Alienation is the modern curse - even if you are among the tiny minority of serious Christians; this applies to you.
(Except for a few brief flashes - if we are lucky); Everything in life is unreal, detached - nothing is, but is only 'about' - we cannot get to grips with our personal situations, because they are remote from us - on the other side of a chasm of imperfect 'communication'.
Religion - as it is here and now, is a necessary step in the right direction - but it is not enough: it does not suffice.
Have you noticed how shallow everything modern is - the people, and the institutions? Everything except nature and the finest art and literature and (if we are lucky ... the occasional religious experience) but even then only in flashes.
A life that is dead - perhaps pleasurable - but dead, meaningless and with no sense of lived-purpose, and dis-engaged, lacking in 'participation' except when we aren't thinking (in dreams, altered states of consciousness, intoxicated...).
Have you noticed how desperate people are not to think? The lengths they go to to forget themselves? Yet life will be dead and we will be alienated until our thinking is fully engaged with everything, when we live inside life and not as separate observers whose only joy is momentarily to forget our separateness...
This is an urgent matter - and non-negotiable: we must get to work and push for something better, something adequate.
And must means must - because if we don't solve this one, then - really - what is the point of modern life? On a spiritual level it is a machine for damnation, a locked-in-state of alienation and unreality and deadness.
That is of no use to us, no use to God; and if nothing better can be developed then He might as well wind it all up and start again - after all, what is the point of having souls born into such an environment that the best that can be expected is that a few people will manage to resist to the extent that they do not actively-will their own damnation?
Really, in an ultimate sense what is the point of that kind of world - of this kind of world? The world is meant to be a place of spiritual growth, not a state of siege with survival until death the only victory.
What is needed is not Utopian, not the blasphemous notion of Heaven-on-Earth - but simply a place where life is real and we really experience it - a world where we can learn and grow; rather than a world where we learn to believe lies and especially the lies we tell ourselves...
So the task is before us - and perhaps only a handful of individual people and no human societies have ever yet achieved it - the task of living life engaged, participating. and fully conscious of ourselves and our situation.
The task is a new and higher kind of human consciousness - that is what we must achieve; that is what the great 'Romantics' from Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Goethe, Steiner, Owen Barfield, William Arkle, Colin Wilson and a few others have been telling us and trying to do for the past two centuries and more.
They did their best, they made many suggestions, they qualitatively improved our understanding; but when it comes to achievement... we are no further forward, indeed (since the accelerating totalitarian micromanagement of human thought via saturation with the media and bureaucracy) we are further back than ever before in the history of the world.
How? I don't know - but we simply must do it. It should be our number one priority now, today, this very hour, starting immediately.
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