How I understand the meaning of these End Times

I often state that we are now "in the End Times" - and I am convinced of it. 

I do Not mean by this that the "Second Coming" of Christ is imminent, because (from my Fourth Gospel perspective) I regard the idea of the Second Coming as false - and indeed bizarre; because Jesus did his work, his work is done, it was completely successful, and there is no reason for Christ to come again. 

I do not have any very specific notion of how or when the End will come-about or what it will entail; but I think we (the human race) have gone beyond a point of no return, and have entered a positive-feedback cycle where each deleterious change leads to further harm in a compounding fashion; such that matters accelerate towards ruin. 

The main reason I have reached this conclusion is that we live - for the first and only time in history (so far as I know) - in a time of net (and increasing) value-inversion - such that the mainstream, official and high-status value-system is the opposite of reality; hence the opposite of truth. 

Because values are inverted, it means that (on average, overall) evaluations of Good and evil (beautiful and ugly/ true and false/ virtue and sin) are upside-down; so that attempts to understand and choose that which is Good will instead home-in-on evil; attempts to make things better will make them worse; attempts to create order will amplify chaos, and attempts to solve problems will make them worse. 

This has happened because sin has the upper hand among those persons, nations, institutions that have the greatest power (wealth, status, influence) - and the apparent mass majority of the populace have become hedonic and despairing - without purpose or meaning; therefore demotivated and cowardly. 

Although this value-inversion does not apply to everyone; and Men remain as free as they always have been to repent and attain salvation; they have ceased (on the whole) to desire salvation. 

Most modern Men will not be saved because they do not want to be saved - indeed they find the idea of resurrection to eternal life in Heaven to be positively aversive: dull, boring, silly, childish, or indeed itself evil.

Modern Man typically wants to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering in mortal life then either painlessly to die into total annihilation; or at least to cease to be a Man with a self and agency; or else (perhaps especially among the ruling Establishment) seeks an afterlife of (demonic) hedonic/ sadistic domination and spiteful destruction.  

Is this a hope-less perspective? No - because hope is properly located in post-mortal eternity; not in this brief and entropic mortal life. 

But is it excessively pessimistic to assume that we are beyond the point at which matters could be turned-around? After all, Men are still free to change their minds - that is not-impossible, so perhaps it may happen? 

Why then; if mass repentance could happen in principle, am I convinced that it will not happen?  

Partly because of the Biblical prophecies about End Times which seem to contain the insight that there will be a point of no return. These put the idea into my mind. 

Then the phenomenon of value-inversion. Value-inversion is so weird and unnatural and false (dissonant with reality, useless for prediction) that one would expect it to be self-correcting - IF it could be corrected. 

Yet instead of value-inversion being self-limiting, instead of it reducing in the face of - what one would suppose - is obvious; value-inversion is spreading, getting worse, and solidifying. 

Evidence for this is... everything in public discourse - the mass media, high status officialdom, large corporations. 

Apparent exceptions soon turn out to be merely apparent. 

Such a situation I find to be so strange, unprecedented, beyond logic and love; that I can only conclude that it represents the deep nature of many Men. 

Why now, why not before? 

Because things change, history is linear and does not repeat; and each Man is unique and brings to the world a nature and disposition from pre-mortal existence. 

Ultimately, I think (I don't know) that history changes due to the changing nature of incarnated Men. 

Modern Men are as-they-are substantially because that is how they were (on the whole) when incarnated. They are not predestined to damnation - because everybody is a free agent; but they (we) are overall more evil than any generations in history. 

It is (was) from this increased original and innate greater-evil, that these times are as they are. 

Don't seek or take Generic Advice! Or, what should "people" actually "Do about things" (considering the way "things" are going...)?

I often (far too often!) see bloggers advising their readers what to do in face of the way the world is going - and commenters asking bloggers what to do! 

Where should I go (to be safe)? What job should I do (to avoid converged SJWs and enforced political correctness)? How can I find a community of like-minded?

Aside from the innate absurdity of offering and seeking such answers in the context of a mass medium (albeit, not very "mass" compared to the big stuff); and exacerbated when the communicative exchange is between pseudonymous bloggers and/or commenters - who know very-little or nothing-at-all about each other... 

Aside from such constraints; the assumption behind such activity is that there is such a thing as generically wise, or at least expedient, advice: advice that is good for everyone, works for everyone.

However this may be for material secular goals (such as finding a "safe" place to live; or discovering how to seduce more 'women'... seduce them in a properly 'Christian' way, natch!); this offering and seeking of generic guidance is Not Good for spiritual goals. 

Of course, there can be generic but broadly-valid negative advice: such as what Not to do - yet even here, in the world as it is - there are just so many things that we ought not to do, that (in practice) we cannot not do all of them.  

Good advice might be - Don't live in an especially leftist part of a leftist nation; don't work in a highly-converged profession, don't take a job in an institution dominated by SJWs... 

Yet the nature of this world is that All nations, professions and institutions (of any size and power) are substantially converged with leftist evil - and getting worse.  

People must live somewhere, and there are massive costs to relocating; people must have some kind of job and work someplace - and it is merely a matter of degree as to how evil each of the options currently are. 

We cannot avoid doing evil in such a pervasively evil world; in the end we can only do our feeble best, and then we  must repent our many sins -- which is not, or should not be, a fatal problem for Christians. Jesus came to save sinners, after all. 

But the deep problem isn't what Not to do in an evil: it is what we ought-to-do; what particular path we should follow in a world where all generic options are merely choices between evils.   

My contrary contention is that instead of trying to apply generic advice to our specific situation in a top-down fashion; we ought instead to start from who we personally are and our personal situation. 

Guidance should be generated bottom-up, not top-down; and the goals sought should be spiritual, not physical-material.

So it is a bad idea to seek 'safety' or 'security' as a goal (motivated by fear); because fear is a sin - and to seek escape from fear is to be sinfully-motivated. 

And because there is no spiritual safety to be had, anywhere, ever. Our world is spiritually evil and getting worse, and more chaotic. 

To seek safety-security in these End Times is like moving to a safer cabin on the Titanic - but worse than that, because it is to affirm and abet the atheist-materialist-leftist evil framework. 

It is to accept the modern world as-is (and as-becoming worse) and to try and make the best of an evil thing: to try to exploit, and thus intrinsically to sustain, the ongoing collapse of Good-values.  

But if not, then what? 

If not generic and material advice; how does one discover spiritual and individualized guidance? 

The is a short answer: which is that we have both internal and external sources of divine guidance. There is that-which is divine in each of us - as sons and daughters of God; and there is the Holy Ghost - which can teach us "all things" necessary to our salvation and for our spiritual development.  

But why should we expect there to be any genuine way in which an individual person can buck the global spiritual trend; and attain something better, something Good - in the world we live in now? 

The answer to that is very basic; which is that (as Christians) we know that God is the creator and continually creating; that God loves us each as His own child; and that our actual mortal life has a purpose - so long as it continues.

So long as we are alive, there is a reason for it, and benefit to be had. 

Therefore we must exercise the Christian virtue of Faith - trust in God's Goodness and Creative Power, which is sustained by Hope rooted in our expectation of resurrection. 

And this potential individual and spiritual benefit to be had; applies especially when we follow divine guidance and learn from what that life - that path - is designed and intended to teach us. 

Yet the fact of our agency and personal motivations implies that our life is intended to be active - therefore not merely the passive following of an externally dictated path. We learn better and more deeply when we are maximally involved in our own lives. 

Therefore divine guidance is not like a blueprint; but more of the nature of a veto when we are trying to do wrong; and an affirmation when we have worked-out the best and proper course of events for each-of-us, here and now.   

In other words; we need to work things out for ourselves, as best we can; make our choices, and then both seek divine conformation, and then (as back-up) continue to monitor things as they develop along our chosen path - to check that we did indeed make the right choice. 

So divine guidance might manifest as a strong inner sense of No when we make wrong plans; or the opposite affirmation when we get it right. 

And after we have set-out on the chosen path, there will be feedback of a positive or negative kind - so long as we seek this. 

And if, after all, we get it wrong - and perhaps wishful thinking or overmastering fear have been our real source of guidance instead of divine destiny; then when we arrive at the destination there will be further feedback as to whether our arrival is a good, or bad, thing - and we have the chance to repent. 

It is the conviction of Romantic Christianity that we each need to embrace personal responsibility for our spiritual (including religious) lives. For a Christian; this responsibility includes, vitally, the duty to seek and follow individual divine guidance as best we can; and as far as it goes. 

Christianity is (or should be) a religion of inequality

Equality is supposed to be 'a Good Thing', but isn't; as William Wildblood demonstrates in a forthcoming book - which I have had the privilege to read in manuscript.

As well as equality being a Bad Thing to aim-at; indeed, equality is not even a real thing. 

The word and concept of equality is, of course, very vague in terms of its actual (i.e. rhetorical) usage, which resembles an hypothetical black box, more than a useful category; but 'equality' can usually validly be reduced to an assertion of sameness... 

Either an assertion that some-particular-things are, or ought to be, The Same. 

But are things ever the same? 

Well, in some sciences, especially the physical science, science there has been an assumption of sameness among things like particular chemicals or atomic particles. Yet even here, the progress of science has usually been towards finding differences among things that were originally assumed to be the same: for instance all atoms were originally assumed to be identical - even between different elements and substances. And in biology, an assumption of sameness is much less frequent, and soon breaks-down, the closer we look. 

Perhaps the only genuine sameness is in mathematics (and formal logic), where the sameness is axiomatic and wholly abstract: a matter of definition. 

But mathematics is not the real world. 

What about in religion? Well, so far as I know, there has never been any actual, viable religion where all people are judged to be the same. 

In the past, human differences were often simplified (for practical purposes) into categories, or classes of Men - but even there, there was always provision for making distinctions. 

e.g. Priests may have been in a different category than non-priests; but priests were internally differentiated in many way - even down to the individual level.  

But what of a divine level? Again, it seems there has never been equality of divine regard of Men - but sometimes this has been simplified into categorical levels of classes of divine esteem; which often reflected social organization.  

So where does the idea of equality come into religion? Well, sometimes there is an equality of 'destination' in terms of post-mortal, afterlife fate. In some religions it seems that all Men will (sooner or later) end-up in the same situation. 

For instance, the Ancient Greeks and Hebrews seem to have regarded the afterlife of all Men as a an underworld of demented ghosts: Hades/ Sheol. 

Or the Eastern Religions Hinduism and Buddhism have sometimes envisaged all Men as sharing the same fate of eventually (after varying numbers of incarnations) being re-absorbed back into the divine, from which they came - at least, that goal was the same for all Men. 

Christianity has always divided the destinations between at least two (not-equal) possibilities: Heaven and Hell; and this has sometimes been elaborated by additional possibilities such as Limbo and Purgatory; and by differentiation of fates and roles within both Heaven and Hell (e.g. the circles of Hell, or the layered Mormon 'Heavens') - sometimes differentiation by categories of people, sometimes at the individual level. 

The main assertion of, and emphasis upon, 'equality' in Christianity is almost-wholly modern (coming after the emergence of political leftism, with is promiscuous talk of actual or aspirational 'equality'), and is related to God's supposed attitude of Love to all Men being absolutely 'equal'. 

But God's 'equal' love can only be entertained as a possibility either if Love is regarded in an extremely abstract way (because in real life, including in the Bible itself, love is always differentiated and selective) -- and/or if equality is redefined into a very vague notion that because God Loves all His children, this 'must' (or should) mean that God (somehow, for some reason) loves all his children in exactly the same way and to exactly the same degree...

This supposed 'equality' has been spun into highly abstract assertions of God's absolute and unconditional - therefore equal - Love; rather as if God's love was an evenly-distributed gas, or a radiation of completely equal intensity that bathed all Men without distinction. 

To my mind, this (frequent) attempt to express God's Love as equal and unconditional is probably an alien import to Christianity; either derived from politics; or apparently derived by back-projection from the (not Christian - but nonetheless held by some self-identified Christians) idea of post-mortal Men all returning to be assimilated-into the divine...

Maybe the argument hinges on the idea that if all Men end-up equally, then this happens because God regards all Men as the same. 

At any rate, these two ideas of the supposedly unconditional and universally-equal Love of God, and a Nirvana-like life after death destination of all Men - seem to go-together. 

For a Fourth Gospel derived and focused Christianity; I would regard it as obviously wrong to regard equality in Christianity as a Good Thing. 

Christians ought instead to be trying to understand God's plans for men in the most differentiated and individualistic way possible; much as the ideal attitude of earthly human parents to their children is one that recognizes each child as individual, unique; and needing (ideally) to be regarded as such in terms of their destined and best path through mortal life and beyond. 

Ideal earthly parents would not love all their children 'equally'. Neither would they love their children in a rank-order. Instead they would 1.) love all their children, and 2.) love and value each child in a particular and unique way to correspond with his or her individuality.  

In other words, it is high time Christians set-aside 'equality-talk'; and began to recognize that the traditional categories and classes of past-Christianity were an imperfect representation of what is actually - from God's point of view - an individual-level scheme of Man's salvation and theosis.  

Contemplation, Enjoyment, and Creation

It has become ever clearer to me that one of the convictions that underlies my metaphysical assumptions is that Man's creative ability is real; yet mainstream, classical, 'traditional' Christian theology has no place for Men to be able genuinely to create: that is, for a Man to be able to to add something new to to God's existing creation. 

This exclusion of the possibility of creation is a consequence of the mainstream Christian's understanding of the nature and attributes of God. 

God is assumed to have created everything from nothing (creation ex nihilo), and to live outside of time (such that God knows everything that including all possible futures), and to be omnipotent and omniscient.

Putting all of these together - for the mainstream-classical theology divine creation has-been done wholly by God, has already-happened; and is complete and unchangeable (since it is beyond time).   

From this perspective; there are two basic ways we can know - which CS Lewis terms contemplation and enjoyment (and which are described and explained in this essay, but without using the contemplation-enjoyment nomenclature - which distinction is explained in his autobiography Surprised by Joy, and elsewhere). 

For a classical, mainstream Christian theologian like Lewis, contemplation and enjoyment are the only possible ways of conscious 'knowing' - with enjoyment a higher form of knowing. 

(There will also be ways of 'unconscious' knowing - in the sense of animals, or plants, that implicitly 'know' many things, because they behave adaptively; but without possessing what most people would recognize as explicit, conscious awareness of their knowing. However, I believe they do, because everything does, possess some consciousness, of some type)

Contemplation is when we retain the stance of a separate observer - it is, in effect, knowing-about something. 

For a Christian, a Man might contemplate God, or the works of God - and this means knowing-about such things; by paying attention, having experiences, studying, learning.

A higher form of knowing God would be enjoyment, or 'communion'. 

This would be when someone (perhaps a Saint, or a resurrected Man in Heaven) inhabited the divine mind, able to perceive and know God by means of a direct connection; becoming joined-with God's creative will - but retaining one's own identity as a distinct creature (created individual). 

Man in full communion with the divine remains conscious of himself; but knows God's work from the inside, and knows his own part in it. 

(It is this retaining of personal identity that differentiates the Christian understanding of divine communion, from the 'Eastern' (Hindu, Buddhist etc.) idea of Nirvana - in which the individual Man loses his distinction, his 'self'; and becomes dissolved-back-into the divine-whole, from which he originated.) 

But communion is not creative; since creation is done. 

What seems like creation to mortal Men is - by this analysis - a result of our limited perspective - and is actually just a selection and arrangement of already-created material. 

For the mainstream-classical Christian, Men cannot truly create, in a primary sense; because Men are creatures/ created-Beings; and only God is capable of true creation. 

But for me, as for CS Lewis's best friend Owen Barfield, there is a higher state than enjoyment - which is creation - or what Barfield terms Final Participation. 

This includes communion, but also involves knowing oneself to be adding-to and enhancing already-existing divine creation: that is, becoming a co-creator of God's creation. 

Therefore, Man can (potentially) become a creator with God, creating in harmony with what already exists. 

It can be seen that for co-creation to be true, several of the classical-mainstream assumptions about God must be discarded. Because it can be added-to; creation is no longer regarded as existing outside time, nor as being complete and finished. 

Man is no longer understood as wholly a 'creature' - but as an 'embryonic god': capable of developing to participate in primary creation of that which is new and unforeseen.

Thus, a recognition of Man as potential creator goes-with a rejection of the assumptions that God is omnipotent and omniscient, that God created everything from nothing, and that creation is complete and beyond time. 

Instead; creation is recognized as ongoing - within time - incomplete and capable of expansion. 

In other words; creation is God's original project; and a project in which Men may develop to participate.

To summarize; if we are to regard Man as capable of real creation; we must reject the classical, mainstream, tradition Christian theology; and adopt different metaphysical assumptions concerning God, creation and time. 

Conversely, if we choose instead to adhere to the classical, mainstream, tradition Christian theology; we must reject the possibility of Man being a true creator; and assume instead that the highest form of being that Man can aspire to is an ultimately passive state of 'enjoyment' in communion with God. 

How to decide between these incompatible metaphysical explanations of Christianity - apart from intuition? 

The Bible as a whole is apparently ambivalent and self-contradicting on this topic; but the Fourth Gospel (of "John" - especially Chapters 13-17 inclusive) strongly suggests that Men (in the new dispensation of Christ) can and should aspire to become co-creators: that is loving 'friends' of Jesus Christ and God, rather than (as in the previous era, before Christ) merely obedient servants of God.   

Intra-Christian, inter-denominational, hostility - and the cure in Core, Romantic, Christianity

I find it very annoying when Christians fight among themselves - perhaps especially in this era - these End Times - when the Christian churches are shriveling and spiritually-eviscerated, and have joined-with the powers of evil dominate all the 'Western' nations, and nearly-all the major social and political institutions of the world. 

My evaluation is that real Christians are now rare, and are scattered across many denominations and churches - despite that individually all of the denominations and churches are net-corrupted by their convergence with significant policies of atheist-materialist-Leftism (as evidence by the Litmus Tests). 

In such a situation it is maddening to find to many Christians 'having a go at' each other - Western and Eastern Catholics sniping and snarking; Catholics denigrating Protestants from the rich well of historical grievances, and vice versa; both of these denigrating Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses; and all the church-obedient Christians excluding Christians who are unaffiliated. 

It is maddening but inevitable; for so long as each denomination, church, sect claims exclusivity as to salvation or theosis with respect to whatever it regards as vitally important. 

Such exclusivity seems almost impossible to avoid when each group has a complex and multiple set of self-definitions that are regarded as essential to being-a-Christian; or of being the kind of Christian that is at all worth being. 

Yet it is clear that the 'liberal' alternative - pursued for more than two centuries, of loosening and relaxing the criteria for 'being a Christian'; by permitting more and more latitude, by taking the old laws, rules and exclusions less-and-less seriously -  has been a colossal disaster. 

Liberal Christianity leads - not to a new and more comprehensive Christianity - but to a subordination of Christianity to politics: specifically to leftist politics. 

And leftist politics leads to destruction of churches, assimilation to evil, and the enlistment of self-identified Christians to the strategies and policies of Satan. 

What is needed is twofold. 

First; a Core Christianity, few and simple definitions by means of which a real Christian can discern the realness of others who claim to be Christian - whatever their denomination or church may be. 

And secondly a shift away from the primacy of churches and to the full responsibility of individuals as the basis of Christianity - i.e. Romantic Christianity. 

These factors can be distinguished, but are inseparable. It is the simple definitions of Core Christianity that enable Romantic Christianity to be tough, incisive and positive in content. And it is the personal responsibility of Romantic Christianity that enable Core Christianity to escape from the elaborate (and institutionally self-serving) claims of particular churches. 

Romantic Christianity without the clarity of Core Christianity would drift away from Christianity; Core Christianity without the individual responsibility of Romantic Christianity would never get off the ground; because each church would simply implement its own already-established, exclusive and excluding, definitions of Christianity. 

Put-together; Core and Romantic Christianity offer a way-out of the current impasse, and a way by which real Christians may be allied in their faith, across a wide range of churches and outside churches; while excluding those who are not Christian. 

Researching the nature of Heaven (in order to decide whether, or not, you want to go there)

I don't think the nature of Heaven can be understood by direct assault on the problem; but only via several prior stages of discernment. 

Note: this is not what I myself did - my own procedure was much more haphazard; but it strikes me in retrospect that progress only occurred with a linear sequence of intuitive assumptions:

First we need to decide what God wants with creation, including why; and how this purpose relates to Man. In different words: where is creation aiming; and how do I personally fit in? 

It is necessary also - either at this, or some other, point - to understand how and why the life/ death/ resurrection/ ascension of Jesus Christ was necessary to this aim. 

(If Jesus is not considered absolutely necessary to God's plan for creation, then there is no compelling reason to be A Christian.) 

Then we can move onto the question of what kind of Heaven God would want; what fits in with God's creative intent for Man.

At some such point; the focus can shift to yourself; and the question of what it is that situation you would most want after your death; especially if it is forever.   

And only then does it make much sense to research the various Heavens that have been described through history - because only then will you have criteria to evaluate them, their coherence and believable-ness; and to exercise your intuitive discernment about which Heaven (or aspects of the Heavens described) is plausible and desirable. 

In researching Heaven I read a wide range of descriptions of Christian Heaven. These included:

Fourth Gospel ('John')

Books of Revelation

Pauline Epistles 

Evangelical Church of England

Roman Catholic 

Russian Orthodox

Mormon (CJCLDS)

William Arkle 

Swedenborg

Rudolf Steiner

Only after something-like this prolonged 'quest' did I reach the ('very simple!) understanding of Heaven that I now believe.

Causation versus Free Agency

It is an implicit assumption of modern culture and life that everything is caused - except what is random. 

Because everything is caused, it is assumed that these causes (if known) are like the 'laws of science' and entail exactly what happens. 

But there is also 'randomness', chance, the undetermined... Which is (somehow, in an unprincipled way) also incorporated into the 'everything is caused' determinism by means of statistical properties. 

If reality really is caused, then this fundamental incorporation of of randomness doesn't make any coherent sense (as Einstein clearly saw) - nonetheless, it has happened, randomness is incorporated into a deterministic world-view; and is justified on the basis that 'it works' to predict things... 

...Or rather, attributed randomness sometimes seems to work; because whether something 'works' depends on (essentially arbitrary) prior decisions about what counts as having worked, or alternatively failed to work.

(And this becomes even less precise when what counts as having worked gets defined retrospectively to include - or indeed be entirely - what has already happened; as with climate change 'predictions...) 

Yet, there is no such thing as randomness 'in real life' and therefore no 'probability'- these are actually just mathematical tools, that may be useful in particular situations; although the nature of scope of the situations in which it is valid cannot be known. In practice the validity of particular instances of statistical reasoning is a matter of 'common sense' - or more likely the exercise of power to control discourse.   

But what of free agency, free will - or what-you-call-it? I mean the thinking of Beings (especially Men); at those times when they are thinking with their real and divine 'selves'? 

(Accepting that Men may - often do - behave 'automatically; and are not 'free' at all times, but only potentially and some-times.)

Free agency cannot be either caused/determined, or random/statistical. Free agency must be something other, which is expressive of a Being itself, arises wholly from that Being - and not, therefore, a product of causes acting-upon that Being.  

To cut the argument short: I believe that genuine Free Agency is either an incomprehensible Mystery and gift from God (which is the mainstream/ classical Christian view); or else (as I believe) Free Agency is a property of Beingness, to be found to a greater or lesser extent in all Beings. 

Which means that all Beings have a divine aspect.

Which means that while there is one God who is creator of this creation we inhabit; creation itself consists of Beings who are all 'gods' in this vital sense of having some potential degree of Free Agency.   

In other words, reality is alive and conscious and consists of Beings/ gods that are in relationships with one another  (in some real way, but varied between Beings). 

If so, then what is the role of causation?  

My understanding is that causation is a series of hypotheses that are useful in inverse proportion to the exercise of free agency. 

In a world where free agency is seldom exercised; then causation is highly predictive. 

Here in mortal life upon earth; things are different according to different times and places, and among different individuals. But the more that agency is active, the less causality is operative. 

Bu, in a world where free agency is ignored or denied, and its effects are suppressed: causal thinking (and its bastard offspring 'randomness') appears to operate as a complete explanation of reality.

(Hence the common idea that - in principle - science can explain everything that is real.) 

In other words; Western Man has (for some generations) been living at, or near-to, an extreme where free agency is hardly a factor in life; and where, because of this exclusion, causal and determinative thinking seems to work very well as an explanation, for prediction, and to manipulate the world (including people). 

Conversely, in a world where free agency is highly frequent and determines thought; there is very little for causal thinking to explain. 

At the extreme - in Heaven - I assume that almost-everything is a consequence of free agency in the context of relationships between Beings; things happen because they are willed to happen. 

Therefore: in Heaven there is essentially no causation; but only free agency and relationships. 

There is a further aspect governing the operations of free agency; which is the extent to which it is groupish or individual. 

If we focus on Men, then in the past free agency seems to have been much more active than now. Hence prediction was 'anthropomorphic'; in terms of personal factors such as motivations, desires and relationships. 

But this ancient agency was not individualistic - it operated at a groupish level such as the clan, tribe, village, guild, or even (later) the nation. Thus, understanding and prediction treated groups as we might regard individuals, and focused on their attitudes to each other, strengths and weaknesses etc. 

Modern agency has, however, become very individualistic; and insofar as free agency genuinely exists and is deployed (which is apparently not much, very seldom), it operates at the personal level rather than in groups. 

What appears superficially to be group agency, is actually a product of causal and determinative thinking; manipulating individuals (eg. via laws, rules and propaganda) to conform behaviour to external will. 

Part of this manipulation is to encourage individuals to believe they are already living by free agency; when in fact they have 'switched-off' their own agency; and are thinking almost-entirely in terms of automatic, mundane, externally-inculcated and -imposed concepts and information.  

To conclude; the destiny which God wishes from Men is to live by free agency, individually exercised; and voluntarily to choose to align this free agency with God's desires for His creation. 

But this is a choice. Some choose not to use free agency, and even to deny its reality; while others use this agency to reject the divine hopes and plans - and instead to serve the adversaries of God. 

In other words such Men choose Not to be free. And probably this applies to most Men, at least in The West. 

At the most basic level, service to the Adversary entails opening one's own soul to thinking hostile to God; and this often takes the form of dishonestly pretending to an individual agency which is, in fact, being denied and suppressed. 

Thinking therefore (i.e. here-and-now, in this world that has rejected God) becomes a thing very much causally determined. 

Men's behaviours become understandable by reduction to to causal reasoning and statistics. 

Men become predictable and controllable.

Looking back - mere nostalgia, or "real history becoming more mythical"? (Or, being A Romantic.)

[Jeremy]: Sometimes I have a queer feeling that, if one could go back, one would find not myth dissolving into history, but rather the reverse: real history becoming more mythical - more shapely, discernibly significant, even seen at close quarters. More poetical, and less prosaic, if you like.

From The Notion Club Papers, by JRR Tolkien.

It is often said that nostalgia is merely a selective memory of the past "seen through rose-tinted spectacles"; but that ignores the sometimes different quality of the past, which is captured in the quotation above. 

In other words, we mythologize our past - and the past of our tribe, culture, nation - not by leaving-out the bad stuff, but because the past actually was "more poetical, less prosaic". 

For instance; when I look back on my education, my working years, or my engagement with literature and music; I perceive a trajectory from the somewhat mythic and poetic to the historical and mundane, which was substantially to do with how I experienced life - and not just a product of the retrospectoscope through which I view them. 

And those periods of my life when, for whatever reason, my life lacked this mytho-poetic quality, lacked "shapeliness"; I both knew at the time, and recall it now. In other words, I am not nostalgic for the mundane times - no matter how 'worldly-successful' or 'pleasurable' they may have been or seemed at the time. 

And I have read enough first-person contemporary accounts of the past (memoirs, diaries, letters etc) to realize that things seemed different then from how they seem to us now. 

Regular readers will be familiar with my favoured explanation of the development of Man's consciousness as understood by Rudolf Steiner and (especially) Owen Barfield; such that both our individual development and the development of (at least Western) societies has been affected by a divine-purposive change in Men's consciousness (both individually, and on average through time).

The past has a different - more mythical and poetic - quality, because we ourselves, or past men, had a different relationship with each other and the world; such that there was not then the same boundary as we now experience between us and them, inner and outer, subjective and objective, the individual and his culture or environment. Nor the same boundary between Men on the one hand, and animals, plants and landscape. 

Then we were - to a significant extent - immersed-in all these other things and reality was different for us-as-we-were-then differently from us-as-we-are-now. And it is this immersion that distinguishes myth from history. 

I am one of those people who regard this matter as of central importance to my life, and life-in-general; and who desire to live again in a more poetic and mythic way.

In other words, I am A Romantic - and have been since my early teens (although there have been significant phases when I fought this trait of mine as strenuously as I knew how). 

It was, indeed, this Romanticism that kept me away from the truth of Christianity for so long; because Christianity-as-is does not (or does not adequately) address this problem of Romanticism - indeed, some Christian Churches and theologies make matters even worse from the point of view of draining the 'magic' from life and history.  

And it is this which drove me to seek, discover, and co-create this Romantic Christianity which I - and a few others - are expounding. Of course I regard Romantic Christianity as True-er and Superior-to other ways of Christianity - but I would not have had the long term drive to seek/ discover/ create Romantic Christianity if it had not been for the intractable trait of Romanticism in myself; and my dissatisfaction with any world-view, religion or ideology that denied it. 

Wall-flower, Wall-flower, growing up so high...

Wall-flower, Wall-flower, growing up so high, 

All the little children are all going-to die,

Except (insert child's name) s/he's the only one.

Fie for shame! Fie for shame!

Turn your back to the wall again!

This is an exceptionally chilling nursery song from my childhood; that used to provoke both fear and guilt whenever I thought or sung it. 

Fear; because to a young child, to say it is to make it happen. Guilt; because I would have to choose just one person to live - and what about all he others? 

Apparently, the song is not quite so existentially stark as I thought; because it went with an apparently harmless ring game - although this had not reached my part of Somerset - or else had been forgotten: 

Game Instructions 

The children form a ring by joining hands. They all dance slowly around, singing the words. When one child is named by the ring she turns around, so that her face is turned to the outside of the ring and her back inside. She still clasps hands with those on either side of her, and dances or walks around with them. This is continued until all the players have turned and are facing outwards.

Why modern Man's ideologies (and religion) have become more truly negative

It is very striking to me, how negative are people's ideals now; compared with even fifty or a hundred years ago. 

And I mean negative in practice - not just in theory; because there have been negative religious theories for at least a couple of thousand years - yet in practice Christians had strong positive motivations. 

Negative Theology (Via Negativa) was prominent in Christianity (substantially inherited from pagan Romans and Greeks) in the early centuries AD. I mean the ascetic path of opposition to the world, elimination of temptation, and repudiation of "the flesh", which was taken to the greatest extreme by the hermit Desert Fathers. 

The Neo-Platonic theology (e.g. associated with Dionysius the Aeropagite) was one of explicit negation; that asserted we cannot know God except by knowing what God is Not, are dragged down by our instincts and desires. This in general down-rated or rejected marriage, family, creativity as paths to God; due to their excessive risk of temptation by fleshly pleasures - binding us to mortal life, its pleasures and pains. 

These desires were to be overcome by prolonged disciplines of deprivation and chosen suffering; so that we may learn control of them, and ultimately independence from them. 

Yet, in practice, there was at this time also a very powerful yet implicit positive desire for communion with God, to emulate (their idea of) Jesus Christ, and to dwell spiritually in Heaven even while on earth.

Therefore, the true situation was one in which there was strong positive desires that were unconscious and implicit; which were disciplined and shaped by the explicit rituals and practices of a negative nature. 

Through human history, these unconscious and implicit positive instincts have dwindled, until many modern people are hardly aware of them, deny their validity, and often altogether deny their presence. People (especially in The West) are no longer guided by positive implicit instincts towards God, the spirit, higher consciousness... 

Instead we are guided by external human-originated ideals - especially the dominant ideology of 'secular-leftist-materialism' that underpins all of social and political discourse and institutions in The West. 

If an individual rejects the dominant ideology, he must (as a rule) do so by an explicit and consciously chosen act of will. 

Interestingly, even the ideology of left-materialism itself has been subject to the same trends in consciousness. It has gone from containing a considerable largely-unconscious and implicit positive element; to being almost wholly negative in its ideals, and oppositional in its practices. 

When it began to emerge a couple of hundred years ago, leftism often shared in the (mostly unconscious) positive goals of Christianity; so that there were many "Christian socialists" in the UK (from the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England, as well as Nonconformist churches), who (albeit misguidedly) saw socialism as a means to the end of a more Christian society. These were a significant cultural phenomenon into the middle 20th century. 

Even among the explicitly materialist-atheist leftists of the late nineteenth century - such as the revolutionary communist William Morris and the gradualist Fabian George Bernard Shaw - there was strong (albeit un-theorized, un-grounded) positive assumption concerning the goals of leftism. 

Such Men would argue that socialism was a necessary/ the best means to achieve the kind of society that was 'common-sensically' (by appeal to universal evaluations) regarded as a good environment for positive virtues. 

For Morris that was a quasi-Medieval agrarian society in which the arts and crafts thrived, and were universal - a world of craftsmen and artists, for whom labour was an altruistic joy. 

For Shaw it was a modern industrial society where all were allocated an equal income that made accessible all the higher things in life (arts, sciences etc). The purpose of universal and equal prosperity was to enable Men to pursue 'mystical' goals; such as attaining higher consciousness - en route to a somewhat Platonic world of pure intelligences whose gratification was contemplation, and untrammeled creativity.

For the likes of Morris, Shaw and other early socialists; the desirability of such a society was self-evident; but it is no longer self-evident in 2022. Indeed, such utopian schemes are all-but off the map, seldom mentioned; and so weakly believed (if at all) that such ideals are unable significantly sustain a life or even (noticeably) to influence behaviour.  

What I mean is that - diminishing, but evident until about the middle-20th century - the underlying, even if unstated, belief even on the Left was that if the obstacles to a better and higher life could be removed by socialism (or feminism, antiracism, an economy of common ownership etc) - then a better and higher life would spontaneously emerge - because that (it was assumed) was what Men wanted.

And it was that better/ higher life that was the ultimate justification of leftism. 

 

Well, that concept has become meaningless, and since the 1960s, as the New Left has focused on negative aims, without any positive sense of where this is going, or what state of society it is trying to achieve, or what people are supposed to do and live-by in a future society. Contra Morris; the arts and crafts, guilds and professions, small villages and farming as a vocation; have all declined catastrophically. And, contra Shaw; Men are more, not less, focused on materialism, consumption and shallow pleasures and dissipating distractions.  

Underlying such changes in both Christianity and Leftism is this waning of the unconscious and implicit, ultimately spiritual and self-justifying, ideal of The Good Life.  

Now we must consciously choose God, Jesus Christ, and to live by the transcendental values of divine creation. These are not longer spontaneously generated from within ourselves. 

On the one hand; we are free-er than Men used to be; because we are no longer subject to uncontrollable drives from unconscious motivations. 

On the other hand; if we do not choose correctly; then we are prone to purposelessness, meaninglessness and therefore despair - in a way that used to be extremely rare, even among the explicit atheists and nihilists of 100-plus years ago. 

Will people (en masse) be awakened and enlightened by the imminent physical deprivation and suffering?

Since, at least in the UK, all the signs are that we are in for very severe (and all-but universal - ultra-rich are exempt, of course) economic hardship and suffering. 

The plans have been implemented, the pieces are in place, the trend is already-established, and further destructive measures are being introduced on a weekly basis. 

So; will people (en masse) be awakened and enlightened by our coming physical deprivation and suffering? 

The answer is a firm No. 

If people (as they currently are) were capable of being awakened and enlightened by adversity, this would have happened in 2020; or, at least, the 2020 events would have been understood for what they really were, and explicitly repented. 

But, although (especially in England) there has been an unexpected (and welcome!) roll-back of the 2020 measures; and although this indicates the English are not such a beaten people as I suspected, and less dumb and sheep-like than the Scots, Welsh, Canadians, Australians or New Zealenaders - this push against measures has merely been based on mass passive disobedience; and rooted in negative, not positive, criticism (e.g. annoyance at inconvenience, rather than on principle). 

Any significant dawn of understanding has been among a few individuals; and not happened explicitly or widely. 

My feeling is that the people of the UK have absolutely No Idea what is about to happen to them: i.e. that we are (almost all) going to become very significantly impoverished - that we will lose a large proportion (tens of percent) of our income and then wealth - from inflation and much higher taxes and (no doubt) other covert extractions. 

(This at least - such rapid and severe changes will have unpredictable systemic consequences, that may induce societal collapse - nobody really knows.)

We face apparently-inevitable considerable suffering; but people will not be enlightened by this suffering. 

At present people 'cannot believe' what is coming because they are not yet suffering enough. Yet when 'enough' suffering comes (shortages of food, warmth, light, fuel, basic services) they will attribute it to false causes. 

Apparently the UK 'leader' (the Prime Minister) explicitly attributes the coming hardships primarily to the leader of the Fire Nation, and secondarily to Brexit -- despite that the true causes were all self-imposed, and deliberately self-imposed, with solid foreknowledge of consequences. (And despite that Brexit never happened!)

It is not enough for him even to pretend that well-intended errors led to unanticipated consequences; but nowadays an actual inversion of the truth is the preferred explanation - no doubt because 'opposites-world' reasoning better explains why the proposed 'remedial' measures instead actually increase economic damage. 

But plenty of people seem to believe this incoherent lying! Enough to make it worth saying. 

People will attribute their suffering to false causes and they will therefore fail to learn from it. 

They will blame false causes, because their basic metaphysical assumptions are false; and wrong assumptions make it impossible to learn from experience. 

Metaphysics comes first! When we have wrong assumptions, we cannot discern the relevant facts, nor can we reason correctly from them. 

It is our basic assumptions that determine what we perceive, and what we perceive as important; and - having chosen what is important from the endless possibilities - it is our metaphysics that determines how we can put these together to make an explanation, and infer from this what to do.

Since Modern Man assumes that we all live in a purposeless and meaningless, accidental universe; and that we humans are accidental products of purposeless evolution; and that our lives begin with random genetic combinations and we are annihilated at death - then we cannot ultimately learn anything at all concerning the true meaning and purpose of our lives. 

Modern Man has pre-decided that he is a passive consequence of blind processes, and can only 'know' the current state of his gratification (his happiness or suffering) - which affective state is manipulated by any of those with power who consciously posses the agency and purpose that Modern Man denies in himself. 

In the country of the nihilists, the purposive Man is king. 

So what is the purpose of our 'kings'? 

I am asking not what the kings say is their purpose; but what truly is their purpose... 

For any Christian who is prepared to think for himself; to ask that question is to know the answer: that the purpose of our kings is malign. 

Our 'kings' want to harm us: physically, but most-of-all spiritually.  

Until Modern Man can recover a basis conviction of purpose, hence meaning; Men will remain as they are: puppets, cattle, and prey; and will remain unable to learn from any possible kind of experience.  

Musk, Twitter and the bankruptcy of the "based" secular "Right"

When I began this blog on a frequent basis, in the middle of 2010, there was (supposedly) a new, vigorous, and intellectually-rigorous movement of the secular "Right" - variously termed Alternative/Alt Right, Neoreaction, and similar 

(The 'rump' of this movement is sometimes nowadays termed "based" - and can be sampled via this branch of Synlogos.) 

One of my earliest themes was that this movement was not actually "Right" but was just part of the Left; because they wanted essentially the same thing as the Left (i.e. optimal happiness and minimum suffering in this mortal life - the 'hedonic' calculus); and the secular "Right" therefore only differed in terms of their priority groups (eg. white native men) and the methods employed (e.g. new kinds of monarchy). 

Same ends, different means. But is the end that is definitive. 

I then argued that the only genuine alternative and opposition to The Left was religion. 

So, the truth was that the Left-Right axis was all-Left; and the only true axis of opposition was Left-Religion. 

For those who opposed The Left, I said; their only valid choice was: which religion? 

This has proved to be correct over the following decade, as evidenced by the fact that the self-identified secular Right are still merely negatively responding to what the mainstream Left are advocating or doing; much as 'fascism' did in the 1920s and 30s; . 

Since the Left is actually a negative and oppositional ideology; this means that the secular Right are a double-negative ideology. 

And since the Left's policies are already double-negative - e.g. anti-racism anti-men (feminism)  - the secular Rights policies are triple-negative anti-antiracism, anti-feminism...

Something like this explains the astonishing obsessions of the secular Right; who remain utterly focused-on everyday mainstream politics such as elections and the Twitter takeover by Musk (what!); but in this extra-negative way of opposing the destroyers instead of proposing positive creation; which the secular Right cannot do because they are secular.

The amount of internet-ink spilled over the Musk-Twitter business is especially gratuitous. Twitter is a Bad Thing, Musk is a Bad Thing - why discuss the business as if some Good would come out of it? 

The answer is: one regards this as a major issue, only when one is operating on the basis of mainstream assumptions of Good.

Just as the election-obsessives implicitly, by revealed-preference, believe (whatever they say) that we can vote our way out of trouble; so the Musk-Twitter obsessive believe we can Tweet our way to a Better World.      

So that Better means, for them, just more of the same stuff - but directed at groups they like. 

And they believe this because they have nothing better to offer. 

But what of the proper opposition to the Left: I mean The Religious? 

Well... In 2020 the major churches of the world - of (apparently) all religions and denominations - overwhelmingly made clear their convergence with the this-worldly and hedonic values of the Global Left: they made this clear by massive closures and cessations of their core activities. 

(It may be that the Government and Orthodox Church of the Fire Nation has since reversed that convergence with global Leftism: where that may lead has yet to be seen; but anyway, such a direction is not a possibility, nor desirable, for The West.) 

So the churches, of all religions, were revealed as just another part of The Left.  

So the situation is that even the Left versus Religion axis, which seemed a possibility back in 2010; is not a possibility. 

My hoped-for (albeit slender, pessimistic) possibility of a church-rooted religious revival to become culturally dominant; has since been revealed as a false hope. False, not merely because of the political weakness of the churches, but mainly because the churches do not even desire it, but instead seek assimilation to the Left (and as fast as the church leaders can persuade the laity).

Therefore; these times are far more desperate than the "secular Right" imagine; and far more desperate than church-orientated Christians acknowledge. Because (at least in The West - albeit the Fire Nation in the East may have chosen a different path of destiny) there is nowhere to turn in the world of powerful, high status, influential public discourse. 

We can neither vote-in a saviour (because none are available to vote-for, and because the bureaucracy-media control everything of social significance), nor can we engineer a way-out by participation in high-impact social media (because the medium is intrinsically evil-promoting; in form as well as its allowed-content).     

What we can do is at the individual level, not in institutions; is spiritual, not material; and is rooted in understanding correctly - which means honestly and with full acknowledgment of its scope - the nature of our situation and responsibility. 

Positing the notalive - what's wrong with (almost) all Christian theologies

Everything is alive - we live in an 'animistic' universe, ultimately consisting of Beings in Relationships. 

This truth is missing from pretty-much all Christian theologies; and even those which explicitly recognize the animistic universe (e.g. Rudolf Steiner, Owen Barfield, William Arkle) will often lapse-away-from their purported animism into abstractions - e.g. talking as if 'forces' or 'tendencies' - rather than motivations, relationships etc. - were primary realities; or talking of 'consciousness' abstractly, as if it could ever be separated from the specific consciousness of a specific Being. 

Although I assume that Mankind began as unconsciously (implicitly) assuming that 'everything was alive' and reality was made-of was 'Beings'; it seems that the categorization of much of reality as notalive 'things' began very early in human history (many thousands of years ago), at least in some places of which there are records - and that this has been a cumulative trend. 

Initially, it seems, only some small scale things like some 'minerals' were regarded as notalive - but in the twentieth century more and more of reality of reality became regarded as notalive.

From mid-century, it began to be assumed that plants and animals were notalive (being composed entirely of chemicals and their reactions); and in later decades (especially since computers were conceptualized and developed) that even humans were notalive. 

This assumption of notaliveness is mostly implicit; rooted in the widespread assumption (including in mass media) that whatever makes us distinctly human could, in principle, be combined with computers ('cyborg'), instantiated in a computer ('downloaded'), or replicated by some kind of 'Artificial Intelligence'. 

The point is not that this is really possible - it is not; but that many/ most people believe it to be possible; which indicates that there is no distinction between the alive and the notalive, and that in practice every-thing is regarded as notalive 

It therefore seems that, through history (and this trend is broadly repeated in the development of each individual human being) we have gone from assuming everything is alive; to assuming nothing is alive: not even our-selves. 

Christian theology, typically, tries to inhabit a half-way house on this issue. It is sure that Men are alive; but tends to be indifferent to whether plants and animals are really alive - because these are regarded as outwith the plan for salvation. And Christianity follows the general culture of many centuries in assuming that the mineral world is notalive. 

What results from this perspective is (to put it simply) a drama of the salvation of living Men and a transcendent God, that takes place against the backdrop of a notalive world.

This is a deeply alienating and unrooted view of Man's life on earth. To my mind it explains the somewhat shallow, 'two-dimensional' quality that I detect in even the very best of Christian lives. 

Such unsatisfactoriness of the normal (non-animistic) Christian theology is not wholly to do with the inevitable corruption and partiality of mortal life; because I believe it applies even to what can be imagined. 

I think that the only wholly satisfactory life we can imagine is one where there are no 'things', all is alive and conscious, nothing is notalive*. 

Furthermore, beineg alive and to some degree conscious; all Beings are part of 'the drama of salvation' and capable of theosis. 

My belief is that this trajectory from all-alive to all-notalive needs to be regarded as incomplete and incoherent; and therefore the process should be completed by recognizing that this is a living Universe; that the ultimate reality is one of Beings in relationships; but this time doing so by a deliberate act of choice. 

Whereas in the past we unconsciously took for granted that we inhabited a world of living Beings; now we should consciously choose to recognize that reality. 

Indeed if we desire this to happen, we not only can but must choose. If we are passive, and do not make an active decision and effort; then we will continue passively to assimilate the deep and pervasive cultural assumption of universal notaliveness. 

In other words; the answer lies in our own hands - or rather minds. We may make the decision to regard everything as alive; and then begin the (long, perhaps life-long) effort to make this perspective normal, habitual.    

*I suggest that this - in combination with a harmony among all these living Beings - is the special appeal of some fantasy races and settings, such as the elves of Lothlorien. 

Ethelred in Anglish - by Michael Baron

Ethelred was a dreadfully bad king. His afterdeath and wordplay name "unready" more truly awends to something like badly-shepherded, with undermeanings of one who made many foolish, or even wicked, choosings; one of which was to adearth England and strengthen the Danish sea-reavers at the same time, by truly entish fees of Danegeld over many years (rather than kilter, and fight the raiders). 

Ethelred had come into a birthright from thrymfast forebears, such as Alfred and Athelstan, an English Richdom (that is of the Saxon Kingdoms such as Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria), which Wood betells as the wealthiest and most high-standing Kingship in Europe. 

By Ethelred's death, the English stock had been greatly unknitted and downhearted by year-tens of helpless reaving under rule of a loatheful, moody, unfit and gutless king; and made weak to the Norman raidings some two begettings later.

The above is part of commenter Michael Baron's enjoyable rendering of a recent blog post of mine, which was about Anglo-Saxon King Ethelred the Unready -- in which he replaces non-Germanic-derived (especially Latin and French) words from modern English with Old English-derived equivalents; somewhat as if the Norman Conquest had never happened...

Read the whole thing, in the comment section. 

The essence of Rudolf Steiner - according to Christopher Bamford (1943-2022)

The late Christopher Bamford was the editor-in-chief of Rudolf Steiner Books; and provided many excellent introductions to variously-themed collections of Steiner's lectures. 

Here Banford was interviewed for a documentary about Steiner; and from about 6-28 minutes, he provides a really excellent insight into what is best, deepest and most important about the work of Rudolf Steiner. It is a distillation of many years of reading, thinking and editorial work. 

For anyone with even the slightest interest in Steiner this deserves careful and focused listening. 

TW - Although Bamford was born in Wales, and lived his adult life in the USA, the trace of accent is Hungarian, deriving from childhood and youth.  

In case the video goes down, I will provide my own paraphrased summary of what Bamford says, derived from notes I took while watching. 

Where I amplify upon Bamford, I will put my own notions into [squared brackets]. 

***

The essence of Steiner's message is that we are already, here and now, living in a spiritual world. This is true despite our habits of reductionist-positivistic thinking - which actually materializes the world; nonetheless we live in a spiritual world: here and now. 

Everything is consciousness. 

...And all consciousness is of a Being which is conscious. 

We inhabit a world of Beings in relationships. 

So, reality consists of relationships in consciousness. 

These relationships continue after that transformation which is death - indeed our relationships with the so-called-dead are highly significant. 

The so-called-dead are not just active on this life on earth, that is their major focus and interest; they desire (sometimes need) to be involved in our lives. 

This reality was reflected in religions where ancestors were with the living, and participating in everyday life. 

After 'death' we will be with those we had relationships with during this life. And in this life we should continue to stay connected with those we love who have 'died'. 

Such two-way relationships continually strive to operate via the spiritual (not material) world; [which is why it is vital to acknowledge that this is primarily a spiritual world].  

Steiner's teaching is about The Earth - which is the centre of concern for the universe. This concern includes the Earth, and Men, through the long history of its developmental-evolution. 

The purpose of the Earth and Men - what this world is essentially for - is the creation of relationships. And this is vital because only on Earth and among Men can Beings learn to love. 

Steiner's most fundamental teaching is that the most important thing in reality is the cultivation of Love; and the development of consciousness of Love.

Therefore, consciousness [i.e. personal awareness, by a Being, of that which is] has a positive transformative capability.

Also both love and freedom are needed and inseparable - you cannot have one without the other. 

[Steiner's concept of freedom is related to the development of consciousness; we become free by first becoming conscious and then by choosing; and this applies to love.] 

The most important activity of the universe takes place on earth, and the rest of reality participates in the development of Love between beings on Earth. 

[This is creation. Our life on Earth is spiritual; this spiritual life is about love; and this love is creation. Creation is made-of love; and the aim of evolution is to develop this love and consciousness of love.]

Earth is the centre of reality. And Love is what makes creation possible - what makes creation happen.  

The gods [i.e. divine Beings, and God the primary creator] are focused on the Earth. Humanity is therefore "the religion of the gods". 

The incarnation of Jesus Christ turned the universe inside-out. God was beyond and 'there', but God is now right here. 

Jesus's instruction to love one another meant that Men could become his friends. Indeed, we must love among our 'brothers and sisters' or else we cannot love God. 

[Love among Men is not sufficient, but it is essential. The first commandment to love God, and the second commandment to love fellow Men are no longer, since Christ, possible to separate. Both are necessary for each other.]

Steiner realized the centrality of Christ by a personal and initiatory experience of consciousness; which reality became a central and guiding light of his whole life and teaching.  

Christianity began as a religion but became more than a religion. The reality of Christ is now global, and in all Men and all religions, everywhere.   

The root ethic of taking sides - to whom or what should we be loyal?

I find that very few people can hold in their minds the scale of lying that is afoot in the world today. It is a fact that the major "Litmus Test" strategies and policies that dominate the world are founded upon lies, and constructed of lies.

And, for a Christian, the evident purpose of this wholesale narrative of lies, is to sustain a system of value-inversion, which - if adopted - will lead Men actively to choose damnation and reject salvation. 

So why do so many people who describe themselves as Christian, so strongly believe these narratives of evil-motivated lies?

One of the current major Litmus Tests issues is the war between the Fire Nation and The West; a war that has been created and sustained by a narrative of lies from The West. 

This is already World War III - in terms of the totality of conflict, but so far the specifically military aspect has a relatively restricted scope (albeit far bigger than any Europe-adjacent conflict since WWII). 

But major players in the Western-dominated Global Establishment - both in politics and the mass media - are repeatedly using violent provocations supported by gross and systematic lies, in the attempt to escalate and spread the fighting war, and to trigger a nuclear exchange (which would almost certainly and rapidly escalate to full-on). 

By my understanding, this is a very real, continuing, and intermittently acute threat. Those in high places - and there seem to be many of them, perhaps especially in control positions of the mass media - who do everything possible to prepare an irreversible momentum towards global nuclear destruction; have not given-up their attempts, and these attempts grow bolder and shriller, the manipulative lies more reckless and blatant... 

Yet many people continue to believe them; and by believing supporting their agenda. 

So far as I can tell, most people believe official-media lies - either in whole, as an overall framework of understanding; or at least they believe each specific lie initially - only to be abandoned much later, and reluctantly. 

Even when blatant, and blatantly-evil, lies are propagated by the entirety of the Western politicians and media and then exposed as lies the next day; basic trust in the system is not demolished. 

The next set of coordinated evil lies will be believed over and again, month after month and year after year - regardless of how many and how big the previous known lies of the same people. 

What we are dealing with here is a root-ethic of loyalty and obedience; as implicitly the primary value of a person's life. 

When someone is ruled by loyalty; then he will always take his chosen side in any dispute, and will believe his side; until conclusively proven otherwise - and even then he will regard lies as specific rather than evidence of an evil disposition. 

The loyal individual will put the best possible slant on dishonesty; and will explain lies as being well-motivated; or, at least, for-the-best overall, ultimately. 

This seems to be a deep human disposition. 

We all take sides, and the choice of sides then shapes all further discourse. 

Thus the discernment of sides, and between sides, becomes crucial; and the evaluation of good and evil between sides will define which side we ourselves will take in the spiritual war of this world. 

For the mainstream, secular materialist left; this is easy. Such a person (whatever mainstream 'party' he sides with - because all the mainstream is on the same side in the spiritual war) will overall be on the side of the globalist establishment; and will therefore operate on an assumption of belief in their narrative of lies - whether that be with respect to the Fire Nation war, Climate Emergency/ Green-environmentalism, transagenda and other sexual issues, antiracism, mass immigration, the birdemic-peck - or whatever major Establishment strategy is being pushed. 

(Even when someone dissents from one or two of the major agenda items - so long as he agrees with even one of them, he is recruited a member of team-evil - expanding his participation from this wedge issue.)

Christians are in the same position. As of 2022; a Christian must take sides, and try to discern the side of Good. Even if he believes that he rejects the Globalist-Left agenda - he may still be ensnared by loyalty to his Church. 

In practice, for many Christians, their primary Christian identity entails loyalty to his chosen Church, and an ethic of obedience to that Church. 

And when his chosen Church is itself 'converged' (as evidenced by de facto institutional support of one or more of the Litmus Test policies), that Church is a part-of the global system of evil...

Then the 'Christian' will find himself on the side of evil. 

And this is why So Very Many "Christians" believe So Much of the narratives of lies. 

Since the overall ethic of loyalty/ obedience is dominant in our natures; this means that the institutionally-loyal Christian will be loyal and obedient to the side of evil. 

This explains how it is that so many Christians reflexly believe the systemic-lies of politicians, the mass media, and the major social institutions (law, science, medicine, police/military, education etc). And when they (typically reluctantly) discover and acknowledge lies; regard the lies as exceptions - or justified by Good Intentions...

In these End Times, and characteristic of them; Christian loyalty and obedience to Churches - to any Church - will lead Christians to self-chosen damnation. It's happening all around us, all the time. 

But if not, then what? 

If not churches, and if we accept that the primary ethic is one of taking sides; then to what should Christians be loyal and obedient? 

The answer to that lies in the individual Christian's power of discernment, and willingness to use that power; to discover the two sides in the spiritual war, and to discover who serves each of the sides - and only to be loyal to those Men and other Beings on the side of Good. 

If the Christian lives in The West; using such discernment, he will discover that all institutions are corrupted substantially and increasingly, and that he should not, therefore, be loyal to any institution; including not loyal to any Church. 

In practice; this means that the Western Christian's primary loyalty and obedience must reach beyond this world and mortal life. 

The answer to "then what?" is as simple as that - the difficult thing is to act upon it; and against centuries of contrary convictions that - until these End Times - served Christians pretty-well. 

But That was Then; This is Now.

Why is it so difficult to find a creative path - day by day, year by year...?

It is my impression that most people are deeply frustrated by life because they neglect their own creative needs. 

I am aware that these creative needs are more powerful in me, and always have been, than in most; and that I am more-than-usually aware of them. Yet, so far as I can see, everybody has them - and they are usually utterly-starved, indeed wilfully so. 

Perhaps because it is so difficult to find our own creative path - exactly because it must be our own - it is common to react by a kind of aggressive refusal to try, and a determination that neither shall anyone else be allowed to try. 

This attitude is revealed in the single-minded triviality of so much social life, conversation and activities (including almost all of the content of social media); and by both the content of mass media (lying 'news', dull-celebrity, incredibly-stupid gossip etc.) and by the avidity with which most people consume it. 

To me; this is revelatory of a harshly fanatical attempt not-to-think, to intoxicate and overwhelm oneself with analgesic stimulation. 

Even among spiritual people; it is obvious that most seek an analogous state of crushed-self, not-thinking, anti-creating... indeed, there are large and vigorous strands of Christianity that are strongly set-against individual creativity; and even in the mainstream it is assumed that permissable creativity must take-place within a narrow-mesh web of rigid constraint - if it is not to be demonized as demonic.  

My view is that as Children of God with agency; we just-are creators - however partially and imperfectly: and this represents much (not all) of what is divine in us. 

Furthermore, it is what God most wishes from us; as indicated in the Fourth Gospel when Jesus describes his disciples as Friends, and not as Servants. 

I understand this to show that Jesus wants to work-with Men who have taken-on the same kind of primary creative agency as he himself had; and as God has. 

Therefore, we should not and cannot be contented with a life in which our own creation is annihilated - and this discontent will not be ignored nor suppressed.

Yet it is difficult to find one's own creativity! Difficult on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour basis; and difficult in a strategic (year-by-year) sense. So difficult that it takes up a great deal of effort for relatively little result!

Why so difficult - if it is a divinely-ordained task? 

First; because our mortal lives are for learning, primarily - rather than sustained and complete achievement (which is, anyway, impossible in this entropic world).

(However; even partial and intermittent creative success is taken-up eternally, when we are resurrected into Heaven - so it is certainly 'worth doing'.)

But the core difficulty is because each us us is strictly unique in terms of our creative potential, circumstances, and needs. 

Nobody else can tell us what we ought to do, beyond making suggestions; and there is no short-cut to discovering it. 

We may have helpful hunches, and can work from innate disposition and availabilities; but that learning method we term trial-and-error, with monitoring and a willingness to repent and correct, is the only possible strategy.    

That is what seems to be required; and therefore it is required that each man and woman will need to make honest effort to satisfy their own creative needs; or else fail in this very important job of mortal life. 

And this must be undertaken as often as possible; in the here and now, time and again - as well as across the arc of mortal life. 

Assisted Suicide (personal and national) is inviting evil into the heart

Is suicide a sin? The answer - as nearly-always - depends on the motivation. 

But if our assumptions are that this mortal life is for our learning - so that we can have useful experiences and learn stuff that is necessary (or at-least very beneficial) - for salvation and resurrection to eternal life...

And if we also assume that God is the creator who sustains our life, and that God loves us each individually as divine children...

Then the usual baseline assumption must be that we remain alive because we have some-thing important we can and should be learning from our life. 

Therefore, to plan a suicide will typically entail a refusal to learn from our mortal lives, which is a rejection of God's plans for us; and the more planned, the more pre-meditated, the suicide - the more likely this is to be the case. 

And when suicide is 'assisted', then actual evil has become involved in the motivation; because assisted suicide is done by a bureaucratic System; and bureaucracy is essentially evil in its nature and effects: plus our actually-existing System-bureaucracy in The West is anti-spiritual, anti-Christian, and pro-Satanic.

So - of its nature - assisted suicide amounts to an act that is both (almost always) evil in motivation, and also an invitation of evil into the heart. 

National suicide is the failure of a culture, a society, to reproduce itself - both materially and spiritually; but most obviously the national suicide of chosen sub-fertility... That is, a societal decision not to have children even at the minimum replacement level - and 'chosen' strategically; despite the availability of sufficient (indeed excessive) national resources; and despite national prosperity, comfort, peace etc. - which ought to support greater levels of child-rearing.

Sub-fertility (now universal in all developed nations, and increasingly gross - especially among native populations) is diagnostic of a profound spiritual malaise that amounts to a covert desire for cultural self-annihilation - i.e. suicide. 

Such strategic suicide is an act of defiance against God; and a deliberate refusal to learn whatever God has created and maintained the nation for. 

National - like personal - suicide by deliberate sub-fertility is an invitation of evil into the heart; as is apparent from the demonic ruling class who now administer and control all the Western nations. These evil Beings (mostly human, some demonic) are invited, tolerated, enabled, trusted, cooperated-with, and actively approved by the intellectual-class servants... 

And these national leaders are easily able to persuade an already self-corrupted populace to accept their inverted value system and become further corrupted. The populace now widely espouse a morality that despises the national culture, loathes patriotism, and which values and privileges any alien over natives.

Our current subsidized, organized, and sustained mass immigration - and the values that justify and sustain it - is therefore an instance of assisted suicide at the national level.   

In sum: when suicide is a sin (a deliberate turning away from God's creative intentions), then this is because of its motivation; but assisted suicide is always a sin, because the motivation is strategic hence responsible, and is compounded by its being an invitation to evil. 

Radical Pessimism and Hope from Peter Kreeft

Peter Kreeft is one of the most lucid and engaging (and most prolific!) Christian apologists of recent years - writing from a Roman Catholic (convert, from Protestant) perceptive.

The above is a five minute video that begins with some personal reflections, then moves onto Kreeft's concise evaluation of where things in general are going. 

Kreeft is absolutely convinced that things are going to get much worse, catastrophically so; that in essence The Book of Revelation (i.e. the End Times) is upon us; and that (materially speaking) there is nothing that we can do to stop it.

I think there is now a division between mainstream Christian 'conservatives' who believe that things are not irreversibly bad, and therefore can-and-should be reformed and catastrophe averted -- and those 'radical pessimists' such as Kreeft (and myself) who believe that things will not be reformed.

Note the asymmetry: mainstream conservative focus on evaluating what might be done; radical pessimists on what actually will be done: this derives from a focus on possibilities, versus a focus on inferred motivations.  

Conservative mainstreamers are focused about socio-political schemes of reform which seem to show potential promise of alleviating or reversing particular areas of decline and corruption. 

These schemes may be concentrated on improvements within existing institutions, or may attempt to found new institutions to replace them. 

And - this is important - the intent and belief behind such socio-political activity is that, if effective, it would be able to prevent, reverse and/or revise the impending catastrophe.  

But radical pessimists believe that it is too late. Whatever theoretical possibilities may exist in particular areas - the sum of human motivational corruption in so many domains, in so many nations; means that people do not fundamentally wish to stop the impending catastrophe.

For radical pessimists; the problem is, in other words, too deep to be solved by socio-political action; because the problem is at the level of metaphysics and motivation.

In other words: the problem lies in the world-conception and primary desires of too-many people (including a large majority of the wealthiest, most powerful, educated and high-status people). 

Far-too-many of those with capability to effect (and to block) change, see the world falsely, and want wrong things; conversely, they reject those understandings and goals that would be necessary to prevent catastrophe and reverse the trend to evil. 

So, whatever the theoretical possibilities may be; the requite multiple-simultaneous reforms simply will not happen: few people want Good things to happen, and a large majority actively want them Not to happen. 

And even when/if socio-political reforms do happen in particular domains; they will not lead to net-Good; because too many Men's motivations and desires are too corrupted - so that Good policy becomes just-another stimulus towards greater evil. 

The final part of this short video is concerned with how - despite solid this-worldly pessimism - Christians can (and must) remain hope-full. 

Kreeft provides one of the standard answers of Christian believers in the Omni-God theology; but my answer would have been different and much simpler.  

My answer is that Jesus made it possible that anyone who loved and truly-desired to follow him, would attain eternal resurrected life in Heaven. And further, that our love for others is of real benefit in helping them to the same goal of salvation*. 

We are meant to be confident of our salvation; and we can be confident - in so far as we personally are sure of our desire for salvation: our own salvation is our own responsibility; and lies in our own hands. 

I suspect such confidence in salvation will be of crucial value for many people in these End Times, in enabling us to Live in Hope; when honest realism suggests that it is too late to avert the coming Apocalypse. 

Thus convinced pessimism becomes compatible with confident Hope. 

*We cannot, of course, compel anyone else to accept the gift of salvation - salvation is a personal choice that cannot be compelled - not even by God. But we can - by our personal love - make a difference (at the spiritual level, by direct spiritual apprehension) to the way in which other people understand and evaluate this choice. 

Note Added: I believe that the Christian Conservative stance is no longer valid, and will not survive - indeed, I can see, in real time, a proportion of Christian Conservatives continually apostatizing (as evidenced by their public failure of one or more the accumulating Litmus Tests, aka. by converging-with the agenda of mainstream secular globalist leftism). For instance; recently many Christian Conservatives failed the Voting Litmus Test; as evidenced by their behaviour during US or UK elections, and their partisan-mainstream political commentary generally. 

Ethelred the Unready and the Norman Great-Reset

Yesterday, I watched Michael Wood's excellent 1981 documentary on Anglo-Saxon king Ethelred ("the Unready"; 966-1016); which crystallized a (more-than-) analogy between the imposition of "the Norman Yoke" on England from 1066. 

Ethelred was a disastrously bad king. His posthumous and punning epithet "unready" actually translates to something like badly-counseled, with connotations of one who made many foolish, or even wicked, decisions; one of which was to simultaneously impoverish England and strengthen the Danish pirates, by truly enormous payments of Danegeld over many years (rather than organize, and fight the invaders)*.

Ethelred had inherited from illustrious ancestors, such as Alfred and Athelstan, an English Empire (i.e. of the Saxon Kingdoms such as Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria), which Wood describes as the wealthiest and most prestigious Kingship in Europe. 

By Ethelred's death, the English nation had been substantially disunited and demoralized by decades of helpless rapine under rule of a spiteful, moody, feckless and cowardly king; and made vulnerable to the Norman conquest a couple of generations later.  

Something I did not fully appreciate until relatively recently, was the way in which the Normans not only tyrannized England; but killed a very large proportion of its people (directly and indirectly), and destroyed its wealth. After William I; it took centuries before England was again wealthy, prosperous, and with her own high culture. 

As I have written before; the Normans were motivated by an elitist disdain of the Anglo-Saxons, who were treated as pressed soldiers, servants and slaves at best; but were exiled, starved and killed in such numbers as severely to weaken the country. 

Much of the North was reduced to depopulated desert, and the rich agricultural lands of the South was converted to semi-wild Forests; exclusively dedicated to the hunting-related recreations of the Norman Masters. 

 

In this respect, as well as in ancestry, the Norman rule resembled the rapacious and destructive piracy of the worst of their Viking ancestors. And resembled too the attitudes and behaviours of the modern alien-cosmopolitan Establishment (many of whom have, and are overweeningly proud of, Norman ancestry). 

When these alien pirates became England's kings and aristocrats; their twin priorities were absolute power on the one hand - with a network of garrisoned castles as the symbol; and on the other hand a short-termist, selfish, and pleasure-seeking attitude to the country and its people - which they regarded as booty of war.  

Their Norman's 'problem', as usually happens with successful pirates, was squabbling over the loot. So that the country was rapidly and repeatedly riven by civil wars; motivated by the selfish power-seeking of the outsider-Lords; and which kept on killing people and dissipating England's innate economic advantages for generation after generation - for no better reason than the choice of whether to be oppressed by Norman de Tweedledum or Norman de Tweedledee...     

The Great-Reset intends a strikingly-analogous economic destruction, depopulation - and conversion of the world (or, as much as possible) to wasteland and recreational territory intended for their exclusive use.

The modern excuses for this evil, selfish and net-destructive power/ pleasure grab are different and dishonest compared with the past: the Normans did not need or bother to justify their deliberate and strategic destruction of farming and industry, with agriculture repurposing to exclusively-accessed wilderness and forests in huge estates which the Establishment own, by anything equivalent to the modern elite's pseudo-environmentalism. 

The Normans killed and starved the peasantry because they wanted-to and could, and because they regarded Saxons as inferior beings. 

But our modern-Norman's pretend to be promoting 'global' public health, defending 'democracy', and preventing 'climate change' by doing so.     

As in Norman times, the problem - but now over most of the world - is an alien and evil-motivated elite; who care nothing for the nations or the people they rule and administer; which they manipulate and torment. 

Indeed the modern-Normans loathe all nations and peoples, as obstacles blocking them from their proximate and insatiable desire for ever-more power and loot. 

Yet our modern, alien elites are far worse even than the Normans of England - not just in their scale and wealth; but because they are more advanced in their evil - and desire destruction for its own sake, rather than as a means to the ends of power and loot. 

Our modern-Normans would make chaos everywhere, and pull-down the whole civilized world around themselves - even if it makes their own lives less pleasurable, and breaks their own structures of power. 

But merely in order to demonstrate to themselves their own superiority; to enjoy their own callously-sadistic indifference to the planet and all creatures and plants on it. 

Because the modern-Normans do not any more serve their own appetites; but serve a master who is of-spirit and not dependent on the material for survival; and who loathes all of God's creation - including, of course, his gullible and blinkered Norman servants. 

  

*Note: Indeed; it is the many tens of thousands of silver coins with which the Danegeld was paid, time and again; that provides perhaps the most direct evidence of the pre-existing wealth of Etheldred's England.