interpolated passage in Chapter 20 - about the coming of the Holy Ghost - is a later and false insertion.
It may be that most of Chapter 20 is not from the beloved disciple (whom I recognise as Lazarus); and instead based on later hearsay and the not-from-Jesus hence alien, 'imminent second coming' agenda.
But either way, I think that the fact of resurrection being the provision of a 'new' body (eternal and incorruptible) by a 'process' that does Not require any contribution from the mortal body, was something known and assumed at the time the Fourth Gospel was written.
This is confirmed for me by the possibility of reincarnation, which seems to have been the 'normal' thing for souls in many parts of the world throughout history - including the ancient Hebrews and first Christians - since the possibility or prophecy of prophets being reborn is mentioned several times in the Old and New Testaments (including the Fourth Gospel Chapter 1, when discussing the identity of John the Baptist).
If a person is to be reincarnated, especially when widely separated by time, then this must presumably be with different bodies - showing that the principle is established whereby a soul may be housed in different bodies - including, potentially, the resurrection body.
On the other side; the indications that resurrection involves re-animating the mortal body can be taken to be implied by two episodes in the Fourth Gospel ('John'): the raising of Lazarus (assuming, like me, you regard this as a resurrection) and by the episode in the 20th chapter where the resurrected Jesus twice shows the wounds in his sides and hands to the disciples.
Some would assume that Lazarus is brought to life in the same physical body that has died, presumably after it had been miraculously repaired; and that the continued presence of wounds in Jesus's hands and side means that we all should expect to be resurrected in the same physical bodies in which we died - or at least one that looks the same.
Instead, my assumption is that these particular public demonstrations of resurrection are not intended to be a pattern for all possible ones. In these; I assume that the resurrected body formed in more-or-less the same physical space as the dead mortal body; as a proof of continued identity for bystanders. But this is not necessary - nor indeed usual.
Unless resurrection was intended to be restricted only to those who had died without serious damage to their bodies, the process of resurrection (whatever it is) cannot depend on the survival intact of the physical body. There is no indication anywhere in the Fourth Gospel that resurrection is so restricted.
Furthermore, I personally do not hang too much on the 'showing of the wounds' episode, since it may well be a later addition to the Gospel by another hand and is unconfirmed by other parts of the Gospel. For example, when Mary Magdalene first met the risen Jesus at the tomb, she seems not to have seen any wounds - or else she would (surely?) immediately have recognised him.
(It is characteristic of the Fourth Gospel that all key points are repeated in different sections; I suppose so that they are emphasised, and also in order to better explain them using different 'metaphors' and contexts.)
Therefore, lacking confirmation, I would not want to depend on the showing of the wounds as decisive evidence; especially as I am sure that the immediately adjacent and interpolated passage in Chapter 20 - about the coming of the Holy Ghost - is a later and false insertion.
It may be that most of Chapter 20 is not from the beloved disciple (whom I recognise as Lazarus); and instead based on later hearsay and the not-from-Jesus hence alien, 'imminent second coming' agenda.
But either way, I think that the fact of resurrection being the provision of a 'new' body (eternal and incorruptible) by a 'process' that does Not require any contribution from the mortal body, was something known and assumed at the time the Fourth Gospel was written.
Assuming the conspiracy theorists are correct about the Establishment wanting a totalitarian world government - why do They want this?
Francis Berger asks a very necessary question on his blog today - and provides a plausible answer:
A big problem with secular right conspiracy theories – at least for me – is their failure to consider the ultimate objectives of the Establishment: what are they conspiring to do?
I would fully endorse Francis's characterisation of the question and his answer.
The following text has been lightly edited by me - read the whole thing.
What do those on the secular right believe the conspirators ultimately want to achieve through their sinister plotting and scheming?
Well, according to the secular right, the Establishment’s conspiratorial objectives are as follows: the destruction of the family; moral inversion (especially through sex); power consolidation; economic, political, and social tyranny; enslavement; disenfranchisement; civilizational dissolution; the abandonment of tradition; the eradication of nations; perpetual surveillance and spying; and the establishment of a globalist, one world government.
The objectives themselves appear solid enough... But there’s the rub. What force, motivation, or desire drives the Establishment's conspiratorial objectives?
Let’s imagine the Establishment succeeds in achieving all of its objectives. One world government has been established. The Establishment owns and controls everything. People are family-less, impoverished pervert-slaves with no sense of identity and no place to call home. They can’t remember or are afraid to recollect anything from the past and are at the complete mercy of the Establishment.
Great! Mission accomplished. But here’s a question – what does the Establishment do after that?
Simply lord over everyone to ensure maximum misery is in effect at all times? Torture people for the fun of it? Conduct bizarre transhumanist experiments in an effort to create some kind of Nietzschean superman? Depopulate the planet and let it heal so that it becomes a global five star resort where the Establishment can enjoy a permanent holiday while being catered to by a select group of servants they spared from the sword or the gas or the virus? Nuke the planet and unleash the ultimate Gotterdammerung that consumes everything including them?
When assessing the Establishment’s plots and schemes, the secular right focuses exclusively on physical and material considerations in this world – and that is where their theories fall short.
Because, above all else, the Establishment seeks to establish and maintain a system of damnation through which it can perpetually turn people away from Heaven and the Divine.
The establishment works to create conditions in which people willingly reject God and actively embrace their own damnation. The objectives outlined above, such as destruction of the family and the dissolution of nations, are all simply means to that end.
The Establishment does not wish to outright destroy us during our mortal lives; instead, it seeks to inspire us to destroy our immortal lives through the choices we make, the thoughts we think, and the actions we take in this world.
That is what the secular right refuses to acknowledge and that is what their conspiracy theories ultimately miss.
A big problem with secular right conspiracy theories – at least for me – is their failure to consider the ultimate objectives of the Establishment: what are they conspiring to do?
I would fully endorse Francis's characterisation of the question and his answer.
The following text has been lightly edited by me - read the whole thing.
What do those on the secular right believe the conspirators ultimately want to achieve through their sinister plotting and scheming?
Well, according to the secular right, the Establishment’s conspiratorial objectives are as follows: the destruction of the family; moral inversion (especially through sex); power consolidation; economic, political, and social tyranny; enslavement; disenfranchisement; civilizational dissolution; the abandonment of tradition; the eradication of nations; perpetual surveillance and spying; and the establishment of a globalist, one world government.
The objectives themselves appear solid enough... But there’s the rub. What force, motivation, or desire drives the Establishment's conspiratorial objectives?
Let’s imagine the Establishment succeeds in achieving all of its objectives. One world government has been established. The Establishment owns and controls everything. People are family-less, impoverished pervert-slaves with no sense of identity and no place to call home. They can’t remember or are afraid to recollect anything from the past and are at the complete mercy of the Establishment.
Great! Mission accomplished. But here’s a question – what does the Establishment do after that?
Simply lord over everyone to ensure maximum misery is in effect at all times? Torture people for the fun of it? Conduct bizarre transhumanist experiments in an effort to create some kind of Nietzschean superman? Depopulate the planet and let it heal so that it becomes a global five star resort where the Establishment can enjoy a permanent holiday while being catered to by a select group of servants they spared from the sword or the gas or the virus? Nuke the planet and unleash the ultimate Gotterdammerung that consumes everything including them?
When assessing the Establishment’s plots and schemes, the secular right focuses exclusively on physical and material considerations in this world – and that is where their theories fall short.
Because, above all else, the Establishment seeks to establish and maintain a system of damnation through which it can perpetually turn people away from Heaven and the Divine.
The establishment works to create conditions in which people willingly reject God and actively embrace their own damnation. The objectives outlined above, such as destruction of the family and the dissolution of nations, are all simply means to that end.
The Establishment does not wish to outright destroy us during our mortal lives; instead, it seeks to inspire us to destroy our immortal lives through the choices we make, the thoughts we think, and the actions we take in this world.
That is what the secular right refuses to acknowledge and that is what their conspiracy theories ultimately miss.
Tuesday, 22 October 2019
What do you think about The Devil?
What do you think about The Devil?
It strikes me that this is a good discriminatory question to ask self-identified Christians; to see whether they are real Christians or something else.
This can work both ways. It can reveal that a self-styled Christian is instead a spiritual New Ager/ perennial philosopher/ Western-Eastern-religioner; or perhaps a 'liberal' (or fake) Christian (actually a Leftist fifth columnist).
It may reveal that somebody who sounds like 'one of the above' is actually a real Christian - when pushed (and this question does push us, at least nowadays). There is sometimes more to such people than first meets the eye - and this can be seen in their expressed attitude to the devil, and to the demonic agenda and activity.
Or it may reveal that strangest of modern types: one who believes in the devil - perhaps practices a demonic religion - but does not believe in God. I think such people are pretending to themselves that their 'Satanic' belief is ironic, playful, political, artistic, magical...
But it is actually the real thing, whether they acknowledge it or not; and it has demonstrable spiritual (and indeed behavioural) consequences.
It strikes me that this is a good discriminatory question to ask self-identified Christians; to see whether they are real Christians or something else.
This can work both ways. It can reveal that a self-styled Christian is instead a spiritual New Ager/ perennial philosopher/ Western-Eastern-religioner; or perhaps a 'liberal' (or fake) Christian (actually a Leftist fifth columnist).
It may reveal that somebody who sounds like 'one of the above' is actually a real Christian - when pushed (and this question does push us, at least nowadays). There is sometimes more to such people than first meets the eye - and this can be seen in their expressed attitude to the devil, and to the demonic agenda and activity.
Or it may reveal that strangest of modern types: one who believes in the devil - perhaps practices a demonic religion - but does not believe in God. I think such people are pretending to themselves that their 'Satanic' belief is ironic, playful, political, artistic, magical...
But it is actually the real thing, whether they acknowledge it or not; and it has demonstrable spiritual (and indeed behavioural) consequences.
What is it about Leftism (including the sexual revolution) that so absolutely blocks real Christianity?
The simple answer is not primarily the things themselves, not the effect of Leftism* (including the sexual revolution - which is Leftism's most insidious and effective manifestation); but the failure to repent.
That is, the failure to know that these are wrong. The failure to recognise, acknowledge that these are not The Path; that these are not what we should be doing - that these are temptations towards sin.
After all, we have it from Jesus that sin is no barrier to salvation, nor even to theosis (to becoming more divine). But for sin to be negated, we must know that it is sin; and to know sin, we must know goodness, virtue, beauty and truth.
The special, lethal damage of Leftism is that so many people are so deeply persuaded that some particular (or more than one) of the multifold Leftist ideals, principles, rights, prohibitions, aspirations... are needful.
(By which I mean any or all of the mutating and evolving imperatives of Leftism: pacifism, abolition of slavery, equality, socialism, social justice, feminism, antiracism, abolition of suffering, the rights of non-biological or pathological sexual orientations and aspirations, environmentalism, libertarianism, transhumanism... etc. and so forth.)
Needful and necessary in an ultimate fashion - as a bottom line.
Necessary for themselves, necessary for some others or groups of others - needful in a kind of cosmic way.
Either that - or another kind of Leftism; that these matters (political, social and sexual) are - as a matter of principle - trivial, unimportant, nobody's business, arbitrary... that they are purely materialist arrangements of matter; excluded from the realms of values; nothing whatsoever to do with truth, beauty or virtue.
What absolutely blocks real Christianity among Leftists is the failure to include the political, social and sexual within the reality of Life that is relevant to following Jesus. This is not, at root, a matter of following rules; but a refusal to be real.
To know and follow Jesus, to know one's mortal life in the context of Heaven to come; is to regard this our mortality as really-real in a way that is absolutely clarifying of our needing to have faith and love in the first place; and then to live this life and learn from it.
What we have, endemic in The West, is a mass refusal to learn from life; derived from a failure to regard life as real, significant, solid and of Heavenly scope. Leftism (including the sexual revolution) is a commitment-against this.
So, in a world in which Leftism encompasses almost the entirely of public, social, institutional life; in which the sexual revolution has been inculcated, encouraged, rewarded since infancy - we are all of us prone to temptation and lapsing. We are all complicit. Purity and consistency is unattainable. We are all infected and diseased, to some significant extent.
None of this matters when we are prepared to live and learn, to recognise, know and repent (trial, error, repentance; and trial...); and this is God-given and comes spontaneously and naturally (if we but allow it - albeit few do) - for those whose orientation is set-upon following Jesus through death to Heaven.
We will stray from the path, we will know when we stray - we can return to the path and continue; but only if we personally and consciously choose to make Jesus primary, and acknowledge when we have strayed.
*Note: This question about the lethal effect of Leftism on real Christianity is of central importance to our time and place: The West, here-and-now; because Leftism is the entirety of mainstream public discourse - including all conservative, republican, libertarian, nationalist groupings... Any and all discourse that does not acknowledge the primacy of the divine is Leftist - to put it another way materialism is Leftism. Therefore, all who call-themselves 'Right' yet who are not primarily religious in terms of how they aspire to arrange society, are actually of-the-Left. The Left (of all types) is therefore the party of evil, whatever one's religion. There are - of course - many religions with very different ideas concerning the nature of deity - but the question of by which religion we ought to live, is a separate discussion.
That is, the failure to know that these are wrong. The failure to recognise, acknowledge that these are not The Path; that these are not what we should be doing - that these are temptations towards sin.
After all, we have it from Jesus that sin is no barrier to salvation, nor even to theosis (to becoming more divine). But for sin to be negated, we must know that it is sin; and to know sin, we must know goodness, virtue, beauty and truth.
The special, lethal damage of Leftism is that so many people are so deeply persuaded that some particular (or more than one) of the multifold Leftist ideals, principles, rights, prohibitions, aspirations... are needful.
(By which I mean any or all of the mutating and evolving imperatives of Leftism: pacifism, abolition of slavery, equality, socialism, social justice, feminism, antiracism, abolition of suffering, the rights of non-biological or pathological sexual orientations and aspirations, environmentalism, libertarianism, transhumanism... etc. and so forth.)
Needful and necessary in an ultimate fashion - as a bottom line.
Necessary for themselves, necessary for some others or groups of others - needful in a kind of cosmic way.
Either that - or another kind of Leftism; that these matters (political, social and sexual) are - as a matter of principle - trivial, unimportant, nobody's business, arbitrary... that they are purely materialist arrangements of matter; excluded from the realms of values; nothing whatsoever to do with truth, beauty or virtue.
What absolutely blocks real Christianity among Leftists is the failure to include the political, social and sexual within the reality of Life that is relevant to following Jesus. This is not, at root, a matter of following rules; but a refusal to be real.
To know and follow Jesus, to know one's mortal life in the context of Heaven to come; is to regard this our mortality as really-real in a way that is absolutely clarifying of our needing to have faith and love in the first place; and then to live this life and learn from it.
What we have, endemic in The West, is a mass refusal to learn from life; derived from a failure to regard life as real, significant, solid and of Heavenly scope. Leftism (including the sexual revolution) is a commitment-against this.
So, in a world in which Leftism encompasses almost the entirely of public, social, institutional life; in which the sexual revolution has been inculcated, encouraged, rewarded since infancy - we are all of us prone to temptation and lapsing. We are all complicit. Purity and consistency is unattainable. We are all infected and diseased, to some significant extent.
None of this matters when we are prepared to live and learn, to recognise, know and repent (trial, error, repentance; and trial...); and this is God-given and comes spontaneously and naturally (if we but allow it - albeit few do) - for those whose orientation is set-upon following Jesus through death to Heaven.
We will stray from the path, we will know when we stray - we can return to the path and continue; but only if we personally and consciously choose to make Jesus primary, and acknowledge when we have strayed.
*Note: This question about the lethal effect of Leftism on real Christianity is of central importance to our time and place: The West, here-and-now; because Leftism is the entirety of mainstream public discourse - including all conservative, republican, libertarian, nationalist groupings... Any and all discourse that does not acknowledge the primacy of the divine is Leftist - to put it another way materialism is Leftism. Therefore, all who call-themselves 'Right' yet who are not primarily religious in terms of how they aspire to arrange society, are actually of-the-Left. The Left (of all types) is therefore the party of evil, whatever one's religion. There are - of course - many religions with very different ideas concerning the nature of deity - but the question of by which religion we ought to live, is a separate discussion.
How to distinguish between angels and demons... We Can't (if 100% certainty is being demanded)
The topic is raised at William Wildblood's blog - in relation to his own, early adult, experiences with channelled communications from higher spiritual beings (not angels, or not necessarily angels).
This provoked me to think, and elicited the following comment - here expanded:
The demand to know how we may distinguish for sure between good and evil spirits, or between angels and demons, or white and black magic is one of those situations in which people seem to be asking for something which cannot be had in mortal life - absolute-infallible-objective-eternal certainty of knowledge.
Such is not available to us. We cannot - in that hard sense - 100% determine the difference between (say) angels and demons. After all, we might currently (at this moment) be insane, delirious or demented - or asleep and not knowing it.
But there is nothing specific to that class of discernment. It is qualitatively the same discernment we need to make between someone who loves us and someone who loathes us and is manipulatively pretending to love us - yet we must make such a discernment to marry. Or between a saint and an Antichrist - yet we must make such discernments to live consciously.
In this mortal life, we are not made (nor is the world made) to be omniscient; but instead called upon to make a truthful and honest evaluation, and to learn from the consequences. That is, Mortal life is for experiencing and learning - in ways that benefit us in the coming (if chosen) eternal, postmortal, resurrected, Heavenly life - we are not supposed to 'be perfect'.
(If that was the intention, we would have to conclude that God-the-creator has badly-designed our-selves and this world.)
I think what covertly (or explicitly) lies behind the kind of question 'Are 'The Masters' demons?' is the assumption that there is a 'safe' way of being a Christian, where we do not need to make such discernments.
The idea that (for instance) by reading and obeying scripture 'literally' we will all be saved; without having to hazard the 'risks' of dealing with spiritual, supernatural, 'esoteric' phenomena...
By contrast, I see no safe way to be a Christian, there are hazards in every direction. For instance, materialistic legalism is a major hazard of supernatural-avoiding, anti-spiritual Bible-based Christianity.
There is no safe path, there is not meant to be a safe path; and there is no path which fits the needs of everybody (we each have different weaknesses, and strengths). Your actual life and my actual life just-are-unique, and deliberately so; because our spiritual needs are unique.
We are meant to live without certainty in order that we may learn through living.
Thus, life is irreplaceable.
This provoked me to think, and elicited the following comment - here expanded:
The demand to know how we may distinguish for sure between good and evil spirits, or between angels and demons, or white and black magic is one of those situations in which people seem to be asking for something which cannot be had in mortal life - absolute-infallible-objective-eternal certainty of knowledge.
Such is not available to us. We cannot - in that hard sense - 100% determine the difference between (say) angels and demons. After all, we might currently (at this moment) be insane, delirious or demented - or asleep and not knowing it.
But there is nothing specific to that class of discernment. It is qualitatively the same discernment we need to make between someone who loves us and someone who loathes us and is manipulatively pretending to love us - yet we must make such a discernment to marry. Or between a saint and an Antichrist - yet we must make such discernments to live consciously.
In this mortal life, we are not made (nor is the world made) to be omniscient; but instead called upon to make a truthful and honest evaluation, and to learn from the consequences. That is, Mortal life is for experiencing and learning - in ways that benefit us in the coming (if chosen) eternal, postmortal, resurrected, Heavenly life - we are not supposed to 'be perfect'.
(If that was the intention, we would have to conclude that God-the-creator has badly-designed our-selves and this world.)
I think what covertly (or explicitly) lies behind the kind of question 'Are 'The Masters' demons?' is the assumption that there is a 'safe' way of being a Christian, where we do not need to make such discernments.
The idea that (for instance) by reading and obeying scripture 'literally' we will all be saved; without having to hazard the 'risks' of dealing with spiritual, supernatural, 'esoteric' phenomena...
By contrast, I see no safe way to be a Christian, there are hazards in every direction. For instance, materialistic legalism is a major hazard of supernatural-avoiding, anti-spiritual Bible-based Christianity.
There is no safe path, there is not meant to be a safe path; and there is no path which fits the needs of everybody (we each have different weaknesses, and strengths). Your actual life and my actual life just-are-unique, and deliberately so; because our spiritual needs are unique.
We are meant to live without certainty in order that we may learn through living.
Thus, life is irreplaceable.
Monday, 21 October 2019
Review of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911)
I listened to the audio-book version read by Johanna Ward - a top-notch narration
[No spoilers]
Late in the day, I have finally experienced the classic children's fiction The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (serialised 1910-11, published fully 1911). I found this to be an absolutely first-rate novel; beautifully written and paced, funny and moving by turns, and with a highly original construction.
What I found original about the structure was that it had an almost unbroken incremental ascent from the sad, impoverished and negative tone of the beginning to the exaltation and affirmation of the end. The made the total effect encouraging, optimistic, healthy-minded and happy.
It struck me how unusual this is in terms of what I have come to expect from a narrative. The usual pattern is two-steps forward then several back - and most books that have a happy ending follow the classic romantic comedy shape of 'Boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back'.
That is, after things have been going well for the protagonists we expect that there will then be some serious setback; and that they will soon be staring disaster in the face; before, at the last minute, there is a turn of fortune and the positive resolution is achieved by some unexpected twist.
I kept waiting for this to happen with The Secret Garden - but it never really does. Instead, with the main characters starting in so low and miserable a state; the story is one of a series of challenges, tackled and overcome; rising step-wise to a happy ending. And this works!
The novel is naturalistic and plausible, yet it is about 'magic' - of an everyday kind that is all around us but unnoticed, or derided; it is about how life could be, and sometimes is - the main symbolism is of winter growing through spring to summer. The 'secret garden' is a real garden; but it is also an enchanted garden with an effect that is healing and exalting.
Altogether inspiring; and (in both senses) a good book.
The strangely chaotic nature of life, contrasted with the golden thread
Since I was (officially) adult, life has always seems strangely chaotic - 'despite' that my actual, externally-visible, life was much more ordered than most.
The chaotic-ness is not in anything spectacular but in the the way that some aspects of it, quantitatively most of it, crumbles away behind me on a daily, hourly, basis.
Life, it seems, is not a structure; not something that is built - piece by piece - into any kind of edifice. One can add pieces - but they won't stay where they are put - they will fall-out, they will distort or crumble.
When I look back - expecting to see an edifice - with evidence of my handiwork, I find my labours are not to be discovered. Most of what I did (and thought supremely important, at the time) I not longer 'remember'.
That is, I merely remember about it; but the memory is as unreal as a newspaper report or an advert. I - personally - am not there in the memory; even if I can see it through my past eyes, from my past perspective.
Instead there is something very different - a single golden thread that constitutes my mythical life. This represents what I have learned that was important - spiritually and eternally important - specifically important to me.
This seems like a microcosmic clue to the nature of universal reality, to Heaven. Not everything is remembered; but what is significant to Heavenly Beings is permanent.
'Everything' is infinite and has no structure; what is truly remembered is because of its important relation the perspective of a Being. It is the consciousness of that Being which interacts with chaotic reality to create what we see as structure.
This is, indeed, the primary act of creation. It was God's interaction with primal chaos that began creation - all of significance depended upon the perspective of God (and God is incarnate; so God necessarily has perspective).
A great deal of what happens falls-away. This contributes to that feeling of chaos. But what matters does not fall away - this contributes to the feeling of life as cumulative, structural.
Of course, in mortal life, the falling-away is compounded by the impermanence of our bodies, and of earthly things. This aspect does not happen in the resurrected world of Heaven.
But in the eternity of Heaven, I would expect that still there is falling away, still not everything is permanent, still there will be trial and error - because this is an aspect of creation.
Whenever we have Beings, and relationships between Beings (and that is an approximation of ultimate reality), there will be a 'dynamic' living situation; and part of aliveness is perspective, and perspective means partiality.
Or, from the opposite perspective, it means focus - it means a permanent thread deriving from personal significance and importance.
The chaotic-ness is not in anything spectacular but in the the way that some aspects of it, quantitatively most of it, crumbles away behind me on a daily, hourly, basis.
Life, it seems, is not a structure; not something that is built - piece by piece - into any kind of edifice. One can add pieces - but they won't stay where they are put - they will fall-out, they will distort or crumble.
When I look back - expecting to see an edifice - with evidence of my handiwork, I find my labours are not to be discovered. Most of what I did (and thought supremely important, at the time) I not longer 'remember'.
That is, I merely remember about it; but the memory is as unreal as a newspaper report or an advert. I - personally - am not there in the memory; even if I can see it through my past eyes, from my past perspective.
Instead there is something very different - a single golden thread that constitutes my mythical life. This represents what I have learned that was important - spiritually and eternally important - specifically important to me.
This seems like a microcosmic clue to the nature of universal reality, to Heaven. Not everything is remembered; but what is significant to Heavenly Beings is permanent.
'Everything' is infinite and has no structure; what is truly remembered is because of its important relation the perspective of a Being. It is the consciousness of that Being which interacts with chaotic reality to create what we see as structure.
This is, indeed, the primary act of creation. It was God's interaction with primal chaos that began creation - all of significance depended upon the perspective of God (and God is incarnate; so God necessarily has perspective).
A great deal of what happens falls-away. This contributes to that feeling of chaos. But what matters does not fall away - this contributes to the feeling of life as cumulative, structural.
Of course, in mortal life, the falling-away is compounded by the impermanence of our bodies, and of earthly things. This aspect does not happen in the resurrected world of Heaven.
But in the eternity of Heaven, I would expect that still there is falling away, still not everything is permanent, still there will be trial and error - because this is an aspect of creation.
Whenever we have Beings, and relationships between Beings (and that is an approximation of ultimate reality), there will be a 'dynamic' living situation; and part of aliveness is perspective, and perspective means partiality.
Or, from the opposite perspective, it means focus - it means a permanent thread deriving from personal significance and importance.
Sunday, 20 October 2019
"Hogwarts Hogwarts - Hoggy Warty Hogwarts" A round to sing with children
This little gem of a scene was inexplicably deleted from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire movie - a decade ago I learned the 'school song' with my kids, and we would perform it in the car.
Aside - the scene below would have been the best in the Half Blood Prince movie (indeed perhaps the best in all eight of the series) but it too was edited-out. It would have been inserted just before the Death Eaters attack Hogwarts, when Snape knew he would have to kill Dumbledore:
Is The System inherently evil, or merely corrupted - by Francis Berger
My penfriend Frank Berger has posted an outstandingly clarifying blog post today - short, punchy, exactly what is needed:
People who perceive the evil gripping the West can generally be divided in two distinct groups.
The first group believes the system has been corrupted, and they advocate for the removal of the evil forces and elements that have caused the corruption. Put another way, people in this camp believe the system is inherently good, or at least was inherently good before dark interests debased it. Purge the evil from the system, the first group argues, and the system can be saved.
The second group, on the other hand, sees the system as purposefully corrupt and evil. People in this group believe the system has been designed by evil for the purpose of creating chaos and promoting damnation. Evil cannot be purged from the system because the system itself is evil embodied. Purging evil from the system would result in the elimination of the system (which is exactly what most in the second group believe should / needs to happen).
So where do you land? Do you see evil in a corrupted but otherwise good system? Or do you see only an evil system?
My comment: I see an evil system - but I am afraid of the implications of such an insight, and so I resisted it for a very long time.
Acknowledging that the system is itself designed for evil implies it needs to be destroyed - and the system is almost everywhere now. Destroying the evil system probably means disruption (and presumably, suffering, disease, death) on a scale never before seen.
I see that as a kind of death grip that evil now has upon the world - evil holds us to ransom - at least so far as this-worldly aspects are concerned. We have a situation in which the destruction of evil will almost certainly mean triggering the destruction of our civilisation - and therefore (almost certainly) our-selves and those we love.
More accurately, I think it means making this happen earlier rather than later - because evil is parasitic and un-sustainable - so such a 'crash and burn' will happen whatever we do; but by supporting the evil system, this inevitable collapse can be delayed.
But the price of doing so escalates. It gets harder and harder to delay collapse, and we would have to give more and more to sustaining the evil system for this to happen.
The only 'answer' - which would ensure we 'did the right thing' (rather than being drawn into ever-greater evil, as is currently the situation) is a really solid and motivating belief in the Heavenly Life Everlasting beyond death, attained through following Jesus with love.
This is why I try to emphasise the teaching of the Fourth Gospel - it is the Christian understanding that we most need now and in the days to come.
People who perceive the evil gripping the West can generally be divided in two distinct groups.
The first group believes the system has been corrupted, and they advocate for the removal of the evil forces and elements that have caused the corruption. Put another way, people in this camp believe the system is inherently good, or at least was inherently good before dark interests debased it. Purge the evil from the system, the first group argues, and the system can be saved.
The second group, on the other hand, sees the system as purposefully corrupt and evil. People in this group believe the system has been designed by evil for the purpose of creating chaos and promoting damnation. Evil cannot be purged from the system because the system itself is evil embodied. Purging evil from the system would result in the elimination of the system (which is exactly what most in the second group believe should / needs to happen).
So where do you land? Do you see evil in a corrupted but otherwise good system? Or do you see only an evil system?
My comment: I see an evil system - but I am afraid of the implications of such an insight, and so I resisted it for a very long time.
Acknowledging that the system is itself designed for evil implies it needs to be destroyed - and the system is almost everywhere now. Destroying the evil system probably means disruption (and presumably, suffering, disease, death) on a scale never before seen.
I see that as a kind of death grip that evil now has upon the world - evil holds us to ransom - at least so far as this-worldly aspects are concerned. We have a situation in which the destruction of evil will almost certainly mean triggering the destruction of our civilisation - and therefore (almost certainly) our-selves and those we love.
More accurately, I think it means making this happen earlier rather than later - because evil is parasitic and un-sustainable - so such a 'crash and burn' will happen whatever we do; but by supporting the evil system, this inevitable collapse can be delayed.
But the price of doing so escalates. It gets harder and harder to delay collapse, and we would have to give more and more to sustaining the evil system for this to happen.
The only 'answer' - which would ensure we 'did the right thing' (rather than being drawn into ever-greater evil, as is currently the situation) is a really solid and motivating belief in the Heavenly Life Everlasting beyond death, attained through following Jesus with love.
This is why I try to emphasise the teaching of the Fourth Gospel - it is the Christian understanding that we most need now and in the days to come.
Covert drug dependence - or how prescribed drugs that create an illness are credited with curing it
In some ways, the editorial I wrote on Covert Drug Dependence was the most important-but-completely-ignored article that I ever wrote!
Covert drug dependence should be the null hypothesis for explaining drug-withdrawal-induced clinical deterioration: The necessity for placebo versus drug withdrawal trials on normal control subjects. Bruce G. Charlton. Medical Hypotheses. 2010; 74: 761-763.
(The core ideas are all drawn from David Healy - articulated in an adjacent article from the same issue of Medical Hypotheses - what I provided was the expression.)
Some edited excerpts:
Just as a placebo can mimic an immediately effective drug, so chronic drug dependence may mimic an effective long-term or preventive treatment...
The discovery of the placebo had a profound result upon medical practice. After the placebo effect was discovered it was recognized that it was much harder to determine the therapeutic value of an intervention than previously assumed.
An analogous recognition of the effect of drug dependence is now overdue, especially in relation to psychoactive drugs.
Just as placebo controlled trials of drugs are regarded as necessary to detect ineffective drugs, so drug withdrawal trials on normal control subjects should be regarded as necessary to detect dependence-producing drugs.
Nowadays the placebo effect is routinely assumed to be the cause of patient improvement unless proven otherwise. Placebo effect is therefore the null hypothesis used to explain therapeutic improvements.
The first aim of drug evaluation is now to show that measured benefits cannot wholly be explained by placebo.
This has led to widespread adoption of placebo controlled trials which compare the effect of the putative drug with a placebo. Only when the drug produces a greater effect than placebo alone, is it recognized as a potentially effective therapy.
The effect of withdrawing a drug upon which a subject has become dependent can be regarded as analogous to the placebo effect, in the sense that drug dependence resembles the placebo effect in being able to mislead concerning clinical effectiveness.
It may routinely be assumed that if a patient gets worse when drug treatment is stopped, then this change is due to the patient losing the beneficial effects of the drug, so that the underlying disease (for which the drug was being prescribed) has re-emerged.
However, this naïve assumption is certainly unjustified as a general rule because drug dependence produces exactly the same effect.
When a patient has become dependent on a drug, then adverse consequences following withdrawal may have nothing to do with revealing an underlying, long-term illness. Instead, chronic drug use has actually made the patient ill, the drug has created a new but covert pathology...
The body (including brain) has adapted to the presence of the drug and now needs the drug in order to function normally such that the covert pathology only emerges when the drug is removed and body systems are disrupted by its absence.
Eliminating drug dependence as an explanation for withdrawal effects cannot be achieved in the context of normal clinical practice, nor by the standard formal methodologies of controlled clinical trials. Just as eliminating the possibility of placebo effects requires specially designed placebo controlled therapeutic trails, so eliminating the occurrence of covert drug dependence requires also specially designed withdrawal trials on normal control subjects.
Our existing clinical evaluation procedures are not capable of detecting withdrawal effects.
Even worse, current procedures misattribute the creation of dependence and harm following withdrawal, as instead being evidence of drug benefit with implication of the necessity for continued treatment of a supposed chronic illness.
The currently prevailing practices and assumptions systematically favours new drugs about which little is known.
Lack of evidence of dependence is interpreted as evidence of no dependence - perpetuating ignorance, and favouring new drugs about which we are ignorant.
In other words, as things stand; a drug that creates chronic dependence will instead be credited with curing a chronic disease.
Our current practice is precisely equivalent to chronic alcohol treatment being regarded as a cure for alcoholism - on the evidential basis that delirium tremens follows alcohol withdrawal, and alcohol can be used to treat delirium tremens!
Note: The prime example of covert drug dependence is psychiatric drugs - especially (so called) antidepressants, antipsychotics and mood stabilizers.
For instance antidepressants cause serious withdrawal symptoms that mimic the illness for which they were prescribed. This is interpreted as some kind of chronic depression or other illness. And that person may be recommended to stay on the drug.
Whenever the patient tries to stop taking the antidepressant, he gets depressive symptoms. The longer he stays on the antidepressant, the worse the withdrawal depression becomes. He may take the antidepressant forever, on the assumption he has chronic depression and that the drug is doing him good.
Thus people who want to stop taking antidepressants - either because they don't want to take drugs forever, or because the drugs have bad side effects on them (such as emotional blunting and demotivation, sexual dysfunction, or intermittent suicidal impulses) find they can't stop taking them. As a result, antidepressant prescriptions have been going up and up.
Big Pharma makes tens of billions of dollars per year by causing covert drug dependence then selling it as long term, preventive treatment.
Covert drug dependence should be the null hypothesis for explaining drug-withdrawal-induced clinical deterioration: The necessity for placebo versus drug withdrawal trials on normal control subjects. Bruce G. Charlton. Medical Hypotheses. 2010; 74: 761-763.
(The core ideas are all drawn from David Healy - articulated in an adjacent article from the same issue of Medical Hypotheses - what I provided was the expression.)
Some edited excerpts:
Just as a placebo can mimic an immediately effective drug, so chronic drug dependence may mimic an effective long-term or preventive treatment...
The discovery of the placebo had a profound result upon medical practice. After the placebo effect was discovered it was recognized that it was much harder to determine the therapeutic value of an intervention than previously assumed.
An analogous recognition of the effect of drug dependence is now overdue, especially in relation to psychoactive drugs.
Just as placebo controlled trials of drugs are regarded as necessary to detect ineffective drugs, so drug withdrawal trials on normal control subjects should be regarded as necessary to detect dependence-producing drugs.
Nowadays the placebo effect is routinely assumed to be the cause of patient improvement unless proven otherwise. Placebo effect is therefore the null hypothesis used to explain therapeutic improvements.
The first aim of drug evaluation is now to show that measured benefits cannot wholly be explained by placebo.
This has led to widespread adoption of placebo controlled trials which compare the effect of the putative drug with a placebo. Only when the drug produces a greater effect than placebo alone, is it recognized as a potentially effective therapy.
The effect of withdrawing a drug upon which a subject has become dependent can be regarded as analogous to the placebo effect, in the sense that drug dependence resembles the placebo effect in being able to mislead concerning clinical effectiveness.
It may routinely be assumed that if a patient gets worse when drug treatment is stopped, then this change is due to the patient losing the beneficial effects of the drug, so that the underlying disease (for which the drug was being prescribed) has re-emerged.
However, this naïve assumption is certainly unjustified as a general rule because drug dependence produces exactly the same effect.
When a patient has become dependent on a drug, then adverse consequences following withdrawal may have nothing to do with revealing an underlying, long-term illness. Instead, chronic drug use has actually made the patient ill, the drug has created a new but covert pathology...
The body (including brain) has adapted to the presence of the drug and now needs the drug in order to function normally such that the covert pathology only emerges when the drug is removed and body systems are disrupted by its absence.
Eliminating drug dependence as an explanation for withdrawal effects cannot be achieved in the context of normal clinical practice, nor by the standard formal methodologies of controlled clinical trials. Just as eliminating the possibility of placebo effects requires specially designed placebo controlled therapeutic trails, so eliminating the occurrence of covert drug dependence requires also specially designed withdrawal trials on normal control subjects.
Our existing clinical evaluation procedures are not capable of detecting withdrawal effects.
Even worse, current procedures misattribute the creation of dependence and harm following withdrawal, as instead being evidence of drug benefit with implication of the necessity for continued treatment of a supposed chronic illness.
The currently prevailing practices and assumptions systematically favours new drugs about which little is known.
Lack of evidence of dependence is interpreted as evidence of no dependence - perpetuating ignorance, and favouring new drugs about which we are ignorant.
In other words, as things stand; a drug that creates chronic dependence will instead be credited with curing a chronic disease.
Our current practice is precisely equivalent to chronic alcohol treatment being regarded as a cure for alcoholism - on the evidential basis that delirium tremens follows alcohol withdrawal, and alcohol can be used to treat delirium tremens!
**
Note: The prime example of covert drug dependence is psychiatric drugs - especially (so called) antidepressants, antipsychotics and mood stabilizers.
For instance antidepressants cause serious withdrawal symptoms that mimic the illness for which they were prescribed. This is interpreted as some kind of chronic depression or other illness. And that person may be recommended to stay on the drug.
Whenever the patient tries to stop taking the antidepressant, he gets depressive symptoms. The longer he stays on the antidepressant, the worse the withdrawal depression becomes. He may take the antidepressant forever, on the assumption he has chronic depression and that the drug is doing him good.
Thus people who want to stop taking antidepressants - either because they don't want to take drugs forever, or because the drugs have bad side effects on them (such as emotional blunting and demotivation, sexual dysfunction, or intermittent suicidal impulses) find they can't stop taking them. As a result, antidepressant prescriptions have been going up and up.
Big Pharma makes tens of billions of dollars per year by causing covert drug dependence then selling it as long term, preventive treatment.
Saturday, 19 October 2019
Are you a Christian or (just) a theist? What role does Jesus have in your theology?
To become a Christian it would seem necessary that Jesus has an important, probably vital, role in your understanding of divine activity - in addition to God the creator. All Christians regard Jesus as divine and necessary - but most Christians are unable satisfactorily to explain why.
And this is something that each must workout for himself, it seems to me; in practice. Because of this, for a long time I found it hard to be a Christian in any theoretically solid way - explanations kept crumbling...
(The ability of Christians explicitly to defend and explain Jesus seems to be increasingly necessary in the modern world - since naive Christians are falling to secular materialism with sustained high frequency.)
I was not satisfied with any of the usual explanations of what Jesus did, because they were either incoherent, or depended on an understanding of God and creation that (on living-with them) I sooner or later regarded as mistaken.
For me, any explanation leads on to further questions - until eventually I reach an assumption, and I must assent to this intuition: it must seem right at the deepest and solidest way I can manage, by sustained and intense thinking. I've reached such firm ground with Jesus - at least for the past few years.
I regard all theories of Jesus that start with an omnipotent God (who created everything from nothing) as fundamentally and necessarily mistaken - because such a God can do, and does do, everything - so there is by definition no need for Jesus.
This rules-out the entirety of traditionalist Christianity - Orthodox and Roman Catholic, and Protestant.
The only large scale theology left standing is Mormon; with its God (i.e. Heavenly Parents) who is wholly good by constrained by time and that creation is ongoing, continuing, open-ended; and began with pre-existent unorganised 'stuff' and the primordial spirits of men and women (who were embryonic Gods).
But, in my view, mainstream Mormonism errs in making Jesus primarily about atonement. This falls into being a double-negative theology of Jesus that I regard as refuted by intuition as well as the Fourth Gospel. Jesus came to bring us something more, life more abundant; not merely to undo sins and errors.
Because if Jesus was essentially an undoer, a negative figure, then that leads back to why God created the situation such as to require an undoer, but that undoer cannot itself be God... It also diminishes Jesus to be an undoer rather than the bringer of a great gift.
Yet, the strangest thing is that the work of Jesus is explained, repeatedly and clearly (albeit poetically) in the Fourth Gospel, which is about 2000 years old. If it can be read without a superstructure of preconceptions - the answer is there.
And this is something that each must workout for himself, it seems to me; in practice. Because of this, for a long time I found it hard to be a Christian in any theoretically solid way - explanations kept crumbling...
(The ability of Christians explicitly to defend and explain Jesus seems to be increasingly necessary in the modern world - since naive Christians are falling to secular materialism with sustained high frequency.)
I was not satisfied with any of the usual explanations of what Jesus did, because they were either incoherent, or depended on an understanding of God and creation that (on living-with them) I sooner or later regarded as mistaken.
For me, any explanation leads on to further questions - until eventually I reach an assumption, and I must assent to this intuition: it must seem right at the deepest and solidest way I can manage, by sustained and intense thinking. I've reached such firm ground with Jesus - at least for the past few years.
I regard all theories of Jesus that start with an omnipotent God (who created everything from nothing) as fundamentally and necessarily mistaken - because such a God can do, and does do, everything - so there is by definition no need for Jesus.
This rules-out the entirety of traditionalist Christianity - Orthodox and Roman Catholic, and Protestant.
The only large scale theology left standing is Mormon; with its God (i.e. Heavenly Parents) who is wholly good by constrained by time and that creation is ongoing, continuing, open-ended; and began with pre-existent unorganised 'stuff' and the primordial spirits of men and women (who were embryonic Gods).
But, in my view, mainstream Mormonism errs in making Jesus primarily about atonement. This falls into being a double-negative theology of Jesus that I regard as refuted by intuition as well as the Fourth Gospel. Jesus came to bring us something more, life more abundant; not merely to undo sins and errors.
Because if Jesus was essentially an undoer, a negative figure, then that leads back to why God created the situation such as to require an undoer, but that undoer cannot itself be God... It also diminishes Jesus to be an undoer rather than the bringer of a great gift.
Yet, the strangest thing is that the work of Jesus is explained, repeatedly and clearly (albeit poetically) in the Fourth Gospel, which is about 2000 years old. If it can be read without a superstructure of preconceptions - the answer is there.
What do You think about thinking?
Clearly, there is something wrong withthe thinking of modern Man: I think we can agree about that - but what should be done about it?
Many mystical/ spiritual people are set against thinking, as such - they regard thinking as the basis of illusion (maya) and alienation, and therefore they try to stop thinking.
Stop thinking and just be is the kind of advice.
The most usual method recoemmended is practicing some method of meditation.
But (unfortunately) for modern people the most easy and direct method of stopping thinking is intoxication; which is probably why the Eastern spiritualities of the Beatnicks and Hippies swiftly became drugs-orientated.
So; if stopping thinking is the ideal, then methods such as intoxication, deep sleep (or anaesthesia) are the most reliable methods; and death (i.e. suicide) is the most permanent. Suicide (or attempts at suicide) is not all that unusual among those who seek not to think - and suicide is made much more likely by most types of psychoactive drug usage.
The great breakthrough of Rudolf Steiner, in his first four books culminating in The Philosophy of Freedom, was that our proper goal should be almost the opposite: he argues that we need to trust our thinking much more fully than we do at present - and to strengthen and expand thinking.
One point is that if we mistrust our own thinking, we deal a deadly blow to ourselves - consciousness becomes alienated from our selves (our true and divine selves), as well as from the world. If we cannot trust thinking, we cannot trust anything - since everything we know comes through thinking.
The task is therefore ultimately to ensure that our thinking is trust-worthy - and in the meanwhile to learn to distinguish trust-worthy thinking from the kind of thinking that is not trustworthy (which is - for most people, most of the time - our ordinary everyday thinking, which we know from experience has something wrong with it).
I have termed this trust-worthy thinking Primary Thinking - and regard it as our consciousness of the real self; our awareness of God-within-us; an experience of the divine way of Being, in which a god knows explicitly, and is therefore able to be free.
(Since un-conscious knowing is not free.)
This idea of Steiner's was - I think - something new under the sun!
Instead of regarding the thinking Ego as The Problem which ought to be deleted; we regard thinking as The Answer.
We should try (as it were) to go through the Ego and out the other side. By which I mean that we ought to regard Primary Thinking as potentially a higher form of consciousness than either divine Ego-less hence unconscious Being on the one hand; or the mainstream modern state of alienated, solipsistic, relativistic and despairing consciousness.
The intent is that by strengthened and expanded thinking we should become aware of the divine that was previous unconscious to us; and therefore become able to join with the divine work of creation - rather than being unconsciously immersed-in and swept-along-by the divine.
And one consequence is that our persepctive becomes pro-life. Fantasies of disovering the truth by not being fully human - by deletion of thinking through meditation, intoxication, or death - are replaced with an imagied future in which our thinking is as powerful as our instincts and emotions; and expanded to includes all that is deepest and best: the spiritual as well as the material.
Many mystical/ spiritual people are set against thinking, as such - they regard thinking as the basis of illusion (maya) and alienation, and therefore they try to stop thinking.
Stop thinking and just be is the kind of advice.
The most usual method recoemmended is practicing some method of meditation.
But (unfortunately) for modern people the most easy and direct method of stopping thinking is intoxication; which is probably why the Eastern spiritualities of the Beatnicks and Hippies swiftly became drugs-orientated.
So; if stopping thinking is the ideal, then methods such as intoxication, deep sleep (or anaesthesia) are the most reliable methods; and death (i.e. suicide) is the most permanent. Suicide (or attempts at suicide) is not all that unusual among those who seek not to think - and suicide is made much more likely by most types of psychoactive drug usage.
The great breakthrough of Rudolf Steiner, in his first four books culminating in The Philosophy of Freedom, was that our proper goal should be almost the opposite: he argues that we need to trust our thinking much more fully than we do at present - and to strengthen and expand thinking.
One point is that if we mistrust our own thinking, we deal a deadly blow to ourselves - consciousness becomes alienated from our selves (our true and divine selves), as well as from the world. If we cannot trust thinking, we cannot trust anything - since everything we know comes through thinking.
The task is therefore ultimately to ensure that our thinking is trust-worthy - and in the meanwhile to learn to distinguish trust-worthy thinking from the kind of thinking that is not trustworthy (which is - for most people, most of the time - our ordinary everyday thinking, which we know from experience has something wrong with it).
I have termed this trust-worthy thinking Primary Thinking - and regard it as our consciousness of the real self; our awareness of God-within-us; an experience of the divine way of Being, in which a god knows explicitly, and is therefore able to be free.
(Since un-conscious knowing is not free.)
This idea of Steiner's was - I think - something new under the sun!
Instead of regarding the thinking Ego as The Problem which ought to be deleted; we regard thinking as The Answer.
We should try (as it were) to go through the Ego and out the other side. By which I mean that we ought to regard Primary Thinking as potentially a higher form of consciousness than either divine Ego-less hence unconscious Being on the one hand; or the mainstream modern state of alienated, solipsistic, relativistic and despairing consciousness.
The intent is that by strengthened and expanded thinking we should become aware of the divine that was previous unconscious to us; and therefore become able to join with the divine work of creation - rather than being unconsciously immersed-in and swept-along-by the divine.
And one consequence is that our persepctive becomes pro-life. Fantasies of disovering the truth by not being fully human - by deletion of thinking through meditation, intoxication, or death - are replaced with an imagied future in which our thinking is as powerful as our instincts and emotions; and expanded to includes all that is deepest and best: the spiritual as well as the material.
Friday, 18 October 2019
When the arts and real science have died; what should creative people do instead?
Creativity in the arts and real science worked on the basis, now gone, that the objective will impose itself on the subjective. But nowadays, the mainstream view is that there is no objective; and even if there was it would not impose itself upon the subjective.
(The only modern objectivity is in subversion and destruction of the objective - because the realm of objectivity is oppression, is evil. Hence modernity is strategically destructive - has no long-term creative goal.)
Tradition says that the good/ true/ objective is imposed upon us - eg. by symbol, logic, ritual, or sacred institutions (of which there used to be many).
Such symbolism (what Rudolf Steiner termed the Intellectual Soul state - running approx. from the Classical Era dwindling to the end of the Middle Ages, after which there was a mere residuum) is what we used to point our consicousness back at the primal world of Original Participation - to put us into that trance state of lowered and lessened but immersed-in-creation consciousness.
But that has become all but impossible; infrequent and unsatisfying. Those days of symbols are gone. True (world class, powerful, motivating) art and science are dead.
Final Participation is good/ true/ objective - but each person must have it by subjective experience. It does not impose; it must be chosen - and by deliberate and active choice. This can only come by loving participation in the divine work of creation.
For this one must love creation, that is - love God.
Because it is God's creation that is good/ true/ objective - and we are a part of that creation; so it is the only possible source of the GTO.
The creation we must love is God's; and it is this love that enables us to participate-in creation.
Not to love God (and goodness, and creation, and the objective) is - like nearly all modern people (including artists and scientists) to be self-excluded from genuine creation. Instead there is the fake-creativity of mere-novelty, extrapoliation, selection and combination - plus dishonest hype (i.e. dead bureaucracy plus the mass media).
So there is indeed some-thing other than, better than, the arts and real science - which supersedes those 'symbolic' forms of creation; and that is Final Participation.
(The only modern objectivity is in subversion and destruction of the objective - because the realm of objectivity is oppression, is evil. Hence modernity is strategically destructive - has no long-term creative goal.)
Tradition says that the good/ true/ objective is imposed upon us - eg. by symbol, logic, ritual, or sacred institutions (of which there used to be many).
Such symbolism (what Rudolf Steiner termed the Intellectual Soul state - running approx. from the Classical Era dwindling to the end of the Middle Ages, after which there was a mere residuum) is what we used to point our consicousness back at the primal world of Original Participation - to put us into that trance state of lowered and lessened but immersed-in-creation consciousness.
But that has become all but impossible; infrequent and unsatisfying. Those days of symbols are gone. True (world class, powerful, motivating) art and science are dead.
Final Participation is good/ true/ objective - but each person must have it by subjective experience. It does not impose; it must be chosen - and by deliberate and active choice. This can only come by loving participation in the divine work of creation.
For this one must love creation, that is - love God.
Because it is God's creation that is good/ true/ objective - and we are a part of that creation; so it is the only possible source of the GTO.
The creation we must love is God's; and it is this love that enables us to participate-in creation.
Not to love God (and goodness, and creation, and the objective) is - like nearly all modern people (including artists and scientists) to be self-excluded from genuine creation. Instead there is the fake-creativity of mere-novelty, extrapoliation, selection and combination - plus dishonest hype (i.e. dead bureaucracy plus the mass media).
So there is indeed some-thing other than, better than, the arts and real science - which supersedes those 'symbolic' forms of creation; and that is Final Participation.
Owen Barfield's intellectual links with Rudolf Steiner - from Keri Ford
Keri Ford has done a really excellent 23 minute analysis of the relationship between Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield. For me, this matter is of first rank important in my own life and thought, and describes the unavoidable current crux of our civilisation; so I am delighted to have such a concentrated consideration of made available in this format.
One interesting and original aspect is that Keri draws upon Barfield's unpublished, semi-autobiographical novel English People - written from 1927-9 (which is available free online) - to demonstrate the point of contact between these two thinkers, and the way in which Steiner worked-upon Barfield in a manner analogous to Barfield's intense appreciation of lyrical poetry.
Near the beginning of the video, Keri also tackles the 'elephant in the room' about Steiner, that ultra-detailed and systematic bizarreness of 'objective description' of past, present and future which confronts anyone who tries to read Steiner.
Keri frames it very helpfully in terms of Steiner describing history as he observes it 'from the inside'; and that what we need to do is first acknowledge the validity of this project, and only then address Steiner's attempt - not by wholesale rejection - but by trying to do better.
Wednesday, 16 October 2019
The genius of Johnny Morris
Johnny Morris was a genius of storytelling, and through my childhood a vivid presence. I've just discovered this radio documentary by him from 1960 - about the Isle of Portland, on the coast of Dorset. It is a masterpiece of its kind. A piece of old Albion!
Italian air force in the Battle of Britain! Mark Felton for military history buffs (especially World War II)
For the past few weeks I have been visiting daily the excellent military videos of Mark Felton. He specialises in telling fascinating snippet stories (about 5-20 minutes) of specific aspects of the 1939-45 war.
For example, today's story was an account of the Italian Air Force's surprising involvement in the Battle of Britain (the results were unimpressive... biplanes versus Hurricanes, massive losses due to accidents and mechanical failures etc.)
There are a series of really interesting pieces on the astonishing German high technology experiments towards the end of the war - such as the rocket-powered Komet fighter; the only rocket plane ever to be in active service:
Or the experimental 188 ton Maus tank - a crazily massive tank.
There are loads of other vids about particular operations, combats, dogfights, personalities - it's a real treasure trove; one of the very best YouTube channels I've ever seen.
For example, today's story was an account of the Italian Air Force's surprising involvement in the Battle of Britain (the results were unimpressive... biplanes versus Hurricanes, massive losses due to accidents and mechanical failures etc.)
There are a series of really interesting pieces on the astonishing German high technology experiments towards the end of the war - such as the rocket-powered Komet fighter; the only rocket plane ever to be in active service:
Or the experimental 188 ton Maus tank - a crazily massive tank.
There are loads of other vids about particular operations, combats, dogfights, personalities - it's a real treasure trove; one of the very best YouTube channels I've ever seen.
Can we ever be certain about anything - should we be?
Plenty of people find uncertainty a stumbling block that prevents them taking up a religion; they feel that they are required to be certain about some religious truth or truths - yet they also feel that certainty is a merely psychological state that does not signify truth.
I may be certain about a thing now; but may become uncertain tomorrow - yet (presumably) the thing is true or not regardless of my state of certainty?
If, however, one recognises this mortal life as primarily a time of experiencing and learning, then it is not our job to achieve certainty, but to learn. The stages and phases of certainty are then seen as a part of the process of learning.
Of course this perspective itself entails being 'certain' that this mortal life is indeed about learning (rather than life being 'about' something else, or nothing at all); which ought to mean that there is a 'Cretan Liar' paradox at work: circular reasoning...
But it does not feel like that - perhaps because the idea that this mortal life is for learning does not depend on a single assumption, fact or type of evidence; but arises intuitively - and intuition is the basis of all possible knowledge.
I may be certain about a thing now; but may become uncertain tomorrow - yet (presumably) the thing is true or not regardless of my state of certainty?
If, however, one recognises this mortal life as primarily a time of experiencing and learning, then it is not our job to achieve certainty, but to learn. The stages and phases of certainty are then seen as a part of the process of learning.
Of course this perspective itself entails being 'certain' that this mortal life is indeed about learning (rather than life being 'about' something else, or nothing at all); which ought to mean that there is a 'Cretan Liar' paradox at work: circular reasoning...
But it does not feel like that - perhaps because the idea that this mortal life is for learning does not depend on a single assumption, fact or type of evidence; but arises intuitively - and intuition is the basis of all possible knowledge.
John Fitzgerald's essay Resistance and Renewal
On his blog Deep Britain and Ireland, John Fitzgerald has a written version of a talk he presented a few days ago to a small gathering that was partly inspired by the Albion Awakening blog (currently dormant) which was a joint venture of myself, John and William Wildblood. Also present were Terry Boardman and Andy Thomas, whose work has featured here.
(Unfortununately, I couldn't be present because my chronic health problems prevented the necessary travelling to the far end of England.)
This essay is a major piece of work, and deserves full attention. I recommend copying, pasting and printing-out a version - as I did.
Here is a taster from the concluding section towards the end, which I hope will inspire you to read it:
Christ tells us in the Gospel that if we have faith the size of a mustard seed then we can move mountains. Faith is the most important element of all - far more than any head-based strategising or planning. It's difficult, because the anti-religious, anti-traditional currents of contemporary life claim the opposite, but we have to believe in ourselves, in each other, and in our country. All three levels - the personal, the communitarian, and that of the country or homeland - were conceived in the mind of God and have a divinely-imprinted destiny to fulfil.
Countries are real. They are living, concrete entities, not abstractions or so-called 'imagined communities'. Lewis shows us this brilliantly at the end of the final Narnia story The Last Battle, where, from the vantage point of eternity, we see all the countries in all the worlds - including England, including Narnia - jutting like spurs from the mountains of Aslan's country, shining like jewels, more solid and real than we ever perceived them down here in the Shadowlands.
Each country has its own inner essence - its charism, its individual gift - which needs, for the good of the whole world, to be drawn out and championed. As Ransom puts it, 'When Logres really dominates Britain, when the goddess reason, the divine clearness, is really enthroned in France, when the order of Heaven is really followed in China - why, then it will be spring.'
The Imagination - with a capital 'I' - is what we're especially blessed with in Albion, I feel. We see it in William Blake, of course, in Shakespeare, Milton, and Traherne, and, in more modern times, poets such as Kathleen Raine, George Mackay Brown, Edwin Muir, and David Jones. Tolkien, Williams and Lewis, as is well-known, conveyed profound Christian truth through the media of poetry and story. How right Williams was then, to portray Logres as the eyes - the visionary hub - of his reimagined Byzantine Empire.
Imagination, however, is not exciusively or primarily concerned with the writing of novels and poems. These are the fruits of our Imaginative labour but they are not its most essential aspects. What is absolutely key is the ability to see through and beyond the Sturm und Drang of daily political and social life and dig down deep to what is truly real. This is just what Ransom does in That Hideous Strength. To MacPhee's annoyance, he doesn't react to the grubby power-plays of the NICE. He doesn't launch a raid on their premises or expose them to the government or call in help from overseas. He refuses to be drawn. He declines to play the game on this tactical, newspaper-headline level. He knows that he is engaged in a spiritual conflict and that the real war goes on in Heaven. He waits, therefore. He watches and prays. He sits at the Lord's feet with Mary, while Martha (MacPhee) complains. Like Taliessin in Mount Badon, he sinks into contemplation and receives the help he needs from planetary angels who operate at a level far above that of the parry and counter-parry of political strife.
The problem, as I see it, is that all these figures - poets, novelists, fictional characters, ourselves too - have been swimming against the tide for a long time now; since 1066, in fact. My contention is that King Harold's death at Hastings was the moment when this country lost its spiritual bearings, and this turning away from the Good has become increasingly pronounced ever since. The Normans brought an expansionist mentality with them and a certain rapaciousness, which had previously been absent in England's ruling class. However noble - jumping forward a few centuries now - the motives behind the Reformation and the challenge to Charles I's authority might have been, the net result, in my view, was to encourage and exacerbate this mindset, flinging open the door to that mercantilism, industrialism, and mechanistic thinking, which Blake railed so mightily against and with which we continue to contend with today.
It hasn't always been this way though. In the last few hundred years before Christ, as Blake well knew, Britain, through the strength and influence of the Druids, was a centre of great spiritual power, with a reputation for the numinous which stretched far beyond Albion's rocky shore. This age came around again - on a higher, deeper, baptised point of the curve - in the Anglo-Saxon era, after the arrival of St. Augustine at Cantiisburg. The island then became a land of genuine saints and scholars, with monastic founders like St. Aidan, St. Hilda, and St. Cuthbert, and missionaries to Europe such as Willibord of Northumbria, Boniface of Wessex, and Alcuin of York, who became Charlemagne's chief adviser. We had high class historians and writers, St. Bede of Jarrow being the shining example here, who penned the highly influential History of the Church in England, plus artists of the highest calibre, as can be seen, for instance, in the wonderful patterns and pictures of the Lindisfarne Gospels.
King Alfred the Great, after the depredations of the Danish invasions, rebuilt our schools, had old books copied out, rewrote the law, and established excellent relations with the Pope and other European monarchs. His sons, Edward and Athelstan, were warriors and statesmen who created the conditions for political and national unity, while the reign of Edgar the Peaceable (959-975) saw a remarkable reform and revival of monastic life across the country.
This is the best of Britain, I feel. This, deep down, is what we're all about. These are the saints we need to pray to and the sovereigns we should strive to emulate. This is the mentality and worldview to tap into if we are to see the dawn of a third golden age - a synthesis of the previous two - a harmonisation and taking up of Britain's Christian and pre-Christian patrimonies. Lewis, again, shows us the way in That Hideous Strength, where Christ (Maleldil, as he calls Him) stands at the centre of the universe like the Sun, with the old gods - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter - circling around Him in the guise of the planetary angels, working in concert with Him for the transfiguration of our fallen world.
(Unfortununately, I couldn't be present because my chronic health problems prevented the necessary travelling to the far end of England.)
This essay is a major piece of work, and deserves full attention. I recommend copying, pasting and printing-out a version - as I did.
Here is a taster from the concluding section towards the end, which I hope will inspire you to read it:
Christ tells us in the Gospel that if we have faith the size of a mustard seed then we can move mountains. Faith is the most important element of all - far more than any head-based strategising or planning. It's difficult, because the anti-religious, anti-traditional currents of contemporary life claim the opposite, but we have to believe in ourselves, in each other, and in our country. All three levels - the personal, the communitarian, and that of the country or homeland - were conceived in the mind of God and have a divinely-imprinted destiny to fulfil.
Countries are real. They are living, concrete entities, not abstractions or so-called 'imagined communities'. Lewis shows us this brilliantly at the end of the final Narnia story The Last Battle, where, from the vantage point of eternity, we see all the countries in all the worlds - including England, including Narnia - jutting like spurs from the mountains of Aslan's country, shining like jewels, more solid and real than we ever perceived them down here in the Shadowlands.
Each country has its own inner essence - its charism, its individual gift - which needs, for the good of the whole world, to be drawn out and championed. As Ransom puts it, 'When Logres really dominates Britain, when the goddess reason, the divine clearness, is really enthroned in France, when the order of Heaven is really followed in China - why, then it will be spring.'
The Imagination - with a capital 'I' - is what we're especially blessed with in Albion, I feel. We see it in William Blake, of course, in Shakespeare, Milton, and Traherne, and, in more modern times, poets such as Kathleen Raine, George Mackay Brown, Edwin Muir, and David Jones. Tolkien, Williams and Lewis, as is well-known, conveyed profound Christian truth through the media of poetry and story. How right Williams was then, to portray Logres as the eyes - the visionary hub - of his reimagined Byzantine Empire.
Imagination, however, is not exciusively or primarily concerned with the writing of novels and poems. These are the fruits of our Imaginative labour but they are not its most essential aspects. What is absolutely key is the ability to see through and beyond the Sturm und Drang of daily political and social life and dig down deep to what is truly real. This is just what Ransom does in That Hideous Strength. To MacPhee's annoyance, he doesn't react to the grubby power-plays of the NICE. He doesn't launch a raid on their premises or expose them to the government or call in help from overseas. He refuses to be drawn. He declines to play the game on this tactical, newspaper-headline level. He knows that he is engaged in a spiritual conflict and that the real war goes on in Heaven. He waits, therefore. He watches and prays. He sits at the Lord's feet with Mary, while Martha (MacPhee) complains. Like Taliessin in Mount Badon, he sinks into contemplation and receives the help he needs from planetary angels who operate at a level far above that of the parry and counter-parry of political strife.
The problem, as I see it, is that all these figures - poets, novelists, fictional characters, ourselves too - have been swimming against the tide for a long time now; since 1066, in fact. My contention is that King Harold's death at Hastings was the moment when this country lost its spiritual bearings, and this turning away from the Good has become increasingly pronounced ever since. The Normans brought an expansionist mentality with them and a certain rapaciousness, which had previously been absent in England's ruling class. However noble - jumping forward a few centuries now - the motives behind the Reformation and the challenge to Charles I's authority might have been, the net result, in my view, was to encourage and exacerbate this mindset, flinging open the door to that mercantilism, industrialism, and mechanistic thinking, which Blake railed so mightily against and with which we continue to contend with today.
It hasn't always been this way though. In the last few hundred years before Christ, as Blake well knew, Britain, through the strength and influence of the Druids, was a centre of great spiritual power, with a reputation for the numinous which stretched far beyond Albion's rocky shore. This age came around again - on a higher, deeper, baptised point of the curve - in the Anglo-Saxon era, after the arrival of St. Augustine at Cantiisburg. The island then became a land of genuine saints and scholars, with monastic founders like St. Aidan, St. Hilda, and St. Cuthbert, and missionaries to Europe such as Willibord of Northumbria, Boniface of Wessex, and Alcuin of York, who became Charlemagne's chief adviser. We had high class historians and writers, St. Bede of Jarrow being the shining example here, who penned the highly influential History of the Church in England, plus artists of the highest calibre, as can be seen, for instance, in the wonderful patterns and pictures of the Lindisfarne Gospels.
King Alfred the Great, after the depredations of the Danish invasions, rebuilt our schools, had old books copied out, rewrote the law, and established excellent relations with the Pope and other European monarchs. His sons, Edward and Athelstan, were warriors and statesmen who created the conditions for political and national unity, while the reign of Edgar the Peaceable (959-975) saw a remarkable reform and revival of monastic life across the country.
This is the best of Britain, I feel. This, deep down, is what we're all about. These are the saints we need to pray to and the sovereigns we should strive to emulate. This is the mentality and worldview to tap into if we are to see the dawn of a third golden age - a synthesis of the previous two - a harmonisation and taking up of Britain's Christian and pre-Christian patrimonies. Lewis, again, shows us the way in That Hideous Strength, where Christ (Maleldil, as he calls Him) stands at the centre of the universe like the Sun, with the old gods - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter - circling around Him in the guise of the planetary angels, working in concert with Him for the transfiguration of our fallen world.
Tuesday, 15 October 2019
Has the Establishment decided to trigger (partial) collapse of The System, now?
It seems possible. The 'demands' of the current (Establishment-created, funded, organised and approved) 'Environmentalism' protests are such that they would cause rapid and irreversible collapse of the world economy with the deaths of several billions.
But this isn't a new strategy. The officially-advocated combination of open-borders and mass immigration from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia to the developed nations would have done the same already, had not these been slowed-up (somewhat) by mass resistance. Other examples could be adduced.
It looks as if there is a desire to trigger collapse of The System; and yet at the same time The System is the means by which the Establishment monitor and control the masses. So I assume that the apparent desire to cause total and irreversible collapse is not genuine. What seems to be aimed at is to begin a collapse; and then stop it part way - while the technological and organisational mechanisms of population-control remain intact.
My assumption, therefore, is that They are playing a high risk 'game' by which they wish to trigger the beginnings of a collapse sufficient to lead to mass demands for an openly and explicitly authoritarian global government of mass surveillance and micro-management.
This would fit with the fact that the Extinction Rebellion activist 'demands' are quoting official United Nations policy documents; and therefore these are policies that all the Western governments have already 'signed-up' for. Even if it seems like a novelty; this is a long-planned strategy for Them.
The Establishment are able - routinely - calculatedly to create social crises and then successfully to deny their obvious real causes in order to implement further authoritarian oppression (what David Icke terms Problem-Reaction-Solution).
A clear example is the huge and increasing London epidemic of murder, mostly stabbings, caused by the officially mandated policy of enforcing a massive, open-ended and increasing influx of (on average) violent immigrants. Thus was the problem created.
The public have reacted with fear, as intended. But this predictable consequence of mass immigration from chronically violent nations is re-branded 'knife attacks' by the media-political complex (attacks by knives, presumably). The solution? An acceleration of the (already advanced) totalitarian agenda - which entails wholesale disarming of the peaceful majority population, confiscation of all potential defensive devices; leaving them helpless, afraid, angry, resentful, vengeful etc. Some will demand protection from The Authorities; those who react violently (even in defence) will be viciously oppressed by The Establishment.
For the Totalitarians, whether the population becomes despairing or resentful, it is a win-win scenario. Because, let us not forget that for The Establishment, this is a spiritual war. Totalitarianism - with control of information and behaviour - is a means to the end of that inversion of values which is the best way of inducing people to choose hell.
I think it possible that massive social chaos is the intention of the Global Establishment - on a larger scale than has been attempted since World War Two. Instead of using international war as the rationalisation for totalitarianism, there would be a deliberate creation of economic collapse leading to starvation, disease and endemic local violence. This would surely lead to urgent calls that Something Must Be Done; and the plans for what will be done are ready.
At this point, the same people who caused the emergency would then offer to 'solve' it - with tough new measures, requiring tough new powers - by making the world into a single global totalitarian regime, with themselves in charge.
(Of course the problems will not be solved - bureaucracies never solve problems; but will be sustained and managed - so that the process may be continued: progressive ratcheting of social control.)
Will this work? Yes, probably it will work - since the mass of Western people are godless hedonists, hence weakly-motivated and short-termist, hence easily manipulated.
The Western masses have shown themselves unable to foresee even huge and immediate consequences of major and psychotic legal changes; such as 'hate crimes', same-sex-marriage and legal assertion of the reality of arbitrary sexual identity.
These have led to an ongoing total reorganisation of the entirety of all social institutions - large and small, official and voluntary, public and private; and a cancerous bureaucracy to monitor and manage the process of wholesale human corruption - especially focusing on the exploitation and psychological/ sexual/ physical abuse of (ever younger) children (because the human Establishment are themselves corrupted by and for such abuse).
What might stop the plan? Perhaps the most likely scenario is that once it has begun, the collapse would become self-propagating by a version of the domino effect; positive feedback mechanisms would begin to operate and - in sum - the collapse could not be 'contained' and could not be reversed.
The large majority of the world's seven billion people would then die, from the usual apocalyptic causes, over a timescale of months.
And the Establishment would thus (accidentally, by over-reach) destroy the technological and organisational means by which they intended to monitor and control the masses. The survivors would return to a multitude of small and local social forms; and historically 'normal service' would be resumed (assuming the planet remains habitable in parts).
This is a spiritual war we live in, and the root cause is spiritual.
Atheism is a mental illness for individuals, and an atheist society is insane. For the past several decades; all developed societies have been atheist in public discourse and by public policy; and the effects are working-through.
No developed societies are willing to defend themselves, to sustain their culture, or to maintain their population fertility. It is official doctrine that life has no transcendent purpose, no permanent meaning; and that all morals, aesthetics and standards of truth are arbitrary, relativistic and expedient.
As long as this is the case, nothing can be done to save the developed world, because fundamentally the world does not want to be saved. And when The West collapses, it will bring down almost everybody else (since the ability to sustain seven billion people on a planet that naturally sustains only about one billion is entirely and irreplaceably due to Western technology and organisation).
So, the only other barrier to the success of the Establishment agenda would be if the developed nations became sane. This would mean that their populations chose, en masse, to embark upon a serious and significant religious revival.
Only then would the inversion of values and corruption of motivations be reversed; only then would common sense and natural, spontaneous human evaluations be restored to a position of strength and effectiveness.
Whether or not this would save the majority of the world's people from extinction is doubtful - probably the die is cast in that regard. But we all die biologically, sooner or later; and the most important thing over the long-term of eternity is how we have lived and died in a spiritual sense.
That is what is at stake.
But this isn't a new strategy. The officially-advocated combination of open-borders and mass immigration from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia to the developed nations would have done the same already, had not these been slowed-up (somewhat) by mass resistance. Other examples could be adduced.
It looks as if there is a desire to trigger collapse of The System; and yet at the same time The System is the means by which the Establishment monitor and control the masses. So I assume that the apparent desire to cause total and irreversible collapse is not genuine. What seems to be aimed at is to begin a collapse; and then stop it part way - while the technological and organisational mechanisms of population-control remain intact.
My assumption, therefore, is that They are playing a high risk 'game' by which they wish to trigger the beginnings of a collapse sufficient to lead to mass demands for an openly and explicitly authoritarian global government of mass surveillance and micro-management.
This would fit with the fact that the Extinction Rebellion activist 'demands' are quoting official United Nations policy documents; and therefore these are policies that all the Western governments have already 'signed-up' for. Even if it seems like a novelty; this is a long-planned strategy for Them.
The Establishment are able - routinely - calculatedly to create social crises and then successfully to deny their obvious real causes in order to implement further authoritarian oppression (what David Icke terms Problem-Reaction-Solution).
A clear example is the huge and increasing London epidemic of murder, mostly stabbings, caused by the officially mandated policy of enforcing a massive, open-ended and increasing influx of (on average) violent immigrants. Thus was the problem created.
The public have reacted with fear, as intended. But this predictable consequence of mass immigration from chronically violent nations is re-branded 'knife attacks' by the media-political complex (attacks by knives, presumably). The solution? An acceleration of the (already advanced) totalitarian agenda - which entails wholesale disarming of the peaceful majority population, confiscation of all potential defensive devices; leaving them helpless, afraid, angry, resentful, vengeful etc. Some will demand protection from The Authorities; those who react violently (even in defence) will be viciously oppressed by The Establishment.
For the Totalitarians, whether the population becomes despairing or resentful, it is a win-win scenario. Because, let us not forget that for The Establishment, this is a spiritual war. Totalitarianism - with control of information and behaviour - is a means to the end of that inversion of values which is the best way of inducing people to choose hell.
I think it possible that massive social chaos is the intention of the Global Establishment - on a larger scale than has been attempted since World War Two. Instead of using international war as the rationalisation for totalitarianism, there would be a deliberate creation of economic collapse leading to starvation, disease and endemic local violence. This would surely lead to urgent calls that Something Must Be Done; and the plans for what will be done are ready.
At this point, the same people who caused the emergency would then offer to 'solve' it - with tough new measures, requiring tough new powers - by making the world into a single global totalitarian regime, with themselves in charge.
(Of course the problems will not be solved - bureaucracies never solve problems; but will be sustained and managed - so that the process may be continued: progressive ratcheting of social control.)
Will this work? Yes, probably it will work - since the mass of Western people are godless hedonists, hence weakly-motivated and short-termist, hence easily manipulated.
The Western masses have shown themselves unable to foresee even huge and immediate consequences of major and psychotic legal changes; such as 'hate crimes', same-sex-marriage and legal assertion of the reality of arbitrary sexual identity.
These have led to an ongoing total reorganisation of the entirety of all social institutions - large and small, official and voluntary, public and private; and a cancerous bureaucracy to monitor and manage the process of wholesale human corruption - especially focusing on the exploitation and psychological/ sexual/ physical abuse of (ever younger) children (because the human Establishment are themselves corrupted by and for such abuse).
What might stop the plan? Perhaps the most likely scenario is that once it has begun, the collapse would become self-propagating by a version of the domino effect; positive feedback mechanisms would begin to operate and - in sum - the collapse could not be 'contained' and could not be reversed.
The large majority of the world's seven billion people would then die, from the usual apocalyptic causes, over a timescale of months.
And the Establishment would thus (accidentally, by over-reach) destroy the technological and organisational means by which they intended to monitor and control the masses. The survivors would return to a multitude of small and local social forms; and historically 'normal service' would be resumed (assuming the planet remains habitable in parts).
This is a spiritual war we live in, and the root cause is spiritual.
Atheism is a mental illness for individuals, and an atheist society is insane. For the past several decades; all developed societies have been atheist in public discourse and by public policy; and the effects are working-through.
No developed societies are willing to defend themselves, to sustain their culture, or to maintain their population fertility. It is official doctrine that life has no transcendent purpose, no permanent meaning; and that all morals, aesthetics and standards of truth are arbitrary, relativistic and expedient.
As long as this is the case, nothing can be done to save the developed world, because fundamentally the world does not want to be saved. And when The West collapses, it will bring down almost everybody else (since the ability to sustain seven billion people on a planet that naturally sustains only about one billion is entirely and irreplaceably due to Western technology and organisation).
So, the only other barrier to the success of the Establishment agenda would be if the developed nations became sane. This would mean that their populations chose, en masse, to embark upon a serious and significant religious revival.
Only then would the inversion of values and corruption of motivations be reversed; only then would common sense and natural, spontaneous human evaluations be restored to a position of strength and effectiveness.
Whether or not this would save the majority of the world's people from extinction is doubtful - probably the die is cast in that regard. But we all die biologically, sooner or later; and the most important thing over the long-term of eternity is how we have lived and died in a spiritual sense.
That is what is at stake.
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