For the past decade or so, I have been trying (in multiple ways) to understand the implications of Owen Barfield's concept of Final Participation - as being the destiny and proper aim of our spiritual life.
Some modern people seem wholly enmeshed in mundane materialist thinking and feel detached and alienated from the living world - trapped inside their own heads. Their only relief is temporarily to forget this in sleep, intoxication, psychosis - and in occasional moments when there is a resurgence of a child-like sense of belonging and involvement.
These brief times are what Barfield calls Original Participation, because they were our original state of consciousness as young children, and also (it is believed) the normal state of the earliest ancestral Men.
Original Participation is - pretty much - the same as Novalis's Sehnsucht and CS Lewis's Joy; Gurdjieff's self-remembering, Maslow's Peak Experience, or Csíkszentmihályi's Flow state are psychological reductions of the experience.
Such moments may be pleasant, indeed there have been times and places (e.g. some of the Romantic movement around 1800, or the 1960s counter-culture... still ongoing) when many people aspired to abandon modern consciousness and return to Original Participation.
Although this return to the spontaneous, natural, child-like, primitive, here-and-now consciousness is powerful and alluring to many people; it has always failed - and must be assumed impossible (except briefly).
However it makes a difference how we regard these brief moments.
If they are regarded as merely pleasant psychological states, then Original Participation can only be therapeutic - like taking a short holiday from the "real world" of mundane materialism.
Yet Barfield asserted that Final Participation was not just a pleasant interlude; but in some deep sense absolutely necessary - necessary if we personally, and our society as well, were to avoid being overwhelmed by evil.
However, Barfield was vague about how this might be achieved (he usually advised consulting his mentor Rudolf Steiner's work - but Steiner's techniques seem obviously ineffective, and Barfield never claimed that decades of practicing Steiner medications had led to any very significant effect on Barfield's own thinking in terms of Final Participation.
Indeed, it seems that FP is not really achievable in a lasting and dominant way.
So we seem rather to be trapped between impossibilities! We cannot go back, cannot stay as we are - yet the destined path forward seems blocked...
Yet anyone who conceptualizes life as bounded by conception and death will find himself bounded by exactly such impossibilities. We cannot escape the constraints of entropy (and death) and evil.
But this is forgetting the reality that we are eternal Beings, and this mortal life can be (should be) seen as a finite transitional phase between eternities before and afterwards.
Furthermore (and here I depart from Barfield, with his ideas of multiple future reincarnations) a Christian sees his eternal future as including resurrected Heavenly life, following after this mortal life.
My idea of Final Participation is that it is the conscious choice to consecrate those moments of Original Participation.
So that when moments of OP happen; we choose to regard them as sacred.
In such a "consecration"; the momentary experience of OP is consciously recognized as being of potentially eternal significance to divine creation - and is actively taken-up into ongoing thinking.
This contrasts with, say, the sixties counter-culture response - which is to stay inside those OP moments, and perpetuate them or as long as possible.
I would regard this as akin to a religiously-contemplative response to Original Participation. Contemplative because it is deliberately passive and self-negating. The moment is primary and we intend to stay with it, dissolve-into it.
This is analogous to the contemplative kind of meditation where people seek a "blissful" state of consciousness and try to maintain it for as long as possible.
The ideal is of stasis in perfection.
But Final Participation is active and creative - hence is is both dynamic - like divine creation; and aspires to join-in-with and influence ongoing divine creation.
And all this is a choice, not a surrender. It is an affirmation of the self, not an attempt to lose the self.
It is the choice to be a Son of God, a sibling of Jesus; one who want to join with God in the work of creation, and add to to that creative work whatever is unique in himself.
So, Final Participation is an active self-confidence; confidence that by the "process" of resurrection after this mortal life we can be transformed such as to be able, worthy, and trust-worthy of eternal participation in creation.
Thus, FP is a state of being only achievable permanently (as a normal state) after our death, and only among those who have then chosen to follow Jesus through resurrection to everlasting Heavenly life.
But Final Participation does have a vital role in this mortal life; because it is when we can add to our resurrected life.
FP represents our choice to learn from experience in such a way that our immortal soul is permanently transformed.
We are talking about our immortal souls, not the conditions of our mortal lives on earth - so the fact that our modern experiences of participation may be relatively few, infrequent, brief - does not invalidate these experiences...
FP experiences are of permanent value not because they last a long time; but so long as we choose to consecrate them.
Consecration would go something like this:
1. Original Participation happens.
2. We recognize that it is happening.
3. We acknowledge that this happening is of potentially permanent importance to our resurrected Heavenly self.
This needs to be done when Original participation happens - Now: here-and-now.
Not put-off until later.
If we do not do it at the time of Original Participation - it will (probably) not be done.
However... An intense imagined re-living of the moment, could also be used to consecrate that moment retrospectively. Because then the moment is not merely "retrospective" but a re-experiencing here-and-now - which is perhaps one reason why we may recollect and meditate on such moments... Why they may last so tenaciously in our memories. The experiences may be re-presenting themselves for consecration.
Maybe, if we do this on principle and habitually; then this will act as a positive feedback and establish a "spiritual reward system" - so that such opportunities will become more frequent?
The thing is: we modern Men are terribly demotivated, prone to despair - and any spiritual advice that diminishes or delays our gratification seems doomed to fail*.
Consecrating our moments of Original Participation generates an immediate spiritual reward as well as a hope-full anticipation.
Instead of OP being a tragic joy; doomed to be short-lived, doomed to be forgotten and lost by age, disease, death... Instead of this; the act of consecration transforms it into a moment of permanent and positive significance.
As far as I can understand; only a follower of Jesus Christ who lives in confident expectation of resurrection can do this; and it will not "just happen" but must be done by conscious choice.
All then depends on making that choice.
NOTE: It may be objected that because Original Participation is spontaneous and natural, it is not necessarily good. This is true; and if an OP experience is not good, then it cannot and shall not be consecrated to resurrected eternal life - so any such attempt will fail. Christian discernment - knowledge of good and evil, God and that which opposes God; is a necessary part of Christian life - and always applies.
* The mass of people are (quite literally) spiritually-dying of despair, for lack of any genuinely positive purpose in life. It seems obvious that the double-negative (e.g. therapeutic) values that are exclusively propagated, including by nearly all religions (eg religions rooted in avoidance of default divine punishment), including most Christian churches - are simply ineffectual; leading to short-termist this-worldly hedonism now, and ultimate despair eventually.
