Cats are fussy eaters - prone to turn-up their furry noses at even sachet-treats of expensive, exotically flavoured food (beef and liver, poultry and lamb... mmm!). What a waste!
So, why don't cat food manufacturers actually make (or, at least flavour) their product with the things cats actually like to eat? Mice, spiders, pigeons, grass, bluebottles, mashed banana, little bits of debris lying on the floor?
The problem is that the makers are trying to appeal to humans - not to cats; on the basis of "who actually buys the stuff?" So we get claims the food contains the kind of meat that people enjoy.
A deeper consideration reveals that the proper question to ask is: "But who controls the purse-strings in a cat-inhabited house?"
We have a tumble drier with a "buzzer" alarm (five ascending notes with a needly kind of electronic tone) that tells you when the washing is as dry as you want it to be.
So, you hear the buzzer, go to the machine, open the door to get the dry washing... and the alarm sounds again: triggered by the opening of the door.
Get this: you are actually in the process of opening the door - and the alarm sounds to tell you to open the door...
What kind of person decided that it was a good idea to install such a mechanism?
What kind of person then sits down to design a device to tell people to do something that they are actually in the middle of doing?
What kind of consumer expert imagines that this will be a popular feature?
What kind of a world are we living-in - that such things happen, yet nobody is called to account?
Note: All text consists of quotations from Joseph Beuys, made in an interview with Louwrien Wijers, November 22nd 1979; published in Writing as Sculpture (1996).
I have edited the text for clarity based on my understanding of what was intended - for which I take responsibility. Because although Beuys was fluent in English - he was not idiomatic; and often deployed German grammatical constructions - plus some personal terminology, and some from Rudolf Steiner. It is probably best to try and get an overview (Gestalt) of his meaning, rather than trying to build understanding from the accumulation of specific statements.
Also, because this was a conversation the recorded and transcribed words benefit, I believe, from some re-arrangement, excision, and slight verbal expansion.
My point here is to emphasize - and this surprised me considerably! - that Joseph Beuys was a serious, and tough-minded, hard-nosed, Christian; in his primary motivations, and his understanding of art, politics, society...
And he was a romantic Christian, because he saw that (here-and-now) Christianity depends on the individual human being, personally choosing to take an active and conscious role in addressing the problems of mundane modern existence: materialism, meaninglessness, purposelessness - dead life in a dead world.
And Beuys saw that the escape from dead-ly materialism was forward-and-through - and out the other side - by a spiritual repetition (individually, and socially) of Christ's death and resurrection.
Christ is not symbolized: he is real!
Christ is not a symbol for something else. He is the substance in himself. It means life, it means power - the power of life.
Christ has already brought life. Without the substance of Christ the earth would already have died.
So Christ is not a symbol of something... I always fear this application of 'symbols'.
The most important power exists in Christ, in the elements and substance of Christ. He is a germination: the idea of the Son coming-out from spiritual entities (abstractly called 'God').
In the Christ element, the spiritual entities are showing the reality that this element also exists in humankind itself. We can speak of the human being because this element exists in him.
The most important declaration of Christ in that Man is the spiritual co-operator*. This shifts the whole energy-problem to the spiritual abilities of the people, of humankind.
Interviewer: When you say we do not need mediators between gods and people in our times, do you mean that this is a task we have to do ourselves, now?
Beuys: Yes, sure: certainly.
And we can do it ourselves. But there must first appear, or should appear - and in fact appears already in humankind - a kind of interest to ask; and that is surely a necessity.
To approach an understanding of world, and Man, and nature; asks for a very individual methodology. An individual mentality or ability...
At present the churches avoid speaking about the possibilities of humankind using such soul-powers, will-powers; powers of thought; and intuition, imagination and inspiration - and to come with this kind of 'ability' towards such an understanding.
We need to understand that to reach the earthly condition of materialism, and to get incarnated with this idea of death; there must be a resurrection...
The Christ spirit was related to the development of the idea of analysis [leading to materialism].
The whole range of philosophy throughout the Western world shows more and more this analytic way, and reaches a materialist consciousness. Thus it comes to death, like Christ.
So, in the Western world there is a kind of repetition of the mystery of Christ's life and death. It ends with the fact that we now have a materialist understanding of the world. And because of this spiritual declaration of the material intention, materialism (as a whole) is a spiritual thing...
First the earth was dead in part; but Men have long been giving death to death - they have added death articles to death principles.
So now our earth is dead! How can this death be surpassed, renewed, regenerated? That is the great question.
Only humankind can do this. Only. Nobody else. People must do it. Men are now totally responsible for the fate of the earth and for life on earth.
We must see that all is alive - and surpass death.
Solving the problem of life and death is the mission of the methodology of materialism.
People have to die, in a way; have to feel what death means - have to reach the earth.
Death belongs to life, you know! In the spiritual meaning, life is not possible without death.
That sounds like mysticism, but is not, because this mystery is experienced by everybody.
People have to have, and to develop, another understanding than the materialistic understanding - which is only looking for power to exploit, with a distorting and debasing understanding of energies.
Everything depends on us!
It is absolutely necessary to see that everything depends on us; and that we can do it!
Very easily we can do it - it is not so difficult to do.
The whole power exists with the people. But if the the people do not use it, then the regressive powers will get stronger.
In future; we need the strongest of human spirits - those who are able to resist in the middle of the shit!
Who live in the midst of things; and who feel that their own abilities can only grow in the midst of problems.
Not those who want a kind-of weak environment with a kind-of 'spiritual feeling'...
*Meaning - Man's cooperation with God has been necessary since the time of Christ, and is ever more necessary. This is clear from (too spread-out to summarize) remarks made elsewhere.
If this mortal life is a time in which we need to learn from our experiences; much of this is likely to be retrospective.
We may fail to learn at the time of experience; but often have further opportunities afterwards, in retrospect, by reflecting on our autobiographical memories.
There are two common wrong ways of thinking about our past: To assume everything we did was right, or to assume everything we did was wrong!
Some people refuse to acknowledge their own sin, error, weakness; and will always rationalize their past behaviour - excusing apparent weakness, error, sin as being necessary, unavoidable, compelled, "not-my-responsibility", a step on the way to something better, or... whatever.
Such people see their whole life a basically-correct and integrated - therefore they cannot learn from experience.
Experience is just grist to the mill of self-justification.
Other people regard their present person as the only good; and their past as merely a sequence of errors that has nothing to do withMe. Here. Now.
They refuse to acknowledge past errors: "That was not me! I was just a kid! I hadn't discovered God/ hadn't discovered who-I-really-am. I was weak (but not any more) - I was an addict (but have overcome it)... I am a different person now."
For such people, the present moment is all that matters, and they repudiate the past. Clearly they cannot learn from experience.
To learn from experience requires both taking responsibility for past behaviour and choices, and also evaluating them as good or bad, right or wrong, strong or weak, loving or expedient...
It means both acknowledging the unity of life (it was and is essentially me), and also the reality of learning, change, development (I really am different).
Learning from mortal life therefore entails both continuity of existence, and transformation of the individual.
What made these three books so very disappointing is that in all cases the authors were people who I first encountered in my teens, at an age when books made their maximum and most lasting impact.
All the authors of the disappointments had previously published particular books that I greatly appreciated, and there had been a prolonged wait with expectations.
I had been hoping for some kind of a 'follow-up' that would provide me with something of the same quality and flavour I had received from the previous book; or at least be complementary.
I had appreciated The Lord of the Rings as no book before or since, having encountered it about a year before Tolkien's death, written to the author asking about its progress, and then waiting for four teenage-years for the publication.
When The Silmarillion was published, I immediately bought it in hardback and took it to college as a special treat - yet I found it so dull and... wrong that I could not finish it; and did not do so for many years.
This book came a decade and a half after I had been bowled-over by the author's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which had originally been lent me in 1976 by Bill Ryan on a month long Outward Bound course where he was a group-leader. I had bought myself a copy, another for the school library - and some as presents; I had exchanged a letter with the author, and published a critical essay.
As with The Silmarillion, I disliked the feel of the book, it seemed a bit sordid rather than having the freshness and hope of ZAMM. And its argument contradicted some of my favourite aspects of ZAMM. I've tried re-reading, but still feel the same. Very disappointing, for sure.
3. Seven Days in New Crete by Robert Graves (1949)
Robert Graves's I Claudius/ Claudius The God were the first grown-up novels I read after Lord of the Rings, when aged about 13 or 14. Soon afterwards I got The White Goddess (1948), and constantly consulted it, and brooded on it, through the following years. About a decade or more later I discovered in a biography that Graves has followed-up the WG - which is non-fiction (sort of..) by a novel that expressed the ideas; called Seven Days in New Crete. It took me ages to find a copy of this - but when I did, I was avid with anticipation...
But, as you will have guessed, I was extremely underwhelmed - on several levels. For a start, it is a poor novel qua novel - never comes to life, is just rather boring. But more damningly, Graves apparently regards his 'New Crete' as a kind of utopia, where the White Goddess rules and is worshipped - as Graves advocated for real-life, and which I had found persuasive in adolescence. Yet his depiction of the Goddess-dominated world was completely unappealing, and without a trace of the romance that permeated White Goddess. In sum: a dud.
Have readers had similar experiences of seriously-disappointed literary anticipation?
The internet, like the mass media generally, is highly dominated by the USA; and most of the comment and analysis comes from the US.
But - since 2020, when all the world was in policy-lockstep for the first time in human history - it should be obvious that we live in a global totalitarian system.
Yet too many US commenters, perhaps especially on the non-religious 'Right'; still assume that the USA is the root and origin of global power.
The work of Mencius Moldbug/ Curtis Yarvin can be taken as an example: in which he puts 'the Cathedral' - the 'Ivy League' intelligentsia and affiliates, with HQ Harvard University - as the controlling ideological centre.
Another common idea is that the US Supreme Court has been the most important factor in influencing long-term socio-political trends - and that is where the centre of power lies.
Others imagine that the birdemic was a US-initiated and -sustained phenomenon*.
But the present situation, in which (apparently) the US Supreme Court Judges are under siege; threatened by totalitarian-leftist violence egged on by the mass media; and leading US politicians and security agencies will neither acknowledge the fact, protect them, nor do anything substantive to discourage the situation... shows me that the USA is now a controlled nation - the US elites are middle managers for executives whose loyalties lies elsewhere.
The US 'cathedral' is run in the interests of the globalists, whose affiliations are demonic and to do with the strategy of soul damnation.
The premier institutions of the USA - whether President, Houses, Supreme Court, or Harvard - are all grist to the globalists mill; and will be destroyed as and when expedient for the globalists agenda.
US national institutions are now - one and all - followers, not leaders.
*Of the five current global Litmus Test issues (the four of 2020, plus the 2022 Fire Nation war) the US originated both the sexual revolution and antiracism; but that was in the middle 1960s. Control of these agendas has since been lost to global institutions; such that the USA cannot now roll-back or step-away from them, even when they desire to - any more than other nations are allowed the choice to opt-out from The Plan. Or, at least, the solution lies at a far deeper and more spiritual level than that of politics, media, corporations and institutions.
It was gradually accepted during the 20th century that the Americas were discovered by the Vikings; but it seems likely that before this date, Irish monks had made the journey, taking the same route. Here (in a ten minute video) Caleb Howells lucidly summarizes the main evidence (which I found convincing, as I stated in the comments!):
Yet knowledge of the existence of the Americas was apparently forgotten in Europe by the Renaissance - or, if not forgotten, then withheld or suppressed.
A particularly good home for spiritual life, protected against all possible illusions, was Ireland, the island of Ireland, in the first Christian centuries. More than any other spot on earth it was sheltered from illusions; and that is why so many missionaries of Christianity went out from Ireland in those early times.
But these missionaries had to have regard for the simple folk among whom they worked — for the peoples of Europe were very simple in those days — and also to understand the great impulses behind human evolution. During the fourth and fifth centuries Irish initiates were at work in central Europe and they set themselves to prepare for the demands of the future. They were in a certain way under the influence of the initiate-knowledge that in the fifteenth century — in 1413, as you know — the fifth post-Atlantean epoch [i.e. the 'modern' era - BGC] was to begin.
Hence they knew that they had to prepare for a quite new epoch, and at the same time to protect a simple-minded people. What did they do in order to keep the simple people of Europe sheltered and enclosed, so that certain harmful influences could not reach them? The course of events was guided, from well-instructed and honourable sources, in such a way that gradually all the voyages which had formerly been made from Northern lands to America were brought to an end.
Whereas in earlier times ships had sailed to America from Norway for certain purposes (I will say more of this to-morrow), it was gradually arranged that America should be forgotten and the connection lost. By the fifteenth century, indeed, the peoples of Europe knew nothing of America. Especially from Rome was this change brought about, because European humanity had to be shielded from American influences.
A leading part in it was played by Irish monks, who as Irish initiates were engaged in the Christianising of Europe.
In earlier times quite definite impulses had been brought from America, but in the period when the fifth post-Atlantean [modern] epoch was beginning it was necessary that the peoples of Europe should be uninfluenced by America — should know nothing of it and should live in the belief that there was no such country.
Only when the fifth post-Atlantean [modern] epoch had begun, was America again “discovered,” as history says. But, as you know very well, much of the history taught in schools is fable convenue [false consensus], and one of these fables is that America was discovered for the first time in 1492.
In fact, it was only re-discovered. The connection had been blotted-out for a period, as destiny required.
Steiner seems not to have realized that Irish monks had themselves visited America; but does suggest that they knew of it and deliberately did not record or disseminate their stunning information about another continent to the laity.
Steiner believes that this decision was made for good reasons; because it was spiritually-desirable (a matter of 'destiny') that Europe develop separately for another millennium before being exposed to the revolutionary knowledge of the New World.
A few months ago I published a post about Tolkien's creative process, and why it has such a powerful appeal for these times. The post retrospectively seems - on reviewing it today - to provide an important clue for how we ought to respond positively to these materialistic and mundane, dark and demonic, times.
We all-of-us need to be subcreators in our own thinking.
Naturally, I do not mean to suggest that we all (or even most of us) should be writing write fiction and poetry, nor painting and drawing, like Tolkien. Neither do I mean that this subcreation should take any particular 'public' form. On the contrary; our subcreation should not be done to impress or to influence 'other people'.
I mean instead that we each of us have the capacity to subcreate in some way, and primarily in the world of our thinking.
That-thinking may be helped by physical activities - such as writing, drawing, fishing or... whatever actually is helpful for you... But whatever that physical expression of subcreation may be - it should be a means to the end of subcreative thinking.
It is in this realm of our subcreation that we are most likely to find personal meaning and purpose in reality - including our everyday reality of totalitarian bureaucracy and propagandistic mass media.
That is one meaning of Romantic Christianity - that (here and now) everybody needs to become a subcreator; and that we can only do this for our-selves.
Subcreation must be active and personal.
And also that - if this is not already happening, in your own life - making subcreation begin to happen ought to be a major life-priority.
There is a brief yet marvelous conversation in The Lord of the Rings, when Legolas and Gimli walk together through Minas Tirith and talk of the race of Men.
**
'We will come', said Imrahil; and they parted with courteous words.
'That is a fair lord and a great captain of men,' said Legolas. 'If Gondor has such men still in these days of fading, great must have been its glory in the days of its rising'.
'And doubtless the good stone-work is the older and was wrought in the first building,' said Gimli. 'It is ever so with the things that Men begin: there is a frost in Spring, or a blight in Summer, and they fail of their promise.'
'Yet seldom do they fail of their seed,' said Legolas. 'And that will lie in the dust and rot to spring up again in times and places unlooked-for. The deeds of Men will outlast us, Gimli.'
'And yet come to naught in the end but might-have-beens, I guess,' said the Dwarf.
'To that the Elves know not the answer,' said Legolas.
**
I have long regarded this as one of the most significant passages in the LotR; yet now I realize that while the exchange gives a correct understanding of Men as it seems from the perspectives of Elf and Dwarf - the Elf-Dwarf perspective is restricted to Men in this world.
Elves and Dwarfs have an existence in both life and after death that is - so far as they know - wholly of this world, this 'planet'. Their lives are therefore bound-up with the life of 'the earth'.
Tolkien links this to the great arts and crafts of these races. Elves and Dwarves can achieve higher standards of work than Men because they both care more about this world, are wholly invested-in this world; and the permanent link to this world means that their interest and commitment to their work does not fade.
Men are relatively much more fickle, easily distracted, more readily bored than either Elf or Dwarf; and therefore Men's work, even when it starts-out very well, is less invested-in and tends to decline. And ultimately this is because Men's souls leave this-world after death.
Knowing this innately, Men feel - and behave - like 'visitors' to the world. Visitors are not so much 'at home' as permanent residents.
For Tolkien's Men, and for us - this world does not feel like home, and is not enough.
Consequently, Men are less engaged with the world, and with their work - they do not take this-world as seriously as Elves and Dwarves - and for Men there is a tendency to become dissatisfied, to daydream and lose focus on the work at hand; and to aspire after something beyond the world...
To understand the perspective of Men, therefore, we must take into account Aragorn's words on his deathbed: "Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory."
For Men, but not for Tolkien's Elves and Dwarves, this mortal life is a phase and a preparation; and can be a temporary prelude to something greater and eternal.
Therefore Legolas and Gimli's understanding is incomplete, and they cannot comprehend the fate of Men as including something that lies beyond this-world.
Gimli seems to regard Men as 'merely' shorter lived, less serious and less skilful Dwarves! Legolas balances this with approval of Men's capacity to bounce-back after disaster defeat and to start over again - in a way that Elves - burdened by their long lives and accumulated memories - cannot.
Tolkien did not wish to make the fate of Men any plainer than the 'negative' statement that their souls left this world after death. At the time of LotR, the salvation brought by Jesus Christ was imagined to be a long way in the future; not known by revelation, yet perhaps vaguely intuited...
But Men such as Aragorn who trusted The One (Eru Illuvatar - the prime creator) already knew that there 'must be' some very good reason why Men died and their souls left this world; which was why mortality was called The One's Gift to Men.
Even the Valar could not take this form of death from Men; albeit afte the fall of Morgoth, the Valar extended the lives of Numenorean Men several-fold compared with their earlier ancestors.
Yet even this life extension - which was kindly intended, as a reward and to allow for greater (more Elvish, or Dwarf-like!) levels of skill and achievement in this world - backfired and led ultimately to Men of Numenor desiring the unending life-in-this-world of the Elves and Valar; and to their ultimate corruption and downfall.
Tolkien's lesson, overall, seems to be that Men are what they are - not second-rate elves or Dwarves! - and Men have their own distinctive destiny.
And 'what Men are' includes a perspective larger than that of Elves and Dwarves: a perspective that ought-to extend beyond the death of the body, and beyond the circles of this world.
This famous and stunning picture - The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, by John Martin - is in the collection of my local art gallery - the Laing, in Newcastle upon Tyne; so I have seen it several times 'IRL'.
It probably used to be difficult to imagine how such a situation as depicted could be an example of God's mercy for the people of the cities (rather than some idea of 'vengeance') and the world more generally; but I find now this destruction increasingly easy to understand as an act of mercy.
A society, a civilization, can get itself into such a terrible situation of value-inversion that its public, official, approved and legally-enforced morality becomes the opposite of truth and goodness. And at the same time many of its people are so hollowed-out by Godlessness that, far from resisting evil, they regard evil as something to boast about - and indeed feel great personal self-satisfaction by advertising their own de facto affiliation to powers of darkness.
The spiritual (let alone material) consequences of such a situation will be one of evil feeding upon itself and growing, such that the scale of evil escalates - with new horrors being continually discovered, only to be surpassed.
And there is no escape even in death; since the mass of people will die in despair, fear, resentment, pride or despair - consenting to, or actively desiring, appalling post-mortal situations for their souls (yet regarding these as desirable!).
God's mercy for such a civilization may take the form of a swift and decisive termination of this positive-feedback cycle of evil - swift... but with the end allowing just enough time for a suddenly dawning realization of truth to offer the best possible (although, unfortunately, still remote) chance of repentance.
I think it is important that we can at least understand how this may be so - such that if, or when, such a merciful situation ensues; we can realize what is happening, and act appropriately.
I often read secular, non-spiritual, analyses of what is going-on in the world - in particular the motivations of the global, national and large institutional leadership class; who are now Very Obviously destroying world civilization.
Such analysts exclude - by prior assumption - what I regard as the correct answer; which is that the underlying reason for the leadership class behaving the way they do, is that they are affiliated with the supernatural beings of purposive evil who oppose God: Satan, Lucifer, demons, devils... whatever you want to call them.
Of course, it is always possible to explain anything using any model... so long as one is not too fussy about incoherence, and is prepared to add incremental complexity to account for exceptions and contradictions. And when an 'explanation' becomes complex - it ceases to 'explain' and becomes impossible to refute...
Thus, by my criteria that the increasing harm being done to world civilization should be explicable on the basis of simple, coherent and commonsensical motives - none of the usual attributed motives stand-up.
My list of the major attributed motives for the upper classes 'destroying society' is - greed, psychopathy, incompetence and insanity. All are partly true, but none explain large and obvious features of our situation.
1. Greed. The ruling class are greedy - for money and power, primarily. But this does not explain why they are so aggressively - and on multiple fronts - destroying the world economy (including food and energy), trade and social cohesion.
Active civilizational destruction can be exploited for a short time, as a type of looting; but when one is already the wealthiest, most powerful class in history it does not make sense to kill the goose that is laying you so many golden eggs.
Active, strategic, repeated self-destruction (i.e. of their own sources of power and wealth) by the leadership class did not happen in historical civilizational collapses. Something extra is at work now.
2. Psychopathy. Psychopaths are people who lack empathy, are selfish and short-termist, and manipulate others for their own satisfaction.
Plenty of the ruling class are of that type - yet psychopathic rulers do the same to each other that they do to everyone else. Therefore a government of psychopaths must self-destruct with infighting.
Further, psychopaths do not not stick to long term plans. They will always put 'me, now' above the objectives - so strategies would be abandoned whenever expedient. Whenever we observe a long term, cumulative social trend - we should recognize that this cannot be explained by psychopathy.
3. Incompetence. Because gross incompetence among the ruling class has become so prevalent and is rapidly accelerating, it must contribute to ongoing civilizational destruction.
But incompetence leads to errors in many directions whereas the current civilizational destruction is all due to leftward 'errors', and over several generations.
Furthermore, there is no reason why incompetents should 'double-down' on their mistakes - even when this makes their own lives immediately harder - in the way that happens routinely nowadays.
No: incompetence is real and worsening, but like psychopathy it is not strategic.
4. Insanity. It seems quite common for analysts to attribute insanity to world leaders. Mostly, this is unthinking name-calling - because the attribution is combined with contradictory motives that would not coexist with insanity.
Nonetheless, so increasingly bizarre, contradictory to common sense, obviously harmful and self-destructive are the behaviours of the leadership class, that they are often called insane: as if the individuals concerned were in the grip of false and impossible private delusions, hearing mad voices prompting weird actions, and/or experiencing disjointed and distorted thinking processes. The insane lack 'insight' into their own insanity, and are incapable of 'reality testing' their ideas - which also seems to fit.
The transagenda is probably the strongest evidence for insanity among leaders; because such an obviously-false and destructive set of ideas has never been seen before - yet is already a worldwide, officially/ legally mandatory, mass media promoted, bureaucratically-enforced set of rules and mores; and the 'insanity' continues to increase month by month.
But while insanity does potentially supply a measure of long-term consistency of motivation - thus of strategic, directional change - genuine and motivating insanity is not a large-scale and coherent group phenomenon, nor does it spread widely and rapidly.
Insanity further lacks the self-promoting/ other- manipulating and other-exploiting aspects that are so prevalent in the ruling class.
Therefore, assuming one believes in the reality of the demonic; the affiliation of the leadership class to the interests of personal, purposive, evil-beings - seems like the simplest, most common-sensical, coherent and predictively-valid of the explanatory models available.
Note added: To summarize the above argument; it is hard to explain what is going-on on the basis of human motivations, but easy to explain it on the basis of demonic motivations (assuming one knows something about what these are).
Indeed, the most coherent alternative 'master-hypothesis' to demonic affiliation is probably one or another version of the idea that the ruling classes are (to a greater or lesser extent) literal aliens.
To attribute control to aliens has the advantage of explaining why the ruling classes are acting strategically against their own interests - and indeed against their own survival.
To my mind; the alien hypothesis is, at root, mostly a speculative and secularized version of the reality of demons. But the main difference is that demons seek the damnation of souls; while the posited aliens seem to have attributed to them the same kind of motivations as human rulers - greed, psychopathy, incompetence, or the 'insanity-equivalent' of being alien and therefore weird.
Today we were eating a packed lunch in Northumberland while listening to Test Match Special on BBC Radio Four Medium Wave - as England closed-in on a famous victory over New Zealand, chasing the unlikely total of 270-plus in the last innings - when, as usual, it was interrupted at 12 midday by that ancient British institution: The Shipping Forecast.
This was read by a continuity announcer called Neil Nunes who has an even-deeper bass, more velvety-textured, voice than Morgan Freeman; which I thought readers might enjoy sampling:
Luckily, we got back to the cricketing action just in time to hear Joe Root hit the winning runs...
Note: Nunes is a pretty well-known voice on UK radio - but I had not heard him reading TSF before; and his rumbling, rolling pronunciation of (visibility) Goood was quite astonishing.
If Easter is about the end, or goal, of everlasting life; then Pentecost is about the primary means to that end - in that sense, today is probably the second-most-important Christian celebration.
And in the Fourth Gospel the main purposes of this contact with the Holy Ghost are knowledge ("he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you"); and 'comfort' (joy and encouragement) - such that the Holy Ghost's synonym is The Comforter.
Jesus addressed these remarks to his disciples only; but I assume they now apply to all Christians. At the time of Jesus's address, the disciples were the only Christians, the only ones who believed and loved Jesus, knew what he promised, and would seek out contact with Jesus's spirit. But since then, knowledge and comfort by contact with the Holy Ghost is for anyone who seeks it in that same loving spirit.
What about knowledge of "all things"? At the very least, this refers to all things necessary to salvation and theosis (e.g. whatever is necessary to discernment, repentance, and to learn life's spiritual lessons). But it may means "all" in a more extensive sense - of all that we need to know and would benefit us; and that we are capable of knowing.
To me, this emphasizes that the constraint on our capacity to benefit from the Holy Ghost is mainly that we seek him in faith and with trust, for the right reasons, asking the right questions - and then we will receive both comfort and knowledge.
The difficulty is, of course (as anyone who has tried will know) disentangling our thinking from the distraction and distortions of external interference, and from the short-termist and self-gratifying desires of our mortal selves.
In other words; the guidance and comfort of the Holy Ghost is designed and intended to assist our passage through this mortal life and aiming at resurrected, Heavenly life eternal.
Therefore, when the Holy Ghost is sought for other purposes - he will probably not be available, and is not likely to be helpful!
We can see that our access to guidance and comfort from the Holy Ghost has an only-indirect relationship to whether we regard ourselves as A Christian or are members of a self-identified Christian Church; and are instead essentially more to do with our purposes in life.
Any person, in principle - of any place or time, religion or spirituality - can and will be able to know from the Holy Ghost directly, whatever he needs to know about Jesus Christ, Heaven, and the purpose of his own life. And this regardless of availability of Scripture, priests, or any other form of infrastructure.
The Holy Ghost is therefore what makes Christianity potentially universal and independent of society, civilization and (ultimately) of all personal circumstances.
To recap: I believe that Rudolf Steiner was correct a century ago when he said that the characteristic spiritual phenomenon of this age was that the power of thinking has been enhanced, to the point that Men tend to become after death what Men think-they-are during life.
This is why the prime strategy of purposive-evil has since become totalitarian - in other words, demonic evil being are engaged in vast-scale attempts to control Men's thinking.
At first (with the USSR, and other 20th century leftist dictatorships) this was mainly by physical coercion, restriction and censorship; more recently, it has been by flooding human minds with addictively-engineered mass and social media.
Thus, Modern Men have (for the first time in history) the power, consciously and by choice, to think-themselves towards the realm of spiritual beings, to communicate with 'the dead', to recognize life and purpose in the world, to appreciate divine providence at work in their own lives... and so forth.
Yet, instead, Modern Man chooses to think the universe as purposeless, meaningless, dead and wholly material - of himself as (merely) an animal whose life as annihilated by death; and by-thinking, makes-this-so (partially so in mortal life, wholly so after mortal death).
The nature of thinking in these times is superficial, shallow - and excluding of our real and divine self.
Our 21st century thinking is put-into-us from external sources, and the 'data' is processed by concepts that are also inserted and sustained by inputs.
Modern Man's thinking is like a mirror of the external world of mass media and bureaucracy - and his social interactions overwhelmingly consist of the same content and concepts. Who controls The System of media and bureaucracy, also controls Men's thinking...
Our global totalitarian System therefore includes Modern Men; and by his thinking Modern contributes to the sustenance and growth of The System.
Our escape from this situation can only lie outside of The System.
Some advocate escape by Not-thinking - but this is attempting to go-against the irreversible direction of Man's divinely ordained evolutionary development which has given our thinking this enhanced power. It will not work, and trying Not to think will do us harm by failing to recognize or oppose The System and its purposive evil.
The answer is not to 'stop thinking', nor to weaken thinking's power; but to redirect thinking towards God and the currently-excluded world of spirits.
(Indeed, our destiny (that direction hoped-for by God) is towards even-greater strengthening of thinking; so long as that thinking is - to the best of our ability, repenting the inevitable failures - aligned with God's creative methods and purpose.)
What is needed is a different kind of thinking; a thinking that comes from within - and comes from our real and divine self: a primary thinking.
But what are its characteristics?
Negatively, we can say that primary thinking is word-less - it is in this sense a 'pure' thinking.
It is intuition - the bottom line of knowing; therefore is not explicable in terms of its causes: primary thinking arises-from the real-divine self, as an expression of that self - it is not caused by other factors (else it would not be primary).
Free will comes after primary thinking. First comes the primary thought - then our consciousness recognizes, evaluates, decides...
And it is important to be clear that primary thinking is - or seems - slow and simple.
Therefore, if we are busy, plugging-into media whenever 'boredom' threatens, working all the time, socializing in every spare moment... if we fill our time/ minds with inputs... then our thinking will necessarily be externally-dictated, it will be System thinking, it will be net-evil.
We will be thinking evil, and desiring evil for our-selves; and (sooner or later) our thinking will transform us into that which we think.
Only if we make space and reduce external inputs and 'noise' may we become aware of our primary thinking.
This cannot be hurried - and 'cannot' means it can't. Primary thinking is incompatible with an 'efficient' life.
Further; if we seek answers - we need to realize that we are almost certainly asking the wrong questions. Discovering and framing the problem correctly is a slow, deliberate process that cannot be rushed. If we really want Good answers - we must do what is necessary to discover them.
Thus, primary thinking is something that only happens to modern Man by deliberate choice, by wanting and making it a priority.
If a typical Modern Man does not make the effort, does not make the needful sacrifices - if he continues to be busy, compulsively interactive; if he fills his quiet and solitary time with stimulation (or sleep)... then he may never do any primary thinking - may live always in a passive and unconscious way, a mere circuit of The System.
Primary thinking should be our priority. It is always going-on - but is nearly-always ignored, buried beneath the deluge of incoming stimuli, and indeed unfindable so long as that external stimulation continues.
Therefore, if we want to escape The System which is filling out thoughts in order to manipulate, torment, and ultimately damn us; we absolutelyneed to make our life-situation conducive to primary thinking.
Which means to accept the necessary conditions of relative slowness and simplicity; and to become conscious of that pure and wordless clarity of knowing that can (and should) bring us a sureness, a conviction of truth, a sense of solidity in reality - and that we may consciously choose to adopt as the basis of a good life.
You may have noticed (if you have noticed anything since 2020!) that evil nearly-always wants to take a round-about and deniable route to its desired outcomes.
This can get pretty complex - especially when (as I assume) different kinds of demons are engaged in misleading each-other.
Thus - the Climate Change scam/lie is mostly about the bureaucratic totalitarian ("Ahrimanic") demons using CO2 (trade mark Gas-of-Life) as a rationale for the worldwide surveillance, monitoring and control of humankind - partly by means of creating a much smaller world economy that is susceptible of such micro-management.
But the demons of destruction ("Sorathic") approve this scheme because (in destroying 'non-sustainable' practices) it will grossly shrink and cripple the world economy; and inevitably will cause the Giga-death of billions of the masses by starvation (amplified by disease and violence).
The totalitarian demons thus used the Fire Nation invasion as a (more-or-less) plausible excuse to accelerate their 'Green Energy' programme by inflicting severe oil-starving and trade-sabotaging 'sanctions' on their own nations (under the pretense that this would harm the Fire Nation!... ROFL).
(Some of the stupider bureaucrats seem also to have believed that these 'sanctions', plus exclusion of leaders from the international elite club of demon-possessed snakes and zombies; would rapidly bring the militarily and raw-material mighty Fire Nation to its knees and under control of the Global Establishment; preparatory to doing the same - sometime down the line - to the productive and populous Earth Nation.)
You can see the cleavage opening between the waning totalitarian-demons and the waxing destroyers; in that (after only three months!) the totalitarians have suddenly realized that the economic-trade collapse wrought by the climate-emergency-inspired oil-sanctions will very quickly and completely disable, then destroy, the complex surveillance-monitoring-control capability of the bureaucratic states...
(With the end of Agenda 2030/ Great Reset and all those other grandiose globalist strategies.)
But why the roundabout route, why bother with deniability?
Partly, because people may react-against and fight overt evil. Albeit, the Godless masses are now so incapable of thought and addicted to distraction - and the intellectual classes so inverted in their values - that they might well go-along - enthusiastically! - with explicit plans for their own annihilation; as with population replacement and enslavement to 'the other' under the diversity ideal.
But mainly because the demons want us to desire our own enslavement and/or destruction.
All the evil that is done to us - up to and including starvation, disease, violence, and death - needs to be regarded by the victims as deserved, "for our own good", for the greater good; or for some other kind of abstractly 'virtuous' reason such as the QWERTY-trans/ Green/ healthist/ feminist or other leftist ideology (now widely advocated as having transcended God, and the need for God).
But, because God is merciful and desires that we are saved; only by Men desiring their own damnation - or, at the extreme of resentment, suffering and fear, by despairing and regarding God the creator as an evil tormentor... Only thus can our death be made an effective route to damnation and Hell.
By contrast; if most people were to notice, acknowledge and understand what is going-on behind the lies, deceptions and deniability - then this insight into evil will lead to an increased likelihood of salvation after death; and also a higher likelihood of people learning and developing spiritually during this mortal life.
This is what the Beings of purposive evil seek to avoid by pursuing deliberately bad outcomes by roundabout, deniable and plausibly-'virtuous' roundabout routes
Therefore, those who remain unconscious, passive, and who refuse to see evil - actually bring down suffering upon themselves.
The demons know that the mass of self-blinded folk will never blame the guilty, and will instead seek well-meaning excuses for the result of Satanic motivations.
The more such people suffer and despair - the more assured is their damnation.
And, contrariwise; our best possible spiritual defense against the domination by evil Beings; is to be alert, aware and honest - and strive always, wholeheartedly, to understand the truth behind the deceptions.
Yesterday there was (apparently) a 'platinum' Jubilee which was intended to celebrate 70 years since Queen Elizabeth was crowned.
This elicited what strikes me as distinctly tepid (mostly top-down, institutionally-led) celebrations - a half-hearted affair; at least compared with what I recall from the 'silver' (25th) Jubilee of 1977.
And rightly so.
Queen Elizabeth has been about a mediocre a monarch as humanly possible; which - in times as we have experienced over the past 70 years, and given that her primary role ought to be as Head of the Church of England; "defender of the faith" - makes her a Bad, because indifferent, Queen.
She has presided-over, facilitated, and done absolutely-zero to prevent - the extreme corruption and near-annihilation of the third-largest Christian church in the world.
The monarch has even yielded the power to appoint archbishops and senior bishops to... The Prime Minister!
Taken together, The Royal Family have themselves been supreme exemplars of much that is worst in modern life - especially in terms of commercialization, greed, vanity, degradation of position, conformity to leftism, sexual infidelity and perversion.
The Queen never 'spoke-out' against any of the horrendous laws or political principles that have been inflicted on her subjects; she never publicly defended English or UK national sovereignty; she never used her (in theory, extensive) 'veto' powers to deter or block the worst evils and the most harmful appointments.
She passively went-along-with all that was worst in the world.
Against that litany of neglect and self-interest; we are assured that Elizabeth (unlike any others in her family) is privately a devout Christian. If so: well and good, and the least we ought-to expect from a major Christian church leader. But the Queen is a public personage.
But then after all, the Queen is a Norman; a member of that alien class that has (mostly) ruled England (later Scotland and Wales) for a millennium.
In those many hundreds of years of misrule and exploitation, there have been a bare handful of Good monarchs - and none to match the Saxon Alfred.
Instead; there has been a near-continuous procession of mediocrities; and selfish, spiteful, lustful, aggressive, self-indulgent and/or outright psychopathic individuals - nearly-always prepared to sacrifice their people to their ambitions and pleasure, and their nation to their affiliation to power elites.
So long as England (and nowadays, the world) is plagued by the globalist, incompletely-human, Norman-derived Upper Classes; the honest Englishman will seldom have good reason to celebrate the rule of any monarch.
Ingrained habits of thinking, conceptualizing, interpreting... these are the proximate, immediate, front-line agents of materialism.
It is these habits that ensure we do not even notice the many 'spiritual phenomena' that flow-past-us in our everyday lives; it is these habits that keep us locked (passive and alienated) in a prison of dead, accidental 'happenings to us' - events which mean nothing, and are going nowhere.
Of course, here-and-now, a meaningless life is usually underpinned by the metaphysical assumptions that sustain materialism: e.g. that the universe just happened without creative purpose, that 'dead' matter came first in history and 'consciousness' evolved from it, that the material is objective and the spiritual subjective products of Men's thinking, that thinking is a brain activity - cut off from the rest of the world...
Yet, even when the metaphysical assumptions are of God, creation and the primacy of the spiritual over the material - as is the case for many religious people; these proximate materialist assumptions usually remain operative...
Such that many devout Christians actually experience most of the world as caused by factors such as random chance, 'luck', accidents and errors, abstract socio-political systems, and humanly-motivated wickedness.
The idea that the 'mundane' events of My everyday life (at work, in the streets, social relationships, dealing with bureaucracies) are actually manifestations of divine causes and purposes - the idea that 'every little thing' in life can and should be understood spiritually - such notions tends to strike thoughtful Christians as simple-minded, self-serving; or even paranoid or crazy...
Modern Christians have developed automatic psychological processes that will spontaneously 'explain' the events of life using mainstream materialist concepts (vaguely...) derived from sciences such as physics, chemistry, natural selection, psychology.
And as some combination of rigid causal determinism with random and undirected chance.
In spiritual terms; people don't just explain their everyday experiences - they explain-away their significance. They habitually (without choice, without awareness) reduce all that seems striking, important, portentous, numinous of our lives into one or another hypothesis of insignificance.
Thus, we look with wonder and joy at something in the natural world - a tree, cat, landscape, baby - and the apparent spiritual significance our emotion is automatically explained-away (whether in broad brush terms, or by a theory) as wishful thinking, or a consequence of evolution, or some random combination of impersonal causes.
Something happens in our lives, or the lives of those we love, or in the national life - and we merely regard it as an accident, good or bad luck, or duet to the incompetence or wickedness of Men...
In the end; for many people the 'deepest' type of importance anything can have is 'merely' related to our personal emotional response. X is good because it makes me happy or give pleasure; but Y is evil because it makes me sad, angry or ashamed.
(...Or, if we pride ourselves on our altruism - because we suppose that X or Y has this kind of emotional effect of some person or group about whom we are 'concerned'.)
Indeed, by these habits we can (and do, all the time) effortlessly and automatically explain-away everything and anything that has or even could happen to us.
To a remarkable degree Modern Men have become processing-machines for stripping all significance, beauty, interest - and spiritual significance - from Life!
But suppose for a moment that this reality is the creation of a God whose children we are, and who is concerned with the eternal well-being of every one of us...
Does it not seem certain that many of the things that we experience - that 'happen to us' - are in fact communications from God?
That life is full of meaningful experiences from-which we are supposed to learn?
So, on the one hand we have these processing-habits that are reducing Life to a situation of temporary materialistic accident; on the other, we have God continually-shaping our personal life and circumstances in order to teach us, to give useful experiences.
The problem is, it seems, mostly/ overall with us: with you and me.
The problem is our failure to apprehend the meaningful communications all around us and inside us.
But what - exactly - are the divinely-intended and meaningful communications among the 'infinite' number of happenings are are in this world; what are the relevant units of meaning among all the vast possible ways of dividing-up reality...
Is it that landscape, or the oak tree, or a particular leaf that is intended to communicate? And is it our emotional, intellectual or physical response to it which is significant?
In principle the possibilities are limitless - and finding our personal divine communications among those which have other functions resembles seeking a needle in a haystack...
Impossible... except that we our-selves have the innate wherewithal to discover and interpret exactly the communications that God is making.
We each have a 'real-self' of divine and eternal origin and nature; albeit this may be feeble, or buried beneath layers of false selves - and we may have made many choices for-evil that have compounded to distort our perspective and understanding.
Nonetheless; there is a real-self; and it can, in principle, be located and activated - if we thus strive.
In conclusion; we need to have true ultimate and 'metaphysical' explanations of the world - or else our materialistic ideology will undermine and erode to nothingness the significance of divine phenomena. That way lies the alienation, resentment, fear, and self-damning despair; which so characterize these times.
But, in addition to 'good metaphysics', we need to address the problem of habitual materialism of processing - which renders our experienced life-in-practice, alienated and meaningless.
We could, we can - when sufficiently aware of the barriers - know this world for the personal and relevant creation it truly is.
And the first and necessary step is to become aware; to be conscious of the way our socially-inculcated and institutionally-enforced reductionism is (moment-by-moment) sabotaging our knowledge of God's attempted communications.
When I wrote recently about the relationship between evil and incompetence, how evil is necessarily incompetent in proportion to evil-ness (except at destruction); I forgot to mention a very important consequence.
Too many clever and well-informed people are so aware of the incompetence of the Global Establishment that they regard incompetence as a sufficient explanation for the evil.
In other words; they focus so much upon the incompetence of the ruling class - the people who are running the global organizations, national governments, major financial institutions, and all large social institutions (and, don't get me wrong - these people really are staggeringly incompetent!); that they fail to notice that behind all the surface chaos and proximate wreckage - there are deep and ultimate evil motives.
These evil motives are what makes the incompetence work in one (i.e. evil) direction, continuing over many decades; the underlying evil-directedness is what enables the destructiveness of mainstream leftism to be sustained and purposive even across several human generations.
The evil is what prevents incompetence from being addressed - or even noticed! And what pursues policies that amplify the presence and power of incompetence, instead of attempting to remedy it. The evil is what praises and promotes wicked policies and bad outcomes as virtuous; vilifies goodness as a 'fascism'.
So - yes incompetence; but doubleplusyes deliberately evil motivations!
All my major spiritual mentors communicate with me via books, and most of them are dead. Many of them are included in the lineage of Romantic Christians.
An advantage of this arrangement is that it is easier to discern and filter the intentions, words and ideas of a dead Mentor, as compared with a real-life Master - for whom it often seems to be a case of 'all or nothing'; full compliance and obedience, or else expulsion.
Yet what we want to do, and ought to do - if our relationship with the dead is to be a living one - is to engage actively with their thought.
But engagement goes through phases...
At first, there usually needs to be an 'absorptive' period of trusting immersion.
I need to read an author essentially uncritically, on the 'working hypothesis' that he was right - if I am to to develop the capacity to see things from his perspective, and to understand him 'from the inside'.
This is an exercise in empathy, in sympathetic resonance - and could be spiritually harmful, if the author was evil.
So, I think we ought not (as a rule) deliberately to engage deeply with someone who we believe, or seriously expect, to have evil intent or affiliations - because to do this we must ourselves become evil... at least temporarily.
To follow this advice means we must accept that we will not always truly (i.e. empathically) understand the perspective of evil. So be it - it is not necessary to understand evil to eschew it and hold to good.
But, of course, we may have experienced this evil ourselves in the past, and repented. This is the potential value of Christian converts, and repentant sinners generally - in particular respects they may have a deeper, because personally experienced, understanding of evil.
For instance, I think that I probably have a deeper and more accurate understanding of atheist ways-of-thinking than do many cradle Christians; because I was that way myself for many decades, and thought critically about atheism and Christianity considerably - while still an atheist. And this understanding has its uses.
That aside; in my experience after the initial phase of passive and largely un-critical absorption which leads to understanding but not towards truth; a second discerning phase of active engagement with a mentor invariably involves evaluation, selection, different emphasis, extrapolation - and contradiction.
The end result may be that I end up disagreeing with most of what a mentor has said - regarding him as having made fundamental errors; while yet acknowledging his importance in bringing me to certain key and vital ideas.
Here is a problem with the societies and organizations - or even friendship groups - that grow-up around influential spiritual teachers; because these typically do not get beyond the first phase of passive and un-critical absorption; and resist approaching the Master's work with critical discernment.
As an example, I regard Rudolf Steiner as an important spiritual mentor - and I continue to engage actively with his work. Yet I regard most of what Steiner said and wrote as wrong; and therefore I find the Anthroposophical Society which he founded - and via which Steiner's legacy has been almost wholly preserved and disseminated in the century since his death - to be... mostly wrong.
Furthermore, I find the AS attitude to Steiner to be idolatrous - which has the effect that the AS membership live and think in a way almost the opposite of what Steiner advocated in his deepest and (to me) most significant writings.
Because Anthroposophists regard Steiner as de factoinerrant; the time and effort expended on absorbing the massive quantity of (I would say) his superficial and false quasi-factual statements concerning every topic under the sun (and elsewhere); utterly overwhelm and bury any possibility of understanding and attempting to live in accordance with Steiner's much fewer - but core, deep and harder-to comprehend - spiritually and philosophically vital teachings.
But much the same attitude to mentors applies to Christianity - or should; taking into account that Christianity is the most fundamental understanding, upon which all others depend.
Just as the only way to relate positively and helpfully to Rudolf Steiner is to eschew the authority of the Anthroposophical Society and explore his thought independently and individually; an analogous attitude ought to apply to Christianity if our engagement is to be alive and active.
It seems likely that in the past most (if not all) Christians remained in the state or phase of absorptive, passive and immersive engagement with Christianity via whatever Church was dominant in their place of residence.
But here and now, as the churches are already, and increasingly, corrupt and self-contradictory; the challenge is that simply in order to remain a Christian - we need to move into the second phase of discerning engagement with our faith.
That is: Christians should be prepared to enter the second and discerning phase of engagement; in which active engagement may lead to testing for coherence, selection, different emphases, extrapolations and contradictions of ideas that previously were absorbed passively and in-a-lump.
If such an engagement is to be positive (and Christian), it must be well-motivated - it needs to be rooted in honesty and the desire for truth and goodness (and not, therefore, an excuse for self-gratification, nor a rationalization of wishful-thinking).
Yes, it is hazardous to approach Christianity in a discerning fashion: and yes, the personal motivations may be corrupt, hence corrupting.
But the worldwide mass apostasy especially evident since 2020; and the obvious corruption of self-identified Christian church leaders and officials (and of many church-active laity) - those who expend their primary efforts in pursuit of leftist ideology and support of the global totalitarian projects - is equally clear.
There is no valid spiritual path without hazard.
It is not just 'hazardous', but spiritually lethal, to maintain 'phase one' - absorptive and accepting relationships with a Church (or other claimed spiritual authority).
As of 2022; the major Christian Churches are large bureaucracies, which - to survive - must sin (really sin) again and again, strategically and systematically.
Churches must sin at least by dishonesty - that is by lies, distortions, expedient omissions - and also (which is worse) by deliberate misleading: by saying one thing in a legalistic sense, but intending that it be misunderstood by the laity and/or mass media.
The Christian Churches must sin to survive; because they are necessarily engaged with the demon-affiliated, global evil totalitarian System by multiple links...
Churches are employers and must comply with employment law, they are involved with the tax system and must comply with these regulations, they engage in buying and selling and must satisfy accountancy rules, charities and must satisfy the demands of these authorities, they obey the legal system and comply with police (for instance with respect to the birdemic)... and in many, many other ways each Church are a-part-of The System.
All these rules, laws, regulations, practices are - by now - deeply imbued with the evil, incoherent, dishonest (and Satanically-allied) practices of the Establishment.
The System is evil - by intent and motivation - the Churches are part of The System; thus the Churches are components of strategic evil.
Therefore, the Churches - presumably via their leaders - absolutely need to repent for their many sins (being committed daily, hourly, continuously) that enable them to continue to exist.
Yet they do not repent, indeed they utterly ignore such sins t0 the point that leaders and laity alike seem aware that they even are sins.
Instead, all the major Christian Churches endorse one or several of the leftist Litmus test issues by which The System pursues its evil agenda.
Instead the Churches officially, and by their leaders' statements, 'apologize' and supposedly-repent-for fake non-sins such as 'racism - as defined in 2022; and for past sins committed by other people - and they do so in a way that is prideful and (again) dishonest.
(As always, lies breed lies, sin compounds...)
The major Christian Churches are (as organizations, as people) thus - systematically, not accidentally - in a state of always-worsening (because neglected), unacknowledged, denied hence un-repented sin.
And sin feeds-upon sin...
No wonder that the Christian Churches are as-they-are!
That Jesus died was necessary - he was a mortal Man. Like you and me; Jesus could only become immortal via the portals of biological death: mortal death is necessary to immortal resurrection.
(I cannot explain by what mechanism this is so, but it apparently is a constraint of our created reality.)
But Jesus was fully divine in his powers before he died - we know this because he was a divine creator, able to create divinely. That is the significance of the resurrection of Lazarus in particular, but also some others of the other miracles; these demonstrate that Jesus was a primary creator.
Being on the one hand a mortal Man, but on the other hand having this divine creative power, meant that although must die sooner-or-later, he could (in principle) often elude death here-and-now.
And there are examples in the Fourth Gospel when Jesus does this - for instance John 8:59 "Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them, and so passed by."
So, sometimes - either by his behaviour, or through miraculous means, Jesus chose to delay his own death. This happened many times through the three years of his ministry, between the baptism by John and the death by crucifixion - during which Jesus was fully-divine, and had miraculous powers - but also, in general terms, he made decisions that kept him alive.
But at a certain point, Jesus stopped doing this, let events take their course, and ultimately allowed himself to be crucified.
Ordinary mortal people may be called-upon to make a similar decision. After spending perhaps many decades trying to stay alive, keep healthy, extend life - a time may come when it is wrong to fight death and right to allow oneself to die... to allow events take their fatal course.
How did Jesus know, how can we know, when it is right to allow ourselves to die?
After all, for Jesus, he was still young - just thirty-three - and presumably could have had many more years to preach and teach; and personally to lead the development of a church, built according to correct principles (if that was what he wanted).
Why then did he die at 33? The implicit reason given in the Fourth Gospel is that Jesus had completed his ministry with the resurrection of Lazarus.
It is a further question why it was necessary for Jesus to raise Lazarus. Many Christians believe that this miracle was not a resurrection; however, I believe that it was (and that we are told this in in the Fourth Gospel).
Therefore, apparently, it was necessary for Jesus personally to resurrect Lazarus in order that he would (after death and ascension) be able to offer the same to all Men. And this was precisely what Jesus came to do: offer resurrection to all Men.
A difference was that Lazarus was resurrected into his own corpse, and into this mortal earth. This was clearly a very important demonstration and teaching - but its cosmic significance was that Lazarus soon afterwards wrote the Fourth Gospel; which is our primary and most authoritative source on Jesus's mission and teaching.
(Presumably, this interpretation of Lazarus's resurrection suggests; the resulting Fourth Gospel is more than just another historical text, with the inevitable errors and deficits of transmission, copying, tampering and translating through many centuries. Presumably there exists the possibility of its being 'received' in a qualitatively special fashion - by the assistance of the Holy Ghost. So that its message may be directly-known in a way that transcends error and distortion... Such an explanation makes sense of the distinctive nature of Lazarus's resurrection.)
But, to return to the original question of "why did Jesus die when he did?" - this can now be understood as a more important question than the usual one of "why was Jesus crucified?"
It was necessary that Jesus died (that he allowed himself to die) when he did, but the method of death was only secondarily important.
In the Fourth Gospel we can read of Jesus meditating, praying, consulting with his Father about whether this was the 'time to die' (or, presumably, whether there was more he needed to do first) - and being assured that Now was the time.
To this, Jesus needed voluntarily to assent. He might in theory have resisted death for many decades longer, and done all sorts of other things... but Jesus agreed to allow death to happen Now, because his real earthly-work was finished; and it was time for his Heavenly work (as the Holy Ghost) to commence.
