Atheist materialism versus Church religion - only one winner, unless...

Atheist materialism - the mainstream ideology of the West, that monopolizes the entirety of public discourse - is a system of reasoning that claims to be wholly based on "evidence"; it claims to make no metaphysical assumptions regarding the ultimate or basic nature of reality. 

Atheist materialism therefore operates wholly at the superficial level of evidence and logic - as defined by its won denied assumptions of what constitutes valid evidence and logic. 

This is achieved by taking its own metaphysics for granted (and denying it exists) and keeping all discourse confined within its own assumptions; and declaring everything else to be meaningless, or merely arbitrary personal opinion (which amounts to the same thing). 

Church religions are deeper than atheistic materialism, because churches declare specifically their own fundamental metaphysical assumptions concerning the nature of reality - and that these assumptions are shared by the religion's adherents.

Church religion is superior to atheistic materialism because it knows and admits that it has metaphysical assumptions, which it then sets-out explicitly - whereas atheistic materialism falsely denies that it makes any metaphysical assumptions.  

However, these fundamental religious assumptions differ between religions.  

Each religion defends its own assumptions by trying to prove them: either prove them from evidence: such as the claimed observable consequences of belief and unbelief in terms of individual psychology, or perhaps societal functioning. 

Or else religions try to prove their fundamental assumptions using rational logic - religions try to prove that their assumptions Must Be as they are, or else things would be incoherent or incomplete. 

However; to the atheist materialist, the variety of Church religions metaphysical assumptions is regarded as conclusive evidence that their assumptions are arbitrary - just made-up.

And the atheist materialist regards attempts by religions to prove that their own particular metaphysical assumptions must be true, whether the attempted proof is by observations or by logic, as being dependent on already accepting the religious assumptions. i.e. Church proofs are seen merely as circular reasoning. 

Atheist materialism has alternative and non-religious explanations for all church attempts to prove all possible systems of religious metaphysics. 

To atheist materialism there is thus "zero evidence" for anything religious; and the assumptions of all religions are seen as arbitrary and just "made-up". 

Atheist materialism (nearly-)always wins disputes with church religions, because atheist materialism is much more powerful... very-nearly all-powerful, at the Western civilizational level.  

The metaphysical assumptions of atheist materialism are immune to social refutation because they never discussed as being "beliefs" - and are denied to be assumptions at all. 

This rhetoric is effective and "works" because the metaphysics has been built-into every type and level of the functioning of modern society; and inculcated such as to become habitual during socialization. 

Atheist materialism is the default for modern Men. 

Church religion continues to lose this debate with atheist materialism, because the dominant public metaphysics depends on power, and church religion gets weaker and weaker. 

Also because church religion has assimilated more and ever-more of the assumptions of atheistic materialism such that it has conceded all the most fundamental ground in advance of discussion. 

Therefore, attempts to prove any religious metaphysics in publicly acceptable or socially effective ways in our society as it actually is; merely lead-back into atheistic materialism. 

Church religion is consequently stuck and doomed; because insofar as a religion has power, cohesion, effective-influence, wealth, organization etc; that religion is itself a part of the atheist materialist civilization, and its already-existing assumptions.  

From such a society, with such basic and habitual assumptions as we actually have; there can only arise various kinds of atheist materialist conclusions.

 

The way forward is therefore down - down to considering the metaphysical assumptions of religion as what they are - which is as assumptions, not evidence-derived...

And therefore religions need to stop pretending to derive our metaphysical assumptions from consensus definitions evidence and logic - because the modern consensus of what constitutes valid evidence and logic necessarily sustains atheistic materialism. 

If we (you and I) continue to rely-upon societal and consensus (including church society and consensus) definitions and understandings of valid metaphysics; we will be trapped by atheistic materialism.

Only by using our own personal discernment to discover what it is that we really belive about the ultimate and basic nature of reality can we escape atheist materialism. 

Only by coming to know our own personal and deepest metaphysical convictions can we move forward to a positive, sustaining, and motivating, and fundamentally different system of understanding. 

And, only if reality is objectively real - and if that ultimate reality is set-up such that we each, as individuals, can attain to sufficient true understanding of reality - could this be possible. 

That is the necessary faith: the faith that it is indeed possible and achievable for each one of us who desires it and consciously chooses to do it; to gain a sufficient understanding of the fundamental nature of reality for ourselves.

Understanding the surveillance monomania as a natural expression of Ahrimanic evil

There is a dominant monomania of surveillance: that everything everybody does, all the time, should be monitored and recorded.

I suggest that this is probably the dominant and overwhelming underlying motivation in the world over the past decades and continuing. There is a constant pressure to increase the scope and precision of surveillance - and a constant casting-around for more or less plausible excuses to do this.

There is both external surveillance - monitoring of behaviour by objective observation (especially by electronic media and 'artificial intelligence' algorithms); and there are the systems of self-surveillance ('quality assurance' as it is sometimes called) whereby individuals fill-in auditable 'forms' and other records about themselves - and these are then externally stored and perhaps checked for internal consistency.

The story of most jobs over the past decades has been one of ever-increased surveillance. And what is interesting is that far more data is collected than used.

To some extent, this is explicable in that the data is there if needed - for example, to sack an individual. But there appears to be a far deeper, and morally inflected, motivation to ever-more and more-thorough surveillance.


This is because surveillance is a part of the primary modern ideology of materialism; indeed surveillance is the expression of that world view. Surveillance is both the natural expression of materialism, and itself propaganda-for and enforcement-of materialism.

The surveillance society is the materialist society - the society from which spiritual and divine matters are excluded by unexamined and habitual assumption (which is the most effective of all exclusions).

A world in which most people participate in surveillance most of the time (often from both sides, as surveyors and as surveyed - monitors and monitored) - is a world of materialism; since the material = that which can be surveyed.

It is a world in which only that which can be surveyed counts as real and important.


The characteristic modern evil is 'Ahrimanic' - that is materialist - and this evil is seldom detected by modern men, because they live in bureaucratic systems that are the instantiation of this type of evil. And, as time goes by, all bureaucracies become linked to make a single entity: The System.

And this System has grown to occupy almost the whole of public discourse, and all the various social institutions (politics, civil service, law, military, education, media etc). The System links functions, and it links nations.

Indeed, ever less of the world is outwith The System. Now, pretty much only the individual's inner thinking (but only if he is exercising his agency, and thinking from his real and divine self) is outwith the System; and (to an important extent) the family. Therefore, The System substantially defines reality - in precisely analogous fashion to The Matrix or other virtual reality fictions.

This materialist evil of The System is vast, everywhere, and unavoidable - therefore, for most people (who suppose evil to be exemplified by violent and murderous individuals) evil goes undetected, and is indeed denied.


Evil is denied, because when God and the spiritual realm are denied, and when reality is seen as a consequence of accidents rather than a purposive creation, and men are seen as a type of animal rather than en route to becoming (small g) gods etc... then materialism is not seen as evil.

Materialism is seen as the hard-nosed, realistic truth about things, not as evil. If there is no God, not divine meaning nor purpose, then life just-is material (and the rest is stupidity, illusion and delusion).

So for Modern man there is nothing wrong with a materialist world! There is nothing wrong with a world of omni-surveillance, there is nothing necessarily wrong, therefore, with a totalitarian society.


(This helps explain why the recent global totalitarian takeover has gone largely unnoticed; and when noticed is not regarded as intrinsically bad. In the UK (perhaps the most materialist nation in the world); it seems that a very large majority of the population, as well as nearly-all of the Establishment - favour the open-ended continuation of the current totalitarian lock-down-social-distancing strategy. Omni-surveillance and micro-control are not seen as an intrinsic evil, but as an expedient benefit.) 


It is helpful to recognise that, from the perspective of Ahrimanic evil and the imperatives of materialism; all surveillance is functional - regardless of whether any 'use' is made of the data.


Here is an example from my experience. Sixteen years ago, a new form of surveillance was itroduced in UK universities which is often called the Diary Exercise. For several weeks per year, academic faculty keep a detailed journal of their hourly activities; and a new sub-bureaucracy was installed at each institution and centrally to administer the scheme. Probably, many tens of thousands of man-hours per year (and many millions of pounds) are expended on this scheme.

Apparently, no use has been made of this data (which is, anyway, objectively worthless) - at least I never heard of any such. So let's assume what is probably true: that sixteen years worth of data has simply been collected, stored but never made use of.

Has the Diary Exercise then been a mere waste of time and resources? No! Because it means that for several weeks a year, academics are compelled to reflect upon and present their work in detail, in such a form and fashion as will satisfy management - that is, year-on-year, academics are being trained in materialist thinking, and made to practise it in relation to their own lives.

By the Diary Exercise (plus, of course, many and increasing numbers of other similar schemes) academics have been trained to regard their work as primarily materialist; primarily that which can be monitored - and gradually that conceptualisation has come to be the academics self-conception of their proper work.

Materialism of living has become the habitual and unexamined way of thinking - it has become a basic assumption concerning the nature of academic work: that is, real work is what can be objectively and defensibly described to a managerial system, on an hourly basis.


My point is that materialism is an end, not a means; and as an end, any activity which promotes materialistic thinking is valid from the perspective of materialism.

It becomes clearer why Mainstream modern people are unable to resist materialism - why, indeed, they broadly embrace it. This includes the majority of Christians in the majority of Christian churches.

And it explains why only those Romantic Christians who regard the divine and spiritual as a vital part of every-day (every-hour) can and do regard materialism as evil; and regard the totalitarian imposition of materialism as evil.


For most people (including most Christians) totalitarianism is only evil if or when it engages in violence and murder (at least, that is all the evil they ever talk about).

But for Romantic Christians, the evil of totalitarianism is the evil of materialism - thus totalitarianism is intrinsically evil.

A world of omni-surveillance is evil, and micro-control of behaviour is evil - because these are means to the end of universal and mandatory materialism. They are training us into materialism of thinking and communicating; they are enforcing materialism on all discourse, and as the basis of all activities.

And this is the major and dominant form of evil in the modern world - yet an evil that is invisible and denied by most people, all of the time.


Note added: I certainly experienced surveillance, especially self-surveillance, as an active evil - although (before I was a Christian) I was not able to explain 'why' this was so. Instead I explained my resistance in terms of surveillance being educationally and in terms of academic research, both inefficient and ineffective. But my (albeit slight and indirect - because of my dissent and boycotts) experience of participation in quality assurance exercises felt like I was being crushed under suffocating weight; meaning was drained from my vocation; I felt that my inner motivation and purpose was being replaced by the demand for submission to arbitrary or malign external plans. 

The fall of Western materialism by 'Plan X'...

Commenter Ingemar made an excellent and thought-provoking point in the recent post on how the One Ring was destroyed with the aid of divine providence, by a sequence of plans - each of which was worse than the previous one in terms of 'collateral damage'.

My understanding of Western history is that we embraced materialism (aka. positivism, reductionism, scientism)* as our underlying philosophy from the late 1700s particularly - and since then we have seen various Plans (B, C, D etc) offered to solve and destroy this way of thinking.

I call these Romanticism, which has come in waves - each of which failed by eschewing Christianity (and also being rejected by Christians) - instead dissipating into just-more-materialism: radical leftist politics and/or progressively extending the sexual revolution.


So, my assumption is that materialism - like the One Ring, which it so much resembles - needed to be destroyed...

Yet not by by reversion to an earlier phase, not by tradition (since history is linear); but by being superseded by further (and divinely forseen and ordained) development.

Plans were sequentially offered to The West by providence, which wove these into on-going creation - however, each successive Plan depended absolutely on human agency to acknowledge, accept, adopt - and consciously creatively participate-in - that Plan (or else it would not happen).


(This is a vital point: The early Plans could not and should not be 'imposed' on Men. All early Plans required Men to be consciously aware of them, required voluntary and active cooperation. This was desired by God, and also entailed by the nature of Man.) 


What happened was that the first phase of Romanticism (late 1700s, early 1800s) could be termed Plan A, and that was the best plan - which would supersede materialism with the greatest benefits and the least disadvantages.

Plan A was refused and distorted; and further Plans were offered over the next couple of centuries - but each with greater collateral damage than the previous one, because the best possibility had been refused and therefore damage and sin had accumulated - more and more as time went by.

Meanwhile, materialism continued to grow, with less and less opposition - into the modern form of anti-Christian, spirit-excluding, leftist bureaucracy. This consists of many national and specialised social systems (government, law, churches, education, science, health services, police, military etc) which are all linked into a single hierarchical and cross-linked System.

These 'functional' sub-systems (and The System as a whole) are vitally supported by a vast Public Relations and propaganda bureaucracy: the mass and social media.


And so we come to the recent totalitarian+ takeover by The System. 

We have now run-out of Plans, used-up all our good options; and providence is left with Plan X, the Plan of last resort - which is that The West be permitted to express all the contradictions and self-destructive aspects of materialism that have, until now, been moderated and restrained by providence.

The need to destroy the evil of The System is now so urgent and vital that it overwhelms any large scale Romanticism - and will proceed regardless of collateral damage.

With the corruption of all institutions, and their incorporation into The System henceforth, the true Christian spirit will be carried by individuals (and small loving groups of individuals) or not at all.


It turns-out that we had misunderstood the old prophecies as believing that God would impose pestilence, natural disasters, and wars as a punishment - whereas it is in fact our response to these phenomena that will destroy our civilisation by pulling it down on our own heads - and destroy it very completely.

Most of what is Good will perish with the evil; this being the unavoidable price of destroying the evil and generation after generation of rejecting better Plans. Instead, we and our ancestors have progressively embraced materialism more and more thoroughly - more and more rapidly and coercively; and The West are well advanced to imposing materialism upon the whole world.

We have therefore forced the hand of the Creator; who has allowed us to adopt Plan X; and will allow it to unfold by it own inexorable internal logic over the coming months.


But, unlike Plans A, B, C etc - Plan X is happening despite most men being unaware of it.

Plan X is, indeed, the direct consequence of our refusal to be aware of, or to cooperate with, divine providence; an outcome of our denial of both the reality and Goodness of God. Our wholesale inversion of true values.

As a civilization, we have chosen, cumulatively, to be passive and blind. Therefore our self-made fate will happen to us without our comprehension or consent.

And because it happens-to-us, we will lack that courage which derives from the active pursuit of Good. 


*+Note on materialism and totalitarianism. It might be asked whether these are necessarily evil? Might they simply be merely 'philosophy' and 'politics' - hence orthogonal (nothing necessarily to do with) Christianity? My answer is that The System is demonic (led by actual demon spirits, those willingly possessed by demons, and by the slaves of demons) therefore it is intrinsically evil in its objectives and motivations. Further, the dominant demonic evil of modernity is of the 'Ahrimanic' type: which works via materialism and totalitarianism - by bureaucracy and the mass media. Therefore, any totalitarian materialist takeover is in practice necessarily evil. 

The "evidence" trap: Why so many modern people are 'stuck' in materialism

To move beyond materialism is not easy - it is a well-constructed trap. For many (or most) people in the West; it isn't just a matter of 'opening your mind' to other realities; because what we think we want is self-contradictory...

Most people - when pressed - will say (along the lines of ) "I can't believe in the spiritual world without evidence".

By evidence they mean either a vivid personal miracle ('inexplicable' by materialism) - like hearing a voice that they believe to be God telling them something, especially when backed-up by a vision of a being that they are 100% convinced (with zero possibility of error) is an angel, or Jesus or a similar authority; accompanied by an overpowered conviction of the validity of this experience; and that one's memory and verbal expression of the experience is perfectly accurate and complete...

(Hmm, we can already see problems about asking for a miracle, can't we?)

Or else they mean something that official (government-certified, mass media disseminated) 'science' has told them, and that 'everybody' whom they respect (like primary school teachers, or wise people David Attenborough) assures them really is real and objectively true (like CO2-driven Anthropogenic Global Warming, or that one's sex is a choice...).


Yet the fact is that - unless they already have a change-of-consciousness, unless they develop a new way of thinking - these people would not be convinced of the spiritual realm either by a miracle or by science.

Because they would explain-away any miracle in materialist terms (error, coincidence, hallucination, delusion, dishonesty, manipulation etc.); and because science foundationally and by-assumption excludes the spiritual, so must inevitably fail to produce evidence for the spiritual.

Indeed if science did produce evidence for something spiritual - such as telepathy, or near death experiences - it would, by becoming science, cease to be spiritual; and would instead be explained materialistically.


What this 'circularity' of the argument tells us is that materialism is a metaphysical assumption, not the result of evidence.

In modern public (and private) discourse; we have already assumed that reality is material; and we will interpret all possible evidence in that light.

(i.e. Materialism is Not based-on-evidence; instead, materialism determines what counts as evidence.)

Therefore to demand 'evidence' before we will be convinced of the spiritual just makes no sense! It is just a mental trap. It simply ensures that you (and everyone) will remain trapped in materialism - whether it is true or not.


This means the modern person has, in reality, a choice: to remain inside the metaphysical assumption of materialism or not. And if not, he will need to assume a broader reality that includes a spiritual reality.

The one impossible thing is to be 'agnostic' - because there is no ground from-which to be agnostic about this question.


(One could of course change one's mind, back and forth, between materialism and acknowledging the spiritual realm. Indeed this is likely, across a lifespan. Such psychological fluctuations are part of the human mortal condition. But at any moment one is either a materialist or not - and to assert agnosticism as a current situation is an error or dishonest.)


How to choose, and on what grounds? There are just two main ways in which people choose their metaphysics:

1. Unconsciously and passively to absorb one's assumptions from the social environment (from 'other people'), and - because the process is passive and unconscious - to assert the objective factuality of assumptions by denying that they are assumptions, and denying that there exists any choice...

2. To become consciously aware of one's assumptions and to choose them.

One what grounds? This can only be on the basis of expilicit intuitive reflection - choosing what one intuitively knows (from the heart, at the deepest level one is capable of reaching, where knowledge is most solid) to be the truth about the reality of things.


This is another instance that modern life is becoming very simple and dichotomous, and evil is operating by trying to convince us that life is Not simple!

To win, evil simply needs to keep us confused. So far, evil is winning...

Consequences of materialism and atheism - JW Dunne writing in 1938

Up to about fifty years ago nobody minded admitting that life was a disappointing thing which opened with high hopes and sounding trumpets, moved on to frustration after frustration, and terminated in a disillusioned crawling to the grave. 

Nobody minded, because everybody supposed that all this was merely the prelude to another life in which they would be promoted to some kind of unimaginable bliss. 


But, fifty years ago, exponents of popular science began to hammer it into these optimists that the notion of a hereafter in which everything would be put right was utter nonsense. 

There was, they pointed out, no future life for any of us; and our world, in sober truth, amounted to nothing more than an execution chamber – dealing as expeditiously as possible with a continuous procession of new victims. 

It would be foolish to revile God for this, because there was no God to revile.


That picture, it seems, was too grim for the human mind to face fairly and squarely. People in general believed it, but they turned their backs on it. 

Then someone arose to point-out that gilding the walls of the cell - making the room bright for the next batch of condemned prisoners - would be, in these circumstances, a truly unselfish occupation; and the intelligentsia jumped at this distraction... 

They concentrated upon decoration; and soon they were all shouting to one another: 'See what a beautiful place we shall make of it someday'. 

A handsome antechanber to eternal extinction! That had become the highest hope in which humanity might indulge...


The old-stagers among our materialists have been disturbed very greatly by the discovery that, beneath to-day's flood tide of almost universal intolerance; there is running, as a more evil undercurrent, a definitely malicious contempt for all human life. 

They had assumed that the first step towards rendering any man good tempered and companionable would be to convince him of his own complete insignificance in an entirely senseless world, and to promise him a rapidly approaching end. 

That the victims of this delightful teaching should, thereafter, start snapping at their fellows like any other lot of trapped animals has puzzled beyond measure these naively optimistic sociologists. 

Many of the latter had taken it for granted that a creature with only one fleeting life to lose would regard this as too precious to be risked in any conflict, so that the triumph of materialism would herald universal peace. 


But Man has taken a different line. He is sensible enough to realise that a life which is to be poisoned at every instant by the knowledge that it is a mere scurrying to extinction is a life which cannot be worth any one's preserving. 

He is consistent enough to perceive that the termination of all human existence in a general holocaust would be a happening of no great moment.

...The foregoing is written as a warning addressed to those overworked scribes to whom truth per se means nothing at all, but who take it for granted that materialism, right or wrong, is to be supported at all costs because it will assist progress and assure peace.


Edited from JW Dunne. The New Immortality. 1938.


The above passage (from 1938) is a lucid and striking account of the psychological and social effects of what has now become mainstream, official, mandatory public discourse and the basis of all public policy throughout the entire Western world.

Dunne interprets this as an unintended consequence of intellectuals who lack adequate understanding of human nature. He assumes that the advocates of materialism and atheism are well-meaning fools, who will back-off from their activities once hey can be convinced of their malign consequences.

However, eighty years downstream, and with the entirety of the global ruling establishment not only doubling down on their incoherent ideology of materialist progress and utilitarian social engineering - but actively enforcing lies, nonsense, and sin while persecuting virtue, beauty and truth; I regard things quite otherwise.

Materialism was deliberately made the public norm is clear understanding of its destructive, demotivating,  despair-inducing and insanity creating consequences. And for those demonic powers behind materialism; things are working our just fine - pretty much exactly as they had hoped-for.

The mass of people apparently now actually want materialism to be true, and for their lives to be an antechamber to extinction; they will refuse to consider otherwise, and indeed will actively attack anyone putting forward an analysis of the incoherence of the arbitrary assumptions leading to such bleak conclusions.

Hostility is now directed at those who try to practice goodness; and official admiration (awards, medals, status, fame, money, jobs and promotions) are showered-upon those who advocate and cooperate-with the agenda of materialism, atheism and value-inversion.

Dunne's world was one in which ordinary people felt sadly compelled (by 'science') to believe that Christianity was un-true; but three generations on, we live in a world in which ordinary people regard Christianity as wicked; and they would not want it, even if it was true...

For many modern people; the idea of this world as a handsome antechamber to eternal extinction is preferable to a created world of purpose, meaning, permanent relationships and creativity - but in which they would be required to acknowledge and repudiate their pet sin (often sexual in nature).

So the intelligentsia were correct, after all...

What evidence for the evolutionary-development of consciousness in Western Man?

On the face of it, there seems little evidence for anything like a divinely destined evolution of consciousness in Western Man. Looking around in the public realm, or even in direct and personal experience; there seems little to suggest anything of the kind. Nothing that looks like 'progress'.

This is because of two things: 1. Materialism and 2. Negativity.

The materialism which absolutely monopolises modern public life means that consciousness appears only in an indirect way. We only see the indirect effect, the consequences, of consciousness change - and we see only its material - this worldly - manifestations.

Abstraction - including the reduction of qualities to the pseudo-materialism of number - is a major aspect of materialism.Indeed, it is more extreme: qualities are denied reality (because qualities are material) yet simultaneously these non-existent qualities are given numbers and used for calculation of decisions. This is the basis of such managerial technologies of quality managements, racial and sexual monitoring etc. 

The negativity means that the change is expressed by criticism, and not by positive assertion. We get some (materialist) version of what people do Not want; but don't get an expression of their goals.

So, the evolution of consciousness can be seen in the dominant aspects of the dominant ideology of Leftism - but reduced and one-sidely.


Take feminism. The positive spiritual ideals of feminism are related to the positive aspiration of a permanent, literally-divine spiritual and creative marriage relation between a man and woman after death and in the life everlasting as Children of God.

But modern feminism has reject the ideal along with the eternal; and the true spiritual impulse has been concretised to this-worldly economics and power differences. The imperfections of mortal marriage means that marriage itself is rejected as oppressive. What remains is only the negative side of anti-Man aggression- and this is implemented materially in laws and regulations. The deterioration in relationships between men and women is then celebrated.


Another aspect of the evolution of consciousness is an awareness of the uniqueness of each individual, and the knowledge that we have a divine seed within each of us - so that we may grow to become a distinct creative deity - each contributing to God's work of creation.

But of this modern culture expresses only the material aspect: we take into account only that which is measurable and mortal - even while refusing to allow the validity of any measure.

There is a negative refusal at accept any rationale for any economic differences - but without any positive desire for actual equality. We reject actual equality, because we demand that differences in individual circumstances be taken into account; but reject any actual method of doing this.

There is a rejection of legal and cultural impartiality, as a sham and a mask for prejudice; but reject individual judgement as also obviously prejudiced.


More generally; modern Leftism generally regards any reference to to the ideals of post-mortal life as merely an excuse for injustices during mortal life ('pie in the sky', 'jam tomorrow').

Another instance: Leftism celebrates racial and ethnic differences, yet refuses to tolerate racial inequalities; and (negatively) there is no acceptable, objective categorisation of race, ethnicity, culture or economics... Race is simultaneously deconstructed and its reality denied - because race is not material; and abstracted into numbers, so as to be implemented in the material processes of modern government.

The same applies to sex and sexual ientity. Modern negativism denies the reality of these categories because they are not material and do not have hard edges; modern materialism simultaneously creates abstract and hard-edged sexual categories for monitoring and control purposes.


In sum; the ideology of Leftism is implicitly trying, but of course failing, to build a positive system from a host of negative rejections. It is always appealing to morality while its materialism erodes the validity of all moral systems.

So Modern Man does indeed show evidence of the development of underlying positive impulses; but because of (covert, denied) metaphysical assumptions these are systematically distorted such that there is not even the possibility of good outcomes, and we get that moral inversion by which bad consequences are regarded as evidence of virtuous motives.

This is why anti-spiritual, mortal-life-focused Leftism has been the main tool of the dark forces; since a system of inevitable, irreconcilable, competing negativities is the perfect seedbed for evil. 

In inducing modern Western Man to accept materialism and reject all spiritual things as impossible; and in making these beliefs a matter of deep, metaphysical assumption - woven invisibly into the enitre realm of public discourse; the demonic powers have created a machine by which even good and necessary impulses can only be manifested as evil.

When 'spirituality' become merely materialistic - lessons in "defense against the dark arts" from Rudolf Steiner in 1917

One of Rudolf Steiner's deepest prophetic hints was from a series of lectures in late 1917 which were collected and published in 2004 under the title Secret Brotherhoods and the Mystery of the Human Double. 

(All the lectures are also available free on the Rudolf Steiner Archive as GA 178, although these translations are less comprehensible than the 2004 collection.) 

I have been re-reading these remarkable works - as always sifting and reinterpreting Steiner's valid 'raw insights' from the (wrong) metaphysical schema and his frequent errors of overelaboration. 

Steiner's prediction was that through the twentieth century and into the next, the demonic powers, assisted by their human servants (i.e. the 'secret brotherhoods' of the book title - nowadays broadly corresponding to the highest human levels of component institutions of the global totalitarian System) would have the primary strategy of convincing the masses that this is a wholly material world. 

This is the ideology we may call leftism; but which is in essence identical with philosophical materialism/ positivism/ reductionism/ scientism. 

Indeed, so successful has this strategy been, and so dominant and habitual its world-view, that we do not have a generally-accepted name for it! Why name what (nearly-) everybody believes?

The reason behind this materialism project is demonic, in the sense that it is the most effective way of achieving mass damnation. 

In the past, it was necessary to induce Men to reject Christ and choose Hell in an explicit kind of way; but with global materialism Christ, God, creation, and the whole spiritual world are simply regarded as not-real, nonsense; a childish and foolish delusion.

The question of Jesus Christ has not been refuted by materialism, it has instead been rendered incomprehensible, meaningless, absurd! Which is far more effective.  

But the plan of materialism needed to account for Man's perennial seeking for 'spiritual' meaning; for something beyond the mundane - and Steiner perceived that therefore there would need to be ways of rendering and reducing 'the spiritual' to the material. 

So that people who regarded themselves as spiritual would actually conceptualize 'spiritual' in a materialist way - without realizing the fact!

And this is precisely what has happened with the New Age tendency in spirituality; which itself evolved and expanded from roots in 'Eastern' or 'Perennialist' Beat Generation in the 1950s, then 1960s Hippy spiritualties.  

What happens in such 'spiritualities' is that the spiritual is very rapidly 'operationalized' as something material. 

Most obviously there tends to be a focus on this world rather than life beyond death; thi world is seen as the most urgent, the most important, the most real - eventually the only really-real. Therefore, the New Age assimilated to mainstream Leftist political ideologies and projects...

Perhaps the commonest example is when spirituality or consciousness is interpreted as an abstraction therefore not as personal - and using terms from physics; as when New Agers talk - and think! - about spirit in terms of energy, light, vibrations and frequencies. 

Another spiritual reduction is when there is a focus upon Healing - and the bulk of New Age spirituality gravitates towards some model of Healing or Therapy - which is both this-worldly, and rooted in feelings, which are substantially material phenomena since they depend on the body and brain, and can be (to some extent) manipulated and controlled.

Thus we arrive at the typical New Age spirituality - rooted in this world, and in feelings; and spiritual practices (such as meditation) become a type of psychotherapy.  

Ironically, Anthroposophy has itself taken exactly this path into materialism; and (in its institutional manifestations) has consequently become assimilated into mainstream materialistic leftism. This tendency towards abstraction (including physics metaphors) is seem in Steiner's metaphysics, and his explanation of the nature of Christ. 

And the energies of 'Steinerism' became focused on the institution (Anthroposophical Society) rather the individuals; and on the 'applied' materialistic and this-worldly aspects in medicine, education, agriculture etc. 

Furthermore (and Steiner himself had encouraged this) the legacy of Steiner became materialistic - with 'expertise' being understood in terms of comprehensive and accurate scholarship of 'what Steiner said' on this, that and the other - regarded as de facto infallible. 

Therefore, Steiner's greatest 'disciples' - who are all more or less 'heretical' in terms of the materialist orthodox interpretations rooted in 'what Steiner said' - have been largely ignored, rejected or unnoticed - for example Valentine Tomberg (expelled), Owen Barfield (marginalized), or Joseph Beuys (unnoticed). 

Looking back over the past century we can easily see that Steiner was profoundly correct about the way in which materialism has triumphed - explicitly in the realm of public discourse; and implicitly in a great deal of the 'spirituality' of today; which is characterized by abstraction, usage of 'scientistic' vocabulary and concepts, and a focus on 'therapy and 'making this world a better place'.  

What is needed is almost the opposite - and Steiner also said this in these lectures; which is to regard the universe as a creation populated with personal Beings - not abstractions; and therefore true spirituality as consisting in a personal relationship with the many spiritual-Beings - such as God, Jesus Christ, angels, the 'so-called dead', and indeed aspects of other Mortal Men.  

And, on the other side - the side of evil; the capacity to recognize that evil is also personal not abstract; therefore purposive, not accidental. 

From this comes our only genuine defense against the dark arts of evil which is recognition, understanding, and rejection - rejection by means of affiliation with God, which (as of 2022) must come through commitment to following Jesus Christ.  

Note: the term 'defense against the dark arts' is a reference to the Harry Potter series of novels; which I am currently re-reading with pleasure and profit. 

What is spirituality?

We may agree that materialism is false, evil and self-destroying. But it is hard to say - positively - what is meant by 'spiritual'. Indeed, I once participated in a research project where the literature was reviewed and people were interviewed about what they understood 'spiritual to mean' - and no conclusion emerged about any shared meaning.

The usual definitions (such as they are) tend towards excessive abstraction (in terms of the properties or classes of spiritual entities), or gestures towards a world beyond the material (reality is 'more than' just that which is perceived or measured) - which are true, in their way, but hardly adequate.

Clearly, too, spirituality does not equate with religion. Some religions, including some practices of Christianity, are barely spiritual - for instance religious life that is almost wholly ethical, rule-following, or focused on ritual participation. Indeed, many people claim to be 'spiritual but not religious' - however, strictly there is no such thing. To be coherent, to make sense; spirituality depends on metaphysical assumptions of a religious kind.


When someone tries to be spiritual but not religious - for example by merely believing-in and communicating-with spirits, or the dead - then this simply reduces to a type of materialism - spirits are, in effect, being brought into the definition of material and treated as mundane.

People who say they are Not spiritual seem to be those who regard life as being wholly on the 'level' of the everyday - so that the entirety of life (including personal and leisure time) is of the same quality as the normal, shared, public world of work, officialdom, the media. 

By contrast, when a spiritual dimension of life is desired - this is a wish for a larger life, beyond the mundane - with a different and 'higher' quality. In practice, nowadays, with the current pressures; this seems to entail according 'the spiritual' the highest priority; above (in particular) the political - and this is where so many would-be spiritual people and organisations fall-down.    


It is probably best to think of materialism as the assumption that the world is made of Things, and spiritual as the contrary assumption it is 'made of' Beings. 'Beings' meaning living-entities, conscious and motivated. Thus, to be spiritual means to assume that this universe and reality consists of Beings. 

We could further say that the materialistic perspective says that the universe arose by means of 'physics' processes - it just-happened for deterministic reasons and/ or perhaps randomly. In other words, in materialism there are Things interacting by physical processes.

By contrast, a spiritual perspective assumes that we live in A Creation - that is, a universe made by a Being. Furthermore, the Beings interact by 'relationships'. For the spiritual person; the ultimate reality of interaction is not the forces, particles, processes of physics, but the attributes of relationships - such as motivations, emotions, beliefs...


What prevents a spiritual world view (among those who want it) is many things. Habit, of course, plus that The World requires us to operate on materialist assumptions - to treat everything (including people) as Things.

It can be seen that this is a source of confusion. in that plenty of people assert a living universe, a purposive creation - but then explain it in abstract, geometric, mathematical, and physics terms. This is, indeed, difficult to avoid - for it is seen in Rudolf Steiner, Rupert Sheldrake and a staple of 'New Age' spirituality. I am saying that this is an error, and leads to an unstable hybrid that default-reverts from failed-spirituality back to materialism-in-practice.

This drive to abstraction based on the idea that abstractions are the primary reality - for example the view that ultimate reality is mathematical, or that physics provides the deepest explanation of the origin of the universe.


All this is a version of the ancient Greek metaphysical practice of explain reality in terms of abstractions; which was taken up by Christian theologians who (to varying degrees, but always to some extent) made Christianity fit-into this pre-existing materialistic framework (whereas most of scripture is describes a world of beings and relationships).

In a strange paradox; much Christian theology over the past many centuries represents a continued attempt at maintaining materialist assumptions as foundational for Christianity. Any whiff of anthropomorphism, animism, a world of beings - all such are regarded as childish errors.

In terms of the evolutionary-development of human consciousness, this was an early and necessary step in the direction of increasing human agency, freedom, choice; until the point (reached within the past 200 years in the West) that belief in God became active and voluntary rather than unconscious and passive.


Men began living in a world of Beings - but passively and unconsciously. This was Man's childhood.  The abstraction was part of detaching us from that immersive world and allowing us to think independently - Man's adolescence. The future is to return consciously and by active choice to the deepest truth of the spiritual world view - and again acknowledge reality as created by a Being, and consisting of Beings.

(From which perspective the abstractions - mathematics, sciences, Classical metaphysics, traditional Christian theology - are seen as ultimately tools: pragmatic approximations for particular purposes.)

But it is this vast inherited inertial legacy of abstract materialistic theology - mistakenly regarded as definitive of being-a-Christian - that has made mainstream institutional Christianity fall-into materialism (including bureaucracy); and which makes it so surprisingly difficult to be a Christian and to be spiritual.


Spirituality entails creation having a purpose, and materialism - with its physics universe - has none.

So, I would say that the spiritual world-view - which I want, and which is sought by many - is one in which we inhabit a universe of Beings that was itself created by a Being.

'Spirituality' is therefore thinking and living in such a way that we interact with 'the world' on the assumption that it is a purposeful creation and consists of Beings.

Defining Christianity - without materialism

In this world of materialism, opposed to all matter of the spirit and religion; it is significant that so many Christians define their faith materialistically, legalistically, bureaucratically - in terms of checklists, bullet points, terms of service, standard procedures...

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the imagination and individuality gets squeezed-out of Christianity, and some of the most important Christian thinkers are rejected as Christians - both by the anti-Christians (who want to deny Christianity the lustre of their membership) and by Christians themselves (captive to materialism).

Many denominations and churches self-define in legalistic terms; and find themselves permanently at odds withe even very similar denominations and churches - and the whole of Christendom disunited, enfeebled, and pervaded by spite and fear.

Yet these self-styled 'orthodox' Christians, the ones who subscribe to (what they regard as) the objectivity of materialism, those who publicly subscribe to multiple, interlocking and sharply defined creedal statements and elaborate oaths... these have (mostly) become corrupted by leftist politics, and nowadays are By Far the worst of fake Christians - worse than the most notorious unorthodox and heretics of the past.

Why should this be? I think it is a consequence of the corruption of materialism. Materialism was present from the early days after the life of Jesus, as Christianity grew in the context of Judaism and the Roman Empire: both legalistically rooted and permeated. At any rate supposedly-strict legalism and objectivity have failed spectacularly to prevent mass apostasy. 

Yet the Fourth Gospel (our most authoritative source) presents the teachings of Jesus in a personal (and very simple) way, as a matter of Jesus's identity and our proper attitude to his person and promise. From this perspective, the public religion of Christianity was misconceived from a very early stage.

If not, then what?

Christianity is, obviously, an internal matter, self-defined. Yet this leaves open the matter of judgement - we must judge others, including whether they are Christian - or in contrast opposed-to and working-against God and creation.

How may this be done without legalism and explicit definition? Well, in exactly the same way that we infer the dispositions, motivations and intentions of other-people about any other important subject. We do it all day and every day. This is the bread and butter of social life, an absolute necessity of social competence.

Of course we do not have any mechanism for imposing our own inferences upon other people. When we judge a person (or institution) to be nasty; this usually cannot be proven to someone who interprets their disposition, motivations and intentions to be nice. Despite this, life goes on.

There is not, and cannot be, a better or more valid definition of Christianity that the serious inference of one individual about another: that is the bottom line. If I am a Christian, then I can and must make a heartfelt judgement about others - insofar as this fact affects me personally.

And I would be a fool to allow this 'intuitive' inference to be overridden by checklists and bureaucratic validations.

Joseph Beuys's Romantic Christianity

Note: All text consists of quotations from Joseph Beuys, made in an interview with Louwrien Wijers, November 22nd 1979; published in Writing as Sculpture (1996). 

I have edited the text for clarity based on my understanding of what was intended - for which I take responsibility. Because although Beuys was fluent in English - he was not idiomatic; and often deployed German grammatical constructions - plus some personal terminology, and some from Rudolf Steiner. It is probably best to try and get an overview (Gestalt) of his meaning, rather than trying to build understanding from the accumulation of specific statements. 

Also, because this was a conversation the recorded and transcribed words benefit, I believe, from some re-arrangement, excision, and slight verbal expansion. 

My point here is to emphasize - and this surprised me considerably! - that Joseph Beuys was a serious, and tough-minded, hard-nosed, Christian; in his primary motivations, and his understanding of art, politics, society... 

And he was a romantic Christian, because he saw that (here-and-now) Christianity depends on the individual human being, personally choosing to take an active and conscious role in addressing the problems of mundane modern existence: materialism, meaninglessness, purposelessness - dead life in a dead world. 

And Beuys saw that the escape from dead-ly materialism was forward-and-through - and out the other side - by a spiritual repetition (individually, and socially) of Christ's death and resurrection.   

Christ is not symbolized: he is real! 

Christ is not a symbol for something else. He is the substance in himself. It means life, it means power - the power of life. 

Christ has already brought life. Without the substance of Christ the earth would already have died. 

So Christ is not a symbol of something... I always fear this application of 'symbols'. 

 

The most important power exists in Christ, in the elements and substance of Christ. He is a germination: the idea of the Son coming-out from spiritual entities (abstractly called 'God'). 

In the Christ element, the spiritual entities are showing the reality that this element also exists in humankind itself. We can speak of the human being because this element exists in him. 

The most important declaration of Christ in that Man is the spiritual co-operator*. This shifts the whole energy-problem to the spiritual abilities of the people, of humankind. 

Interviewer: When you say we do not need mediators between gods and people in our times, do you mean that this is a task we have to do ourselves, now?

Beuys: Yes, sure: certainly. 

And we can do it ourselves. But there must first appear, or should appear - and in fact appears already in humankind - a kind of interest to ask; and that is surely a necessity. 

To approach an understanding of world, and Man, and nature; asks for a very individual methodology. An individual mentality or ability...

At present the churches avoid speaking about the possibilities of humankind using such soul-powers, will-powers; powers of thought; and intuition, imagination and inspiration - and to come with this kind of 'ability' towards such an understanding.  

 

We need to understand that to reach the earthly condition of materialism, and to get incarnated with this idea of death; there must be a resurrection...

The Christ spirit was related to the development of the idea of analysis [leading to materialism]. 

The whole range of philosophy throughout the Western world shows more and more this analytic way, and reaches a materialist consciousness. Thus it comes to death, like Christ. 

So, in the Western world there is a kind of repetition of the mystery of Christ's life and death. It ends with the fact that we now have a materialist understanding of the world. And because of this spiritual declaration of the material intention, materialism (as a whole) is a spiritual thing...

First the earth was dead in part; but Men have long been giving death to death - they have added death articles to death principles. 

So now our earth is dead! How can this death be surpassed, renewed, regenerated? That is the great question.

Only humankind can do this. Only. Nobody else. People must do it. Men are now totally responsible for the fate of the earth and for life on earth. 

We must see that all is alive - and surpass death. 

Solving the problem of life and death is the mission of the methodology of materialism. 

People have to die, in a way; have to feel what death means - have to reach the earth. 

Death belongs to life, you know! In the spiritual meaning, life is not possible without death. 

That sounds like mysticism, but is not, because this mystery is experienced by everybody. 

People have to have, and to develop, another understanding than the materialistic understanding - which is only looking for power to exploit, with a distorting and debasing understanding of energies.

Everything depends on us! 

It is absolutely necessary to see that everything depends on us; and that we can do it! 

Very easily we can do it - it is not so difficult to do.

The whole power exists with the people. But if the the people do not use it, then the regressive powers will get stronger. 

In future; we need the strongest of human spirits - those who are able to resist in the middle of the shit! 

Who live in the midst of things; and who feel that their own abilities can only grow in the midst of problems. 

Not those who want a kind-of weak environment with a kind-of 'spiritual feeling'... 

*Meaning - Man's cooperation with God has been necessary since the time of Christ, and is ever more necessary. This is clear from (too spread-out to summarize) remarks made elsewhere. 

The evil doppelgangers in Mens' minds (and electronic devices): How Satan (Ahriman) uses materialism to recruit souls for Hell on Earth

What follows may be one of the weirdest things I have written! Nonetheless, I am sure that it is on the right lines and there is something behind it. 

It derives from my personal interpretation, my decoding, of Rudolf Steiner's lectures published in 2016 as The Electronic Doppelganger; and particularly a lecture from 16 November 1917. Steiner's speculative essay, and this one, addresses the question: What happens to damned souls in an age of materialism? Where do they go, what do they do?

 

The matter is interesting because this is an age of Materialism in which the dominant form of evil is 'Ahrimanic' - that is, coldly-cruel, materialistic, controlling, bureaucratic;  an 'Antichrist'-type of evil that pretends to 'good' (i.e. altruism) and does its work of damnation behind a facade of 'caring' (healthism, antiracism, environmentalism, sexual liberation and rights, etc.)  

So - Materialism is the dominant ideology in our world - indeed, the only working ideology in public discourse. And Materialism has it that there is no God, no soul, no spiritual, no afterlife, no Beings, no love; the really-real is only that which is perceived by senses and physics, and modelled by mathematical and symbolic abstractions. 

Materialism mostly says that death is annihilation. We die and nothing of our 'self' is left-behind. But there is another possibility, a 'loophole' - not offered to all, but aspired-to by groups with the character of initiates ('secret societies', one might call them). I mean the transhumanist project of the abolition of aging and death by technology, of indefinite 'life extension' of a material kind. 

This combines with another strand of transhumanism which aims to combine Man and computer - in a cyborg fashion;  which aims (in various ways - surgical, electronic, genetic etc.) to 'integrate' the electronic and digital world of the computer, with the living flesh of Men.

This technological pseudo-salvation has been taken-up by some strands of explicit transhumanism; and also, but without that name, is now (2020) mainstream, dominant, global public policy; being a strategy for the Ruling Establishment in their UN Agenda 2030, the Great Reset idea and others.  

This idea of what might happen to sustain 'life' (or personal identity) after death, has been propagated in various ways; such as the mind being like a computer, and therefore down-loadable onto a computer; the cryogenic idea of preserving a brain for future reanimation; and even the common Hollywood (hence presumptively evil-motivated) trope that 'we live-on' after biological death, 'in the memories/ hearts of those who remain alive'. This trope may - deceptively - have a literal meaning intended; behind the sentimental metaphor.

 

Ancient Greeks and Hebrews, and probably others unrecorded, had an understanding that death was (mostly) a matter of the spirit being severed from the body; and surviving in an Underworld (Hades, Sheol...) as witless, gibbering, demented ghosts without consciousness or free agency or sense of self - but not suffering. 

Perhaps those materialists who want to live forever in a material way, are offered a 'deal' whereby instead of going to the underworld (or to Heaven, which they usually disbelieve; and mostly wouldn't want if they did believe it) - they instead remain on earth and involved with earthly life in return for serving the Satanic agenda. 

This is achieved by these 'ghosts' living-on in the material 'minds' ('brains', 'hearts') of the secret societies, and of any other men who the secret brotherhoods persuade ('brainwash') into providing brain-space' to these spirits. 

This may be one actuality of Biblical Hell; which is often referenced to being on earth, with demons being ghosts of the evil-affiliated deceased, still active among living people - i.e. the 'principalities and powers' - serving the agenda of Satan who is thus a 'ruler' of the earth in a literal sense. 

 

This would mean that the Satan and the demonic powers recruit not just living Men to their side - including in secret societies dedicated to evil; but that some of these same Men, when they die, desire or consent to become 'evil ghosts', remaining on earth and still active in this world, in a form of perpetuated, materialistic (but not embodied) life; a 'reward' for which they pay by being bound to the service of Satan. 

The idea is that these spirits of the evil and deceased are materially instantiated in the brains, minds, symbols, rituals etc of living Men. These 'evil ghosts' live-on in the minds and brains of Men of the secret societies - Men who believe-in, know, and side-with Satan: the servants of Satan, in other words. These Satanic servants are are aware of the doppelganger, consent to it; and use the evil-ghosts in their evil strategies - e.g. for gathering information and covertly influencing other men.

And the evil-ghosts also live-on among the masses of materialistic unrepentant sinners, who have taken Satan's side against God. These masses are unconscious of being hosts of evil-ghosts; indeed they do not believe in ghosts, do not believe in Satan - and are standard, unthinking dupes to the incoherent ideology of Materialism. 

These masses of un-conscious, ignorant, God-denying, Satan-affiliated yet Satan-Disbelieving Men; are therefore acted-upon by the evil-ghosts of self-damned Men. This is what Steiner meant by his term 'doppelganger' - he meant the evil-double, unconsciously hosted, and unconsciously influencing the minds of those who host it. These are the dupes of Satan, rather than his servants.

 

(As always, the spiritual 'law' is that evil must be consented-to, must be - like an archetypal vampire - be 'invited-in', invited to cross the threshold into the mind. This, at least, must be a conscious decision. It corresponds to what some people call 'taking the ticket' - the Faustian bargain which is presented to almost everybody, nowadays sooner rather than later; of knowingly consenting to do evil, in return for some worldly advantage. But then most people explain-away, bury and deny this decisive corrupting-event - saying to themselves that they 'did nothing wrong'; and therefore they never repent it and must take the consequences. Of course, repentance would immediately negate the damnation, and anybody can repent at any time (albeit on certain conditions); but typical modern people do not believe in the reality or possibility of repentance.)

 

Evil ghosts may also live-on after biological death by inhabiting electronic devices, such as computers and the internet. This is possible because of the pseudo-brain/ nervous system, quasi-intelligent, cognitive-processing qualities of modern electronic media.  

Of course, 'electronic media' are not distinct from (not separable-from) Men's thinking - indeed nothing is distinct from Men's thinking (except primordial chaos). In other words, God's creation is made by thinking, as well as from 'stuff'. Our thinking is inextricably part of the world. 

(This is another insight of Rudolf Steiner's - articulated in his early philosophical books Truth and Knowledge and The Philosophy of Freedom.)

What this means is that we should think of electronic media, computers, the internet etc as part of the web of human thinking, continuous with human thinking, and indeed sustained-by human thinking. 

And this is the inverse of the transhumanist ideology, which considers human thinking to be wholly a matter of brain activity; and brain activity to be wholly abstract mental processing, which processing can then be instantiated in electronic media. This ideology makes the possibility of its own validity.

 

To conclude, Hell on earth is the hosting of evil-ghosts (who are the post-mortal spirits of evil men) by the minds of Men who have joined-with the agenda of Satan; and by the electronic media that are manifestations of materialistic, hence Satanic, thinking. 

Hell lives in the mind of evil-affiliated (unrepentant) materialistic Men, who may well be a large majority of Men in this year of 2020.  

These evil-ghosts can only influence by consent; so the doppelganger must be 'invited-in'. A few Men (servants of Satan) are aware of this 'double' and manipulate it, for evil purposes; but most (dupes of Satan) are unaware or in denial - and are therefore open to manipulation by their doppelganger. 

The vast modern world of electronic media also provides a dwelling place for these evil-ghosts; but again they can only influence those who 'invite them in' to their minds, for example those who are willingly addicted-to, and who subordinate themselves to, the ideology, propaganda and manipulation of the mass media.

But those who know the reality of Satan, and can discern his influence, and who have chosen to follow Jesus and accept his gift of resurrected Life Everlasting in Heaven - such Men are immune to the evil doppelgangers of mind and machine. 

The karma of materialism: "From an academic point of view, it's a tremendous privilege to watch a civilization collapse in super-slow motion high-definition real-time"

The title comes from a recent comment by "Epimetheus" (brother of Prometheus, the word meaning 'afterthought'):

The whole situation is remarkable. For those who are paying attention, and from an academic point of view, it's a tremendous privilege to watch a civilization collapse in super-slow motion high-definition real-time. Not many people in history get to sit in comfy chairs, eating plenty of food, and watch what we are watching.

This captures my own view - at least some of the time.


Anyone interested in history must have wondered what it would be like to participate in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the suicidal eco-destruction of Easter Island, or any other of the catastrophic civilizational transitions.

We wonder - could the people not see what was coming - when it seems so obvious to us, in retrospect? Having seen, could they not at least stop actively making matters worse?

Apparently not. And we can now understand that the essence of these matters is that the collapse happens precisely because people can't see.

This kind of collapse is self-inflicted, and occurs as a direct consequence of the axiomatic assumptions of the people. They cannot perceive the collapse, and cannot stop causing collapse, because it is a product of their most cherished motivations.


To borrow and adapt a phrase from Rudolf Steiner: we are witnessing The Karma of Materialism.

In other words, for more that two centuries, and increasingly, the world has been embracing materialism (aka. positivism, abstraction, reductionism or scientism - equivalent to 'leftism' correctly understood, in its many manifestations); such that God is denied, the spiritual dimension is assumed not to exist, and life has become reduced to (ever more short-termist) personal gratifications.

This has built-up to become dominant; has instantiated in bureaucracy - which has interlinked into The System (world and national government and the mass media, plus all other functional systems) - and in the past generation such a way of regarding the world has been willingly, eagerly, assimiliated into the minds of the masses.


Our way of thinking is now materialistic - so that materialism now structures our world-view.

Much of reality is now invisible - by assumption. 

And this crisis and the impending collapse is the destined consequence and revelatory fruit ("karma") of this Modern mindset.


In one sense there has been a top-down coup and takeover of most of the world (all the powerful, wealthy and influential bits, at any rate) by a tiny Global Establishment. But in another equally-important sense; the coup was invited, initiated, encouraged and actively-facilitated by the great mass of people from all over the world; which is why the impending collapse remains invisible.

Where I see the most obvious global totalitarian takeover imaginable; the masses see the world Establishment (at last!) working-together altruistically to defeat a deadly plague. Where I see a deliberate, active, coordinated and stubbornly-resistant policy of destroying civilization; most people see nothing more than a temporary - necessary albeit regrettable - suspension of unneccessary activities, as the alternative to extinction.

The people are getting, by and large, exactly what they want - and so are The Esablishment: so everyone is happy!


Yet, as so often, giving depraved and corrupted people what they want is a short-route to disaster.

This is, it seems to me, God's role in the current crisis. God has simply allowed the mass of people to have what they want, what they have chosen, what they insist-upon despite numerous attempts to teach them better and to provide experiences from which they could have learned better.

The sheer volume and intensity of actively-chosen and insisted-upon corruption in the world had been building-up for so many decades, and it is now so great - and all the signs are that it would-have increased further - that God has decided (for the good of our eternal souls; for the sake of those of his children who may thereby choose Heavenly resurrected life everlasting) to bring things to an end, by this means of allowing people what they demand.

(Or maybe the pressure of evil became so strong that stopping or reversing it was not possible, without massively and coercively encroaching on human free agency.) 


But politics is a very simple and crude matter - it is never susceptible to fine-tuning: especially not at a global scale. Most things are (over the long term) all or nothing. And what the Establishment want, and was the masses of people want, is impossible.

Materialism has us in its grip. We deny the ultimate purpose and meaning of life; and the consequence is that our lives lack purpose and meaning; and people are reduced to fear and despair - and the pathetic attempts at propitiation (but of what?) by repetition of official mantras, observances of official rituals, displays of prescribed symbolism...

These constitute the shell of a pseudo-religion that nobody really believes. In actuality it represents the lineaments of the materialistic demonic cult of a selfish, cowardly hedonism that people are too dishonest even to acknowledge to themselves.


So what we want (as a civilization) will bring everything down on our heads; and this is what those who live long enough will be 'privileged' to observe: and it is a privilege (or could be).

We each need to take proper advantage of this privilege; derive proper benefit from it.

May it be that we will learn from the experience, rather than becoming consumed by the generalised fear and despair. The most important thing we can do is to maintain faith, hope and love - and to understand. Understand consciously and explicitly. To think clearly and honestly.

Whatever we can or cannot do; we can always think: and know that thinking is reality, with permanent objective consequences.

 

The Christian challenge of modernity - not yet faced

If, as I said yesterday, it is correct that Christianity was bound-to an unsatisfactory (and pre-Christian) metaphysics at an early point in its history - what was the effect?

Well, clearly, for several times and places over the past 2000 years, there have been great, indeed superlative, individual Christians - and there have also been (much more rarely and temporarily) fine Christian societies (albeit of very small scale, by modern standards).

So it could be argued, from its 'fruits' or outcome, that the mainstream Christian metaphysics was true, because it has sometimes sustained good Christians, or that at least it it can't be bad enough actually to prevent someone being a good Christian. Or that Christian metaphysics is irrelevant - because the real thing about Christianity is not metaphysics...


It is quite true that the real thing about Christianity is not metaphysics - otherwise it would not be possible legitimately to discuss the two separately - but that does not make metaphysics irrelevant.

My understanding is that the wrong metaphysics did not matter as much in the past as it does now (and for the past couple of centuries) - although it did have adverse consequences in the long and bitter (and profoundly un-Christian) 'heresy' disputes, wars and persecutions concerning Christology and the Trinity.

The fact that modern Christian churches remain unable to acknowledge the basic wrongness of the early-centuries church reactions to the Monophysite, Arian, Pelagian etc disputes has become something like a fatal flaw at the heart of things. The whole way that these disputes in the early Christian centuries arose, were formulated and conducted is clear evidence of profound wrongness in the way that the Christian churches were set-up from the start...


Christianity was muddling on - sometimes overall-Good, many times Not, until its great challenge began to emerge at about the time of the industrial revolution in the later 1700s: the challenge of modernity.

My understanding is that the challenge was divine in origin - it was the unfolding of Man's destiny that was desired; it was the irresistible pressure to make a Christianity that was conscious, explicit and based in the individual's direct knowledge of God and thus the individual's agency: the individual's autonomous free will.

The impulse behind modernity was the developmental push towards Man becoming more like God, during mortal life.

However, this pressure did not, except in a few individual persons, lead to the God-desired change. Men did not understand the need to develop what I have termed Direct Christianity.

Instead, Western human agency split between reaction and radicalism: between a doubling-down on tradition and conservatism; versus a this-worldly materialist throwing-out of Christianity, and all acknowledgement of the reality of the spiritual, of purpose, of meaning.

Attempts to 'liberalise' metaphysically-unreformed Christianity became assimilated to the secular materialist ideology. Attempts to be spiritual but not Christian very rapidly assimilated to the secular materialist ideology.

Extremely few people apparently understood the need to be both Christian and spiritual, to be individualistic and Christian; to be guided by intuition - but as a tough inner conviction of Good and source of resistance to adverse social pressure - and not merely as an excuse for short term hedonism and careerist or status-seeking self-aggrandisement. 


We now know, 200 years later, that tradition-conservatism failed to prevail or even to defend itself - and the perspective of this-worldly materialism has triumphed in this world. God and the immaterial are excluded from the public realm - and increasingly from private thinking. And the Global monitoring-control system of bureaucracy and the mass media are successfully pursuing goals that are more obviously demonic with each passing year.

The large and powerful Christian churches are by now de facto assimilated into secular materialism and have become fake/ pseudo Christian - while covertly anti-Christian; meanwhile the various traditionalist-reactionary and really-Christian churches are wedded to an indefensible metaphysics, as they have been for up-to 1900 years.
 
(This secular materialism triumphant is 'Leftism' - understood to include all worldly-materialism including the fascism, national socialism, conservatives, Republicans, libertarians etc - as well as the entire self-identified Left. It is the ideology of the entire Global Establishment at its elite level.)


What modernity has done is to probe and probe at the metaphysical flaws and inconsistencies of mainstream historically-dominant Christianity; and because these metaphysical flaws are intractable (they are built-into the assumptions), and because the mainstream theologians are unable or unwilling even to acknowledge that metaphysics is separable from the Christian religion; the mainstream can only double-down on them, and hope that the lethal criticisms will eventually go away.

But whatever (apparently) happens, my understanding is that the deep problem remains that divine destiny, 'the challenge of modernity', has been refused.

We now know in our hearts that while most of modernity-triumphant is evil and evil-seeking; some of the original impulse towards modernity was valid and necessary for man's spiritual development. We know in our hearts that both available sides are wrong - Leftism is wrong and evil in motivation; traditionalist Christianity tries to do Good... but is crippled and poisoned by a kind of fundamental and chronic metaphysical dishonesty.


Since no group in the modern world is prepared to tackle this matter head-on and explicitly - and indeed it is possible that no actually existing group can do so - since in this time and place groups may exist to serve the individual in his spiritual development, rather than the other way around... Then the implication seems to be that each individual person needs to take-on this heavy responsibility for his own spiritual development and theosis.

Our great fortune is that we are children of God the creator of this world and he would not leave us bereft of help. What we need to do we can do.

This is not, and cannot be, a matter of replicating the strategies of an earlier era - building churches, ideologies - persuading via the spoken and written word - getting power and protection... If it is truly individual, and truly based upon direct knowledge of the spiritual and the divine - then we have nobody to 'persuade' of truth, except our-selves.

 

Why modern materialism was necessary, despite its demonic possibilities; and how the 'thinking of the heart' is the way forward: Stanley Messenger gives Rudolf Steiner's teachings

Unless we reach the point where we believe nothing except what comes to us through our senses and the intellect, we will be ruled by a compelled belief in some kind of divine source. We have to reach a situation of total materialism order to free ourselves from a belief in the divine that we cannot avoid. 

The whole process of human evolution has been geared towards producing a species of conscious entity that can approach the divine but is not compelled to do so. We can either believe in God or we needn't believe in God - it is a matter of our freedom. 

That was impossible until we had reached such a point in human evolution that we could actually come to the conclusion that there was no God. If you can't come to the conclusion that there is no divine world, you are not free to choose. 

The huge evolutionary step that has been taken over thousands of years in Man's history is that a conscious being now exists in the universe which can arrogate to its own consciousness freedom to decide what is true - to create universes. And this is a perilous and devilish capacity; and is at the same time a capacity that can raise mankind to the level of the gods. 

What is the difference between those two possibilities? The difference is whether, in this growth of self-awareness, mankind comes to the realisation that the perceptions of the heart are more fundamental than the perceptions of the brain. That our capacity to know through the heart reaches a more profound and truth-filled level than can be reached by perception, hypothesis and analysis.

**

Transcribed from a lecture by Stanley Messenger to the Wessex Research Group, probably in the middle 1990s. (For more on Stanley Messenger, see this memorial website.) 

The above passage is a very lucid summary of the evolutionary views of Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield; including the way that the necessary materialism of modernity brings us to a fork in the road.

A divergence where one path (which is the one historically and currently taken by The West) leads to a 'perilous and devilish' world (as described by both Steiner and Barfield); and the other path (the 'road not - yet - taken') would leads us towards experiences of higher stages of divinity.

This is our spiritual actuality contrasted with our potential: the actuality is demonic materialism and the inversion of values; the potential is (sometimes) to think and be at the level of 'the gods' (which I take to mean resurrected Men - post-mortal angels) while still in mortal life on earth.

The Good and Loving path is thus necessarily a matter of conscious choice and entails effort, will, work...

By contrast, the devilish path is the default; we take it when we fail to choose; when we are unconscious, passive and absorptive of culture - when we reject freedom and remain unfree. 

The Good and Loving path leads to what Barfield termed Final Participation.

Why Rudolf Steiner? (despite everything)

I need to keep explaining the importance of Rudolf Steiner, and why it is that - for example - so many of my recent posts have been about or inspired-by him... Despite that almost-all of his advocates and followers, and the Anthroposophical Society itself, are anti-Christian, Satan-allied Leftists (whatever and despite their self-identification). And despite that most of what Steiner wrote and spoke is just plain wrong. 

In the first place 'almost-all' Steiner's advocates misses-out that among the small handful of The Most valuable, insightful and important Good Guys at work today; there are several Steiner followers such as Terry Boardman, Jeremy Naydler, Amo Boden; and the editors of New View and The Present Age. 

These are among the extremely few people and venues currently worth reading; where, for instance, you can see a solid understanding of the world historical events of 2020, and what led-up-to them. Or of the long-term purpose and effects of the sexual revolution; the computer/ internet revolution - the 5G mania; or the strategy behind the climate change agenda.  

But the core of what Steiner supplies the discerning reader - above all other authors and sources - is his insistence that the core task of Men in this time and in The West - is a new-restoration of the spiritual to our thinking. 

 

A 'new-restoration' (both restored and new) because what's required is something on the one hand unprecedented in world history; and also a restoration - because it represents (in several respects) a return to the basic, original, primal way of knowing. 

As a brief summary, Steiner advocates (in vital respects) a return to the 'animistic' world-view; that saw the universe as alive; composed of multiple Beings - each with life, purposes, and a distinct nature that develops through time. But this primal animism was unconscious, unchosen, passive. Men were simply immersed-in this spiritual reality, and (pretty much) passively and instinctively responded-to it. They were swept-along by the thoughts of spiritual Beings - to the point that Men's thinking was itself the thinking of spiritual beings. 

When Men (in Ancient Greek times) first began to become aware of this situation; it was captured by the idea of 'inspiration', in its original sense; that we 'breathe-in' the spirits of Heavenly beings, which are all around us, as-it-were in the wind. But there was almost no freedom, and life was passive, responsive.

Steiner's idea is that mainstream Modern Man incrementally has become detached from this primal situation. Man can now originate his own thinking and is free to choose; but until now has rejected the reality of the spiritual. He has becomes an isolated and alienated consciousness, and feels his own thoughts to be sealed inside his mind (=brain) and thereby disconnected from external reality. For Modern Man; 'subjective' means private, and unreal. 

 

Steiner advocates that Modern Man needs to move to an unprecedented primacy of intuition; where intuition means a creative, generative thinking; that originates from our real, true and divine self. A 'heart thinking' that takes primacy over both primitive unconscious instinct and current conscious materialism.

By 1917; Steiner saw very clearly that Modern Man - trapped in his own consciousness and rejecting of the spirit - would inevitably and inexorably degenerate. That the paradoxes of materialism would tend to destroy everything of positive value. That, for example, pervasive materialism would destroy even that autonomy and agency of human thinking which generated materialism in the first place! That a consciousness disconnected from the spiritual, would end by denying consciousness itself!

Steinr saw (among other things) how the consequences would include the (now mainstream and mandatory) value-inversions of the sexual revolution; and he saw that this corruption would be 'validated' and supported by an increasingly corrupted materialist 'science'. He also foresaw a 'healthism' that destroys actual health and causes death; along with destroying basic human needs and freedom. And he described a society in which technology became organised towards totality of mind-control by an integration of the electronic-technological with the demonic. 

 

In sum, Steiner expicitly foresaw the essential features of 2020 if we did not restore the spiritual to thinking, to life-in-general. And he further described what we need to do, what we should aim-at; which is - as individuals - developing (in our-selves) a qualitatively-different and spiritual way of thinking, living, and being in our own lives.

Now, much of the detail Steiner described about what exactly we should do - such as his prescribed mental exercises designed to train concentration, visualisation, imagination; and a large role for 'initiated Masters', and a major role for the Anthroposophical Society itself - almost all of this I regard as mistaken - or even counter-productive. 

But in terms of what we most need to accomplish (aside from the suggested methods of doing it); Steiner was solid, vital and unsurpassed. 

 

I completely agree with Steiner's core teaching, which is that our primary urgent task - here and now in 2020 - is to choose consciously to live by-and-from the spiritual (including to discover what that means for us, as individuals). 

This should be what we think about when we awaken each morning, and when we look back on our day each evening, and as we settle to sleep at night. 

This should be a focus of our meditations and prayers. 

Nothing is more important than this: here, now; for you - and for me. 

Note: The Spiritual must be Christian - that comes first; but Christianity without a newly-developed return to spiritual-based-thinking/living is Not going to be sufficient. Indeed, it is not even a working possibility; as can be seen by taking a clear look at what has happened to the mainstream - including traditional - Christian churches this year of 2020. Christian Churches are in essence Gone, Finished, Closed - have ceased operations. 100 years after Steiner, and of refusing to follow Steiner's advice; Christians Now have 'Hobson's Choice' - i.e. no choice at all. Either they follow Steiner's direction of developing personal spirituality, or else they they will de facto cease to be Christian (unless that has, indeed, already happened). In this necessary transition; the West might have followed a gentle path of gradualism - but did not. Having rejected multiple opportunities over the past generations; Christians now have a sudden, massive spiritual shock, applied by external events; and the prospect of being compelled to choose-between either an almost instantaneous, and 'mind-blowing', transformation - or else passively going over to the-other-side (which the majority have already done). 

The primary sin of Modern Man

I have to call it a sin, rather than an error, because it is a choice made despite our better instincts - nonetheless it is so common, so universal, that it is almost asif the sin is a part of normal socialisation, of growing-up in The West.

The sin is 'materialism' - which could also be called positivism, reductionism, scientism... it is the standard assumed view of all public discourse for several generations, so it doesn't have a commonly used name; since we don't name our assumptions, and are seldom even aware of them.

Materialism is what blocks that which is most necessary for us to be aware of: which is our knowledge of the reality of that 'matrix' of Beings which make up this world. The awareness that this world is alive, conscious and has purpose. We all have this knowledge, but we lack awareness of this knowledge and deny it by assumptions that (at some point in our development) we have chosen to adopt.

It is all One Big Thing, really - but there are various aspects to the assumption:

Deadness - There isn't even a word for this assumption, which almost everybody assumes... It is that ultimately everything is or will be Not Alive, but Dead. We exist in a Dead universe (the stars, planets, moon are all Dead; all submicroscopic stuff is Dead), and living things are made of Dead components. Ultimately, everything is reducible to Physics, and the entities of Physics (waves, particles, forces etc) are Not Alive, not Conscious, lack innate purpose. What is denied is our inborn assumption (and that of most people in history) that reality consists of living, and (in different ways) conscious Beings. Apparently everyone believes this at some level, but Modern man denies it - by assumption.

Entropy - We believe in the reality of entropy - the tendency to chaos, but not of love. Entropy is assumed as a universal reality, an inevitable force, a tendency of everything everywhere - breaking down, corrupting, destroying everything all of the time... but we deny by assumption the reality of any similarly universal tendency in the direction of development, creativity, life, consciousness etc.

Natural Selection - We believe that this is the sole explanation of the adaptiveness and range of life on earth - that it is the origin of life, the only cause of the variety of species, the single reason for the emergence of Man and individual Men. We deny by assumption that any of the above has any purpose; we deny that there is any reason for any of it, we deny any meaning to it. The assumption is that Natural selection Just Is, and Just Does.

You get the idea. Always and everywhere, Modern Man assumes a one-sided view of existence - he assumes that underlying reality is dead, chaotic, going nowhere and without meaning. This has not been discovered but is assumed. This assumption is not natural but chosen; and that choice was personal.

If we call this materialism, then materialism is our great sin.