A genius dies - Richard Adams, author of Watership Down

He lived to the age of 96 - a 'good innings' by any standards - and was hale and hearty until very recently.

I have read only his Watership Down, and autobiography - not fancying the other fictions; but I regard Watership Down as a truly great book, right up there at the pinnacle of the Fantasy genre:

https://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/brief-review-of-watership-down-by.html 

 

Brief Review of Watership Down by Richard Adams (1972)

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I have just re-reread this after a gap of six years, and can confirm that I rate it as one of the best 'children's' fantasy books of all time - to be set alongside Wind in the Willows, The Hobbit, Narnia and Harry Potter (my personal pantheon).

Like each of these it is unique, a one-off - and clearly written under some kind of inspiration.

Also, Watership Down has that multi-valent richness and depth of the best books in this genre - including a vivid, convincing and beautiful incorporation of the rabbit's religion and spiritual life (and some of their language!); which is, I think, better-done than in any of the other-mentioned books.

Watership Down has great characters, adventures, love, battles, natural beauty, humour, mystery and high seriousness, and lots about the life of bunnies! - a complete and rounded sub-created world; but to pick these apart and present them separately would be to distort and misrepresent the feel of the book.

Certainly, it is a work of genius.

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Aphorism or what?

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I have experimented for a week with a blog of aphorisms (listed below) but find that this is not the right medium for my ideas/ notions - it seems I would rather write a mini-essay (or indeed a micro-essay) than a free-standing aphorism.

Nonetheless, I suspect that aphoristic knowledge - not argument, not evidence, not opinion - is probably what we most need now: only it will have to be someone else who provides it!

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The Good News

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A simple Christian message.

If you seek God, you shall find. You will make the right choice (and before it is too late).

If you have not yet found, do not despair: keep seeking. You will not be disappointed: you will get the real and eternal essence of that which you seek.

(Only pray also that you seek that which is Good for you.)

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Thursday, 24 November 2011

The triumph of the Left

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That the best-behaved people are on the wrong side; and most of the kindest people are in service to evil.

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Wednesday, 23 November 2011

We resemble Eloi...

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but we are not innocent; what we truly are is Cowslip's Warren.

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The Eloi are from The Time Machine by HG Wells' - Cowslip's Warren is from Watership Down by Richard Adams.

I regard Watership Down as a multifaceted, multi-level work of poetic and narrative genius.

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Nihilism is not believing nothing

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(although it may self-describe as such); To be a nihilist is to seek destruction of The Good.

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Do not seek humility directly -

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...Instead seek Love of God: humility is a by-product.

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Advice for middle aged reactionaries

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Don't read: re-read.

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(You have already read what you need to know.)

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Tuesday, 22 November 2011

Common sense, tradition, revelation versus hurt feelings

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On the one hand we have common sense (spontaneous human instinct), two thousand years of uncontradicted tradition, and divine revelation (as revelation has been understood for two thousand years and by the Holiest people ever known)...

And on the other hand we have hurt feelings; or, at least, the expression (or at least imagined attribution) of humiliation of some individual person or group of persons at being excluded.

No contest! Very Obviously hurt feelings carry the day.

To say otherwise would be unkind.

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The mass media are the primary therapy of modernity

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...because the mass media provide the two main answers to alienation: distraction and desensitization.

The mass media first distracts with deliberate inversions of the Good: ugliness, depravity and lies, which keeps our minds off the overwhelming fact that modernity depicts life as meaningless, purposeless and isolated;

then the mass media desensitizes us to the hideous, the immoral and the dishonest.

The ratchet turns another notch.

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Monday, 21 November 2011

Man is a creature incomplete

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Man is a creature incomplete, maimed; but which can become complete if he acknowledges his incompleteness; and further acknowledges that he can become complete only by Grace of God deriving from the healing completeness of Christ.

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Jesus Christ was the completion of Man maimed by loss of his primordial supernatural and specific continuous-awareness of God: Christ was the restoration of this primordial awareness in a new completion: which is called Son of God, and is made available to those who recognize the need and its source, and choose to accept the gift and its consequences.

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Natural Man is the relation with the real nature of things - this is natural Good. But natural Good does not, cannot, restore the lost supernatural and specific awareness of God because it relies on human resources which are radically incomplete.

So Natural Man relying on his own resources is alienated.

Natural Man can only be healed via the recognition that supernatural and specific awareness of God can come only from God.

(This acknowledgement is termed humility. Humility can only come from trust, which can only come from Love - from conviction that God Loves each of us specifically and personally. This is why the Love of God is primary for Christians - the primary commandment without which the others are inoperative. When God is acknowledged but not Loved, there is submission but not humility. And only an incarnate God can be Loved by a human - hence the necessity for Christ.)

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Note: the above ideas are derived from Charles Williams, especially The Descent of the Dove and the commentary on this in Alice Mary Hadfield's An Introduction to Charles Williams.

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Sunday, 20 November 2011

Nihilism defined

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Nihilism is denial of the reality of the real.

Which is to say, nihilism is denial of the reality of The Good.

(The Good - Truth, Beauty, Virtue in Unity - is one conception of primary reality) 

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The denial is necessarily in-practice, as well as theoretical.

Thus nihilism is destruction of The Good.

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Yet the Good cannot be destroyed - only distorted: all things are necessarily motivated by seeking Good - but innately only one or more aspect of Good.

In practice, therefore, operationally instantiated: nihilism is the purposive destruction of The Good in Unity in pursuit of a partial Good.

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(For instance, modern nihilism is characteristically the destruction of Truth, Beauty and all virtues but one: kindness. In sum, modern nihilism is constructive of a world of ugliness and lies and vice in the name of a single Good, namely kindness - the desire to alleviate suffering, misery, pain: at any price and with any consequence. Most past nihilisms have been less complete than modern; partial but with a larger number of Goods.)

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Saturday, 19 November 2011

You may ask one question

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You will receive one answer.

That answer must, of necessity, be brief.

(Hence incomplete, hence distorted, hence enigmatic at best - probably ambiguous - at worst misleading.)

Tough - that's all you can have.

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If you don't understand the answer then that is your problem

- go work on yourself until you do understand.

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Friday, 18 November 2011

Who would want to be a Zen master?

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I think I understand what Zen is trying to achieve, I know of the method/s by which it might plausibly be attained, and I believe that at least some people have successfully reached this objective.

But what I do not understand is this: why would anyone want it?

Suppose Zen enlightenment was available at a shop and for a reasonable price - but was, of course, non-returnable: who would buy?

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The pure quest for 'enlightenment' seems nothing more than a very long and uncertain path to analgesia - and there are swifter and surer paths to the alleviation of pain such as intoxication, sleep or suicide (unless further factors are introduced, like the immortality of the soul, and then we have gone beyond Zen).

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Thursday, 17 November 2011

Modern man and metaphysics

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Modern man is the most metaphysical creature in history; so much so that he denies the existence of metaphysics. 


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Metaphysics is the frame around the world: man is born with a natural frame, and has been offered a different and better frame but at a price. 


However, modern man prefers a different and worse frame on 'easy terms' (the price is higher, but the payment is due later). 


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Modern metaphysics does not pretend to be more real than common-sense metaphysics; it does not pretend to be as desirable as Christian metaphysics.


Neither real nor desirable... why are there so many takers? 


Because the poison is administered in small, sub-lethal doses, and is sugar-coated.


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Participation in the reality of The Good

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The Positive Way is participation in the reality of The Good.

This works indirectly, via the imagination.

The participation must be real; that which is participated-in must be reality.

To use the imagination to engage with reality...

not a paradox, just very difficult to sustain.

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Wednesday, 16 November 2011

Can The Left make poverty history?

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Too late, already happened (7 billion people and rising).

Prosperity is the problem, not poverty.

Make prosperity history, then?

Be patient, we're nearly there...

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The complacency of 'doubt'

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Surely complacency is a great sin of intellectuals? That characteristically smug self-satisfaction which comes from denial of the duty of worship. Ingratitude.

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Tom Bombadil and the hierarchy of things

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No detail is too small for the notice of Tom Bombadil, yet he observes the whole world unfold and die.

He observes from a tiny and obscure corner far away from what appears to be the centre; and yet not with resentment nor with provincial pride, but with unquestioning faith that this is his place, his role.

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Reading Pascal's Pensees...

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I have the conviction that anyone who understands must become a Christian; unless he be sure that Christianity was false.

Pascal explains the human condition, and that Christianity is the answer: the only answer.

The others are not answers but denials and distractions.

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Tuesday, 15 November 2011

Humility cannot be a primary goal

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Love of Man is not, cannot be, the primary goal of life - it must be second to Love of God.

Thus Humility is not, cannot be, the primary goal of life - it must be second to Love.

(When we love, we are humble in respect to that which we love.)

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Insufficient reform is worse than none

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Insufficient reforms are worse than none in the long term since they allow things to get worse for longer.

Excessive reforms are worse than necessary in the short term, but effective in the long term (so long as the patient survives).

Ergo all effective reform is excessive.

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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.

A note on rabbits, political correctness and divine providence

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I started thinking-out a Watership Down type of fable, about a strain of mutant rabbit which limited its own  reproduction in favour of 'industrial' activities that raised the standard of living; and where this disposition was combined with a compulsive altruism; such that the surplus product was shared with any mutant rabbits who cared to come and ask - and how this led to an horrific collapse of the warren...

And so on...

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It was (obviously!) meant as an allegory of modernity, and how the particular combination of reproductive suppression and altruism was even-more-rapidly self-destroying than either would be on their own.

And how the psychological factors which led to reproductive self suppression were themselves amplified by the consequence of that psychology; how modernity creates more of itself.

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Then I got to thinking that this could either be explained in terms of natural selection - of the weeding-out of deleterious genes (i.e that moderns are essentially a lower fitness mutant strain); or in terms of divine providence - like those Old Testament stories of wicked societies which get worse and worse yet still refuse to repent, until they are overwhelmed by catastrophe and slaughtered or enslaved.

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It is weird in the extreme to see this scenario unfolding relentlessly, step by step, and sustained not so much by ignorance as by self-blinding.

It is things like this which seem to require the operation of purposive evil in the world (if we did not already know this from divine revelation).

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And the greatest triumph of purposive evil is surely that the self-destroying society finds the concept of purposive evil laughable, infantile, embarrassing or itself evil; and regards this attitude as evidence of their enlightenment and intelligence, their superiority over all previous ages.

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The fires are lit, the fuel is being loaded on them, the conflagration builds, the defenders are bound and gagged, all exits are sealed.

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What is the evidence that people despair in The West?

Two bits of evidence came to mind while thinking about Richard Adams's great fantasy novel Watership Down (1972) - the one about rabbits. If you have not yet read it: you should give it a try: I will try to avoid spoilers.

During their adventures, the heroes come across two contrasting dystopias: Cowslip's Warren, which superficially seems like a hedonic, lotus-eater's paradise; and Efrafa which embodies military virtue of courage, loyalty and organization.

But although both warrens have good qualities, each has a sign that something is very wrong, and indeed intolerably, fatally wrong - and these are signs we see in the modern West.

In Cowslip's Warren the 'poet' rabbit is a kind of degenerate who tells 'decadent' stories of despair, paradox, unattainable yearning, the beauty of horror - and the traditional encouraging stories of the rabbit's trickster-god El-Ahrairah are regarded by the Warren with embarrassment as being childish, simplistic, outdated.

Something is deeply wrong when the creative artists communicate inversions of the Good.

And in Efrafa, for all the efficiency and technical capability, the does (female rabbits) have stopped reproducing (by reabsorbing their kittens): a sign of their profound stress and despair.

I feel this way about our civilization. Our most admired and accomplished art is despairing, our women have (all but) stopped reproducing.

Whatever else is happening is pretty much irrelevant: these signs indicate extreme, underlying despair - which despair is what underpins our self-hatred, our inability to defend our values, the active but denied pursuit of cultural suicide.

Addressing this despair, and replacing it with hope, is the prime task.

Unreliable Prophecy

The problem with prophecy is that - when it is made public - it never seems to come true; or - even when some would interpret it as validated; prophecy never seems to do any good.

I have read many sincere, detailed prophecies made over the past fifty years or so; and they are often completely wrong - as wrong as it is possible to be.

There were, for example, from the 1970s - 1990s (and again leading up to 2012) many channelled messages about an imminent landing of aliens on earth and the consequences, and multiple predictions of an imminent planetary breakthrough to a higher 'frequency/ vibrational' level of consciousness. Didn't happen.


The only valid prophecy I have encountered has been Rudolf Steiner's of 1918 - about which I have written extensively. Perhaps significantly this was a pessimistic prophecy - about what bad things would happen if Western man continued to reject the reality of the spiritual; if we continued to assume the truth of materialism. And even in 1918 this was an extrapolation of a century-plus trend. 

But Steiner's main prophecy - of the Second Coming of Christ in c1933, was completely wrong - at many levels. Instead of Christ we got Hitler as Chancellor - although Anthroposophists actually interpret Hitler as a demonic reaction against the Second Coming. But if the 1918 prophecy is straightforwardly true, then the Second Coming prophecy is falsified by the same common sense criteria.

Another of Steiner's main prophecies was that Ahriman (Satan, the Antichrist) would be incarnated in c2000 - so I suppose that remains a possibility, although I think we might have noticed by now?

But from Steiner we can see that being A Prophet does not mean that one is correct about most things, most of the time. And if only a small percentage of  statements are accurate - and we don't know which percent until afterwards - then this really isn't much use.


There are several ways by which, it has been suggested, God could enable prophecy. But the question is why he would want to do this.

Prophecy essentially assumes divine planning to a timetable. And why would God (at least the Christian God) want to do that? And if he did, why would he want people to know about it. And if he did want people to know about it - why choose a human prophet as the mechanism - and expect the message to be accurately disseminated and understood?


There is no doubt that - through the ages - there has been a fascination with prophecies. But public, objective, social prophecy is beginning to strike me as a wrong idea at root. It may be a fascination - one I personally feel pretty strongly; but that fascination may be idle or evil rather than good.

I can certainly see the value in personal prophecy - among family, friends and the like. This can serve a function of retrospective validation - as apparently happened among Jesus's disciples when after his resurrection, they recalled some relevant prophecies. But something goes terribly wrong when these are made public, with 'general prophecy', when prophecies are made into objective statements, applicable to 'all'; when they are supposed to affect public policy.

Indeed, the most convincing stories of prophecy are when The Public disbelieve and ignore The Prophet, but a much smaller group of the prophet's family, friends, followers do believe; and these 'believers' are able to escape some prophesied disaster.

A good example is at the beginning of the Book of Mormon, when the prophet Lehi are ignored by the authorities, but he and his family escape the destruction of Jerusalem. Or in fiction when, in Watership Down, the shaman rabbit Fiver predicts the destruction of the burrow, is ognored by teh chief rabbit, but escapes with his brother and a small group of followers.   



I am certainly guilty, many times over, of worrying about what the future holds in general terms unless... or of trying to avert one or another prophecy. But surely this is a fault? Surely I ought to be discerning what I ought to do now - and (so far as possible) setting aside what might (but probably will not) happen as a consequence?

Or, if I did recieve a real prophecy, then this would surely not be about anything large scale - but about what should happen to myself or my family; something I can directly affect: where my personal decision is significant. 


Like most people, I want to be reassured that If I do X, then Y will eventuate; but we know that it is seldom possible really to know what will happen - too many factors impinge. Most importantly, all people (all Beings) have agency, and are capable of choosing. In principle, conscious behaviour cannot be known in advance - only guessed.

And therefore what we ought to do, ought not primarily to be aimed at consequences - especially when we know what it is right to do regardless of consequences. That seems the case in real prophecy - the future is not known with any great precision; but what ought to be done is clear. 

We may, if we are sincere, come to understand the reality of our situation - and this will include what we personally should do in consequence. To get back to that broadly-fulfilled 1918 prophecy of Steiner - we may reasonably infer that the bad consequences happened for broadly the reasons Steiner stated 100 years ago. But we only knew that for sure in (perhaps) the past generation or two; many decades after the prophecy was made.

And what we do not know is the consequences that would actually eventuate from here-and-now if we (from this point) did what Steiner rrecommended and remedied the defects Steiner outlined... If we (you and me, other people) regarded the spiritual realm as real, developed a more frequent and intense awareness of the spiritual realm etc.  What effect would this have?


In sum, even if we know that the prophecy was true, and what we ought to do about it  - this does not tell us what would happen if we actually went ahead and did it. If (for example) there was a general recognition that 'Steiner was right after all!' (at least, in that particular lecture of 1918).

What then: what would be the resulting consequences?

It seems we would need yet another prophecy!

It is the casual, blandness of modern corruption which is so very disturbing...

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A few days ago I watched the pilot episode of the TV comedy M*A*S*H - viewed now (in contrast with my atheist teenage impression) it was very crude, obvious, in-your-face propaganda for the sexual revolution, pacifism and Leftism-in-general.

But, in its favour was that it was indeed crude, obvious, in-your-face and knew exactly what it was doing and why.

It was demonic, knew it was demonic - and revelled in the opposition that its demonic nature would evoke.

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Now we live in a world (I live in a world) where the attitude to historically-unprecedented, extreme and self-destructive behaviours is casual, bland - either indifference or mild-approval.

So, there is a decades-long epidemic of (among other things) extreme drunkenness, a cult of government-pushed gambling, incrementally expanding self-defacement (tattooing), self-mutilation (piercing of tongues, lips, faces etc), moralistic but astonishing triviality and small-minded spiteful vendettas or witch-hunts; and an active state policy of aggression towards marriage, parents, families, decency, subversion against once-valued and useful institutions - and all the rest of it...

And the general public response is... passivity, acceptance. A shrug or a wry-smile at most.

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The freshness and aggression of the sixties counter-culture was part of a society which was culturally at war - and knew it was at war.

But modern corruption is one of surrender: we live in the soma-drugged Brave New World of Huxley, we are the Eloi of Well's Time Machine, Cowslip's warren from Watership Down - we dwell in the situation of dull, routine officially-sanctioned sin described in C.S Lewis's follow-up to the 'Letters' volume - Screwtape Proposes a Toast...

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