James Hillman - evil genius; contrasted with his recent equivalent: Jordan Peterson

At one time I spent a great deal of time and effort in understanding, and attempting to live-by, the ideas of James Hillman.

Yesterday, I took a look at some of the online interviews with and talks by Hillman that have been posted over the years; and I can see what it was that appealed about him. He is extremely intelligent, articulate, creative - and consequently generative of interesting ideas.

The current successor to Hillman is, of course, another post-Jungian: Jordan Peterson - and the contrast is interesting. Peterson is also articulate and intelligent, albeit less so than Hillman, but he is not creative: JP is a summariser, not an originator.

There is a smallish political contrast: Hillman was a radical Leftist who worked in the in the sixties counter-culture and its descendants; whereas Peterson is a Left-libertarian. Hillman called himself a polytheist - but was only ironically so; and his main alignment was as an anti-Christian. Jordan Peterson is not a Christian, but is pro-Christian in his political alignment.

The thing is: James Hillman was evil - by which I mean that he was explicitly, strategically and self-consciously against Good (as Good is understood by Christians). Of course, Hillman said many good and true things, because all people have both Good and evil in them: but Hillman's alignment was undoubtedly evil.

By contrast Jordan Peterson, is on the Wrong Side in the Spiritual War that is Life; but he is not explicitly, strategically and self-consciously against Good.

Anyway, Hillman is an interesting case! As I watched him speak yesterday on various YouTube vids, I felt on the one hand a fascination at the ideas, and mode of expression; on the other hand a mounting distaste and discomfort - a kind of revulsion or disgust which built up the longer I watched. I was insidiously drawn-in; and also felt an increasing desire to flee...

I suppose what James Hillman was, was a kind of dragon! Much like Smaug of The Hobbit. Impressive, hypnotic, beady-eyed, witty, eloquent, sly, manipulative - and with a stone-hard heart!

James Hillman 1926-2011 - a colossal waste of my time

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I didn't hear until a couple of weeks ago that James Hillman had died last year. He was probably the major intellectual 'heir' to CG Jung in terms of writing both on myth, and on psychological therapy in relation to modern man and the modern condition; and a few years back (before I became a Christian) I spent an inordinate amount of time reading him (as my bookshelves testify).

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I came across Hillman in the late 1980s from an excellent little article in the Resurgence magazine (of the Schumacher Society) - which I tore out and still have somewhere. It was about work as a writer being like that of a farmer; and there is always something to do on the farm - even if not the actual composition. I tell students something like thsi about large projects - writing a dissertation, project or thesis for example.

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I went back to Hillman after reading Daniel C Noel's Soul of Shamanism which was a great favourite during my neo-pagan/ New Age period.

Hillman was regarded in this circles as the intellectual and scholarly heavyweight - so I set about trying to understand him.

This was difficult; since the easily understood work - interviews and popular books - was very obviously incoherent; while the scholarly work was very difficult to understand (and dull). I thought I must be missing something crucial.

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After some years of grappling, I realized that the scholarly works were, in fact, saying exactly the same thing as the interviews and pop books - but that the deficiencies were more effectively concealed.

The moment I noticed this (actually it took longer than a moment) was in an extended interview when the  conversation revealed that - whatever his intellectual productions might imply - for Hillman, and for the whole New Age/ Myth/ Growth movement, all the vast and wide-ranging explorations are predicated on the wrongness and harmfulness of Christianity - and that, come what may, Leftism is the bottom line

The one and only place that Hillman came off the fence and spoke in clear and unambiguous sentences was politics, and mainstream party politics at that.he was a Democrat, a Liberal, a Leftist first - and everything else was up for discussion.

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So, although (like many writers in this area) Hillman has much to say that is acute in diagnostic terms; in prescriptive terms he is not just useless, but worse than useless - actively harmful in that his writings are wrong where they are not incoherent, and have a tendency to waste a great deal of the reader's time and energy - which in itself tends to seduce the reader into falsehood, despair and destruction.

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My lifelong interest in consciousness

I have been interested in consciousness, and unusual conscious states, for my whole adult life and continuing - but in various ways and with different focuses.

c1974: I discovered the work of Robert Graves; first the Claudius novels, then the essays and criticism. I became fascinated by his remarks concerning the poetic trance, and the possibilities of non-logical leaps of inference and types of knowledge. Bernard Shaw's writings on Creative Evolution (Man and Superman, Back to Methuselah) pointed at higher consciousness as the (impersonal) aim of Life - this amplified by a mystical nature writer called John Stewart Collis. HD Thoreau's Walden and Journals described moments of connection with nature, which I sometimes experienced.

1978: I discovered Colin Wilson's work, with its primary focus on attaining higher forms of consciousness - since then I carefully read through most of his books, many several times. About this same time I encountered CG Jung, and the idea of archetypes that lent depth, universality and significance to life and art. A book of essays by composer Michael Tippett (Moving into Aquarius) talked of the importance of this kind of thing in artistic creation.

1994: I began an active scientific study of consciousness from the perspective of the theory of evolution by natural selection. I began to publish on the subject. To Thoreau I added an engagement with RW Emerson and other 'related' authors like Walt Whitman, William James, Robert Frost.

1998: Shamanism was of increasing interest - I read anthropological texts, and also - from about 2001 - Neo-Jungian writers such as Joseph Campbell and James Hillman.

2010: Having become a Christian, I investigated Eastern Orthodoxy (and the analogous 'Celtic'/ Anglo Saxon British tradition) - i.e. the practices of constantly-praying/ meditating ascetic monks and hermits, wonder-working Saints etc.

c2013: Having committed to Mormon theology and metaphysics; this was the beginning of my current phase of great interest in William Arkle, Owen Barfield and Rudolf Steiner, supplemented by William Blake and ST Coleridge.

So, for me, consciousness has been (in different, sometimes contrasting, ways) the single major intellectual and personal interest over a span of more than four decades - and continuing.

The nihilism of Positive Psychology

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Seen re-engaging with the work of Maslow, I have come across a more recent movement called Positive Psychology (which claims Maslow as an intellectual father) and of which I was only vaguely aware.

It seems that Positive Psychology is a big deal in the USA (two and a half million Google Hits for the term, multiple YouTube videos with tens of thousands of views etc). On looking into it, I find that I have myself been through several cycles of Positive Psychology during my life - beginning around 1980, and with several iterations over the three decades.

So I feel myself to be an experiential expert on this subject! - in addition to having read and pondered, and indeed researched, several of the component elements (Jung, Maslow, Joseph Campbell, James Hillman, cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, the scientific study of spirituality, surveys of self-reported happiness etc.).

From this perspective, the Positive Psychology movement adds nothing except shallow ignorance and exploitative hype, permeated with pervasive dishonesty and fuelled by blatant careerism. The excuse of being 'well meaning' is, I am afraid, long since worn-out - we may be able to claim that the originators of this kind of stuff were well meaning, but now that we are fifty and a hundred years down the line we already know where this is destined for.

So, I can tell you that it does not work, and will not deliver - or, more exactly, Positive Psychology operates at the level and with the efficacy of just one Lifestyle Choice among many.

It is not that we do not know anything about the science of personal well being - loads is known, and most of that has been known to common sense for centuries (probably millennia). It is just that knowing it does not make the difference that advocates claim.

We now live in an era of nihilism, or life regarded as (in reality) meaningless and purposeless and each human as thoroughly alienated - so in this nihilistic context a Positive Psychology of well-being can only be a psychology of pleasing delusions. A psychology of emotional self-manipulation. And if followed rigorously, a psychology of transhumanism - that is, the project of unconstrained technological 'transcendence' of human limitations on pleasure, happiness, and freedom from pain and discomfort.

We may start with a human, the intent is that we will end-up with something that is happy - and never mind whether or not it is human. Failing that we will end up with something that is not-unhappy, that does not suffer - and never mind whether it is alive.

Because positive psychology is self-destroying. Insofar as it is factually true and possible to know and manipulate the human prerequisites of well-being; then so far well-being is utterly relativized, made subjective, and dis-valued. We become convinced that our deepest motivations are a consequence of 'science' and not a basis for life. Human meaning and purpose are become subjects for manipulation, not fulfilment.

So, whatever the motivations, insofar as the project of Positive Psychology succeeds, thus far it undermines itself. And we can know this as a fact, not jus on theoretical grounds, but from many trials of the idea since late Victorian times.

If we actually manage to make ourselves believe that science holds the meaning of life, then at that exact moment we will find that life has lost its meaning.

Positive Psychology is no less than a nihilism bomb, operating on a delayed timer.

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Note added:

It seems mention-worthy that the Positive Psychology movement was launched and given status by Martin Seligman. It must first be acknowledged that Seligman has a track record of substantial and significant achievement in science. So, how are we to interpret this? It could be: 1. that Seligman's endorsement of Positive Psychology broadly validates it; 2. that Seligman's advocacy is based on ignorance (this option seems unlikely to me); or that Seligman has been, like so many scientific leaders over the past few decades, corrupted into a charismatic, careerist, BS-merchant and bureaucratic shill.

Thus: is MS's advocacy sound, simple-minded, or spin?

Judge for yourself:

http://www.ted.com/talks/martin_seligman_on_the_state_of_psychology?language=en

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Erecting a "middle realm" between the private-subjective and public-objective is a Dead End

Through the twentieth century, but especially since the late 1960s - and associated with Hippy/ New Age spirituality - there have been many repeated attempts to erect a middle realm to mediate between the private and subjective realms, and the public and objective realm. 

In other words - for many people The spiritual problem of modernity is alienation: the severing between subjective and objective - and the consequent denigration of the subjective; so that modern people experience life as a personally-purposeless and -meaningless, temporary and brief, state of mere-existence in an indifferent universe, which is operating on the basis of randomness and mechanical causality. 

In the pre-modern era, this situation was - to varying degrees - ameliorated by "the church"; which provided a shared, public, 'sacred-realm' of ritual and symbolism. 

This meant that the individual had an indirect (because mediated) relationship with divine reality; yet the symbolism and ritual was (although intermittent) so effective in bridging the gap, as to enable engagement ('participation') between Man and reality; making life broadly tolerable, and sometimes spiritually-fulfilling. 

Due (I believe) ultimately to changed in Man's consciousness, the symbolism and ritual lost its connecting-power; and left modern Man bereft and alienated. The new and traditional 'middle realm' systems were, implicitly, an attempt to replace what the churches had once provided. 

There have been, and are, many middle realm systems. 

One, and the most explicit, was provided by CG Jung and various neo-Jungians such as Joseph Campbell and James Hillman. Such people envisaged an underlying, mostly unconscious, collective "objective psyche"; shared by all Men in all times and places. 

The idea was that modern, subjective Man could engage with this middle realm of the Psyche as a kind of symbolic/ ritual bridge - accessed via meditation, dream, psychotherapy, personal creativity (arts, crafts) etc.  

Such Jungian ideas provided a rationale for a massive resurgence in occult traditions and new systems of symbol and ritual; which had the advantage over traditional churches of novelty and abundance. Novelty and abundance together overcome habituation and fatigue; so that a whole life could be spent in exploring, sampling, and permutating spiritual systems selected from the New Age smorgasbord.  

So, there have been big revivals of astrology, Tarot, alchemy, , numerology, Neo-Platonism and the like; and new systems based on UFOs, crop circles, geomancy, earth energies, cosmic radiations - and a multitude of healing therapies with spiritual implications. 

I'm afraid I regard all such attempts as essentially misguided because regressive, hence ineffective. 

And indeed, despite great hopes for a "New Age" inspired global spiritual revival, the world has become more and more materialistic, bureaucratic, and totalitarian. Spirituality (as well as religion) has been eliminated from the public realm in the West.

(Or, at the least, reduced to reactive, insincere, and ineffectual rhetoric - such as the regular call from-and-to explicit atheists to 'pray' for such-and-such victims. Politics now - very obviously - drives religion; and spirituality merely fits-around prior left-ideologies such as antiracism, carbon-environmentalism, socialism, feminism, healthism etc.) 

Middle realm construction and advocacy is misguided, ineffectual and a dead-end. 

What actually happens with such middle realm constructions, is that they become absorbed-into materialism. Instead of making a bridge connecting modern Man from the material to the spiritual; these systems either do nothing but provide lifestyle options...

Or else the rituals and symbols crystallize into the material to become large, difficult and complex systems - the preserve of experts and professionals - standing between the individual and the spiritual in much the same way as institutional churches. 

This is why I am filled with a mixture of boredom and dismay whenever I come-across one of these middle realm systems; describing some large/ difficult-to-understand/ complex layer of ideas; or purporting to give 'information' or 'teaching' concerning the higher or spiritual world (which spiritual world always seems to resemble a complex, hierarchical, multi-specialized, multi-national corporation, or bloated state bureaucracy!). 

These middle realms purport to be bridges and mediations; but I see just-another barrier.  

After many centuries during which the effectiveness of mediation has progressively dwindled; and all churches and religions have become corrupted to the agenda of this-worldly, materialist-leftist, socio-politics; we are now confronted by a situation in which our choice is either to abandon the subjective along with the spiritual (and accept our status as depersonalized 'units' in a transhumanist world)...

Or else: To approach reality (including God) directly and (as much as possible) un-mediated. 

Romanticism and the twin snares of CG Jung

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Why are so many modern spiritual people left/ liberal in outlook?

This is the question addressed by William Wildblood in a recent blog post to which I have contributed a comment:

http://meetingthemasters.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/question-on-justice-and-mercy.html

It is an important observation that modern spiritual people are indeed notably left/ liberal in outlook; because it leads to the recognition that they are left/ liberal with greater intensity and conviction than they are spiritual. Their spirituality is eclectic, flexible, changeable - their leftist politics is dogmatic, solid and often fanatical. It is easy to see which they are most serious about. 

I became interested in New Age type spirituality from the late 1990s (i.e. before I was a Christian), in the sense of reading some of the recent and still active US writers. Up until then I had read a great deal of CG Jung, upon which much of New Age is based; and a lot of Colin Wilson - who never quite fitted into this category but overlapped with it. But from 1998 I read John Hanson Mitchell, James Hillman and some of his 'disciples' such as Daniel C Noel and Thomas Moore; and a smattering of others across the field, including most of the best known writers. 

At that time I was a libertarian centrist in politics - and would have been a Republican if I was American; and I noticed in interviews and personal reminiscences that these and other writers came across as fanatical Democrats of the most partisan type for whom even the mildest libertarian or conservative ideas were demonised - and on the other hand openly advocating seedy, corrupt, dishonest careerist Democrats as if they were spiritual exemplars leading the world to a higher future (e.g. the likes of Al Gore!).

And New Age writers were typically, almost universally, utterly in thrall to New Left concerns - and structured their theories inside such a world view. For example Ecopsychology (look it up) was supposed to be a fundamental biological-spiritual perspective on the earth - but in practise made all kinds of recent and ephemeral leftist socio-political assumptions - and seemed to operate as a Left Wing pressure group. 

A book that I read with great attention - the Soul of Shamanism, by Daniel C Noel - structured its entire analysis and argument within a context of politically correct 'sensitivity' to the imagined perceptions of 'indigenous peoples' - with an intensely moralistic inflection to this demand that stood in complete contrast to the 'amoralism' of the spirituality being advocated. I mean, those individuals who were deemed to have behaved disrespectfully to the supposed sensitivities of American Indians (by 'appropriating' their spiritualities and adapting them for modern Western usage) were 'damned' pretty strongly!

This happened so often that I eventually realised that it was structural to New Age spirituality; and undercut the depth and validity of that spirituality. The New Age was, in fact, being led by people whose own spirituality was at best shallow and insincere; and at worst merely a front for their primary aims which were Left-political. 

Nowadays, I see one of my main tasks as resynthesising spirituality with Christianity, in a Christian frame - i.e. with Christianity as primary but spirituality given full value as a necessary modern priority. 

And in this task I realise that very little of modern spirituality is relevant, because very little is worthwhile. Those authors who are worthwhile are those for whom politics is a very secondary concern - the likes of William Blake, ST Coleridge, Rudolf Steiner, Owen Barfield; and more recently William Arkle, Colin Wilson, Jeremy Naydler, and William Wildblood himself. 

By no coincidence these are also those whose spirituality is honest, sincere, often deep: and primary.
                                             

What to say to kids about fantasy

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

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

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Kids want so much for the fantasy to be real.

They ask: But is it real?

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

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

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There is the perspective which says nothing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is that what we should tell our kids?

Is it true?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are not alone in our delusions...

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

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

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A thought experiment.

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

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

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

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

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

Would that be enough?

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

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

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

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

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

Is Middle Earth enough for them?

Obviously not.

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

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

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

At this level the problem is inevitable and insoluble.

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

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

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

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

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The poison of literalism - the necessity of 'fantasy'

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One big reason why traditional thought seems impossible to so many modern people is the 'literalism' of our discourse - its fragmented, specialized and over-precise nature.

So that when we try to discuss fundamental matters that can only be comprehended in mythic poetry; what actually comes out is professional, bureaucratic, procedural prose.

(This applies particularly strikingly to modern 'poetry' - which is professional, political, partial, prosaic; never mythic.)

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Many people have noticed this, of course - including the Inklings - but I got it from a post-Jungian psychologist called James Hillman (whose work I would *not* recommend in general. Flashes of light amidst oceans of confusion and willfulness).

So modern Christianity tends to be very prosy, very legalistic - somehow it cannot connect all its aspects - all its transcendent qualities - simultaneously.

Instead of being able to comprehend multiple poetic and mythic meanings from a single word, sentence or passage - we are reduced to picking it apart and sequentially describing its ethics, its philosophy, its historical meaning etc. Each of which, taken alone, rings false - and is dull, unengaging, indeed aversive.

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We see this dissecting to death, this vivisection of reality, when people analyze and describe poetry - but it applies more fundamentally to theology.

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Of course, the wholeness of thought is not altogether dead: it lives on in childhood, in dreams, in visionary glimpses, and in fantasy.

But wholeness does not live (or only exceptionally and dwindlingly) in 'real life', or in public discourse - at any rate it is dying.

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It used to be possible for The Law to be regarded as beautiful - C.S. Lewis in his book on the Psalms points at the way some ancient Jews loved and hymned their Law - it was seen as virtuous, but also and at the same time true and beautiful.

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But now it seems that Laws are merely rules.

Modern humans are dying of starvation, because the food of their souls has been broken down into its chemical constituents.

We hunger for meaning and purpose and a relation with life - for life to be myth and poetry; but we are given merely dry, professional, rational prose.

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A decade ago, when I was a kind of pagan, I wrote about recovered animism:

http://www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/animism.html

I would regard this diagnosis as accurate but the prescription as partial and hazardous.

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What we hunger for, at root, is a recovery of the 'animistic' world view in a context of Christian reality.

Animism that is not psychotic, not self-gratifying, not a seeking after power or diversion; but instead a continual awareness of our relation to everything.

But this is not animism repetitively checked and constrained by Christian rationality; so much as animism contained-within the greater frame of Christian Truth - so that we connect with the reality of life spontaneously.

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At present, for many or most people, this can be had only in private - in 'fantasy' (in Truth-full fantasy) - but if so, if public discourse is deficient, then fantasy is of primary importance.

For modern people, fantasy may be the secret thread running through self-perceived earthly existence, absorbing into itself all that our souls recognize as real.

And from this mythic inner perspective, we discover that the trivial morass of literalistic modern culture - formal education, jobs, media, laws and rules, politics, bureaucratic committees and procedures... all of this nightmare of crushing but meaningless literalism dissolves in retrospect into a cloudy illusion.

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"Writing is thinking" and "Thinking is participation" - Writing as a potential magical act

I came across the notion that "Writing is thinking" from post-Jungian psychologist James Hillman - in the mid 1980s; and the potentially-linked idea that "Thinking is participation" from Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield, in the past 15 years or so. 

Both are valuable insights, but partial truths: writing can be thinking, but usually is not; likewise thinking with respect to participation. 

The situation is that "writing is thinking" is true only when we are writing in a certain way - meditatively? Spiritually? 

At any rate, you know it when you are-doing it, if you are looking-out for it. 

Further, this is a real-time and dynamic experience between the writer and ultimate reality... 

This kind of writing must not be confused with possible later processes such as editing and publishing the inspired writing, or the potential effect of that published writing on various readers at various future times. For instance; published or professional writers certainly are Not thereby more profound or significant thinkers. 

The relevant "thinking" is that which happens during the writing.

And what about "thinking is participation"? 

This means that some kinds of thinking may be an active and mutual engagement in the ongoing divine creation: potentially, in thinking our-real selves are changed, the universe is changed... 

Another way of considering it is that (contrary to common ideas that thinking is sealed off inside the brain) thinking is an action, a behaviour.

Thinking therefore, like many other kinds of physical behaviour - Has An Effect. 

The double-insight is that active process of writing can - potentially, sometimes, while it is actually happening - make a difference to ultimate reality. 

It can change the world, and change our-selves: for better, but also for worse. 

So, even though nearly all of writing is insignificant, trivial, ineffectual; there is a writing-thinking which is a serious business; because it is a magical act for which we have an ultimate responsibility, and which has ultimate consequences.  

 

Is the Lord of the Rings true? Of course! - but in what way?

I remember being aged about 14 and being mildly mocked and teased for believing that Tolkien's Lord of the Rings was true - the person doing the mocking was the friend who had actually introduced me to the book, and he liked it very much. That was one thing, he said; but I actually believed it.

What I found so cutting - and this is why I remember the event - was that it was correct: I did believe LotR was true; and I was shocked to discover that this friend did not - it seemed like a betrayal, and indeed I did not regard him as a friend after that point.

For me, the main fact about the Lord of the Rings was that it was true. How exactly to explain that - to explain what 'being true' meant in this context - was a further question; but the truth was the main thing. Indeed, I have never come across a satisfying explanation of the way that LotR (for example) is true. I am not satisfied by Tolkien's own explanation with respect to Subcreation in his essay On Fairy Stories and the many other pieces in that tradition; I am not satisfied by the explanations based on Symbolism; nor by Jungian Collective Unconscious type explanations - even less by post-Jungian explanations of myth in the Joseph Campbell/ James Hillman style.

All these sell short the way in which LotR is true. On the one hand it is not literally true in any kind of fact-by-fact basis; but on the other hand it is solidly true in-and-of-itself in a way that is grossly under-sold by the explanations I have seen. These explanations are, indeed, not even the kind of thing that could be a satisfactory explanation - they are abstract schemes based on abstractions; whereas the truth of Tolkien is anything-but abstract - the opposite of abstract! It is something experienced.

In fact, given its role in my life over many decades, this inability to explain the truth of LotR takes on a decisive aspect - it points to a major inadequacy of metaphysics, a failure of the basic structure of thinking which I have assumed and lived-by.

If it was just the Lord of the Rings, that would perhaps be less significant; but the problem is more general. For example, the truth of Father Christmas/ Santa Claus. I really dislike hearing people say that Father Christmas is untrue - it seems like a shocking and shameful admission to advertise oneself as an unbeliever in so obviously and importantly true a phenomenon. Yet I seemingly can't explain how or why Father Christmas is true - any explanation I have known for the way he is true, grossly undersells the matter.

On the flip-side, there are many, indeed most, things in public life which it would be regarded as a mark of insanity to deny the truth of that do not strike me as true - things in science, history, common knowledge... They conspicuously lack that which Lord of the Rings has in such abundance - I know that LotR is true, and with them... I don't.

This is a long-way-round to my recent grasp of Rudolf Steiner's metaphysics (or, 'epistemology' as modern philosophers tend to call it) which I outlined yesterday -

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/my-understanding-of-rudolf-steiners.html 

- and its clear assertion that what is thought is reality: not a 'representation' of reality, but actually the same thing. In thinking we are participating-in the totality of universal truth.

This is metaphysics, so it is not the kind of question we discuss on the basis of 'evidence' - but (among many other attributes and consequences) this seems to me to be the solution to the problem of the truth of the Lord of the Rings. In reading (and thinking about) LotR I was - with great focus, concentration and clarity - thinking some of the truths of the universe; the actual primary stuff of creation was active in my consciousness.

But why specifically LotR? Surely all thoughts and all thinking have that characteristic? Yes, but not all things that we casually assume are thoughts and thinking, actually are thoughts and thinking. For me, clearly (assuming the metaphysical assumptions) there was something about Lord of the Rings that made it so I really, clearly, powerfully thought it and was aware of my thinking.                 

Of course the Lord of the Rings is true! - universally, and really true.