(i) two articles

a worldview

today’s post is a recommendation, or rather two. two articles from two of my favorite bloggers.

they were published a day apart, and seemingly unrelated, but in my opinion they are very much related, and the ideas in them underpin my own worldview, so i thought it worthwhile to recommend them.

the first one, by Francis Berger, is called: We’re All Moderns; Start There and Then Move Forward

here’s a quote from it:

Those who affix the modern label as a magical line of demarcation separating themselves from the masses are essentially deluding themselves with the misguided belief that they somehow possess a pre-modern form of consciousness locked in an otherwise modern world. (…) no person alive today could function effectively within the milieu of a previous era regardless of how well they think they could. I refer here to internal rather than external considerations. Like it or not, the way past people understood and interacted with God, the world, and each other was immeasurably different from how we understand and interact with God, the world, and each other.  

the second, by Bruce Charlton, is called: Romanticism: ecstatic, intoxicating, magic, enchantment

Jesus was himself an intensely romantic, spontaneous, and emotional personage - who lived at a high level of engagement with reality (including spiritual reality) that our earthly attempts can only approach, and only briefly.

When God is depicted as is usual, as an abstract and philosophical entity, defined by attributes, and especially when God's "impassible" nature is insisted-upon (i.e. the assertion that God is incapable of "passions" or emotions) - then we are being dangerously misled (no matter how ancient and venerable such assertions may be!). 

i’ll add two bits of commentary of my own:

both articles relate to and assume what is generally called ‘the evolution of consciousness’.

the first bit that seems important to me is that this is not a general state, by which i mean, it’s not defined by the age but it depends on the people. not every human alive during the european middle ages had a medieval mindset, not every human alive during the axial age had an axial age mindset - but rather, specific places and specific peoples influenced by specific individuals varied greatly. and similarly, and more importantly, this is still the case, and is yet another challenge and part of the satanic plan to prevent modern consciousness from emerging from its womb: the majority of the world’s current population does not, in fact, have a modern mindset. as moderns we have to deal with this, in several different ways. though of course without the recognition of different types of consciousness, past or present, it is impossible to.

equally important, from my perspective, is this: i am very much convinced that the greats of the past and present, be they saints or prophets or artists, operated in a more evolved state of consciousness than their surroundings, and thus their work can help to bring our own consciousness forward. on the flip side, in every age there are those who, even though they have a more advanced consciousness, try to pull it back: in our case, the traditionalists are precisely that, and whether they are aware of it or not, and most are not, they are doing the bidding of hell.

as a paramount and primary example of the positive side, i am convinced Jesus was, not only very well advanced in consciousness compared to his milieu, but really the only man to achieve Final Participation while in this life, and the raising of Lazarus is directly related to this.

this is not something that Barfield says (in part because he is still very much trying to fit absolutist metaphysics into his phenomenological study), but rather it’s something that i've intuited on my own: Final Participation will be a sort of synthesis of Original Participation, which was very much an embodied experience, and the disembodied experience of Mind that modernity achieved. so basically, we will have a body of flesh, but also the powers of 'the air', so to speak. the raising of Lazarus seems to me to be that: Full Mind raised in Full Flesh. that Jesus was able to do it before he himself resurrected tells me that he had already achieved Final Participation in life, but then went through death to open the door for the rest of us, otherwise he would have to do it personally for each one, like he did with Lazarus, which is definitely not the way. why did he do it for Lazarus then? first because he was his friend and he loved him, and second because he had a specific mission for Lazarus.