Primary Thinking is the term I have devised for what Owen Barfield called Final Participation and Rudolf Steiner the Imaginative Soul - as a state it would also include some examples of Jung's active imagination, Gurdjieff's self-remembering, Maslow's peak experience, and alert types of shamanic, poetic and creative trances.
I regard the attainment of primary thinking to be the main task of modern Man - but clearly, since the state has been so widely noticed, and is experienced by so many people - merely experiencing primary thinking is ineffectual.
This is because primary thinking is firstly nearly-always brief and very intermittent, and secondly the experience of primary thinking nearly-always misunderstood by normal every day consciousness when that state resumes.
Primary thinking ought to be understood as an experience of the divine way of thinking, intrinsically Good and valid - and superior to other and lower types of normal existence. In primary thinking we know - and we know directly - truth, beauty and virtue; and in this state we are intrinsically creative; because primary thinking is that which is divine in us, active within the realm of universal knowledge.
However, most people who experience primary thinking most of the time will misinterpret the experience; or will try to use it for their own worldly expediency. Jung and Maslow, for example, regard it as therapeutic - in effect a branch of medicine, aiming at making people feel and function better. While mainstream New Agers tend to regard primary thinking as a source of pleasure and gratification - part of a satisfying lifestyle.
And of course most of us are substantially evil; so despite that the primary thinking state is intrinsically Good; once they 'snap out of it', people will try to use the knowledge attained during primary thinking for selfish and short-termist reasons, or else for actively-evil purposes - using their knowledge of Good to try and destroy Good.
(This is presumably what devils and demons do: i.e. a kind of inverted black magic.)
Mainstream secular leftist people usually regard primary thinking as a pleasant but foolish delusion - and make fun of, or scorn, those who take it seriously.
So the challenge of primary thinking is not so much to do it, but - when we are not doing it - to 1. understand it correctly, 2. learn from it, and 3. put those lessons into practice as best we can.
Wednesday, 22 November 2017
Reincarnation and our ultimate divine destiny: two significant points where I disagree with Owen Barfield
Despite that I have been persuaded by almost all of Owen Barfield's philosophical and historical analysis; there are two important points where I believe he is mistaken. There are his view of reincarnation and his description of the ultimate destiny of each Man.
Barfield's view of reincarnation is that it is vital to the evolution - that is the developmental unfolding - of human consciousness. He sees the history of life in each person as a matter of living-through different eras of consciousness, with (to simplify) each human spirit reincarnated in each era - so that each of us can learn from the very different experiences of consciousness prevailing in the evolution of earth and society. This process is building toward a ultimate state of divinity that will place each willing person onto a par with God.
Where this is all going is described in Barfield's 1944 collection of essays Romanticism Comes of Age in terms of a U-shaped curve. The human spirit began as spirit in a unity of blissful close communion with God - not incarnated and without a sense of self but conscious - indeed almost universally conscious, immersed-in-consciousness but not differentiated from it. Through the history of reincarnations the plan is for each spirit incrementally to go down the left side of the U; at each descent becoming more separate - until at the nadir of the U our self becomes utterly separate-from and autonomous-of God - with a distinct sense of 'self', but without consciousness of anything else.
At the extreme bottom of the U we are just detached selves, and regard other selves, indeed the whole of reality, as uncertain. We become alienated - even from our own thinking; which we come to feel is separate from our-selves. In sum we are utterly free in thought - but confined within the bounds of our subjective selves, and unaware of any other reality.
Then Barfield describes a re-ascent up-the-other-side of the U; recapitulating the previously negotiated states of consciousness - but this time retaining our distinctive sense of self, hence our freedom. The ultimate, and fully divine, destiny of each Man is therefore intended to be a non-incarnated spirit life, again in blissful close communion with God, but this time having acquired our selves and our freedom. Thus we become as God: fully free, fully conscious.
My difference is that I regard reincarnation as possible but very unusual (for example the New Tetstament discusses the possibility of whether John the Baptist is some kind of reincarnation of an earlier Hebrew prophet; whether it is true it is certainly regarded as possible.) - but reincarnation is not a necessary nor an an intrinsic part of the process of divinisation.
And I regard ultimate human destiny as like God the Father, but not as an unincarnated spirit state, instead as an eternal resurrected life, with a body (like God the Father); and not in any kind of literal unity or communion - but instead in a harmony with God that is like an indestructible and total state of human love; but love of the same kind - yet elevated to the highest level - that we know from marriage, family and the very strongest friendships.
In other words, I accept the three stage Mormon description of human life as first pre-mortal spirit children of God; then life on earth as mortal incarnates; then death and resurrection to eternal embodied life - just as both Jesus Christ and God the Father are embodied. In essence, incarnation is seen as a higher state than spirit existence.
This is probably why reincarnation is so rare - and perhaps is not exactly re-incarnation in Barfield's sense when it happens - because embodiment is seen as a higher form of life, so there is a reluctance to reverse it once attained (and perhaps it cannot be wholly reversed - spirit life after death seems to be a very partial, and unhappy existence - probably without memory, self or freedom; which was why Christ's gift of resurrection was such Good News and so necessary).
I account for the differences between myself and Barfield, while nonetheless asserting that I am correct, by the assumption that Barfield (and his master Steiner) misinterpreted memories and visions of our pre-mortal spirit life as being life between-incarnations; and that they accepted the common mainstream Christian assumption that God the Father is a spirit and lacks a body.
My assumption is therefore that Barfield (and Steiner) had correct but partial intuitions, which they misinterpreted.
Barfield's view of reincarnation is that it is vital to the evolution - that is the developmental unfolding - of human consciousness. He sees the history of life in each person as a matter of living-through different eras of consciousness, with (to simplify) each human spirit reincarnated in each era - so that each of us can learn from the very different experiences of consciousness prevailing in the evolution of earth and society. This process is building toward a ultimate state of divinity that will place each willing person onto a par with God.
Where this is all going is described in Barfield's 1944 collection of essays Romanticism Comes of Age in terms of a U-shaped curve. The human spirit began as spirit in a unity of blissful close communion with God - not incarnated and without a sense of self but conscious - indeed almost universally conscious, immersed-in-consciousness but not differentiated from it. Through the history of reincarnations the plan is for each spirit incrementally to go down the left side of the U; at each descent becoming more separate - until at the nadir of the U our self becomes utterly separate-from and autonomous-of God - with a distinct sense of 'self', but without consciousness of anything else.
At the extreme bottom of the U we are just detached selves, and regard other selves, indeed the whole of reality, as uncertain. We become alienated - even from our own thinking; which we come to feel is separate from our-selves. In sum we are utterly free in thought - but confined within the bounds of our subjective selves, and unaware of any other reality.
Then Barfield describes a re-ascent up-the-other-side of the U; recapitulating the previously negotiated states of consciousness - but this time retaining our distinctive sense of self, hence our freedom. The ultimate, and fully divine, destiny of each Man is therefore intended to be a non-incarnated spirit life, again in blissful close communion with God, but this time having acquired our selves and our freedom. Thus we become as God: fully free, fully conscious.
My difference is that I regard reincarnation as possible but very unusual (for example the New Tetstament discusses the possibility of whether John the Baptist is some kind of reincarnation of an earlier Hebrew prophet; whether it is true it is certainly regarded as possible.) - but reincarnation is not a necessary nor an an intrinsic part of the process of divinisation.
And I regard ultimate human destiny as like God the Father, but not as an unincarnated spirit state, instead as an eternal resurrected life, with a body (like God the Father); and not in any kind of literal unity or communion - but instead in a harmony with God that is like an indestructible and total state of human love; but love of the same kind - yet elevated to the highest level - that we know from marriage, family and the very strongest friendships.
In other words, I accept the three stage Mormon description of human life as first pre-mortal spirit children of God; then life on earth as mortal incarnates; then death and resurrection to eternal embodied life - just as both Jesus Christ and God the Father are embodied. In essence, incarnation is seen as a higher state than spirit existence.
This is probably why reincarnation is so rare - and perhaps is not exactly re-incarnation in Barfield's sense when it happens - because embodiment is seen as a higher form of life, so there is a reluctance to reverse it once attained (and perhaps it cannot be wholly reversed - spirit life after death seems to be a very partial, and unhappy existence - probably without memory, self or freedom; which was why Christ's gift of resurrection was such Good News and so necessary).
I account for the differences between myself and Barfield, while nonetheless asserting that I am correct, by the assumption that Barfield (and his master Steiner) misinterpreted memories and visions of our pre-mortal spirit life as being life between-incarnations; and that they accepted the common mainstream Christian assumption that God the Father is a spirit and lacks a body.
My assumption is therefore that Barfield (and Steiner) had correct but partial intuitions, which they misinterpreted.
In the beginning was... Participation
In the beginning Men were merely primordial selves immersed in the ocean of universal consciousness; and the history of everything has included the progressive and incremental separation of these selves from the universal primary reality.
We began as immersed in universal reality - joined with everything, and everything joined with us - with permeable selves... We end with a Self that is aware of its own separation from things, from other people, from memories - and even from its own thoughts...
Why? Because separation is necessary for freedom, for agency; we must first be separate in order to be free. And free in order, ultimately, to share the divine status of the Creator - because God is free.
*
This separation of the self can physically be be imagined as a process of precipitation - of solid bodies coming from gaseous spirits.
Or as a biological analogy; as development. A baby lives at first in the ocean of amniotic fluid, inside the mother; and only gradually, incrementally, does the baby's self become separate from the mother's self - first by birth, then by development and increasing independence... but only in adolescence does the child at some point become existentially separate - an agent.
And once reached, and attained, that cannot be undone - he can get stuck in adolescence, or move on to adulthood; but he cannot return to childhood. Consciousness, separation, can temporarily be obliterated by disease, or intoxication - or suspended during sleep - but is essentially permanent.
(Incarnation is an example. When we became embodied, we could not return to the spiritual state; the preceding spiritual being could not be restored - because our selves are in our bodies, and if the body is then subtracted, what remains is not what there was before. Therefore after death the only alternatives are resurrection - with a renewed body - or else a fundamental change of the spiritual self with loss and distortion.)
*
So we begin by participating in the whole of reality - that was given. But our selves were only feebly independent, and not sufficiently separate that we could be free agents. Then a process began in the history of the human race, which is recapitulated in individuals - we developed agency by separation of the self from everything else.
At some moment the self is cut-off from everything else - and therefore unfree, because isolated. So there is a step beyond, which is a return to participation with universal reality.
Universal reality is always there - that is, everywhere - we used to be in reality but the future, the destiny, is that we should think reality.
The self now needs to - voluntarily and by an effort - engage with universal reality in a free relationship; knowing that this is happening.
The task or destiny is to re-engage with universal reality - which is everywhere for everybody, as it always has been, in a deliberate, explicit, way. This is not a matter of 'thinking about' universal reality - it is a matter of thinking-universal-reality; in other words, by thinking to become part of it.
*
But universal reality is everything - does this mean we can know everything? Not exactly and not in practice.
It does mean that there are not ultimate limits to knowledge - excepting other selves, which lie outside the system. But in practice we must navigate through this unbounded and vast world of universal reality - and for our experience to lead to valid knowledge, we ourselves must be Good and the experience we encounter to be undeceptive.
In practice, we navigate universal reality with love. It is love which leads us to the people (and entities) we can learn from; it is love which leads us to the truth rather than the falsehoods and misleadings, the evil entities, which also lie within universal reality.
Love is the cohesion and structure of everything in God's creation. And love is our safe-guard against the possibilities that would emerge is we were motivated by power, or even merely by 'curiosity'.
Imagine yourself as a self, guided by love, navigating the ocean of universal reality! That is the possibility. It is love which guides us to our Heavenly families and which guides them to us; it is love which guides the great composer to the beautiful music with universal meaning; it is love which guides the real scientist to the intuitive truths about reality...
*
So participation is given, knowledge is given... but what must be achieved is the autonomy of our-selves; and having been achieved the destiny is to return to participation; to take it up again but not to be inside it, but outside of it while yet part of it.
In a sense, with Final Participation, the vast world of universal reality is experienced as 'within us' - within our thinking. Instead us us being immersed in the ocean - the ocean is, somehow, in our own thoughts! And therefore we engage with the ocean from a place outside the ocean - and our relationship with the ocean is one of self-awareness, purpose and will.
And this is, of course, a godlike state; in the sense that a god is a cause not a consequence; outside the system and not contained-in the system; a creator not that which is created. And that is the whole point! For us to become adult, grown-up children of God, we must become like God in our nature, including our consciousness.
This moving towards divine consciousness can only happen by our choice, as an act from the agent-self.
*
Therefore, the task is to set-aside nostalgia for the original state of immersive participation: this is now impossible. It is to acknowledge the state of Modern Man as an error - a failure to move-on; a perpetual adolescence in which freedom has reached the absurd and self-refuting point of existential isolation - and got stuck.
Universal reality awlays was and still is there. We have cut-ourselves off from it. This was necessary as a phase - but is lethal as an end-point. We must re-engage with universal reality - and again participate in that universality; but from outside - in purposive thinking from our true selves.
Participation is given, knowledge is given, even love is given; but from where we are now, we need to make the choice and effort to acknowledge then create a new autonomous and free relationship with this reality.
Our task is to re-engage with universal reality in what eventually may become fully divine consciousness, but at first will be a partial, distorted and temporary kind of divine consciousness; which is thinking engaged with universal reality, and guided by love.
(The above is a development of the ideas of Owen Barfield, which were substaintially influenced by Rudolf Steiner.)
We began as immersed in universal reality - joined with everything, and everything joined with us - with permeable selves... We end with a Self that is aware of its own separation from things, from other people, from memories - and even from its own thoughts...
Why? Because separation is necessary for freedom, for agency; we must first be separate in order to be free. And free in order, ultimately, to share the divine status of the Creator - because God is free.
*
This separation of the self can physically be be imagined as a process of precipitation - of solid bodies coming from gaseous spirits.
Or as a biological analogy; as development. A baby lives at first in the ocean of amniotic fluid, inside the mother; and only gradually, incrementally, does the baby's self become separate from the mother's self - first by birth, then by development and increasing independence... but only in adolescence does the child at some point become existentially separate - an agent.
And once reached, and attained, that cannot be undone - he can get stuck in adolescence, or move on to adulthood; but he cannot return to childhood. Consciousness, separation, can temporarily be obliterated by disease, or intoxication - or suspended during sleep - but is essentially permanent.
(Incarnation is an example. When we became embodied, we could not return to the spiritual state; the preceding spiritual being could not be restored - because our selves are in our bodies, and if the body is then subtracted, what remains is not what there was before. Therefore after death the only alternatives are resurrection - with a renewed body - or else a fundamental change of the spiritual self with loss and distortion.)
*
So we begin by participating in the whole of reality - that was given. But our selves were only feebly independent, and not sufficiently separate that we could be free agents. Then a process began in the history of the human race, which is recapitulated in individuals - we developed agency by separation of the self from everything else.
At some moment the self is cut-off from everything else - and therefore unfree, because isolated. So there is a step beyond, which is a return to participation with universal reality.
Universal reality is always there - that is, everywhere - we used to be in reality but the future, the destiny, is that we should think reality.
The self now needs to - voluntarily and by an effort - engage with universal reality in a free relationship; knowing that this is happening.
The task or destiny is to re-engage with universal reality - which is everywhere for everybody, as it always has been, in a deliberate, explicit, way. This is not a matter of 'thinking about' universal reality - it is a matter of thinking-universal-reality; in other words, by thinking to become part of it.
*
But universal reality is everything - does this mean we can know everything? Not exactly and not in practice.
It does mean that there are not ultimate limits to knowledge - excepting other selves, which lie outside the system. But in practice we must navigate through this unbounded and vast world of universal reality - and for our experience to lead to valid knowledge, we ourselves must be Good and the experience we encounter to be undeceptive.
In practice, we navigate universal reality with love. It is love which leads us to the people (and entities) we can learn from; it is love which leads us to the truth rather than the falsehoods and misleadings, the evil entities, which also lie within universal reality.
Love is the cohesion and structure of everything in God's creation. And love is our safe-guard against the possibilities that would emerge is we were motivated by power, or even merely by 'curiosity'.
Imagine yourself as a self, guided by love, navigating the ocean of universal reality! That is the possibility. It is love which guides us to our Heavenly families and which guides them to us; it is love which guides the great composer to the beautiful music with universal meaning; it is love which guides the real scientist to the intuitive truths about reality...
*
So participation is given, knowledge is given... but what must be achieved is the autonomy of our-selves; and having been achieved the destiny is to return to participation; to take it up again but not to be inside it, but outside of it while yet part of it.
In a sense, with Final Participation, the vast world of universal reality is experienced as 'within us' - within our thinking. Instead us us being immersed in the ocean - the ocean is, somehow, in our own thoughts! And therefore we engage with the ocean from a place outside the ocean - and our relationship with the ocean is one of self-awareness, purpose and will.
And this is, of course, a godlike state; in the sense that a god is a cause not a consequence; outside the system and not contained-in the system; a creator not that which is created. And that is the whole point! For us to become adult, grown-up children of God, we must become like God in our nature, including our consciousness.
This moving towards divine consciousness can only happen by our choice, as an act from the agent-self.
*
Therefore, the task is to set-aside nostalgia for the original state of immersive participation: this is now impossible. It is to acknowledge the state of Modern Man as an error - a failure to move-on; a perpetual adolescence in which freedom has reached the absurd and self-refuting point of existential isolation - and got stuck.
Universal reality awlays was and still is there. We have cut-ourselves off from it. This was necessary as a phase - but is lethal as an end-point. We must re-engage with universal reality - and again participate in that universality; but from outside - in purposive thinking from our true selves.
Participation is given, knowledge is given, even love is given; but from where we are now, we need to make the choice and effort to acknowledge then create a new autonomous and free relationship with this reality.
Our task is to re-engage with universal reality in what eventually may become fully divine consciousness, but at first will be a partial, distorted and temporary kind of divine consciousness; which is thinking engaged with universal reality, and guided by love.
(The above is a development of the ideas of Owen Barfield, which were substaintially influenced by Rudolf Steiner.)
What is the divine purpose of Primary Thinking?
Without Primary Thinking there would be nothing but chaos - mere phenomena.
It is by God's thinking that the world of creation was formed from chaos - and it is by Man's thinking that he joins God in the work of creation.
Theosis (a.k.a sanctification, divinisation, spiritual progression) is the purpose of Life on earth - our purpose of Men living beyond mere incarnation and death (and of thereby risking the problems of human life, the danger of us rejecting salvation) is so that we may work towards ultimately becoming full deities - sons and daughters of God on the same qualitative level as God.
This entails attaining divine Goodness (which is well known, and tends to be the exclusive focus of most Christians); but also attaining divine Thinking - so that we may each participate in creation.
If we attain divine Goodness without divine thinking we may choose to inhabit and passively experience creation (like a child - indeed as a spiritual child in our nature)...
Or else we may reject this - we may choose 'damnation' which is to live outwith God's creation.
But to be fully mature children of God - we must be able to co-create with God.
In brief: the primary purpose of Man is Love. God wishes deeply to share his creation with divine children, and this is why men and women are created (made literal children of Heavenly Parents).
But then what? Having established a divine family, what do we all do for eternity? It would not be satisfactory for God's children passively to bask-in creation for eternity...
The only coherent answer is that we need to create - which is endless. And to create like God, actively to participate-in God's creation - we must think as God does: Primary Thinking.
It is by God's thinking that the world of creation was formed from chaos - and it is by Man's thinking that he joins God in the work of creation.
Theosis (a.k.a sanctification, divinisation, spiritual progression) is the purpose of Life on earth - our purpose of Men living beyond mere incarnation and death (and of thereby risking the problems of human life, the danger of us rejecting salvation) is so that we may work towards ultimately becoming full deities - sons and daughters of God on the same qualitative level as God.
This entails attaining divine Goodness (which is well known, and tends to be the exclusive focus of most Christians); but also attaining divine Thinking - so that we may each participate in creation.
If we attain divine Goodness without divine thinking we may choose to inhabit and passively experience creation (like a child - indeed as a spiritual child in our nature)...
Or else we may reject this - we may choose 'damnation' which is to live outwith God's creation.
But to be fully mature children of God - we must be able to co-create with God.
In brief: the primary purpose of Man is Love. God wishes deeply to share his creation with divine children, and this is why men and women are created (made literal children of Heavenly Parents).
But then what? Having established a divine family, what do we all do for eternity? It would not be satisfactory for God's children passively to bask-in creation for eternity...
The only coherent answer is that we need to create - which is endless. And to create like God, actively to participate-in God's creation - we must think as God does: Primary Thinking.
Tuesday, 21 November 2017
Advanced spiritual warfare
Towards the end of his magnum opus Saving the Appearances (1957), Owen Barfield makes a vital, but chilling, point about the future of human imagination and how it was (and is, much more than in 1957) being poisoned and inverted by artists, writers, musicians and other creative contributors to the mass media (including especially the avant garde, high-brow, elite, academically-validated and critically-approved media).
[Edited from pages 145-6]
Imagination is not, as some poets thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. But so long as art remained primarily mimetic [i.e. 'realistic'], the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature.
[But now that the artist has become self-conscious of his ability to create non-natural phenomena; he can create aberrations].
In so far as these aberrations are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has personally experienced the world he represents. In insofar as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move towards seeing the world that way - and ultimately, therefore, seeing that kind of world.
Barfield is saying that imaginings of evil will tend, more and more as they become more popular, to become realised in the actual world as we experience it.
In short, popular and powerful evil imaginings become social reality.
As modern Man comes to recognise that his imagination is an inextricable and necessary part of his perception of reality, and as he becomes more free to use his imagination; so there is a new possibility of corruption by imagination.
Barfield gives the example of the kind of surreal-hideous fantasy pioneered by Salvador Dali - but nowadays (and increasingly over the past fifty years) this kind of thing is the average content of majority, mainstream' officially-endorsed 'art' of all kinds. We live in a world in which 'subversive' is a term of artistic approbation.
In terms of the destined and desirable consciousness state of Final Participation (in which we become aware of the ways in which our minds, our thinking, participates in the making of the world as we experience it); it is therefore vital to become aware of the effects of our personal choices in the creation of perceived-reality - that is, the effects of our choices on the nature of the world, as we know it.
Since we cannot, in the end, resist Final Participation (it is our destiny), we have a stark choice as to whether it will be deployed for Good or evil.
Barfield hopes that our choices will be 'exercised with the profoundest sense of responsibility, and with the deepest thankfulness and piety towards the world as it was originally [unconsciously] given to us in original participation'.
In short, Final Participation will be positive and valuable only in a Christian context; even more shortly - it is our task and responsibility to return to the essential values and realities of childhood and early tribalism, but this time in a willed and conscious fashion.
This, I believe, relates to the hundreds of years of lack of success and retreat by traditionalism in the face of Leftism/ Liberalism/ Progressivism. Yes, we do need to return to the traditional values which were once natural spontaneous, unselfconscious; but no, this cannot be done by a restoration of the unconscious traditional situation; by instinct, by simply perceiving and accepting the traditional values in the world around us. That possibility is past (and was, anyway, pagan in its purest form).
Instead, we need to move forwards to an aware, thinking version of traditional values - which are not identical with, but which will retain the heart and soul and motivations of tradition; which, however, will not be identical-with traditional values, as if the traditions were a recipe for good living.
My understanding is that we cannot, and should not try to, recreate the past (not least because the fullest and most natural spontaneous past consciousness was pagan; hence only partially and distortedly true); but must move forwards into an unknown future that will, however, be in its essence deeply akin to the conditions and natural practices of early childhood or early tribal living; the difference being an inner, imaginative, free and agent, consciously-knowing and directly-experienced Christianity.
[Edited from pages 145-6]
Imagination is not, as some poets thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. But so long as art remained primarily mimetic [i.e. 'realistic'], the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature.
[But now that the artist has become self-conscious of his ability to create non-natural phenomena; he can create aberrations].
In so far as these aberrations are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has personally experienced the world he represents. In insofar as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move towards seeing the world that way - and ultimately, therefore, seeing that kind of world.
Barfield is saying that imaginings of evil will tend, more and more as they become more popular, to become realised in the actual world as we experience it.
In short, popular and powerful evil imaginings become social reality.
As modern Man comes to recognise that his imagination is an inextricable and necessary part of his perception of reality, and as he becomes more free to use his imagination; so there is a new possibility of corruption by imagination.
Barfield gives the example of the kind of surreal-hideous fantasy pioneered by Salvador Dali - but nowadays (and increasingly over the past fifty years) this kind of thing is the average content of majority, mainstream' officially-endorsed 'art' of all kinds. We live in a world in which 'subversive' is a term of artistic approbation.
In terms of the destined and desirable consciousness state of Final Participation (in which we become aware of the ways in which our minds, our thinking, participates in the making of the world as we experience it); it is therefore vital to become aware of the effects of our personal choices in the creation of perceived-reality - that is, the effects of our choices on the nature of the world, as we know it.
Since we cannot, in the end, resist Final Participation (it is our destiny), we have a stark choice as to whether it will be deployed for Good or evil.
Barfield hopes that our choices will be 'exercised with the profoundest sense of responsibility, and with the deepest thankfulness and piety towards the world as it was originally [unconsciously] given to us in original participation'.
In short, Final Participation will be positive and valuable only in a Christian context; even more shortly - it is our task and responsibility to return to the essential values and realities of childhood and early tribalism, but this time in a willed and conscious fashion.
This, I believe, relates to the hundreds of years of lack of success and retreat by traditionalism in the face of Leftism/ Liberalism/ Progressivism. Yes, we do need to return to the traditional values which were once natural spontaneous, unselfconscious; but no, this cannot be done by a restoration of the unconscious traditional situation; by instinct, by simply perceiving and accepting the traditional values in the world around us. That possibility is past (and was, anyway, pagan in its purest form).
Instead, we need to move forwards to an aware, thinking version of traditional values - which are not identical with, but which will retain the heart and soul and motivations of tradition; which, however, will not be identical-with traditional values, as if the traditions were a recipe for good living.
My understanding is that we cannot, and should not try to, recreate the past (not least because the fullest and most natural spontaneous past consciousness was pagan; hence only partially and distortedly true); but must move forwards into an unknown future that will, however, be in its essence deeply akin to the conditions and natural practices of early childhood or early tribal living; the difference being an inner, imaginative, free and agent, consciously-knowing and directly-experienced Christianity.
Thinking is the difference between chaos and the creation
See my previous posts on Primary Thinking...
Primary Thinking is creation - and this applies to God's creation.
Without thinking is chaos. There are phenomena, but these are meaningless, incoherent, lacking any relationship or purpose.
Phenomena are incomplete - they are completed by thinking.
Reality was chaos until it was thought by God - it was God's thinking which made creation from chaos.
*
Creation is ongoing, as God continues thinking eternally.
When we Men think from our divine-selves (i.e. Primary Thinking) we participate in this creation.
Our thinking (from that little corner of reality that we grasp) changes creation; changes it universally, for everybody who knows and participates-in creation by their thinking (including God).
*
The primal event that made creation possible was the love of Heavenly parents (their celestial marriage) - this was God.
Together our Heavenly Father and Mother thought, and this thinking was creation; and their shared thought could independently be known by each.
This is why the ultimate reality is Love - because love underpins and permeates all of creation (and outside of love is chaos, no meaning, no cohesion, no relation, no purpose).
Only that which conforms with primal love can participate in creation. All Primary Thinking is within-love and conforms with creation - else it is not Primary Thinking, and does not create.
(And what of ourselves - children of God? Yes, we too were thought from chaos; but there was more than this - because we were more to begin with, being also gods - and there was more done than simply to think us into creation, because we are God children, not only God's creation. But this matter is not clear to me...)
Primary Thinking is creation - and this applies to God's creation.
Without thinking is chaos. There are phenomena, but these are meaningless, incoherent, lacking any relationship or purpose.
Phenomena are incomplete - they are completed by thinking.
Reality was chaos until it was thought by God - it was God's thinking which made creation from chaos.
*
Creation is ongoing, as God continues thinking eternally.
When we Men think from our divine-selves (i.e. Primary Thinking) we participate in this creation.
Our thinking (from that little corner of reality that we grasp) changes creation; changes it universally, for everybody who knows and participates-in creation by their thinking (including God).
*
The primal event that made creation possible was the love of Heavenly parents (their celestial marriage) - this was God.
Together our Heavenly Father and Mother thought, and this thinking was creation; and their shared thought could independently be known by each.
This is why the ultimate reality is Love - because love underpins and permeates all of creation (and outside of love is chaos, no meaning, no cohesion, no relation, no purpose).
Only that which conforms with primal love can participate in creation. All Primary Thinking is within-love and conforms with creation - else it is not Primary Thinking, and does not create.
(And what of ourselves - children of God? Yes, we too were thought from chaos; but there was more than this - because we were more to begin with, being also gods - and there was more done than simply to think us into creation, because we are God children, not only God's creation. But this matter is not clear to me...)
Monday, 20 November 2017
The key to doing primary thinking and attaining final participation
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) - which is the same thing as attaining Final Participation - 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.
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.
The remarkable thing that is thinking
We need, urgently need, to be aware of the remarkable thing that we are doing when really thinking!
When thinking from our true-selves; we are knowing, participating and creating.
Only in thinking is freedom - Only in thinking is agency.
Consciousness severs us from the world - but thinking restores the world to us.
Thinking is the cure of alienation (properly understood, properly done) - It is in real thinking that we belong to the world, and the world to us; in thinking we know that the world is real and autonomous; and we know that we ourselves are co-creators of the world - which, until we thought it, was partial and incomplete.
*
Such are the joyous, inspiring and motivating insights which may be attained from reading, pondering and knowing Rudolf Steiner's early metaphysical/ epistemological works:
Philosophy of Freedom (aka. Philosophy of Spiritual Activity - of 1894)
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA004/English/RSP1964/GA004_index.html
and his Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception (of 1886).
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA002/English/AP1985/GA002_index.html
I have found a couple of essays by the highly-insightful (and highly-irritating!) maverick Anthroposophist Joel Wendt to be helpful and clarifying of what these books mean and how they should be understood:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Prokofieffbookreview.html
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Saving.html
When thinking from our true-selves; we are knowing, participating and creating.
Only in thinking is freedom - Only in thinking is agency.
Consciousness severs us from the world - but thinking restores the world to us.
Thinking is the cure of alienation (properly understood, properly done) - It is in real thinking that we belong to the world, and the world to us; in thinking we know that the world is real and autonomous; and we know that we ourselves are co-creators of the world - which, until we thought it, was partial and incomplete.
*
Such are the joyous, inspiring and motivating insights which may be attained from reading, pondering and knowing Rudolf Steiner's early metaphysical/ epistemological works:
Philosophy of Freedom (aka. Philosophy of Spiritual Activity - of 1894)
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA004/English/RSP1964/GA004_index.html
and his Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception (of 1886).
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA002/English/AP1985/GA002_index.html
I have found a couple of essays by the highly-insightful (and highly-irritating!) maverick Anthroposophist Joel Wendt to be helpful and clarifying of what these books mean and how they should be understood:
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Prokofieffbookreview.html
http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Saving.html
Sunday, 19 November 2017
There is no such thing as communication, only participation/ identification (or not)
For several years in the early 2000s I was working on Niklas Luhmann's Systems Theory, publishing dozens of papers, articles and a book from that perspective - its central tenet was that communications are primary. I now understand that communications don't actually exist - and indeed, that is the conclusion of Systems Theory - although self-awareness of the fact is obscured by paradox.
Systems Theory is a formalisation of the usual view of science - for example that we know about the world via senses which detect signals. The things 'out there' are detected by light, sound (etc.) communications; and in response to these communications our minds make 'representations' of the things.
Systems theory clarifies that communications cannot actually communicate - and our 'knowledge' of things is actually a representation which arises in the mind - and which indirectly interacts with the environment. By this account, we never actually know things, but only our models of things; and these 'internal' models are never more than un-disproven in our interactions with (what we cannot help but regard as) the outside world.
This Systems Theory may sound excessively abstract, but it is merely a formalisation of normal modern Western consciousness - in which modern Man has become paralysed and demotivated by the 'fact' that his communications are unreliable. So, the Bible cannot guide us anymore, nor can the instructions of The Church; because we believe that all communications are partial, biased and prone to misinterpretation without any possible way of achieving objectivity.
*
For instance, we may believe we have understood a communication, but how do we know for sure? - The answer is only by further communications. But each further communication - intended to clarify the first one - is itself equally ambiguous, uncertain...
So we conclude (correctly) that later communications cannot ever (in principle) clarify the meaning of previous communications. All that happens is we get more and more communications!
In other words, once we have accepted the metaphysical scheme that communications are the way we attain knowledge, we realise that communications cannot - in fact - lead to knowledge; but only back to ourselves.
Apparently, we are trapped in our own minds and can never know what lies outside them. In fact it is worse than that because we cannot consciously know even our own minds! - since conscious knowledge is itself a communication about the mind - and therefore prone to all the uncertainties and ambiguities of any other communication.
*
The way 'out' from this is to return to the original understanding that when we know something we do so by participating in it, or by identifying with it - in a literal sense. So when we know another person's mind, or understand the behaviour of an animal, or the properties of a rock, or the lay of a landscape... this is because we share the being of that thing.
So we do not make an inference about the thoughts of another person, but we actually think the same thoughts as that other person - we share in the exact same (and to us both available) thoughts.
Or we understand the animal we are hunting by becoming that animal - not by thinking a copy of that animal's thinking, nor by stopping being ourselves and becoming the animal - but by both the animal and our-self sharing the exact same thinking.
This is (seemingly) the spontaneous and untheorised way that young children think (you may remember thinking this way yourself), and also hunter-gatherers and Men in less complex, more aboriginal societies. They just think this way - to the extent that they do not have the same intuition of separateness - they live 'in' their environment - identified with it. They do not observe their environment, they participate in it, un-self-consciously.
Indeed, their selves are substantially a product of that environment - they do not set their conscious selves against the environment, do not separate their personal purposes from the purposes of the environment.
(This state is what Owen Barfield calls Original Participation.)
*
Now this metaphysical scheme has become very difficult to modern Man because we have a powerful intuition that we ourselves are separate from everything else - that we are cut-off from everything else, that we are observers of the rest of the world and lack direct access to it.
Trapped in the alienated state of our own consciousness, many modern people yearn to return to that state of Original Participation of childhood, or of tribal Man - yet this yearning has been evident form more than 200 years (since the Romantic Movement, especially) and we are further from the goal than ever - clearly we cannot do this, even if it was the right thing to do.
Two centuries of failure to return to Original Participation, and the same period of profound alienation and nihilism as reinforced by the focus on the primacy 'communication' and its implication of the impossibility of communication; is evidence that we can only go forward not back.
It seems that alienation can only be alleviated by a different kind of participation - by a metaphsyic and experience which allows for genuine participation/ identification in a context of the self-aware consciousness. That is, we remain self-aware, we remain located inside our minds - but acknowledge the possibility and actuality of identification with the environment.
In modern man, identification is no longer the un-self-conscious and spontaneous and uncontrolled thing it was in childhood or tribal Man; but instead identification happens in conscious, self-aware thinking. In other words, when we are thinking - purposively, consciously, in the normal way - we may achieve (and we aim to achieve) an identification with the reality of our environment, and the things in that environment. So that our own thinking is a sharing in the thinking of the environment - the identification is at the level of thinking, not of being.
This is (even if regarded as false) understandable in the case of people - we understand how we might conceivably share the thoughts of another person. But if there is to be a possibility of real knowledge (and not merely of our own 'models' of reality) this must also apply to everything else - not just to people, but to animals and plants, rocks and hills, water and chemicals...
To be crystal clear, we must be able to share the thoughts of animals, plants, rocks, hills, water, chemicals and everything else; which means that (in the first place) these things must have thoughts in order that we may be able to share them.
This explains the necessity for our basic assumptions, our metaphysical framework of reality, to be animistic - if we want to really know about reality, we need not only to regard the whole world as alive, but also as thinking.
If this principle is accepted, then we can move forward to Final Participation; we can cure alienation, can really know about reality, can have human relationships based on truth not illusion, and can feel and be 'at home in the universe'.
*
Of course the secondary question is concerned with how we know when we have achieved Final Participation, and identification of thinking - and are not merely fooling ourselves, or making an error?
Well, that is a secondary question - it does have answers, but such answers themselves depend on the acknowledgement of the possibility of direct participation.
For as long as we persist in regarding everything as communication, we shall always be uncertain about everything, and will only have more and more communications - each as fundamentally uncertain as every other.
So there can be no answers unless and until we move forwards to a metaphysical system, and personal experience, of direct participation, actual identification of thinking - sharing in the thinking of other entities.
At which point we can understand the answers to questions about error, self-deception and accuracy. But from the perspective of Modern Man's current detachment from, alienation from, the world and from his own mind - there are no answers to anything.
We first need to live-by a new metaphysics.
Systems Theory is a formalisation of the usual view of science - for example that we know about the world via senses which detect signals. The things 'out there' are detected by light, sound (etc.) communications; and in response to these communications our minds make 'representations' of the things.
Systems theory clarifies that communications cannot actually communicate - and our 'knowledge' of things is actually a representation which arises in the mind - and which indirectly interacts with the environment. By this account, we never actually know things, but only our models of things; and these 'internal' models are never more than un-disproven in our interactions with (what we cannot help but regard as) the outside world.
This Systems Theory may sound excessively abstract, but it is merely a formalisation of normal modern Western consciousness - in which modern Man has become paralysed and demotivated by the 'fact' that his communications are unreliable. So, the Bible cannot guide us anymore, nor can the instructions of The Church; because we believe that all communications are partial, biased and prone to misinterpretation without any possible way of achieving objectivity.
*
For instance, we may believe we have understood a communication, but how do we know for sure? - The answer is only by further communications. But each further communication - intended to clarify the first one - is itself equally ambiguous, uncertain...
So we conclude (correctly) that later communications cannot ever (in principle) clarify the meaning of previous communications. All that happens is we get more and more communications!
In other words, once we have accepted the metaphysical scheme that communications are the way we attain knowledge, we realise that communications cannot - in fact - lead to knowledge; but only back to ourselves.
Apparently, we are trapped in our own minds and can never know what lies outside them. In fact it is worse than that because we cannot consciously know even our own minds! - since conscious knowledge is itself a communication about the mind - and therefore prone to all the uncertainties and ambiguities of any other communication.
*
The way 'out' from this is to return to the original understanding that when we know something we do so by participating in it, or by identifying with it - in a literal sense. So when we know another person's mind, or understand the behaviour of an animal, or the properties of a rock, or the lay of a landscape... this is because we share the being of that thing.
So we do not make an inference about the thoughts of another person, but we actually think the same thoughts as that other person - we share in the exact same (and to us both available) thoughts.
Or we understand the animal we are hunting by becoming that animal - not by thinking a copy of that animal's thinking, nor by stopping being ourselves and becoming the animal - but by both the animal and our-self sharing the exact same thinking.
This is (seemingly) the spontaneous and untheorised way that young children think (you may remember thinking this way yourself), and also hunter-gatherers and Men in less complex, more aboriginal societies. They just think this way - to the extent that they do not have the same intuition of separateness - they live 'in' their environment - identified with it. They do not observe their environment, they participate in it, un-self-consciously.
Indeed, their selves are substantially a product of that environment - they do not set their conscious selves against the environment, do not separate their personal purposes from the purposes of the environment.
(This state is what Owen Barfield calls Original Participation.)
*
Now this metaphysical scheme has become very difficult to modern Man because we have a powerful intuition that we ourselves are separate from everything else - that we are cut-off from everything else, that we are observers of the rest of the world and lack direct access to it.
Trapped in the alienated state of our own consciousness, many modern people yearn to return to that state of Original Participation of childhood, or of tribal Man - yet this yearning has been evident form more than 200 years (since the Romantic Movement, especially) and we are further from the goal than ever - clearly we cannot do this, even if it was the right thing to do.
Two centuries of failure to return to Original Participation, and the same period of profound alienation and nihilism as reinforced by the focus on the primacy 'communication' and its implication of the impossibility of communication; is evidence that we can only go forward not back.
It seems that alienation can only be alleviated by a different kind of participation - by a metaphsyic and experience which allows for genuine participation/ identification in a context of the self-aware consciousness. That is, we remain self-aware, we remain located inside our minds - but acknowledge the possibility and actuality of identification with the environment.
In modern man, identification is no longer the un-self-conscious and spontaneous and uncontrolled thing it was in childhood or tribal Man; but instead identification happens in conscious, self-aware thinking. In other words, when we are thinking - purposively, consciously, in the normal way - we may achieve (and we aim to achieve) an identification with the reality of our environment, and the things in that environment. So that our own thinking is a sharing in the thinking of the environment - the identification is at the level of thinking, not of being.
This is (even if regarded as false) understandable in the case of people - we understand how we might conceivably share the thoughts of another person. But if there is to be a possibility of real knowledge (and not merely of our own 'models' of reality) this must also apply to everything else - not just to people, but to animals and plants, rocks and hills, water and chemicals...
To be crystal clear, we must be able to share the thoughts of animals, plants, rocks, hills, water, chemicals and everything else; which means that (in the first place) these things must have thoughts in order that we may be able to share them.
This explains the necessity for our basic assumptions, our metaphysical framework of reality, to be animistic - if we want to really know about reality, we need not only to regard the whole world as alive, but also as thinking.
If this principle is accepted, then we can move forward to Final Participation; we can cure alienation, can really know about reality, can have human relationships based on truth not illusion, and can feel and be 'at home in the universe'.
*
Of course the secondary question is concerned with how we know when we have achieved Final Participation, and identification of thinking - and are not merely fooling ourselves, or making an error?
Well, that is a secondary question - it does have answers, but such answers themselves depend on the acknowledgement of the possibility of direct participation.
For as long as we persist in regarding everything as communication, we shall always be uncertain about everything, and will only have more and more communications - each as fundamentally uncertain as every other.
So there can be no answers unless and until we move forwards to a metaphysical system, and personal experience, of direct participation, actual identification of thinking - sharing in the thinking of other entities.
At which point we can understand the answers to questions about error, self-deception and accuracy. But from the perspective of Modern Man's current detachment from, alienation from, the world and from his own mind - there are no answers to anything.
We first need to live-by a new metaphysics.
Seeing spirits - Knowing spirits
In some situations such as a ritual, the entirety of a tribe may see spirits - but the modern Western anthropologist who is also present sees nothing. Are spirits really there?
Most Western people would say no; and they would explain-away the observing of spirits as some kind of group hypnosis, or wishful thinking, or a conjuring trick of the shaman... or something. Because modern people know (or rather assume as a metaphysical certainty) that spirits don't exist - therefore it doesn't matter what people say or claim: there were no spirits.
Yet, of course, everything we know about everything depends on no more than a consensus among people who report it; or perhaps a consensus among people in some restricted category - sensible people, intelligent people, adults, calm people...
Implicitly, therefore, the modern Westerners claim that all people who see spirits are unreliable, and over-emotional, gullible, unintelligent, immature, dishonest - or something of the kind. When whole tribes or societies claim see spirits - then this is exactly how modern Western people actually, in practice, regard them (although of course they are too afraid, or feel to guilty, actually to say so).
Yet there is something different about spirits... The Western anthropologist and the tribe he is studying all see most things in common - they see the huts, the spears, the food, the animals... but when it comes to spirits the tribe see them and the anthropologist doesn't.
There is something different about spirits - are the really there?
One thing than can be suggested is that there has been a change in human consciousness between the traditional Tribal Man and the modern Western Man. Tribal Man may regard stones as alive and plants as conscious... and he sees spirits.
All true - consciousness differs; but since we are not postmodern relativists - we can still ask what is really going-on. When Tribal Man sees a spirit - is there an object there, or not?
My understanding is that the seeing of spirits is an example of what Owen Barfield calls Original Participation. There is a spirit, but there is no object because it is immaterial - and the evolution of consciousness includes that Modern Man cannot perceive the immaterial...
Why is this? The given answer is that by Not seeing the immaterial, Modern Man is made free.
That which we perceive makes us passive - it is given, we are not free not to respond to it - because the mechanism by which we know it is unconscious. Tribal Man sees spirits, and spirits dominate him in the same way that Modern Man is dominated by whatever he sees.
Where Modern Man goes wrong is is asserting that because he cannot perceive spirits (and neither can he detect spirits with any technology), the spirits are not there: typically, Modern Man claims that the imperceptible does not exist.
The way ahead is to Final Participation; so, what would a Man in Final Participation experience in the situation described? Would he see spirits? No - but he would know the spirits were real. Instead of perceiving, he would know directly.
A Man in Final Participation would consciously know that spirits were present, would know about them (what kind of spirits and where) - but he would not see, hear, touch smell or taste spirits. What is the advantage in that? The answer is Freedom - the answer is Agency.
In Final Participation knowledge is in conscious thinking (i.e. 'primary thinking') - hence all knowledge is thinkable, all thoughts are inter-relatable.
All (primary) thinking (in FP) is real and true.
But the perceiving of Tribal Man is Not real and true - because perceptions are not complete; because all perceptions need to be interpreted. Tribal Man may see spirits, but he must still make sense of what he sees, and there is no guarantee that he will understand spirits correctly - indeed different people in the tribe will probably interpret what they have seen very differently.
Seeing is Not believing; because seeing is incomplete.
It is better Not to see, but instead to know directly - because what is known directly is true. That is why Final Participation is 'final' - because it is true; and it is also Final because it is divine. God knows by Final Participation - once FP is attained, there is nowhere further to go: it is indeed final.
Most Western people would say no; and they would explain-away the observing of spirits as some kind of group hypnosis, or wishful thinking, or a conjuring trick of the shaman... or something. Because modern people know (or rather assume as a metaphysical certainty) that spirits don't exist - therefore it doesn't matter what people say or claim: there were no spirits.
Yet, of course, everything we know about everything depends on no more than a consensus among people who report it; or perhaps a consensus among people in some restricted category - sensible people, intelligent people, adults, calm people...
Implicitly, therefore, the modern Westerners claim that all people who see spirits are unreliable, and over-emotional, gullible, unintelligent, immature, dishonest - or something of the kind. When whole tribes or societies claim see spirits - then this is exactly how modern Western people actually, in practice, regard them (although of course they are too afraid, or feel to guilty, actually to say so).
Yet there is something different about spirits... The Western anthropologist and the tribe he is studying all see most things in common - they see the huts, the spears, the food, the animals... but when it comes to spirits the tribe see them and the anthropologist doesn't.
There is something different about spirits - are the really there?
One thing than can be suggested is that there has been a change in human consciousness between the traditional Tribal Man and the modern Western Man. Tribal Man may regard stones as alive and plants as conscious... and he sees spirits.
All true - consciousness differs; but since we are not postmodern relativists - we can still ask what is really going-on. When Tribal Man sees a spirit - is there an object there, or not?
My understanding is that the seeing of spirits is an example of what Owen Barfield calls Original Participation. There is a spirit, but there is no object because it is immaterial - and the evolution of consciousness includes that Modern Man cannot perceive the immaterial...
Why is this? The given answer is that by Not seeing the immaterial, Modern Man is made free.
That which we perceive makes us passive - it is given, we are not free not to respond to it - because the mechanism by which we know it is unconscious. Tribal Man sees spirits, and spirits dominate him in the same way that Modern Man is dominated by whatever he sees.
Where Modern Man goes wrong is is asserting that because he cannot perceive spirits (and neither can he detect spirits with any technology), the spirits are not there: typically, Modern Man claims that the imperceptible does not exist.
The way ahead is to Final Participation; so, what would a Man in Final Participation experience in the situation described? Would he see spirits? No - but he would know the spirits were real. Instead of perceiving, he would know directly.
A Man in Final Participation would consciously know that spirits were present, would know about them (what kind of spirits and where) - but he would not see, hear, touch smell or taste spirits. What is the advantage in that? The answer is Freedom - the answer is Agency.
In Final Participation knowledge is in conscious thinking (i.e. 'primary thinking') - hence all knowledge is thinkable, all thoughts are inter-relatable.
All (primary) thinking (in FP) is real and true.
But the perceiving of Tribal Man is Not real and true - because perceptions are not complete; because all perceptions need to be interpreted. Tribal Man may see spirits, but he must still make sense of what he sees, and there is no guarantee that he will understand spirits correctly - indeed different people in the tribe will probably interpret what they have seen very differently.
Seeing is Not believing; because seeing is incomplete.
It is better Not to see, but instead to know directly - because what is known directly is true. That is why Final Participation is 'final' - because it is true; and it is also Final because it is divine. God knows by Final Participation - once FP is attained, there is nowhere further to go: it is indeed final.
Discussion with a correspondent about Primary Thinking - an exchange of e-mails
What follows is a recent exchange of e-mails between myself and A Correspondent - in which he makes some excellent and clarifying points on the nature of Primary Thinking. I hope this may help others who are working-through this vital theme...
**
My Correspondent: If primary thinking is certainly true (not just hypothesis), and if it is free, then it seems to follow that it is literally creative. If it is free, it need not conform itself to the world; but if it is true, then there is nevertheless a correspondence between what is thought and what actually exists. There can be no necessary correspondence without some sort of causal relationship, and if primary thinking is not caused by external facts, then the inescapable conclusion (if, given what I have just said about the freedom of thought, I may be permitted the phrase) is that the causation runs the other way: external facts conform themselves to thoughts. Primary thinking creates the world.
My first thought was to call that a reductio ad absurdum and reject the whole "primary thinking" model, but on second thought I think it has to be accepted. After all, theism requires some such concept in order to make sense of God's role as creator. We can hardly imagine that God created the world by physically moving matter around with some kind of construction equipment; rather, he created everything by his "word" or logos. And what is possible for God is possible in a general sense -- and, if we are his children, possible for us.
[In Mormon doctrine, it is said] that Adam helped create the earth, but that when he entered mortality he forgot that fact. And when Adam fell, the earth fell with him. Did God deliberately wreck his own creation as a way of punishing Adam -- or was the world in some way directly dependent on Adam's thoughts, Adam's state of mind? The knowledge of evil came first, and the existence of evil followed. And of course Adam, the prototypical man whose name simply means "Man," represents all of us.
(Is "faith" primary thinking? It, too, is supposed to be both free and true. In the New Testament, faith can make you whole, enable you to walk on water, and cast mountains into the sea -- in other words, the external world changes to conform itself to true faith.)
One problem with this idea is that it threatens to destroy the re-ality ("thingishness") of the world by making it wholly dependent on thought -- a hallucination, essentially. Without something that exists independently of our own thoughts there is, it seems, no world. Another problem is the question of how the thoughts of potentially billions of different primary-thinkers interact to create the one world we presumably share -- and what it is about God's thoughts that make them uniquely powerful, making him "the" creator. But I suppose the second problem offers a solution to the first. The reality of the world comes from its being the production of many minds, and not of mine alone.
Myself: That is my understanding too. We seem to have reached the same place, more or less.
I have found Steiner vital for this, mostly the early three books on Goethe's conception, the PhD thesis, and the Philosophie der Freiheit (variously translated) - but I only came across a dense and inspiring summary of his early philosophical work yesterday - in the following introduction to a book from 1900:
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA007/English/GA007_Intro.html
"One problem with this idea is that it threatens to destroy the re-ality ("thingishness") of the world by making it wholly dependent on thought -- a hallucination, essentially. Without something that exists independently of our own thoughts there is, it seems, no world. "
Not quite. There is a world - a world of raw phenomena, without meaning. There really are things, and we really sense them - but without 'concepts' (which we provide, in thinking) nothing means anything, then nothing could or would add up to anything (our experience would be of a blooming, buzzing confusion, to quote William James).
"Another problem is the question of how the thoughts of potentially billions of different primary-thinkers interact to create the one world we presumably share -- and what it is about God's thoughts that make them uniquely powerful, making him "the" creator."
My understanding is that this makes sense only if it is real/ true thoughts and creations that affect this 'one world' (the world of universal reality). I can't see that it could be reality if it was affected by wrong/ false/ evil thoughts from billions of people - so I assume it is only affected by true/ correct/ good thoughts of people engaged in primary thinking. Perhaps most people, most of the time have zero connection with this real world, and never influence it in any way - while others have interacted significantly.
Another factor is perspective. It seems that part of this view is that in primary thinking we only grasp, but we DO grasp, a corner of reality. This would seem to imply why it is 'a good thing' to have many, many people going on-and-on thinking, and creating, reality - multiple perspectives, so that universal reality becomes more rich and dense, without any end.
That's about as far as I have reached, so far.
My Correspondent: I think we have to go quite a bit further than just saying that thinking gives meaning to existing phenomena. Of course we are free to conceptualize given phenomena in this way or that -- James somewhere uses the example of a hexagram, which can be conceptualized either as two interlocking triangles or as six triangles touching at their corners -- but this is not the true creativity required by thinking which is both free and true. Above and beyond investing phenomena with meaning, primary thinking must be capable of altering the phenomena themselves. Simon actually acquired, by thought alone, the physical ability to walk on water, not merely to interpret his sinking as meaningful. And God is the creator, not the mere interpreter, of the world.
I lean toward thinking of the world of raw, meaningless phenomena as being an effect, rather than a precondition, of primary thinking. The "raw" world may be meaningless in the same sense that a hundred different voices speaking simultaneously produce a meaningless cacophony. The unintended interaction of various meaningful primary thoughts may yield a meaningless hodgepodge. Forging this into a harmony (not a unison!) is the work of creation.
I agree with you that it must be only thoughts that are in some sense "true" that affect the world. The question is what "true" means in this context. It can't have the ordinary meaning of correspondence with pre-existing facts; that would make it impossible for true thoughts to change anything, since their truth would consist in merely reflecting what already existed. It seems we must work out an alternative answer to Pilate's question.
A post of yours that I keep returning to in my thoughts is the one about Hobbes and whether or not he is "really" alive. If we could understand how and in what sense Hobbes is invested with real life (and I certainly accept that he is so invested), I think we would be one step closer to understanding primary or creative thought.
Myself: Corrections accepted, you're right.
My first thought about what is true, is that which conforms with, is compatible with, God's (already in existence) plan of creation.
Maybe this truth could be defined by motivation... by Love?
**
My Correspondent: If primary thinking is certainly true (not just hypothesis), and if it is free, then it seems to follow that it is literally creative. If it is free, it need not conform itself to the world; but if it is true, then there is nevertheless a correspondence between what is thought and what actually exists. There can be no necessary correspondence without some sort of causal relationship, and if primary thinking is not caused by external facts, then the inescapable conclusion (if, given what I have just said about the freedom of thought, I may be permitted the phrase) is that the causation runs the other way: external facts conform themselves to thoughts. Primary thinking creates the world.
My first thought was to call that a reductio ad absurdum and reject the whole "primary thinking" model, but on second thought I think it has to be accepted. After all, theism requires some such concept in order to make sense of God's role as creator. We can hardly imagine that God created the world by physically moving matter around with some kind of construction equipment; rather, he created everything by his "word" or logos. And what is possible for God is possible in a general sense -- and, if we are his children, possible for us.
[In Mormon doctrine, it is said] that Adam helped create the earth, but that when he entered mortality he forgot that fact. And when Adam fell, the earth fell with him. Did God deliberately wreck his own creation as a way of punishing Adam -- or was the world in some way directly dependent on Adam's thoughts, Adam's state of mind? The knowledge of evil came first, and the existence of evil followed. And of course Adam, the prototypical man whose name simply means "Man," represents all of us.
(Is "faith" primary thinking? It, too, is supposed to be both free and true. In the New Testament, faith can make you whole, enable you to walk on water, and cast mountains into the sea -- in other words, the external world changes to conform itself to true faith.)
One problem with this idea is that it threatens to destroy the re-ality ("thingishness") of the world by making it wholly dependent on thought -- a hallucination, essentially. Without something that exists independently of our own thoughts there is, it seems, no world. Another problem is the question of how the thoughts of potentially billions of different primary-thinkers interact to create the one world we presumably share -- and what it is about God's thoughts that make them uniquely powerful, making him "the" creator. But I suppose the second problem offers a solution to the first. The reality of the world comes from its being the production of many minds, and not of mine alone.
Myself: That is my understanding too. We seem to have reached the same place, more or less.
I have found Steiner vital for this, mostly the early three books on Goethe's conception, the PhD thesis, and the Philosophie der Freiheit (variously translated) - but I only came across a dense and inspiring summary of his early philosophical work yesterday - in the following introduction to a book from 1900:
http://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA007/English/GA007_Intro.html
"One problem with this idea is that it threatens to destroy the re-ality ("thingishness") of the world by making it wholly dependent on thought -- a hallucination, essentially. Without something that exists independently of our own thoughts there is, it seems, no world. "
Not quite. There is a world - a world of raw phenomena, without meaning. There really are things, and we really sense them - but without 'concepts' (which we provide, in thinking) nothing means anything, then nothing could or would add up to anything (our experience would be of a blooming, buzzing confusion, to quote William James).
"Another problem is the question of how the thoughts of potentially billions of different primary-thinkers interact to create the one world we presumably share -- and what it is about God's thoughts that make them uniquely powerful, making him "the" creator."
My understanding is that this makes sense only if it is real/ true thoughts and creations that affect this 'one world' (the world of universal reality). I can't see that it could be reality if it was affected by wrong/ false/ evil thoughts from billions of people - so I assume it is only affected by true/ correct/ good thoughts of people engaged in primary thinking. Perhaps most people, most of the time have zero connection with this real world, and never influence it in any way - while others have interacted significantly.
Another factor is perspective. It seems that part of this view is that in primary thinking we only grasp, but we DO grasp, a corner of reality. This would seem to imply why it is 'a good thing' to have many, many people going on-and-on thinking, and creating, reality - multiple perspectives, so that universal reality becomes more rich and dense, without any end.
That's about as far as I have reached, so far.
My Correspondent: I think we have to go quite a bit further than just saying that thinking gives meaning to existing phenomena. Of course we are free to conceptualize given phenomena in this way or that -- James somewhere uses the example of a hexagram, which can be conceptualized either as two interlocking triangles or as six triangles touching at their corners -- but this is not the true creativity required by thinking which is both free and true. Above and beyond investing phenomena with meaning, primary thinking must be capable of altering the phenomena themselves. Simon actually acquired, by thought alone, the physical ability to walk on water, not merely to interpret his sinking as meaningful. And God is the creator, not the mere interpreter, of the world.
I lean toward thinking of the world of raw, meaningless phenomena as being an effect, rather than a precondition, of primary thinking. The "raw" world may be meaningless in the same sense that a hundred different voices speaking simultaneously produce a meaningless cacophony. The unintended interaction of various meaningful primary thoughts may yield a meaningless hodgepodge. Forging this into a harmony (not a unison!) is the work of creation.
I agree with you that it must be only thoughts that are in some sense "true" that affect the world. The question is what "true" means in this context. It can't have the ordinary meaning of correspondence with pre-existing facts; that would make it impossible for true thoughts to change anything, since their truth would consist in merely reflecting what already existed. It seems we must work out an alternative answer to Pilate's question.
A post of yours that I keep returning to in my thoughts is the one about Hobbes and whether or not he is "really" alive. If we could understand how and in what sense Hobbes is invested with real life (and I certainly accept that he is so invested), I think we would be one step closer to understanding primary or creative thought.
Myself: Corrections accepted, you're right.
My first thought about what is true, is that which conforms with, is compatible with, God's (already in existence) plan of creation.
Maybe this truth could be defined by motivation... by Love?
Final Participation: A life based on thinking (rather than feeling)
I am struck by the fact that we regard thinking as an activity which can (and should) only destroy. It is thinking that has destroyed the unconscious and spontaneous spirituality of our childhood, and of earlier cultural epochs.
So thinking is clearly powerful... yet we deny the validity of thinking when it is used to cure the ills of modernity.
We assume that if something good needs thinking-about, then it is not really-real but only a kind of delusion from 'wishful' thinking.
We assume that a Life cannot be built from thinking; that thinking is strong enough to destroy, but too weak to be a foundation of good living...?
Of course, thinking is not necessarily valid, and we recognise that thinking can be - and often is defective or manipulated. But so is feeling, even more so!We must not conflate the potential validity of thinking, with the imperfections of everyday thinking.
So, it seems that our modern complaint about thinking is that thinking is done-by-us; it is active, it requires effort and purpose. Our complaint is that thinking does not overwhelm us with its truth. Our complaint is that truth is not forced upon-us...
I now understand better that truth comes to us in thinking in a way that deliberately and necessarily does not 'overwhelm' us.This is indeed a difference between the child-like consciousness state of Original Participation and the Mature goal of Final Participation.
In Original Participation we are passive before reality, we are overwhelmed by what is perceived, because we cannot separate our-selves from our perceptions - we lack full self-consciousness. In Final Participation - however, we recognise that what we supposed was reality is actually co-created by our selves - we distinguish our-self from perceived-reality and at-the-same-time we are aware that both the self and the perceived reality are inextricably bound-together (because in any situation understood as meaningful, our self is always actively-involved).
We need to set aside our wish to be overwhelmed by reality! We need to recognise that when we are overwhelmed, such that thinking is compelled, and the self is coerced; than this is a false situation.
After all, is God overwhelmed by His feelings? Surely not! God is free; and when we become full Sons or Daughters of God: so will we be.
This is, indeed, freedom: to be in a relationship of Final Participation, to know that we are co-creators of Reality.
So thinking is clearly powerful... yet we deny the validity of thinking when it is used to cure the ills of modernity.
We assume that if something good needs thinking-about, then it is not really-real but only a kind of delusion from 'wishful' thinking.
We assume that a Life cannot be built from thinking; that thinking is strong enough to destroy, but too weak to be a foundation of good living...?
Of course, thinking is not necessarily valid, and we recognise that thinking can be - and often is defective or manipulated. But so is feeling, even more so!We must not conflate the potential validity of thinking, with the imperfections of everyday thinking.
So, it seems that our modern complaint about thinking is that thinking is done-by-us; it is active, it requires effort and purpose. Our complaint is that thinking does not overwhelm us with its truth. Our complaint is that truth is not forced upon-us...
I now understand better that truth comes to us in thinking in a way that deliberately and necessarily does not 'overwhelm' us.This is indeed a difference between the child-like consciousness state of Original Participation and the Mature goal of Final Participation.
In Original Participation we are passive before reality, we are overwhelmed by what is perceived, because we cannot separate our-selves from our perceptions - we lack full self-consciousness. In Final Participation - however, we recognise that what we supposed was reality is actually co-created by our selves - we distinguish our-self from perceived-reality and at-the-same-time we are aware that both the self and the perceived reality are inextricably bound-together (because in any situation understood as meaningful, our self is always actively-involved).
We need to set aside our wish to be overwhelmed by reality! We need to recognise that when we are overwhelmed, such that thinking is compelled, and the self is coerced; than this is a false situation.
After all, is God overwhelmed by His feelings? Surely not! God is free; and when we become full Sons or Daughters of God: so will we be.
This is, indeed, freedom: to be in a relationship of Final Participation, to know that we are co-creators of Reality.
Saturday, 18 November 2017
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.
And by Primary Thinking we attain to what Barfield terms 'final' participation - final because it is true, it has no limits and is conscious; in other words it is thinking as a god (Son or Daughter of God) thinks; and participating, as a god (Son or Daughter of God) participates.
Once Primary Thinking is attained, fully and continuously, there is no further to go in terms of mode of consciousness (although, of course, there is an unbounded amount of knowledge content which might potentially be known, and can only be learned by serial addition...)
*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 - relative to what could be known - minuscule; a shell on the beach compared with the ocean of truth.)
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.
And by Primary Thinking we attain to what Barfield terms 'final' participation - final because it is true, it has no limits and is conscious; in other words it is thinking as a god (Son or Daughter of God) thinks; and participating, as a god (Son or Daughter of God) participates.
Once Primary Thinking is attained, fully and continuously, there is no further to go in terms of mode of consciousness (although, of course, there is an unbounded amount of knowledge content which might potentially be known, and can only be learned by serial addition...)
*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 - relative to what could be known - minuscule; a shell on the beach compared with the ocean of truth.)
The definition of The Spiritual
It is difficult - I would say impossible - satisfactorily to define The Spiritual, except as a 'diagnosis of exclusion'.
In other words, the spiritual is that which is not material;
or, the spiritual is the immaterial.
This was, indeed, the definition of spiritual suggested by Owen Barfield (after are careful examination of the history of language); and while it is correct, it is not fully satisfactory - because the definition of 'the material' has been fluid through time, in a way that shows the reality of the spiritual as being (more or less)
that which contemporary modern culture regards as unreal.
For example - mathematics was, at one time, regarded as spiritual, mystical - and Mathematicians were if not theists (believers in a personal God) then at least deists (believers in an impersonal creating-deity). This was the case for many - perhaps all - of the great early scientists such as Newton. However, the development of modernity included mathematics within science, and excluded all non-scientific uses and functions of mathematics to the realm of pseudo-science or 'superstition'.
A more recent example is quantum theory. As Barfield remarks, this branch of physics has many spooky and immaterial aspects which would normally have made it a spiritual subject; however, it has been included in mainstream science and any consideration of the general implications of quantum theory for human life have been ruled-out and (as with mathematics) consigned to the realm of pseudo-science and ignorant superstition.
An example of personal relevance has been Rudolf Steiner's remarkable 1918 prophecy about which I have written recently. Steiner (I believe correctly) regards the recognition of 'the spiritual' as primary and essential task of our era - in Barfield's terms this corresponds to the next step in the evolution of consciousness to Final Participation.
However, putting so much weight upon the concept of The Spiritual is problematic when the definition is negative - and the same problem arises in the 'mission' of this Albion Awakening blog to promote a new and 'spiritual' kind of Christianity.
I think the correct formulation is that Western Man must become more spiritual by reunifying the material and immaterial - and this unification happens quite naturally and spontaneously as a consequence of the evolution of consciousness to Final Participation by means of what Steiner terms 'pure' thinking and I have termed 'primary' thinking: that is, the conscious, purposive, free-agent thinking of the divine-self in Man.
Primary thinking is also a kind of intuition - and in intuitive thinking there is no division between material and immaterial; because the thinking is (simply) assumed to be in the universal realm of reality, which contains all kinds of things; some that we would call material and others that we would not.
Therefore, a return to The Spiritual for modern Man actually involves the abolition of the category of Spiritual - we would (rightly) cease to be concerned with the categories of material and spiritual.
And that change and unification is precisely the necessary evolution which Steiner (in 1918) argued was our divine destiny.
In other words, the spiritual is that which is not material;
or, the spiritual is the immaterial.
This was, indeed, the definition of spiritual suggested by Owen Barfield (after are careful examination of the history of language); and while it is correct, it is not fully satisfactory - because the definition of 'the material' has been fluid through time, in a way that shows the reality of the spiritual as being (more or less)
that which contemporary modern culture regards as unreal.
For example - mathematics was, at one time, regarded as spiritual, mystical - and Mathematicians were if not theists (believers in a personal God) then at least deists (believers in an impersonal creating-deity). This was the case for many - perhaps all - of the great early scientists such as Newton. However, the development of modernity included mathematics within science, and excluded all non-scientific uses and functions of mathematics to the realm of pseudo-science or 'superstition'.
A more recent example is quantum theory. As Barfield remarks, this branch of physics has many spooky and immaterial aspects which would normally have made it a spiritual subject; however, it has been included in mainstream science and any consideration of the general implications of quantum theory for human life have been ruled-out and (as with mathematics) consigned to the realm of pseudo-science and ignorant superstition.
An example of personal relevance has been Rudolf Steiner's remarkable 1918 prophecy about which I have written recently. Steiner (I believe correctly) regards the recognition of 'the spiritual' as primary and essential task of our era - in Barfield's terms this corresponds to the next step in the evolution of consciousness to Final Participation.
However, putting so much weight upon the concept of The Spiritual is problematic when the definition is negative - and the same problem arises in the 'mission' of this Albion Awakening blog to promote a new and 'spiritual' kind of Christianity.
I think the correct formulation is that Western Man must become more spiritual by reunifying the material and immaterial - and this unification happens quite naturally and spontaneously as a consequence of the evolution of consciousness to Final Participation by means of what Steiner terms 'pure' thinking and I have termed 'primary' thinking: that is, the conscious, purposive, free-agent thinking of the divine-self in Man.
Primary thinking is also a kind of intuition - and in intuitive thinking there is no division between material and immaterial; because the thinking is (simply) assumed to be in the universal realm of reality, which contains all kinds of things; some that we would call material and others that we would not.
Therefore, a return to The Spiritual for modern Man actually involves the abolition of the category of Spiritual - we would (rightly) cease to be concerned with the categories of material and spiritual.
And that change and unification is precisely the necessary evolution which Steiner (in 1918) argued was our divine destiny.
Nightmare consequences of assuming the exclusive validity of the Brain-Thinking model
The problem with Brain-Thinking - the mind as brain as information-processor, is not that it is utterly false. It is not false - it describes well many aspects of thinking.
The problem is that, firstly, it is merely a model - hence a partial truth: necessarily incomplete and distorted; and, secondly, that Brain-Thinking has captured belief in public discourse to such an extent that other understandings of thinking are assumed to be, not merely false: but impossible. Thirdly, following-on from monopolisation of public discourse - the assumption has invaded and colonised the mind itself.
Because people have come to assume (assume, mostly without thinking) that Brain-Thinking is the only possible model of thinking; Brain-Thinking has become a self-fulfilling assumption. Any thinking which does not fit the model of the mind as a biological-computer is regarded as childishly-mistaken or actively-delusional.
Since people do not wish to regard themselves as dumb or deluded; this has, over time, meant that our culture has restricted first its communications about thinking, then later (and increasingly) actual thinking itself, to a form which fits within the Brain-Thinking model.
In other words, actual thinking is now (mostly) restricted to automatic and externally-determined processing of information derived from sensory inputs (or from memories of sensory inputs). Actual thinking has become passive. People regard themselves as functioning like computers, driven by inputs in accordance with their processing software.
The possibilities of human change are increasingly seen in a transhumanist frame; where improvements to Men are conceptualised in terms of re-programming, or being enhanced by upgrades.
It seems quite natural to younger generations that the essence of a person could - in principle, and 'soon', they assume, in practice - be down-loaded from the biological-computer of the human brain into a silicon computer; or even translated to pure information, encoded in whatever convenient form is available (binary code stored in a hard drive, or captured in a single complex artifact).
This is, indeed, a standard current trope of 'immortality' - that our-selves might live forever in the 'purest' essence of a characteristic pattern of information-processing.
Other types of thinking, especially Primary Thinking (for example genuine creativity or intuition, direct knowing, telepathic phenomena etc.) is either re-conceptualised into forms of information processing (which abolishes even the possibility of real creativity, intuition, direct knowing, 'telepathy'), or else they are rejected outright as naive or exploitative obsolete formulations - now superseded...
That Brain-Thinking is the only possible thinking has therefore passed swiftly from being an assumption - and an assumption which would be impossible to prove; into being treated as a fact: a fact-supported-by-overwhelming-evidence.
In other words, the exclusive truth of Brain-Thinking is (like the theory of evolution by natural selection) an example of metaphysics masquerading as a scientific discovery. As such, it is tyrannical - because a metaphysical assumption can never be disproved by any observation or experiment - since all possible (all evidentially-allowable) observations and experiments are interpreted within the metaphysical framework.
Consequently, many modern people are trapped by their assumptions into inhabiting a world of experience framed exclusively by Brain-Thinking - a wholly-determined world, with no possibility of freedom; a world which excludes the possibility of any reality beyond the five senses.
And - given inevitable imperfections and errors in bio-processing and memory; this is also a 'relativistic' world in which we can never be sure of anything.
In other words, an inescapable nightmare world; and a mind-set that makes it possible (for the first time in history) for rulers really to manipulate the thinking of everybody, forever.
(My echo of Orwell's phrase from 1984 is deliberate.)
The problem is that, firstly, it is merely a model - hence a partial truth: necessarily incomplete and distorted; and, secondly, that Brain-Thinking has captured belief in public discourse to such an extent that other understandings of thinking are assumed to be, not merely false: but impossible. Thirdly, following-on from monopolisation of public discourse - the assumption has invaded and colonised the mind itself.
Because people have come to assume (assume, mostly without thinking) that Brain-Thinking is the only possible model of thinking; Brain-Thinking has become a self-fulfilling assumption. Any thinking which does not fit the model of the mind as a biological-computer is regarded as childishly-mistaken or actively-delusional.
Since people do not wish to regard themselves as dumb or deluded; this has, over time, meant that our culture has restricted first its communications about thinking, then later (and increasingly) actual thinking itself, to a form which fits within the Brain-Thinking model.
In other words, actual thinking is now (mostly) restricted to automatic and externally-determined processing of information derived from sensory inputs (or from memories of sensory inputs). Actual thinking has become passive. People regard themselves as functioning like computers, driven by inputs in accordance with their processing software.
The possibilities of human change are increasingly seen in a transhumanist frame; where improvements to Men are conceptualised in terms of re-programming, or being enhanced by upgrades.
It seems quite natural to younger generations that the essence of a person could - in principle, and 'soon', they assume, in practice - be down-loaded from the biological-computer of the human brain into a silicon computer; or even translated to pure information, encoded in whatever convenient form is available (binary code stored in a hard drive, or captured in a single complex artifact).
This is, indeed, a standard current trope of 'immortality' - that our-selves might live forever in the 'purest' essence of a characteristic pattern of information-processing.
Other types of thinking, especially Primary Thinking (for example genuine creativity or intuition, direct knowing, telepathic phenomena etc.) is either re-conceptualised into forms of information processing (which abolishes even the possibility of real creativity, intuition, direct knowing, 'telepathy'), or else they are rejected outright as naive or exploitative obsolete formulations - now superseded...
That Brain-Thinking is the only possible thinking has therefore passed swiftly from being an assumption - and an assumption which would be impossible to prove; into being treated as a fact: a fact-supported-by-overwhelming-evidence.
In other words, the exclusive truth of Brain-Thinking is (like the theory of evolution by natural selection) an example of metaphysics masquerading as a scientific discovery. As such, it is tyrannical - because a metaphysical assumption can never be disproved by any observation or experiment - since all possible (all evidentially-allowable) observations and experiments are interpreted within the metaphysical framework.
Consequently, many modern people are trapped by their assumptions into inhabiting a world of experience framed exclusively by Brain-Thinking - a wholly-determined world, with no possibility of freedom; a world which excludes the possibility of any reality beyond the five senses.
And - given inevitable imperfections and errors in bio-processing and memory; this is also a 'relativistic' world in which we can never be sure of anything.
In other words, an inescapable nightmare world; and a mind-set that makes it possible (for the first time in history) for rulers really to manipulate the thinking of everybody, forever.
(My echo of Orwell's phrase from 1984 is deliberate.)
Friday, 17 November 2017
Pre-mortal life seems natural to modern, 'evolutionary' thinking
Modern man must believe of anything that exists, that it has come gradually into being, that it has 'evolved'.
By and large, modern Man can no longer accept an hypothesis of instantaneous creation; and there is little doubt that, consciously or subconsciously, he applies that as much to his own individuality as to anything else.
If belief in his own existence is to involve believing that he was created at, or immediately before, his physical birth, he will abandon that belief - and he will have good reasons for doing so.
Edited from Self and Reality, in The Rediscovery of Meaning and other essays, by Owen Barfield (1977).
Barfield is surely correct in his observation of modern metaphysics - there is an inbuilt assumption that things 'gradually come into being'. Among mainstream Christians who have noticed this, such an assumption is typically regarded as necessarily a secular corruption, and there is an attempt to restore a pre-modern (medieval) metaphysics of instantaneous creation from nothing.
But for both Barfield (an Anthroposophist) and myself (a believer in Mormon theology), the 'modern' evolutionary thinking is correct, and in its essence an aspect of the spiritual progression of Man.
For both Anthroposophists and Mormons; the pre-modern belief is instantaneous creation is seen as an error, inherited from pre-Christian classical philosophy.
By 'evolution' is Not, of course, meant the purposeless evolution of Darwinian natural selection; but evolution in its original (and primary) meaning of a purposive and developmental unfolding towards a goal.
The implication is that each us us has an existence stretching back into pre-mortal life. For Barfield, this pre-existence was one of several incarnations with periods of spirit life in between - in which incarnations began as diffuse and spiritual, and became more solid and embodied. (The future envisaged was one of further progressive incarnations, eventually leading to full deity.)
For Mormons; pre-existence began with some kind of primordial consciousnesses, a stage of being spirit children of God, then a chosen incarnation into this mortal life. (The future envisaged is of a post-mortal resurrected eternal life, with ultimate potential for full and embodied deity.)
A belief in pre-existence - that we each, each of us, lived as spirit children of God, before being incarnated in mortal bodies to experience death, and thereby enable resurrection - is a metaphysical assumption that has potential to make a very large and positive difference to Christian life: it is an assumption that overcomes some of the stumbling-blocks and solves many of the deepest problems and paradoxes experienced by modern Christians.
By and large, modern Man can no longer accept an hypothesis of instantaneous creation; and there is little doubt that, consciously or subconsciously, he applies that as much to his own individuality as to anything else.
If belief in his own existence is to involve believing that he was created at, or immediately before, his physical birth, he will abandon that belief - and he will have good reasons for doing so.
Edited from Self and Reality, in The Rediscovery of Meaning and other essays, by Owen Barfield (1977).
Barfield is surely correct in his observation of modern metaphysics - there is an inbuilt assumption that things 'gradually come into being'. Among mainstream Christians who have noticed this, such an assumption is typically regarded as necessarily a secular corruption, and there is an attempt to restore a pre-modern (medieval) metaphysics of instantaneous creation from nothing.
But for both Barfield (an Anthroposophist) and myself (a believer in Mormon theology), the 'modern' evolutionary thinking is correct, and in its essence an aspect of the spiritual progression of Man.
For both Anthroposophists and Mormons; the pre-modern belief is instantaneous creation is seen as an error, inherited from pre-Christian classical philosophy.
By 'evolution' is Not, of course, meant the purposeless evolution of Darwinian natural selection; but evolution in its original (and primary) meaning of a purposive and developmental unfolding towards a goal.
The implication is that each us us has an existence stretching back into pre-mortal life. For Barfield, this pre-existence was one of several incarnations with periods of spirit life in between - in which incarnations began as diffuse and spiritual, and became more solid and embodied. (The future envisaged was one of further progressive incarnations, eventually leading to full deity.)
For Mormons; pre-existence began with some kind of primordial consciousnesses, a stage of being spirit children of God, then a chosen incarnation into this mortal life. (The future envisaged is of a post-mortal resurrected eternal life, with ultimate potential for full and embodied deity.)
A belief in pre-existence - that we each, each of us, lived as spirit children of God, before being incarnated in mortal bodies to experience death, and thereby enable resurrection - is a metaphysical assumption that has potential to make a very large and positive difference to Christian life: it is an assumption that overcomes some of the stumbling-blocks and solves many of the deepest problems and paradoxes experienced by modern Christians.
*
Much more on this vital theme can be read in When
Souls Had Wings: Pre-Mortal Existence in Western Thought by Terryl Givens, 2009.
The Mormon understanding is articulated by a recent Apostle (and great orator!) Neal A Maxwell: https://www.lds.org/ensign/1985/11/premortality-a-glorious-reality?lang=eng&_r=1
Thursday, 16 November 2017
Mind-Thinking versus Brain-Thinking
The major psychological concept of thinking is the 'cognitive model', which states that thinking is a kind of information processing done by the brain: let us call this model Brain-Thinking.
Brain-Thinking is an automatic, computer-like processing that has either been learnt, or else is instinctive (i.e. built-in by natural selection, on the basis of evolutionary history).
But reflection informs us that Brain-Thinking is a model; and being a model it necessarily leaves-out a great deal, consequently is partial and distorted. Furthermore, if Brain-Thinking has validity, the theory cannot itself be merely a consequence of Brain-Thinking - because Brain-Thinking is merely a consequence of learning experience or selection for whatever is reproductively-expedient.
If thinking is to be potentially valid (as I am assuming) then thinking needs to be true; and to be true the thinking process must be directly tied-to reality - without any steps in between where there may be errors or misunderstandings of communication.
In other words, thinking needs to be reality.
In other words, thinking cannot - ultimately - be regarded as merely 'thinking-about, nor 'a-picture-of reality', nor any kind of secondary 'representation' of reality - because any picturing/ representing process is uncertain.
For instance, if thinking is supposed to be derived from perceptions, then there are errors and distortions of the perceptual apparatus and of the stages of processing of raw perceptions into comprehensible representations - all of which detach thinking from reality. Or if thinking is derived from memories, then there are all the problems of making a representation from sensory perception, plus all the imperfect processes by which memories are made, stored, located and read...
No - for thinking to be valid, thinking needs to be actually real in-and-of-itself, unmediated, direct.
In sum, thinking must itself be reality - at least potentially. But clearly this cannot be the base for Brain-Thinking, as it is understood by Psychology - brain thinking is not regarded as itself-reality, but at most about-reality.
Also, if Brain-Thinking is an automatic process - causally-determined and therefore without possibility of 'freedom' or 'agency' or genuine creativity; then Mind-Thinking is (by contrast) conscious, willed or purposive, creative and free.
A Mind-Thinking capable of being understood as actual reality therefore needs to be conceptualised as qualitatively different from Brain-Thinking. If Mind-Thinking is reality it cannot be a material process - therefore it must be immaterial; Mind-Thinking cannot be 'in' the brain - because reality cannot be subjective/ unique to one person - therefore must be objective/ accessible to many persons, simultaneously.
Indeed, Mind-Thinking needs to be reality itself which is not merely 'accessible' but is itself the world of reality in which our own personal thinking participates. Thus, as we think, we are actually engaged-with and participating-in reality as it unfolds.
In other words, with Mind-Thinking, any single person thinking is actively engaged in making reality - objective, permanent, universal reality - as well as knowing reality.
This is only apparent if we become aware of the nature, constraints and limitations of the mainstream psychological model of thinking; and take accounts of the pre-requisites of valid thinking.
Of course, we might try to contend that thinking is not valid, but is arbitrary and unlinked with reality; but then this would undermine the thinking which contends it, since it rules-out any possibility of validity in the thinking which led to the contention that thinking is invalid.
If thinking is indeed non-valid, and has no necessary relation to reality; then there is nothing to be said - nothing to be said about anything...
Brain-Thinking is an automatic, computer-like processing that has either been learnt, or else is instinctive (i.e. built-in by natural selection, on the basis of evolutionary history).
But reflection informs us that Brain-Thinking is a model; and being a model it necessarily leaves-out a great deal, consequently is partial and distorted. Furthermore, if Brain-Thinking has validity, the theory cannot itself be merely a consequence of Brain-Thinking - because Brain-Thinking is merely a consequence of learning experience or selection for whatever is reproductively-expedient.
If thinking is to be potentially valid (as I am assuming) then thinking needs to be true; and to be true the thinking process must be directly tied-to reality - without any steps in between where there may be errors or misunderstandings of communication.
In other words, thinking needs to be reality.
In other words, thinking cannot - ultimately - be regarded as merely 'thinking-about, nor 'a-picture-of reality', nor any kind of secondary 'representation' of reality - because any picturing/ representing process is uncertain.
For instance, if thinking is supposed to be derived from perceptions, then there are errors and distortions of the perceptual apparatus and of the stages of processing of raw perceptions into comprehensible representations - all of which detach thinking from reality. Or if thinking is derived from memories, then there are all the problems of making a representation from sensory perception, plus all the imperfect processes by which memories are made, stored, located and read...
No - for thinking to be valid, thinking needs to be actually real in-and-of-itself, unmediated, direct.
In sum, thinking must itself be reality - at least potentially. But clearly this cannot be the base for Brain-Thinking, as it is understood by Psychology - brain thinking is not regarded as itself-reality, but at most about-reality.
Also, if Brain-Thinking is an automatic process - causally-determined and therefore without possibility of 'freedom' or 'agency' or genuine creativity; then Mind-Thinking is (by contrast) conscious, willed or purposive, creative and free.
A Mind-Thinking capable of being understood as actual reality therefore needs to be conceptualised as qualitatively different from Brain-Thinking. If Mind-Thinking is reality it cannot be a material process - therefore it must be immaterial; Mind-Thinking cannot be 'in' the brain - because reality cannot be subjective/ unique to one person - therefore must be objective/ accessible to many persons, simultaneously.
Indeed, Mind-Thinking needs to be reality itself which is not merely 'accessible' but is itself the world of reality in which our own personal thinking participates. Thus, as we think, we are actually engaged-with and participating-in reality as it unfolds.
In other words, with Mind-Thinking, any single person thinking is actively engaged in making reality - objective, permanent, universal reality - as well as knowing reality.
This is only apparent if we become aware of the nature, constraints and limitations of the mainstream psychological model of thinking; and take accounts of the pre-requisites of valid thinking.
Of course, we might try to contend that thinking is not valid, but is arbitrary and unlinked with reality; but then this would undermine the thinking which contends it, since it rules-out any possibility of validity in the thinking which led to the contention that thinking is invalid.
If thinking is indeed non-valid, and has no necessary relation to reality; then there is nothing to be said - nothing to be said about anything...
No compromise on thinking
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. Such Thinking is the mode of Final Participation - it is by-means-of such Thinking that we participate in the on-going creation; such Thinking is Final because it is the same mode as divine being - albeit in an extremely partial and incomplete fashion.
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...
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. Such Thinking is the mode of Final Participation - it is by-means-of such Thinking that we participate in the on-going creation; such Thinking is Final because it is the same mode as divine being - albeit in an extremely partial and incomplete fashion.
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...
Wednesday, 15 November 2017
Thinking as the primary thing: as an end in itself (meditations in a migraine)
Yesterday - as not infrequently happens - I had a sustained and severe migraine which was not fully controllable: consequently I had a lot of time to think, but much of the time found it very difficult to think.
But at certain phases and balances of the pain and its treatment, again not unusually, I was able to think with exceptional lucidity; perhaps because (most activities being necessarily suppressed) the process of thinking then feels to be detached from other mental events; and can be isolated, studied, and simultaneously experienced...
Anyway, I then experienced (and made notes on) what I had previously often argued-for - that thinking is the primary thing and should be regarded as (pretty much) an end in itself.
Whereas typically we regard thinking as merely a means to some other end - as a thing justified by results. We try to use thinking to achieve some goal or another; we don't in general try to live-in our thinking, nor to enhance our thinking - to purify or strengthen the process... That is seldom or never the case.
In some ways it is hard to believe that a single person, thinking, is of prime importance in the vast scheme of things; yet in other ways - when it is actually happening - nothing seems more likely. It then seems obvious and natural than that this thinking, going on here-and-now, is indeed the most important of all possible things with which we personally might participate - that this thinking is of universal and permanent significance.
When it is clear and strong, when I am alert and aware, the activity of thinking really does feel just like what I have worked-it-out it to be: the main thing.
But at certain phases and balances of the pain and its treatment, again not unusually, I was able to think with exceptional lucidity; perhaps because (most activities being necessarily suppressed) the process of thinking then feels to be detached from other mental events; and can be isolated, studied, and simultaneously experienced...
Anyway, I then experienced (and made notes on) what I had previously often argued-for - that thinking is the primary thing and should be regarded as (pretty much) an end in itself.
Whereas typically we regard thinking as merely a means to some other end - as a thing justified by results. We try to use thinking to achieve some goal or another; we don't in general try to live-in our thinking, nor to enhance our thinking - to purify or strengthen the process... That is seldom or never the case.
In some ways it is hard to believe that a single person, thinking, is of prime importance in the vast scheme of things; yet in other ways - when it is actually happening - nothing seems more likely. It then seems obvious and natural than that this thinking, going on here-and-now, is indeed the most important of all possible things with which we personally might participate - that this thinking is of universal and permanent significance.
When it is clear and strong, when I am alert and aware, the activity of thinking really does feel just like what I have worked-it-out it to be: the main thing.
Thinking is the problem - Not-thinking is to become unhuman - Thinking is the solution and way forwards
By the very process of thinking, of 'cognition', we create alienation: we create a reality in which there are 'things out there' and 'me in here'.
We then make the mistake of believing that what we have actually created by our thinking is true reality.
We then then alienated - either we assume that the things out-there are real and our inner life a subjective illusion (i.e. mainstream modern 'scientist' materialism); or, sometimes, that the inner me is real and the outside world an illusion, a creation of the mind (i.e. idealism or solipsism).
Alienation is an intolerable situation - so we seek escape in trying to stop our awareness of the consequences of thinking - by various means: we can try and stop thinking, perhaps by intoxication or ultimately by death; stop ourselves being aware of the alienated consequences of thinking, by distraction (compulsive socialising, mass media, novelty etc).
Sometimes, occasionally, someone confronts alienation - and tries to solve it.
And it can be solved, indeed it is solved - if we allow it. Because what thinking takes-away, thinking can also restore...
Thinking breaks the world into out-there and in-here; and then recombines the two into more thinking. That is, indeed, what most of our thinking is.
If we stop supposing that the splitting caused by thinking represents reality; and instead suppose that the recombined outer-inner world of our actual thoughts is actually a restoration of the wholeness of the world - then the problem of alienation is solved.
What this entails is that primary reality is in thinking.
Primary reality is not 'out there' - it is in thinking. Thinking is what re-combines reality into unity - it is both objective (out-there) and subjective (in-here) - thinking is the whole-thing.
Thinking is therefore the real world - and as such it is not merely-subjective but thinking is instead objective and universal.
Ultimately, it implies that human thinking is part of the divine plan- that our actual thinking (yours and mine) is potentially a co-creation of reality...
(Potentially because our minds are typically clogged with false thinking, pseudo-thinking, self-contradicting-thinking, automatic 'mental processes' into which we are trained and duped... the purpose is to think properly, do by aiming-at-it deliberately what we were intended to do spontaneously but have self-sabotaged.)
At any rate - the answer to alienation is in our own hand - or rather in our own minds; and at some level and however imperfectly we already do it. It is a matter of recognising, becoming more aware of, clarifying, strengthening making habitual what we already spontaneously are doing.
(Note - the above is a re-explanation of Rudolf Steiner's primary insight found in his early philosophical books - leading-up-to The Philosophy of Freedom - 1894.)
We then make the mistake of believing that what we have actually created by our thinking is true reality.
We then then alienated - either we assume that the things out-there are real and our inner life a subjective illusion (i.e. mainstream modern 'scientist' materialism); or, sometimes, that the inner me is real and the outside world an illusion, a creation of the mind (i.e. idealism or solipsism).
Alienation is an intolerable situation - so we seek escape in trying to stop our awareness of the consequences of thinking - by various means: we can try and stop thinking, perhaps by intoxication or ultimately by death; stop ourselves being aware of the alienated consequences of thinking, by distraction (compulsive socialising, mass media, novelty etc).
Sometimes, occasionally, someone confronts alienation - and tries to solve it.
And it can be solved, indeed it is solved - if we allow it. Because what thinking takes-away, thinking can also restore...
Thinking breaks the world into out-there and in-here; and then recombines the two into more thinking. That is, indeed, what most of our thinking is.
If we stop supposing that the splitting caused by thinking represents reality; and instead suppose that the recombined outer-inner world of our actual thoughts is actually a restoration of the wholeness of the world - then the problem of alienation is solved.
What this entails is that primary reality is in thinking.
Primary reality is not 'out there' - it is in thinking. Thinking is what re-combines reality into unity - it is both objective (out-there) and subjective (in-here) - thinking is the whole-thing.
Thinking is therefore the real world - and as such it is not merely-subjective but thinking is instead objective and universal.
Ultimately, it implies that human thinking is part of the divine plan- that our actual thinking (yours and mine) is potentially a co-creation of reality...
(Potentially because our minds are typically clogged with false thinking, pseudo-thinking, self-contradicting-thinking, automatic 'mental processes' into which we are trained and duped... the purpose is to think properly, do by aiming-at-it deliberately what we were intended to do spontaneously but have self-sabotaged.)
At any rate - the answer to alienation is in our own hand - or rather in our own minds; and at some level and however imperfectly we already do it. It is a matter of recognising, becoming more aware of, clarifying, strengthening making habitual what we already spontaneously are doing.
(Note - the above is a re-explanation of Rudolf Steiner's primary insight found in his early philosophical books - leading-up-to The Philosophy of Freedom - 1894.)
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