Owen Barfield QnA - Jung, Dante, Steiner, Lewis, imagination & meaning

Excited to hear this

I tend to agree with Mark - I do follow and appreciate tremendously Vervaeke's lectures.....and yet, he believes that through our thinking plus some psychotechnologies we can "redeem" ourselves. Creating a non-religious religion is an oxymoron.

I'm totally on board with the idea that we are co-creators with the divine. As far as spiritual growth goes I've been wondering if we place too much emphasis on purely mental efforts. Since we're embedded in the world it seems that developing skills is important. Monks would brew alcohol in years past. We have countless things we could spend time mastering, and pretty much all of them can include the imagination.

Apocalypse- in my comment below I used the pun of being 'realed in'.
If we accept that the subjective or interior consciousness is free to invest in its imaginative creations - subject only to consequence of cause and effect - then we may see that an expansion of going forth in unfolding idea is the cultural expression and embodiment. Insofar as dissonance are held, they can be separated out in space and time but never really breaking effect from cause. The sustainability of any structure is its foundation in all its parts and the strain, overhead and cost of managing unhealed or unowned and unaddressed conflict or denials works the deconstruction of its coherence and a 'running out of time and space in which to keep apart what in truth doesn't belong. Those who recognise the breakdown is in truth a breakthrough or revealing of what moves within and beneath the mind of appearances - cooperate with a reintegrative compression while those who are as yet deeply invested in illusion (unshared or unfitting thought that 'separates' the thinker) defend their sense of self possession and control - as in the parable of the tenant farmers. And so the catastrophic association of The Revealing (for such it is) is the fear or pain of loss given every meaning relative to a sense of possession and control in our own name - as if naming or defining ourself is our creation.
The particular Scripture 'The Book of Revelation' relates a previous period of compression to a period and a cosmology that is no longer our experience or makes sense to our current flow of consciousness as experience of our world. We can put our own meanings and find them and we may also be guided by the Holy Spirit in alighting in Meaning that is not divided or destructive to anything true - and so look not as a picture of a world of wickedness meeting a divine judgement, but the unfolding disclosure of a mind that made a world in error by mutual alignment in judgement of good and ill as a power unto ourselves. That a new world is revealed one - such that Heaven and Earth pass away as separated polarised states is the direction of 'final participation' as a co-creative extension of Life - rather than a blocked channel of its own making.
Unselfconscious joy in being is not added to, acquired or achieved by a self-inhibiting defence, nor can we of such a self decide to participate at will but that we mimic the forms of life and then - believe it!
The ego or self-image is a masking without which we would not develop or participate in an alloyed world of love and fear that is recognisably our human condition or conditioning as a result of a desire to experience that is some sense has become entangled in its own creations. But the unmasking is to a true Currency and not to the projected fear of our own judgements. (In the measure of our giving is our receiving means give now truly! Perhaps as a result of opening the way by desisting to give false currency of thought, word and deed and waiting on the true movement as the gift of a true will).
The other facet to catastrophic archetypes that effectively structure us to a past that is not here - but we bring it with us by a largely subconscious re-enactment of separation trauma, broken family constellations and power struggle - that we also unconsciously project to the world so as to mitigate, evade and escape or deny and overcome OUT there. This is falsely addressed if its root is our own unfaced or unrecognised relational conflict.
However such a past is not a fabulous invention of stupid people who hadn't evolved scientific reason and made up stories of terraforming and terror-forming or mind splitting events with planetary associations as gods that now make NO sense. But to revisit the past of a conflicted foundation merely to reiterate its reaction in recoil is not to see with new eyes but merely to re-traumatise the fearful.

There are new understandings that are revealing more of what was and is hidden by collective denials. Plasma physics opens the perspective of a self-organising electric Universe that is not truly separable from consciousness - though that arrives in its own timing. But for my part I expand my embrace of the physical from a recognition like to Owen Barfield - in that I don't assign Cause to effects or to the physical - although when we do so we do experience the result as physical - but note the experience itself is in the word we give it, knowingly of by habit-reaction.

Noting that The tenant farmers killed the messengers of the 'absent' Master - it is wise to knock first and listen. But once we have acted in faith we must stand in who we are by trusting the movement and giving witness from a relational appreciation rather than in apology or justification. There is no power struggle in God and a lack of coercion is one of the qualities of a true recognition that then extends to the other of itself.
Defences are enacted to protect what is believed a true right of inheritance, and as a the power of choice that is so - even if freedom is used to deny or undermine itself in error. We may learn to make a better choice by honest evaluation of our results - not by 'moralising' blame and shame.

Excellent talk, especially interesting to see Dante increasingly entering the conversations about imagination, meaning, the intellect and spirituality!

Oh my, this is so right. So digestible and practical. I love that you mention a Christianity based on Scientific materialism. So many Christians would claim to be the very antidote to scientific materialism while they simultaneously incorporate it into the basis of their faith in God.

I've never heard this kind of discourse before. Is Mark Vernon a latter day apostle?

Ever since I started reading the Bible, I realized how the main thing Jesus is doing is blowing to pieces the thought of morality, honor and justice, basically showing where such a human construct really leads if we live by it. At the same time though, He tells us that to ignore it, or pretend it has no bearing on us, is also not His point. Morality is what humans use to condemn each other, to take the other down and raising the self, looking for how the other doesn't measure up. Living by gratitude and faith is the exact opposite, where morality becomes something inevitable because we are not perfectly loving, but it is never an end in itself which is detrimental to the inner life.

deliberate avoidance of all the major facts about Barfield's thought....excruciating

Thanks Mark. Just got Dante and secret history.
Keep her lit.

I disagree with the characterizations of Vervaeke's work in this talk and in the comments. I think Vervaeke's approach allows for what is being expressed as lacking. I'd be curious to know if Dr. Vernon would be interested in updating his opinions of Vervaeke's work now two years later.

I’d love to hear more about ‘the mystery of Golgotha’ which Steiner focused on. I think I heard you mention in another lecture that Barfield spoke of it, too.

I know C.s. Lewis respected the Tao and the Stoics. They recognized that there is a balance in life between good and bad. To me, it is the balance that is divine. Jesus seems like a fulcrum who sees suffering as blessing -- one on each side of a balance scale.

The first world war was a manufactured event and the second world war was the continuation of the first world war. Quantum physics don't work and is fake.

Thank you. Best of luck on your book launch. I’ll be buying one, for sure.

Barfield's philosophy/theology seems close to Orthodoxy's belief in theosis. However, theosis is fully located within the Church and its liturgical/sacramental life.

I saw this book in the book store and didn't know what it was. I have to get this now. Great video. Thanks guys.

Morality for me means how one treats others and the sign for me and act is the washing of the feet.