Looking back and surveying memories; there are periods of my adult life when I seem never to have experienced participation.
I mean those memories (characteristic of childhood, especially) that have a special and "romantic" quality. For example the visual memories that of are surrounded by a literal hazy glow; that seems to represent the experienced reality of us being part of the scene. The haziness represents that entities are not separate objects, but entities are instead concentrated or condensed from a single reality-field.
(You might say barriers between entities are "permeable" or that entities are "connected" - but actually it is more that entities were not separated in the first place - that it is the separation which is secondary and illusory.)
But it strikes me that there were long periods (extending up to a few years) throughout my adult life when my memories indicate that I did not experience this - when my memories are wholly mundane.
It is as if I remember that something happened, but in memory I am observing from the outside, as a mere description - I am not "in the scene", and indeed memory says I was not really in my life at these times.
And these periods when genuine participation was apparently absent, now seem in retrospect to be times when I was off the "destined" spiritual path of my life.
Analyzing the phenomenon; I seem to need both to personally to have the right attitude, and to be in the proper situation.
When I was not in the proper situation - for instance when I was pursuing the wrong aims or with the wrong people, or in the wrong place - then no amount of striving was able to induce that sense of participation.
In a basically-wrong situation - the harder I tried to attain romantic participation the more mistakes I made, the wronger the things I did.
Furthermore; even when I was in the right situation and properly aimed; there were situation in which I was deluding myself...
I mean, the things I "wanted" would need that I be an impossibly different person; or would need to inhabit a non-existent place or time (maybe somewhere else I could not go, or a time in the past and gone)...
For example; after becoming a Christian, I was sometimes drawn to types of Christianity that were fundamentally alien to my nature; that were, it now seems, based on a fantasy about what kind of person I would like to be but was not, and life-circumstances that I felt would be preferable but did not actually exist (and in which, even if they did exist, I would not be able to function).
All this has to do with a lack of intuition - to do with a superficial and external scheme of myself and the world; a fantasy scheme that, while appealing in a day-dreaming way, lacked positive and deep inner endorsement. Also, for which a deep inner endorsement simply could not be manufactured; instead only a kind of fake conformity and public support.
I seem to detect exactly this faked inner-endorsement in most of what I read from most self-identified Christians.
I do not believe that they intuitively believe that which they publicly affirm. It rings false. I infer they life in the same kind of superficial conformity to external structures and systems that I myself professed, and which memory now reveals was inauthentic.
I suppose that some people must live for such long periods (maybe all their adult lives?) without that "romantic" quality of experience I describe above. Maybe this happens because they have the wrong aims, or are in the wrong place, or among the wrong people...
Whatever the cause; because they are off the proper path of their spiritual destiny, they are like I was for those months or years in which memory indicates that I was not really "in" the world.
Perhaps they rationalize this situation as Real Life, or Necessary, or even as Best?
This may explain the active hostility to romanticism that is so prevalent.
The idea that romanticism is either outright evil, or at least liable to lead to evil: the insistence that the Good Life - the Christian life - ought to be lived at the secondary level of my memories "about" things, and to eschew those hazy, participative memories of being "in" my life and world.
Or that romanticism is deluded, a day-dream, people fooling themselves...
Whereas my memory tells me that it is romanticism that is reality, and the mundane is when people are fantasizing and telling themselves lies...
Self-lies which, deep down, they don't themselves believe, and which consign them to the mundane and the secondhand in life. But they dishonestly respond to their endemic and self-inflicted alienation by refusing to acknowledge their own unbelief - and by scorning the romantic.
I can't think of any arguments that would persuade such people. As usual - it is down to intuition applied to fundamental assumptions. Either we intuitively know that romanticism is right and best - or we don't.
NOTE ADDED: Why is this important? Well, it is not necessarily important too all people, all of the time; but it becomes important for some people when (on the one side) their faith is not strong enough to resist the many temptations from all around, to put the values of this world above eternal resurrected life in Heaven - or (on the other side) to regard this mortal life as ultimately futile, or essentially negative in its potential.
