What kind of thinking we should be aiming for, and the essence of Anthroposophy, in 10 minutes (from Joel Wendt)

This is a very dense video describing that thinking for which I believe we ought to be aiming; here termed Pure Thinking. 

It is also described as the true meaning of "Anthroposophy" - which is not content; but a method or path or state-of-being, "leading from the spiritual in Man, to the spiritual in creation" (This being my translation of Anthroposophical Leading Thoughts Number 1) . 

I have also called Pure Thinking primary thinking and heart-thinking. It produces the experience that Owen Barfield called Final Participation - that is, a thinking that contains awareness of its own participation in the creation of reality. 

What it is, and what it does; the above 10 minute video from Joel Wendt will tell you.

"How to do it" is something that depends on motivation, and a proper motivation cannot be conjured to order... 

I would say that Pure Thinking can only happen in consequence of a motivation from love and to Good, which could be analyzed further as a motivation towards the transcendentals of truth, beauty and virtue. 

Thus I have experienced Pure Thinking when doing science or philosophy, when creating some artistic artefact or performance, and when genuinely trying to discern the right choice or path in life. 

But I cannot long sustain it, and the attempt ends it; nor can I have it for wanting or trying...

Probably because such motivation is usually a mask for the desire for a pleasurable experience, to achieve some-thing for egotistical or expedient reasons, or from wanting to escape the mundane boredom of everyday living.

Good motivation therefore comes before Pure Thinking - yet Pure Thinking is the best possible way to discern the evaluations of our divine self - potentially forming a virtuous circle (if only we can refrain from trying to use its understandings for unworthy goals!).  

Note: In fact I do not believe that even Rudolf Steiner himself could engage in Pure Thinking at will, sustainedly, frequently, or reliably. Instead I am pretty sure that from the time he joined the Theosophical Society (some years after publishing the philosophical books, mentioned in the video) Steiner usually deployed partial mediumistic trance states of 'altered consciousness' in order to generate much of the content of the vast volume of published Spiritual Science... 

Which is why most of the content is wrong. 

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 key to doing primary thinking

I have found Rudolf Steiner's instructions and exercises concerning 'how to do' primary thinking (or, what he terms pure thinking, or his type of meditation) to be misleading and indeed counterproductive; since they concentrate on concentrating - on attaining a thought and holding it, expanding it etc...

In the first place, this method splits the mind into that part which is doing the concentrating, and the results of that concentrating. Secondly it is insufficient - from personal experience, I could concentrate in the prescribed manner (e.g. when I was doing theoretical science) long before I could do primary thinking. Thirdly, and consequently, the results of this concentration style of meditation are misleading (because it is easy by concentration to 'force' thinking towards pre-determined conclusions, and thereby create false content).

Fourthly and most tellingly, it doesn't seem to work. After all, this was not how Steiner himself learned to meditate, so there is little reason to suppose that other people could get to where Steiner was by using a different method. Also, the capacity of his exercises to induce 'clairvoyance' in the many members of the Anthroposophical Society who have followed then, seems (to the observer) to be a near-total failure.

If not, then what?

We need an 'external' technique of holding attention - of stopping it being distracted, or sliding around. For me this can be taking notes, reading short passages, drawing 'doodles' - essentially with a pen in the hand. Others would need to find what worked for them.

What to think about? That depends on your motivation, here-and-now. Motivation is one of the keys: it needs to be some-thing that you really want to know, to think-about.

Steiner, by contrast, prescribes arbitrary subject matter for his thinking exercises (this plant, this stone...). This seems like seriously bad advice: ineffective, because the motivation for arbitrary thinking will surely be feeble; and also (in a sense) arbitrary motivation is immoral, because this is trying to use primary thinking for frivolous or expedient purposes (and primary thinking, being in the realm of reality/ truth/ beauty/ virtue, will not - indeed cannot - be so used).  

Once the attention has being controlled by some such external means, the whole of the mind can fill the activity of thinking from the deep and true self. It wells-up. And leads to further notes/ doodles etc. just as a way of holding the line; while allowing it to develop by internal logic.

The key, though, is metaphysical - it is to acknowledge the validity of thinking; the validity of the process, content, findings... We need to internalise the fact that primary thinking is not constrained by what we term 'evidence'; because primary thinking happens in the domain of universal reality, hence it is necessarily true. 

(This is a delight to observe - in full consciousness: the emergence of truth, quite naturally, spontaneously, fluently, and without boundaries. This is also why the kind of wound-up state of concentration is hostile to the process.)

The content of primary thinking is intrinsically valid in and of itself - so we want to be attentive but relaxed, as it comes-forth.

Of course, summarising, recording, transmitting this primary truth makes the resulting communications prone to all sorts of possibilities of error, distortion and misunderstanding - if we try to use this knowledge.

But the direct knowledge of primary thinking is itself is pure, real, and true.

Is Thinking a means, an end, or an illusion?

I may be a bit strange this way; but there are few subjects that excite me as much as thinking! 

I have come to regard thinking as an-end-in-itself; indeed probably the highest activity of which we are capable. 

Of course, I am immediately compelled to clarify that I certainly do Not mean all kinds of thinking have thus supreme value; nor even most kinds of thinking... 

Indeed, I would go so far as to say that it is possible that many people may never experience the kind of thinking that I am talking about - not least because to experience this highest kind of thinking one must simultaneously recognize its supreme value. One must regard this thinking as intrinsically valid and intrinsically valuable. 

And that recognition is very far from the case!

Indeed, for most people, thinking is just a means to an end - and that end is 'action'. 

Most people would say that thinking but not doing is just a waste of time; and empty activity. Good thinking is that which leads to good outcomes in the perceptible world...

Most people nowadays would say that unless something is changed in the material, objective, external world - then thinking is a free-spinning-cog: futile, just wasteful of energy and effort. 

This seems like simple common sense to the modern, mainstream mind - its ideology and assumptions. To suppose that thinking had intrinsic value or validity is for such Men a kind of delusion; sheer insanity. 

For other people; thinking is a kind of illusion; and indeed a wicked illusion. 

Thinking is regarded as an aspect of maya: in other words, thinking is one of those snares or nets that keep us trapped in a world of appearance and suffering instead of the blissful reality that lies behind maya. 

Many of the influential 'gurus' of Eastern and New Age spirituality emphasize that we should aim to eliminate thinking, instead our striving should be towards not-thinking-being. 

We should strive for non-thinking awareness; because (they understand) thinking is what leads to our (false) sense of separation from the world; and the illusion of separateness leads to suffering. If thinking can be eliminated, so can suffering. 

For those who regard reality as One, and assume we began as unconscious spirit aspects of that One; our task as going beyond the body and back to pure spirit - and also going beyond thinking to pure being-awareness.  

Yet I have the solid conviction that thinking is of primary importance; and that our destiny lies in the direction of 'more and better thinking' - rather than no-thinking, or material-action. 

For many years this was an un-conscious and inarticulate conviction - and it only began to reach awareness and clarity by reading the work of Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield. I found both of these authors very difficult to 'get' and spent years tackling them before the penny dropped. 

But the penny  dropped when reading Steiner's Truth and Knowledge followed immediately by re-reading the later part of Philosophy of Freedom. I then returned to Barfield and was immediately clear what I had been missing. 

The excitement of this perspective is now latent - and can be awakened or re-awakened by coming across the same view in these or other authors. For instance, yesterday I was listening (on Rudolf Steiner Audio) to a lecture from early 1914; the opening words of which triggered that joyful lifting of the heart (emphasis added).  

Man experiences within himself what we may call thought, and in thought he can feel himself directly active, able to exercise his activity. 

When we observe anything external, e.g. a rose or a stone, and picture it to ourselves, someone may rightly say: “You can never know how much of the stone or the rose you have really got hold of when you imagine it. You see the rose, its external red colour, its form, and how it is divided into single petals; you see the stone with its colour, with its several corners, but you must always say to yourself that hidden within it there may be something else which does not appear to you externally. You do not know how much of the rose or of the stone your mental picture of it embraces.” 

But when someone has a thought, then it is he himself who makes the thought. One might say that he is within every fiber of his thought, a complete participator in its activity. 

He knows: “Everything that is in the thought I have thought into it, and what I have not thought into it cannot be within it. I survey the thought. Nobody can say, when I set a thought before my mind, that there may still be something more in the thought, as there may be in the rose and in the stone, for I have myself engendered the thought and am present in it, and so I know what is in it.” 

In truth, thought is most completely our possession. 

If we can find the relation of thought to the Cosmos, to the Universe, we shall find the relation to the Cosmos of what is most completely ours. This can assure us that we have here a fruitful standpoint from which to observe the relation of man to the universe.

For me, this expresses in a nutshell a deep and vital truth. Thinking is potentially our most complete and valid form of knowing. Therefore, the big question becomes: How this knowing is related to 'reality' - to divine creation? 

If thinking turns-out to be in a direct relationship with reality - and not merely having some kind of indirect, 'translated', representational or linguistic 'communication' with reality - then this is of the greatest possible significance. 

We begin to see (as Steiner goes on to articulate later in this lecture) that the distinction between this 'primary' thinking, and the kind of 'secondary' thinking which most people do most of the time (and some people do all of the time) - is related to language.

Most thinking is in words, it is language - therefore secondary; therefore either a means to an end, or perhaps illusion. 

(This is the level of all public discourse and most private conversation: language responding to language - and nothing more. Our secondary thinking is no better than this.) 

But some thinking may be primary, and not in words or any other symbolism; but thinking 'in' the primary creative essence of reality. 

This kind of primary thinking is indeed itself reality. 

Thus we can come to know reality.

You see why I regard thinking (of the right sort - primary thinking) an end in itself?

As the demons infiltrate our minds, consider that Real-thinking is a slow business

To recap: I believe that Rudolf Steiner was correct a century ago when he said that the characteristic spiritual phenomenon of this age was that the power of thinking has been enhanced, to the point that Men tend to become after death what Men think-they-are during life. 

This is why the prime strategy of purposive-evil has since become totalitarian - in other words, demonic evil being are engaged in vast-scale attempts to control Men's thinking. 

At first (with the USSR, and other 20th century leftist dictatorships) this was mainly by physical coercion, restriction and censorship; more recently, it has been by flooding human minds with addictively-engineered mass and social media.

Thus, Modern Men have (for the first time in history) the power, consciously and by choice, to think-themselves towards the realm of spiritual beings, to communicate with 'the dead', to recognize life and purpose in the world, to appreciate divine providence at work in their own lives... and so forth. 

Yet, instead, Modern Man chooses to think the universe as purposeless, meaningless, dead and wholly material - of himself as (merely) an animal whose life as annihilated by death; and by-thinking, makes-this-so (partially so in mortal life, wholly so after mortal death).  

The nature of thinking in these times is superficial, shallow - and excluding of our real and divine self. 

Our 21st century thinking is put-into-us from external sources, and the 'data' is processed by concepts that are also inserted and sustained by inputs. 

Modern Man's thinking is like a mirror of the external world of mass media and bureaucracy - and his social interactions overwhelmingly consist of the same content and concepts. Who controls The System of media and bureaucracy, also controls Men's thinking... 

Our global totalitarian System therefore includes Modern Men; and by his thinking Modern contributes to the sustenance and growth of The System. 

Our escape from this situation can only lie outside of The System. 

Some advocate escape by Not-thinking - but this is attempting to go-against the irreversible direction of Man's divinely ordained evolutionary development which has given our thinking this enhanced power. It will not work, and trying Not to think will do us harm by failing to recognize or oppose The System and its purposive evil. 

The answer is not to 'stop thinking', nor to weaken thinking's power; but to redirect thinking towards God and the currently-excluded world of spirits.  

(Indeed, our destiny (that direction hoped-for by God) is towards even-greater strengthening of thinking; so long as that thinking is - to the best of our ability, repenting the inevitable failures - aligned with God's creative methods and purpose.) 

What is needed is a different kind of thinking; a thinking that comes from within - and comes from our real and divine self: a primary thinking. 

But what are its characteristics? 

Negatively, we can say that primary thinking is word-less - it is in this sense a 'pure' thinking. 

It is intuition - the bottom line of knowing; therefore is not explicable in terms of its causes: primary thinking arises-from the real-divine self, as an expression of that self - it is not caused by other factors (else it would not be primary). 

Free will comes after primary thinking. First comes the primary thought - then our consciousness recognizes, evaluates, decides... 

And it is important to be clear that primary thinking is - or seems - slow and simple. 

Therefore, if we are busy, plugging-into media whenever 'boredom' threatens, working all the time, socializing in every spare moment... if we fill our time/ minds with inputs... then our thinking will necessarily be externally-dictated, it will be System thinking, it will be net-evil. 

We will be thinking evil, and desiring evil for our-selves; and (sooner or later) our thinking will transform us into that which we think. 

Only if we make space and reduce external inputs and 'noise' may we become aware of our primary thinking. 

This cannot be hurried - and 'cannot' means it can't. Primary thinking is incompatible with an 'efficient' life. 

Further; if we seek answers - we need to realize that we are almost certainly asking the wrong questions. Discovering and framing the problem correctly is a slow, deliberate process that cannot be rushed. If we really want Good answers - we must do what is necessary to discover them.

Thus, primary thinking is something that only happens to modern Man by deliberate choice, by wanting and making it a priority. 

If a typical Modern Man does not make the effort, does not make the needful sacrifices - if he continues to be busy, compulsively interactive; if he fills his quiet and solitary time with stimulation (or sleep)... then he may never do any primary thinking - may live always in a passive and unconscious way, a mere circuit of The System. 

Primary thinking should be our priority. It is always going-on - but is nearly-always ignored, buried beneath the deluge of incoming stimuli, and indeed unfindable so long as that external stimulation continues. 

Therefore, if we want to escape The System which is filling out thoughts in order to manipulate, torment, and ultimately damn us; we absolutely need to make our life-situation conducive to primary thinking. 

Which means to accept the necessary conditions of relative slowness and simplicity; and to become conscious of that pure and wordless clarity of knowing that can (and should) bring us a sureness, a conviction of truth, a sense of solidity in reality - and that we may consciously choose to adopt as the basis of a good life. 

Escaping bad habits of thinking: should we aim-at good habits, or no habits?

That modern Western Man has developed bad habits of thinking is obvious to anyone who has tried to escape them. In a post a couple of days ago, I excerpted a representative analysis of this phenomenon by Owen Barfield, which he concluded by suggesting that the only cure for bad habits was good habits.

Here I ultimately disagree with Barfield; because the essence of the problem is not just the badness of habits, but the dominance by habits - so the cure of bad thinking habits is more along the lines of reducing the habitual element in thinking.


It has proved to be very difficult indeed for individuals to go beyond the point of analysing this problem in their own lives, to giving general and effective advice (or training) about what to do next. For example, Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield thoroughly understood the nature of the problem; but Steiner - in my view - became sidetracked into system-building, and movement-building; and in more than a century his anthroposophical movement has got nowhere in achieving Steiner's original goals for a new consciousness.

Barfield made no claims to expertise in this matter, and always pointed to Steiner as the authoritative source of guidance - yet Steiner's specific guidance (for example in How to Know Higher Worlds, 1904-5) has a long track record of failure, and indeed even in principle seems clearly insufficient and prone to unwanted consequences.


My understanding is that the reason for this difficulty is that, when to comes to going where we want to go (which Steiner sometimes terms Pure Thinking, Barfield terms Final Participation and I have called Primary Thinking) - then habits are the enemy, and there is no such thing as a 'good' habit.

My understanding of this is rooted in the simplifying idea that (very briefly put) what we are trying to do it to attain a conscious version of the spontaneous and intutive state of young children or simple hunter gatherers. That is, our goal is a life in which the present moment is intuitively comprehended; and therefore all a life without much in the way of strategy, complex social systems, plans or routines.

I am aware that there is an inevitable, indeed irreducible, element of strategy, system and plan in any life - I regard the matter as one of polarity in which there are valid distinctions that cannot be made into division (i.e. we can validly distinguish between stability and change, but these are abstractions, and in life neither can be produced in a pure form; because life is 'developmental', and development is a process that necessarily includes stability and change).

However, my point is that any increase in the habitual, organised, systematised, strategic, planned elements of life will thwart our goals. Final Participation cannot be implemented by a flow-chart. And the attempt to organise, to drill, to proceduralise; has been a trap into which person after person, organisation after organisation, institution after institution has fallen over the past couple of centuries during which the need for a development in consciousness has been known.


If not, then what? First, we need to be careful that the form of the question does not simply lead us back into error. The demand for general advice, for general guidance, often contains an implicit demand for 'a system'. When the objective is to live from our real and divine Self, in harmony with God's creation; then any explicit, communicable external and objective system is going to be wrong - since it must be a simplified, partial and distorted version of God's creation.

When we align-with and participate-in the on-going reality of creation this is exactly-Not about implementing pre-decided plans. It is about love as the basis for working-with God in our family-business. Coming into this business with a set of plans developed before we joined, when we were lesser people (as we are now) would be harmful - and indeed simply does not happen.

(Love makes possible creation, love sustains creativity - and the family is the true metaphysical principle of reality.)

To join with the work of creation (which is the nature of Final Participation, of Primary Thinking) requires that we are not of that way of thinking - it is not that this is a test or exclusion criterion - but that Final Participation just-is a setting aside of the abstract models, plans and schemes, rules and protocols that Man has developed over the past several thousand years of 'civilisation' in his state of increasingly alienated consciousness.

(That Rudolf Steiner developed a massive, complex system of abstract distinctions and protocols, and a huge international social organisation - with and elaborate headquarters, a bureaucracy, multiple branches and specialities; is a measure of how far Steiner fell-away-from the clarity and purity of his original insights.)


When we are stuck in bad habits, based on false metaphysics; we need to correct our metaphysics: that is vital. If we are materialists, we need to stop; if we are not Christians, we need to start. But this of itself will not induce the desired changes - the nature of our situation tends to lock us into falsehood and error... bad habits.

We may have insight and be born again as believer-in Jesus; but for our-selves to become more divine (i.e. theosis; which is what Final Participation is about - the divine mode of thinking) we cannot achieve by drilling ourselves into some new habit: it is habits-as-such that are agents of our alienation.

This is why we cannot rely on any organisation, any system, any abstract scheme, strategy or plan of training. Why we must take personal responsibility for our theosis. Why we need to become attuned to the actualities of the existing situation, to develop aware intuition as the basis of life.

The aimed-at state - as I said - is much like that of the child or hunter gatherer, a life in which memories and aspirations all find integrated expression in the present. However, the child is passively immersed-in living and unconscious of it - he may be an instrument of God, but never a co-creator.

Our aim, by contrast, is to be consciously participating with life, with God (our Heavenly parents) and his grown-up children (our older brothers and sisters); and this is done by-and-in our thinking.

Pure conceptual thinking - the innate validity of thinking without any evidence at all

(What follows is metaphysics - it is neither proved nor disproven by 'evidence', because metaphysics is prior to evidence; evidence can only illustrate a metaphysical scheme.)

First (by an act of assumption) we divide our experience into percepts, which come into us via the senses - and from memory; and concepts.

Concepts are primary, because percepts can only be understood by means of concepts. (Incoming sensory 'data' is just random and meaningless noise - unless and until interpreted by concepts.)

In other words 'information' or (more clearly) 'knowledge' is only possible due to a pre-existing interpretative scheme into-which percepts are inserted. Mere sensory data - such as photons coming at the eyes, or vibrations coming at the ears, the the consequence nerve impulses... these mean nothing at all. All their meaning comes from the fact they are interpreted by out pre-existing concepts.

So concepts are primary - and if true knowledge is possible, then the validity of true knowledge must come from the validity of concepts.

(If true knowledge is not possible, - why are you reading this? Why are you even thinking? Our first assumption must be that true knowledge is possible or else there is no point in thinking about knowledge. That is not a proof of the truth of knowledge, it is another metaphysical assumption.)

So concepts must be valid - or at least some concepts must be valid. And if concepts are valid then for knowledge to be public and shared, then concepts must be public and shared.

It seems that when we use true concepts to understand the world, this means that each of us is thinking using the same concepts - I mean exactly the same concepts.

So concepts are not located privately in our brains or minds - and certainly concepts are not communicated via percepts (concepts are not shown, or heard, or explained) - true concepts exist in some place where everyone can access them and can think with them.

(As a metaphor, concepts are somewhat like a radio station, but a radio station not broadcasting from a particular antenna but located everywhere; with everyone always being permeated by radio waves, everyone potentially able (with the right equipment) to hear exactly the same radio programme; and any number of people may tune-into the signal if or when they want to hear the programme.)

The point is that it is concepts, not percepts - it is our ideas and not our sensory data - which confer validity to our knowledge, and enable knowledge to be shared - which enable true and valid communication.

Consequently, if we can think purely conceptually, then our thinking will be wholly valid.

Therefore pure conceptual thinking - thinking without any percepts at all, thinking without any evidence, would be intrinsically valid, intrinsically true.

True although also partial and imperfect, insofar as our ability to access use concepts is incomplete in various ways and to various extents - so we all access and use the same concepts but from different and incomplete points of view.

To reiterate - the above is metaphysics - that is, it is a basic framework for structuring our understanding of reality - including all forms of 'evidence' including science. Its possible value comes from providing a way we can understand the possibility of valid knowledge at all, and how we personally may have valid knowledge, and how we may share and communicate valid knowledge with other people.

And it points to the central role of human thinking in knowledge; because thinking is where we put-together percepts and concepts; or else work-with pure concepts. Indeed, thinking, by this scheme, has not just a central role; indeed pure conceptual thinking is the unique basis of our interaction-with - our participation-in - the rest of reality.

**

Next, we need to know how we personally might engage in pure conceptual thinking, and know we were doing so. A topic for another post.)

(Note: the above is a re-explanation and re-interpretation of the argument of Rudolf Steiner's early philosophical book: The Philosophy of Freedom/ Freiheit.)

Freedom in Thinking: the essence of Final Participation (and the destiny of modern Man)

Continued from: http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/modernity-is-do-not-try-to-join-dots-in.html

Final Participation is simple to summarise in its essence - it is Freedom in Thinking.

This is why Rudolf Steiner's most important book was entitled The Philosophy of Freedom - but of course Freedom here is of an ultimate and existential nature: it is, indeed, the Freedom in Thinking with agency, from the Self.

Freedom, by this account, was in general not possible to Men at any time in the past - such freedom is the destiny of the future; but as yet Man has not embraced but rather denied and rejected this freedom (from wickedness, ignorance and wrong ideas).

Freedom of thinking is possible because Man is a child of God, hence has the divine creative capacity to originate - to be an uncaused cause.

In early Men, and in childhood; the self was not autonomous - and thinking was a consequence of immersion in other causes.

With the evolution of consciousness, Man's thinking became incrementally cut-off from the environment (for example, in very different ways; the abstract philosophy of the Ancient Greeks, the detachment from immersion in God and nature and forbidding of representations of God and nature of the Ancient Hebrews).

Man became in a sense more free - less influenced by externals; but at the cost of this freedom being cut-off from participation in reality. The end point was modern alienation, meaninglessness, purposelessness. The self cut-off even from its own thinking...

The future is for Man to be free in thinking: thinking that is primary and uncaused, thinking from the real self (not any social construct), thinking of unbounded scope - thinking which encompasses and integrates all. This is Final Participation - in Owen Barfield's term - 'final' because it is the divine mode of thinking.

Naturally, Man's divine thinking would be partial and distorted compared with God's thinking (which is whole and true); nonetheless it is the next and necessary step.

So, when confronted with a modern world of isolated, meaningless, purposeless, incoherent 'dots'; and experiencing the need to 'join' these dots and attain wholeness and understanding - this is Not a matter of actually taking these dots as they currently-are and joining them. These existing dots are partial, distorted, dishonest... the task is near infinite in scope - overwhelming in complexity...

Rather, the task is much simpler. It is first to attain real, true, thinking and then confront all of reality (sensations, perceptions, feelings, memories, intuitions... everything) - on the basis that everything is significant - and to think them.

Suppose yourself to be looking at the night sky. With Final Participation what we do Not do is to think about the stars as a scientist might; we do not and cannot be un-self-consciously immersed in the experience as our ancestors might; neither do we think concepts of the meaning of stars as a philosopher or theologian might...

With Final Participation we think the stars, we think with the stars. The stars are real, objective and universally-accessible things that are included-in the stream of thinking along with... whatever might be other foci of attention such as the garden, the trees, our memories, our intuitions and imaginations... All are part of thinking, and this thinking is free because it originates in the self, and the self is agent and uncaused.

Such thinking is primary, all-encompassing; and we are not detached from anything that may be thought-about, because we think with it; but we rather participate-in anything, in this thinking.

This is what we need to do, we need to practise doing it until it is voluntary and habitual. This is metaphysics - first philosophy - and we should not be distracted from it, at least not initially, by second-order and 'epistemological' questions about the validity of the various bits and pieces of thinking.

(Naturally, even if our thinking is pure and uncontaminated by external causes, or by wrong motivations - and much thinking will, sooner or later, be so contaminated; our personal thinking will be partial and incomplete as compared with God's thinking. But to demand to know exactly how our own thinking matches up to God's - exactly where it is true and where it is not - is in fact to demand to know as much as God! Epistemology is therefore a fool's errand, a snare and a pitfall. Leave it alone!)

Insofar as we attain to this concept of Freedom in Thinking we are doing what is most important for us to do - that is for us to do, here and now. It is the essential next step in the primary purpose of the saved Christian - which is theosis, to become more divine, to become more like to Jesus Christ.

Don't try to 'strengthen' your thinking...

The path of attaining to Rudolf Steiner's objective of Pure Thinking, or alert and aware clairvoyance (what Barfield terms Final Participation and I have dubbed Primary Thinking) is something I have often seen described as a practice of 'strengthening' our thinking.

This is usually approached by a series of exercises devised and prescribed by Steiner - which amount to exercises aimed at single-mindedness, concentration and broadening of subject matter.

But, the history of Anthroposophy indicates that these exercises are a failure. At the very least; the results are slow and modest - and they seem not to lead to a transformation of thinking.

I would advocate discarding the language of strengthening, and indeed any 'effortful' attempts at deepening thinking; because the effort is almost-inevitably coming-from and directed-at the wrong thing/s.

There is no need for strength, there is no need for concentration; Primary Thinking is quite natural, it is always going-on - we 'merely' need to attend to it... That 'merely' is in fact usually very difficult to do, but this is not the kind of difficulty that can be overcome by conscious-striving; more by 'allowing'...

Allowing the Real Self's thinking to come to awareness and deciding that its natural and spontaneous thinking is valid. Is - indeed - direct knowledge of reality.

Read the whole thing at the Owen Barfield Blog

No compromise on Thinking (must be absolute, clear and coherent)

Life has been ruined by compromise - that is the conclusion of history. All that was originally Good, and might have been better, has been dissipated away into expediencies...

But what is it that should be pure? Not the usual ideas; not facts or feelings - because the actual world of our experience is intrinsically intractable, impossible fully to make conform to our hopes (and the pseudo-attempts to do this have been disastrous, albeit in a different way from the compromised muddle we see about us).

It was the great and central insight of Rudolf Steiner (which he himself badly lapsed-away-from - especially in his later career) that Thinking is primary: it is Thinking that can and should be absolute, clear and coherent.

Because Thinking is our personal dwelling, understanding and activity in the universal world of reality.

Not just any and all kinds of thinking - naturally; but a purified Thinking of our true selves functioning at our best and highest; it is such Thinking that should be our primary purpose, and the primary 'location' of our endeavours.

If we become distracted from this, and put 'real life' above Thinking then we simply end-up by compromising Thinking itself - and then we are adrift, and deceived.

Thinking is not 'theory' - Thinking (of the kind indicated) is Real Life - indeed it is the only Real Life - since what we generally-suppose to be 'real life' is anything-but.... a tissue of illusions, deceptions, mere images and easily manipulated by the forces of evil.

What we need to do is very simple to state, although difficult to accomplish (difficult but, importantly, not impossible!) and that is to regard our Thinking as primary and absolute; and we must settle for nothing less than the highest conceivable degree of perfection in our Thinking.

And an included and vital part of this perfected Thinking is precisely the gap between Thinking and Feeling, and the gap between Thinking and 'facts'/ observations/ the phenomena of the world apparent to our senses and to science.

There always is and always will be a difference between Thinking on the one hand, and feelings and facts on the other hand. That is a secondary problem - but this is no reason to compromise the absolute integrity of Thinking. No Reason At All... 

Consequences of the fact that primary thinking has no limits and is fully conscious

Primary Thinking (or Pure Thinking, as Rudolf Steiner generally terms it*) has no limits to potential knowledge, and is fully conscious, self-aware.

This means that because we are fully conscious of our thinking (and active, not passive, in the free agency of this thinking) - we can know (for sure) when we are 'doing it'; and of course when we are not; and we can therefore chart our own progress.

On the other hand; given the unbounded power and scope of primary thinking (that is in the realm of truth, beauty and virtue) - we also know with certainty how very partial, embryonic, our own achievement actually is.


*This can be discovered in his magnum opus 'The Philosophy of Freedom'; which is very helpfully expounded and interpreted in 'Rudolf Steiner on his book The Philosophy of Freedom', edited by Otto Palmer.


(Since primary thinking is the creativity of a genius, the combination can be illustrated by Isaac Newton - who knew that he was one of the greatest of mathematicians and physicists; yet also knew that his discoveries, while significant, were relatively minuscule - merely a lovely pebble or shell compared with the whole ocean.)

A sketch of an abstract autobiography of consciousness and Christianity ('Bildung')

The German concept of Bildung refers to the partly experiential, partly willed, potentially destined; developmental unfolding of a person from the advent of adulthood in adolescence to some kind of viable spiritual maturity. In its highest form it describes a seeking for 'the answer' to living, and its finding (to at least some significant extent).

The proper form of Bildung is therefore some kind of linear, biographical account - necessarily in an abstracted, often actually fictionalised, form - and always, underlying, there must be autobiography: a true and honest work of Bildung must be rooted in personal experience or powerful imagination of the phases depicted and described.

Such a work only became both possible and necessary with the advent of Romanticism in the late 1700s - and the Bildungsroman, the novel-of-Bildung. This hit the European mind with Goethe's Wilhelm Meister novel, and has been theorised by many philosophers since.

A debased modern offspring of the Bildungsroman is the coming-of-age movie or series, which typically focuses almost wholly on sex. Indeed, the post-mid-twentieth century cult of youth seems to be a selective, distorted, fixated conceptualisation of the interest in the process of personal transformation.

*

It all began for me in my middle teens and associated with the area of Bristol which is centred on College Green - beside the City Library and Cathedral; and runs up Park Street past coffee shops and esoteric suppliers to George's Bookshop. JRR Tolkien was the first and enduring talisman, Robert Graves another, Thoreau followed soon after. There was a deep dissatisfaction with the thinness and futility of modern life, and a yearning for something deeper, more mythic.

This was the continuation into adulthood of that Golden Thread of the most intense, significant and memorable events and impressions of childhood.

Since then certain places have drawn me repeatedly - often with obscure reason - to live, to stay for holidays, to visit - while other places, books, music, ideas, themes, activities - theoretically, perhaps, better suited? - when experienced and lived left me... well, perhaps diverted; but at depth unmoved; they failed to ignite the fire which turned out to be so essential, and lacking which life was drained of meaning.

Life was a zig-zag of trial and error; knowing better what was wrong than what was right - indeed (in retrospect) I certainly lacked any correct or clear understanding of what was right: what I was and should be aiming at, and why. There was certainly, I see now, a lot less 'luck' in it than I supposed at the time; and much more of destiny, and consequences.

(Making mistakes, and suffering for them - making partially correct decisions but misunderstanding and following false leads until I bogged down in the slough of despond.)

There was, in fact, no possibility of getting anywhere until I became a Christian: the Christian context was vital. But, after becoming a Christian, there was (for me) no possibility of getting very far until I could escape the vitality-draining sensation and conviction of suffocation and constraint, the 'school dinners' aspect of churches etc, which came from my trying to accept 'on trust' and without personal revelation (without working through for myself) the spiritual authority of actual Christian institutions.

In sum, there was an absolute necessity that my Christianity be based upon personal conviction and personal experience; and that this was known to be non-arbitrary, indeed the ultimate authority.

In sum, I remained true to the aspirations of Romanticism, but needed to move beyond its errors: in particular the error of aiming for the past, at tradition. I explored this option, in imagination, to a possible conclusion, and found that it was mistaken and unacceptable in multiple ways, as well as being incoherent here and now.

The key was provided, in the past three or four years, by Mormon theology, the work of Owen Barfield, Rudolf Steiner's early philosophy, and William Arkle's overall context: all of these remain crucial, and continue to yield depths and delights; motivation, direction and purpose.

Key elements needed to come together, among which are the following... that there is a universal realm of thinking (pure thinking, primary thinking of the real/ true/ divine self), of think-ing, conceptualised as a dynamic activity that need perpetually to create-itself; and does so from polarities that are regenerated.

This conceptualisation means that our personal thinking is involved in this dynamic process of universal thinking - so that such thinking is true and universal reality. We participate in reality by this thinking - which means that we both experience and know reality as it already is; and at the same time from our unique perspective (and because reality is always re-making) we are reshaping the context of that universality.  We add our personal selves to the multiple polarities that maintain the livingness and development of reality.

Since we may (in principle, although perhaps seldom or never in actual practice) participate in reality; then all problems and paradoxes of 'communication' are abolished - all concerns about the limitations, distortions, and misinterpretations of communication are deleted; all fears that there is no real and reliable communication... all these are superseded by the actuality of direct knowing, including direct person-to-person and person-to-God knowing.

So there is the incremental, then sudden, dawning of clarity and comprehension which comes as the conclusion of a Bildungsroman; and the motivated purpose that points forward to more Bildung. I

Isn't this what most thoughtful persons have wanted since Romanticism? - if they are honest with themselves, and are able to put aside paralysing fears? I mean a general understanding of their destiny and purpose, which is based in the reality of God, and aligned in accordance with God's hopes and plans; yet unique, personal, needing me-specifically?

Isn't this what is implied by 'the meaning of life?'

But/ And we also see that each of us must attain this meaning of life for himself or herself - it cannot be attained at second hand: certainly not for us here and now. Thus Bildung remains, as it has been for more than 200 years, the quintessential Western form.

My experiences with meditation...

...Began in the late 1990s, when I became fascinated by hunter gatherer spirituality ('animism') and then actively interested by New Age spiritual writings.

My main problem was alienation - feeling cut-off from from Life, inside the nutshell of my mind; and my understanding was that there were two main possibilities to escape this - both of which I attempted in meditation.


1. Hypnosis

The first aim was 'hypnosis', more exactly auto-hypnosis - which was tending towards deep, dreamless sleep. I did this by allowing myself to drift toward sleep, and diminishing the control and awareness of my 'self'; but trying to hold myself halfway.

(Of course; sooner or later I would fall-asleep or wake-up.)

 The idea was that self-consciousness was diminished, to allow a return to a dream-like cognition.

This solves the problem of alienation but at the cost of no consciousness - and little or no memory. So it was pure escape - but that period of escape was just take out of life. And there was no 'meaning' in life - just an indifference to meaning - and not even the possibility of purposive in life.

I could not be integrated with 'real life' but was, at most, 'time-out' for recreation.


2. Shamanism

The second aim was 'shamanism' - which seemed similar to Jung's idea of active imagination, and was closely related to lucid dreaming (which I knew about, but had not experienced).

The idea was to relax my body completely but to keep my awareness awake - so that the body would sleep, but the mind remain alert - to create a dissociation in psychological terms.

This produced a state of waking dreams, of a kind of temporary psychosis-with-insight - hallucinatory, delusional and thought-disordered - but I found this was completely 'random' and uncontrollable.

It was rather like watching disorganised, cut-together movie snippets on multiple topics - and the experience was mostly trivial and boring. Certainly it did not provide any interesting answers or insights.


3. Magical times

A much earlier feeling I had experienced throughout life were periods of minutes or a few hours when I seemed to be in a meaningful, beautiful, purposively-unfolding world where everything was integrated and flowed-together: feeling, thinking, being, perception, memory...

This could not be forced - but would sometimes happen on holidays in, or visits to, certain places that had some special external meaning for me - the Park Street area of Bristol, Keswick, Oxford, Berwick upon Tweed - even, a few times, abroad: Berne, Girona, Freiburg, Cambridge Massachusetts...

But these came-upon-me and could not be controlled or held-onto - I couldn't do anything with them except remember them as a possibility that made life more hope-full. I could not achieve them through meditation.


4. Communion with God

When I became a Christian I found the work of Seraphim Rose - and via him Eastern Orthodoxy - and tried to meditate in that fashion - aiming at a communion with God, a kind of immersion with the divine; again with loss of the self.

Insofar as I touched-upon this, once or twice in divine liturgy, and in Mass at an Anglo-Catholic church -  I found the state very moving; but in a sense paralysing - it was, again, time-out-of ordinary life. I could find no way to integrate the state of consciousness with everyday consciousness - and while I did find meaning, I did not find purpose... except to the extent that I had a vague notion that if I was serious then I should be more like an ascetic monk.

Yet my real life was first of of a family man, a husband and father; and secondly someone engaged in a creative exploration of philosophy and science; and this was in practice - and by my conviction of the heart - far more important to me than the idea of solitary, ascetic striving for communion.


5. The current situation

About four years ago I developed a solid conviction that the Mormon religion was true, and the distinctive theology was a valid Christian theory.

(I regard the Christian religion as separate from the theories about it - and theology and metaphysics are ultimate theories about Christianity - so none are true in the same sense as the religion is true - all are at least somewhat partial and distorted by our human limitations. So Mormonisn is - for me - the best and truest; but I regard several other theologies - some extremely different - as equally Christian.)

But my meditative practice has been influenced mainly by William Arkle, then Owen Barfield, then (via Barfield, mostly) by Rudolf Steiner; in particular I now strive for a meditation in which I remain fully alter, conscious, self-aware, purposive...

In sum, I am trying to meditate by thinking - and to make this thinking align with my deepest self and include all possibilities.

I strive for a thinking which is an active process that moves fluidly between the external perceptions via the senses, internal perceptions (feelings), memories, and (vitally) that direct knowledge which enters thinking from super-sensory, extra-perceptual sources. 

My conviction is that - to the extent my motivations are Good - then this kind of meditative thinking is also Good; and has an unbounded scope for discerning truth, beauty and virtue.

There are no limits to what this thinking can do, in principle. By it we may know everything which can be known (this 'everything' does not, however, include the content of other agents minds, nor of God's mind, except insofar as these are purposively shared by them.)

So my meditation operates from a belief in the potential for absolute freedom and agency of the thinking mind.

My actual practice is that such thinking can only be attained sometimes and for short periods; and that it tends to be contaminated by my own evil motivations (ranging widely and including a desire for power or prestige, to pride - to a desire for present pleasure and the tendency for seeking wish-fulfilment rather than reality).

I have not found any 'method' for this meditation - except that it is sometimes helped by reflective note-taking and reading (sitting at a table, or lying on a bed propped up on an elbow), and by ambling walks though areas I find sympathetic (which luckily includes several walks near to my home, and many more in the countryside nearby).

In two words, what I am now seeking, primarily, is exactly Owen Barfield's concept of Final Participation (as described, for instance, in his book Saving the Appearances) - and my understanding is that Final Participation is actually the divine mode of thinking (which is why it is 'final') - therefore seeking FP is the path of theosis appropriate to my metaphysical and theological understanding of Christianity.

Our decades-deep problems of incoherence

Yesterday I was re-reading Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances; which was published in 1957, more than 60 years ago. This book is not an easy read (and most readers seem not to have understood it - including most Barfield scholars), but it is tremendously rigorous and incisive to the point of being life-changing. 

Barfield reaches the conclusion - which I cannot fault - that the way of thinking and reasoning, the mainstream philosophy and ideology, of the 'modern world' of the 1950s, is utterly incoherent. In his analysis, I think Barfield goes deeper than almost anyone else I have encountered. 

[I will not engage in the futile attempt to 'summarize' StP - the 'point' of the book is to work-though the argument. But, anyway, the purpose here is simply to accept the main thrust of the book's reasoning and conclusions, and consider the implications.]

This is my first point: that by the 1950s it was already clear to any thoughtful person that mainstream and ruling ideas in the major areas of culture did not make sense. Barfield analyzed this fundamental incoherence better than anyone perhaps; but the insight was pretty general. 

At any rate, I am sure he was correct - and he was correct that the set of ideas that are foundational to the whole functioning of the modern world as it was in the 1950s was so absolutely, fundamentally, self-contradictory that... Well what? 

In 1957 Barfield assumed that such a degree and depth of incoherence could not possibly survive, and that therefore it must change. Barfield, at points, warned what kind of consequences there must be if the world view did Not change; but he clearly assumed that things would change - and that the prevailing philosophy-ideology would move decisively in the direction of recognizing the primary of the spiritual over (and before, in terms of existence in time) the material; the guideingness of 'evolution' of consciousness in the history of reality; the way that reality is necessarily co-created and shaped by the presence and interpreting consciousness... and so forth. 

But it did not happen. Although there have been intermittent recognitions of the unsatisfactory nature of mainstream 'reality', these have taken the form of attempts to return to the instinctive and unconscious; as with the 1960s counter-culture, or the 1980s New Age - both of which have remained culturally-active; in private subjectivity and in mass culture. Or else less influential attempts to return the world to the lesser, but still fundamental, incoherences of 'the past'. 

[Barfield, following Steiner, was guilty of this; insofar as both attempted to fight the incoherences of system with alternative - somewhat less-incoherent - systems; a venture that began with Goethe's attempt to make biology into a differently-systematic science incorporating a systematized version of imagination. Steiner's ideas for agriculture, education, medicine, threefold societies etc, and Barfield's advocacy (in StA) of a new 'system of imagination', are both examples of laying this false trail. Imagination just is Not systematic, and a new world view based on intuitive direct-knowing or heart-thinking cannot be systematized. Cannot means can not.)   

The incoherent world-view of public discourse did Not change; but, necessarily, continued to worsen since it developed from the same incoherent assumptions.

What happened was that instead of becoming coherent; over the past decades more-and-more cultural ways evolved (and were successfully imposed) to make that incoherence not-apparent, or to deny its significance. 

Until we reach The World Now - where incoherence is extreme, global and mandatory - but is almost completely occult; hidden by the universality of bureaucracy, micro-specialization and dishonesty - fueled by mass emotional manipulation via the mass/ social media. 

We now experience a world of astonishingly vast and increasing chaos of incoherence; in which the monolithic nature of global totalitarianism is itself regarded as The Objective Reality (objective because there is nothing else in official public discourse, and only this reality is 'shared'); and where any individuals who recognize its incoherence and strategic evil are already and increasingly labelled as merely isolated instances of cut-off (insane, idiotic and/or wicked) pure-subjectivity.

[The official consensus of world experts versus... just your personal opinion.] 

Steiner and Barfield did indeed foresee these consequences - and wrote prophetically of the nature of our current world 'if' we failed to awaken to their insights. A Steiner lecture of 1918 and remarks by Barfield in StA and his (1984 published) novella Night Operation, are instances. 

But neither Steiner nor Barfield emphasized such 'if not, then...' prophecies; because both expected that culture would correct itself - because the problems were so obvious, and were getting worse.  

I think the actual state of the world now was (and is) missed, because modern people focus upon abstract and specialized matters such as politics, science and philosophy - and the impulses which drives these; whereas the dominant impulse throughout has been purposive evil - the agenda of the devil/ Satan and the demonic spirits. Steiner and Barfield were both guilty of this - seldom discussing God and never (I think) framing their arguments in terms of God and his creative aims. 

When we are up-against supernatural evil; no amount of reform within the domains of politics/ science/ philosophy - nor any other social system such as law, education, medicine, the military or churches - can effectively oppose it. Any local improvement in a specific area of discourse is quickly outflanked by continued degeneration in many or most others. 

It is akin to trying to correct the dishonesty of the global establishment. If an official statement or line-of-argument is revealed as a gross and deliberate lie (that is a lie-rooted discourse such as the birdemic-peck, climate change, antiracism, feminism or the trans-agenda - or any of the multiple sublies within these discourses); then the lie is still operating and indeed accelerating in all the other social systems - media, corporate, legal and so forth. 

The societal assumption is that any number of proven Establishment lies are specific and encapsulated; while the validity of the total system is unchallenged because assumed. 

In other words, the actual root and motivation of that expanding incoherence which Steiner and Barfield exposed was undying evil spirits operating across many human generations; whose agenda is the destruction of God, the good and divine creation. 

The problem of incoherence was Not based in philosophical error, nor the limitations of science; nor the aims of politicians, bureaucrats or judges. 

We have - all along - been dealing-with the war between, on the one hand, God and Jesus Christ - with their aim of saving mortal Men to a resurrected life of growing more divine; and on the other hand, the many-fold powers of evil that oppose all this.

Evil is not trying to sustain any particular alternative evil reality; but to oppose The Good by whatever means seem to be effective at any particular time or place. Hence evil is protean, mutating, and cannot positively be defined in terms of what it 'wants'. 

For evil, incoherence is a feature, not a bug; and the more that actually-existing incoherence is accepted, embraced, and defended as real, true, necessary and Good - the greater is the triumph of evil. 

So here we are Now! The most extreme adverse prophecies of Steiner and Barfield have come true; evil is globally officially endorsed and imposed - and yet so extreme and pervasive is Man's corruption that he (mostly) does not even notice (and strenuously denies) that ruling-evil, and its explicit and implicit tendency.

And/but insofar as Modern Man can perceive evils - he sees No Alternative. 

After so many decades; Modern Man has incoherence baked-into his world view - which is a measure of his evil nature; and therefore sustains the only 'unity' and possibility of public that he can believe-in - which is that ever-shifting consensus of demonically-controlled, monolithic global totalitarianism.

 

What is anthroposophy? Owen Barfield's definition (1944)

From Romanticism Comes of Age by Owen Barfield (1944 First edition) pp 60-61

[Note: I have lightly edited this passage for the sake of clarity of meaning - it is a condensed, not literal, transcription.]

**

What is anthroposophy? Believing without a shred of evidence everything that Rudolf Steiner chose to say?

This is exactly what it is not.

Anthroposophy is knowledge, as it is expressed and grasped by the Consciousness Soul; and the Consciousness Soul knows first and foremost that anybody's thought - once it is conceived in ideas and expressed in words - must be alloyed with error. 

It is easy to understand Steiner's extreme reluctance to have his lectures recorded; and it is easier still to realize why he kept on repeating, almost to exasperation, such phrases as 'what is contained in', 'what is reflected by'...

'Think these thoughts without believing them', he once said; and in nearly all of his utterances he employed the mode of pure assertion - and not of discursive argument; although he could syllogize as well as anyone if he chose to (as he showed in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity). 

It is therefore really a kind of betrayal of the founder of anthroposophy to believe what he said. He poured-out his assertions because he trusted his hearers not to believe.  

Belief is something which can only be applied to systems of abstract ideas. To become an anthroposophist is not to 'believe', but to decide to use the word of Rudolf Steiner for the purpose of raising oneself to a kind of thinking which is beyond words, which precedes words. 

This is 'concrete' thinking, neither objective nor subjective, which is the source of all ideas and propositions, the source of all meaning whatsoever. And it can only take the form of logical ideas, propositions and grammatical sentences at the expense of much of its original truth.

To be an anthroposophist is to seek to unite oneself with this concrete thinking, whose existence can only finally be proved by experience.  

What are the causes of the developmental change ("evolution") in human consciousness throughout history?

A clear statement description of the way that human consciousness has changed throughout recorded history (and inferred from pre-history) is something I associate with Rudolf Steiner and his later follower Owen Barfield; who both explained it in terms of each human being having undergone multiple reincarnations. The changing nature of consciousness was therefore assumed to be caused by the accumulated experience and learning - hence maturity - of the reincarnating spirit. 

Ultimately, the underlying cause of these assumed multi-reincarnational changes was tacitly assumed to be the divine will; which sought to provide multiple and additive experiences to spirits. 

This was supposed to operate by a process that starts with pure (immaterial) spirit beings, leads down into denser and denser incarnations (such as ourselves), and ultimately (as its highest goal) leads back up to purely spiritual existence. 

But I do not share these assumptions about reincarnation. 

More importantly I regard Jesus Christ as having provided Man with the opportunity of resurrected human life in Heaven - which is a permanent state of embodied incarnation. 

In short: as of 2025 (and for nearly 2000 years) God does not want us to reincarnate after death - but instead to follow Jesus Christ to resurrected eternal life in heaven. 

Thus, for me, the objective of spiritual development is not a "spiritual being"; but instead a resurrected and embodied Man, of which the model was the resurrected Jesus.    

However, since I regard the evolutionary development of Mankind as a reality, but reject the Steiner/ Barfield explanation; I feel a need to explain this in terms of causality. I believe that there are several interacting causes, working at different levels. What follows is my current understanding. 

1. God's plan

At the deepest level of causation; I believe that God (our Heavenly Parents) desires that divine creation should lead first to divine children, and then towards the idea of "divine adults" - God seeks to encourage childlike children to develop into grown-up friends. 

(Much as it is usual (but with significant exceptions) to expect and hope that our own mortal children will not remain immature and childlike; but will grow-up to make the choice to become "best friends" with their parents.) 

In other words; divine creation is structured towards the generation of God's children - such as we now are; and that we children should be enabled and encouraged to "grow up" further, in order to mature towards becoming beings of the same kind and level as our Heavenly Parents. 

In yet other words; God desires that we would (through time) choose to develop towards becoming fully divine, fully loving, creators - and then to participate in the eternal work of divine creation. It was Jesus Christ who first achieved this, and who made it possible for others to follow Him in this. 

The goal is that our Heavenly Parents should cease to be the only beings at their level of divinity, but should build a continually growing family of grown-up children of God (together with the extended family of those beloved children who - whether by spiritual nature or current-choice - remain spiritually "immature": i.e. not full-creators.  

2. Incarnation of progressively more mature spirits

One of the ways that God influences the direction of creation, is through the nature of pre-mortal spirits that are incarnated into mortal life on earth. 

My impression is that when the earliest-known Men were first incarnated, their consciousness was more like that of young children. And incrementally throughout history, progressively more-grown-up spirits were incarnated; who tended to mature towards what we would now recognize as more adult modes of consciousness. 

So, at present and overall, spirits are incarnated that spontaneously mature to a kind of spiritual adolescence - beyond which further maturation depends on various individual factors, including personal will and choices. 

(I suspect that while spiritual maturation from childhood to adolescence is mostly spontaneous and involuntary; maturation beyond spiritual adolescence can only ever be attained by active alignment with God's nature and creative will, and by personal choice - the choice to live only by love.)

Maturity is most obviously revealed in terms of thinking and self-awareness... Modern Men are aware of our-selves and the distinction from the world and others; and we live subjectively in our stream of conscious thoughts - in ways that did not happen (or only in rare individuals) in the past. 

3. Metaphysical assumptions and ideology

Due to the nature of the human society into-which modern humans are born (which is partly a consequence of past and present choices by other people; under the influence of demonic beings) - modern Men assume that ultimate reality is dead (unalive), material (not spiritual); and operates solely by physical-mechanical causes or non-causally/ chaotically (ie. "randomly").  

I believe that these bottom-line assumptions concerning reality have a profound and malign effect on modern Man's consciousness.

What this typical modern metaphysics does to our consciousness; is to transform self-awareness into a false conviction of inescapable existential alienation - the implicit yet wrong belief that we are alone in our thinking, which is merely subjective: detached from reality. 

And this leads onto the typically modern mind-set of existential despair; variously countered by the attempt to overwhelm it with hedonism, and/or to obliterate thinking by such means as constant distraction by powerful stimuli, strong emotions, intoxication, and the like. 

In sum: an element in the changing of consciousness is the prevalent ideology of our times. And in more general terms, it would be expected that metaphysics, theology, and ideology would often (although not necessarily) tend to shape human consciousness in particular directions - which is, of course, exploited as much as possible by the purposive powers of supernatural evil. 

4. Direct spiritual contact between people, and other beings

I believe that there is potentially a direct (mind-to-mind, as it were) contact between living people, between the living and some of those who have died, and other beings. 

Insofar as this happens (for instance, among those people in mutually-loving relationships) among people whose consciousness's are changing for the reasons described above; this is the basis for shaping, perhaps amplifying or instead reversing, changes in consciousness that may be directional through time.

Put differently; we each inhabit a very selective thought-world - one that changes throughout our lives, and includes new, different, other-minds (alive, dead, or potentially not human). 

This, then, is another reason for changes in consciousness.  

5. The comfort and guidance of the Holy Ghost

The Holy Ghost is a potential source of comfort and guidance for those who follow Jesus, and this contact naturally affects a human consciousness and its development through time. 

Such interaction with the Holy Ghost has the nature of a chosen, mutual, and specific relationship between one spiritual Being and another. 

Which means that I disagree with those who conceptualize the Holy Ghost as providing some kind of blanket effect on Mankind, or any particular group of people. 

(I also disagree with those who regard the evolution of consciousness as driven by any kind of quasi-physics-like influence on the planet and its inhabitants... I mean those who see the maturation of consciousness as driven by an externally-applied influence - such as increasing frequency or vibrational level; or some kind of transformation of spiritual force, or an increase in spiritual energy; or indeed by astrological change.)

  

 

As a general comment - I think it is probably necessary to emphasize (to myself, if not other others!) that the causal mechanisms that contribute to the developmental evolution of human consciousness, are all aimed at the individual human spirit. 

I am increasingly sure that God does not, and never has, operated primarily at the level of human groups. 

We ought therefore to try and stop thinking habitually about Men In The Mass; when it comes to understanding fundamental spiritual matters.

 

The false-impression that God is concerned primarily with the salvation of particular tribes or particular churches; was I think an (inevitable) artefact of an earlier stage of human consciousness; among Men who (inevitably - but with some few exceptions) experienced reality in this groupish way.

That is to say: The earlier we go in history, the more groupish was human consciousness - and individuals were not, and did not feel nor aspire to be, detached from the "group mind". 

But as of Now - things are very different. From adolescence onward, modern people are spontaneously detached from the group mind, and must therefore be influence and controlled ("micro-managed") by multiple and constantly-applied external and perceptual inputs - laws, rules, propaganda etc.)  

Nowadays, such groupishness in considering Christian theology is simply an error - but no longer an inevitable error; being instead the consequence of (for example) false metaphysics, wishful thinking, despair, dreadful fear - or a simple paucity of alternative ideas.  

Therefore; we should understand the evolution of consciousness as the averaged outcome of our innate (inborn) spiritual-nature; with a multitude of individual human choices; concerning the outcomes of individually-tailored ("bespoke") interactions between each individual person with God and the Holy Ghost. 

 

When the problem, the limitation, is in my-self...

It is hard, but not impossible, to change oneself - including for the better.

That, indeed, is the problem at present - the barrier to doing what needs to be done is not in The World nor in My Circumstances but in myself - or perhaps more specifically my-self.

I am the constraint. I cannot proceed further until I myself have developed further.

I think I know what needs to be done, but doing it is not quick and not straightforward (else there would be more examples of success - and indeed there are very, very few I have heard of who have ever done what I intend to do in terms of developing my way of experiencing, being and thinking).

But there is precedent; Rudolf Steiner wrote his early philosophical books (the one about Goethe's implicit world view, the PhD thesis and his Philosophy of Freedom) a few years before he actually made the breakthrough into the kind of thinking he had already described in such detail.

The one led to the other: metaphysics preceded an evolution of consciousness.

From The Story of my Life - Rudolf Steiner's autobiography, chapter 22:

http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA028/English/APC1928/GA028_c22.html

At the end of the Weimar period of my life I had passed my thirty-sixth year. One year previously a profound revolution had already begun in my mind. With my departure from Weimar this became a decisive experience. 

It was quite independent of the change in the external relationships of my life, even though this also was very great. The realization of that which can be experienced in the spiritual world had always been to me something self-evident; to grasp the sense world in full awareness had always caused me the greatest difficulty. It was as if I had not been able to pour the soul's experience deeply enough into the sense-organs to bring the soul into union with the full content of what was experienced by the senses. 

This changed entirely from the beginning of my thirty sixth year. My capacities for observing things and events in the physical world took form both in the direction of adequacy and of depth of penetration. This was true both in the matter of science and also of the external life. 

Whereas before this time the conditions had been such that large scientific combinations which must be grasped in a spiritual fashion were appropriated by me without mental effort, and that sense-perceptions, and especially the holding of such facts in memory, required the greatest effort on my part, everything now became quite different. 

An attentiveness not previously present to that which appeals to sense-perception now awakened in me. Details became important; I had the feeling that the sense-world had something to reveal which it alone could reveal. I came to think one's ideal should be to learn to know this world solely through that which it has to say, without man's interjecting himself into this by means of his thought, or by some other soul-content arising within him. I became aware that I was experiencing a human revolution at a far later period of life than other persons. 

But I saw also that this fact carried very special consequences for the soul's life. I learned that, because men pass early out of the soul's weaving in the spiritual world to an experience of the physical, they attain to no pure conception of either the spiritual or the physical world. They mingle permanently in a wholly instinctive way that which things say to their senses with that which the mind experiences through the spirit and which it then uses in combination in order to “conceive” things. 

For me the enhancement and deepening of the powers of sense-observation meant that I was given an entirely new world. The placing of oneself objectively, quite free from everything subjective in the mind, over against the sense-world revealed something concerning which a spiritual perception had nothing to say.

Sure knowledge is based upon direct apprehension of a situation of absolute simplicity and clarity

I have seen a convergence of several strands of my interest in 'intuition' and metaphysics.

The surest, indeed the only sure, knowledge we have comes from our direct apprehension of a situation of absolute simplicity and clarity: nothing can be surer than this; and it can retrospectively validate a system of metaphysics which is that such direct knowing is fundamental.

It seems that - for instance - Wittgenstein's method (all through his work, including both early and late) was to strive (by multiple attacks on a problem) to attain exactly this situation. In his early Tractatus he called it 'showing' as contrasted with saying - he meant that knowledge should be based on that which is so simple and clear that it can be comprehended and known wholly and instantly. His last work - On Certainty - is the most comprehensive and sustained example of the 'method' - trying again and again to attain exactly the right question, the right example - so that 'certainty' can be understood all-at-once.

Goethe's concept of observation and experiment was identical at root: he strove in his science to attain a clear and simple view of the phenomenon so that it could be grasped whole. An ideal experiment was aiming at exactly the same - purposively creating a situation of clarity and simplicity when observation did not yield it. 

(The usual idea of an experiment is to contrive a controlled observation to test an hypothesis. But this merely evades the idea of where true hypotheses come-from - Goethe's deeper insight in that true hypotheses come from this intuitive clear-simple apprehension.) 

Socrates questioning can be seen in the same light - not as 'dialectic' (whatever that might be supposed to mean, I have never been able to understand it) - the attempt to frame the problem so lucidly that the answer becomes obvious (or else to show that the usual way of framing it, the usual form of questions, do not yield such a situation, but only contradictions and complexities).

Rudolf Steiner (much influenced by Goethe) likewise regards 'pure' thinking as aiming at just this: his intuition refers to a simple view; his use of the term clairvoyance has the literal meaning of clear-seeing.

This 'method' is absolutely general. It can and should be applied to all forms of knowing - whether logic, science, ethics, metaphysics, religion or whatever.

The Underworld and Fiver - the 'shaman' rabbit in Watership Down (perspectives derived from Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield)

[Fiver:] Well, there’s another place - another country - isn’t there. We go there when we sleep: at other times too; and when we die. 

El-ahrairah [the rabbits' god] comes and goes between the two as he wants, I suppose, but I never could quite make that out, from the tales. 

Some rabbits will tell you it’s all easy there, compared with the waking dangers that they under- stand. But I think that only shows they don’t know much about it. It’s a wild place, and very unsafe. 

And where are we really - there or here?

[Hazel:] Our bodies stay here - that’s good enough for me.


I am re-reading Richard Adams's novel of genius, Watership Down, for something like the fifth time in the past decade; and it strikes me as even-better with each re-reading.

One of my favourite characters has always been the seer or 'shaman' rabbit, Fiver; whose trance states and clairvoyant visions guide the chief rabbit Hazel in the big decisions that need to be made.


(The fact that Fiver is meant to be a shaman is confirmed by the heading of chapter 26 which is a relevant quote from Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. Adams was significantly influenced by Campbell's work on anthropology and mythology, and the two men later became acquaintances - Adams speaking ("the proudest moment of my life") at a celebration of Campbell's 80th birthday that is recorded in The Hero's Journey book and video.)


In the above passage Fiver describes the source of his visions; which is the 'underworld' or what Ancient Egyptians termed the 'dwat' - and which was redescribed in would-be scientific terms by Jung as the Collective Unconscious. The world of gods, the spirit aspect of sleeping mortals, spirits of the dead, and perhaps other beings such as angels and demons.

Rudolf Steiner and Owen Barfield had many interesting things to say about the changing, developing relationship between our conscious and waking minds in our mortal, incarnated (embodied) lives; and this underworld.

The first stage is when men (or rabbits, perhaps) were pure spirits, not incarnated. In this state there is no distinction between the Waking-world and the Underworld.


The second stage is after incarnation, when there is a distinction between the Waking-world inhabited by bodies, and the Underworld which can only be visited by the spirit part of Men (and rabbits) - while 'Our bodies stay here' - i.e. in the Waking-world - as Hazel says.

At this second stage there are 'specialists' in crossing to the Underworld, those who modern people term generically shamans - like Fiver. To do this, the spirit must be separated from the body, in a trance, sleep or some other 'altered state of consciousness'. But this crossing generally needs to be done by an act of choice, and perhaps by means of a learned skill; and is a hazardous business.

There is a personal price to pay for most shamans - in terms of such as illness, disability. alienation, social hostility and so forth. Fiver, for example, was a 'runt', smaller and weaker than average male rabbits and of a more nervous disposition.

The first stage seems to be normal when Men lived before agriculture and settled dwellings; as nomadic gatherers and hunters. When men had access to stores of food, they settled and developed specialised occupational hierarchies.

Direct contract with the gods incrementally faded, and a 'professional' priesthood (in charge of myth, ritual, sacred objects, scriptures etc.) displaced shamans.


As the second stage continued in Man's history of consciousness, it became harder and harder to cross this boundary, until (in the past few hundred years) more and more people become unable to cross the boundary, and attain the experiences of the Underworld which are the basis of knowledge of the gods, the dead and other such matters.

Religion became less spirit-experiential until it became almost wholly material-procedural. 

Thus we reach third stage, which is materialism - the assertion that there is no spirit, not Underworld, no gods, and no dead.The fact that extreme changes in consciousness are required to have even a chance of shamanic experiences; means that the content of such experiences are hard to recall accurately; and allows experiences of gods, the dead, clairvoyance etc. to be relegated to the realms of pathology - delusion, hallucination, delirium and the like.


The fourth stage if what Barfield terms Final Participation - it is when experience and knowledge of the Underworld comes directly into the Waking-world - during normal consciousness. So, knowledge of the gods, the dead, angels and demons, and so forth are woven-into the stream of conscious, awake-thinking.

An analogy with the shamanic era is that this integration of the Waking- and Underworld is an act of choice. The Underworld must be believed, regarded as significant, attended to and taken seriously - all of which stands in stark opposition to the materialism of the third stage era.

When the fourth stage happens during mortal life it is a temporary foretaste and learning experience of post-mortal resurrected, Heavenly life; when this becomes the usual nature of consciousness. But our mortal experience of the fourth stage is probably mainly intended to give us a Heavenly understanding of our mortal situation - so that we can learn the significance of our own lives, and the main phenomena in the world around us.

Fear, Resentment and Despair - the triad of Ahrimanic sins... Leading towards purely-negative Sorathic evil - as seen in 2020 with social destruction

(Note: Here I am using a typology of evil: Luciferic, Ahrimanic, and Sorathic - which I have adapted and transformed from their origin in the works of Rudolf Steiner.) 

*

In the past, the dominant sins were probably the triad of Anger, Lust and Pride. These, at any rate, seem to be the dominant characteristics of great sinners of history - right up into the middle twentieth century. 

But as Western society became more industrialised, specialised, coordinated and impersonally-systemic; the dominant nature of evil became Ahrimanic. 

The most prominent triad of sins became Fear, Resentment and Despair. 

 

Fear, Resentment* and Despair is the dominant mood of the world in 2020 - these are the modern, 'bureaucratic sins'. 

The self-seeking, self-aggrandising evil of the mid-twentieth century (as exemplified by the atheist-socialist dictators such as Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot etc.) is not much in evidence in the West. Of course, Luciferic evil is still present; but these sins require greater courage and motivation than are possessed by the masses - or indeed the rulers - in 2020. 

Luciferic sin is weaker and less common than in the past; because it requires high motivation which is fuelled by the virtue of courage. 

Great Luciferic sin entails a positive, active, for-the-self mind-set. However; courage, hence motivation, has been incrementally eroded by the passage of several generations of de facto atheism. Hence the rise in Ahrimanic sin; which is much more passive, negating, and directed against-others. 

Beyond the Ahrimanic lies the Sorathic, which is even more fully negative in its motivations. I think this happens, because the Ahrimanic sins erode their own basis. 

A bureaucratic world tends towards a state of passive, unconscious, materialism. The Ahrimanic impulse begins with a denial of the aliveness of the mineral world, extends through denial of consciousness to plants, then animals, and eventually - as for the past decades, creates a world where aliveness, and consciousness is denied even to Men. 

This materialism (positivism, scientism) is the basis of modern bureaucracy; which terms Men 'human resources', and generates policy on the basis of numbers and statistics. The individual Man counts only as an integer. 

 

When this world view of negation of the Self, penetrates the soul and has been internalised; we get the Sorathic form of evil. 

...Evil as the negation of The Good - any good. 

So, evil loses any positive goal and becomes directed-against Truth, Beauty and Virtue; against life and consciousness, against the natural and spontaneous, against Beings and their relationships. 

Sorathic evil's only 'satisfaction' (because it has become incapable of 'pleasure') is in this destruction of anything that is of-God; anything created, anything capable of creation.

 

An example? Well, a very obvious instance of Sorathic evil in 2020 is the imposition of that demonic-triad of lockdown, social-distancing, and masking. Leading, as they must do, to the permanent annihilation of human society - and the construction of a world of universal solitary-confinement.

Obviously the mainstream, birdemic-related, excuses for annihilating human society and culture are lies. But - much more significantly - even the architects of the Great Reset cannot make a coherent argument why societal destruction is necessary!

They do it, but They can't explain it.

 

Their attempted justification of universal isolation relates to the need (and benefits) of automation, robots and artificial intelligence systems; but this is a non sequitur. The 'need' for one, does Not imply the destruction of the other.

What we are therefore seeing here is a very pure form of Sorathic negation. Even the Global Establishment themselves, the people who are imposing societal destruction on the world, do not understand why they are doing this work of societal destruction. 

They insist upon its necessity; but they cannot coherently explain it!

 

The reason is that the 'need' for societal destruction cannot be explained in materialistic terms - which are the only terms possible in public discourse; and among those who deny the reality of God and creation. 

The true reason for societal destruction is that human society is Good and therefore needs to be destroyed. Society between Men is indeed one of the great and essential Goods of this mortal world; as Men at all times, everywhere, have acknowledged and acted-upon - quite naturally and spontaneously. 

The idea that this can and should be dispensed with is monstrous, outrageous and ridiculous... for anyone who is Not deep into the servitude of Satan. But then, that is precisely what we are dealing-with. 

 

Therefore human society is an obvious, and essential, target for Sorathic evil; not because it is 'useful' to destroy human community, not because its destruction will enhance the lives of the Global Establishment - but exactly because human society is Good, and a Great Good; and because destroying it will induce suffering and (in this atheistic world) despair on a scale unprecedented. 

 

(And despair is a sin, because it is a rejection of God: a failure to trust in God, and a refusal of Jesus's gift of eternal life in Heaven. Despair - that is, as an existential decision, not a mere emotion - is therefore the choice of damnation.) 

 

In this burgeoning world of Sorathic evil, we need to stop looking for the 'advantage' in evil. Need to stop trying to 'explain evil' in terms of it (for example) making more money for Them, or giving Them more power...

From now, evil needs gain no advantage by its action: evil thrives purely on the destruction of whatever is Good. 

Evil has therefore ceased to be a triad, and has become a unity - the unity of negation; the unity of simple destruction of Good.

This is Sorathic evil. 

* Resentment can be understood as primarily directed against others. Spitefulness is another term for this. A person motivated by spite will put his greatest efforts into causing harm to others, rather than promoting himself. He will even harm himself in his zeal to harm others. The 'positive' face of resentment is the burgeoning phenomenon of 'entitlement'; which, again, has a strong flavour that 'my' privilege is best expressed in terms of the intrusive inconvenience, anger and misery it causes to others.

 

Note added: 

There are implications in the above understanding for Christians; because Luciferic evil was usually opposed by trying to build church-administered systems to 'tame' Anger, Lust and Pride - by encouraging/ insisting-upon obedience to church rules. 

However, this strategy of taming by obedience (as we have seen) played-into the reinforcement of the Ahrimanic sins. And church-Christianity has dis-couraged, and de-motivated itself. Thus all the churches have (more, or less) become part of the global, atheistic bureaucratic System of Ahrimanic evil. In 2020, the mainstream churches have actively embraced their all-but annihilation by birdemic rules.

Ahrimanic evil was opposed by 'counter-cultural', anti-System, individualistic ideas - which, when not 'Romantic' Christian - often fell back into Luciferic evils (especially lust). And it is tempting, nowadays, to suppose that evil can be attacked by resisting and destroying the Global Bureaucratic System ('The Matrix'). But, if I am correct that this Ahrimanic System is already being superseded and consumed by negative, Sorathic evil; then the current, world dominating evil cannot be resisted by any form of destruction. 

In sum; if we aimed primarily to destroy The System, we would only reinforce the emerging Sorathic spirit of destruction. 

What then? Resistance to Sorathic evil is as simple as the evil it opposes; in that it is to pursue the positive virtues most characteristic of God - which are love and creation (which are one: creation being a superabundance of love); that is, to pursue loving and creating.

('Loving' in the sense of love in the best marriages and families; 'creating' in the broadest sense of thinking and acting from our real, divine self - we are children of God; which is always original and generative.)

And, resistance to Sorathic evil must be individual, or based upon personal, loving 'familial' relationships; because of the danger of Ahrimanic ('Systemic') evil, standing behind the Sorathic.  

So, our course seems clear and simple, as well as difficult and hazardous; which is for each individual to resist Sorathic destruction by creation; to resist Sorathic negation by love. And to ensure that these values and behaviours of creation and love come from within-us: that is, come from God-within-us. 

And not to wait for a lead from any church, institution or other-person - nor to look behind to see if anyone is following us. We must do what needs to be done our-selves, starting now.