It is equally clear that two equal forces acting in opposite directions, both being finite and each distinguished from the other by its direction only, must neutralize or reduce each other to inaction. Now the transcendental philosophy demands; first, that two forces should be conceived which counteract each other by their essential nature; not only not in consequence of the accidental direction of each, but as prior to all direction, nay, as the primary forces from which the conditions of all possible directions are derivative and deducible: secondly, that these forces should be assumed to be both alike infinite, both alike indestructible. The problem will then be to discover the result or product of two such forces, as distinguished from the result of those forces which are finite, and derive their difference solely from the circumstance of their direction.
Tuesday, 20 June 2023
Four interacting abstract tendencies or forces - or else one Being: Why I found it necessary to revise the "polar metaphysics" of Coleridge/ Barfield/ Arkle
Tuesday, 2 January 2018
Not Process but Provenance - (and Polarity is an abstraction of creative-being)
Allow me to explain... The (modern, fake...) idea is that 'understanding' of something is a matter of being able to describe it in terms of process; and that correct understanding has happened when process leads to predictable outcomes.
So - the modern activity of professional bureaucratic research that calls-itself 'science' claims that valid results are what come-out-of this process of research, and what comes out of this process is intrinsically valid. Science is regarded as The Process.
But, it would be truer to say (although still an abstraction) that science is what comes-out-of scien-tists; that is, out-of individual human creative-beings whose motivation is scientific. Science is what-(real) scientists-do.
Other examples would be my current obsessions of Primary Thinking and Polarity. I have been having difficulties explaining these, including to myself (especially polarity...). And these difficulties are related to my trying to do this explaining in terms of process - which is an abstraction. I should instead have been trying to understand them in terms of their provenance.
Yet my explicit metaphysical foundation is that ultimate reality is personal, not abstract - my bottom line is that reality is made up of beings (variously alive and conscious beings). Abstractions are therefore merely models - therefore (being models) always simplified and always incomplete and always not-true... no matter how expedient or useful in limited circumstances.
So, trying to explain Primary Thinking in terms of process is always and necessarily wrong - in reality primary thinking is the thinking of that-which-is-primary: i.e. the thinking of our real self, which is a divine self (a son or daughter of God): a self that is in part existent from eternity.
The thinking of this real self is primary thinking - and the validity of the 'products' of divine thinking comes from that provenance: that is from thinking's origin in the real self. Thought that originates-from the real self is valid, and that provenance is what makes thought valid...
And polarity... I have (following Coleridge and Barfield) tried to explain it abstractly, that is as a model... but polarity so-considered is a process; a process consisting of opposed by inextricable centrifugal (feminine) and centripetal (masculine) elements... and so on. And all processes are abstractions, hence wrong.
So, in the end, polarity has not really been understood. And nobody can make a machine or any other model that 'does polarity'... Only beings do it.
Polarity is an abstract model of creativity, and creativity is done by beings.
The ultimate creativity is to create creators - that is, to pro-create, to have offspring. Thus the ultimate reality, of which polarity is merely an abstraction, is the fertile dyad of man and woman; of two complementary beings.
Other types of creativity (literary, scientific artistic etc) are inextricable from the inclusion of beings - a poem without a person to read/ a symphony without someone to hear it... is not a creative product but merely ink marks on paper.
All creativity entails beings. (And beings entail life and consciousness - of some type and degree.)
That is, creativity is also (like polarity, like primary thinking) a matter of provenance, of source and origin...
So, to return to Primary Thinking - we cannot explain it as a process, indeed that is its nature to be inexplicable as a process - else it would not be primary (and instead 'the process' would be primary).
We know primary thinking by knowing that we do it - more exactly, that we have been-doing it: that our real self has-been-thinking. We cannot look-within the process of primary thinking - because primary thinking is what eventuates-from our real self. We know primary thinking by recognising that it has-eventuated - we recognise primary thinking as a product-of our real self, thinking...
Therefore, the deepest understanding is not of (inevitably incomplete and biased) abstract models of processes; but knowledge of the nature of the beings that constitute reality.
Aside: All this is why and how Christians can correctly regard love as primary in God's creation - which would not make sense if ultimate understanding of creation was of the nature of physics or mathematics. Love is primary because beings are primary - thus ultimate reality is alive, conscious, purposive.
Tuesday, 10 May 2022
Re-reading Owen Barfield's "What Coleridge Thought"
I am currently re-reading various Owen Barfield works, including What Coleridge Thought (1971); which had a massive impact when I last read it in 2016. This reading led eventually to my still current metaphysical system (based on the eternal existence of Beings).
Both in 2016 and now, I gave the fullest and most active attention to my reading; which for me entails reading, in a cafe, at the 'best time of day' for me - which is before 11.00 am. I sit wit the book on one side and a notebook on the other; and read a bit but keep breaking-off to write comments in the notebook about as much as I read. And I take as long as it takes to work through the book in this way.
When I first read this book, I was mainly trying to understand 'what Coleridge thought'; but this time I am comparing this with the ways in which I have extended or modified my own philosophy - in which I was triggered by the ways in which I regarded Coleridge as 'dead right' and the ways in which I felt he was still captive to the philosophy he had learned as a younger man.
In particular, Coleridge (and indeed Barfield) seem to me to suffer - to a relatively worse degree than I do myself - from what Barfield termed Residual Unresolved Positivism. Coleridge was a great genius pioneer, and was making a trail for the first time; such that things were made easier for those who followed.
(Including that Coleridge had, by his work, permanently affected and added-to the world of divine creation - which we can now discover intuitively for ourselves - if we are able to ask the right questions.)
Thus, Coleridge's extremely abstract and difficult exposition of 'polarity' or 'polar logic' and of his schemata for describing human mental activity, can be simplified greatly (I believe) by the simple assumption of having the metaphysical assumption that the 'basic unit' of reality are Beings, which have properties such as life, consciousness and purpose - and who are 'defined' as existing through-time - which means that we should eschew discussing them without reference to time and transformation.
I have found this to be (so far) extremely powerful and satisfying - partly because it is an explicit elaboration of how I recall seeing the world as a young child; and it chimes with my understanding of the 'animism' of hunter-gatherer tribal people.
So, this time of reading, I am fitting Barfield's understanding of Coleridge into my own understanding - which is, in a sense, the opposite of what I did first-time-through.
Sunday, 9 April 2023
Heavenly Parents and the dyadic/ one-creator God - an update
As I have often written, but not recently, I believe that God is dyadic - consisting of a Heavenly Father and Mother, a man and woman who are (in some sense) incarnate and not spirits.
This is the Mormon understanding, and reading about Mormon theology was where I first came across it.
I am not trying to persuade other people that I am right; but I shall here consider why I personally believe this, and what it is that I believe.
In the first place it is due to what might be termed intuition; in the sense that when I first encountered this idea, my heart seemed to jump and warm; as if I was discovering something true, good and with great possibilities of more-good.
There was an immediate and positive sense... not so much that this was true, but that I wanted this to be true - this came before my conviction that it was true.
Following this I read more about Mormon theology, and realized that the dyadic, man-woman nature of our Heavenly parents was just part of an entire metaphysical understanding of creation (including procreation - the creation of beings including people) as something dynamic, interactive, developing, evolutionary, open-ended, and expanding.
In other words, that creation itself was creative (and therefore creation was not, as I had previously assumed, a done-thing, a closed accomplishment, a finished totality - once-and-for-always.)
I then began to explore the implications of these ideas for myself; using concepts I got from William Arkle (and his reflections on God's motivations for creation); and Owen Barfield, including Barfield's accounts of the 'polar' philosophy of ST Coleridge.
I was also building on a longer-term fascination with 'animism' - with the (apparently innate and spontaneous) tendency to regard the world (the universe) as consisting primarily of beings - all of whom were alive, purposive, conscious - albeit in different ways, at different scales and timescales etc.
The motivation for creation, and why God should have created this kind of creation, was something I had found difficult to grasp (none of the usual explanations made much sense to me). But when I conceptualized God as the loving dyad of a man and woman, then it seemed obvious why such a combination would have wanted to create - including others who might eventually become like themselves.
Furthermore, it did not seem possible that creation had arisen from any state of oneness of self-sufficiency, since this would make creation arbitrary; nor could creation arise from a tendency towards differentiation, because that would lead to meaningless-purposeless chaos.
There must (I felt) have been some kind of original 'polarity' - in abstract and physics-like terminology, there would need to be at-least two different kinds of 'force', the interaction of which would be creation. Coleridge (also Barfield and Arkle) saw this in terms of a 'masculine'-tendency for expansion and differentiation; and a 'feminine'-tendency for one-ness and integration.
But in terms of my (non-abstract) preferred metaphysics of beings and animistic assumptions; 'masculine' and 'feminine' simplifies to just a primordial man and a primordial woman; this would mean two complementary, unlike-but-of-the-same-kind, beings; the love of whom would lead to a desire for creation.
(In the same kind of way that - in this mortal life - love of man and woman usually leads to a desire for procreation.)
At some point I validated this understanding by means of meditative prayer; by refining and asking a simple question, feeling that this question had 'got-through', and receiving a clear inner response.
In summary; the above account is something-like the sequence by which I desired, concluded, became-convinced-by, the metaphysical assumption of God as Heavenly parents; by some such mixture of feelings, reasoning, and 'feedback'.
All this happened a good while ago (about a decade); since when I have been interpreting things on the basis of this framework, and it seems to 'work', so far.
What the real-life, this world, implications are; include a reinforcement of the idea that the family is (and ought to be) the primary social structure; on earth as it is in Heaven; and a clarification of the nature of creation - starting with the primary creation by Heavenly parents and also including the secondary creation of beings (such as men and women) within primary creation.
This metaphysics has further helped me understand both why and how love is the primary value of Christianity; i.e. because love made possible creation in the first place, and is the proper basis of 'coordinating' the subcreative activities of all the beings of creation.
And it helped me understand how creation can be open-ended and expansile, without degenerating into chaos; because it is love that makes the difference.
Also, it helped me to understand the nature of evil; and how evil is related either to the incapacity for love or its rejection. Without love, the innate creativity of individual beings is going to be selfish and hostile to that of other beings: non-loving attitudes, thinking, and actions by beings, will tend to destroy the harmony of creation.
I don't talk much about this understanding, and I often use the generic term 'God'; because it is difficult to explain briefly and clearly that the dyadic God of our Heavenly parents serves as a single and 'coherently unified' source of creation
But God is two, not one, because only a dyad can create, and creation must-be dyadic.
And the dyadic just-is the one-ness of God the primal creator.
Note added: It may be said, correctly, that the above does not depend on the Bible; but then neither does the metaphysics of orthodox-classical theology depend on scripture. We can find resonances and consistencies within the Bible - but assumptions such as: strict monotheism - creation ex nihilo (from nothing) by a God outside of creation and Time, the Athanasian Creed descriptions of the Trinity, God's omnipotence and omniscience, original sin... These are ideas that would not be derived-from a reading of scripture - the most that can be said is that someone who already ideas can find Biblical references that can be interpreted as consistent-with these assumptions. They are (apparently) products of philosophically sophisticated theologians who brought these ideas to Christianity from earlier and mostly pagan (Greek and Roman) sources. Also, these kinds of metaphysical assumption are theistic - to do with a personal god - but not specifically Christian. The salvific work of Jesus Christ (principally: making possible resurrected life everlasting in Heaven) was done within already-existing creation, and Christianity is not therefore an explanation of creation-as-such.
Wednesday, 11 April 2018
The new/ return-to animism and anthropomorphism: clarifying the key concepts from Steiner and Barfield
For example the vital idea of 'polarity'. If you follow the previous link you will see some of my attempts at explicating polarity. However, I have come to realise that root problem relates to polarity being a metaphor derived from physics (i.e. from magnetism) - often with mathematical (e.g. geometric) aspects. And this makes it difficult to apply to the situation of human reality.
So Coleridge, for example, argued cogently and (to me) convincingly 200 years ago that we must have a logic based on polarity - but it is terribly difficult to grasp what he meant by this, and how we would go about such a change, and what positive difference it might make... William Blake seemed to express much the same conviction as Coleridge in some of his poems - especially the early aphorisms... but again it's a big jump from appreciating poetic 'paradoxes' to changing the structure of mainstream thinking.
But is, instead, we use biological metaphors and analogies to explain the same essential situation, then it is much more comprehensible. So, if we do our philosophy in terms of life, development, growth etc - then we find that we don't need a special concept of polarity. A living being generates contrasts and differences that can be distinguished (as we validly and usefully distinguish the several organs of a body, such as the heart); yet these distinctions are not separable (as we cannot separate the heart from the rest of the body, without killing both).
In fat, a thoroughgoing animism, or anthropomorphism, seems to be the best solution to many difficulties. And this has the added advantage of fitting with our own childhood experiences as well as the evolutionary-developmental-history of human consciousness. We can see that our task is to return to the simple, childlike animism and anthropomorphism - but this time not unconsciously and because we know no differently, but deliberately and in full awareness of what we are doing.
In a sense; Coleridge, Steiner and Barfield all knew this and explicitly said this; but they did not follow-through with the task of ejecting physics and mathematics from their explanatory schemata and replacing them with the child-like way of thinking of reality as alive, conscious, purposive - and with the relations between entities understood as relationships between beings.
Or consider the way that Steiner and Barfield describe the evolution of consciousness through various stages - and the possible future of the Imaginative Soul/ Final Participation. We seem to see a mechanical universe going-through various phases towards a predetermined outcome (and Steiner, especially, attaches all kinds of mystical-numbers of years to these phases and the way they play out - with predictions stretching millennia into the future).
How much clearer it is to state that the evolution of consciousness happens because God wants it to happen and influences the world accordingly; but only insofar as each Man chooses (from his agency) to ally himself with God's plan. Man's destiny is therefore what God hopes will happen, it can be achieved only incrementally, but each individual must choose to cooperate; and might well choose to oppose.
Animism and anthropomorphism are only 'childish' in a bad sense insofar as the child knows nothing different than them (and much the same applies to Men in simple, tribal hunter gatherer societies). Modern Man knows many different ways of thinking - especially the simplified-modelling of reality with mathematics and the sciences; and every model is partial and distorted and of ultimately unknowable generalisability... all of the explanations of mathematics and science are at bottom only simplified models that may, or may not, be useful for some specific purpose and situation.
Yet reality is as it always was. There is nothing childish about recognising that we were correct about the ultimate nature of reality when we were children and before Men had civilisations - after all nothing has ever disproved it!
Sunday, 6 October 2019
The problem of residual abstraction (maths, geometry, physics) in philosophical (and theological) thinking
The problem is that the understandings and explanations of such people are/ remain rooted in abstract phenomena - despite that these are intending to advocate a personal, 'animistic', 'anthropomorphic' metaphysics.
Their basic idea is that reality is a matter of Beings in Relationships... That the ultimate entities are Beings (alive, conscious, purposive) and that what holds things together and provides structure is the relationships of these Beings.
Yet ni advocating a metaphysics of Being and Relations; these authors fall back, again and again, into abstraction; into the use of examples drawn from physics, geometry and mathematics.
eg. Steiner in Philosophy of Freedom develops his argument wholly abstractly, in terms of categories of percept and concept, and his example is the geometrical figure of the triangle.
Barfield uses physics as his primary mode of explanation; the rainbow is his most famous example; and he calls his new way of thinking 'polarity' which he describes relationships between beings in abstract-mathematical-physics ways - using magnetism and electricity as explanations.
Arkle's main book, A Geography of Consciousness, uses geometrical and physics graphs, tables and diagrams to explain his 'system' - despite that he explicitly asserts everything is alive and conscious.
This could be regarded as a prime example of Residual Unresolved Positivism (RUP) as described by Barfield - and the fact that Barfield himself was prone to it (as was his Master, Steiner) shows how difficult it is to shake-off. This difficulty is most apparent in Barfield's most deep and rigorous book - How Coleridge Thought - when the clash of perspectives is the source of greatest difficulty in understanding the argument. Barfield seems unaware of how his abstractly-structured schemes are so fundamentally at-odds-with what he is trying to prove using these schemes. The key term 'polarity' is mathematical and derived from magnetism (later electricty) - and as difficult to understand intuitively as most such ideas are.
The problem is so old that it can seem inevitable - it goes back to the ancient Greeks, who nearly always used (the ancient equivalent of...) physics as the basis of their metaphysics - with principles such as fire or water underlying 'everything'.
Another example is that 'form' is taken as primary (as with Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas) - and 'form' is conceptualised in geometric terms and often using geometrical examples. (A modern instance is Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields.)
Whereas the primary reality is actually A Being, not A Triangle; is a Being's motivation, not a force or principle.
This abstraction then leads on to the problem (the error) of regarding Time as... optional. The delusion that Time can be set aside, redefined etc. When a world is seen as abstract as its reality and bottom line - then Time loses its function; indeed Time becomes a nuisance!
Yet, if the world is of Beings, beings exists In Time, and only In Time. In cross-section, there are no Beings - because in a 'zero' timescale there is no Life, no Consciousness - if Life and Consciousness are primary, then there is and always must be Time...
Thus one error leads on to another,
But what this does show is the need for further work for Romantic Christianity; because Steiner, Barfield, Arkle are all in error by using maths/ geometry and physics as their models and explanations.
There us work to be done to restate their arguments in terms that are coherent with the conclusions of their arguments.
The good news is that - when thus restated - the metaphysics and theology of Romantic Christianity becomes something intuitively understandable by a child; rather than requiring advanced training in the natural sciences.
Thursday, 20 March 2025
"Masculinity" and "femininity" versus the actual person of Mother in Heaven
While I assume that God is Dyadic (a Heavenly Father and Mother) - this is something I have not really grasped, not does it correspond much with daily experience.
Partly this may be because we Christians are intended to relate primarily to Jesus, rather than the primary creator; but partly it is because I tend to get "hung-up" on inaccurate and unhelpful assumptions relating to principles, rather than persons.
An example of an unhelpful/ misleading conceptualization would be that of Coleridge's "polarity" between "two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely ["masculine], while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity [feminine]".
One such assumption is that habit of thinking of male and female in terms of being specific exemplifications of those abstractions: "masculinity" and "femininity"... Abstractions that are somehow floating unattached beyond time and space, and sort-of imposing-themselves-upon Beings (as it were to make them men, or women)...!
Really; things must be otherwise.
Our Heavenly Parents are those two Beings who (in actuality, not by any prior necessity) first committed to eternal love; and on that basis began divine creation.
It is their two natures, originating as two Beings, that ramify through all of creation since.
Thus male and female both structure and power creation; but in this personal way - derived from actual living, conscious, developing Beings; and not therefore in terms of abstract metaphysical forces or fields or tendencies.
As (always?) with metaphysical realities, it is not possible to derive the metaphysics from empirical specifics (such as actual men and women) - nor is it possible to derive any particular empirical specifics from the metaphysical assumptions.
If the universe truly is derived from a dyadic God; then that universe includes everything that exists, has existed, or could exist - and this reality (this Primary Creation) in which we dwell; includes not just divine creation, but also entropy/death and purposive evil.
What this seems to mean - among many other things! - is that our experience of Mother in Heaven ought not to be pre-conceptualized in terms of an ideal earthly-mortal Mother, nor any other archetypal female conceptualization.
Of course, if that is what we have decided in advance that we will find, then that is what we will find - and any female archetype really is there; but only as a selective, hence distorted, part of the reality.
This stricture applies both to Goddess conceptualizations; and to the Blessed Virgin Mary - whom I regard as ultimately a selective and distorted representation of the reality of the actual person of Mother in Heaven.
(Albeit the veneration/worship of the Mary, Mother of Jesus has - in some times and places - been very valuable as such; and IMO far preferable overall to an exclusively "masculine" conceptualization of God.)
I think the difficulties of you and I experiencing the person of Mother in Heaven are therefore partly due to the nature of God the Creator - who is not personal in this world, in the way that Jesus Christ is personal; partly it is due to the ultimately-dyadic nature of God (and the consequent difficulty of disambiguating Father and Mother, who are necessarily participating-in each-other); and partly due to our usually false expectations concerning what She is like.
So, what is She like?
The best answer is: She is like who-She-is.
...Which can be known - as here on earth - by personal experience, by getting-to-know a person.
But She is not to be known in terms of exemplifying a list of supposed-female attributes, nor can any list of attributes validly communicate her reality.
Monday, 29 October 2018
Ultimate metaphysics and Mother in Heaven
My aim is something much more like those Ancient Egyptian myths of primal beings - gods and titans emerging from chaos; or the folk stories about 'totem animals'... Instead of particles and forces we have beings with motivations.
As I have previously posted I have a personal intuition/ revelation that confirms the Mormon teaching (independently endorsed by William Arkle) that God is both Father and Mother (a 'dyad' - complementary - the whole God consisting of an eternal union of man and woman).
The implications are tremendous, and only incrementally becoming clear to me.
One is that this is the truth behind the principle of 'polarity' as articulated by Coleridge and clarified by Barfield. 'Polarity' is a concept derived from the physical sciences - hence is only a model: the reality is our Heavenly Parents.
Thus, the two interdependent forces - centrifugal and centripetal - about which Coleridge talks; and from the interaction of which, all may be derived in a dynamic and self-renewing way; are actually the primal man and woman.
If we ask what is the difference between the Father and Mother, we have actually taken a step away-from the primary reality, because our answer can only be in terms of abstract qualities - whereas our divine parents are the irreducible units from-which all else (including all abstractions) are derived.
Our Heavenly parents are what they are. While we can know and understand them empathically, by direct intuition - because we are their children and of the same kind - we must (in the attempt to communicate) resist the false temptation to describe them in terms of lesser qualities, or to analyse them as quantities - and then to regard these partial, distorted, abstracted descriptions as the reality.
Heavenly Father and Mother differ; qualitatively and complementarily (to make a living unity in-time); but this difference can't be captured by a static, structural 'personality description'.
Creation is the consequence of their love; and that is why love is (as the Fourth Gospel tells us) the prime relationship in the universe of creation. Nothing is more important than love; because love (between our Heavenly parents) is the causal basis and reason for all of creation (including, of course, the creation of ourselves, as children of God).
Having reached this point; it seems very important to pay more attention to both Father and Mother in the nature of God; this duality is neglected yet must be of prime importance. If this was physics, we would not neglect one of a polarity - how much more important when it comes to God.
Indeed, this seems a matter of urgent importance.