My special gratitude to Owen Barfield

When I encounter a special author, I will initially hurl myself into trying to understand him - read many books, think a lot, take notes (in a meditative fashion); and often talk and write about these experiences. 

After a while, when I have become surer of what they mean and have a fairly sold grasp on it; I find that what I have learned amounts to some particular things; but I then need to detach these specifics from the whole of the writer's assertions - because I have never found any writer whose views I can endorse or believe fully.

Eventually, I get to a point where I have (more or less) obtained 'what I needed' from a writer; and may (more or less) cease to re-read or explore actively that author's works. 

I have, at this point, built-into my own philosophy of life, some elements from the special author; and from then onwards, these ideas may undergo further development and refinement - and may indeed end-up by being very different from how they are in that author's own work. 

So, the end result is that I retain a special gratitude to the author for insights that I needed; but I have ceased actively to engage with that author, and am then often more aware of my points of disagreement with him, rather than agreement. 

Yet the core debt remains - I have been changed, and for the better, by the encounter. 

I have almost reached this stage with Owen Barfield. I do continue to engage with his writings; in a cyclical fashion - but his importance to me has by-now been fed-into my own philosophy-of-life, and they have interacted with other ideas from elsewhere; have been modified; and have developed in (sometimes) different directions. 

Looking back; what I got from Owen Barfield - in a general sense - was a positive and hopeful attitude to life, deriving from his articulation of Final Participation. 

Until I encountered Final Participation, I could not see any positive direction for human life - here and now. I saw life as a binary choice between the present and the past; a present which was alienated and increasingly evil - and a past which seemed both irrecoverable and harmful to try and recover. 

It was as if an adolescent hated being an adolescent, and yearned for childhood - but knew that childhood could not be recovered - so that this mortal life had no real hope within itself: no real positive purpose. 

But through his concept of Final Participation; Barfield made me realize that there was a third possibility. Barfield terms the 'childhood' state Original Participation and the adolescent state Consciousness Soul; and he analyses how the one derived from the other through a process of unfolding development of consciousness, that stretched across different generations and historical eras. 

The 'original' participation was an immersive, passive, unconscious sense of being part of the world and knowing the spiritual; while the consciousness soul was that active, self-conscious way of thinking that finds itself cut-off - alienated - from the spiritual, and indeed from the world. 

I personally have found (since adolescence) this cut-offness, this being an 'observer' of life, trapped inside one's head - locked into one's thinking; to be appalling. It removed depth and meaning from experience, it dissolved all sense of purpose. 

This was a demotivating and depressing situation - which recurred daily, almost hourly, and needed always to be fought; but where the fighting seemed to provide no more then a subjective and ephemeral amelioration. 

For me alienation was The Problem of my adult life - and I was always seeking solutions; but never found any that were convincing, effective, strategic. 

Barfield convinced me that this development pointed forward to Final Participation which was an active, chosen, conscious state of being part-of the world; and of contributing creatively to the world. 

I realized that many of my best and most hopeful experiences in life could be seen as glimpses of this Final Participation state, but without Barfield's insights I could not make sense of them - could not learn the lessons they had to teach...

Instead I merely treasured these 'moments' (epiphanies', 'peak experiences'. moments of 'joy'); held onto them, and tried to seek them out - but with small and dwindling success... And the treasuring of these moments was itself alienating - given their temporary and very partial nature.     

But now, with Barfield's analysis to help; these moments could be seen in terms of a developmental process, a growing towards a future and better state - and this future and better state could be recognized as resurrected eternal life in Heaven. 

Having been given certain analytic tools and deep insights by Barfield; I was then starting to use them in a Christian context that I had already in-place, but which was deficient in exactly the areas that Barfield supplied. I began to see - more and more clearly - my path to the Romantic Christianity that I had always implicitly wanted but had not been able to articulate. 

That is; a Christianity that supplied the Romanticism which could cure my alienation, cut-offness, trapped-in-the-headness which had been left almost untouched (or even exacerbated) by mainstream Christianity.  

I found (I find, now) that I was was going beyond Barfield, and into areas where he would very probably not have followed; but I could not have done so without Barfield's help. 

So, now I find myself having integrated Barfield into my own thinking; having changed some of his core ideas in the process - yet I know the Barfieldian provenance of my situation; and that he ranks as one of a handful of vital sources in my own deepest convictions. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ideal is of stasis in perfection.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consecration would go something like this:

1. Original Participation happens. 

2. We recognize that it is happening. 

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

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

Not put-off until later. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All then depends on making that choice. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was the childhood of Man.

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

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

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

This is the adolescence of Man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

This leads to my final summary:

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

Romanticism comes of age... Owen Barfield's insight

Romanticism Comes of Age was the title of a collection of essays published by Owen Barfield in 1944, and also of the biography of Barfield by Simon Blaxland-De Lange in 2006.

This matter of Romanticism is one of Barfield's major statements with relevance to our times - he is saying that Rudolf Steiner's core insights are the completion of what began with the Romantic movement, and they are a necessary next step for human spiritual evolution (ie. the divine destiny for Man).

I will summarize my understanding of this matter, including adding my own framework.

1. In ancient times, especially during the hunter gatherer era, Man lived undivided from, immersed in, his perceptual environment - and mostly lacked self-awareness or a sense of separate consciousness. This was termed Original Participation by Barfield.

2. From the 1700s there was a new era of alienation for Western Man - in which consciousness becomes isolated from perception; heralded by the work of Descartes and Newton, and implemented by the Industrial Revolution. Barfield subdivided this according to the stages of its gradual increase - but sometimes termed it the era of Observing Consciousness - because Man seemed to himself to be cut-off-from and observing 'the world' - and eventually even his own thoughts.

3. At the same time, the means for healing this dichotomy by moving forward to a new era of consciousness - what Barfield terms Final Participation. This impulse, mostly unconscious, began to emerge in the Romantic movement  - associated with such English poets and thinkers as Blake, Wordsworth and (especially) Coleridge - this rapidly spread to Germany via the likes of Herder and Goethe - and then to the USA with Emerson and the circle of New England Transcendentalists.

4. The unconscious impulse towards Final Participation strengthened the longer it was resisted or, often, perverted into a regression to the previous phase of Original Participation - with notable Romantic Revivals in the late 1800s-early 1900s, then again from the 1950s culminating in the middle-late 1960s.

5. The current phase is one of un-integrated oscillations (within individuals, and within culture) between the deal bureaucratic official world of alienated Observing Consciousness and regressive, instinctive, attempts at Original Participation (often by inculcating altered states of semi-awake consciousness with dreamy trances, intoxications, sexuality as a focus for life, and other types of regression).

6. This has led to the characteristic pathologies of our time; including in Christianity which is mostly divided between Observing and Original Participations.

7. What is needed, ever more desperately, is to move forwards into Final Participation - but this must (according to both Steiner and Barfield) be within the context of a truly Christ-centred Christianity (no matter how 'heretical' or unorthodox - Christianity must be Christ centred as its primary reality).

So this is the challenge, the necessary dual destiny, both for non-Christians and Christians - to adopt Christianity as the primary framework and within that to move towards Final Participation.  

Distinguishing Final Participation from Original Participation

It was Owen Barfield who defined  Original Participation - characteristic of young childhood and the early states of Mankind's development of consciousness (roughly, the nomadic Hunter Gatherer stage); and Final Participation - which was the divinely-intended future development of consciousness that was posited to come after the modern alienated consciousness which is cut-off from participation. 

But Barfield perhaps never made it really clear how one might distinguish these types of participation - at any rate, confusion on this matter seems to be rife; and it seems usual, in my experience, for those who have encountered Barfield to list instances of what is actually Original Participation, with the claim that these are Final Participation.  

Here is my understanding of the distinction, as these states occur in modern Man:

Original Participation is experienced as a stillness, dreamlike, a trance-state - as if time is slowed or stopped or the individual has moved out of time into eternal simultaneity. 

As immersion in "the world" or divine consciousness - with loss of boundaries between individuals.

As a blending into "being-ness" - during which the individual "self" dissolves-into the larger or other consciousness. 

Ultimate reality is felt to be a state of oneness, unity; variation is only superficial because the deepest truth is singleness. 

For Original Participation we seem actually to inhabit an ocean of one-consciousness; from-which our individual consciousness sometimes emerges, briefly; rather like a crest among swirling waves that randomly gets shaped into a degree of illusory and temporary distinction and self-awareness - just long enough to realize this, before again dissolving-into the infinite sea. 

Final Participation is a dynamic state of consciousness, associated with directionality and movement of thought. 

The "self" is intensified, thinking is afoot; and consciousness absorbs into itself awareness of "the world", other people, other beings.

Awareness becomes wider and deeper - and this is awareness of other and different consciousnesses.

Ultimate reality is - at its best and highest - a state of friendship, harmony between different beings; between different but allied consciousnesses. 

Final Participation is likely to happen when we are enacting some strong and good inner motivation. When we are propelled by a creativity that is aligned and affiliated with divine creation. Perhaps while we are gathering insights that are being intuitively confirmed; or when actively-engaged in enchanted doing, or making. 

In summary - for us modern people: Original Participation happens in a state of rest or stasis, while Final Participation happens when mentally active; OP includes a loss of the sense of self, while FP includes an intensification of self; OP leads towards a sense of oneness and timelessness, while FP is a dynamic and connected form of "ongoing" consciousness.

Original Participation - the spiritual life of hunter gatherer Man (and ourselves as young chidlren)

Over the past couple of years I have fully engaged with the writings of Owen Barfield, and incorporated some of his key ideas and perspectives into my thinking; one of these is dividing human consciousness into three phases: Original Participation, the Consciousness Soul and Final Participation.

This sequence is primarily concerned with human society, or civilisation through hunter gatherer, agrarian and industrial phases and pointing at the destined future - but also corresponds to the development of Man from birth to mature adulthood.

Thus the consciousness of Original Participation can be seen both in the 'childhood of Man' (the earliest, simplest and most spontaneous society: the hunter gatherer life), and also in each Man's childhood. 

*

I became extremely engaged with understanding the hunter gatherer mind some twenty years ago - by immersion in all sorts of books on the subject; both by leading twentieth century academics (mostly anthropologists) who lived among such people (or among those who had recently been hunter gatherers) and also by looking at some examples of 'first contact' literature from previous centuries when a variety of people - e.g. explorers, missionaries - described their encounters with hunter gatherers.

My interest was then focused on spontaneous animism; or the way in which hunter gatherers - and young children - interpreted the world 'anthopomorphically', or socially; in terms of being a collection of person-like agents. So large animals (such as the bear) or environmental objects both living (such as a tree) and 'non-living' (such as a mountain) would be understood as persons, each with a character, motivations, desires and intentions.

Thus, for the hunter gatherer the whole world was social; a web of relationships. And if we can remember and introspect about our own early childhoods, we can perceive that it was the same situation for each of us; we used to see the world as social, as full of living and conscious entities.

(This may also re-emerge in altered states of cosnciousness - such as the 'paranoid' delusions of self-reference in psychotic illnesses, or in some types of brain pathology, or some types of drug intoxication. The social perspective seems to be something of a default.)

*

The perspective of Barfield brings a further aspect to this subject; which is to notice that for the hunter gatherer the Self was much less developed and distinct than it is for us (living at an advanced stage of the Consciousness Soul); the individual hunter-gatherer is not, therefore, very aware of himself as an individual - does not perceive a line of demarcation separating himself and 'the world' (when 'the world' includes both the society of other people, and the society of significant entities in the environment - bear, tree, mountain etc.).

The hunter gatherer participates in the world because he perceives no separation between himself and the world; and much the same applies to young children even nowadays. But as civilisation developed, grew, became specialised... each Man separated from the world, and perceived life as himself one one side of a line, and everything else on the other side - losing the sense of participating in the world, and feeling more-and-more like a detached observer.

Indeed, matters have reached such a point, that we even feel detached from our own thoughts - that is, the thought in our minds are not regarded as the same thing as our-selves.

The disadvantages of the modern condition are obvious enough - alienation from life, and despair. But the advantages were also perceived by Barfield, drawing from the early work of his master Rudolf Steiner. The key word is freedom. By separating our perceived self from the world, the self becomes free.

The hunter gatherer is hardly free, because he hardly feels himself separate from the flow of the human and other environment in which he lives; and much the same applies to the young child. Modern Man in the Consciousness Soul phase is, by contrast, in a position in which he may becomes free, may be able to stand apart from the influences on his life; and consciously, deliberately, in full self-awareness exercise his divine creativity as a source of original thought, and potentially other actions as well as thought (although Steiner clearly described that it was in Thinking that Man primarily was free). 

The equivalent phase to the Consciousness Soul for the developing Man is adolescence; when a man becomes conscious of himself (self-conscious) apart from other people - and this becomes 'a problem'.

As for growing-up into Final Participation; Barfield (and Steiner) would say that this seldom happens in the way that it should - it happens to few people (and only partly and intermittently) and has not yet happened to any human society. Final Participation would be a state of consciousness which retains the autonomy and freedom of The Self (which emerged during the consciousness soul) but returns to a felt-participation-in The World; but a participation of a new type.

*

The way I envisage Final Participation is that we participate in The World through loving relationships; in the sense that only an autonomous self, distinct from other selves, can love. And this means that in order to participate we must (again) recognise the world as wholly alive and conscious - just as was the case when we were young children, or as did hunter gatherers.

So, we have much to learn from hunter gatherers, and from young children - but not so as we can go back to that form of consciousness, but so that we personally - and also our modern societies - can go forward to Final Participation in which we would have 'the best of both worlds': both and simultaneously the felt-and-lived engagement with the world typical of hunter gatherers and children, and also the freedom and distinct individuality of the Consciousness Soul.

Final Participation, I would therefore regard as the destiny of each Man, and of Mankind as a whole - if we choose to accept it.

Participation in Romantic Christianity

I have found Owen Barfield's concept of "participation" - as expounded in Saving the Appearances - to be a deep and fertile insight - a gift that keeps giving, and demanding! 

This affected me so strongly because I had already recognized "alienation" as the distinctive problem of modern Man (and, especially, of me personally); and the driven-need to "cure" (or, in practice, temporarily alleviate or forget) felt-alienation, to be a core and increasing motivator of human life in our current civilization.   

In particular; I have found it necessary repeatedly to explore the relationship between participation and Christianity - having become aware that a great deal of mainstream Christianity is strongly alienating - not just in practice, but also in theory (which makes the defect incurable, without theological change).

It is important to realize that participation is the truth and reality of creation. It is not an optional extra, not merely a psychological feeling; but participation is intrinsic and unavoidable. 

Yet we modern Men are mostly unaware of the actuality of our own participation - and have erected an incoherent pretence of an external objectivity, something that supposedly exists without our consciousness, and to which we must conform - like it or not. 

So our task, as alienated modern Men, is not really to "seek participation" as such (although that is a shorthand for the process) - because participation Just Is - but to seek consciousness of the reality of our own ongoing participation. 

Mainstream Christianity often encourages participation of certain types, in specified circumstances...

For example, during prayer the person praying is encouraged to participate in a two-way and mutual communication. Something similar applies to participation in Holy Communion; or any other of the sacred rituals. 

On the other hand; the context of prayer is presented as happening in a context of objective and external fact - and something in which participation has no role. Thus; if a prayer is directed at God, then according to mainstream theology this is not a participating relationship, because God is infinitely "other", without any necessary role for human (or other) consciousness. 

The Christian is told the nature of God, creation, reality - how things work; what is appropriate ritual and symbol; what is real scripture and what it means etc... and the Christian's job is first and foremost and mandatorily to accept these "factual" (unparticipated) descriptions. 

Only after A Lot of objective, external and not-participated descriptions have been accepted, is the mainstream Christian supposed to work on participating in them. 

And, of course, such participation carries with it a more-or-less detailed expectation of what is allowed to come-out from the attempt...

In other words; the "mystical" Christian who desires participation, has already been told The Answer! 

The mainstream Christian who seeks conscious participation has been told what he will find in his mystical participation, and what it means - as a matter of objective truth; so that the seeking for participation is regarded as secondary, subjective-essentially; and an "optional extra" to the "realities" of Christianity that are objective, external - and matters about which our personal experience is irrelevant. 

Because I regard participation as necessary and intrinsic to the human condition; I regard this to be a fatal flaw in mainstream Christianity... Because participation is an unavoidable reality, thus our un-consciousness of it (an unconsciousness that is encouraged and enforced by mainstream Christianity) must be an error or an untruth. 

In sum: Seeking conscious participation in reality, including divine realities, is not some kind of optional or esoteric activity for Christians; on the contrary, it is a matter of working towards what Christianity needs to be and must become - if it is to be motivating and truthful. 

 

The relationship between evolution of human consciousness and reincarnation - a consideration of Steiner and Barfield

The idea of an evolution of human consciousness throughout history has been a part of spiritual thinking for more than a century - I know it mainly through considering the work of Rudolf Steiner, Owen Barfield and William Arkle over the past couple of years.

(I encountered the idea over thirty years ago summarized in the work of Colin Wilson, but did not then pay much attention.)

The idea of an historical evolution of consciousness seems to go-with a belief in reincarnation, because reincarnation allows each person to participate in the different stages of evolution that are aiming-at a fully divine form of consciousness.

Steiner and Barfield describe this aimed-at state in some detail - in essence it combines on the one hand a direct involvement with, and participation in, reality such as was characteristic of early man and remains characteristic of early childhood; with, on the other hand, a fully alert, self-aware, purposive and analytic consciousness which is characteristic of the adult consciousness and the modern phase of Western history. 

So, the idea is that I am personally experiencing the distinctive modern, alienated consciousness now - including the knowledge and aspiration towards a future state; however, in earlier lives I have also personally experienced, and benefited from, earlier phases of human consciousness. At some point later this life, and perhaps further lives, I may incrementally, a step at a time, learn how to combine the positive qualities of all phases. This aimed-at fully divine conscious state is what Barfield calls Final Participation.

According to Steiner and Barfield, these earlier life phases include non-incarnated lives - lives when we were conscious but had no body. So the theory is really one of multiple lives, rather than re incarnation.

Therefore the human spirit or soul (i.e. that entity which is reincarnated) is here conceptualized as undergoing an educational process toward which each life is contributing.

Repeated lives, many lives, seem to be necessary in order to allow for the very large amount of experience and learning required to bridge the gap between being a man and becoming a god. Certainly, one mortal life seems grossly inadequate for this, especially given that most human lives in history were terminated either in the womb or in early infancy - a small minority of humans have reached adulthood, and even fewer of these have had a full experience of marriage, family, maturity and growing old etc.

So, evolution of consciousness and reincarnation seem to make a neat package. However, this package is, if not incompatible with Christianity, at least somewhat alien to the structure of Christianity; which places a great deal of emphasis on the individual life which we are experiencing now, and sees 'this life' as having potentially decisive consequences for eternity.

And certainly, while reincarnation seems to described in the Bible - most notably in the case of John the Baptist apparently being a reincarnated Prophet Elijah - there isn't any scriptural description of a scheme of reincarnation as the norm. And especially not of multiple lives.

My interpretation is that ancient Christianity saw reincarnation as true, but as an exceptional possibility, done in exceptional cases and for specific purposes - rather than as the standard procedure for the majority of people.

Does an exclusion of reincarnation then rule-out the evolution of consciousness throughout human history? No, but denial of reincarnation with multiple lives does limit the role of evolution of consciousness in the lives of individual spirits or souls - it breaks the link between the evolution of consciousness in history and the evolution of my consciousness and the specific consciousnesses of every other individual.

Put differently, the arguments which (in particular) Owen Barfield makes for different types of consciousness in human history, such as his insights into the changing scope and meaning of words, may well be true; but they lose their relevance to the evolution of my consciousness and your consciousness if we were not present (in earlier lives) actually to experience the several stages of this historical evolution.

In sum, the historical evolution of consciousness is a matter of historical but not personal interest, if we ourselves were not present during that history.

My own belief is therefore that I accept Barfield's description of human consciousness having changed throughout history and in broadly the way he describes; and I also accept that we are meant (or destined) to achieve that mode of consciousness Barfield terms 'Final Participation'. But I do not accept that the two are causally linked - for instance I do not believe that I have, myself, personally participated in the historical phases of the evolution of consciousness during previous lives.   

Rather, I see the evolution of consciousness as a sequence which is recapitulated in different scales in different situations: e.g. through human history, in each person's individual development from childhood to maturity, and also in the largest cosmic scale of our salvation and divination across eternity.

(To clarify this last point: the Barfieldian sequence of Original Participation, the Consciousness Soul and Final Participation can be mapped onto the Mormon theological sequence of pre-mortal spirit life, mortal incarnate life, and post-mortal eternal incarnate life.)

I therefore would modify the Steiner/ Barfield model, since I regard this evolutionary sequence of consciousness as a basic and necessary process in terms of Man as a whole and also individual men working towards fuller divinity. And I think it is because the process is basic and necessary that we see it appearing and re-appearing here and there throughout reality; operating at many scales and across many time-frames.

Note: Previous posts on reincarnation
http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=reincarnation

Final Participation as the goal of human evolution of consciousness - what did Owen Barfield mean by it? Ideal married love as the exemplar

Owen Barfield claimed not to be very clear about the nature of that Final Participation which he saw as the destiny of human evolution of consciousness.

(Original Participation is that immersive and unselfconscious living in-the-world of hunter-gatherers and similar tribal peoples, and modern man is detached from the world, and even his own thoughts, in the Consciousness Soul).

But I think that sufficient clarity can be arrived at by considering the phases of human love through human life as an analogy (or rather, as more than an analogy - since the one is an example of the other).

Infant and young childhood love is an Original Participation; immersive and undifferentiated - the child is hardly aware of himself as distinct from his parents and family; his experience of the world is of a world alive and sentient because he is himself a part of everything he perceives. Love is everywhere (in an ideal childhood) like a sea in which everything is immersed, or like a gas in which each individual thing is merely a slight concentration of the element. We know everything, but we hardly know our-selves, and everything blurs into everything else.

With adolescence comes self-consciousness, which intensifies until the Self experiences itself as detached from the world. Indeed the Self experiences most mental activity as detached from itself - our Selves are cut-off from all experience, looking out upon the world, such that they world seems uncertain and unreal (how do we know that it is real), and indeed the Self is also experienced as perhaps unreal - since it changes, and can only rely upon itself for validation.

The point of Consciousness soul is 'freedom' in the sense of agency: to be free we need to be able to live from our-Selves (our true Selves). The consciousness soul is the condensation and concentration of the self, such that we can work from it. This is, indeed, a divine state of being - and that is what this phase is necessary to human spiritual progression.

To evolve towards a fully divine state of being, we must pass-through the Consciousness Soul. But it is meant to be a transitional phase, a short-lived phase - a phase we merely touch upon in passing...

This Consciousness Soul state of consciousness is also the state of modern culture. Modern culture is stuck, arrested, in stasis in the consciousness Soul - so intensely subjective that subjectivity itself is destroyed - experiencing the external world only via perceptions and instruments, and unsure about the reliability of these senses and mechanisms... THE problem being epistemological - how do I know if I really know? No answer forthcoming (because the assumption is of a gulf between the self and the world) and Modern Man is stuck in Consciousness Soul - held, trapped, imprisoned by the assumptions of modern culture.

Modern Man is stuck in Consciousness Soul - and that was not, and is not, meant to be - the CS is meant to be just a phase (albeit a necessary phase) on the way to Final Participation. Being stuck in the Consciousness Soul is a precise analogy to being stuck in adolescence, unable to grow-up, paralysed in that state of alienation, in which uncertainty erodes all potential solutions - and unable to move on.

Final Participation is like the ideal of spouse - indeed married love is a type of Final Participation.

In married love at its highest, each individual retains the full self-consciousness of the Consciousness Soul, but has a certainty of contact with another, distinct, self-conscious human being. There is no problem of communication, indeed there is a certainty of communication. Each party is not trapped in the nutshell of their own skulls but is able to share, participate in the life of the other, but with full self-integrity and self-awareness.

On the one hand individuality is assumed and valued, and is part of the essence of married love; on the other hand there is no problem of communication between these individuals - because the universal immersive state of Original Participation still is real and exists as much as it ever did. We are still part of each other and of everything - but with Final Participation our individuality, our Self, has been clarified, strengthened... has become a free, autonomous agent.

Final Participation is Original Participation plus the Consciousness Soul - it is the sea of infant family love, plus the individual island of adolescent self-awareness. 

There is no desire among loving spouses either for a return to the detachment of the Consciousness Soul (the state before love) or to return to the immersive and undifferentiated love of childhood family. They have the best of both worlds. The differentness and individuality and self-awareness of the other is essential, and so is the given background of universal communication.

In conclusion, when married love works as it is meant to, then it is a species of Final Participation - which is to say a state beyond Consciousness Soul, a moving-forwards and not a regression (or atavism).

Culturally, human destiny is to have an analogous relationship to ideal married love, but inclusive of all reality - and that is what Barfield meant by Final Participation.

Owen Barfield's epistemological terminology of 'consciousness', contrasted with Rudolf Steiner's epistemology of 'thinking'

Owen Barfield regarded himself as a disciple of Rudolf Steiner - in a not-altogether healthy way; because it exerted a constraining effect on his potential and caused Barfield to leave out - unexplained - considerable aspects of his world view. 

Instead Barfield, at a certain point, would merely recommend his audience to 'read Steiner'; which is, for most people, way too much to ask; since locating and extracting the undoubtedly gold insights from Steiner's voluminous dross of error and nonsense is the work of several years hard labour...

I speak as one of not-many of Barfield's great admirers who actually have put-in these years of work. Having done so; I was rather surprised to find that Barfield makes a very noticeable change to Steiner's terminology from The Philosophy of Freedom (insights from-which form an essential basis to Barfield's schema as expressed in (for example) Saving the Appearances, Unancestral Voice, Speaker's Meaning and History, Guilt and Habit.

How do we attain knowledge of reality, and is such knowledge indeed possible? This question forms the basis of that branch of 'modern' (post-medieval) philosophy called epistemology. 

However, the modern attempt to make epistemology fundamental (as does so much 19th and 20th century philosophy) is actually an error, and has gone nowhere. 

Nowhere; because epistemology takes-for-granted the primary level of philosophy, which is metaphysics: that discourse which tries to describe our most fundamental assumptions about the nature of reality. 

Thus, both Steiner and Barfield fail to describe their primary assumptions about reality before they embark describing their model of knowledge - which has the effect of giving these models a rather arbitrary, take-it-or-leave it quality. 

(For instance, both Steiner and Barfield ought to describe what they assume about God before they describe what they believe about knowledge; since for them both the possibility of knowledge depends on a personal creator God who has certain attitudes towards Men.) 

Nonetheless, since I share broadly the same metaphysical assumptions as Steiner and Barfield, I regard their models of knowledge as very useful - which is all that can reasonably be asked of any simple model of reality; especially one that aims at a time-less hence 'static', cross-sectional description of reality. 

The following is a comparison of the terminological equivalents of the epistemological models of Steiner and Barfield: 

Rudolf Steiner

Percept + Concept = Thinking

Owen Barfield

Perception + Thinking = Consciousness

The potential confusion when reading these authors is that they use thinking to mean different things: Steiner's thinking is the end result of our perceptions of the world being understood and interpreted by concepts. 

But for Barfield, thinking is (more or less) what Steiner means by concepts': the processes by which we understand and interpret perceptions  - or 'images' in the case of ancient Man, whose perceptions came packaged with meanings. 

Steiner thus talks a lot about 'thinking' of a particular kind (e.g. 'pure' thinking, or 'heart-thinking') as being the main aim of modern Man; the destined path ahead. This thinking (says Steiner) can be cultivated by meditative exercises which are intended to (but actually do not!) promote the desired kind of thinking. The desired kind of thinking is itself True Knowledge - and this is therefore Steiner's epistemology.

By contrast; Barfield talks about the destined and desirable future state of Consciousness; which is self-aware, active and chosen (rather than unconscious, passive and automatic): he calls this Final Participation; and for Barfield this is True Knowledge - as well as the proper aim of created Man (because Final Participation is to join with God in the work of creation).

After struggling to 'get' this for a few years; I think the above equivalence is broadly correct; and might be helpful to those who wish to read both Steiner and Barfield.   

The link between the evolution of consciousness and reincarnation in Owen Barfield's thought

Owen Barfield's central idea, and the one for which he is best known, is the evolution of consciousness - meaning that the nature of human consciousness has changed throughout history such that people in different eras and places had very different relationships with the world: these changes fall into three general categories of Original Participation, the Observing Consciousness and Final Participation.

He traces the evolution of consciousness mainly by observing the characteristic changes in the meaning and usage of words, which seem to display a cohesive development - and also looks at other cultural evidence. Barfield's idea of evolution in this regard is not natural selection, but a developmental process (akin to the growth and differentiation of a living entity): the emergence and unfolding of human destiny, interacting with the agency and free will of individual humans.

What is seldom appreciated or emphasized is that for Barfield the evolution of consciousness is divinely designed, and bound-up with reincarnation. To put it concisely, the reason for the evolution of consciousness through history is that this provides the necessary conditions by which successive reincarnations of  human spirits may learn what they require to develop towards divinity.

So, for Barfield (although this is hinted at much more often than made explicit) it is God who 'provides' the evolution of consciousness in order that reincarnating human spirits may have the necessary experiences they need to growth towards the ultimate goal of Final Participation - whereby firstly, and stepwise, the Ego or Self has become separated from its original 'unconscious' immersion in the environment and strong in its purpose and will - awake, alert and in-control; then secondly the now strong and purposive Self/ Ego comes back into a participatory relationship with The World.

To underlying rationale (the 'point') of the evolution of consciousness is, for Barfield, bound-up with the reality of reincarnation; and therefore those (such as myself) who disbelieve in reincarnation as the normal human destiny, yet who believe in the evolution of consciousness, need to be clear that we differ from Barfield; and are, indeed, denying the main reason for evolution of consciousness as Barfield understood it.

To put it bluntly: those individuals who are sympathetic towards Barfield's core idea of the evolution of consciousness yet who do not believe in reincarnation, need to explain what the evolution of consciousness is for - if not to provide the conditions necessary for educating the reincarnating human spirit.  

**

Note: My personal 'take' on reincarnation is that it is not the normal human destiny - but that reincarnation happens to some individuals for particular purposes - for instance, a sage, prophet or saint may be a reincarnate who has returned to assist in the divine work - indeed I suspect that many of the wise intuitive individuals such as Rudolf Steiner and perhaps Owen Barfield himself, who claim direct personal knowledge of the reality of incarnation, are themselves actually some of these rare and atypical persons. As a believer in Mormon theology, my explanation for the evolution of consciousness is that humans have a pre-mortal spiritual existence before being voluntarily incarnated into life on earth - and the evolution of consciousness allows pre-mortal spirits to be 'placed' - by God - into the historical era which best addresses their personal spiritual needs: i.e. their specific needs for mortal experience of a particular kind.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=reincarnation 

Renaming Barfield's categories for the developmental-evolution of human consciousness

I have very often used Owen Barfield's categories to describe the evolution of consciousness over the past three years. These are Original Participation (OP), the Consciousness Soul (CS) and Final Participation (FP).

However, I have not been happy about the actual names, which are partly uninformative and, as I now have come to feel, somewhat inaccurate.

Original Participation is not truly a participation in reality and creation because it is a passive and unconscious state. The Consciousness Soul (this term comes from Steiner, rather than Barfield) is simply uninformative. And  the term 'Final' in Final Participation is not descriptive - but rather it informs us that this is the qualitative mode of divine consciousness, and therefore no further evolution (except quantitatively) is possible.

So I will be trying-out a new set of terms: Original Immersion, Detached Agency and Agent Participation.

Original Immersion (this was OP)

This refers to the original state of consciousness for Man. Original in the sense of its being both the mode of consciousness of young children, and also of early tribal man - foragers/ hunter-gatherers.

It is a state of passive and unconscious immersion in reality - 'animistic', regarding the world as alive and conscious.

There is little in the way of a separate self - therefore little in the way of agency. The content of thought is mostly caused.

The child's thinking is therefore essentially a consequence, rather than being internally-generated. So, the child is not 'creative' - does not originate or generate thinking. 

It is also something of a 'twilight' state, in some ways intermediate between the awake and asleep state of modern Western adults - and a modern adult can experience Original Immersion in some altered states of consciousness such as trances, delirium and certain 'drugged' states and psychosis (for example).

Detached Agency (this was CS)

This refers to the characteristic state of consciousness of an awake, alert, modern Western Man.

Our self is detached from the world, observing it through the senses; and we are strongly aware of this separate self and its agency in thinking.

The evolutionary step is in agency - thinking becomes a primary cause, self-caused: thinking emerges-from the self intrinsically. Thinking need not be a consequence of external factors.

With detached agency, Man becomes creative - originates thinking. However, this thinking is at the level of ideas and imaginations. These thought must be translated into the external world - by 'actions'. And actions are known only via sensory perceptions.

Therefore in the stage of the process is indirect. Thinking does Not participate in reality 

Initially the self may feel cut-off, and doubt the reality of the world ('solipsism'); and ultimately - by inference - may doubt its own reality.

The agent self experiences the world as perceptual/ sensory input that is made-sense-of by reasoning - i.e. a matter of facts and theories. Thus is it is literalistic, scientistic, materialist and reductionist. Reality is dead/ not-alive.

There is no experience of objective meaning nor purpose nor relationships: these are just theories.
Subjectivity is the dominant experience; objectivity is conceptualised sensation.

Agent Participation (this was FP)

The thinking of the creative and agent self participates in reality - directly. This is the divine mode of thinking.

That is, thinking is real, and reality is thought - and there is a unity, no separation - therefore reality is changed (expanded) by thinking.

So, with Agent Participation, the Man directly knows reality - not indirectly via senses and reason or facts and theories. Direct knowing means there is no mediation, which means that there is unity.

For a divinity, reality is 'made' by thought; and known directly because the reality is the divine thought.

However, Agent Participation is partial, from a perspective. Thus some of reality is known directly, and creativity has also a limited scope. 

Thus, in Agent Participation, everything than can be thought is real - but only some things can be thought. Everything than can be thought is known - only some things can be thought.

And in Agent Participation with respect to creativity: everything that can be thought is original, uncaused and self-generated (although, naturally, it may and probably will use the existing knowledge of that self).

Everything that can be thought is participated-in, and therefore this thinking is directly creative (without mediation) - but only some things can be thought and only some kinds of creativity are possible.


The idea is that scheme describes the (ideal) development of a child to an adult who is divine - being a son or daughter of God: Original Imersion being young childhood, transforming to Detached Agecy at Adolescence. Most modern men are arrested at this adolescence of consciousness, but almost all will have periods of Agent Participation - even though they may be brief, feeble, and not taken seriously.

The scheme also describes the development of human society from earliest Man through modern Man to the divinely destined future of man. And it describes states of consciousness which we each may move-between - even during one day of our lives.

But the main 'lesson' or value of these categories is that Agent Participation is what we ought to - and need to aim at in our lives - as indeed the primary aim of a Christian.

In other words, these categories are a description of spiritual progression, theosis, sanctification or divinisation. Therefore, Agent Participation cannot be achieved except insofar as a person is Good and motivated by Love.

Because to participate-in creation is to participate in the loving work of God, it is the most profound alliance-with God.

Hence the absolute nature of the first and second commandments: Love of God, and of Neighbour (our neighbour being our co-participant). Only thus may creation proceed.


Note: These three states are - strictly speaking - 'polarities' in the sense that although they can be objectively distinguished (as above) they cannot be fully separated or detached one from another. For example, even a young child is not fully without agency or creativity; and certainly some hunter gatherers display these traits at some times.  

In other words, these are extremes or emphases of a unitary process of human consciousness. Any categorical scheme, when applied to a process, can only result in such polarities - because ultimately the unity cannot be divided without destruction of its nature. 

Owen Barfield's concept of participation provides the basis of what is needed for Christians, as of 2025

Owen Barfield's concept of participation provides the basis of what is needed for Christians, as of 2025 and going forward. 

Barfield assumes that participation in Divine Creation is both our nature as created beings; and also the proper aim of created beings. 

Creation is in the direction of developing participation in the direction of freely creating in greater consciousness. 

More exactly, that this is our proper aim as Christian beings who have chosen to live by love and therefore in harmony with God's creative will. 

The reason why participation is so centrally and vitally important to Christians, is that it is by participation that there is creation in the first place. 

Creation is itself (if properly understood) a matter of participation; because creation is (as all Christians acknowledge) primarily a matter of love. 

For there to be love in this "relational" and personal Christian sense; there must be distinct beings each with the capacity for loving - and then love needs to be mutually chosen.

The cohesion of divine creation should therefore be understood as an ongoing process of harmonizing the motivations of beings; harmonization through the love between beings. 

In different words; divine creation is (partly) a matter of once indifferent beings, coming to participate-in the creative direction of God's loving nature; through loving God and loving one-another. 

It is this love between Beings that is the basis of the harmony that is creation.

But divine creation is also living, dynamic, continuing, increasing... And by the Christian understanding it is God's intention that Men become fully (and divine) Sons of God; share in the work of creation, and who each contribute something unique (because from themselves), new, and additional-to creation. 

Therefore, the direction of creation is towards greater consciousness and choice among beings - towards an increasingly-active participation - which change must be freely-chosen by each being. 

That is to say; there is a change through time from a mostly passive, mostly unconscious, harmony of creation in which individuals largely serve the divine will and each does not bring much new and additional to the whole...

And towards what must necessarily be a more collegial participation in the work of creation; by which every single being that chooses to live by love, is consciously enabled to contribute that which is unique in himself and which he learns to the totality of creation.

Final Participation needs to aim at participation in Divine Creation, not "The World"

It has often been recognized that modern Man is alienated from life, feels cut-off by his consciousness from both the divine and from the "Spirit World". 

A desire to alleviate this alienation is behind a lot of spiritual activity, and many of the spiritual "movements" of the past couple of centuries. 

The problem was incisively analysed by Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield: both were clear that we should not, and indeed could not effectively, "go back" to earlier modes of unalienated consciousness.

Instead we need (and must, unless we are not to suffer spiritual death and self-chosen damnation) to move forward to a new kind of integration with the divine and the spirit world: this desired state Barfield termed Final Participation. 

(Named on the basis that participation-in the world is the opposite of alienation-from it.) 

Steiner believed (or, at least, asserted) that Final Participation could be attained by spiritual exercises in a new kind of meditative practice, and made schemes of such training - but after a century of near-total failure, it is reasonable to conclude that such techniques/ methods/ training don't work - or don't work well enough to make a significant difference.

I think the reason that Final Participation cannot be achieved by such procedures is partly that FP must be part of a Christian life and operate in that context. Christianity is necessary, and must come first.

(A fact sometimes apparently denied, and often backgrounded or down-played by Steiner and Barfield - certainly it was not clearly explained in terms of God's motivations.) 

And also that this kind of participating consciousness requires to be motivated by Love. And Love cannot be attained by techniques, nor can it be had simply by deciding. 

It is false to try and make ourselves love this or that (or everything). 

Therefore, Final Participation needs to begin from actual Love; and build from that.

I now strikes me that this also makes sense from the perspective of what exactly is is that Final Participation should desire to participate-in.   

We should not - as Christians - desire to participate in The World, not the entirety of reality - because this includes evil. The attempt to participate in "everything" is not Christian, but part of oneness spirituality - which has a very different aim than salvation*. 

Instead; we should aim to participate in Divine Creation. That is, we should aim to participate in that of this world (and only that) which is a "product" of Love. 

Not try to participate in the whole world, but to align myself with Divine Creation... I find this insight to be clarifying! 

(Whether the insight will lead to greater success in my seeking of Final Participation remains to be seen.)

*Note added. To clarify - those who wish to participate in the world, the whole world; do so on the basis that all is one - and the distinction between good and evil is illusory because this mortal world is illusory. I would have thought it fairly obvious that this is not what Christians believe; despite that many who call themselves Christian espouse it. Christians should (surely?) believe that evil is real, not illusory. Although - in this mortal life - we cannot help but be involved in evil, this ought to be discerned, and repented. So it does not make sense to have an an ideal participating in everything that goes on in this world. Our hope is to be resurrected to eternal life in Heaven, where everything may be participated, because all derives from love.   

What should we do when beauty, truth and virtue become separated? The example of Owen Barfield

When beauty, truth and virtue become separated, they pretty soon die.

Indeed (as I have implied before, in my books on the corruption of science, and the decline of genius) - when there is a move from the unity of the traditional Christian religiousness (with residues of Original Participation) to a concentration of life-energies upon just-beauty (artistic romanticism), just-truth (science and the Wissenschaftlich factual-systematic academic subjects) or just-virtue (some types of Protestant) - then there is at first an enhanced achievement in that specialised field.

The exceptional productivity of first generation atheists (i.e. childhood traditional Christians, who become atheist and then channel their religious energies into 'their subject') provides a misleading, ultimately false, impression of a wonderful future of enhanced attainment from rejecting religion and specialising in some narrower aspect of Culture. 

Thus, first-generation atheists who become commited artists, scientists and ethicists (such as 'fundamentalist' Protestants, or the existentialists) may achieve genius-level work, when they have been brought-up as traditionalists, and assimilated and retained a unified thought structure from that.

But with the next generation, brought-up as atheists, and without any coherent unity of world-view, the specialised art, science and religion withers and begins to die - because separate organs cannot live independently of the whole organism.

Art for arts sake, science-as-religion, purely ethical philosophy (or Christianity indifferent to beauty and truth) are all non-viable; and will sustain in-name-only, only by assimilating to mainstream secularity - bureaucracy and the mass media...


OK, but what then? Above all others, Owen Barfield pointed the way forward; perhaps because he was born in 1897; yet (ahead of his time, in this respect) he was brought-up in a thoroughly secular fashion - as an atheist, in an atheistic leftist radical household. Therefore Barfield could not revert to a childhood Original Participation religiousness; but in seeking to overcome the fragmentation and death of Life, he could only move forward.

Barfield was able to move forward, because he had extreme appreciation and ability in all three of the main specialised capacities (art, science, ethics). He had an intense appreciation of poetry and music and great ability as a writer; a brilliantly philosophical rigour; and an two-sided sensitivity to contemporary ethical collapse (he saw both the profound faults of the past, and the utter inadequacy of contemporary 'solutions').

Then, Barfield had the intellectual honesty to recognise that the prevalent situation was unacceptable and non-viable - it was, in a word, evil. The only possible answer to this gathering, unavoidable crisis and denied-decline into damnation, was that the separation of life into 'watertight compartments' must be overcome. A new synthesis was required.

Barfield had also the rare insight that going-back was simply not an option. Barfield argued that a reversion to earlier forms was undesirable, because it was precisely analogous to an adult trying to become a child; and for the same reason it was anyway impossible.

Since an atavistic reversion to past unity was not going to happen, and the present disunity was evil and unsustainable; we simply must move forward to a new kind of unity. 


Barfield saw that the broken threads of Culture must be rewoven, if we personally and socially were to avoid an incremental descent into hell-on-earth; but rewoven in a new and unprecedented way. Specifically, re-woven in full consciousness and with full choice.

Past unity was essentially traditional, hence unconscious and unexamined; the future unity could only be freely chosen, and as such conscious.

Future unity - which he called Final Participation - was not something that would happen-to us, but something we must each make-happen. So, if we did not make that choice and effort, it will not happen. We must know what we are doing, and then do it.

Moving on to a new unity and synthesis of Good is - unavoidably - up to each of us, personally: starting now.   


References: Owen Barfield's main books on this theme are are probably Romanticism Comes of Age, Saving the Appearances, World's Apart, and Unancestral Voice. All are equally good, although all take sustained effort to understand - each has a different character. 

What is the meaning of "Romantic" in Romantic Christianity - and how does it differ from "pleasure-seeking" or psychotherapy"?

We need clearly to distinguish between, on the one hand, the "psychotherapeutic" aspects of spirituality and religion; and, on the other hand, participation. 

Romantic Christianity is primarily and essentially about participation, not pleasure or therapy. 

(Although Romanticism without Christianity usually devolves into pleasure-seeking and/or therapy.) 

Therapy focuses on emotions and feelings; while participation is a fact about reality. 

Participation is the fact that we are involved-with reality; including that our "inner life" is involved with reality. 

In other words; we are not separate from reality, we are not cut-off from reality, even in our innermost thinking and feeling - even though most modern people feel that they are cut-off; even though we wrongly believe that we are observers rather than participants in "the universe". 

So, participation means that we Just-Are (like it or not, know it or not, want it or not) participants in divine creation. 

The felt-need of Romanticism is to be aware that we are participants in reality. 

Thus, Romanticism is a good impulse for Christians - it is spiritually positive - because it is the aspiration to become more spiritually-developed, more God-like in our consciousness of reality. 

**

Psychotherapy is not only distinguishable from Romanticism, but also the two can be separated and dissociated; so that we can have one without the other: we can have therapy without participation, and participation without therapy. 

Obviously, there can be therapy without participation - and this is the normal, mainstream and dominant form of therapy in modern Western civilization. 

(It is also what historically happened to Romanticism when it rejected Christianity - we got the pleasure-seeking of Byron instead of the participation-seeking of Coleridge; and a century later, we got the therapeutic intent of Jung instead of the participation-seeking of Steiner and Barfield.)

For instance, people can be made to feel happier or less-miserable, by distraction from reality (as by the mass and social media), or by suppression of awareness (by inner-materialism and bureaucracy). 

Distraction-from and suppression-of awareness of the fact of participation both diminish participation and are anti-Romantic. 

And there can be participation without therapy. 

This happens when recognition of our involvement with reality makes us feel more miserable here-and-now. 

This might be through a recognition of evil in our situation; or by recognizing the tragic quality of a life that ends with death (tragic even when death has "lost its sting" from resurrection); and of a mortal earthly world of endemic degeneration, disease, and loss.

In sum; Romanticism is not some form of pleasure-seeking; but is instead a recognition of the benefits, indeed I would say necessity, of consciously recognizing the fact of our continuing-participation in God's created reality.  

 

Recognizing Final Participation - inspiration plus personal creativity

If we assume that because Final Participation (FP) is our destiny, what God wants from us at this stage of things; then perhaps it ought not to be impossibly difficult or rare. Perhaps we should expect to see Final Participation in our own lives; and in those of at least some people whose work is recoded in the public domain. 

Maybe the difficulty in locating Final Participation is in recognizing it as something genuinely different and new, and therefore misclassifying it under old categories - because the old categories are all we know.  

To clarify; Final Participation is an engagement with reality, in which we bring to bear our own creativity - to participate in creating. 

This could be participation with divine creation (this is what I understand to happen in Heaven); or participation with another person's created work - perhaps someone from the past. 

This can serve as an illustration - taking the example of JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (LotR). 

Two widely known categories of engagement with life, with works; could be termed 'projection' and 'channeling' - and I will contrast these with Final Participation.

Projection

Projection is not intentionally a participation, because it describes what happens when a reader of Tolkien projects his own concerns onto the book. 

This seems to be the usual practice of Tolkien mass-fandom. Except minimally; the projecting fan-reader does not experience what Tolkien himself felt or intended; but instead uses the book (selectively and distortingly) as fuel for his own interests. 

For example such a fan might read LotR as-if it were a "sword and sorcery" novel, being interested only by the fights, magic, monsters, spectacle etc; and either not-noticing, skipping-over or forgetting the other material. Or, to judge by the content of one genre of fan-fictions; quite a few readers even seem to read Tolkien in a subversive fashion, as fuel for their personal sexual fantasies.   

Therefor projection is not a form of 'participation' except very minimally, unconsciously, unintentionally; because the intent is to impose oneself upon the-other. 

Channeling

The ideal behind the form of participation I am calling channeling, is that the reader become so totally immersed in the work that he identifies completely with the author. 

This is a contemplative, not creative, ideally-non-participating form of engagement - because the ideal is that the reader be passive, absorptive, and reflective. The reader seeks to lose-himself-in the work 

This is, indeed, the form that has been called 'inspiration' and which used-to be (in the pre-modern era) the form that so-called 'creativity' took. The 'creator' was supposed to be a clear-channel for God/ The Gods/ The Muses - and himself to play no personal role in what emerged.

In other words; with channeling, with inspired work, the ideal is non-participation. 

This channeling is therefore a particular example of what Owen Barfield termed Original Participation - which is the primal relationship with the world of the child or the early tribal Man. It does have elements of participating; but only in the secondary sense that we are then (and almost fully) engaged with the world, with life, with other beings. But (when channeling works) we are so immersed in the flow of external things, that while our own participation in them is inevitable, it is intentionally minimal.  

Perhaps the ideal of the medieval sculptor working on one of the great cathedrals might serve as an illustration. He is contented to be anonymous, and forgotten, and to work in exactly the same style as every other mason - because his personal nature should 'stand-aside' and should not have anything to do with the product. I have heard of musicians (conductors and soloists) who regard their interpretations likewise: they try to identify so closely with the composer that they lose-themselves in the perormance altogether. 

In terms of Tolkien, this is perhaps the ideal of the best kind of literary critic of the old school: he attempts to expound Tolkien, and not to 'interfere' by interjecting personal views or evaluations. In particular, he is very wary of 'projection', which he regards as itself a gross and unscholarly error, leading to distortions such as anachronism.  

Final Participation

For an example of FP we need to go to Tolkien himself, in his writing of Lord of the Rings; and to that activity which he termed "subcreation". 

This - I suggest - is the relationship between JRRT and his 'source material' - which came from the author's engagement with his academic subject of philology (the language-focused study of old texts), and his other concerns such as mythology, and the matter of England. 

I believe that Tolkien not only had a deep immersion in his sources; but that he also went beyond immersion in his 'sources'. That is; JRRT went beyond the contemplative-passive processes of channeling, and brought his own creativity to bear on the material that he was experiencing from-within. 

There are innumerable examples. Tolkien's elves are rooted in Icelandic, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic material from his philosophical studies - the words for elves, their histories, their implications (as discussed by Tom Shippey in Roots and Branches); but Tolkien also brought a deep and intense personal interest and concern with elves - which he envisaged as an ideal type of certain aspects of Men; blessed with innate health and extreme longevity, greater love of the earth, greater skills and intelligence, and magical powers. 

And yet Tolkien felt a need to explain (to himself, primarily) how and why it was that elves were (more or less) estranged from, then replaced by, Men - who became rulers of this earth; despite that Men seemed inferior, overall. 

To generate acceptable answers to these (and other) questions about elves, problems about myth, England and so forth; Tolkien needed to go beyond existing material and theories: he needed to enlist his own creativity. 

I consider Tolkien's writing of LotR as a publicly-available example of Final Participation. 

In the first place JRRT was inspired by many, already existing, source materials; and had immersed himself in these materials so that he could, when needed or desired, 'channel'/ expound/ explain these materials in their own terms, in the context of the times and places of their composition. 

But in the second place Tolkien wanted to do more than just passively be-inspired-by; he wanted actively to generate something new by bringing to bear from-himself to participate with that which others had created.  

This was (pretty much) what he termed subcreation. 

To generalize, I think it would therefore be reasonably accurate to state that:

Final Participation = Inspiration plus Personal Creativity 

As such, examples can be generated from other areas of the arts, sciences etc. The pianist Glenn Gould did not just 'channel' Bach (as some have wrongly claimed), because, although he was steeped in Bach's creative mind and intent - Gould also added his own creativity, to make something participated. A synthesis, rather than recreation. 

A creative scientist of genius must, of course, build upon the valid science of his precursors; but as well as selecting from among the already-existing scientific literature that he deeply understands in its own terms (which might be said to 'inspire' him); and as well as extrapolating this work; the great scientist will bring something new, something original: from himself - in order to make a qualitative breakthrough.  

In sum; I hope the above might help make clearer what is meant by Final Participation; and to help recognize when it occurs in our own lives. 

The un-understandability of abstraction: or, let's be clear about God (reflections on Owen Barfield)

First, the abstract version...

Abstract thinking, thinking about things in general, is very difficult - so difficult that it is difficult to know when you know - and when you have got lost in abstraction.

A lot of the philosophy I read is made more difficult by lacking a basis in metaphysics - the philosophy just 'hangs there' in mid air - not really explaining, lacking context.

It is an advantage of theology when God is put into position at the top of the explanatory scheme - rooting the further speculations. But then again, for most philosophical writers, God is conceptualised with extreme abstraction - impersonally, as a collection of attributes or non-attributes.

Only when God is understood as a person with personal attributes; a man with a plan; a man who has motivations, hopes and can feel sorrow and joy: our Father... only with such concrete clarity are the abstract schemes rooted.

I find that what was a complex and hard-to-follow explanation often enough becomes something simple enough to tell a child - when expressed in terms of what God wants.

All this is a factor when authors leave-out God. They may leave Him out because they suppose they don't believe him (although their scheme entails implicitly that they actually do), or in deference to the conventions of the genre that they are writing in, or in hope of attracting a wider audience.

But there is a price to pay - misunderstanding by others, on top of the danger of self-misunderstanding.

Is abstraction more explanatory? Maybe not. Maybe the greater scope of abstract explanations is merely the result of a wider deficit of understanding?

*

Now the concrete version...

Understanding the work of Owen Barfield has been made far more difficult than it need be by the omission of God from the explanatory scheme. In particular, the failure to link the philosophical scheme to what God wants, and why.

For example, great effort is made to explain the evolution of human consciousness through three phases from Original Participation and aiming at Final Participation - but it is never explicitly explained why, what this epic drama of millennia is all for. Nor is it explained why God needs to achieve His goals by such a long-drawn-out and unreliable process. 

Now, all this can be answered, and the answers are implicit and can be quarried out. Barfield was a Christian. But the fact is that most of Owen Barfield's advocates and admirers were and are not Christian (or, if they are, never mention the fact) - and indeed may be 'post-modernists.

Clearly, the modern Barfeldians do not realise that the evolution of consciousness metaphysic is neither-here-nor there without God.

In the first place, it is a metaphysical scheme which, as with all metaphysical schemes, intrinsically cannot be proven empirically. Barfield says he came upon it by studying the changing meaning of words, but that is autobiography. Observations of changing meanings of words can be 'explained' in innumerable ways that do not entail a fundamental restructuring of metaphysical reality. 

But secondly - even if it is true (which I believe it is!) the evolution of consciousness has no significance unless there is some reason for us to live by it - we need to know whether the new metaphysics of consciousness is Good for us to believe, no just whether it is coherent and consistent with the facts.

I presume that Barfield left-out God partly in order to make his work accessible to a wide audience who did not share his Christianity, and partly because he did not himself see his work as flowing-from his Christian belief - but rather as pointing-at it. Whatever the reason, there was a price to pay - and the price was:

1. His work became very difficult to understand , due to its abstract nature. and,

2. People who misunderstood his work were unable to detect their own misunderstanding - again due to the difficulties of extended abstract thinking. Consequently,

3. Most writer about Owen Barfield seem to leave out God, and thereby implicitly reduce the significance of his work to being some kind of conceptual metaphysical schema simply floating in a space somewhere in-between our personal lives and the ultimate basis of reality.

*

The trouble is that when we force or allow ourselves to be crystal clear about God, it comes across as childish which puts off most intellectuals and academics - thereby destroying ones' audience. It also makes things so clear and easy to understand that people immediately feel able to mock, criticise and to reject - whereas an abstract scheme can seldom be understood well enough to reject it outright, and will be ignored rather than mocked.

So, what should Barfield have done?

Well, I am not sure how Barfield understood God - and probably he had the rather unclear conception which is usual among most Anglicans - that is, he probably regarded God as in some symbolic way our Heavenly Father, but probably felt embarrassed and uncomfortable about 'anthropomorphising' God - and preferred to discuss Him abstractly, symbolically and so on.

But my own view of God is derived from Mormonism, and is straightforwardly anthropomorphic and concrete - also I believe that we can and do know what God wants for us and from us in general terms: he wants us to grow spiritually to become divine like him, so we can eventually have a relationship of 'friendship' rather than a parent-child relationship (or rather, a perfected loving relationship like that between a grown-up child and his Father rather than like the relationship of a perfect Father and his infant son).

Anyway... I think that what Barfield needs is something on the lines of explaining that God wants us to grow up, and attain adult consciousness (which is Final Participation) - but we must ourselves want this to happen. It can happen by the experience of living - experience is necessary, therefore the process takes time.

By our innate agency, we are free to accept or reject each step in our spiritual growth - and this applies not only to the individual soul but to the (various type of) group soul. The individual soul can achieve final participation (albeit temporarily and imperfectly during mortal life), but at the level of the group soul - e.g. the nation, or civilisation, the process is much slower.

This happens because, as the Bible makes clear, God works with 'people's as well as with individuals - because individuals are actually, in fact, like it or not - part of peoples. We began as immersed in a group consciousness, and that link to the group remains. 

The stages in the evolution of consciousness which we may observe in history are the deliberations of the groups soul in moving through the developmental process form childhood consciousness, through adolescent consciousness - but none have yet reached adult consciousness (and indeed the current most advanced civilisation has turned-away-from adult consciousness).

I could go on - but this is just supposed to illustrate how the ideas are easier to express and understand when they are put into the full context.

*

Men need, Men must have, purpose - and purpose entails a divine plan and the reasons for it - reasons which we can understand and agree to.

If we leave-out purpose from our explanations then those explanations will be abstract, and become very difficult to understand, and more difficult to make sense of; and easy to misunderstand without realizing...

But if we include purpose, clearly and explicitly... everything gets much simpler. The difficulty is then related more to doing what is required, rather than (as so often) getting stuck on trying to understand what it is that we are supposed to do.