Jung versus Steiner

It is striking that two of the most influential spiritual writers (and movement-leaders) of the early twentieth century - CG Jung and Rudolf Steiner - both lived in Switzerland at the same time, and not far apart - and saying many of the same things...

Yet, apparently (from what little was written or recorded) the two men cordially disliked and rejected one another. 

This mutual dislike is not difficult to understand; but it is unfortunate - especially for Jung; because Steiner's work contained the answer to Jung's insoluble problem of how to 'integrate' Modern Man, and to overcome his alienation. 

Jung was far more prestigious a person - by birth and education, and concerned to maintain his upper class social status. To him, Steiner must have appeared as what he mostly was (from the bulk of his writings and lectures); just another Theosophist; an upstart cultist, locked-into what Jung frequently described the typical errors of the Theosophical Society; that is, a false emphasis that led to modern Westerners, superficially and selectively, trying to copy knowledge and practices from a promiscuous brew of 'Eastern' religion and philosophy. 

Such an attitude from Jung would, I don't doubt, strike Steiner as both ignorant and snobbish; Steiner being older and from a working class Austrian background.  

Also Steiner was, by nature, a 'right man' who would never acknowledge that his ideas had changed or that he ever made an error - and so he never repudiated his usage of the vast body of standard, mainstream Theosophical Society-derived 'information' (identical with, and presumably derived from, Madame Blavatsky, and her successors) about Man and Cosmology, that quantitatively dominate Steiner's public discourses. 

Steiner, indeed, reacted very badly to any criticism, including thoughtful, informed and sympathetic critiques; almost never refuting it directly but instead engaging in irrelevant and blistering ad hominem rants to his loyal followers! Whereas Jung, despite being far moodier, more selfish and bad-tempered than Steiner in his personal relationships, displayed a kind of sublime indifference to his critics.

Yet, buried within this mass of errors, and arbitrary (and implausible) assertions concerning medicine, education, agriculture, and anything else that anybody asked him about - Steiner contains the insight which could have made coherent sense from Jung's almost random, and contradictory, insights.  

Steiner's early books that led to The Philosophy of Freedom, and his later remarks derived from these works - including some of his cultural and prophetic insights concerning the 'destiny' of modern Man and what would happen if this destiny was rejected, were exactly what Jung most needed to know. 

Jung - who lived with a sound mind until 1961, might even have found these ideas more lucidly expounded by Steiner's posthumous disciple Owen Barfield; e.g. in Romanticism comes of age (1944), or Saving the appearances (1957).  

The core problem that Jung needed to solve, and never did solve; was that his idea of an integrated and un-alienated Man was that of an earlier stage of human history, a child, a dreamer or a psychotic. This arose because Jung regarded a life dominated by the mythic collective unconscious as the ideal and answer. 

To solve this, Jug needed a true and sufficiently-complete set of basic, metaphysical assumptions; on which could be built practical advice. But Jung's metaphysics was incomplete.  

Jung's solution to modern Man' search for soul was therefore to engage deliberately with the collective unconscious, and to become conscious of its content; to seek there the unity and engagement that was lacking. 

This was correct as far as it went; but Jung's methods all involved an atavistic, regressive, sinking-down into the unconscious, and aiming to bring-back the findings. 

He advised seeking a half-way state between the modern consciousness and ancient un-consciousness; striving either to maintain awareness and memory during a descent towards dreams or psychosis; or else assembling an intermediate and symbolic discourse (or images, ideas etc.) to bridge between them. 

In Steiner/ Barfield terms, Jung only acknowledged Original Participation and the modern Consciousness Soul - but disregarded Final Participation. 

From Steiner/ Barfield's perspective; Jung was trying and failing, because it is not possible to reverse the direction of human developmental-evolution. It is not possible to return to something like the Classical-Medieval mindset; during which Man lived-in, and was satisfied-by, Public Systems of symbol, ritual, sacred text and picture mythic or legendary narrative, allegory and the like. 

Jung, in essence, was advocating that modern Man re-create (by acts of personal - and private - creativity) some such symbolic intermediary for himself; make his own 'private religion'. This is what Jung did himself, in his private notebooks, his sculptures and pictures. 

But Jung also stated that any such private spirituality nonetheless had universal significance; so long as it drew from the collective unconscious. 

What emerged was unsatisfactory - it alleviated to some partial and temporary degree the alienation and dis-integration of modern Man (i.e. it has symptomatic therapeutic value) - but the method was inadequate, just didn't work well enough. 

It did not suffice. 

Why? Because we cannot return with full consciousness and memory and control of our thoughts to the collective unconscious/ Original Participation. What Jung offered was - at best - an alternation between modern consciousness and a simulacrum of the more ancient mind - but not the actuality of the ancient mind. 

The intermediate state of active imagination was - in effect - a kind of lucid dreaming or dissociated semi-sleep state; and this state is both unstable ('metastable' tending either toward waking or sleep) and also insufficient as a solution to the problems of modern Man. 

It is trying to be simultaneously passive, spontaneous and-unconscious; and at the same time active, creative and conscious. These are opposite states - and can only be alternated or else 'averaged'.  

Hence Jung and Jungians can be observed to lack the hallmarks of wisdom, insight, discernment etc. which would characterize an integrated and unalienated person; and they lack the resources (or honesty) to explain this failure.    

Steiner/ Barfield's solution was a third state that Barfield termed Final Participation; in which integration and participation (i.e. escape from alienation) was attained in a new and qualitatively different kind of thinking*. 

This was conceptualized primarily as a learning experience; and the fullness and permanency of this state could be attained only in Heaven (or else after many further incarnations) - thereby explaining its own 'failure': i.e. why Final Participation could only be partial and temporary in this mortal life.  

Jung believed in a life after death, but never integrated this with his other ideas; which his why his ideas have been merely therapeutic - i.e. directed at making this mortal life less miserable and more fulfilling. 

Jung's concepts therefore underlie much of New Age spirituality - which operates at the level of consumption and lifestyle: a quantitative amplification of whatever ideology is already present (nearly-always mainstream leftist); but without the strength to have a qualitative impact; without providing a profound or powerful alternative and satisfying motivation for modern living. 

Therefore, I regard Jung as one of those sources that are harmful if pursued primarily: Jung will not lead anyone to The Truth. 

But, for those who have already grasped The Truth and who have a Romantic Christian attitude (ie. with personal intuitive discernment acknowledged as the basis of metaphysics); then Jung's work can be an exciting and valuable resource. Read selectively; Jung can even be seen as himself a proto-Romantic Christian. 

Jung's ideas are overall a mass of contradictions: wisdom and foolishness; insight and triviality; truth-seeking and self-serving dishonesty... 

But if approached in the properly critical spirit, we may discover there many helpful and inspiring formulations.  

*Note: By contrast, Jung's reports of his own experiences of the collective unconscious are perceptual. That is; Jung describes visions, conversations and dramatic scenarios between himself and persons or events. These have a 'hallucinatory' quality - i.e. they are subjective, private perceptions; outwith normal discourse and imperceptible to others. 

Further comment: If the reader is unclear about any of the terminology used above, I would advise doing a word/s search on this blog (search box located to the upper left corner of the opening screen) to get background or further explanation.  

Jung interview from 1959 - CG Jung at his best!

I thought I had already watched this interview, but if I really had then I had forgotten: it is excellent.

I have read a lot of Jung up to about eight years ago and even more (purportedly) about Jung - but this is the best and clearest and most impressive I have ever seen.

Reading Jung is mostly an exercise in boredom and frustration; and most of the books about him don't get him right, or focus on some of the many things wrong with the man and his life. In his writing he seems paralysed by the "Germanic Professorial" mode of defensive prose - so that nothing is ever said clearly because there is so much qualification that it amounts to obfuscation; and this sometimes reaches the point of dishonesty, where Jung is often deliberately misleading the reader about his own more 'outlandish' views.

Anyway, in this interview done near the end of Jung's long and vigorous life, Jung seems to have set-aside his self-defeating caution, and is very open and candid in his answers, despite using his second language - and reveals himself to be a theist, living in sure expectation of continued existence beyond mortal death, and indeed a mystical Christian of solid conviction (he says he knows, not 'believes' such things - something which is very hard to be sure of, in the writings).

The interview is interesting in its form. The interviewer (John Freeman - who was also a left-wing professional politician) comes across as a typically modernist and materialistic journalist - whose personal interest is more Freudian than Jungian (Freeman asks Jung Freudian questions about his childhood, and probes the relationship with Freud); but he listens respectfully and patiently to Jung's more dsitinctive and significant spiritual and religious discussions, and does not distort the final cut to suit his own prejudices.

The result is a vivid personal portrait - which made me recogise for the first time how impressive Jung was 'face to face' and verbally; and how this must have been the primary basis of his reputation; as was also the case for Coleridge, for example - or Charles Williams. How fortunate that we have this interview to show us what could otherwise only have been assumed about Jung - and how such an interview might have been to help us understand some geniuses of the more remote past, who gave their best in speaking rather than writing.

If you wish to try reading Jung, the only two things I could recommend are the spiritual autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections which was written from dictation by Aniela Jaffe; and another late piece: The Undiscovered Self.

Ultimately, I think that Jung did not succeed in solving the fundamental problems of modernity - either in theory or in practice. What he was advocating, in the search for meaning and purpose - amounted to an alternation between public life as a normal mainstream alienated modern 'official' consciousness; and regenerating, therapeutic interludes of something like the immersive consciousness (ie. Barfield's Original Participation) of childhood and tribal Man - including the visionary, divinatory and animistic life of those modes.

Jung did not - as did his older contemporary and Swiss neighbour Rudolf Steiner (or his younger contemporary Owen Barfield) perceive a way beyond this dichotomy. Nonetheless Jung provided an accurate 'diagnosis' and a partially-helpful therapy for the modern condition.

CG Jung - the psychopathic genius

*
CG Jung is unusual among geniuses, in that he was dishonest about his own work and its implications.

That he was a genius I think is correct; he made numerous discoveries and conceptual breakthroughs  - and he is an unseen but pervasive influence behind vast areas of modern culture including psychology, psychiatry, therapy and (especially) that vast and vague phenomenon called the New Age movement (almost everything about the New Age has a Jungian lineage - even when this is not generally known or acknowledged).

But that Jung was a thoroughly-dishonest and deceptive man is something equally undeniable. Jung was never plain and honest when that was inexpedient - Jung was not driven by a pure pursuit of truth; because truth was readily and repeatedly sacrificed when the consequences were unwanted by Jung.

He craved respectability as a Professor, psychiatrist, scholar, scientist - and would trim his published views to ensure this. He wanted wealth, status, admiration - and patients were charmed, strung-along and generally exploited to ensure this.

Jung wanted to be regarded as an unworldly sage - but worked to create an organization dedicated to his own self-promotion. He was a wholesale sexual seducer of his patients and trainees right into old age; and had a long-term live-in mistress who functioned as a second wife (while being unmentioned in his autobiography - he also used his personal magnetism to maintain a household of handmaidens to dote upon and serve him.

*

The point is that Jung's many compromises, deceptions, evasions, and lies are so consistently dedicated to his own comfort, convenience and gratification that the picture is one of a highly charming and dominant; but heartless, manipulative and selfish psychopath.

*

So far, Jung is the precursor of the modern intellectual - the 'tenured radical', the charismatic bureaucrat, the bourgeois bohemian, the alpha-male academic, the medical research project manager, the therapist-entrepreneur, the charity CEO, the self-help/ help-yourself guru, the sexual healer...

But this could be put aside as mere hypocrisy - and that is something of which we are all guilty (it would be hypocritical to pretend otherwise). But Jung's dishonesty went even deeper than that, to invade his primary achievement.

Because Jung's work is incoherent at the very deepest level - and this incoherence has afflicted his legacy. And this incoherence was not the result of confusion, but the result of dishonesty.

*

An example is the idea of synchronicity; which has become an extremely influential cultural idea - but which is deployed in a way that makes no sense. And this incoherence is not due to misunderstanding Jung, but comes directly from Jung's written contradictory accounts and evasions of the implications of his own insight.

Colin Wilson exposed this in his marvelously insightful short study: Lord of the Underworld: Jung and the twentieth century (1984); especially the chapter the Sage of Kusnacht, where Wilson goes through the writings on synchronicity with a fine toothed comb, and tries to pin down what Jung really believed, or meant - and comes up against a mass of obfuscation and self-refutation: of giving with one hand and taking back with the other.

Jung's last recorded words from his death bed seem appropriate: "Let's have a really good red wine tonight." The final statement of a man whose personal gifts were astonishingly great - but who consistently and successfully deployed them for his own comfort, convenience and glory.

*

Romanticism and the twin snares of CG Jung

Plenty of Romantics have got caught-up and lost in the toils of one or another of the snares left by CG Jung. 

My impression is that there was a major resurgence of the Romantic impulse between about 1954 and 1979 - which was the root of Existentialism, the Beats, Hippies, Neo-Pagans and the Counterculture in general.

I think initially there was a hope, a yearning, that modernity would be overwhelmed by a resurgence of what Alan Garner called The Old Magic. (This also drew-upon Robert Graves's White Goddess - which is another kind of snare.) 

When this just didn't happen, the counter-culture was disseminated, and modernity continued; there was a re-conceptualization in terms of Jung - and this was, pretty much, the transition to the multifaceted (and highly consumer-orientated) New Age, which still continues. 

The two snares of Jung are first the reduction of magic, the supernatural and the spiritual generally; to the psychological. And secondly the reduction of spirituality to therapy. 

Jung took all kinds of spiritual phenomena and re-explained them in terms of the psychological. For example, his last book took the phenomenon of Flying Saucers, and reduced them to a modern version of the same psychological phenomena that had previously caused sightings of fairies. Jung claimed that it was not a reduction, because he posited a new kind of psyche that was in between the objective and the subjective - a kind of objective subjectivity. 

This was perhaps related to the collective unconscious - which sounded exotic at first, but ended-up being a purportedly objective place, accessible by all people in certain half-awake/ half-asleep states of mind (active imagination).  

The deeper one goes into Jung, the more his world is revealed as just another branch of modernity. The exotic glamour of the subject matter becomes revealed as mundane symbolism - like Jung's paintings of mandalas - which strike me as excruciatingly dull!

The other snare of Jung followed-on. Since Jung turned out not to be an extra depth of living - and not to transform the person spiritually; Jung's ideas became reduced to a broad definition of therapy. 

Broader than the Analytic Psychology which was its root; the promise was a that if one adopted a Jungian perspective, there would be very general improvement about how one felt. This could be less suffering, more happiness, or (as with James Hillman - Jung's most eminent successor) a greater depth of apprehension, a more profound life. 

This got progressively diluted through the materialistic 1980s onwards; and became absorbed into the self-help, counselling and 'mindfulness' themes; which were rapidly bureaucratized. 

Jung was a red herring, a blind alley for the Romantic impulse. The problem was that while he addressed the important issues - he retained the this-worldly, atheistic, non-Christian context of mainstream materialistic discourse. His analysis was therefore intrinsically incapable of addressing the problems at a sufficiently deep level to solve them. 

Meanwhile; the proper way ahead was already available - deriving from Jung's rival and competitor of the early twentieth century in Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner; and elaborated by Owen Barfield. This was in the lineage of Romantic Christianity, which had begun in the late 1700s.

Yet, I cannot really blame the Romantics from missing the right answers - since, especially in the case of Steiner, they were buried in among a great deal of wrong and irrelevant material, and a personal guru-cult; where they still (pretty much) languish. 

 

Is life after death important? CG Jung's opinion

Jung in his shirmer phase - beside his mistress/ extra-wife Toni

Regular readers will know that I regard Christianity to be, in essence, Jesus's offer of resurrected eternal Heavenly life to those who follow him. Yet this is very far from being regarded as the core of Christianity. Indeed most Christians would disagree - both now and throughout the history of the Christian churches. 

The idea that we might want/ need/ expect eternal life after mortal death - especially first-and-foremost - is something that the modern mind sees as a bad thing; selfish, childish, indeed ridiculous. To the typical modern atheist-stoic; a desire or demand for life everlasting is seen as irrational; and a product of psychological deficiencies such as wishful thinking and/or cowardice. 

It is interesting to consider what CJ Jung - son of a Protestant Pastor; in late life probably a deist rather than theist, and not a Christian - had to say about life after death, writing in the middle 20th century and in old age. 

It is not that I wish we had a life after death. In fact, I would prefer not to foster such ideas. 

Still, I must state, to give reality its due, that, without my wishing and without my doing anything about it, thoughts of this nature move about within me. 

I can't say whether these thoughts are true or false, but I do know they are there, and can be given utterance, if I do not repress them out of some prejudice. Prejudice cripples and injures the full phenomenon of psychic life. And I know too little about psychic life to feel that I can set it right out of superior knowledge...

I lend an attentive ear to the strange myths of the psyche, and take a careful look at the varied events that come my way, regardless of whether or not they fit in with my theoretical postulates. Unfortunately, the mythic side of man is given short shrift nowadays. He can no longer create fables. As a result, a great deal escapes him; for it is important and salutary to speak also of incomprehensible things. 

Such talk is like the telling of a good ghost story, as we sit by the fireside and smoke a pipe. What the myths or stories about a life after death really mean, or what kind of reality lies behind them, we certainly do not know. 

We cannot tell whether they possess any validity beyond their indubitable value as anthropomorphic projections. Rather, we must hold clearly in mind that there is no possible way for us to attain certainty concerning things which pass our understanding.

From Memories, Dreams, and Reflections by CG Jung 

Jung seems confident that ideas concerning life after death are in the realm of anthropomorphic stories we tell-ourselves, and therefore cannot in principle be understood in terms of truth to reality. 

Nonetheless Jung feels that there is a psychological reality to life after death - and he personally cannot-help but regard an afterlife as something that will happen to him. 

Such a perspective seems only to have been a genuine possibility as a relatively brief transitional phase; possible only for those who were raised religious, became atheist in adolescence or young adulthood, then came to value psychological (or social) aspects of religion as helpful (or indeed necessary) for an integrated and fulfilling life. 

In considering what is objectively real and knowable; Jung's perspective makes the same assumptions and exclusions as natural science - therefore its conclusions are inevitable: and Christianity becomes nothing more than a potentially therapeutic fairy-tale - something that it may make us feel better, if we believe it. 

In a word: for Jung, as for many other modern people, religion is, at best, a palliative. 

He would have said that (for many people) it is "good to believe" - and by "good" he meant good for our health and happiness, here-and-now. 

This (I think) is what underlies the common assertion (something we heard a lot from Prince/ King Charles - for instance) that "faith" is a good thing; while atheism is (usually a mistake, because is makes many people ill, miserable, dysfunctional. 

Jung may argue that life after death is important; but its importance is confined to how we are feeling in life before death. 

Life after death exists as an idea, and its reality relates to the role that ideas have in human functioning. 

(For Jung, this included a collective unconscious that was part of - and accessible to - all humans, and extended through many generations. Yet the nature and value of ideas in the collective unconscious ultimately and inevitably cashed-out in term of human mortal lives; human happiness or misery, health, social functionality and the like.) 

Life after death therefore is excluded from any cosmic role; it cannot have anything to do about solving the fundamental problems of existence - the problem of evil, and the problems of entropy (disease, degeneration, death). 

Life after death by Jung's account can affect what we think about such matters; it is a matter of adjustment to immoveable realities - it is a therapeutic understanding of religion.

As I said, Jung did not, apparently, seriously identify himself as a Christian; but here are plenty of people who do self-identify as Christian and who have a closely similar understanding of life after death. 

Joseph Campbell (and CG Jung) and RUP (Residual Unresolved Positivism)

BILL MOYERS: Do you ever have the sense of… being helped by hidden hands? 

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time – namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. 

From The Power of Myth - interviews with Jospeh Campbell by Bill Moyers - book and PBS documentary, 1988.

Owen Barfield described a common phenomenon among spiritual people he named  RUP - Residual Unresolved Positivism. In essence, he meant that such people suppose that they have transcended materialism and become spiritual, but have not really done so. It is the difference between theory and practice, or between explicit belief and implicit habits - in theory they believe that spirit is primary but in practice they continue habitually to depend on materialist metaphysical explanations.

In the passage quoted above, Joseph Campbell reveals a failure to follow-through his beliefs to their conclusions. (I can confirm that this is true of the whole span of his writings, not just this particular passage). He describes how, when a person follows his Bliss (by which he means his deepest inner convictions - get translates the term from a Hindu doctrine of five 'sheaths' of the person - Bliss is the most fundamental sheath)... then Life will arrange-itself around the fulfilment of this need.

Campbell was known as a spiritual writer on the subject of mythology; but his bottom line explanations were derived and adapted from Carl Gustav Jung (e.g Campbell edited a popular anthology The Portable Jung, he attended conferences and met Jung and some of his early books were issued by Jung's publishing house).

For Jung, and for Campbell, spirituality and myth were ultimately a matter of psychology, and psychology was ultimately about human gratification during mortal life. The difference between Jung and other psychologists and psychiatrists is that the mainstream were aimed at therapy (alleviation of pathology) while Jung aimed at positive enhancement of a person's sense of meaning and purpose in Life... however, in the end this meaning-purpose were simply feelings.

For whatever reason, Jung and Campbell both stopped short of a religious metaphysical basis for their beliefs. So, in the passage quoted above, Campbell defensively refers to his belief as a 'superstition' even though he believed it and based his life upon it. He regarded living for Bliss as better than living for money or status, but could not justify this except in terms of making people feel better (overall and in the long term).

Campbell felt that a person living for and from their Bliss would experience meeting important people and having doors-open for their destiny - but presented this as an empirical observation, merely; and did not explain why or how this should happen - why, specifically, 'the world' should arrange-itself (in multiple extremely complex and interacting ways ) to enable a person to follow their Bliss, or destined 'track'...

One of Campbell's problems was a deeply rooted anti-Christianity, in reaction to his upbringing in a very literalistic, exclusive and hard-line (all-or-nothing) Irish Roman Catholicism. Yet if Campbell had responded to Christianity with the depth and flexibility he allowed for other religions, he might have seen that Bliss could coherently be regarded as God-within-us (God immanent). And Campbell might have seen that if indeed Life does arrange itself around the true destiny of an individual human being, then this implies a personal God of great power, who loves each person as an individual and intervenes in the world to help them follow their proper 'track'.

Much the same applies to Jung's concept of synchronicity - which is what Campbell is rephrasing here. If indeed reality arranges for individual people to have 'meaningful coincidences', then it also implies a personal God who is doing the immense job of arranging multiple factors, for the good of specific persons.

In the case of Jung and Campbell, I think we can see that their unresolved positivism is quite extreme - since they lack even a spiritual metaphysics; hence they both end-up making thoroughly materialist and this-worldly analyses and recommendations.

But for those of us who try-to live by a genuinely spiritual and Christian metaphysics, there is still a major problem of RUP - since we live in a world with a materialist and this-worldly metaphysics; and it is this modern world that socialises, trains, educates and entrains our habits of thinking.

In the end and under such circumstances; we all find that a thorough-going, 100-percent spiritual Christianity is impossible; and we can only manage a partial and intermittent consistency between our metaphysics and our habitual thinking.

Our need, then, is to repent our failures; and to take seriously, learn from, and try to amplify our successes at transcending positivism and fully-living-by what we theoretically believe.

 

What CG Jung does, and doesn't, do...

I have often written about CG Jung on this blog; because he was a significant (albeit on and off) influence over a period of some thirty years, from my young adult life through to becoming a Christian. 

Jung is something of a help for atheists who experience alienation and 'division' very sharply - as I did (and do). Alienation is the awareness of being cut-off from 'the world' including human society - cut-off in a world of abstractions, thinking, un-naturalness - while division is the awareness that we live in separate worlds that do not join up: e.g. the worlds of solitude, family, education, the workplace, crowds, authority, mass media, the arts, science and technology...

The Jungian approach is to treat alienation and division as 'dis-ease'; as a therapeutic problem. In other words, the idea is to alleviate the misery, depression, hope-less-ness of this experience of being a compartmentalized and cut-off subjectivity. 

This Jungian 'therapy' might be actual psychotherapy with a therapist in 'Analytic Psychology' - or, much more often, a kind of self-help, or self-therapy; based on reading and understanding Jung's ideas - or at least some secondhand (and more accessible) account of them. This latter was my own approach - I read a great deal by and about Jung, thought deeply about it, and tried hard to live by it. 

But the idea was not wholly 'therapeutic', because the way I encountered Jung was in a context of artistic creativity. I think it may initially have been (age 19) via reading Michael Tippett's essays published in Moving into Aquarius; then various bits of actual Jung, an short book by Anthony Storr, and a Jungian analysis of Wagner's Ring (and Mozart's Magic Flute) by Robert Donington. 

At any rate; Jung came to me as both a way of feeling-better, and as a way of artistic creation - a way in which the artist might on the one hand integrate the warring elements of his personality and simultaneously re-connect with 'the public' or 'the audience' by reference to the shared archetypes of the collective unconscious. 

This was explicitly the case with Michael Tippett - whose best work (from the late 1930s and for about a decade), which is maybe the best English classical music of the twentieth century, was written under the impact of Jung. It was also argued (by Donington and others) to be the explanation for the uncanny power of many other artistic works, especially those that had reference to 'mythic' elements.

So the promise of Jung was alluring: that one might both heal that misery of personal alienation so characteristic of twentieth century life and beyond; and also deepen the capacity creatively to connect with other people. 

The difficulty is, however, that of having psychology at the bottom line; because when psychology provides the ultimate justification then life becomes a matter of subjective 'feels'. And it turns out that - in practice - the Jungian therapeutic strategies don't work very well. 

This is not surprising because they do not address causes, but only effects. There was, perhaps, a hope that integrated Men conscious of collective archetypes might 'make the world a better place'. But the problems are actually intrinsic to mortal life (and the ancients realized); secondly to human consciousness - as it now is; and thirdly to the nature of modern 'industrial', mass, bureaucratic society - which has only become worse over the past century. 

Jungian strategies do help a bit, especially at first; but the effect is neither profound nor lasting; and sooner or later, the Jungian perspective dissolves into a corrosive, 'relativistic', subjectivism - which devolves towards short-termist selfish hedonism. 

This is because psychology is not anchored, and goes nowhere - except to death. 

So Jungian ideas take their place among the failed promises of a this-world utopia; and we are set back to the ancient realization that mortal life in this world cannot satisfy our deepest needs; and even the satisfaction of our superficial, here-and-now desires turns out to be very temporary and/or partial.

Also, the Jungian perspective lacks ultimate purpose. Even if Jungian techniques really worked; they would only restore 'dis-ease' to 'ease'. The Jungian basis for creativity may explain why things are emotionally powerful; but do not provide a reason for creativity per se; do not provide a purpose for creativity any more profound than that of an analgesic or stimulant drug. 

One a man, or Mankind, has been healed - then what does he actually do? Once men are united by their awareness of the collective unconscious... what then? 

The aimed at situation is a state-of being and there is no purpose, no dynamic. Which may be why Jungians tend to adopt 'Eastern' types of spirituality derived from Hinduism or Buddhism - in which (for Westerners) the hope is of a permanent state of unchanging bliss, without awareness of any separate self - assimilated into oneness...

By contrast, the Christianity I have arrived at sees this mortal life as purposive, and a preparation for immortality as a separate self - not assimilated into oneness but instead many persons whose purposes are harmonized by love. 

I see creativity not as the removal of divisions; but instead as the overflowing of love between persons, between beings - by a close analogy of the way that an ideal (eternal) family operates, in which the individual family members are continually experiencing, learning and developing.  

From a this-worldly perspective this looks like an attempt to ignore the problems of this mortal life and instead yearn for another world; but properly it should be understood as the only way in which this mortal life can be made more than mere, temporary, psychological states.  

When we look forward to eternal resurrected life in Heaven; then the experiences of this mortal life are given permanent relevance. When this eternal life is loving, personal, familial and everlastingly creative - then there is a real, objective, permanent value for the things we do here and now... including creative work such as writing, music and art. 

It turns-out - contrary to mainstream expectation - that Jungianism is unattainable because this-worldly - hence subject to 'entropy' (the worldly tendency towards change; disease, degeneration, death); whereas Christianity is practical and realistic for everybody because rooted in the eternal love and creativity of Heaven. 

(Creation can be understood as the true opposite of entropy.)

No matter our situation or past; we can all participate in the making and enhancing of future Heaven. 

The good (loving, creative) things that happen in this life can (if detected, discerned and valued) be carried forward into Heaven...

While bad things can (when acknowledged) teach us about sin and the need for repentance; so we can repudiate and leave these behind at the time of resurrection - because Heaven, to be Heaven, must be a place of love only. 

Whatever happens to a Christian can be regarded as grist to the mill for experiencing and learning; and that in itself is therapeutic in a way that goes beyond psychology. 

Individuation - Jung's idea

*

For CG Jung individuation was the purpose of life.

It is hard to be exact about what he meant by this - it was a lifelong process of self-creation and self-therapy - a project of re-making the worldly self in conformity with the inner self.

The inner self has an unique aspect - the individuality - and a common aspect shared with other people - the collective unconscious of archetypal forms and stories.

Well, all this gives people something to do with their lives - to 'work on themselves' - and it is quite possible that doing so makes people feel better than otherwise. But of course it isn't going anywhere and it doesn't provide any link with anybody else - life becomes a matter of 'memories, dreams. reflections'.

(Which is the title of Jung's purported autobiography - mostly a highly-selective work written by Aniela Jaffe with a propagandistic eye for Jung's posthumous reputation - it also happens to be far more enjoyable and interesting than anything Jung ever wrote by-himself!)

So, Jung's project is on the one hand radically inadequate - leaving all the fundamental problems un-addressed hence un-solved; and on the other hand, radically selfish (not to mention idle).

Yet Jung's project ought to be part-of a viable, satisfying, therapeutic, engaging religion in the modern world - partial for sure, but that part worth having. 

Lacking-which we have religion as social control; something external, coercive, alienating - something that boils-down-to do this: don't do that.

*

What to say to kids about fantasy

*

Kids read and watch vast amounts of fantasy and make believe - many kids, (and I was one) find the world of fantasy more appealing than this world.

Indeed, it seems that this world - for all its distractions and excitements - is simply not enough.

*

Kids want so much for the fantasy to be real.

They ask: But is it real?

(If not real here and now, is it real at some place and time, or could it become so?)

*

So there is, on the one had, this world - which is not enough to satisfy the human spirit; and, on the other hand... what?

*

There is the perspective which says nothing.

That this life is real and all there is, fantasy may be nicer, but it is make believe and exists only in your mind.

And if you don't like this life, then that's tough - your life will be a miserable waste of time.

*

What can this perspective advise? There is only one thing: you must try to enjoy this life: it is absolutely imperative.

You must cease to yearn for the impossible, and make do with the attainable. The attainable may seem crumby - but that is all that is on-offer.

Grab and hold as much attainable pleasure as you can cram-in; don't waste a moment, fill your life with it (and use attainable pleasures to displace dissatisfaction and the yearnings).

*

Yet if this advice succeeds, then all it achieves is to convert a miserable waste of time into a pleasurable waste of time.

Is that what we should tell our kids?

Is it true?

*

For much of my adult life, especially the decade c 1998-2008, I was a sort-of Jungian; which was in fact not much different from the above.

As well as Jung, I  read deeply in James Hillman, Joseph Campbell, Daniel C Noel - and sampled 'new age' writers widely.

Although this Jungian view claimed to have solved the problem of meaningless this life versus meaningless fantasy, in fact the problem was still intact.

*

The Jungian view has it that everything is psychology - nothing is outside of psychology - but psychology is shared.

Reality is wholly subjective, because the mind 'creates' everything; but not solipsistic exactly because the mind is (in some way) shared between people.

So, for Jung and his followers, everything is as-if. Fantasy is just as real as this life; but neither are realer than ideas in human heads.

*

But if my own imaginations are inadequate for life, then so is Jung's psychology; because it merely expands the scope from my psychology to human psychology - but does nothing to affect reality - because reality is regarded as a product of psychology.

In effect, Jung says that delusional reality is the only reality, but asks us to be happy about this because at least the delusion is (to some extent) shared among all humans.

We are not alone in our delusions...

*

Talking with a child makes one realize that while such tortuous abstractions may (apparently) satisfy adult intellectuals - they do not satisfy the basic human craving for reality.

Children want to know 'but is it real': they are at root not satisfied with make believe, even if that make believe can be sustained almost indefinitely by the abundance of modern media.

*

A thought experiment.

Suppose you love The Lord of the Rings and were totally absorbed by it on first reading. Suppose you feel that the fantasy world of Tolkien is more real than this life.

Would it be enough to spend your whole life reading LotR?

Okay - you would get used to it, habituated, it would lose its effect...

But, supposing your memory was wiped between each reading; such that each time you read LotR it was like the first time and undiminished?

(Something of this type happens in certain forms of brain damage, and might in principle be possible with some technical interventions.)

Would that be enough?

*

Ah, but you would know at the back of your mind that LotR was fantasy...

Suppose that that knowledge could be removed; suppose you dwelt in LotR as you read it - like an alternative or virtual reality, and unaware of the fact?

(Technically, this might too be possible - insight and awareness disappear in some psychotic illnesses - so they should be able to be abolished artificially.)

SO - you can read and re-read Lord of the Rings each time as fresh as the first, and this is taken to be this world in which you dwell - is it enough?

*

Well, is it enough for the creature who actually dwell in Middle Earth? The Hobbits, Men, Elves, Dwarves, Ents?

Is Middle Earth enough for them?

Obviously not.

*

So when a child yearns for the reality of fantasy, and implicitly recognizes the inadequacy of this life; in fact the fantasy is not itself an answer.

So this life does not satisfy, and the fantasy would not satisfy even if it became our own life (or was apparently our own life, by some kind of technical intervention - some kind of subtle brain damage).

*

The child's yearning, sparked by fantasy, in in fact a profound statement of the human condition; and a heart-felt recognition of the inadequacy of this world, and of any imaginable world, to our desires.

At this level the problem is inevitable and insoluble.

The problem can, indeed, be solved only at a transcendental level; and in a manner which cannot be understood.

Just as any actually imaginable fantasy would leave us yearning; so we cannot imagine what would satisfy our yearning to be ourselves-yet-transformed in a world which was like this-world-but-transformed.

Yet that is precisely what we yearn for; and nothing less could or would ever satisfy.

That is what the child's question 'but is it real?' is telling us.

*

The lineage of Romantic Christianity in England (a sort-of manifesto: a testimony)

To define Romanticism with precision has proved impossible - because it is a movement, a phase in human consciousness; but those who feel it will recognise it when we see it.  

To be included in this list, one must be both Romantic and Christian (and be someone whose work I personally respond-to):

William Blake
William Wordsworth
ST Coleridge

Then came several generations during which the Romantics were not Christian, and the Christians were not Romantic. Exceptions include George Macdonald and GK Chesterton, who link between the early Romantic Christians and the Inklings. Both of these I somewhat like, especially GKC - but I am unable to engage whole-heartedly.

Charles Williams
JRR Tolkien
CS Lewis
Owen Barfield

William Arkle

Current representatives of whom I am aware include Jeremy Naydler, Terry Boardman, and the Albion Awakening bloggers: William Wildblood, John Fitzgerald and myself.

Comments:

The influence of Rudolf Steiner is evident; since although Anthroposophists are extremely rare in England - Barfield, Naydler and Boardman are all of that ilk. This is evidence that Romanticism fits most comfortably with heterodox Christianity - despite that Tolkien (Roman Catholic) and Lewis (Church of England) were orthodox in their practice. Indeed; Blake, Barfield (for much of his life), Arkle and most of the currently alive people - are (I believe) essentially unaffiliated Christians; whose religious and spiritual practice is mostly and in-principle individual rather than communal.

The Steiner link is also important because Germany (in the sense of the Central European German-speaking culture - including Austria and Switzerland, and some culturally-Germanic cities not nowadays in Germany) was the other great origin of Romanticism - with Herder, Goethe, Schiller etc. However until Steiner's 'conversion' in about 1898; the German Romantic literary tradition was not really Christian. An exception is Novalis - the father of Romantic Christianity in Germany.

It might also be argued that CG Jung (1875-1961) is also part of the German tradition of Romantic Christianity - although (as so often with Jung) his status as a Christian is ambiguous - overall, I would say that by the end of his life, Jung should indeed be regarded as a Christian.  

There are not many on this list; because I don't know of many Romantic Christians. It is a job still to be done, by each individual - since Romantic Christianity must be experiential (knowing 'about' it does not suffice).

However, I regard both Barfield and Arkle as having essentially done the necessary work and, uniquely, achieved Romantic Christianity: both in their theory and in their living.


Mainstream Christianity still tends to regard Traditionalism as a 'safe' path to salvation; and theosis as too 'risky' - and Romanticism is about theosis.

But for the Romantic Christian there is no 'safe' path in the modern world; and traditionalism has in fact become impossible (judged at the deepest level of motivation); as well as sub-optimally desirable. We feel that, in modern conditions, salvation requires theosis; so a purely salvation orientation can only be a kind of 'rescue' procedure.

Because ultimately Romanticism is not a 'reaction' against the Industrial Revolution, modernity and bureaucracy; rather, Romanticism is a positive path of divine destiny, concerned with human evolutionary-development of consciousness.


The aim of Romantic Christianity is (implicitly) to attain the divine form of cosnciousness (what Barfield termed Final Participation) as the primary goal of mortal life at this era of history. In different words: the aim is to restore the unity of Life - including the healing of the split between mind and matter, subjective and objective... to cure the malaise of alienation.

Romantic Christianity is both theoretical (metaphysical) and practical (experiential) - ideas and living both need to change; because otherwise the two aspects will be at contradictory, at war - and therefore unattainable in life.

The Romantic Christian demands that life be Christian - as its root and frame; and also demands that life (including Christianity) be Romantic - therefore it cannot accept the ultimate of primary necessity of System, organisation, institution, bureaucracy... these are all to be regarded as evils; even if, sometimes (in mortal life); expedient or even temoprarily-necessary evils - evils that challenge us to love, faith and hope; and to grow.

Love and creativity are the goal; with creativity as located in thinking, and thinking regarded as universal and primary. 

Synchronicity-type-stuff implies a personal deity

Jung should not be given much credit for inventing the word Synchronicity to describe meaningful coincidences, since his writings on the subject are so vague and self-contradictory. But there it is.

***

Most well-adjusted people have some kind of 'instinct' to guide them throughout life - a sense of what to do, what matters, and whether one is on-track - and I regard Synchronicity as a part of this.

When one is in a good frame of mind, and doing the right kind of things in the right kind of environment - for example, exploring a city on holiday - there may arise a subjective sense of things unfolding just right, of the right decisions being made, of coherent things happening. As a part of this, all kinds of coincidences, links between past and present, tend to arise.

If you have this sense of things, then its implications are actually extremely far reaching - much more far reaching than Jung ever seems to have recognized, and more far reaching than his modern New Age descendents recognize.

For example, James Redfield's popular 'Celestine Prophecy' series of books are mostly built on amplifying the Synchronicity idea and making it the centre of life - so that people are supposed to be guided through life by Synchronicity and to get into a frame of mind that encourages Synchronicity.

***

But any idea of the nature of life which sees it as having a path, or way - a proper goal and behaviour for that person, a way which can be walked or from which a person can stray onto the wrong path (wrong for them, that is) - is in the same general category as Synchronicity. 

My point is that although such ideas are a part of New Age alternative spirituality, of spiritual seeking, of - in other words - a philosophy which sees itself in contrast to and separate from 'institutional religion', separate from 'dogma' and so on - Synchronicity actually carries the implication that the universe is (in some sense) organized around the well-being of each individual human.

If coincidences can be regarded as meaningful for a person, and clearly many people do think this way, and if these phenomena point to a proper path through life - a proper set of decisions leading to a 'way'; then that person, and all other people, are all at the centre of the universe - the world must be organized-around them.

For instance, someone like Heidegger will talk about walking a way, being en route to an unknown goal, as if it was in contrast to Christianity - he talked about waiting for God or a new God or hoping for a God. As if he did not acknowledge the reality of God at the moment, but hoped to do so at some point - or that at some point society would enable this. But the fact is that by saying he was on a path, finding a proper way through life, Heidegger had already assumed the reality of a personal God.

***

In other words, for there to be a path, or even to look for a path (assuming such might exist), or even to deny knowledge of the right path but to believe that oneself (or mankind) has strayed from the right path - there must be a God, and that God must potentially be in a personal relationship with each individual.

So that, although New Age spirituality believes that it has rejected a personal God, in fact it has not. A personal God is logically entailed by even the most explicitly non-religious spirituality of this type.

Jung never saw this point - or at least never acknowledged it clearly, and neither do his modern descendents - but it seems to hold, nonetheless.

A meaningful path implies a personal God.

Beams and Motes: The problem of repeated failure to live by our basic assumptions

By Domenico Fetti

I was reflecting on Owen Barfield's shorthand term of RUP, meaning Residual Unresolved Positivism, by which he pointed out that those who accurately diagnose the spiritual malaise of modernity nonetheless continue to live-by positivistic, materialistic, reductionist, scientistic assumptions - and this comes-through again and again in the person's thinking, writing and actions.

One example Barfield gave was Jung, who said and wrote many contradictory things - Barfield diagnosed the root of this problem as partly the persistence of many positivistic features of which Jung seemed unaware; plus Jung's compromising wish to communicate-with and be-valued-by a positivistic world.

We need to be aware of such matters - because the thinking, writing and doing of most writers and philosophers of the modern condition is likewise compromised - and we need to avoid being misled by this. To avoid absorbing their confusion and errors, we need to distinguish the points where other-people are failing to live consistently by their most considered assumptions.

In a nutshell - with RUP there is a significant gap between the metaphysical assumptions we wish to hold; and the metaphysical assumptions that we have unconsciously absorbed from socialisation and propaganda. Our new and improved metaphysics may simply be an aspiration; our true belief (that which we live by )   

However, the mote in the eye of another is easier for us to acknowledge than the beam in our own eye; and all of us who are trying to move beyond alienation and materialism into Final Participation are only-partially successful (at best). Most of our thinking is not primary, but automatic; and our alienation is often relieved (temporarily) merely by lapsing into the passivity and unconsciousness of Original Participation rather than actively, consciously, thinkingly moving-forward.

The answer is not to aspire to eliminate 'positivism' - because that is not possible - but to learn from the RUP problems of others to diagnose, to notice and acknowledge, our own inevitable, frequent deficiencies.

In other words - we should probably not be aiming to attain perfection of Final Participation as a powerful and permanent state - since this is (at present, for us) impossible; as to recognise and repent our own failures to do this.

This is, indeed, the core Christian response to our own weakness and corruptibility.

A Man's mortal life is trial, error and repentance - with repentance the worst sins are washed away, without repentance the slightest lapse or deficiency may be enough to damn us by a pride-full insistence that we have not erred: thereby such error becomes built-into our self-understanding. 

The new religion of liberalism (political correctness) - James Kalb

*

From The Tyranny of Liberalism by James Kalb, 2008. Page 94 (re-paragraphed):

*

The new religion, a system of moral absolutes based on a denial that moral truth is knowable, consists in nothing less than the deification of man.

To refuse to talk about the transcendent, and to view it as wholly out of our reach, seems very cautious and humble. In practice, however, it puts our own thoughts and desires at the center of things, and so puts man in the place of God.

If you say we cannot know anything about God, only our own experience, you will soon say that there is no God, at least for practical purposes, and that we are the ones who give order and meaning to the world.

In short you will say that we are God.

*

Skepticism invariably turns into dogmatism. 

We cannot help but act, and if skepticism makes all action nonrational we will nonetheless act on some principle or other. 

If, because we are skeptics, we cannot take arguments in favour of other principles seriously, we will treat our arbitrarily chosen principles as absolute and denounce those who question them as a threat to peace and public order. 

(*) 

Liberalism (...) proposes a faith - man the measure as the highest truth and preference satisfaction as the summum bonum - but cannot discuss what it is doing or why. Any reasons it could give would fall far short of the clear demonstration it demands.

Rather than engage other beliefs it must obfuscate its position, claim that it wins by default, and declare other faiths out of bounds.

***

I can easily recall feeling just this way, for years; accepting that man is the measure of all things, having what felt like strong moral principles, but unable to discuss what I was doing or why.

It was - curiously - a very secure position, since it was so unclear, so impossible to pin-down, that it could never be refuted: there was, really, nothing to refute.

Unfortunately, my way out of this was so slow, multi-step and complicated that it is hard to seem how it could be of any value to anybody else.

But one aspect was that I eventually admitted to myself that I had 'always' operated on the basis of some kind of benign providence which was like a path to which I ought to adhere, and which was revealed by instinct and serendipity - then gradually recognizing that this lifelong mode of actual-living made no sense except if there was a God with a personal 'interest' in my 'salvation'.

(I recognized that this was entailed by Jung's ideas - which I had explored in some depth - but that Jung had himself not followed his own logic; then I diagnosed that neither had I.) 

Once that fact of living was recognized, once the human centred-perspective was rejected (or was recognized as always having de facto been rejected), then this - obviously - led onto other things.

*

How Jungian psychology became the spirituality of mainstream global Leftism

There is a deep structural similarity between the psychology of CG Jung on the one hand and mainstream New Leftism (post-sixties Leftism) on the other; which has led the two into a symbiotic relationship. Nowadays it is the broadly-Jungian New Age that provides spiritual depth and a therapeutic rationale to the project of Leftism. 

The structural similarity is that Jung and the Left are both therapeutic in structure - they diagnose problems and prescribe solutions to alleviate and remove the problems. Jungian psychology takes its therapeutic stance towards the individual; Leftism to society. 

Thus, both diagnose a negative disharmony and state of disintegration and conflict as baseline. This negative is the situation in which all individuals and all societies are assumed to exist: already and inevitably. 

Then, both Jungian psychology/ spirituality and Leftism both claim to cure this pre-existing negative situation with therapeutic interventions intended to lead to integrated cooperativeness, wholeness, unity... 

Since the 1960s, the 'New' (post-Marxist) Leftism has 'diagnosed' society (all societies) as suffering from various psychological disorders - such as racism, misogyny and 'phobias' - e.g. of sexual identities or religions. 

Modern environmentalism projects this disorder onto the planetary ecosystem - as a sickness of Gaia ultimately caused by wrongness in the minds of Men. Environmental sickness therefore needs to be treated by the same kind of psychological and therapeutic interventions and restructuring as do the disorders of racism, homo/trans-phobias, misogyny etc.  

The recent birdemic-peck phenomenon has also been assimilated to the Jungian therapeutic model; which is why it has been treated primarily by essentially 'psychological' forms of restructuring at the social level - i.e. by changing human attitudes, understandings, relationships and behaviours - all at a global scale.   

  

Thus we get to the basic assumption of all politics today: That all Men and all Societies are sick and in absolute need of urgent therapy. 

Therapy... but from whom? From, implicitly, an elite of Global Healers. 

Hence the 'need' for a World Government with total powers. Anything less than this; dooms the planet and all its people to terminal disorder and death. 

And since early 2020; an elite of all-powerful Global Healers is exactly what we have got.

Left-politics (which, nowadays, is just all of mainstream, global 'politics' - everywhere in the world) presents itself as a societal therapy by which the innate sicknesses - i.e. the irrational prejudices and hatreds, phobias, delusional beliefs (i.e. the sub-types of 'denialism') etc - will all be cured by a kind of social-level 'psychotherapy'.

This Left-therapy starts with therapeutic 'consciousness-raising'; the intent to replace pathological motivations by the encouragement of 'healing' attitudes and beliefs. 

Such 'encouragement' of positivity is what lies behind the enforcement of correct - i.e. therapeutic - attitudes throughout all mass and social media discourse, and in private life. 

Because the whole of society is seen as sick; the Leftist project sees itself as (in effect) transforming our sick society by rebuilding it into a 'therapeutic community'. 

That is, a community which embodies only examples of healing attitudes, beliefs and behaviours; a community which excludes all attitudes/ beliefs/ behaviours that tend to sustain 'sicknesses' such as racism and other irrational hates, phobias and delusions.

This process is not seen as censorship, manipulation or political propaganda; but is regarded as a common-sense 'medical' intervention to cure disease and restore health in all people, groups and places.  

So much for the theory and claims of Leftism. But Leftism is unmasked to serious Christians as a demonic strategy; rooted in lies. Its basic analysis is false, negative and arbitrary. And its supposed cures and therapies lead to not to healing - but to endemic sickness and accelerating dis-integration. 

Leftism's global 'therapeutic community' turns-out to be variants on a literal prison: with more of the same promised. 

Its Global Elite of self-styled healers and harmonizers lead to results indistinguishable from the activities of parasites and wreckers. 

Its 'consciousness raising' has been the conversion of public discourse into a realm of value inversion, honesty and goodness excluded; instead a tissue of lies and the insidious advocacy of sin and evil.  

Such is our situation. The 'facts' are there: the word-wide triumph of Jungian-Leftism; the totalitarian global governance; the convergence of all public discourse in all social systems. 

What is at issue is whether the current and developing situation is a constructive, therapeutic and existentially necessary response to the innate sickness of this planet and global population and the crises that assail it? Or the stepwise, strategic, deliberate destruction of all that is Good; because it is Good? 

Are we on broadly the right lines, and being led by persons of basically good-intent and will? Or are we being led - deliberately - towards a demonic anti-world?

One or the other. 

Animating the landscape - thirty years experience

The Devil's Beef Tub - a powerfully-evocative hidden valley near Moffat

I was very 'sensitive' to country landscape in my middle and late teens, but this capacity was one of the casualties of my young adulthood - when I became city-orientated. It was in the summer of 1991, thirty years ago, that I began to recover - or re-forge - my capacity to know the mindscape as alive and implicitly conscious and purposive.  

This happened through a series of explorations of the English-Scottish borders - which at that time I was approaching from the Scottish side (I was living in Glasgow). And the medium was a mixture of history and folklore. 

In retrospect, what I seemed to be doing was to view the here-and-now landscape through a lens of a past in which I was personally involved, mainly due to the many ancestors who inhabited this part of the world. I was reading every book on the region I could lay hold of - gleaning whatever ideas and impression fed the magic.

At the same time as this retrospective angle, I felt that there was something occult (hidden but discernable) about this place which pointed to a better future. 

This future was vague, but had to do with a re-integration of life and spontaneous-warm community - a kind of 'neo-pagan' aspiration for a life of more immersive engagement, although I was not initially aware of that term or movement.

At the time, and for long afterwards, I conceptualized this landscape sensitivity in terms of an immersion, an attunement; a lowering of barriers between my-self and that which the landscape contained. 

There was therefore a sense of self-hypnotically reducing my conscious awareness of what was happening - but not too much; enough to 'liberate' the associative powers of the mind, but with enough consciousness retained so that I would be aware of, and then remember, what was happening. 

This was a difficult balancing-act - and could never be retained for long. But such is mortal life...

This may all sound very theoretical, but it was effective - to a significant extent, sometimes. I was sometimes able to be in a kind of magical mood for considerable periods of time (a few minutes usually, up to an hour or two).

That it was objectively effective was evidenced by the synchronicity of these moods - I would move from one such experience to another; would move through the landscape from one discovery to another; discoveries not known, not seen, but with the inevitability of a dream and recurrent deja vu even for places I had certainly never been.   

It was all very encouraging, but of course habituation soon sets-in and repetition of action loses its effectiveness; the experiences became less reliable, less intense, less frequent - and in general I needed to know what (if anything) they meant for me and my life. Or was it just a kind of pleasant delusion, a self-deception...

In retrospect I can see that I was recapitulating the search for Original Participation that was evident in neo-paganism as it developed from the late 19th century, and in the likes of CG Jung and Robert Graves; and indeed that was the direction in which my reading was drawn - for example I recognized the state of mind I sought as being Jung's Active Imagination. 

It was evident that this quest could never be more than partially and dwindlingly effective and very intermittent. An activity for holidays, essentially. And an expensive one - meaning that I had to work at alienating jobs in order to achieve these moments of brief engagement and fulfilment. 

Plus, they were solitary; and yet I was prone to loneliness and boredom.  

And - most decisively - I recognized how much of this was me, was brought by me to the situation; and this undercut the experience, reduced and invalidated it significantly. 

It was a paradox: one part of myself sought to engage in self-examination to try and exploit my own disposition and sensitivities of another part of myself! This splitting was sustaining the alienating divisions that I was (supposedly) trying to overcome. 

It was a psychological equivalent of the split between work - needed to get the money (and car) needed to pursue these Border explorations; and the bought-leisure in which such explorations could proceed.    

This struck me as not just a practical limitation, but a fault in the whole project; the whole idea. It was ultimately incoherent - and therefore not a valid basis for life.

I have now conceptualized this experience as Final Participation. It is not a 'recovery' of ancient ways of being or thinking; it is a moving forward to a new way of being and thinking, that exists in a new kind of thinking. 

I recognize that I bring my-self not only this these magical moments; but to all moments - all meaning, and lack of meaning, comes from me; yet is not merely-subjective, because of God and because this is a creation.

All meanings, purposes, and relationships in God's creation always-have-been the consequence of 'minds', of consciousness - thus the integration of all things is a fact, not an aspiration. 

What is an aspiration is the awareness; from which comes the magic, the enchantment. 

 

The nature of the creative (poetic) trance

My recent exploration of Owen Barfield's work in relation to the evolution of consciousness, and the idea that Man went through three stages of consciousness (ancient immersive absorption into a living reality, an intermediate alienated phase of the ego/ self cut-off from the world*, then a return to a relationship with the living world but retaining the ego), continues to yield insight and make unexpected links across subjects.

For example, I used to be a deep reader of Robert Graves - and was fascinated by his account of the poetic trance state. Graves was vehement that when he wrote poems or his best novels and essays. For instance, in the state Graves felt himself to be actually present in other times and places - and it was this realism which made his historical novels so vivid and convincing.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/analeptic-trance.html

When Graves was 'inspired', this was not an unconscious state - it was not a matter of 'channelling' the poetry, not a bubbling up of the subconscious, not a matter of 'automatic writing'... All of these he damned and rejected as contrived pseudo-poetry when he seemed to detect them in the work of other modern poets such as WB Yeats, or Dylan Thomas, or surrealists.

By contrast, Graves claimed to remain alert, critical, purposive while in the trance state. In Barfieldian terms Graves achieved Final Participation - in which he accessed 'the gods' and spontaneous sources of intuitive knowledge but while retaining the more 'modern' ego/ self.


And in this respect Graves seems to have been mirroring (from a very different direction of approach) the same demand as expressed by Rudolf Steiner whose 'clairvoyance' was done in clear consciousness and a state of concentration, or CG Jung whose Active Imagination attempted to combine dream imagery and imagination with conscious awareness and purpose.

Despite that all these men were born in the 19th century, this goal has not yet become understood or pursued. Instead we have a mainstream secular culture oscillating between scientific-bureaucratic objectivization of reality (in which the world is regarded as un-alive and lacking in awareness and purpose, and Man is increasingly regarded as ultimately the same) and a Beat/ Hippy/ New Age type of 'regression' to the childlike/ primitive/ spontaneous spiritual state of un-conscious surrender to a reality that is felt to be alive, self-aware and full of gods - this being achieved either via the alternative reality of media and arts, or by killing-off consciousness with alcohol and drugs.


The message of Barfield - and Steiner and perhaps (more confusedly) of Jung - and implicitly of Graves - is that we should not stay where we are - alienated and alone in a dead world; nor should we try, and fail, to go back to an ancient world of immersive animism - but should move forwards to a conscious state which combines the best of both worlds - living as conscious selves in relationships with a world of conscious selves.

The failure of this perspective has, I believe, been related to its becoming detached from Christianity; and from Christianity's rejection of any need for it - or from a Christian rejection of its validity as a spiritual path. Many Christians have denied the need for regarding the world as alive - so that human existence becomes a matter of nothing more than the isolated ego in a relationship with God - and everything else in the universe (except other egos, barely glimpsed) perceived as dead and either unimportant or actively evil

What I would like to see - and am working to attain in my own life - is to take the spiritual insights, perspective and aims of Barfield et al - but pursued within the Christian framework.

*Note - This is the phase that Barfield called the consciousness soul
http://davidlavery.net/barfield/Encyclopedia_Barfieldiana/Lexicon/Consciousness_Soul.html
The chronology of when this occurred seems to be complex, and to differ somewhat between authors - or else I may have misunderstood. My impression is that the Consciousness Soul was made possible by the Ancient Hebrews and Greeks, and the divine intention was that this phase shuld come to an end after the birth, death and resurrection of Christ - but that this did not happen (at least, not in the West) but instead the CS intensified right up until the Romantic movement when it began to be challenged. However, this challenge was usually in the nature of a return to Original Participation rather than an advance to Final Participation. In other words, and with some usually temporary exceptions here and there, humanity has so far chosen to refuse - or was unable to take - the step to Final Participation.  


Note added: As a further illustration of what these three stages entail, consider that in pre-Christian, pagan religions it was usual for the adept (or at least the shaman or priest figure) to seek unification with the god - to seek to become possessed by the god, taken-over by the god, a channel for the god. The self was never very distinct in such cultures - and the line between the self and the god was blurred, and easily crossed.

But when the ancient Hebrews (also, in parallel, and very differently conceptualized, the Ancient Greeks) developed a new concept of God. He was utterly different from Man - there was a gulf between and no possibility of unification nor even possession. This 'alienated' attitude later (but mistakenly) was then carried over and became almost mainstream in many types of Christianity; such that the desire to become divine was often regarded as sinful - or at least extremely hazardous. The danger was of possession - but since possession could not be by God, nor even the gods/ angels; therefore possession was intrinsically demonic.

However, some of the greatest individual Christians (and also some of the Old Testament Prophets) achieved the goal of Final Participation in terms of themselves becoming purified and holy persons, and accepting the offer of a close, loving, wholly harmonious personal relationship with God - and especially with Jesus Christ; whose work could be interpreted as having made this possible.

So now, since Christ, Christians have the possibility of again moving beyond alienation and into participating with the living world in the closest and most fundamental way - but not by absorption, fusing or possession by a god - instead, in terms of becoming more like God, more divinized in our nature; and developing with God the Father, Jesus Christ and/ or the Holy Ghost a direct and loving relationship with the divine person.

Understanding and learning-from the experience of primary thinking

Primary Thinking is the term I have devised for what Owen Barfield called Final Participation and Rudolf Steiner the Imaginative Soul - as a state it would also include some examples of Jung's active imagination, Gurdjieff's self-remembering, Maslow's peak experience, and alert types of shamanic, poetic and creative trances.

I regard the attainment of primary thinking to be the main task of modern Man - but clearly, since the state has been so widely noticed, and is experienced by so many people - merely experiencing primary thinking is ineffectual.

This is because primary thinking is firstly nearly-always brief and very intermittent, and secondly the experience of primary thinking nearly-always misunderstood by normal every day consciousness when that state resumes.

Primary thinking ought to be understood as an experience of the divine way of thinking, intrinsically Good and valid - and superior to other and lower types of normal existence. In primary thinking we know - and we know directly - truth, beauty and virtue; and in this state we are intrinsically creative; because primary thinking is that which is divine in us, active within the realm of universal knowledge.

However, most people who experience primary thinking most of the time will misinterpret the experience; or will try to use it for their own worldly expediency. Jung and Maslow, for example, regard it as therapeutic - in effect a branch of medicine, aiming at making people feel and function better. While mainstream New Agers tend to regard primary thinking as a source of pleasure and gratification - part of a satisfying lifestyle.

And of course most of us are substantially evil; so despite that the primary thinking state is intrinsically Good; once they 'snap out of it', people will try to use the knowledge attained during primary thinking for selfish and short-termist reasons, or else for actively-evil purposes - using their knowledge of Good to try and destroy Good.

(This is presumably what devils and demons do: i.e. a kind of inverted black magic.)

Mainstream secular leftist people usually regard primary thinking as a pleasant but foolish delusion - and make fun of, or scorn, those who take it seriously.

So the challenge of primary thinking is not so much to do it, but - when we are not doing it - to 1. understand it correctly, 2. learn from it, and 3. put those lessons into practice as best we can. 

Getting beyond embarrassment, and pretentiousness...

It is my impression that many who have communicated their philosophy of life, have been more or less seriously impaired in this work by a kind of embarrassment: a fear of damaging their social status and self esteem because of saying or doing something.

This embarrassment leads to an attitude of guardedness, defensiveness - the embarrassed Man develops a continual self-filtering of communications to try and avoid spontaneously revealing something that might be used against him, or might lead to him being rejected. 

Such embarrassment can blend with attempts to impress others - with pretentiousness; but it can also be found in an almost purely negative form by a sense of inhibition. 

This is so common as to be normal - yet when it comes to the communication of matters of the greatest depth, embarrassment can provide a formidable barrier to generating what ought to be as clear and comprehensible as possible - or else it probably will not be understood.

When I consider some of the influencers and 'mentors' who led to my Romantic Christian perspective; I can see that William Blake was a Man who was free from embarrassment, and who communicated in a spontaneous and bold fashion - apparently without caution against being misunderstood, or mocked.

Another of this ilk was William Arkle; who seems unconcerned about making an impression, who seems unguarded in his attitude - and whose communications appear to flow without going-through a filter of caution. 

A third 'William' of this type, is Bill Ryan of Project Avalon; who is unembarrassed about revealing and discussing his strange experiences with ETs - and many other unusual subjects - without regard for how such comments will strike other people. 

Bill Ryan (although not a Romantic Christian) is helpful in understanding this, because I knew him some forty-seven years ago; and can therefore recognize that his candid spontaneity seems to have been characterological, innate - a gift of nature. Yet a gift he still retains at the age of seventy. 

And I think the same applies to Blake and Arkle - they were 'made this way', from childhood, presumably from birth - yet also they 'stayed this way', throughout the stresses and temptations of their long lives. 

Therefore; the achievement of the Three Williams has the quality of retaining that which was, in origin, a natural confident unguardedness.

There are far more examples of writers whose work is hampered by - greater or lesser - degrees of embarrassment. 

One is CG Jung; who was mostly a confident and bold thinker; but who would (again and again, as he approached his conclusions) back-away-from the direction of his reasoning and the implications of his thinking; exactly as if he had suddenly become embarrassed, and feared the effect of his words. 

For Jung; this negative tendency to take away with one hand what had just been given by the other, was exacerbated by a positive desire to impress people, a pretentiousness. He would back-away from clarity and honesty, partly so as to impress others, and gain the rewards of higher status. 

But embarrassment can impair communication even among those who are wholly lacking in any pretentiousness; such as Owen Barfield. 

By all accounts, and confirmed in his writings, Owen Barfield was a very modest man - although with a great inner strength that was generated by intellectual mastery, deep thought, and inner confidence. 

Yet I find that Barfield's ability to communicate clearly is impaired by what seems like embarrassment - a diffidence at expressing anything that might seem like boasting, a reluctance to speak simply about the deepest matters of his understandings - such as the nature of God, God's nature and purposes. 

Just as Barfield approaches his conclusions, again and again he veers off into defensive abstraction - or excessive brevity - so that his argument is set out with meticulous clarity, but the final 'answer' is ambiguous, unclear, difficult to understand.  

The writer Charles Williams was someone who was remarkably unembarrassed in all social situations - even when mixing with the rich, prestigious, and famous; but also one who pretentiously desired to impress people. 

His life and work were both impaired by this pretentiousness: because it led to a strong element of play-acting, and indeed dishonesty, in his social relationships.

While in Williams's poetry, theology and novels there is a strong element of deliberate obfuscation and obscurity - a striving to appear profound.

Well, we are what we are - at least to begin with; and only a few of us have been blessed with unselfconsciousness. 

But character is a beginning only - and innate disposition can either be corrupted by choices made and habits developed; or it can (to some extent) be overcome by effort and practice. 

For myself; I had an original disposition somewhat the opposite of Owen Barfield and more like that of Charles Williams; in that I did not suffer much from embarrassment (i.e. negatively, I did not much care about how other people might react in a negative sense); but I tended towards pretentiousness - (i.e. I positively wanted to impress people - or, at least, some people). 

This was an obstacle to communication - because anything is an obstacle to communication that interferes with the primary desire to communicate. 

On the one hand, we cannot help the way we are; but on the other hand we are here (in this mortal life) to learn. Part of this is learning about ourselves. 

Often, our strengths are the obverse of weaknesses; but by recognition and striving we can move in the right direction. 

Conversely, by failing to recognize and acknowledge our defects; the modern world has a strong and pervasive tendency to corrupt people, to encourage people to ignore their deficits and instead regard them as strengths. 

Thus (as we sadly observe among family, colleagues, acquaintances and friends), however they start-out, most people get worse.

And these applies even to those who are innately and naturally Good. 

Thus the originally confident and unembarrassed child becomes a self-conscious and peer-group dominated adolescent - and never goes beyond this... 

While the 'show-off' child becomes the pretentious adult; more concerned about the impression created and rewards obtained than making actual achievements.   

These are among the lessons of life that we need to learn - and we can learn them from our own experience, and also by sympathetic yet honest understanding and critique of the lives of others.

To sleep, to dream...

*

I have never been satisfied with the usual cultural and scientific views on sleeping and dreaming.

These see sleep and dream as both subordinate to awake life, and also as optional extras.

Behind current concepts is the idea that it would be better not to sleep at all, but if we must sleep then it should be as little as possible.

*

By contrast, I tend to think that sleep is, in a sense, primary - at least in its creative and generative role -

http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/04/sleep-elaborationawake-pruning-seap.html

I think it possible that sleep (or equivalent but weaker states which occur during awakeness, daydreaming trances etc) produce most of our subjective 'experience' - which is then shaped and fitted to the world around us during awakeness.

*

Valuation of dreaming is split between a minority of people who regard dreams in a distorted and exaggerated way as the royal road to understanding neurosis (Freudians) or to understanding the prerequisites for personal growth (Jungians); and the large majority who see dreams as (merely) a kind of entertainment.

A few who trivialize dreaming regard them as a kind of home movie, which might be controlled and made more enjoyable - e.g. people interested in lucid dreaming.

And of course the highest value on dreams is placed by 'shamans' - in the broadest sense of the word - who regard dreams as a source of arcane knowledge; and in some societies these individuals are accorded high social status.

*

I am unconvinced by psychodynamic concepts of dreaming since most people do not remember their dreams most of the time - so it seems unlikely that dream recall is of the essence.

Like Tolkien, I believe that dreams can, by various mechanisms and routes - some psychological and others revelatory, be a source of knowledge otherwise unavailable to the awake mind; but I regard this as a rare gift (and one usable for evil as well as good).

What what about 'normal' people who certainly dream but cannot remember much about it: people like myself?

*

Dreaming certainly feels important to personal well-being (I regard this insight of Jung's as correct), and if so this means that dreaming does its work whether we recall dreams or not.

In a nutshell, I believe that dreams are important in giving 'depth' to our subjective experience.

Without dreaming I think that life would be a matter of 'what you see is what you get' - like watching soaps or the news on TV - a matter of emotional stimulation by this, then that, then something else.

With dreaming, our minds make connections and relate things to one another; so life has at least a semblance of being whole.

Of course, since we fill our minds with dross, our dreams don't have much to 'work on'; nonetheless they do what they can.

And, of course, since modernity regards sleeping and dreaming as a big waste of time, we don't sleep enough and do things which probably damage our dreams; and so get less good from this than we should (or could).

*

But, since most dreams are not remembered, how could we know any of this? How would we know if dreams were doing this kind of work?

Well, there are theoretical arguments such as I make in the co-authored paper linked above (which I think is one of the best - or at least cleverest - things I ever did in psychology - although naturally it has been completely ignored).

And there is introspection (what the German psychiatrists termed phenomenology), i.e. awareness of one's own psychological states - which ought to be regarded as a vital check on all psychology and psychiatry.

Introspection is an ability which varies quite widely between individuals, and can also be trained or suppressed - and bear in mind that introspective ability is quite different from the ability to write on the subject of inner states.

Jung was a hugely naturally-gifted introspector who developed this ability, Freud seemed to have no abilities at all in this domain - but Freud was a much better writer.

Among modern writers Tolkien was an introspector of genius and also a writer of genius - so is a primary source.

*

I conclude that if we introspect we know that sleep and dream are very important indeed.

At the very highest levels, ascetic Saints seem to reach a state in which sleep and awakeness merge and fuse; but at the lower levels the rest of us inhabit, sleeping and dreaming represent a vital alternation of human being - even though we can seldom recall or discuss explicitly and exactly what they are doing.

*