A prophecy of humbling - but then spiritual revival - for Britain (made before the birdemic)

I post this prophecy from before the birdemic for you to exercise your discernment upon. I do so because I found it both thought-provoking and cheering. 

I am satisfied that both the 'prophet' - a pastor called Chris Wickland - and the host of this web site (Richard Barker) are decent and sincere men who have taken the right side in the spiritual war of these times. 

The podcast is probably the best way to get it; but here is an excerpt from the transcript:

Sadly, My own Church has failed to see how impoverished and how weakened she has become. She is literally now a remnant in this country. Yet I will do great things with a remnant...

Mark My words, punishment will come for the sins that have covered this land. But ... this punishment is not to destroy this nation. This punishment is to humble her and to chastise her, that she may repent of her wicked ways and turn back to Me. 

...I will bring Revival, but it will not be like any revival that has been before. It will be uncontainable; it will be uncontrollable; and the world will HATE it because it will be so strong and it will be so powerful that they cannot ignore it. ... 

Men will just drop into two distinct camps: those that love Me and those that absolutely hate Me. This is why in many respects these days are dangerous days, because it will polarize people, in ways stronger than they are now; but you will know the righteous and you will know the evil... 

Mark My words, I will do something wonderful with this country; I will restore law and order to this country. This country has become lawless and it has no more order to it... 

I am going to do a new thing. And many men will lay down their crowns and place down their swords before Me and repent and give their lives to me. And many powerful men and women who vehemently hate My name, will come to know Me and love My name. 

The very ones that brought in those [evil] laws, I will turn into trophies of grace to make the enemy despised in his own camp, for I will make those who passed those wicked laws be the ones that undo them, for they will reveal the secrets and the dark intent and heart of sinful wicked flesh. And the world or this country at least, will look on in horror at the things that they’ve released and allowed in this country, and they will be rescinded and retracted.

As you can see - this is a very precise prophecy. If some of the very same leaders who have introduced so many evil laws to this nation were publicly to repent, resign their power, and place themselves in God's service - then such an extraordinarily unlikely event should be very obvious. 

The Great Enhorsement

"None are safe 'til all are safe"

***

If WmJas Tychonievich is allowed serially to update us on his silly dreams - I don't see why I should not be extended the same privilege.

One major reason I am such an early riser is that if I don't get out of bed I am afflicted by sillier and sillier, more and more annoying, increasingly repetitive dreams. 

Today, I nipped this in the bud by escaping what was shaping to be one of the silliest: a dream about a new UK national government campaign called The Great Enhorsement - which was intended to get more people to take-up horse riding. 

That's it. Make of it what you will - I shalln't. 

My time as 'an epidemiologist'

My 'career' was always unconventional, and by conventional criteria pretty unsuccessful in terms of promotions, power, prestige and financially! I spent a fair span of the middling period 'doing' epidemiology and public health - beginning in 1991, peaking in activity with three years as a lecturer in Epidemiology and Public Health (publications from 1993-7), and extending through approximately to the end of my editorship of Medical Hypotheses in 2010.

This period was very valuable in many ways - although as early as 1995 I moved towards a focus on (successively)  Evolutionary Psychology, Psychopharmacology, Systems Theory and then Intelligence and Personality.  

One thing I learnt was the increasingly monopolistic and dishonest leftism and managerialism of social science and medicine; which is now blatantly obvious with the birdemic, its response and the peck agenda. I experienced how rapidly science was moving away from truth-seeking and truth-speaking; and towards being absorbed into the administrative apparatus - driven by financial, official and careerist imperatives.  

I worked a couple of days a week in the NHS (National Health Service) - at two levels of seniority - and this was a revelation concerning how bureaucracies and managers operate; and their contrast with real science. I saw how policy flowed down from government; and was never challenged. How nothing ever was learned from experience. How discourse was dominated by coercion, bribery and propaganda. And how actual health and actual truth had no place at all in these considerations. 

As well as picking-up the foundations of basic, solid knowledge concerning infectious disease and epidemics; technically, I learned a great deal about understanding medical and health data - and distinguishing fundamental from superficial issues. 

In particular, I pursued a line of work on the nature of randomized controlled trials, and the use of very large data sets in medicine; which led me to to articulate (I think for the first time) the ineradicable problems and limitations of what was becoming (from 1994) overwhelming trend in health practice under the slogan of Evidence Based Medicine. 

In many way, being a professional epidemiologist/ public health physician was mostly a negatively salutary experience: certainly I was left with a very low opinion of the field and of its practitioners - especially of the most famous, influential and highly-regarded leaders and opinion-formers - especially in the UK (a horrible bunch of mediocrities, craven fools, psychopaths and political Quislings). 

All of which was excellent preparation for seeing-through the fakery of the birdemic, its response and 'the peck' and its programme; the reality of which was extremely obvious from an early stage and without any difficulty. 

I presume this extreme bogosity was also evident to many thousands of others with similar, or much greater, experience and knowledge of basic, solid epidemiology and public health than myself... 

Or rather; it would have been obvious had they not, long since, discarded personal responsibility; eagerly accepted the Big Lies of Leftism; embraced the expedient dictates of external authority; and consequently become unable and unwilling to think and reason coherently. 

What is the most important thing in life supposed to be?

The most important thing is life is supposed to be 'religion'. That is how Men are made - spiritually, and even biologically. Because biologically Men evolved in a religious world - and Men's responses, motivations, attitudes and behaviours were always calibrated by a religious environment. 

(I use the scare quotes around religion, because the term is so ill-defined, controversial and indeed tendentious - against Christianity; but you-know-what-I-mean.)

Men are made by God so that our lives are built-around and permeated by considerations such as God or the gods, the spiritual world around us -including matters of contact and communication with that world, life beyond death, the purpose and meaning of life so-considered... and so forth. 

If we look back at any pre-modern society; it is obvious that religion was (almost always, for almost everybody) the most important thing: it provided a multi-level and integrated perspective through-which all else was evaluated.  

After religion was incrementally deleted from both public life, and - in effect - from personal thinking (even among the self-described religious - due to the change towards materialism-positivism-and this-worldly ideologies) Mankind entered an unprecedented world in which there was no integration overall, and where meaning and purpose were confined to micro and specialized domains, short-termist, selfish and pulling apart. 

What took-over as the most important thing in life? Variously (in different times and places) national identity, leftist politics, sex and sexuality, money, status - and sometimes (briefly) idealistic devotion to work: arts, literature, science, scholarship... 

At first after religion there was an age - a generation or two - or idealism and ideology. Even sex was an ideology, for a short while - for normal sex in the 60s, for abnormal sex from the 80s... 

But always, soon, these ideologies became negative, oppositional, incoherent - and much weaker as motivators. None of these replacements for religion were sufficiently powerful, effective, coherent, deep-rooted or motivating. 

Until in 2020 - all ideologies, all utopian hopes (whether for sex-utopia, arts or sciences, for the residual rump of church Christianity - or for any positive ideas), were suddenly discarded; and the whole world of human aspiration replaced by a mass mindless, irrational, panicky, dependent, pathetic craving for short-term personal survival at any cost. 

There was no longer any compelling positive reason to live - but only negative reasons not to die, not to suffer...

Against this global, pseudo-unifying mass effect of fear (also fuelled by manufactured and false fear of climate change due to excessive CO2) - worked many individual and group negative resentments based on sex, sexuality, race, nation, church-religion etc.  

And this is where we are - now. One world system organized around negative motivators concerning the birdemic and climate change; which are Big Lies. And multiple fissile and hostile negative sub-motivators based mainly on race, ethnicity, religion and the other resentments of leftism. 

Absent religion; there is only one terminus, which is despair and the desire for death - which means, to the non-religious - wished-for annihilation of the self, of the soul. 

All because the most important thing in life must be religion. First that must be recognized and acknowledged as a fact. Then people must 'choose their religion'...

But this time choosing religion personally, from internal evaluations, without equating religion with any external assumed-authoritative 'church' (all major denominational churches having by now demonstrated unambiguously that they are a part of the religion-deleting, negative-system of evil).

How may someone choose their religion? On the basis of what is true - of course; but the process should probably start with asking "What would I most want to be true? Now - and, most importantly, forever."

Once that is known - we can begin work to establish whether our first idea of what we most want is really what we most want; and then whether it really is true by the profoundest intuitive evaluation we can discern.

An ongoing world system of mandatory multiple pecking/ implanting: The real choice about pecking

"The peck" is a misnomer - not only because "peck" includes many and different agents; but because what is at stake is not one, nor two, nor any specific number of pecks of any particular kind - but a world where mandatory pecking (and, we should presume, any other insertion of technological devices or substances) is simply part of 'life' - something that continues as often as the authorities wish and without end or limit. 

So "the" peck is doubly misleading. What is already at stake is that several interventions - with different methods, effects, and adverse effects -  are being talked of as if they were one; and as if it didn't matter which was given. This is clearly the case: despite differences, the authorities do not mind which peck is given so long as every person submits to pecking - as and when 'required'. 

Furthermore, the evidence is already obvious (and was knowable in advance) that the pecks are unnecessary, ineffective and harmful. This makes the escalating insistence upon them at best nonsensical, more accurately gross (unprecedented) malpractice, from a medical perspective. 

Yet if these pecks are understood merely paving the way for a system of continuous mandated pecking with... whatever the authorities decide should be inserted into humans... then the whole thing makes sense. 

"They" don't distinguish between different pecks because the focus is not upon the birdemic, but upon a establishing a new and invasive system of social control. The idea is that in future (i.e. the next few eeks) everybody should always accept whatever pecks They require - however many pecks, and pecks for whatever purpose. 

(Knowing what we (ought to) know about the people running the world; these purposes could plausibly include making specific people or populations sick in specific ways; and killing either individuals or masses in a deniable fashion - by multiple agents, or agents with multiple/ delayed lethal effects. And if you think this scenario is absurd, then I'm afraid you must either be ignorant or self-blinded by false assumptions.)

This is not my discovery, nor is this agenda anything new. David Icke, for example, has been telling us that exactly this is coming for a couple of decades. Such correct predictions are possible because the aimed-at destination is known. Pecking is interwoven with the global totalitarian New World Order agenda that goes back more than a century, with Agenda 2030, with The Great Reset, with the transhumanist agenda - and seems to be based upon the intention to make people into some kind of hybrid between Men and technology. 

The 'promise' would be that this envisaged 'world-of-pecks' would be good for human happiness, health and functionality. But the genuine yet covert intent would be surveillance and control of human behaviour (and ultimately, They believe, human thinking) - and the actual effect of multi-pecking on human happiness, health and functionality is of little or no interest. 

The birdemic peck provides us with an example of what is coming - if They are able to follow Their plans. We can already perceive from the fact that the peck is in-practice unnecessary/ ineffective/ harmful - yet They still want to force it upon everybody in the world; that They are indifferent or hostile to human happiness, health and functionality. 

This fact ought to tell us a great deal about Them and Their motivations. And warn us of what They would be intending to do with unlimited ability to inject/ insert/ implant whatever They wanted into human bodies. 

The intent is that They will unilaterally decide how (and how much) to modify Our bodies; and We will accept whatever They insist-upon, gratefully.

Now - I do not believe that the transhumanist project is possible - in particular I do not believe that human thinking can be monitored or controlled by technology. That idea is just an erroneous consequence of materialist modelling, that ignores such primary realities that real thinking is spiritual in nature, and a 'product' of our real self which is divine. 

Thinking just isn't the kind of thing that can be monitored or controlled. 

But crude kinds of surveillance tracking bugs, or drug/ hormone manipulations could be accomplished by 'injectable' agents and technology. Pain could be inflicted, disease encouraged. 

As we are seeing with the birdemic peck; increased mass suffering and deaths could easily be imposed, sometimes deliberately, at others due to stupidity and incompetence. 

My point here is that the decision we are confronted-with Now is not between getting 'the peck' or not. The choices will not stop here. This is just the first of many choices. 

The eventual choice is about whether we agree to a long-term system of mandatory, imposed, continuous pecks for multiple reasons and regardless of their effect. 

That is where we are being led - step by step. They want Us to want that kind of world - want Us to agree that would be a necessary and Good way of living for everybody in the world to submit to... whatever They say is Good for Us. 

"The" birdemic peck is only the first of many steps. But we need to remember that this is a spiritual war, a war over souls; and Their objective is to make people reject salvation and choose damnation. 

In principle, as totalitarians ruling a compliant materialist/ atheist/ leftist mass population, They could forcibly impose any evil on anybody. But their goal is to make people want evil. 

That is why the birdemic peck is the first step. If the people can be induced into wanting that which is unnecessary/ ineffective and harmful just on the say-so of an Establishment-media that is known to be evil. And to want this imposed everywhere, on everybody and forever - and whatever.

If that stuff can become desired by Men - then those Men are damned. 

But those who perceive the truth of 'what is going-on' and withhold their consent from being recruited-into this plan and onto the side of evil; have already defeated this strategy of evil in themselves. 

Note: Just because the world-of-universal-endless-pecks is planned, does not mean that it will happen. It may never happen, it may not happen everywhere, it may not happen soon. For that reason even merely delayed compliance is important - especially when delay is extended and extended. Plus - every act of delayed compliance to evil itself requires the evil system to expend more resources, and creates thereby more difficulty and inner tension - it weakens evil a little. So if in doubt - delay, delay, delay. 

The loveliest 2.5 minutes of music?

Some eight years ago I posted my vote for loveliest miniature in classical music. It is excerpted from a Bach cantata, and features a pair of treble recorders (blockfloeten) - this being, in some ways, my favourite of musical instruments. 

I have found a somewhat crisper (live) recording here - one that brings-out the wonderful effect Bach gets from the interplay of the recorders.  

If you are wondering just how Bach created that astonishing sound from the recorders - this remarkably lyrical 'animated graphical score' of the music makes clear:

Middle-managers, hysterical and psychopathic fake-leaders had better watch-out! (Biden = Sorath ascendant)

Six years ago I wrote that there are almost no real leaders heading-up modern institutions - instead they are mostly over-promoted middle managers (hard-working obedient drones); with a smattering of hysterics; plus the usual self-seeking, manipulative and cruel psychopathic charm-merchants or thugs, who have so often posed as leaders through history. 

But, in a world now ruled by a Global Establishment, engaged in imposing coup-compliant institutional leaders everywhere; the choosing, installation and persistence of Joe Biden as US President (!) should be worrying for all those servants of evil who aspire to the highest societal positions. 

In a nation filled with so many servile and conscience-free leftist zealots of so many types; the choice of Biden-as-he-is of all people - and his continuation despite... everything - must surely send a stab of fear into the shriveled souls of the US political class. 

If That is what They want... well, what is the point of the vast societal structures of the US Establishment? 

What need for the complex ideologies of Harvard and the New York Times, for the vast spider-web networks of 'smart' and/or 'woke' careerists busily toiling, lobbying, back-stabbing and grafting? 

If someone like Biden is first choice to 'lead' the US government - then what kind of person do They want to lead all the other institutions?

Biden is a Sorathic joke striking at the heart of the vast Ahrimanic bureaucratic Establishment - at those who really Believe in the Great Reset, Agenda 2030 and world totalitarian government. 

If they weren't so blind, stupid and dishonest; the Establishment would by-now have realized that their days are numbered, and time is running-out.

For the rest of us, and especially for Christians; we can see confirmation that evil is becoming more purely oppositional and extreme; and its ideological excuses ever less plausible. Things are coming to an even-sharper point... 

Those capable of repentance and of choosing to follow Jesus Christ; will find the choice between Good and evil to be clearer than ever.  

In 2021, we cannot 'fight evil' - we must be-Good, 'do' Good

However it may have been in the past; we cannot now 'fight evil' - because evil is everywhere! Evil is the net-direction of System, the Establishment, the masses, the Christian churches...

I don't mean we cannot beat evil - I mean that it cannot be fought; because evil is a negation, opposed to Good - and a negation cannot be fought.

Indeed, even discerning and rejecting one evil after another does not suffice to be-Good - since there are too many evils, and the business of rejecting them has no end. Only when the rejecting of evil is set aside and The Good is embraced positively have we learned the lessons of evil. 

 

To oppose that which is evil is Not to do Good - but merely to engage in Men fighting fight Men, or evil-System fighting evil-System... because all Systems, all institutions, are evil now. 

If we engage in the fight of the lesser evil against the greater (taking the side of the less evil nation, corporation, religion) then at best we merely strengthen the less-evil, which is Not actually doing Good! 

Fighting to reduce the amount of evil is not positive Good. It is to support one type of demon against another; to support one version of Hell against another. 

To be-Good we must forget about fighting and be-Good, join-with Good: that is, take the side of God and Creation. 

We must do Good; that is to love; to pursue truth, beauty and virtue; to know sin and reject it...

And this doing - where is it done, how manifested? Well, in many possible ways, unique to each person. Different individuals will be drawn to manifest different positive Goods; for example the traditional transcendent values of truth, beauty and virtue - and their unity in practice. To pursue and real and positive value is to do Good.

Some Christians naturally want to fight and win, they want the heroic camaraderie of being part of a victorious army battling on the side of God - so naturally they seek a Good-army to join. BUt there isn't one. 

Other Christians want to suffer to win, regarding this mortal life as wholly negative, a trial, a test. They oppose the negativity of evil with a negativity of not-doing evil. They embracing death to this world for the goal of life everlasting. 

...Yet so long as the world is, and I am - God has a reason for sustaining them. A long as there is me and I live, here are things I need to learn from this mortal experience, and Good to be done. 

But how to do Good in a world where all activity is so constrained, where so much is forbidden, punished or poisoned?  

To begin with - we can be confident that there is a Good way for us (as individuals) to live, else we would not be alive. There are Good things that we personally can do, else we would not be able to do anything. 

And if our life is such that we can 'only' think; then there are Good things we could thing - Good ways we could think. 

We are alive to do Good; and we can always do that Good for which we are alive. 

What do demons want? What motivates them?

There are some fascinating and important reflections on this vital (literally vital) subject from William Wildblood, and following-up from WmJas Tychonievich. 

Wildblood states the basic idea:

It would be my contention that just as there is a divine plan for mankind so there is also a demonic plan... Their aim is to absorb the energy from human souls for their own benefit and use. They have cut themselves off from the source of life and need life energy to maintain their existence. So they seek to corrupt souls.

Tychonievich amplifies:

Pure spite just doesn't seem like enough of a reason for the devil to keep working tirelessly, millennium after millennium, for something that brings no benefit to him personally. It seems plausible that the devils must in some way need human damnation, that they must be soul-predators, vampires.

I comment:

This would be an extremely valuable addition to understanding positive demonic motivation. Perhaps we could look at our own evil acts and those of others - in this mortal life - to see whether an assumption of some kind of life-energy vampirism fits what we have observed. I think it does. 

Of course we can't actually perceive or physically measure what is going on - in terms of energy transfer - but it certainly seems as if this can happen. 

Furthermore, from what I have read of the dark side of the ritual magical societies of the late 19th, early 20th centuries (including what found its way into Charles Williams novels - who knew this world from experience) energy-vampirism seems to be almost exactly what dark ritual magicians were trying to do - and almost certainly sometimes did. 

This certainly supports the idea that it is what demons do; as does what I have read in (for example) David Icke and elsewhere about the kind of rituals that the Global Establishment engages in. A great advantage of knowing this is that it means we can get away from discussing 'demonic psychology' - what they like, what they want etc - which all sounds (as you say) too mushy and superficial to lead to the long-term planning and work They engage in. 

If demonic activity is seen as something more like a technological process or making a 'drug' maybe this models gets a bit closer. However I think we also need to guard against making it a one-sided 'materialist' thing as if human souls could really be treated as drugs or a fuel... 

Clearly, there must be some kind of 'consent' induced for this to happen - for the energy/ vitality transfer to occur. The victim must be induced to consent. 

 That, of course, is the Big spiritual problem of these times - the apparent large majority who consent to the evil vampiric operations being performed upon them.

How deep do the birdemic lies reach?

I have always tried to emphasize that the Big Lie of the birdemic may go all the way down; in the sense that there may be literally no single-causal infective agent. 

Reading the relevant chapters of David Icke's most recent (and very worthwhile) book "Perceptions of a Renegade Mind" - which focuses on the birdemic - reminds me that it is quite possible (scientifically speaking) that there may not be any new and specific agent which causes the medical conditions which are supposed to justify the totalitarian response. 

The whole thing may be nothing-but an exercise in relabeling - that is an absolutely credible scenario.

In this world of dominant, endemic lies and core incompetence - I do not believe that we can know exactly what is and is not the truth behind the scam; a wide range of possibilities are plausible. 

There may be no single agent, there may be some influence from a new (and, if so, engineered) agent, which may have emerged from a range of accidents or been deliberate spread; and (if so) has been deliberately-amplified by the addition of a large, but various, proportion of fake attributions (especially influenza)...

Many things are possible and plausible because the definition of the birdemic agent is so vague and loose; and because 'the test' is so grossly inappropriate and inaccurate that its false positives may range from high to total.

That is; there may be 'a lot' of FPs - where 'a lot' covers a wide range of percentage FPs - or all test-positives may be false. These situations will surely vary in different circumstances and places, and across time.  

And 'the peck' is not a 'the' since that term officially encompasses several very different types of agent, and unofficially (in different times and places and persons) may contain... well nobody knows. 

Nobody knows. In a global discourse of liars who neither seek nor speak the truth - nobody knows. 

Luckily, it does not matter what is the exact reality wrt. the birdemic - so long as we do not fall into the trap of believing that the 'material' reality is determinative. 

This is a spiritual war; and we need to keep reminding ourselves that it is the spiritual reality which we need to discern. 

Even if (which is certainly Not the case; because we know it is permeated with multiple deliberate lies*) the official story of the material birdemic were 100% true; this fact would not affect the spiritual reality that the birdemic is a tool of the powers of evil; strategically aimed against God, creation and The Good. 

That's what we must know; and all the rest are shades of opinion. 

*Note: 'Multiple deliberate lies' means that those responsible have chosen to take the side of 'the father of lies' - i.e. the devil. John 8:44 "Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it." This means that all who lie have already chosen damnation - unless they repent and follow Jesus. 

We need to try and stop our inculcated compulsion of thinking 'causally' - to acknowledge direct knowing

Causal thinking can be useful - or even essential - in certain restricted domains of practical functionality; such as science and engineering. Yet, significantly, causal thinking has almost ceased at high levels of professional research - such that only one or two steps of causality are being considered, and each micro-specialty has its own unique and non-overlapping set of permissible causes. 

But while properly-causal domains have nowadays suppressed causal thinking (replacing it with officially-controlled bureaucratic consensus - aka. peer review); a fake causality is improperly imposed-upon the major policy areas of public discourse. 

So causal reasoning is (nowadays) not used where it should be; but instead used where it shouldn't. 

As I said; causality is improperly imposed-upon the major policy areas of public discourse. 

Improper; because causal ways of thinking exclude God and human free will (agency); because they exclude uncaused-causes - and all purpose agency must be understood as a cause which originates in/from a Being. If a Being's thinking or behaviour is explained wholly on the basis of having-been-caused - then it is not a free thought or behaviour. 

So, we need to develop a not-causal understanding - and this is indeed a spontaneous and natural understanding for humans; and this is often referred to as a matter of motivations, intentions, purposes and the like. So beings initiate causal chains by un-caused thought and actions. 

However; the understanding that the world is ultimately determined by Beings can also open the mind to the reality of 'non-causal' influences. 

Beings do not only initiate causal chains - but also communicate directly with other Beings; in other words thoughts (as well as actions) of God and other Beings can be known directly, and without the indirect linkage of causes and effects: i.e. without such causal chains as the production, reception and understanding of languages. 

When we recognize that the main determinant of 'what happens' should be understood in terms of the motivations/ intentions/ purposes of living Beings - then we can also appreciate how Beings (including ourselves) can and do change things for the better directly and by our thinking and behaving.

This means that we who take the side of God and Creation are not wholly caused by the material (public, controlled) world; and also that we can affect the world for the better despite being excluded by the material world. 

'Just' by what we think and do that is aligned with God and Creation - other people who are also aligned with God and Creation can know and be affected by this. 

In a deep and primary sense; a blog post such as this one is not necessary. All such communication might be deleted; and yet a spiritual community of Christians would still exist by direct knowing; for as long as Christians acknowledge the primacy of the non-causal.

  

Our 'personal God' - means that every-thing is ultimately personal (including the fate of this world)

For Christians 'personal God' - means (or ought to mean) both that God is a person, and that God regards each of us an individual persons. 

This means that salvation, resurrection, theosis, damnation - all the cosmically significant possibilities are essentially personal. 

God does Not deal-with-us, primarily, as 'a people', a nation, civilization, as Mankind or as a Planet; rather God deals with us primarily deals with us each as a person; and the larger and group units serve that personal primacy. 

So, although group-aspects are real, necessary, and (especially the family) vital; for Christians they are secondary. 

When we look at the general situation in 2021 - whether that be our family, the immediate environment, region, nation, civilization or Mankind - we should mainly regard it as the mass product of many personal discernments and choices. 

As a group-phenomenon - the world in 2021 can be seen as providing within-itself many instances of the kind of personal situations that provide the best (i.e. most spiritually-necessary) learning opportunities. 

Thus, the world as we experience it is individually-tailored (by God, through creation) to provide each person (not immediately, but sooner or later) with personal experiences that provide the opportunity for us to learn spiritually - with the aim of following Jesus to resurrected eternal Heavenly life. 

Repeat: This world is designed to induce people to know and choose to follow Jesus to resurrected life... Therefore this world is Not designed for those who do Not want to follow Jesus - and for Non-Christians the world is indeed ultimately meaningless and purposeless. 

For those with Christian assumptions (but only those) therefore; the world in 2021, our world in 2021, shouldn't be lazily (taking the lead from officialdom, statistics and mass media) regarded in mass terms, by group-ish analyses. God isn't create-ing this world in mass terms.  

Because the spiritual reality in 2021 is one of literally of billions of spiritual micro-environments!

We can (and should) assume that the mass world is one that is overall potentially beneficial to us (sooner or later), to those we love, and to everybody else as persons - but we cannot possibly know exactly how or in what way beneficial; nor when learning-situations will present themselves to each (because billions of individuals!).

This is why individual discernment of the spiritual nature of our actual reality (especially of the side of God versus Satan, Good versus Evil) is spiritually-essential. 

(And essential means essential - without personal discernment, individuals will almost certainly choose to be damned - that is the nature of the world of 2021, which is highly/ increasingly unified in its evil-aligned global agenda of value-inversion. Accepting value-inversion = rejecting Heaven and wanting damnation.) 

Christians can each (consciously, explicitly) know spiritual reality and its necessary discernments and learning for themselves; for sure, sooner or later; because God makes it thus. 

And we might also know for a few of our loved ones - and we might be able to help them towards salvation (by our love); but in the end they each and all must decide for themselves - from themselves. 

The future? No idea (except that the end is coming)

I am absolutely unable to predict the future in any specific way at present - except that I am sure that these are the end times, and the end is accelerating. 

I am not very sure what The End actually means; but Christians will know it when it happens. 

It is not the second coming - because that is not a real thing - by my understanding. Certainly our civilization is ending - from multiple causes: biological, psychological, socio-political - but 'our civilization' now encompasses the world (especially since early 2020) so that the end of civilization will affect every person on the planet. 

But in materialist terms everybody dies, all nations and civilizations end, and the planet will sooner or later become uninhabitable for one reason or another; so that is certain. 

However; at the primary, spiritual intuitive level is where the significant end is hastening. 

To anyone with Christian discernment, it is clear and explicit that the Establishment, the authorities, are actively destroying all that is Good - all that is part of God's creation. Virtue, beauty and truth are under accelerating attack; and anything that is natural, spontaneous, created likewise. They are even beginning to destroy The System, The Matrix upon which their own collective power depends...

This is a very comprehensive strategy of destruction. 

What convinces me that this is the end, is that this attack by the powers of purposive evil is broadly celebrated - indeed, destruction of God, creation and The Good has become the core of the mainstream and 'normal' morality - enforced by law, taught in schools, propagated in the arts and mass media and by all major institutions (including churches).

Value inversion is our value system - already overall, and ever more comprehensively. 

This, I take it, is distinctive of the end of things. 

Thus, materially speaking there is nothing constructive to be done. Any material opposition to the plans, will merely be from supporting one lesser evil part of The System and directing it against a greater evil. At best, this will only delay.

Materially reasoned; there are no grounds for optimism - and in deed no realistic grounds for hope. 

For hope we must turn to the spiritual realm, and take advantage of Mankind's recent capacity for each individual to stand spiritually alone against the world. 

At present, this ability is being used to stand alone against God - and to affiliate with Satan's agenda; but this same human capacity can be deployed on the side of God. 

It is simple and instant. 

But what use is it? Is it any use at all? 

From a materialist perspective, of course not. By mainstream metaphysics: What I think in 'my brain' has no affect outside of my body.  

But what if it does have an effect; what if my thinking has a tremendous effect - but spiritually, not materially. 

What if, for those relatively-brief and transient moments when my thinking is truly aligned with God's purposes and harmonized by love of God (and fellow Men)?... 

What if this thinking is then taken-up by God and amplified and disseminated with astonishing efficiency and strength - to produce positive spiritual effects where possible (where the hearts of others are open to it) and necessary (where the effects will do the most Good) - and by a 'process' not confined by proximity in space or by physical contact?...

I personally would be unlikely to know anything about this - at least not in any detailed or comprehensive fashion - yet I might know that it was happening, or had happened. 

Think of it in terms of causation versus motivation. 

Causation is a materialist concept - cause and effect, billiard balls colliding, chemical equations and the like... It relates to dead things without consciousness or will. 

But if 'things' are really alive, conscious and have purposes - then they don't work on each other by cause and effect; but by means such as motivations, and by acceptance (or rejection)... 

If our divinely-harmonious thinking is motivational it affects other Beings like a personal relationship; and these Beings can choose whether or not to welcome this, and be affected by it -- much as we might accept or reject the love of another person. 

Indeed love is the key. If love is welcomed then it generates more love; amplifying the love. This is a way of picturing how our divine thinking may spread and be amplified in effect; and may do Good in the spiritual realm.  

But the spiritual realm is not cut-off from the material - rather, the material is a sub-set of the wider spiritual world. So the material world will be affected by what we think. And potentially affected for the better. 

There is no need for us to have a strategy - to predict the future: God has the strategy. We 'merely' need to help God with his future. 

Of course, this is an active process of discovery, and of discernment and thinking. But we will learn about where things are going from doing it, from participation - not from material analysis of 'the facts', not from logic/ maths/ models.

These are the end times, but that has long been the case; for many generations. The end is accelerating towards us - but still we do not know what it will entail nor when exactly it will come. Nonetheless - we know what to do. 

Magic Flute and Rhinegold - magical and symbolic operas

It is significant that three of my favourite - the most enduringly interesting, as a whole - operas should share an archetypal and 'Jungian' feel. These are Mozart's The Magic Flue [I mean Flute]; Wagner's Das Rhinegold (Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage is another, albeit musically inferior*). 

Perhaps this is because these are dramatically (situationally, as regards plot) is as high as opera can reach as an art form? 

After all, most operas are dramatic contrivances to produces scenes of strong and essentially 'populist' emotion - love at first sight, a love affair or the start of a marriage, the misery of broken love, pathos at loss, anger and vengefulness. Perhaps Verdi did this better than anyone - and his operas are composed of primary colours, black and white. 

It is the music which sometimes (and there are very few really successful operas - a couple of dozen perhaps) raises an opera above farce and melodrama and sometimes to sublimity. The plots of Mozart's Da Ponte-written operas -The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and (especially) Cosi Fan Tutte - are essentially horrible, shallow, facetious comedies of manners; which I would find intolerable as plays. It is the music of Mozart which raises these stock situations to the Heavens. 

The Magic Flute is my favourite opera, perhaps my favourite music. And this has to do with the fairy tale and archetypal aspects; but also the Masonic symbolism. Now, of course, Freemasonry is ultimately an enemy of Christianity and indeed probably an instrument of strategic evil. Yet here it is, structuring perhaps the greatest music ever written!

This is not uncommon in the arts; including the arts of genius. We are all sinners, including geniuses; and the greatest human creations are tainted with sin. But it is not the sin tow which we most deeply respond in the music of the Magic Flute - it is the Good. 

Because, after all, all evil contains some Good - and early Freemasonry (at the time and place of Mozart) had many good aspects - which rendered it a suitable and effective vehicle for the Magic Flute.  

Das Rhinegold has an extraordinary grandeur and symmetry - really marvelous orchestral writing and effects; and in general Rhinegold is a convincing and enchanting example of world building in opera. 

We feel we are inside the Teutonic legends - living in the heightened reality of gods, nymphs, dwarves, giants - indeed I merely need to think about the opera to get a halo effect on my lived experience. 

Yet, the 'message' of the work is again dubious. The plot is permeated with deception, greed, resentment, lust... and these are not really balanced by any great Goodness or nobility of purpose. It is, of course, the music - and not so much the singing (which is pretty arbitrary) but the orchestral part of the score - that makes the difference. 

In opera it is the music - not the play - which may reach the heights; and the music which can go beyond both the limitations and the explicit intentions of the composer. 

The lesson can be applied to other art forms, and other periods - even nowadays when the evil intent of art, literature and even music is very evident. 

When any artist (and artists nowadays are almost-never genuises, not even minor ones) taps into genuine creativity - he expresses the divine. Which is why there is good that may (with proper intent) be derived even from evil works - and most works (and all modern works) have a far greater admixture of evil than these three operas. 

* The Midsummer Marriage by Michael Tippett is another symbolic and magical opera - indeed, probably the last such to be written in a way that is (just about!) potentially accessible to the intelligent layman (rather than the professional musician). 

While the Wagner and Mozart are susceptible to Jungian analysis (as performed by Robert Donington) - Tippet actually wrote his opera from an explicit and deliberate Jungian schema.  

I would have to regard this Jungian schema as ultimately evil! - because it regards good and evil as light and dark sides of a personality; and aims not to acknowledge and repent sin, but it integrate it in the 'whole' Man. 

Yet, there is enough positive value in Jung to make it an effective basis for a Good opera. In particular - it addresses the problems of alienation and divided mind (the mundane and the enchanted worlds, materialism and spiritual); and the protagonists attain a kind of healing which is a positive outcome. 

With the Midsummer Marriage it is the music which (in parts of the score) raises the whole to greater heights than its flawed plot, clumsy language and (mostly) unmelodic vocal writing; and even than its explicit (wrong) intent. And, as with Rhinegold, it is the orchestra (not the singers) that has most of the musical good stuff.  

The masses are not asleep, but stuporous

In a stimulating blog post about his sense of expectation that something Big is about to happen; WmJas Tychonievich discussed the meaning of Apocalypse in terms of unveiling, awakening, showing forth of reality and such like; and went on to speculate:

My sense is that the next big event is not going to be an event at all, but a revelation of what has already been done — a revelation so clear that even those who slept through the global coup will not be able to ignore it.

On reflection ,it strikes me that we may be misled by our terminology of regarding the mass majority of being asleep - since a person can easily be aroused and awakened from sleep; and once roused they will tend to stay awake for a significant period.

But rather than 'asleep' it would be more accurate to state that the majority of the world are in a stupor. 

Stupor means that only vigorous and repeated stimuli will arouse the individual, and when left undisturbed, the patient will immediately lapse back to the unresponsive state.

Stupor fits the facts. People are only aroused from their stupor by extreme events; and arousal is very brief. Almost immediately they lapse back into stupor. 

It is Not, after all, a case of Sleepers Awake; but of first needing to cure the cause of stupor, before being able to arouse the stuporous. 

It is this immediate relapse that I find so striking (and frustrating). 

Sometimes, some-thing will 'awaken' a mainstream sleeper - some event, some piece of information, an insight... But very quickly that person will relapse into the fake-world of the Big Lies - as if their awakening had never been!

There is apparently no memory of having been awake, of having understood, of having seen. Just a reset to stupor. 

So why the stupor? Put simply: the mass of mainstream, modern, atheist, materialist, leftist people are cognitively damaged at a deep level; their thinking does not work, reasoning does not work; memories are disorganized. 

And even when their is some kind of retained representation of a vital revelation; the recall is too feeble and vague to affect behaviour or beliefs.

Deletion of God, creation and the spirit from human minds has made most Men stuporous; and Men cannot be aroused from this unresponsive state for long enough to use common sense or to learn from personal experience. 

The only possible cure is metaphysical, conceptual, at the level of primary assumptions. The mind will only awaken and stay awake long enough to benefit from the experience, when that mind recognizes correctly the basic realities of the world, its own nature and relations between the self and the world. 

Healing 'divided Man'. What would it require?

It was a matter of general concern among intellectuals, artists and writers of the mid-twentieth century that Man had become internally 'divided' - and it would be a good idea to heal this.

My interpretation is that this internal division was experienced as a consequence of living in several or many of the increasingly differentiated and specialized worlds of industrial society: differences between home and the workplace, the personal and the political, arts and sciences, and even within the sciences. 

The work of CG Jung was influential - sometimes explicit - in addressing this internally-divided experience (albeit, failing to solve it). 

But since the middle 1960s this experience has been much less discussed - and for the likely reason that all of life has been 'reunited' by leftist ideology and bureaucracy. Nowadays the world of experience is more and more fully like living in a managed bureaucracy - being monitored and controlled, with every aspect reduced to measurable, quantifiable operational definitions. 

Since around 2000, modern Man has been internally, more-or-less, unified; by having become assimilated into The System, the Matrix; and with that system having been massively expanded outwards and internally. The System now encompasses all of public life, and within these domains more and more of the detailed functioning. 

Furthermore, The System extends into Men's thinking; especially his habitual and expedient thinking. He accepts The System as The World - and lives in that context: 'life' becomes a natter of maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering within The Matrix. 

So, the sense of division is now between this unified world and... what lies outside of it, what is excluded from it - but the sense of anything being excluded from it or outside is itself disappearing, due to the addictiveness of The System, the habits of thinking it inculcates; and the basic metaphysical assumptions which The System incorporates which make the concept of 'outside' into a thing both unreal and incomprehensible. 

Even the radicals and rebels of 2021, nearly all operate within The System - trying to improve it is small ways, while accepting the fundamental assumptions. This applies equally to mainstream religion - including Christianity - as can be seen by the way that Churches and Christians have marched in lockstep with the  secular, left, anti-Christian Establishment throughout the birdemic, and with respect to the antriracist-diversity agenda. 

How may the division be cured? Well what is needed is quite simple - albeit not many institutions or authorities will tell you about it, and none will support any re-integration; and achieving it will surely be incomplete and infrequent (given that integrated being goes against so much of public discourse and work). 

Re-integration would be a lived, and thinking, awareness of the whole; and this would include the fact of creation and a loving and personal God, spirits, and the whole world (animal, vegetable and mineral) as animated and conscious beings. 

It would also include an awareness of life as a whole which extends (at least) into a future eternity. 

And, because the world is as the world it; it would entail some solid acknowledgment of that fact that it is each person's unique responsibility to determine such matters for himself. 

Because, in a world where The System is nearly everywhere (on a moment to moment basis), where The System is so habitually internalized, and where The System excludes acknowledgment of its own exclusions - only the individual who embraces the fact and Goodness of his own agency will be able (even in principle) to leave The System. 

The church was, in effect, necessary for salvation in its early centuries - but this is no longer true

The claim that the church is necessary to salvation was always factually false - as is clear from the Fourth Gospel (of 'John'). 

And to some extent, the claim that Man alone could not be saved was a claim of expedience, based on what worked best from the point of view of the growth and power of the church institution. 

Yet, we must take seriously the possibility that this was in fact necessary for the survival of Christianity in a world where such claims were probably inevitable, given the way that Men's minds worked and the conditions of the time.  

In a practical sense, it was correct that there was no salvation outside of the church in the medieval period; in that anybody outside the medieval church would not have been a Christian at all. 

Not because it was 'impossible' to be a non-church Christian in a 'theoretical' sense; but that Men were not at that time fully independent agents, and were always part of some community from-which they (more passively and unconsciously than now) absorbed their faith. 

For a medieval man to leave the community of faith (church) was therefore to leave the faith; and not to be in a community of faith was not to believe.

In other words, there has been an evolutionary development of human consciousness in the direction of greater autonomy and agency; and the nature of Christian life has been transformed by this. 

We now must Now consciously choose to do (and think) much that was once unconsciously and passively done and thought. 

Conversely, the kind of communal life that was once necessary and inevitable has become impossible and undesirable. 

One can't (now) be agnostic about Christianity - what what about other stuff? Classic conspiracy theories?

Things have been coming to a point for some decades - and have now arrived-at the point; so there are only two choices in the ongoing spiritual war: the side of God, or of Satan. Nobody can be 'an Agnostic' in this sense - can claim 'not to know' about God - because that is to take the side of Satan.

But I think one can be agnostic about other issues, which are not of crucial importance, and/or which cut across the Christian-Evil divide. 

I find myself agnostic about much of the 'conspiracy theory*' field - such topics as are nowadays covered by people such as David Icke, or my penfriend Andy Thomas (or, in the recent past, by John Michell): Illuminati, crop circles, UFOs, 9/11, Atlantis... 

Many of these subjects I feel genuinely agnostic about; in that I could imagine them being either true or untrue - or of containing significant elements of truth, mixed with error and fraud. 

Further; in such matters, being agnostic is very different from rejecting them altogether and outright - which is the mainstream position. Indeed, to be agnostic is closer to being 'a believer' than it is to being a 'skeptic'. 

What is interesting is how and why I should (apparently) be content to stay in my agnostic state, without trying to settle matters one way or the other. Why, for example, don't I actually visit a crop circle, or make efforts to observe a UFO? 

I suppose the answer is that I don't think the answer is of decisive importance either way. I really don't - and that is because for me the answer (whatever it is) is subsumed within the much larger matter of destiny, or providence; that is, God's plans for me and for the world and its people. 

As I understand divine destiny, it is such that these matters are not crucial. 

Whether, for instance, aliens are contacting, or trying to communicate with, Mankind (or whether aliens are deceptive demons) is - for me - a matter of only mild interest; because the answer would be only one factor among innumerable others. It would not affect the way I lead my life, or what I strive for. 

This perspective is, I suspect, incomprehensible to the mass of contemporary conspiracy theorists - who are atheists; and, because things have come to a point, therefore more or less, anti-Christian. But so it is. 

Therefore I read, and have read, a fair bit about these topics; watched videos, listened to audios etc. I have found much of this material interesting, and indeed very useful, in a wide variety of ways. Yet this value does not seem to depend upon reaching a conclusion one way or the other; and so I remain agnostic. 

Note: The term conspiracy theory is itself propaganda on the side of evil; so the conspiracy theory field is an example of The Enemy's enemy. However, most members of that community still seem to be wedded to one or another aspect of the Leftism agenda - so (for all their valuable insights) they fail the Litmus Tests and are on the other side.  

Did JP Donleavy "descend into Hell"?

As a young adult I read several novels by JP Donleavy - including his first book The Ginger Man, which was famously banned from Ireland and the USA for obscenity. 

It is an energetic, picaresque story of an American student in Ireland - a charming psychopath, drunkard and rake; written in prose-poetic style reminiscent of James Joyce or Flann O'Brien. 

As a novel it is innovative and influential - and being sexually explicit (albeit linguistically hard to unravel) was naturally a big success; probably because it did much to make selfish-short-termism sound attractive and enjoyable! 

This was the much-reproduced publicity and jacket photo of Donleavy - presumably taken in the 1970s:

About a decade later; Eerdmans publishers reprinted Charles Williams's novels in paperback with rather attractive colour illustrations on the cover; including Descent into Hell - which, among other events, depicts the way in which an author (Lawrence Wentworth) is led to damnation in part by his sexual fantasies for a younger woman.

Was the illustrator (and/or publisher) making some kind of satirical visual equation of JP Donleavy with the wicked protagonist who eventually descended into hell? 

Or, perhaps it was simply that - in that photograph, at least - the appearance of JPD seems to show the same kind of smug-yet-insecure arrogance that motivated Lawrence Wentworth? Maybe the JPD picture was chosen without any knowledge of who it depicted? 

Or was the picture of JPD intended to represent another character altogether? Maybe even the Charles Williams alter ego playwright and poet Peter Stanhope? 

I wonder whether Donleavy came across this cover; and if so what he thought about it. My guess is that he would have seen the appropriateness, and indeed welcomed it. After all, from what I gather of his life and from his books; I don't suppose that JPD would have harboured any serious or sustained desire to 'ascend into Heaven'. 

Real Christians now need conceptually to divide the Christian 'religion' from the churches - or die eternally

It has been commonplace for at least a couple of centuries in The West for people to reject Christianity (supposedly) on the basis of abuses by and in one or all the Christian churches. 

This stands in contrast to the way people behave in politics; where a convinced socialist (for example) has no problem in remaining an ideal socialist despite the gross failures and corruption of actual socialist governments in Russia, China, Cambodia or wherever. 

People will put great intellectual effort into distinguishing the 'real' ideology from the institution...

But when it comes the the ultimate religious questions, Christianity is abandoned and rejected quickly, wholly and vehemently; and this is justified on the basis of much less gross failure and corruption than those of actually-existing communism. 

This Christian apostasy in The West has been such an extreme phenomenon as to indicate a covert desire to abandon Christianity on any excuse. 

At the same time, apostate Christians - i.e. those who were in the process of rejecting Christianity - have often pretended (to themselves and others) that they were 'rejecting the church/es in order to be better Christians'. 

Yet in retrospect it is obvious that challenging, subverting, 'reforming' the Christian churches was, in practice, nearly-always just a transitional phase on the way out of Christianity altogether. 

It turns-out that the frequent claim of leaving church 'to become a more serious Christian' - almost always - was disguising the fact of leaving the churches in order not to be a Christian at all. 

...Or maybe to become the kind of pseudo-Christian who simply follows the lead of the evolving Left agenda while giving it a pseudo-Christian rationale (like the modern leadership of all major 'Christian' denominations). 

I regard this as (by accident or design) a false trail - a misleading association - laid by the powers of evil to discredit in advance what has now become the only way to remain a real Christian: I mean that now all real Christians needs to become spiritually independent of all churches. 

This does Not means that all Christians need to leave all churches - individual Christians may/will continue to find specific churches to be helpful - but it does mean that all Christians need to regard all churches as (more or less helpful) means to the end of salvation. 

Even those Christians who regard their specific church as necessary to salvation, now need to regard that church as a means not an end. They need to look upon their own church with a discerning eye, and discriminate decisively within that denomination - to see in what ways denomination churches, or priests and leaders, enable or assist salvation; and distinguish these institutions and individuals clearly from the many/most ways in which that church-as-a-whole is leading its members away from salvation. 

The situation here-and-now is a choice simple and stark: Christianity or spiritual death. 

And indeed, without real Christianity as a basis - even ordinary, everyday, commonsense living has become impossible - has turned against itself. We live in an unprecedented world of officially-imposed, mass-accepted, value-inversion. 

To be normal, mainstream, agnostic is thus to make the choice of damnation and death. 

(It was not always so - but it is Now.)

This means that each and every person must now find a way to become and remain a real Christian.

Find a way. There is no signposted path anymore. 

Christianity is primarily about ends, not means; because the means derive-from the end. 

The end is simple: to follow Jesus Christ to eternal resurrected life in Heaven. 

That is easy to understand. The tough thing is doing it; but people do tough things all the time when they want them - they travel long distances to meet family or lovers - or even 'just' for holidays, train - hours a day - for sports; they pursue education and careers over decades...

If someone truly regards eternal life as important; then he will not shirk from work, from searching and suffering, in order to get it. 

Why I keep going back, over and again, to re-read Charles Williams

Durham Castle (University College) is the silhouette on the right (Cathedral to the left) and my rooms were located just to the right of the keep, looking out on this view

I have recently been re-reading some of my favourite Charles Williams bits and pieces - including what began my interest in this writer: Humphrey Carpenter's biographical account in The Inklings (1978). I would recommend this to anyone who thinks they might be interested, because Carpenter highlights Williams's most appealing and exciting aspects. 

I recall first reading about 'CW' in my dark rooms located in Durham Castle one autumn morning; and being so energized and gripped that I dashed off to the university library to borrow some of his books. The included the Place of the Lion novel, Image of the City collection of essays and the Taliessin through Logres and Region of the Summer Stars poems.   

Yet I have never appreciated the actual work of Williams as much as I did the biography, the idea of what he was trying to do; the fact that he lived this strange life in which the natural and supernatural were not divided - and in which the eternal and perfect forms of reality were perceptible behind the everyday and mundane. 

For this reason - one of my favourite Williams books is the early (long since out of print) An Introduction to Charles Williams, by his friend Alice Mary Hadfield - since this gives the deepest and most vivid account of the best aspects of William's point of view on life.  

However, after periods of immersion and when I attempted to live my spiritual life in a way modelled on that of Williams; I have ended in a very different place indeed. And I am much now more aware of the fact that Williams's ideas failed in Williams's own life: that he was always a deeply unhappy (even desperate) man, who consistently made (and doubled-down on) wrong choices. 

Because (again and again) that which he most wanted at a surface level, and which he adopted as life-assumptions; was also exactly what hurt him the most profoundly. And as a consequence, made his own life worse than it needed to be.

This tragic situation (which lay behind the surface of success, charisma, and apparent spirituality) was mostly a consequence of CW's deepest metaphysics and most rigorously followed-through philosophical convictions. 

So, you can see why Charles Williams continues to fascinate over such a time span, and draws me back recurrently to engage with his life and work. 

Patient long suffering or complicity with evil

The Philosopher Edward Feser - whose book on Aquinas I found very valuable - has a recent post about the need for patient suffering among church Christians. (This post was triggered by Pope Francis's latest act of destruction against the Roman Catholic Church.)

This is a perspective worthy of respect. This world is full of abuses, perhaps more than ever before in human history. And especially full of those in authority who are not merely selfishly corrupt, but agents of Satan covertly dedicated to the destruction of those institutions they have undertaken to sustain. I have known many of these active in medicine, universities and science - indeed they seem to be something between majority and a monopoly in these and other fields. 

That we should patiently suffer these is certainly a possibility. Because as well as evil-motivated leaders, there is a mass majority who are faithless cowards - and few of us are altogether free of these weaknesses. 

Yet also, someone who claims patiently to suffer may not really be suffering - but may blandly be indifferent from lack of real faith in the church (or lack of real commitment to whatever institution). Or may instead be exploiting the evil for personal, careerist gain. 

Or he may also be going beyond patient suffering and on to active complicity with evil - by passive or even active complicity with evil purposes - for example working hard and diligently to assist with change that is intended to subvert or destroy that which is good.

As usual, motivation is all. Because someone who claims to be opposing evil might well be doing so for evil reasons - from personal resentment, for example. To try and make his own life more comfortable or secure. Or because of the desire to cause faster and greater destruction. 

Given the mixed nature of our own motivations, the case for patient suffering may be a strong one. But if so, we should be as clear and explicit as possible just what it is we are suffering, and why.  

What we do is secondary to our motivation; and of course people lie about motivations - especially when justifying themselves to others. 

The main duty is not to lie to ourselves about what is motivating us; to recognize that it is the reality which matters, and not what we succeed in persuading other people is true. 

And to repent whatever in our true motivation needs repenting.  

An enchanted family picnic - what does it mean?

I use a family picnic as (sometimes) an example of one of the most delightful occasions of being a parent with children. 

Certainly, the picnics in the middle of a country walk (or a walk around a country house estate) are among my treasured memories. 

There was about them a spontaneous atmosphere of enchantment - but there are various ways of conceptualizing its meaning. 

In a mainstream, materialist and mundane fashion - a 'successful' family picnic could be described as a form of pleasure; some kind of combination of the biological bond between parents and offspring, and the physical pleasures of warm weather and soothing views, pleasant food and rest after exertion... something of that kind. 

By this account there is no extra or special significance to a family picnic - it was nice while it lasted; but in mortal life nothing lasts...

And when the event has faded from memory, then it will have disappeared from reality. The vast universe closes over the indescribably micro-incident, obliterates it - as if it never had been. 

Or; we might imagine something like a family picnic among animistic hunter-gatherers - with a significance that is in one sense timeless and in another sense one of an unending cycle of eternal recurrences with transformations. 

One picnic is all picnics; and all picnics are in that one picnic here and now. No individual picnic is necessary, none add to the sum of picnics - but any specific picnic is simultaneously all past and future picnics. 

Each is different, but in a way that does not affect the quality of the world - which Just Is. 

In the same way each reincarnation of each family member is different in terms of the exact manifestation of the soul - but there are just so many souls which recur over time. 

There can be permutation and recombination of the specifics of a picnic, but it is ultimately an arbitrary event artificially detached from the unending continuum of live cycling and transforming - neither adding-to nor subtracting-from the totality of creation.  

From a traditional Christian transcendent (broadly Platonic, or Eastern Orthodox Christian) perspective; the picnic might be seen as a glimpse or foretaste of Heaven. Its value lies in what it symbolizes, what it represents, what it leads-to. 

Strictly speaking, the actual earthly picnic is not significant - because it is transient and mundane. Only insofar as it induces us to think of the eternal and unchanging true-reality of Heaven, to yearn for it, to strive for salvation - does this specific family picnic have value. 

Mortal life is - at most - a preparation for eternity. 

The earthly picnic is evanescent and will disappear, because ultimately it is not needed. If the picnic had never happened, this would not affect the reality of eternal Heavenly perfection - which, because it is perfect, has no need for earthly things, and can neither be enhanced nor affected by earthly occurrences. 

But my own understanding is that this picnic is unique and unprecedented; and adds something eternal to the cumulative sum of divine creation; which had a beginning, and perhaps a different future because of this picnic. 

This earthly picnic potentially affects the eternal souls of the participants. If the family are able to learn from their experience now, then after death their resurrected souls will carry the learning from this picnic forward into Heaven. 

This picnic has something Good in it which makes a permanent difference, and things will never be the same again afterwards. 

Even if the picnic - and what it did, and what it meant - is absolutely forgotten by the mortal humans who participated in it - no matter! The immortal souls of those humans will be affected by it - and the Good consequences will survive through the transformation of resurrection to affect Heavenly life everlasting. 

My point? What happens on earth means more than our fleeting feelings in this transient mortal life; yet the Good, significant events of our lives are not merely secondary,  imperfect and disposable glimpses of the eternal perfection of Heaven. 

Our bodies and minds are temporary - but our souls are eternal.

And if our souls proceed to resurrection and Heaven; then all that is relevant which we have learned on earth will be carried forwards into life everlasting; and will change the nature of eternal creation.

  

The end of Gemeinschaft - the dawn of... what?

Gemeinschaft is a German word which indicates a type of social grouping which has been actively extinguished over the past century; indeed I saw into almost-total obliteration during my working life. Yet, Gemeinschaft used to form the basis of all human society. 

The features of a Gemeinschaft grouping include a relatively informal, self-selected (and self-regulated) group of men who are united by common interests and/or purposes. Examples would include the Medieval craft guilds and learned professions. But also much smaller groupings of men such as clubs and hobby groups, and social/ discussion groups such as the Oxford Inklings.

I emphasize men, because women very seldom form such groups, or even participate in them - and there are (I think) no examples of mixed sex Gemeinschaft groups that were stable over time.

What has been apparent over several generations is the replacement of Gemeinschaft by at first mixed sex, then woman dominated, formal, externally-controlled/ internally rule-based bureaucracy. 

Why? Ultimately because bureaucracy has been a major strategy of purposive evil in the world - because it is intrinsically demonic in nature: anti-God, anti-spiritual, anti-human.

Gemeinschaft has been attacked by feminism on one hand - which regarded all-male groups as inherently oppressive to all-women; and on the other side by an inferred sexualization of Gemeinschaft as latent or covert male-male sexual attraction. 

In reality; the major thrust of hostility was that Gemeinschaft contains an intrinsic goodness in terms of the basis of its cohesion - whereas bureaucracy is intrinsically evil. 

Yet, on theoretic and empirical grounds, it seems obvious that we cannot return to a world dominated by Gemeinschaft ... It certainly looks as if modern men do not even want Gemeinschaft: they are not pressing for more Gemeinschaft, modern men are not spontaneously doing Gemeinschaft. 

So now there is hardly any need for the authorities even to repress or disrupt it; and anyone who yearns for Gemeinschaft will find it difficult or impossible to get going; and will find it almost impossible to sustain.

We must not accept bureaucracy, because it is evil - yet we cannot go back to traditional Gemeinschaft because it is obsolete - so, as usual, we need to develop hitherto unprecedented creative possibilities; and these may need to be be so radical as to require extremely high motivation of a kind only possible when based on strong and personal religious convictions. 

And there is our clue. We must build from what actually does motivate and is Good; no matter how small such groups may be, to begin with.  

Note added: The cause of the decline of Gemeinschaft is - like the cause of decline in all human institutions and groupings - the loss of Christianity as a framework and assumption for human life. This deletion either obliterates Gemeinschaft aspects altogether - as for the mass of young people whose lives are dominated by mass and social media; and large, variable and loose groupings. Or renders smaller interest-orientated groups weak and labile, being merely contingent mutual venues for pleasurable pastimes. One should not mistake these hedonically-justified residues for the internally-cohesive, mutually-aiding and -influencing, and temporally-resilient Gemeinschaft groups of history: strong enough to serve as the building blocks of functional human society.  

Bureaucracy kills the spirit - and bureaucracy is now (almost) everywhere

I find it hard to recognize that most people do not feel - immediately and without having to reflect upon it - the innate evil of bureaucracy; the soul-killing properties of a world of monitoring and control of ever more of life; the world of ever more regulations, procedures, check-lists. 

And the adverse effect that bureaucracy has upon people - on their thinking, behaviour - on their souls... I am astonished that this is not more widely recognized, and opposed.  

My own aversion to bureaucracy is spontaneous and powerful; and has shaped my life for several decades - and much of the 'activism' of my younger adult life was directed against it in medicine, universities and science.

For one example, I was the editor of what was apparently the last international academic journal Not to be (bureaucratically) peer reviewed (Medical Hypotheses). And the (official) reason for sacking me from this job was my refusal to introduce peer review. 

But what I did not recognize about bureaucracy until a few years ago - was that it was not just a result of evil choices; but more fundamentally a consequence of bad choices operating on changes in human consciousness. 

Past societies were never bureaucratic in the way that ours is - and officialdom lacked the parasitic and malignant tendency of modern bureaucracy, primarily because they could not be like that. The minds of Men could not operate in the ways necessary for a modern bureaucracy. 

When modern Man 'evolved' (developed deliberately; as part of God's creation, part of God's plan) bureaucratic thinking was always going to be a temptation; but it was one that Men were supposed to reject. 

A handful of the early (and Christian) romantics (e.g. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Novalis) showed the proper path, the God-intended and God-hoped-for path. But instead most Men chose the path of atheism, leftism and materialism - which leads inexorably to bureaucracy, death of the spirit, nihilism and despair.

Now bureaucracy is the public face of Ahrimanic evil: it has occupied the world, including the means of production and communication, and extends its tentacles almost daily. 

Now - if we reject bureaucracy, we also reject the System - and the System is what keeps us alive. 

Yet the ultimate evil motivation of bureaucracy is evident in the fact of its parasitic, malignant nature - that it will grow until it kills its host. 

And its evil is evident in that the bureaucratic leadership class - the leaders of major government, institutions and corporations; are advancing in corruption beyond the Ahrimanic; and into more purely negative evil of the spitefully-destructive.

In other words, because of their developing corruption - because of being ideological bureaucrats; They no longer serve The System - but instead serve Satan and themselves. 

Therefore the System - the global bureaucracy - is not only killing itself distally by parasitic colonization of the means of production... But also killing itself from within - by leaders implementing mandatory policies for enhanced group and interpersonal resentment; and multiple PSYOPS leading to destruction at all levels. 

The bureaucracy is, in other words, no longer internally-'rational', rule-based and systemic in nature;  but convulsed from within by contradictory objectives, compulsory incoherence, value-inversions and other manifestations of the most advanced forms of evil.  

 

This is why the individual must step-back from any affectation of concern with the System, with Politics, with Civilization or Society... These are not an answer, because these are destroying themselves from both external and internal reasons. 

We now have a global bureaucracy, which is a global system for evil; and the system evil is one that is atheist, leftist and materialist - and which therefore innately has the property of damning all those who live by it, believe it, endorse it. 

I think everybody knows this at some unconscious (and usually denied) level: i.e. that we are in the End Times - although what that phrase means in detail is unsure. But I mean the sense that things are going spiritually downwards and will continue to go inexorably downwards, to some kind of terminus.  

Thus hope is in opposition to optimism. 

Hope is spiritual - for salvation: for resurrection to life eternal. And hope depends on being spiritually separate from the System bureaucracy. 

Whereas optimism (expectation of positive outcomes) depends on wishing for the bureaucracy to continue - wishing for it not to be destroyed by inner-spite or by its own malignant tendencies - or not yet, at any rate. 

Optimism dictates that we defend and try to reform the System; hope dictates that we neither actively nor willingly participate in the work of evil; that we do identify, repent and reject evil. 

The System demands that we identify-with its evil - demands that we want and favour inclusion for our-selves and for all. 

But Romantic Christianity instead has it that our hope be located in divine creation rather than the System; beyond this world rather than in this world; beyond death rather than in mortal life. 

Our task is therefore to live from this transcendental root. 

This task is not easy - but it is possible. 

The best (yet) single sentence summary of the 2020 coup?

Under the guise of the birdemic, the Establishment finally pulled off the trick Satan had been trying to pull off since beginning of history - the incorporation of everyone and everything into a system that is inherently opposed to God.

By Francis Berger - read the whole thing.

Marshall McLuhan - is he worth reading?

My 2014 book Addicted to distraction: psychological consequences of the modern Mass Media (probably my 'best selling' book - although this is an exceedingly low bar!) began with Marshall McLuhan's statement The medium is the message; and continued with the following tribute:

Although more than 99% of what he wrote was (in my opinion) either wrong or nonsense, Marshal McLuhan (1911-1980) was nevertheless the first to see clearly that the key fact, the primary reality about the Mass Media is not the vast multitude of its specific contents; but rather its form as a whole, its unifying nature as a phenomenon, its underlying operating-principles. McLuhan therefore defined the subject of the Mass Media, drew a line around it, made it an object for study. This whole book can be seen as, in a sense, an unpacking and elaboration of McLuhan’s pregnant phrase: “The medium is the message” – therefore it seems appropriate that it be dedicated to the memory of that maddeningly-inconsistent volcano of creativity.

So, the short answer to my question "is Marshall McLuhan worth reading" must be - Yes! However, this is very much a Yes - but...

I was brought to think again about McLuhan after reading Douglas Coupland's 2010 MM book - subtitled "You know nothing of my work!"  (quoting the scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen hauls-out McLuhan from off camera, to refute a pompous fool bore who is pontificating in a cinema queue). Coupland's book is poor overall - marred by its superficial knowledge and journalistic tone, and its excruciating (assumed not argued, natch) political correctness/ virtue signaling. 

(For all his affectation of cool insouciance; Coupland is throughout very evidently running scared - pre-emptively groveling in the face of feared-anticipated woke denunciation.) 

Yet the book served to clarify 'what went wrong' with McLuhan - indeed, the several things that went wrong. 

Most importantly, MM's brain tumour and then the extensive operation to remove it in 1967 was lethal to his creativity; so we need to judge MM only by his mature works written before 1966 - which means just two books: The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media.

A further problem with MM was that he was a brilliant/ inconsistent aphorist; who generated insights and nonsense in an unique and personal fashion; partly innate and partly from an unusual set of formative life experiences - including a rural Canadian upbringing, attendance at Cambridge University when it was the cutting edge of literary criticism, and being a devout Roman Catholic convert as an adult.  

But, from the 1960s, and as he began to become extremely famous; McLuhan went against his own gifts and tried to make his insights into a kind of science (or, at least, a bureaucratic project): raising huge grants, setting-up a university research centre employing many people, and training many students in standard techniques of analysis, and doing (half-baked) experiments on the psychological effects of media.

What began as the erratic but original and stimulating products of one man's mind; transformed into an overblown, grandiose, fake academicism. 

Yet, with all these provisos - there is a real (and timeless) energizing excitement that comes from those early McLuhan books, and from the first years of his fame. This was well captured in a excellent Penguin collection of excerpts, essays and interviews from 1968 called McLuhan: Hot & Cool and edited by GE Stearn. If you want to try McLuhan, maybe that is the best place to begin.   

Note: My Addicted to Distraction book is - in retrospect - significantly flawed by my failure to recognize that - although the medium is indeed the main message, and the bad effects of the mass media are mainly due to the media form - there is a small percentage of core, mandatory media content (the 'litmus test' issues) that is of crucial importance to media functioning. This became fully evident in 2020 when the mass media became the channel and mechanism of government; and when censorship of media content became international, explicit and widely publicized. At times, in the UK, government by media was commonplace; as the media disseminated 'official' diktat (e.g. TV or video footage of some Establishment individual setting out policy). This literal media-channeled-dictatorship was, at times, the sole and unsupported method of mass control (with political and bureaucratic mechanisms wholly absent, or trailing behind). The fact that, in these core matters, the mass media are globally unified and centrally controlled (albeit by covert mechanisms, the nature of which I do not know for sure) is by now surely undeniable; nonetheless I missed it back in 2014!