How does free will work? The Divine Self and the Conscious Self

In brief, I will describe how there are two elements to free will. 

1. The creative power of the primordial Divine Self 

We are all Beings who have existed from eternity. And as Beings we have the capability to originate thought. Therefore, we are not merely passive and reactive - but can generate thought from our-selves. 

2. The directive power of the Conscious Self

For there to be free will - more is required; and that extra was provided by God when he 'created' us; that is, when he made us into Children of God ('Sons of God').  

What God provided was the Conscious Self, which has the ability to direct the attention of the Divine Self. 

It is the Divine Self that enables us to originate thought (independent of external causes). The Divine Self is what make's each Being (and each Man) and uncaused case. 

But in our primordial situation, before God created us, this originative thought was passively responsive to whatever external situation we were in. 

We would have been able to think, to originate uncaused thoughts; but we had no control over what it was that we thought. 

There could therefore be no free will primordially, because there was no control over the originative properties of the Divine Self. Free will was made possible by God's creation of Men.   

When the Conscious Self is added to the Divine Self, free will becomes possible; because the Conscious Self can 'point' the Divine Self at one thing or another. 

The Conscious Self could also be termed our 'will' - in other words, we can consciously will our Divine Self to attend to what we are observing, making, reading, doing - or whatever it may be. When this happens, we are able to choose where to deploy our divine creativity. 

The Conscious Self cannot 'control' what comes-out-of our Divine self. Because nothing can control the Divine Self - the Divine Self is the basis and reality of our ultimate freedom, autonomy; our capacity to create-from-ourselves. 

But we can consciously control the subject matter attended to by our Divine self - we can therefore choose what the Divine Self deploys-itself-upon.

So, conscious will can direct our Divine Self; and that is why we need to be conscious in order to be free. 

If the Conscious Self was not present, or not actually conscious; then the Divine Self only responds to whatever external circumstances present to it. But with consciousness, potentially we can voluntarily influence what we think about.    

And that is how free will works, what free will does; and why it is important for Man to become more conscious...

Because consciousness is what enables freedom; and freedom is what enables us to choose to accept Jesus Christ's gift of eternal resurrected life. 

Final Participation as the theosis of the future - Owen Barfield's scheme given its full Christian context

It was seemingly difficult for Owen Barfield to express clearly what he meant by Final Participation of human consciousness - indeed I think he exhibited a reluctance to be explicit on this point.

I now feel I have sufficiently understood Final Participation to re-explain it in my own words; but in doing so I take a step further than Barfield was willing to go in most public fora; and I think I can understand why.

To make Final Participation clear involves acknowledging its basis in Christianity - which has a tendency to alienate non-Christians; while at the same time claiming to move-forward-from, and in that sense 'supercede' Historical Christianity - which would tend to alienate most Christians: thereby leaving Barfield with only a very small audience!

Anyway, whether or not the above understanding is a correct guess: here is my understanding of the assumed historical sequence of Original Participation - going through various phases to our current almost wholly-alienated Modern Western Consciousness Soul - to Final Participation.

The key concept is theosis, which is the process of becoming divine. The consciousness of theosis therefore clearly depends on the concept of the divine: in becoming like-god it depends what we understand by god.

Original Participation was the situation of the first Men - who lived in hunter gatherer societies. They understood the divine to be something like energies in a process of circulation and transformation. Theosis was therefore the living daily experience of participating in these energies and transformations. The system was closed, all is as it was and ever will be. Man is part of the divine, but not a separate self.

This was the childhood of Man.

Then came the start of an increasing degree of self-consciousness, of Man as aware of Himself as an Agent with 'free will'; which brought with it an increasing sense of separation from the divine. At first the separation was only temporary and could be overcome by the activities of priest, performing rituals, in temples - and the ultimate aim was to restore each man into the divine. Mundane life was an exile - the aim was reabsorption of the individual self-consciousness back into the divine consciousness. Man conceived himself as as 'a worm', with the merest glimmer or vestige of autonomy - and that autonomy essentially wicked.

By stages, over many centuries, the separation of self-consciousness and awareness of the self as unique increased until it became almost (but never fully) complete; so that now and for many generations Man regards himself no longer as a worm, but as the only god - which either leads to absolute (but brittle) pride at his self-creation of his own reality out of nothing; or (and eventually) to despair at his belief that therefore reality depends on his own continuous creation and is therefore feeble and temporary and doomed to end with death - Man regarding himself as something even-less-than a worm.

At this stage theosis has stopped, is no longer a purpose, life has no meaning outside of the contigent and ephemeral and private subjective consciousness.

This is the adolescence of Man.

Final Participation is the renewal of a new kind of theosis in which God and the Self are both regarded as real (eternally real) - and there are many selves, each on the path towards divinity. So the aim is not immersive participation in divine energies; it is not reabsorption into the divine; but the aim of Final Participation is instead to participate in the process of ever more, and ever more loving and creative, relationships between the many eternal selves of Men on the one hand and God (in divine multiplicity) on the other hand.

Final Participation is Final because the system is no longer closed (as it was in Original Participation) but open-ended and capable of eternal expansion, as we as individuals each and collectively grow towards a divinity of the same kind and level as God - but an unique, and continually added-to divinity; and with many others (being added-to) all around us, in relationships with us, who are doing the same.

To move towards Final Participation we need to consider the nature of our relationship with the divine - and that we are to understand ourselves as immature and very-partial divinities - but that God has a loving and paternal relationship with us; so we need have nothing to fear from him and an attitude of trust and confidence in him as he will always want the best for us and work for that end.

For Final Participation, therefore, we need to see God as a person and a personal friend; and not somebody or some-thing vast and mysterious to be awed by and needing to be appeased, not somebody to be pleaded-with, nor an alien and incomprehensible being to be worshipped - and not an abstract infinite perfection which we seek to 'lose ourselves' into. At least, such attitudes cannot be foremost and regulative of our relation to God - but only background, exceptional and temporary.

Of Course, God condescends greatly to meet us at our level, and for that we should be grateful; but having said that we just need to put aside that fact and get on with the relationship at our own childish or adolescent level (just as a child knows that the adult is condescending to play, but the play cannot be play unless that condescension is 'forgotten' while the play is in progress). Respectful friendliness, trust, confidence - and an 'equality' which (like the child's in play with  parent, as he grows) is not less real for continually being superceded by higher levels of maturing and diminishing magnitudes of difference. 

Barfield - following Coleridge - saw reality in terms of distinguishable, dynamic but not separable polarities. The Polarity of Final Participation may be between God as an eternal and fully-divine person; and each of ourselves as eternal and partially-divine persons. The poles never to be united, but always bound-together in dynamic process, energized by that thing we could call Love - so long as we are clear that Love contains many positive aspects such as creativity, intelligence, power...

In sum - the movement from Original to Final Participation (leaving-out the long transitional state that occupies recorded history, and in which we still seem to be 'stuck') is therefore centred on the work of Christ; understood as enabling the change from theosis as loss of the self and reabsorption back-into the divine - to theosis as a stronger and maturing self-awarness and consciousness; closer and closer towards the adulthood of a full friend-like relationship between the personal loving God and his growing-up child.

It is the lived experience of this theosis which is Final Participation.

*

Note added: Having posted the above I almost immediately came upon an explicit confirmation of my interpretation on page 154 of What Coleridge Thought by Owen Barfield:

...The polarity God [polar-with symbol] Man is the basis of all polarity, in nature and elsewhere.

This leads to my final summary:

Original Participation = Divine Unity
Consciousness Soul = Human Separateness
Final Participation = Divine-Human Polarity

"Will power" characterized the spirituality of the religious elite during the era of Medieval consciousness

Religions, as we know them, emerged in the era of Medieval consciousness  - which was a millennia-long transition between the immersive passive un-consciousness of Original Participation and the current alienated Modern consciousness. 

There were (perhaps) two main forms of religion - one for the masses, the other for elite religious specialists. 

The Medieval mass consciousness was based on obedience to the religious institutions; and spiritual participation was made possible by intermediary phenomena; such as symbol, ritual, scripture, song - or social dynamics. 

The Medieval elite consciousness was based upon control of the whole person by "will power"; that is by human will aligned with divine will. 

The basic idea of Medieval era elite consciousness; was that a human being might discover the divine will; and then organized his life around the process of getting his own will into accord with the divine - and the totality of his behaviour into accord with his own divine-aligned will. 

So, the religious life was about prolonged discipline and training (e.g. varieties of initiation); aiming towards conscious goals. 

If successfully, the will was directed at the divine, and mastered all aspects of behaviour; to produce a transformed person (the higher type being described in various terms - holy, enlightened, an adept etc).  

Since the religious elites led the masses - and the obedience of the masses was directed at the religious elites - it was vital that there was sufficient alignment between elite and divine will. 

Usually - in most places, most of the time - there was not sufficient human-divine alignment. 

But sometimes and in some places there was; so it remained a valid ideal; especially in a world where individual consciousness was not much developed in most people. 

This idea of subordinating the whole of life to an elite will (purportedly aligned with the divine will) was "a good thing" insofar as the human will really was aligned with the divine will. 

And also insofar as the Medieval mode of consciousness infused this process of deployment of human will with "the spirit"... 

Because otherwise the whole thing was merely legalism - with all the ambiguities and imprecision intrinsic to the interpretation of language

It is this second aspect of the spirit infusing the human will, that has changed so much in the modern era - such that now the religious elites seldom even claim seriously to to be highly-aligned with divine will. 

Indeed, elite religious authority is usually based upon the same modes as the secular - that is to say institutional legitimacy, laws, rules, guidance understood as normal language (and in practice interpreted in the secular ways that such language is interpreted - e.g. legalistically, by historical and linguistic analysis, quasi-scientifically etc).  

What the modern era is left-with; is therefore the forms of Medieval consciousness, but minus the spontaneous spiritual infusion that used to accompany these forms. 

This, I think, is a reason why the Medieval forms are so badly-disenchanted; and exhibit such a dry, monochrome, dull, "school dinners" atmosphere...

Lacking spiritual infusion, their motivate only feebly, sometimes imperceptibly feebly; and consequently the elite religious specialists become assimilated into mainstream elite social mores: which are currently those of bureaucratic totalitarianism; hence evil; hence anti-Christian. 

(This can explain why the church leaders are the primary conduit for this-worldly and socio-politically-expedient corruption in the major Christian churches.)

And this, in turn, is why so many of the religious elite have turned away from them to immerse in the psychological gratifications - e.g. political spectacle-excitement, media entertainment, self-gratifying pseudo-moralism, therapies and palliatives - of mainstream secular culture. 

"Successful" churches are nowadays enterprises; providing meeting places and organizing holidays, staging events, serving as cafes and theatres, hosting social and health services - and so forth. 

This, then, is our situation. The aim, I presume; if our Christian life is to be strongly-enough motivated to transcend the pervasive pressure of secular society - is for each of us is to seek "enchantment" - i.e. infusion by divine spirit. 

...That same spiritual infusion that Mankind enjoyed in the past - but accepting that this is not possible either by passive immersion or by mediating phenomena. In sum: We need to seek the spirit actively and consciously - or else it will not happen. 

And we need to seek to integrate our-selves not by will power - which is now alienated from the divine. Nor by integration with the unconscious - from which we are detached, and which is anyway not Christian. 

But instead by seeking re-connection with our own partially-divine, eternal, original selves that are currently cut-off and alienated -- both by modern culture; and cut-off also by the forms of Medieval religion without the spirit. 

Because it is our eternal self that is in direct contact with the divine; and which therefore knows when it is aligned with God - and when it is (usually) more or less in a state of disharmony with creation - i.e. sin.  

For us; will power, and the disciplined seeking of conscious goals that characterized elite religious life in the Medieval era of consciousness; needs to be secondary to seeking divine-motivation, and divine-guidance and correction, by this inner-directed seeking consciously to establish direct-contact with our eternal selves.  

This is something new and unprecedented; and therefore difficult - but not so difficult as it may seem. The first step is to recognize what is wanted; then to recognize when it happens...

And the third step is not to expect too much! 

What is needed is sufficient Christian motivation to be able to navigate a Christian life in a hostile world - the ability to discern and the commitment to choose the divine and reject the demonic. 

We do not need, and shall not achieve, permanent and pervasive personal transformation for-the-better! 

We will neither become holy nor enlightened persons (unless we already are these things). 

But what is attainable; is a steady and robust desire to follow Jesus to resurrected eternal life in Heaven.  

True personal creativity is only possible when originating from the True Self, in alignment with already-existing divine creation

When I think rigorously about what is required for 'true creativity' by a Man, then it seems that a pretty extensive set of pre-requisites must be in place; such that true creativity is only possible to some people, at some times and places in history. 

Human creativity is possible because of divine creativity: we dwell 'in' God's creation; so, for a Man's creativity to be real entails first that it comes from the Man himself - from his unique personal 'self'; and second that it harmonizes with divine creation. 

If creativity does not come from the Man himself, then what we have is just an instance of divine creation. 

Through most of history (in most places) Men did not claim to be creative, because their experience was that creativity came from God (or the gods). This was sometimes called inspiration; reflecting that it was breathed-in from some other source - from the divine, from the muses or whatever. 

So most of creativity in the past was not the product of an individual person - because the individual was merely a conduit for the divine; a tool or instrument of the divine. 

This kind of creativity is therefore real - and it harmonizes with divine creation - but it is not personal, its creative aspect is of-God, not of-Man. 

On the other hand; every-thing (every thought or action) which comes from a person innately, from his Real (hence divine) Self; is not of God, is indeed personal - but it is not creative unless it harmonizes-with and adds-to divine creation. 

Thus, most things we do from our-selves is merely personal, is not from God but instead a product of a Man; and it is Not creative. It is indeed anti-creation. 

In other words; of itself, that which originates from Man will Not, of itself, be creative - because it will be individual and out-of-harmony with divine creation. It will therefore be (to a greater of lesser degree) damaging or subversive to divine creation. 

In order, therefore, for a Man to be genuinely creative; he must be sufficiently an independent agent that he can generate thought/action from-himself (rather than simply being a conduit channeling divine creation); and top be genuinely creative, he must also make the choice to align himself with divine creation by a voluntary act. 

All independent acts of a Man that are aligned with divine creation are therefore instances of true personal creativity - but the magnitude of achievement varies between a world-historical genius; and someone 'minor' or altogether unknown, who has lesser ability and application but who nonetheless does 'make a difference' (and an eternal difference) - but a small difference, yet in a positive direction. 

Thus all acts of true personal creativity add-to divine creation, but the amount by which they add to divine creation varies hugely in accordance with the 'stature' of individuals. 

The business of aligning with divine creation is what happens when a scientist is devoted to 'the Truth' or when an artist is devoted to 'Beauty' - both of these are types of alignment with the Reality of divine creation. 

The long period of attunement, learning, practice and preparation which leads-up to a work of genius is exactly this process of alignment. Once the individual is aligned with divine creation; then his spontaneous creativity will contribute to overall creation. 

This model also explains why recent generations of supposedly creative people have the form of the 'evil genius' - in that these are people of great ability who are Not aligned with the Reality of divine creation; and who therefore inevitable do harm to creation. 

Confusing selection-replacement with transformative developmental-evolution... The covertly suicidal impulse in Artificial Intelligence, Transhumanism, and Oneness spiritualities

There is a very prevalent logical error that pervades our culture; so thoroughly pervades it that it is all-but invisible, and difficult to understand. 

The error is to confuse annihilation and replacement, with transformational development. 

This error was made clear to me only in recent years and through reading Owen Barfield; but until that point (around 2014) I too was in thrall to the mistake. 

We have a deep, ancient and primary understanding of 'evolution' as a process akin to the development of an acorn to an oak tree, and egg to a chicken, a newborn baby to an adult. 

That is, we understand evolution to be a transformation of the self - while retaining the identity of the self. 

This could be called developmental-transformative evolution. 

In this primary understanding of evolution; the Being remains itself - but changes form. 

Thus, if we (as Christians) imagine our future spiritual evolution from this mortal life to resurrected eternal life; this is a 'process' during which we remain our-self but undergo developmental or transformative changes in both body and mind. 

The result is that our resurrected eternal self is the same person as he was during mortal life. And in Heaven we can 'recognize' others whom we knew in mortal life: they are still themselves.

But from the time that evolution by natural selection became a dominant social paradigm (during the late 1900s) there has emerged a qualitatively different conception of 'evolution'. 

This could be called selection-reproductive evolution. 

The key to this concept is selection acting on reproduction. Evolution of this sort 'happens' after reproduction, and is defined in terms of changed offspring. Therefore it is Not about transformation of the same-self; but replacement of the original parent by following generations. 

With selection-reproductive evolution; a variety of different types - different selves - compete; some reproduce differentially more than others; and evolution has occurred when either one or just-some of the original selves continue to reproduce. 

Meanwhile the other selves have Not reproduced, and their continuity has been annihilated. 

So this concept is based on Darwinian ideas of natural selection; and entails not transformation but replacement. After such selectional evolution, what persists is Not the previous self - but a different self: a different Being; because offspring are different Beings than their parents.  

In a brief phrase: natural selection is reproductive replacement. It is all-about replacing one thing with some other thing. 

Some survive and others do not; and those which survive replace those which do not. 

Because if the identity of the organism is being defined in terms of its genetic composition; then any genetic change is itself a kind of replacement. 

Following Barfield; I believe that many people are often deeply confused between these two concepts of evolution. The seem to believe emotionally that they are proposing a developmental-transformative evolution; when in fact they are advocating replacement of one thing by another. 

For instance; when people are keen on a future based upon Artificial Intelligence, or the Transhumanist changing of Man (by means of drugs, genetic engineering, inorganic implants, links to computers or the internet etc); they seem to suppose that this is an transformational enhancement of Men. 

But in fact such aspirations are simply the annihilation of Men and their replacement. Replacement of Men with... something else. 

In spiritual terms; AI and Transhumanism are therefore advocating covert suicide: suicide, because they themselves (and all other Men) will cease to exist; covert, because this desire for self-destruction is hidden by an irrelevant focus on what might replace us. 

This is closely analogous to a plan to solve the problems of this Earth by exploding the planet - and then calling Mars 'the new and better Earth'. Maybe Mars is better (fewer problems), maybe not - but better or worse, Mars is Not an evolved Earth; it is some-thing different. 

So much is fairly obvious; but the 'afterlife' proposed and yearned-for by many people shares this fundamentally suicidal impulse; because it hopes for the total destruction of the body, the self, the ego and all that is individual - by its absorption into the impersonal and discarnate divine.  

I am talking about the Oneness spiritual movement - which is so much a feature of the New Age in The West. This talks constantly about how all things truly are one, and how separation into persons is an illusion (Maya), and a 'sin'; and separation of Man from God is an illusion and a sin. 

According to Oneness; in reality there are no persons, no Men - only one God; and that God is not a person - because the divine encompasses everything, so there can be no definition or description of God. 

Nothing specific can be said about the divine except for an infinite series of denials of all less-than-total claims of God's nature: i.e. a negative theology of what God is not.

To hope for the 'evolution' of my-self, and Mankind, into One; is therefore to hope-for one's own annihilation and replacement. 

There would be - could be -  no continuity between me-now, and now living Men - and the aimed for annihilation of separateness into divine unity.

Oneness spirituality is not to solve any of the problems of the world; but to destroy the world - to destroy every-thing... and replace it with something else. 

It is solving the problem of misery and suffering in life, by ending all life - by killing everything. 

In other words; Oneness offers exactly the same kind of 'solution' to the problem of Man's mortal life as does Artificial Intelligence and Transhumanism. 

Oneness is just as much a covert advocacy of suicide, as are the schemes of technological replacement of Man by... 'something better'. 

And the reason why this is not immediately obvious; is that our culture has become deeply confused by the two concepts of evolution.

And has erroneously carried-over the spiritual aspirations of evolution understood as transformative-development, into the annihilation-seeking mechanisms of transformative-replacement.

What survives death? An intuitive account

What of us survives death? The same 'self' that survives through all the transformations of our mortal life; and that same self which came originally from before that embodied life when we were first formed on earth. 

As I look back on my life the memory seems like a dreamy vision which was inhabited by the same self. In my earliest childhood memories, through the development of growing -up and adolescence, and the now-strange events of my early adult life... Everything seems fuzzy, indistinct, dreamy (maybe nightmarish) - but the self continues. 

I can imagine my-self as a four year old, as nine, as thirteen, when I was twenty-one and so on - it is the same self but the situations are as different as can be, and mostly have the quality of a day-dream: fluid, imprecise, fuzzy... 

Was that really me in those situations, in those behaviours? Yet the self that observes these strange occurrences was the same. 

That inner self seem independent of the body - that body which changed so much. Independent of circumstance - which changed so much. 

I think "Was that really me?" about what I did, where I went - but I do not think that about the self that remembers. That was really me. 

It is that self, which was maintained through so many 'bodies' and situation which will be maintained through the transformation of biological death - and will remain.

But what then? What happens to the self when the body has not just changed, but died? It continues in some way, but how?

The tendency is for the self to lose its consecutiveness; its memory and its continuity; to break up into mere awareness of the moment. We have an inkling of this from some dreams, from recollection of descending into delirium... of losing grip on the situation, or our sense-of-being falling-apart; that perplexity, slippery-confusion-angst as we cannot recall how things became as they are, or what we are supposed to do. 

(We may see exactly this in demented people - as reality, purpose, their situation is always slipping away from them.)

This situation seems to be the 'natural', spontaneous fate of the self - called by the ancients names including Sheol and Hades. The self survives biological death to become a witless, demented ghost who does not remember who he is; merely reactive; incapable of purpose and choice. 

(The process of dying is the dwindling of the self towards this state.) 

Death is the state of mere-being, without memory, aware only of the instant now.

This state of Sheol/ Hades is what Jesus called death; it is what he came to save-us-from. Jesus is our saviour from the death that is mere-being of the self. 

We are saved from death by following Jesus. How can this 'following' be imagined? 

All will encounter Jesus after death, and before the dissolution of the self into a witless ghost. 

What is preventing immediate dissolution of the self? God does that  - God the creator - by divine creative power. If we love God; then we allow God to stop the dwindling to nothing, allow God to sustain our-self in a state in which we retain our memory, purpose etc. 

So we remain able to choose. 

We could imagine this choosing as meeting Jesus in a dream; and, as in a dream, we will know that it is Jesus. We realise that Jesus is present with us. And then we decide. 

So, instead of dwindling to mere-being; we will recognise Jesus, and will remember and know what he is offering us: resurrected life eternal in Heaven. And we decide whether to follow him to this everlasting life; or not. 

If we choose to follow Jesus - what then? It is the continual presence of Jesus that will guide us through the transformation of resurrection. It is the continual presence of Jesus that enables resurrection - and for this to happen we must actively wish for this transformation - which transformation is permanent and entails rebuilding from the remnant self wholly in the basis of love. 

If we cannot love, if we reject love, or if we want something else - then we will choose Not to follow Jesus. Indeed we cannot follow Jesus unless we are prepared to make a permanent and irreversible commitment to live only by love; to become forever incapable of not loving. 

As I implied earlier; if someone loves God, but does not want to follow Jesus (e.g. perhaps a theist but not a Christian) - he will Not be transformed. Instead he will remain in the state of consecutiveness of consciousness; being maintained thus by ongoing divine creation. He will be sustained in awareness wholly by God - thus aware only of himself and of God. 

This is the state sometimes called Nirvana; a blissful state of current awareness of God's love and of being in the state of loving God - an eternal now; without memory and without purpose. A passive state. 

Not mere being; but a state of being 'in' love. 

What of Hell? The demons themselves do not die, since they are never incarnated spirits. But what of the ex-Men in Hell: those selves who were once Men but have been through biological death?  

I suppose Hell to be the choice to prevent the dissolution of the self by continual infusion of life energy. So, instead of becoming a witless, demented ghost in the state of Sheol/ Hades; the self is maintained in this world, 'animated', energized by demonic actions. 

Divine creation is primary - it is (as we see it) something from nothing. It is originative and primary - adds to reality. Creation is the opposite of entropy. But creation entails love (in a crude sense, creation requires love). 

So, those who cannot love, or reject love, cannot creation.  

Since demons cannot create, they are bound by entropy. 

That life-energy that sustains continuity, memory and purpose is continually being used-up, needs continual replacement - like fuel in a car. 

Replacement life-energy to sustain a dead-self functionally-above the level of Sheol must therefore be taken from living beings, for example from living Men. 

The process is not creative but parasitic, vampiric. The sustaining life-energy is extracted from one being and redirected into another; just as we consume the energy of coal to warm ourselves when otherwise we would freeze. 

Crudely, one lives because another dies; one dies that another may live - but (because of entropy) only temporarily. 

The Hellish economy is therefore based upon destruction of energy. While Heaven grows as love grows; Hell is always shrinking. 

Hell's intent is to retain functional life without love of God. Hell maintains control of its denizens by the threat of death - if life-energy is not infused (by demonic action), the damned soul will to revert to the insensibility of Sheol. 

Thus the economy of Hell is one of mutual exploitation, of 'dog-eat-dog' - one ex-Man survives only at the price of another Man being consumed (either consumed partially, or - eventually - consumed wholly). 

...Until only one remains - and he will then inevitably die. 

In the end, all will die; so life in Hell is a deferral of ultimate death - the ever more frantic desire to live a little longer, to be the last to die.

In conclusion. When we die biologically, our self will survive; but the state of that self is a matter of choice. And the choices seem to be fourfold: Heaven eternally, Nirvana, Hell - en route to Sheol, or Sheol and the extinction of self awareness. 

In a deep sense, after death we get what we want. And what is that?  

From what most people are saying nowadays, it seems that Heaven is currently the least popular of these destinations - Sheol-direct (i.e. perceived death, annihilation, cessation of all awareness of the self) perhaps the most sought-after. 

And the other two possibilities of Nirvana and Hell, maybe ranking somewhere in between?  

Just a guess... 

The Primal Self - what's in a name?

Last week I came up with a new name - the Primal Self - for a concept that I have been trying to grasp for about a decade. 

Ever since I discovered the writings of William Arkle, and Rudolf Steiner, I have wanted to be able to understand clearly that of ourselves which I have previously, variously, termed the Divine, True or Real Self - which is our permanent Self (or Ego or I); that is our essence in some way, and which is relevant to our relationship with God and Reality. 

The word Primal has connotations of old, original, most fundamental, and primary in importance - all of meanings which are intended to be a part of the understanding I am striving to clarify. 

The implicit contrast is with that mundane, "personality-level" self that is concerned with everyday and practical matters of life; of which we may spontaneously be aware-of as the stream of consciousness or inner voice; which is so changeable and easily manipulated... 

And which, pretty obviously, has nothing necessarily divine or true about it, and indeed typically (in the Modern West, at least) opposes God and divine creation. 

At one level, Primal Self is just a new name; but in fact it seems to have made an impression of being valuable and helpful - not only to myself (the new name felt like some kind of a breakthrough in my understanding) but also to some of my most valued commenters. 

I have since been puzzling why this should be; because I don't think it is merely an illusion of novelty.

Because it seems that a better name for an entity really can help! 

Perhaps this is obvious. Just as we observe in mundane mainstream life that a worse name - e.g. when propagated by the totalitarian leadership and their mass media - really can harm... Can really harm our capacity to understand, and harm our values. Conversely, a better name ought to be able to enhance our understanding of reality, and (if our motivations are Good) enhance thereby our apprehension of true values. 

My guess - at present - is that Primal is clarifying of the truth that there is in-us, as part-of-us, of all-of-us and always; a Self that has always-been and always shall-be.

And that this eternal Self can experience, learn, choose - and thereby be transformed (for better or worse). 

(This being my simple understanding of theosis, or its opposite: corruption into a chosen alliance with with the spiritual Beings of evil.) 

And it is that Self - i.e. the Primal Self - of which we need to become-aware, to acknowledge as real and vital; and from-which we need to work in our valid and Good spiritual strivings.     

The evilness of evil (in a pluralist universe)

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The reason that mainstream theologians have persisted for 2000 years with monism (and an Omni- concept of God) despite the insoluble and fundamental problems these cause for Christianity is that they want to be able to say that God is necessarily good - i.e. that the goodness of God is built-into reality, part of the existence of the universe; and therefore that to oppose God is to be irrational (i.e. they want to be able to state that evil is simply irrational).

(Note: this doesn't actually work, because it makes evil into a kind of insanity rather than a deliberate choice of evil. For instance, Satan could not rationally choose to rebel against God and reject salvation, and because he is a high angel who would know for certain the terrible consequences of rebellion; this framework makes Satan into a kind of lunatic or demented creature, rather than truly-evil).

Pluralism would regard this as a mistaken purpose in theology since it makes a universe where choice is meaningless and Man is a puppet. Such a universe is incompatible with Christianity.

(i.e. Incompatible in a common sense way. But obviously if theology is allowed to get-away-with recourse to paradox and mysticism then anything is possible - and paradox and mysticism have duly been built-into mainstream intellectual Christianity since not long after the death of the Apostles - e.g. in describing the nature of Christ, the Holy Trinity and the operations of free will.)

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As I understand it, pluralism starts with assumptions and a situation that 'just is' and cannot be (or does not need to be) explained further - and the main assumption is the God is God - He is just there.

(And, for Mormons, so is Mother in Heaven 'just there' - because reality is dyadic, male and female are two complementary and irreducible parts that together make unity. ^See note below)

God is inside the already existing universe of reality (matter or 'stuff') which is also 'just there' and has certain properties which are understood by us as the laws of nature including the principles of beauty and morality.

We Men (and other intelligences) were also 'just there' but as some kind of essence that lacked self-awareness.

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God (and, for Mormons, Mother in Heaven) then made us into self-aware 'children of God' so that now we are all related to God and to each other - relationships (or one enormously large family with multiple sub-families) is the reality of the situation in which we find ourselves.

Therefore, 'good' is to choose to live in accordance with these relationships, as established by God; evil is to reject these relationships and aim to live as solitary and self-sufficient gods. (This is pride.)

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So evil is a choice. It is not necessarily irrational, it is not necessarily dishonest - except that it seems always to involve a denial of the true situation and of our debt to God - but evil can be a hatred and rejection of the divine families in which we find ourselves - perhaps a hatred of God for forcing us to become self-conscious (and therefore liable to suffer) and to having saddled us with unasked-for responsibilities to our divine parents and siblings.

I think it is at least conceivable that a person might simply choose to reject self consciousness, and/or family ties  and aspire to live utterly alone. By the mercy of God this state could be made into an unselfconscious bliss; but this state too might be rejected and the person would then live in 'hell' of utter and self-imposed eternal and self-aware solitude.

The evil of this 'hell' comes from rejecting divine relationships but clinging to selfhood; rejecting gratitude and responsibility towards God but clinging to God-given powers.

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The primary moral decision in the history of reality was therefore that God (and Mother in Heaven) unilaterally decided to 'make' us into self-conscious personages, to make us into His children. His motive for this was love and our own benefit, just as the motive of earthly parents for 'making' children should be love and the children's own benefit - nonetheless it was unilateral, and is irreversible.

Consequently, because God is loving; I think it must have been the case that God made provision for us to opt-out of this situation in which we find ourselves, and to return to primordial unawareness and unpersonhood.

This is why I believe God has made provision for 'Nirvana' i.e. what feels-like loss of self/ personhood, and reabsorption into the blissful state of His goodness.

This is not an actual stripping away of our status as Sons and Daughters of God - that is irreversible - but it does allow a non-evil choice to reject the basic situation in which we find ourselves - to reject self-awareness, incarnation, intelligence, power and everything else. 

To 'return' to original un-consciousness.

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But these are all choices: suboptimal, sad - but self-chosen and self-inflicted. They are simply a consequence of the reality of agency/ free will.

The evilness of evil is really about the gratuitous spitefulness of trying to wreck the self-consciousness and divine family relationships which other people want and have chosen; of trying to persuade other people to inhabit 'hell' as some kind of eternal consolation for the misery of one's own choice of hell. 

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^The other explanation for God in a pluralist universe is an infinite regress - i.e. that God the Father and Heavenly Mother are children of previous Gods, are children of previous Gods, and so on forever. But this amounts to the same thing as saying 'just there' - it is merely substituting a process which is 'just there' for entities which are 'just there'.

Why did God make Men so selfish? (An explanation from William Arkle.)

It is a legitimate question, I think, to ask why God made Men with such a strong predisposition to selfishness? 

The usual Christian response - to point at The Fall of Adam and Eve, and the propagation of Original Sin - does not suffice, by my understanding. Since this merely kicks the can back to the question of why God made A&E the way He did; and made the world such that they fell; and that this sin was then transmitted to all Mankind.

I came across a neat explanation in a recorded talk given by William Arkle in (I think) the early 1990s (which is not publicly available). 

The basic framework is that God embarked upon creation with the intent of enabling Men to become full Sons and Daughters: that is, grown-up divine friends who would become participators in the work of creation; or co-creators working within-God's primary creation.

For this to be worth doing, each Man needs to bring something unique to himself to the work of creation - something that God does not have and could not contribute. 

This is what happens by our mortal life followed by death and our resurrected life in Heaven - should we choose to accept this gift from Jesus Christ (willingly embracing the necessary conditions)   

Therefore (by Arkle's account, modified somewhat by me): 

God chose to create Men with a strong sense of self - even to the point of being naturally selfish (such as most young children ) - and in a world (i.e. this mortal life) that would often sustain that strong sense of self. 

God's hope was that some men at least (all ideally, but in practice only some) would arrive at a point of totally isolation of the self, total self-ish-ness of perspective; without any compelled belief in God and with no perceived obligation to the divine plan... 

Then - wholly voluntarily and from positive and loving motives - would make the choice to join-with God in his work of divine creation. 

So, innate selfishness was a necessary baseline for Men; but God's hope was that those Men capable of love would come to realize the futility of this selfishness; and would willingly accept Jesus's gift of resurrection into an eternal, wholly-loving and creative life in which our self is voluntarily fully-aligned-with God's creative motivations. 

This strategy can be more clearly understood by considering the alternative that God made Men wholly unselfish, without even a distinct self, and already-immersed in God's creative motivations. 

I think it can be seen that such a creature would be useless as a divine companion in the work of creation. 

This alternative is indeed, pretty much, the world view of Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism - which regard the self as an intrinsic evil (or illusion) and strive to extirpate the self; and to join human-beingness wholly with the divine purpose.

For a Christian, by Arkle's account; this mortal world is a vital place of learning - without which we cannot become the both self-centred and loving-creative companions that God desires. 

In complete contrast; we can see that 'Eastern religion' (pretty much) regards this world as an illusion that must be overcome for us to lose the false sense of self, and re-assimilate with the divine purposes.  

Anyway - the main point I intend to convey here; is that this is an explanation of why Men are made the way they (nearly-always) are, and this mortal earthly life the way it is; and to show how this makes sense and is indeed necessary -- given the assumptions I hold regarding what God is intending by creation, and what Jesus made possible by Heaven. 

The self is not swallowed by eternity, because the self is eternal

The usual idea (in modern life) is that if the self (unique person-hood - individuality) is temporal and temporary - then the self is swallowed-up when embedded in the context of eternity.

Or, the self becomes utterly insignificant when set in an infinite frame.

This is why some people find contemplating the stars to be a disturbing experience, or contemplating 'life' in general.

Maybe they are correct: if the self is temporary, then in eternity its significance is one divided by infinity.  

So, for the self to be significant - the self must be eternal.

Indeed, simplistically, it makes most sense if the self is eternal in both directions: before birth as well as after death.

By this common sense kind of analysis, the choice lies between a self that always was and always will be, and the self as insignificant.

Either the significance of the self is an illusion (lasting a short time, some kind of meaningless, accidental by-product of our form of 'life'); or else the importance of the self is extraordinarily great - divine.

And ultimate and permanent reality, the eternal universe, contains many, many selves; of which we, you and I, are - and always have been and always will be - two.

How can imagination provide objective truth and judgement? The metaphysics of the heart

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For imagination generally, and spiritual or meditative experience in particular, to provide real, objective, valid knowledge and guidance - there needs to be some explanation of why.

Where, in particular, does this knowledge and guidance come from; why should this be 'within' us, and and why should it be valid?

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My answer is that it comes from the Heart, and (to put matters bluntly and simplistically) The Heart is made of two things - our eternal selves and a piece of God.

Since these are eternal and God is divine, they may, in principle, provide valid and true guidance.

Ideally these two things should be in perfect harmony, in practice the essential self may dissociate itself from God and go against God - and we call that pride - or some people call it original sin, because it is structural.

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I have been writing for some time on the importance of The Heart in discernment - for example:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=%22the+heart%22

I think I can now say a bit more about how the Heart may be conceptualized - and just 'what it is' that we consult when we look within ourselves for guidance.

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First, it seems clear that The Heart is within us - this is not a matter of tuning-into some external guidance.

So, what could be within us that is capable of guiding us? 

I put forward a metaphysical schema which seems to me to account for things and lead to acceptable inferences:

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/the-basic-components-of-reality-back.html

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This scheme has it that within each person is an unique individual essence (what I called an eternal flame of agency); and also a divine flame - it could be expressed as a piece of God-within-us.

I propose that these two eternal essences are what is consulted when we look within ourselves to make a discernment of The Heart.

The objective validity of the knowledge and judgement of The Heart comes from the fact that these are eternal in origin.  

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But these are two things. Theosis, the becoming divine (Sons of God) which is the great task of each one of us, is about our essential selves and God coming into harmony, into communion, into perfect accord; but the problem is that we can (and often do) distinguish our 'selves' from God, and increase that distinction (instead of diminishing it) by following the discernment of the self and not that of God-within-us.

The fact that this distinction is possible could be termed original sin, because it is built-in - our temptation to do act of separation could also be original sin because it is gratifying in the short term.

The subjective feeling of 'pride' is the name for this gratification - our pride is at being able to discern what God wants, and then NOT doing it - pride is the gratification of defying our creator.

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Anyway, this is what seems to be meant by The Heart - these eternal things within us: the essential pre-mortal self, and a piece, shard, fragment or little flame of and from God.

Something of the sort explains why The Heart can be our guide - indeed should be our guide; and also explains why it can all go terribly wrong: when we consult our Heart but choose to obey the discernment of our Self even when, or especially when, the Self is in defiance of God-within-us.

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Theosis reconceptualized - the Primal Self transformed

Theosis (at root the same notion as sanctification, exaltation or deification) is the general idea that throughout our earthly mortal lives we are supposed to become (in some way) more like God, or perhaps more like "a god". 

"Supposed to" because this is why we are sustained alive -- After all, why stay-alive (in the past and now) rather than simply dying and achieving salvation as soon as we choose to follow Jesus Christ to eternal life?

(Because that would surely be a more certain salvation: To die at the split second we converted, at the instant we made a commitment to follow Jesus. There must therefore be a very important reason why it does not happen.)  

But theosis is difficult to conceptualize except in the rare instance of the greatest Saints; who have very obviously become more divine throughout their mortal lives (head in Heaven, feet still upon earth - as the Eastern Orthodox say). 

It has often, and truly, been observed that becoming a Christian does not (or only seldom) make somebody overall a better person - so that, if theosis is indeed an integral aspect of genuinely Christian living, then the process doesn't seem to work very well... 

I have, therefore, found it difficult to explain to myself - in some kind of comprehensible 'model' - what is supposedly going-on with theosis - but I now think I may have found a useful picture of the process, as it is intended to operate. 

My assumption is that we have a primal self - which could also be called our real, true or divine self; and it is this which is eternal, and has existed from eternity. My primal self is "encased" within a mortal and temporarily-incarnated self; which is (approximately) our body and our personality - that which other people observe, and which interacts with The World. 

The process called theosis describes the transformation of my primal self, across a timescale of eternity; but at present intended to be achieved by interaction-with, and learning-from, the experiences of my mortal self in this world. 

So -- if I succeed in my God-given task of learning from the experiences God has set-up for me in this mortal world; then it is my primal self that is positively-transformed by this learning. 

And it is this process of positive transformation of the primal self that can be called theosis. 

This model may explain why it is that theosis is not necessarily (or usually) observable in a Christian individual. 

What is happening is that the primal self is being-transformed positively and eternally - but the bodily behaviour and actions, and personality level motivations and thoughts; are Not (or not usually) being transformed. 

So the primal self is getting-better when we learn Godly-lessons from our life experiences  - whether or not the mortal self improves... or even gets worse!

This depiction maybe explains why and how it is that we may know someone who we are convinced has a Good Heart (i.e. the primal self); despite that his behaviour is clearly sinful and not improving; or exhibits grossly inconsistent, incoherent or chaotic behaviour.  

And, on the other side; why it often seems (to our intuitive inference) that someone who leads "a Christian life", who seems to think and do the Right Things, who is nice, socially responsible, devout, a good neighbour etc.; may strike us as heartless, cold, unloving - and certainly Not improving as a result of his continued-living. 

Or why we perhaps are sure that we our-selves are being made better by being-a-Christian; despite that we continue to sin in the same ways as much as ever, or in new ways, or backslide repeatedly - or even behave (to an external observer) overall worse than we did before becoming a Christian.  

Another aspect of this mismatch between primal self and mortal self, is that it becomes understandable why God would allow (or even want) such a divergence. 

The reason why we are sustained alive is to challenge us with repeated and multiple interactions with this world: experiences that are intended as learning opportunities. 

And this situation may be easier to arrange if our mortal selves are Not (or not much, or only unevenly) positively transformed by life. 

After all; the ultimate value of this mortal life is not within this temporary world, where nothing lasts and everything dies; its ultimate value is found in Heavenly life everlasting. 

The highest form of prayer I can imagine

All sincere prayer is good; but some forms are higher than others - and it is reasonable to expect the form to develop as our consciousness develops through stages of life. 

As a child, our prayer tends to be petitionary (asking for things to happen) and also propitiatory - begging for things not to happen; including making deals with God ("if you do X for me, then I will do Y for you"). 

This form of praying could be characterized as excessively egotistical; in the sense that it is often the surface, personality and this-worldly 'me' that is talking to God. As if we knew better than God what God ought to be doing...

Later in life, we may become aware of this egotism and self-assertion as a major barrier, standing between us and God. 

Then we may aim for an ideal of 'sitting before God', and of prayer as silent, contemplative; an opening to allow God to 'take over'. The idea of removing the self, and our own will - so that only God's will is done. 

Yet this ideal of self-effacing prayer is so passive as to be aiming implicitly to delete our-selves from divine creation. We are implicitly assuming that it would be better if we personally did not exist, better if we never had been born - which means as if we were never created by God... 

Yet God did create us - and presumably He knew his business! He would hardly have created us if the ideal was then for us to disappear-into His creation! 

I may not actually be able to do it reliably; but I can see that what God would most want from us is not to sit in a passive, obedient merely to absorb and transmit divine creation (as if we were Not There); because this would add nothing to God's creation. 

Admittedly, self-effacing prayer removes the problem of sin, and stops us from actually fighting against God's creation and will. And this is desirable. 

But surely God created us for positive reasons, to do something good - not merely to refrain-from-doing bad things? 

God created us, I believe, so that we may choose to develop such as to join our personal creativity and love to that of God. 

We live so as to add-to creation, by our continuing existence. 

Yes, to do this efficiently (to avoid fighting our-selves) we would indeed need to eliminate sin and evil from our will - we need to cease to oppose divine creation - but we would also need to add-our-bit to creation. 

Therefore, I believe that prayer should ideally be personally active and creative; and therefore not ego-less, self-effacing and contemplative. 

Exactly this has been made possible to us through the work of Jesus Christ; by resurrection to eternal life in Heaven. In Heaven, and after resurrection, the ideal can become eternal reality. 

But how do we actually do this; here-and-now; during mortal life and on this side of resurrection? 

For a start, in this mortal life, it cannot be done in any complete and permanent way from our own will-power, effort and practice; because we are all indeed tainted by sin and egotism and selfishness that cannot be eradicated (or at least not without also eradicating the possibility of active, personal and creative prayer).

The highest form of prayer is, however, possible here-and-now - so long as we accept it will be brief and usually partial in degree; as are all attainments in this mortal life - yet still of permanent value. 

(Whatever actually is achieved in this temporary life on earth, will be retained, will be added to the totality of eternal divine creation; and then potentially experienced forever by those who are resurrected to Heaven.) 

In thought much is possible - and to any person - that is not possible in the constrained material realm. By knowing what we most want, what we are aiming-at; then we are able to attain it in our thinking. 

Thinking what? Well, for instance thinking about our own death and resurrection, and about Heaven. Thinking about our deepest Good desires - thinking on that we value most deeply and permanently; thinking on those we love, on what we value in those we love. 

Thinking on the truth, beauty and virtue of God's creation; and on our own thoughts and deeds that add to this creation (maybe in practice, but certainly adding to creation in thought - in potential). 

Thinking in a spirit of gratitude to God and affirmation of divine creation; with intent to contribute to it. 

In essence, perhaps; by thinking on joy and love in our own lives and ideal thoughts; and 'consecrating' these joys and loves to God's creation. 

In our imagination; adding our joys to the permanence, development, and eternal growth of creation. 

Such seems to me the highest form of prayer. 

Anti-Nirvana is Hell

While some humans seek Nirvana - in most Eastern religions this entails a discarding of the self, the ego; a reduction of self-awareness to the absolute minimum such that we cease to be aware of time, space, or our division from God and from other-things.

This is a pretty much neutral desire for people; neither Good nor evil; neither virtuous/ beautiful/ truthful - nor yet sinful/ ugly/ a lie. This is to say No to the self, but to say Yes to God. It is to wish for union with God.

But to be the devil or a demon is to refuse to yield-up consciousness, to hold fast to ego; yet to reject creation.

Such seek Anti-Nirvana = an eternal static-state of pure self, pure ego; to be the only known Being forever and everywhere. And this is Hell.


When the divine self is denied there is isolation.

It is the (shared, universal) divine self which makes possible love; because our real self has both our primordial individual self and God-within - inherited because we are God's Children.

It is this divine inheritance that enables us to love one another (as well as love God) - because we all share it. 

Beings that have rejected God, hence the divine self, cannot love. They cannot love God; and also they cannot love one another. Since they have rejected God and Creation, they have also rejected the divine within them-selves.

Rejecting love; the devil and the demons can only relate to each other (and God) in terms of instrumentality; of being manipulative and exploitative.

To live in isolation in such an environment of exploitation is Hell. 

'Following' Jesus to Life Eternal': the good news of the Fourth Gospel

Modern people assume that death is the end of everything personal, the destruction of the self; they assume that when the body dies then nothing is left.

The ancients, before Jesus, also believed that death was the end of everything personal, and that there was destruction of the self - but the difference was that after the body has died, they believed that something was left: that the soul remained.

The soul minus the body wasn't any use, it lacked self-consciousness, it could not help-itself... but the soul remained alive, like a witless 'ghost'. (The Underworld/ Hades/ Sheol was populated by such ghosts; left-over after death of the body.)

Before Jesus only a perfectly divine-aligned Man could become fully-divine; because being divine means to join with God in the creative work of the universe. To join in the work of creation, one must wholly embrace that work and its aims; to have something distinctive to contribute to creation, one must have free will, must have agency.

Therefore one must have 'a body' because the body is what enables us to have divine free will: it is incarnation that separates our will from that of God.

So resurrection - with an immortal, indestructible body - is necessary for us to become divine agents. 

In sum, before Jesus divinity was not possible to a Man unless one was already fully divine-aligned. However, Jesus was a perfectly divine-aligned man, and therefore Jesus could and did become fully divine (at his baptism by John).  

And that event changed everything.

After Jesus, who began as a Man, had become fully divine; then it was possible for any other Man to become fully divine, simply by following the path that Jesus had made. In other words, one needed to love Jesus, to have faith in who Jesus was and what he could do; and then anyone could follow Jesus to full divinity - but only after death, only via death.

Why only after death? Because we are not perfectly-aligned to God during our mortal lives (that is, because we are all sinners) our body must first die, before our soul can be resurrected. Our personal self must be ended before it can be remade (from the remnant soul)

This process began before Jesus himself died, with the resurrection of Lazarus. What we know of Lazarus is the mutual love between him and Jesus. Lazarus was the first Man to die who had faith in Jesus, and Lazarus was therefore the first Man to be resurrected by Jesus - but uniquely Lazarus was resurrected back into earthly life, as a miraculous sign of the new dispensation.

Lazarus then went on to write the Fourth Gospel as the 'beloved disciple', being the best possible witness to the reality of this new dispensation; and the Man who best knew the nature of Jesus and what gift he brought. 

So, now, after Jesus - the Good News is that we can each and all have life everlasting and the resurrection that entails; no matter what our state of sin or how far from being God-aligned we may be. We may have resurrected life everlasting after we have died; 'simply' by loving and trusting Jesus to lead us, and by following the same path to full divinity that Jesus first took, and which (by taking) he made for us.

Christ as a cosmic event

Naturally and rightly, we tend to focus on Salvation and Eternal Resurrected Life as being the main consequences of Christ's incarnation - but there is a further sense in which Christ brought-about a transformation of human consciousness.

This happened because the possibility of salvation and the advent of resurrection introduce new potentialities - which therefore transform the current actuality of consciousness. When Men became creatures capable of repentance, then this changed us - whether or not we actually repented.

Even though we regard these as a gift from God, the fact we have been given these gifts changed us irreversibly - even if we choose to deny or reject the gifts; these gifts have, nonetheless, been-given. When Man became a being destined for resurrection then, involuntarily, Man was changed here-and-now, whether or not Man knew about what had happened in any explicit fashion.

However, because agency (or free will) is real, then the cosmic significance of Christ is not that Men were brought closer to divinity - rather, the change was and is in terms of possibility rather than attainment. But that possibility changes the meaning and significance of everything.

The change may be understood in terms of our inmost and real Self. With the prospect of resurrection the self was given the eternal destiny of focused autonomy in a physical body; and with the possibility of repentance the Self was given control over the divine destiny.

A reasonable analogy is that the effect of Christ's incarnation was the end of man's childhood and the beginning of his adolescence - with potential for greater maturity and complexity and responsibility for Good, but also with potential for things to go very wrong in the direction of selfish short-termism and impulsivity. If we learn from adolescence the right things and move-on to maturity we are stronger as a consequence and move closer to God - but there is also the possibility of getting stuck in adolescence and of learning the wrong things and rejecting the Good.

In childhood we are substantially shaped by our innate nature and the surrounding environment. Adolescence is about Self-consciousness, consciousness of the Self, and detachment from that environment.

We reach a point of complete self-consciousness and separation from the outer world - at this point we perceive the choice as being total subjectivism (in which our own current feelings are the only reality and trump all considerations) and/or total extinction of subjectivity in which the external world of Things is the only reality and the Self a transient illusion (the world, more-or-less, of rationalism and science, of public discourse and bureaucracy). Neither of these conclusions is coherent or sustainable - so adolescents usually oscillate between them, or else simply despair.

At the adolescent stage, the Self is cut-off from the world - but the destiny of Christ as a cosmic event is that this is a transient developmental stage: Man is meant to bounce-off this transitional state of total Self-consciousness and alienation, return to full engagement wit the external world - but this time with the autonomous Self in charge.

In sum, man begins as engaged but hardly-a-Self and can only achieve his (adult) destiny as a fully an agent who is fully engaged with the world by going via the (adolescent) state of being a disengaged Self.

The next stage of being a participating agent can easily be described and foretold; but what is required is that it actually be experienced. And indeed, this experience already happens, at least for many people some of the time - but is not generally recognised. The reason that the experience is missed is that it is a transient dynamic state of being, and not a category: it is the state of being conscious of our own thinking as a living and happening phenomenon. It is Me Thinking of This-Thinking.

In other words the Self and the World are unified in our real experience, in the ongoing process of thinking and the simultaneous awareness of this as an ongoing-reality - as a fact.

But this is not widely appreciated because of several things - we may not regard it as a fact because the state cannot be sustained, but instead we regard it as a temporary illusion; we may find ourselves unable to communicate what we have experienced; we may regard the adolescent state of alienation as the ultimate reality and the adult state (of being a participating agent) as deluded wishful-thinking... and so on.

In other words, we are trapped in the stage of adolescent alienation, because we have trapped-ourselves. And ultimately this is our choice - we are self-trapped because (ultimately) we have chosen to be self-trapped. We have, of course, the agency (a gift of Christ) not to be self-trapped - but have chosen for whatever reason to deny this agency, to claim that we cannot (or should not) use this agency.

In sum - the incarnation of Christ was a cosmic event, the world was changed, the universe was changed - and the consequences unfold. If we find that consequences are bad and we don't like them, then that has been our own individual choice.

Notes on mysticism of thinking

I would describe myself as 'a mystic'; despite that I probably strike other people as mundane in the sense that I don't do anything very noticeably mystical - like meditating in the lotus position, using magical technologies (tarot, astrology etc) - and I don't claim to have had anything that would strike other people as spectacular spiritual or religious experiences (like overwhelming visions, near death experiences or striking paranormal events). 

This is because I take mysticism is be synonymous with regarding intuitive experience as the bottom line, and a conviction that mystical experiences are intended for the person who experiences them - and not for general public consumption. 

I have, like everybody, experienced many everyday miracles, and synchronicities - inspirations and the like. But it is immensely liberating Not to feel I need to convince anybody else that they were spectacular or of general relevance. 

One big difference between the mysticism I practice versus that which has become enshrined in the mainstream - is that I strive-for and value conscious experiences in thinking. I neither seek nor much value the usual (so-called) 'mystical' state of non-thinking, death-of-the-ego; of being blissed-out/ unaware of time/ convinced of being literally transported elsewhere... 

I do not want to be overwhelmed-by something that seems objective and external; nor to have visions that I believe to be real; nor to hear voices speaking to me - telling me things or conversing...

Yet some (most?) definitions of mysticism insist that these are what mysticism is. 

For example, that a mystic is unaware of time - more exactly that the mystic perceives that in reality there is no time ('all time is present'). In total contrast, the mysticism I seek is more like a 'process', it is a situation of things happening, a flow of life. 

In a nutshell, it is a kind of thinking that I regard as a higher state - I have called it primary thinking, heart thinking, and direct knowing - the state of Final Participation; and it simply amounts to a conscious and chosen thinking in the divine way; with and from that which is divine in me; and aligned-with/ in-harmony-with God's divine motivations and purposes.

It is me, my-self, joining-with God in God's work. It is therefore a creative state, and not merely a contemplative state. In it I add-to divine creation (I do not merely become aware of it, nor do I immerse in it.) 

For me, creativity is what we are meant to do, we are meant to active participants in God's creation - that' for me, is what the mission of Jesus was all about.  

Now, it is often said (and by writers I respect) that we ought to be striving to engage in this kind of thinking all the time - and any lapse from it is a failure. The idea is that we are supposed to be primary thinking at every moment, whatever we are doing; and that when we aren't, it is a lapse and a failure. 

But this assumption makes every human life a failure, and a tragedy - since nobody ever has achieved this unbroken continuity of mystical thinking (except for Jesus, in the last three years of his life). 

I cannot believe (I mean this literally - I mean the idea is incoherent) that our loving-parents God (who I know, in this state of mystical thinking) created his mortal children on earth to fail. 

Indeed, for mortal life to make any sense, for it to have a necessary reason for happening, we cannot regard it as being set-up to attain any kind of perfect, continuous state --- since here in mortal earthly life we are ruled by entropy, subject to change/ disease/ degeneration and death. 

Jesus's ministry described by an eye-witness in (only) the Fourth Gospel, is a joyous, not tragic, message - 'Good News' indeed. So we ought to realize that Jesus brought a positive gift - and not merely the negation of a negative situation. (As with the doctrine that Jesus came to save us from original sin: i.e. Jesus came to negate a negative deficit.) 

And indeed Jesus did bring a positive gift - as repeatedly described in that Gospel: the positive gift of resurrected life eternal in Heaven.

That is the essence of Christianity. Clear and simple. 

Therefore I am not supposed to be a full-time and permanent Mystic in this life on earth - the evidence for which is that it is impossible. But I am supposed to value mystical thinking above all else, because that is what is on-offer in Heaven. 

More exactly (since each person has an individual destiny) anyone like me who knows and values mystical states, is meant to strive for them on the permanent and continuous basis offered only by resurrection into life everlasting. 

So - since mystical thinking cannot be done all the time on earth, then we are not meant to do all the time it on earth. But our valuing of mystical thinking is what provides the correct framework for that learning from personal experience that is the main point of continued-living in this mortal life. 

We can see immediately that there is a potential problem here; in that we are essentially intended to learn from personal experience - whereas the mainstream modern world supplies us with a merely secondhand and abstract experience. 

Indeed, as of 2021; The System does not provide genuine experience, but a form of non-experience. 

The System intends that we live abstractly, vicariously, and as guided by The System. This is the opposite and inversion of learning from personal experience.  

One thing I used to worry about (and many others worry about - to the point of paralysis) is the matter of self-deception concerning mysticism. 

The question of 'how can I tell?' when I really am 'doing' mystical thinking - or when instead I might be pretending to myself, or engaging in wishful thinking (merely relabeling ordinary mundane and manipulated thinking as 'mystical'). 

But most of this is dealt with when one regards the significance of mystical thinking as being personal rather than public. 

Self-deception becomes a problem among actual or would-be spiritual leaders, people trying to get power, make money, gain status, influence people, make-a-better-world, heal people, create or administer a movement/ cult/ institution/ religions (etc) from their own spirituality. 

All such objectification seems to create self-deception. Even great mystical thinkers such as Rudolf Steiner fell (deeply) into this trap of self-deception by striving for objectification, abstraction, generalization... 

But intrinsically, it is not difficult to know when one is, or is not, engaged in mystical thinking. 

The state is self-validating - as must be intuition in general. That is what intuition must be - if it is to serve as the bottom line. 

We need to assume that there is a divine self in us. 

And we must further assume that when our consciousness, our awareness, is motivated by Love; then conscious awareness can know the divine self. 

It is Love that distinguishes divine-thinking from any other kind of thinking. We can therefore consciously know when we are (here and now) thinking mystically, from our divine self; and when we are not. 

That's all there is to it. That is direct knowing.

The fact that it is based in the motivation of love is exactly why mysticism fails when made objective, when the attempt is to harness mystical thinking for 'use' in this mortal world.

We do not love The World; love is not abstract - indeed we love only some, specific beings - sometimes a person loves only one being. 

That defines the scope of mystical thinking. One can think mystically only about that which is loved. 

Love must come first. So we cannot 'use' mystical thinking by a forced application of love to that which we merely wish to know!   

(Lack of real love is where public mystics go badly wrong. The give-away is that they always claim to have a lot of love, for a lot of people. The engage in a lot of promiscuous love-talk... They try to operationalize love, by equating it with some kind of 'altruistic' or sacrificial action. Doing so, they are trying to control love; which manipulation is intrinsically putting second that which must be first. Abstract, generalized loving is a snare - and a lie.) 

Thought and Think-ing: the gap between theory and practice - aspiration and achievement

We create the world (more specifically, we participate in creating the world - in interaction-with the real phenomena of the world) through our thinking ; and the -ing of thinking is what requires special attention. Thinking it is not the abstract category of 'thought' but the active process of think-ing, by which we co-create the world. 

The world is real, but its reality is inextricably bound up with our thinking - it is the active process of thinking that is primary (and we must not kill it in our attempt to comprehend it).

We change our thinking, and it is-changed by the experiences of our lives (and often for the worse - often in ways which sabotage our lives, and prevent their spiritual progression - induce spiritual corruption instead. Look around!). So, thinking can be changed and is changed - and we ourselves might want to take-over this process rather than being passive recipients of changes imposed by our environment... what do we do?

The answer is: Thinking-about-Thinking - that is, we need to think about, become aware of, our own Thinking and its assumptions and characteristic (habitual) processes. Another word for this activity is Metaphysics.

Why is Metaphysics so difficult? Why is it blocked by external distractions and internal incapacities and obstacles? These seem legion - and the worst is that, to some degree and sometimes very completely - our selves (who are trying to do the Thinking about Thinking) are actually false selves; mere personae that have developed to do automatically the business of interacting with the world in ways that are short-term expedient.

There is a tendency (at times almost irresistible - because habitual) to make the seeking of understanding into a static and deadly analysis - we distinguish, divide, organise and kill the concepts we need. Like subjective and objective - we distinguish them, divide them and separate them - and then they both die.

What is needed is to be able to analyse without killing - which means that instead of laying-out reality before us, inert, on a dissecting slab - reality must have at its heart and as its prime term, a thing which is dynamic, alive and existing through time (with a past and future - not seen as a timeless 'present').

Analysis must not be allowed to kill the livingness of the central phenomenon. Rather, analysis must go-on around the livingness of the central phenomenon. In other words, the central pheonomenon can be delineated - but cannot itself be analysed (or else it will be killed). If the central phenomenon is Consciousness, or Quality, or Reality - then it cannot be dissected without killing it and thereby making it no longer the central phenomenon.  

*

When think-ing changes, the world changes - and not just 'my' world: but the actual world. There is, indeed, no division between 'my'-world, and the-world (if there was, the world would not be my world). To change the world requires changing our think-ing (it is a fallacy to talk about the outer-realities as if they could be divided from our think-ing); and the difficulty of changing our think-ing is a measure of the difficulty in changing the world.

(As usual, it is far easier to change things for the worse: to destroy --- than it is to change things for the better: to create.)

On the other hand, if - by thinking about thinking - we can gain metaphysical understanding and can cure/ improve the mainstream metaphysical corruptions as they operate in our minds - can improve our habits-of-think-ing to make the process more Christian, loving, creative... then by this we have improved the world (not just for ourselves, but for everyone). 

Metaphysics is therefore a prime task for everybody now, not just intelectuals (although they need it more than most). And since metaphysics is intrinsically difficult, and being made ever more difficult by modern culture, and deliberately so - we need to enable it in our lives by ceasing to crave distraction, intoxication, and passive absorption: by seeking to make our thinking active, awake, aware and concentrated on what needs to be done.

*

And what is it that does the thinking about thinking? And how is it able to do it?

Ah - there's the crux of the matter! It is our eternal and (embryonically) divine selves that are what does real metaphysics. And it is its eternal position and and divine nature which makes possible the detachment required for thinking about thinking.

Metaphysics is our eternal self contemplating our mortal self - but actively: that is eternal think-ing contemplating the mortal personae which have been built by experience and expediency, and which now do so much of our thinking and being, that we have often lost or encapsulated the eternal self...

Final Participation is a conscious consecration of this-moment to our eternal resurrected life

For the past decade or so, I have been trying (in multiple ways) to understand the implications of Owen Barfield's concept of Final Participation - as being the destiny and proper aim of our spiritual life. 

Some modern people seem wholly enmeshed in mundane materialist thinking and feel detached and alienated from the living world - trapped inside their own heads. Their only relief is temporarily to forget this in sleep, intoxication, psychosis - and in occasional moments when there is a resurgence of a child-like sense of belonging and involvement. 

These brief times are what Barfield calls Original Participation, because they were our original state of consciousness as young children, and also (it is believed) the normal state of the earliest ancestral Men.  

Original Participation is - pretty much - the same as Novalis's Sehnsucht and CS Lewis's Joy; Gurdjieff's self-remembering, Maslow's Peak Experience, or Csíkszentmihályi's Flow state are psychological reductions of the experience.  

Such moments may be pleasant, indeed there have been times and places (e.g. some of the Romantic movement around 1800, or the 1960s counter-culture... still ongoing) when many people aspired to abandon modern consciousness and return to Original Participation. 

Although this return to the spontaneous, natural, child-like, primitive, here-and-now consciousness is powerful and alluring to many people; it has always failed - and must be assumed impossible (except briefly).  

However it makes a difference how we regard these brief moments. 

If they are regarded as merely pleasant psychological states, then Original Participation can only be therapeutic - like taking a short holiday from the "real world" of mundane materialism.

Yet Barfield asserted that Final Participation was not just a pleasant interlude; but in some deep sense absolutely necessary - necessary if we personally, and our society as well, were to avoid being overwhelmed by evil.   

However, Barfield was vague about how this might be achieved (he usually advised consulting his mentor Rudolf Steiner's work - but Steiner's techniques seem obviously ineffective, and Barfield never claimed that decades of practicing Steiner medications had led to any very significant effect on Barfield's own thinking in terms of Final Participation. 

Indeed, it seems that FP is not really achievable in a lasting and dominant way. 

So we seem rather to be trapped between impossibilities! We cannot go back, cannot stay as we are - yet the destined path forward seems blocked...  

Yet anyone who conceptualizes life as bounded by conception and death will find himself bounded by exactly such impossibilities. We cannot escape the constraints of entropy (and death) and evil. 

But this is forgetting the reality that we are eternal Beings, and this mortal life can be (should be) seen as a finite transitional phase between eternities before and afterwards. 

Furthermore (and here I depart from Barfield, with his ideas of multiple future reincarnations) a Christian sees his eternal future as including resurrected Heavenly life, following after this mortal life.

My idea of Final Participation is that it is the conscious choice to consecrate those moments of Original Participation.     

So that when moments of OP happen; we choose to regard them as sacred. 

In such a "consecration"; the momentary experience of OP is consciously recognized as being of potentially eternal significance to divine creation - and is actively taken-up into ongoing thinking.

This contrasts with, say, the sixties counter-culture response - which is to stay inside those OP moments, and perpetuate them or as long as possible. 

I would regard this as akin to a religiously-contemplative response to Original Participation. Contemplative because it is deliberately passive and self-negating. The moment is primary and we intend to stay with it, dissolve-into it. 

This is analogous to the contemplative kind of meditation where people seek a "blissful" state of consciousness and try to maintain it for as long as possible. 

The ideal is of stasis in perfection.  

But Final Participation is active and creative - hence is is both dynamic - like divine creation; and aspires to join-in-with and influence ongoing divine creation.

And all this is a choice, not a surrender. It is an affirmation of the self, not an attempt to lose the self. 

It is the choice to be a Son of God, a sibling of Jesus; one who want to join with God in the work of creation, and add to to that creative work whatever is unique in himself. 

So, Final Participation is an active self-confidence; confidence that by the "process" of resurrection after this mortal life we can be transformed such as to be able, worthy, and trust-worthy of eternal participation in creation.

Thus, FP is a state of being only achievable permanently (as a normal state) after our death, and only among those who have then chosen to follow Jesus through resurrection to everlasting Heavenly life.  

But Final Participation does have a vital role in this mortal life; because it is when we can add to our resurrected life. 

FP represents our choice to learn from experience in such a way that our immortal soul is permanently transformed.

We are talking about our immortal souls, not the conditions of our mortal lives on earth - so the fact that our modern experiences of participation may be relatively few, infrequent, brief - does not invalidate these experiences... 

FP experiences are of permanent value not because they last a long time; but so long as we choose to consecrate them.

Consecration would go something like this:

1. Original Participation happens. 

2. We recognize that it is happening. 

3. We acknowledge that this happening is of potentially permanent importance to our resurrected Heavenly self. 

This needs to be done when Original participation happens - Now: here-and-now. 

Not put-off until later. 

If we do not do it at the time of Original Participation - it will (probably) not be done. 

However... An intense imagined re-living of the moment, could also be used to consecrate that moment retrospectively. Because then the moment is not merely "retrospective" but a re-experiencing here-and-now - which is perhaps one reason why we may recollect and meditate on such moments... Why they may last so tenaciously in our memories. The experiences may be re-presenting themselves for consecration. 

Maybe, if we do this on principle and habitually; then this will act as a positive feedback and establish a "spiritual reward system" - so that such opportunities will become more frequent? 

The thing is: we modern Men are terribly demotivated, prone to despair - and any spiritual advice that diminishes or delays our gratification seems doomed to fail*. 

Consecrating our moments of Original Participation generates an immediate spiritual reward as well as a hope-full anticipation. 

Instead of OP being a tragic joy; doomed to be short-lived, doomed to be forgotten and lost by age, disease, death... Instead of this; the act of consecration transforms it into a moment of permanent and positive significance.  

As far as I can understand; only a follower of Jesus Christ who lives in confident expectation of resurrection can do this; and it will not "just happen" but must be done by conscious choice. 

All then depends on making that choice. 

NOTE: It may be objected that because Original Participation is spontaneous and natural, it is not necessarily good. This is true; and if an OP experience is not good, then it cannot and shall not be consecrated to resurrected eternal life - so any such attempt will fail. Christian discernment - knowledge of good and evil, God and that which opposes God; is a necessary part of Christian life - and always applies. 

* The mass of people are (quite literally) spiritually-dying of despair, for lack of any genuinely positive purpose in life. It seems obvious that the double-negative (e.g. therapeutic) values that are exclusively propagated, including by nearly all religions (eg religions rooted in avoidance of default divine punishment), including most Christian churches - are simply ineffectual; leading to short-termist this-worldly hedonism now, and ultimate despair eventually.