Distinguishing Final Participation from Original Participation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Participation in Romantic Christianity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Romantic Christianity is not Only negative and reactive...

The cultural era (commencing in Western Europe in the late 1700s) known as Romanticism, is usually described in terms of being a negative reaction; partly against the newly dominant "rationalism" and scientism - reducing divine creation to a contrivance of clockwork wheels; and then fuelled by the beginnings of urbanization, noise, regimentation and pollution from the Industrial Revolution. 

And much the same applies to those of us "dissident" Christians whom I have termed Romantic Christians - they/we are usually understood as reacting-against. 

As I say - this is correct, so far as it goes - but it is not the whole story. 

But Owen Barfield (following Rudolf Steiner) clarified that Romanticism also had a positive agenda; it tended to regard "nature" as much more significant, alive and purposive than did Medieval or Reformation Christianity. This included an interest and seriousness about "the supernatural", and the "magical".   

There was a strong focus on the value of more intense personal states of awareness, intuition, revelation and the like - a "poetic" perspective on life. 

There was a new high-valuation of individual creativity including genius. 

In terms of Christianity; these might briefly be translated as striving for a faith rooted in direct personal experience and responsibility. 

Altogether; Romanticism - and this includes Romantic Christianity - has now been around long enough that surely it ought to be accorded more than the usual dismissive condescension - or quasi-puritantical abhorrence - that is its fate among orthodox and traditionalist Christians?

As I understand it; Romanticism among Christians is partly a negative and reactive rejection of the corruption, dullness, triviality, and superficiality of the churches; but when it is serious is has a more motivating and positive agenda: which relates to an inner conviction that a better Christianity is possible than that resulting from the primacy of church obedience - a Christianity that is more honest, more coherent, more inspiring, and more responsible. 

This refusal to subordinate ones primary religious convictions to the external authority of a church does not - Of Course Not - mean that a Romantic Christian is obliged to live a solitary and isolated life of abstention from all ritual, music, scripture, tradition...

It merely means that these come second, and not first; and the Romantic Christian's engagement with the forms and symbols of Christianity are subordinated to his direct and personal relationship with the divine - which is given primacy, as his motivating ideal. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the past decade or so, I have been trying (in multiple ways) to understand the implications of Owen Barfield's concept of Final Participation - as being the destiny and proper aim of our spiritual life. Some modern people seem wholly enmeshed in mundane materialist thinking and feel detached and alienated from the living world - trapped inside their own heads. Their only relief is temporarily to forget this in sleep, intoxication, psychosis - and in occasional moments when there is a resurgence of a child-like sense of belonging and involvement. These brief times are what Barfield calls Original Participation, because they were our original state of consciousness as young children, and also (it is believed) the normal state of the earliest ancestral Men. Original Participation is - pretty much - the same as Novalis's Sehnsucht and CS Lewis's Joy; Gurdjieff's self-remembering, Maslow's Peak Experience, or Csíkszentmihályi's Flow state are psychological reductions of the experience. Such moments may be pleasant, indeed there have been times and places (e.g. some of the Romantic movement around 1800, or the 1960s counter-culture... still ongoing) when many people aspired to abandon modern consciousness and return to Original Participation. Although this return to the spontaneous, natural, child-like, primitive, here-and-now consciousness is powerful and alluring to many people; it has always failed - and must be assumed impossible (except briefly). However it makes a difference how we regard these brief moments. If they are regarded as merely pleasant psychological states, then Original Participation can only be therapeutic - like taking a short holiday from the "real world" of mundane materialism.Yet Barfield asserted that Final Participation was not just a pleasant interlude; but in some deep sense absolutely necessary - necessary if we personally, and our society as well, were to avoid being overwhelmed by evil. However, Barfield was vague about how this might be achieved (he usually advised consulting his mentor Rudolf Steiner's work - but Steiner's techniques seem obviously ineffective, and Barfield never claimed that decades of practicing Steiner medications had led to any very significant effect on Barfield's own thinking in terms of Final Participation. Indeed, it seems that FP is not really achievable in a lasting and dominant way. So we seem rather to be trapped between impossibilities! We cannot go back, cannot stay as we are - yet the destined path forward seems blocked... Yet anyone who conceptualizes life as bounded by conception and death will find himself bounded by exactly such impossibilities. We cannot escape the constraints of entropy (and death) and evil. But this is forgetting the reality that we are eternal Beings, and this mortal life can be (should be) seen as a finite transitional phase between eternities before and afterwards. Furthermore (and here I depart from Barfield, with his ideas of multiple future reincarnations) a Christian sees his eternal future as including resurrected Heavenly life, following after this mortal life.My idea of Final Participation is that it is the conscious choice to consecrate those moments of Original Participation. So that when moments of OP happen; we choose to regard them as sacred. In such a "consecration"; the momentary experience of OP is consciously recognized as being of potentially eternal significance to divine creation - and is actively taken-up into ongoing thinking.This contrasts with, say, the sixties counter-culture response - which is to stay inside those OP moments, and perpetuate them or as long as possible. I would regard this as akin to a religiously-contemplative response to Original Participation. Contemplative because it is deliberately passive and self-negating. The moment is primary and we intend to stay with it, dissolve-into it. This is analogous to the contemplative kind of meditation where people seek a "blissful" state of consciousness and try to maintain it for as long as possible. The ideal is of stasis in perfection. But Final Participation is active and creative - hence is is both dynamic - like divine creation; and aspires to join-in-with and influence ongoing divine creation. And all this is a choice, not a surrender. It is an affirmation of the self, not an attempt to lose the self. It is the choice to be a Son of God, a sibling of Jesus; one who want to join with God in the work of creation, and add to to that creative work whatever is unique in himself. So, Final Participation is an active self-confidence; confidence that by the "process" of resurrection after this mortal life we can be transformed such as to be able, worthy, and trust-worthy of eternal participation in creation.Thus, FP is a state of being only achievable permanently (as a normal state) after our death, and only among those who have then chosen to follow Jesus through resurrection to everlasting Heavenly life. But Final Participation does have a vital role in this mortal life; because it is when we can add to our resurrected life. FP represents our choice to learn from experience in such a way that our immortal soul is permanently transformed.We are talking about our immortal souls, not the conditions of our mortal lives on earth - so the fact that our modern experiences of participation may be relatively few, infrequent, brief - does not invalidate these experiences... FP experiences are of permanent value not because they last a long time; but so long as we choose to consecrate them.Consecration would go something like this:1. Original Participation happens. 2. We recognize that it is happening. 3. We acknowledge that this happening is of potentially permanent importance to our resurrected Heavenly self. This needs to be done when Original participation happens - Now: here-and-now. Not put-off until later. If we do not do it at the time of Original Participation - it will (probably) not be done. However... An intense imagined re-living of the moment, could also be used to consecrate that moment retrospectively. Because then the moment is not merely "retrospective" but a re-experiencing here-and-now - which is perhaps one reason why we may recollect and meditate on such moments... Why they may last so tenaciously in our memories. The experiences may be re-presenting themselves for consecration. Maybe, if we do this on principle and habitually; then this will act as a positive feedback and establish a "spiritual reward system" - so that such opportunities will become more frequent? The thing is: we modern Men are terribly demotivated, prone to despair - and any spiritual advice that diminishes or delays our gratification seems doomed to fail*. Consecrating our moments of Original Participation generates an immediate spiritual reward as well as a hope-full anticipation. Instead of OP being a tragic joy; doomed to be short-lived, doomed to be forgotten and lost by age, disease, death... Instead of this; the act of consecration transforms it into a moment of permanent and positive significance. As far as I can understand; only a follower of Jesus Christ who lives in confident expectation of resurrection can do this; and it will not "just happen" but must be done by conscious choice. All then depends on making that choice. NOTE: It may be objected that because Original Participation is spontaneous and natural, it is not necessarily good. This is true; and if an OP experience is not good, then it cannot and shall not be consecrated to resurrected eternal life - so any such attempt will fail. Christian discernment - knowledge of good and evil, God and that which opposes God; is a necessary part of Christian life - and always applies. * The mass of people are (quite literally) spiritually-dying of despair, for lack of any genuinely positive purpose in life. It seems obvious that the double-negative (e.g. therapeutic) values that are exclusively propagated, including by nearly all religions (eg religions rooted in avoidance of default divine punishment), including most Christian churches - are simply ineffectual; leading to short-termist this-worldly hedonism now, and ultimate despair eventually.

I talk a good deal on this blog about purpose, and how important it is - yet purpose is an abstraction, hence not really real, but just a symbol for reality.

(The reality is the personal desires of living Beings.)  

For most theologically-minded people, the abstract nature of purpose is important; because theologians want purpose to be detachable from individual persons - such that it can be implanted or put-into a Being - for example by God.

The currently-dominant half-baked philosophies of "AI" are also dependent on this abstraction; since they assert that purpose is something that can be built-into computer, robots and the like - inserted by external entities such as computer programmers and engineers, and their paymasters. 

But - if I am rigorous, and manage to escape the bad habits of my socialized 21st century metaphysics - then I acknowledge that purpose is ultimately the desires, the "wantings", of Beings. 

In a nutshell - purpose is an attribute of particular (living, conscious, eternal, spiritual) Beings.

A major difficulty of classical traditional theologians in the 21st century (and indeed for several centuries already, albeit increasing) is that inherited Christian theology implicitly incorporates the Ancient Greek (Platonic, Aristotelian - and also scholastic Aquinas-derived) sense of purpose as an attribute of a Being. 

(e.g. When Aristotle, apparently, explains the motion of things - such as gravity - in terms of where entities want to be; or when Aquinas describes the stars and planets as being angels.) 

The ancients knew, from their personal daily experience - but unconsciously and implicitly, that they inhabited a living universe. This formed an unspoken background structure, a matrix, for all their philosophizing.  

Those in the past were developing their abstract logical arguments on the unconscious, implicit - yet vital - assumption of a living universe of Beings with desires. 

But modern theologians - who expound (as they suppose) ancient or medieval theology and philosophy have (almost invariably) lost this implicit assumption - at least since their adolescence - and have not restored it by conscious choice... 

The consequence is that the bottom line assumption of modern classical-theologians is of the divinely-entailed validity of an abstracted version of Greek-Medieval logic; operating in an originally-dead universe. 

(And this originally-dead-universe mind-set has been inherited by nearly-all post-reformation theology; and the atheist traditions of philosophy including science, and also and more obviously the "rationality" that underpins and regulates the modern System of governance, corporations, media etc.)  

In sum: modern (post-medieval) theology is rooted in pure abstraction - which is why it is experienced as dry, quibbling; irrelevant to me-here-now - why it Does Not Convince. 

In order to follow the reasoning of such philosophers - we are compelled to think from a stance in which abstract logic is the primary reality - operating in an otherwise life-less reality. 

So that human beings, you and me, are being regarded very much as-if we were (bottom line, ultimately) nothing-but the product of logic! 

We are excluded from the assumptions; and, consequently, the conclusions. 

Into this assumed-dead universe, God then "puts" souls - souls that he has made from nothing. 

God puts into these inserted-souls other attributes - such as purpose, and freedom.

And this kind of abstract stuff is what we are invited to imagine, invited to believe!... Nay instructed that we Must believe; about our-selves, everybody else, the world and universe!

To put it starkly - classic traditional theology of the 21st century pictures a kind of zombie universe; dead but animated by some kind of insertion of properties. 

However, this isn't what people believed 2000 or even 1000 years ago - because it leaves-out their spontaneous animism - their implicit and unconscious knowing that ultimately reality consisted of living Beings, and the properties and attributes of these Beings emerged from this living nature. 

No matter what the ancients said and wrote: this animism lay behind it; which was why the abstract logical scholastic philosophy was not - to them, then - dry and quibbling and irrelevant in the way it is to us, now. 

The history of human consciousness, and therefore of philosophy and theology; is one of emergence from spontaneous innate animism - to the present state when animism is no longer spontaneous, but is denied and ridiculed...

Consequently our ultimate metaphysical philosophy is either/ both incoherent and/or consists of irrelevant autonomous syllogisms.  

But we need consciously and by choice, to recover the implicit and (mostly) unconscious animism of the past - if we are really to understand-by-experience the nature of reality. 

Therefore we must beware of the delusions of abstractions understood in a way that did not apply to Aristotle and Aquinas - whose minds included the built-in assumption of living Beings as a "given"...

And this built-in assumption underlay everything they thought and wrote. 

*

Note: The above insight is heavily indebted to the work of Owen Barfield (eg. Saving the Appearances) and Rudolf Steiner (eg. The Riddles of Philosophy). 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ideal is of stasis in perfection.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consecration would go something like this:

1. Original Participation happens. 

2. We recognize that it is happening. 

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

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

Not put-off until later. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All then depends on making that choice. 

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

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