First, read this article from 2001 - when I was essentially an adherent of New Age spirituality - it was published in Abraxas - a Colin Wilson focused magazine photocopied and home-published by an eccentric and likeable, Somerset-born writer called Paul Newman (now, alas, deceased):
http://hedweb.com/bgcharlton/ceremonialtime.html
At that time I could see that there was an ancient, participative, immersive and unselfconscious-consciousness which I call here Ceremonial Time; then there was the dead materialistic and nihilistic way of thinking which was economically efficient and necessary to survival in the modern world.
And that was it.
I could see no realistic way out of this impasse: either you were an ineffectual but connected hunter-gatherer or an efficient but alienated modern.
Neither were more nor less ultimately true (I regarded both as more-or-less false) except that - realistically - nobody could live by the unalienated life unless cut-off from modernity. So I regarded this unalienated life as only, in practice, accessible by altered states of consciousness:
http://hedweb.com/bgcharlton/animism.html
Since then, one big step is that I now know that there is something beyond the above two possibilities - there is a third stage which Owen Barfield calls Final Participation: it combines the best of both worlds because it has all the connectedness of the ancient spirituality and all the consciousness and precision of modern consciousness.
This state of mind can be achieved - if you know what you are aiming-at (which needs metaphysical insight and restructuring) - to varying degrees of completeness and intermittently - but this takes will, work, effort and resistances must be overcome.
It is not a matter of surrender, relaxation, just-seeing - it is not a going-back but a going-forward - it cannot be done by artificial or technological means - and it is not a by-product of any actual religion but must be done by individuals (although information on this can, and should, be shared and discussed).
THIS is what I am mostly working on doing, and describing on this blog, at present.
