Increased self-consciousness *should* imply a move from externally- to internally-motivated - but culture (and 'reaction') is doing the opposite

The development of human consciousness over the past several hundred years (the "modern" era, from c1500) has been towards great self-consciousness - often experienced negatively as cut-off-ness, alienation, isolation, solipsism, despair...

But, in a positive sense; this change has been towards greater freedom or "agency"; and it sustained (during its earlier generations) a great burst of individual geniuses who deployed this new agency in great works of literature, art, science, ideas etc. 

Yet the major developments of modern culture - especially over the past century or so) have been towards a more complete - "totalitarian" control of the human mind.

This, by means of ever-larger and more cross-linked bureaucracies; covering ever-more of life; integrated with a vast apparatus of propaganda and manipulation we term the Mass Media; and these systems have moved from national to multi-national ("global") control, over recent decades.  

In other words; the social trends have been in the opposite direction than the development of consciousness. 

This opposition of social and personal can be understood in terms of the perceived-need for rulers to monitor and control their - more potentially-autonomous - citizens more thoroughly. And this entailed getting them to respond to external motivations rather than to their (increasingly powerful) inner motivations. 

In other words; external society has fought-against the inner trend towards greater freedom, agency, creativity. 

And, so far; external and social control has been winning - hands-down! - against the individual and inward developments of consciousness; especially since the massive spread of Mass, then Social, media from the 1990s. 

But this expanding external control System (of bureaucracy and media) has been overwhelmingly and increasingly evil in its motivations; and this has triggered resistance to this evil among those who were less thoroughly and less-deeply mind-controlled. 

In other words; there have been reactionary movements, opposing the mainstream; and some of these "reactionaries" are Christian. 

Yet, (overwhelmingly) Christian reactionaries have not opposed the social trend towards increased external control - but instead have sought to replace evil-motivated external control with various forms of (putative, because they have not happened) Good-motivated external-control. 

Christian reactionaries are just as opposed to the modern-era developments of human consciousness as are the globalist leftists. 

The difference is that Christian reactionaries are, or aspire to be, totalitarians on-behalf-of-God. 

Thus we can observe all kinds of proposals for what is believed to be a "restoration" of Christianity as an external system of monitoring and control; but replacing the secualr-leftist global leadership with "The" Church... with the the specific identity of this church varying among the advocates. 

The scale of proposed change may be international - for those who adhere to an actual international church - by means of changing the leadership and enforcing the practices of that church. Or the proposed change may be local and piecemeal e.g. setting-up a small personal dictatorship, purporting to be "on behalf of" the real international church - whether institutional or spiritual. 

What Romantic Christianity does, in contrast, is to accept and embrace the inner development towards greater self-consciousness - for its enhancements in agency and creativity; and argue that inner-motivation should become the core of Christianity. 

This implies a move away from, in opposition to, all forms of external control; whatever ideal they serve, or purport to serve. 

It entails each individual accepting ultimate responsibility for his spiritual situation and choices; and moving towards an attitude that evaluates and discerns all forms of external control, and attempts at external motivation. 

Society cannot be eluded, nor opted-out-from; society is necessary and inevitable - and contains much good. 

But the Romantic Christian faces all societies with an attitude of inner-evaluation towards all external influences - including all actual churches, and all possible churches. 

He seeks ultimate motivations from within - and direct from the divine; to clarify and strengthen such motivations; and, insofar as his faith is rooted in the promises of Jesus Christ of resurrected life eternal - then external social influences cannot prevent him achieving what he most desires.  

God is 'polarity': From inspiration to intuition

It may be helpful to consider God (the creator, the creat-ing) as, from our perspective, a polarity.

We know God directly and personally in two ways - from outside and from inside: that is, we know God from inspiration (e.g. of the Holy Ghost), and from intuition of the divine within each Man.

The idea of polarity is that both external and internal divine elements are always necessarily present, because we are dealing with an active 'process', ongoing through time; and the polarities are twin poles of that process, generated-by that process.

So God (the divine) is not a structural, separable thing (which would be static, dead, unmoving), but God is a person - and as a person God extends through time.

And we are involved-with God by our inheritance as children of God: we each are, in essence, divine - so we too are (abstractly) processes through time.


We have the divine within each of us (the True Self) and God is also outside of us (as persons, in God and in Men). So there is a kind-of Divine Web - of individuals divine selves in relation with all other divine selves.

In other words, fundamentally, reality is beings in relationships.

As Man has developed to become more conscious, he begins at one pole by being 'inspired' primarily by external sources of divinity; and as Man grows in consciousness he is supposed-to move, voluntarily and by choice, to the other pole of living primarily from personal intuition of his True Self.

This is also a movement from passivity to activity; from being-controlled to being free. 


So, the completeness of divinity is always when external divinity meets with inner divinity; but in a child or in early Man the external source of divinity was primary; and each man was unconsciously, passively driven-by the external. In such a situation, obedience to the authority of external divinity was the primary virtue; and the primary sin was to rebel against divinity.

As Man's consciousness grows (partly by development in his mortal life, partly at a species level and through human history) he becomes more aware of the distinction between himself and external deity. At a certain point (the culmination of spiritual adolescence), he experiences the reality of separation between external deity and the True Self.

At this point, experience of the polarity of deity is lost; because the experience is a static 'moment' of awareness, insight, 'enlightenment' - an epiphany - the truth of which is true in an abstract cross-sectional way (at a particular moment, 'outisde' of time); but the experience of separation from divinity is untrue in terms of life really being longitudinal, experienced through time.

The reality is that the dynamic process of polarity is always the case - and each man is always a meeting between external and internal divinity; but a snap-shot experience of a dynamic process is a 'frozen moment', in which the dynamic and reciprocal relationship is lost.


Man's divine destiny is to move from the child-like, un-free pole of external and passive immersion-in deity, to the free-agent, grown-up pole of working primarily from our own inner divine True Self. But because these are poles, both sides are always actually present.

So, the divine world begins as dominated by God, with Men as little-conscious (and other even less conscious beings), unconsciously and spontaneously (almost wholly, albeit never quite fully so - because this is a polarity) doing what God directs; and through time moving towards a situation in which some Men are much more powerfully conscious, and have chosen to live in mostly from their own inner divinity.

Instead of being unconsciously and passively directed-by God; such men have consciously and actively chosen to work from their independent agency and with God.

And this is the evolutionary movement from inspiration (primarily, not entirely, external divine guidance) to intuition (primarily, not entirely, inner divine guidance).


When we consciously choose to live primarily from the polarity of our True (and divine) self and with God, this is to become our-selves divine (albeit in a much less-continuous and less-able way than the creator). We become active participants in the process of creation.

And at a personal level, we become something more like God's grown-up 'adult' children; and friends (or 'junior colleagues') of God in his work of creation.


This is the plan of creation. God loves all his children - both the young one, the grown-up ones, and the (many) adolescents somewhere in between. But God certainly wants and hopes to have other 'adult' divinities with whom to relate in a loving and comnpanionable fashion; because grown-up divinities are working mainly from their unique selves.

When at least some of God's children choose to grow-up and join with God in the work of loving creation; divine creation becomes an harmonious interaction of increasing complexity and richness, as compared with the original and lesser situation of unitary, top-down control.


In sum, God wants us to participate, actively and consciously, in the process of creation.

And to do this we need to become more conscious, and by this consciousness to choose to live primarily from our inner divinity.

Yet, because of polarity, because inspiration and intuition are poles of the same single process; this inner motivation is necessarily harmonised with all other external sources of divinity.

Thus the universe of creation coheres.

 

Why the mass vulnerability to crude and incoherent propaganda? Interpretation is more fundamental than perception

Man has been becoming detached from his original, spontaneous, natural contact with the god/s, spirits, nature and other Men for many generations - indeed for many hundreds of years. Originally Men lived in a kind of immersive telepathic contact with all of these and with each other - but that has been dwindling for a long time - and at about the millenium the separation became complete for almost everyone, from adolescence onwards. 

Lacking such an immersive awareness, almost everyone is now utterly dependent upon external perceptions - incoming 'information' from the senses, communications, images etc. And because 'information' includes both the symbolic code and the decoder; Modern Man not only absorbs what specifically to think (ideas, beliefs, facts) - but much more significantly, how to interpret perceptions: how to think about things. 

Modern Man blots-up concepts along with data; absorbs his software as well as his inputs. 

 

Modern Man is therefore pathetic in his extreme vulnerability to external influence - and since both perception and interpretation are equally open and adrift; there is no easy answer. 

In particular, there is no way in which large-scale (mass) external influence can cure this fundamental deficiency in the ability to resist external influence!

We need and must have the ability to interpret, think and be motivated-from our inner reality - which reality is also the only possible route to the realities of the god/s, spirits, nature and other Men. 

 

Access to inner reality - which is actually the divine within us - is made difficult by the entirety of mainstream public discourse (and all kinds of institutions, including churches), by inculcated habits; and access if made impossible when our conceptual framework rejects all inner realities that contradict our imposed-programming; as meaningless, trivial or (increasingly) immoral. 

 

(For Modern Man the source of evil is the individual's soul; the path of 'salvation' is to be open to 'the right kind' of external influence; and the only disagreement between people concerns the 'right kind' of source of external influence to which we should open our-selves. But then any person's discernment between rival sources is equally open to external influences...)

 

The stark nature of our condition is that the answer lies within everyone (at least, every person or being capable of love); but the answer is almost-wholly dependent upon each person both diagnosing his continuous state of sinful passivity to the demonic; and also seeking his own cure. 

Unless or until an individual initiates the seeking of his own salvation from his own divine inner resources by means of 'intuition'; his situation is literally hope-less. 

I mean he has No Hope.

Yet, if any Man does seek salvation within; vast creative divine resources will immediately be available  to assist. The merest pinhole made by inner-divine-soul intent is all that is required as an entry point for help from the god/s, spirit, nature and other Men (including the so-called dead). 

But that initiatory intent is absolutely required.

Christianity: complexity versus simplicity

Traditional and orthodox church-based Christianity is extremely complex; and so are many of the 'occult' forms of Christianity involving graded initiations, rituals, symbolic systems, and training of the mind. Indeed, in a generic sense; traditional churches and occult Christianity can be seen as variations on the same theme: aiming-at the same endlessly-complex way-of-living as a Christian.

There are many advantages in making Christianity endlessly complex! 

For instance, such Christianity is inexhaustible, there is always something else to do - indeed always many possible things to do; so that the complex-Christian can always find something to do to suit every mood and circumstance. 

So what the complex Christian 'needs to do' is always far greater than what he has-done or could-do. There is scripture to study, and liturgy and other rituals in which to participate. There are many forms of prayer to be learned and practiced - some of these very difficult, some very tough. There are ascetic practices, and celebrations. There is a vast world of scholarship - learning Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Aramaic; individually and comparatively with historical context... There is history, archaeology - and these stretch over many places and times going back thousands of years. And there is a massive world of socio-politics in relation to the church - from the international and geopolitical to local congregational matters and everything in between. There are intellectual and abstract matters of theology and philosophy; and there are matters of personality and relationships...

The above only sketches out the limitless complexity of "Christian living" as it is conceived by many of its major representative institutions; and traditionally through most of history. 

What all these share in common is an emphasis on the external location of Christian life. The complexity creates an external world which the Christian inhabits. Much of the power lies externally, and therefore 'happens-to' the individual Christian. 

In a sense, the Christian invests himself (potentially without limit, because there is always more-to-do) into this external and complex world, in order to be able to draw-upon it: in order to be positively affected by-it. 

Furthermore; Christians can share in this external world - it forms a tangible and material link between Christians; and via this physical instantiation of Christianity, individual Christians and group-Christianity both relate to all the activities of society and culture generally. 

There is no aspect of culture that cannot, in this way, be linked with Christianity: politics, the military, law, the arts, science, education... In principle, there are (or can be) Christian aspects and relations of all these. 

When Christianity is thus complex and external, everything in the world is a part of it; and can be seen to be a part of it by all participants. 

 

But this conceptualizing of Christianity as external and complex carries several disadvantages - both innately and in current/ modern practice. 

The current/ modern practice is that - because this kind of Christianity is external and complex; it has been infiltrated, subverted, and then destroyed or inverted in multiple ways and from multiple directions simultaneously - such that the major churches have all been enlisted in the mainstream, secular, leftists and totalitarian agenda. 

This was evident during early 2020, when church leadership willingly (avidly) suspended the core activities of their churches - without time limitations. 

But even if the churches had not been corrupted and conscripted; there are still innate problems with the idea of Christian living as ultra-complex and externally located. 

There is a price to pay for the many advantages listed above; and that price is the habitual subordination of our self to external influences and causes, to external powers. 

Whenever there is an intermediate between our-selves and God, or the divine in any manifestation, then that intermediate has power over us: whether than intermediate be symbol, ritual, hierarchy, scholarship, intellectual discipline, learned abilities, or whatever. 

Although complex-external Christianity does not exclude direct, personal and experiential aspects; these are subordinated-to (embedded-in) the complex forms. Thus the experiential aspects are intermittent (because there is So Much else that must be done); and therefore the Christian often lives from memory, rather than in the here and now.

And vast complexity ties each Christian to the mundane. 

...The experienced consciousness is held in the mundane stance, for all of the time that a Christian is participating in that huge range and intricacies of the "Christian world". 

In a nutshell; the problem with complex-external Christianity is that it is mostly (indeed, nearly-all) discourse about-God, about-Jesus, and about-... everything else that it includes. It is largely secondhand. It leaves the central 'problem' of Life untouched. 

What Christians most need (and often crave) is not mundane discourse about God but experience-of God; and we desire that this be continuous not intermittent; here-and-now and not mere memories that we once-upon-a-time had such experience.  

What we need and want is somewhat like a young child's relationship with his living and loving parents. 

The child ideally (and sometime in practice) experiences that parental love as a continuous factor in his life; ever-present; confident and trusting; a background, a safety-net, an enfolding medium through-which the child moves. 

So, this represents a simple and inner-derived, experiential Christian path through life, to contrast with the complex and external. 

Such a simple path is rooted in knowing the nature and motivations of God - who is creator of this world and strands towards us as a loving parent. 

The inner Christian path is based in having a loving relationship with this God; primarily individual, but also as member of a family of Christians.

And the relevant Christian spiritual activity is directed towards recovering this primal simplicity; discovering, clarifying, and choosing, this loving and personal relationship: recovering it when we go astray.  

Complex external Christianity aims to steer us through life by means of multitudinous sources of guidance - some exact, other generic and with rules of extrapolation/ interpolation. 

Simple and inner Christianity works instead from a strong sense of God's nature, motivations, purposes, and love - and that which is divine with each-of-us -- and it is prayerful meditation directed towards such personal "sources" which provides needful guidance... When that is not already obvious. 

The Litmus Tests revisited - or, what do we need to know about some-one/ some-institution?

The Litmus Tests* may seem crude and formulaic as a way of discernment applied to a person or institutions; but in reality they are almost the opposite. 

The Litmus Tests include the birdemic-peck 'healthism' agenda; support of the opponents of the Fire Nation in the ongoing war; antiracism; pro-sexual revolution; CO2 Climate-change/ warming; and any other form of leftism such as socialism, environmentalism, equality, diversity, libertarianism etc. 

The Litmus Tests refer not so much to specific beliefs, but to the core agenda items of the global totalitarian System, which - properly understood, from a Christian perspective - is evil in its intent -- i.e. the dominant System ultimately seeks the damnation of souls; which requires that (in the end) each soul desires and chooses to be damned. 

Therefore, to fail a Litmus Test means to be subordinated - in at least one major aspect, although typically many or most of the tests are failed - to the external ideology of evil. 

When somebody, or some institution, supports one of the Litmus test agenda items; this is evidence of value-inversion; which is evidence that they are self-subordinated to the dominant external agenda. 

In a sense, from the perspective of making an overall evaluation of somebody's (or some organization's) affiliation in the spiritual war of this world; this affiliation tells us all we need to know: Are they on the side of God/ divine creation/ The Good -- or are they opposed? 

Anyone who accepts, defends, follows, actively advances any of the Litmus Tests - has placed his motivations, thinking and actions under external control from those powers who oppose The Good.

This matter of external control is very significant. 

Because the world (here, now) is so pervasively and top-down corrupted by evil; all powerful external influences are evil. 

Therefore; to be externally-motivated - including by any large or mainstream church, of any denomination) is to be a part of the agenda of evil.  

(This is evil. Evil is Not about niceness or good works or devoutness... Evil is about taking the side of Satan against God. Simple as that. One on-the-side-of Good is Good; no matter what his personal sins - because anyone on the side of Good will/ must have repented his sins; will know, acknowledge, and reject his sins. That is what it means to "be Good".)

Such is the nature of Litmus Tests: they function as an index of whether some person or group has chosen subordination to fundamental, ultimate, external control. 

As of here-and-now; only one who seriously seeks to detach himself from external control can be on the side of God, divine creation and The Good. 

Such a detached person may Not be on the Good side - because he might choose evil from his own inner motivations; but only a detached person can affiliate to Good. 

In our totalitarian and media-saturated world; only inner evaluation and motivation can be a source of commitment to the motivation of Goodness. 

We are Good as individuals - from our inner choices - or not-at-all. 

Affiliation to any external authority is to subscribe to one, more, or many of the negative, incoherent, and oppositional Litmus Tests; and this represents a decisive affiliation to the work of Satan. 

Note added: It should not really be necessary to say so; but maybe it needs saying anyway: that the state of someone's soul now - e.g. affiliation to the Satanic agenda, as evidenced by Litmus Test failure - does not mean that they will choose damnation at the last. Indeed; I think it almost certain that an individual person is only sustained alive for as long as he is judged capable of repentance; which means that where there is life there is hope. However; the same does not necessarily apply to institutions/ groups/ corporations - including churches. Whereas there are many (including recent) examples of individual persons (and, presumably, other Beings) who seem very likely to have repented and chosen salvation despite previous servitude to evil - and done so very late, very near to death; there seem to be none among recent institutions. This may be because the kind of corruption that afflicts most modern institutions is one that excludes the ultimacy of the kind of "presiding spiritual Being" that used-to stand-behind traditional institutions (variously conceptualized as patron saints, angels, and the like). I would guess that so long as there is a presiding spiritual Being, then repentance is possible. But when there has been a hollowing-out, bureaucritization, self-subordination of an institution to external influences, then there can be no basis for repentance. 

How to follow your personal destiny - the polarity of outer and inner - our dual-guidance-system

Since we are each, from eternity, unique souls - then there is an unique destiny, a personal destiny, for every individual.

But discovering (and then, of course, following) one's unique destiny is a difficult matter, and many people don't know how to start - or how an unique destiny differs from randomness or arbitrariness.


To make an unique destiny possible requires both internal and external guidance, and it is from the dynamic polarity of their relationship that we can navigate our destined (but not pre-destined) path through life.

Our external guidance is known as the Holy Ghost, and is accessible to all Christians; since the Holy Ghost (according to the Fourth Gospel) was provided by Jesus after his ascension.

Yet if the Holy Ghost had been the only kind of guidance, then our destiny would be 'given' to us; and our task would merely be to consult the Holy Ghost, and then passively to 'follow' its instructions, as best we could.This would be a life a spiritually children (and was indeed our own life as children, and probably the life of all Men in earlier periods of Man's history.)

Such a life of obedient passivity is a one-sided caricature, because it never was, nor could be, wholly the case; but this life of child-like obedience to external dictates was surely once regarded as an ideal; wheras now a passively obedient life is Not the task of modern Man.

(Such a life is simply Not An Option. Modern Man is an adolescent in spiritual terms, negatively rejecting of passive obedience; and as adolescents we cannot return to childhood. Our task is freely to choose to develop, to grow-up, into spiritual adults... or else we will remain, as we are: perpetually adolescent.) 

Due to the evolutionary-development of human consciousness since the time of Jesus, our task is now to take an active, conscious path through life - freely chosen. This does Not At All mean that the Holy Ghost has been superseded, but instead that we now have a 'dual guidance system' formed from the interaction of outer and inner.

The inner guidance comes from our real self; the eternal self that is divine; albeit an undeveloped divinity; which is how it can be the creative source of uncaused thinking, primary thinking. A life guided solely by the inner guidance system would be merely egotistic, prideful, rebellious, hedonistic, impulsive - adolescent. 

But outer and inner guidance combine to form a classic polarity; in the sense that the outer guidance is centripetal, constraining, receptive, 'feminine'; while the inner guidance is centrifugal, generative, exploratory, 'masculine'.

This is a polarity because although they can legitimately be distinguished, neither guidance can exist in actual detachment from the other - and this union arises because at a deep level outer and inner are continually-being-produced-consequences of a single, living, conscious, dynamic process.

So our task in this mortal life is therefore actively to work from our own inner motivation, which is in continual interaction with the Holy Ghost. The result is experienced as 'intuition', which is our directly known direction and purpose through life.   

How can modern people becomes sure enough about their beliefs, for this to be strongly motivating? Example from my earlier life as a scientist

We need to be sufficiently sure of our bottom-line convictions that they will serve strongly to fuel our personal motivation - so that we have the clarity and courage to aim at good; and to discern and navigate through life. 

But we modern people, in this modern world, find it very hard to believe in - anything!

At least, we moderns don't believe in stuff strongly enough that we can be truly free, and choose God and divine creation, and have the courage to stick with this --- in the face of a world that continually subverts, ridicules, suppresses, persecutes... and even inverts such intentions. 

We need true beliefs - i.e. beliefs that reflect reality (divine reality); and we also need to be subjectively sure about these beliefs in order that they can be positively motivating.

So how can we discover, and become sufficiently-convinced, by such things?  

The short answer is "intuition" - but I need to explain what I mean by intuition. 

For this I will here use the example of my earlier life as a scientist. 

When I began learning science, in the "early" phase;  it was learning "about" science; and I learned it in just the same way that we learn most other things about this world: we are told it we absorb it in terms of the assumptions that lie behind the functioning of our world. 

And we generally believe what we are told, especially when it comes from socially-defined authority figures.

But such "early" learning is superficial and passive - and such beliefs are not strongly held, not least because they have never really been understood, and we have never invested anything very personal into them. 

Consequently, these early beliefs concerning science were easily revised, modified, even reversed - when some "higher" authority said so. 

So: this early kind of passive and external belief about science was only very weakly inwardly motivating, and was unstable.

The same applies to all such beliefs - and this accounts for almost all proclaimed political, social and religious beliefs. They are shallow, impersonal - and very easily redirected or reversed by a change in what "authorities" are currently-saying. 

When I became a professional scientist, and began to do research; I entered an intermediate phase. I soon became much more discerning about what I believed, and more active in choosing who I would personally regard as authorities.  

My own understanding became deeper; albeit in externally derived terms. 

The doing of science became much more selective - but what I selected-from, and the criteria for regarding something as true; was something I assembled from that selective sample of what "authorities" stated.

I was not doing original or creative work in science; rather I was trying to be more professional, more discerning, and to do my work at a higher level than others. 

At this intermediate level; the work I was doing was not really anything to do with "reality" - rather it was dictated by the scientific literature - and was a matter of filling in gaps, extrapolating from what had already been done - and refuting pieces of established science that were (I believed) refuted by better authorities. 

It could be said I had "faith" in science as a process, as a social activity. This is analogous to most Christians "faith" in their church. 

I changed my mind less often than in the early phase, because I was more motivated - but this motivation was very much bound-up with and shaped-by the professional scientific environment - which was regarded as the ultimate arbiter. 

So, at this intermediate level; science was what the best scientists were saying (or had said) - and the intent was to become one of these "best" - and this was determined by the higher professional structures. 

Such a vision of science is this-worldly, and its standards and motivations are of this-world - even if rather idealized within this-world.

The motivations are stronger, because of the personal investment in the process; but the motivation is still ultimately external - and when the external consensus of those I regarded as "best" scientists changed, then so would my own purposes and motivations. 

I could (I hoped!) stand in a select company which I had partially chosen to ally-with; but I could not stand alone.  

The highest level of science was concerned by transcendental ideals that looked beyond the scientific milieu; ideals to do with reality (not just the relevant scientific literature) and truth (not just professional standards. 

At this highest level I was compelled to take personal responsibility for my beliefs; and might therefore need to "stand alone" when I thought that "the external world of science" (even of the best scientists, and by my evaluation) was wrong and misguided. 

For these evaluations to become beliefs that were strong enough to motivate; I needed to have criteria for conviction that went beyond my interpretations of the external world of the professional scientific literature. 

At this point, as may be clear, I had actually moved outside of the professional system of science. 

I had come to recognize that science had its assumptions that were not really true; that it was a matter of models not reality; and that for science to be true and real, required that science be understood in terms of ultimate reality...

Which included God and divine creation, and myself as having some personal significance in this.  

This was the point at which I developed sufficiently strong a personal motivation that I could, where I regarded it as necessary, maintain my convictions and direction without support from other scientists. 

I was, in other words, innerly-motivated, and also (consequently) more strongly motivated. 

This stronger inner motivation came from a different quality of conviction concerning what was true. 

At the early and intermediate levels of science; I was dependent on external authority as expressed in external communications and externally-validated interpretations of these communications - i.e. my belief (hence motivation) was rooted the observations and theories to be found in some selective sample of the scientific literature...

To reiterate - this understands science as communications that are externally derived and externally validated. 

At both early and intermediate levels; my convictions could be no different-from, deeper-than, or more-solid-than these external factors.  

And when these external factors vacillated, or even apparently reversed - then there was no alternative but for me to revise my convictions. 

This situation is demotivating! - especially when, by criteria external to science (and to do with truth and reality) science is being corrupted, as was very obviously the case.

(Science began explicitly to serve the needs of bureaucracy, careerism, politics etc. I could not fool myself other than that this really was corruption!)   

For me to have a personal conviction and motivation in science; I needed to have an inner sense of truth and reality; what is more this inner sense needed to be direct, not a communication; needed to be self-interpreting - not dependent on observations and theories. 

In other words "intuition". 

Actually, I have put matters the word way around; because it was only after I had recognized that intuition was and ought to be the root of science, that I moved to the higher level. 

What happened was that I would be thinking about something, working on something; when I realized that "this was it". 

From the stream of superficial thinking and doing, there sometimes emerged, there was discovered, a solid sense of conviction and surety; a "this is it".  

  

After a while, the intuition of "this is it" became the final validator of my work - unless I got it, and unless the sense of this-is-it was solid enough to survive repeated consultations; then I was not convinced. 

Lacking such an intuition; I remained unsure. 

I knew that "more work was needed". 

But with this intuition, and so long as it lasted and was operative - I was highly motivated, and could withstand any amount of external contradiction. 

To generalize from this specific experience; when we regard the external world as corrupt, and increasingly taking the side of evil; then unless we are to be drawn-into that; we need to move "above" considerations of the external, the communicated. 

We need, I think, to operate from the kind of deep intuition I eventually found in doing science...

Because only this intuition can be the basis for us to be free and positively-motivated by something outwith "society" that is both solid and potentially real.  

A religion rooted in external reality does not prevent death of the soul - indeed, nowadays, it encourages this

Have you ever noticed that when a lot of people convert to Christianity, or convert to a different denomination or church within Christianity, they cease to become interesting or "real".

That person may have been interesting while he was seeking and exploring, because he was engaged in working to gratify the deep yearnings of his real-self. But after conversion and worsening with time; after he has sworn fealty to his church... then he incrementally becomes an obedient mouthpiece for... whatever he understands as the church's world-view. 

His inner self is now harnessed-to, self-subordinated-to, an outer church agenda. 

In converting to church-Christianity (of almost any church) such people voluntarily become human-parrots. They become utterly predictable in what they say and (apparently) think; because (like a corporate spokesman or Party commissar) they are saying and thinking whatever an institution has put-into them. 

You ask a question, ask for an eveluation, press a button - and if you know what their church says, you know exactly what will come-out. 

Such is, indeed, characteristic of "converts" in general. But those who are devout in their birth religion/ ideology may have always been like this - so we probably don't notice the difference in the "before and after" way that we do with converts. After all, maybe the cradle-communists or -religionists are not capable of anything else? 

I think that this chosen obedient parroting, is why so many devout or convert church-Christians have so spectacularly failed to see the existential threat of "AI" - they fail this easy spiritual "test" because they have out-sourced their fundamental religious thinking. 

And this failure is unfixable; there is no effective negative feedback, no tendency to a pendulum swing. 

One who has handed ultimate authority to anything outside cannot learn; he can only respond to what his chosen external authority instructs him. If the external source does not learn; then neither will he learn. 

This happens because such a person has made the choice and decision that ultimately external is better than internal. 

Such a person has made it a baseline assumption that his understanding and knowledge of goodness, of value - of truth, beauty, and virtue - ought to come from outside of himself.

He has chosen to place himself in a position of ultimate and existential inferiority to some-thing which is external to himself.  

**

My belief is that this fundamental choice is a matter of soul - and the choice is between a soul voluntarily tethered to the external world, and therefore lost...

And, on the other hand; a world experienced, known, understood... from the soul. 

Either we hand over our-selves to be assimilated into out-there; or else we root our ultimate understanding of out-there in our inner-souls. 

This situation is real and active for some decades; the task is a matter of escaping from what has happened, and is still happening and worsening. 

If Christians are to escape their current actuality of passively being swept-along in the stream of whatever current social mores and trends; clinging to a church which is also being swept-along by the same stream (and indeed the church is usually ahead of the individual, and leading the way, in terms of this-worldly corruption); then Christians must begin operating from some-thing that is outwith the stream.

For Christians, this escape ought to be straightforward (albeit not "easy") - if only they will allow it to be. Because Christians know that God is personal and loving of each individual person. We will therefore never be abandoned without divine help - whatever the surrounding level of societal and institutional evil.

To me this implies quite simply that there is (there "must be" - I see no effective alternative) a direct and unmediated - soul to soul - link between God and each individual person. 

In other words; Christians can escape the fate of soul-loss, if they choose - but they must choose. 

If individual persons do not so choose, then they will not escape. 

(There is no incentive, and many disincentives, for institutions to save individuals from institutional-doom, from corruption and evil; when the consequence would be that the individual becomes ultimately autonomous of that institution. It is foolish and irresponsible to wait for externally-led/ -instructed salvation.)  

So we individually must choose the inner over the outer, the sould over society; or else it will not happen. 

And what we discover will get its value from the fact that it is personally experienced and validated, for that person, and because that person has taken responsibility for endorsing it. 

Note: This inner guidance cannot then be handed-on to become secondhand guidance for other people or persons; because that would not then be an "inner", but merely a different kind of "outer". 

It depends on what we want from our existence, and how much we want it. 

Do we want what Jesus offered enough to experience and know, with- and from- our souls? 

Or shall we place our ultimate faith somewhere outside? 

Exactly where outside (church or corporation, religion or ideology) we place our ultimate arbitor will not, in the end, make much difference. 

Only that which lies within can save us.    

In search of courage/ motivation

Ever since I began regularly blogging some 15 years ago; I have cycled around this distinctively modern problem of demotivation. Modern Western people are strikingly lacking in powerful motivators, compared with earlier generations - and this is the reason why we are so lacking in courage, so cowardly. 

The deep reason is obvious enough - our atheism, materialism, our systematically built-in cultural assumption that there is neither purpose nor meaning to life.

In a word: our nihilism. 

In seeking to escape such nihilism, some people turn to ideologies - but (lacking a personal and loving God) these always turn out to be rooted in negative values - hence incoherent; and incoherence cannot provide us with strong and lasting motivations. 

This is why people just go long with (what they perceive - as manipulated by the mass media) to be "the flow". 

Lacking inner motivation, they seek to conform to externally structured and short-termist goals relating to personal gratifications. Lacking inner motivation and ultimate purpose, they have no reason to be courageous. 

The answer is, of course, Christianity - but exactly what this implies is unclear. 

All of the major Christian churches are, and nearly all of Christian discourse is, nowadays so overwhelmingly corrupt and distorted in emphasis; that to become "a Christian" is only a very small start down the path of discovering a strong, valid and good motivation for life. 

One problem is that Christians are told to seek the truth in "a church" (i.e. to discover and obey a/the "true" church) - yet Christianity is replete with discourses placed at a level of "idealization" and detached abstraction; such that whatever was resolved by such procedures could never motivate a flea - and doesn't! 

This applies to the vast structure of logic and legalism, complex doctrines and dogmas, wranglings over language and translation, ancient history and context; and endless bitter disputes over the valid structures of hierarchy and authority.  

Consequently, lacking strong motivators, the actual motivations of Christians are just "whatever is socially and personally expedient": whatever is most rewarding, least risky, and in-general easiest in their particular societal niche. 

The would-be Christian falls into such mire because he is told always to seek truth (and motivation) in some external and objective - yet always and necessarily human at the interface - persons and institutions. 

In other words, there is an assumption built-in (from the history of religion and culture) that truth is a thing-out-there, and that truth ought to impose upon us - our job being merely to let this happen.

This assumption talks as if human experience, consciousness, awareness, intuition and insight - had not existence except as distractions. 

Actual people (particular human individuals) are edited out from it, except as a source of interference. 

The picture it accepts is one of a human passivity that excludes the essential "presence" in the description of our distinctive existence as living beings. 

What people don't realize is that this not how things are, but it is a theory of knowledge and behaviour and life and spirit. As long as we allow ourselves to assume such a theory, then we will always be alienated (because we are not actively participating in the process), can never know truth (because it is out there), and shall never be strongly motivated of our-selves - but only secondarily following some external source of guidance. 

Even when someone escapes (for a while) from the deadly assumptions of our civilization, and recognizes that the world is not out-there but participative; and that motivation must derive from our primary involvement in the creation of reality - then the actual daily/ hourly business of being motivated to Good remains a present problem...

But at least it is a real problem, in which we are primarily and personally concerned; and a problem that involves both us and the world; both us and God...

And, after all, this mortal life is a transitional phases - not a thing to be solved. 

What we should seek is the courage and commitment to keep engaged and keep learning; guided both from within and by our real and creative participation in divine creation. 

Ultimately, there is no possible division between inner and outer, subjective and external - reality is inconceivable without a basis that includes both. Yet at the same time we are not immersed in unity, but distinct beings. Our picture of reality should explain how this works. 

And like the knowledge itself, this is something that is learned by inner participation and engagement in creation. 

Learning this is not possible when the self is self-expunged; it is not something learned-from any conceivable external source.  

Our selves must be engaged and participate in the reality outside ourselves. 

Such knowledge is motivating because we personally and actively know it, and such motivation gives courage. 

Note added: Motivation/ Courage are therefore a by-product of solid (Christian) conviction - and not something that can be sought directly. If sought directly, then all that will result is "psychological courage" - which is a product of external causes interacting with internal disposition - and will only be as strong or lasting as the stability and strength of those external causes and internal disposition. The way to get motivated (and have a reason for courage) is to discover meaning and purpose in a way that is underpinned by personal conviction of personal destiny. 

Motivation is vital - but what is it?

I've been harping-on about the vital importance of "motivation" since I began daily blogging in 2010 - and repeating that this, our age is characterized by extremely (historically) low levels of motivation. So it's maybe about time I clarified what I mean, and what I do not mean, by "motivation"...

Motivation needs to be distinguished from power; indeed motivation is revealed when power is lacking; when there are stresses and adversity working against it; and over the course of time. when weak motivations inevitably fail.

Motivation is long-term; and continues despite lack of external encouragement or reward - and in the face of active dis-couragement and negative sanctions. 

Be clear that high motivation is not sufficient to good: it depends on what that motivation aims at, and someone might be highly-motivated towards evil. 

However, motivation is necessary to good; because without motivation, people merely conform to external incentives and pressures. 

Therefore motivation underpins long-term courage; and motivation is an aspect of "freedom" or "agency". 

Motivation is inner, ultimately; therefore needs to be distinguished from what people actually do in their lives; because actions are subject to external control. In an extreme case, a slave's actions may be almost wholly controlled (on pain of death), yet that slave can be motivated to good. 

Or, more commonly, a person may be prevented from "actioning" his motivations by many adversities such as inborn deficits or damage, sickness or accident, or a character that is weak-willed. 

Because will-power is not motivation. indeed, most people with exceptionally high levels of will-power - I have known several - use this to pursue socially-valued behaviours. Their will is thus subject to somebody-else's externally-supplied motivation. Such a life-strategy does not need real (i.e. inner) motivation. 

But a highly motivated person might we thwarted by his own deficiencies from achieving anything significant, or observable - and these deficiencies may include lack of "will power".  Such an individual's "aim is true", but his ability to action that aim is feeble.  

 

A highly-motivated person is one who sticks to his inner goal, his destiny (as he has chosen it); even when he is unfitted, or for any reason unable, to achieve that destiny - even when he acknowledges that he has failed.

High motivation is therefore indomitable: it cannot be beaten in this mortal life. 

And when motivation is aligned with God and divine creation, when motivation seeks salvation by following Jesus Christ - then we get the needful Christian combination. 

We get someone who will achieve resurrection to eternal life whatever happens or does not happen in the external world. 

And that is the vital importance of motivation. 

**

Note: The next question is perhaps: How then do I become a highly-motivated, indomitable Christian? That is a task in its own right; and one that involves meeting one's own innate and most-intuitive aims with a long-term and solid apprehension of the Goodness and love of God the Creator. Second-hand information and advice do not suffice. External influences and pressures are more likely to be deceptive than helpful. It is a personal quest. But one who recognizes the absolute need for inner Christian motivation, is guaranteed timely success - exactly because God is the Creator, is good, and loves us each individually.   

The imperative to re-connect; and the choice between passive immersion and active Love

The stage that Modern Man has reached in his evolutionary development is one where, sometime in adolescence, his consciousness becomes cut-off from the collective consciousness in-which he used (in early childhood) to be immersed (as was 'early man'). 

Modern Man becomes alienated such that his only direct experience is self-consciousness. There is coherence within his mind; but outside his mind is an incomprehensible chaos - and all communication are uncertain and prone to distortion and 'wishful-thinking'.  He finds himself alone, isolated. 

What does he do? Man cannot be alone, and so he must somehow reconnect with the collective, with other Beings... 

There are two options - one is mainstream and common - the other rare and regarded by the majority as childish and dumb wishful-thinking. 

The mainstream attempt to reconnect is to open the mind to dominant external influence. 

Each Man reconnects with the collective by voluntarily immersing himself in the dominant, powerful, most authoritative current-opinion; and thereby alleviates his lonely isolation and again feels a part of a greater whole. 

This mainstream strategy is a chosen passivity; a decision Not to think, but instead to be... what ever the collective is currently dictating. 

In the modern West, this is the decision to live in accordance with The System (the decision that most people have clearly made - including most self-identified Christians) - by this; one's facts, concepts and attitudes absorbed-from the powerful bureaucracies, officialdom and the mass media. 

And by this - to some subjective extent - one escapes isolation and becomes a part of the human collective: a materialist world backed-by a de facto monopoly on propaganda/ education and coercion/ bribery, and therefore assumed to be 'real'. 

And now that all of these institutions agree monolithically on all issues that They regard as essential; and now that individuals are plugged-into communicatiouns systems for most of every day - it has never been easier to feel a part of the collective by the simple decision to be passive and absorptive. 

Of course; this sense of belongingness is impaired by the covert fact that such cohesion is man-made and arbitrary - and by the intermittent awareness that the unity of perspective is (substantially) manipulative and exploitative. 

Nonetheless, it is regarded as the only alternative to utterly alienated isolation - so such doubts are suppressed or ignored; on the basis that 'there is no alternative' - at least none that are real. 

But there is an alternative to the mainstream outer-to-inner, switching-off thinking and opening one's mind to external meanings; and that alternative is to work from the inside outwards. 

In other words; the alternative is to start from the cohesion of one's isolated mind, and then choose to align this inner coherence with divine coherence. 

By choosing to align with God's creation; we thereby reconnect our inner mind with the larger world, and escape from alienation by re-joining God and God's people, the inhabitants of Heaven and those who have chosen (while on earth) to follow Jesus Christ to resurrected Heavenly life after their deaths.

So these are the choices. We are driven to escape the isolation of modern consciousness; and can choose either to open our minds to the external; or to connect of inner divine natures with the greatness of divine creation. 

This inner-outer reconnection is done for the sake of Love - or else it is not done at all. We must want to live by-Love. 

And why would we want this? Because, in essence, we have chosen to believe the hints and glimpses of a life rooted in Love (hints and glimpses from family life, romantic love or intense friendship) that are afforded by this mortal life. Those who choose to believe that these point-at the possibility of Men living eternally with the divine (and other Men); having made an eternal commitment to live-by-Love.  

 

Conversely (and this seems to be the normal, mainstream, dominant view of Modern Man) we can choose to regard the hints and glimpses of a life lived by Love as merely delusions or manipulative deceptions - such that the only realistic decision is to subordinate our-selves to whatever currently are the dominant external influences. 

A theory of creativity based on a new understanding of the nature of high-Psychoticism

*
If the standard 'natural selection' model of creativity is regarded as deficient, as previously argued - I mean the 'Simonton' model in which creativity is explained as a product of the high-Psychoticism-trait (high-P) personality producing wide-ranging and abundant random variations on old ideas, and high intelligence sieving and sorting-through these abundant randomly-varied ideas on the basis of coherence and memorized knowledge - then what do I propose to put in its place?

*

The key relevant difference between my view and the natural selection view - and the difference which leads to the following alternative model for creativity - concerns the nature of the high-Psychoticism trait.

Eysenck sees Psychoticism in terms of a tendency towards loose or broad associations - in other words a partially-pathological state. Psychoticism is seen as a partial breakdown in the normally tightly controlled and narrow associations of ideas to a situation being more like we have all experienced in dreams, and some people have experienced in delirious states of illness or alcohol withdrawal, or psychotic illnesses such as mania or schizophrenia, or under the influence of psychosis-inducing drugs (such as mescaline or LSD).

By contrast, I regard high-Psychoticism-trait as being an innate, substantially heritable, hard-wired set-up of the nervous system in which some individuals experience a higher dominance by 'inner' states than do most normal people. High-P individuals are inner-attentive, inner-aware, inner-engaged and inner-motivated.

*

So how does high-P work in producing 'creative solutions'?

The short answer is that the creative insight is preceded by a period of focused 'quest' (which may last many years) during which the mind is filled with more-or-less relevant ingredients. The inner-directed processes then observe, work-on, try to understand these various facts and concepts - try to select among them, achieve a clear view of their proper or best organization or arrangement,

This means that such high P individuals are attentive to their inner states (i.e. their thoughts and emotions, their 'stream of consciousness'), they are more spontaneously aware of their thoughts and feelings, they find these inner experiences more engaging, spontaneously more interesting than external matters such as social and sexual interactions (which fascinate most people for most of the time) - and these inner states provide the dominating motivations for such people, such that they are therefore substantially autonomous - that is to say indifferent to, independent-from peer pressure and socialization.

The process by which the mind works on these ingredients to give a breakthrough is a 'black box' - so far as science is concerned. (Although it can be said that the inner, unconscious mind works by different rules than those of conscious logic.) But it is the high-P person who has the focused abstract interest to bring together the ingredients, to watch the processes of understanding and organization, and to get a clear view of the answer as it emerges; and then powerfully to feel the rightness of the right answer as energies and positive emotions are triggered and experienced.

*

Although this inner-dominance can be caused by diseases and toxicity or brain damage; which can cause any normal person to be overwhelmed by powerful and pathological inner stimuli, or cut-off-from outer perceptions - the idea of Psychoticism is that high-P is a relatively rare but hereditary personality trait - commoner in men than women, inborn, emerging in childhood and persisting through maturity and adulthood.

The reason that high-P is hereditary, is that it is an evolved adaptation with a useful functional role to play - i.e. creativity - and the reason it is rare is that not many (i.e. not a high proportion) of creative people are required by a society; and high-P tend to be associated with lower reproductive success overall (as would be expected when individual invest more time and other resources in the inner life, and therefore relatively less resource into social and sexual life).

*

So high-P creative people are sometimes very useful to a particular human society (assuming that society 'takes advantage' of their special abilities) but there cannot be too many and indeed not many are needed.

The reason that high-P people are needed, but not often, is that most socially relevant problems (of population survival and expansion) are dealt-with by habitual and traditional means - the individual is socialized into the usual way of dealing with problems through childhood, and these usually work.

But most human societies have recognized (whether explicitly, or more often implicitly, tacitly, that some problems do yield to tradition or habit, and other problem do not always yield to tradition or habit - and what then?

In a nutshell, then is the time to bring in the creative specialist - the Shaman, the mystic, the intuitive priest, the scientific or inventive genius, the Holy Fool: someone who has resisted socialization and instead thinks by different rules, because he is more engaged with the inner world

*

So the assumption is that high-P has evolved at a low frequency by some (unknown) group-selection mechanism that leads to a reliable but rare supply of high-P individuals to do this vital but infrequent job. And part of this group-selection must also be a recognition from the majority of low-P individuals that these high-P 'oddball' or 'eccentric' individuals must be tolerated, supported, and asked for advice and guidance in certain relatively unusual circumstances when their special abilities are the best (or only) hope for group survival.

Since the supposed mechanism is group selection, and different human group shave experienced widely different selection pressures; then it is likely that high-P is not found with identical frequency everywhere. This presumably explains why creative genius is very unevenly distributed by time and geographical space - and why its frequency varies over time within the same culture - not least because group selection is always open to being subverted by individual-level selection.

This group selected nature of high-P potentially explains why creative genius is all-but absent from many continents and nations, and also why it may appear in abundance (e.g. in ancient Greece) then disappear. However since genius also requires high general intelligence (high-g) then too low an average level of g, or a decline in g, may also be a cause of declining rates of genius.

But I think it fair to say that high-P is a more crucial aspect of genius than high-g, because any high-P individual who is sufficiently higher in intelligence than the majority of his group can perfom his creative social role; while a low-P person will not be creative, no matter how high his intelligence.

So I imagine that the 'shamans' of a recent hunter gatherer tribe will typically have had an intelligence level that is high for their tribal group, but of a lower than average level for a Western nation (as measured by IQ tests). However, such (by Western standards) 'low-IQ' individuals could nonetheless perform their highly valued and effective social function - so long as they had the high-P, creative personality trait.

*


Also posted at:

http://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/the-inner-nature-of-trait-psychoticism.html
*

God is, and must be, both out-with and with-in us. Christians need to be more explicit about God within us

*

When Christians think of God - we should do so from a dual perspective that he is both out-there - external to us; and also within us - inside our awareness.

(We are Sons and Daughters of God: that is how God is IN us.)

However, the externality of God has been much more greatly emphasized in Christianity, to the point that it has been seen as a religion of 'some God up-there in Heaven, telling us what to do' - because the externality of God has in times and places been used to make a religion of rules and obedience only.

By contrast, 'Eastern' religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism often have a much stronger emphasis on a god-within - that we are ourselves gods, and that the way to contact the gods is to look within - by meditation and spiritual disciplines.

*

In the nineteen fifties and sixties, the spiritualism of the time made much of this difference between Western Christianity with its God out-there, and Eastern mystical traditions which look within.

Reading Joseph Campbell, who was raised as a devout Roman Catholic in the Irish tradition of the early 20th century, he makes this contrast repeatedly and persistently in explaining the difference between West and East - and he personally had rejected the externalizing 'objective' concept of Christianity and embraced a 'subjective' inner directed Eastern spirituality.

For people like Campbell (brought-up Christian), Eastern spirituality was about a fresh and exciting emphasis on personal growth, creativity, aesthetic appreciation, embrace of modern science - it was all positive, expanding, joyful. 

*

But a god who is merely inner is inadequate, just as a God who is outer is inadequate - very obviously so.

A god who is merely inner is just our-selves - and such a religion is (or soon becomes) a disguised form of self-indulgence; while a God who is merely outer is just a tyrant, running a political system (it would perhaps seem more noble to defy such a purely external god than to worship him). 

*

Joseph Campbell had had a solid grounding in Christianity as a child, therefore when he embraced an inner-orientated Eastern Mysticism, in reality he was bringing the effect of that up-bringing with him into the East, and was living a hybrid.

Likewise, the actuality of Eastern religions is that there is a very large element of the external gods about them; gods who set rules and expect obedience - and this objectivity may be very heavily emphasised in the lives of ordinary adherents.

*

But it is a damning indictment of the Christianity Campbell grew-up with that it had drifted into a near-exclusive emphasis on the externality of God. That style of Christianity emphasized obedience to rules to the extent of crushing the qualities of personal growth, creativity, aesthetic appreciation, embrace of modern science which Campbell and others like him actively needed.

Yet God must be out-with us in order that He explains anything; in order to structure our lives and to make us a community of believers, in order that life has purpose and meaning.

And God must be carried with-in us in order that the meaning of life may be experienced as alive; that we have a personal destiny as creative, imaginative, exploring individuals.

*

So to find God we can look outside; and we also can look inside.

God is wherever we are because he can always be contacted in prayer, and God is wherever we are because we always carry him around.

We can pray to our Father in Heaven, and we can do this in a group and share the experience; and we also can meditate, attune with our inmost being in solitude - and we will find God there too.

*

How is this achieved? - mostly through knowing God in a relationship - as our Heavenly Father. God is out-with me because he is not me - he is another person. And God is with-in me because I am my Father's Son, and my Father is therefore intrinsic: part of my make-up.

To use a biological metaphor - I am unique, in being a one-off combination of heredity and experience and specific circumstances; but I also have genes which I got from my parents, and which I share with all other humans - men and women.

Therefore, I am both generic and distinctive.

And I must be both to be Human.

*

So Christians should take care not to neglect God within us - actual Christian doctrine and life should never make it possible to draw the outer versus inner contrast that Campbell experienced and taught.

*

Why is the Western intellectual class (managerial, professional etc) the most deeply corrupted?

It has become pretty obvious that the class of which I am a member - the "upper middle class", the people who work in professional and managerial jobs; nowadays, mostly as bureaucrats, of one sort of another - are the most corrupted of people in The West, 

I mean the most corrupted - that is the most mentally-"converged" with the evil ruling ideology of atheist-materialism* (therefore and de facto Leftism, whatever its self-identification). 

The Leadership class use the ideology for their own personal (and at the highest levels - evil/ spiritual/ strategic) ends; but it is the intellectual class who believe the ideology, who live-by-it, and who are convinced that living by the ideology is righteous.  

Why should this be? I think there are two main reasons that are worth attention. 

The first is that the intellectual class are profoundly unspiritual, unreligious; they have internalized that there is no life for their personal souls, their unique selves, beyond death; and that there is no purpose to their own individual human life; and that their individual life has no objective meaning for the totality of reality. 

So, these people are seriously demotivated. They do not have any genuine and primary reason or quest or job-to-do in their own life. 

Consequently. they look outside themselves to be motivated: the seek outwith their own personal evaluations to be told what to think and do; how to evaluate and behave.  

Because they have nothing they deeply desire to do, from-themselves; they have no reason seriously to resist (let alone oppose) external influences. 

They are prone to regard external influences fatalistically, as absolute and inevitable - even when they are not. 

But when external influences are genuinely overwhelming, this is seized-upon a a decisive reason to join with them - motivationally as well as obediently, mentally as well as physically.   

This relates to, and is reinforced by, a stubborn and profound desire to avoid personal responsibility.

This refusal of responsibility is extraordinarily strong; and individuals will go to extreme lengths to assert their own powerlessness (their own status as passive victim); and will become extremely passionate on the subject. 

Non-responsibility of the individual (ultimately of "myself" in the istuation of this mortal life) has something of the status of religious dogma among the Western intellectual class. It is not just an excuse, but a righteous conviction.  

Any person who does not share this dogma of the ideal of non-responsibility is regarded as ignorant and deserving of exclusion - or insanely deranged if he persists in non-compliance. 

And someone who defends the primacy of his own inner motivation on the basis of taking responsibility for their own mortal lives, is perceived as dangerous - and probably evil. 

In respect to demotivation and denial of responsibility; professed religion or spirituality appears to make an insignificant difference; yet the actuality of a primarily motivating belief in Christianity combined with a responsible personal engagement would appear to be the only way out from the systemic self-corruption of the intellectual class. 

The inner reality of a personally-engaged Christianity would seem to be necessary - albeit that its public profession is neither here-nor-there. 

This was my experience before I became a Christian. I was highly inwardly motivated to pursue what I considered to be the highest path I could envisage - and I took responsibility for doing-so. 

Yet I could not explain or justify this to others - nor even to myself! - because "officially" by metaphysical assumptions were those of atheistic-materialism. 

By my innate nature, I was compelled to make life difficult for myself and be a nuisance to those around me - but while I intuitively felt this was actually good; this hardly-conscious intuition was refuted by my conscious and explicit beliefs. 

And such contradictions in myself weakened motivation, and sometimes rendered it vulnerable to the drip-drip of societal pressure; so I would recurrently slip into self-justified conformist expediency - until "rescued" by my own intractable personality.  

The reasons why publicly-professed Christianity is nigh-irrelevant are obvious enough: when a Christian's righteousness is externally-motivated he will lack the needful inner motivation to eschew and strong exposure to corruption (which is everywhere); and when he sees righteousness as entailing surrender of responsibility to any external entity, he will become subject to the endemic, all-pervasive, increasing corruption of Western totalitarianism as a matter of religious principle!.

++

*Among this class, self-identification as religious is just a lifestyle choice; religion makes no significant difference to their fundamental convictions or bottom-line behaviours - which are ideological. Ideology comes first: their religion is fitted-into the their ideology. 

Positive possibilities of this time and place

In the previous post, I finished by saying:

This era really is one of potentially unprecedented awakening. It is not an era for great works, but an era for great insight and understanding - for learning things never learned before.

Such an attitude seems important, if a siege mentality (and ultimately demoralisation) is to be avoided. And it is implied by our actual situation.

Since this is a materialistic, spirit-denying age in which you see Beings as Things; it is not surprising we always look to external explanations for our problems; and if external things are the causes, then we seek external solutions: socio-political solutions.

Yet there are two sides to this era - and the inner factors are primary. The driving force of change has been the development of human consciousness. And this is part of divine destiny. To put matters crudely: We needed to become capable of not believing in God, so that we can truly choose to believe.

So the inner consciousness of Western Man has, incrementally, become detached from the world (alienated), and detached from external authority; so that now it is (for most people) the power of tradition and external authority has been lost, unconscious instinct and common sense are ineffectual - and we can disbelieve anything.

The foolish and invincible credulity of modern Western Man (mainstream leftism in general including 'global warming', the 'trans' agenda etc) is actually an expression of dis-belief in tradition, instinct and common sense. Therefore people believe only what is short-term expedient; and are grossly demotivated such that life has become an affair of short-termist hedonism, distraction, and petty status competitions. 

However, this is a narrative of loss... By this account; yes, we have more freedom, but it is a negative freedom due to loss of authority. Yes matters are clearer to us as Good and evil diverge, and things come to a point - but this is again an advantage for the negative reason that evil has become more extreme, open and insane - and is therefore easy to discern.

What we most need to know is our positive new strengths. Surely, God would not have put us into such a situation unless we were equipped to benefit from it. How has the evolution of consciousness equipped us to better lead Good lives?

As socio-political conditions move towards a greater totalitarian evil; and the mass of life is more obviously false, fake, dishonest, manipulative, ugly - designed to induce resentment and despair... As public avenues for creativity and expression are closed off; as Good public discourse is suppressed and punished...

That which is loving and creative; that which is virtuous, beautiful and truth-full... Each individual person's proper and destined path - All this, here and now, at each moment - will be much clearer than ever before.

And the detachment of modern human consciousness will be seen as a marvellous strength, indeed a divine strength - the capacity (when making the right choice, following the right path, doing the right thing) to become a primary source of divine loving-creativity.

So long as we remember that his mortal life is for experiencing and learning; and not for achieving any fixed and final state of being; we will not become dismayed at the temporary nature of our successes - at the fact that gains are usually incomplete and never permanent; but we will acknowledge and take-seriously all such positive achievements; confident, with faith, that all such (mortal, temporary) learning-experiences are eternal in their significance.

Radical implications of the "Mandela Effect"

I have written before about what I think is really going-on in the discussions of The Mandela Effect. Another way of thinking about it; is that it is to do with concepts of Time. 

Some twenty years ago; I wrote an essay about the contrast between Ceremonial Time and Technological Time. Ceremonial Time could be called subjective time, based on human memory as it works in an oral and illiterate culture; whereas Technological Time is the, now dominant, modern idea of time as objective, consensual; and where the bottom line is in written history, and scientific concepts and measures. 

My feeling is that much discussion of The Mandela Effect is rooted in a spontaneous (to young children, and ancestral men), unconscious, and instinctive desire to reassert the primacy of Ceremonial Time; rooted in spontaneous, emotionally-inflected, and human-centred, memory. 

But this is (exactly because rooted in the unconscious and instinctive - hence opaque to analysis) confused by trying to hold-onto various aspects of Technological Time.

For instance the reality of the Mandela Effect is asserted by referencing books and other written material; or movie films, TV, computers, and other technologies that have significant roots outside of the mind; in memory cues that are materialized in symbolic, encoded, linguistic, and visual representations.

The debate focuses on asserts about differences between past and present artifacts. And it focuses on trying to convince other people about the validity of our own memories compared with current public information.  

I find this contradictory. 

This is moving back and forth between the official and external, now and then; and back and forth between our own subjective memories and the attempt to make others regard our assertions about these memories as externally-valid truths. 

But if we desire to assert the primacy of the subjective, directly-known and human; then we should not use the objective, symbolic and technological as evidence. 

Discussion of the Mandela Effects seems to arise from a profound dissatisfaction at the destructive violence that our bureaucratic-mass media and totalitarian world is doing to both our basic humanity and freedom, and furthermore our spiritual nature and destiny. 

As such, I think it points at a much more extreme and radically-different way of thinking and being, then such discourse currently attains.

I think the concern over would-be Mandela Effects should be addressed by making the choice to root our primary assumptions concerning reality in that which is not just our own memories and reasoning (which are, after all, subject to change, including distortions); but to root them in a vision of life as - ultimately - a matter of living Beings who are in relationships. Therefore, altogether separate from (and immune to!) the domination of external, institutional and codified forms of knowing.  

We each need to develop a separate interior discourse from that which imposes upon us from externally: from the public, officialdom, the media...

This interior discourse needs to be Christian, by which I mean our inner discourse needs to be aligned-with, in harmony with, the purposes and nature of divine creation - insofar as we can know this.  

If such an inner and God-orientated discourse includes significant knowledge that contradicts what we are being told by public institutions that we know to be corrupt (at best) and (increasingly) demonic in overall-control...

Well, then we know what we ought to believe in our hearts - don't we? 

In which case, trying to convince others that 1. their understanding of 2. our reports of 3. what we currently remember.. is pretty irrelevant - both to us, and even more to them. They ought to be doing the inner work for themselves - otherwise, their discourse will simply be a different variant of passively accepting external data; which is (both cognitively and spiritually) much like soaking-up official-media propaganda.  

Self-mistrust is a root of modern Man's evil-subservient gullibility - Christianity the indispensable way-out from it

We are at a profoundly maladaptive stage in the degenerative pathology of modern consciousness; that is to say the Consciousness Soul - in which we experience our-selves as cut-off from the world and other people. 

The subjective experience of the self now regards itself as a meaningless epiphenomenon, a free-spinning cog; with no access to reality, and no validity to its thoughts. 

Therefore, people do not trust their own thinking, do not even trust their own powers of observation and reasoning. They doubt (to the point of paralysis) any conclusions that they may themselves reach - even about the simplest and most obvious of matters. 

Yet people need to live - so lacking anything from-within (anything that they will believe, or can motivate them); they must by default respond to external guidance. 

Consequently, modern people (especially women) have become almost wholly passive and dependent-upon external inputs of facts and values; which mostly come via mass and social media, and from 'official' institutional sources. 

Women are most prone to this passivity and gullibility, since their evolved disposition is to rely on the peer group for life-guidance; and for motivating their behaviour.  

(Or in practice they rely upon whatever modern simulacrum psychologically most-approximates the ancestral peer group: i.e. mass/ social media and the official consensus of those with power) 

The desire to fit-in to the norms of this perceived peer group is very powerful - and when people are lacking any more powerful inner motivation it is overwhelming, irresistible; and people become incapable of learning from experience. 

And as men have become much more behaviourally-feminized (apparently from many contributing reasons); men too have become increasingly helpless against their own perceived (but actually Establishment-manufactured) peer group motivations.  

Consider the birdemic, or any other of the Big Lies such as climate change, antiracism or the sexual revolution. There is, in the first place, no reason At All to believe the mass Media, the official bureaucracy, the corporate PR, the international or national politicians - since they are known to be incompetent and have bad incentives. 

On top of that; they are known habitual and extreme, grossly inconsistent and incoherent in their statements, and show zero capacity to evaluate the consequences of their policies or learn from experience. 

Further; they have now all-but prevented (made impossible, punishable, illegal) all public dissent from the dishonest, manipulative gibberish they spout...

Yet the mass of the public cannot see this, cannot comprehend it, will not think about it, will not question it - and have shown an open-ended and apparently infinite capacity for zealous credulity. The masses regard whatever happen-to-be today's facts and theories as 100% good, true, vital and necessary. 

What this means is that the typical, majority, modern Man ignores that which he knows from his own experience and by his own reasoning (which he believes to be worthless); and therefore, necessarily, thinks and does whatever the dominant external sources tell him to think and do - without limit and regardless of changes and contradictions in this external input. 

This is exactly what we see everywhere around us in the world today. 

It is therefore completely ineffective, therefore futile, to explain and show modern Man the arbitrary, dishonest, and inconsistent behaviour of the Global Establishment/ officialdom and the mass media - because that is an appeal to his own motivation to think, discern, reason and act upon the outcome. So, modern Man will believe powerful external authority regardless...

There is an answer; but it is religious and metaphysical. Modern Man must consciously choose (because that is what the Consciousness Soul requires) to believe in God; and specifically believe-in the Good creator God of Christianity, who is our divine Father - we his children...

And from this modern Man must come to understand and believe that his own thinking is potentially valid: and that his own best discernment of truth is the best possible motivation for life. 

The best motivation - because he is a child of God, who shares in the divine; and the best because his loving God will provide specific and individual guidance for his life. 

Only then can modern Man come to see-for-himself, think-for-himself, and learn from his experiences; and become sufficiently motivated to over-ride the external, pervasive, evil-seeking programming from the Global Establishment.  

The "hero fighting his own destiny" trope: expected, normal, approved...

One of the ways in which 'modern' stories (of the past few decades) differ from literature up to the middle twentieth century - is that now the 'hero' (protagonist) of a story will nearly always fight against his own 'destiny'. And, indeed, that fight takes-up a good deal of the narrative. 

Thus if the 'chosen-one' of a mythic narrative swiftly and decisively takes-up his heroic role and does his best with what ought-to-be done (like Frodo) - this is regarded as unsatisfactory. But if the appointed-hero struggles (at length) against adopting his role, if he is tempted strongly to abandon it, if he acts in violation of his role and needs to be brought-back... this stuff gets a writer critical 'Brownie points'. 

Struggle-against-destiny has become the usual thing for a modern hero. 

My impression is that this inward fight against what he (or she) ought to do, is expected and approved-of by those who consume and comment on novels, TV, movies etc. For instance; introduction of this self-doubting, inner-conflicted element to several major characters, over and again (Aragorn, Theoden, Faramir...), was perhaps the major distortion of the Lord of the Rings movies, compared with the original fiction. 

If such inner conflict is not present, the writer is likely to be accused of childish simplicity, of having 'black and white' characters; whereas a hero divided-against his destiny is regarded as complex, subtle, realistic, mature.

But the anti-heroic-hero is not a wise Man, nor is he a Man who is consciously adopting what he regards to be the highest path. The focus of stories is moved away from what needs to be done - and trying to do it; towards inner psychological - even psycho-pathological - rumination and conflict. 

Drama has become psychodrama - myth has become a psychoanalytic explaining-away of myth. 

What this means, when repeated again and again stereotypically and in context in which the 'hero' is implicitly admirable, whatever he does (so long as he is in at least two-minds about it) - and when the 'embrace my destiny' hero is excluded; is that the question of a Man's proper aim of life has been deleted; the possibility of wisdom has been deleted - because wisdom is to know what one ought to do, and to do it as best possible. 

Furthermore, the anti-hero makes all stories mundane - all are diminished to the level of endless soap operas (who are eventually driven to deploy this 'inner division' to permutate character motivations and actions over the long term). There can be no real 'myth' or 'magic' - because mythical and magical characters are excluded. 

A real, wise hero is not one who wallows interminably in uncertainty; nor one who is only compelled to - finally! - do the right thing by elaborate coincidences of external circumstances, or the harsh (yet, somehow always reversible!) lessons of selfishness, short-termism, hedonism and cowardice. Wisdom is - by contrast - knowing quickly what is needed, and then doing it as best possible, despite problems. 

In real life - as we used to know - it is not the mixed-up, self-indulgent, inwardly conflicted Man who does the right thing and saves 'the world' - and fiction cannot convince us that he is. 

Instead, we take-home, absorb and learn a message that there is no real heroism because there is no real destiny: because there is nothing to be heroic-about!

We learn that action comes from mixtures of self-centred motivations and external compulsions; and the sophisticated, admirable Man is one who talks extensively about his feelings and paradoxes - such as the incompatibility of the things he wants (home and adventure, flee or fight, wife or mistress... whatever).

Since the best fiction is also a kind of vicarious experience; the conflicted anti-heroic protagonist is likely to be worse than useless (i.e. harmful) as a model for how we personally ought to approach this mortal life.  

But unfortunately, writers have become addicted to this kind of protagonist; because the delay in adopting destiny, and 'getting on with what he ought to be doing' can be spun-out narratively for astonishing periods: many volumes of a book series, many episodes of a TV programme, most of a long movie...  

When a writer is praised for such shameless and easy padding-out of stories; little wonder that so many succumb to the temptation - and thereby contribute their mite to the corruption of Men and culture. 

Why the failure of all spiritual techniques and methods?

At least from the 20th century onwards; I find the results of 'spiritual techniques' to be so unimpressive as to suggest that they are at best useless and more likely spiritually-harmful. 

By spiritual techniques I mean the use of all types of external assistance from symbolism and ritual, through prayer and meditation (of many kinds) - to reading, group work (of many kinds), vigils, magic, music, fasting, pilgrimage and the power of place... everything you can think of.

People are always claiming that one, other or all such things are helpful and yet - just look at the results! And look where we are now? 

It strikes me that this apparently counter-productive effect of almost any 'method' of spirituality may have a very simple explanation; which is that all such techniques are external, when what is needed is internal.  

The more external spiritual assistance we seek, or come to rely upon - of whatever possible type; the weaker and more-passive becomes our inner spiritual strength. 

Any yet it is this inner spirituality which is needed now above all. 

If not, then what? 

If I am saying that any and all external methods or techniques are harmful - then what is left for us to do? 

I suppose the answer lies within us: That all which is both good and also strengthening over the longer term needs to come from within our-selves and/or be discerned and chosen by our-selves (with a sense of fullest responsibility and in light of the ideals of salvation and theosis); aiming at our resurrection to Heaven, and that of those we love; and to learn the spiritual lessons of our own mortal life. 

And everything else is a - more-or-less harmful - distraction.