First discussion: Gary Lachman and Mark Vernon on the evolution of consciousness and Owen Barfield.

Evolving Consciousness: Spiritual Experience in a Secular Age
Saturday 30th November 2019, London
Scientific and Medical Network with The Fetzer Institute
The inability of individuals and society to perceive spiritual reality has, today, become critical. But could our crisis itself be significant? Might it be valuable, even necessary for the evolution of human consciousness?
In the twentieth century, thinkers including Owen Barfield considered this possibility. They concluded that the experience of being human shifts fundamentally across cultural time. Understanding the nature of this change - particularly today in the centuries after the scientific revolution - is essential and can greatly illuminate our current spiritual task.
This day conference addressed the evolution and meaning of human consciousness. It brought together leading twenty-first century exponents of this crucial dynamic and explored its fundamental role in personal and collective spiritual formation.

[@michael2l]

Wow great conversation 👍🏻 thanks for sharing!

[@topherming6565]

“When the imagination is not controlled and the attention not steadied on the feeling of the wish fulfilled, then no amount of prayer or piety or invocation will produce the desired effect. When you can call up at will whatsoever image you please, when the forms of your imagination are as vivid to you as the forms of nature, you are master of your fate.” ― Neville, The Power of Awareness

[@DenianArcoleo]

Wonderful talk, so inspiring. Thank you both.

[@SGleaf]

An excellent summary & introduction to Barfield's project & how it relates to other thinkers and to the importance of the imagination. Happily, both speakers have published works that address Barfield and related topics that I can highly recommend.

[@Philosophe422]

Keep it up Mark! I appreciate your work.

[@samuelglenn123]

Brilliant discussion thank you both!

[@jimmieoakland3843]

I find that the idea that they alienation we feel is part of the evolutionary process is very helpful to my understanding. Because it generates anxiety, we tend to think of the alienation as a negative. But much of evolution is driven by changes in the environment that have to be addressed by changes. Things that can't last have to stop, to be replaced by something better. The alienation is as it were spurring us forward and helping to form the final participation. Alienation is there necessary, and thus is to be welcomed.

[@christopherk222]

5:52 Perception ! 🙂 I think this also relates to Hans Urs von Balthasar. . . and Origen ! ("Double Man": physical senses + spiritual senses)

[@aaronneil780]

Do you have a reference for this? Thanks!

[@christopherk222]

@@aaronneil780 Spirit & Fire, edited by von Balthasar (Origen anthology)

[@TheBaronOfBromley]

nice

[@binra3788]

Self imaged, self concepts, and self definitions unfold perspective of experience that develops its own ideas and cultural expressions which at times flips and shifts polarities that frame our perception-response TO conceived and perceived reality. This unfolding, evolving or development of idea has mythic archetypes that I sense to be seeds from a 'past' that replicate as the underlying patterns of what can be intuited as a spiral of multifaceted expansion and compression. In many ways I see a devolution of consciousness at a critical juncture in these times - that those who sense it choose not to die - but to seek and align in growing consciousness or perhaps more accurately letting a new consciousness abide and become in us. (While there are very many approaches of opening such a willingness, I have lived with A Course in Miracles for much of my adult life as a 'Christed' teaching - not as any claim to authority over anyone but as embodying qualities I can love and understand and willingly stand under). Without awakened perspective we all reinforce thinking and talking about life, the world, ourselves and each other - as if we know what we are talking about. The willingness for truth's revealing is of course our willingness to at least pause from 'already knowing' to make a space through which a real question moves in us - rather than a self-reinforcing assertion framed as a question. But the question is a movement of true desire and thus an opening for fulfilment. Another term for the 'awakened perspective' is the Holy Spirit - or indeed the Christ Consciousness. But the terms in themselves don't matter if they serve the territory of an intimacy beyond words - that transforms and guides our words as it does our perceptions and responses. This is why when we meet in shared purpose of willingness to heal, make whole or serve wholeness of being - the sum is greater than its parts and yet felt and known in all its parts as one. Such moments may be fleeting because the unwatched mind so readily interjects to convert an intimacy of wholeness of being into a private insight - as if to keep it - which expresses the belief in self-possession and control and fear or loss - which is self-imaged in lack.Which reverts to the consciousness as defence instead of communication and intimacy is lost - or rather covered over by the drive to get it back in external terms. I am one with Barfield in many respects - but we should realise Consciousness - capC seeds itself as the Creative - and so that we seem to start from a past rendered by gods of Awe and Terror who we associate with an activation our consciousness, such that our split of mind, was directly descended and yet no longer accessible - and yet guided the split mind/world through its unfolding experience - perhaps in some sense through a process of integration that operates through experience of polarised identities as facets of a greater whole. In this sense I see the devolution of consciousness - indeed the reduction and erasure of consciousness in the many as part of a period of compression that generates the seed for a new era. In that sense our first responsibility is to accept the undoing of the false - so that we can willingly align in who we are - rather than wilfully persist in who we are NOT as if to escape, overcome or deny who we are afraid we are. Identity set in seeking to evade fear of pain of loss - carries it as baggage while seeking antidote or salvation outside itself - because the attempt to posses and control our being is an alien will given access - that usurps or cuckolds our true Inherence as if running off with a false inheritance - ie Our Father Lives all That is - and to perceive is to image through the self-definition. I see what Barfied calls final participation - as the yielding of the self to the Movement of our being. This is not regressive but restorative in the same way waking from a reverie to a shared appreciation is restorative. But our investment in self illusion is such as to make waking from its spelling, a delicate balance and timing of feeling into the blocks to love, so as to recognise them in their release from service - because we are in willingness to receive and extend love's recognition. What else could block reality but the unwillingness to share it? regardless whether you relate to my own 'contributions' I appreciate that you are bringing the willingness to quaestion and look at our own thinking and its development - along with its feedback looping of self-conditioning robot - which is a habit we need to uplevel to awareness of Choice - if our choice is to embrace life in place of running with a fearful sense of segregative 'control' - which consolidates power struggle to monopolar monocultured morons. (mmm - I couldn't help but make a literative gesture there). But I don't like pejorative terms for the living and so please do not read it that way. We are all familiar with error in our own perceptions and responses - if we pause to own it. Consciousness is a multifaceted spectrum of experience of rich reflective interaction - as we grow the stability from which to hold polarities within us - instead of 'casting them OUT' and denying their re-entry.

[@binra3788]

Jesus yielding to the Christ anointed the idea of Individual Covenant with God as love's extension. The idolising of the individual is an antichrist or hollow and sick parody of the true presence of undivided Will. The underlying pattern is where image or form or structure is invested with the Meaning that belongs to the Living and shared Movement of being. There is no separate mind or body but for the wish it be so for thinking apart instead of being moved in the thought that knows its Part-icipance. So in that sense the Mosaic Law served and serves order within the realm of chaotic or lawless entanglements in forms as meanings unto themselves. That the law could not be held is not that it failed to hold order and continuity for the development of consciousness that can call for and recognise and receive love - through willingness to share it. If you have any sense of the depth of self hatred in the human heart - if not in our surface consciousness then you will know why we are more terrified of love than anything else, and so anything else serves as some sort of mitigation, diversion or evasion - and we struggle and die to protect the diversion because we are afraid of what we have made of love and fear to look or be rendered naked to. hence the development of all the works and means to validate ourself as if we can preempt the judgement of the Holy Spirit. I know I go on - but your reference to the individual is very much a social contstruct made to pre-empt and mask over or usurp our nakedness or lack of substance. "And who told you you were naked sayeth the Lord?" This I recognise as the Gift of the Holy Spirit. The capacity to look ON all that we made rather than suffer it as an unending uncorrectable error.

[@NGC-catseye]

@@binra3788 Thanks for your words of wisdom. My path continues and I can see clearer now.

[@binra3788]

@@NGC-catseye You are welcome. I hold that wisdom cannot be taught or even possessed - so much as listened for and recognised by aligning in. We walk together in shared willingness - through which a recognition grows - as both a Consciousness and a world embodiment (to bring Barfield's perspective in). I capitalised as Consciousness, because what was taken as conscious before, was in some sense 'unconsciously filtered and conflicted'.

[@christopherk222]

26:39 This sounds similar to "integral ecology": Pope Francis / Laudato Si'. . .

[@aloha878]

As Kant put it, a percept without a concept is blind; a concept without a percept is empty. Is the truth to be found by us from that tension between the blind and the empty?

[@xwsftassell]

"The individual matters more today". Check Oswald Spengler's reasonings viz. Vikings (English) and Prussians (Germans) "Capitalism"/"Socialism".